CRAFT ESSAY #5 - Crossing the River

Craft Essay #5:

Crossing the River, by Caryl Phillips

Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River offers a master class in the techniques of fractured chronology and withholding information.
The novel is made up of four separate sections, plus a prologue and epilogue. The prologue is, on its surface, a first-person recollection by an African father who has sold his three children to a slaver in 1753. “For two hundred and fifty years,” the haunted man says, “I have listened to the many-tongued chorus” (p. 1). Two hundred and fifty years? Is he Africa itself? What of the italicized lines (“Bought 2 strong man-boys, & a proud girl”)? As the novel progresses through its several sections, the many-tongued chorus swells through the voices of the characters, and these mysteries become clear.
Part I, “The Pagan Coast,” is a combination of third-person narration, mostly aligned with “benevolent” slave owner Edward Williams, and first-person letters written to Williams by his former slave, Nash Williams, from Liberia, c. 1834-42. Throughout both sections, the author lays trip wires—tidbits of information that blow up later, for maximum impact. On page 55, Edward fears that the other white men with whom he visits in Africa might be aware of “the personal tragedy that had recently enveloped his name.” The details of this tragedy—his wife Amelia’s suicide—are not revealed until the following page. The delay creates a sense of mystery and suspense. The revelation also provides long-awaited information about the fate of Nash’s many unanswered letters, which Amelia, mad with jealousy, had destroyed (until this is revealed, we don’t know why Edward was not writing back to Nash). Nash’s letters to Edward, meanwhile, are also sprinkled with trip wires, some of which are never fully explained, but they accumulate to create a palpable sense of dread. On page 33, he casually refers to his “fellow black emigrants” as being critical of “my dictatorial manner” and questioning “the moral value of my behavior.” Later, he mentions in passing that “the numbers at the mission school [have] fallen off in a dramatic manner” (p. 39) Eventually, in later letters, he slips in details of his relationships with several different local women. These dribs and drabs of information imply Nash’s slow movement away from religious missionary work—he’s “going native” without ever directly saying so. In the end, like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, he cuts off communication with his former world and disappears upriver.
Part II, “West,” documents the journey of Martha, an escaped slave, as she heads into the U.S. western territories in the 1860s. Alternating between first and third person, Phillips again withholds information to great effect. The first-person section starting on page 81 tells of how Martha meets, falls in love with, and loses Chester, a wrangler in the frontier town of Dodge, where Martha has a laundry and food business. But the chronology of this brief (four-page) section is scrambled. It begins with three men looking for Chester at Martha’s small restaurant. Slowly, Martha reveals the pertinent information: Chester recently killed a card-cheating friend of these men; the men are out for revenge; Chester is Martha’s man, and they are in business together; the Civil War has recently ended; Martha is a free woman. The narration then circles around as Chester arrives and is killed by the three men. This structure—starting near the end, reversing to fill in gaps, then returning for the climax—is repeated several times throughout “West” (and not just in individual sections—the overall structure of “West” follows a similar pattern; e.g., we find out Martha has been abandoned in Denver [p. 73] before we read the scene where she’s actually left there [p. 93]).
Part III, “Crossing the River,” consists mainly of excerpts from the journal kept by James Hamilton, master of a British slave ship circa 1752-3, as well as letters from Hamilton to his wife. Written with a shocking “commercial detachment” (p. 113: a longboat “brought with her 5 slaves, 2 fine boys, & 3 old women whom I instructed them to dispose of”), the journal entries indirectly reveal the “deep feelings of revulsion” (p. 119) toward the slaves that Hamilton can only directly confront in his letters. The letters also reveal Hamilton’s insecurity about his position—some consider him no more than a “gentleman passenger” (p. 120)—which goes unsaid in the journal. Also, the journal entries trip the bombs set up in the prologue: the italicized passages on pages 1-2 are direct quotes from Hamilton’s log. He is the slaver who purchases the “2 strong man-boys, & a proud girl.” Thus, the information withheld on page 1 is finally revealed on page 124.
Part IV, “Somewhere in England,” is narrated entirely by an Englishwoman in brief, journal-like passages dated from 1936 to 1963. By arranging these passages out of chronological order, the author immediately creates a structure given to the withholding of information: events are obliquely referred to, but we have not yet witnessed them ourselves. For instance, toward the end the narrative leaps from World War II to 1963 (p. 223), where we infer that Joyce gave up her son, Greer, for adoption back in 1945. We also learn that she had married Greer’s father, Travis, that same year, but is now married to someone else. The story then leaps back to 1945, where we witness Joyce’s reunion with Travis and their wedding on New Year’s Day (p. 225-7). Then comes Greer’s birth and Joyce’s decision to give him up for adoption (p. 228). The next passage takes place prior to that, as Joyce is informed of Travis’s death on the battlefield (p. 229). Finally, the narrator leaps forward again to 1963, to 18-year-old Greer’s arrival at her doorstep (p. 231).
Joyce, as narrator, also withholds information with her use of pronouns. The “they” on page 129 are not revealed as American soldiers until page 134. Travis is referred to as “he” (or “the tall one”) from his introduction on page 149 until page 208, when Martha finally refers to him by name. Most dramatically, the fact that Travis is black (which we’ve surmised) is not specifically stated until page 202.
This fractured narrative structure, with its fluid approach to time and chronology, accomplishes two things. First, it creates a kind of informational void that the reader is forced to fill. This draws us in, involving us in the telling of the tale. Second, on a more metaphysical level, this technique echoes the novel’s theme of spatial and chronological diaspora. The narrator of the prologue and epilogue—the African Father—speaks from a vantage point unlimited by time. His observations span 250 years, from the mid-18th century to the present day, encompassing everything from slavery to jazz to Martin Luther King, Jr., as he follows the doomed fates of the “2 strong man-boys, & a proud girl” —Nash, Travis, and Martha—whom he sold to James Hamilton.

CRAFT ESSAY #4 - Jesus' Son

Craft Essay # 4:

Jesus’ Son, by Denis Johnson

In “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” the opening story of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, a woman is taken into an office and told that her husband was just killed in an auto accident. “From under the closed door,” the narrator tells us, “a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there” (p.11). This strikes me as an apt metaphor for these radiant stories, which seem to have been organically harvested from the narrator’s (author’s?) subconscious.
This first person narrator, known only as Fuckhead, appears to be telling us these related tales from a later vantage point (“This was in 1973” [p. 69]; “Those sodium-arc lamps were new in our town then” [p. 28]). This historical perspective lends Fuckhead an air of authority he might not otherwise deserve, being a (recovering) addict. The passing of time between the action and the telling also allows him to be oddly vague at times—“I was twenty-five, twenty-six, something like that” (p. 91); one character had “been a high school quarterback or something” (p. 28)—a quality not often found in fiction, but which, here, actually adds to Fuckhead’s authority (he was high at the time, after all). Fuckhead is in many ways the ultimate unreliable narrator—a drunk, a drug addict, a thief, and a coward—but he tells these stories with an awkward honesty that invites our trust. His vagueness also provides an exciting contrast to the razor-sharp observations he is sometimes capable of: “The downpour raked the asphalt and gurgled in the ruts” (p. 3); “She was about forty, with a bloodless, waterlogged beauty” (p. 61); and this description of a dive bar: “It was a long, narrow place, like a train car that wasn’t going anywhere” (p. 36). The combination of these precise descriptions and those other, more inarticulate ones creates a unique and compelling tension.
In Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose writes of how important it is to decide who the narrator is telling the story to. Though he sometimes uses poetic, soaring language (more on that later), Fuckhead’s otherwise informal, conversational tone implies a specific audience—perhaps a roomful of regulars at a series of AA or NA meetings. When he begins a story with “But I never finished telling you about the two men” (p. 105), harking back 90 pages to the story “Two Men,” he is commenting on the act of remembering, just like we do when we lose, and then find, our train of thought while telling a long anecdote. On pages 38-9, Fuckhead’s story about meeting Jack Hotel at the Vine is turned inside out when he realizes that he’s gotten the story all wrong: Hotel wasn’t about to be convicted of armed robbery and sent to prison for twenty-five years after all; he had in fact been acquitted. There’s more confusion on page 84, when the beautiful snow scene (at the deserted drive-in theater) is followed by this: “Or maybe that wasn’t the time it snowed.” These realizations “twist” Fuckhead’s life, as he puts it (p. 38), and they create for the reader an appropriately vertiginous sense of reality.
Another, related technique that emphasizes the informal, almost chatty tone is the narrator’s tendency to digress, often by making leaps in time. In “Car Crash,” for instance, Fuckhead interrupts one hospital experience (post-accident) to tell us about another “some years later when I was admitted to the Detox at Seattle General Hospital (p. 12).” Similarly, when relating a story about one of his unfortunate friends, Fuckhead will skip to some later time frame to tell us about the pathetic destinies of, say, Jack Hotel (p. 42), or Dundun (p. 51). This is another characteristic of improvisational (oral) storytelling.
Dialogue is also integral to the author’s establishing an awkward, off-kilter tone, and is often as idiosyncratic as Fuckhead’s narration. There’s a sameness that breaks the rules of fiction (Each character should sound like him- or herself!) while, paradoxically, affirming Fuckhead’s authority. When Jack Hotel says, “Everything was completely out of hand” (p. 47), or Georgie says, “They’ll get as big as gorillas” (p. 79), or Terence Weber (the man with the knife in his eye) says, “Okay, I’m certainly ready for something like that” (p. 72), they all sound like Fuckhead, which seems appropriate, since these stories are being filtered through his quirky sensibility and Swiss cheese memory. Dialogue also serves as a vehicle for the book’s humor, an outlet for the narrator (and us) in an otherwise bleak landscape.
All these narrative idiosyncrasies and the strangely casual tone are dramatically offset by the narrator’s frequent flights of equally strange but compelling poetry. Some of my favorites: “I knew every raindrop by its name” (p. 4); “The seeds were moaning in the garden” (p. 18); “After sitting on the bus for several blocks with a thoughtless, red mind…” (p. 56); “Later in the afternoon, with sad resignation, the county fair bares its breasts” (p. 77); “Through the neighborhoods and past the platforms, I felt the cancelled life dreaming after me” (p. 95); “When I coughed I saw fireflies” (p. 100). These seem to emerge whole and sincere from the disjointed mind of an addict, and serve as the spine on which the mood is built. Again, the tension between this poetry and the less articulate tone creates tension. It’s like we’re watching life with the color slightly off—or, we’re witnessing the radiance of diamonds being incinerated—and the effect is a feeling of anxiety and unease. And wonder, for this disconnect does not push us out of the stories, but pulls us in.

