—The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, Cornelia teased.
—Cut it out, Clay said.
—Your heroes might surprise you someday, she said.
—I’d like that, Clay said.
—I bet you wouldn’t, Cornelia said.
He told her about a distressed woman in the news who had found out she’d been adopted when she was twenty-one, which made sense to her, she was even glad, because she had never felt close to her parents, who were like aliens to her, and then the woman spent years searching for her birth parents. When she was fifty, she found her mother, who’d given her up for adoption because she’d been unmarried and only fifteen. But the mother she unearthed wasn’t the mother she expected or wanted, so the woman was very disappointed. Also, her birth father was disreputable and long dead.
—Do you think people have the right to know? Clay asked.
—A constitutional right, Cornelia said.
—Okay.
—What about the right to privacy?
—Maybe some rights kill others.
If Clay turned violent, deranged, on the street, the cops would subdue and cuff him, take him in, interrogate him, or they might just shoot him on the spot, if he charged them menacingly, resisted them, or appeared to be carrying. The cops waited to arrest him and others from doing things they didn’t know they could do or felt they had to do or did because inside them lurked instinctual monsters. He didn’t know what he had in him, but he knew restraint, and he recognized, as Max Weber wrote early in the twentieth century, that only the state had the right to kill, no one else, and that fact alone defined the state. But where he lived everyone had the right to bear arms, to answer and resist the state’s monopoly on power. That was the original idea, anyway, but if Clay carried a gun, he might use it, because he didn’t know what he had in him.
Better to be dead and buried than frank and honest, his mother had said. His father ghosted their dining room table, his tales gone to the grave with him and now to his wife’s grave also. One night his father hadn’t come home from work the way he always did, Clay was seven, and his mother’s face never regained its usual smile. She smiled, but not the way she once had. When little Clay walked into the butcher shop or the bakery, he felt the white-clothed men looking sympathetically at him, prying into him for feelings he hadn’t yet experienced. The fatherly baker gave him an extra cookie or two, and in school, even on the baseball field, Joey the baker’s son didn’t call him names anymore, even when he struck out. But his mother clutched his little hand more tightly on the streets, and he learned there was something to fear about just being alive. He learned his father was dead, but it didn’t mean much to him, death didn’t then, and soon it became everything.
—It’s why you’re a depressive, Cornelia said. Losing a parent at that age.
—I guess, he said.
—It’s why you hold on to everything.
Clay didn’t throw out much, like matchbooks and coasters from old restaurants and bars that had closed, outdated business cards, and with this ephemera he first kept his father with him. There was dust at the back of his father’s big desk that he let stay there. There was hair in his father’s comb, which had been pushed to the back of the bathroom cabinet, so Clay collected the evidence in an envelope, and wondered later if he should have the DNA tested. What if his father wasn’t his father? Maybe there was someone alive out there for him, a father, but his mother disabused him of the possibility, and played the violin so consolingly that Morpheus himself bothered to carry him off to a better life. Now, scratches on a mahogany table that once nestled close to his father’s side of the bed and his mother’s yellowing music books, her sewing cushion with its needles tidily stuck where she’d pushed them last, marked matter-of-fact episodes and incidents in their lives, when accidents occurred or things happened haphazardly, causing nicks and dents, before death recast them as shrines.
How long has this scrap been in the corner of a bureau drawer, he might ask himself, did it have a history. He could read clues incorrectly, though it didn’t matter to him if his interpretations were wrong, because there was no way to know, and it wasn’t a crime, he wasn’t killing anyone. Cornelia’s habits were different, heuristically trained and developed in the editing room, where she let go of dialogue and images, thousands of words and pictures every day, where she abandoned, shaped, or controlled objects more than he felt he could, ever.
At last. To last. Last remains. What lasts
remains. What, last. Shroud of Turin, Torino
mio, home to Primo, Levi knew the shroud.
In Clay’s sophomore English classes, in which the students read George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss and Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, his charges contested the rules for punctuation and grammar and argued for spellings and neologisms they used on the Internet and in text messaging. They preferred shorthand, acronyms, to regular English, they wanted speed. He argued for communication, commonality, and clarity, the three C’s, for knowing rules and then breaking them consciously, even conscientiously. He attempted to engage them, as he was engaged, in the beauties and mysteries of the history that lives in all languages. It’s present, it’s still available, he’d say. And, by tracing the root of a word and finding its origin in Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit, and then by delving into its etymology, they could find how meanings had shifted over the years through usage. A few students caught his fervor, he thought, and who knew what would happen to them as they grew up, maybe they’d discover that love, that attachment. Curiously, there were many more new words each year, an explosion added to recent editions of dictionaries, more proportionately than had previously entered editions of the tomes he revered, and yet he remembered, always, what the words once meant, their first meanings. Cornelia told him it was another way he hung on to the past, and grammar countered his internal mess.
