Ozone Park
A new journal from the MFA Program in Creative Writing
at Queens College, CUNY.
A Journal from the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Queens College, CUNY
Fiction
DOG DAYS
By Thaddeus Rutkowski
At the writers’ retreat, one of my housemates was a woman who had a dog. The dog wasn’t a seeing-eye animal, but it was more than a friend. It was a therapy dog, and the woman kept it with her at all times. “I have this dog for my mental health,” she said, “for my sanity.”
The dog’s name was Dylan, and so was the woman’s. But Dylan wasn’t the woman’s real name. Her real name was Shirley. The dog, however, had no name other than Dylan.
I could tell when Dylan the woman was home because I could hear Dylan the dog on the stairs. I could hear the scraping of his nails and the panting of his lungs. The rule of the house was not to disturb the other guests, but Dylan’s clicking and breathing weren’t so loud. No one seemed to mind when he came and went.
One of the other residents was a senior woman who had a lot of poet friends. She kept telling me about Bill Nut. “Bill Nut is a great poet,” she said.
I went to the public library to look up Bill Nut. I couldn’t find him anywhere. After some investigation, I realized his last name was Knott, not Nut. Bill Knott was a respected U.S. poet.
Another time, the senior woman told me she’d been to a serious colony. It wasn’t like the frivolous one we were at now.
“It’s a very mature, civilized place,” she said.
I asked her if she would give me a ride to the serious retreat. I wanted to take a look at it.
“No,” she said. “We can’t just show up at the gate. That wouldn’t be serious enough. They would turn us away.”
Another resident, a man, told me he’d been to the serious colony. “I’ve been to the most serious colonies in the country,” he said.
I wanted to ask him what he was doing at the rinky-dink place we were presently occupying, but I didn’t. I just listened while he talked.
“I met a woman at the serious colony,” he said. “We were living in a cabin in the woods, and our meals were delivered by a girl who looked like
Little Red Riding Hood. It was a real romance.”
“That’s great,” I said.
“But I’m seeing someone else now,” he added.
“Who?”
“The veterinarian from across the street.”
I remembered seeing the vet on the sidewalk. She was young, and she had a ponytail. I was impressed that a guy who was just visiting the town
had moved so fast with a permanent resident.
Another houseguest was a young woman who wasn’t old enough to buy alcohol. One night, I offered to get a bottle for her. Oddly, she was old
enough to drive, so she gave me a ride to the wine store.
We were the only ones in the shop, so we browsed the aisles with confidence. “What kind do you want?” I asked my new friend.
“Anything strong will do,” she said. She pointed at a label, and I picked up the bottle.
The man at the counter would not sell me the wine. “I heard you talking,” he said. “Your friend is a minor. It’s illegal to buy alcohol for her.”
I could have kicked myself then for speaking so openly. I also could have kicked the counterman for his refusal. But instead of kicking anyone,
I went with my new friend to a different store.
While we were drinking the wine, my young friend showed me her pierced belly button. She lifted her shirt so I could see a gold ring hanging
from her puckered skin.
“Did it hurt?” I asked.
“At first,” she said. “But now it just tickles.”
She pulled her shirt down so the ring was no longer visible.
I wondered if she had other hidden piercings, other secret rings or studs. But I felt I couldn’t ask, because I wasn’t a piercenik. I hadn’t
attended any pierce meetings, hadn’t marched in any pierce parades. I was a piercing virgin.
In the morning, I walked into the kitchen and saw the senior woman cooking at the stove. She was frying bacon.
“I talked to that man,” she told me, “the one with the veterinarian. He claimed he went to the serious colony, but I didn’t believe him. So I asked
him about the place. He actually knew things that only a resident would know.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like the person who brings food to your door looks like Little Red Riding Hood.”
“That proves it,” I said.
I didn’t ask her again for a ride to the serious place. I resigned myself to serving out my time at the goofball residence.
While several of us were sitting at the kitchen table, someone asked, “What does ‘tumbrel’ mean?”
“I don’t know,” someone else said.
“Is it some kind of conveyance?”
“No, it’s a Fugazy,” Dylan the woman said. “A Fugazy limousine.”
During the day, I heard Dylan the dog barking in Dylan the woman’s room. Dylan the woman must have shut the dog in and left. Dylan the dog sounded like he was having a nervous breakdown. He kept barking for what seemed like hours. Shortly after the incident, the colony officials asked Dylan the woman to take her dog and leave the house.
In the evening, we gathered for a going-away party for the Dylans. For the occasion, we decided to compose haikus on the spot. During one round, the challenge was to use the word “rain” in a seventeen-syllable piece. Dylan the woman wrote a haiku that went:
“Turn on the wipers,”
I said, not realizing
the RAIN was inside.
The poem had the right number of syllables and lines. It was a perfect haiku.
I knocked on the young woman’s door in the evening and asked her to go to the bar down the street with me. She was in bed when I knocked and didn’t want to get up, but somehow I convinced her to put on clothes and walk outside.
When we got to the bar, we asked about the selection of beers. “We have only one kind of beer,” the bartender said.
We each took a bottle of the one brand and worked on it. As we sat, I thought about bringing up the topic of piercing. I wanted another look at my companion’s perforated navel. But I had nothing to show in return. My eyebrows, tongue and septum were intact. My leather hadn’t been tooled. I couldn’t enter into any pierce negotiations.
On the way back to the house, I saw a meteor. I pointed overhead, and my companion looked up. We both saw a white streak that flashed across a segment of sky before it burned out.
In the morning, I met the senior woman in the kitchen. She was finishing her cooking, and the smell of bacon was in the air.
“I’m going to my room,” she said. “I feel a story coming on. It’s inside me, and it’s going to come out.”
I started to make a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich.
“I can’t stop it,” she said. “When the story’s time is here, I have to let it out. I just hope it shows up alive.”
For the rest of the day, I heard her hitting the keys on her electric typewriter. The sound was so loud it came through her closed door.
But it was not as loud as Dylan the dog’s barking had been.
BABY FEVER
By Diane Shakar
Paula left her young neighbor drinking tea while she went to get the gun. She felt a twinge of guilt over how easy it was. Rosalina enjoying the fragrant orange-cinnamon tea and chocolate chip scones, probably thinking how nice Paula had been to make them for her. And she had been nice, using the delicate Chinese porcelain teacups her mother had collected and passed down and the silver swan-tipped teaspoons. The tray of mini-scones, chocolate chip and pecan (her husband’s favorite), was especially fetching all decoratively piled into a delicate pastry pyramid. And there the young woman sat, licking the melted chocolate from her soft fingers and the pink corners of her mouth, picking the crumbs off her pregnant belly and eating those too, unaware of her need to savor them. Paula swept the crumbs from her own pregnant belly, which was no more than a pillow stuffed into her stretch pants, and excused
herself to the “little girl’s room.” She felt badly but continued down the hallway past the sweet yellow nursery to the bedroom and her husband’s dresser drawer, the narrow middle one between the two wider drawers. Unwrapping his service revolver from the black bandana, she felt the familiar weight and coolness of the metal and carried it back along the hallway. She walked quietly; it would be better if Rosalina didn’t hear her and turn. She would shoot anyway but the girl’s stare might unnerve her and spoil her aim and she felt one shot would be best. Not for the noise so much, as most of her neighbors would be at work or have their TV’s blaring, but because it would be messier and it was going to be messy enough cutting the baby out. The thought of the surgical instruments readied on the white dresser scarf steadied her. Wouldn’t Derrick be surprised arriving home to a new baby and scones? It occurred to her that the aroma of orange and chocolate and buttery pastry would no longer be floating in the air. It was really too bad.
VOUSSIOR
By Eric Darton
I awake to find my visual field transformed into an evanescent hexagonal mosaic. I don’t remember if this is a memory or if I constructed this remembrance. I know that every memory is supported by columns and that the heaviest rest on piers. Some memories are domes, others are vaults with and without intersecting vaults and, or, lunettes.
