A Life in Five Buicks

by Linda Boroff

Roadmaster

Summertime, Hopkins, Minnesota: I toddle from the back door of the Elmo Park Apartments, skinny in suspendered blue corduroy pants. My dark, water-slicked hair is caught just above the right ear by a bobbypin.

          Suddenly, I stop short. Looming before me in the driveway is my father’s new, two-tone Buick Roadmaster, massively at rest on its tumescent whitewalls. The car, jade and loden green, fills my vision like a whale; as if its mighty grille of chrome baleen could suck up the road. Four incredible tunnels in its side, leading to God-knows-where, attest to its pedigree.

          The neighbors have flooded out to gawk, as amazed as if dad had taxied up in the B-24 Liberator he had flown in the South Pacific. The women, pregnant in cotton housedresses with bright scarves wound around their pincurls, stroke the monster’s bulging flanks. The men, beer bottles in hand, wear pleated pants into which white undershirts are tucked. They stride up and spank the Buick commandingly, nod at the engine statistics, call it “she.” 

          At my appearance, all turn with tolerant amusement to savor my response. I am gaping at the giant intruder, eyes smoky with suspicion. Attempts to pull me near for an introduction fail. To everyone’s delight, my confusion soon resolves itself into a drawn-out wail.

          .

          Now it is evening, the air fragrant with the warm raspberries that grow wild behind the project where we live, and also with the faint, fetid odor of the swamp beyond, which will not to be drained until a toddler drowns in it later this summer.

          I stand outside the back door, gazing into the kitchen, where my father sits at a gray Formica dinette with an old Army Air Corps buddy. They are holding beer bottles and laughing as they celebrate new cars, peace, youth.

          The screen before me sags in its frame; insects aggregate on it, awaiting a chance to invade. Their brethren have struck up a summertime concert out beyond the Buick, poised on its concrete slab like some brooding god of highway thunder.

         

Riviera 

It reigns from the driveway of our new ranch-style home: a Buick Riviera, its blue as rich and deep as the stained glass of Chartres. Ensconced in its pale plush upholstery, I feel like Cinderella in her pumpkin chariot. Shiny windows reflect my outsize new teeth grinning from the passenger side. 

          My father’s remodeling business is booming, and he often invites me to “tag along” as he pitches attics and basements door-to-door. The housewives usually ask us in when they spot me on my hobbyhorse, Pal, a high-spirited thoroughbred of rich brown leatherette, with flaring crimson nostrils and a lush mane of white yarn. “Hi there, cowgirl, that’s a mighty fine horse you got there, you betcha.” And before they know it, they are talking knotty pine and dormers and linoleum.

          He is tall and handsome, my dad, with curly brown hair and a wicked sense of humor. I spend hours trying to emulate his jaunty pilot’s swagger. He has built us a beautiful corner house in a tony neighborhood near Lake Calhoun and given my mother a generous allowance to decorate: blond oak, raw silk, rose brocade, and a thick, cocoa brown carpet to roll around on. The house sits on three lots with one of them dedicated to a sandbox, a swing set, and a huge bountiful garden. People slow their cars to appreciate the landscaping.

          C’mon,” my father says mischievously one afternoon. “Let’s go blow out the carbon.” I know that under the hood of the Riviera chugs a magical nest of dark coils and shiny pans. Superheated and unimaginably powerful, they create and tame the explosions that propel us. 

          I imagine the car’s chrome innards clogged with soot, which we must now expel at ninety miles per hour in a tamponade of black smoke and red flames bursting from the tailpipe. The highway uncoils before us like a whip; farms are a green blur. I watch the speedometer quiver at ninety and then inch toward 100 as the Buick enters the realm of pure motion.

          Just outside Red Wing, he guides us back down to fifty, which will forever after feel like a standstill. Then, as if anything were needed to make the afternoon more perfect, he buys my eternal discretion with a salted nut roll on our way home. 

         

Roadmaster Again

It isn’t much of a recession, but, as Mercutio declares of his fatal wound, “marry, ‘tis enough.” My father’s business has dried up into a pile of debts; our brief, feverish glow of prosperity only a memory; our future dreams a mocking, retreating mirage that we will never reach.

          The bill collectors call around dinnertime, and my mother rises to answer, swallowing her food quickly: He just stepped out. A payment is on the way. Fights over money have become the white noise of my childhood. 

          My father’s latest Roadmaster is greeted by my mother not with delight, but with fury. Burnished bronze, this unwelcome intruder sits alone in falling snow, like a grounded eagle.

          “We can’t afford this. What’s the matter with you?” My father tries to look wise, as if he knows something she doesn’t, but her disillusionment is impenetrable, and she glares back coldly. Her eyes have narrowed, and a crease divides them now, even when she isn’t angry, which is seldom. How can she blame him for his business failure, I wonder, when it is the customers’ fault that they are now remodeling their own attics. “Do It Yourself” is the chant that accompanies our march to poverty. 

          Our home goes on the market just after my 12^th birthday, bringing long, melancholy weekends filled with officious realtors and skeptical strangers who poke around in our kitchen and assay the carpeting, eyes narrow with arithmetic. Their children stare wordlessly at me and my younger sister. Nobody wants our house, and there is a lot more eking and borrowing before the foreclosure finally arrives, almost a relief.

          Homeless now, we drift to Los Angeles, where my father has family. Relatives grudgingly pony up small sums after collect calls from a phone booth. We rent a motel room with kitchenette in East Hollywood, the walls green and weary, veterans of a thousand familial disintegrations.  

          Daily, my parents look for work; by night, fights erupt, roaring and gusting like wildfires. We are warned by the motel management about the noise. Sometimes we go for swims in the stagnant pool. A thick orange moon hangs above us. We float like corpses in the tepid water.

          My mother finally finds work in a nearby children’s store, sweltering in outdated designer suits. My sister and I start school. My father lies on a black Naugahyde sofa all day, reading the want ads, sipping gin and devising dubious schemes to recoup his finances. Deals “fall through” he says—evoking for me an image of something hurtling earthward through a dense forest, hitting branches, landing broken and dying. His creditors soon find him again where he huddles; first one—and then many in a rush, persistent and abusive.

          One night, his suitcase clatters suddenly into the living room, and my mother stands above it, eyes dark with fury. He had borrowed five hundred dollars from a loan shark.

          “When I got off work, some little man threatened me,” she shouts. “I gave him my paycheck. How will we live? She grabs my sister and sinks her nails into the squirming girl’s shoulder. “What in the hell did you do with five hundred dollars while we were starving?”

          My father follows the suitcase, arms dripping with neckties. “I didn’t know he’d come to you.” He shakes his fist and the ties sway. “For eighteen years I worked for you. I broke my heart.”

          “He threatened me!”

          “I’ve got to get out of here. I’m dying.” My sister and I begin to cry, although we have been expecting this for a long time. 

          “Let him go,” screams my mother. “Him and his goddamn pills and his goddamn booze. There’s always money for that, isn’t there?”

          Outside, my father sits, jowly and misunderstood at the wheel of a rented Ford, curtained with suits and shirts. The car hums to life, coughs loose its emergency brake, and backs hesitantly out of the driveway. A quick shift and it is away. The night rings with sudden silence.

