I hear you, señor. How over and over you keep reaching for something and those guys keep interfering. You try and try, but they keep messing with you, changing the rules for what you’ve got to do to succeed. You’re frustrated and unhappy, feeling you might never make Vice-president, might lose the house to foreclosure, lose your Bechtel stock in a crash. You reach, and grab, but you wind up empty handed. If only they’d be consistent, you say, you could get ahead. They’re wrecking all your hopes, ruining your restful sleep, covering your face with sweat, waking you up in the middle of the night.
Everybody’s got a right to a good night’s sleep. Those sleeping meds aren’t doing it for you, the threats are too strong, and those guys in the night keep waffling on the rules. I’ll tell you what, señor. I’ll take your dream and I’ll give you mine. Because you see, in mine, absolutely nothing interferes with the rules. The Bechtel stock is a hundred percent secure. The protocol is set, it’s always the same guys calling the shots, and they follow the rules exactly, precisely. Meticulously. You wanna trade? The machine whirrs, I hear the water beginning to flow, low voices speaking in words I cannot make out. That might be English they’re speaking, same as the guys in your dream. The man in charge announces a name like a train conductor calling a stop: routine, loud, clear, strong; no interference, no interruption. I imagine his small face, pinkish, with a mustache, a little toothbrush of a mustache (but I can’t see him through the hood), and I picture him at a metal desk, scratching an itch on his left knee, checking the manual and nodding to his partner. And then, without a single deviation from the set protocol, they pounce on me, grabbing me by the arms, under the arms, pushing me to the table, pushing without interference, to the regulation steel table brought in by the Bechtel contractors, below the tank of water mixed with the prescribed amount of salt. They yank on my chin and push it backwards, submerging it in the saltwater tank, and I shudder, señor, gagging, choking, drowning. I am gasping for breath when I wake up in my wet, sweat-soaked bed. You wanna trade? No transaction fee, just a quick trade on the dream exchange. |
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THE ENVELOPE TRICK
Flash fiction, 2016 (winner, New Millennium Writings Award)
Also published in River Styx, June, 2016.
What are three fingers? "You're lucky," the nurse said, "you still have the opposing thumb." Who you kidding, I thought. But I kept my mouth shut. She was trying to help me out.
Clamping that lucky thumb and the baby finger like a pair of pliers, I've learned to fork up the rice and beans that Sarita serves for supper. Good thing we're not Chinese, I think. Chopsticks.
With a delicacy that makes me embarrassed, I'm able to unzip my fly, and even to tuck it in after I'm done peeing. Wiping is a little tricky, but I manage, like I manage with the shaving. When I watch myself in the mirror shaving with my left hand, it looks like my right hand, and for a little moment every morning I'm tricked into believing I'm whole.
"What have you got to complain about, compañero?" I ask my reflection as I brush my teeth and feel my tongue rolling over the bottom row. Pedro's tongue they cut out, because he spoke up for what he believed. My eyebrows match—a matched pair, black, over brown eyes with lashes so long my mother used to say I should have been born a girl. Over there, they say things like that.
Yeah, my eyebrows match, but Rafa's don't. One of his, the left one I think, turned white, at the spot where the soldiers attached the electrodes. There's guys at Guantánamo right now gone white all over. You've got to remember how everything's relative, Sarita tells me.
I inspect my nose: straight, nice, a painless appendage on a friendly face, a face like a puppy dog, like my old man's. The nose of Dora María, Sarita's sister, flattens to her cheeks and pinches a nerve, convulsing her in pain whenever she sneezes. They shattered the whole cartilage when they smashed their rifle butts into her face.
I look down from the mirror and see that except for the mangled hand, the rest of me is in good shape. I'm alive, I got my family out. My wife still loves me. What's there to complain, about an industrial accident where all you lose is three fingers? Dough machines have been known to snatch up arms all the way to the elbow.
The guys on the job were real pals. Michael drove like crazy to get me to the hospital. Richard ripped off his own shirt to wrap my bloody stumps, and held me tight so I wouldn't do something wild in my writhing and screaming. Without their quick action I might have bled to death; the fingers have a lot of blood vessels. The boss, he was good too. He didn't dock their pay for the time they took to help me out.
After the accident I had to miss English class, so I studied at home, looking up words in the dictionary. Mano, "hand." In English it's so happy: handsome, handy, handshake, to handle. In Spanish, it hurts. In my country, Mano Blanca, White Hand, is the five-fingered print left on the wall by the Death Squad. Maniobra, maneuver, is what we call it when the government steps up the repression. Dedear, to finger, means to point somebody out for detention. It's because I was dedeado that Sarita and I had to grab the children and run north. No good-byes, no preparation, no plans. Like you’d run from an erupting volcano. U.S. foreign policy sponsors marathons for millions.
