The boys I liked in eighth grade were all the same – blonde, all-American, slender. Athletic. Of average intelligence. Those boys usually went for their female counterparts, and as a buxom, dark, bookish, exotic looking girl, I was none of those things. Still, I hoped that if I wrote a lot in my journal and wished for some attention, I might get it.

The boys who did pay me attention were not boys I desired. Kevin McSorley was one of them – tall, brawny, missing a tooth. He ran with a rough crowd that was at the academic bottom. His hair was light brown and rarely combed. He wore t-shirts, even in the winter, and smoked cigarettes. He was vaguely dirty.

Kevin’s locker was next to mine. I dreaded running into him on days when no one else was around. He would push himself against me, and say in a low voice, “I’m going to rape you. Do you know what that means?”

I didn’t know what it meant – as an overprotected daughter of Armenian parents, I was the only kid in my seventh grade class the year before who was excused from having to take Sexual Education. My parents refused to sign the permission slip, which meant that once a week for a month, I had to be excused from science class to go sit in the Media Center.

“Rape,” he would say, looking down at my chest.

Now I was a girl who had a retort for everything, the way nerdy kids usually do – words are our recourse. But I couldn’t speak a word to Kevin McSorley. I would just look at him and try to see who he was seeing. I couldn’t even write about it in my diary, where I kept a record of everything that went on in my world. I couldn’t tell my parents about this, even though I was scared to death. Somehow, I thought if I did, even if they took action against this unwanted attention, they would blame me for it. I couldn’t be sure, but maybe Kevin McSorley was responding to something dark and nasty inside of me that I didn’t even know was there? I needed to keep this worry to myself.

Joan Capobianchi, Kevin’s girlfriend, hated me. She finagled a place behind me in line one day and announced in a loud voice that I was a “slut” who “stole her boyfriend”. Her friends glared. I whirled around to see that she was crying.

The last day of school came. I was thrilled and frightened – high school would come in the fall, and no more Kevin McSorley. But we had to clean out our lockers, which would give me prolonged time with Kevin.

I arrived at my locker late, hoping he’d be done. He was there, scooping everything out of his locker and into a gym bag. There was a lightness about him that I hadn’t seen before.

“You like the Beatles, right?” he said to me. It was true. Everybody knew that.

Kevin thrust an eight-track tape into my hand – “Percy Faith Plays the Beatles.” “For you”, he said, beaming.

“Thanks”, I said, and with that, he was gone.

I stared at the tape, my reward for a year’s worth of silence and fear. My family liked the Beatles, too. I could maybe share it with them, and say that I’d found it.
Read Michele Markarian’s bio »

A flight attendant with a severe bun and red lipstick slid an omelet, the texture and color of a kitchen sponge, onto my open tray table. I picked at my food with a plastic fork. It was so hard to cry and chew at the same time.

I looked over at my husband Hadi. How could he slice into his bread as if he hadn’t uprooted my entire existence?

“Why don’t you try to eat something? Maybe you’ll feel better,” Hadi said, putting his roll down, his eyes concerned. I hated the softness in his voice, his sincere attempt at kindness.

I nodded, keeping my face fixed on the food in front of me. I sniffled through the first two bites, and then I took a deep breath and ate. The omelet was warm, and it felt good to fill the hollowness within me with food. Without intending to, I finished everything on my tray. Refreshed, I turned to the window and cried again.

It was my first wedding anniversary and instead of jetting off to Europe like my friend, Munna or loading up my car for a road trip to a rustic cabin like Sura, I was moving to Mexico so that Hadi could attend medical school. And on this day when I was supposed to be blissfully happy, I had waved good bye to my mother’s wet face, my sister wiping the tears off her cheeks, and my father standing awkwardly beside them, hands behind his back.

The tissue in my hands had turned to shreds so I reached for the coarse napkin on my breakfast tray and took a breath. Get a grip, a voice from within me said. Mama went through far more, flying all the way from Iraq to the US with a husband she barely knew. She was only eighteen, and she hadn’t finished high school or spent a night without her six siblings lined up on mattresses next to her. You are twenty-one years old. You have a college degree, and you were friends with your husband before you married him. In a few years, this will be over, and you’ll be sorry you didn’t have a nice anniversary. Pull yourself together. Make a good memory for today, and then you can be sad again tomorrow.

#

In the days before we left California, I’d entertained two competing and shamefully stereotypical images of what Mexico was going to be like. Either I was going to wear ponchos and live in a mud shack with a donkey tethered outside, or I was going to wear flowing linen gowns, pin flowers in my hair, and live in a palatial villa with a large balcony overlooking a flowered courtyard.

As we drove from the airport to our hotel, it seemed one aspect of my vision had been correct. Guadalajara was a landscape of contrasts. We drove past brick houses with glassless windows and flat tin roofs; our fair share of modern, tall buildings and an even greater number of charming, colonial ones; and finally once into the suburbs, we drove past tall concrete walls, some of them a block long, their edges trimmed in broken glass bottles. I could only imagine the mysterious mansions they housed. Their very walls seemed to imply that the homes behind them were too precious for the common passerby to view.

In the taxi, I no longer felt the urge to cry. My eyes were now busy searching out my surroundings for clues as to what my life was going to be like. Everything had to be taken in. The surly, overweight taxi driver who’d huffed and puffed while tying our luggage to the top of his rickety, dingy yellow Nissan Sentra station wagon. The vendors ladling colorful juices out of large tubs into clear plastic bags they tied closed with a rubber band around the neck of a straw. The intersections where children begged, men wiped down windshields, clowns juggled. The arch strangely reminiscent of France’s Arc de Triomphe, and the great big roundabouts that spoke a language of honks.

Before I was ready for our moving picture show to end, we arrived at our hotel. From our room, I called home to inform my parents of our arrival, cried again, and then opened up my suitcase to change for dinner. On top was the evening gown and silver, strappy high heel shoes I had packed in hopes of finding a fancy restaurant at which to celebrate our anniversary. I reached for the cotton summer dress and the pair of flat, black sandals underneath instead.

Outside the weather was still warm and inviting even though the sun had begun to set. We walked until we came to an indoor shopping mall, the center of which was filled with children bouncing long, silver missile-shaped balloons. The lack of rules inhibiting children’s play struck me as very Arab. It reminded me of services at the masjid where all the children wandered about oblivious to the speaker behind the microphone, snacking on chips, climbing over the bodies seated on the floor.
The only restaurant options were a Mexican diner and the Kentucky Fried Chicken we had passed on the way in. Hadi asked me if I wanted to leave and keep walking, but it was getting late, and I was afraid we’d get lost, or worse, find nothing and wind up coming back to the same spot. But when he asked me which of the two places I preferred, I panicked. I could not have my first wedding anniversary dinner at either of those places.

I tried to pass the choice back to Hadi. “I don’t know. Where do you want to go?”

“It doesn’t matter to me.”

“You always say it doesn’t matter. Today I need it to matter.”

“That’s not what I meant. It’s just that you care about where we spend special occasions more than I do.”

I started to say, “Let’s just go to the di…,” but then I paused, overcome by traveler’s anxiety and suggested KFC. It took a lot more language to sit in a restaurant than it took to order fast food.

#

We stood back before entering the line, staring at the lit-up menu. The options were limited enough to make the choices decipherable, but that still didn’t solve the problem of what we would order. Up until that moment, Hadi and I had eaten only halal meat. It was an easy thing to do in my California university town where halal grocery stores and restaurants were popping up all over. But there wasn’t going to be any halal food in Mexico. We hadn’t even discussed the issue. Were we going to be vegetarians, or were we going to start eating store-bought meat?

I said, “If we aren’t getting chicken, then that pretty much leaves biscuits and mashed potatoes. And the coleslaw, but you don’t like that.”

“But you can’t get the gravy on the potatoes.”

“Mmm. Mmm. What a dinner,” I said.

“I’m fine with that. Go ahead and order.”

“Me? Why me?”

“You’re the one who speaks Spanish.”

“I do not. I took Spanish in high school. Everybody knows that you don’t actually speak the language you studied in high school.”

“Yes, but you know more than I do.”

“Is that how it’s gonna be here too? Me taking care of everything. Fine. I’ll order.”

I stepped into the maze-like line, fuming. Hadi dragged me all the way down here, and he still couldn’t play the hero. As the line thinned, I rehearsed, puré de papas, bisquets, but how do you say gravy, and how do you say I’d like? Do I just say, quiero, I want…or should I say, puedo tener, can I have…?

Standing in front of the cashier, my heart beat wildly. A language barrier was all it took to make a teenager in a little paper hat intimidating. I’d never actually produced Spanish words for another person’s ears, and this boy was going to think I was so stupid.

“Buenostardes.Enquelepuedoservir?”

I already didn’t understand, but that was okay. All I had to do is tell him what I wanted.

“Quiero,” I said, “puree de papas sin gravy?” I prayed that he knew the word gravy, but his expression was blank.

At once, I grew uncomfortably warm. I took a deep breath, and then tried another approach, “No quiero la salsa.”

“But we don’t put salsa on the potatoes.”

“I know. I don’t want the thing you put on the potatoes.”

“Ahh,” he said as if he now understood. The flames of discomfort that had lit up around my ears cooled down.

I carried our order back to the table where Hadi was sitting and peeled back the lid on the mashed potatoes. There was gravy all over it. I sank into our bench.

“You didn’t tell them we don’t want gravy,” Hadi said, surprised.

“I thought I did.”

“Take it back,” he suggested as if it was the simplest, most obvious solution.

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean, you can’t?”

“I just can’t,” I said, feeling tears sting my eyes for the hundredth time that the day. How was I going to manage my life here? We couldn’t even order dinner, and we still had to find a place to live, get around in taxis, buy housewares, maybe furniture. I felt as if someone had switched on the lights in a dark room, and suddenly I could see everything. I could see what it meant for my parents and Hadi’s parents to have moved to the United States, all of our family-friends. Had they really gone through moments like this and survived?

I pushed a plastic spork through its wrapper. “Just scoop it off and eat around it. Please. If you really love me, you’ll just eat it.”

#

On the way back to the hotel, I heard these words in my head: You gave up school to struggle ordering mashed potatoes without gravy.

I’d brought all of my letters of acceptance to graduate school with me because I still had to write to each university begging them to defer my enrollment until God-only-knows when, and also because I loved them, each one a tiny diploma, a small salute to years of hard work.

I was holding Hadi’s hand because it was dark now, and the sidewalks were uneven. Hadi said, “Watch out for that crack.”

I looked down, and in that moment a fat rat scurried in front of us, its long tail sweeping the dusty sidewalk. I screamed and jumped up and down in place as if trying to shake off the rodent’s memory. Then it started to rain. This was not a gentle rain that arrived with a soft, warning drizzle. This felt as if the sky had cracked open and decided to pour its entire contents upon us. Hadi took my hand again, and we started to run, but my feet kept slipping out of my sandals.

Hadi looked back and said, “You had to wear those shoes. You still haven’t learned about the elements.”

There was a levity to his tone and a smile on his lips, and I knew exactly to what he was referring. I had worn these same sandals on our honeymoon. Every time a pebble rolled into them or my toes got covered in dust, he’d say, “That’s why I always wear closed shoes. To protect my feet from the elements.”

He thought he was being cute bringing this up now, that this moment would remind me of happier times and lighten my mood. I didn’t appreciate it. My mood was so heavy it would have taken wheels to make it budge.

By the time we got back to our hotel, we were soaked, but still we stopped to look out the window. Jagged bolts of lightning cut through the night. Thunder roared. And through the window opposite us, rain pummeled its way through the clear glass roof above the courtyard, the fronds on the potted plants flattening from the pressure and the tile floor disappearing under water.

“Oh my God. It’s a hurricane,” I said. This was it. The roof of the hotel was going to blow off, and we were going to die tonight.
Hadi said, “It’s just a summer thunderstorm. I’m sure everything will settle down in a bit.”

But the only thing that settled down that night was the storm. As soon as all our first anniversaries deeds were done, gifts, kisses, and bodies exchanged, I started crying again, straight onto Hadi’s bare arm. He tried to comfort me, promising me that things would get better as soon as we found a place and got settled, but I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. I was crying over what I’d lost.

I cried for this anniversary that had ended without redemption, the letters I had to write, the mother I missed. I cried for my old life. I was only twenty-one. I should have been meeting someone to marry right now, if not a few years from now. What I wouldn’t have given to go back to that hopeful unknown, to savor the sweet mystery of who I was going to marry, to wonder what my future was going to be like. Already so much had been decided for me. Already I had so little to look forward to.

I wasn’t supposed to have followed a husband anywhere. I belonged to a new generation of Muslim women, and we were going to have educations, careers, and love marriages. This was down-right embarrassing; my professors and classmates expected me to achieve things with my degree. Giving up my education to follow my husband to another country was my mother’s generation, not mine.

#

Nothing about the Gomez family seemed to bother me. Not the fact that they were taking their old 1960s stove and refrigerator with them, not the fact that the bathrooms had not changed since that era, or that the place smelled musty and that it wasn’t walking distance to the university. Because I was tired, and I wanted a place to live. And because I liked the Gomez family’s sweet daughters. They reminded me of my favorite girl cousins, and I hoped that if we rented their apartment, they would be our friends, a second family in Guadalajara, taking care of us, and inviting us to dinner. That’s why when Hadi looked at me with eyes that said, Tell them no, I took a seat on their wooden bench of a couch, nodded my head to everything the wife said, including her offer of a drink, and acted as if I planned to move in the very next day. Because I did. I really did.

The last two weeks had been one long chain of KFC moments. Every time we tried to get into a taxi, order at a restaurant, or go see an apartment, there was always one critical word I did not know and could not find thumbing through my dictionary. High school Spanish had not prepared me to say things like, Where is the water tank? Is it a gas or electric water heater? Are we responsible for filling up the gas tank? Does the apartment have a working telephone line?

When we finally left the Gomez’s place, Hadi looked at me as if my sanity was in question. “What got into you?” he said. “We turned down newer places because we’d have to buy a fridge and now you want us to buy a fridge and a stove.”

He was right, but I feigned insult. Walking back to our hotel, I argued, “I don’t have a problem with it. If you don’t want to live there, you tell the husband.”
Hadi played the language card, but I would not be swayed. “His wife said he speaks English.”

Later that night when Mr. Gomez called our hotel room to confirm our interest, I dashed to the bathroom and jumped in the shower. I didn’t want Hadi to pass me the phone in frustration nor did I want to witness how the conversation went.

Under the water, I tried to wash away disappointing such nice people, the guilt of forcing Hadi to deal with a situation I’d put us in, the frustrations of being a woman in a man’s world. Mexico still operated along gender-lines, and I hated being the one to do all the talking when both males and females still looked to Hadi to have the final word. I imagined the locals pitied me for not having a stronger husband, or then again maybe they pitied Hadi for having such a domineering wife.

I toweled off, feeling more overwhelmed than I had before. These were not the kinds of thoughts that could be washed away by a spray of hot water. These thoughts clung to you as soon as you brought them into consciousness; they nagged and nagged until they drowned you with despair.

I waited until I heard the sound of the phone hanging up before I stepped out of the bathroom.

“He didn’t speak English,” Hadi said from the side of the bed.

“Did he get what you were trying to say?”

“He got it, but it wasn’t easy.”

I felt a pang of remorse that I pushed away with, “Now you know how I feel.”

Hadi didn’t respond, and his silence rendered the smugness of my remark into something uncalled for, something regrettable. I walked the aisle between our room’s double beds and sat next to him. Our thighs touched and our fingers linked and for the first time since we’d arrived, I found that I was quiet too.

This is my second week in Sevilla and I start feeling almost at home. Here, the afternoon is still an afternoon at 8 pm. The night shows itself slowly and the shadow of the Columbus statue across the bay from Palos de la Frontera seems to apologize for the shameful tribute to a fraud discovery. I’m drinking the fifth or sixth Cruzcampo beer with the usual bread and olives, and a glass of white wine, all at the same time. Then Javi, the waiter which has become my friend, says: Maja, Seville has 81 wonders and you’re the first. I smile, but do not believe him. I blush and then ask to take a photograph with him in order to show it when I get back to my country. I want them to see what a tipazo is Javi, so handsome. He brings me ice cream at no charge every time he could. So sweet.

In Spain, the flies do not leave, even if you try to scare them, whipping up your hands. They are different from the ones in Puerto Rico, where, at the slightest provocation, the insect flutters its wings and flies away. In my Island they are kind of paranoid. Schizoids, certainly due to the heat of the Caribbean, or the Montserrat volcano ashes, or the haze from the Sahara desert which is the direct responsible for my asthma. The phenomenon is repeated in Andalusia and Punta Umbria. You move your fingers and nothing. You move hands and arms, and nothing. They don’t fly away. They stay on your piece of bruschetta, your tomato bathed in olive oil and you can almost swear they are laughing. There you are, trying to eat a piece of pork ham from Huelva, and your Iberian chorizo and they land in front of your nose. And if you swivel both hands, and rotate your arms with go away gestures, you will feel almost that they want to start playing with you.

You can literally touch a fly that lands on your travel package, or your cortadito coffee cup, or a basket of bread. You can even caressed them, and I am sure that with a little patience and tenacity, you could learn to tame one for a trick, even take one as a pet.

The other day, after a poetry reading in the bar 1900 at 23 hours, the Puerto Rican delegation —I’m part of it—began to complain of the men (we were all women, of course). Saying that there are just a few good ones, the really good guys are taken, or finally with bad habits; drinking, cocaine, gambling. There are also a few who borrowed money or whatever and never return anything back, those who go through life comparing yourself with old exes, or crying for old exes, or include you into a horror drama with the ex, those who beat you, or force you to play non-consensual anal sex, and the worse, blame you for being frigid.

Passed the digression, back to the discussion, I said that the males of our specie and the howling women who pursue them reminds me of the Seville phenomenon. We are like a bowl of olives, but they are like boricuas flies. Wild, elusive, undomesticated. Difficult to tame, very difficult to tame.

In the bar 1900, after the 23 hours, boricuas women were looking at Spanish flies. We study them, we revise their conduct, and we research their behavior. Some women began to see the flies as an advantage, not with disgust. And even another one called them appealing. The problem: it is very possible that not even one of these flies is male.

Read Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro’s bio »

Reverie for The Girl at Gabe’s Bar, downtown Iowa City , where the accordian player belts out, in Anglo-Spanish, his love song

On the wall, framed, a girl in a red dress floats perpetually down the stairs, black hair masking her pale face. Descending towards the basement, one hand on the white railing. No clock on the wall. Her sister crying in the next room over. A brother in hiding. She (mistress of the dress) has crossed miles of fields without harm, past ditches plentiful with water and weeds, the body of a girl easy enough to take apart, hide.

But in late summer, do. Do step into the ditch, weeds obscuring the depth to the ground; slip over the gravel into the suck of muck til waist deep in milkweed. Wait, standing with the sculptor at the edge of his driveway, for the farmer to pass in his colt-black pickup truck, raising the dust in a typhoon wake behind him, John Deere cap, curt nod, two finger salute.

The other dozen artists sit under a blue tarp held by a silver pole swarmed with flies in the muggy dusk. When the sculptor, blue-eyed, sixty, married, hears the plan to walk into the cornfield itself and not alongside, he laughs, No. If we both disappear, you know what they’ll say.

The corn is taller than the sculptor. No. But he hesitates by your side. Thirty, thirsty, in sandals and fire-engine-red painted toenails, a white knit skirt with grooves in it like a record your sister traded you years ago. A wine purple blouse and lipstick to match. A motherless child considering mothering.

Step into the first row. The scratchy rustle of broad leaves. Absurd how the ears of corn, so full, stick out from the poles of stalks, adhered, so heavy, they should fall onto the fissured soil.

Step in. Dare glance back to blue tarp: the composer, the poet, the sculptor’s wife, laughing. If you can see them surely they can see you.

Row three. Crouch down. Don’t hurt the crop. Your brother chasing you deeper in. The leaves overlap overhead. Stay put, he warns. Choir of beating hearts. All night trembling to the rustling: wind, sister, never yet brother return to fetch you home. Soldier advancing to exact his wage. Long enough for your brother to run.

This life: waking alone. Walking alone. Memories of then drugging the cells like sunlight in the window melting feathers of frost. Finish your drink. Then hand the red dress to the little sister, waiting her turn on the stair, wanting, like you, to be wanted by the sculptor.

Read Tania Pryputniewicz’s bio »

I don’t remember where they got the gun, a .22 rifle. They might have stumbled upon it there on the farm, or maybe they brought it with them from home. I heard the screen door slam as they headed out on some semblance of a hunt, the sound of their voices diminishing as they left the yard. I ran after them.

I was ten and my three big brothers could no longer keep me out of things with tactics like stringing a vacuum cleaner hose around their poker game knowing I wouldn’t cross it; nor was I still falling for the trick of ‘go grab the cards and we’ll play’ only to find them gone when I returned with deck in hand. The youngest was four years older than I and each of them two years apart; they always seemed like grownups to me. When I was little I asked, “When will I turn into a boy?” sure that I would, because they all had. The query came, in part, from overhearing my father list the accomplishments of his sons without ever mentioning me. I got the idea that I wouldn’t be my father’s child until the transformation.

My father had sent my mother, and me along with her, to the farm that belonged to his mother, so we were three generations of his women collected there. When I was eleven, I was allowed to come home, but Mom never made it back into the family. There was a new woman in Dad’s life. When the judge asked me which parent I wanted to live with, I said my brothers, so by default, I ended up with Dad.

My brothers’ visits seemed few and far between during the year we were apart. When I knew they were coming, I would sit out on the porch and imagine them along the three-hour journey from our home in Long Beach, up I-5 over the Grapevine and down into the San Joaquin Valley, veering off on 99 through Bakersfield, then veering off again and again onto ever smaller roads into Porterville. Though they were always only a couple of hundred miles away, for me it might have been a million. Waiting, my excitement would grow, eyes peeled on the road; my heart would race with each passing car. When they finally pulled in, it was like their arrival opened a fissure into my world and they brought in color and light.

Now I hurried to keep up as the three of them ran off ahead. They headed down the path alongside the barn, a building I had never entered, mostly for fear of black widows, but also I lacked the courage to venture far from the house, a courage I usually found when with the boys and lost in their absence. They moved as a unit, wiggling around the gun in a circle like small minnows around a scrap of food, while still being carried along by the current. I yearned to jump in.

They set up shop across from the barn beside a broken down wooden fence. Brittle brown grass extended well beyond the perimeter on all sides; the fence seemed an arbitrary decoration, long since having the formidability to serve any purpose, huge chunks gone altogether. On the tattered pieces that remained, the grain was deeply grooved where the dusty desert wind had dug out the softer bits, leaving a wavy texture.

I stood off to the side, not daring to enter the frenzy and a bit surprised I hadn’t been shooed away from their project. Mom tells a story of how when I was a baby I would lie in my crib and cry until one by one they would show up, and only when all three were there staring down at me, would I stop crying and play with my toys. Now as I watched them battle for first dibs, I was conscious of the security I felt with them near. This time, though, I wanted to play with their toys.

One had the gun, another the bullets and the third grabbed at both. The lineup eventually established, each took turns firing at a particular stone, or the far fencepost, or birds as they darted about the cloudless sky. We were used to guns, having always had them around. In the basement of one of our homes there was a long hall, the end of which was packed with many feet of newspapers so we could shoot inside. I was always pretty good at it, hitting the target with regularity. But I never got credit; instead it was chalked up to luck.

The vast blue ether hung in contrast to the brown grass below. The barn stood slightly askew. There was a huge walnut tree that loomed above the entire back of the house, and one black and one green olive tree nearby, the fruit of which was periodically pickled and canned. Just across the driveway was a garage with an attached room where, when enough bacon grease was collected, soap was made. Beyond there was a pool made of cement blocks, empty and full of composted leaves from years gone by. Sometimes I would close my eyes and try to imagine someone swimming in it or lying nearby, but I couldn’t bring forth a single image of people ever having occupied the area. The walkways to the pool, barn and pastures had all grown over with tall brush and quiet took hold of the landscape.

Except when my brothers were there. During that year of exile, life appeared on the farm in the form of visits from the boys. From the time they drove in until the time they drove out, quiet took a backseat. As I stood and watched them argue over supremacy, the sound of them filled me with a familiar joy. I could breathe again, air went in and out. The sun seemed brighter in the sky; the birds were dancing in the warm air. Even the sad, dull thud of a walnut pod hitting the ground seemed more like music when they were around.

They were starting to grow weary of this game. Seeing my opportunity I asked if I could shoot, and before they lost interest altogether, I was allowed a turn. I found a level slat in the fence and used it to steady the gun. I lifted the barrel and could see the tip bob up and down with my excitement. As I held my breath to steady my hands, a small black object rose from the brush. I aimed a little in front of it and squeezed the trigger. It flipped around and hung frozen in the air before gravity reached up and pulled it to the ground. A stunned silence and then glee surrounded me. “You hit it.” “Holy shit, she hit it, on her first try!” “Lucky shot.” This time luck was definitely a factor, but I didn’t care. I was now the center of the minnow pack.

Basking in the glow of inclusion I looked out into the field. My kill had energized the game and the boys were back to haggling over who would try next with a renewed need to prove their manhood: not to be outdone by their little sister. I suddenly felt a deep sadness with the realization of what I had just done. I wanted to rush out and find the bird and put it in a nice shoebox and nurse it back to life. But I knew it was dead. I started to tear up.

I stepped back as shots continued to ring out. Then I stepped back some more, quelling the urge to run away. I felt nauseated. I needed to push down hard and stand strong. I couldn’t let them see me cry.

But something had shifted. It was like I was looking through a wide-angle lens; the dirt beneath us seemed to warp and expand, but the distance between us was no longer of their making. For the first time, I didn’t want to do what they were doing and I didn’t want to feel what they were feeling. I didn’t want to be them, and I was on shaky ground. Now I was scared and I didn’t know why.

Another shot rang out, another bird fell. A celebratory clamor ensued, but I couldn’t share in the excitement. Having met the little-sister challenge the game was soon over. I was relieved to get away from what was now, and would be from then on, the bird graveyard. I was frozen in that moment between an old and a new idea of who I was. I unstuck my feet from the ground and followed them back to the house, but I didn’t hurry to keep up.

