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ken*again, the literary magazine
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ken*again, the literary magazine
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Prose
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Girls' Night Out Patti See |
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Manhattan Skyline
Hal Muskat |
9/11 John Buskin
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Girls' Night Out Patti See
Genealogy Michael Hansen
Braille of Narcissus Michelle Cherrix
Bunker Shots Jack Swenson
Mommy Says I'm Pretty on the Insides Lucy Alibar-Harrison
Lo (Mandelbaum) ve Jack Goodstein
by Patti See
he carries a rosary in her purse next to her coral lipstick because her mother did, though she doesn't remember which holiday brought her to church last. She is a worker bee who helps you buy beads for your son's science project, one whose purpose is to find exactly what you need. You know the type. She says "Hey" when you walk into a store, and you want to believe she knows your type too. Her name is Marjorie or Marlyce or Mona, a spinster name that hangs on her loosely like a borrowed funeral coat, a name for slippered aunts, a name she hated until a boy said it softly in her ear. She is much older or younger than she looks. She works a high school job that went fulltime the fall her boyfriend left for college. Later she was promoted to assistant manager, a gold bar on her blue smock at twenty. She met her husband at the bar down the street. Happy hour. It's ironic now.
Mona told me once that the only time she touches herself is when she's home alone whatever night her husband plays recreational league basketball or flag football. She told our other friend Dawne that it's a dart league. Part of her charm is making everything in her life tackier than it is.
When all of us were sixteen we took a Cosmopolitan sex test. One of the questions asked, "How many times a week do you masturbate?"
"Is this for men?" Dawne said.
We checked the subtitle of the test. Women aged 18 to 25.
"EEEEWWWW," Dawne screamed, a bad Lucy Ricardo impersonation.
"No way," I said.
"Why," Dawne said, tossing the magazine, "would a girl want to do that?"
Mona explained it to us. Still, masturbation was something adolescent boys did, chicken-hatted older brothers in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, college students with scrunched up eyes, old men without partners or whose partners had sagged into hefty bags of cottage cheese. It was not a discovery of sexuality. We heard the stories: boys with hairy palms, pimples, insanity. Even in our ignorance, the consequences for girls were unimaginable. Dawne and I worried about Mona. Like many Catholic girls, the mechanics of our bodies were as mysterious as stigmata. I didn't believe arousal could be more than a slow dancing heartbeat in my throat, Love's Baby Soft on my neck tingle in the pit of my stomach.
Mona was the first person who taught me what a ping was--a flutter spot she felt since she was a girl, one that moved up through her stomach as she waited on the front steps for her date or thought of his lips afterward, alone in her canopy bed. She told me that when he was the right boy, she felt a ping all the way up to her breasts, an inside jagged line that her husband taught her to get at from the outside.
Now I imagine her lying in her marriage bed in front of her mirrored closet doors, all twenty feet of them distorting her. She's never bigger than she is then, eyes-wide, inside big with nowhere to go. Sometimes she wants to laugh at her figure, laugh till the doors shatter.
Mona still goes out once a weekend a month with the friend we've known since first grade--Dawne with an e, how she has always introduced herself, thirteen years coming to this bar. It starts the same, one calls the other on a Saturday afternoon, says, "Tonight." They end up around nine turning their lives into news for each other, two women who can still make a barstool feel like a throne. They often invite me, and tonight my husband encourages me to get out of the house, reminds me that my friends and I have known each other through pigtails and training bras and virginity, husbands and babies and some gray hair. We sit at the horseshoe bar--Dawne, Tessa, Mona. Dawne drinks imported beer, stuff that's dark as root beer and just as foamy, in her attempt to look classy or simply to feel like she's treating herself. Mona and I drink wine, and I feel the first glasses going down and the warmth they bring. At our age, only our necks still blush, a mood ring of flesh when we are drunk or nervous or aroused. My alive spot is how I think of it, a pinkness that shoots through me and shows on my skin like a spilled liquid spreading across my throat and sometimes even my collarbones. I see it on Mona only when we drink together. A flash of flesh on otherwise pallid skin.
Mona says to me, "Wouldn't you like to kiss a boy again?"
Dawne and I look at each other and back to Mona.
"No," I say.
Mona looks to Dawne, who shakes her head.
"Just once, softly and sweetly on the mouth?" she says.
I think of Blanche DuBois, but no one would get the allusion. Mona goes on, "Someone with bangs and a blank face?"
Dawne and I shake our heads again.
I wonder what makes Mona think she can kiss a 21-year-old-boy. Someone she saw here before? Someone she met at the drugstore? He might be an engineer or an accountant or an assembly-line worker, but he's read the Oprah-picked book she's reading, and she thinks she might be able to like him. I know this kind of wanting for what you don't have, one that makes the familiar bearable.
I saw a prospect for Mona, a baby-faced man who came in alone. He's drinking vodka and tomato juice, something exotic for this place. Dawne motions him down the bar to us, and she drapes her arm around his shoulder. For a moment I think she's read my mind, found someone for Mona.
Dawne says, "Guess who babysat this babe when she was twelve?" She nods as a clue to Mona and me, as if we'd guess anyone but her. I can almost remember him, but I keep thinking disposable or cloth, and all I remember is that the whole world has started calling me "Ma'am." He has the whitest teeth I've ever seen.
Mona flirts a bit, but she's out of practice and doesn't seem to notice or care. Her hand flutters to her throat. After depositing this young man with us, Dawne works her way around the bar like she always does after seeing a brother or a cousin of a guy she dated or wanted to. With Dawne I often feel like she's Diana Ross and Mona and I are her Supremes. She comes out with us to have a chorus, a backdrop.
