Senior-Citizen Discount

by Patrick Dobson

Lucy liked bad music, had a dog everyone but she could smell, and owned her own fixer-upper in an up-and-coming neighborhood south of the University of Missouri-Kansas City campus. Narcissism and/or alcoholism marked former husbands with whom she had bad marriages and no children. She’d had three different last names other than her maiden name.

Lucy had a penchant for celebrity and had spent much of her youth as a rock-n-roll band groupie. She stayed more than one night in jail for various petty crimes, not the least of which was a disturbing-the-peace charge where she’d thrown a shot glass through the street window of The Gate, a third-rate tavern in Northeast Kansas City that convicts and steelworkers from the nearby mill frequented.

By the time I met Lucy, she’d tended bar and cocktail-waitressed at numerous lounges of low repute all around Kansas City. But she’d gone on a self-improvement binge and put herself through nursing school. Along with nursing at a large hospital, she worked a succession of bar jobs, each better than the last. She’d climbed up out of smoky no-name taverns to the rooftop of the Ritz and was making $400 a night serving drinks to out-of-town corporate executives and wealthy adulterers hiding in the dark corners of the bar—after her shifts at the hospital. Her fellow employees at the hotel and the hospital admired her strong will and devil-may-care attitude work and life.

I fell for Lucy the first time we both stepped on the hotel service elevator to the rooftop bar and restaurant. She was getting ready for a shift and straightened her skirt and showed me her teeth. “Anything in them?” she asked. My eyes wandered from her teeth. I had a close look at her fake-blond hair. I saw an anger, vulnerability, and sadness beneath the makeup she used to hide her age that tugged at my heart and stoked visceral desire. She’d been around, something I found deeply attractive.

I told her no.

“I’m Lucy,” she said. She stretched up to her full height, which was a couple inches over my five-foot-ten. “I’ve seen you around. You’re the guy who takes care of the furniture, aren’t you? What’s your name?”

“Patrick,” I said. “I repair and refinish all the antique and reproduction furniture here at the hotel.”

“You do a helluva job,” she said. “It’s about as fancy as a place gets. How much are these things worth?”

“Sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. I have a book with the insurance-replacement values in them.”

“Must make fabulous reading,” she said as she stepped off the elevator into the rooftop kitchen.

She turned and smiled and waved. She made her way around the large standing refrigerators and between the stainless-steel prep tables. “Maybe I’ll see you sometime,” she said.

I was thirty and dumb and just sober after nineteen years of hard drinking. I’d been drinking seriously before my teens—sneaking from my parent’s stash and sopping up leftovers from parties. It got worse from there. Having missed the lessons sober people get out of their teens and young adulthood, I fumbled when it came to relationships with women. But her savage beauty and age did things to my insides. I discovered through the hotel grapevine—a vibrant avenue of falsehood and truth—that she was forty-four years old. I had a thing for older women. My heart melted.

After I met Lucy on the elevator, I moved my attention to the rooftop furniture, refinishing sideboards and armoires that years, hands, and banquets had ravaged. During my days, I wheeled them down to my basement workroom in the engineering department and stripped off the finishes and made them look almost new. I’d wait until the staff was starting to head up to the restaurant for the night shift to return the pieces, hoping to see Lucy again.

Around the same time, she started showing up to work early to take dinner in the employee lunchroom, where I’d see her on my coffee breaks. One day, I made an excuse to eat late and sit at her table. We made small talk and learned a few things about each other. Over the course of a couple of months, she told me of her humble beginnings and how she’d come to work at the Ritz.

“You get sick of feeling dirty all the time,” she said. “I mean, bar sitters only hold your interest so long, you know. After a couple of years, you’ve heard all the stories. The money was all right but hardly anything that would keep a person like me in a mortgage. Renovating a house costs money, you know. The hospital pays well, but since I don’t have a family you can speak of, just a daughter who’s twenty-two now, the Ritz fills in my free time and gives me enough to make me comfortable.

“Plus, I own a little land on the Klamath River in northern California, just five acres, but it’s mountainside and backs up to the national forest. I want to build a place up there where I can retire. I have a pile I’ve put away. The house here will be worth something when I get done fixing it up. Altogether, I figure I have a couple of years on my feet before I can get out of here and find a job at a little hospital or clinic up there in the wilderness.”

She asked over the months what my story was. I told her quite honestly that I’d been drunk most of my life and had sobered up a couple of years before. I had gone to grad school in Wyoming and had a three-year-old whose mom I never married. All I ever wanted to be, I told her, was a writer.

“Now that’s interesting,” she said. “A scholar who fixes expensive furniture and wants to be a writer. Keep your mind to it and you’ll make it someday.”

We came to have a standing date at the employee lunchroom every Friday. She worked Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays at the hospital. She caught up on her rest and read detective novels until time to go work on Fridays and Saturday nights in the bar. She worked in the restaurant on Sunday during brunch.

I became fond of Lucy, her drive and determination. I was scared to ask her out, unsure of myself and still getting over the relationship I’d had with my daughter’s mom. For a couple of years, my main concerns had been single-fatherhood and child support. I was broke nearly all the time. Some weekends when I was to spend with my daughter Sydney, I filched food from the employee lunchroom for our dinners on Saturdays and Sundays.

My mates in the engineering department noticed Lucy and I spent time together in the lunchroom. The hotel was like a little village that way. Rumor spread through the hallways and rooms, through the departments and offices like rivulets running to a river. While everyone didn’t exactly know everyone’s business, everyone got a taste for what was going on here and there. Most of us knew, for instance, that the GM was having an affair with the front-desk manager. She, on the other hand, was carrying on with the concierge, who was also close—very, very close—with the day waiter in the lobby bar.

One of my coworkers was a stout mechanic by the name of Bruce. He hated me for reasons I’d never understand, though it appeared he didn’t like the way I directed my own job and kept my own hours. He approached me one day at my workbench. I was repairing a glass end table a guest had broken by sitting on it.

