Berkeley Fiction Review, Volume 7

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Sponsored by the ASUC

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B e r k e l e y

F i c t i o n

N u m b e r Seven 1987

R e v i e w

T h e

B e r k e l e y

Fiction

R e v i e w

N u m b e r Seven 1987 Editors Shelly Crist Julia E. L a v e Editorial Staff O w e n Bly John Carroll C a r e n Doyle Suda H y m e Sophie Julien Steve M y e r s James Penner Eric Schocket We thank the Associated Students of the University of California for their assistance in publishing The Berkeley Fiction Review. m

Special thanks to Jacqueline Gallo for her help and her tolerance.

Our appreciation and best wishes to all the writers who submitted their work to us.

C o p y r i g h t 1987 by The Berkeley Fiction Review.

All rights reserved.

Typesetting by The Cooperative Type, Berkeley, California.

Printed at GRT Book Printing, Oakland, California.

Submissions to: The Berkeley Fiction Review 700 Eshleman UCB, Berkeley, CA 94720

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IERKELEY FICTION REVIEW

C O N T E N T S Lullaby Kelley E. K. Boyd 1 Clang Association Bill Van Wert 9 The Monster Maker John Kiefer 23 Sway Suda Hyme 35 Long Distance A. Cabrdra 37 Under the Red Umbrella B.S. Jones 43 Julia's Body Trishka Munro 45 C h a n g e Is A P e n n y In M y Pocket Sharon Bridgforth . 53 A S p e l l of K o n a W e a t h e r Sylvia Watanabe 57 B o b b i n g for A p p l e s Lauralyn Garfield Hailey 65 Graduation Maureen Katniya 67 Bedtime Stories Judy Warren 77

Kelly

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KELLY E.K. BOYD

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A mother can wear her own self well into the ground working to give her child a chance at a life; but she can't ever kill herself outright. That would be just plain unmotherly.

What a mother can do is just so many things. She can teach a son to earn his keep. She can teach a daughter nice and young to cook and scrub floors and mend her own clothing and later to sew enough for others. A mother can moan right out.loud about the wreck of her own life and the pointlessness of it when nothing gets better and nobody notices a damn thing she does anyway. A mother can swat a backside with a tight rolled newspaper or just any old thing; and a slap upside the head never in her life could make a stupid child any stupider than they were d a m n well intent to become. And, a mother can rest just as soundlessly as possible, because it's best for her if nobody knew she ever did such a thing.

And it is always easy for a mother to kiss and h u g her children, because she loves each and every dirty-faced one of them.

She'd got it in her fool head to love their no good daddies once too though. She knows the foolishness of that sort of love though, and is best to put it aside. A square meal and a roof over his head tells a child he is loved much more sensibly than a hundred warm hugs in a shelterless cold ever could. A mother knows just what she needs to know and stays healthy by dreaming of outliving her offspring. Meanness keeps her healthy in hard times. She has to figure if she can't live well then she's sure as hell going to live herself one long old time instead.

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April Jean Baker knows all about what a mother can and can't do, and at this point in her life she supposes she knows why as well. April Baker isn't anyone's mother yet, but in about three more months now she is looking to be just that.

In the Baker family, and she has heard that is a polite term for them, there are six children and three daddies, but only one woman most all of them have cried put to as momma. April is the number five child and her daddy, Eugene Baker, is also the daddy of number six; but by all reports he wasr still in a county somewhere in the state of South Carolina when number four was being got. All the kids are named Baker now because Eugene married their momma, Corinne, and took along with her everything she had at the time. That included Leland Stillwell, a suspiciously dark halfCuban who had fathered number four, Eddy, but never married Corinne; and later also Bobby Moore, a sharply pale apple picker from Maine who had fathered one through three and never actually divorced Corinne. Now it is easy to see what was meant about the freedom to hit folks upside the head. Things were always just happening and nobody seemed ever to be thinking.

April Baker is eighteen years old and her momma is round about fifty or so. All the older children, except Eddy who has trouble passing for white in this county with his daddy being so conspicuously nearby, are married or settled. Jessie, the oldest, is thirty and has four kids of her own in a trailer park in rural South Dakota; and Verlon is twenty-eight and has his own eighteen Wheel truck and trailer and three kids, in two states, but a wife in only one. Nadine is either a year older than Eddy or a year younger than Verlon, and that no sense child had to give up her two babies until her husband either left the state or left them all alone.

If Eddy were smarter he would have a child of his own by now in this county because there are plenty of young girls who would just as soon he didn't pass for white if what they hear is true. But, old Eddy is just stupid enough at age twenty-three to quiet such a rumor supposing it to be in his best interest to do so. He has a good job as a truck mechanic, so it's just as well now he settles down with some pretty young thing sooner or later.

Corinne keeps her baby, Elvin, who is nearly sixteert, as near to her own hip as propriety allows. She does well to keep him far enough away from that wild thing April's influence. If that girl

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KELLY E.K. BOYD had an ounce of sense in her pretty blonde head Corinne would have half a mind to knock it right on out.

Corinne and Eugene rent a three room house with a loft at the edge of a sorry rise overlooking an orchard whose owner they are the tenants of. For six hundred dollars a month Eugene keeps his stupid eyes on the orchard to ward off thieves and to watch for fire or flood. Bobby Moore, who shares the loft with Leland Stillwell, is so homesick for Maine that he handpicks the orchard clean every fall for two free bushels and five hundred dollars. Leland, who owns a guitar and two changes of underwear, does not work, but he sings right pretty. Corinne met him in a honky tonk long about a week after Bobby left her to return to Maine, arid she took him into her house though she knew she was not free to marry him. Once she discovered for certain sure he was negro she felt it was just as well she hadn't married him because she was never one to seek to court scandal. After she married Eugene and then later Bobby came back and said they were never divorced, she worked out an honorable system whereby,one night a month Eugene slept up in the loft with Leland and Bobby came downstairs and took his rightful place. The other twenty-nine days of the month were just what he deserved for leaving her alone to care for three young children.

In April Baker's Civic class, before she had to leave the high school last month, they had discussed civil rights. They talked mostly about freedom of speech, segregation and abortion. The next day ten mothers, including Corinne Baker, carried ugly painted signs in their chubby old woman hands and marched in front of the school building until the principal came out and promised there would be no more mention of abortion in Civics class. After that they only talked about it.mostly in the hallways between classes. The biology and hygiene teachers next cancelled a joint lecture on reproduction and birth control since their contracts were yet to be signed. April was already eight weeks pregnant by then anyways, though she didn't yet know it. She figured it out in her tenth week and had Leland Stillwell drive her out to the welfare clinic to be sure.

N o member of the Baker family has ever been on welfare Even Leland Stillwell would rather starve, or work two weeks in a cannery before he would go on the dole. Corinne sews draperies and

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW

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repairs upholstery, and works three nights in the cannery herself to keep her family fed. Until they fired her for being pregnant, April worked every afternoon in the coffee shop next to the bus depot to buy her own clothes and to help pay the rent with Corinne and Eugene. N o w she helps her momma sew draperies and regularly dodges blows. She thinks a lot about what she will do and where she will live after her baby is born. Eddy lives in a Volkswagen bus alongside the house and has color television and his own cookstove. With his good job he could afford to move away, except that the Volkswagen doesn't run, Conine Baker has accused all three daddies of fathering by April, but in truth it was the driver of Greyhound 217 who lives in town and is in the Baptist congregation. April will not name him because she knows her momma would whoop her good about the religious differences. Bakers were Methodists before Leland Stillwell came along, and now. they do not go to church because of the way they have offended nature. April feels this is foolishness because, apart from his not having a job, Leland is the best of the fathers. He is younger and has all his teeth, never walks around the house in his underwear (which just the same is always clean), he sings lovely songs on the porch all night, and he never sleeps with momma. Corinne says Leland was her sin and Eddy is her cross to bear. April suspects it is just the other way around because if s always Eddy or Leland have to haul heavy things around the house and orchard because the other daddies are too old, Corinne is too small, Elvin is too big a baby, and now April is too damn pregnant.

The driver of 217 is twenty-four and his name is Harry Ray Jr. He did it to April twice in his car behind the coffee shop before driving home for the night. Thing was, she had to do it to him for just forever before he would give her anything back at all. He asked her if she was happy once she finally got her way; and she figures now her jaw is less tired, but as she pats her swelled middle in the long hot afternoons she can see where she just didn't think this one all the way through. She expects that Harry Ray Jr. loves her and that she loves him, because she knows they have mostly done all the things momma and daddies did except for pounding on each other. If it wasn't a compact car they might have gone ahead and done that too. April figures she loves Harry even more than momma loves the daddies because the daddies (except for Leland) do it to her, but she doesn't ever do it to them.

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KELLY E.K. BOYD

Nobody has ever told April this fact. She just plain knows it. , On the porch of the rented house in the afternoons April sits sewing hems by hand on the sawhorse table Eddy made for her.

Leland comes out with his guitar if there is a little bit of a breeze coming through. He sings the blues while his calloused dark fingers pluck away at the steel strings. Leland is forty-four. When April asks him about his time with Corinne he shrugs and says, "Oh, I was just a boy myself. I didn't know nothin7." Corinne always hollers that Leland stays on all these years because he is too plain lazy to move on. When April watches him singing "Summertime" as he rocks like an already old man on the porch, she knows Corinne is wrong. Leland knew something for sure when he met Corinne, and April figures it must be the only thing he's known all his life. As he sings on in his heavy, black man's voice and the rocker sways back and forth, his old work boots are heavy along the porch step and he doesn't even tap in time to the beat. When the radio plays in the kitchen he can dance across the floor there with Corinne like he was just as light as the air; but when he sings those old sings his feet stay planted right where they aire looking as if they were weighted down with iron.

A letter came a week back from no sense Nadine who has, her babies back but found her husband waiting at the doorstep too. He beat on her a bit but left the kids alone, and in her letter she wrote that she was fixing to leave him. Bobby Moore sent her his last twenty dollars to help get her on a bus somewhere, but her momma called her right on up. She said many a mother took worse than that to keep her home together. Now Nadine isn't sure of what she should do; but really, the more that man pounds her head the less she is ever going to have to think. For about three days April had thought momma gave her daughter the right advice. April gives her momma credit for keeping things together being poor and all and having her husband up and leave her to go climb a tree.

Then April remembers it only took her momma one week to think to just go shake herself another tree. That was about finding a father for her babies though, not about just doing it. April knows that with her and Harry Ray Jr. it was mostly about just doing it.

When April was ten she and no sense Nadine went to a matinee movie and April left her new little birthday purse in the theatre. When they got home Nadine got a smack up againstiier

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW left ear so her whole head sounded to her like a suction cup coming mean away from a wall. April got backside whooped till she had to sleep on her stomach for a week and take her meals and her business too standing up. That purse cost a whole dollar and a half and was a birthday present meant to last. On the porch were April hid to do her crying Leland come and wrapped his arms around her and kissed the top of her head, and then he cried a little bit too. The first time in the car when April hadn't had to do it to Harry first it felt just that same way to her when he finally dropped down into her arms.

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Harry Ray Jr. know about the baby now. He came to April one day and shoved fifty dollars in her hand and told her to get rid of it. She thought he meant the fifty dollars because he held it out like it was something dirty. April asked Leland Stillwell on the porch that night if her baby was already real. He said all he know was Eddy was real the first time Leland looked into Corinne's eyes and she took to looking back. April couldn't get rid of the baby if it was already real. She gave Harry Ray Jr. back his money. She said she was sorry about the baby but she was going to have to have it. Harry shrugged. He wasn't exactly mad, she could tell. Since she got fired from the coffee shop April hasn't seen him at all, except if she's in town when his bus passes on by.

There are just so many things April has to be figuring out all of the time.

April went to the coffee shop and asked the owner if she could have her job back after her baby was born and she wasn't pregnant anymore. He said no because the scandal would still be too fresh in people's minds. He didn't want any trouble in his place. April has next to no money, and when the baby comes she knows she will have to pitch in a greater share. It is the only fair thing. At home Bobby is out of money and if s only just the very beginning of summer yet. Her own daddy doesn't do anything besides watching the old motionless orchard to bring in money and now there is talk of getting Elvin into the ROTC. Corinne had a cousin once who went to college and said ROTC paid for most everything. Even if Elvin doesn't go off to college some day, isn't anyone going to make him get a job one minute before momma gives the say so.

In the kitchen, measuring cloth from a bolt, April asks her momma if she's a real mother now that she's pregnant. "Baby, all

coming he had and her d a half h were is arms cried a had to n he fi-

pril one t rid of d it out on the all he nto Coet rid of ack his oing to ad, she hasn't on by. ll of the

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sks her aby, all

KELLY E.K. BOYD that lump in your gut proves right now is that you can be real stupid. You got no job, no man, and if it weren't for me you'd have no home. When that baby's a child and you work your fingers down to this," here momma produced calloused flesh and raw, ragged fingernails to make her point; "When you're so tired you can't even sleep, and you can't count on your next meal because every penny is spoken for before it's even earned, and you can still feed and cloth that child, then April, you're a real mother." As April rims a pair of sheers though the fabric carefully she shakes her head. If ever a day in her life her momma said a true thing to her, today was that day.

Eugene took his guarding of the orchards very seriously since he didn't have another thing in his life that he was good at. He sat out on the front porch with Leland in the evening and tuned out the man's gentle singing voice as it crooned "Mockingbird" so that he could hear every ordinary sound of the orchard breathing. He knew its rhythms better than those of his own body. That was why he reached over to still Leland's hand along the guitar strings as the night was deepening. He sat forward in his chair, and when he felt for the shotgun along the beam behind the woodstack and reached out to only broken cobwebs he know something was terribly wrong. He looked across, ashen faced, at Leland, and the two men rose silently together.

Out in the orchard, near her favorite tree where Bobby Moore used to drop her apples from, April leaned her back against the rough and chipping bark. She had so much to be thinking about all this time, and the only things she was certain about was what was real and what wasn't even close. She though about no sense Nadine scrambling out of the reach of an angry man's fists, of Bobby sleeping downstairs one night a month and not even doing anything anymore. She thought of herself as she might look, holloweyed and hungry but trying to hide it as she stood in a line at the welfare office. She remembered freshly washed if not new clothing as a child, and the warm bed she could feel free to jump into even after the worst of whoopings. She looked off down the rows of ragged trees in the orchard and saw her own pale hands one day pulling off a switch and bringing it down around a child's legs, and she quickly drew her eyes shut.

She like to think just now in the quiet of the stilled grove at

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW night that if Harry had been a Methodist at least something might have been possible. She remembered the one time she had watched her momma sleeping, when Eugene had a bad cold and there wasn't anyone in the bed with her. In the soft lighting trickling d o w n from the loft her eyes had rested peacefully in her head without sinking a way back like they sometimes did. That was a real sleep, she imagined, and it wasn't about being a mother. It was the only thing she could think to bring about because for the rest of it she wasn't even close. So, April rested her tired lips around the barrel and thought of Harry one last time and then pressed down with her toe against the tiny slip of metal that was still somehow heavier than she had ever imagined.

Leland and Eugene heard the report and each man made himself freeze in his tracks over the way it had sounded breaking through the trees like that. In the darkness their eyes met, and Eugene moved forward then, because he was the one who had to; but Leland was free to drop to his knees there and bring his big old guitar playing hands u p to cover his face so that it would be alright for someone to sob. Back at the house a pan dropped suddenly in the kitchen and from the front room Elvin though he heard his mother cry right on out, though he know she had never done so before.

What a mother can do is just so many things.

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BILL VAN WERT

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Courtney felt like an ostrich, her head about an inch away from wearing celery stalks for antlers. She pulled the top half of her torso out of the trunk of the Olds, admiring her work In neat rows of four, the brown grocery bags buttressed each other.

"Trunk space," she said to herself, adding in her mind, "That's why I keep this piece of junk."

She dearly loved storage space, and the trunk of the Olds was bigger and deeper than three women's hope chests.

While the lid was still up, shielding her from the rest of the car, Cpurtney straightened herself: pull down the sweater, lift u p the skirt, run both hands through the sides of her hair. She coached herself a s s h e went along. Then she m a d e the sign of the cross before slamming the trunk shut, wondering how many green stalks she had decapitated as she walked to the front door on the right.

