The D Line

It always sounds like a train is arriving in Estación 9 de Julio. The ground rumbles and people around you pick up speed. They think their train is coming. The C, D, and B all connect here; the rumbling could be coming from a track above or below you as they all cross under the obelisk.

Today it is your train and you hop onto it, afraid the long beep will sound and you will get hit by the closing door. It happened last week and you said Ow, which showed that you weren’t from here. An Argentine would have said Ay. You felt clumsy and stared at your size 12 shoes; you tower over the other men in this country like you never towered at home. The Argentines, you have noted, go for a crisp side part if they are older. Women pull their hair back and pin it three or four inches from their foreheads with bobby pines—it makes them look like a brontosaurus, that ridge they work so hard to make. The teenagers sweep it all into their eyes, a dyed black wave sweeping sideways over their heads. Androgyny is in, which perhaps explains why thinness is in as well.

You note all this on the subway. That is how bored you are. The subway rocks back and forth like a ship in choppy water and the people sway like kelp—a few stumble and they too are clearly not from here; maybe they are from the provincia. Today you are late, which is another way of being on time. Still, you check your watch often and then pull your sleeve anxiously over it again. It’s a nice watch and people may be watching. You haven’t said Ow or anything else since you got on the subway, but they know you and your size 12 feet don’t belong. It is a sixth sense that they have that causes you to keep getting the English language menu in restaurants.

At Estación Bulnes, a man with no arms gets on the subway. You’ve gotten to know the different deformed people who work this subway line. The woman with the burned face, no hair, two children on her pants; the Malvinas veteran missing his left leg. But you don’t know this man. His sleeves are tucked into his pants and he carries an old cloth bag around his neck. His hair is buzzed but he has a long cue at the nape of his neck, tied with a piece of red string. You wonder who ties it for him every day. When the man begins to speak, it is in the high pitched, monotone voice of the street vendors and beggars of the city—it is almost impossible to understand what he is saying, although his tucked in sleeves and dirty alms bag around his neck say everything. You turn your face away when he walks past you, bumping between passengers like a pinball because he can’t grab on to anything to steady him.

You are relieved when, two stops later, he gets off. Then you get off a Juramento and walk the five blocks to work.

Sunday Demons

It raining outside
and I am taking tea
with my Sunday demons
while I cook rice on the stove;
sweet ají, dehydrated basil
float on top of the water,
the only spices on the shelf,
bags propped up by a jar
half full of crystallizing honey.
I use the small camp stove pot—
rice for one but enough for three
days of stir fried leftovers.
I get distracted Sunday
between reset and the next alarm,
get withered up looking at myself
from the wrong end of the telescope,
abortion of some beauty,
some Saturday night with friends
a bottle of wine and the same
searching frustration carried to—
and back home from—the bar.
Get distracted then it’s stuck to the bottom,
crunchy on top, water too low.
Its steamed itself out
leaving spice pulp on the lid.

Cherry on a Spoon

What she didn’t understand, Miriam thought, what she really didn’t understand was this stupid cherry on a spoon. The huge sculpture sat there in its lake, its bright red cherry poised happily on the grey spoon-bowl’s ridge, a symbol of Minneapolis. What about it excited people? What, exactly, was the point? She sat on the grass by the pond, head tilted upward, mulling it.

Miriam was a museum studies major, although she had started college doing studio art. During that long first year, she spent more time in the art supply store than actually making art. She loved to touch the taught canvases and read the names of all the colors of paints. Ochre seemed to promise sex, cerulean undiscovered planets—every object was expectant, waiting. But when she set up an easel in her room or in class, the brush made primitive, directionless marks, unresponsive to her oblique desire to paint something. In the hours just before an assignment was due, she would chew on the dead ends of her long brown hair or the handles of her wooden brushes. Finally, she understood why someone might throw a bucket of paint over herself and then run hard into a wall one hundred times.

But self-abuse wasn’t art.

When she expressed that opinion in her art history seminar—having by then cut her hair into a blunt bob and changed her major—the professor shook his head. “What, then, is art, Miriam?” Allowing a short pause, he then pressed the forward button on the rickety slide machine with greater than usual verve, as if having made his point.

If self abuse was art, Miriam had thought, freshman year of college had been a post-modernist masterpiece of cheap keg beer and dubious sexuality, encapsulated in the nickname that still made some of her old friends laugh. Before learning about “Black-out Sniper,” Miriam had never thought about her liaisons buffered by alcohol and darkness as being anything but normal—at least normal within the realm of freshman year. At parties everyone was drunk and looking, scanning dimly lit, crowded rooms with hopeful and later glazed eyes for another pair of eyes with the same idea. Every tasteless poster on her guy friends’ walls validated that practice. Beer Goggles, one read, getting ugly people laid for fifty years! She was under no illusions about her appearance, and was in fact more critical of herself than anyone else. She reminded herself of a painting by Goya; her face pale, eyes big, chin receding just a little, like those inbreed Spanish aristocrats. Arrested by her face, people were often surprised by the solid, almost voluptuous frame that contrasted sharply with the fragile tint of purple under her eyes.

The cartoon man on the poster gave her the thumbs up and smiled, holding his frothing pint out in a gesture of toast. Go for it, he seemed to say. So how could she be doing the wrong thing when, drunk at a party, if she met someone she liked, she stuck with him until the party was dying down, and, if he was willing, took him back to her dorm room? It was true, the guys she picked up usually turned out to be way more intoxicated than her, having proven their manliness by doing beer bongs and 40’s, and they rarely remembered her the next day. But that suited Miriam just fine—they had both gotten what they wanted, after all, and it wasn’t like anyone was watching.

Or that was what she had thought. As she was leaving a party one Saturday night, a drunk friend grabbed her elbow and whispered, “‘Black-out Sniper.’ Get it?” For a moment, she didn’t get it. She looked around her, trying to figure out what her friend was talking about. The she turned to look at the boy she was with—his drunkenness was suddenly far more apparent. Miriam felt nauseous as the heat of embarrassment mixed with the alcohol in her stomach. She left the boy standing by the door and fled to her empty dorm room, her eyes burning and itchy from tears she wasn’t yet shedding. In the silence of that night, as the alcohol wore off, Miriam’s emotions moved from shock and embarrassment to shame to anger and indignation, then back to shame that felt like anger until the emotions couldn’t be distinguished. That she should have to feel this shame was more than a betrayal of privacy. It was a betrayal of the mantra, the promise, that had helped her, helped them all, get through high school. The promise that when they got to college, the holding back, the fear of discovery, the claustrophobic family dinner table at which nothing could really be hidden, would be gone. No one would be watching them anymore.