“So, you and the nurse lady’s getting along just fine, I hear.” He stood across the workbench from me, the fluorescent fixture above lighting his body but leaving his head in darkness.

“You mean Lucy?” I said, looking up from the joint I was gluing.

“You know she sleeps around a lot.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. “That’s kind of her business, isn’t it?”

“You just ought to know what you’re into, kid.”

“Don’t call me kid,” I said.

“She’s way out of your league, anyway,” he said. “You know she hangs out with all the big-wigs that come to the hotel, and you know we got a lot of them. What’s she want with you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “We have lunch once in a while.”

“Yeah, my ass,” he said. “You got a thing for old ladies?”

“Old ladies?”

“She’s elderly, man. What’re you after? The senior-citizens’ discount at the movies?”

I finally asked Lucy out as fall began to throw its chill over Kansas City’s streets. We had just finished eating on Friday and she was headed up to her shift in the bar. My day was about to end and I was going to pick up Sydney that night. I stopped her at the service elevator. No one was around. She gave me a deep kiss. “I wondered when you were going to ask,” she said. “I was getting sick of waiting and was going to do it myself if you didn’t make a move soon.”

We went to a movie the following Thursday night. She started holding my hand about halfway through the picture. That night, I stayed over at her house and had to get up early to make it home to change before my shift. I rushed through coffee and headed out the door.

I felt light and good. Something special had happened and I felt like my life was turning around. At least now, in my single-fatherhood, I had something to look forward to besides weekends with my daughter Sydney. Possibilities opened up for me. I began to think of taking a long walk across the country. I needed adventure. I wanted to test my legs in my new, sober life. I needed something to write about.

Before long, Lucy and I had become the talk of the hotel. Wherever I went about my business hauling furniture about the public spaces, I’d hear people talk behind my back. It wasn’t mean or spiteful, just whispers. “He’s with Lucy now,” I heard a houseman say to one of his mates one afternoon. “Apparently, they’re pretty hot and heavy.”

A banquet server, a tall, broad shouldered Palestinian by the name of Simon, caught me in the foyer of the main lobby one day. “Say, man, you’re going with that tall woman in the bar, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, you can say we’re dating.”

“Lucky,” he said, and slapped me on the back. “She’s real good lookin’ for an old lady.”

“She’s not old, Simon. She’s forty-four.”

“That’s a lot older than you. You got a mommy thing, don’t you?”

“I suppose I do.”

Meanwhile, Lucy and I spent many nights together. Her busy schedule limited our time together to Thursday nights. We went to the movies and watched more on the VCR. We ate out at late-night diners. We cooked dinner at her house. I even coaxed her into walking the dog, which got us out into the neighborhood after dark. We made love every chance we could.

After a few months, I fell into a kind of comfort with the relationship. This wasn’t love. We were very different people. She liked clubs and enjoyed nightlife after her shifts at the rooftop bar. I preferred to stay home. She read different books than I did. Our talk revolved mostly around the hotel and movies, and even then, we liked different kinds of films. She really fell for blockbusters and chick flicks. I was more a classic-movie kind of guy. I drifted toward art-house flicks and complicated stories. The domestic aspect of our affair satisfied me. I liked the lovemaking and laying around and watching movies I never would have looked at on my own. Nights with her gave me time to think. My thought of walking across the country moved to determination.

But Lucy wanted more from me than I was willing to give. I liked sitting around the house. I wanted quiet and domestic. I loved the walks and breezy conversation. But things were changing. I was becoming more my own person, less willing to go along with whatever happened to me. I wanted to steer my future. I’d fallen in for Lucy and our relationship had become convenient.

She seemed to go along with the program. At least, I thought so. I was content, why shouldn’t she? We went for a walk one night in Loose Park in the early spring. There was still a chill in the air. The trees had just begun to bud and you could smell the green. While we were walking, she said she wanted to take me to a concert.

“I just love the Eagles,” she said. “They’re touring for the first time in fourteen years. It’s called the ‘Hell Freezes Over Tour.’ They once said they’d get together again when hell freezes over. The tickets are $110 each and I’m buying yours.”

“That’s too much money for a concert. I can’t let you spend that.”

“Why not? I’m flush. I’m buying.”

I was stuck. I hated the Eagles and always had, even in my high school years when they were all the rage among my classmates. Moreover, I thought it obscene to spend $110 for a ticket to any concert.

“I have a conscience thing about spending that much money on a concert,” I said.

“But I’m buying. You won’t have to spend a dime.

“Besides the money, Lucy, I hate the Eagles.”

“You’ve got to be joking. They’re one of the greatest rock bands ever. Everyone likes the Eagles.”

“Maybe everyone you know likes the Eagles, but I don’t.”

“Come on. You are joking, aren’t you?”

“I’m not joking and you’re not spending $110 on a ticket for me. I would have a terrible time.”

“I can’t believe it. You have to like the Eagles.”

“I don’t have to, Lucy, and I don’t.”

“You have to, they’re great.”

“Listen, I’m not going to that concert with you.”

This went on for some time. I’d never had a fight with a girlfriend before. Previously, whenever things turned sour with someone I dated, I left and didn’t look back. Things were different now that I was sober. I was trying to be a good guy and stick with something. Our relationship had turned into a routine, which I didn’t mind. I could have kept it up for a long time.

The conversation turned into a shouting match in the middle of the empty park. She accused me of only wanting to be with her for the sex. I retorted that there was more than that, that I liked her for more than her body. She kept at it and wouldn’t let it go. I became resentful. I told her I hated the way her dog made her whole house smell like a dirty kennel. She shouted that I was a bum who didn’t know how to have a social life and that maybe I should start drinking again. It would make me more interesting. She made sport of the kinds of movies I liked and said I was a snob.

She became so angry with me that we left the park and drove home in silence.