Camaro

The mighty arches of the San Francisco Bay Bridge pass over my head like the ribs of a dinosaur. I think about those people unable to cross the bridge without counting them.

          “Tell me about your father,” says Cliff.

          “All I know is he called this afternoon wanting to get together. Apparently he traveled out here with some woman, and things fell apart and she took off in his car.”

          “When did you last see him?”

          “I have not seen my father,” I reply, “in eight years. I don’t know what he’ll be like.”

          “Well, you met my father,” Cliff says. His parents had visited from Bakersfield two weeks earlier, and his father had, as promised, displayed the physique and mentality of an Alabama State Trooper guarding a speed trap circa 1954. Packed tightly into a booth at the pancake house, he had polished off a platter of pork chops, cornbread and easyover eggs while declaiming loudly on hippie treason. Cliff’s mother, smelling strongly of mint, sat wordless, eating nothing, observing her husband with reddened blue eyes of pure Southron hatred. Cliff told me later that she had found and drunk about half a bottle of tequila while he and his father were out buying a lug wrench.

          Cliff’s blue eyes are flecked with amber; his thick brown hair brushes his collar. At twenty-one he is already a master of the amused deadpan, and he is a good bet to hurt me deeply one of these days. His parents have gifted him a new Camaro for graduation, and riding beside him makes me feel shiny, new, and well-maintained too.

          My father is staying in one of those hotels that appear at first hopeful glance to be only a little seedy, but is really extremely seedy. I spot him at once in the lobby, swaying slightly beneath the fluorescent lighting, arms stretched toward me. He is pudgier than I remember, his skin grayish and loose around the mouth. He shakes hands solemnly with Cliff, and shoots me a wondering glance.

          We have dinner and embark on a spree through San Francisco. At one bar, a drunk sits alone looking morose, and we invent a history for him, a reason he drinks. 

          “He tried hard all his life,” says my father about the drunk. “The bastards just wouldn’t let him live.”

          “He can’t do anything right,” comments Cliff. “He found himself alone....”     

          “He done her wrong,” I say.

          The pavement in front of my father’s hotel is slick now from the foggy drizzle that had begun around midnight. He climbs stiffly from the car.  

          “I’ll walk him in,” I tell Cliff. The lobby is not as deserted as it should be at 3 a.m. People are wandering about sleepless, smoking, unwilling to be alone in their rooms.

          “Goodbye Linny,” says my father.  

          I hug him and say “Goodnight, Daddy.” As I return to the car, I realize that Cliff and I have grown so close tonight that we will probably get married. He looks at me pensively, having figured that out himself. When I turn back, my father is still gazing after me from the lobby, hands hanging limp at his sides, head slightly cocked.

Century 

I am an advertising copywriter working in Palo Alto, divorced, with a nine-year-old daughter who looks like Cliff. I drive a 1986 Buick Century Custom, an impulsive purchase after my father died years before of a heart attack. Somehow, driving a Buick keeps him a little closer in spirit. 

          So I leave my office on a warm, sunny October afternoon for the commute south to Santa Cruz over Highway 17, a sinuous black python notorious for head-ons. I grip the steering wheel of my Buick, intent on survival, eyes darting about with primal alertness evolved over millions of years, called on now to dodge not leopard or lion, but Audi; not charging aurochs but careening Range Rover. 

          When the traffic stalls—as it often does—I look beyond the asphalt to the young redwoods, fernlike and primeval, and to the yellow poppies and blue lupine bobbing gamely in the hydrocarbon exhaust. Sometimes I murmur little prayers for the road kills, tarry, feathered clumps and featureless gray fur patties scattered on the shoulder.  

          As I approach the summit, hemmed in by other commuters, the Buick begins to jerk and shudder. Dammit a flat drifts into my mind seconds before the asphalt ahead rears up and rips asunder like a bar of licorice. I slam on my brakes at the lip of a widening gash as the side of the mountain to my right trembles like Jell-O and falls away with a roar, sliding and tumbling onto my car. Trees, their moorings scaled away, drop, still upright, straight down the mountain.

          The air turns white with dust, and the car shudders at the boulder that finally breaches its back door. Dirt pours in across the seat. I glimpse myself in the rearview mirror, perhaps for the last time, looking rather puzzled and nondescript.

          Then, as abruptly as it had started, the earth quiets and settles, though something keeps cracking like pistol shots. The dust clears, and I see to my left, the very top of the concrete center divider barely visible above the dirt. Covering the road now is everything that, seconds ago, had been a hundred feet above us.  

          It is October 17, 1989, 5:17 p.m. They call it the Loma Prieta Earthquake, and I have nearly been buried alive. My only thought now is to get to Santa Cruz, but the road ahead has ceased to exist. Boulders are still bouncing down the mountainside like ping pong balls.

          A couple of truckers make their way through the trembling debris to my driver’s side window: “You alive?” They wrench open my door and I clamber out with no dignity, my pencil-skirted business suit caked with dust. “Whole mountain’s gonna go inna minute,” one of them says, and I say, “Didn’t it go already?” But no, there is still plenty of geologic time poised above us. I consider running, but to where?

          “See if she’ll start.” A trucker climbs into the driver’s seat and turns the key, eliciting only a feeble cough. He tries again, and suddenly the Buick rises from the dead with the sound of a hundred lions competing for mating rights.

          Six men rock it loose from its crumbled matrix, which opens a car-sized hole in the debris. I get in, push on the gas with a shaking foot, and the Buick miraculously begins to limp forward, yawing like a drunk on its broken suspension. One by one, we creep down the mountainside, over the buckled, rock-strewn pavement. The roots of upended trees oddly resemble the configuration of a lightning flash, I note, and also the heart’s circulatory system illuminated by echocardiogram: fractals? I keep my foot on the accelerator, and the car keeps rolling, around the tree trunks, through the sand and the dirt. Somehow, it finds a way.

          Nearing Scotts Valley, we come down off the hill at last, and the highway re-emerges. I nurse the Buick past people who stop their stunned wandering to point at me and shake their heads. There must be sirens, but I am in a state of deaf, numb panic that recedes only when my daughter dashes toward me from the yard of her now lopsided school.

          Days later, an insurance adjuster lifts the Buick’s hood and gasps. The engine is buried under rocks and dirt. “I can’t believe this thing actually ran, he says, shaking his head.  

          “Ran pretty well,” I say, channeling my father. I open the trunk and get out the jumper cables and a notebook of ideas for a novel that I have been carrying around for several years. I take them to where my friend is waiting.

Century Again

There are as many roads to penury as there are paupers to follow them. Today, I’m on my way to sign over the pink slip on “Moby Dick,” my white 2000 Buick Century, as security on a loan, so that I can pay my rent, three weeks late and counting in the wake of a layoff. My destination is a storefront in a bleak San Jose strip mall between a liquor mart and a shoe repair shop. A fuchsia neon sign beckons: “Fast Cash! Paycheck Advance! Auto Title Loans!” There, my signed pink slip will net me $1900, which I pledge to repay at an interest rate of about ninety-six percent. 

