Uncle Ralph

by Donald Dewey

I never came close to climbing into the ring as a contender and my brother never ended up hanging from a meat hook in an alley, but the two of us have always identified strongly with “On the Waterfront”. The link isn’t the Malloy brothers played by Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger, but their mobster patron in the 1954 Elia Kazan movie, Lee J. Cobb’s “Johnny Friendly.” Our uncle Ralph Johnsen might not have controlled the docks, but he was so physically similar to Cobb, down to his heavy jowls, deep, bleating eyes, and quiet growl of a voice that we found it easy to imagine him controlling just about everything in Brooklyn that Johnny Friendly didn’t. Supporting that fanciful impression was his “money game.” But we’ll get to that later.

Like all those of his generation, Uncle Ralph was a man of hats and cigarettes. You can see him whenever you turn on the Turner Classic Movie channel—black-and-white characters going brim to brim and butt to butt, working small miracles every time they move away from one another without putting out an eye with either of their everyday weapons. But even more noticeable than his brown fedoras and Old Golds in my Irish Catholic family was the particular that Uncle Ralph was a Norwegian Lutheran who had seduced my Aunt Mary into marriage with his smorgasbord charms. For those who grew up within the steeples of central Brooklyn, the Scandinavians who inhabited the borough’s southwest area around Lapskaus Boulevard and Fort Hamilton Parkway were at best domesticated Vikings with a secret nostalgia for their pagan rituals. No question that Bay Ridge restaurants relied on their trade for survival, especially on hung-over Sunday afternoons, but what were all those bellicose drakkar pins and logos promoted by the Sons of Norway? Just homage to Leif Ericson’s fabled discovery of America or the tip-off that professional pillagers always had one more invasion in them? Wasn’t the peace-loving cross of the Knights of Columbus good enough for them?

Give Uncle Ralph credit for trying to bridge the cultural gap. At times this meant painfully diplomatic interest in the latest Catholic gossip from another of my aunts: what ballplayers should be rooted for because they were of the right religion, what movies should be avoided because they offended one commandment or another, what priests had just dropped dead before Uncle Ralph and his heathen ways had gotten to know them. Others confronted by these parochial assaults either suddenly remembered phone calls they had to make or refrigerators that had to be defrosted, but the family Lutheran was usually left with only one defense—his habit of nodding attentively as he slowly circled a room and shook all the change he kept in both pants pockets until my aunt’s pious recital had gained something of a musical score. (My mother once cracked that “Ralph keeps his hands in his pockets more than some of those guys in the subway,” but then her opinion hardly counted since she was always the first to go running outside to unplug the refrigerator when my aunt got started with her bulletins from the Vatican.)

Politeness wasn’t Uncle Ralph’s only tactic in trying to ingratiate himself with his wife’s family; he also did his best to inform those on the other side of the barrier why he was proud of his own background. Sometimes this produced only blank stares, as in his peppery bulletin one day that Norway maples were the most common tree in New York City—this to people whose sole interest in trees was how much they cost around Christmas. Other times it approached the dubious, as in his boast that Jimmy Cagney was Norwegian—an ethnic fact not unlike the claims of Hollywood publicists that their latest he-man star is one-eighth Cherokee. He was on more solid ground when he carped at a once-popular beer commercial built around the ethnic diversity of New York City. If Madison Avenue could point out that there were more Puerto Ricans in New York than in San Juan and more Jews in the five boroughs than in Tel Aviv, he complained, why couldn’t they also mention that Brooklyn had the largest Norwegian population outside Norway?

He never received an answer to that one, but he labored on with his instruction. Our cat heard more about the Atlantic voyage of the Restauration than Cleng Peerson’s descendants. One weekday afternoon (when it wasn’t morally compromising) he conducted a tour of his sparely furnished Lutheran church to show his in-laws that there were no traces of a baby’s blood on the altar. He was also emphatic that nobody in the family make other plans for Norway’s Constitution Day in May—a social obligation I still associate with a lot of O’s, for Oslo the capital, Olaf the king, and Ole the neighborhood drunk who annually stood another round for “Ralph and his Catholics.” And maybe most personal of all, he made sure every piece of his ulcerated stomach extricated over the years was dispatched at the Norwegian Hospital, thus giving relatives the chance to see that the place could handle more than frostbite and reindeer poisoning.

Probably inevitable for anyone feeling tested in a social setting, Uncle Ralph had a compulsion to perform, in his case by telling jokes. Even more inevitable, many of the jokes had self-deprecating Scandinavian themes, if with more cultural subtleties than I was able to appreciate at the time. One that has stuck after decades appeared clearly aimed against the Swedes. As Ralph told it, one holiday before he was encouraged to drink more and talk less, two Norwegians and a Swede found themselves near an ice cube death at the North Pole. Suddenly they discovered a magic lantern in the tundra, and the standard genie emerged to grant them three wishes. The first Norwegian said he just wanted to get warm, so the genie transported him to a nice fireplace in Oslo. The second Norwegian said he wanted the same thing, so off he went as well to the fireplace. Asked what he wanted, the Swede replied that he was suddenly feeling very lonely and wanted his companions back. I don’t remember this or any of the other stories bringing howls from my parents or other aunts and uncles, but Uncle Ralph always seemed to show an extra layer of pleasure in arriving at his punch lines, as though he had just evened some generational score in Stockholm.