Soon after that, their visit was over. My body ached, as it always did, at the sight of them packing up the car in the shadow of the old walnut. The screen door banged over and over in a flurry of activity; then came the hugs and goodbyes. As their car pulled out from under the tree and into the sun I could see the boys inside as they adjusted and settled for the three-hour ride back. When they made the left onto the road, I waited for a wave, but their thoughts were already back home. The distance growing between us this time was real.

In the vacuum of their departure, a walnut pod hit the ground, back to the familiar thud amid the silence.

Read Joanne Arledge’s bio »

I was talking with a friend the other day, and she said to me, “You know the whole being late thing? What’s the deal with that?”
I was so relieved. Someone finally understood me. “I know, right? What is the big deal? I mean, so you’re 10-15 minutes late. Is that so bad? I don’t know why everybody makes such a freaking big deal out of it. Who cares about being on time?”

“I do,” she said. “What I meant was, why are you perpetually late? Is it some kind of control issue for you? Is it a matter of time management? Is it a statement you’re trying to make? My sister’s always late too. Always. I’m trying to get some sort of handle on why it is some people are late all the time. It’s so frustrating.”

I laughed, realizing my error. But I wondered, Why do people make such a big deal out of things when you’re late? I admit it, I’m a perpetually later, latist, late-person. I would claim that I was late upon birth, but I’d be lying. And I’m not a liar. My pragmatic father had me induced early so that I would arrive before the end of the tax year. My birthday is December 30th. He was successful in his efforts. Perhaps that’s the reason that I’ve been making up for it for the rest of my life.

I can remember being scolded for being late as a child, for bed, for carpool, for school, for basketball practice. I was late for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner; and I love to eat. I was late turning in my homework: does it really make a difference it if comes in at the beginning or the end of class? I walked in after the bell rang, much to the dismay of my teachers, and later, professors. I’ve been late for countless lectures, football games, basketball games (and I was playing), dates, parties, and movies (trailers are the 15 minute buffer window, you know).

After college, I flew to Australia to backpack around the country. I took off my watch before I got on the airplane, thinking, Who needs a watch in Australia? I didn’t I was never late there. And I worked, caught buses and trains, and even boats to my job at the first cocktail bar in Australia. I pulled shifts that included a couple of meals, though I was never sure of the hours I put in. I didn’t care so much, but reminded the manager that I had come there to get a tan, so I didn’t care to work all day shifts. She nodded, obliged. I was a hard worker, she knew.

After five months, I left Australia, and was standing in the line at the airport. Late, of course, I ended up missing my flight and panicking as my boyfriend was supposed to pick me up from the airport in Memphis 24 hours later. Oh man, I thought, looking around for the nearest phone booth. I asked the guy next to me if he’d save my place in line while I ran over to make a quick call.

“Use my phone,” he said, pulling a 1989 corded mobile phone out of a suitcase. It was still connected to the suitcase by a curly phone cord.
“Oh wow, how weird. I’ve never seen those before. How cool! But it’s international. Won’t that cost you a fortune?”
“Just talk fast. It’s no big deal, love.”
I caught my boyfriend dead asleep. It was two am in Memphis. I was jumping up and down with excitement over the phone. “You will NOT believe what I’m doing right now.”
“Uh, what honey? It’s kind of late, you know.”
“Yeah well, you know me. I’m talking on a phone in the middle of the airport. It’s not a pay phone. It came out of this guy’s suitcase. It’s still connected. Craziest thing I’ve ever seen!”
“Okay, so is that what you called to tell me?”
“No, oh yeah. I’m going to be late. I’ve missed my plane, so I have to hang out for a few more hours to catch the next one. I was running late getting to the airport. I’m not sure what time this one will get in.”
“You? Late? I don’t believe it. Just call me when you land in Memphis.”

Back in the States, I kept falling asleep, in movies, on friends’ couches, in the middle of parties, once on a roof. That made me later and later. I would arrive at my job as a tour guide at Sun Studio, saying a phrase that had long become part of my litany: “Sorry I’m late. Yeah, I know. It won’t happen again. What can I do to help?” If you roll it all into one, it ends on a better note than it started on. They would push me into the tour that the sound engineer had already started, saying, “Take over for him. He’s supposed to be running the booth right now.” So, halfway through the tour, we would exchange the mike like it was a Christmas gift, and I’d chime in with: “Welcome to Sun Studio. And in the words of the late, great Elvis Presley, I’m sorry I’m late tonight, baby.” They fell for it every time.

I’ve been late for weddings (even ones that I was in), for my grandmother’s funeral (she would have died if she’d been alive to know that), for my youngest son’s birth (I was trying to post some last minute work online, take a shower, and eat some lunch before leaving, plus there was laundry and mopping, and all kinds of housework I was trying to finish, not to mention pack my bag for the hospital). After two marriages and three kids, I naturally assumed people would cut me some slack for always being late, because really, what’s the big deal?

My boyfriend calls it Karen-thirty, as in, “We’ll meet you guys at the restaurant at Karen-thirty.” He apologizes to me because he’s forever punctual in everything he does. “Left over from being in the Navy,” he says. Then he looks at me and squints, “You’ve never been in the Navy, have you?”

He makes fun of my clocks in my house and my car. All are set to different times in the future, in hopes of making me on time, or even slightly less late, which I would happily settle for. It never seems to work. By the time I wrangle all of our kids up and get everybody buckled into their car seats with the DS’s, books, blankets, and whatever else they need, we are already late to wherever we were going. I try to drive fast to make up for the late start. But then there’s that whole sitting in traffic issue of lateness that creeps up when you least expect it.

I’ve been late for court, which would have been bad, except that the judge was late too. I’ve been late for job interviews, for training sessions, for meetings, for classes. I’m always late for doctor and dentist appointments, intentionally so, or I have to sit there even longer reading People Magazine from three months ago.

The strange thing is that every now and again, I’m actually early. I’ll walk into a meeting and no one is there yet. Or only one other early bird has arrived on the scene. And I nearly panic. My palms sweat, my heart skips a beat. What do you do with yourself when you’re early? Do you talk to the people who are there? Do you check your calendar, notes, cell phone? What you do, is you wait.

Early is the flip side of late. And when you’re early, you wait. And you wait, and wait, and wait. Believe me, I’ve spent my fair share of time waiting. I’ve waited on tables, on babies, on children, on my parents, on men who never came back. Once I waited for three days to catch a bus out of Glastonbury, England. It was one of those, you-can-come-in,-but-you’ll-have-a-hell-of-a-time-getting-out kinds of towns. I’ve waited for tides to come in, for buses, cabs, carpool moms, for new moons, and draw bridges. I’ve waited in traffic jams, in lines at the bank, at the movies, for the bathroom, for my period to start. I’ve waited on teacher conferences, and divorce papers, and proposals. Once I stayed on hold for the Tennessee Department of Child Support for 39 minutes before they let me leave a message for a woman who I didn’t end up needing to talk to. I waited six years for Dave Matthews to play in Memphis, and then I was out of town and missed it. I’ve waited countless times at drive thru windows because they gave me a girl toy instead of a boy toy in my son’s Happy Meal. I’ve waited for my kids to roll over, to crawl, to walk, to talk. I’ve waited while they’ve brushed their teeth, picked out their favorite books, tried on new dresses, new shoes, new pants, a new way of talking that involved a British accent or mimicking cartoon characters. I’ve waited for the other shoe to fall, and figured out that sometimes it just doesn’t. I’ve waited for the sun to set so I could see how beautiful one more day was spent being late. And I realized that even if I got there too late to see the sun set, if I missed the entire thing, then there’d be another one, same place, the next day. And hey, check out the stars while you’re out there standing, in the dark, at the edge of the world. They’re pretty remarkable if you stand still long enough to see them.

Read Dr. Karen B. Golightly’s bio »

Many hours into a twenty-four hour retreat at home, a semi-annual spiritual practice, I have reached the point of recognizing and accepting my own rhythms. I am content. Cocooned in pillows, I lie on my back finding pictures in the clouds that drift across the tranquil summer sky beyond the window panes. I’ve been at this delightful task for more than an hour despite harangues from my internal critic–Get up this instant, you lazy slob, and do something productive. Review that book you finished two weeks ago. Those shutters haven’t been dusted in weeks. The windows are filthy. A delicious languor gently disarms every impulse towards busyness; bliss overflows my soul, bathing every cell in sweet contentment. I gaze at the tangle of cottonwood, oak, and tallow limbs in the front yard. A red-headed flicker pounds away on a tree-trunk, reminding me of my usual head-banging approach to life. I’m glad to be here now doing nothing.

But it was not always so. When I closed the door of my small study early this morning, I experienced anxiety, even faint claustrophobia. I knew that except for two fifteen-minute meal breaks, this 10′ by 10′ room with its connecting bath would be home for my next twenty-four hours of self-imposed withdrawal. I would deny myself my usual activities—writing to publish, reading, drawing, listening to music, watching television, practicing yoga. I would not answer the door, I would not collect the mail. The answering machine would take phone calls.

I was alone with myself, my thoughts and feelings. The initial panic was familiar; I curled up on the floor with a blanket and a pillow and let it wash over me, comforting myself with a litany: I have chosen this retreat, and I can choose to end it anytime I wish, but just now I choose to remain here, listening to my inner voices, reacquainting myself with my natural rhythms, accepting the gifts of solitude. I need not fear drifting away from reality like a balloon, for I am grounded in love, and the Mothers will watch over me.

The waves of panic ebbed only to be succeeded by paroxysms of grief. Again I submitted, giving up my will to resist the pain, hearing but ignoring the insidious whisper of the internal critic–How ridiculous you look lying on the floor crying. It’s a beautiful day. This is a pretty house. You have a wonderful husband, three fine sons, a daughter-in-law. What on earth could you have to cry about?

From tears I slipped into sleep, brief and easeful. When I awakened I began to journal, the one activity I permit myself during a retreat. Since the point of a retreat is staying with myself through physical and psychological discomfort, I like to record what happens to read later. I know that during the twenty-four hours I will vacillate between contentment and despair, one hour accepting passivity, the next railing at myself. Each retreat has its own tempo, rhythm, and structure. Some have revolved around a single issue; others have released creative blocks as poems, essays, even the plan for my last book have gushed out as fast as I can record them.

This morning I wanted to discover why the need for a retreat had been building over the last few weeks, a need which could no longer be placated with quiet reflection at bedtime or an afternoon lost in thought at the computer. I wanted to learn what aspects of my life need to be examined now, what my soul requires of me at this time.

One issue emerged immediately. Lately I have accused myself of hypocrisy and laziness in my spiritual life and practices. As I journaled, it gradually became clear if attending church no longer seems to be doing anything positive for me, I could give it up for awhile or try another church.. I believe in a Creator God; I believe we are to use and share our blessings. I believe the effort we go through in creating ourselves as we are—personality, education, behavior, thoughts—is purposeful, that it does not disappear with the death of the physical body but is born again in some form although I am not certain what that form may be. If I question whether I can continue in good faith to call myself a Christian, then I could read a gospel and decide if it portrays my God. I could return to meditating or centering prayer.

Another issue was exploring what my husband’s eventual retirement will mean for me. I fear his requiring too much of me; it seems only yesterday I finally had time to myself, time to set my own schedule, time to live authentically. If I let others start nibbling bites off me now, I may be back to where I was several years ago—insecure and uncertain, too prone to look to others to discover how I should feel, what I should think. I may appear selfish now, I do refuse to participate in activities I used to do, I feel guilty because I do less volunteer work , and I’m not as disciplined about my writing as I would like to be. But developing an authentic self is difficult, arduous, time-consuming—and ultimately very worth-while.

I left the computer then to practice self-hypnosis. I asked for guidance from my future self and she rose up before me, cloaked and veiled, but strong and tall. And her cry was full and deep–I want to be accepted as a writer. That’s how I preserve my individuality within our marriage, that’s what I want to do in our retirement. And that’s also how I help others—by honestly sharing what I think and feel through my writing. The practical self chimed in then, saying okay, start writing. Work up a schedule, set aside blocks of time, write, write, write. Turn that future vision into reality. Nothing else will make you happier.

I emerged from trance and went to the bathroom again, perhaps for the fifth or sixth time, much more often than usual. Perhaps I ordinarily ignore my body too much. Perhaps my body is mimicking the emotional process of expurgation, getting rid of physical toxins. Today I honor all of my processes and rhythms, physical as well as emotional, spiritual, and mental.

Then I was hungry and left my room for a meal break. Being enclosed in one room had already apparently caused a certain degree of sensory deprivation, for the brightness of the white kitchen, the strong reds and browns of the kilim in the breakfast room dazzled me. I savored lunch, realizing as I ate that reading during meals as I often do weakens the pleasure of eating. When the timer reminded me the quarter-hour had passed, I climbed the stairs a bit reluctantly and shut out the world once more. Bellyful, I napped briefly.

Awakening, I stretched out on the loveseat and watched the clouds. But as I move into meditation, chanting in my mind “be still and know,” instead of peace, I find agitation, an accelerating heart-rate, my throat closing and tightening around unspoken words. Tears come. Trembling, I sense someone, something, waiting to leap, and I struggle, resisting. Then I force myself to belly-breathe, empty my mind, go where I am being taken.

Suddenly facing me is a hag, pointing a bony finger saying, You are going to stand here and listen to all the worse things you ever thought about yourself; I’m here to tell you they are all true.

I recognize her as a shadow-self and realize I’ve been expecting this confrontation.
She begins, You are a liar.
Yes, I have told lies and I also tell the truth.
You are selfish.
Yes, I am selfish with food I like, my time, my affections.
You don’t love your husband.
I don’t like some of his expressions, habits, behaviors, but I care about his happiness, and I want to share the rest of my life with him. I call that love.
You’re lazy.
Yes, I am. I’m tired. I was superwoman for many years and I’ve given that up. I’m more realistic about my energy. I can’t do as much. Sometimes when I appear to be doing nothing, I am gathering resources, incubating ideas.

You procrastinate.
Sometimes I put off what I don’t want to do, but often that’s because I’m not sure about the activity. That’s a luxury of mid-life.

Do you know what you’re doing now? You’re internalizing approval. If you keep going, you won’t need any external standards of approval. Then where will you be?
In a very good place.
The image of the hag begins to soften as she becomes my mirror image. I smile. How much easier it is to embrace you now. Come and get a hug.

We embrace and I smile as I emerge from trance and begin to journal. I have bubbling moments of pure joy now and the hours seem to be passing more swiftly. I decide to practice self-hypnosis again. I feel myself floating past layers of present concerns, noting them, letting them go. A spirit guide I call bear woman appears, clasps me tightly in her arms, and dives with me into the sea. Momentarily afraid, I struggle, but she blows her breath into me, and I find I can breathe underwater. We sink lower and lower through transparently iridescent bubbles, ribbons of beckoning plants, technicolor fish. Enchanted, I would stay and play here, but she moves purposefully past these glories to the cold, dark bottom of the sea. I see a path outlined by rocks upon which luminescent plants glow.

We start down the path, and I find it lined with tableaux from my life, past moments of fear, embarrassment, rage, and pleasure frozen for me to examine. In one a small girl in a pinafore cringes in terror before an angry father. I scream at the man, telling him to direct his rage where it belongs—but not at his child. I take her in my arms. I see an older child being punished for not watching her younger sister carefully enough and I say it was her parents’ fault, not hers. She joins us. We embrace the preadolescent whose first menses repulsed her mother and give the mother permission to enjoy her womanhood too. We reassure the teenager confused about her sexuality.

We meet the college student who fell in love but postponed marriage until she finished a graduate degree, the young mother who found balancing her needs and those of her babies so difficult she gave up having any desires of her own, and many others. With the help of my guide, I am able to view these younger selves with compassion and detachment, to forgive, accept and love each.

When I emerge from this trance, I journal until it is time for dinner. Afterwards, I watch the sky darken until my mind empties and I can meditate. When I become aware of my surroundings again, it’s after nine. I reflect on the lessons of the day. I feel relaxed, purged, at peace. Towards midnight I fall asleep and don’t awaken again until 6:30. The vigil is over. I long for a hot bath and some physical activity, but first I record my last thoughts and read my journal. The solitude of a retreat has once again cleared some of the brush from the tangled paths of my life and restored, refreshed, and renewed my soul.

Read SuzAnne C. Cole’s bio »

Some say “You can’t go home again,” but you’re determined to give it a try. Consider these tips before you unpack your new clothes in that one-signal California ranch town.

Tip #1
First, you must accept the spectacle you’ll be making, the stares, the gossip and the rumors that will follow you. The fact is you won’t be able to leave your house without someone looking at you sideways, frontways, backways to catch something the doctors might have missed.

Tip #2
Prepare for the disappointment in your father’s face when you tell him that you are no longer his only son, his family namesake, his promise of another generation. Anticipate his distrust, his distance, and, eventually, his dismissal. But then again, there’s always a chance he may surprise you.

Try using language he understands. Until now, the parts didn’t fit together, like using the wrong size wrench. Nothing turns, never loosens, never tightens, never grips. Tell him it was a necessary step, like a fine sanding before the primer. Like well-oiled ball bearings that eliminate friction and keep the wheels moving.

Tip #3
Move to Sweden instead. Forget about that little boy who ran the register in his father’s hardware store.

Tip #4
Show your best friend Elizabeth all the benefits she’ll enjoy. You can share a dressing room at Macy’s during their One Day Sales. Get makeovers, mani-pedis and go for weekend getaways at the spa. You can even lend her clothes if she sheds those pesky ten pounds—what better motivator? Offer these up to balance the sadness when she realizes she’s lost the illusion of romance in her life. Remind her that she hasn’t lost your love. And now, when she meets a new man, he won’t have to measure up.

Tip #5
Expect Joann at Food King to take a step back when you hand her money, even though you’ve known each other since kindergarten. Carl—the boy you gave clarinet lessons to—may not ask if you want paper or plastic. Marilyn at First Valley’s merchant window could refuse to cash your personal checks and point you to the line of regular customers. Irene might drop your packages, even the ones marked fragile, and never put extra Bed, Bath and Beyond coupons in your mailbox like she does for your mother; and when you want to buy the new Humane Society stamps, don’t be surprised if she says she’s all out. Harold Cook, proprietor of the Jolly Cone, could forget the burger he concocted in your honor—extra pickles, extra cheese and a dollop of Hunt’s BBQ sauce—when you returned from the state spelling bee finals. Give him some time and he might remember. And if Pastor Moore tells you, “Man can change the body, but only Jesus can change your soul,” smile, bow your head, then turn away.

Tip #6
Your mother will be easier. At first, she may blame herself for letting you play dress-up in her closet, or for agreeing to call you Susie when you invited her to your tea parties, serving her lemonade and cookies in the tree house your father built. But, in time, once she sees you happy to be the woman you were always meant to be, who, deep down, she always knew you were meant to be, you can joke that, though she lost a son, she also gained a daughter. Hope that she laughs. And when you tell her only now do you understand how she suffered during those years of mood swings and crying jags, she could take you in her arms and dry your tears, something she hasn’t done since you were twelve.

Tip #7
When you can’t keep up appearances, when you don’t want to explain, appease, or reassure anymore, take comfort in the pleasures you’ve claimed as your own: the shift of silk against your knees; the binding elastic of your Playtex bra; the first time a man held the door for you, tipped his hat, bought you a drink. In the mirror, you see what was always there, waiting for you to rescue. The counselors said it would feel like coming home. Perhaps you took that too literally. You want to believe people change. Just look at yourself.

Read Lori White’s bio »

Music drew me to her. Beethoven’s Pathétique floated across the marsh backwater from an old clapboard house I thought was empty. Curious, I walked around. By then, all I could hear was birdsong.

When I knocked, I was greeted by an old woman. Her hair was blunt cut, as if she’d done it herself, and a bobby pin held it to one side like a little girl. Although wrinkled, her face had a classic bone structure, but her body was short and square. Thick legs showed beneath a flowered cotton dress and her bare feet had bunions.

“Hello. I’m Cynthia Malik. I own a cottage on the other side of the marsh. I heard the music and didn’t know anyone lived here.”

“Moved in last fall,” she said. “Want some iced tea?”

“I’d love some.”

She headed for the kitchen.

“Watch for Pete. Close the door.”

I went in, wondering if Pete was a boy or a dog. Suddenly I realized that I had a bird at my feet, a sparrow with a toothpick tied to his wing. He squawked as I stepped over him. Then I looked up and saw cages with other birds in various broken states—wings, legs, even a beak. The cage doors were all open.

“Here, Petie, Petie,” said my hostess. Pete waddled over and climbed on her finger. She put him on the kitchen table, then poured tea.

“Porch?” she asked, pointing to the back of the house.

She spoke in whispers to Pete as we left the kitchen. Her tone was soft and light, her words so quiet I couldn’t hear them even though I was right behind her.

The floor slanted to the back of the house. Apart from the cages, all she had in the living room were two wooden rocking chairs and a side-table.

“What brought you to the Irish hills?” I asked.

“Wanted to live easy.”

“Have you kept birds long?”

“I don’t keep them. They just visit for a while.”

I swallowed more tea. Pete stuck his beak in her glass.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know your name,” I said.

“Millie Aleman.”

“I really enjoyed the music. Do you have a large collection?”

She laughed. “No collection!”

“That was you? But I didn’t see a piano.”

She lifted Pete and got up. “Here,” she said, opening the door.

There were two small bedrooms off the back hall. Her bed was in the first, the piano in the second. It was a baby grand and filled the room, but I could see why she’d put it there. The room faced west and south to the sun. There were piles of sheet music stacked on the floor. I started to look through them—classical, modern, Broadway, jazz. Most of the modern pieces were original editions.

“Would you play something?” I asked.

“Pick.” She put Pete on the piano.

There was so much I wanted to hear, but at last I handed her Debussy’s Images.

She played Reflections in the Water. It was effortless, as if she didn’t even have to move her muscles. Her bare bunioned feet looked as if they belonged on the pedals. The music rippled out, and I sat on a pile of sheet music and closed my eyes, drifting away with her.

I don’t know how long we sat there after she finished, but I finally opened my eyes. She was looking out the window. The birds were silent in the afternoon heat.

“Thank you. That was wonderful. I must go.”

“Come back when you like,” she said.

I did. I came back and back and back. We hardly talked, but I felt close to her when she played or we were silent. We went to Paris, Vienna, the English countryside. We visited Broadway and European cabarets. The birds chattered when I came and were silent when I left.

We never talked about us. It was unimportant if we were married or single, rich or poor, with children or without. It was music and birds.

One day, I was in Mrs. Mullins’ general store.

“Haven’t seen you in a while,” she said, ringing up my groceries.

“I’ve been busy and my garden is doing well.”

“You seen that old lady out your way?”

“Yes. We’ve met.”

“Don’t say much, does she.”

“No. She’s not much of a talker.”

“Must be feeding all the birds in the whole damn county. She buys me out of seed.”

Mrs. Mullins knew everyone’s habits. She saw what they bought, handled their mail, and got most of the crisis calls if Dr. Bryan was out of town or no one knew what to do.

“You see her much?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“How come she’s buying bird seed in summer?”

“She helps injured birds.”

“She a vet?”

“I don’t think so.”

Mrs. Mullins snorted. “Sounds like one of those bleeding-heart liberals.”

In fall, I realized my concerts were about over. It was time to go back to my teaching job in Dearborn. All winter I wondered about Millie. Her playing was so wonderful, I thought she must have been somebody once, so I went to the library, but I couldn’t find anything. I sent her a Christmas card, but she didn’t send anything back. I was busy with work and all the unimportant things that seemed to take over my life.

The next summers passed in a dream. I took her vegetables from my garden. She played. Sometimes, I helped with a broken bird. She taught me patience when working with a delicate wren and caution with a raven or hawk. I grew to love summer so much, I could hardly wait for school to end.

The fourth summer, I was hardly in the door before I walked to Millie’s, but there was no one there and I couldn’t hear anything—no birds, no music. I went to the store.

“Mrs. Mullins,” I called.

She waddled out of the back room. “Well, welcome back for the summer. You must be just in. What can I get you?”

“Where’s Millie?”

“Who?”

“Millie Aleman.”

“Oh, her. They took her away.”

“Who? When?”

“The ambulance folk. They showed up asking directions and went out there and took her away. Must of been February, March maybe.”

“Where did they take her?”

“Don’t know. Didn’t say.”

“Mrs. Mullins, you know what goes on in this town. What happened to her?”

“I don’t know nothing if nobody don’t tell me. And nobody didn’t tell me nothing.”

I could see that Mrs. Mullins’ nose was out of joint. I got in touch with Dr. Bryan.

“Her nephew came,” he said. “He was upset and asked me to call on her. He said the house was full of wild birds and she had practically nothing. She didn’t say much when I visited, but her nephew was right. The birds had the run of the place. In the end, her nephew found a home for her near where he lives.”

“But that’s not right! She wanted to stay here.”

“But she couldn’t take care of herself.”

“How do you know that? You didn’t even know her. Yes, she takes care of birds, but that’s good, isn’t it? Have you ever heard her play the piano? She’s incredible.”

“She didn’t have proper heat and she really couldn’t take care of herself.” Dr. Bryan patted me on the shoulder. “I’m sorry. No one wants to see people in homes, but sometimes it can’t be helped.”

“That’s not good enough. Where is she?”

“I’m not sure I should tell you. Why don’t you go home and see how you feel when the shock wears off.”

I wasn’t getting anywhere, so I went home and worked in the garden, but it was no use. I called him.

“If I promise not to interfere, will you tell me where she is so I can at least visit?” I asked.

She was in a home outside Chicago. Her room was semi-private and she was in a chair, her back to the window, her head on her chest. Her roommate was watching TV.

“Hello, Millie. How are you?”

She raised her head. It took her a moment, then she looked me straight in the eye. “Miserable. Can’t stand that,” she said, pointing to the TV. Her roommate glared.

“Oh, Millie, I’m so sorry. How did this happen?”

“I’m an old woman. No power when you’re an old woman.”

“Why couldn’t they leave you alone?”

“Didn’t like the way I lived. Wouldn’t live like ‘normal’ people. Besides, I’ve got money.”

“Money?”

“Used to be a concert pianist. Made money then.”

“I looked you up in the library, but I couldn’t find anything.”

“When I quit, I disappeared. Took another name. Not my own, one I made up. My real name’s Elizabeth Furman.”

I was stunned. No wonder she played like a dream. She’d had a great career.

“Why did you stop?”