"We will send you to Rehabilitation," the nurse told me, “and having that lucky opposing thumb, you’ll be surprised at how many things you’ll be able to do with just two fingers. You’ll learn to write, too, with your other hand." She was right. I learned quick. Before a month was up I sent a left-handed letter to my mother back home. I told her how I got lucky.
They fill out a lot of forms at the Rehabilitation, and ask a lot of questions. They teach you to trust in the future, to see the lucky side. At first I thought they were missing something, because, you know, they don't teach you how to caress your wife left-handed, how to make love. And they don't explain to you what to do when your three year old daughter starts to cry because she touches your knuckles. So, they can't cover everything, I said to myself. Look how they showed you about the shoestrings, and the trick for opening envelopes.
When the letter came from the Homeland, I opened it using the trick they taught me at Rehabilitation, and it started to sink in, this business about luck and learning. What did they teach you, pendejo? I said to myself. Did they teach you how to plant your corn or feed your animals with seven fingers? Did they show you how to repair a fence, or patch a roof, or run a water line with nothing but a clumsy paw and a fleshy pair of pliers? Or what to do if a white print of five fingers shows up on the wall of your house? They make sure you learn the envelope trick, don't they? That way, when they send you the official notice that they're deporting you to your country because you used their super-lucky medical system, you'll be able to open up your mail.
* * *
Flash fiction, 2016 (winner, New Millennium Writings Award)
Also published in River Styx, June, 2016.
What are three fingers? "You're lucky," the nurse said, "you still have the opposing thumb." Who you kidding, I thought. But I kept my mouth shut. She was trying to help me out.
Clamping that lucky thumb and the baby finger like a pair of pliers, I've learned to fork up the rice and beans that Sarita serves for supper. Good thing we're not Chinese, I think. Chopsticks.
With a delicacy that makes me embarrassed, I'm able to unzip my fly, and even to tuck it in after I'm done peeing. Wiping is a little tricky, but I manage, like I manage with the shaving. When I watch myself in the mirror shaving with my left hand, it looks like my right hand, and for a little moment every morning I'm tricked into believing I'm whole.
"What have you got to complain about, compañero?" I ask my reflection as I brush my teeth and feel my tongue rolling over the bottom row. Pedro's tongue they cut out, because he spoke up for what he believed. My eyebrows match—a matched pair, black, over brown eyes with lashes so long my mother used to say I should have been born a girl. Over there, they say things like that.
Yeah, my eyebrows match, but Rafa's don't. One of his, the left one I think, turned white, at the spot where the soldiers attached the electrodes. There's guys at Guantánamo right now gone white all over. You've got to remember how everything's relative, Sarita tells me.
I inspect my nose: straight, nice, a painless appendage on a friendly face, a face like a puppy dog, like my old man's. The nose of Dora María, Sarita's sister, flattens to her cheeks and pinches a nerve, convulsing her in pain whenever she sneezes. They shattered the whole cartilage when they smashed their rifle butts into her face.
I look down from the mirror and see that except for the mangled hand, the rest of me is in good shape. I'm alive, I got my family out. My wife still loves me. What's there to complain, about an industrial accident where all you lose is three fingers? Dough machines have been known to snatch up arms all the way to the elbow.
The guys on the job were real pals. Michael drove like crazy to get me to the hospital. Richard ripped off his own shirt to wrap my bloody stumps, and held me tight so I wouldn't do something wild in my writhing and screaming. Without their quick action I might have bled to death; the fingers have a lot of blood vessels. The boss, he was good too. He didn't dock their pay for the time they took to help me out.
After the accident I had to miss English class, so I studied at home, looking up words in the dictionary. Mano, "hand." In English it's so happy: handsome, handy, handshake, to handle. In Spanish, it hurts. In my country, Mano Blanca, White Hand, is the five-fingered print left on the wall by the Death Squad. Maniobra, maneuver, is what we call it when the government steps up the repression. Dedear, to finger, means to point somebody out for detention. It's because I was dedeado that Sarita and I had to grab the children and run north. No good-byes, no preparation, no plans. Like you’d run from an erupting volcano. U.S. foreign policy sponsors marathons for millions.
"We will send you to Rehabilitation," the nurse told me, “and having that lucky opposing thumb, you’ll be surprised at how many things you’ll be able to do with just two fingers. You’ll learn to write, too, with your other hand." She was right. I learned quick. Before a month was up I sent a left-handed letter to my mother back home. I told her how I got lucky.
They fill out a lot of forms at the Rehabilitation, and ask a lot of questions. They teach you to trust in the future, to see the lucky side. At first I thought they were missing something, because, you know, they don't teach you how to caress your wife left-handed, how to make love. And they don't explain to you what to do when your three year old daughter starts to cry because she touches your knuckles. So, they can't cover everything, I said to myself. Look how they showed you about the shoestrings, and the trick for opening envelopes.
