ice cream tamer

watching boy

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 22:47:00 -0700

They say there are three rules to good stargazing. Or tips, rather: dark skies, dark skies, and dark skies. And that’s why he is here, on top of a mountain, where the yellowy glow of streetlights and storefronts cannot reach. Here there are always dark skies, and tonight the clouds cover only the moon, leaving a dark theater of stars glowing in the blackness like punched out holes between him and God. He’s left the radio on in his car and windows down, but he’s lying in the cool outside, settled in a rock cleft in the center of this small valley, looking up.

First, Ursa Major as Big Dipper, burning hot on the left side of his view. Henry follows it to Polaris and then to Queen Cassiopeia, punished for her vanity, stuck upside down near her husband, King Cepheus. They hang there so quietly and so solemnly he can almost see them—cold and dark and blue and watching Henry the way he is watching them. Perhaps in some twist of space and time they are there, perched in lawn chairs with the finest gold and ruby decor in Aethiopia, and Cepheus is pointing at the Watching Boy, an arrangement of stars that is him, slung long and low between Dubhe and Solaris, a reclining boy with binoculars peering into the pools of time. And their daughter, the fair-haired Andromeda, will giggle when Cepheus tells her that someday she’ll be in the stars with her beautiful mother Cassiopeia. Henry smiles, laughing at himself as he watches this troubled family float above him in points of light.

He thinks of Annie now. He can almost see her because they were here, once, and King Cepheus’s family looked down on him sadly out of dead blue eyes for stars. She was wearing yellow and that necklace she wore when she was a bridesmaid for her sister, and her hair was straight, just the way he liked it, and she was laughing again at something he said.

“I just don’t know what to say,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know what to say to you.”

“Why does anything have to be said? Why can’t we just sit here?”

Her legs are crossed and she is leaning on one hand, her silver watch caught shining at him from the crook of her wrist. He wants to say something different this time, because she’s here, looking at him with those eyes, and he wants to say whatever will make her stay. But it’s confusion in his mind, like the stars look now—a mess of points with no form, no lines, no Polaris and no constellation. And one of those stars is supposed to be his, but he can’t tell them apart anymore. They burn at him fiercely, a backdrop of dread and confusion behind her expectant look. “Henry?”

“I don’t know either.”

He is thinking. What if you could do something differently? What if you could change it and make it the way it was supposed to be. Wasn’t there fate in the stars? Wouldn’t Romeo tell him to watch them more carefully, watch for clues and signs and a warning?

“You know how I feel,” he says at last.

“I know, I know. But what can I do? This is how I feel.”

“You can’t force it.”

Cepheus is looking at Watching Boy and tells Andromeda that Watching Boy once had a true love that he let slip away forever. “Why forever?” she asks. Practical and questioning, like her mother. “What’s forever?”

“Forever is as long as the stars, Andromeda. That’s why he’s there.”

Henry is telling Ann again about Andromeda tied to the rocks at the shore of Aethiopia, tied there to wait for the dragon of the sea. And Cassiopeia, sentenced to an upside down chair of torture, caught hanging with her vanity in a milky stream of light. And then, Cepheus, his constellation the crown—a symbol of his nobility, his dignity, his sadness. There is nothing the King can do to save them. “That’s like us,” says Henry. And he is watching her eyes. He’ll say something different this time. He’ll say something that will prove to her how much he cares, and she won’t wonder, and she won’t question, and above all, she won’t choose anyone but him.

“Hey? I have to go.”

“Then we’ll go,” he says. She is crazy to wear sandals when it’s so cold outside, almost winter, but she does it because no one else does and it’s just her and she’s stepping over rocks back to the car. She pretends not to hear him, and he knows that they’ll drive in silence back to her house and she’ll disappear beneath the trees that tunnel the walk in front.

“I don’t know what to say.” she says.

He wants to tell her that Robbie doesn’t feel that way about her, and never will, because that’s what happens. He likes someone else. That’s what happens you know, he whispers at her as she glides underneath her canopy of trees at stage center. He doesn’t love you and I love you. But he doesn’t say it. He is lying in the cool outside, settled in a rock cleft in the center of this small valley, looking up.

the greatest

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 01:36:00 -0700

Once I wanted to be the greatest, sang the radio.

It was starting to rain. At the barely-cracked tops of the car windows the smell of lightning breezed inside. It was a good feeling. She didn’t turn the wipers on just yet, okay to watch the drops slap and stick and slip away in the driving wind.

And then came the rush of the flood, stars of night turned deep to dust, she sang along.

The modern landscape shuttered past her, a collage of grays and silvers. Under the sooty storm clouds, everything looked black and white, and she pretended that was how she had always seen the world. She saw her mother, made young again, putting her hair behind her ears. Putting something on the stove. She saw her father’s trimmed beard, his white shirt, his arms strong from working in the bakery. Mom would call out: Dad’s home.

