Hamilton Stone Review #25
Fiction

Harriet Rzetelny, Fiction Editor

 

 

 

Miryam Sivan

Assets

 

“Conflicts, like living organisms, had a natural lifespan.
The trick was to know when to let them die.”

Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

 

 

At precisely nine o’clock one June morning Rahv walked outside his apartment building in Haifa with Lucky, a large four year old Airedale, to wait for the groomer. A dark blue van turned quickly into and down his small street and stopped abruptly in front of him. A dog’s face had been painted on the van’s front: headlights were eyes, dark whiskers and a black canine nose filled the front grill. The driver’s door opened brusquely. A smallish person slid out and came around to the sidewalk. It was only when Rahv saw the face partially hidden beneath the Yankees cap’s brim, that he realized the groomer was a woman.

“Hey Lucky,” Libi bent down and hugged the dog, running her fingers through his heavy winter hair. Thick and matted it stuck out like beige and brown marshmallows from his otherwise slender body. “Aren’t you happy I showed up, hey boy, relieve you of these nests.”

She barely noticed Rahv and he wasn’t sure whether to be pleased that she was so concerned with the pooch or insulted that she wasn’t at all concerned with him. Rahv was forty-five years old, very attractive, and he knew it. When he wore a crisply ironed buttoned-down shirt and clean jeans women looked at him openly, with appreciation, even desire. He felt prized which only increased his exasperation with Anne, his wife. Why didn’t he experience her craving? Why didn’t she choose him, again and again? The groomer slid open the van door and Lucky, familiar with the routine and willing to endure it, jumped in.

“I’ll call when you when I’m done.” Libi took off her cap. She had hair the color of apricots, grey eyes, and pale white skin. Not a trace of make-up. A real beauty. Rahv didn’t want to leave and even felt happy that Anne rushed off to hospital this morning to be with her mother as she went through one of her mock heart attacks. Rahv agreed, with great reluctance, to not leave for work at his usual hour so Lucky could have his hair cut, and only because of the panic on Anne’s face. “I think this time it’s a real one,” she said to Rahv, scrambling to find her car keys and handbag, and running out the door. “Sureץ ” Rahv turned back to the morning paper. “Last time it was a real one too.” And when he heard Anne racing down the building stairs he mumbled, “Crazy English.”

“I’ve never seen Lucky being groomed. Do you mind if I watch?” Rahv asked thinking of the financial reports waiting for his perusal in his apartment upstairs. Much more pleasant to pass the half hour in this beautiful woman’s company watching her clip, lather, and towel off the family dog.

“Sure.” Libi lifted large Lucky onto the metal table and attaching his collar to a chain hanging down from a large hook in the ceiling. She began to mow. Straight lines of tuft appeared on Lucky’s body. All over the table, piling up around his legs, hair fell and floated.

“Nice van,” Rahv said.

“Thanks.”

“Kind of old, no?”

“Old and serviceable.”

“Who knows how to fix these old models anymore?”

Libi looked up momentarily. “I do.”

“Really, most women barely know how to open the hood of the car.”

“I’m not most women.”

Libi began to work the shears around the dog’s rump and he began to fidget and tried to sit. Libi shortened the chain between his collar and the ceiling hook. Now Lucky could only stand. Libi quieted him with soft words and sounds, put one hand on his head and stroked him, and used the other to quickly work the area around his testicles.

“Can I ask you another question?” Rahv asked, watching the intensity on her face, and her muscular and lean arms work.

“Sure,” she said as she shaved down one leg and started up the other.

“What happens when a dog misbehaves? Restless or bites. What do you do?” Rahv looked around for some of the medieval looking devices he remembered from the neighborhood pet shop. Anne had a fight with the groomer there for using a muzzle and body restraints. She was convinced Lucky came home bruised and badly shaken two years ago. Rahv had no patience for dog psychology if such a thing even existed. But he agreed with Anne that there was no reason for the dog to suffer. He wanted his wife to be happy and if her dog was happy so was she.

“Doesn’t happen.” Libi loosened the leash giving Lucky more hind movement. She began to shave close to his head.

“Dogs never misbehave? Never?” Rahv asked.

“Not with me.”

He watched as she quickly sheared the kinky hair off the dog’s head and took his snout in hand and lifted it to shave his neck. Lucky began to shake his head back and forth.

“Shh, boy.” Libi tightened her grip on his snout. “Shh, it’s okay.” But the dog decided it was far from okay and he began to use his front paws to try and knock her hand off his face. “Lucky, stop it,” she said firmly but the dog wouldn’t calm down. He tried to back off the table and a low growl came from his throat. Libi stepped back from the table. “This is what you get for asking such a question. First thing in the morning, what a question.” She gave Rahv a disdainful look.

“I’m sorry, I…”

“Don’t you know they understand everything we say? You wanted to know what happens when a dog acts up? Here, he’s showing you. You know how many of my customers tie up their dogs before they even call me to make the appointment? The dog hears them talking to me about a hair cut and that’s that, they run away and hide. Not one customer, not two. But lots. Now go outside with your questions and wait until I’m done.” Libi pulled the van door open.

Rahv stepped into the bright morning sun and turned away from the whimpering of Anne’s Airedale. What airs she gives herself, this British bride of his, couldn’t get a mutt from the shelter. She needed a pedigree and waited over a year for the right litter. A dog who needs haircuts. A ridiculous dog. A ridiculous woman. And what was he doing here anyway with so much work at the office?

“Domestic chores, which include dog grooming appointments, are part of the division of labor between us, Anne,” Rahv managed to say to his wife while she threw on clothing that morning. She had just gotten the call telling her that her mother had been rushed to the hospital with chest pains.

“Please, Rahv, not now,” Anne pleaded.

“I’m very pressed,” he muttered watching her pack the children’s sandwiches. “Clients are leaning hard on me. End of quarter’s approaching.”

“This isn’t the time for the usual speech,” Anne pleaded and demanded simultaneously, hurting Rahv’s feelings. “Please just cooperate.”

“You know…” he couldn’t quite contain himself.

“Please, please, be quiet,” she added, insultingly.

But he wouldn’t because the pressure of holding back the words was too great. He was angry from the night before. He was angry for months it seemed. ”Would it kill you to initiate sex one night? Couldn’t you surprise me and take my cock in your mouth? Is it such a big deal to call me in the middle of the day to ask how I’m doing? You know it’s my hard earned money that enables us to live like this.” He waited for her response. Anne shot him a nasty look and slammed the bedroom door shut behind her. Why were his needs such a mystery that still needed explaining?

The van door crashed open. “Here,” Libi held out the leash when Lucky jumped down to the sidewalk. Libi got back into the van and drove off without telling Rahv how much it cost, without a good-bye. Sitting in his office later that afternoon, Rahv couldn’t stop thinking of Libi’s slim muscular arms. Despite their tan he could see their thin veins. Arms that worked, that were strong and capable and knew how to touch and to hold. He wanted to touch them and for them to hold him. He decided to call and invite Libi for a coffee, to make up for his ill-timed question. He hoped he hadn’t ruined her morning.

Libi accepted the peace offering and they met at a café by the beach. She was waiting for him at a table wearing cut off blue jeans, a tie dyed tank top, and pink rubber thongs on her feet. A different league from Anne and her friends and their high fashion wardrobes.  Libi’s legs, like her arms, were tan and strong. Her hair was damp orange, and it hung straight around her face. This was a woman who worked out, and not only with dogs.

“What if a dog doesn’t want to come into the van?” Rahv asked as he drank ice coffee and Libi ate white chocolate mousse pie.

“More questions?” she laughed. “It may be less dangerous if I ask and you answer.” Her smile was a definitive passing of the peace pipe between them. “I coax them in, a whiff of a bone, or some wet food from a freshly opened can. By the time they’ve licked and re-licked the bowl they’re attached to the hook and their backs and sides are done.”

“I’ve seen how fast you work. Are you like that with all creatures, or only dogs?” Rahv usually asked questions to mask his disinterest and because women loved to be listened to. He was willing to listen, willing to let this woman talk if it led to her strong hands. They were resting on the table and he wanted them on him.

“I see you don’t need coaxing,” Libi laughed. “Dogs need to be very relaxed before I work on their heads. I can’t exactly afford work accidents.”

“I’m sure you have insurance.”

“Not an insurance issue, man. Plenty of that. More a matter of reputation. Nicking an ear, cutting too close to the jugular: professional liabilities.” And she smiled at him again, inviting him to become a liability and he didn’t think twice when he took her strong hand off the table and put it into his mouth. He rolled his tongue in between her fingers and bit down on her nails. Her hand tasted like white. With a hand on his neck she led him to her van in the beach parking lot, and once inside touched him all over for nearly two hours.

