Dreams from the Station in Gargoyle 60

The Gift, short story

That's it. The rest is history. And history is never as interesting as what your imagination can give you. History is what you get when the projector gets stuck.

It turns out that art, like everything else, is what some people do for a living. Art, what passes for it, is a commodity. It is just one more thing to pay for, lug home with you, borrow, or steal—hurtar para dar por Dios, as it says in the dictionary.

If I could rouse any interest, I would start a support group for people committed to art. I would circulate a petition, start an internal movement to bust people out of the art hospital. I would get a witness to say that I were healthy enough to live on my own, to make a decent living. What is stopping me is thinking that I am bound to the commitment I made to art as a child.

One way to make something real is in solitary confinement. Some people walk with God and honor their commitments. Those people may live anywhere on Earth except in the limelight.

Lock-up, I queried. Where is lock-up?

I would not have asked where lock-up is had I known it would seem forensic. The first thing you find out in lock-up is that God exists. In other situations you could just dismiss this information. In lock-up that is impossible. The second thing you find out is that God is everywhere, even in you. Your job as an artist is to come up with a reasonable gift to present to God.

Most people who go into the art hospital never get out. They just get moved to more comfortable quarters. Some of them, the invalids and life-long convalescents, live on the deluxe wing. The worst thing is knowing that deep down I want to stay. I would show no sign of resistance if they offered me a room with a view. "Put the trophies over there," I would tell my students from my comfortable bed.

For about one month out of solitary I would have appreciators. There would be no question about it—I had served both God and man. After that, if I managed to do anything more, they would give me students. It is very strange, these students. They come from miles around to be put in the hospital with you. Most of them are starving and craven. Usually it is because they had a parent or step-parent who belonged in one hospital or another themselves but who managed to hold on by sheer will power to the world outside. Then values changed, and these offspring lost the wherewithal to define their own existence. There are millions and millions of them, and their numbers are growing. There will never be enough beds.

The easiest wholesale solution is for everyone to drink their gift to death. That way is the most popular, but it is not the only possibility.

If people were willing to open their minds a bit, they could find constructive uses for creative energy. They could leave the hospital, even for day trips, and no one would blame them for changing their minds. They could write to their congressmen. They could volunteer at shelters for the homeless; better yet, they could go on the road with Jimmy Carter and build habitats for humanity. They could sing in the church choir. They could grow a garden. They could raise their own children. We do not need as much art as we are making. There are many other things we need more.

Some people, women especially, go the sex route. They devote their ingenuity to making themselves as sexy as movie stars. Artists can never be worshipped as mindlessly as movie stars, but some of them come pretty close. Other artists, the men especially, sleep around or mulch up their brains on fame.

The very lucky few get shipped back to solitary confinement. Most of these do not know they are lucky, chosen. They think they are being punished for bad reviews. They think bad reviews cheat. They think good reviews tell the truth.

There is no need to worry about art. Art in its ideal forms stays safe. Real art resists being the object of attention. It directs your gaze, and it swings in you forever.

Of the inmates with windows, every year, one or two of them, the purest at heart, beg to be let back into the cell. They are afraid they might jump. That would be going beyond the call of duty, something no one might say. They say that they have learned their lesson, and they promise all the real powers-that-be that they will work harder this time. They sign statements to that effect and they apologize to their loved ones for the emotional and financial turmoil they have caused and will continue to cause until death. (In some of them, the very exemplary, this bad behavior will be held up as customary, even as tax-exempt.) They say goodbye to them and vow never to look outside themselves for companionship or diversion again. Of course, it does not last. Pretty soon someone or something better comes along.

They all have one thing in common. They discovered their gift in the first place because they needed a friend, so they made one up. They kept on making things up until they had a world. Now that they have real friends, and sex, you would think they could just let it rest, but they can’t. They still have something to prove, so they put their name on the waiting list to perform their very own, original talent shows in the seasick cafeteria.

Most of the shows are the same, except in detail. It is rare indeed when someone gets the wind whipping through your grapevine. These days most anything is acceptable as an offering—a stick of wood, a drum roll, a shitty conversation ya had with a friend. The ones who feel ashamed of their limitations almost quit.

It was better in the days before promotion, when having a gift meant something in Latin. In God, a token to His allness in your smallness. A simple nest egg.

(1991)

Published in Mad Hatters' Review, issue 10, 2008.

Triptych

These stories can be found at Fictionaut: http://fictionaut.com/stories/ann-bogle/hobos-pastor; http://fictionaut.com/stories/ann-bogle/story-for-neds-edit; and http://fictionaut.com/stories/ann-bogle/purple-iv

Necessary Heat

Jane Vanderbosch told me before Pastor Santo hid in flames then perished that I was spiritual and hid my strength. Liz was blue-eyed, naturally frizzy-blond, honey-tanned in summer. One day, a pleasant semblance took accord. It was Liz and somehow John Lennon around her face, at her piano, her fingers tiptoeing middle C, ebony to ivory, like goldhips. What is writing, Rick B.? You appear in your photo to be more handsome than your first brother. Sudden memory: ”Question mark? Curly cock. Exclamation! Stiff prick.” Eric deserves a position in this/our native country. Next I’ll suggest he go home to Oakland—a call for imaginative conduct—no mere white man living near here in the Middle West, west of Milwaukee. Mne Sota Makoce. The Land of the Dakota. Poet Anonymous lives in America—harped miscegenation, once, to Dr. Poetry, Ph.D., whose master’s pay was unrelated and horrid. Elizabeth Brown-Guillory fired the word, too, in Black Women Writers, the first I’d heard it—shuffleboard puck down center aisle, seminar table, into the net of the door. Hockey was my favorite sport, early. Trailing my father’s walking lesson, he conducted me in hand, north along Williston Road to the Ice Arena behind our City Hall. During the game, I rose in the stands, with all-out alarum, in favor of my future high school team. Liz startled, egyptically—then resumed. Not a soul or spirit could have predicted it, my enthusiasm. Hover-seeing, the hockey cheerleader jump-split it.

This story appears at Fictionaut.  First composition, February 14, 2013, revised off and on since, as is my present practice with stories I have written this year sur les amis.  Original version(s) may be available to those interested.  Latest revision, October 30, 2014.

My mother has shared, with enthusiasm, the plot of a non-fiction account of the Church's view of curiosity before and during the Renaissance in The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in nonfiction. ~AMB

Flash Mob 2013 entry: http://flashmob2013.wordpress.com/

Brock & Cheryl: Comp

A short story written collaboratively in early 2001 by mIEKAL aND and Ann Bogle and shared at Wryting-L listserv in 2005.

He is about six-foot-seven; he has brown, medium-length hair (crooked sort of, to the bottom of his ears); he wears a big suit that he probably got at a tall men's store. And the pants and coat match, into pin stripes (not a pin-stripe suit but a navy/gray line pattern). And his briefcase has insurance policies in it because that is what he sells. He got her name from an old boyfriend, but she doesn't know that or which one, and she thinks she needs more insurance, something she thinks of as another thing she must buy. The kind of insurance isn't clear to her — fire, theft, renter's, flood, other acts of God, what does he usually sell? He opens the briefcase.

