Fall 2010
English-language debut of poet Vyacheslav Kiktenko, translated by Jamie Olson
Queens Poet Laureate Paolo Javier
CONTENTS
INTERVIEWS
An interview with poet Paolo Javier by Jolie Hale and Rajiv Mohabir
FICTION
St. Josephine by Benjamin Schactman
POETRY
Three poems from "Her Bone Throat: A Ghost Duet with Eugenio Montale's Ossi di seppia" by Heidi Hart
Myrtle Beach by Jeffery Berg
Bight by Pete Vanderberg
Taking the Union Loop in December and As If the World Were Made of Light by Jeffrey Alfier
Prevention by Rebecca Leah Papucaru
yellow film by Jessica Thoubboron
There Are No Accidents and Steven's First Taste by Levi Rubeck
TRANSLATION
Untitled and An Abandoned Park by Vyacheslav Kiktenko, translated by Jamie Olson
Civic Duty and War News Brief by Marie-Claire Bancquart, translated by Wendeline Hardenberg
NONFICTION
Sugar Blues by Eric Day
PLAYS
Louis Riel, Do You Know How I Feel? by James Payne and Ryan Starinsky
INTERVIEWS
An interview with Queens Poet Laureate Paolo Javier, by Jolie Hale and Rajiv Mohabir
This interview took place on Friday, November 12, at the Brogue bar in Sunnyside, Queens, New York.
Ozone Park Journal: You’ve said in past interviews—
Paolo Javier: Oh, god.
OPJ: —that your experience as an MFA student [at Bard College] was overall a negative one. As a very happy MFA student myself, I’m naturally intrigued by this ... Can you tell us what you had hoped to gain from your MFA experience that didn’t happen for you?
PJ: I got what I really wanted, which was an MFA. I got my MFA because I wanted to teach. Otherwise I was perfectly happy just living and writing. It’s an expensive degree. Bard College is not cheap, and then there was also the greater cost of being away from New York. I really do feel that my writing is not possible without this geography and this location. I kind of have this codependence with New York City.
My problem with my MFA had to do with the cultural politics, and the cultural insensitivity that I felt towards not only writers of color but also queer and transgender folks there. But I guess my experience had everything to do with race. I wrote part of my second book when I was at Bard, although I had begun it before and completed it after. That work was challenged—or not challenged—in terms of, “Are you achieving what you’re setting out to do, and really, why are you doing it in the first place?” And that has to do with folks being unfamiliar with my writing and also unconsciously being upset by the challenge that I was presenting. It has everything to do with the instability of language, specifically English. I was really opening up English. That project was met with tremendous resistance, sadly, from the writing faculty.
The cool thing about being at Bard was that I found a community amongst the musicians and the filmmakers. I’m a pretty interdisciplinary writer anyway. It gets so insular, the MFA community, and I had a life outside of it. The great thing about Bard is that it’s an intense six weeks at a time. It’s a low residency program, so you’re only there in the summer. It’s this great experiment, it’s art camp, you know? But some of us want to keep a separate life outside of poetry, have a real life outside of poetry. I blame myself partly, for being naive about what to expect. Not everybody was on an equal level in terms of why they were there and what they wanted from it. I was already teaching [at NYU], I’d been teaching for several years, and I was really at Bard to get my degree, get some feedback, get to know the artists on the faculty, be qualified to teach specifically creative writing at the university level. That was what I really wanted to do. But Bard’s a great school, with great faculty. It was easier for others.
OPJ: How does the physical space of the city influence your writing in its form or content?
PJ: I feel safe here in Queens. I feel very safe to write, I feel very safe to try new things in my writing. That’s one of the things I didn’t feel safe doing when I was at Bard. That’s always a problem with the avant garde. Bard’s conservative when it comes to cultural issues. It’s experimental, formally, but with other things ...
I feel like I can write here. I feel like I can be as bold and out there as I want. I think it has a lot to do with the fluidity in this neighborhood and the community in this neighborhood, class-wise. I go to Williamsburg and I feel suffocated, you know? And you see people of color there, too, but they’re all part of a certain class. Here in Queens I feel there’s a lot of room to live. I always made it a point to have a life outside of poetry. It feeds the poetry. I feel like I’m a full time poet, because I think and breathe poetry, but I don’t feel like it’s something I have to do twenty-four-seven and be “on” twenty-four-seven. I deliberately have other friends outside of it. Queens is great for that.
And there’s diversity here. There are a lot of Asians and, even more importantly, a lot of immigrants. As an immigrant myself, I appreciate that. I moved to the states when I was twelve, to Westchester county—which is very white. But I had a great time, I had a happy experience there. I went through the stages of assimilation. You still see that here in Queens. That’s probably the main reason I feel safe enough to write here. It’s cool that there are a lot of poets “out of the closet” here in Queens, and I’m feeling that more just over the last few months.
OPJ: Why do you think you had such a good experience as an immigrant in Westchester? That seems so unlikely to me.
PJ: In terms of being the “token,” I probably went through that but I don’t’ remember it. It has to do with the fact that I grew up speaking English, in the suburbs of Manila. I was raised speaking English at home, my parents’ philosophy being that I would learn Filipino in school. So I had no problem mimicking and absorbing the accent when I came here. And I was very garrulous, very talkative. Initially it was tough, but I think it had more to do with being small, being the new kid, and folks were like, “look at the Asian kid.” There were a few other Asians there, some cool Asian dudes who were popular, and there was an Asian guy on the football teams. That helped. “He’s Filipino too, don’t mess with him or you’ll get your ass kicked.” I made friends relatively quickly. I think my fast talking abilities got me out of a lot of trouble. Oh, and I was good at basketball. That’s really how I won the respect of the guys. And I was good at wrestling in high school.
OPJ: Earlier this year, in June,
you were named Poet Laureate of the borough of Queens. The act of creating
poetry is generally perceived to be personal and private, even if its product is
shared with the world. For some poets, even the fact that they write poetry or
identify themselves as poets isn’t part of their public identities. In your
experience so far, what does it mean to be officially a “public poet”? Has the
appointment been a significant change for you, and does it affect the way you
work?
PJ: Yes, it changes how much I get done. Because I’m spending a lot more time reading now—I’ve never read so much in the ten years that I’ve been seriously writing. I’ve always written throughout most of my life, and seriously pursuing poetry has been something I’ve done for the past fifteen years. Since I got this appointment, being professional helps my poetry in a way that I expected I would eventually experience, down the road, if I were to achieve a certain level of success. I never really looked for it. But now I’m having to articulate what I do a lot more. That’s something I’ve had to negotiate. You have to put yourself out there, it’s a different psychic energy.
And giving readings is hard work! I think I gave five readings in three days, in October, over one weekend. I gave three in one day, on a Sunday. I gave a reading at the public library, and then I read for Topaz Arts, and I had to make an appearance at the Queens Museum. So that’s been really exhausting. In terms of working, I really haven’t had a chance to work on my stuff as much as I would like, but I’m not too worried about that because teaching distracts you from writing anyway. During the semester I write when I can, and that’s been my M.O. for years now. So there hasn’t been too much of a change in terms of productivity, but in terms of the energy, and how I have to engage publically, that’s been a huge adjustment.
OPJ: How does your background in visual art contribute to your writing life?
PJ: I have an amateur background in visual art. I’m a proud amateur.
I’m a pretty restless poet on the page. My writing insists on breaking away from traditional form and moving all over the page. I don’t think I’m a narrative poet. If I’m a narrative poet, the narrative emerges in all the senses—visually, how it sounds, not just in content. And this has a lot to do with having a short attention span. I’m easily distracted. I probably go to more art shows, I see more films, and I read more comic books than I go to poetry events and go to book launches and read books of poetry.
I used to read only poetry. Then I said, I like viewing art, I like my cinema, my comic books, my music. It’s all a developing thing, that you find ways to write. I let all these things absorb me, and I let myself be absorbed by them. That’s when I started to write really interesting poetry. It’s nothing new. The Dadaists, the Surrealists, the New York School—that’s part of why I decided to come back to New York, the New York School of Poets. Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Joe Brainard. It was so fluid, the identity of the author, the collaboration. I’m all about collaboration.
It’s not conscious, being influenced by visual art. I write poems when I’m at an exhibit, but I’m not conscious that they’re going to be poems. The fancy term for it is ekphrastic poems, but they’re really just notes. I take notes when I’m watching a film. I have a new book coming out in October next year and there’s a piece in there that I wrote during and after watching “The Dark Knight.” I watched “The Dark Knight,” I think, three times. I wrote while watching it. If I really like a film, I don’t get it, and I watch it again. Something about that film stayed with me, stirred me. I wrote this piece that’s sort of a quasi-essay as well as a poem.
OPJ: You’re a playwright and filmmaker as well as a poet.
PJ: They’re generous when they describe me as a filmmaker.
OPJ: You’ve written at least one full-length play (“Lunatic”) as well as some shorter works for the stage. Can you tell us more about your dramatic writing and how you got started with it? I hugely enjoyed the short dialogue (“A Play, A Play”) that appears in 60 lv bo(em)bs; how would you place that piece in relation to your playwriting?
PJ: I do more poet’s theater than theater theater. When I was an undergrad, I majored in creative writing, but I was very restless. Part of my major was screenwriting and theater, in addition to translation, poetry, and fiction. I love theater. I’m particularly interested in experimental theater like Richard Foreman. He’s a huge hero of mine.
I ran a theater company for a year, a one-act theater company.
OPJ: That’s quite an undertaking.
PJ: Yes, and I eventually
realized that theater isn’t for me. I was the executive director, and that was
a lot of babysitting, a lot of psychology, stuff that I knew I wasn’t very good
at. Theater comes up in my writing, but it’s not something I necessarily set
out to do. I don’t set out to write a theatrical piece. I did a piece recently
that I thought was theater, but it’s sort of poet’s theater. It’s called “Wolfgang
Amadeus Bigfoot.” Four voices, four
characters. But usually it’s not something I plan. I’m an amateur, a dilettante.
