Ex Marks the Spot

My lover and I spotted Spaulding Gray,
Spaulding Gray on Valentine's Day.
On a bicycle he did ride,
A bicycle shiny and yellow.

Riding along he was merry and gay,
Merry and gay in a talkative way
Chatting and laughing with his companion,
A bespectacled Indian fellow.

It seemed to us he was telling a tale,
Telling a tale to his bicycling friend
And we drove alongside in our old red car,
Feeling especially married.

My lover and I went our separate ways,
Separate ways for the rest of our days.
And I never saw Spaulding Gray again
For he jumped to his death on a ferry.

Home Again

Home Again

When Hilary finally gets to the house, all the windows are dark and there is manifestly nobody around. Her father’s already left for the city, where he’s sure to have a ball doing whatever a five-star chef does on vacation, eat someone else’s cooking, she supposes. She’d hoped to catch him in time for at least a quick hello/goodbye, wanting to bounce on her heels for a few minutes before plunging off the diving board.

Jane is meant to be right behind her, carrying pie. Jane is, was, is, the love of her life. Jane, however, had other plans, which as of fourteen days ago no longer include Hilary, and certainly not visiting Hilary’s childhood home in East Oxbridge (pop.124) for Thanksgiving. Staying here was to have been a treat. Although a treat is not what it anymore is, she’s still come according to plan, unable to relinquish anything that was theirs. That her childhood home is as spring-loaded as a beebee gun and could, at any moment, pepper her with painful and unbidden memories has not escaped her—entirely. Hilary has been employing a prudent measure of denial lately. It helps get you, she finds, from points A to B.

She reminds herself of this for the severalth time as she hesitates on the steps, confronted by the postings that caution her to BEWARE OF DOG, GUARD DOG ON DUTY, and, propped in a window box among frostbitten lobelia, to pay ATTENTION, CHIEN DE GARDE. Her father’s beloved German shepherd Shark has been dead for a couple of years; the signs remain. Gertie, Hilary’s own dog, noses at the door, eager to get warm.

She hasn’t stayed here alone since before her parents’ divorce, many dozens of lifetimes ago. Her father still entertains weekend and summer guests here, just as her parents used to, though without (she presumes) the neurotically competitive sexual theatrics that defined their union. Guests here may still eat their cassoulet off her parent’s wedding china, but (again, presumably) they are no longer required to make an appearance in their hosts’ bed, or receive wine-soaked confidences a CIA operative might have difficulty keeping under wraps.

The diving board judders as she swings open the front door and is greeted by the smell that isn’t, to her mind, the house’s proper smell. It once had a mapley, brown, woolly smell with an underlayer of fireplace and wax polish. Her father’s reign has routed out these subtle notes by force of meat demi-glazes, unfiltered cigarettes and Shark. Obeying a habit that hasn’t been reinforced in years but apparently still has a fix on her, she troops upstairs to survey her girlhood room. Her old lair, where she spent her eighth summer making sealing wax out of a kit and brewing potions out of insect repellent and her own ill-intended pee, is distinctly a guest room. An aggressively floral drape blots out the view of the river and the old covered bridge. Jerking it open she meets with a frigid draft. No storm window. The shelves that once showcased wasps’ nests and magic tricks are peopled with left-behind paperbacks, some shelved upside down.

Every inch of the house in fact now isn’t hers, except, weirdly, the banister. As a child she’d loll on the banister, slack-limbed like a lion on a tree branch, gazing absently over the dining room. When she’d felt comfortable in neither the upstairs nor the downstairs world, the former too lonely, the latter too fraught, she’d lay there feeling suspended in space, an observer outside of the flow of events. It seemed to render her invisible to her mother as she clattered around the kitchen. No, not invisible, she corrects herself: She couldn’t make herself disappear; turning her invisible was a terrible power that only her mother possessed. To hover on the banister was to be peripheral, that’s the word. Her mother might smile vaguely as she passed through the dining room, or announce the approach of supper, with a serious No picking, her warning against sampling whatever was on the stove before it was formally served. No picking meant a special meal. Go wash your hands meant it was really almost ready, not like Pretty soon, which meant so many hours yet to come it might as well be tomorrow, or Soon, which meant pretty soon. Hilary had given some thought as to how to explain to Jane the banister’s appeal.

Like nothing at all else here, the banister is unchanged. Over it Hilary slings her coat, bags, scarf, Gertie’s leash; she fits her hat over the newel post’s noggin and places her luggage and shoes at its foot. Then, remembering the thick sheaf of hand-written instructions that her parents used to leave for house sitters, she hunts around for it or something like it, hoping for some solid fatherly advice concerning furnace pilot lights and storm-window installation.
The only note is wedged under the phone. It reads:

Hi girls
lamb in fridge - sear on high heat, then oven 15/20 min
peppers & onion at restaurant (restaurant back door unlocked)
pot cookies in freezer, help self
back on Saturday

She flips it over in case there’s a helpful P.S., but since the only addendum is a coffee stain, she gets on to the business of fetching firewood from the cellar, proud that its spidery crannies and coffin-shaped water tank no longer give her the spooks. She and her older brother used to draw straws over who had to get logs to feed the fire, and she – unlike him, so unclever at cheating – had always been the one to slump down the cellar steps. While the kindling catches, she helps self to pot cookies from the plastic baggie in the freezer. Sugar’s pretty much all she’s been able to eat since Jane left, anyway. She views it as a metaphorical craving for sweetness, which doesn’t make real food seem one whit more eatable. The last time her dad offered her pot cookies, they were delicious, and didn’t affect her in the slightest. These are the same kind, but smaller, very small, the size of chocolate kisses. She eats five of them.

She should try, try, try to relax into this experience. For one thing, close the doors to any rooms she doesn’t want staring at her, the guest bathroom being first on the list. Probably her father would rather she use that one but Hilary’s chicken to go in there, especially when there’s nobody else home.
(Playing and re-playing there forever, the terrible sound that she doesn’t want to recognize as her mother’s voice, a high-pitched eee-eeee from behind the guest-bathroom door, ee-ee-ee and ten-year-old Hilary stands with her hand hovering in knock position, trying desperately to think it isn’t scary, eeeeee and her frozen hand gropes dumbly at the doorknob, and her voice tries to say Mom? normally but her voice does the thing it does in nightmares where you’re trying to do a huge scream of HELP but all that you can push out is a husking huh, and she squeaks a mouse-sized mom? which automatically makes it too late to pretend she hasn’t heard anything and tiptoe silently away, and the door nudges open, bumping against her mother’s knee because her mother is lolling on the bathmat, and the smell of her going-out perfume rolls out of the bathroom like steam, and she’s wearing a bra and pantyhose and going-out shoes and eye makeup which is around her eyes but also splotched on other parts of her face and she holds up the bottle of pills that Hilary’s not allowed to touch and holds it upside-down pantomiming all gone and says in a sloppy-tongue voice like she just came from the dentist I can’t believe I ate the whole thiiiing, which is a line from a popular TV commercial, and then she snorts a laugh and mucous comes bubbling out of her nostrils and Hilary closes the door again fast)

Hilary closes the door fast before scary violins can start playing in her head the don’t go in there theme. Don’t dwell. A long soak might go some way toward the whole relax-into-the experience concept. Go upstairs and use dad’s bathtub.
On the scale of relative machismo, her father rates somewhere between matador and bounty hunter, so Hilary’s always found it charming that he keeps such an extensive selection of froufrou bath products. His only perceptible soft spot, a bad back: His vocation has left him secretly crippled. He stands before an inferno all day, beating ingredients into smithereens with his hammer of perfection. The diners bravo, he wraps up his veal stock and pomegranate reductions, staggers home to collapse into a hot bath. Sometimes (her brother’s witnessed it, apparently) he weeps with pain. When Hilary asks him about his health, he says, I don’t complain, shooing her testily away with his cigarette.

or does he, apparently, leave towels folded on the bed for visitors. She’d once gone through a week-long phase, maybe she was nine, maybe (embarrassingly) older, of sleeping curled up in the linen closet. She remembers the feeling of being an animal cozed into its den, the fuzzy smell of extra bedding. Reaching for a towel tonight is like cranking the handle of a jack-in-the-box, bracing for the ghost of herself to sproing out at her. She wonders if Jane loves/loved her in spite of, or because of, her having been the sort of child who lurked in closets and on banisters.