          I back out of my carport, find a jazz station playing rueful sax, and hit the road. The rain that threatened all morning arrives now in earnest, and the mist on my windshield quickly turns to tears, as if to make up for the ones I’m holding back. Somehow, my whole life seems prologue to this ordeal. It could be worse, I console myself, which only reminds me that it may indeed grow worse. The wipers begin beating time to the scold in my head: why didn’t you, why did you, why didn’t you, why did you?

          “It’ll be okay, mom,” says my daughter, guessing the reason for my silence. She sits beside me now, as she always has, and in a way nothing has changed—although her once downy head has grown into an avalanche of blonde-streaked waves, and the rattles and sippy cups have given way to a plastic box of eye shadow that she dabs on in the passenger mirror. I understand, without taking it personally, that to not follow in my footsteps is for her almost a career goal in itself. Financial turmoil has shaped her life since her father left us when she was three years old.

          I merge onto Highway 280 south; the road nearly empty on this Saturday morning. As the miles unreel, I cannot resist backtracking mentally over my own highway of choices that delivered me to this pass. How many wrong turns? How many dead ends, detours, directions unheeded? Or is the problem deeper still? The map is wrong. The destination does not exist. 

          Perhaps, as my father’s daughter, I am just genetically wired to be broke. My inborn character quirks always seemed to have veto power over good intentions and resolutions. By age seven, I was already displaying the traits that have cleft my life like a fault line: impatience with saving, impulsive overgenerosity, dislike of routine. Reading Aesop’s fable of the grasshopper and the ants, I quickly identified with my gangly orthopteral soul mate, shivering out in the cold with his inedible fiddle.

          South we hurtle from Palo Alto, where I had presumed to live so that my daughter could attend its top-ranked high school. And was that another wrong turn, I wonder, hearing her reel off anecdotes of snobbery, anorexia, and grade grubbing?

          After years of battling a commute so brutal it inspired articles in foreign magazines and enduring a manager who gnawed at me like a polar bear at a whale carcass, I have decided to work freelance.

          Fiction was calling me: story plots scratched on the message pad on my bedstand or scribbled on the back of parking stubs or the flap of an envelope as I drove. These potential novels existed now only as wads of lint at the bottom of my purse.  

          And what makes you so special, my roadside Greek chorus now chants. Do you think yours is the only quiet desperation, the only stifled ambition? You are a bundle of plastic twine floating on your daughter’s ocean, lying in wait as years pass to wrap yourself around her wings with your poverty, neediness, and irrational ambition. You… writer! 

          Last week, I had dusted off my interview suit and explained to a succession of loan officers that I was a “freelance technology writer” and needed only a little “bridge loan” to see me through to the next big project.

          What else could I have said? That I’m a perennially aspiring novelist whose short stories are probably read solely by other hopefuls? That I have spent the last eight years trying to shoehorn myself into Hollywood’s clenched consideration, resulting in one low-budget feature and four options simmering in a perpetual broth of revision? As a borrower, I am about as appealing as a glass of silicon wastewater.

          I walked out of the last bank and stand in the parking lot feeling sorry for myself. Then I looked at my Buick as if seeing it for the first time. Finally paid off after eight years, it has been through a lot. In 2005, it was repossessed in the rain at 3 a.m. by a couple of husky young men, who had it up on the tow truck by the time I emerged in a ratty bathrobe, holding my Lhasa Apso. “Put some shoes on,” one of them said.

          The Buick looked forlorn and reproachful and a little silly, its capacious rump elevated by a chain, its grille tipped into a puddle. When a copywriting windfall enabled me to redeem it a few days later from a dusty San Jose repo-yard, a friend said admiringly, “You always land on your feet.” But her metaphor was wrong. I had not yet landed. Today looks and feels more like a landing. And not on my feet.

          It takes two or three passes around the block in what is now a freezing deluge to find the auto loan storefront. We park, and my daughter, impatient with my umbrella, leaps out and makes a dash for the door which looks close, but is actually far enough away for her to get thoroughly soaked. I come up behind her, and she grins sheepishly, the rain bedewing her face and lashes, the damp tendrils of hair pasted to her fresh, unconquered skin. “Young Girl Caught in a Downpour,” I mentally title the artwork. We wrestle open the door, and a line of people turns at the cold, wet draft, one or two actually smiling in commiseration. They are mostly poor and minorities: young mothers with children hanging from every limb; gray-headed veterans in bill hats with numbers on the front. 

          The young woman at the window smiles too, although the line is long, the paperwork complex, and her computer capricious. She hands us a battered camera to photograph the Buick’s VIN number and its odometer. My daughter waves me to a chair and ducks outside—again without the umbrella—although the rain is now coming down in sheets from a truly biblical sky, occasionally riven by trees of lightning so close you could almost grab their molten trunks. Seconds later, massive thunderclaps trigger little screams from the women. The veterans flinch, their jaw muscles working. 

          When my daughter re-enters, I pull off her soaked outer sweater as though she is a kindergartner and help her on with my own.  

          “Thanks, Mom.” The people in line titter. I catch the eye of an elderly lady, and she beams at me, a universal smile of motherhood. And all at once, everything is all right. It’s more than all right. Why, the Buick is merely fulfilling another of the roles it was intended for. Like reindeer to the Inuit, it is both transportation and sustenance.  

          So we all watch the rain subside and a cold blue sky emerge amid turbulent clouds, a fresh wind whipping the treetops. The line slowly shortens, and at last, I am presented with a bale of papers on which I provide my signature in about forty places. The clerk counts out my money in small, used bills, and feeling far from dissatisfied—even a little rich—we get back into the Buick.

Linda Boroff graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in English and currently lives and works in Silicon Valley. Her suspense novel The Remnant has recently been accepted for publication. Her fiction and nonfiction appear in McSweeney’s, The Write Launch, All the Sins, Epoch, Cimarron Review, Parhelion, Crack the Spine, Writing Disorder, The Piltdown Review, Eclectica, 5:21 Magazine, Thoughtful Dog, The Satirist, and other publications.

Brush with Greatness

by J.D. Scrimgeour

At the end of summer in 1982, my family drove me from our home in New Milford, Connecticut, a town of 20,000 in the southern Berkshires and helped me unload my meager belongings—a few bags of clothes—in Carman Hall, the freshman dorm at Columbia University. While I had been to the city a few times, living in the frenzy of Manhattan was an adjustment. One time that first year my family joined me in the city to watch a basketball game, and when they returned to their car, they discovered that someone had broken into it. The thieves had stolen a couple ratty sleeping bags and a few of my siblings’ high school textbooks. The following year, two students in Carman Hall found a rolled-up rug in a dumpster and carried it back to their room. When they unrolled it, they discovered a corpse inside, a man who had been shot twice.

It wasn’t just the grittiness of New York in the 1980s that left me disoriented; I had to adjust to being around so many people who had lived lives so different from what I had known. As someone who had attended public schools, I was fascinated by all my classmates who had attended private boarding schools, places I’d only read about in The Catcher in the Rye. And Columbia was cosmopolitan. I remember going for ice cream during orientation week with students from Italy and France, hearing languages and accents that were foreign to my ears.