To say Uncle Ralph worked as an insurance agent was much like saying Johnny Friendly worked as a labor union agent, at least to the impressionable who knew him mainly in his leisure hours. In fact, there were few occasions when I didn’t know him in the far more romantic light of gambling. Cards, horses, pool tables, ballgames—Ralph seemed to dedicate his every free hour to policies Prudential would never underwrite. Other members of the family had their living rooms dominated by sprawling couches, mantle pieces, or television sets; the most conspicuous objects in the Johnsen living room were stacks of playing cards and burnished mahogany chip wheels. Looking for a pencil in a drawer usually meant having to dig under a Jack of Diamonds that hadn’t been thrown away with the rest of an old deck. I don’t recall how much I knew about poker beforehand, but I do know that after spending a weekend with Uncle Ralph and Aunt Mary, I never again had any doubts about the hierarchical order of straights, flushes, and full houses.

Visiting them produced other epiphanies, as well. For instance, there was the Nordiske Tidende, the first foreign-language newspaper I had ever seen outside a candy store or newsstand. It wasn’t that Ralph read the paper or was even fluent in Norwegian; as he put it when I asked him, “I can understand the headlines.” Forget that this is the answer I would give if somebody spotted me holding the newspaper of Laotian tribesmen. More to the point was that he was open to the extortions of a sister, an activist in Brooklyn Scandinavian circles, who pressed a subscription to Nordiske Tidende on him as his tie to a homeland neither of them had ever seen. For her part, Aunt Mary didn’t seem to mind collecting the newspaper every morning and sticking it, usually unread, in the garbage every evening: “We get a lot of rubber bands,” she said. On the other hand, there was no sacrifice for either of them in shopping at a local Scandinavian bakery. The meticulously baked glue of Silvercup, Taystee, and Wonder Bread never had a chance against fyrstekake, or even the Danish helenesnitter—at least until I asked for these discoveries when I returned home and my mother suggested I go take a swim in my favorite fjord.

Exposed as we were to it from an early age, Ralph’s gambling might have seemed like an easy source of corruption. Nobody was more aware of this than he was, leading to a solemn—and morally bracing—ritual when the family teenagers reached their 18th birthday. As his special gift to me, as to my sister and various cousins before me and to my brother and various other cousins after me, he rented a limousine to go to Belmont for an afternoon. On the drive out to the track, he delivered a little homily about the responsibilities of reaching 18 and how these new burdens included knowing how to spend the envelopes of money we had all received for such a signal birthday. In other words, he made it clear, he would be there for advice if needed but any money wagered would be our own. From this experience, he warned, we would get a clear idea of the pitfalls of gambling.

Truth to tell, his little lecture lent a dour Protestant air to what was supposed to be an afternoon of fun; in other words, I had been counting on him to bankroll a few races. But thanks to my sister and the cousins who had preceded me, I had learned enough about racing forms to keep my questions to Ralph to a minimum and remembered enough about arithmetic to keep my bets to five dollars. Also like my sister and cousins before me (and my brother and other cousins after me), I left the track that day with a nice profit, while Uncle Ralph and Aunt Mary bickered in the limo all the way home about whose moronic idea it had been to put down so much on Crazy After All These Years. Needless to say, no one who celebrated an 18th birthday with Uncle Ralph’s help developed a phobia about racetracks.

Another time, Ralph’s desire to impart positive moral lessons led him into the perilous territory of what he presumed Catholic kids should be hearing. The occasion was what he assumed was going to be an innocuous Robert Mitchum war movie, “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison”. He was right about its being innocuous—except that he decided as we went home that the film’s central situation of a soldier and a nun being stranded together in a cave on a Japanese-held island required further explication. So he explained and explained and explained, along the lines of “Deborah Kerr isn’t a real nun, just an actress” and “Soldiers don’t think of nuns as real women, they think of them as female altar boys with a job to do.” By the time I arrived home I was resolved to return to the movie house the following weekend to see what I had missed. (Many years later, I told this story to John Huston, the director of “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison”, and his response was: “Lad, the thought of anyone sitting through that twice is terrifying. You would’ve been better off listening to your uncle.”)

Although he never delivered on a cushy job in the loft as Johnny Friendly did for Terry Malloy in “On the Waterfront”, Uncle Ralph did have a fondness for folding bills (singles) into the shirt pockets of his nephews after we had entertained him around the pool table at his Scandinavian social club. “Go buy yourself a soda and let the old man play with the other old men” was his version of a kiss-off. But nowhere did his benevolence come off as self-satisfied power more starkly than with the money game.

The money game belonged to our family holidays as much as Santa Claus did to Christmas and the Easter Rabbit to Easter. The first ingredient was Uncle Ralph shaking all the change in his pants pockets whenever he was called upon to move from Point A to Point B. The second ingredient was a pack of nagging kids begging him to play the money game—a chorus of charming innocence that, as the hours went on and Ralph pleaded for four or five more beers first, reached lynch mob timbre. Finally, with the other adults present also entreating him to get it over with, he gathered all the kids in one of the bedrooms and explained the rules. The most important of these was that anyone who threw a punch or gouged an eye would be immediately expelled from the bedroom.

As soon as that was on the record, he reached into both pants pockets and came out with more nickels, dimes, and quarters than all the parking meters in the neighborhood could accommodate. Up they all went into the air, over beds and bureaus and nephews, and the scramble was on. The chaos might not have had the same religious significance as when the Greeks dove off the Sheepshead Bay piers every year for an Orthodox cross, but the theological principle was the same—grab first. And through it all Uncle Johnny Friendly stood with a beatific smile, watching out for any foul blows but mostly handicapping the winner to himself.