But people were still watching.

Exhausted and still awake as the sun came into her dorm room window, Miriam decided that she was done. Done with college boys who couldn’t handle a woman taking what she wanted without becoming a needy mess afterwards; done with girls who called you a whore if you tried. After that party, Miriam stopped hooking up with guys and stopped drinking anything except for good wine. After all, she reasoned, she couldn’t be in the art community without learning to like good wine and despise the swill served at openings.

Miriam had left freshman year and the Black-out Sniper behind her, but she was still of the opinion that if you waited for a man to make the move, you would end up watching hundreds of fucking piano concerts and contracting cancer from second hand smoke in shady music venues. That was why she had sat down on Jason’s piano bench, and why she had held his hand in the light rail, and why she had finally suggested that they move from the couch to the bed.

Jason. He was probably still sitting in the coffee shop with a stupid look on his face, his forgetful fingers clutching his coffee mug.

Her eyes filled with angry tears and she was back in the sculpture garden.

Big red cherry on a spoon.

Microscopic piece of sludge, pulsing embryo stuck to the inside of her uterus.

She pulled up a clump of grass. Jason played piano at the Guthrie Theater as the rehearsal pianist. He’d been doing it ever since graduating two years earlier and he said it was like playing for an audience with cotton in its ears. No one was ever really listening. When he wasn’t needed at the theater, he played gigs in small cafes that wanted cheap but classy ambience. Then he could play whatever he liked, as they weren’t really listening either. The apartment they shared didn’t have a piano, although Miriam had offered to chip in so that they could buy one. Jason insisted that he liked having the separation from his art, or at least that was what he told Miriam if she brought it up over a rare dinner together at home. Miriam almost always had dinner at home, almost always between seven and seven thirty. Working for the Walker Art Center as a public relations lackey, her hours were much more regular than his and home was so near by it seemed stupid to spend money eating out. Their brick apartment squatted—even lurked she sometimes felt—on a small side street ten minutes from the Walker and the Guthrie, the Twin Cities twin assertions of edge in the midst of the Midwestern mild smile.

Sometimes, when Miriam sat at home alone eating, she would wonder what attracted her to Jason. They had met at one of his concerts at Augsburg College her junior and his senior year and she had been struck by his incredible stillness; no matter how rapidly his hands moved across the keyboard, his back was like a lightening rod that contained the energy at his fingertips. What she liked best about him, though, was in his eyes. The other musicians seemed to play on nerves. Miriam would find herself hoping that they wouldn’t screw up and embarrass themselves. But with Jason, she never worried; he clearly didn’t.

Miriam began actually reading the half sheets of paper that the music department stapled to the campus boards, looking for Jason’s name. At the end of the school year, she went to his senior recital and, when it was over, finally talked to him. Unlike the other faces who hovered around the edge of the piano to give their congratulations, she walked up and sat down on the bench beside him. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Miriam. You should let me take you out for a drink, to celebrate being done.”

His pale blue eyes darted from side to side, as if looking for an escape route and Miriam felt a moment of doubt. He looked smaller beside her than she had expected; was she taller than him? Perhaps all that confidence on stage left him nothing to work with in real life. Miriam worried if, once again, she had been too bold, but it was too late to get out of it, and she never enjoyed backing down was she had gotten up the nerve to do something. So Miriam gave him her best, most reassuring smile, and was relieved, if surprised, when he finally looked her in the eyes and said sure.

“I know the perfect place. They don’t check ID’s.” She sat up a little straighter beside him on the bench, daring him to back out now that he realized she too wasn’t a senior. But he just shrugged and began collecting the music off the piano.

The bar that Jason was expecting turned out to be an Indian restaurant. The lights were dim and the tables were only a few inches from the floor, surrounded by a moat with filled with cushions, masquerading as seating. Miriam dropped, gracelessly, into the hole farthest from the door and motioned for him to sit down. She had worn a black spaghetti strapped dress to the recital and it rode up what she considered her slightly-too-ample thighs.

A waiter in a loose fitting shirt, whose dreadlocks protruded from his turban in clumps, came up the table, put down a menu, and smiled at Miriam. She introduced him as her friend Todd. “He can make a ceramic vase that reaches his waist. And he’ll let me have a drink.” She picked up the menu and looked it over for a moment, before holding it out for Jason. When he didn’t take it she began flapping it at him.

“You can order,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows slightly and had to stop herself from smiling as she felt an entirely familiar but unexpected sensation—she felt in charge of the situation. Sitting across from her in the pillowed moat, Jason looked like the other musicians sitting behind their pianos. When Todd reemerged twenty minutes later with a bowl full of chicken curry, Jason peered suspiciously at it before finally taking a fork full of chicken. He straightened his chin with two quick jerks—a gesture she would come to recognize as a pre-performance tick—and put it in his mouth.

“Hot,” he blurted out, a little fleck of orange sauce clinging to the inner corner of his mouth.

“You are supposed to eat it with your right hand.” Miriam dipped her index and middle finger into the portion on her plate and inserted them into her mouth. As Jason watched, she became intensely aware of the gesture, almost choking as she hastily removed her fingers from her mouth again. “It is hot,” she coughed.

“I taste ginger, I think. And chili powder.”

Miriam wrinkled her forehead at Jason and closed her eyes, tilting her own head to the right and to the left, attempting to find the spices. It was a gesture she would make many more times that night, wondering what Jason was thinking, wondering where the confident man behind the piano was in the boy at the table.

A few weeks later, Jason graduated. Miriam, with one year left, went to as many of Jason’s small shows as she could, becoming familiar with the warren of cafes that covered the cities. Without ever really talking about it, they were “together”—a loose, fluid construct that distance aided by creating space. Space for Jason from Miriam and space for Miriam from the insular world of college. Having a boyfriend distanced her like nothing else had from her freshman year nickname, and going into the city on weekends made her feel like she was already moving on from the world where that name had had any power at all.