When the letter came from the Homeland, I opened it using the trick they taught me at Rehabilitation, and it started to sink in, this business about luck and learning. What did they teach you, pendejo? I said to myself. Did they teach you how to plant your corn or feed your animals with seven fingers? Did they show you how to repair a fence, or patch a roof, or run a water line with nothing but a clumsy paw and a fleshy pair of pliers? Or what to do if a white print of five fingers shows up on the wall of your house? They make sure you learn the envelope trick, don't they? That way, when they send you the official notice that they're deporting you to your country because you used their super-lucky medical system, you'll be able to open up your mail.
* * *
RANDOM SAMPLE
Flash fiction, 2012 (winner, Able Muse Write Prize) Able Muse, Winter, 2012.
Ellen Sussman, Contest judge, wrote: 'Random Sample' took me by surprise. I greatly enjoyed the voice, the prose, the quirkiness of the characters, but I wasn't ready for the knock-out ending. The author was able to tell a story with real depth, captured in a single moment. That's story-telling at its best.
Flash fiction, 2012 (winner, Able Muse Write Prize) Able Muse, Winter, 2012.
Ellen Sussman, Contest judge, wrote: 'Random Sample' took me by surprise. I greatly enjoyed the voice, the prose, the quirkiness of the characters, but I wasn't ready for the knock-out ending. The author was able to tell a story with real depth, captured in a single moment. That's story-telling at its best.
Random Sample
The house looked abandoned: drawn shades, old newspapers scattered in the weeds, cobwebs on the front porch. But it was the second house from the corner on the West side of the block, and the rules said I had to give it a try; somebody might live there. It was my third day on a new assignment, in a job I’d gone to hell and back to get. I’d lied about my age, and they couldn’t card me because everything was done by telephone, and by the time they set eyes on me I’d already become their star employee and they couldn’t afford to let me go. I was no longer Odd-jobs Maddie, I was now M.G. O’Brien, field interviewer for SurveySite-USA.
The promotion to field interviewer came after I’d been working the phones for three months. I had to go to the office in Palo Alto for the training. First I panicked. Hair. I’d never dyed my hair. I bought a brunette wig and tried it on in front of the full-length mirror. Even at forty-nine I didn’t like to look in that mirror. It showed all the bulges and fat—“cellulite,” they call it now, like we’re made out of plywood. Under the wig my stringy brown hair had gone to a dull salt-and-pepper that olive oil rinses turned greasy instead of pretty. My chin looked like it lost something down on my chest and was reaching out to find it. Between the fat, the chin, and the bags under my eyes I was looking pretty grim, but adding in the fake hair, I looked like the bride of Frankenstein. Impossible. I couldn’t deal with it. I threw out the wig, put on a comfortable dress, and took myself over to Palo Alto, warts and all. “You want a good interviewer?” I thought. “You take what you get, SurveySite-USA.”
It was a lucky day. The new survey was sponsored by the government’s department on aging. We had to interview older people in their homes, and the older we looked, the better our chance of getting them to participate. What a break!
I climbed the creaky wooden steps of the stucco house and rang the bell, and heard a chime somewhere in the distance, a shallow, musty sound that died without reverberations, like a lonely moan. Nobody came. Nobody home. Probably vacant, I thought. But the instructions were for this address, so I made a fist and gave the door a brisk knock, scaring a pigeon out from under the eaves. It flew over me, followed by another one, followed by a falling feather that wafted past my impatient eyes when I turned to face the street, ready to call it quits. Just then I heard a voice say, “What is it you want?”
A voice! I turned back and called out to the pigeon house, “It’s a study of the quality of life of older Americans, and your address came up on a sampling of households. If someone lives here who is over seventy, we’d like to interview them.”
The voice didn’t say yea or nay, it asked for my name.
There I am on the porch. The wooden door hangs heavy on its hinges, it doesn’t budge. I can’t tell where the voice is coming from, or whether it’s female gone low from nicotine or last-stage male, mutating from tenor sax to tuba. In front of me, the door stands motionless, but down below, where my French heels shift under my weight, the unraveling braids of a rotting straw doormat wriggle like worms under my feet.
“M.G. O’Brien,” I yell. “Is there someone over seventy living here?”
“O’Brien,” says the voice, reprovingly. “That’s an Irish name, isn’t it?”
Oh boy. Next would be the shit about too many children, grocery money gone to booze. Defensively, I bellow to the door, “Yes, it is.”
“Are you Irish?”
I flinch. I can tell now that it’s a woman, a certain kind of woman.
“It was my husband’s name,” I shout. And if you don’t like Irish, lady, get this: “He was Irish, I am Jewish.” I leave it there.
“So am I,” says the voice.
After a little time of quiet the voice sounded again: “What do you want?”
More gently now, but loud enough to be heard, I explained that this was a study being conducted by the bureau on aging, and there were some questions we needed to ask of a person over seventy, about their lifestyle. “It only takes about a half hour, and it’s kind of interesting,” I lied. I added politely, “Do you qualify?” If she qualified and I failed to get the interview it would be a mark against me. Yesterday, the wallpaper taster, a lunatic who let me in but was too crazy to respond to the questions, had already put a blemish on my record, and as a single parent with a kid getting ready for college I couldn’t afford another Incomplete. A good job could be harder to find than a good husband.