We talked about the money game the last time we saw each other. I was about to leave on a trip to Europe and he was in bed with little more stomach to surrender and few days remaining on his calendar. He joked that the game had been his opportunity really to do what Aunt Mary said he had always been expert at doing—throwing his money away. But forget about that; did I think I would get to Norway while I was in Europe? I told him I didn’t think so, but at least I was crossing the Atlantic to France on a Norwegian freighter. He tried to look like that was close enough.

I decided it wasn’t. So I took the freighter to Bergen.

Donald Dewey has published 31 books of fiction, nonfiction, and drama, including widely translated biographies of James Stewart and Marcello Mastroianni, and a history of American political cartooning, The Art of Ill Will. His two latest books were published in June—a biography of the trainer Ray Atcel (Ray Arcel—A Boxing Biography) and the novel Wake Up and Smell the Bees.

Sleep Baby, Sleep

by Amy Herting

The words reach out through the years to touch the heart of every parent in any age. The grave is weathered, ornate and stands out in stark contrast to the precise military markers that surround it. It catches my eye and I am compelled to pull over and take a look. Marjorie Graves sleeps forever in the company of soldiers at Ft. Logan National Cemetery. She lived from 1892-1894, the daughter of William S. and Katherine Graves. On her left lies her brother in a grave simply marked “Infant 1891”. The loss is so enormous that I can feel the echo of grief calling across a century. Not able to think of him as “Infant”, I decide to call him Billy—in honor of his father while also remembering mine.

I have come on this crisp fall day to visit my dad, Robert J. Cooper, who has been resting at Ft. Logan since July of 2005. He died a peaceful, premature death in his sleep at 63. As I drive past Marjorie and the endless white rows of heroes, I’m thankful that Dad is joined with them in the still beauty of this place. His military service had a profound effect upon his life and—as seems fitting—his death. After a raucous youth, my father found purpose in the special brotherhood of the US Marine Corps. At 17, he was introduced to an exciting new life that was worlds away from the concrete existence of his Chicago upbringing. He served as a guard at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, was a Marine escort for John Glenn’s 1962 Homecoming Parade and stood watch at the fence of Guantanamo Bay on the brinkmanship of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He went to Vietnam in the early days of that conflict and was wounded in the line of duty—all before the age of 25. He received a medal for that service but never felt it was necessary for “just doing his job.” He eventually left the Corps, started a career and fell in love. He led a full life but never lost the pride of being a Marine. My childhood was filled with Chesty Puller, “The D.I.”, and the amazing feats of the brave Devil Dogs who are always the first to arrive on the field of battle. At first it seemed a shame that his only child was a girl, but he loved me with the fierce intensity that was his nature.

Fathers and daughters hold a special bond. I wonder about William S. Graves and his Marjorie. Did he cherish her all the more for having lost his son the year before? Did they delight in her first wobbly steps on the frontier military outpost that was Colorado? What claimed the life of little Marjorie, beloved baby eternally sleeping? I think of the faces of my own two daughters and the blue eyes of my precious baby boy. I remember my dad and how I still miss him every day. I drive away from Marjorie and Billy, but I cannot forget them. They haunt my dreams, and I must try to find out who they were. Maybe I can also find a salve for my grief in the process. 

I learn that Major General William Sidney Graves had quite a distinguished career in the US Army. Starting out as a teacher, he later decided to attend West Point Academy in 1884. Recognized for his leadership potential, he was posted to Ft. Logan in 1891 where he met his wife, Katherine Boyd, and had four children. He served in many capacities throughout his career, always steadily rising in rank. He was promoted to Captain of Infantry in 1899 and was cited for gallantry fighting insurgents in the Philippine Island battle of Caloocan in 1901. He helped with relief efforts after the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Later on he would become secretary of the General Staff in Washington as well as Assistant Chief of Staff of the Army. At the onset of war, he was chosen by President Woodrow Wilson for a covert European mission that would pave the way for our involvement in World War I. By then, Brigadier General Graves became Major General Graves as he took over the command of the 8^th Infantry Division in 1917. President Wilson, under pressure from the Allies, decided to send troops to Russia in order to open up an “Eastern Front” that would serve to divert the Germans from the main front in Europe. He sent Major General Graves to Siberia to guard the Trans-Siberian Railway and serve US interests with all the different factions there. It was a difficult post requiring diplomatic skills and restraint. Later on he would write a book about his experiences and concerns about the mission there called America’s Siberian Adventure 1918-1920. He would retire from his final post as commander of the Panama Canal Zone in 1928. He died in 1940 at 74. Katherine would join him at Arlington National Cemetery in 1957. He died on the eve of our entrance into World War II while my Dad would be born at its fiery beginning in 1941. Two men who served their country in very different times, bonded together through their valor. So much is owed to all those brave souls in a thousand Arlingtons and Ft. Logans, who laid down their lives or lived to tell the tales as old veterans. All the William S. Graves and Robert J. Coopers down through the centuries of America’s bold experiment will live on through their bravery and service—we must never forget them.

There is no mention in any of the biographies on William S. Graves of his lost children. I know that death was very common then—especially on the Colorado frontier of the 1890’s. His obituary listed his survivors as his wife and two children, a daughter,r Dorothy Orton (wife of Colonel William R. Orton) and a son, Sidney C. Graves. I find a picture of his grave at Arlington and wonder about his children who lived. What did they grow up to become? How many grandchildren did they give him? Did they hear stories of their brother and sister still at Ft. Logan?  I know that what happened to Marjorie has probably been lost forever in the mists of time. She and Billy would have been in the original Ft. Logan cemetery and moved to their present location years ago. What I do know as sure as anything, is the love of her parents found in the simple plea to “Sleep Baby, Sleep”. It’s enough for me to share that timeless love with my own children and also recognize it in the inscription added by my mom to dad’s headstone: “My Life, My Love”. We are all linked together in the human experience by that love that transcends death and in a way, conquers it. I bring flowers to Marjorie and Billy every time now when I visit dad. I look down the long, clean rows of graves and am filled with admiration for them. For all of us who are their families, for America. I leave a single pink rose at the grave of my father and say “Goodnight Chesty, wherever you are.”