49 LOVE LANE - Section 3

This section was sent to Nalini on 15 April...

5. Psychological Impact

Anders Lehigh returned a few days later, bringing with him three Latin American men to do all the digging. I saw the truck pull into the driveway—no music this time, perhaps out of respect for the three men huddled like hitchhikers in the truck bed—and ran out to greet him.
It was another boiling hot day, the first of its kind since the last time Lehigh had stopped by. The three Latin American men moved slowly, removing shovels and hoes from the truck, their serious brown faces carved from some dark wood. Lehigh spoke to them in halting Spanish before turning to me.
“I have a question for you,” I said, my voice vibrating as he pumped my hand.
“Shoot.”
“That story you told. About the baby getting killed?”
His expression told me he’d been expecting something like that.
“Do you remember the name of the family?”
He adjusted his cap, scratched his head. His face was as dry as powder in the sun. Mine was already wet, a mustache of sweat tickling my upper lip.
“Let’s see,” he said. “My friend’s name was Bill. That I remember.”
“Uh-huh.” I waited. Meanwhile, two of the men wandered the yard picking up twigs and branches that had fallen during our most recent storm. The third had opened the truck gate and was positioning a metal ramp. These men were short, bowlegged, but solid in their faded flannel shirts and scuffed jeans. They looked like they could do almost anything asked of them: climb a tree, break a wild mustang, construct a pyramid.
“I’m trying to remember,” Lehigh said. He called out in Spanish to the man at the truck, who was carefully unloading a heavy machine down the ramp. It looked like a small, pushable steam roller.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s the aerator.”
There were small, pointy knobs on the drum.
“We roll that across the lawn before planting grass seeds.”
He directed the man toward the far side of the yard.
“Billings?” he said. “Billingsly?”
“Was that it?” I asked. “Billingsly?”
“Something like that. This was twenty-some years ago, mind you. And that was the last time I ever saw them.”
“Well, if you remember, can you let me know?”
“Sure,” he said. Then, “ Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned all that.”
“No, no. I’m sort of glad you did, actually.”
I’d already called the realtor, who assured me she knew nothing about the murder, though her defensive tone made me wonder. “There’s even a requirement in the contract for that sort of thing,” she said. I dug it out and sure enough, there it was, paragraph 21: The SELLER represents that the Premises are not psychologically impacted as defined in CT General Statutes sections 20-329cc, et seq. When I asked how I could track down the previous owners, she tried to dissuade me. She said that, in her opinion, that never helped. “It’s like asking old friends for their honest opinion of your new girlfriend,” she said. “It just opens up doors you’d rather leave closed.” When I persisted, she told me to go to the town hall and look up the field cards in the tax assessor’s office. “You can find the names of all the former owners there.”
While Lehigh’s men poked at the lawn with their shovels, I sat out on the deck drinking iced tea and sweating. I had to wait for Abby and Daisy to return from the grocery store so I could go to the town hall. We still had the one car and were going to need a second before classes started, but the thought of car shopping and shelling out all that money made me quiver. The down payment on the house had drained our savings—Abby’s savings, really, from her lawyer days—and the mortgage payments stretched out ahead of us like monthly blood lettings. My salary at the Pfister School was not as high as it had been at St. Ann’s, and I wouldn’t even get a paycheck until the Fall, but we figured we could make ends meet, at least until Daisy was in school and Abby could return to work.
Today I was also supposed to call Frannie Johnston and thank her having us over for dinner. Abby refused to do it, and I’d put it off for days now. I kept seeing that pale ass in the night, and hearing Monica cry out, “Oh God!” I still was not convinced it had been Arnie, and Abby couldn’t say for sure, but just the idea that it might have been him gave us both the heebie-jeebies. Did Frannie know anything? How could I talk to her in a normal way after seeing that? She’d probably want to make a plan—another dinner, drinks—and we’d have to see Arnie and the girl, pretend everything was normal. Maybe it had been some local boy, but Abby was sure it was an older man, at the very least. But why do you think it was Arnie? I’d asked, but she couldn’t say. She just had a feeling.
The Latin American men worked like patient, persistent mules while Lehigh leaned against his truck and chatted on his cell phone. Soon the offending shrubs had been removed and a patch of lawn by the stone wall had been tilled and bordered.
“You’ll need some deer netting when you put in the flowers.”
Lehigh had materialized on the deck steps.
“Those bastards’ll eat anything,” he said.
Just the night before I’d seen a large buck on the lawn. I happened to glance out the window and there he stood, his antlers silvery in the faint moonlight, his eyes glowing red as he stared back at me. “Look!” I’d said to Daisy, lifting her up to see, but the buck ran off in that graceful awkward way they have.
“Want some iced tea?” I asked Lehigh. I’d already guzzled down two tall glasses of the stuff but still felt as though I were locked in a steam bath.
“Nah, thanks.” He watched his men for a while, his eyes following their movements. One aerated the lawn, another followed with the seeder. The third spread hay across the seeded ground.
“I can tell it bothers you,” Lehigh said. He was now standing beside me.
“What bothers me?”
He sat across from me and rested one thick forearm on the metal-topped table. “That story.”
“Oh. It’s not that it bothers me so much. I just find it interesting.”
“Some people wouldn’t be able to live in a house where that happened.”
“Like you?” I asked.
“Honestly, I don’t know.” He turned to gaze through a window into the living room.
“You want to go in?” I asked.
I could almost hear his mind turning the thought over, like a taffy machine. He swallowed and said, “Okay.”
I stood and walked to the sliding door. Lehigh yelled something in Spanish to his men, then followed me inside. He paused after three steps and looked around.
“Look any different?” I asked.
“The same. But different.” He glanced into Daisy’s room. “That was Bill’s room.” He stepped inside. “Seems so much smaller now.”
Back in the living room he said, “Those skylights weren’t there.”
“You want to see the other rooms?”
His face was now shiny with sweat.
“It’s hot in here,” I said. “Sorry.”
I led him to the kitchen and the dining room.
“Looks more or less the same,” he said.
“And here’s the bedroom,” I said, opening the door. “Excuse the mess.”
He stood in the doorway and looked inside. The bed was unmade, and Abby’s clothes were piled on the floor. He blinked at the sweat rolling into his eyes. He breathing sounded shallow, as if his lungs were small tin cans.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Fine, fine. It’s just…”
“This is where it happened, right?”
“Yup.”
“Which wall was it? Do you remember?”
He looked at me as though I’d asked him to name the capitol of North Dakota.
“The wall,” I said. “Didn’t you say the guy threw the baby against the wall?”
“Uh huh.” He stared at the far wall, his adam’s apple bobbing. “Nice picture,” he said.
“Yeah. That’s my wife’s parents.”
Just then the kitchen door squealed open. I heard Abby say something, then Daisy babbling.
“Carl!”
Anders Lehigh turned and headed straight through the living room to the sliding glass door.
“Carl! I need help with the groceries!”
Lehigh opened the door and stepped out into the glaring sun.
“Carl?”
A few moments later, as I was leaving to go downtown, Lehigh and his men were packing up the truck.
“I’ll mail you a bill,” he said.
“Is there anything I need to know?”
“Just keep the lawn watered for the next few days. And get some of that netting for the flowers.”
“Do we need to schedule a follow-up or something?”
He considered this for a moment. One of the men slammed the truck gate and Lehigh jumped.
“Nah,” he said. “Not necessary.”
I thanked him, then climbed into the Corolla and pulled out. As I drove off, Lehigh was standing beside his truck, staring up at the house.
*
The town hall was a simple, two-story brick building on Main Street. I parked on the street in front of a sign that read “2 HR PARKING,” and they were serious—no sooner had I gotten out of the car than a uniformed old codger with a white mustache drew a line on my front right tire with a long piece of chalk. He tipped his cap, then walked slowly away through the heat, his underarms dark with sweat.
Inside, I found the tax assessor’s office down a dingy flight of stairs. The low-ceilinged room glowed pale green under fluorescent lights. A tall, regal woman in pearls stood behind the counter. She was in her fifties, at least, but very well preserved. She led me to a small room off to the side where a set of metal shelves lined three of the walls. The shelves were lined with thousands of pale blue field cards the size of greeting cards. She looked up my address in a folder and found that our house was on Lot 70B. She searched among the field cards in Section B, but number 70 was not there.
“That’s odd.” She worked her elegant fingers through the cards on either side of where number 70 should have been. “Ah-hah.” She removed a card. “Lot 70B. Someone else must have looked this up at some point and then misplaced it.”
I thanked her and she left me alone in the room. The air was dusty with the smell of slowly decomposing paper. I sat at a large table and opened my pocket notebook. I turned past pages of phone numbers, addresses, ideas for novels I’d never write, and lists of books to read, to a blank page. According to the field card, there had been more than a dozen owners of 49 Love Lane in the past thirty-five years. Alexander and Geraldine Stanitzky lived there for about twelve of those years; the rest lived there for periods of one to two years each: John and Annette Bingham, followed by just Annette Bingham, Rana and Alan Lieberman, Herman and Joanna Kydd, John and Lisa Lord II, Thomas and Lydia Sennett, Foster Peck, Matt and Donna Anthony, Jerry and Mary DeSantis, Henry and Clare David, Michael Harms, and, most recently, Sally and Kevin Prince, from whom we’d bought the house. It must have been the Binghams—not the Billingslys—who had lived at the house when Anders Lehigh was there. For two years Annette Bingham owned the house on her own. Maybe John was in jail, or else they divorced before the murder and the baby killer was some other man not listed on the field card. I held the pale blue card in my hand for a moment. The names were written in pencil, all but the last two in different handwriting. I imagined some town hall employee—the regal-looking lady, and those before her—sitting at this old table in this windowless room and carefully noting down the names as they came in. I replaced the card, careful to slide it into the proper slot, thanked the regal woman, and left.
The town library was located just down the block, a one-story brick building that looked to have been constructed at the same time as the town hall. Even that short walk was laborious in the heat. Trees lining Main Street drooped. The sidewalk reverberated beneath my shoes. Air conditioning units hummed and dripped and gave off even more heat, curdling the air.
The library was over-cooled. The instant relief lasted a moment, then quickly became discomfort. My sweat felt like ice on my skin.
The information librarian, a fragile-looking lady wearing a coarse-haired wig over her deeply lined face, directed me to the microfilm room. She helped me find the film spools for the local weekly newspaper from twenty-five years earlier, then patiently explained how to use the viewer. It was an ancient-looking machine, with wheels and knobs and a scratched-up screen. There was a small plaque on the table: “Donated by Friends of the R------- Library.”
“Let me know if you need any more help,” the librarian said.
“Is it me,” I asked, “or is it freezing in here?”
Her thin, drawn-on eyebrows arched. “Seems fine to me.”
She wore a wool sweater over a pantsuit.
“Must be me, then,” I said.
And so, shivering and with teeth chattering, I rolled through a year’s worth of newspapers, concentrating on the front page stories. It was mostly dull local politics, sports, and human interest stuff. Tax Rate Up Mill From 78. Dogs Bite 14 People Since July 1. Tigers Whip Knights, 31-7. Prestidigitating from an Early Age. Another Dog Warden Quits. I also kept my eyes peeled for the police blotter, but it consisted mainly of drunk driving and marijuana possession arrests.
I was cursing myself for not asking Lehigh to be more specific about the year of the murder when I spotted the headline: Local Man Charged With Manslaughter. The subhead was Tragic Death of Toddler Shocks Town. The story, written in a claustrophobic prose by a reporter who had clearly never covered a crime like this, told of an Arliss Taylor, who lived on Love Lane with Annette Bingham, and how Mr. Taylor had allegedly killed the child by “use of blunt force.” There were no more specific details about the murder itself—nothing about smashing the baby’s head against the wall. There was a fair amount of space devoted to the reactions of such locals as Sheriff H. R. Simpson, who was outraged and hungry for justice, and First Selectman Nico Papadopoulis, who vowed to enact a special law protecting children from abuse. Neighbor Thomas Schwinn was aghast that such a thing could darken his sleepy neighborhood, where everyone always said hello and no one locked their doors at night. Mr. Larry Winters (father of Jerry, I assumed) noted that the accused had not exactly been loved by his neighbors, and he was personally not surprise that he’d landed in trouble. There were no quotes from Arnie or Frannie Johnston.
The murdered child—aged sixteen months—was not named. Nor was there any mention of another child or children in the house on the night of the murder.
The following week’s edition had a smaller headline: Child Killer Pleads Guilty. There were a few more details, including that Arliss Howard worked for a local waste removal company. The article also said that Howard and Annette Bingham were engaged—not married, as Lehigh had said—but there was nothing in either article that specifically said he was the baby’s father. There was a reference to the coroner’s report, which found that the child had suffered a fractured skull that led to massive internal bleeding. There was also a photograph of Howard, a thin, lanky man with deep-set eyes, being led to a patrol car by the sheriff. And there was a photo of the house. Seeing it on the screen, the image dark and grainy, missing the deck and with slightly different shrubbery, took the chill right out of me. My face, my hands, went all warm. The caption read: Murder Site on Love Lane.
The story also referred to “strange things” having gone on in the house. There were vague references to infidelity and bizarre religious practices. The source for this information was “a neighbor who wished to remain nameless.” I pictured Mrs. Schwinn whispering to a reporter from behind a mostly-closed door.
The following week’s paper had a brief follow-up story on page two. Taylor was to be charged with involuntary manslaughter rather than murder because he’d pleaded guilty at his arraignment the week before.
After that there were no more stories about the murder. I looked for news of Arliss Howard’s sentencing, but couldn’t find any.
I returned the microfilm and left the library, barely noticing the heat as I walked back up Main Street. That photograph of the house had burned itself into my eyes. The house looked so seedy, nothing more than a grisly crime scene. It was like the mug shot of a drunken celebrity—I wasn’t sure I could look at it again without remembering the murky image from the newspaper.
As I climbed into the car I noticed a piece of paper on the windshield. It was a parking ticket.





