Thursdays@Three

Feria del Libro Wrap-Up

2009-05-07T06:55:00.000-07:00

Another successful Feria del Libro for Thursdays@Three has come and gone. The U.S. Embassy's stand setup was a excellent setting for our readings and the agenda provided a diverse, eclectic mix of talks and readings from writers for fair goers.

We were also were able to give two talks this year: "How to Write a Screenplay" and "How to Form and Maintain a Writer's Group", the latter of which was reviewed in Critica. Click here to read it.

Also, two members of Thursday@Three, Sharon Haywood and Maryann Ullmann, were interviewed by the English language program (RAE) on Radio Nacional Argentina about their experiences as expat writers living in Buenos Aires. They discussed the second Thursdays@Three anthology in addition to their individual writing projects.

Listen to the interview here:
Part I (20 minutes)
Part II (13 minutes)

If you haven't been yet to the Feria Internacional del Libro at La Rural, you still have a few more days. On May 12th the Feria will close its doors until next year. Be sure to stop by the stand to check out Thursday@Three's anthology.

Expat Writers in Buenos Aires to Release Anthology at 35th International Book Fair

2009-04-21T18:38:00.000-07:00

Also to give public readings and panel discussions
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 23 April to 11 May, 2009 – English-speaking expatriate writers living in Buenos Aires will release a second collection of their work, Thursdays@Three: Expat Writers in Buenos Aires at the 35th International Buenos Aires Book Fair in the La Rural Exhibition Center. The anthology, published in English, features short fiction, memoir, essays and poetry, on everything from alpacas in England, funerals in Ghana, to buying underwear in Buenos Aires. The authors draw from their diverse travel experiences, memories of home, and living in Argentina. They will give public readings of their work and also present two panel discussions: How to Form and Maintain a Writers’ Group and How to Write a Screenplay. (Please see a schedule of events below.) Complementary copies of the anthology will be available at these readings and panels, as well as at the U.S. Embassy stand. Advanced copies available on request.

Authors whose work will appear in the collection are: Ambi Alexander, Amanda Fernandez, Sharon Haywood, Katharine Jones, Joanna Richardson, Tara Sullivan, Maryann Ullmann, and guest author Donald Ranard.

Schedule of Readings & Panel Discussions:

Readings by Authors (in English)
At the U.S. Embassy stand, Yellow Pavilion, Calle 35, Stand 2023:
Saturday, 25 April from 15:00 to 16:00
Maryann Ullmann and Ambi Alexander
Sunday, 26 April from 18:00 to 19:30
Amanda Fernandez, Katharine Jones, and Tara Sullivan
Friday, 1 May from 17:00 to 18:00
Amanda Fernandez and Maryann Ullmann
Friday, 1 May from 19:00 to 20:30
Tara Sullivan, Katharine Jones, and Ambi Alexander

Panel: "How to Write a Screenplay" (in Spanish)
Date & Time: Saturday, 25 April from 16:00 to 17:00,
Location: Sala D. F. Sarmiento, White Pavilion
Participating: Katharine Jones and Tara Sullivan
Description: Two members of Thursdays@Three, a writing group of English speaking foreigners living in Buenos Aires, will present key points to consider when writing a screenplay. Topics covered will include: 1. How to turn a "story" into a screenplay; 2. Screenplay structure; 3. Plot v. character driven screenplays; 4. What you want from each scene; 5. What makes dialogue work, and how you know when it doesn't.

Panel: "How to Form and Maintain a Writers’ Group" (in Spanish)
Date & Time: Tuesday, 5 May from 16:30 to 17:30
Location: Sala A. Storni, White Pavilion
Participating: Amanda Fernandez, Katharine Jones, Tara Sullivan, Sharon Haywood, Ambi Alexander, and Maryann Ullmann
Description: Many writers strengthen their craft by participating in writing groups, which differ in structure from the local "Taller Literario" format. Members of Thursdays@Three, a writing group of seven English-speaking foreigners living in Buenos Aires, will discuss how to form and run a peer-led writing group, including guidelines for critique, group structure, membership, and group goals.

For additional information, please contact Tara Sullivan or Maryann Ullmann, and see the website www.thursdaysatthree.blogspot.com (English) or www.juevesalastres.blogspot.com (Spanish). For further information about the Book Fair visit: www.el-libro.org.ar.

About Thursdays@Three – Thursdays@Three is a group of seven English-speaking expatriate writers that meet weekly to critique one another’s work and develop their craft.

Contact: Tara Sullivan
Thursdays @Three Writers’ Group
Phone: 6380 0450
Cell: 15 5403 6629
E-mail: sullivan.taraann@gmail.com

Secondary Contact: Maryann Ullmann
Thursdays@Three Writers’ Group & Writers in Buenos Aires
Cell: 15 6875 4407
E-mail: writersinba@gmail.com

Conkers

2008-05-27T15:03:00.000-07:00

The most important thing at primary school was not what we were studying, or even what we were wearing but what craze was currently in: hopscotch, French skipping with elastic, marbles, stilts, hoops, you name it they all came and went. Most of these crazes were fleeting and unrelated to the seasons, but there was one craze that came round regularly every autumn: conkers.

The conker is the seed of the horse chestnut tree. A magnificent deciduous tree which has pink or white candelabra of flowers in spring and in autumn bears a curious fruit that looks as though it came out of book on mediaeval warfare. The conker hides inside a green prickly ball which is quite tough and almost leathery – it is difficult to peel open but well worth the effort, as once you manage to pry it out of its protective shell, there lies the conker, a luscious, dark-chocolaty shiny brown gem.

Although well worthy of being collected for their beauty alone, that was not what we wanted conkers for. Indeed we did use them in a kind of warfare. Once you had found and peeled your conker you had to see if it was a good one. This meant that it had to be hard, but not brittle, as it had to be pierced by a sharp instrument and then threaded onto a piece of string about 6 inches long, knotted underneath the conker. Many a conker did not survive this first test and had to be discarded when it split open at the skewering process.

Once the conker was threaded for combat we paired off to duel with our mediaeval flails. Each person held their conker like a ball on a chain swinging ominously. On the count of three both parties would bang conkers together, trying to split the other person’s open. The winner survived unscathed. Some conkers were invincible and those became our favourites and would rule the playground for days, only relinquishing when they, in turn were split by a new contender.

One particularly bounteous autumn the conker crop was so glorious that my sister Isobel decided not just to use them for warfare but to collect them. In a trunk my father had used to pack his belongings for boarding school, she hoarded away literally hundreds of conkers. To her they were jewels, lying in the chest winking and glowing like so many amber eyes.

I suppose she thought that they would retain their fresh autumn-lustre forever but of course they could not. When, a couple of months later, she opened the trunk to be confronted with a mound of withered opaque nuts, so acute was her disappointment that she threw a tantrum and tipped the contents of the trunk out of her bedroom window where they hailed down like cannon balls falling from the citadel of a mediaeval castle. Conkers are to be enjoyed in autumn, not kept for spring.

Joanna Richardson, May 12, 2008

Internet Resources for Writers

2008-05-07T11:09:00.000-07:00

On May 7th, 2008 at the 34th International Book Fair in Buenos Aires, members of Thursdays@Three presented a workshop in conjunction with the U.S. Embassy entitled, "How to Launch a Writing Career Using the Internet." See below for resources referred to in this workshop, in addition to other useful web sites.

AWARDS, CONTESTS, & PUBLICATION RESOURCES:

Poets & Writers Magazine
www.pw.org
Searchable database of contests, residencies and retreats, magazines seeking submissions, and grants, mostly U.S.-based. Also has articles for a writing audience.

Funds for Writers
www.fundsforwriters.com
Grants, contests, magazines that pay for submissions, and other writing resources. Also possible to receive e-newsletter with updates.

First Writer
www.firstwriter.com
Agents, publishers, magazines, contests and advice.

Writers’ Market
www.writersmarket.com
Fee-based comprehensive service on writers markets in the U.S. Free 30 day trial.

ONLINE WRITING CLASSES:

Gotham Writers’ Workshop
www.writingclasses.com
Premier resource for online writing classes in any genre.

Writers College.
www.writerscollege.com
More online writing classes.

FREELANCE JOURNALISM:

Media Bistro
www.mediabistro.com
Freelance market hub for journalists.

Suite 101
www.suite101.com
Always looking for freelance writers to write on an endless variety of topics. Also has articles about writing at: www.suite101.com/writingandublishing/

Ground Report
www.groundreport.com
Citizen journalism website. Upload your articles and get paid by number of clicks.

Argentina’s Travel Guide
www.argentinastravel.com
Online travel guide to Argentina that accepts freelance articles.

GENERAL FREELANCE RESOURCES:

Guru
www.guru.com
Online freelance marketplace.

Elance
www.elance.com
Online freelance marketplace.

BLOGGING RESOURCES:

Blogger.com
www.blogger.com
Set up your own blog for free.

Technorati
www.technorati.com
Hub of blogs and blogger news.

WRITERS NETWORKS:

Craigs List
www.craigslist.org
Classifieds for everything organized by city. Click on “writing/editing” under “jobs” or “writing” under “gigs” for updated opportunities. Can also post to advertise opportunities, organize a local writers’ group, etc.

Coffehouse for Writers
www.coffeehouseforwriters.com
Online writing community with workshops, resources, advice and opportunities to chat with other writers.

Red Room
www.redroom.com
Online community of writers and news on the writing industry.

Society of Authors
www.societyofauthors.com
Online community of writers with staff available to answer questions about the business and grant award opportunities. Primarily for British authors.

More resources in Spanish are available at: www.juevesalastres.blogspot.com

Introduction

2008-04-24T18:34:00.002-07:00

Suzanne LaGrande

It struck me when I visited the Writers’ Museum in Dublin, Ireland. With the exception of William Butler Yeats, most Irish writers, including George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, were expatriates. Would they have been able to write so truthfully had they stayed? Would they have written at all? Is it necessary to travel and to have some distance to be able to write about the place and the people you grew up with? How is one’s perspective as an artist enriched by the experience of childhood, but also by the experience of leaving and of living in a culture or place that is very different from the “home” that you are familiar with?
We can trace many literary movements to geographic areas where artists and writers of all kinds gathered to exchange ideas and to inspire one another: The Harlem Renaissance in New York in the 1920s, the Lost Generation in Paris in the 1930s, The Beat Poets in San Francisco in the 1960s. Is it a coincidence that many of the writers, poets and artists who met together were not native to those places, but from some other place? I think not.
And so in the tradition of expatriate writers, here is a collection of writings written by English speakers and expatriates living in Buenos Aires. In the spring of 2007, they came together to take “Creative Chaos”—a 12-week creative writing workshop I lead in English. The group was made up of all women, some from England, one from Canada, several from the United States, and one from Buenos Aires; some who were in Buenos Aires temporarily and some who had lived here for years, one for 23 years. Each week we met to share and critique one another’s work, read and discuss the work of contemporary writers, and watch as new works and new strengths evolved.
I created a context and a place for writers to gather. Week after week, each writer took risks to try something new, to give voice to thoughts and feelings and ideas that hadn’t found expression before. And they showed up despite the demands of work, of relationships, and of children (one was born while this book was being edited).
After the workshop was over they continued to meet, continued to share what they were working on, and continued to critique, rewrite and to battle—and it is a battle—for clearer expression of their material. Woody Allen says that 80% of success is about showing up. What you are about to read is the result, not only of these writers’ creativity, but their work and above all, their willingness to show up. I hope you enjoy these new works by expatriate writers in Buenos Aires and also marvel, as I do, at the commitment, courage and creativity behind the work that made these writings possible.