Amy Herting is a busy mom of three from Colorado who loves to write stories, copywriting, and show scripts in her spare time. When not chasing kids around and writing, she also sings/performs in a ladies barbershop chorus of 150 and a quartet called Déjà vu.

Black and White and Red All Over

by Kristin Troyer

The tour was meant to deter us grade-schoolers, I guess, from slipping checkout-aisle candy bars in our pockets or from letting our friends drive drunk or from doing something truly terrible like joining the Mafia. Or maybe it was just to instill in us that cooperative attitude known to teachers as “appreciation” for our local law enforcement. A policeman (maybe his actual role was different, but I remember a uniform) let us peer through the unbreakable glass to the small colorless cement room with a toilet where arrestees stayed initially. Maybe there was a cot or a board in the wall for a bed, or maybe my memory is confusing the school tour with pictures I’ve seen of torture chambers.

No one is in the cell now, but my memory has juxtaposed this dull chamber with an image of my brother that I have never seen—bruised, stumbling, confused, belligerent, ratty t-shirt, ripped jeans slung low on his pelvis, laughing, arguing, shoulder-length curls matted together in a rubber band—a lot of detail for a scene conjured from imagination. I must imagine because no one ever told me, and I need the details. I wondered whether he was still unable to see straight when they shoved him in here to wait out the first night, or if the impact had shaken some of the alcohol from his brain. Did anyone watch behind the wide window as he stumbled up against the naked toilet and there vomited (or maybe it was already out of his system by that point)? What a terrible place for a hangover, with the gray cement converging on an already spinning head.

Funny how gray is a mixture of black and white, and yet its monotony bears no witness to the harsh contrast between light and dark. If white is all colors and black, the absence of color, then is gray a color? It can’t be. Colors spark and bite and whisper and mew and protest. Gray simply drones on in endless blah.

On days that my shirt is black or white or gray I usually add a colorful headband or a flower in my hair. Somehow a touch of red makes me feel more alive.

All Mom and Dad told us was that we had to pick up Stevan’s truck in town. I thought then that I hadn’t seen him in several days, but that was hardly unusual since he was often out late. My six-year-old sister and I rode along to the courthouse, curious as to our mission but sensing the need for silence with a childish intuition. Like any courthouse, ours has imposing stone steps and carved letters with U’s that look like V’s, imprinting on my mind words such as eqvvs, eqvitas, and vnitas, probably none of which were actually etched in stone marquee around the basilica that held my brother.

Dad got out of the van, and when I thought Mom’s forehead crease had lightened, I quietly asked why we were picking up Stevan’s truck. I took her answer in stride, as I’ve taken most news since then, because I could think of no other response. “Oh. Okay. Is he okay?” Since we were uptown, we probably ate at Kewpee for lunch, the squashed greasy burgers and thick salty chili that had been the forerunner to Wendy’s sloshing indigestibly in disillusioned stomachs.

I vacillated between which of my brothers was my favorite. Brent, nine years older than me, was closest to my age and let me play with his Micro Machines and would swing me by my arms through dizzying circles. Stevan and Seth were twins twelve years my elder. Stevan was funnier, but Seth taught me wrestling moves. Both let me play their Nintendo on occasion.

The truck, if I remember correctly, was peeling navy, with a band of skinny multi-colored stripes, dilapidated to begin with and completely mutilated after its rendezvous with an oak tree.

Everyone knows the old joke that goes, “What is black and white and red all over?” Children are quite young when they first hear it, and when they confess their ignorance, the time has come for the wiser child or capricious adult to crow, “A newspaper! Get it? It’s read all over!” And the child blushes and wonders how she has missed such an obvious answer, secretly considering it unfair that the joke must be heard rather than seen. In ink the solution presents itself plainly, with stamped-out letters. Out loud, anyone could have made the same mistake.

In time I would learn to associate black-white-red with pleasanter things, like music. The ebony and ivory of piano keys, the crimson roses or carnations from my family, the satin sheen of concert black, the warmth of faces under hot stage lights: cool elegance and sharp contrast to stimulate the eye as well as the ear. The black and white are sensible, the red, exotic. For my high school senior recital, my outfit was red and white, and my sister left some of my curls in dark ringlets around my face. It was my time, my show, and I was beautiful. My brothers, of course, wouldn’t notice.

Stevan’s six months were marked for us by “pay to stay” bills from the jail, white envelopes with cobalt writing that I handed to Dad without comment. This is the only incarceration I remember, though I have since gathered that he was in and out of jail for DUIs and drug possession for several years. My older sister mentions this casually, as if our brother’s record is common knowledge. It is not. Sometimes at family dinners I can hear Seth or Brent toss out a suggestion of past trouble from the other end of the twelve-foot table, but a glower from Stevan usually terminates the sentiment. My sister’s nonchalance sends a crawling, wormy sensation into my stomach.

