The Sounding Board

by Natasha Lvovich

 

“I looked inside the temple and saw a single monk praying. From his body came several voices…He produced these voices from within his body, offering a sounding board to storytellers who themselves had none…I began to pay attention to these voices as I spoke. Telling stories no longer took the place of listening: rather listening gave rise to stories.

 

Perhaps the ear is the organ of storytelling, not the mouth. Why else was the poison poured into the ear of Hamlet’s father rather than his mouth?”

Yoko Tawada, Storytellers without Souls, in Where Europe Begins (p.111-112)

 

I am often asked: How did you learn English so well? What’s the secret? So for about twenty years, I have been searching for an answer, telling tales of language and immigration, which, like childhood memories, never fade and never end. To my own surprise, an embarrassing story has recently popped out of a dusty memory drawer, and it seemed like the best answer ever.

In the building in Brighton Beach where we rented our first apartment in America, a neighbor befriended us. In his early sixties, tall and athletic, with a thick mustache and a patch of hair combed over his bald head, he was loud and exuberant, just like we imagined true Brooklynites, and he constantly spat out a mish-mash of words we were unable to decipher. Since pretty much all speech was indecipherable anyway, it did not make a difference one way or another. His name was Michael.

Michael would greet us in the lobby with a thunderous “How are you" (which we soon discovered was not a question) and would hold us there forever on our way back from the supermarket, shopping bags painfully hanging from our hands. He occasionally invited us for dinner to neighborhood Chinese restaurants, where he rambled, his mouth full, about still-incomprehensible American topics: baseball, Hollywood, TV, food, money, politics, as well as himself. He would go on and on and would get so worked up, bubbling and boasting, that he seemed on a verge of a nervous breakdown. No comments or dialogue were expected, so we just sat there and nodded, acting as a sounding board and painfully longing to go home to exhale the tension of our cluelessness.

At some point during these so-called interactions, Michael confessed to us that he was passionately in love with a young Russian woman he had met somewhere in Brighton Beach. The drama included convoluted descriptions of his encounters with her, his elaborate secret fantasies, and recitations of poetry. To us, there were some practical implications to the matter: Michael wanted to learn Russian to speak to the Love of His Life. He wanted to impress her and to understand her down to the core of her very being, from her Pushkin-immersed childhood to her adult Brezhnev stagnation years--in her native tongue. And he was willing to pay for it.

On my meager $12 per hour teaching, we were struggling to pay our rent. A little extra money would certainly help, especially so close to home--quite literally, next door. Always a conscientious teacher, I started preparing my Russian lessons—only to discover in disbelief that tutoring Michael basically meant doing exactly the same thing we had been doing in Chinese restaurants and in the building lobby: being a sounding board. For the first few weeks, Michael promptly paid me for the “lessons,” but then problems surfaced with the cash flow from the business that he supposedly managed. Still I faithfully showed up at his door every night.

In the spirit of classic immigrant mythology, my then husband, a former jazz musician, was washing dishes in a Russian restaurant, and this injustice deeply upset Michael. So one evening, he slapped his hand to his forehead, suddenly recalling that he had a great deal of useful contacts in various broadcasting companies and recording studios. He promised to help the “good Russian man” get a foothold in the music business, where he rightfully belonged.

Later in the week, Michael produced a piece of paper with a scribbled name on it. The address? OMG! Get it in the Yellow Pages! Phone number or extension? Are you kidding me? Everyone knows this person there, just go and say the name at reception. And don’t forget to mention my name. Wink, wink.

Oh, the comic scene of a heavily gesticulating Russian man, speaking a few English words from the Ray Charles repertoire and showing a crumpled piece of paper to a stunned front desk receptionist at NBC, ready to call security. Oh, those frantic calls home, even more frantic (unanswered) calls to Michael, and the excruciating return to Brooklyn, filled with the inexhaustible reservoir of Russian dark humor…Michael would reappear, several days later, mumbling excuses and pulling out another piece of paper with a name scribbled on it. The saga, amazingly similar in every detail of immigrant gullibility, would repeat itself several times, with the trips to the city, a bewildered receptionist, and a bitter trip home.

Michael’s next philanthropic action was directed to our friends, Sasha and Irina, frequent guests in our house. Sasha, today a reputable doctor, was then studying for his medical license exams, and his wife's job as a receptionist supported them. Dirt poor, they were renting a tiny decrepit attic. Hearing their story, Michael offered one of his apartments—of which he had plenty, all over the city. Of course, for his Russian friends, he would immediately make a gorgeous one-bedroom available, in a brand-new building, with all new appliances. He even took Sasha for a tour so that he could see for himself the friendly neighborhood and the building, and stare in awe at his dream apartment windows--from the outside! The lease was signed. Sasha and Irina paid Michael the security deposit and the first month rent. They started packing, ready to move in, when it occurred to them to contact the super, just in case. The super had no clue. And Michael was not home. 

