place: under a bush

object: cracked walnuts

weather: brisk

- - - -

The panties in questions were gold with little black butterflies. They were a work of art, Benny thought.

“So,” Caleb whispered, peering more deeply though the parted bush behind which he and Benny were slouched. “So willya do it?”

Benny leaned back on his heels and unteepeed his fingers. He picked up a shell from one of the dried and cracked walnuts that were puddled around them as he rolled Caleb’s words over in his head. Willyawilllyawillyawillya.

For the last three weeks, Benny has been breaking rank. Somehow, he had found himself hanging out with the older boys. The eighth-graders, even though he was miles beneath them: a measly fifth-grader. He still couldn’t understand why. But they reeled him in and paraded him around and it felt good. It felt dangerous which, for every minute leading up to the last three weeks of his life, Benny had never been.

Which is why he found himself, today, squatting behind one of the bushes lining Main Street. The thick one that cast a swollen circle of shade against Ms. Helen’s Lemonade Stand and that, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays provided a ripe, hidden vantage point up Lindsay Malone’s skirt. And that is a sight that every boy from middle to high school wanted to see. Lindsay Malone was famous because she was beautiful. She was famous because her beauty was on display every day of the week but it was a fact that it was never for sale. And that was what made the hiding spot on Main Street prime real estate, the older boys argued.

Want to snag a look at the hottest spot in town, they asked (Joe and Danny and Will, strewn across the brick of Murphy’s Variety with their skateboards tucked between their feet) and Benny found himself nodding. That was the thing about questions from older boys. The answer was always yes.

Benny felt Caleb’s elbow hard against his shoulder, felt himself spilling to the side.

“Yo,” Caleb whispered, arching his eyebrows. “Are you a pussy?” Benny squinted. He swallowed. Willyawillyawillya. He rolled a small, cracked piece of walnut shell between his fingers and he felt the chill of the autumn air creep in against his neck. The afternoon was starting to fade. In not too long it would be dusk and Lindsay would pack in the lemonade stand: restacking cups and cinching in the umbrella and ushering herself and her gold and butterfly patterned-self away. Benny swallowed and he rolled the small bit of shell some more.

“Uh-uh-uh,” Caleb said, flicking away the shell in Benny’s hand and replacing it with an engorged, fully cased walnut. “If you’re gonna do it, you’ve gotta do it. None of this pussy, shit. She’s gotta feel it. Right on her ass. I want to know there’s a welt beneath those tight panties.”

He folded Benny’s fingers around the bigger nut and Benny swallowed again. His mouth was dry. He wanted water. He wanted lemonade, he realized, he wanted to be on the other side of that stand handing Lindsay feeble one dollar bills and waiting for a glass with all the rest of the world.

“Do it,” Caleb croaked and when Benny looked up into his eyes he realized that there was no way to get off this rollercoaster he was on. Caleb was the conductor and there was no where left to go.

Benny reeled back his hand and closed his eyes. He brought his hand behind his head and he was reminded of summer days growing up on the front lawn. Arching popups to his father and catching them in return. He did it so much he didn’t have to look anymore. He did it so much he couldn’t explain how they landed so precisely in the leathery heart of his father’s mitt or how the webbing of his own glove always found the dirty white skin of the baseball. He missed those days, he felt, sorely in his stomach, of just catching and throwing and not thinking or making any mistakes.

Benny held the nut tightly in his fingers. He closed his eyes and he threw. He felt his heart beat behind his hears.

A sharp, metal ding sounded onto the street and when Benny opened his eyes he watched Lindsay looked down to her right where his walnut had collided with the siding of her stand, splintering into pieces. Benny felt himself let out his breath as he stood.

“Pussy,” he could hear Caleb say or maybe the wind had already carried it away as Benny zipped up his windbreaker. He wiped the silty, nutty resin from his fingers and let the cool night air lick his face as he crossed the street towards home. 

In my heart it will never be spring.

From Kimbra’s “Plain Gold Ring”

- - - - - - 

Janet doesn’t wake to her alarm clock this morning.

She likes to think it’s because she has a sixth sense for wakeups. That she’s trained to who she is and what her life has become, but really it’s the birds. When she rubs the sleep from her eyes, the uncurtained window beside her bed comes into views where birds, browsing along the rose bush, sing to themselves and look in at her through her window like she’s a groggy, real live T.V.

