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So funny I forgot to laugh: the female comedic voice in contemporary American short fiction

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So funny I forgot to laugh: the female comedic voice in contemporary American short fiction

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Content SO FUNNY I FORGOT TO LAUGH:
THE FEMALE COMEDIC VOICE IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN SHORT FICTION
By Allison “Amy” Silverberg
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING)
December 2021
Copyright 2021 Allison “Amy” Silverberg
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So Funny I Forgot to Laugh:
The Female Comedic Voice in Contemporary American Short Fiction

Table of Contents

Literature
Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv
Part. 1 The Female Comedic Voice: An Introduction .................................................................... 1
Historical Context .................................................................................................................... 4
Why the Female Comedic Voice (Why Does Gender Matter)? .............................................. 6
Significant Frameworks ......................................................................................................... 10
The Unruly Woman ........................................................................................................ 10
The Female Trickster ...................................................................................................... 10
Pretty / Funny ................................................................................................................. 11
My Goal in Defining a Genre ................................................................................................ 11
Minimalism & its Relation to the Genre ................................................................................ 12
Part 2. The Godmothers ................................................................................................................ 16
Dorothy Parker: The Forerunner............................................................................................ 16
Grace Paley: My Foundational Text ...................................................................................... 19
The Influence of Paley’s Background on her Style ........................................................ 23
Paley & Plot .................................................................................................................... 26
Paley & Relationships .................................................................................................... 28
Part 3. A Bridge ............................................................................................................................ 33
Amy Hempel: The Miniaturist ............................................................................................... 33
Lorrie Moore: The Maximalist .............................................................................................. 42
The Comedy in “You’re Ugly, Too ................................................................................ 45
Lorrie Moore & Performance ......................................................................................... 52
Part 4. Branches of the Family Tree ............................................................................................. 57
Roxane Gay: “Difficult Women ............................................................................................ 57
Danielle Evans: Humor & Trauma ........................................................................................ 62
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 68
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 71
Preface ........................................................................................................................................ 76
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Creative Writing
Part 5. You Must Be Kidding: Stories .......................................................................................... 78
THE DUPLEX ....................................................................................................................... 79
I SPY .................................................................................................................................... 100
ONE ROUGH, ONE TENDER ........................................................................................... 103
SUBURBIA! ....................................................................................................................... 118
THE CHECK UP ................................................................................................................. 132
MURDER SOUNDS ........................................................................................................... 135
TEACH ME SOMETHING ................................................................................................ 143
A WORLD OF WOMEN .................................................................................................... 149
WORKING FOR THE MAN .............................................................................................. 164
PETER ................................................................................................................................. 168
THE ACTOR’S DEN .......................................................................................................... 177
DESERT TOWN ................................................................................................................. 189
ONLY A JOKE .................................................................................................................... 207
AMONG MEN .................................................................................................................... 210
US GIRLS ............................................................................................................................ 231
HAVE YOU MET HUSBAND? ......................................................................................... 234
THE ESCAPE ARTIST ....................................................................................................... 247
THE ELASTICITY OF THE BRAIN ................................................................................. 252
THIS MAY SURPRISE YOU ............................................................................................. 264
APOLOGIZE! ...................................................................................................................... 268
I THREW RICE AT A WEDDING ONCE ........................................................................ 273
THE PARTICULARS OF BEING JIM .............................................................................. 274
DARK ARTS ....................................................................................................................... 281

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ABSTRACT

In this project, I define a literary genre I call the “the female comedic voice” relegated to
contemporary American short fiction. I consider comedy, feminist, ontological, and performance
theories in order to build a family tree of female authors, focusing on how they’ve influenced
each other as well as their overlapping and distinguishing characteristics. With each author, I
focus on language, subject matter, and structure while occasionally using relevant
autobiographical details, particularly regarding my foundational author, Grace Paley. Originally,
I theorized that the female comedic voice was a way for female authors to gain or exert control.
In the end, I became less certain that they ever achieved the control they wanted, but that the
short stories existence in the world was what mattered—that was the crucial feminist act. By the
end, I conclude that not only does the female comedic voice refer to a certain group of hallmark
characteristics, it can’t be distinguished from feminist literature at all. Instead, it is an integral
part of it. The comedy in these short stories is what forces readers to stomach truths that
otherwise might make them uncomfortable. If laughing, they can swallow.

In short, by the end, I hope I’ve laid out a working definition of the female comedic voice, as
well as a family tree of influences.

v
“Name?” the desk clerk said to me politely, her pencil poised.
“Name,” I said vaguely. I remembered, and told her.
“Age?” she asked. “Sex? Occupation?”
“Writer,” I said.
“Housewife,” she said.
“Writer,” I said.
“I’ll just put down housewife,” she said.

— Shirley Jackson to the hospital clerk, before she gave birth to her third
child in 1948 (from her autobiography, Life Among the Savages)

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PART 1. THE FEMALE COMEDIC VOICE:
AN INTRODUCTION

What do I mean when I say “the female comedic voice?” And what makes the genre distinctive
from the comedic voice in general, other than that the writing is by women.
When I was allowed to teach my first Introductory Fiction course at USC, I did not yet
understand I should tailor my tastes to what might best suit the students. Instead, I wanted them
to read what I loved, and of course, I wanted them to love it too.
“This story is sad,” one of my students said, about Lorrie Moore’s “You’re Ugly, Too,”
from her second collection Like Life, in which a history professor attempts to go about her daily
life after she’s diagnosed with cancer.
“What about this is funny?” The student asked. He had an accusatory look on his face, as
though I’d purposefully misled him, or maybe simply didn’t know the definition of “funny” after
all. Wasn’t I also a comedian? (The question seemed implied).
“The language,” I said. “The jokes!”
“It only made me feel bad for her,” another girl agreed. “The woman seemed very lonely.
And sort of annoying.”
“No,” said another a girl, in a sorority sweatshirt, her ponytail buoyant and cheerful.
“You’re missing it. It’s only funny because it’s also sad. Having both is the point.” (Of course,
these conversations with my past students are my own reenactments, and reenactments will
become integral to my definition of this genre later in the dissertation).
It feels important to note that I liked this student, I felt there was a complicatedness
lurking beneath the constant chatter with her blonde sidekicks. It had something to do with the
enthusiastic hand-raising about everything we’d read, and her unusually insightful papers.
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Maybe she just reminded me of myself, and made me think about how secretly depressed I’d
been at her age, also a member of a very blonde sorority, at a college notorious for its “party
culture” at a time when I didn’t feel like partying. I’d felt tragically lonely, unable to drink as
much everyone else (I’m a Type 1 Diabetic), and frankly uninterested (I wanted to read books
and be left to my own devices). Then, I was unable to articulate to anyone quite how I felt. I had
an impulse toward joke-telling but did not yet know “comedian” was an occupation available to
me. I thought maybe I wanted to be a writer, too, but that seemed almost as unlikely a career.
Regardless, books were my only reprieve. And when I look back at that time—the time I
discovered writers like Grace Paley, Lorrie Moore and Mary Robison—it seems to me that I was
depressed in a very nineteen-year-old way, which is to say, as I sat, fully dressed on an
abandoned, empty keg in a fraternity house, I worried I was the only one who had every felt like
this before: caught between worlds, helpless to make the way I felt inside match what I said and
did.
I agreed with the argument my student was making about why Moore’s stories were
comedic: it was the way they rode the line, the way in which comedy and tragedy dovetailed that
somehow made the context sadder and the dialogue funnier. “Nothing’s a joke with me,” as the
protagonist in Moore’s “Jewish Hunter” says. “It just all comes out like one.” Almost every main
character in Moore’s short stories has this same propensity for jokes and malapropisms and
misconceptions regarding language. (In Bark, there’s a restaurant with steaks cooked “to your
likeness”; a man who tells his girlfriend she looks “hunky-dorky.” In the final story of the
collection, one character asks, “Why is there a month named March, but no Skip? May but no
Can?”) There are the set-ups and punchlines and misdirects, plus all of the breathless pauses and
rhythms that comedians also keep in their toolbox. As Marion Winik writes in the Washington
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Post about all of Moore’s jokesters, “the effect recalls what they say about your dreams: Every
character is actually you.”
After that semester, I didn’t teach the story again, not because I thought the class had
gone especially poorly, or that they all needed to love the story, but because my own attachment
to it seemed to obscure my ability to teach it. In an essay for the NY Times Book Review, Lauren
Groff describes discovering Lorrie Moore:
It is impossible to overstate how deeply it can move you to discover, in a literary
world that you love all the way to the bedrock but find mostly barren of any trace
of yourself, a voice that could be your own, if only refined into art. (Moore’s) stories
were so modern they thrummed with the urgency of my own young person’s
anxieties and obsessions, so mordantly funny that I laughed out of sheer,
astonished, often gleeful pain (Groff).