The problem is proportion, Clay thought, how to live proportionately. He passed the bakery on his way home, maybe he’d buy cinnamon buns for him and Cornelia for breakfast, and with an image of the pastries and her at the table, so that he could already taste morning in his mouth, he entered the store. It was busy as usual, and Clay waited on line, listening for the casual banter of the bakers, and when he drew nearer to the long counter, he overheard Joey the baker’s son.
—I’d kill all of them, nuke ’em, torture’s too good for them.
Clay continued to wait, suspended in place, breathing in the bakery’s perfume, when finally he reached the front of the line, where the baker’s son smiled warmly, the way he always did.
—I got you the recipe, you pasty-faced poet, Joey said.
He always teased him, ever since they were kids. Clay thanked him, smiled, and asked for two cinnamon buns, and then Joey handed him the famous recipe for sourdough bread, which in their family’s version was littered with salty olive pieces. The cinnamon buns were still hot, fragrant. Fresh, Clay thought, fresh is a hard word to use, fresh or refreshed. There were suggestions, associations, and connotations always to words, he should stress this more to his students, because the connotations of a word often meant as much as its denotation, sometimes more, and there was ambiguity, ambiguity thrives, because words were the same as life.
Traces, stains, call it noir, in the shadows,
torture for us. And the child, the hooded
childhood. Fresh ambiguity to contradict
contradictions, refresh
what remains somewhere else.
The beat cops stationed themselves on the same corner, at the same time, so in a way they made themselves targets or spectacles, Clay thought, or even, by their presence, drew enraged, desperate civilians to them, like a recipe for disaster.
Walking home, mostly oblivious to the familiar streets, Clay looked over the ingredients. A teaspoon of balsamic vinegar, that may have been the secret the baker’s family treasured for generations. Or the molasses and tablespoon of rum, that might have been their innovation. Cornelia wasn’t in
the apartment when he arrived home, she was the one who wanted the recipe, and the rooms felt emptier than usual.
He boiled water, brewed tea, opened the newspaper, couldn’t look at the pictures or read the words, stared at the cabinets, they needed fresh paint. He’d cook tonight, a beef stew, because at the end of the day, he remembered the woman saying, everyone wants someone to cook for them. He stood up and, without really thinking, opened a kitchen drawer and tossed the recipe in the back.
Martha Witt
This version of the story is in English. In Milan. Standing tiptoe on the edge of a king-sized bed. She is shutting a window cut into the slant of the ceiling. She is naked. It is the largest bed she has ever seen. Since she arrived, the nights have been good. Good summer nights, dark and bold as a shape. This night, a friendly night she can shut a window on. Later, open the window to the same good night. For seven weeks, she has been teaching the verb to be, the verb to lie, the verb to want, the verb to go. Some verbs more active than others. All verbs conjugate. All verbs useful. Some more useful than others. Not the confusion she studied in college, people asking, “But what does the verb to be really mean? What is Being?” Maybe there was “Having” too. She dropped the course and took Italian, where she asked the professor, “You mean to say that the past participle of a verb conjugated with the verb to be has a masculine end even if the subject of the sentence is hundreds of women and only one man?”
“Ending,” the professor corrected. “Yes. That is true of any Romance language. As long as a man is part of the group, the past participle of a verb conjugated with the verb to be will have a masculine ending.”
“An old-fashioned idea of romance,” she joked. No one laughed.
Someone else said, “The notion of romance is more old-fashioned in English. In English there is never any discussion of sex between verb and subject.”
This story includes him. He is here, too. His English is basic, so words should be chosen with care. He is lying on the king-sized bed. To create the Italian version of this story, possibly all the words of the English version must be tossed into the air, allowed to fragment and fall back down onto new pages. Or perhaps the English version is created from Italian words thrown this way. But why talk about possibilities? There is little enough room for fact. In the Italian, all the verbs of this story are in the present perfect and therefore require past participles. This is not true in the English version. For him, the English version tries very hard to stay in the present and the present progressive. There are a few past tenses, one or two conditionals.
He is lying in bed. He is thinking about the sleek front of the new refrigerator door his company is marketing. His girlfriend is in Rome. She is marketing the new refrigerator door in Rome. She would call him a cheater. A liar. An ass. Obvious, stupid names. Names for millions of men, not meant only for him. He has been taking English classes for seven weeks. He never imagined lying naked in bed waiting for his teacher to shut the window in the slant of his ceiling. She is naked. On tiptoe. That is it. Enough. Sleek is a hard word. Slant is a hard word. The story slows down. Explains more. Now. He lies in bed. The window. A large rectangle. She, naked. Summer. Milan. Night. Words American and other English-speaking people use. Useful words. Useful is use in its adjectival form.