I don’t remember any doors clanging behind us, like in the movies, but there was a small waiting room with black padded chairs, where we bounced until the guards finally escorted us through even though my sister and I were technically too young. Aren’t jumpsuits orange? Maybe Stevan actually wore orange when he appeared at the window booth, his sandy hair tangled into a snarling tight ponytail, but I remember stripes. Black and white. Good and bad. But now just bad. No crisp, clean distinction between colors, just dirty smudges where white faded into black and back into light again, over and over, numbing in its repetition.

Recently Stevan asked if I remembered coming to visit him in jail. “Of course.” He was really mad at Dad, he said, for bringing his kid sisters to see him in jail. If the goal was to shame him, it worked. I was eight, I think, and Megan was six, and it was summer because I told Stevan over the echoing phone about my birthday. Between awkward pauses we made polite conversation, ignoring the black plastic wood of the cubicle and the muffled metallic clink of voices across the phone and the cigarette smoke wafting from the visitors flanking us, the families of actual criminals. The phone was black. The walls were white. My pale arms glowed against the dark cubicle. The stripes on his suit went black-white-whack-blite, like a straight-line version of those spiraling optical illusions. Strawberries. I had just turned eight. Was it a strawberry pie I had for my birthday, or chocolate cake with strawberries?

Strawberries were my favorite fruit and they seemed safe to talk about. Sun-burnt skins, miniscule hairy seeds that lodged in your molars, their oozing sugary juice would have contrasted richly against the white of the pie crust or the almost-black of chocolate cake, redeeming the bland non-colors into rich vibrant taste. Stevan said my birthday dessert sounded delicious, and I envisioned myself rolling the pin over the wax paper and dough, lifting the round into its shallow dish and crimping the edges, stirring the mashed berries and cornstarch over medium heat until the mixture was clear, at last sliding the glowing pastry into the fridge to cool. One glance at its ruddy radiance and the grumpy officers would wave it on through in dazed silence, mindless of any opiates it may contain. My pie’s presence would vivify this entire dingy institution, and return my family to normal.

Kristin is an undergraduate student at Cedarville University, pursuing interests in music, theatre, and writing. Whether you call her a bookworm or a nerd, listening to and telling stories have been an important part of her life since she was small. This is her first publication.

The Razored Truth: My Journey from Rape into Survival

 by Janna Vought

            I was raped.  Yes, rape, that dirty four letter word that makes people cringe with discomfort.  Yes, rape, the one crime that perpetuates itself throughout the generations, victimizing women over and over again.  Yes, rape, the ultimate act of savage domination.  Rape.  I joined the ranks of hundreds of thousands of women around the world who are swallowed into the bowels of the beast the moment another forces their way into their sacred heart, uninvited—unwanted. 

            Every two minutes a woman in the United States is raped.  My two minutes came when I was fifteen, vulnerable and naive to the reality women face: the constant presence of the threat of victimization.  One hundred and twenty seconds reshaped my destiny.  One thirtieth of an hour destroys. Two minutes—an eternity.  In those brief moments, the time it takes to brush your teeth, call a friend, savor a slice of cake, read three pages in a Stephen King book, watch the sun set over the Rocky Mountains, swim a lazy circle in a tranquil pool, my world collapsed.  Two minutes—a drop of rain in midnight pools glistening on the sidewalk after the storm—nothing.

          A number holds no meaning.  The occurrence of even one sexual assault is one too many.  Statistics do nothing more than sterilize the personal element of crime, the stories of the people suffered, a face to place with a position on a chart, a news report, or a regurgitation of fact.  Two minutes begat my journey into Hell.  

            I knew about rape.  As a teenager in the late eighties, I believed sexual assault only happened to older women who lived alone or naive little girls.  There was no sex offender registry, no understanding of preventative concepts like never allowing your drink out of your sight at parties or holding your keys out as a weapon against a possible attack.  I watched films in health class depicting a stranger lurking in the shadows, waiting as a frail and defenseless adolescent walks down the street, her nose buried in a library book, travelling from some unknown location where people loved and cherished her.  He stepped out from the bushes, or car, or whatever other camouflage prop he chose to use, offering her candy, a toy, or her picture in a magazine.  I knew the stories: don't talk to strangers, never get in a vehicle with someone you don't know, yell "fire!" if someone tries to grab you on the street, never let yourself be taken to a second location.  It was a mantra repeated endlessly to classrooms filled with adolescent girls—fear the stranger, he desires vile deeds—but I felt immune to the advances of sexual pariahs that roamed the streets.  Rapes happened in dark alleys, abandoned cars, or in bedrooms on quiet streets that hid families' secret shame, not to me.

            Never once, ever, did any health teacher or gym instructor, or even our mothers mention the danger hiding among us, the bright-eyed young misses who dreamed of finding their prince charming in the halls of their high school, unaware of the danger looming—acquaintance rape.  I, too, held onto those fantasies of love found in the lunchroom across the pizza buffet, or at the Sadie Hawkins dance, when I, the beautiful and daring girl approached the mysterious dark-eyed boy standing across the dimly lit gymnasium festooned with balloons and cascades of crepe paper and asked him to dance.  I was no different than the rest.  I engaged in the rebellious, yet typical behaviors for a young woman my age:  I thwarted the attempts of my overtly strict parents who sought to keep me chained to my innocence, I drank at parties, I skipped a class now and again to drive to a neighboring school to watch the varsity football team practice, played volleyball in the park, or stayed out past my curfew.  I bolted through my adolescence without pause, embracing each new experience with vigor.  How was I to know that a friend would exploit such innocence?  