Homo Boludis

2008-04-24T18:34:00.001-07:00

Joanna Richardson

A subspecies of homo sapiens, the common or garden homo boludis may be recognized by any or one of the following distinguishing features:
1. moves in small clusters, numbering from three to ten, depending on time of day;
2. small clusters are always same sex;
3. each sex has a clearly defined role: the female of the species congregates in small circles; common activities are preening and grooming or acquiring new garments; the male’s main activity is to toss a small round inflated object around, often made of manmade fibers, apparently according to a series of clearly defined rules. Both sexes clearly display for courtship purposes.
One of the most distinguishing features of the subspecies is its eponymous call: “Boludo/a” is the most frequently heard cry in its nesting sites. They appear to be unidentified specimens that only respond to this call—hence their scientific name, coined by the late animal behaviorist Magnus Magnusson.
Plumage: the male sports a mullet and wears low-waisted trunks. The female has long hair she tosses frequently and wears two narrow strips of cloth to cover breasts and bottom, which she tweaks at periodically.
Habits: a late riser which congregates on warm beaches in summer and is otherwise mainly nocturnal by nature, it drinks spirits abundantly, smokes nicotine sticks and grazes lightly. Not dangerous except to its own and rarely interacts with homo sapiens. Approach upwind with precaution.
Survival chances: while in no apparent danger of extinction, as this subspecies have neither offspring nor parents it is a mystery as to how it will fare in the future. Further research is required on this point.

Visit

2008-04-24T18:33:00.000-07:00

Katharine Jones

We are walking on an old logging road in the New Hampshire woods. It’s a dry spring, and the river beside us that should be strong and roaring white is low and quiet this year. “Too many dried up days,” I say. My father smiles a bit and looks past me, past the hint of melancholy that makes him uneasy. He puts his hand to his forehead a moment and then begins pulling words out of his private storage in the air above. As if reading from a favorite tome he begins,
“‘Margaret are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving …’.” It is the first line of a Hopkins poem. He speaks by allusion in such moments. But still, he isn’t speaking, and won’t inquire further.
“‘Leaves, like the things of man …’,” I say, obediently offering the second line of the poem he’ll then delight in finishing. It’s the game we play once we’ve exhausted news about the neighbors, and stripped clean topical subjects like the war and the weather. It’s the way we deal with emotions: entertaining them into oblivion. We don’t speak like people with knowledge of the other’s dreams and failures; we speak like people on a literary quiz show.
The woods are thinning out and the trail becoming wider. He is on his third poem. I want to tell him what a year I’ve had. How nothing has worked out the way I dreamt it would. How the man I have loved for five years is afraid of everything in life, including me. How I want a child more than he ever did, and while he got five who could never be silent enough for him, never be invisible enough for him, I am alone in a house that begs for noise all day. I want him to know me as more than the daughter who shares his memory for language.
Slowing his pace a moment he finds the next poem. His choices are obvious, but I don’t think he hears them. Dramatically, under the pine branches, with his walking stick in hand—and perhaps because it is spring, perhaps because he doesn’t know how deep a note it hits—he begins in his lowest voice, “‘April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land …’.” I stumble on a rock and his arm is there to catch me. I want this moment to become us: him catching me, without hesitation. In that moment I gaze into his eyes and imagine everything is possible.
“Everything is a mess,” I say.
“No,” he says. “You know this one: ‘Mixing memory and desire …’.”
“Right,” I say, surrendering the line, “‘Stirring dull roots with spring rain’,” and wonder if I will ever prove to know enough for him.
That evening, confined to the house, we loiter in silence. It’s the night before I leave and we are waiting for the visit to end, the way people wait for a late train. “Did I tell you summer stage will be doing Lear next week?” he asks. Sitting across from one another, the large dining room, lined with bookshelves on two sides, feels suddenly small and cramped. But it is just the air between us, as tense as a tightrope. “You know, I saw Hamlet last year and it was as good as anything I’ve seen at Stratford,” he says. I nod my head and ask what day he’ll be going, who will join him. I ask like a reporter whose inquiries have been pre-approved. I want to ask him how to be a daughter he can speak to. I want him to tell me how to begin my life again. I wonder how a man who read King Lear a thousand times, who lectured on the finer points of it for 30 years to students who treated him like a god, can’t speak to a daughter begging to be heard.
Finally, stepping out from between the lines, I tell him, “Dad, I’ve had a bad year; I need to leave him.”
He clears his throat. “Well,” he says, uneasily. “Well.” And a still silence pours through each hole in the room faster than any word could stop it. He looks around me; he looks to the sides, as if something between us is obstructing his gaze. And, for a moment, I see him stretching for words and imagine he will stretch all the way across the table to find me. I imagine in this moment everything about us will change. I will tell him all the trouble and he will listen: eager, rapt. In this moment I will become the narrator at the performance he has waited all year to attend, reciting each painful moment in near perfect verse; setting down each disappointment in just the right words, paced just so, until it becomes the story he can’t get enough of, the story that haunts him at the moment of its telling and draws him back again and again. “I want to know more,” he’ll say. “Tell me everything.”
“Well,” he says, clearing his throat. “Well. We all have bad times,” he says. Then, tilting his head a bit, he begins, a needy actor whose talent can never be admired enough, “‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow …’,” he says, as the light comes up, nearly blinding.