Another adjustment was that there were so few women. My class, the class of 1986, was the last all-male class at Columbia, a fact that I’d hardly registered when I decided to attend. I knew that Barnard was just across the street, and I had assumed that the students all took the same classes. They didn’t. In order to meet the women from Barnard, I would go with friends to the campus pub where we’d drink pitchers of beer. At some point, I’d muster courage to saunter up to a stranger and ask her to dance. She usually said no, and I’d slink back to my table and pour another into my plastic cup. It seemed simply impossible to meet a woman. Even if a conversation were to begin amid the too-loud music, what was I supposed to say?

I was adrift, and even the routines that I developed were those of someone who was lonely: playing hours of pick-up basketball in Levien Gymnasium and watching David Letterman’s late-night show in the TV lounge at the end of our floor. I got a kick out of Letterman’s sardonic humor, his stupid pet tricks, and his “Brush with Greatness” segments, in which members of the studio audience shared comic stories about how they crossed paths with celebrities. Having a brush with greatness may have been one of the reasons I chose to attend Columbia. Being in New York held the possibility of seeing famous people, and, in fact, I walked past Letterman himself in Midtown one afternoon as he was filming on the street.

That first semester I’d take The Odyssey or Euripides’ plays out to the campus lawn and lie reading in the sun, hardly registering the words, dozing off more often than not. My classes all went well enough, except for the class in my declared major, Math. Before the semester started, I met with an advisor to help choose my classes. “Wouldn’t you like to take a class with a world-famous mathematician?” he asked, and so I decided to take the test to place into a theoretical calculus course taught by a professor named Lipman Bers. The test was like the SAT, and I did well enough to get in.

Lipman Bers was old, from eastern Europe, with a thick moustache and a thick accent. He had us buy a book with more equations than words. Unlike my math classes in high school, we never had to turn in homework. It wasn’t always clear what our homework was.

It was a small class, a dozen students in a musty room. Although a seminar table filled the space, we didn’t sit around it exactly. A blackboard ran along one side of the room, and Bers would lecture in front of it, so we would sit in two rows on either side of the table, facing the board. I sat in the back corner, the table in front of me. In the front center sat Daniel, the thirteen-year-old with a bowl cut of black hair and just visible fine dark hair above his lip, the beginnings of a mustache. Daniel was, I’d heard, the captain of the U.S. math team, whatever that meant. I don’t think he was enrolled at Columbia; he was just taking this one class.

It seemed like Daniel was the only person, besides Bers, who spoke in class. He’d raise a scrawny arm and ask a question that I didn’t understand. Bers’ eyes would light up. “That’s a very interesting question, Daniel,” he’d say, and the two of them would engage in a long dialogue while the rest of us—or maybe it was just me—sat in befuddlement. Eventually, I began doodling in my notebook, rehashing my stats from my senior year baseball season or reviewing possible starting line-ups for the Knicks. I passed that class with a gentleman’s C, dropped down to a more standard Calculus class the next semester, and dropped that after I bombed my first test. I wasn’t going to be a math major.

I’ve told the story of that math class many times. It seemed a story about discovering one’s limits, though, to be honest, it involved pumping my ego, too—I was good enough in math to place into that class, after all. And the audience always got a kick out of my embellished description of how lost most of us were while Daniel and Bers held their abstruse conversations.

But recently, while writing about this event, I began to wonder about Lipman Bers. He really was, of course, a world-famous mathematician. He was born in a Jewish family in Riga, Latvia, at the beginning of World War I, and his early life was colored by the political upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century. He spent time in St. Petersburg and Berlin. While studying math at the University in Riga, he became a political activist who argued for human rights, an orator and columnist for an underground newspaper, defending democracy in the face of Latvia’s dictator. A warrant was issued for his arrest, but he escaped to Prague. He fled from Prague to Paris with his family, and then, just ahead of the Germans, he fled to the United States. Living as a refugee, he continued to work on mathematics. He eventually did math work assisting the allied war effort, and then went on to write many important papers in the field, known for their elegance and clarity.

He was admired by his students and fellow mathematicians, and a recent book, Lipman Bers: A Life in Mathematics, celebrates his achievements. Mathematician William Abikoff writes this about Bers:

Lipa possessed a joy of life and an optimism that is difficult to find at this time and that is sorely missed. Those of us who experienced it directly have felt an obligation to pass it on. That, in addition to the beauty of his own work, is Lipa’s enduring gift to us.

Bers had a way not just with numbers, but with words. I laughed aloud when I came across his line that “Mathematics is a collection of cheap tricks and dirty jokes,” though I don’t know enough about math to really understand it. Throughout his career, he also continued to advocate for human rights. Here’s Bers himself, speaking about human rights in 1984, when he was awarded an honorary degree from SUNY-Stonybrook:

By becoming a human rights activist ... you do take upon yourself certain difficult obligations. ... I believe that only a truly even-handed approach can lead to an honest, morally convincing, and effective human rights policy. A human rights activist who hates and fears communism must also care about the human rights of Latin American leftists. A human rights activist who sympathizes with the revolutionary movement in Latin America must also be concerned about human rights abuses in Cuba and Nicaragua. A devout Muslim must also care about human rights of the Bahai in Iran and of the small Jewish community in Syria, while a Jew devoted to Israel must also worry about the human rights of Palestinian Arabs. And we American citizens must be particularly sensitive to human rights violations for which our government is directly or indirectly responsible, as well as to the human rights violations that occur in our own country, as they do.

Bers retired from teaching at Columbia in 1982. The class I took with him may have been the last he ever taught.  

I wish I could claim that Bers and his vision, expressed so eloquently above, had an impact on me, but it’s only through the lens of time that I see more than myself in that room—those other students may have been getting a lot more from the class than I imagined. And, having learned a bit about him, I can better see Bers, a man brilliant and committed, see the spark between him and Daniel. What did I know?

It was my first semester, and I was a lost boy. I needed grounding myself to see others. I went on find circles of friends at Columbia, to find a girlfriend when I lived in Barnard dorms my sophomore year. Eventually, I no longer needed David Letterman’s late-night company. And my junior year, I started to put my own words down. I took classes with the poet Kenneth Koch and legendary literature professor Wallace Gray, early steps on the path to becoming a writer.

That same year, I took to the cold March nights to join students who blocked the doors to Hamilton Hall, a main classroom building, demanding that the University divest its financial holdings in South Africa and South African companies. Some of my friends scoffed at the protests, and their cynicism made me doubt my conviction, but, ultimately, I could do the math.

I was usually alone those nights, one of the crowd. Many of those around me were people who, I had been taught, did not look like me. I sat among them all and listened to the speeches, the music, the drumming.

I took in the world, and the world took me in.

Writing this essay, I became curious about Daniel. Perhaps discovering Bers’ words, his insistence on being aware of all others, made me wonder about Daniel and his life. I googled “Daniel, mathematician, born 1970,” and I discovered Daniel, a mathematician at an Ivy League university. I thought the thin face, something about the nose, looked familiar, and so I sent an email. Sure enough, it was him. He read the essay and was gracious and self-depreciating. He confirmed the bowl haircut; he didn’t recall the table. He said he had read some of Bers’ papers and built on his work. I hope that in my own way I’m building on Bers’ work as well.

J.D. Scrimgeour is the author of three books of poetry and two of nonfiction, including Themes for English B: A Professor's Education In & Out of Class, which won the AWP Award for Nonfiction. Recent essays have appeared in blackbird, Solstice, Sport Literate, and The Woven Tale Press.