“I qualify, but you don’t want to hear,” said the voice. “If I talk about my life, I’ll just cry the whole time.”
Over seventy, living in a closed-up house, Jewish. Just crying if she talks about her life. . . .
On my fingers I count how many years we are post-Holocaust. The questionnaire in my briefcase wants to know things like what TV programs the respondent was watching at age fifty. I fidget again on the tattered doormat. “Look,” I implore the door, staring into its woody grain, “forget the interview. Come on out, and let me take you to lunch. C’mon, we’ll go for a sandwich.”
There was silence from the door.
“Are you there?”
“You wait five minutes, then go stand by the back door.”
A little apprehensive, I clutched my briefcase and went down the creaky steps. Knee-high weeds along the side of the house made the passage difficult, but two nice flowering trees, a bottlebrush and a magnolia, formed a red and white canopy over my head to add a little cheer. I trudged through the brush and waited, and after a few minutes the back door opened to reveal an overweight grey-haired woman dressed in a flowered mu-mu, squinting, using her hand to shade her eyes from the sun. “I can’t go to lunch, but I’ll fix you some tea,” she said, making a small grimace of a smile. “My name is Bertie.”
There was a dinette table covered by a layer of dust. The dust was so thick and old it was almost fossilized. It had a patina, like a dirty dish that sat too long in the sink. One section of the tabletop, about the size of a placemat, was clear, and in this small zone sat
one clean plate, one spoon, an empty water glass, and one folded square of paper towel: Bertie’s service for one. I sat down and watched her run hot water over the kettle and wipe it down with a napkin before filling it to put it on to boil. As the kettle heated, Bertie talked and I listened. A few feet from me, on the other side of the unwashed window, the open flowers of the magnolia tree spread out their huge white petals, tinted to brown by the dirt on the glass.
I was the first person Bertie had invited into her house in twelve years. For the dozen years since the death of her husband, Bertie had never gone out. She had never left the house.
Glancing into the dining room, I could see a menorah hidden under a cloak of dust, and a silver tea service that seemed to be growing moss in its accumulated grime. On the floor, a footpath cut through a heavy layer of dirt like a trench for a sewer pipe cuts through soil.
In spite of what she’d said about crying, Bertie insisted on doing the survey. “I know they won’t pay you if you don’t get it done, and I want you to get that money,” she said.
A shrewd observation, but I tried to discourage her because of the painful memories that could be aroused by her participation. I gave her a few reasons why it wasn’t all that important, and she gave me back a few reasons why a single parent had to be protective of her job. Finally I reluctantly agreed to go through with it, to honor her insistence. I had to know something first, though. Why was this recluse making an exception for me?
Twelve years of solitude and despair, and now this. . . .
“Bertie,” I said quietly, “Why did you let me in?”
Bertie squinted again, though there was no sun in the dinette. “Madeline,” she said softly, “Why did you invite me to lunch?”
The house looked abandoned: drawn shades, old newspapers scattered in the weeds, cobwebs on the front porch. But it was the second house from the corner on the West side of the block, and the rules said I had to give it a try; somebody might live there. It was my third day on a new assignment, in a job I’d gone to hell and back to get. I’d lied about my age, and they couldn’t card me because everything was done by telephone, and by the time they set eyes on me I’d already become their star employee and they couldn’t afford to let me go. I was no longer Odd-jobs Maddie, I was now M.G. O’Brien, field interviewer for SurveySite-USA.
The promotion to field interviewer came after I’d been working the phones for three months. I had to go to the office in Palo Alto for the training. First I panicked. Hair. I’d never dyed my hair. I bought a brunette wig and tried it on in front of the full-length mirror. Even at forty-nine I didn’t like to look in that mirror. It showed all the bulges and fat—“cellulite,” they call it now, like we’re made out of plywood. Under the wig my stringy brown hair had gone to a dull salt-and-pepper that olive oil rinses turned greasy instead of pretty. My chin looked like it lost something down on my chest and was reaching out to find it. Between the fat, the chin, and the bags under my eyes I was looking pretty grim, but adding in the fake hair, I looked like the bride of Frankenstein. Impossible. I couldn’t deal with it. I threw out the wig, put on a comfortable dress, and took myself over to Palo Alto, warts and all. “You want a good interviewer?” I thought. “You take what you get, SurveySite-USA.”
It was a lucky day. The new survey was sponsored by the government’s department on aging. We had to interview older people in their homes, and the older we looked, the better our chance of getting them to participate. What a break!