“If this is the way you’re going to be . . .” she said when we arrived at her house.

“What do you mean? Standing up when I don’t want to do something?”

“You could at least do it for me, goddammit.”

“But I don’t want to do it for you or anyone else,” I said.

“Well, that’s it,” she said as she climbed out of the car. “You can just forget about us then. Don’t call anymore. I’ll see you when I see you.”

“Fine,” I said as I slammed her door for her and sped away.

*

I saw her occasionally in the hotel hallways and service elevators over the next couple of months and she was cordial. Within weeks, we started to talk like old friends. Before I knew it, we were again sitting down together for coffee on Friday afternoons.

We fell into routine almost right away. I’d show up at her house on Thursday, we’d make love, order in a pizza, and watch movies. I’d go home and not see her for another week.

In the meantime, I started to notice a woman who worked in the HR Department. Kristi wasn’t as tall as Lucy but was as slender and fit. She was pretty in a severe sort of way with sharp, angular features and bleach-blond hair. Her face twitched with a nervous tic that interested me. She, too, was older than me but only by five years. We began to have coffee in the lunchroom during the day, before Lucy came to work. Lucy saw me talking to Kristi in the way I had once talked to her. I went to Lucy’s less often. Soon, weeks went by between our visits.

One day, Lucy stopped me at the service elevator where she had first asked me to look at her teeth.

“So, you’re with the HR woman these days,” she said. “I’ve heard you and her are going steady.”

“It’s nothing like that, Lucy.”

“Sure, it is. I know you. You’re on to the next good thing.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Are you coming over this week?” she asked.

“Do you want me to?”

“Until you start sleeping with that woman, I want you to come over.”

I had a first date with Kristi. She was a swimmer and liked basketball more than having a stimulating conversation or any conversation at all when her favorite teams and players were on television. She lived in an apartment that, coincidentally, a friend of mine had lived in years before. She had a cat, Scout, that more or less regulated Kristi’s comings and goings when she wasn’t at work.

At the time, I was getting ready for the long trip I’d been thinking about since soon after I started dating Lucy. I planned to walk to Helena, Montana, with a backpack and sleeping bag and then canoe back to Kansas City on the Missouri River. The preparations were intense. I took on double shifts at the hotel, working the day in the engineering department and then changing into a banquet uniform at night. Between work and weekends with Sydney, I spent time with Lucy on Thursday nights and with evenings with Kristi on Friday.

The relationship with Lucy sputtered along for a few more months. Lovemaking. Pizza. Movies. I liked the way we didn’t have to talk to each other. We spoke of mundane topics, as we really never had that much to say to each other anyway.

Soon, I did start sleeping with Kristi and stopped going to Lucy’s. It wasn’t long before I missed the routine I had with Lucy. Except for that one altercation, we never crossed words again. Kristi was a different story, a much different relationship. We rode bikes together and went camping. The bonds that held Kristi and me together grew stronger. Our relationship began to bud about the time it was time for me to leave for Montana on May 1, 1995. I’d spent about a year and a half with Lucy but now found myself as deeply infatuated with Kristi as I had once been with Lucy.

Still, on the way to Montana, on those lonely nights in town parks and in the backyards of people I met along the way, on couches in living rooms and in the woods of Wyoming, and during the solitary days on the river, I thought of Lucy, what she must have been up to, how she was pursuing her goal of one day retreating to her land on the Klamath River.

Kristi came to visit me once on my trip. She drove 350 miles to Lexington, Nebraska to stay with me overnight in a swampy hotel room on the outskirts of town. That night, she asked me about Lucy. We were laying in each other’s arms on the bed. She wanted to know what my time with Lucy had been like.

“It was like an old coat,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“About the time it gets comfortable, you need a new one,” I replied, realizing what I was saying and hoping that Kristi wouldn’t get offended. She elbowed her way out of bed and stood in the center of the room. “But you keep the old coat around because it fits well and means something to you,” I continued. “You’ve lived an important part of your life in it. You can’t throw it away. It sits in the closet until you find it again the next winter and you remember that part of your life again.”

“So, you’re saying I’m going to wear out on you someday too?”

“To tell you the truth, Kristi, you’re nothing like an old coat.”

“But I will be.”

“Maybe someday,” I said and paused. Who knew where we were going or what was going to happen to us. The 350 miles I’d walked toward Montana were already changing me. I was becoming a new person—more confident, more adventuresome. “But I don’t see it happening anytime soon. After all, you thought enough to come all the way to Nebraska to see me. I’ve talked to you about every other day on the phone. You’ve given me encouragement when I needed it. Plus, we have things to talk about. Lucy and I never had much to talk about.”

“You still think about Lucy?”

“When I’m not thinking of you, and I think about you most of the time.”

“Well, you better get over this Lucy thing pretty damn soon.”

To tell you the truth, twenty-three years later, I’m not sure I’m over the Lucy thing. When I remember that time, I think about Lucy and not Kristi. Sometimes I imagine Lucy in a log house on the banks of the Klamath. The wind sighs in the pines and the snow is just beginning. She’s lit a fire in the wood stove and is sitting in her favorite chair next to an end table with a lamp, the only light in the otherwise dark room. The house smells faintly of old dog and pine resin. She would be seventy now.

Lucy sticks with me, this person I let into my interior and treated so shabbily. I’m not sure I’ll ever get rid of that old coat. Though it was gone, thrown or given away, I remembered it. And Lucy wasn’t an old coat. She did more for me in our time together than keep me warm. She was a catalyst, an agent of change, and in being so, became part of me. I wouldn’t be who I am without Lucy. I’ve become a better man, in part, because of her. My memory of her makes me wish to become a better man still.

