Dog Canyon » fiction

AMBULANCE: a short story. Part 3.

Mary Pauline Lowry — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 13:51:00 +0000

A slender woman knelt beside me. Usually a civilian comes up to me at a scene saying he’s a volunteer medic out of Blanco County and I say, “Thanks, move along.” But this slender woman, she had a voice from a dream in which babies come into the world riding great waves of warm water and the mothers weep with joy to hold their newly born.

“I’m a nurse,” she said.

This competent woman kneeling beside me and in my head she kept talking. In my head, I could hear her voice, like band-aids and brownies, saying, “You are not alone in this parched, cracked world into which you were so ruthlessly begotten.”

You’re always supposed to keep a woman who is pregnant on her side. Lying on the back puts the full weight of the baby on the spine and on the inferior vena cava; it can cause crazy ass changes in blood pressure, too. But for CPR, the patient has to be on her back. I’d practically memorized our goddamn protocol manual and there was no protocol for this, not for doing CPR on a woman who must be at her due date, if not just past it; and it wasn’t something I’d thought to ask about, not ever.

One of the guys from Fire noticed Nan wasn’t gonna be able to handle doing compressions; and so he knelt down, laced his fingers together and put the heel of his palm right on top of her sternum; his hands, they barely fit there between her great big round breasts and the hilltop of her stomach.

And I have always loved pregnant women, so ripe and everybody knowing just how they got that way; and no one should know them any way but with the smell of talcum and the taste of nervous, happy tears.

The guy from Fire started chest compressions and I could hear chestnut-colored hair’s ribs cracking underneath the weight he put on her. His face was stoic, all business. I kept maintaining the airway; and there was the nurse’s own heartbeat and breath as she knelt beside me. I could feel it even as Nan hovered further and further away from us where he could keep his own pregnant wife somehow safe.

We loaded the chestnut-haired woman onto the stretcher and into the back of the ambulance. The guy from Fire was coming with me, still doing compressions. Nan would be fine to drive. I was leaving the nurse behind. I had not seen her face. She had no name. Her heartbeat and I knew that she was with me.

The chi had gone out of the chestnut-haired woman, but the intubation and the CPR was keeping the blood oxygen exchange between her and the baby going. The baby floating and squirming inside the still-warm world of its mother’s dead body.
I felt as if I’d just rolled up on a mangled car with the living inside and I had a Jaws of Life, only I didn’t have permission to use it. And the person inside the car was going to die if I didn’t.

The woman with the chestnut-colored hair was dead and so she wasn’t my patient anymore; now my patient was the baby inside of her.

Paramedics aren’t authorized to do emergency surgery, not even on the dead.

By the time we arrived in the ER, the baby would be dead, too, or hopelessly brain damaged.

I grabbed the scalpel. The guy from Fire looked at me. Our eyes met. He knew and I knew and he nodded, just ever so slightly. And so without thinking beyond what needed to be done, I made the great, smiling cut just above the chestnut-haired woman’s pelvis. And the giant gush of water came spilling out onto me and I had a hold of the baby’s bright blue shoulders, slippery with blood, and I was pulling her out of there. I cut the cord as the baby turned pink in my arms and we both began to cry.

I’d heard of it happening a few times. A paramedic does an emergency C-section on a dead patient at the scene and afterwards he loses his license for it. The review board has to take his license. They’ve got no wiggle room there. But the paramedic can say, “Fuck you, the baby lived. Take my goddamn license.”

But that baby I delivered, she died in the hospital, four hours after we arrived, from internal injuries sustained in the womb during the terrible car wreck that killed her mother.

And sometimes when I made sweet love to my girlfriend Lily, I had the crazy notion I wanted to get her pregnant. But then later when her period came I would always remind myself that maybe you’re not doing anyone a favor by bringing them into this world. Maybe that’s no favor at all.

THE END

AMBULANCE: a short story. Part 2.

Mary Pauline Lowry — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 13:39:13 +0000

Back at the station Nan and I watched an Ultimate Fighting Championship match while we ate some popcorn we mixed with almonds, because we’re both trying to get more protein. I wished for a joint; my second week on the job and I was already thinking I needed one where I can smoke without the specter of the piss test hanging over me all the damn time.

I’d always thought UFC was for meatheads, but since I started work Nan had talked me through the rules; and now I can see how much there is too it, dude. So many different kinds of martial arts—-aidkido, jujitsu, tae kwan do—-of course there’s boxing, too. And there’s beauty to how, when a guy is in a chokehold, he taps out when he’s ready to be released. Just gives a light little tap on the beasty forearm of the fucker who’s got ahold of him. And that’s it: the guy lets him go.

In UFC, the guy in the chokehold always gets to say when he’s had enough. And that’s civilized, dude, in a way real life is not.

But as we’re sitting there watching this big blonde guy with a mullet pull a chokehold on a smaller, wiry Puerto Rican fucker, the Puerto Rican doesn’t tap out and all of a sudden his eyes roll back in his head and he’s out. That doesn’t happen too often. There aren’t too many Cool Hand Luke’s, not even in Ultimate Fighting. Most guys, you take away their air and they’re gonna want to breath.

So the Puerto Rican goes limp and the big guy with the mullet lets him down onto the mat right as dispatch comes over the radio with a call for us, a three car pile up on I-35 and we’re on the truck and rolling. We couldn’t see the wreck for the backed up traffic on the road, but we made decent time on the shoulder lane.

As I climbed out of the box with my jump bag, a guy from Fire came up to us to give a report. He had a giant gut that said he’ll for sure drop dead two years after he retires. “We got someone here in the Nissan with a broken leg,” he says, “someone over there who’s okay, we got a guy pissing and moaning who wasn’t even in the wreck. And we got a woman who—” But I was already hustling towards her.

The front of the car was accordioned to hell, but two more guys from Fire had the door open, no airbag and they’d already pulled her out and had her on the asphalt. And as soon as they saw me coming, both of the firefighters looked up at me like they were relieved: Someone else to be in charge of this one.

Her head was completely crushed in on the right side. Crushed in like nobody lives through, not even as a vegetable. She would be dead in five.

I knelt down beside her. Even though her brains were out, I could see that she had the thickest, shiniest chestnut colored hair.

The woman’s stomach rose like a giant frilly purple hilltop as she lay there on her back. The blouse low cut and her breasts spilling back towards her throat.

It could’ve been a labor pain that sent her shooting across three lanes of traffic and into an oncoming car.

Her mouth hung open and she sucked in one of the slow gasps that comes just before dying. Once you see agonal breathing a few times, you know it.

I pulled out my intubation tube as I knelt behind her head to adjust her airway. My face up close to her brains and the smell powerful. She took one more agonal breath. The last dying gasp of this ripe, beautiful woman, it would be with me forever. You can’t unring a bell, that’s what my grandma would say.

I slid the intubation blade down her throat.

You always work a pregnant woman, no matter how dead.

Nan’s standing over me, but I can tell this one’s hard for him. His wife, she just found out she’s pregnant with their second.

Stay tuned for Part Three of AMBULANCE.