“Didn’t like the way I lived. I got rid of things. Fancy house. Furniture. Jewelry. The lot. Bought the house and moved in. Started living easy and felt free as the birds. Wouldn’t do what others wanted.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“Can you get me out of here?”

I didn’t know what to say.

She smiled. “You took too long to answer.”

I smiled back. “I’ll come and see you again.”

“No. Just depress yourself. Go home and listen to the birds. Live easy.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about her. That fall, for the first time, I was glad to close the cottage. Right before Christmas, I got a letter from Mr. Grant, a lawyer. She’d died and left me everything—house, music, birds.

“She never said a word to me,” I said to him when I called. “What about her nephew?”

“Her estate is yours. Can we meet?”

I drove to Chicago on a cold, gray day. After we talked, he offered to help me clear things up. We drove to Millie’s house.

It was the first time I had approached it from the road and I was afraid my car wouldn’t make it. Mr. Grant unlocked the door and we went in.

Dead birds. Dead birds everywhere, their eyes glassy, lying on their sides in the cages and on the floor. Silent. I felt my knees buckle.

Mr. Grant grabbed my elbow. “Why don’t you wait outside while I go through the rest of the house.” I shook my head. In the back bedroom, there was thick dust and the piano was cold. I lifted the lid and hit a key. Stiff and out of tune.

“Do you play,” asked Mr. Grant. I shook my head.

We went into her bedroom, a room I’d only seen from the hall. I opened the closet. A couple of dresses and a coat. One pair of shoes. Her drawers held practically nothing—underwear, a shawl, a photo album. I pulled it out and turned the pages.

How beautiful she was. Her hair was shoulder-length in a page boy style. She wore dresses fitted through the bodice and flared from the waist, and her face had that classic bone structure I’d seen when I first met her.

“I’ll get someone to clear things out,” said Mr. Grant.

“No,” I said. “I’ll do it myself.”

As soon as I could break ground, I dug a hollow and buried the birds. Then I gave away everything except the piano, the music and the album.

As summer wore on, I grew more reluctant to sell her house. I couldn’t make myself do it. One morning, I walked over there and sat on her front porch, aching for her music. The sun was warm and I drifted into that half-state between waking and sleeping. I thought about her decision to come here, to live easy in this place. Suddenly, I knew that she hadn’t played for me. She’d played for the birds. I listened and let their music flow through me.

When I went home, I called the Audubon Society. “How do I start a bird sanctuary?” I asked.

It took two years. I sold the piano and the music for money to keep it going, but not to keep birds. Just to let them visit for a while. Now, I live easy myself.

Read Aline Soules’s bio »

She missed looking at mountains and seeing men in them, tens of them maybe—rows of rough-hewn torsos waiting for her to finally knuckle down. She wanted still to feel the need to mount them, one at a time, to lay to, to undo their detachment, to back-stride every set of jags on the Cascades, to hasp onto the furthest peaks of the Brabazon Range and fall to work, one quick pump of every other point on the Carpathians, whip hand not hanging on to anything. She missed the need to think she had to do something swashy or wry with her tongue on the west tip of the Rockies—bent up and scarp-faced, to lick out the fusty, unseen rucks of so many folding contortionists, or, to do something more rose-hued, like bleed all over the pointiest part of Los Cuernos del Paine in southern Chile or ease slowly down the nose of each face in the Presidential Range. She yearned to long again for the mass of the great great Grampians in Oceania lying in wait beneath her, for the Slovene Karavanke chain to openly slake her liquid need. Not to mention effects of thinking of the Montes Recti and Mons Hansteen—mountains on the moon—ready for just such scenes to come to fruition. Nor to mention Cuba’s Sierra Maestra. She’d always wanted to hover just over that mother-idea.

Read Diane Raptosh’s bio »

Russ, the boy who never slept, roused them at dawn. As Jeter rolled off his side of the mattress, Lydia squeezed shut her eyes, then listened to his stumbling footfall and the water as it hit the bathroom basin. Russ tested her eyelids with his amazingly dexterous little fingers, tentatively at first, which felt like a creepy-crawly wanting in between her eyelashes. Then he flat-out tried prying her eye open, gouging her. Lydia slapped what she couldn’t see– the boy, left predictably to her. With his whole small body he tried bulldozing her from the bed.

Complain, and Jeter’d say, “Who has work to go off to?”

She imagined justifying. “And who remains here?”

Talk which would not satisfy Jeter or Lydia, and least of all Russ.

“Toast, Mommy.” Her boy head-butted her hip. He beat on her like a metronome. “Toast toast toes toast oast oats.”

She smelled pee in his pajamas and cookies in his hair. A laundry list started scrolling on the movie screen in her head where dreams looped nonsense all night long, but she turned away and burrowed into pretend sleep until Jeter stood at the bedside. She smelled him in his fragrant after-shave, an aroma of clean-cut wood at odds with something industrial.

“Jeez, Lid, don’t you think this little guy needs a changing?”

He lifted the boy and flipped him so his feet were pedaling air and his head screamed giggles underneath. Russ got stripped and changed. Pajamas and bedding were flung into the washer. Breakfast got cooked and eaten. Jeter went off to work.

Alone and in charge, Lydia deposited Russ with his bowl of cereal on the living room floor in front of The Skipper Ryle Show.

“Sit here,” she said. “And I mean it, Russ. Leave me be for just ten minutes.”

Free from his grabby hands, she stood and gazed out the kitchen window through the smoke of her Tareyton. She watched a black ant crawl up the white painted sash, saw how determined it was to test where the window glaze didn’t quite meet the wood frame, and the crevice into which it disappeared.

The Fernald plant in the far-off coughed out plumes that swelled and lifted, spreading with the higher clouds, then blending into streaks the airplanes left behind. Lydia hadn’t yet tossed crusts from the breakfast plates, but pigeons strutted across the backyard patio, pecking at the cement, in anticipation. The birds maybe sensed her cigarette burning down and her slight movement in bringing it to her lips because they rose, wheeling as one the way birds do.

Lydia flicked the silver cigarette lighter, the one that matched the silver tray on the cocktail table in by Russ, who prattled to himself, or Skipper Ryle, in the garglely, language of a two-year old. She tapped out the next Tareyton and sucked to keep it lit, then set the lighter on the windowsill above the sink. She couldn’t leave the lighter around for the boy to grab.

More birds leaned across the sky. Lydia tilted her head as if she flew with them, though she’d never been on an airplane; airplanes scared her silly. The birds perched and set up a racket in the bare tree branches. In the absence of leaves they were the quivering leaves. Then they lifted and fell into another formation, flying as one in the direction of smoke that belched from Fernald’s tallest stack.

The plant had assigned Jeter first shift this week and that left Lydia in charge of Russ from daybreak on to supper — a babysitting marathon. Jeter’s usual second shift allowed him to shoulder mornings with the boy, which granted Lydia two or three more hours of sprawling sleep—a luxury she now sorely missed.

Her mother always said, “You sleep like the dead” — a kind of deep unconsciousness she must have inherited because her parents had snored open-mouthed, overcome with similar exhaustion, while a younger Lydia crept back inside their house pre-dawn after spending half the night with Jeter. Her mother and daddy had pronounced that Jeter Burns, who dated their only lovely Lydia, was a decent young man. Her mother quoted it to her renters, Daddy said it to his Crosley Motors foreman. But mention of marriage curdled their good will.

“You are not wedding that boy. He’s army bound,” her daddy said.

Her mother said, “I won’t have you widowed, and you with your heart broke.”

Lydia cringed at this phony romanticism. Her mother most times dammed up any heart-felt thing. Some said she was stoic, others called her callous. The truth of it: she didn’t care a whit about Lydia’s heart, whole or otherwise.

Lydia had stomped her small foot in its new sling-back stack heel, good American-made footwear sewn tight and sure at U.S. Shoe over in Harrison. Her daddy owned a piece of that, too.

“What about love?” Lydia cried.

They looked at her, dull-eyed. She stomped again, but her fury budged no one. The three of them had never hid emotions, always wailing and flailing and hurling objects across the room to make a point. A Lydia-tantrum was old news.

Her daddy peeked at her from the top of the Post & Times Star. “You’ll get over him.”

Lydia dared to suppose Jeter had impressed them with his cool talk and manners, but she soon realized her parents’ tolerance of their duet was part of a waiting game. Once she overheard Mother and Daddy discussing her in the kitchen.

“She’ll tire of him soon enough. When has Lydia ever seen a thing through to its end?”—her mother’s complaint.

And her daddy remembered: “She chucked that typing class after three sessions.”

“Don’t even ask me to number the boys she’s traipsed in front us.”

“Distractable,” her daddy said.

Her mother sniffed. “And wanting too much.”

Which served to sharpen Lydia’s resolve.

“The boy’s getting shipped off to Korea,” her daddy said.

She would detour around the roadblocks they set. Daddy should have known forbidding would send her directly opposite. She endured Jeter’s weeks of basic at Ft. Riley, but then they stationed him in Alaska with just that tiny Bering Strait between him and Russia. Japan and Korea, too, so close. Over the long distance she and Jeter plotted permanent reunion; they’d drive during Jeter’s next leave to the J.P. in Lawrenceburg. For a full week during that furlough Jeter returned Lydia to her doorstep, as if each outing was any of their ordinary dates. And the last night then, with Lydia wearing her favorite pink boucle suit, they drove across the state line.

“You look sweet as icing,” Jeter said. He scooped her to him and kissed her so recklessly the car jerked over the yellow lane divider and back. With a second kiss, he tasted her neck.

When he had to rejoin his unit in Anchorage, what could she do but follow? Her parents thought it was a party “the kids” had gone to. They were expecting her home. She’d slipped out, with her new husband’s help, hefting two suitcases and a train case, her makeup spilling over inside.

Russ came running to the kitchen, his Red Ball Jets squeaking on the linoleum. Lucky he wore rubber on his feet or he’d be shocking Lydia every time he raced from the living room carpet and pummeled into her calves with his short, compact body. He was like a dwarf or a stout magical elf. Lydia’s passion for her boy could not be contained inside the walls of this house, but she had no idea what to do with him.

“I love you, Mommy.”

“I love you, too, baby.”

Russ burrowed his head into her with his face to the floor. His shoes squeaked as he squirmed. His fine hair, in the all-purpose bowl cut Jeter gave him, swished against Lydia’s thigh. She still wore her housecoat, though the gold filigreed wristwatch with the springy black band that had been Jeter’s surprise for her twenty-third birthday read half past morning. Russ’s wiggling had opened the halves of her robe and exposed her. She stood barefoot. He was worshipping her leg, dribbling his face down her ankle.

Lydia double-knotted the robe’s belt to keep herself covered. She took a drag from her cigarette and set it on the edge of the sink. Then she bent to Russ and yanked him from his worming around. Her hands grabbed him up by his armpits. She stood him on his own two feet.

“Do you have to go potty?” She shoved her face into his to make him look at her.

“No.” He couldn’t stand still.

“Do you, Russ?”

Jeter insisted that a mother had to set rules, but any little battle defeated her. She longed to turn her back on this problem, wanted to be liked by everyone, most of all her boy. She’d once had a determined will; because of Russ, it melted.

“I don’t have to,” Russ said. He pouted.

Okay, she wanted to sigh, leaving him to his toddler peculiarities.

Since she’d lowered herself to his level he burrowed into her stomach.

She shook his shoulder, his sweet substantial shoulder. How had this boy made it out of her in the first place? “Russ, tell me true,” she said.

He hung his head. He plunged into that bottom rib right above where Lydia had folded her belly as she squatted next to him. They both collapsed on the floor. Her robe, as a cover-up, hardly mattered.

She saw sugar had been spilled under the kitchen table. Black ants were marching away with it toward the base boards, one grain per ant. They were orderly, efficient. Each little beast knew the routine.

Lydia could smell her boy’s odor escaping even as he tried to hold it in. Russ struggled against giving up anything, especially his own shit. He was a rock, a mule, a headache. He had a problem with the potty.

He leaned into her, squirmed half in her lap.

“Look at the ants, Russ.” She pointed them out and envisioned a day-long project of watching their progress, their getaway.

Oh, to remain on the cool linoleum and let it soothe every part of her it touched. They would see something accomplished no matter how long the job took. She stood suddenly, heaving Russ up, and in that moment he forgot to struggle. She slung him over her shoulder so far he hung halfway down her back.

“I’ve got an old sack of potatoes,” she called out like a grocer at Findlay Market. It was all kidding, part of their mother-baby game, but Russ wouldn’t play.
His fists pounded an echo she could feel in her lungs.

They both screamed, “No!”

Lydia stood him on the half moon rug in front of the bathroom sink. She scooted Russ closer to the toilet so she could steal his place and clench her toes into the deep pile of the carpet. He slapped his sweaty hands on her cheeks and her ears. He pulled her short hair that she’d not yet washed today. She tugged his pants down, outers and inners, and plopped him on the seat. There she held his thighs tight under her hands. In this she found her best strength of the day. She pinned her boy, directed her whole one hundred and nine pounds through her two shaky arms so her elbows trembled in their locked positions. The bangles she wore, three silver and three gold, clanked against the porcelain when they slid down her right wrist. Her struggle with Russ had flipped over her birthday watch so the shiny back side was all Lydia knew of the time.

Russ cried hot tears as he strained. He was straining to get up, straining to push, straining away from her, straining to burrow against her body.

“Oh no you don’t.” Lydia almost sang it, rejoicing in the fact she’d maneuvered Russ onto “the big people’s potty.” “I am very proud of you, Russ.” She gagged at the smell as she praised him.

Russ clonked his skull on hers. Each of his hands clenched around each of her ears so the pliable bones at the edges were bending and sore. She and Russ locked limbs, sweaty and brimming with their opposite intents, both of them as inanimate as tub or sink or wash machine. In overpowering Russ, Lydia felt more resolute than she’d ever thought possible. Not since she’d eloped had she known such victory. Blood, or something just below skin level, traveled throughout her scalp, a chemical rush that blared emergency, as if she’d veered into oncoming traffic.

“All done, honey?” She used her cheeriest voice to congratulate him.

He clonked her head with his, a “yes” nod.

She wiped and released Russ, then grabbed him back before he could tumble away.

“One minute, buddy.” She pulled up his pants and tapped his behind. “Okay. Go play.”

She watched him motor off on his strong little legs—ham bones, Jeter teasingly called the boy’s fat thighs– the hem of his outer pants hanging far enough to conceal the mark of her hold on him.

When Jeter came home, Lydia turned from the stove where she had chops sizzling in the fry pan so she could collect a kiss.

She announced, “Guess what Russ did today!” She imagined herself through Jeter’s eyes, seeing her pretty and teasing and triumphant. She felt that way. She’d washed and set her hair so it gleamed black and sleek. She dressed in red because Jeter remarked the color set against her dark hair was “alluring.” The red halter blouse with its peplum looked great, she thought, paired with these black pedal pushers from her pre-pregnancy wardrobe she’d starved herself to return to. A Tareyton, lipstick-kissed around its filter, sat poised on the edge of the sink. Its long ash would soon fall into the stacked breakfast plates with their cloudy morning water still shallow and dripping against the plugged drain.

Lydia’s eyes glittered. She might have just finished crying. Russ sat under the kitchen table watching the ants devise a detour around his Red Ball Jets. He licked his finger and then touched the sugar so he could eat it.

Jeter grabbed Russ up from his hidey-place and tickled his boy’s belly. “You big boy. Did you use our potty? Is that what you did? That’s super. That’s super duper.” He delivered to Russ’s gut what they called “tickle bombs.”

Wait a minute. Had he even kissed her?

Lydia’s razzle dazzle voice failed to impress Jeter so she swallowed it.

“And we’ve got ants.” She pointed out the sugar supply line trimming the baseboard.

“I’ll spray,” Jeter said.

He released the boy, who tucked and rolled and promptly unwound. Before Jeter could rise, Russ jumped on his daddy’s back the way he did when the two of them played along with television’s Big Time Wrestling, mimicking the dangerous and the fake. “Whooaaa.” Jeter bucked and bronco-ed with Russ giggling on top of him.
Lydia shut down the stove burner. “The ants can wait,” she said. “Let’s eat.”

Russ sang, “Ants, ants, ants, ants.” He leapt out of a squat and then made himself into a small box of a boy, then erupted again, racing around to slap his palm on every kitchen surface like he was taking inventory.

Jeter scooped him up when Russ finished the circuit, while Lydia set plates on the table.

“Those ants in your pants driving you crazy? Huh?” He settled Russ in his high chair.

“He’s just naturally buggy,” Lydia said. She ruffled Russ’s hair and he pushed her hands off as Jeter used a piece of torn bed sheet to tie the boy to his seat. Otherwise he’d slide right down behind his tray, squirming and wriggling until he broke free.

Even this might only guarantee them five minutes to gulp dinner before Russ began bellowing. Her mother had suggested the tactic, and for once she’d contributed something applicable to Lydia’s real life. With Russ, you had to be a warrior with ambush and a whole arsenal of tricks and coercion.

After supper Jeter pushed back his chair and hung his head so he could see the enemy below table-level. “I guess I’m off to the garage,” he said.

“Me, too,” Russ called, running in from the living room and crashing into Jeter’s legs.

“For the poison,” Lydia said.

“You know another way to stop them?”

She shrugged, but she had reservations. The ants followed instinct, so who was she to interfere?

“Come on, Russ. Us boys got work to do. We got to save the little lady from the varmints.”

“Varnt, varnt, varnt,” Russ chanted, stomping and marching in Jeter’s footsteps.

Lydia, nearest the kitchen exit, got to her feet and held the screen door for both of them, then called after, “Don’t let Russ touch anything.”

Jeter turned to face her and the house while approaching the garage backwards. He saluted. She waved from behind the screen, thinking of his soldier days. She whispered, “At ease.”

They disappeared inside where Jeter parked the Plymouth and the lawn mower, which left Lydia in the very same place she’d been that morning, staring out at the yard, greeted by birds that dipped close in one formation and then rolled away like they were peeling back the sky.

Jeter and Russ returned to the kitchen with a spray tank and Jeter let the boy hold the nozzle.

“Aim low,” Jeter told him.

She looked away from Russ, whose eyes had the gleam of an executioner.

The canister hissed as Jeter pumped it, and the nozzle hissed as Russ drowned the ants with more than his usual excitement. Lydia held her inhale. The ants lay inert and scattered, like spilled jimmies off a cupcake.

“I have to get out of here,” she said.

Jeter, in his bent, administering, pal-to-Russ position, looked up at her. “I thought this was what you wanted.”

“Me, too. I thought so, too.”

The patio held its reservoir of fresh air. Her bare toes gripped the pocked surface of the cement. How hard and lovely and lasting it was, as manmade and modern as the products they churned out at Fernald, she guessed. She didn’t really know. People who worked there nimbly changed the subject when you asked. Jeter did. And she didn’t have the guts to push him on it.

She traveled the sidewalk around the house and down the driveway to the edge of the road where a cardinal lay flattened on its own bent wing, an origami bird among flame-colored leaves. All false beauty to distract from the ugly underneath, she thought. The underneath, where ants met in a frenzy, feasting and undiscovered. Lydia worked the hinge of her elbow, brought her hand to her breast, swung her arm open like a gate and then back to her heart, as if she was revving up and preparing to give Russ a good spanking, or maybe practicing to lift her chin, shoulders, feet, and fly.

Later, on the back step, she tapped out a cigarette. One left in the pack. Tomorrow, then, there’d be a trip to the store, and that thought cheered her up. She blew smoke into the deeper dusk. Beside her Jeter sat, his long gorgeous arms dangling the beer bottle between his legs.

He said, “Look at our boy tear around after those lightning bugs.”

Lydia squinted to try and locate Russ, but the dark both reduced and expanded the space around his body.

She said, “He’s been beating up on me all day.”

Jeter took a long drink and swallowed. “And vice versa, from the looks of it.”

“Are you blaming me?”

“Should I?”

He hadn’t been there. He didn’t know how tough it could be.

She shrugged. “I’m doing all I can.”

“Lid, are you, really?”

She could feel his eyes directed on her. He drank his beer.

The insecticide smell hung in the air. It seeped through the screen door as they sat observing Russ ricochet around the yard. Lydia imagined poison dusting her clean hair and her eyelashes and her lips. It married what she was sucking through the cigarette. She drew it all in more heavily and her lungs held it longer.
“I’m not the guilty party,” she said.

He stood and stalked off until she could no longer see him, then he accused her from the distance: “You’re as bull-headed as the boy.”

“Come on, Russ,” his voice called out in the dark. “Time to pack it in for tonight.”

“So what if we’re both obstinate?” she said, probably not loud enough.

Then Jeter materialized so fast out of the dark he spooked her.

“If you’re aware, then shouldn’t that give you some kind of edge? You’re his mother, for God’s sake.”

“Yes, I am,” she said, sick to death of everything they worked at keeping veiled. She wished he’d just blow up at her. The night spread too silent and the darkness too dark. The little bit of wind died to nothing.

She heard the wet and breathy running around of her boy in the yard. She said, “If we don’t bring him in soon he’s going to get chilled, all sweaty as he’s gotten.”

“Russ,” Jeter called.

“Wait,” the boy panted as he ran past them.

Jeter collapsed beside Lydia on the step. “He won’t be still a minute, will he?” He sounded like the reality of Russ’s limitless energy was just now dawning on him.

“Always yo-yo-ing off somewhere,” she said. Affection coasted in her blood — beyond passion, beyond care. “And then you know what?” she said. “He’ll suddenly pop into my lap like a cork from under water.”

Jeter said, “You might as well be talking about your own unpredictability.”

Apology fused with affection in his work-weary voice, one of his make-up tactics she’d come to recognize, but she didn’t fault him for it. When he pulled Lydia on to his knees, she felt if he could give an inch then she could give two. She snuggled her face near his ear, and he linked his arms around her, shoulders to thighs. They made a knot of perfume and soap, smoke and sweat, and insecticide kisses.

“Now who’s the baby?” Lydia said. There lurked the possibility of romance, but then Jeter called out, past her cheek and her short curls tucked behind her ear: “Russ.”

Miracle that the boy skidded to a stop at their feet.

Jeter said, “Hey there, Speedy.”

Lydia imagined a huge cloud of dust obscured by the night. Russ delivered to them the aroma of mulched leaves and the lovely sweat smell that rose from his scalp.

“We both liked the ants, didn’t we, Russ?” she said. She tried to sound nonchalant, even cheery, while she brimmed with wishes and wistfulness and a little regret. She turned all her charm on her boy.

“Oh, there’ll be more ants,” Jeter said, reeling her into his chest, luring her away from Russ. “Bet on it. This season or next, they’ll swarm.”

Hardly the first time Lydia felt divided. Perhaps she let Russ push her to her limits precisely so she could pinch him, since pinching him was a little like pinching herself. If her mother had been visiting and witnessing, she would have stood with crossed arms, impatient as she observed Lydia’s give and take with Jeter, and with Russ wiggling to make a space for himself between them, as if she were waiting for a late rent check to warm her palm, nodding and congratulating herself on another prediction come true.

“Lousy renter, spirited daughter,” she might say, “both hip deep in trouble of their own making.”

Lydia, of course, would quibble. “Nothing murky here,” she’d say, but she might be lying. She’d lied plenty to her parents. She routinely packaged little anecdotes about Russ to tell her mother, half-truth half-invention, to keep her off her back.

“The little savage,” she might say into the telephone while Russ played with trucks in a world of his own making. “The boy will not nap.”

Her mother’s advice: “Eradicate before those bad habits become ingrained.”

Like the ants, Lydia, thought. They had to go. Nothing personal.

Above her boy’s tousled hair, her gaze roamed the backyard, skimmed the dark figures which were probably just leafless trees. All this shadow upon shadow inspired the rippling she’d felt earlier all along her scalp, an alertness, an itch.

Russ leaned in, trying to separate her from Jeter. His elbows dug into their soft parts as he leaned in with his body and expelled his sweet candy breath. “Swarm, warm, worm, warm,” he chanted.

“His voice is hoarse,” she said. “See? He’s caught cold just like I predicted.”

“No one knows Russ like his mommy,” Jeter said. “Ain’t that right?”

He swooped a tickle bomb into Russ’s belly so the boy collapsed on his giggles, fighting off his daddy and squirming to Lydia, begging her, “Save me save me,” which was as it should be. Because I’m his mother, she thought. The declaration spilled over with all the extravagance and collusion and subterfuge that motherhood implied. She felt her heart might burst.

Heat from his little furnace of a body and the damp, spent smell of autumn grass rolled off Russ and wove in between their hugging arms and legs. The sweet Russ smell threaded itself among the leftover ant poison. It paired up with Jeter’s weakened aftershave and the beer on his breath, knit with her own sweat-diluted perfume. What Russ brought them wove into a net, a safety net. Lydia sucked on her own tongue to calm herself. She held the taste of nicotine in her mouth while she counted down the seconds, then she said, “What did you use?”

Jeter unwound from Russ’s limbs and wordlessly acknowledged that she meant the ant concoction. “Little bit of this, little bit of that.” He snapped his fingers. “And, voila.” As if he was King of Chemistry.

“Time to go inside, Russ,” Jeter said.

“Pooh,” their boy said through a wet pout. He pried Lydia’s hands from her knees finger by finger. He tried launching her up from behind with his knees in her kidneys.

“Take him,” she said, and Jeter lifted Russ to his chest. “In,” she said.

“Are you coming?”

“In a minute.”

Russ called to her with outstretched arms: “Mommy!” His head hung horizontal. Jeter’d trapped the boy’s thighs at his own hips, otherwise he was perpendicular.

“I promise she’ll be in right after us.” Jeter pivoted Russ to the house while Russ leaned mightily opposite.

Lydia fled down the driveway to the garage.

“Vroom, vroom,” Jeter’s make-believe truck growled from the back step.

“Vroom, vroom,” Russ squealed.

The screen door slapped its divide, their voices and bodies receding, receding where all was dark until Jeter hit the light switch in each room they traversed, probably flying Russ now like an airplane, his arms held out stiff from his chubby sides, maybe Russ slapping the lights on himself, deep into a game she didn’t initiate.

Lydia had a husband and a father who’d provide whatever she cared for, but she wanted to verify, and in verification sabotage her peace of mind. Shouldn’t be stepping in this garage barefoot, she thought. The concrete was warm and gritty, smelled of motor oil and sand.