On the drive home Rahv was elated and enraged. Why didn’t Anne touch him like that? Why didn’t she run her fingers through his hair? Why didn’t she pay attention to his entire body—toes, backs of his knees, hips? He wasn’t just a penis. And why didn’t she kiss him passionately? He experienced intense sexual dissatisfaction with his wife, although according to his calculations, on an annual basis, he worked 50% more than she did and had only 15% of the leisure time at his disposal. When Anne reminded him that he forgot to add to his accounting ledger all the time she spent with their three children—pre-breakfast, at breakfast, driving them to school after breakfast, shopping for and cooking hot lunch everyday, talks after lunch, supervising homework, chauffeuring the lot to their various after school activities, supper, baths, reading time, bedtime, smoothing the transition to sleep time, not to mention night time illnesses and terrors, Rahv said that he did not forget. He just didn’t calculate the same. She gave them a 1:1 weight. He gave them a 1:5.

Only a few nights ago, he brought up his sexual unhappiness. Anne was still suffering from a stomach virus which had laid her low for days. Rahv told her he understood she wasn’t well, but pale and weak she still looked good to him and he wanted her. Anne said she was sorry there was little she could do. From the waist down she was incapacitated. And Rahv said that this was true, but from the waist up she still had hands, she still had a mouth. She had bolted out of bed then and through clenched teeth told him that this was a 1:5 rejection, not a 1:1. He could jot that down in his little pad.

Rahv was tired of Anne’s excuses. She insisted sex became something else after fifteen years. He wasn’t prepared to live with that.  He needed intensity, hunger, and sparks in her eyes when she looked at him. She told him he was having a mid-life crisis, and that soon he’d spend a chunk of their savings on a sports car. If he were that kind of man, he would have throttled her. But not being, he complained some more, insisted a little more loudly, hoping she’d understand the earnestness of his circumstances, and he thought of other women, though he did nothing but jerk off in the shower, nothing at all. Until now.

Three months into their affair, Rahv began to wonder why Libi never accepted the other treats he offered her: dinners, rustic cabins in the Golan, pampering at expensive spas. Libi just wanted to meet him in the van and to have sex in all sorts of positions against the grooming table, under it, on top of it, in the bathtub, in the driver’s seat, the passenger’s, and occasionally even in the Carmel forest, next to the van, on the ground under the pine trees, with the birds and the bees and the clouds drifting overhead.

Anne had no idea what Rahv was up to, of course. He was careful to continue his work routine – meeting Libi during work hours or taking advantage of Anne’s trip abroad with the kids for a one night tryst. Even that encounter was only for a few hours. Libi wouldn’t spend the night, even when he insisted it was safe, Anne would never know he wasn’t at home. But Libi said no. She slept only with her animals. And so Rahv left the van at four in the morning and went to the beach to watch the Mediterranean lighten. The western horizon caught the sun’s rays rising in the east and held tight. Rahv didn’t understand why Libi wouldn’t let him stay longer. Or why no matter how vigorous their sex, she never called him afterwards. He always made contact; he always suggested a rendezvous; he always expressed frustration that they couldn’t spend more time together.

“How often do you think of me when we’re not together?” he asked two days ago after he fucked her twice in a row in the van, on a quiet street, in the sea-facing neighborhood of Carmeliya. Libi had moaned so loudly during her second orgasm he thought for sure all the neighbors heard. This gave him great pleasure. Libi didn’t answer. She stroked his back, fingertips running lightly up and down his spine, and stared at the van’s metal ceiling. “Huh? Do you think of me a lot when we’re not together?” Rahv asked.

“Sure,” she answered, not taking her eyes off the ceiling.

“So, why don’t you call me? You can always reach me on the cellular.”

“Okay.” Libi unfolded herself from his embrace. “I’ve got a two o’clock appointment in French Carmel. Got to get going.” She dressed quickly and barely waited for Rahv to zip up his expensive trousers when she slid open the van door and kissed him fully on the lips. “Bye for now.” She slid the door shut before he had a chance to make any closing comments.

Rahv was unsettled. Could he be facing the same feelings of unresponsiveness with his mistress that he felt with his wife? Libi was sexually passionate, no denying that, but where was the caring, where was the love? Libi was the solution urged upon Rahv by most of his male friends: take a lover, take the pressure off your wife, have your thrills and your family simultaneously, for life was passing and virility was sand in an hour glass. And for the first month or so it worked. He was satisfied and happy and came home in a good mood, but sex with Libi only whet his appetite. He wanted more of the same with Anne, his beautiful English bride. His frustration at her indifference, at her mechanical responses to his touch, was mounting. At the beginning of the week Anne cried out that she couldn’t take his complaining anymore – since when was expressing one’s emotional hurt complaining -- that she was being forced to consider leaving. He laughed in her face. “Where to,” he asked, “the living room couch? Who’s going to support you like me?”

“The money isn’t worth it,” she spit out at him. “I’d rather be poor and free than rich and enslaved to the bottomless pit of your emotional greediness.” Her psychobabble made him laugh even louder.

“You’re too smart and too powerlessness to act. Our assets -- three children, four aging parents, two apartments, four bank accounts, two cats and one dog who needed quarterly grooming -- keep both of us rooted in this marital flower box. And as long as I’m the primary income earner and you‘re the primary spender I don’t see any change on the horizon. Besides Anne,” he said softening his tone, taking her hands in his to show her how much he truly loved her, “Where would I go? My family is with you. All you need to do is make more of an effort to let me know I’m central to your life. Is that so hard?”

 

On a hot Wednesday at the end of September, three plus months into their affair, two days after Rahv asked Libi if she thought of him when they were apart, Rahv called Libi and she did not answer. This was not atypical. Libi never answered the phone in the middle of a cut and shampoo. He left her a message asking her to call him back, knowing with a small rush of anger that she wouldn’t. After an hour he called again and once more her voice mail picked up. He left another message and so it went every half hour for the entire day. By the time six in the evening rolled around, Rahv was frantic. Maybe something happened to her? Maybe she was out of the country and hadn’t told him? But how could she -- not tell him? Maybe she was with another man? The edges of this thought were enough to send a ceramic cup his eight year old daughter had made in camp the month before fly across his office and shatter against the bookcase filled with tax and other sundry reports.

When he came home he was angry and sullen and snapped at Anne that she never asked him about his day or his mood. And when she walked out of the room in a huff he followed her into their bedroom and asked, “Is it too much to give me a hug and mean it? Is it too much to kiss me with some feeling? I’m not talking about tonguing or fellatio, but some love, god damn it, how do you expect me to go on like this?”

“I don’t.” Anne changed from jeans and a tee-shirt into a dress of soft fabric. “Now leave me alone I’m getting ready.”

“Where are you going?” he asked, upset that she was leaving when he needed comfort.

“I told you yesterday I was going to the movies with Molly and Isabel.” She brushed her hair and tied it into a ponytail. She drew a line of kohl under each eye and turned to his scowling face with a smile on her own.

“The children have eaten and bathed. Just read to them before bed. There’s food on the stove for you.”

“I can’t believe you’re going out now,” he punched the pillow on the bed.

“Rahv do you have to give me a hard time every time I go out with my girlfriends? It’s enough already, don’t you think?”

“I’ll tell you what’s enough…you treating me as if I were a cash machine. Where is the attention a man and woman give to one another, where is the passion, where is the excitement to see one another, the anticipation, the pleasure?”

“In the past,” Anne took her handbag off the chair.

“What, Anne, just tell me, what can I do to make you love me? I’ll do anything.” He followed her to the front door.

“Stop moaning so much about your need for love. Stop making demands. A person who loves, receives love in return. Your words are fingers down my throat. I want to vomit.” As she walked out the door, Rahv caught her arm, not aggressively, but his hold was firm. “I need you to love me, Anne. Please love me, make it all right.” Anne kissed him on each cheek and then kissed him sweetly on the mouth. “Don’t worry so much, big boy, it’ll be all right. Calm down. Have some wine.”

But it wasn’t all right. Not all that night when Rahv was filled to exploding with his own aching need for love. And it wasn’t okay the next day when again he couldn’t reach Libi. By lunch time he could think of nothing else. He left the office, got into his car and began cruising the streets of Haifa looking for her van. After three months of having sex, two and sometimes three times a week in the van in between canine clients, Rahv knew most of Libi’s routes. And so it did not take him long to find the van parked on Costa Rica, a small dead end street in Denia. The university’s administrative building towered above, and a steep patch of forest ran down towards the pale shore and sinuous sea. It was a street Rahv had met Libi on a number of times. When he spotted the van parked at the very end, tucked into the shoulder of the mountain, under the canopy of a tall eucalyptus, he felt his stomach explode. Within seconds he was out of his car and was trying to wrench open the van’s sliding door. It was locked and the curtains were drawn behind the front seats. He walked around pounding fists against the doors, the metal panels, kicking the tires, kicking the dog’s face painted on the front. He couldn’t believe she was fucking someone else in the same spot where she so tenderly took his cock in her mouth and pressed her tongue against his balls. He thought he heard a moan, in fact he was convinced he heard a moan. He jumped up and landed on the back bumper.

“What the fuck…” Libi slid open the van door and stepped outside.

Lunatic with wounds, eyes dilated, arms raised, his body tense as a spring, Rahv leaped inside and pulled open all the curtains. Only Pablo, Libi’s large white Great Pyrenees was there. “Where’d he go?” Rahv twisted around to Libi, his face a frightening taut mask.