I climbed the creaky wooden steps of the stucco house and rang the bell, and heard a chime somewhere in the distance, a shallow, musty sound that died without reverberations, like a lonely moan. Nobody came. Nobody home. Probably vacant, I thought. But the instructions were for this address, so I made a fist and gave the door a brisk knock, scaring a pigeon out from under the eaves. It flew over me, followed by another one, followed by a falling feather that wafted past my impatient eyes when I turned to face the street, ready to call it quits. Just then I heard a voice say, “What is it you want?”
A voice! I turned back and called out to the pigeon house, “It’s a study of the quality of life of older Americans, and your address came up on a sampling of households. If someone lives here who is over seventy, we’d like to interview them.”
The voice didn’t say yea or nay, it asked for my name.
There I am on the porch. The wooden door hangs heavy on its hinges, it doesn’t budge. I can’t tell where the voice is coming from, or whether it’s female gone low from nicotine or last-stage male, mutating from tenor sax to tuba. In front of me, the door stands motionless, but down below, where my French heels shift under my weight, the unraveling braids of a rotting straw doormat wriggle like worms under my feet.
“M.G. O’Brien,” I yell. “Is there someone over seventy living here?”
“O’Brien,” says the voice, reprovingly. “That’s an Irish name, isn’t it?”
Oh boy. Next would be the shit about too many children, grocery money gone to booze. Defensively, I bellow to the door, “Yes, it is.”
“Are you Irish?”
I flinch. I can tell now that it’s a woman, a certain kind of woman.
“It was my husband’s name,” I shout. And if you don’t like Irish, lady, get this: “He was Irish, I am Jewish.” I leave it there.
“So am I,” says the voice.
After a little time of quiet the voice sounded again: “What do you want?”
More gently now, but loud enough to be heard, I explained that this was a study being conducted by the bureau on aging, and there were some questions we needed to ask of a person over seventy, about their lifestyle. “It only takes about a half hour, and it’s kind of interesting,” I lied. I added politely, “Do you qualify?” If she qualified and I failed to get the interview it would be a mark against me. Yesterday, the wallpaper taster, a lunatic who let me in but was too crazy to respond to the questions, had already put a blemish on my record, and as a single parent with a kid getting ready for college I couldn’t afford another Incomplete. A good job could be harder to find than a good husband.
“I qualify, but you don’t want to hear,” said the voice. “If I talk about my life, I’ll just cry the whole time.”
Over seventy, living in a closed-up house, Jewish. Just crying if she talks about her life. . . .
On my fingers I count how many years we are post-Holocaust. The questionnaire in my briefcase wants to know things like what TV programs the respondent was watching at age fifty. I fidget again on the tattered doormat. “Look,” I implore the door, staring into its woody grain, “forget the interview. Come on out, and let me take you to lunch. C’mon, we’ll go for a sandwich.”
There was silence from the door.
“Are you there?”
“You wait five minutes, then go stand by the back door.”
A little apprehensive, I clutched my briefcase and went down the creaky steps. Knee-high weeds along the side of the house made the passage difficult, but two nice flowering trees, a bottlebrush and a magnolia, formed a red and white canopy over my head to add a little cheer. I trudged through the brush and waited, and after a few minutes the back door opened to reveal an overweight grey-haired woman dressed in a flowered mu-mu, squinting, using her hand to shade her eyes from the sun. “I can’t go to lunch, but I’ll fix you some tea,” she said, making a small grimace of a smile. “My name is Bertie.”
There was a dinette table covered by a layer of dust. The dust was so thick and old it was almost fossilized. It had a patina, like a dirty dish that sat too long in the sink. One section of the tabletop, about the size of a placemat, was clear, and in this small zone sat
one clean plate, one spoon, an empty water glass, and one folded square of paper towel: Bertie’s service for one. I sat down and watched her run hot water over the kettle and wipe it down with a napkin before filling it to put it on to boil. As the kettle heated, Bertie talked and I listened. A few feet from me, on the other side of the unwashed window, the open flowers of the magnolia tree spread out their huge white petals, tinted to brown by the dirt on the glass.
I was the first person Bertie had invited into her house in twelve years. For the dozen years since the death of her husband, Bertie had never gone out. She had never left the house.
Glancing into the dining room, I could see a menorah hidden under a cloak of dust, and a silver tea service that seemed to be growing moss in its accumulated grime. On the floor, a footpath cut through a heavy layer of dirt like a trench for a sewer pipe cuts through soil.
In spite of what she’d said about crying, Bertie insisted on doing the survey. “I know they won’t pay you if you don’t get it done, and I want you to get that money,” she said.
A shrewd observation, but I tried to discourage her because of the painful memories that could be aroused by her participation. I gave her a few reasons why it wasn’t all that important, and she gave me back a few reasons why a single parent had to be protective of her job. Finally I reluctantly agreed to go through with it, to honor her insistence. I had to know something first, though. Why was this recluse making an exception for me?
Twelve years of solitude and despair, and now this. . . .
“Bertie,” I said quietly, “Why did you let me in?”
