Issue 24 & 25 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

KATHERINE SWIGGART
Chateau Bungalows
Living here is as grand and hard as it is
easy; enter the code that opens these gates
and know suburbia abolishes suburbia.
However tall or wild those other trees were
they are dwarfed by these shrubs
trimmed to the point of animism. Bengal tigers
paw what is left of the lawn to pieces; petit fours
and other French things
are there at the touch of a bell. Nothing is left
of the old, less layered life
unless you count the way—and I do—
days crash into days, reckless and indifferent
as the shopping carts at the end of The Stepford Wives.
Only when the list of what is not allowed
is whittled down to a single word
will you untangle your eyes from the nets
and buoys your ceiling is afloat with
(though there is no water,
the idea of fishing is encouraged), beat your fists
against a sign you know you once saw
and shout, where are The Skinners: Butch and Irene?

18/ Eagan
Faith galloped back to the table holding her cake between
two red potholders. At the sight of their father she
stopped. "Mom," she said.
"Good Lord," their mother said, dropping into a chair
and gathering their father to her, so his head lolled against
her shoulder. "Let's get you to bed." He nodded, rising slowly
from his chair.
When their parents had left the room, the three of them
stared at one another, unsure how to react. Barry's grin still
hung tentatively on his face. But Faith looked afraid and
Phoebe felt it, too. like ice water down her spine. The cake
plate still hung in Faith's hands, forgotten.
The next day was Sunday. Monday their father would go
to the doctor. There was a false heartiness in the air, too
much loud, bright laughter.
After church they went to Baker Beach. Normally the
waves were bloated and sodden, pulling away from the gritty
sand with a sound like deep-frying. But today the sea was
flat, silvery as a lake.
Their mother leaned against a log, one arm around their
father. Faith and Barry rolled up their pants to wade and
Phoebe ran behind them, shrieking when the icy water
touched her feet. Barry wanted their father to walk with him
to the far end of the beach, where giant mussels and purple
starfish clung to the rocks.
"Don't think so, Bear," their father said. "Not today."
Barry looked crestfallen, and their mother offered to go. They
set off, padding over the thick sand.
"Want me to sit for you?" Faith asked.
"I'm beat," their father said. "You draw me for a change."
"Okay," Faith said with energy. She sat, the big pad covering
her legs. She held the stick of charcoal between two
fingers and looked at their father. They both laughed shyly.
"It's hard," Faith said.
"Damn right it's hard," he said, closing his eyes and resting
his head against the log. "Just draw what you see."
Phoebe leaned against her sister. Together they took in
their father's pale, spent face. Faith made a few lines, charcoal
trembling in her fingers. The longer their father's eyes
Excerpt from The Invisible Circus / 19
stayed shut, the more nervous they became. They had to
keep him awake.
Faith stood up. The pad dropped to the sand, and their
father's eyes snapped open. "I'm going swimming," she said,
slightly breathless.
Phoebe looked up, surprised. This was not a swimming
beach.
"In your clothes?" their father said.
"I wore a swimsuit." She pulled off her sweater, hurrying,
whipping off her stretchy pants to reveal a blue onepiece
with a white ruffle along the bottom. The wind made
her shiver.
Their father sat up. "I'll be damned," he said. "If you'd
told me, I would've worn mine."
"But you're tired," Faith said.
"Not that tired."
Phoebe felt relief. Faith moved nervously on the sand.
"Will you watch me?" she asked.
"Sure I'll watch. Just don't go too far out."
"But watch." Faith was always asking to be watched, having
reached that age when nothing seems quite real without
an audience.
Faith walked toward the sea. "She's nuts," their father
said, and laughed. "Your sister is one hundred percent crazy."
They watched Faith slowly enter the water. She was
twelve, fragile in her adolescence: small breasts that astonished
Phoebe whenever she caught sight of them, the slightest
indentation at her waist. Phoebe saw from how slowly
her sister walked that the water frightened her. So what,
she thought anxiously. Get in.
Her father leaned against the log and gathered Phoebe
into his lap. The top of her skull fit perfectly under his jaw.
Together they watched Faith wade deeper into the water. "It
must be cold as hell," he remarked.
Faith turned to look back at them. "Are you watching?"
"We're watching," he yelled. "We're wondering when you're
going to dunk your head."
The instant he said it, Faith dove underwater and began
to swim. With careful strokes she moved parallel to shore,
first the crawl, then the breaststroke. She turned around

20 / Eagan
and came back the other way, doing the backstroke and sidestroke.
Now and then she paused, calling out to make sure
they were watching. Phoebe fattened their father's yell with
her own—she was happy. Faith was keeping him awake.
"You must be freezing to death," he shouted.
"I'm not," Faith cried through chattering teeth. "I'm warm
as a desert."
But gradually Phoebe felt her father's head grow heavy
above her own. Faith did the butterfly. "You see that?" she
called. But the wind had risen, her voice was faint. Their
father's eyes must have fallen shut.
"Daddy?"
Phoebe raised her arm, but apparently her sister couldn't
see it. "Dad?" Faith called again. When there was no reply,
she resumed swimming, faster now and away from shore.
Go on, Phoebe thought, Faster! She felt unable to move, as
if she could act only through Faith, as if her sister's movements
included her. Go, go, she thought, watching Faith's
shape grow smaller. Good! He would have to wake up now.
The next time Faith stopped, she looked tiny. If she called
out, Phoebe couldn't hear. Faith lingered there, looking back
toward shore as if waiting. Phoebe felt ready to explode with
the urge to run to the water, shout that their father was
sleeping again and Faith had to do something. But he rested
so solidly against her, pulling long, deep breaths, and Phoebe
felt paralyzed—not frozen so much as absent, without a body
of her own. Go, she thought, Keep going. And as if hearing
her, Faith began swimming again. It became hard to see her
sister through the cold glitter of sunlight on the ocean.
Phoebe thought she stopped once more, but couldn't be sure.
It worked. To Phoebe's vast relief, their father stirred
behind her. He rubbed his eyes, shook his head and looked
out to sea. He looked up and down the beach. "Where's
Faith?" he said.
"Swimming."
He leapt to his feet, holding Phoebe under her arms. He
set her down on the sand.
"Jesus Christ," he said. "Where is she?"
It hadn't occurred to Phoebe that Faith herself might be
in danger. Now a sick, guilty feeling swelled in her stomach
Excerpt from The Invisible Circus /21
as her father bolted to the water's edge. She followed slowly.
"Faith!" he bellowed at the top of his lungs. "Faith!" His
voice cut the wind, and the force of yelling so loudly made
him start to cough. "Faith," he cried over and over again.
Then he stood, one hand shielding his eyes, and stared at
the water. "I think I see her," he said. "I think she's out there."
He turned to Phoebe, who waited timidly at his side. Her
father's pants were soaked to the thighs. He took Phoebe's
arm and walloped her behind so quickly and efficiently that
she hardly knew what was happening until it was over. "How
could you let her get so far out?" he shouted helplessly. "Why
didn't you wake me up?"
Phoebe began to sob. She had no idea why.
Their father resumed calling out to Faith. He hollered
until he had almost no voice left, then he coughed and
coughed, unable to stop, until, to Phoebe's horror, he doubled
over and vomited into the water. Afterward he wiped his
mouth and began shouting to Faith again.
She was swimming back. Phoebe saw her sister's tiny
arms plowing the sea. Their father's face was gray; he looked
on the verge of collapse. He stood back from the water,
breathing hard. Phoebe clung to his leg, and absently he
cupped a palm over her head. "She's coming back," he said.
"You see her?"
Finally her sister emerged from the water, frail and exhausted,
nearly gasping for breath. From the look on their
father's face. Faith must have known she was in trouble.
"You said you'd watch," she said, without confidence.
Their father slapped her across the face, his palm making
a loud, wet noise against her cheek. Faith looked stunned,
then tears filled her eyes. "That didn't hurt," she said.
He hit her again, harder this time. Phoebe, standing to
one side, began to whimper.
Faith was shaking, her thin limbs covered with gooseflesh.
With each breath her ribs stood out like a pair of hands
holding her at the waist. "Didn't hurt," she whispered.
He hit her again, so hard this time that Faith bent over.
For a moment she didn't move. Phoebe began to howl.
Then he lifted Faith into his arms. She clung to him,
sobbing. Their father was crying, too, which frightened

22 /Eagan
Phoebe—she'd never seen him cry before. "How could you
scare me like that?" he sobbed. "You know you've got my
heart—you know it." He sounded as if he wanted it back.
Phoebe put her arms around whatever parts of them she
could reach, her father's wet pants, Faith's slippery calves.
A long time seemed to pass while they stood like that.
Finally their father lowered Faith onto the sand. She
looked up at him, her teeth chattering violently. "Daddy, are
you going to die?" she said.
There was a pause. "Of course not," he said. "There's
nothing wrong with me."
"You're not scared?"
"No, I'm not scared. Why, are you scared?"
Faith took a moment to answer. Phoebe thought of her
father coughing, vomiting into the waves. She wished she
hadn't seen it.
"No," Faith said slowly, "I'm not scared."
He was dead within the year.
LESZEK SZARUGA
Informing on a Couple Unknown Guys
Between God and truth
there lies philosophy—I was told
by somebody who
read Kant and Husserl:
he's come out of that
intact but now his eyelids
don't completely close. The second
who can't tolerate
contemporary poetry and reads
only morning papers, incessantly
washes his hands and
grinds his teeth
in his sleep: he
says nothing anymore, but
you can see clenched fists
underneath his eyelids. Et
cetera.
—Translated by W.D. Snodgrass

MAUREEN SEATON
A Single Subatomic Event
In memorianv Barry Siebelt (1945-1994)
There is no way you can use the word reality
without quotation marks around it—Joseph Campbell
Imagine two concentric cylinders with a liquid like glycerine
in the snug space between them. Drop a small circle
of ink into the glycerine and rotate the apparatus slowly.
See how the ink is drawn into a thin black line,
how it fades, invisible as the energy it takes to ponder reality.
/ like reality, it tastes of bread. The path exists only when we observe it.
We expect so much from the dead; or we expect so much less
than the dead can give. One theory of reality implies
a folding of atoms, humans, tea cozies inside a seamless universe,
objects we can't see, hear, etc. right at our collective noses.
Who can measure the distance between us and the dead? How many arias
in an oratorio? What is crucial, according to the theory of relativity,
is that a sharp distinction between space and time can not be maintained.
When told to "get real," I instinctively turned my head to right and left
so my eyes and ears could catch something invisible, inaudible:
a hum so close I could hug it, and beneath the hum
that cache where the universe stores its music. Einstein
could be heard laughing over the flaws of relativity. Something
A Single Subatomic Event 125
travel faster than the speed of light, can you believe it?
particles, once in contact, separated even to the ends of the universe,
jynng instantaneously when a change occurs in one. There are more
arias than you can count, right, Barry? Let me tell you,
when I rotated those cylinders in reverse I held my breath. Not
^t I expected disappointment, but when that fine black line reappeared,
teasing me like the lonesome tail of a memory, I understood
about the speed of light, how you defied it and spun away,
and all the cities between us stood tall at your departure, every cow
and turtle. Now we see you. Now we will see you again.

26 / Seaton
When I Wore a Garter Belt
I was alive before the invention
of pantyhose. It was the Golden Age
of Belts—garter, sanitary. Fashion
depended on holding things up, assuaged
cravings you could wear beneath your schoolgirl skirt
and slip, those silky knees, that sudden rage
of nylon hissing down your leg, what hurt
the most: your new Taupes fresh from the drug store,
your fingernail barely brushing, that squirt
of pinkie through Hones, that grief. I was fourteen,
awkward. Notice how my poor nipples
deepened in the nightlight dark. Way before
white lace, way before camisoles. The Belt
slipped with gravity until noonish when
it lodged tightly and cut a groove of welts
around my hips like a skewed and outsized crown
of thorns, studded choke collar gone South. Here's
algebra, I thought, my stockings leaden
with sag at the ankles, crispy skin, where
are the numbers to save me, formula
to ease my body into sweet fifteen? Bare
above the knee, garters etching fabulous
asymmetrical circles front and back.
Coarse wool uniform, polyester blouse,
oxfords of substance and sin-ugly. Black
eyeliner circling my eyes like a blur
of wolves. Sexy as the word attack.
CHERYL DERBY
Ripening
Summer's close as an unborn child
My dress made of earth, moist at the waist, tight to my chest
Somewhere there is a roof where rain taps its stone note
but I am full of the soaked sweet clover unstoppered,
the cloud traveling the distant moon
Moments are ripening; tomatoes; dark forms of cornstalks shake their limbs
loose, husks shudder
I pull my rain collar close as voices carry off, as hushes deepen, as marigold
seeps out junebug, firefly

JOHN HAY
Listen to the Wind
Excerpt from A Beginner's Faith in Things Unseen
Iwas surrounded by cultivation, order, and control as I
was growing up, and when, in later years, I was confronted
by chaotic circumstances, I was grateful for such training.
Original, native space, on the other hand, was never cultivated.
I learned to count on everything that came from it,
unannounced. I remember a wonderful spring day in the
city when a warm golden light suddenly flooding our street
inspired us to open all the doors and windows to the great
air. That dark city, with its way of swallowing people whole,
had not been able to separate us from the light.
In New Hampshire, the north country, although I had
relatively little education in the particulars of nature, I was
always conscious of the dark green hills rolling on toward
some unseen grandeur in the west.
The waters of the lake were always gently lapping on the
rocky shore. The brook that supplied the water for our house
ran out of its source on Sunset Hill and down to the lake
through the trees. At intervals, the sky would turn a deep
slate gray, and a thunderstorm would crash in all around
us. Lightning occasionally cracked a tree, and once hit the
corner of the house. The lake waters scudded and raced
ahead under the concentrated passion of the storm. Bird
song, a magic of the elect, lifted out of the trees. Some fifty
yards up from the lakeshore was a spring of pure, could
water lying under leaf litter, which I periodically cleared away
to drink what my father said was the best water in the state.
I had such accomplices in the electric process of growth,
emerging out of dark grounds I was barely conscious of. They
led me toward a beginner's "faith in things unseen." Universal
life is what we are given, before we start to dissect it.
1 followed the facts as they were fed to me, but was also
a friend of the intangible. "Is it real?" asks the child, seeing
Listen to the Wind / 29
the mounted specimen of a bird. It might be alive, but it
does not move. That area between the animate and the inanimate
is not easily dismissed by children even with adult
suggestions not to touch it, not to swim in it, not to explore
it without supervision.
Since everything is unfinished, the young accept the intangible
as having a life of its own. The sun climbed the
steps of the sky in and out of sight. The trees, whose names
I had hardly begun to know, were clearly full of undiscovered
secrets, and the birds appeared in springtime out of
nowhere, or everywhere. "All nonsense," said the adults when
I blurted out some fanciful notion which did not square with
their reality. On the surface, I began to give up dreaming,
but dreams are subterranean, not controlled.
The world I moved into out of my youth could hardly be
described as "practical" and it was far from secure. All the
realists were out fighting fires of unreal proportions which
they had created. Impermanence led us, and all our vain
imaginings. And no fish or flower was given credit for having
any experience of its own. The countryside was no longer
the safe haven it once had been, and now, where money is
valued above life itself, society cannot discriminate between
what is useful to it and what is not. Still, we have no other
recourse but to follow the wind that leaves us behind but
goes on its everlasting business of reconciling and begetting,
carrying the signs of an enduring architecture around
the globe.
On the sandy peninsula of Cape Cod, as well as the rocky
shores of Maine, where we have lived for many years, the
wind comes in from all directions, to blow out over the Atlantic.
Storm systems, especially between late fall and spring,
are the products of vast influence, stretching from the Gulf
of Mexico to Labrador, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The
winds join storm tides in carving away the cliffs and headlands
of the Cape, and they are constantly reshaping its
beaches. In terms of geologic time, this is a fast and relentless
process. In another ten thousand years or so, this sandy
and vulnerable land will be reduced to some outlying sandy
shoals.

30 / Hay
This is an ephemeral land, and our occupation of it seems
more impermanent every year. The local evidence of a rooted
life has largely disappeared. The native speech is seldom
heard; the farms and truck gardens are long gone; the old
barns converted into housing, or antique stores. Because of
a disastrous decline in fish populations, the native fishermen
are seldom seen. New developments have been scattered
over once "worthless woodlots," and houses are dropped
down on bulldozed land as if they had been preassembled in
the sky. The old sandy, rutted roads have been paved over.
The "rural seaside atmosphere" much loved by the Chamber
of Commerce can hardly be appealed to any more. All this
means that we are now part of mainland America, a nation
of itinerants.
Hundreds of thousands of visitors crowd in to shop and
lie on the beaches during the summer months. Even the
winter traffic has increased with quicker access to town, and
a much greater population of the retired. People on wheels
are perpetually elevated above the land, speeding everywhere
and nowhere, reflecting the restless and distracted character
of the world at large. Notwithstanding this abstracted
relationship with the land, the tides keep moving in and
drawing back in their complex regularity, and the ocean
keeps releasing and withholding its passion. This is where
we are placed, in spite of ourselves.
In mid-April, three weeks after the vernal equinox, when
the seabirds are moving off to their nesting grounds, the
clouds on a cool and windy day seem to take the shapes and
forms of the tidal world below them. In one part of the sky,
smoky clouds spread like a great fan, and in another there
are widening patterns of skeletal fish, or fronds of seaweed.
A long, wavy line of brant geese flies over the water, forward
into the wind. This is a small, compact, handsome bird, once
numerous and much prized for its meat. It is now relatively
scarce, having suffered a serious decline during the 1930s
when a blight nearly wiped out the eel grass the brant depend
on for food.
During the months of autumn, the brant are late migrants,
flying south from their nesting grounds in the Arctic
circle. They winter along the shores of the Carolinas, and on
Listen to the Wind/31
Cape Cod, where their numbers vary from year to year. Flocks
of brant heading down from Hudson Bay to New York are
sometimes forced into a more easterly heading by strong,
seasonal winds from the northwest and land along the
marshes of the inner arm of the Cape. I look forward on any
year to seeing these distinguished visitors as they move from
one part of the shore to another. Their call is a very distinctive,
high-reaching "r-r-r-r- ook" or "cr-r-r- up." One day,
when I was walking far out over the sandy flats at low tide, a
group of them flew overhead close enough so that I could
see their breasts through my field glasses, and I sensed the
clean weight of their bodies as they raced through the air,
and the fast pulsing of their hearts.
The tidal areas, stretching off at low tide for miles along
the horizon, comprise a vast range of seed time and harvest
engendered by the shallow seas. I go to them for their wealth,
in the midst of a semi-impoverished land, and for visions of
new lands and continents far beyond them. When the tide
recedes, the flats are like a great plaza., a floor of ripples,
ribs, and chains, and show as well the tracks of birds, leading
in, over, and away. You can follow the evidence of innumerable
holes or burrows, made by various kinds of worms,
shrimp, and countless other tidal organisms that range in
size from a great sea clam off at the farthest reach of the
tide to a tiny purple-hued Gemma clam. This shore life is
full of complex associations in a harsh and demanding environment
that is changing every day from one form of exposure
to another. These plants and creatures live and thrive
on the fine edge of flooding and drying out. Each marine
community has its own manner of dealing with a world of
transformation, a world which never erases their distinctive
forms and devices for survival.
The seaweed, more common on the rocky ranges of the
coast, are born of and supported by the dynamic motion of
the waves. Their slick, leathery skins, their fronds and
plumes, and the air bladders that give them buoyancy belong
to the oscillation of a wave. They are dragged back by
its turbulence from their rocky foothold, carried under the
water, and as the waters move forward again, they bob up
like corks. The forms of seaweed were built of millions of

32 / Hay
years of turbulence and forbearance.
These closing and opening communities along the shore
do not behave automatically in the face of all the pressures
that best them. Their lives are part of an interchange, on a
cosmic scale, of moving energies. We may be deluded into
thinking that we are on the outside looking in, taking full
advantage of our sight and mind, masters of all we enumerate,
but all lands and landscapes are creations of what we
are unable to conquer on our own.
Sometimes, during late fall and winter into early spring,
you can smell a storm coming in on the wind, and sense its
pressure in your lungs. Down by the sandy shores, the sand
grains are driven into your face, and the wind may almost
topple you. Inland, the leafless oaks lean away from the invasion
of the salt sea and the air, rocking and swaying. The
heavily laden pitch pines are visibly straining from their
roots. During strong gusts they look as if they were being
forcibly plucked out of the ground. Branches crack, trees
fall and, in some areas, litter the landscape. The wind's roar
dies down, the seas subside, and the transient land is reduced
once more.
The winds that influence birds on their migration, often
taking them off course, are also one of their consistent
guides, as are the position of the sun over the horizon, the
landmarks below them, and an ancient, magnetic pull of
direction. The wind joins a reproductive dance across the
continent, carrying pollen, seeds, and insects, as well as dust
particles for great distances. As the form of seaweed is a
rhythmic counterpart of a wave, so land plants are responsive
in varying degrees to the wind and the atmosphere. A
bit of knowledge that passed me by for many years was that
grasses are pollinated by the wind, and that their characteristics
reflect it. They are slender, and the stigma of their
inconspicuous flowers are feathery so as to catch the pollen
grains, which are tiny, light, and dry, easily carried by the
air. The grass seeds are also light and small. Flowers designed
to attract insects are far more elaborate.
The wind is not specific, but sends the seed ahead indiscriminately,
and where it lands it can be tumbled, or washed
around, as well as blown, across the varying contours and
Listen to the Wind/33
surfaces of the land. Over the grasslands of the west, the
seed is also transported by animals. The hooves of the bison
as well as their thick, woolly coats carried seeds, and so did
the antelope, prairie dog, coyote, rabbits, and the innumerable
mice and voles.
Grass seeds that survive their travels remain dormant
for varying lengths of time, while forest seeds germinate
quickly, given the right conditions. During periodic years
when species of oak drop their acorns like hailstones on the
ground, assuring the gray squirrel and the ruffed grouse a
good food supply, each acorn wastes no time in thrusting its
white root into the soil, so as to give the great structure of
an oak tree a sure beginning in its tenure on the land. Where
the trees are all cut down for man's temporary convenience,
we lose a tenure in our minds.
Adherence, in an age which casts so many time-honored
worlds adrift, is to join the wind as it travels over the light of
the waves, and it is to see the wind in the seed, to know the
dedication of the birds on their planetary missions. We can
find neither home nor direction without participation.
In the fall, as a child in New Hampshire, I had a feeling
of "going away," which was not so much a sadness at the
end of summer, and at having to go back to school, but an
inner mood that corresponded with the sailing of the year.
The fire in the trees made me long to go on voyages. There
were leaf spinners all around us in the hazy, blue air. They
were coming down on an invisible decision of the trees to let
them go. They were not dying. They were part of a magical
process that denied finality, joining a future regeneration of
the ground. Out in the wind and the golden sunlight, they
rocked and eddied down, at times skidding like a bird, then
slowly skated in, to be with earth, fire, water, and air.
To listen to the wind, to join the drifting dance of the
autumn leaves, is to take part in the unity of space. If the
whole world as we use it is ungovernable, then look to the
greater government of the ocean-sea that covers three-quarters
of the planet. If we can only think of ourselves as a
unique species set apart from all others, then we deny the
greater community of the sun, which attends all rituals.

34 / Hay
The Grass Dance of the Plains Indians originated among
the Omaha. Central to the ceremony, which included a feast
of dog meat, was a great drum, made out of a cottonwood
tree, and associated with thunder. The drum was used by
the Omaha preparatory to going to war. The transition to
the contemporary form of the dance, as it has been diffused
and changed, is hard to trace. The songs and social features
of the Grass Dance as they have been adopted might very
well reflect a spiritual need to come out in the open again
after dark and terrible times, to join the lasting color and
motion of an open world.
The Lakota word for the dance is wacipi peji. Wacipi
means dance, or celebration, and peji means grass. Grass is
a symbol of generosity, a word that seems to have a deeper
meaning than the idea of abundance.
In the area where the dance is to take place, a circle of
grass is beaten down and flattened, symbolizing the four
corners of the world. The life of plants is celebrated in the
dance. The Plains tribes use sweet grass, and they make
braids out of red grass, which is that same Little Bluestem
that grows on my sandy acres. They may also wear long ribbons,
reaching down their backs.
"A good grass dancer," I am told, "is so much a part, and
moves in the same natural way as the grass itself when winds
blow gently through the fields. A grass dancer has a way of
moving so that it makes you want to watch him. He is beautiful
and he is free."
The dance comes to the people through an ancient, tribal
heritage of attention to the earth, and through listening. The
plants have spoken to the people through their dreams and
visions, and they listen to the wind as the voice of creation.
Out in the country of the Great Plains where the wind passes
over the dances of the grass elders listened intently to the
wind, and though many of them are gone, some remain.
These listeners are not common, but if they listen in the
right way, they will be spoken to and guided in the right
direction. Behind the visible world, the wind carries the word
to an attentive listener, out of earth's creation. "And all your
Listen to the Wind/35
relatives are behind you every step of the way. Your relatives
and the Great Spirit."
Our modern, owned world is going deaf from listening to
its own answers. Listening to the wind is an exercise in the
location and inner sense of a continent we have been leaving
behind us in our haste.

Adventures Aplenty Lay Before You / 37
JANE MILLER Adventures Aplenty Lay Before You
Though Not Admonished of Your
Intentions in Words
Soft thumps In the earth as you approach
you need comfort and food now your body
saved for the time being
trenches are dug under the wooden walls of the fort
that one may pass in and out
fiery arrows dart from the cliff across the river
men familiarly torch roofs
no sooner do you beat the fires with wet skins
the fire rains down again
the cattle drink the rain
children's hair beaded with tears
a whippoorwill calls
a fish hawk lodges in the top branch of a dead pine
the dead live in the wild
hitherto I was prevented from observing
structures burn to the ground
these were events of a time
I went without you and came back without you
by and by the tempest spent itself
I allow that I'm not myself today
I slip my arm through yours
though no one ought to open up that country
first the settlements and claims
then the same land sold over and over
it's at this point in our history
we cannot go ahead if we value life
that turns into tribute
no longer visit my love
You would like to move right
into the heart of the wilderness
because you have a hunter's eye.
"Oh, there will be fighting all right,"
you said, I remember you pushed
your foot through one of the burning logs.
I wait all morning and not
because I think you'll show.
You're fickle, and I'm not available,
I have another life. Suddenly your clothes
render you skin and bones.
You're a ghost when we embrace, so it's torture.
I cannot know what an innocent I am,
letting you get to the new world
first, for truth to tell
the life's gone out of it,
thicket razed to the coast, motels, by God, bus fumes.
But you're desperate; time is
of the essence now that it's exactly
a year—every day, in fact, seems exactly a year
to some of us, but never mind—
dead a year and still scrutinizing my motives?
Though you've barely given us a thought
it cracks the skull around your heart,
a gourd as full of seeds as a forest
dear father, of bear and deer.

Ambition inquired,
are you the martyred
ocean or infrequent rain?
Of course it was ugly.
Of course my savior
was weathered by rain.
What remains of the crucifix
is a grinning spoon.
DONALD REVELL
Missal
Very soon now, the tethered unreason of John Calvin
will roam at large in beautiful cities and kill men.
Undressed in a hotel
in Holland the naked vowels
in black and black pallor
copulate like seaways.
Undressed in the art school
in Amsterdam and inwardly
the martyr howls.
She is teeming, inwardly.
An unlikely Puritan likewise howls for her.
The night ends
not in words
but in direction:
dawn, empty rooms,
empty inundation.
Psalter
Pain and prayer do not agree. In daylight and disguised
as themselves, earth and sky repeat intolerable abuses.
In each of us, oceans of unexamined pleasures rise.
At dawn my nature
alarmed my loving.
Like a broken necklace,
like a remarkable bird
tethered amid predators,
my nature came to pieces
in the colors of the sky.
Psalter/ 39
Separate jewels refreshed the earth. Separated wings
refreshed the air. My Lord regained the ocean of his
darkness and was far from me. On such a morning, worldly
sounds of protest and uniformity go forth insensibly.

