"I never noticed,” he said.
"No."
—
Q: Who do you think did dishes while Dumas and Maggie were hiding?
A: This is what Maggie and Dumas ask each other.
When Maggie and her brothers were little and their parents told them to clean their room, they played “The Barbarians Are Coming.” First they picked out on the clock the time the barbarians were due. “When that hand touches that one,” they'd tell the ones too little to tell time. Then they started cleaning. When the barbarians came marching with their longboats over their shoulders, any toy still on the floor was murdered. Horribly. Toys in their proper places were invisible and safe.
Q: If a woman's place is in the home, is a woman in a home invisible?
A: A woman's place is with her children.
When Dumas was hiding in the alley, he wondered if Maggie missed him. When Maggie was hiding in Dumas's house, she missed Dumas. She missed his missing toes and the gap between his front teeth. She missed him hesitating before he said her name, like he wasn't sure it was the right thing to call her.
When Dumas was hiding in the alley, he missed Maggie, but not as much as Maggie, hiding in Dumas's house, missed herself.
A human body is a thing that can be bought like a jar of pickles, and it's also something that can be manufactured like a pickle jar lid. You are a good advertisement for this.
"If I'd known you when we were children,” Dumas once told Maggie, “I would have found you a very interesting person.” He was watching you draw clocks. The clocks had hands that pointed out of the picture and bubbles that asked “What time is it?” This was a joke that you'd made up yourself.
Maggie said, “Maybe you wouldn't have been so interested in me.” She told him that you and she weren't really so alike. But she agreed that you were a Good Advertisement. After all, children aren't so like their parents. Probably children are more like you.
—
The last thing Maggie has learned to deal with is how Dumas will look at a piece of her speculatively, like he's trying to talk it into the corner with him alone.
"When you're little,” says Maggie, “they always tell you: Don't go off with strangers. But what choice do we have?"
Dumas says that he's sorry she finds him such a strange man.
"No,” says Maggie, “I meant this stranger here with these ears and these breasts and these knees."
Q: Will you miss me when you are dead?
A: We miss you already. I miss your feet when they were squares, and your mother misses your teeth and hair rubbing the skin where they would grow in. When you grow up and become an actuary, your father misses the astronaut he claims you once wanted to be.
We miss you when you fall asleep, and when you refuse to take your nap, we miss you sleeping because your eyes are beautiful when shut. (Like egg-shell.) We missed you weeks before you were born and years after.
Q: I don't want you to miss those things. I want you to miss me.
A: It's not so easy to know you. It takes a long time, and we're grown up and old.
[Back to Table of Contents]
To the Moon Alice
Eileen Gunn
Mean as a sitcom
Ralph grins like a pumpkin
I'm warning you Alice
Forget it thinks Alice
I'm leaving the next time
He shakes that fat fist
Alice looks up at
A full autumn moon
The deep amber of honey
How can I get there?
Russia sent up that puppy
It can't be so hard
Shouts come from the airshaft
Our neighbors the Nortons
Are fighting again
Ed Norton lord love him is
No rocket jockey
But knows how things work
Trixie is smarter
And sexy to boot
Now what does she see in him?
Hey Ed can you help me?
I want a surprise
For Ralph on his birthday
Can't let him find out
That I'm planning to split
He'd tip off old Ralphie-boy
We'll launch Brooklyn's first moon shot
I know we can swing it
We got what it takes
We're looking for thrust
In a ship that can boost us
To Mach twenty-six
There's three ways to do it
Drop bombs or burn fuel
The third I forget
An A-bomb would probably
Damage our rooftop
Can we get rocket fuel?
Ed says there's some fuel in
Cans in the sewers
He'll swipe some tonight
He starts with the guts
Of a washing machine
Alice found in the street
Sweat-soaked Ed Norton
Grabs ahold of a wrench
And a butylene torch
He solders a chamber
For Feynmann-type bombs
That are dropped out the back
Sly Ed builds a gantry
With tools from the sewers
While Ralph drives a bus
Alice the seamstress
Sews up a snug space suit
And a spare just in case
Up on the rooftop
The lift-off is sparked
By oxyacetylene
At the wheel of his bus
Ralph watches the take-off
No dinner tonight
Forget about food
Crafty Ed tells Ralph later
Let's bowl and drink beer
Weightless in orbit
Black stars at the windows
Alice howls like a dog
There's no stack of ironing but
Space is sure lonely
She thinks in despair
A noise from the closet
The spare suit is moving
My god it's alive
Stowaway Trixie
Comes out with a grin
Alice, we're free of them
Zoom!
[Back to Table of Contents]
Portfolio
Mark Rigney
This is the incomplete story of Paints, grandson of Paints No More. It begins in shadow. Like this:
As far as reincarnation goes, I became a believer on the day that I found a dead mole in my Gran's stuffy one-car garage. The old Volvo had obviously run the mole over, or at least its back half; the head and forearms still looked ready to rise and crawl away.
I resolved to pitch the carcass into the garden where it could do some good. Even at the age of eight, I knew not to handle dead things with my bare hands, so I strapped on a pair of Grandpa's over-large gardening gloves—stiff with years of dirt and flowerbed filth—and I reached out to grasp the mole's tail. It took a few tries, my fingers newly clumsy and gigantic in the gloves, but at last I got a decent grip.
