Collected Fictions

by Gordon Lish

  Ah, but suppose the set screw had come undone.

  Or that you had played "the" seven of spades.

  Or that I had not been the "dealer."

  But it did not and you did not and I was.

  SOPHOCLES

  TAKE EGG. Boil until hard-cooked. Crack shell. Hold under running water. Remove shell. Set shell aside. Peel away white. Set white aside. Use heel of spoon to mash yolk in midsize mixing bowl. Add one teaspoon heavy cream, one tablespoon granulated sugar, one teaspoon confectioners' sugar, three teaspoons almond extract, dash salt. Blend until blended consistency has been achieved. Set mixture aside. Take half cup shortening, two cups sifted flour, one teaspoon salt, four tablespoons ice water. Press with fork. Melt two sticks unsalted butter and fold in. Add two teaspoons vanilla extract. Shake in ground cinnamon and nutmeg to taste. Cover with dampened towel and set aside in warm, dry place. Core eight apples. Cream three bananas. Take one cup sour cream, half cup sweet cream, quarter cup molasses. Blend three tablespoons dark brown sugar with quarter cup unsalted butter. Add half teaspoon baking powder. Turn when bubbles appear. Set mixture aside. Heat bacon drippings, peanut oil, and corn oil in shallow frypan. Drain excess onto brown paper bag. Pour remainder into buttered casserole. Sprinkle with paprika. Pat dry. Remove from pan. Allow milk to "billow." Cut in four servings of finely chopped cabbage. Put seven egg yolks, two pints buttermilk into large mixing bowl. Beat until ingredients are thoroughly moistened. Resolve butter while gradually adding sugar. Add egg mixture to hot milk in saucepan. Set aside and take two tablespoons strained orange juice and eight-ounce jar apricot preserves. Cut pecans coarsely. Pour and spoon into prepared pan. Add half cup condensed milk, half cup evaporated milk, whole cup skim milk. Cook until substance has clarified. Let cool before refrigerating. Then bring gently to boil. Stir in apples and "shave" top with well-chilled knife. Beat vigorously until thick. Set this aside. Crush four vanilla beans with curd mallet. Divide with scissors into one-inch pieces. Transfer mixture to baking tin. Core more apples. Fold in eggs. Fold in pecans. Beat until stiff. Where's your cooked egg white? Don't forget your cooked egg white! Cut shortening into safflower oil. Remove cabbage from double boiler. Steam and then spread until surface is crumbly. Beat with whisk. Set aside. To begin sauce, take one quart okra, two pints tomatoes, two chopped onions, salt and pepper to taste. Take off skin and slice thin. Shake until greens are engulfed. Combine and keep beating. Prepare greased sheet. Allow contents to regroup. Dice and remove grated walnuts. Mixture is "ready" when peaks appear. Set aside and boil without stirring. Is it brittle? Discard and start again if brittle. What happened to vanilla beans? Crush more vanilla beans. Take creamed bananas. Pat dry. Remove from bowl. Lift gently. Combine. Fold back towel. You dampened it, didn't you? Didn't you dampen it? You didn't, you didn't, you didn't dampen it! You took this for a joke and didn't fucking dampen it, did you? See the brittleness? Weren't you warned? You were warned, weren't you?

  Take egg.

  No, forget it—don't take egg.

  Go get eight pounds stewing meat.

  Hack away gristle.

  Hack away suet.

  Rip out bone.