It was only much later that somebody suggested that Sasha file a complaint about that rent money in small court. By that time, we had moved out of the building and Michael had completely vanished. For the next year or so, as we were emerging out of culture shock, Michael’s case became a taboo in our households. One day an older woman contacted Sasha and paid back his deposit, apologizing profusely. She introduced herself as Michael’s legal guardian and explained that he was severely mentally disabled and not responsible for his actions. She also added that he had to be committed to an assisted living facility, since he couldn’t manage life on his own.

And that is how I learned English.

 

Natasha Lvovich is a writer and scholar of second language acquisition and bilingualism. She teaches at CUNY and divides her loyalties between academic and creative writing. She is an author of a collection of autobiographical narratives, The Multilingual Self, and of a number of articles and essays. Her creative nonfiction recently appeared in the academic journals Life Writing and New Writing, in the anthologies Lifewriting Annual and Imagination and Place, and in many literary magazines, including Big.City.Lit, WHL Review, Post Road, Paradigm Journal, Nashville Review, and Two Bridges. Her piece, Balakovo, was nominated for 2011 Pushcart Prize.

All the Way Through to the End

by Elizabeth Stainton Walker

 

Years later, sitting in my college physics class, I would learn about Schrödinger’s cat, and my thoughts would go immediately to that hour between the time I woke up and the time I found her. That time when my mother was neither alive nor dead.

            For as long as I can remember, she had been a night owl. She would stay up reading into the early morning, the light in her room still glowing hours after I had put myself to bed. In the years before I could drive, I would have to wake her up two and three times to get her to take me to school in the morning. So, no, it was not strange. Her room was always quiet in the morning. She was not missed.

            When I called 911, the operator told me, “You have to turn her over on her back.” I tried to tell him that because of her extreme obesity and her proximity to the edge of the bed, moving her was simply impossible. I could only rock her back and forth. Each time I rocked her, I saw her cheek, blue from lack of circulation, and her swollen mouth. The operator kept telling me how important it was that I roll her over. It turned out not to matter anyway. She had been gone for hours by that time.

            The first person I called was Kathy. Red-haired and busty, my mother’s best friend had only recently moved back to Little Rock after twenty years in Atlanta. It had been cute to see my mom act like a teenager again. The two of them would spend whole days together, shopping and drinking limeades, the same things I did with my own best friend. Kathy and my mother made sex jokes. They would giggle and talk about men.

            Kathy had recently begun online dating, and my mom would help her navigate these new interactions. Because of my mother’s weight and her frequent bouts with depression, she had not been on a date in my living memory. It was strange to hear her talk about condoms and penis pumps. Riding in the car with Kathy, with me leaning forward from the back seat, my mom told stories about men from her past. These were anecdotes I had not heard, like the time Jimmy Buffett asked her to a party after one of his concerts. “You never told me that!” I would shriek, squeezing the fat on her upper arm. But then, at sixteen, I had never been on a date or kissed a boy, so I suppose there is no reason the subject would have come up anyway.

            It was only after I phoned Kathy that morning that it occurred to me to try to reach my aunts and uncles who lived two hours away, outside of Memphis. It must have been around eight by that time, and while I was on the phone with Uncle Joe, my mother’s favorite of her three brothers, the paramedics came and told me my mother was dead. Looking back, I cannot think why Uncle Joe would not have already left for work by this time. As an ophthalmologist, he had his father’s habit of getting to his practice hours before he saw the first patient. I am sure if I were to ask him now, he could not tell me why he was still at home when I called. I do know that it was he who was on the other end of the receiver when a female paramedic looked at me and nodded. I am certain that I was speaking to Uncle Joe when my story changed from, “Something’s happened to my mother” to “Yes, she is definitely, definitely dead.”

            Kathy and her sister Bonnie appeared at the house a few minutes later. Bonnie was shorter and slimmer than Kathy, dark from the tanning bed, and more tightly wound. She had arrived in her bathrobe and wanted me to get her clothes to wear. “You’ve got to get your Aunt Bonnie something to put on!” Ten years later, this still strikes me as an odd request.

            A few minutes after the sisters’ arrival, our house phone rang, and it was obviously a telemarketer. She mispronounced our last name when she asked for my mother, and I remember screaming into the phone, “She just died!” and slamming down the receiver. As an adult, I wonder now what the poor salesperson must have thought, if she imagined I was making it up, just a rude teenager who thought death would be a funny thing to joke about.

            For the record, it was an arrhythmia. She had died in her sleep and without pain.

            In the following hours, I was swept away to Bonnie’s house. I have no idea who locked our home after the coroner removed the body. These are the questions you do not think to ask at the time: Who locked the house? Why is Uncle Joe not at work? I can remember so many strange details of the day, like my friend’s mother gathering my dirty laundry to wash at her house. But then there are things I cannot remember, like who locked the house. And in thinking about it, I know I must have been the one who locked the house. But I cannot say for sure.

            I do remember dialing the number of the boy I liked, the line ringing with hope as I paced around the tree in our yard waiting for him to pick up. His name was Colin, and even with my only parent now dead, I felt a bit excited I finally had a reason to talk to him.