Bertie squinted again, though there was no sun in the dinette. “Madeline,” she said softly, “Why did you invite me to lunch?”
PAPERS GALORE
Flash fiction, 2014 (Gover Prize finalist) in C. Klim (Ed.) Best New Writing (Hopewell, 2014)
My little boy, I been watchin him grow in Briana’s stomach. I got a picture of him hangin in my room. I never knew anybody could be that tiny.
There's no pictures of me from when I was unborn. There's papers, though. Lots of papers. Papers galore. My lawyer got copies for my trial, stuff about Allie and Ricky, my brothers, from when I was just teensy, probably no bigger than a mouse. Sheriff came and took Allie and Ricky and put em back with my Grandma Nanda, cause my mom had moved out from her but wasn't doing too good, stayin in a shack that didn't have no beds or electric or bathroom or nothin, and Burt Riverbank, Allie's dad, was beatin up on Ricky real bad. He couldn't get to me, cause I was still unborned. I guess they come in and found Ricky hanging by one foot, and they figured they better call the ambulance. The doctors saw all them bruises and that crippled foot, and Burt told em Allie was always pickin on Ricky, always hittin him and stuff. So they asked him How old is Allie, and when he said Three, they called Child Protection on Burt Riverbank.
I saw Allie in Juvies one time and he told me that was the last he ever saw of Burt Riverbank or Big Mike, too, which was Ricky's daddy. Allie didn't stay with our grandma, neither, cause they put him in foster care out in the country somewhere. Allie looked sad when I showed him the letter Ricky sent me before he got shot over in Oakland. I wish I still had that letter. A counselor at Juvies found it in my room and tore it up.
My lawyer, when he located my grandma, got me a picture of her. It’s hangin up there next to the picture of my unborned baby. That big smile on her face is so pretty you'd think she was a movie star. She still doing good, too. She says it ain't fair how she's so far away and can't visit me. Ain't fair neither how they tried me as an adult when I'm only sixteen, and called me for murder when I never killed anybody. That death penalty, she says, is the worst thing she ever heard of. Worst I ever heard too.
I was there when Lashawn shot the dude at the Stop 'N Go, but I didn't have no gun. I was choosing Valentine’s candy for Briana, just out of range of the secret eye that takes your picture. I didn’t hardly know Lashawn, he was just giving me a ride, said he had to stop for cigarettes.
Yesterday Briana promised me that when my little boy gets borned she'll take lots and lots of pictures of him. Our baby gonna have plenty of pictures, she says, cause when all you got is papers all your life, you might as well be dead.
CALIFORNIA CATECHISM
By Adrianne Aron
In By the Bay (Bay Area Library ePublishers, Sunnyvale, CA, 2015)
Bay Area librarians collected stories by and about the San Francisco Bay Area, and published an e-Book featuring local authors. Adrianne's "California Catechism," excerpted from a novel in progress, was honored as a selection.
California Catechism
The move took a lot of money, so I had to watch my pennies, and the flat in the Haight-Ashbury was just the thing: not too expensive, and close to a good school for Brenda, who was starting kindergarten. That’s where I first met Rosie, another single mom with a kid in the same school. Like metal filings in an Etch-a-Sketch, we glommed onto each other. We saved on gas by pairing up to go to the laundromat and the supermarket, and we went out to eat on two-for-ones to save on food. If the car broke down or the sink stopped up, we’d call on each others’ boyfriends for help. If things with the boyfriends broke down, we had each other’s shoulder to cry on. My first year in San Francisco, Rosie was my compass; she knew north from south.
One day during that first year, Brenda brought me a question that rattled me so much, I was tempted to get back in touch with Steffan, thinking I might have to get help from that skunk because I didn’t know what to do. I’d been living in Chicago, on the South Side, and before that I’d lived in Des Moines, where I grew up. Nobody had ever asked me a question like Brenda brought me in San Francisco.
San Francisco! There was no such thing as a Jewish neighborhood. Levi Strauss was remembered as a cowboy type instead of a yeshiva boy. It was a different world. Luckily, that world had a Rosie, and I didn’t have to write to Steffan. I got on the phone to Rosie.
Rosie’s David was a little older than Brenda, so Rosie was ahead of me on school matters. Raising a girl, I was usually a little more advanced on the social-developmental side, but this time I was way behind. Brenda had come home from school, and again the teacher’s aide hadn’t washed out the thermos, and the lunch box stank when it got opened. Brenda crumpled up the baggies and the wax paper, and was getting ready to throw out the orange peels, when she turned to me with her big kindergarten eyes that see everything as a wonder, and asked a question to turn my mother over in her grave. “Will you buy me a white dress for my First Communion, like Mary Catherine got?”
Would I buy her a white dress for a Communion! Quick on my feet I said to her, “We’ll talk about that later. Get in there and change your clothes, and don’t forget to hang up your jumper.”