Chapter One from The Good Aunt

2008-04-24T18:31:00.000-07:00

Tara Sullivan

You don’t get to pick and choose your family. Heather believed that, no matter how hard her Uncle Tom kept trying. And he had been trying for 25 years, since Heather was ten. She had been old enough to know that his daughters were still her cousins, even though she saw them only by chance at their grandparents’ home; too young to know why she was no longer invited to sleepovers or to spend the afternoon at their pool.
As Heather turned the key to her apartment, a letter tucked under her chin, grocery bags heavy in both hands, her thoughts weighed her down. You pick favorites—she was her Aunt Angela’s favorite—you choose who will be your child’s godparents—Tom was her godfather—and everyone else you are related to is family and there’s no choice in that.
But choices were made in Heather’s family. Heather wanted to believe that for most family members the choices had been made for them, but she was no longer the naive child she had been when her Uncle Tom stopped speaking to her Aunt Angela. Heather’s mother Marie, her Aunt Angela, her other two uncles, Mark and Paul, even her grandmother chose sides that day. Their wives and husbands filed in after them, each taking a position, and finally their children did too, one at a time, until all 14 cousins had found their place.
Standing in the doorway to her apartment, her children clamoring for her attention, Heather felt the weight of her family’s choices and understood at that moment that those choices at one point had no longer been made for her but by her.
“You’re late,” Heather’s husband said. “Dinner’s already served.” The letter stuffed into her purse would have to wait until after dinner, until after her children’s evening bath, book and bed ritual had been done. Heather saw the light blinking on the answering machine and knew it would be her mother, wanting to talk about the letter. It could wait, she thought. They all could wait; what was another day after 25 years?
Not family, not friend. She pushed the words down as she finished the last of her wine. “No more fighting,” she yelled down the hall, “out of the tub. Time for bed.” Do not try to contact me or anyone else in my family.
Her husband came out of the bathroom, their oldest son wrapped in a towel, swung over his shoulder, “You get Sam?” he suggested and then asked, “You okay?”
“I keep seeing ghosts,” she answered with a weak smile. Heather felt a twinge of guilt. He would think she was making some reference to her sister’s ongoing chemotherapy to fight a disease that had proven itself undefeatable. She knew he wouldn’t ask any questions, not in front of their kids.
“I can take care of this,” he told her, letting her shrug off her role as mother for roles, which rarely took priority anymore: sister, daughter. He didn’t know that the titles weighing heaviest on her then were those that had seemed devoid of any meaning for so long: niece, cousin.
She took the letter out of her purse to read again. As the words left the page and attached themselves to her heart, she swore her family would no longer be one that only came together because someone had died.
Tom had not spoken to his sister Angela since their father’s death, which had followed the thing Angela had done for which her brother had banished her. “You’re a bitch and a whore,” he said as he walked out the door 25 years ago. That was the last time they spoke.
No one could remember exactly when Tom had berated her, “I can’t stand the sight of you. You make me sick.” But it was somewhere between their father’s last breath and their mother’s first prayers as a widow sitting at the kitchen table, clutching her rosary and clinging to her faith that God would take her soon too. It was from those words, “You’re a bitch, nothing but a cheap whore,” that Heather’s mother, her aunt, her uncles, their wives and her grandmother, assumed new roles. They walked away from the family relationships that had defined their childhoods, their teenage years and the first steps into adulthood that each was taking when their father died. They married, embracing their new spouses’ families as their own. They had children. They created new families to replace the one that was shrouded in uncomfortable silences and unspoken accusations.
Still they were bound by that primal sense of family that no choice could dilute. And so every holiday season Tom called on them to march like silent foot soldiers on his crusade to punish Angela. Each holiday became occasion for Angela to remind everyone she was being punished. For some, Christmas with Angela meant Thanksgiving or Easter with Tom. For Heather’s mother, any holiday spent with Angela meant no holiday with Tom and his family. Family gatherings were rare and Sunday dinners at the family home rarely warranted setting the large dining room table that in the past had never seemed long enough.
The last time they had come together was for Heather’s grandfather’s 25th memorial mass. Heather’s grandmother prayed nightly, pleading with her dead husband—with the help of Jesus and the Holy Mary—to make them a family again; it was not all she asked for, but it was what could be done.
The mass was held at Mount Carmel Church in downtown Worcester, Massachusetts. It was there that Heather’s grandmother’s five children had received their first communion, where three had been married and later chose to baptize their own children. It was where she still sang in the choir, although it was harder and harder for her to climb the balcony stairs and make herself heard above the younger voices. Her family filed one by one into the first four pews marked with bunches of white chrysanthemums: her five children were there, with their husbands and wives, and her 14 grandchildren; ten of whom were born after her husband’s death into a family already divided and conquered by Tom’s hatred. They sat down together for the first time in 25 years.
But like so many prayers, the answer would bring unintended consequences. Later Angela would tell her sister that she didn’t know what came over her. She would blame her father’s spirit for making her walk over to Elizabeth, Tom’s youngest daughter, and saying to Liz’s husband Jim, “Hello, I am Elizabeth’s Aunt Angela, we haven’t met. I wasn’t invited to your wedding.” (Only Heather knew that her grandmother had not been alone in making promises of impossible sacrifice in exchange for her grandfather’s intervention.)
Liz said nothing. Jim said nothing. The silence they greeted her with washed out the sound of the tolling bells in the church tower. Angela would later tell her sister that she walked away because no one said anything. Marie was incredulous, “They must have reacted in some way? What about their faces? Did they seem surprised?” “No. Nothing.” The sisters joked that maybe they didn’t hear her. They guessed at poor Jim’s reaction to one of his new wife’s crazy relatives walking up to them like that. They didn’t laugh about how much it hurt to be ignored though they both knew Angela should have been used to it. They didn’t talk about what Elizabeth’s silence might have meant.
Three weeks later Angela received a letter. When she saw the return address on the envelope was from Tom’s law firm, she thought he wanted to make amends. Maybe her words had not fallen on deaf years, she told herself as she opened the letter. She took a deep breath then exhaling slowly, she felt hopeful. She pursed her lips, keeping them from a smile. Hopeful about recovering something she had long believed was lost forever she struggled with the envelope. Her heart raced. She let her eyes rest on the first line, “Angela, after all these years I did not believe it necessary to remind you that you have no right to speak to anyone in my family.”
She had been so wrong. He warned her to stay away from him and his family. To never make any attempt to contact him or any other member of his family. He wrote that she had not been invited to the wedding because only family and friends were invited. She was not family or friends.
Angela read the letter dozens of times; alone; over her husband’s shoulder; to her sister on the phone; and the numbness she had managed to feel whenever an invitation was not extended or responded to, came back to her. She was used to his reproach, like the touch of arthritis she had inherited from her father, bothersome but nothing she needed to treat. She read the letter again and again until a heart monitor wouldn’t have picked up any difference had she just read one of those true stories from Reader’s Digest, and she could finally shake her head as to say, how terrible, glad it’s not me.
That was when Angela decided to go to their mother’s house, numb to the hateful words on the page, “I have only one sister: Marie. You Angela are nothing to me.” Armed with this letter, this proof, she believed her mother would finally realize that it was not Angela herself who was responsible for the 25-year rift that had divided the family. Her mother would be forced to see it had been her own son Thomas. Because, while her brother’s unjust accusations were like a rope weighing heavy on her shoulders, they rarely tightened into a noose anymore; it was her mother’s allegiance to Tom that wrapped itself around her neck, choking her until she could barely breathe.
Her mother’s response, though not unexpected, stung, “Tom is very hurt by what you did.” Angela rebutted, “This isn’t about how he feels. This isn’t about him. This is hateful and meant to hurt me.” She would have yelled, “This has never been about Tom. I did not leave Tom. I did not divorce Tom. I divorced Andrew.” But that had been said before and her mother’s defense of Tom was too painful for Angela to endure again.
While Heather’s grandmother wanted to reunite her family, it was to be on her terms, which meant that Angela must repent. She had always defended her sons, “the boys” she called them, no matter what they did or said. The three of them held the title roles of oldest, middle child and baby. The girls, mother’s helpers, were in between each one, filling things out. And none of this may have mattered much; just stuff that happens in a big Catholic family, if Angela and Tom hadn’t fought. The line their mother had drawn years ago when they were all children, like a school teacher organizing her charges, boys to one side, girls to the other, suddenly mattered—very much.
Not only was Angela a girl, a daughter, but she had also failed at the one thing that she had been raised to do easily. She had married Andrew, Tom’s wife’s brother, despite her mother’s disapproval and then, to make matters worse, left him, despite her mother’s objections, offending everyone: her mother, Thomas, Thomas’ wife and Thomas’ wife’s family, all of whom made up his family now.
Then Angela remarried—in a quiet civil ceremony—and soon thereafter divorced someone else (whose name Heather couldn’t remember) and in doing this had offended God and Heather’s grandmother for a second time. Her original sin had been enough for Thomas and his family.
Like Angela, Heather too read and reread the letter, trying to make sense of it but unlike her aunt, no numb feeling washed over her. Instead confusion surged into an indignant rage. Although written by her Uncle Tom, it was another voice Heather heard.
Why had Elizabeth decided to incite Tom? What had she said to her father? No matter what she did say, she said it knowing that her words would enrage him, hadn’t she? Questions whirled around in Heather’s head until they found answers and sank heavy into her gut. Elizabeth didn’t want a family reconciliation. She accepted her father’s resentment as her own. Elizabeth believed Angela had wronged her too.
Divorce was not a sin, certainly nothing Heather or any of her peers condemned, yet this was what destroyed her family. Heather had played her part for 25 years, a secondary role that included silently accepting invitations when extended, not questioning when they were not and never mentioning the name Angela on the rare occasions Heather was family Tom chose. It was written for her by the older generation who adhered to rules dictated by a Catholic church, whose threat of hell fire and eternal damnation paled next to the everyday headlines of escalating crime, global warming and terrorist acts, all around her.
“But what was it really that Aunt Angela did?” she asked her mother on the telephone after she tired of reading the letter.
Heather needed an answer. The answer to a question she had been asking for 25 years. She needed the answer when at Elizabeth’s seventh birthday party—although only ten years old herself—she knew something had happened to merit that she would be quietly punished. She needed that answer when she never was invited to another birthday and her time with her cousins was reduced to chance encounters at her grandparents’ house. She wanted the answer when she had no idea what to give her cousin Elizabeth for a wedding gift because she didn’t know anything more than that Elizabeth’s favorite color was purple when she was seven years old. And she wanted to give her cousin Sarah, Elizabeth’s sister, the answer to that question when Sarah told Heather how hard it had been growing up without family being family unless her father said so. Heather wanted to be able to tell Sarah why they had had to suffer the loss of each other—cousins, like a sister and more than a friend. That answer was what Heather needed to prove to Sarah that it was not their fault; to prove Uncle Tom had been wrong to try to pick and choose his family. But she didn’t have the answer. And it seemed no one in the family did.
Heather’s mother answered with a distracted voice, “Tom doesn’t even really know.” Uncle Mark was of the opinion that Tom’s wife was to blame. Uncle Paul said Tom’s wife’s mother was to blame. But these were answers filtered through Angela and Marie, who then as an afterthought said, “Angela once said it’s because she did what Tom couldn’t.” Words soaked in tears followed quickly as her mother wept for a family lost, a sister hurt, a brother stolen from her by his own pride. The new answers were washed away by the old ones as they flooded out again.
Heather knew as she listened to her mother that she could not count on any of them—not her mother, her aunt or her uncles—to lift the crushing weight of their years of feuding. Heather would inherit her grandmother’s diamond engagement ring, one of her cousins would inherit her grandfather’s oak desk; even the proceeds from the sale of the family home would be passed down to the cousins. Their inheritance would not include forgiveness.
Heather folded the letter and placed it back in the envelope. She avowed herself against Elizabeth carrying on for her father. She would not allow Angela and Tom’s conflict to become theirs. She would uncover the answers she had been seeking for so long. She would do it for her children, in her sister’s name and in her grandfather’s memory.
Heather would begin her inquiry with Angela. At first, Angela would evade her questions. She preferred the numb feeling she had grown used to over the pain that could be caused if the past were looked at too closely; if too many questions were asked. Angela knew something the others didn’t. She knew how much more pain she could cause.
And although she would be evasive, Heather would persist. And eventually Angela’s resistance would weaken. She would allow herself to be tempted and cajoled into appointing Heather as her successor.
Angela would teach Heather how to swallow the pain that comes with keeping family secrets. Tom would teach her to hate because of those secrets.

Author’s note: This is chapter one from The Good Aunt, a novel in progress.

Nonsense Poem

2008-04-24T18:30:00.000-07:00

Joanna Richardson

Come into the garden Maud
clicked the glockenspiel on its throne.
How yummy is the string of this haptic elastic
whispered a transsexual onomatopoeia
into the encyclopedia of
trucky perambulators blooming
with nasturtium and wysteria.
What a hoot, cried the lupin
as the catamaran took a tome
and the pony meowed wow!