I have no aspirations of making it onto Broadway.
OPJ: In 60 lv Bo(e)mbs you refer to
several characters (outside of the dialogue that "Paolo" has with
"Love," "Nietzsche," and "Villa"), such as
"Alma," “Mia," and "Kai." There are many other words
and phrases that are repeated and echoed throughout the book. What are you
hoping that this accomplishes?
PJ: The more I think about them, the less I know. I knew specifically who they were when I was writing it, but I didn’t know by the end of it. I don’t think Paolo is autobiographical. They’re people I knew at the time, perhaps, but they’re characters. The book is kind of a biological experience of language, how when you’re reading it, it has a life of its own. I didn’t want to ascribe a specific narrative to these characters. I don’t’ know who they are, who they were, who they will be. I was working with the unconscious in the initial writing. Of course you go back, you revise. I was thinking about language, privileging how words look and sound, and how words mean only comes in after I’ve written them. One reviewer really nailed it, saying that the book makes a certain sense for folks who don’t’ speak another language, and won’t ever. There’s this awareness that language is slippery. I wanted to have that be a location for the writing, as opposed to it being this mess that you have to clean up and sanitize. So I think these names are not necessarily intended to be fixed, but you can sense them, they’re there, just as all the words are there.
OPJ: So when you use repetition of particular words and phrases in the book, would you say that’s about a certain kind of sound that you’re going for?
PJ: Yeah, it has to do with the
experience of language, how you remember words, how you retain language. If you
don’t understand language, how do you recognize it? Unconsciously, the reader
experiences language the way I do. Which makes it intimate and personal. I
think you get really close to how I experience language. When I finished
writing it, I felt so vulnerable, because you’re seeing my language turned
inside out. It’s exposed. But I’m also very much influenced by the Surrealists
and by writing that is de-centered, that is paratactic rather than syntactic. I’m
interested in writing where the reader isn’t told what to think of it, but invited
to experience it in a way that they can make it their own, and the reader
becomes kind of like a writer. And that has everything to do with writers I
admire. Gertrude Stein is one my all-time heroes. The Surrealists, Breton, Claude
Cahun. I like work that operates in translation. There’s a political experience
that isn’t didactic.
OPJ: O Books calls you a “bilingual heretic.”
PJ: [laughs] That’s in the book [60 lv bo(em)bs]!
OPJ: Yes, you describe yourself that way, actually! You take “impure,” hybrid linguistic opportunities to utilize English in ways that are “heretical” to its imperialist uses, and Tagalog in ways that acknowledge its contact with “English." Based on your work in your chapbook, The Feeling Is Actual, can you talk about the different Englishes you encounter and how they affect your writing, how you include or exclude them in your writing?
PJ: My new book, The Feeling Is Actual, has everything to do with other Englishes. 60 lv bo(em)bs is in many ways so tortured. It has everything to do with the buildup to the war in Iraq, how language was used by the government, and we’ve since learned that it was used effectively. It worked. 60 lv bo(em)bs was meant to challenge that.
The Feeling Is Actual is lighter, in a way. It’s more interested in the love part than the bomb part. It’s a lot more personal. When I was growing up, and to this day, the English that I hear spoken at home is not grammatical. American English is so standardized compared to British English. The British love puns more than Americans do. Thank gosh for hip hop, it makes English more interesting. Growing up, Filipinos, we loved to pun. It has everything to do with covering up your lack of understanding of English, compensating for the class that you belong to, because English is still very much about class. It’s a gift, being able to pun.
With lv bo(em)bs, I wanted to get inside not just language but how I work with language, the in between, the hyphen. I think I was also very resistant to a lot of political poetry being written post 9/11. It worried me. It’s been pissing me off. I thought it was grief porn, and there’s no implication of the reader or the writer. We’re American, we live in the states, we’re part of the empire.
I’m always thinking about other
Englishes. There’s guilt in there, too, because I know it’s the language of the
educated, where I’m coming from, but it’s lingua franca because of American
imperialism. And here I teach diverse classroom settings, and why can’t I teach
bilingual classes? I’ve got a lot of Chinese kids, Latino kids. What are the texts
that they’re gonna read? They’re in English. Why? So all of these things, I’m
constantly thinking about English. It has to do with my obsessive writerliness.
It’s shifting from me feeling so pained about having to choose, to being comfortable
moving in and out of different languages and moving in and out of different Englishes,
and looking on the bright side of things. I don’t have to choose one English or
the other. Although, for this new book, I did choose certain types of Englishes.
OPJ: In what ways do you try to subvert the "glitzy appeal of U.S. cultural products" as far as your books and
marketing them?
PJ: I don’t know if people think of them as US cultural products because they’re not sold all that much, and you can’t acquire them very easily outside of the US. You’ve seen the cover of lv bo(em)bs, it is aware of capital. I think, specifically in the poetry community, I’m trying to get better at supporting the book. I come from the New York School ethic of: you get published, and that in itself is an end, and then you let it go. Also, I’m bad with money, I always feel—and this is romantic, I guess—but I always feel bad about promoting my book in terms of, I’m going to reach out to so-and-so and see if I can get an interview. If I want to do a reading, it’s because I haven’t done it in that place before. I’ve never been to Chicago, for example. But I wouldn’t seek out certain venues or events just to promote myself.
For the first two books, I did very little in the way of promoting them. I’d do a launch amongst my friends and that’s it. I felt guilty, I guess, like I didn’t want to sell out, but at the same time I owe my publisher. I want to sell the book. But I’ve never been a Time Out New York kind of guy, putting a face to the book. I’m embarrassed about author’s photos, I don’t like mine, but I’ll definitely get behind this next book and perform with it. It has to do with the fact that the book performs as a script.
Poets, we have our own economy. It’s a gift economy, especially within small presses. Most poetry publishers are small presses, and the people who buy our books—we have each other. So it’s not so much of a capitalist structure with books of poetry.
OPJ: It seems that most poets publishing today, it’s all about community support. It’s everybody feeding everybody else’s work.
PJ: Which has its pluses, definitely, because there are more poets being published these days than ever before. I’m trying to be more professional these days. I hope to do readings across the country—Chicago, California, Seattle—but I’m also obligated to be here.
I don’t know if that answers your question. I don’t know if I can think about most poetry as a US cultural product because it’s so esoteric, what poets do. Unless you’re Billy Collins.
FICTION
St. Josephine
by Benjamin Schachtman
I know it’s late in the game to get to know someone like me, I say, but it’s important. It is.
Okay, you say, okay, go ahead.
So: here goes.
The shame of it was, Brenda was only a slut with her clothes on.
Brenda was tall when the rest of us were toddling. She was getting mistaken for a senior when we were still gangly muppets, arms and legs flopping from fishing line strings. She had boobs first, she got her period first, she got to first base first. She was the first person I ever even heard say the word “blowjob.”
Which is how Brenda stole Dwayne away from me.
Dwayne Jasper was the love of my life and he was beautiful. At twelve, he was beautiful. At thirteen he was leaving beautiful headed for, I don’t know, beyond beautiful. Fourteen and he was already dragging me headlong into puberty, wanting him like I had wanted chocolate before I had ever tasted it, when our family didn’t allow it in the house because my stupid brother would eat till he made himself sick.
Our family probably wouldn’t have allowed blowjobs in the house either.
But back when Dwayne was twelve and merely beautiful, before I had heard of blowjobs or tasted chocolate, before Brenda starting making a big deal of carrying tampons around and rolling her hips and joking about how she felt “fertile” and all that, it was just me and Dwayne on the poor-kids bus route, the one that circled south of town out into the grasslands. Littleton, Ohio. Nowhereville. It was just me and Dwayne and nothing else for twenty-eight minutes, twice every day.
I prayed to God and thanked him for putting Dwayne on that bus with me.
How God put Dwayne on the bus with me was by killing Mr. Jasper with colon cancer, which left Dwayne’s mom and his two older brothers on a military widow’s income, and when I found this out, I felt a minute of pure pukeyness.
But then I thought, maybe God wasn’t answering my prayer when he killed Dwayne’s father. Maybe he was putting Dwayne on the bus with me to make up for killing Dwayne’s father. Maybe I was Dwayne’s silver lining, Dwayne’s sunshine. Maybe God wanted me to be Dwayne’s girlfriend.
The whole seventh grade year we sat next to each other and during the last semester, we started holding hands. We never said anything about it, just one day, as the bus pulled up sharply to a stop, my hand landed on his leg. Dwayne simply took my hand in his and held it in his lap for three minutes until we got to the bus parking lot.
Brenda wanted to know if I touched him.
“Touched him?”
“Well, your hand was in his lap.”
“Touched his penis?”
Brenda laughed. She called it a cock, or a dick, which is what her older sister called it. I called it what the Health Sciences book called it.
“I’d be impressed if you skipped to third base, not that he’d have much of a second base to go to,” Brenda smacked me with a tampon on the chest, “but you should at least kiss him before you give him a handjob.”
I knew all about handjobs from Brenda. I knew, for example, not to give them to a boy after gym because he would smell funny, and then your hand would smell funny. I also knew that you should point the boy’s penis away from you when you did it, or you could get sperm in your eye like Brenda’s older sister Amy, who got an eye infection and had to go to the doctor. She had to wear an eye patch for three weeks and everybody, including Brenda, called her “dickeye.”
I didn’t mind Brenda’s stories, though. I wasn’t the way people thought I was, like my parents, who never joked and had probably never done it except twice, once for me and once for my brother. I wouldn’t have minded giving Dwayne a handjob. Brenda said it was kind of like a back-rub, or doing someone’s nails.
“You like someone, no big deal,” Brenda said one day, doing her toenails in two-tone shades like the beauty salons did, “you don’t even have to take your bra off or anything.”
I don’t think I would have given as many as Brenda did, but I wasn’t opposed.
