by Peter Orner
And Rickles talks on about how dead he already feels, and the more he talks, the more roaringly alive is that mouth. And Sarah remembers how Walt used to watch him when he was on Carson. He’d call out from the new room, the add-on from the ’50s, because they needed somewhere to put a TV, and back then you didn’t put a TV in the living room. “Carson’s got Rickles. You gotta see this! Sar?” And she’d be doing something in another part of the house. Finishing the dishes, darning a sock (she’s never darned a sock in her whole life), or maybe she’d just be sitting on the edge of a bed upstairs, because didn’t she have her moments of ponderment? And she wouldn’t come. What did she want with that nasty man? But she’d listen to Walt’s guffaw. For a bookish highbrow, he sure could laugh at a television. And now she sits, in the dark, watching this sad sack, and Walt nudges her in the synapses and says, Sarah, you gotta live!
Onstage, Rickles is having a coughing fit. Hard to know if it’s real or fake. When he catches his breath, he says, “Hell, why not kick it here? These Comanches have already paid me my ducats—”
What the hell did Walt think she was doing? Playing dead?
Yes, he said. And yet you’re right, it’s a curious thing to ask someone to do. Because how to define live?
See? He won’t let up. How could she possibly explain this to Ruthie?
Live! Yes. A verb but, in this instance, clearly a command, an exhortation. Still, quite vague. I mean, I’m no scientist, but take a cell—
You know what, Walt? Go exhort yourself. Us two soldiers nightly foxholed. Remember that? And you deserted, decamped, Splitsville, you took your breath from me, your fingers—
Acknowledgments
A grateful thank-you to the editors of The New Yorker, where “My Dead” first appeared; as well as to the New York Times, “Allston”; The Paris Review, “Ineffectual Tribute to Len”; and Tin House, “Maggie Brown.” Further grateful thanks to the editors of the following magazines and journals, where stories appeared in an earlier form: Alta, Arkansas International, Bomb, Conjunctions, Confrontation, Faultline, Guernica, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, New American Writing, Ploughshares, the Southern Review, Zyzzyva.
The Isaac Babel line that opens the book is from “Childhood at Grandmother’s,” translated by David McDuff (Penguin, 1994). The line that appears on page 22, “The only defense against man’s envy…,” is a muddled quotation from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, translated by David R. Slavitt (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). The Natalia Ginzburg quote on page 187 is from her book of essays The Little Virtues, translated by Dick Davis (Arcade, 1989). The Rita Dove lines from Thomas and Beulah on page 211 are from The Selected Poems of Rita Dove (Vintage, 1993).
Names. Isn’t there something very beautiful about a list of names? Think of Genesis. The sons of Levi: Gershon, Kohath, and Merari. The sons of Judah: Er, Onan, Shelah, Perez, and Zerah (but Er and Onan died in the land of Canaan); and the sons of Perez were Hezron and Hamul. It makes me think of my maternal grandfather, a furniture salesman who died before I had much of a chance to know him. He used to collect Fall River phone directories. I inherited these heavy bound books. I like to imagine him up in his little office, delighting in the names of his fellow citizens. There’s more information in these directories than in our modern, now mostly vanished, phone books. 1945 is here on my desk. Arthur Rand dentist (Phyllis), Manuel Rapoza printer (Herculana cook), Joseph Raska radio service (Eva trimmer), George Rasmany shoe repair (Anna), Rita Ratcliffe sanitary laundry, John Ratowski grocer (Catherine button sewer)…I could read this book all day. Name after name, each and every one a story. Don’t you wonder about Herculana? In this spirit, here’s my own (very) partial list of indelible names of people without whose support this book, among many other more important things, would not exist: Ellen Levine, Ben George, Reagan Arthur, Betsy Uhrig, Nicholas Regiacorte, David Krause, Elizabeth Garriga, Kimberly Burns, Martha Wydysh, Pawel Kruk, Sue Betz, Cynthia Saad, Shannon Hennessey, Pat Strachan, Ivan Strauss, Lee Boudreaux, Chris Abani, Andre Dubus, Marilynne Robinson, James Alan McPherson, Tish O’Dowd, Charles Baxter, Vievee Francis, Bill Craig, Sally Brady, John Griesemer, Nelson Mlambo, Yuki Tominaga, Maxine Chernoff, Debra Allbery, Oscar Villalon, Mary Ladd, Rachel Levin, Josh Richter, Jeff Sharlet, Gabe Marr, E. J. Hahn, Paul Griffiths, Charlie Harb, Junse Kim, Anna Lynch, Mike Brown, Kelsey Crowe, Julia Scott, Jason Roberts, Tom Barbash, Riccardo Duranti, Donal McLaughlin, Audrey Petty, Evan Lyon, Michael Parker, Julie Gordon, Alex Gordon, Rob Preskill, Nancy Amdur, Eddy Loiseau, Matt Goshko, Rhoda Pierce, Dan Pierce, Eric Orner, Blake Maher, Rosalie Crouch, Katie Crouch & Phoebe & Roscoe.
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About the Author
Peter Orner, a two-time recipient of the Pushcart Prize, is the author of the novels Love and Shame and Love and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and the story collections Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge and Esther Stories, a PEN/Hemingway finalist. His latest book, Am I Alone Here?, a memoir, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Orner’s work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, the Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and many other publications. He has been awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, as well as a Fulbright to Namibia. Orner teaches at Dartmouth College and lives in Norwich, Vermont.
Also by Peter Orner
Fiction
Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge
Love and Shame and Love
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
Esther Stories
Nonfiction
Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live
As Editor
Lavil: Life, Love, and Death in Port-au-Prince
Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives
Underground America