Libi lay back down on the unfurled futon. Pablo pressed up against her with the full length of his big body and she did not answer Rahv’s question. She stroked Pablo’s head and watched Rahv as one would combating baboons in the zoo—with curiosity, distance, and even some pleasure.

“Do you think I enjoy calling you and calling you? You think I like it when you don’t answer, don’t respond to my messages and missed calls?”

Libi worked the thick fur on Pablo’s neck with her fingers. The dog stretched even more, relaxed, though he kept one eye in Rahv’s direction. He knew the man but he didn’t like the tone of his voice.

“Can’t you answer me? I’m standing right here, in front of you. How can you treat me like I don’t exist?”

Libi sat up and the dog shifted with her. “What is it exactly that you want, Rahv?” Libi asked calmly. “I told you the first day we met that I’m not most women. You can’t want that and then not want it. Who I am is a fact. Take it or leave it.”

It was her self-possession that Rahv thought was going to drive him out of his mind. How could she be so cool, so fucking composed, when his mind, his heart, his guts were bursting? “I want to know where you were all day yesterday, why you don’t return my calls, and who you were fucking in the van just now?”

“What I do is none of your business. I’m not your wife, your girlfriend, your mistress. I’m not your anything. I’m just a woman you have sex with. A woman you put your penis into. A woman whose company you enjoy, whose body you enjoy. You’re demanding more than that? Are you leaving your wife, the hearth for me? I don’t think so. I certainly hope not.”

“But it is so wonderful between us,” Rahv sat down on the edge of the futon.

“It is. But it’s also just what it is. Nothing more.”

“I don’t understand how touching can be so powerful between us, almost like merging, and then when we’re not together, it’s nothing for you.”

“It’s not nothing. It’s what it is. But you don’t have to understand. You just have to accept.” And she moved into the driver’s seat and Pablo into the passenger’s.

“I’ve got a 3:30 cut and shampoo on Derech Hayam. Sorry, got to go.”

Rahv paused at the open van door and asked -- for he couldn’t help himself, all impulse control drowned in a whirlpool of needs and longing -- one more time. “Who was with you, here, just now?”

Libi looked at him with pity and contempt. “You don’t get it, do you? Pablo was with me. We were taking a nap. Please close the door.” She gave gas before Rahv had time to step back. He felt trapped in the van’s wave of hot air as it turned quickly down the quiet street, towards the hub of the city.

He went back into his car and began to cry. He was in freefall, caught in a twister of autumn heat—dizzy, frightened, going nowhere and everywhere at the same time. He had felt so understood kissing Libi, so fulfilled naked with Libi, so vindicated as a man buried deep inside her body. With a turn of her apricot head, she tossed him aside. It was intolerable. He needed to be loved. He needed to be adored. He needed to know that someone waited for him, longed for him, was willing to crawl, was willing to spread her legs to receive him, give him her breasts, feed him on demand.

Somehow Rahv made it home, a bit earlier than usual, physically safe and mentally unsound. His children were not there but Anne was. She spoke on the phone and prepared food in the kitchen. She turned when she heard footsteps, said a quick hello and returned to her activities: talking to a friend, cooking. Rahv went and sat in the living room. He scowled at the world. Here were a couch, chairs, tables, a bookcase full of books, photographs, and artifacts, a large Persian style rug, and an Airedale in the middle of it all. Is this what he worked so hard for? Things? Black scratches on an accounting sheet? Anne was right when she accused him of always adding up the numbers, but it wasn’t the number of things which interested him really, though he talked as if it were. The things were points of love. If he had them, then he could show himself, convince himself, that he had love.

Everything he needed, everything he really wanted, was right here, in this house. A beautiful intelligent wife, children, art, mementos, memories, a shared life. It was so simple. If only Anne would comply, would greet him when he came home with affection, would show some passion in bed at night, would call him up during the day, every once in a while, not everyday, but every few, just to ask how he was, then he would be content, then he could say, okay, it wasn’t the fireworks of a new lover, but it was satisfying and reliable. If only Anne would try and surprise him with a weekend in the Golan, for example. Or if she asked him what he would like to eat for a special dinner. If only she didn’t always buy him shirts for his birthday but was creative and bought some sex toy, or a trip to Amsterdam. If only she’d get off the phone already and come into the living room, didn’t she know he was in crisis?

And when she didn’t, and the seconds seemed like minutes, and the minutes like hours, he felt he was imploding and charged into the kitchen where the onions were sautéing with garlic and the cats waited patiently by their food bowls. Anne didn’t turn from the sink and he felt like striking her down. Instead, he tapped her on the shoulder.

“We need to talk,” he said, his face tight with restrained fury, his mouth pressed into a thin blade.

“Okay, just a moment.” Anne took her washed zucchini out of the sink.

“Yes, I was there last week and agree,” she said to her friend over the telephone.

“Now,” Rahv yelled.

Anne turned to him and stared. “Now,” he said more quietly. “Please get off the phone.”

“Roni, I’ll call you back. Got to go.” She set the phone into its receiver.

“Anne, I can’t go on anymore. Not like this.”

“Like what?” she asked, her voice sinking in anticipation of yet another long lecture.

“Do I need to go over it all again, how I need to be loved, how I need to feel that I am important to you? Is it so hard just to give me what I’m asking for? Am I such a bad person that you withhold so much?”

The first few words of her customary answer spilled forth : she was trying; how could he not see that; she was overloaded with professional and domestic responsibilities; Rahv needed to be patient. And then she short-stopped. Anger, not obsequiousness, filled her gullet. In addition to Rahv’s typical self-righteous swagger there was a posture of threat in his tone and body language. To this she wouldn’t lay her neck low.

“I’ve had it, Anne. I’ve been talking about this for years, I’ve been warning you it would come, and now it has. The switch in me that is directed towards you— you as my love object, my sexual object, my partner, my mate— has been turned. And it’s going to remain that way, on OFF, unless you change. And I mean right away.” He leaned against the stone countertop and placed his hands on either side of the freshly scrubbed electric range. There was something unusual in this attack, and then he started to cry. “Anne, please, it’s just too hard for me. Can’t you just love me, please, just love me.”

And she went over and held him. She stroked the back of his head and tightened her arms around him.

“Just stop it already,” Rahv pulled back and pushed her away. “Why can’t you just be a little passionate? You’re stroking my head as if I were one of the children, or better yet, Lucky. Yes, that’s how you touch me. Like I’m the dog.”

And then he remembered that Libi wouldn’t run her fingers down the crack of his backside anymore, that she wouldn’t suck his toes one by one and then fill her mouth with them all of them anymore, she wouldn’t lick his hip bones and push her pudenda up against his face anymore. And that all that was left were Anne’s insipid strokes, her maternal solicitations. It just couldn’t be. He wouldn’t accept that all that remained was a wife who would not make him feel wanted. And that’s all he wanted. That’s all he wanted.

 

 

 

Gail Greiner

Animal Rescue

 

“You may not keep the wild baby rabbit,” the Animal Rescue web site read, “no matter how cute it is.” Jane was relieved to read this. Because it was cute, the baby rabbit. Impossibly cute. But she couldn’t keep it. The web site said she couldn’t and, at the same time, understood the impulse.

Her dog had cornered the rabbit in a briar patch. She liked the way “briar patch” sounded, evoking a children’s book. The dog was barking at the briar patch, and Jane had gone over to see why. There, terrified, was a tiny rabbit: little rabbit ears, little black eyes with tiny eye lashes, a little, yes, cotton tail.

Jane had reached down into the prickly branches and gently lifted the baby rabbit from danger. It was then that the rabbit screamed. She had been unprepared for the sound, like pure terror, a banshee, the wail of death. Staccato and high and simultaneously deep and relentless. That this disturbing sound was coming from a miniature, jewel-like replica of a grown rabbit, a Beatrix Potter drawing in three dimensions, made the scream more chilling. Weren’t bunnies silent? Didn’t they twitch their noses to communicate? And wasn’t Jane, by picking up the rabbit, only trying to save it? The rabbit didn’t understand. The rabbit thought Jane was trying to hurt it, when really she was saving its life. Or was she?

When she thought about it later, she wondered why she hadn’t just removed the dog, taken the dog inside and closed the door, and let the bunny find his way home. What had she been thinking? She’d been thinking, she reminded herself, that the bunny had been taken from his nest -- did they have nests???-- and would die in the briar patch if Jane didn’t lift it out, even if she had pulled the dog inside. The rabbit had lost her way, lost his mother. Jane was a mother, and saving small animals was what mothers did, wasn’t it? The children would join her, they would all feed the bunny with an eye dropper, then a bottle, and put his little basket on a heating pad to keep it warm, and grow fond of it and it would grow fond of them and grow and grow and then, tearfully but stoically they would release the rabbit back to the wild. Or maybe she just lifted the rabbit out of the briar patch because she wanted to see what it would feel like in the palm of her hand.