I, too, felt this “gleeful pain” when I first discovered Moore’s debut collection, Self Help, in
college. Coincidentally I felt the same gleeful pain the first time I’d ever done a paid stand-up
show—a show I’d prepared for through months of painful open mic nights. To see the look on
the audience members’ faces as they laughed, as though it pained them, as though I’d forced it
out of them was also the first time in my life I’d experienced the kind of control I’d always
wanted. This brings me to an essential strand in the DNA of this genre: a desire to exert control.
“A witty writer gains some degree of control over the events of her life,” Nora Ephron
said, by “retelling her story her own way, by putting herself as the intelligence at the center of it”
(Levy 3). In other words, a “witty” writer—the phrase Barbara Levy uses in Ladies Laughing:
Wit as Control in Contemporary American Fiction—learns to control her material with one main
goal: to convince her reading audience that her viewpoint is a valid one, or the valid one. Levy
argues that there is an “added aggressive quality to the control of witty female writers” as
opposed to writers in general, or witty male writers. For example, Faith, the recurring narrator of
so many of Grace Paley’s early stories, seems, at first, “haplessly manipulated by men in her
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life” (Levy 3) and yet, Paley’s language directs the reader where to look, what to see, and how to
react. Often slyly and unbeknownst to the reader, Paley exerts her control. For the purpose of
my dissertation, Paley will be foundational to the female comedic voice, the root from which all
the other author-branches stem.
Historical Context
“Witty” women writers have been excluded from the traditional definitions of wit, which
where were grounded in eighteenth century thought. The prevailing eighteenth-century attitude
toward witty female writers foreshadowed Samuel Johnson’s famous dismissal later in the
century of a female preacher: “She reminded him, he said, of a dog dancing on his hind legs—
one marvels not at how well it was done, but that it was done at all” (Levy 8). One of the
premises behind Nancy Walker’s A Very Serious Thing: Women’s’ Humor and the American
Culture, which traces humor from the beginnings of American literature, is that female humor
and comedy has been excluded from the canon because women’s subjects have always been
considered trivial.
What made them seem trivial? Maybe because the humor of women was so closely
entangled with domesticity (which so many of the contemporary female authors I’ll discuss here
seem intent on thwarting). In Merry Wives and Others: A History of Domestic Humor Writing,
Penelope Fritzer and Bartholomew Bland argue the history of domestic humor is, in many ways,
a history of twentieth century domestic life. “The American housewife," they argue, “the focal
point of that domestic life that provides the fodder for the humor being examined is unique —
revered and reviled at the same time. The subject of countless studies and inquiries, and at the
fulcrum of the endless discussed subject of the deteriorating nuclear family, she is at once
hopelessly dated and a powerful force to be reckoned with” (Fritzer 3). Here lies the paradox of
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domestic humor: it tracks various changing social strands while dealing with consistent themes
and preoccupations. Domestic humor will remain timeless because it is based on the interactions
between children and parents, between partners, between houses and inhabitants, between
neighbors, between owners and pets, and between chores and their doers (Fritzer 22). While the
contexts of these interactions change—and the particulars of the dynamics change, too—the
interactions (and their complications) will still take place, will always be taking place.
Maybe to appreciate and understand domestic humor in a scholarly context, it’s helpful to
understand the attitude toward housekeeping at that time, particularly the sincere earnestness of
society toward homemaking in the days when it was taken very seriously. The images and ethos
of Donna Reed and June Cleaver that once dominated, and to which contemporary conservatives
still cling (tune into Amy Coney Barrett, for one) are both distant and pervasive. For this reason,
they trigger “both nostalgia and camp” (Fritzer 39). Cultural icons like Martha Stewart and B.
Smith (also known as the “Black Martha Stewart”) represent both sides of the evolving attitude
toward the American housewife: earnestness and satire. For example, when Martha Stewart
willingly parodied herself on commercials—in an American Express advertisement, she tiles her
pool with a mosaic of cut up credit cards—and on daytime tv shows like Ellen, we see another
layer of how this stereotype might be subverted (comedically) for personal gain. And we can’t
forget Stewart’s personal life, too: the fact that she’s divorced, and was at one point incarcerated,
complicates her original “iconic housewife” image even further.
Currently, Martha Stewart is one half of a talk show with the rapper Snoop Dogg, in
which she teaches him domestic shortcuts while he teaches her about weed culture. Before the
Martha and Snoop Dogg collaboration, we saw stand-up comedians undermining the “June
Cleaver” archetype—tv shows like Roseanne, in which the titular working class mother has it
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anything but together, opting for pizza instead of gourmet home cooking, giving her kids the sex
talk in crass jokey metaphors, and so on. Roseanne was the self-proclaimed satirical “domestic
goddess” in her standup act, an act proved so popular she built a television show around it. Joan
Rivers, too, based an act around all the ways she was a disappointment to her mother: with men,
as a housewife, and as a woman in general. “I hate housework,” she says in an old joke. “You
make the beds, you do the dishes, and six months later, you have to start all over again”
(Raymond).
In this dissertation, while we won’t always be in the realm of housework or housewives,
we will continuously see domestic norms grappled with—sometimes agreed to however
grudgingly, and sometimes undermined.
Why the Female Comedic Voice? (Why Does Gender Matter?)
In They Used to Call Me Snow White…But I Drifted: Women’s’ Strategic Use of Humor,
Gina Barreca argues that historically the “relationship to joking put girls in a position similar to
the sexual dilemma that proposed we be attractive but unavailable, caught between being cheap
and being prudish” (Barreca 7). In other words, when a girl heard an off color or dirty joke, she
was stuck between being afraid to show that she “got it” and being embarrassed to say that she
didn’t want to hear it, or participate. And while I’m not arguing that male readers don’t enjoy the
writers of this genre—now more than ever—I am arguing that inherent to the text is a language
meant to go around men and bridge the gap between women, biologically female or not.
Not only does the gender difference play a role, it’s often crucial to the humor. Consider
the classic Rita Rudner joke: “My boyfriend and I broke up. He wanted to get married…and I
didn’t want him to.” The success of the punchline is because of gender, not despite it. The joke’s
language dislocates us for a moment; it is not what we were expecting to hear. This undermining
7
of our expectations—and the shock of awareness when we understand what’s actually being said,
the thing that makes us laugh (our surprise)—is perhaps the basis of all jokes. If the genders were
switched, if a male comedian said, “My girlfriend and I broke up. She wanted to get
married…and I didn’t want her to” the joke would change; it wouldn’t work. Or at least, it
wouldn’t be funny. It wouldn’t operate on the level of undermining our expectations, or causing
us surprise. When the joke is told by a woman, the joke is framed by one set of Western cultural
expectations: women are usually the gender who desires marriage. So much of the female
comedic voice hinges on just this: undermining expectations—what society expects of us, and
how that continues to change.
Years after Rita Rudner, comedians like Ellen DeGeneres, Wanda Sykes, and Sam Jay
told jokes about their ambivalence toward marriage, but this time, to another woman. In a set for
the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal, Sam Jay revealed she and her wife were
getting divorced: “Gay people fought for the wrong thing,” she says, regarding marriage. “We
should’ve fought for a tax break.” Later in the set, she explains why she and her wife had so
much difficulty living together: “Nobody told me our periods would sync up,” she says. “Older
lesbians talk about oppression. They never told me about the sync up” (Just for Laughs).
To ask why women’s humor is excluded from theories of comedy—mostly studies
written by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), and Henri Bergson
(1859-1941)—is to ask why womens’ humor is excluded from playbills, films, comedy clubs,
and anthologies. It is because “they didn’t imagine women and minorities as powerful subjects of
their own comedy” (Sturtevant 10). When feminists set out to claim and think about women in
comedy, in scholarship that began in the late 1980s, they had to barge into the critical
conversation, ask new questions, and point out how sex and gender make a difference. For my
8
purposes, Bakhtin seems to be the most useful due to his theories of “transgression and reversal,
and especially his focus on the body and its social meanings in comedy” (Mizejewski 10). His
theory of the “carnivalesque,” in particular—a version of medieval carnival which continues in
New Orleans Mardi Gras today—asserts that carnivals were a time when hierarchy was
disrupted, social status was turned upside down, and the body itself remapped. This has been
useful to feminist thinking about the rowdiness, disruptiveness, and lewdness of certain strands
of female comedy, such as the “rank ladies” of vaudeville and burlesque (Mizejewski).
Comedy as a topic of feminist criticism lagged behind other kinds of feminist academic
work in the 1970s and 1980s, partly because women were avoiding topics that seemed frivolous.
Eventually, feminist scholars of popular culture tapped, revised, and reinvented theories of
comedy in order to open up discussions of women’s comedy, past and present, and to
acknowledge its diversity. The earliest feminist scholars on comedy seized on comedy’s
antiauthoritarianism, pointing out that women writers from Aphra Behn to Lily Tomlin have
used the power of wit to critique patriarchal culture. For example, Judy Little’s 1983 book,
Comedy and The Woman Writer: Woolf, Spark, and Feminism, was the first to argue for a
literary tradition of women’s feminist comedy.
“Hysterical!” Women in American Comedy argues that what female comedians and
writers have in common is their “outsider” relationship to traditional male political power.
Studies of comedy often cite anthropologist Victor Turner’s writings about liminality, in which
identities, social roles, and even gender roles can become unfixed. For Turner, these “reversals”
mostly took place during festivals, rites of passage, and seasonal rituals in certain cultures, but he
acknowledges that liminality can be used to describe borderline or counterculture experiences in
many societies, including the activities of artist and philosophers, or for my purposes, female
9
writers of the comedic voice. The clown or comic (or the comedic writer), as an insider/outsider
has similar license to challenge and ridicule cultural assumptions and values, and this so-called
antagonism toward the status quo is intrinsic to the female comedian’s power and appeal.
Little draws on Turner’s concept of liminality and the festival role reversal to describe
feminist humor that plays with identities and mocks social norms but then refuses to return from
“festival” mode, instead pushing for “a radical reordering of social structures, a real rather than
temporary and merely playful redefinition of sex identity” (Little 25). The result, she says, is
comedy that can be called “subversive, revolutionary, or renegade” (26). Nancy Walker shares
this conclusion in her 1988 book, A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American Culture.
While Little focused on British writers, Walker identifies a tradition of female humorists in the
United States, arguing that not all women’s humor is necessarily feminist, but a “significant part”
of that tradition is politically charged, either through a “subtle challenge” to gender roles or
through open confrontation of those roles (17).
In Redressing the Balance: American Women’s Literary Humor from Colonial Times to
the 1980s, Nancy Walker moves further towards a theory of feminist humor, arguing that
because of their unequal status, women have developed a distinct comic style that is more
indirect and oblique than men’s. The “funny woman” is implicitly a gender outlaw because she
refuses her place as the silent, docile feminine ideal. In this way, female comedy is innately
subversive and aligned with the oppressed: “Feminine comedy doesn’t attack the powerless; it
makes fun of the powerful” (Barreca 74), which we’ll see later in this dissertation with Roxane
Gay and Danielle Evans in particular.