There’s an element missing to Hilary’s relaxation plan, but she can’t place what it is. When she figures out music, she’s already undressed, but it’s worth zipping downstairs to prevent the empty house from attacking her with silence rays. Feeling comical in her naked hurrying up, she gropes for the light switch at the top of the stairs. No light comes on, instead, she becomes aware of a roaring sound that’s emanating, seemingly, from deep within the house’s timbers. Panicking, she turns the switch off, and the roar dies down. The immediate problem becomes: Was the house roaring when she first arrived and she just didn’t notice till now? This threatens to start out Hilary’s night on a freaked-out foot. Is this a bad roaring, as of an abruptly-extinguished pilot flame now streaming a deadly cyclone of gas fumes into the basement? The all very right and good roaring of a hot-water heater kicking into its water-heating cycle? Unnerved, she re-flips the switch into roar mode.

Doing shivery tippy-toes on the cold kitchen tiles, she double-checks the instructions. Peppers, onion at restaurant. Scuttles back upstairs, concentrates her ears on the sound. When she remembers that there’s an invection fan in the attic, she flips off the switch with a little Ha! of triumph. In the no-roaring that follows, she scampers back downstairs and swats the radio on, which she knows will be tuned to classical, before returning to the scalding water. It’s so hot she has to make monster sounds as she lowers herself in.

Hilary does yoga poses in the tub. Cat stretch, cat recline. It makes her feel like an old hippie. But that’s okay. Old hippies, though badly maligned, have wisdom. Using hippie thought techniques, she spends not one more second than is strictly inevitable wondering for what purpose precisely does her dad have a mirror mounted at crotch level.

By the time she gets around the dog’s evening walk, she needs to carry a flashlight. The only one she can find is a headlamp on a strap meant to be worn hatwise, the strap of which she snaps over her hand, not up for sallying forth with a beaming forehead. In the dark, the river looks like a furious whirlpool, skirling blackly over the rocks’ humped backs. From the outside, the bridge is a cozy barn red, but the inside is painted white, which vividly showcases one hundred and seventy years’ worth of cobwebs. There’s a gap between the webby floorboards and the webby walls through which, if you lean over far enough to court danger, you can see the torrent below; this Hilary knows from years of forcing herself to look. Now she moseys through, watching Gertie’s cheery rump.

They amble along the riverbank. Waiting for Gertie to satisfy her snuffing-around requirements, Hilary gazes across the water at the house, blowing on her belamped hands for warmth. She thinks, look at it clearly, it’s just a house, no biggie. Imagine yourself a tourist, aiming your camera at the covered bridge. Pretty old house over there. A nice place to spend Thanksgiving.

The house draws itself up on its knoll and regards her indifferently through one chandeliered eye. It’s putting up out its unwelcome mat for her, oh no. Ghosts are starting to flap their empty bed sheets around on the front lawn, moaning, Look at me, look at meeeee. The seven windows of the bridge send their greenish glow out over the water.

Bad, bad, she can’t start wigging on the house now, it’s too late in the evening to launch some journey into the heart of personal darkness, she’s got to elbow this thing aside. The thing is, though, the pot cookies, she is realizing, they are not not affecting her in the slightest. They are working just fine, all five of them.
No, she says out loud to the prospect of bad vibes. She lifts her hand, palm facing out. She’s elephant-headed Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles, who holds up her hand to allay fear. I allay fear! Hilary says. She shines her flashlight hand of divine love directly at the house. I banish paranoia! she says. I banish fear! She keeps saying it until she hears the real calm, not just the trying to be calm, come into it.
She pauses to watch her breath pluming in the dark. I call on the house’s spirit of comfort, she whispers. I call on its spirit of fun, of respite, of restoration. She’s hoping that nobody’s secretly witnessing her doing mystical incantations by flashlight. Then the old hippie of her decides that if they are, that’s okay too. She whistles for Gertie. “When we get back there,” she tells her as they clip-clip back over the bridge, “everything’s going to be okay.” It better be, she thinks.

But when she first returns, the normalness of scooting off her shoes fools her into automatically calling “We’re back!” to the Jane that isn’t there, and her voice bouncing back at her instantly, cruelly unfools her. Because it’s not actually possible to kick yourself, she does Rumplestiltskin-like hops of dismay before flopping onto the couch in defeat. Dishwatery waves of anxiety slosh over her. For a long while, she doesn’t know what do to except watch as the furniture signals weird intentions. Then, remembering the nature of a country house, she builds a new fire on the one remaining ember. You need to tend the hearth, that’s a rule.

Next things next, she marches into the kitchen and spoons some honey into a mug, surrounds the fat island of honey with a pool of half-and-half. After a moment’s consideration, she cuts a little knob of sweet butter off the restaurant-supply-sized wedge in the fridge, adds that, and grates a smattering of kosher salt into the cup. She’s thinking of yak-butter tea she had once at a Tibetan restaurant: Salt, butter, milk, tea – a beverage to ward off any brand of cold, a beverage invented by lonely sherpas to drink at night on a snow-covered mountain. A beverage to keep the goddamn Yeti at bay. She pours in boiling water and adds a bag of spicy Masala tea. Test-sipping, she adjusts it till it’s kid sweet, lonely sherpa sweet. A rich yellow slick rolls around on the top.

While ferrying it to the living room, she notices that small items of hers have come to roost on tabletops and staircase risers. A favorite pen. A bag of chocolate coins. A stripey hat. A novel. When her father is here, she tends to keep everything packed in her luggage and close by, as if readying for a dash to the lifeboats.
She comfies into her favorite chair, the original of which was long ago replaced with a sleeker, less yielding version but still has her vote for occupying the spot nearest the fire. She used to spend holidays curled into this chair, gorging on holiday chocolate. It was easy to get away with certain types of excess: Holidays here induced a trance of overindulgence in which the grownups moved in their own mysterious, elliptical orbits; her own child vices went un- remarked-upon. Once the Christmas stocking was shaken out onto the rug or the Halloween loot traded between siblings, her stash could be dipped into with impunity throughout the sluggish, over-stimulating days. The long afternoons unspooling into ribbons to nowhere, the elaborate feasts that sprung up late in the evening, transforming the dining room into an Elfin antechamber of glittering candelabra light and silver chafing dishes. Sometimes you were invited to the feast, its ooh-ahh ritual as the lid came off the gleaming tureen. Other times you were put to bed early, and could only creep into the kitchen and lick the pots. But no matter what your relative position to the adults vis-à-vis dinner, you could chank off the head of a solid-milk Santa any hour of the day. You could stay fortified with sugar-eyed bunnies, marshmallow pumpkins, pillowy caramels.

Willing herself hypnotized by the fire’s primal show, Hilary opens the mesh bag of chocolate coins and eats them all one by one, laying them first to soften on her tongue like communion wafers. She falls into a light doze, wakes up again soon in a drift of foil wrappers. Gertie’s doing the wake-up stare at her eyelids, signifying a supper long overdue. Alright then, it’s time to make Thanksgiving dinner – for, try as she might to tune out the Thanksgivingness of tonight’s meal, it’s like trying to not look at a car accident. The festive occasion that’s not happening in the dining room is getting louder, the voices that aren’t there becoming more insistent as the wine that’s not being poured gets not drunk.