After Miriam’s own graduation, she moved into Jason’s apartment and they had sex twice a week. Miriam was proud of this healthy-seeming statistic, although the regularity of it worried her sometimes. Would it be better, one week, not to have sex at all, just for the thrill of recovering their passion the next? But Jason had his habits, his days in front of the piano touching nothing but ivory for hours. To come back home to bed with her, what would her skin feel like after so much slick surface? The noises she made could hardly be as beautiful as the ones his fingers usually elicited. So it was good that on the days he took off from extensive practice, for the sake of distance as he said so many times, he came home for dinner and brought her closer.

Maybe if she had thought about it more, the distance would have bothered her. But when she did sit in the apartment eating dinner alone, thinking, the patterns and textures of their live together were almost as comforting as paint colors or the art canon. So when Miriam had missed her period, she didn’t say anything. She went on having sex twice a week. She organized a publicity event for a collection of pots, fine examples of Ming dynasty porcelain, tributes to a masterful touch. After a few weeks, when routine didn’t bring a return to routine, Miriam bought a pregnancy test and a six pack of paper towels. They had been meaning to buy paper towels for days. And while Miriam sat, eating her dinner of salad and soy patty, the plastic strip already in the trash can, she wondered if the small piece of goop attached to the inside of her uterus was enjoying it with her. If it would enjoy the carrots or beets or the classical music playing in the background on NPR. It was late and Jason was still at some café, playing the last leg of a Saturday night show. She sat on their couch the rest of the night, eventually falling asleep.

In the morning, they went to their ritual Sunday breakfast at a café down the street. After picking at her eggs for a while—conversation a labored, lurching chore—she blurted it out. “We’re pregnant,” she said, sitting up straighter as she had on the piano bench, willing defiance into her pose, daring him to say something.

“What are you going to do?” he finally asked. his curiosity seeming so genuine she wanted to slap her.

“What am I going to do! What are we going to do, Jason.”

“Right. I meant what are we going to do.”

“I have no fucking idea, Jason.” The way she kept saying his name at the end of her sentences seemed to make him intensely uncomfortable. Good, she thought, as she watched thoughts run through his head, absorbing her news. His coffee mug had a crack down the outside and he reached out to touch it, drawing his eyebrows together into a crease over his hooked nose. She couldn’t imagine what he was thinking, making it even more absurd to think about “them” being pregnant. As if together they would start to vomit in the morning, swell like ticks and crave strange combinations—tuna salad and ice cream, steak and yogurt—then, finally, splash, crown, release. A mess of placebo covered chaos would come screaming forward into life.

“I’ve always supported a woman’s right to choose,” he finally mumbled.

“Which means what? That I have to choose and you get to sit there and watch?”

Jason didn’t respond. He started to play the C scale on the table cloth and refused to make eye contact. It seemed to Miriam like his way of saying, exactly. Of saying, you’ve always taken the lead. So take the lead. I’ll play the piano very well.

“I have chosen. I’m going to get an abortion.” She ground the words out. Then she added, “And I’m not going to marry you, so don’t get some stupid chivalric idea and bother asking.” Miriam picked her purse up and pushed her chair back so hard that it fell over. The clatter caused the café to get quiet for a moment and Miriam was conscious of the tears in her eyes welling into tears down her cheeks. The look on Jason’s face was like a deer in the headlights. A fisherman blinded by the beam from the lighthouse. “And don’t tell anyone, either,” she hissed, then turned on her heel and walked quickly out the door, leaving Jason to pick up the chair.

When Miriam got back the apartment that night, after hours of doing nothing except stare at the spoon in the sculpture garden, she found that Jason wasn’t home yet. She sat on the couch and stared at the blank television screen, her hand on her stomach. The stranger inside Miriam startled her again and again. It was almost as if she kept forgetting she was pregnant. Her mind darted to what she could make for dinner, what should she eat and what did she want to eat, had it gotten colder outside today, or was she just imagining fall coming? And where was Jason? His name was like movement just beyond her peripheral vision, it made her turn her head as if she was looking for something. As if the piece of muck he had helped to create, the bundle of change inside her, would come to the door like an uninvited guess. Staring at their closed door, she thought perhaps her nervous ticks were just the noises she kept hearing or imagining, waiting for Jason to come home.

Tiny piece of muck. That was all it really was. And maybe the stupid spoon was really just a stupid spoon. Maybe that was the mystery. Maybe the muck was just muck. She would get an abortion, even though her mother hadn’t. In the hours she had spent on the couch the night before, Miriam had kept returning to her mother’s face. The profoundly tired expression she got when she was disappointed in Miriam or worried about something that was probably Miriam’s fault; she wanted too many lessons, too many clothes, and too many rides in their gas guzzling mini-van. What would she say when Miriam told her the news? In her mind, Miriam had rehearsed her expression when she defiantly announced her pregnancy before the duel audience of her mother and Jason. She had told them she would of course take responsibility for it, the strange, soon to be sentient consequence of sex on only birth control. If Jason felt vaguely resentful, Miriam felt furious. She, lucky number one out of one hundred, stuck with this thing, this it. It. Yet gender was already encoded in its genes, an entire personality wound up tight like a golf ball. A golf ball that would soon be a volleyball. She shuddered in revulsion as she thought about the uncontrollable changes, the stretch marks on her thighs.

But she wouldn’t need to tell her mother, now that she had decided to just get rid of it. As if it could really be gotten rid of. Unwilling to begin that circle of thought again, Miriam forced herself to get up off the couch and go into the kitchen to look for something to eat. Her will to cook, to chop vegetables or sauté the fish she had bought, was gone. She opened the fridge and pulled out a vanilla yogurt, the only thing that didn’t need preparation. When she opened the cupboard to get some granola out to mix into it, she saw Jason’s bag of Ruffles. All the food in the apartment was shared, at least technically, but Miriam and Jason still rarely touched one another’s purchases. On an impulse that felt like the phrase fuck you, she picked up the bag of chips instead of the granola and took it and her yogurt back to the couch.