"Ready?" the voice asked her as she was buckling her seatbelt. Courtney looked u p to see her mother straightening her own hair with the aid of the rear-view mirror: nervous pointy fingers running through white hair, the color of sheet rock,, and pulling down the black safety goggles over the eyes.

"Ready, aim, Freddie," her mother said.

"Whafs the idea of...?"

"Eye pollution," her mother said chomping on her dentures so that they made a clicking sound.

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW Courtney adjusted the rear-view mirror as best she could, guessing for her mother.

"This is supposed to be for watching oncoming cars."

"Never use it for that. Does a cat wear a hat?"

"You sure you don't want me to drive, Mama?"

"I'm your chauffeur, you're my gopher, we all live in a penny loafer."

Courtney took a deep breath. This was not going to be easy.

"We've got to talk, Mama."

"Jockey Steward, heer," her mother interrupted. "I eanna make this kear go fahst enoof..."

Hi

And then she whipped out of the parking lot like a ricochet hornet, near-miss after near-miss. With visions of collisions dancing where sugarplums should have been, Courtney shut up and pulled her belly in, the way a woman does when her water has broken. The talk could wait. She prayed to Saint Christopher instead.

"Cleo, you're a menace," Courtney said in an EASY 101 voice at one of the infrequent Stop signs that her mother deigned to notice.

'The menace from Venice again us..."

"Oh God." "...in Genesis," she twittered, rapping the wheel with a steady quartz conviction.

Courtney know her other disapproved of being called by her first name. Calling her Cleo had probably triggered the latest string of clang associations.

"Hocus-pocus n focus n locus... n crocus invoke us."

Courtney turned up the music on the radio. Bob Marley and the Wailers. Some real leaky-faucet reggae. She smiled and danced from the neck up, nodding like a Baptist; Cleo could clang all she wanted.

At home again, Cleo parked herself at the kitchen table, to mumble "sweet treat" to the parakeet, to humm. "Just a Closer Walk With Thee," to watch Courtney put away the groceries. Be-

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BILL VAN WERT tween bags, Courtney stole glances at her mother, sitting there like a baobab tree, her legs spread, her lap extanded like a picnic.

Courtney wondered at such swarming, all that frantic nervousness to occupy a chair, the way her mother's lower body billowed to drape and disappear the chair.

"Want to play cards?" her mother asked, clicking her teeth again.

"Can't you see I'm busy?"

"Busy dizzy. I'm busy took but I'm willing to stop what I'm doing to play cards with you" "Mother, we've got to talk."

"Yes. I like to talk."

Courtney remembered how she used to like the weekends when she was a little girl. N o w she loathed them. They meant non-stop time with her mother. Going back to work on Monday mornings was her escape clause in life.

"No. I mean, a real talk."

"Real talk, unreal talk, I like 'em just the same."

"Mama," Courtney said, sitting down at the table to face her maker, "I want to put you in a home."

"You have, dear, and don't think I'm not grateful. This is as much a home as Henry ever gave me."

"I mean a home-home."

"There now," her mother said, patting her hands, "You see?

You do it too."

Her mother thought she had clanged. Home-home. Why did she bother? She was almost forty, her mother was over sixty-five, clanging like a litany, Mother Goose and Dr. Seuss, and Courtney couldn't hear a word, without waiting for its rhyme. They had both outlived their husbands: gentle men, fragile men, who had no ear for echoes. Courtney had raised two daughters, was ready for an empty nest, could see here way to remarrying, resettling, reliving ... except for her mother, who blocked her path with banging and clanging, the sick child and peripheral parent, steadily more narcissistic, more charismatic and convoluted in her belief that the rest of the world used language improperly, not she.

11

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW "So/' her mother said, as though the issue were settled, "you want to play some cards-cards?"

And she began dealing, in liea of a response from Courtney.

Even the cards could go imaginary. Gin rummy was not a matter of sorting, lay-downs and scoring. Instead, it became a game of same-colored suits, Cleo throwing some spades in with her clubs, a game of trust and rejection, so that Courtney dared not gin too soon, for fear of embarassing her mother.

Courtney had noticed the same concern in her mother, about embarrassing Courtney's grandmother, when she was still alive.

The concern worked upwards on the ancestral totem, not down.

Cleo had never been shy about putting the pink to Courtney's cheeks.

Courtney smiled.

"Remember the first time Frank came to pick me up at the house?"

"No, dear."

"And you came out in your bra?"

"That's a gin, I think n wink."

"And Daddy was so shocked he put his coat on and left? And Frank? He never talked about it, but I think it prevented him from calling you 'Mother' after we married."

"He was a nice boy" "Yes he was."

"A toy of a boy."

Courbaey's thoughts had turned. The leaving, the uncertainty, the letter from the Army, the service. Frank had died in Vietnam.

"Aren't you going to count your points?'4 "Sorry, Mama. I was thinking about Frank."

"He had good ways."

"We have outlived our husbands," Courtney said, while thinking inside, "We have outlived our usefulness."

"They were both good boys. They should come around more often, don't you think?"

12

BILL VAN WERT

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"Mama, they didn't just leave."

"That Henry. He knows how to make we wait. And he's right, you know? After awhile, I do begin to miss him. " "Stop it, Mama."

"He ought to see the bras I wear now."

Courtney excused herself, using first the bathroom, then some phone calls, then making supper for her excuses. The trick was to stay busy. And hope Cleo stayed busy,, feeding Tweetie, reading her mail from the missionaries, watching television, polishing her shoes and dentures.

"Catherine is coming tomorrow," Courtney said, over pot roast and baked potatoes.

"Won't that be nice?"

"Yes. She and the baby."

"She has a baby, does she?"

"You know she does. They'll be here about nine. We can all go to church."

"Does she have a husband?"

"Who, Catherine? You remember Ray. You met him."

"Describe him."

"It doesn't matter, Mama, He's no longer her husband."

"So he won't be coming, then?"

"No. Just Catherine and Rebecca. Later on, after lunch, I'll be going, out for a little while. Catherine will stay here with you."

"Can't we come too? I could drive you."

"Np. Neil will drive me."

"Is he a friend of Catherine's?"

"No, mother. He's my friend. I'll be back by supper."

"That's nice. You run along now."

"Not now. Tomorrow, Mama. After church and lunch."

"Yes, well, you have a good time and don't mind about me. I can get by."

"Like I said Catherine will be here."

13

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW "Well, okay then. I'll take care of her too."

Courtney knew when to serve dessert. She knew when not to persist with her mother, and the time of one coincided with the time of the other.

Two hours after Cleo had gone to bed, Courtney could still hear her clanging away at her rosary.

"Hail Mary, Tom and Jerry, the Lord can afford to be with thee and thou and hee and how ..."

Interminable, her mother's prayers at night: sometimes blasphemous in their incongruities, sometimes delightful in their patchwork rhymes, always full of good intentions, sound and fury in a room that glowed with statues and smelled of linament and cough drops. Courtney imagined the Smith Brothers in there with her mother, decked out in their stove hats, stern eyes and fundamentalist beards, giving mentholated breath to a heathen prayer.

"Aren't you going to bed, dear?"

Courtney was ready for the question. It came every night, and she was not truly alone at night until she had answered that question. It stemmed from her childhood and, like a tornado's tail, it had a lot of years on the question mark.

"Very soon, Mama."

N o w she could relax. Her mother had finished her rosary, had asked the nightly question and was going to sleep now.

Courtney felt the same at night with her mother as she had When, as a single parent after Frank's death, she had forced herself to stay up beyond Catherine and Carrie's bedtimes, just to have that precious feeling that some part of her day, any part at all, had been hers alone. Sometimes, she sewed or baked. These activities unwound her. If she were too tired for them, then she folded laundry, watched television or worked half-heartedly on her sales reports for the boutique. More tired than that, she took long baths or read short books.

Once in awhile, she took a Valium, drank a glass of scotch, asked a lover over or read erotic magazines. If quotas existed in such things, she felt that she had been underfed sexually. Much of her dream time, some of her reading time and all of her shower time were given over to sexual fantasies. She had her own person-

14

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otch, ed in ch of ower rson-

al highlights film, to be sure, which included a one-night stand with Frank's brother the night of Frank's funeral, but the one did not make up for the many. Her childhood Catholicism leff her with a hangnail belief in rewards and punishments. She felt reasonably sure that she had burned off a good deal of Purgatory time here on Earth, but her body still hungered for a man's touch, his smells, his indentations in the bed.

Two winks shy of forty, her biological clock had accelerated to the point of near-panic, the hands leap-frogging forward, inex^ orably. Hormones reacted like the Blue Meanies in Yellow Submarine. She could cry at a callous and rage at a traffic jam, the most inanimate objects animating her the most. Her skin was shifting, from the downward spiral around her breasts to the bunching up around the hips. She felt like Russian wrestler in her thighs. Her voice was getting thicker, lower, more masculine, even as the first follicles of a moustache were growing right under her nose.

She dreamed of having another child. Sometimes she was the child. Sometimes it was Catherine's child. To be pregnant one last time, no matter who the man, this was her wildest fantasy. Sometimes it was Frank's brother. Sometimes Neil. Sometimes it was the least likely man she had met in a day: the ticket-punch on the subway, the redcap at the Bellevue, the cook with tattoo at the Greek sidewalk stand.

She wondered if her mother had gone through these changes.

The doubts, like ice blocks in the stomach. The silly vanities. The odds-and-ends beginnings of superstitions, horoscopes, trust inTarot cards. The sexuality, freed of all prior restraint, roaming up and down her body. That blood-longing in her womb, to be fulfilled again, even as, mentally and emotionally, she was beyond depen-^ dency upon men. And making lists of last-chance satisfactions: a lottery ticket, an encounter group, a pair of shoes that would never fit, a trip to Italy. Learning to live within limits. Learning to speak of priorities and options. Becoming too reasonable for things she might have tried at twenty, things she, used to do at thirty: putting an ad in the personals, getting picked up in clubs, betting on the horses.

She wondered if Cleo had one day gotten too old to listen to Tommy Dorsey or Harry James,, too reasonable to think about mak-

15

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW ing love as "getting laid,'1 too sensible to buy a dress too sizes too small for her.

She dared not ask. She couldn't give her mother the satisfaction of feeling needed, of mothering again, after all this tifne. And when her emotions ran to extremes, Courtney could only problemsolve by polarities, as though everything wrong in her life could be rectified by putting her mother in a home. Aging would stop, men would come like fourth-class mail, and time would stretch out like a hillside of dandelions. Mother in a home, mother in a home. The solution began to announce themselves, cheerleader fashion, obsessively, until they begem to clang, reminding her of her mother,, her fear of becoming like her mother.

P

IP

She smoked cigarettes late at night, until they made her lungs throb and gave her headaches, probably because Cleo had never permitted smoking in her own home. The picayune pleasure Courtney felt in breaking her mother's rules: smoking, cursing here and there, staying up late and breaking curfew. She realized her life was so much a reaction against Cleo's life that she halfway feared the absence of any barometer if she put her mpther in a home. But maybe her mother could meet other closet schizophrenics who clanged in a home. Maybe what looked like total rejection and maximum transfusions of guilt would turn out to be a yentl's miracle.

She decided to speak to Catherine. Tough as nails, Catherine.

Gutty, intensely feminist, religiously pragmatic. The jaws of General Patton to Catherine, at least as portrayed by George C Scott.

Frank's mechanical approach to the world in Catherine. Not a spare part of wonderment anywhere. She could ask Catherine.

She: was thinking these things when Cleo crawled into bed next to her.

"Mama, what are you doing?"

'1 got lost."

"You got lost?"

"I turned the wrong way."

"From where?"

"From the bathroom."

"Do you want me to walk you back to your bed?"

16

BILL VAN WERT s too

isfacAnd blemcould stop, h out in a eader er of

lungs never Courte and r life fway r in a hrenection entl's

"You don't have to shout. I can hear."

"Okay. I'll whisper. Do you want me to walk you back to^our bed?" * "No thanks. I'll be fine here."

"This is my bed."

"I let you come sleep with me when you were little."

"You don't have to pout, Mama. If s not dignified."

"Can I stay?"

"God, you're acting like a little baby. Whafs the matter?"

"I got scared."

"Of the dark?"

"No." "Of a nightmare?"

"No. I never went to sleep."

"This is ridiculous. Are you going to make me keep guessing?"

"You give up?"

"Yes, Mama. What are you afraid of?"

"Your leaving me."

erine.

GenScott.

Not a e.

"What?" , "With that Noah fella."

o bed

"Don't start crying, Ma."

"Neil."

"Neil."

"I can't help it."

"You can stay."

"What; honey?"

"I said,, you can stay."

"You were always my favorite child."

"I was your only child. Now go to sleep."

Courtney rolled over and away from her mother. Slowly, first by toe touching, then by the knees, her mother followed.

17

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW "What are you doing?"

"I need to know where you are," her mother said.

Courtney almost called her Cleary, because Carrie had used that same voice when she was little.

"Good night, Mama."

"Say your prayers, dear."

"Said them."

"Don't let the bedbugs bite." \> i

Courtney looked to the ceiling, as though to plead her case before the celestial jury, and then she closed her eyes. Not that she thought she would sleep. Far from it. She was feeling martyrish, and she hoped to be able to say to Catherine the next morning, "See how serious it is? She crawls into bed with me at night and keeps me up."

She coughed and cleared her throat Tossed herself like a salad. Embraced her pillow forty-two different ways. Listened with appropriate displeasure to her mother's snoring. And then, de*spite her petty-best intentions, she was suddenly sleeping, swarmed by security.

>

Her guardian angel, or a reasonable facsimile, the low-flying doughboy with the coiffed wings two sizes too small for the trunk, appeared to her in a dream and announced in a Brooklyn accent, "Leave Cleveland." She had been waiting most of her adult life for someone to tell her that.

What followed was a travelogue of her early years in Wooster, with stop-frame pauses on picking sweet corn in the fields, eating strawberries at the Latham school, and flying a kite with her father. Then the move to Akron, with a Busby Berkeley collage of tires, to the tune of the theme from Rawhide, the Sons of the Pioneers singing, "Roll 'em, roll 'em, roll 'em" and her father, in a pin-striped suit that looked like tire treads, saying, "This, too, is an anAJKRONism," to the bawdy applause of everyone in the Goodyear blimp. And, finally, Cleveland, like a boldness in a church choir, terrariums and swimming pools, a sprawl of Buckeye Visigoths upon the land, the modern limestone minarets, the lake so aptly named, and Frank tossing babies in the air,, holding them up to the light, higher than spires could dispprove, Frank in short

18

used

e bet she rish, ing, and

salwith de*ping,

ying unk, ent, t life

oosteather ge of Pioin a o, is the in a keye lake hem hort

BILL VAN WERT sleeves and proud of his wits, in Cleveland. Then, Cleo, coming to her from Shaker Heights,, looking like a penitent after Henry's death, wearing her hair in a nun's bun, carrying her dignity tlose to the belt, the way the Jews wear yarmulkas. And both of the, she and Cleo; learning to drive the Olds that Frank left behind, with the tableland hood and trunk space for four. Finally, the brief glimpses of Pittsburgh, Toledo and Columbus, as though they formed a goblet, into which Cleveland swam and swam right over the dam. All through the night, Courtney slept to the rhythms of a biblical narration, the voice of Orson Welles: "And Sara begat Cleo, who begat Courtney, who begat Catherine and Carrie, who begat Rebecca and Samuel, who will beget Levi and Mickey and Tamara and K a t e . . . " In the morning Courtney found her mother in the kitchen, wearing Sara's blue taffeta dress, an Easter bdnnet, a rosary around her neck, the beaci& that were blessed in Rome. Her mother was excavating a grapefruit with a serrated knife, her eyes full of a lustre Unusual for that time of morning.

"What are you doing, Mama?"

"Do I know thee?"

"Courtney, Mama."

"Lovely name. We approve."

"And who might we be, pray tell?".

"Miss Bronte. Pleased to make thy acquaintance."

"Charlotte?"

