Sonya Schneider’s poems can be found or are forthcoming in American Poetry Journal, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Penn Review, Potomac Review, Raleigh Review, Rattle, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she’s been a finalist for the Laux & Millar Poetry Prize and twice for the Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry. A graduate of Stanford University and Pacific University’s MFA in poetry, she lives with her husband and daughters in Seattle, Washington.

“Mystery Hill” by Sonya Schneider is our Poem of the Week.

***

Mystery Hill

Are we going uphill or downhill? Mom asks.
Rooster Rock towers to our right, all jagged-toothed

basalt, hairy with pines. To our left, the Columbia River
portends her Gorge. We’re going downhill, I answer.

It seems obvious enough, though she’s clearly
up to something. My uncle, her younger brother,

opens the door to his apartment,
his corkscrew curls, now completely grey,

are weighed down with shower water.
The look in his eyes is one-third love,

two-thirds confusion. He asks, Have you been here before?
Below, on the river, colorful kiteboards whip

in the wind. Three times before, Mom answers.
We eat chicken sandwiches under a portico

wound by wisteria, flowers long spent,
dark green pods rocking gently above.
 
This is a good sandwich! he says,
then, What is it? as if he hasn’t heard

the answer before. He remembers his three wives,
scuba diving in the Red Sea, the waiter,

Edsel Fong, whom he befriended at Sam Wo’s,
but he can’t remember what sandwich he’s eating.

Later, in the small hospital room, a kind,
long-fingered doctor explains the diagnosis

is dementia, Alzheimer’s. My uncle hugs
his arms and asks about ways he might improve.

He holds his hand like an airplane taking off
to show the rise he means, but the doctor

slopes her hand like a plane aiming
for a crash landing, calls it a progressive disease.

Progression seems a funny way of putting it,
he laughs, though his eyes shine with tears.

We help him write reminders on butcher paper:
renew car registration, check credit cards

for hardship programs, buy napkins.
When he waves goodbye, he shouts,
 
Look at those beautiful clouds!
As we pass Rooster Rock on our left,
 
Mom asks, So, are we going uphill or downhill?
I should say uphill—abiding by the law of physics—

but my sense of gravity has upended. When I shrug,
she smiles. Good, I want you to be as perplexed as I am.

***

Author’s Note

A mystery hill, also known as a gravity hill, is an optical illusion where a slight downhill slope appears to be an uphill incline. I didn’t know these existed until a recent trip my mother and I took to visit my uncle in Hood River, Oregon. She’d driven this road with my father before, and they’d argued over which direction they’d been going. On our drive—which was scenically stunning—Mom kept asking me, “Up or down?” At first, I felt certain of my answer, but the farther we traveled, the more uncertain I became. Not until I got home and began writing this poem did I realize the parallels of this phenomenon with dementia, and with existence itself.

I’ve always been close to my uncle. He’s led a fascinating life, including running a nonprofit for peace in the Middle East and writing and starring in a one-man show about Abraham Lincoln. Twenty-two years ago, he officiated my wedding (he had my husband and me laughing and crying under the chuppah). Learning about his Alzheimer’s diagnosis and seeing its effects firsthand have been heartbreaking. But there is also so much of him that remains—his brilliant humor, curiosity, and love of nature. I think of the mystery of it every day.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

In Kent Nelson’s “The Secret Child,” Elimas Querida can recall his one-hundred-year life with perfect memory, and yet, an unexpected encounter leaves him with something even more vibrant and precious.

***

THE SECRET CHILD

Elimas Querida was, by the estimates of his neighbors, his two dozen sons and daughters and six wives, one hundred years old. He was toothless, scrawny, and wore sheets wrapped around him, rather than pants and shirts that rubbed his skin raw. His shoes were threadbare sandals made from yucca fiber. He spent his days by the side of the dirt road between Xtilan and Tiapas doing nothing but watching the cars and trucks roll by, the occasional villager who had two legs to get wherever that person wanted to be, and the mutts with matted fur, torn ears, who sometimes limped and always had hunger in their eyes.

Elimas perched on the uphill side of the gravel road, whittling a piece of wood, staring, waiting. His view was through the trees and across the valley and sometimes over low clouds that tumbled off the peaks to the north. For the truck drivers and tour guides and families or assorted passersby—and the dogs—he was a vacant-eyed old man, carving nothing, whose days left on the earth were only a few and of no consequence.

But Elimas had memory before memory. He knew everything from the past, the whole of every ordinary day, nothing omitted. Others said that wasn’t possible, especially for someone so old, that forgetting was natural, even necessary for the brain to keep on its assigned path, and especially for one who had lived so long. Elimas hadn’t argued with anyone, because how could he prove them wrong? But he knew what dress his daughter Esmerelda had worn when she was eleven and walked across the plaza in the muted sunlight; he knew the texture of his third wife Merced’s hair when she conceived their fifth child; he heard the sound of water when he was three and was first bathed in the river. At thirty, when he’d climbed to the ridge above the village, he saw every stone on the trail, every root, every flower. He remembered the day he’d asked Carla to the place butterflies gathered. The breeze came up and died away. Her yellow shirt had a tear at the neckline, and he saw consent in her eyes. They lay in the grass, and every detail of love, from his cock to her wetness and blood, was vivid in his mind. She bore him two children before she went away to the capital to become a nurse and never returned.

Seven of his children had died, four of disease, one from falling from a cliff, another for wandering into the road at dusk and being hit by a truck, and the last from a knife wound in a cantina fight. Most of the others deserted the village and him, which was natural when one was raised in a place without hope for the future. The few with less ambition stayed close to the land, farmed, and made their way with their own families, but they were old now, older than Elimas, it seemed, though that wasn’t possible in the reckoning of time.

Memory had no time. Elimas could walk; he could sit and carve; he could tell a story that was true. He had seen bodies piled one upon another when the cartels first came through the area, though they were gone now. He had seen the scattered wreckage of an airplane that had crashed into the mountain in winter, the bodies thrown around, blood-soaked and frozen. He’d seen a horse half-eaten by a bear, a bobcat festered with maggots, and the body of a young girl, lost for several days, who had been decapitated.

He’d known the ache of lost love, the beauty of ten thousand sunsets, and as many sunrises that spawned hope that never materialized. He remembered the lovemaking that caused every child, and the lovemaking that didn’t. He might have counted these occasions, because he remembered every one, but what was the point? A number had nothing to do with anything and had to be remembered, too. He didn’t count or analyze or offer solutions. He didn’t judge good or bad. At a hundred years old, he knew now the simple bliss of a warm day sitting in one place.

 

On a day of many last days, Elimas sat on the side of the road on one tuft of dry grass among many. He liked any of them, because, if he was tired of sitting, tired of whittling, he could lie back against the warm grass and gaze into the blue of the end of the world. He might snooze or follow the clouds or relive a moment from his long life.

But on this day, he was dreaming everyone in the world was peaceful, happy, and dancing. Usually, he wasn’t prone to imagining, thinking about what wasn’t true, or about what he didn’t know for sure. But the mind he owned owned him, too. These visions had been coming to him more often, though he didn’t connect them to death. He was the only player in his drama that had neither good nor bad in it, no upside or downside, and was nothing but itself—what was, what existed and was ordinary—what happened. What troubled him was that he might become like other people who wanted what they didn’t have, tried to lose weight, hated others, hoped to find a partner, be stronger—these were not relevant to a man who was a hundred years old.

He was languishing in the idea that everyone was as well off as he was, when a dog trotted down the middle of the road, limping, staggering, and making his way because it wanted to live as much as any other form of existence. Elimas had seen this dog before. He was owned by no one and unloved by the ones who didn’t own him. A motorcycle approached from beyond the hill—Elimas heard its hum and roar—and it curved too fast around the bend. Dust flew up. The helmeted driver saw the dog and, at the last second, swerved, but struck the animal anyway—the dog had lurched away, but not quickly enough. The motorcycle hit the dog in its back legs. The dog yelped. The motorcycle slid sideways off the road and disappeared.

Elimas stood up. The dog was still crying out and dragged itself to the nearer side of the road, not because he wanted to or knew of another danger, but to go somewhere. For Elimas, it was a few careful, clambering steps from his perch to the road. The dust brought up by the motorcycle hung in the air. Elimas offered the dog a look of consolation and crouched next to the dog’s head and stroked his throat, though he saw death was coming. “Es lo mejor,” he said. He took his whittling knife, worked it through the dog’s fur, and slit its throat.

Elimas crossed the track to the other side, where, thirty meters down the slope, the biker thrashed in the brush. Elimas wasn’t strong enough to do anything, but watching was a help—someone was there sharing the moment. He heard the biker swearing.

He waited. His life was sitting, sleeping, waiting, doing nothing, all of which he was good at, but time continued no matter what. He waited until something that was about to happen came about.

The biker emerged from the tangle and gazed back at the motorcycle, looked up at the sky, and took off the helmet. Long hair was set free. A hand pushed it aside, and a young woman was revealed, though Elimas had no exact number of her age. She had on black pants and a torn red shirt and stood still for several seconds, then looked at the blood on her arm, which hung loose at her side. She tossed the helmet down and took a few tentative steps up the slope, holding on with one hand to tufts of grass and shrubs. She looked up once and saw Elimas looking down.

“Help me,” she said.

“No entiendo,” Elimas called down.

The woman scrabbled up over the grass and rocks on her knees. Elimas, meanwhile, unwound the loose sheet he had around him and, with his bloody knife, cut a long strip, which he tore in half lengthwise. The woman stopped several feet from the road, because the last slope was too steep for her to gain purchase. “No es posible,” she said.

Elimas tied the strips together, twisted them into a rope and knotted the ends. He looped one end around a boulder at the side of the road and threw the other down toward the woman.

Again, time—more valuable than water or money—passed by.

The woman grasped her end of the rope, but she had only one hand to hold it. She edged upward over loose stones a few inches at a time, until, some minutes later, she was sitting on the road.

Elimas untied and untwisted the sheet and wrapped a section of it around the woman’s bleeding arm. A truck passed by and showered them with dust.

“No está lejos mi pueblo,” Elimas said.

“What’s that mean?”

Elimas pointed in the direction he meant and, with his two hands, motioned for her to stand up. The woman shook her head.

“Usted debe,” he said and offered his hand.

She took his hand and got herself to one knee.

“Bueno.”

“No es bueno,” the woman said.

She struggled to her feet and, holding Elimas’s arm, limped fifty meters along the road to the trail that led down through the trees. Several times on the trail the woman stumbled over roots, so that, Elimas, who was ahead, had to steady her. At one point, where the trail turned steeply downhill, the woman slumped to the ground.

Elimas had no choice but to continue on to the village, because that was where help was available.

 

Three men fetched the woman from the trail and carried her to Elimas’s shanty, because, when any of his grandchildren or great-grandchildren stayed with him, he slept on a pallet on the floor. He wasn’t fearful of scorpions or rats, nor was he bothered by ants. As it happened, one of his granddaughters had recently washed the sheets and made up the bed. When the men brought the woman in, her eyes were open, but she said nothing.

“Ella no sabe dónde está,” one man said. “Está perdida.”

But she recognized Elimas—so he thought, because her eyes quickened and she gave him a weak smile. The men stretched her out on the bed and put a piece of plastic under her bleeding arm.

A neighbor woman called the medic in Xtilan.

Antonio Valdez was not a doctor, but he had studied the books and knew more than anyone else in the three valleys around Xtilan. He examined the woman, manipulated her shoulder back into its socket, and removed the blood-soaked sheet Elimas had wrapped around her arm. He used a hot knife to pry out the stones from her skin and shoulder, and he sutured the deep cut in her arm. “Ella vivirá,” he said, “pero el problema es el shock.”

“Shock?” said Elimas.

“Hay que estar vigilante,” Antonio said. “Cuídala, dale atención, y manten la calma.”

Elimas pondered this. Could he sit in his own house to give care, attention, and calm as easily as on the hillside by the road? “Lo voy a intentar,” he said.

Antonio packed up what he had brought with him and walked outside.

Elimas followed. “I am old and have no money,” he said. “My children can give you food.” “I serve God,” Antonio said. “If they can give, I will accept. If not, I accept that, also.”

“One way you have more, the other less.”

Antonio smiled. “In this world, what is important?”

“In this world and the next,” Elimas said, “nothing.”

 

A few days later, the men who’d carried the woman down the trail to the village went to see about her motorcycle. She had ridden from a place no one knew and was going to another place no one knew, and they did not know the reason for her travel. These places had been in her mind, and whatever they were, she could not go where she meant to without her motorcycle.

The men had machetes and slashed at the thick brush in which the motorcycle was entangled. They tied the three ropes they’d brought to the wheels and around the seat and, with tugging and jostling, dragged the bike up to a clearing. They also found the woman’s helmet and backpack. They discussed whether to open the pack, whether it might have money in it or something else valuable. They agreed that to find out would be a sin, and, if they found money and kept it, how, in the village, could they hide what they’d found? “We’d have to move to the city,” one of the men said, and he laughed. “We’d be arrested for stealing,” said another, “but who here would arrest us?” “But,” said the third man, “if we take the backpack to her, without looking, nothing will happen to us, except we will live as before.”

The back fender of the bike impinged on the tire, but, with the tools the men had brought, that was easily remedied so the tire spun around. Much worse was that the fork on the side of the front tire had been bent, as was the rim of the front wheel. The foot-shift had also been torn off. One of the men retrieved this from the bushes.

It was a motorcycle. It looked like one but couldn’t act like one.

The men used the three ropes to haul the bike up the slope, lifting and pulling and jerking it three or four feet at a time, until they got it to the road. One of the men walked back to the village to borrow a pickup to carry it the rest of the way to Elimas’s house.

 

In his own house, with walls instead of the vista across the valley, was not how Elimas imagined his last days, but he did not question what was needed. The woman didn’t talk, but she ate what he made for her—eggs, soup, the meat from the pigs one son had, the thighs of the chickens from another. She ate what he ate. She slept long.

In these days of caring, Elimas lapsed into a new phase he’d never known before—he knew he was dying, but what he experienced wasn’t a fading out. He wasn’t darkening or weakening further—he was already weak—he was enlightened. When he stepped outside his house, escaping from the woman, he felt as if he were in a new world, not the ordinary one he’d remembered every detail of for so long, but, as if he were a secret child, learning for the first time about the green leaves on the trees, the sun shadows on the ground, the sky with clouds that never ended. The songs of birds were sweeter than he’d ever heard them, the light that gilded the close trees and the faraway hills was a light he’d never seen before, stark sometimes, but also mysterious and magical. He didn’t know the names of the birds or the trees or the clouds, but he saw movement and colors and felt the sweetness of the air.

The woman got out of bed; she walked; she looked through her backpack and found information she needed. With the help of the neighbor woman, who spoke a little ingles, Elimas arranged for her motorcycle to be fixed in the next farther town from Xtilan.

So it came to pass, she was ready to leave the village and be on her way. No one knew where that was. She owed deference and money to many people, and, on her departure, she paid the men who’d brought her and her motorcycle to the village and gave the woman who’d spoken on her behalf a few coins. She offered to pay Elimas for the food he’d given her, for the bed he’d provided, and for his time caring for her, but he refused, though he couldn’t explain to her in her language what, in his last days, she had given him.

***

Kent Nelson’s story collection, The Spirit Bird, won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. He has published four novels and six collections of stories. Four of his stories have been included in the Best American Stories series. He has traveled most of North America, including Attu, the last Aleutian Island, in search of birds and has identified 771 species. He has also run the Pikes Peak Marathon twice. He lives in Ouray, Colorado.  

First published in TMR 47.2 (Summer 2024), Hana Choi’s “Naked” tracks a young woman’s growing awareness of her mother’s vulnerability as an immigrant. When a customer at the Korean spa where the mother works makes a racist remark, a public confrontation results in a stunning reversal of power. Sharp-eyed yet tender, Choi’s story showcases some of the subversive tactics for countering racism available to those oppressed by it.

Naked

Hana Choi

 

He was supposed to make breakfast. I didn’t think he would, but I was still surprised to find my father pouring soju into the tall water glass that morning, craning his neck to slurp the near-spill at the rim. It was ten past seven. I was fully dressed, hair parted and brushed, backpack ready. The noise from the bathroom had woken me up, my mother’s hair dryer blaring until my mind was rinsed clean of sleep. It was my mother’s first day at work, her very first job. I didn’t know much about it, only that she would work at a Korean bathhouse in North Dallas, a few miles down the highway from where we lived.

The apartment was quiet now, but my mother wasn’t in the kitchen. I stood next to my father and reached for the box of cornflakes on the counter.

“I don’t know how you eat that thing,” my father said. He was in his boxers, no shirt, his eyes mapped with veins. “American food—it fucks up your bowels.” He raised his glass and took a large sip. I poured myself a bowl of cornflakes. No milk, just the cereal, so I could eat them like chips.

He was closing his jewelry store and taking a break, my mother had told me the night before. We were in my bedroom with the door shut, but she still whispered, as if my father were standing outside with his ear pressed to the door. She didn’t fear him so much as pity him, I thought, her discreetness a form of kindness.

My mother walked into the kitchen just as I sat down with my bowl. She looked different. Gone were the T-shirt with faded flowers and loose jeans. She was wearing a white blouse—spotless, ironed—tucked neatly into a slim black skirt. Her eyes seemed bigger, her lips brighter.

My father leaned forward and squinted. “Are you wearing makeup?”

“It’s my first day,” my mother said flatly.

My father belched and then wiped his mouth with his wrist. “And look at your clothes. Ya, you think you’re working at a bank?”

My mother frowned at my bowl. “Jaehee-ya, is that what you’re eating for breakfast?”

I glanced at my father, but his eyes were pinned on my mother. “You’re loving this,” he said. “You’ve been hoping for this.”

“You need milk.” My mother clunked open the refrigerator and took out a carton of milk.

“Oh, let me. You’re a career woman now.” My father yanked the milk from my mother. The carton slipped from her hand and fell to the floor, splattering milk across every surface—the floor, the cabinets, my mother’s skirt.

A moment of silence. Then my father jerked his head back and laughed.

That was the last time I saw my father.

 

My parents had moved to America ten years before, in the ’80s, with me, a six-month-old then, strapped to my mother’s back. My father had been a high school history teacher in Seoul, a skill that had lost its currency instantly upon our arrival. But he had taken the demotion as a challenge rather than an insult, according to my mother, or at least appeared to do so for the first few years. “Anybody can have a spark of ambition,” my mother said, “but Jaehee-ya, life is long. Much longer than you think.”

We were tallying the few remaining items in our near-empty apartment. My father had claimed everything that could plausibly be declared his, right down to the last set of chopsticks. The sweep had been carried out by his friends two weeks after he had left—three ajeossis who stomped around the apartment and threw things into moving boxes. They were terse and offered little explanation except for one of them saying, “A man has made his decision, can’t do nothing about it.” He repeated the line under his breath as if to remind himself of some universal truth.

So I was fatherless. Fatherless, fatherless, I said to myself once my mother had gone to bed and I had the night to myself. I liked the sound of it, the substantial, striking quality of it. I was going to be okay as long as I had my mother—she was the strong one, the good one, I knew—but now I had an indisputable badge of loss. By then I had developed an inkling, a working theory about the ways of the universe. When something bad happened, it was a sign that good fortune awaited. That was how the universe kept its balance, by constantly correcting its course. So when I started fifth grade in the fall, I expected the universe to unleash its goodwill, a stroke of luck to greet me.

But what greeted me was something else: a white boy named Tyler whose family had recently moved from Wisconsin. He had a pointy face and a long tail of hair that fluttered up like a skirt. He noticed me in the way certain boys spotted their prey, but he didn’t call me names or pull my hair. He sent me messages. First, notes with vaguely sinister words written in capital letters (MOUTH-WATERING, TEETH) and then envelopes filled with disposable chopsticks, those thin, splintery ones you would get from Chinese takeouts.

When I spoke to Miss Barnett, my homeroom teacher, she chuckled. She was a big white woman around my mother’s age who hummed to herself and wore stiff floral dresses that made bright, crunchy sounds as she swept about the classroom.

“When boys act like that, that means they like you,” she said. “And let me tell you, I’m not surprised.” She was particularly tickled by the chopsticks, which she said were not unkind if you really thought about it. “It’s just that you’re special,” she said, patting my hair, “and some boys like that.”

Special how? I wanted to ask, but I already knew the answer to that. At school there were three other girls who looked like me: Angie Chen, Minjee Kim, and Jane Lee. We avoided one another with a searing vigilance, with the unspoken understanding that being seen together would likely cement our membership in the specials club.

Miss Barnett added nothing Tyler had done went against any rules—the things from him, they were a type of gift, weren’t they? Before I left she made me promise not to dye my hair ever, for she adored how black and shiny and straight it was.

That evening at home, I told my mother I should quit school. Why? I posed the question myself. Because it was unnecessary. Because I could go to the library, borrow books, and learn things on my own. Because I was smart and resourceful, just like her.

My mother didn’t say anything for a while, simply carried on with her nightly task of ironing our clothes on the kitchen table, which served as her makeshift ironing board. Over the summer, we had moved into a smaller place, a one-bedroom apartment with grime-coated walls, the air smelling chronically of grease no matter how often we opened our windows. I didn’t mind. My father’s absence had brought about a certain clarity, a shared understanding of my mother’s authority and my loyalty to her.

“Tell me what happened.” My mother lifted the iron as it hissed out steam. “Just tell me.”

And that was all it took.

When I finished, my mother turned off the iron and set it aside. “Jaehee-ya, here’s what you do,” she said. “You picture him naked.”

“Naked?”

“Yes, you picture everything. Tell me, what is this boy like? Skinny? Chubby?”

“Average, I think,” I said. “But kind of short. He’s shorter than me.”

My mother asked some more questions about Tyler, and I described him as best as I could. My mother nodded along, asking more questions. Yes, he had blond hair, but was it straight or curly? What about his eyes? What color were they, and did he wear glasses? Ah, so he liked wearing boxy T-shirts, but why? Was it to look bigger than he actually was?

“Okay, I see him now,” my mother said, staring into the space before her. “I see his arms, they are like little twigs you can snap in half.” She raised her hands, holding them side by side with her fingers curled around an imaginary arm. Then she rotated her wrists as if to bend it. “I see his chest too. It’s pasty and hairless. Smooth as rubber.”

I pulled up my chair. “What else?”

“Let me see.” My mother drummed her fingers on the table. “A small, flabby butt. Covered with pimples.”

I didn’t laugh. I couldn’t, because my mother kept her voice flat, her face stiff with seriousness. She narrowed her eyes and remained quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Aigo!” and slapped her knee. “Someone needs to teach this boy how to wipe his butt because I see these crumbs of poop stuck in there.”

“Ewww, Mom.”

“What else do I see here? Jaehee-ya, what do you call those tiny sausages?”

“Little smokies? Cocktail sausages?”

My mother nodded. “Yes, this boy, he’s got a cocktail sausage penis,” she said, laughing now. “And little wrinkled balls, like boiled chestnuts.”

We repeated this exercise over dinner, over rice and kimchi and a big plate of hot dogs chopped up and slathered in ketchup. The meal lasted over an hour because we broke into a fit of laughter whenever one of us forked a piece of hot dog.

By then, I understood what my mother did for a living. She scrubbed people’s bodies from head to toe—ddaemiri, or Korean body scrub, it was called—to remove the dead, dry layers of skin. A common treatment in Korea, according to my mother, though it was just starting to catch on in America. “It’s better than anything you can get from a dermatologist,” she told me. “I’m not making this up, Jaehee-ya, it’s science. Without the dead skin your body can breathe in more oxygen and generate more new skin cells.”

She had recently been offered a job at an upscale place downtown, which called itself spa instead of bathhouse. It was owned by Mr. Lee, who had been introduced to my mother as a man who used to work at Samsung and knew how to run a true American business, and there she scrubbed more white ladies than Korean ajummas. I gathered she enjoyed this change, because she told me stories about her work.

“These women, they roll into the spa wearing their fancy clothes and carrying their fancy handbags,” she would begin as we sat in the living room after dinner. I would be on the couch and she on the floor, me hunting for her grays. She gave me a quarter for each plucked, though I would have done it without the money, happy that I could be of use to her. “But listen, Jaehee-ya. They’re nothing but naked flesh when they come to me. I spread their arms and legs, I flip them over like fish. Aigo, your mother sees more than their husbands and boyfriends ever do!”