Miriam ate the yogurt first, methodically and without really tasting it, and then ripped open the bag of chips with a satisfying screech of plastic. As she brought chips from her fingers to her mouth in satisfying clumps, she wondered why she hadn’t eaten potato chips in so long. The grease of them inhabited the entire cavity of her mouth. There was no other way to describe it than sexual, since it was the only word she had for such strong physical pleasure. Being responsible, she thought, resisting, wasn’t worth it. Here she was anyway, pregnant and eating potato chips. Wondering how she had gotten to this couch from the piano bench at the concert so long ago, she thought of how she and Jason used to argue over the story of how they met. Jason always said that he hadn’t been nearly as awkward as she insisted on remembering. He tried to point out that any true musician would be startled by someone invading his performance space so soon after a difficult piece! And he didn’t usually eat oriental food. But he always came off sounding petulant, his soft voice was drowned out by the enthusiasm of her storytelling, the vivid detail of her own memory. Still, no matter how many times Miriam told the story, she never could explain why he had agreed. Maybe she just didn’t want to admit to herself that his sure had been more submission than consent. Another victory—victim—for the Black-out Sniper.

Suddenly, she wanted to be drunk. To be drunk the way she had been freshman year; so drunk she couldn’t think straight or see herself or anyone else clearly. She went back into the kitchen and surveyed their alcohol supply. In the cupboard were two bottles of red wine Jason had got from his parents and a nearly empty bottle of whisky left over from a party. Miriam picked up the whiskey. It was Jameson, better than she was used to, but it still burned as it went down in a few gulps. Then she picked up the bottles of red wine. She didn’t know how much it would take her to get drunk after so many years mostly abstaining. As she was putting the bottle opener in her pocket, she remembered that women weren’t supposed to drink when they were pregnant. She laughed a laugh that that she nearly choked on—it was devoid of mirth and hurt coming up. Let’s kill it tonight, she thought, so I can’t change my mind. Then she grabbed a sweater and headed out the door without stopping to think who the second person in her us might be.

When Jason finally did come home, it was to find a half-eaten bag of potato chips lying on the table in a dark apartment.

Sitting at her desk in the empty Walker several hours later, the neck of the wine bottle firmly in her grip, Miriam realized the point of the cherry on the spoon. It was the first bite of an ice cream sundae! The enormous spoon, the red cherry as shiny as a booth in a 50’s dinner, the happy little fucking children all around it all day long on endless art field trips—how had she not seen it before? Too rigid, she thought, too rigid. But now she felt light as a feather, free and floating. She hadn’t even needed to open the second bottle of wine. The whiskey and the first bottle had done it.

Smiling as she thought about the cherry on a spoon, Miriam got out all of her Sharpies—the rainbow connection, as she called them, twelve different colors—from her desk drawer. At first she began to draw on computer paper, but the scope was so limited! Looking around, she decided she would do a mural. She sat down in front of the white wall, and began to draw. Not anything particular, not with a plan. Each color just seemed so bright, so beautiful. She drew a stick woman holding hands with a stick man and then drew in a tree next to them like a cotton candy, which she choose to make blue with a red trunk. Little kids must feel this way, she thought, when they draw those god-awful pictures that parents then have to put on their refrigerators to prove how much they like them.

Miriam kept drawing until she had Sharpied every inch of wall she could reach without actually getting up any farther than her knees. Then she rolled over onto her side, drew her knees into her chest, and pulled the now empty wine bottle parallel with her eyes. On the label, a small yellow kite blew in an invisible breeze, a gale, maybe, that was also moving the floor beneath her. She was so drunk that when she began to cry she didn’t hold anything back; she simply gulped and yelped as the air pumped her lungs like a bellow. She cried until she fell asleep.

When she awoke in the morning, a pair of shoes was next to the picture of the kite. Her boss, in a sharp black pant suit, stared down at her at a loss for words. Miriam sat up and pressed her hair to her head. Everything hurt and her eyes were gummy.

“I’m pregnant,” she said. There seemed to be no other explanation.

Noting the empty wine bottle, her boss asked, “Should you be drinking?”

“Should I be pregnant?” Miriam laughed hollowly.

The other woman pursed her lips. “You should go home.” Then her face softened a little bit, like she was having a memory of her own. She looked to her side, at the wall. “We’ll get that painted over,” she said.

For a moment, Miriam didn't know what she was talking about. Then she saw her work of the night before; demented stick figures, trees, great swirls of wind. And in the center, a sundae with twelve different colors of ice cream, the top scoop green and slightly indented, from where someone had taken the cherry off the top.

Stopping By

The day Sara finally stopped by the house was so hot that I had Walter sitting nearly naked in the living room and was in the middle of sponging him off. The windows were open, in hopes of catching a breeze, but I had closed the faded, red cotton curtains to keep out some of the strong, late-afternoon sun. The dirt drive, covered as it is with pebbles, usually alerts me when people are coming. I hear their cars turn off the road onto our half-mile drive or the slow crunch of their feet. Occupied with Walter, though, I didn’t hear a thing, and Sara knocked and entered in that simultaneous, entitled way young people have.

At the site of Walter sunk into the couch, his fleshy wrinkles perpendicular to the corduroy’s contoured stripes, she stopped uneasily in the doorway, hovering in a puddle of light and fresh air. I simply stared, letting the damp sponge in my hand drip a little onto the carpeting.

“Sara, honey.” I reached my arm out towards her, trying to imagine what had brought her here. She clearly she wasn’t hurt, at least not physically. Instinctively, I looked over to Walter to see if he knew, but of course he didn’t even seem to notice that anyone had come.

Realizing that Sara was still standing like a beggar on the door step, my manners took over, which is half the point of having them. I took a few steps towards her, ushering her in and closing the door behind her. “Take a seat.” I motioned to an empty arm chair by the couch that faced a little away from Walter. That way she didn’t need to be averting her eyes from his concave chest. Or from the photo of Rachel behind him on the mantel piece. I felt a stab of guilt that it was still there. We had taken the picture down, of course, but the space it left on the mantel was an invisible eyesore, a slightly darker spot on the wood where her face should have been. One day, I went down to the basement and got it out of the big trunk, still right on top where Walter had put it. With Walter sitting right there on that same couch, I had marched into the room and put it back up, and Walter for once had kept quiet.