“A baby rabbit,” her friend Margot snorted on the phone, “That’s all you’re short of.” Jane was jolted back to the time when her cousin had used the same phrase in reference to the idea of Jane having another baby. Her cousin understood that she, Jane, had her hands full already. She had a one-year-old and a three-year-old and a husband in medical school. She abridged novels for books on tape companies and edited a rip-off Nancy Drew series of books to supplement Carter’s student loans. She was supposed to be a writer and she wasn’t writing, unless writing plot outlines for the faux Nancy Drew series counted: faux Nancy exposes the insider traders, faux Nancy discovers toxic waste in the housing development. Jane would write something real when her husband became a doctor. That was the deal.

Jane had always imagined three children, had wanted to out-produce her mother, erase the loneliness of her own childhood. She had an older brother who had adored her until she was nine and he was twelve and started putting vodka in a plastic water bottle filled with orange juice and camping out with his friends. From that point on, her brother became a source of constant worry and trouble, and Jane became invisible.

Three children had been part of their marriage fantasy--he’d had two siblings, she wished she’d had two siblings--but suddenly there was medical school and back then they lived in the city and to keep their car, which gave them a sense of freedom even if it was false because they rarely had the money to go anywhere--but to keep their car and their false sense of freedom, Jane had to get up every other morning with the kids and the dog, and do the crazy New York City car parking switch.

Jane liked to say they lived on the windiest corner in New York City and so this meant that on some mornings she literally could not open the car door. She’d have to  explain to Carter when he got home that night or the next morning if he’d had an especially long shift, why the car had one of those impossibly sticky orange stickers on the windshield saying that it had obstructed the City’s street cleaning efforts. He would just look at her and then go lie down.

But even when it wasn’t windy, the door on one side of the car was permanently frozen shut, so if the car was parked on the wrong side of the street, she had to stand in the middle of traffic, unstrap the one-year-old from the stroller while the three-year-old hoisted himself up into his seat, put the baby on her hip while she expertly kicked and shook the stroller closed, slide the stroller in, stick the baby into the car seat, fasten the straps, assist the three- year-old in buckling himself into his car seat, as cars and taxis whisked by without even slowing down, before getting in herself and driving round and round and round trying to find an empty place.

So, it was true: all she had been short of in this scenario was a new baby. Her cousin understood this, understood that Jane had lots of other things to do, in addition to moving the car on alternate days, but more than this, she understood that Jane didn’t have the easy temperament that would make having a third baby easy. So another baby was pretty much, as her cousin had said, all Jane was short of. But a baby rabbit?

Why would a wild baby rabbit push her over the edge? Was she, did she appear to be so close to the edge?

Now they were no longer in the city. They’d moved to the leafy and fragrant suburb where Carter had grown up, another part of the marriage fantasy -- to live in the idyllic community where his childhood had been cut short by his parents’ divorce.  They were just renting, but Jane had a yard, a vegetable garden with a compost heap, and a briar patch. The children could go in and out of the house as they wished. Jane had a driveway and a Volvo station wagon. The car with the frozen side door had been put to rest. “Doctor,” their mechanic had said, putting his arm around Carter, “We’ve done all we could do.” The only thing missing now was her husband.

Two months earlier, Jane had sat on Margot’s heated kitchen floor weeping, because it turned out she’d been right about why Carter had been whitening his teeth. “When I feel like that,” Margot said, “When bad stuff happens to me,” she continued, as she stirred her chicken soup, “I try to figure out my part in it.”

At that moment sitting in Margot’s renovated kitchen as her baby girl, naked in her high chair, squeezed a stick of organic butter through her sea-anemone fingers and then rubbed it through her gold curls, Jane couldn’t imagine that bad things had ever happened to Margot.

Once, Sub Zero had delivered to Margot the wrong refrigerator and almost worse, the delivery guy had wanted a tip. What other bad things had happened to Margot? There was more, Jane was certain, but she couldn’t at that moment think of Margot’s pain, her own was so certain and heavy on her chest. Sitting on her kitchen floor crying, Jane had a vague recollection of Margot’s suffering, knew she had her share of pain, but she couldn’t see how she could take responsibility for any of it.

The crazy, drunken mother, the adored sick father, the bad spelling.

Well, maybe the spelling.

It’s true that Margot had tried to warn her about Carter. “You had better get down there,” she’d said about the Emergency Room where Jane’s husband worked.  “There are a lot of pretty women in there.” Jane was once a pretty woman but she had taken to wearing man-ish glasses and black loafers, Carter’s shirts and blue chinos.

Jane had never wanted to be loved for being pretty. When she was 14 and in love for the first time her boyfriend had said “You are so beautiful,” and she had cried and cried, convinced that that was the only reason he loved her. “You only love me because I’m beautiful,” she had wept, drunk on Sloe Gin fizzes. Then there was the time her college boyfriend, the professor, had said to her in a restaurant, “You are the most beautiful woman in this room.” She believed it was true, but she also knew it wouldn’t always be. What then? When she was nine her father told her that beautiful women were lonely and that he hoped she wouldn’t be lonely. What kind of thing was that to say to a nine year old?

Anyway, Margot had gone down to Carter’s hospital when her four year old had burned himself on the radiator (Margot’s fault?). It was then that Margot had seen all the pretty girls, and told Jane she’d better high tail it down there. Jane realized now that Margot had most certainly seen the one pretty girl in particular, the one out of the Dolly Parton song: auburn hair, eyes of green.

So Margot had been right about that--she should have gone down to the emergency room--and she was right about the rabbit. Jane would not be able to save it. And she knew that Margot was reminded, when faced with stories of animal rescue, of her mother, who had a collection of Have a Heart traps and would, drunk,  routinely drag Margot, high, down to the court yard of their Central Park West apartment building in New York City and bring back cats and ferrets and mice and rats.

“I have something to confess,” Carter had said one day last summer as they were driving back to the suburbs from the beach in their Volvo, the kids asleep in the back. Jane’s teeth did that thing they did when she got bad news, sort of vibrating so that she became aware of their roots. She kept looking straight ahead at the LIE, LaGuardia on the right, all huddled around the air traffic control tower looking so 1950’s, so Father Knows Best. Would her husband really be confessing an affair while the kids slept in the back, Mac in his booster, Parry in the baby seat? Her teeth continued to vibrate. “I want another baby,” he said, turning to look at her, taking his eyes off of the road and causing Jane to scream because the car in front of them braked suddenly. The kids woke up and the conversation was over for the time being.

By this time, in spite of, or maybe because of the fact that they had left the city, Jane was deeply committed to her relationship with the pills she kept in her Clinique give-away bag. Margot called it her Happy Bag and not just because of the jumpy blue and yellow and pink floral pattern. Jane had started trying to elevate and regulate her mood with a health food store remedy her groovy therapist had recommended, but then the groovy therapist suggested one day that she might need something a little stronger. “You don’t,” she had said when Jane had told her about crying in the bathroom during a dinner party with her new neighbors, “seem to have much of a buffer,” and sent Jane to a real doctor. Now she had a delicious cocktail of buffers... buffers and eveners and smoothers and softeners. “Welcome to the club,” the doctor had said when she tore the prescription out of the pad and handed it across her desk.

If Carter wanted to have another baby she would get off her happy pills. She didn’t know exactly how they were going to afford a baby, though. Carter was still in his residency. Was she supposed to have a baby and take in more faux Nancy’s, more books on tape? What about the novel? And she worried about her mood. “It’s not like being blue,” she tried to explain to Carter, “it’s like being ill.” Carter didn’t want to hear that his wife was ill, as he saw enough of ill in the emergency room.

She went off the happy pills and while she didn’t exactly feel unhappy, she did find herself sleeping on the couch most of the day when the kids were in nursery school or napping instead of doing her faux Nancy’s, and then she found she had fleas. They’d just gotten kittens, brothers rescued from Brooklyn, so they must, she thought, be the source of the itchy bumps on her midline.

“Yes, flea bites,” confirmed her husband the doctor who had been against getting the cats.  “I’m a dog person,” he’d said, but relented. The bites spread in a swath around her waist and onto her back. “Now I have them on my back,” she complained to him when he’d gotten back from a shift and was eating the rest of the children’s chicken nuggets.

“And they hurt inside and out.” That made him stop and look up at her -- she’d always been a good historian -- and he said, “Let me see,” and she turned around and raised her shirt, twisting around to get a look herself at her mottled back, and he said, “You have shingles,” and went back to the chicken nuggets.

“Stress,” said her doctor handing her a prescription for an anti-viral and one for a nerve-pain killer. “I guess I can’t be trying to get pregnant on these,” Jane said. “Not a good idea,” confirmed the doctor, his hand on the doorknob.

“He says it’s stress,” Jane told Carter when she got home and he was on his way out the door for his overnight. She knew Carter couldn’t see what she was stressed about. It was hard to explain to someone who worked in an emergency room, who routinely got no sleep, who was fifteen years older than his fellow residents, and who had taken out hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans to make his lately realized dream of becoming a doctor like his father come true, why going to the grocery store with two small children, for instance, was stressful. “I make it a game when I take them,” he said. She took the new drugs, got back on her happy pills, and they didn’t say anything else about another baby.