She told me about faces stripped of makeup, about bruises and scars and tattoos—the catalog of secrets, all laid bare before her. And it was with no less scrutiny and amusement that she undressed Tyler over and over despite the imaginary nature of our exercise.

Our routine lasted for quite some time, throughout that fall and early winter, even after Tyler had made friends and whatever fascination he had with me had faded into benign indifference. Not that we lacked material. There was Beth, my newfound nemesis, who kept asking me why my face was so flat, and Mr. Murphy, my gym teacher, who appeared to have mastered a dozen seemingly accidental ways to touch his students’ breasts.

Then, one windy day in January—windows rattling, dust whipping the streets—my mother came home from work with her eyes red and swollen. Without a word she made her way to the kitchen and pulled a bottle of soju from the top cabinet. I knew about this bottle, although I had never seen her drink from it. Soju looked no different than water, but I knew what it was like. My father had once goaded me into taking a sip, and that was how I learned that to drink was to burn yourself.

“That woman,” was all my mother said as she downed her drink.

Another night of drinking after that. Then a new bottle appeared in the cabinet.

On the third night I went into my room and took out my favorite dress from the closet. I cut it up with scissors until slips of fabric scattered on the floor. I twisted my favorite hairband until it snapped in two. I grabbed the books I treasured and tore off their pages. They were my offerings to the universe. If I created enough unhappiness for myself, my plan went, the luck would bounce back, restoring our lives to the way they had been.

The next morning I woke up to the smell of my mother’s cooking. Rice and rolled omelet, stir-fried fish cake, and beef radish soup—a feast. My mother glided through the kitchen. She tapped the stove with a wooden spoon as if keeping time to a melody in her head. At breakfast she said she was taking the day off and I was free to stay with her and skip school. My offerings had worked, I thought, the universe had accepted them. So when my mother asked if I wanted to take a trip downtown with her, I said yes without hesitation.

 

We arrived at a building where every wall seemed to be made of glass. Brightness surrounded us and even the air seemed to glint. The floor of the lobby was smooth like a skating rink, and I had to clutch my mother’s skirt to keep from falling. We were dressed in our finest clothes. My mother had picked out a yellow dress for me and for herself a cream-colored blouse with a round collar and a billowy skirt. Our bulky jackets had been left in the car.

A man in a dark suit sat at the front desk. A pale, angular face and close-cropped hair. He glanced at us but then looked down at the newspaper in front of him. He stayed like that for a long time without turning the page even once.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Could you tell us where Dr. Glass’s office is?”

I was used to being my mother’s English spokesperson, but it still felt strange to say the lines she had made me practice in the car. After we left the apartment, she told me we were going to a doctor’s office, although for what she didn’t say. Was this why she was upset? I imagined all the fatal illnesses I could think of—cancer, brain tumor, leukemia—but my mother remained cheerful throughout the drive, her eyes bright in the rearview mirror. She talked about the old Korean tale of the tiger and the rabbit, how the rabbit fooled the tiger over and over until the predator was captured by the hunters. That was the best kind of power, she said. Not the kind you were born with but the kind you created for yourself, using your wits.

“Excuse me,” I said again to the man at the front desk.

“Can you read?” He tilted his chin toward the wall where the building directory was posted. My eyes quickly located Richard Glass, M.D. and Associates. 5E.

When the elevator reached the fifth floor, my mother stepped out first and walked down the corridor, her heels clomping on the floor. I wanted to clutch her skirt again, but she was walking fast, always a few steps ahead of me, and no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t seem to bridge the distance.

“Just need a second,” she said, entering the restroom. She stood at the sink and looked in the mirror. Her hair, which she had let grow since my father’s departure, was styled in a way I had never seen before. Thickly curled and voluminous, it framed her face like waves. Her eyebrows drew a sharp arch, and her lips gleamed a deep red.

“Do I look all right?” my mother asked.

I nodded. She looked beautiful, of course, but I kept the thought to myself. Saying it out loud, I feared, might break the spell we had cast upon ourselves with our lavish breakfast and fine clothes, the spell that would shield us from whatever news awaited my mother in the doctor’s office. This much I was sure of.

My mother bent down to me and tucked my hair behind my ears. “There,” she said. “You look prettier like that.”

 

The doctor’s office was just as bright as the rest of the building. Everything was white—the walls, the floorboards, the ceiling—and the space seemed to expand as we walked in. It was just after eleven in the morning, and the waiting area was well occupied. A dozen women sat reading their magazines, their feet calmly planted on the rug. There were sofas and side tables, real plants in ceramic pots. Nothing like the free clinic where my mother and I went for our checkups, with its dim blinking lights and folding chairs that creaked.

My mother found herself a seat under a glossy picture of orchids. On the wall next to it were large, embossed letters that spelled ob/gyn. It looked like a puzzle, just as being there with my mother was. I walked up to the reception desk.

“Excuse me,” I said to the white woman behind the desk.

She stopped tapping on her keyboard and looked up. She had a broad forehead, halved by a deep horizontal crease. “Yes?”

I said the line just as I had practiced in the car. “My mom has an appointment with Kathy.”

The receptionist scanned the waiting area to find my mother, her face folding into a scowl, as was often the case when people realized why I took up their space: my mother’s imperfect English.

“You said what—Kathy?” the receptionist said. “You mean Kathleen, our nurse?”

I had no answer prepared in return. I turned to my mother, but she was staring into space, her eyes glazed and opaque. She had disappeared, I knew, into that faraway place inside herself. I understood this to be a place where grown-ups shut themselves in to make certain decisions about themselves. It was there, I imagined, that my father had made the decision to leave us.

“My mom has an appointment with Kathy,” I said again.

The receptionist sighed. “What’s your mom’s name?”

When I told her she tapped on the keyboard, a bit harder than necessary, it seemed. After a moment she said, “I don’t see her name. You sure your mom has an appointment here?” There was a subtle yet unmistakable emphasis on here.

Heat rose up the back of my neck. I looked down at the framed photo on the reception desk. In it the receptionist stood beside a smiling man, her head angled into his shoulder, and posing before them was a girl around my age, her arms extended in a large V. They were at some foreign location, a castle-like building looming in the background. I felt something inside me harden.

“I told you my mom has an appointment,” I said, louder this time, “with Kathy.”

A tall white woman appeared from the hallway then, taller than any woman I had ever seen. She was wearing blue scrubs, her hair gathered up in an oval bun. It sat on her head like a hat, making her look even more towering.

“I heard my name?” she said as if posing a question.

It was then that my mother came up and stood beside me. “I look for you,” she said in English. “Me.”

The nurse looked from my mother to me and back. “How can I help you?”

My mother spun around and faced the waiting area. A few cursory glances, but nobody paid much attention to us, all seemingly occupied with their magazines. Except an elderly lady who wore a pearl necklace over a beige cardigan, who looked up and smiled at me.

“This—” My mother swung her arm to point at the nurse. “This woman!”

The heads shot up then. Now everyone in the waiting area was looking at my mother.

“Who is she?” the nurse asked the receptionist. “Is she a patient?” “Took ninety minute to clean this woman,” my mother said. “So much dirt and shit!”

The receptionist’s fingers froze on the keyboard. The women in the waiting area held their breath, their magazines forgotten in their laps. The nurse stood still, hands at her sides, facing my mother. There was a faint rustle of fabric, a shifting of legs. An errant cough, quickly muffled.

“She a nurse, but filthy—filthy!” my mother said. “You think she skinny? No, no, no, her fat sucked. Sucked with needles! I seen her tummy, so I know. Oh, I know.”

“Jesus Christ,” someone said. “She’s crazy.”

“Is she drunk?” another voice said.

My mother turned to me. She nodded and smiled the way she did when we undressed people at home. I was expected to smile back, her face suggested, maybe even join in. But we weren’t at our kitchen table. This was the farthest place we could get from our kitchen table, I thought, even farther than Korea or any other country. I wanted to say that to my mother, but no sound came out when I opened my mouth.

My mother returned to her audience in the waiting area. “I tell you about her vagina,” she said, her voice scaling up an octave. The elderly lady touched her pearls nervously, her lips frozen in a grimace. I turned to look at the nurse, who was still standing by the reception desk. Her eyebrows were furrowed, but she seemed more confused than anything else. She whispered something to the receptionist, who then picked up the phone.

“It shave like bald head,” my mother said. “Bald vagina.”

“Is there a problem?” A man in a white lab coat appeared, a stethoscope around his neck. This must be a play, I thought, everything was staged, all these people were actors. “Ann, do you know who these people are?” he said, a look of concentrated annoyance on his face.

The receptionist shook her head. “I already called the building security.”

Someone in the waiting area whispered something about Chinese.

“How did they get in here?” another person wondered.

The man we had seen in the lobby entered the office then. He pulled the door with such force that it thundered shut behind him, a gust of air blowing in my eyes. My mother flung her head back and snorted. “You kick me out?” She held up her hands. “I leave, no problem. Everyone now know.”

The security man grabbed my mother’s arm, and she held him back like they were lovers. I followed them under the blinding light, my feet doing the walking, it seemed, without any command from my head. Just as I was stepping out of the office, I saw the nurse glancing at me before returning her attention to the receptionist. “My god,” she said, shaking her head. “That poor little girl.”

 

My mother drove us to a mall not too far from the doctor’s office. We walked on the sidewalk along the parking lot until she spotted an ice-cream shop. The place was empty, and the woman at the counter looked surprised when we entered. My mother ordered two large cups of strawberry ice cream. Her favorite flavor—and what she thought was my favorite. This was how I had made most of my decisions until then, by mirroring my mother or not objecting, because how was I to know what I was supposed to like? Except it felt wrong now, my mother not asking me; it felt offensive.

We sat down at the table by the window. My mother wrestled her jacket off. Her blouse was limp and sticking to her chest, the collar stained with makeup. I kept my jacket on.

“Why did you do that?” I heard myself say. “What did that woman do?”

My mother sliced her ice cream with the spoon and mashed the chunks until they turned into a puddle. The air smelled of strawberry, syrupy and fake, and I pushed my cup away.

“Mom, why did you do that?” I asked again. The accusation in my tone surprised me, but it did make my mother speak. The nurse was someone whom Mr. Lee, the owner of the spa, had offered a complimentary body scrub. She was a friend of his sister’s, Mr. Lee told my mother, the two of them had gone to nursing school together, and now the woman worked at a fancy doctor’s office where his sister was hoping to work too. The practice was in that new glass tower next to the post office—surely my mother had seen the building? And guess what the doctor’s last name is, Mr. Lee added with delight. Glass!

In the days leading up to the day of the woman’s visit, Mr. Lee repeated this observation over and over as if it were some private joke he and my mother shared. But my mother understood the message: she’d better give this woman special attention. And that my mother did, even though she didn’t expect much of a tip for a service given as a personal favor. After the treatment was over, my mother stepped out to get water, and that was when she heard the nurse talking on the phone in the changing room.

I only said yes not to be rude, but my god—the whole thing is barbaric. … You know these people eat dogs! The woman’s voice was pitched, but my mother could see she was smiling. You should see this woman. … No, not a masseuse, I don’t even know what to call her. A butcher—.A burst of laughter, which continued even after her eyes had met my mother’s.

“She probably thought you didn’t understand what she was saying,” I said. And it was true—people often assumed my mother didn’t understand a thing because her spoken English wasn’t half as good as her listening. I used to think it would make her a great spy, people blithely revealing secrets in her presence. But I had never imagined those unguarded comments might concern my mother herself.

My mother drew her lips tight. She blinked repeatedly as if her eyes didn’t work.

“Why didn’t you say something then?” I said.

My mother shifted her gaze down to my cup with sudden concentration. “Your ice cream, Jaehee-ya. Eat it before it melts.”

“You should have said something then.”

She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes and circled them slowly. She peeled them from her face one by one. “Your father,” she said in a voice I didn’t recognize. “Maybe he was right.”

“What are you talking about?”

She shifted her legs. She raised her spoon to her lips only to put it back down.

“Mom.”

“He said I was an embarrassment. He said it was no different than being a maid, my job—no, worse, it was like being a servant. He said he didn’t come all the way to America to see his wife cleaning other women’s armpits.” She hunched forward and looked me directly in the eye. Her face was pale and strange. “Jaehee-ya, do I embarrass you?”

Outside the window a group of women walked by. They were dressed in what I had come to understand as office clothes, crisp fabrics in white and gray and black, badges swinging from beaded chains around their necks. It was the same kind of clothes my mother had worn on her first day of work, I remembered, except now I realized something else. She had looked out of place that morning, awkward, unlike the women I was looking at now, who seemed like they had been born wearing those clothes. They were talking to one another, laughing, perhaps on their way to lunch. The universe didn’t care about me or my mother or anyone else, I thought, there were better lives and worse lives and that was it.

“You know who’s embarrassed?” My voice shook a little but righted itself as I answered my own question. “That nurse. Really. I mean, did you see her face?”

 

My mother and I never undressed people with our words again, nor did we ever speak about the day at the doctor’s office. Eventually she would stop scrubbing strangers’ bodies for a living, and I would leave home and go to college.

But that afternoon, it was still just the two of us, my mother and me, against the world. So when my mother looked at me in doubt but not without hope—she wanted to believe me, I knew, to believe in the nurse’s supposed humiliation—I told her we should go home. My mother asked me why, as if she needed a reason to do so, to move from the chair where her body seemed to have sunk. I said I wanted to go home so I could pluck her grays.

And it was true, that was all I wanted to do that afternoon: to go back to our small apartment, to breathe in that greasy air, to have her sit on the floor with her body cradled between my legs, so I could touch her hair and feel the soft heat of her scalp, not searching but knowing that I would catch her when she fell.

***

Hana Choi is a bilingual writer, translator, and attorney. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Epoch, Mississippi Review, the Florida Review, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the Grants for Artists’ Progress from Artist Trust and a fellow of the Jack Straw Writers Program. A native of Seoul, South Korea, she now lives in Seattle, where she is at work on her first novel and collection of short stories.

First published in TMR 47.2 (Summer 2024), Jennifer Anderson’s “Rockdale” follows a young couple faced with the harsh realities of renovating an old Wisconsin farmhouse. Anderson reflects on the strain and retrospective joy of making a house a home for her family.

Rockdale

Jennifer Anderson

 

Recently I dreamed I was living at the Rockdale house. I woke with a mix of nostalgia and relief. I told my neighbor, who knows the current owners, has eaten meals on a table in their backyard. She said it’s no wonder I’d been dreaming; they’d just begun to remodel the kitchen.

Sixteen years ago the agile, eighty-something owner led us around the house and its 2.7 acres. I knew within thirty seconds this 1840s brick box with the bar up the road would not be our first home, stranded in a tiny township miles away from all our friends. I didn’t care how historical it was. This would not be the place we’d start a family, where babies would learn to crawl on plywood sheet floor, stained and stamped with sponge-painted flowers. We would not make meals in this ramshackle kitchen with walls that didn’t reach the ceiling, an industrial sink that was longer than my car. I feigned interest. The place reeked of convalescence and death.

The three of us stood by the row of towering pines on the property’s west end. My husband stiffened against the wind and buried his hands deep inside his cargo pockets. Question by question, he summoned the building’s history and ascertained the soundness of its structure. I was irritated, then alarmed. My husband’s attention span rarely accommodated idle chatter, and never for this long. The owner told us to take a minute, adding that she had an accepted offer on the house, then turned to go back inside. I looked at my husband and I knew. Dreams danced in his eyes.

Tears rolled out of mine.

I’d agreed to partner with him once before in what had seemed an insurmountable feat (twice before if you counted marriage). During my senior year in college, after we’d been dating two years, he’d suggested we start a mobile food cart. We had to form an LLC, secure a small business loan, create a menu, source ingredients, design graphics, apply for half-a-dozen licenses, and build a food cart—from the ground up—to present to a panel of reviewers who would either grant or deny us a site. In twenty-one days. Our Saturday-market brunch, made from the seasonal produce sold at the vendors’ stands, grew a cult-like following. I’d married a visionary, an adventure-loving entrepreneur, though I hadn’t fully understood then how that would disrupt my dream of a safe and tidy life.

My husband said there was blond brick under the piss-yellow plaster and wooden beams under the stained drop-ceiling office tiles. He assured me we could transform this building into something like the urban lofts I loved, like the pump house on Milwaukee’s lakefront that sold coffee and scones and Moleskine journals. All I saw was work—days, months, years of endless projects. A financial black hole.

I was right.

(And so was he.)

 

The closing was scheduled for the first of February. Unlike the first offer, we had no contingencies on ours. We left the country for the better part of January, traveling around Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru with four friends before we began the renovation. I don’t remember if, while we were thousands of miles from the property, I’d tried to persuade my husband to reconsider our purchase while we still could or if I’d embraced the vision for the space or just resigned myself to the work. I was younger and more eager to please than I am now. He was adventurous and afraid of nothing—the opposite of me. Maybe I figured we’d find a way.

Koshkonong Creek divides in half the incorporated village of Rockdale. Our property line crossed the highway that separated the house from the water. We were a few blocks past where the sidewalk ends, the last stop on the way out of town, and too close to the busy road for my liking. A circle of one-hundred-year-old silver maples towered over the house’s north end, and old pines bordered the west; the south faced the gravel parking lot, streetlight, and large plot of grass. The original owner had abandoned the bricklaying to go fight in the Civil War, then returned to finish constructing the three stories. Fifty years ago, the house one hundred years old, someone removed the third story for reasons unknown. All the decorative brickwork that bordered the roofline was lost; the structure was essentially a brick box.

On our first evening in the space, we made a vat of chili and hosted family and friends on folding chairs and stained linoleum. His family was pessimistic about the endeavor; mine said we were ambitious; our friends were along for the ride. We were part of an artist community of twenty-something musicians, painters, poets, and potters. Few had steady, paying jobs. Later that week, a thirty-yard dumpster arrived—the first of thirteen. We armed a crew of four volunteers with crowbars and sledgehammers: Everything goes!

Decades of dirt and cobwebs—and one desiccated squirrel—cascaded from the layers of ceiling before the original was unearthed. I’d never seen so much dust, never had it invade such orifices or fill so many pores. It would be a ubiquitous presence for years. Dust when we chipped off all the plaster and sandblasted every beam, dust when we pulled up the rotten floorboards that spanned the first floor, dust when we dismantled the harrowing stairwell before building a new one, dust when we ground out the joints between each brick, then dust when we mixed up mortar to tuckpoint every one, dust when every wall came down, then more when the new walls went up, dust when the masonry saw cut through sixteen inches of brick as we reconfigured windows and eliminated doors.

During the renovation, we were living five miles away in an empty farmhouse my family had purchased near their land. We had my sister’s college futon in the bedroom, a wicker couch in the living room, a hot pot in the kitchen, and a rowdy horde of mice in the basement. It was like camping with a roof. Our combined belongings—we’d been married just over a year—were in a storage unit five miles away. We anticipated living at the farmhouse for two to three months until our property had windows, heat, and light. The house was uninhabitable for more than a year.

Sometimes when we’d drive away after working for hours, I’d stare at the hulking edifice, all the window openings vacant and black like missing teeth, and wonder if it’d ever feel like home. After bouncing around thirteen of them as a child, I desperately wanted to make one. I’d ask my husband what he thought married people did when they left work for the evening. I imagined them sitting in restaurants, with clean clothes and sweet-smelling hair, eating a hot meal that had been cooked in pots and pans on working appliances before they returned to their homes with throw pillows and framed photos and a blissful absence of dirt. I’d stare up at billboards on my way to work, feeling the lusty pull of cookie-cutter homes that a team of professionals would design, build, and clean before handing over a shiny key. “I saved you from suburbia,” my husband loved to say, but many were the days I’d rather have memorized each aisle in IKEA than know my way around every brickyard in town.

 

We started with a loan that was $40,000 above the purchase price of the house. Over the next three and a half years, we’d sell off a pickup truck and the mobile food-cart business we no longer had the time or energy to run. We both had part-time jobs: he was a cook and I was a nurse. There were years we had only $12,000 to work with—I refused to go into debt—and we’d barter when we could. My husband catered one wedding for flooring installation, another for a wall of custom cabinetry. I washed all the dishes.

During demolition we discovered that the subfloor on the first level was rotten. Most of the sixteen hundred square feet needed new joists to be fitted into the masonry pockets of the foundation’s stone walls. We pursued several bids from contractors who looked relieved when we told them we’d do it ourselves. The project dragged on for weeks, and the house looked worse than before, as if a team of bulldozers had ravaged the place, then left. I complained. My husband did not. We hired a friend as much for moral support as for help. My husband barreled forward, working twelve-to-fifteen-hour days. I picked up extra shifts at work—there were weeks I rotated between all three—commuting the forty minutes in the quiet of my dirty car. My mom was in town during this part of the project. She discovered a rhubarb patch in the backyard buried beneath a pile of shingles encrusted in tar. She returned hours later from my sister’s kitchen with a warm pan of rhubarb crisp and a stack of paper plates. I cried. I was hungry and cold, and it tasted like home. We had no running water, no plumbing, no sink. I ate with my dirty hands.

Once the demolition was done, the house was a shell: brick walls with two support posts on each of the two floors and several in the basement. Nothing else. No electrical, no plumbing, no HVAC, no windows, no walls. The structural engineer we’d consulted had recommended we have the house jacked up to remove and replace three of the six posts—the floor of the house slanted inward on both sides. We had three steel I-beams installed, two in the basement and one on the first floor. For a few minutes the house rested on jacks before it was lowered onto its new supports. A part of me wished the entire structure would fall, but it settled into place with a thunderclap.

Was it days or weeks later that the rains came? Our basement flooded, the water swirling around our knees. We borrowed a sump pump from a neighbor we’d never met. Throughout the night, my husband drove to Rockdale to check the water level. Soon there was mold growing on the new joists; the humidity had climbed above 80 percent. We bought a scratch-and-dent commercial dehumidifier for the price of two plane tickets to Rome. The previous owner’s words echoed in my head—they’d felt irrelevant at the time—the building was originally a creamery, built near a spring and designed to flood to cool the cream. The basement needed a sump pump, drain tile, and a concrete floor.

I seldom went to the basement and never went alone. It felt like a punishment to descend into the cool cavern of mold and fungi and fear, to duck my head below the stone lintel before the floor turned to brick and dirt. It looked like somewhere Gollum would dwell, where an ancestor would squat, a stick between her teeth, and birth a son. I didn’t know yet that the snakes would come from there.

 

On a cold gray day in November we rented a conveyor belt. By then we were on a first-name basis with the owners of a local supply rental company. Before we could dig out the bricks from the basement floor, we needed to haul out the detritus the previous owner had left. We hired a few friends and passed out work gloves and bottles of beer. They wore flannel shirts and waterproof boots. After we cleared out the paint cans, rotten wood, and medieval-looking tools, the original water softener remained. Made of metal and full of salt, the army-green canister must’ve weighed a thousand pounds.

We borrowed a Bobcat from my family, rigged together a harness and strap, and rolled the canister onto a makeshift ramp. After many attempts to manipulate torque and increase speed, we’d finally positioned the canister and the Bobcat so that when my husband gunned it, the water softener shot out of the basement like a rocket, sailing past the Bobcat—and us, as our mouths gaped. “It could’ve killed someone,” my husband would say years later. Like he’d say about the time he climbed up a tree carrying a chainsaw when the largest branch split from the trunk and filleted his calf on the way down. Or when he dislodged the old cast-iron vent pipe in the attic and then it slipped through his gloved hands, crashing through two stories—and slicing perfect holes—before it landed on the basement floor. Or when he stood on scaffolding four stories tall, wielding an aluminum stove pipe high above his head before willing it down a brick chimney on the coldest day in January, the wind so fierce it could’ve knocked him to his death.

I don’t remember feeling much fear back then. Maybe it was because he was always bulldozing forward, deaf to the doubts most others would heed, or perhaps it was because we were still in our twenties, our brains bathed in the belief that anything was possible and nothing bad would happen.

 

We soon became something of a roadside attraction. People would often pull over, get out of their cars, and help themselves to a tour. They’d cite anecdotes of when the building was a general store, a restaurant, the basement a sanitarium for respiratory ailments. Many would ask when we were going to cover the wooden rafters or drywall over the brick. Because brick was a terrible insulator (its R-value is next to nothing), and we’d already blown through two thousand pounds of propane in a matter of weeks, we’d need more insulation in the attic at the very least. These were the sorts of things my husband and I discussed on our way to Home Depot. Not whom we’d invite over for dinner or if we’d vacation in the spring or when we’d start a family.