I know that memory is all about transferring thrust into dead weight so the pillars can support it. And I know that arches, ribs and bays are good at this. As are buttresses. And that you need – I need also – to build a scaffold so that each stone in the arch can roll against the next without falling through.
I know that if you’ve done your job right, you can take away the scaffold and the keystone will lock the arch in place and the web of stones will hold up everything as it needs to be. And I also have observed that for some reason, though it is no more important than any other stone, that the keystone will be the one we carve an image into.
Perhaps, and this is only a conjecture, it is the memory that leads us both toward and away from remembrance.
SAFE
By Judy Gerbin
You’re fairly young now, still on the before side of most things. But anything could happen... Perhaps you’re moving through the tunnels beneath Manhattan, riding the downtown #4 train, as you do each day, and unbeknownst to you it passes through an odorless, invisible, lethal chemical cloud planted by a terrorist. You get off the train and it doesn’t even occur to you that anything foreign is in your body, and a little later you’re home, and you start to feel sick and think you must have the flu, you must have picked up some virus. But what you don’t know is that all across the city others are experiencing the exact same thing, thinking that they have suddenly come down with the flu. You feel really sick and plan on going to the drugstore later to get something, or calling your doctor tomorrow, but for now you lie down, not realizing that you’ll never get up.
Or perhaps it’s a windy day. You’re taking a walk on your lunch hour, and are only a block from your office. On the other side of the street there is construction taking place. Scaffolding obscures the entire front of a building. You don’t pay too much attention, lost in thought and planning what you will do when you get back to the office. You have to remember to call so and so. And just as you’re thinking about the report that’s due, a wood plank is blown off the scaffolding by a sudden gust, and takes your head with it. You were only out enjoying the weather. In nearby offices people discuss the tragedy at the water cooler: “Never even saw it coming,” they say, shaking their heads.
Or perhaps the economy falters and the company you work for goes under or lays people off and you are out of a job and you can never get another one. What would you do? How to live? Passing by the homeless you wonder if that could ever be you, believing deep down that of course it couldn’t. But through a series of events and mismanagement of money, it is you. And there you are, looking for a bite to eat in the overflowing trash basket on the corner, or collecting empty bottles in a large plastic sack slung over your shoulder. You find yourself on the lookout for a stray shopping cart, to help move the growing paraphernalia of homelessness more easily. Leaning against the side of a building, all your stuff contained in two bulky bags, you hold out a cup in supplication for change. The people rush past you on their way to work, and they don’t even seem to notice you are there.
Or at some point you meet one of those people who leave their mark on your life forever. But of course you have no idea of the significance of the moment when you first meet. You are at a party given by a friend, one that you reluctantly attend because you don’t care too much for her and her other friends. But somehow you promised to bring a baked good and you feel guilty for your unkind thoughts toward your friend so you go as a kind of penance. A kind of making up for things of which no one else in the world is even vaguely aware. You are standing there holding your first glass of wine, observing your friend and again having those unkind thoughts but also feeling deep down inside that the thoughts are true. And you are standing next to her and she introduces you to a friend of hers you have never met. A few days later the two of you run into each other. It happens a couple more times, and then you go out on a date with this person. And the two of you become involved and you feel really happy. You think you are in love, you are walking on air. Things are really great. You decide to move in together. But almost right away things begin to change. There seems to be a lot of tension. Your lover has become cold and distant. But you keep hoping, remembering how happy you used to feel, believing it may be recaptured. But it isn’t recaptured, and you finally agree to part. You stay at a friend’s place for the weekend while your former lover moves out. But when you return not only is this person gone, but so is some of your stuff. Just out of spite, this person has stolen your favorite big sweater, your most comfortable chair, your coffee maker, rolls of tape you stored in a kitchen drawer, and even photo albums going years back, from before the two of you met. And it’s all because of that dumb party you didn’t really want to go to in the first place, but did only to avoid feeling guilty. And you begin to wonder.
Or tonight you get a phone call. Your heart thumps as the phone rings and wakes you in the middle of the night. The alarm clock reads 2 a.m., but you get up and answer it anyway compelled by the thought, “What if something happened?” The “something” in your mind involving injury or death to a family member. But it’s never that. It’s always a wrong number, or a drunken friend, and you go back to bed annoyed but relieved. Well, what if this time the phone rings late at night and it’s not a wrong number or a drunk friend but it’s your sister calling with the news that your brother has been in a car accident and has suffered severe brain damage and is in a coma?
But you’re still fairly young. You have not found an alarming lump, or received a dreaded phone call. You have not been in the wrong place at the wrong time when a terrorist bomb exploded, or something accidentally fell from a building. You were not the man pushed in front of the subway train by a discharged mental patient, or the woman whose car was hijacked and who now can’t be found, and whose picture appears on the evening news in a family photo with husband and young child. You have not yet met someone to whom you give yourself wholeheartedly and who, bit by bit, dismantles your self-confidence. You still have a job, still have an apartment. On a couple of occasions you were nearly run over by traffic because you weren’t paying attention, you were lost in thought. But it didn’t happen. It only almost happened. For now, you’re safe.
GROWN IN CRACKED TURF
By Deborah Di Bari
Janet and Louie kiss under the tenement lined street. The sliver of daylight falls between the cellar doors onto the top steps. The metal rattles when someone passes on the sidewalk overhead. I kick a loose clump of cement with the toe of my saddle shoe. My mother keeps an eye on Janet while her mother is at work. I am sent with Janet wherever she goes: to the corner grocery, the candy store, not the cellar. Janet and Louie kiss in hidden places. Other girls sit in their boyfriends’ arms on the stoop; some make out leaning against parked cars. Louie presses Janet against a metal pole, his thin black moustache covering her pink mouth. I wait on the edge of their shadow, afraid of the dark and worrying what my mother will do when she finds out. I tell Janet we have to go. Her voice sticks in her love-soaked throat. Janet and Louie kiss. Strange odors seep through the timber where a bodega has taken Chigimara’s spot. Green bananas and rice sit in the windows that use to be stacked with macaroni in blue boxes and cheeses hanging from string.
Janet and Louie do not speak in rhyme. She does not whisper poems to him from her fire escape. Janet and Louie kiss in the dark with cloth tongues, scuffling feet, shushing and the scurry of rodent claws. Sister Mary Francis has told my third grade class that kissing is a sin. She said God blocks the light from reaching the fiery pit of hell where sinners are damned for eternity. I can imagine heaven and hell but not eternity. Janet and Louie kiss goodbye. Janet grabs my hand, holds on tight as we stumble up the wooden stairs and go out through the door in the back of the hall. After she brushes cellar dirt from my navy blue uniform, she tucks her blouse into her skirt. Her hands shake and her voice cracks. I cross my heart and swear not to tell. Janet fears what will happen if I do.
Our mothers are neighbors. Janet’s mother comes home to her only child smelling of cigarette smoke and liquor. My mother does not drink, but she lives with her boyfriend. My two brothers and I cross Second Avenue to see our father. He works two jobs to pay for child support. My mother’s apartment is on the top floor of a six-story walk up. She moved up a flight after she told my father to leave. Janet lives with her mother in the apartment at the far end of the hall. The steps next to our apartment lead to the roof. The metal door, always open a crack, is on the last landing that smells ashy, is out of bounds, and forgotten. The roofing glistens like black sand in the hot sun that melts the crooked tarred seams. My mother and I found a bottle cap and needle on the landing. She told me that if I ever take dope she would beat the hell out of me.
Our apartment is in an alcove between two other doors. Thick coats of paint smooth the beveled edges on the three panels. The banister’s dull sheen is tacky where dripped paint has hardened into beads. The hallway walls are queasy green. My stomach hurts on school days. The nuns damn me for my sins. They tell me the devil can disguise himself as Jesus. If I trust him he will lead me into temptation. Louie has olive skin, a thin moustache and he looks nothing like the Jesus or the devil, yet he tempted Janet into sin. My mother pumps me for information on how this happened.
