“It has always seemed to me that the two most influential things which can occur in the life of a boy just on the cusp of puberty are to have his father die or to have his father live. In either event, it forces the young man to choose the path of his identity or lack thereof in the inevitable downriver progress of his life.” If this quotation sounds to you like the words of Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, I’ll accept that compliment and move happily along, for to sound like Twain is a consummation devoutly to be wished by any American writer.
We writers are all about voice and giving voices to our narrators and characters. But, in whose voice do they speak? Is it ours or their own?…
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Gabe was standing beneath a light, misty drizzle, checking on his little bit of garden—the flowerpots on the second-floor balcony. Playing through his head was a snippet of Sibelius he’d been listening to, over and over, the day before while he was trying to get his grading done. But he didn’t know the whole piece by heart—far from it— so mostly the same bit was repeating, over and over.
The melody was in the horn section. There was something so lonely about a French horn. Composers almost always grouped their horns by four or eight. And yet they still sounded lonely. Like a group of lonely people who had gathered together… to be lonely together.
He kneeled down to see that one of the cups he had set out to catch rainwater had a cricket in it.…
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I sit in my room and watch the paint dry,
although it’s not wet. I wish it was
as that would be something to do
other than just sitting.
In the summer they wheel me outside
and I sit
smothered in sun tan lotion
in my straw hat and watch the grass grow.
My life has become slow,
each day sliding silently into the next
while I wait
for my last breath,
for the sun to go down
on this quiet solitude
where I am surrounded by kindness
and dying of boredom.
I used to be so busy
but now I must be content
with the grass and the paint.
As if old people did not need something to do
in their last years,
someone to talk to as their world shrinks
down to a room,
to a bed
and finally to a box
where there is nothing to do
but sleep.…
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The woman did not cry when her husband told her he was leaving.
No. She was a woman with a hard mother––a good mother––one who taught her to never become a wretch. A hard mother who taught her that men had hearts, but they were different from women’s; they were colder, and better for shaping, like biscuit dough. She showed the woman, then a girl, how to hold the dough, how to warm it enough to bend but not enough to stick, and then she showed the girl the wretches, the abandoned women, the ghoulish, vacant wanderers. She showed her them as a warning to never join them.
Her husband told her at the table, stone-faced and flinty-eyed. The one she’d bought after they first married, stumbling around a furniture store drunk on love and hope.…
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I wish you had warned me,
When we were young,
Or some other time,
While we sat on the terrace,
Drinking wine,
Or, perhaps, the time
We walked for hours,
Miserably lost,
Or that evening
We slept on the sand,
And could smell the sea
And could feel its pulse,
Or the time we sat
In a waiting room,
As quiet as air,
Reading ragged magazines,
Wishing we were
Somewhere else,
Or any time,
In the time we had left,
In simple words,
In a voice as loud
As a coyote’s howl,
Or soft like whispers
Of conspiring thieves;
In shuddering stammer
Or wrenching rasp,
In scattered sobs,
Or syllables spat,
In a long moan
Like dying breath,
The only thing
I needed to know:
That someday
I would be all alone,
And walk the house
In a sad trance,
And find myself
At the foot of the stairs,
Gaze up at the top
As if it were a universe,
And need to summon
All my strength
To climb those cruel,
Inhuman steps.…
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I am an identical twin. Our mother would sometimes dress my twin—let’s call her Arlene—and me in identical outfits (although she’d sometimes vary the colors). Once, we dressed in our white crepe Bat Mitzvah dresses, trimmed with silver threads in the bustline, which we didn’t quite fill out. (Looking at the photos now, I knew which one was me because I distinctly remember wearing tan pantyhose.) Then there were our rust-colored double-knit polyester pant suits that we decided to wear on April 1 when we switched classes. Teachers, of course, could not tell the difference.
The following year my sister and I were forced into Mrs. Friedman’s home cc classes and to the sewing machine. Over the course of the year, my sister became the better seamstress.…
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The pigeons arrive in the spring. She watches him try to shoo them away—first with the clapping of hands, with the stomping of feet on the wooden deck, then finally with a garden hose. “Stop,” she tells him finally. “Leave them alone.”
She’s grown to like their incessant cooing, their low murmur a lullaby.
The birds roost on the wooden beam just under the roof, side by side, staring into the Spanish fir across the street, like two people sitting side by side at a bar in front of a baseball game.
*
Flying rats, he calls them. Or, rats with wings.
How does a bird get a reputation like that? she wonders. As a pest—when pigeons are really quite beautiful, with the blues and purples feathering their necks, their curious faces, their bobbing heads.…
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