            That evening, I went my friend Anna’s house and waited to receive visitors. My high school friends got off work or returned from sporting events and made their way to Anna’s living room.  The film Zoolander was playing. Someone must have brought it over, and to this day, I have never seen it all the way through to the end. I remember looking around the room, thinking, “All my favorite people are here” and “It’s nice we can all get together like this.” Then I would remember why everyone had gathered in the house in the first place, and my stomach would sink.

            Colin arrived around nine. Truthfully, I do not remember what he was wearing, but odds are it was his navy Transformers tee shirt. He wore it most days that year. I walked outside with him, and we sat together on Anna’s porch swing.

            “How are you doing?” he asked.

            I shrugged. I had been asked that question one hundred times and was still without an answer.  I was too tired to feel anything. “You know,” I told him, “I think everyone is waiting for me to cry.”

            He smiled warily. I wonder now, knowing what I know about men in general, and young men in particular, if he might have feared I would in fact start sobbing uncontrollably and that he would be left sitting there, unsure of how to get me stop.

            We were on the porch for maybe twenty minutes. The warmth from the day was still hanging on, and Anna’s mother’s lilies combined with the Arkansas humidity to make the air smell heady. The cicadas hummed in the darkness. A grey tabby jumped up on the swing with us. Colin stroked her and told me about his allergy to pet dander. He was on Claritin, he said. It had helped.

            When he fell quiet, I put my head on Colin’s chest and felt the worn cotton of his Transformers shirt, or whatever tee shirt it was that day. This close, he smelled like chorine. His long arms folded around me. His chin stubble sanded my forehead.

            Inside, my school friends talked about what would happen to me now that I was an orphan. Outside, my life was perfect, and still.

 

Elizabeth Stainton Walker is completing her M.A. in English at the University of Arkansas, where she also works as the English Department secretary. Her story, "Detritus," was published on the MonkeyBicycle website. She and her husband are both great dressers.

Alachua Autumn

by Carla Charleston

 

My North Florida world is about to change.  Dark billowing clouds suspend above the earth—a cold front is on the way.  Hurriedly, I move pots of anthurium from the pool deck to the living room for a warm transition into spring.  In Alachua, “Latchuway” according to locals, tropicals don’t survive outdoor winters.  

A gust of wind rattles the trees and spills handfuls of confetti-colored leaves.  Flame red crepe myrtles, magenta dogwoods, and golden oaks.  Alachua autumns inspire a Miami girl who grew up thinking such color transformations only happened “up North,” in colder climes.

A leaf in salmon shades floats down onto the birdbath.  Yellow butterflies circle purple lantana and sip nectar from wine-colored periwinkles.  Satsuma branches hang like willows, heavy with mottled orangish fruit awaiting winter’s alchemy for transformation into golden oranges.  A squirrel darts under a Margarita daisy bush to scavenge long-buried hickory nuts.  Fresh sand mounds appear around the armadillo’s burrow in a far corner of the yard.  Will anyone mind if she remains?  Or if during summer drought, the deer munch the daylilies down to their roots?

Ginger leaves, so lush in summer, rustle like brown wrapping paper.  I pull up dried stocks of daisies, zinnias, and cockscomb, break off the seed heads, and shake them over upturned soil—the beginnings of next spring’s garden. 

My friend Wanda will arrive any minute.  She can use the seeds, too.  I jam desiccated plants and stacks of plastic seedlings pots into a yard bag to await her arrival.  I add other garden treasures for Wanda’s collection.  Amaryllis, epiphyte orchids in baskets and terrestrials in soil pots, a small Meyer lemon, and three knock-out roses.

In the distance I imagine golfers, a ruckus of laughter, curses, and whizzing balls.  No fairway chatter today.  No games.  Course closed.  For sale.  A sign of the times.

Don’t forget Wanda’s frangipanis, beautiful flowers in Hawaiian leis.  We’ve had “Whitie,” our oldest, for twenty years.  Her branches almost fill one side of the pool deck.  Last summer, a smaller frangi swelled with multiple shades of pink flowers.  In Alachua, whites grow more easily than pinks.  This year Whitie won’t have her blanket and electric light bulb by the pool.  Instead, we’ll pull her in close, under the roof, and wind her branches with sparkling Christmas lights for warmth and color.  Will she stay warm?

I set two young frangipanis by the lemon.  Overhead, a gaggle of Sandhill cranes stream south in v-formation.  Like colorful leaves, Sandhills are part of North Florida autumn.  The pomegranate, another long-term survivor, beckons me.  Now a collection of caramel-colored sticks with yellow leaf-fringes, in spring he’ll sprout orange tissue-paper blossoms.  

Wanda’s white pick-up truck pulls in the drive.  Quickly we load the plants and garden tools from my garage, and then say good-bye.  No more annuals or perennials for me.  I have no need for tools.  I’m moving to a new condo in Jacksonville.  Like pomegranate and Sandhill cranes, I must transition.  But will I survive there?

 

 

Carla Charleston is a freelance writer from Jacksonville, Florida.  Dr. Charleston was a professor and scientist in the field of communication sciences and disorders.   She has published six books and over fifty refereed articles in her field.  She is currently marketing her novel, Finding Faustena, the story of Americans rebuilding Naples after World War II.