            There is nothing unique or special about my assault.  I was not grabbed off the street, taken to a hidden location and molested.  An intruder did not break into my parents' house and rape me.  My attacker was someone I saw in the halls of my school every day.  I talked to him, laughed at his boyish pranks, cheered for him at soccer games.  I made the mistake of assuming that no harm comes from those we know—trust. 

            I learned my harsh reality at a party on Valentine's Day.  I made all the mistakes of the "classic" rape victim: I allowed myself to become separated from my group, I drank alcohol that inhibited my thinking skills and ability to react to danger in a timely fashion, I wore clothing that revealed the right amount of my blossoming form.  Phil was there.  Phil was a junior at my school, a popular soccer player whose dark shock of hair and olive eyes made him most popular among the female population.  My heart skipped as he flashed me a smile embedded in a mass of metal, braces covering his perfect teeth.  My infatuation with him permeated the marijuana-stained air.  He detected my scent: drunk, isolated, yearning for his company.  He wove his way through the sea of gyrating figures rubbing against each other to the pounding music searing through the small stereo, straight to me:  "Hi, Janna, what's up?"

          "I'm just looking for my friends.  Have you seen them?"

          "Nope.  Do you want me to help you find them?"

          "Sure," I said, a shy smile stealing across my face.  I tried to maintain my composure, but my stomach swelled with surging anxiety.  All the alcohol I had consumed clouded my mind, mixed with the intoxicating smoke wafting about the room.  My head paddled through the fog trying to grasp the situation unfolding around me.

            Phil pressed his hand against the small of my back, guiding me toward a group of boys crouched around a keg, trying to run the tap.  Next to them, a table held rows of cups filled with beer.  Phil grabbed two off of the table and handed me one.  I tilted my head back and opened my throat and let the tepid liquid flow.  I handed him the empty cup and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.  "Impressive," he said, grinning at me with his metallic smile.  He set the cups down and grabbed my hand, leading me away.

            My eyes blurred the images before me.  Vague shadows faded in and out of my gaze, each figure unrecognizable to me.  I felt a dense pressure in the back of my head.  Between the alcohol I shared with my friends in the car, and all of the cups of beer at the party, I lost track of my consumption.  I tried to form my mouth around words, but my lips suffered from paralysis.  All I could muster was a string of incoherent mumbles.  I felt Phil beside me, but my eyes could not focus on his face, his olive eyes.  I noticed the pressure of his hand on my back increasing, pressing me forward with urgency.  "Where are we going?" I asked, stumbling over feet shuffling around the floor to the latest song raging through the speakers.  No answer, or at least, none that I recognized.  His other hand gripped my shoulder, steering me towards a door at the back of the room.  As we reached the threshold, I made out the silhouette of my friend Deann on the couch, smoking a joint with a group of people. "It's Deann!" I slurred.  I tried to wave, but Phil grabbed my hand, pushing it down to my side.  He reached in front of me and opened the door.  I peered into the darkness, unable to see anything.  The hand at my back pushed me in—swallowed up in the pitch.

            The only sound in the room was the click of the lock on the doorknob and my labored breathing.  I tried to gather my thoughts, assess the situation, but I had no time.  The dark bore two hands that shoved me down onto a bed.  The combination of the alcohol and second hand marijuana smoke rendered me defenseless, my synapses firing a split second too late.  As if in a dream, I hovered outside of my body, watching the horror unfold.  He shoved my pants down around my calves, pulling at the hose I wore underneath.  He fell on top of my motionless frame, a suffocating pressure on my chest.  I tried to scream, but my voice fled the scene, escaping into the night for self preservation.  He covered my mouth with his, flicking his tongue in and out as a viper samples the air for its prey.  He tasted like beer and cigarettes.  I gagged from the wretched combination.  With a heave and thrust, pain exploded from within, a fire burning so hot and deep it robbed me of my breath.  No sound escaped me, the only noise coming from the black was a low guttural moan—the devil inside me.

            When he finished, he pushed himself off the bed, releasing my constricted lungs.  I took a deep breath; I searched for virgin air.  He switched on the overhead light in the room and exposed my devastation.  "Get up," he said, a smug smile on his face, his eyes cold and dead.  I rose off the bed and pulled on my clothes, humiliated as he stood and watched me.  As I buttoned up my shirt, the one selected with such care earlier in the night, he swung open the door and beckoned to one of his friends standing outside the door.  He walked in, glancing at me and then the rumpled bed, a small red stain among the floral print revealed Phil's conquest, "All right!  You popped her!" his friend Scotty whooped, slapping Phil on the back.  Phil looked at me with indifference, rubbish now worn and used, and walked out the door.  Nothing special or unique, just an average rape.

            Rape fleshes itself with the souls entombed within.  It feeds off their vulnerability, guilt, fear—disgrace.  It pulsates with energy spent hiding truths and concealing names.  My rape was a fully functioning entity.  It had a belly engorged with my life, a hearty meal that it ingested that night.  Its arms reached forth from the darkness to encircle me in a stifled embrace.  Its head burst with my memories.  It followed me.  It taunted me.  It tucked me into bed every night.  I gave it life, supplied it breath with each tortured exhalation.  I kept it beside me at all times.  I never left home without it.  It was the only thing that understood my pain—my sole companion.

Janna Vought is an MFA graduate student at Lindenwood University in Saint Charles, Missouri.  She attends school online from her home in Colorado Springs, Colorado where she lives with her husband, two daughters, and two dogs.  Her nonfiction has appeared in Imperfect Parent Magazine.  She also has poetry featured in The Rusty Nail and The Eagle Literary Journal, and fiction published in Ideagems Tough Lit V and Tough Lit VI.