The last holiday she’d spent at that dining room table was, probably ironically, the Thanksgiving she was eleven. Over that summer her mother, hunting for a jar of cornishons, had caught her father sporting with his sommelier in the restaurant’s walk-in pantry; throughout the fall the Yellow Pages had been stationed by the telephone, dog-eared at ATTORNEYS/AUTO. Yet Hilary’s parents had decided to spare their own parents the news of their incipient divorce and go on with the holiday season as they’d always done, with gruesome results. That Thanksgiving Hilary had spent an unseemly amount of time dangling on the banister, feeling like a treed cat.

She investigates the lamb. It’s a small Frenched rack, its chorus line of bones kicked jauntily up in readiness to don paper frills. One chop gets separated from its brethren by her father’s magically lethal knife -- this will be Gertie’s supper -- and the rest gets dealt with as outlined in the note. Rooting around in the fridge she discovers a trove of chanterelles, about half of which are not turning into liquid rot; she lifts the living ones to safety, sautees them with garlic. She hasn’t quite wrapped her mind around the idea that she’s actually going to eat roots, fungi, flesh; cooking feels like play, like forming little mudpatties to serve as cakes at a doll’s tea party. But her father’s invisible presence makes it impossible to forgo a real dinner for a few more cookies or a scavaged spoonful or three of jam. His voice in her head demands to know what is she, five years old?

Allons, enfants de la patrie, she sings, decapitating the tops from a heap of root vegetables. She blanches, coarsely chops, then tosses in a baking dish, beets and carrots and yams alike. To whisk a shallot vinaigrette she uses a special tiny whisk, just for the fun of whisking. As an afterthought, she slices half a pear into the salad, thinking forlornly/absurdly, I’m half a pair. It seems important to plate the meal nicely, and dig around for a good linen napkin, but she doesn’t have the heart to fraternize with the dining room’s four empty chairs, and so transports her feastlet to the couch.

She gets the throw pillows scrunched into place, salts her gorgeous lamb. This spot on the couch is her father’s favored sitting spot, and culinarily speaking she’s launched a meal he would approve of, and she realizes that this is the first moment she’s truly felt at home here tonight, hell, for decades; and the connection between the two, the notion of this unintentional but come to think of it goddamn nice communion with her dad for one heartwarming moment makes her feel a mellow kinship before it hunches her over, fork cast aside, broadsided by a memory so cringeful she has to knuckle her eye sockets:

After several years’ estrangement between them, she’d gone to the house unannounced, hoping to fix something with action that couldn’t be fixed with yet another letter. Anxiously she’d tapped first too softly, then too loudly on the front door. She stood for many minutes listening to Shark bark before her father finally let her in, and Hilary could see at once that she’d interrupted something: Two plates lay on the coffee table, occupied by an entire Cornish game hen each. The woman he was dating that year (did she have an Italian name? Hilary can’t recall) was seated on the couch, smirking fixedly into the middle distance. He, clad in his knockabout bathrobe and an expression of not-happy shock, gave her an embrace that made Hilary feel she’d been momentarily held and then released by a set of corn tongs before leading her through the house on a rambling, incoherent tour of new kitchen gadgets. Hilary’d scrammed out of there as soon as was polite for a newly unestranged daughter. Later, she’d complained about it to her aunt as further proof of her dad’s untouchable aloofness, his deft deflation of Hilary’s every attempt to bridge the gulf between father and daughter. “Well, I heard about that,” her aunt had said. “It seems that when you came over, your father was having an intimate moment.” Her voice put quotation marks, respectful ones, around intimate moment.

Hilary’s dinner is filming over with a layer of cooling grease. Heaving a sigh forceful enough to ruffle the linen napkin, she addresses her meal, which is undeniably delicious. There’s also no denying the vast weirdness that’s spinning around and around on its rim like an enormous plate, threatening to topple at any given moment and come crashing down upon her relative okayness, shattering it into fragments. She’s eating this holiday meal without Jane, a fact with an unassuming face but a nature as terrible as a Norse god when considered in its entirety. The sturdy vegetables, the happy match of shallot and pear, provide a focus for their duration, but once the silverware clanks to the bottom of the kitchen sink, the evening shunts her abruptly into aloneness.

Around the nation, she knows, her compatriots are gathered around the TV. And why not, when in America, do as Americans do? Distraction, that’s the thing. There are three remote controls, each a Rosetta Stone of enigmatic symbols. Clicking and adjusting and toggling between functions, none of which produce anything more than a steady blue light on the screen, none of which in fact have any discernible effect whatsoever except to cause her to press each button harder and harder while gritting her teeth together harder and harder, Hilary is forced closer to, rather than away from, the specter of Jane’s looming absence, due to her predicament having its source in a certain quality of their home life that she treasured, namely that they, unlike any of their coupled-up peers, lived without a television, happy to watch only movies they’d been interested in enough to rent or, just as often, read together in their pajamas, a lifestyle that’s rendered her completely unable to operate a modern remote control, which is a handicap she’d be delighted to have every night for the rest of her life while Jane’s neat little stocking feet play-wrangled with hers for space on the couch, and (her teeth no longer merely gritted but actively grinding) she still. Can’t. Get. The Fucking. Teevee. To work.

Grimly scarfed and hatted, she flings open the front door. Gertie is, of course, thrilled, as dogs thrill at each foray into familiar territory as if something new awaits them. Back over the covered bridge they tramp. The mission: Pillage the restaurant for dessert. He’s got to have left something in the freezer. The somethings available to plunder turn out to be, one, snail shells stuffed with something, probably snails, and two, a half a pint of vanilla ice cream. Fine. Pint container squashed into her coat pocket, she trundles back down the village’s main drag.

“Come on, girl,” she calls. For Gertie has gotten busy in the underbrush along the railroad crossing, digging a hole, it sounds like. Hilary goes into temporary zone-out mode before she gets suspicious and calls thrice, a command Gertie willfully tunes out, thus cementing her hunch that something forbidden’s underway. Plucking her coat sleeves free of burrs and fruitlessly commanding leave it leave it! she stumbles upon the dog’s prize, who by this time has consumed a proportionately small but digestively significant portion of dead deer. Its black eyes have a bluish glaze, but otherwise it’s got a weirdly alive expression, as if it could still get up and dust itself off. Except it’s missing, it appears, the bulk of its internal organs. And one of its hind legs (she hopes, maybe irrationally, that this is the part Gertie’s been consuming) is attached only by a red gnarl of sinew. Not its leg, his leg: he has little horns like tapered buds.

She claps the dog away. “Don’t eat that, it’s dead,” she says faintly. The ice cream curdles in its waxy container. She has to take a lot of deep, deep breaths. Nothing’s computing in her mind as to why this sudden onslaught of horror; a dead deer is, more’s the pity, not a shocking sight, and Gertie was simply, when all’s said and done, eating meat. Her own innards billow and furl like a parachute floating slowly to the ground. She wants to go home.
*

Standing again in the brightly lit kitchen, she leans heavily on the countertop, staring out the window at nothing. Spatters of grease decorate each pane. In the big silence, the sound of Gertie lapping at her water bowl produces even more silence. The thought comes, this is your life without her. Her solitude burrows into her and tightens like a tick, concentrated, acute, grotesque.

The deer’s face, its expression stamped with the bad surprise of being dead, appears before her mind’s eye with a message, which is that seeing it was a symbol, a telegram from another world to say yes indeedy, your heart has been taken from your body. You’re finished.