The back shelves stocked all kinds of stuff Jeter worked with– for car and lawnmower, for plugged drains and shorted-out switches, for house patch and paint, for garden and basement, all the foggy things that took place in the dim coal room downstairs. Things for making a mess and solvent for cleaning up. Lighter fluid, turpentine, mouse traps, and paint sticks. Dozens of metal tools and small drawers full of sorted smaller things which required those tools. Pesticide containers lined the top-most garage shelf in the way her canisters of flour, sugar and salt sat in the pantry. Skulls and crossbones posted the same warnings printed on the backs of Drano and Borax and Comet cleanser Lydia had inside her house beneath the sink or in the laundry cabinet.

Chlor-Kil was an amber liquid in an amber bottle, like medicine Harry Rudemiller would hand you across his counter at the Family Pharmacy. She hoped the “little bit” Jeter’d mixed in was mostly water. Even Lydia knew you shouldn’t stir different chemicals together. Dilution for in-the-house spraying only made sense. And all for the sake of some ants. She could imagine her mother’s blame: Well, you started it. In lifting one foot, then the other, Lydia misplaced the floor grit. Some of it stuck to the sweat between her toes. She bounced in place in the garage, no closer to exit but entering no deeper, jigging her weight right and left as if the floor held hot coals she’d sworn to walk across on a dare.

Read Donna D. Vitucci’s bio »

Lorraine had always loved the crackling way the yellow leaves in the trees of her yard announced the fall’s arrival with a color so warm. She thought of herself, now, at sixty, like the leaves—a bit dry, but still warm, even as she faced the end of life.

She could never say this to her husband. Since her cancer, they couldn’t talk of death anymore. He used to say things like, “That man should be shot,” or “I’m gonna kill myself.” That was in jest, of course, but now it wasn’t funny.

So now it seemed the chemotherapy had worked and Lorraine had convinced Mitch he could return back to work in the chemistry department—“Better living through science,” she’d said, but he didn’t laugh— and the house was Lorraine’s again during the day. She could take her warm herbal tea out to her favorite place on the back porch and listen to the dying leaves all by herself and think of them, and herself, as similar things—dry, wrinkled, breastless, but still warm and beautiful.

This is what she was doing at ten in the morning on a November day when the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Mom?” It was her younger son, Steven. He had been married two years.

“Yes?”

“I’ve got news about the baby.” Steven’s wife was pregnant.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Mom, listen, it’s just that we’ve learned that it’s gonna be a boy.”

“Oh, Steven,” she sighed.

“Yeah, I know.” Steven’s older brother’s wife, Dianne, had had a girl baby. It was no secret that Lorraine had wanted a boy. “So, I was thinking,” Steven continued. “I was thinking that maybe you want to give us those clothes you’ve been saving….”

“Yes, yes, of course!” Lorraine almost shouted. “You’re a good boy, Steven.”

“Yeah, well.”

Lorraine took her tepid herbal tea and poured it down the sink before changing into a t-shirt and jean overalls. So much for the contemplation of leaves and dying. There was life, new life, coming, and it was time to move from her place on the porch and get busy.

Once up in the attic, she started sneezing from the dust and had to come back down the stairs again to get an antihistamine. Then she started up the stairs again, armed with tissues and plastic bags and a knife.

She went to the first box labeled “Newborn” and opened it carefully with the knife, cutting the yellowed tape with the serrated edge. The clothes inside were first worn by her son Samuel, and then, three years later, by Steven, so the box had been unopened for thirty-three years.

And now the tiny clothes would be worn by her first grandson. The thought of it made Lorraine start to weep a little, so she grabbed a tissue to wipe her eyes.

When she opened them again, what she saw at the top of the box was a tiny yellow cardigan. It had been hand knit by Mitch’s mother for Samuel. It had an “S” sewn onto one of its tiny yellow pockets to make a place for the baby’s tiny hand. Mitch had joked that Lorraine named her next son Steven so that he, too, could wear this sweater. Perhaps he had been right. At the time, of course, Lorraine had snapped, in that way that mothers of two young children have been known to do, saying, “Don’t be such an ass.”

But Mitch had been right. Lorraine did love this sweater. It was knitted with angora, for softness, and virgin wool, for warmth. Lorraine herself could never knit—or sew or crochet or do much of anything that women of her generation were supposed to do– so this sweater, when her mother-in-law gave it to her, in the days before the first birth, was a kind of welcoming. A kind of acceptance. “You’ll never be me,” her mother-in-law was saying, “but you don’t have to be.”

When Lorraine learned that Samuel’s wife would be having a daughter, she was relieved. She hadn’t really wanted to give the sweater to her. At the time, Lorraine was not sure why.

But now as Lorraine rubbed the soft yellow knitting across her face, she suddenly remembered the last time Steven had worn the sweater. How could she have forgotten this? How could she have misplaced this memory?

Of course, people did forget things like this all the time. That’s how people continued going on, as she and Mitch did, over years and years of marriage.

It might have been the cancer that had cleaned out the cobwebs in the place of her memory, Lorraine thought. She had been sure, as Mitch sat by her side in the oncology ward, day after day, that she was going to die. All thoughts of regrets for the past—what had taken place or not taken place over the course of the marriage—were destroyed by the radiation.

It had been a beautiful fall, like this one. Mitch wanted to take her with him to a new place. He was giving a paper at the American Scientists Association Conference in New Orleans. “It’ll be romantic,” he had said, remembering the places they’d gone together before they had children.

Except now they had children. Two. Mitch’s mother offered to take care of three year-old Samuel, but since Steven was still breastfeeding, they would have to take him.

So, they went, the three of them, on a plane to New Orleans, for a romantic getaway. But Mitch was the one who could get away. He spent hours in the panel sessions, leaving Lorraine with a fussy Steven, saying, “Go see the sights. Take a tour.”

But it was hot. Hotter, in October, than their hometown was in the summer. Lorraine loved warm places, but this place was downright hot. And there were not enough leaves. Too many cypress and pine trees. Lorraine, already hot from the breastfeeding hormones, was not especially in the mood to take a city tour, particularly when she would have had to have one of her breasts partially exposed on the bus throughout the day.

So she spent her days in the air-conditioned hotel lobby. Every two hours and fifteen minutes, the scientists would come streaming out from the conference rooms, grab coffee and muffins like hungry refugees, and then rush back in to the next session. Not one of them spoke to her. Some would look, quickly, with a blank stare that showed they only saw “Wife” when they looked at her, or with a more embarrassed glance if they allowed themselves to register that her breast’s soft pale skin was revealed just above the yellow shoulder of the baby’s sweater.

On the third afternoon of the conference, an African American man came by and sat down next to her and Steven in the middle of a session.

“Nice and quiet here,” he said.

“Yes,” she offered.

“I just couldn’t take anymore of the pomposity,” he said.

“Oh?” Her eyebrows raised only slightly.

“Three days is quite enough, yes.”

“You’re a scientist?” she asked.

“Yes. Grant Ford,” he said, and for a split second she was not sure if he meant that this was his name or he was working on a grant sponsored by Ford. Many of these scientists, she knew, honestly cared more about the foundations that gave them grants than they cared for their own names.

He reached out his warm dark hand, and she met it with her own pale one, and gave him her name. “Lorraine Dixon.”

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Dixon.”

“Please. Lorraine.”

“Lorraine. Call me Grant.”

At the memory of his fingers wrapping around hers, Lorraine decided the attic was not the right place for this memory and took the yellow sweater downstairs to the kitchen and started heating water for another cup of tea.

“What’s your baby’s name?”

“Steven.”

“Ah, I see the ‘S.’ It’s a lovely sweater.”

“My mother-in-law made it.” She knew she said it as a warning. It was meant to remind him that she was married.

But with the honest light of age upon her now, in her yellow kitchen, Lorraine could admit, as she poured the hot water over the bag of chamomile, that it was she herself who had needed warning.

“Lovely,” Grant said again, his eyes giving off hazel sparks. “My grandmother used to knit. Before she passed. I don’t know what happened to all those sweaters and blankets she made. I was in college then. Too young to know what was important to save.”

Lorraine nodded again, in the kitchen, just as she had then, at the wisdom of his statement.

“May I touch it?” he asked, extending his steady hand slightly.

“Sure,” she remembered herself whispering. The hot tea burned her tongue.

As his hand caressed her sleeping baby boy’s back, she found herself feeling wet, and before she knew it, her breasts had soaked the lavender blouse she was wearing, turning it a dark purple.

“Oh my,” he murmured.

She could not speak.

Lorraine walked slowly, moving from the kitchen to the living room and then up the stairs to the bedroom as, in her memory, they had walked together from the lobby to her hotel room on the second floor.

He took his place on the bed, freshly made by a stranger’s hands. He was waiting, as she put the still sleeping baby down on a soft recliner, pulled another chair next to it for a makeshift crib, and started to unbutton her blouse.

He watched.

She undid the back of her bra, stretched and faded from months of breastfeeding, and her breasts came spilling out.

“Come here,” he said, in a low voice.

She walked to his place on the bed, as she was walking to the bed, now.

He took her breasts in his hands and held them to his face. Then he put his lips around the warm nipple of one, held his mouth in that place, gently, and then moved to the other. Milk streamed from both. He moved back and forth, sucking and swallowing, with his mouth, as his hands brought her hips up close to his body.

He moved back slowly and pulled her after him, tugging her skirt up as Lorraine was doing now, so that eventually she was sitting on his lap with her legs around him, and his fingers were between her legs as her fingers were now and he was continuing to suck and then she was, as she was now, moaning, and after her pleasure had moved in warm circles from the places he touched to the whole of her body, he lay her down gently upon the bed and covered her body with a warm blanket, as she was doing now, then he kissed her once more and left.

In the memory the baby slept and then woke, but there was no baby now, only the yellow sweater that, she realized with a slight start, she was still holding in her hands.

She would keep it, she decided. She had lost this memory for so many years and now she did not want to let it go. She folded the sweater carefully, patted its yellow softness, its warmth, its secret, and put it in the top drawer of her dresser, never to be boxed up or forgotten again.

Read Cassie Premo Steele’s bio »

“There is always one night where you stand
insufficient before the sea.”
Lorand Gaspar, Islands.

I’m in St. Malo, on the eyelid of France, to teach English to high school students. I work a scant twelve hours a week, which isn’t much even by French standards. But what the days lack in length they make up for in width.

Each day I stand alone in front of a classroom full of bored teenagers, gesticulating wildly, trying to teach myself how to teach. I had put my hope in the one-day training session provided by the Ministry of Education, but the course taught nothing of classroom psychology. My students talk out of turn, slump, sleep, fix me with sullen stares, and I sweat and try to steady my voice. My lessons succeed or fail with little indication of what worked and what didn’t.

Meanwhile, beneath my racing heart, I battle myself. I’m here because of my love of language and a desire for cultural exchange—specifically the French language and the French culture. But I am also here out of despair. Deeply disappointed in my country’s arrogance and aggression, I am the caricature of sheltered disillusionment and shock. I’m here, out of my element, because my element feels sick, poisoned. France somehow seems the saner sister to the U.S.

There is no rest from that here, of course, no way to reconcile my disappointment with my country and a love for a culture that (gently, subtly) disdains mine. I long to speak French and immerse myself in the French way of life; instead, I’m meant to speak English and talk about “what it means to be an American,” exactly the thing I’d like to forget.

All of this clamors for my attention amidst photocopies and administrative tasks, the confusion of vocabulary jostling about in my brain, and that cold, dry-throated feeling you get, at any age, when navigating the echoing halls of a high school.

I do the best I can. I put in my time. Then I shut my locker and head for the sea.

I take the same long loop most evenings, starting from my tiny flat, my cheeks stinging with cold and salt as I walk. Depending on the tide, I go down to the beach or follow the seawall to the heavy stone perimeter of the old walled city.

St. Malo is a tidal circus. Four times a year, at each equinox and solstice, the grands marées unleash ocean against stone. Swelling with unrest, the waves rise with alarming speed, rearing back and rushing forward again. Over and over the waves stampede against the walls, shooting skyward like geysers, then overflowing and rushing onto cobblestone and asphalt. By morning, the sea has calmed and receded, leaving everything strewn with seaweed. Malouins come out in tall boots and windbreakers, with buckets, fishing poles, and nets, to gather the edible creatures among the rocks. The police pace the beach, too, scanning for WWII bombs disturbed in the upheaval and washed on shore.

The city is layered with history, but the sea is a clean slate—eternal, impersonal, indifferent. It’s a narrow inward jutting of ocean, the English Channel. La Manche: the ‘sleeve’ between France and England.

In my daily life, the threads of English and French tangle my thoughts into impossible knots, and it’s comforting to unravel them as I walk, to stare at the islands that have no names, craggy and gray on the horizon. There are 365 islands off the coast of Brittany, one for every day of the year, and many are simply jagged rocks where nobody goes, their rough-edged peaks hostile to the flesh.

On Wednesday nights, I go to a language class at the Alliance Française. A multiplicity of accents—Chinese, Slovakian, Ethiopian, Colombian, Guatemalan, Scottish, English, American—lap up around the strange contours of French words. Their shapes are foreign in our mouths, but we laugh and talk about our lives in St. Malo, our lives back home. One way or another, we get the main feelings across, whether through detours and pantomimes, or translation byway of English.

Here among other étrangers, strangers navigating day-to-day life in a foreign language, the particulars seem to dissolve. We share the same desire to communicate, the same frustration with our awkwardness in a strange culture. This somehow renews in me a sense of compassion for my students, who arrive in a foreign land each time they enter the English classroom.

But unlike here, where English is as welcome and useful as a rescue raft to a shipwreck survivor, for my students it is the assumption of English as the common denominator that grates, that distances us. On top of their resentment that English has become the default common language, my students reserve special scorn for the American accent. They prefer British English instead, which is seen as more proper and more desirable to prospective employers in Europe. In class, I try to draw them out, asking them to tell me, in their British English, about their hopes and fears for the work lives ahead of them.

They are aspiring kinesthesiologists, engineers, nurses, firefighters. In their quiet answers to my questions, there is the unmistakable ring of certainty. Whatever they make of it, there is a place for them in the future. Most imagine themselves working for a French company, living and raising a family in France. I am struck, as I will be during countless family meals with students and teachers, by the depth of their rootedness in their country and culture.

Later, through the caffeinated crowds in the teacher’s lounge, the joke-cracking philosophy teacher hands me a copy of Le Monde Diplomatique, and points to an article entitled “Contre le Tout-Anglais.” Against All-English, All the Time. It touches on 1994’s Toubon Law, which made it mandatory for all French firms located in France to use the French language. The debate over the right to “create, hire, work, access information, and enjoy leisure in one’s own language, in French,” has reached a deafening pitch of late. Not surprisingly, there are fiery emotions on either side of the argument.

In the resistance to English, and the partial mandating of French, some see a clinging to former glory and the remnants of colonial condescension, an attempt to suppress other languages with one’s own. In the embrace of English, some see a sign that France is making the emotional shifts necessary to embrace an inevitably globalizing world—an extremely painful process for a country with infamously strong cultural pride. This shifting is tectonic, explosive, as the European Union consolidates land masses once regarded as islands.

An American CEO starts a firm in France, and requires that all workplace communication be conducted in English, violating la loi Toubon. “Since the national and the international are tightly woven,” the article’s author asks, “what could be more natural than that the language of the Dow Jones index and the City [New York] should be at home everywhere, in the street as in the workplace?” The word choice here is illuminating: in French, the word for language is feminine, and in this article ‘she’ is described as being chez elle [at home] everywhere ‘she’ goes. The translation does not quite capture the sense of indignation, the suggestion of arrogance on the part of the English language, as an extension of American arrogance and presumption to essentially take over wherever it sees fit.

Not so long ago, it was French making itself chez elle in countries all over the world. French is still the official language of almost half of all countries in Africa, and predominantly spoken where not official. It is spoken in the countries identified as Maghreb. It is spoken in places once considered part of France— Laos and Vietnam—and in places still considered part of France: Corsica and French Guyana, Guadeloupe and Martinique.

Certainly, there are consequences to mandating a language. The most direct is the loss of diversity. The dialect of Brittany, Breton, almost died out completely when the state forbade children from speaking it in their schools. Once seen as backward, Breton has only very recently regained value as an important piece of cultural heritage. It hangs on to life in university programs and language schools for children.

Toubon does not say that firms must use French exclusively—important in an era when European firms must communicate globally to compete, and when such conversations are overwhelmingly conducted in English. Yet there are excellent reasons for safeguarding a worker’s right to work in their own language.

There’s the 2008 radiation overdose in Epinal’s central hospital, which resulted in the deaths of four cancer patients whose medical technicians misunderstood computer software that was not translated into French. As part of his election promises, Nicholas Sarkozy vowed to uphold the right to speak French in the French workplace.

A related law mandates that a certain number of songs played on French radio stations must be in French, that the majority of films at movie theaters come from France, and that foreign television shows must be dubbed. This extends to a percentage of commercials and advertisements. For all this, my students know more American pop songs than I do; when I ask “What else?” in class, prompting them to elaborate on a response, they erupt into laughter. I’ve just repeated the tag line of a current television ad for instant coffee, featuring George Clooney.

When the pressure to globalize hardly feels like a choice, and when technology and commerce speak English because in recent history, the countries in control of the most resources have been Anglophone, how can I blame my students for their resentment and distrust? I, too, am wary of a globalizing world, where we is a pronoun used as a weapon. I did not think of myself as a we before leaving the U.S., which in itself speaks volumes of my cultural conditioning, having grown up in a country with a naïve (at best) understanding of independence.

I’m beginning to wonder if it’s really possible to escape the self, one’s own image, in a globalized world. Don’t look at me, I want to say, I’m here for the French. But the students look at me, because I’m the one at the front of the classroom, waving my arms and talking in a funny way, “like gargling rocks.”

English – my mother tongue, mother language, my langue maternelle. There are lovely mirrors in French: mere, mother, and mer, ocean. English is my ocean language. It has a rhythm of its own, an archipelago of memories that go deeper into my consciousness than I can. All associations between signifier and signified were originally entered in English in my mind—specifically in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that governs memory and language.

One Wednesday night, the Guatemalan au pair tells me that when her father suffered a stroke in this part of the brain, he emerged from a month-long coma with his mother tongue literally yanked from his mouth. Previously fluent in English, with Spanish as his first language, he now speaks only in Spanish-accented English. How deeply connected are we then, to these neurons? How much do the words we speak really define who we are, who we think we are?

Hippocamp is the French word for ‘seahorse,’ and a character in Robert Desnos’ serial poem Siramour. Desnos was a French Surrealist poet, an active member of the Resistance arrested by the Gestapo in 1944. He died of typhoid in a Czech concentration camp; over sixty years later, in a city still haunted by the memory of the Occupation, I haul out a giant dictionary to decode his poem, a kind of love letter written from l’hippocampe to a mermaid, sirène. The mermaid’s identity is mysterious: is she the sea, the muse, the spirit, the self? She’s a little of all of these, and always just beyond grasping. L’hippocampe becomes utterly lost in the great mystery, daring to fall in love with her.

Une algue perdu au large, détachée d’on ne sait quel haut-fond et travaillée par les phénomènes de la dissolution et de la germination. (Seaweed lost in the abyss, detached from we know not what heights, worked over by the phenomena of dissolution and germination.)

I want to dissolve here, in the rain and the salt wind. I want to dissolve my sense of self as American, to experience this foreign culture from the inside out. But no matter how well I learn the language, I continue to feel alone, apart. In the streets, on the train, in cafes, I listen in astonishment as two- and four-year-old children float blithely in the sea of sounds, mimicking and babbling back more perfectly than I can through years of concerted effort. Their proficiency almost frightens me, showing me how I received my mother tongue, innocently, through open ears. Language is impersonal as the moon.

And yet as we grow older, the sponge-like absorption of our youth gives way to a stranger, more sophisticated acquisition process. Conglomerations of words, memories, and emotion attach to our sides slowly, like barnacles on a whale. The relationship is symbiotic; language grows and evolves as part of the organism.

In the classroom, I am humbled by the students who do want to learn, who can spot a poorly-planned lesson a mile (or 1.6 kilometers) away. Quel leçon louche, one student mutters under his breath when I am caught without an answer to a good question. What a lousy lesson.

I cannot disengage from the part of me that is American, utterly and irrevocably. Those parts of me are inextricable from the rest. They form my memories, my way of seeing and saying and being. Who would I be without them?

So, too, my years in France lodge in the cells of my being. French words, lilting above the market stalls and cried out on the beaches and streets, carry my memories of these years. They contain the tastes and scent of fresh bread, sea salt, cigarettes and coffee in the high school courtyards. For years, long after I leave France, whenever I hear French out of context I am washed over by this particular sea of emotions.

I still cringe at words that call up failed lessons, tears shed in the bathroom or while turned to the window, hidden (so I think) from the appraising stares of those impossibly aloof French teenagers. I tongue the words that hurt like loose teeth, the ones that tore ruthlessly at my romantic ideals. Again, I try to swallow the paltry phrases I offered when asked for my opinion on world political issues, the debates that wore away at my conception of myself as knowledgeable or worldly, my hope that the French language could somehow save me, strip away the ugliness of my country and give me a new identity.

I hovered, in that year between languages, in a kind of word-saturated limbo where meaning and definition canceled each other out. As an unnamed island is defined and shaped by the waves surrounding it, I felt what it is to belong exactly where I come from, and precisely where I stand, both at the same time. I am still finding and redefining that shape, here in the country of my birth— home, in spite of myself.

Read Melissa Reeser Poulin’s bio »

In l990 when I first moved to Antigua, Guatemala, my birder knowledge was…for the birds. Or at least my housemate, Kelly, saw it that way.

I knew enough to feed spinach greens, not stale muffins, to the domestic ducks at Recreation Park in my hometown of Long Beach, CA. Enough to avoid annoying the thirty-pound swans in London’s Hyde Park. Enough to understand that silence is golden while trailing knowledgeable birdwatchers in the woods near The House of the Doves at Uxmal. And once, at my grandmother’s house in Los Angles when I was ten, I learned the hard way that it’s wise to avoid poking a thumb inside a budgie’s cage.

But I never quite understood birders like Kelly, who hiked the John Muir trails with binoculars, packsack and pen. Or who toted notepads to record every winged creature that soared overhead. Now Kelly tried to recruit me to share his obsession.

I’d heard about “The Bird Man of Alcatraz,” but never a bird woman. Batgirl didn’t count…bats were flying mammals, definitely not birds.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m not really interested. Is birding a ladylike activity?”

“Of course it is. Just think of our sundeck as a portal into a world of magic,” he answered, patting the bench beside him, inviting me to join him staring out at our neighbor’s coffee finca. Kelly could sprawl out there for hours, tallying the varieties of feathered creatures that fluttered among the overarching trees.

“Yeah, right. Like Disneyland.”

But Kelly persevered. “Birding is the number one sport in America. It even beats basketball,” this lifelong Lakers fan declared. “And here there’s over 700 species of birds. You gotta pay attention. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity.”

One afternoon he dropped in at Un Poco de Todo, the bookshop nook that faced the Parque Central, and bought me a guide to local Aves.

“Thanks,” I said, “I guess it won’t hurt to give it a try.” So that sunset we sat on the deck together, sipping Gallo, the local beer, right out of the bottle. I’d ceased to care if that were ladylike or not.

After a while Kelly cocked his head toward the flame-hued bougainvillea vine draping the brick wall separating our sunken garden from the finca. “Just listen to that warbler!”

When it came to bird clatters, I scarcely could distinguish a skylark’s carol from a barn owl’s screech. Now I heard a harsh, persistent trill, okey dokey, okey dokey, tweet, tweet, tweet, followed by a cacophony of raucous caws and kissy sounds.

“It sounds like more than one bird.”

Kelly shook his head. “Just one.”

“Is it a crow?”

Kelly laughed. “It’s a mockingbird! Most likely a bachelor. The males without mates usually are the ones who sing at night.”

He winked at me. “The ladies are much more silent. A rare feat of nature.”

I chuckled, and then took another swallow of my Gallo. “All right, Mr. Ornithology, I’ll learn. I promise.”

So I studied my manual. Here in the highlands, I read, we had brown-backed solitaires and black-headed siskins, gray silky-flycatchers and blue-throated motmots, white-winged tanagers and green-throated mountain-gems. I loved the rhythm of the names, and hoped soon to be able to single out some of these rainbow-hued creatures.

Gradually I grew defter at identifying the feathered guests plummeting through our gardens. From time to time I’d point out the iridescent beryline hummingbirds, locally called “garden jewels,” as they darted on nearly invisible wings among the fuchsia shrubs. I’d identify turquoise bushy-crested jays nesting in nearby trees.

Sometimes we welcomed more exotic visitors, an occasional orange-fronted parakeet or emerald toucanet, attracted to the peachy scent of plumeria in the sunken garden. Neither of us hoped ever to spy a parrot in the wild.

The manual said that scarlet macaws, las guacamayas, the national bird of neighboring Honduras, preferred rainforests, but had been known to frequent higher elevations. Because of poachers and deforestation, the macaws were in population decline throughout Central America, but on rare occasions had been spotted in Antigua.

“I’d love to see a scarlet macaw,” I confided on New Year’s Eve. “That really would be something, like a total eclipse of the sun.”

Kelly eyed me strangely. “Funny you mentioned an eclipse,” he said. “In July we’re going to have one right here in Antigua, and we can watch it from the sundeck.”

Soon the Guatemala Times carried warnings against looking directly at the sun. Next we heard it might be better to watch the eclipse on television to avoid eye damage. Kelly laughed and asked if I thought we should just listen to the eclipse on the radio to ensure complete protection.

We marveled at our luck. Thousands were trekking to Hawaii and Baja for a chance to stand in the shadow of the moon. We had merely to pop out to our sundeck to witness darkness at noon. The totality of the eclipse would be nearly seven minutes, the longest for the next 141 years.

I wondered how wild birds would react to “the day of two dawns.” Ex pat friends puzzled over whether roosters would crow at midday. Local gossipers focused on how Maya in the remote rural areas would behave. Would old superstitions prevail, even in l991? Would pregnant women fear miscarriages? Would shamans predict earthquakes, droughts, or other disasters?

On July 11 Kelly and I settled into our deck chairs, with shaded eclipse glasses, macadamias and mimosas at the ready. By noon dogs begin to bay as the moon bit into the western edge of the sun. Birds on the finca floor drifted upwards to roost in the trees.