RUSSELL BANKS
Red Rover
Excerpt from Rule of the Bone
By the time I got to the clinic I'd gone all trembly and
loose in the limbs. Even my jaw hung down and my
mouth was open like I'd been shocked by the sight of something
awful, a way bad accident or a bloody crime and I
suppose I was. My hands were wet and my knees felt
watery and I was afraid I was going to flip out if anybody
looked at me the wrong way like with suspicion or even a
hint of disrespect. And I was dangerous, wicked dangerous
because after the deal back at the house with Ken I
was aware now that I was carrying chrome, I was a dude
with a loaded niner in his backpack who could start blasting
if he wanted to and who could blast an actual person
and not just some rich guy's view of the mountains. For
the first time I understood how these pissed-off ex-employees
or some divorced guy who didn't get child custody
can walk into a post office or a Pizza Hut full of people
and pull out his heater and start firing and not give a •
shit who gets hit. I didn't want to do anything like that of
course but I felt like if one little thing went wrong in the
next hour or two I wouldn't be able to stop myself, that's
how far gone I was on account of my stepfather and the
collapsed situation at our house and family and the fact
that ol' Willie was dead and no one seemed to give a shit
and I was trying to come home again but no one seemed
to quite get that either, not even me.
The clinic is a low brick building at the edge of town
near the ballfield where there was a Little League game going
and some parents sitting in the bleachers watching like
it was the World Series so nobody noticed me when I walked
by. I almost felt invisible or like I was watching a movie with
Red Rover/41
me in it even when somebody passed me on the sidewalk or
drove past on the street. Everything was weirdly normal except
for the storm coming up and the trees swirling around
in the wind.
The waiting room at the clinic was empty of customers
and silent like a morgue, spooky. I walked up to the receptionist,
this blond mound of renown around town named
Cherie who I knew by her reputation from guys but also
slightly from before when she used to come around the house
with my mom after work sometimes for a beer, and I said. Is
my mom here?
She slowly looked up from the People magazine she was
reading and said, Huh?
My mom. Is she here? I wanna talk with her, man.
Who's your mom? she asked evidently not recognizing
me on account of my hair grown back and no more mohawk
or nose rings and earrings which in the past'd kept people
from actually looking at me and seeing my face for what it
was which was the whole point of course. But now I was
into accepting I-self as I-Man would say and as a result I
didn't give a flying fuck what people thought when they
looked at me.
I said my mom's name and suddenly everything registered
in Cherie's mind, meaning who I was and that I wasn't
missing and presumed dead anymore which raised up a
whole lot of new questions in her small mind that I did not
particularly want to answer so I said, She's still in bookkeeping,
ain't she?
Oh yeah, sure. But listen. Chappie honey, where have
you been?
Call her in bookkeeping, willya, and tell her that I'm out
here in the lobby and I want to talk to her about something
important, I said and I turned around and walked across
the room to a far corner behind this big plant where I set my
pack on the floor and took a seat and crossed my legs and
folded my arms. I studied the No Smoking sign and waited.
A minute or two later here came my mom looking all
frazzled and scared like thanks to Cherie she expected to
see me covered with blood or something. I love my mom, I
really do, despite everything. And I especially loved her then

42 / Banks
when she came running out from the bookkeeping office and
rushed past Cherie at the receptionist's desk and by the time
she got to me she had her arms opened wide like a real mom
so when I stood up I kind of walked right into her and disappeared
inside. That's what it felt like anyhow. Then she was
like crying and saying things like, Oh Chappie, Chappie,
where have you been? Let me see you, let me look at you!
I've been so worried and all, honey, I thought you were deadl
She told me she'd been sure I'd been burned up in that
fire but Ken had kept saying no and then when my friend
Russell showed up again she'd started to hope maybe Ken
was right. And now here you arel she said brightly and stood
back and held me by my arms and smiled and I smiled and
then she hugged me again and so on back and forth like
that until we'd pretty much covered the reunion scene and
were ready to get on to more serious stuff.
She wanted to know where I'd been all these months
and who I'd been staying with naturally and I lied a little bit
so she wouldn't think I'd been hiding out in Keene and the
Plattsburgh just down the road practically and could've come
home easy anytime I wanted. Instead I said I'd been across
the lake over in Vermont almost to New Hampshire living on
a commune with these old hippies who ran an organic school.
I didn't know what that was but I could tell the words organic
and school eased my mom's mind somewhat although
she's a long ways from being a hippie. She's just not scared
of them is all and believes anything organic is good, just too
expensive and of course school is the magic word. So it was
like I was hanging out with rich people.
She hugged me some more and commented on how
healthy and tanned I looked and I told her how I'd been doing
a lot of gardening for the hippies and lately with the
garden in and all I'd had a little free time and I'd started to
miss her a lot so I'd come over from Vermont for a visit maybe,
in case she wanted me to visit or stay a while or whatever.
I was being careful because I wasn't sure if she'd want
me back again after everything I'd put her through this year
and once she knew I was okay she might get mad like before
and slam the door on me again, although to tell the truth it
was never really her who slammed the door last summer
Red Rover/ 43
when I left home, it was Ken and in a sense it was me myself.
My mom just kind of went along with the boys which
sad to say is how she's always dealt with her problems. Until
now that is, with this new AA program she was into and
which seemed to've gotten her to move out on Ken and all
even if it was only to move in with Grandma. Still, this was
a promising set of developments, I thought.
I told her I'd already gone by the house and had seen
Ken and knew about Willie getting whacked. Yes, she said,
she was sorry about that, it was sad and all, he was a good
cat. But it was an accident, you know, just one of those
things that happen in life. She said Willie changed after I
left and didn't come home much anymore so she wasn't all
that surprised when she found him pancaked on the road a
few houses down one morning when she went out to work.
I didn't want to hear about it. Yeah, well, lots of things've
changed, I guess. Ken's pretty messed up, it looks like. And
the place is too, I said. You oughta see it. You'd be disgusted.
By the way, Ken explained to me what happened, I told her.
About you guys separating, I mean, and you staying at
Grandma's.
He did, did he? Did he say separating?
I don't know. I guess I just thought it. But he's really
one messed-up dude, you know? I mean, the guy's kind of
sick, don't you think? He's like a pervert. You know what
I'm saying?
I was trying to figure out how to tell her for the first time
about Ken, about what he'd done to me when I was a little
kid. I wanted her to know about the ugliness that still connected
me and him and how I hated it and was dying to get
it out of my life but couldn't as long as I had to deal with
him as the price for being with her and keeping everything a
secret. It meant that I couldn't actually be with her, I couldn't
be with my own mom in a clean way until her husband, my
stepfather was out of her life once and for all and there
weren't any more secrets, none and it didn't matter about
the drinking and the AA and all his promises to get straight
because it was the secret of the past that he carried with
him, my secret past, it was the ruined part of my life that he
brought into the room with him like Dracula's cape over his

44 / Banks Red Rover / 45
shoulders and a werewolf s mask over his eyes so that whenever
I saw him I was scared and felt ugly and dirty and weak.
With Ken anywhere in the neighborhood I felt the exact opposite
of how I felt when I saw my mom alone with just me
and her for instance like now or when I was with I-Man or
Rose or even ol* Russ. With them I was the Bone whether
they knew it or not but with my stepfather I was still little
Chappie lying in the dark alone. Except when I had the gun.
It's the drinking that makes him sick, Chappie, she said.
It's the alcohol. He's allergic to alcohol, that's why he acts
the way he does . You have to understand that.
Bullshit, I said.
Oh come on, Chappie, please, let's not get into this. Let's
just leave Ken out of this, okay? It's our reunion, okay? Don't
spoil things, honey. And I wish you wouldn't swear.
Yeah, well, are you gonna get a divorce from him? Are
you? 'Cause you oughta. I mean it. There's things about Ken
that even you don't know. Stuff I heard. Stuff I know.
I don't need to hear whatever you heard.
Yeah well you oughta kick him out of your house right
away anyhow so we can move back in and clean it up. He's
completely fucked it up, sorry about swearing. But it's your
house, ain't it? Didn't my real father give it to you? Ken, he's
just the stepfather, you know. He doesn't have any right to
live in that house unless you say so. Besides you should see
what a mess he's made of the house, it's really gross and
disgusting.
Chappie, please. I want you to keep out of my business.
Ken and I are trying to work things out, and we will, if you'll
just stay out of it.
Me? I said and my voice went all twinky and high like a
bicycle bell. Me? You think I'm the problem? Ha! That's a
laugh.
She looked over my head like she was enjoying the breeze.
It's Ken who's the problem, not me, I said but it was
useless I knew.
That's just not true, Chappie! she yelled. She was mad
now and here it all came again, the same story as before.
She said, As a matter of fact, young man, over the last year
or so you have been very much a problem, wouldn't you say.
and otherwise I think maybe Ken and I would've gotten along
better. I certainly wouldn't have been so upset all year and
he might not've turned to alcohol to deal with his problems
and frustrations so much. Really, who knows how many
things would've been different if you hadn't gotten into drugs
and stealing and all? If you'd've stayed in school for instance
and had some decent friends and all, who knows how things
would've been different? Only now you're fine and you're
back, and that's wonderful, Chappie. I know we'll be able to
work things out now, sweetie, all three of us.
No. Fucking. Way.
What do you mean? Don't you want to work things out?
Not if it's the three of us, I told her. I mean, I want to be
with you, I said. With you I can work things out. But not
him. Not if he's there.
Where?
Wherever you are.
Well, excuse me, mister, but you can't make that decision.
It's mine to make, if Ken and I are going to stay together.
Mine and Ken's, not yours. We're still trying to work
things out and I'm at Grandma's only temporary. Until Ken
decides to deal with his drinking problem, that's all. And
you certainly can't live at Grandma's with me, there's barely
room for me there. So if you want to live at home with me,
and you're welcome to, I want you to know that, then you'll
just have to let me and Ken work things out first. Which we
will, and when we do you'll have to like it, too. And be nice
to him for a change. Many things will have to change,
Chappie, for the three of us to go back to living together like
we used to, back before you started getting into trouble. And
you, mister, are the one who has to do the most changing,
she said. You and Ken too, Ken will have to make a few
changes too, she said like she'd made a big compromise.
Then she stood back from me and crossed her arms over her
chest which always meant that she'd made up her mind,
she'd staked out her territory and there'd be no more arguing
with her now. Only defiance, only open in-your-face fuckyou-mom
defiance.
Nothing's changed! I said. And it never will! Nothing! I
guess I was shouting because she stepped back like she was

46 / Banks
scared of me. You're just trying to set up the same old thing
as before! I think I was crying by then. Look, Mom, please
please please! Just try, please? Just try and see it my way. I
was practically begging her but I knew she wouldn't even try
to see it my way and probably couldn't anyhow, not without
knowing my secret and there was no way I could tell it to
her now. It was too late. So I kept on hollering and I made
all these stupid demands instead, not because I thought or
even hoped she'd meet the demands but because I was pissed
at everything that was going down and frustrated because it
was too late to change anything and also because I didn't
know how else to express myself.
You know what. Mom? You wanna know what? I'll tell
you what. You should choose! Yeah, you should choose between
me and Ken! I said. That's right, choose which one of
us you want. 'Cause you can't have both. That's the one
thing I can guarantee. So c'mon, Mom, choose one or the
other. Ken or me. Let's get serious.
Stop this! she said. Stop it right now!
Who d'ya want standing there beside you, Mom? Is it
gonna be your stupid sicko drunk of a pervert of a husband,
or the homeless boy who's your own flesh-and-blood son?
Red Rover, Red Rover, who're you calling over, Mom? Is it
me or is it Ken?
I was remembering how when I was a little kid in the
schoolyard we used to play Red Rover and the teachers
thought it was cute and all but it was scary, two lines of
kids holding hands facing each other across a distance and
the one in the middle says, Red Rover, Red Rover, let Chappie
come over, and I'd get all excited like I'd been chosen for
something special. I'd let go of the hand of the kid on either
side of me and I'd step out there in like no-man's-land between
the two lines all alone and exposed and everyone looking
at me and I'd wind up and start running straight at the
line opposite as fast as I could. I'd slam against the linked
hands of the kids who I only remember as being bigger than
me because although I didn't realize it then you only call
come over to the littlest kids, the ones who are too small
and weak to bust through the line. Otherwise if you break
through you get to go safely back to your own line and now
Red Rover / 47
it's your team's turn to call for the littlest kid to come over
and try to bust through and when he fails he gets captured.
Back and forth you go until finally there's only one kid left
on the other side facing a huge long line of everyone else
opposite him, and the last kid realizes that he can't call anyone
over anymore because he's all by himself. It was usually
the biggest strongest kid in the schoolyard like a fifth or
sixth grader who ended up standing there all alone and it
was interesting because he was the loser. Anyhow I was never
him. Instead I was always called over early in the game and
got captured and even though I said like Oh no and all, I
was secretly glad to be captured. I never wanted to be the
big tough kid who ended up on the other side all by myself
and unable to say Red Rover, Red Rover, let even the littlest
kid in the schoolyard, let Chappie come over.
You—you're—you're just a terrible son! she sputtered
and she started to cry but more from being mad than sad.
Yeah, well, that should make it easy for you to choose, I
said. So who's it gonna be. Mom? The terrific husband or
the terrible son?
She wrung her hands and I knew I was totally screwing
up our relationship forever probably but I couldn't stop
myself. Her face was dark red and had more lines in it than
I'd ever seen before like she was aging right before my eyes
and I truly wished that I didn't have to force her to make
this choice. But I felt like I myself didn't have any choice
and it was her husband, the man she had chosen to marry
after my real father left, who had taken it away from me and
had made it so that neither me nor my mom had any freedom
to choose, and the one who had taken it away from us,
Ken, he wasn't even here.
She said in a low voice, almost a whisper, Then go,
Chappie. Go away.
I'll always remember that moment. I've played it back in
my mind a hundred times at least since then. But not much
of what came afterwards. I think I said okay. I was calm and
picked up my backpack and I remember thinking about the
niner inside and I remember noticing with relief that I hadn't
the slightest interest now in becoming a mass murderer.
I'm gonna go by and see Grandma first, I said. Just to

48 / Banks
tell her like goodbye. I didn't do it before, I said. Then I guess
I'll go back to Vermont, to the organic school.
Whatever, she said. She looked definitely downcast, like
her only son had died only of course he hadn't, he was standing
right there in front of her saying goodbye. But I think
she kind of wanted me dead, that she actually had all along
preferred me missing and presumed dead to being where
and what I was now. In a sense by cutting out I was only
giving her what she really wanted but didn't dare ask for.
What a good boy am I, thought I. See ya 'round. Mom, I
said and left her sitting there in the chair behind the big
green plant in the lobby of the clinic looking dreamy and
sad and when I got to the door and turned she looked relieved
too.
GEOFFREY WOLFF
Notes from a Handcart,
Heading Downhill (and Up)
N ostalgia ain't what it used to be. Makes you long for
the bygone: Remember Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City,
leaning his elbows on the boardwalk, gazing at the sea, recalling
that way-back time when the Atlantic was really an
ocean? I recognize the feeling, can recollect when the Good
Old Days were really days, twenty-five hours apiece, nothing
but sunshine cooled by brisk nor'westers.
I read somewhere recently...Wait a minute, I must have
seen it on TV. Anyway, my mind's eye sees a chap with a
British accent informing me that archaeologists have made
a systematic study of conventional ancient wisdoms decorating
such public monuments as bathhouse walls and the
dedication plaques of Sumerian shopping centers; investigators
have discovered that the most numerous, timeworn
and common sentiment cut into stone from the beginning of
the Chisel Age is this: THE YOUNG TODAY ARE A DISGRACE. This
dictum has axiomatic corollaries: WHEN I WAS A BOY WE GAVE
GRAMPS A FIRM HANDSHAKE AND LOOKED HIM STRAIGHT IN THE EYE
WHEN WE OFFERED HIM OUR SEAT. Or: WHEN I WAS A GIRL WE
LISTENED TO GOOD MUSIC AND NEVER MADE OUT ON THE FIRST
DATE.
Well: the music wasn't better and the Gramps hasn't been
born who approved of a youngster's handshake and plenty
of moms made out plenty on plenty of first dates. But you
know this. By surviving a certain number of years anyone
becomes expert on the Good Old Days before everything went
to hell in a handcart, downhill all the way. Because I have
both a white beard and children, not to mention thirty years
in college classrooms, I claim authority on The Kids Then
vs. The Kids Today. Let me begin with today.
A couple of days before Christmas I got a phone call.

50 / Wolff
"Hi! Professor?"
"This is Geoffrey Wolff."
"Hey! Thanks for being home when I called. This is
Debbie!"
"I'm sorry, Debbie, you're going to have to give me a little
more."
"Debbie, from your class!"
"I've taught many years, Debbie. There have been some
Debbies. Work with me a little."
A tad sour now, sore to feel not quite the unique
personhood that is every New Age American's due, the young
woman walked the rounds in on her ID. I recalled her. I had
taught her during a visiting lectureship of five weeks. She
had seemed an alert and personable student, friendly, with
slapdash energy and good will; of course on such brief acquaintance
I couldn't pretend to know her or her writing
well. She had graduated from the college last year, and was
now working for her father, and if any circumstance is better
designed to provoke a person to consider graduate school,
I can't imagine what it would be. She wasn't certain, she
said the day before Christmas Eve, what kind of graduate
school would suit her—law or business school, maybe
"American lit or American civ, and I'm thinking of psych."
What she did know was that she wanted a "rec" from me,
and she wanted it in a few days, by the first of the year. I
have been made accustomed recently to such requests and
might even have briefly considered this one had my calculations
not been interrupted:
"I wasn't going to ask you, but my mom said, 'hey, he
wrote a book, maybe he can help.' Hey Professor can I put
you on hold for a sec thanks?"
It was more than a sec. I hung around because this was
a new thing for me, and I thought I'd heard it all. Nobody
has ever heard it all. When Deb came back to me, it was to
explain that she had to go away again. And to tell me: "If we
get cut off, just jingle me back." And she gave me her number.
And would you believe it, we were cut off! That was
goodbye (I must have lost the piece of paper her number
was written on, or maybe—my God, anything's possible—I
forgot to write it down.)
Notes from a Handcart, Heading Downhill (and Up) 151
What I've been trying to puzzle out since then: did this
phone call express a new subterranean level of loutishness
or merely a baneful new technology, the wretched call-waiting?
It's tempting to report that when I was a student we
respected our teachers, expressed that deference with impeccable
etiquette and exquisite consideration. To believe
this I would have to forget my first encounter with the lanky
young freshman, a masterpiece of bad manners, who later
became my college roommate. The occasion was the introductory
class of a seminar in Greek literature taught by a
young scrubbed and bow-tied lecturer manifestly ardent to
bring us the good news about Aeschylus. He had been teaching
us avidly for almost half an hour when a tall, sweaty and
grass-stained young chevalier opened the classroom door
so violently that its knob whacked the blackboard. The boy,
without speaking, took a place in the front row and—weary
from the exertions of the touch-football game he had been
playing noisily outside the classroom window—stretched out
his legs, clasped his hands behind his head, sighed, shut
his eyes. It was at this moment that Professor Robert Goheen,
staring out the window, shared with us the information that
he had just learned that he was the new president of our
university. If the president of Princeton believed this would
interest or even awaken the latecomer to his class, he was
mistaken.
But I learn from Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise that
student impudence was invented even earlier than my freshman
year. Connolly tells of an Eton classmate caught reading
a book in class:
"'What is that book, de Clavering?'
'Les Chansons de Bilitis, sir.'
'And what is this lesson?'
'You have the advantage, sir.'
'What do you mean, boy?'
'Ah, sir, fair's fair. I told you what my book was. You
must tell me what's your lesson.'
'Elementary geometry.'
'But it sounds fascinating! Then this delicious piece of
celluloid nonsense is—I know, sir, don't tell me—a setsquare?'

52 / Wolff
'I have been teaching it for twenty years, and never met
with such impertinence.'
Twenty years, and still at Elementary! Oh, sir, what a
confession.'"
Such an exchange, alas, is unthinkable today. De
Clavering would have the schoolmaster up on charges for
harassing behavior. An empowered adult may not abuse a
student still in the developmental process with a self-esteem-diminishing
charge of "impertinence." This could hurt
the boy's feelings. Reproaches these days are torts, actionable.
Such an exchange, double alas, is unthinkable today because
wit in a classroom is almost unimaginable. Wit in a
classroom is understood to violate expectations of gravity
and cool, to bristle with hazards. In practice, wit has become
anathema in academies regulated increasingly by contracts
and statutes, by fine-print admonitions and bold-faced
proscriptions. Wit is potentially aggressive and—worse—
ambiguous.
My own beef is not with the hedging consequences of
political correctness. At the risk of seeming inattentive, or
self-congratulating, I have very seldom been assaulted in
my classrooms by those rubber-hosing Red Guards ever vigilant
to spy out violations of right-think. So rare have been
dramatic flare-ups of reproach from my students against
one another or against me that I have sometimes felt neglected,
wondered if I am missing the parade. I have been
scolded in a literature seminar by a woman pointing out
that only forty percent of the assigned stories are by women,
and that one of them (Flannery O'Connor) seems unfriendly
to women and that in her essays another (Euroda Welty)
uses "he" as the indefinite pronoun to describe "the reader"
and "the writer." I weathered this assault. I have not been
suspended, fined, disciplined, petitioned against or picketed.
I mean to say that my students have shown to a marked
degree a sense of rough justice, even of tolerance. I try to
work in accordance with the Golden Rule and I am treated
in turn with approximate civility (they try to chew gum and
eat crumby cookies and slurp soda pop In my classrooms;
they slouch in their chairs; they sometimes yawn frankly in
Notes from a Handcart. Heading Downhill (and Up) 153
my face; I have had to awaken students in afternoon classes,
and one sleeper sustained an injury, not actionable, thanks
be, falling from her chair.) All that sleeping and yawning
might describe a problem of pedagogy I would be the last to
recognize were it not for the frequent evaluations students
write, their chance in the anonymity of the voting booth to
settle that old bore's hash. In different years enough students
have found reasons to deplore either my wisdom or
my methods to chasten my smugness. Putting aside the occasional
malcontent, sourpuss and dumbbell, I have found
their judgments to be scrupulous and just; what they don't
like about my teaching is what I don't like about my teaching.
So why has teaching these days become a minefield of
unhappy consequences, more like a business meeting between
hostile competitors than like a good-willed game or
debate in which it's bracing to exercise intelligence and learning?
In a literature class an African-American student wondered
stormlly, in reference to Flannery O'Connor's "A Good
Man is Hard to Find," why no white child in her work is ever
referred to as a "pickaninny." This was a question with an
answer in etymology as well as logic, but in deference to the
climate I knew better than to attempt to answer it. In an
earlier time I might have assumed the question to have its
origins not in grievance but in wit.
It is pernicious to generalize. Let me be pernicious. Of
the ruling characteristics of Kids Today, the most universal
is hostility toward unresolved complexity. My students despise
enigma and uncertainty. When I began teaching, my
arrangements with students about their academic performance
were mostly implicit: at the first class I distributed a
syllabus detailing the dates by which books were to be read
and papers to be written, but otherwise I could be confident
that we understood one another: read carefully, write legibly,
come to class, don't cheat. As the years have passed,
and unhappy misunderstandings have multiplied, such a
simple aide-memoire has evolved (more accurately devolved)
into a four-page document titled "Expectations." In accordance
with institutional mandate and student preference this
spells it all out: if attendance is mandatory, what exactly is

54 / Wolff
the penalty for cutting? If in one year I have learned that I
must add the defining phrase "on-time" to my requirement
of attendance, the following year I find I must put in writing
that I require them to remain in class till it ends.
You might think that grade-grubbing is the provocation
for the fine-print of this loophole-closing. In fact, with a few
predictable and comic exceptions (over-the-top lamentations
bewailing injustice, as often from parents as from students),
the people I teach stand up with good grace to the caprice of
grades in a subject so resistant to precise calibration as a
piece of writing. (Grade inflation is another matter, and no
fault of students; look ye with dismay instead on Adults
Today for their sorry and relentless resolve to be all-loved,
or at least well-evaluated, by their children and customers.)
My beef with my students comes down to this: too little
laughter, too little engagement, too little learning, too little
imagination, too little joy, too much caution.
The sobriety of these young men and women bewilders
me. My sons, in their mid-twenties, esteem in their friends
the comic sense of life almost as greatly as they esteem the
virtues of honesty and courage. They play; they giggle; they
tease. They don't seem to regard themselves as exceptional
in their values and tastes. My students in class are all business,
grim and set-jawed, wary. I could write this off as an
uninvited response to my seriousness about our common
enterprise were it not for the odd way their solemnity ramifies
out among themselves. When I walk into a seminar room
a few minutes before class begins, and find in that room a
dozen or so young scholars sitting in silence, staring at their
fingertips, without a thought or even a joke they wish to
share before Teach arrives, something's missing, something's
screwed up.
But what? Television, for one thing. It's embarrassingly
reflexive to blame on the cathode-ray tube and electroluminescence
principle all the ills that confound and affright us:
violence, trash talk, whining, bad tailoring, Toyota ads. Fact
is, from my experience in the classroom I have to conclude
that television has swallowed the culture whole. Beginning
a discussion in a literature course of John Cheever's brilliant
sensitivity to light, I am immediately told by an eager
Notes from a Handcart. Heading Downhill (and Up) / 55
student, her eyes alight with recognition, that "Cheever was
on Seinfeld a couple of weeks ago." I explain that Cheever is
dead. Sure, I'm told, but what happened on the show was
sort of about that aspect of him, the dead part. We listen to
a detailed explanation of a character on the sitcom inheriting
a putatively valuable signed Cheever letter addressed to
the character's late kinsman, and reading it aloud for the
first time only to discover that it is a graphic love letter to
the reader's father (or uncle; I wasn't there.) This is jolly
enough fun, but we have now wandered an almost unbridgeable
distance from the language of evocation, from benign
concentration of that moment in "Goodbye, My Brother," after
supper on the terrace at Laud's Head when "the clouds
held that kind of light that looks like blood," from the moment
when "The Swimmer" weeps to see Andromeda, Cepheus
and Cassiopeia out of season.
It isn't that my students don't know their constellations.
They don't know them, but who does? Who did? We're way
down the road from the time—if it ever existed—when T. S.
Eliot could protest with a straight face that "The Wasteland"
contains in it no allusion that should not be common knowledge
to a well-educated high school student. I mean that my
students are so soaked in television that their short stories
are unapologetic rehashes of plot points of The Twilight Zone
or L. A. Law, and that even Melville's Bartleby immediately
"reminds" them of a character on Saturday Night Live, "reminds"
them because they saw the skit before they read the
story.
Despite their interest in virtual reality, for most of my
students all time passes in their real time. Their chronologies,
their comprehensions, refuse to bend to their vestigial
imaginations. If they haven't encountered a situation in life
or on television—and because I have finally banned allusions
to television as explications of texts, we are stuck with
their life experiences—the situation has no meaning, no use,
no interest. They don't like to put themselves in a fictional
character's shoes; they like to put the character in their
shoes. (The denser among them insist on putting themselves
in their shoes. The relentless and tragic suffering of the Correspondent
in Stephen Crane's "Open Boat" reminds one

56 / Wolff
student of a time when he got blisters rowing his dad's dinghy
into the wind, back to his dad's yacht; another complains
that the story bores her because "I'm not really into
boats.")
Despite the ascendancy of television over written language,
most of my fiction students write with greater proficiency
than they did ten or twenty years ago, and because
many display an impressive competence in the jargon of
workshop criticism (this narrator seems unreliable, that point
of view seems scattered, these tenses are inconsistent), I am
cast down by how little even the most ambitious among them
have read, how little they seem to want to read.
They want, many of my students, to be Writers. And why
not? The picture-pages of People make a seductive promotional
pitch for the allures of my calling. Travel, no boss,
flexible hours, money and then some to repay the student
loans on that $25,000 p.a. tuition bill, the chance to go on
television.
When I was a boy...Ah, when /was a boy, when boys
were boys (yakkity-yak), I read to break free of what hedged
me. Like many children I was lonely; I felt put-upon and I
was certain only that I could not know what would happen
to me next. To read, as I tell my students and myself, was to
have the keys to the cell-lock. Anyone can remember the
experience of first reading, that exhilaration, that building
wave of comprehension sweeping all before it. For me there
has never been anything like that liberation from the prison
of the self. But I grew up, I did my escaping, in real time too.
By the accident of having been born in 1937 rather than,
say, 1972, I didn't set eyes on a television screen until I was
eleven, and my family didn't own a set until I was sixteen. I
wonder now, given my loneliness then, my father's love of
gadgets, my longing to transport myself to a place other than
the place I was...I wonder if I would have found the Hardy
Boys; Lad, A Dog; Huck; Dexter Green; Nick Adams; Quentin
Compson? Maybe, grounded on the reef of my circumstances,
I would have learned that Gilligan could provide a quicker
tow off than the king who divided his realm. Whatever, The
Kids Today are a sweeter bunch that The Kids Recently.
Twenty years ago a young professor at Princeton, teaching
Notes from a Handcart, Heading Downhill land Up) 157
one classroom away from me, created an awful ruckus when
he physically attacked a young scholar for saying of Lear,
"what's the relevance to me, why should I care about some
imperialistic old fart?"
Of course I've scanted the many virtues of my students,
of my sons' generation. I have taught remarkable writers,
remarkable readers; the remarkable are always with us, and
always remarkable in the same way: passionate, hungry
and—above all—capable of patience, of the long view.
Of the others, of the unremarkable: if it's true that
Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" needs line-by-line footnoting
for egalitarian young men and women readers who can't begin
to fathom the delicate distinctions of class—expressed in
tailoring and speech and schooling—that drive that story, it
is also true that my students aren't snobs among themselves,
and hooray for that. If they sometimes show an unsettling
inclination to reveal contempt for those whose educations
stop at the end of high school, they all dress in more or less
the same tee-shirts in warm weather, sweatshirts in winter.
Every generation has its signature virtues, signature
vices. If too many of my students seem peevish and
unspecifically aggrieved, ducking before they're hit, with feelings
almost too tender for the words I care about, it is easy
to conclude that they are spoiled, soft. If too many of my
students labor over their resumes (with touching ingenuity
monkeying with the fonts and page layouts available to the
better laser printers) more lovingly than their ideas, my own
generation often didn't bother with resumes at all, and not
frequently with ideas. My generation was smug, cocksure
that everything good would and should befall us, that we
were the best generation of the best nation on earth, that
after us they'd break the mold, and they did. Again.