"Emily. Charlotte is away on holiday."

"I see. Shall we sit together, Miss Emily?"

"Splendid. Might I have some scones as well?"

"Oh verily," Courtney said, confused enough by her mother's high eyebrows and genteel gait that she didn't laugh or make fun at all.

After tea, her mother returned, calling Courtney "dear" again.

As long as she returned to Cleo, Courtney didn't worry about the woman's costumes, disguises, identities. Like Ruth Gordon in films, Courtney found her mother to be more inventive than frightening, and so she pretended that Oreo cookies were scones, 19

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW But her mother had come back, and she was appalled.

"Look at you, dear. I eat grapefruit, and you eat those nasty things. Pure sugar and preservatives."

"Yes, Mama," Courtney said, putting the cookies away for the next Victorian visitor.

Then Cleo went to take her shower and clean up, always her breakfast before her toilette, the reverse of Courtney.

M

When Catherine came, Courtney left Rebecca with Cleo and took Catherine to her bedroom.

"I've been thinking of putting her in a home."

11

"Just like that? You're cold, Mother."

"Cath, she's getting worse. The medication doesn't stop her anymore; She clangs a w a y . . . " "She's so cute," Catherine said, smiling.

"She's a damn embarrassment in public. I don't know how much longer I can control her."

"Is she dangerous?"

Âť; I n1

"She drives like a bat out of hell."

"So, don't let her drive. Look, Mother, Carrie and I have always said we would take her on."

"I'm her legal guardian."

"Have it your way."

"Well, I didn't want to just do it, without talking to you first.

But I've been giving serious thought to putting her in a home."

"So why did you ask my opinion?"

"I respect your opinion."

"Okay, then. Here's my opinion. If you put her in a home, you better pray you're sane as rain when yoti're seventy, because I'm going to follow your good example and bounce your butt in the first home J find."

"You wouldn't speak that way if you understood what I was going through."

"I'll be raising Becca long after you've buried Nanny. I understand tough."

20

BILL VAN WERT

nasty

Courtney nodded. It was a mistake to ask Catherine/ She should have asked Carrie first.

or the

Neil took Courtney to the water that afternoon. The boats went in and out of focus all afternoon.

s her

Neil was a lawyer in his mid-fifties, five years out of his marriage. He picked that afternoon to propose.

Courtney was too distracted.

o and

"I can't decide a thing like that," she said, "with Mama in the picture."

"She may live another twenty years or more. I might be too old to ask you then."

p her

Courtney held his hand but didn't give in.

"I know i f s crazy," Neil said, "but I'd like to have a baby with you."

how

ve al-

She was still too distracted. After small talk and twenty more boats, he took her home.

Courtney had waited all week to get away from her mother and be with Neil. But there she was, bursting into tears, unable to stand Neil a minute longer, so great was her need to see her mother again.

"Ifs because she slept with me last night," Courtney thought, standing outside her doorway to pull down her sweater, hitch up her pants and rim both hands through the sides of her hair.

first.

"

e, you se I'm e first

I was

under-

"Thank you, Catherine," she said as soon as she was inside.

"It was nothing. We had a good time. Gram taught Becca how to play gin rummy."

"No, I mean 'thank you' for the talk we had. I feel much better."

"I'm sorry for what I said. No matter what you decide, I would never, you k n o w . . . " "Never what?" Cleo asked, curious now. "Marry again?"

Nobody answered her. Courtney noticed that Catherine had an issue of Esquire in her hand.

"What are you reading that for?"

"I wanted to see what 'man at his besf amounted to," Cathe21

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW rine said, pointing to the subheading on the cover.

"And?" "Still a jungle out there."

Courtney suddenly had the desire to propose that they all get slightly drunk and talk about men. Instead, she asked Catherine to stay for supper.

"Emotional support?" Catherine whispered.

"Yes." "Okay. We'll stay. But let's call Carrie too?"

"The more the merrier." u

Cleo disappeared to dress for supper. When she came back to the kitchen, she was wearing a red robe with a baggy hood. She looked like Little Red Riding Hood and her Grandmother, rolled into one. Rebecca clapped. Tweetie did a somersault on his perch.

Cleo anno;unced that she was the Queen of England, and nobody contradicted her. There was food enough to feed the queen and all her royal court.

22

all get herine

ack to d. She rolled erch.

d noqueen

JOHN K1EFER

John

Kiefer

M o n s t e r

M a k e r

"You can be thankful for one thing," my mother would say whenever something bad happened to me, "real problems are easier solved than imaginary ones." She spoke those words to me again at the hospital, just before she died of cancer three years ago, leaving me alone.

God knows her saying meant something in our house. She was strong. Stable. My father, a chronically depressed man, committed suicide when I was thirteen. He was a welder and one, day he came home despjpdent and walked into his room and blew a hole in his head. My mother found him. She cried for a week straight When she stopped, she was strong again.

It was that spring, during my early adolescent years, I turned to fishing and writing in solitude at Harvest River. That was probably what saved me.

My older brother Neil, who was labeled a genius in the second grade, wasn't as lucky. He has been in and out of mental hospitals for the past nine years. It all started during his freshman year away at college when he fell in love with a girl. It was his first time. She didn't fall for him. He wouldn't stop calling her. Finally he became violent and beat some other guy she dated to a pulp.

He was kickedout of school, sent home.

H e lived in his room and listened to records through headphones all day. "Humming bird don't fly away, fly away ..." It blasted so loud that we could hear it from the hallway outside his door. The same song, over and over. He became more and more 23

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW irritable when he was interrupted for meals, or to take out the garbage. Finally, at three-thirty one fall morning, he stormed out of the house and began pounding madly on a neighbor's boat with a baseball bat. It took four cops to stop him. After they drugged him at the hospital, he told a psychiatrist that the boy he beat up at college had hired some brute to stalk and kill him. The monster was sleeping in the hull of our neighbor's boat, my brother, the genius, said.

I only tell you this in fairness to myself. For one judges another's experience with his own jury, because he has only lived his own life, and no two lives are the same—just as no two juries are.

You may say I have an overactive imagination—as my best friend Gerard did. With my family history in mind, however, perhaps you will more fully appreciate the events I am about to recall.

•

f

•

•

The first time I noticed him I was driving home from work at three in the morning. A bright October moon lit more than just his outline. He crouched like a starving neanderthal on the hood of a dusty, blue station wagon with flat tires. His face was angular; his hair- appeared to be pasted around his forehead—like a boy at School we used to tease because he seldom washed. His eyes were intent, watching me closely as I slowly passed in my Volkswagen Beetle, his bony knees looked as if they were trying to burst through his double-knit slacks.

It would have seemed strange to me—or anybody else I suppose— too see a man perched on the hood of a car early in the morning. But I figured he must have lived in the old, yellow cottage at the end of the driveway. It was a halfway house* That afternoon, on the way to work, I slowed when I turned onto Skarman Street and looked for the strange man, but he wasn't there.

By the end of eight long hours of loading boxes onto freight cars, I had all but forgotten about him. On the way home I buzzed by, turning my head quickly, when, at the last minute, I recalled my journey twenty-four hours earlier. I caught a glimpse of his eerie eyes darting after me and slammed on the brakes; I backed up to the front of the driveway and stared. He stared back.

24

ut the ed out t with ugged e beat monother,

anothed his are.

y best wever, out to

ork at ust his d of a ngular; a boy s eyes Volkso burst

JOHN KIEFER His expression didn't change. He was fascinating. He was scary.

I sped home and scribbled down a few stanzas describing him.

In the morning I made some revisions, running it through the typewriter, fictionalizing here and here, in order to suit my needs.

Then the title.

"GARGOYLE" I was pleased—enough to buzz over and show Gerard before another reworking.

He penciled a figure that so closely resembled the creature I grew suspicious.

"You've seen this guy before."

"No, this is a great description." He pulled back, squinting through his wire-rimmed glasses at the sketch. "I can visualize him. The hair reminds me of—what's his name from high school."

"Claude," I laughed. "Great, it did work."

"You should be a monster maker," he joked. "Give me a few more lines, and I'll sculpt him for the horror film I'm working on."

I supin the w cot-

Gerard worked in special effects for various film producers, including those who brought to life space adventures and prehistoric behemoths. His small bungalow was always interesting to visit, for miniature models of all of his creations lined the shelves which ran floor to ceiling on three Walls of his Hying room. On the fourth hung murals of color fantasy landscapes or "spacescape" backdrops he had painted, and he did a lot of his work right there—on card tables set up in the front room.

urned wasn't

'Tou've got to cheqk this guy out." Ipointed at a painted wax replica of a skinny, devilish looking humanoid with wings, horns, and a tail. "He looks a little like that dude."

freight uzzed ecalled his eeked up

Gerard; lightly adding shadows to the gargoyle sketch, glanced up just in time to see my finger aimed at the creature on the top shelf. "Sounds like an interesting specimen." He turned back to the drawing. "Where is he?"

"On Skarman—he must live in that halfway house; he's always crouching on the hood of that old car in front"

25

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW "Hello Rick," a soft voice sounded. I turned and Sara walked into the room with a pile of wool shirts resting over her arms.

"Hello Sister Sara," I said.

She glided over to Gerard,* .kissing him on the cheek. "Look what I found on sale for your Canada trip," she said, handing him a stack of Pendletons.

i If m 3

Sister Sara (as I affectionately called her) had been Gerard's girlfriend for five years, although I was the first to date her, during our junior year in high school. She was a beautiful, yet quiet blond, and I was a shy, skinny kid with pimples. I never really believed I had a chance, and my lack of confidence eventually caused me to fall victim to my best friend, who must have concluded that I really didn't care for her that much. Sometimes, no matter how close friends think they are, there are things that they can't, understand about one another. Gerard—an expressive, confident artist—couldn't have known of the jealousy I felt whenever I saw them together in the school hallway.

Sometimes, I have to admit, I wished they would split, so I might have another try. Living alone after my mother died eventually bolstered my confidence, removing certain adolescent plains. For some of us, it seems, it ordy takes a couple of years on our own and we catch up to the Casanovas we once so admired.

"How long you going for?" I asked.

"Four months— or until they call me back for the next film."

Gerard's first love was natural art, and every block of time he could get, he spent with other artists at a game farmin the Okanagan Valley in Canada, studying animals,-sketching, painting and sculpting. The spring after we graduated from high school he said he was going for seven weeks, but he became so engrossed in his wdrk, he lost sight of the weeks and didn't return until the end of summer. Sarah was worried and upset, not hearing from him— until Gerard finally called about four months later and asked her torn come up and spend the remaining weeks with him; I glanced at Sarah, and she looked down to the sketch. Gerard shaded under the gargoyle's eyes.

"Are you going to visit?*' I asked.

"Not this time," she said. "I can't get any time off from work."

26

lked

Look him

ard's durquiet y beually cludmatthey confiver I

so I evenscent rs on .

m."

me he Okannting ol he ed in e end im— d her

erard

ork."

JOHN KIEFER The next morning it was foggy, and I could only see his silhouette. But it was then I noticed something scary about the fellow, something not at all human. Through the charcoal mist, his eyes glowed yellow, like those of a cat. Turning off my headlights, I made a U-turn and killed the engine While coasting up to the curb in front of the dark house. His orbs slowly followed me as I rolled to a stop. The outline of his squatting form—his bony knees out to either side and his long neck and small head jutting forward from his torso—was that of a vulture. Suddenly his mouth opened and let out a horrifying laugh and then spewed forth a glob of sticky liquid that sprayed the door and spattered in the open Window of my car, hitting me on the arm. I started the engine and sped home, where I ripped off my clothes and jumped in the shower. The man's vomit filled my nostrils with such a vile stench, I closed my eyes and plugged my nose to keep from throwing up. The warm water did little to shrink the goose bumps that ran up and down my limbs.

After fifteen minutes of scrubbing myself, I went back outside and hosed the green mess from the driver's side of my car, then hopped in and sped of toward Gerard's house. * His lights,were off, and Sarah's moped was parked in front, causing me to hesitate before proceeding to the doorstep.

I knocked softly; after a few seconds the porch light came on, and Gerard let out a loud whoopc "You hoo, who is it?" he said, his voice then tapering downward, grumbling. "At three-forty-five in the morning."

"Ifs me," I whispered loudly, "Open up!"

"Who's me?" he whispered back, opening the door, "the big bad gargoyle?"

"He was there again."

"What do you want me to do about it?"

"You've got to see him." I grew excited. "His eyes glow in the dark—I don't even know if he's human. He spit this big green glob of something fifteen yards."

A voice sounded from down the hall.

"Who is it?"

"Hi, Sarah/' I said, calming myself, peering around the door 27

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW jamb. "There's aâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;unique guy I thought Gerard might use for a creature study."

Gerard, clad only in his bright red Jockey briefs, turned back to Sarah, who stood behind him, cinching the cloth belt of her long, baby blue robe.

"Remember the sketch of the skinny man?" Gerard jerked his thumb in my direction. "He saw him again tonight. Only this time, the man's eyes were glowing in the dark, and he spit a big glob of something."

There was a moment of silence, as warm embarrassment simmered up to my face. Sarah, sending my discomfort, said, "why don't you go look at him?"

"Can't it wait til the morning?" Gerard turned, looking back to

If me.

"He's only there around this time, when I'm on my way back from work." , Gerard rotated back toward Sarah, shaking his head slowly.

"Do you want to come along?"

A stick-like figure could be seen through the fog as we turned onto Skarman Street.

'There he is," I gasped, speeding up the street. I pulled a wide arc, stopped, and turned the high beams on the wiry creature.

Propped on the brick wall in front of the halfway house was a scarecrow> complete with straw sticking from his pant and shirt cuffs. His head, a bright orange pumpkin, donned a black, coneshaped hat with flourescent stars and moons. The kind a wizard wears. A candle beamed yellow rays through two triangular eyes.

'That isn't what I saw," I said.

"And what was it you saw?" Gerard asked.

"He sits on that old car there." I pointed and tried to sound confident. "He must have turned in/' "Maybe it's past his bedtime," he said in a sarcastic tone.

"There are those who are asleep."

"Gerard!" snapped Sarah, who sat next to me in the front seat.

She glanced at me cautiously.

I looked at Gerard in the rear^view mirror. H e threw a hard,

28

JOHNKIEFER for a

critical stare at the back of Sarah's head.

"Why don't you believe me?!" I said

ack to long,

ed his y this a big

t sim"why

ack to

y back

lowly.

urned

a wide e.

was a d shirt conewizard eyes.

"'Sister Sara' apparently does."

"Come on Gerard," said Sarah softly, glancing to the back seat.

"For Christ sake, I saw him here, half an hour ago!"

"During the afternoon," Gerard said in a tired voice, "when I'm working diligently on my creatures, and you on your poems, I believe it. But atrfour in the morning, you'll have to give me five snorts of coke and spin Van Halen at seventy-eight speed."

"So you think I'm making it up?"

"Look Rick," he said, "you see this guy early in the morning, after you've been working hard. Ever wondered it you're a little fatigued?"

"He's real," I said.

Gerard chuckled.

"I'm sure something was there," Sara said. "He's probably one of those patients from the halfway house."

There was a long pause, then Gerard sighed. "Can we get some sleep now? I've got a long bus ride to Canada day after tomorrow.

The next morning after work, when I cruised down Skarman, only the scarecrow watched over the street, and I began to ponder what Gerard said about fatigue. The more I thought about it, the more the gargoyle reminded me of one of Gerard's miniature devilish creatures made for the movies. Perhaps my imagination was playing tricks in the early morning hours. But he seemed so real.

"And what about the green shit?" I mused in bed.

sound

tone.

nt seat. hard,

A bang on the bedroom window followed my whispers. I froze, and waited.

Once, I remembered, when I was no older than ten, there was a loud crash on my window after dark. For hours I cowered beneath the covers, waiting for some hideous creature to crash through the glass and kill nje. As the moments of uncertainly dragged on; the monster grew more and more horrifying, turning green, dripping blood, growing horns, laughing at me. (Like the gargoyle!) The next morning, my mother and I captured the robin that broke his 29

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW wing on the pane, and we nursed it back to where it could fly again.