Dear Daisy,
You said your first real word today: “Baby.” Up until now you have spoken only nonsense words, or adorable pseudo-words, like “Wa-wa” and “Ba-ba.” Once I thought I heard you say “Mama” but your skeptical father disagreed. He claimed you were just babbling. Today, however, the word rang out clearly: “Baby!” You were crawling around the house, your little arms and legs pumping, and you zipped into mommy and daddy’s bedroom and said, “Baby!” I clapped and cheered and you grinned, showing your three beautiful teeth (two on top, and now there’s one on the bottom!). When your father comes home I’m going to open a bottle of wine and we’ll celebrate. I wish your grandparents—mommy’s mommy and daddy—were alive to hear you speak. Their photo hangs on the wall of the bedroom and it looked to me as though you were peering up at their faces as you uttered your first word. I lifted you up to get a closer look and again you shouted, “Baby!” as if showing off for them. Someday you will inherit this picture, a faded old portrait your grandma and grandpa had taken at some department store. Your grandpa was a high school shop teacher. He looks so sweetly awkward in his tight-fitting suit and tie, his still-dark hair slicked back. Grandma appears more self-assured, as she did in life, her gaze hard beneath her stiff black hair. When I went to set you down you started fussing and whining, but when I lifted you back up you continued until I didn’t know what to do with you. Sometimes it’s so hard to know what you need, dear little Daisy. “Baby! Baby!” you kept crying, wriggling in my arms so that I worried I might drop you. Finally I carried you into the living room to the sofa. You lunged for my breast and I let you suckle there, feeling guilty for continuing breast feeding so long—your other grandmother says I should have weaned you by your first birthday--but also feeling wonderful. This is the best time. I’m writing this now as you drink from me. It’s like we are still one, as we were when you were inside me for those nine months. It was so hard to give you up. I know most women are ready by the last month but I was not. I wanted you to stay with me. For weeks and weeks I compulsively rubbed my big belly and somehow saw your face, your big blue eyes, your tiny fingers and toes. The first time you kicked, I wept. After a big meal—every meal was a big meal!—I would take off my blouse and watch for the little lumps you made by pushing out with your hands and feet. Not yet, I’d whisper, not yet. Someday, God willing, you’ll know what I mean. You

6. Liar

The white, clapboard-sided buildings of the Pfister School for Boys campus were nestled into the grassy hills north of town. At the base of the hill were tennis courts, a swimming pool, and the school’s barn-like gymnasium. From here a private drive wound past classroom buildings to the administration building at the top of the hill. From the parking lot I gazed down upon the bucolic campus and toward the town in the distance.
I’d met the school’s Headmaster, Lucas Berk, three months earlier, after he’d responded to my letter and resume. The school was looking for an English teacher and Berk brought me in for an interview. All had gone smoothly, and after a second interview with Berk and the other administrators, I’d been hired for the Fall.
Now I sat waiting outside Berk’s office, crossing and recrossing my legs. The headmaster had called that morning and asked me to come in. There had been no explanation.
The waiting room was small, with four simple chairs, a water cooler, and a desk for Berk’s assistant, who was not in. Sitting there I felt like a naughty student who’d been sent to the headmaster for some unspecified infraction. There was no window, and the stained pine walls seemed to lean inwards.
This may have been due to my hangover. Abby had opened a bottle of wine the night before to celebrate Daisy’s first word, and I had drunk most of it. I was glad to see Abby in a happy mood, though she soured after a glass and a half of cabernet. It was like watching a helium balloon slowly drift back to earth. She was unable to coax Daisy into saying the word she’d apparently been exclaiming all day—“Baby”—plus she was sore because Daisy had bitten her pretty hard while nursing. She showed me and there were three little teeth marks around her nipple.
“Maybe she doesn’t want to breast feed anymore.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Abby went off on how the World Health Organizaion recommends breast feeding until at least two years, preferably three, etc. That’s when I started filling my wine glass to the rim.
I was about to get some water from the cooler when the door to Berk’s office swung open.
“Come on in, Carl.”
The headmaster was a tall man with a ring of wispy gray hair above his ears. His otherwise bald head was mottled with moles and age spots, giving him the appearance of a toad. He wore a dress shirt without a tie, and khakis—almost exactly what I was wearing.
“I figured you’d be somewhere exotic about now,” I said. “You know—recharging for September.”
Berk’s desk was littered with papers. On the wall hung old photographs of the school campus and faded class portraits.
“Have a seat,” he said. He squeezed himself between his desk and the picture window. From my chair I could see the valley spread out all the way to town.
“I’m not going to beat around the bush, Carl,” he said. “I got a call last night from--” He consulted a slip of paper. “—a Tad Greff.”
Tad Greff was headmaster of St. Ann’s. But I wasn’t picturing Tad. I was picturing the cool green eyes of Okay Peterson.
“How is Tad?” I asked.
“He’s perturbed.”
“He is?”
“Yes.” Berk sat forward in his chair and leveled his eyes at me. They were a dark brown, almost black. “Mr. Greff told me a very disturbing story,” he continued, though I could have sworn his lips did not move.
“What sort of story?”
Berk didn’t budge. Someone looking in through the window might have thought this was a still photograph of two men in an office.
“What can you tell me,” he finally said, “about a Miss Okay Peterson?”
“Okay Peterson?”
“Come now, Carl. Surely you wouldn’t forget someone with such a name.”
“Right. Well, she was a student of mine last year. Smart kid.”
“Pretty?”
I saw the dark black rain of hair across her face. “Sure. I guess so.”
Again, a pause. This was classic headmaster stuff: the stare, the waiting. Most teenagers can’t handle it. They crack, and confess everything. I had the urge to go there myself, but I wasn’t sure what Berk knew, so I held off. Still, I was positive the man could detect the sour wine smell that was now pouring out of me.
“Apparently,” Berk said, “Miss Peterson’s parents recently paid a visit to Mr. Greff.”
“Oh.”
“Yes,” Berk said, laying the word down on his desk like a sword. The whole sorry episode was carved into the sharp blade.
“Look,” I began.
“I’m not interested in explanations,” Berk interrupted. “It’s all very simple. Is it true what Miss Peterson told her parents?”
“Well—“
“Yes or no, Carl.”
“Can you please tell me what they told Tad?”
“Let me put it this way, Carl: did you have an inappropriate relationship with this girl?”
There were a lot of images floating through my head. None of them could be called appropriate.
“Yes,” I said.
“Thank you.”
At last he looked away and leaned back in his seat.
“You know, Carl,” Berk said, “I’ve been here at the Pfister School for Boys for twenty-seven years, nine of them as headmaster. I’ve seen it all. We had a young lady here, an art instructor, who slept with three of our boys. There was a history instructor, an older fellow, who would have the lads over to his condo to watch World War II movies with crème soda and buttered popcorn, and as far as anyone knows he never laid a hand on them—but it looked bad, didn’t it? We’ve had boys traipse off together into the equipment room only to be found by Mr. Mulroney, the maintenance man, in flagrante. We can’t really blame the youngsters, though. Their chemicals are boiling over, aren’t they? That’s why our staff must maintain the highest level of appropriate behavior at all times. Otherwise, the whole thing breaks down, you see.”
“I’m awfully sorry, Mr. Berk,” I said. “I’ll be perfectly honest. I should have told you, but I was afraid you might not hire me.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t have,” he said. “But I would have been interested in your side of the story. This Mr. Greff certainly has his opinion.”
“I’m sure he does. And I’d like to tell you my side.”
“Save it, Carl.”
“Sir?”
“I’m not interested any more. Perhaps the girl is exaggerating a bit. Perhaps Greff doesn’t care for you for some other reason. I know how office politics are at learning institutions. But the thing is, Carl—I can’t trust you. And I have to trust my instructors.”
“What are you saying, Mr. Berk?”
“I’m saying we won’t be needing your services in the Fall.”
“But you can’t do that!”
“Already done.”
“I signed a contract!”
“Yes, and if you’ll read it, you’ll see we’re perfectly within our rights.”
“But it’s almost August. You’ll need someone—“
“Taken care of.”
“But we’ve moved! We bought a house!”
Berk sighed and looked at me the way he probably looked at students expelled for cheating.
“We can’t have a liar here at Pfister School for Boys,” he said.
“A liar?”
“Good luck, Carl.”
With that he opened a manila folder and began to read some papers. I managed to stand on wobbly legs and walk the three miles to the door. My mouth was parched. Winey acid burbled up my esophagus. In the waiting area I took a paper cup and pressed the water cooler lever. Nothing. The cooler was empty. I turned around and saw a man sitting in the seat I’d occupied earlier. He wore a crisp linen suit with a pale blue shirt and yellow necktie. He looked to be about my age, but more fit and well-kempt. His brown hair was parted with a ruler. He smiled and drank from a paper cup. He crumpled the cup and tossed it across the room into a small trash can.
“Two points,” he said.
The inner door opened. Berk stood there. He was surprised to see me, I could tell. I took what little pleasure I could from his discomfort. He turned to the other man and motioned for him to enter. The man nodded, stood, and went into Berk’s office.
*
Okay Peterson performed beautifully on opening night. From the seats she was tough but vulnerable, a complex, real character. From backstage she struck me as fearless and totally in control. Unlike most of the cast, she knew her lines and she listened while the others spoke. Most teenagers aren’t mature enough to really listen. They just wait for their next line and pray they don’t forget them. For an hour and a half, I forgot that I’d kissed this girl the night before. I gave notes after the show and had to make up something to tell her so the other actors wouldn’t feel bad. Again, she lingered around the theater until everyone else had gone.
“Aren’t you going to the cast party?” I asked.
“I guess so.”
“They’ll all be waiting for you—the star of the show.”
“Where’s Mrs. Hammond?” she asked.
“Home.” I tried to make it sound like I didn’t care, though Abby and I had argued about it all week. I’d wanted to hire a sitter but she insisted Daisy was still too young.
“Will she come tomorrow, or Sunday?” Okay asked. “I’d love to meet her.”
“I don’t think so. Look, Okay, you were great tonight. I mean it, but you really should go.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“I was great?”
I shut out the theater lights and was standing by the side door that led from backstage to the street. My hand was on the push bar but something was stopping me.
“Yeah,” I said. “You were awesome.”
The only light was from a streetlamp outside the small, reinforced window in the door. Okay wore a shearling jacket over a short dress. Her long, bare legs disappeared into a pair of puffy boots. She pushed her black hair off her face.
“Aren’t you going to the party?” she asked.
“I was thinking of stopping by, just for appearances.”
The party was being held at the home of the stage manager. His parents owned a brownstone four blocks away.
“We can walk there together,” Okay said.
“Well, actually, I might skip it. Nothing cramps a party like the appearance of a teacher.”
“No! You’re so wrong, Mr. H. You’re like one of us.”
“Really?” I felt foolish that this made me feel so good.
“Oh, yeah. You’re the coolest.”
My hand still refused to push the door open. Okay didn’t seem to be in a hurry. She was a good six inches shorter than me. I tried not to look at the smooth, freckled skin above her breasts.
“I really do like you, Mr. H.,” she said.
“I like you, too, Okay,” I replied through dry lips.
“No. I mean I really like you.”
“Listen, Okay—“
“I mean, I dreamed about you last night.”
“Wait,” I said, not really meaning it. The thing was, I’d dreamed about her. I couldn’t remember much beyond the kiss, but I knew I woke up in a state of serious tumescence.
“I dreamed about our little kiss,” she said, and I instantly wondered what she meant by little. Then she went on: “It was a beautiful dream, Mr. H., just beautiful, and I thought about it all day, and I used my feelings—you know, my feelings of love, and fear—all of that—in the play tonight. So you see, if I was great, like you said—if I was awesome—then it was because of you. It was because of the kiss.”
And, goddamnit, that’s when it happened.