ART SPIEGELMAN
Scraps from a Cartoonist's dreambook
LITTLE LESTER is in trouble with his next-door neighbor
again. Grouchy old Dr. Mengele is doing a slow burn while
looking at the gooey peanut butter sandwich he has just
pulled out of his VCR. Lester grins mischievously and runs
off, shouting "HA. That's for what you did to the Jews!"
FEARLESS FORESKIN juts out his razor-sharp jaw and
jams it into Mrs. Pruneface. "Your jaw aches," she moans.
For safety's sake he dons a cheap plastic beard and
thrusts ahead confidently.
"SHORT CIRCUITS," the elliptical gag panel in a circle,
appears in over 1500 papers daily—more papers than have
ever mentioned places like Estonia, Latvia or Zaire.
Looking harried, Papa Short is trying to apply a scalding
hot steam iron to baby Dexter's squirming, bare, two-yearold
behind. Unconcerned, Fiona, the colored maid is
reading The Protocols of the Elders qfZion in Papa's
favorite easy chair as she's been doing for the last 70
episodes. (She's almost halfway through.) The other four
little Shorts are playing "Treblinka Guard" at the Nintendo
set, as long-suffering Mama Short enters the front door
and says:
"Shit, Harry. I'm pregnant again and you haven't even
branded the last one yet!"
JULIAN BARNES
1?
Hamlet in the Wild West
Afew years after the end of the American Civil War an
English theatrical troupe arrived at a small town in
Western Missouri. It was a dust-hung crossroads where most
people naturally had more than one occupation: the saloonkeeper
ran the stable the sheriff was also the gunsmith, while
the schoolteacher accepted paying guests, provided they were
clean and generous. All this would have made the English
actors feel at home. Being themselves few in number, they
were constantly obliged to double up their parts: no sooner
had a villain been joyfully executed than he had to reappear
as the priest and solemnly bury himself. Whether they were
playing comedy, melodrama or tragedy, the actors found
themselves changing costumes and accents as often as if
they were in a French farce.
On the night of my story, the English troupe was due to
play Hamlet. This always caused an extra strain, since on
the Atlantic crossing their jeune premiere, their Ophelia, had
been courted by the ship's captain, who told her such terrifying
stories of the American mid-West that she immediately
accepted his proposal of marriage. The captain exercised his
traditional maritime right to conduct a wedding ceremony,
and so on this occasion he too doubled up, as civilian authority
and bridegroom. The other members of the troupe
stood around the state-room doubling up their emotions:
they all pretended, and some felt, true happiness for the
young actress, but also a griping irritation that Ophelia would
now have to be played by one of two fifty-year-old sisters.
However, the farther they got from New York, the less it
mattered, since few of their audience had seen Hamlet before,
and most had never been to the theater. Everything
therefore seemed both miraculously strange and absolutely
normal: Shakespeare's language, the extravagant costumes,
the non-existent scenery. So was the fact that the play lasted

60 / Barnes
little over an hour and had been reduced to half a dozen
episodes: the ghost of Hamlet's father, the murder of
Polonius, the madness of a middle-aged Ophelia, the plotting
of Claudius, the gravedigger scene, and the final duel.
The theater in that Missouri town was by day a drinking
saloon; many of the audience wore guns, and none of them
knew the plot of Hamlet. After three months on the road, the
English actors had become used to audiences who babbled
out their instant reactions, like a modern family around a
television set. They had also learned which scenes to emphasize,
which to slow down, which to eliminate. Even in
this simplified form—tragedy thinned to melodrama—the
story of the Danish prince still excited and enraged the audience,
made them tender and made them sad. The ghost of
Hamlet's father walking the imaginary battlements while
twirling his own skull on an index finger was always a great
success; the killing of Polonius behind a hastily-assembled
arras moved some to shout against the injustice, others to
laugh uncaringly. The refusal of Hamlet to kill Claudius while
the king knelt at prayer was approved by most, yet baffled
some. While the concluding sword-fight and massacre
brought a climax of foot-stamping encouragement and dismayed
protest.
It was a hot night in the saloon, and the audience was
both more rapt and more vocal than usual. The account of
Ophelia's death was heard in tranced silence, the plotting of
Claudius with even more active disapproval than usual. The
actor playing the king was becoming more self-indulgent as
each week passed, and now made an extravagant display of
poisoning the tip of Laertes' sword, playing up to the hisses
and hoots with great gestures of evil. The sword-fight—always
an extended and well-appreciated part of the play—
reached the moment when Hamlet was about to receive his
fatal injury. Laertes, his venomed sword aloft and one booted
leg on Hamlet's chest, was just about to slash the defenseless
prince, when a cowboy in the fourth row stood up and
shot Laertes dead. Whereupon the cowboy sitting next to
him also rose, loudly protested that his friend had plugged
the wrong villain, identified Claudius as the true malefactor,
and without any of Hamlet's hesitation dispatched the
Hamlet In the Wild West/61
king as he lolled cackling on his throne.
The sheriff, who was also the gunsmith, disarmed the
two cowboys, and the surgeon was called. Laertes' shirt was
cut open, and medical science was confounded: Ophelia's
brother was covered in blood, but no bullet-wound could be
found on his body. During the examination, Laertes opened
one eye and closed it swiftly—the reverse wink of a sleeping
man. Finally, the surgeon pried open a clenched and bloody
fist to discover an empty muslin bag stained scarlet. Whereupon
Laertes climbed to his feet like a revenant: if Hamlet's
father could work the trick, why not him, too? Claudius also
returned from the dead, although the flesh wound in his
upper arm required cauterizing and bandaging. In subsequent
performances the actor exploited this to the full, playing
the king as an old soldier still troubled by a war wound.
Justice being quick on the draw at that time, the trial of
five men took place the following day. The two cowboys were
charged with attempted murder and causing an affray; while
three actors—Claudius, Laertes and even Hamlet himself—
were charged with inciting an affray. The five men sat in the
dock, guarded by the sheriff, who was also the gunsmith.
Evidence was heard that the cowboys had been completely
sober the night before, had never previously seen a play,
and honestly believed themselves to be defending Hamlet's
life. Witnesses declared them to be of previously good character.
The other defendants, being actors, were presumed to
be of previously bad character.
The judge, who was also the surgeon, was a veteran of
the American Civil War. He had been at the battle of Franklin
and watched 20,000 Confederate soldiers advance across
open ground, flushing quail and rabbit from the brush in
front of them. Later, he had seen five dead generals in gray
laid end to end on the verandah of a plantation house; he
had seen amputated limbs stacked like asparagus. His mind
that day had swiveled between awe and despair.
He had been voted judge in this Missouri town because
he was known to be a wise man who did not consult his law
books very often. He knew that justice is often best achieved
by a leap of the imagination rather than by the dogged rivalry
of fact. He also understood the duality of human na-

62 / Barnes
ture. He knew that our friends may become our enemies
but that the logical consequence of this is that our enemies
may also become our friends, and that in this reversal lies
our only hope as a race.
His judgment, therefore, did not strictly accord with the
printed statute law of the territory of Missouri. He found the
two cowboys not guilty of attempting to murder Claudius
and Laertes after persuasively arguing to himself and to the
court that Claudius and Laertes, being figments of the imagination,
could not be murdered except by other figments of
the imagination. On the charge of causing an affray, he found
the cowboys guilty: they were sentenced to be run out of
town, and once out of town, to be brought back and rewarded
from municipal funds for their public-spirited behavior. Hamlet,
Claudius and Laertes were all found guilty of inciting an
affray: they were first to be rewarded from municipal funds
for their self-restraint in not fighting back when attacked,
and then punished by being run out of town in the direction
of their next engagement.
The judge, who was also the surgeon, did at least believe
in one legal maxim: that justice must not only be done, but
also seen to be done. He therefore had a third occupation,
as proprietor of the local newspaper, which the following day
came out with a special edition. The courtroom correspondent,
who was also the theatrical critic, recounted the events
of the previous twenty-four hours, offering special praise for
the skill of the surgeon and the wisdom of the judge. Before
they were run out of town to the sound of friendly gunshots,
the English troupe bought several copies of that two-page
gazette. Its paper now is fragile and tawny, like the skin of
an old actor. Hamlet was my great-great-grandfather, which
is how I am able to tell you this story today.
DAVID HERRSTROM
Cabot's Tune
What makes a man
abruptly rise from his bean soup
pat down the flap
of a slightly frayed jacket
onto his corduroys,
then disappear into the darkened house
and pass back through his kitchen
as if he were a guest,
holding against his body
a rented cello like a secret
a man, a minor bureaucrat,
who must commute and occupy a cubicle
every day
to keep the meager farm,
what drives him past his barn,
then past the pigsty
with its crowded city of fleshy buses
nudging each other in stench,
and purposefully across the pasture
cows raising their heads
slow as timber
with indifferent eyes
what compels the middle-aged man
lugging a lacquered cello
to climb a rail fence
into a scrub oak
and onto the small platform he's built
from scrounged
boards and weekends,

64 / Herrstrom
sit on a plain chair, fastidiously
as if a congregation waited,
place the cello between his legs,
and draw a long,
broad, hovering stroke
like a smoker inhaling
ecstatically the first drag
why one evening would a man
stride into the world of air
and carve out
a sound shaking above plowed ground
toward his house
brushing the heads of cattle who dream
some faint ancestral bellow,
a pure sustained note
that quakes the house until
wife and sons at soup
lift their heads
toward the solitary tree
that rises from a pasture's far corner
like a pillar of cloud?
RITA DOVE
Lullaby
(after Lorca's Cancion TontaJ
Mother, I want to rest in your lap again
as I did as a child.
Put your head here. How it floats,
heavy as your whole body was once.
No stiffer than I.
If I fall asleep, I will be stiff
when I awake.
But I want to lay down and do nothing
forever.
When I was angry with your father, I would take to my bed
like those fainting Victorian ladies.
I'm not angry at anyone.
Mostly I'm bored.
Boredom is useful for embroidery,
and a day of rest never hurt anyone.
Mother, I want the birthday supper of my childhood,
dripping with sauce.
Then you must lie down while I fix it!
Here, a pillow for your back.
Already? So soon!
I can't. The schoolbus is coming.
She'll be waiting at the corner.

BARBARA HELFGOTT HYETT
His Wife
And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife...
Her dreams are stones
on water, invisible, small.
She wakes to thunder,
the thorn of a husband's leg
upon her. Her body has been
his mountain and his plain.
She prays to the animals
in their untidy rooms.
In the forests of water
the animals are angels,
some standing, some married
to wind-soaked straw.
Din is its own soft pillow.
She has filled every bowl
to overflowing, as if rain
were a blessing, as if
the name she has forgotten
remembers her
Genesis: 7:7
CHARLES B. WHEELER
Received at the Old Windmill
Gelehrter Meister, I write from the Convention of Lab Assistants
here at the Caliban Inn and Conference Center, which you so graciously
gave me leave to attend. It is most rewarding, I tell you,
to know that one is not alone in this arduous service,
to meet and embrace one's fellows, recalling the simpler days
before our roles were set, before we first saw ourselves
in a nurse's or mother's eyes, or woke to the cramped future
designed for us to fit these bodies, and to realize that happiness,
believe me. Sir, was to be in seconding genius. On the convention floor
the grumbling rises in splendid crescendo as Igors from everywhere—
it is indeed remarkable how many small mountainous kingdoms
exist in Europe still—exchange almost-forgotten surnames,
boast of their exploits in the laboratory (leaving out, of course
the broken glass ware) and the experimentum cruets soon to be performed
that will climax a Master's lifelong search (I am pleased to report
that none of them seems to threaten yours). This morning's speaker
was Doctor Watson, very good in spite of his accent, tomorrow
we hear from Tonto and Sancho Panza, and then of course
there are section meetings and seminars, most of them still to come,
with titles like Brain Identification, Advanced Shuffling and Sidling,
High-Voltage Circuits, Straight Talk About Your Back,
How To Behave During Thunderstorms. At the week's end we conclude
with a general assembly and a special performance of Mozart's
great opera, Leporello. It is all, if I may venture to say,
intoxicating: many an otherwise dull and averted eye
sparkles after taking this draught—mine no less than the others.
I have not encountered the English lady who has been bothering you,
and no one else I have met here seems ever to have heard of her.
In my room now, looking over the valley in the rising evening mist
I see the full moon, queen of satellites, reflecting still

68 / Wheeler
the glory of her now invisible ruler, and I am content
to sit here and savor our kinship, while across her face
occasional shadows pass and my window curtains sail
out into the breeze, as if it were possible to reach and snare
the sources of all this excited squeaking in my head.
HAYLEY R. MITCHELL
if
What the Grimm Girl Looks Forward To
My birth will kill my seven brothers
turn them into ravens, into stones.
My parents will hate me, cut off my hands
for the devil behind the watershed.
Or the brothers will live and be valiant,
skillful, faithful, Iron men, and I,
the ugly one, sent to fetch water
in heavy pewter buckets full of holes.
There will be frogs everywhere.
I will be orphaned in a paper frock,
left to the forest of wizards and gnomes.
My stepmother will be evil, will hammer
me into barrels, imprison me in thorns.
If I am beautiful, they'll call me idle.
If I am smart enough to see the wind come
up the street, they'll say I'm proud. If I am
obstinate or inquisitive, they'll take me
for a block of wood and throw me in the fire.
I will waste my youth spinning straw to gold.
If my flax remains unknotted I will find
a husband, but I will be stupid, will fall
into wells. I will roll cheese down hills to catch
my fallen crackers. I will hang cow bells
around my neck to be sure I am heading home.

70 / Mitchell
I will become greedy. Tempted to bathe
myself in milk, I will sell my sons
for silver coins. I will wake up wrinkled,
an apple, an old and lonely crone.
And still, it will not be enough.
I will open that thirteenth door.
DAVID MARSHALL CHAN
Brilliant Disguise
M y father calls me in the night. Stumbling out of bed,
my sheets wrapped around me, I manage to grab the
phone in the middle of my answering machine message. I've
been dreaming for hours already, but my father doesn't know
this. He really doesn't know me at all.
—Your mother wants you to come eat dinner, he tells me.
I do this every three months or so and that's all I ever see of
them, even though I live only fifteen minutes away. I hear
my mother in the background reminding my father of the
time and date he should tell me. I figure she has him call me
so that the two of us get to talk more.
After writing the information down in my appointment
book, I head back to sleep, but the call has already ruined
any possibility of a peaceful night. Later in my dreams, I'm
being pile-driven, and double-teamed, and figure-four leglocked.
A sleeper hold is applied to my neck. I wake up pounding
my hand against the bed—one, two, three! Later in the
shower, the irony is not lost on me: I woke up after the sleeper
hold.
The rest of the day I'm feeling resentment towards my
father for giving me those dreams, and for not knowing better
and calling me so late. What he should have known is
that I go to bed early because at six each morning I rollerblade
along the bike paths in Griffith Park.
I skate to the office, too, and I'm glad for not having to
use my car because of my driving phobia, which, like the
bad dreams, I have my father to thank for. He did such a
bad job teaching me to drive—not telling me what to be careful
of until after I made the mistakes—that I think I've been
traumatized for life. But my office isn't too far from my house
in the Silverlake Hills, and part ownership of the business
means flexible hours whenever I choose.

72 / Chan
When I get in I find Imee, our receptionist and secretary,
down on her knees next to the fax machine, furiously smashing
bugs with an old telephone book. Lately, the bugs have
been everywhere in the office. They're only ladybugs, which
to me aren't so repulsive as cockroaches or locusts, or those
potato bugs that occasionally show up alongside the driveway
to our parking lot. Our accounting office is located in a
residential neighborhood, about four blocks from my old high
school, and except for the tax season we rarely see any walkin
customers so it was strange when homeless people started
wandering in, trying to sell us eggs full of bugs.
Some philanthropist had started a program where destitute
people could pick up the ladybugs for free—they came
packed about a hundred each inside silver egg-shaped containers,
which were then sold for a dollar a piece. The eggs
were sold to homeowners, who needed the bugs for their
gardens after years of Malathion sprayings had virtually
depleted the natural ladybug population that guards against
aphids and other garden pests.
When it rained, these homeless bug vendors wandered
the streets wearing shiny, metallic-looking smocks they had
been handed by the government, guarding their precious
eggs from the wetness beneath this makeshift silver rainwear.
Their shiny outfits dragged along the ground so that they
seemed to float as they drifted slowly down the wet streets,
looking like ghosts from some distant, unnamed future: an
era of silver clothes and silver eggs and constant rain.
None on us in the office ever bought any of the eggs, but
I remember clearly the one man—boisterous, smelling of liquor—who
dropped one of his in our reception area and released
the ladybugs inside our office. The bugs flew out from
the shattered egg like a red mist. They flew out and entered
the air like a cloud of toxic memory, and in that moment my
mind flew back to the year I'll always remember as the first
year of the sprayings, my last year of high school, and the
year my father lost a cage match.
I remember waking up one morning that year and opening
a window. I opened a window and I could smell that
something was not right. The night before, insect spraying
Brilliant Disguise / 73
had begun in a part of the city close to where we lived, the
section of Echo Park inhabited mostly by Mexican and Asian
immigrants and the working class. We lived in a section of
Los Angeles that had no name, but it was somewhere between
ethnic Echo Park and wealthy Silverlake, a prime real
estate area where my parents dreamed of moving but were
never able to. They saw other Asians living over there in
their perfect three-storey houses, new cars parked outside
and their kids off playing tennis or at cello lessons, and they
wanted that for themselves. I guess I did, too.
That year an infestation of fruit flies was threatening
the agriculture of the whole state, so proposals to spray even
urban areas like Los Angeles were mandated. LA residents
balked at the idea, of course, rallying to keep their homes
outside the spraying territory. During the initial spraying
everyone seemed to think it might be possible to get away
with spraying just those areas people didn't seem to care
about, even though the people in Echo Park weren't the ones
with the imported fruit trees growing in their backyards.
I became involved in the lobbying effort against the spraying
only because my friends in school were, the ones I envied
and never invited home to see where I lived. The chemical
being used was Malathion, a powerful insecticide that
people feared would, years later, be linked to unexplained
health problems like with the soldiers exposed to Agent Orange.
When I went to sleep the night before, I heard the helicopters
coming in the distance. I wasn't sure then whether
they were the copters carrying the spray, ones haunting my
dreams, or just regular ones like those that passed overhead
each night shining thick beams of light across the
streets below.
In the morning I was sure they were real, and that they
had indeed released the chemical. Days later I would hear
stories on the news about some homeless people falling ill
after direct exposure to the Malathion. Even that morning I
plainly saw its effects in our area with the stray dogs, once
threatening, now staggering lost and confused down the
street, and I felt it in the air that it hurt to breathe in.
When my father went out in the morning to start up his

74 / Chan
car, he smelled it too. He was a large, quiet man who rarely
shared anything with his family—with myself, my mother,
or my two younger brothers. I knew he smelled the scent of
the spray only because of what I heard: the sound of his
cursing, a mix of English and Chinese, before the slam of
the door, the start of the engine, and the sound of acceleration
as he drove off to work.
My father didn't have a traditional job in the Asian American
sense—he wasn't an accountant, or an anesthesiologist,
or a lawyer. He wasn't a scientist, or a judge, or a brain
surgeon. He was, in fact, a wrestler, although this too, like
other parts of his life, was rarely spoken about to me. 1 had
grown up not really knowing or caring what he did for a
living until I got into middle school, when I began to realize
how different he was from other fathers, the lawyers and
doctors from Los Feliz and Silverlake whose kids I now took
classes with.
Then I started watching the television matches on Saturday
afternoons, when I was alone in the house and no one
knew what I was watching. My father wouldn't have approved
of me seeing him at work; he never, ever talked about his
matches—what he did, or how he prepared. All that I knew I
found out from the television screen.
If his wrestling career was supposed to be a secret, it
wasn't a very well-kept one. He never brought back to the
house any of the wrestling stuff I saw on the television screen:
not the numchuk weapon he used illegally to beat Sergeant
Power, or the kendo stick he employed to hit Mamoo the
Magnificent and win the Intercontinental title, or any of the
uniforms he wore in the ring. I looked all over the house,
but I couldn't find any trace of the white oriental powder he
sneakily threw in the face of Rowdy Rodney Piper, or the
exotic, blinding green mist he blew out like a dragon from
his mouth at a crucial point in one match to blind Hector
Santana and pin him. I never found him out this way, but
seeing him in action was easy.
Most of the matches took place on a Friday night. The
fans were wild: shouting, spitting, giving their favorite villains
the finger and jumping frantically up and down at the
Brilliant Disguise 175
prospect of blood spilling in the ring. These were the type of
people, I thought, who invented Monster truck racing, who
believed shit was pronounced as a two-syllable word.
After being taped, these matches were broadcast on television
Saturday afternoons on a UHF station. We had an old
set, and to get the UHF channels you had to spin a knob
below the normal 2—13 channel switcher. The knob was a
faded yellow, with the numbers printed in an arc. The wrestling
program was found somewhere between channels 50
and 55, you could never tell for sure, and at one-thirty every
Saturday they showed wrestling straight from the Olympic
Auditorium.
My father could be seen almost every week in some match
during the two-hour program, which was interrupted at intervals
by cheaply filmed commercials for used cars, loan
sharks, greatest hits albums, and vocational colleges. Right
there on the screen I could see him doing what he never
talked about at home.
He wasn't very good at keeping secrets: I also knew that
he spent the weekend gambling at the race track, at Santa
Anita or Del Mar, which is why—with my mother and younger
brothers gone visiting her sister in Monterey Park on Saturdays—I
was alone in the house able to watch whatever I
pleased. This gambling, I guess, was where all the wrestling
wages went, why we were never able to move into Silverlake
like we wanted. This was before pro-wrestling hit the big
time, back when it was confined to places like the Olympic
Auditorium on Pico Boulevard in a forgotten section of Los
Angeles. Now, after the Cyndi Lauper heydays, after the
numerous Wrestlemanias and the action figures, the video
games and other merchandising, wrestling is playing in the
big sports arenas and touring nationally, but back then, it
was possible to make just enough to lose it all at the track,
which is what I assume happened each week to my father.
He never talked about the losses, but I could tell. He hid his
racing forms in the bookcase that no one used, in the shelf
that held the unread volumes of the Food, Cooking & Nutrition
Encyclopedias we received from Aunty Mei-Mei. He
thought no one knew he hid the forms between the T volume—tortellini,
tortes, tuna and turnips—and the combined

76 / Chan
UVW volume—uneeda biscuits, vitamins, watercress and
wontons.
Money had always been a worry, I knew, and when you
grow up with immigrant parents, pennies and nickels and
dimes add up to small fortunes. In his rare talkative moments,
my father told stories of how it was before I was born,
of how my mother had worked in a meat factory until one
day one of her co-workers accidentally sliced off her thumb
on a machine. I always wondered what they did with that
thumb, but I never asked. I still cringe thinking of the story:
how the lady had to be taken away by ambulance, and how
my mother decided then to quit that job. So I'm not surprised
that my mother didn't say anything about the gambling,
because at least he managed to keep us where we
were, at least she didn't have to work as much anymore.
I don't know much about the beginning of my father's
wrestling career, only what I've seen on t.v., and there isn't
much to tell. It's all basically the same story, told over and
over again with slight variations. In the black and white world
of the wrestling stage, with its pantheon of heroes and villains,
my father always played the heavy. He's the inscrutable
one, the devious Oriental who will do anything to win
and who can never win fairly. Usually he's pitted against
some ail-American type, the kind of dude the fans wave the
flag for. He plays the threatening jap, the one who's booed,
who's told to go back to where he came from. If he wins, he
does so by using some trick he learned in the Orient—a
deadly karate chop, or mysterious fumes or white powder,
or an oriental variation of the nearly fatal sleeper hold.
For a number of months that year my father, the wrestler,
was embroiled in an ongoing conflict with Fabulous
Frank Fortune, the latest long-haired blonde hero of the ring.
It went on like all the other rivalries did—the ones in the
past with Dashing Dave Dalloway, Macho Man Arnie
Muellens, Ted "Venice Beach" Miller, All-American Brent
Powers, Kris Von Erick and too many others to remember. A
series of matches escalated the conflict, some won by Frank
Fortune—always fairly—and some won by my father. The
matches my father won were always done so illegally, of
course. He used powder in the eyes, or pulled the trunks for
T
Brilliant Disguise / 77
leverage, or employed an illegal object in the ring. The animosity
between the two wrestlers would inevitably explode
into an all-out blood battle—in that world the usual conclusion
to such situations—culminating in a much hyped fight
to end all fights topping the wrestling card for the week.
The stories with all the previous blue-eyed wrestlers
ended neatly enough with the defeat of my father, ending
the foreign reign of terror in the pages of that chapter of the
book of wrestling. But the rivalry between Fabulous Frank
Fortune and my father—who went under the name Mr. Moto
in the ring, even though we're Chinese—escalated far beyond
that. It got so out of hand that instead of the usual
title bout to end the feud, the conflict led into a loser-leavestown
match.
The day of the match was much anticipated by both
myself and the fans. I saw it the day after it happened—on
tape, on t.v. I watched the fans get riled up behind their
boy, Fabulous Frank. There he was, in red, white and blue
tights.
The outcome was as expected. Going through the match
blow by blow is useless, because it was the same old stuff—
full of teases for narrative tension, with someone for the
audience to identify with and a sound defeat to trumpet the
theme—never, ever a cliche in wrestling—that good always
wins out over evil. That, and a few easy signifiers thrown in
to connect all the metaphors, hiding what is at best a simpleminded
story beneath the flash and glitter of costumes and
stage names, under the spit and the blood, the yells of the
crowd.
After the match I was scared. I worried about my mother
and my brothers. I didn't know what we would do without
my father's wrestling income, and I sure didn't want to lose
a thumb in no meat factory, either. For weeks I was waiting
for my father to break the news to us: that either we were
losing our shitty house, or that we would have to move to
white-trash Tennessee to join the wrestling circuit there.
One Saturday, however, after weeks without Mr. Moto
appearing on the wrestling show, a wrestler calling himself
the Yellow Angel made his debut. He wore a yellow mask
with just the tiniest of holes for the eyes and nose and mouth,