Chapter Three from Ghana Stories

2008-04-24T18:29:00.000-07:00

Amanda Fernandez
We live in the part of Accra called Labone. My husband and I like to channel the late Saturday Night Live comedian Chris Farley and joke to each other that our neighborhood is Spanish for "The Bone.” It is actually pronounced LaBONEee, and you are immediately pegged a newcomer if you pronounce it like Chris Farley would have.
Our house is a welcome 15-minute walk to my husband’s office at the U.S. Embassy, a walk he wouldn’t dare to take on his way to work in a suit and tie. If he did, he would show up looking like he had taken a shower in his clothes. We don’t have an Internet connection, cable TV, or have a paper delivered yet, so there’s no simple way to find out what the temperature is. I just step outside and compare the weather unscientifically against other places I’ve been. “Hmmm, today it feels heavier and more oppressive than the hottest day in D.C.’s summer; not quite as hot as Puerto Rico in September; more like New Orleans in August.” Accra’s “best weather of the year,” for the last few days at least, has been a muggy heat of 90% humidity and temperatures fluctuating around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, with a sun searing down through a cloudless sky from 6 A.M. to 6 P.M. I wonder how I’m ever going to survive the hot season.
The house we’ve been assigned is much larger than what we’re accustomed to, having moved here most recently from Boston, and before that, Washington, D.C. It has two stories, four bedrooms, each with its own full bath, and large kitchen, living and dining area. We also have a detached garage, servant’s quarters, and a driveway and yard, surrounded by a 10-foot concrete wall, with razor wire and broken shards of glass lining the top. The design of the house is rather strange; our front door is sliding glass, and the master bedroom has a window above the bed overlooking the dining room. What could the architect have been thinking? “The better to see you eating my dear …?” The floors are all white tile and sound carries easily throughout, given that other than scant, government-provided furniture, the house is empty.
We have neighbors on four sides of our house, two in front and two in back. I’m guessing that the neighbors in the front live a lot like us, economically speaking anyway. Their houses are freshly-painted, well-maintained, two-story, concrete, western-designed buildings measuring around 2,500 square feet inside. They’re surrounded by kept lawns filled with tall trees, palms and flowers, and carports filled with luxury sedans and sports utility vehicles. Also located outside these houses are rubber water storage tanks, diesel-run generators, and 25-foot high, metal water towers topped with yet another tank (to provide water pressure). They also have 24-hour security guard details, house alarms, and razor wire topping the ten-foot high concrete walls separating our properties.
The two houses facing the back of our property however, are more typical, Ghanaian compounds, where one family unit and their extended family members all live together in the same house, spending most of their time outside. These houses are also two-story, modern, concrete affairs, and at some point they probably looked a lot like ours, but they haven’t been painted in a while. The sides of the houses have cracked walls. The front gates are rusty and broken. They have no water towers, no generators, no air conditioners, no guards, no security fences, no house alarms. Originally built with amenities, such as indoor plumbing and kitchens, they’re not getting much use now. Their "kitchens" (a metal barbeque burning wood over a concrete pit) are located outside, where most of the cooking is done by the women and girls. Everyone eats outside too, under attached, lean-to structures. Houses in our neighborhood are unbearably hot inside without air-conditioning; most are made of brick, have few windows, and most roofs are made with corrugated metal. With the sun blazing down for 12 hours during the day, they heat up like solar-powered ovens. The neighbors in back bathe and go to the bathroom outside in their yards, in plain view from the second floor of my house.
We live in a residential area, where for security reasons, most Americans who work at the Embassy must live. These security criteria inadvertently drove up the property values in this neighborhood to some of the highest in the country. One plot of land in the vicinity can run as much as US $250,000, an incomprehensible sum in a country where most of the population lives on just a few hundred dollars per year.
One telling sign of a country’s economic prosperity is the state of its roads. The ones in our neighborhood and through most of the capital are paved, a good sign. On the other hand, most could use significant repair, a bad sign. For example, we have a rather dangerous four-foot wide, six-foot deep hole in the road directly in front of our house. Someone stuck a dead tree branch in it as a warning sign. The hole leads into the sewer, one of many that line the streets in our neighborhood. The sewers must get some use when it rains, but right now they are filled with dirty, stagnant water, perfect for breeding malaria mosquitoes. From what I’ve heard about Ghana’s budgetary situation from my husband, I imagine we’ll spend our entire three-year tour here without that hole being fixed. City and federal government offices here barely have furniture, telephones and computers. Ghana clearly has other more pressing priorities than fixing the hole in the street in front of my house.
Other than in the commercial section of town called Osu, there are few sidewalks in Accra. The streets in our neighborhood instead are bordered with uncovered, four-foot deep, three-foot wide, concrete, open sewers. Without any barriers, warning signs, or fluorescent paint, they’re a bit of a hazard. The partner of one of my husband’s colleagues fell into one the night he arrived. He was out with his wife for an evening stroll to get acquainted with the neighborhood. “Welcome to Ghana!” or as they say here, “Akwaaba!”
Also hazardous are the many taxis that zoom up and down the roads, perusing the streets for passengers, often revving up to 50 mph on short stretches. The drivers beep a lot at pedestrians. I’m not sure yet what the beeping is about. Is it to say, “Watch out, I am driving like a bat out of hell!” or to ask, “Hey, wanna ride?” Maybe it’s to say “Hey Obruni! (foreigner) What are you doing walking in this hot sun? Don’t all white people have cars?”
As someone whose career has focused on working for the poor, I loathe to admit that living in the U.S. recently has softened my shell of resistance to extreme poverty. But the level of Ghana's poverty is striking to me. Years of living and working in developing countries trains one to compare levels of poverty from place to place—Bosnia to El Salvador. Colombia to the Dominican Republic. I’m wracking my brain, but I can’t find a comparison for Ghana.
In contrast to the other places I’ve mentioned, there are no neighborhoods where you don’t see poor people here. Just a few streets away from my house are much less prosperous neighborhoods, where small shacks are thrown up with whatever materials the family could scrape together: wooden boards, cardboard, plastic sheeting, tin. I often spy women, men and children sleeping outside on wooden benches or cardboard in the mid-day sun under whatever shade they can find. In other countries I’ve lived and worked in, most poor people in the capital wear shoes. They have houses with roofs. They can find clean water within a ten-minute walk. Most have some sort of indoor plumbing, if only a separate outhouse. Not here. In the capital of Angola back in 1996, you could at least see the remnants of the apartment buildings and factories and farms and government buildings that existed before being ravaged by war. Ghana looks like a place that no colonialist ever bothered to invest in; rather, it was a place for plunder. Its capital is still being built up for the first time. As a consequence, it’s taking me longer to arrive at what I refer to as the “get over it” point, the point where I’m no longer shocked by what I see, a necessary survival skill to endure living in a place like Ghana with my heart intact.
Our neighborhood is a microcosm of Ghana’s overall level of wealth inequality. A few wealthy Ghanaians and (mostly white) foreigners live in relative luxury, surrounded by others who live, materially at least, not much differently than they have for the last thousand years. I'm sitting in an air-conditioned room, on sturdy, government-provided furniture, typing away on my laptop being powered by a $15,000 generator, while looking outside my window to witness my five-year old neighbor crouching down in the ditch alongside the wall of his backyard, defecating. The irony envelops me. It’s the same thing I feel every time I move overseas to a less developed country—that by some accident of birth, I'm here, looking down on this family, literally and figuratively. What gives me the right to feel this way? Why am I here and not in their place? The thoughts don’t comfort me. They don’t make me feel lucky; instead, I feel an underserved sense of superiority. I’m simultaneously shamed and convinced that I can't live here without somehow working to make it a better place for its people.
An expatriate friend once told me how she justified living so shamefully well compared to the local population in a poor, foreign country. Her reply was that her presence alone was an economic boost. She was purchasing goods, increasing employment through hiring domestic servants, spending dollars in an economy that desperately needed foreign currency, and was renting someone else’s house at a high price. "I'm doing more for this country just by living here, than I would if I were living in the U.S., selling more widgets and sending checks to aid agencies." I didn’t disagree. I still don’t, but that’s not enough for me. I’ve never lived overseas and not worked to improve a place. I wasn’t going to start now. Not here. I couldn’t live with myself.

Meditation on a Word

2008-04-24T18:28:00.000-07:00

Ambi Alexander
blue anger steamed from her ears in short puffs and a long exhale out her nostrils. the words flew at her like arrows from an ancient Greek battle. she began the slow steady mantra—eyes closed, silently mouthing, “it’s not me. it’s him. it’s not me.” inhale, pause, exhale, count to five. pause. she wrapped the inside wound in wisps of oxygen. then, she tried to focus on The Word. no, not Patience—too intelligible. not Forgiveness either—too saintly. it loomed dream-like in a cloud high above her, unreachable. twisting and turning, the letters played follow the leader in their celestial playground, dancing and holding hands tightly like children. just knowing it was up there somewhere comforted her, saved her from insanity, from screaming until she had no more voice, from taking a sharp knife from the kitchen drawer.
after 25 years of marriage it never got easier. some days her patience felt young again and she wrestled the beast down. today it creaked as old as her 62 years. her mind sought reprieve from the word parade of hate. “you’re fat, stupid and worthless,” it started. rat tat tat. specifics hurt too but the theme was always the same. “why hadn’t she accomplished anything in life like him?”—a retired army captain most days drunk on Jack Daniels and self-importance. “why couldn’t she try harder to please him?”—wear sexy dresses like the young women working the perfume counter at Bloomingdales. why, was the theme, can’t you be someone else, someone I’d like more than I do. her mother knew well what life would be like with his type but didn’t try to warn or dissuade her. instead she nudged, “he’s a complicated man but how lucky you are.” early on, his explosions of anger seemed more passion and energy than vice. suspected burglar: kicked-in door; lost football game: punched wall; bad day: bag of groceries hurled across the room. she had kidded herself then but was keen to the deception now. she would wrap her shoulder in a bandage with some ice, call the one friend to whom she could admit this indiscretion and leave for a night. by morning he would be sorry. so sorry with the eyes of a doe. she would reach up and grab Compassion easily this time. yesterday’s malice fading with the hours and stroke of an attending ear. it would fill her like silence and shine her dull stare. it would heal her insides and she would go on again.

A.K.A. The Bitch

2008-04-24T18:27:00.000-07:00

Sharon Haywood

No matter how hard I try, no matter where I live, I can’t seem to get rid of her. I know she’s family—my first cousin on my mother’s side—but the cliché that says, “blood’s thicker than water” doesn’t mean much to me. Her name is Anger, but when it’s absolutely necessary to call her by name, I prefer to refer to her as The Bitch. Some days, I pretend not to notice that she’s watches me from the ninth-floor window of her apartment, directly across the street from my eighth-floor living room window. On those days, she knows I feel good, confident, powerful. She’s knows it’s not worth the effort to come over and attempt any kind of small talk, so she doesn’t even bother to try. I’m pleased to tell you that today’s one of those days. But on other days, when my defenses are weakened, she’s much bolder. She has a knack for sensing when I’m sleep-deprived, overwhelmed, or desperately hungry. On those days, she follows closely behind me, clipping at my heels, her repugnant breath on my neck. Just one waft of her stench—a combination of stale smoke, oily sweat, and half-chewed food lodged between her teeth—is enough to cause my stomach to tighten and churn. The burning taste of acid at the back of my throat is her calling card.

Nine times out of ten, she shows up in the presence of The Rude, The Selfish, and The Unjust. Now, don’t get confused and think that The Rude, The Selfish, and The Unjust are friends of hers, because they’re not. Instead, they’re her energizers—she feeds off them. The Rude, The Selfish, and The Unjust give her strength. Anything that gives her something to gripe about makes her stronger.

Like yesterday, when I made the mistake of letting her in, which is more or the less the equivalent of giving her a free pass to go on one of her rants. Yesterday’s rant featured her plight to prove how useful she is in my life.

“Do you remember when I prodded you enough so that you finally slapped and cursed that creep who was rubbing up against you on that crowded subway car?” she said while blowing out a slow train of smoke rings in my face. The Bitch knows I still fantasize about drawing long on a Marlboro Light. “You should have kneed him where it really hurts.” To this day I’m not 100 percent sure if he was getting off or if it was just normal rush-hour crowds. I push the thought out of my mind.

“Or what about that day when you finally got sick and tired of all those people in the supermarket express line ahead of you with more than the allotted eight items? I was so proud of you when you told those jerks off.” The memory of me yelling at the obviously stressed-out mother of two and the elderly man makes me cringe.

“How ‘bout when I gave you the guts to chase down that punk who stole your purse? If I hadn’t been there you would have just cried like a baby and whined about how you were victimized,” she said as I marveled at the smoke escaping through the gaps in her grin. I never did get my purse back and I still ended up crying.

As a matter of safeguarding my sanity and minimizing her presence in my life I realized I needed to get to know her friends and her enemies. Her closest friends are Resentment, Arrogance, and Irritation. They’re like the “in” clique of high school senior girls that giggle and taunt The Uncool. I’m ashamed to say that on more than one occasion, I’ve actually invited them over to my place. We’ve also frequently visited my family together. However, I’m slowly learning how not to let Resentment, Arrogance, and Irritation cajole me into thinking their presence in my life is a good thing. Getting to know The Bitch’s enemies has been my saving grace actually; spending more time with her prime enemy has given me much reprieve.

Honesty—I owe him so much. It took a while for me to see his perspective but now I believe him when he says that she’s a coward. (Just an aside, but last week it suddenly made sense why she always excessively layers her clothing, even on those scorching, humid days. It’s like her armor.) Whenever I invite Honesty over, The Bitch bolts. She can’t tolerate being in the same room with him. His voice is deep and sweet. His mahogany skin is unblemished. His celestial pale blue eyes are penetrating. She knows he has the power to make her a peripheral part of my life. Honesty continually and patiently points out that when The Bitch gets to the root of what really aches her, she is nowhere to be found.

I’ve come to realize that the old saying that you can’t choose your relatives is true, but I can choose how much time I spend with them. These days, I do my best not to ignore her ‘cause that ignites her even more, like a child throwing a temper tantrum. Instead, whenever The Bitch shows up, I give Honesty a ring and pass the phone to her. It’s usually a short conversation.