Dr. Patrick Dobson has worked as a journalist, book editor, and union ironworker in Kansas City, MO. The University of Nebraska Press published his two travel memoirs, Seldom Seen: A Journey into the Great Plains (2009) and Canoeing the Great Plains: A Missouri River Summer (2015). He teaches American History, Latin American History, and Western Civilization at Johnson County Community College in nearby Overland Park, KS. His essays and poems have appeared in New Letters, bioStories, White Wall Review, Kansas City Star, and dozens of other newspapers, scholarly journals, and literary magazines. His essays and travel pieces can be viewed at http://patrickdobson.com.

Other People's Music

by Cynthia Aarons

To the backdrop of Regan’s echoing words Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall—I took piano lessons. When no one was looking, my favorite thing to play instead of practicing was Animal from Sesame Street (if he played piano) and Don Music, the frustrated composer. I dramatized Don Music’s cries when he couldn’t remember the next note and the screeches of elation when he played like a concert pianist. Or I played “Thunderstorm,” every novice’s best number. I started with a gentle rain tickling the upper register of the highest octaves, then as “Animal,” cascading down into a violent, formidable nightmare of the booming keys, a roar that would be the perfect soundtrack to any mansion murder. It was in these moments that I was a messenger of a distant music that I alone was privileged to hear and transmit. Eighty-eight keys produce a million variations of seven notes. I could feel the power of the keys stretched out before me, realizing that any melody could be played by any ambidextrous child. The piano teaches children that anything in the world is possible. 

Miss V was my piano teacher. She was also the vocal music director of three different grade schools and one junior high. Miss V had no eyebrows. She drew them on with an oily brown make-up pencil, the thick kind that leaves a permanent clown upside down smile over each eye. Her olive tanned forehead was always smeared in a glossy sheen. Her big glasses, the plastic kind the 80s were known for, a direct revolt against the librarian half-glasses of the 1950s and 60s, magnified her eyes and reflected her face in the Coke bottle corners. Miss V had a block tummy, like a book hidden under her shirt, that fell over the waistline with an even roll all the way around. It looked like the door to a dumbwaiter that if open would reveal afternoon treats: Battenberg cakes and cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off and a pot of steaming tea, the tall slender silver kind, spouting upward with the elegance of a giraffe’s head. It was not a good look. I noted her odd shape at seven am every other day of the week as I arrived for choir practice. I sat sleepily in the front row of the sopranos, my stomach full of scrambled eggs and toast, and I silently noted, without fully acknowledging the significance to myself, all the beauty atrocities I would never commit as an adult. I would never become her.

My piano lessons took place at Miss V’s house, a 70s yellow brick ranch with a picture window looking out on a yard that didn’t get enough sun. The too soft ground seemed always to be covered by wet leaves and hollowed out branches from the one tree in the center of her yard. It, along with the other trees in the neighborhood, created a tunnel over the shady one-lane street. Her tree had a tire swing tied to its sturdiest branch, something I never understood because she had no children.  Every time I walked up the path to her front door I wondered about it—an unspoken question in the back of my mind—did the former owners put it there, or did she? And who was it for? Did Miss V look at it from her picture window and dream of children who might one day play on it? Did the neighbors’ children use it? Nieces and nephews? Or did it twist in the gentle wind every summer, unoccupied by children or laughter, still full of autumn leaves and April rainwater?

In the summer, Miss V kept the front door open with the screen door closed to let in the cool breezes that the shady trees of her neighborhood created. In the Midwest, the humidity could be eighty percent or higher, which meant 85 felt like 105, and none of us had air conditioning. So the only things that made getting through the summer bearable were screen doors and screen windows at opposite ends of the house that created a cross breeze along with Oster fans—rotating models angled to blow on your face, and large square ones that sat inside windows to suck out the hot air. As I walked up Miss V’s path, feeling sweat underneath my clothes and the oppressive heat on my neck, I encountered the most wonderful thing in the world: piano music coming through an open window. At first, I couldn’t tell if it was Joe or Miss V. Joe was two years older (and my neighbor) and a lot better at the piano than I was (his Catholic parents made him practice). But soon I could tell the difference. Miss V was extraordinary—the technical precision was unparalleled. Her man-like, calloused fingers, one or more usually wrapped in a Band-aid from playing so much, and her square powerful hands hit every note without a mistake, ever.  

Over time, I heard something else during my weekly visits that I couldn’t explain at first. By the next summer, I walked up to her screen door with a new sense of dread, a gnawing, tugging pain in my stomach, and each step closer to her was an involuntary act that I recognized as self-sabotage. Although Miss V’s playing was technically accurate, including the crescendos and sudden shifts to piano legato—there was absolutely no feeling in her playing. I can’t call it music now. Even at that age, my pre-pubescent, still innocent, naive wondering self knew that Miss V’s playing was cold, devoid of emotion and color. I vowed never to let my music become like hers. I vowed I would never become like her.

As a family friend, Miss V shared personal information with my mother. I remember the day my mother got off the phone with someone talking about Miss V and “her condition.” She hung up the receiver attached to the wall next to the kitchen door, its curly cord that could uncurl and stretch through the dining room to the entrance of the living room or all the way to the stove if necessary, recoiling against the wall as she returned the handset to its home. With a cluck in her throat—the one that meant, “Isn’t it a shame?”—Mom said she hoped Miss V would recuperate soon, and she declared she would make a casserole for Miss V.  

The casserole: an invention that probably originated in the 1930s but really gained traction in the 1980s: egg noodles from a plastic bag, a glob of Cream of Chicken soup, a glob of Cream of Celery soup, a quarter of a bell pepper, a small onion, and bam you have a meal that can feed 500 people. 