The problem was, since handjobs were, at the time, all Brenda talked about, they became all I could think about. I’d be sitting in algebra, trying to solve for x, and suddenly, I would picture my hand on Dwayne’s penis, or, at least, the Health Sciences cartoon illustration of Dwayne’s penis that floated around in my head. And on the bus rides home every day, when Dwayne would take my hand and hold it in his lap ...
Yeah. My head spun.
I’m not stupid, I know that I mostly wanted to give Dwayne a handjob because of what Brenda had told me.
“After you do it, they’ll do whatever you want. Carry your books, do your homework, give you their milk money, you just wave those pretty little fingers around and they’ll do whatever.”
Looking back, I guess Brenda was possibly the youngest prostitute in all of Ohio, but I felt like Christmas in July every time she called after dinner to tell me about her latest adventure. I didn’t want money, and I didn’t need help with my homework, and I didn’t care if any other boy in the school even blinked in my direction.
But I would have loved to have Dwayne carry my books home.
I would have loved to introduce him to my folks.
“This is my boyfriend, Dwayne.”
At the end of seventh grade, when I was thirteen, a teenager, I asked, begged, pleaded, stood on my head and wailed for my parents to let me go to the Cotillion Dance, and they said no. I prayed to God to let me go, asking him politely not to do anything too drastic. I did not tell God that I intended to give Dwayne the best handjob of his young life. I certainly did not tell my parents that. I was on my best behavior for weeks.
I took out the trash, I cleaned dishes. I cleaned my room, I washed my own clothes. I shucked corn, even if we weren’t having corn I just shucked it anyway and put it up in the fridge. I took out more trash. I came straight home and did my homework. When Joshua would have fits I’d do cartwheels, walk on my hands, back flips, whatever I could until he calmed down, clapped his hands. I helped my dad change the oil in his truck even though the feeling of oil on my arms made me sick in the pit of my stomach.
I was the shining angel of Ohio, the greatest daughter in the history of daughters.
The night of the Cotillion they told me they were sorry.
I cried so hard I think it broke my hymen.
The next day was Saturday and after I slunk downstairs and told my parents I needed clean sheets, my mom took me up into my room and we had a long talk. She told me everything I already knew from the Health Sciences book, except that in her version there was God to thank for all the “miracles” and not Mother Nature. She told me that boys and girls both go through changes. I told her I thought it was unfair, because Brenda had said it was unfair.
“It’s fucking bullshit,” Brenda would say. Brenda knew all the swear words now, she had learned them from a junior on the soccer team.
“It’s funny, he says fuck when he finishes.” Brenda would laugh and imitate him, closing her eyes and pushing her neck forward like a chicken and making a gurgling noise out of the word, fu-uh-uh-gh-gh-gh-ck.
There I was, thinking about Brenda and handjobs and the most forbidden of all words, fuck, while my mom was patiently going on about a woman’s this and a woman’s that. I just looked down at my sheets and that smear like red mud and I must have forgotten who I was talking to, since I only ever talked about sex stuff with Brenda.
I forgot who I was talking to and I said:
“It’s bullshit.”
And my mom’s eyes fell out of her head and landed in her lap. Just about. And I thanked God for not letting me say what I meant to say, which was fucking bullshit, and I promised to take my whipping like a grown woman which was, according to my mom, what I now was.
But I didn’t get whipped.
My mom sat there for a long time and then without a word starting taking the sheets off my bed and I think that we were never as close as we were that one time she didn’t beat the crap out of me for cussing.
That Sunday I didn’t have to go to church. I stayed at home with a hot-pack on my stomach, I have no idea why. I felt fine.
“You must be bleeding like a pig!” Brenda laughed.
“What? No, not really.” I said. “Why aren’t you at church?”
“I ditched, I’m going to sneak over to soccer practice. You should come. I’ll tell you all about the Cotillion.”
But I didn’t really want to hear it. So I told her I was sick and I stayed home. I lay on the couch and watched cartoons and made fart noises with the hot pack to make Joshua laugh. It was the nicest Sunday I could remember in a long time.
When my parents came home they brought a snow-white pet rabbit for me.
“Her name is Josephine,” my dad said, holding the rabbit by the neck.
“Like the cartoon you like,” my mom said with a smile.
I think they meant “Josie and the Pussycats,” but I didn’t correct them. I just hugged them and ran upstairs with Josephine cradled to my chest. I ran all the way back downstairs, grabbed the box that had the cage in it and ran back up into my room to put the rabbit cage together, completely forgetting I was supposed to be crippled with my period. I left my parents downstairs with the soft farting sounds Joshua was making with the hot pack.
I spend all night feeding Josephine bits of carrots, holding her and letting her tickle my face with her little black nose. I called Brenda and even though she tried to sound uninterested, like pet rabbits were so fifth grade, I could tell she was jealous. I told her she could come over and play with Josephine during the week.
Summer came and went and I had yet to get my hands on Dwayne’s cartoon penis, yet to exert upon him the kind of superhero mind control that Brenda now had over half the soccer team and some of the swim team. Dwayne was busting out all over that summer, working on a neighbor’s farm to earn money to help his mom. Which I thought was sweet, but what I really paid attention to was all the wonderful things that were happening to Dwayne’s body.
“You’ve got good taste,” Brenda would say, “I’m getting a warm fuzzy just thinking about him.” This was Brenda’s new thing. Warm fuzzies were a kindergarten way of saying someone made you feel good. You were supposed to feel it in your chest, but Brenda felt it everywhere, from her fingertips to her ears and all the spots in between. Now we both spent our fair share of time in the bathtub with the shower nozzle, but somehow I was slow on the uptake about that feeling. That feeling in my head, like having to pee and being super hungry and eating too much sugar all rolled into one. Brenda figured it out right away, that feeling wasn’t about touching yourself, or lazy daydreams. That feeling was a reaching out.
I didn’t know it until that summer, and even then, it was dim, not yet sunrise on the horizon.
But I’m not going to lie, talking about Dwayne did the same thing for me it did for Brenda. We spent one night, lying awake in a big double sleeping bag, talking about it.
“What do you think it means?” I asked.
“What does what mean?”
“You know,” I said, searching for a word and not finding it, “the all-over warm fuzzy.”
“It means you’re ready,” Brenda said, holding Josephine and smiling.
“Ready for what?”
“Don’t be stupid, it even says that in the Health Science book. It means you’re ready,” she made a mocking face at me, “to have a penis inside you.”
“What’s wrong with the word penis?” I asked.
Brenda stuck her tongue out at me.
“Nothing, I guess, but boys don’t like that, you sound like a health teacher.”
I shrugged.
“Would you let Dwayne do you?”
I shrugged again, turning bright red.
“What’s it like?” I asked, finally.
Brenda sighed in the dark. She stroked Josephine’s ears.
“I don’t really want to talk about it,” she said, “but it’ll be good with you.”
We were both quiet for a while.
“For you, I mean, and Dwayne, whatever you guys do. It’ll be good. Dwayne’s a nice guy.”
She rolled over into me, and tucked her head onto my arm. She pulled Josephine into her chest and the three of us curled up. Brenda smiled and closed her eyes. It occurred to me that I knew plenty, too much, about all the boys Brenda knew. How they got bashful, nervous, ruined their shorts waiting for Brenda to show up, how they all seemed to think the best thing to do was to promise Brenda they’d get her out of this town – even though everybody knew nobody really left town. I knew about their birthmarks, about their animal-print underwear. I practically knew what it was like to be a teenage boy, dragged around in a stupor by a penis. I could look at their faces and know exactly what they were thinking, it was part of the fun of knowing Brenda, having this thing you knew about half the school.
But when I looked at the velvet shades of Brenda’s eyelids, I felt powerless.
Like I knew nothing.
And …
Christmas came on Halloween that year. Barely a semester into eighth grade my parents sat me down after dinner to tell me that it was ‘okay’ with them if I went to the Halloween dance.
I hadn’t even known there was a Halloween dance, but there it was, and I was going. I hadn’t even prayed. I soon found out that the dance was a lock-in, and it dawned on me that my parents were afraid I would go off trick-or-treating to a party and get my hands on a beer, that they didn’t trust me and would rather lock me up in a high-school gymnasium than sit at home and watch me sulk. I didn’t care one bit.
Dwayne was going to be mine.
I called Brenda, and she came over on a Sunday afternoon so we could plan.
“Don’t forget to be careful where you point it, or you’ll end up like dickeye,” she laughed, cradling Josephine in her arms like a baby. It was weird, she’d say the filthiest things, but she was always so sweet with that rabbit.
Dwayne and I didn’t ride the bus together anymore, which didn’t matter so much because we had homeroom together. We didn’t hold hands anymore, which wasn’t Dwayne’s fault, it was just against the “amorous behavior” codes and oddly enough, it was easy for Brenda to get away with giving handjobs in the janitor’s closet by the Home Ec room but harder than hell for me to get away with finger-snuggling Dwayne in homeroom.
It didn’t matter, we made eye contact. Lots of eye contact.
One day, while we were making googly-eyes at each other I said:
“Hey Dwayne, can I go with you to the Halloween dance?”
I almost wet my shorts, I couldn’t believe I had actually asked him, out loud.
“Sure.” He smiled at me, then asked, “Your folks will let you?”
“Naturally.” Another borrowed Brenda-ism, although the whole situation was as natural as a dancing cow.
He reached out and squeezed my hand! Illicit amorous behavior!
“Mr. Jasper!” The homeroom teacher growled from behind his coffee mug. All the oooooooohs swelled up in the room and I did not care. The homeroom teacher didn’t really seem to care either. After the other kids calmed down, and my face cooled off a little, Dwayne turned to me and said:
“We’ll have a great time.”
I hoped Brenda would be proud.