AMBULANCE: a short story. Part 1.

Mary Pauline Lowry — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 13:45:05 +0000

The sirens wail and the four year-old kid is screaming and I’m getting a listen at his chest, which is about eight inches across. I’m worried one of his lungs popped when the car ran him over and I want to hear the whisper of breath on each side of his chest but I can’t hear shit.

At the hospital we hand him over to the ER. They do a needle decompression, which is what I would’ve done in the ambulance if I could’ve heard well enough to know he needed it. Dr. MacKenzie drove a tiny dart through the kid’s chest and all that extra air leaking out from his popped lung had a place to escape so it didn’t fill up his lung sac and push his heart flat. He lived, that one.

A month later Nan and I were called in front of the review board. No man is an island—you go before the review board with your partner—but it was my patient. The supervisor and the medical director look at me across the table. That supervisor hasn’t been in an ambulance in fifteen years. And the medical director? Never. They want to know why I didn’t do the needle decompression on the kid.

“You get in the back of the box and have a listen at that tiny chest and tell me what you hear, you entitled dickwads.” That’s what I want to say.

I want to stand up and turn the table over onto them, Jesus-style.

I keep it reined in, though. Answer their questions. And so I keep my job.

“The patient had all the signs of pneumothorax—tracheal shift, dropping pulse, sub-Q air. Without the needle decompression, it’s lucky the kid didn’t die.” That’s what the medical director said.

“You saved the kid.” That’s my best friend Perry, that night when we’re drinking beers.

I shrug.

“Sure you did,” Perry says.

And I think about it. I’m the one who transported him. Twenty minutes more and he would’ve been a goner. I may know I’m doing a decent job when I’m in the box, but once I’m out and people who weren’t even there start second guessing me, I can’t hang onto it.

“You’re a hero,” Perry says. And he lights us up a joint.

Later on that same night I’m smoking a little more, playing drums in the band room under my garage apartment. My dad owns the place, but he charges me full rent. And it’s the fucking piss ant law student who lives behind me who comes around banging on the side door, saying he’s gonna call the cops if I don’t lay off. And then I’m outside and I’m yelling back at him and I’m giving him a little push. And then I’m saying some things he finds threatening and he’s backing away from me. And then he’s gone into the darkness, back the way he came.

photo by Chris Wise.

And I might just leave something on his doorstep. A mousetrap. A flaming bag of shit. A skull and crossbones. Some kind of warning that there’s an anger here, something with which he should not fuck.

My next shift, the first run we made was to a residence. The house wasn’t too small, but it was old, the way houses start to look when there isn’t anyone doing a damn thing to take care of them. The firefighters had arrived first– they always do –and had broken down the door.

The firefighters crowd around this old man on the floor in the kitchen. Walking through the living room, it’s dusty, but not too bad, then boom, the kitchen: a mess. Dirty pots and pans on the stove and the oven door hanging open with a half-baked pan of spaghetti casserole being exited by a roach army unused to the kind of commotion we were stirring up.

The old man’s on the floor—the firefighters haven’t moved him, and his hip has dislocated and he’s in a lot of pain. He’s not that old even, not really, and even though the kitchen’s a disaster his clothes look like they’ve just come from the cleaners and he’s had a shave and there isn’t a bunch of hair growing out of his nose like you get with a lot of old guys.

I check to make sure it’s really the hip and it is and then I offer the old guy a valium. But he won’t take it. I ask if he’s ready for me to reduce the dislocation and he nods yes. And there is something sad about the motion, like the old guy has lived long enough to know how these things go. He knows it’s going to hurt and he knows that he can take the pain.

And sure we’ll be able to pop the old hip back in, but there’s nothing we can do about the way life does people.

Nan gives the old guy a hand to grab onto. The old guy’s skin is starting to go thin and loose, but it’s still a strong hand. He looks at me as I take ahold of his femur, this old guy, and he’s not afraid of anything. And when I give my shove the guy winces, but that’s it, even though most people scream like little birdies. The hip pops back in and we’re helping the old guy to his feet.

He’s a little unsteady at first, but then he shakes it out and he’s not embarrassed to have needed the help. He looks at us, the two guys from Fire, Nan and me, and he sees how young we are and how strong. He glances around him then and it’s like he hadn’t been able to see the state of his kitchen before and now he’s seeing it. “Samantha being gone,” he says, “it’s not an excuse.”

We shuffled our feet and one of the guys from Fire said something about the old guy being the last American bachelor, but it was a bad joke to make to a widower. The old guy gave a laugh that said it was funny how dumb some good intentioned people can be.

I wrote the name of my dad’s housekeeper on a napkin. “Her number’s listed and she’ll clean this place right up,” I said. The guy could afford it for sure. “She’s a good cook, too.”

He nodded and put the napkin on the kitchen table under a saltshaker.

On the way back to the station, Nan and I were both quiet. The run had been too easy, the kind that makes you see the years working an ambulance stretching out in front of you.

“Have you ever thought about working on Starflight?” I asked him. Every time a Starflight emergency transport helicopter landed at the hospital I was stunned by jealousy. “They get to wear those jumpsuits. They do water rescue, too, you know. Every call life or death. Every call something that matters.”

“You’ll give yourself away caring about a single fucking thing except what you need to do to treat,” Nan said.

“What do you mean?”

“A housekeeper? Seriously?”

“They’re really fucking cool, those jumpsuits.”

Stay tuned for Part 2 of Ambulance: a short story.

No Innocent Man (Part 3): Femme Noir Fiction

Mary Pauline Lowry — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 14:23:13 +0000

Dita Von Teese

On the tube, a too-handsome kid with a mic in his face was saying, “I think Mason is the smoothest rider in freestyle. I think his grabs are his strong point, his holy grabs. The reason I’m going to beat him is, I’m better with my shirt off and it intimidates him.” The too-handsome kid laughed.

Miguel stabbed at the channel changer button with his index finger. Missed. With the camera on the dresser and the model changing her panties in the open-doored bathroom, his hands shook. Badly.

Gorgeous and Thompson jumped out of the Lincoln. Thompson popped the Lincoln’s trunk as Gorgeous jimmied the lock of the photographer’s two door Mazda, a sad little car really. Together the two folded the plastic up around Natz and hoisted him out of the Lincoln’s trunk with twin grunts.

“You hear that, Gorge?”

“Hear what?”

“That liquidy little sound.”

They staggered the few steps towards the Mazda. But when they tried to shove Mr. Natz in the trunk, an arm dangling out of the plastic complicated things.

“If he’s alive, won’t be for long.”

Gorgeous gave Natz’s body a savage shove.

Unfortunate that the jokester iceskating movie had come on just as the model exited the bathroom. That goofy fuck in leather grabbing his crotch to Billy Squire as he skated the rink. The women in the crowd tearing off their shirts and tossing them on the ice.

But with the model before him, Miguel knew he’d never manage the remote. He’d already tilted the bed back on its side and shoved it into the far corner. The model stood up facing the wall. She reached around to unzip her pleather skirt, pulling it down below her ass so that he could see the tail of the phoenix dipping below the hemline of her see-through pink panties.