Tiny spots of light shaped like crescent moons showed up on our deck as the daylight began to fracture. I glanced at the stucco walls of the Hotel Antigua across the way, entranced by thin wavy lines of alternating light and dark. I later learned these “shadow bands” are created by the sunlight being distorted by irregularities in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Suddenly the sky grew dark. We knew this was second contact, so we raised our eyes to the full glory of the sun’s shimmering corona. The petals of the hibiscus in our sunken garden began to curl inwards. The birds ceased their chirrups. I shivered as the temperature dropped. We watched the stars emerge, and singled out Venus.

Moments later as the sky began to lighten, we looked away. Sure enough, roosters crowed. Then Kelly whispered, “Slowly, slowly, turn your head to the right.”

I casually swiveled my head until my eyes fell on a scarlet macaw outlined against the magenta bougainvillea bracts. From its crown to the tip of its bright red tail feathers it measured about three feet. It had to be a male.

“Offer it a nut,” Kelly prompted. I carefully extracted a macadamia from the dish. The silent macaw watched me closely. I rolled the nut gently along the brick wall in the bird’s direction. He reached out his left talon and snatched it up. Then he emitted a low-pitched throaty squawk, bobbed his head, spread his wings and flew back to the finca.

I blinked and shook my head, transfixed by the otherworldly moment.

“Unbelievable.”

Kelly smiled. “Like Disneyland? And something that ladies would appreciate.”

By the time I left Guatemala a year later, I had traded my birder manual for a Spanish textbook, since I was heading to the Dominican Republic to serve as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Kelly, who remained in Antigua, wrote me occasionally. No scarlet macaws ever showed up again, he said. Just parakeets and toucanets.

Years later I experienced a second total solar eclipse, this one on the Black Sea. Terns and other confused seabirds flapped around us, but, alas, not a single scarlet macaw appeared.

Not that I was expecting one. I’ve finally learned enough about birds, and ladies and life, to realize that some things might happen just once in a lifetime…and are well worth waiting for. And that a simple wooden sundeck in Antigua, Guatemala, might indeed turn out to be a portal to a world of enchantment.

Read Dr. Terri Elders’s bio »

On my first day alone in India, a man mistook me for a boy. I was twenty-three and had never before faced any confusion about my preferred pronoun. I was trying to look modest and semi-monastic on my Buddhist pilgrimage. The man took in my buzzed haircut, loose trousers and union-made button-down shirt, the absence of make up or jewelry along with my skinny arms and short stature, and saw a boy of eleven or twelve. He believed this for only a few minutes before something gave me away, and he said, with a bit of surprise and scolding, “I thought you were a boy!” I was unsure what to make of his misunderstanding or his need to tell me. Two days later I bought a demure salwar kameez and my womanhood has never again been questioned.

It’s strange to me that in twenty-eight years, I’ve been read as anything but female exactly once. I’ve worn boys’ clothes, shaved my head repeatedly, and for a brief time, actively strived for butchness and androgyny. I was a late bloomer, knob-kneed and almost breast-less until high school. As a young woman, I devoted myself to trapeze for a year, flaunting defined biceps and rope burns. No matter what I wear or what I do, though, my femininity is obvious to the world.

This is not true of other aspects of my identity. People regularly mistake or wonder intrusively about my age, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, nationality, and even race. Perceptions of these vary by context and the person who is looking. Traveling on four continents and living in five states, I have been seen as Persian, Turkish, Chicana, half-Indian, Spanish, French, Native American, Jewish, Eurasian, and generically white American. People have assumed I’m a straight girl, a dyke, queer, bi in mostly straight way, bi in a mostly gay way, and bi in a mostly bi way. In high school people sometimes thought I was in college, and teaching elementary school right out college, people thought I was a sixth grader. Yet save the once, my gender has always been easily and correctly understood.

This is not a complaint. Other than my awkward coming out, I have consistently leaned heavily toward the stereotypically feminine. I loved princess dresses and pink as a child, and as an adult I claim my femme identity with relish and pride. Facing so many questions about who and what I am, it is a relief to never need to correct the pronouns someone applies to me. I value my gender visibility and recognize my cisgender privilege. I particularly appreciate when I am quickly read as femme in queer community. Being female is my constant place, my permanent and solid identity, no matter where I am or in what other ways I am seen and not seen.

But why is this so clear the world over for me, when it is decidedly not for many people I know? My straight younger sister’s pixie cut in junior high had people calling her “he” for over a year. My female friends with height and broad shoulders have all experienced at least a mistaken “sir” or two. Skinny male friends fond of tight jeans and shaggy haircuts have stories of drive-by sexual harassment from men who believed them to be teenage girls. This doesn’t even touch all the people I know who gender outside the lines, who are trans or genderqueer or in anyway beyond the images assigned to the gender they were raised. They are misnamed and misplaced as frequently as I am called “Miss.” What is it about my gender that makes it easier for everyone to locate than other genders? What makes this part of me obvious everywhere when much of identity shifts depending on the situation, without my control?

For me, traveling alone meant taking advantage of this flexible self and figuring out how to be an “appropriate” woman in different communities. I learned how to get the information and assistance I needed, and I learned to do this as a woman. In some places batting my eyelashes implied sexual interest that I did not have, while in Italy it was difficult to discover the bus schedule without meaningless flirting. In some cultures people came to the aid of a pretty young female crying and acting helpless, while in others such a sight was not met with patience or sympathy. Many parts of myself could be finessed to blend in, and it was easier to allow strangers to see what they wanted. I tried not to dress like a tourist, to learn basic words and phrases to avoid forcing everyone to speak English with me, and went along as best I could. But I was also, except for that single encounter in Bangalore, always seen as female. Unable to disguise this or move outside of gender, I studied what local women did, how they dressed and spoke and placed themselves in their environment, and worked with these rules as I understood them.

My adolescence, on the other hand, was a long rebellion against these kinds of rules. Traveling, I passed through, adopting and dropping habits and customs and identities as a performance separate from my true self. My first eighteen years were spent stuck in a town with more cows than people, where every phase and experiment was remembered and attached to you for life. I could not pretend and understand myself to be pretending there, even if it was safer or less complicated, because doing so seemed to be nodding in agreement. I could not subvert or play the rules I was given, at least not as a teenager. So I pushed and fought and left, and increasingly did not come back.

I am about to visit my Idaho hometown for the first time in five years, and I am bringing my gender variant girlfriend with me. It is not a completely safe thing to do. Racist and anti-Semitic violence thrives, and homophobic harassment is probable bordering on certain. That is, if we are seen as queer. “Dyke” in Lewiston, Idaho, means not truly female, not conforming to visible femininity. If I walk through my hometown alone and say nothing, the dangers I face are about being seen as Jewish or foreign or possibly a person of color. I will probably receive unwanted and potentially aggressive male sexual attention if I go without a man. But with my long hair and skirts and globally agreed upon femaleness, I won’t be seen as a lesbian, and by myself most likely won’t be harassed as one.

I experienced homophobia in high school, mostly when I cut my hair off to come out. It wasn’t my actual same-sex desire, though, that people seemed to have a problem with. It was my feminism, my politics, my insistence that I was smart, my refusal to fawn over boys as they stared at my legs but ignored my words. When I was loud or opinionated, when I didn’t yield the floor to males, I was called a dyke or a bitch. When I simply kissed a pretty girl, no one seemed to mind as long as I was pretty too. An effeminate gay male friend received death threats at our school, and eventually a brutal beating by our peers. I was kicked and shoved in the hallways in eighth grade too, but not when I came out. The violence against me occurred only when a Christian fundamentalist teacher asked me my religion and then announced it to several classes where I was not present, without my knowledge or consent. My queer identity didn’t spark this kind of response, especially after I grew my hair into a bob and started wearing earrings again.

My girlfriend, though, has a gender that’s harder to place. She is mistaken for a boy more than I would expect, her short hair and preference for men’s clothes overriding her generous breasts or less than generous height. In Idaho, she will either be perceived as a dyke or as a boy. The latter is undoubtedly safer for us, and she has said that during our visit, she hopes to pass as male while I hope to pass as straight, both of us disconnected from our identities during our stay.

She says it doesn’t bother her if others stumble over her pronouns. She likes her gender ambiguity, that people don’t automatically place her as female. But being placed as male is not what she wants either, and this can challenge even the sympathetic. Well-meaning people have offered their support for her masculinity without affirming her identification as female. She once dated a woman who told her that if she were a guy, she’d be perfect. Sometimes when she is mistaken for male, people seem pleased with her gender. It is when she corrects them, when she does not hunch her shoulders so her heart and breasts collapse into her chest, that people get less comfortable.

I love her femininity, so private and so tender, and I love that it is not for public consumption. I love that she can embody aspects stereotypically masculinity without being male or embodying all of it. There is little space for all this in the world. She cannot perform as an “appropriate” straight woman in Lewiston, so the closest safe gender is male. It is not only small-town Idaho where this occurs, where people misplace her gender and by extension, her. The place where I am forever located is the place she is most commonly dislocated.

I don’t know what it is about me that makes me notably female in dozens of different cultures, or how much of this was that I do not know how to ape maleness the way I imitated a language or local style of dress. Perhaps I could have gone through India playing a young boy if I had studied maleness and hadn’t bought culturally appropriate women’s clothing. Maybe being female is too central to how I had already learned to be seen or to see myself, and I could not relinquish this even in playful exploration. I know, though, that even I when I was not trying to present as a particular gender, I was placed as female. It is where I fall by habit and by natural inclination both. The small box of what women are told to be is uneasy and unfair, and I also look like I fit there even if I have chafed against it. I did not play by the rules for girls in my hometown, and I also did not try to be a boy. I presented in the ways that appealed to be, followed my interests, and so I was understood as a strange girl, a bitch, a dyke, incorrectly female, but female still. Despite my efforts, I can’t parse out why gender is a constant location for me but not for others. I don’t how much of this is my willingness or ability to adjust other aspects of my identity for the situation but not to adjust my gender. I only know that this is what I have to work with, a fact everyone can readily agree upon about me, when other things about me are not revealed so easily.

Read Natalie Wendt’s bio »

The terrace was deserted, heat haze and scorching sunlight dancing off the rough white stone, the sun a pinpoint in the desert sky. Aruna’s skin burned, scorching seven layers, as she shaded her eyes and watched the black flecks circle overhead, wingspan spread, almost motionless as they rode invisible air currents. Death birds. Birds of prey.

“A witch’s escort,” Ma would have whispered, “harbingers of doom…” her hands fluttering at her throat and then reaching for her prayer beads. Ma would have scanned the skies, pulled her veil low and fervently prayed, making a deal with the powers above– her own barter exchange–and she would have trembled at the wails, the message of the birds that only she could hear. And then she would have sighed and stepped back into her silent cocoon. Ma was like that. Stoic, or perhaps it was something else, an undefined acceptance?

No. Ma wouldn’t check the skies anymore. She was gone.

As was most of her family, sucked into a swirling, all encompassing void. One that she’d as good as pushed them into. Bhai, her brother, was gone. He’d been all life and color: unruly curls, easy smile, off tune yodel, high voltage energy…. Baba was gone too, a figure she knew mostly as sedate grays and greens, she could see him calculating the year’s grain yield, a pencil tucked behind his ear, worry on and off in his tired eyes, the story of his life in the map of lines that crisscrossed his forehead.

Sharp bands of colors. That’s how she remembered them. Sepia-tinted memories and shards that poked her like thorns, that was all she had left.

Ma, Baba, Bhai. Identical earthen urns held their ashes, their essence reduced to fluffy gray dust, tied in with cloth and red thread. Three souls yoked to the *neem* tree outside their estate gate, much like a vagrant kite caught in the branches, paper tearing every time the kite struggled to break free.

After the thirteenth day rituals, they’d be cast adrift in the river, their ashes floating away with the rushing water. “Don’t look back,” the priest had said at the funeral, but she had, her gaze caught on the spearhead of that bitter moment. Baba would not have to worry anymore about tenant farmers cheating him. Bhai wouldn’t place wild bets on test match outcomes or burn up the highway with his bike, Ma wouldn’t pray to the sky, or drink in the stars, heeding a mystical call only she could hear. Only she survived, bent double with the cursed knowing that she’d as good as pushed them to their deaths.

Now they were well on their way to moksha. Sixteen steps to the land of the souls, that’s what the priest had said. Redemption. Breaking free of earthly ties. All her fault—her liaison with Ranbir had cost them their lives.

Overhead, a bird screeched, flapped its wings and swooped lower. Ma had strained to hear their call. She had a gift. A boon of the mystics, she’d said, a smile in those gray serene eyes.

But now there was no one. Sometimes she’d turn and see shadows slip by. But there was no one. No one to dissect and fret over tonal quality, frequency, pitch. No one to check the time, consult the almanac and interpret. Which was just as well. Perhaps all that was wishful thinking, the working of an old woman’s mind. When trouble loomed and cast its net, how had her faith helped Ma?

For no birds had announced the marauders. Just when they were needed the most, they’d stayed away. All her fault. She’d broken the rules, stepped past the *lakshman rekha*, transgressed her family’s honor code, its line of accepted behavior.

That afternoon, Ranbir’s hired goons had driven swift and ruthless, emboldened by rage and empty roads, sullen in the orange glare of the harsh day. Daring someone to stop them. As if they would. The few people who’d seen, had turned away, tight lipped. *When the sword was drawn, a sandstorm strung my eyes*. Jeep tracks had crisscrossed the desert sands, mocking, unchallenged. In time the gritty sand would cover every trace. Just as the honor code would cover every trace of these deaths.

The hard-faced cavalcade had raced through the main road of their village. They knew her father would be caught by surprise. They knew her family would put up a spirited defence. And that any brave front would crumble in no time. In her mind’s eye, she could still hear the ugly clash of steel that had punctured the dappled afternoon silence. A black miasma had swept down and eaten away all the colors, swallowed them all in. Accompanied by the babel roar of that screeching lament—yes, the black birds had swept down too, but to scavenge, not warn, for it had been too little, too late.

No one from the village had rushed to their rescue. No one would, she knew, and now her father knew that too. *When the sword was drawn, a sandstorm strung my eyes.* The splutter of distant tractors and busy pump sets could be heard clearly past their wild cries and mercy pleas. After the raiders had reached the farm, they had pursued each member—family, paid help– and showed no heart. Each of them pursued and cut down, threshed and bound like a grain bushel, the air soaked with their bloody screams.

She’d been alerted to their arrival by a sudden change in the air. Mangu, her mongrel guard dog, had wailed for no reason. She’d heard the shouts and hidden, first behind the haystack and then climbing down the rusted step ladder to shelter in the old dry well. With each echoing scream she had shriveled, something dying within her. A gag seemed to be throttling her ever since, the acrid taste of bile now her constant companion. And it was all her fault.

Ranbir’s angry words from that last fateful evening were like nails hammered on her defenceless head. That last time when he’d held her so hard she’d winced, he’d shaken and hit and mocked her, his narrowed eyes raining fury.
.
“We’re different, you don’t know? Class, language…everything! You low-class slut! *Chudail!* Were you mad? Willingly giving everything, uncrossing your limbs? Putting on airs just because you’ve been to college? Accept you? Never! Neither will my family—you’ll be cut to pieces if you even try. And tell that lily-livered brother of yours to keep a safe distance. A baby due, a cake in the oven? What can you do? Nothing!”

She’d cowered at this fury. The trigger? She’d only begged him, once again, to speak to his parents and hers. To take the first step towards a shared life. She’d adjust, play the ever-dutiful daughter-in-law of his feudal family. Angered by his words, she’d clawed him, hit out; but he’d only laughed. “Go to the bazaar! Too many of your kindred rot there. Get a good price!”

That had been a month ago. After which a plan of brutal harassment had been put into place. Their grain stores trashed. Their fields razed, giant flames soaring skywards in the middle of the night. Temporary workers would suddenly go missing, or be unavailable for hire. Even their tractor was gutted beyond repair.

Her father had fought long in his quest for justice. Did he leave any avenue untried? They’d battled village scorn and derision, they’d made the rounds with police complaints, they’d put forth faltering pleas to community leaders, begged politicians and social workers to listen. No one wanted to look at gray, once bright colors now blending into dark nothing. Empty reassurances, wringing hands.

They’d still been hunted down.

She patted her belly. A few more months. She’d bide her time, nurture this corrosive flame.

In time the death bird would call out again.

Read Mira Desai’s bio »

Berkeley, California June 2010

It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

Flying back to California late Saturday night allowed me to have that one additional day in Saint Paul to spend with the kids and finish the long list of things-that-needed-doing-before-leaving-for-about-a-month. My flight arrived at 9:30 in the evening, so I’d still get a good night’s sleep, and then have plenty of time to head off with Steve on Sunday morning to sing in the San Francisco Free Folk Festival in the afternoon. Steve already had the schedules figured out for riding on BART and transferring to the bus that would drop us off a mere one block from the festival. Simple. Why, I’d even had the foresight, before leaving Berkeley two weeks ago, to set out my performance clothes so they’d be ready. Talk about organized. We had this one all but wrapped up.

When will I learn that what looks good on paper isn’t always manageable in real time?

Squeezed onto the most packed bus I’ve yet to ride, I can’t tell if I am excited…or angry. Normally, I’d be excited and there’s certainly no reason for me to be angry about anything, today of all days. We are, after all, on our way to a wonderful folk festival!

Yet, I can sense that I look mad. Typically, I’d be watching people, smiling at the toddlers snuggled in their mothers’ laps, or motioning happily for the elderly man to take my seat. But today my smile feels forced, my face—a lifeless mask. I actually have to think what to do and what to say. Can by no means trust my reactions to flow naturally. Smile at Steve. Okay, now answer his question. Yes, take the transfer the nice driver is offering me. In some peculiar way, I don’t even feel like I’m in my own skin. It is painful, although I am, at the same time, completely numb. No, this pain is not in my muscles or nerves. It’s somewhere much deeper; somewhere I cannot reach to massage it away. Less than twenty-four hours ago I was in Saint Paul, seated in a cozy corner table at Café Latte, eating scones and lingonberry sauce with Adria, while she poured out her heart to me. The luscious treat all but forgotten, so absorbed we were in discussing the difficult choices my young daughter is facing.

How can that person be this person, riding through San Francisco in heels and formal black attire, clinging to the overhead safety handle of an overcrowded bus? I cannot comprehend how I am here.

During our ensuing choir warm-ups I can only stare silently at the many glowing faces around me. All of them, flushed with nervous expectancy. My dear husband and his bastion of fellow basses, teasing and jostling one another like schoolboys as they find their places. Amongst the sopranos standing opposite me, Bobbi looks simply radiant. Approximately as old as I, her face in this moment is as jubilant and trusting as a young girl’s. Transformed in song. Singing together is such a joy for everyone in our World Harmony chorus. Yet today I cannot sing. In fact, hardly a sound comes from my mouth as the others begin to rehearse Hanatra, the hauntingly lovely song from Madagascar. For weeks I have worked to memorize the lyrical Malagasy pronunciations of these verses. Verses that, only in translation, reveal the irrevocably harsh and cautionary warning set into such tender harmony. Literally translated “A Word of Wisdom”, this song is bittersweet tribute for a pregnant bride-to-be. Yet innocent ears will hear only the beautiful melody of a simple love-song. I have mastered words and melody alike, so thoroughly have I prepared for today’s performance.

“Mitari bady tsy lasa vodiondry…”

Yet, nothing above a whisper can I manage to utter.

How can people be so happy, I wonder to myself? How can they sing? How, for that matter, do I make myself sing? I literally cannot even fathom how the others’ bodies can be so relaxed, their voices so free and clear. For here I am, standing as stiffly as the guards at Buckingham Palace. My fingers on both hands are turned back and clutching the table behind me, else I fear I will fall over. Or bolt. I cannot bear to stay amongst such joy. I fear I will shatter.

I do bolt, though quietly, and ease my way through the alto section, out the practice room, and down the hall to the Girl’s Room. Here, at last, I can take a deep breath. I head for the toilet furthest down the row of stalls, dash inside and bolt (this time) the lock on the door.

Instantly, the tears pour from my eyes. Tears that have locked my mouth, my heart, and my voice are at last free to release their hold. I lean against the cold, tiled wall and sob and sob and sob. I would wail except for that I know the sound of my keening would reverberate off this tiled echo-chamber and soar down the corridors. No. I choose to weep in silence.

Even as I cry, I can see myself, huddled in this toilet stall, weeping for reasons of which I am not completely clear. How many girls, I wonder, have fled to this very room over the decades, to hide and cry? This “rest room” being the sole place for privacy in the vast, aged school building—a relic built, it seems, around the very time I was born. Somehow I am clear that the tears shed here have been many. I am grateful for the chance to add mine in this safe harbor. I cry for my children who are too far away and so vulnerable in their youth. I cry for my parents who are even more vulnerable in their old age. I cry for my marriage that, today, feels much too fragile, and for myself who am utterly confused, living like this between worlds. I cry, too, for all the young girls who have hidden here—and in bathrooms throughout the world—and have cried.

At last, my tears are spent. I move towards the row of porcelain sinks and slowly turn the archaic knobs until warm water gushes forth from which I splash my eyes. Searching the dented, metal mirror, I can see that my face is blotchy and red. Yet I sense my throat is, once again, open. I walk back towards the practice room, knowing I can now sing.

Mitari bady tsy lasa vodiondry,
Efa viray ny zaza izay vao mba nihoitra,
Tsy misy tsy andalo fitiavana…
*
A WORD OF WISDOM
Married soon without the parents’ blessing,
To the son-in-law of a dear friend.
Already one child (you have) before starting out.
But there isn’t much to be done about it.
No one fails to fall in love,
So accept what pleases you, even if it is
Not by the law of the land, and not by the law of the church,
Neither engagement ring nor marriage (do you have).
No job even with which to feed the child.
It’s not that the world will be forbidden to you.
It’s the wagging of people’s tongues that will be unbearable.
*

music credit to Claudia Marie Noelle Ramasimanana & Sanoela Andriamalalaharijaona, Wixen Music (BMI) 1996

Read Catherine Boebel Grotenhuis’s bio »

My toes press against the railing almost as high as my head, and I admire the white triangles left on my feet by wearing the same flipflops every day in the Colombian sun. The balcony connects to the hotel’s common TV room, where two people absentmindedly switch channels. I look across the street into balconies of other hotels, and a crowded, touristy upstairs bar to the left. The buildings are yellow, turquoise green and brown. I moved to the hotel this morning and can’t
remember what color it is on the outside.

I had been staying at an International hostel chain across town, where policy was to cram twelve people to each room, bunk beds surrounding the walls. My room housed a large percentage of twenty-something men from the States, or Australia, who tended to stumble in early in the morning, turning on the lights to find their bed, knocking over someone’s suitcase, sorry mate! and snoring loudly. There was also a couple from Belgium who cuddled under the covers of a bottom bunk all day, quickly emerging when I came in to grab a book or water bottle. Are you here alone? they had asked, straightening their t-shirts.

I decided that I need to be even more alone, so this morning I bumped my suitcase over cobble-stoned streets, past stacks of sliced mangoes in cups, art museums and jewelry stalls, to a dirtier quarter, where beggars slump against walls while their children play in the dirt, and pushcarts sell large bowls of soup with a huge, unidentifiable bone stranded in the middle, where hotels have smaller rooms, and even some real, live, traveling Colombians amongst the guests. My new room has only one other occupant, a forty-something blond woman. We already bonded in the kitchen, with phrases like I have extra tomato, would you like some? and you are in room 4? that makes
us roommates, I am sorry my English is not so good, and the obligatory, your English is perfect! She is German and knows that all Colombian men play their TVs too loudly.

Now my new roommate and I fill the balcony’s two wooden chairs, each with our own meal prepared moments ago in the kitchen, and watch the opposite buildings. A band from the bar on the left just finished a not very good cover of a Manu Chao song.

“I am very happy that you are my roommate,” she says, perhaps too soon after a bite of noodles and vegetables. “So many times I am in rooms with bad Latin American men.”

“Bad? What do you mean?”

The sun has burned her face and arms to a red that clashes with her baggy orange dress, and as she thinks about my question her lips clench and her eyes narrow, forming ripples of deep wrinkles. Her hair looks tough and very pale, like longer versions of the flakes of skin that peel off her nose.

“Some men, I know they do not like women. This happened today, I needed to take taxi but I see the driver and say no, I am not comfortable.” As she spoke her eyes swelled into round bulges, which she fixes on me so that I will respond. I wonder if the cab driver had noticed these bulges,
and what he though of her weather-damaged skin and sinewy hair, whether or not he laughed about it with co-workers later, if they rolled their brown eyes about sunburned skin, if they had a slang word in Spanish for weird German woman. I look down at the street where people seem less abused by the heat and the people around them, but can feel that her eyes have not left my face.

“I guess you have to trust your instincts,” I say, watching the scene below. The two men who squatted on the porch steps across the street from the hotel when I arrived this morning are squatting still, so that I see them just below my raised feet. The younger in white shorts and an orange t-shirt, legs spread, the older in marine blue. They call out Spanish words for drugs to every man who walks by, and cat calls to every woman. Before my new roommate joined me on the balcony, I had watched them until they saw me, and then pretended that I couldn’t hear them.

“Yes, it is your instincts. And many men I know here are bad.” Salad dressing globs on the side of her mouth, supported by a structure of thin blond mustache hairs, slighter than the hair on her legs and the thick strands sprouting from her toes. Dinner debris spews from her angry words, and the way that it lands on the arm of her chair, and the flakes on her nose and the hair on her toes, make me want to take a break from eating my own dinner, and I wonder what it would be like to be bunked in room five with the consistently loud TV, or room twelve with the tall, silent man who always has a beer, or to pay the few dollars more for a single.

“Men can be bad in Germany, too,” I say as if I really know, and place my plastic bowl of noodles and vegetables on a small side table.

“Yes, this is true.”

And then she tells me about her brother who cheats on his wife, a man she started to travel with but who turned out bad, and her father who never showed tenderness, a typical example of today’s deteriorated German family, she says. German culture, she says, has a problem.

She uses a wooden spoon to scrape out her shallow bowl, lathering the tracings on to her tongue. She is tired and must wake up early, but is so glad that I am her only roommate, maybe now she will get sleep. Could I please get my things ready so that when I went to bed I wouldn’t make noise.