10
Significant Frameworks:
The Unruly Woman: Rather than claiming that women’s comedy is innately subversive,
Kathleen Rowe Karlyn focuses on a type of outrageous comic female character that she traces
from the Middle Ages to contemporary popular culture. This “unruly woman” uses Bakhtin’s
theory of the carnivalesque and the female grotesque to describe female characters who “disrupt
the norms of femininity and the social hierarchy through excess and outrageousness” (Karlyn 6).
Karlyn cites characters from medieval and Renaissance plays through Mae West, Roseanne,
Miss Piggy, and my friend from childhood Rachel Hall, if only you knew her. She also points to
romantic comedy films, in which women are the agents of their own sexual desires. In romantic
comedies especially, women are traditionally “emplotted” in stories and the unruly woman
disrupts those plots.
The Female Trickster: In the 1988 book Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The
Female Trickster in American Culture, Lori Landay taps North American folklore and literature
as sources of the female trickster: “the sly, resourceful woman who subverts the status quo and
outwits her adversaries through deception and fast thinking” (8). According to Landay, while the
trickster is traditionally represented as a man, the “use of doubleness is especially suited to
women in that the social practice of femininity is a form of trickery.” Landay cites the tricksters
as the heroines of screwball comedies and madcap sitcoms, like Lucy Ricardo in I Love Lucy.
Landay also cites Catwoman in Batman Returns as a female trickster because she “imagines
what tactics are necessary to escape the system as well as what factors prevent that escape”
(Mizejewski 46). In short, female trickers are fantasy figures of resistance, self-preservation, and
self-definition (Landay). For my purposes, many of the female protagonists in the stories I’ll cite
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in this dissertation are unruly women and female tricksters, as are the authors writing them. It’s
only the readers who are often misled into thinking they are merely being entertained.
“Pretty/Funny”: In Pretty Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics (2014), Linda
Mizejewski argues that in the twenty-first century, women’s comedy has become a key site for
feminist discourse and representations of feminism. The concept of “pretty versus funny” springs
from the biases of popular culture, which tends to divide women in comedy into the “pretty”
ones (actresses with good comedic timing who get cast in romantic comedies) and the “funny”
ones (comedians who write and perform their own work but aren’t considered attractive enough
to be leading ladies). According to Mizejewski, since 2000 the stereotype has been powerfully
challenged by the likes of Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, and more. Because of this
binary of pretty-versus-funny, “women comics, no matter what they look like, have been located
in opposition to ‘pretty,’ enabling them to engage in a transgressive comedy grounded in the
female body—its looks, its race and sexuality, and its relationship to ideal versions of
femininity” (Mizejewski 17). While this scholarship interests me personally because I’m a stand
up comedian who writes her own material, it interests me in terms of this “genre” of fiction,
because protagonists’ attractiveness to men—their ability to interest them, keep them, and the
question of if they even want them—is a beat at the pulse of many of these stories. Additionally,
the notion of navigating the world as a “funny woman” not a “pretty woman” is complicated
when the notion of “pretty” means non-white or non-straight. This becomes important in stories
like Danielle Evans’s and Roxane Gay’s which I’ll touch on later.
My Goal in Defining a Genre
In Barbara Levy’s book, she says that she included personal information because “in the
same way that subjects typically written about by women have been undervalued and trivialized,
12
so have their lives” (Levy 3). Her solution was to mix biographical information with critical
commentary. When I read this initially, I bristled. I am suspicious of conflating autobiographical
details of authors with the lives of their protagonists. But I found, surprisingly, that as I wrote
this dissertation, like Levy, I became interested in aspects of these authors’ lives—the things they
so wanted to control—if only because they seemed, at times, enacted on the page in a way that
was impossible to ignore. In this dissertation, I will focus on only a few sparse autobiographical
details regarding one or two short stories, but I will often consult interviews with the authors, as
well as the theorists I’ve previously mentioned. By the end, I hope I’ve laid out a working
definition of the female comedic voice, as well as a family tree of influences.
Minimalism & its Relation to the Genre
I know what my students meant when they said the stories were sad. If we dissect
isolated lines in the work of these writers—more than isolated lines, whole paragraphs—they are
anything but funny. These lines are somber, sometimes tragic, and yet, I’d argue that the female
authors I will discuss here are masters of the comedic form. If you’ve ever heard them read in
person, you’d laugh. Of course, this has something to do with their performances, and the
embodiment of these voices by the women who created them. Many of these writers’ work show
the hallmarks of minimalism, but minimalism is an umbrella term under which most of these
writers can’t adequately fit, or stay out of the rain (minimalism is raining men). As Mary
Robison said about being called a minimalist: “I detested it. Subtractionist, I preferred. That at
least implied a little effort. Minimalists sounded like we had tiny vocabularies and few ways to
use the few words we knew” (Taylor). Instead of minimalism, I think the genre employs a style
closer to what I’ll refer to as miniaturism. Maybe these writers aren’t funny exactly, but they’re
anatomists of funny—forensic psychologists of everyday life; miniaturists in their attention to
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detail, and scientific in their deconstruction of feelings and all of those feelings’ grotesqueness.
This notion of miniaturism has a long history: Jane Austen described her use of characterization
as portraits in miniature. According to Alex Woloch’s The One vs The Many: Minor Characters
and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel, Elizabeth Bennett from Pride & Prejudice is such
a strong protagonist, “the intensity and vigor of her personality seems almost to compel minor
characters all around her.” In other words, the force of Elizabeth Bennet’s personality is rendered
with such detail that in order to withstand interactions with her, the minor characters in the novel
must be described with equal specificity and precision.
In order to discuss miniaturism, we must further discuss minimalism. When Lorrie
Moore’s first short story collection, Self-Help, debuted in 1985, the fashion in short fiction was a
“button-lipped minimalism that tried to invest an abyss of emotion into the slightest of gestures”
(Sodowysky). Moore’s debut collection also appeared the same year as Grace Paley’s Later That
Same Day, Paley’s third short story collection. The minimalist fad, Madison Smartt Bell said in
1989, is a “literary style exemplifying economy and restraint" and named Donald Barthelme,
Raymond Carver, and Amy Hempel as practitioners. Mark A. R. Facknitz in Benet's Reader's
Encyclopedia of American Literature divides minimalist writers into two types, formal and
social, the formal minimalist being "a technician with a taste for clear, colloquial language and
uncluttered plots," using "narrow temporal frames, present tense, and first-person narrators while
eliminating editorial or authorial intrusions" (Sodowsky). These characteristics describe so many
stories in the "social minimalism" group (also known as “dirty realism and Kmart realism”) that
I’m collapsing the two categories.
Critics like John Barth and Dan Pope called minimalism "terse, oblique, hyperrealistic,
slightly plotted, extrospective, and cool-surfaced" (Sodowsky). The comparatively maximalist
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Barth called minimalism "homely, understated, and programmatically unglamorous" (Sodowsky
8). In my own research, I was struck most by the sheer derision many critics seemed to harbor
toward minimalism. Pope referred to the narrators as “fickle, alienated, generic, self-obsessed,
family-less, often alcoholic,” and often divorced or dealing with marital troubles (Sodowsky 10).
He also pointed to the writers' fondness for the present tense and their disregard for background
or historical explication, the monotonous use of colloquialisms, the sitcom dialogue, the
unresolved situations, the characters' vague sense of emptiness and disillusionment, and the
trendiness (in example, the endless references to brand names).
Minimalism’s typical subject matter, at least to many critics, is relegated to the present,
and to the domestic, unconcerned with history or context or literary merit. Many detractors of
minimalism seemed to be saying that there is something small about these stories—something
vaguely inconsequential—and as I read these critiques, I pictured a large man looming over a
doll house, watching the trivial melodramas of its residents as though from a great distance,
pausing only to call them “generic” and “self-obsessed.” And maybe a critique of the suburban
yuppie is required when writing not only about minimalism, but about the female comedic voice
and many of its practitioners. After all, aren’t many of the authors I’m interested in writing from
the battleground of the domestic, which seems much less dire than the literature in which
characters actually go to battle? And yet, the stakes in these stories are extremely high—they all
hinge on women’s survival.
In the wake of Grace Paley, Moore wrote about many of the same things as minimalists
like Amy Hempel and Mary Robison did—adultery, divorce, sex, illness, small-town ennui—but
she did away with the negative space. Her stories are verbose, filled with run on sentences and
extended metaphors, as though silence is scarier than whatever crisis her characters are
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undergoing. Moore’s characters banter, pun, toss up non sequiturs, get lost in maze-like
irrelevant flights of imagination. And they often tell jokes. Another distinguishing feature of
Moore’s work: the relentless likening of X to Y, through the use of analogy, metaphor or simile.
Even the title of her second collection, Like Life, acts as all three.
When Moore’s second collection Like Life came out in 1988—coincidentally, the year I
was born—Moore was reading radically experimental postmodernism authors of the time, like
Donald Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon as they were being “superseded, or at least joined, by
new forms of realism” (Kelly). The Post-postmodern fiction that were hallmarks of the time ranged
from detailed accounts of consciousness and the minutia of experience like Richard Ford's novel
The Sportswriter (1986), to minimalist snapshots of domestic life like the short stories in Amy
Hempel's first collection, Reasons to Live (1985). Moore's small-scale technique established her
position at the miniaturist end of this spectrum, but her style differentiated it.
If Grace Paley and Amy Hempel controlled the readers’ experience with every
painstaking word, Moore exerted her control through a kind of over use of language: italics, em
dashes, exclamation points, metaphors, and jokes from which you couldn’t look away lest you
miss a word. For the minimalists, every word is important. For Moore, the way in which the
words are spoken—the performance—is important, too. But more about that later.
Lorrie Moore is a paradox: a maximalist in the miniaturist genre, but I’ll also cover other
writers who are very much a part of this minimalist lineage or spectrum—practitioners of
miniaturism. As I referenced before, part of my project in defining a genre is creating a family
tree: one writer influencing another influencing another influencing another, some things
inherited in the way daughters inherit traits from their mothers, other things shared, like cousins
or sisters. It’s fitting, too, that these stories deal so heavily in familial relationships. The
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protagonists are always obligated to someone, hinged with another person: their spouses or
daughters or mothers, even as the hinges squeak and holler and threaten to come off (to un-hinge,
as many of the narrators do). Often, these stories center around moments in which narrators push
back, or at least, come to terms with their relational distance to other people, and the
expectations they’ve inherited: from family, from society, from being a woman in the world.
First, let’s start with the godmothers, Dorothy Parker and Grace Paley.
PART TWO: THE GODMOTHERS
Dorothy Parker: The Forerunner
Born a generation before Grace Paley, Dorothy Parker was twenty-one when her first
piece was published by Vanity Fair in 1914. Parker’s mother died when she was five, and her
father was a successful businessman, first in the growing garment industry and later in the cigar
business. He twice married Christian women in the hopes of sloughing off a bit of the Jewishness
that—it seemed to him—held him in a lower social strata (Meade). When he forced Parker to
attend a private Catholic school in New York City called Blessed Sacred Academy, she made
trouble at every turn. “She treated formal schooling as something to rebel against, as would
Grace Paley thirty years later” (Levy). Parker dropped out of school shortly after, and spent most
of the next six years as a companion for her twice-widowed father. In Writing a Woman’s Life,
Carolyn Heilbrun believes this rebellion against formal education was an early attempt by Parker
to step outside of the conventional script still being written for middle class women.
It seems extraordinary in retrospect that in 1918, Vanity Fair chose her to replace drama
critic P.G. Wodehouse when she had neither literary connections nor a high school diploma. But
she did have wit, and she did have style. When she reviewed Tolstoy’s Redemption for Vanity
Fair, she wrote, “There’s only one thing I could wish about the whole play—I do wish they
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would do something about those Russian names” (Levy 17). Parker had led a privileged
childhood in New York City up until the age of twenty, when her father died and—according to
Parker—left her penniless. Although she could have chosen to live with an older brother or
sister, she chose to live alone, supporting herself by playing the piano until her writing began to
receive recognition. In less than a year, she received her first acceptance check from Vanity Fair,
which marked the beginning of her writing career (Meade). According to Barbara Levy, despite
her literary success, Parker was consistently “diminished by the bias against women who wrote
wit.” Parker’s wit sometimes backfired in that it provided her readers with an excuse to dismiss
her politics and serious social commentary. Two of Parker’s biographers, John Keats and Marion
Meade, present Parker as depressed and self-destructive. (“Dorothy Parker had not been very
good at being Dorothy Parker, either,” Nora Ephron wrote, in her essay collection Crazy Salad).
There is an implicit threat in such negative assessments, argues Levy, “women can be funny and
successful, this threat goes, but only at a high personal price” (15).
And while she often reviewed books and plays, in all of my research, I found her
reputation at the time stressed her jokes and humor at the expense of her intellectuality and
insights. When she reviewed the work of Ernest Hemingway, Parker said, “he is, to me, the
greatest living writer of short stories; he is, also to me, not the greatest living novelist” (Levy
22). In a review for Esquire, Parker wrote of Nabokov’s Lolita: “I cannot regard it as
pornography, either sheer, unrestrained, or any other kind…It’s an anguished book, but
sometimes wildly funny” (Levy 23). Here we see Parker’s penchant for letting tragedy and
comedy dovetail— like I so often insisted to my students was this genre’s key. It was courageous
of Parker, too, considering the ban on Lolita had been lifted for mere days when she published
her review.
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In 1919, twenty-six-year old Parker was sufficiently established in the New York literary
scene to receive in invitation for a luncheon party at the Algonquin Hotel celebrating the return
of New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott from the war. The luncheon was such a
success that someone suggested they meet daily. These meetings later became known as The
Algonquin Round Table, and thus established the legend of a group of witty and flamboyant
writers enjoying stylish alcoholic lunches when not recording those witticisms down on paper for
posterity. Meade’s account suggests that it functioned as a close-knit support group and a place
to exchange ideas about writing and politics. It included both men and women, and seems
indicative of Parker’s collected interests: to speak freely among men about whatever she wanted,
and for the whole of her intellect—wit and politics included—to be appreciated. While it lasted
barely ten years, the Algonquin Round Table has been granted a permanent place in the literary
history of America (Levy).
In a 1956 interview with The Paris Review, Parker lamented her reputation as a
“smartcracker,” saying it made her sick and unhappy. “Wit,” she said, “has truth in it;
wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words” (Capron). Wit allowed Dorothy Parker a way of
telling the truth slanted, so it didn’t get her or other women in trouble. Unlike so many men who
were shouting from rooftops at the time, women had to find a way to slip the truth under the
door. Even with her subtle wit, Parker still found herself in trouble. She was blacklisted in
Hollywood during the McCarthy purge. Her political activities (for example, she risked traveling
to war-torn Spain in order to send back firsthand reports of Franco’s atrocities) get lost in the
details of Parker’s flamboyant lifestyle (repeated divorces, alcoholism—all the things that
contemporary critics would later accuse the minimalists of being obsessed with). In both Keats
and Meade’s biographies, Parker’s depression, alcoholism, and suicide attempts are
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painstakingly recounted, as is her aversion to domestic skills (I, too, have that aversion). But as
Barbara Levy writes, “it’s as if we expect a woman who is so in control of her words to display
an equal control of her private life, and blame her for disappointing us” (20).
While most of her peers discounted her politics, she protested on behalf of Nicola Sacco
and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (two Italian-American anarchists who were arrested for a murder she
didn’t think they’d committed), she raised money to help the refugees of the Spanish Civil War,
and again to fight the Nazis. When she died in 1967, she left her money to Martin Luther King, a
man she had never met, and in the event of his death, to the NAACP to continue to fight for the
Civil Rights Movement. Parker wrote at least one report for The New Masses, a cultural and
political magazine of the American radical literary left, whose contributors included Theodore
Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes (Levy 21). Parker grew so
frustrated with the way her opinions were dismissed, (and so fed up with people accusing her of
being a communist in order to dismiss her opinions) that she included the following disclaimer in
the report: “I am not a member of any political party. The only group I have ever been affiliated
with is that not particularly brave little band that hid its nakedness of heart and mind under the
out of date garment of a sense of humor.” Ironically, her political agenda is inextricable from her
wit, not apart from it. With that said, let’s move on to Grace Paley, my foundational author of the
female comedic genre.
Grace Paley: My Foundational Text
When asked about her stories’ distinctive wit in a 1988 interview with Caliban Magazine,
Grace Paley said, “if you have a humorous view of the world, you have it and there’s no way to
fight it. You can’t write a story without something of that in it, there’s just no way.” Paley
published only three slim collections of short stories (the first in 1959 and the last in 1985), and
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her work has been characterized as dealing with the day-to-day triumphs and tragedies of
women—mostly Jewish, and mostly New Yorkers. As one editor who worked with Paley wrote,
"Her characters are people who smell of onions, yell at each other, mourn in darkened kitchens”
(Isaacs). Regarding her own work, she wrote, “I couldn’t help the fact that I had not gone to war,
and I had not done the male things. I had lived a woman’s life and that’s what I wrote about”
(Schweitzer).
Paley was also well-known as a political activist, a Jewish socialist to be precise. While
she referred to herself as a “somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist” the FBI
declared her a Communist, dangerous and emotionally unstable (Isaacs). Her file was kept open
for thirty years. Paley was an archetypal Village figure, as Alexandra Schwartz writes in The
New Yorker, a “five-foot-tall lady with the wild white hair, cracking gum like a teenager while
handing out leaflets against apartheid from her perch on lower Sixth Avenue.” Paley’s
protagonists were often wives and mothers, but that didn’t prohibit them from activism. In the
story “Somewhere Else” from Later the Same Day, during a trip to China, a character says, “We
hoped we were not about to suffer socialist injustice, because we loved socialism” (Paley 46).
Often her narrators are equal parts political minded and self-aware, preventing her stories from
being preachy—they don’t set out to demonstrate a particular ideology or set of ideals. Instead,
Paley’s ideology is threaded throughout, an unwavering trust in the power of the collective being
essential to activism, with an affection for the “foibles and fallibility of the individual being
essential to art” (Schwartz).
Interviewers often asked Paley about the connection between her politics and her fiction.
Mostly she said that her subject matter turned out to be inherently political. Authors like Henry
Miller and Saul Bellow were not writing about the lives of people like Faith Darwin—a mother
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and wife at the mercy of her husband and children’s demands, unmoored in an unending sea of
domestic life. Paley initially suspected that her work would be considered “trivial, stupid, boring,
and not interesting,” but she couldn’t help it: “Everyday life, kitchen life, children life had been
handed to me” (Schwartz). Paley also considered an obsession with justice to be at the root of
both her literary and political career. In a 1985 “Fresh Air” interview, she told Terry Gross,
“When you write, you illuminate what’s hidden, and that’s a political act.”
Politics is inextricably linked to the female comedic voice, at least in my definition of the
genre. In All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents, Rebecca Krefting coined the
term “charged humor” which she uses to explain comic performers who intentionally produce
humor that challenges social inequality and cultural exclusion. Kreftig argues that while “all
humor locates itself in social and political contexts, not all humor does so self-consciously or
with specific intentions to promote unity and equality or to create a safe and accepting space for
people from all walks of life” (2). This, in particular, separates charged humor from other kinds,
like absurd or screwball. It also further separates the female comedic voice from the comedic
voice in general (or a genre in which men are included). Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David,
for example, offers a Charlie Chaplin-like model of living improvisationally—making do with
what one has while untethered to societal norms—but Larry’s comedic protagonist is not in any
way marginalized. It’s for this reason he can flout societal norms without any real fear of
consequences. (That, and he lives in a sitcom). While he does have an egalitarian view of the
world, it is not borne from a lack of privilege.
In contrast, Paley’s comedic voice was borne from the kitchen and the children’s’
playgrounds—the world of the domestic—borne from being left out and left behind. Paley
identified the minutiae of domestic life and magnified it until it took up the whole page, until it
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finally took up the space it deserved in the proverbial family room, or on the proverbial hearth.
Jokesters, as Kreftig refers to them, reveal inequality by identifying the legal arrangements and
cultural attitudes and beliefs contributing to their subordinated status—“joking about it,
challenging that which has become normalized and compulsory, and offering new solutions and
strategies” (Kreftig). Paley is one of these so-called jokesters, and in her stories, she offers a new
way for women to exist in the world.
While Paley calls the publication of her first book The Disturbances of Man in 1959 a
“stroke of luck,” (Capron) the second book, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974)
arrived out of the sixties and more so, the women’s’ movement. The buoyancy and noise and
freedom of second-wave feminism gave Paley a definitive framework for analyzing the world,
and a community with which to survive it. As she put it, she required three or four “best women
friends” to whom she could “tell every personal fact and then discuss on the widest, deepest, and
most hopeless level the economy, the constant, unbeatable, cruel war economy, the slavery of the
American worker to the idea of that economy, the complicity of male people in the whole
structure, and the dumbness of men (including her preferred man) on this subject.” (Schwartz).
While Paley was a feminist writer from the start, in her first book, women are often preoccupied
by their dealings with men. In her second book, they suddenly have friends—other women with
whom to sit around the playground and the kitchen table and discuss life. In her second book,
gone are the days of Paley’s recurring protagonist, Faith, passively listening to her husband
drone on as she rolls her eyes toward the ceiling, while making witty but often internal
observations. We see the changes in Paley’s life reflected in her style and voice. By her third
collection in 1985, Later that Same Day, we see her narrators hungry to talk (and so must be
Paley) the sentences longer, brimming over with dialogue and the quotidian details of her day.
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The Influence of Grace Paley’s Background on Her Style
Every sentence Paley writes is “filtered through, and quite purposefully flavored by, her
own distinctive Yiddish/Russian New York ear” (Levy 91)—influenced by the table around
which she grew up. According to Paley, her childhood was “typical Jewish socialist” in that she
believed Judaism and socialism to be one and the same. One of the ways in which Paley’s
distinctive filter works is revitalizing cliche by moving it off by only one word or two. For
example, in the story “Faith in a Tree,” Paley’s narrator watches a man observe her from below:
“That is Alex O Steele, who was a man organizing tenant strikes on Ocean Parkway when I was
a Coney Island Girl Scout against my mother’s socialist will” (Paley ). By inserting “socialist,”
Paley revitalizes the well-known phrase “against my mother’s will.” It provides specificity, sure,
and a sheen of uniqueness that’s the backbone of all comedy. It also offers a key to unlock the
entire context, the entire childhood, of Grace Paley. We see this influence in all the writers to
whom I’ve ascribed this genre, along with what I refer to as “defamiliarization,” in which
authors describe a well-known item or feeling by unpacking it with painstaking detail and unique
language until it’s made new again.
When asked if she felt that humor was a strategy that allowed resistance to a dominant
class of language, Paley said:
Humor is about disparity; a matter of the very tall and of the very small…if you see
a very very tall man and a very very small woman walking along, you smile. But if
you see a very very tall woman a very very small man, you laugh. So both things
are humorous, but one is more humorous than the other. That’s just a very basic
thing…disparity. And maybe for Jews or people in oppression, it’s the disparity
between power and suffering. I don’t think in my case it was because of the
oppression of language. I think that the English language welcomed me. (Levy 27).