Halloween came so freaking slowly that I couldn’t believe I almost forgot to pick a costume. The day before the dance, my mom drove me to the Five and Dime and I picked out a princess costume that I could at least pretend to have boobs in and prayed to God not to let my parents ruin my chance with Dwayne. I stayed up all night, rehearsing just exactly how I would look into Dwayne’s eyes and say:
“Dwayne Jasper, I’m going to give you a handjob now so you better kiss me.”
I rehearsed the line to Josephine, her tiny blinking black eyes radiated encouragement.
And I prayed and prayed and prayed that my parents would not ruin it.
To my surprise they didn’t.
After school I came home, got changed, and my parents just smiled like I was going to church or t-ball practice and said:
“You look nice, dear.”
“Have a good time, sweetie.”
“We’ll be there to pick you up at nine.”
And then they let me walk out the door to Brenda’s mom’s car and I might as well have been walking into a bar in downtown Canton but they just waved and closed the front door and went to watch a movie with Joshua and I stood with my jaw hanging open until Brenda shouted at me.
“Hey, princess blowjob, let’s move it!”
And I thanked God for making Brenda wait until my parents had gone inside before letting her say that. I got in the back seat with Brenda.
“Catwoman?” I asked. Brenda was stuffed into a little black leather get-up. I wafted her mom’s cigarette smoke away from my face and tried to see if her mom’s face showed any sign of disapproval but there was nothing. Brenda’s mom turned in her seat and asked:
“Do you guys like the Stooges?”
I shrugged my shoulders. Brenda’s mom turned up the radio and we headed for the school.
“It’s too bad you couldn’t bring Josephine,” Brenda said. “We could’ve dressed her up.”
I nodded.
“I can’t believe you said that,” I said after a minute, “in front of parents.”
“My mom doesn’t care,” she said, laughing.
“Mine does.”
Brenda apologized quietly.
“More like princess handjob, anyway.”
We both giggled.
The dance sucked, but that was okay. They kept playing terrible, lame songs that you couldn’t really slow dance to but that weren’t very cool. Most of them I had never heard before. And I was bored, because Dwayne was standing on the guys’ side of the dance floor, talking with the junior varsity football guys about playing next year—I know because I kept walking by to overhear if he mentioned me. Brenda, well, she disappeared ten minutes into the dance to go smoke pot.
Pot, according to Brenda, vastly increased the mind-controlling powers of handjobs and blowjobs.
“It’s like a fucking superpower,” Brenda had giggled one night on the phone.
She even claimed she was going to get a senior to drive her to Columbus for a big rock’n’roll festival.
Which was great for Brenda, but left me alone in my princess outfit, amongst the distinct minority of people who had dressed up. And I was beginning to think that giving myself play-dough boobs had not been my greatest idea ever. They were starting to sweat.
Finally, I could take no more of the lame music and couldn’t think of any more excuses to wander near enough to Dwayne to overhear things, I tried to make myself feel as Brenda as possible and walked over to Dwayne. I touched him on the arm, the way Brenda always did to her boys, and whispered to him:
“Let’s go outside for a minute.”
Dwayne’s eyeballs popped like corn kernels. We were outside in three seconds, standing innocently behind the bushes in the courtyard.
“What’s up, Eliza?” Dwyane asked. His breath smelled like pot, and I wondered if he had snuck away while I had been in the bathroom boobifying myself.
I opened my mouth, thought of Josephine’s reassuring little face, willed the words to come out.
Dwayne Jasper, I’m going to give you a handjob now so you better kiss me.
Nothing came out. I was freezing up.
“Dwayne ...” I got out, but nothing followed.
“Yeah?” he said, looking around, bored, I thought, already.
“Handjob,” I said, sputtering, the rest of the words blowing away like leaves.
Dwayne looked at me for a minute while I tried to recover from the shock of hearing the word come out of my own mouth, having said, sort of, what Brenda would have said. Then he unzipped his shorts, pushed his hand into his boxers and pulled out his penis.
It didn’t look like the cartoon, there were no cartoon hairs, or the little cartoon helmet. Just a lump of skin which Dwayne held out like it wasn’t really his. I put one hand over it, covering it in Dwayne’s hand.
“Oh, boy,” Dwayne said, which made me laugh.
I guess I expected f-uh-uh-uh….
“What are you laughing at?” Dwanye said, a little hurt.
“Nothing. But I think we’re supposed to kiss first.”
Then Dwayne kissed me.
It was a really nice kiss. He didn’t jab his tongue at me the way Brenda was always complaining the soccer boys did. He didn’t grab me or try to get a hand into my panties or do anything except lightly lay one hand on my shoulder.
It was a movie kiss. It was a storybook kiss. It was worth bleeding like a stuck pig for, it was worth the clammy, sweaty lumps of green playdough stuck to my chest, it was worth it, worth it, worth it and I thanked God for Dwayne Jasper.
Then Dwayne’s penis jumped in my hand, like a frog, and grew, a little. I snatched my hand back and threw up on Dwayne, then sat down on the ground.
I looked up at Dwayne. He looked down at his shirt, vomit dripping into the palm of his hand where he was still holding his penis, then he looked at me.
And he said the sweetest thing:
“You don’t have to give me a handjob if you don’t want to.”
And I said:
“I’ll be right back.”
Or I thought I did. Maybe I just ran out of the courtyard, leaving poor Dwayne with puke on his penis and ran down the hallway and into the bathroom. I tore the play-dough out of my stupid pink princess top and threw it at the wall and threw up again in the sink and then, standing in the bathroom with barf on my face and green hands from the sweaty play-dough, I got my period.
Thanks, God.
Twenty minutes went by before Trish from my Civics class finally came into the freaking bathroom and it turned out Trish wasn’t a freaking woman yet so I had to wait for her to get her sister and so a half-an hour later I was finally “plugged up,” another nasty Brenda-ism, and I’d mostly gotten the green off my hands and the barf off my face, so I ran back out to the courtyard, snuck behind the bushes, and there was Dwayne sitting with his back against the wall and Brenda on her knees in her little Catwoman outfit and I swear it looked like she had Dwayne’s penis in her mouth for a second before she looked up at me with half a grin. Dwayne’s little penis had grown, shot through with veins like a comic book bicep. But Dwayne himself looked smaller, like Brenda had partially devoured him. He looked like a nervous squirrel, frozen in the street, unable to decide which way to run.
And she looked like a panther.
And I prayed, oh Jesus Fucking Christ, I prayed to let Dwayne shoot all he had right into Brenda’s eyes, both of them, and I prayed for those sperm to claw their way into her eyes and blind her. I prayed for her to live the life of a crippled blind hag, and I’d stay her friend just so I could call her dickeyes for the rest of her life.
I ran back to the dance and told a chaperone I had food poisoning from the French onion dip that no one had touched and they called my mom to come and get me.
I don’t think I thought about Dwayne much, really, but I sat up all night thinking about how much I hated Brenda. And then, at about three-thirty in the morning, I got out of bed and walked over to the rabbit cage and took Josephine out. I thought about how much Brenda loved Josephine, and how sweet she always was with Josephine, nuzzling their noses together and whispering, and how her parents would never let her have a pet.
And I’m not proud of what I did.
My parents never said anything about it, but we never got another pet.
And I never talked to Brenda again.
I studied a lot, read a lot. All those hours I would have spent with Brenda, either hanging out in my room or on the phone, I read instead. Every time I thought about her, and felt a little sick, and a little lonely, I’d crack open a new book. I had a different one nearly every week.
I think I was the only person under the age of seventy to use the public library. When I was fourteen, my dad gave me a list, a hundred great works of literature. He sort of laughed when he said it, “literature,” the way he laughed when someone set a Guinness world record, “world’s biggest ball of string,” or “most pancakes eaten in one sitting.” I laughed too, because I was halfway through the list already.
By fifteen I was finished with the list. By sixteen I was finished with the library. Some of it I didn’t get, some of it I hated, but I finished almost everything except Finnegans Wake. I felt a little bad about that, like cheating on a test. But, truth was, I wasn’t really trying to expand my mind. I was killing time. I was one of those unlucky cusp babies— born just too late to enter school with most of the kids my age. That meant I wouldn’t graduate until I was eighteen, almost nineteen. Two more years, and not much left to read. I thought about reading the dictionary. Maybe the Bible.
But before it came to that I found out about the GED. One of those adult things, hidden in plain sight, the way my dad used to keep a bottle of rye whiskey on top of the bookshelf. One day I was just old enough to see it. I remember asking the guidance counselor, “You can do that?” Like I had just found out I could fly or fast-forward time.
I was too young to take the test without a waiver from the principal and he had already insisted that I finish the tenth grade, at the very least. But if I stuck to my plan I could get myself out of Littleton by my eighteenth birthday with some money saved up, maybe even a car. My dad said that it sounded like a lot of work to save myself a measly year. Then he stopped in the middle of talking. He turned and just stared out the window at the street. Broken down cars. Sullen teenagers skulking in oversized jackets. Houses boarded up, “For Sale” signs bleached out and torn. Then he hugged me and told me good luck. My mom cried and quoted scripture.
“When I was a child ...”
There were two jobs available: waitress and stripper. Yeah, I know, these are two sides of the same coin, but, at the time, I thought they were night and day, so I picked waitress. I lied about my age and the head manager, Mike, must have known because he paid me under the table the whole time I worked there. Still, he hired me, that was the important part, and I was too desperate for the money to ever ask why.
Of course, I wasn’t good at remembering orders, or carrying them out, and I didn’t make much in tips. The kitchen guys were horrible, really horrible, at least at first. Mike cussed them out from time to time, but he was a sweet-faced, heavy-set guy with bashful eyes, and the lilting way his sentences always ended on a high note, like questions, would always just set them off laughing. I finally thought to thank him, but he just grumbled.
“Maybe you should just try insulting them back,” he said with a shrug.