Balcony Envy

2008-04-24T18:26:00.001-07:00

Suzanne LaGrande

Before I moved to Buenos Aires, I developed a condition I now recognize as balcony envy. It began in New Orleans, with covetous glances towards spacious wrap-around verandas where at night it seemed the whole city lounged drinks in one hand, fans in the other, greeting passersby. A glimpse of black lacey wrought-iron balconies in the French Quarter hastened my casual yearning into a full-blown obsession. Would my life be different, I wondered if I, too, enjoyed the view from a balcony?
The possibility of having a balcony of my own figured rather prominently in my decision to move to Buenos Aires, a city of balconies, par excellence. Rounded, with marble buttresses, stretched across the corners of a building, with a view of two streets simultaneously, square and enclosed, with bicycles pressed up against the screen, decrepit with cracked bottoms, sagging under the weight of an old refrigerator or crowded with Sunday afternoon families and smells of asado, the streets in Buenos Aires are filled with balconies.
I imagined that with my balcony I would be the captain of a small ship, surveying the ebbs and tides of the street below me. No doubt I would also become the worst kind of small-town gossip, clocking, if necessary, the departures of my neighbors, just as I imagined my neighbors commented on my comings and goings:
Her accent, what is it, Eastern European?
A little too friendly if you ask me, something odd about her...
Well past thirty, and no kids to speak of.
What does a woman like that find to do all day long?
With a balcony, I would let drop the ever-pervasive set of to-do lists, and instead notice the little things of daily life: a girl in a grey pleated skirt, pulling a purple suitcase behind her, its wheels click clacking against the uneven cobblestones; or the slight droop in the leaves of my recently repotted plant. A balcony might teach me the advantages of a slower life, and I might learn to sit, without an ulterior motive, absorbed by nothing so much as the wind, and the changing temperatures and smells of the seasons to infuse my being. With a balcony I could at last learn the art of hanging out, and doing nothing in particular, but doing it well. Here in Buenos Aires, it seemed that my dreams of languorous days leaning over the edge of a balcony might at last be within my reach.
The balcony was perfect: rounded, facing the street, perched between two large Jacarandas. I rang the bell to the front door, next to the sign that read, "Pension para señoritas" where for 300 pesos a month I could rent a furnished room in a hotel with a shared kitchen and bathroom. It seemed like the perfect solution, especially if the balcony that I saw from the outside was somehow available. A woman in her fifties, wearing a loose, grey dress and a resigned expression on her face, descended the white marble staircase and lead me up to what had been an elegant hotel lobby 50 years ago. Past the front room with the balcony, she instead lead me to the back, where a young woman in a pink uniform drank mate and another tired-looking woman with a two year old clinging to her leg hand-washed clothing in the sink, up a set of narrow stairs to the third floor, where I glimpsed though an open door a leopard-print bedspread, and a table filled with family photos. The owner of the bedroom paused to greet me, as she mopped the hallway wearing high-heeled boots that I had the impression were indeed made for walking. The available room was dark, windowless just large enough to hold a single bed, with a paper-thin mattress. This was how working women in Buenos Aires live and though I would surely get an education in life, I was afraid that my computer might quickly disappear and after a month I would be in despair, not only by the tawdriness of the room, but by the difficulty of survival that I saw in my brief tour. Besides, the room with the balcony I so longed for, as it turned out, belonged to the proprietor.
I did in the end manage to find an apartment in Buenos Aires without a balcony. I do however have a small terraza. If I stand on my tip-toes I can look out over the rooftop-filled horizon, and from one particular spot, down upon a neighbor's roof garden. It is not the balcony I hoped for, but it is my own window to the world, that looks, if not down out to the street, then at least upward, towards the sky.

God Moments in Cabs

2008-04-24T18:24:00.001-07:00

Ambi Alexander
I stepped into the cab three seconds from soaking. During class the weather had turned from cloudy to torrential. Rain pummeled the sidewalk and every moving thing searched frantically for shelter. Cabs were full and on an afternoon like this, impossible to get. I hurried down the one-way street with my struggling umbrella hoping for a miracle or dumb luck. In front of a church, a taxi pulled up and as a woman stepped out, I thanked God’s house and motioned to the driver that I wanted to get in.
At first I didn’t notice anything special. I was so relieved and too spent from the rain to do anything but take a few deep inhales. Then I saw his froggy bulging eyes and wild white hair in the rearview mirror. “Cerviño y Lafinur,” I directed. He nodded and pulled into the heavily rain-congested melee of colectivos and taxis. He took a long drag from a silver sequined cigarette holder and blew square ringlets of smoke out the side of his mouth. The cab reeked of pond dew and Montana fireflies. First he asked me where I was from. So obvious even from the way I pronounced the two street names that I wasn’t a local. He wanted to know what I did: “¿A que te dedicas?” He was probing slowly, gathering information for his coming observations of me and of life. “I’m a writer,” I told him with a touch of phony confidence. (Wait ‘til I tell Suzanne, my prof, I thought all puffy-chested). His eyes widened a bit more and his wrinkly long-fingernailed hands gripped the steering wheel tighter.
“What KIND of writing do you do?”
“I write fantasy—about worlds that don’t really exist.” Kind of a shaky answer but what the hell—we’re all making it up as we go, in some form or another. His forehead scrunched and eyes half-closed, he asked me in long articulated breaths, “What do you think fantasy is?”
Whoa—esoteric turn. Now this is getting interesting. The penetrating stare, witch fingernails and hunched shoulders smelled of something darkly magical, alluring. I was 9 years old again. “Well, I stammered—fantasy is whatever your imagination can come up with, it could be anything?” I ended my response with a question and my voice went up an octave or two, lacking confidence. He went in for the kill. “NO!” He shook his right index finger at me. “Fantasy is the unique combination of real and imaginary. For example, the Centaur—half man half horse. Or the mermaid, half woman, half fish. People accept the fantasy because it comes along with something they can relate to.” (Shit, I knew that.) How did I end up in this cab?
He wrestled the traffic with grunts, snorts and humpfs and just as aptly switched topics. “Do you have children?” he inquired. “Not yet,” was my honest reply. Squinting ahead and licking his lips with a charcoal-filmed tongue he cautioned, “Don’t rush. Take your time now, enjoy life and travel. See the world. When you have children, you must breast feed a minimum of one year. This is the most important thing a woman can do! Never leave your child for the first six years. This is critical!” he exalted, right fist in the air, the left holding the skinny cigarette and the cab maneuvering somehow in and out of traffic. Ohh-kaay, the merit of his parenting advice aside, I marveled at his bravado.
He spoke like all Argentines—more with his hands than his voice but talked slowly articulating every word for dramatic effect. Pausing and asking if I understood him. He tells me he works in the world of espectaculos—eyes wide again bulging nearly out of their sockets.
“You must write for the theater,” he tells me. It wasn’t a suggestion. “Tell the truth,” he says. “Tell the truth about the problems of our time, of our people. We are the people. You are the people. Tell the truth in your writing! What else is there?” he demanded to know. I was entranced. Who speaks of the truth in a 10-minute cab ride? Who speaks of the truth anywhere?
Is this my sign? It’s almost too obvious. So obvious, it could be mistaken for something else, less like the message it is. Is this as my friend Wendy calls it a “God moment?” We’ve all had them even if we don’t recognize or name them. They’re episodes with strangers (usually short so you could forget easily if you aren’t paying attention) that tell you, ask you, the most personal knowing things. Things that you can’t or don’t talk about with your intimates. Things you may think but don’t say. Things from your subconscious that only God would know to nudge you about, guide you, question you. God moments in cab rides. Tucked away as the title of something.
“You will see a sign promoting a show called Poder de Affectación—Niños y Adolescentes de Artes.” He said it again, saying each word slowly looking me in the eye so that I would remember. “Go in and enjoy it. Then come see me about a job.” Pow.
Startled awake, I handed him the cab fare and asked his name. “Santino Milagro (Miracle Saint)—mother Spanish and father Italian.” We shook hands and I stepped out and away from the fantasy ride. Looked back twice, blinking in the rainy glare to make sure it wasn’t just my imagination.
He could have been just one of a million weirdoes in Buenos Aires, drunk on smog and their own unexercised ideas from too many years at gratis university. Or was he the real deal? I pondered the countless sessions with psychics, palm readers, tarot masters, Santa Tierra shell throwers, and astrology experts all to find out who I am, what should I being doing with my life. Was this more real than the only advice I got from my 50’s era mother—“Take a typing class dear, at least you’ll know you can always get a job.”
Señor Milagro haunted me that night. His piercing eyes and steady voice penetrated my usually pink-tuttued dreams. “Stop waiting for your life to begin. You already know what to do.”

Collective Nouns of Punctuation

2008-04-24T18:23:00.000-07:00

Joanna Richardson

A battery of full stops, steady and reliable.
A stutter of commas, anxious but hesitant.
A quaver of semi-colons, never quite sure where to go.
A drum roll of colons: stealing the show.
A stream of dashes—flowing across the page,
A shy flurry of brackets, hiding at every stage.
A suggestion of ellipsis … insinuating much,
A posy of apostrophes hovering high above’
A query? of curious question marks and, oh grand finale,
A crescendo of exclamation marks draws to a cymbal-clashing close!