She is standing tiptoe on the edge of the board at the end of the bed. Edge is a hard word. Here. This. Edge. The edge of the footboard or baseboard? She is not sure. Not important, really. The word. Not all beds have them. Naked. She. Footboard/baseboard. Window. Night. Milan. Oh—Summer. Bed. King-sized bed. The footboard/ baseboard runs from the edge of the bed under the window to the edge of the bed near the closet. Complicated use of run. The footboard/baseboard goes from the right edge to the left edge of the bed. It lies flat. Complicated again for both goes and lies. (Runs. Goes. Lies.) Boards have an active life we know nothing about. He does not laugh. No. Sorry. Sorry. No. Nothing. A joke. Complicated. Nonsense. She stands on the footboard/baseboard. No longer tiptoe. The flat board. The moon is round. Flat is the opposite of round.
Remember shapes? The window is a rectangle. The moon is a circle in the center of the rectangle. The circle is at the center of the window. The moon is central to the rectangle. The light lies in a square on her naked back. Prepositions are not easy. Lies has different meanings depending on context. He can lie. He is lying. He waits for her to lie. She steps on the footboard/baseboard. Foot over foot, like a tightrope walker. As in the circus. The circus with clowns and horses.
Naked in the circle moon and square light. She understands now. Now she sees. A complicated see. Not with the eyes. A seeing of the flat in the round of the moon. She does not want to lie on the king-sized bed. Not now. Not naked. Not with him. Her walk has to end at the closet edge. A complicated form of have. Different from the ownership have. Must has the same meaning as has to, in this case. The first has in this last sentence showing ownership. The meaning belongs to the must. Now. Like a tightrope walker. Must owning meaning and has to meaning must. Ownership central to the rectangular window. She sees. Her back flat in the round moon. Naked. Walking. Milan. Night. Summer. Teacher. Footboard/baseboard. Tightrope. Flat. Foot over foot. Lie. Her walk must end at the edge near the closet.
Maybe there is a better way to explain the verbs? Let us see. The same complicated see as before. Not with the eyes. (Flat. Naked. Round.) Does see make sense now? (Summer. Milan. Night.) Does slant make sense now? (Light. Naked. Moon.) Does lie make sense now? (Round. Naked. Eyes.) Does run make sense now? Adjectives are harder to explain.
The story ends with her at the edge of the footboard/baseboard. The story’s end in English is different from the story’s end in Italian. In English, this story ends with her running. Remember, run? (Round. Naked. Eyes.) In Italian, this story ends in the king-sized bed with a verb in the past participle conjugated with the verb to be. It is that gender agreement between verb and subject that makes the ending of this story in Italian different from the prudish English ending. Let us point out that he sees and she sees (Flat. Naked. Round.) that the meaning of the different ends is the same.
She does not love him, and he does not love her.
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE was born in Nigeria. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and longlisted for the Booker. Her short fiction has won the 2003 O. Henry Prize and has appeared in various literary publications, including Granta and the Iowa Review. She is a 2005/2006 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and divides her time between the United States and Nigeria. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, will be published in September 2006.
AIMEE BENDER is the author of three books, most recently the story collection Willful Creatures. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Tin House, and other publications and has been heard on Public Radio International’s This American Life. She lives in Los Angeles.
JUDY BUDNITZ’S stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Story, The Paris Review, the Oxford American, Glimmer Train, Fence, and McSweeney’s. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize, and her debut collection, Flying Leap, was a New York Times Notable Book in 1998. Budnitz is also the author of the novel If I Told You Once, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in Britain. Her most recent book is the collection Nice Big American Baby. She lives in San Francisco.
JENNIFER S. DAVIS is the author of Her Kind of Want, winner of the 2002 Iowa Award for Short Fiction. Her fiction has appeared in such magazines as the Oxford American, The Paris Review, Grand Street, and One Story. Her new collection of short stories, Our Former Lives in Art, is forthcoming from Random House in spring 2007.
JENNIFER EGAN is the author of the novels The Invisible Circus and Look at Me, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001, and a short-story collection, Emerald City. Her short stories have appea
red in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and McSweeney’s, among other publications. Also a journalist, she writes frequently for The New York Times Magazine. Her new novel, The Keep, will be published in August 2006.
CAROLYN FERRELL is the author of the short-story collection Don’t Erase Me, which won the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the John C. Zacharis First Book Award, given by Ploughshares, and the New Voices Award from Quality Paperback Book Club. Her stories have been published in several anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike, and Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present, edited by Gloria Naylor. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Ferrell teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in the Bronx with her husband and two children.
MARY GORDON’S novels include Pearl, Spending, The Company of Women, The Rest of Life, and The Other Side. She is also the author of the memoir The Shadow Man, among other works of nonfiction. She has received a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 1997 O. Henry Award for best story. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City.
CRISTINA HENRÍQUEZ is the author of the short-story collection Come Together, Fall Apart. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, TriQuarterly, and AGNI. She was featured in Virginia Quarterly Review as one of “Fiction’s New Luminaries.” She lives in Dallas with her husband.
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