Mona and I are alone with the boy, though over the music, I can't hear anything he says. He moves closer to Mona and blames the jukebox. I watch them and try to listen. Mona tells him her theories about women and men, the inside and outside of it. Sex is just exercise, I hear once. Sex is love.
I imagine this is what she thinks about when she stocks shelves, ideas she's picked up from years of innumerable customers, three bosses, two husbands, and, of course, talk shows. With this boy, she holds back parts that are abstract until she gets to them--how to know a man's a scoundrel and what's really wrong with America. After four glasses of wine, I'm ready to reflect on this myself, nearly offer my own ideas. But Mona is entertaining me, so I listen.
She promises him truth and light for next time--what happens when two strangers kiss in a bar like this and how she learned this lesson. I have to laugh to myself. She's good. She knows she'll never see him again. I know she learned this trick from her mother: always leave them wanting more.
Dawne watches from the other end of the bar, singing a solo to a man in a fringed leather jacket. I give her a look. Come back. When the boy gets up to leave Mona shakes his hand, a firm one like at the end of an interview for a job she thinks she wants, but driving home she knows she doesn't. I wave to him as he walks away.
I move my stool closer and say, "You're still looking, aren't you?"
"What's that supposed to mean?" Mona snaps.
We used to be close, which means I still give myself permission to ask her questions like this. My last year of college I drove home once a month to drop by her apartment when her daughter was a baby, timed my visits so I'd get there just as her husband was leaving for his second shift factory job. I knew how much she needed me then, even if she'd never say so.
I say, "Still looking for the one. For someone. Anyone who'll fill you up."
"I don't know what you're talking about. You turn everything into something more than it is."
I know she used to like that about me, and I've drunk enough wine to take a chance.
"Okay," I say. "How about this. Even as this young man was leaving, you considered all of the ways this could turn out different. Maybe you could have touched his leg like he touched yours and tell him you like him, hokey and straight to the point. Maybe you could tell him things about yourself." I remember a story Mona told me years ago. "That you have Catholic school slacks hidden in the back of your closet that you try on each birthday to remind you who you are. That you use the word slacks." I drag it out like Sister Mary Simon used to, and Mona laughs.
I add my own details. "Maybe you'd tell him that just last week you were brushing your teeth and noticed lines around your lips that don't go away even when your face is slack. That you still dance in front of your full-length mirror to 'Tupelo Honey.' That you've never tasted clams or beluga caviar or vodka straight out of a bottle, and he'll never taste you." I'm on a roll, and Mona is still laughing. "But knowing he wanted to, his white teeth grinding above your dark muff you trim to look like you've got a fifteen-year-old's patch, is enough." I say the last piece dramatically, part Dorothy Parker, part Bob Dylan.
"That the edge is where the pleasure is."
Mona laughs. "Is that a poem or something?"
I'm drunk. "No, honey," I say, all Dorothy Parker this time. "It's my life." She laughs harder.
Dawne slides onto the boy's stool. "What did I miss?"
Mona and I shrug our shoulders.
"Why you really seeing a counselor?" Mona asks, a diversion. Dawne says, "For my head. Why else?" They speak to each other's reflection behind the bottles. "I just gotta clean out my attic," Dawne says. "That's all." Mona puts her lips to a glass of wine the boy ordered for her.
Even at closing time we're still not ready to give up the night, so Dawne finds a house party on the way home. I glance at my watch and think, I'm doing it, something as hackneyed as being conscious of my own breath at 3 a.m. I don't stay out this late anymore and that in itself makes this an adventure, watching a kitchen full of small town barflies catch their second wind. Mona sits at the dining room table trying to light her cigarette when some guy tells her he's her spirit guide. He tells her that whenever she needs him, to call on him with her spirit, and he'll be there. He's older than her father would have been. She nods, because she doesn't know what else to do.
We've all seen him around, on and off for years. He called Mona "Little Lady" once just like John Wayne. The bartenders call him "Chief." His name is Bill or Bob, he knows my husband. You can trust a guy named Bob, I nearly say.
He puts his hand on Mona's head, an absolution, and mumbles, "Two ears with which to hear. . .one mouth to speak. . . use your mouth, my child." Some northern Wisconsin pick-up line we'll laugh about later, but right now Mona's face says she almost believes. I haven't seen this expression on her since we were kids.
"Sweat lodge," Dawne says. She reaches for the Indian's hand. Mona's lips purse strangely, as if she is relieved that someone else sees him. "Take me to your sweat lodge and help me find myself," Dawne says. She lays one finger on his silver braid. He doesn't know how serious she is, maybe only I do or ever will.
"That's not quite the way it works," the Indian says. He is kind but perhaps bored with dispelling myths.
"Just because we're Caucasian," Mona says out of her haze and the side of her mouth, the way she does when she's drunk or sarcastic and now she's both. Her tone surprises me.
He says slowly in Mona's direction, "Just because that's not the way it works. She has to believe like you do."
Dawne looks from the Indian to me, her lips drooping, her eyes squinting into focus, as if I have some magic trick for finding a spirit guide or for finding myself.
I don't want to be here anymore, watching Mona picked out of a crowd, Dawne on the edge of pathetic. I like to watch the people, anyone out this late has to be looking for something. I want us all to be anonymous as beer.
An hour or so from now Mona will curl to her husband in bed as if she's just rolling over. She'll feel the fit his folds make with hers, a wife after two thousand nights. Dawne will sit in front of her 102-channel TV and pass out in her recliner, where Todd or her daughters will find her in the morning. I will sit on my porch and drink one last beer alone and after a night as a Supreme, I'll almost feel normal or at least content with my familiar, dull life.
But we all stay here, half-feeling, half-knowing something we've never been able to name. Like the séances we held in a basement when we were twelve and each of us took turns believing one of us felt someone brush against her hair, Marilyn Monroe or Elvis or Jesus or just a guardian angel. Days later I couldn't recall if it was Mona or Dawne or me who felt a presence, and for days afterward everything was important or seemed it.