In the armchair, Sara was intently playing with a thin silver ring she wore on her middle finger, twisting it around clockwise, then counter-clockwise. Her back was hunched a little and her brown hair was escaping its ponytail, the fly-aways sticking to the sides of her sweating face. She wears too much red for her skin tone, I thought, anxiously mirroring her by playing with my own wedding ring. The red dress she had on, with its thin straps, highlighted a light blush of shoulder acne mingling with her freckles.

Was she really old enough to have acne? It had to have been five years since she and her father had come over for a weekend dinner, making her about sixteen. Our families had been having regular dinners together ever since my Rachel and their Maryann got to be so close as kids. They played together so much it got to be that they never ate apart. It stuck even after they grew up, bringing their families together every weekend.

Of course I loved it, being fond of company and cooking. The last dinner they were here I baked chicken stuffed with cheese and rubbed in basil I grew in the garden. I steamed string beans and made whipped potatoes the way I like them—with so much garlic you can feel it in your nostrils. Her father sat silent most of the night, his hair falling across his eyes, sculpting his potatoes like a child. He and Walter talked about farming mostly, and Walter did most of the talking until I couldn’t help myself—I can’t stand to watch people pout. I said it was just plain laziness on his part, acting that way, not wanting to work past something that the Lord had put in our path. He snapped back, his voice rising, that I had never controlled Rachel the way I should have, that if I had been a proper mother and gotten Rachel to marry that man who asked her, none of this would have happened. We fell into silence, him getting the last word. But we both knew he just felt inadequate himself, his wife leaving him that way. Walter started talking again as if nothing had happened, using that deep voice of his that makes crop cycles sound as solemn as scripture. His tone told me to hush up and I did—not as sorry as I usually am when I make him angry. Sara’s father hushed up too, clammed up tight until he burst, standing up from the table and knocking his knees. I’m sorry, he said and opened his mouth like he was going to say something else. Then he just walked out, and Sara, her pinched face glancing from Walter’s face to mine, followed him out the door. I thought he would come back after he had cooled down, but I guess I gave him credit for more gumption than he had.

The question on my lips as Sara walked in, what happened, was stretched tight over the silence, but Sara didn’t seem eager to say what was on her mind. Tired of standing in my own living room like I was lost, I went to the kitchen to get something cool for us to drink. It had been a particularly hot September, hot and dry, not like the usual humid Minnesota summer. All the farmers were taking about drought and global warming, God or carbon emissions; I just kept the fans running and prayed for rain. I took out a liter bottle of Sprite from the refrigerator, it seemed like something Sara would like, and poured some into two glasses, filling a third with water for myself to drink right there as I leaned my back against the kitchen sink.

The counter’s edge pressed into my lower spin, feeling nicely solid and almost cool as it pushed my sweaty dress against my skin. After all, she had kept coming to the church on Sunday, even after her father had stopped. She was always in front of us, her vacant family pew two rows to the right. “She needs us,” I had told Walter one day walking home from service, but he told me not to meddle with other people’s children. Rachel had meddled enough in Sara’s family as it was.

The water was cool and so pleasurable that I suddenly felt more tired. I just wanted to sit a spell, maybe next to Sara, but without the need to say a thing. I wished Sara would have kept coming to dinners, or at least to visit every once in while. Instead silence had accumulated like sediment, each passing day like a thin plane of glass, until the memories all come out distorted. My hands shook as I refilled my glass with water and when I picked up the tray I was glad there was no ice in the glasses to give me away. The freezer couldn’t make ice in that kind of heat; the best it could do was give each cube a thin layer of ice, like a pond in early spring, with a bubble of water underneath.

In the living room, Sara and Walter were both staring into their laps, just as I had left them, awkward and oblivious. “Why don’t we go out onto the porch, where it’s cooler?” I said, and turned for a moment to look at Walter. His vacant face always made a stark contrast to his gray hair, which still grew in shocks, still alive and virile. Finger nails and hair grow after you’re dead, I remembered Rachel telling me once after school. When I walk in on Walter, I still expect him to turn around and ask me what took me so long, but instead anxiousness just flickers into relief. That is if he is having a good day. Usually he doesn’t look at all. Maybe it’s true that old age is a second childhood, but even in second childhood someone gets stuck being the older sibling, and I never leave him alone for too long.

“Walter,” I said loudly, giving him his Sprite and making Sara jump. “I’ll be right outside.”

He nodded, or perhaps just shifted his weight, and reached for the remote to turn on the TV.

The porch is an old one, made of wood, but still sturdy as a rock. Walter used to put a new coat of white paint on it every two years but now I have to hire a boy to do it. It wraps around the back of the house, overlooking our, or really my, fields; Walter married into them. They still look about the same as they did when I was a girl, though perhaps the plow lines are a little straighter now and you can see more semis driving by on the distant highway, their height protruding above the grain. It was a porch that should always be full of children, I reflected, but the time when I could make that happen had come and gone. Now there were only old people like me left to enjoy it in a peace I am supposed to want but only find boring.

I decided to tell Sara about the time I had driven her father out to fix our silo—she was silent anyway, staring into the glass like she expected to find the remains of a poison capsule at the bottom—when she blurted out, “It’s Mom.”

“Maryann,” I said, letting the word settle. Of course it was Maryann. She hadn’t been here for twelve years, so long that Sara probably couldn’t even remember her that well. Sara is Maryann’s spitting image, always has been; she even had the same mannerisms as a child. Now, though, Sara has a heavy way of walking, her face to the street, like she doesn’t want to get where she’s going. She never trips. Maryann’s knees were like tilled earth. The scars turned purple in the winters, blushing again and again for the falls that made them. I watched from the kitchen one afternoon as Maryann told Rachel some of her scars’ stories, getting that serious look on her face, the way kids do when they explain things. One from falling down the stairs was a sharp, straight line. One from fighting with her brother was a wide blemish. One on her right knee cap was from playing baseball at school. “I scored, though,” she had said seriously. “They told me not to slide, but I scored anyway.” She then generously offered to let Rachel touch her scars, sitting there on the steps of my house. The raised bumps of rougher skin, rougher like nylon is rougher than silk, tempting exploration. Rachel had reached out, rested her fingers lightly on Maryann’s knee, and then laughed. The mood broken, they popped up from the steps and raced off together into the fields, my fields, their voices loud, rippling the wheat with their laughter.