On the day we blew insulation into the attic, I was dressed as if ready to board a space shuttle. I climbed two stories, dragging one hundred feet of tubing connected to a hopper, outside and two stories below, into which my husband dumped block after block of cellulose insulation. I’m not sure who decided to do this at dusk. I wielded the hose as if fighting a fire and distracted myself from freezing fingers and toes by singing and laughing until the dust stung my eyes and burned my throat and I could no longer see through my hooded mask or yell above the whine of the machine. It was after a day like this that my husband and I drove to the next town over to rent a movie because that’s what married couples did. Still dressed in dusty work clothes, we handed the 1980s comedy The Money Pit to the man at the register. He told us he lived just across the creek, and I apologized for his view. He didn’t so much as grin.

 

For more hours than I care to count, we’d taken turns wielding a small tool to strip away the plaster from ceiling to floor. Finally, after decades in hiding, the Cream City brick was exposed. Moisture, dust, and cold emanated from the damaged walls. It was as if we’d pried open a tomb.

We contacted the mason who lived up the road. He surveyed the brick, explained we’d need to tuckpoint everything, and then taught us how to grind out the old mortar between each brick and apply fresh mortar to every rise and run. He didn’t wear gloves, seemed proud that his hands could withstand the lime. Mine couldn’t. He showed us the tools we’d need to buy and where to find the least expensive diamond blades—we’d burn through a dozen of them—and created the ratios for our specific mortar mix. The masonry dust would get everywhere, no matter how new and tight the mask, goggles, and gloves. If we’d had the tens of thousands of dollars it would’ve cost us, we’d have paid him to tuckpoint the entire house.

We disagreed about whether to repair the sections of brick high up between the joists. My husband said they were fine the way they were. I said if we were going to do it, we should do it right; this was a conversation we’d have many times. He made a case not to disturb anything structural, and in the end, we left those sections alone. I wasn’t disappointed not to have to climb the fourteen feet to reach them, though my eyes would always find their flaws.

The project dragged on—we were approaching eighteen months—and the romance was gone. The tuckpointing alone had taken hundreds of hours, and we hadn’t begun work on the second floor. Even if I could convince my husband to cut our losses and move on, no one would buy the house in its current state. I’d taken up swearing, a cheap and convenient vice. It took weeks before my husband wasn’t surprised by my exclamations when I tripped on a tool or jammed my hand or took a swig of a warm and forgotten beer, impregnated with the ash of someone’s discarded cigar. I’d daydream about a windfall of cash and exchanged correspondence with HGTV’s Generation Renovation producers (our application was eventually denied). When I was capsized by the details—I saw each and every one—my husband would send me for sub sandwiches or two-by-fours or a box of ten-inch screws. There were times, my husband tells me now, he’d pull up to the house in his 1970s Land Cruiser and sit awhile to rouse the want and will to work. It was worse on the days he labored alone.

Our friends sustained us. We were a scenic drive from the city, something to do on a Saturday, a side job with flexible hours that paid in cash. Once we had a working kitchen, almost two years after purchasing the house, we were somewhere to go for a hot meal and home brew on tap. My husband would mix a batch of mortar during the morning and pizza dough in the afternoon, declaring himself a Renaissance man, his hands and clothes coated in the dust of flour and lime. We have dozens of photos of our twenty-something selves surrounded by friends, seated in camping chairs with books and guitars and drinks, a few with cigarettes or cigars. We held big bonfires that sent sparks into a sky full of stars, work parties with potluck spreads on makeshift tables on our sprawling lawn. The first round of babies napped in playpens while their parents pulled electrical wire, hung drywall, or swept. My husband would host band practice—he played electric guitar—the extension cords snaking around ladders and brooms and oversized garbage bins, red rosin paper covering the new floors. We hosted Friendsgiving for twenty-one, cooking for days before feasting like kings.

 

It surprises me now that I cannot recall when we finally moved in—neither the moment nor the month. Not even the season comes to mind. My husband has no memory of it either. Maybe it’s because the work and the dust were endless, because even after I could take a hot shower and make meals on a stove, after we’d finished the laundry room (we’d rescued most of the flooring when the sewer backed up) and could clean our clothes, there loomed numerous projects, many of which would again coat everything in dust. Because we hadn’t started working on the second floor, we slept in what would later be a large playroom with an attached full bathroom and a three-season porch that, on the coldest nights, dropped the temperature of the room into the fifties and made our sheets feel like ice. I’d burrow beneath goose-down blankets, taking shelter in my husband’s heat.

Most evenings my husband cooked and I did the dishes. Finishing the kitchen made it feel like perhaps the project was slowly becoming a home—though perpetually under construction. He’d call me on my drive from work to foreshadow that he hadn’t yet cleaned up the latest project (I doubted they’d ever end), and I knew I’d return to find screws and coffee grounds, socks and extension cords, sawdust and eggshells scattered across countertops and strewn across the floors. My love and need for order, his predisposition for chaos, was—and is—our matrimonial bane.

 

That first summer we moved the front entrance from the east side to the south, knocking out the last of the old windows and removing some of the brick. The eight-by-twelve-foot hole in the front of our house gaped like a bomb crater. Piles of bricks and rubble covered the grass out front. We spent hours stacking the bricks onto pallets, a Badger football game blaring from the mortar-crusted Bosch work radio, a growler of Lake Louie beer balanced on a pile of bricks. At night the openings were covered in blue plastic tarps. I found it hard not to think of mice.

I once told the pest-control guy that he was what kept me from selling my house, not that any sane person would want it. I just wished I’d found him sooner, before the months I’d wake to sweep up the pellets and disinfect the counters while my French press brewed, washing every utensil and drawer the rodents had ransacked. The exterminator set several traps—I said no to the glue; I’d witnessed that horror before—and placed bait stations indoors and out. Within weeks the mice had been banished to the basement. They could have it for all I cared, as long as they didn’t crap on my spoons or dart across my floors.

If only there had been a solution for snakes; I feared them more than mice. One day I bent down to pick up what I thought was the shop vacuum hose coiled in a heap on the sunny floor, only to have it move as I reached out to touch it. Once I stooped to lift the ficus tree and a snake slithered away from the base of the pot. Neither one was caught. For weeks I’d scan the floor, mindful of where I’d tread. Any sudden movement flooded me with fear.

 

Autumn came. We were approaching our third year when we started work on the second floor. It had been vacant for decades—nothing but two hand-hewn posts and four brick walls. More grinding out old mortar joints, more tuckpointing, more dust. After we’d cut six new windows into the brick walls and hired a friend to frame out the new ones, we held an art show for our friends. For two days there was food and live music on the main floor. The clean house smelled of hot cider and burning wood. Upstairs, candles and lamps illuminated the remortared brick, our friends’ paintings hung on the two-by-fours, tables displaying jewelry and pottery wares. Textiles and reupholstered furnishings added color and texture and warmth. My nesting instincts were ramping up.

With a baby on the way, the drive to finish the upstairs felt urgent. I figured I’d be two weeks late—we needed every one of those days to drywall and paint, install the flooring and trim, tile the bathroom, and hang the sliding doors my husband was certain he could build in time. He took a job that pulled him to Chicago, two hours away, one to two days a week. Just when it felt like we were gaining momentum, it seemed we’d hit a wall.

 

When my water broke four weeks before my due date, before my baby shower, before we’d bought a crib or car seat or clothes, I told my husband to go back to sleep. It was midnight. This wasn’t happening. My mind raced with worries about the preterm baby and the unfinished house. Eventually I called the midwife and my mom, who began her sixteen-hour drive east. When we left the hospital two days later, we settled into a family’s guest room instead of returning to our house. My husband divided his time between work, Rockdale, and perfecting swaddling techniques on our five-and-one-half-pound son. The baby and I stayed away from the drywall dust and noise until he was three weeks old. While he slept in a bassinet atop a card table, I’d paint, sweep up sawdust, organize the tools. I wanted to get settled in upstairs before I returned to work at the hospital.

 

A new pest emerged that sweltering August. I woke daily to find a fresh pile of guano on the northeast corner of the new floor. Almost every night one or two bats evaded the tennis racket in my husband’s hand while our four-month-old and I hid in the bathroom, the only room upstairs with a door. I hired a bat specialist. This lunacy had gone on for weeks. He arrived in a late-model minivan affixed with bat decals and crooked letters that spelled out Bat Man. He told me more about the winged mice than I cared to hear. We paid him the equivalent of a brand-new living room set to eradicate the transient, male juvenile brown-bat population that had made our attic their home.

After the dust and bats were gone, we hauled up our hand-me-down couches, our mattresses and crib. We set up the nursery and bought new bath towels. We hung a Swedish swing from the rafters and stocked up on blankets and toys. When our son was old enough, we’d snuggle up on the couch, share bowlfuls of popcorn, and watch Gilmore Girls, the only show he cared to watch, on our prehistoric TV.

 

Our son was sixteen months old when his brother arrived a month early. My husband and I shared childcare, so the boys were always with one of us. I worked every weekend and two evenings a month; my chef husband was gone for two to three days at a time, working in Chicago, Milwaukee, Lake Geneva. A few work trips took him to Napa and Vegas. I spent most days and evenings alone with the boys. I longed for sidewalks that led to libraries and coffee shops and parks, for conversations with adults, for uninterrupted sleep. I’d invite over family and friends, all of them busy with their own small kids. We were a forty-minute drive people didn’t always want to make. Sometimes I’d brave an outing to the YMCA or strategize a trip to the store with a well-stocked diaper bag and a backup plan, returning home to a cold and empty house.

In the recession of 2008, my husband lost his job. I was momentarily relieved—I’d have more help with the boys. He returned to his employer in Madison and worked part-time. Maybe now he’d have time to hang that last closet door or trim the big window or source next year’s firewood. Maybe I’d be able to fold all the laundry or paint the playroom walls or take a long, hot shower alone. Maybe we could go out for sushi, leave the boys with a sitter.

 

When our youngest was nine months old, I was pregnant with our third. My nurse practitioner sister still uses me as a cautionary tale for IUDs more than a decade later. I had no idea how we’d manage; I was wildly overwhelmed. Again. My husband didn’t seem too worried, maybe because he knew we’d just keep plowing through whatever terrain lay ahead.

Three kids in three years—all of them in diapers—brought with it a new kind of exhaustion. It may have rivaled the renovation. I remember the day I was ushering my three-year-old out to the cold minivan. Our parking lot of a driveway was a sheet of pure ice. I had my toddler on my hip and an infant carrier hanging from my other arm when I slipped and fell, taking everyone down with me. I asked for a remote starter for my birthday and stocked up on salt.

We hired the energetic, artistic daughter of a friend to watch one or two of the kids for eight hours a week while I took the baby to a checkup or the three-year-old to preschool or brought the middle one along to get groceries. She probably saved my sanity. Nearly every Saturday while I was at work, my husband would take the kids to the farmers market, wearing the baby and pulling the toddlers around the square in our wooden wagon, stopping for honey sticks and spicy cheese bread and crêpes at our friends’ coffee shop, where they’d give him hot water to make the baby a bottle.

Our kitchen was still the epicenter of our home, though swarming with toddlers instead of twenty-somethings. We’d spend the day on the first floor and not too far from the fire, toys strewn across the house from the playroom to the front door. Our children had inhabited the kitchen since they were old enough to climb up on a chair, cutting apples with plastic knives, working their way up to peeling carrots or rolling pizza dough. My husband’s first cooking demonstrations—he’s done thousands by now—were to a diapered audience standing on chairs. They’d watch him strip the seeds from a vanilla bean, eager for the mixer to stop so they could drag their fingers through the frosting. We’d go upstairs when the sun set, resuming the tag-team ritual of bathtime and stories and bed. We found a sort of equilibrium. I’d gotten better about overlooking the imperfections of our work and ignoring the details that remained, not that I had any energy left to spare; it was easier at night when the lighting was low.

 

The offer to buy our unlisted house came, unbidden, in the six-month stretch of real estate’s deepest depression. We’d owned it for seven and a half years. I’d always told my husband that it would be for romance that someone would buy our house. No pragmatic person would. Our Realtor friend, who’d wielded a crowbar during our demolition days, called to tell us he might have a buyer. He knew we’d be emotional sellers who wouldn’t relinquish the house to just anyone. We had mixed feelings but said the interested party could stop by if they’d like. There would always be more to do, and we hadn’t begun on the exterior, much less the landscaping. It was almost surreal to imagine living in a space that wasn’t such a struggle to make warm, find rest in, keep clean. “We were just done,” my husband said of our decision years later.

I immediately loved the couple who walked through our front door, a baby girl on her hip, the small hand of a young boy in his. They took in the fire and the smell of wood, the way the chandelier cast its warm light on the brick at dusk while my husband cooked them steak tacos and poured them each a pint. I’m sure our ambivalence about selling made them want it more. He was an unassuming writer who wanted to keep bees on the property; she’d majored in art history, worked in the fashion industry, and loved to cook. We signed papers on their third visit. I didn’t know what to feel; I didn’t want to leave without the bricks.

Weeks later, after days of rain, our three children, ages one, two, and four, were asleep in their beds when a branch from a one-hundred-year-old maple crashed into the roof and shook the house. My husband out of town, I froze in my bed, willing myself to get up and go look. I fully expected to see a sky full of stars through the ceiling. Had I climbed into the attic, I would have. I went downstairs and opened the playroom door. Branches and leaves filled the porch; the pine planks we’d installed on the ceiling dangled by their last nail, insulation draped over the ceiling fan blades. I carried each of the kids into our king-size bed and shut the door, trying not to think of bats.

Had the contract not been extended—the buyers would sell their house within the month—it would’ve been their first night in the house. As it was, the $30,000 insurance claim and its whopping deductible were ours. We’d be the ones to manage the collapsed porch roof and the flooring and furniture it destroyed, the rafters that snapped in the attic—exactly one away from the gas line—and the water that ruined all the insulation we’d blown in that cold, dark night. We’d lived with tarps and dust before. We moved out shortly after the house was repaired, photographed, and cleaned. We left them with gifts, flowers, historic photos, and all the keys.

 

An architect once told us that building a home often put considerable stress on a marriage, that more than 50 percent of clients had separated or divorced by the time their project was finished. We looked at each other and laughed. I told him that getting to design a house built by a team of skilled, experienced professionals, a house we’d move in to only after it’d been fully constructed and cleaned—in under a year—didn’t sound the least bit distressing. It sounded like a miracle.

While our new house was being built, we lived in a one-story ranch with an attached garage. It was luxuriously warm. I filled notebooks with paint samples and tile mock-ups, researched fixtures and lighting, sketched kitchen plans to scale, detailed timelines and to-do lists. While our oldest was in kindergarten class, I brought the younger two along to gather tile samples or swatches of cork flooring.

We spent our ten-year anniversary seated on buckets in the dirt that would become our front lawn, scrubbing the moss off the Cream City bricks that we’d unearthed from Rockdale’s basement floor. We dipped them in muriatic acid, then rinsed them off so that the mason could lay them on our living room walls. He told us bleach was cheaper and just as effective and sold us on a newer mortar that looked like the old batches we’d made with the recipe he’d created for the Rockdale house. It came premixed and was more expensive, but we had a bigger budget this time. He showed up early every day for weeks and always left the work site clean. Some days he’d bring his daughter along, and she’d draw or play while he worked. His mortar joints were flawless, the bricks perfectly set. Two years later, at his funeral, I took one last look at his hands.

 

Our house stands on a hill just down the road from my sister, close enough to walk over and raid her pantry for paprika or coconut milk when dinner is simmering on the stove. She drags me along on her runs, laughing when I curse while trudging up the hills. Our kids run and play in our yards and build forts in the woods. My husband and I sit together on the deck that overlooks the willows and tamaracks that turn gold in the fall. We sip gin and tonics in the springtime when the frogs sing songs from the marsh. We talk about building an outdoor kitchen with a wood-fired oven and a bonfire pit. We both love coming home. When our friends visit, we open a bottle of wine before dinner and talk of parenting or dreams of travel until the mosquitoes drive us indoors. We can fit ten around our dining table. Most of the seats are filled on Friday nights when we make homemade pizza and salad. I spend hours writing on the screened-in porch. We have no bats or snakes or mice. We have geothermal heat and a small wood-burning stove because I’ll always love the smell of fire. My husband has proposed other ideas over the years: let’s move to another country, let’s start a donut cart, let’s rent out our house. I say let’s stop and catch our breath. Our kids’ teenage years will soon be adventure enough.

 

For me the romance of Rockdale came retrospectively, after time and space allowed me to sift the beauty from the dust, separate the story from the stress. I loved our spiral staircase with its helical lines and maple treads, the way the sun would stream in through the big picture window, casting it in a spotlight like the art it was, on display for passing cars. I adored the welder who lived up the road, with his mind for math and his pointer finger rounded at its nub, the way he came every day wearing his Older Than Dirt baseball cap and welded each tread into place. He could fabricate anything I could dream—a chandelier with Edison bulbs, legs to turn a wood post into a bench, a metal ring to hold the firewood. I loved our friend’s painting—we’d purchased it instead of a couch—the way the rust-colored fractals looked against the brick, and I loved the coppery glaze of the bathroom sink made by our potter friend. I thought of the thousands of meals we’d shared with friends and family that my husband had cooked on gleaming appliances we could never have afforded had he not worked for the company that made them.

The same welder made us an identical chandelier and a stair stringer for our new house, this one straight with walnut treads. We sat outside on camping chairs, our three children bundled and piled on our laps, the day the crane lowered it into the house. Our friend’s painting hangs on our Rockdale-brick walls, the masonry aglow in lamplight, firelight, sun. The hefty wooden bench made from one of Rockdale’s original posts, hand-hewn in the 1840s by a chisel’s hard blows, sits by our front door.

***

Jennifer Anderson has worked as a psychiatric nurse for children and adolescents for more than twenty years. She has workshopped numerous essays and short stories with Madison Writers’ Studio and holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Antioch University. She lives northwest of Rockdale with her husband and their three teens.

Parents often worry, “Am I doing this right?”—a question that takes on humorous complexity in Robert Long Foreman’s “Song Night,” which tells the story of a pot-smoking father who discovers his teenage daughter has been following in his footsteps. Beset with concerns no less pressing for being commonplace—about the quality of his parenting, about the strength of his marriage—the narrator learns from his daughter and her friend how to loosen up. First published in TMR issue 46.4 (Winter 2023), “Song Night” is a tender, funny account of what it looks like to bend to contingency—to be along for the ride, to be a river, broad and strong but also helpless in its outflow.

Song Night

Robert Long Foreman

I thought about calling this “What We Do in the Basement,” because there are several things we do in our basement.

It’s a good basement. It’s furnished. It has a fireplace, a couch, a TV we rarely use, and some comfortable chairs. The carpet is ugly, but so are most carpets. It came with the house, so I guess it has other people’s eyelashes mashed between the fibers. There’s a desk and a chair, where I sit and work all day. I have a record cabinet with all my records and a turntable on top. Sometimes I remember that I live in the twenty-first century, so I plug my phone into the receiver and play a song from an online streaming service. What a world. What a basement.

Clara, my wife, keeps her workout stuff there: a yoga mat and weights. She’s not huge, but she’s toned. Some people like to spend their time defining words. Clara spends a portion of every day defining her biceps and calves. She does it in the morning, before I wake up.

When I wake up, I make breakfast, eat breakfast, and take Clara’s place. I go to work as an in-house editor for an investment firm. I don’t tone muscles, I tone documents. I don’t bulk them up; there’s no writing involved; I only further define them, streamline sentences, cut paragraphs in half. It’s like yoga for reports and prospectuses down there.

The basement is also where Kristin and I have Song Night every Wednesday night. She’s our only child, because one is more than enough.

I never thought I’d have a daughter named Kristin. I had a bad girlfriend once named Kristin. She even spelled it with those same two i’s. She wasn’t the meanest woman I dated in my twenties, but she was harsh. I’d rather not get into how.

It was Clara’s idea to name our daughter that. She insisted. And it’s fine, because since then our Kristin has all but washed away the memory of that other one who was mean. I hardly recall what her face looked like.

When she was six years old, Kristin and I started having basement parties. They weren’t real parties. No booze was involved, though I have been smoking cannabis in the backyard every night for almost as long as Kristin has been alive.

Cannabis is okay. It’s not a drug that obliterates me like alcohol does. It slows my mind in a pleasant way. It allows me to focus on one thing at a time, like the songs Kristin wants me to listen to on Song Night.

When we had our first parties, way back when she was six, Kristin wanted to play board games, not listen to songs. She and I played Sorry! and Trouble until nine thirty every Wednesday night, when she had to go to bed. After the board game phase, we played video games: Knights and Bikes, Heave Ho. She turned ten, eventually, and got obsessed with The Sims. She wanted to find out what would happen if she led a Sim into a room and removed all the doors. It’s what Edgar Allan Poe would have done if he’d had access to a Sim.

We found out what would happen. The Sim starved to death.

Kristin laughed. I didn’t.

Okay, I did. I laughed a lot, actually—mostly because Kristin was laughing so hard it was infectious.

For about five years in there, our parties were suspended. Kristin was caught in the throes of puberty, a phenomenon that occurs among many teenagers. She went from being a little girl to being a stranger who hated me and Clara and wanted us to be miserable from the moment we woke up to when we went to bed.

But Kristin’s was a regularly scheduled animosity: puberty is an evil spirit that visits all children as soon as they’re no longer children. When it came to our house and brought its discord, no one was surprised. We were just hurt. For years. Like we’d never been hurt before.

We get along better now. Kristin and I have parties again, but they’re not like they once were. They’re shorter now, and they’re not really parties; they’re Song Night.

I was surprised when she said she wanted to resume our parties. At fifteen, she told me she’d always hated our parties, even when she was six. She’d only agreed to attend them because she felt sorry for me, because I didn’t have friends and she could tell how pathetic I was.

It wasn’t true. I have friends. I’ve always had at least one friend. But I am insecure about everything, and Kristin had found some exposed flesh. She dug the knife in and twisted it like her hormones told her to do, for I was her father, and I had to be diminished.

Now on Song Night, Kristin sits on the basement floor with her loser dad. We take turns playing songs for one another. I’m glad we didn’t do this when she was younger. Her taste in music isn’t perfect, just as mine isn’t, but it’s better than when she listened to songs made for people whose brains hadn’t fully developed yet.

Now she listens to MIA. It was one of the first revelations of Song Night. I knew some MIA songs—but not “Bingo,” until Kristin played it for me. It is one of the woman’s best tracks, and I never knew. When I asked where she found it, she said, “Greta showed it to me.”

Greta is her best friend. They’ve known each other since they were eight.

But at our most recent Song Night, I had to ask Kristin a different question: Where did she get the idea that she should smoke marijuana?

I knew the answer. It’s the same answer the kid gave his dad in an antidrug commercial I saw on TV forty times a day in the 1980s: “From you, Dad. I learned it from watching you.”

I had noticed that Kristin’s eyes looked red. I asked her why that was. She said she had been scratching them. Her eyes were itchy. That was all.

I kept watching her. I observed that when we talked, she appeared to be on a one-second delay.

I asked Kristin point-blank if she was high. She shrugged and said yes. Then I asked her my question: What had possessed her to take up smoking marijuana?

She said, “Why are you calling it that?”

“Because that’s what it’s called. It’s what it is.”

“But when you talk about it when you’re not mad, you call it ‘cannabis.'”

“Kristin.”

“Dad.”

“When did this start? You doing this?”

“Six months ago. I learned it from you.”

There it was.

“Don’t say you learned it from me,” I said. “Please.”

“It’s okay, Dad.”

“No, it is not. Not at all.”

“But then, what? It’s okay when you do it?”

“I’m middle-aged. No one cares what happens to my brain. It’s too late for me and my brain. Yours is fresh. You still have a chance.”

We were silent for a half-minute, Kristin leaning back against my record collection.

What was I feeling? Shame? It was something like shame, but I also knew this wasn’t such a big deal. Teenagers get high. They’ve been doing it since at least the 1960s. They probably did it in the 1860s. And why shouldn’t they? Sure, they should take care of their internal organs, but then, everything causes cancer, now that the world is a trash heap. Even the water we drink causes cancer, as does the air we have no choice but to breathe. And it’s not like teenagers have urgent business to attend to that being stoned would prevent them from addressing properly. They should probably be high all the time, since in the years ahead, there’s nothing but dullness awaiting them and people they won’t like having to deal with but who are somehow in charge of whether they keep their jobs and how much money they’ll make.