  THE DEAD

  DEAR, DEAREST PEARL,

  Just a note to say how sorry I am I cannot be with you to visit with you before you turn two days old. The trouble is I'm sort of snowed in up here in a northerly city and they're saying there won't be any way out of it for me for a while. It makes me feel just awful to have to be kept away from you like this. Your mother and dad called on up here last night to pass along to me the news about you being in the world with us and all. I'm glad. I'm so glad. It's just terrible the way the weather way up here is keeping me away from you. I never saw such weather—snow, snow, snow!—and the wind blowing it past my window with such meanness. How is it wind can get like this, so wild and nasty and mean? I'm not only way up here in this northerly city, I'm way up high in this hotel. Maybe the wind wouldn't be so bad if my room were on a lower floor—or maybe it just wouldn't seem to me to be so bad—everything, the wind, the cold. I mean, maybe the wind would seem to blow the snow by slower or something. I don't know. I'm just miserable about the whole thing, me stuck here like this up here like this, and you down there getting ready to be a day older without me there to sit in there with you on the passing of the time. It's probably warm where you are—indoors, inside, all that sort of thing of being okay. I'm indoors too, I'm inside too, but it feels pretty terrible to me in this room. God, Pearl, it's so white outside. I never saw it so white outside. But you know what? When I get up close to the window, I can see there is a skating rink down outside there out across a kind of park out there just opposite from the hotel I'm in here over on this side of this hotel. Can you believe it, people skating when it's weather like this? There's a lot of them out there, it looks to me like, going around and going around. It looks easy the way they're doing it, but I bet you it isn't—what with so much wind and so much cold and so much snow and so on. Imagine it, your feet freezing in your skates and the wind getting you right in the face every time you make your turns. But none of them, those skaters, there is not a blessed one of them who is not showing off anything but the greatest of ease to me from way up here in this hotel. Of course, I'm way up. It's such a high floor I'm way up on. Oh, Pearl, dear Pearl, this hotel couldn't be a bigger one if it tried. What made them ever want to make such a big hotel way up here so crazy, crazy north? But I suppose nobody way up here can really tell what it's really like way down there in the rink. Maybe it's not so bad. Maybe I am just making it sound bad because I do not know what else for me to say. I guess they're probably having fun, all of them, the skaters in the world. They're going around. I can hardly see them the way you can hardly see people from here. But they are skating, don't you fret. It's the white. It's the snow flying and whiting everything out—or whiting it way down anyhow—making everything seem so faraway-seeming. It is like a dream. Did you know my mother's dead? Did you know my father's dead? Did you know my sister's dead? Pearl, dear Pearl, dearest Pearl, I know you are not even two days old yet and I know it is probably not the best thing for me to be sitting here saying to you anything about dead people yet, but I just wanted for you to hear it first from me—my mother's dead, my father's dead, my sister's dead—and lots of other people, they are all of them dead too. There are so many dead other people. They died of different things. And I had the idea I should tell you. If I get another idea I think you should hear me tell you, I think I will do it, okay? But this is it for the time being. Plus saying hello to you and saying welcome to you and saying I love you to you. Just this one other thing, Pearl, dearest Pearl. I really like the name your mother and dad gave you. I mean, it's got a lot in it for a name, I think. It goes, I think it goes with all these things I'm seeing in the world today—and thinking of today and missing so bad, so bad, so bad today. Pearl, Pearl—I am just saying your name. I hope you're warm. I hope everybody's warm. If you ever go skating, be careful—oh, please. Get something bright and put it on. How about a red scarf or something like that? Or it could be a red cap. Then maybe people won't bang into you maybe—and then maybe everybody will be certain to be able to see you and to keep seeing you and to never stop seeing you—even from a long way off. Oh, and another thing, Pearl—keep going, Pearl—don't stop going, Pearl, don't ever stop going, Pearl—because otherwise what will happen is they will come and they will come and they will bump you from behind as if you had not ever been—or are or were—there.

  Your grandfather,

  Gordon

  WOULDN'T A TITLE JUST MAKE IT WORSE?