At this memory, I grabbed a flashlight from the bedside table, lifted my tired body from bed and walked over to the window and pulled the curtain cord. I slid open the window, letting a cod burst of air into the room. Resting my belly on the sill, I leaned outside, flashing the light to the ground, which was covered with the brown leaves of a nearby sycamore. No bird in sight; he must have been okay. My feet landed back on the floor, and I shut the window and closed the drapes.

i;

N o sooner were they drawn when another thud rattled the pane. I pulled hard on the cord. There stared the gargoyle! Into my room! His scaly, green nose pressed hard, fogging the glass.

This time his eyes weren't glowing. They were human, but his eyeballs shifted quickly from side to side, as if he had no control.

On his head were two bumps that resembled the budding horns on Michelangelo's Moses. As I let out a shriek, he pounded hard with his right fist, cracking the pane. He then spit a green, sticky blob on the glass. I grabbed my alarm clock, and winged at him, smashing through the mess on my window, spraying shards into his face.

He backed away, turned, then dashed off through the fog.

I picked up the phone and dialed.

"Hello," answered Sarah.

"He was here!" I yelled frantically.

"Who is this?"

"Rick. Quick, get Gerard and get over here; the gargoyle broke my window."

Sara paused for a moment "You okay?"

"Yeah, but get Gerard."

"Gerard went to the store. Ifs our last night together; and he wanted some more wine. He'll be home in a minute. Why don't you come over?"

I was shaking when Sarah answered the door. She had a worried look on her face. I fell into her arms; and she gave me a deep hug and kissed my cheek, then beganrubbing her warm hands up and down m y back.

30

JOHN KIEFER d fly

dside winting a eaned with must ut the

d the ! Into glass. ut his ntrol. rns on d with y blob mashs face.

broke

nd he 't you

a wora deep nds up

Pulling her head from my shoulder, tears in her eyes, she spoke gently.

"What happened?"

"He's real/' I whispered, holding back shivers. "He pounded on my window, and I thought it was a bird, so I opened my curtains and there he was, his ugly face staring in at me."

I could tell she wanted to believe me. She kissed me again on the cheek, and I slowly wiped her tears with the back of my index finger.

"I thought I was the one who was supposed to be scared to tears," I said. Sarah stared into my eyes. The words just leaked from my lips.

"I love you, you know."

She nodded slowly, then rested her chin on my shoulder and held on tight I closed my eyes.

"Great," came a voice out of the darkness. Gerard walked up to the porch with a grocery bag in his aims. "My best friend doesn't even have the decency to wait a daiy for me to leave town before he steals my girlfriend."

I let out a nervous chuckle, then a deep sigh.

Sara pushed away slowly. I looked from her to Gerard, who stood staring at her as if she were the biggest slut in the world. He wasn't joking after all.

"Gerard," I said, swallowing hard, "she was trying to help me. The crazy dude from the halfway house followed me home and tried to break in." ^ "You're the one thaf s crazy!" He threw the brown bag to the ground. Two bottles of wine smashed, and the liquid quickly drained from the sack. His fabe reddened. "You come here in the middle of the night with your stories, start fuckin' with my girlfriend."

"We didn't do anything!" yelled Sarah, tears running down her face. Gerard continued in on me.

"Are you a psycho like you brother? Or is this one of your goddamn games?! Is this the only way you can reach her? Get 'Sister Sarah' scared, just because you were too big of a chickenshit when

31

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW you had your chance in high school."

'The gargoyle is real," I said firmly. "Come over to my house and I'll show you whatâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;" "What!?" a goddamn mess that you created. To get us to believe that some phony demon is after you! Just get the hell out of here and leave us alone."v I stood still for a moment, then turned to Sarah. She was shaking and crying. I whirled around and walked to my car and drove off into the night.

When I arrived home, I grabbed a hammer, nails, and a piece of plywood from the heater room and boarded up my broken win-, dow. Fully clothed, I collapsed on my bed, only to awaken the next afternoon with my body drenched in sweat and the gargoyle on my mind.

i<:

Maybe I was going crazy, but I couldn't come home from a long night at work just to toss all morning in bed. I had tossed and turned enough. I had to know if he was real. And if he was? I would have to confront him.

I didn't drive down Skarman. Instead I took Chester Drive, which ran past the back of the house. Unlike the street next to it.

Chester Drive was a budding neighborhood with brand new houses springing up left and right. On the lot directly behind the halfway house stood the frame of a two-story home. The property surrounding the structure was scattered with scrap lumber piles, bushes and large boulders.

I coasted up to the front of the lot with the headlights o u t the moon allowed the wooden skeleton to cast light shadows onto the lot When the car came to a complete stop, I paused, glaring over toward the back of the halfway house.

I was so quiet, so cunning, as I floated around the maze of bushes, rocks and woodpiles and over a broken-down barbed wire fence.

It was as if there were two of me. One to cheer the other on, give him courage. Near insanity can do that to you.

Crouching low at the corner of the faded yellow halfway house, I spied the silhouette of his vulture-like body facing Skarman Street This is a nightmare, my brain whispered. Like the one I had the morning before, when he came pounding on my bedroom windowâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;his nose pressed hard against the glass, his eyes dart-

32

house

to beout of

e was r and

piece n win-, e next on my

a long d and was? I

Drive, t to it. house halfy surpiles,

s out s onto laring

bushfence. , give

alfway Skarhe one droom dart-

JOHNKIEFER ing! I thought my chest would burst as my heart raced. I became short of breath.

Near insanity can do that too! Give you courage and take it away the next moment. I was alone. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe easy. Could he hear my gasps? I counted backwards "nine, eight, seven, six ... maybe he'll be gone when I open them ... three, two.. Oh, sweet Jesus, sweep him from my mind forever!"

He hadn't moved an inch. I crept forward because there was nowhere else to go. Twenty feet of dead lawn separated us. As I drew nearer, something tugged at my right leg. Reluctant to move my eyes from the devil, I slowly knelt and reached a hand back. A piece of barbed wire had snagged on the soft sole of my tennis shoe. I sighed in some kind of crazy amusement, unhooking the wire. I discarded it gently, but then picked it back up in the same motion.

His dark, greasy hair was bunched up solid in two spots near his forehead, like horns. He crouched on the wall, where the scarecrow had previously stood. With the two-foot piece of wire in my left hand, I stepped slowly, lightly. One step. Two steps.

Three steps, four. His back was nearly within an arm's reach!

How could he not know I was there? How could he not hear my breathing? Dare I reach out and touch this creature?!

I held the barbed wire up with my left hand, grabbed the other end with my right My eyes lowered to the rusty wire.

Last night he had stalked me. Tonight I stalked him! I let go with my right hand. Inched toward him. My index finger drew toward his green, scaly back, touching ever so lightly. His. right arm whipped back and knocked my right hand toward my face. I quickly took hold of, the other end of the wire and looped it around his nedd I closed my eyes and yanked back as hard as I could, holding tight The barbed wire eased into his throat.

I opened my eyes and saw that during the short struggle he had managed to turn his body toward me. His red blood squirted from several holes in his neck and gushed from his mouth, over his hard, cracked lips. I let the wire loose, and his final breath bubbled through the blood and out the tiny slits made by the barbs.

He wheezed like a poisoned mouse then stopped. His eyes stared through me.

33

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW He was dead. And much heavier than his bony elbows and knees led me to believe. After the long and gruesome haul around the skeletal house, I dumped the rugged heap into the back of my car. My small Volkswagen soon reeked of the bloody, sweaty creature, and I rolled down both windows as I drove away. I turned on the radio for the first time in nearly a week.

A sense of relief warmed by body. A part of me was glad he had turned out to be real. Perhaps because real problems are easier solved than imaginary ones.

After parking under the bridge, I carefully pulled hisr body from m y car a n d laid it in the w a r m m u d near Harvest River.

Winter was coming, a n d the water level had already picked up.

Soon it would be spring again, and I would come here to fishapd write poems.

I knew exactly how to proceed I removed my soiled sweatshirt, turned it inside out, dipped it in the stream, and worked myself into a sweat, scrubbing every trace of blood from my upholstery, I then Jcnotted the sleeves and searched out the proper boulders. a

I

He Sank easily. Four rocks wrapped in a sweatshirt and tied around the gargoyle's waist were more than enough to put him under the muddy, swirling waters—forever.

•

•

•

Ifs been over a year, and my soul is somewhat settled. Sarah has been living with me for some time now. At first it was hard for her; she was devastated when Gerard didn't return from Canada or never even called.

Some nights while w e quietly lie in bed after making love I can sense that she's thinking about him. Then she tells me she loves me but feels scared because she does not know where Gerard it. But I'll never bring myself to tell her that I ' m frightened as hell because 1 think that I do.

34

LAURALYN GARFIELD HAILEY

s and round of my y creaned on Suda

Hyme

lad he easier

r body River. ed up. fishapd

sweatorked upholboula

nd tied im un-

Sarah ard for Canada

love I me she Gerard ned as

S w a y

They are putting a new roof on my building. Everyone keeps their windows closed because of the tar smell. The windows are open late at night or early in the morning when the tar wagon parked in front isn't churning and smoking. Rocking and rolling.

I like to sit in my room and listen to them pounding on the roof.

Early one morning all was still quiet, and my window open. I stuck my head out to sample the air and decide the day, like dogs in cars. My neighbor caught me at it.

"Do you know what a whirling dervish is?" he asked me. I don't understand his blue eyes and the silly things he says.

"Yes," I answered, and withdrew. I like his bonesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and the way he slapped his hands together to keep them from going numb.

Pad circulation. I knew, not by the air but by his hands, that the day would be cold.

That morning, I had dreams full of technicolor and glory. Not remembered, the dreams are discarded personals or inarticulated history. There, but not there.

Walking home from work, I trailed a boy smoking and swaggering. He was in danger of pitching himself into a tree. Shoes were red and untied, they went clump, clump. He pretended to go one way but wasn't headed that way after all. I took a bite of my apple, in place of smoking and swaggering. Munching on my bravado, it gets stuck in my teeth.

The boy with the red shoes knew it was no good not to stop 35

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW swinging. I have trouble remembering this as I try to stay in one place. The problem is that the sway scares me, I need focus. You can see it then.

I reach the apartment building, the men are still hammering away, in rhythm with the racket of the tar machine. My neighbor arrives at the same time. I say to him, "You can't watch the sun until it starts to go down." What most people don't know, is that peace remains insidious. Its hollowness will just lead to dust.

He is delighted. "But I can't wait that long."

36

A. CABRERA

n one . You

ering ghbor e sun s that

A.

Cabrera

L o n g

D i s t a n c e

"She kept saying, 'Don't turn out the lights and go to sleep.

Don't turn out the lights and go to sleep.' Nobody aver talks about it. Nobody says anything. I'm sorry. I'm depressing you. I know I am. I can't help it, I keep thinking about it. Don't turn out the lights and go to sleep. I'm depressing you."

I f s your sister calling in the middle of the night. She is crying. She is drunk. "No," you tell her, "you're not depressing me."

You finger the soft plastic cord connecting you to your sister, three thousand miles away, in the middle of thfe night, drunk and crying.

People are making plans to go home, to go to other people's homes, to stay home and cook and have other people come to their homes. It is Thanksgiving. For the past week now, your roommate Allison has been talking about the holidays with her midwestern enthusiasm. Her voice sounds like sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce. She talks about last Thanksgiving, laughing about how boring i t was with her ex-boyfriend, Bruce, a physics graduate student, and his boring friends from Princeton. "Everyone was introduced by class; Joe Hancock, class of '79, or Hillary Harlow, class of '82. I was miserable." She is playing with her blonde hair in front of the bathroom mirror, checking her roots. She asks you in her Michigan twang what you did last Thanksgiving.

You cannot remember. In fact, for several weeks now, you've been thinking about it and you cannot remember at all. You know 37

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW what you did the Thanksgiving before that. You were at Susan's apartment in the city. It was the first time you had tasted pumpkin soup. Randy made a plum pudding that looked like a dark gelatin brick. You remember the spoonful of warm pudding heavy on your tongue, its sweetness filling your mouth till you felt you would never taste anything but the whiskey-laced fruitiness again. And you remember how Randy broke your gastronomical revelry when he mentioned lard as he listed off the ingredients.

And you can remember the Thanksgiving before that and the one before that.

"Oh, that's right," says Allison, looking into the mirror at you behind her, sitting on the edge of the, bathtub, "you flew home last Thanksgiving." And you realize that you did. You know that you flew home and you know why; but you cannot remember doing it. You know that you probably spent a lot of time at the hospital, but you cannot remember.

• •

•

Your sister is crying harder, now. She is drunk in the middle of the night. She is alone and crying and asking you if you remember.

You lie and tell her, yes.

"No you don't do you? Don't lie to me. Don't you remember? she kept saying, TDon't turn out the lights and go to sleep.' I'm depressing you. I know I am. I'm sorry. Wait, hold on a minute."

• •

•

You remember one Thanksgiving, years earlier, when you were living outside of Boston. Your family was all together then.

Friends and relatives had flown in from Ohio and New York. You were eating at the dining room table, the mammoth mahogany table that stretched from one end of the room to the other. The person on one end was pushed up against the wall and had to climb over the arms of the chair to get up. Your Aunt Marie was sitting on the other end, almost in the kitchen and kept getting up for more ice, or another pepper mill, or to refill the gravy boat that had a turkey painted on the side.

Alice was drunk, (that was when you still called your mother "Alice"); she always got especially drunk on holidays. You were all seated, eating and passing plates and somebody had looked up out the window and pointed out the old man in the black overcoat

38

usan's umpk gelvy on you tiness mical ients. e one

or at home w that doing pital,

dle of mber.

mber? m de-

were then. . You ogany . The climb itting up for t that

other were ed up ercoat

A. CABRERA walking past the house. Everyday that you lived outside of Boston, the little old man in the black overcoat had walked past your house on his way to McDonald's. And then Alice was outside on the sidewalk with the old man in the black overcoat and she was pulling him by the sleeve. Everyone sighed the holiday exasperation sigh because Alice always caused scenes on holidays. And then the man was in your house and someone had taken his coat for him and Alice forgot he was there and went into the livingroorn to cry in the dark. The old man's name was Mr. McGriff and he was senile and as people were pushing potatoes and turkey towards him he kept asking where his wife was and later you learned she'd been dead for fifteen years.

••••••••• Your sister is lighting a cigarette. You hear her strike a match three thousand miles away. She exhales into the phone and you wish that the smoke would cloud in front of your face. But she is three thousand miles away smoking a cigarette and the air is cold and clear in the middle of the night. You tell her you remember other things.

• •> • You do not remember. Things come to you. When she was still "mom" to you, she let you have french fries or pizza for breakfast.

When she drove you and your sisters to school she always sfppped for cigarettes and the newspaper and candy. Other kids in the neighborhood liked when they rode with you because she never let anyone go to school without candy. On nice days she took you to Jones Beach instead of school. You spent the day. lying in the sun, playing at the shore; and she and your Aunt Marie would be drinking and reading in their beach chairs. The next day s h e would write a note asking your teachers to please excuse your absence. She would write that you went on an educational outing.

And when she was still mom, thafs the way it was.

Later, after you'd started calling her Alice, she'd stopped getting up in the morning and would mumble, 'Lef s all just, sleep in today." So you would walk to school. Sometimes, if it were raining, she'd tell you to take the car and remember to pick up your younger sister after school. And you would stop for coffee and cigr arettes and drive to school even though you weren't old enough to have a driver's license; and Alice would sleep in. And you did not 39

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW

T

like it at all when she was Alice.

Alice. Alice lying on the couch. Alice sending out for Chinese food or pizza. Alice who says she has cooked for too many goddamn years for too many godamn people. Alice who sends you out to get her a chili dog. Alice who yells that she is tired of cooking and cleaning. Alice who is sick and tired. Alice who is sick and lying on the couch drinking. Alice who the neighbors in the quiet N e w England town call crazy, nigger lover, running a cat house.