She had a blue dress in those days that she would put on to go dancing at the Academy. There was a Hairport there now, big windows with dryer chairs and magazines and legs folded over in the light.

at the beach

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 11:40:00 -0700

“Is he dead?”

Mr. Torrey lay wrinkled into his faded towel. Dead?

He would have reached out his hand to assure the little girl of his life force, but feared it was too skeletal to be convincing. He thought of his own daughters, the little darlings, once sunny-eyed faeries, now weathered, weary mothers with girls of their own.

I should be dead, he whispered, but his voice was caught in the now overwhelming towel fronds. I should have been dead a long time ago, he continued, to no one in particular. He thought of how many times death brushes all those who live a long, full life, as he had.

He had once been hot-rodding in his Nova, cutting long, generous curves into a canyon road when his tire exploded and twisted him around and into oncoming traffic. Except there was no traffic; there was only an eerie hoot hoot from an owl hidden in the foliage overhead. He had even stared into the distant road a moment, expecting an 18-wheeler to obliterate him into a million car parts. It didn’t happen. He kaflumped all the way home to Maude’s strawberry rhubarb pie and marveled at a second chance to mix that sour red taste with a scoop of vanilla bean. He never mentioned it, of course.

He had been deathly ill once. This was before Maude and before the Nova, actually. Newly awash in a sea of blinking freshman at Rutgers, he had been talked into some brightly colored seafood at an Orientation Banquet. The sandy, silky stuff slipped into his throat and closed it off and threatened his very life. He was too poor and too proud for a doctor, even then. He determined to beat it back with the strength of his own immune system. He remembered his bedsheets: light blue, pale, wrinkled and creviced as he coughed and gagged and sweated and rolled and whimpered and cursed the fish in the sea. He had never discovered what it was, that sickly sweet conch-shell-shaped Capricorn of bland madness. At last, after an amount of time now forgotten to him, he emerged triumphant, showering on shaky legs, nibbling at buttered toast, sipping grape juice and blinking bloodshot eyes, reclaiming the spaces of his apartment for the menial uses he had grown to miss.

He supposed he had nearly died of a broken heart, too, waiting for Maude to write that letter. They had walked out of Funny Girl arm in arm, a magic web spun for them by the incomparable Omar Sharif (though he’d liked him more in Lawrence of Arabia) and Barbara Streisand, his Fanny, his funny girl. Here was his Fanny too, he realized, sunk low in the theater, his dry hands shaking as he finally took her hand, made contact with feeling, contact beyond the handshakes and back-pats and slight elbow-touches of all awkward, early courtship. Impossibly speechless as they nervously laughed down the long, hedged walkway to her front door, he went home that night and wrote a too-honest declaration of his true feelings, though Maude would tell friends at her Tupperware parties that she already knew from the first look of his “stormy eyes.” At least it wasn’t sweaty hands she remembered, he would say, and the plastic bowls would shake with laughter.

Mr. Torrey was in dangerous territory now; the sun was beating a hot spot onto his head that seemed to spotlight the membrane—the very cells—that stored the memory of her death in his gray matter like a caged bird. He had wandered too close and now he was there: the starchy sheets, the acid smell, the snaking tubes of all sizes, the liquid bag, tight and heavy with a thick liquid cocktail of chemical ooze. After she went in the night, he correctly answered Jeopardy!’s final question (he mumbled it even now) that went, “Among the many movies that have premiered here at Radio City Music Hall was the 1962 film based on a novel by Harper Lee”. She always said Jeopardy! was too easy. That she could have been one of them. They had driven to the St. Louis audition to give it a shot, but she changed her mind at the very last moment.

the darlings

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 12:49:00 -0700

Mr. Darling was leaning back and closing his eyes. “She was wearing a poodle skirt, I think.”

“I was not!”

“You were. All of your friends were wearing them that day. To be funny.”

“Oh! And a ribbon, in my hair!”

Darby loved poodle skirts, probably. He put all the girls he had ever loved in a poodle skirt and sighed. His nail was coming off in pieces at the champing of his teeth and the Darlings were laughing at something else already, something that had nothing to do with Darby.

Friends of the family, his father had called them at the airport, his glasses glinting. Darby thought maybe it was his eyes shining with tears that day, but it couldn’t be. Just a reflection. And they must be friends of the family, thought Darby. Since he had come to school here they had fed him dinner several times, sent him home with bought food, not leftovers, and even gave him money for his birthday. As much as he had grown to love them, his heart was always breaking when he stayed here.

It wasn’t their fault.

He just couldn’t stand the sight of the five Darling children, glowing yellow heads with combed, wet hair and wide blue eyes sitting at attention before grace. Hearing their soft voices just over the piano music drifting from the parlor. Watching Mrs. Darling pour the water for Mr. Darling, and then watching him pour her glass when it was empty. The way Mr. Darling still put his arm around her when they talked. She would watch his eyes and smile and put her hand over his.