“Open your legs a little wider.”

She looked over her shoulder. “Why don’t you make me open them a little wider?”

Thompson filled the syringe full of superglue and gave the lock of the Mazda’s trunk a shot. Gorgeous behind the wheel of the Lincoln before Thompson finished. Thompson slid into the passenger seat next to Gorgeous, chortling.

“He ain’t gonna have any luck getting his equipment in that trunk,” Thompson said.

“No luck at all,” Gorgeous concurred.

Miguel fucked Roxy against the wall, from behind at first, not even sure what he was doing. It had been that long. But then she turned, pulling his shirt over his head before guiding him into her again. She wanted his skin against her own; she wanted to rake his back to bits, to come away with his flesh under her nails. She fucked him back, so hard it scared him and just before he came she grabbed his ass and yanked him to her, so there was no chance of pulling out.

Dita Von Teese

“Wait a sec,” Thompson said. “Almost forgot.”

Gorgeous hit the brakes and Thompson ran back to the Mazda. He ran the bloody fingertips of his gloves under the doorhandle of the driver’s side of the photographer’s car.

When Thompson jumped back into the Lincoln, Gorgeous was chuckling.

“What is it?”

“Just thinking about this stand-up I saw the other night. You know the guy, that black guy.” Gorgeous pulled up his shirt and thumped his belly with his cupped palm in imitation. “I’m a sex symbol, ladies! I’m gonna get you pregnant!” He busted out laughing. “You know the one.”

Thompson shook his head as the Lincoln rolled smoothly out of the lot.

Roxy tucked her lingerie back in her bag before putting on plain cotton panties, a sensible and unalluring bra. She stepped back into her jeans and long-sleeved shirt.

In the room, Miguel sat in the chair, bewildered and ashamed. He looked at his camera as if he had betrayed every image he had ever locked inside.

“I’ve never slept with a model before,” he said.

“I didn’t realize either of us did any sleeping.”

He actually looked hurt. Roxy kissed him on the forehead.

A sweet goodbye.

She pulled her car out of the lot, only to park it a half block down the street. She tucked the gun into the waistband of her jeans and ran back to the Motel 6 parking lot. She tried the back passenger side door of the Mazda. Thompson had left it unlocked, just as he’d promised. She gave the gun a last wipedown and then slipped it under the passenger seat, locking the backdoor before shutting it, quietly but firmly. As she ran around the corner of the building, she heard the door to Room 129 open and Miguel’s footsteps as he headed out to load up his equipment.

Her hands stayed steady on the wheel and she parked in the three-quarters empty lot. The giant double doors shone. She entered, the fluorescents blinding. A woman sat in a chair, cradling a man’s head in her lap. He moaned softly. A small girl with her hand wrapped in a bloody towel wailed rhythmically as her mother shushed her.

Roxy approached the Registration Desk. The attendant looked up at her with tired, compassionless eyes before sliding a clipboard loaded with intake forms towards Roxy.

“I need an exam,” Roxy said. “I’ve been…” She choked on the words. She had indeed been raped on the regular—but it had been two years since that first time. Mr. Natz. Then upon his orders, by five of his gang of underlings—Gorgeous and Thompson had been the only two with apologies in their eyes. The men had beaten her, too, and left her locked in the studio apartment with the other women. There had been no police report then. There had been no exam.

“Roxy,” the voice came from the doorway to the examination rooms. Roxy stood up and walked towards the tiny nurse in the baggy scrubs.

In the Sexual Asault Nurse Exam room, she lay naked on the cold table. Her teeth chattered. The nurse said, “It’s gonna be okay, hon.” But clearly she understood that things might never be exactly okay for Roxy again.

It took two hours. The nurse scraped under Roxy’s fingernails for skin cells, swabbed her sex for semen, combed her entire body, searching for a stray strand of thread or a pubic hair. To Roxy it felt right: for the first time in two years, she shared her body with complete willingness, offering it up as the scene of a crime.

The End

No Innocent Man (Part 2): Femme Noir Fiction

Mary Pauline Lowry — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 13:26:38 +0000

Jolee Blon'. photo by Marco Patino.

The model had disappeared into the bathroom with her bags of panties and pushup bras and five-inch heels. He liked his models with a little meat on them, but it took careful arranging to make things smooth. He could see why the fashion ran towards rail thin. With a skeleton, you never had to worry about a sexy swell of flesh bulging against a garter, messing up the clean lines of a shot. But he enjoyed the challenge.

He’d worked an Army formal the night before. All of those handsome Mexican and black kids, a smattering of white guys, sloppy drunk by the time they posed before the cheap backdrop with their dates. The girls had shellacked hair and too much makeup and because the photos he took of them would never be art, Miguel actually saw them as people and they made him sad. They deserved better than what they were getting. Boys who didn’t know how to draw out a woman’s beauty, but only how to suck it up. Boys who would go off to a war with no spoils. And kill and be blown to pieces but not die. And come home barely patched up and that much angrier than before.

By the time the bathroom door opened the game had ended, replaced by freestyle motocross, the announcer’s voice rattling like a keychain. “90 seconds seems like a long time, but when you’re out on the course it goes by really fast. You got to get as many tricks in as you can.”

The model emerged with the confidence of a woman who knows her aesthetic. She didn’t ask for his advice on her outfit, either. She didn’t need it.

She wasn’t like the underweight women on the catwalk, ovaries surely shutdown from lack of body fat, pussies prematurely dry for want of estrogen. This was a real woman, juicy and firm, with a full bottom and D-cup breasts. Black lace panties, fence-net hose, knee-high boots with heels, black bra, a silver horseshoe necklace settled in the hollow of her throat for luck. Smoky eyes, pink lips. A tramp stamp covered her lower back—a phoenix rising from the flame of her crack–but the bright colors looked good. None of it was anything he hadn’t seen a hundred times before. But she made it different.

He shot her against the wall, facing him, legs spread. A whip slung around her shoulders. When she bent forward with her fists pulling down on the whip, it dug into the ample flesh of her breasts.

Miguel pulled the chair near her, stepping way back before she perched on its edge.

“Let’s go with your knees apart. A little further apart. That’s good. Yeah, that looks better.” He’d read an interview with a famous Hollywood actor once. And the actor was saying sex wasn’t his thing so much. All his energy, all his drive, he put into his acting. He wasn’t queer, either. But maybe—every once and again—that actor worked with an actress so good that she pulled his attention away from the camera.

Next Miguel had the model straddle the chair. For a minute—with the sight of the chairback rising between her legs–not a single word came to him. Not the vision of a shot. Nothing. There was only this woman, in her silly outfit, in this cheap hotel room. And he wanted something more for her. And he wanted something from her.

He made himself do his job.

“Kind of take the same pose, but angle yourself that way. Now reach down for this foot. There you go right there. Excellent. Perfect. There we go.”

Nothing but the camera clicking.

He couldn’t help himself. “Mr. Natz sent you.”

It wasn’t a question. She didn’t answer.

“You one of his girls?

“He’s paying you, right?”