CRAFT ESSAY #3 - The Bookshop

Craft Essay #2:

The Book Shop, by Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald’s short novel The Book Shop is a psychologically astute comedy of small-town manners. What fascinated me most as a writer was her mercurial use of point of view, which moves from the omniscient to the close third person, usually aligned with the protagonist, Florence Green, but occasionally with other, supporting, characters.
The novel begins with the omniscient narrator’s insightful introduction of Florence—“She had a kind heart, though that is not of much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation”—foreshadowing the doomed struggle ahead. The narrator briefly describes Florence’s appearance (“small, wispy and wiry”), and goes on to tell us a little about the aptly named town of Hardborough, circa 1959.
This omniscient narrator, who is so familiar with Hardborough’s history and inhabitants, could very well be the town historian, or the town gossip, though he/she is never identified as such. It’s fun to imagine the story being told years later (say, 1978, when the novel was published) by this highly observant townsperson, perhaps beside a fire in the local pub.
This sense of a narrator looking backward can be found throughout the novel. On page 20, notice the use of such phrases as “at the time” and “in the 1950s.” The narrator is speaking from a vantage point well beyond the time frame of the story. The narrator is, therefore, privy to the tale’s sad outcome, and occasionally drops clues like seeds that later flower. These can come in the form of an observation, as on page 30, where Florence notices a storm warning flag “against a sky that was pale yellowish green.” Only two pages on, Florence interprets an encounter with the local fish shop owner as “a warning” from the powerful local socialite Mrs. Gamart, who has designs on the old building Florence has recently purchased for her bookstore. While Florence does not take the threat very seriously (“it was absurd to imagine that she was being driven out, and that the hand of privilege was impelling her”), the narrator, in his/her choice of details, knows better.
Fortunately, the narrator also has a sharp sense of humor, particularly when it comes to the provincial ways of small town England. The repeated description of Mr. Drury as “the solicitor who was not [Florence’s] solicitor” wittily reminds us that Hardborough had only the two attorneys in 1959. The introduction of Mrs. Gamart’s husband, known as “the General” (p. 20), not only provides amusing insight into his personality—like a character in the hectic plays of the time, he “hovered, alert and experimentally smiling”--it also reveals the narrator’s contrasting sophistication (he/she is familiar with trends in theatre).
But for most of the novel’s duration, the narrator remains close to Florence, allowing us into her thoughts and feelings. Though she lacks the narrator’s advantage of history, Florence is nevertheless quite perceptive. Her meetings with the officious banker, Mr. Keble, are wonderfully observed, and on page 21, when the General tries to impress her with his knowledge of obscure poetry, Florence notices that “clearly he had tried to make this point before, perhaps many times.” That “perhaps many times” is both funny (in an understated, British way) and sad.
We also learn, via the narrator, that Florence is unusually sensitive to the nuances of power in the context of her relationships. When speaking with Mr. Thornton (the solicitor who was not Mr. Drury), she wishes she were taller “so that she could look down, rather than up, during interviews like these” (p. 37). When dealing with her precocious 10-year-old assistant, Christine, Florence (again, via the narrator, who chooses what to reveal) obsessively monitors the balance of power in their relationship. On page 55: “The first admission that there was something [Christine] didn’t know encouraged her employer a little. Christine saw immediately that she had lost ground.” (Taken out of context this seems to be from Christine’s POV, but in context it feels more like Florence’s—she is extremely perceptive about the girl’s state of mind.) One of Florence’s more taxing encounters is with the reclusive, powerful Mr. Brundish. Florence has more or less left it up to the respected old man whether or not to stock Lolita in her book shop. When Brundish approves of the controversial book, Florence is relieved “at a decision in which she had no part.” Then, “to reassure herself of her independence, she took the single knife, cut two pieces of cake, and offered one to Brundish” (p. 82). In scenes like these, the narrator allows us to witness Florence’s insecurity, thereby emphasizing the novel’s theme of “a kind heart” not being of much use “in the matter of self-preservation.”
The big question for a writer reading The Book Shop is: why does Fitzgerald move the POV around, from omniscient to close third person, and from close third person aligned with Florence to close third person aligned with someone else? In the course of one scene, we get glimpses into the minds of not just Florence but also Mrs. Gamart, or the General, or Mr. Thornton. The author does not bother to distinguish these switches in POV with chapter breaks. The narrator, as in an old-fashioned novel, moves around at wil. How conscious was Fitzgerald of these maneuvers? Did she map out the scenes and move the narrator around like a general moves his troops? Or was it purely instinctual? Did she just know, as she sat there writing, that she needed to dip into Mrs. Gamart’s mind for a line or two in order to better move the story along? She could easily have limited the narrator to Florence’s POV and provided a piercing psychological study of a middle-aged woman and her struggle to assert herself against the forces of society. But I think she was after something bigger: a dissection of the town itself, for which she needed to give us these brief but revealing glimpses into the small minds surrounding Florence. In fact, I get the feeling that Fitzgerald, who may have borne a strong resemblance to Florence Green in 1959, and who clearly harbored a deep love of literature, savored those moments when her narrator aligned him/herself with the foolish members of a community that did not want a bookstore.