Paley’s father immigrated from Siberia and her mother from Germany, and they learned English
by reading Dickens. If that isn’t disparity—Dickens in her loud, Jewish, socialist immigrant
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home—I’m not sure what is. In Devorah Baum’s The Jewish Joke, she asks the question: what is
quintessentially Jewish? For her, it’s being at odds with oneself. It’s taking pride in one’s
difference and feeling ashamed of it at the same time. This is why self-deprecation plays such a
key role in Jewish joking — so much so, in fact, that Freud wondered “whether there are many
other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of their own character” (Baum 48). The
so-called “Jewish joke” is further complicated by a woman telling it. Baum says, “joking has
always been a good cover for not joking. When speaking ‘only in jest,’ one may speak of
difficult, unsafe, or even unspeakable things” (63). All of female writers in this dissertation use
self-deprecation as a technique in their work, though they’re not all Jewish, I’d argue they’ve
certainly been influenced by Paley, whether they know it or not.
In “Resisting the Pull of Plot,” Susan Ferguson points out that the moniker "Jewish
feminist" may still seem oxymoronic. Contemporary feminism must by its most fundamental
social agenda pose multiple challenges to Jewish patriarchal religious tradition and everyday
custom, of which Paley was a part. Paley is fundamentally a secular writer, whose Jewish
identity is broadly cultural rather than religious in nature. I’d argue that it’s this oxymoron that
makes Paley a foundational writer in the female comedic voice—she’s required to undermine the
system in which she exists, that at times, entraps her. Ferguson also notes that “Paley herself, like
her protagonist, married among the goyim, in a paradigm of resistance or transgression that also
invites much speculation about the possible ‘autobiographical’ nature of the stories.” Although
Faith shares many of Paley's expressed ideas, it is more useful to see her, as Paley does, as a
“kind of stand-in or emissary” (Ferguson).
In the story “Faith in the Afternoon,” Faith hears her mother agree to join a group of
women knitting wool socks. Faith knows that this project is merely designed to fill the empty
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hours and to give the aging knitters a sense of purpose: “They worked. They took vital facts from
one another and looked as dedicated as a kibbutz” (Paley 78). The disparity between this
relatively trivial chore in the Children of Judea Retirement Home and the vital work of a kibbutz,
a place especially significant to Paley and her family (they escaped religious oppression) is both
humorous and layered with meaning. This notion of disparity in the female comedic voice
becomes especially important when we look at Lorrie Moore’s use of metaphors and similes.
We also see Paley’s signature use of disparity in the biblical language of many of her
stories. Bible stories from the Old Testament played a significant role in her childhood, and
Paley has described the paradox of growing up “the American child of Russian Jewish
immigrants in the twenties and thirties” which was to live in a world of “constant noise pierced
by bewildering silences” (Schwartz). Politics was debated ad nauseum with neighbors and
friends, yet the private history of suffering went largely unspoken. The humor of Paley’s voice
lives in this disparity: between biblical and sacrilege, holy and profane, suffering and laughter. In
“A Subject of Childhood,” after Faith finally throws her husband Clifford out, she echoes the
sentiment of the long-suffering religious woman: “What is man that woman lies down to adore
him?” (Paley 46). By using the weighty language of the bible to talk about the mundane—the
fraught push and pull of marriage—this reference to Psalms 8:5 serves as an equalizer: it makes
the everyday seem sacred. This is one of the chief functions of the female comedic voice: to un-
trivialize what had previously seemed trivial, to prove that the lamp in the corner of the room is
as important as the conversation the husbands are having in the center of it. In “Faith in the
Tree,” Faith imagines God looking down on all he created in the park, including her: “But me,
the creation of His soft second thought” (Paley 65). While this self-deprecation is vintage Paley:
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sliding in a critique of traditional femininity, I’m reminded of what we will later see as a
hallmark of Lorrie Moore—the acutely self-aware mockery of her own place in the world.
Paley & Plot
In Paley’s “A Conversation with my Father,” we see the origins of the fragmented non-
traditional story structure later used by other writers in the genre, like Amy Hempel and Mary
Robison. The narrator’s father asks her to write a simple story, which she finds herself unable to
do because she has always despised “the absolute line between two points.” Not for literary
reasons, but “because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open
destiny of life” (Paley 27). It’s important to note, too, that it’s Paley speaking in this story: a
narrative surrogate—her and also not her, the writerly version of her—like the many brief Amy
Hempel stories I’ll discuss in a later section, in which narrators go unnamed.
Paley is well-aware that her viewpoint on life is different than her father’s just as her
viewpoint on plot and story structure varies, too: “He came from a world where there was no
choice, where you couldn’t really decide to change careers when you were forty-one years old”
(Paley 234). There, his belief in a traditional plot makes sense. He was an immigrant who
worked hard to move from point A to point B, and wanted his literature to reflect that movement.
In life, he wanted a traditional plot while his youngest daughter was born into a different world,
one with less tradition and more choices. Paley's resistance to developing her themes in a
novelistic way has to do with a need to subvert the novel's tendency to justify "things as they are"
(Ferguson): the culture according to its mainstream rules and formulas. “Unable to mount a full-
scale war on the social norms,” Ferguson argues, “Paley sends up little explosive anecdotes that,
even in themselves, almost always refuse to be traditional ‘stories’ with causal plots.” Instead,
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Paley’s plots are deceptively simple: interactions between husband and wife, father and daughter,
or women—finally and fully unmasked—around each other.
Paley’s non-linear plots make even more sense when we reconsider her role as the
oxymoronic Jewish feminist writer: Paley does not wish to abandon her Jewish culture, but
rather to force it to accommodate the circumstances of a society in which social justice and
individual fulfilment are ideals. In her stories, Paley isn’t shouting “down with the patriarchy” as
much as she’s quietly bending the will of the patriarchy to see what she sees: opening its eyes to
the truth of things. Regarding Paley’s collection of stories around one narrator, Faith, Ferguson
says: “while she clearly has the material for a novel, Paley equally rejects the form as falsifying
the issues that move her in contemporary life.” As a feminist Jewish writer, Paley is an outsider
with a special perspective on the dominant culture in which she lives. Using a more hybrid,
fragmented form to tell the Faith stories—in which they might be interrelated but not physically
linked in a traditional book—Paley is able to seize power through a deceptive acquiescence to
the norms (of society and writing both).
Post-Paley, we still see the protagonists of contemporary female comedic voices grapple
with the same paradox of more choices and therefore more losses, too. None of the choices
available to our female protagonists seems fully gratifying. They can never be fully gratifying
because choosing one means forsaking another. It is the job of these writers—or authorial
surrogates—to communicate this sad truth to you in a funny way. In Women Writing in America,
Blanche Gelfant points out a connection between Paley’s treatment of time, her jokes, and her
optimism: “Paley’s joking seems a way of searching within life’s inevitabilities for a
loophole…refusing to follow that absolute straight line of causality, which she sees as the
tyranny of plot” (Gelfant 124). Paley’s stories traces loops and twists and unexpected turns in
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events that always serve to circumvent doom. These loopholes always seem comic, jokes that
Paley plays on life; specifically when her plots pivot around death directly, which we see in
stories like “Samuel,” “A Little Girl,” and “Friends.”
Paley & Relationships
Like all “female tricksters,” Paley’s narrators see the systems in her life for what they are
(the family system, capitalism, or the political system)—indestructible, at least from that
narrator’s point of view—and yet, she finds a way to survive from within. Paley’s narrators so
often do one thing while saying another, a wink in their voice, which brings me to my next Paley
hallmark, what Barbara Levy refers to as “the witty exposure of male domination.” At the time
Paley was publishing, the critic Patricia Waugh said, “Paley often records the relations between
men and women as a sort of serious but mockingly enacted contest” (Levy 16). Similarly,
Jacqueline Taylor said Paley “refuses to take seriously any of the sacred cows of male
dominance” (Levy 24). Yes, most critics agree that there’s a general lack of hostility or bitterness
in Paley’s female characters, or what Diane Cousineau referred to as Paley’s “generosity of
vision.” In an interview for Women Writers Talking (1983), Ruth Perry asked Paley: “why you’re
never angry in your stories?” (Notice that Perry conflates the narrators in Paley’s stories with
Paley herself, which is an issue or possibly strength of this genre that will continue to recur). In
answer, Paley said, “I think what happens is humor sometimes takes the place of anger, and it
may even subvert it. You know, in a way, sometimes there should be more anger, and there’s
humor instead” (Todd 174).
In Paley’s handling of female-male relationships, humor consistently usurps the place of
anger or pain. What’s more, Paley says, “the anger or pain, had it not been replaced, would
always have been the woman’s” (Levy 104). Anger is the woman’s burden to carry or express,
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not the men’s. Regardless, the man’s offense, if that’s what you want to call it, still gets recorded
on the page. While a few critics at the time she was writing call what Paley does “mockery,” I’d
argue that as a “female trickster,” Paley subverts the system of patriarchy in which she’s not
supposed to anger men, and simply lets the men in her stories speak for themselves. This critique
also reminds me of a critique I’ve often read of one of her successors, Lorrie Moore: that the
men in her stories are too often reduced to punchlines, or cornered into the butts of jokes. Here,
again, we see the authors of this genre exerting control by making alchemy of their interactions:
a man turned into a punchline—what magic to see one thing turned into something else, the
definition of a metaphor.
In “Wants,” my favorite Grace Paley story, the narrator runs into her ex-husband from a
twenty-seven-year marriage on the steps of the library. He tells her that her problem in life has
always been that she never wants anything. He, on the other hand, wants a sailboat—and by
sailboat, he means a different life, or a richer, fuller version of life than the one he had with her.
“But as for you,” he tells her, “you’ll always want nothing” (Paley 129). The ex-wife explains
their relationship:
“He had a habit through the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark, which,
like a plumber’s snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, halfway
to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment. What I
mean is, I sat down on the library steps and he went away” (Paley 130).