While she was doing that, I gave thirty seconds thought to contacting my ex, then rushed to the phone to call Rosie. I didn’t have to explain, I only had to repeat the question. She said she’d come right over. “You learn to grin and bear it,” she said before she hung up. “Last December I lost a battle with David over a Christmas tree. You never saw it, because I made him keep it in his bedroom.”
I put on the coffee maker and thought about that. A Christmas tree, I felt, was one thing; a Communion was something else. Back East, this sort of thing wouldn’t come up. But here, in Assimilation Central, a six year-old could bring you a question that could turn your stomach sideways. Communion! They get down on their knees and stick out their tongues and some man in a dress says hocus pokus, and my daughter in some totally nutbucket fantasy wants a new outfit so she can take communion with Mary Catherine Ryan.
Rosie arrived and took her place in my kitchen, at the round oak table with the claw-foot pedestal. She always liked to sit in the Captain’s chair, the one with the arms. By the time she got there I had already settled on a plan, but I was glad she was there. You never know if your plans with your kids will backfire and shoot you in the foot. I didn’t have time to fill Rosie in on the plan, because no sooner had I poured the coffee as Brenda came bouncing into the room with her coloring book to show me a picture, and I knew I had to grab her while I had her attention.
“Look,” I said, touching her sweet ponytail as it swished against my thigh, “Come and sit down here with Mommy and Aunt Rosie so I can explain something to you.”
She had her special place at the table, too, but I let her sit on one of the grown-up chairs, which she considered a treat. Larry was sprawled on the floor playing with colored blocks. I poured Brenda a glass of pineapple juice and added a sprig of spearmint. “Tell Aunt Rosie where you got that spearmint.”
Brenda held the glass with two hands and took a sip, then complied in that kid tone of “why-would-anybody-want-to-know-that?”
“We picked it in Shelly Mandel’s backyard and the dog peed on the roses,” she said. She brightened up at the memory of the dog.
Rosie leaned over and placed a block on top of the tower that Larry was building. “Next time you can get some by my place,” she said to Brenda. “There’s mint growing all over my yard and there’s no dogs.”
“But I like dogs,” Brenda said.
I had to head off that conversation before it got into the question of our getting a dog and I’d have a temper tantrum on my hands. “I asked you about the mint because I want to tell you a story,” I said to my little girl. “It’s a story about Us and Them.”
“Maddie,” Rosie said under her breath. “Maddie, I already told you, it’s a losing proposition. We’re outnumbered. You just hope they’ll settle for a plastic star instead of a Virgin Mary on the top of the Christmas tree.”
“Think of it as a capitalist catechism,” I whispered back, and then I turned to Brenda and said firmly, “In our religion, Brenda, we don’t do dumb things. There are some people who believe in getting everything new. They even buy new bags to put their garbage in! They don’t pick their spearmint from the ground or their bay leaves from the trees; they go out and buy them at the store.”
I gave Rosie a look, then went on with the training: “Some people think you have to have new outfits all the time. They even think their rags have to be new. Instead of cutting up old clothes and old sheets like we do, they go out and pay good money just to buy rags! Brenda, honey”—I paused, to let this sink in. She was listening. “It’s against our religion to get a new dress for Communion,” I said, “just like it’s against our religion to buy mint leaves when God gave us mint in our friends’ backyards. Some other religions don’t have rules about that, but ours does, so, if you want to do Communion, you’ll have to do it in an old dress. In fact, you have to do it in the oldest dress you’ve got. That green plaid one with the scratchy collar: go get it and show it to Auntie Rosie.”
“I don’t want to do communion,” she pouted. She jumped down from the table so fast, she knocked over her brother’s tower. “I’m never doing communion,” she yelled. “So there!”
“It’s okay, honey,” Rosie said with an understanding glance in my direction. “Me neither.”
By Adrianne Aron
In By the Bay (Bay Area Library ePublishers, Sunnyvale, CA, 2015)
Bay Area librarians collected stories by and about the San Francisco Bay Area, and published an e-Book featuring local authors. Adrianne's "California Catechism," excerpted from a novel in progress, was honored as a selection.
California Catechism
The move took a lot of money, so I had to watch my pennies, and the flat in the Haight-Ashbury was just the thing: not too expensive, and close to a good school for Brenda, who was starting kindergarten. That’s where I first met Rosie, another single mom with a kid in the same school. Like metal filings in an Etch-a-Sketch, we glommed onto each other. We saved on gas by pairing up to go to the laundromat and the supermarket, and we went out to eat on two-for-ones to save on food. If the car broke down or the sink stopped up, we’d call on each others’ boyfriends for help. If things with the boyfriends broke down, we had each other’s shoulder to cry on. My first year in San Francisco, Rosie was my compass; she knew north from south.
One day during that first year, Brenda brought me a question that rattled me so much, I was tempted to get back in touch with Steffan, thinking I might have to get help from that skunk because I didn’t know what to do. I’d been living in Chicago, on the South Side, and before that I’d lived in Des Moines, where I grew up. Nobody had ever asked me a question like Brenda brought me in San Francisco.