CRAFT ESSAY #2 - Sabbath's Theater

Craft Essay #3:

Sabbath’s Theater

In a recent profile of Ian McEwan in The New Yorker, McEwan tells how Philip Roth attempted to help him with an early novel by spreading the manuscript out on the floor. If we were to do this with Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, we’d find the novel falls into several sections, each structured differently (and not always separated by chapter breaks): 1) Drenka; 2) NYC-A; 3) NYC-B; and 4) Home. Section 1 is the most virtuosic of these, and thus the most interesting to me as a writer. For an idea of its complexity, let’s examine the opening pages (pp. 3-17). The bold first sentence: “Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over”—is a paraphrasing of the ultimatum delivered to Mickey Sabbath by his lover, Drenka. Then, for the next 14 pages, Roth’s third person narrator flits from one topic to another, a long digressive burst that introduces characters, sets up relationships, and dips deep into Sabbath and Drenka’s past—all with such a command of language that we are sucked into the novel’s dark, funny, debauched world. This exhilarating digression begins with the unspooling of three increasingly long sentences, sentences as sensual and plump as Drenka herself, labyrinthine sentences that establish the themes of sexual obsession and fear of mortality. Does the narrator then return to the scene where Drenka demands “adulterous monogamy?” No. Instead, we are introduced to Sabbath’s wife, Roseanna, and Drenka’s husband, Matija; we are escorted to the Grotto, the wooded area where Sabbath and Drenka meet for sex; we’re given even more history of Drenka and Matija; and then we get details about Sabbath’s arrangement of a three-way with Drenka and a hitchhiker. And we’re still only on page 7! For ten more pages the narrator bores into both Sabbath’s and Drenka’s present and past, from the death of Mickey’s brother in World War II (from which their mother never recovered) to Drenka’s symbiotic relationship with her state trooper son, Matthew. Also included are brief references to Sabbath’s former career as a puppeteer for the Indecent Theater of Manhattan. We do not return to Drenka’s ultimatum until page 17, and then only after we learn that Sabbath has been regularly speaking to his dead mother, who, he believes, has returned “to take him to his death.”
The first section jumps back and forth in time, settling down only when Sabbath travels to New York for a friend’s funeral (around page 125, which marks the beginning of section 2). In lesser hands, or at least in hands with less technique, this structure would collapse under it own weight. But Roth is in complete control. Like his master puppeteer protagonist, the narrator deftly moves his characters around the stage, both in space and time, distracting with one hand while preparing for a sucker punch with the other.
Why has Roth chosen this fractured structure for the second section? Why not employ a more linear narrative, as he does later on? Why not more leisurely, scene-like flashbacks, perhaps even separated by line breaks or chapter headings?
First, it is a clever and effective way of providing back story. We receive a generous amount of information in a short space of time, so that when we are finally plunged back into the scene, we really know Sabbath and Drenka. More importantly, this dizzying bit of time travel reveals Sabbath’s state of mind. At 64, he is resisting the tug of mortality by clinging to the life rafts of sex and memory. Like a patient on a therapist’s couch, Sabbath, via the narrator, follows a stream of consciousness that, however digressive, is always revealing. It’s also important that this first “scene”, which the narrator smashes open like a box full of memories, culminates in Drenka’s revelation that she’s gravely ill (she’s dead by page 33). Even more reason to grasp for that life raft!
Section 2 (pp. 125 to 185), in contrast, is almost entirely tethered to the present, and is less interesting for it (in my humble opinion). Section 3 (pp. 189-351) is a more traditionally structured combination of present and past, with longer scenes and plentiful dialogue. It’s as if Sabbath, geographically removed from his late lover and wife, feels less boxed in (interestingly, he also stops conversing with his dead mother). There is less sex to be had, even in the flashbacks (not that Sabbath doesn’t try), and less resistance to the pull of mortality.
The novel’s final section is dominated by two remarkable, dialogue-heavy scenes, one in the present (Sabbath and Fish, p. 380), one in the past (Sabbath and the dying Drenka, p. 415). These and other scenes in this last section are not interrupted by the sort of digressions that run rampant in the novel’s first 100 or so pages, and so finally allow us to get close to what Sabbath has been dodging: “He had arrived at the loneliest moment of his life” (p. 438).
This evolution in the structure of the sections—from chaotic digression to longer, more penetrating scenes--is echoed by Roth’s evolving use of the third person narrator. This narrator is so close to Sabbath that that I kept picturing him (definitely not a her!) as a little devil on the man’s left shoulder, listening to his innermost thoughts and guiding us through his “turbulent inner talkathon.” As the novel progresses, the narrator tries on and discards various formats, including a brief foray into Joycean stream of consciousness (p. 195), as well as journal entries (p. 263), letters (p. 408), and imagined obituaries
(p. 191).* Early on, he also occasionally lapses into first person. With each successive section, as the narrative settles down, the line between third and first person blurs, and the narrator merges with Sabbath for longer and longer stretches. Why not write the entire novel in the first person? Is Sabbath too sex-obsessed, too depraved, even for Philip Roth to give voice to directly? Is Sabbath too much like the author? In the novel’s final section, when the narrator slows down to record the two remarkable scenes with Fish and Drenka on her deathbed, we finally understand how lonely Sabbath really is. At that point, the novel is as much a first person narrative as not. We are inside Mickey Sabbath.

49 LOVE LANE - Section 2

This section of the novel was sent on March 15...

On the way home, as dark clouds rumbled toward us over the hills, we were nearly run over. I was pushing the stroller up Love Lane, with the lake and beach at my back, leaning into it and staring down at the pockmarked road, when over the crest of the hill came a faded red Cadillac. There was a blind spot at the top, where drivers couldn’t see over the crest, so it was a dangerous spot to walk. I jerked the stroller onto the side of the road, and watched the driver’s eyes widen as he passed just inches away. He braked without fully stopping and shouted out, “Sorry!” before continuing down the hill and turning onto the lake road. I wanted to holler something cutting, but my throat was too tight. I checked the stroller, expecting to find Daisy terrified, but she was sound asleep. From far off came the deep tympani of thunder. I pushed the stroller up the hill and paused at the top, out of breath. I’d never seen the car before, nor the driver. He struck me as young to be behind the wheel of an old Cadillac—mid-30s, maybe, with dark, stringy hair. He probably lived across the lake, where there were still lots of people we hadn’t met.
Perhaps because of this incident, by the time we arrived home I was less determined to share with Abby what Mrs. Schwinn had told me. Maybe if Abby had been awake, instead of sleeping so soundly on the bed, the momentum of the encounter might have carried me in that direction. But seeing her there, with her mouth open and her breath pouring out in grunts and snores, I felt like I wanted this to myself. She was not very interested in the Dead Baby Story, anyway. Whenever I brought it up she sighed and rolled her eyes.
Daisy was still asleep, so I carried her into her room and set her in the crib. She let out a little moan and rolled onto her side. I stood there for a while and watched her.
“What about you?” I whispered. “Are you interested in the Dead Baby Story?”
Her eyes pulsed under their papery lids. When she slept, she went somewhere deeper than us grown-ups. What do one-year-olds dream about? Was she seeing the dead squirrel? Her little hands were balled into fists. I reached down and touched her smooth cheek.
Sometimes when I watched Daisy sleeping I was overcome with fear. How on earth was I supposed to take care of this helpless creature? She couldn’t walk (though she could crawl), she couldn’t speak more than a few nonsense words, she could barely feed herself and even then half the food ended up on the floor. It was hard to imagine she would ever learn how to use the toilet, never mind some day grow up and meet a man and have her own kids. When Daisy was born, the midwife handed me this red, wrinkled monkey who stared up at me with a stupefied expression. Daisy was just as shocked as I was. And our relationship had not changed, with both of us wary of the other, just waiting for something to go terribly wrong. It wasn’t that I expected her to disappoint me, but that I was sure I’d disappoint her. And sometimes, when I looked into her disconcertingly piercing eyes, it seemed she was sure I’d disappoint her, too.
That first year with Daisy. The wailing in the middle of the night, that guttural cry, more like a small farm animal than a human being. It cut through my sleep like a corroded blade, and even though it was Abby who did all the heavy lifting—the endless breastfeeding!—I felt exhausted all the time. When I went back to work that Fall (Daisy was born during the school’s summer vacation, thank God), I had difficulty concentrating. My students would ask me questions and I stood before them like a hollow, papier-mâché version of myself. It sounds like I’m blaming the baby for what happened that first year, but I’m not. Not all new fathers, however tired and anxious, end up making out with a seventeen year-old girl.
Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the window screens. Rain started pinging on the roof. I went around the house shutting the windows, leaving them open an inch for air to circulate. Then I checked in on Abby. She lay in the exact same position, mouth open, chest rising and dropping. I thought about crawling in beside her. The room was dark, rain fell like silver wires. But something stopped me. She looked so scrawny there, in her baggy jeans and t-shirt. Sometimes I worried she might break in two just from the force of gravity. When we’d met, ten years earlier, she’d been so sturdy, on the cusp of graduating from law school, her back strong from hauling around all those books and ideas. Three years later, we married. Six more years and Daisy came along, and it was as if some of the life had poured out of her in the birthing room along with the blood and water. She quit her job to stay at home with the baby, willing to live on my teacher’s salary for a few years, and look what I went and did.
Okay Peterson. That was her actual name. Not a nickname, she was quick to point out. Her parents were bohemian types with funny ideas. Her little brother was named Cymbal. Okay always pretended to be annoyed by her name but I suspected she liked it, especially when it prompted interest from boys.
She was a very mature seventeen. In her plaid uniform skirt and white blouse she was a grown man’s fantasy of a school girl in bloom, pleats flapping against her smooth thighs as she stalked the halls of St. Lucy’s Academy. Her black hair fell over her face so that she was always flipping it back, giving quick glimpses of her pale face, thin lips, green eyes. From behind the waterfall of hair she watched others as they watched her.
I was directing the school play, an original drama written by one of my students. Okay was playing the lead character, a drug addict living in a fleabag hotel populated by the usual skid row residents. It was a decent little play, given the age of the author. The characters were stereotypes but there were some surprises and a touching ending. Okay was great in the role. She managed to put aside her schoolgirl glamour and project the sad, desperate part of herself.
There were some long rehearsals after school, sometimes into the evening. Okay was always lingering after the others had gone, asking questions about her character. Why is she so into drugs, Mr. Hammond? Where are her parents? Does she believe in God? Other girls had had crushes on me. I never took it more seriously than students who were angry at me for giving them a bad grade. It was part of the job. I would answer Okay’s questions patiently and then shoo her home. Then I would go home myself to find the apartment in disarray, with Daisy squalling and a depressed Abby thrilled to step aside and let daddy take over. Some nights, when Daisy had finally fallen asleep, and Abby lay there snoring, I’d think of Okay and wonder.
On the night of dress rehearsal, the performance was a mess. I kept the cast late, going over the scenes, making changes, fixing problems. When we were finally finished they all went home except for Okay, who volunteered to help me clean up and prepare for opening night. While we swept the stage and fine-tuned the set she told me she was learning a lot and thought maybe she wanted to be an actress. I told her that was great, and she asked if I could help her find a good college program. By the time we were finished talking the stage had long been prepped and we were sitting on the ratty sofa that was part of the set. I told her she was very terrific in the role. She told me she couldn’t do it without me. I told her that was nonsense. She told me I was her favorite teacher. I said I was flattered. She stretched out her long legs and pulled aside her hair. It was like I was drunk. I could feel my thickened blood struggling through my veins. And she could tell. She laughed. What’s so funny? I asked. Would it be bad if we kissed? she asked. Yes, I said. Do you want to be bad? she asked.
To kiss someone new after ten years. Every hair on my body stood up and cheered. I tried not to listen to Abby’s off-stage voice: No! Meanwhile, Okay latched herself onto me like she’d never let go. I remembered being seventeen, half a lifetime ago, and the bottomless need. I knew I couldn’t fill that. After a long time, during which I allowed Okay to rub her hands across my chest and belly and lap, I managed to push her away. Oh please, she said. Her face was red, her thin lips swollen. I stood up and looked down on her and said I couldn’t, not now, not later. This was awkward with that obvious lump in my pants. She tried to interrupt but when I mentioned my wife, my daughter—that word still felt foreign in my mouth—she went quiet. I told her to go home and study her lines.