Etiquette in small Midwestern towns was rigidly and happily adhered to. Death? A casserole. Bridal shower? A casserole. Baby shower? Potluck? Any party, including major holidays? Casserole! You switched it up with a different canned meat or something festive on top like dried onion rings. You just had to label your pan with a piece of masking tape and a permanent marker. Except for Vera K’s casseroles and my mom’s, which actually tasted good, the rule for the casserole beneficiary was to store the casseroles in a deep freeze, the one in the cellar shaped like a coffin, packed with ice cream, deer meat, and twenty-five cent plastic Corelle containers of frozen corn waiting for a tornado to take off the roof. After a polite month, the beneficiary was allowed to thaw a casserole, feed it to the dog (or put it on the burn pile for the neighborhood strays), and give back the pan. If you gave back the pan too soon, everyone would know what you did. If you waited longer than six months, it meant you stole their pan. Either way, you would no longer receive casseroles, which you might appreciate but only at the cost of not being liked, which in a small town could be unrecoverable. These and other rules I learned as a child without anyone explaining them to me. I learned that the gift of a casserole accompanied the most serious events of life, especially those we did not talk about in detail in the Midwest, if at all.

Mom seemed particularly troubled as she stood next to the phone. Because Miss V was my piano teacher, I pressed my mother that day, but she wouldn’t tell me, a child, what was wrong. I worried Miss V had cancer. I worried someone I knew would die. My mother assured me she wouldn’t die, but it was clear the condition was as big as death, perhaps bigger, and I was not allowed to go to the hospital. Days later, I pressed my mother again. In a moment of weakness my mother revealed that Miss V had a “female condition.” Amazingly, the tone of voice let me know she was referring to the part of the body that we truly never, ever talked about, something not even vaguely alluded to on TV except in tampon commercials. Many years later, I brought it up again. Mom shared that Miss V had had a hysterectomy, and visiting her at the hospital on the day of the “casserole phone call” was an ex-boyfriend, a well-respected music director from the next town who had jilted Miss V at the altar years before! 

This was high drama indeed. And it was death. A death to possibilities, to something I could not put into words until now because it was so horrible and frightening to say out loud. Some people didn’t get to have children. Or partners. Or happiness. My mother let me know without saying anything that this was one of the worst things that could happen to a woman. And I took Miss V’s hysterectomy to be a stain connected to her singleness, to her not being chosen. It seemed to explain her music, too, the dead, rigid, robotic approach to the keys. Again, I decided I would never become like her.

During piano lessons and choir practice, even though I didn’t know exactly what was wrong, I looked for signs of Miss V’s “change.” But I couldn’t see anything wrong with her. She was always upbeat and projected her voice as though performing a solo in Carnegie Hall. Her energy frightened me. She seemed to lunge into life a bit too enthusiastically, a bit too hyper. I took piano lessons from her for three years. But when I was eleven, she told me I had to trim my fingernails. I wanted to have sexy fingernails, as sexy as an eleven-year-old can have. I knew feminine nails were long and had learned from a teen magazine how to push back the cuticles with a stick and apply a base coat, two color coats, and the final clear coat without getting polish outside the nail. But Miss V said my nails were too long and were “impairing” my ability to play properly. She and I fought over how I held my hands over the keys, and she wanted me to study the 3 B’s (Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms). At a younger age I loved the Classics, but in my pre-teen years, I wanted to play Billy Joel. I wanted to jump on the keyboard and then onto the couch singing, This is My Life! (Go ahead with your own life—leave me alone!)

Miss V had dreams of making me her protégé. She wanted to “expand my repertoire” and increase “my range.” When I learned of her plan to live vicariously through my life as a professional pianist, or at least as a fourth place winner at State recitals, I panicked. And for one of the few times in my life, I stood up for myself. I told my mother I was quitting piano. I stopped pretending to practice and really started to sound horrible. Miss V and I both knew it was a sham. My mother told me, You will regret this for the rest of your life. She urged me to think it over for a couple of months. But after a while she let me quit. I quit the choir also to avoid eye contact, to avoid the fact that Miss V embarrassed me and frightened me, and to avoid admitting to myself that I missed the piano.

I could not take piano lessons from a different teacher because in a small-town Miss V would find out. It would be an insult I would never commit. So I practiced on my own and even improved quite a lot in the next years, but without technical guidance, I peaked early and stayed there. I secretly longed for music. I would play Eric Satie and Debussy with passion, as long as no one else was in the house. I could be the faint heart of someone who had loved and lost or the fiery self-made woman who led a Bohemian life that caused men to fall at her feet. I mourned over Apartheid, humanitarian crises in Somalia, and homelessness. I played with a deep conviction that I could be anything, do anything, and that I could save the world.

Now I have lived in San Francisco for more than ten years. Passionate types are a dime a dozen here, and some actually save the world. I never went to South Africa to end Apartheid, didn’t stick with the homeless ministry I joined when I first moved, and now work two jobs, nearly to my own death, and I am, just like Miss V, single and childless. I am probably five years older than Miss V was when she had her hysterectomy, but unlike Miss V, I never had a man value me enough—if even in a moment of reckless abandon—to offer to meet me at the altar. I’ve contemplated adopting through Foster Care and becoming a single parent, but I have come to accept that at least for now I cannot do it alone, not financially, not logistically, not emotionally.  

The world I inherited from Women’s Liberation (though I am thankful for it overall) and Steve Jobs is one in which I have more education than my parents and older siblings, with fewer job opportunities—yet, I’m supposed to be successful in a profession and have kids (through IVF) and postpone marriage indefinitely if not forever because if necessary I can do it alone. We’re supposed to work all the time wherever we are with all our documents in a cloud, readable on a tablet as thin as a fifty-cent piece … on a date, in transit, even at the top of small mountains looking out at the vast world below … the Me Generation turned iPhone turned a thousand points of light all converging in my kitchen from all my devices, the lines between work and the personal erased as quickly as a Venmo Smartphone kiss.