 

Photos courtesy of Carla Charleston

Tabloids

by Amanda Forbes Silva

I try to cajole myself into thinking that chaperoning the fifth grade's overnight camping trip could be the closest I will ever come to experiencing celebrity. As a traveling teacher, working in four elementary schools, my presence on this trip is something like having a guest spot on a hit television show. My bunkmates, all eight of them, are inexplicably my biggest fans though I don't know them well. This, I assure myself, will not be like the overnight trips when I was in fifth grade. I blanch at the memory of my outward-bound trip to Wales when I came out of the bathroom to find Red-head Raaum waving my new bra out the window for a group of boys to behold. In the center of that crowd stood Lee. Our fathers worked together. Lee was from Alabama and would remain in my mind as the type of boy to avoid when I started high school in Atlanta.

Raaum laughed, one strap dangling from her freckled finger. The stripes of the material caught the breeze in a way that reminded me of static on Gram's television. Mom had bought this bra for me as a surprise before my trip. Although it was of the training bra variety and I pretended to hate it, it was wild in its own way and I secretly loved it. Black and white stripes crossed the camisole as naturally as they would on a zebra and I felt a secret sophistication while wearing it that is not commonly experienced by chubby, frizzy-headed, pre-pubescent girls. I knew after Lee had seen it, I would never wear it again.

Maddie dangled her head over the edge of her bunk, "Boo!" I was reading in the bunk below, trying to set an example that might inspire the girls to do the same. "Did I scare ya, Miss Silva?"

"Lots of things about you scare me, Maddie."

"Ha! Good one. Hey, check this out." She launched an envelope onto my sleeping bag. "Open it!" Maddie's swinging hair zigzagged shadows over my legs. I picked up the envelope and turned it over. "Maddie," a heart dotting the letter i, was written on the front. I recognized it as a mom note.
"She must have tucked it into my bag. So embarrassing."

I nodded and handed the envelope back. "You don't know embarrassing," I said. "When I was in sixth grade, my classmates and I went on a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon...that's where Shakespeare was born - Madison, your face is turning purple, can you please come down?"

Her head disappeared over the bunk and she swung her legs over the edge, balancing her dingy toes on the stepladder before she hopped down to the floor next to my bunk.

"So what was so embarrassing?"

I propped myself up on one elbow. "When we reached the hostel...that's like a cheap motel for students...the manager welcomed us and called out our room numbers and roommates."

Maddie yawned. "So?"

"Then he asked if there was an Amanda Silva in the group."

"Your name's Amanda?" Students are always surprised to learn their teachers have first names and that those names aren't Mister, Miss, or Mrs.

"Yes. Anyway, I raised my hand and he reached out to hand me three envelopes. ‘Fan mail,' he said. Each one of them was from my mother. She had sent them ahead of time."

Maddie gasped. "Are you serious? Did you just want to die?"

"I am serious and I didn't want to die until I opened the second one and this boy I hated, named Lee, read it over my shoulder... ‘Hey, Boo-boo!'" Standing there, I had smiled like it didn't bother me, but later on cried in the bathroom, embarrassed at the thrill I had felt seeing the mail, followed by the realization that mom was still the closest friend I had.

Maddie raised an eyebrow, "Boo-boo?"

"Call it a term of endearment, a nickname, whatever. Anyway, once he started calling me that, they all did." I remembered coming home from that trip, embarrassed and annoyed with my mother. I told her what the kids were calling me, thanks to her letter. She laughed. She thought it was cute and she became convinced that Lee had a crush on me.

The next morning the girls came to life early. I played possum while they took turns in the bathroom and packed their bags. When it was finally my turn, I lingered in the shower, the only time I would be alone for the rest of the day. We were scheduled to leave later that afternoon and be back at Broad Street Elementary by early evening. I toweled off and wrapped myself in my faded bathrobe and twisted the threadbare towel around my head. Reaching for my toothbrush, I gasped at the sudden shrieking coming from the bunks. Toothbrush still in hand, I stepped out of the bathroom and into a throng of girls talking all at once. A few of them had come over from another bunk and seemed to have brought the commotion with them.

"It was so gross! She threw up everywhere. Just all of a sudden-everywhere!"

More shrieks and fake gagging noises as I held up my hands and attempted a "shh." Before I could ask who was sick, I noticed a chaperone from the other cabin marching up the stairs. I had never met her before and assumed she was a parent volunteer. She came in the room, slightly out of breath and smoothed back her hair. "Miss Silva, I understand you're leaving earlier than the rest of us today. Is that right?"

"Yes. I split my time between four elementary schools, and this was all the time I could take away from my regular schedule. So, I'll be leaving after breakfast."

She smiled and her shoulders relaxed. "Wonderful. We have a young lady who has been up since the crack of dawn, vomiting."

"That is so gross!" Maddie shivered.

The woman closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. I had the feeling she had been dealing with this all morning. "Do you think you could drop her off at school so that her mother can collect her sooner than later?"
Though I wanted to shiver like Maddie, and dreaded the hour-long mountain drive back to school, I could say nothing besides, "Of course. I'll just get dressed and meet you at the cafeteria."