Alice who says "fuck" too much. Alice who gives the finger to the lady across the street looking out from behind her curtains at Alice. Alice who forgets a graduation, a birthday, a burning cigarette. Alice who asks you to stay home tonight and play cards with her. Alice who will talk to anyone who will talk to Alice. Alice who.wakes up every night from her sleep, screaming. Alice who stumbles through the dark empty house usingv a cigarette for a flashlight, looking for something. Alice who is sick and tired.

Alice who is tired. Alice who is Alice.

II t Your sister has stopped crying. She has stopped repeating herself. "I miss her so much. I cry every day. I can't help thinking about her. Don't you miss her? Don't you think about her all the time?"

Yes, you tell her. But, you tell her you think of different things.

• •

•

Things come to you. You discover. She became Maggie-Alice.

You went home for the holidays. She asked you to call her Maggie-Alice. She wanted everyone to call her by her full name. You walked into the house and she was lying on the couch watching TV. She tried to sit up but couldn't and so she leaned on her arms.

She was arying, she was so happy to see you. She told you that your younger sister would be flying in from Florida and that your other sisters would be driving up from the city the next day. You tried not to stare at her thin arms, the purple veins sticking out like tubes. You tried not to stare at her skinny legs curling out from under the velour bathrobe you sent her for Mother's Day. You tried not to stare at her bloated belly, swollen and heavy on her thin frame. You called her Maggie-Alice and played cards with her.

You helped her up and got her dressed. The two of you walked

40

Chinese y godou out ooking and lyquiet house. to the ains at cigars with Alice e who for a tired.

eating inking all the

fferent

-Alice.

Mage. You tching arms. u that t your y. You ng out t from u tried r thin h her. walked

A. CABRERA

T

down the street, beneath the naked branches of the ancient elm trees that lined the quiet New England neighborhood. You held hands. You were surprised at how small and thin her fingers felt through the brown gloves she wore. She held on to your hand tightly. You were surprised at how fragile and light she felt as you helped her along. She held on tightly as if.she were afraid of the evening darkness that quietly wrapped around your warm bodies moving slowly and close together down the street. She talked about the dress she had on when she met your father; she talked about being nineteen and living with a girlfriend in Greenwich Village and dating four boys at once. She talked about'family vacations to a house on Cape Cod and about playing bridge with the other newlywed couples that lived in the Veterans' Project. And then she started to sing "Shine On Harvest Moon," and you sang with her. And she cried because she was so happy to see you You woke up in the middle of the night to Maggie-Alice crying. You walked through the dark hallway to her room. She was sleeping and she was crying. You tried to waken her. You wanted to wake her up so that she would stop crying. But she would only half-wake; and look at you groggily and go back to her dream. To her nightmare. To wherever it was that made her cry. You pulled the covers around her boney shoulders and went back to your room.

You heard her cry out several more times before morning.

•

• •

"I called everyone. I don't want the holidays to come. It sucks.

Ifs going to be so fucking depressing."

"Did any of us ever want the holidays to come?" you think.

But you don't say it. You tell her you know what she's talking about. You remind her of french fries for breakfast and take-out Chinese food for Easter dinner, of giving the finger to the snotty old snoop across the street and of Mr. McGriff looking bewildered in your dining room asking where his wife is. She was way ahead of her time, you say, a woman who just didn't like housework.

Maggie-Alice-Freedom-Fighter-Jesus-Christ-Woman-LibberMother-Superior. Your sister is laughing and you tell her you lover her and that you'll call her next week.

• •

•

You go to your room and get into bed. You lie in bed with a 41

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW reading light on. For the past year now you have slept with a light on. Until now, you had never thought about it; you would just fall asleep reading, with the light on. And you remember. You remember the hospital room and your sisters dragging you out the door after twelve hours of pulling the covers around her bony shoulders and holding the thin pale hand that stuck outfrom beneath the sheet. And Maggie-Alice, her eyes closed in the middle of the night in the hospital, talking in her sleep, her dream, "Don't turn out the lights and go to sleep; don't turn out the lights and go to sleep.'4 And you cry for a long time, three thousand miles and one year away. You cry in the middle of the night for a long time, remembering. A nd then you turn out the light and go to sleep.

42

with a d just ou reut the bony m bemiddle eam, lights miles a long go to

B.S. JONES

B.§.

Jones

U n d e r

T h e

R e d

U m b r e l l a

H e met her in Tecuanapa, the only white girl. She looked surprised to see a white man. He pulled her away from someone and danced w i t h her slow, holding her neck, the hot stink of her breath.

On the ^treet, she threw her thin purse at him, the patent leather slippery from her armpit. y<

You can go back," he said. "Go ahead."

She shook her head. They sat down in the square. The wind was hot a n d blew her hair onto his neck.

H e helped her to her feet She teetered on her heels and he reached down and pulled them off. "Walk in your bare feet."

She laughed loud and said, "Carry me/' •

•

•

In the next adobe hut, Juan Carlos was beating his wife; he said once, "Women dream all day. Like donkeys," "No," she said, "they are just lazy." She stretched her legs, slow like a cat. "There's no point in pretending.' Still her eyes filled up, "What if he kills her? for nothing?"

Carlos' little girl burst in and said, "Ayiideme."

H e lit a l a m p and followed her—brave, not waiting for his light. But when he got there> Juan Carlos was sitting, quiet, in a chair.

The w o m an slapped the child and said to him, "You know nothing. What do you know? You and that whore with the yellow hair."

43

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW

r •

•

That night in the moonlight she had a terrible dream. "There were men piled on top of me, so many I couldn't breathe. I thought if I could just spread my legs far enough, they'd all fall through."

He brought her water and she drank thirsty, cupping his hands. Great brown moths circled close to the lantern flame.

At dawn she said in Spanish, "I'm so tired. Rock me to sleep in your arms."

The next morning she pinned her hair up like the older women of the village and washed clothes with them in the river.

•

•

•

In the plaza, Juan Carlos said, "You think because your dick is white, she will stay with you. She will take everything. JSven the flowers she planted. There will be nothing but holes in the garden."

She looked up, surprised, her hands white with flour.

He went outside and looked at the garden.

He thought, what do I care about a few holes in the earth? they will fill in with their own dirt.

She came out and stood there, quiet.

The sun was low and red behind the pepper tree. "Come. Ifs time." He took her hands and she smiled; She heated the water and he bathed her first, gentle, with a soft cloth.

Her head was turned to the side. Her raised up and looked out the window at Carlos' little girl knee-deep in the opaque evening water again.

Ii

"Ifs her reflection," she said.

He nodded. He wanted to run out and throw himself on it like a grenade.

"When the sun is just right, it sparkles like diamonds."

They could hear the mother calling her, calling her name but it was lost downwind. Carlos' little girl stood stock-still, as if the slightest shift of weight could loose her to the dark beneath, until the woman came down to the water's edge and stamped her bare foot.

P JUL

44

TRISHKA MONRO r

"There hought ugh."

ng his

Trishka

Munro

eep in

women J u l i a ' s

dick is JSven in the

earth?

me. Ifs

with a

ed out vening

it like

me but if the , until er bare

B o d y

Julia needed a bedpan. She lay in the hospital bed, one leg propped on a pillow, and concentrated on her Madder. She had already rung for the nurse, but no one had come. Now she pushed the buzzer impatiently and shifted in her bed. She would not wet herself. She might be an old lady but she wouldn't lose control, not that way.

She gazed idlyout the big glass door. Small groups of people sat on the curved cement benches of the small courtyard. Must be visiting hours. Maybe that explained itâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;no bedpans during visiting hours. That would make as much sense as their other absurd rules.

She wasn't entirely sure why she was lying in this hospital.

Surely a broken leg wasn't so serious. And, besides, these days doctors said exercise was the thing for an injury. But Dr. Bradley wouldn't even consider i t "Some signs of osteoporosis..." he told her. "Lef s just monitor your progress for a little while. Don't worryâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;you just pretend you're having a vacation../' He had patted her cast and walked out of the room without waiting for her reply.

Julia wished she had answered him. She would have explained that she couldn't possibly take a vacation in spring: After all, she had to put her garden in order. The isotoma was invading her moss and one of her sprinkler heads had broken. That new persimrndn needed special watering. And she had begun shaping the hedges, which got out Of hand so easily. No, she really couldn't

45

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW leave her garden.

She heard footsteps and leaned forward to peer into the hallway. A young woman in a long pink robe shuffled slowly past.

Some new mother on her way to the nursery.

Bad enough that she was lying helpless in the hospital. Then some clerk had decided to stick her near Maternity, where she couldn't help hearing the constant wailing of infants and the foolish chatter of their parents.

"Well, you asked for a private room. Thaf s where they are, dear," the nurse—a long-nosed woman with blond hair drawn into a tight bun—had told her as she turned down the sheets. "If you want to share..." Julia had never shared a room.

She hated the new mothers, but could not stop herself from peeking at them, watching with unwilling fascination. Their swinging breasts and newly slack bellies under loose nylon nightgowns revolted her.

I i

They would walk past her room> their bodies slightly stooped, their eyes focused faraway in the vacant gaze of intense concentration, as if they were trying to keep their insides from falling out. She watched them sit on the courtyard benches outside her window. They would rock cautiously from side to side on widened hips, as they protected their tender bottoms. Julia thought they looked, older than she did.

(• * w *

Julia had never had a child. She cared for her body meticulously. Twenty minutes of calisthenics everyday, followed by a brisk walk. Good food and not too much. N o smoking or drinking.

ii I

'ii: i *»

•i

Now, though she was a bit over seventy, her stomach had only a hint of slackness, her thighs were still lean, her hips slim, her breasts small. She had watched them vigilantly for the merest hint of sagging. Even her face was unlined, so smooth that she knew her friends wondered if she had ever gotten a facelift. Only her skin, faintly dry despite her tableful of creams and oils, was not a young girl's skin. Her arms had the coarse texture of her mother's skin just before she had died.

The last time she had seen her, before she died in that awful home, her mother had seemed so old. Julia had been apalled to find a wrinkled woman with tangled white hair and hands that waved aimlessly as those of an infant She had been sixty.

46

e hallpast.

Then e she e fool-

y are, n into If you

TfllSHKA MONRO Once Julia had thought her mother was beautiful. That was before the day she had seen her undress. Julia had been ten, maybe eleven, and very much in love with her own body: the elegant way it moved when she dressed in fancy clothes, the smooth movement when she ran. Everything about her body was perfect straight lines, smooth skin and a clean sweet smell.

That afternoon Julia had been posing in front of her mother's mirror, practicing different expressions. On a impulse she had stripped off her dress and knickers and stood, staring at her naked body. Almost immediately, soft footsteps sounded in the hall and the doorknob clicked as someone turned it. She grabbed her clothes and hid behind the old armchair.

from Their night-

Her mother entered, carrying a towel over one arm. She was slightly sweaty from canning somethingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;tomatoes or peaches, Julia couldn't remember. She set the towel on her bed and began to undress. Julia peeked around the chair.

ightly ntense from s outde on Julia

She had never seen her mother naked. Her mother wasn't at all beautiful without her clothes. Her breast hung like little weights encased in pudding bags and her stomach bulged a bit.

Her legs weren't a bit smooth.. They were bumpy and had blue veins bulging out in places. She had hair in odd places: under her arms, on her legs, even between her legs. Julia reached for her crotch without thinking, as if to reassure herself that, in that instant, her body had not changed.

eticuby a ing.

h had slim, merat she Only , was of her

awful ed to s that

As she undressed, her mother moved around the room, crumpling a stray piece of paper, straightening a painting. When she passed the chair, Julia wrinkled her nose. Her mother smelled of sweat, just like the men did. But there was another, more pungent odor, like the sour smell of molds growing in the damp under a fallen tree.

Her mother left the room at last and Julia heard the sound of water filling the tub. She crept out of the corner and, holding her clothes in front of her, tiptoed "back to her room.

"I'm never going to smell like her," she had whispered, as she shut the door fijrmly behind her.

The rumble of a hospital cart startled her. Footsteps shuffled past her room, accompanied by the bleat of a newborn, Julia didn't even glance at the door, just shifted in her bed as she tried to ease

47

pp BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW the pressure on her bladder. She pushed the buzzer again and looked at her watch. Twenty minutes had passed. How could they ignore her for twenty minutes? She could have died in that time.

The bathroom was so close, only a few steps. If only she could walk. Julia lifted one corner of her mouth. If she could walk she would be at home, in the garden. Of course, the garden had been where she broke the leg. She still couldn't understand it. She had been walkingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;nothing moreâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;when she had slipped on a bit of mud. She had been startled, but the leg really hadn't hurt a bit until she tried to stand. Then the pain had been so excruciating that she very nearly fainted.

After a few moments, she had managed to drag herself into the house. The doctors had been impressed by that. Stoic, they had called her.

A baby was still crying somewhere down the hall. Julia wished fiercely that the brat would shut up, that the high inhuman cry would just stop.

She had avoided children for most of her life. They were unpredictable creatures. N o children lived in her neighborhood, for which she was grateful. She couldn't have tolerated children tromping through the carefully pruned junipers, the neatly raked gravel.

The baby let out one final yelp and stopped. Julia imagined the melon-shaped head and the swollen shut eyes of the newborn.

Such ugly imperfect things. She wondered at the admiring cries of parents: what tiny fingers, perfect toes, delicate face, and so on.

Didn't they have eyes?

Her sister had been the same. Julia had gone to stay with Katherine just after she graduated high school. Her parents had wanted her to marry some boy or other ... Who had it been? Harvey somebody... but Julia hadn't been interested.

And so Katherine had asked her to visit.

"You can make up your mind here," she had written, "You know you won't get any peace at home. Stay with George and me until the baby comes. I'm sick as can be these days and so lonely.

There's no one nearer than two miles to the farm. If you would come and keep me company, just until the baby's born> I will be ever in your debt"

48

TRISHKA MONRO

n and d they ime.

could lk she d been he had bit of t a bit ciating

lf into , they Julia inhu-

re unod, for ildren raked

agined wborn. ries of so on.

y with ts had ? Har-

"You nd me onely. would will be

Julia hadn't really believed her sister was sick. She had thought Katherine was overstating her condition, giving* Julia an excuse for coming. So she had been astonished at the violence of Katherine's pregnancy.

Katherine would vomit every night, often more than once. In the morning, Julia would carry the bitter-smelling bucket with the stuff sloshing thickly as she walked. She would hold it far away from her body, empty it with one big splash into the old outhouse, then rise the bucket with well-water. Katherine would fill the bucket again by nightfall.

The vomiting stopped after Katherine began to feel the child move. She sewed and knitted constantly: tiny baby blankets, ruffled gowns and bonnets. And she talked all the while, amazed at her body, giddy with relief now the nausea had stopped.

'It felt," she said, as her needle poked up and down through the tiny quilt, "like influenza that wouldn't stop. I just wanted to die. And I just knew my baby would die. But he didn't No, you didn't, did you, little one?" She looked down as she crooned to her swollen belly.

Julia was simply relieved when there were no more buckets to empty. But she watched her sister's body grow with something like revulsion. Katherine had always been thin, elegant. Julia had never seen her leave her house without checking the mirror three, even four times.

N o w her breasts swelled, her bottom spread out, and her chest expanded to allow room for the growing baby. And the belly itself ... Julia thought it looked grotesque, a mass that might burst out of control at any moment When the sisters were alone, Katherine patted her new belly possessively. She touched her breasts tvith awe and laughed about her new shape.

"It just doesn't matter," she said, Qne day, as she watched Julia pull on her girdle. "I'm perfectly content wearing shifts and staying in the house, out of the snow. I can't stand to wear confining jclothes these days."

The baby arrived during a thunderstorm in ApriL Katherine had been feeling what she called twinges most of the day. By nightfall they were long, aching pangs and George left Julia in 49

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW T charge of the moaning woman while he drove to fetch the doctor.

Later George explained that, in his excitement, he had gotten lost. And, when he finally found the doctor, he was delivering Mrs. Warren's baby boy. So, when the two men finally arrived, baby Sarah was sleeping next to Katherine and Julia was washing the floor.

She never told anyone about those hours holding Katherine's hands while she breathed in and out and in andout and inandout andinandoutandohhh over and over. She never told anyone how helpless she felt each time the agony gripped her sister.