When I go home, an empty hallway table greets me where plants once sat until they wilted in shadows, leaving a blank gray wall. I binge watch Netflix and eat slices of cheese pizza for dinner. Is there someone out there with the same ache I have watching the entire oeuvre of Friends? Are there others reaching out to the rest of our X generation/Ancient-Millennials, especially those still single, unwilling to use online dating because it’s too much like ordering toilet paper on Amazon? Perhaps Netflix will connect us, given that it knows more about our daily lives than eharmony ever could—the unvarnished, raw pain of loneliness recorded on our Watch List cue, the muted shades of TV light dancing on our faces as it changes from scene to scene to blackout.

And what about the dream of saving the world? As a community college instructor, I honestly don’t think anything could shock me—I’ve taught a Lost Boy who witnessed his father being macheted while his village burned down, a twenty-year old mother I took to a women’s shelter, a boy whose stomach was eviscerated by an IED in Iraq, a woman who witnessed her uncle executed in the street during the Cultural Revolution, a woman who escaped her violent husband by jumping off the ledge of a building, and countless students with precarious financial and immigration statuses. 

I taught all of them how to use a comma, and I tried to give them hope. But I have not corrected the wrongs done to them and cannot undo the trajectory of trauma and misfortune. In the endless cycle of trying to make enough money to pay the always increasing rent in San Francisco, meet the needs of overcrowded classrooms, and complete ridiculous amounts of committee work, I can’t fit saving the world into my Google calendar.

Is there a man out there who is tired of this treadmill, too, whose B12 shots are no longer working?—Stop the Madness! Is he unavailable because he is living in a biodome saving icebergs in Antarctica or trekking solo on foot in Nepal, knowing that I am so special he will have to look in the most remote place on earth? Or is all the evidence pointing to the end of a fantasy that kept me alive through the darkest times? Or perhaps the darkest times are yet to come. What is the next delusional hope to pull me through?

In reality, I never could have been a concert pianist. My hands are too small. I can barely reach an octave, and so a lot of the more complex works are just physically too hard. And frankly, I never wanted to be the kind of person who plays other people’s music. But my mother’s voice is right there, You will regret this for the rest of your life. She was right. My heart cries out every day for music. For the past two years, I haven’t been able to listen to music of any kind because the melodies make my cold life seem so pathetic in comparison. Today I can listen to the radio occasionally, but I find myself listening to the news and traffic reports more and more often.

Now I see Miss V’s empty swing. I can see her at the window, and I feel sure a woman who devoted her life to bringing music to children probably wanted some of her own. Yes, I’m certain she imagined her own children playing on the swing and a husband to watch through the window with her. I’m sure she felt trapped in our little community—where would she have possibly met eligible men there at her age? (I can’t even find one suitable man in this great world-famous city of romance!) 

I see myself walking up the path, the inevitable steps to my own tragedy, as she played inside her front living room, pounding the notes, getting them right, doing them justice, that cold, lifeless shell. And now, I finally understand her.

Cynthia Aarons is the author of fiction, poetry, and memoir. She teaches composition and creative writing and has led support groups utilizing memoir writing and art therapy. She is the author of a mystery novel and a collection of personal essays. 

The Conflagration

by Brent Fisk

In what should have been my future, I’d have turned my small record shop into a giant retailer with a cadre of devoted customers seeking advice on what album to buy next: Which Big Star record is best? Where to turn once the grooves of Kinks Kronikles are too worn to play? Who else has a voice as pure as Sandy Denny’s? I envisioned a homely couch where like-minded fans could sit and talk music. A cooler in the backroom stocked with Nehi and Warsteiner. A pinball machine beckoning from one corner. Rack after rack of brilliant albums. Reclaimed bookshelves stuffed with tasteful erotica, foreign poetry, the odd Scandinavian police procedural.

Instead I’ve strolled down a quite different career path. I’m a staid librarian at the local university. The IRS no longer hounds me for financial records so they can discover every small equivocation and the fuzzy math of my desperate record shop self. Those papers turned to ash in the arson that followed the burglary. This current job is easy to leave at day’s end. I can forget it like a coat hung on the back of a door. I no longer reek of incense and patchouli. When I wake in the middle of the night it’s because I have to pee, not because of the sheer terror of a negative account balance. I know the true meaning of the hoary phrase, a smoldering ruin.

Little I wished for has taken place; not the stacks of pristine vinyl, not the sought after bootlegs of Bowie in Berlin. The closest thing to books I sold was a steady string of High Times magazine. There were few acolytes I turned on to Parliament and Funkadelic. To keep the doors open we sold metal one-hitters, water bongs with a markup that staggered the imagination. Every black dude with a neck tattoo wanted to talk about the joys of marijuana. Rednecks in manure-smeared boots wouldn’t say two words to get laid, but walked up to the paraphernalia counter and were positively chatty. There were a host of words customers could not say. As the signage said, the pipes were for “tobacco use.” Utter some joke about pot, and the customer was out the door. We carded everybody who looked under thirty.  It was part of the unwritten local ordinance. You want to run a head shop, you have to act like Wally Cleaver.

So I had to wonder what it meant that early morning in December when the phone rang in the dark. Some random wrong number, another smash and dash, or the police entering with a warrant? The dispatcher’s term for the building: Fully engulfed. My wife and I huddled across the street, feet in the gutter, fire hoses snaking across the blocked-off road. It poured rain though it did nothing to dampen the fire. The eaves of the roof belched clouds of thick black smoke and steam. Orange flames broke through the ridge of the roof. Among the flames, horrors were loosed both long term and short. The ATF agents were saying arson, the three investigators with side arms strapped to their waists noted every red flag as I answered their questions. My wife was a sound sleeper—could she vouch for my whereabouts? Sure I was there when the phone rang, but what about the hour before? The bald investigator asked if I’d raised the coverage on the building and contents. Would it matter that my insurance agent required it? Was I current on all my bills? They scribbled in notebooks as I looked at my feet. 

My life was a snarl of insurance claims, follow ups with the fire department, and desperate attempts to salvage business records and inventory. There were levies for unpaid taxes. Insurance payments were delayed “pending the investigation.” I let employees go one by one and tried to start over in a florist’s basement. The mice shit everywhere and silverfish nested in the posters. I grew to loathe the smell of incense but could not wash it from my clothes.