It seemed childish, but I actually kind of liked it. I could say whatever I wanted to the kitchen guys. They seemed to take it in stride, so I did too. I kept forgetting orders and dropping plates, but Mike never fired me, and the kitchen started covering for my screw-ups. I think, mostly, that they were lonely and liked having a girl around to flirt with. I liked having the extra money, even the little I was making, because at least in theory I was saving up to get out of town when I could take my GED. Soon enough, I wasn’t the new girl anymore, which meant more respect and less abuse, they loaned me cigarettes, and bought me wine coolers or vodka whenever I asked.
On slow nights, they would tell me about their girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, who they had eyes on for future ex-girlfriends. At first, it was what you would expect, bragging, largely in terms of cup sizes and inches, but eventually, as nights dragged on, we talked about heartbreaks and fuck-ups. One of the guys, a Mexican kid named Manny whose parents were both doctors, cried on my shoulder one night. I didn’t have to ask him why and he didn’t have to tell me.
Keith, the fry cook, confided in me that his last break-up had left him impotent. Anytime he got in bed with a girl, he’d be hard as a crowbar until the girl touched him, then he’d remember his ex and his guts would fall apart. I told him the Dwayne story and he laughed so hard he swore he was cured. That became our joke, whenever things would go badly, whenever someone had a shit day, I’d offer them a handjob and they’d start laughing, till their eyes would tear up and then, finally, holding their side, they’d say:
“Okay, okay, I’m okay now.”
One day Dwayne actually came by for lunch.
I took my break and we stood outside, just in case the kitchen figured out he was that Dwayne. We talked a little, about football, mostly, and shared a cigarette. Brenda had just broken up with him, although she had fucked most of the boys in his grade while they’d been dating anyway. She had been suspended for having sex in detention and they were trying to expel her. I wasn’t surprised that he came to see me, guys aren’t too complicated.
“I guess maybe I should have waited for you to come back that night, huh?” he said, ashing our cigarette.
“You really wanted a handjob, didn’t you?” I said, trying to joke, trying not to be sour.
“I guess I got more than I bargained for.”
I sighed.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his arms at his side.
“It’s okay,” I said, taking the cigarette from his hand. He looked relieved.
He asked if I wanted to go get a coffee. I stared at him, looked over my shoulder at the diner, then back at him, but I wasn’t mad at him. In my head, to this day, poor stupid Dwayne is standing there in the courtyard behind the bushes with his barf-covered dick in his hand, and that’s just a hard image to stay mad at, God bless his heart.
“Can I tell you something kinda personal?” Dwayne asked after a minute.
“Shoot, Dwayne, we’re old friends.” I meant to sound sarcastic, but it came out as honest.
“She sleeps around, I know she does, and I guess it makes her happy.”
I shook my head in agreement.
“But when we have sex, she just lies there, like she’s scared to be naked, and she cries, and won’t talk to me, and I just have a hard time picturing her like that with other guys, it’s like she’s not herself with me.”
And I didn’t have the words or the heart to tell Dwayne how wrong he was. But we stayed friends. Not good friends, but he’d find reasons to drop by the diner and I’d find reasons to drop by practice. Mostly we talked about football, and algebra, and getting out of Ohio, and it was nice to have a relationship that was so simple. But we didn’t ever talk about Brenda again. At that point, a lot of people didn’t talk about Brenda.
I had already said goodbye to my parents months ago, we just shared a place and I even kicked in for rent, out of pride, mostly. They let me pay because it’s good practice, and we all knew I’d never have it quite so easy as I did with them, and they were decent enough not to mention it. Sometimes we ate dinner together, but mostly, we coexisted. We didn’t talk a lot, mostly because they had already given me their blessing and they had long since been out of advice. I don’t know what they thought of me, or my leaving. I wish we had been closer, I wish we’d had more in common, but we weren’t and we didn’t.
I should say that I’m not one for the finger-pointing and the TV-grade psychobabble and the woe-is-me routine. My parents worked hard and as it happened they just got smacked around by bad luck one too many times to keep up with the world or try and figure it out. But they did the best they could, as well as parents can, which is to love your kid, teach them to stick up for themselves, somehow get them through high school and then to get them as far from their hometown as you can. Anyone who asks their parents for more than that is still a child.
It took longer than I wanted but, when I was seventeen and a half, I finally dropped out of school. I got all my waivers signed and my forms filled out. I even paid for the classes and the test with my own money. Mike let me pick up a full time shift, even though I wasn’t eighteen. I got better at remembering orders, practiced my balance at night with upside-down Frisbees full of water. I thought my parents would be disappointed, but they weren’t. They were happy in a quiet kind of way. They even co-signed on a used car, so I could get to work without taking the bus. A lot of kids were dropping out, but not a lot of them were working, or getting degrees, even Good Enough Degrees. I overheard my parents talking a lot about what was happening to our little town.
Even Mike grumbled about it.
“We used to be a beer and pot town,” he said one night, glaring at a huddled mass of raw-faced teenagers smoking from a glass pipe in the parking lot. “Now it’s just meth. Fucking crystal meth.”
Mike was an okay guy, not smart, or handsome, but decent enough. He never said anything when I was late, never said no when I needed to pick up shifts, waited all those months for me to get my balancing act down. Always paid out my credit card tips in cash, never stiffed me. He told me to me cut my ties, say goodbyes only if really I had to. The cleaner the break the better. He told me to save my pennies. All the usual good advice. Obvious and cliché, but the kind of thing a teenager needs to hear if she’s not going to get eaten alive.
One night, his eyes pink and his face clammy behind two day’s worth of beer, he came stomping out of the office while I was putting all the pastries back in the fridge.
“You still here?”
“I’m almost done,” I told him.
“You know what I fucking mean.”
“Easy, Mike, I’m going.”
“Don’t wait,” he said, leaning against the wall and taking a couple of shallow breaths, “don’t you fucking wait too long.” He looked like he had a stomach full of buckshot when he said it.
He went back into his office. When I poked my head in, he just waved me away.
“If I had any heart left I’d fire you,” he said, pushing the door shut with his foot, leaving me standing there in the hallway with my purse and my keys.
The night I left, Mike was the only person I said goodbye to. He was sitting in his old, ketchup stained chair in the office, staring at half a plate of French fries and rubbing his beer belly.
“Well, keep my number,” he said, then bashfully added, “in case you need a reference, or whatever.”
“I don’t know how to thank you, for everything.”
He shrugged.
“I’m actually legal now. You want a handjob?” I asked, sliding one of my bra-straps down over my shoulder with a grin.
Mike shook his head.
“That would be great,” he said, trying to grin, “but I don’t think I’m up for it.”
“Probably for the best,” I said. “I don’t think I’m much good at it. Probably throw up on you.”
Mike laughed, not as hard as I wanted him to, but he looked up with a smile.
“Okay, okay, I’m okay.”
I smiled at him.
“You got a fucked up way of saying goodbye, though,” he said, but then stood up and hugged me so quickly that it trapped my arms at my sides. He slid my bra-strap back up on my shoulder, turned me around, and kicked me in the butt out the door.
“Tell ‘em I fired you,” he shouted, and closed his door.
If he had his way, I’d forget him.
I left Ohio and for years never thought about a soul there except Brenda. Childish as it was, I still hated her. But every night, I’d think about her, and sometimes a hand would slide under the waistband of my underwear. Every night I’d say her name. I’d dream hazy, blurry dreams about Brenda lying naked in the grass, not crying and shivering, but laughing. Sometimes there were other bodies with her, sometimes she was alone. I could never tell if I was watching her, if I was with her, if I was her. I knew, though, that my phone would be ringing soon. Somehow I knew, and wasn’t surprised to see that old Ohio area code on my phone. Brenda had stabbed herself in the heart with a boyfriend’s hunting knife. No one in the neighborhood thought she did it, thought it was a murder, because hometown girls, even promiscuous ones, don’t kill themselves, and even if they do they take pills or drink poison. Most people didn’t even believe she was dead at all, because, “stabbed in the heart”?—seriously, it’s a bit much.
But it was Brenda. Any psycho might have done a dead body up in lacy underwear, but only Brenda would’ve painted her toenails in two tones first. She left her makeup perfect. And even though she was a registered organ donor, Brenda took her heart with her. I could see her lying there, the handle of the knife pressed up between her breasts, a smile on her face. Laughing: F-uh-uh-uh- …
Brenda’s fuck you to Littleton, Ohio. Dramatic, selfish, ballsy and sad.
That night I finally let my boss take me out to the dinner he’d been offering for months. Behind the French bistro in his Lexus, I found myself kissing him, talking about how I was manager material while he slid his hands up my shirt. When I slid my hand into his pants and wrapped around him, I thought of Brenda. When he slid his fingers inside me, I have to admit that the fancy car, the nice suit, the three hundred dollar dinner, his ability to lift me up above the other struggling waitresses, to hold my head above water, all of it … well, it gave me one big warm fuzzy.
When I took my panties off in a damp clump I thought of Brenda. And when I was cramped in the front seat, the gear shifter smashed into my ribs, my nose clogged with slobber, trying desperately to breathe around his short, fat little dick, I thought of Brenda.
I pointed him away from my face and let him come onto the sleeve of his tailored Italian suit and giggled. When he asked what was funny I said it was nothing, and looking past his face I smiled and tossed my hair over my shoulder and wiped my mouth clean. I took a deep breath and let it out. And I waited. And I didn’t have to wait long for the bile to rise up in my throat, and as I struggled to choke it back down I wanted to thrash about and pull my hair and scream and gouge my eyes out and take a razor to my throat. I wanted to crawl home through the rain and the mud, I wanted to clean myself off, do myself up like a pin-up tattoo and put an ice-pick through my heart. Take that, world.
But I didn’t.
And after a minute I felt okay. I suggested that we go somewhere for a nightcap and my boss buttoned his pants, and dabbed at his sleeve with a concerned look. Then he shrugged and put the car in gear. In the back seat, Brenda was sitting, holding Josephine to her chest and smiling and laughing and saying:
“Oh, Prairie Girl, I’m so fucking proud of you.”
I smiled back. Because you don’t stop loving someone just because you start hating them.