I lifted, and the mole disintegrated in a shower of bunchy, crawling maggots.
I raced out of the garage as fast as my legs would carry me. Twenty yards down the driveway, I realized I still had what was left of the mole in my left hand, and I flung it into the daylilies, spikes of green topped with flaming bursts of peach-yellow, and then, after a lengthy, panting minute, I settled myself, forced down my gag reflex, and ventured back up the drive to the garage.
Where the mole had been was a damp, colorless stain. It looked like a two-dimensional bomb blast, a flat crater, and all the victims were crawling pell-mell away in an ever-spreading ring, blindly seeking for shelter and a fresh supply of food.
That was it: Proof positive of reincarnation, demonstrated by a common mole turned suddenly to an army of larvae. I was appalled—and fascinated. I stared despite myself and then, suddenly skittish, I ran inside to find Gran and beg her to read me a story, the longest, most involving sort, the kind that would transport me so utterly that I wo
uldn't have to cope with the image of those hurrying maggots—their voracious, hungry circle—and how the largest had been crawling, as if they could scent my warmth from afar, directly toward me.
* * * *
"Must have been the rat poison,” said Grandpa, over dinner that night. “I hate to put the stuff out, but if I have to kill a mole or two to keep the rats out of the basement, then that's their tough luck. You know Boston's crawling with rats."
Gran allowed her fork to clink hard against her chinaware plate. “Can we find a topic more suitable to the table?"
She painted, my Gran. She painted well and often, concentrating on flowers and birch trees, with occasional forays into brick-walled alleys, mud-red and choked with vines. Other departures included a series of looming stone portals that led only into darkness, and she'd won an award for a flight of freed balloons racing past a skyscraper. She won another for a great blue heron winging its way home across a lake lit only by a wash of green-hued Northern Lights.
Her busy, cramped studio could hold me transfixed for hours at a time. I would simply stand there, gazing at image after image, half of them painted only on cheap cardboard or featherweight construction paper. These preliminary pieces sat in piles on the floor, they hung from string on tiny rusting clips, they huddled together in heaps and clumps. The most recent scratch-work and sketches always rested on two black metal music stands, awaiting judgment.
"Studies,” she called them. “Beginnings."
To me, they were masterpieces one and all, but the obvious quality of her work was almost beside the point. For me, each of her paintings was like a window, more inferred than seen, a glimpse or an echo of the mysterious and independent adult lurking inside my cheerful, worldly-wise grandmother.
Gran's studio was an afterthought, an addition built directly behind Grandpa's study. From the outside, the studio looked as it had been tacked to the house like a secondary appendage, cheap and boxy. From the inside, it always felt like a comfortable part of the whole, perhaps because it boasted windows on three sides that afforded easy views of the shady, fenced back yard. Gardens bloomed in front of the fences, uncomplicated affairs that relied heavily on hosta, daffodils, and innumerable impatiens: purple, red, white, and the occasional white and red mix.
Gran had Grandpa plant impatiens because she adored painting them. No subject held her more rapt, and when housework or church business or visiting friends didn't demand otherwise, warm weather usually found her perched on a stool with a sketchbook on her knee, selecting yet another perfect grouping of the tiny upturned flowers. Painted and framed, her myriad impatiens had migrated to every relative and neighbor; they were given—and received—as cherished Christmas gifts. To unwrap one of Gran's impatiens was to be accepted, blessed and acknowledged. To have one hanging from your wall connoted status, and arrival.
I was too young that summer to have been given a proper painting of my own—despite my presence in the house, I had not yet arrived—but Gran had kindly worked up a rough version of several blotchy purple impatiens on a strip of cardboard.
"A bookmark,” she said. “For a grandson gifted with a keen imagination."
I kept that bookmark jammed in the pages of my Illustrated Knights of the Round Table, a measure of the value I attached to both. My father had given me that amazing book as a gift for my recent birthday, and I hardly ever closed its cover, leaving it always open to one page or another, each more full than the last of steely blades and unfurled standards, mighty jousts and grim-walled castles. With both of my parents looking for work in far-away Bangor (where distant relatives had promised lucrative seasonal highway jobs), I dreamed my way daily through that book, not just because of its own implicit wonder, but also to keep better track of my family, and myself. The stories inside told me more than mere tales of Arthur's long-dead retainers, they sang to me that my parents would one day return, like knights from a quest, for me. We'd settle in one place and there'd be good and steady work, and all would again be right with the world.
Not that I objected to spending a Belmont summer with Grandpa and Gran. They were wonderful people, by a child's or any other standard, and they made it easy to slip into their routines while still allowing me the freedom to strike out on my blue banana-seat Huffy and pedal my way to new, mettle-testing friendships with all the neighborhood children. Pirates, bombardment, sandlot baseball: It was summer, and we played them all. It should have been as idyllic a summer as any I ever experienced.
"We have,” Grandpa told me, on the day I arrived for my extended stay, “only one house rule."