She sinks by slow degrees to the kitchen floor, all the strength punched out of her legs. Gazing across the crumb-strewn landscape, she remembers the time a mouse was found in the dishwasher after the dishes were taken out, its small sodden body in the drain. Then too there was once a mouse her mother found inside the toaster. It had gotten caught in the wire elements and perished. Hilary trances out on the music that’s muttering out of the radio, a blues ballad so hushed with age it sounds like it’s covered in fur. Better throw yourself in the river and drown, better throw yourself in the river, throw yourself in, throw yourself in… it begins to seem like a directive, an instructive tutorial from the old-timey past on coping with heartbreak of this kind. Throw yourself in, throw yourself in...and how easy it would be, seeing as there’s a river so conveniently located. Throw yourself in, an instruction sung so mumblingly, with lyrics so skull-drillingly repetitive, she can’t imagine how it ever got recorded for posterity, a mystery which is solved when she remembers she turned the radio off hours ago. It’s the river itself she’s hearing, an auditory illusion, and with this she realizes that the pot cookies are making a comeback, and she recalls, now, from her college days, that this is what happens when you eat pot; the high comes in waves, waves upon which she now spends some long minutes being washed this way and that like a mess of seaweed.
*
The fridge kick-starts itself awake, starts to hum. Hauling herself up, Hilary splashes cold water on her face, eyeballing her po-faced reflection in the kitchen faucet. Be present. Be present. Another old hippie idea, as sensible as toast. What’s in the present is a slew of dinner dishes, for one, so okay, she washes those, not leaving the pots to soak. Papery garlic husks get swept off the floor, pepper residue sponged from under the peppermill. Putting plates away, she notices that the handsome old china cabinet in the dining room is paisleyed with fingerprints. Behind its smeary glass she spies a cream-colored mug with a faded rose pattern, dubbed by her longago self as Flower Cup. A small faint memory alights on her like a firefly: Sitting pajama’ed up in bed, and her mother asks if she’d rather have her (milk? juice? cocoa?) in a cup or a bottle; Hilary’s decisive reply—cup! – a thrillingly experimental foray into non-babyhood. The mug placed carefully, lovingly, into her hands.

Now she adds her own smudges to the collection on the cabinet, pressing five outspread fingertips against the glass as if the mug is in prison and it’s visiting hours. The notion of smuggling it home is briefly considered, then scotched. Probably Flower Cup can only maintain its magic in its native habitat. In the kitchen where Jane’s many baking accoutrements have left floury traces, where there’s a gummy rectangle on the fridge instead of Jane’s best biscuit recipe scotch-taped to that spot, where the dented red stepstool that equaled If you keep me company I’’ll do the dishes goes unsat-on, in this new version of Hilary’s kitchen Flower Cup is unlikely to adapt, and will soon become a nice mug which eventually loses its handle in a washing mishap and then lives out the remainder of its days holding pencils or a (singular) toothbrush.

Hilary rummages under the kitchen sink for cleaning supplies. She’d never break out the spray bottles at her mother’s house, where it might be seen as a rebuke, but she doubts her father will even notice. Not a big noticer, her dad. She squeaks Windex around with a paper towel, stands back to appraise the streak factor. The chandelier winks mellowly at its reflection in the glass. Much better. Only, now the begrimed set of tiny silver dishes and spoons (which have hung in this spot being used by nobody for as long as she can remember) makes the rest of the wall look, in comparison, shabby. So the dust and grime must go, all of it, and right away Hilary understands she’s about to embark on one of those rare, unstoppable, cathartic cleaning frenzies that more resemble the Calling in of the Orishas than anything one might cross off a to-do list.

Far from unaware of the lateness of the hour, she’s acutely conscious of the bed waiting for her upstairs, the double bed, with its two extra feet of space. Toes determinedly gripping the edges of the kitchen sink, she degreases the kitchen ceiling with a soapy rag, thumbnails off a patch of dried something on the threshold of the dining room. Candle wax gets pried off the base of the candelabra. Nails in the barnboard floors that have been catching at her socks since she was in high school get pounded down. A few of Shark’s remaining hairs are plucked from between the hearth tiles; gilt frames housing her grandparent’s wedding photographs are dusted. When she so vigorously scours the scuffs where the basement door gets kicked shut that the paint wears through, Gertie huffs loudly and shambles riser by riser up the staircase.

The piano gets polished with polish. Her mother, the only one in the family with any musical ability, loved to play this piano, as too she loved the candelabra, and (Hilary dips the ceramic goat on the mantel into a bucket of Murphy’s Oil Soap-y water), come to think of it (wiping sweat from her forehead, replacing it with a smear), why did her mother not take the piano, why did her mother not take the ceramic goat, why did she leave her half of everything behind when she moved out, why for that matter did she move out at all, letting Hilary’s father keep their beloved – her beloved – house and elect instead to rent that cramped apartment in the city with its pots of sagging geraniums on the fire escape and its smell of canned vegetables?

Hilary sits down hard on the living-room rug. She’s asked herself that question for years without sticking around to listen to the answer, which now drops a cartoon anvil onto her idiot head. Anything is nothing without its animating force of love. Once their marriage was over, their ceramic goat was junk. A house houses, that’s what it does. If it’s housing only objects, you might as well leave it on the side of the road where you found it.

But what, then, of her father’s BEWARE of very dead DOG signs? Does her father still feel an abiding love for Shark so pure that the signs still make him happy? Each time he waters the lobellias in the windowbox does he feel, not loss anew, but only the joy of having loved? Or, on the other hand, (rubbing soapy water into her eyes) is he simply, as the daytime-television gurus put it, not letting go? Fine, but how then is he expected to let go, and when has he overstepped his allotted time to hang on? The notion of letting go makes Hilary’s guts sound klaxons of panic. To let go now would be to row away from her love for Jane while it was still afloat.

Jane though, unlike the beloved animal, is not gone in the strictest sense. Despite the difference between herself and Jane viz. their relative desire to be a couple, they’re both alive, and couldn’t one say, then, that means there’s still some small hope for them, isn’t there in fact an axiom to that effect? Where there’s life there’s hope, that’s it. It is not, technically at least, impossible that they could be an us again.

Yes, by god, being of sound mind (by now, finally, sober as a judge) and body (a hot ache has bivouacked at points on her body from root to crown, her ears are ringing, her eyes are gritty, she’s tired, it feels goddamn good to be tired) she’s reached a verdict: While she might be justified in harboring only a scrap of hope, she’s not letting go of that scrap and that’s that. Yanking open a living-room curtain with a damp wad of paper towels at the ready, she finds that the sun is coming up, a discovery which brings a little ray of delight, then concern as she realizes that, having eschewed all opportunities to get a good night’s sleep, the day ahead might pose a challenge.

The bare branches of the dogwood tree stir a little against the pane. This calls to mind the encroachment of late-autumn air emanating from the window upstairs. Even though she has zero intention of sleeping in the double bed, she’ll be damned if she’s going to let that room become the house’s Little Match Girl, orphaned to the cold as the rest of the house stays snugged up all winter long. She creaks up the spindly ladder to the attic, nods a wry hello to the invection fan. Storm windows are stacked upright from the attic’s vaulted center to all its cantilevered sides, dauntingly. There appear to be more of them than the house has windows. After clacking them around aimlessly she realizes (squinting in the mouseful gloom) that some have penciled labels, in her father’s handwriting: kitchen—west, kitchen – north; a half-dozen front porch. Clacking through them all again, she comes at last upon front east bedroom.

Oof-ing, she hoiks open the sash (back muscles protesting) and jimmies the storm window this way and that. Her first try is wrong side out. Flipping it, she spies a thumbtack bearing the raised numeral 25 embedded in the wood, clotted over with decades of Colonial White paint. The storm windows must’ve originally been installed by number, a system clearly found to be unsatisfactory in the long run. 25 is her date of her birthday, not coincidentally her lucky number. As a child this was the sort of small surprise that would’ve pleased her immensely. Even now it makes her feel a fizzy sensation, as if the house is winking at her.
On the other side of the window, the purple, green morning is glittery with frost. She rests her nose gently on the glass, letting her ears tune in to the river’s shh. It’s supremely peaceful, her nosetip registering chilliness by degrees. Exhaustion settles onto her like a drift of leaves. Also, she’s hungry for leftovers. Luckily, there are plenty.

frag lit: the weirdness of the 'Ham

After a walk alone in nighttime Easthampton, this meeting will now come to order. The minutes of tonight's evening will now be read. One. Cartledge's name, its window display, and the problem of miniature telescoping back scratchers that go from five inches to twenty-five inches in .3 seconds. Who buys these? How lonely a person must be, when even the door frame turns away, when even the bark of a tree shies from your touch. There is also the continuing issue of the owl-shaped cookie jar. What is the sinister circular object it offers in its feathery hands, and what abyss has it seen to render its eyes into two black and bottomless wells?