She said, “Do you want to hear my song or not?”

I grunted. She took it as a yes.

She played a song she’d discovered on Spotify called “Run Cried the Crawling” by Agnes Obel. It was atmospheric, with piano and strings and Obel’s breathy Scandinavian vocals all mixed in the same aural pot.

It’s a song that walks around you in a circle, never coming close enough that you can touch it, always out of reach.

“It’s a great song to hear when you’re lit,” Kristin said when it ended.

“Come on,” I said. “Don’t talk like that.”

“Am I wrong?”

“I don’t care if you’re wrong, Krissy. I don’t want to hear you say those kinds of words.”

“What kind of words?”

“‘Lit,'” I sneered.

She laughed.

“I have failed,” I said. “I’m the worst father in the world.”

I felt like such a fool. The song I’d played for her prior to her song was “The Shore” by Corrina Repp. It’s another song that’s even better when you’re high, with those vocals that sound like they emerged from the Marianas Trench—like she’s channeling something ultrahuman—and her guitar tone that has bounced off asteroids on its way to your sad little ears.

To be fair, all songs sound better when you’ve been smoking. It’s like what Ralph Ellison’s unnamed and unseen narrator says at the start of Invisible Man, when he describes listening to Louis Armstrong after smoking a marijuana cigarette.

I ended Song Night early. I was high and felt sleepy, and I was mad at Kristin for doing something I had to admit I’d been doing for a long time, often in her vicinity, which meant I had normalized it for her and it was all but inevitable that she’d take up the habit herself.

The next morning, Kristin was in the kitchen, ready to go to high school. The daily shit show. I came up and looked in her eyes.

She said, “What?”

“You know what.”

Clara was taking a shower. Kristin was standing, eating toast, taking small bites like she always has. Her mouth is pretty small.

She said, “Are you checking to see if I’m high?”

“Are you?” I asked. “High?”

“No.”

“Are you going to get high with Greta before school?”

“No.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“We’re not getting high before school. We tried it once, and she hated it.”

“But you didn’t hate it.”

“No. I did not.” She bit toast and said, munching, “School is terrible.”

“I know it is. It’s school.”

“And getting high makes it easier to deal with how bad it is.”

“You’re a straight-A student.”

“I know. Exactly. It’s fine.”

We heard Greta’s car horn. Kristin shoved the rest of the toast in her small mouth and fled.

I wasted no more time. I went to the bedroom and swung open the bathroom door.

Clara jumped. She yelped. “What,” she cried, “the fuck, John?”

She was naked, putting lotion on herself, her skin like cream and the lotion literally cream. She has perfect legs, a flat stomach. Clavicles straight from heaven.

Clara wasn’t mad that I could see her naked. We’ve been together twenty-one years. She was mad that I’d scared the shit out of her by banging the door open. I hadn’t surprised her that way in a long time.

But my god, Clara looks good without clothes. My freaking god.

She said, “What do you want, John?”

I said, “Kristin gets high.”

“What?”

“Kristin. She smokes marijuana.”

“You mean cannabis. That’s what you usually call it. You always say they only ever called it ‘marijuana’ because they wanted it to sound foreign and dangerous.”

I didn’t know what to say.

Applying a different lotion now to her naked face, which jostled her breasts, because her arms moved a certain way, Clara said, “Are you trying to make our daughter sound foreign and dangerous?”

I said, “Aren’t you mad about it?”

“I’m not happy about it.” She squinted at herself. “I don’t know if I’m mad.”

“Well, what are you, then?”

“I’m your gorgeous, aging wife. Oh, come on. Don’t look at me that way.”

“I just don’t understand how you’re so—”

“So what?”

“You don’t seem to care.”

“I care! I do. It’s just—I don’t know. I smoked pot when I was fourteen. I’ve told you that. Do you have an erection?”

“I do. Yes. You’re beautiful.”

“Well, shut the door. I can’t help you with that right now.”

In the kitchen, both of us clothed, neither of us still lugging an engorged sex organ, we had our second cups of coffee.

“You look worried,” I said.

She said, “I’m not worried.” After a pause: “Okay, I am. I don’t know. This isn’t great.”

“It’s not great,” I agreed. “But how bad is it?”

“It’s not that bad.”

“At least Krissy’s not doing heroin. That we know of.”

“I’m pretty sure she is not into heroin.”

“Or meth. That would be bad.”

“I tried meth when I was seventeen.”

“You did?”

“Yeah.” Clara shrugged. “A few times.”

“Well, no. No. You tried it once. After that, you weren’t just trying it anymore.”

“We need to have a conversation with her about this.”

“I already had one with her.”

“We need to have a better conversation. A real one. You know what I mean; don’t give me that look.”

I knew what she meant. Clara knew how to really talk, especially to Kristin.

So we worked all day, or most of the day. We work from home. We have office jobs without the offices. It’s great.

We cleared our late-afternoon schedules so we could intercept Kristin when she returned home. She walked in with her headphones on and found us sitting in the living room.

She stopped when she saw us and said, “You’re kidding me.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Clara asked.

I said, standing, “Do you smoke crystal meth? Kristin. Tell us the truth.”

Greta came around the corner behind Kristin. “What’s up, guys?” she said.

I hadn’t expected her to be there. Neither had Clara.

Clara said, “Kristin, why are you wearing headphones when Greta’s here with you?”

Greta said, “We don’t like the same music. She keeps her headphones on in my car so she doesn’t have to hear mine.”

“You don’t talk to each other?”

Greta said, “Not with my music playing.”

“I’ve never even seen meth,” Kristin said, finally answering my question.

“I’ve seen meth,” said Greta. “Didn’t try it, though; they didn’t offer me any.”

“Greta,” I said, “you’re not even supposed to look at meth. Do you want some coffee?”

She did want some coffee. And I wanted to leave Clara and Kristin alone. They had to talk.

I went to the kitchen. Greta followed. I got a whole pot of coffee going. I mean, why not? I asked Greta how her day had gone.

“It was fine,” she said. “Is Kris in trouble?”

“Sort of. It’s complicated.”

“You know about the weed, then.”

“I guess you do it, too? Do your parents know?”

“No way. They’re not nearly as cool as you guys. They’re absolute freaks—in an uptight way, I mean. They get passionate about organizing closets.”

I wondered two things: How did Kristin talk about me and Clara when we weren’t around, and how did I not assume by now that Greta was getting my daughter high every morning before school? She had on a hemp necklace. She had a look in her eye that told you that even if she wasn’t stoned right then, she would be in the next forty-eight hours. Well, let’s be honest: the next four hours.

But wait a second.

I said, “How many times have you and Kristin smoked before school in the morning?”

“Just once.”

“Did she tell you to say that?”

“No. Did she say she would tell me to say that?”

“Greta, no. If she was going to tell you that, why would she tell me first?”

Greta shrugged.

I said, “Did you get Krissy started with this?”

“With smoking? No. She started on her own, with your stuff.”

I nodded. My head felt heavy. “She learned it from watching me. How long have you been doing it?”

“Shoot. Uh. Two years?”

“Has Kristin been doing it that long?”

“No. For her it’s been, like, less than a year. She doesn’t really do it that much.”

“She shouldn’t do it at all.”

“Probably not. It’s better than drinking, though. Our classmate died from drunk driving.”

“I remember.”

“And we don’t drive high. We’re really safe about it. What are you most afraid of, Mr. York?”

“What am I most afraid of?” I sighed.

“Yeah. You can tell me.”

Could I? Really?

Why not.

“I’m afraid,” I said, pouring Greta and myself mugs of coffee, “that my wife is only pretending to still love me.” It may seem strange, my sharing this with Greta, but I’m an open book, always. “I’m afraid that as soon as Kristin’s gone to college or she sees a different opportunity, Clara will drop me completely. Move out of the house or kick me out. And I’ll be all alone because it’s too late for me to go on dates, I’ve only looked worse every year since we met. And Kristin will blame me for the breakup, even if it’s not my fault. She’ll never talk to me again. It could happen literally any day.”

I sipped the coffee I had poured for myself.

“I meant,” said Greta, “what are you most afraid is going to happen to Kristin? Because of the weed thing.”

“Oh.”

“Are you really scared about all that? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Greta.”

“It’s so bleak.”

“I know it is. It’s my greatest fear. I thought that’s what you were asking me.”

I sipped more coffee. Greta sipped hers.

“Really, though,” she said, “what’s your worst-case scenario? For Kris?”

“There isn’t one. Or, that’s not true. I don’t want her getting into anything more serious than weed. I don’t want her smoking crack—or doing cocaine.”

“She’s not smoking crack. And no one does cocaine anymore.”

“My friend Jim does cocaine. He makes a lot of money, too. A lot more than I do.”

Before I followed that thought to its natural conclusion—that I should get my hands on some cocaine—Clara and Kristin entered the kitchen. Their eyes were puffed. They had been crying.

I said, “Is everything okay?”

Kristin gave me a big hug, the likes of which she hadn’t given me in a long time. She said, “I’m sorry, Daddy.”

I said, “It’s okay.” I patted her back. “I just want you to be safe. And make lots of money.”

“Fuck that,” she said, pulling back to wipe tears from her eyes.

It really was okay, though. I had already known it was more or less okay—”it” being our whole situation, or life, or whatever.

But that must have been the precise moment when I knew, definitively, that I didn’t care if Kristin smoked cannabis like her father and mother did. Yes, Clara smokes it, too, just not as often as I do.

As long as it didn’t interfere with other aspects of life, what difference did it make? As long as Kristin wasn’t high all the time, what was the harm?

Greta was right. Smoking cannabis was far better than drinking, which was a problem in my family and in Clara’s family. It killed her father and his parents, killed my aunt and uncle, nearly killed my sister before she quit and got religious. It’s far more dangerous to drink than it is to smoke weed. Whether they’re driving or operating heavy machinery, or just hanging out and trying not to break anything, I’d rather have a stoned person do it than a drunk one.

Anyway. That whole episode ended without anything really changing, but with everyone feeling better about the status quo. Kristin didn’t quit smoking, nor did I, nor did Clara. Nor did Greta, I guess.

We didn’t punish Kristin, because she outgrew punishments long ago. They never even worked in the first place. She was always the same impossible child after she was punished as she was before it.

The following week, we had another Song Night. It was better. I felt certain Kristin was high that time, again, but so was I.

She played for me “The Magic Number” by De La Soul, which I’d heard before, though I pretended I hadn’t. I played for her the first song from The Low End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest, and she liked it. She hadn’t heard it. Or she pretended not to have heard it, like I had with “The Magic Number,” the song that says three is the magic number because De La Soul has three guys in it.

Two nights later, that Friday, Kristin and Greta were in Kristin’s room for a while. When they emerged, Greta was holding something made of glass. It was purple, and at first I thought it was a sex toy, which made me feel like I was about to have a panic attack.

Then I saw it was a thing made for smoking stuff out of. Like tobacco.

“Hello?” Clara said, looking up from her phone.

We were watching Succession, but when the TV is on, no matter what we’re watching, Clara looks at her phone.

Kristin said, biting her lip, “Greta thinks we have to get high together.”

“I think it’s the only way,” Greta said.

“The only way to what?” asked Clara.

“To fix everything. Kris told me how tense you’ve all been since the other day.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “No one’s tense. We’ve been normal.”

“Exactly,” said Greta. “You’re tense people. I can feel it just standing here.”

Clara said, “Greta, do you talk to all your friends’ parents like this?”

“No,” she said. “You guys are cooler than other parents. Mine especially.”

I knew she was flattering us. I also knew it was true. Most parents are fucking idiots.

“Why,” asked Clara, “do you think us getting high together would be a good thing?”

“I just think it’ll, I don’t know, make things clearer? When you smoke with someone, you’re vulnerable with them. You let yourself be your realest self. You have to.”

She kept talking, but I didn’t pay attention.

I wouldn’t have the best memory of what she said even if I had been listening, because when she finally shut her mouth we all went to the back porch and smoked out of the thing she’d been holding on to.

It was, she said, a steamroller. I’d heard of them but never used one. The way it works is, there’s a hole at the end of the pipe. First you light the weed, cover the hole, and inhale. Then you uncover it and keep inhaling so that all the smoke that’s collected in the body of the steamroller rushes past your mouth into your lungs.

If you’d asked me last year if I would ever smoke weed with my daughter, wife, and daughter’s best friend, I would have said no. But Clara and I had been planning to share a joint halfway through Succession anyway. And it wasn’t like Kristin’s smoking was a secret anymore.

Once we were all sufficiently high, we went back inside and resumed Succession. Greta and Kristin sat with us, not on the couch but on the floor nearby.

“What is this show even about?” Kristin asked.

“Rich people who hate each other,” Clara said.

I said, “It’s like a highbrow version of those reality shows you watch. About wealthy people from the same family who all have massive problems. It’s funny.”

“It doesn’t seem funny,” said Greta.

“It just looks dark,” said Clara, “so it doesn’t seem funny at first. It takes a couple episodes to catch on.”

“It’s like Arrested Development,” I said, “but with a different tone.”

“What’s Arrested Development?” Greta asked.

Clara paused Succession. “Are you kidding me, Greta?”

“About what?”

It turned out, we actually were the worst parents ever, because we’d been raising Kristin for seventeen years and she hadn’t seen Arrested Development. Greta hadn’t either, obviously. So we switched over to Netflix, and Clara found the episode where Michael thinks his brother’s Colombian girlfriend is cheating on him with a guy named Hermano.

The show was as funny as the first time we watched it because for two of the people in our crew, it was the first time they’d seen it. Plus we were high, so for that reason it felt new. It was a good time, and it wasn’t weird like it was a week later, when Greta returned to our house.

She’d been to our house several times in the interim. She comes over a lot.

Clara went to answer the doorbell, saying, “I bet I know who that is”—and found, when she opened the door, that it wasn’t only the Greta she expected, but also the man and woman who had brought her into the world. Greta’s parents.

They really aren’t cool parents.

I mean, I’m not cool. Not at all. Every truly cool person in the world would agree that Clara and I are, despite the flora we smoke, pretty square. But those two are at a whole other level. A squarer one. Like, if we are squares, then they are cubes. Jake and Susan.

They’re tall, like Greta, and blond like Greta. Jake smiles a lot, Susan doesn’t. She wears braces and possibly doesn’t like to smile because she’s shy about wearing braces at age forty-six or whatever.

Like me and Clara, they are products of the Midwest, but unlike us they never left. They have blue eyes and look like they shop for clothes at a little-known boutique called Casual Church Picnic.

Clara said, “Oh!” when she saw all three of them standing there. Three.

The magic number.

“Hello,” said Jake, Greta’s dad, as he walked in. “Greta said you had something to tell us.” Jake is a direct person. He is friendly and good-natured. Direct, though. When he comes to the house, he just walks in.

He didn’t sound upset. He sounded curious to know what Greta had been talking about. Which Clara was, too, just like I was, as I walked into the living room to join them all, having no clue what was going on.

Clara turned to me as I approached and said, “Do I have something to tell them?” brushing her hair back with one hand like Helen Hunt.

“Actually,” Greta said, “Mom? Dad? I’m the one who has something to tell you.” She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, opened her eyes. “I didn’t make those chocolates I gave you on the way here. I lied about that.”

“Okay,” said Jake. “Who made them?”

“What are you talking about?” asked Susan.

“I don’t know who made them,” Greta said. “Like, I don’t know what guy it was. Or lady. My friend got them at the dispensary.”

Susan squinted. “What dispensary? What is that?”

Oh, no, I thought. Oh, fucking no.

I said, though I didn’t want to say it, “A dispensary is where you buy cannabis products. Now that it’s legal.”

Susan said, “What are you saying?”

Jake said, “Did you feed us drugs?”

Clara said, “We didn’t know about this. We had no idea. Greta, my god, what were you thinking?”

“We got stoned here last week,” said Greta. “All four of us. We watched this crazy old show.”

“Arrested Development is not old,” I said, and then thought maybe it was.

Jake’s face was bright red now that he’d had a second to process his situation. He took Greta by the arm and said, “We are going home.”

“No, we’re not,” she said, pulling away. “You can’t drive with twenty-five milligrams of THC in your system.”

I said, “Jesus Christ, Greta. Twenty-five?”

She nodded.

“Each?”

She kept nodding.

Susan’s face was white. “Is that a lot?” she asked.

“Yes,” Clara said. “It’s way too much.”

Jake said, “I don’t feel anything. Is this a practical joke?”

“It takes a while to take effect,” said Clara. “You can’t drive home. It’ll hit you soon. Oh, god. Come sit. I’ll get you water.”

Jake said, “I’m fine. I’m not staying here. Greta, come on. Let’s go.”

I said, “It really is dangerous, to drive when you’re high.”

“I’m not high!”

“Jake, I’m sorry. You’re going to be high soon.”

“I don’t do drugs,” he said, looking at Susan. “We don’t do drugs.”

“You do now,” Greta said.

Was she trying to get herself killed?

“Is this something you people do?” Jake asked.

“Drug people?” I said. “Without their consent? Absolutely not.”

“He means,” said Clara, “do we use cannabis.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, we do that a lot. It’s great.”

“I’m scared,” said Susan.

“Don’t be scared,” said Greta. “It’s beautiful. You’re about to have the time of your life.”

“Bullshit,” Jake barked.

“It’s really not going to be any fun,” I said. “You’ll be lucky if you’re not comatose in twenty minutes.”

“He’s exaggerating,” Clara said, “and that’s not helpful, John. You’ll be fine, you just have to ride this out.”

Susan asked, “How do you know so much about marijuana?”

“We don’t know that much,” I said.

Clara said, “We’ve been smoking for a long time.”

Jake sat on the couch and shook his head.

Was he feeling it yet?

It was strange. These parents were older than us by several years, but they had no experience with this controlled substance that when I was growing up was a rite of passage. Everyone smoked weed at some point, even if it was to try it and find out they didn’t like it.

Where the hell had these two been? Had they never in their lives gone to a party?

No, I thought. Probably not.

They looked frightened and angry. Susan sat with her hands clenched between her knees. Her eyes darted around the room like we might have on one of our walls a blacklight poster of a languid wizard holding a long pipe out of which he’s smoking some uncertain substance, with a dragon standing behind him, also smoking a pipe. Weed art, I mean, the likes of which you’d expect to see on the walls of college dorm rooms.

But we didn’t have any art on our walls. We did have a clock.

“It’s going to be all right,” I said, sitting in the chair nearest to them while Clara brought them glasses of water. “It’ll be intense, but it’s like having too much to drink. It messes with your mood, and you feel bad. Then it’s over. You’re back to normal. It’s easy to forget that once it’s over, you’ll get your life back.”

Jake looked at me like he didn’t know what to say.

“It might even be kind of fun,” I said, “before it gets bad.”

Clara said, “I can drive you home once you level off. I just don’t think you should be in a car when it hits you.”

“Why not?” asked Susan.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Clara said. “You might throw up.”

“Cars are the worst place to throw up,” I said. “I’ve done it.”

“I don’t think they need to hear details about that,” Clara said, which was smart because I was about to offer details. “The best thing is to go home and sleep through it.”

“You’ll probably wake up feeling normal,” I said, “and you’ll have had the best night’s sleep of your life.”

Then I had an idea. I asked if they’d ever watched Arrested Development.

“Of course,” said Susan. “What does that have to do with anything?” After she said that, she gazed into the middle distance, as if she could watch the words she’d spoken float across the room.

It was happening. She was beginning to be high.

It was good to learn that we all had one thing in common. We hadn’t tried the same drugs, and they might vote for all the wrong people, but at least we’d watched one of the same TV shows. I said, “It helps to have something to focus on.” I went to Netflix again, found the show again. “I mean, there’s a reason why when people get stoned, they veg out on the couch. Weed and TV are a grand combination.”

Jake was glaring at Greta. “I still don’t feel anything,” he said.

“I feel something,” Susan said, watching her own hand.

As the show began, I remembered something.

“Do we still have those CBD tablets?” I asked Clara. “The ones your sister gave you?”

She said, “I think so. Why?”

“Because CBD helps.”

“How would it help?”

“It’s one of the active chemicals in cannabis,” I told everyone, like I was giving a public service announcement. “THC makes you high, CBD makes you sleepy. It calms you, and when you add it to your system, it kind of neutralizes the THC.”

Clara said, “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

I said, “I don’t really, either. I just know that the weed strains they put in chocolates like the ones you had are all THC, and if you want to not be as high as you’re about to be, you take CBD. Or chew peppercorns.

“It’s true. Neil Young says so, anyway. If you get too high, chew peppercorns. Scientists say CBD is better, but honestly, in the world of weed wisdom, Neil Young outranks all scientists. It’s never worked for me, though. It just made me taste pepper.”

Susan said, “You mean I have to take more of this stuff if I want to feel normal?”

I said, “Oh, no. You won’t be feeling normal for a while. I just mean, take CBD if you want to be able to stand up in an hour.”

“John,” said Clara, “why don’t you go find the CBD capsules?”

I went to the basement and found the bottle of CBD capsules. When I brought it upstairs, I could feel the tension in the room. I tried to melt it with a joke. I said, “I just got off the phone with High Times. They want you two on their next cover, isn’t that crazy?”

But no one found my joke funny. I didn’t know how much CBD to give them, so I gave them each a capsule.

I think it helped. In the half hour that followed—which we all spent watching Arrested Development with less mirth than the last time we’d watched it—neither of them had a stroke or whatever happens when you take enough THC to give an elephant bloodshot eyes. They merely sat still and didn’t say anything.

Greta asked if the rest of us should get high, in solidarity with her parents.

Jake growled to indicate that he did not want her to do that.

Heather Graham was on the TV when Greta turned to me and asked, “Did you talk to Clara about her leaving you?”

Clara was sitting between me and Greta. “What did you say?” she asked.

“It’s nothing,” I said.

“It’s not nothing,” said Greta. “I think you should talk about it.”

“Greta,” I said, “what the hell has gotten into you?”

“She’s always like this,” Kristin said. “What is she talking about?”

“Yeah,” said Clara, “what is this about, John? What did you do?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I did nothing.”

Greta turned to Clara and said, “He’s scared you’re going to leave him. It’s his greatest fear.”

“How do you know that?”

“He told me,” she said. “I thought you would have talked about it by now.”

“Why would we talk about it?” I said.

“Because you have to. It festers if you don’t. Like a dead animal.”

“It’s true,” said Susan, eyes glued to the screen. “You have to talk about stuff. Or it’s dead animals.”

Greta laughed. “Oh, man,” she said.

“Why are you afraid I’ll leave you?” Clara asked me. “What did you do?”

“Yeah, Dad,” Kristin said. “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I did nothing. I’m just scared you’ll leave.”

“Why, though?”

“Because it’s what people do.”

Jake was looking at me. “Not everyone does it,” he said.

“I know that.”

“Oh, god,” he said. “Oh, god.”

I said, “What?”

“Does my voice always sound this way? Am I like this all the time?”

“No,” Clara said. “Well, yes. But you’re going to be fine.” To me, she said, “John, I’m not going to leave you. Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Things are changing all the time. Kristin is growing up. She’s going to leave soon. People split up when that happens. And I’m scared.”

“Well, I’m scared, too,” she said, and she reached across Greta and held my hand. “We’re scared together, like always. I don’t want that to change. Kristin can leave or stay; it won’t affect how I feel about you.”

I nodded. “Okay,” I said and felt something welling up in me.

“See?” said Greta, patting my shoulder. “It helps to talk about things.”

“Greta,” I said, sweeping a hand through my hair in frustration.

“You really need to learn boundaries,” said Clara.

“Maybe I do,” Greta said, “but I got you two talking, didn’t I?”

The episode ended. Only Susan had been paying attention. It was time for us to drive these people home.

Jake and Susan had eyes as red as stop signs, and when they stood, they did it slowly. The CBD must have helped, because they weren’t lying on the floor, drooling, speaking in tongues, or doing all three at once.

Clara would drive them back in their car. I would follow in my car and bring Clara home. Clara, I was certain, would apologize to them all the way that they’d had to go through this. She might help them into their house. If they let her, she’d help them into their bed, where they’d sink into the mattress and leave behind their waking nightmare for a series of literal nightmares that would play out behind their eyes until they awoke together, groggy but otherwise okay.