Of course, Paley’s meaning is simple: this ex-husband caused the narrator pain. Throughout their
marriage, he could say a simple phrase that hurt the narrator in the particular way only someone
who has been married to you can hurt you—someone who has slept next to you night after night,
and scheduled children’s’ doctors appointments, and talked about the weather over breakfast and
when to file taxes, and to whom you told the terrible thing your father said to your mother in the
kitchen on Fourth of July. You see, he would insult her in that very married way. In her
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metaphor, Paley spares the reader the same pain by disguising it as something as (albeit
something used for toilets): plumbing equipment. Yet, the pain is recorded somewhere in the
reader’s consciousness behind the clever metaphor. And because the reader knows marriage,
maybe not because she has been married, but because she knows people who have been married,
has talked with friends at bars and in kitchens very late at night, and has read many celebrated
novels about marriage, and her own parents are still married! She has had enough long
relationships, anyway, enough tense, egg-shell mornings with partners to know exactly what
Paley means. And so she feels the pain too, but in sort of a pleasurable way.
In the same interview with Joan Lidoff, Paley said she feels “writing something to let
someone really have it” is wrong. “Writing,” Paley said, “should be illuminating rather than
distorting” (Levy 107). Regarding relationships in particular, she writes to illuminate women’s
neglected lives rather than to attack mens’. In fact, Paley has written from the male point of view
occasionally, mostly in the beginning of her career. “The Contest,” for instance, one of her
earliest published short stories, was written from the point of view of a man. And yet, “The
Contest” isn’t really about the narrator, Freddy, who opens the story with “Up early or late, it
never matters, the day gets away from me” (Paley 41). It’s about the women with whom he’s had
relationships, who populate his life with all of their eccentricities. There’s a particular woman he
wants to talk about in this story, feels compelled to talk about, named Dottie Wasserman, a
Jewish girl, often warm and “concerned about food intake and employability” (Paley 42). The
story still manages to be about a woman—about the way she thinks and moves through the
world, and the way she manages to change the way Freddy moves through the world too. In this
way, Paley’s comedic voice is about women even when it’s about men.
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Once Paley allowed herself to write about a woman’s world, the domestic sphere—from
a woman’s point of view— much of her comedic sense was aroused by male behavior. But she
didn’t always feel comfortable writing about women. In an interview with Katherine Hulley,
Grace Paley explained: “For a long time I thought women’s lives…I didn’t really think I was
shit, but I really thought my life as a woman was shit. Who would be interested in this crap? I
was very interested in it, but I didn’t have enough social ego to put it down. I had to develop that
to a point where I said ‘I don’t give a damn.’ Women who have thought their lives were boring
have found they’re interesting to one another” (Levy 32). It’s from this specific point of view,
one in which she examines the men around her with a generous eye and sometimes gentle
mocking—that Paley’s comedic voice became fully realized.
In “The Used Boy Raisers,” one of Paley’s most famous stories, we see the culmination
of all of Paley’s techniques. The story opens with Faith’s description of breakfast:
There were two husbands disappointed by eggs. I don’t like them that way either, I
said. Make your own eggs. They sighed in unison. One man was livid; one was
pallid. There isn’t a drink around here, is there? Asked Livid. Never find one here,
said Pallid. Don’t look; driest damn house. Pallid pushed the eggs away, pain and
disgust his escutcheon (Paley 81).

The set-up of this story is comedic in itself: she is fixing both of her husbands’ eggs: one past,
and one current. She calls her ex-husband, who is visiting, Livid, and the current husband
Pallid. They’re both unhappy with the eggs, and with Faith, the narrator, in general. “Pain and
disgust” are Pallid’s “escutcheon”: he wears it like a coat of arms, as though showing the world
his dissatisfaction is his family’s legacy, and he’s a noble knight, defending the family’s honor.
Paley employs gentle mockery, disparity, and exaggeration all at once—we don’t know the
actual names of these men, and we never learn them. Their identities exist only in relation to the
way Paley’s narrator, Faith, sees them: Pallid, lacking in vitality, and Livid, lacking in empathy.
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Paley uses the capital nouns of the bible, and bare-boned, plain dialogue. Faith speaks without
equivocating or justifying, and the reader is able to see what she’s really up against: a whole past
life with a man, plus a whole unknown future with another—children and domestic duties, too,
the whole writhing lot of them here in the present.
“The Used Boy Raisers” is from Two Short Sad Stories from a Long and Happy Life, a
novella which “subverts and undermines readers' expectations of fictional development and
closure” (Ferguson). The continuities and disruptions posed by the stories' not having a straight-
forward plot or sequence helps to highlight Paley's own identity as a Jewish feminist writer, as I
mentioned earlier, in which she is both subverting the status quo while existing within it. The
irony of the title (that there might be two short sad stories in an otherwise long happy life, and
that those are the stories that should be told above all else) is indicative of the entire project of
the “female comedic voice.” One can’t have comedy without tragedy, one can’t be happy
without having felt sadness—these two elements are inextricable from each other. I told a friend
I was writing about Grace Paley for this dissertation, and she said, “oh Grace Paley —feminism
but without the tired vocabulary.” I thought about that a long time after. What is the female
comedic genre for, if not educating a reading public without letting them know they’re
undergoing an education.
For the remaining sections of this dissertation, I’ll use many of the elements I’ve laid out
in Paley’s work to talk about the female authors that came after her, the legacies who define “the
female comedic voice” in contemporary American short fiction.

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PART THREE: A BRIDGE
Amy Hempel: The Miniaturist
Amy Hempel has written five short story collections—the first of which, Reasons to Live
came out in 1985, the most recent, Sing to It, came out in 2019. In the introduction to Amy
Hempel’s collected stories, Rick Moody says, “Where Grace Paley’s voice has everything to do
with the New York City of the first half of the twentieth century, and its slangy Yiddishisms,
Hempel’s voice has something to do with stand-up comedy, contemporary poetry, celebrity
magazines, visual arts, the West, and the popular song.” The emphasis on poetry is especially
evident later in Hempel’s work, when her concision is at its height. “Perhaps, in the nineteen-
seventies and eighties,” James Wood writes in the New Yorker, “she learned from her teacher
Gordon Lish how to abolish the nonessential, but then she got to work on the essential.” Most of
Amy Hempel’s narrators are unnamed, authorial surrogates maybe, like many of Paley’s
narrators before hers.
According to James Wood, Hempel is an “experimental writer, in the way that Grace
Paley was an experimental writer.” Like Paley, who has clearly been an influence, she is easy to
read and sometimes harder to comprehend. “Her sentences are not complex, but the speed of
their connection to one another is a little breathtaking. Like Paley, she is a natural storyteller who
is also very interested in the artifice of storytelling—in the ways that stories deform or hide the
truth, in what can and can’t be disclosed on the page” (Woods). She is a self-reflexive writer
who, miraculously, doesn’t seem self-conscious. It was after the publication of Reasons to Live
that Hempel “came out from under Paley’s skirt” according to Rick Moody, and also became a
female comedic voice in her own right.
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In “Wants,” when Paley’s narrator first sees her ex-husband on the street, she delivers a
very particular line of dialogue: “Hello, my life” (129). With the actual details of this marriage—
and this life—omitted from the page, we see only the leftover inkblot, a woman on the steps of
the library, worrying over the book that’s overdue. The book then becomes far more important
than any details of a marriage; the book is the embodiment of all that marriage’s disappointment.
It’s the essential object around which the emotional resonance piles. Most importantly, this is an
example of the miniaturism I was referring to in the introduction, and this handling of time (and
it’s compaction) is a feature of Hempel’s work, too.
For Hempel, it’s not just the minutia and what is symbolizes; it’s the minute language-
level choices like punctuation. Hempel’s story “Memoir” from The Dog of the Marriage is
comprised of a single line from an unnamed narrator: “Just once in my life—oh, when have I
ever wanted anything just once in my life?” (Hempel 348). There’s rhythm in this Hempel story
(a single sentence) and rhythm is crucial to the female comedic voice—the way control is a
muscle flexed in every word. The em-dash delays one thought for another related but tangential
notion, undercutting some depth of emotion. That em dash seems to stand in for….what exactly:
another relationship, an entire novel’s worth of sentences describing love, loss, and the body?
Here, the em dash is not just a bridge from one thought to the next, but also a way to
communicate on its own. The em dash serves the double function: amputating one thought, but
also directing the reader straight into the mouth of another thought. Note that “oh”—what is it,
that performative sound? A visceral signal of regret, of longing? It might embody the whole
female experience: she wants too much, or too many things simultaneously, or she wants it too
many times. “Just once in my life” would be dishonest, and so the rest of the story follows.
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According to Moody, Hempel both wants to believe in a higher power in these stories
(“there is the unbidding tolling of religious language” (Hempel 4)—and hates the
“gobbledygook” of anything but flesh. For instance, Amy Hempel's three-page story titled “And
Lead Us Not into Penn Station” is a list of interactions, some overhead, which at first read like
odd bits of dialogue tossed off in an odd way but on a second read, have multiple (sometimes
infinite) meanings. None of the implications are biblical. In The Paris Review, Alice Blackhurst
writes of Hempel’s prose: “so blanched of needless embellishment, it refuses to accommodate
comfort or the familiar narratives we use to buffer our existences.” And yet her writing is not
cold. It brims with humor, though Hempel’s comedy is the kind “derived from finding typos on
hospital menus or taking detours to IKEA stores” (Blackhurst). I’d agree, Hempel’s comedy
seems found as opposed to invented, as though she has found her punchlines in the margins of
regular life, overhearing other peoples’ conversations. Though her dialogue is often comprised of
non-sequiturs, the stories are not themselves wispy; they are grounded in wit, in mundane
objects, in old-fashioned social friction. Her characters and narrators are often a bit eccentric,
often solitary or even antisocial, and drift at the fringes of things, nursing remembered pain.
For instance, in the aforementioned “And Lead Us Not Into Penn Station,” Hempel
recalls seemingly random dialogue: “A beautiful familiar woman is escorted from a nightclub. A
visiting Southern girl says, ‘Scuse me, ma’am, but aren’t you a friend of my mama’s back in
Sumner?’ ‘I’m Elizabeth Taylor,’ the woman says, ‘and fuck you.’” (Hempel 154). The
overhead interactions that make up the story’s structure are strange and sad and funny and
profane. Hempel’s narrator is never an active participant, but merely an observer. According to
Blackhurst, Hempel told her long ago class of beginning writing students, “You want to be
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underneath the bleachers in a story. Looking for what’s left.” There is where Hempel finds her
comedy.
In Ladies Laughing, Levy explains Shirley Jackson’s theory of dialogue, which Jackson
simply refers to as conversation: “When a writer is praised for realistic and convincing dialogue,
the critic, duped along with the general reader, often claims the writer has a good ear for how
people really talk…But the way people usually talk is extremely dull.” It’s the writer’s job, then,
to tell story “only in the most carefully stylized and rhythmic language” (53). The paradoxical
effect of this dialogue is its own kind of trickery: it seems realistic while actually being
painstakingly constructed. This could be said of all written dialogue (except for those authors
whose style hinges on being truly realistic; recorded just as it was heard in the world) but I would
argue that Hempel’s dialogue differentiates itself by the lens through which Hempel sees, the
particular focus on the minute and strange detail.
In “And Lead Us Not Into Penn Station,” Hempel writes, “Women who are attacked
phone a hotline for advice. ‘Don’t report a rape,’ the women are told. ‘Call it indecent exposure.
A guy who takes it out and doesn’t do anything with it—cops figure that guy is sick’” (Hempel
155). It doesn’t matter where or when this exchange took place. Readers don’t care if it was on a
Tuesday, and the sky was bruise-colored, and woman who spoke those words had the tense,
fragile body of a bird. It only matters that this is what women are told. What’s significant is that
this is very specific advice for a very large population—the details are not just beside the point,
but would only serve to dilute it. In The Art of Fiction for The Paris Review, Hempel explains
why she doesn’t bother to describe every little thing: “There’s so much I can’t read because I get
so exasperated. Someone starts describing the character boarding the plane and pulling the seat
back. And I just want to say, Babe, I have been downtown. I have been up in a plane. Give me
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some credit.” Through her own style, Hempel’s giving the reader credit too. She’s giving us just
enough details to get by, and everything leftover is the story.
I return to Shirley Jackson to quote from her obituary in The New York Times: “Shirley
Jackson wrote in two styles. She could describe the delights and turmoil of ordinary domestic life
with detached hilarity; and she could with cryptic symbolism, write a tenebrous horror story in
the Gothic mold in which abnormal behavior seemed perilously ordinary” (Levy 72). I’m struck
by this obituary when thinking about Amy Hempel’s fiction—that she turns the usual domestic
subjects into a kind of gothic humor. Women: here’s how the police will believe you if a man
assaults you. Friend: here’s how I might convince you to stay alive in a hospital bed for a little
longer.
In Amy Hempel’s use of language, we see so much of what Barbara Levy refers to as
Paley’s “revitalizing cliché” (or what I often refer to as defamiliarization), which Levy cited as
Paley’s main methodology of control. Hempel often shifts a clichéd phrase one notch over, until
it is no longer the phrase we know, or sometimes works backwards, deconstructing and
unpacking the phrase in order to make it mean something new. For example, in “Tumble Home,”
Hempel writes,
I have written letters that are failures, but I have written few, I think, that are lies.
Trying to reach a person means asking the same question over and over again: Is
this the truth, or not? I begin this letter to you, then, in the western tradition. If I
understand it, the western tradition is: Put your cards on the table (Hempel 72).