Now Carter was living around the corner from the hospital with a pretty nurse named Jolene. Jolene, Jane reflected, would certainly have lots and lots of babies -- three, four, five -- and take them all to the grocery store with her between nursing shifts. “She isn’t a nurse,” Carter liked to remind her, “she is a resident, and her name is Julie” -- and Jane was the new mother of a baby rabbit.

“Call crazy Barbara Yankowitz,” Margot said. “Unless you want me to come hit it over the head for you.” Jane piled the kids and the rabbit into the car. The rabbit was so scared that it had almost stop being cute. It was hard to look at anything that petrified. When they got to the Animal Rescue house the yard was overgrown and dogs inside barked ferociously. She rang the door a few times before it was answered by a grown but not quite right man surrounded by barking dogs. The grown man and the dogs were soon replaced by his father who looked equally perplexed, and he was then replaced by the mother who said, “It’s Margot’s rabbit. Come in.” The smell hit them first, before they heard the racket, a rancid, sour-milk stink.

Barbara Yankowitz led them through the living room into the dining room saying, “We have sixteen squirrels, and it’s feeding time.” The sixteen squirrels, in sixteen different sizes and in various squirrel containers including lots of bird cages, all of them crammed on the dining room table -- were in a feeding frenzy, wildly attacking baby-formula -- soaked bread in dishes made from jar tops, a cacophony of slurping, squishing and sucking. The squirrels shoved the wet bread into their little squirrel mouths, baby formula spraying all over their fir as they did. “Look!” Jane said to her children, even though she knew they were just as horrified as she was, maybe more, “Look at all the squirrels!”

“I hope they’ll all be rehabilitated before Thanksgiving so we can get our dining room table back,”  said Barbara. And then, in an unprecedented display of wits and speed, Jane wrote Barbara Yankowitz a check for $20, left the rabbit and the basket, and grabbing both kids’ hands, shot out the front door, past the dogs and the child man watching television. She didn’t ask what the rabbit’s chances of survival were nor, she realized, did she care.

Driving back, Jane wondered how many times Margot had been to Barbara Yankowitz’s animal shelter. Margot didn’t tell Jane much. In their friendship, Jane was the fucked-up one. But her sadnesses, Jane remembered, transcended the disappointment of the wrong refrigerator, the entitled delivery man. When Margot was sixteen, her father, whom she adored, had acquired a wasting disease that left him in a wheelchair, perfectly cogent but locked in, unable to talk. Margot, the youngest and still living at home, was the only one in her family who understood him. She once told Jane that she would sit with him in his library, high, reading him Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King,” he loved Arthurian legend, trying to feed him, or just listening as he grunted out sounds that only she could interpret. “Get me out of this living hell,” was one of his choice phrases, but he had also told her that her mother was a nut job -- as if she didn’t know -- and that Margot was his favorite daughter. Her mother ignored them both and spent a lot of time in Central Park tracking baby raccoons and stray cats.

Margot’s father had been Marilyn Monroe’s lawyer and Margot had a yellow Dansk casserole that had been hers. Jane wondered if she and Arthur Miller had registered for a whole set of yellow Dansk cook ware. Jane liked to imagine all the different pieces of it...the sauce pan, the butter warmer with the long handle, the skillet, the pitcher, the fondue pot. Or had Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller predated the fondue pot? Carter and Margot had traded Marilyn Monroe stories one night over the casserole, filled with one of Margot’s comforting stews, sitting in her warm, low-ceilinged, candlelit dining room, the fragrant night air pressing up against the leaded glass windows. Carter’s story was about an old color photograph his aunt had given him one Christmas, of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller out on his grandfather’s boat. Carter’s father was in the picture, a young man of about 20. Carter’s grandfather had apparently been friends with Arthur Miller, although no one knew anything more about it. Maybe they’d just been friends that day, because Carter’s grandfather had invited them out in the Sound in his beautiful wooden sailboat. In the picture Marilyn Monroe has her hair up in a white scarf and is wearing white shorts, curvy and gorgeous. She is looking up at Arthur Miller and Arthur Miller is looking out at the Sound.

 

 

 

NEW VOICES

 

Wendy Shreve

Lamentations

 

 

Roger Fredrickson swaggered at every opportunity. Climbing over rocky terrain with his hiking club, attending Bible readings; shopping at the supermarket, his six foot five frame, salt and pepper hair, and naturally tanned skin were difficult for any woman or man to miss—from a distance he resembled an ancient warrior. Closer examination showed tight lips; icy blue eyes. Tonight, he demonstrated to the local garden club the correct method of composting. In his mind, he reviewed the steps, confident he hadn’t forgotten anything. Oblivious to his audience’s reaction, he had no doubt the evening had been a success.

The teakettle whistled. Fredrickson poured two cups of water into the teapot, which contained two level teaspoons of loose Earl Grey tea, and set the timer for three minutes. He removed his newspaper from the rain-soaked plastic wrapper, fuming that the delivery person had not put the paper under the port cochere as he had asked, several times. After pouring his tea into the cup with the right amount of “real” milk, he sat down at the table to read.

***

 

His neighbor avoided calling Fredrickson unless he had no choice. Years dealing with him had taken its toll and Serge had finally surrendered and placed a “For Sale” sign on his own lawn, which his wife promptly removed.

“I know he’s there. The bastard’s answering machine is not on.”

The high-pitched whistle was slowly fading but something told Serge Hoffman to boldly go where no one had volunteered to venture. When he opened the kitchen door and walked in, he first noticed the spotless kitchen appliances. Serge hadn’t been given the rare honor of seeing this room and had imagined it to be pristine, but this room wasn’t real; a trade show exhibit that you wouldn’t touch for fear of smudging the porcelain. Then he saw it. No trade show exhibit here.

 

***

 

“Frederickson died of a heart attack, Maeve. The medical examiner will confirm it.”

“Serge, you’re not an expert. A few CPR classes and you’d think you were Sanjay Gupta.”

He laughed but stopped himself as he and his wife remembered what had just happened. Their eyes met. Hers sadness; his disbelief.

Maeve had never told her husband she had met Roger. When Serge and Maeve moved into their home, they bought it at the bottom of the market without caring who lived next door. Learning who her neighbor was, Maeve chose not to tell Serge about her past connection to Roger, and was relieved when Roger appeared not to remember Maeve. She guessed Roger Fredrickson had become paralyzed with embitterment. A feeling Maeve easily could have  shared.

“You’re welling up, dear. Isn’t that going a bit too far?”

Maeve struggled to speak. How much could she say?

“You may not want to hear this, Serge. Someone loved him—once.”

“What are you talking about?”

Maeve watched Serge’s face as it begun to register.

“He was married. Back in the days before he ‘washed ashore.’”

That old expression for residents not born on the Cape seemed most appropriate for Fredrickson—Serge had a vision of flotsam reeking of decaying fish and rotten seaweed.

“Arranged marriage? Las Vegas hiccup? Alcohol poisoning?”

She felt she was speaking with a stranger, Serge’s face was a question mark: baffled, yet unfazed that Maeve had known Roger.

“Serge! Never mind. Why should I explain?”

Did she owe her husband an explanation? Why had Maeve had taken away the FOR SALE sign? Because Roger Fredrickson had been the last string. Now, his death broke Maeve’s link to her best friend. And, like an over strung tennis racket, Maeve had been too tense for too long. She turned and ran up the back stairs.

Her thoughts followed her as Serge tried calling after his wife.

“What did I say?”

***

 

Until last week, no one had come forward to claim the body. A cousin twice removed had reluctantly stepped forward. The undertaker had told Maeve that "the corpse was dressed in a stiff, gray suit," to match the rigor mortis, the funeral director added. Maeve wondered if the shirt was Brooks Brothers.

Then she reminded herself why she was here. Clockwise, she slowly studied the faces of her friends and the others who inexplicably chose to honor the dead man. Beside Serge, who kept rocking back and forth on his feet as Maeve punched her husband's arm periodically, stood Rachel Potter, the town clerk, whose usually sharp eyes appeared cloudy and unfocused as the minister read the eulogy.

Sandwiched between Serge and the minister was the mayor who waited his turn, stretching his hands and turning his head side to side, as if he were an actor staying loose until performance time. Behind the mayor, was the high school principal who watched respectfully, though Maeve guessed he was sorrier to give up his weekly golf game. Then, to Maeve's right was Carol Hart, Roger's most recent, but quickly dropped, admirer. Maeve saw Carol's hands shaking, so Maeve placed her hand on her friend's shoulder without speaking. And yet, at the bank where they worked, Carol had said only a few months ago, "That tight-ass may as well be dead."

"Let us take a moment to pray for this child of God who has found peace in the kingdom of heaven."

An unabashed agnostic, Maeve found herself listening and praying. Anything to stop herself from displaying her hidden sorrow, as her mother would always remind her: "After all, dear, you came from Yankee roots." A hard swallow. Maeve had been thinking about the first time she was introduced to Roger; there had been something too familiar about him, the strong jaw line, aquiline nose, cleft chin—a spark of recognition, too close to home, now suddenly and forever gone.