The Photo Finish

by Sheila Morris

In 1965 when I was a freshman in college my parents bought their first home ever in Rosenberg, Texas, after almost twenty years of marriage.   My dad was the assistant superintendent of the local school district and my mother taught second grade in one of the elementary schools in the district.   Since I wasn’t living with them, I’m not sure how the decision was made to hire someone to help with cleaning the bigger new house, but when I was home for spring break, my mom introduced me to Viola, who was hired for that purpose.   When I returned to stay the summer with my folks, Viola was gone.

I never knew what happened to Viola but was so self- absorbed I didn’t really care.   Early in the summer Mom informed me we would have a new woman who was coming to work for us and encouraged me to keep the stereo at a lower volume on the lady’s first visit.   I was in a Diana Ross and the Supremes phase and preferred the speakers to vibrate as I sang along but I obligingly lowered the level for our potential new household addition.

I needn’t have bothered.   Willie Meta Flora stepped into our house and lives and rocked all of us for more than forty-five years.   She became my mother’s truest friend and supported her through the deaths of her mother, brother and two husbands.   She nursed my grandmother and my dad and uncle during their respective battles with mental illness, colon cancer and cerebral palsy.   She watched over and protected and loved and cared for my family as she did her own, which included five daughters and two sons and an absentee husband.   In many ways, we became her second family and she chose to keep us.

Willie and my mom shared a compulsion for honesty and directness that somehow worked to keep them close through the good times and the hard times in both of their lives.  They were stubborn strong women and butted heads occasionally, but most of all, they laughed together.   Willie’s sense of humor and quick wit kept Mom on her toes and at the top of her game in their talks.   They also shared a deep love for the same man, my dad.   In her own way, Willie loved my dad as much as Mom did, and my father loved her and loved being with her right back.    His death broke both their hearts.

Although Willie kept her own apartment, she and Mom basically lived together in the years following the death of Mom’s second husband.   Mom planned her days around the time near dusk when Willie would be there to spend the night with her.  Willie became her lifeline to maintaining her independence, and the two of them grew older and crankier as time passed.   Willie and I talked on the phone frequently, and she began to tell me she was worried about Mom’s safety and getting lost when she drove around town in her old brown Buick LeSabre.    I dismissed her fears and ignored the signs of dementia until Mom’s 80th birthday when it became apparent she had major problems in everyday living.

Not long afterwards, I was forced to make a decision about my mother’s long term care needs and opted to move her to a Memory Care Unit in a facility in Houston which was a thousand miles from my home in South Carolina.   Why not move her closer to me?   A good question with a complicated answer that included my trying to keep her available to Willie and her family who could drive Willie to see Mom.  If my mother could choose between visiting with me or seeing Willie, there was no contest.   I would always come in second.

Mom will be 85 next month and struggles with the ongoing physical and mental battles associated with Alzheimer’s in her ultimate race towards death.   This past fall I moved her again to a different residence that is still in Texas but much closer to my second home which is also now in Texas.   Alas, she’s two hours farther from Willie, and Willie has only been able to visit her once since her move.

Willie will be 81 next month.   She and Mom have the same birthday month, and now they have the same disease.   We don’t talk on the phone now because she can’t form words I can understand.   When I visited her yesterday, she didn’t recognize me and was uncomfortable with getting up out of her bed, just as Mom is sometimes when I go to see her.   Willie’s five daughters and three of her granddaughters are coping with the same problems I’ve faced with Mom–trying to keep her comfortable in a safe environment.   They have the additional complications of differences of opinion about Willie’s care and what the environment should be.   I decided being an only child has a few advantages.

          When I consider the strength of these two women and their determination to rise above their inauspicious beginnings in an era when women weren’t valued for their strong wills, I feel a sense of admiration and respect and gratitude for the examples they’ve been for me and for Willie’s daughters, too.   We are the children of our mothers and we reflect their strengths and weaknesses in black and white.   Theirs was a mysterious bond that we may never fully understand, but the similarity of their physical and mental conditions in these last days is surreal and takes irony to a new dimension.   Leora, one of Willie’s daughters, told me recently she thought Mom and Willie just might end their race toward death in a tie.   I think it will be a photo finish.

A sad but apropos postscript: Wille M. Flora died April 14, 2012.  Selma L. Meadows died Wednesday April 25, 2012.

Sheila Morris was born and raised in rural Grimes County, Texas and describes herself as an essayist with humorist tendencies.   She is the author of two memoirs, Deep in the Heart – A Memoir of Love and Longing and Not Quite the Same. She and her partner Teresa live with their four dogs in South Carolina and Texas.

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.

How I Met My Husband

by Jane Hertenstein

Every couple has their own story, but certain stories are stranger than fiction. That’s our story.

It was 1985, a time buried in the armpit of disco and the Euro New Wave. By the mid-80s I knew that the decade would go down as a footnote. Seemingly all the real history was behind us and we were stuck with Reagan and mediocrity. I think I was entering my cynical years, post-college, and just realizing that the world had nothing to offer me—especially a career. We were in a recession, nothing new—except that this one peaked right when I was graduating and needed a job. When nothing came fast enough I panicked and took a bus for Chicago where I ended up doing volunteer work. In exchange for room and board I worked at a city mission where I was promised a chance to use my educational background tutoring underprivileged kids.

Instead I ended up sorting through donations.

In retrospect I can see how my classes in psychology were helpful. I developed a character profile on who donates old clothes caked with feces to charity. After ripping open a bag that smelled like cat pee I insisted on wearing latex gloves. Who actually thinks: There’s still wear left in holey underwear? Who donates ONE shoe? It was enough to confirm my low opinion of mankind. Cynicism was a coping mechanism, not just an attitude.