Here, Hempel deconstructs a clichéd phrase from Westerns and the lexicon of Americana (“put
your cards on the table”) to explain her relationships with other people, and with this person
specifically. Above all else, she’s trying to say something honest. It’s Hempel’s comedic voice
that allows her to state it plainly by playing with pop culture and cliché. She’s not playing poker;
she’s only writing a letter. She’s not telling a lie; she’s only telling a failed truth.
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We see more of these pop culture references Moody referred to in Hempel’s famed “In
the Cemetery Where Al Johnson was Buried” from Hempel’s first collection, Reasons to Live, in
which the narrator entertains her friend in the hospital bed where she lays dying. The friend
opens the story by asking the narrator for a favor: “Tell me things I won’t mind
forgetting…make it useless stuff or skip it” (Hempel 29). The narrator agrees to the task, using a
plethora of seemingly useless trivia, such as “Did she know that Tammy Wynette had changed
her tune? Really. That now she sings ‘Stand by Your Friends’? That Paul Anka did it, too. He
Does ‘You’re Having Our Baby.’ That he got sick of all that feminist bitching” (Hempel 29).
While Paley’s stories might be feminism without the academic vocabulary, Hempel uses pop
culture to complicate academic ideas of feminism. The irony of two women in a hospital room—
one dying—talking instead about a famous man’s “bitching.” While Paley’s Faith refers to her
men as “Pallid” and “Livid,” Hempel says her friend is “flirting with the Good Doctor, who just
appeared. Unlike the Bad Doctor, who checks the IV drip before saying good morning, the Good
Doctor says things like ‘God didn’t give epileptics a fair shake’” (Hempel 33). In Hempel’s
work, jokes sit nestled in the words of a doctor: even in the grim hospital bed, humor and tragedy
lie side by side. What emerges in the story is the outline of a voice undone by loss, a voice in
withdrawal.
According to James Wood, Amy Hempel’s wit is a strategy of defense: a way of singing
to the danger. And, as with her latest collection “Sing to It,” Hempel’s text itself becomes the
song that “can’t be sung by the characters; it exists ideally in its suspensions and elisions, which
the reader must inhabit and intuit” (Wood). He also argues that “In the Cemetery Where Al
Jolson Is Buried” can be seen as an inversion of Grace Paley’s “A Conversation with My
Father,” in which an old and bedridden man asks his daughter to tell him, for once, “a simple
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story. . . . Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next.” Of course,
the writer-daughter does not—cannot—oblige. She must twist the facts somehow, she must “sing
to the danger.”
In an interview with The Paris Review, Hempel explains her style by saying she
presumes the reader is always dying to get away from her. It’s for this reason that she needs to be
concise, to offer only what is needed. (I feel this, too, incidentally, and I wonder how impossibly
long this dissertation seems to you. It is not that different from the feeling I get on stage when I
watch an audience member turn to whisper to her friend or look at his phone. It has something to
do with my childhood, I think—I was required to be funny or interesting or both. I had trouble
sustaining the attention of my overworked, distracted Jewish parents). Back to Amy Hempel:
hers is a voice “haloed by omissions and wide margins,” Blackhurst says, her words surrounded
by white space on the page. The lines which are permitted to appear are often devoted to dogs (a
Hempel staple), minor encounters, and quotidian events such as barbecues and children’s
birthday parties—otherwise known as the “blessings of dailiness” as Hempel puts it in 1997
novella Tumble Home.
Her broader interests are in off-pitch, off-kilter voices: she often deals in empty language
and small talk. As we’ve covered, Hempel’s narrators are not often at the center of the action.
“Beach Town,” the first story in the collection The Dog of the Marriage, starts, “The house next
door was rented for the summer to a couple who swore at missed croquet shots” (Hempel 305).
Immediately, the narrator sidelines herself, planting herself in the margin of the story, an
onlooker and overhearer. The action takes place at the house next door, in which a woman is
“doing something memorable to a man with her mouth” (Hempel 30)—everything we know
about the couple is encapsulated in minute details like their penchant for swearing and playing
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croquet. Of course, the story isn’t really about the couple, or it is, but it’s also about a woman we
assume is so isolated that her chief concern is the comings and goings of the people next door.
At one point, the narrator considers phoning the wife (the victim of infidelity) in the city
so she could “hear what she would sound like if she answered. I had no fellow feeling; all she
had ever said to me was couldn’t I mow my lawn later in the day” (Hempel 307). Then, the
narrator goes on to explain the rules of lawn mowing in this beach town—she unpacks the trivial
details that make up her day. We know nothing about the narrator, about her family or her past
or her love life. All we know is the marginalia—the corners of her lawn, the sound of her
neighbor’s voices. At one point, the narrator says, “Nobody thinks about the way sound carries
across water. Even the water in a swimming pool” (Hempel 305), which acts as an incisive line
about human relationships: they carry. This exclusion of the narrator’s past (and present) does a
huge amount of characterization. We know only what the narrator notices, and more than
notices, obsesses over. Paramount to the female comedic voice is the obsession over minutia,
particularly by these narrators who exist on the sidelines, in the audience as opposed to on stage.
Like most of Hempel’s narrators, this one is not cushioned by the usual identifiers—name, age,
or appearance—but she still seems as though she might stand up and walk right off the page.
And surely, Hempel would describe the odd way she walked, or the way the lawn looked under
her feet.
In a critique of her writing in The Chicago Tribune, Robert Olen Butler calls Amy
Hempel’s particular version of minimalism “sentimental.” Why sentimental, Butler asks?
Because although Hempel’s voice appears to be the opposite (there is a “polished spareness to
the voices, a self-assurance in the emotional austerity that seems nothing if not hip”) at the heart
of sentimentality is the invitation to have a “feeling that is deeper, stronger, and more meaningful
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than the object of the feeling has earned” (Olen Butler). This, Butler says, is what Amy Hempel
offers. I don’t argue that there’s sentimentality at work—a deep, and beating heart at the center
of seemingly empty small talk. But while Butler says Hempel’s narrators are passive observers
“without compelling inner lives and without clear, dramatized emotional reactions to anything,”
I’d argue that Hempel’s narrators are passive observers who work at every turn to conceal their
complicated inner lives and substitute dramatized emotional reactions for some other sort of
misdirection: a joke or a double-edged observation. These observations aren’t mundane—they’re
not the placid surfaces of a clear and quaint pond; but rather the dark and opaque surface of a
swamp, there’s something teeming beneath it. “They (Hempel’s narrators) look at the surface of
everyday life and see things we may not have noticed in a long time,” Butler argues, “but they
give us no compelling reason to reconsider them….you only find irreducible words, a veritable
fetish with individually crafted sentences, sentences with occasional beauty but without the true
power of fiction.” Is the true power of fiction only a propulsive, forward-moving plot in which a
character’s motives are clearly laid out for the reader?
I’ll answer this question by quoting a story in Hempel’s most recent collection, Sing to It.
The narrator of “Cloudland,” is another of Hempel’s drifting solitaries, a woman struggling to
construct a life in Florida, after losing her job as a teacher at a private girls’ school in Manhattan.
She now works as a part-time caregiver, visiting old people in retirement communities and in
their homes. As the story unfolds, we learn that the narrator, as an eighteen-year-old, gave a baby
up for adoption, and cannot bury the memory of this loss: “It’s been how many years, and I see
her—the girl I never saw—wherever I go. I never made a list, and don’t keep count of the
number of times I see her. But man, she gets around” (Hempel 84).
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The story has a very free form, moving back and forth between an almost diaristic
present—in which the narrator muses on everything from the recent death of Prince to climate
change to Floridian weather—and memories of the past, dominated by the anguish of her long
ago decision. Although the story, at sixty-one pages, is almost novella length, it proceeds like
much of Hempel’s fiction that’s come before, which is to say, mysteriously: it seems to be made
of nothing very much, just stray observations and equal parts witty and poignant flotsam that the
author has arranged. The arrangement holds, somehow. The arrangement holds because the
character’s motivations are clear: she’s trying to survive a loss. And the author’s comedic voice
will provide a blueprint for how that survival can function—how it might look and sound and
feel.
Lorrie Moore: The Maximalist
Lorrie Moore is the author of four short story collections—the first of which, Like Life,
came out in 1985—and three novels. In The New York Times, Lauren Groff lists the reasons why
Lorrie Moore’s narrators use humor: “to try to smooth over awkwardness, to defang their terror,
to stave off despair, to endear themselves to lovers they sense are drawing away, to armor
themselves against the aggressions of others, to put up a brave front when it seems that
everything around them is caving in, and to gesture helplessly at the absurdity of the world”
(Groff). This, you might think, seems to cover every use of humor that’s ever existed, and I can’t
say I disagree. Moore’s “The Jewish Hunter,” a story in Like Life (her second collection), is a
story I used to give to men I dated as a test—to see if they liked it—because I thought it had
explained me to myself and therefore would explain me to them, too. If they didn’t like it, I
couldn’t date them.
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In the story, the narrator explains the conflict she’s having in her current relationship:
“How quickly bodies came to love each other, promise themselves to each other always, without
asking permission. From the mind! If only she could give up her mind, let her heart swell,
inflamed, her brain stepping out for whole days, whole seasons, her work shrinking to limericks”
(Moore 182). The narrator is a poet, and love presents itself to her as an either/or scenario. She
can have love or work, but to have both would be impossible. In other words, love infers a kind
loss of control, and for the narrators in this genre, that’s what’s so often at stake: some modicum
of control. Whenever I read this story, I seem to shout “From the mind!” while reading, and I
feel the performance aspect of this genre again, that enacting of Moore’s writing, as though part
of reading these stories is acting in a play I wish I’d been smart enough to have written about
myself. Note, too, the exclamation point, which for Moore, always denotes a “willed rather than
felt excitement” (Gates).
Moore is skeptical of language even as she makes it do tricks. “Mutilation was a
language,” a character in Moore’s collection Bark says, when she sees her son’s cutting scars.
“And vice versa” (Moore 63). Her characters banter and wisecrack their way through their often
tragic lives in screwball-comedy style, but for them it’s a compulsive tic whose aim is sometimes
self-protective (it warns others off and forms a protective shell), and sometimes just fills the
void. At times, the point of her language is its pointlessness. As David Gates wrote in the New
York Times, “Moore didn’t invent the breed—Beckett, among others, got there before her—but
she may be the chief contemporary chronicler of those whose dread makes them unable to turn
off the laugh machine.”
We saw this in Hempel’s stories, too—the endless trivial facts Hempel’s narrator relays
for her dying friend “In the Cemetery Where Al Johnson was Buried”—and for many of the
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same reasons: to protect, to ward off danger, to fill the void. While the point is its pointlessness,
yes, the language isn’t just for language’s sake, it’s for the sake of survival too. For Amy
Hempel, it’s as though superimposing one singular experience over another might be to bludgeon
both with the violence of comparison. But a distinguishing characteristic of Moore’s work is the
many similes and metaphors—the constant use of analogy. For Moore, analogies and similes
create layer after layer of remoteness from the real: a “banana-flavored” custard “doesn’t taste
like real banana but more like what burped banana tastes like” (Moore 140). They suggest an
almost frantic impulse to connect anything with anything.
In “The Jewish Hunter,” Moore’s narrator makes a series of comparisons about love:
“The walls, like love, were trompe l’oeil. . . . The menu, like love, was full of delicate, gruesome
things. . . . The candle, like love, flickered.” At other times, a conventional verbal simile (“like
riding a bike”) morphs, by a series of associations, into a whole imaginary visual scene. In
“Thank You For Having Me,” the protagonist wonders, “If you were alone when you were born,
alone when you were dying, really absolutely alone when you were dead, why ‘learn to be alone’
in between? If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding
a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the
wind in your hair. You didn’t have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell
off the bike” (Moore 156). It’s here we see the defamiliarization of language I originally
identified in Grace Paley’s work—how better to define love (or death) than to un-define it. This
is how Lorrie Moore makes life (and love! And death!) into something new and strange which,
after all, it so often is.

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The Comedy in “You’re Ugly, Too”
In “Jokes, Fiction, and Lorrie Moore,” Robert Chodat argues that Moore’s “You’re Ugly,
Too”—the title itself a punch line—is a self-reflective text that not only asks questions about
Moore’s particular humor but also about the nature of storytelling itself. In other words, not only
does the text initiate questions about the legitimacy and depth of Moor’s humor, but it also
“places us smack in the middle of debates about the ontological status of fiction” (Chodat). What
does a fictional story mean? What kind of reality does a fictional story represent? What sort of
world does it depict, and how is it related to other worlds? While Chadot doesn’t suggest that
Moore is necessarily preoccupied with questions of philosophy—nor was she necessarily
thinking about these particular questions about the ontological status of fiction while writing
“You’re Ugly, Too”—but I agree with him when he suggests that to miss the philosophical
implications of Moore’s works means misunderstanding the comedy completely. He also
attempts to define her place in contemporary comedic fiction in general, which John W. Aldridge
had previously identified as “satirical realism” (Chadot 3). This so-called “satirical realism”
results in a work of fiction on the knife-edge between two forms of joking and, in turn, two
forms of fiction. This knife-edge is what makes this story no laughing matter; or at least, not just
a laughing matter. It’s the same doubleness I cited in the introduction—the dovetailing of the
comedy and tragedy that’s so integral to this genre.
Is it possible to say why exactly Moore’s work is so funny (and would “it is
impossible to say” have been a valid answer for my former students, who often didn’t find it
funny at all?). James Wood wrote, “comedy, like death and sex, is awarded the prize of
ineffability” (Chadot). I’d also add, is there a less funny piece of writing than literary criticism
about comedy? But let’s look at the opening of “You’re Ugly, too” anyway:
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You had to get out of them occasionally, those Illinois towns with the funny names:
Paris, Oblong, Normal. Once, when the Dow Jones dipped two hundred points, the
Paris paper boasted a banner headline: NORMAL MAN MARRIES OBLONG
WOMAN. They knew what was important. They did! But you had to get out once
in a while, even if it was just across the border to Terre Haute, for a movie (Moore
67).