Katherine had fought it, laying back to pant raggedly or sip water between the pains. Then, as they came closer and closer, she could no longer bear it and screamed until her voice was gone, a high; hoarse sound that subsided briefly to low moans, before she began to scream again.

Julia brought fresh water and washed her forehead with cool water. She turned her from side to side, cringing at the sweaty, leaden slickness of her sister's skin. She changed the bedding when Katherine soiled herself, and again when the water broke with a pinkish spurt. All the time she willed herself not to think, knowing that she could not bear the contortions of Katherine's body if she did other than simply act.

Then the sounds changed. Katherine began grunting, loud grunts that ended in shouts. Her face contorted horribly, as Julia imagined a perjson with lockjaw would look. Her lips pulled over her teeth and flecks of saliva dried on them. She rocked to and fro, moaning, grunting, screeching. Her legs sprawled open and Julia could see a small black spot between them, growing larger with each push.

"No, it can't come now!" she shouted, fighting an urge to push her sister's legs together, to tidy the messy body. "The doctor's not here. Stop it! You have to stop it!"

Katherine didn't even hear. The baby's head slowly pushed out of Katherine's body into Julia's unwilling hands. She held the wet, slimy head and gently pulled the shoulders out as Katherine gave one final scream, then lay back, her breath whistling in her chest.

The umbilical cord snaked out, brushing against Julia's arm.

50

octor.

gotten vering rrived, ashing

herine's andout ne how

or sip er, she gone, a ore she

th cool weaty, edding broke think, erine's

, loud as Julia d over to and and Jularger

o push r's not

pushed eld the therine in her

's arm.

TRISHKA'MONRO T She jumped, almost dropping the baby. She turned the slippery little thing upside down and shacked it on its back. It couched twice, gave a small wail, then cried, "nyah, nyah." Stuff dribbled out of its mouth.

"What is it?" her sister asked. "Give it to me. I want my baby." Her voice was eager, though still hoarse. She smiled and held out hands that trembled slightly.

"Ifs a girl," Julia said, as she awkwardly wiped the baby and wrapped the floppy little body in a blanket. She handed the child to Katherine and began to clean up, as Katherine murmered in a quavering voice to the sleeping infant.

Later, after Katherine was walking comfortably again, Julia had asked her how she had endured the pain Katherine had looked at her blankly.

"Pain?" she said, in a faintly puzzled tone. One hand stroked Sarah's head as the baby snuffled at her breast "It hurt, I guess.

But, you know, once Sarah was born, I just didn't care. It didn't much matter."

When Sarah was just a month old Julia took a position as a book-keeper with a firm out West. She did not marry Harvey Whatever-his-name-was. Her mother made sure she knew when he married a girl from New York and moved to a wealthy neighborhood in Chicago.

Julia had worked as an accountant until she retired. The work suited her. She enjoyed the tingle of pride when she solved a difficult problem and the chaos of numbers she had been handed was perfectly ordered.

The company president had lauded her at the retirement dinner. Ten years later, she still prized her memory of the speech. He had called her meticulous, a cherished asset for thirty years.

Julia shifted in her bed again. She felt as if she were going to burst Hadn't some Greek or other died from a burst bladder? If her bladder burst she would sue the hospital ... Where was that nurse? She buzzed again, a long burst of sound.

"I don't care if my leg is broken," she muttered. "If I don't get up, I will soil myself. I refuse to wet my bed."

She sat up and eased her leg over the side of the bed. She

51

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW groaned. It hurt terribly. She turned and set her good leg on the ground. She moved one arm to the night table, then the other.

The bathroom w a s only five steps from her but she couldn't even take one step. She leaned over the night table and pulled at a chair. It slid easily on spherical wheels toward her. Pushing straight down, she stood upright, clutching the back of the chair.

Slowly she pushed it across the floor, moaning each time she hopped on her good foot.

Her bladder shifted with sharp pain as she m o v e d She clamped her mouth tight as she concentrated on the next step and the next. She reached the bathroom door and, leaning far over the chair, began to turn the knob w h e n a sharp voice behind her asked, "Miss Mac-Allister, what are you doing?"

She jerked upright. The doorknob slipped from her grasp, as the chair began rolling out from under her. She stood full on her broken leg to grab desperately at it, then screamed and slid down the side, still stretching toward it, as if it could still support her.

The chair, free of her weight, careened across the room and banged against the wall.

Julia lay on the ground and moaned at the searing pain of her broken leg. Suddenly she gasped, and laying her face on the cool, gritty linoleum began to wail, with a harsh, despairing cry. A warm wetness spread down her legs, soaking her hospital gown, engulfing Julia's body.

52

SHARON BRIDGFORTH

n the r.

uldn't led at shing chair. e she

d She p and er the d her

sp, as on her down her.

Sharon

Bridgforth

C h a n g e I n

i s

M y

a

P e n n y

P o c k e t

oppression fills the air like the smell of human decay . . .

m and

of her e cool, cry. A gown,

"I always wanted long hair. So after I figured I wasn't gonna grow none I went out and brought me some. Ain't it nice?"

pregnant, i stand in line at the welfare office counting the heads before me getting evil, w a n t i n g to leave, needing to throw-up, feeling victim of the conversations around me.

quietly i pay the price for fucking a stranger.

oppression fills the air like the smell of human decay, but no matter how sick i get i must stay because i need assistance to terminate my condition.

"Boy! You better get your ass off that floor and stand here like you got some sense. Say lady the line is back there!"

53

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW children running, tempers flaring, food everywhere and i am getting sick, potato chips, fried rice, chili dogs, burritos. not only can i identify each morsel of food in the building i can smell the breath of those eating.

"I ain't never heard of a White chick having to worry about hair."

"Well like I said I got me a wig so I ain't worried no more."

"Personally I like short hair. N o worry, no fuss, no bucks, just snip snap and go. rbeen'wearingrny hair close to my head since I took off for college."

blacks, latinos, jamicans, whites and some i can't tag. cripple, blind, burnt, drunk, crazy, everyone is here and everyone is talking. At the same time, and i am getting sick.

i can feel the old woman behind me eyeing for the right moment to strike up a conversation, i hope i look distracted.

"I said the line is back there! Big Samoan Negro."

"Bitch."

Ii

i !

"Yea, I thought you knew the language."

the old lady is creeping up on me. please don't let her start talking, too late, maybe if i don't say anything she'll leave me alone.

"You know you're pretty cool, for a White girl."

n â&#x20AC;˘

"And you're pretty simple for a Black one. I mean you go to college only to stand in the welfare line. I don't get it."

\f i i

"That one's easy. I have education but no skills, training but no

54

SHARON BRIDGFORTH

m getly can ell the

experience, and now I'm working on a Masters so I can be overqualified and get a gig. Until then I have to come here so my educated ass can get a meal."

about

"At least you got a change to look forward to. The only change I'm looking for comes on mother's day, every month, when I get my

e."

check and some smoke. See I don't have no dreams to chase."

ks, just

since I i do not understand one word this old lady is saying, and i really don't care about that baby in her picture, though it is kind of cute.

ripple, s talk-

'Tm gonna have to kick some ass now Samoan. I been standing in line too long to let you cheat me out my place just cause you think you're too good to get at the end of the line like everybody

ment to

else."

"Shut up boy before your ass be the one I beat!"

"I am tired of waiting. Seems like that is all I do. Wait. And don't nothing change. Not my kids, not my neighborhood, certainly not the way this line moves. Just once I'd like to look out my window and think the block is changing. For the better. But no, those brow dripping, hand clasping, shittalkingmotherfuckers

t talkalone.

that are my neighbors are always there, blocking my view. Messing up everything. And somehow I am sure that these bitches here are responsible for it all. So Samoan you better get your ass to-the

to col-

but no

end of the line before I lose what's left of my mind."

i wonder if my baby would look like that, so helpless, so perfect, i 55

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW

know that i'm doing what's best but i can't help but think that after this baby is torn from my womb it will mend its wings and follow me for the rest of my life, crying, because i could not let it live.

"So Lady Wig, what's your name?"

"Franklyne."

"Oh honey with a name that pretty I know you got dreams."

this old woman is so kind, wiping my tears with her napkin, i can tell it is hand embroidered, very special.

"Thanks for the cigarette Ms. Samoan. You got any kids?"

wouldn't you know it, just when my spot gets warm, the line moves u p a little.

56

SYLVIA A. WATANABE

hat af-

nd fol-

it live.

Sylvia

A.

Watanabe

ms."

i can

"

moves

A

S p e l l

o f

K o n a

W e a t h e r

For months after Tita ran Sonny Cabral's '53 Chevy convertible into the tree at the bottom of Dead Man's Slide, she had t o go to Doc McAllister's once a week to get the glass picked dut of her face. When she came home from the hospital, I walked her to his surgery in the big white house at the other end of the village, every Saturday morning. I stood with my eyes shut> squeezing her hand, as he picked the slivers out, one by one, with a pair of shiny silver forceps.

"I want, to see too. Whose face is it, anyway?" Tita kept after Doc to remove all the bandages.

"Wait till the swelling goes down, let the bruises heal a b i t " He tried to p u t her Off. "Tita, you better listen to Doc," I urged.

"Oh, Mouse," Tita scoffed. She never could walk away from bad newsLast October, in the middle of the Kona season, the bandages were taken off for good. That afternoon, Grandmother dosed the grocery and came with us to Doc's for the first"time.

Dressed all in black, With her bladk-dyed hair pulled tightly back from her face, she sat in a corner of the reception room, with the handle of her cane firm in her bony grasp and both feet planted squarely ort the tile floor. Tita once said there is something about Grandmother that makes you feel like getting u p and turning on all the lights in a room.

When she saw Tita'S face, Grandmother gave it the same 57

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW thorough and untrembling appraisal that Tita was giving her own reflection in the glass. It was a look that didn't miss a single detail of the tenuous struggle to hold on to form—the swollen purple flesh, shapeless lips, deep gashes, now stitched closed across the cheeks and chin—like the distortions of memory made visible.

"Lucky nothing was broken," Doc McAllister said, putting the bandages aside and gently smoothing Tita's rumpled hair, still as long, and black, and glossy as ever—so strangely untouched. "Just give it time."

"Mo shikata ga nai." There's nothing to be done. Grandmother got to her feet. "Stay too broken for fix."

She repeats the words now, as I walk into the store after putting Tita to bed upstairs, "Shikata ga nai." Her angular shape pokes £>ut from the darkness behind the cash register; her black dress, blacker than the shadows behind her. "Everyday, nomu bakkari " I pick up a rag and begin dusting the two-foot jars of colored puffed rice, preserved plums, and dried cuttle fish lined up on tiers next to the register. Beads of moisture drop from my forehead onto the heavy glass lids. " . . . N o work. Only drink, drink all day, all night. . . . " Grandmother never sweats. Her skin is the color of dead leaves and makes a wruspery soimd when she moves; All day long, you can hear her, rustling among the shadows in the store, complaining of drafts and whispering of cold, even in the dead of the Kona season. " . . . Make fight, police come. . . . " The cash register dings.

She pulls the drawer open and begins counting the bills into little piles on the counter. "Ichi, ni, san . . . All the time, too much shame " I wait for the words that always close the litany: "Just like your Mama." It has been nearly twenty years since Mama ran off with the Marine from.California, leaving nothing behind, except a bad taste in Grandmother's mouth and ^ closet full of going-out dresses. Fringed^ and sequinned, their electric colors shimmer in the darkness hehind the dusty boxes of old photo albums,, and they smeE even still of stale gardenias and hotel ipom bars at two in the morning. , ,_ " . . f Hachi, ku, ju,.... " Grandmother slips a rubber band over

58

own single n puracross made

ng the till as "Just

other

r putshape black nomu

olored n tiers d onto

SYLVIA A. WATANABE each stack of bills and enters the amounts into a ledger. "If s too much already, too much " Outside, in the gathering dark, the evening is turning to lead.

The gray-green of the grass and trees, the gray of the sky, and the rain that doesn't rain—the grayness of everything draws close, and the smell of the sea hangs in the air. The rusty old fan in the corner rocks crazily, circulating heat. " . . . Doc McAllister told me he knows a place where they can take good care of her." Grandmother puts the stacks of bills into a bank deposit bag. She has been talking about sending Tita away, ever since she disappeared with all. the cash in the register, a couple of days ago. "Ifs on the other side of the bay, past the resort " Tita didn't surface again till this evening when the manager of the BJue Water Cafe and Dance Emporium, just outside the village, called Sheriff Kanoi to come and pick her up.

After the Sheriff had helped me to get Tita upstairs, I sat with her, smoothing her hair. "Sleep, Tita. You sleep now."

"Can't, 's dark. You come with me next time, 'kay, Mouse?"

"Okay. But you close your eyes now."

..." eaves , you plainKona

"'s dark, I said! You scared to come with me?"

"Shh . . . s h h h . . . . " "Don't shush me—this a bloody hospital or what?" She began to shout. ''Somebody turn on the lights! You heard me, turn on fhe lights!"

dings. little much

I reached over and switched on the lamp next to the bed. '"s better. You old 'fraidy cat. M o u s e . . . . " As I stroked her hair, I kept remembering how it was when we were kids—the way she marched straight into things, while I tagged behind. "Are you sure, Tita? How do you know?" '"Fraidy cat, eat a rat!" she taunted back.

N o matter how hard I ran, Tita was always ahead by four years. I followed, afraid of what was before us—the top branch of Koba Kobayashi's mango tree, Dead Man's Slide in the dark, the deep water out beyond the buoy—but more afraid to be left behind.

t like an off except ng-out mer in d they wo in

d over

She opened her eyes. "Almost made it." She closed them again. "Airport... California . . . next time, y o u come " 59

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW I touched her face with my fingers. I could still feel the hard lumps under her skin where, even now, the fragments of glass sometimes come poking through.

Before the accident, Tita was never what you could call beautiful, but she had a kind of vividness—with her dark skin and all that black hair. She laughed a lot and you liked laughing with her until you got caught inside it, the way a moth gets caught in a fan, with the blades whirring faster and faster.

While w e were growing up, Grandmother was forever sending her off to Culture classes at the Japanese Temple—to learn flower arranging, or tea ceremony, or classical dancing—which, most times, Tita skipped.

"Who's going to marry a roughneck like you?" Grandmother scolded. Whenever Tita went out, Grandmother insisted that she wear a long-sleeved shirt and a pair of blue leggings, like the hoe hana women wore in the canefields. All the women of Grandmother's generation cover every exposed inch whenever they go out in the sun, to keep their skins from turning dark. But Tita just laughed and ran down to the beach park where Sonny Cabral was waiting in his Chevy convertible.

"The Portagee," as Grandmother called him, was a high school drop-out who did not qualify as a "nice boy." She tried to distract Tita by introducing her to the sons of friends. The three of us would be sitting in the living room after supper, Tita reading a magazine or painting her nails, Grandmother working on the accounts from the store, and me doing my homework- -when Grandmother would suddenly announce, "I saw Mrs. Tanaka's boy Chester today."

"Oh?" Tita would lay down her magazine and glance at me.

"Chester?" And both of us would giggle.

But that didn't fluster Grandmother. "He asked about you."

"How could he—I never heard of him till this minute." Then, Tita would turn suspicious. "Have you been talking about me again?"

"No," Grandmother denied. "People come into the store, you make conversation. But I was thinking it would be good if you met him. Mrs. Fujita h e a r d . . . . " "Mrs. Fujita? Who is Mrs. Fujita?"

"She's the cousin of Mrs. Tanaka's husband's aunty, and she knows Chester, and I told her about you."

60

SYLVIA A. WATANABE

hard glass

beaund all with t in a

nding ower most

other at she e hoe randey go a just l was

high ed to ree of ing a n the when s boy me.

u."

Then, t me

, you u met

d she

"You what? You told this perfect stranger, this tanin lady..."

"But she's not taninl I told you she's the cousin of Mrs. Tanaka's " "Okay, so you told this not-so-perfect stranger whom neither of us has ever met in our lives, "Look here, Mrs. Cousin of Mrs. Tanaka's Whoever You Are, I have this granddaughter who desperately needs to marry a doctor or whatever this Chester person is going to beâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;she's not proud I don't think lean stand it!"