He remembers someone long forgotten from high school. Everyone called her Tippy, but he always thought of her as Excess — a sublime popularity in his head: someone he took home at night, in his thoughts. Tippy or Excess, so many insurance policies later, was at the heart of his successful salesmanship, the One he never had but substituted in her absence with a readymade fiction of conquest and spooning.

Tippy, his fantasy mistress from high school, had actually gotten married two or three times, he heard later, but in high school, the fantasy was first, that she might be big enough for him — a stroke of luck there — but also he imagined himself married to a little woman who received his seed by caesarian. And Tippy, no one he would really take home, would climb in and out of the tool shed window — how he'd always imagined it. Brock has an insurance policy for this new version of Tippy Excess sitting before him, stupid, clueless, and hungry. Her pink-colored lips stuck in agape.

Let's make it clear that a policy is not a contract. Fantasies harbored for lifetimes attain a self-imposed rigor, a sentencing to a strict line drawn by the will. He could have slipped Tippy notes, but then there was the chance that Bogus, the football guy and her true possessor, would find him out. So in a makeshift flight of fancy he composed a marriage contract over and over in his head, only to surface later as the fine print of those damned policies.

This Tippy's name was Cheryl — something both of them were so far not committing to paper or saying. Unusual in a salesman, she thought. He is insincere and intends to sell her something. Best would be if he sold her the need for it, but that was beyond his intelligence to do, she decided. Skip need straight to conclusion. She was thinking about the chicken for the broiler pan. Buy insurance; keep up the regular home cooking because the time to prepare to meet a regular guy and settle down had come, again.

“I think of myself as sassy,” she once told a girl who shared a locker next to her. Having said that she was never free to become; the unprompted words were self-determined. Looking in the mirror every hair had its place. Morning required her complete attention to construct herself in an image that The Man of Dreams would be ready to float off on life's raft with. Something was burning in the oven, and a child would be crying with hunger and impatience. How fast Cheryl — Sassy ol' face, girl-runner-jumper-other, funny light — Cheryl got to the out: As soon as she could think of someone who might be coming to meet her. She would think of the loss, of it becoming a life for someone not Sassy, pale Cheryl, good Cheryl, Cheryl too right for the bank, Cheryl righter than the bank, of the kid, the cooking, the forgetting to look in the mirror, the man — it could be Brock Insurance Salesman — out scouting his next Sassy, but mostly, she thought of staying at home without her next Someone Coming Up, the guy out the corner of her eye, just next to her day, coming up, to unlock Sassy and leave a baby girl crying.

9 a.m.: Brock picks up the phone and leaves a message.

10 a.m.: Cheryl checks her messages, something about an expired “policy.”

11 a.m.: This is the day that the mail is not delivered (a bank holiday), so Cheryl heads for the Post Office.

12:15 p.m.: Cheryl discovers a letter from many years ago crammed into her postal box. Shreds of poems and clippings from a yearbook but no return address. She hastily looks around the mailbox room to be sure that no one is watching and puts the envelope in her purse. Out the door.

12:20 p.m.: Brock is standing in the street kicking a tire in the hopes his car will start up.

The good thing is the blue, bark, back thing never reversed, never reversed. Traversed is Professional Cheryl, not a walker, a lady getting her mail before a date with the too-tall Brock. Brock is thinking of his car. No lady getting her mail can save the car, more important in the scheme of who-he-is-today: Nissan — than who he will be tonight after he smokes her. He can see her yeah/no walk as he kicks the tire one more time, in time for her to see it, squarely, but what if she's got her hand on his too-tall ass the entire mile, an eternity? No, the car is temporarily disabled. He does have time for a hand on the ass, but where does it come from and in the end will his car start? All these questions are the province of the third party ambiguous, someone who claims to be an accomplice to the Author, but not a loyal Reader, or a Scanner. The car was Brock's pride before the wheel wells started rusting out. His buttocks tightened as he swiveled to have a look-see.

It was another Jesus-Short, something in the circuitry between car-man-song, no wise, again (his buttocks itching for the real touch not about to come from a Jesus reaches from Cheryl past him). He hadn't decided about Jesus, the real Jesus from the morning of his life, about his past, her past, except to look forward to the real touch or face or past means Cheryl's past was (Cheryl no one's wife, he guessed) a streak of indiscretions. Cheryl thinks of his tall ass first, the car second, and of his two secrets last. She can guess at his secrets. There is no hold, no Nissan — she tells him the car will be fixed or he'll get a new one, must be God sending him a message. With this guy she has to take even a minute of her two-minute approach to mention God and cars as if they were synchronously connected. Last time she thought of Jesus she was looking at him, dark Aramaic, long-haired, just her type, and it seemed profane to her. No, she wasn't a churchy girl, but she belonged to the couch of believers who invited the banal to constitute her religiosity, not hail Marys but some man in imitation of a god implanted in her male universe. The men of tomorrow lined up in a row, unchoosable but nonetheless viewable. Brock only knew how to wink in acknowledgement. This was the one. He had her picture in his glove compartment, more than one, the others in the photos darkened.

“Your car,” Cheryl pried.

“Gas,” Brock mentioned. He was more than a bucket nervous.

“1982?” She remembered him. “Stairway to Heaven.” That song played in his car, in his home, at work. “Economics class?” She had never had much of a mind for indecent global numbers.

~mIEKAL aND & Ann Bogle

Fiancée

The willing suspension of disbelief, a parakeet.
You cook then leave dishes for the reader.
I prevent having dishes to wash by not cooking.
I eat nuts and cheese and berries, but what if I did not eat?
. . .
A while ago, my boyfriend left me. Bella says it's sexy that I go around my small circle in town saying, “He broke up with me. He left me. He quit.” Sexy, but I don't know how not to: he didn't leave, and he wasn't my boyfriend. He was my fiancé. He stays in, deep in, a granite fissure in Manhattan. I stay in Minnesota and go out. I go out to meet the girls—old girls, new. We go on, trifling with language that's in use for us. Hot, cool, loving women with not cool, loving husbands or with hot, cool, loving boyfriends or with no husband or boyfriend: duende for a season or a reason for a while.

“You don't like the word ‘cunt,'” my fiancé said judiciously. “I like it but not as a first name,” I said.

Bella shows me a heavy, beaded necklace that matches my boots--beige-tipped and turquoise-shafted, the turquoise color not visible under jeans. I bought the jeans already tattered so I wouldn't have to wait for them, but they are all cotton without added stretch, so I wait anyway, stand around cased in them, dropping pounds walking and talking ceaselessly in them, talking and walking, while the air in the rooms turns pale red. He'd spy me dancing to paragraphs, gorging on beer then pizza yet growing loose and looser in the limbs until I feel like a girl again, a go-girl on a budget, a Gidget, a gadget. Yes, I say to Bella: I'll take the beads and black wool wrap with alpaca feathers and peacock brooch starred with crystals. I wind the stole around my jeans and pin the peacock at my hip. The wrap swings like a thick skirt over the jeans and beige boots. The peacock sparkles. They say and it is: subject for a runway.
. . .
Bella tells a story about a woman, an acquaintance, who came into the boutique with her boyfriend, the woman smelling of an STD. We perk up, listen. What STD? The smelly one, Bella says. The one with impossible syllables no one has heard of. The men of the north reject condoms and motorcycle helmets. The law permits you to break your head.