Miguel dipped his chin slightly. Fair enough.

A long moment later.

“It’s been two years.” She looked straight into his eyes as she said it. He didn’t quite understand the challenge there. “How many of Natz’s girls you photographed?

He considered. “Maybe twenty. Maybe more.”

“You ever think how we get to be his girls?” He hadn’t. A beat. She continued. “That an experience you can picture?” He couldn’t.

Perhaps he should have.

Some people believe that because they aren’t guilty, they are innocent. Roxy could see Miguel was of that class.

She did not agree.

“I was a kid,” Roxy said, “everyone in the neighborhood knew this big bully Fernando robbed the owner of the Paki Mart on the regular. Didn’t just take his money. Pistol whipped him, too.

“We saw Fernando walking down the street towards the Paki Mart, we’d scatter, even if we’d been headed that way. None of us ever called the cops. Assistant DA could’ve dragged us into court himself and we would’ve turned deaf and dumb. None of us wanted Fernando after us.

“But it got to where any customer opened the door to the Paki Mart, the guy behind the counter would start quivering a little. After awhile, we could see he wasn’t every gonna really be right again.” She paused. “See No Evil, Hear No Evil. Ever think that’s its own brand of evil?”

She smiled on the last sentence. Fluttered her long lashes at him.

He couldn’t really follow it–all that talking–not with her right there in front of him.

When she disappeared into the bathroom for a costume change, Miguel moved the chair, then pulled out one of the beds, laid it down. She came out. Now a black bra, white trim, white garters. Black thong, black stockings, patent leather pumps. He shot her lying on her back, propped on her elbows, heels digging into the mattress, chest arched, head dropped back. Then he photographed her on all fours.

Talina. photo by Flat Black Photography.

It conjured doggy-style, but there was nothing canine about her.

He showed her the digital image.

“I like the shadow,” she said.

“Now change outfits.”

She didn’t look over her shoulder before entering the bathroom.

But she didn’t close the door behind her, either.

“It’ll all come down to the next semi-final bracket,” the announcer said.

Miguel set down his camera and grabbed for the remote. He’d never cared for motocross.

In the cramped bathroom, Roxy tugged on thigh highs, the kind with elastic at the top to hold them in place. She would’ve needed help to hook her other pair of garters, and she wasn’t into asking for help. Her panties were hot pink and see-through. Bra pink. Black pleather skirt on top. A different pair of five-inch heels, these with a peep toe. The nails of her toes a ruthless blood red.

Gorgeous and Thompson rolled up into the Motel 6 parking lot.

“That’s his little rice burner.”

“You sure?”

Gorgeous gave Thompson a look, already pulling on medical gloves.

Stay tuned for Part 3, the last installment of “No Innocent Man.”

No Innocent Man: Femme Noir Fiction (Part 1)

Mary Pauline Lowry — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 12:59:15 +0000

Roxy pulled the trigger five minutes before she needed to step on-stage.

The bullet hit Mr. Natz in the center of his chest. Gorgeous and Thompson caught the well-dressed Natz as he fell, pushing him backwards into the open trunk of the Lincoln, already lined with plastic. Gorgeous had to give Natz’s inflexible legs a shove to double them back onto his chest. A gurgle came from inside the trunk as Roxy tucked the revolver into the waistband of her swing costume. With the gun tight against the small of her back, she stepped forward to slam the trunk closed, giving its shiny metal surface an affectionate pat before turning on her heels.

Gorgeous slid behind the wheel. In the gleam of the car’s domelight, his face looked like a misshapen winter squash.

“Break a leg.” Thompson opened the passenger door.

Roxy ignored him, walking down the dark alley and through the backdoor into the kitchen of the Old San Francisco Steakhouse.
The new fry cook hauled a basket of wedge fries, skins still on them, out of the hot grease.

Roxy grabbed one as she passed.

“Careful,” the fry cook said, looking after her.

But Roxy had already taken a hot bite.

Roxy stepped through the slender door, her heels clacking on the hardwood. For a moment she couldn’t see past the stage’s edge. She existed as the center of a small bright world. And then her eyes adjusted and the restaurant patrons came into view. Japanese men barely hanging on to international accounts. Gambling gangsters with a greasy shine to the knees and elbows of their suits. A lone married couple, the woman’s face turning sour as she realized why her husband had selected this particular establishment. All of them sipping blood red wine from faux crystal.

They stopped speaking, stopped eating. With Roxy on-stage before them, cheese and crackers lost their appeal; the men could only anticipate rare steaks to come. Only the disgruntled wife hacked at the block of Kefaloturi with the heavy silver slicer.

Roxy knew about smoke and mirrors. Her hair piled on her head in 19th century curls, her eyes lined and lips red, a dust of sparkle on her décolletage. The skirt of her swing costume short. Fishnet hose, tall square heels, her calves strong. Turning so that her profile faced the diners below, she reached behind and above to grab the twin ropes hanging from the thirty-foot ceiling, pulling herself up and resting her supple ass on the swing. She leaned back, her arms taut, her legs extended. Then forward, her chest pushing out between her bent elbows, her legs bending back at the knee. And she began to swing. She moved higher and higher. And higher.

With an expert shift of weight, she changed her trajectory, sailing out diagonally above the stage, the arch of the swing terrifying and huge. A gaping maw of flight.

The diners’ gaze rose with Roxy. As she swung forward, the line of her strong legs pointed to the shiny brass bell hanging from the ceiling beyond the edge of the stage, above the first table. None of men—even the ones who had seen the show before—believed that the diva on the swing would be able to propel herself high enough to kick the bell, but on one great arch she swung her leg out hard, and the brash bell sounded as she nailed it with her foot. She swung back and then forward and then kicked the bell again.

On that next backswing she threw her weight forward, rotating in a full flip, nothing but the tiny strap around her waist tying her to the swing. The breath of every man in the audience caught in his throat. And they each felt the strange tension of knowing that every cock under every table had turned hard at the sight of her weightlessness; at her ability to fly when all any of them wanted was to crush her flesh beneath them.

Forward the swing went and on the next backswing she threw her weight sideways so that the rope twisted and twisted as it arched and then she spun wildly as the rope unwound and the great pendulum of her swing decreased and her spinning slowed.

When the swing finally came to rest above the stage, Roxy daintily unbuckled the belt and flipped backwards off of the swing, her square heels sailing over her head and landing with a solid sound on the hardwood.

Steve, the pianist, was already walking towards her, the mic in his hand. She put the black microphone to her pursed lips and began to sing.
“Falling in love again/Never wanted to/What am I to do?/Can’t help it

The sound of her sweet voice allowed diners to breathe again and their cigarette smoke rose and curled in the air around her, as if even the floating tendrils longed to touch her.

Steve ran his hands over the piano keys; Roxy climbed kittenishly up onto piano’s top, tucking her legs beneath her as she belted out the song, which let all the men feel as if they had not been born decades too late.