4. Goodnight Nobody

We were headed over to the Johnstons’ for dinner. Abby baked an apple pie, which I carried in both my hands, having been warned not to tip it (the juice would leak out the sides), while Abby carried Daisy.
The Johnstons’ house had been added on to over the years, but unlike Jerry Winters’s place some thought had gone into the additions. From the road the two-story structure appeared cohesive, as if it had been constructed all at once, but as we approached up the gravel driveway I could make out the former chimney line and the difference between the upstairs and downstairs windows. Up close like this there was a shabbiness that, for some shameful reason, I found gratifying. The front yard, which, like ours, rolled gently down from the house to a stone wall, was haphazardly gardened, with sections here and there devoted to flowers covered by a thin, nearly invisible plastic netting.
We climbed some uneven stone steps to the front door. Still holding the pie in both hands, I pushed the doorbell with my elbow.
“Did you hear it ring?” I asked.
“Push it again,” Abby said.
“Let’s see if someone comes.”
I stood on my toes and peered through the small square of glass in the door. I saw a sparsely furnished living room tinted a fading pink by the early evening sun. Beyond that a square of yellow light fell across the carpet, perhaps from the kitchen.
“You have to push it hard,” Abby said.
“I thought I did.”
“Maybe you have to lean into it.”
“Or maybe it’s broken.”
“So knock.”
I slipped a palm beneath the pie tin to free up a hand.
“Careful with that, please.”
Just as I was about to knock, the door swung open, and there stood Monica Johnston in cut-off jeans and a gingham top that fell short of her waist.
“Hi!” Abby shouted. “We weren’t sure if the bell rang.”
“It rang,” Monica said. She stood there, blocking the doorway. Her belly was flat and tan. There was a gold hoop in her navel.
“Your mom invited us for dinner?” Abby said.
“Uh-huh.” The girl stepped aside and smiled as I passed. Had she noticed me staring at her midriff?
“Welcome, welcome!” Frannie cried out as she emerged from the kitchen. She wore a long, pale green apron with World’s Sexiest Chef emblazoned across her perky chest. “Oh, you didn’t need to bring that,” she said, grabbing the pie from my hands before I could warn her to be careful. Without spilling a drop, she leaned in and kissed me on the lips. Her mouth tasted sweet. Then she kissed Abby, also on the lips.
“Look at that little angel!” she said, grabbing Daisy’s face with her free hand. The baby wore a white cotton dress with dancing blue elephants, her thin blonde hair combed back and held in place by a matching blue barrette. For someone who couldn’t care less about what he wore himself, I was very attentive to Daisy’s appearance. I was proud of her cute looks and determined to have her be my ambassador. Frannie squeezed the baby’s cheeks and said, “Just look at her, Monica, honey. She is just luscious.”
Monica ignored her mother and ran up a flight of carpeted stairs. I could not help but notice the round moons peaking out of her cutoffs.
Frannie bent into Daisy’s face and said, “Don’t ever grow into a teenager, little girl.” Daisy grinned, showing two tiny upper teeth, and tried to gab Frannie’s nose. Frannie giggled and said, “Would y’all like a glass of wine? I just opened a bottle of Chardonnay and it’s yummy.”
We followed her into the kitchen, which was double the size of ours. Abby wore the look of a bag lady gazing into the window of a fancy restaurant. “What a beautiful kitchen.”
“You’ll have to excuse the mess. I can’t seem to cook without destroying the place. Arnie’s always threatening to kill me.”
There were dirty dishes and bowls piled in the double sink, but other than that the room was sparkling.
“Where is the man of the house?” I asked. We still had not officially met. I’d seen him coming and going, but never to say hello.
“Oh, he’ll be here shortly,” Frannie said. “I told him I’d make a capon out of him if he was late.”
She poured two glasses of wine and refilled her own. I was more of a beer man, but I thanked her anyway and held up my glass in a toast. “Cheers.”
“To neighbors,” Frannie said. “Now you sit right down while I finish up here.” She waved us toward a set of tall stools lining a large, tile-topped island.
“Can we help?” Abby asked.
“No way. You’re guests. I may try to get my useless offspring down here to lend a hand, though.”
We watched Frannie prepare a tossed salad and occasionally check on a lasagna in the oven. Daisy sat perched on Abby’s lap, fascinated by Frannie’s ceaseless activity. Our hostess didn’t seem at all bothered by the heat in the kitchen, which was turning my underarms swampy. To counteract this sense of wilting I quickly drained two glasses of the sickly sweet wine.
While she dervished around the kitchen, Frannie filled us in on neighborhood gossip. Carol Howser, a single mother who lived on the other side of Jerry Winters’s place, was a heavy drinker. Daryl and Rose Pierce were a “mixed” couple, with one little boy who had the most gorgeous skin tone. “Poor Mrs. Schwinn” lost her husband ten years ago when a car ran him down on Love Lane.
“Really?” I said. “I almost got run down there myself.”
“It’s a terrible spot,” Frannie said. “In front of Carol Howser’s place.”
“When was that?” Abby asked me.
“A few days ago.”
“With Daisy?” There was that look—the one you give a child abuser. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“You were asleep when we got home,” I said, making it her fault.
“Mr. Schwinn was such a mean old man,” Frannie said, coming to my rescue. “Nobody minded much when it happened.”
“You’re terrible!” Abby laughed.
“Well, it’s true. Especially Mrs. Schwinn.”
Frannie went on to regale us with stories of Mr. Schwinn’s dislike of black people and cats. Throughout all this I could feel the wine seeping into my brain.
“Hey, speaking of neighborhood gossip,” I said. Abby turned and gave me the hairy eyeball. She knew what was coming. “We heard this crazy story about our house the other day.”
Frannie was peering deep into her oven. I could feel the heat all the way across the kitchen. Why someone without air conditioning would bake a lasagna in the middle of summer was beyond me.
“Do you know anything about a murder being committed there?” I asked.
Frannie continued to stare at her lasagna. “How on earth are you supposed to know when one of these things is done?”
“Our yard guy told us that a baby was killed there. Some crazy lunatic did it.” I was trying to make it sound sort of harmless—just more gossip.
Frannie slammed the oven door. “I don’t know anything about a lunatic next door.”
“You guys weren’t living here then?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Abby nudged me with her knee. I smiled, enjoying this switch—she was usually the one asking all the probing questions.
“So you knew them?” I asked.
“Vaguely.” Frannie’s face, normally open and warm, had shut down. “We hadn’t been here very long when all that happened.”
“Carl is obsessed with the story,” Abby said. “It seems a bit morbid for a nice occasion like this. Don’t you think?” She smiled at me, but the muscles around her mouth were taut.
“I’m just trying to get the details straight,” I said.
“Well, I don’t know much more than you do,” Frannie said.
“But you did know them?”
Frannie was about to say something when the kitchen door swung open and in came Arnie Johnston, tall and wide-shouldered in his work shirt and oil-smeared trousers.
“Hey, darlin’,” Frannie said, perking up as she went to him and gave him a kiss on the cheek. She introduced us, and Arnie strode over and shook our hands.
“You’re home oily,” I said. Frannie laughed in her stagey way while Arnie forced a smile. His face was handsome but cold. I got the feeling he wasn’t thrilled to have guests in his home. He barely even acknowledged Daisy.
“Why don’t you run upstairs and change, sweetie?” Frannie said. “And drag those children of yours down here while you’re at it. Dinner’s almost ready.”
Arnie obeyed without a word, the strong, silent type. When he was gone, Frannie said in a stage whisper, “Don’t mention the murdered baby thing around Arnie.”
“Really? Why not?”
“Just don’t bring it up, okay?”
During dinner, with another glass or two of Chardonnay sloshing around my cranium, I kept wondering what made Frannie so anxious about the Dead Baby Story. Arnie sat at the head of the dining room table, methodically cutting his lasagna with a knife and shoveling it into his mouth. He drank a beer, which I coveted, but he made no offer to share. In retaliation, I drank another glass of wine. The kids were chips off the old block, silently boring into their dinner like small prairie animals determined to finish their meals before some hawk swooped down and carried them away. Ellis had his father’s closely-spaced eyes and clenched jaw. Monica, who sat directly across from me, resembled her mother so directly that she could have been pulled from her like putty. Her face was unblemished and radiant, even behind her scowl. Before she lifted her fork she would swoop a strand of her long blonde hair behind a perfectly formed ear. As she chewed, her bowed lips squirmed daintily beneath her slightly upturned nose. She barely looked up from her plate, but when she did she caught me staring. I looked away, toward Daisy, who sat in an old high chair that Arnie had dragged up from the basement. She was playing with a lasagna noodle, her face smeared with tomato sauce. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Monica watching me. I was a little afraid of her.
“So how’s the oil business, Arnie?” I asked.
“Steady,” he said in between bites. I considered counting how many chews he gave each mouthful, but I’d had enough wine that any numbers beyond ten melted into each another.
“How long have you been with OilCo?”
He looked up at a corner of the ceiling. “Twenty-one years.”
“Twenty-two,” Frannie said.
“Mm mm. Twenty-one.”
“You started the day after our fifth anniversary, remember?” Frannie turned to Abby and added, “Seems like yesterday.”
“You’ve been married twenty-six years?” Abby asked.
“Excuse me,” Arnie said, pushing back from the table.
“Oh no you don’t,” Frannie said.
“Be right back.” Arnie walked through the kitchen to the back door.
“Can you believe that man still smokes cigarettes?”
“That’s not good,” Abby said.
“Maybe I’ll go keep him company,” I said, rising. I didn’t particularly want to spend time with this stoney man, but I was pretty drunk now and half-convinced I could break him down like a wild colt. The ladies watched me go as if I were leaving to walk across hot coals.
Arnie stood out on the back patio, smoking a cigarette. There was a glass-topped table and chairs beneath an umbrella, a massive gas grill, and, beyond the patio, the familiar lawn with the swing set and folding chair. A fat squirrel scampered across the top rail of the fence.
“Hey,” I said.
He was already half-way through the cigarette, as if he’d burned it away with one long inhale.