78 / Chan
so no one could tell who he was. The mask was embroidered
with a small red cross on the forehead, and around the rim
of the Angel's left eye was a sewn a blazing red flame design
like a fire burning out of control. The Yellow Angel fought
both bad guys and lesser known, less-liked good guys, beating
both types. His fame rose quickly.
I wasn't sure whether it was my father underneath that
mask or not, and to this day I cannot tell you one hundred
percent for sure one way or the other. I do know that if it
was Mr. Moto underneath that mask, he appeared a lot happier
being an anonymous wrestler than the despised yellow
villain. Assuming it was my father, at least now he was permitted
to use the moves he wasn't allowed to use previously,
could show everyone that he could wrestle scientifically just
as well as any of those guys. Putting on that mask in some
way freed him, moved him beyond the kung fu schtick he
was forced to play before.
You could probably predict what happened next. It was
destined, maybe, or at least scripted. In the Yellow Angel's
ascent up the ladder of the Wrestling Federation he was intercepted
by none other than Fabulous Frank Fortune.
Meeting up with a clear-cut good guy, and a popular one
at that, the simple justice of the wrestling universe mandated
that the Yellow Angel become a villain. At least he
wasn't race defined, so when the Angel cheated to win a
match he didn't breathe green fire into his opponent's face
or hit him with a kabuku stick. The Angel was able to use
the old-fashioned American methods of throwing a chair,
gouging his opponent's eyes with an illegal metal object, or
simply hitting him upside the head with the bell clapper.
Every Saturday I sat glued to the set, watching as the
drama unfolded and the conflict between the Angel and Frank
Fortune intensified. The commercials between the matches
offered a break to run to the refrigerator or the bathroom,
but usually I just sat and watched them. An announcer promised
the amazing success of Ginzu knives, used in the Far
East for centuries, or a call button to help you if you fell
down and couldn't get up.
Many of the commercials advertised used car dealerships,
and the most prominent one featured a man with a cowboy
Brilliant Disguise / 79
hat named Cal Worthington who appeared with his dog Spot.
Cal promised to stand on his head if needed to sell a customer
a car, and each commercial ended with him doing just
that, as the camera moved from the upside down Cal outwards
to project the wider picture of the whole car lot.
Cars of every shape, size and model filled the screen,
glistening underneath a hot California sun, until the picture
stopped expanding and it appeared like the whole world
was filled with empty, used cars just waiting to be bought.
The helicopters came in the middle of the night before
the big match, the one of the Angels' unmasking. The conflict
between the Yellow Angel and Frank Fortune escalated
as you might have expected, marked by a series of illegal
wins by the Angel in which he was aided by other villains
like the Russian, Ivan Kruschev, and the African-American
wrestler Big Bad Teddy Brown. Fortune and the fans got fed
up with the cheating, and finally it was proposed that a match
be fought in a steel cage to prevent any possibility of outside
interference.
One on one, Fortune vowed, he would destroy the Angel,
he would rip the mask from his face.
I was in my bed, dreading the outcome of the Angel's
next battle, praying for his good fortune. In the distance I
heard the sound of the blades spinning, the mechanical roar
of the motors as the helicopters approached. Then I saw the
light shining through the window, which I had made sure to
shut for the night, and waited for them to come.
I felt the buzzing of the machine's wings as it hovered
overhead. The vibrations rocked the house. The glass of the
window shook, and through it—illuminated by the
helicopter's searchlights—I could see the copper spraying
the chemical overhead.
It took almost a minute, and then it was gone. It didn't
end there. For hours afterwards I heard the helicopter in
the distance, spraying and respraying other areas. Eventually
I fell asleep.
I fell into a deep sleep that night, dreaming of how the
righteousness of our cause would come to be known. In my
dreams grotesque animals transformed by their exposure to

80 / Chan
the Malathion roamed the streets with terrible, unnamed
objects clenched in their jaws.
In the morning none of this had come true. The city officials
were mostly right, and in the future, the sprayings continued,
though they became confined to more specific areas
and the helicopters were no longer employed.
We had lost, it seemed, despite all the lobbying efforts,
and it felt like a terrible defeat. It felt like being thrown over
the top rope, sprawled on the concrete floor and unable to
get back in the ring while the referee finishes his ten count.
The next year I went off to college, and there I was more
concerned with graduating and making some money than
with any political causes. Caught up in passing my courses
and working my way through school, I silently watched as
around me other students played at being radicals—the militant
minorities who called themselves oppressed people of
color while their parents paid their tuition and mastercard
bills, and the out gays and lesbians and the recycling geeks
and the socialists all free to be activists on an elite campus
comfortably shielded from the real world. It seemed like a
play, where the actors fell into their roles and got lost within
them, and at times I wanted to join in but I had more immediate
concerns.
My father the wrestler couldn't care less what I was doing,
and he gave me little support as I struggled through
college and then later business school. When I returned to
LA with my M.B.A.—a new person, or so I thought—all my
time was concentrated at the office, working my way up to
part ownership of the business. That last year of high school
became a distant thought, a year devoted to a knee-jerk cause
I only half believed in, falling in step with the dance of the
moment, one which other people soon forgot as different
problems consumed the city.
That year the officials had said that the homeless were
at no risk, that Malathion had no obvious detrimental effects
upon humans. In the morning everyone awoke, the
smell in the air reminding them of what they thought they
had only dreamt the night before. Pets were let out, and
cars were started to head off to work. Before stepping into
their cars, though, most people stopped to remove any cov-
Brilllant Disguise / 81
erings they had placed on them the night before, because
the city had cautioned that the chemicals, though reportedly
harmless to people, might scratch the paint.
Let me describe the wrestling ring on the day of the
match. A steel cage was constructed around the ring, an
inescapable prison as large as history that would surround
both the Yellow Angel and Fabulous Frank Fortune. The two
would wrestle inside this cage, with the referee the only other
man inside to ensure no possibility of outside interference.
At each of the four corners of the ring were placed handcuffs,
which a wrestler could employ, keeping his opponent
there for a maximum of five minutes before the referee unlocked
him. They called this a Texas-Style-Revenge Cage
Match.
The match started out pretty evenly, until the Angel took
the advantage by throwing Frank Fortune through the ropes
and into the hard steel bars of the cage.
The Angel followed up by reaching into his trunks for a
foreign metal object, which he jabbed into Fortune's face.
He then drove Fortune into the ring post, afterwards raising
his arms up in victory to taunt the crowd. The Angel, I saw,
was clearly the villain now, and although I didn't want to
think it, that spelled only one outcome.
Dazed and confused, Fortune stumbled back to his feet.
He came back with a roundhouse punch, stunned the Angel
with a headbutt, then executed a staggering flying dropkick.
Fortune regained the lead, placing a hammerlock on the
Angel before moving his opponent into position for the unbreakable
Boston Crab hold. The Angel miraculously broke
loose, however, amid the crowd's boos, and performed a flying
head scissors on Fortune.
The, after dazing Frank Fortune with a series of forearm
uppercuts, the Angel applied his infamous sleeper hold.
This should have been it. This was the hold the Angel
had used in seven previous matches to put to sleep and defeat
seven different opponents. This should have been the
end—lights out, one, two, three...But the crowd was behind
Fabulous Frank, shouting to keep him from losing himself
to sleep. Frank struggled, but the Angel held on, until, sud-

82 / Chan
denly, in a burst of incredible strength, Fabulous Frank
Fortune propelled the Angel backwards into the steel cage.
The Angel was dazed, hitting his head against the metal,
and Fortune managed to get him into one of the handcuffs'
The cameraman got a close-up of the Angel's hand, locked
in the handcuff. In my recollections of the scene, sometimes
I picture my own hand on the other side of that cuff, sometimes
I see the whole long silent history of a people. On the
screen, though, there was nothing on the other end; it was
linked only to the ropes.
The crowd grew louder, screaming for the removal of the
Angel's mask. I saw the red cross on the mask, the left eye
ablazed. Fabulous Frank teased the crowd, removing the
laces slowly, bit by bit, as the back of the Angels' black hair
was slowly revealed. I knew then that the mask would come
off, that the time had come for the Angel to come face to face
within that cage with who he really was. And I knew it was
all an act, that it was an elaborate show choreographed like
the circus and rehearsed like a soap opera. The blows when
the wrestlers hit one another never left any bruises, and
assault charges were never filed when a wrestler was battered
senseless in the ring and had to be removed on a
stretcher.
The crowd cheered on Fabulous Frank Fortune outside
the cage, calling for the mask's removal. I watched as the
laces of the Angels' mask were finally undone, as Fortune
moved in and began pulling the yellow mask off the Angels'
face.
I watched as the mask slowly began coming off, and then
I turned off the set. I didn't need to watch. I already knew
the whole story.
Sometimes we build our own cages, sometimes we set
ourselves free.
All of this happened many years ago, so you have to forgive
me if things didn't occur exactly as I described them. I
was younger then. Frank Fortune, I am sure, was not nearly
so much the cliche that I present him here as being. He was
a much more complex man, all the wrestlers were, as much
blinded and trapped in their roles as my father. But in
Brilliant Disguise / 83
memory we tend to recast our stories with heroes and villains,
with clear-cut, black and white symbols of wrong and
right that do not exist in our real world.
In the years since, so much has happened.
The Cold War's end has redefined the face of wrestling,
bringing forth an age once undreamed of. The Russian villains
who once terrorized the square circle—wrestlers like
the Russian Nightmare and Ivan the Horrible—have all disappeared,
gone in the blink of an eye.
A few resourceful ones—the ones that used to do battle
with the likes of Frank Fortune, Hulk Hogan and All-American
Brent Powers in the featured matches—have been reborn,
often taking on new names, new identities. Nikolai,
the ex-Russian Terror of Leningrad, has renounced his past
and joined forces with Brent Powers to capture the prestigious
tag team title. Ivan Kruschev, we now learn, was never
really from Russia, but from Lithuania. He's become a fan
favorite, renaming himself Captain Freedom and entering
the ring to the music of Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A.
With the Russians all reformed, my father has been in
high demand. He's even bigger now, swelled up from years
outside the ring. He no longer wrestles, but remains in the
wrestling world as a top manager. He's the man you see with
a big briefcase of money, now playing the Japanese heavy
threatening to buy up all the wrestlers. He carries a cellular
phone to keep in touch with his investors in Tokyo, and occasionally
he'll deviously interfere in a match, tripping up
one his wrestlers' opponents, or knocking them in the head
with his briefcase. The stories don't change much, they simply
evolve with the times.
The fans of wrestling have evolved also. The wrestling
crowd has grown upscale, more mainstream. Now, when I
see the wild fans on t.v. with eyes thirsty for violence, they
look like the well-groomed sons of my clients. Frank Fortune's
red-blooded fans are called Fortune-Maniacs. They appear
for a moment like well-behaved boys out enjoying the theater,
until my father or some other despised villain appears,
and then they shout their obscenities, saliva flying, their
faces twisted monstrously to resemble those horror masks
worn on Halloween.

84 / Chan
And the targets of their hate have evolved, as well, a
whole new generation of minority wrestlers in line to collide
with the likes of Fabulous Frank Fortune. Fortune has continued
with his grappling career, and despite his receding
hairline he's one of the stars of the merchandising cottage
industry that's arisen around pro-wrestling. You can buy
Frank's image on anything from t-shirts and posters to bandannas,
acrylic mugs, and toothbrushes; last week, I even
saw him appearing on Family Feud. In the aftermath of the
recent Hulk Hogan steroids scandal, and the tragic deaths
of Andre the Giant and Kerry Von Erick, Fortune has become
the main draw on the card.
He'll have to contend with the new generation of wrestlers,
youngbjoods like Rockin' Ricardo Ramon, the dangerous
Cuban immigrant threatening to swallow America
whole.—I don't want just a stinking crumb of the American
pie, he snarls.—/ want the whole thing! First I'll take the Federation
title belt, then all of America!
Then there's also the Cherokee, Hunter Goingsnake,
fighting in the squared circle for the dignity and ghosts of
his ancestors and for his dreams of a new Native American
nation. He enters into the ring like a man possessed, with a
determination so strong that every time I see him I'm struck
with a sense of deja-vu: that look, the face like my own face
years ago, except I was determined to do everything to get
away from the ring, to move away from it all.
My own dreams have materialized, somewhat.
I've managed to move into the Silverlake Hills as my parents
only dreamed of doing, living on credit and hope, on
the edge of things. There is a house, empty except for me.
The third floor has a balcony that overlooks the city, and I
sit there some nights to read, or just to look out at the sky
and the stars, the helicopters and planes passing by. At times
I look instinctively towards where our old house was, but I
can't even see it. It's too far away.
—Why don't you talk to your father more, my mother asks
me.—He is your father. What did he ever do wrong to you? I
can't answer her.
I do know that we meet in dreams. When I get those
wrestling dreams, I find myself with my father in the ring,
T
Brilliant Disguise / 85
and I help him with his cage match. In this one alternative
universe version of myself, I've followed in his footsteps and
become a professional wrestler. We're a cross generational
wrestling family, like the Von Ericks, the Harts, the
Guerreros.
Together in the ring, we can beat all our foes. We have
them on the ropes, we have them pinned, but then we change
all the rules. We call for peace, for an end to all the fighting.
(We can forgive, but we won't forget.) We shake hands with
our opponents in a gesture of unity. And together, we all
walk out of the cage.

YVETTE CHRISTIANSE
Desire
(For E)
Who was it that stopped at night,
made the window hold its cool, clear
breath under the slowing summer air?
Who slipped through the room, celebrant
of the free hours, dancing into the
government of shadows—the night—
and turning my shoes over to see
where I had been all day, and by
which routes I had arrived and
departed? Who read my palms as they
lay open on the blue sheet? Who
traced for the frailest history
and measured my life line and found
both short and broken? Who breathed
onto my face? Who left me like this,
seized by a waking knowledge which is
that bereavement some call longing?
TORY DENT
The Crying Game
—written to the song by Geoff Stephens
I know all there is to know about the crying game
for I've seen him turn his face
away from me
So now I can say I've seen the lord,
his aquiline nose
his long sandy blond hair streaked with blue and red
No tears were streaming down his cheeks
When he turned his back to me
the great V of his torso pivoted like the turning point in a
classical novel
as Anna foresaw the traintracks in Frou Frou's broken back
I've discovered my eventual absence in his sacrum
the thick braid of muscle that denotates into nothing

88 / Dent
I've had my share of the crying game
when I watched his body turn, slowly
as a rotation of the earth
first there are kisses
then there are sighs
or screw in a head press
his effeminate waist swiveled in its socket
of the pelvis that once fit me like a yoke
his body covering me, a critical mass
the pressure of his hand, before my confirmation
barely felt the way a priest blesses a child
pushing me down, further and further
to my confirmation, the denigration of a child
as if swallowing the semen of god would bring me closer to gods
and then before you know where you are
you're saying good-bye
The Crying Game 189
0 they say he loves us all but for some reason he stopped loving me
One day soon I'm going to tell the moon about the crying game
and we'll cry together like the day I told my father I was HIV positive
And if he knows maybe he'll explain
just him and me under a fluorescent tube
our chairs as close as we could push them together
why there are heartaches
why there are tears
If I had been younger he would have embraced me with his whole body
held me in his lap and while I sobbed and he,
though less dramatically, too
He'll know what to do
to stop feeling blue

90 / Dent
but the closest we could come to that was to cry together but separately
our heads in our individual hands, though our knees remained touching
for crying is always, in essence, about crying alone
when love disappears
into the astringent light of fluorescence
first there are kisses, then there are sighs
then fluorescent light replaces the moon
I genuflect beneath the circular tube
lit 24 hours, a postmodern shrine
that illuminates my deathbed
spare and apologetic
bare futon on a wood floor
I'm willing to be yoked by his pelvis again instead of, instead of...
but he doesn't look back, he doesn't say why
The before you know where you are
Don't want no more
you're saying good-bye
of the purifying, of the placating, of the penury ritual
The Crying Game/91
of self-depravation of the crying game, the goals, overly ambitious,
of its refinement like spiritual fasting for which fasting, broth and
bread, then bread and water, then just water, only water, itself will
not provide a spiritual dimension, an exaltation that results from
impoverishment, base in expectation, ingenuous in intent by being void
of intent, of sacrificial ecstasy comprised of only one desire, only one
like water, a fasting of desires until living upon one, desiring only one
desire, the desire for atonement is only that
Don't want no more
of the nights, not just the sweats, not just the fear of sweats,
not just the dreams, the gargantuan, exhaustive dreams, the hallways,
the staircases, the crowds, the water, the betrayal, not just their
cruel non-sequiturs of composition, not just the bedside light turned on
at four in the morning as if of its own accord, contemptuously, in order
to underscore the aloneness, "You must feel so alone." it says, without

92 / Dent
affection, without even a gesture, "You must feel so alone," it says
D ° n '* WJUlt
The Crying Game 193
mechanically undergoing modes of observation like a night nurse of wh&t * n
° ° f> ° f *** paradigm f the Ciying game
°
blanched to the moans of her patients. She reads my unconscious fears as if
viewing an x-ray of them, a blood pressure speedometer, then checks them
which is the paradigm of starvation driven so deep inside me it's written
In the mutilation of my body, separating me, irreparably from
off. executing the little marks on her chart with cursory but automatic *y self ' S0 left l ^ t0 keep ^ ° Ver * ^ of vegetable ' a love death '
precision simultaneously shutting off another light with each notation. a deathwish that can't fulfill itself, that just keeps hanging on like
It's the crying game when she's left, it's the squeaks of her rubber-soled
white shoes on the linoleum as she whisks onward down the corridor into
silence. It's the length of darkness ahead I'm forced to contemplate. It's
the drive for relief that refuses to atrophy.
Don't want no more
of the condoms, of policing, of elaborating excuses, of newsbreaking,
of the crying game that bullies me into one crying jag after another with
no reprieve to be found after, of vitamins, of poems, of suicidal scenarios,
of imagining, willing your life to change but nothing happens, no parole,
no tenure, no wedding, just a waiting, the massive silence of a crowd waiting
the silence of exodus, the silence of entrapment, the silence of failed
imaginings: hungry mouths in an orphanage
Karen Quinlan

94 / Dent
From the Defeat of Linear Thinking
(...) Take from me this soliloquy, cut it out like the tongue of Romeo
Make me mute as a tree where I can be found like a village idiot, like
Nietzsche absorbed in vibrant discourse with the origami birds of my fingers
Some resignation will have taken over, a partial lobotomy.
Dumb to my own inadequacies, the shackled limitations of my body, my brain
will have short-circuited, my heart will function only as an organ,
my face cocked permanently in a befuddled, but not tormenting, wonderment
my eyebrows knit but without the focused scenario of an actual worry;
my desires released to a kind of weigh station that relieves them of urgency,
of their emotional gridding: 111 want but not know for what and thus quickly
forget except for a mild sentient aftermath of dull pulsation that could
easily be mistaken for anything—symptoms can be so heavenly ambiguous-
Take from me like a coat this circumstance, this circuitous mode of living
claustrophobic as the arena of a placemat; excuse me from this table,
my future perceived in the convexed depth of a spoon as only that.
Undress me then completely and help me into my nightshift
carry me to my cradle of straw where the voluminous rooms of Versailles
multiply the way its famous hall of mirrors replicates yet another ballroom.
The closet will have allocated itself then to a dark corner of my psyche,
the documentary photograph filed away in the archive
guarded by sleeping dobermans I fear now at a distance like the flooding
in the Midwest, or the rape camps in Bosnia.
From the Defeat of Linear Thinking 195
coffin, empty, buried anyway, tessellated with wildflowers
clucked from the untended cemetery, or sawed in half before an audience,
demonstrates the disappearing act as a ceremony of survival.
Take from me this child I cannot save, the stillborn that rots in the tomb
inside me. My womb has shed its walls, a snake who cannot transcend
from aging to death, a kind of internal myth of Tithonus.
Show me just once my dead child's face and I will accept my barrenness.
Show me just once the face of god and I will pardon him like Nixon.
Pardon him by paying homage to the shrine of my future emblematized
in the cradle, and hence, like the falcon, erased in its emblem.
Therefore I pay homage by merely walking beneath the crest of the sky.
It's as if in the end, we are all, if only by default, absolved as blameless
whether or not we die in prison, whether or not we die of a terminal Illness,
another kind of prison, whether or not we believe or disbelieve
we are all caught in a spatiality that reserves judgment; caught but not
released the way children are to a playground or P.O.W.'s to their homeland.
I know, because I know what it's like to be there, to be dying but not to die.
I know because I've acquiesced to the face of Hitler,
to the face of god and watched myself as if through the eyes of god
engage in an act inconsequential and benign.

DAN POWELL, Light and Stone #15/Pompeii, Italy, 1994
DAN POWELL, Light and Stone #34 /Paris from Notre Dame, 1994
0
3
to
-0

DAN POWELL, Light and Stone #29/View from Agamemnon's Tomb,
Mycenae, Greece, 1994
CD
00

100 /Frank
JOANN FRANK, Untitled/Skelemaquettoy Series, 1986
JOANN FRANK, The Boneyard/Skelemaquettoy Series, 1984
Frank/ 101

JOANN FRANK, Untitled/Skelemaquettoy Series
JOANN FRANK, Untitled, 1994
I
£
8
o
10
n

RICK MOODY
Circulation
1. Of Office Supplies
Bern Lewis, divorce lawyer, opened the file folder before
him and removed the offending paper clip from a portion
of the materials relating to Westman v. Westman. He
pursed his lips thoughtfully as he dropped it, dropped the
paper clip—it inappropriately bound together pages of two
separate documents—carelessly onto the surface of his
rolltop desk. The Westman's divorce was Mexican—this was
back in the era of Mexican divorces—and his client, Mrs.
Westman, would soon be leaving for that debt-ridden, oilproducing,
microbially-infected nation. He was rushing to
get the last details in order.
This story however does not concern Bern whose successful
practice is its own reward. It does not concern his
convertible Alfa Romeo nor his house in East Hampton nor
his daughter (at the Spence School) nor his wife—the first
Jewish person to be admitted to the Junior League of
Westport. Nor, in fact, does this story concern the Westmans
themselves and their divorce or recent unscientific theories
(no control group in the landmark study) of developmental
problems in young adults who have suffered through the
agonies of a broken home. No, this story is about something
else entirely. It's about the paper clip.
At seven-thirty that evening Bern Lewis buzzed his assistant
Kathy Gennaro, who sat in a somewhat remote cubicle
in the corridors of Gerbasi, Wellman & Crabtree. Kathy
was a young, attractive woman from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn,
who Bern felt, managed with her heavily made up look to
affect a genuine radiance. When she smiled at Bern he had
this feeling that some marriages never unraveled. While
Kathy took no pleasure in her job she was good enough at
it—she'd been a secretary for eight years—to give the illusion
of loyalty and affection. Bern's voice over the intercom
Circulation/ 105
that evening—p's popping, s's sussuring—gave her a few last
minute instructions about appointments in the coming week.
Then he asked sheepishly if Kathy would mind cleaning up
his desk.
—Of course not, she told him. But this wasn't entirely
true. Actually she did mind. She felt it was something he
should have been able to do himself.
—Oh, and have a great weekend, Bern said. Hey, are
you going to make it out to the beach?
—No, um, just a quiet weekend, Kathy answered. Bern
wasn't really listening.
When she made her way to his office, the paper clip wasn't
the first beneficiary of her crusade for desktop order. First
Kathy organized a large stack of pending files—a whole host
of divorce cases, a whole town's worth of sorrow—into one
substantial pile that she balanced in Lewis's In box. She
then lined up pens and pencils in a compartment in the right
hand top desk drawer. Rubber bands she retired into a small
duck decoy container. It was only just before taking leave of
her boss's desk for the weekend that Kathy swept all the
paper clips on the desk into her palm and crammed them
into a magnetized plastic cup which conveniently offered, in
a space age design, several for easy access.
Since her boss was gone now—eight minutes before,
having waved on the way to the elevator—she could safely
make her escape. Wait. The appointment book.
It was while Kathy was exasperatedly trying to figure out
what to do about the double-booked lunch for Monday that
she plucked what had once been the Westman paper clip
from the magnetized dish and stuck it in her mouth. She
intended to attach it immediately to this problem day in
Bern's calendar. However, she forgot about the clip entirely
and carried it—in her mouth—and the appointment book
back to her own desk. She set the leather bound appointment
book on top of her own In box. First thing Monday
morning she'd deal with the darned lunch. Then she crossed
the hall to the coat rack in the supply closet and found her
second-hand fur.
—Night, Kath! shouted one lonely assistant as Kathy
Gennaro passed through the expanses of shuttered desks

106 /Moody
by the elevator. Most of the associates occupied this large
teamwork-oriented space.
—Mmmnn, Kathy replied.
She laughed. Because she suspected the nervous things
lawyers did with paper clips. Who knew for sure? They used
them for anything but holding documents together. Who
knew how many people had sucked on this very paper clip?
Was there any way it was still sanitary?
Delicately, she removed the paper clip from her mouth
before burying it deep in the pocket of her fur coat, beneath
a spare lipstick, a subway token holder, three pennies, and
a note to herself reminding her to reschedule he dental hygienist.
—Night! she called. Have a wild weekend!
Among the problems that Kathy Gennaro faced—her
parents' constant and depressing arguments, her brother's
service in the Armed Forces, the terminal condition of her
AMC Gremlin—there was one that really made its mark on
her. It was her boyfriend Al. Two months ago he had suffered
a bad accident at the foundry where he worked. A very
serious burn on one hand. He'd had skin grafts to replace
what was lost, but later the grafts had become infected.
Bronze had gotten into the wound, or something. In the end
Al lost two fingers. They'd been amputated: the middle and
ring fingers of his left hand.
Kathy and Al had quarreled a little bit even before the
accident. Theirs was a star-crossed romance. This Kathy
knew in part from voluminous reading of soft reference books
and women's magazines. She had also spoken with a priest
at her parish, who recommended that she give Al as much
room as he needed during this difficult portion of his recovery.
A quiz in one of the women's magazines agreed. She
should keep her mouth shut if she wanted that engagement
ring, if she wanted peace of mind. She didn't comment on
his relentless television watching at both his apartment and
hers, she didn't bring up her own problems—such as her
toothache, or the unusual lump in one of her breasts—and
she helped him fill out his OSHA and medical insurance
forms.
In this way, one Saturday, the Westman paper clip be-
Circulation 1107
came attached to the claim forms of Alfred F. Shaughnessy
(emergency service, including skin graft, x-ray, consultation,
two nights semi-priv. on burn ward, observation, anesthetic,
amputation, physical therapy, psychiatric counseling, follow-up
and aftercare), and mailed across county lines to the
offices of the Atra Insurance Corp. of White Plains, New York.
Three months Shaughnessy's paperwork languished in
the Atra headquarters. Three months. The middle management
at Atra was trying to evolve a computer-based claim
processing system that would hasten refunds, but it had a
lower priority than some income-generating management
gambits. Thus, Al's form got a lot of relaxed personal contact
over the months. First the claim was entered by hand
onto an enormous mainframe computer of the sort they had
back then—with gigantic spools of information going through
some telecommunication spin cycle—from which it was
downloaded and distributed to the filing department, where,
again by hand, it was broken up into component documents
and filed in perpetuity. Just before this last step, just before
Al's claim was filed, an employee of this massive insurance
bureaucracy finally rubber-stamped the documents. Funds
were disbursed without a hitch.
However, in the midst of a misfiling spree several months
later, a fellow who only worked at Atra through nepotism
(and to keep him out of trouble until Manhattanville College
was back in session), a guy named Randall Evans, actually
trashed the Alfred Shaughnessy forms, threw them out, and
while he was doing it he bent the paper clip, yes, the Westman
paper clip, out of shape—out of the shape of the most profitable
patent in the history of intellectual property, as he,
Randall, had once heard a science teacher remark—into a
straighter, sturdier projectile that could easily have put
someone's eye out. He did this in order to clean beneath his
nails, which were not particularly dirty. It was 4:15 on a
Friday afternoon and his feet were propped up on a stack of
human tragedies. The radio at his back blasted a fledgling,
free form, album-oriented FM rock and roll station. He leaned
back in his chair.
And then Randall did it. Leaned too far. He hit his head
on the filing cabinet behind him as he fell backwards—as