Where did you see Janet and Louis kiss?
On a park bench on the East River Drive under a scrawny tree.
Where else?
In the dark cellar under Louie’s building.
What did you see?
I saw them kiss.
Are you telling the truth?
I swear.
What happens to girls that lie?
They live in eternal damnation.
I cannot explain to her how kissing put a baby in Janet’s belly. My mother’s shouting and my crying bounce off the hallway tiles, out the window, and down the six flights of stairs. The yelling begins again when Janet’s mother gets home. My mother hits me, not for the first time—it is her only defense. She tells me never to bring her home a surprise package. I remember how scared she got when our cat brought home a mouse and dropped it at her feet. The smell of damp concrete is still in my nostrils the next Saturday when I go to confession. Father Julian tells me to say ten Hail Marys and five Our Fathers for lying to my mother while I kept Janet’s secret. My penance wipes away my venial sins. Janet’s surprise package will need baptism to wash away its mother’s sin.
Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss like the white stripe of paper curling from a chocolate Hershey. Janet and Louie kissed; a baby is on the way. Janet’s white fifty/fifty poly cotton blouse pulls and gapes at the buttons. Afternoons spent in the dank cellar have fattened her thin body. Janet’s mother wipes the floor with her trying to get rid of the baby growing inside her bellyful of kisses. Janet wants to jump off a bridge even though she knows there are no bridges on 119th Street. The East River lumbers by the metal railing embedded in concrete. Dry grass breaks through the cracks in the ground around green splintered park benches where Janet and Louie kissed under the scrawny tree. She does not climb over the railing to jump into the green currents. She does not walk up the flight of stairs past the syringe and cap to jump off the ledge around the tar beach. She does not go under a butcher’s knife. Janet waits. She waits at the top of the staircase for her mother to reach the last landing. Her mother calls Louie a spic and curses him for knocking up her daughter. Janet watches her mother rest her heavy body against the wood frame of the large window. There is one window on each landing overlooking the courtyard. The dishcloths Janet put out to dry after another meal alone hang limp from splintering clothespins. Janet leans her fetus half way out the window to watch the clothespin she dropped land on shredded brown grocery bags. Her mother stumbles up the five remaining marble steps with worn edges translucent as the plastic mother of pearl pin on her housedress. Greasy clumps of black hair stick to her swollen face. Janet waits a long time for her mother to reach the top step.
Janet serves her mother a pork chop with cold spaghetti. She braces for the slaps that comes when inside her mother’s reach. I close my eyes until the dull crack fades. I hear her yelp as if the blow was to her stomach. She drops the plate and grabs her belly. Shards, sauce, chop, tangled in spaghetti streamers crash on the floor. Her mother’s hands on top of her own move around Janet’s round belly as if spelling out the answer. I run across the hall screaming to my mother for the help I think Janet needs. She is half way down the long foyer in our apartment when I burst through the door. She turns me around pushing me ahead of her. I hear her count off the months since Janet’s belly bloomed in last May’s sunshine. All through June, July, and August I overheard my mother, her friends, Janet, and her mother talk about what to do. September comes in through the open window on the landing it still feels like summer even though school has begun. My mother tells me the baby isn’t due for another two months. Janet says she felt a kick. This time her mother does not say it’s gas. This time she agrees Janet must marry Louie. There is nothing else to do.
THE ORACLE
By Susan O’Doherty
When the beeps start, Maura jerks upright. She wasn’t actually asleep, though she must have been drifting, because at first she thought it was the smoke alarm, she was back in the fire, with Mamie Slattery screaming that Jamal was somewhere in the house, and Katie and the firemen pulling her back from the door, yelling at her not to be crazy.
The whole point of the watch was so she wouldn’t have to worry about waking up on time, Maura knows this, but instead she worried all night that she hadn’t set it right or that she wouldn’t hear it going off through the pillow. She switches it off now, quickly, the way she practiced in the bathroom last night.
It’s too late. Katie is staring at her from the other bed.
“Where’d you get that from?”
“Get what? Go back to sleep.”
“You know what. That watch.”
“Somebody gave it to me.”
“Who?”
“Janelle.”
“Huh. You took it.”
Maura curls her hand into a claw and threatens to rake it down Katie’s cheek. The room is just light enough for Katie to see and flinch away. Maura fishes her backpack from under the bed and heads for the bathroom.
“Might as well stay here, I’m up now,” Katie says.
Maura considers this. Her sister is just a dumb ten-year-old who can’t understand anything that takes complicated thinking or imagination, so she acts like Maura is the stupid one. Maura should be above being bothered by it. But when Katie horns her way into one of Maura’s secrets, she invades Maura’s brain, too, so that Maura ends up thinking like Katie does. Things that Maura knows are true and important start to seem ridiculous. She can’t afford that.
On the other hand, if she stays in the bathroom longer than it takes to pee, one of the real kids might wake up and need to go.
She pulls the blanket off the bed and covers the crack under the door with it, then turns on the light. “One word and you’re dead,” she says to Katie. Katie makes a zipping sign over her lips.
Maura opens the backpack and pulls out a copy of the Village Voice. Katie’s eyes widen. This is a Christian household, and the children are not allowed to bring filth in. “You promised,” she reminds Katie. She flips through the pictures of naked people, the headlines that make no sense, until she comes to a section labeled Women Seeking Women. This must be it. I aim to please, she reads. Discreet encounters. There is no heading for Women Seeking Girls.
“It’s here,” Katie says, pointing at the back page. Maura turns the paper over. Katie scrambles over and huddles next to her.
Maura is careful not to skip ahead. She reads each ad twice, combing it for possible code words, before letting herself look at the next one. She loses her breath when she comes to one that reads, Am I Your Mother? It takes a minute before she can make her eyes focus. But it turns out to be about mothers who gave their children up for adoption, who don’t know who their kids are. “This isn’t her,” she tells Katie. “Don’t get excited.”
“I’m not excited,” Katie says. “She’s not writing to us.”
There she goes, getting into Maura’s brain. Maura wants to pinch Katie’s arm to keep her out, but Katie would yell and wake everybody up. She repeats Trident, trident, trident in her mind to shut Katie out, and it works, for now, at least. If she slips up and lets Katie take over, they could lose their only chance.
The code word is Trident because this is how Maura always knows their mother is following them, looking out for them. Sometimes Maura sees her, standing in the shadows outside the school, even here at Mrs. Cranston’s house sometimes, peeking through the windows. She disappears when Maura comes too close. Maura understands that. Ed would kill her if he knew she was hanging around here, and now the child people are mad at her, too. So, she has to send messages in code, and it’s up to Maura to figure them out. She used to make mistakes, but she has learned to tell a real sign by the smell of Trident Sugarless Gum, her mother’s favorite.
Once she left a newspaper on Maura’s seat on the bus. Maura always takes the 7:50 B41 to school, and always sits in the same seat; obviously, she watches them and knows this. The paper was folded to an article about a housing project in the Bronx, to let Maura know where they are. The next morning, Maura told Mrs. Cranston she was trying out for chorus after school, and took the subway to the Grand Concourse, but she couldn’t find either Skelly or Kennedy on the buzzer system, which is Ed’s doing. Now, whenever Maura hears the word “Bronx” she pays attention. She even watches the Yankee games with Steven and Matt Cranston, and she has to admit they’re okay about explaining what’s going on. They like to flip the channel at the most important part, though, when the teams have a time out and the camera moves around the audience. It’s their TV, so Maura can’t ask them to stop without explaining why.
Another time, Maura smelled the Trident and found a pearl on her desk at school, with two little holes in it, meaning that she and Katie are precious to her mother. Maura already knew that, but it was nice of her to remind them. She knew she was supposed to tell Katie, because of the two holes, so she did, but she had to punch Katie in the stomach for saying it dropped off somebody’s broken necklace, and it was a fake anyway, look how the shiny stuff peels right off. Since then she keeps the messages to herself, and she hopes her mother understands. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what she wants Maura to do.