Before she could return to that moment, meeting Roger, Maeve realized the minister had finished. The mayor elected to say a brief comment, as the funeral director began lowering the dead man's body into the grave. For her own reasons Maeve had dreaded this day, the casket brought unwanted memories; another funeral; another passing.

Thirty years ago, Maeve Hoffman, née Riley, had been a bridesmaid for her friend, Aurora. They had met in grade school; Aurora had pushed past Maeve's stony façade awakening new wonders. Aurora's family lived their lives zigzagging along while others walked a familiar direction. Stalwart but kind, Maeve, became a welcome challenge, as Aurora introduced her friend to a limitless universe.

Walking along Chatham Harbor one day, Maeve watched Aurora dancing and pointing excitedly as she spotted a grey seal popping its head above the water. Or on class trips to Boston, Aurora would disappear down a darkened alleyway to discover a used book shop where she would dwell—lifting each book, smelling its history and gingerly turning the pages—ignoring the chaperone's orders and Maeve's pleads to move along. Radiance followed Aurora; a fire fly glowing day and night, attracting mates for brief a rendezvous. The day Aurora left for college she promised Maeve, "I will never settle."

Ten years later, Aurora received her doctorate in New Age studies, and started teaching at what was then Radcliff. The wedding had been spur-of-the-moment. A Harvard Divinity student, who had gotten his license via mail, performed the simple ceremony. The groom and bride had met each other at a lecture on "Eastern Religious Traditions". Given their differences—he older by ten years; he buttoned up; she buttoned down—Maeve unable to get beyond Roger's rigid mantle, not seeing the protective shell she herself had once worn, marveled at Aurora's choice.

With her mass of black curls bound together like a sheath of wheat; her smooth, olive skin unadorned by make-up, Aurora walked toward the make-shift, Delphinium-covered gazebo. She wore a white lace mini-dress which brushed against her long, sculpted legs—and had bare feet. Dressed in his tailored, navy blue suit with a polka-dotted bow tie, a starched white shirt and loafers, Roger stood proudly, ignoring the muffled amusement of the minister as Aurora stepped up to join her groom. Roger had renounced a devoted life to be a devoted husband, knowing his bride would bring infinite possibilities, and he would give Aurora the longed for structure she secretly desired while remaining independent.

Maeve never could pinpoint why their affection for Aurora didn't bridge the widening distance between Maeve and Roger. Aurora sensed the awkwardness among her fiancée and best friend and how they were happiest when she was with them. Neither could be themselves when Aurora was not. And yet, Roger demonstrated his underlying passion when he met and fell in love with Aurora and decided to become a Religion professor. He had chosen not to remain celibate; to pursue the priesthood. He had a real future. Aurora loved him. Maeve smiled, and pretended.

***

The morning after the funeral Serge came downstairs and poured himself his usual mug of black coffee. Maeve had already started breakfast.

“Will you explain to me what all that fuss was about last night?”

Should she tell her husband about her friend? Would he understand?

After returning from the funeral, Maeve began banging cabinet doors and kicking kitchen chairs until she caught herself sobbing and ran upstairs. Serge knew better than to follow.

“Why did I cry?”

“Come to think of it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you cry.”

“And you won’t today,” if I can help it, she thought. With Aurora’s sudden death, the childhood pact they’d made had gone with her. Maeve had lost her muse, and reverted to the days before Aurora, to her cocoon.

“I don’t get it.”
His wife thought, “Is he reading my mind?” She couldn’t, wouldn’t let him.

“Yup,” Maeve responded.

“It’s like talking to a man,” Serge said.

Normally, she would have taken that as a compliment. Now, Maeve kept herself from hitting him with the frying pan. She decided to take a chance.

“You remember my friend, Aurora.”

“The college lady?”

“We lost touch after she married. Inevitable. Anyway, I didn’t tell why we lost touch . . . that she died.”

Maeve had chosen to find comfort in a foreseeable future. She had chosen to marry Serge.

Not having much curiosity for people he hadn’t met, such as Maeve’s old friends, Serge didn’t bother to ask what had happened to her school friend. He was more curious about Maeve’s past life, a subject she rarely discussed.

“When did Aurora . . . what a name . . . seriously, when did she die?”

Maeve watched her husband. Serge sat wearing his standard uniform, a white t-shirt and blue jeans. He’d be leaving soon to do another fix-it job, hang at the local pub for lunch with his buddies; living what he thought was an uncomplicated life, yet finding fault in everyone. Maeve hadn’t been surprised the two neighbors reacted like stones of flint, sparking whenever they had even a minor conflict.

“A few years after she married Roger, yes our neighbor, Aurora was killed by a drunk driver. She was walking to college. The car came right up on the sidewalk.”

“Roger married to her?!”

The woman standing at his side became a stranger whose tight lips and burning eyes issued a warning. Who was this man she married?

“Yah, well. That’s bad. Too young.”

“Twenty-nine. Roger never got over it.”

“That’s no reason to take it out…”

“For someone like Roger, it was, but there’s more to it.”

“What do you mean?”

“After Aurora died, Roger disappeared for a few years. Just vanished. I tried to look in on him but no one knew where he’d gone. His parents were dead by then, too.”

“I get it. Your wife dies a few years after you marry her. I guess I’d be a wreck too.”

“You’d recover. That’s not the point. No matter how stuffy I thought Roger was, he really did love Aurora. He wasn’t the kind to sit around and feel sorry for himself.”

“He loved himself too much.”

“Serge . . .”

Maeve walked to the kitchen window which overlooked Long Pond, a large lake really, but the name stuck. She opened the window and a cool, summer breeze greeted her, as if it would carry away an inflamed memory, rekindled by Roger’s death. The days before Serge, old boyfriends; boys. Love had been found in storybooks and Doris Day movies.

Happiest when they were alone: the two girls held hands as they sat on a bluff, overlooking the expanse of stars and sea merging into the horizon, sharing dreams of what could be. Aurora traveling to the Far East; Maeve discovering a comet.

She shook her head and looked out the window, noticing the light breaking in the distance, teasing her into believing dawn was approaching. Instead, a whisper of clouds brushed across the tree tops filtering the rising sun. The dampness in the air foretold another rainy day ahead. Maeve welcomed the droplets as she walked out to the porch and sat down; they disguised the streaming salt water running down her cheek.

Footsteps announced her husband.

“So you are crying for a dead man.”

He’d never understand. The innocent friendship she’d tucked away in her heart. Aurora had been all that Maeve had wanted to be.

She wiped away her tears and looked up at Serge, trying to recall the many years they’d shared, contented; comfortable until she couldn’t pretend anymore. She turned away to watch the darkening sky.

“No, lost promise.”

 

 

Julia Kaminsky

Splinters

 

The secret to life is to learn how to live with unfinished business. I figure this out at age 27 at work when my coworkers invite me to a mani-pedi lunch break and I say I can't, I have a project to finish, how can I possibly enjoy a mani-pedi when the project's not done, and they say, you've got it all wrong, that's WHY you enjoy the mani-pedi. I have many pieces of unfinished business. The boyfriend I'm lukewarm about, the man I'm nuts for who left me, my yet-unformed habit of using dental floss, the dermatologist appointment I should have made months ago, and the pimples that remind me of this, expired milk in the fridge, boxes of pasta that have gone uncooked, takeout receipts, untalleyed, and a mediocre credit report with items to dispute.

How, it all begs the question, is a woman supposed to get a pedicure with pages of draft writing and unpaid bills bursting into the salon and sticking to the polish, streams of magenta dripping over half-formed thoughts, chunks of ripped paper lodged in and on paint-globbed toenails, rogue curdled milk plopping into my glass of coconut water, reams of floss tying my hands. Except these things, they are not just things, they are people: roaming manicurists in surgical masks like militant dermatologists, noodle fingers with tomato-colored nails prodding me until I can't help but look: there he is, by the sink, my lukewarm boyfriend splashing warm foot-soak water in a desperate cry for attention love me love me love me let me rinse your weary feet; over there, by the row of mirrors, the man who left me slipping a ring on the slender finger of his lover, whose nails are more polished than mine could ever be; soapy water like insect eyes, a million tiny reflections of her face refracted from bubble to bubble, her army of sterile gazes shooting through slippery prisms of blue and yellow light, illuminating and then submerging my chipped toenails and the leathery skin of my heels, swollen and calloused over the splinters that will never come out.

 

 

 

 

Miriam Kelly Ferguson

Weaver

It was one of those hot, muggy midsummer afternoons in Elktown, the kind that makes you think of lung fevers. How I had once dreaded coming back. But, where else could I go. I had been to the west coast, east coast, and even to a far-off country, only to be broken by life or things I didn’t understand. More than anything in the world, I wanted to be whole, have children, and have a life like you see in Life magazine. At thirty-three years old I was back where it all started, still about five foot three inches tall and barely one hundred pounds, still with my shoulder-length braids; I was back where it all started. Most people said I looked like a young Diana Ross when she was a teenager. I hadn’t lost my smile though, just lost my way. I had come back to live with Mama. “The world is not for people like you.” That’s what she’d told me. She was right. It had kicked my ass.