Excerpt from Chapter One of Blue Hole

2008-04-24T18:21:00.000-07:00

Maryann Ullmann

Leilagh and Jess knew each other far too well for their own good. The day they met stood out clear in Leilagh’s mind like an encounter with the supernatural. She was six, and her family had just moved from Northern Ireland to Vermont, into an old farmhouse with gloomy corners that smelled like mothballs and mold and needed some serious brightening up. It was a small town, the kind with a general store, a used furniture shop, a gas station that closed by 9 P.M., and a library housed in a house with a slanting porch. They settled on the edge of the center, across the street from a long dirt driveway that disappeared mysteriously into the woods, accessorized with a homemade wooden mailbox painted in rainbows and a child’s rendition of what was either a sheep or a cloud, or a cross between the two. As her parents moved in boxes, rolled up their sleeves for scrubbing, and told Leilagh to stay quiet and out of the way, that things would be like home soon, Leilagh spent hours curled up on the window seat gazing over at that driveway, waiting to see who or what would come in or out.
Finally one afternoon in the patchy sunlight following a morning of rain, a reddish-brown haired girl, stark naked save a pair of pink rain boots and an armful of jelly bracelets came hopping down the driveway after a toad. She leaned down to cup her muddy hands over it, then barely missed, and continued with her pursuit, until she was practically out in the road. Leilagh stared wide-eyed like she was some kind of alien, or fairy. Where were her clothes? Where were her parents? Did she know not to go into the road? Who was watching her? And did she really like handling toads? Weren’t they slimy?
“Mom,” she announced at dinner that night. “There’s a girl my age across the street. I saw her.”
“Oh good,” said her mother. “Well, when we get things organized we can go over and invite the neighbors over for dinner. I’m so glad you’re thinking of making friends Leilagh.”
She had, however, left out the details of her sighting, and a couple days later her unsuspecting parents were walking her down that driveway bearing a neat little package of shortbread cookies, the mud scuffing up her dad’s shiny loafers.
“How long does this driveway go on?” he said. “Who’d think we should’ve taken the car, just to go across the street?”
“I don’t know, Charles, do you think we should turn around and get it? Are these woods safe?”
But just then Leilagh caught a glimpse of something red through the trees. “I see something!” she exclaimed.
“Good eye,” said her dad, and they continued. They finally emerged into a clearing hosting a giant, lopsided red farmhouse, indistinct patches of garden and weeds, and an array of contraptions like some mad inventor’s paradise, which Leilagh was to later learn consisted of an assortment of functional, semi-functional, and defunct windmills, solar water heaters and showers, solar ovens with giant silver reflective panels, a wood-fired hot tub (like being cooked in a big pot of rabbit soup in one of those Bugs Bunny cartoons), a solar fruit dryer, an old bathtub for barefoot grape crushing, a bicycle-powered apple cider press, and pieces of an epic treehouse that was never quite finished.
Leilagh looked around in more wide-eyed curiosity as her parents shifted in unease.
“I don’t see a doorbell,” said her mother, examining the house. “Is this even the front door?”
“Let’s see,” said her dad as he stumbled over some blocks of wood and overgrown grass to peer around the other side. “Hello!” he called out. He came back and rapped on the door. “Hello!”
“I don’t think anyone’s here,” said her mother. “Maybe we should go, Charles.”
“Wait, I hear something,” he said, and a couple moments later they could hear a muffled shout of, “Be right there! Hold on!” and some heavy-pounding footprints and finally the door swinging open to a plump woman bedecked in a turquoise and orange dress, her long hair tied back by a gypsy scarf and her hands coated elbow-deep in flour.
“I’m sorry, I was out back making bread and I don’t hear the door too well back there. Have you been waiting long? What can I do ya for?” she asked.
“I’m Charles Baxter,” said Leilagh’s dad, holding out his hand and then letting it drop again when he remembered hers was covered in flour. “And this is my wife, Claudia, and our daughter Leilagh. We just moved in across the street and wanted to introduce ourselves, but if you’re busy we can come back another time, we don’t want to barge in.”
“Oh no! No!” said the woman. “I’m not busy, never busy. Always things to do, but that’s not being busy, just living life! Please come on in. I hope you don’t mind coming out back for just a moment, I need to get this bread dough covered or the blackflies’ll get to it. But please, make yourselves at home! I’m so glad you guys came over!”
They followed her gingerly through the house, past the staircase piled full of books, papers, and trays of jars waiting to be remembered to be put in their places, past the kitchen full of pots and herbs bunched and dangling from the beams, past a big sunny room full of mattresses and—was that a trapeze hanging from the ceiling? And then they emerged on the back patio where piles of dough polka-dotted a big wooden table and a round mud oven piped out smoke through its chimney, a warm fire crackling in its belly.
“So!” said the woman, clearing recipe books and painting supplies off of chairs for them to take a seat. “Welcome! What’s that accent of yours? Are you from Scotland?” She proceeded to search around for towels to drape over the dough and then hosed down her arms, accompanied by an, “Ooh! That’s cold!”
“Ireland,” said Leilagh’s mother. “Northern Ireland, outside of Belfast.”
“Ireland!” repeated the woman. “Very cool. I was there once, in the south. We rode bikes around the Dingle peninsula and went scuba diving with that dolphin in the bay there—what’s his name? Fungi. Weird name for a dolphin, but fun times. Do you know if Fungi’s still kicking? How long do dolphins live I wonder?”
“I’m not sure …” said her mom. “I never—”
“I wonder who thought of that name,” the woman continued. “Do you think it means something in Gaelic other than, well, fungi? Do you know Gaelic?”
“Yes, we know some,” said her dad. “But it’s a different dialect from the south and I haven’t ever heard the word fungi.”
“Fascinating,” said the woman. “I did learn that dingle is another word for a man’s mickey, as they say, because that’s the shape of the peninsula. Well anyway I’m sure Fungi’s fine and if not, there’s more to the pod and life goes on. He sure knew how to live life to the fullest and play a lot, that one, anyhow. Dolphins have a lot figured out, don’t they?”
Leilagh’s parents nodded politely.
“We brought some cookies,” said her mom, still a slight shade of red from the dingle comment. She held out the package. “And we were going to ask if you might like to come over for dinner some evening. Leilagh says she caught sight of a girl in your driveway. Is that your daughter?”
“Oh yes!” said the woman. “Jess, that’s my daughter, Jess. She’s out right now with her father checking the sap buckets. Should be back anytime now, but then you never know. Wow, I’ve clear forgot to introduce myself haven’t I? I’m Kathy. And I’m afraid you’re going to have to tell me your names again. I’m embarrassed to say I never catch names the first time around. Ooh, can never have too many cookies …”
They reintroduced themselves as Kathy tore open the shortbread cookie package and nabbed a couple to munch on, then handed the open package back to them to take part.
“Jess must be right about your age,” she said to Leilagh. “How old are you?”
“Six,” she answered.
“So’s Jess! What’s your sign?”
Leilagh looked confused.
“When’s your birthday?” she tried again.
“October first.”
“Ah! A Libra,” she said. “Always seeking beauty and balance, taking time to weigh decisions, seeking justice. I like Libras. Jess is a Taurus, very down-to-earth, very tactile. I think you two’ll be good friends.”
Though Leilagh had no idea what “tactile” meant or even what this woman was talking about, she liked her right away. Before long Kathy was to become like a second mother to her, a far more vibrant, far more nutty, overbearing, and overtly dysfunctional second mom to offset her own more reserved, prudent, worrisome and tempered dysfunctional one.
“I’m an Aquarius myself,” continued Kathy, “an air sign like you. And Claudia, Charles, what are your signs? Wait, let me guess. Claudia, you must be a Cancer …”
“We don’t exactly believe in astrology,” said Claudia, a little more abruptly than she had perhaps intended it to come out.
“Oh, I see,” said Kathy. A prophetic awkward silence fell on them then. A foreshadowing of years to come, full of awkward pleasantries and avoidance masking contempt. And a couple no-holds-barred clashes of worldview, their children shuffled about as pawns, each parental set finally settling into their own charitable outlook: their daughters’ friendship would be allowed because surely their own daughter would be a good influence on the other, who could not be faulted for her family’s ignorance. Leilagh, in Kathy’s view, sorely needed a path toward liberation. And poor lead-astray Jess, according to Charles and Claudia, a path toward God.
The silence was finally broken by the arrival of Jess and her father traipsing out of the woods. “Speak of the little devil now!” announced Kathy.
Jess emerged at the side of a tall, lanky, bushy-bearded man. She donned clothes this time, an ethereal if somewhat shabby white princess dress, and a pair of slightly oversized hiking boots. Her fists were full of pine needle clusters, fiddleheads and leaves she had collected.
“We have visitors!” Kathy called out to them.
Jess clunked forward and her eyes fell immediately on Leilagh. Without a word, a huge involuntary smile broke across her face, the contagious kind that melted all of Leilagh’s inhibitions. Yes, they were going to make good friends. Sisters, even.

Author’s note: This is an excerpt from the first chapter of an novel in progress, currently titled Blue Hole.

The Fourth Rule

2008-04-24T18:19:00.002-07:00

Amanda Fernandez

“There’s no flight?”
“It’s Christmas Eve,” the Croatian Airlines representative replied in way of an explanation, as if anyone in Bosnia needed reminding that most Croatians were Catholics.
“Something you might have mentioned when we bought our tickets MONTHS ago!” I yelled in exasperation.
There was no way I was spending Christmas in Sarajevo. Not after three months of driving the country in crappy weather past destroyed houses and towns, not speaking the language, and trying to convince traumatized people to forget the past and start over. I called my boss. “Can I take a car for a few days?”
An hour later, still seething, I took a right and quickly spotted an anomaly for Sarajevo—a brand new police car with its lights rolling directly behind me. “Shit!” I pulled over. The car stopped, and the RoboCop-sized, newly NATO-trained officer got out.
“Ne govorim Bozanski” was my go-to expression to weasel out of all sorts of uncomfortable experiences, from turning away beggars at my door, to ignoring questions while I jogged, to haggling in the market. No doubt it would serve me well now.
I rolled down my window and blurted before he could say a word, “Ne govorim Bozanski!” a bit too enthusiastically. “That’s ok,” the cop replied. “I speak English.” Busted.
“You went through a red light.”
“What? No I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did. That light,” he said, pointing to it. “You went through it red.”
“Impossible!” I exclaimed. But was it? I was in fury-induced autopilot, engrossed with my morning’s misfortune, canceling the trip to Prague, creating a new plan for Budapest. If I did, I wasn’t going to admit it now.
“You come to station.”
Three rules I always abide by overseas:
1. Never walk around alone at night;
2. Never look a man in the eyes walking down the street, and;
3. Never, EVER go “downtown” with a huge police officer in a former war zone.
“Can’t we resolve this right here?” I lamely dropped, wishing the newly-trained officers weren’t as honest as NATO hoped.
“No. We go to station.”
And then I felt them. The humiliating tears welling up in my eyes. I choked them back, swallowed and stammered, my voice reaching new heights, “No! You don’t understand. My flight was canceled. I have to go to Budapest now! Today is a special day for my people! And, and …,” and then, what if? Why keep it together? Losing it might not be such a bad thing …
I let go: scrunching my lips, putting my hands to my face and sobbing in earnest. So much for the tough, war-zone babe. I cried about that day, about the shell-holes in the cement, about the ruined economy, about the concentration camps of the 1990s, about everything the country suffered.
“Aagh!” he scoffed, rolling his eyes. “Just go.” He turned on his heel and walked back to his shiny, new police car. NATO hasn’t taught them that trick yet. Budapest, here I come.

Red

2008-04-24T18:19:00.001-07:00

Tara Sullivan

The woman her lover called Cerise wondered what he would do when he found her red cloaked figure, as she now gazed at it in the mirror.
The second time he came to her apartment he gave her fire-engine-red crotchless panties. She wore them. She began to receive gifts not only Tuesday evenings when he would visit but there were a dozen red roses on a Monday, more red lingerie on a Thursday, a red velvet armchair delivered to her apartment on a Wednesday. Then came cases of red wine, a fruit basket with red grapes, red satin sheets, red perfumed writing paper, a ruby-red leather purse with a gold buckle, expensive red lipstick, red poppies, more red purses were delivered.
Gifts came for days on end, weeks on end; always red.
Cerise never gave him a gift.
The last gift she received from him was a few days ago when three men arrived with buckets, brushes, coveralls, masking tape, sheets, lots of sheets. They came to paint her apartment red—every wall, the window frames, the doors, the ceilings.
They finished their work a few hours ago. The only thing they left behind was one sheet—a white sheet—that had been covering the red velvet armchair next to her bed.
Cerise wrapped herself in that sheet, white except for a splattering of red paint, took the razor from the bathroom shelf, walked back to her bed, and slit her wrists; the perfect gift for her lover.

The Letter P

2008-04-24T18:17:00.000-07:00

Sharon Haywood

Deep in the backyard, lying face up in the long grass, Sara’s fingers comb the smooth strands, slowly, rhythmically. She stares up at the sky and softly hums “The P Song” from Sesame Street. Tilting her head first to the right, then to the left, she spots a kitten stretching out its front legs in the mutating clouds. The wind gently tugs at the cat’s claws, little by little. Elongated claws join and a thick, gliding snake opens its jaws in slow motion, tiny fangs multiplying.

Slam

The screen door rebounds and slams again, only a little less forcefully than the first time. Sara flinches, waits with held breath, and listens: just the wind, a bit stronger now. She exhales, breathes deep, and begins humming again. Sara concentrates on trying to see another shape other than the scary snake. It slithers into a mermaid with crazy twisting curls that reach the tip of her tail. The tail breaks apart into two smaller snakes.

Scream

Sara’s mother screams insults. Sara swallows hard, hoping that by ingesting the threatening tears at the back of her throat, she will also squash the stomach butterflies. Her father’s deep bellows retort and threaten. Squinting, Sara counts soldiers in a line—one, two, three, four, five covering the pale blue background of her living cloudy painting.