“Nice yard,” I said. “Nice grill.”
“Thanks.”
Suddenly conscious of my hands, I wished I’d brought my wine glass. Arnie puffed away and stared off into the distance.
“So you’ve been here twenty-six years?”
He shook his head. “Longer.”
“Oh. I thought—“
“Fran is mixed up, as usual.”
Another pause. He tossed the still-smoking butt out onto the lawn.
“Wanna get high?” he asked, pulling a small pipe and a pill bottle from his shirt pocket.
“Really?”
He unscrewed the bottle and removed a tiny bit of green herb. He gently tapped the pot into the pipe bowl, screwed the bottle top back on, and produced a lighter.
“Surprised?” he said.
“A little.”
He tilted the lighter flame into the bowl and inhaled. He held his breath for a moment, then let the smoke roll from his mouth. He offered the pipe to me.
“Why not?” It had been years. I inhaled as Arnie relit the bowl. My throat burned, but I managed not to cough until I’d held the smoke in for a few seconds. Then it roared out in a loud, rolling bark that left my eyes watering.
“Thanks, man,” I croaked.
He lit himself another bowlful. The sky seemed to take on a slightly different hue.
“So,” I said. “You’ve probably seen a lot of folks come and go.”
“Some. You want another hit?”
“No thanks.” My head felt like it was filled with helium. “That’s strong stuff.”
“I get it from some guy across the lake.”
I felt the wine slowly burning off under the heat of the pot. For what seemed like an hour I watched the fat squirrel leap from the fence to a tree and expertly barber pole its way to the uppermost branches. It was the most impressive feat of athleticism I’d ever witnessed.
“So,” I finally said, “how many have come and gone in our house?”
He looked over at 49 Love Lane, just beyond the fence and a few wispy shrubs.
“Quite a few.”
“Yeah?”
“It being haunted and all.”
I started laughing. “Excuse me?”
“They didn’t tell you that?”
“No, they didn’t.”
“I think they’re supposed to tell you that sort of thing.”
“Really? By law?”
“Well, they don’t have to tell you the place is haunted, maybe, but they have to tell you there was a violent incident there.”
Something about the phrase must have cracked me up because I felt my face erupting into a childish grin. “What kind of violent incident?” I asked.
Arnie proceeded to recount pretty much the same story that Anders Lehigh had told: the screwed-up parents, the ten year-old boy, the baby. But unlike Lehigh, Arnie seemed to enjoy telling the story. Every time I said “Really?” or “Holy shit!” he relished my shock. I wondered why Frannie had warned me not to say anything to him about the murder. Maybe it was less that the story disturbed him than the story excited him.
“Did you know the family well?” I asked.
“Not really.”
“Do you remember their names?”
He shook his head no. “Been a long time. Before the kids, even.”
“I wonder what happened to them.”
He shrugged. “The idiot went to jail, I know that. The mom and the boy moved away somewhere.” As he spoke, he headed toward the door. He was apparently done talking about it. I followed him inside and into the kitchen. As I walked I noticed that my movements and thoughts were slightly disjointed. I was in a movie with the sound out of sync.
Arnie paused at the refrigerator and grabbed another beer.
“Is it really haunted?” I asked quietly. I could hear the women buzzing in the next room.
“Some of the folks who’ve lived there say so.”
“They saw things?”
“Saw things. Heard things. Whatever. Talk to Frannie. She’s the one they told this crap to.”
“Can I have one of those beers?” I asked.
He looked surprised. “Sure. I guess so.”
“And where’s your john?”
He handed me a beer and pointed toward a door in the hall off the kitchen.
The bathroom was done up in red: red sink, red wallpaper, red toilet seat. It was like stepping into the interior of my eyeballs. Over the commode hung a sign done up in the style of the Whitman’s sampler: If it’s yellow, be mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down. This is what happens when you don’t have city water, I thought. Another, smaller, sign was framed and propped up on the tank: If you sprinkle when you tinkle, be a sweetie & wipe the seatie!
I didn’t buy that Arnie couldn’t remember the names of the people next door. He may have been pushing fifty but he had the same expression a sixteen year-old has when lying. I’d seen it hundreds of times. The eyes go all darty, looking everywhere at once.
What was he leaving out?
*
Later that night, back at home, Daisy was having trouble settling down, so I sat her on my lap and read Goodnight Moon, her current favorite. I was still a little high and having a hard time reading. I found the book’s lack of punctuation especially maddening. Where were the goddamn commas? I felt like an obsessive-compulsive in a roomful of half-open drawers. Something else about the book provoked anxiety in me: all those wide shots of the bedroom, where nothing seemed to remain in place. Where did that “quiet old lady” come from, anyway? She seemed a malevolent presence somehow. And the bunny in the bed—why did he seem to be climbing out at one point? It was like he was trying to escape this surreal prison cell. Then there was that one unnerving page, empty but for the words “Goodnight nobody.” For the first time the book struck me as the record of an existential nightmare. I read it quickly, eager to finish, but then Daisy turned the pages back to the beginning and grunted her version of “Again.”
Earlier, on the way back from the Johnstons’, I’d told Abby about getting high with Arnie. I hadn’t planned to tell her, but she knew something was up with me—I’d had a giggling fit during dessert, having remembered the signs in the bathroom—and I really wanted to surprise her with this revelation about uptight Arnie Johnston.
“You were out there smoking dope?”
“Can you believe Arnie’s a pothead?”
“I can’t believe you.”
“What?”
“How old are you, anyway? Nineteen?”
I was just being neighborly.”
Daisy watched us closely, recognizing the smell of fire in the air, so Abby tried to keep her anger under wraps, but I could see she the flames right behind her eyes.
“No wonder you were acting so stupid,” she said, unlocking the door to the house. She didn’t talk to me after that except to say she was tired and would I please read to Daisy. “If you can see straight, that is.”
After I’d read Goodnight Moon five times, Daisy finally fell asleep in my arms. I sat there in the chair listening to Daisy breathe and Abby turning magazine pages in the bedroom. My brain felt tired, like a muscle after exercise. I shut my eyes and fell into a brief dream about the fat squirrel in the Johnstons’ yard. The squirrel sat in my lap and while I stoked its soft, white belly it looked up and said, “Be a sweetie.” When I woke up I had no idea what time it was. Daisy lay sprawled across my legs. I shook the sleep from my head, carried Daisy into her room and set her in the crib. I stood there in the dark for a while, remembering what Arnie had said about the house being haunted. I thought again of the night Abby heard the baby crying.
From the bedroom Abby called to me in a heightened whisper: “Carl! Carl!”
She had shut off the lamp, but in the light from the living room I could see she wasn’t in bed.
“Carl.”
She was kneeling at the window wearing one of my old t-shirts.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Shhh.” She waved me over.
“What’re you doing?”
She pointed out the window toward the Johnstons’ yard. The night was dark beneath a moonless sky. I could barely make out the swing set poles and the fence just a few yards away.
“What?”
“Look.”
As my eyes started to adjust, I thought I could make out some movement in the yard. Something pale. The darkness seemed to be reactivating the THC in my system. It was as though everything was behind a scrim.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Listen.”
I heard crickets and the insect buzz of a television somewhere. There was also a soft, cooing sound.
“Is that a fox or something?” I asked. Ms. Schwinn had told us that foxes occasionally roamed the neighborhood.
“Look closer, you idiot.”
Some pale animal in the yard was moving up and down. Maybe it was a hawk feasting on a rabbit.
“It’s the Johnstons,” Abby said, giggling.
I squinted until my dry eyes were about to pop out of their sockets. The hawk slowly morphed into a pair of buttocks.
“What the--?”
On either side of the pale ass I could now make out two long legs.
“Can you believe it?” Abby whispered.
I wanted to turn away but I couldn’t. There was that electric thrill that I used to get as a teenager looking at dirty magazines. Even more exciting than the sight was the sound of Frannie Johnston cooing rhythmically, the pitch reaching higher and higher as Arnie gyrated atop her.
Next to me, Abby was breathing heavily, heat rolling off her. I put my hand on the nape of her neck. Her skin was goose-pimpled. She pushed her hand beneath my shirt and rubbed my back.
Arnie’s ass pumped away while Frannie let out quick bursts if air. I kissed Abby’s ear. She groaned. As I sucked on her earlobe I imagined a clearer picture of the action: Frannie naked, her face red and sweaty, her breasts jiggling as Arnie pounded away. I reached under Abby’s t-shirt and cupped her breast. The nipple was like a rock.
“Oh God!” Frannie cried out in a voice that didn’t even sound like hers. This was followed by a low grunt as Arnie ground himself on top of her. I moved my lips down to Abby’s neck.
“Holy crap,” she grunted.
“Mmmm.”
“That’s not Frannie.”
The pale ass was covered up now. I could barely make out the dark shape of a man standing in the yard. Beneath, still lying on the grass, was a half-nude woman.
“That’s not her?” I asked.
“I think that’s Monica.”
I peered into the blackness. The woman pulled on a pair of shorts. All I could see now were her long legs.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Shh.”
“Who’s the guy, then?”
“Shhh.”
They were talking softly but I couldn’t make out the words. The man, or boy, lay down beside Monica. There was a girlish giggle.
“That’s her,” Abby said. “That’s Monica.”
“Why would she do that right in the back yard like that?”
Abby stood and went to the bed. I watched for a while longer, but the two figures did not move. Their words blended in with the sound of the crickets.
I checked the clock—1:42—then joined Abby and draped a leg across her. “Arnie would kill her if he knew,” I said. I kissed her ear, but she did not make a sound. “What’s wrong?”
“I think that was Arnie.”
“What?” I sat up. In the light that filtered in from the living room her face was hard and cold.
“I think that was Arnie,” she repeated.
“Arnie and--?”
“I don’t know.”
“But—“
“I don’t know, Carl.”
I lay back down and stared up at the ceiling. My high was gone, dissipated by the idea of Arnie and Monica. I climbed from bed, went out to the living room and shut out the light. Back in the bedroom I looked out at the window again, but the figures were gone.