We walk to the Narrows from the boutique, fortified by talk of men and fashion. The Narrows is a blues bar known for outbreaks of small violence. I am wearing the winter white swing coat I bought for the wedding and the gold and turquoise beads.

A crowd parts to assess us. We take our seats at the corner of the bar. At the boutique we drank vodka. If I want to kill myself, but I don't, not here, not now, I'll order red wine. I ask for a Stella. A handsome man is already sitting next to me. I eye him as I shimmy in. He has beady green eyes. We go straight to politics. He is a Republican who lives on the Lake and commutes to Wall Street. Here, I am not surrounded by liberals on a sofa. Liberals are irresponsible dreamers who know nothing about finance, he says. I am not a liberal I tell him, but a leftist, a feministe. I hate abortion -- keep it legal, I say. I am wearing the sapphire ring. I have no friends and no enemies. My fiancé left me, I say.

An hour of this, a radio hour of talk-fucking, his green eyes boring into me, he leaves, and I turn, isolated. “He's married!” I say to Jen. “After I invested an hour in it.” Jen laughs and repeats to Bella what I say. Bella has to leave. It's ten. I move to her seat and into the brown eyes of a bald man shorter than I, a Libertarian distributor of faux tin ceiling panels. He sails in summer, ice boats in winter. I am a leftist and a feministe, I tell him. My fiancé left me. When we get up to dance, I feel drunk, but he holds me at the waist, and my legs kick out freely on the tiles.
. . .
If I get caught drinking and driving, I'll go to jail for a year. I tell the man with the brown eyes to drive us. Where are we going? To his house, he tells me. His friend, also named Tom, gets in the backseat. That Tom wears tiny spectacles, and I think that I have gotten it backward and that the glasses-Tom is the intellectual, but what if none of us is? I put on the seatbelt.

At Tom's the other Tom says good night in the driveway, and we go upstairs to where a clean white dog with beige spots and beautiful brown eyes is watching us. Tom leads me to a black leather couch in one of the living rooms. He strips me: boots, jeans, swing coat, beads. In moments, he's in me. He's not large, not small, slick. This--that--entry--is raison d'etre. “Clean as a whistle,” I say to the air, meaning no organisms, the organisms you can feel on contact. "Tight,” he says.

My fiancé said,“It was like having sex with the Holland Tunnel to be fucking Diana. My wife that was sex in a monkey patch. But sex with you is the sweetest, snuggest space.”

I'm glad Tom rolls me over and buffs me again. I call out in the dark that I'm a Jamaican. Another man comes near the room and stands in the door. He says something, but I miss it. I don't know who the other man is, but I see his shadow watching us. I wish the second man would come in, but there's thought in his distance. Later Tom tells me it's his foster son. Tom is 61.
. . .
I wake in the bed looking out at a giant golden maple, not knowing what town we are in. “What town is this?” I ask Tom, and he tells me but I forget. He answers my next thought, "I can't get you pregnant."
. . .
At breakfast, Kevin, who is 23, tall, dark, and impressive, sees me in the light. “I thought you were African when I heard you,” he says. “British and Swedish,” I tell him. “I might be Arab,” he says.

(Published at Istanbul Literary Review, May edition, 2010.)

Inaccrochable

Unapproachable. I imagine an L. Frank Baum novel with a hairy lesbian marching band in parade. The womyn visit the barbershop and keep their hair short like men's then let the hair on their legs and armpits grow like European women's.


The womyn are hippies in their way.

I have to look back at it: men in Madison guaranteeing the free speech of a preacher on the library mall. The preacher stands during lunch hour on a concrete platform and shouts at the group, perhaps hoping to save them, "F-o-r-n-i-c-a-t-i-o-n!" The beards face him braced at attention, forking the word in the cold.

I walk by watching them, not stopping, thinking, "What fornication?"

Later, ten years later, in Texas, I visit G.'s apartment. She orders the men to piss off the balcony but lets the women through the bedroom to the bathroom to pee. Pages of my thesis are strewn throughout the rooms and cover the floor. We sit on them and on old CDs. The visitors grow upset, to the point of hysteria, if one of their lovers sleeps with another of their lovers or husband or wife. "F-o-r-n-i-c-a-t-i-o-n!" I shout from the bathroom. The men hear it and send in J., the little drug dealer girl, to see.

. . .

When the man comes in the house with his girlfriend, he is hoisting a 12-pack of Bud, and she is holding her eye where he has flicked it with his baseball cap while driving. M. and I have been arguing about the future. At first we are glad to be interrupted. I immediately think of the two of them driving 25 miles out of Houston to get to us in Sugarland, but when I see that the girlfriend is injured, I get on my horse.

The man is wiry and jumpy. There is a tattoo on his upper arm of Charles Manson. He jumps and jumps. He looks like a man on a pogo stick. He will not stop jumping. "I'm going to smash all the windows of her car," he claims. "Stop him," I say to M., but M. does nothing except try to make peace with concentration. "You're not allowed to hurt her or her car," I say to the man, whose name I have heard once and forgotten. The man veers close to my face and says, "Who are you? Bella Abzug! Gloria Steinem!"

The girlfriend smiles then goes to lie down on the daybed in the dining room. The man runs through the kitchen and out the back door. When he comes back, he says, "I smashed the windows of her car." M. goes out to the driveway and returns. "He did it," he says. "Call the police," I say, and M. says, "We can't have the police here. The neighbors will complain about rehearsals."

Then the man jumps near my face. "I'm going to tell you a story, Bella, Gloria. When I was 13 my father beat my mother every day, and I threw myself into the fight and tried to stop him. I couldn't stop him. He was bigger than I was. You have TLE. I have TLE. You have bipolar. I have bipolar. But mainly I shoot heroin. Would you like to shoot heroin?"

"No," I say and look at M. "She doesn't do that," M. explains. Then M. leaves the house by the front door, and I pretend he will be right back, that he will not abandon me to a fiend. The girlfriend has not gotten up from the daybed to look at her car. She lies turned to one side holding her eye and shyly laughing.

I go to the master bedroom. I close the door. I leave it unlocked for M. The man comes running through the door, jumping and making noise. "I'm going to eat you," he says. Then he leaves and I lock it. I get in bed. I can hear him fucking her in the dining room. I hear her songbird sigh. I can try to get under my head. I pull the pillows over my ears and the covers under my chin. I pray, What solidifies them. What unites them: Blessed are these the workers of the world.

[Published in Wigleaf, 2010.]

Cousin, short story

This old man stays in bed all day reading a book of Polish poetry, trying to remember what he’s heard about Venus Fly Traps. He knows they grow nearby, in a nature preserve, but he can’t remember which one, and his car is unremarkable—he can’t go from preserve to preserve looking for fly traps. He can ask Aldo. Aldo is his best friend, married but separated, with the heart of a hunter. Cousin can say, “It’s cold out here, old boy,” and Aldo will reassure him, as he always does, that Cousin’s indecision is the right one.