Crash

Plates shatter. Or maybe they’re glasses. Sobs follow. Sara’s hand moves to her belly. A slam follows a scream. A bellow follows the slam. Eyes shut tight, her hand presses down hard to make the butterflies stop hurting her belly, so the fighting will too. Wait. Nothing. Wait.

Shatter
Slam
Shriek

Leaving her belly, Sara’s palms cover both ears. Wind is cold. Goosebumps cover her bare arms and legs. Waves crash. Lions roar. Unicorns gallop away. Sara imagines they go to a safe place she can’t see in these clouds.

Screams
Bellows

She plunges her index fingers as deep as she can into her ears. Chewing on her lower lip, Sara resumes humming. Shatters. Slams. Screams. Bellows. A raindrop bounces off the side of her nose and slides down her cheek. The sky is dark. No more kittens or mermaids. The soldiers are gone too. Eyes squeeze tight. Another drop. Sara’s humming transforms into singing. “P for pancakes, P for pancakes.”

Drop.
Drop.

“The letter P. How about some pickles and some pastrami?”

Drop.
Drop.
Drop.

“P for pork chops, P for pork chops.” Quiet thunder. Drops come quickly now. Sara doesn’t move and keeps her eyes shut tight. “Pumpkin pie, pumpkin pie, the letter P.”

Blonde in a Kimono

2008-04-24T18:16:00.000-07:00

Maryann Ullmann

It’s not every day that one can walk into a place and all heads swivel with anticipation. I was simply accompanying my Japanese friend, Mariko, on her errands in a small town outside Kyoto, as she made a stop at the beauty salon to make arrangements for an upcoming party.
But no sooner than the bells on the door jangled with its closing than the hairdresser, make-up artist, and kimono dresser swarmed around me buzzing with excitement, touching my long blonde hair, and chattering rapidly. Mariko translated, “They want to dress you in a kimono,” she said, “What do you think?”
My eyes widened. Kimono dressing was no small endeavor. Women attend kimono dressing schools for several months to learn the process, a fine-tuned art which takes about three hours and costs several hundred dollars. And that’s just the price for the service of being dressed before leaving the salon, then there’s the rental cost of the kimono itself, and if you want to actually buy one? $10,000. Young modern Japanese women often make the choice between saving up for a kimono or a car.
Nervously, I said to Mariko, “I don’t have the money …”
“No, they want to do it free,” she said. “Just for fun.”
I felt a bit foolish, but I knew this was not an opportunity to pass up. So we made a plan to return later that afternoon and let them have their way with me. When we came back, they were prepared. They had selected a beautiful silken azure kimono, to match my eyes, they said, with dramatic fuchsia flowers. They sat me down to paint my face first: arched blue eye shadow like a seventies disco queen combined with the thick eyeliner and blush of a geisha.
The hairdresser came over and began to run his fingers and combs through my hair, commenting on the difference in texture than what he was used to: thinner, softer. This will be interesting, he said. He proceeded to parse out and clip up various strands into deft poofs of fireworks as he set to work with the curling iron and pins. And then a mystery of traditional Japanese hairstyles was revealed: the smooth buns, curves, and bulges were actually styrofoam forms that he wrapped my hair around and pinned into place. Leaving strands of ringlets out to frame my face, he then garnished the sculpture with a butterfly pin and a dangling cascade of pink flowers to match the kimono.
An assistant whisked me away upstairs and delivered me to the kimono dresser. She welcomed me into her lair and shut the door to the hubbub below. The mood turned reverent. The dressing room was simple: a large closet, a full-length mirror and a lot of open space in which to work. She instructed me to change into a white slip, after which she returned with piles of material, none of which was the kimono itself.
She set to work quietly and with great concentration, my arms held out like a scarecrow, and wrapped various widths of cloth around my midsection. She flattened my breasts and padded my belly, all to achieve the cylindrical form of the ideal female shape for kimono-wearing. Another couple layers of slips and several tightly-cinched belts later, I started to think she must be close to done and was beginning to feel light-headed, but still more wrapping and tying ensued. I thought of the old lace-up whalebone corsets of western tradition, of the various techniques around the world for cinching the breath out of women.
Finally, she carefully withdrew the kimono from its golden box and draped it over my now stiff form, wrapped it in still more belts, and tugged and pulled it into shape, running her hands down the sides to smooth out extraneous folds and creases. Then she topped off all the layers around my mid-section with a fuchsia obi, and spent a good deal of time behind my back tying and retying it to get the bow just right. One last golden rope atop the obi and I was almost ready. She slipped on a pair of white socks, forked at the big toe, and fished out a pair of kimono shoes just one size too small—I had the largest feet she’d ever seen. I stepped up into the shoes, like platform flip-flops, and then realized with horror that I was somehow expected to navigate my way back down the stairs.
Having not anticipated being swept up in a spontaneously ceremonious afternoon of kimono dressing, I was unprepared for the profound shift in mental state that donning a kimono elicits. Not to mention the shift in the way I was treated by those around me. As I began to shuffle forward in the small, short movements the shoes and kimono would allow, I soon discovered I was not at all expected to descend the stairs by myself, nor do anything on my own for that matter. I suddenly became aware of what it was like to become a human doll.
Attendants flanked me, held up parts of the kimono, assisted me in walking, fetched me soda, opened the can, aided my getting in and out of the car that took me to a courtyard Zen garden for photos, moved my limbs and head into artful poses and above all, made sure that no corner of the very expensive kimono I was wearing got the slightest bit soiled. I felt silly being served, being the complete center of attention for my beauty and nothing else, and realized it was best to simply give up on any notion of independent movement. Was this a window into the psychology of the traditional roles of elite Japanese women? Was it my own western individualist mindset that led me to feel so restricted? I suspended my prejudice and decided to go with the flow.
Though the light-headedness and feeling of suffocation continued, I also found a certain slow, deliberate grace. Though restrained, I was freed from the need to rush anywhere or do anything. Each moment came with careful, focused attention and reverence. I sat and smiled in a beautiful Zen garden at dusk, the water trickling from the fountain, and enjoyed my eternal hour in a kimono.
Later, when I returned to the dressing room, the hours of carefully placed layers were stripped off in five minutes, lying in crumpled heaps on the floor, the sacred kimono was returned to its box, and I was left in my last layer of underwear to dress myself. My hair fell out of its pins in unruly, though still curled cascades. I slipped on my jeans and headed downstairs feeling oddly unsettled: though I had looked forward to breathing freely again, I felt aimless, flailing and clumsy. I no longer had an excuse to move slowly and purposefully. The fascination was gone, and I was shooed out the door with a polite, “Goodbye! Thank you!” as the busy salon returned to primping its paying customers. In what was perhaps a crash course of cultural differences, I realized: There are two different ways of being, of walking in this world, wearing a kimono and not. Two entirely different ways of being.

Under the Bed

2008-04-24T18:14:00.000-07:00

Tara Sullivan

He lies under her bed, a long-toothed monster, with large paws, sharp claws, wet lips, unkempt fur, thick, a short tail with too many spikes, a quiet monster, a still monster who knows how to hide; he is hiding now as she sits on her bed in her pajamas directly above his furry head and reads a book about a monster in a little girl’s attic, another book about a monster with a toothache and a third book about a distant land where monsters live, and he knows that before she reaches the end of the third she will be asleep, and before long she won’t be reading stories about monsters, and she won’t ask her father to look under the bed or ask her mother to check the closet one more time, and soon he won’t hear them say “there’s no monster here”—which will, in fact, be true—but later that night, when she is asleep, he will lie under her bed and listen for creaking floorboards, howling wind and the child’s mumbled cry that keep him real for one more night.

Author’s note: “Under the Bed” was written in homage to Molly Giles’ story “The Poet’s Husband.”

Negative Interference

2008-04-24T18:08:00.000-07:00

Joanna Richardson

The onomatopoeia sat next to the
juxtaposition but would not demean
herself to talk to the simile. While the
dichotomy flirted with a beguiling metaphor
they supped on prepositions, relative clauses
and conjunctions. “Who would have thought,”
pondered a prefix, “that this miscellaneous
alliteration would form such a delightful soirée.”