I say that I will, when I’ve finished eating.

She leaves the balcony and I stay to watch the street below, where the sitting men call out to a tall white guy who walks with two girls. The girls move on and lean against a nearby doorway, and the white guy approaches and talks guardedly, to the squatting men. I could never do that, I
think, and I slowly shake my head, left to right to left. If I approached like that would they keep whistling, if I stopped in front of them and stared would they reach out to grab me, would they suggest that we go to a back alley, would they commend my bravery and offer me a beer, would they tell me I’m beautiful? If I said I wanted drugs would they laugh and say goodbye pretty lady, would they rape me?

The tall white guy and the Colombians exchange small, indistinguishable parcels, hand to hand, and the white guy moves on to his girls. He kisses one of them and both girls giggle. The younger Colombian man, still sitting on the steps below, shouts something at a passing black man, who drinks a beer.

My new roommate is back and tells me that now she is going to sleep, and gives me an orange, spiral shell. She found it on the beach after leaving her boating partner, who had turned out to be a bad man. Merry Christmas, she says, because we are both travelling alone for the holidays in
Colombia. Thank you, I say and put my feet down from the rail of the balcony to accept the gift. I accidentally catch the eye of the men below, and when they yell something I want to throw the shell at them, for it to hit them both on the head, and for it to be full of salad dressing, burnt skin and feminine mustache hairs.

Read Alison Turner’s bio »

The dime-sized hole in the knee of the counselor’s khakis was slightly frayed around the edges. It was not a fresh tear recently sustained in a fall on the icy sidewalk or clumsily snagged on the sharp corner of a metal desk; no, it had been through several washings, that much was certain. So distracted was Liz by the sight of this hole, wondering about what kind of woman would wear such tired garments to tend to the business of mending relationships, that she could barely hear her husband next to her as he wondered aloud to this stranger what had happened to her. What had he done wrong?

The answer, of course, was nothing. He never did anything wrong.

“Liz, what do you hear when Jason asks that question?”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“What do you hear when Jason asks what he has done wrong?”

Liz had to resist rolling her eyes: “He’s really saying he didn’t do anything wrong. He knows he didn’t, and so do you. Isn’t that passive aggression? Can we just move past this question and can you please tell me what you want from me now? Go ahead. I’m listening. Go ahead you fucking cow with your ratty pants and Reeboks. Tell me.”

But she didn’t say that. She just stared at the hole again, and at the pale, slightly stubbly skin of the counselor’s legs showing above her ankle socks. The office was tiny and dark, the tired Berber carpet permanently grungy in front of the sagging Herculon couch she shared with her husband of almost twenty years. The first thing she had noticed when entering the room was the box of Kleenex on the woodgrain Formica end table. She had never been to a counselor before, but here were all the trappings. Apparently it was customary, even expected, to sit here and weep. This was normal behavior when one’s relationship was in tatters, but Liz hadn’t felt normal for a very long time. She was tired of watching Jason’s hangdog expression when he asked her over and over again what had made her leave. “What do you want that you don’t have? If I was such a terrible husband, why didn’t you tell me?”

But he wasn’t a terrible husband. He ironed his own shirts, coached the soccer team, did the dishes, cooked once in awhile. He was far more patient with the kids than she. He spent weekends working around the house or in the yard, not golfing or watching football as she knew he would have preferred. He skipped his daily run once in awhile to volunteer at the homeless shelter. He was good looking and a good lover, a great date at a party. The list went on and on, and she knew it by heart. She had recited this litany of blessings to herself night after night as she lay beside him, hoping it would crowd out the crushing boredom that threatened to swallow her whole.

Some nights, this worked. Other times, a competing list invaded her thoughts. She remembered the time when her printer broke just as she had a project due, and he had refused to let her use the one at his office because it was against corporate policy. How self-righteous he had been when he found a pack of cigarettes stashed in her nightstand after she promised she had quit. His affinity for chain restaurants and love of John Grisham novels. Even his insistence that she come every time they had sex seemed like a burden on nights when she was so tired from kids and laundry and tedium she could not have mustered up an orgasm if her life depended on it. “It’s okay, honey. I know you’re tired. Let’s just skip it tonight,” he’d say, and open his paperback, denying himself pleasure because she could not summon up her own.

“It’s not his fault,” Liz finally said. “I know that.”

“So you blame yourself?” the doughy woman asked.

Liz looked the counselor in the eye for the first time since she had sat down, unable to remember her name. A pen was poised over her clipboard, waiting to check a box.

“Who else is there to blame?” she said, unable to hold the counselor’s gaze.

“That’s not really an answer, is it?”

Liz looked up. “Fuck off.”

“God, Liz, what’s wrong with you?” Jason stared at her as though he’d never seen her before. “Jesus Christ. Could you at least pretend to be here?”

But that was just the problem: she couldn’t. She was gone. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to come back.

The first time she had left was a month before. The house had started to feel cluttered and worn as it always did after the holidays. She had sat down at her desk in the kitchen, shoving aside to make room for her keyboard a basket overflowing with detritus: cafeteria lunch menus, hockey camp brochures, unmailed Christmas thank you notes, empty jewel cases, a flash drive, a folder full of medical receipts, a box of stationery, a newspaper clipping, a school district calendar, two school directories, a list of props needed for the winter play, an overdue DVD from the library, the rough draft of a homework paper, the course catalog for Woodrow High School, and countless writing instruments–only half of which were fully functional. This mountain of obligation and trivia–this pile that shifted and grew and shrank with the seasons, suddenly filled her with despair. She had stared at it for a full five minutes, paralyzed with vague dread, of what, she had no idea.

“Fuck it,” she had suddenly said to herself, shoving her chair away from the desk. She had to get out of the house for a few hours. Work was slow, her deadlines comfortably distant, and for once, the roads were clear of ice and snow. She threw on her down jacket over her jeans and ratty sweater, shoved her feet into her boots, grabbed her keys from the hook by the door, and took off in her SUV. She’d go do something productive–maybe get a wedding present for Jason’s assistant, as he’d asked her to. IKEA was an hour away; the drive and some music would do her good.

But when she got there, she quickly became overwhelmed. Even on a weekday, the place was jammed. Klatches of dyed and pressed women with designer handbags and bored looking children in tow turned over tags and exclaimed over prices, dialed their cellphones to consult girlfriends or spouses, scribbled furiously with little yellow pencils. Watching them, Liz suddenly found it hard to breathe. Weaving through the brightly colored displays, the bins of graphic throw pillows and faux living rooms, she tried to figure out from the dotted lines and numbers on the signs hanging from the rafters just how to find the exit. She needed to get away from the Stuff to Buy and the smell of Swedish meatballs.

A third wrong turn landed her in a compact, perfect mockup of an apartment in a deserted corner of the store. It was like a tiny oasis: there was no clutter, no pile of bills on the kitchen counter, no jumble of shoes by the door. She peeked into the bedroom and fought an almost unbearable urge to lie down on the crisply made bed. The miniature kitchen was sleek and efficient. Neatly graduated utensils hung from a clever, compact rack above the stove; spices were arranged alphabetically in tiny magnetic jars on a metal strip above them. She thought of her parents’ boat: the cozy galley perfectly ergonomic and fully equipped. How this had fascinated her as a little girl! How she had wanted a place like this all her own when she grew up! A sign on the coffee table in the modern but homey living room boasted that the apartment was only 500 square feet, its contents affordable and in stock! She slumped down on the couch, her purse sliding off her shoulder, and stared at this sign, tears stinging her eyes. This was it. Maybe she would just stay here. Maybe she wouldn’t go home.

When she did, it was long after dark, and Jason was frantic. “Where the hell have you been? I called you a dozen times. The kids came home to a locked house and the dog hadn’t been out since this morning….”

Liz stared blankly as he went on with the list of things she had not done, the needs she had not fulfilled, the tasks she had not completed, waiting for him to say something about her absence.

“I went to IKEA,” she said casually when he was finished, pushing past him and hanging up her coat. She could not hear what he said after her as she walked calmly up the stairs, quietly undressed, and slipped into bed.

In the weeks that followed, she left twice more. After the third time, Jason had insisted that she see a counselor.

“C’mon, Liz. You can fix this!” Jason urged when she failed to answer his question. She twirled a thread that protruded from the worn arm of the sofa, her mind filled with static. She looked again at the hole in the woman’s trousers. Everything was so worn out. It made her tired.

“What did you say, Jason?” the counselor asked. She was looking over the top of her dime-store magnifiers at him; he seemed puzzled by the sudden turn the questioning had taken.

“I said that she can fix it. I believe that. I believe in her. I really do.”

“I want you to think about what you are saying for a minute,” the counselor said patiently, sitting back in her chair and taking off her glasses.

Jason looked puzzled, his brow furrowing and his handsome face drawn. Liz looked from him back to the counselor, feeling something ease very slightly in her chest.

“What?” Jason protested. “You don’t think so? Then what are we doing here?”

The counselor waited for a few moments, letting the echo of his words fade.

“Has it occurred to you,” she said very gently, “that she is not the one to fix it?”

On the ride home, Jason was pensive. It was not a mood Liz recognized readily, and it passed quickly.

“Well, that place was a dump,” he scoffed gently.

“Yes,” Liz chuckled softly. “Yes, it was.”

“And did you get a load of those pants? Jesus. How depressing.” His face was obscured by the winter’s early darkness. Liz looked at his profile for a long time.

“I know,” she finally offered. “I know.” She slid her hand under his and squeezed it, then looked out the car window. It had started to snow again.

Read Kate Geiselman’s bio »

I tell myself stories. Like the one about my son and how he needs me as a fortification against the rest of everything. When I was 30, I needed this story. It may even have been true – one part of me hung onto his baby self and the other part of me plugged into being alive. That’s the difference he made. Before him, I hung onto the possibility of death when things were hard in the ways things used to be hard, when youth and all that accompanied it made me suffer for love or justice. My personal out button: that’s how I thought of it. After my son was born, I grieved its going.

Now I’m older and I spend less time cradling the idea of death, less time blocking my son’s view of the rest of his life with mine. I tell myself another story: that I moved across the country because he wouldn’t leave home. It is true that I left him in our house with the date when new owners would arrive, left him with his two cats and his father’s presence across town, and drove two thousand miles to these three rooms next to the ocean. Maybe closer to the truth is that I moved across the country because I loved him too much, loved myself too little.

Maybe I did it because I wanted to practice separation from him, from everything I had made of my life for the twenty years of his. Some old, familiar stories would explain it differently. In those tales, the mother dies and so sets the child out on his quest for life and himself. I tell myself half that story.

The new town by the sea unfolded around me on a map from behind the wheel of my car. The big green blob in the middle was a nature area, up a hill and through trees that don’t grow where I’m from. These trees were tall and old, history trees surrounded by ferns and shade. I had seen some of these kinds of trees, but the green blob on the map promised more.

I passed the road twice because it was unmarked until I was almost upon it, no help to tourists or others who wanted to take in the forest. Three walkers veered off into the trees on a narrow path at the bottom of the hill as I passed, my flatland car making loose tapping noises under the hood as the road became steep. Ahead, a fairy tale arch of trees ushered me in and I drove under it slowly, watching the light go green. A minute or two on and the sighing of pines surrounded me, whispered its way through my half-open windows.

After a sharp left turn, I drove into a parking lot where three other vehicles were parked. I pulled in and found the wooden sign burned with the symbols. A hiker with a stick pointed one way, and a series of horizontal lines crossing two verticals capped by an inverted V pointed the other. I took the path toward the tower.
The cool under the trees was new. Where I came from, August was on fire with sun and drought. People here carried jackets with them, able to adapt to changing sun and shade, wet and dry. I had not yet formed the habit, so I followed the yellow arrow into the trees bare armed. No human sounds followed. Whoever belonged to the cars must have gone the hiker’s way. Long fern fronds dipped into my path, and a small dark bird fluttered to the ground ahead of me, then hopped up onto the hillside. I heard its small rustle as I passed. Fairy tales are my first stories, maybe even still the most important ones, and I set out into the dim woods alone, a Hansel-less Gretel wearing Nikes with a cell phone in my pocket.

My eyes were used to looking at the horizon of the plains, my body accustomed to enervating heat in summer and bone-cracking cold in winter and springs and falls so short you could miss them if you were having a bad week when all you wanted to do was stay in bed and read British mysteries. When my friend suggested her old town, her mid-life leap back to graduate school, I decided her idea was better than any I’d had lately, and so I leapt. No more horizons.

I could have moved to a place more like the one I came from where I would recognize the birds, but I had not. I chose a place on the edge of the continent after living for so long in Kansas, the land-embraced vast center of things. If this was the crust, then I had left the soft, doughy middle of the loaf in favor of something chewier, more friable, harder to come by. And I could have chosen an apartment farther inland where the birds would have sounded more like the ones I missed – cardinals and sparrows, finches and bluejays. Instead I spent the days in my new place, windows open on the cool, listening to crows’ raucous cries and the insistent overlapping voices of gulls.

Open windows where I was born invited mosquitoes and flies, biting gnats and even wasps. Here, an occasional small moth or spider wandered in through screenless windows, and disappeared back out. I chose this particular place with its saltwater smells, islands and ships, the horizon (when not covered by low, smoke-gray clouds) ringed with irregular ridges of mountains blocking my view. I still expected definite edges of things – flat blue sky meeting flat yellow land, a long, unbroken horizontal out there that the rest of this was hiding.

In the forest I had no horizon but only the trail under my feet and tree silence. The forest whispered a private conversation that had been going on much longer than I could imagine. The trees seemed to murmur that if I kept moving, they would let me pass. Then, to my left, through a scrim of pine branches, the tower came into sight. It glowered over the path, an unnatural thing ascending from the undergrowth. A turn in the trail took me to a flat place, gray gravelled, where the lookout tower’s timber legs were anchored. A flicking, mechanical sound stopped my approach.

A man stood at the base of the tower, lighting a cigarette. I caught the sharp burning scent of tobacco before he saw me, turned his red face toward me, startled but blank.

A loose mist-gray pack hung on his back, weighted only at the bottom. He was tall and slender, and he had combed several long strands of hair over his forehead. His eyes were large and flat, a color I couldn’t detect. I was too far away to tell. He dragged on his cigarette and then moved off the concrete pad where the ascent to the tower began. Back home, we would have been expected to say hello, exchange a word or two about the weather, the view, the hike up to this point.

And everything in me knew that speaking to him was the wrong thing to do. I’ve read Flannery O’Conner, Joyce Carol Oates, the Brothers Grimm. In place of a smile, I bared my teeth at him, fear stretching my mouth, the one so used to politeness. It was my intention to go up the tower. The whole morning had been about finding the road in, following it up, walking through the forest and finally climbing the broad wooden steps to see the view from the top, a height that somehow promised it would show me the place I sought – a receding plane of land meeting a bigger sky.

The landscape we grow up with shapes our expectations. In Kansas, the tallest things are wind turbines and airport control towers. Neither needs to be very tall because it is unnecessary to rise above or clear anything in order to see or catch the wind. In the countryside where few trees grow, you can watch someone coming for miles and miles, the shimmering dot getting larger and larger until you see separate legs, the color of a shirt. After a snow once, in a town paralyzed by cold and ice, a friend and I decided to set out for each other’s houses to meet in the middle and share a thermos of hot chocolate. We waved at each other for blocks and blocks and blocks. I could see her coming toward me for at least fifteen minutes, both of us crunching into the silence of the snowy street.

This new landscape has its own rules, and I did not yet know them. In a sort of slow motion dance, I moved toward the tower as the man moved away, a bubble of distance between our bodies maintained by my wary approach and his languorous withdrawal. I began the climb, asking myself what I was doing at each level, stupidity or a lifetime of safety or something else pushing me forward. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him disappear down the trail the way I had come. The interior monologue I had been having, a narration of each moment as it happened, shifted and now sounded like my mother’s voice telling me don’t be so silly, so fearful, so dramatic. I paused at treetop level, looked out at the canopy a little closer to the sunlight screened by the dense trunks and branches. I rested my arms on the broad wooden timber and breathed.

A silent movement below and he reappeared, heading toward the tower. Slowly as he had left, he entered again the broad gravel and concrete place that surrounded the structure. He did not look up. He was still smoking that cigarette. From above, his forehead and eyes – eyes that I imagined had seen things I had never pictured for myself, flat eyes with flat lids – were all I could see of him.

That, and the top of his head with the strands of hair parted and placed over it, his florid skin between each piece. Out from the center of my chest and without my consent, I felt my life fly over the tips of the trees and straight on toward the sea. It did not feel like my breath going, but that went, too, I realized as I tried to inhale.

He disappeared beneath the tower where I couldn’t see him, and I waited, still.

Men who are supposed to save us arrive differently. In tales, they dash in, assess the danger. They act decisively, swiftly. Sometimes they ask us to put our dainty feet into impractical shoes, or to let down our hair. I kept mine in its knot, did not lean out to look down, tried to make myself silent as trees.

A minute – or an hour – later, he passed out from under the tower toward a small trail leading into the woods on the left. Half of me watched him turn into the shade of the path. My body turned toward the stairs and continued to climb. Three more flights and I landed under the roof, looking out to the ocean, almost the same view I had from my apartment window, this one partly obscured by taller trees to the left: trees below, a disc of ocean, masts of sailboats tiny as eyelashes moored at the distant marina. On the log ledge where I rested my arms was chalked one long line in capital letters: LONG WAY DOWN.

And long way out. The horizontal I had traveled away from my son might have been continents. I was by myself up there, within a cell phone’s call of no one near, no one who could do anything to save me. And it was my son I pined for then, the way his birth had rooted me, uncentered me, sent me to this moment far away from him and yearning toward a view of the old horizon so I could tell myself he was still close.

In the story I was telling myself, I imagined the man was waiting on the trail. I pictured the weight in his pack as a gun, and the silence of taking its smooth metal heaviness from the soft fabric bag. The stairs were narrow and my feet found each one on the way down and along each step of the trail – the same one I had used to come up to the tower, the one he had abandoned – each step carrying its load of flesh, its burden of blood and breath.

In the shower that night, my shoulders and arms soapy, my hair wet against my neck, I wanted my life back. I called to it through the open window, but the empty place in my chest felt like nightmare, like violence, every single thing I thought was mine abducted, flown. How easily I gave it, that thing I had forgotten I carried.

Read Lori Brack’s bio »

At 12:47 on Saturday afternoon, I cut the packing tape on a box marked “Early American.” We had moved into our new house eleven days earlier, and I had thus far unpacked about 73 boxes marked with inscrutable names like “Batman parts/cars/Halloween” and “Cookbooks Fragile.” We had been stacking the empty boxes in the basement. Periodically, someone responded to my Craigslist post about free boxes and showed up at my house to remove a few, but the pile of empty boxes kept replenishing itself, a monument to our efficiency and productivity.

We have an order to unpacking, perfected over the years and the moves. First, the kitchen, because we can only handle so many days of pizza eaten on the living room floor. Kids’ rooms are next. Toys should come third, but this time they came earlier because I couldn’t get to the kitchen and the bedrooms if the only entertainment the kids could find was systematically putting all the pots right back into the box I just took them out of.

We leave the books until almost the end. After the winter coats, the spring-form pans, the towels now badly frayed at the edges, and the wedding china that hasn’t been used in six years, although we have high hopes for this Thanksgiving. This time, the twelve boxes of children’s books jumped to the top of the unpacking list because of our three narcissistic little readers. But, the adult books are a discrete project, twenty-five or so boxes, all neatly labeled and stacked to one side, patiently waiting until the other bits and bobs have found their final – and usually arbitrary – resting spots. Only the pictures come after the books.

When we moved to Philadelphia eight years ago, there were no children or remote-control firetrucks to slow us down, and I was shelving my books three days after we arrived, eager to get back to studying for my qualifying exams. I set to work, separating out the Americans from the British from the poetry, everything chronological within its own category, although let’s be honest, who really cares about getting the Brits in perfect chronological order? I knew the publication dates on most of the texts, and only rarely did I need to flip the book open to confirm.

Two years later, we bought an eighty-nine-year-old house with the original wiring, a bewildering number of doors, and built-in bookshelves. I was eight months pregnant. I walked slowly, so I welcomed my mother-in-law when she came to help with the unpacking, only to discover that she had a tendency to shove things into drawers just to make them disappear. Now, I often agonize over whether Fates Worse Than Death should be shelved with the memoirs or with the other Vonnegut books, and should the one Williams novel I have go into fiction or be tucked between Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire? I was taking no chances by letting my mother-in-law shelve my books. Despite my giant abdomen, I unpacked the books myself. Within a week, I was hurrying to complete some revisions on my dissertation so that I could send it out to my committee before I went into labor.

I decided not to seek a tenure-track job when I graduated, instead working as a writer. I got steady work as a speech-writer and found some free-lance clients. Then, my husband was offered a two-year transfer to London. Who wouldn’t want to move to London? Of course we would move to London. When we boarded the plane, I was seven months pregnant with our second child.

It would be hard for me to work while we were abroad, so I would focus full-time on child rearing, for which I didn’t need a vast personal library. Most of the books went into storage in some deep warehouse in Delaware, where they would await our return. I set aside only those books I wanted to see every day. I wouldn’t need both editions of Sister Carrie while we were abroad; I could do without my Bible Concordance. The public library would fill my reading needs just fine.

I regretted this decision a year into our stay, when I began writing a book. Just two years out of graduate school, my mind was full of literary references. I wanted to be able to roll my chair over to a shelf, flip quickly to just the right page in just the right copy of just the right book, and pinpoint the quote that suited the mood. But most of those just right books were still in Delaware. I muddled along, awkwardly putting off finding the quote until I could strap the baby into the stroller, drop his brother at preschool, and then get to the library, by which time the mood had completely passed and the quote seemed stale and obvious.

Then my husband was transferred to Los Angeles, and we once again were rootless newcomers. The books sat in boxes for three more months while we moved a third of the way around the world and looked for a house in this strange new city. The books remained idle while I sought preschools and researched neighborhoods and took the boys to the pediatrician and settled in with my new obstetrician because I was three months pregnant. Six months pregnant by the time we finally moved in.
Now four years out of graduate school, I stood in the dining room of our Los Angeles bungalow and flipped open the cover of Barren Ground to see if Ellen Glasgow should come before or after William Faulkner.

My book didn’t find a publisher. The industry went up in flames the same month my agent started pitching it, and she kept telling me she couldn’t take it to editors until I built up something called a “platform,” which meant I needed to sell articles. I started reading magazines and websites, trying to figure out where my audience might be. The pile of books next to my nursing chair sat neglected.

We hated Los Angeles. All the flashy cars zooming past homeless schizophrenics gave us vertigo. Despite the economy, I told my husband it was time to find a new job someplace where most of the people had their original hair color and noses.

We moved to New Jersey just four weeks after my husband found a job there. We grabbed a small rental in a good school district, certain that we’d find a house in just a few months. As four months turned into five, I finished unpacking the books, which went on the shelves in a slipshod manner – Joyce next to Chaucer with no regard for genre or period. The children pulled them off the shelves, then shoved them back in, so that feminist theory was mercilessly mixed in with travel guides and The Best Short Stories. The books were in the living room, which was also where the children played; there was no way I could have stopped the mayhem. It didn’t matter – this was only temporary, and I didn’t need to access the books.

It took ten months for us to find a house. Meanwhile, I was writing at the kitchen table while my youngest crawled across it and a mouse scampered across the floor. I was trying to build a platform, but I was also trying to define myself as a writer with little pieces I wrote while the kids used my books as bridges across flaming moats. Then I would press “Command-S,” snap the laptop shut, and holler to the boys to get in the car because we had to get to tae kwon do.
The house we finally found was spacious, with a room for each child and another just for the toys, not to mention a family room plus a living room. We were lucky – I was lucky. My husband made a good living and we could afford a good house and my kids were in a good school district. I drove a minivan that got regular checkups to soccer practice behind other minivans that got regular checkups.

While we waited to close on the house, my agent emailed me. The industry was in crisis, she said, and she’d been criticized too much lately for trying to sell authors who had no platform. In short, she was dumping me, but we could still be friends. So, I sat at the dining room table and researched independent publishers. I’d have looked to see who published some of my favorite recent books, but those books were already in boxes, awaiting removal to our nice big house with a giant tree in the front yard.

A month later, the books ended up in my brand-new study, piles of boxes awaiting my attention, as soon as I finished putting away the Nambe platters we had gotten as wedding presents. Except I was also in the middle of looking for a job. We moved in September, which is the time that academics search for teaching jobs. I was no longer an academic, but I was a writer with a Ph.D., and I wanted to teach writing. Those who cannot publish teach, except without publishing you can’t really teach. I sidestepped the boxes of books as I hurried to complete my job letter, which would have been easier to do if four-year-old Benjamin hadn’t insisted upon parading through my study every ten minutes.

My study. I hadn’t had a workspace in years, but here I had a study. With a desk and windows and bookshelves. I’ve always wanted a room just for the books.

So, at 12:47 on a Saturday afternoon, eleven days after moving, I had finally gotten Lilah down for her nap, sent off one more job application, and pitched my book to a new agent. My husband was reading to the boys books dug out of yet another box of children’s books. And I cut open a box labeled “Early American.”
And I couldn’t remember if Stowe came before or after Thoreau. Awkwardly, I opened the books, trying to get each author chronologically situated. I opened another box, and there were Faulkner and Hurston, somehow boxed with Tennyson and Nehru, which just shows how confused things had gotten. When I finally found Djuna Barnes, I had no idea when Nightwood had been published, even though I once had taught the book. I was astonished to realize Nightwood had come out the same year as Gone With the Wind, even though I am sure I knew both publication dates once upon a time.

Every book I picked up seemed clumsy, as though it had no place in the chronology of authors until I opened the book and checked. I was not the confident scholar, fluidly dancing from box to shelf, slipping the books right in where they belonged. I was a slightly lumpy stay-at-home-mom with a sputtering writing career and a four-year-old who was likely to burst into the room at any moment, insisting that he had to use my bathroom, even though there were certainly other toilets in the house.

I pulled out Franny and Zoey. The last time I read Salinger, I was still in high school. I have no idea what Franny and Zoey is about. I moved to check the publication date, then stopped. I walked into the next room, a large master bedroom, and placed the book on my nightstand. It had just jumped to the top of my TBR list.