Two. The plump man inside the used clothing store, which over the course of a year has been four other kinds of store. He is standing with a kitschy painting in his hand, squinting at the wall, not seeing me because I am outside, peering between two of several dozen fliers pasted to the window. The fliers bear the store's name, which is NOW HERE FAST. Will he fail, as all before him have failed, and leave town? Will he be the first to rise above the fug of perspiration and diminished expectations that lies limp over Union Street like a greasy uniform?

Let the record show that what shall now be listed as minute Three should have, in fact, been listed as One: the smell of a thaw in Western Massachusetts: salty, sandy, wet.

Four: On the marquee of the gas station: HAPPY BIRTHDAY KAYLENE 25.

Five: Walking through the Chinatown of New York City with my sweetheart yesterday was like walking in the spirit world -- flashing strings of plastic firecrackers, wind-up lion dancers, boughs of pussy willows for the new year -- but also like being at home. Home where things are auspicious or not auspicious, where dumplings are lucky, where monsters caper and immortals where special hats. Moseying along the empty sidewalks of Easthampton at night I'm also home, but for reasons of recognition. I recognize the smell of corn fields in the snowmelt, I recognize the laughter of the girl who lives in #6 coming from the apartment of the girl in #8. The gazebo, home to off-key polks bands all the livelong summer, is also familiar and equals home.

Eight: "Valentine's Day Tea Party at Williston HIgh School, special KIDS-ONLY tea party in the basement."

It's hard to walk by the 7-11 without craving something sweet. The chalkboard in front of the new arts center reads WE'RE OPEN!!!!! and I recoil slightly, feeling the desperation in the five exclamation points.

Concluding remarks: The buzz and beep of cars whooshing around the traffic circle. The hush of my apartment. The bunny dozing by the prayer bell. The awareness of the similarity of this moment of solitude and other moments of real loneliness, and gratitude therein.

not fiction: For Sale Old Thing

ADS FROM UNCLE HENRY'S SWAP & SELL, MAINE:

Hospital bed, also trapeze barely used

Female Llama 5yo, very friendly, but has proper respect for people, $500

Three white young roosters and one colorful rooster, also five chickens, not laying good, put in crock pot, call Charlotte, must all go please

Divco milk truck. Don’t ask why. I have no idea, won’t travel too far.

Basset Hound born July 4 tri-colored male very loving housebroke, our other Bassett doesn’t feel he need a friend & seems ugly

Divorce yard sale Sat Oct 21 sharp tools, karate gear

Wanted young bore for breeding this fall

Piglets 3 months old, trained to roll stumps and clean gardens, $75 each. Smart and sassy. Winter’s coming, strap a board across their nose and plow snow.

Two female llamas one 3yrs and 1 1 yr. I’m not able to do this, please call.

Z120 racing sled. Over 35 MPH in 660 ft. fully modified engine and suspension. Sled is a 200 w/ a 203 mod motor. Can be ridden around the house.

Ferret female very friendly and playful to good home only asking $100 cash. Grandson outgrew adorable masked face

Two beef critters ready to kill

Hi I’m Wiggles.I’m a yellowhead amazon parrot. I’m jealous of new baby.

Adult movies, my wife wants them gone, all new unopened, 5 for $35.

Baby Bjorn front carrier, blue, great shape, done having children.

Need to swap my classic car road ready for a backhoe. Need to move a circa 1820 homestead back from highway before state destroys

Help, my 3 pups will need loving homes, my farm beau got me pregnant, unexpectedly and pups resulted, call to view

A wonderful black gown. Beautiful jewels to make the dress more elegant $25

Diamond engagement ring, barely worn, no bad mojo

Real skunk mittens and headband. Set only.

Trebuchet, Maine’s largest, has thrown pumpking 140 yards.

Wanted Shiba Imu puppie must be a puppie I can pay $200 I don’t have a telephone I live on the Little Field Road my mailbox number is 57.

FOR SALE
OLD THING
IN BARM

fiction: Kitsune

For Rachel

It is summertime and the fox is young. Okay, not young, just stupid. Though wickedly clever, as foxes are known to be. It’s the specialite de maison in every fox’s kitchen. Anyway, you left town with my spit still on your lips, and this fox went running out onto the streets of the small town we live in. Dubious gift shoppes and the mysterious jetsam of other peoples’ lives. She catches sight of a flock of sparrows. Junk birds, extras. She’s not quick enough to catch them. But she wants to swat one down, pin its wings against the ground with her paws and pull its flesh upward toward her mouth, first resistant, then yielding. She imagines doing something not unlike this to you. She imagines that she shouldn’t be imagining this and walks on along the boundaries of her little town, her red purse tucked under her arm, the plush fur of it getting slick with sweat.

She cuts across the cautious lawn of the firehouse. There’s nothing here for foxes. But then, is that true? They’ll eat what doesn’t run away. The luscious stuff that some man took one bite of and left the rest, the results of his fickle hungers.

The fox crosses a bridge over a pond, contemplates the lilies that choke the water sand lend it its appeal. Being prone to melancholy, she broods on the phrase that the reflection of the moon upon the water is not the moon. She’s read her Buddhist scriptures. She knows too about the alcoholic poet who fell into a lake, groping happily for that lunar reflection. He pickled himself like a sprat. This is an educated fox. Though stupid, as I said. She passes some grapes that are barely starting to ripen on their tangled vines and thinks: it should be autumn. Leaves should be crimson and releasing their clutch on the bough, or crimson and trembling like kimono silk slipping from a pair of shoulders.

Idiot fox, she always thinks this way: how it might become otherwise. For example, the exquisite fall. She tends to skip over the summer, though god knows how, considering that at this very moment, the sweat is sliding beneath her breasts, lying across the nape of her neck like a damp hand, and making the red purse positively wet. She forgets about spring, how it’s possible to plant a seed and then up comes an entirely different kind of flower than the one you were certain you’d get. Even now, mysterious shoots are coming up in her garden: delicate leaves of a shape that’s unfamiliar, suggestive somehow not of flowers but of something richer, les transient. Grapes perhaps. But the thought of grapes and their drunken harvest brings her right back to autumn.

Who on earth wants a fall, however gorgeous, when heat lightning is shuddering the hills? The fox, that’s who. She craves fall likes it’s the delicious fruit growing from the thorniest questions, like it’s a lip-smacking combination of sharp, sour, salty and sweet, an Everlasting Gobstopper. And then winter comes, predictable as the mailman. The landscape cold and dormant, up to your thighs in snow.

Stupid fox. Knowing this, she still longs top wear the blazing robes of the autumn season, the quilted undergarment stuffed with feathers plucked from wild geese she killed herself when they were mere chicks, the bold hues of the outer layers dyed to a brilliant luster, with salt used as a fixative. The golden sash that binds her tight. She longs to kneel bewside a brazier, holding her hands to the glowing coals.

While she’s passing the library, the bed and breakfast, she thinks of the woods, how blissful it would be to root among the stink-heavenly mushrooms, churning up dirt with her nose. She reminds herself that she’s a fox, and is made content by the digging of a shallow hole. By calming the rabbit’s rush of panic with her teeth, the loving death her mouth can bring. But already she is dreaming of chasing you zig-zag through a grove of trees, of your body stretched back on a moss-covered boulder. Somehow you’re naked, although your having had to unbuckle and untie yourself, the necessary fumbling, gets forgotten in this dream. Even though in real life that part’s always very real. A lot gets overlooked in a fox’s dreams. They tend to be long on appetite and short on logic.