The littlest Darling, Mary Ann, always smiled when he looked at her, smiled and closed her eyes and looked up and away, embarrassed. At dinner, the oldest Darling, David, would watch for his father to sit first, and then take up the other end in a sincere and awkward imitation of him. And there was always much laughter, right after grace and right up until the table was cleared and the children were doing the dishes.

Traditionally, Mr. and Mrs. Darling would push warm cookies on him while they answered the questions he had written down in his pocketbook that week. He always wrote them down, not so much to remember them but to make sure they sounded right. Just last Thursday he had written “so how did you two meet?” and changed it already to “so where did you two meet?” This certainly sounded less suspicious than the first. He didn’t want them to think anything. He always asked that question anyway, asked it of every happy couple he had ever come across. Then he would carefully write the answer, as best as he remembered it, in his loopy handwriting. The Darlings were his last page. And how fitting—people like that don’t happen everyday. He wanted them to be the last.

While he rolled dewy chocolate chips around in his mouth, Darby thought of all the girls he’d gone out with. Ann had stopped calling when he did. Emily had found someone bigger, stronger, and British. Lacy had moved to Hawaii without leaving an address. Even Jane, who had insisted on kissing on their first date, had gone away, insisting already on someone else, no doubt. Lindsay had sat on the other end of the classroom after that second date and seafood. He had decided he was doing something wrong and maybe just knowing the Darlings would fix it.

Mr. Darling whispered something in Mrs. Darling’s ear and the middle child, Alexander, scrambled between them to listen. They laughed and Mrs. Darling turned to Darby. “More cookies? Where were we?”

a city tree

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 11:21:00 -0700

They watched him watch the window.

“What’s he looking at?”

“I don’t know. The city.”

They could see him resting his chin on the windowsill and whispering into his long fingers.

“The city? He’s never seen the city.”

“Exactly.”

He was counting buildings. They stood tall and gray and quiet as far as he could see. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten, he breathed, and closed his fingers into fists and started over. He thought if he could just look between the buildings and find a hole small enough to look past the city, he would see his old house with the old trees and the old leaves.

When they had moved, when the car was burdened with all the possible luxuries of modern life, when they locked the door and at last walked out into the sudden rain, he had stepped on one of the leaves from the tall red-leafed tree watching the roof of the house and sniffed back a sudden scent of tears. There was a tire swing in the back that he wished he had left swinging, swinging back and forth so he could have seen it from the side of the house as they pulled out. But the picture framed in the back window was just the red-pink leaves resting on the roof. He had to imagine the tire swing swinging. He had never had any friends. Just the tree and the tire swing.

When Mom had shown him his new room, he could only see the great tall window at one end, without drapes or decoration, and the gray buildings and he saw under the window a crack in the wall and a hole in the wood floorboards. He sighed and put his hands in his pockets.

“Did you know you can grow a tree from a seed this big?” Grandpa had said, before he went away to heaven. James had put both his hands in Grandpa’s and pressed the seed into his fingertips.

“That’s it?” he asked with big eyes.

“That’s it.”

He had put it in that little fifth pocket where Grandpa had told him all seeds should go. “Mom says you have a green thumb.”

He laughed. “Do I?”

“Mom says.” But when Grandpa held his thumbs out, they looked old and brown and waxy.

“She just means I can grow things.”

When Mom and Dad left him alone in his new room, he fished the seed out of his little fifth pocket where Grandpa had told him all seeds go and knelt and flattened himself against the wood and dropped his seed into the hole under the crack in the wall.

At first there was only a tiny green tendril, curled lovingly over the lip of the floor knot, a single paper-thin leaf drinking in a whole window pane full of gorgeous yellow-glowing sunlight. Surprised, he had tucked the leaf back in and moved his wood chest over it. But when he closed his eyes that night, he saw the leaf under the floorboards, caught reaching up for a sunlight that would never reach down, caught between spider webs and the insect corpses of the underground. He shivered and caught his breath and scrunched his legs up to keep his feet under the blanket. And the next morning he pushed the chest aside and knelt and flattened himself against the wood and put his eye to the knot, and when he saw what he saw there, under the floorboards, he blinked.

There were two leaves now, and they were reaching towards the wall underneath where a glob of sunlight was dribbling out like honey. The light-green tubed tendril unwinding itself towards the glow. There was something about it that James thought was beautiful.

From underneath the floorboards, one could see the single eye in the hole shut tight, and James imagined the tall pale window pane framing a great swaying tree, once a fledgling vine, now coming up out of the floorboards like a dream from Dr. Suess. And he had put it there with his own fingers, pushed it into the thick brown gnarled knot in the floor beneath the window and tamped it down with one of Mother’s silvery-shiny forks that only guests could use.