My parents sat across from him at the enormous oval dinner table in the slightly grimy kitchen. The tablecloth was corn-yellow, the walls pistachio green; I never understood, until owning a time-consuming home of my own, how anyone as artistic as Gran could put up with such a horrid-looking room. Not that the color scheme was on my mind at that moment. I stood at Grandpa's elbow, nervous as all get out, waiting for the axe to fall. A rule, one rule! It would surely be a terror.
Grandpa grinned and showed his gums. “My one rule is: Listen to your Gran."
Gran confided her single rule after my parents had driven away, a departure that had taken an hour or more thanks to the endless admonitions they'd only at the last minute remembered. Wear clean socks, use soap in the bath, listen to your grandparents, help out around the house, don't track mud all over the place, leave insects and snakes and toads outside...
...and above all, listen to your grandparents. We know you'll be a good boy.
Gran's one rule wasn't a rule. It was an injunction.
"Nathan,” she said, “you will ignore the portfolio behind the piano. Do not pick it up, do not take it out, do not venture any little peeks. Do you understand me?"
I did, of course, but I already knew perfectly well that if I was told not to investigate something, then it stood to reason that I would have to do so, and that at the earliest opportunity.
To my surprise, I tried to explain this, and Gran's response I remember still, as clearly as any statement she ever made.
"You are not the first child to enter this house, and you are not the first to take a liking to my work. But you are the first that I have warned away. Of course I know that you will eventually break this rule, and I look forward to the day that you do. I only ask that you put it off as long as possible. Some paths cannot be retraced."
What that meant, I had no idea, so I got on with the business of being eight, eight in the summer. Eight: The age when time ran fast enough that I could look to my future with a certain expectation, and yet it still crawled with sufficient slowness that I could pause and look behind with a feverish, leaden accuracy.
That combination made for a summer of powerful, indelible memories. I remember a mosquito bite behind my left ear that itched for a week. I remember devouring a coconut cake at a neighbor's house. I cannot recall the neighbor's name or the names of her children, my playmates, but I remember the cake, not only its flavor but its texture, the roughness of the coconut shavings blended with the sumptuous plaster-white icing. I remember bicycling all the way to Beaver Brook, shooting straight through the lethal five-way intersection at Belmont Square with hardly a glance for crossing traffic, and I vividly remember somehow making it home both alive and in time for supper. I remember slipping one day when I stepped out of the tub and catapulting head-first into the bathroom wall's indigo tile. Grandpa had to drive me to a wizened, lisping doctor who gave me nine stitches, black and thick, on my forehead. I was the hit of the neighborhood for a month, and all the kids called me Frankenstein.
Grandpa had been a jeweler, and while he had retired from his shop, he had never stepped back from his craft. He spent long hours at it still, a green-tinted visor over his eyes to block any glare as he poked and prodded tiny strands of metal into clasping shards of brilliant jewels. He made metal and stone meet and match, he bent them to his bidding. He did private work, for friends of the family, long-time customers,
relatives. Had his projects been on a larger scale, I'm sure his rings and bracelets and pendants would have fascinated me just as much as Gran's canvases, but there were times when the work he held was all but obscured by his heavily knuckled hands or the fingers of his vise, and it was all I could do to see. For the most part, I left him alone.
And, on a day when he and Gran left me alone while they ventured out to the supermarket, I decided to do as Gran had said I must, and break her single law.
The forbidden portfolio wasn't hidden or even locked up. Just as she'd said, she kept it tucked along the side of the old upright piano, black and mostly in key, an instrument that Grandpa still played daily in a mournful, offhand way as he waited for his morning coffee to percolate. As if the piano itself were a sentinel and I a thief, I avoided looking at it as I hauled the portfolio, stuffed and heavy, to the living room. I spread the canvases and boards across the furniture until they ringed and surrounded me. Only then did I allow myself to fully survey what I had exhumed.
Impatiens, one after another. All colors and stripes. More and more impatiens, on every single panel.
Was this a trick? Gran's way of setting me up? No, it couldn't be. I narrowed my gaze, I stared harder. And I saw beneath those cheerful blooms.
They were impatiens, yes, but this time rendered with a sickening attention to what lay below the gaps in the dark, orderly tangle of leaves. These were not mere flowers, a homey portraiture of petals and sepals. No, in these paintings, Gran had used the blossoms to guard and highlight what crawled and twisted beneath, host after host of hideous, snaking worms, many of them deformed into multi-tentacled, many-headed monstrosities that nature surely never meant to allow.
I peered closer. I reached out a finger to touch the surface of the nearest painting, and there is a part of me that will swear to this day that those writhing worms turned toward me and reached, up and out, to meet my offered finger.
I jerked my hand away and backed up until I stood in the very center of the artwork circle. Perky impatiens blossomed on every sofa, chair and ottoman; they leaned against the bookshelves, they stood beneath the tarnished brass lamps, they sidled up to the cobwebbed legs of the stereo cabinet. From a distance of even a couple of feet, it was impossible to see the wormlike things beneath the leaves—but I knew, without even checking, that they infected every canvas, the perfect marriage of macabre and mundane.
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 22 Page 9