I have a whole To Be Read shelf, of course, a shelf I had barely touched in a year. I had read one book in six months. The shelf was populated by the books I bought in spurts, when I thought that perhaps I would suddenly be able to carve out reading time. As I found those books in the boxes, I put them on their new TBR shelf, where they would likely languish as they had done in our last house.

Putting away a box of Brits, tragically mixed in with a lot of books on parenting and some book my husband once bought on how to win at Blackjack, I came across Forster. Without thinking, I reached over and put A Room With a View on the TBR shelf, even though I’ve read it many times before. Moments later, Giovanni’s Room and Pride and Prejudice followed, with The Plague not far behind.

I was shoving books on that shelf, as if the intention to read them would restore something that was lost, crumpled under The Madwoman’s Underclothes and The Complete Plays of Henry James. I reached into the box again and pulled out a book, just as my husband called out, “Can you get the boys to the bathroom so we can get ready to go?”

“In a minute,” I replied. I stood there, holding the book, looking at it, wondering if it needed a special place. After a moment, unable to shelve it next to the rest of Woolf’s books, I stood A Room of One’s Own up in front of the row of books.

My books now have a room of their own. It remains to be seen whether I do.

Read Emily Rosenbaum’s bio »

She liked looking at herself in the mirror. The contours of her face, the curvature of her body, it was all very pleasing to her. But today as Alona stared at her image in the mirror backstage at the Miss Louisiana State Beauty Pageant, all she could see was a cracked egg.

She looked around the changing area with all the women in various degrees of dress. They were too preoccupied to notice but if they had they would have assumed she was sizing them up. She had long moved past trying to befriend them. Many of them had grown up with her on the pageant circuit. She knew their names and weaknesses, but she didn’t know her competitors any better than they knew her. They were all colorful marionettes who were only taken out for the big show. Many of her counterparts had enhanced their appearance with spray tans, obsessive dieting and breast augmentations. They hated her because she was so effortless. Even the hours of practicing how to walk and stand had come easily to her. She had a natural poise that couldn’t easily be fabricated and for those gifts, the pageant girls had generously given her the constant view of their backs. And their snarky comments.

She felt her mother hovering over her before the older woman’s face appeared beside Alona’s in the mirror. “What are you doing, Alona? We’ve been preparing your whole life for this.” Her mother’s eyes were ablaze with enough passion that Alona could feel it tingling in her extremities. She just didn’t feel it in her heart. She had learned early on that pageant crowns were heavy and full of sacrifice.

She’d never known a father and to compensate, her mother had often worked double shifts down at the factory during the week to pay for the frilly Easter egg colored dresses Alona needed for an endless amount of pageant competitions on the weekends. At first that meant spending lots of time with her grandparents but by the time they had passed away, there was already a continuous stream of boyfriends who would watch Alona after school. Some of them were scary. Some of them were mean. Some of them left dark holes in Alona’s childhood that she refused to revisit.

One Mother’s Day she was standing on a wooden chair next to the stove making her mother breakfast when her mother came into the kitchen in an old fuchsia-colored bathrobe. She sat down at the table and asked what Alona thought of her current boyfriend, the one who was still asleep in the next room.

“He’s okay,” Alona said never taking her eyes off the simmering frying pan. She cracked an egg on its side but when it opened, there was no yolk. Alona never forgot that.

And there were always the pageants. Smile. Turn on your toe. Look over your shoulder with a twinkle in your eye. It didn’t matter what you were feeling that day. Whether you wanted to laugh or wanted to cry. It was always about making the judges believe you were the most beautiful woman in the room and Alona was good at doing that. She had an entire room full of crowns and sashes at her mother’s house to prove it.

She lined up with the rest of the girls just behind the curtain where they could see the stage but not the audience. In her head, she concentrated on the words to “Amazing Grace” just like she always did in the moments before a big show.

When Alona was fifteen, the man her mother was seeing took them all to church. Her mother was left uninspired but as the minister called his congregation into action, Alona found herself longing for the power of the Holy Spirit to enter her. The pageants gave her the illusion of divinity but the Holy Spirit would make it so. She believed that. And she began to pray. She prayed so hard, in fact, that it caught the attention of the handsome youth pastor, Luke Ciphor who crowned her with his full attention. They spent long hours together alone in the youth room in the basement of the church. She idolized him, hung on his every word. He made her feel beautiful. The touch of Luke’s hand thrilled her. The touch of his lips drove her to new passionate heights and the things they did alone together she never considered to be depraved. They were acts of physical love. It didn’t matter to her that he was thirty-one and she was fifteen. Wasn’t love blind in the eyes of God? The minister didn’t think so.

They were both banished from the church and Alona found herself having to endure sitting in the room as Luke begged the minister for forgiveness.

“She’s the muse of the devil,” he cried pointing at her. “She seduced me!”

Alona just huddled so low into herself she hoped she might disappear. The minister then asked her mother what to do and, of course, her mother saw no point in ruining anyone’s reputation. Alona had shiny crowns to uphold. So the entire ordeal was kept very quiet and no one mentioned it directly to Alona again. She only ever heard it mentioned behind the scene in low whispers.

One by one the girls began to parade out onto the stage and Alona thought about the last time she’d actually seen that particular church. It was through an angry haze of yellow yolk on a deserted night with an empty plastic egg carton in her hand. The anger of that moment flushed Alona’s cheeks and as the hot spotlight fell on her, she smiled and walked to her place in front of the judges.

Since then she’d been with a continuous line of boyfriends of her own. The most recent one would lie next to her, their naked bodies sticky in his repugnant sheets. He kept the shades of his apartment closed so that, even in full daylight, it was so dim that if she looked over at him she could only see the dark holes where his eyes should have been and the hot ash of his lit cigarette.

Alona smiled, despite the blinding hot spotlight that left beads of sweat on her upper lip and when they called her name, she walked to her mark with the showmanship of a circus performer. Somewhere over the light, in a place where she could not see, there was applause and the calling of her name. She ignored the revelry and concentrated on the judges before her as the man with the neatly trimmed beard carefully read a random question on an index card into the microphone. “In recent years, the use of prescription drugs among teenagers has skyrocketed. How would you, as Miss Louisiana, educate our minors on the dangers of these drugs?”

That was easy. The answer was automatic. Alona didn’t even need to think before she began speaking into the microphone. She’d practiced the answer to this question hundreds of times. It was a subject she knew about intimately even though her brain refused to link the question to the Vicodin in her medicine cabinet that she used when prancing around on heels became too painful for her once shattered ankle. She didn’t believe it pertained to the Percocet her doctor prescribed for her migraine headaches or to the OxyContin hidden in her underwear drawer that was strictly for “just fun”. She liked the way they made her feel numb to the world because in the numbness there were no disappointments, no painful realities.

She could feel her competitors nervous shifting as the judges’ scores were tallied. Collectively, their breaths quickened as the apprehension built. The crown would mean something to any one of them, but Alona felt anesthetized as they waited in their high heels and their false smiles. The man with the beard walked the results over to the MC who took a sneak peek and grinned slyly. There was a drum roll that should have shaken her to reality and a preamble which should have made her heart pump with anticipation and desire. Her name was called. The girls surrounding her shook her, hugged her and still there was nothing as she walked to the middle of the polished stage where the MC and former Miss Louisiana waited with her prize. She accepted the roses they laid across her arms graciously and stood still as they pinned a crown high upon her head. It slipped, falling right into Alona’s arms. She laughed at the small mishap in a way that put everyone else at ease because that’s what she was good at: the pretending everything was normal. Even when it wasn’t.

Because today the numbness she felt had nothing to do with a magically sedating pill and everything to do with a pregnancy test, with the sign of the cross, buried deep within a trashcan in a hotel room upstairs. She’d forgotten that there were also eggs inside of her. Eggs she could nurture the way she’d always dreamed she could be nurtured. It was an inspiring thought that appealed to her. Of course, no one would believe it was a good idea. Not her boyfriend. Or her mother. Or the pageant officials. The pressure to strip away that part of herself would be immense but she had not allowed her mind to wander down those dark corridors just yet. For now, it was simply all about her and as she walked carefully out to the edge of the stage, she couldn’t help thinking her mother had been right. Her mother had always said that at this moment, at the pinnacle of Alona’s career, that she would be fulfilled, and as Alona stood smiling and waving back at the crowd, she was.

Read Erica McBeth’s bio »

Hi there!

Let me say at the outset that this message comes to you courtesy of one and a half cheese masala dosas and the most enormous vanilla-enriched cold coffee milkshake I’ve ever consumed – that too, at nine pm in a country that doesn’t quite see the point of decaf! But after the day that Katy and I have just survived, I will confess to savouring every miniscule caffeinated jolt of that delicious concoction. I never thought I’d say this, but who needs beer when you can have a milkshake like this at the end of a long, hot day of “doing India”?

I can just imagine the look of horror on your face as you read that beer comment…Don’t worry, there’s some distance to travel before I turn teetotal, but I fear that this trip is changing me in mysterious ways. For example, while vegetarianism has never really appealed to me before, I am now perilously near to being seduced into the belief that this could be a viable lifestyle for me.

Part of this vegetarian wanna-be(haviour) on my part can of course be attributed to the amazing variety of non-sentient – or more accurately, “never were sentient” – items that make up the gastronomic final frontier in the Indian restaurants that the two of us have been exploring. Furthermore, after today’s experience, I’m convinced that dosas must be the ultimate comfort food, specially designed for the spicily-inclined. I mean, how can you go wrong with a deceptively feather-light wrapping of paper-thin savoury pastry deep-fried and filled with deliciously seasoned potatoes, with a little chopped carrot and a few peas thrown in as a nod to healthy eating?! The generous amount of cheese lining the inside of my dosa really put the comfort into this bout of comfort eating.

The day started well, since Katy and I were both determined to get in as much activity as possible before the melting caramel haze of the intense afternoon heat seeped into our bones and sapped our determination to make the most of this two-week break in northern India. We should have known better, I suppose, than to arrive in Delhi at what is still the height of summer. I think the autumnal shades of early September in London had lulled us both into believing that India would just be a warmer version of what we were in such a hurry to leave behind.

I have a confession to make. Although – as you know – I was born across India’s faraway eastern border, in Bangladesh, the many intervening years spent studying and working in Britain have left me completely disoriented in terms of how the subcontinent functions, from its weather patterns to the vagaries of public transport and the eccentric characters one invariably encounters in the course of travelling. And while that wouldn’t be considered an acceptable excuse by any of my South Asian brethren, the truth is I have more than once on this trip found myself experiencing the peculiar disorientation of a brown foreigner; the situation isn’t helped by the fact that I’m female, and expected to conform to certain codes of behaviour.

My Hindi (which is the closest that northern India comes to having a lingua franca) is a lot worse than rusty; it’s more like fossilised, based as it is almost entirely on a childhood diet of occasional Bollywood movies and a few family vacations. Needless to say, on the latter occasions, I at least had the luxury of relying on my parents, who both grew up under the British Raj and are fluent in Hindi. Unlike theirs, my Hindi is in such appalling shape that an Indian friend in London had warned Katy that she mustn’t rely on my non-existent communication skills. “I don’t know what language Farah’s speaking, but it’s certainly not Hindi!” she’d said, laughingly dismissing my halting attempts to articulate a few basic sentences.

In some ways, this trip has been a lot simpler for Katy – as a white English woman who speaks only her mother tongue, she has nothing to prove; she can, without embarrassment, explain away almost any faux pas on her legitimately alien status. She also benefits from the fact that the rules are different for “real foreigners”, particularly where gender issues are concerned. However odd the average South Asian on the street might consider social and sexual mores in the West where women are concerned (widespread acceptance of premarital sex, multiple partners over a lifetime, alcohol consumption, the use of “provocative” clothing etc), it allows Western women a degree of leeway when they’re travelling in this part of the world; though they are likely to encounter the occasional unpleasant stereotype of being perceived as “loose white women”. Nevertheless, the situation is probably easier for them than it is for an Indian looking-woman who looks, sounds or behaves differently from what is expected. As I have discovered to my considerable irritation!

Anyway, getting back to the language issue, we have by and large managed quite well. Fortunately, most of the Indians we’ve interacted with to date have spoken enough English to render my unintelligible linguistic efforts pretty much redundant. That is, until today.

We’d spent the morning visiting old Delhi, especially the area around the Red Fort. The architecture dates back to the Mughal period of Muslim rule in northern India, and the building style is a wonderful melange of arched entranceways; spacious apartments reaching up to touch soaring, domed ceilings; and manicured gardens full of colourful blossoms and verdant plant life, complemented by the luminous blades of emerald-green grass that spring forth from every inch of ground.

As usual, we encountered some young guys who wanted to practice their English language skills on us. Actually, I mind less when it’s their English that these ubiquitous groups of men want to practice, rather than cheesy pickup lines – which is quite often the case! My looks are considered fairly run-of-the-mill here, particularly since there is no dearth of gorgeous Indian women. But Katy’s dark colouring combined with a peaches and cream complexion is distinctly more exotic, and a combination that many find attractive.

Tired of negotiating this particular gauntlet, an inspired Katy decided to deny her British heritage in order to avoid the stilted conversation that was likely to follow. In response to the inevitable “Where are you from, sister?” query, she replied, briefly and without batting an eyelid, “Norway”.

The conversation that followed didn’t quite go according to script. In amazement, a couple of them cried out – “Nowhere?! How can you be from nowhere?”

I stepped in to clarify, saying “She doesn’t speak much English. She is from Norway – not from ‘nowhere’. Do you know it, N-O-R-W-A-Y?”

“Oh yes, we know Norway” one of the men responded gamely. He proceeded to respond in kind, “And we are from India – I-N-D-I-A”! They were good sports and didn’t pester us further, so we humoured their request and ended up in one of the group photos that is so close to the South Asian male heart, before moving on.

Dipping into some of the souvenir shops near the entrance of the Red Fort, we emerged with small treasures: sets of beautifully-made glass animals in swirling shades of red, green, blue, yellow and black, ranging from the more familiar standard dimensions to the fingernail-sized versions, rendered to perfection in each instance; intricately embroidered cloth wallets and purses; carved wooden miniature chess sets; white marble inlaid with jewel-coloured patterns of flowers and geometric shapes to create boxes of various shapes and sizes, reminiscent of the Taj Mahal marble work; and Katy’s favourite, small red seeds that had been hollowed out and filled with fragments of bone, miraculously carved into tiny animal shapes and clearly visible through a magnifying glass.

After a respectable afternoon siesta, we re-emerged from our hotel room to venture into the crowded alleyways of Delhi West in search of the famous restaurant, Karim’s. Although there was a larger-than-average youthful male presence in the alleys, I felt I was on familiar ground. This place has always been a Ghuznavi family favourite, though I haven’t been there in almost 15 years. In the end, I managed to locate the restaurant, and we laid to rest (or so I thought at the time) the possibility of a vegetarian lifestyle once and for all.

What followed was an orgy of grilled meats, kebabs on a skewer – and so that Katy could prove her ‘adventure traveller’ credentials, a surprisingly delicious dish of sheep’s brain masala – helped down by a selection of rotis, breads of various types and textures. A minor detour for the mandatory paan followed; this betel leaf and chopped betel nut confection is garnished with a white paste that’s notorious for providing a narcotic kick to the senses. It’s highly addictive, and side-effects include a tendency to produce copious quantities of scarlet spit. Neither of us managed to keep it in our mouths long enough to experience the latter; it’s definitely an acquired taste!

Deciding to work off some of the gluttonous calories we’d absorbed, we took a brief tour around the nearby shrine of Nizamuddin, which is the mausoleum of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya. The Sufis belong to a Muslim sect that takes a distinctly “peace and love” approach to all religions, and indeed humanity as a whole, emphasising spirituality and co-existence. The place attracts people of all faiths, and has a wonderful atmosphere of calm despite the crowds that make their way there to worship. This shrine also featured in the highly controversial film “Fire” where the lesbian protagonists find refuge after escaping domestic violence. We passed a couple of peaceful hours just people-watching and drinking in the atmosphere there, before making our way back to the main road.

I would like to blame what happened next on the narcotic in the paan, but that wouldn’t be fair since we’d both spat out the mangled green concoction into the nearest rubbish bin. I had once again let down my origins by doing so with unbecoming speed, even faster than Katy managed to get rid of hers. But I think that the sinful indulgence of that meat-heavy meal may have had something to do with lulling us into a stupor of sorts. Or maybe we were just blissed-out by our time at the shrine. Anyway, we climbed into one of the three-wheeled motorised scooters that litter the streets of the capital, and I instructed the driver to take us back to our hotel in Jorbagh.

It was only after we’d been riding for some time that I began to get nervous about where we were heading. It seemed to be taking a lot longer to get back than it had on the ride out. A couple of times, I reminded the driver that we wanted to go to Jorbagh. He nodded his head rhythmically back and forth in that uniquely Indian way that was presumably meant to be reassuring. But when we began once again driving away from the centre of the city into what looked like its outskirts, I could no longer dismiss my increasing sense of anxiety.

We didn’t have to wait much longer for enlightenment of a decidedly non-Sufi nature. Bringing the scooter to a screeching halt on the side of a dusty road in the midst of completely unfamiliar surroundings, the driver indicated that we had arrived. The question was: where were we?! The place appeared to be some kind of industrial suburb, with no sign of any tourist accommodation in sight.

Upon enquiry, the driver informed us that we were now in Karolbagh (which he pronounced to rhyme with our original destination, Jorbagh, as “Krorebagh”). If we now wanted to go to Jorbagh – which we should have told him in the first place, he asserted – it would cost us an extra 100 rupees!

I was outraged. It was the most obvious form of extortion. Clearly he had taken us both for idiotic foreigners who had no idea where they were. The fact that he was partially right didn’t make it any easier to swallow. And it certainly didn’t help that we were young women! Dressed in casual Western clothing, we were by no means clad revealingly, but it made no difference. The mostly male passers-by began to stare at us with somewhat aggressive curiosity, since it was perfectly clear that we didn’t belong there. With twilight fading into rapidly-descending night, and no other scooters or taxis to be seen, I didn’t give much for our chances of finding our way home alone.

Katy stood by the roadside, looking paler and more foreign by the minute, urging me to pay the man whatever he wanted to take us back to Jorbagh. But I’d had enough of being the vulnerable alien female. It’s possible he would have done this to a male foreigner as well, but there was something distinctly threatening about being women in such rough surroundings at that time of the evening. It made me angry and I began arguing with him in my appallingly fractured Hindi instead of handing over the money. He was taken aback, perhaps not having expected much resistance from a couple of women stuck in an isolated location.

It went on for several minutes; and it felt like a lot longer. To be honest, I’m not sure what I actually said to him, but perhaps my tone said it all – his certainly spoke volumes! In the end, he agreed to take us back for a mere 20 rupees extra. Hiding my relief, I scrambled back into the scooter with poor Katy, who was badly shaken, deprived of even the limited relief of an adrenaline surge born out of righteous indignation.

In less than 15 minutes, we were back in the blessedly familiar environs of Jorbagh. Our scooter driver drove off in a huff, hurling a few choice swear words in my direction as he went. He had understandably expected a better return on his scam than a mere 20 rupees. But I couldn’t have cared less. We were home safely – and surprisingly, the alternating surges of anger and terror (in my case) and unrelieved terror (in Katy’s case) had left us ferociously hungry once again.

Heading for our favourite vegetarian restaurant in nearby Khan Market seemed an apt way to celebrate our deliverance. And the cherry to top off the whipped cream on my delicious drink came in the form of Katy’s comment, uttered with unmistakably heartfelt sincerity: “I don’t care what anyone says about your Hindi, Farah – that scooter driver certainly understood what you were saying!”

So it all ended well; we survived our traveller’s rite of passage and have already started laughing about it. And on that happy note, I will leave you for this evening. The last bit of my masala dosa awaits my attention, and I’m contemplating dessert…Hoping for an update from your end soon -

Love

Farah

Read Farah Ghuznavi’s bio »

A woman’s place remains uncleared for the twenty-three seconds it has taken us to decide on ordering two of each appetizer as well as a mess of entrées from tonight’s menu and sharing until we are glutted, then divvying up the leavings (except for Alexi, who despises leftovers to a degree that prohibits even bottled condiments from occupying her fridge) for tomorrow afternoon when we’ll laze around in pajama-type attire, sweatshirts, and happy-pants and have lunch together without each other being there.

I know it was a woman, not by the lipstick on the empty wine glass, but by the way the raspberry-vinaigrette-dotted napkin has been folded and placed atop the empty plate in the shape of a Pilgrim’s hat. I don’t know a single guy who has ever executed the post-meal inclination to fold a cloth napkin into a minor work of banal art. Much less a Pilgrim’s hat.

She is gone when we come in and take up residence at a table for eight, shedding custody of coats, carryings, and concerns and piling them into the extra chair. Without thought attached, the four chairs on one side of the table are scooted closer to embrace naturally the same sum of space as the three on the other.
But I’m not paying attention to this detail when we sit. The eyes of my awareness are focused on where she’d been sitting. I see her hands as they gently, deliberately crease the folds of the napkin she’d used to dab the corners of her mouth after mixed greens had grazed them on their way inside. See the corners of that mouth bend up into a private smile as she places the napkin on top of the place where garden leaves had been presented as though they were worth the money charged to arrange them. See her fluff the hat in the middle toward the back, where it sags.

A lovely smile. A satisfied self.

A damn fine Pilgrim’s hat.

A busboy crushes the creation as he stacks the table’s china.

My focus shifts back to our table where myriad snippets of conversation are going on all at once, part of a larger understood design that I too would grasp if I’d been paying attention.

“Evie, what in the name of my ass is going on with your hair?

“Buddhist, hell. You can’t candy-wrap the Dahlia Lama, suck on a few sweet platitudes and then call yourself a Buddhist.”

“Yep. Five hundred of them. Right there. Just like that. I nearly wet my pants.”

My focus shifts to Evie. Evie. The first and middle initials E and V spelled out to harmonize their union. Coalesced, just like the words each letter stood for had merged into the person they branded: Élan Vital Trotter, whose parents had named her with the hope she might live up to the christening in the face of the five boisterous brothers preceding her. It was their singular gift to their only daughter. And it had taken root.

Evie’s most recent love interest had told her Élan Trotter sounded like a Derby horse. But that was only part of the reason we now referred to him as her ex, even though they were still dating. She suffered no pedigrees. And she was no stallion. But she was world-class.

Rinker’s cheeks are filled with laughter, and they flush as Evie finishes the story I’d been listening to as well, but without paying attention. I doubt I would have blushed, though. Evie had sunken in years ago. Rinker Wave Tatum, so-named for the runabout her parents had been rolling around the ski-slogged bottom of the night she was conceived, was prone to redden at any mention of sex, so I assume that had been the subject of Evie’s tale. The boat was an outboard. Mr. And Mrs. Tatum now own an inboard and a pontoon. And three more children with less inspired names.

Appetizers had arrived so long ago that in any other company, the gap of time elapsed since physical proof of our waiter’s existence within this lifetime would feel stagnate. Instead it’s entertaining. There are rumors of his materialization at tables near ours, but to us, he remains a shade.

Alexi – who Evie had renamed Sexy upon their introduction to one another a year ago by Rinker, who had blushed then, too – claims his disappearance stemmed from my use of the word vagina just as he’d placed in front of me a plateful of petite puffy creations I vaguely recalled should erupt with pulverized falafel beans and pureed sprouts when prodded to do so.

Not that this was a declaration I typically employed upon the arrival of hors d’oeuvres. It was merely a mid-sentence manifestation that happened to coincide with his approach from behind announcing rotolo! at the exact moment the other three-syllable word left my mouth with more crescendo than I would direct had I the opportunity to re-orchestrate the brief duet.

Our eyes had met. Mine grateful and thrilled at the arrival of my spriggy-looking stuffed masterpiece. His repulsed at the evident shock of confrontation with an unanticipated body part. The rest of the appetizers were delivered without introduction and the intensity of his disregard since that time has shown no signs of tapering.

At first I felt bad for having accidentally thrust the word upon him, as it seems to have apparently been a terrible distress to him. But it’s only a word, after all. Perhaps not typical dinner conversation, but not so unconventional. We decide he must have issues.

“I’ll bet if you’d used the ‘p’ word instead, he’d be all over us right now. Why do they all love the ‘p’ word?”

True to form, Evie trumps Maggie, “Just imagine if you’d said cun– ”, but the table drowns out the rest of her sentence with a burst of protestations against the word that prompted it. As the table erupts, concerned patrons lean and crane to determine the source of the flare-up, surmising the possibility of a stray, baked-in hair and then alive with stories of unidentifiables discovered in cuisines du jour across the city, country, ocean.

Our waiter remains in shadow, as I suspect would stay the case were a three-toed sloth to burst from my rotolo and wrestle me to the floor. Satiated by the first round of food, no one is in too much of a hurry for the second, but when Maggie starts sweating gin, Sarah moves toward the bar to collect another double martini with a side of cranberry juice, bottle of wine, and three margaritas, extra salt.

“What gives? What the hell does waitboy think we’re going to do, whip out our – ”

“Evie, don’t say the ‘c’ word.” Colleen interjects.

“I’m not, Coyster,” acting annoyed but not really. “What I wonder is why he has to act like we have the clap just because Texas said vagina.”

“Not so loud. My grandparents eat here. It’s just not right.”

“See? That’s exactly what I mean. Why does it cause everyone but your gynecologist to flip when you say anything like that? Like you’re some kind of militant she-ra blazing sex maniac or something.”

“But they do love the ‘p’ word.” reminds Maggie and then adds that there’s nothing wrong with blazing sex maniacs or militant she-ras, thinking of her experimental college years. “By the way, were you going to say ‘whip out our uteruses and start waving them around?’”

“Yeah, why? Have I used that one before?”

“Yep. Pitch night at the Legion last Thursday.”

“Damn.”

“You said that in front of veterans? In front of Maggie’s dad?” Colleen’s head is in her palm. Rinker is saturated crimson. Alexi is thinking about germs.

“That’s why he insists I bring her along.”

“Unbelievable.”

Sarah returns bearing drinks and a large platter of artichoke tapas as well, compliments of the bartender. Sarah is a magnet for freebies – one of the reasons she has become the official candidate for these types of tasks. Colleen calls things like this brazen, which is why Evie has dubbed her Coyleen.