Susan cut the card

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:00:05 -0600

long ways, across the numbers. She tried to cut them in half. She didn’t want someone to piece it back together and go on a spending spree. But there wasn’t anything left on this one anyway. She cut the other way now and reduced the card to little bits of plastic confetti. There was a little computer chip in this one too, and it fell apart at her scissors, crunchy tiny bits of metal and who knows what else.

She had been waiting to cut this one for a long time. After Robert left and after they let her go at the restaurant. But things weren’t so dramatic. She still had her apartment. She still had Indy. She still had her books. She had taken to stacking them everywhere there was a flat surface. Poetry on the fridge gathering dust. Short story collections on the counter tops and kitchen table. Agatha Christie had the coffee table all to herself. Indy liked to fall asleep on the books on the TV. Self-help and biographies.

She was writing again, too. She found a typewriter at the Salvation Army. She filled pages with her thoughts. Almost a diary, but not really.

Pat lay quiet in the still dark

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 23:59:00 -0600

He could make out strange shapes in the fuzzy blackness: the old pipe radiator looking melted to the wall, shifting drapes, the clutter of books and trinkets and papers. His right hand was trembling again, fluttering ever so slightly. The doctors couldn’t tell if anything was wrong or not. But he could tell. He held his hand to his head and felt the blood pumping through his palms. It was warm.

He could hear his mother coughing in the room below. She didn’t look right anymore. Her eyes were wide and afraid and her hair was tossed and her body was lumpy and large. Her feet turned out from the heels she had worn these long years. She didn’t look right. She always sat at the dinner table now, where she could see the TV, and where she could see Pat. She fretted. Her eyes fretted at him quietly, great and wide as they were. He was afraid of her now. He was afraid he would see her die. Would she moan and whimper and suffer away? Would she pass out and lay on the kitchen carpet? He was afraid of that.

His father chided her. She fretted and he chided. His Dad had wrinkled, small eyes and a big nose and red cheeks. He wore the old derby hats and used a cane. When he came back from fiddling in the garage, from whatever he did there, he would sit on the couch in the living room and chide. He would chide and she would fret and Pat would lay on the couch and listen to them.

“Rose! Come over here.”

His mother never left the dinner table.

“Rose come up here!”

Pat would yell down the stairs. “Ma!”

“Pat?”

“Ma, Dad’s calling you!”

“Yes?”

“Come over here!” And so on.

They were watching the Whammy game show and it made Pat nervous to watch it. To him, everyone got Whammied and there was no way around it. His mom had said he should go on and try for something big, but Pat was sure he’d get a Whammy. Everyone always did.

In the dark, in the crinkly dimness, Pat would sometimes see things. Shapes and maybe letters. It made his chest tight and he would ball his fluttering hand up over his heart and close his eyes and still he could see them. It made him afraid enough to cry. The wetness on his face as his eyes opened and shut.

He fancied himself a poet.

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 23:59:00 -0600

With broad strokes, he fit line after line to the pages of his small notebook, counting the rhythms under his breath. He didn’t think about it too much. If there was a tree set just so against the sky, or a moon grinning sideways over a mountain, or a bright flower purposively placed, he would tell its story. He didn’t bother to show anyone. He knew what it was like to read other’s writing, when pressed upon you in that moment. You read it lightly, you skimmed it, you tried to forget about it quickly. You were bothered they ever tried at all. Anyone can write a story. Everyone tries.

There was a place in town with a great roaring fire. He found a chair there he liked, and he put his feet out, and turned the pages of his notebook. It was thick with moisture. The pages crinkled. He read a poem at random. There were no dates.

Everyone comes to an end, it began.

He didn’t think it was very good. He sipped a very hot drink of something. He didn’t remember what.

She would be marrying any moment now.

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0600

A moment before that moment, she would be free as a bird, unhitched and unclaimed. Then the moment—a ring, a kiss, an official declaration. And then the moment after, lost to all other men, she would be jealously guarded, prettily distant, mapped and properly documented, with a certificate and everything. All in just a few moments, just past Exit 221.

He thought of how she would think of him in that middle moment. She would blink her eye just so and a little blue tear would drop and dry in an instant, but that tear would be for him. No one else would see it—not the lavishly dressed guests, not the photographer in her small business suit, not their fawning parents, now crying, now smiling, now crying and smiling at once. And not her husband, tall, blond, irresponsibly muscular, for he would close his eyes and draw her in and crush her soul into his. She would be all his, and all not Darby’s.

He would not allow it.