“Men cluster to me/Like moths around a flame/And if their wings burn/I know I’m not to blame”

The men forgot their new wives and their alimony. Forgot their business woes. Forgot that despite the prices, the Old San Francisco Steakhouse had seen better days. That without Roxy, it would only be an overpriced restaurant staging as a Wild West brothel, hunkered down alongside I-35—a sad, angry road to nothing but Dallas.

Miguel checked his watch. 10:52 p.m. Eight minutes before his model-de-jour’s scheduled arrival. The models always showed up at least ten minutes late. Always. Some combination of trepidation and an underestimation of time allotted for whatever magic they worked before the mirror, illusions aided by hot rollers and lip liner, flatirons and eyeshadow. He wondered why the photoshoot had been requested for such an unusually late hour. But Mr. Natz didn’t pay Miguel to ask questions.

He glanced around Room 129 of the Motel Six. Two double beds turned upright and stuck into the far corner by the bathroom. Flooring clean and bare. Back wall cream-colored and plain. Lighting set up. Westcott halo light modifier in place. Extension cords plugged in and working. Texas playing Nebraska on the television. Heater blasting. He’d learned the hard way that unless he was roasting, the models would be cold.

Miguel only photographed women. But it wasn’t the dames themselves that did it for him. It was the pictures. The flesh and blood complained of an offending fat roll or—unsolicited—they told Miguel where they’d purchased their shoes and that they’d gotten them on sale. Often they looked so melancholy it changed the whole tone of the photographs. The women were posing balls of woe and trite facts nervously blurted. But the photographs were something else. Unlike a woman, a black and white didn’t change its mind or mood. The shots were timeless and still and beautiful; he created them and then fell into them and they saved him.

He liked women fine, but they went by his lens in a parade. The photos remained—the love of his life. It wasn’t tits and ass that turned him on. The art was his ultimate fuck.

He’d been shooting in anonymous Motel 6 rooms ever since their remodel, in which every DNA-riddled carpet in the national chain had been ripped out and replaced with fake hardwoods. In minutes, he could make a Motel 6 room look as classy, clean and bare as any studio.
The effect achieved, and nothing left to do, he dialed the phone on the bedside table.

His bookie in Alabama answered on the first ring.

“Hello.”

“Hey, Linda,” Miguel said. “814 here.”

“814! How’s it goin?”

“Good.”

“How’s 813?”

“Saw him yesterday.”

“And 812?”

“He’s got a cold, but it won’t do him in. I’m calling about the check you sent.”

“Yeah?”

“I talked to 813. How about I tear up the check and he gives me in cash the straight five he owes you and we’re all even?”

“Long as you’re happy and 812’s happy, it’s fine by me. I’ll keep with the cash from now on.”

“Thanks, Linda. You’re a sweetheart.

He hung up as the knock came at the door. The digital clock read 10:59 p.m.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of “No Innocent Man.”

On Writing: The Hunchers, the Librarians and War

Joe Ahearn — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 12:04:21 +0000

The enduring conceptions of what we nowadays call the “writing process” come from two camps: the Ugly Hunchers and the Mincing Librarians.

Hunchers are characterized not only by their grotesque facial features and typically poor posture but also by their gnomic pronouncements on the composition process. The chief Ugly Huncher of our time is no doubt John Ashbery, who in the early Nineteen Seventies renewed the Huncher philosophy with remarkable pith. “Poetry,” he said, “is mostly hunches.”

Plato, despite his relative talkiness and reputed beauty, is the most famous of the Hunchers. All Huncher Pronouncements are considered merely afterwords to his. He said, speaking of the poet: “…he is a manufacturer of images and is very far removed from the truth….” There have been many Hunchers and many Huncher pronouncements since, of course, but I give Plato pride of place not only for his thorough-going Hunchiness, but also for his figurative bleakness. Reading his words, I am always persuaded he is right: the poor poet toils away in the dark, creaking image factory, way out in there in boring suburbs of truth, far from the vibrant metropolis where the philosopher kings whoop it up every night. And there he has stood for millennia, poor, benighted, stooped and weary on the assembly line, forever stitching together his dank bolus of falsifying imagery. Plato always convinces me, for awhile, that whatever it is we do when we write cannot be discussed–and certainly not in the open air and the strong, cleansing light of the sun, as one would discuss, say, the progress of a garden vine or the habits of a charming pet.

Plato inhabits what we might call the First Huncher Position. The idea, perhaps also implicit in the comment by Mr. Ashbery, is that Poets Are Idiots. But there is also a Second Huncher Position, one that dwells not on the simplicity of the poet’s mind, but the complexity of the poetic product. I call this the Hideous Mongrel Theory of Poetry. It goes like this. No story, no poem is purely blooded. No one has worked for years, as people do with dogs or racehorses, to establish a clean, predictable line of descendants from a single source of good genes. Each poem has many fathers and mothers. Each poem is mongrel. And each poem is two-headed, three-headed, four-headed. What seems to be a singular poem is actually two or three poems or plays fighting it out like cats in a bag (or like mongrels in the trailer courts of language). Look closely at any poem, even the simplest, and you will see several poems, even many poems, each with its own dubious heritage. It is the same with stories and plays and certainly with novels. A piece of writing is not a singular creature. It is a colony. And each member of the colony, each sentence, each word, has its own lineage, its own strange face, its own gait, its own inclinations.

T. S. Eliot, a Closet Huncher, sums up the Hideous Mongrel theory elegantly, but with great discretion. Always decorous, he does his best to disguise with a euphemism the genetics of the monstrous, three-headed pup dropped with a plop into the proper workshop or literary journal:

“It is not in the nature of things that there should be a point-for-point correspondence between the mental processes of any two poets. Not only do poems come into being in as many ways as there are poets; for the same poet… the process may vary from poem to poem. Every poem has its own embryological pattern…” (emphasis added)

Embryological pattern? We know to what he alludes: bastardy, monstrosity, excess digits, random mutation.

Whitman is perhaps more to the point. “Something long preparing and formless,” he says, “is arrived and form’d in you.” Whatever it is that like the Alien has built up in us from the digestive gases or the ethers, we cannot know. We may have a hunch about it. We may figger it’s probably its own singular monster, one unlike any other monster that grinds through the ribs of any other poet. But what it is and how it forms, where it comes from and how it arrives, we don’t know. We hunch around our hunches and sometimes we splat out a poem. This is the Basic Huncher Position.

Opposed to the Hunchers and their ridiculous, though picturesque theories, are the Mincing Librarians. The Librarians believe in metonymy. In Mincing. That is, they believe in division by parts. The Librarians are the ones who take swords to the quaint metaphors nurtured with such care by the Hunchers. The most influential, though least recognized, of the contemporary Librarians is Janet Emig. Haven’t heard of her? You only think you haven’t heard of her. Janet Emig coined the Librarian’s Big Sneaky Term. That term is “writing process.”

According to Emig, who developed her theory while studying the composition process of high-school students, writing consists in:

· “Pre-writing,” which consists of planning, research and outlining
· Drafting, which is the initial composition
· Revision, which is review, modification and organization by the writer
· Editing, which is proofreading for clarity, conventions, style, whether by the writer or another
· Submittal, which is sharing the sharing the writing, possibly through performance, printing, or distribution of written material

(I have quoted here extensively from the Wikipedia entry on “writing process.”)