Kristin said she’d ride in the car with me.

“Why?” I said. “You hate my car.”

“Because,” she said, “it’s Wednesday night.”

“Far out, Krissy. Just stay here.”

“It’s Song Night, Dad.”

“You want to have Song Night in the car?”

“I don’t know. Yeah.”

I shrugged. “All right,” I said. It was good enough for me.

We got in my 2008 Honda Accord—it’s really an awful car; I don’t blame Kristin for how she feels about it—and she plugged the aux cable into her phone.

A few seconds later, as we pulled away, I heard fuzzy white noise—then a drum, a guitar, a keyboard, and someone going, “Bu-bu-da-dum” over and over again.

It was, I learned later, “I Am the River” by Lael Neale. I hadn’t heard it before.

She sang that she was the river. She sang some other things. And the song was like the fastest, saddest, most desperate anthem of all time. She cried out that like a river, we were all moving.

I wasn’t high, but the music moved through me as if I were. And the car was moving, too, so the song was moving with the car, and everything was moving.

By the third verse, I had a feeling I have had but which I almost never have. It was the feeling of knowing you’re hearing a song that’s telling you about the time you’re living in, that shows you where you are on the map of your unfinished life. It sticks a pin in the world and says, “Look. Pay attention.”

Lael Neale reminded me of something: that people are not the same right now as they were five minutes ago or five seconds ago. There’s no such thing as static electricity. There’s no such thing as a static person. Everyone is changing every moment of every day. They’re hearing songs that make their minds turn on a dime. They’re getting dosed with recreational drugs by young women who only exist because of them.

People leave each other. They stay together. No matter what they do, they’re never the same as they were. They are always moving downstream.

Would I have preferred it if none of this had happened? Would I have liked it more if Kristin didn’t smoke weed? If she’d never taken up the habit?

Of course I would have preferred that. The whole situation was weird. Everything was strange. I would have liked for my little girl to never touch the stuff I smoked. I would have preferred that she get into fitness and nutrition. But I’m nothing like that, myself. I hate fitness and nutrition. Why would she be into that stuff? Being into that stuff sucks ass.

And wishing Kristin could go back to not smoking weed is like how I wish she could be a baby again, for just a few minutes sometimes. I would hold her like I did when she was three months old and on the day she was born. I would feed her mushy peas and press my thumb against the bridge of her nose. But there’s no going back to that. It’s all gone.

Kristin was gone, even though she was right beside me.

She cried so hard when she entered the living world. I stood by as she was born, one of the first to lay eyes on the crown of her little bald head. Starting that instant, I wanted to spend all the time I had left reassuring her that life would be okay, even when it wasn’t, even if she would have to keep moving all the time and never stop, like the woman who insists she is a river and has written a song that proves it.

“What do you think?” asked Kristin. “Wait. Shit. Why are you crying, Dad?”

I shook my head. “A lot of things are too much. All the time.”

“What?”

“It’s a good song.”

“It’s not that good.”

“Do you know how I used to go out a lot? Like, to have coffee and read books? I don’t do that anymore. I can’t anymore.”

“Like, as of right now?”

“No. Never mind.”

I didn’t even know what I was talking about.

I hadn’t gone to read in a coffee shop in a long time. I used to love to have coffee among people I didn’t know and read books I liked. But I hadn’t done it lately, I hadn’t wanted to, and I understood that little change to be a sign of how I’m always changing, despite how I stay mostly the same, across the years, plus or minus some extra pounds I’ve gained and the lines that have crept across my face.

Now I had to play a song for Kristin. That was the deal.

I didn’t have one prepared, and I couldn’t think. So I held the phone up to my mouth and told it to play “Stars and Stripes Forever” by John Philip Sousa.

I turned the volume up loud. Kristin looked at me like I’d lost my mind. And somehow, despite everything that was wrong and could never be fixed, I felt great. I was great. I was a river, one that could never be dammed or contained.

***

Robert Long Foreman wrote the novel Weird Pig and the short story collection I Am Here to Make Friends. His work has been in AGNI, Electric Literature, Cincinnati Review, and other magazines. He lives in Kansas City and at www.robertlongforeman.com.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal. In “Her Berliner,” a short affair leaves behind a lasting sense of possibility. Sometimes it’s enough, not taking them, to be shown alternatives, other paths you might have followed, the glimpse itself sustaining you for years to come. More sweet than bitter, Mara Finley’s elegant story is about letting an opportunity pass while keeping its promise alive in the heart.

Her Berliner

Mara Finley

 

Here is a scene: a man and a woman sit on a bench in a cemetery, sipping cappuccinos from small paper cups and tearing warm, flaky ribbons from a shared croissant. The man wears an oatmeal sweater, loose black pants, and leather sneakers without socks. He is tall, thin, and blond with gray-blue eyes. He says, they call those of us who are actually from here Berliners. The woman is also on the tall side, also thin. But she is dark-haired and wide-eyed, with an unmistakably Jewish nose. On their walk from the café to the cemetery, the man pointed out bullet holes in old buildings next to small, engraved plaques. He said, it’s illegal here to cover up traces of the war.

On the bench the woman runs her long fingers through the man’s short hair. She says, show me a picture of your daughter, then snaps a photo of him as he scrolls through his phone. His daughter’s name is Marlene. She beams at her father from the photo, also blonde but a bit chubby. A perfect age ten.

The woman has been in Berlin for nearly three weeks. She’d planned ten days then extended the trip. This is her last full day, and she does her best to stay in it. It’s a warm September morning, sunny, with just a hint of fall. At home in San Francisco, she is an uneasy woman, but with this man she feels her shoulders sigh, feels the warmth of her own steady breath. His hands are already a memory, calloused and gentle on the small of her back.

He says, let’s walk, and she slips her sandals back on. The streets in his neighborhood are narrow but not quite picturesque. She likes the quiet grit of this city, likes the graffiti art, the sooty train stations, and the doner kebab stands that stay open all night. The man takes the woman to a recreation area with sand volleyball courts and an elaborate, thick-roped climbing structure for children. Marlene loves it here, he says. He cannot introduce the woman to his daughter, but he wants to show her the texture of his days.

The woman wraps her arm around the man’s narrow waist, and the man drapes his arm across her bare shoulder. They walk like that for blocks, not saying anything. He takes her to a grassy clearing—it’s a park and a memorial, commemorating an atrocity committed at this very slab of still-standing wall. He translates another plaque for her. Years later, she remembers only the words firing squad. The man tells her that he was nineteen when the wall came down, and that he and his friends leapt drunkenly into the East. The Stasi chased us, he says, but they had a cease-and-desist order so couldn’t shoot.

The man has been sober for ten years now, ever since his daughter was born. He says this to the woman on their first night together, as he orders himself a nonalcoholic beer with her glass of rosé. She says, oh I’m so sorry, let’s get coffee instead. She is being polite, although could use the boldness of a buzz. Don’t worry, he says, I’m not that kind of alcoholic. They have a second round; they close the bar down. Outside the bar the streets are slick and glimmering from strands of lights hung high above their heads. She says, would you like to see my pretend apartment? He lights a cigarette, raises an eyebrow, grins. Is that a trick question? he says, exhaling a triangle of smoke. The man’s English is impeccable, the woman’s German nonexistent. Gut, she says, trying on the language with the tip of her tongue. Follow me.

 

The man says, I don’t do one night stands anymore. Without pause the woman replies, neither do I. Would you like to have a week-long vacation affair with me instead? She is staying at her friend’s apartment, but tonight the friend is with his boyfriend, so she is free to bring home strange men. The man is speechless for a moment, then says, um, definitely yes. She is an actress in her own movie, improvising between the lines. She dots the man with soft kisses: forehead, temple, lips. Usually she is the camera, but tonight she stays firmly within scene.

The man is beautiful but tired. The man is older than the woman, but neither are young. He says, tomorrow I have my daughter. She is tired too, but effervescent. She feels a kind of carbonation running through her veins. She asks the man about his daughter, his job, his city. She could talk to this man forever in her friend’s plant-filled living room. She doesn’t even crave her usual, ill-advised late-night glass of wine. She dots the man with a few last kisses, then sends him home around 4:00 AM, when dawn begins to break. She lingers for a moment in the empty living room before falling into the deepest sleep she can remember in her friend’s low, pillow-laden bed.

In the morning the woman wakes up late to the muffled sounds of her friend and his boyfriend speaking to each other in Spanish with German words thrown in. Her friend has given her his bedroom, and he and his boyfriend are sprawled on the L-shaped living room couch, shirtless, brown, and tattooed. She understands the words evolución and amor. They are discussing the terms of their open relationship again, which seems to be in constant, but not particularly contentious, flux. The friend gets up to make her espresso on the stovetop, and the boyfriend beckons her to join him on the couch. Buenos días cariña, he says, winking. Tell us everything about your night.

 

The woman doesn’t want to overstay her welcome, so she books herself an Airbnb. The apartment is in a gentrifying Turkish neighborhood, in an old, tall building on a tree-lined, cobblestone street. In the wide stairwell, stained glass windows cast primary-colored shadows on cracked white walls. The apartment is small but airy, with sheer curtains and vaguely Moroccan decor. She sits with a book on the little balcony off the kitchen, listening to a cover band play “Back in the USSR” on the street below. She thinks about the man, but also about the apartment. Since her early twenties, she has been with one man, then another, with a few flings in between. Lately, in her early forties, she feels herself losing faith in the idea of long-term romantic love. Or maybe she is just losing interest. She has never had an apartment of her own.

The woman texts the man pictures of the apartment, one of which is an artfully arranged still life of condoms, white wine, and non-alcoholic beer. He texts back a laughing emoji, a kissing emoji, and a cherry-red heart. Last night the woman wanted to talk to the beautiful man forever, but today she only wants his body and his face. She wants him naked, flushed, and silent. Wants to enjoy him while she listens to the hum of her own uncluttered mind.

 

The woman is not a napper, but she nods off easily after her uncharacteristic 4:00 AM night. When she wakes, she makes an espresso, then stirs in sugar with a doll-sized silver spoon. She walks to the Turkish market on the river, buys fat green olives, dolmas, and feta in brine. Danke, she says. You’re welcome, says the aproned shopkeeper as he slips a free container of hummus into her already overflowing plastic bag.

Later she takes the train to a new neighborhood to meet her friend and his boyfriend for drinks at an outdoor bar. The neighborhood is quiet and stately, with manicured hedges and elegant, understated shops. Well-groomed, white-haired men walk in pairs, some in matching leather boots and harnesses, others in shiny black gimp suits. It’s Folsom Street Fair, Berlin. The sidewalks are narrow, and the men step out of her way politely. Danke, she says, as she walks on, trying not to stare at leashes and ball gags. Aside from the cocktail waitress at the bar, she is the only woman in a world of men.

Her friend is wearing a gauzy white button down with striped, pink suspenders underneath. His boyfriend is wearing a mesh white tank with a bolo tie, a harness, and a black leather sailor hat. The woman is wearing jeans, a black leather jacket, and pointy ankle boots. Tough but femme, says her friend, brava. She laughs, orders a beer, and says, yeah well, when at Folsom Berlin. Her beer arrives fifteen minutes later in an enormous, sweating, tulip-shaped glass.

The friend and his boyfriend are going to a party at an underground bar across the street. Men gather around the steps, giddily waiting to descend into the pulsing, bass-heavy space below. Berlin is waking early from a global pandemic, but most clubs are still closed. The woman is relieved. The friend teases her lovingly, tries to get her to wear color, or at least leave her curly hair down. In the morning her friend announced his plan for their day: coffee, gym, dinner, drinks, dungeon. Luckily, thinks the woman, this dungeon only allows men.

The friend and his boyfriend have purchased the most elegant whip the woman has ever seen. She is no whip expert, but she likes the feel of this one’s smooth wooden handle, likes the feel of the soft leather tassels as she brushes them against her skin. Her friend takes a photo of her waving the whip. Years later, she crops the whip out and uses it as a profile picture. Tough, femme, and radiant, she thinks. Brava. The whip is her little secret, hovering just outside of frame.

The woman kisses the boyfriend and the friend, says, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, and heads back toward the train. The beautiful man is still working at the restaurant where she met him, but she knows he’ll be off soon. On the train she holds onto a cool metal pole, feels the rumble of the tracks vibrate in her bones, lets her expectant body sway. Back above ground, the trendy Turkish neighborhood is bustling in a hushed, un-American way. All around her are oversized glasses, voluminous scarves, architectural strollers, and identical platform boots. In the apartment she takes off her jacket, then her shoes. She opens the balcony doors and artfully arranges yet another still life—this time, a late-night Turkish feast. The man texts almost, and then, a little while later, on my way.

 

It’s late when the man arrives, so she tells him not to ring the bell. She slips down the stairs in socks, turns a series of locks to open the building’s heavy front door, then pulls him in by his shirt. Willkommen, she whispers, to my pretend apartment Number Two. The man says his sweat smells like the restaurant. She doesn’t mind, but she waits patiently while he showers, watching the steam curl up from a band of light at the base of the bathroom door. He joins her in the still life, revived. If this were a movie, she would feed him olives and dolmas, but she lets him feed himself. She lets him finish his nonalcoholic beer, too, before giving him the grand tour. Kitchen, she says. Balcony. Bed.

The man is a deft lover in a hushed, un-American way. She falls asleep sated, then wakes to the man smoking naked on the balcony around 4:00 AM. It’s chilly, she wraps herself in a towel. So tell me, says the man, are you married? He turns his head to exhale smoke away from her, then inhales again while he waits for her reply. Yes, she says. In the same even tone he says, still live together? This time she is the one to look away. Yes, she says. It’s awful. He reaches for her across the small, round table. Covers her hand with his own. Not awful, he says, just sad. I’m sorry. She gets up to pour herself a glass of water from the tap and feels something like relief as she walks barefoot across the cool, kitchen floor. Children? he asks, exhaling again. No, she says, wishing for a moment that she was a smoker too. The man stays mercifully quiet. He lets her have the next word. Do you think I’m a terrible person? she says. Oh no, he says, not at all. Married or not, you are free to do as you like.

She feels something like love, then, for this man who she will never really know. She leads him gratefully back to bed. Later, she nods off again, then wakes to the same scene as before. The woman is a night owl, but the man appears to be nocturnal. She says, come back to bed, meine liebe. She is not sure whether my love is meant to be used so casually, but the man does as she asks. Beautiful girl, he says, tracing her eyebrows and cheekbones in a hypnotic loop. She is no girl, but she takes the compliment willingly, like a delicate, breakable gift. He says, have you ever thought of going to couples counseling with your husband? She says, why would I do that if I don’t want to stay? He untangles her from the sheets and wraps his long body around her small frame. No, no, he says. Don’t do it to stay. Do it to make the leaving a bit less painful.

 

The next night, the man is with his daughter, the friend and boyfriend are out dancing, and the woman is alone. The man and his ex have a loose custody arrangement, which the woman finds admirable until she tries to make plans with the man. She falls asleep half reading, half thinking of the man and the unseen women in his orbit. Hours later, she wakes to the sound of her phone buzzing repeatedly. In the early morning dark, she feels a flash of fear when her next-door neighbor’s name appears on the small, bright screen. Her husband’s voice. Relief. I lost my phone, he says, then I panicked and crashed your car. My phone, he says. It’s my only connection to you. The husband’s story loops drunkenly like the West Berlin boys running from the Stasi, and the woman listens until she can’t listen anymore. It’s the middle of the night here, she says. I’m hanging up now.

 

The Berliner’s beauty is objective, but he is covered in crudely drawn, fading tattoos. Your tattoos are terrible, she says. Thank you for your honesty, he says, laughing. The woman wants a tiny tattoo, but she is too indecisive to settle on a design. Here, she says, showing him the inner seam of her small wrist. But it has to be perfect. He grabs both of her wrists, then, and pins them onto the pillows above her head. He says, who wants perfection? Then kisses her almost imperceptibly, like a fleeting, early morning dream.

 

When the woman leaves for the airport, her friend says, I’m so glad you came. His boyfriend says, be strong, don’t forget who you are. The woman is so glad she went. She is strong. She does not forget who she is. She rents an apartment of her own, small but bright, perched on the corner of a stately hill. She buys furniture slowly, with care—a blue chair, an orange lamp, a vintage teak coffee table, small enough for one. She sleeps soundly in the empty quiet. But she cannot afford the apartment, and she cannot walk away, as she’d thought she could, from her last chance to have a child. She goes to couples counseling with her husband, as advised. She returns to him, and together they have an objectively beautiful baby boy. She does not get a tiny tattoo.

 

The Berliner’s English has an odd, fairytale formation, and she files his lines away like crumpled fortune cookie notes. Years later, at the grocery store with her son or in bed with a book while her husband sleeps, she feels for them in the secret pockets of her mind: Beautiful girl, who wants perfection? Do as you like. You are free, you are free, you are free.

***

Mara Finley’s essays and reviews appear or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review and The Rumpus. She is an MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction and recipient of the Agnes Butler Award for Literary Excellence at Saint Mary’s College of California. She is also the recipient of the O’Dwyer Scholarship for the 2023 Community of Writers Summer Fiction Workshop. She lives in San Francisco.

In “Wilderness Survival,” which first appeared in TMR issue 46.3 (Fall 2023), a recently widowed mom does her best to support her young daughter, who becomes an avid student of wilderness survival techniques as a way of coping with her father’s death. Genevieve Abravanel’s effervescent story builds toward an unexpected conclusion that offers insight into the bewildering process of grieving and healing in the aftermath of loss.

Wilderness Survival

Genevieve Abravanel

 

I. Water Is Life

I had mostly tuned out the noise of YouTube in the living room when Candy asked me for a condom. I stared at her. She’s ten.

“I’ll just look in your bathroom,” she said.

I sat still for a moment. On the Internet, someone laughed. Then I took a deep breath and walked to the bathroom. I didn’t hurry. There were no condoms in the bathroom. There were a few left in the nightstand, and they weren’t likely to be used.

But when I reached the bathroom, Candy wasn’t there. She was already in the bedroom, sitting on her father’s side of the bed, a frown of concentration as she tried to tear open the orange foil square.

“Let me help you,” I said and caught myself. “Why do you need a condom?”

“I don’t need it.”

“Is this for school?”

Candy shook her head, fitted the foil zigzags between her teeth, and delicately ripped the package open. She grinned as she wiggled the little latex sleeve out, like unwrapping a long-awaited Christmas present.

“What for, then?”

“You’ll see.”

It had only been six months since her father died, leaving us both adrift. My sister kept reminding me that Candy needed time. She would open up, and it didn’t mean anything that we never talked about it.

Candy pressed the condom to her mouth. I made a little squeak of protest. She blew into it hard, her cheeks puffing, her face turning red.

“Is this about … something called a blow job?”

Candy pinched the end of the inflated condom. It looked like a balloon. She turned it in the light of the lamp, and the condom gave off an eerie glow. “It can start a fire.”

“What?”

She looked between the bedroom window and the rumpled red comforter. Her father had picked it out. I hadn’t liked it then, but it had grown on me.

Candy touched the comforter like she was testing its flammability. I needed to get her a therapist. I shouldn’t have waited.

“Hang on,” said Candy, her eyes glinting.

She ran with the condom-balloon into the bathroom, and I found her there, releasing the air. The condom shriveled. Candy fitted it around the mouth of the sink’s faucet. She turned on the tap, and the condom sagged as it filled.

“In an emergency situation,” said Candy, “a condom can serve as a useful drinking bladder.”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “Joe Wilderness.”

________

Her obsession had begun while her dad was in the hospital, during the worst of it, in waiting rooms, even at his bedside. She’d started watching on her tablet, and I noticed that instead of homework or Minecraft there was now a bare-chested man demonstrating how to build a shelter from fallen tree limbs. Candy chewed her fingernails and soaked in every demo, every word, like she was committing it to her deepest memory.

Her dad made fun of it once, but lightly. “Who’s this big guy?” he asked Candy, straining his neck to see. “Where’s his shirt? Can’t he make some clothes out of twigs and leaves?”

Candy ignored him, which was painful for both him and me.

“The useless dad,” he said. Oh, his sense of humor, his amazing ridiculousness. At that time, I was always, always on the brink of tears.

“Not totally useless,” I said.

________

Now, Joe Wilderness was the most consistent male presence in my daughter’s life. After school, Candy liked to curl up with her tablet and put on an episode. There are years of episodes, hours upon hours of footage. Joe Wilderness spends months at a time in the wild, live on the Internet. He videos his every waking moment, and my daughter is right there with him, watching.

I let her keep the condom. That night, as I lay awake under the red comforter, a persistent murmur reached me from Candy’s bedroom. That deep, knowing voice with a touch of an Australian accent. Joe came from a blended family: Australian and Thai, a bevy of stepbrothers and sisters. I knew far too much about him. Candy shouldn’t have the tablet at this hour. It was almost midnight.

Inside the bedroom, the covers were tented over Candy’s head. From beneath, a muted glow, flickering patterns of light. Joe’s familiar voice explained about cordage and something called belaying.

For the moment, Candy didn’t know I was there. She was in her temple of sound and light. After my ragged hours in bed trying to sleep, this felt soothing. She couldn’t shut me out if she didn’t know I was there.

I stood and watched the patches of light shift in intensity beneath my daughter’s covers. I felt close to her.

Then she threw the covers off. “You’re there,” she said.

“Yes.”

Joe Wilderness continued to speak, and it was strange to remember that he couldn’t hear us.

Before I could ask for the tablet, Candy made a space for me on the bed. She patted it.

“It’s late,” I said, but I was already crawling in beside her, allowing her to burrow into my side as Joe Wilderness, fully dressed for once, hacked his way across an endless field of snow.

 

II. Fire Is Danger

The next morning was Saturday, and we were both exhausted. But Candy seemed happy to see me. The tablet wasn’t on. The house was strangely quiet. “It’s charging,” said Candy.

“You want my tablet?”

“No.”

Candy seemed to consider how best to phrase her next words. “I want us to try it.”

“Try what?”

“Surviving.” Candy looked away, as if she’d already said too much. The force of her innocence hit me. “We’re doing just fine, baby,” I told her.

“No.” Her tone was urgent but clipped. “Actually surviving.”

I glanced toward the kitchen. “You could learn how to cook.”

She nodded. “I’d have to hunt first.”

“Or clean. We really could clean up around here.”

Candy sniffed dismissively, that smile coming back into her eyes. I would do anything to keep it there. Her eyes had been dull lately. “I have a better idea,” she said.

________

Candy disappeared into the yard for the rest of the day. Late that afternoon, she came and fetched me. I hadn’t heard the tablet since last night.

Possibly I should have kept a closer eye on her, I thought as I surveyed the damage. The yard was completely destroyed, worse than if a pack of dogs had made it their private romper room. The tulip bulbs that my husband had planted were all dug up and arranged in a heap. Sticks of various sizes lay jumbled. Piles of leaves dotted the yard in a mysterious pattern. And in the yard’s far corner, where we used to have flowers, stood a circle of stones.

“What happened to the daffodils?” I asked her.

“The roots are calorie rich.”

I knew she was just echoing Joe. Strangely, I felt a flush of pride that she, a young girl, wasn’t planning to diet.

She led me to the ring of stones. It all felt fairly druidic. “Here, Mom. We’re going to start a fire.”

“I might have one of your father’s lighters somewhere.”

Candy cast me a severe glance. “We can’t use his lighter.”

“No?”

“That’s cheating.” Candy jutted out her jaw. “You don’t think we can do it.” There was the sound of a child’s dare in her words, and I felt myself rising to resist it, as if I too were a child.

“No, no, we can,” I said, though I doubted it.

Candy sighed and took out a knife. One of the steak knives from the kitchen with a black plastic handle. She grabbed a thick branch and dragged it toward her.

I wanted to take the knife from her, but I didn’t because this felt important. Like if I didn’t let her try, she wouldn’t grow up right and would be forever stunted by my inability to meet her where she was.

“Careful,” I said.

With deft strokes away from her body, Candy shaved the branch, wicking away the dark, moist bark. The knife got stuck, and she had to shake it free. “You want to get to the dry heart of the wood. Away from the wet.” She nodded her chin at me. “Go gather leaves and grass. The drier the better.”

My journey around the yard felt unfamiliar. I’d never looked from this angle, from below. How damp everything was in western Pennsylvania in the fall. Moist fungus nestled into the grass; snails and maggots burrowed their slick bodies beneath the logs; everything seemed soft, alive, changing. The ground smelled earthy and nutritive. I was beginning to understand it, this obsession with the natural world. It was full of marvels.