Clever fox remembers her shopping list, that thoughtful inventory of specific needs we all have floating around somewhere. Hers she generally carries whenever she leaves the house. She ducks into the market on the way home. Candles for prayer and atmosphere. Dish soap for keeping it together. Eggs for the possibility of comfort. At the market, her cashier is a witch who lives at the bottom of a long flights of stairs, below your apartment, below the fox’s apartment. Al in close proximity. Like spring and death. Like feathers and fear. Like a glass half empty and a glass half full – hey, that surpasses proximity. Like the fox and her tail, which she’s famous for chasing.

The witch praises the ornament placed in the fox’s hair, some geisha’s silver trinket. She declines to mention the claws ticking scratches into the supermarket linoleum, the staring eyes outlined in black, or that smell.

The fox marches home, purposeful with her burden of important provisions. The summer air has settled onto her skin like a sweaty-dampened bedsheet. She clambers up to her apartment, which is directly opposite your apartment, proximity again. She plays haunting Japanese music on her crappy Japanese stereo. She tries not to think of you, or rather, to think of you only in ways that her sensible friends would approve of. She is trying to be clever, but with the wickedness melted out of it like sculptor’s wax, leaving the pure hard form of intelligence.

But let’s be realistic. She is a beast, and has only the blind faith of the gopher in its hole, the hart in its dark forest, the fox on her third night of hunger.

fiction: Tame

.


They hadn’t expected sleaze at a big chain motel, but sleazy it was. The parking lot was crazed with cracks, out of which weeds listed, beaten sideways by the damp wind, and loose tiles flapped from the carport roof. Huddled into the shelter of a payphone, a woman with fried blonde hair cursed loudly into the receiver and blew jets of smoke out of her nose. Claudia and Leonie looked at her, and they looked at each other. “Well, this ought to be good,” Claudia said.

Their key jammed in the lock at first; then they were greeted by an unpleasant smell wheezing out of a vent in the wall. Because they had been dating for a very short while, and because they had no inkling of the terrible things that would soon happen, this was all tremendously funny. Leonie lay back on the bed, looking very sweet and winsome with her tawny hair fanned around her face, cheeks flushed, her blue eyes set off prettily by her blue shirt. Claudia rested her head on Leonie’s stomach and let the little wavelets of happiness come. There was, she felt, something extremely precious about the moment, a baby chick of innocent bliss. This only lasted for a little while, of course, as they soon set to some rather ferocious sex.

After that, Claudia felt langorous, burrowing into the snarl of bedspread. Among the floral mayhem of its pattern, which looked like gigantic cabbage roses hurling themselves against smaller cabbage roses, she discerned a menstrual bloodstain, a labial Rorschach blot. She reflected that the pattern must have been chosen to mask just such stains. Leonie emerged from the bathroom, her mouth foaming with toothpaste. “I’m running a bath for you,” she said.

But when she stepped into the grim plastic tub, Claudia, too easily unhinged, let out a wail. “It’s all cold!” she cried. Indeed, there was no hot water to be had. Leonie suggested her usual palliative, which was that they immediately drink some gin. Too late Claudia realized that they had been provided only with washcloths, no towels.

Some hours later they staggered out of a bar and into the thick seaside fog, drunk as lords. They could not really see where they were going and did not especially care, since they were busy amusing themselves by pointing out how dangerous a match they likely were for one another. They began a rapid exchange of the many awful things they had done to past lovers.
“Opened mail!” Leonie said.
“Cut up clothes!” Claudia said.
“Read diary!” Leonie said.
“Slashed tires!” Claudia said.
“You realize if we stay together, we’ll both end up in prison!” Leonie said gaily. Which was not quite true; only one of them would. Just then they came upon a telephone pole festooned with streamers of yellow CAUTION ribbon, which they also found amusing, since it so perfectly illustrated their conversation. Claudia pulled off a length of ribbon and tore it in half with her teeth. Leonie tied her portion around her neck with a jaunty bow in the front; Claudia wrapped hers several times around her wrist, like a bandage. They joined hands and stumbled off the curb.

When they rounded the next corner, their eyes were dazzled by klieg lights. A circus was packing up for the night behind the civic center, filling the loading docks with heaps of reeking sawdust. An ill-tempered-looking woman strode by them, flicking a small whip against her boot. She was followed by a jolly black dog, who leapt expertly into the cab of a horse trailer bearing the legend THE SVITLANDERS. That must be Mrs. Svitlander, horsey people are always ill-tempered, thought Claudia. They peered into the windows of the Svitlander’s trailer. The horses’ eyes were pale blue, and had a gaze that was eerily human, not like an animal’s gaze at all. Their snow-white manes crested stiffly over the snow-white arches of their necks. One of them had a tidy little braid in its forelock, tied at the bottom with a yellow band. Claudia reached through the bars and tugged gently on that braid. The horse stayed still as a statue. The animal’s stillness made Claudia want to weep, though she didn’t know why. The ladies drifted away.

Claudia paused to press her ear against a truck that seemed impossibly long, and heard mysterious thumps inside. She was not embarrassed when a man in coveralls who was pushing a dolly with nothing on it asked her what she was doing.
“I want to know what’s in there,” she said.
“I got hyenas in the back, ponies in the front, and llamas in the middle,” he said.
She wondered what would happen if the barriers between the different kinds of animals should break inside the truck. “Where are you going now?” she said.
“Got another hundred miles before we sleep tonight,” he said. He unfolded a wrinkly piece of paper and stood very close to Claudia so she could read over his shoulder, which she actually could do, because he was very short. She scanned printed directions to a town she’d never heard of. At the bottom it said in capital letters, “DON’T STOP UNTIL YOU SEE ‘THE INDIAN.’”
The man pushed his empty dolly away.

They roved the unfamiliar streets with no special purpose; every block or so Claudia would push Leonie against a wall and kiss her very hard. Eventually, though, they sobered up enough to realize they were ravenous, and then it took a while to find a restaurant, because no matter how many times they asked passers-by for directions, they kept getting disoriented. The fog made it harder, since it was so dense it obscured church steeples and even the cozy glowing windows of apartments right across the street. When at last they found a place that was still open for dinner, Claudia discovered her wallet was gone. “The circus man stole my wallet,” she said, remembering how he had stood very close. “I don’t have any money now.”

Leonie tactfully refrained from pointing out that this was always the case with Claudia. “Don’t worry about it,” she said warmly, “I’ll take care of you.” This delighted Claudia, who liked nothing better than to have someone tending to her pecuniary needs. When Leonie discovered that her purse had been liberated of its wallet as well, she let out a hiss of air between her teeth. “Those motherfuckers should be lined up against a wall and shot between the eyes,” she said.
Luckily, they had filled Leonie’s flask with gin before leaving the last bar, which made going back to the motel hungry more bearable. They had intended to play cards, but Leonie changed into a cheap red negligee, and Claudia at once began to maul her. Soon Leonie’s head was bumping against the headboard and her moans, Claudia thought, were surely loud enough to disturb the people in the adjoining room. Claudia’s brain felt split in two: it was galloping with desire, and yet was fixed on the image of her fingers tugging on the white horse’s braid. No matter how roughly she handled Leonie’s body, she could not really touch her, any more than she could disturb the circus horse in its spooky calm. The room seemed to tilt and spin on its axis. I am mad with desire, Claudia thought, which was true, because Claudia was in fact completely mad.