Then at thirteen, we became brave enough to light candles on a bathroom vanity, each taking a turn saying Bloody Mary three times into her own reflection. I don't know what we expected anymore, if it wasn't the Virgin's or a witch's face. Would our nubs turn back to nothing, would the lines in our faces never appear? I can't tell either of them, can't tell anyone, I still think I saw, I felt something then, because if I didn't I'd be a fool.
by Michael Hansen
he fog’s sliding in smooth as white grease as I approach the coffee shop. My father is sitting at an outside table, as we’d agreed to over the phone. He’s leaning forward on the edge of a wrought iron chair, his thick forearms perched on the table and wrapped around his coffee as he stares down into the cup. Dad’s gotten unobservant in his old age--he doesn’t see me until I’m looming over him out of the thickening mist. The old man flicks his electric-blue gaze up at me, and my eyes slide away, to the harbor. The fog is really rolling in now, but I can still see the masts of a few dozen sloops poking out of it, jostling each other at the marina. In the old country, in the old days, all those masts would’ve signaled the preparations for a major Viking raid. Now they’re toys for weekend sailors.
I sit down across from the old man and look him in the eye. The waitress comes and I order without either of us breaking eye contact. It’s been years since I’ve seen him, and the years have not been kind. Dad sits there leaning toward me, a shrunken crow in a black trench coat. His face is gaunt, his mouth is a lipless gash--but his eyes still bore into mine in the same old way, like chain blue lightning.
He doesn’t speak until I reach inside my coat and pull out the mini-tape recorder. I set it on the table between us and turn it on, and Dad grunts. “What’s this? The third degree?” he asks, the pale ghost of a smile quirking his lips.
“I just wanted to hear about the family, about the old country. I never met any of them, and you’ve never told me about them--I figure there might be something interesting there.”
“Ah! Like a family tree or something. For your writing?”
“Yeah, Dad. For my writing.”
The waitress brings my cappuccino then, and sets it before me. I thank her and she hurries inside to escape the icy white fog that has engulfed our table. Dad turns his head slightly as the young woman leaves. He’s not looking directly at her, but I know he’s checking her out without appearing to. One more skill he learned in prison.
The old man looks down at the foam and shaved chocolate floating on the top of my cappuccino. “In my time, all a guy needed was a basic cup of coffee.”
“It’s not really your time anymore, is it, Dad?”
The words sort of burst out of me, and I almost regret them. But Dad merely nods. “No, it’s not,” is all he says. His eyes drop back to the tape recorder, the little wheels spinning the tape round and round.
“Where you want to start?”
“As far back as you can remember.”
He nods again, and looks thoughtful for a few moments, considering.
“You have to remember that we come of Norse stock. Pretty rough guys, you know? I’ve heard tales from way back, about our ancestors. One of them followed Egil all during his one-man war against the King of Norway. Another was there when Njal was burnt alive with his whole family in Iceland.” Dad looks almost proud of those ancient butcheries, as if he regrets not having been there.
“Go on,” I say, impatiently. This part I already know.
“I don’t have many details about them, the ones way in the past. The furthest back I know by name is my granddad Carl, your great granddad. He sailed around the world five times, in the days of the tall ships. I heard when he was a cabin boy of thirteen he stabbed another sailor to death--the guy had tried to rape him. Granddad Carl was shipwrecked three times, once twenty miles from land--dolphins helped him to shore that time.”
Dad pauses to take a sip of his coffee. The fog has settled in all the way now, like God has wrapped the whole world up in thick white cotton. I can’t even see across the street. Dad and I float alone together in the colorless void: total privacy.
I wait, but he doesn’t say anymore about Great Granddad. He just stares into the blankness surrounding us, lost in thought. Finally I ask, “And?”
He comes back to the present with a visible start. “That’s it, son,” he says. “That’s all I really know about my granddad. Except that he died at seventy-three on a hot summer day in Denmark, after guzzling down a whole pitcher of beer on a bet. Heart attack. That, and he fathered my dad. Now my dad Peter, your granddad, that’s a whole ‘nother story.”
Dad grips his coffee cup in both hands as he speaks, letting the heat soak into the old bones of his big knobby hands. I can see the pale scars covering his knuckles, duplicates of the scars crisscrossing his leathery cheeks. “Your granddad Peter was in the German Navy, the KriegsMarine, in WWI. His ship was sunk, he was captured by the British and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp in Jamaica.”
“That must have been rough.”
I’m spellbound despite myself: Dad’s never told me any of this before. Not that he was ever around to anyway.
“Not actually. Even behind bars, he managed to make quite a pile of dough in the black market. Then, after the war, he left Jamaica one step ahead of the British cops, left in the middle of the night if you know what I mean.”
I’m leaning forward in my seat now, just like Dad. “Then what?”
“Peter came to Chicago. He met my mom in a speakeasy--she danced there. He fathered me and your aunt Elsa, and finagled his way into the one of the bootlegging gangs somehow. Unfortunately, his gang crossed the Italians, and your granddad winded up being tommy-gunned in the street.” Dad’s eyes stare into the past again--I don’t call him back this time.
He speaks of running away from home at eleven and roving the Chicago streets with a feral pack of little boys with knives, rolling drunks and smoking tobacco gleaned from the filthy, sodden cigarette butts he found in the gutters. He tells me of the Great Depression descending on his and everybody else’s lives like a vulture from hell, and of getting a job as a railroad bull, beating hobos with ax handles when they tried to ride the rails.
“How many did you beat to death?” I ask. Dad doesn’t answer that one.
The old familiar rage is filling me, the rage I’ve always felt in his presence.