“Maybe we should try this St. Jude thing,” Katie says now. “Hopeless causes.”
Maura does pinch Katie then, and of course Katie yells and Mrs. Cranston comes stomping down the hall. Katie is quick, Maura has to give her that. The blanket is off the crack and on Maura’s bed, and Katie is back in her own bed, by the time the steps reach the door. Meanwhile, Maura tries to cram the newspaper into her backpack, but it’s all spread out and it won’t fit. She kicks it under the bed. “The watch,” Katie hisses. Maura can’t get the strap undone fast enough, so she throws herself onto the bed with her right hand under the pillow.
Katie yells again. “Get away from me, Ed!” She squints her eyes shut as Mrs. Cranston comes in. “Help!” Maura has to pretend she’s crying, she’s laughing so hard inside.
“Oh, honey,” Mrs. Cranston says. “Oh, you poor thing.”
Katie half-opens her eyes. “Was it a dream, Mama Julie?” That is what Mrs. Cranston wants the children to call her, except for Matt and Steven, who get to call her plain Mama. She hates that Maura calls her Mrs. Cranston, but Maura won’t say the other word, and children are not allowed to call adults by their first names in this house.
“It was just a nightmare,” Mrs. Cranston says. “It’s all over now. Go splash some cold water on your face.” Katie gets up and pads out.
“You okay?” Ms. Cranston says to Maura, not as nicely.
“I was just scared,” Maura says. “I’m okay now.”
Steven sticks his head in. “What’s going on?” Maura doesn’t want a boy in her room but she knows better than to say anything.
“Might as well start breakfast,” Mrs. Cranston says. “No point in going back to bed now.” She thumps back out, leaving the door wide open, Maura
huddling under the blanket in her thin pajamas. Steven is still standing there, looking, hoping she’ll move and he’ll see something.
Katie comes back in and shuts the door. She sticks her tongue out at Steven through the closed door. “Pervert,” she says, not loudly enough for him to hear.
Maura jumps out of bed. She dresses quickly in case someone decides to open their bedroom door again. She sticks the watch into the pocket of her jeans. She tries rolling the Village Voice, but it still won’t fit in with all the books and her notebook.
The paper fit in perfectly when she found it, right after that Oprah show about the couple who broke up over something stupid and the man put an ad in the Village Voice every week for six years before she finally saw it. And then the watch, sitting right on the sink in the girls’ bathroom just when she was wondering how to get up early enough to look through the paper. But now she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do. This is going to cost her at least ten strands of hair, maybe twenty.
“Just don’t burn it,” Katie says.
“Shut up.” Maura knows better than to start a fire here. Any more trouble and it’s a group home for her, without Katie. And who knows if their mother could trace her to a new home? It’s a miracle she found them here.
Her mother knew her way to the Slatterys’, of course; she even came to see them there, right out in the open, before Ed got complete control of her. But after she disappeared and the Slatterys started meeting with the child people about adoption, Maura had to take action.
She didn’t mean for things to get out of control. She never imagined that Jamal would hide out in the broom closet, scared of the firemen in their big boots and face masks. She tried to run back in for him, but she wasn’t strong enough to fight off the firemen. She is really sorry about Jamal’s arm, she pulled out her whole left eyebrow over it, but she had no choice.
The Cranstons are a better family. They’re not all lovey-dovey like the Slatterys; it’s plain they’re in it for the money; but that’s a good thing. They’re not making any moves to keep Maura and Katie permanently, to make them change their names so they won’t belong to their mother anymore.
Mrs. Cranston doesn’t like Maura much, that’s clear, and not just because of the name thing. She doesn’t hide that she thinks Maura is sneaky and dangerous, even though Katie is the real sneak, acting all lovey-dovey, like she doesn’t already have a mother, just to get what she wants.
Mrs. Cranston hasn’t hit her yet, though. And Maura doesn’t blame her for favoring her own kids, Maura’s mother would do the same. Best of all, there’s no man to come poking around them. Maura has no idea where Mr. Cranston went, if there ever was one, but the family doesn’t seem to miss him, except for the money, and Maura and Katie are helping with that. The boys look at her too much, Steven especially, but it’s just looking.
When Maura first told her mother what Ed was up to and her mother slapped her and called her a liar, Maura didn’t get it. She thought her mother didn’t understand what she was saying. So she tried again: He comes in after you’re asleep and touches me.
But then, later, Maura did get it. Ed had taken over that part of her mother’s brain, the way Katie takes over Maura’s brain when Maura isn’t careful. She and her mother are the same, except that her mother didn’t realize what was happening, so she couldn’t protect herself, and Ed got all the way in.
After Ed took over, her mother was still her mother, but anything that had to do with Ed was under Ed’s control, and there was nothing Maura could do about it. So she just tried to turn her mind off while it was happening, until he went to Katie’s bed. When Maura saw him, she jumped on him and clawed his neck. The next morning Katie had bad bruises on her face and arms. Other places, too, but the teacher asked about the ones she could see, and then Maura and Katie were both called into the guidance counselor’s office, and Maura told. That’s when the child people got involved, and Maura and Katie went to live with the Slatterys.
Their mother came to see them at first, but she wouldn’t talk to Maura, only to Katie. Katie cried and wanted to come home. So did Maura, but her mother didn’t pay attention to that. The child people said they could only come home if Ed was out of the picture and they all went for counseling. Mrs. Slattery took Katie and Maura for counseling, but their mother never showed. Maura can’t blame her for that; what a waste of time. The counselor was a pervert who wanted the girls to tell him everything Ed did, and even to draw pictures. But when her mother didn’t show up, the child people got mad at her, and then she didn’t come to the Slatterys’ anymore, either. That put the idea into the Slatterys’ heads that the girls were up for grabs, which led to all the trouble.
After they have finished their Kix, and Mrs. Cranston has swatted Steven for slurping milk from his bowl, she says, “Actually, it’s a good thing we’re up early. There’s something I need to talk to you girls about.” Matt and Steven lean in, hoping the girls are in trouble, but Mrs. Cranston says, “You boys go to your room now. And shut the door.”
To the girls she says, “Ms. Ali from the agency called last night. She had some news.”
Here it comes, Maura thinks. She can feel her face getting hot. Maura didn’t mess up after all. All of it—the Oprah show, the paper, the watch—was part of the plan to get them up early, to hear the news in time to say good-bye and pack before she gets here. Maura doesn’t want to waste a minute.
“The Slatterys are willing to give you another chance,” Ms. Cranston is saying. “It’s generous of them, considering.”
Maura forces herself to think. Ed arranged this. She has to be careful. “That’s nice of them,” she says. It’s hard to make her lips move. “We want to stay here with you, though.”
“Why, that’s sweet,” Ms. Cranston says, “but I can’t adopt you.”
“We don’t want to be adopted,” Maura says. “We just want to be with you.” Ms. Cranston looks at her, wondering what Maura is up to. She takes a breath. “Mama Julie,” she says, her fingers crossed under the table.
“I had no idea,” Ms. Cranston says. “That’s so sweet. I don’t know what to say.”
“I’m going,” Katie says.
Maura jumps to her feet.
“She’s not looking for us,” Katie says. “She never was.”
Trident, Maura screams inside her head.
“She thinks our mother’s coming back,” Katie says.
“Oh, honey,” Ms. Cranston says. “Your mother gave up her rights long ago. I thought you knew that.”
Of course Maura knew. “Ed made her.”
“She doesn’t want us,” Katie says.
Maura grabs Katie’s hair. She cracks Katie in the face with all her force.
Mrs. Cranston stands up now, her own hand raised. Katie breaks away and curls into a ball under the kitchen table. “This is a Christian household,” Ms. Cranston says. She says other things, too, but Maura doesn’t hear them; doesn’t feel the blows. She stares out the kitchen window, scouring the empty street for a sign.