Cousin is a solitary, and his proper heart beats hard against his chest. He regulates it by running five miles a day. He drinks hard liquor in his white, empty living room. He has work to do, articles to write.

“It’s cold out here,” begins one article about hauling his married friend’s car from the shoulder of the highway to the nearest repair shop. Afterward, the two men drink shots of tequilla and shoot pool. They play for the married man’s wife. The narrator wins the game but goes home without the wife. Moral: Some things you don’t do. A job well done. He made it all up. He got $900 for it on the first round and $400 or so from seven other newspapers.

Cousin dials Aldo and gets his machine. He buzzes into the receiver while Aldo’s message plays.

“It’s cold out here, old boy,” Cousin says. “Call me later. I’ll be here drinking.”

Then he calls Aldo’s wife, Marietta, the editor, ready to ask her about his latest piece. Her machine picks up. “Marietta. Cousin. Haven’t heard from you. Thought I’d give you a try.”

. . .

Darkness comes early in December. Cousin flicks on the light, picks out a tape. He slices open the boneless chicken breast and chops enough garlic to starve ten fevers. The phone rings. It’s Ellen, the woman he’s been screwing since September. She says she’s hungry, but he doesn’t want to feed her. He tells her he’s already eaten.

“I doubt it,” Cousin says. “You two go out so late. I’m an old man. I can’t stay out late anymore.”

“You’re no old man,” Ellen says. “We’ll be at Thirsty’s.”

Cousin’s indecision fills the universe. “Call me later,” he says. “I’ll probably be here.”

“What do you expect with a name like Cousin?” Petra says and hands the cue to Ellen. Marlboros dangle from their lips. They’ve plugged the jukebox, and men hover over it and in the doorway.

“His sister called him that,” Ellen says. “Significant because he likes his sister.”

“How can you stand it? I would have killed him by now.”

“He tells me I don’t know how to suffer properly.”

“Ask for a revolution, get Summer of Love,” Petra says.

“I told him we could just have sex, but he said that wouldn’t be right. Once I said, ‘I love you,’ then ‘sorry’ right after because he stopped. I said, ‘I love you’; he stopped. I said, ‘sorry’; he continued.”

“Faggot,” Petra says, laughing.

“The beginning was good. That’s what he likes. The moment when you’re driving in the open air and your hair is flying and your skirt is whipping up around your knees, and he’s smoking, of all things, and happy and looking at you. The first date. Don’t know what might happen. I tell him you don’t know what might happen once it’s started either, but he doesn’t believe it. Is he a womanizer or does he fake it?” Ellen shoots and misses. “Says later she seduced him. ‘Really hard to do that,’ I say.”

“What did he say?”

“He laughed. He always laughs. It means he can do what he wants.”

“You need vegetables,” Petra says. “We’ll cook for you, give you vegetables.”

“Then you can tell me what it’s like not to be hated,” Ellen says.

“Ben is sweet. He’s really sweet, but I haven’t been alone for two months. He’s always there. Always touching me. I feel like his mother. I can’t stand feeling like his mother. I want to scream, ‘Don’t touch me. I’m not your mother.’ I told him that, one day, told him I was feeling cowed. He says he doesn’t want a mother, doesn’t know how I got that feeling.”

“It sounds good to me,” Ellen says. “Remember chaos?”

“I miss chaos. I miss coarseness and stupidity. I want violence.” Petra crescendos and misses her shot. She grinds the cue into her foot. The men near the jukebox shift in a herd. They seem aroused, but wary. Petra and Ellen are tuned to it, like a station.

. . .

“You girls out turning over dumpsters again?” Cousin asks. He has called Ellen’s machine to tell her he’s going to bed.

Petra and Ellen stop at Cousin’s on their way home from Thirsty’s. His light is out. It’s not like either of them to drop by without calling. Petra goes to his bedroom window. Ellen wonders how Petra knows that it is his bedroom window. Then she remembers that Petra went to his Halloween party.

Petra taps on the pane. “Wake up. You lug,” she says. “Get up. You do nothing. Two women are at your window, and you don’t even get up. You don’t even move.”

Cousin lifts the corner of the blind away from the window. It is dark in his room and at first Petra can’t see him.

“Not dumpsters,” Petra answers. Ellen can’t hear him. “Lawn signs. Get up.”

Ellen watches Petra talk to him then moves to the window herself, full of dread. He’ll be unhappy to see her. When she sees his face, he surprises her by smiling.

“Fine,” Petra says. “Who needs you?”

Cousin lets the blind fall back against the window, and the women go to the car.

“He needs a lobotomy,” Petra says.

“He’s had a lobotomy,” Ellen says.

“I’m glad you’re not talking about me,” says a man who passes them on the sidewalk.

“One lobotomy is rarely enough,” Petra says.

“But he’s good in bed,” the man says over his shoulder.

. . .

Cousin jots down notes for the fly trap story, “Flying Too Close to Venus.” Venus Fly Traps in the Bog. He can make it scary. He can tell it from the fly’s point of view: getting suckered in, lured in by juices. It’s involuntary, a trick of nature, survival of the species. He only thinks he likes it. He should remember from the last time what really happens, zap, you’re dead, wrapped up like a mummy before you can blink. Gotta keep your wits about you, visit other plants, avoid the dread Venus. Moral of the story: a great place to take the kids for a study of nature and of things to come.

He calls Petra. “You,” he says. “Out turning over dumpsters again.”

“You missed it,” Petra says. “Not everyone would forget to inhale.”

“What are you doing now?”

“Taxes.”

“Again? You’re always doing taxes.”

“End of a quarter.”

“How’s Ben?”

“He’s fine. Want to talk to him?”

“No. Just wondering.”

“Ellen and I think you need a lobotomy,” Petra tells him. She chews on the end of her pen and uncaps it to cross out a line.

“Thanks,” Cousin says.

“We said, at least, that there’s hope for you.”

“That’s good. Glad you decided that.”

“Well, maybe we can pound on your window tonight. Right now I have to finish this schedule. I’m really behind.”

“Talk to you later,” Cousin says, his finger on the button.

“There’s the other hooligan,” he says when Ellen answers the phone.

“I’m on the other line. Are you at home?”

. . .

Cousin hoists the barbell to his chest and hovers it. Think fly traps, he tells himself. Fly Traps in the Mist. He does twenty reps, and the phone rings.

“So what did I miss?” he says.

“Do you want to do something or not, because if you don’t, I can do something with someone else. If you do, I can think about it.”

“Tonight I might actually want to do something,” Cousin says.

“Very precise,” Ellen says.

“Call me later,” Cousin says.

. . .

Fighting with a woman is the essence of life, Cousin writes. He slices open a boneless chicken breast and opens a package of spinach. Chicken ala spinach e garlic. He knows a little Spanish, a lot of English.

The woman in Seattle is not the communicator that Ellen is, but she is a fornicator, and she rides horses. She says that anyone who would jump into something the way Ellen has is unstable. Ellen has a problem.