The car was his mother’s and it was new. There was no thump thump bang like his rusty Datsun. No, mother’s car fairly flew between the painted lines, and in the driving rain and deep darkness, his headlights reached out and warded off his darker dreams. The winter before, she had been all his, wrapped up in his scarf, making snow angels, baking cookies, wearing his mittens. He had held back her hair when she threw up, just like in the movies. Was the favorite of her little sister, the receiver of Mom-made cookies, and the Only Boy Who Dad Ever Liked.

And then: the drive-in! There was one newly built on the edge of town, the only one in the whole world, it seemed. “The drive-in, Darby!” Oh, yes, the drive-in. He remembered like he was there. He rolled through the tollbooth in his Datsun, drifted silently into a far away parking spot, and killed the engine. Before them was an audience of metallic beetles glinting under a silver screen. No one watches a movie at the drive-in! No one! And he turned and looked directly at her mouth while she watched. The ribbon in her hair matched her dress. He thought of tender smooches.

“I can’t hear. Shouldn’t the radio be on?”

He found the muffled static voices on the dial. “Do you want to watch?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” she breathed. The screen was lit large and bright before them. He sat defeated. She teased the ribbon from her curls and draped it with a feminine arm out the window. Clearly, he couldn’t watch the movie. Instead he watched her sidelong and saw the flicker of moving images refracted and painted on her smooth white face. There was a shuffle of gravel and a face appeared at the window at the very tip of that very feminine arm.

“Did you drop this?” There was a man crouched at her eyes, dangling a ribbon.

“Oh! Yes,” she said. Embarrassed.

Darby cleared his throat. “Thank you.”

He handed the ribbon over. She was smiling much too much, he saw, and he felt as far away from them as he did the silver screen.

She liked him because he was tall.

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0600

It wasn’t, for instance, the way he held her hands, firm and cold. It wasn’t the way he spoke to her, like a child. It wasn’t even the way he opened every door for her, even the refrigerator door. He was, however, wonderfully tall. His legs loomed over her like columns, a doric belt buckle adorned by fingertips. After a short time, she became acquainted with the perfect way he shaded her vision, cooled her from the sun on hot days, and generally hid her from wide view on a campus crawling with creepers.

“He’s tall,” she told her mother, who she did not, as a rule, tell things to.

“Well what else? You can’t love someone because they’re tall.”

“Wow. I don’t love him.”

“But what else can you tell me about him?”

She didn’t even have the energy to try and say what else there could possibly be. They met in her Astronomy class on the first day. They took the back row. She thought he sat back there out of courtesy, sure that a boy of such stature would go out of his way to prevent his head from blocking the views of everyone else in the world who was shorter than him. When the Professor asked them to share what they knew about constellations with a partner, she turned to him, looked up, climbing over that square chin, past the holes of his nose, and to his eyes, where she found them rolling towards her.

“I know about the Big Dipper,” she said. He laughed.

“I do too.” His voice did not boom, as she thought it would. It was as high pitched as the roof of his head, casting wonder over and about her. From that moment, she began to show herself in the only way she knew how. She put ribbons in her hair. She dangled her shoes from her feet. She gently tossed her hair when he asked her a question. And she laughed at everything she could possibly laugh at.

I miss you in that normal way,

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 12:18:00 -0600

like when you need to sleep but you can’t. You turn over in bed, you turn over your pillow to the cool side, but you’re still awake. The ringing in your ears. I’m sorry if this is too much for you to hear.

When we met I was sure everyone was in love with you, with your very serious way and your very serious ideas. You were going to save the world before you weren’t twenty anymore and everyone believed you, even me, and I don’t believe such things.

You asked me if I’d ever been in love and I said once and you said that wasn’t enough. You said that’s no way to live, letting everyone love you without loving back. I started to protest with dramatic images of my heart, and walls, and locks, but you would have none of it.

There comes a time, you said, when you have to start believing all the good things people are saying about you. I thought that was a clumsy sentence but to you it was the truth. I throw away birthday cards and love letters as a rule; I don’t like clutter, emotional or otherwise. But I have these pictures of you, the last handful of a disposable camera that I blinked away at Walmart. You frown, you gasp, you smile, and then you look away.

Death can be sweet, he said.

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 22:37:00 -0600

Like blackberry jam.

I met him somewhere between where you are and where I am. It was dark, the stars stark and sudden, our breath colored with cold. Or maybe it was day, bright in the park, the grasses scurrying under our feet, joggers moving along the spider web of sidewalks. He does not look like they say, neither skeletal nor hooded, neither scythe-wielding nor ominously tall. More like Joe Black really, bearded, unassuming, awfully handsome and quiet and gray.

We talked easily of our occupations, me relating the minutia of mail delivery, him detailing the depths of death. I told him about the constant flow of mail in letters and magazines and furniture catalogs; he told me about the incessant demand for death among the old and young and up-and-coming.