But when I returned from my circuit with a few fall leaves and the tops of untrimmed grass, Candy scowled at me. “Too wet and not enough.”

A tangle of sticks and twine lay at her feet. With the steak knife, she sawed through a piece of twine from her father’s stash in the garage and tied it to a stick, as I had seen Joe Wilderness do once in a video. It formed a small bow. A toy for an elven archer.

“Bow drills,” she said, and nodded with her chin. “There’s one for you.”

With the knife, Candy dug a hole into a broken split of branch. She began to twirl one of the bows in its socket.

I watched her, then fitted the other drill into a small chunk of wood. There was a little notch where the sharpened stick went in. Candy had made it, and it looked real. We spun our bow drills. We spun and spun. I thought of the fairy tales of women spinning: the pricked fingers, the ounce of blood. But here we were in the fading light of the backyard, together in a way we hadn’t been in some time. We had a shared purpose.

After a good hour with no fire, no sparks, no indication of any kind that this drill was in fact intended to produce flames, Candy groaned. I shook out my wrist.

“Maybe we should take a break for dinner,” I said.

Candy shook her head and continued, aggressively, to spin.

I wanted to go in but was afraid I’d lose it, this tenuous line cast out to her in the twilight, so I stayed. We sat together as the evening went from dim to dark and our neighbor’s porch light clicked on. A minute later, ours began to flicker. It needed a new bulb, had for weeks. That hadn’t been my job, changing bulbs, maintaining the house’s chipped exterior. And I was hardly managing my own household jobs: keeping the toilets scrubbed and the counters clean. Though of course, now all the jobs were mine.

Sometimes a voice in my head spoke plainly: You’re not going to make it.

Candy hunched, one shoulder lifted, leaning into the drill, cranking and cranking. My wrist hurt, my back hurt, and my foot had fallen asleep.

“It’s past dinner.”

Candy grunted.

“I can’t leave you out here in the dark.”

“If we make a fire,” she said, “it won’t be dark.”

“You can’t set a fire out here by yourself. That’s not safe. We’re going in.”

“Five more minutes.”

I sighed and set a timer on my phone. Its light flashed, artificial, violating the darkness of the backyard, the wildness of it.

Candy leaned forward. She cranked hard on the drill, and then I saw it. A little orange glow, a quick spark, primal and alive. The spark leaped for the pile of wood shavings and damp leaves, but it didn’t catch.

“Shit,” said Candy, and I bit back a reprimand.

Candy cranked hard again, trying to reproduce the spark, but it didn’t come. She dropped the drill. The timer on my phone went off, bright and chipper, a relentless digital music. I fumbled and silenced it. The phone cast light everywhere. In its glow, we could see the wood shavings, splintery and pale, clinging to our pants and sleeves.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit,” said Candy.

 

III. Watch the Animals, You Might Learn Something

After Candy went to bed, I returned to the yard and poured water on the drills and shavings. I stomped on them. She would be angry, yes, but I couldn’t risk her strange obsession burning our house down. I was still the parent. Someone had to be.

The next day, if Candy was upset after surveying the backyard, she didn’t let on. It felt like something had shifted between us, or maybe I just hoped so. She disappeared wordlessly to school, and I sat down to work on my freelance assignments. They didn’t pay the bills, never had, but I was choosing not to think about that.

One of my editors, Maureen, who was also a friend, was setting me up on an assignment. As in—she was setting me up with a man I’d never met, even though it had barely been six months, even though I hadn’t remotely asked for this.

Maureen wanted to send me to the monkey lab to meet a guy who worked there and would show me around. I’d turn in two thousand words on the twinkle in his eye for the “cool jobs” section of her teen magazine. Easy.

“You’ll like Harrison,” she said.

“I’m not ready to date.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not a date.”

________

I showed up ten minutes early, intending to get my bearings before being forced into a social encounter, but Harrison was waiting outside.

My first impression was that he was large. A tall, hefty white guy with a curly, reddish-brown head of hair, a copper-colored beard, and an untucked, red-checked button-down shirt. He looked so unlike my husband as to be an alien. My husband had been small and Mediterranean-dark like me.

I smiled. He smiled. Although he seemed friendly, I approached him warily. I wondered what Maureen had said about me.

“I’m here about the monkeys,” I said, and Harrison laughed like I’d made a joke.

I tried to put myself in the right frame of mind for viewing monkeys, but Harrison took me to see fish. An entire wall of clear tanks, a lone fish in each, their tails fluttering and diaphanous.

“These are betas,” he said.

“Why one per tank?”

“Oh, they fight. Watch this.” Without needing a step stool, Harrison held a small mirror up to one of the tanks. The beta immediately began to quiver.

“It thinks it sees another male. It wants to fight.”

“What about the females?”

“They’re pretty aggro, too.”

In the next room were the rats. Cages and cages of them stacked like shoeboxes, more even than the beta tanks.

“These are the young males,” said Harrison. “Two to a cage. The mothers with children. And there are the fathers.” Harrison pointed off to the rats alone in their cages.

“The fathers?”

“We can’t house them with anyone,” he said, almost apologetically. “Once a male has bred, he’ll fight another male. One of them won’t survive.”

And the tour went on like this. Turtles separated for biting. Bunnies too dangerous to breed. Even in the monkey chambers, there were a father and son forced to live apart because they’d wrestled. “It was vicious,” he said.

I nodded as if I expected it.

“But now,” said Harrison, “they tell us every day that they want to be together.”

I considered the father monkey, a silver streak on his small head, and, on the other side of the partition, the son, who was about the same size, if not a little bigger. The monkeys cupped their hands to the glass and tried to see us.

This room, this strange room. Candy would have opinions.

“They’ve defeated the one-way mirrors,” said Harrison.

I smiled at the monkeys, feeling self-conscious, wondering what they saw. I gave the father monkey a little wave. The two monkeys peered through the glass beneath their cupped hands. Then the younger one—the son—bounded up onto a high ledge.

“Shame to keep them in these cages,” I said.

Harrison frowned, and his curly beard seemed to twitch. “They’re like houses.” He cleared his throat. He straightened. “These animals live much longer than they would in the wild.”

“The wild can be brutal.” A quote from Joe Wilderness.

Harrison smiled at me, relaxing again. “True words,” he said.

________

The next day, I went into Candy’s room and nearly tripped. Her stuffed animals were lined up by the door. The lion missing an eye, the stuffed brown bear. Her father had brought home the bear when Candy was small. It seemed so big then. When she was a toddler, it was almost as big as she was.

Candy emerged from behind her bed, crawling on the carpet. At first I thought: a return to babyhood. Regression. Wasn’t that in the grief textbooks somewhere?

But then I saw that she had a dark scarf tied over her face, covering her nose and mouth.

“Careful,” she growled at me.

“Are you an animal, too?”

Candy gave me a withering look, quite impressive given that I could see only her eyes and forehead. “In a fire-prone forest,” she said, “attend to the flight of the animals. Exit in the direction of their stampede.”

She crawled painstakingly toward the door and then collapsed.

“You okay?” I stepped over a stuffed turtle.

Candy turned her head away. “Fallen tree limbs, enflamed. I can’t trespass that way.”

I wanted to tell her that she was using “trespass” wrong, but it didn’t seem the moment. Candy swiveled on her belly and crawled to her bed, climbed up, and opened the window.

“Wait,” I said.

It felt too slow, the way I was moving across the room.

She stuck her head out. We were on the second floor.

“Candy!” I grabbed her, pulled her back on the bed.

Her dark eyes stared at me from above the black scarf. “I am only conducting recon,” she said. “Avenues of escape.”

I hugged her to me, and she didn’t resist. She felt limp in my arms. “Don’t go out the window,” I said.

________

The next day, the line of animals was gone. I decided to enroll Candy in Girl Scouts. They did a little hiking, I understood, and though Candy was a touch old to start now, it could still be good for her.

I went to tell Candy. “Girl Scouts is just like Joe Wilderness.”

“Jenny said they did macramé.” Candy punched her pillow, then fluffed it. “And crafts.”

“Crafts build dexterity.”

“I’m not a Girl Scout.”

I came back later to find an assortment of items on the carpet: the stuffed bear, a tampon, a kitchen knife, medical tape, and antiseptic cream.

Candy sat on her bed, unfurling the tape.

“Is Bear injured?”

“He attacked me.”

I hesitated. Bear lay vacantly on his back, his glassy brown eyes staring up to the ceiling. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“No,” said Candy. “No, you don’t understand.”

“Want to tell me?”

She considered me for a moment, screwing up her lips. “Not really.”

I took the knife. “Knives belong in the kitchen,” I said. “Okay?”

But Candy didn’t answer.

Later, I found Bear with a hole in his midsection, plugged with a tampon. His mouth had a faint smile about it. I’d always liked that expression, sort of mystified and wondering, pleased to be a chosen favorite, but now Bear just seemed vacuous to me. Didn’t he know what it meant to be wounded? Didn’t he appreciate Candy’s attempts to save him?

 

IV. Grief in Situ

Harrison wanted a date. He messaged me. “I’d like to see you again, if that’s okay with you.”

It was such a strange way of asking a person out. I messaged it to Maureen. She was all, “Girl, get it.”

“We are way too old for ‘girl, get it.'”

“I’m not.” Maureen sent a tongue-sticking-out emoji.

I emojied her back: eyes rolled up and laughing.

Even though my daughter was technically old enough, I didn’t want to leave Candy by herself. I didn’t even want to leave her with a babysitter, who might falter when Candy started—I don’t know—drowning her animals or setting small fires in the bathtub. My imagination was getting carried away, but only because I didn’t know what to do for Candy, how to be everything she needed.

So I invited Harrison over. “We can get takeout,” I said, and he offered to pick up the food.

Candy chose Thai, and Harrison arrived that evening with two plastic-lined paper bags.

My heart sank when I opened the door and saw him standing there, but not because of him. He actually looked good. He’d trimmed the beard, and I was reminded how tall he was. He carried his extra weight well.

No, it was because Candy was sitting behind me in the living room, probably already smelling the Thai food. Wasn’t I breaking some rule of grief dating? Like, don’t introduce your child to a possible mate until you’re sure? I couldn’t be farther from sure at this point. I hardly knew the man.

I wasn’t clear why it was a bad idea, having Harrison over. I just knew from watching television and reading books that children hated this sort of thing. I took a deep breath. Why was I such a bad parent? When her father died, Candy had refused to go to a therapist, and I had caved. Maybe that too was a dreadful parenting mistake, one I would regret for my entire life.

“Come in,” I said to Harrison, and he smiled.

Candy set the table. She was acting very mature, and I could tell that Harrison was impressed. He didn’t have any children and only ever saw college students at the monkey lab.

“Would you like ice water?” Candy asked him.

“Yes, thank you.” Harrison sat at the table, and he was just so big.

Candy’s father had been more normal-sized, or at least that’s how it felt. At our little square table, I had to look up at Harrison, like actually tilt my chin.

Candy brought him water. Harrison thanked her again. It was getting a little painful. Finally, we were able to eat in relative silence. Harrison tucked into his food with a slow, measured seriousness. I liked how he didn’t rush.

Then my attention turned to Candy, who was examining the chopsticks the restaurant had given us, though apparently they weren’t common in Thailand. Just in American restaurants. She slid the sticks from their paper sleeve, broke them apart, and began to rub the two sticks together.

“Watch out, you could start a fire that way.” Harrison took a sip of ice water.

I locked my gaze on Candy.

She scoffed. “It’s not that easy.” She thrust the chopsticks toward Harrison. “You try.”

“Seriously?”

I forced a laugh. “Candy loves Joe Wilderness. On YouTube?”

I expected her to protest, embarrassed, but instead she nodded. “Joe could probably do it.”

Harrison set his lips and reached out for the sticks. He seemed to be taking this as some kind of challenge. Candy was really good at this, making people feel challenged and getting them to do what she wanted.

He held the chopsticks together and frowned. “I don’t really think this is going to work.”

“Never give up,” said Candy.

I felt a pulse of sympathy for Harrison, who was frowning harder, like this was some kind of gauntlet. My husband would have laughed it off. But back then, there was no Joe Wilderness in this house.

Slowly, awkwardly, Harrison began to rub the sticks together.

“Okay,” I said. “We can’t risk sitting the table on fire.” I held out my hand as if to confiscate the chopsticks, and Harrison handed them over with a grateful sigh.

Halfway through my peanut noodles, we managed to get a little conversation going. I kept steering the conversation away from Candy, who was eyeing the cutlery with an expert’s gaze. At one point, she dipped under the table and popped up again to ask Harrison if he knew what to do in a hurricane.

But otherwise, we managed to talk about his work, which was far more interesting than mine and safer than anything Candy might have to say.

“We have a fire evacuation plan for all the animals,” Harrison told Candy. He explained it in great detail.

Candy nodded. She looked to be taking mental notes. When he paused for a bite of pad see ew, she cleared her throat. “I appreciate your care for the animals,” she said. “But sometimes you just have to save yourself.”

This was straight out of Joe Wilderness and his guide for escaping household fires. I could almost hear his Aussie accent declaiming the very words. Harrison looked like he might choke on his rice noodles. Not long after dinner, I saw him to the door.

It was the moment when one of us could say something future facing like “Let’s get together again” or “What does next weekend look like for you?” But neither of us said anything.

“Thanks for bringing dinner,” I said finally.

Harrison gave an uncomfortable shrug as he straightened and zipped his jacket. “You’re welcome.”

________

The next morning, I found I wasn’t too upset to have bombed the date with Harrison. Well, technically, I hadn’t bombed it: Candy had bombed it for me. But it meant that I didn’t need to worry about having introduced her too soon. It meant that by being a bad date, I could continue to be an acceptable parent. Theoretically acceptable. Besides, Candy had defenses of her own. She would protect her habitat, even if it meant startling off any potential predators.

I wasn’t sure if a man who brought Thai food really counted as a predator, but once I reached Candy’s bedroom, just to check on her, I forgot that line of thinking.

Candy lay on the carpet in push-up position, her fists balanced on an assortment of water bottle caps.

She completed one rep and then leaped up and began walking on the bottle caps.

I stared at her, and to my astonishment, she gave me a small smile. “Conditioning,” she said.

“Let me see your hands.”

Dark bruises shone at her knuckles.

“Candy,” I said, “you have to stop.”

“You don’t control me.”

“Clearly,” I said, and she grimaced. “But listen to me: You can’t injure yourself. It could make you less effective in a crisis.”

Candy considered her knuckles. “A cut could get infected,” she said slowly. “Bruises should be safe.”

“Internal bleeding,” I said.

She cocked her head, then nodded. “I’ll put them back in the recycling.”

“I’m losing you,” I said, totally against my will and better judgment. A sob hammered at my chest, and I made a strange sound, like an untuned cello.

Candy stared at me. “Stay calm.”

“I am calm.” I wasn’t, and we both knew it.

“If you want to help me,” she said, “you can participate in my training. You can come with me for a walk.”

 

V. A Walk in the Woods

“Let’s get lost,” said Candy.

We had just arrived at the trailhead and were heading toward a path to a small waterfall, one of the region’s prime sights.

“The whole point of orienteering is not to get lost,” I said.

“But if you’re following a marker”—Candy waved a hand dismissively at the blue blazon on a nearby tree—”you can’t use your skills. You’re just following someone else’s trail.”

“Humans survived by working together. That’s it. We’re smart, and we cooperate. Otherwise we’d be extinct.”

“We’re dumb, and we fight,” said Candy.

“Also true.”

“And you learn best by getting lost.” In Candy’s words, I could hear Joe Wilderness’s voice. Except he didn’t say that, did he? Did he actually recommend getting lost?

Candy stood at the lip of the woods. She gave me a funny look, then waved at me and laughed.

It was great to hear her laugh. I wanted to soak in that bubbly sound as I watched her step backward and disappear into the trees. A tight wave of panic rolled over me, pleasure now coated in fear. An unusual flavor, like a double scoop of ice cream, though as a parent, I was familiar with extremes. Losing my husband hadn’t been like that. We’d laughed sometimes, but it had only ever been sad.

I stepped into the woods, right where I’d last seen her. It was still daylight, plenty of sunshine left. Candy didn’t have a cell phone. We’d decided not until she was twelve, her father and I, back when we made decisions like that together.

I stomped into the underbrush. It wasn’t easy, though this was hardly the jungle we’d last seen Joe Wilderness hack through with his machete. Soon I lost sight of the path. It took almost no time. None at all, and I was lost.

I took out my phone, imagining that I would follow a GPS line directly to my daughter. It showed me where I was, in a morass of trees.

This park wasn’t large enough for a ranger. It was bordered on all sides by roads. Candy wouldn’t walk into a busy road; she was all about survival. Besides, that would be the same as being found. I thought about calling the police. But Candy wanted me to get lost with her, to be as lost as she was.

I took a few cautious steps forward, watching the GPS bubble on my phone rather than the underbrush. My leg hit a branch, and I nearly tripped.

I took a few deep breaths. Remain calm. I could almost hear Joe Wilderness’s voice. That smug accent. I really hated him then.

Okay, I had a choice. I could use the GPS to get back to the path and hightail it to the waterfall in case Candy was heading to the prime attraction. Or I could try to find Candy. I could use clues in the wilderness: snapped twigs, muddy footprints, compressed leaves. I could track her.

This is what she wanted. For me to find her.

After a few minutes, I was ready to give up. I was bad at tracking. Terrible. It all looked like woods. Every squirrel made me jump and turn, hope in my heart.

“Candy,” I yelled, knowing I’d spook her if she heard. “Come back here!”

Except I was not “here,” a known place. I was somewhere unknown. Unknown-where: akin to nowhere, but lonelier. With a swallow, I took out my phone. I’d lost signal. My bubble was gone.

I tried to think, What would Joe Wilderness tell me to do? Retrace my steps. Go back to the beginning, don’t keep barreling forward. Also, build a shelter and protect my head, and if it was summer, pee on my jacket and wear it as a hat. But I would start with turning back.

It felt like defeat. I hated every step. After I got back to the path, I’d call the police or the park manager or someone. It had been less than thirty minutes, but it felt like a lifetime.

Unlike Candy’s tracks, mine were easy to follow. I’d crashed through the brush like a stampeding beast, only slower. My boots left clear prints in the mud. I stepped on top of one precisely, pointing myself back where I’d come from.

By the time I reached the path, I was exhausted, nervous tension quivering in my jaw.

Candy sat cross-legged on the opposite edge of the path, eyes closed like she was meditating.

“Mom.”

“What the fuck.”

Her eyes flicked open. “Good job.”

I wanted to hug her and also to handcuff her and sling her in the car, never let her tramp through the wilderness again.

“Now, let’s try that again,” said Candy in a patient, teacherly voice. “Only this time, we find water.”

 

VI. Second-Chance Survival

I stared at Candy. “You’re kidding.”

“Am I?”

“We’re going home.”

“I can disappear again.”

“I’ll call the police this time.”

Candy shrugged. She was probably faster than a cop, moving through these woods. What power did I have? I could ground her, and she would take it as a challenge, slip out the window or door, test herself against the elements. Eventually, she would have to survive without me. Maybe this was what she was trying tell me, or herself.

My throat felt thick. “If I go with you—if!”

She smiled.

“We stick together the entire time.”

Candy appeared to be considering, sitting there cross-legged in the mud.

“Please. I can’t do it without you.”

Candy flinched and nodded. They say kids know when you’re finally telling the truth.

We stepped back into the woods, right where I had crashed out. Candy had mud running up one leg and didn’t seem to care at all. I had been a different kind of girl. Makeup, nail polish. Hours at the mirror. And then too tongue-tied to talk to boys but thinking about them all the same.

I followed Candy’s precise, deliberate steps. Noticed how she considered each move, sometimes breaking a branch with her foot to clear the path as we walked. When we reached a fallen log, Candy hopped up on it and peered over the other side.

“Always check for snakes,” she said.

I nodded. I hadn’t known.

We were in the thick of the woods when Candy paused. She put a finger to her lips. “Listen.”

I took a breath. The very earth had a tang to it, the scent of moldering leaves and mud. A bird call, the shudder of a creature in the underbrush. Somewhere very far away, the sound of cars on a highway.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“No.” Candy twisted to face me and hiked a thumb over her shoulder. “Water.”

I hadn’t heard it. It struck me that I was old enough to die easily in the woods, never having learned these skills as a child. This was the first time Candy knew more than I did about something important. Not the rules of a game or a new method of long division but being here in the woods, staying alive.

I followed her. It was hard hiking uphill through the brush, and I longed for the path: those blue blazes, leading me quickly and painlessly to gape at the waterfall and back. My stomach grumbled, loud, and Candy ignored it, except for a small sigh.

“It’s down on the way back,” Candy said when I asked to stop for a minute. My sunscreen was running into my eyes. I was sweaty and thirsty.

“Should have brought Gatorade.”

Candy searched in her pack, pulled out a small, restaurant-style tab of salt. “A few pinches in your water bottle,” she said, and I obeyed.

After an hour of climbing, we reached the waterfall, coming at it from the side. On the lookout across from us, a mother and her young son posed for photos with their phone.

Candy set down her pack. “Let’s get in and cool off.”

“We’re not supposed to go in there.” The lookout had a railing and, I knew from last time, a sign forbidding the very thought.

“Blister prevention,” said Candy. “And you won’t overheat.”

She could see me wavering.

“It might be good for your skin, too,” said Candy. “The removal of debris.”

I thought of the stinging sunscreen. “Fine,” I said, though Candy was already taking off her shoes and stepping carefully onto the wet rocks. She wasn’t asking permission. Maybe she was testing me. I didn’t know if I was passing or failing as I took off my own shoes and followed her in.

The water was cold and delicious. I splashed my way toward Candy. I hooted. This was amazing. Candy dunked the back of her hair until it was slick and dark.

“You look like an otter,” I said, and she splashed me.

As the pair on the observation deck turned to go, I heard the mother say to the son in a loud, deliberate voice, “No, we can’t go in. It’s not safe.”

Candy met my eyes and laughed.

During our wet, squelchy trek back through the woods with Candy in front, leading the way, my mood was transformed.

We’d had a breakthrough. It felt delicate, tenuous, and I wasn’t sure how to keep it from vanishing in my grasp.

“I liked Harrison,” Candy said as she forged forward. I stared at the back of her head, her wet hair looped into a ponytail, clinging in dark, feathery strands to her neck.

“You did?”

“Can you get him back?”

For a flash, it seemed she was asking about her father. Not Harrison, that overgrown puppy of a man.

“I don’t know.” I stepped over the branch Candy had crunched for me. She held a twig to keep it from snapping into my face.

“Can you try?”

“I’m supposed to be the one who decides that.” My voice was uncertain, but I knew I would call him.

________

When Harrison next came over, he brought a Middle Eastern mezze: falafel, hummus, baba ghanoush, and some kind of meaty kibbe. Candy was all smiles. She showed him her Joe Wilderness guidebook, and I was shocked. That thing was like her Bible. I’d never seen her show it to anyone. Candy asked him questions about the animals and laughed at the photos of rats and monkeys on his phone.

It was like she was courting him, but not romantically. She was auditioning him—welcoming him, even—for the role of father.

After Harrison left that evening with a modest peck on my lips and a promise to call, I cornered Candy.

“What were you doing?”

Candy shrugged and banged out a few knuckle push-ups. Then she burped. “Can’t do too much after a meal like that.”

“Was that it? You like the food he’s bringing? Honey, we can order food ourselves.”

She sat on the floor and stretched out her calf, stone-faced.

“I choose who I’m going to date.”

Candy switched to the other calf, reaching for her toes.

“Okay?”

Candy sighed like she couldn’t believe the idiot she’d been saddled with. “Safety in numbers,” she said.

 

VII. Knife Sharpening

“Never cut with a dull knife,” Candy told me. With the tip of the steak knife, she poked at my mangled knot.

We were sitting on the floor of her bedroom, learning ropes. She had several different types of cordage laid out and was showing me the patterns. Currently, I was failing the bowline knot.

“If you can’t tie knots, tie lots.” Candy sang the phrase at me, straight from season four. “But it’s better to actually learn the correct knots for if you ever find yourself in a survival situation.”

“Wouldn’t you rather just go to the beach?”

“The beach.”

“We could rent something. An Airbnb, we could cook.”