When he tells Ellen this, they are lying on the sofa. He has just returned from a second trip to Seattle. Ellen mulls it. Finally she says, “I see it.”

“What’s the prognosis, Doctor?”

“The woman in Seattle is normal. You like her because she’s normal. She’s never been to a shrink. She’s an equestrian. She has the same friendships she’s had since high school. And she has you, man with a tan.”

“Don’t be nasty.”

“That’s what you want.”

“What is?”

“That.”

Cousin mixes their drinks before slinging her over his shoulder and carrying her to bed. Ellen rides out her hatred and his. She erases her mind with the back of her hand. She slips around next to him, backs into him with her ass. He gets behind her and in. She arches, dodges, clamps her eyes wide, bites his wrist, arm, hand. He nearly strangles her. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, she thinks. This goes on until he stops, the only sign of his coming.

“Couldn’t you fake one,” Cousin says and rolls over on his back.

He stares ahead without seeing, unaware of having seized the sweetness of his time.

(First written in 1991; published in Submodern Fiction in 2003.)

Onion family

Excerpt from "Initial Signs of Mercy," (or "The Sitzer"), short story, 1997:

Welsh Onion
"Fred went agreeably to weekly jam sessions at The Bar of the Common People. Her own interest in flight was beginning to show and expressed itself in solo dancing.

While Jimmy was on stage, Fred talked with the bartender, a sound poet from Missoula. It was difficult to hear what he was saying so she wrote notes to him across the bar. She wrote about the weather. She wrote about trade winds. He wrote that he had not known that she was going to be crazy.

One night cops arrived -- someone in the neighborhood had complained about the noise. The cops repeatedly asked to see the liquor license and repeatedly stated that the piece of paper pinned to the wall above the cash register was merely a receipt for a license, not a license.

Fred grew impatient with their circular remarks. 'I know they have a beer and wine license,' she said.

'Where is it then?' one of the cops said.

The sound poet had told her the week before that he had sent off for a license but that it had never come in the mail.

'You tell us,' she said.

That was on a Wednesday. On Monday, the police closed the joint, right down to the basil growing fragrantly in the back, the rose bushes, the chive, the Wisconsin."

My Crush on Daniel Ortega, short story

A week later.

In this room, where love was spilled on the oldest bed, there is a draft. I begin the song again, the song about the eye, and I smoke and drink coffee. I am crouching, and I am waiting, because the dream of the clarinet tells me to begin again.

February 20

Daniel Ortega dances the mayfly with women on the campaign trail. He rides in on horseback, Godivas in tow. The week of the election, I do my taxes in North America. I remind myself that he is married, but it doesn’t stop me from thinking about him. I blot from my mind the deaths he has ordered. His soldiers are rowdy and young, eager to kill for an ideal.

Violetta Chamorro travels again and again to Washington. She limps in on crutches. She is here for the better medical care and to take our money. There is a dim recollection that she is a martyr. Somoza killed her husband while we were on Somoza’s side. The sides change. Her children, her son and daughter, put out the Sandinista newspaper.

March 27

Politics kills romance.

I tear apart the sheets you wrinkled, sleeping with my friend, and I wonder if I can learn to be louder while making love, as loud as you were while I stood on the other side of the wall, in the kitchen, feeding the cats. You’re not legally married, and neither am I, as we keep telling each other.

My friend says that you and I are like hands, back to back. She matches you in loudness, and she can forget me and your wives, as she rolls with you in my husband’s bed. She says that places mean nothing to her. That it’s crucial for self-preservation.

April 3

My taxes are still not done. The documents I need are filed in a box in the closet. I’ve paid them thousands of dollars, and they want more. I open and close the closet door, and the documents snap at the hem of my robe.

My throat is sore, but I won’t quit. When I get the prescription, I’ll take two and go out. It’s raining. I dance along the street with my headphones on and keep my eye peeled for Daniel Ortega.

I am never alone. The music runs the cord to my ear. The cats sleep at my head. The men call and call. They stay in orbit. I am protected only by gravity, and I am not a planet. I slip. I let them nearer, by turns. I veer toward one then another.

Her letter arrives, printed. She speaks simply, as if I were a child. There are things she won’t be telling me. I read quickly for a reference to her betrayal. She writes out of concern for me and out of curiosity. Our week together was refreshing, she says, but not relaxing. We talked so much. We lost the toothpaste. Our visitors were all poor. Maybe one of them took it.

The toothpaste didn’t turn up, I tell her. I am seeing the new man, but I don’t know what his fate will be. Sorry to hear her new one is trouble. It’s worth it only at certain moments, and then what choice do we have? The house is full: three of a kind and two of another.

Finish it, she says. Put it behind you and walk on. Put them all behind you and continue on alone, without these crutches.

March 24

My friend had a dream that she was away when the fire started, and that I was stuck in the upper floors of the building. She waited helplessly on the street for my rescue. They put me in the hospital for smoke inhalation, and three days later, I was shot at in the same building. She stood on the street below waiting for them to carry me down. Again? she said. Again? And she thought that what had happened was her fault.

April 3

The most reliable suitors are the traitors, the ones who come first in their own minds.

The phone rings, but it’s not the right caller. I pick among relative evils. One I want is bad for me; one I love is married. There is a hope with the new man that I’ll wait for him to catch on to me. I’ll take off my clothes in protest of this taxation and get on his back, side-saddle.

March 29

In the dream about the married man, I read his poem. I had let myself into his office and ransacked his papers, looking for an indication. Ours was not a one-night stand because his brow was wrinkled, sadness there like a mark. We read the book about Anna and Levin without being Anna or Levin.

He says that I should be on my guard, that my trouble will be that I arouse strong emotions. In the dream, he climaxed while I read the right side of the poem, the column about Anna. I stopped reading when he came and thought: We missed each other.

April 3

I do not fool myself by thinking death will not come. I plan for it. I kill time until it arrives. Sal says that when he gets sick, he lies in bed, thinking uncharacteristically of death, wanting sympathy. I tell him, not in answer: Death is my constant companion.

When Tom Petty counts squarely, he says foe. One, two, three, foe.

When I come to you, there are two yous, a you and a you. With one of you, I spill my
guts. With the other, I stroke your brow. You all have a dog bite above your left eyebrow. Gay men used to wear earrings in their left ears. Now everyone wears earrings in both ears.

Time advances. One space between words, two between sentences. When I’m not working, I rehearse the language of newspapers: teez, pica, reefer, jump, hed, sig.
. . .
On Ash Wednesday we brought the Lebanese man to what I tell myself is a "crackhouse," but really it is just someone's house. The Lebanese man's mother is from the Dominican Republic, no matter what your understanding was. You said she was from Honduras, but those are the fire victims. His father was the ambassador from Beirut to Santo Domingo. He grew up in Spain. After midnight, he told us about the Jesuit priesthood. He said that until he had been with a woman, he had not known God. He said, pounding his abdomen: Until man knows woman, he cannot know himself.