As she left, the girls looked at each other and then me. Maddie, their unofficial leader, spoke up. "Miss Silva, what if she pukes in your car? It's over an hour back to school and the roads are all windy and...oh, I could puke just thinking about it."

"Well don't." I flipped my head upside down and unwound the towel. Tossing the towel aside, I started raking a comb through my hair. "It's not her fault she got sick. These things happen. I'm sure she's embarrassed as it is. I know I was."

The girls stopped giggling and zipping their bags. I had their attention.

"Oh, yeah. I threw up on a school trip. It wasn't an overnight trip, but still. I got off the bus and puked in front of everyone-girls and boys. Teachers. Proper British pedestrians, who were just minding their own business."

I smeared moisturizing lotion across my face, spreading my fingers down my neck and over my collarbone.

Eight pairs of eyes watched me in the mirror. I knew that cosmetic rituals fascinated the girls, even the tomboys. But more than that, none of them could believe that I had puked in public. I dabbed tiny dots of concealer under my eyes, and bounced a mascara wand under my lashes. Although we were at camp now, I would be back in one of my other schools by noon and needed to return looking like my professional self.

"You know what the worst part was?"

They shook their heads, as though they were leaves on a single branch.

"It was bright blue."

That snapped them out of their makeup-induced reverie.

"Why?" A quiet voice asked.

"I hadn't eaten anything for breakfast. I had a nervous stomach and not eating can make that sort of thing worse. We got stuck in smoggy, London traffic, and one of my friends offered me a Sweet-tart. Those were my favorite..."

"Mine too!" Maddie interrupted.

"Anyway, the only time we had American candy was when someone's parents brought it back, or a relative sent it over. So, even though I felt queasy I was excited when my friend, Becky, offered me one. I pulled the first bright blue one off the top."

I couldn't remember the last time my students had paid such attention to what I had to say. The girls surrounded me, wide-eyed, as I explained that although I had actually made it to our destination, one of London's many art galleries, I hurried down the bus steps and moved away from my classmates, breathing deeply as I tried to stop an unstoppable force. I didn't succeed and as disgust met relief, I heard Matt yell, "Amanda is throwing up!" I had an audience, complete with pointing fingers. Matt nudged Lee in the ribs. By the time the regular school bus dropped me off in front of my house, my mother had already heard what had happened. I hadn't planned on telling her, but Lee made it to his house before I made it to mine. He announced the day's highlight to his mother who sat at her kitchen table drinking coffee with mine. "Boo-boo barfs blue!"

Patting a tissue over my lipstick, I turned to face the girls, all in a semi-circle around the vanity. "Now, beat it so I can get dressed and hit the road. I'll see you in the cafeteria."

The girls made a clumsy exit, shouldering sleeping bags and well-worn pillows, stuffed backpacks hunching them over, making them look like aged rag dolls. I zipped up the back of my dress, ignored the run in my hose, stepped into a pair of heels and soon followed after them.

On the way to the cafeteria, I made a detour to my car, tossed my bag in the trunk and cleared the front passenger seat of books and to-go coffee cups. Slinging my purse over my shoulder, I felt something wet stick to my side. The cap of my water bottle had come loose and spilled whatever was left into my bag. I pulled my phone from the bottom, and groaned when I realized it had been marinating in a little puddle for who could say how long.

Evidently, I hadn't whispered my string of obscenities as I had imagined. Mystery Mother had rounded the corner, eyebrows raised. "I thought maybe you were trying to make a clean getaway." She was holding plastic bags in her hand. I assumed they were for my companion to hold at the ready on our drive back.

"No, I somehow spilt water in my bag and it drenched everything-my phone included." I held up the green Envy. She tried to help me dry the phone and all of its components, which I had hastily torn free of each other. I knew it was useless and I would have to factor a trip to Verizon into my day. Maybe if this hadn't been my first phone-death by water, I wouldn't have been so discouraged. I was losing track, but I think I had killed three in such a way thus far. This phone had, in fact, replaced my last waterlogged device.

I noticed when she glanced at her watch. "Well, I better go say goodbye to the girls and find my newest charge." I was still new to the school, and since it was only one of four that I worked in every week, I didn't know all of the students yet.

"She seems to be feeling much better, just washed out. The nurse seems to think she might have been dehydrated, too much excitement yesterday, and too much sun. Who knows?"

I dropped my beloved, but drenched red leather HOBO bag with the matching wallet-a gift from Mom-on the front seat and waited for the car to chirp, "locked." We started back up the hill, towards the main building. "What's her name, anyway? I'm not sure I've met her." Dusting my sunglass lenses, I realized I still didn't know this volunteer's name. I tripped over an exposed tree root and nearly lost my footing. She gripped my elbow, steadying me.

"Her name is Amanda."

I should have guessed.

Later that afternoon, I stood in line at the Verizon store, clutching my casualty. When I made it to the counter, the clerk took my phone, cradling it as if it could be resuscitated. "What happened here?" His nametag said "Elvis" and he spoke with an Eastern European accent.