When you become sickened, if you are not sick already, by seminars, colloquia, talks, discussions and papers, like this one, on the “writing process,” you will know who to blame: Janet Emig, who, bless her heart, was only trying to figure out how to teach idiot high-school students to write five-paragraph essays. That her Big Sneaky Term became big at all is a testament to the littleness of contemporary thinking about whatever it is that we do when we write.

But the Librarian model has always suffered from a certain sketchiness. Emig’s model obviously follows from Aristotle, our first great classifier, who also analyzed the writing process as consisting of steps. For Aristotle, of course, there were but two steps: figuring out what to say and then saying it. Falling from a chair might require fewer steps, and less analysis, but otherwise creative composition seems to be among the simpler phenomena ever analyzed by the Great Classifier. Emig’s model is Steppier than Aristotle’s (it could hardly contain less) but her method obviously devolves from his.

The problem with the Librarian’s model is that whether it contains five steps or two, none of the Steps, and certainly none of the “analysis,” teaches us much about the creative act of composition. It is all very well to include a step called “Drafting” in a model of a writing process, but what does “Drafting” tell us about how poems and stories really get made?

This difficulty becomes most apparent when we look at the Librarian explanation in its purest form. For this most elegant and generally applicable model, we turn to Elder Olson, who has described The Librarian’s essential sense of the “writing process” as well as anyone has:

“… the poet… is operating as a poet only insofar as he is constructing constitutive parts and assembling them into a whole; in those operations only does the poetic process exist…”

And this process, making parts and arranging them into wholes, is, I hasten to add, the same one used by the fiction writer, the playwright, the ad man, the architect, the house-builder. Olson’s definition has the virtues of clarity and relevance; unfortunately, it tells us nothing about the writing process as a process unique to writing. Writing is another of those things humans do and humans do it they way they do most things–with some focus, many distractions, with love, or boredom, or maybe with genius (as if we could define that!) and with no particular understanding of the process itself. No one knows what Olson’s “parts” are. Nor his “wholes.” The writer works with words and sentences, but they are not really the parts. The parts are both smaller and more subtle and larger and more powerful than words and sentences. And what are the “wholes?” Unless the writer strictly imitates a piece of writing already written, who knows? The whole is what the writer is trying to get to, and she stops when she gets there, maybe, if she doesn’t run out of energy or inspiration first. But what is the “whole”? Define it at your peril.

In short, the working writer trying to understand her process must read any Librarian’s account as a soldier reads Caesar: with interest, but remembering that the battle itself is altogether muddier, bloodier and rattier than Caesar ever knew. And that what happens in the trenches when the Barbarians begin their howling charge is probably explicable, but perhaps only by old, battle-scarred soldiers, who can generalize based on their experience of many battles with Barbarians. The younger soldiers, and perhaps even the earnest Librarian, may, in the event of an actual battle, be altogether too preoccupied with the festivities to take many notes.

I do not assume that I am yet a soldier with enough experience to say what the battle is truly like. And, of course, writing is only like a battle in a rather florid figurative sense. But it is useful, if only as an exercise in imagination, to imagine one of these old soldiers, probably now a limping, drunken grandfather, and to listen to what he says as he rattles around in his cups late at night. I often hear him, or someone like him, when I write. Sometimes he speaks faintly, sometimes more strongly. Sometimes he is full of folly and I listen as a dutiful grandson listens, half-aware, sunk in the muds of my own dreams and worries, lulled by his voice yet eager to be on my way. Other times, what I hear from him seems to shine in the air like a star.

What he tells me is always a story. He is not an abstract talker. He cannot tell me what battle was. He cannot even tell me what battle is. But he can spin a tale, sometimes, that I cannot forget. He always talks of war–he has never known anything else–but never as “war.” It is always a battle, this one, that one, always the particular siege or rout or enfilade. He talks as well as he can. It is important to him to get the details right. And over time, if I listen carefully, these details seem stack up into a kind of truth–a small truth, a battered one.

What do we learn from the old soldier? First, that there are few useful general truths about war. The battles are various, their outcomes always different. What worked this time might work next time, but then again, it might not. And second, that luck plays a bigger part than any general is willing to admit. Often the battle is decided by weather, or by a flock of birds that signals the arrival of flankers, or by the presence of a single ditch that no one saw until a clumsy corporal fell in. But the main thing? It’s a fight. He is emphatic about this. What you gain you must take.

This is the crux of it, right here, the question I most want to ask. How do you do it, how do you take it, seize the day, stand your ground, rout the enemy? How do you win?

Here the old man smiles, and takes another drink. Here, he knows, he is telling me a Big Secret. “Ambush,” he says. “Ambush is always best. Know the terrain. Set up in the best spot, on the best ground, the high ground, and wait with cool patience.”

And then?

“Well,” he says, grinning, “You must kill like a champion. You must be fast and ruthless and cold. You must love to fight.”

But there must be more to say. Some secret behind the secret. It’s difficult to believe this is all there is to war, about which so much has been written, so much lore, so much romance, such strategy. I tell him this. He seems offended. I wait. He settles down, takes another drink.

“Look,” he says, finally, staring right at me, trying to make me understand, “Peace is for dogs.”

“That life I had,” he says, “It’s the only life.”

He gets up to leave. He has said all he’s going to.

References

Arrington, Phillip K. “Tropes of the Composing Process.” College English. Vol. 48, No. 4 (April, 1986). 325-338.

Ashbery, John. “Craft Interview with John Ashbery.” The Craft of Poetry. Ed. William Packard. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1974. 111-132.

Olson, Elder. “The Poetic Process.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Autumn 1975), pp. 69-74.

Plato. “The Republic.” Book X. The Dialogues of Plato translated into English with Analyses and Introductions. Trans. B. Jowett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892. 13 February 2009. .

Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. New York: The Library of America, 1982.

“Writing process.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 10 Feb 2009,06:11UTC.14Feb 2009

My Morning Light: a short story about Paris & Revenge. Part 4.

Mary Pauline Lowry — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 05:12:53 +0000

Photograph: George Marks/Getty

After almost fifty years of marriage, I didn’t even leave a casserole for Sterling in the freezer, just a note, that’s all. I took family photos with me, but none of Ethel and me. I also had to leave behind my greatgrandfather’s Oriental rug, my grandmother’s couch, my favorite rocking chair and of course, my morning sunlight, but I knew I needed to go.

I glanced over towards my nosey neighbor Delia’s as Nancy and I loaded up the car, hoping Delia would see me leaving and alert Ethel right away. I asked Nancy, as we pulled out of the driveway, if she’d ever driven a client four whole hours to a new apartment. She said no, she never had, that in fact, she’d had to argue with her boss about it to receive permission. “You did that?” I asked. “You argued on my account?”

“You’re an amazing woman,” Nancy said, which made me feel guilty deep down; she didn’t know the half of it.