"So, throw yourself away!" Grandmother would shout back.

"Throw yourself away on this Mr. Sonny with the Big Car. Shikata ga nai, shikata ga nai."

Last June, just after Tita turned twenty-five, Sonny went into the service and was shipped to the West Coast. He said he'd send for her as soon as he could.

Tita waited for word and kept to herself, going for long swims out in the bay across the road from our house. Several times, I thought I saw her with someone. A man. TsaW him running after her up the beach, catching her, touching her hair with his hands.

Though he was always too far away for me to see very clearly, he seemed older than the surfers who usually hang out at the, beach.

There was something familiar about hrm. ' Sometimes, especially toward the end of summer, Tita would ask me to accompany her on her swims. At these times, there was no sign of her friend; she didn't mention him, and I didn't ask.

I would follow her into the surf where it broke high up. on the beach and swirled around her legs, pulling us deeper into the sea until the ocean bottom suddenly dropped off into nothing and the water was like rippling silk around us. There was no transition between not-swimming and swimming, no easing ourselves into the motion of the sea. Beneath the surface, I felt the ocean pulling at me, and fear would start in my chest. At first, Tita and T just swam out to the raft about a hundred yards from shore, and we'd lie there talking a while before turning back.

Early in September, she told me she'd heard from Sonny; he. was getting a leave to visit his father who was in the hospital after having a stroke. "It looks like I'll be living in California soon," she said. "Can you imagine it, Mouse? You have to come visit " "But did he tell you that?" I asked.

61

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW "What?"

"Did he actually come out and tell you that he was going to take you back with him? After all, i f s been three m o n t h s . . . . " "He didn't have to! I know him. I just know."

In the next couple of weeks, she did not bring up the subject again, though I continued to accompany her on her swims. Each time, we swam farther and farther, until one afternoon, we reached the buoy at the center of the bay. There, the currents were stronger and ran deeper, and if you fitted yourself into the wrong channel by mistake, or if you went out between tides, you could be swept into the open sea. As I stroked out toward the buoy, I fought the impulse to turn back. But I was more afraid of Tita's scorn, so I continued o n One afternoon, she didn't turn around. I stopped and clung to the buoy, as it bobbed, up and down, and watched her moving, strong and smooth away from me, until she was only a black dot on the surface of the water. I turned and headed back to shore, now more afraid of the ocean than of Tita.

She took a long time swimming back, and stumbled out of the surf, nearly falling. When she saw me watching her, she broke into a run. "You 'fraidy cat," she gasped. "I turned to look for you, and you weren't there."

As we lay warming ourselves on the sand, I asked, "Sonny come back yet?" .

Titajaughed. "Sure did. Tonight's his last night met some girl. They're engaged to be married." She over the water, and when she spoke again, her voice "Looks like he was just another Chester, after all. world is full of 'em, you know, Mouse?"

Seems he's looked out was quiet.

The whole

But it didn't matter, she went on; she'd met someone else. I thought of the man on the beach.

That night, she and Sonny went for one last ride in his convertible, and she ran ;t into the tree at the bottom of Dead Man's Slide. Sonny escaped with only a few cuts and a couple of bruised ribs, and he was able to return to California the next day. Tita was in the hospital for oyer a month, but as Doc McAllister said, nothing was broken.

Even before she took off with the cash two days ago, I knew

^^

62

SYLVIA A. WATANABE

ng to ."

ubject Each , we were wrong ld be ought n, so I

ng to ving, ot on now

of the broke you, onny

he's d out uiet. whole

lse. I

something was up. I could tell when she began pacing again last week, just as the weather started closing in. That night, it was hot, and I couldn't sleep, so I came downstairs in the store for restless thought. The sound of her pacing moved in larger and larger circles, until it seemed the house couldn't hold her. Then, I heard the creak of the screen door and the slap of her cloth slippers on the stairs. Her footsteps moved across the porch out back, and the wooden swing creaked. It made a whooshing sound, as it rocked her back and forth, and I thought of the way she throws herself at everything and gets thrown back, until it makes her crazy and everyone around her too.

The evening before she disappeared, I was working in the store, when I saw her crossing the road to the beach. She was wearing one of Mama's dresses—the silk blue one, covered with sequins. The sequins shimmered in the almost-dark.

'Tita!" I called. "Where you headed?" She began walking even faster in the direction of the water. Grandmother was out back,, checking the stockroom, and I yelled to her that I would be right back. I knew I had to get Tita.

When I reached the beach, it was deserted, and the tide was going out. "Tita!" I shouted again, but she ignored me; shouting only used up breath.

The sand pulled at my legs. My chest burned. I stumbled and nearly fell, but I was gaining on her. £he was so close—just ahead, at the edge of the water. "Oh please," I thought. "Please let me reach her before she gets to the drop/' The waves fanned out across the sand, pulling at my ankles. Tita was about ten feet away. Then, suddenly, she seemed to drop off the edge of the world. I saw her head bobbing above the water, and I knew I had to go in too. I waded in, feeling sand under my feet, and sand, and sand, then nothing. The ocean was unbearably alive around me, the pull of the current strong. I swam toward Tita, closed on her, reached, and missed. The movement disrupted the rhythm of our strokes. We flailed around for a little, trying to pick it up again.

conMan's uised Tita said,

"Go back," she gasped. I reached for her, and she said again, "Go back."

I reached a third time and got her. She struggled. We both went down. She stopped fighting. We were almost at the raft; then, we were there. We pulled ourselves onto it and lay, panting, with our heads on our arms. She said she would come back with me; maybe, she knew I wouldn't make it if I had to pull her in.

knew

We swam across the current to get back to shore and crawled 63

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW out on the beach. We lay there a long time..

Grandmother was in the store when we got back. "You'd better get out of those wet things," she said. Neither Tita nor I offered an explanation, and she didn't ask for one. Tita glanced at me in the old way, and I hoped she'd gotten whatever it was bothering her out of her system. Then, she went and ran off the day before last.

"Ifs better she goes away for a little while/' Grandmother says now from the shadows across the store. "Tomorrow I'll call the place that Doc told me about."

Upstairs, the screen door bangs softly, as if the breeze is pushing at it; there is the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

Grandmother gets u p and walks to the door. "Shikata ga nai," she grumbles; there's nothing to be done.

The footsteps move across the drive; it is dark outside.

"You finished counting the cash?" I ask, a little too loudly.

Grandmother turns. "You saw me, do you need glasses?"

"You're right. I forgot. Shall I close u p now?"

She waves impatiently, muttering, "Do what you like," and lets herself out.

Outside, the air shimmers with the sound of crickets.

Grandmother has reached the top of the stairs. "You're going to let flies in the house, if you keep forgetting to close the screen door!"

The house is still.

I switch off the lights and step outside. It is done. The darkness presses close, and the belly of the sky is slung low over the sea, heavy with rain.

64

LAURALYN GARFIELD HAILEY

better ffered me in ering efore

Lauralyn

Garfield

Hailey

other l call

pushnai,"

y.

and

going creen

darkr the

B o b b i n g

f o r

A p p l e s

Absently, she peeked under the covers to see the yellow bull's-eye painted on her stomach. This was about the tenth time within the last few minutes that she had looked, making comparisons between the bright-yellow circle and her slightly swollen, white breasts. She stared at her skin noticing too that the pale color of her a r m blended in with the sheets, walls, and old radiator in the hospital room. Her pain had kept thinking at a distance. Now, without the pain, she^was exhausted but comfortable. Maybe she would sleep for a few years, waking slightly, only to sHp comfortably back into a dreamless state.

Not to dream of gorillas or chickens.

When she found out that she was with gorilla, she had Been too far along for normal procedures. Her father had hurriedly m a d e the arrangements, and with so little time, she would have to suffer theinduced labor pains. There was no moral question involved; if it had been human, well, then maybe . . . h u t it was not. The man had been short and hairy, speaking few words, but mostly grunting. It was one of the few times that she had acted spontaneously. The man who worked for her father's construction company had winked his hairy wink until one day after school she accepted a ride home with him. By the time she had told her parents, the gorilla had monstrously" begun to grow within her.

After she had been admitted to the hospital, a nurse came to accompany her to the treatment room. The nurse was large with her uniform stretched taut and smug. Walking through 65

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW the corridor, the nurse's sanctimonious aura settled upon the passing doctors, nurses, and patients . . . nodding and smiling, nodding and smiling.

1 I

They halted before the treatment room marked with the letter "T." She wondered if she had been taken here for a brandingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a "T" to wear forever. They entered, and she lay down. The nurse lifted her hospital gown to one side and began to cleanse her stomach. Next with detached strokes, the nurse painted a large yellow bull's-eye. Then the nurse left and she was alone for awhile until a wordless doctor with a hearing aid in each ear came into the room. He took out a large needle.

Soundlessly, the needle thrust the saline concoction into the center of the target. Again she was left alone.

Later, she was brought back to her room and connected to a long steel pole with glucose drip, drip, dripping into her veins taped to a kleenex box. Her family all came to see her, all smiles and nods, waiting for the gorilla to die.

It took two days. She and her new attachment made many trips to the toilet. Finally, feeling an explosion coming, she ran to the toilet. There she dumped the gorilla. She rang* the buzzer for help. In came the nurse and the doctor, and as she stood, feet spread on either side of the bowl, he clipped the useless lifeline. She looked down; interestingly, the saline solution must have turned the gorilla into a chicken, a plucked chicken.

N o w the pains would begin. She was told that if they got too bad that she could ask for a sleeping pill. With her knees collected up to her chest, she rocked back and forth. Hours of rocking, asking herself if she hurt enough to ask for a sleeping pill; no, if she hurt enough she wouldn't need to ask herself is she hurt enough, hours of hurting.

Finally the pain left, leaving her limp. The funny little doctor returned to her bed. Five or six tall student doctors accompanied him, looming over her. Something was wrong. The placenta hadn't come out. The doctor ordered her feet into the stirrups. Sparing her like an ostrich, he covered her lower half with a white sheet so that only they could see. With his playtex living gloves, he began his search. There were mumbles, hmmmms, and haaaaaaas. She was invisible. The doctor laughed, "Ah ha . . . here it is . . . this is rather like bobbing for apples." From her toes to her cheeks she blushed pink, making 66

MAUREEN KAMIYA

pon the miling,

ith the e for a she lay d began e nurse and she hearing needle. nto the

ted to a r veins her, all

e many she ran e buzzstood, useless olution hicken.

hey got r knees ours of leeping rself is

y little ors acng. The nto the er half s playumbles, doctor ing for making

Maureen

Kamiya

G r a d u a t i o n T h i s year, all three hundred of us came. The evening of June 13th was warm and dusky in Las Voces, the shadows darkening under lush orchards and vineyards, the summer wind carrying scents of white carnations and blowing the girls' voile dresses against their knees. We gathered, as always for graduation, outside the school's Madison Hall at seven o'clock, the men of the town splendid in dark suits, the women delicate in pastel dresses and hats. The boys' white shirts, buttoned all the way up to their chins, were stiff and new under their black ties. This year's eighth grade class was the same size as before, thirteen.

We greeted each other, and we spoke especially kindly to Mr. Wright, who had just lost Bob in Vietnam. You must be very proud, we said. Mr. Wright had honest, work-hardened hands like the rest of us, but they clenched into fists below the sleeves of his blue serge suit. He acknowledged us politely, but refused to look us in the face, instead turning the talk to the coming almond,harvest, taxes, rain, the latest price of grapes. We understood, and talked about our latest new tractors, pur labor problems with the wetbacks, our new sprinkling systems, and congratulated him on his other son, Ted, whose red hair stood out among the group of eighth grade boys. We said Ted would be a fine-farmer, like the rest of us here in Las Voces. "No/'said Mr. Wright politely, 'Ted wants to be a doctor, and he'll do it, too." Mr. Wright glanced oyer at the line of eighth graders, waiting to march to the stage. We said how nice, and settled into our seats inside Madison Hall.

The hall was turned out as well as always: the arch of carna67

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW tions, the band of nervous sixth and seventh graders in the corner timing their instruments, and the stage before us lit in solemn expectation. Mrs. Yamato had another new hat, we saw, surely the fourth one since her birthday. Mr. Kent was standing by the door and we told him to come on over, even if he was a county man. Mr. Kent was the best fireman the county had sent us in ten years and we liked the way he kept up with our school, bringing candy at Easter and playing Santa Claus at Christmas. Didn't want to miss this one, he said, seating himself. His black shoes gleamed.

We sat back, and that's when we saw Mr. Wataguchi and Mr. and Mrs. Ferrer greet each other—silent, firm handshakes—and walk, smiling, to sit in the front row. We smiled too, waiting.

Then the eighth graders marched in while the earnest little band played "Pomp and Circumstance." It didn't §ound quite as good this year since the lower grades needed more brass players.

But w e listened and watched the line slowly march up the aisle, onto the lit stage, the girls' white high heels teetering slightly, the boys' thin shoulders manfully straight. Ah, we murmured, pride swelling in our throats.

Mr. McGoolin, our principal, stepped to the podium. We're very honored to have this company here tonight, especially tonight. His deep voice rumbled over us; his eyes bulged a little, but he had a commanding presence, we thought, in his tall dark suit standing there under the stage lights. And now, please rise to salute our nation's flag, he said, placing his hand on his heart.

We rose as one. Our voices echoed out into the gathering summer night. We settled into our seats again, waiting.

We are gathered here tonight to honor these fine young students who have traveled the long road of grammar school with earnest, conscientious application to their studies. We know they still have questions, questions we hope they will seek answers to in their coming years. Mr. McGoolin rolled his words out. We waited. —and. now, I have the honor to present Maria Takahashi, our eighth grade valedictorian and graduation speaker.

Mr. Kent craned his neck. We lifted our heads too, watchful, and applauded. Our hands rippled in waves, the soft patter echoing up, then quickly fading.

We leaned forward. Mr. Wataguchi cleared his throat impor-

68

1

MAUREEN KAMIYA

corner mn exely the e door an. Mr. rs and ndy at o miss .

tantly. Mrs. Ferrer smoothed a wrinkle from her white dress with her plump hand, her round face smiling under her brown- tinted curls.

The girl, very small behind the microphone, her eyes invisible behind the lights on her glasses, was dwarfed by the podium.

She stood alone under the shining lights, alone, before our three hundred pairs of eyes. We waited, one breath holding.. Then the girl, her voice a monotone, delivered her speech to us.

We clapped when she finished, and her steps sounded in a flat cadence as she walked back to her seat.

nd Mr. s—and g.

Then we waited for the graduation to end. Then, as always, outside near the schoolyard's big oak tree, the students lined up to be congratulated, and w e lined up to shake their hands. And thaf s when we saw Mr. Wright cut in front of the line to talk to Maria. Mr. Wright was not one of us. We watched sharply, but Maria said nothing.

t little uite as layers. e aisle, ightly, mured,

Relieved, we settled back. And we each shook hands with Maria, one in the line of thirteen students, waiting; three hundred hands, reaching.

We're lly totle, but rk suit to sat.

•

tchful, r echo-

impor-

•

What do they want? What do they want?

g sum-

ng stul with w they wers to ut. We ahashi,

•

1

I have been in Mr. McGoolin's office for four hours, and he is talking and talking, saying how they are trying to get ready, and how there are only two weeks left until graduation, and how I am not helping any, and I have never, never, never been sent to the principal's office before, and I have been a gopd student, and I can't figure out what he wants, and he keeps stabbing my speech with his fingers, big, white fingers with black, curling hair§, and he keeps saying, "There, there, and there," and his hands have yellow, cracking nails, and I will never cry again in front of anyone after this, never, never—they said I am supposed to make a speech since I am the valedictorian, and I have worked so hard, and now what do they want, what do they want from my speech.

The hands keep pointing at the words: "Our generation today is growing up in a world you, as adults, have created. The environment produced by your generation i s shaping our personality, ideals, views, and the political tenden69

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW cies we will retain to adulthood.

"All of us will become a part of America's citizens, many of us entering the clan of the "silent majority/ and others becoming active members of this country. War, the glossing over of wrongs our country has committed, prejudice, and the increasing awareness from high school and college students of today's problems are some of the major influences upon this generation.