By Thaddeus Rutkowski
At the writers’ retreat, one of my housemates was a woman who had a dog. The dog wasn’t a seeing-eye animal, but it was more than a friend. It was a therapy dog, and the woman kept it with her at all times. “I have this dog for my mental health,” she said, “for my sanity.”
The dog’s name was Dylan, and so was the woman’s. But Dylan wasn’t the woman’s real name. Her real name was Shirley. The dog, however, had no name other than Dylan.
I could tell when Dylan the woman was home because I could hear Dylan the dog on the stairs. I could hear the scraping of his nails and the panting of his lungs. The rule of the house was not to disturb the other guests, but Dylan’s clicking and breathing weren’t so loud. No one seemed to mind when he came and went.
***
One of the other residents was a senior woman who had a lot of poet friends. She kept telling me about Bill Nut. “Bill Nut is a great poet,” she said.
I went to the public library to look up Bill Nut. I couldn’t find him anywhere. After some investigation, I realized his last name was Knott, not Nut. Bill Knott was a respected U.S. poet.
Another time, the senior woman told me she’d been to a serious colony. It wasn’t like the frivolous one we were at now.
“It’s a very mature, civilized place,” she said.
I asked her if she would give me a ride to the serious retreat. I wanted to take a look at it.
“No,” she said. “We can’t just show up at the gate. That wouldn’t be serious enough. They would turn us away.”
***
Another resident, a man, told me he’d been to the serious colony. “I’ve been to the most serious colonies in the country,” he said.
I wanted to ask him what he was doing at the rinky-dink place we were presently occupying, but I didn’t. I just listened while he talked.
“I met a woman at the serious colony,” he said. “We were living in a cabin in the woods, and our meals were delivered by a girl who looked like
Little Red Riding Hood. It was a real romance.”
“That’s great,” I said.
“But I’m seeing someone else now,” he added.
“Who?”
“The veterinarian from across the street.”
I remembered seeing the vet on the sidewalk. She was young, and she had a ponytail. I was impressed that a guy who was just visiting the town
had moved so fast with a permanent resident.
***
Another houseguest was a young woman who wasn’t old enough to buy alcohol. One night, I offered to get a bottle for her. Oddly, she was old
enough to drive, so she gave me a ride to the wine store.
We were the only ones in the shop, so we browsed the aisles with confidence. “What kind do you want?” I asked my new friend.
“Anything strong will do,” she said. She pointed at a label, and I picked up the bottle.
The man at the counter would not sell me the wine. “I heard you talking,” he said. “Your friend is a minor. It’s illegal to buy alcohol for her.”
I could have kicked myself then for speaking so openly. I also could have kicked the counterman for his refusal. But instead of kicking anyone,
I went with my new friend to a different store.
***
While we were drinking the wine, my young friend showed me her pierced belly button. She lifted her shirt so I could see a gold ring hanging
from her puckered skin.
“Did it hurt?” I asked.
“At first,” she said. “But now it just tickles.”
She pulled her shirt down so the ring was no longer visible.
I wondered if she had other hidden piercings, other secret rings or studs. But I felt I couldn’t ask, because I wasn’t a piercenik. I hadn’t
attended any pierce meetings, hadn’t marched in any pierce parades. I was a piercing virgin.
***
In the morning, I walked into the kitchen and saw the senior woman cooking at the stove. She was frying bacon.
“I talked to that man,” she told me, “the one with the veterinarian. He claimed he went to the serious colony, but I didn’t believe him. So I asked
him about the place. He actually knew things that only a resident would know.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like the person who brings food to your door looks like Little Red Riding Hood.”
“That proves it,” I said.
I didn’t ask her again for a ride to the serious place. I resigned myself to serving out my time at the goofball residence.
***
While several of us were sitting at the kitchen table, someone asked, “What does ‘tumbrel’ mean?”
“I don’t know,” someone else said.
“Is it some kind of conveyance?”
“No, it’s a Fugazy,” Dylan the woman said. “A Fugazy limousine.”
***
During the day, I heard Dylan the dog barking in Dylan the woman’s room. Dylan the woman must have shut the dog in and left. Dylan the dog sounded like he was having a nervous breakdown. He kept barking for what seemed like hours. Shortly after the incident, the colony officials asked Dylan the woman to take her dog and leave the house.
In the evening, we gathered for a going-away party for the Dylans. For the occasion, we decided to compose haikus on the spot. During one round, the challenge was to use the word “rain” in a seventeen-syllable piece. Dylan the woman wrote a haiku that went:
“Turn on the wipers,”
I said, not realizing
the RAIN was inside.
The poem had the right number of syllables and lines. It was a perfect haiku.
***
I knocked on the young woman’s door in the evening and asked her to go to the bar down the street with me. She was in bed when I knocked and didn’t want to get up, but somehow I convinced her to put on clothes and walk outside.
When we got to the bar, we asked about the selection of beers. “We have only one kind of beer,” the bartender said.
We each took a bottle of the one brand and worked on it. As we sat, I thought about bringing up the topic of piercing. I wanted another look at my companion’s perforated navel. But I had nothing to show in return. My eyebrows, tongue and septum were intact. My leather hadn’t been tooled. I couldn’t enter into any pierce negotiations.
On the way back to the house, I saw a meteor. I pointed overhead, and my companion looked up. We both saw a white streak that flashed across a segment of sky before it burned out.
***
In the morning, I met the senior woman in the kitchen. She was finishing her cooking, and the smell of bacon was in the air.
“I’m going to my room,” she said. “I feel a story coming on. It’s inside me, and it’s going to come out.”
I started to make a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich.
“I can’t stop it,” she said. “When the story’s time is here, I have to let it out. I just hope it shows up alive.”
For the rest of the day, I heard her hitting the keys on her electric typewriter. The sound was so loud it came through her closed door.
But it was not as loud as Dylan the dog’s barking had been.
BABY FEVER
By Diane Shakar
Paula left her young neighbor drinking tea while she went to get the gun. She felt a twinge of guilt over how easy it was. Rosalina enjoying the fragrant orange-cinnamon tea and chocolate chip scones, probably thinking how nice Paula had been to make them for her. And she had been nice, using the delicate Chinese porcelain teacups her mother had collected and passed down and the silver swan-tipped teaspoons. The tray of mini-scones, chocolate chip and pecan (her husband’s favorite), was especially fetching all decoratively piled into a delicate pastry pyramid. And there the young woman sat, licking the melted chocolate from her soft fingers and the pink corners of her mouth, picking the crumbs off her pregnant belly and eating those too, unaware of her need to savor them. Paula swept the crumbs from her own pregnant belly, which was no more than a pillow stuffed into her stretch pants, and excused
herself to the “little girl’s room.” She felt badly but continued down the hallway past the sweet yellow nursery to the bedroom and her husband’s dresser drawer, the narrow middle one between the two wider drawers. Unwrapping his service revolver from the black bandana, she felt the familiar weight and coolness of the metal and carried it back along the hallway. She walked quietly; it would be better if Rosalina didn’t hear her and turn. She would shoot anyway but the girl’s stare might unnerve her and spoil her aim and she felt one shot would be best. Not for the noise so much, as most of her neighbors would be at work or have their TV’s blaring, but because it would be messier and it was going to be messy enough cutting the baby out. The thought of the surgical instruments readied on the white dresser scarf steadied her. Wouldn’t Derrick be surprised arriving home to a new baby and scones? It occurred to her that the aroma of orange and chocolate and buttery pastry would no longer be floating in the air. It was really too bad.
VOUSSIOR
By Eric Darton
I awake to find my visual field transformed into an evanescent hexagonal mosaic. I don’t remember if this is a memory or if I constructed this remembrance. I know that every memory is supported by columns and that the heaviest rest on piers. Some memories are domes, others are vaults with and without intersecting vaults and, or, lunettes.