And I got the job, naturally.
And I tell Johnny all of this, as we lie on a blanket and watch the sky out over the ocean go orange to red, purple to black. We pull the blanket up around us. Johnny plays his cards right, which is to say, he just lays them out there. He’s got the same sad streak as the others, probably every guy has it. They just can’t help getting the wind knocked out of them when they find out they ain’t the first. Sometimes they lie about it, sometimes they stare at you like your skin is raw chicken and they can’t wait to wash their hands.
Johnny sits up and stares out into the darkness. I know the bile’s rising up in his throat. And he mumbles something. He kisses me on the forehead and walks down to the shore. I watch his figure against the water. I can barely see him, only where his body interrupts the silver lines of the breakers, sea foam in the moonlight. He stands down there. He stands there, and I’d bet good money he’s crying. He’s ashamed and afraid he’s too proud to do anything else. He knows we’re perfect for each other and that he’s ruining it. He knows that if he shakes it off right now and comes back and lies down beside me that it’ll evaporate. We’ll kiss, and undress, and everything will be okay. We can outlast it and one day it will even be funny. He can do it. All he has to do is do it.
And you throw up your hands. You flash a jaded sneer. You say: it ain’t that easy.
But it is.
It is.
POETRY
Three Poems from “Her Bone Throat: A Ghost Duet with Eugenio Montale’s Ossi di seppia”
by Heidi Hart
Eugenio Montale wrote his 1925 debut Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones) on the coast of Liguria as Fascism overtook Italy. The following three poems engage with Ossi di seppia not as translations but as antiphonal responses to the poet’s first lines, rhyme patterns, and images from the natural world. They also form a “duet” in that they speak to absent music, as did the poetry of Montale, who gave up singing after his voice teacher’s death in 1923.
The canebrake’s spears poke up again ...
The damaged, singing reed. This pen-tip,
split. Unmended shirt, the needle
in my hand—refused; my phallic
dreams, fierce Handel
aria, saette d’amore, Eros’ arrows;
what I said on the front porch,
this pressure building, clouds
that rise, and fall as ash.
Imagine this page as a coastline
ragged with your absence.
My ink-wet world spins
fatally off course.
Faint sistrum on the wind ...
Percussion instrument from Egypt,
lost cicada sheath. That rattle
in the piano from the pencil dropped
inside. Are you nettled
at what’s lost in you,
still noisy, turbulent as blood?
I risk the word truth
and wish I could release the flood
you’ve dammed, years, words, debris
washed up against the wall;
in the knotted tree
outside my window, all
the miniature wind chimes ping
like tapped glass, falling pressure
as the storm comes, never
wild enough to make you sing.
Haul onto the parched shore ...
Only paper boats. Still, they wash up
on your porch, old wicked songs,
dark fairy tales, they wreck your sleep
and leave their needle-sharp debris along
the wrack line, threshold you thought was
impassable. Don’t worry; I’ve become an owl
like that cursed woman in the Welsh tale,
midnight singer left to voice
her I am human, I am human call.
To think my tone might hold you, soft as
feathers, safer than a boat to carry you across
and take you deep. Only language, after all.
Myrtle Beach
by Jeffery Berg
At Wings, a hermit crab clings
to cage wire. Confederate flag rafts
below Gamecock towels.
Carolina moon: the sickle above the palmetto
on a boogie board. Clemson paw crocs.
All the symbols the same,
twenty years since I’d been there
in the taffy air. Now I walk
past Gay Dolphin, distorted
in the mirrors of Ripley’s Believe It or Not,
the space of grass
where the Pavilion used to be.
I jostled there in a wooden seat
in the haunted house, skeletons
out of coffins, low orange light
in dark corners. And again, I rode it,
sunburnt, our family’s yearly vacation,
a photo of us I found once, all of us
together in a line, the ocean behind us,
a red raft, squinting with laughter.
A family that now feels
fragmented. On the shore now,
the marbled dusk. Once I wanted
to be carried by water cyclones.
Over and over I watched Dorothy
on tape, I listened to her record on my knees.
Now, a white truck with lavender lights underneath
thumps out country, an arm dangles out,
a palm open to the breeze.
The hermit crab falls
into a hot pink water dish.
I watch a child run across the sand.
Bight
by Pete Vanderberg
Curve of coast; loop in a line.
The language of water always has two meanings:
One soft: my daughter holding the main sheet;
my son pushing the tiller back and forth. The sailboat
on light winds tolerates their energies.
One hard: way to handle wind, meaning way to handle God.
New on my first ship I was told never to trust a bight—
will cut a grown man in half, meaning, imagine what it’d do to you.
Sailing past the Boat Graveyard with my father on the tiller
I have leisure to look at the half-sunk hulls grown
through with reeds, the osprey display his crab atop a channel marker.
There are always two meanings: life and death—
god that we name twice because we have two
identities and neither understands the other.
Taking the Union Loop in December
by Jeffrey Alfier
The wide, sunless face of winterblue sky
delivers its hard-edged promise of snow
above the tick-tock of railcars trundling
over time-worn joints, nudging passengers
behind their rustling newsprint. Half awake,
they watch shades of wind-besieged foot traffic
thread the sharp sting of oncoming weather
that culls paper trash from the remnant night.
On platforms, north- and southbound turnstiles spin
above a boarding house. Its occupants
hear blowtorches plume in the wind, knowing
they’ll trade eviction for urban progress,
molten sparks flaring in that fleet brilliance
the blind know, turning pages in their sleep.
As if the World Were Made of Light
by Jeffrey Alfier
The stucco cottage with its terra cotta roof was encircled by mimosa bushes and a small yard where my aunt combed her long tumble of red hair for hours under a lemon tree. At high noon in August her hair harbored the sun. She would bask and listen to the transistor radio, fill ashtrays with Chesterfield butts. Her lipstick gleamed. The last ashtray she filled remained unemptied after she left. My uncle never spoke much about what happened. He did suspect a “dapper bastard” three blocks down had run off with her—the spitting image of Errol Flynn. But that man had lived forever in solitude. I had seen him several times glancing toward my aunt and uncle’s house, but in my youth connected nothing. When I knocked on his door years later, to ask if he’d ever seen my aunt, he said yes, but a woman that beautiful couldn’t possibly exist. And looking beyond me, he swore my uncle’s suspicions were nothing but a trick of light.
Prevention
by Rebecca Leah Papucaru
My father drives from his end of the island to mine, bearing an article establishing a link between soy and breast cancer. Without a word, still wearing his coat, shoulders heavy with snow, he goes straight for my fridge.
"Death has a life of its own," he says.
("Doesn't it worry you," I ask my sister, "not having a healthy role model for our golden years?"
"Tell him to replace that soy milk you splash in your coffee. You're not made of money.")
What is my father made of, these days? As he floods his body with phytochemicals, flavonoids, and antioxidants? Bricks of dark chocolate to soften arteries, fistfuls of walnuts to elasticize blood vessels, gallons of pomegranate juice to put down cellular mutiny?
My father calls this his medicine. Taken with the same pleasure as an aspirin. Overwhelming his body with mixed messages. I can relate. His concern tends to feel like punishment. Leading you to find comfort in the dimpled arms of semi-solids.
But not full rebellion. That only happens to those who don't take the time, at least once a day, to scare themselves shitless.
Why am I thinking about snow angels, a grown woman watching her father pour Soy Dream down her sink?
Mine always resembled the imprints of stroke victims. Buried in the snow, I flapped my wings for hours.
Inside the house, a forty-year-old man with two teenaged daughters. Consoles himself with a brick of halvah.
yellow film
by Jessica Thoubboron
i am a bit hungry—
yes, wasn't it
hemingway who said art
always looks more sharp
in this state?
for you, the world, i starve
the black paced streets covered
in us, we peer
through yellow film
j'ai les lumières dans les yeux
we see, them
the people who do not know we watch
and we continue on, regrettably
There Are No Accidents
by Levi Rubeck
Oh you and your kelpy teeth, stuffed in those
avocado gums like broken doors
buried dune-deep in some beach. You’ve been
awake for years, sanding your sinuses and
weeding out the disposable fiancées.
Ache shall ripple through the prairie when one
jellyfish is finally chosen and
you can write your life of perforated
wishes. Beware of jealousy, D said,
true now as it was back on the gravel of
Alta Vista’s swing set. I learned the word
harlot in a book full of old women,
Rebbecca murmured, brakes locked, before D’s
guts got tumbled over the arctic dashboard.
Steven’s First Taste
by Levi Rubeck
The girl with whom I first fell in
love, during another windy spring, looked
like a boy. Before my beard grew
un-erasable, before my first chrome
bike, I memorized how Wen’s eyelashes
wobbled around her maple irises.
Her buzz cut was always in my
periphery, and for the first time I’d
consider my wardrobe in the morning.
D and I dabbled as stalkers, but open
windows were too dangerous—instead we
wrote everything down. As the last three weeks
closed in on grade six I lost two winter
coats and took my first risk.
TRANSLATION
Untitled
by Vyacheslav Kiktenko
Translated from the Russian by Jamie Olson
A boy stands aside and wonders,
what do these grownups do,
lingering here at the crossroads?
They don’t feed the birds from their palms,
or pilot a kite to the clouds—
they just scrape their way through the square
with a pair of reliable brooms.
How did they end up like this?
Someone, no doubt, must have seen them
when they were young boys or girls—
them, with their work boots and shabby
sheepskins, their gloomy old faces …
Just what kind of people are they?
They never want any ice cream,
or even a bottle of pop.
If they could just finish up scraping
the pavement before the boss comes,
throw off their clothes in the guard house,
each grab a glass of mulled wine,
grab it and forget about everything …
The boy stands by and decides
who to become when he grows up:
an engineer on a steam train,
or maybe the Minister of War—
so unpretentious yet rich …
To pilot a kite to the clouds!
Мальчик стоит и дивится —
Чего это взpослые люди
Делают на пеpекpёстке?