For every fifty gross bags there was maybe one containing something fantastic—like a vintage gown or a black-dyed lamb’s skin fur coat with oversized buttons. Once I found $20 in an old purse. Each day I was greeted by a mountain of black garbage bags. I’d pull a few out, but the pile never went down because the mission was always getting calls from people wanting to donate. That’s the worst part—our brothers went out in a snub-nosed old mail truck and picked this stuff up for free when the owners should have been taking it to a dump.

Let me back up and explain. The mission operated a Freestore. On assigned days we opened to our clients to let them “shop” for the things they needed. We had regulars. One came so frequently that I struck up a conversation with her. What do you do with all the clothes you get? I asked. Miriam had about five kids. I say about because she also kept her friend’s children and had a revolving door policy of hospitality, so she was constantly on the lookout for sizes anywhere from 0 to 13 juniors. One of the older daughters also had a baby, I think. Miriam seemed embarrassed at my question. I assured her that this was why we were here, to help people like her.

She finally confessed, “We get new stuff when the other’n get too dirty. But don’t worry, we give it all back.”

Well, that took care of my profile. I simply didn’t have that category in mind. The person who gives because they hate doing laundry.

I was set up in an annex, a building that was in a perpetual state of repair and, because the work was being done in-house, the renovation was going slow. Like whenever there was money, which wasn’t too often. During my entire Freestore tenure the abandoned annex was one brick away from collapsing. At one point the walls had been demo-ed down to the lath, the wooden slats beneath plaster, awaiting drywall. If I needed to use the bathroom I had to walk an obstacle course, through walls and around pipes and hanging electrical wires, to the opposite end where there was a stall without a door but those clinking beads that you see in the Mediterranean where it seems climate appropriate and not a side effect of poverty. It was like a Cohan movie or a Beckett play where life is cruel and somewhat absurd. Along the way I passed through an “office” where a guy sat taping on a typewriter.

What are you working on? I asked one time.

I’m working on a story.

He had clunky glasses, sturdy, and always dressed neatly in casual office Friday attire. Like the stuff I pulled out of the sacks stacked up to the ceiling three rooms over.

I explained I was looking for the bathroom and he continued typing, while sitting in architectural chaos. One day he asked me if there were any new book donations. I said, yes, in fact there had been. He followed me back to the Freestore where I’d set up a display rack in what used to be a shower. Watch out, I warned, pointing to the hole in the floor where the toilet used to be.

He helped me sort out the books. What do you do with the totally lame stuff? He wanted to know.

I knew what he meant. Mass paperbacks. Thrillers, romance, Christian prophet and Christian profit titles. How to live like a King’s Kid. I throw it down the hole, I said.

We tossed in some John Grisham and Tom Clancy.

We opened a banana box of books on childrearing. What to Expect When You’re Expecting, etc. Mike attempted to put a book down the toilet hole. Wait! I halted him. What are you doing?

He was embarrassed.

Breast feeding is important. A lot of women have questions about it. I put them over here.

There was a baby swing, the kind used to soothe a child into slumber, I had six or seven books stacked in the seat along with a handful of breast pumps, the cheap models that resembled torture devices.

We continued sorting and I was grateful for his help. It got a little creepy working in the Freestore alone. Once I found a guy sleeping in the bathtub I used for the one-of shoes (I kept them just in case, a totally hopeless situation.) He’d wandered in off the street drunk and had no idea where he was. He’d been looking for a bathroom. After a brother escorted him out I peered down the hole. There was The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey at the bottom pelted with piss.

On really slow days I tried on clothes and modeled in front of a bleary mirror. There were some really funky styles. I don’t know why I wasn’t freaked out about bedbugs or head lice. On really cold days, the days when frost collected on the inside of the windows (none of the radiators worked; they’d all been disconnected when the pipes burst), I wore layers of coats and rag-picked wearing fingerless gloves like a character out of Our Mutual Friend.

Yet I always had reading material. Whole libraries were donated. I could easily guess the former owners and their preferences, likes and dislikes. I acquired what was left of the estate of a university professor. His specialty was antiquities. The books were all hardback, the pages brittle and liver-spotted, and smelled of basement, as if they were in fact artifacts, stolen from a sarcophagus or pried from the hands of a mummy. It was sad. A couple divorces and liquidates their combined library. The kids are grown and their old books given away. I randomly collected Newbery Award winners, most inscribed by a literary auntie or uncle to their favorite niece or nephew: “Christmas 1962” or “To a Special Boy on His 12th Birthday”.

Mike got into the habit of stopping by to help me organize. Of course he took home whatever struck his fancy. We got to know each other and found we had a lot in common, not the least books and writing. One day he asked me out.

So when people ask how we met, my mind wanders back to those cold days leaning over crates of books, my breath a noir-ish fog, the wind rattling the loose frost-glazed glass in the window panes, bundled beneath layers of dead people’s coats. Mike, he just tells people, I found her at the Freestore.

Jane Hertenstein is a blogger, memoirist, tightrope walker, and blender of blended genres. She is not to be trusted. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in: Hunger Mountain, Rosebud, Word Riot, Flashquake, Steam Ticket, The Write Room, Frostwriting, Cantaraville, Fiction Fix, Six Minute Magazine, and Tonopah Review.  She is the author of the books Beyond Paradise, Orphan Girl, and Home Is Where We Live.  Visit her blog at: http://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/.