Then one day the police made an arrest. Some drunk at a bar knew details we’d never released, and after several hours of interrogation, he finally fingered the person responsible. Pretrial dragged on for half the year before the judge ultimately gave the guy probation. As part of the guy’s sentencing, I get a $400 money order once a month for twenty years, no interest. I closed my doors and filed for bankruptcy.

Maybe those years are a total loss. The thousand fears I was afraid to tell my wife. The thoughts I choked on like smoky air. That’s such an easy phrase to say, “a total loss.” But things are gained as well. You are forced to stand stock still and let things pass. You strip away a shallow film and lay things bare. I have settled up with the government. I love my wife, and miracle of miracles, she still loves me. I own a small house near the park. A student loan big enough, let’s say that it owns me. Still, I come home to a mess of cats that swerve between my legs. I pull an album off the shelf, listen to Linda Thompson, Nina Simone, the soundtrack to Grease. The afternoon light can be caught in a glass of wine.

An envelope with money inside is sent a few days late from Owensboro by that other person marked by my fire. There are days I can almost feel the kind of sweat that must have come when the investigators first knocked on his door. I wonder if he loves his job, if he struggles to make ends meet, if he’s come to loathe each stamp he sticks on payments he sends me. Does he own the door he unlocks? Does he have a wife to kiss, cats that mew behind a screen door hungry to move through the world? When he stares into the embers of a fire, does he also think of loss, all the choices we both have made, intermingled and reduced, how they drift away like ash?

Brent Fisk is a writer from Bowling Green, Kentucky. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Fugue, Folio and other literary journals.

Chasing the Dead

by Susan E. Lindsey

I kneel in the damp sod in front of Lydia’s lichen-covered gravestone. It’s a chilly October day in southeastern Kansas. The wind scatters white clouds across a cornflower blue sky. Dry oak leaves skitter through the graveyard and collect by the thirty or so gravestones.

I press my palms against the soil covering Lydia. I’m not sure what I expect to feel—surely not a pulse. Lydia’s heart stopped beating more than 140 years earlier. I had been haunted by dreams of her for months.

I’m an amateur genealogist; we live for these moments. Call us crazy (many do), but there’s something fascinating about chasing the dead.

Lydia died at the age of eighteen while giving birth to her first child. Her baby boy survived his mother by only a few months. Lydia’s husband was my great-great grandfather, David Lindsey.

“Alas, she hath left us, and we mourn our loss,” the inscription reads.

Just to the left of Lydia’s stone is a similar gravestone. David’s second wife, Sarah Sophia, lies beneath it. The two arched stones look alike—made from the same material, inscribed in a similar style, and each has a weeping willow at the top. A small lamb lies beneath the willow tree on Sarah’s stone—symbolizing the baby boy buried with her. She, too, died in childbirth. My great-great grandfather had three sons; only Sarah’s older boy survived.

The two women didn’t know one another in life, but spend eternity next to each other in this small family cemetery, a speck in the midst of rolling farmland.

Mine is a sometimes gruesome hobby. I spend hours in old cemeteries, dim basement archives, old county courthouses, and historic battlefields. I am caught up in lives long passed. I admire their courage. I’m touched by their tragedies and moved by their grace.

I feel as though I almost know them, that I understand something of their lives, joys, sorrows, and passions. They have become more than dates and names.

Lydia’s story haunted me. By the time she married David, she was an orphan. She had lost both of her parents, two sisters, and a brother in less than six months. I’ve never learned why—maybe one of the countless diseases of the past swept them away.

She married David when she was seventeen. Exactly ten months after their wedding, she died in childbirth. After I found her grave, placed yellow grocery store roses on it, and whispered a prayer, my dreams about her stopped.

Others now take Lydia’s place in my thoughts and dreams and haunt me. They are my direct and not-so-direct ancestors, and their neighbors and friends.

There’s James, who packed up his wife and family, and moved from Kentucky to Illinois twenty-seven years before the Civil War because he was determined that his children would be raised in a state free of slavery. Most of his relatives remained in Kentucky and continued to own other human beings.

Jane, his wife, had courage and strength of her own. She gave birth for the first time just ten months after her marriage, and for the next twenty-one years, she had a new baby on an average of one every twenty months—twelve children in all. She raised all of them to adulthood, an extraordinary feat in an era when half of all children died before they were grown.

James and Jane had a good friend named Ben. He also opposed slavery even though he was a slaveholder. But after living and working in New Orleans, Ben wanted no part of slavery. He spent the next few years educating his slaves to ensure they were literate. He then freed all of them and paid for their passage on a ship to Liberia, Africa. Ben’s involvement didn’t stop when his former slaves boarded the ship. For fifteen years, letters to and from the freed slaves and their former master crossed the Atlantic. Some of the letters still exist; I’ve held and read these yellowing pages.

There’s William, Ben’s brother-in-law. He lost his father when he was only five and his mother when he was eighteen. He and his wife had eleven children and William, a preacher, buried nine of them. He unknowingly brought home cholera after a trip. He survived the disease, but his wife and two of his sons did not. He struggled with guilt, tragedy, and debt the rest of his life.

I didn’t descend from powerful or famous people. My ancestors were mostly preachers and teachers and farmers.

My family’s history is entwined with the nation’s history. My grandfather pursued Poncho Villa. My great-great grandfather helped Kansas join the Union as a free state. My great-aunt served as a nurse at a first aid station at the Chicago World’s Fair. My paternal grandmother could shoot the head off of a chicken from across the barnyard. My maternal grandmother made exquisite bridal gowns. Her great-aunt was murdered by Plains Indians. My father, when he was just a teenager, helped get Pretty Boy Floyd’s car out of a ditch.