“Shoo,” she says. Meekly because, although the annoyance is there, the strength isn’t. Janet has never been a morning person for the same reason she’s never been a spring person: she hates change. She hates starting and revving up. She hates gathering momentum. Wouldn’t it be easier if we all just existed, she thinks. Rather than this pattern of strength and vitality ebbing into relaxation and sleep? Life’s exhausting, she’s always held, and in her heart it will never be spring. It will be always be the heart of winter or the thick of summer: a season she’s used to. A life style she has gotten the hang of. A life style hat she has grabbed by the balls and forced into submission.

But now, this morning, now that she’s come to terms with her winter coat and the chilly ache in her cold feet and fingers, now it’s spring. She can feel it in the air and the burden of all those steps to prepare herself for summer, that burden has just begun to weigh on her.

Janet clears her throat.

“Shoo,” she crows again, this time with more conviction, and she watches the birds, those harbingers of what is to come, flutter in unison and break away.

She’d made an impression on Joe the one time he’d been inside their house.

- - - - - - - - -

She’d made an impression on Joe the one time he’d been inside their house. He walked in through the backdoor, thirsty after catching one hundred pop-ups in the backyard with Brian. He wanted water and Brian said, well go inside and get it, jeez, and so Joe wandered in through the backdoor, stumbling through the indoors’ darkness and that haziness that happens when you walk into someone else’s house for the first time. Almost like it’s a museum.

Joe squinted through the living room where a clacking and a clattering of what sounded like metal pans wafted in through the kitchen. When he made his way there, to the kitchen, sliding off his sneakers and walking in stockinged feet across the carpet, Brian’s mom was at the stove, looking like angel. The sunlight that sliced through the window laced her hair, lighting up her cheeks, drawing out the bright red of her lips. Before Joe could even draw a breath he saw, clinging, deftly, to the curve of her forehead, three beads of sweat. Joe felt time stop. He watched her smile. He watched her mop at her forehead with the back of her hand.

“I thought it was you, Joe,” she said. “You sounded different from Brian there. I mean your footsteps on the carpet.”

He couldn’t take his eyes off of her: her hands, as she wiped them against the towel tucked into the waste band of her apron; the soft, indentation of her waist and then, above it, the miraculous, real-live breasts that swayed, there, in the folds of her blouse. He’d seen ones like that on T.V. And in the magazines his older brother, Craig, kept stacked underneath his textbooks by his bed. But he’d never seen ones like this in real life. And he’d never dreamed of seeing ones like this on a mother. Joe swallowed as she tucked the towel back against her waist and he tried to reel in his eyes, to take control of himself, to nod and ask for a glass of water. But there they were, the sway of her shirt, the ghost of something beautiful right beneath the surface. It was too much.

“Joe?” he heard her saying, “Joe?” Her voice was like an echo, the faded version of something heard above water. But all he could do was shake his head. He swallowed. He blinked and he ran to the bathroom where he cupped tap water from the sink to his mouth and then sat on the toilet and tried to think of as many images as he could of The Three Stooges. It was a trick, Craig always told him: If your woody lasts through that than you’ve got other problems on your hands.

“Joe?” he heard the echo of her calling from the kitchen and he plugged his ears, his fingers, slippery from the sink, squeaking against his lobes.

He closed his eyes against the bathroom and its faint smell of lemon and he fought for an image of Curly fainting beneath the smack of a frying pan. 

knee-jerk \NEE-jerk\ adjective

: readily predictable : automatic; also : reacting in a readily predictable way

 - - - - - - - - - - -

Every morning Meredith wakes up here, in Oregon, where she has been living for the last month and four days, the sky is swollen: tie-dyed purple and dark gray.

She tells her mother, who has retired where it is eternally summer, on the South Carlsbad bluffs in San Diego—that she feels the weather most in her hands (swollen and cold to the bone) and her clothes (wet and cold to the core.)

Meredith tells her that, when she dresses in the morning, she can’t keep from pulling on shades to match the sky, a guttural impulse towards these the dark and depressing. A knee-jerk reaction to keep from smiling or putting on blush or outlining her lips in rosy lip-liner.

She can feel the weather dragging her down, which she tries not to admit to because she doesn’t want to hear the I-told-you-so lacing her mother’s voice. Because Meredith has moved here for good. At least good for now, for the next handful of years of her life until she has a diploma in her pocket and three letters tacked on to the end of her name: PhD.

This morning she rubs coils of sticky stylist-approved syrup through her hair. Her mother has sworn this is the antidote to counteract the humidity. I should know, her mother reassured her over the phone, I’ve been a Jew all my life. If there’s one thing I know, I know curls.