108 /Moody
always in these situations, it almost seemed to happen in
slow motion—and the paper clip was driven far into the sensitive
skin underneath the nail of his index finger. It hurt
like hell. It was only in there a quarter inch or so, but it hurt
like hell, especially when he yanked it out and the blood
began to flow. His finger was throbbing. Randall Evans shut
off the radio when he collected himself. He was rubbing his
head with the good hand. Shit. He kicked an empty desk
drawer. Dented it. And then he deposited the rogue paper
clip in the wastebasket underneath his desk. From which it
was carted to a dumpster, from which it was hauled to a
landfill, in which it was buried, never again in all of the
centuries of elemental existence to be touched by human
hands.
2. Of Blood Cells
Of lineage and biology we now have cause to speak! Of the
movement of genetic destiny and the spheres writ smaller in
veins and arteries!
Okay, the circulatory system, as you know, carries oxygen
from the lungs to cells and organs throughout the body.
These red corpuscles nourish tissue that needs oxygen to
thrive and they likewise carry away a byproduct, carbon dioxide.
That's their job. Feast and waste are their cargo. By
means of this circulation, by means of its damming and flowing
it's possible to read all the geographies and histories of
an organism. That's circulation.
Likewise, in the modern age, blood cells from donors are
shipped and frozen and reused in transfusion. Transfusion
allows for a whole new circular pattern in which strangers
are attached by gossamer coincidences. We can therefore
follow a history of Randall Evans's blood along a trail of generous
low-level philanthropists.
Like many of his generation, Randall had run afoul of
the D.W.I, traffic regulations enacted by his home state. This
was a year or so after his stint at the insurance company. It
started with staying out late. He liked to drink, take speed,
smoke pot, bird-dog chicks, stay out all night. He liked to
Circulation/ 109
take his parents car and enact revenge fantasies with it. His
dad was tough on him and he resented this toughness. One
Thursday night he was racing his girlfriend—he was dragging
her—on the back roads of Harrison, New York. It was
maybe 2:30 in the morning. Perfect time for dangerous
automotive games. Realizing that she was about to be
victorious, though, that his imported sub-compact was
slower—unbelievable!—than an American luxury sedan,
Randall's eyes strayed momentarily, sheepishly, up toward
the heavens.
He hit a mailbox. That was first. This initial lapse of concentration
resulted in his striking a mailbox, and the wheels
seemed to lock on something, the mailbox post (anchored in
a cement base), and there was a sudden shower—in the headlights—of
uprooted and shredded daffodils, and then he was
swerving across a lawn uncontrollably—holy shit! he was
heading for a house! and he couldn't stop the vehiiicle! The
car came to rest finally when he collided with an above
ground pool, a Doughboy. He was unconscious when the
pool-owners, awakened by the sound of impact, pulled him
from the wreckage. Water rushed through a jagged crack in
the pool housing.
Because he hadn't been wearing his seatbelt he had innumerable
lacerations and contusions, preeminent among
them a large head wound. It was gushing (to use the language
of the witnesses) in the minutes after impact, and, as
a result, he received his first transfusion, in the Emergency
Room at White Plains General.
Into Randall's body pulsed the AB positive blood of Arne
Bennett, bank teller. Responding to a well-publicized plea
by local medical authorities—he'd heard it on the all-news
radio station one morning while stuck in traffic on the Cross
County Expressway—Arne donated his blood precisely forty
days before it hit Randall's veins. It reached this needy party
just two days shy of its expiration date.
After the donation, Arne, who had never stopped to consider
that his initials were the same as his blood type, tried—
and the effort was characteristic of his good-naturedness—
to rise immediately from the gurney at the makeshift Red
Cross donor station. It was a masculine thing. He was in the

110 /Moody
branch conference room of a competing bank. Marine Midland.
He wanted to get back to work. Immediately upon giving
up the pint of blood in question he swung his massive,
tree trunk legs to the edge of the cot. Perhaps he intended iii
part to impress a matronly and friendly nurse. Perhaps he
was worrying a little about his toupee—the color of scorched
straw—about whether or not it was going to stay on as he
lay prone there. In any case, as soon as feasible he worked
his legs down to the carpeted floor and stood.
Then he collapsed. Through sheer teamwork, the nurse
(by the name of Eleanor) and several impromptu volunteers
hefted Arne back up onto the folding cot. His toupee stayed
rooted to his scalp. In all the commotion, though, he missed
the chance to ask Eleanor if they might somehow meet. He
was so embarrassed by his fainting spell he wouldn't have
found the courage for it anyway. He disliked his timidity
with women. He worried that he would never marry. In spite
of everything, Arne was back at work in forty-five minutes.
Randall Evans, on the other hand, was hospitalized for
several days of observation. Concussion accompanied his
more superficial wounds. Meanwhile, Evans's girlfriend, Mary
Cassell, escaped without a scratch. She had pulled over
twenty yards ahead of him that fateful night and watched
the whole thing in her rearview mirror, a hand clamped
worriedly across her mouth. She visited him in the hospital—against
his wishes, because his face with all its stitches
looked like a goddamned railroad map—and at that moment
something began to sour in their relationship. Where crises
might have brought other couples closer, it pried this one
apart. Randall couldn't accept her indulgence anymore; he
wouldn't let her straighten him out. He was uncomfortable.
He wanted out of the hospital. He wanted to be left alone.
Soon Evans was released. The injuries weren't terribly
complicated, it turned out. He had scars, but they were the
scars of a tough guy. And he prospered in his second life, in
his life of good fortune. Despite his family's wishes, Randall
became a large crane operator. It was a union job. It paid
very well. At union headquarters he too frequently donated
blood. In early 1974, for example, he donated in the large,
Circulation /111
undecorated union hall that served his local. Sinatra was
playing on the radio. The donation went smoothly. Randall's
story thereafter—with its placid, middle-aged heavy drinking
and its relatively amicable divorce—diverges from this
one and is lost.
Not long after Evans's donation, Debby Fahnstock, a
wealthy woman who had always favored corporeal punishment
in the instruction of children took Randall's blood (also
AB+) into her own depleted physique. The transfusion occurred
during her 1974 triple bypass operation. She was a
patron of the city opera and a collector of various types of
miniatures. In her fifties she became remorseful about her
past, about her life, about the prospects for earthly love, for
agape, for simple human kindness. She began to refuse visits
from her family and friends.
Debby survived the operation. She grew stronger. But
four years later, in 1978, when her son Ansel was 34 years
old, he came down with a rare kidney disorder. It was likely,
actually, that he'd had it all along. The disorder—Osoborne's
Syndrome—ran in the remote tributaries of the Fahnstock
family. Transplant was the only successful treatment but it
was risky. Nevertheless, Mrs. Fahnstock ventured forth from
her self-imposed exile and, at great personal risk, donated
blood for Ansel's kidney transplant. The hospital was Lenox
Hill, New York City; the presiding physician, Debby and
Ansel's general practitioner, was John D. Westman, M.D.
Though perhaps Arne Bennett's very blood cells did not
flow between the generations that night in 1978—that night
when the differences between the Fahnstocks were forgotten
for a moment, when a mother and son who had never
much liked one another were of like mind and like flesh—
some remnant of these red cells did persist, some atavistic
genetic material, some trace of Bennett's ardent faith (in the
Baptist church), for example, or perhaps some watered-down
approximation of Randall Evans's simple love of life. Something
must have been in that blood. Something must account
for the change of heart that passed that night through
that transparent plastic tubing, unless it was just the sheer
enthusiasm of survival.

112 /Moody
3. Of Ideas
Chain letters circulate. Coinage. Wealth through inheritance.
Moisture circulates, through the ecosystem. Disease
circulates, venereally, virally, et cetera. The planets circulate.
Books circulate [Go little quair! Fly!] and stories circulate
and through them ideas and opinions and doubts and
hopes. Gossip circulates. Philosophy trickles down. Jokes
spread like wildfire, beginning at the Wall Street trading desk
of Kidder, Peabody.
Ansel Fahnstock, unemployable heir to the heavily diversified
Fahnstock portfolio, recoiled from violence of any
kind. He never in his life, even as a child, initiated any instance
of fisticuffs. When as a young man he was struck by
his mother he took the blow and prepared for another, usually
sneering with a really arresting vehemence. She then
beat him harder. However, these pugilistic altercations were
short. As he grew into manhood, Ansel married, and his
marriage—like his parents' marriage—was typified by sullen
disagreements that never escalated to the pitch of a real
fight. He never struck his wife, but he didn't attend to her
either. He was no ally. Likewise, he never struck his daughter,
Joy, although there were occasions when the thought
crossed his mind. He followed her up the stairs one day, his
palm open on the backswing. Her diapered ass swayed above
him on the step. He felt deeply ashamed of this. Any kind of
laying on of hands disgusted him.
Meanwhile, Ansel gave himself over to two consuming
avocations—philately and numismatics. Gleaming freshly
minted coins and cellophaned, untouched stamps—never to
be circulated, never to know the decay that always starts
with human contact—were the subjects of much of his thinking.
To occupy himself, he substituted as a teacher of high
school mathematics. As an instructor he was neither loved
by his students—too passive, too impersonal—nor hated.
And then in 1978 his kidney problems flared. The transplant
was accompanied by transfusion, as they always are,
and steroids (to avoid tissue rejection). In the days after the
procedure his family gathered often at his bedside—his sisters,
his wife, his daughter, and even his mother. If only his
Circulation/ 113
father were here, they each said. If only his father would
come. If only his father would cover over the wound of his
paternal abdication; if only, after all this time, that one terrible
fact could be undone; if only the marriage had not failed.
Among the Fahnstocks, then, persisted the notion of the
American family with its respectful marriages, its rivalrous
but loving siblings, its dogs and cats, its vacations, its meals,
its tennis matches, its boating trips. This idea of theirs was
like some perennial weed that grabs every square inch of
topsoil, choking off all other vegetation, until the countryside
of American notions featured this weed alone and no
others; it reproduced limitlessly from coast to coast; no energy
or water or sun or cash was needed for it; it wasn't even
subject to the laws of thermodynamics.
Ansel's private room was piled high with borrowed vases.
These hospital flowers were more beautiful for being ephemeral.
To and from consciousness he drifted fighting off infection.
His remote and cranky moods were forgiven. His wife
forgave his silence, his daughter forgave him, even his mother
forgave him. Forgiveness was in the room like a dignified
perfume and it wasn't even contingent upon his recovery.
Forgiveness became its own reward.
Because of his death. Because Ansel passed away. He
came to some celestial dead stop. His mother's blood cells
went with him, as did any cells belonging to Arne Bennett or
Randall Evans, as did the transplanted kidney in him, the
one that had formerly belonged to Kapoor S. Nigam, also
deceased, a kidney which, before it was Nigam's, had belonged
only to the awesome pool of things yet to happen.
Ansel's daughter was married eight years later to Howard
Gates and again, I'm afraid, the marriage was not happy.
Though a gentle and thoughtful son was issued by this
union—it was me, in fact, the narrator of this story—a young
man she had occasion to discipline only rarely, Joy Gates
soon sought the representation of a divorce lawyer, Bern
Lewis, and the results of these proceedings are a matter of
public record, filed both in the offices of Gerbasi, Wellman &
Crabtree (in triplicate, velo-bound and paper-clipped) and
with the Manhattan District Court on Park Row. To maintain
liquidity, and because the legal fees in the case were

114 /Moody
not insignificant, Joy Gates found one day that she was removing
her father's coin and stamp collections from the safety
deposit box at Marine Midland so that she might take them
to dealers to be appraised. And in this way the history of her
family and its notions, thought to be retired from the harsh
light of scrutiny, were once again adrift in the universe of
brief attachments.
Thereafter Joy Gates conducted herself quietly, peaceably,
never again to reappear in this or any other public
account.
PHYLLIS STOWELL
Snowtown
build in a city of snow
—Wallace Stevens
Momentous to see a householder on his roof shoveling
not once stopping to admire where he has done
or weigh the more to be done, his mountain
the next shovelful avalanches. Snow laps doors no one opens,
walks no one walks. Windowpanes
gleam glassy clean outside each window's window
where a shy schoolgirl steals a look and seeing you
seeing her, brightens—the rare sun come out
a bulwark in this village (what then?)
You pretend as you pass the brick Unitarian with its precise
Moore steeple, all is well
and shall be well
for the scarfed fellow buying Kotex for his wife, the substantial
for-sale potholders, the free coffee where you buy
But day stalls here, the falls
stiffen in the tedium of winter, an overlong second act
the citizen is forced to sit through
as in a claustrophobic theater [what then?)
You'd miss being lost in the forest with its acoustics
its bilingual utterances, now and forever
without a wild supremacy to propitiate

WILFRID SHEED
Notes on a Brainwashing
An Excerpt from In Love with Daylight
This is the sixth chapter of In Love With Daylight, Wilfrid
Sheed's account of his recovery from three catastrophic illnesses:
polio, substance-enhanced depression and cancer.
Following his youthful bout with polio, Sheed embarked on a
successful writing career. In middle age, he found himself
celebrating life more strenuously than necessary and sleeping
with the aid of sleeping pills. A crisis was reached when
a pre-cancerous lesion was discovered on his tongue. The
prescription: stop drinking. On the advice of his physician,
he entered a treatment facility named here "Happy Valley."
Since patients were forever coming and going at Happy
Valley, there was no such thing as a course of instruction.
You might hear the thing you needed to know on the
first day or the twelfth or possibly on your way out the door.
The stuff just went round and round, like that neon band of
news that used to circle the New York Times building from
morning to night. They called it a "program" and advised
you to get with it, but getting with it turned out to be like
entering a London fog at Chelsea and leaving it at
Westminster, or vice versa, who can tell? So any attempt I
make now to describe me going through it has to be purest
impressionism, a study in fog on fog.
Indeed, as I write this, a memory comes back of once
trying to get home in a real pea-souper in old Fog City itself.
Incredibly, the buses are still moving, so slowly that a square
hit from one would barely nudge you, but their lights do tell
you that there must be a street over there, which means
that this is a sidewalk; and when the wall you're gripping
runs out, you're close to a corner, but which one? Is this a
Kensington wall, or a Chelsea?
Notes on a Brainwashing / 117
Same thing now. It feels today like a Sunday-type of afternoon,
so categorized by its sheer emptiness and sense of
foreboding: anyone who's ever attended a weekly boarding
school will recognize a Sunday afternoon a mile away. Actually,
I have no idea what day it is, except that I am about to
meet my counselor the next morning for the first time, and I
decide to move things along by jotting down a few notes about
myself to kick us off with. But in the desolation and nervous
dysfunction of the moment, these turn into the most scathing
psychological portrait anyone has ever drawn of anybody—a
study of warts on warts this time, in my new, severe
manner.
To my everlasting relief, the counselor shows not the
slightest interest in my indictment—he is not a shrink, and
doesn't want to pose as one—and I plunge with him back
into substance abuse and denial with a high heart, as if I've
made a good and terrible confession to a priest who doesn't
speak English. When I return to my room, I tear the notes
into small pieces, consigning them and my memory of them
to oblivion. I shan't write anything else the whole time I'm
here—not just because I'm too confused to but because, like
a fat child asked to do push-ups, I don't feel like it, for the
first time in years. There is no joy in scribbling any more,
and no point. Depression is marked off from the other diseases
of mankind by a somber baseline of indifference. This
is like the one operation you don't want to talk about or
show anybody, the Purple Heart you throw in the garbage. I
knew that I had a great subject here, a hundred great subjects,
and that I would never see any of them again. To hell
with it. For once in my life, I didn't even feel like showing
off.
With exceptions. After his normal dose of phenobarbital
had failed to impress me on my fourth night, Dr. Y. gave up
and slipped me a real mickey in the form of a King Kong fix
of phenobarbital, with a view to weaning me back to regular
sleep with gradually diminishing doses. I slept like an angel
and woke up singing. My God, this was a beautiful place.
The morning air hit me like a Christmas morning hitting Mr.
Scrooge, and I quite startled our den mother or matron or
whatever by singing along with her at breakfast, and unob-

118 /Sheed
trusively straightening out her lyrics (I trust it was unobtrusive).
By lunchtime I instinctively wanted to have a celebration
lunch to welcome such a day into the calendar,
and I pictured the headwaiter at our favorite Chinese restaurant
slippering up to say, "Ah, Mr. She, your favite martini?"
Here, I realized, was my nemesis; not depression or inadequacy
or all the stuff they would hurl at my head for the
next few weeks, but the same gargantuan, half-insane urge
to celebrate life as much and as often as possible that had
gotten me here in the first place. And as if to drive this simple
truth home, I dreamed that night that I was buying drinks
for everyone in the bar, including a double for myself, to
celebrate the fact that I'd given up drinking. And someone
nudged my elbow and said, "That's not quite the way we do
it."
No, indeed. By the next day I was back in the swamp,
getting my ears pinned back about the insidiousness of booze,
which was such that if we accidentally swallowed a trace of
alcohol in some cough medicine, the speaker assured us,
we'd be doomed forever. So I wouldn't even be allowed to
celebrate with cough medicine.
The moments of exhilaration and clowning around were
so rare that I remember every one of them like heavenly visitations
sent to keep us from going quite crazy, and to inform
us that life can be beautiful and hang in there. But they
were invariably followed by days that said quite the opposite
in thunder, and I would sink so far in the other direction
that around the end of Week One, Dr. Y. decided to put me
on Prozac, the wonder drug of the season; and a week after
that, a Wednesday, I had another good day. And I fell on this
one too with glad cries, like an Englishman spotting an egg
in 1943.
Otherwise, the bad days were the story, and I'll only say
as temperately as possible that anyone suffering from anxiety-depression
should stay as far as a large continent permits
from programs designed for substance abusers; talking
may be a perfectly good cure for some things, but to my
sick ears it sounded like voices just outside your window
while you're trying to sleep off a fever. What they were say-
Notes on a Brainwashing / 119
ing was so dull and unmusical.
Perhaps the best example of the riot of cross-purposes
I'd stumbled into came toward the end, when my counselor
trotted out, as if for the first time, a colorful phrase he had
actually used at every one of our meetings, and I winced as
I saw it coming. "Yes—the truth hurts, doesn't it?" he purred.
"It's not the truth," I muttered, "it's the repetition," which
on bad days could reverberate in my head like a trash compactor
in an echo chamber. "Well, you'd better get used to
repetition in AA," he said. "Because that's what it's all about."
The counselor, Lord knows, was doing his best. But he
was like a doctor who has taken a degree in only one disease
and therefore treats all his patients for, let's say, measles,
because what else is there? Since I was in my last week by
then, I was thoroughly familiar with the "single disease"
theory and just anxious to get home and sit in gorgeous
silence for a while.
I can't let myself off so lightly now, however, but must
return to that first week, where it is now definitely Sunday,
a real one this time, and I've been impressed into something
called a rap session, so named presumably because the instructor
had taken turns rapping us on the knuckles and
slapping us up alongside the head. To wit.
"You—yes, youl" It was obviously too late to hide in back
of the sofa. "When did you have your first drink?"
I honestly had no idea, but I could tell that that was no
kind of answer for the sergeant here.
"I guess I remember sitting in the college bar and thinking
I'll never get to talk to these guys if I don't have a drink
with them," and in the anxiety of the moment I guess I really
believed this story, although as I remember it now, my first
drink had probably been a bottle of Schaeffer beer my mother
had allowed me to try three years earlier at a farewell party
before we returned to England in 1946; and if that was forgettable,
how about the pint of something called, I think,
"Old O'Dougherty's" that a friend of mine and I had smuggled
into a school dance and gotten sick as dogs on?
The thing was, I had to say something, and the college
bar version at least gave us some good stuff to talk about:
feelings of inadequacy and other soul-searching staples that

120/Sheed
seemed to fit the spirit of the program. Maybe it would give
Rover here something to chew on and would take his mind
off my trouser leg. But the rapper was a regular dyed-inthe-wool
measles specialist, or subspecialist, because he
quickly broke in to "Cut the crap," as he would say in his
straight-shooting way, and to pipe, "But it really doesn't
matter, does it?" "What, who?" I shot back, and he said, "What
matters is that you had that first drink. Right?"
I cannot vouch for the other particulars of this dialogue,
or browbeating, but I believe the man then said, "Suppose
you found yourself on an island where the custom was for
everybody to drink all day and night—would you go along
with that?" To which I honestly answered, "No—I've been
with people like that, and I couldn't keep up with them."
I wasn't trying to be a smart-ass, I was just trying to
survive and get this guy off my back. But he wouldn't quit
until I'd taken all my measles medicine, and although he
talked and even looked like a storm trooper, I'm sure he
thought he was helping us the best he knew how with this
good, brisk, straight-from-the-shoulder talk. As I say, it's a
hell of a way to treat depression, but it did deepen my acquaintance
with a single-disease dogma the army way, by
stuffing it up my nose, where it can still be found.
Dealing as I was from about a one-card deck, I was in no
shape to decide whether it was even remotely possible that
all the raggle-tag citizens I began to bump into around here
had exactly the same thing wrong with them. But even in
that shape, I could see the irresistible convenience of the
proposition. With a small nation of addicts yammering at
the moon and hammering on the doors, each one of them
convinced he is a special case, who has time for details?
These embattled institutions couldn't possibly hope to hand
out customized treatment to all these bums. America's
drunks alone would overwhelm every doctor and therapist
in the land just by breathing on them. And in recent years,
the drunks had been joined by an equally unruly horde of
heroin, cocaine, and everything-in-the-medicine-chest addicts,
all in need of a therapy fix right now, while they're
still in the mood. ("And don't blame me if I go out and kill
Notes on a Brainwashing / 121
someone tomorrow, if you turn me down for treatment, man.")
What to do, what to do? The only possible way to treat
such a continental mass of supplicants was the same way.
But where it had at least seemed plausible to tell alcoholics
that they all had the same disease, could it really be possible,
let alone provable that the beautiful dreamers of heroin
and the ecstatic insomniacs of cocaine also all had the same
disease?
Enter, in the nick of time, the new miracle drug, "the
addictive personality," which makes the whole world of highs
and lows kin. Never mind the physical aspects of addiction,
which can drag down anyone (to wit, hospital patients
hooked on morphine) regardless of personality; and particularly
never mind the legion of cigarette addicts who couldn't
possibly all have the same personality, unless you expand
the word to meaningless infinity.
These exceptions would have cut no ice at all with the
rap sergeant, whose attitude was simply "Look, we're dispensing
this stuff here and it seems to be working"—and in
one sense, it certainly was: in my four weeks in the Valley,
and later, during the year I spent intermittently checking
out AA meetings, I ran into case after case where the speakers
seemed to be talking themselves by main force into the
symptoms of "addictive personality" and conforming to type
a little bit more each day—until their suggestibility and pliability
and inner softness seemed like the real symptoms,
while the ones they'd started out with were just decoys. These
people would agree to anything, it seemed, in order to come
in from the cold and warm themselves at the fire; and since
those who didn't were deemed incurable and constitutionally
incapable of facing the truth—yes, the stuff they were
dispensing worked. How could it not?
But in another sense, I wasn't quite so sure it was working,
because I'd already met at least three people who'd been
here before. What did this mean? Did you have to keep doing
this stuff? Think about it later. As I reeled from the rap
session that first Sunday, I simply felt vaguely, and I can't
tell you how vaguely, like a recruit who's been stuffed into
the same-size uniform as all the other recruits, because it's
the only size they have. "One disease fits all." Well, why not?