"Water damage." I thought it best to keep my story simple. Elvis didn't share that philosophy.

"I can see that. How?" He set the phone to the side and folded his hands.

"I was on a field trip..."

"Aren't you a little old for field trips?" With a name like Elvis, I suppose one needed a sense of humor.

"I was a chaperone."

He leaned back in his chair. "Well, I hope you took better care of the children than your phone." He fell apart on himself, a gangly, balding fit of laughter. My fifth grade self blushed beneath my makeup.

Amanda Forbes Silva received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2012. When she is not writing, she teaches fourth graders, a population that offers her an abundance of creative material.

There's No Place like a Stranger's Floor

by Heather Rick

 

I was walking southeast on Milwaukee and my tights were slipping down my legs. It was the kind of winter day that feels like a December without a Christmas. The world was wrapped in cold, damp cotton, the fog stinging my pores and nostrils like rubbing alcohol. The advent of winter in Chicago is always presaged by a weight in your stomach, as though your intestines are processing lead. It’s a pressure that makes you hate the scowling streets, makes you want to duck into bars to drink whiskey shoulder-to-shoulder with other denizens of the loosing daylight hours, and to see yourself reflected in the steel walls and concrete bellies of the city, just to know you aren’t a ghost in all this grey and ice.

In defiance of the weather and the city-wide depression, I wore a blue flowered dress with a white ribbon around the waist and a long bouncing skirt, something that Alice would have worn to tea in Wonderland. The blue tights were beginning to puddle around the tops of my Doc Martens. I couldn’t pull them up because I was carrying my entire life in my arms down a wet, hazy half-mile of Milwaukee.

A blue duffel bag, embroidered with my ex-girlfriend’s name and high school volleyball number, bulged with weeks of unwashed socks and panties, crumpled jeans and un-ironed skirts, t-shirts snagged from her closet. They smelled like cigarettes, like her roommates’ pot, and the angry rumpled clothes of her bed, all stuffed into the bag on our last morning together. Her apartment had been covered in vomit and beer cans from a party the night before, and I’d had to dig my things from beneath blissfully blacked-out people. The fact that she hadn’t even offered me breakfast rankled in my stomach, still uneasy from last night’s beer and crying fits. Digging into my hip with each step, a brown paper shopping bag was square with books, records, notebooks, official pieces of paper that had ceased to anchor my life to any semblance of adulthood or normalcy.

I don’t know why I didn’t just put my bags down on the sidewalk, yank the thin nylon fabric up my stubbly legs, and look at myself reflected over vintage cocktail dresses and pearl-embroidered handbags in a boutique window, to watch the ghost of my blue hips and legs dance in fractured light against the ashy wet street. But I kept walking, letting the crotch of the tights work slowly down toward my knees. The strain in my arms and shoulders warmed my stiff muscles and limbs. I was cramped from sleeping on the living room floor with my ex, curled into the crescent wasteland of her body, the sound of boys shouting in the kitchen and the ground-into-your-bones-deep sound of the El trains outside sifting into my body through the cracks in the shifting tectonic plates of sleep.

I passed a group of squatter kids sheltering against the raw edges of the mist in the doorway of an abandoned storefront on Honore. They all had white faces the same color as the winter smog, crust punks in black clothes and combat boots, facial piercings bristling. One girl, with a tear-drop pearl of a face and long black hair, asked, “Can you spare a dollar so we can get something to eat?”

Her words made little vapor puffs on a thin babyish voice. I shook my head, panting under my load, almost limping from the rebellious tights and biting boots. Couldn’t they see I was walking around with my whole transient existence in my arms—my purse empty but for a CTA pass, a Walgreen’s-brand lipstick, and enough change for a coffee? Couldn’t they tell from my pallor and my lips the shade of artificially-colored frosting under 24-hour convenience store lights that I’d had nothing to eat all week but Pop-Tarts from vending machines and spoonfuls of Skippy peanut butter? I had almost as little as they did.

Maybe that’s why she asked me—another poor kid, half-crazy with desperation, would have more sympathy and willingness to split with a dollar than some hipster babe riding through Wicker Park in the diamond-scented arms of a trust fund, to whom shopping was a recreational activity. There was an offer of kinship in the girl’s question, a bond of youth and penury that we both suspected might exist.

I could have set my bags down in the slush like so many useless fragments of an old life, easily thrown away into the maw of winter. I could have yanked up my tights and dug out some quarters and a smile for the girl. I could have stayed and talked, told them about my troubles and listened to theirs. Our laughter would have bloomed through the murk, the kind of belly-quaking laughter that chases away hunger pains and warms the body and spirit like a couple shots of tequila, laughter that teases the beauty and humor out of shared misery.