I know that memory is all about transferring thrust into dead weight so the pillars can support it. And I know that arches, ribs and bays are good at this. As are buttresses. And that you need – I need also – to build a scaffold so that each stone in the arch can roll against the next without falling through.
I know that if you’ve done your job right, you can take away the scaffold and the keystone will lock the arch in place and the web of stones will hold up everything as it needs to be. And I also have observed that for some reason, though it is no more important than any other stone, that the keystone will be the one we carve an image into.
Perhaps, and this is only a conjecture, it is the memory that leads us both toward and away from remembrance.
SAFE
By Judy Gerbin
You’re fairly young now, still on the before side of most things. But anything could happen... Perhaps you’re moving through the tunnels beneath Manhattan, riding the downtown #4 train, as you do each day, and unbeknownst to you it passes through an odorless, invisible, lethal chemical cloud planted by a terrorist. You get off the train and it doesn’t even occur to you that anything foreign is in your body, and a little later you’re home, and you start to feel sick and think you must have the flu, you must have picked up some virus. But what you don’t know is that all across the city others are experiencing the exact same thing, thinking that they have suddenly come down with the flu. You feel really sick and plan on going to the drugstore later to get something, or calling your doctor tomorrow, but for now you lie down, not realizing that you’ll never get up.
Or perhaps it’s a windy day. You’re taking a walk on your lunch hour, and are only a block from your office. On the other side of the street there is construction taking place. Scaffolding obscures the entire front of a building. You don’t pay too much attention, lost in thought and planning what you will do when you get back to the office. You have to remember to call so and so. And just as you’re thinking about the report that’s due, a wood plank is blown off the scaffolding by a sudden gust, and takes your head with it. You were only out enjoying the weather. In nearby offices people discuss the tragedy at the water cooler: “Never even saw it coming,” they say, shaking their heads.
Or perhaps the economy falters and the company you work for goes under or lays people off and you are out of a job and you can never get another one. What would you do? How to live? Passing by the homeless you wonder if that could ever be you, believing deep down that of course it couldn’t. But through a series of events and mismanagement of money, it is you. And there you are, looking for a bite to eat in the overflowing trash basket on the corner, or collecting empty bottles in a large plastic sack slung over your shoulder. You find yourself on the lookout for a stray shopping cart, to help move the growing paraphernalia of homelessness more easily. Leaning against the side of a building, all your stuff contained in two bulky bags, you hold out a cup in supplication for change. The people rush past you on their way to work, and they don’t even seem to notice you are there.
Or at some point you meet one of those people who leave their mark on your life forever. But of course you have no idea of the significance of the moment when you first meet. You are at a party given by a friend, one that you reluctantly attend because you don’t care too much for her and her other friends. But somehow you promised to bring a baked good and you feel guilty for your unkind thoughts toward your friend so you go as a kind of penance. A kind of making up for things of which no one else in the world is even vaguely aware. You are standing there holding your first glass of wine, observing your friend and again having those unkind thoughts but also feeling deep down inside that the thoughts are true. And you are standing next to her and she introduces you to a friend of hers you have never met. A few days later the two of you run into each other. It happens a couple more times, and then you go out on a date with this person. And the two of you become involved and you feel really happy. You think you are in love, you are walking on air. Things are really great. You decide to move in together. But almost right away things begin to change. There seems to be a lot of tension. Your lover has become cold and distant. But you keep hoping, remembering how happy you used to feel, believing it may be recaptured. But it isn’t recaptured, and you finally agree to part. You stay at a friend’s place for the weekend while your former lover moves out. But when you return not only is this person gone, but so is some of your stuff. Just out of spite, this person has stolen your favorite big sweater, your most comfortable chair, your coffee maker, rolls of tape you stored in a kitchen drawer, and even photo albums going years back, from before the two of you met. And it’s all because of that dumb party you didn’t really want to go to in the first place, but did only to avoid feeling guilty. And you begin to wonder.
Or tonight you get a phone call. Your heart thumps as the phone rings and wakes you in the middle of the night. The alarm clock reads 2 a.m., but you get up and answer it anyway compelled by the thought, “What if something happened?” The “something” in your mind involving injury or death to a family member. But it’s never that. It’s always a wrong number, or a drunken friend, and you go back to bed annoyed but relieved. Well, what if this time the phone rings late at night and it’s not a wrong number or a drunk friend but it’s your sister calling with the news that your brother has been in a car accident and has suffered severe brain damage and is in a coma?
But you’re still fairly young. You have not found an alarming lump, or received a dreaded phone call. You have not been in the wrong place at the wrong time when a terrorist bomb exploded, or something accidentally fell from a building. You were not the man pushed in front of the subway train by a discharged mental patient, or the woman whose car was hijacked and who now can’t be found, and whose picture appears on the evening news in a family photo with husband and young child. You have not yet met someone to whom you give yourself wholeheartedly and who, bit by bit, dismantles your self-confidence. You still have a job, still have an apartment. On a couple of occasions you were nearly run over by traffic because you weren’t paying attention, you were lost in thought. But it didn’t happen. It only almost happened. For now, you’re safe.
GROWN IN CRACKED TURF
By Deborah Di Bari
Janet and Louie kiss under the tenement lined street. The sliver of daylight falls between the cellar doors onto the top steps. The metal rattles when someone passes on the sidewalk overhead. I kick a loose clump of cement with the toe of my saddle shoe. My mother keeps an eye on Janet while her mother is at work. I am sent with Janet wherever she goes: to the corner grocery, the candy store, not the cellar. Janet and Louie kiss in hidden places. Other girls sit in their boyfriends’ arms on the stoop; some make out leaning against parked cars. Louie presses Janet against a metal pole, his thin black moustache covering her pink mouth. I wait on the edge of their shadow, afraid of the dark and worrying what my mother will do when she finds out. I tell Janet we have to go. Her voice sticks in her love-soaked throat. Janet and Louie kiss. Strange odors seep through the timber where a bodega has taken Chigimara’s spot. Green bananas and rice sit in the windows that use to be stacked with macaroni in blue boxes and cheeses hanging from string.
Janet and Louie do not speak in rhyme. She does not whisper poems to him from her fire escape. Janet and Louie kiss in the dark with cloth tongues, scuffling feet, shushing and the scurry of rodent claws. Sister Mary Francis has told my third grade class that kissing is a sin. She said God blocks the light from reaching the fiery pit of hell where sinners are damned for eternity. I can imagine heaven and hell but not eternity. Janet and Louie kiss goodbye. Janet grabs my hand, holds on tight as we stumble up the wooden stairs and go out through the door in the back of the hall. After she brushes cellar dirt from my navy blue uniform, she tucks her blouse into her skirt. Her hands shake and her voice cracks. I cross my heart and swear not to tell. Janet fears what will happen if I do.
Our mothers are neighbors. Janet’s mother comes home to her only child smelling of cigarette smoke and liquor. My mother does not drink, but she lives with her boyfriend. My two brothers and I cross Second Avenue to see our father. He works two jobs to pay for child support. My mother’s apartment is on the top floor of a six-story walk up. She moved up a flight after she told my father to leave. Janet lives with her mother in the apartment at the far end of the hall. The steps next to our apartment lead to the roof. The metal door, always open a crack, is on the last landing that smells ashy, is out of bounds, and forgotten. The roofing glistens like black sand in the hot sun that melts the crooked tarred seams. My mother and I found a bottle cap and needle on the landing. She told me that if I ever take dope she would beat the hell out of me.
Our apartment is in an alcove between two other doors. Thick coats of paint smooth the beveled edges on the three panels. The banister’s dull sheen is tacky where dripped paint has hardened into beads. The hallway walls are queasy green. My stomach hurts on school days. The nuns damn me for my sins. They tell me the devil can disguise himself as Jesus. If I trust him he will lead me into temptation. Louie has olive skin, a thin moustache and he looks nothing like the Jesus or the devil, yet he tempted Janet into sin. My mother pumps me for information on how this happened.