The man whose house it was had asked for my phone number at a poetry reading. I had known him in the past as a cook at Muther’s Kitchun. I had had the impression that he had taken a turn toward stupidity, that he had used up too much acid. He was against tobacco. He let the whole-wheat carob brownies burn in the oven, as the men lit up the ladle with the gray, thickening cocaine. He told me to go outside if I needed to smoke cigarettes.

Jennifer Casolo is caught with weapons in her yard. She went to Central America as a missionary and came back as a chief.

CAST (in order of appearance):

Women:

I (me, my)
Godivas
Violetta Chamorro
Her daughter
My friend
Your wives
Anna Karenina
The Lebanese man’s Dominican mother
Jennifer Casolo
The woman who dumped the man with the long hair
The new man’s old love
Jean Rhys

Men:

Daniel Ortega
His soldiers
Somoza
Violetta Chamorro’s husband
Her son
You
My husband
The new man
My friend’s new man
The married man
Levin
Sal
Tom Petty
Gay men
The Lebanese man
His father
The man whose house it was
My old boyfriend
The man with the long hair
Frankie, the mafia son
The Assemblyman
The news anchor
The Texan in the Dewar’s profile
Vronsky

Animals:

Horses
Cats

April 4

The new man spends 19 hours in my bed then leaves to buy pot. He wants to come back afterward, but I tell him I have things to do. I remind him that my old boyfriend is coming to town. He says he’ll call at eleven. At eleven I’m eating old macaroni, hoping he’ll call, planning to ask him over and to kick him out early, but I don’t get the chance. He doesn’t call.

I put on the headphones. By sheer telepathy, I am not able to make the man with the long hair call, but I think of him.

March 28

The new man spends 15 hours in my bed. At 5 o’clock, I drive him to work, and on the way, the man with the long hair passes us and waves. He has on dark glasses, and wisps of hair escape his ponytail. I drive erratically and let the new man out. In my rearview mirror, I see Frankie, the mafia son. This town is too small. I don’t want to live here anymore. I go straight home, with a firm plan to straighten the upholstery.

I realize that the man with the long hair will follow me, but I don’t know why he would decide to since we were going in opposite directions. I tell myself to go inside and brush my teeth, when he pulls up behind me in his father’s car. I recognize the New York Assemblyman plates.

He meets me in the middle of the street and kisses me. He takes my hand and points me toward the pizza shop at the corner, but we never get there. He walks, and I float beside him. He wants to know how my infatuation is coming: Am I over him yet? No, I tell him, it’s still with me. I like to be near him to intensify my suffering. He asks me who the man in the car was, and I ask him if he wants coffee. By then he has walked and I have floated down the street and through the park. He pauses to wave at the news anchor in the intersection. I wave, too, not realizing that I only know the news anchor from TV.

We go inside to two cups of coffee on the table. There are no other traces of the new man. I wonder if the man with the long hair knows that we just got up, but he isn’t talking. He’s sitting on the couch, waiting for his coffee, reading my journal. He injures my peace, but we flipped for it. I listen from the kitchen to his silent reading and wait for him to ask again if all my sentences are short. He doesn’t ask. He says he likes it but doesn’t get it.

He tells me about running into the woman who dumped him and that she is cold toward him now. He asks how would I feel if he were cold toward me. I tell him he is cold, though he tries not to seem so. He asks if I’m involved with the new man, and I say, no.

April 4

The new man’s old love is in the past. He says her name, and her name means love. I tell him there are things to look forward to, but I’m no more certain than he is. I think ahead to Texas. I think of meeting the Texan in the Dewar’s profile. That wouldn’t be love, but it could be fun. Perhaps fun is just around the corner.

My husband calls while the new man is fucking me. I’m on the bottom and yelling, "I don’t want to hear it." The answering machine is blaring, and I’m plugging my ears. My husband says our name for each other over and over, in a slow decrescendo.

April 5

The new man falls off his horse doing a trick for me. I show no mercy. I leave him in the mud, caked with tears. I want him supple, and he wants merely to be soft. No amount of mercy will change that.

During our druid times, my friend says: There are no other lovers.

April 6

My husband reads Jean Rhys to me over the phone at four in the morning, and I can’t remember why I left him. Neither of you rides a horse. Anna Karenina crumbled in the stands when Vronsky fell off his horse.

(First written in 1990; published in Washington Review in 1998.)

Texas Was Better, short story

We’ve come rowing in our boat for gasoline. The last place didn’t have it. The first place sold us food. We ate heaps of beans and rice with plastic forks. This is better than in New York. The further the better. But there’s a limit.

So I think about having not gone to Canada. Had I gone to Canada pluperfect. What Canada would have looked like from the boat, what it would have looked like from the shore, with my back to it, having already seen it, saying later in New York that the lox had been delicious. "The gardens are well-kept due to a still-thriving sense of civic pride." What people had heard.

Had I gone to Canada--but in particular had I gone to Halifax--I would have walked until I had found the three cats. It would have been like Hemingway’s cats--I would have looked for the descendants of the three cats that had slept under the house where my professor had lived with her professor--married. This is how it came about, she had said.

In the story there were a large caesar salad and a guest. Her marriage ended before they ate the salad--she and the professor broke their vows over bread. The guest left hungry. The child continued. Over the course of further stories her daughter became her friend, but not in forward order.

In a story of my friend’s--one my professor would not have heard--the daughter did worse things to her room than not clean it. After some months, my friend ordered my professor’s daughter to wash dishes.

My professor drove the mountains in spring, when the buds were red. Had she not told me about the red spring, I would have gone on seeing the usual yellow spring from my apartment. I went out to it. Probably my windows were dirty. It was a beautiful movie. The buds were red--it seemed they were dying at the beginning. I had no idea what fall would be--bright fish composing on Beethoven Street.

If you had said, "Let’s go to Canada," we would have gone, if I had thought you meant it. You didn’t have a car. How many men have not been taken seriously for not having a car? You gave your reasons: the ozone layer, carbon monoxide, but really it was your DUIs. The relationship would have felt different had you driven.

Eventually, I dreaded to see you drive. Because driving one should never look small. What if you had driven and looked small? Or thin or stiff or overly law-abiding? You would not have found my back seat so congenial for your blues harp.

It was the first clean sheets in a month. The best without someone. Bugs had not wanted to come into this house. (Where were the much-prophesied cockroaches?) The cats saw the one bug on the ceiling and sat still for an hour tracking it.

Texas was better in the story of your birth in El Paso’s fluke of a dust storm. I imagined your mother giving birth to you at the center of the storm, not, as she must have done, on the military base. I came here thinking that I was returning to your birthplace in your place.

Had we driven, we would have stopped in Memphis, knowing what I now know about Memphis. Even as I flew, gasoline prices went up. Had we driven, we would have beaten the panic by moving slower than it.

We would not have eaten the rice and beans en route. We would have eaten them in southern Louisiana or in New Mexico. Would you have guessed this?

Originally--a story you would not have heard--New Mexico was to be the location of our ranch. My friend and I would have lived in the house. You and my ex- would have lived in town. Not that my friend would have belonged to my ex-. I was to have both you and my ex-, and my friend would have been there to talk to. She could have had anyone she wanted.