Dad continues telling his life, more quietly now. He tells of WWII, and the Battle of Leyte Gulf, when the kamikazes fell from the sky like burning angels and ships were smashed all around him. Then he moves on to after the war, and meeting war-widow Mom in Oakland California, and marrying her. And then my entry onto the scene.
That’s as far as he’ll go, he doesn’t rehash the old familiar landscape of our times together. He tap dances around my childhood, around his times in prison, and I stop listening to him--the tape recorder will capture it all. I stare into the fog and remember all the drunken car wrecks and the shouting and the brandished guns of my childhood. All the scars are still there, inside and out. I look back across the table at Dad.
For the first time he talks about a female member of the family, my aunt Elsa, named after my grandmother. He talks about when Aunt Elsie was a beatnik and slept with Jack Kerouac, and of how she was murdered in Tijuana in ’56, her head blown off in a heroin deal gone bad. I tune him out again as I stare at his seamed face, and it suddenly seems to be a mirror-image of my own, seen through a film of time and self-abuse. I picture a parade of faces, all identical to my own, extending back into the furthest reaches of the past, back into the dim prehistory of Northern Europa. Were all my ancestors the sons of rage? Were we all doomed to live lives of violence and conflict?
I think of my lady, Pia--the love of my life. I think of my son Sam, his little body all whale bone and rawhide, with his inquisitive jut of a face and his big hands so like my own. I left the street life forever the day he was born. Neither Sam nor Pia have ever been beaten by me. There will never be a gun in our home, nor will they ever see me led off in chains by the police. No: my bloodline was not doomed. We were not bound by our heredity, we are all of us free to choose who we are.
Thinking of guns brings me back to Dad. He’s still rattling on as I look at him sitting there on the edge of his seat, and I realize (I should have known it all along) that he’s carrying a gun stuck down the back of his belt. That’s why he can’t sit back in his chair.
“Dad,” I say softly, interrupting him. Dad’s brows leap up his forehead as he stops talking. “Dad, are you packing a gun?”
He scowls at me, and looks from side to side to see if anyone’s eavesdropping from the fog. “Of course I am!” he says in a harsh whisper. “A guy’s got to take care of himself, you know?” An ex-con with a gun. Why am I not surprised?
Dad sits there, still scowling, waiting like he cares what my answer is. I can’t even look at him. I just stare at the little wheels on the tape recorder, watching them spin around and around, recording everything between us, and yet nothing at all.
Braille of Narcissus
by Michelle Cherrix
don't know where I am or how I got here. Unopened spaces are moving in and out of mirrors, the mirrors that are bent all over these circular walls. With all my senses I probe their surfaces again and again until the space breaks open. I see no colors; I feel the sun dropping over ice. Only pulses of strings pulled tight like ambient music, dragging a cold, heavy head into rushing heat remind me that I am still breathing. Undulations of confusion are rising to clarity, only to be swallowed up again. Falling waves. A sudden fear dressed up with enchantment draws me nearer to a neck stretched from the floating head. A neck so exaggerated that for a moment I believe it is something I can rest my entire body upon. I am being fooled by a neck that rotates in space on a gossamer axis. I look again and it has disappeared. The floating head. Black sea hair, a crescendo growing from a single strand, endlessly. I reach out and dip my hands in and my skin vibrates like an electric bass submerged into a hot spring. But now I cannot tell if it is my skin or her skin.
I try to pretend that I don't see the different versions of the reflection that I don't recognize. Peeling away from each other faster than my energy being devoured. Energy that chases itself in circles, winds itself into impatient coils. Mirrors perfecting every angle into confusing me. The figure of her body appears, drowns itself in mud and passes into another figure. A huge vibrating warmth at its center that I'm afraid to touch. Look, you're over there. Your outline forming crystals that pierce the wave crests then dissolve again into the thick mud. Falling down, laughing, crying, across sudden deserts--which is the real you? Fragile echoes of a toy piano smashed apart against a voice scratched by absinthe. Words of her own language. She murmurs, "Katja," and peels off the shape of her mouth and tosses it into the water. But is she calling herself this or me? Her hand is in mine. I close my hand over it. Tiny kisses between each of my fingers and I feel like discarded air sliding over the length of her body. I begin to run backwards to find the real me. Are we not in here somewhere?
My feet have turned into fins. I lose all balance, I cannot run anymore. The floors have crawled up the walls, the ceilings chased all the doors closed and I have met impossible beauty.
Before me heavy veils hang with the weight of water. I must wade through, struggling for the tear that I can slip through where she waits for me. Each time I grow closer I fall further backward, stumbling though there is no ground. I pull myself up on the dangling ice she's carving her kisses out of. I hear her whispering my memories. I can no longer breathe with my own lungs. Our voices cry out for each other in unison as I grow closer. Our voices resound in ten-double echoes. Each word bounces against these stretched elastic walls, encircles, always in suspension. Each word has a hard sound that slams against the other trying to open up the meanings. Hieroglyphics of sound it takes us days to complete. Each word mingles with the other making it impossible to tell who has spoken. Our voices rise into condensed screams pressed between two magnetic walls.
As she walks towards me a cluster of shadows follows her. Shadows mingling with their own dark edges, breaking into deeper colored shadows, stranger and more distorted forms. Expanded or contorted, shrunken or whole, they continue to grow around her in no fixed pattern, stalking her every movement like disturbed pantomimes. Disguised secret selves seemingly oblivious to each other, all fighting to dominate her.
Layers of veils that we continue to peel away and then discard to continue the clawing through, deftly, until sudden images of delicate violence erupt shuddering waves throughout us. Like the outward continuance of a circle spreading in water, expanding in our secret language, we rock back and forth sustaining interdependent rhythms. But I want danger. I want to go deeper. I want to be led into her strange new world and like a curious child I want to yield to it completely.