But I walked on, solitary. It’s harder to shoulder through life that way, but it doesn’t require a sacrifice of vulnerability, the way trusting somebody enough to laugh is always like cutting out a length of intestine and tying one end to their wrist, a bloody mockery of the friendship bracelets we might have worn as girls, she and I, when that half-mile of Milwaukee, gray with the winter-beauty of our fractured youth, was as yet unthought-of. Who knows what I would have given to join her, as I made my way down Milwaukee Ave onto Wicker Park Ave into the tangle of residential blocks, cutting the frozen quiet of Ellen Street, to drop my burden on the concrete outside Mike and Stephen’s basement apartment. I rapped frost-chapped knuckles against the door and waited for people to wake up inside and let me in so the next phase of this failing decade could begin.

 

Heather Rick is a New England-based writer with a Midwestern heart. An art school drop-out, she is currently churning through the bowels of community college in the cultural wasteland of north-central Massachusetts. She is suspicious of writers with fancy degrees and believes in the power and importance of fucking up. She is currently working on a nonfiction book about her own fuck-ups.

In Passing

by Eric Torgersen

 

I’m out walking, three quarters of a mile from my house, breaking in the hiking boots I’ve just bought because, at sixty-five, I’ve signed on to go backpacking, for the first time since the early 1980’s, and almost certainly the last time in my winding-down life, with my daughter Elizabeth, who’s forty years younger. We’ll be doing just a couple of nights, nothing all that strenuous, on the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, near Munising on the Lake Superior shore of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I’m grateful for the opportunity, but one reason I’m going is that Elizabeth says she’d otherwise go alone, and there are sheer cliffs, black bears and unknown human beings up there. I’m in decent shape and have only a couple of minor physical issues (right shoulder, left foot), but the truth is that besides breaking in the boots, which are cheap but seem to have good fit and support, I’m trying to make sure no part of this aging body is going to give out. I haven’t started carrying a pack yet, but I’m covering more distance each day.

As I reach the bridge over the Chippewa River, I notice two people coming toward me, on the same side of the road, starting down the hill I’m about to start climbing, almost a half mile ahead. As they come closer I can tell that they’re girls, and closer still, they’re something like fourteen and wearing only bathing suits. I’m sure they notice soon that I’m an old guy, not the boy they may have imagined, and I’m gray and unshaven and wearing a funny old-person hat no boy would risk being seen by girls in. Reasonably, about then, they cross to the other side of the road, as if they’re aware of some possibility or risk or, against all outward signs, want their privacy. Just as the imperative to stop looking—I don’t want to embarrass or bother them—overcomes that primary impulse to look, I see that the suit on the one on the left, the taller of the two, is nothing much more than three small patches of cloth over a body lean but ripening, and that the girl’s walk is that body-conscious adolescent walk of a girl who’s being looked at. As they pass I shoot them, while studiously not looking, a quick, awkward smile, intended to be grandfatherly and benign, which I’m almost sure they don’t see because they too are carefully looking away. I keep on climbing the hill and don’t look back.

Every couple of minutes, on this country road, a pickup goes by, doing sixty. I imagine some of them slowing down a little as they pass the girls.

And I’m puzzled. They must live up there somewhere where the houses are spread out, not concentrated in anything like a neighborhood, where taking a walk like that wouldn’t seem quite so out of place. Some kids go tubing on the river, but no one was there on the bridge to meet them as I crossed, and the girls aren’t carrying anything with them. They’re just out for a walk in those new bodies, but Jesus, dressed like that? That’s flat dangerous out here. As a parent, I wouldn’t have allowed it, and if I found out my daughter had snuck out and done that, she’d have been in big trouble. (I was too much of a pushover, to tell the truth, but my wife would have laid down the law.) We had big enough arguments over where she could go out running—we wanted her to go back and forth on our half-mile cul-de-sac, at least when it was either early or late, but she wanted to head out on the road I’m walking now, and a lot of the time, I’m pretty sure, she did.

I remember next that, when my daughter had a sleepover in junior high, five or six friends tenting in our back yard, we learned much later that two of those Catholic school eighth graders had snuck out in the middle of the night and walked to the Soaring Eagle Casino,  a couple of miles away. We never did find out what they did there. But there’s something about junior high girls I may have forgotten, if I ever knew it.

Then I remember the two girls who used to walk by the house I grew up in, not in bikinis—it was the fifties—but in very tight and very short shorts, with that I-know-you’re-looking walk. We, the boys, would watch them as they passed, calling them tramps to ourselves but getting a good look. I think I remember they came over and talked to us once, but I at least was too young for that to go anywhere. But those girls seemed to want to be seen, and there’s ordinarily no one at all on this empty stretch of road for these girls to be seen by. Still, I can’t quite believe they’re unaware of what the world makes, at a certain point which surely they know they’ve passed, of those bodies when it sees them.

Then I think: Poor kids. They go out for a walk where they live, where possibly in their own minds they’re stuck living, and in bodies they’re stuck living in too, and even a benevolent old guy like me gets all worked up about it. That’s a load they’ll carry on their backs for years.

So, okay, it’s still kind of puzzling, and making only this much sense so far: the girls in their bikinis were working on how to do fourteen-and-growing-up-fast, making a mistake I still think, that day, as I was working on how to do sixty-five-and-fading, climbing that hill in hiking boots, getting ready for one last long walk in the beautiful, dangerous world.