These are the names of actual towns in Illinois near the Indiana border (I checked), and the
humor of “Normal” and Oblong” occurs on two levels. First, there’s that disparity (see Grace
Paley, some pages ago): the terms are adjectives, not proper nouns, used to describe persons and
objects, not towns. This implies a kind of immediate strangeness to the people and towns—the
residents can’t even give their towns logical town names? Second, Normal and Oblong are
comical because, when applied to people, we are confronted with terms that have been
completely estranged from their ordinary semantics. Could a man from Normal actually be
normal? Regardless, when put together with an Oblong woman—that’s surely an abnormal pair.
The semantic play of the headline is also, as Chadot notes, “the first hint of the ill-fitting
relations between men and women that occupy so much of the story’s plot,” and that I’d argue,
make up so many of Moore’s plots in general. The men in the text are in fact hopelessly normal,
and Zoe is a kind of square peg. In contrast to Normal and Oblong, the humor of the town name
“Paris” lies not in its being an unplacelike place-name but in its being one of the most famous
place-names in the world, incongruously far—in every sense of the term—from small-town
Illinois.
While Oblong and Normal don’t sound like the names of actual towns, Paris
overcompensates: this town does not, we’re led to believe, deserve a name like Paris. The ironic
juxtaposition of the sophisticated and the rustic that marks this use of Paris is carried over to the
joke at the end of the paragraph, namely that Terre Haute “would appear as a kind of cultural
oasis…to which you retreat when ‘you had to get out’” (Chadot). Taken together, Moore
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suggests there’s an insularity to its local residents—they are only concerned with two of their
own being married, local romance and familial legacies, as opposed to whatever might be going
on in the greater world, from which our narrator hails. This marks a preoccupation of Moore’s—
a recurring theme—in which female narrators are always portrayed as a kind of alien species
compared to the “normal” people around them, strangers in a strange land, particularly far from
those closest to them.
Let’s look again at the first sentence in “You’re Ugly, Too,”: “You had to get out of them
occasionally” Moore begins. The first word of the story is “you,” and the paragraph continues in
the second person point of view. The effect of this is to draw the reader, here at the start, onto
Zoe’s side. The “you” creates a familiarity and tries to establish a kinship with the reader by
addressing her as a confidant—someone in on the joke. We are encouraged to see ourselves as
part of an “us,” someone who might agree with the narrator’s assessment of the referenced
provincial towns. “They knew what was important,” Moore says, “They did!” (Moore 68). She
seems to want to convince us, her readers, with that classic Moore exclamation point poking us
in the chest, doing its usual persuasive job.
The second-person voice of the opening paragraph attempts to establish what Ted Cohen
refers to as the “intimacy” that a great deal of humor—not just women’s—depends on, and
which it often attempts to foster. Why, asks Cohen, in his article “Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts
on Joking Matters,” do we want someone to hear a joke and find it funny? Is it because we wish
each other well? “Well, maybe,” he answers, “but at its core I do not think it is entirely a matter
of altruism” (Cohen). It is, instead, a wish to have our feelings toward something understood and
shared. “I think that what you want is to reach me,” says Cohen, “and therein to verify that you
understand me, at least a little, which is to exhibit that we are, at least a little, alike.” This wish
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for intimacy, and the threat of its collapse, is at the heart of Zoe’s story as a whole, and the use of
the second person here in the first paragraph demonstrates this desire—“inscribes it into the text”
(Chadot)—and creates the reader’s relation to it. It’s also a joke-telling technique used by
women referenced in the aforementioned They Used to Call Me Snow White…But I Drifted:
“knowing that you’re not the only one experiencing something takes the misery out of
commiseration: to laugh at something is to drain the fear out of it. That’s at least one reason
suffering and humor, when shared, are both validated and validating. They serve a purpose,
which is to abolish or mitigate a sense of alienation” (Barreca 5). It becomes a shorthand for
women, or at the very least, for a reader who sees themselves as Moore’s narrator might:
alienated by those around her.
Chadot categorizes Moore’s comedy as occurring in one of two “units.” The first is the
sentence-level, the similes and metaphors I’ve already touched on. For instance, Zoe’s mother
sends her a box of old decorating magazines that she has saved over the years, which to Zoe feels
“like getting her mother’s pornography ... her drooled-upon fantasies, the endless wish and tease
that had been her life” (Moore 74). The second is what Chadot calls Zoe’s “crazed fantasies,”
which read like notes toward a stand-up routine or a Monty Python skit. It’s in these “fantasies”
where we see Zoe respond to those around her as though they’re in different worlds altogether,
or at least different rooms. She’s speaking her own language, but it’s not meant for connecting
with the other characters in the text, it’s meant for connecting with those outside the text—the
readers. For example, when Zoe’s sister asks if she’s seeing anyone, she says, “I’m seeing my
house. I’m tending to it when it wets, when it cries, when it throws up” (Moore 73). It’s about
and around men, especially, when Moore’s alienation seems most acute, and therefore her
language most fantastical.
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During a date with a fellow professor, Murray Peterson, and a married couple whose wife
boasts she was once able to memorize the first and last names of everyone at an entire dinner
party, Zoe says, “I knew a dog that could do that…It was a Talking Lab, and after about ten
minutes of listening to the dinner conversation this dog knew everyone’s name. You could say,
‘Bring this knife to Murray Peterson,’ and it would” (Moore 73). It is in comparison to this sort
of imaginative flight that we recognize Zoe’s acquaintances’ impoverishment of language, and
their lack of imagination. They regard her with confusion, at times amused and other times
bewildered, as though she’s an alien who’s only just arrived on Earth, the Midwest specifically.
To grasp just how distinctive Moore’s prose is, recall the literary context out of which her
short stories emerged, in particular the ways in which the short story had developed in the wake
of minimalism. Like many of the minimalists, Moore typically favors a spare prose that is far
from the complex syntax of more lyrical writers. But Moore’s sentences are far more hectic than
those of the minimalists and rarely seem to exhibit the minimalists’ guarded, often melancholy
restraint. “They knew what was important. They did! ” seems unimaginable in a Carver short
story, though a little bit more imaginable in an Amy Hempel or Mary Robison story. Minimalism
has sometimes been referred to as “TV fiction,” but the analogy to television is more appropriate
to a story such as “You’re Ugly, Too” than to anything the traditional minimalists wrote, except
of course for Hempel. The sentences hop and bounce, cutting from one brief clause to the next in
the way that images skip around playfully on a TV screen (Chadot). This is why I see Lorrie
Moore and Amy Hempel as a connective branch in my female comedic genre family tree.
The humor in “You’re Ugly, Too” is reinforced by the breakneck speed of Moore’s
prose. Zoe does not slow down to mull over what she is going to say before a thought pops out of
her mouth, and the third-person narration of the story enacts this recklessness in the pace. The
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story’s presentation of character, too, bolsters the humor. The figures around Zoe belong as
much to the realm of caricature as they do to the realm of character, with all the “one-
dimensionality and postmodern deathlessness that this implies” (Chadot). The students at
Hilldale-Versailles are uniformly uninformed; the men Zoe dates are uniformly incompetent; the
guests at her sisters Halloween party in New York are uniformly self-obsessed. And this
“deathlessness” is reflected not only in the individual characters but also in the way they interact
with one another, through comical miscommunications and deep misunderstandings. Zoe’s
alienation, then, is not just relegated to the Midwest; rather, it follows her to New York and
everywhere she goes. (“It’s not you—it’s me” or so the old break-up adage goes).
Why does Zoe respond to the world in the way that she does? Is it, as Barbara Levy
argues, a way for Lorrie Moore to exert some sort of control? I’d agree, yes, control is a central
aspect, and it’s meant to control a specific danger lurking in every corner of the story: death.
Death first appears when Zoe goes for an ultrasound to check a large and mysterious growth that
doctors have found in her abdomen, and then reappears again and again. Zoe meets this dread
with all of the ammunition—jokes and misdirections—characteristic of Moore’s writing.
Moore’s comedy escapes the charge of frivolity in part because she shows a clear-eyed
awareness of mortality. She is not a reincarnation of P.J.Wodehouse, as Aldridge says, and
although she’s often described as a “comic writer,” her materials are “altogether unfunny”
(Vogel). We see it again and again in Moore’s stories; in "People Like Us Are The Only People
Here” for example, about a woman’s baby surviving cancer, which is partly autobiographical. As
in the well-known joke that Zoé describes as “terribly, terribly funny”—the punch line of which
this story gets its title—the humor of “You’re Ugly, Too” emerges in part from an existential
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terror and from the main character’s attempt to ask, like the patient in the joke, for a second
opinion.
One of the ways to read Moore’s jokes in “You’re Ugly, Too” is to see them as instances
of alternative worlds—of “worldmaking,” to use Nelson Goodman’s phrase from his book, Ways
of Worldmaking. Or as Donald Davidson says, we recognize metaphors partly by recognizing
them as nonsensical (Lepore). “Absurdity or contradiction in a metaphorical sentence,” Davidson
writes, “guarantees that we won’t believe it, and invites us, under proper circumstances, to take
the sentence metaphorically.” Moore’s house-as-baby joke and dog-as-butler joke are small,
fabulist worlds she creates, on the spot, apart from the actual world going on around her. These
jokes initiate all of the moral and emotional dilemmas dramatized in the text as a whole. The
story is a tale of disappointment and frustration, continually registering the gulf between what is
real and what Zoe imagines, and the persistent presence of such a gulf is a source of underlying
sadness, both for Zoe and for the reader. If Zoe’s jokes were capable of creating alternative
worlds in any substantial way, if she really could construct alternative universes into which she
could insert herself, she could live blissfully unaware of any word/world distinction. But of
course the drama of this story depends on this gap—"between Zoe’s efforts at gaiety and the
dread of the world” (Chadot)—and the comedic but tragic consequences this difference creates.
Practically speaking, Zoe’s fabulist jokes don’t actually allow her to exist in a series of
proliferating worlds, but they do help to isolate her from the one in which she actually lives.
In Moore’s comedy, the flights of fancy are wryly held in check by a respect for the
norms of realist fiction. The protagonist, Zoe, is again and again brought back to Earth as a
consequence of interacting with those around her—a party-goer shoots her a disapproving look, a
man she’s out with expresses confusion, her sister asks her to be normal for once. Through a
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series of misunderstandings, “You’re Ugly, Too” asks whether the pain of decay and death can
be overcome by jokes and whether the failures of being alive—mostly, the alienation—can be
ignored by telling alternative stories about it. I believe it can, at least for the time it takes to read
this story. In an interview, Moore said, “there is that prejudice against humor as somehow
mucking up the seriousness of your endeavor” (Garner) but I’d argue that the whole point of this
genre; or, its measure of success, hinges on whether humor has in fact underscored the
seriousness as opposed to having undermined it.
Lorrie Moore & Performance
Finally, there’s more to Moore than just jokes and long-winded metaphors. There’s
Moore’s interest in performance, which is another feature of this genre, particularly regarding
Moore’s work. In an interview with Elizabeth Gaffney for The Paris Review in 2001, Moore
said, about theater:
I was quite captivated by the theater when I was a child. My parents were
members of an amateur operetta club, …and from a very early age I was brought
to watch the rehearsals on Sunday afternoons. Watching grown-ups put on
plays—watching them fall in and out of character, or burst into song or laughter—
were probably the most enchanted and culturally formative moments of my
childhood. I became if not stagestruck, then theaterstruck, or artstruck.
Somethingstruck…I suspect that love of theater…is part of the pulse of
everything I've ever written.