"War is being glamorized for us; the killing of humans is passed over. As a result of this, much of the population has become insensitive to the value of human lives. Can it be that we're fighting in Vietnam jnot to stop communism as we've been told, but because we're aware of the rich natural resources in Vietnam that could become open to our use? That, and other reasons, is the belief of William Winter, publisher of a newsletter and noted lawyer and lecturer. If he is correct, how will this cynical planning of human slaughter for selfish gains affect us as we grow older? Somehow, w e must realize that others also have emotions and feelings as we have. Only then can war truly cease to e x i s t . . . " "You are grandiose and generalizing; I myself have lost a relative in Vietnam, and I find it offensive, very offensive, to hear that he died for natural resources, and you cannot say those things at graduation." Mr. McGoolin's eyes bulge; his hands are grasping the edge of the desk.

I am trying to sit straight on the hard plastic chair, trying not to cry anymore, and I am trying to say I didn't mean to be offensiveâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;you said to be formal and I thought it was formal.

"Formal? Then what is all your talk about deceptionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;" "The wrongs that our country has committed have been cloaked in deception. Kingman Brewster, president of Yale, said, K It is hard to keep faith when the repeated promises of victory and the promises of negotiated peace are not fulfilled. We have been fooled by the false promise that this would be an easy war. If our country can survive this wound, let us be more honest in the pursuit of peace than we have been in the pursuit of w a r . . . ' "

70

ny of us ming acngs our areness re some

mans is has bet we're old, but am that e belief lawyer g of hu? Somefeelings

st a relto hear e things rasping

ing not e offen-

"

e been e, said, victory e have war. If t in the '"

MAUREEN KAMIYA Mr. McGoolin's eyes stare. 'That's the problem today—not enough people keep faith. That is a negative, cynical thing to say. Anyway, you are just copying from newspapers—" N o I didn't, I didn't, I said there it was a quote, I didn't copy; you said the speech was supposed to look at the future ahead, and that is the president of Yale—it says so where I read it. " "We have tried to teach you to think for yourself, and just because someone is in a high position doesn't mean his judgment is sound, and here in Las Voces, our judgment is as sound as anyone's."

I am holding onto the hard metal arm of the chair.

"Now, what about this part? What are you going to do about this part?" The thick white finger stabbing, jabbing.

"Honesty is hard to find, especially in an atmosphere of prejudice. Prejudice is around us always, at school, home, and outside of these places. We also hear you, perhaps, as our parents, speak in a degrading way of a group—the farm workers of Cesar Chavez.

Most of us probably feel that we're not prejudiced. If this is true, why are the farm workers having to fight so hard for equality?"

"Equality is very complex, and there isn't any racism and you cannot include those parts, since people are not racist. The only people in Las Voces who are racist are the white trash living over there by the railroad tracks, and we will not have inappropriate things said at graduation with our whole town attending, and there is a book out that tells how Cesar Chavez is doing things like meditating."

What? What? And I look down, the black ink swimming under red x's on white paper.

"One favorable influence upon us is the increasing number of high school and college students becoming aware of the enigmas of today and trying to solve, them. We can read and hear of their* opinions on Vietnam, racism, campus unrest, and other problems, thus "getting both sides of an issue.

"Many times we make you our scape-goat, and many times you make us yours. However, to gain anything in the future, and in or71

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW der for this country to advance, both generations must work together.

"You attempted to make the world safe for democracy. N o w let us all, you, we, and generations to come, work to make this nation and this world safe for humanity."

"You do not realize the violence of those college students, since you are very young. You do not appreciate the opportunities of a good education, and you are too negative." Mr. McGoolin's thick fingers move shaking over his desk.

I will change the speech; I will change i t Then I should say a preface saying you changed it—you said not to copy anybody else's words. What do you want?

I\

"I want you to change it yourself and not by yourself. You may not say I made you change it—that is not true. I will not be accused of censorship. You are just pretending not to know what negative things you said, and don't think I will stay quiet about this— plenty of other people in this town have a lot to say about the graduation too."

I can't hear—what does he want? What does he want?

•

•> <8>

"Did you stand up to him? Did you stand up to him?"

Yes, I think, I don't know, Mom, what do you want? f

"That's all that matters, you have to stand up to him, hold onto your rights."

I think—I'm not—okay, Mom. •

•

•

We listened to Mr. McGoolin and read the copies of the speech. The duty of a school principal, we said, is to guide and help the children and shorten their graduation speeches. Mr. Ferrer, his voice very loud, said he heard that Marlays mother was threatening to tell the Modesto Bee to tell the county superintendent But the Las Voces school board can make any policy it wishes; what is self-government about, anyway? If some hardhead wants to take it to court, then we'll see, we'll see. I Will not hear any of this about natural resources. Mrs. Ferrer said, Npw dear.

71 i

MAUREEN KAMIYA rk to-

•

• June 6,1971

Now his na-

Dear Maria, I am not highley intelligent, but I have got a college education, and I have lived for forteyone years. I am writing in the hopes that I may help you to better understand better, some of the feedings in our comrnunuty.

, since es of a thick

Maria, are you being sensative to all others, when you imply publickly that you hear all of us degradeing other groups of people? Is it not possible, that you, in your speech have spoken degradingley about all of us adults, teachers, parents and others in authourity?

say a y else's

When I was younger, I was also very irnpateint But it takes a heep of living, learning and soul-searching to intrepert right and wrong., Nothing is ever all or either.

u may ccused gative this— ut the

As bad as things are, I am thankful that I live in a country where you have the privilage to dessent. IJhope you continue to make this a better world for all people.

Love, Mrs. Ferrer P.S. Maria, as a child I was the-child of farmworkers. Nobudy ever told us we were under-privilaged. I wonder if I were a child of a farmworker today if I would be granted the protaction of this silunce. This is a hew thought to me I had never conddered it before.

, hold

June 7,1971 Dear Mrs. Ferrer,

of the de and r. Ferer was intenwishdhead t hear ar.

Yes, you are not highly intelligent. Hahaha!

Love, Maria •

•

•

I* will mail this when I am old enough to leave this town.

73 i

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW Tammy and Jan said that Jim said Ted said that Mr. Wright said Mrs. Ferrer is a "goddam fat-assed fool," and he said it in the fire station when he was waiting to get a weed-burning permit when Mr. Kent asked him if he was going to the parents' meeting like the rest of them, but Tammy said she didn't believe Jim because Mr. Wright Wouldn't ever talk like that. Then Bob said that no it wasn't in the fire station—his father heard it when he borrowed a plow from Mr. Yamato, who heard it from Mr. Dunn, and Mr. Dunn heard it through the window when he was waiting in Mr. Wrighf s yard to get the Lion's Club fees.

And then Tammy and Jan said they didn't believe it and look at all this fighting about our graduation, why don't you just shut up about your old speech.

Then Jim said his mother said she heard that Mr. Wright said "somebody ought to help that kid, but I'm so tired of fighting this goddam town," and his mother was never, ever so shocked in all her life.

I will leave this town and never come back.

It is not the content of the speech we object to, we said, it is the tone—shrill, overblown, and too serious.

•

*

•

"You are supposed to put serious effort into a graduation speech," said Mr: McGoolin, "not imitate college students' rhetoric."

•

•

•

"Did you stand up to him? Did you?"

Yes, I guess so, Mom. •

•

•

Mr. Wataguchi came yesterday, his bald head shining, his hands holding his elbows tight, and I was standing by the living room door listening, and Mom was so mad and Mr. Wataguchi was hissing, "You stupid woman, now they will think Japanese are not good citizens, we are Americans, damn it, and you are making people forget that, we are good, upstanding citizens, and our farms are one of the highest-producing areas in California, and I was in the 442nd, and what do you think you are doing? I bet you wrote that

74

MAUREEN KAMIYA

Wright in the permit eeting im beb said hen he Dunn, waiting

damn speech yourself, and we have fought long and hard after the concentration camps, and we will not be spat on ever again, and now look at you, look, we will stay together in this town, damn it," his voice shaking.

d look t shut

And Mom shouting back "Stay together? This town grabs and holds like a leech—Japanese and white, one damn leech; there aren't any people in this town, just all these scared voices saying the same damn things, over and over." Mom's knuckles were getting whiter and whiter as she shook her fist and hollered that she did not write one word and who did Mr. Wataguchi think he was, coming into her house like that, and anyway, he was just scared of the white people.

Wright ghting ked in

Then Mr. Wataguchi shouted that he was not either scared of anyone at all, the Japanese were not going to be trash ever again, and look at her, and anyway, John the postman said she got communist newspapers.

And I never heard Morn yell like that at anyone before, throwing my brother's college newspaper at Mr. Wataguchi.

is the

uation hetor-

g, his living hi was re not g peoms are n the e that

Really, such behavior, we said.

•

•

•

N o w it is the day before graduation, and Mr. McGoolin is staring with his clammy eyes, saying it wasn't just him who had objections to the speech—even quiet Japanese people did too—and his hands are moving over my speech, saying, "Well are you going to change it nor not?" I will not do a speech at all, I tell Mr, McGoolin. The walls of his office are looming, close. "You are just sour apples and immature. You have to make a speech; everybody knows I said you are the one to make a speech at graduation" And I am home telling Mom I will not speak, I will not go to graduation. And Mom is saying how disappointed she is, how "even if Mr. McGoolin changed- the speech, maybe it is not so bad, and all the other eighth graders should hear the speech—" —They hate me already, for the valedictorian thing and ever since this started, and I hate everybody, too.

—"and anyway, this will be the first time one of my kids is making a speech, you can't quit now."

75

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW And I am thinking N o no no, No to Mr. McGoolin, No to Mr. Wataguchi, No to Mrs. Ferrer, N o to Mom. And the lights are so bright.

I read from the x's and scribbles: "Our generation is growing u p in a world you, as adults, have helped to create. There are many influences upon us, both profitable and damaging.

"Some of the major influences are war, prejudice, the progress of medicine and technology.

"Are w e sensitive to the value of human life because of the war? Maybe this nation is sensitive and because of this sensitivity, we're fighting to stop communism.

"Our nation was founded upon democracy and justice. In order for justice to prevail, we have had an education better than what there was for previous generations. All of these factors are helping to produce better educated and informed citizens of tomorrow.

1\ •

"We, as tomorrow's adults, can concentrate on the advancement of mankind. Let us all work to make this world safe for humanity."

1

And l a m so cold outside under the tree. Mr. Wright is choking, "You shouldn't have let them d o that," his face red, his fists clenching beneath the sleeves of his blue serge suit. "You shouldn't have, you shouldn't have." And I can't hear his voice anymore.

And the three hundred hands are sweaty, clammy, and I am so tired, and I am saying Yes, thank you, Yes, Yes, over and over.

i\

••• ••• ••• After congratulating our students, we took them inside the school cafeteria and ate Mrs. Toshiro's pink sugar cookies, and drank orange punch and black coffee. Mrs. Ferrer also brought her yellow lemon bars with sweet frosting, which were very good, too.

Then Mr. Finn said he had to go because he had to get u p early and smooth over the baseball field the next morning, for the kids.

H o w nice, we said, and went home too.

i* 76

JUDY WARREN

to Mr.

Judy

Warren

, have rofita-

ogress

of the nsitivi-

n order what helprow.

vanceor hu-

oking, s fists ouldn't ore. am so r.

de the s, and ht her d, too. ly and kids.

B e d t i m e

S t o r i e s

I was nine years old when the bedtime stories stopped. H e called us out of bed just like every whisky night and we fell out like small, cold soldiers, four from the girl's room and three from the boy's. In the livingroom we sat on the couch as we always did, in order of age. The babies, one boy, one girl, both wet, leaned into the next older, and I, as the oldest, felt the weight of them all.

We shivered in the cold room, but any idea of going back for a blanket was stopped by his whiskey eyes.

He sat in his chair, the big one that looked like leather, and faced us in the shadowy room. I could barely make out the Bible in his lap, but even if I hadn't been able to see it, I knew it was there, open as always to the final book. I could see the shape of the whiskey bottle on the floor by his chair and knew it contained one or two swallows for after the stories. He called them stories. They weren't reallyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;they were lessons.

"Timothy,'' he asked the youngest boy, "what does revelations mean?" Timothy got this same question, every time so he squealed the answer out easily. "The ÂŁnd of the world!" Whiskey eyes laughed, "The babies smarter an' all ya' p u t together!" He skipped baby girl who sucking the pacifier that hung around her neck on a dirty string, and went on to David, who was five. "What happens at revelations?" David, w h o stuttered when he was scared, answered slowly, "The graves open u p and t-the b-bodies c-come o u t " Whiskey eyes made fun of Efevid's stutter, "B-but ww h y d-do they c-come out?" David hid his face in Daniel's side.

Daniel was six. Whiskey eyes laughed again, b u t his voice didn't 77

BERKELEY FICTION REVIEW sound funny. "Well, somebody better answer me!' 'They come out for judgement," Daniel answered, "What else?" "Trials and tridulations," piped in Elaine, who sat next to me. He slowly fixed his eyes on her. "If the devil was holdin an axe to yer mother's head and said he'd chop it off if you didn't take the mark of the beast, what would you do?" I felt a tear on my bare arm and felt Elaine press into me so hard it seemed like she wanted inside. "I'd take the mark of the beast." More tears from her small, round face.

Whiskey eyes grinned at her, "You know that means you'll burn in hell forever, don't you?" Elaine nodded and wiped her nose on her sleeve. Her small soul had been doomed for years now, but she cried every time just the same. Elaine was sensitive like mother.

Mother didn't come out of her room for bedtime stories anymore. She hardly came out at all, except to go to the bathroom.

She had taught me how to use the old wringer washer, and how to make enough oatmeal for seven, and had gone into her room to grow another baby. The little ones missed her and used to cry by her door, but I always made them go outside and play, and after a , while they didn't seem to miss her anymore. I brought her cups of Lipton tea with lots of sugar and sat on her bed and tried to tell her how Whiskey eyes was hurting me differently now, not just with the belt like he used to. But she looked at me funny like she didn't know me, and all she ever said was the tea is delicious, just how I like it, and take care of the babies.

"Amanda!" It was my turn. "If the devil gave you the choice of drinking blood or taking the mark, would would you do?" The first question was always easy. "I'd drink it." "You probably already do," he said flatly. "Well, what if he had your baby sister over a fire and he said he'd drop heir in if you didn't take it?" The babies were crying openly now, and I could feel Elaine jerking next to me. I clenched my teeth, thinking "I hate you Whiskey eyes. I wish the devil would cut off your head and drink the blood." He always saved toe for last. It was a contest between us. He would put the kids or mother in the hands of the devil, and I always had to save them without letting the devil tattoo those numbers on my forehead. I liked saving them, feeling like a hero, listening to the kids sniffing cause they'd stopped crying. I always talked my way out of it with the devil, and Whiskey eyes knew every time that I'd really won. I never cried, no matter how hard he tried to make me. Whiskey eyes said I didn't cry because I didn't

L,L

78

me out tridud his head beast, Elaine d take face. urn in n her t she her.

anyroom. ow to om to ry by fter a ups of o tell t just e she s, just

JUDY WARREN have a soul. I thought a soul would look like the inside of the chocolate covered cherries he gave mother every year at Christmas. I remembered how the chocolate gave so easily against my fingers and how the pink stuff oozed out into my hand. I was glad I didn't have a soul.

Whiskey eyes was breathing hard. My throat was dry and I felt the way I did when I climbed the big tree in the woods with all the dead branches, never knowing if one would give out under me, but climbing higher anyway. "Well, what would you do?"

"Nothing," I answered. The kids were silent now and Whiskey eyes was leaning forward in his chair. "You mean to tell me you'd let the devil burn your baby sister?"

I could feel the tears sliding down my face. "I wouldn't do a thing cause there's no such thing as the devil or God, and when we die we just stay dead and rot." Whiskey eyes sagged back in his chair and his Bible slipped off his lap and it the floor. It lay there closed while he reached for his bottle.

hoice " The ly alsister " The g next yes. I ." He would lways mbers ening alked every rd he didn't 79