Candy dismissed me with a puff of breath.

“Why do you want everything to be so hard?”

Candy considered her knife. “Why do you pretend it can be easy?”

I wanted to hug her then, though I knew she wouldn’t let me. I wanted to take the rope and tie her to me, bodily. To fix her to my person, tying lots and lots of hard nubs in the cordage, connecting us and keeping us safe.

But I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t even tie a bowline.

Candy gripped her knife and with a sawing motion sliced through my feeble knot.

“Okay, Mom,” she said. “Try again.”

***

Genevieve Abravanel’s short fiction is available or forthcoming in American Short Fiction, the Normal School, Indiana Review, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. Her creative nonfiction is forthcoming at Shenandoah. She has received grants and fellowships from the NEH and the American Academy of University Women and is currently working on a novel.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal. In “No Great Name on Earth,” Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon muses on the similarities between her mother and Dorothea Brooke, the main character from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Apparently without regret, both women give up public pursuits for unsung family lives. Perplexed by this outcome, Wiltshire-Gordon weaves literary criticism with personal memoir to investigate how values and aspirations can shift over time, opening up new and valid avenues for happiness.

No Great Name on Earth

Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon

 

The summer after my freshman year of college, my mother read Middlemarch out loud to us. My older brother was away for a summer research program, but three of us were at home: my twelve-year-old brother, sixteen-year-old sister, and me. It wasn’t unusual for my mother to read books aloud, but we knew that George Eliot’s most famous novel was her favorite. We grew up with the story of my mother’s ultimatum to my dad early in their relationship: if this was going to go anywhere, he’d need to read Middlemarch.

I was working as a camp counselor that summer, and in the afternoons when I came home, or after dinner when it was still light out, we’d sit in somebody’s bedroom and listen to her read. We usually picked my little brother’s room, since it was the biggest and he was the most difficult to corral. I’d sit on the bed, knitting; Virginia would stretch out on the floor; Skip would sprawl next to me or needle Virginia or dig through his closet for forgotten amusements.

In July, after we’d read about a third of the novel, Virginia left to clear trail in Maine for six weeks. Loath to wait for her return, we decided to record our reading sessions and email them to her so she would be up-to-date when we were together again in August. By the end of the month, we’d sent her seven and a half hours of footage, which she dutifully listened to among the eastern pines.

I forgot about these recordings until ten years later, when I was assigned Middlemarch in a graduate seminar on the realist novel. I loaded them onto my phone and played them on long runs: Eliot’s story and my mother’s commentary and our sporadic interjections made a calming soundtrack along the COVID-quiet streets.

***

If you ask him now, my brother will insist that he was bored the whole time. This claim is not without evidence: “Skip, don’t throw that, please,” my mother says more than once. At one point I yelp because Skip has poked me with my knitting needle. There’s an altercation involving a blanket, which he wants off and I want on. Still, he wasn’t entirely disengaged. He sounds genuinely upset when Fred Vincy defaults on a loan, forcing the poor Garths to sacrifice their savings to cover for him. Fred had a hundred pounds toward the debt, but he spent it on a horse that has gone lame. “I have tried everything—I really have,” Fred insists.

“No, you didn’t!” Skip interjects. “First of all, just use the hundred pounds to pay the—”

“Sell the flute,” I suggest. “It’s not like he can play it anyway.”

“Yeah, sell your flute! Or beg from your sister!”

“Well, but he enjoys the flute,” my mother says reasonably. “He could get a job, how about that?”

My mother is not a theatrical person, but she reads with expression. She adopts a monotonous drawl for Casaubon; an earnest, straightforward voice for Dorothea; a light, musical tone for Rosamond. Occasionally the text doesn’t make it obvious who’s speaking, and she mixes up the voices. “Oh, this is Sir James,” she realizes once, after beginning in Celia’s light flutter; she rereads the speech in a more sensible baritone. She offers definitions and editorial commentary as necessary: “When you say ‘friends’ in an English novel, it means ‘close relatives’”; “tatting is like knitting, but tatting is making lace.” When Mr. Brooke announces his run for office, she gives a brief history of the English parliament and the changes happening at the time. We get a description of Dorothea after her honeymoon, and she points out the aesthetic contrast: the Christmas-red of Rome gives way to Lowick’s spare white walls, enclosed and tomblike.

***

The Fred Vincy–Mary Garth storyline held the most pathos for my brother. But for the novel itself, Dorothea Brooke is more central: Middlemarch begins and ends with a reflection on Dorothea as a modern-day Saint Theresa, an “ardently willing soul” in search of “the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self.” And at the novel’s climax, Dorothea’s choices are the ones the narrator asks us to attend to most closely.

Still, I can understand why Skip wasn’t drawn to her. She’s idealistic and earnest, and at times comes across as holier-than-thou. In the opening scene, Dorothea and her younger sister are looking at some jewelry they’ve recently inherited. Dorothea makes a little speech to Celia about how she doesn’t care for earthly things. But then she sees an emerald ring that she particularly likes and has to do some mental gymnastics to make room for her liking it: “They look like fragments of heaven,” she says. The narrator tells us that “her thought was trying to justify her delight in the colors by merging them in her mystic religious joy.” (Celia, who also likes the emerald ring, is irked.)

But Dorothea has a commitment to helping others that overshadows these small hypocrisies. And her performative morality diminishes as she finds opportunities to do real good, to make a meaningful difference. She learns that her husband’s aunt was denied any inheritance for marrying a Polish refugee, and she’s willing to sacrifice her own income to make restitution. She sees the poor conditions of the tenant-farmers on her uncle’s land, and she devises a plan to build what’s essentially an affordable housing development. (This was the part of the novel that my father, an urban planner, found most compelling.) Dorothea has principles, and she’s not content for them to remain an abstraction. The narrator tells us she feels a “desire to make her life greatly effective. What could she do, what ought she to do?” This is what draws me to her—why I like her, even in spite of her initial Puritanism. She wants to do something that matters. She has education, money, and energy, and she feels a call to make the most of it.

***

My mother had time to spend afternoons reading to us because they decided my dad would be the one with the career. After all, his job could support the whole family, whereas she was teaching as an adjunct lecturer in anticipation of an academic position once she finished her PhD. She started her dissertation the year before my brother was born, and she kept teaching and writing even once there were two of us. But her progress slowed, and when my sister arrived three years later, they moved to the Chicago suburbs to escape the intensity of the city. My mother packed her dissertation notes into brown boxes that traveled with us to our new house, where they sat in the study unopened and unmissed. She’s still on the rolls at the University of Chicago in a state called “ABD”: all but dissertation.

Of course, her intellect didn’t shrivel once she gave up academic work. Instead of the Tudors and Stuarts, her focus was the Wiltshire-Gordons. “Hyphen. G-O-R, D-O-N,” we’d hear her on the phone, the same patient cadence for every parent-teacher conference she scheduled or doctor’s appointment she confirmed. She found more interesting projects, too. She rewrote the bylaws for the community school we went to when we were little. She managed the household finances: long-term and short-term savings, diversified investments, charitable donations. She organized family trips and redesigned her mother-in-law’s dilapidated kitchen with my uncles serving as the labor.

The ease with which my mother accomplished these tasks has always made me feel that she could do absolutely anything she wanted to.

“Mom, would you say you’re undaunted?” I asked her once.

She laughed. “That would not be a word I would use.”

“You never are daunted, though,” I said.

“Well, nothing has ever come along to daunt me.”

***

Early in the novel, Dorothea marries Edward Casaubon, a man much older than she, whom she’s drawn to for his knowledge and seriousness. She imagines that her marriage will be something like a research assistantship, providing her with the training she needs in order to make a difference in the world. “I don’t feel sure about doing good in any way now,” she reflects. But “I should learn everything then…I should know what to do, when I got older: I should see how it was possible to lead a grand life.”

It doesn’t quite turn out this way. Casaubon is insecure about his own work, reluctant to let her help him, and jealous of her efforts to help others. Dorothea embodies every virtue he wants from a wife. But “whether Providence had taken equal care of Miss Brooke in presenting her with Mr. Casaubon,” the narrator wryly observes, “was an idea which could hardly occur to him. Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy. As if a man could choose not only his wife but his wife’s husband!”

We must have read this passage soon after my birthday: my mother notes, “Maisie, you are now Dorothea’s age, because she’s nineteen.”

“But I’m not married to Casaubon,” I say.

“No, and you’re not likely to be, either,” she replies.

It’s not likely, of course, because Casaubon is a fictional character and thus not available to marry a real human; furthermore, he has already chosen Dorothea, to whom he remains married until his death in Chapter 48. In any case, I hope I’d know better than to marry a man thirty years older who gives no sign of emotional readiness for partnership. Having held a research assistantship myself, I am quite satisfied for that experience to remain a professional one.

I can see the appeal for Dorothea, though: the possibility of building a life with an intellectual equal, someone who thinks deeply and shares her principles. How tempting—I know this!—how tempting to ignore practical concerns in favor of the electricity of thinking with someone who knows things I don’t. But my vision is too clear—or maybe it’s that the practical has a way of making itself painful—and I’ve always given it up.

***

The literary critic Catherine Gallagher argues that Middlemarch is “structured like a triptych”: continually moving between specific description, general type, and back again to the particular case. For example, a description of Mary Garth gives way to what Gallagher calls “the general category of persons by which we are to make sense of [her]”: “If you want to know more particularly how Mary looked, ten to one you will see a face like hers in the crowded street to-morrow.” But such generality “seems to want experiential grounding,” Gallagher writes, and the narrator soon returns to Mary’s unique traits: her distinctive smile, her singularly sharp tongue. “If you made her angry, she would not raise her voice, but would probably say one of the bitterest things you have ever tasted the flavor of; if you did her a kindness, she would never forget it.”

“Experiential grounding” would be an apt euphemism for the various side plots captured on our recordings. In Chapter 27, my mother worries that the hat I’m knitting will be too small; in Chapter 36, she is proven wrong. Skip starts throwing things in Chapter 23 and never stops. But my favorite moments happen when our dialogue weaves with the story itself. It’s a sign of Eliot’s ear, and her success at creating characters who are at once particular and universal. The matronly Mrs. Garth has two young children who follow her around the house, doing their lessons as she cooks and folds laundry. Her instruction is peppered with various asides: “Those apple peels are for the pigs, Ben.” My mother’s narration features similar interruptions. “Please don’t toss that, honey bun.” (Later, more forcefully: “Skip. Stop throwing that.”)

In Mrs. Garth’s lesson on the Romans, Ben has trouble remembering yesterday’s facts about Cincinnatus. Moments later, when Fred is confessing his debts to Mrs. Garth, Skip chimes in: “He can sell Diamond, right? Can’t he sell Diamond?”

My mother patiently reiterates the central plot point from ten minutes earlier. “No, Diamond is lame now.”

“What?! He’s totally lame? I thought he was only a little lame.”

“If a horse is lame, you can’t get much money for it! He had a bad temper, nearly killed a groom, caught his foot in a rope, and lamed himself. That’s the situation. Skip, please don’t do that.”

On the next day’s recording, Fred is still worrying over his debts when Skip pipes up again. “But Fred has more money now. For selling the—for putting the horse down.”

“He doesn’t have any more money. He gave it to Mrs. Garth.”

“No! Horse flesh! Horse meat!”

My mother is baffled. “Horse meat? No, they don’t eat horse meat.”

“No, c’mon,” Skip says. “They don’t eat it, but he sold it. That’s what he was doing in the alleys.”

“That’s what he was trying to do; he never managed to do it! The horse was lame—he had the buyer lined up, and the horse went lame!”

“Yes, I know, but now he can sell the horse meat.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying, they don’t eat horse meat. Anyway, we’re trying to hear about Mr. Wrench, who is coming on the morrow…”

(Listening to this recording again, I finally located the source of the misunderstanding. Skip is at least partially vindicated: Fred’s unsuccessful foray into horse-trading is described as “a bad bargain in horse-flesh.”)

***

My mother and I both feel dissatisfied with the end of Middlemarch. After his death, Casaubon leaves Dorothea an inheritance but restricts it with a petty codicil: if she ever marries Mr. Casaubon’s cousin, she must forfeit the whole sum. Dorothea, who finds she does in fact love Mr. Casaubon’s cousin, gives up the money.

In the epilogue, we learn that Dorothea devotes herself to her new husband’s career. It’s a good career: he’s working for political changes that increase representation and help the common people. But she doesn’t do any of the things she used to want to do. She doesn’t manage money for public interest projects. She doesn’t design and build an affordable housing development. And—what I find most unsettling—she’s okay with this. She feels that her life is happy, fulfilled, valuable: “Dorothea could have liked nothing better, since wrongs existed, than that her husband should be in the thick of a struggle against them, and that she should give him wifely help.” It seems like the novel wants us to be okay with this, too. Its closing exhortation asks us to see an immense ethical value to her life with her husband and children, even though it’s behind the scenes, even though it’s not public and well-documented like her husband’s work.

But my mother and I both feel a grief at this. We feel that Dorothea had plans, and we wish she could have executed them. My mother isn’t quite as taken with Will Ladislaw as Dorothea is. “She could have found someone else,” she says.

“But she wanted to marry him,” I say.

“Heaven knows why,” she says.

My dad, of course, was a sensible choice in every way—and she loved him. So I suppose it’s hard to know what she would have done if he hadn’t been a sensible choice. Probably she wouldn’t have loved him.

***

In his essay “The Art of Decision-Making,” Joshua Rothman describes a fundamental paradox to the way we approach life-changing choices. We make those choices based on what’s important to us, what we value. But, for big decisions—whether to change jobs, move across the country, have children—the result will change what we value. “Before having children, you may enjoy clubbing, skydiving, and LSD,” Rothman writes. Or “you may simply relish your freedom to do what you want.” After having a child, these things are much harder to come by. Instead, you stay in on the weekends, looking at trucks on the street and reading books about racecars where the couplets don’t quite scan. You’ve given up the things you used to want to do. “And yet,” Rothman writes, “as a parent, you may not miss them. You may actually prefer changing diapers, wrangling onesies.” Parenthood will turn you into the person you feared becoming. But you may find that this is exactly the person you want to be.

How do you plan for your own future, then? How do you make decisions in pursuit of a sense of fulfillment—a life you find valuable, enjoyable—when the terms of that fulfillment are subject to change based on the very choices you’ve used to pursue it?

Even if my goals go unchanged, my career path is far from assured: I’m working toward a PhD in the humanities, where jobs are notoriously hard to come by. I know that even though I love the work I’m doing, and even if I keep loving it, it might someday be relegated to a hobby—the way it was before grad school, when I would spend my workdays wrangling Microsoft PowerPoint and weekends parsing Levinas and Wittgenstein. I can imagine changing the way I spend my time. But it’s more disconcerting to imagine changing my values: that something could be so important to me and then, simply—stop mattering.

***

My mother picked me over the English legal system and development of common law under the Stuarts. I don’t mean to make a false dichotomy here: people study English common law and the Stuarts without shortchanging their children. My mother doesn’t frame it this way, either, as if one choice was virtuous and the other morally bankrupt. Still, there are subtle variations in the story depending on when you ask her.

“I didn’t have time for it once Virginia was born,” she says sometimes, as if the dissertation naturally fell by the wayside. But every choice she makes is deliberate, it seems to me; and if something falls by the wayside it’s because she has decided to let it fall by the wayside.

“Well, yes, that’s true,” she says. “We decided that Dad would be the one with the career.”

“Why?” I ask her.

“I wanted to spend more time with all of you,” she usually says.

We have this conversation a lot. I don’t know why I keep asking her the same questions. Maybe because it seems so out of character, that she would choose not to finish something that mattered to her. But this is what she keeps trying to explain—that it stopped mattering to her. She cared about it, and then she found that she cared about being a parent more. For all her planning ahead, she’s not rigid. You can make a plan and then change it, which is still more useful than not having a plan at all. If she reads a book and discovers it’s repetitive and superficial, she won’t waste her time making it to the last page. (That said, she reads so fast that she might as well finish it.)

Sometimes she comes a little closer to what I guess I’m fishing for. “Dad was more established. When we got married, he was almost done with grad school, and by the time I was deciding whether to finish my dissertation, he was making enough to support all of us.”

Regret: I think that’s what I’m trying to hear. A sense that she still feels the PhD was a worthwhile endeavor, that in a different world she would have liked to finish it. And I care about this because I am in the middle of a PhD myself: I am about to start my dissertation, and I find it intimidating, and I worry about not finishing. And so I’m listening for reassurance that this is a worthwhile way to spend my time. It’s the sort of thing children often want from their mothers, I suppose: validation and encouragement. I want to know that she thinks I’m doing something worth doing. I want to know that she’s proud of me.

But maybe I’m also listening for regret because I know it’s a gift she gave me—that time with her growing up, those afternoons reading Middlemarch. And so I’m alert for any indication that she wishes it had been otherwise. Are you sure it was worth it: I know what it cost you.

***

Dorothea is a serious person. “Ardent” is the narrator’s favorite epithet for her. She’s not dour—she laughs along with others’ light-heartedness—but I don’t think she tells a single joke in the whole novel. My mother just manages to surpass her in this regard: she knows one joke, and she will tell it if you accuse her of a lack of levity. (It is not a funny joke. “How do you make a peanut butter sandwich?” it begins—something along those lines—and I don’t remember the ending, except that if you have the gall to ask my mother for a joke you are getting what you deserve.)

But she laughs at our jokes, my dad and my siblings and me. I suspect she knows we need this from her, because she has a genuine laugh, but also a laugh-of-acknowledgement that recognizes the attempt at humor and responds to the bid for connection: your jokes aren’t funny but I like that you tell them. Her real laugh is a much greater prize; and sometimes when we’re all in the kitchen we’ll each try our various gambits, the repartee for her benefit, to see who can provoke a genuine smile.

“Do you relate to Dorothea?” I asked her once.

“No,” she said.

“But Dorothea has principles, and you have principles,” I said.

“Well, she has principles and ambition. And I just have the principles.”

In fact, this does sound like Dorothea—Dorothea at the end of the novel, who gave things up but wanted to give them up. She wanted a life with Will Ladislaw more than the life she could have without him. She never did the grand things she planned. But her small acts of selflessness ripple outward, and they turn out to make her own happiness possible, too.

What are the big things you could have done? You could have done anything you wanted. You could have had a career like my dad’s, if you had decided you wanted one.

“I did do what I wanted,” she says.

***

Three weeks ago, I took my qualifying exams. I sat across a table from a classicist, a literary theorist, and a philosopher and answered questions for three hours while the sweat soaked my shirt. Then they sent me out of the room while they deliberated. An eternity later, they called me back and declared my competence.

This means that I am now, like my mother, ABD.

***

There are so many respects in which I want the same things as my mother, so many ways I want to be like her. I’m a different person, I know that: she’s more analytical; I’m more interested in feelings. She likes logistical projects; I prefer creative ones. But I’m better at my creative projects because she asks me how I plan to manage them. I’m more emotionally stable because I see how placid she is, how calmly she responds to discord, how she’s able to take one issue at a time without letting old hurts spill into new ones. And she’s the one who taught me to care about academic work, she and my dad both: to investigate ideas deeply, to work hard at them. To care about literature.

And if I turn out like my mother, how could I be anything but grateful? She’s not perfect, of course she’s not—but if someone said, this is the life you’re going to have, I would count myself lucky beyond belief: not least because it means having four children who love each other. “I did do what I wanted,” she says, and I want her to have done it; I want her to have read Middlemarch to me on summer afternoons.

I don’t know how to want something else for myself, though. I mean, I do—I do want something else for myself. I want to do things that are bigger, that are more public. I’m wary of the impulse toward selflessness, wary of giving in to it, as much as I believe in it—as much as I think it’s one of the most important things about me or about any person.

With anyone else it would be easier: to say, we’ve made different choices, and that’s fine. But I have tried so hard to make choices the way my mother does, because she is wise and honest and thinks ahead. So I find myself following along with her decisions, wanting so much of what she wanted, and wondering whether I will come to the same moment: ABD and deciding not to finish. She says it doesn’t feel like grief. But we both grieve for Dorothea, for what she didn’t do.

***

Dorothea is not my mother’s favorite character. Wry and judicious, Mary Garth holds that honor. Dorothea, by contrast, strikes her as childlike—even at the end of the novel, when she has decided to marry Will and reconciles herself to a life without riches.

“Remember what she tells him?” my mother says. “‘I will learn what everything costs’! Whereas all those other Middlemarchers have had to pay attention to what things cost the whole time.”

I have more sympathy for Dorothea than she does, although I’m also fond of Mary Garth. But my favorite character in the novel is the narrator.

“Is that cheating?” I ask her.

“I guess not,” she allows. “It’s not Eliot herself; it’s a voice she’s created.”

In case my mother’s opinion holds less weight outside her family, I’ll add that the scholar J. Hillis Miller is also on my side: the narrator asserts a personhood, he argues, through subjective choices about how to tell the story. At the beginning of Chapter 15, the narrator explicitly comments on the task at hand: “I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web.” Miller asks us to “note that personifying ‘I.’ The narrator of Middlemarch can only with difficulty be thought of as a purely neutral or neuter narrative voice.”

Middlemarch’s narrator is the reason the story is worth reading. She is funny yet insightful, satirical but never belittling. On its own, the plot offers its share of intrigue, but it’s the narrator’s keen eye and turns of phrase that make the novel what it is. Self-important patients like Mr. Trumbull, for instance, are no rarity—but only our narrator finds quite this way of describing it:

“[Mr. Trumbull was] much sustained by application of the thermometer which implied the importance of his temperature, by the sense that he furnished objects for the microscope, and by learning many new words which seemed suited to the dignity of his secretions. For Lydgate was acute enough to indulge him with a little technical talk.”

Many of the characters in Middlemarch imagine futures for themselves that have little grounding in reality: Fred’s faith in his own good luck; Casaubon’s expectation that marriage will bring rapturous happiness. But the narrator is playfully, thoughtfully attentive to the world as it is. Miller describes the voice as “sympathetic…but also deliciously ironic, mocking, and clairvoyant in his (her, or its) insight into human folly.” She’s an alert observer of the life around her, and the novel invites us to join her in that observation.

In other words, she is a writer.

***

All but dissertation: as if my coursework constituted everything, as if the dissertation really were the only thing left.

Maybe I am listening for my mother’s regret because I can’t choose what she did. When she was my age and writing her dissertation, my mother had been married for six years, already had my brother, and was pregnant with me. Whereas the choice I have right now is between writing on Henry James or Virginia Woolf.

For my mother, “ABD” seems much more accurate. She really did do everything else, everything that mattered to her. And when you have the rest, maybe you don’t need the dissertation after all.

***

The novel closes by reflecting on Dorothea’s life and impact, with sentences as exquisite as they are famous:

“Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

The irony, of course, is that Dorothea’s life does not remain in obscurity. Even as the narrator asks us to recognize the ethical value to acts unseen and unsung, she herself has taken up the task of seeing and singing them. We recognize the exquisiteness of Dorothea’s generosity in part because of the exquisiteness of that sentence—that public, historic sentence. I admire Dorothea’s selflessness. But I also admire the narrator, who found language for it.

The narrator: who perhaps never faces the forked path that Dorothea does. We don’t know much about her life, after all—whether she’s married; even whether she’s a woman. And we don’t know whom she’s addressing. She could be speaking to three teenagers sprawled in a childhood bedroom, the youngest of whom only pays intermittent attention—or to a committee of literary scholars hanging on her every word. Of course, she does speak to both these groups, and indeed anyone who picks up Middlemarch, whether she can imagine that audience or not: we are all reading the novel that gives words to a hidden life.

Dorothea didn’t need the words, though. She never knew her life was narrated, that millions of readers saw her choices and her kindnesses. And as far as I can tell, she didn’t wish for it.

When I told my mother I was working on this essay, she said, “No need to write about me!” I’ll clarify, then, that it’s not for her I’m writing it. This is no favor to her, to publicize her quiet life: she studied history but she never needed to be part of it.

“Do you think you’re Dorothea?” I ask again, always circling back to the same questions.

But she has never been one to indulge a metaphor if she doesn’t have to. “No, I’m just myself,” she says.

And I am narrating her, not because she needs her life to be told, but because I would like to tell it. I want to make something that lasts, and this seems worth saving: that things are not so ill with me as they might have been is mostly owing to her.