Not knowing what to say to Sara, I picked at my nails, a nervous habit that makes me bleed too easily. “Your mom picked a plastic pen clean with her teeth every semester of high school, always looking out the window at cars driving by and lucky kids leaving school on a pass.”

Sara frowned slightly, something worked in her face. My comment made little enough sense. But I never knew what to say about Maryann, who was so inaccessible perhaps because she seemed so open. I had thought about her a lot over the past twelve years, thought about her more and more as I tried not to think about Rachel. But Rachel was always there, a pair of legs with drooping socks and dirty sneakers or a voice calling, making Maryann look that way with a smile; there never was a Maryann without a Rachel somewhere near by.

Sara ran a hand aggressively across her face, clearing away the stray hairs blowing in the wind. “Mom died,” she said. “There was a letter from, from a friend of Mom’s in Minneapolis.”

A friend. But we both knew.

“What did her friend say?”

“She said Mom died. It was breast cancer.”

So Maryann had been sick for a long time then, and neither one had bothered to tell us before the end. It was just like them, I thought, and tears rose into my eyes as I thought about how callous they had been over the years, how selfish. Some of the old anger came back for a moment, some of the righteousness that I had held onto so tightly even as I listened to it wheeze out the flat tire. They had left me, and now they had left this poor girl next to me to deal with it all by herself. I shifted to put my arm around her, but she stiffened at my movement, so I let it drop back to my side. For a while, we just sat and I couldn’t help thinking of the times I had watched Sara walk by our place without coming in. She didn’t walk by often, just a few times every humid early fall—campaign season getting ripe like the harvest—putting signs in the ground, a freelance lawn aerator of sorts. I had watched her from inside the living room, its big window overlooking the road, thinking that if she had stopped walking so hard and lifted her head up, she might’ve cared about whose lawn she was punching like a time card. But she never waived or came inside for something to eat. She never raised her eyes our way at all. It wasn’t like I had anything against her for being her mother’s daughter. Anyone could see that Sara was a good girl. Certainly no credit was due to either of her parents. And now Maryann had gone on. Gone on without probably even a decent service, without a family member there to forgive her.

“What does your father have to say about all this?” I asked, breaking the long silence.

“He doesn’t know. The letter was addressed to me.”

“You haven’t told him yet?”

She just shook her head and kicked the porch with the toe of her sneaker a few times. “He never mentions her. Why should he care? No one talks about it, and I was just wondering.”

It was my turn to stiffen.

“I was wondering, do you think the friend will write us again. I mean, now that she has written this time?”

“She knows better than that, I think.” I paused. I wanted Sara to understand. “The first time I had a friend die, I was sixteen.”

She looked at me in disbelief. “This isn’t a friend.”

“Well, now, I know that honey. You got to let me finish. What I was going to say was, well, you can lose friends. I have. But nothing is as hard as losing family. Like losing your mom and Rachel. And losing Walter little by little.” I wanted to tell Sara she was lucky Maryann was dead, that she was too young to have to carry the weight of someone lost but still alive. Someone lost behind those panes of glass. I waited until I felt like I could speak again, getting control while Sara stared across the fields, her mouth set tight in teenage defiance. I recognized that expression, not from Sara’s childhood or even my own, but from Rachel’s. Rachel, who never wanted to go to church, but who was the most moved by the spirit by the time we left. She never liked to admit that I might know what was best for her. Maybe I hadn’t known what was best, but I hadn’t always had the freedom to choose.

“When people go where we can’t follow, that doesn’t mean that the things they did when they were here with us are gone, bad or good. You don’t need to feel bad that you weren’t there when Maryann went, when she left you and your daddy or when she died. She chose those things, just as sure as she made you and chose my Rachel.”

“Dyke,” I heard Sara say under her breath, and her tight face tightened a little bit more, the lines in her forehead deepening, like she was fighting back the urge to cry. I hated to hear that kind of ugly language. She had probably heard it in high school. The kids there must tease her about Maryann and Rachel.

“That isn’t a very Christian word, Sara.”

She looked at me for a long moment, like she was trying to solve a riddle. Her brown eyes blinked rapidly.

“I should go,” she said suddenly, but I caught her wrist. I couldn’t have held on, but she stopped anyway.

“Sara, you should come by our place more. It doesn’t matter if your dad comes or not. You stop on by whenever you want to. Your mom was here all the time; she and Rachel together.” I knew I wasn’t making her understand what I meant, that really I couldn’t. Rachel and Maryann had decided to go to Minneapolis and live that way, and she would never get a chance to accept them. We had both missed that opportunity.

“Rachel won’t write again,” I said, more bitterly than I had intended.

“That leaves just you and me, I guess,” Sara said, and I could hear the blame in her voice. Before I had a chance to speak again, she leapt from the porch and ran out into our fields, quickly disappearing in the grain. I walked up to the porch railing, looking over the landscape, as bleached out by the heat and setting sun as it would be later by the endless snow. I needed to go in, to check on Walter, but I waited a moment. A cool breeze was finally picking up and I could feel it blow the smell of the horizon against my face. Rachel wouldn’t write again, not after all those unanswered—unopened—letters that Walter never showed me. He still didn’t know I had found them in his desk drawer, the day I had to take him to the hospital after his first stroke. No, Rachel was gone—but maybe Sara would come back.

A Face to Meet the Faces

The sound of barking sent the woman stumbling, her heart pounding painfully in her chest. For a brief moment, she saw teeth, smelled the acrid insides of a dog’s mouth, felt two paws pin her just above the breasts. Sylvia tried to remember her sister’s advice, that she just count to three and pick a safe object on which to focus. It was easy for Molly to give advice; she hadn’t experienced what Sylvia had. Still, Sylvia paused long enough to draw in a deep breath and look away from the dog, at the houses around her. Boring, safe suburban homes. She picked a window sill on the house in front of her. It had flowers in it and what looked like some kind of small fern. She felt her heartbeat slowing, and looked at the man and the barking dog.

A small terrier strained against its plaid leash and the man holding it looked confusedly apologetic. “He’s really harmless,” he said.