Some of my friends are researching their families. I hear their stories, too: the great-grandfather who, while drunk, smothered his own crying child; the woman with talent too big for her small town, who left her husband to embark on a stage career in New York and European capitals; and the father who walked across the frozen Ohio River to bring home Christmas gifts for his children.

These people were real. They lived through tornadoes, blizzards, drought, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, wars, and famine. They fell in love, married, had children, and buried loved ones. They made good choices and bad ones. They were human.

There’s no soap opera more compelling than these very real lives. Their stories should be remembered—these people helped shape our nation and literally brought us into being. But we also learn lessons from their lives about the nature of true sacrifice, and about honor, hard work, conviction, and courage. I complain less about trivial annoyances in my own life when I recall the very real challenges they faced.

So I continue to chase the dead, coaxing stories out of old documents, and trying to bring long-forgotten lives back into view.

"Chasing the Dead" received honorable mention in our spring essay contest.

Susan E. Lindsey fell in love with words in the second grade while reading The Wizard of Oz. After a nearly 20-year career in corporate communication and public relations, she now leads a much happier life as a writer, professional editor, and speaker. Her essays, short stories, and articles have been published in various newspapers, magazines, and anthologies. Susan earned a degree in communication at Pacific Lutheran University. A member of three writing groups and numerous historical and genealogical societies, she is completing work on a nonfiction manuscript.

Yellow Raincoats

by Michelle Valois

          We called them slickers.  Mine was hard, yellow plastic, with a tear under one arm that we tried to tape but the tape came off in the rain.  We had different names for things back then. 

My father called films moving pictures.  We called his mother, our grandmother, Mémay.  I once called my father a mold maker, but my mother explained that my father was a tool and die maker.  I asked the difference, and she told me that a tool and die maker was a man with a trade.   We called that sweet, carbonated beverage soda and then grew up to laugh at words like tonic and pop and soft drink.  I always wondered about soft drink and also hard liquor.  My father called those tiny bottles of whiskey and rum nips or sometimes toots.  He’d take them fishing.  They fit in his tackle box.

My other grandmother, not the French one, we called her Grandma, but my mother called her Mary.  She called the woman who gave her life her real mother and the woman who raised her Mary.  My mother’s real mother died when my mother was nine. 

Mary, some might call her step-mother, sewed and cleaned and cooked and made sure the children went to Sunday mass–though she herself was not Catholic–and kept the family together during the height of the Great Depression and stayed with the children’s father, my grandfather, who beat and belittled her.  Today she might be called an abused woman, the situation domestic violence.

My grandparents are gone now, my father, too.  It is a very different world that I inhabit, in some ways.  I have three children, but by some accounts, I am not their real mother.  I did not give them life or carry them inside my body or nurse them with my milk.  They call me Ma.  It was one of the first sounds the first child made so I claimed it for myself to feel chosen, to feel real, and because my father called his mother Ma.  The children call my partner, their other mother–real, by some accounts–Mommy, though just the other day the eldest declared that she might start calling her Mom.

          My mother, whom I also call Mom, is not legally blind but can only see out of one eye. She has had to give up knitting and driving and working, her independence, her once full life.  The other night she told me about spool knitting, which she did as a child. 

It was winter and my grandmother, Mary, herself barely twenty, had ordered the younger children outside.  It was a hard, biting cold, so my mother and her sisters took their play into the landlord’s barn.  There they found a box of yarn.  To keep them amused or to get them out of her hair, Mary had taught them how to use a knitting spool, which my grandfather made by hammering three nails, equal distance from each other, on the top of an empty spool.  Using a crochet hook, some yarn, and a lot of patience, the children could actually knit things–doilies, pot holders, baby blankets–each piece unraveled after completion since the box of yarn from the landlord’s barn was the only yarn they had.

          Before my next visit, I stop at a craft store to buy my mother a spool knitter.  The young man at the store has never heard of such a thing.  Later, I learn all the different names for my mother’s childhood toy: knitting nancy, bizzy lizzy, corker, peg knitter, bobbin doll, bobbin knitter, French knitter, doll knitter, punniken, patdocker, strick spiel, corking doll, knitting knobby, knitting mushroom, knitting bobbin.  Finally, I discover something called a wonder knitter.

My mother tears open the package.  The bright colors of the wonder knitter make it easy for her to distinguish the parts from the whole: the pegs from the spool from the green yarn, the only skein left from a lifetime of filling and emptying baskets of yarn in every color, texture, and fiber content.

She is awkward at first.  Her blue-veined hands and crooked fingers fumble with the green yarn.  Every part of her is trying to remember how the spool works.  She doesn’t read the directions; she relies on instinct and memory.  It’s been nearly seventy-five years since she has held such a tool in her hand. 

          I watch her fingers hold the bright yellow hook that came in the package.  All things are illuminated under the stark light of her magnifying reading lamp.  She is patient.  Within a half hour, she has knitted six inches of braided wool.  She wants to get one for my daughter.  Imagine, she tells me, how proud Grandma would be, her great-grand daughter learning to use a spool knitter.

          Yesterday, in an early morning drizzle, I walked the children to the bus stop.  Up ahead I saw a gathering of yellow raincoats.  My old one, I remember, had a hole in the pocket.  One morning, I put my favorite matchbox car in the pocket and walked to school.  Along the way, it fell through the hole and was lost forever.

          People called me a tomboy, a name I wore like a badge of honor.  Today, I suppose I am called middle aged.

          As we near the bus stop, I can make out three separate yellow-coated children huddled together.  I wonder if I can find a yellow slicker in my size and what I would call it if I did–and what would fall through the pocket and what would be lost forever.

Michelle Valois teaches writing and humanities at a community college in central Massachusetts.  She lives in Florence (Mass, not Italy, alas) with her partner and their three children.  Her writing has appeared in TriQuarterly, Moon Milk Review, Florida Review, Pank, Brevity, Fourth Genre, North American Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, among others.