I am skating on the veins of her hand, swimming against the hairs of her arm; hairs wavering like exposed cartilage of sea animals' bones. From her hands cage wire dangles against beads of sandalwood. Feathers depart from her hair and warm the eggs being born beneath her feet. I am to create a mask for her. Over a surface of worm-eaten leaves she is making a collage to sew into my pillow. I cannot decipher the language she weaves into it. Frantically I continue her mask as she curls herself inside a musical sound that has abandoned space, with shifting vibrations that hypnotize her blood flow. She summons the sounds into the water where they swim together. Each sound isolates itself from the other and begins to communicate with the water. The water answers in its own precise pitches of sound. The water soon needs the sounds to guide it into rhythms; the sounds need the water to guide it into waves. She thrusts herself against it all, throwing her head back in delirious joy like a fish jumping downstream. She treats the water like a rope that she must balance upon, and like the tightrope walker, she delights in the risks. She calls out for me to join her. I can feel the freedom in her voice the way a deaf person may hear musical vibrations through the floor. She swallowed all the sounds and then cupped her hands before her face and blew it all away. A million wishes colliding. I place the mask upon her face. I do not feel skin.
Her mask is very simple. It is a cage with three openings. One to smell the first sparks of desire, another to steal glances from every lover at once, and the last to speak through in the language of deceits.
Our feet sink into the giant orchids that have saturated the air. We are following a path lined with tiny boxes that unfold and collapse themselves. One box may contain broken teeth, another sand and sugar, or broken eggshells, discarded threads, dots of blood on rare silk, pieces of tangled hair or thought refractions in bent glass. Interdependent structures that unravel themselves to pierce the sky, and then shrink back to fit inside the hand. The last box expanded on all sides to reveal compartments lined in swollen berries with jewels sunk inside them. A tiny, bone-white figure of a woman was bending over glass. Her image was cast onto every side of the box, now fully expanded by fragile strings. Long and empty passageways lead to a room that passes into a room that passes into a room that passes into a room that she has flooded. Flooded with laughter, flooded with singing, flooded with light, flooded with shadows, flooded with colored shapes that spin in gentle revolutions of sound. Endless doors are opening and closing. We cannot stop running our hands over every surface, again and again, trying to penetrate the undergrowths of depths feeding on each other. Over and over we feel the abstract patterns that push their swollen bodies through, like clusters of sounds wounding silence. So brutally we need to discover all the secrets.
We are becoming all rhythm, a rhythm steadily rising to a dual explosion. With slowly increasing symbiotic limbs we reach over the mirrors, inhaling the broken fragments. Our legs and arms are ripening from control as we dance out the struggles of our inner tensions. The tensions that keep prolonging the space between us, blurring our movements into reverse, pushing our bodies into dizzying cracks of indecision. Broken pieces of fantasy unable to see each other until all we exhale is blood. Our dance is becoming a dissension of fragmented movements trying to break apart our fantasy world. Our nerves have become excruciatingly unsettled tangles that coil around each other. Terror condenses inward. Her body now made of mercury injects itself into me in intraspinal waves.
Music returns again and again to the source of its flow. Trying to ascend the
staircase of rushing waves, it falls upon itself as it carves space through sounds.
All depths have now become covered in ice, a hall of mirrors reflecting static
images that will never touch each other.
Bunker Shots
by Jack Swenson
henever Tom visited Doc in L.A., Doc’s wife left town.
Poor Mavis, Tom thought. Driven
from her home by her husband’s rowdy friend.
Doc told him not to take it personally.
The message implicit in her exodus was meant for him, not Tom.
“Mavis isn’t a party girl,” said Doc, handing Tom a beer.
They had stopped at a liquor store on the way back from the airport. Doc stowed the beer in the refrigerator, and put the bottles of whiskey and gin on the kitchen counter. They went out on the balcony overlooking the canyon and sat down.
Doc raised his glass. “To the English dead,” he said.
Tom looked out into the soft twilight of the canyon. He sighed. He was happy to be off the airplane, happy to see his friend. He was happy to be in L.A., too. The place amazed him. Whenever he visited, it was like traveling to some exotic foreign city, Cairo, maybe. Or Timbuktu.
Doc rustled up some supper for them, and afterwards they sat on the balcony until it got too cool, and then they moved inside. Doc built himself a martini and told Tom to help himself to whatever he wanted.
They talked for an hour or so, and shortly after ten o’clock, they went to bed. Doc told Tom that Mavis had made up a bed for him in one of the rooms downstairs. Tom unpacked, then sat on the edge of the bed looking at the rows and rows of books that lined the walls of the room. Books or Mavis’s knickknacks took up every square inch of free space. Most of the books were about World War I.
They were on the practice green in front of the clubhouse at 7:30 the next morning. They had driven miles to get to the golf course. Tom complained, which puzzled Doc who said you had to drive forever to get anywhere in L.A.
One of Doc’s coworkers was going to play with them. Zoyd was late. That was normal, Doc said. “Zoyd’s never on time,” Doc said.
Zoyd arrived a few minutes before their tee time. He plodded up to the first tee dragging a huge bag of clubs on a tiny cart. Zoyd was a short, wispy fellow who looked vaguely like someone Tom had seen in the movies. He smiled and shook Tom’s hand. He shook Doc’s hand, too. “Sorry I’m late,” he said.
On the drive over, Tom had asked Doc how Zoyd got such an odd name. Doc said that there were four boys in the family. The others were named Lloyd, Floyd, and Boyd. “By the time Zoyd came along, there were no ‘oyd names left,” Doc said.