  HOW COME IS IT I am always telling people stories and people are always construing my stories to be stories as in stories? Why would I want to tell people made-up stories? I can't stand made-up stories. It makes me sick to hear a made-up story. Look, if your story is a made-up story, then do me a favor and keep it to yourself. Me, I would never tell a made-up story about anything, let alone about myself. I res
pect myself much too much for me ever to stoop to just making something up about myself. I don't get it why anybody would want to tell a made-up story about himself. But the even bigger mystery to me is why, when you tell them the truth, people go ahead and look at you and say, "Oh, come on, quit it—nooooooooooooo." Take this one, for instance. I mean, suppose we just take ourselves a squint at how this one works with someone like you instead of with anyone like anyone else. So okay, so it was when I was lecturing someplace far away from here once. I was there for the week, had to be there for the week, was signed up to teach fiction-writing there for the week—and was, for the week, being put up at the home of some very fancy folks, dignitaries in the English department or in the literature department or in one of those departments like that, both husband and wife. Anyhow, they were very grand and very nice and very kind, and I accordingly start to begin to feel so tremendously and irredeemably in the debt of these persons even before I had even slept for even one night under their roof. Well, I wasn't actually under their roof, as it were, but was in a sort of added-on affair attached to the house by a sort of connective passageway, you might say, since passageways, I suppose, connect. I only mean to say that my place, my borrowed place, the place lent to me, that is, had its own window and its own door and when you went out of it, the door, you stepped into a little connective consideration that put you right up against the kitchen door of where the grown-ups were—which is to say, the house of one's hosts. Anyhow, to get right to it if you don't mind all the hurry—you just have to appreciate the fact that I am the most fastidious little thing in all the wide and untidy world. In other words, let's say I happened to have been your houseguest for a period of ten years. At my usual base rate of one squillion tidinesses per year, it works out to your finding not just your house but your next-door neighbors' houses about one gazillion times tidier than they were when I first put in an appearance in your neighborhood. So I guess it goes without saying this little tiny sort of garage apartment I was in was the last word in presentability the morning I was—the week's work now a job left unjumbled behind me—making ready to leave. Okay, I had to catch a plane, you see. So here's the thing—had positioned a box of candy on the table by the door, had leaned up against the box of candy a square of writing paper on which had been entered the written expression of my gratitude, had situated the key on the table so as for the key to act as a discouragement against the thank-you note's drifting to the floor, had taken one last look about to make certain nothing would offer the slightest invitation to reproach. Ahhhh. Good Gordon. I tell you, I felt as if, praise God, here I was—Gordon, Gordon—getting away with crimes against humanity all over again. And at this our fellow shoulders his carry-all and goes for the knob with his other hand. But lets go of it, the doorknob, in the instant, it having just been disclosed to him that he is going to have to race to the latrine, and this—this!—with all possible speed. Now then, we are hastening ahead ourselves in order that we might consider the forthcoming event from the dainty standpoint of hindsight, eh? Are you following me? Try to follow me. I have wiped. I have, as is my custom, wiped—wiping with soap, wiping with water—wiping such that the concept of wiping is delivered from its critique—flushing, don't you know it, like Neptune all the while. Good again, hurray again, for I have not tarried for too long. I can make it to the airport in more than enough time. I get to my feet, draw up my trousers, fasten them, yank a handful of toilet tissue free from the roll for to give a last finishing touch to the porcelain, to the seat, to the whole glistening commode. When I see—in the bowl—in the bowl!—this solitary, big-shouldered, brute-sized stool. So I activate the flushing mechanism. The water goes into its routine commotion, the excretum gets itself sucked out of sight, but in due course—just as I had guessed—hell, guessed—knew, knew!—from the instant I was born, I knew, I knew!—it, this thing, this twist of Lish-ness lifts itself back into blatant view—grinning, I do believe—even, it seemed to me, winking, I do believe. Fine, fine—I hit the plunger again, already knowing what there is to be known, what there is always to be known—namely, that I and that all my descendants might stand here at our hectic labors flushing toilets until the cows come home, that when they did come, this malicious, hainted, evil turd would still be here for them to see it, and see it—it idly, gaily, gigantically turning in the otherwise perfect waters below—they, the bovine police, would. What to do, what to do, what to do? I mean, I could see, foresee, could feel myself defeated by forecast galore. This blightedness, this fouledness, it would never be gone. If I snatched it up and hid it away in my carry-all, the contents thereof would smash into it and mash it into a paste that would then smear itself remorselessly onto my really prize stuff, the best of which I had toted with me to this outpost to show myself off in in front of whosoever might show up in my class. If instead I went to the window with it (you know what) and dumped it (you know what) overboard, would my hosts not come and discover it (it!) beneath the very porthole the very minute my plan had seen me gone? What of taking it in hand, of going to the door with it, then of going with it (oh, God, it again!) thither, thereafter to dispose of same in a suitable municipal receptacle as soon as I were well clear of the neighborhood? Ah, Jesus, this seemed the very thing! Until foresight (stories, stories, stories) made me to read in my mind—in my mind!—the sentence predicating the presence of my protectors there in the passageway on the other side of the door, they foregathered in beaming bonhomie for the very purpose of embracing me the one last time, thereupon to send me all the more welcomed off. So are you seeing what I in my mind—in my mind!—saw? I would fling open the door and he would be there to reach for my hand to clasp it powerfully to his own. Whereas were I to have taken the precaution of having shifted the turd into my other hand, then would this not be the hand she, for her part, would then shoot out her hand to to seize, no es verdad? I mean, I do not know what this means, no es verdad—but can you think of what else there is for anyone to say? Except, to be sure, to report to you—yes, yes, yes!—that, yes, I ate it, you bastards, I ate it! Well, of course, I ate it. After all, had it not been written that I would? Come on, quit it—what outcome by the teller—by me, by you, by Willie, by your aunt Tillie—has not already been well and roundly foretold?