In the Garden

2008-04-24T18:04:00.000-07:00

Katharine Jones

Everything in the city was oozing heat. Even in Brooklyn, where they came off the subway, the streets were sweltering and breezeless and people walked at a slower pace, as if held down by great weights.
“Can we stop a minute?” Elizabeth asked as they reached the corner, half a block from the party.
“Why?” Mark asked.
“I want to put on a little makeup. I don’t want to look like I was crying.”
“Who cares what you look like?”
“I care,” she said, and then repeated it, “I care.”
She sat on the stoop of a brownstone and dabbed some concealer below her eyes, then brushed on a little mascara. In the wet heat the makeup seemed absurd. They had lived together for four years and for two years the same argument erupted and always it ended in a stalemate—her eyes swollen with tears and nothing resolved.
“Done,” she said, closing her bag. “Let’s go be normal, happy people.”
“You want to go or you don’t want to go?”
“Why not?” she replied, conjuring a false smile. “It’s not like we have anything else we have to do.”
“No—you’re right—we don’t. Great attitude,” he said with a hiss.
“I’m just saying …”
“I know what your saying. I get it, okay? I get it.”
“Good. Then we’re both clear: we have nothing more important to do.”
Elizabeth stood up and started down the street with Mark trailing a few steps behind. She knew what he had been thinking. That in the easy flow of Graciela and Fergus’ garden, with cool drinks in hand, with friends they both enjoyed, that perhaps he would get lucky and the subject would evaporate and be forgotten, like the water that pooled below the open hydrant they passed on Bedford.
Graciela opened the door with a pitcher of sangria in one hand and a baby bottle in the other. “Come in, come in. We’re a little disorganized today, so pick a hand. I’ll run up for a few things and meet you in the garden,” she said, and then added with a little laugh, “But beware, if you pick the wrong hand it just might seal your fate.”
Mark took the pitcher of sangria without a pause. “This, I think, is for me.”
In the garden, several couples, most with babies or toddlers, moved in easy conversation. Elizabeth didn’t recognize anyone, except Fergus, who sat holding the six-month-old Olivia. He was chatting with a handsome man whose very pregnant wife looked on with a languid smile, caressing her huge belly as if it were a lounging pet.
“Hello and hello,” Fergus said, as he stood and passed Olivia to Elizabeth with a casual, “If you don’t mind Liz.” Elizabeth’s face lit up a moment as she felt the baby’s arm reach for her.
“I don’t,” she said, and softly maneuvered the bottle’s nipple into Olivia’s mouth and looked away, away from Mark, away from the garden and its guests, out past the ivy-covered fence to the neighbor’s yard where children’s splashing and screeching seemed to cool the air.
“Elizabeth, Mark, I don’t believe you know Carrie and Rory?” Elizabeth turned back, her eyes heavy, her face tightening into a smile. “And may I present their nearly-one-year-old Max,” Fergus continued, as he gestured to a toddler in a black tee, who was busy inspecting a patch of grass. “The genius of the neighborhood—second only to Olivia, of course.”
Max’s parents cooed at the remark while making room for Elizabeth and Mark on the picnic bench. “Sorry, I don’t move too quickly these days,” Carrie observed as Mark plunked himself down and began pouring the sangria. Still standing with Olivia in her arms, Elizabeth surveyed the garden, noticing the newly planted trees and a small herb garden with thyme, mint, rosemary, and bright red peppers. She eyed the kitchen window that looked down from above. How easy life could be in such a garden, she thought. Placing a large platter on the table, Graciela swooped in to retrieve the now sleeping Olivia.
“Why don’t you let Mark hold her?” Elizabeth said. “He is so good with babies, and I’m sure you could use a break.”
“Great idea. Mark, she’s all yours,” Graciela said, depositing Olivia into his lap. “But tell me, Mark, Elizabeth, how are you? I am in a constant spin these last months. You have no idea—well, I had no idea—how much work such a little person can be. It’s non-stop. But tell me, tell me: how is work? The apartment? Give some news from the world without diapers and feedings and endless gurglings of ‘choo-choo’ ‘choo-choo,’ pleeease.”
Elizabeth glanced at Mark and thought how easy he looked with Olivia. For a moment a great warmth swelled inside her, and then just as quickly she informed it away. “Well,” Mark said, eyeing the bassinet beside them, “Elizabeth has workers in the apartment—this dividing-the-living-room-in-two idea—why we need an extra room, I have no idea.”
“We just got back from upstate,” Elizabeth said.
“Oh, we’re going next week,” Carrie said, leaning in. “Max hasn’t been in water yet, aside from our sink; we’re so excited to show him a lake¬—aren’t we Max?”
Mark slipped out of the conversation, placed Olivia in her garden crib, and headed to the makeshift bar. “Maybe we’ll even go to a farm, let Max hear what sheep really sound like—what they smell like for that matter,” Rory said, and added, as if only to the other parents, “These electronic farm toys—ah!”
Elizabeth watched Mark as he cut fruit and chatted with Nathan. She felt a bit relieved to see another familiar face. Nathan and his wife Mia were designers they had met the year before, at Fergus’ weekend-long birthday party in the Catskills. They were an odd couple, and while she didn’t care much for Mia and her constant references to her latest design award or investment woos, she had found Nathan interesting and easy to speak to. In contrast to Mia—a short, rather dominating, brunette—he was tall and elegant, with a slightly effeminate manner that made him seem gentle and prince-like. He had soft, clear eyes, and his voice was soft too, tinged with a British accent.
“Mia, you’re back,” Graciela exclaimed. Everyone turned to see as Mia strutted toward the table, quite changed. Her hair was longer, and fell freely about her face and shoulders, her clothes were breezy and earthy; and wrapped to her body with a long, brightly patterned sling-scarf was a tiny baby nursing at her breast. Elizabeth tried to mask her disbelief, but it was too late.
“It’s a bit shocking, right? Just six weeks,” Mia said, as she moved around the table with the slow, sure gait of a newly-ordained queen. It was doubly surprising, as everyone suspected that Nathan was gay, and that their marriage was one of friendship and papers.
Nathan came round the table. “He really is precious, isn’t he?” he said with a pout, as he petted the baby’s head. “I really can’t explain how truly right it feels to be a father. Truly right.”
“He certainly knows how to enjoy himself,” Mark said, noting the baby’s excited sucking, his face betraying a mixture of awe and fear.
Mia stood with a slight sway, as if telling Elizabeth to take a closer look. “There seems to be a pregnancy epidemic here,” she said, and continued with a singsong sense of dread, the way a lottery winner might warn the impoverished of the burden of managing large sums of money. “If you don’t want a baby you better not stay in Williamsburg too long.”
“Well,” Elizabeth said, turning to Mark, “Most days we are safely in Manhattan; we feel pretty immune, don’t we darling?”
“Most days we do,” Mark replied. “Who wants another drink?”
“Just juice for me,” Mia answered. “Mine is the organic—the one in the brown glass jar,” she added in a tone meant to remind everyone that her body was now a temple, and as such required special care. “You know, you really shouldn’t drink anything but organic. In fact, finding locally grown organic fruits and making your own is best. Well, you just can’t know what you’re taking into your body unless you make it yourself.”
“Ah, poor Mia, good Mia,” Nathan chimed, as he smoothed her hair from her face, “She really is restricted these days.”
Elizabeth held her glass up in Mark’s direction. “You know what I want, don’t you darling?”
“Don’t you think you should have something to eat first?” he asked. “If you don’t eat …”
“If I don’t eat, what? I might get a little drunk? And if I get a little drunk—what then? Come on Mark, I don’t have any reason to forgo a drink, especially on a day like this …. Hot.”
“Ah, let the woman drink,” Carrie added. “What I wouldn’t give for a cold glass of sangria, but I just know I couldn’t.” She looked down at her stomach and resumed caressing it.
“Your choice,” Mark said, as he ducked under the awning to retrieve the drinks.
“Yes, my choice,” Elizabeth mumbled to herself.
“So, Elizabeth,” Carrie began, with a tilt of her head, “you don’t have any children then?”
“No,” she said, and watched Max as he patted small handfuls of soil onto her feet.
“Oh, so you don’t want to be a mother then?” she asked.
“Such big questions!” Graciela exclaimed, reaching across Carrie for a pitcher of water. “I had Olivia at forty, and I am glad I waited.”
Elizabeth looked down and held her glass to her forehead a moment, searching for a place to rest her eyes as they traveled from Carrie’s bulging stomach to Mia’s swollen breasts, to Olivia sleeping away in the crib. She looked at Mark as he placed the bottle of juice down, and then stared at the handmade label: “Mia’s Mix” in bold green letters.
“Kids are great,” Mark declared. “They’re great. Just a matter of the right time.”
“Ah, that’s what we thought,” Mia said with a little sigh. “But you know, if you’re waiting for the right time … having a child,” she continued, gazing down at her baby and adjusting the position of her breast, “it’s just, just a whole different level of intimacy—with your partner, with yourself.”
At that moment another woman arrived, tall and blonde, slim, like a streak of bright summer light beamed into the garden. Her hair was up in a messy bun, and over her thin tee she wore a gossamer scarf that draped almost to her knees—a seeming impossibility in the day’s heat. Holding a bottle of champagne above her head, Camile declared in a strong French accent, “Graciela, I don’t care what those American doctors are telling you, we are going to celebrate with a glass of champagne. If it comes in your milk, well then, lucky, little Olivia!”
“Oh really? And what are we celebrating?” Graciela asked.
“Everything!” Camile said, making her way around the table as if blown by a soft breeze to kiss the cheeks of each guest, repeating “Ca va” with each bend of her head. Luke, an unshaven man in his mid-thirties—as carefree and confident as they come—stood back a bit with an affectionate smile, arms full of champagne glasses. Elizabeth had heard the story of their romance from a mutual friend. They had met five months before, at a café in Costa Rica, where Camile was shooting a documentary, and where Luke had gone on a grant to teach and study eco-farming. They moved in the intoxicating air of new love; love before disappointments, before accusations and separate agendas tore at its soft veils; love without echoes of the word no. Camile knelt beside the bassinet a moment and whispered to Olivia, “You’re perfect.” Luke watched her with her same expression, and when she looked back they held a long, intimate gaze, as if they were the only two people in the garden.
“Alright now, alright,” Fergus said. “Stop making us old couples look bad.”
Elizabeth stepped back from the table where everyone was laughing and moved to sit beside Graciela. She tried to shake it all off¬—to start her moment at the party again—to make easy, afternoon conversation. “You’ve planted so many new things. This tree, is it a kind of willow?”
“Actually, it’s a butterfly tree. I thought Olivia might like it one day, if the butterflies really come.”
“And the vegetable garden you were planning last summer? Are you going to plant it soon?” she asked.
“Well, we thought we might put a swing over there instead.”
“Make sure it’s soft rubber,” Mia cautioned. “Or even better: hemp. Those wood ones are so dangerous for little heads. I can’t believe they still make them. Who would buy one?”
Elizabeth took a long drink of her wine. “And the peppers look great. Are you cooking with them?” she asked.
“Well, for now we’re not. I figure whatever I eat Olivia drinks, so peppers could be tricky. I can cut some for you to take—I bet they’re delicious. You can tell me.”
“Great.” Elizabeth said, adding, “God it’s hot,” as she motioned over her shoulder to Mark for more ice.
“It is so much pressure, isn’t it? What you eat, what kind of cream you put on your skin, what you clean the counter with,” Mia added. “You don’t just eat for two, you do everything for two.”
“Everything,” Carrie echoed, and then gave a little sigh, as if impressed by the range of her sacrifices.
Elizabeth looked over at Mark again. He was speaking with Fergus and Rory about the cabin they rented upstate and the bike trails they found, about a trip he hoped to plan to the south of France. He was drinking and rolling a joint, as carefree as he had wanted to be.
“You want more ice, right?” he asked.
“No. I want a mojito.”
“I think Luke is going to open some champagne,” he answered.
“So, no mojito then? Or is ‘champagne’ French for mojito?” she said, and cooly held his gaze.
“Why a mojito?”
“I think I need one.”
“Why?” he pressed.
Camile stepped closer. “I love mojitos,” she said.
“Well, I love the French,” Elizabeth blurted out with a laugh as she raised her glass, tears receding, and finished off her second sangria. “Are you in? I see mint, so all we need is a little lime, some rum and we can make a batch.” Camile smiled so warmly it was like a soothing, stable arm wrapping around Elizabeth’s shoulder.
“Well, I’ll help you make them, but first I have to help Luke with something,” she said, and went to take her place beside him.
“Everyone, everyone, a moment please,” Luke began with the ting of his glass. You all know by now that this woman—your friend—is the love of my life.” He paused as he popped the champagne cork. “So …” Elizabeth shrank a bit, stepped back toward the edge of the garden, toward the mint plant and away from what, she assumed, would be the announcement of another engagement, or of moving-in together. Only five months, she thought to herself. Five months and he is so sure. He is a man who knows what he wants. He is a man like the others. He knows, and she’s lovely and—why not? She looked over at Mark, who seemed to know nothing, to need nothing, so enraptured in the happiness of the group, so separate from her. She looked to him with the eyes of one who was drowning, her head barely above water, but he didn’t see her. She scanned each woman in the group. What had they done to earn such completeness? What hadn’t she done? She began repeating, silently, like a mantra, “I won’t feel bad. I won’t feel bad. I won’t …” as the water beading on her glass trickled down her arm.
“Out with it now—be brief!” Fergus prodded, exaggerating his Irish brogue.
“Camile, hold up your left hand please …” Graciela joked.
“No need,” Camile began. “As you all know I don’t believe in marriage. But I believe in love. Some people say I love love. And, well,” she paused, looking to Luke, “I think I don’t need this scarf anymore, because—well—it’s time you all know too.” She drew the scarf away from her body as if pulling back the curtain of a miniature stage, and cradled the small round belly she had been hiding.
“We’re having a baby,” Luke said, putting his hand on hers, “a baby.”
“You see—I told you!” Mia said, looking back toward Elizabeth, as all the advice and questions and hugs of congratulation began to swarm Camile like small sprinkles of confetti. Fergus poured and passed around the champagne. A small celebratory sip was the one exception each mother made, because this, after all, was an occasion. Elizabeth too raised her glass in the toast while holding a fistful of mint in her other hand, and as Nathan’s words of “welcome to The Club” trailed off she added,
“Thank God for men, and all the joys they bring us.”