Pre-Med

by Gary Fincke

Whiz Kids

We were Sputnik children, the designated smart ones who had been accelerated in science and math since seventh grade, but by May,1963, we were impatient seniors bored with high school. In Southeast Asia, the United States had begun posting military advisors for a war that was so obscure none of us would ever fight, not nineteen bright boys (and two brilliant girls) taking advanced, progressive physics. Not the shortstop on our advanced physics class softball team, the Coriolis Force, who called in our scores to the Pittsburgh Press each time we beat the faculty, the French Club, or even the rest of the senior class minus those who played varsity baseball. 

In Problems of Democracy, the map for world policies showed a large blue French Indochina where Miss Ward had hand-painted Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, both North and South. “Maps,” she said, “must last ten years before replacement; this one is two years overdue,” and we snickered like we had when she’d altered Africa as if countries were as temporary as high school.

What was up-to-date in our high school was physics, chemistry, biology, and math, and before 1963 ended, everyone who played for the Coriolis Force expected to be finishing his first college semester at MIT, Chicago, CalTech, or schools with less name recognition, but where, we’d been told, science flourished.

What’s more, the Coriolis Force, despite a battery of eggheads, went undefeated for all nine games we played. The Press printed all of those scores in agate type, but by graduation all of us believed some reporter should have covered us, whiz kids who kept statistics, including batting averages taken to an extra place like the Pi we memorized for math, science all-stars about to march off to discoveries.

*

Summer

In July, when I turned eighteen and had to register for the draft, a woman at a desk in Pittsburgh’s Federal Building asked me for my eye color. “I don’t know,” I said, and instead of smiling, she glanced quickly and said “hazel,” something I didn’t bother to debate. I was off to college in less than two months. All I knew about a draft card was that it would admit me into the dingy, downtown Art Cinema to see movies full of naked women or to buy the raunchy magazines that were sealed in plastic on the vendor’s shelves at the bus station. Drinking and voting had to wait until I was twenty-one, but Kennedy seemed like he was going to be President for another five years, and my first beer wasn’t even a fantasy yet. The initial steps to medical school were on the top of my to-do list. That, and making the college basketball and tennis teams, meanwhile trying my luck with whichever girls might be interested in how I saw myself, a scholar-athlete.

All summer, my mother had headaches and what she called “the blahs.” On the days when she stopped holding her head, she often carried canning jars up from the cellar. When she sat at the kitchen table, catching her breath, she sometimes snapped the ends off green beans, using that time to recover, whether the pills she took kicked in or not. Because, she explained, who else would preserve the beans or later, the tomatoes and peaches, arranging the filled, sealed jars for winter? Who else would cook and clean, strip the beds and remake them when her headaches only simmered like soup she reheated, sipping the broth because she could keep that down and work? When she stopped moaning into her pillow. When she came out of her darkened bedroom. When she could do what needed to be done. When she could save things that needed saving.

          In August, Joey Reimer became the first one in our graduating class to die, driving his hand-modified old Ford off the road near our high school and into a tree. He hadn’t been a whiz kid, hadn’t even been going to college, but he was my age, something, my father said, to think about.

A few weeks later, during my last Friday night of working in my father’s bakery from 10:30-5:30, my father brought up the story of the night in November, 1950, when fire invaded his bakery where a tangle of wires shorted behind the ancient blue refrigerator. He explained how he had purchased the bakery earlier that year from a baker whose breath had been shortened by the invasion of emphysema. He wanted me to know that he had been lucky his lungs had stayed clear despite the clouds of flour. My father said it had taken that man a decade to die, that the baker’s widow still stopped in to buy a coffee cake every Saturday.

I remembered how he had guided me, age five, through what was salvaged, and now I understood that he was trying to teach me what could be lost and the necessity of rebuilding despite everyday threats.  As if he meant me to realize we were always under attack. As if he was reading my mind in order to say, at last, “Use that brain of yours if you don’t want to stand on your feet all day to make a living.”

First Semester

My first night at college, after enduring hours of orientation sessions, my new roommate and I piled into another freshman’s beat-up Plymouth. He lived in town and wanted to drive us around to all of the places he expected to leave behind in four years. He said he knew the disc jockey who was playing rock music on the small, local station, and before we took off, he called the station from our dorm’s one hallway phone and requested “Bust Out”, what I told him was my current favorite song.

          We drove past a factory where railroad cars were produced and one with aluminum in its company name. Except for the college, it was a Western Pennsylvania blue-collar town. The disc jockey said, “This is for the new guys at the college,” and I leaned forward, ready for the aggressive guitar and saxophone instrumental I loved. Instead, I heard “Sugar Shack,” a sappy, big hit for Jimmy Gilmore and the Fireballs. I was happy that he hadn’t mentioned my name.

          “I guess he didn’t have ‘Bust Out,’” my new friend said, and laughed. We drove into the country, picking up speed, but the car didn’t seem to handle. “What the hell?” the driver said, and he pulled over to the shoulder. One look at the front, passenger-side tire was enough for him to say, “Whoa.” The tire was tilted. He showed us how the lug nuts had come loose or had already fallen off inside the hubcap. For a few minutes, he performed only the last step of tire changing while I tried to laugh like he did.

I registered as pre-med, a first-generation college student with whiz-kid credentials of high SATs and excellent grades, placed, accordingly, in advanced math and advanced composition. All of the twenty in advanced math were freshmen; only one other was a freshman in advanced composition, a discovery I relished.

I had an eight o’clock class every day, three days in French, two in gym, where the former Marine wrestling coach lined us up and gave us the “look-to-your-left, then look-to-your-right” speech, reminding us that one out of three of us wasn’t going to graduate and to think about how we could make sure we weren’t among them. Terry D, a townie, was to my right. Greg L, who said he’d hated gym since junior high, was to my left. I didn’t worry about my chances.

After five weeks, I hitchhiked home with a friend who lived half a dozen miles away, getting in and out of six cars to cover the eighty-five miles. The next-to-last ride was a quick eight miles with my junior high school art teacher. He remembered me because, he said, “You couldn’t make yourself draw breasts on your female figures.” I squirmed, red-faced.

He chuckled as he dropped us off about ten miles from where I lived. “I hope you got over that,” he said. I told my friend that everybody I knew had always thought that teacher was gay.

 The last ride was with a guy in his early 20s who quickly accelerated way over the backroad speed limits, cresting a hill where a cemetery entrance lay to our right. There was a line of cars turning in behind a hearse, no chance of us stopping in time. I braced myself, but that driver barely touched the brake as the line parted just enough to let us squeeze through to a variety of horn sounds. “We dodged one back there,” he said, and I thought of myself as being as calm as a surgeon, outside of myself somehow rather than wallowing, like I had, in the embarrassment of awkwardly drawing a girl’s body at twelve or thirteen.

The weekend was uneventful and boring. All of my whiz-kid friends were away at college. Other graduates who lived at home had jobs or girlfriends. There was nothing to do but sleepwalk through Saturday and wait for church to end on Sunday before swallowing two helpings of Sunday’s roast beef dinner and riding in the rear seat as my friend’s mother drove us back to school.