Sylvia nodded, not really wanting to talk to him, and started walking past. The panic attacks were getting a little easier to control, although not as much easier as she had told her psychologist that morning. She still had flashbacks when she heard a dog bark before she knew where the dog was, and though she dreamed less often of the attack, when she did the dreams were as vivid as ever and she would wake up with her jaw clenched and aching. Sylvia unconsciously rubbed the place over her lips where her scars used to be. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get over the feeling that people were staring at her. And she hated dogs and people who owned dogs but didn’t know how to control them. Which, as far as she could tell, was most people.

Besides, she needed to get home quickly. Her appointment with the psychologist had been delayed half an hour and now she was worried that she would be late getting to her interview with the reporter from the BBC. He wanted to ask her a few questions about her face and about the procedure in general. They were going to have lunch at her apartment and she wanted to have a chance to pick up, change, and put on a little make-up before he got there.

Sylvia smiled softly to herself. How lucky she was, that she could once again worry about having time to put on makeup! Of course, she had had to buy entirely new foundation and eye shadow for her slightly altered skin tones. It had cost a fortune, but the chance to go shopping again, like she used to, to have a sales lady chat with her to try to get her to buy just one more color of lip gloss—it was worth it. When she had come home from the mall, her face made up and her eyes smiling, Megan had told her how wonderful it was to see her embracing her life that way, embracing the great gift she had gotten, and Sylvia had been to happy to even be annoyed with her.

Lost in her own thoughts, Silvia didn’t notice that the man with the terrier was following her.

“Excuse me. Excuse me?”

Sylvia turned around.

“Do I know you?” he asked her, his bushy eyebrows pressed together in thought.

“No.” She shook her head, trying to obscure her face behind her long brown hair.

“I’m sure I do. Your face looks really familiar.”

“No. You don’t.” Sylvia began walking more quickly. She could here the man’s steps following her and the clicking of the dog’s toenails against the concrete sidewalk.

“Rachel!”

She began to almost run. Snot built up in her nose, her beautiful, working nose.

“Rachel, I know it’s you. Please.” Sylvia wanted to sprint, but the tone of the man’s voice stopped her and she turned to face him, still trying to keep as much hair in her face as possible.
Now that she wasn’t trying to walk away from him, the man didn’t seem to know what to say. They stood for a few moments on the sidewalk—she noticed that he was wearing a light fleece pullover even though the spring day had turned so warm. Maybe he was a nice man, despite his dog. She would probably never find out. For his part, he alternated between staring at her face and at her eyes, finding some kind of incongruence there that he didn’t know how to explain.

“I think I’m going crazy.” He paused to run a hand through his hair, perhaps hoping she would speak. “I read that you died. You were in a coma, and it was in the alumni bulletin. It said your husband pulled the plug.”

Sylvia’s eyes filled with tears. She hated thinking about Rachel’s husband and family, so generous and so terrified when they saw her with their lover and daughter’s face. The father had actually had to leave the hospital room when he saw her and the doctor had tried to usher the rest of the family out as quickly as possible. “It really doesn’t help anybody to see it,” he had said, more to the walls of the room than to Sylvia’s stricken face. “They say they want to see the good their loved one has been able to do, but they don’t.”

Taking a deep breath, she thought for a second about the window box, the flowers and the ferns. “I did die. I mean, she did die.” The man took a step away from her. “It’s a face transplant. Over two years ago, my face was destroyed by a dog.” She gave a wet laugh; the story never stopped sounding stupid and now she didn’t even have the gapping hole of a nose, the thick scars to stave off skepticism or laughter. “I got a face transplant.”

“Face transplant.” He was still, so still that even the dog was completely quiet.

“It’s a revolutionary procedure, very new. I’m sorry about your friend.”

He nodded, disbelief and fresh grief passing across his eyes like clouds, changing shape and darkening. “I don’t believe it. That’s just sick.”

He wasn’t the first person who had thought so and there was a reason the BBC was so interested in talking to her. The procedure was potentially very dangerous. If her body decided to reject the new cells in the facial tissue despite all the medication she was on, that skin could get badly infected. And people just didn’t know what to think about taking someone else’s face. What would it do to someone, having a different person looking back at them in the mirror? Sylvia had her own point of view—that anyone who thought that being a freak forever was a better option was welcome to it. She usually felt good about her choice, although she had her low days, and as she looked at the disgust on this stranger’s face, she couldn’t help but think about her ex-boyfriend.

Nathan had been her boyfriend for over seven months when she was attacked and he had left her soon after, the pain and ugliness being more than he had bargained for. But he had come back to her when she wrote him an e-mail telling him about the procedure, the possibility that she might be ok again. Don’t take the fucker back, said Megan, but Sylvia had learned too much about fear and hatred wearing her mangled face to let go of anyone who had known her as she was. Holding her hand as they unwrapped the bandages from around her face after the final skin graft, he had given it a squeeze, silently reassuring her that he loved her.

A week after she was home from the hospital they had finally made love. Trying not to think about how her new face must look, elastically expressing pleasure, she noticed that he seemed distracted too. “What is it,” she whispered, and he had rolled off of her, onto his side. “It’s like making love to a dead woman,” he had said, and she had felt her new cheeks go wet with tears.

Sylvia pulled her hair out of her eyes and tucked it behind her ears. In the man’s repulsed face, she saw teeth, smelled the acrid insides of a dog’s mouth, felt two paws pin her just above the breasts; before there had only been blank good intention. “I have to go. I have an interview about the procedure, actually. It’ll be on the BBC.” She turned and walked away, leaving him and his dog behind her, carrying with her a new memory to weave into her dream of attack from forces she couldn’t see but which saw her too clearly.

Peripheral Vision

The sun chased her in a horseshoe path around the large plaza. As it fell, it cut through the tall surrounding trees, casting moving shadows over the wide half moon fountain and its surrounding ring of wooden benches. Sara progressed across the benches slowly, small slides to her right, then quickly gathering her book and purse together to move to the next bench, only noticing the light as it fell upon the pages and hurt her eyes.

The early evening sun wasn’t strong, but her bare shoulders and the back of her neck were already bright red from spending all day outside. She turned her head to look down the dirt path behind her and felt the uncomfortable tightness of her burnt skin. Where was her friend? Sara had been in the plaza for two and a half hours, waiting. She shifted her stiff body and wondered—somewhat guiltily—if maybe she shouldn’t have stayed with Megan. But what was she going to do in a call center while Megan talked to her boyfriend? Sara imagined watching Megan on the phone, a Cheshire cat disappearing little by little until only her eyes were left, no longer seeing the call box in Argentina but Chris in San Francisco.