So, this morning, Meredith stands in front of the mirror and pulls her hands apart. She weighs them heavy and thick with product and then wiggles her fingers through her hair, covering the strands, protecting them somehow from the rain. I will not complain, she says to her reflection, seriously and like the professor she hopes to become. I will not complain. She’s sick of talking about the weather. Sick of slouching into coffee shops, and into the English Department, defeated, already, by the drizzle. Soaking and sullen.

From a basket on the sink by the kitchen, Meredith grabs an apple and granola bar, as she leaves the bathroom and heads out the house. She slips them into her bag before sliding into her raincoat. Her second skin. She leans her face against the square of glass on the front door, holding her breath to keep from fogging it, and watches the weather slicken the front step and pool against the windshield of her Taurus. She counts to three, realizes she hasn’t moved, counts again and then reaches to the door handle. She’s determined to push herself out into the day, to not be washed away. 

- - - - - 

While we wait for Chris, standing on the dock, the both of us in our mother-daughter rain boots, Shanie plays with his old fishing rope. Safety hazard, I can hear the other mothers say. But what I’d say back is, she likes the smell of it. Even though we’re here by the ocean where it all smells like salt, Shanie likes to hold that rope right up to her nose (No matter what you think, I’d never let her put it in her mouth, I’d tell them) and just take it in. It smells like her father, like Chris, is what I think. So I give her as much of his old fishing rope as I can find because when he’s gone like this – gone for months out into the ocean – there is a very big part of me that thinks that Shanie won’t remember who he is when he comes back, his heavy-booted steps rocking the dock, pulling me close, pressing my face to his, taking me back into his arms and then Shanie. I don’t want her to forget. I don’t want to have to remind her every time: this is who this is. This is who you’re supposed to love just as much as you love me. I don’t want to explain to the other mothers that it’s not just me. That Shanie has someone else. That she’s just waiting for him to come home.

Today it’s warm for spring so neither of us are shivering. I plant Shanie on the dock between my boots and listen to her hum as she spins rope, clumsily, through her chubby fingers. I spiral the tips of my nails through her tuft of hair and I think that I catch a whiff of her fresh, warm scalp. Just a trace of it among all this sea.

The ocean is calm today as we wait for the silhouette of his boat off in the distance, the smudge that could be a shadow or a boater or hope taking solid form. But the trick is to wait. To wait until it fails to disappear, until I knows it’s him, standing on the deck, waving to me from a boat with my name tattooed in cursive along its side. Not until then will I lift Shanie up from the dock and untangle her from the mass of loops and knots her baby-hands have made. I’ll prop her on my hip and point and wait for her to follow the invisible path sprouting from my fingertip. Who is it?, I’ll say, and then I’ll hold my breath and wait to see if she says Daddy.

Oh and anytime you think about leaving
Think about what you know

- - - - - -

Just as my shift is wrapping up, Janice catches me flipping through the employment section of Uncle Henry’s. Drops of coffee splatter between the thick, cap letters  I read (UNPAID INTERNSHIP) as Janice leans toward me, looking down at the pages over the pink rims of her glasses. She looks at me with a more steely version of the way she looks at everybody: like she’s your mother and she always knows better.

She wipes the dripping mouth of the coffee pot with the wet towel tucked into her apron, all the while leaving her eyes on me.

“You think you’re too much for this place?” she asks as she starts to organize receipts near the register and I roll my eyes. Janice isn’t as bad as the boss, but just about. She’s got a mouth like a faucet: everything she hears comes right back out.

“No,” I say, which is a lie but I admit it’s a job I need. You can’t do much in this town—you can’t do much anywhere—without a few bucks in your back pocket.

“That’s right,” she says and when I roll my eyes a second time I make sure her back is already to me, that she’s already waddled back down the diner to clean tables.

“Oh,” she tosses back over her shoulder. “And anytime you think about leaving. Think about what you know.” She starts scrubbing at a table near the back and I watch the spilled globs of ketchup and crumbs of fries swirl all into her towel like a garbage tie-dye.

I go back to reading Uncle Henry’s, waiting for our next customer, except I’m more just looking without even taking anything in because, unfortunately, Janice is right. What I do know is that college graduates and former restaurant owners are vying for jobs like mine. You look at the type of people coming in, asking where they can drop their resumes and you’d think this diner was a top-notch palace. You’d think we didn’t just reheat frozen food and shove it through the kitchen window and call it homemade. I’m not kidding, you should see these people asking for jobs. Slipping us their resumes with their italicized references and bolded GPAs. They don’t know that where they end up is the recycling. They don’t know that we haven’t hired in years, that the only reason I’m here, hating every second of it but scrounging up enough money not to quit right here and now, is because I got in when the getting was good. I got in when it was still high schoolers and college dropouts wanting to work at the diner. When you didn’t apply with a resume, you just applied as a regular who all of a sudden got her daily mug of coffee for free.