I tutored chemistry during the first semester. All the work felt like a rehash of what I’d learned in high school advanced chemistry. For a while I went to parties with one of my students, another freshman. She was happy with the C+ she received on the first test. “I would have failed, for sure,” she said, and hugged me. I wanted to tell her I thought the hardest thing about college was getting up for my daily eight o’clock classes while my roommate slept.

But I loved advanced composition at ten a.m. I wrote and revised and wrote some more. With relish, I tackled all of the long, complicated sentences we were told to diagram. They were puzzles to solve. And their solutions filled me with a sort of academic joy.

Like times tables up to twenty, the math of each weekday’s requirements was done in my head. The future wore scrubs. It washed its hands in scalding water and answered the body’s questions with blades and thread.

In mid-November, I made the basketball team. Playing time was likely to be infrequent, but I had good news to take home for Thanksgiving. A week later, walking to the dorm after a Studies in the New Testament lecture, I learned that Kennedy had been shot and killed. Every station on my cheap clock radio played solemn music. The news on the television in the basement of the dorm said the country was in shock and mourning, but when I went to basketball practice, the coach ran us for the whole two hours and announced we were scrimmaging another college on Monday at the same time as the funeral, Kennedy already becoming a comma in the long sentence of my first semester.

My mother, forty-three now, tried on three of my aunt’s wigs before we drove off to the annual Thanksgiving dinner at my grandfather’s house. She made me turn away, eyes closed, until she sported a second shade and style, asking which one I liked and whether she looked good enough to be seen in public. She was modeling like a schoolgirl, eyes meeting mine in the mirror when I stood behind her, a third wig waiting on the dresser, three styles in brown barely different under the dim overhead ceiling light, the drapes pulled shut as if our neighbors might spy her bald head. “Which one,” she asked, makes me look as if I’ll live?”

At my grandfather’s, nobody seemed upset about Kennedy. I watched football with my uncles, my cousins, and my father while my aunts and mother worked in the kitchen. We were separated by the large dining room where we would finally mingle over turkey. My mother wore her wig. She acted as if she didn’t mind standing on her feet for a couple of hours.

At half time, my uncles asked about pre-med. They sounded impressed. “That will be something,” one of them said. “We’ve never had a doctor in the family. Another said, “By the time you have a practice, all of us here will be old enough to be regular customers.” My father seemed to glow, but then he said he was going to the kitchen to see if the heart, liver, and gizzard were ready to eat. My mother was waiting for him in the kitchen doorway. They sat together in the dining room until the third quarter was nearly over.

          Saturday night I went to my former high school’s senior class play with a friend, something, at least, to escape watching Lawrence Welk and Perry Mason with my parents. On the way home, my friend had his father’s car up to sixty on the narrow, two-lane that snaked past the streets where we lived half a mile apart. Less than a mile from my street, a car backed out onto the road, and when my friend punched the brakes hard, the car drifted to the right as I gripped the door handle and watched the world turn green with hedges that shielded a cement wall. Then the car spun, the tires caught, and we rocked to a stop parallel to the other car. “He must have shit himself,” my friend said. “Good thing I knew what to do.” It sounded like he was excited we’d almost died. When I walked inside my house a minute later, my parents were watching the news. I didn’t say anything but “I’m back.”

In my room, the radio on to settle me down, I thought about how, in seventh grade, that friend who was driving hadn’t been chosen to be a whiz kid, but he’d graduated with better grades than I had, just missing salutatorian. He’d always been a better driver, no doubt about that. And I thought I knew why my friend had sounded the way he had. I felt experienced. I had a secret.

I played a few minutes of garbage time in two or three December basketball games. My roommate threw up after a party that offered free beer, one that I missed because of an away game.

Christmas was no different than the ones I’d celebrated before college. Church on Christmas Eve, another dinner at my grandfather’s. A quartet of uncles sang their songs of expectation in unison. My mother wore the same wig as she had at Thanksgiving. I went to a party at the home of one of the two whiz-kid girls. Nobody drank anything but Coke.

New Year’s Eve, I rode to the Belmar theater in Homewood with the whiz kid shortstop in his father’s Peugeot to see a triple feature of Edgar Allan Poe thrillers. That part of Pittsburgh was what my parents called “a colored neighborhood.” Admission was so cheap we expected broken, empty seats, a janitor hobbling the aisle with an early broom and bag while Vincent Price let loose his laugh on the screen.

The Belmar, though, was crowded. We stumbled over sets of feet as we squeezed into a row near the front, entering in mid-feature, half an hour before the House of Usher tumbled. We settled back to watch Monsieur Valdemar melt into phantasmagoric gore. Before the credits rolled for The Pit and the Pendulum, the house lights went up, and we saw ourselves whiter than white. The aisle clotted, black and loud, but everyone ignored us. We worked the crowd’s rhythm so perfectly into our shoes we managed to bump nobody in that swirl from behind or the side, impeding none of the three hundred black patrons who never seemed to see us. In less than a minute, we walked speechless into the cataract gray of near midnight, snow swirling around the tracks we made toward that foreign car.

Twenty minutes later, my friend’s mother made us each what she called a cocktail. “There’s no harm in having one,” she said. “You should celebrate not running into trouble over that way.” I said nothing about the fact that I was swallowing my first drink.

          My grades arrived the following week. My mother was pleased. “He won’t say so, but your father is happy, too,” she said, “but he wanted to know why you had that one B in your math class after being in all those special classes through high school.”

          “Everybody in the room was in a special class in high school,” I said, though I had no idea whether that was true.

Second Semester

          The first day of second semester, Terry D wasn’t standing beside me in eight a.m. gym. I’d heard, as soon as I’d got back to school, that he’d been killed in a car crash the week before. Someone whose name I didn’t know was to my right. After roll was called, I reminded the wrestling coach I was excused from gym because of basketball. “That will be over in a month,” he said, “then you’re back here at eight sharp.” I decided not to tell him I would be excused again once tennis season started, receiving another one credit of A. I had three cuts, enough time for the courts to shed winter and practice to begin. I’d be on the official roster sent to all the gym teachers by the coach.

          The first weekend of the second semester, I attended my first keg party. It was love at first sight. I told myself, only on weekends, a vow I thought I could keep.

The senior chemistry lab assistant told everybody that Ranger VI had hit the moon on Ground Hog Day, but it failed to send back any messages. “We need to get our act together,” the lab assistant said. I’d never heard of Ranger VI. I hadn’t been in the television room since Kennedy. A few days later I made my way downstairs and stood in a crowd to watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. The night before, after my second keg party. I’d thrown up in the bushes behind the dorm, congratulating myself on how discreet I could be.

The professor in charge of chemistry recitation had been raised and educated in the Soviet Union. Each week his tone sounded to me as if it was overstuffed with condescension, asking his questions in a way that showed he expected weak, insufficient answers. One morning, he stopped in front of where I slouched in my chair. “Sit up straight,” he said in a voice that made it clear good posture was mandatory, and I did.

“What an asshole,” I said to half a dozen classmates after we were dismissed, but I knew that professor controlled the class participation grade that was factored into the semester grade for chemistry. Though bad posture could be considered bad class participation, what I was angry about was how I’d acquiesced to authority.