San Francisco! There was no such thing as a Jewish neighborhood. Levi Strauss was remembered as a cowboy type instead of a yeshiva boy. It was a different world. Luckily, that world had a Rosie, and I didn’t have to write to Steffan. I got on the phone to Rosie.
Rosie’s David was a little older than Brenda, so Rosie was ahead of me on school matters. Raising a girl, I was usually a little more advanced on the social-developmental side, but this time I was way behind. Brenda had come home from school, and again the teacher’s aide hadn’t washed out the thermos, and the lunch box stank when it got opened. Brenda crumpled up the baggies and the wax paper, and was getting ready to throw out the orange peels, when she turned to me with her big kindergarten eyes that see everything as a wonder, and asked a question to turn my mother over in her grave. “Will you buy me a white dress for my First Communion, like Mary Catherine got?”
Would I buy her a white dress for a Communion! Quick on my feet I said to her, “We’ll talk about that later. Get in there and change your clothes, and don’t forget to hang up your jumper.”
While she was doing that, I gave thirty seconds thought to contacting my ex, then rushed to the phone to call Rosie. I didn’t have to explain, I only had to repeat the question. She said she’d come right over. “You learn to grin and bear it,” she said before she hung up. “Last December I lost a battle with David over a Christmas tree. You never saw it, because I made him keep it in his bedroom.”
I put on the coffee maker and thought about that. A Christmas tree, I felt, was one thing; a Communion was something else. Back East, this sort of thing wouldn’t come up. But here, in Assimilation Central, a six year-old could bring you a question that could turn your stomach sideways. Communion! They get down on their knees and stick out their tongues and some man in a dress says hocus pokus, and my daughter in some totally nutbucket fantasy wants a new outfit so she can take communion with Mary Catherine Ryan.
Rosie arrived and took her place in my kitchen, at the round oak table with the claw-foot pedestal. She always liked to sit in the Captain’s chair, the one with the arms. By the time she got there I had already settled on a plan, but I was glad she was there. You never know if your plans with your kids will backfire and shoot you in the foot. I didn’t have time to fill Rosie in on the plan, because no sooner had I poured the coffee as Brenda came bouncing into the room with her coloring book to show me a picture, and I knew I had to grab her while I had her attention.
“Look,” I said, touching her sweet ponytail as it swished against my thigh, “Come and sit down here with Mommy and Aunt Rosie so I can explain something to you.”
She had her special place at the table, too, but I let her sit on one of the grown-up chairs, which she considered a treat. Larry was sprawled on the floor playing with colored blocks. I poured Brenda a glass of pineapple juice and added a sprig of spearmint. “Tell Aunt Rosie where you got that spearmint.”
Brenda held the glass with two hands and took a sip, then complied in that kid tone of “why-would-anybody-want-to-know-that?”
“We picked it in Shelly Mandel’s backyard and the dog peed on the roses,” she said. She brightened up at the memory of the dog.
Rosie leaned over and placed a block on top of the tower that Larry was building. “Next time you can get some by my place,” she said to Brenda. “There’s mint growing all over my yard and there’s no dogs.”
“But I like dogs,” Brenda said.
I had to head off that conversation before it got into the question of our getting a dog and I’d have a temper tantrum on my hands. “I asked you about the mint because I want to tell you a story,” I said to my little girl. “It’s a story about Us and Them.”
“Maddie,” Rosie said under her breath. “Maddie, I already told you, it’s a losing proposition. We’re outnumbered. You just hope they’ll settle for a plastic star instead of a Virgin Mary on the top of the Christmas tree.”
“Think of it as a capitalist catechism,” I whispered back, and then I turned to Brenda and said firmly, “In our religion, Brenda, we don’t do dumb things. There are some people who believe in getting everything new. They even buy new bags to put their garbage in! They don’t pick their spearmint from the ground or their bay leaves from the trees; they go out and buy them at the store.”
I gave Rosie a look, then went on with the training: “Some people think you have to have new outfits all the time. They even think their rags have to be new. Instead of cutting up old clothes and old sheets like we do, they go out and pay good money just to buy rags! Brenda, honey”—I paused, to let this sink in. She was listening. “It’s against our religion to get a new dress for Communion,” I said, “just like it’s against our religion to buy mint leaves when God gave us mint in our friends’ backyards. Some other religions don’t have rules about that, but ours does, so, if you want to do Communion, you’ll have to do it in an old dress. In fact, you have to do it in the oldest dress you’ve got. That green plaid one with the scratchy collar: go get it and show it to Auntie Rosie.”
“I don’t want to do communion,” she pouted. She jumped down from the table so fast, she knocked over her brother’s tower. “I’m never doing communion,” she yelled. “So there!”
“It’s okay, honey,” Rosie said with an understanding glance in my direction. “Me neither.”