Later, after we’ve officially given up on the arrival of out entrées, and after another round of drinks is delivered from the bar, this time with three bowls of garlic-, gorgonzola-, jalapeno-stuffed olives in addition to a plate of dolmas, it has become far too late to ignore that we are probably going to be late for the performance of Summer and Smoke to which Sarah had been bequeathed seven free seats three days before they went on sale.

There are several appetizers left, but since our waiter has officially vanished from our sphere of existence, we forgo any expectations of a respectable wrap-up and instead swathe what food we can into the paper napkins that came with our drinks. We’re not at all hungry now, but no one will feel like cooking tomorrow. Alexi excuses herself from the table briefly. Tomorrow, she’ll have crackers and individually wrapped slices of cheese for lunch after a breakfast of fresh fruit salad and two granola bars.

She’ll spend part of the morning scrubbing microbial bacteria from all surface areas occupying her kitchen, including the neck of the milk bottle inside her fridge – the one and only item aside from a jar of French mustard (somehow, that condiment received a bye) allowed to be reconsumed after its initial visit upon the premises. Though she’s not necessarily comfortable with the milk reuse, she hasn’t found another way around it aside from pint-size cartons, but milk stored in paper repulses her more than milk stored in large quantities over time, so she’s just accepted it. No other way around it. Nature of the beast and all. No one had asked about the mustard yet, though its retention was seen as a breakthrough.

Then, for the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon, Sexy Lexi will study for the PPE. Evie will sleep late to fantastic dreams. Rinker will reply to the fifty-three emails she’s already read and then marked unread to remind herself to go back and compose replies. Maggie will spoon mashed foodstuffs into her very loud and pink child’s mouth, then clean them up as they run their course. Sarah will contemplate bundling up in at least three layers and listening to R.L. Burnside while she takes her mammoth hounds to the park, where she’ll probably come across a twenty-dollar bill laying in the withered grass; but instead she’ll just put the dogs out in the yard for a while and find the twenty there. Colleen will do yoga and then call her mother, aunts, grandparents, and sister-in-law while she works on crosswords. None of us will want to cook.

Around noon, each of us will still be wearing whatever sufficed for pajamas the night before, and minus one, we’ll rummage around for last night’s stash of leftovers, unwrapping and reheating tamale cakes, spring rolls, strombolinis, and whatever else could escape neatly enough in a cocktail napkin.

We’re out of the paper coasters, but there are still several breaded raviolis and seasonal wraps left unclaimed, not to mention honey rolls and parmesan pepper bread. Sarah is about to make a trip to the bar when I suggest a Pilgrim’s hat as the perfect take-away container, especially for olives.

Evie calls it a capital idea, bugger-all, which offhandedly reminds me how she despises the British for no real reason. Colleen’s coat pockets and Maggie’s mom-purse are almost large enough for our spoils. Rinker places the remaining two napkin hats inside her big blue fuzzy one she carries all winter, everywhere. Alexi is back. She has the hiccups and tallies what we owe for what was delivered, plus a sizable tip for the bartenders. She places a pile of money on the table for the bill and hands the rest to Sarah for transport to the bar.

Just as we are leaving, invisiwaiter makes a surprise appearance, ignoring us still, but hovering nearby to fill the water glasses of our neighbors, his eyes glancing toward the wad of cash on our table. We stare at his lack of acknowledgement that we are doing so. Evie smells fear and swoops in to execute the coup de grâce. He places the silver pitcher of water in front of his chest, like a shield. Smiling her words, Evie tells him, slowly and deliberately, that the food was positively wonderful and the atmosphere divine. He stays fixed and silent.

She winks then turns toward the door, predicting the precise moment he will move uneasily to count the money we’ve left behind, then looks back over our shoulder with a casual “Oh. But I forgot to mention, the cervix was horrible.”

Alexi guffaws and hiccups at the same time, a sudden sound that makes our waiter start and people turn. Rinker has totally missed the exchange and is trying to figure out what was said because Colleen is melting into the floor. Maggie grabs Evie’s hand in hers and then pulls toward the door while I tug Sarah away from the bar and its tenders.

In the crammed car we blaze through yellow lights, and five separate packs of gum are passed among bodies piled on top of one another – cinnamon, bubble, something fruity, spearmint, and god-awful mouthwash-smelling sugarless purposeful gum. I choose bubble. We’re late and have to wait to be seated until after the prologue about eternity, which lasts about as long.

Tomorrow I will ignore laundry, dishes, bills, and the unpainted wall so I can finish two overdue books. At lunch I’ll find the playbill on the counter where I left it. Thumbing through, I’ll discover it’s not mine. The wad of gum pressed into the center folds of a two-page advertisement isn’t bubble. I’ll smell its spiciness as I flip through last night’s unread pages, and I’ll know exactly whose program I have.

Read Joanna Beth Tweedy’s bio »

Cactus, Texas-the chief of police spits his tobacco into a cup and looks me over. “I heard someone was in town asking questions.” I talk fast, a Boriqua/Chicana spitting out English. I try to get my three minute sell out fast, why I’m here, looking for immigrants who have been trafficked or forced into working.

“Hold on there,” he says, never taking his hat off. ” We’re not down in South Texas no more. And we talk a bit slower up here. And you didn’t come here first?”
It wasn’t really a question, just giving me notice. I bit the inside corner of my lip which always produced a semi-smile. He asks if there’s any money in it for him, helping me find these “victims” and helping them get visas for being sold, bought or forced to work.

His starched uniform is saturated in sweat. “I actually live here. Do any of my officers? No. But I bought a house here and I live here. My wife won’t move here. She still lives in Amarillo.”

We’ve been in town for a few hours, drove in from Amarillo. There’s no hotel in Cactus, so we’ll be heading back at sun down. Driving up towards North Texas, the landscape changed from burnt fields and small trees, to rolling hills and now in the Panhandle, miles and miles of green plains and distant canyons. Damn picturesque even.

This summer never ends and we stop at every little town we come across. This should be the last stop for the summer, on the edge of Moore County, before we head back to South Texas. Carlie will be going back to law school when we get back. I tell her if she plans on coming back, she has to form roots in the community and not just work for the community.

I want to visit New Mexico which is only a few miles away but we can’t take the car out of Texas. Carlie sings corny country songs and makes me dance in the car. I can’t find one single station on the radio that plays anything but country. In Tulia, she took the bed with blood on the box spring. I kept her up all night with my stories of how the blood got there.

“One of us’ll get crabs from the bed,” I tell her. “Try explaining that to your boyfriend.”

Once in Cactus, I say talk to the kids at the swimming pool and walk up to Mrs. Gonzalez, the lifeguard who’s also the gym coach at the only elementary school in Cactus. Junior high and high school kids get bussed over to Amarillo. “They have to wake up early,” she says, “because the bus leaves at six am, but the group is small anyhow and mostly the Mexicans don’t send their kids, get them to work instead.” I stare at her shiny forehead, browned skin under the sun.

I buy a Mexican Coke, pan de polvo, three Gansitos at the only store in town. I ask the owner, Mrs. Morales if I can leave Spanish “Know your Rights” pamphlets at the counter. She’s nice enough. Tells me the story of Cactus. The immigrant Filipinos of the 40s, the waves of illegals, she says. After the last raid, reporters came into town and hounded everyone for weeks. The city manager was fired for something he said to the press. Since the raids last year, folks don’t seem so nice to outsiders. And I remind myself, I do not belong there, I am an outsider, even though this chief doesn’t see any difference-I am the same color as the people of “his town.”

Yolanda, who works at the only laundromat in town, says for days after the raid last December, no one was seen in town. It was like after the tornadoes that had hit last April-house after house with red spray-painted X’s on them. The streets were ghosts and they seem too still even now, empty trailers and desolate streets. The one park is empty. It reminds me of neighborhoods where every one goes up north to work in the summers, but this is the famous “norte” that families go to look for work, with factories and fields.

Mrs. Saenz, the librarian, tells me 80 percent of the kids didn’t go to school for days after agents detained hundreds of workers at the local meat processing plant. Either they had been deported with the parents, or the one parent left behind was too afraid to send them.

For months we had been hearing reports of parents being arrested outside of schools throughout West Texas and the Panhandle. I worried who would pick up the kids come 3:30. We heard reports of grocery stores being shut down and agents going around asking for papers. Random checkpoints appear at traffic lights and streets in El Paso, stopping cars and asking people for their papers. ERs calling border patrol on patients. No boundaries. We’re supposed to be looking for victims of human trafficking, held against their will and forced to work-but the tales we hear are different.

Making our way up to Cactus from South Texas, we come across one of those random checkpoints in Del Rio. The flashing red lights tell us to stop and after a few minutes they open the lane next to us, putting a plastic barrier in front of our car.

“Why y’all headed?” The agent in the telltale green asks.

“Going to Uvalde.” I’ve learned too much information can work against you.

“Coming from?”

“We were in Del Rio.”

“Why are y’all coming up from Highway 83 instead of going straight on through on 90?”

“What do you mean?”

His sidekick appears. “What he’s asking is why’d you decide to take 83 which takes you through La Pryor and is 45 minutes longer and not go straight on through US90?”

Things to remember: always keep your hands on the steering wheel. Have your license and car info on your lap. Do not reach for anything underneath your seat. When they ask you for your insurance, let them know it’s in the glove compartment and you have to reach over to get it. Tell your passengers to keep their hands in plain sight.

“I’m just following the GPS thingie that came with the car.”

“Where’d you get this fancy car?”

“It’s a rental, through work.”

Then they searched us. Separating me from Carlie, looking for incriminating words in my paperwork. I am patted down, asked where I was born. I am reminded of the time cops called border patrol on my mom, who is Puerto Rican. I don’t know what they ask my passenger, my friend, on the other side of the car.

“Why is the rental in your name and not hers?”

“She’s a volunteer, I’m an employee,” I say.

Still scrutinizing the paperwork, I reword my response. “She’s a law student, volunteering where I work.”

She smiles across to me and I know her heart hurts. The parts we play, we know them well.

Trying to engage law enforcement is my least favorite part. They say it should be a partnership, a circle where all the parts work together. I even made a nice chart to show law enforcement this symbiotic relationship, even if I don’t believe it myself. Back in Cactus, a town that was built in the 40s to produce ammunition for World War II, I explain to the chief the government benefits human trafficking victims can receive. I mention the Visa that lets them stay for up to three years and a social security to work legally. I mention relocation fees and counseling. His eyes get shiny, he spits and says, “So then we’re gonna have the whole town saying they’re victims!” Moments away from blowing a gasket, I let him know that the FBI or another federal agency has to certify that they are in fact real claims of human trafficking.

I have seen his reaction before, like the sheriff who told me they get what they deserve. I use other arsenal, “even U.S. citizens can be victims of trafficking, it can happen to anyone.” It does not help, and I don’t bother with the rest of the requirements. I don’t tell him how sometimes federal agents don’t return our phone calls or how once they whisked a victim away from us, as a “witness” for one of their cases and put her in a cell. I don’t tell him how it’s stacked already against them and how defeatist it all seems to me.

Chief tobacco spitter perks right up to Carlie when she mentions he can apply for grants from different government departments. I know why they paired us up like that. The Mexican mom who can relate to the community and the white law student who can pacify the authorities. The scene repeats itself throughout most of Texas– Crystal City, Quemado, Sonora. I tell Yolanda and Mrs. Morales I’ll be back next summer, but I’m not too sure about that.

Read Noemi Martinez’s bio »

So this is what it’s like to live alone, I thought contentedly as I sank into the sofa with a spoon in one hand and a pint of Häagen-Dazs java chip in the other. I wrapped my worn old robe tightly around my bare legs (ignoring the unshaven stubble) and settled in for an uninterrupted evening rereading Gail Sheehy’s Passages. I had spied it in a little bookstore on my way home. Just the thing to help me start a new stage of my life, I thought.

After 30 years of navigating the suburban sprawl, it had been a treat to walk home, browse in a neighborhood bookstore and buy fresh flowers at the corner grocery. Almost as good as going to the French bakery on 10th Street.in the morning for real crisp-on-the-outside, down-soft-on-the-inside, croissants, distant cousins to their soggy suburban simulations. And coming home from work at night swept up in the rushing human currents on the electric yellow streets was a far cry from the dark silence of returning late to the town where I had lived.

It had taken me the first quarter-century of my life to traverse the 25 miles from the Lower East Side of my childhood to the Westchester suburbs, but twice as long just to get across town to the West Village. Now, here I was, almost 50 years old, and finally in a place of my own. Well, technically it was just an informal sub-let, but I was paying for it myself and, most important, I was living by myself for the first time in my life. Having attended a commuter college and married young, I had gone straight from my parents’ home to the one I shared with my new husband.

Side by side we had built a life, complete with two kids, a rotating menagerie of pets and an old house that sucked up all our spare time and money. During those thirty years I was wife, mother, enforcer, chauffer, cleaner, cook, dog-walker, laundress, shopper, gardener, volunteer, commuter, companion, adviser, homework helper, disciplinarian, shoulder to cry on and God knows what else.

Now most of those roles were obsolete, unneeded and unwanted. The children were on their own, and even Bill, my husband, wasn’t around much, trying to keep afloat a business that was past its prime. Even when he was home, without the children to talk about and worry about together, we no longer had much to share. I was set adrift.

At first it was easy to substitute the office for home, and the demands of the job for the family responsibilities that had consumed me all those years. But the emptiness at my core persisted. Who was I now? What had happened to my marriage? Was this the life I wanted? Did I have the courage to try something else?

“I haven’t spoken to you in two weeks. Why don’t you call?”

My mother was on the phone from Florida. “So tell me what’s doing.”

“Nothing much, Ma. I guess that’s why I didn’t call. There’s not much to tell.”

“How’s the job? And the children?”

“Same as usual. The kids are fine. I don’t hear from them much. They’re involved in their lives. You know how it is.”

“You need a hobby. Why don’t you take up bridge? It’s a wonderful way to meet people and pass the time.”

I hung up dejected. Is that what I faced? Killing time until the cocktail hour brought blessed respite from boredom? Maybe at 50 it was too late to revive the dreams of my youth: being a famous dramatic stage actress who routinely reduced audiences to tears; writing a novel that everybody loved but nobody understood; ending poverty, even in Africa. But did that mean I was consigned to bridge and booze? Weren’t there other options?

A few days later, a friend at work mentioned that he was moving in with his girlfriend but was unwilling to give up his apartment just yet.

“Yes!” I thought. Here was my opportunity to try on a different life, without having to make a permanent commitment! I could live the life I used to think I wanted. Culture. Concerts, museums, theatre. Urbane friends. Witty conversation. Go where I wanted, when I wanted. Best of all, I could see if I could make it on my own. Or maybe, if it panned out, I could talk Bill into moving back to the city. Maybe that’s what our marriage needed.

“You know, I’m working late so many nights and the trek home is a drag,” I said to my colleague. “Maybe I could use your place during the week for a few months. Just until you decide what to do.”

Of course he was glad to be able to recoup his rent and we quickly came to an agreement for me to move in that weekend.

I was so excited that I even thought Bill would see the logic of it. It would be a weekend marriage. No more daily commute. And for what? To watch TV or just go straight to bed so I could get up the next morning and go back to work?

It wasn’t a lie, even if it wasn’t the whole truth. Somehow it seemed too silly to say that I no longer knew who I was or what kind of life I wanted. Here he was, burdened by real problems, trying to salvage an outdated business, and I was creating issues where there were none, trying to “find” myself, like an adolescent.

But he sensed there was more to it than saving travel time.

“You’re sure?” he asked when I said it wouldn’t last past spring. “This isn’t some midlife crisis? A trial separation? Some fantasy of yours, living the single life? I guess it’s pretty dull around here lately.”

My antennae quivered. I was right. It seemed childish to him. A fantasy. Was there even a touch of contempt in his voice? Midlife crisis, he called it.

Feeling defensive, I went on the offense.

“I don’t know why you care so much,” I said. “You’re never home anyway. Or if you are, you go to bed by nine, leaving me alone. You never want to go out; we’ve lost our friends. You’ll hardly notice the difference if I’m there or not.”

“Damnit!. You know what I’ve been going through with the business. Can’t you cut me an inch of slack? Everything is always about you. It would be nice if just once, you’d stop criticizing and be more supportive.”

“I want to help, honey. But if you won’t talk to me about your business problems, how can I understand what you’re going through?”

“I don’t tell you because I know you can’t take it. You panic and run away. Just like you’re doing now. Well, I can’t worry about keeping you happy right now. If I lose the business, you won’t be happy anyway.”

And with that, the subject was closed.

Packing my bags that Sunday, I was both excited and scared. This must be what going away to college would have felt like, I thought. But I was much older now and traipsing off into the unknown was more daunting.

Bill drove me downtown to help me set up the apartment. But once we were there, he was anxious to leave.

“Oh, do you have to go?” I complained. “I had hoped we could walk around, you know, explore the neighborhood a bit.”

“You’ll understand if I’m not in the mood for that,” he said pausing at the door. ” I know you’re thinking of all the fun you’re going to have in your little pad, but I don’t feel like celebrating.”

As it turned out, living alone was not nearly as difficult as I feared. Of course, the sophisticated soirees I had anticipated never materialized, but neither did I ever feel lonely. I enjoyed the quiet, free from the constant accompaniment of a TV laugh track in the background. And I especially relished the freedom to think about no one else’s needs but my own. No dog to walk, no dinner to prepare, no homework to check. No one to please but me. I subscribed to a theatre nearby and went happily by myself. A couple of times I went to a movie — one that Bill would not have wanted to see anyway. I even conquered eating alone in a restaurant; there were so many interesting places to try!

Most important, I chased the boogey man away. I discovered that I could live alone — and like it! With that relief, my anxiety about my future receded. Whatever decisions I had to make, I knew I wouldn’t make them just because I was afraid of being alone.

As winter turned to spring, however, it was clear that I was drifting, enjoying my self-centered life but still lacking direction or sense of purpose. And with my lighter summer workload, there was no longer any reason to stay in the city, at least no work-related reason.

In addition, to my surprise, I started to miss the suburbs. I missed seeing the earth stirring to life: the tightly wrapped hosta leaves bravely piercing the cold ground, the rhododendron buds showing their first blush, the early robin pecking furiously at the hard brown lawn. There was outdoor cleanup that needed to be done, fall bulbs to put in, and a bricklayer to find to replace the cracked front walk.

Being in the apartment as the days grew longer began to feel cramped and confining. I longed for the evening walks we used to take down to the harbor, the intoxicating smell of sea air, the stinging spray of salt on our faces, the glorious colors in the sunset-tinted water.

.And, as the initial exhilaration of self-empowerment faded, I found myself hungering for Bill’s physical presence and for the ballet of shared tasks and time-honored routines that we had choreographed over the years: getting a meal together, cleaning up, paying bills, catching the news. More and more often, even midweek, I took the train to Westchester after work instead of heading downtown. Bill wasn’t always home, but with my new self-reliance I was no longer so dependent on his company.

The end was anti-climactic. Gradually, I shifted my belongings back to the house. I hadn’t made the big life changes I had thought I needed. But I was more at peace with myself when I returned, more content with who I was and the life choices I’d made. I felt more like a complete and separate person, free to forge my own way when I wanted to, whether or not Bill joined me.

My being less needy seemed to free Bill, too. No longer was he burdened with the responsibility of making me happy. No longer did he feel always obligated to keep me company at home or to attend one of my work-related events. As he became more confident in my new-found independence, he even began to share his business worries with me, and to our relief, I was able to listen with empathy but not fear. We reminisced a lot, too, about trips we’d taken, people we’d known and crises we’d weathered. And with those memories as a foundation, we gradually reconstructed the love we’d had.

And so it goes. I still sometimes go to the movies by myself or to a restaurant for a solitary meal. I spend hours writing, no longer resenting the equal hours Bill spends poring over his accounts or on the phone with suppliers. And when he turns on the TV, that is my chance to retire to another room to read.
Yes, change was needed. But changing venues was not the answer. Neither did I have to lose what was good in my life. Little by little, I carved out my own space, a place of my own right there at home.

Read Susan Amlung’s bio »

Try to get comfortable. It’s your first month in eastern Europe and you’re about to take a 14-hour train trip from Moldova to Bucharest, Romania. This overnight journey will be mired in the deepest humidity and where you actually want to go is Ukraine. The trip to Romania is costing you, in total, 28 hours of wrong-direction travel time. But the multi-entrance visa stamp you will need to re-enter Moldova after visiting Ukraine is only available from an embassy in Bucharest.

I hope you’re laughing. It is 2001, so there isn’t even a reigning Communist regime to blame for this bureaucracy. Your Russian friend, Vlad, escorts you to the train and says cryptically, “Just don’t show anyone your passport.” Then he waves goodbye.

Once aboard, however, word quickly – even instantaneously – spreads that an American is on the train. Awkwardly, it is you. People approach, speaking Russian or Romanian, but since you have no idea what they could want (apart from your passport), you smile dazedly and try to imply, through a certain glazed look in your eye, that you are just a little bit slow. You hope they will leave you alone.

This ploy works fairly well for the first few hours, until an official enters the cabin. No false smiles or chatty preliminaries for him. You hand him your passport, doing your best to convey a carefree, yet meek, air of innocence. You are, of course, innocent – at least, in the criminal sense – but you are also an unmarried, unaccompanied young woman, traveling from country to country, hapless and apparently mute.

To everyone else on the train, this situation is incomprehensible. There is already something wrong.

The official gruffly marches away with your passport and does not return for hours. You are now more than a little nervous. You have recently gone around the world and the passport is filled with stamps of a quantity and variety that astonishes even you. Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Morocco. You fear the official who examines it will alter his appraisal of you as a cretin and decide you are a spy.

Tense ages pass. Finally, the official returns, looks you shrewdly in the eye and, in a few pointed words, manages to convey that he now knows the sordid truth about you. One thing he knows is your age: at 34, a good five or ten years older than you appear. You feel mortified, as if you have been caught in a lie.

As the official exits the sleeping car, a cabinmate gestures at your passport, wanting to see it. You have already tried to chat with him, his sister and the third occupant of the cabin, a blind man. It hasn’t been easy, since only the boy speaks even a smattering of English.

Yet, since you are stuck with these people for the rest of the night, and the language barrier between you is thicker than the Great Wall of China, you have no words with which to graciously refuse. You feel as if you are handing a translation of your intimate personal diary to your new acquaintances. You sit silently while they pass it amongst themselves and discuss it in a foreign language.

You wish you’d brought more books to kill the time. What you need is something funny and cheerful. What you have is a horrible, tiny-print tome of Dostoevsky. Back in New York, it seemed logical that eastern Europe would be a good place to catch up on Russian writers.

Finally, it comes time for the four of you to climb into your sleeping berths. The two men remove their shirts and fold them neatly away. Their semi-nakedness makes you uncomfortable, but you, too, feel the brutal humidity. Since it is far too hot to sleep, you listen to your Walkman, the volume turned down as low as possible.

At midnight, the train comes to a complete halt. Sixty minutes later, it is still stationery. You are told the train is changing wheels to fit the Romanian train tracks, and that this is normal procedure. You sit in a dumbfounded silence.

At least you’d like to. Alas, the downtime requires you to bond with the three other sweating inmates of the cabin. Maybe the blind man will tell you, as he did me, “I can sense you have a nice smile.” His kindness will touch you, though you are far too hot and tired to want to exert the effort needed to communicate, a few words at a time, via the boy.

No matter. It is you who are the foreigner on display at very close quarters. Just smile through the humidity and try to seem friendly. You will be here for hours to come, so — you may as well get comfortable.

Read Avra Kouffman’s bio »

Pasayten Wilderness, Washington State, October 1991:

“Hiking Haystack Mountain, I follow my shadow down a trail of loose rock and horseshit, coming to a place I didn’t mean to find. I meant to wind up at the summit or somewhere else on the ridge now behind me. Keep going to that better place along the curving trail. Not here where a small bird glows silver as it flies between conifers…”

Twenty years later, I sit in my writing room, read an old journal, try to remember that place, that day, but I’ve walked many trails.

“I drop my pack and sit where winter sunlight warms rock. A white moth alights on a stone and opens its wings to the sun. A chipmunk stops, then races with tail held high into a patch of shooting stars. The purple flowers crumble like parchment… If I continued on I could find that other place, that better place, that right place…”

When I wrote that, only a few years had passed since I put a continent between me and my upstate New York home, where friends and family swore they knew everything about me, no surprises to ponder, no questions to ask. I left believing that with the freedom of a fresh start, I’d find my true self in a new place.
“As I sit in this place, at this moment, the world is spinning on its axis, shooting out and returning in an elliptic orbit around the sun. That sun has its trail through the galaxy. That galaxy takes its own journey. There is no other place like this, no moment like this. But it’s not my place. What’s that green lichen slowly spreading across shadowed rocks? What snapped that twig? What red spider, no larger than the point of my pen, scurries across the page? What’s humming, for just a moment, as it travels through this silence? Perhaps if I knew, I’d have my place…”

Sitting in that sharp sunlight, I paid my freedom’s price: loneliness. What’s “place” but a fancy word for home? What’s home without spouses and lovers, friends or foes, children, neighbors, colleagues, strangers and everyone else moving through life with you? If I didn’t have a place where I was known, then I wanted to know where the wind blew, what tracks crossed the trail, an encyclopedic knowledge that could conceal how out of place I was.

“There are the names, of course, but I want something more, an older, deeper knowledge…”

Now my three-year-old daughter pushes my door open. So many trails; did I find that better, right place? Not if it means knowing everything living here beside me. Home is simply where I choose to stay and figure it out. I try to find my freedom in the weathered intimacy that grows after sharp questions overturn familiar ground, and a wilderness of possibilities takes root. And so my daughter and I explore wolf fur kept in a Tibetan bowl, brittle pinecones, and six black feathers, each with oblong white markings, that I found the day I buried an old friend. I want to tell her what bird it’s from, but is she old enough to be introduced to field guides, binoculars, this vast world we walk through?

My daughter pulls my hand. I shut my old journal. I open the door. Isn’t it too soon for her to seek her place? Or are we always doing that, no matter how happy we are? A good home nurtures a question, or two, or more. Keeps the place from getting boring.

Read Adrienne Ross Scanlan bio »

We appreciate your patience while we update the anthology.

Best,

the editors

Thanks to everyone who submitted.

We intend to send out notifications no later than October 10, 2011 and hope to have the anthology live and fully readable no later than December 1.

We appreciate your patience while we figure out how to decide which stories will be included in the anthology.

Best,

the editors