In advanced calculus, another B in math rapidly became a fantasy. I moved from anxiety and embarrassment to shame and despair. The professor returned the first test in the order, from best to worst, of grades received. Near the end, there were only two of us left without a returned test. He seemed to relish having suspense before he handed a test to a guy seated three rows away from me. It took the professor a few seconds to make his way back to my desk with that last-place exam, a 40% that he mercifully did not announce aloud.

          The failure in calculus settled in like a long hangover. French was a hassle to attend at eight a.m. Chemistry had moved past material I was previously familiar with. Arranged alphabetically by our initials, our test grades were posted beside the professor’s office door. GWF’s first test score was 83. Not only did I have to remind myself nearly every day to study, I struggled just to do laundry and make a

my bed. To rise from filthy sheets and attend a lecture, so unprepared for class participation that I kept my head down as if I was about to vomit. “You’re becoming a familiar story,” a girl I went out with said. While I was trying to make out whether or not she was being sympathetic, she said she’d prefer folk medicine, miracles, and prayer to my future medical care.

I started leaving chemistry lab early. Three hours was exhausting. Sometimes I managed to finish an experiment if a miracle occurred in less than two. Usually I asked a chemistry major who lived just down the hall from me, “What did you get?” as if I were comparing results, as if I wasn’t working backwards from his answer to produce a semblance of proper procedure.

Before long, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday became the best days for waking near noon, when calculus and chemistry and French were nearly ended and the gang shower was deserted. Tuesday and Thursday were a relief. I attended history and literature, classes where I did the reading and didn’t dread being a fool.

Spring break was a week stuck in Pittsburgh while the weather was still problematic. After I received an F in calculus at mid-terms, the grades arriving home before I could escape, my father asked me if I knew the story of how janitors were once hired in Alamogordo, New Mexico, whether the name of that town meant something or if I’d stopped thinking altogether about anything but my present self.

“The atomic bomb,” I said, but he went on as if I hadn’t answered.

“If you couldn’t read a word, you were hired. They wanted illiterates to do that work in New Mexico.”

We were together in a restaurant. I had been born, within a few weeks, of the atom bomb’s first test. I was supposed to become a doctor, not clean up after their accomplishments, somebody who’d never know their secrets, a failure sweeping up in ignorance.

“The scientists,” he said, “were creating the end of the world while those janitors, unaware of their secrets, emptied trash.” Lips moving, he calculated a tip before sliding three quarters and two dimes under his plate, waiting for me to stand, leaving my grades open on the table because I needed to understand that anyone, even a busboy, could recognize I was as helpless as those illiterates in New Mexico.

That night, out with two girls and a friend who followed me home in his car, I believed I was being thoughtful as I carefully opened the garage by hand to park my parents’ car inside.

Because we thought it was cool to stay up until sunrise, last beers standing open for more than an hour, I was awake and dressed at five-thirty when my mother called that friend’s house because she needed to be at work. “The driveway and your bed,” she said, “were both empty,” crying because my small kindness, so unexpected, had brought her anger, and then a near-paralysis of fear.

My mother drove off in time, and I walked outside into the same weather my mother felt at the bakery door my father unlocked for her before six each Saturday, returning to doughnuts and eclairs, the most perishable items he sold made last. Outside, the scream inside my ears dialed back to buzz, and I believed I was myself again.

We drove those girls to the houses in which they lived before it was fully light outside, the car’s radio full of the British Invasion. One sat beside me, knees drawn up to her chin like a pouting child. Expectation is the only thing that had happened between us. I followed her under the driveway’s double floodlights to the house I would never be inside. “Next time you’re home,” she said, offering an empty promise, before my friend and I pulled away and drove, a few miles later, past where she would die in another boy’s new sports car the following week. It was a place I’d seen so often, I noticed nothing but oncoming headlights, ones kept on by cautious drivers even as the light improved. I switched the radio in to Marvin Gaye and James Brown, the road so familiar I didn’t worry as he became careless with the speed limit.

“You have the blahs,” my mother said when I saw her later, true enough, since I was already failing one course, scraping by two more with Cs. Even then, before those cautionary grades became final, I couldn’t see why my parents said nothing more than my father’s breakfast veiled warnings about janitors in New Mexico. Why my mother, after working from six to six, made fried chicken and corn that night as if her remission was something to be tested by exhaustion. Why my father read the newspaper while he ate, his plate turning white with coagulated grease beneath bones. Why she washed dishes while I showered and dressed before borrowing the car again as they settled in to watch Lawrence Welk. But mostly why I thought melancholy was a way of life or preparing me for discovery.

When I used my first away tennis match as an excuse for taking a test late and the professor gave me the same test that a friend provided to sample problems he had solved, I managed only a 55. All that was left was the chance I might get above a 70 on the final.

One morning, the present felt crumpled like scratch paper after an exam. That wadded ball unfolded wrinkled and smaller and whimpering until I smothered it in my fist. All day I was leery of numbers that chattered like reunion relatives: square roots and functions, molecular weights of compounds. Already the slide rule was a set of footprints that ended in a steep drop into water. The day I gave up medicine, Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty, but I didn’t learn that until the semester ended because I didn’t read a newspaper or hadn’t watched television since that night with the Beatles.

Later that day, a girl I wanted to have sex with said I should be tested for the name of my problems, sounding like a family doctor handing me off to an expensive specialist. I slipped my hand under her blouse, thinking nothing about the medical terms for arousal, intent upon the anatomy of desire. Whatever she felt for the next few minutes, our separation had already begun.

Easter came early in 1964, Good Friday on the 27^th of March. As always, my father closed the bakery from 12-3, and I, home again, was expected to sit through all seven words of the cross. Nearly every churchgoer came and went between the words, spending anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour. Except for me and my parents. We lasted through “I thirst,” “Why have you forsaken me,” and “It is finished” as if Good Friday service was the equivalent of chemistry lab. We sang the doleful hymns. The minister worked seven variations on sacrifice and martyrdom before he released us to blink in the late March sun. My mother, at three p.m., reopened the bakery for workers whose shifts were never adjusted for God. My father slept and ate and drove me back to sugar, salt, flour and grease by seven because my mid-term failure made me feel obligated to pitch in and help until midnight for some sort of atonement.

We were side by side at 9:26 EST in Etna, Pennsylvania, the work room filled with the smell of yeast, my father, because it was still Good Friday, refusing the red radio until midnight, instead humming the old hymns, keeping the last hours holy, when an extraordinary earthquake struck Alaska. Though neither of us knew anything about it until five minutes of news came on the radio at midnight just as he turned it on as a signal I was excused.

          The next night, as I was leaving the house, I told my parents that I’d changed my major to English. I came home late enough to be certain they were asleep.

My father didn’t talk to me at breakfast or on the way to church. My mother passed my news along to a couple of aunts after the service. She took me aside to confirm what I already knew. “Your father is disappointed,” she said. “He doesn’t know what he’s paying for now.”

At my grandfather’s, while we ate ham and scalloped potatoes, one uncle said, “I hear you’re an English major now. What’s that all about—pre-law?”

My father looked stricken. “Maybe,” I started in, then decided against lying and added, “probably not.”

An aunt said, “I know. You want to be a teacher.”

“No,” I said at once, sure of myself on that guess.