After their round, they sat in the clubhouse bar congratulating each other on their round. Zoyd was a terrible golfer, but that day he broke a hundred, which he admitted he rarely did. Doc shot an 82 and Tom an 85, which was a good score for him. Doc, when he was on, was the best golfer of the trio, but he was wildly inconsistent, and often Tom managed to beat him. That day for the first four holes Doc was one under par, but he hit his tee shot out of bounds on number five and ended up with a quadruple bogie eight.
“Typical,” said Doc.
Nevertheless, they were all pleased with their rounds.
“Great game, golf,” said Zoyd, and he signaled the bartender to bring them a second round of drinks.
They teased Tom about the shot he hit on number twelve, which hit a tree, rebounded, and nearly decapitated him. “Never saw anybody hunt grass so fast!” laughed Doc. Tom blamed it on Doc. “'Aim for the tree, you’ll never hit it,' he says,” said Tom. Tom had hit his drive into the woods to the right of the fairway, and to reach the green, he had to steer his second shot through a scattering of willow saplings.
“Hell, that tree was no bigger around than this,” Tom said, and he made a circle with his thumb and forefinger.
Doc drove home at a leisurely pace. He always drove slowly, drunk or sober. He avoided the main thoroughfares, taking a route that he claimed was faster, but Tom suspected that they could have cut the time in half if they’d used the freeways.
Doc parked his ancient Volkswagen on the street outside his house, beyond the cement bib in front of the garage. “We’re taking the Mercedes tonight,” he said. “We pick up the girls at seven,” he said. “The restaurant where we’re going has tablecloths.”
Tom pointed out that in L.A., that didn’t mean anything.
They picked up the women at Mert’s apartment. Mert was a secretary for the county agency where Doc worked. Tom had met Mert during a previous visit. She was a pert redhead. The other woman, Mert’s friend, was a small, slender woman with dark hair and glasses. She looked like a librarian, but she had a look in her eye that said she wasn’t. Mert got into the backseat of the car with Tom.
Tom liked Mert. She was witty and sarcastic, but she wasn’t mean. She seemed to view the world with a resigned, good natured amusement. Mert had been around the block a few times, as she would be the first to tell you. At one time she had dated a famous baseball player. She told Doc that the baseball player had a thing for toes.
The food at the restaurant was nothing special, but the drinks were fine, in Tom’s opinion. They were all in high spirits when they got back in the car. Back at Doc’s house, Doc took Joanne on a tour. An architect designed the place, he told her proudly. Joanne was impressed with the view. The house was perched on a steep hillside, and Joanne asked Doc if he were afraid of earthquakes. Mudslides, fire, earthquakes, everything, Doc said. He said that if there were a big earthquake, the house would be at the bottom of the canyon.
Mert sat down on the couch in the living room, and Tom went into the kitchen and fixed them a drink. Tom was drinking scotch and water. “Just enough water to keep the ice cubes from sticking together,” he said. Mert said she’d have a glass of wine.
Tom sat down next to Mert. Mert took a sip of her drink, then reached over and loosened Tom’s tie. “You two looked pretty spiffy tonight,” she said.
“Thank you,” Tom said.
Mert turned the tie over and peered at the label. “Designer tie?” she asked.
Tom told her that he had purchased the tie in a second-hand store in Minneapolis for fifty cents.
Later, Tom went into the kitchen to get another drink, and Doc and Joanne were pressed up against the kitchen counter. Doc’s big hands were under the young woman’s skirt. When Tom reported what he had seen to Mert, Mert asked if Joanne were wearing underwear. Tom said he didn’t think so. “That naughty girl,” Mert said.
They played one of the local municipal courses the next day. The course was laid out like a Midwestern muni, heavily wooded, with narrow fairways. It had rained earlier that morning, and the grass was wet. From the first tee, you couldn’t see the flagstick because of the mist. Doc used his driver to point in the direction of the green. “It’s over there, to the left of that fairway bunker,” he said.
Doc had a new driver. It was a Calloway with a head as big an anvil. Doc had worked on his game, and his setup and take-back were flawless, but on a bad day, his swing came apart at the top, and on the downswing, he looked like Ichabod Crane trying to dodge a pumpkin.
Doc’s drive was a low screamer that barely avoided a wall of trees on the left. Tom hit his drive fat. The ball landed about 150 yards from the tee, bounced once and died.
“Just because you hit a bad first shot doesn’t mean you’re not going to par the hole,” Doc said. Tom took a seven on the hole, and Doc had a double-bogie six.
Tom’s score for the first nine was 51. Doc beat him by two strokes. “Thank God we were playing winter rules,” Tom said. On number seven Tom hit another popup off the tee, and they never did find the ball. Tom saw it land, and he walked directly to the spot, but the ball was buried in the muck. He took out another ball, and set it down on a tuft of grass on firmer ground, then hit his next shot into a sand trap in front of the green.
They played two more holes, then decided they had had enough. They joined a gaggle of other red-faced, mud-spattered golfers in the clubhouse. “Tough out there,” said a fat man on a stool at the end of the bar. “Can’t see your hand in front of your face.”
Tom took a swallow of beer, and it felt as if he had doused a fire in his stomach. “Oh, boy,” he said. “That tastes good!”
“Cheers,” Doc said.
On the way back to Doc’s house, they stopped in a bar on Franklin Avenue. The bartender kept looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar, and Tom opined that the young man must be an aspiring actor. “So’s everyone else in Hollywood,” Doc said.
The bar was packed. Fascinated, Tom watched the shenanigans going on around him. Funny, he thought. The weekend had been fun, but he woke up that morning thinking that life was a tragedy, and now it seemed like a comedy. He shared his thoughts with Doc, who agreed.
At the table next to theirs, a slender man in a suit and tie was commiserating with a balding man with a walrus moustache. “I mean, I knew she was bisexual,” said the mustachioed man. “She told me that a long time ago. But I thought that was all over.”