Where did you see Janet and Louis kiss?
On a park bench on the East River Drive under a scrawny tree.
Where else?
In the dark cellar under Louie’s building.
What did you see?
I saw them kiss.
Are you telling the truth?
I swear.
What happens to girls that lie?
They live in eternal damnation.
I cannot explain to her how kissing put a baby in Janet’s belly. My mother’s shouting and my crying bounce off the hallway tiles, out the window, and down the six flights of stairs. The yelling begins again when Janet’s mother gets home. My mother hits me, not for the first time—it is her only defense. She tells me never to bring her home a surprise package. I remember how scared she got when our cat brought home a mouse and dropped it at her feet. The smell of damp concrete is still in my nostrils the next Saturday when I go to confession. Father Julian tells me to say ten Hail Marys and five Our Fathers for lying to my mother while I kept Janet’s secret. My penance wipes away my venial sins. Janet’s surprise package will need baptism to wash away its mother’s sin.
Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss like the white stripe of paper curling from a chocolate Hershey. Janet and Louie kissed; a baby is on the way. Janet’s white fifty/fifty poly cotton blouse pulls and gapes at the buttons. Afternoons spent in the dank cellar have fattened her thin body. Janet’s mother wipes the floor with her trying to get rid of the baby growing inside her bellyful of kisses. Janet wants to jump off a bridge even though she knows there are no bridges on 119th Street. The East River lumbers by the metal railing embedded in concrete. Dry grass breaks through the cracks in the ground around green splintered park benches where Janet and Louie kissed under the scrawny tree. She does not climb over the railing to jump into the green currents. She does not walk up the flight of stairs past the syringe and cap to jump off the ledge around the tar beach. She does not go under a butcher’s knife. Janet waits. She waits at the top of the staircase for her mother to reach the last landing. Her mother calls Louie a spic and curses him for knocking up her daughter. Janet watches her mother rest her heavy body against the wood frame of the large window. There is one window on each landing overlooking the courtyard. The dishcloths Janet put out to dry after another meal alone hang limp from splintering clothespins. Janet leans her fetus half way out the window to watch the clothespin she dropped land on shredded brown grocery bags. Her mother stumbles up the five remaining marble steps with worn edges translucent as the plastic mother of pearl pin on her housedress. Greasy clumps of black hair stick to her swollen face. Janet waits a long time for her mother to reach the top step.
Janet serves her mother a pork chop with cold spaghetti. She braces for the slaps that comes when inside her mother’s reach. I close my eyes until the dull crack fades. I hear her yelp as if the blow was to her stomach. She drops the plate and grabs her belly. Shards, sauce, chop, tangled in spaghetti streamers crash on the floor. Her mother’s hands on top of her own move around Janet’s round belly as if spelling out the answer. I run across the hall screaming to my mother for the help I think Janet needs. She is half way down the long foyer in our apartment when I burst through the door. She turns me around pushing me ahead of her. I hear her count off the months since Janet’s belly bloomed in last May’s sunshine. All through June, July, and August I overheard my mother, her friends, Janet, and her mother talk about what to do. September comes in through the open window on the landing it still feels like summer even though school has begun. My mother tells me the baby isn’t due for another two months. Janet says she felt a kick. This time her mother does not say it’s gas. This time she agrees Janet must marry Louie. There is nothing else to do.
THE ORACLE
By Susan O’Doherty
When the beeps start, Maura jerks upright. She wasn’t actually asleep, though she must have been drifting, because at first she thought it was the smoke alarm, she was back in the fire, with Mamie Slattery screaming that Jamal was somewhere in the house, and Katie and the firemen pulling her back from the door, yelling at her not to be crazy.
The whole point of the watch was so she wouldn’t have to worry about waking up on time, Maura knows this, but instead she worried all night that she hadn’t set it right or that she wouldn’t hear it going off through the pillow. She switches it off now, quickly, the way she practiced in the bathroom last night.
It’s too late. Katie is staring at her from the other bed.
“Where’d you get that from?”
“Get what? Go back to sleep.”
“You know what. That watch.”
“Somebody gave it to me.”
“Who?”
“Janelle.”
“Huh. You took it.”
Maura curls her hand into a claw and threatens to rake it down Katie’s cheek. The room is just light enough for Katie to see and flinch away. Maura fishes her backpack from under the bed and heads for the bathroom.
“Might as well stay here, I’m up now,” Katie says.
Maura considers this. Her sister is just a dumb ten-year-old who can’t understand anything that takes complicated thinking or imagination, so she acts like Maura is the stupid one. Maura should be above being bothered by it. But when Katie horns her way into one of Maura’s secrets, she invades Maura’s brain, too, so that Maura ends up thinking like Katie does. Things that Maura knows are true and important start to seem ridiculous. She can’t afford that.
On the other hand, if she stays in the bathroom longer than it takes to pee, one of the real kids might wake up and need to go.
She pulls the blanket off the bed and covers the crack under the door with it, then turns on the light. “One word and you’re dead,” she says to Katie. Katie makes a zipping sign over her lips.
Maura opens the backpack and pulls out a copy of the Village Voice. Katie’s eyes widen. This is a Christian household, and the children are not allowed to bring filth in. “You promised,” she reminds Katie. She flips through the pictures of naked people, the headlines that make no sense, until she comes to a section labeled Women Seeking Women. This must be it. I aim to please, she reads. Discreet encounters. There is no heading for Women Seeking Girls.
“It’s here,” Katie says, pointing at the back page. Maura turns the paper over. Katie scrambles over and huddles next to her.
Maura is careful not to skip ahead. She reads each ad twice, combing it for possible code words, before letting herself look at the next one. She loses her breath when she comes to one that reads, Am I Your Mother? It takes a minute before she can make her eyes focus. But it turns out to be about mothers who gave their children up for adoption, who don’t know who their kids are. “This isn’t her,” she tells Katie. “Don’t get excited.”
“I’m not excited,” Katie says. “She’s not writing to us.”
There she goes, getting into Maura’s brain. Maura wants to pinch Katie’s arm to keep her out, but Katie would yell and wake everybody up. She repeats Trident, trident, trident in her mind to shut Katie out, and it works, for now, at least. If she slips up and lets Katie take over, they could lose their only chance.
The code word is Trident because this is how Maura always knows their mother is following them, looking out for them. Sometimes Maura sees her, standing in the shadows outside the school, even here at Mrs. Cranston’s house sometimes, peeking through the windows. She disappears when Maura comes too close. Maura understands that. Ed would kill her if he knew she was hanging around here, and now the child people are mad at her, too. So, she has to send messages in code, and it’s up to Maura to figure them out. She used to make mistakes, but she has learned to tell a real sign by the smell of Trident Sugarless Gum, her mother’s favorite.
Once she left a newspaper on Maura’s seat on the bus. Maura always takes the 7:50 B41 to school, and always sits in the same seat; obviously, she watches them and knows this. The paper was folded to an article about a housing project in the Bronx, to let Maura know where they are. The next morning, Maura told Mrs. Cranston she was trying out for chorus after school, and took the subway to the Grand Concourse, but she couldn’t find either Skelly or Kennedy on the buzzer system, which is Ed’s doing. Now, whenever Maura hears the word “Bronx” she pays attention. She even watches the Yankee games with Steven and Matt Cranston, and she has to admit they’re okay about explaining what’s going on. They like to flip the channel at the most important part, though, when the teams have a time out and the camera moves around the audience. It’s their TV, so Maura can’t ask them to stop without explaining why.
Another time, Maura smelled the Trident and found a pearl on her desk at school, with two little holes in it, meaning that she and Katie are precious to her mother. Maura already knew that, but it was nice of her to remind them. She knew she was supposed to tell Katie, because of the two holes, so she did, but she had to punch Katie in the stomach for saying it dropped off somebody’s broken necklace, and it was a fake anyway, look how the shiny stuff peels right off. Since then she keeps the messages to herself, and she hopes her mother understands. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what she wants Maura to do.