A moment passed. “What else is there?” my uncle said.

“That’s what I’ll find out, I guess,” I said.

My uncle looked at my father. “Sounds like you’re paying for a mighty expensive scavenger hunt.” I knew what my father was thinking: English is fuzzy and feminine, an easy major that means his son is an academic coward.

Once basketball had ended, I had begun drinking a few weekday evenings a week in a townie bar that served underage. Like nearly everyone, I ordered Iron City drafts that came in ten-ounce glasses for fifteen cents each. Alone sometimes, head down, I listened to men my father’s age complain about politics and work.

I was always waiting for a story to tell, and one night, before I finished three beers, it came in the shape of a man who stumbled down the backroom’s flight of stairs holding a knife anybody could tell he’d been stabbed with. Ashen and sweating, he mumbled his way to a booth and performed the dead-man’s drop. Like me, the men seated nearby watched him in the mirror above a sculpture of bottles while the bartender dialed the phone beside the cash register.

For three minutes, no one ordered or spoke. Siren wailing, an ambulance arrived seconds after two bellied policemen. As if he’d been summoned, a shirtless man

came down the stairs to surrender. “Stop me,” one cop said, “if you’ve heard this one before,” and from both sides of me stories started about an earlier upstairs stabbing, one from the year before.

Weeks went by, nothing worth retelling except the night that stabbing victim, apparently recovered, sat at the bar and nobody asked him about anything but high school football and basketball. His assailant sat beside him, and I felt older knowing men returned to habits as easily as swallowing beer, that they could even fall asleep in the same room while jukebox rock and roll rose through the floor, and I sat infatuated with small experiments in self-destruction.

All that protected me was silence and quarters. I slotted one after the other like a townie who wanted to be liked by playing Fifties music, someone whose father surely worked with steel or coal.

At the spring honors convocation in mid-April, I was announced as the male recipient of the freshman scholarship. The award was for the combination of first semester grade point and a multiple-choice test that reminded me of the verbal SAT, the test that the school had used to place me in advanced composition.

The donor wanted to meet me and the female recipient. I recognized her. She was the only other freshman who had been placed in advanced composition first semester. I’d never spoken to her. My calculus professor walked past in his academic regalia and seemed to squint when he saw me.

In May, in a low-budget Cleveland hotel, I watched my doubles partner snap the arms off both chairs in the room of another doubles team from our college. Drunk, he’d decided he wanted them to witness a show of force, sitting to flex his arms. Hiroshima, he said, triumphant, and as if they needed to understand, he reseated himself for Nagasaki, laughing and leaving them to wonder. For two days, he had been my ally in a college conference tournament we hadn’t won. The following week, I’d receive my first F and learned, when I moved back in with my parents for the summer, that my father would continue his Easter break refusal to speak.

My second day at home, borrowing the car while my father slept after his night shift at the bakery, I noticed a neighbor at the bus stop at the end of our street. He was older than my father, but now he looked ancient, stooped and fragile, and I offered him a ride. He sat beside me and said he was going grocery shopping at the Giant Eagle along the highway a couple of miles away, that he didn’t drive anymore, launching into his colostomy story, his liver cancer sequel, ending “I’m still here today,” he said. “I’m buying food.” He smiled as I dropped him off at the grocery. “Maybe you’ll be the one discovers a cure for this mess,” he said.

I didn’t tell him I was no longer pre-med. I said, “Sure thing,” driving off to a factory job interview daydreaming about my F of calculus, his F of tumors, and what seemed to be the passing grade my mother had received, all of them assigned by the hit and miss of luck. Though I thought, finally, that all of my ambition had suffered a form of congestive failure.

“Go to work,” my mother said at ten o’clock. “It’s his last night. Surprise him.” Her hair had returned. She’d given those wigs back to my aunt. She knew that my father wasn’t about to tell me that he had decided to close the bakery. “He got himself a job as janitor at the high school,” she said. “He says it’s because it’s too hard to make ends meet, but I know it’s because of what’s been going on with me this last year.”

My father nodded when I walked in. He turned the radio on. In Etna, that last night of baking, he marked the early hours with the same scheduled hand-work as always—bread and sandwich buns being readied or already baking. When my father spoke to me for the first time since March, I knew my mother had been working on him since Easter. He told me to go home and sleep, and then, as if it was an afterthought, he said he needed me the next afternoon, so be around.

          The next afternoon, in the day’s full heat, there was one wedding cake, three tiers, the bride and groom standing in a white gazebo that needed to fit inside a circle of sugar roses and loops of icing. My father ordered me to drive so he could balance that beauty nine miles, three of them to avoid the cobblestones of a neighborhood called Cabbage Hill to the Cherry City Fire Hall where women were preparing golabkies, pierogies, and kielbasa, sweating in a windowless small kitchen.

He retouched those swirls of icing and laid that white gazebo just right, erasing the dot of icing that reminded him which part of those circles faced front. Those women praised the cake and offered beer, Iron City on tap, but my father waved his spatula until one of them fished out a bottle of cherry soda from a cooler packed with ice. She looked at me, and I nodded, accepting the same, able to wait three hours to drink myself stupid with a girl I planned to never marry, allowing my father to take his time with the end of baking, standing beside the cake until he decided to drive back to the bakery where my mother, near closing, would be offering everything for half price.

“I could have kept this going,” he said as soon as we were in the car. “You understand what I mean by that?”

          I nodded. And I did. It would kill my mother, maybe, and because hiring a full-time salesperson would erase the thin margin of profit. Because, feeling useless, my mother would refuse to quit until she dropped or her still-unspoken “health problems” returned. Or what would never be said, because it would take his legs out from under him or cloud his lungs and, unlike the janitor position, there was no safety net of social security or medical insurance or retirement plan and never had been.

“Get up for church tomorrow,” he said then. He didn’t say anything else, but that one extra sentence felt like acknowledgement by indirection, that beginning the next day he’d return to a few comments about sports and church, leaving unspoken that janitor        

was a job that suggested failure as much as the English major did, that we both had something to prove. He wasn’t self-sufficient, my mother was mortal, and “whiz-kid” was a name more appropriate for those who hadn’t yet been tested.

Sunday night I drove to a high school graduation party for a girl I’d been out with a few times. After it ended, as I approached the railroad tracks that crossed the highway a block from my father’s bakery, the red lights began flashing and the crossing gates lowered. I could see there was no train coming from the south. Impatient, I slowed and glanced up the tracks to the north, noticing the train seemed far enough away to beat. “Here we go,” I said, like I’d done it before, pulling around the gate and bouncing over two sets of tracks, the train, running downhill, something I hadn’t fully considered, flashing behind us a second later.

That girl caught her breath as if she were resurfacing from a minute underwater. Neither of us spoke, not even when she left the car and hurried up the driveway to her house without waiting for me to walk beside her. I idled at the curb like a taxi driver who believed he was protecting the vulnerable from possible harm. She never looked back.

Gary Fincke's latest collection of personal essays The Darkness Call won the 2017 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose and was published in early 2018 by Pleiades Press. His collections of stories have won the Flannery O'Connor Prize and the Elixir Press Fiction Prize, and earlier nonfiction books were published by Michigan State and Stephen F. Austin.