Птиц не покоpмят с ладони,
В облако змея не пустят,
Только скpебут себе площадь
В две настоящих метлы.
Что с ними стало такое?
Ведь кто-то их видел, навеpно,
Мальчиком, девочкой — их,
В гpубых ботинках, в потёpтых
Тулупах, с угpюмым лицом...
Что же это за люди?
Пломбиpу им неохота,
И лимонаду — не очень.
Им бы успеть до начальства
Выскоблить раннюю площадь,
Сбpосить одежду в стоpожке,
Взять по стакану с поpтвейном,
Взять и забыть обо всём...
Мальчик стоит и pешает
Кем ему стать: машинистом
Свистящего тепловоза
Или военным министpом — Очень пpостым и богатым...
Змея пускать в облака!
An Abandoned Park
by Vyacheslav Kiktenko
Translated from the Russian by Jamie Olson
O kingdom of moss-covered plaster!
These strata of calcified culture.
And sculptures, sculptures, sculptures.
Mere shells of more lyrical years.
A lock of hair shines in the grass here,
an earring over there, while the figure
of a Young Pioneer soon emerges
with a trumpet and fanatical visage …
Nearby, a bathroom appears.
The park, regardless, is gloomy—
grave and commemoratory,
so quiet, glimmering with the sheen
of unearthly, deathly green plaster…
Here, worms and slugs slither freely,
wet leaves lie unswept in a gazebo,
and two lovers seem to hold fast to
each other with deathless passion.
O wonderful kingdom of yore!
This place never knew hatred or war,
but only these cultures and sculptures,
designed by masterful craftsmen.
And even when there were evildoers,
each one would forget all the others—
he’d forget about his skeletal armature
with its steely ribs welded on in fragments.
Заброшенный парк
О царство замшелого гипса!..
Слои известковой культуры.
Скульптуры, скульптуры, скульптуры,
Скорлупки одических лет.
То локон волнистый, то клипса
Белеет в траве, то фигура
Встает из травы пионера
С трубою, с лицом изувера...
А рядом стоит туалет.
Как парк этот все же печален,
Могилен и мемориален,
Как тих он, зеленого гипса
Загробно мерцающий светЕ
Здесь плавают черви и слизни,
В беседке не убраны листья,
И, кажется, намертво слипся
Целующихся силуэт.
О милое царство былого!..
Здесь кажется — не было злого,
Здесь были культуры, скульптуры,
И были свои мастера.
А если злодеи и были,
Злодеев злодеи забыли,
Забыли скелет арматуры
С обломком стального ребра...
Civic Duty
by Marie-Claire Bancquart, from Avec la mort quartier d’orange entre les dents
Translated from the French by Wendeline Hardenberg
I would like to puncture something
and for it to drip
slowly, like tears or resin.
Thus would I contribute to
the insidious crevices of volcanic formations
to the lapping spasms of sludge
to the ulcers, to the rheum
above all to the unsavory wounds
that are inflicted mutually
among men.
Playing my part, you see,
in the petty hatred, geological and human:
my “civic duty,” no?
Acte citoyen
Je voudrais crever quelque chose
et que cela coule
lentement, comme larme ou résine.
Ainsi je participerais
aux fentes sournoises des terrains volcaniques
aux spasmes clapotants des boues
aux ulcères, aux chassies
surtout aux blessures louches
qui se font mutuellement
chez les hommes.
Tenir mon rôle, en somme,
dans la petite haine géologico-humaine:
un « acte citoyen », non ?
War News Brief
by Marie-Claire Bancquart, from Avec la mort quartier d’orange entre les dents
Translated from the French by Wendeline Hardenberg
With her own hair
they strangled her
her braid
was cut up into a soup
they forced her sister to eat it
now, at the hospital,
she feels it like oats drying up
her insides, which are no longer a stomach, intestines,
but a wall-less place
utterly open
to the brutality of men.
Informative.
Petit fait divers de la guerre
Avec ses propres cheveux
on l’a étranglée
sa natte
on l’a coupée dans une soupe
on a forcé sa sœur à la manger
maintenant, à l’hôpital,
elle la sent comme une avoine brûlante
dans son intérieur, qui n’est plus estomac, intestins,
mais une place sans parois
entièrement ouverte
à la brutalité des hommes.
Démonstrative.
NONFICTION
Sugar Blues
by Eric Day
Something had to be done. We were out of control. Our mom was now calling us “savages.” As soon as our dad got home from work she followed him upstairs to their bedroom, where they deliberated in hushed tones. The four of us sat around downstairs just under them trying fruitlessly to listen, to decipher their muffled voices coming down at us through the ceiling.
We’d broken another window. We’d picked blackberries and squished them with our bare feet into the carpet, sat around drinking the juice and pretending it was fine wine. We’d soaked wads of toilet paper and hurled the wet masses straight above our heads, where they bled the popcorn ceiling brown. A copy of Juggs magazine was discovered between the pages of a Bible concordance. The cat was currently sporting a quartet of Ace bandage leg casts. This on just one summer’s day.
To ease our nerves we chomped on candy. My oldest brother Jeff was half finished with a Big Hunk and sat there chewing like a slow horse, no doubt thinking of the privileges he could lose, as he’d just gotten his driver’s license and a feathery new haircut that was sure to “bag the ladies.” My middle brother Mark and I, in the grips of puberty ourselves, were shooting Pop Rocks by the handful. Even Christen, the oldest of all of us, chewed on her watermelon Hubba Bubba in noisy snaps and smacks. The cat, still wound in bandages, seemed to pause in her desperate escaping to watch us fret.
Our old farmhouse was built to last. It was going on a hundred years old. The walls let nothing escape. Which meant we were left to our candy-addled imaginations. Would there be real punishments this time? Like summer camps? Bible retreats? Or worse, off to the produce fields for manual labor? Mark had been sent to the onion fields last summer for whining about being bored and came back after the first week as well-behaved as an altar boy. His face, as he swallowed the explosive candy beside me, looked white. To this day the scent of onions causes him to stiffen with obedience and look around for someone to salute.
As we heard the ceiling creak—a sure signal they were coming down—we chewed our candy slower, trying to look casual and otherwise preoccupied on matters not associated with guilt. Mom came down first, looking calmer, if worried. Then our dad appeared, carrying a black plastic lawn bag. He hadn’t even gotten out of his suit. He went to Jeff first, holding the bag open.
“Okay, gimme what you got,” he said. Jeff looked up at him nervously—just what did he mean, exactly? Drugs, alcohol, various sharp objects? With us, you had to be specific. “Your candy, mister,” he said, a note of exasperation in his voice.
Jeff dropped what was left of his Big Hunk into the bag. “And the giant blob in your trap. Out with it.”
We relinquished everything we had, going to our rooms and releasing it all into the Hefty bag’s gaping abyss. Even Christen had to concede her storehouse of Hubba Bubba.
Then there was the kitchen. It was an odd sight indeed, our father in a suit dumping what we loved into a trash bag held by our distraught mother. First he emptied the fridge. We watched the soda go, the chocolate drink go, the pudding snacks, and even, after a glance at their nutritional facts, all the yogurt and various jams, the Sunny Delight. Out of the freezer came our tubs of ice cream, our popsicles and frozen fudge bars. After the slightest hesitation, he even tossed his quart of almond mocha fudge—there was no disputing it, this was for real. Then he hit the cupboards, throwing whole boxes of Trix and Frosted Flakes in along with our Pop Tarts and Chips Ahoy and animal cookies. In another cupboard, Mom’s baking stash, he took the C & H sugar and emptied it all—the source!—in a blinding white stream.
“That’s it,” he said, and crumpled up the paper bag. Then he threw it in with the rest as if for good measure.
If the cause of our misbehavior was sugar, the cause of our household ban on said stimulant was a book called Sugar Blues. I never read from this hallowed work, but we understood the author had set out to place blame for all childhood problems on one thing and one thing only: sugar. There was a blurb on the front: Remove sugar and get your children back! Our father didn’t read from it as much as he lived and breathed it, hitting on its main points every chance he got.
“You know,” he chimed in as we watched a commercial showing happy people enjoying scoops of ice cream, “Hitler loved ice cream. He had a furious temper, too. Oh, you couldn’t control that guy, not for anything. And look what happened.”
When you’re up against the likes of Hitler in your father’s mind, you kind of lose the will to fight, and our dad was satisfied the book was working—we sure as hell were blue.
Dinner was the only meal we looked forward to now. Meat, potatoes, vegetables—not much to screw up there. But breakfast was another matter. Instead of opening the cereal cupboard to find colorful boxes with mischievous cartoon animals beckoning us to fill our bowls to the brim with their sugary goodness, we were met with smaller boxes that weighed a lot and showed bowls of putty-colored flakes or brown mounds of crushed gravel topped with a single strawberry sliver.
Sugar Blues advised implementing honey as a “transition sweetener,” and on the first morning the family sat at the breakfast table eating Grape Nuts. I nearly broke my molars on the first bite. All drenching them with honey did was cause the rock-like granules to coagulate. We looked at each other, all of us limply holding globs of Grape Nuts the size of baby fists in our spoons, and rolled our eyes.
“What?” Dad responded. “There’s nothing wrong with these.” He took his first bite, the crunch of which resounded off the walls. He tried not to look as if he was in pain. “They’re great. You don’t know a good thing when you got one. Come on now: eat up.”
For lunch we were given raw peanut butter sandwiches on whole grain bread the consistency of carpet padding. For chips we now had unsalted seeds or raw nuts. For dessert either golden raisins or a banana. For afternoon snack, swimming in water in the fridge, celery and carrot sticks awaited us and most often went untouched except by the very desperate. I recalled the old days of enjoying my jelly sandwiches and pudding snacks and soda and nearly cried into my prune juice.
We hung our heads low and avoided each other; confrontations led to blowups. They’d managed to divide us, and we’d fallen, straight down onto the TV-room davenports. Instead of running around full of glittery life, we sulked and watched bad television.