122 /Sheed
I hadn't come here to argue, and maybe the uniform fit better
than I thought.
The other thing I'd learned from the rapmeister was that
the world of sobriety was even more disagreeable and unlike
the civilized world than I'd feared. Around here it was perfectly
in order for the grown-ups to treat us like backward
infants and jump all over our answers and, if we did manage
to say something smart, insist on the last word anyway.
"In my judgment," begins the patient, or straight man,
and before he can get any further, the authority figure
pounces on him like Robin Hood jumping out of a tree onto
the fat sheriffs back. "Your judgment—you mean the judgment
that got you up to a kilo a day [or whatever]? The same
wonderful judgment that left you staring at your face in toilet
water every night? I thought you'd handed your judgment
over to Mr. Smirnov [or Herr Heroin or King Cocaine]
on permanent loan. So is that the judgment you're appealing
to now?"
If I had answered back, I would have said, "That's right—
and it's the same judgment that brought me here, Jack. Silly
me, huh?" This was a particularly tough argument to keep
out of: obviously we hadn't used our judgment before, and it
was high time we started doing so. But what purpose was
served by ridiculing this battered old faculty? Surely we had
to patch it up and send it back into battle anyhow—so what
was the point of tearing it down like this?
Which shows how much I knew about brainwashing.
Soon after that, maybe the next day, I got another big fat
clue. Every morning began with a group therapy session,
which differed from a rap session only in that we were allowed
to talk a little longer before the gavel came banging
down on our heads. Anyway, the subject this day was something
called "low self-esteem," a phrase which, incredibly
enough, hadn't yet reached my ivory tower in this spring of
1988.
Did it have anything to do with the virtue of humility
that little papists like me had been taught to cultivate? Only
kidding. I wasn't that blessedly detached from the culture
around me, the air we all breathe. In our breathtakingly ignorant
society, no lesson has been more thoroughly and uni-
Notes on a Brainwashing/ 123
versally learned than the absolute necessity of loving oneself,
before one can hope to love anyone else; the message
hit the motion picture screen as early as the mid-forties and
has been hitting it and the Box methodically ever since. The
only thing that took me off stride was this namby-pamby
way of putting it. My own self-satisfaction had always been
such a robust, full-bodied affair that it was hard to imagine
squeezing it into such a prissy formula.
"Self-esteem" was, moreover, a phrase that put me fatally
in mind of a Jane Austen clergyman patting his stomach.
"Mr. Collins was a man of considerable self-esteem, to
the vast amusement of his friends and the mild astonishment
of such parishioners as gave thought to the matter"—
and normally, this would have had me off and running into,
maybe, a Dickens variation. "No one in the city had ever
questioned Mr. Pickwick's self-esteem, although his title to
it was sometimes a matter of the most intense debate," and
so on.
But that is the difference between sick and well: nothing
strikes you as funny, and nothing the outside world can do
to you seems worse than the way you feel already. I had by
now swallowed a gallon of infelicitous verbiage around here,
and my palate was quite numb. If self-esteem was the way
they wanted to put it, fine with me. It didn't amuse me, but
it didn't bother me either. It was gray on gray.
This being said, it did seem that accusing us of low selfesteem
at this point was pretty much like shooting fish in a
barrel. Anybody who felt good about himself at this particular
time and place must be self-deluded indeed, not to say
nuts. Outside of the sheer embarrassment of being here in
the first place, we were almost by definition physical and
nervous wrecks, incapable of feeling good about anything.
As I mulled the question in my mind, preparatory to placing
my head in the stocks for the group's inspection, I realized
that my own self-esteem was usually as good as my last
review, subtracted from or added to the vast reserve one
needs to get into the writing game in the first place, and
adjusted to the last decimal by how I felt about that morning's
work.
In other words, as with many artists from the best to the

124/Sheed
bogus, my work was myself by this time, and it stood in for
all the blows and all the praise, the raspberries and the roses
that normal people receive in person. The typical artist, in
my experience, barely even takes in compliments that don't
relate to his work, unless they come from beautiful women,
and he certainly isn't interested in compliments or insults
to his character. Tell him he's drawn a great line or written a
perfect bar of music and you can follow it with every term of
abuse known to man: he won't even hear you. "Perfect. The
fellow said my sonata was "perfect."'
But suddenly I was stripped of my alter ego, my standin.
I hadn't worked that morning, and I hadn't wanted to.
And just like that, I wasn't a writer anymore—but I wasn't
anything else either. So okay, I have low self-esteem—tell
me what to do about it, and let's get started on it.
Round and round the circle we went, each of us lower in
self-esteem than the one before, like tourists competing in
the limbo, the dance that ends in a crawl. But the antidote
never arrived, or, if it did, I missed it. Instead the message
seemed to be that feeling bad about ourselves was a step in
the right direction and that if we ever started to feel better,
it probably meant we were succumbing to "grandiosity," a
catchall word worthy of the Jesuits. There was no escaping
from grandiosity even if you decided to make a break for
daylight: it waited at every exit as Pride waits for the young
Catholic.
In my determination to play ball, I decided that perhaps
what they meant by low self-esteem was what I'd always
thought of as a lack of confidence. In which case, we were in
business (and besides it was my turn and I had to say something).
Once my own spiel was dutifully delivered to the
group, I fell to daydreaming about the subject. My peculiar
upbringing, which had shuttled me back and forth over
oceans and class barriers, had left me as alert as a jungle
fighter to all kinds of signals real and imaginary. As soon as
a new guy entered the pub, I'd ask myself, How do you talk
to this one? English or American? Sports or weather, or
Whither the Novel? The mysterious moods of drunks are of
no help in this respect. Nine o'clock's nice guy is ten o'clock's
psychotic killer. So you could never put your gun away. Then,
Notes on a Brainwashing/ 125
again, England, with its quagmire of unwritten rules, presented
one kind of problem (I can still hear the mumbletitters
along the table because some damn-fool Yank has lit
a cigarette before the Queen has been toasted. Too priceless)
and America, with its impenetrable politeness, presented
another. You could make every kind of chump of yourself
in America and never know it. Indeed I'd been watching
Englishmen do this very thing all my life, and had borne the
embarrassment they should have felt, on my own back, like
a martyr in a farce.
So maybe that's why I drank (as if one needed a reason?)
In my heart I knew this was all nonsense as soon as I thought
it. If my myth about wanting to talk to the guys at the bar
was based on anything at all, I had the story the wrong way
round: I would have stopped drinking to talk to them. Booze
blunts your social instincts and makes you horribly vulnerable,
a transcultural chump all ready for roasting, and I had
always avoided drinking among strangers if I could help it,
or even among friends who wouldn't match me drink for
drink, like two nations agreeing to disarm at the same pace.
All in all embarrassment had been a great force for sobriety
in my life, if not the only one, and had kept me from making
God knows how many silly phone calls to famous politicians
and friends I hadn't seen for years, besides saving me, at
least since college days, from the irremediable sin of talking
back to policemen.
Stop daydreaming, you in the back! The worst thing you
could do in group therapy was not to speak at all, and I'd
already seen one laconic character, a rustic old New Englander
pummeled mercilessly for not opening up and letting
us share him. So whenever the talk turned to self-esteem,
as incidentally it tended to do (Steinem is right) if
women spoke first and proposed the agenda, I offered them
this again, a displaced Englishman's infinite fear of embarrassment,
because it was the best I could do. Who knows—
maybe it was true, it sounded bad enough to be true.
Meanwhile, the real bad news kept on coming hot and
heavy. The Valley had only four weeks to cut us down to
size, which in my case would reduce me from about three
inches tall to barely visible. A diet of humility designed for

126 /Sheed
knocking the stuffing out of a monster of arrogance can make
short work of a borderline depressive, and most of the time
I neither agreed nor disagreed but just lay there and let the
bulldozer do its deadly work. If I didn't have low self-esteem
when I got here, I'd sure as heck have it by the time I left.
A month of this pounding seemed, as you might suppose,
to stretch to infinity like the winter term at a boarding
school. But for a complete brainwash it was probably barely
enough. So in the manner of a cop leaving the lights shining
in your eyes even while he's not actually torturing you, my
counselor presented me with a lugubrious pile of books (plus
a bill for them, which rankled) to absorb between sessions.
Fortunately, he didn't follow me into my room, so I didn't
have to make things worse by reading them—just having
them around and dipping occasionally was dreary enough.
For instance: "When I came into AA, was I a desperate person?
Did I have a soul-sickness? Was I so sick of myself and
my way of living that I couldn't stand looking at myself in
mirrors?" No, I decided, playing along as best I could. I was
sick of feeling lousy, period. And when I looked in the mirror,
I saw nothing worse than a damn fool having a very bad
day. But the book was insistent. "What makes AA work?
The first thing is to have a revulsion against myself and my
way of living." And so on.
The above thoughts were recommended respectively for
January 1 and 2 (I didn't get to January 3), presumably every
year come rain or come shine, even as a priest must
remind himself even on holidays that "dust thou art and
unto dust thou shalt return." In fact, the little black book
they were drawn from could almost pass for a priest's breviary
in its stark black sobriety. But it is not a religious book,
they were suspiciously quick to tell you, because AA is not a
religion.
The speed with which religion was invariably disowned,
in almost audible italics, led me to suppose that someone
must be into deep denial about this—a denial that reached
a crescendo in a series of talks we had to go to after group
therapy, roguishly entitled "God and All That." It seemed
that there was no hope for any of us if we didn't submit our
sick souls forthwith to a Higher Power. Bill Wilson, the
T Notes
on a Brainwashing / 127
founder of AA, had strongly recommended this procedure,
and a recommendation of Bill's instantly became a commandment
etched in stone to his followers, almost the way a
founder's words are sacralized in a real religion.'
This imperative did much to explain the extreme variation
on Christian humility that had been mainlined into my
veins ever since I got here. Even the rationale for it was the
same. In order to submit fully to God, one must shed every
vestige of one's old, false self to find one's true self in Him. It
is a leap of faith, even if you already believe, thrilling and
scary as a tunnel of love to the zillionth power, but the light
at the end was said to be worth it, if you make it. If you
don't, of course, you're stuck, with nothing to fall back on.
With all belief in yourself gone, you now have to believe in a
Higher Power, or be damned.
. So what kind of Higher Power were they offering here,
what sort of light to justify the leap in the dark? At this
point we seemed to hit some kind of snag. The desperate
jauntiness of that title "God and All That" had already given
me a clue, and as soon as the sermon began I had the whole
picture. The speaker was like some kind of minimalist Christian
minister who, having insisted on a particular doctrine,
hastily proceeds to empty it of all content until Voltaire himself
could agree to it, but not a single soul anywhere could
die for it.
This was a serious gap. Even my own Catholic Church,
which offers a God entire and undiluted and well worth dying
for if one can believe in Him enough, doesn't expect many
people actually to do so. The flesh is weak, and little Catholics
are not generally expected to give up their old selves
completely or take leaps in the dark, but only to do the best
they can. Yet Happy Valley was demanding a level of selfabnegation
of all of us, including some fresh-faced teenagers
recently blindsided by cocaine, worthy of Trappist monks
and Hindu holy men, in the name and service of—what?
It wouldn't be fair to my lugubrious pile of books not to mention that I found
Wilson's own story fascinating and clearly the record of a significant man, well
worth saving from at least some of his followers.

;
I
128 / Sheed
Where the Unitarian minister gives you a stripped-down
God, the counselor today went him one layer further. The
Higher Power didn't have to be God at all, but whatever you'd
like it to be, the Higher Power of your preference. Although
the speaker's preference was obviously AA itself as the ultimate
in Higher Powers, he didn't even insist on that. The
straight talk and hardheadedness they so prided themselves
on evidently ceased abruptly just as we approached the heart
of the matter. Everything about AA, as taught here, positively
ached to be a religion, but religion is a well-known
turnoff, so they leave the altar empty.
A lively discussion ensued as we rummaged among various
alternate gods, trying to find one you could possibly
lean on, and I pitched in with my own William Jamesian, or
we it Bergsonian, interpretation of the phrase. One's Higher
Power was the force that makes flowers grow through cement,
or lions survive in high mountains, or humans (to use
James's own example) lift several times their own weight to
rescue loved ones from wreckage. It was the £lan vital, the
life force, and I knew it well from polio days.
The discussion was so all-inconclusive that I wondered
why they kept circling back to the question and didn't just
move on to something else. As it was, our various Higher
Powers seemed to cancel out and weaken each other. My
reading of it didn't seem to interest anyone else much, but
theirs didn't interest me either. In fact, I never sensed much
connection between any of the various inner lights on display
at such sessions.
For myself, I was soon off and daydreaming again, and
remembering the last time I had made a sustained pitch to
my official Higher Power, which was when I asked God, by
name, to help me out with polio. For as much as three years
I had prayed nonstop for a cure, until at age seventeen I had
come to my senses in the icy waters of Lourdes, and had
realized I was not going to get one—and that I didn't need
one. I was used to polio, which meant as far as I was concerned
that I was cured, and my prayers had been answered.
But a habit dies hard, and for some years after that I had
continued to utter reflexive mental prayers for every emergency—"Dear
God, help me with this and that"—until one
Notes on a Brainwashing / 129
day I saw how childish it was, and what an invitation to stay
childish, and I gave it up just like that, although not necessarily
the faith that inspired it. The problem of why God
allows suffering that so vexed Ivan Karamazov seemed from
my experience to prey on people who have to watch pain
more than people who directly suffer it, and to this day I
haven't met a single polio veteran who had any trouble with
the problem of God and pain. But generalizations about this
subject are by their nature a hopeless mixture of the subjective
and the imaginary, and I can only report that such
pain as I've encountered myself has made religion seem more
reasonable, not less.
But not this time. If I was ever going to return to my
rather whiny intercessions, it certainly wasn't going to be
now. I had gotten myself into this mess, and it was up to me
to dig myself out as best I could. I would have felt, once
again, embarrassed to drag God into this. And besides, I
had just an inkling, not yet a full-blown insight, that harping
on spirituality was not the route for me, that this was as
much a sensual experience as a spiritual one. I'd heard somewhere
that abstinence from booze and tobacco enhances your
taste buds, your sense of smell, and even your eyesight (the
jury is out on hearing, though I now believe music sounds
better too). And that's what I concentrated on now. Once
upon a time, I had discovered the incredible pleasures of
eyesight when I put on glasses for the first time and found
myself staring transfixed into the window of a hardware store:
I had no idea that power drills could be so lovely. So I enjoyed
imagining that sobering up could be like buying the
equivalent of glasses for each of my senses. And every now
and then, I would get these emanations, even down at the
bottom of my well, of strength returning on a scale I hadn't
experienced in years. Although the light might be snuffed
out ruthlessly a minute later, I could remember where it
was and what it looked like. When I got out of here, I reasoned,
there would be a huge self-indulgence gap to fill every
day—drunks devote an incredible number of man-hours
to their own pleasure—and at least some of the pleasure
came from anticipation, which was something I could start
on right away during those flickering moments.

130/Sheed
My standard pipe dream, probably common to prisoners
everywhere, usually took the form of picturing my old life
pretty much as before, but tackled from a fresh angle instead
of slurring my way past the hostess and the cops on
the way home, I would dazzle them with epigrams. And I
would sniff the night air as never before, and thrill to the
scrambled eggs I planned to make when I got home.
But if there was one thing Happy Valley frowned on more
than anything, it was your old life, which to them was a
tracery of pitfalls and potholes. Obviously, we must start all
over—the great American temptation; we must be born again
and yet again, as often as it takes. But here we hit another
snag, because along with the problematic God they were
offering us at journey's end, came a threadbare, unfurnished
heaven to move into with Him, Her, It, Them. One session
was devoted to the subject of weekends and how to get
through them (there was no question of looking forward to
them); and the sheer thought of finding something useful to
do in the house or out in the yard on a lank Sunday afternoon
made me almost ungovernably thirsty—for the
first time, I realized, since I'd been here. If anything could
make me reach for a drink over the warnings of my
precancerous tongue, it would be a weekend spent on the
Happy Valley plan.
And then there were the daily trips to the Happy Valley
workshop, where we were encouraged to lose ourselves in
modeling clay or woodwork. For fear of looking unoccupied,
I reached for some crayons and dashed off a couple of the
kind of cartoons I used to draw when I was stuck in bed at
the age of fourteen, and the supervisor greeted them with
the gushing enthusiasm of a parent at a show-and-tell. Such
promise! I really should think of taking this up seriously.
Trouble was, the cartoons took eight minutes tops, so
I'd have to do an awful lot of them to fill the day, and they
weren't going to get any better. My art had frozen in place at
fifteen, and wasn't about to start moving now: Grandpa Moses
I wasn't. As for woodwork—again I felt the tickle in my throat.
These people knew more ways to make you thirsty than
Budweiser and Miller put together. But I knew that these
things, woodwork and yardwork and make-work, wouldn't
Notes on a Brainwashing / 131
really drive me to drink, they'd drive me to despair, and someone
would find me hanging by a promising homemade noose
from a freshly whittled rafter on a Sunday afternoon in August
that I was just trying to get through in order to get to
that day of days, Monday!
But Happy Valley's own heart didn't seem to be in salvation
by woodwork either, because most of the time the workshop
was occupied or closed, and the inmates just stayed in
the television room, where they sat in long rows staring at
the cartoons. I'd never seen grown-ups looking at TV cartoons
before, and I wondered what went on in their heads.
Were they thinking or what? And if addiction was a disease
of the total personality, and if we had just four weeks to do
something about it, was this really the best way to spend
the time? Shouldn't we be talking to each other or reading
something?
Before I left, I would make several good friends who did
like to talk, and independently we built our own world in
the midst of the larger one, but the institute itself didn't
seem to know what to do with us between browbeatings,
except play records over and over again of a hearty, goodsense
clergyman, telling it like it is: it was vain to protest
that perhaps three hearings was enough for one of Father
Goodbody's jokes, or that the shiny pink face I (perhaps
unfairly) pictured the jokes issuing from was exactly what I
most feared about sobriety. The records were smilingly compulsory
("Laughter is the best medicine, and we're going to
give you your dose right now!"), and I just sat there considering—was
I, too, destined to turn pink and shiny? Would I
too make hearty jokes? Never mind. If I didn't thrill to Father
Goodbody, I was in deep denial.
That was on weekend nights, when the local AA chapters
were not in session. The policy during the week was, as
noted, to keep us occupied almost every minute, so we
wouldn't go getting ideas. But come Saturday, the place
seemed to change its mind and leave us completely to our
wretched devices, heightening the normal gloom of a Sunday
to a screaming crescendo of angst, and thus preparing
us for life on the outside, I suppose.
By Saturday night one wanted company so badly that I

.
132/ Sheed
actually found myself looking forward to our weekly pummeling
from the rap sergeant the next day and to the group
therapy session that started the real week, frustrating though
this invariably was. Group therapy, one would imagine
would be the one chance for us to connect with each other;
the word we used over and over again was "sharing," which
suggests a certain vestigial give-and-take. But no sooner had
one speaker tried to address what the last one had said than
the counselor would jump in like a boxing referee on steroids,
breaking up clinches before they could even form.
"You're supposed to address the group," he would bark,
"not just Fred." I suppose he figured that any advice we gave
each other was bound to be bad and he would only have to
undo it later—so why not jump in with the good stuff right
away? "The way you should feel..." he would actually say,
which is how you know you're in the middle of a brainwashing.
The next step would obviously be a correct set of dreams
for each night of the week and a uniform personal history.
I guess it all came under the heading "ironing out our
differences," because it turned out that not only did we all
have the same disease but we all needed exactly the same
medicine for it despite the crazy-quilt nature of our group.
Alongside the taciturn old-timer, who was a Valium head,
sat, for instance, a jolly matriarch from Providence who had,
like many of us, stayed at the party a wee bit too long and
had no trouble talking whatever. Well, twenty lashes and
five Hail Marys for the two of them, says the judge, peering
dimly over his spectacles.
Across the way sat the teenagers, including one who, to
the untrained eye, needed a good spanking before you could
even start talking to him, and a fresh-faced lad of a kind
you'd be delighted if your daughter brought home some night.
The kids—who came and went in the usual rotator band—
were for their part, divided into cocaine addicts, who'd
thought they could beat the game, as kids have thought since
time began, and everything addicts, who'd started on their
mother's medicine cabinets and moved on to glue sniffing
and anything else that could be sniffed, swallowed or injected.
Back on the other side of the net, the veterans tended to
Notes on a Brainwashing/ 133
be mostly drunks who were congenitally suspicious of anything
called drugs and quite immune to other forms of feeling
high. Thus, variously equipped, the bunch of us sat talking
blindly past each other, "sharing" but making no contact,
with the sound of the referee's whistle squealing constantly
in our ears.
My heart went out particularly to the kids, who were
being pounded day and night with industrial-strength
therapy when a few kind or sharp words might have done
just as well. A couple of times, I actually broke through the
lines to try to impart a little common sense—nothing brilliant,
which was quite beyond me, just the stale fruit of experience.
Even if we did all have the same disease, it surely
made a difference at what age we'd gotten it. Along with all
the flotsam of pop psychology that had drifted into this place
had come an across-the-board egalitarianism that I couldn't
quite swallow even in my 97% absorbent phase. Addiction
might make the whole world kin, but it doesn't make it the
same age, and even a worthless life accretes experience that
can't be had any faster, some of which is worth passing on.
To wit, to a boy suffering from obscene tantrums, I suggested
a couple of insults with G ratings that could probably
madden his tormentors just as much as his puny supply
of swearwords. He was particularly taken with one recommendation
for use on enemy taxi drivers: "My, you're
ugly—I mean hideous," and is probably on his way to becoming
a theater critic, if he hasn't been killed yet.
It was exhilarating to try sneaking such pearls past the
supervisor, and I remember two other small successes. To a
girl who said she planned to declare her complete independence
from her family when she got home, I said, speaking
for parents everywhere, "You mean you're going to pay your
own bills?" No, it certainly didn't mean that. "Well, then, it
won't be real independence will it? It'll just be words and
dreams, like before."
I said my advice wasn't brilliant. It's just that you can
never be too sure about the obvious—somebody might have
missed it, as this young lady, along with half the new republics
in Russia, had missed the boring connection between
independence and money.

134/Sheed
My third client hadn't missed a thing, but had actually
gotten the gist faster than any of us. "Well, supposing I go
home and try my best, but just can't make it the first time
and I have to come back here—that wouldn't be so bad, would
it?"
No doubt the official answer to this was simple enough—
something about not "projecting" into the future and taking
things "one day at a time" (never forgetting, on the other
hand, that "tomorrow is another day"). But the boy had been
listening to the music, not the words, and the tune they
were playing over and over was "The Prodigal Son." Never
has an organization had such a soft spot for fallen sinners—
and why not? The disease, as they describe it, is so overwhelming,
and its victims so weak and helpless in the face
of it, that defeat is almost to be expected. Every fall from
grace is a testament to the fierceness of the enemy and incidentally
to the absolute necessity of their own role as therapists.
The fact that our hyperactive counselor did not answer
right away spoke volumes.
Since I considered defeat completely out of the question,
I couldn't afford to be in two minds about this myself, and I
stepped up smartly into the vacuum to say, "When you came
here this time, Jack, you probably had a brass band to see
you off, and people murmuring 'What a mature fellow, what
a wise choice.' Don't expect any of that next time."
In each of these cases, the kid looked around as if a
lightbulb had just turned on above his or her head. Hey,
that's right. As I say, you never know about the obvious.
I only wished, though, that I felt half as snappy as the
above interjections make me sound. The truth is that (1)
these were almost the only words I can recall saying voluntarily
and (2) having decided not to argue, I'd almost forgotten
how to, and if they said we were all absolutely powerless
against booze, fine with me, boss. Indeed, I'd gone along so
thoroughly that when I finally got out, I half expected the
first bottle of Beefeater gin that I saw behind a restaurant
bar to walk over to my table and pour itself down my throat.
And it didn't have to be gin, they warned over and over.
A wayward spoonful of that old devil cough medicine or even
mouthwash would be enough to start any of us off, and blood-
Notes on a Brainwashing / 135
curdling tales circulated of people who'd picked up the wrong
glass at cocktail parties and been turned into ravening monsters
by a sip of someone else's vodka and tonic.
Even when you're not arguing, certain propositions stick
in your throat. And I wondered whether this tom-tom insistence
on our helplessness might not have something a tiny
bit self-fulfilling about it. Simply as psychological strategy,
which everything was around here, the "fatal dose of cough
medicine" doctrine seemed like a two-edged sword. On the
plus side, it put the fear of God into us, which seems to be a
necessary precondition of abstinence. All my life, I've heard
people say that they really ought to quit drinking (and by
the time they say it, they're already lit); and the next time
one sees them, they're at it again, drinking themselves
miserable, sipping and swearing to quit in almost the same
breath.
The absolutism preached by places like Happy Valley
certainly has this to be said for it: it breaks these deadlocks
and induces an exhilarating sense of danger. The enemy is
everywhere, even in your medicine cabinet. The stakes have
been raised, and every moment is an adventure.
On the minus side, one person's bracing whiff of fear is
another one's stark terror, and at one of our compulsory AA
meetings I would witness a lady consumed with panic because
a favorite eating place was about to install a bar. Where
to go, how to hide? Life on the run suits some people better
than others, and forbidden fruit exerts different appeals to
different temperaments: one man's wonderful challenge and
chance to defy the gods is made of the same material as
another man's sweat-drenching nightmare. The forbidden
fruit is going to get you eventually, thinks the second one.
So why not get it over with? I remember as a child standing
on the platform of our rinky-dink village train station and
reaching reflexively for the railing in back of me as the express
train roared toward us—only to find my mother gripping
it tight too. Flinging oneself in front of trains, or from
high windows, has absolutely no appeal except inevitability,
yet for just that moment, my mother and I and, I believe,
countless others could have been addicts of flinging ourselves
at trains.

136/Sheed
If reasonably normal people (my mother wasn't an addict
of anything but detective stories) could be tempted by
such altogether uncomfortable fates, imagine the mental
state of a tosspot who is told over and over that one drink
will return him to hell. The appeal to surrender, to lie down
and give up, or sit back and enjoy, plays right into his court.
After one sip, he won't be accountable, old buddy. He has a
disease that certifies him as helpless, you see. And we'll
understand his fall, unto seventy times seven. It is no disgrace
to lose to such an overwhelming enemy.
But the authorities also assured us at regular intervals
that their methods worked, and again I took their word for
it, only registering small blips of dissent on my own good
days or right after I'd heard yet another veteran reminisce
about his days at Betty Ford's place or Hazelden. Was that
how it worked—repeated immersions? Never mind. In such
a total atmosphere as this, and with your spirits as low as
chemistry can make them, you believe what you're told, by
God, and you accept any rescue that presents itself.
And yet and yet. I recall wondering, even in that state, if
they weren't asking people to give up a little too much of
themselves, if they weren't cutting away too much live tissue
to get at the tumor.
My counselor framed the matter succinctly for me when
he said, "You have to believe that your sobriety is the most
important single thing in the world."
No, it isn't, I thought, there are a hundred more important
things. A thousand.
On my occasional frisky moments I even wondered
whether they weren't making unnecessarily heavy weather
out of this whole thing. Drinking is bad for you, so don't do
it. How's that for a program?
Only kidding, guys, I know it's much more complicated,
or we wouldn't be here, right? These playful spasms were
soon over, and angst was always just around the corner. So
shut up and listen. The Happy Valley way of doing things
worked, worked, worked; it worked because we believed it,
and we believed it because it worked: all I had to do was buy
into this equation at either end and all would be well.
I must have settled the matter in their favor a dozen
Notes on a Brainwashing I 137
times—and yet, the continued assaults on our own resourcefulness
and ability to help ourselves continued to bother
me, like an itch in the center of my head, every time I heard
it. At one particular meeting a kid piped up to say that he'd
been practicing his willpower lately and felt pretty good about
it, and you would have supposed that he had blasphemed
the Twelve Steps themselves. Speaker after speaker worked
the lad over, until the AA meeting began to resemble a Communist
show trial. "Trying to lick this thing with willpower
is like trying to stop diarrhea with willpower" was the
showstopper. And I thought, before I had time to correct my
thinking, "So what? You can't stop diarrhea by going to meetings
either." Metaphors have to do a better job than that,
baby.
But the kid seemed quite crushed, which I suppose
proved that his accusers were right. If he lost his moxie this
easily, it certainly wouldn't have stood up long to the pressure
of friends urging him to have just a little nip in honor
of that good man Saint Patrick.
What spooked me was that they didn't even know this
guy before passing definitive judgment on his willpower. Lots
of people presumably go to meetings because they're having
some trouble with their drinking, even they don't know how
serious, and they hope to learn something here. But there
are no degrees in the mind of a hard-liner. If you're here at
all, you must be helpless, now and for the rest of your days,
unless you put yourself immediately in the hands of the
Higher Power of your choice. To the true believer, there is no
such thing as a little bit alcoholic or a small drinking problem,
and the believer's mission, as laid down in the twelfth
step, is to help you to see this too. Otherwise he can't do a
thing for you. And if this absolutism turns you off, as it has
several people I know and who knows how many others, too
bad for you: your heart is hardened in denial, and you're
not ready to give up drinking yet. Bill Wilson's first step has
been promoted from a useful suggestion to the narrow and
only gate through which initiates must enter, even if they
have to shrink themselves like Alice in Wonderland to do so.
At an intramural AA meeting, manned mostly by my fellow
shavetails, I sensed that we were watching each other

138 / Sheed
like ferrets to see who would say the magic words "I'm an
alcoholic" next. Nobody was telling us to say them, we had
to arrive there on our own or our own confession was of no
use; but it had become clear that if we didn't arrive there
we were not being honest with ourselves, but were locked in
denial, and would have to stay shivering outside while the
others warmed themselves by the fire.
So one by one, we came over—myself, I must admit, with
fingers crossed and only because I felt silly saying "Hi, I'm
Bill, and I may or may not be an alcoholic, but I'd like to get
a word in edgewise." The few stout souls who did use this
formula seemed like second-class citizens, and all of them
came out with their hands up eventually. Whatever one's
motive, there was the same giddy relief in the air afterward,
as if another soul had found Jesus and Happy Valley had
done its job once more. And I'd guess that the new converts
were quite pleased, too, at having caused such glee, and
were soon caught up in it themselves.
It was an instructive brushup on all the old playground
lessons. "Hey, Sheed doesn't think we ought to pray to win
football games. Isn't that right?" The score is 7-7 at halftime,
and we need all the help we can get. So you wind up
leading the damn prayer. Since I planned, for my tongue's
sake, to give up drinking forthwith whether I was an
alcoholic or not, the more good reasons I could find to support
my resolution the better. So sure, "I'm an alcoholic."
Why not?
The next problem was that I didn't consider a lifetime
spent at AA meetings a sufficient inducement to quit drinking.
Although AA was, I suppose, an incontrovertible improvement
on DTs, my problem now was depression, and all
I could see before me between here and the grave were hundreds
of men in windbreakers and women in faded jeans
dragging plastic chairs across the floors of church basements,
in order to say yet again, "Hi, I'm Fred, I'm Mabel and guess
what? I'm an alcoholic."
To the depressed, all things are depressing. And months
hence, when the tide had turned, I would find AA meetings
so entertaining and packed with genuine, un-TV-like drama
that I hated to give them up. But to my abraded nerves, the
Notes on a Brainwashing / 139
clothes and chairs and voices jarred all the time I was at
Happy Valley like acid rock played into an infected ear, and
I could barely take in what they were saying. So a diet of
that was clearly not what I needed right now.
Unfortunately, what I did need, namely my usual Marx
Brothers fallback view of the situation, was quite beyond
my scope. There is no point in telling a depressive to come
out laughing, or fighting either. Next to exhorting him to
relax, no advice could be more grating or beside the point.
Fighting back was all I knew, but it would have to wait. Fight?
I could hardly drag myself out of bed.
Au contrary, as Miss Adelaide would say. At another kind
of meeting, one of the spunkier inmates had summoned the
gumption to say, "Some people have the idea that AA can
become kind of a crutch itself after a while. So what do you
say to that?" "I would tell them"—and I can't remember the
first part of what the speaker said, except that it was the
usual ingenious piffle, but the last part had me almost up
and roaring. "What's wrong with crutches anyway?" he said
with all the purring complacency of someone who never gets
answered back.
Reflexively, I gripped my canes. And if my own gumption
had been anywhere to be found today, I would have bellowed,
Til tell you what's wrong with crutches." Once upon
a time, I'd wriggled my way down from crutches to two canes
to one cane, and sometimes none, as I swung the bat at
softball games, and even the feet at dances; and now, in my
fifties, I was glumly retracing my steps and had recently gone
back to two canes, and no softball, and could make a case
that my melancholia had begun with that: my most persistent
worry even at Happy Valley was, it now surprises me to
remember, that my right foot would drop and I would need a
second brace, a second AA, to use today's metaphor. If they'd
handed me crutches as well, I would have burned them or
drowned them and gone to bed forever.
Since I already had one incurable disease, I decided then
and there that I'd just as soon not have another one. So it
came as a prodigious relief when help arrived from the least
likely of quarters (there were no likely quarters around here),
namely our Sunday rapmeister himself, who paused long