In the morning, there was still no hot water. They packed their bags into the car before visiting the concierge desk, where they huffily demanded of a man with pockmarks the size of dimes that they not be charged for their room. He vanished into the office. Claudia perused the leaflets advertising regional attractions, all of which seemed to feature Santa and his elves. Finally the man returned and presented them with a revised version of their bill, which Leonie triumphantly swiped from his hand. The revised bill gave them a discount of two dollars and twenty-five cents. “Excuse me, I’m off to use the little girl’s room,” said Leonie, and Claudia followed her. They hurried out the back door and drove out of the dismal parking lot very fast.
They took a series of scenic back roads home, which gave them a pleasant feeling of being lost. They stopped at pump-before-you-pay gas stations, from which they plundered both fuel and snack food. When they came upon a county fair in full swing, money or not, their spirits were far too high to resist (especially Claudia, who had left her medication in the motel bathroom and was becoming suspiciously enthusiastic as a result).

It didn’t take long to find a place in the cyclone fence to wriggle through. They ranged around, greedily snuffing the aroma of carnival vendor food, until they found something they could do for free, which was to watch Buckaroo Bob’s Wild West Revue. Buckaroo Bob was a naturalist first and foremost, he made that very clear. He loved wild animals, and his show was there to make the point that they should never be made into pets. His troupe consisted of his wife and three daughters, one of whom was wearing a great feathered war bonnet that went all the way down her back. Bob brought out a grizzly bear cub, which looked adorable drinking from a bottle. Then he brought out a mountain lion and draped it across his shoulders, whereupon it bit him on the hand. Although it didn’t draw blood, you could tell that it must have hurt. Claudia and Leonie clapped their hands over their mouths to stifle their giggles. Bob kept up his stream of patter about the importance of wild animals having a natural habitat to roam in while his wife tugged the cat away on its chain.

The finale of the Wild West Revue was the daughters riding ponies around a ring, carrying American flags on long poles while Buckaroo Bob waxed patriotic from horseback off to the side. When the war-bonneted daughter galloped past him, she accidentally clocked her father on the skull with her flagpole, and he sagged forward in his saddle, face-down against his horse’s neck. For some moments he was still, and two roadies rushed to his side. “Is he dead?” whispered Claudia. But he roused himself and resumed his narration, except that his voice, which had been brisk and twangy, now sounded like a very old recording that was being played underwater. Then Leonie and Claudia had to leave, because they could not contain their laughter. They clutched at each other and wiped tears from their eyes.

Night fell, and the rides looked especially appealing, glittering with metallic-flake paint and multicolored lights. Leonie had her heart set on riding a menacing piece of machinery which pushed a little red car directly off a sheer drop, to smash you to bits on the ground below. They spent some time loitering around it while Leonie purred innuendoes at the carny, jutting her hip and sticking her chest out. He was not interested, though, and good thing too, because Claudia became jealous. “I wouldn’t have actually done anything with him,” said Leonie. Claudia was not entirely convinced.

She cheered up when they came to a game tent, the kind where you squirt water from a gun into a balloon clown’s open mouth until its head explodes. The woman running the game looked very bored and annoyed, and Claudia saw this as a lucky chance. She propositioned to the woman, whose name was Sandy, that she and Leonie look after the game for, say, half an hour, in exchange for ride tickets. This way Sandy could smoke the cigarette she so obviously craved, eat some fried dough, mingle with her carny comrades. Of course, she would take the cash box with her. Surprisingly, Sandy agreed to this arrangement. She lit a very long menthol cigarette and left the ladies in charge.

When people stopped at the tent to play the game, Claudia and Leonie dissuaded them. “It’s all rigged, you know. You’ll never win, nobody does. These prizes have been here for ten years,” they said. The fairgoers would leave with deflated, puzzled looks. Altogether they probably cost Sandy about a hundred dollars’ worth of customers. “Tell me,” Claudia sweetly inquired of one man, “Why does your child have such an enormous head?” He hastened away, frowning, the fat-headed child bobbing unhappily atop his shoulders.

Leonie grew bored and went, she said, to visit the petting zoo. Claudia got up on a wobbly stepstool and pried a small stuffed lion off the ceiling to give to Leonie. Leonie returned bearing two slices of pizza temptingly sheened with grease, a bag of green cotton candy, a hot pretzel daubed with mustard, and a long strip of ride tickets. Claudia flew off the handle and demanded to know (in a louder and louder voice) how Leonie had procured these items. Had Leonie done something filthy with the pizza vendor? The cotton candy vendor? The PRETZEL VENDOR?

Leonie stormed off, carrying both slices of pizza away with her, Claudia noted with disappointment. Leonie had forgotten to take her purse, however. Claudia took the opportunity to rifle through it and discovered Leonie’s wallet in plain sight among the lipsticks and crumpled Kleenex. There was hardly any cash, but she tucked what there was into her pocket.
Sandy returned much later than a half an hour, but still before Leonie. “Nobody came to play,” Claudia told her. “Never mind about the ride tickets.” She shot out into the milling crowd before Sandy had time to react. Claudia moped around until she spotted Leonie on the Bumper Cars, driving a car painted a luscious gold. She was ramming it into a car being driven by a very young boy, who was shrieking with excitement or terror. When the cars stopped and Leonie came down the gangplank, Claudia threw Leonie’s wallet directly at her head, and then she threw the stuffed lion, which jabbed Leonie in the eye with its stiff little foreleg. Leonie retrieved both wallet and lion, and hurled the lion at Claudia’s face. It bounced off the bridge of her nose, fell to the ground, and was squashed by someone rolling by in a wheelchair. What was left of the lion was an eviscerated mess of yellow fur and styrofoam BB’s. Claudia dissolved into theatrical tears. “You fucking lied to me,” she said.

“Yes, I did! Because I’m goddamned sick of paying for you,” Leonie said.
Then they sat on the gangplank, dejected and silent, until the Bumper Cars carny asked them to move along. Leonie linked her arm through Claudia’s. “Come on,” she said, “we’ll go on the Wipe-Out.”

There was nobody riding the Wipe-Out, and nobody on line either. The blurry forms of two men were visible behind the scratched red plastic of the ticket-taker’s window, and Leonie rapped on it with her knuckles. The man-shaped blurs ducked down out of sight.
Leonie knocked again, much harder, on the window. “Come out of there, we want to ride the ride!”
“Do you see that guy?” Claudia said.
“Yeah, there’s two of them in there.”
“No, that guy, over there, standing by the Porta-Potty,” Claudia said. “Oh my god, it’s ‘the Indian’!”
“What are you talking about?” Leonie said. “There’s nobody there at all. HEY! WE KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE!”
“The Indian,” murmured Claudia. “It’s got to be a sign.” Indeed, it was a sign of her screws coming ever looser.
The two carnies pitched out of their booth as if onto the deck of a storm-tossed ship. “Not ready for you yet,” said the black-haired one.
“Just need a minute,” said the yellow-haired one. “Gotta check something. We’re from South Africa,” he added. He yanked the black-haired carny into the tangle of the Wipe-Out’s metal tentacles, and they disappeared from view. The ladies shouted at them to come back.
The black-haired carny popped back into sight. “When we come back, we’ll treat you like queens,” he said, and made a sweeping bow.
“Fuck this,” Leonie said.
“But the Wipe-Out is my favorite,” Claudia said.
Leonie sighed. But the carnies did come back, and ushered them into a seat without asking for tickets. Claudia could not figure out how to fasten the safety belt. “Hey guys, how do we work this thing?” she called, and the Wipe-Out began to move.

The ride lifted them up and down in a wavelike motion as it spun, which both relaxed and exhilarated Claudia and made Leonie look somewhat green, due to the pizza perhaps. Claudia leaned her head back rapturously. She squeezed Leonie’s hand and got a squeeze in return. “Do you love me?” Claudia asked, never one to leave well enough alone.
“When the hell is this thing ever going to stop?” said Leonie.