CRAFT ESSAY #! - Shepard/Prose

Craft Essay #1:

Like You’d Understand, Anyway

via Reading Like a Writer

Words

While reading Jim Shepard’s story “The Zero Meter Diving Team,” having just read Francine Prose’s chapter on “Words” in Reading Like a Writer, I found myself underlining words and phrases like crazy: to bear up, crash cart, murderousness, tinted, colorations, enraged tenderness…. And these are just from the story’s first three pages! If Prose’s declaration that “language is the medium we use in much the same way a composer uses notes” is correct, then what kind of music is Shepard composing in this story? To me, it sounds like one of those modern Eastern European symphonies filled with jarring notes and strange percussion while still maintaining a pleasing, even catchy, melody.
While keeping our focus on words, let’s start with his decision to divide the story into separately titled sections. These titles range from the simple and explanatory (“Loss,” “That Warm Night in April”) to the mock Soviet intellectual (“The Individual Citizen in the Vanguard”). Like the words so carefully chosen in the story itself, these titles reveal the state of mind of the narrator, who has lost a brother to radiation poisoning after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster (another brother nearly died as well, and becomes an invalid). Boris is Chief Engineer of the Department of Nuclear Energy, and thus feels responsible for Mikhail’s death. As a scientist, he knows the lingo of that world (radionuclides, roentgens, etc.), but mostly his words communicate guilt, loss and anger. Shepard finds the correct balance between the two poles—the cold science and the hot emotion—through word choice. Let’s look at the opening paragraph (titled “Guilt Guilt Guilt,” a repetition later echoed by the dying Mikhail’s sarcastic “Tragedy tragedy tragedy”):
Here’s what it’s like to bear up under the burden of so much guilt: everywhere you drag yourself you leave a trail. Late at night, you gaze back and view an upsetting record of where you’ve been. At the medical center where they brought my brothers, I stood banging my head against a corner of a crash cart. When one of the nurses saw me, I said, “There, that’s better. That kills the thoughts before they grow.”

Boris begins with the poetic image of the guilty party “leaving a trail,” snail-like, wherever he “drags” himself. Still, the words are sturdy--to bear up, burden, drag, gaze—anchoring the metaphor to the page. Then we get the important information about the hospital and the poisoned brothers, and all of a sudden Boris is banging his head “against a corner of a crash cart.” That crash cart is key. The concussive sound of the words conveys all we need to know. Finally, there is that line of dialogue, spoken to the startled nurse. Boris has returned to the metaphorical and poetic (methinks Shepard has read Jesus’ Son), with the word kills embedded like a bomb.
Ka-boom.

Sentences

In Reading Like a Writer, Prose considers the long-flowing yet easily followed sentences of such masters as Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf, as well as the shorter, punchier sentences of Hemingway. Jim Shepard uses both styles, often within the same story. Check out the opening sentence of “Proto-Scorpions of the Silurium”:
It’s a crappy rainy morning in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and I’m home from seventh grade with a sore throat and my parents and brother are fighting and I’m trying every so often to stay out of it.

First, he presents a wonderful amount of information in this sentence. But let’s look at its construction. There are three connective and’s linking four potential sentences, with no commas separating them. This perfectly captures the young narrator’s state of mind as he deals (in present tense) with his dysfunctional family on a claustrophobic rainy day. It’s as though the narrator is on one of those unpleasant, exhausting carnival rides, the kind that leaves him queasy. Then comes the follow-up sentence: “Jonathan Winters is on Merv Griffin, doing his improv thing with a stick.” We now know the time frame (early ‘70s), and we get another glimpse at this kid’s jaded, precocious personality. A few paragraphs on, the overwhelmed boy tries another tack with a series of short declarative sentences:
My brother and I are playing 500 rummy. He’s kicking my ass. For a while I was kicking his. He’s quiet like he’s trying to concentrate. He hates when my father goes out of his way to do something for him.

Here we get the sense the narrator is trying to slam on the brakes of that nauseating carnival ride, or perhaps armoring up for some inevitable fracas (which, indeed, occurs). Later, just before all hell breaks loose, he creates a palpable feeling of unease with this killer: “He sits there with his eyes on me, setting one molar on another.” Reading this is like having the dental hygienist scrape some stubborn plaque off your teeth.
In what seems to be a companion story in the collection, “Courtesy for Beginners” (though the sibling birth order has been reversed, with the crazy brother now younger than the narrator), the teenage narrator opens with: “Summer camp: here’s how bad summer camp was.” (Notice the similarity to the opening line of “The Zero Meter Diving Team.”) Why the first two words and colon? Why not start with “Here’s how bad…”? For that matter, why not start with the following sentence, which begins “The day I arrived…”? But Shepard knows what he’s doing. This kid needs some distance from the red-hot nuclear core of the story (his loneliness, his alienation from his family and peers, his terror about his brother’s insanity), and this is achieved with a one-step-back approach. As I read the collection, I kept getting the impression that the author himself is working through his own heavy personal issues—a dangerous test tube full of unstable elements that requires distancing, which he achieves with these intricate sentences and other effects.
Finally, note how Shepard creates an authentic voice for this young boy with such sentences as “It was like 104.” The use of like and goes (instead of says) throughout the stories plants us firmly in the mind of a teenager.

Paragraphs

I loved the observation made by Rex Stout’s detective (as related in Reading Like a Writer) that a sentence’s implied meaning can change depending on whether it’s at the end of a paragraph or the beginning of a new one. This seems obvious, but when you read Shepard’s stories with this idea in mind, you pay closer attention as a reader and as a writer. In the story “The First South Central Australian Expedition,” the explorer narrator, recording his increasingly terrifying observations while on a doomed expedition into the outback, occasionally (and often unknowingly) signals a sense of dread not only through his choice of details but through his placement of those details in a paragraph. For example, in the entry dated “April 10,” the narrator summarizes a conversation he had earlier in the day with the other expedition officers about their complementary virtues. It’s an optimistic entry, written early in the journey, with the diarist clearly pleased by his choice of fellow explorers. At the end of this one-paragraph entry, he then includes the following sentence: “A short while after our discussion, one of the men shot what Mander-Jones informs us is a new sort of butcher-bird, very scarce and wild.” Leaving aside the symbolism of this weird bird and its demise (Coleridge’s albatross comes to mind), why on earth does this detail arrive at the end of the same paragraph as the cheery conversation? Why not give it its own paragraph? The author (Shepard) appears to be signaling to us (if not to his protagonist) that there is some sort of powerful link between the two. The reader is left less with an appreciation of the expedition’s personnel than with the taste of dead bird in his mouth.
Shepard goes for the opposite effect in the story “Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak.” The narrator, a high school football player, is talking about the sense of tradition his coach engenders, and how his vicious friend Wainwright is “the main upholder of that tradition as far as everybody else is concerned. Players for other teams: they’re wearing another color and they’re on his field. He takes it personally.” Then, a new paragraph: “I try to ride that wave but there are mean dogs and mad dogs, and it’s not that easy to make the leap.” Here, the narrator, recognizing that he may be mean but is not mad, separates himself from Wainwright by creating a new space—a new paragraph.

Narration

We cannot approach the topic of “Narration” without acknowledging the breathtaking scope of Shepard’s choice of narrators. There are themes to be found—troubled teens, doomed explorers, ancient Greeks and Romans, all of whom are struggling with family issues or the crush of history, or both. But, from a writer’s standpoint, what boggles the mind is the author’s magnificent devotion to authenticity. This is attained by the use of language (listen to the “Russian-y” placement of the prepositional clause in this sentence from “The Zero Meter Diving Team”: “Mikhail for a full year carried himself as though he’d been petrified by a loud noise”), by vivid details (from “My Aeschylus”: “The plain, empty of trees and left fallow for grazing, smells of the wild fennel that gives it its name”), combined with what could only have been an obsessive regimen of research.
In her chapter on “Narration” (which could also be called “Point of View”), Francine Prose poses the “problematic” question Who is listening to the story? She correctly observes that most writers focus much more on who is telling the story, while forgetting the listener. I find it interesting and charming that she had to “trick” herself into writing her early novels by having the narrator actually tell the story to another character—an old-fashioned framing device hardly ever used anymore.
Jim Shepard’s stories, all of which are composed in the first person, do not go so far as to contrive a storytelling situation (two people telling tales by a fire, or someone confessing to a priest or a cop or a shrink), but two of the eleven stories do make use of a journal format in which the “writer” tells his/her tale for the sake of posterity, and many of the other stories use techniques that create the sense of a storyteller with a definite listener in mind.
The “journal” stories (“The First South Central Australian Expedition” and “Eros 7”) are straightforward, dated entries revealing the day’s events. And because it also features titled sections, “The Zero Meter Diving Team” has the feel of a story constructed for the benefit of an audience (why else label those sections?). More challenging, if we’re looking to discern the “listener,” are the other tales, which we could easily surmise are addressed “out into the ozone,” as Prose puts it, but which do contain fascinating clues that the narrators are speaking to specific listeners. The narrator of “Hadrian’s Wall,” a scribe (aha!) for the Roman army in the fourth or fifth century, introduces himself—“I am Felicius Victor, son of Annius Equester”—the way one would if speaking to a listener. The same goes for “My Aeschylus,” which begins “I am Aeschylus son of Euphoion of Eleusis.” The sense of a predetermined listener is also implied by these narrators’ unusually frequent posing of questions (from “My Aeschylus”: “Who’s trained me? Who’s pruned my independence? Who’s stopped my mouth?”) and the relative sparseness of dialogue in favor of summary (another trait of oral storytelling).
Did Shepard consciously decide to construct these stories as if the narrators were telling tales to particular listeners? Did he need to trick himself, like Francine Prose, into getting permission to tell stories? I doubt it. But I do get the feeling that he consciously created distancing techniques in order to insulate his narrators from the crippling truths of their lives.
A dramatic example of this is in the collection’s concluding story, “Sans Farine,” which is told by an executioner during the aftermath of the French Revolution. Toward the end of the story, Sanson, overwhelmed by the desertion of his wife and numbed by the literal buckets of blood he is responsible for, reverts to the third person, as if he is unable to inhabit his own skin anymore. I was reminded of poor Bob Dole, who kept referring to himself in the third person while running for president in 1996. Here was a man who was not comfortable in the role of candidate and so needed to create for himself a separate, perhaps thicker-skinned, entity on the campaign trail. So, too, does Sanson the executioner split off from himself so as not to face head on (no pun intended!) what he’s unprepared to deal with. It is a beautiful and fitting way to conclude these stories, all of which are told to us by people who are on the edge in one way or another, but who so often are paralyzed by fate, so that, like the sad, lonely astronaut of “Eros 7,” they turn their backs on all the world has to offer.