I like to park the truck and walk as much as I can, I said. Look people in the eye when I give them their mail. I like to leave the scene before someone finds them, he said. I hate to see mothers approaching baby strollers, sons finding fathers, the ambulance driver at the scene of his wife’s car accident. But the act itself was glorious, he said. Sublime. Just as the sun began to set or the dark began to dawn, he took my hand.

She slept on the dark side of the moon.

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0600

She slumbered in an unearthly silence: no violin of crickets, no howling of the neighbor’s baby, no wind stirring at the windows. She curled under her favorite molehill of moon, the dust rising and settling with her breath in low gravity. From earth, with a powerful telescope, you might see her as a small hair in the ear of old man moon, nothing more.

He moved his camp every 29 and a half days to stay in sunlight, wondering when he would step into his own footsteps from years before, a journey full circle across a landscape littered with craters. He pulled the paper from his rucksack and began another poem. The moon has eyes, he wrote, as his cosmic fire waved silent and smokeless. The moon has eyes, he wrote, and they watch for you. Henry would make the long walk to visit Claire as often as he could, though his eyes never seemed to adjust.

He thought fondly of their next visit, some 207 earth days away. In the darkness, he would fumble like her lost lunar puppy, feeling his way along the ridges of craters he’d made into poetry. Tell me one, she would say, when they had settled into an embrace, knowing the parchment would be unreadable in the ink black. The moon has eyes, he would begin. As earth drifted overhead like a shard of stained glass, they would share secrets and make plans. Stay with me, she would say, her voice breaking, but he’d be asleep.

Once upon a time,

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0600

a man wandered in the woods. This aspen forest hugged Saginaw Bay, a foggy drop of Michigan magic north of Detroit a hundred miles. I mention Detroit because people think Michigan is Detroit. But I am here to tell you that there is much more to Michigan than Detroit’s dirty streets and limo drivers. You should know, however, that this wandering man was a Detroit man. I use the term “man” with some hesitance, because he’s really just a boy. We are not sure when we become men for we are not sure what a man is.

If you saw this creature, dull-eyed, flaxen-haired, and wet-lipped, marching with some uncertain certainty in these woods, would you call him a man? He is dressed like a boy. He has a backpack. He has, even, a note from his mother. It’s on stationery a light, warm yellow. I’ll tell you what her looped handwriting says in just a moment. Every other step he takes like he knows where he’s going. Those other steps are visibly uncertain. Where do you run away? If there were woods nearby, would you run to them? Would you find meaning in your solace, in the dirt under your nails, in the struggle to stay warm in a Michigan winter?

You could say his father lives on the other side of these woods. But his father lives farther than this boy-man can walk. He walks to the idea of him, captured in photographs only, bound in an imitation leather album he’s got in his backpack. There are pictures of a man there with a wide smile and white teeth. He does not frown. To the boy-man, he is strange: a saint, or maybe an angel. What work is wrought by the dead by memory only? If a boy walks in the woods to the memory of his father, is it his memory compelling him, or is it his father with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls? If I write a letter to you with the feeling of my heart, do you receive it with the same feeling? Is that feeling in the words? Is it in the ideas behind the words?

His mother writes in well-worn phrases, picked dead of meaning, wall hangings as scribbles. Do those older than us use them because they have new meaning or because they are lazy? You must find your own path, she wrote. You’ll know what to do. He lifts the visor of his helmet to read again, stops under nothing particularly interesting, as opposed to a gold bar of sun beaming through a canopy of some sort, like you were thinking. His shoes make the faintest of prints in the hard dirt, covered in leaves. There comes a time, she writes, look to God, she writes, where much is given, she writes, it’s the moments that take your breath away. He searches them for meaning, for anything originally conceived, for anything said new this time for the first time.

A boy, a man, an anthropod, walks in the woods. The sun follows his helmet and makes it gold. The shadows follow his gloved hands and swallow them up. There is a backpack with few supplies and a letter. Go west, young man, she writes. Your father would be proud. The man with the white smile is upside down in his backpack, but the boy from Detroit does not know this. He will walk until he finds the original memory, or feeling, that called him into these woods.

When henry was inducted into the circle of heartbreak,

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he found many fellow sufferers. The milkman, with his native cheery temperament, had fallen in love with the lady on 193 Leaf Avenue, just a few blocks from him. He had left her pink milk on Valentine’s day but she had left it on the porch. The paper boy, targetless bundles of fine print heralding from his wire rimmed basket, had loved the impossibly freckled girl in the neighboring cul-de-sac. She sat on the front steps and stared him down day after day without even a spotted smile from her lips and now he would detour past her house. Miss Dearborn, the oldest widow in the neighborhood, had been leaving notes in Mr. Earhart’s mailbox every Friday, a secret admirer of sorts until he had spotted her on that blustery day last Fall when his bird fountain tipped over. He left a note inside for her the next Friday that just said, “NO” in a shaky, loopy, hand.