Elktown was about twenty miles outside Easton, Maryland. Once a farming community, it was run-down now. My grandmother grew string beans, tomatoes, corn, and cucumbers for the farmers who owned the land. She somehow owned a patch of land herself, about two acres. Our house had weathered clapboard siding and rose straight up two floors. Across the road from our house were seasonal workers’ tract houses. All empty. The land looks battered now. There was no money in small farming. Even animals stayed away from here; but Mama’s in charge of me now and I needed to be still.

As I sat on the porch swing of my Grandma’s big old house, I saw the dust of an oncoming car. Who could that be coming up this way? A man, dressed in a light brown shirt, drenched in sweat. He sat tall behind the wheel of the dusty white car. There was even sweat from his bald head running down his face. Reaching into his pocket, he took out a white handkerchief to mop his brow and pat his cheeks. As he stepped out of the car, his skin glowed like neon red and his white teeth was big. His face seemed familiar. He walked up to the porch with a limping left leg and just stared at me. “What’s your name Miss lady.”

I answered him while sucking my teeth, “My name’s Almena Johnstone. You lost or something?”

“No,” he said, “Don’t believe I am, cause I’m your daddy.”

“My daddy! Come to think of it, you do look like that old picture Mama got in the drawer. Come on up here on the porch, I’ll git you something cool to drink.” I walked to the kitchen and I said to myself, “Lord, let it be him. I been tricked so many times. Last month a man come by, saying he was from the health department and he needed to check my heart. He had a bag with a listening device and all. Said, I just needed to take off my shirt and give him the state fee of two dollars. I gave it to him. Thank goodness Mama come and chased him away. He pinched my nipples too hard.

As I passed the living room couch, I reached under it and pulled out Grandma’s make’m do right stick and put it by the door where I could reach it quick. It’s too hot for a trick today. He did look kinda like what people had told me. My stomach was excited. I had to tell myself to calm down before I peed on myself. Returning to the porch with some iced tea I looked at his hands, they was rough and hard, and ashy looking. He took the glass gently and didn’t seem threatening at all.

“Ain’t you got a hug for me” he said.

“I do, but first let me tell you all about me, I’m about to bust, if I don’t tell you this, Daddy. Oh, by the way,” I said, “What’s wrong with your leg?”

“Long story, baby girl, long story,” he said. “Why don’t you just let me sit over here and hear what you about to bust about?”

“Guess what, Daddy!” my voice rushing out of me. “I’m a weaver just like you. Since you’ve been gone, I’ve spent a lot of time doing it, but you’d never know it from my hands. Mama said my hands are smooth as a baby’s bottom. I weave in little bits of myself in my shawls and my rugs, bits of other people too. I weave in lies, and I weave in life, and in the end it’s hard to know if one keeps me warmer than the other.  Oh Daddy, if you could just see my work. Maybe when Mama comes home she’ll unlock the attic. That’s where they are, they resting. I tell my eyes not to see so much cause sometimes my rugs weep like somebody’s lost. They the truth and some folks can’t take the truth.”

“I know that’s right, baby girl.” Daddy shook his head and smiled.

“I can use my rugs for a blanket, a shawl, or just hang on a wall. Most of the time I wrap one over my shoulders, wear it to cover myself with whatever I see. I got a rug from when mom and me used to live in town. I weaved that rug out of Seagram Seven gin bottles. I used the bands from the necks of them bottles. It’s kinda hard to walk on and even rougher to wear. But a real piece of work anyhow. Just like me and Mama. Everybody in town was always saying me and Mama was a piece of work.

“ Hey, Daddy,” I laughed over at him.  “You got yourself one hell of a weaver here. I got me a rug so blue that them Persian weavers got nothing on me. My blue rug came to me during me and Mama’s loving period. Her loving husband, Wallace, pulled, pushed, jerked, kicked and tried to kiss that one out of me. Nothing could stop him from making me finish that rug except death and it did. One day Mama got so tired of his loving, he went to sleep and didn’t wake up. Yes, sir. He didn’t know what hit him. I got me a pretty blue rug out of it though. I don’t show that rug too often, it’s the kinda rug you hide or just show the edges. Its right up there in the attic, just as blue as any blue you’ll ever see.”

Daddy didn’t look too well, rubbing his fingers across his temples, and staring off in space. But I continued anyway.

“Daddy, I got me a yellow shawl. It came to me during my power to the people years. See, all you had to do was suck on this paper or sniff up this powder and just like magic, California Sunshine! My shawl’s got a kinda white foggy border all around it, but it’s pretty though. Don’t know how long that shawl took to weave, but I think it’s a good piece!”

“Yes sir, you’ve got yourself one hell of a weaver Daddy. Ain’t you proud of me?” I looked up at him and his sweat had dried and turned his skin a faded gray, seem like he didn’t want no hug no more. I must remember this color. There was stillness. He didn’t say a thing, and we sat there watching a bumble bee buzz around the rim of his glass of sweet tea. I stuck my thumb in my mouth and took a delicious suck. Something I hadn’t done in years.

Finally I couldn’t stand the silence any longer and I whispered loud enough for him to hear, “You come for me? I bet you could teach me how not to see so much.” I searched his face and saw he was struggling with my last question. Oh Lord, I did it again, I ask for too much. Mama’s always telling me not to want. Stop wanting Almena. Stop seeing. It ain’t coming. That’s like telling a weaver not to weave.

After a few more minutes of silence, I said, “Does your leg hurt?”

He cleared mucus from his throat and said, “Almena, I lost the full use of my leg in Memphis, Tennessee. Did your mother tell you I was in the army?”

“Of course she did.  I tried to go but they wouldn’t take me.”

“That’s my baby. But that’s not where it happened.  One night, in Memphis, I was down on my luck and decided to switch decks with my own special one. I won big time for the next three nights, so big that the prettiest lady in Memphis went out with me. She and I went to her house and between the liquor and the loving, I told on myself. Her man didn’t take highly to that, me cheating him out of his money or being with his woman. Four men with crowbars took me out back of the gambling house the very next night. They beat me and destroyed my hip, and yes, baby, my leg does hurt. It hurts when I move too quick, it hurts when it rains, it hurts when I see a deck of cards, but most of all it hurts right now. I should have been here so you didn’t need to all that stuff.”

I gave him a hug, a light one. I don’t rightly like touching too much. Some folks in town took me for slow or strange. I give people a wide spacing. Maybe I am strange, but I am also a weaver, a damn good weaver. My thumb taste real good today. Mama better not catch me sucking it through. She says we done with that.

I could hear the sound of the bus coming way before it got to our lane, and I knew Mama would be walking up the road shortly. She was going to be happy tonight. Daddy is home. I usually would run to meet her and either hold her hand or hug her around her wide waist all the way to the house. Not today. I could see her hotel maid’s uniform at the end of the lane; she walked slow like she was very tired today. The closer she got to the house the louder my heart was pounding. It’s been a long time since Mama smiled. Closer she came. First she looked at the car and after a few more steps; she looked at me, as if to say, “Are you ok.”

I ran down from the porch and clung to her wide waist. “I bet you can’t guess who’s here?”

“No, honey I can’t guess,” she said, “Who is it?” She peered over at him and her whole being came to attention. Her face seemed to twist up, like when I miss a whole row of stitches in my weaving. The almond eyes I loved so much squirted water and it looked like steam was coming from her nose. “Almena, go inside, I want to talk to this man alone,” She said.

I went inside, but I sat down by the window so I could hear every word. I wished I had my weaving needles with me; I’d never weave forgiveness. I shut my eyes real tight and prayed that my ears would see what my next rug would be.

There was a howling, wolfing sound coming from Mama. “Is she crying?” No she’s mad. No, she was telling him to git off her porch but I could tell she didn’t really mean it. She just wanted to be in charge of whatever was going to happen here. That was my Mama always in charge. She told him every way he had failed us.

He said, “Now, Georgia, after all this time, can’t you just listen. There’s some unfinished business we have to talk about. Then if you still want me to go, I’ll go. You sure are still a firecracker and just as pretty too. I done you wrong, I know. But I always meant to come back for you and Almena. Just let me have my say. Life has a way of letting you down and you can’t come back to where you been cause you can’t git enough of what you left to go git. I always loved you best, but I never had enough to give you. You and my daughter deserved better.”

I thought to myself. Oh daddy, he sure can talk sweet, can’t he? Mama wasn’t saying nothing now. He was going to have to do better than that. Mama could be mean when she wanted to be. They talked for almost two hours before I saw the screen door sneak open; and Mama told me, “Your daddy’s going to stay for dinner so git cleaned up and help me in the kitchen.”

“Yes, Mama,” I boomed, with a smile the size of a watermelon, creeping up on my face.

That night we cooked everything we had in the house. Mama was humming. Good smells was coming from everywhere. Daddy was swinging on the porch, talking bout the work that needed doing around here. Dinner that night was fried chicken, sweet potatoes, quick greens, cornbread, fresh fried tomatoes, and lemonade. For desert we had toffee pecan gooey butter cake. We had not had that kinda meal since Grandma died of a heart failure.