            Down the way Janice is humming as she finishes cleaning up her tables, leaving the other half of the restaurant for me to clear before we all head home. She whistles up something I can’t make out because even Janice, Janice who would never say a bad thing about the boss or the job, even Janice is glad to go home. I hate it here, I hate most everything about it, but Janice is right. If I think for just a second about what I know, there’s no point in aiming higher then right here at the diner, and so I toss the Uncle Henry’s, sliding it down the counter for the next Joe Shmoe to read over his burger and fries.

She places the list in front of Van’s face, leaving him not much choice but to look at it.

From Tara Ison’s novel “The List”

- - - - - - - 

            She places the list in front of Van’s face, leaving him not much choice but to look at it.

            “See,” she says. “See, this is why I said we shouldn’t get cable.” She watches him read – skim – the sheet of construction paper while the listed items reflect, backwards, in the sheen of his glasses.

1. Fisher-Price Barbie Cadillac Hybrid Escalade

2. Stoneybrook Lodge Wood Gym Set

3. Dream Dazzlers Stylin Head Doll

            “What is this shit, she says as Van reads. He mouths the words head doll, and she tries to imagine what he’s imagining.

            “This is why I said no T.V.” She snaps the Christmas gift list from Van and pins it back beneath a magnet on the fridge where the kids had left it this morning after breakfast. A twenty-item list. Full, commercialized names. Website addresses. Color and size, when appropriate. The list made her feel slimy. It made her feel a part of something she’d never agreed to be a part of.

            “So?” She yells from the kitchen where she’s been reheating last night’s casserole dish of shells for dinner. Just Like Home McDonald’s Cash Register, she remembers that from the list, too, as she forks heaps of salad onto all their plates. When she was a kid there were no lists. There were just stockings and two presents a person, gifts her mother picked out from the catalogs that came once a month in the mail. A salmon-colored, cable-knit sweater. Lincoln logs. An illustrated copy of The Secret Garden. She had this copy, still – its pages creased and smudged with years and love – upstairs in her study.

            She remembers her father all those years ago during Christmas, legs crossed, resting on the couch, propping aside his cross-word book to watch them unravel the newspaper rapping to find their new things. Things, she thinks now at the stove. Simple, solid, things. Presents. How did they ever mutate to what they are today? Sick, fluorescent-colored, fabricated, crowding the shelves.

            From the kitchen, she can hear the T.V. jump to life now in the living room, and when she cranes her neck towards the noise she sees Van, his arm outstretched, prodding the clicker at the screen like a wand. Seconds of sports and news and photoshopped faces flash by.

            “Van,” she yells again, angry at how loud her voice has risen, piercing the kid-free quiet of the downstairs. “Van, did you hear what I said?”

            “I heard you, Beth. But what do you want me to do? Cadillac Barbie car, who cares? Just say no.” She hears the T.V. pause on a burst of canned laughter and then there’s Van, joining in, and the sound of the leather of the living room chair and she watches him ease back into its folds.

            “I will just say no,” she says. “But that’s not the point.” She’s walked over to him now and, standing in front of the arm chair, it’s her own reflection she sees in his glasses when he turns to her, looking up at her, slouched and confused like one of the kids.

            “You said it was just sports,” she says, waving towards the screen with its antennae sprouting, alien and fixed, into the middle of her living room. “You said it was just for the Red Sox.”

            “Beth, can we talk about this later?,” he sighs. “I’m tired, alright.” But she hears him inhale and gather himself from the armchair, yanking himself from the leather. She feels his hands encircling her waist, toppling her onto him and she lets herself laugh.

            “Stop it, Van. I’m serious,” she says, but he has her, pinned to him like a wrestler and she smiles because it feels good to rest like that, to not feel herself upholding her own weight. He kisses her, right on that line where her scalp meets the start of her hair.

            “We’ll fix it, Bethy,” Van says, muting the T.V. with a quick press of the remote. “It’s playoffs. Two more games. Three if we’re lucky. And then we’re done.” He’s let them both fall back into the arms of the living room chair, holding the two of them in place. He kisses her again, “And then no more Cadillac Barbie.” And again, “Or, Lalaloopsy Nail Art Kit.” She smiles as he kisses again, “Or, Blue Muppet Whatnot. I promise,” Van says, and she nods into him and, as dinner reheats in the oven, she rests against him as the muted lips of T.V. stars mouth, wordlessly, behind them.