Yes, Henry had once watched smugly from his front window, watching the leaves fall across the block like he was looking into an autumn fishbowl with hopeless, single, floating specimens, destined to swim singly forever. He would sit on the couch with his Priscilla, one hand at her back, softly tugging at her ponytail, kissing her under the chin and holding hands and laughing about something on the television. He could feel the eyes of the heartbroken on him: lingering, loving, languorously watching their own long ago memories played out. Their own impossible future hopes shimmering on the other side of the glass.

Oh Henry, she’d sigh.

He had told her about a sonnet he’d written in her honor, a regular rhyming Shakespeare of a sonnet that he was sure would send her into paroxysms of joy. It’s funny, Henry would say later, it’s funny how the future and the past are colored rosy by our present loves. Every girl he had ever known before Priscilla drooped like a dead weed in the garden halls of his memory. And there would only be one girl for his future, one girl in white on his wedding day, one girl strolling his babies and cooking his dinners and looking up from his books and laughing at his jokes, one girl to lie awake with at night and ask questions about the cruel imbalance of the universe. It’s funny, he would say.

Henry discovered Priscilla’s new love through her friend’s friend’s cousin by accident, while shopping for groceries at the A&P. Oh! she said, clapping a hand over her mouth. Then the blushing and the eye-rolling and the stuttering. They’re just friends, really. Henry nodded imperceptibly. It’s wonderful, he would say later, to feel your heart melting in the hands of heartbreak. It had been stainless steel before, maybe even hollow iron. In the red hot hands of heartbreak it steamed and sizzled and dripped into a pool of bubbling silver. All the silly love songs and bad poems about this moment began to play in his mind like haunting elevator music, a trite record of heartbreak on infinite repeat.

Surely, he told himself through the tears as he scrambled morning eggs like she would sometimes (for his egg salad sandwiches), surely no one had ever felt this particularly bad about it. From his lemon-lime kitchen he could see the fishbowl window framing dead trees and a gray sky. The leaves had all gone to better places, leaving him only their stenciled silhouette in the rain. He was afraid for the coming days with their coming pains. The smell of her perfume, unlocking from blankets and furniture as he passed by. The large mirror by the front door with only him, an engagement picture with a missing half. Her long brown hair, clinging with reluctance to every place she had floated past. Music was thoroughly off-limits. The pop songs he didn’t know were heartbreak, and the ones he did know they’d probably danced or smooched or drove to. Days and weeks and months of dreams featuring her return: wide-eyed, begging, weeping, certainly sorry.

The only place of refuge was outside of their snow globe of romance: the front window with its passing faces and stories. Here now was that milkman, trim and proud in his milk-white uniform and dark suspenders, bowing and trotting like a toy robot with gifts. Milk here, and here, and here. Some houses nodded at him from the window, others remained dark. Here now was the paper boy, toothy and awkward, all knuckles and ankles, flipping a paper up and over his hedges and onto his porch. Miss Dearborn stood on her porch with her cats surrounding her, old and still with the wisdom of years. He had never noticed before the quiet strength of those older and younger and prettier and homelier than him.

Today he’d leave the snow globe and walk outside again. He’d breathe the smell of rain and walk between the sidewalk cracks. He’d walk and walk and walk.

I am a rock,

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goes the song. I am an island. There is a palm tree of a lamp in my hand and I’m bracing against the waves of sheets, bracing against the dark. It’s so quiet I can hear the lapping of the books, tumbled from my bookshelf like paper doves. Somewhere in this madness is my square glass phone, reflecting a cut of moonlight from between my ill-fitting drapes. When I close my eyes I see it startle to life with one, two, or three words: i am sorry, maybe, or i miss you but that’s too hopeful. i am sorry comes with bangs and i miss you comes with curls, big natural curls that bounce even when she isn’t moving.

* * * *

We kissed like they do in the movies, but it wasn’t gross. It meant something. On New Year’s, when she found out about her dad, we were in the backseat watching fireworks melt across the sky and I caught her crying. She closed her eyes but I took her by the shoulders and wiped her tears like the man she thought I was. Don’t cry, I said, because that is the best of three things you can say when a girl cries. Behind her I saw an elderly couple watching us and I figured they hadn’t wiped tears from each other’s face in a long time, and that maybe they’d remember to the next time just because of us. I don’t know, she said, and she looked at me with something to say.

What’s wrong?

This isn’t working, she said.

After a little while, the fireworks began to end, trails of smoke hustling after the dots of color in climax. I’ve always been good at goodbyes. I could always say the right thing, just like in the movies. Is this it, I said.

I think so.

I even held her hand, which I never do, and she closed her fingers tight, which she never does. Hillary Hillary Hillary, I thought, closing my eyes.