At the bar, a man with a ponytail had his arm around a whey-faced blonde. “Hey, Jack,” he shouted over his shoulder, pawing the air with his hand. “Come over here! I want you to meet someone who’s going to be the next Mia Farrow!”
A wrangler in a cowboy hat was sitting by himself at a table between the table where Doc and Tom were sitting and the bar. A young woman, who had been perched on a stool at the bar, came over and sat down across from the cowboy. The cowboy leaned across the table and whispered something in the woman’s ear. She giggled. “Oh, no,” she said. “He’s just being supportive. I’d never sleep with someone just to get ahead.”
Tom and Doc sat in the bar until the conversation around them didn’t sound strange anymore. Finally, Tom looked at his watch and said they’d better get going.
Mommy Says I'm Pretty
on the Insides
by
Lucy Alibar-Harrison
3:14 PM
Jerome is staring at my eyebrow again. Or the part that’s there. I’ve tried to draw the rest on with Magic Markers, but the scar tissue is too smooth for ink. Elmira pulls his face back to hers and re-inserts her tongue.
She knows how much I hate it when people stare.
3:34 PM
Elmira’s chewing his neck. His neck is beautiful. His eyes are beautiful. Light green and flecked with gold. The color of what I cough up most mornings, but prettier. Those beautiful eyes look so sad, so pensive and disturbed. Like Daddy’s when he talks about his botched circumcision.
That happened when I was six.
Daddy’s Catholicism wasn’t an issue during their courtship, but after I was born, Mommy wanted a traditional Jewish home. I was enrolled in Hebrew School. Daddy was circumcised.
All Mommy has to say about it is that it was the mohel’s second day on the job and “things didn’t go quite to plan.”
When I try to ask any more than that she reaches for her bottle of vodka and changes the subject to cancer.
She and Daddy sleep in separate bedrooms now. At night, if I listen hard enough, I can hear them crying.
I don’t want Jerome to be as sad as Daddy. I will make him smile.
I take a deep breath and exhale on a high pitched gurgle. Tiny globes of mucus bubble out between the grating of my braces. I pop them one by one with my tongue.
Breathe and pop. Breathe and pop. Breathe and pop.
Jerome looks away. He doesn’t like it.
Different people have different senses of humor, is what Mommy always says.
“Different people have different senses of humor, Tzipporrah,” she cooed whenever I came home from school crying. “Kids tellin’ you you're ugly is their way of sayin’ howdy. Just laugh with them.”
“But they say I’m hideous!” I’d wail. “They say I’m so nasty and slimy my own mommy won’t touch me!”
“Horse shit,” Mommy said, reaching for her vodka. “I touch you plenty.”
To prove her point, she reached out to stroke my scar, but the hand seemed to change its mind mid-reach. She mentioned Jesus and disappeared into her bedroom, clutching the Smirnoff.
The next day I laughed with my third-grade tormentors as they kicked me to the ground and took turns spitting at my head. Since then, I’ve handled the hatred of my peers by laughing or doing cool tricks like Mucus Bubble Blowing to make everyone else laugh and forget they hate me.
But Jerome’s not laughing now.
Maybe I’ve lost my spark.
3:41 P.M.
Elmira’s tongue has disappeared into Jerome’s trachea. His thick, burly hands probe the front of her turtleneck.
Elmira looks so pretty in turtlenecks. Elmira looks pretty in everything.
Mommy says I am pretty on the insides.
3:56 P.M.
Jerome’s arm has vanished beneath Elmira’s turtleneck. I shouldn’t be watching this. That’s sick. I have to entertain myself.
Even if Jerome doesn’t think Mucus Bubble Popping is funny, I do. And they’re not paying attention anyway.
Breathe and pop. Breathe and pop. Breathe and pop.
3:59 P.M.
Jerome leans over and whispers something in Elmira’s ear. Elmira has the cutest little ears. Elmira has the cutest little everything.
She leans and whispers back.
Whisper, whisper, whisper.
Breathe and pop. Breathe and pop. Breathe and pop.
4: 00 P.M.
Elmira asks me if I want to take a walk. She says it will help get rid of my baby fat.
“Sure!” I say. I immediately regret my enthusiasm. Projectile bits of mucus shoot through my retainer. One of the chunks flies into Jerome’s eye and he cries out.
Oopsy daisy.
I hand him a tissue.
4:01 P.M.
A late afternoon stroll with my two gorgeous friends. Maybe they’ll want to hear some of my prize-winning poetry. Maybe we’ll bond like in “The Breakfast Club” and be friends forever. I swing my rucksack over my shoulder.
Elmira pats me on the head.
“Be back in a few hours. Have fun.”
Jerome is kissing her stomach and she is moaning a little.
Oh.
I get it.
4:31 PM
The interstate is long and hot. Truckers leer out of windows to waggle their tongues between their fingers. I smile and nod and keep on walking.
I am always getting kicked out of places so that beautiful people can have sex without having to look at me. A University of Florida biology student named Dale told me once that the merest glimpse of me would render a man impotent. I’d started to explain that I’m pretty on the insides, but he said that I was ruining his hard-on. Through the plate glass doors, I watched as Dale held my babysitter Juanita in a passionate embrace. At seven, I was unsure of what “impotent” or “hard-on” meant, but I shrugged it off and went to play Mermaid Princess in a nearby drainage ditch until my parents came home from Couple’s Therapy.
There are no drainage ditches here. Only a long stretch of highway littered with road kill.
4:40 PM
I can understand how I rendered men impotent when I was seven. I had a unibrow until I was nine years old.
Now I have half a unibrow.
It’s because of Couple’s Therapy.