***

Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon is a 2022-2023 Emerging Critics Fellow with the National Book Critics Circle and a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, studying the relationship between ethics and literary form in twentieth-century novels. Her essays and reviews appear in The Paris Review, The Iowa Review, Kirkus, and elsewhere.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.  J. M. Scarpati invokes family history in his short, potent story of childhood “Eels in the Basement.” The story is Scarpati’s first fiction publication.

Eels in the Basement

by J. M. Scarpati

 

My father kept pigeons up on the roof. Brooklyn was different back then, though, not a mess of pavement and concrete like today. We lived in a two-family home that my grandfather owned: a squat brick square house with windows that looked like eyes, a front door right in the middle that looked like a nose, and a white-painted cast-iron fence in front for teeth.

In the house was my family: my mother and father, me, and my four younger sisters. Then my father’s brother, my uncle Dante, his wife, and my four younger cousins. My grandfather lived upstairs on my uncle’s side of the house. My grandmother had died when I was a baby, so my grandfather lived up there with my father’s two youngest brothers, both unmarried. When I was six, my mother’s sister was killed by her husband, so her three youngest kids came to live with us too. And my mother’s youngest brother also moved in with us around that time.

I think that’s why my father kept his pigeons. It gave him a place to go to get away from all of us. He was a quiet man. If he hadn’t been my father, I might even call him shy, but men weren’t “shy” back then. They might be reserved, solemn, even stoic, but they couldn’t be shy.

It was August 17, the Festa di Sant’Agata, maybe 1937 or ’38, after my aunt died, because her kids were already living with us but my youngest sister was not yet born. The house was loud with all the familiar noises: kids fighting and running and laughing, my grandfather’s radio playing as loud as he could turn it, a greased pan screaming hot on the stove, and my mother shouting directions at me as we tried to get ready for the feast.

“Nunzia, go get your father off the roof!”

“Can’t Grazia do it? I am still chopping!” I pointed the dull knife at my sister. She was only two years younger than I but didn’t help in the kitchen. My mother said she had careless hands.

“Stunatu, I said now!” I thought the spoon was going to splinter in her grip. Grazia crossed her eyes at me, our version of the malochio, and I gave it right back to her as I fast-stepped out of striking distance of our mother.

The only way onto the roof was through a heavy wood latch door at the top of a suffocating staircase. We weren’t allowed up there unless my father was with us, so I rarely had to open the thing myself. I reached the top step, my chest already tight, and struggled to push the door up. It was summer, but the air on the roof was cooler than the hot trapped air in the house. My father was across the length of the roof, his big broad back to the me as he faced the coop and the sunset behind it.

“Papa, dinner is ready.” I stood on the top step using all my strength to balance the door. I could tell he was holding one of his birds by the way his shoulders were arched and how his head was tilted down and hidden.

“Come here, Topolina.” He didn’t turn but gently pitched his head up over his shoulder to call out his pet name for me. His words were soft in the distance and evening air. I lowered the door closed and stepped up onto the tar roof. The day’s heat had left it sticky, and I felt my feet resisting with each step I took. On either side of me, the whites swayed on clotheslines creating a path that led straight to my father and his birds.

Keeping the bird and his one hand tucked close to his body, he used his free hand to close the screen door of the coop. I stood beside him, still and quiet, watching the caged birds in their moments of restlessness—a cascading wave of cooing and wings flapping and stunted flight in the ramshackle cage of wood and frayed wire.

With the bird now wrapped delicately in both hands, he bent at the waist and met my eyes. I looked at the bird, white and gray with purples and greens shimmering up and down its outstretched neck. I watched as he turned the bird over softly in his hardened hands, its wings reaching out as if to take flight before relaxing again in his heavy palms.

“Hold this for me.” He passed the bird to me like a newborn. It was light in my hands, like crumpled paper, its fragile little neck twisting one way while its eyes spun the other. I watched my father disappear around the side of the coop, and I heard the moan of a rusted hinge.

“Hello, passerotta,” I whispered to the bird. I imagined it in flight, a small speck against the sun in the distance.

My father returned with an old burlap bag of seed and opened the screen door again. The calm that had settled in the cage broke once more with fluttering and frenzy. Even my little birdy kicked with anticipation in my hands. My father tipped the bag generously into the trough and let it spill out onto the ground in the coop. The cacophony filled the rooftop: wings against air and heavy cawing. The gentle rush of spilling seeds pinged against the empty metal trough like water falling into a basin.

“Let it back now.” He nodded at the bird and then the cage. As I had seen my father do before, I unclasped my hands and felt the bird take flight, the push of wind running up my arms and in my face. Through squinted eyes, I watched it lift, its trajectory upward toward the sky and sun, vanishing, if only for a moment, into golden light, before it came diving back down in a single motion through the open cage door. In the commotion of the cage, I lost sight of it. “Come, Topolina,” my father, already on the other side of the roof, called out to me.

The Feast of Saint Agatha was always my grandfather’s favorite holiday. I forget the name of the town in Sicily where we came from, but he told me it was on the water, with white, sandy beaches and palm trees and sparkling blue water in every direction as far as you could see. And for the feast every year, the whole town would eat and drink and dance on the beach into the night, firecrackers bursting in the darkness, lighting up the sea behind them.

Our feast was different. We still made the traditional arancini, and once my father did bring home fireworks, but there was no beach and there was no dancing. My grandfather’s sister and her family would come over, but there was no village.

One year, when I was a very small child, before my cousins were born and when my sister Grazia was still in my mother’s arms, my father let me stay up late with him and his brothers as they drank and joked into the early morning. I was sitting on my Uncle Dante’s lap. The thick black smoke from his cigar curled past my eyes and nose, and the flaky gray ash dusted my hair. A song came on my grandfather’s radio, and I could feel the kitchen’s fading energy flash alive again. My uncle laughed and shot out of his chair, taking me soaring with him. He spun me around in the air, his face clear and crisp in my mind as the rest of the room blurred around us, and then he plopped me down on the kitchen table. My uncles clapped for me as I danced, my bare feet kicking cans and stepping on the mess of playing cards.

I could feel the kitchen reach a pitch, the smoke and laughter and old food smells whooshing around me, the steady thump of feet and clap of hands, dim lights flickering in odd corners, and the rare and brief smile that crept up in the corners of my father’s lips. I was looking at him when two hands, seemingly disembodied, pulled me off my feet again.

They belonged to my mother, and after thudding me back on the floor, she hit me harder than she ever had up until that point. I remember the jeers and laughter from my uncles as my mother pulled me out of the kitchen by my ear. In the other room, she told me I had embarrassed myself and, worse, I had embarrassed her. Dancing on a table in a room full of men! It was the last time there was any dancing at a Feast of Saint Agatha.

***

I returned to the kitchen after leaving the roof with the image of my passerota taking flight toward the setting sun still in my mind. I found my mother, sweat glistening at her graying hairline, glaring at me as she stood in front of the stove. I looked at the pile of potatoes I had been chopping and found them finished.

“What took so long? I had to do the potatoes myself.” She wore a big frown as she rolled the balls of rice in her palms.

“I had to help papa feed his birds.”

“Of course, we’ve got the whole family to feed, and you are off playing with rats.”

I knew not to say anything else and walked to the counter to look for something I could help with.

“No, I don’t need you in here anymore, I did it all myself. Go help your grandfather with the chickens in the backyard.” She shooed me without another look, much to my sister’s delight.

The fire from the cooking pit blew hot wind at me as soon as I stepped out the back door. My grandfather was sitting on an old stump, bottle in hand and a big toothy grin on his face. He was a small barrel of a man with deep lines in his forehead and around his squinty eyes. His mouth looked like a graveyard; his teeth, gray and worn, stuck out like jagged tombstones, the back of his throat black like the night behind them.

My father stood next to him, leaned up against the old ashen wood fence that separated our yard from our neighbors’. Unlike my grandfather, my father was tall and lean. He wore no visible emotion on his face, but his hands were busy, rubbing at his knuckles and twisting one in the other. At his feet, the chickens pecked idly in the dirt, unaware.

“Mama told me to come help out here with the chickens.”

“Good. You are almost ten now. I think you are ready to do the whole thing, no?”

My grandfather’s words were thick and wet across the fire, and I felt the sick in my stomach at his suggestion. I had scalded, plucked, and even gutted chickens since I was young, but I had never done the first part; I had never killed them myself.

“What do you think?” He flashed his graveyard grin at my father, who remained quiet for a moment.

“It’s up to her. Are you ready, Topolina?” He raised his eyes to meet mine.

“It’s easy, Nunzia!” my grandfather interrupted, shooting off the stump and landing on uneasy feet. “The birds, they trust you, so you coax them in.” He puckered his lips, making little ticking sounds with his tongue, until one of the birds wandered close and he scooped it up tenderly. “Then, once they are calm,” he said, shushing the bird as he positioned his hands, “you do it quick!” His clasped hands snapped in opposite directions, and with a pop, I saw the bird’s orange talon drop limp underneath his arms. “And you see,” he said, bringing his cloudy eyes back to mine, “none of the other chickees even knows.” He laughed and flung the carcass down on the stump next to him, and the dull thud of the suddenly lifeless body vibrated through me.

“Can I just do the plucking again this year?”

My grandfather let out a big, barrel-chested belly laugh at my question and walked over toward me. He grabbed my cheek between his thumb and index finger and shook my face.

“Sure thing, Fragolina.” I could feel the dry, cracked skin of his thumb grating my cheek. “But then you go get me my eels.” He tapped me twice on the cheek with his open palm and pointed at the cellar door.

My grandfather used to tell me that his favorite part of the festa in Sicily was the sardines beccafico, little plump, oily fish stuffed full of breadcrumbs and pine nuts and raisins. The sardines were commonplace in his town, and he’d catch and eat them regularly, but the pine nuts and raisins were for special occasions, and he would look forward to the dish all year.

Here in America, he complained, the only sardines you could get were in a can. So, every year, under the docks, off the pier near Coney Island, early in the mornings, before the ferries came in through the fog, he would go fishing for the only fish he thought was a suitable replacement for sardines. Anciddas. Eels.

By the time I woke up, my grandfather would be coming home with a bucket full of the slimy black creatures. He would keep them alive in an old clawfoot tub in the basement. The tub, the same one he made his wine in before, during, and after Prohibition, was picked from the dump and lived its life in the middle of that dark basement. More than I couldn’t stand the idea of snapping the necks of chickens, I hated that tub.

The stone steps leading into the basement were sloped and slick from the damp air. The only light was that of the fire and the late evening glow that followed me down the steps from outside. The smell of mildew and saltwater hissed past me as I held on to the splintering wood railing and tried to keep my footing.

Lining the steps on either side of the railings were creaky old shelves my grandfather had built, packed with old glass pickling jars. Their tops, metal and rusting, caught the dull glimmers of light from behind me as I crept past them, briefly showing the thick layers of dust that had settled on them.

In my nightmares, at the bottom of the steps, in the damp and dark, I would step off the last rung and my bare feet would land in a pool of slippery, tangled eels, their bodies one tight, powerful muscle and their skin like wet leather against my toes. Then suddenly, the wind in the basement would kick up and the eels, still struggling and flailing out of the water, would lift and spin like a cyclone around the room, swarming me, their slime thick as they bounced off my arms and shoulders and face.

It was those images that I held in my mind as my eyes adjusted to the dim light at the bottom of the stairs. I inched my way toward the clawfoot tub; the faded white cast iron, absorbing the light from the open door at the top of the steps, illuminated the specks of orange and yellow rust. From a safe distance of a few feet, I craned my head and peered into the tub.

The eels, much as in my dreams, were piled on each other in the shallow water, their bodies moving slowly over and under and around each other. I grabbed the metal pail from next to the tub and held my nose as I used it to scoop blindly. The eels, disturbed and panicked, writhed and splashed, trying in vain to escape the invading pail. Finally, when I felt the weight of their bodies dragging the pail down, I quickly swung it out of the water and plopped it down on the cellar floor, inspecting the haul to make sure I had caught enough for the dish. Then, making sure not to look behind me, I raced back to the stairs, leaving the tub and the dark and the leftover eels behind.

The soft glow from the fire at the top of the steps flashed like a beacon, and my heart sputtered as I tried to get back above ground as quickly as possible. Phantom eels bit at my ankles as I made it up each step. I reached the top out of breath. In the backyard again, I found that the last bits of light from the setting sun had vanished. Across the yard, lit by the crackling fire, my father stood with his back to me, his big shoulders peeking out over the flames, his head tilted down. I watched as his body contorted and heard the familiar pop of a bird’s neck separating with a haunting echo.

He turned to face me, the bird hanging limp in his arms like a sleeping child, his face hiding any hint of his thoughts. Without a word, he placed the carcass on top of the pile of other birds. I walked the pail over to my grandfather and placed it next to the stump where his paper-thin filet knife lay ready.

“Grazij, Fragolina!” My grandfather swung his hands up and stumbled toward me, his eyes narrowing and his toothy smile creeping back on to his face. “We’ve got one more chicken,” he said, nodding toward the golden-brown hen wandering on the other side of the yard. “Do you know what that means?”

He picked up the knife and pointed it at the lone bird. The knife, twisting softly in his hand, glinted against the fire.

I stammered and took a step away from him as I tried to voice a refusal. On suddenly steady feet, he breezed past me, beelining for the chicken, knife in hand. The bird, sensing danger, flitted its wings and began to run, trying to get off the ground into the safety of the suspended darkness, but it was too late. My grandfather scooped it up by the back of the neck with his left hand and swung around to face me, the bird squawking, its wings outstretched and its feet, suspended, thrashing furiously against the air.

“Since this is the last one and we do not need to worry about scaring the other birds, we kill it like this!” My grandfather ran the knife quickly through the bird’s neck, letting the body fall out of his clasped hand and onto the ground in front of him, the head still peeking out of his closed fist.

I squeaked and covered my mouth with my hand, unable to avert my gaze from the bird’s terrified eyes. To my surprise and horror, the headless body righted itself on the ground and took off running, spurts of blood shooting up out of its neck with every frantic step. It ran in a wide circle around my grandfather, slowing with each lap, swaying softly to each side, until finally, with a slow, sad wobble, it fell forward into the dust at my feet. My grandfather looked me up and down and laughed. It wasn’t a cruel laugh. Simply amused. I looked over my shoulder and saw my father leaned against the old ashen fence, a familiar curl at the corner of his lips.

The Feast of Saint Agatha that night was much like all the others before it and the ones that came after it as well. My father, along with his brothers and the other men ate and drank and smoked and stayed up late. At a certain hour, I helped my mother get the children to bed.

Men are a particular beast. In all my life, I never figured out if I was friend or food or fun. I am not sure they knew most of the time, either. The same hands they use to comfort, caress, turn over softly, they can use to snap your neck.

***

J. M. Scarpati is a fourth-generation writer and is proud to follow his mother, mother’s mother, and grandmother’s mother in a pursuit of storytelling. He is currently working on a novel and collection of short stories all inspired by family lore. He is very proud to have his first story published by BLAST. You can find him on Twitter occasionally @jmscarpati1

 

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.  In Margaret Hawkins’s story of a young family on the road to their new home, a devastating tragedy emerges, almost between the lines, changing parents and children both.  This is Hawkins’s second appearance in BLAST. You can read her previous story, “Nothing Beats a Good Presbyterian,” here. 

The Sweet Short Life of Taylor Swift

Margaret Hawkins

Nicole and Brad Cortez, with their children, Delta and Bravo, and Delta’s goldfish, Taylor Swift, were moving from Nicole’s mother’s house in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Jacksonville, Florida, where Brad had gotten a better job. Brad and his cousin Jimbo had already driven a truck full of their stuff down to Florida over a four-day weekend, taking turns sleeping while the other drove. Now Brad and Nicole were hauling what remained of their possessions in a trailer behind the seventeen-year-old Buick LeSabre Nicole had inherited from her grandfather.

Delta was seven, and Bravo, the boy, was four. Nicole was twenty-eight, almost six months pregnant. They planned to name the baby India if it was a girl, Charlie for a boy. Brad and Nicole had met in the army, and the day they got engaged they came up with the idea of naming their kids after the NATO phonetic alphabet. The joke, which they told over and over, was, “What will we name the twenty-seventh?”

Everyone kept asking Nicole if she was all right. They meant moving when she was pregnant. She’d done most of the packing, too—her mother had helped, but she had a bad back, and Brad had worked overtime until three days before they left. Nicole was fine, she said, recently a soldier. What choice did she have, really? Besides, until this morning she had been fine.

Nicole held the baggie on her lap. Delta had begged for a pet for her seventh birthday. She’d wanted a Labradoodle, but Brad had negotiated her down to a fish. It was supposed to be Delta’s job to carry Taylor Swift, and at first she had, holding the water-filled two-quart Ziploc baggie on her stomach with her hands folded over it, the way her mother sat. But when she’d left the fish in the booth at a Denny’s outside Indianapolis, after breakfast the first morning, and they had to drive back fifty miles, Nicole took charge. Now the plastic baggie sat on Nicole’s lap: one taut, warm, bulbous mound filled with jiggly fluid and life on top of another.

Nicole kept the little cardboard container of dry fish food in her purse. Twice a day she unzipped the bag and shook a few flakes into the water, and they all watched the fish flutter to the surface and vacuum up the food. Bravo always tried to poke the bag to make more food fall out, but Delta would grab his finger to stop him.

Everyone said the drive would be a nightmare, with two little kids, but Nicole was over the morning sickness and the kids were mostly good. As long as Bravo let Delta be the boss, there was peace. Nicole made up games. The kids’ current favorite was What’s His Name? The point of the game was to guess the name of the person in the next car. Sometimes even Brad played that one. He always said the same name, and the kids screamed it along with him, “Captain Tobias Floppy von Flubface!” Delta made up a game called What’s the Baby Like, the point of which was to guess what its favorite color would be or what TV show it would like best. She especially liked to speculate about the baby’s future relationship with Taylor Swift. “Taylor wants a little sister,” she told Bravo.

“Me, too,” Bravo said.

“You already have one,” Delta said, correctingly, turning the tables on him in that way she did sometimes that made him cry. He was trying to agree with her!

Delta was tired of him always imitating her. “Taylor’s your little sister, dummy. Remember?”

“Taylor’s a orange fish,” he said, soberly, unable to remember the word goldfish.

Bravo was a quiet boy and often sad, and now he couldn’t form the words to say what he was thinking, which was that he’d meant he wanted another little sister, though if Delta had said Taylor Swift wanted a brother, he would have wanted that, too. Having a sister like Delta was both a burden, one he would carry for the rest of his life, even after Delta died in suspicious circumstances in a hotel room at the age of fifty-nine, and a deep, warm engulfment of limitless, painful love that felt sometimes as if it might suffocate him. But he couldn’t express any of that. Delta didn’t think much about Bravo at all, except that he was a nuisance.

Nicole had felt great during all three of her pregnancies, and she’d had two easy births. Packing hadn’t bothered her at all. She was an organized person and thought it was fun, an opportunity to sort their possessions, give things away, throw things out. Even sitting in the car for the past two days hadn’t been bad. Lucky for her, her grandpa had bought himself the most comfortable car he could find. At first, after he died, they’d talked about selling it, but Brad had been the one to say no. “This thing’s like driving a bed,” he said. But now, despite the well-upholstered reclining front seat, Nicole had started to feel uneasy.

“You OK, Nic?” Brad could tell something was wrong. He and Bravo were the same that way. Nicole worried that when Bravo went to school he’d get mowed over by the talkative kids before he ever got a chance to become whatever he was supposed to be. Whatever that was. Kids already called him “weirdo.” When people spoke to him, he just stared at them. Maybe he was thinking what to say, but by the time he figured it out, they were usually gone.

Brad said it again. “You OK?”

Nicole prided herself on not being a complainer, but an hour later, somewhere in South Carolina, she asked Brad to find a motel, even though it was only three o’clock. At the Days Inn, Nicole changed the kids into their bathing suits. Brad took them to the pool.

When he brought them back an hour later, Nicole was in the bathroom. After a while, Brad went in too. Pretty soon, Bravo started to knock on the door, whining that he had to go. Brad came out and told Delta to take Bravo and get in the elevator and go down to the lobby and use the bathroom there. They both should go, Brad said. “I don’t have to go,” Delta said. “Try,” Brad said, more harshly than usual. He gave her three dollar bills and a handful of change and told her to buy whatever they wanted from the machines.

When they got back, Nicole was in bed and the lights were out. Brad was sitting in a chair.

Brad had thought they should go to an emergency room, but Nicole said what was the point now? Besides, she didn’t think their insurance would cover it. Brad was thinking that if they went to a hospital, maybe the doctor would keep her overnight. Then he could come back here with the kids and get some sleep. Because frankly, three people to watch was too many. She’d be OK, she said. Now all she wanted was to sleep.

Brad took Delta and Bravo back to the pool. It was getting dark, and the pool lights were on, and everyone had left except for one old lady. After a while, he asked the old lady to watch the kids for a few minutes and went up to the room to check on Nicole. She was asleep. He picked up the kids’ clothes from the floor and carried them down to the pool. He wanted to thank the old lady, maybe offer to bring her a drink or something, but she was asleep with a magazine on her chest. The kids were in the pool. Delta was holding Bravo’s head under the water.

He got the kids into their clothes and took them to supper at the restaurant across the street. They both ordered spaghetti. He ordered rum and Coke. While they ate, he picked dried blood from under his fingernails. Delta kept saying, “Where’s Mom?”

While they waited for dessert, Brad told them the baby had gone to heaven and now their mom was tired.

“You mean it’s dead?”

“Yes.”

“Is she sad?”

“Yeah.”

Bravo started to cry.

After they ate their ice cream, Brad took them to a miniature golf course he’d seen from the road on the way in. They played three games. Delta won all three, cheating.

In the morning, Brad went downstairs and got doughnuts and hard-boiled eggs and little boxes of breakfast cereal and milk and coffee and brought it back to the room on a cardboard tray. Nicole didn’t want to eat. She felt fine, she said; she just wasn’t hungry. She said they should keep going.

They packed their things. Brad wouldn’t let Nicole carry anything. Although, too little too late, he told himself. His father used to say it all the time, meaning he was a useless piece of shit. Brad slung the bags over his shoulders and around his neck, and they headed out. Two old people got on the elevator on the way down and smiled like maniacs at the kids, like they were some TV show about happy family life. When they were about to get out of the elevator, Delta screamed.

“Where’s Taylor?”

Brad looked at Nicole. Nicole put her hands on her stomach and closed her eyes. Delta looked back and forth between them.

“Where is she?”

Delta’s voice, which was low for a child and naturally loud, had gotten louder. The old people’s smiles wavered.

Brad led Nicole to a chair in the lobby. “Wait here,” Brad said to the kids.

He came back a few minutes later with the Ziploc bag, empty except for a few drops of cloudy water clinging to the inside. He leaned over Delta, put his hands on her shoulders. “Taylor had to go away,” he said. He looked at Nicole. She would have handled it better, but her eyes were shut.

“Go where?” Delta’s voice was husky.

“Home, Delt.”

Brad felt annoyed by his daughter. She was an annoying girl and would grow up to be an annoying woman, but he knelt in front of her.

“We’re close to the ocean. Remember, I showed you on the map?”

Delta frowned and crossed her bony arms over her Beauty and the Beast T-shirt.

“She told me she had to go join her people. You know, in the sea.”

“You said she was a freshwater fish.”

“Yeah. But they’ve got freshwater marshes here along the shore. Right next to the ocean.” He was making it up. It seemed possible, but he didn’t know for sure.

Delta kicked the vinyl couch.

Somehow, Brad got everyone into the bathroom one last time, then into the car and back on the road. Delta stared out the window. Bravo cried a little for a while but in a half-hearted whimpering way they were used to that didn’t disturb them anymore, like a dog in its sleep. Brad told the kids if they were good they could go swimming when they got to the next motel. Nicole fell asleep.

Later, Brad heard Delta instructing Bravo.

“When you die, they’re going to flush you down the toilet. Then you can swim to your heart’s content.”

“I don’t want to swim,” Bravo said.

***

Margaret Hawkins writes fiction, essays, and arts journalism. Her work appears regularly in Visual Art Source and the Democracy Chain.  Her third novel (fourth book), Lydia’s Party, was published by Penguin in 2015.  Her work has appeared in the New York Times, ARTnews, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Art & Antiques, the Perch (Yale), Fabrik, the Missouri Review, Brevity, and many other publications. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Loyola University.