“It’s a beautiful day,” my dad said, before going to work. “Get out in the sunshine and play, why don’t you. When I was a kid you couldn’t keep me indoors on a day like this if you paid me.”
“Got homework,” Jeff said, forgetting it was the middle of summer and feathering his blond layers listlessly with a large-handled comb.
“Don’t feel like it,” Mark said, pretending to be interested in Marcus Welby, M.D.
“There’s nothing to do,” I said, and kicked my sandals off to the floor.
Christen blew a sugar-free bubble and headed upstairs. “Gotta practice my flute,” she said.
Meanwhile, our mother was in the basement grinding wheat.
Things got worse before they got better. We resorted to the consumption of carob. In the form of malt balls, clusters, and raisins, it rarely made it to the swallowing stage. We tried popsicles composed of little more than ice. Our mother baked cookies that tasted like nothing. What finally cracked us may have been the induction of goat’s milk to our nightly table, or else the wheat germ banana shakes my mom called “Pep-Up” but which we called “Burp-up” for their daylong repeating effects. Either way, our dejected spirits towards the end of that frightful summer turned vengeful.
One weekend, with everyone home doing nothing, my brothers and I dragged our unstimulated bodies outdoors looking for trouble. First we got into a rock fight, a risky affair in any company, but deadly in ours. The gravel drive provided unlimited ammo, but trying to replenish as others pelted you from the bushes or from the corners of the house was truly terrifying. After someone misfired and shattered an upstairs pane, we dove for cover, counting the seconds before we’d be called in. But nothing happened. No one appeared. So we came out of hiding and dispersed, emboldened.
Mark got the gas can, poured figure-eight patterns on our gravel drive, and lit them, where they ignited in domino fashion and blazed like a sign from some heathen god of snakes. He rode his BMX through the flames in nothing but shorts, and turned down our sloped walkway at full speed, skidding out at the bottom and sending his back tire clean through the screen door. This inspired me for some reason to pick up the cat by the tail and swing her over my head like a sling and stone, her screeching undulating like an air raid horn as she flew over the fence twelve feet away. Jeff was running though the neighboring filbert orchard half-naked with a girl we knew only as “Luscious.” He returned with a glazed look and a series of hickeys around his neck like a string of rubies. Christen played the same scale on her flute over and over again in her room with all her windows open, every time just a little bit louder. It was even getting to my mom. She returned from the meat market and stood at the drain board, pulling whole chickens apart and bringing down the butcher’s knife in great whacks we could hear all the way outside.
And what about our dad? Where was he during all this? Shut up reading his new Bible, we thought, Sugar Blues. Or perhaps he was at the digital piano, jazz standards by ear, his anxieties eased by our apparent new behavior and large foam headphones. Well, we’d show him. The three of us grabbed stones and crept up to the windows of his den. We’d broken one window, what was another to us? We would show him that his great experiment had flopped, that sugar wasn’t the problem at all. We were the problem, and unless we got what we wanted, we’d get worse.
The three of us stooped outside his window in the bark dust and minty shrubs, peering under the blinds into the murky shadows of his hallowed den. But instead of reading a book or playing the piano, we saw him reclined in his chair devouring Brach’s caramels, his old favorite. He gorged on them, one after the other, and we were shocked, even outraged. But something in his face told us not to call foul. We’d gotten to him, and he was going for a cure. And perhaps we realized that we were somehow part of the problem, even all of the problem, but it was only a fleeting concern. For we knew that the end of his resolve was near, and so retreated from the windows slowly, letting him enjoy his secret feast and biding our time, the weight of our weaponry falling from our hands.
PLAYS
Louis Riel, Do You Know How I Feel?
A one-act play by James Payne and Ryan Starinsky
(This monologue takes place in Toronto, Ontario; therefore, anything possible to induce an ambiance of Vietnamese food and MDMA is advisable.)
The curtain opens on an elderly woman, played by either a man or woman, standing next to a woman in her twenties/thirties on a street corner. The elderly woman, played by either a man or woman, has a dog, played by a cat. Or rather, five cats, on leashes. The woman in her twenties/thirties also has a dog, however, hers is played by a dog. The elderly woman, if at all possible, should wear a babushka. Both women have on matching red jackets.
During the elderly woman’s monologue, the woman in her twenties/thirties should be looking around, in all directions besides the elderly woman’s. Think: bus stops, interminable waits, limbo, Waiting for Godot and your boyfriend being late to pick you up because he is selling MDMA to someone since we are in Toronto.
LIGHTS.
WOMAN IN HER TWENTIES/THIRTIES is fumbling for her transit card, switching the coffee she is holding from hand to hand while trying to maintain a hold on her dog’s lead. Her pup is intrigued by a waft of feline smell emanating from the direction of an elderly neighborhood dog-walker.
ELDERLY WOMAN (coughing, gesticulating): Oh, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t do big dogs. I only do small dogs. I’m an old woman, what do you expect? I just can’t handle big dogs. Don’t ask me about your, you know, Why-mer-high-mers—and noooooowhooaonooo boxers. (matter-of-factly) Had a bad experience with a boxer once. Teutonic Shepards. No, no New-fun-mans! (pause) No Labs.
Significant pause.
ELDERLY WOMAN: Hate Labs.
Pause.
ELDERLY WOMAN (emphatic): I’m an old woman. I don’t do Pinchers, doesn’t like being pinched.
Thinks for a moment, pondering subtleties.
ELDERLY WOMAN: Now, maybe a big dog breed, but only if we’re talking something that’s still a pup. Because I only do small dogs. I don’t do big dogs, just can’t handle them. Can’t. Handle. Them. (Pointing to WOMAN IN HER TWENTIES/THIRTIES’s dog) Now that, that’s no pup. What’s the age?
WOMAN IN HER TWENTIES/THIRTIES (blankly staring at ELDERLY WOMAN): …
ELDERLY WOMAN (leaning in to hear): Six months? Yeah, I don’t do big dogs. Now give me a Chee-wow-wow, a Dot-sunny or even one of those wieners, you know? But no big dogs, I don’t do big dogs. Look, I’m an old woman and so what do you expect? Now, my favorite, and oh, gosh, really always has been, you know, like the Queen majesty herself, (euphoric, wistful) give me a good Corgi.
She looks down. Semi-significant pause.
ELDERLY WOMAN: My dear, dead husband, my dead, dear husband, my dead, dead, dear, dead, dear husband Walter, you know, his favorite was his Dali-maze-shun, Dolly. Oh, always, always on and on and on about it. (coughs) And always at her beck and call. Ha, wondered who was married to who, if you know what I mean. And I think you do. Every time I’d bring him his lunch she’d be there at the station, barking her spots off. I had to leave, lunch in hand—but that’s what the cad gets.
ELDERLY WOMAN (caustic): Dolly. Dolly. DOLLY. Dolllllllllllllly. DOLLY.
She ruminates.
ELDERLY WOMAN: Dead now though, I suppose.
Looks at sky.
ELDERLY WOMAN (plaintively): I just could never stand the thing—look, I don’t do big dogs. (trailing off) But no, Walt never understood that did he, never listened to reason, never understood much in the way of canine matters and I just ...
ELDERLY WOMAN (reinvigorated): I’ll tell you why I told Walt I don’t do big dogs! Now, first off, it started with a boxer. Had a recital, had quite the voice you know, younger times … better times, betttttttterrr times—can you believe it? Believe it, because my voice was like a pluck of King David’s harp, oh, even the Frogs had to admit I was a real grande chanteuse.
Scans her environs while shielding her eyes.
ELDERLY WOMAN: So I look out to the crowd, scanning those school chum faces, just searching for any sign of my family.
ELDERLY WOMAN is the subject of a frightful fit of coughing.
ELDERLY WOMAN: Ugh. Hm. Mhm.
A bewildered pause. One to three of ELDERLY WOMAN’s dogs meow.
ELDERLY WOMAN (unperturbed): And not a single one, not a single one, of those big dog lovers made it that night. My night! Because that big oaf boxer had to plop out eleven bastard pup juice balls instead. And where’d the flooze pick? My bed, my canopy bed. On my dust ruffle even. Now, that’s why I don’t do big dogs. Don’t even cotton a Poop-dell. What do you expect? When I see, when I see them, I just think “dust ruffle.” You know? Dust ruffle. (Digressing, uncharacteristically.) And of course no one wanted to take the pups, because who wants a big dog? No one wants a big dog, where you going to keep them? Who’s walking them? Going to have them around your children? I didn’t think so. And guess how, how these, these big dogs get so big? Food! (rubbing thumb and index finger together to indicate expense) Dog food—Pure-eena. Chow-chow. Key-bells-and-bits. And, well, you know, I’m an old woman, a pensioner you know—you think I’m keeping a big dog going?
ELDERLY WOMAN positions herself inescapably within view of WOMAN IN HER TWENTIES/THIRTIES and begins to point vociferously.
ELDERLY WOMAN: So I was stuck with them, in my room, on my canopy bed, slobber on my dust ruffle, and, you know, without their father around, no one could keep these mutts straight. (closing in) I’ll even let you in on a little secret; I have reason to believe they, (coughing) those big dogs, the real big ones, even hatched a plan to chew up my two favorite song books: Ode to the Moose and Maple and Louis Riel, do you know how I feel? I was twelve! And there, that was my singing career, done. Voila! Une grande chanteuse pour un grand chien …
The streetcar approaches and WOMAN IN HER TWENTIES/THIRTIES hurriedly boards. ELDERLY WOMAN begins to follow.
STREETCAR OPERATOR: Ma’am, we just can’t have all those kit-cats on the car.
Pause.
We only do big dogs.
ELDERLY WOMAN (with head inside streetcar, simultaneously yelling, laughing and crying): Let’s just say I’m not precisely opposed to muzzles.
BLACKOUT.
The End.
C’est Fini.