Money was tight when Dr. Singh told my family that I desperately needed braces. Mommy had me fitted with a discount retainer. She said I’d grow into it. It’s rusty and protrudes half an inch from my mouth. The jagged edges mean my gums are constantly bleeding and infected. In winters, the cold freezes the metal bands so that my gums and tongue stick and have to be ripped off at the end of the day.
After school I used to warm it on the stove while I slurped Cheerios at the kitchen table.
It was the winter of 1993. Mommy and Daddy came home from Couple’s Therapy angrier than usual. Mommy was crying and Daddy called her a “castrating kike bitch.” He spit in her face and stalked off to his room.
“Whush uh kike?” I dribbled through soggy Cheerios. Oopsy daisy. I said the words too fast and a few Cheerios flew out of my mouth and hit Mommy in the eye. She dropped to her knees and started to scream. Between her ragged sobs, I heard “Walking Abortion” and “Waste of Chromosomes.”
I finished my cereal as the sobs petered out.
Out of the corner of my eye I watched my mommy climb to her feet. I began slurping at my cereal milk. Slurp, slurp, slurp. I saw Mommy staring out of the corner of my eye.
“It makes me puke to know you slithered out of my womb,” said Mommy.
She snatched the red-hot retainer off the stove and hurled it at my head. The jagged edge caught my eyebrow and ripped off two inches of unibrow and skin.
She apologized in the car on the way to the emergency room.
“Sometimes, the only way to make my anger go away is to watch something bleed,” she explained. “But I love you. You better get that straight. You’ll always be my Pretty-On-The-Inside Princess.”
We held hands and sang “Dayenu” while I got thirteen stitches across my forehead.
“Dayenu” means “that would have been enough.” It’s a Hebrew song about how God keeps giving and giving and giving, and just when we think he’s given us enough--Dayenu--he gives us something even better.
Mommy says my eyebrow used to scare her so badly that she had to get drunk just to breastfeed me. But eventually she’d be drunk enough to feed me and not throw up afterwards. I was a very well-fed baby.
Dayenu!
Mommy says that one day I’ll find a man who will love me for my talent and inner beauty.
Dayenu!
Now I have half a unibrow and a bright red scar that splits my forehead in two just like that retainer did.
No more unibrow!
Dayenu!
5:00 PM
“Don’t worry, sweetie,” Mommy would croon after Daddy got drunk and said that my scar makes my face look like a vagina.
“Your face has character. Just like you.”
“I have character,” I chant as I step over a swollen deer carcass. “I have character.”
5:12 PM
I won a poetry contest last year. This is what my award certificate says:
Tzipporah O’Malley
Second Place
Selena Chambers Award for Poetic Excellence
My poem was a haiku called “Gatorade.” It goes:
Hey, Michael Jordan,
What does Gatorade have to
Do with basketball?
I’d entered a lot of haikus about Michael Jordan in the contest, but “Gatorade” I guess is the strongest.
I Xeroxed the certificate and taped copies to my parents’ bedroom doors, and one on our liquor cabinet just to make sure they saw.
Who’s a waste of chromosomes now? Who’s a walking abortion now?
Not me!
5:34 PM
I stepped on a chunk of scrap metal a mile and a half back. My shoe has been slowly but surely filling up with blood.
To look at Elmira, you wouldn’t think she has big scabs the size of nickels all over her butt. But she does. All over her butt.
5:35 PM
I am sprawled out at the side of the road, too tired to move. Trucks whiz by and blow exhaust in my face.
I wish Jerome could see my poetry.
Hey, Michael Jordan,
What does McDonald’s have to
Do with basketball?
5:37 PM
A truck driver with a mullet and eczema picks me up. His name is Brian and he is very nice. He asks me why I’m out wandering the highway all by my sweet little self. I try to explain my impotence affect, but he says that’s not true, not at all. Not At All. He pats my thigh and tells me he’s got exactly what I need.
The other half of my eyebrow? My father’s foreskin? A new pair of braces?
Hey, Michael Jordan,
What do batteries have to
Do with basketball?
6:00 PM
Brian scrubs his moustache on his sleeve as I zip up my pants.
“See, you didn’t kill that, baby!”
I didn’t kill that. Not At All.
Brian has promised to take me back to Salt Lake City with him. He will give me everything. Brian can see my inner beauty shining right on through. He says since Jesus made me, of course I am beautiful.
Of course.
Brian leans in to kiss me and his beard gets caught in my braces. A brief tug-of-war ensues. The repeated thud thud thud of my head against the passenger-side window underscores Brian's squeals of pain as he struggles to free his beautiful red beard from the aluminum prison of my mouth.
I think it's time to go home.
6:46 PM
“Oh, Tzipporah,” Elmira says.
I try in vain to dodge an armadillo.
“That was, like, the most deep thing I’ve ever been through. I mean it lasted like, two minutes ‘cause I think he was nervous, but you know I don’t care about that.”
“I know,” I gurgle. Phlegm is beginning to fill up my trachea.
“And afterwards, I realized that I am still in love with Craig. Because I can’t stop loving him, Tzipporah. I can’t.”
“That’s beautiful, Elmira.”
“And Jerome realized that he still has unresolved issues with his father. So we both cried and held each other for hours. It was like--wow.”
Wow.
I roll down a window and spit. I pray that the mucus doesn’t hit anyone’s windshield, but the cacophony of horns suggests otherwise.
Elmira and I lock eyes and beam. Never again will we be this young. Never again will Elmira be this beautiful. Never again will I have so much character. She maternally picks a speck of mucus from my braces. I scrape away the dried remnants of semen just above her lip. Elmira can be messy sometimes, but it’s all right because we’ll always be there to take care of each other.
“He said he’d email me.”
Of course he will.
Dayenu.