This had been a daydream. The image of the ranch, looking back on it, prefigured my friend’s affair with my ex- and her falling in love with you. The daydream as described in the letter is preserved. She got a typed copy. Her idea had not been so different except she at that time would have brought her ex- --also relegated to town.

Well, daydreams being equal and sort of meaningless, neither here nor there.

Still, it was useful to imagine the four of us in New Mexico and in the pattern I had been used to. It was a way to move without changing and to keep the terrible power I had in a new setting.

My ex- thinks about Nova Scotia--he had gone there as an Eagle Scout but dropped out after the trip.

(First written in 1990; published in Submodern Fiction in 2003.)

Cigs, (short story)

“It’s like hungering for a year of cigs. A year of cigs, a yard full of cigs. Stick ’em in my face. Burn me out. Kill me with their emotional therapy.

I stay sleeping to avoid wanting to smoke. 'Dread Baron' was wrong in saying volition seems gone from the world. There is plenty of the kind that heads toward death. Early death, early retirement, takes care of each emotion until it kills you at 50.

I don’t want to smoke. How can I convince myself? I say it, but I know that my body will become a pear for three years, not fat per se, but newly formed. Gelatinous, new ridges. From not pounding my heart so hard just watching TV. I can take walks, I can fix my bike, I can join a swim pool, yoga day. Can type better, if I try. My fingers are sleepy. I am sleepy, too, from no speed-er-up. No coffee, no cigs, want to fall down sleeping all the time.

What about sub drugs from a shrink? Mood-altering chemicals from a shrink? Pain is pain. Emotional pain is emotional pain. They teach that emotional pain is physical pain, culture pain is science pain, but they cannot test for the absence of these synaptic conclusions. I will say, if you can test me and find something missing, then you can supplement me for the missing thing, but don’t play chemical guess work in my body.

'Tenny' resists less because drugs are his favorite response to all life’s situations. The only thing not drug is sex, and he approaches sex as a drug, to cure pain. Uses sex to end love pain. Love to end sex pain.

My throat is sore, but the soreness is from not smoking. Going back would not help and would make me feel resigned to risk death at 50 from early laziness. Also, there would be a lost sense of free will. All my oratories would be about the inevitability of all life.

'Rye Character’s' stories would have been different had he gotten off the cigs. They say booze kills, but much more often, cigs kill. Cigs are not okay, not mild, not non-reactive. They smooth every emotion, tame every flare up. Cigs are quick like crack must be quick. I can’t imagine that there would be a lot of difference, except with crack cops would be involved. Say crack gives you a buzz. Cigs give you a buzz, too, but you don’t know that after a while. Then you need another one.

Cigs kill. Reports say that cigs kill more people than anything in the U.S. Not booze. Booze hardly kills, even drunk driving, compared to cigs. Cigs cost the public in hospital bills, years on end, trying to stomp out the avoidable disease. Maybe cigs are bad because of other chemicals. Then take them out. Smoke Lucky’s or Camels or American Spirits. I loved to smoke. I loved to smoke. Where will be the next love? Where will be the courage to face life not smoking?

Every cig you light you know you’re killing yourself. Early. Not that you wouldn’t die but that you are hastening death. In these writers, they’re dying twenty years sooner than other people. They write about sadness. Every one thinks their sadness is universal, but it’s the sadness of a tobacco addict, a self-killer. Not family, not friends, not cancer, not wisdom stop them from offing themselves every twenty minutes. Addicts.

Got my cereal box here for munching. Got my list of to do.

. . .

Maybe I just want to smoke more this minute because I am writing and drinking coffee and it’s a test. It’s hardest the first day giving up an old practice. The first day was nearly impossible. Not undoable but nearly so. I wanted to smoke or die. But after I had passed the addiction period, it was my mind telling me. They say if you can hold out, if you can stick with it and ignore the damn memories of loving your little white lover man sticks, then the desire becomes less and less. You get over it. You try.

That is all I know how to say.

It would not be acceptable to go back and suck down a pack of Camels because I would still want to smoke when I had done that. I want to smoke now though I don’t smoke, and I’d want to smoke then, if I did smoke. The wanting to is constant whether I do it or don’t. Not smoking is harder for a while, then, they say, the urges begin to decline. You begin to fit into a life without smoking.

Give myself a break. Twenty-year habit begun as a child. I am bound to feel more pressure. There is no memory like my memory of liberation through cigs. Good memories of independence and liberation and being smarter than parents in smoking. The other self, the other person, the bad self, the sexy self, the sinner self, the not wanting to be all good all the time because it was so hard to be perfect, the rebelling by smoking and sex (which I never really chose then but was proud of, as if accomplished).

My mother must have been very angry to see me get away from her grasp that way. Don’t smoke! Alarm. Don’t smoke! Who is smoking for? It is for rebelling. Who has me locked up now? Cigs, that’s who. Cigs. Don’t do it. The devil dog is cigarettes.

Devil Dog, God as my witness, Devil Cigarette Humper, Go Exactly to Hell!

It was cigs I loved, not life. That’s true. Cigs, not life. Cigs were the little punctuations in each day I needed to feel alive, to feel life was worth something. Cigs. Cigs are life? Are cigs life for addicts? What is life for the non-addict, me? For me, life is life, I suppose. What is life to be life to someone? What is life to be life to someone?”

(1991)

Hogging the Lady, short story

This is the hardest of the stories. This is the story that belongs in its place. This is the story that takes second place. It is the story that follows its master. It is the story that grows old. It is the story for a season, for fall.

Which door did she slip in, in her torn fishnet stockings and faux leather skirt, brown, her mascara falsely applied, her vacant blouse in need of hitching. She was not the usual member of the band, not the girl nextdoor, not next to any door, not a regular housekeeper or woman. She was a ditch digger, a pied, circular piper, a mouse hugger.

I took her to be the last of her generation. She seemed drunk without eating. She seemed ashamed without sin. She seemed cursed without a family. She seemed as though she had planned a porkchop for the boys and girls of Tallahassee. She seemed to believe that she had roped a strong pony. In the first movement her dance looked lonely and lame. Then she got up on the stage and tried to kiss the front man. He didn’t want to kiss her at first, but when he did, something magical happened, something tender.

She got down off the stage and put down her riding crop. She started loving the air. She started singing in her voices. She started dancing. She whistled a bar of Dixie then she sallied north. She swiveled her legs and her arms, looking much like a 44-year-old rodeo worker on the floor at Christopher’s, but she was at the Turfside.

Everyone wanted to dance with her, a face she well knew, but that did not seem to be the reason to dance for her. She danced, it seemed, so that others would dance, too, and they did.

(1999; published in Poetic Inhalation in February 2005.)

Almanac, short story

Marcy called on the abortion day. She had been reading from Source Almanac.

"Wisconsin produces more beer and brandy than any place, and furthermore, Milwaukee is a better city than Minneapolis, in all areas except one thing ... "

"The police force," I said. "Milwaukee police beat people like Philadelphia police beat people and bomb people."

"And of the ten cities with most bars per capita, Wisconsin has six of them."