Megan knows how to get back here, she thought. Even if she can’t ask for directions, she has the map. But Sara found herself looking behind her, down the path and around the park to her back, more and more often.

As the light got softer and moved more swiftly slantwise, the park began to fill with families, many of the benches with couples. When the sun finally pushed Sara all the way to the right side of the bench, she wouldn’t be able to move again. At the next bench to her right, a father stood above a seated woman and their two small children. He was still in a suit and seemed preoccupied by a cell phone conversation. The woman bent over her children, taking care to wipe melting ice cream from their faces. She looked up, silent and anxious, as the man’s voice reached a sharp peak; it was an expression Sara had seen on the face of her own mother.

The bench to her left held a couple pressed closed together, kissing, the girl’s black hair held in his hand. They moved rhythmically, in and out, him pushing and her guiding him back like eels twisting together. She watched them kiss until she was aware of herself watching and then turned back to her book, unnecessarily annoyed with herself. She was hemmed in, four feet of bench to both sides, with the light already creeping across the open book. The white pages glared.

Had Megan bought another phone card so that she could keep talking on the phone? Selfish. Sara thought of their near argument over lunch about wasting time and money calling Chris, but Megan had already promised. He would worry if he didn’t hear from her, she said. Sara’s silence had acquiesced and now, the slats of the bench irritating her spine, she spoke to Megan in her head as she had wanted to that morning. Codependent. Needy. They were only gone for spring break, not for months or years. If Megan had really spent two hours on the phone with him after only being gone four days, Sara was going to give her hell.

Sara had stopped seeing the page of her book, though she was still looking at it. In her peripheral vision, people entered and walked and left again and she noted their movements, hoping to see Megan’s blond hair bob into view. And then a noise, a whir and the squeak of brakes on rubber tires, and two bicycles pulled up at both ends of her bench. The owners, two teenage boys, leaned their bikes against the ends of the bench like bookends and sat down on each side of her.

Neither boy said anything at all. At first they simply just stared ahead. Sara kept her eyes on the lines of text in front of her. This was probably normal, she thought, although it didn’t feel normal. She had space, about two feet between herself and each boy, and now that there weren’t any benches left people would have to begin to share. She read each word on the page but couldn’t connect them; each stood alone between the others, the strange whiteness between them like pillows over open mouths, stifling communication.

In the corners of Sara’s eyes, the corners into which she had been waiting for Megan to emerge, she noticed each boy staring at her. The boy on her right smiled. His hair was short in the front but long and tied into a ponytail in back. The t-shirt he wore carried the faded image of Che Guavara and had a hole in the left shoulder, revealing a dark patch of skin stretched over collar bone.

“Que linda que sos.”

She kept reading. Her mouth felt dry.

“¿Por qué no me miras, amor?” Unable to look to either side, the park telescoped until she was alone in it. All she could see was the fountain: a great, bronze Argentine general on his horse, the sky’s depth in the shallow concrete pool, the leaves on the water, slowly moving, the boys framing it all. She could hear the families around her, she could picture the kissing couple continuing to sway in their own tide, but the images seemed far away and her finger tips felt cold. This was different than the mumbled comments she had heard on the street, the fragments she understood—amor, linda—from which she could quickly walk away, rolling her eyes at Megan.

“Why don’t you look at me? You American, yes?” Hearing English, Sara turned to face the boy. His accented English was far more disturbing than his Spanish, the edges of the words grating against each other. It picked her out for exactly what she was, a foreigner, and made her feel that much more isolated. She wondered for a moment how it could be so obvious that she was a stranger and unconsciously touched her dark brown hair. She thought about the expression of tourists in San Francisco, the way their eyes opened when they looked around, instead of staying shuttered. Had she been doing that, even here, waiting for Megan? Then she remembered the book in her hands, its condemning English text.

“You don’t want to talk? Por favor, amor. Contestame.”

Her head was already up; she felt like she had to say something. Looking the boy straight in the eyes, Sara said, “Can I help you?” In the silence that followed, she clenched her teeth and tried to keep her gaze from faltering, but when he didn’t flinch or look embarrassed she felt her face begin to beat with blood as fiercely as her burns. His smile got bigger and the two boys laughed. She dropped her eyes to her lap. Now that she had spoken, would the other boy start talking to her? Would they move closer? Each on his far side of the bench, neither had moved any closer to her during the entire exchange. She noticed that now the boys were looking at each other instead of her. Maybe even they didn’t know what happened next. Where the fuck was Megan? What had been anxious annoyance with her friend deepened into an ache of dread.

The boy on her right kept smiling and the boy on her left stayed silent; she refused to look up or speak again. Then, as quickly as they had sat down, they got on their bikes and cycled away. Sara didn’t look up for a few minutes, worried that they had moved but not left, worried that she would look up and meet their eyes.

When she finally did, the boys were gone. The park was full of people and she breathed in deeply to stop her pulse from racing. She began to feel foolish. What were they going to do, a couple of boys in the middle of a public park? She turned the page. She hadn’t read it, but she didn’t want to look at that page anymore.

Thinking about My Sister on the Bus

My sister’s small, soft hand. Her hand and the top of her head. Her desire to wear the same outfit as me, my resistance and compliance. Our small, intimate cruelties and the certainty that even if she pinched me and I hit her, no one would tell. My hand over her mouth at the top of the stairs. Stop crying, stop crying, someone will hear you, stop crying. Her defiant look at me across the dinner table after she has said the wrong thing.

Stop kicking me.

I’m not kicking you.

Years and years to write the script to all of our future silences. A look, a smile, an eyebrow, the laughter of women who know without speaking what’s so funny. Grown up and drunk, sharing ear-buds, favorite songs, at a table outside with a two Euro bottle of wine. Drunk and happy in the streets of Florence. Drunk and sad and talking about love. Relearning our small, intimate cruelties, articulating our strange silences, certain that no one will tell.

My sister’s small, soft hand. Her hand and the top of her head where there is a scar from falling against the fire place, the edge of a brick. I was chasing her; I held the washcloth against the bleeding cut on the way to the doctor’s.