Despite Leonie’s nausea, they both had an appetite for more. From a distance, the Flame looked attractive, so they marched purposefully across the fairgrounds, which were becoming seedier as the night wore on, strewn as they were with the accumulated debris of revelry. The carny beckoned them to the front of the line. He let them, only them, inside, and closed the barrier once they were in. The car of the Flame was not upholstered in the plush vinyl of the Wipe-Out; the seats were raw red metal and the safety bar too. “Hey look,” said Leonie, as the red claw lifted them up with a hydraulic hiss. Claudia just had time to see Sandy getting her cigarette lit by the Flame carny before the car started to spin.
“Oh. Whoa. Damn,” laughed Leonie.
“Yow,” laughed Claudia.
For the Flame whirled in much faster and harder circles than one would expect. In fact, Claudia felt like she was a test tube in a laboratory centrifuge, and that all the fluid in her brain was being forced against one side of her cranium. The weight of Leonie’s body pressed against hers, usually a source of tremendous pleasure, was crushing the air out of her lungs and cracking her ribcage like rotten floorboards. Both of their heads bent to one side on their stalks and could not be raised upright.
“Ow God ow ow!” they yowled. They were not laughing anymore.
“It’s got to stop soon!” Claudia gasped out of her flattened lungs.

But it did not stop soon. The carny kept the ride going for twenty minutes, impervious to their screams and pleading. When at last the Flame came to a standstill, neither he nor Sandy were anywhere to be seen, not that the ladies could have focused their eyes in any case. Claudia fell to the ground and rested her head on a discarded hot dog bun. Leonie vomited abundantly in an impressive shade of cotton-candy-green before crawling on her belly to lie beside Claudia.
A long time went by. First the lights of the Ferris Wheel went out, then other lights. A paper napkin blew into Claudia’s hair and lodged there. “Nothing in the whole world,” said Leonie finally, “could ever feel as awful as that.”
“Nothing,” Claudia said.

But they were wrong.

fiction: Sanctuary

324 Baker Street, San Francisco, the past:

The lavender sunrise at the end of the acid trip reveals the living room to be France, causes the pale knock-kneed living room table to shyly show her young Parisian schoolgirl legs. Someone wedges a pair of black Mary Janes under two of her feet and everyone giggles, heaped up together under a mess of feather duvets.
Five people come home from the Japanese Tea Garden. A yellow gingko leaf is caught in someone’s long red hair. Someone tapes their fortune-cookie slip to the fridge.
Someone with a fresh tattoo moves slowly around the back yard, picking acrid little blackberries.
On the roof, someone has been asking the sky for an answer since noon. Someone is exulted with mania; stacking up beer bottles; pissing behind the chimney. Someone whose lover has died puts a cassette of African music in the boombox and dances, singing very softly.
Someone makes toast triangles. Someone records their grandmother telling everything she can remember about living in the shtetl before the Cossacks came. Six people dye eggs.

*****************

Return:

I’m in San Francisco, home of my past. My ruined city, blighted with yuppies nibbling at its moist center like rats.

The bathroom in the Amtrack station is ripe with the stench of homeless women who aren’t there.

S/he staggers past me and my chattering friends, wig askew, his/her face buried in hands, sobbing. I should stop to say, “Are you okay,” meaning “You’re not okay, and I care.” In Massachusetts I would stop. On the hooker’s beat of Polk Street in San Francisco I don’t, which is a good reason to have left.

In Chinatown, the lion dancers exploding their firecrackers in shop doorways, cymbals crashing. The lions are wearing transparent plastic rain ponchos.

Seen in passing, on the burnt remains of a pier, an old and faded sign in the shape of a hand pointing down to the water. It reads:
YOU YOU ARE
THIS IS


*****************************

Staying with a friend:

In the Lower Haight, people make whistles and bird-calls which mean “drugs for sale.” This morning as I was making coffee, the street was like a rainforest, ringing with trills. Now, at four o’clock: explosions of manic laughter, screeching tires, hyena yelps, shattering beer bottles.

I watch out the window as a raccoon canters past the hal’al butcher and hooks a left at the billiards hall.

My hostess and I are driving back from a movie in her new black BMW. I say, things have changed here. Now everybody is talking on a cell phone all the time. They don’t even see where they are. And everybody has a fancy car! She frowns, annoyed, and her cell phone rings.

******************

324 Baker Street, San Francisco, the present:

My feet begin walking themselves toward Baker Street. Watchful for muggers and bad men, I walk by landmarks. By the pickled toads in the display window of the witchcraft supply store and then by the Church of John Coltrane; by the overturned milk crates of old-timers who nurse gin bottles every afternoon, by, by. At a stoplight a black woman with a curdled face struts in stiff-legged circles, spastic elbows ajerk; a pack of white dudes in gleaming leather jackets shoulder out of one bar and into another. A current of energy whisks me along, the wake of the past.

I walk by New Star-Ell Liquors, where I was once mugged on my way home from a nightclub. I’d been blissfully stoned, my hands rococo with curliques of fresh henna. I recall the night a woman came into that store bellowing drunkenly for help, her bloodied white clothes hanging in strips like surrender flags.

For the last two blocks I get same cozy almost-home feeling I always used to. The fog is making buffalo clouds, roaming out over the rooftops, skirling around the eucalyptus trees of Golden Gate Park, stampeding past the bright moon.

The entryway of 324 Baker Street has been painted over; a neutral scheme of beige and grey has blotted out the shambolic hippie purples. I settle on the front steps and gaze, as I always used to gaze, at the calm lighted windows of the Russian retirement home. For nine years I would sit on this stoop when I had no place else to go. Waiting forever to be forgiven after a terrible fight. Or waiting forever for a cab. Or waiting forever for this woman or that woman to come. Unable to sleep, staring at first the BAKER ST sign and then the FELL ST sign forever.
Just as they always used to, the Scary Blue Building People are slouching lurkily, even darker shadows under the dark shadows of the tree on the corner, waiting and waiting and waiting.
This one thing is different: little particles glow around me like golden motes, a furze of light. My old building is haloed in leftover molecules of time.

* * * * * * * * * *
Psychedelic guitars wah-wah. Someone on psilocybin mushrooms vomits aces diamonds clubs heart clubs into the musical air, doubled over laughing in the w.c. Someone brings a bough of blossoms for Chinese New Year. Purple finches raid the plum tree that hangs over the fence in the Nice Yellow Building People’s yard. In the kitchen, three people play badminton using wooden spoons and a wad of balled-up tinfoil. Two people in tipsy vintage dresses try to follow the leftfoot-rightfoot instructions for the cha-cha on the back of Arthur Murray’s Music for Dancing.
A cat leaps onto the windowsill. Someone pours more coffee. Someone’s ex spends the night on the couch. Someone who’s been blind since birth goes into Downward-Facing Dog pose in the middle of the kitchen. Someone flounces into a beanbag chair announcing, “I’m pretty sure I crashed at your house once in the 1960’s.” Someone paints the hallway floor green with gypsy red roses, like a Romany canal boat.
Friends coming bearing flowers, bearing secrets, bearing unbearable sorrows. Someone weeps, is comforted. Everyone is reading everyone else’s fortune. Steam curls from a pot of pasta. Someone is singing “I Need a Little Sugar in my Bowl.” Someone is rummaging to find the best knife for carving a pumpkin.
* * * * * * * * * * *
These moments are eddying around the front steps, whirling up like smoke over the roof and floating back to the sidewalk. The building has become a lighthouse. The building has become a sanctuary.

I want to curl up in the doorway and sleep there until daybreak. I think about the homeless man and his puppy who camped there for a month in 1997. Everyone brought him beer, dog food, sandwiches. They snoozed together in one fat sack throughout the long days.
I feel myself fading into a doze like a child being carried. I draw my drowsiness to me like a shawl.

Eventually the stone stoop makes my bones ache with cold, just as it always used to. I wrench myself up and go buy a pack of gum at New Star-Ell Liquors, which has made many recent improvements.