  So which is it, do you say?

  Is it story or story?

  It's truth?

  Not truth?

  Nor aught but words as words working their way along as words—a bit of ink on this otherwise blank or—worse, worse!—unnumbered page.

  EATS WITH OZICK AND LENTRICCHIA

  I AM WRITING THIS the night of 30 January 1994.

  Barbara is in the next room.

  She is being fed by two nurses. One spoons the soupy food onto Barbara's tongue, the other promptly pushes between Barbara's teeth the canula that carries what Barbara cannot swallow down into the canister where what is suctioned out of Barbara's mouth is stored until someone must come dump the contents into the bedroom toilet so that the procedure might be continued without spillover or mechanical breakdown.

  Barbara will be fed, in this manner, all night, which means, as a rule—all night, that is—until about four in the morning, at which time Barbara will be prepared for bed, and then finally laid down onto it at about six-thirty. She will be gotten up from bed and positioned back into her chair at about nine-thirty, whereupon the feeding will begin again throughout the day and the night again, this in the care of three shifts of a pair of nurses who come to us as Mercy Persons—until about four in the morning of 31 January—if, in fact, there is going to be a 31 January this year.

  I don't know.

  I turn sixty in February.

  I mention these matters not to press you with the force of conditions now in sway in Barbara's life but instead to create the context for the one literary memoir—if this is what it might be claimed this recollection of mine is—I am ever likely to impart to print.

  It concerns the critic Frank Lentricchia and the novelist Cynt
hia Ozick.

  It concerns eating.

  It concerns an item that belonged to Barbara but which I took from Barbara—actually, from the chifforobe in the room Barbara now sits in now being fed in as I now sit writing in this one—the evening last July that Ozick and Lentricchia asked me to come out to dinner with them.

  It was, the item, vintage spectacles that pinch the nose to keep themselves stationed at their post and that have a ribbon that, looped through an eyelet formed from the frame, goes over the head and takes purchase around the neck and hangs down.

  Pince-nez, yes?

  Barbara never wore them.

  The glass in them was plain glass.

  I had picked up this novelty for Barbara from some sort of fashion emporium back when we were first setting up housekeeping together.

  The pince-nez were like so many of the things I was then snatching from everywhere for Barbara—notions I had, frenzied notions, of ornamenting her, of delineating her, in her beauty.

  Barbara was a very beautiful woman.

  Barbara is still, inexpressibly, incredibly—reduced to a depletion more severe than anything I would have imagined possible without death present in complete dominion—a very beautiful woman. You can see this, Barbara's authority in this category, registering in the styles of approach made to her by the women who come to nurse Barbara—a sort of recognition, I think it is, a sort of satisfied acknowledgement of the insult nature reserves—justly!—for the very beautiful.

  Barbara is regnant in there in our bedroom with two such nurses right now. They feed her, or struggle to feed her, as Barbara, for her part, struggles to swallow little sips of what was yesterday cooked and pureed for her, everybody in there, none more blindingly than Barbara herself, getting a good look at what most of us never see: the work that can be done to the body by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.