140/ Sheed
enough in his weekly hectoring and badgering to give
his own definition of what an alcoholic is or is not. "If you
can give up drinking whenever you have to," said this
wonderful man, this prince among bullies, "then you're not
an alcoholic."
Eureka! I searched my soul with a dawning delight. To
be fair, I didn't strictly speaking know if I could give up booze,
because I'd never tried before. But the rewards for doing so
had never seemed so sweet. It seemed that if I could just
persuade my mangy old willpower to go along and grunt "No"
from time to time, these people could never lay another glove
on me, or rap at me, or straighten me out in any way, shape,
or form. Better still, I would never have to give one more
thought to my self-esteem for as long as I lived.
Right now, the question of whether I could do it would
have to be put on hold while I waited for my nervous system
to be repaired, if it could be: like one of New York City's
bridges, it might have passed the point of no return. I had
no firm reason to suppose I would ever feel better, and
through the foggy wretched time that lay ahead, the Happy
Valley brand of scare talk would continue to weigh heavily
on me like a convoy of tractors crossing the Williamsburg,
and the smear campaign against willpower and self-reliance
would send shudders through my whole rickety structure.
On the plus side, though, their warnings gave me more
reasons to abstain from booze than I would ever need. The
truth was that I would have had to be absolutely insane to
try drinking in my current condition. Besides my cancer
deterrent (which they absolutely refused to take seriously)
and my oft-stated desire to get back to work (they'd heard
that one before), I had a motive they had noticed, which was
an obsession with sleep. And surely they knew, as I knew,
that if I had a drink now, the insomnia would be instantaneous
and ferocious, the waking nightmare to end waking
nightmares, and this would come on the very first night,
before I'd even hit my stride as a recidivist. So what was the
point of all this jawboning? Why did I have to be told
over and over not to do something so totally crazy and
unrewarding?
The quick answer is that some of us really were that
Notes on a Brainwashing/ 141
insane, so all of us had to take our medicine—if we were so
sure we didn't need it, we shouldn't be here. And this was
reasonable, I supposed, I shouldn'tbe here, but I didn't know
where else to go.
People in search of a medium-strength brainwashing are
just out of luck these days because the Happy Valleys of
this world are geared to desperate customers only, not
pantywaists who've gone over the edge; so if one of the latter
staggers in by mistake, he shouldn't be surprised to find
himself flung on the operating table being prepped for major
surgery. There is never a minute to waste, because the prototypical
drunk who strays into these places, or is tricked
into coming, is probably only passing though sobriety on a
whim, his own or someone else's, and as soon as he's rebuilt
his strength, he'll be off and flying again like new, unless
they can break his will, his wings, in the short time he's
in their power.
Enter next a pale-faced wreck (well, they all look like
that when they get here) who's been taking depressive drugs
until he can hardly raise his head—well, never mind about
the details. He drinks too, right? So he's a drunk, and all
drunks have the same disease, and whap, into the black
hole he goes, where they hit him with everything they've got.
If I could just have made it into the depressive ward, presumably
I would have been safe.
Up to a point. One day, I had lunch with someone from
that ward, and the sadness was quite overwhelming, such
that it could not have been made worse even by the slapping
around he'd have got in my section. Depression needs no
help from outside; once it turns up the screws, it doesn't
matter where you are. My case against Happy Valley was
not so much that it makes one even more depressed, since
in most cases that would be impossible, but that there were
so many things they didn't talk about, or warn me about, in
between their bursts of ominous prattle. Of the many gaseous
words I heard there, only a handful were of any use at
all. One purely factual lecture sticks in my mind, concerning
the subject of drinking and sleep, the gist of which was
that I'd worn out the cushion that made alcohol a sedative
and would henceforth find it a stimulant. And there was

142 / Sheed
another one about allergies to formaldehyde, which, to my
fevered brain, made clear why outdoor swimming pools made
my feet itch.
All this and cancer too. Believe me, doctor, I'm sold—
you don't have to hit me again. I'm not going to drink anymore,
okay? I hadn't been going to when I got here and I
certainly wasn't going to now, even if I had to hire a gorilla
to lock me in my room. But my resolve obviously didn't show,
because it did not spare me the Child Psychology I treatment
from my counselor at our penultimate session. "I can
just see you a month from now," he said, hardening his voice
like a marine sergeant in the movies, "back at the bar, sippin'
away." ("I'd rather die, sir!" I guess I was supposed to say.)
I asked to be excused from my last meeting with this
dangerously overheated man, because I couldn't face going
another round with his pet phrases, so I suppose his
impression of me as a hopeless weakling was confirmed
forever. But his hellfire preaching had already sunk in sufficiently
to convince me that abstaining from booze was quite
beyond unassisted human power. So in the same muddle
of despair and curiosity and nothing-to-lose that had brought
me here, I asked if I might try some Antabuse before
leaving, the stuff that makes you violently ill on contact with
booze.
For the curious—the Antabuse made me violently ill even
without contact with booze. But my request for it impressed
the authorities mightily. "We didn't think you were serious,"
they explained, completing the cycle of misunderstanding.
Mother of Battles, what did I have to do to convince them I
was serious? Here I thought I was being Job on his dunghill,
and they thought I was trying to be Groucho. Thus perish
all clowns.
On my way out the door, they tried to set me up with one
more rap session, this one to include my wife. But knowing
the nature of their rap sessions—and the nature of my wife,
bless her—I managed to veto it. Later on, I might have enjoyed
the riot of crossed purposes and clashing cultures or,
alternatively, the strained efforts on both sides to understand
each other, repeatedly frustrated by the language barrier—but
not until my head felt a little better. Not until I saw
Notes on a Brainwashing / 143
the point of jokes again.
Now that I was heading back into the real world, I had to
decide how to handle whatever this thing was on my own.
And as with polio, the first step seemed to be to keep the
cast as small as possible. I might be sick, but my wife certainly
wasn't, and there was no way I was going to drag her
into this, or ask her to adapt her life to mine. Outside of the
impertinence of the request, I believe it would actually have
increased the pressure. If booze was going to be a problem,
I didn't want to add a thirsty, reproachful wife, or friends
who didn't call anymore, to my caseload. It's a lot easier to
write a book by yourself than to bring a play to Broadway
with actors and technicians oinking and bleating along the
way. Yourself you can ride herd on; yourself, beat down and
discouraged as you may be, is the least of your worries.
The other thing is that if you want to ease your way back
into the human race, you have to accept it pretty much as it
comes. Addiction is, among other things, a social disease,
and you haven't really licked it until you can face the world
just as it is, with a smile or a growl as you prefer. And this
meant emphatically not asking it to change, or to pay me
any mind whatever.
Brave talk, and at the moment not much more than that.
But, as I hope the next two chapters will demonstrate, this
was the right medicine for me—although, as they may also
indicate, I would barely know I was taking it half the time.
While I was still at Happy Valley downing my phenobarbital
every night, I was subject to bursts of lucidity, and could
form these Napoleonic plans; later, I would find myself just
hanging on. Yet, at my most incoherent, I would still know
that it was my fight and no one else's, although advice was
welcome from any quarter, and I would overdose on shrinks
for a while.
The question is, Would this medicine have done anyone
else any good, or was it specific to me? The answer depends
squarely on whether one has an incurable disease or merely
(to use a phrase the therapists had almost drummed out of
the language) a bad habit. For my own purposes, I had me a
beautifully simple test of whether I had a disease or not. If I
took a drink or a pill right now, after the hazing those two

144 /Sheed
rascals had just put me through, I had a disease, all right.
And if I ever gave anyone cause to send me back to this
place, or to start me on another course of temperance studies
anyplace at all, I was not only diseased but crazy. The
invitation to my wife was the snapping point, and the thought
of being talked about and planned for, like a sick kid in the
next room, was enough to have me up on what was left of
my hind legs and howling. Disease? I'll show you disease!
But it turned out to be an academic question, because
not only would I find booze precisely as easy, though even
more painful, to give up than cigars, but I was about to enter
a zone where it would all seem like a bunch of sounds
anyway: disease, Higher Power, self-esteem—the rain streaking
across the windows and the wind banging on the roof
made more sense, and explained themselves better. And since
we have plenty of both out our way, Happy Valley rapidly
lost whatever reality it had and became one more strange
dream in a period of strange dreams—you know, the one
where you're sitting in kindergarten with your bony knees
sticking out from the desk and a dunce cap on your head
because you have flunked Life itself and been sent back to
start over. Talk about being born again—some of the other
students in the dream are babies, others seem to be at death's
door. But you're never too old to learn your ABCs.
Well, it was no skin off my nose, they could do what they
liked now, because at long last I was swinging down the
driveway in my own car, giddy with freedom and with the
thing I came here to cure, insomnia, which was staging a
last hurrah but felt as if it was leaving—I can't explain it
better than that. Therapeutically speaking, Happy Valley
might have been using a howitzer to kill a flea, but the flea
was dead, I knew it, and ever since I have slept like a baby,
if any pill-taking insomniac out there wants to know.
Now all I had to do was get over the howitzer, and thirtyfive
years of fun, and I'd be in the clear.
APRIL BERNARD
*
See It Does Rise
See it does rise, and will not be stalled
by the dew-point, how murky the aura, nor by the sight
of the face that has been my face, wry-turned on the shelf.
Where does it go to? It goes to the sky
which is also the sea, salted and horse-tailed
and urging toward autumn and its talent to gell
and turn all runny edges to smooth gem-cut sheen.
Straight from my sun the light shoots up,
through my hair, ecstatic, and on to the place
of all light and sharp cider, the taste of apples
pressed free, done with the bark and the bees
and the barrels: the clear golden blood you can pour
on your tongue or on the ground, it has risen past care.

146 / Bernard
The Wise Word, The Good Word
Intolerable tumult in the corridor;
storm drains wadded with melon rinds and worse;
heavy gritty drops hurling themselves like judgment
on the men who sit and sell trash—
See, the maple keys are reaped and tossed to cement,
as if in Persian carpeting, and the bodega cats
adjust their own postures, so.
So the news of the rain's passing.
Many are the other places we own
yet somehow do not hold title to;
broad and cool are their polished stone floors.
Something said is snappy, something drained down the throat
cool and thin in its coursing.
Somewhere else the sky clears like an opened eye.
Color admits and then form, whatever, and a pleasing line.
It is not as if these places could not be taken by force.
But we are contemplating a different way to speak
upon the ground that wounds so easily at the foot's passage:
Sweep, sweep, the edges of your cape in the silver and green
of the unborn maple trees.
~
BRENDA HILLMAN
Very moment
Why, I can't identify
the very moment
it might have been felt;
my bones had lit up
like those on an x-ray;
I could see the apple trees "behind"
the old self...
After death they will look for us
at the border between;
love comes in from the side;
we can't see the source—

148 / Hillman
Autumn continued,
and hadn't you
always been empty
(where you had been most nothing at all)?
Garlic sprouted on the wlndowsill: its leaves
lay parallel to the spaces, exhausted from traveling
through different parts of themselves;—
and you wanted to be
the troika, the cottage, the stubborn
little candle by which the forest would appear
but, what hesitated was most natural
it seemed like. You were the method
for the blank to get here...
RICHARD HOLMES
The Dancing Mariner
I once had a dream that I was dancing with an Albatross.
The Albatross was a woman, but this did not seem strange.
She held me in her white feathers, close to her breast, and we
danced in the air. We were suspended high above a tilting sea,
which glittered to the horizon with no land in sight. The rhythm
of our dancing was strong and surging, not at all like flying, but
like blood pulsing. The sense of height and rhythm was exciting,
but terrifying. In the dream I knew that the Albatross would
eventually let me fall into the sea. So I danced like someone
condemned to death when the music stops. But the Albatross
never let me go, and we were still dancing when I awoke.
This dream occurred while I was in Malta, working on a
biography of Coleridge. It was not hard to see where its images
came from, though less easy to see what they might mean.
Malta is a yellow, sand-stone island set in the Mediterranean
between Sicily and North Africa. Beyond the old historic
harbor of Valletta, it is a rocky plateau surrounded by high cliffs,
caves and seabirds. Coleridge exiled himself here for two years
in 1804-5, when it was occupied by the British during
the Napoleonic Wars. He was trying to cure himself of opium
addiction.

150 /Holmes
But he was also working with surprising efficiency as
the First Secretary to the wartime Governor, Sir Alexander
Ball. He drew up emergency legislation, wrote strategic reports,
and drafted dispatches which were sent to Nelson in
the months before Trafalgar. Coleridge also kept extensive
private diaries in Malta. In one of these, he noted that the
ballad of the "Ancient Mariner"—written six years before,
and based on the shooting of the Albatross—had now become
the symbolic story of his own life.
All this was much in my mind. During the day, I was
working on Coleridge's papers at the Royal Library, Valletta,
in a paneled room overlooking the drowsy fountain in Queen's
Square. In the evenings, I walked along the cliffs and swam
from the rocks beyond Slima until it got dark. It was November,
and though the sea was still warm, there were few visitors
and the coast was deserted. Sometimes I met people by
chance: an arms dealer from Libya, a sculptress from
Catania. On the evening before the dream I had gone dancing
at a little run-down bar, with an open terrace strung
with colored lights, on a promontory high above the sea.
In my experience, such dreams are not unusual for a
biographer, who spends many solitary hours both waking
and sleeping in the company of his subject, often over many
years. They are usually connected with the biographer's suppressed
feelings about the subject; or with parts of the
subject's life that are not fully understood; or with insights
into the subject's work which do not fit within the normal
terms of criticism. They can rarely be used within the strict
confines of the conventional biography; and will probably
never reach the final book at all. But the dream material
can sometimes be valuable. (I have often thought that it
would be interesting to write a biography entirely in the form
of dreams about the subject, set within the barest skeleton
of documentation. It would, I suppose, be a form of Illustrated
Life.)
This particular dream of dancing with the Albatross had
several repercussions for me, but one immediate outcome. I
The Dancing Mariner/ 151
began to think of Coleridge's great poem, "The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner," in terms of a modern ballet.
It struck me that the Ancient Mariner's whole story could
be brilliantly interpreted, not through criticism, but through
physical performance. Its powerful rhythms, its haunting
music, its mysterious confrontations between human and
supernatural forces, are peculiarly suited to the expressionism
of ballet. Though metaphysical in its implications, the
poem is directly and even violently physical in its action and
imagery. This physical immediacy is the essence of ballet, in
which the most subtle feeling can be rendered as movement
and gesture.
Coleridge also said (in his Table Talk,) that critics always
forgot that the Mariner was young at the time of his
original voyage. He grew old only in the obsessional retelling
of his tale, over many years. So the Mariner is a young sailor
when he meets the Albatross, and there is something erotic
in their confrontation. Here emerged my central idea: the
Mariner dancing with some beautiful but dangerous embodiment
of Nature's power, which had first surfaced in my Malta
dream. My sketch for the ballet, which of course never got
into my biography, was roughly as follows. It can perhaps
be imagined more vividly than it could be staged. But one
never knows with dreams.
Concept
An adaptation of Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" for modern
dance and music. Two basic sets: an 18th-century
Somersetshire village with church, tavern and green (like
Nether Stowey); and a square-rigged galleon on the high sea,
with deck and rigging of the type used by Captain Cook to
explore the Southern Pacific. The choreography and music
score adapt traditional English and folklore forms: the country
jig, the naval hornpipe, the sea shanty, the wedding and
funeral march, the danse macabre. Scenery and laser lighting
produce haunting visual effects of dawn, sunset, starlight,
moon, and sea storms.

1.
152 /Holmes
The ballet company dance both the villagers on land
and the ship's crew at sea. The leading solo dancers each
take more than one part, and this duplication of roles—one
identity melting into another—is central to the concept and
should be clear to the audience. The main dance roles include:
The Mariner: as ancient bearded sea-salt, and as young
sailor.
The Albatross: as beautiful bride: as sea-bird; as the terrible
Nightmare Life-in-Death; and as the
Female Spirit.
The Hermit: who also dances as the village priest, and
the Male Spirit of Nature.
•
The ballet has three movements, which are divided into
five acts. It begins in the bucolic morning atmosphere of a
country wedding (Act 1); it then moves backwards in time to
the Mariner's nightmare voyage (Acts 2, 3, 4); and finally it
returns to a solemn evening wedding-feast, where the hope
of happiness is tempered by the tragic presence of the
haunted Ancient Mariner. The whole ballet reflects
Coleridge's original "vision" of some profound but inexplicable
metaphysical crime, leading to a struggle between love
and cruelty in Nature.
Synopsis
Act 1. The villagers dance and celebrate a country wedding
outside the church door. They pay homage to the beautiful
young Bride in her long white dress. The village band
plays a wedding march. The celebrations are abruptly interrupted
by the appearance of the bearded Ancient Mariner,
who dances across the village green and insists on telling
the story of his voyage. Unwillingly at first, the villagers circle
round the Mariner and are gradually drawn under his spell.
Helplessly, they start to mime the parts of the ship's crew.
The Bride confronts the Mariner, but is also spellbound.
Act 2. The village is transformed into the ship. The green
becomes the deck, an oak tree becomes the mast and
shrouds, the church door becomes the poop. The ship's crew
The Dancing Mariner/ 153
are joyfully dancing the hornpipe. The Mariner—now young—
spies a lovely white Albatross (the erstwhile Bride) dancing
alluringly across the deck. He dances after her, and the crew
join in wildly. But when the Albatross refuses to dance with
him, the Mariner is overcome with the desire to possess her,
and maddened by her repulses, suddenly turns and shoots
her with a cross-bow. A terrible storm immediately descends,
and the Act ends in terror and confusion among the sailors.
Act 3. The ship is becalmed under a burning tropical
sun. The crew perform a dance of death, as one by one they
drop to the deck, stricken by drought. As they die, they curse
the Mariner. The Pacific night comes on, and under a huge
moon the ghastly taunting figure of the Nightmare Life-in-
Death appears. She dances provocatively across the ship,
mocking the Mariner. As the moon begins to set, the Mariner
is left alone, the sole survivor, exhausted and grief
stricken, dancing over the bodies of his shipmates. The ship
slowly fades into twilit unreality, as the Mariner collapses
on the deck.
Act 4. In a haunting dream-sequence (one might say a
dream-within-a-dream), the Male and Female Spirits of Nature
dance over the prone body of the Mariner. They argue
and decide his fate, the Female Spirit pleading for mercy.
They transform the dead crew into glittering sea-creatures,
who weave hypnotically over the Mariner. He wakens, and
astonished by their unearthly beauty, joins in the dance and
blesses them. The heavens open, rain pours down, and the
ship sails on into moonlight and safe harbor as the dream
dissolves. The Old Hermit comes aboard, and absolves the
Mariner; while the crew form a silent tableaux carrying the
dead Albatross in their arms.
Act 5. In a sudden blaze of light and music, the same
tableaux bursts back into life, now as the country villagers
carrying the Bride to the evening wedding supper outside
the tavern. But the Mariner—a old, bearded figure again (as
in Act 1)—moves among the revelers like the traditional ghost
at the feast. As night comes on, he stands silently watching

154 / Holmes
them, as he had watched the beautiful sea-creatures. Stars
come out, candles are lit, a long table is laid (a white cloth
billowing like a sail). The Bride and groom are toasted in
wine by the villagers, and blessed by the priest. In a final
movement of love and forgiveness, the Bride dances round
the table and brings the Mariner a cup of wine to drink. She
draws him back into the company, and the whole village
rises and dances together happily. But at the last moment
the music stops, and all the dancers freeze motionless as
the sound of a rising wind fills the air. All that is, except the
Mariner, who silently dances on by himself as the curtain
drops.
END
JEFFREY GREENE
The Cherry Tree
1
Black bark peals away from the black heartwood:
some part of the tree is hollow.
I know this because I watched
a blue tit vanish into it
where the branches seem grafted all in one spot,
where the green moss grows around
the perfect O.
Eggs must rest there,
each smaller than a thumb,
a child's thumb, their white shells
with red-brown spots still unbroken in the black tree.
At some moment, the body receives the soul.
The ancients said
it could be weighed in feathers.
Last winter at New Year's, an errant skyrocket
flew into our cherry tree
and lit it up like a fountain
of green fire. But this soul will come differently.
no less a comet, mid-sentence,
the four of us just talking, Anne pregnant,
in the country house.
Some night
the child will hear us again and be comforted
by the cadence of family voices
balanced against the starry background of the bedroom.

DENISE DUHAMEL
The Threat
my mother pushed my sister out of the apartment door
with an empty suitcase because she kept threatening to
run away my sister was sick of me getting the best of
everything—the bathrobe with the pink stripes instead of
the red, the soft middle piece of bread while she got the
crust I was sick with asthma and she thought this made
me a favorite
I wanted to be like the girl in the made-for-tv movie Maybe
I'll Come Home in the Spring which was supposed to make
you not want to run away but it looked pretty fun
especially all of the agony it put your parents through and
the girl was in California or someplace warm with a
boyfriend and they always found good food in the
dumpsters—at least they could eat pizza and candy and
not meat loaf the runaway actress was Sally Field or at
least someone who looked like Sally Field as a teenager—
the Flying Nun propelled by the huge wings on the sides of
her wimple Arnold the Pig getting drafted in Green
Acres—my understanding then of Vietnam I read Go Ask
Alice and The Peter Pan Bag books that were designed to
keep a young girl home but there were the sex scenes and
if anything this made me want to cut my hair with scissors
in front of the mirror while I was high on marijuana but I
couldn't inhale because of my lungs my sister was the
one to pass out behind the church for both of us rum
and angel dust
The Threat/ 157
and that's how it was my sister standing at the top of all
those stairs that led up to the apartment and she pushed
down the empty suitcase that banged the banister and
wall as it tumbled and I was crying on the other side of the
door because I was sure it was my sister who fell—all
ketchup blood and stuck out bones my mother wouldn't
let me open the door to let my sister back in I don't know
if she knew it was just the suitcase or not she was cold
rubbing her sleeves a mug of coffee in her hand and I had
to decide she said I had to decide right then

160 /Nelson
My sister clattered out of the inner room, trailing her
purse on her injured hand, as if to draw attention to it. She
was a teenage model. Her hair was a glossy white curtain
she swung with exaggeration, as if it were heavy, though in
reality it was thin hair inclined to stringiness. She had to
have just this moment brushed it for it to swing as it did.
"Ready?" she asked us, leaning into Ascenzo's open arms.
Their embrace was for us to witness; they were dear friends,
this gesture implied, dear and sympathetic like kin of another
plane. Janice gave me and Dad a little glance, just to
make sure we beheld her worldly, uninhibited affection.
I was like my father, shy, embarrassed by my own presence,
as if I were large or ugly or uninvited, though I was
none of those things. But my sister was superior on all three
counts: lithe, pretty, welcome. And damaged, her right hand
shredded and ruined.
She held it up to slide her leather bag onto her shoulder.
Where her three fingers had been were cherry-like buds,
suture scars along the rims. Only her forefinger and thumb
remained, so that she appeared constantly to be making
a point.
"Thafs eighty-seven eighty-seven, even," Ascenzo told
Janice, "including the drops," handing her a bottle of his
oil. My father made out the check, crossing his sevens with
a terse jerk of his wrist, and then leaving the paper on the
table instead of in Ascenzo's open palm.
If I'd been brave, I would have answered my father's earlier
question: "You pay fifteen bucks a bottle, that's who."
"Drink water," Ascenzo advised Janice. "I thought those
kidneys would never clear. I had to do some talking to those
fellows," he told me.
It was July, and though Janice glistened with massage
oil and smelled of almonds, I sweated. In the car, she rode
up front while our father drove us to her next appointment.
She cracked her neck, side to side with her eyes closed. I
wondered where my kidneys were, my liver and all the rest.
How had she become so exotic? My life had sprung from the
same source, fed on the same nutrients, been exposed to
the same midwestern rays, and yet—the chasm between us.
"What did you think of Ascenzo?" Janice had asked my
The Other Daughter/ 161
father and me after the first session, in June, her hand then
a white plaster-cast club, a big wrapped drumstick stuck
on the end of her slender arm.
"His name sounds like somebody sneezed," I had answered,
without thinking. She'd given up expecting much
from me. When she was whole, we'd spatted: it had been fair
to do so. But now I felt a chilling, dumb guilt for the injustice
done her.
My father said, "Uh-huh," trying not to sound judgmental.
Later, when Janice wasn't around, he said to me, 'That
Ascenzo was a fairy." He made declarations of these sort
only occasionally, as if releasing accumulated pressure, and
only to me, as far as I could tell. Why? Because he knew I
was thinking the identical thing? But shouldn't he have had
the befuddled respect for me that he did for Janice and my
mother, the same masculine mock impatience, the same restraint?
Instead, something about me generated confidence
in him, as if I were his son instead of younger daughter. The
other daughter.
Today my father leaned his elbow on the ledge of the
open Falcon window, holding a cigar in his fingers. He'd done
this so regularly, for so long, that the paint on the door had
worn away, revealing a smooth silver beneath. I always
thought the whole car might have looked pretty, rubbed down
to this hue, a blinding chrome. At the tip of the cigar, his
wing window glass had a halo of unctuous brown smudge.
In the back, I smelled myself. I shook my head to see if it
hurt. I tried to focus on the painted lines of First Street to
quell carsickness. Had I ridden in the front seat since Janice's
accident? I had driven—learning, in the graveyard; later today,
I would finally take the test for my license—but had not
been a passenger up there.
"You girls want some lunch?" he asked us as we passed
Pitt's Barbecue.
"Frozen yogurt," Janice answered, gazing out her window
as the crowded, shimmering parking lot of Pitt's disappeared
behind us. "Salad and a Diet Coke, don't you think,
Patty?"
I shrugged; nothing sounded appetizing, though I would
eat more than she would, once we arrived at the table. They

mi
162 /Nelson
consulted me as if they might actually take my advice, my
father looking in the rear view, my sister turning her ear my
direction. I might have mediated between them, if it had been
called for, having a foot squarely in each of their worlds. But
it was never called for.
"I could circle round to Pitt's," he said, edging the Falcon
toward the right lane.
"Grease," Janice said, motioning with her good hand for
him to swim back into thru traffic. "I'm nothing but a greased
pig myself. Let's don't eat one, too."
"What do you want, Pats?"
"Nothing, a Coke, some Tylenol. My hair hurts."
"If we eat at the yogurt shop, I'll have fries," Janice said.
"If the air's not greasy, I could eat some fries and yogurt."
"Air conditioning," I agreed. The yogurt shop appeared
in my mind like a mirage, bright green and white.
My father did not belong in a yogurt shop. He belonged
at Pitt's, where he could bring in his cigar, not here where
little stickers with puffin penguins on them declared the place
anti-smoker. Janice ate a yogurt cone with her left hand,
her tongue moving concircularly around the white cream. I
couldn't seem to maintain my posture in my seat, slumped
and suddenly chilled by the rush of Coke up my straw. That
icy ache flew to my forehead. My father pulled a hairy mound
of bean sprouts from his avocado sandwich and left it on his
plate. ("Bean sprouts smell like sperm," he'd declared to me
once. Was I supposed to know enough to praise such an
insight?) We all checked our watches; Janice's next appointment
was at the Danish furniture store where she would be
photographed displaying teak end tables and high-tech
chairs that looked like praying mantises. This shoot had been
delayed for two weeks to allow her stitches to heal and her
gauze to be removed; I was just happy not to have to anticipate
seeing her in bras and underwear in the Sunday newspaper
pullouts.
Why had they waited for her? I studied her to try to learn
why, what people saw in her that commanded their submission.
She was not merely beautiful. That wouldn't have been
enough. And now she would have to tuck away her right
hand, behind cushions, in her pocket, leaving perhaps her
The Other Daughter/ 163
thumb poised outside like a cowgirl. She was blessed with
something far better than simple beauty, a kind of fickle,
charmed affection that made you feel lucky when she turned
it on you, and flawed when she withdrew it. She would choose
to leave you, and you would deserve it.
Men stared at her here, as they did everywhere, and
Janice did not seem to differentiate between those who ogled
her intact, and those who fixated on her sudden deformity.
She ignored them all unless it became necessary to do otherwise.
"Take a picture," she would say. "It'll last longer." If
only I could have adopted her assurance, I often thought,
but of course it was inseparable from the rest of her. She
had earned her indifference.
After lunch we returned to our wretched hot car. Later I
was going to drive it around with a stranger and obtain my
license. Dusty bits of the old cushion stuffing would stay
like fine sand on the examiner's pants. Janice sat in the
front again and brushed her hair with her clumsy left hand.
"My shoulders are killing me," she told us. "My relationships
are a wreck, Ascenzo said, that's why they hurt right here."
She stretched to tap her right shoulder blade with her hair
brush.
"Which relationships?" I asked, as I was supposed to.
The air was so hot that my words seemed to come out composed
of a gaseous substance.
"All of them," she said. "Family, friends, lovers, all of
them."
Dad snorted and re-lit his cigar. He only made it through
one or two of them a day, constantly extinguishing and tamping,
the butt end in his mouth growing soggy, its leafy origins
becoming grotesquely clear, little remnants like lawn
debris on his tongue.
"Who'd believe insurance would cover this stuff?" he announced.
Janice and I had heard this before; I listened as if
in a trance. He digested topics of conversation like a cow,
constantly bringing them back up for a chew. "I wouldn't
believe it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. This Ascenzo,
the guy with no last name, or maybe no first name, who has
the Blue Cross, Blue Shield OK, this guy knows from your
back you have trouble? He consults with your kidneys, they