I wanted to hurry up and finish dinner so I could show Daddy my rugs, but he kept saying, “Baby, we got plenty time. In fact we got the rest of our lives.”

Daddy went to his car and came back with a stack of blues records. He played them on our old record player. Songs that made you sad, but in your sadness, you have to laugh, cause some of the predicaments the singers got in was funny. I mean, what was they doing with the milkman’s woman anyway? Then him and Mama started dancing. Now that was funny. Him, being a little lopsided and her being a little shy. Daddy told me to come join in, but I told him no. I had to just see this. My rug was shaping in my head. A weaver is a thinking kind of person.

I fell asleep right there on the floor, watching them dance to the Blues. Somebody put me to bed. When the rooster crowed the next morning, I jumped up and ran to the living room. The house was still. There was no Mama, no Daddy, and no car outside. My rugs was spread out over the couch as if someone had inspected them all. On the record player was a white envelope with my name on it. It read:

My dearest darling,Almena,

Your daddy and me have gone for a while. We will be back someday. Enclosed is the deed to the house and most of the insurance money your grandmother left for you. You’ll be just fine. Your daddy loved your rugs but they hurt. We both want you to be free, free in your head, free in your mind, free in your spirit and free in the way to see your next rugs. You are a weaver, a damn good weaver, and if we leave now you won’t see no more sadness brought on by us. The colors we see are dim, but you still have a chance to see light and good.

                                                          Mama.
P.S. Almena baby, I didn’t ever say your father was a weaver. You misunderstood me. I called him a no good lying deceiver.

 

As I put the letter down, I said bye to Mama, but didn’t she know that all I ever loved is gone? What I know about free? Free seem lost. Only God knew the emptiness of my heart. Even my rugs couldn’t fill up that hole. This time, when I looked at my rugs, they was ugly. It’s a shame for a human to know nothing but hurt and disappointment in her life.

That was two years ago, such a long time ago. Someday never did come for Mama. Her and daddy run off the road in Allentown, PA and died in a car collision. They’re gone. The first six months after Mama left, I didn’t weave a thing. I couldn’t see anything through the pain in my heart.  I was broken once again. The cold of winter came and it made me see death too. I wondered what color is death to a weaver. It’s not black cause it wasn’t like I was in the dark. It just don’t sound like free to me either. I hope no one ever has to feel that kinda hurt. It ain’t nothing but misery.

It was all too complicated for me, made my head hurt, made it match my heart. Mama and Grandma started talking to me in my head. They’d be having one of their usual  arguments about whether I should stay or leave. They didn’t talk all the time, just times when I felt like I couldn’t go on. So, I wasn’t lonesome, just lonely. Folks in town used to cross the street when I came by. I guess it was the way I looked at them. You git mighty down, even ill, when people treat you like a retard, and then, you start to believe it. I needed to weave again, but that would have taken a feeling, a doing, and I didn’t have nothing but all that talk in my head going round and round and getting nowhere. I couldn’t tell anyone that my dead kin talk to me because, I’m sure, they would’ve sent me to the unsteady house. I betcha I could find me some subjects in there.

I thought about leaving again, figuring if I wanted to find myself some happiness, I’d have to be around some happenings. Grandma kept telling me, “You miss too many opportunities, and anyway girl, don’t you leave my estate girl.” Death must expand your vision, cause this here was more like a spot than an estate. Grandma did have a big old rocking chair that would hold you and rock all your cares nearly away. That chair was estate worthy. I rocked myself dizzy some days.

Grandma and Mama would be arguing between themselves so loud it felt like it a hurricane went off in my head. Grandma usually won these arguments. Like the one they had bout whether I should go to Salisbury and work in the canning factory. Oh my, how they carried on through the night. Mama said, “Go” and Grandma said, “Stay.” Me, I just rocked and swung my head from side to side. Head listening is hard; it can grasp a person’s wind.

Sometimes I had to quiet them down. Sometimes I had to make some homemade dandelion wine and take to drinking it when they got on my last nerves. That helped; yes… and when it did, I didn’t even know I had a nerve.

Most mornings saw me looking through hazy eyes, blurred by too much wine and fitful sleep. This day I could see that winter was unlocking its hold on the old oak tree in Grandma’s yard.  Streaks of sunlight through the living room windows made me shield my eyes and hope I had an Aspirin somewhere in the house. Searching the bathroom cabinets, I come up with nothing. It was Saturday, the day I usually get my groceries. I threw on a light sweater and start down the lane to catch the bus. This headache would have to wait. You can’t make wine if you’re out of sugar and yeast.

An hour later I’m still standing there kicking stones, waiting and no bus.  Walking back toward the house I saw the first of four or five leaves budding on bare branches of the oak tree.  I stop and ease down onto the worn swing to finish out my wait, wondering as I let go and drop into the seat if the swing would hold my weight. It does and I begin to swing. The breeze and the light feeling of being whisked away is almost as comforting as rocking.  The harder I pumped the higher I went. I could see the clouds through the branches of that old tree. A big cloud directly overhead, forms in the outline of Grandma’s face and puffs of her white woolly hair. To the right a thick branch resembles her sturdy arm ending with palms up and long arthritic fingers.  Things were shaping in my head. On another branch two beasty eyes peer back at me.  When they blink, I nearly break my back flipping out of that swing.  I hit the ground hard on my backside and scoot away, skinning my elbows through my tread bare sweater. “What the shit…” I yell. Whatever it was, it had the air rushing from my chest.

Groaning and running a few more yards away from the tree I wonder what the hell I saw. Just then the bus passes by, leaving me without a chance to catch up to it,  I was that far back in the yard.

I’ve never been known for courage so I don’t go back inspecting nothing in that tree.  I return to the house to tend to my skinned elbows.  Was it a spirit or a sign?

Sitting on the porch swing and holding a rag soak with peroxide to my right elbow, I try to make out what I saw.  Then it come to me; it had to be a squirrel or a bird that high in the tree.  I set my sight on that tree; about ten minutes went by, and then he rose in all his glory.  

He drop down from the limb and pecks at the ground and threw his head back proudly. I sat still to watch him; I didn’t have nothing else to do. Grandma always did say if you look at something long enough you’ll find some use for it…so I watch.

His head is capped midnight black which falls down past his throat and out to his wings. The underbelly, shoulders, tip and edges of his tail are orange with shades of yellow.  His beak comes to a sharp point and looks silver in the morning light. This bird is dressed for a party.  Laying down in the porch swing with my hands beneath my head, I see his every move. 

His moves are jerky but with purpose.  His eyes seem to never leave me although he is busy picking, gathering and storing his bounty in the tree. He is not a big bird but, he has a large presence.  Every once and while he stops as if posing, picks up one of his thin legs and high steps a bit closer to the house.

I watched that bird a while before leaving to fix me a quick lunch. In the kitchen, a lemon catches my eye. Once again I think of my new neighbor Mr. Fancy Bird because of all that yellow.  I want to get a closer look so I crumble up some bread, spread peanut butter across some soda crackers and make me a tall glass of ice tea.  Throwing the bread around close to the porch, I wait for him to come have lunch with me. I can see his body moving back and forth on the limb. This is one busy bird. My offer was not accepted.

Not wanting to scare him away, I went back inside.  What a mess it was. Piled in the corner was unopened mail, last year’s catalogs, and a coat of dust that now lives on my Grandma’s knick knacks. I hadn’t clean all winter.  I start by scrubbing the green and white kitchen cabinets, sweeping the living room floor, dusting down every table with wood oil and finally washing every window in the house.  It’s surprising where you can hide wine stained mason jars. Mr. Fancy Bird had started something.  Before long sweat pours from under my arms and down my back. It gives me a cleansing feeling.

Wiping sweat from my brow with my hanky, I go back outside to see what Mr. Fancy Bird is doing.  He is not there.  Walking down closer to the tree and looking up into it, I see what he’s done. That squatter is building a nest. As I look at his work it has a near perfect shape to it.  It hangs like a squash from the tree.  He has tucked twigs and plant scraps together in a basket weave pattern.  That was the first pattern Grandma taught me to weave. It’s a nice piece of work.

Just as I turn to go back toward the house Mr. Fancy Bird comes swooping down on me. I try to duck with my hands shielding my face and head but he manages to pulls at my braid.

“Goddamn you” I cry out while moving away.

He’s a brave little critter. He takes the strands he’s pulled from my hair and tucks them into his nest. I think to myself, he has snapped off more than he can weave. There ain’t but one weaver around here and she looks just like me.

Pulling my weaving table outside I’m ready to do battle with him. In my head I’m already framing what my next rug will be.  I lay my clamps, and lacing thread on the table.  Grandma taught me to have what you need right in front of you.  It’s been a while since I felt this lively. I’m running around like a puppy chasing his tail trying to find what I need.

“Just start!” I hear Mama’s voice say. I can picture the white woolly clouds that outline Grandma. The tall oak tree with the swing will be swaying. And of course, Mr. Fancy Bird will be strutting all around my rug. This will be my best rug yet.

 

 

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