Two weeks after I left, I made my first call back to Woodville. My friend Louise answered on the first ring; Sterling had told her I was gone and she’d been frantic with worry. But she hesitated to tell me the news she must’ve thought was my worst nightmare, that a week before, Ethel had moved into my house with Sterling. I smiled to myself, though I can’t say it didn’t pain me.

I can imagine it, my face, still catching light through my morning window. My face, surrounded by auburn hair, sitting atop a leaner, infinitely more flexible body. That had always been the thing I feared most, ever since I was a child, that Ethel would find a way to step from her life to mine and stay there. But by now, I believe what Nancy told me that first day that we met. That courage isn’t fearlessness, it’s looking at what you’re afraid of and moving towards it.

And besides that, I’d actually started wanting out of my own life. But as badly as Sterling had been treating me, I was still his wife and knew I couldn’t leave him all alone, not with his mind going and him not even really admitting it yet. Then I started to realize I could walk away and be almost certain Ethel would rush right in. That she would think she was finally getting what she deserved, finally getting some kind of revenge for having to share a childhood with me, for the fact that I was our grandmother’s favorite. She doesn’t know Sterling’s true character, not the way I do after fifty years of marriage, but she’ll find out soon enough.

I knew if I didn’t go when the apartment came available I’d never have the strength to leave; it was only a matter of time before someone noticed Sterling’s mind was going and expected me to be the dutiful wife. I made myself remember the rage I saw in his face, the threats, the awful things he did to me at night, the pills he took to enable him to break our wedding vows. I thought of those things in order to harden my heart against the memory of the look that came over his face when he couldn’t remember the name of a familiar street or the day of the week.

After my dad passed, I swore to myself I wouldn’t take care of another dying old person. It may sound selfish, but seven years of my father the invalid–it would be enough for any woman. And Ethel, during those years when I changed hundreds of our father’s soiled diapers, was off in gay Paris with Francois, eating egg pancakes. It’s her turn, I say. Let her take care of Sterling in his old age. He may be strong now, but I can see that his new forgetfulness, his fresh rage, are portents of a terrible decline. Let Ethel be the one there with him, come to take my place for the last time.

I don’t know what I was expecting from this Paris; certainly not little cafes serving quiche and croissants; certainly no wide boulevards or spoken French flowing around me like an invisible river, but that’s okay with me. I wouldn’t know what to do with such things. This Paris–Paris, Texas–is quiet and my apartment building full of other old men and women. They love to air their physical complaints and encourage me to do the same, so that I no longer try to pretend that my body is still capable of what it once was. My neighbors in the Assisted Living Apartments have never seen me young, so don’t fault me for growing old. They’re people who don’t even know I have a twin and have never met my husband, so that when they see me coming slowly, stiffly down the hallway to the community dining room, they call out “Hey, Ellen, how are you doing?” as if I am worthy of being asked after for my very own sake.

THE END

My Morning Light: A Short Story about Paris & Revenge. Part 3.

Mary Pauline Lowry — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:20:35 +0000

Photograph: George Marks/Getty

Sterling’s body seemed to get stronger and stronger as if to mock my own. But I was the one to prompt him about a hunting trip he’d planned with his friend Mason. Once I even had to remind him of Mason’s wife’s name. It was as if the proper noun–Louise–had slipped into a gray fold in his brain, an inconsequential loss. But it was a name he’d known for fifty years.

Strong as Sterling was, he started getting sick pretty soon after that. Nothing serious, just an occasional bout of diarrhea at night. I told him he needed to be more careful where he ate. Ought to quit going to the Coffee Cup Café, except for coffee. Cooks must not be washing their hands after they went to the Men’s, I said, in a voice full of wifely concern.

One day, about two months after Nancy started picking me up every other week or so to take me out for burgers, I called Ethel. My sister. My twin. “How have you and Sterling been?” she asked. She never asked how I was doing, it was always “you and Sterling.” Just as, when Ethel and I were children, people always asked us, “How are Ethel and Ellen?” or “How are you, twins?” I realized I wanted someone, someday to ask after me alone, to ask how I, Ellen, was getting along.

“Well…” I said carefully.

“Well, what?” She pounced on my hesitation.

“We haven’t been getting along lately. It’s just that, well, Sterling…he used to be nicer to me.”

“You must not be keeping him happy,” Ethel said. “That’s why he’s not treating you right.”

“I didn’t say that,” I paused for effect. “Sterling treats me just fine.”

“But you just said…”

“Nevermind that I said anything. How have things been going with you?”

“Boring, painfully boring,” Ethel said. “Living in France, it spoils you for Woodville, Texas, it really does. I still can’t figure out how it is you’ve stayed here your whole life, never gone anywhere at all.”

When our father was old and became an invalid, Ethel traipsed off to Paris with her boyfriend Francois, leaving me to take care of our father alone for seven years–she didn’t come home until he was in the ground.

“Well, I was married,” I said. “And then raising the kids.”

“I hate to say it,” Ethel said, “but sometimes I think Frank passing when he was so young was the best thing that could’ve happened to me. Kept me from spending my whole life being somebody’s wife. Used to be I was sad the two of us didn’t have kids. But now I think, what good would they have done me anyway? I mean look at your children–if you didn’t go to visit them you wouldn’t know they exist. They’re sweet, of course and I’m sure they’d come more often if it wasn’t such an expense.”

“Maybe so,” I said. “Well, I need to run to the grocery before Sterling comes home.”

“I hear he hasn’t been home much,” Ethel said and I wondered if it was a well-aimed shot in the dark, or if one of my neighbors was talking. Probably Delia. She could see my driveway from her kitchen window and she and Ethel had always been tight.

That night Sterling woke me up from a dead sleep to pin me down and grunt away on top of me. I couldn’t tell what hurt worse, my muscles and limbs and joints, or him not caring, him wanting to hurt me even. The next morning he left to go hunting, but came home in the middle of the day with his stomach knotted up in cramps and he spent the afternoon on the toilet. The groans I heard coming through the bathroom door almost made up for the pain of what it proved.

I’d been wondering if I shouldn’t have replaced all of his Viagra with laxatives instead of just a third of them. It would’ve saved me from what I went through the night before. But I didn’t want him to realize right away it was the pills that were making him sick. It was important to me to figure out whether or not he was just taking the pills to use with me, or if he really was cheating.

A few days later I called Ethel. “It’s getting worse,” I said.

“What’s getting worse?” she asked. I heard in her voice she knew exactly what.

“Sterling,” I breathed. I wanted her to be prepared, to have a plan. I knew she was rusty; it’d been over twenty years.

“What’s he doing?” she was nearly panting to hear.

“Well,” I said, “it’s kind of confusing.” And it was confusing. I’d never told a mean-spirited lie in my life, and now that I was getting ready to tell one, I felt elated and giddy. “What’s happening…you know…in the bedroom…”

“Don’t be a prude,” Ethel snapped. “Just spit it out.”

“It’s fantastic. Better than it’s ever been. But everything else…it’s just awful. I’m starting to feel like I can’t stand it.”

“Really?” Ethel said, sounding furious and excited at once. “Well, what are you going to do about it? Where are you going to go?”