164 /Nelson
say 'send water'?" But Dad wasn't really annoyed. He found
Janice gratifyingly mysterious, and her fierce defense of the
bizarre amusing. He tolerated all sorts of what he called Jlake
lore as long as it came from her. He'd allowed her to glue a
large, many-spired crystal right in the center of the dashboard,
stuck there with a green substance like Silly Putty,
because she said it would protect his ride. The crystal was
almost exactly the size of the fat compass that had used to
be attached to the windshield, its slow watery slosh something
to focus on from the backseat when I grew bored, the
green letters slipping serenely from N to NE to E. This had
been my mother's compass, something she'd ordered by mail
for no apparent reason; she never traveled anywhere she
might have needed one, and besides that, she'd stuck it in
our father's car instead of hers. Also for no apparent reason,
the compass simply dropped off one hot day, rolling to
the floorboard and disappearing out the passenger door when
Janice opened it, the plastic ball cracking open as it hit the
parking lot pavement and spilling out its viscous fluid. Oddly,
it fell off only hours after Janice's crystal had been affixed
beneath it, as if they'd waged a turf battle in the stuffy, summer
interior of our closed car. On the windshield where the
compass had been remained a cloudy circle of left-over glue,
something Janice picked at in traffic with her bad hand.
What had Ascenzo made of that hand, anyway, free from
its bandages at last? Her mangled hand—I stared at it endlessly—those
sutured buds like boys' testicles with their
funny seams, three in a row.
We arrived at Danish By Design and pulled in behind
the white panel van that belonged to Marty, Janice's photographer.
"He's probably sleeping with that masseuse fag,"
my father had said to me privately. Privately, while Janice
had been posing for a girdle ad, a still for Macy's, the bottom
half of a girl who didn't need a girdle. Red and black
girdles, spread on our Sunday breakfast table, the newspaper
sticking in the syrup. I'd never known girdles came in
colors. But mostly, why did my father feel he could say things
like that to me?
"You guys waiting, or coming with?" Janice asked. She
had to reach over herself to open her car door, her right
The Other Daughter/ 165
forefinger not yet strong enough to pull the stiff handle by
itself. A yawn suddenly overtook her: her mouth flexed open
wide like a cat's to reveal her impeccable teeth—as she shook
her head, rolled her shoulders, cracked her neck—then
closed with a little peep.
"I'll bring your stuff," I told her, unhooking the drycleaner
bag holding her pressed skirt and blouse. The blouse was
silk, and she would wear it without a bra, her large breasts
quivering like gelatin beneath. My father had already stepped
from the car. He wouldn't sit outside waiting, "like a dog," as
he put it, "a damned drooling dog."
Yet he reminded me of something ferocious and canine,
a boxer or bulldog. And then there was me, the mutt. Janice
led us inside where it was air conditioned. Customers
watched her as they moved on the periphery, fingering floor
lamps that looked like microphones. I sat in my poor-postured
way on an ottoman with Janice's clothes on my lap.
Marty's assistant, Roid, was playing with his shields and
reflectors, snapping them open like big round silver fans,
then checking his light meter, retracting the reflector, checking
the meter. Roid, like Janice, was another South High
student, a doper looking for a way out of class. Marty taught
photography there, a buzz-cut redhead, tense and tangerine-freckled
from top to bottom, also a doper. He'd brought
Janice drugs when she was in the hospital, a French candy
tin full of pretty pills that she'd given to me. She'd given me
her legitimate meds, too, the codeine and seconal. Marty
had no patience for Janice's family, us, my father the watchdog
and me, the gape-mouthed dimwit.
"Yo, Patty," said Roid, who only had clout here. His biggest
function was to shoot Polaroids—hence, his name—in
advance of Marty's real shots. At school, he was nobody.
"Scum," I said to him, not unkindly. "Freak."
Janice motioned for me to follow her to the back, to the
closet-like bathroom where she changed. I had to button
her blouse, zip her skirt, smell again the warm perfume of
almonds. It was her dominant hand that was ruined; her
physical therapist would train the other fingers to take up
the slack. Soon, she wouldn't need my help. When I'd heard
about her accident at school, during algebra, my first thought

166/ Nelson
had been that she would die, that I would be a celebrity. My
imagination was grotesque that way, greedy and ruthless.
"I look OK?" Janice asked me. In our previous life, I would
have lied and said no.
"Great," I said, which was true, but which didn't feel true.
"Thanks," she said, dismissing me. I left her to apply her
own lipstick and found a leather armchair to sink into, momentarily
comfortable in its pristine coolness. Marty's lights
had cast an over-bright, beach-like atmosphere in the place,
and I closed my eyes as if sunbathing. Through a drooping
pair of eyelids I watched Janice's shoot. She floated through
the showroom, caressing a teak highboy, sprawling over a
cream-colored chaise, crossing her beautiful legs as she
perched on a mahogany computer center shaped like a
dressmaker's dummy, her bad hand behind her, supporting
her. My father sat at a dining table across the showroom,
reading Danish By Design literature, biting his damp extinguished
cigar. Marty marched from his camera to Janice's
knees and lifted her skirt. "Scooch," he told her, wiggling his
own ass. She pulled the skirt higher. Roid giggled. "Thankee,"
Marty said, restored behind the lens of his camera. "Isn't
that the way we say it out here, in Kansas? Thankee?"
"That's right," Roid told him.
Janice said, "You bet" without moving her smiling lips.
It was clear to me that Marty wanted to provoke my father.
What would happen if Dad reacted? Janice would patiently
hop down from the table and calm him. Marty would
step outside to his van and take a toot, pop a diet soda,
return when the air was clear again, red-eyed fox. Janice
had taken several Independent Studies with Marty at South,
leaving the grounds to visit developing labs and museum
exhibits, to sit in his panel van and tell him about herself,
to earn A's by virtue of her sophisticated flat affect and her
natural beauty.
Outside of Danish By Design's tinted showroom glass, a
traffic jam evolved around the overheated engine of a red
Celica. I watched languidly as the driver put his face in the
white vapor, everything wavering around him like a dream.
My driving exam was our next stop today, and I wondered if
I were prepared to navigate a snarl like this. I ran groggily
The Other Daughter/ 167
through rules of the road while Janice finished up with her
shoot. Signal at 100 feet. Two seconds space between your
vehicle and the one in front of you. At breakfast—pancakes
for the rest of us, milky coffee in a bowl for Janice—Dad had
asked in his bright expectant morning voice, as he did every
morning this summer, "What's on the agenda for today?"
Janice couldn't drive because of her hand; I was useless
unless accompanied by one of my parents. My mother
worked. Dad had to take us. In better times, he was a general
contractor. But his temper defeated him, over and over.
He'd been supposed to supervise the construction of a car
lot this summer—a sultry, asphalt-heavy prospect. A fight
over his office space—the air-conditioned trailer parked at
the site—had lost the job. This was what my mother called
shooting his mouth and foot off at the same time. Her position
at Southwestern Bell was secure—she liked to work;
she liked it better than she liked us—and we got telephone
perks. For example, Janice had her own line, her own unlisted
number, and her own calls that came late at night to
keep her murmuring in the room beside mine, her indistinct
voice telling other people her secrets.
"Wrap, wrap, we gotta wrap," Marty sang out after an
hour of flashes, to the tune of "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead."
Janice pulled down her skirt and shook her breasts. Roid
lowered his head like an industrious mole and began collapsing
equipment.
Janice and Marty were intimate in a different way than
she and Ascenzo were. With Marty she exchanged little pecks
to the cheeks, both of them, their arms not involved, like
birds nipping seeds. How did one know these things, I wondered?
What in his appearance led Janice to behave this
way and not another? And to be always correct?
"See ya, Dick," Marty called to my father, who preferred
to be called Richard, or, if one absolutely had to shorten it,
Rich. "Pat and Dick," Marty continued, meaning me and my
father, "the dead Nixons."
"Yeah," my father said. "Ha ha."
Marty raised both his hands as we left, two-fingered victory
signs, "I am not a crook," he called, "I am not a crook."
"Bye, Babe," Roid yelled out to me.

168 /Nelson
Restored by my doze in the chair and by test anxiety, I
climbed into the stifling back seat. Now we were headed for
my appointment. Now it was my turn.
"You want to try to drive?" my father asked.
"Sure," I said.
"I meant your sister," he said. "I thought maybe she'd
like to practice."
"No thanks," Janice said from the front passenger seat.
"I'm happy just to ride. Let the munchkin drive."
"Nah, we're already going," Dad said, swinging the Falcon
into traffic.
They did not wait for me. They relinquished the car because
I had to drive it to pass the test, but there was a coffee
shop down the block, so they walked there, my sister
still in her modeling clothes, my father with his new cigar.
Of course, the Department of Motor Vehicles was not air
conditioned. Old-fashioned floor fans whirred, orange
streamers flying straight out as if to prove they were doing
their best.
My examiner was a woman named Officer Davies. She
sat in front of me as I took, and passed, the written and eye
exams, and then, afterwards, motioned with her fingernail
at her own front teeth. "You have something right there,"
she said, looking cross-eyed at my mouth. A chocolate
sprinkle, there since lunch, had lodged itself beside an upper
canine. Then she asked me to lead her to my vehicle.
The Falcon was blistering. I felt obliged to explain the
crystal, though she hadn't asked. "My sister's superstitious,"
I told her. "She thinks this crystal will bring good luck to the
driver."
"We'll see," said Officer Davies. She buckled, I buckled.
Before we even left the parking lot I had failed to stop at the
sidewalk and she had made a demoting little black mark on
her clipboard.
I piloted my father's car slowly down the street, past the
coffee shop where I dared not glance; would they see me,
sailing sluggishly by? Obtaining my license was our last errand
today, and if all went well, tomorrow it would be I who
ferried Janice from doctor to physical therapist to voice les-
The Other Daughter/ 169
son, and we would go in my mother's car, the one with a
stereo and air conditioning, first dropping her off downtown
at Bell headquarters. Everything would be different, once I
could drive. My father, with nothing else to do, would be
obliged to call on his contacts in the world of construction.
He would go to Pitt's Barbecue and do some lunchtime hustling.
He would lose track of Janice's commitments and adventures.
Between tomorrow's errands and today's lay a brief
but important fissure of time: passing the test, and waiting
tonight for Janice while someone else took her away from
the house.
My sister had two boyfriends, and this evening's date
was with the college guy, Trevor. "How can she go out with
him?" my father would ask my mother and me while we
moved around the house in her absence. "Who can take seriously
this Trevor, the boy named from a soap opera?" We
would occupy ourselves in front of electrical appliances—
TV, stereo, refrigerator, microwave—while we waited for her,
rotating every thirty minutes or so. Before the accident, my
mother would have predicted the hickeys Janice might arrive
home bearing on her neck, the liquor on her breath, the
tardy hour. Never mind that it was I who sneaked cigarettes
(Janice wouldn't risk the stains or stench), or that Janice
never went without her full eight-hours' rest. These facts
merely compounded my mother's annoyance. She seemed
not to want a beautiful daughter, after all, nor an unbeautiful
one, either. Maybe she wished she'd had sons.
Janice's other boyfriend, Teddy, was Janice's age, and
my father preferred him. Teddy's parents had the same
names as our pets. Max and Emma (dog and cat, respectively)
and Dad liked this about Teddy; it kept him in a proper
place.
But tonight was Trevor, and then when we all woke tomorrow
things would be different. That's what I thought as
I performed my headcheck before changing lanes, as I scrupulously
entered intersections and on-ramps and parking
spaces when Officer Davies instructed. Everything waffled
in the miserable Midwest heat; the sky above us was featureless,
not blue but simple empty white. Pets and children
and red rubber balls all stayed put in their yards; wheel-

170 /Nelson
chairs weren't rolling into crosswalks, taillights weren't flashing
on ahead of me unexpectedly. I drenched myself, jumping
these mild hoops only adequately, but Officer Davies was
going to confer my reward.
At our house it had always been I who'd come home
marked and scarred and broken, from sunburn or windchill,
the V on my chin from the rock I hadn't seen, an apostrophe
at my scalp line from which a fish-hook had been pulled,
the chicken pox and acne dimples, the fractured femur after
skiing, the grisly flesh on my hand where the iron had once
fallen, the bruised lips and genitals from boys I let handle
me.
On the hot steering wheel, I tucked my three lesser fingers
till they were hidden away. In my nightmares, it had
happened to me.
Who had done this to Janice, our beauty? A stranger
had, an ugly girl with no stature in our school, no notoriety
until now. Now, she had plenty. She was the one who'd stood
beside Janice in Mr. Tilbino's Shop class, who'd been designated
Janice's building buddy, who'd held the end of Janice's
two-by-four as they used the radial arm saw, who'd shoved
her sideways into the blade. There was jealousy involved, as
you might expect, a boy this ugly girl loved in a sickening
unrequited way, this boy who loved Janice in the same pathetic
way, lonely desperation begetting lonely desperation.
Couldn't you sympathize with that luckless girl's desire
to do damage? Couldn't you imagine the self-preserving instinct
that would guide her lurching into my sister?
When we got our bodies, Janice and I, when we bloomed,
my mother took me aside to offer consolation. Janice had
gotten Grandma's big breasts and slender legs. She had gotten
a confident swing in her hips and large clean teeth, a
flare for higher math, a spontaneous wit, a knack for combining
unlikely clothes. She'd gotten things I ought obviously
to desire, and now she'd gotten something I could not
have known to wish for.
Officer Davies said, "Both hands on the wheel, please."
It would be an enduring habit: using my thumb and forefinger,
I made my own gun.
LUCILLE CLIFTON
Untitled
evening and my dead once husband
rises up from the spirit board
through trembled air i moan
the names of our wayward sons
and ask him to explain why
i fuss like a fishwife why
cancer and terrible loneliness
and the wars against our people
and the room glimmers as if washed
in tears and out of the mist a hand
becomes flesh and i watch
as its pointing fingers spell
it does not help to know

CHARLES WRIGHT
Envoi
What we once liked, we no longer like.
What we once used to delight in settles like fine ash on our tongues.
What we once embraced embraces us.
Things have destinies, of course,
On-lines and down-loads mysterious as the language of clouds.
My life has become like that,
Half uninterpretable, half new geography,
Landscapes stilled and adumbrated, memory unratcheting,
Its voice-over not my own.
Meanwhile, the mole goes on with its subterranean daydreams.
The dogs lie around like rugs.
Birds nitpick their pinfeathers, insects slick down their shells.
No horizon-honing here, no angst in the anthill.
What happens is what happens.
And what happened to happen never existed to start with.
Still, who wants a life like that,
No next and no before, no yesterday, no today,
Tomorrow a moment no one will ever live in?
As for me, I'll take whatever wanes,
The loosening traffic on the straightaway, the dark and such,
The wandering stars, wherever they come from now, wherever they go.
Envoi/ 173
I'll take whatever breaks down beneath its own sad weight-
The paintings of Albert Pinkham Ryder, for instance.
Language, the weather, the word of God.
I'll take as icon and testament
The daytime metaphysics of the natural world.
Sun on tie post, rock on rock.

174 / Contributors Notes
Contributors Notes
RUSSEL BANKS is the author of more than ten books including
Continental Drift, Affliction, and The Sweet Hereafter. His most
recent novel, Rule of the Bone, is forthcoming in May of 1995
from HarperCollins.
JULIAN BARNES is the author of seven novels, including
Flaubert's Parrot, The History of the World in 10 '/2 Chapters,
and Before She Met Me. He works and lives in England. "Hamlet
in the Wild West" was broadcast over BBC radio.
APRIL BERNARD'S first book of poems, Blackbird Bye Bye, won
the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets.
Her second book Psalms was published by W.W. Norton in 1993.
She lives and works in New York City.
DAVID MARSHALL CHAN is 25 years old, and grew up in Los
Angeles, where most of his stories are set. "Brilliant Disguise" is
from a story collection titled Goblin Fruit, and he is currently at
work on a novel, Memoirs of a Boy Detective. His work also appears
in the spring 1995 issue of BOMB magazine.
YVETTE CHRISTIANSE is a South African-born poet living in
Australia. She is the publisher and editor of The Phoeniz Review.
Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and
magazines, including Trafika, Southerly, and Hermes. A collection
of her poetry was also featured in the shared volume
Faultlines (Round Table Publications, Sydney).
LUCILLE CLIFTON has published 30 books during the last 25
years, including numerous volumes of poetry and children's
books. Her most recent book, The Book of Light, was published
by Copper Canyon Press in 1993. Her awards and honors include
the 1992 PSA Shelley Memorial Award, three National
Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and runner-up for the
Pulitzer Prize in 1987. She is trie Distinguished Professor of
Humanities at St. Mary's College of Maryland and Professor of
Writing at Columbia University.
Contributors Notes 1175
TORY DENT is author of What Silence Equals, published by
persea Books. Individual poems have appeared in Partisan Review,
Antioch Review, Paris Review, Agni, Kenyon Review and
elsewhere. She has been a fellow at MacDowell Colony, Yaddo
and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. A section of prose,
loose Rides, will be included in the forthcoming anthology In
the Company of My Solitude, Persea Books.
CHERYL DERBY manages a bookstore in Troy, New York. She
has published in Slant and The Paterson Literary
Review.
RITA DOVE is the current U.S. Poet Laureate and Consultant in
Poetry at the Library of Congress. She received the 1987 Pulitzer
Prize for Poetry for Thomas and Beulah. Her most recent publication
is the verse drama Darker Face of the Earth (Storyline
Press, 1994). Her new poetry collection. Mother Love, published
by W.W. Norton, is forthcoming in May 1995. She is Commonwealth
Professor of English at the University of Virginia.
DENISE DUHAMEL has been published in The American Poetry
Review and Ploughshares, and the anthologies The Best American
Poetry 1994 and The Best American Poetry 1993. Her third
book of poems, Girl Soldier, is forthcoming from Garden Street
Press later this year. She teaches at Lycoming College in
Williamsport, Pennsylvania.
JENNIFER EAGAN's first novel. The Invisible Circus, was published
in January by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. Her short stories
have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, GQ and
other magazines, and have been anthologized in The O. Henry
Awards: Prize Stories and Voices of the Xiled.
JOANN FRANK is a photographer living in the New York area
whose work has been exhibited and published throughout the
United States. Her work will be included in the upcoming permanent
collection exhibition of the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Mexico City, and is included in the permanent collections
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art, the Center for Creative Photography and others.

IK! : :l
176/ Contributors Notes
JEFFREY GREEN is a winner of the "Discovery'VThe Nation
Award and has published work in Boulevard, The New Yorker,
Poetry, Ploughshares and elsewhere. His book of poems To
the Left of the Worshipper was published in 1991. He is an
Associate Professor at the University of New Haven and a
director of Phoenix: The New Haven Poetry Series.
JOHN HAY is the author of 13 books of natural history, including
The Run, The Great Beach (winner, John Burroughs
Award), The Undiscovered Country, and The Bird of Light.
His latest book, from which this is excerpted, is A Beginner's
Faith in Things Unseen, published this spring by Beacon
Press. Mr. Hay lives with his wife Kristi on Cape Cod.
BRENDA HILLMAN's most recent book of poetry is Bright
Existence (Wesleyan 1993). Her work has won the Delmore
Schwartz Memorial Award for Poetry and the Poetry Society
of America's Norma Farber First Book Prize. She teaches at
St. Mary's College in Moraga, California.
DAVID HERRSTROM has published in USI Worksheets,
Altadena Review, Nimrod, Berkeley Poets Cooperative, Blake
Quarterly and the Bucknell Review. He is author of Jonah's
Disappearance, a sequence of poems with drawings by Jacob
Landau published by Ambrosia Press.
RICHARD HOLMES is the author of Shelly: The Pursuit (winner,
Somerset Maugham Award), Footsteps: Adventures of a
Romantic Biographer, and Coleridge: Early Vision (Whitbread
Book of the Year, 1989), among others. His most recent work,
Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, won the James Tait Black Award.
BARBARA HELFGOTT HYETT's most recent volume of poetry
is The Double Reckoning of Christopher Columbus (1992).
A new book on endangered wildlife of North America is forthcoming
from the University of Illinois Press. Her poems have
appeared in many magazines including The New Republic
and The Nation and in 20 anthologies. She is director of The
Workshop for Publishing Poets and co-founder of the Writer's
Room of Boston, Inc.
Contributors Notes / 177
JANE MILLER'S awards include a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest
Writer's Award, Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, the
Four Corners Book Award, a Discovery Award, and a Los
Angeles Times Book Award Nomination. She won the National
Poetry Series Open Competition in 1982 with The
Greater Leisures, and recently won the Western States Book
Award with August Zero. She teaches at the University of
Arizona in Tucson.
HAYLEY R. MITCHELL is currently studying Creative Writing
at the University of Washington's M.F.A. program, where
she recently co-won the 1994 Joan Grayston Prize for poetry.
Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blank Gun
Silencer, California Poetry Quarterly, Chiron Review, Olympia
Review, Pearl and Slipstream. She is the co-founder and
editor of the small press magazine Sheila-na-gig.
RICK MOODY is the author of two novels, Garden State and
The Ice Storm. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review,
Harper's, Story and other magazines. He received the 1994
Aga Khan Award in Fiction. A collection of short fiction, The
Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, will be published
by Little Brown in August.
ANTONYA NELSON is the author of three short story collections:
The Expendables, which received the Flannery
O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, In the Land of Men, and
Family Terrorists, which was published last year by Houghton
Mifflin. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire,
Mademoiselle, Redbook, and elsewhere.
DAN POWELL'S photographs are meant to depict the past as
it exists in the contemporary mind—as a layering of emotion,
object and association. The images in this series are
hand-colored, -bleached, and -marked gelatin silver prints.
The work was exhibited recently at Candeso/Lawler gallery
in New York City. Powell teaches photography at the University
of Oregon and lives in Eugene.

178 / Contributors Notes
DONALD REVELL is the author of 5 books of poems. His
most recent book, Beautiful Shirt (Wesleyan), appeared in
1994. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the
National Poetry Series, Pushcart and PEN Center USA West
Award. His work has been selected for three editions of Best
American Poetry. He is Professor of English at the University
of Utah.
MAUREEN SEATON's book The Sea Among the Cupboards
(New Rivers, 1992) won the Capricorn Award and the Society
of Midland Authors Award; Fear of Subways (The Eighth
Mountain Press, 1991) won the Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize.
Poems have appeared in The New England Review,
Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Indiana Review, The Paris
Review, and others. In 1994, she received an NEA Fellowship
and an Illinois Arts Council Grant.
WILFRID SHEED, novelist and critic, has been nominated
three times for the National Book Award and once for the
National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.
W.D. SNODGRASS is the author of eight volumes of poetry.
Among his many awards and honors are an Ingram Merrill
Foundation award, a Poetry Society of America Special Citation,
several Yaddo Resident Awards, a National Endowment
for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Academy of
American Poets Fellowship and a Centennial Medal (Romania).
He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1960 for
Heart's Needle.
ART SPIEGELMAN is the co-founder and editor of Raw. His
work has appeared in the New York Times, Playboy Magazine,
and the Village Voice. His Maus books were awarded
the National Book Critics Circle Award and won him a
Gugenheim Fellowship. He lives and works in New York City.
PHYLLIS STOWELL is a professor at St. Mary's College. She
has published in The Southwest Review, New Letters, The
Threepenny Review, Five Fingers Review, and others. She is
author of a chapbook entitled Who Is Alice? published by
Contributors Notes / 179
Pennywhistle Press. A critical study of her work appeared in
The New Review in 1994. She has had fellowships at Djerassi,
MacDowell Colony and the Camargo Foundation, France.
KATHERINE SWIGGART was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work
Center in Provincetown in 1994, and is now studying at the
University of Iowa. Her poetry has appeared in Best Writers
at Work 1994.
LESZEK SZARUGA is a pseudonym (meaning gray weather)
for a Polish poet who has spent many years underground
working for Solidarity.
GEOFFREY WOLFF is a novelist and biographer whose most
recent books are A Day at the Beach: Personal Essays (Vintage)
and his sixth novel. The Age of Consent, published this
year by Alfred A. Knopf. He is Writer in Residence at Brandeis
University and has taught recently at Brown, Princeton and
Williams College.
CHARLES B. WHEELER is a retired professor of English at
Ohio State University. He is the author of the textbook The
Design of Poetry (W.W. Norton) and is co-author of The Bible
as Literature (Oxford). Poems have appeared in Laurel Review,
Centennial Review, Tar River Poetry, Ascent and
Cumberland Review.
CHARLES WRIGHT'S last book of poems was The World of
the Ten Thousand Things. A new book of poems entitled
Chickamauga is forthcoming in the spring of 1995 from
Farrar, Straus & Giroux and a new book of prose improvisations
and interviews entitled Quarter Notes from the University
of Michigan Press is forthcoming. He lives in
Charlottesville and teaches at the University of Virginia. The
poem "Envoi" is the envoi note to a larger three-part poem
entitled "Apologia pro Vita Sua."