* * * *

There’s technicolor movies where the damsel pulls a very small gun out of her purse, a black purse with small veins running over it, and points it with a gloved hand at your heart. This has happened to me. I am laying on the island of my bed with a heart wound because it was a direct shot. The heart has 4 chambers and she pierced them all, that divine knot that surges without coming untied two and a half million times in the average lifetime, thump thump thump, it says modestly, beneath bone and flesh while we walk unaware.

A bullet to the heart wouldn’t leave a hole for sunlight to come through, like in The Quick and the Dead. It would fill right up with blood, as if you were being made right again, but it would keep filling up until your shirt was red too. There’s not a lot you can do with a bullet to the heart, so I try to lay back and breathe deep, but I’m panting sometimes and my head is light. I need a doctor, or even a nurse, and I’d like to reach out and push a button like I did when I broke my arm and spent a night in the hospital. But the only thing in reach is my lamp, tall and rough, the palm leaves bowing over me in mourning.

* * * *

At first we walked from our Spanish class, one foot in front of the other. I had to lead the way or she’d disappear into the crowd. You have math today, right? I’d say.

Yes.

I really hate math.

It’s pretty bad in the morning.

Why are we taking morning classes?

I don’t know. She laughed, I swear.

Because we work, that’s why. Important work. People need shoes, for instance.

I know, right?

She worked at the Famous Footwear in the mall. She practiced her Spanish there on anyone she could. That’s an unfair advantage, I said.

Maybe.

Look, do you want to get some dinner sometime? Like this week?

Sure.

Okay. I’ll call you.

She gives me her number. Everything’s easy. The sun is coming up over the buildings on campus. We’ll get dinner sometime, sure.

* * * *

Sometimes I fall asleep with a hand at my throat, or over my heart, clutching it unashamedly in the cover of midnight. I can feel the physical pain of it, the surging of new blood beneath my surfaces, working to make things right. I imagine a new heart in a cooler on a train from the East coast, unraveling through the Midwest like a shoestring. It’s packed in ice, fleshy and torn-looking and red and pink and tattered tan. My name is on it.

There’s no cure for heartbreak, the doctor told me. He really did say that. He sat below me on a genuine oak stool, and I sat on the high doctor bench, the one with the funny paper stretched over it. He could have been checking my reflexes with that blue triangle hammer, but we were looking at x-rays instead. You see here, he said, standing up. The folds in his slacks dropped and smoothed to penny loafers framed in marked off-white tile. You see here where the break occurred, he said meaningfully. These pieces will eventually mend, son, but I can’t give you anything for it. Where my celestial knot of flesh should have been there was a blast of powder, colored pink by special dyes. Well that’s not true, he said. He fished in a few drawers for a sample boxlet of pills guaranteed to make me “sleep again, and eat again too.” My mother stood solemnly in the corner, like I’d asked her to if she insisted on coming. Her eyes were closed and she looked asleep.

* * * *

We first met in Spanish class. She had Egyptian eyeliner on or something, the kind that ends in a pinch at either end. When I walked in that first day I felt like we immediately looked at each other, but we didn’t. She was looking down at something, in all reality, her mind lost in conjugations. I was late and the professor was reeling in the telling of a story about Peru and temples and stones that lifted and locked into place like Indiana Jones. I was old enough that I went to the back and sat next to her. When I was younger I would have moved at her a row at a time, each class ebbing nearer until I could smell her hair and ask her to dinner without looking like I needed her so much. I began to whisper in a very offhanded way, like, what did I miss? And she said, not much. This story?

Is it a good one?

What?

Is it a good story?

She nodded and lifted her eyebrows towards our professor because I was being too loud, I think. I notice everything. When I was little I would look out the window at the big boys riding their bikes in our cul-de-sac, around and around, watching the spokes in the wheel turn in the sunlight, watching the shadows turn with them in the grass, watching them watch me. When I was even littler I got a bloody nose from tumbling into the legs of the trampoline. I stood at my back door and cried because I didn’t want to touch the doorknob with blood on my hands. I cried until an older girl opened it for me. Hillary was nodding sweetly at the professor, and even laughing, because this story was apparently very funny. He was all hands, waving and circling and shooting something. He was very funny, apparently. He’s funny huh? I said. She nodded.

* * * *

I’m still on the island but I’m wading out now because it’s morning again and I can’t stay in bed forever. Today I will stretch and shower and pull my toothbrush over my tired teeth. I will rub my eyes into perfect vision, and I’ll tease my hair until it’s tousled just right. A tide of books rushes over my feet: My Antonia and The Brothers Karamazov and Broom of the System. The smaller ones fill the gaps: Of Mice and Men, Mrs. Dalloway, The Art of War. I put my hand over my heart and feel a very distant, burning twinge. But it’s threads and threads deep now, soon to be forgotten. I step out from underneath the palm tree. I’m looking for someone very special, I always say. Someone as special as me.