 

Eric Torgersen, born on Long Island, has spent the last 42 years in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. He is Professor of English, emeritus, at Central Michigan University. His newest collection of poems is Heart. Wood. (Word Press, 2012). His essays have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review and other places. His website is www.erictorgersenpoet.com

ARTISANAL JOURNALISM

by John Palen

 

I had my own newspaper for a while, a one-man monthly in a small town halfway between Detroit and the Mackinac Bridge. I exposed racial discrimination in rental housing and the diversion of a third of a million dollars from a local non-profit. I wrote about conversion of landfill gas to electricity, and about a golf course that should have paid its way but didn't. Once I wrote about a school superintendent who used a district truck to move furniture from his house. I wrote a couple thousand stories over 10 years, and then I folded the paper and moved away.

 

“You must not have a very interesting personal life,” the city engineer commented pityingly one winter evening in the paper's early days. Others were less sympathetic. “I don't want to see that in the paper,” a board member snapped after saying something controversial in a public meeting. “Sorry, Frank,” I told him. “It's too late.” School board members reddened when I walked into a planning retreat in the Mandarin Room of the country club. Legally they couldn't throw me out, so they offered to feed me. I said no, took notes and wrote a story. In ensuing years they never got all the way to transparency, but at least they stopped meeting in the Mandarin Room.

 

A couple hundred people paid $35 a year to get the 24-page, digest-size paper in the mail each month. There were no ads. I made about $3.25 an hour. But I was able to share fresh accomplishments and frustrations with my college journalism students, and I kept current with how public schools and cities were governed and financed. At the time I started the paper, I had not written a news story for 16 years.

 

The genesis lay in a rash decision by a popular children's librarian to mail a sarcastic card to her boss. The boss always initialed memos with a squiggle resembling a fish hook, so the librarian taped a hook to the card—a No. 8 or 10 short shank, I believe. She covered the barb safely with tape, but the city manager saw a threatened assault and fired her. The local paper, a daily hollowed out by years of Hearst ownership, did little with the story, so I started researching a letter to the editor. Hours of digging unearthed a sad situation—steady decline in the library's services and circulation, and an angry exodus of trained librarians. I began to wonder why I was doing the local paper's job.  

 

The first issue of my paper went in the mail in December 1999. Page one described a program to build modest homes for low-income families. An inside page reported the library's problems, with a sidebar dashed off after a hugger-mugger board meeting: The boss whose initials resembled a fishhook had resigned! The local daily carried nothing on either story. From that day until it folded, my little paper ran in the black. 

 

The ricky-ticks were the best, the zoning board, park board, housing commission. I learned at aviation board meetings of ballooning subsidies for an airport used by only a few hobbyists. I learned at a neighborhood association gathering of plans to replace low-income housing with a fancy parking lot. Late one night around a table piled with stale pizza, I heard a planning commissioner propose rezoning for property he himself owned. 

 

It was artisanal journalism, and I loved it. Working alone on self-imposed deadlines, I could make the extra phone call, interview the additional source, polish the story until it shone. The only limits were my skill and energy. I scooped the local daily, whose editor knew more about The Book of Revelation than about the city budget, with a regularity that surprised even me. 

 

But I also got under some people's skin, and they didn't like that. Sometimes they reacted with anger; more often they simply pretended I didn't exist. Some of my best stories—about evidence of racial discrimination in rental housing, for example—were largely ignored. 

 

There were other downsides. The paper required a lot of work, often at night after a day of teaching. As time went on, with no one to answer to but myself, I didn’t always go the second mile—sometimes barely the first. My skill and energy had limits. So did my hearing. As it worsened I made mistakes and relied more on written reports, background papers and news releases. With less of the salt and pepper of real speech, my writing lost some of its savor.    

 

Toward the end, the school district hired a search firm to find a new superintendent. The process had a clubby feel, and I mentioned one day that all the finalists were white. “In a community like this,” the head hunter said, “we wouldn't have brought in anyone who didn't fit that profile.” It was a casual, one-on-one response in a hallway, but I could have gone after it. A few years earlier I would have. But I rationalized that I was tired and getting old and nothing would change. I let the story drop.

 

I kept the paper going a while longer, and then I sought a buyer, for a dollar. “I'm flattered,” one young journalist told me, “but you know, I just don't want to work that hard.” So I refunded outstanding subscriptions, said my goodbyes and shut the paper down. For three months I suffered pounding rebound headaches from self-medication for bruxism. Eventually my teeth stopped aching. I moved 400 miles away, to a larger city that was closer to grandchildren and vibrant with music and literature. 

 

I meant to attend local government meetings in the new place, just to be a good citizen. But I haven't, not a single one. Journalists say you're only as good as your last story. In my case, a story I no longer had the fire to write told me it was time to quit, time to seek that more interesting life in places other than City Hall.

  

John Palen’s poems have been published in little magazines and journals for more than 40 years. Mayapple Press brought out his Open Communion: New and Selected Poems in 2005 and his first collection of short fiction, Small Economies, in 2012. A retired journalist and journalism educator, he lives in Central Illinois.