Then I knew that four years at college, beer with Marcy and everyone we met may not have been normal. It had been a way to meet lonely people who were secretly brilliant and unfit to live how they must in this place.

I said, "Marcy, Source Almanac is a guide for the Apple."

In Moscow there are oxygen tanks on the street because everyone drinks too much, like here, like Wisconsin. Maybe the students can’t move from within.

I thought then of Robert, who was brilliant and spoke pure poetry, of how we met the only time in a bar and I loved him. He said, "Kill or be killed," and he yelled at me because I couldn’t shoot a gun.

I said, "Robert, I thought you were in mathematics."

And he said, "Turnip, you little nothing sassy, kill or be killed."

Then the other guys, who had been to Vietnam, too, said, "Robert, sit down."

(First written in 1985; published in Poetic Inhalation in February 2005.)

Rule Out Euthymia, short story

My sister is stuck in a physical passion. She describes it as an aura that lasts longer than the time it takes to watch a film, but after a real film, the credits roll, the illusion breaks, and the color of life seeps back in, one reminder at a time, until one is who one is again, even when the film is about sick passion.

The man Juni calls Bing hurts her feelings compulsively then screws her so completely that her wish to talk about it is drummed from her forever—forever, that is, until the next time. We come to her rescue (by now it is less often than she would like), but we cannot rescue her; no one can. She turns on us, on him, on everyone. I have seen her snap at a bank teller, and my sister is hardly ever rude. That, too, must be part of the high or demon or whatever it is that costs the pretty penny. "How would you know?" she says. "You're not a guy."

As a sinner who has bowed devoutly to four years of psychotherapy myself, I see what she is up to, and I care, to a point. To care any more than I do would keep it my problem.

Bing is just a trucker. That is what I tell our mother. I say, "Mom, all it is is, Juni has a thing for men with guts," but our mother did not raise her daughters to have "things" for anything, let alone for men "with guts." She raised them to help those who need help, not to ask for help, and to live in married certitude with men without guts.

Men like her dead husband, our dead lawyer father, who folded over his desk at ten of one evening. What husband? I used to say in the days before his death, before my own therapy, where I was reminded that every situation in life is of my own making. He left behind a wife, six daughters—all of us named after trees or shrubs—and an ungodly insurance policy. No one carries that much insurance.

Bing's father died standing up doing shift work. I should say, he fell over. Bing was twenty-one. I tell our mother that that is not why.

Juni's counselor, salesperson for higher powers who serve addictive personalities here on earth, has told us that only twelve steps and fifteen thousand dollars can save Juni: Juni is a co-sex addict.

When Juni is not threatening extreme unction to hotline volunteers (she calls hotlines in other cities when the hotline number in our city is busy), she tells us that Bing is the smartest man she has ever known—witness his survival as a teenager at a juvenile detention center and his finesse on the Interstate Highway System. Leave it to me to imagine what they do on it when Juni is with him and not barely at her job for the state.

Our youngest sister, Jade, wants to know what the deal is; although she wouldn't say it to me, she wants to be, as her sister is, in love. Jade is seventeen. As far as I know Jade is still a virgin, although I think that Mr. Biebel molested her when she was nine. She can't remember, but she hates her stomach and thighs. I believe that Mr. Biebel had a crack at all of us, except for maybe Holly, the third born. None of us really remembers what happened, but we all have improper relations with food. Holly has never had one disordered thought about food in all her life, and she never fell in love so badly that she failed to graduate from college, or, like me, to leave it. As a nutritionist, I hope to ban Biebels from the refrigerator, at least from refrigerators in Milwaukee, but it leaves me feeling marooned after French philosophy, where I first learned to play a field.

In her belief that Juni is lucky, Jade eases the horrors our mother suffers at night, not because Juni is stuck in a physical passion, but because the whole family and whole groups of strangers know what Juni is doing for sex. Juni does not have sex, I tell Jade. Juni is sex.

Lately, Juni is thin. Her breasts are small. She may not obviously resemble a man, but it saves everyone the trouble of self-differentiation. It bothers me that no one in her support group has even mentioned it. They mention humiliating moments, but apparently not the humiliating belief that one does not have the right to eat. Bing certainly does not suffer that humiliation. He eats her, like a hamburger or a donut. "I'm not thin, Laurel," she says. "I'm not even normal size. Look at these!" she cries, clutching at the flimsy sides of her hips and legs.

She needs exercise, but if I say it, she will feel condemned. She will worry that she doesn't fuck right. It will be like a man upping the ante all over again from the cover of a women's magazine.

Sometimes I think that if Juni knew women in more wholesome circumstances than in their own decrepitude that she would be all right. All she has in the way of women are support groups and her family. And what is family, really?

She has the prayer that Jesus brought her, but, as she told her group, she does not pray while Bing is hovering over her. She prays later, to his sleeping corpse, when it's over, and she's done, first to us, then to him, then alone.

Our mother, Geraldine—as she likes to remind us—is hip. She goes catalog shopping, not because she couldn't spend whole days in ceremony in department stores if she wanted to nor because she wouldn't do that if her lifestyle depended on it, but because cranberry-ale cardigans and pewter-puff pullovers communicate her optimism. She hopes that by her example her daughters will stop wearing only black. Her friends call her Geri, a name with a tweeter to it, a flip, as if Geri were someone who couldn't help but be her own person (men's names on women always serve that way), but our mother is Mom first and Mrs. Reeve Baumgaard second, even though Mr. Baumgaard has been dead for almost twelve years.

Since Juni met Bing, she wears torn blue jeans and men's white v-necks, and because she is as thin as a boy, people say she looks great in them. She wears what she finds on Bing's floor, where he lives with his father's half-brother, or she gives up afternoons tugging through racks at the Salvation Army.

Jade and I like the real thing: We go real shopping with Mom's credit card. Jade is in high school and doesn't have a job, and my stipend as a research assistant barely covers my efficiency apartment and the food I buy, which is expensive—raw nuts and seeds, yogurt farmed in small batches, organic apricot juice. Jade and I both wear size 12, which I sense has been a deep disappointment to Mr. Biebel—all the more reason to buy the most flattering, extravagant clothing we can find. Sometimes we shop sales; other times we just grab the car keys and head for Rome. We buy the new fall line before it hits the racks. We buy make-up, too, especially lipstick, my favorite way to kiss off a Biebel, but I admit, it's a little compulsive.

The middle three—Holly, Heather, and Lily (her real name is Lilac)—are all married and living elsewhere—Holly in Denver, Heather in Coon Rapids, and Lily in Waco. We mainly see them at Christmas, when we all tend to wear what our mother has bought us.

Bing is 34, and like a lot of men just over thirty, he bloats on beer. If Juni were not a co-sex addict, she would be a co-alcoholic. His work gives him a good ass and good legs—all that climbing in and climbing out, loading and unloading. I can see the attraction on that level, and that is the level we are talking about. Since as a family we are opposed to Bing, it would be hypocritical to ask Juni what sort of torso he has. Bing is too polite or too self-conscious to take off his shirt in our presence, so we don't know how strong or hairy he is there. We are just left wondering.

(1995)