“Maybe we should try this St. Jude thing,” Katie says now. “Hopeless causes.”
Maura does pinch Katie then, and of course Katie yells and Mrs. Cranston comes stomping down the hall. Katie is quick, Maura has to give her that. The blanket is off the crack and on Maura’s bed, and Katie is back in her own bed, by the time the steps reach the door. Meanwhile, Maura tries to cram the newspaper into her backpack, but it’s all spread out and it won’t fit. She kicks it under the bed. “The watch,” Katie hisses. Maura can’t get the strap undone fast enough, so she throws herself onto the bed with her right hand under the pillow.
Katie yells again. “Get away from me, Ed!” She squints her eyes shut as Mrs. Cranston comes in. “Help!” Maura has to pretend she’s crying, she’s laughing so hard inside.
“Oh, honey,” Mrs. Cranston says. “Oh, you poor thing.”
Katie half-opens her eyes. “Was it a dream, Mama Julie?” That is what Mrs. Cranston wants the children to call her, except for Matt and Steven, who get to call her plain Mama. She hates that Maura calls her Mrs. Cranston, but Maura won’t say the other word, and children are not allowed to call adults by their first names in this house.
“It was just a nightmare,” Mrs. Cranston says. “It’s all over now. Go splash some cold water on your face.” Katie gets up and pads out.
“You okay?” Ms. Cranston says to Maura, not as nicely.
“I was just scared,” Maura says. “I’m okay now.”
Steven sticks his head in. “What’s going on?” Maura doesn’t want a boy in her room but she knows better than to say anything.
“Might as well start breakfast,” Mrs. Cranston says. “No point in going back to bed now.” She thumps back out, leaving the door wide open, Maura
huddling under the blanket in her thin pajamas. Steven is still standing there, looking, hoping she’ll move and he’ll see something.
Katie comes back in and shuts the door. She sticks her tongue out at Steven through the closed door. “Pervert,” she says, not loudly enough for him to hear.
Maura jumps out of bed. She dresses quickly in case someone decides to open their bedroom door again. She sticks the watch into the pocket of her jeans. She tries rolling the Village Voice, but it still won’t fit in with all the books and her notebook.
The paper fit in perfectly when she found it, right after that Oprah show about the couple who broke up over something stupid and the man put an ad in the Village Voice every week for six years before she finally saw it. And then the watch, sitting right on the sink in the girls’ bathroom just when she was wondering how to get up early enough to look through the paper. But now she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do. This is going to cost her at least ten strands of hair, maybe twenty.
“Just don’t burn it,” Katie says.
“Shut up.” Maura knows better than to start a fire here. Any more trouble and it’s a group home for her, without Katie. And who knows if their mother could trace her to a new home? It’s a miracle she found them here.
Her mother knew her way to the Slatterys’, of course; she even came to see them there, right out in the open, before Ed got complete control of her. But after she disappeared and the Slatterys started meeting with the child people about adoption, Maura had to take action.
She didn’t mean for things to get out of control. She never imagined that Jamal would hide out in the broom closet, scared of the firemen in their big boots and face masks. She tried to run back in for him, but she wasn’t strong enough to fight off the firemen. She is really sorry about Jamal’s arm, she pulled out her whole left eyebrow over it, but she had no choice.
The Cranstons are a better family. They’re not all lovey-dovey like the Slatterys; it’s plain they’re in it for the money; but that’s a good thing. They’re not making any moves to keep Maura and Katie permanently, to make them change their names so they won’t belong to their mother anymore.
Mrs. Cranston doesn’t like Maura much, that’s clear, and not just because of the name thing. She doesn’t hide that she thinks Maura is sneaky and dangerous, even though Katie is the real sneak, acting all lovey-dovey, like she doesn’t already have a mother, just to get what she wants.
Mrs. Cranston hasn’t hit her yet, though. And Maura doesn’t blame her for favoring her own kids, Maura’s mother would do the same. Best of all, there’s no man to come poking around them. Maura has no idea where Mr. Cranston went, if there ever was one, but the family doesn’t seem to miss him, except for the money, and Maura and Katie are helping with that. The boys look at her too much, Steven especially, but it’s just looking.
When Maura first told her mother what Ed was up to and her mother slapped her and called her a liar, Maura didn’t get it. She thought her mother didn’t understand what she was saying. So she tried again: He comes in after you’re asleep and touches me.
But then, later, Maura did get it. Ed had taken over that part of her mother’s brain, the way Katie takes over Maura’s brain when Maura isn’t careful. She and her mother are the same, except that her mother didn’t realize what was happening, so she couldn’t protect herself, and Ed got all the way in.
After Ed took over, her mother was still her mother, but anything that had to do with Ed was under Ed’s control, and there was nothing Maura could do about it. So she just tried to turn her mind off while it was happening, until he went to Katie’s bed. When Maura saw him, she jumped on him and clawed his neck. The next morning Katie had bad bruises on her face and arms. Other places, too, but the teacher asked about the ones she could see, and then Maura and Katie were both called into the guidance counselor’s office, and Maura told. That’s when the child people got involved, and Maura and Katie went to live with the Slatterys.
Their mother came to see them at first, but she wouldn’t talk to Maura, only to Katie. Katie cried and wanted to come home. So did Maura, but her mother didn’t pay attention to that. The child people said they could only come home if Ed was out of the picture and they all went for counseling. Mrs. Slattery took Katie and Maura for counseling, but their mother never showed. Maura can’t blame her for that; what a waste of time. The counselor was a pervert who wanted the girls to tell him everything Ed did, and even to draw pictures. But when her mother didn’t show up, the child people got mad at her, and then she didn’t come to the Slatterys’ anymore, either. That put the idea into the Slatterys’ heads that the girls were up for grabs, which led to all the trouble.
After they have finished their Kix, and Mrs. Cranston has swatted Steven for slurping milk from his bowl, she says, “Actually, it’s a good thing we’re up early. There’s something I need to talk to you girls about.” Matt and Steven lean in, hoping the girls are in trouble, but Mrs. Cranston says, “You boys go to your room now. And shut the door.”
To the girls she says, “Ms. Ali from the agency called last night. She had some news.”
Here it comes, Maura thinks. She can feel her face getting hot. Maura didn’t mess up after all. All of it—the Oprah show, the paper, the watch—was part of the plan to get them up early, to hear the news in time to say good-bye and pack before she gets here. Maura doesn’t want to waste a minute.
“The Slatterys are willing to give you another chance,” Ms. Cranston is saying. “It’s generous of them, considering.”
Maura forces herself to think. Ed arranged this. She has to be careful. “That’s nice of them,” she says. It’s hard to make her lips move. “We want to stay here with you, though.”
“Why, that’s sweet,” Ms. Cranston says, “but I can’t adopt you.”
“We don’t want to be adopted,” Maura says. “We just want to be with you.” Ms. Cranston looks at her, wondering what Maura is up to. She takes a breath. “Mama Julie,” she says, her fingers crossed under the table.
“I had no idea,” Ms. Cranston says. “That’s so sweet. I don’t know what to say.”
“I’m going,” Katie says.
Maura jumps to her feet.
“She’s not looking for us,” Katie says. “She never was.”
Trident, Maura screams inside her head.
“She thinks our mother’s coming back,” Katie says.
“Oh, honey,” Ms. Cranston says. “Your mother gave up her rights long ago. I thought you knew that.”
Of course Maura knew. “Ed made her.”
“She doesn’t want us,” Katie says.
Maura grabs Katie’s hair. She cracks Katie in the face with all her force.
Mrs. Cranston stands up now, her own hand raised. Katie breaks away and curls into a ball under the kitchen table. “This is a Christian household,” Ms. Cranston says. She says other things, too, but Maura doesn’t hear them; doesn’t feel the blows. She stares out the kitchen window, scouring the empty street for a sign.