“Wait a minute. I’m not talking about leaving. I wouldn’t ever. Sterling is my husband,” I said.

“I know you’re not. I know he is.”

“But it sounded like you were suggesting…”

“You’re the one who said you couldn’t take it anymore, that’s all.”

“I’m married,” I said. “I made a commitment.”

“I’m sorry. I forgot. You’ve always been the loyal wife.”

“I have,” I said. And I meant it. I wouldn’t leave Sterling alone, no matter how badly he treated me. “What was it like in Paris?” I asked. With Ethel, I’ve learned how to change the subject.

“Oh, Paris…Paris was fabulous–I still miss it everyday–but nothing you would like. The coffee shops are full of sad-eyed whores with fabulous hats. The boulevards are wide and everywhere you go you hear people speaking French, like lovely warm rivers of silvery water washing over you. And there are little stands selling crepes everywhere along the streets.”

“Crepes?” I asked. She couldn’t see that I was smiling.

“Oh you know. Aunt Pauline used to make them only she didn’t know better than to call them egg pancakes. Anyway, Paris you wouldn’t appreciate at all.”

“I need to go,” I said.

“You hurry to the store and make something that actually tastes good for Sterling’s supper,” Ethel advised. “You’ve been looking so washed out lately–the only hope you have of getting to his heart is through his stomach.”

A week or so later Nancy called and said I was first on the housing list if I wanted to move out, but that I shouldn’t tell Sterling I was leaving because he might become angry, even violent. I told Nancy I’d wait until he planned a big hunting trip, until he was sure to be gone a couple of days.

To Be Continued….

My Morning Light: a short story about Paris and Revenge. Part 2.

Mary Pauline Lowry — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 12:09:16 +0000

Photograph: George Marks/Getty

When Ethel and I were girls, our parents always dressed us in matching clothes and gave us matching toys. For our birthday one year–we must’ve been seven or eight–my Grandmother Adeline gave Ethel a yellow ribbon and me a pink one. It was the first time that I could remember being given something that was a little bit different than Ethel’s and I was delighted.

I cherished the pink ribbon, wore it everyday, a reminder that I was my own person, no matter that even our parents couldn’t tell Ethel and me apart at first glance. I fell asleep one night with the ribbon wrapped around my hand and woke up with it cut into tiny pieces, scattered over the blanket covering me.

I wish now I’d only known how much Ethel wanted the pink ribbon. I would have given her mine, no matter that I loved it. I’d rather that than have such unspoken pain between us. See, neither of us ever talked of the obvious fact that I was my grandmother’s beloved. Grandmother Adeline lavished attention and praise on me while treating Ethel as if she were a coiled viper.

When we were older, Ethel’s tactics for making me miserable took on new depth and creativity. Once when we were in junior high, I came down with the flu the night before an American History test. “I wish I was sick,” Ethel said, “so I wouldn’t have to take that stupid test.” I’d been studying for days; Ethel never studied for anything. When the teacher passed back the tests a few days later, she didn’t give one to Ethel, but placed one on my desk, marked with a bold letter C. “Not your usual work,” she murmured and I flushed hot with shame and rage.

Once, in desperation, I snuck to the beauty parlor and had my hair bobbed to my chin. Longer hair was in style and I didn’t think Ethel would dare follow suit. But by the weekend, her hair again looked just like mine. Within a month, almost all the girls in our class had chin-length hair. After that I gave up trying to look like my own person.

I sat there across from Nancy, remembering those long ago times. I almost told her about Sterling’s bouts of forgetfulness, but for some reason, I stopped myself. “You know,” I admitted, “it’s terrible to say, but the real reason I can’t leave my husband is that my sister would snatch him right up. She’s my twin sister, too. It sounds so shameful, but it’s the truth. I can’t stand the thought of it–how humiliating for all of us, even if they don’t have the sense to know better.

My twin sister doesn’t have fibromyalgia. She gloats about it, says it’s because she eats organic vegetables and goes to yoga, twists her body into pretzel shapes. Says I’m sick from all the chemicals I’ve been ingesting all these years. But she’s the one who’s toxic, I tell you. Been that way our whole lives.”

I’ve had a waking nightmare that’s been coming and going, ever since I saw Ethel and Sterling leaning into each other at the hospital. In the nightmare I am canceled out, gone, as if I’d never existed. And in my place, Ethel’s face basks in the morning light coming through my kitchen window, my morning light. It is my face in the window, only surrounded by hair still tinted a believable shade of auburn.

When Sterling loses his car keys, as he seems to do more and more often these days, she will move from the window to look for them in a seeming act of goodwill. She will cook his dinner, clean up after him, remind him not to go out without the lunch she’s packed him. She will do these things for him because they fit into her plan, the plan she’s always had to become me, though I have always been the one she secretly hated.

I see her throwing out the rail I have along my bed, the special seat in my shower, as if I have become young again, no longer stiff and slowed down and in need of things specially made for the ailing. At night, Sterling will wrench her into impossible, ruthless positions like he’s been doing to me ever since his doctor prescribed those awful pills, but instead of being pained and humiliated as I am, she will make delighted grunting noises.

That was my greatest fear, engendered by all the times Ethel played off being me. It wasn’t just that one time, that one History test, you see. It was every chance she got to humiliate me. Once, when we were in high school, she pretended to be me and told my first boyfriend she hated his sweaty palms. Sometimes throughout the years when she knew I was home sick, she’d show up at my garden club meetings, saying she was me and act purposefully uncouth and rude to my friends. The last time it happened was over twenty years ago, but I still feel the sting as if it was last week.

So that it was a relief when my movements became stiff and I let my hair gray. A relief in a way because it made it impossible for Ethel to masquerade as me, the risk of being found out if she tried it certain. That Thursday in Dan’s Hamburgers, I wanted to explain all of it to Nancy, who looked at me with the kindness and wisdom of one who spends her workweek helping the unhelpable.

I told Nancy that things weren’t as they were supposed to be. There I was having lunch with a social worker, something that should’ve made me feel humiliated and ashamed. And yet I was feeling freer than I’d felt in months. “You do look happy all of a sudden,” Nancy said. She was so round and plump and smiling, like the fairy godmother in Cinderella. “What is it?” she asked. “A minute ago you seemed so scared.”

“I was just thinking I can’t remember the last time I ate food like this,” I said, gesturing at my cheeseburger and fries. “I always want too, but I’m always so worried I’ll end up making a mess.”
“Bippety boppety boo.” Nancy said, or maybe I only imagined it.

The next morning, though Sterling criticized the breakfast I’d cooked him, there was fairy dust in the air as I washed the dishes, and I had more energy than I’d had in months. I swept the whole house, then hung the small hallway rug over the front porch railing and beat it with a broom. As it aired out in the sun, I started doing laundry. I went through the pockets of Sterling’s pants and there was the pill bottle full of the medicine that made Sterling able to do such terrible things to me in the night.
I examined the pills carefully, noting their size and shape, their color, before putting them back in the pocket of his pants, which I then re-hung over the chair where I’d found them.

To be continued….

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