We see this preoccupation with performance in the story “Willing,” in which the protagonist is
an aging film actress. According to Allison Kelly, the story uses performance to posit individual
identity as “dramatically configured, projected, and reconfigured.” Moore’s use of actors, both
professional and amateur, as protagonists demonstrates a thematic interest in enactment. In
Moore’s work, gender categories do not come un-fixed; rather, her female protagonists grapple
with the ways in which they feel inadequate within the bounds of the category. Moore's female
protagonists often have non-ideal or imperfect female bodies, but this is not a matter of willed
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transgression on their parts; rather, it causes them great discomfort—they feel a sense of
shortcoming or failure.
Part of the feminism of Moore’s work consists in exposing the social pressures that
generate such body-image anxieties and aspirations. When Moore's protagonists feel like female
impersonators (for instance, Charlene in "How to Be an Other Woman" from the collection Self-
Help), the experience typically arises from a sense of failing to fulfill natural expectations
concerning womanliness. Again, many of Moore’s female protagonists are alienated—even
among other women—when they cannot seem to fully inhabit the category, and therefore are
unable to act accordingly. It makes sense, then, that Moore so often returns to the “unfulfilled
childless woman” (Kelly) for her protagonists—Ginny in "How to Talk to Your Mother" (Self-
Help); Mamie in "Like Life" (Like Life); and Agnes in "Agnes of Iowa" (Birds of America).
Moore's writing does not endorse or promote essentialist or biologically determined conceptions
of identity, Kelly argues, “but it does acknowledge that these factors operate alongside cultural
forces in the formation of many subjects.”
The story “Willing” is one example of Moore’s interplay of linguistic, corporeal, and
ritual elements of performance. In “Willing,” the protagonist, an actress named Sidra, tends to
objectify her life as something separate from her, outside of her, possessing an agency which she
has lost somewhere down the line: "There were moments when she looked out at her life and
went, ‘What?’…It had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake” (Moore 18). Note Moore’s use of
italics (What?)—that control exerted on the reader, forcing her to perform the dialogue along
with the protagonist, and in doing so, becoming the writer’s surrogate, just as, perhaps, Sidra is a
kind of surrogate for Moore. Sidra feels unequipped to "make a real life," having been given, as
she says, only the mismatched tools of a can of gravy and a hairbrush. She can only stand
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"blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush," passively watching her life refusing to
become whatever she might have hoped it would be but instead "veering off suddenly to become
something else" (Moore 18).
We see this objectification not just about her life, but about the way she sees herself,
and her floundering acting career. For example, the story’s opening line describes the last film in
which she acted: “the camera had lingered at a hip, the naked hip, and even though it wasn’t her
hip, she acquired a reputation for being willing. ‘You have the body,’ studio heads told her over
lunch at Chasen’s. She looked away. ‘Habeus corpus,’ she said, not smiling. ‘Pardon me?’ A hip
that knew Latin. Christ.” (Moore 16). The narrative's interest in this hip—whose hip exactly?—
establishes the “value placed on embodiment by Sidra's audience” (Kelly). Ironically, the hip is
not Sidra's but a stand-in belonging to a body double. Instead of using this knowledge to resist
the process of objectification (she cannot be reduced to a sexy body part if the body part doesn’t
actually belong to her), Sidra feels guilty at the deception.
Whether this substitution occurred with or without her knowledge, Sidra believes “it
should have been her hip" (Moore 16), and therefore she participated. Furthermore, she considers
her reputation for being willing as deserved: “She herself was true as a goddamn dairy product;
available as lunch whenever” (Moore 16). And later, talking on the telephone to her “gay friend
Tommy,” Sidra further diminishes her own value when she argues that what he calls talent is
only '"willingness"'—to show a bit of shoulder, to tell a raunchy joke. Tommy disagrees, saying,
“someone's got you thinking you went from serious actress to aging bimbo”(Moore 17). Sidra's
experiences in Hollywood have led not only to an external construction of her as a failure but to
her self-construction as one too.
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Eventually, she leaves Hollywood for a “life of obscurity” in the Midwest. (So many of
Moore’s characters end up marooned in the Midwest—Sidra, in Chicago, a city in which people
were “never lonely at the same time” (Moore 16)—that fly-over alienation, once again). But
even away from the trappings of Hollywood and her acting career, Sidra continues to perform. In
Chicago, “there were small dark pits of annihilation she discovered in her heart, in the loosening
fist of it, and she threw herself into them, falling" (Moore 19). The phrase describing her
response to this existential crisis: “threw herself into” implies dramatic enactment in its wording.
Even in this moment of self-awareness, and with the absence of an audience to watch her, Sidra
still “throws herself into” this new self-construction, as though she were a Method actress
inhabiting a role.
When she meets Walt, an auto-mechanic at a bar (and like so many male love interests in
Moore’s fiction, he’s a bit hapless, a little dopey, but often well-intentioned—unable to meet our
protagonist on the same intellectual plane, often nodding along to what she says, a little behind
on the uptake) she’s relieved that he doesn’t recognize her from her movies. She likes a quality
about Walt, “something earthy beneath the act. In L.A., beneath the act you got nougat or
Styrofoam. Or glass” (Moore 20). Sidra perceives Walt—even Midwestern Walt!—as someone
performing an act, albeit a convincingly earthy one. At the same time, Sidra theatrically
constructs an image of herself as Walt's future wife, as if she is preparing for the leading role in a
domestic romance about "children and lawn mowers and grass clippings" (Moore 21). The
construction of herself and Walt as a "mismatched" couple draws on models from drama. Ill-
matched and argumentative, Sidra thinks they will be Beatrice and Benedick in contemporary
costumes, "wrangling and retangling, like a comedy by Shakespeare” (Moore 23).
After Walt watches Sidra in one of her films, she gets into bed with him in the grip of a
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"new" and "frightening" need for praise about her performance in the film. Walt awakens from
sleep only to give the lukewarm verdict that the film was “okay.” He then goes mechanically
(like a car mechanic, maybe) through the motions of sex without even looking at her: "He had
his eyes closed. She could be anybody" (Moore 23). Instead of making her the object of his
desiring gaze as her fans once did, Walt gives Sidra what she thought she wanted: escape from
the pressure of embodying her audience's desires and expectations; in other words, anonymity.
When, like so many of Moore’s stories, the romance can’t continue (or is simply unsustainable),
Sidra confronts Walt about his infidelity to her. In his reaction, she notes his acting: “He sat up
on the sofa, looked distraught and false—his face badly arranged. He should practice in a mirror,
she thought” (Moore 23).
Unable to mend their damaged relationship as he might repair a broken-down car, Walt is
incapable of mustering the appropriate words or gestures worthy for the final parting, at least the
one in Sidra’s mind’s eye. Sidra compensates by both directing and starring in the lead role in
their final scene together:
‘For your own good,’ he was saying. ‘Might be willing…’ he was saying. But she
was already turning into something else, a bird—a flamingo, a hawk, a flamingo-
hawk—and was flying up and away, toward the filmy pane of the window, then
back again, circling, meanly with a squint (Moore 25).

Walt inarticulately pleads with her to spare him the job of breaking up with her by being
“willing” to break up with him instead, and in response Sidra transfigures into a creature of her
own construction (finally) as opposed to somebody else’s. She becomes not only beautiful and
exotic (the flamingo) but with a predatory and unforgiving eye (the hawk) which she turns on
Walt before leaving him. The transformation is metaphorical, occurring in Sidra’s mind and
separating her from Walt both emotionally, mentally, and eventually physically. (Also, the scene
mirrors that of the film Sidra and Walt watched earlier in the story). While Sidra doesn’t literally
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fly away, of course, her liberation is literal in the sense that she has “reclaimed the subjective
agency that is expressed in enactment and performance,” (Kelly) and the story ends on a note
that signifies escape from Sidra’s point of view: “she was gone, gone out the window, gone,
gone” (Moore 25).
While “Willing” begins with the stationary image of a motionless hip, it ends with an
image of motion—a flight that is both a symbol of power, and of kindness ("If she left him,” she
thought, “he would be better able to explain it" [Moore 25]). This image is ambiguous, and this
ambiguity aligns with what she was known for during her heyday as a professional actress, when
Sidra “made ambiguity of this kind her signature.” She is reminded of this when, channel-
hopping on the motel TV, she comes across one of her old movies (ambiguous in genre, “a love
story murder mystery called Finishing Touches”) and watches her former “way of being,” her
consciously muddled style: “It was the kind of performance she had become, briefly, known for:
patched-together intimacy with the audience, half cartoon, half revelation; a cross between
shyness and derision” (Moore 26). This becomes a meta-description of Moore’s writing:
teetering on the line between disclosure and concealment, approach and withdrawal, realism and
caricature, and of course (drumroll please) comedy and tragedy.
PART FOUR: BRANCHES OF THE FAMILY TREE

Roxane Gay: “Difficult Women”
To date, Roxane Gay has written five books—one memoir, one collection of essays, two
collections of short stories, and one novel. She’s also edited multiple anthologies, and is the first
Black woman to write a Marvel comic book, Black Panther: World of Wakanda. Regardless of
the genre, Roxane’s voice is consistent: it usually centers women, and its often about trauma, in
one way or another. And, it often includes an undercurrent of humor. Roxane is a first generation
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American born in Omaha, Nebraska to parents originally from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. For many
years, they were the only Black family in the neighborhood. The Haitian community there was
also small, and this is partly what led Roxane to a life of writing: the double-outsider status of
not only being Black, but also Haitian.
In Hysterical! Women in American Comedy, Linda Mizejewski argues that the
“disobedient laughter of the oppressed is a powerful tactic of social bonding, but it works for the
other team, too” (9). The edginess of comedy has enabled sexist, racist, homophobic, and
xenophobic expressions that would otherwise be forbidden. Joining in the laughter at a sexist or
racist joke is a way to feel like an insider, smugly aligned against the outliers. But the
antiauthoritarian nature of comedy guarantees the persistence of defiant laughter against the
powers that be, as seen in the prevalence of Jews and African Americans in the history of
American Comedy. According to Mizejewski, it’s the “the disorderly, subversive, and unruly
qualities” that make so many of the comedians in Hysterical! not just funny, but hysterically
funny (comedians like Wanda Sykes, Whoopi Goldberg, Sarah Silverman, Margaret Cho, and
Lily Tomlin). Of course, I’m not talking about female comedians in this dissertation, but I find a
lot of relevance for female writers (and not just because I am both). Writing anything in this
genre is “disorderly and subversive” especially if you’re in a body that is not heterosexual, white,
or cis-presenting.
In Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy, Regina Barreca argues that women
have “traditionally been considered objects of comedy because they are perceived as powerless;
they are perceived as humorless because it is assumed that they simply refuse to get the joke”
(17). Even the traditional romantic comedy plot in which “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, and boy
wins back girl” is different for women: for women, there are a different set of endings, or non-
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endings. “The pleasure of being the girl the boy ‘got’,” Barreca says, “so that he can then found a
nice little society around himself is not her happy ending” (28). If women appear “unlaughing” at
conventional masculine humor, this might in part be because the directive to find something
amusing is as inappropriate, even impossible, as the inverted directive not to find something
funny (Barreca 19). Charges of not laughing or laughing inappropriately have been levelled at
women since women began to participate in the creation of literary works.
These charges have also been brought against the female audience, Barrecca argues,
expected to laugh at humor often based on the degradation and debasement of their sex. Roxane
Gay echoes this sentiment in her famed essay collection Bad Feminist, though she takes it a step
further, and argues that those who refuse to laugh at the offensive joke are not just called
humorless in contemporary America but often—get this—feminist: “When women respond
negatively to misogynistic or rape humor, they are ‘sensitive’ and branded as ‘feminist,’ a word
that has, as of late, become a catchall term for ‘woman who does not tolerate bullshit”” (Gay 18).
Unpacking the word feminist—and the way it can be used to describe a host of behavior, from
standing up for one’s self, to being overly sensitive—is part of Gay’s project in that particular
collection.
Now you might be thinking, sure Roxane Gay writes about feminism—she’s a feminist
voice, undoubtedly. But is she a practitioner of the comedic voice in the short story form? I’d
argue like all of the writers I’ve discussed, Gay’s short stories toe the line between comedy and
tragedy (as my therapist, Dr. Barbra, says, two things can be true at once). In Roxane Gay’s 2017
short story collection Difficult Women, the female protagonists must balance their desire for
intimacy with their desire for freedom, and men pose both a threat and a salve, sometimes
simultaneously. For example, the story “I Am a Knife” opens with “My husband is a hunter. I am
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a knife.” Gay’s short stories employ many of the techniques I’ve identified in this dissertation:
the disparity of language, the defamiliarizing of ideas we thought we knew, the magnification of
odd details as a means of talking around the true and central pain. Like Lorrie Moore and Amy
Hempel, Gay’s narrators draw men close only to grapple with their feelings for them, about
them, and about men in general. (“We have already slept together, twice,” the narrator of her
story “Baby Arm” says, “I’m not a hard sell”).
In Difficult Women, sex and violence intertwine in much the same way comedy and
tragedy do. Unlike Moore’s narrators, the women in Gay’s stories don’t puncture their cryptic,
claustrophobic romantic relationships with constant puns and jokes. But the stories are still
punctured with humor. In “North Country,” the narrator is a postdoc at the Michigan Institute of
Technology, where she is the “only woman in the department and as such, a double novelty”
(Gay 14) because she’s also African American. On a boat tour, a man asks her if she’s from
Detroit, to which she thinks, “I’ve been asked this question twenty-three times since moving to
the area. In a month, I will stop counting, having reached a four digit number. Shortly after that, I
will begin telling people I’ve recently arrived from Africa. They will nod and exhale excitedly
and ask about my tribe. I don’t know that in this moment, so there is little to comfort me. I shake
my head” (Gay 15). In Gay’s stories, the humor is a doorstop, meant to shut the conversation
down. Unlike Moore’s flights of fancy in “You’re Ugly, Too,” Gay’s comedy is based in reality.
The narrator doesn’t just imagine giving this alternate answer, eventually, it becomes the answer
she actually gives. In Laughing Mad: the Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America, Bambi
Haggins defines the comedy of Wanda Sykes and Moms Mabley as “commonsense social
discourse,” in which she uses a line from Moms Mabley’s standup as an example: “You think
you’re gonna hear some jokes? Well, Moms don’t know none. Moms don’t know no jokes….but
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I can tell you some facts.” Similarly, the voices of Gay’s protagonists are matter of fact, and the
humor they use to couch their pain is borne from real interactions with actual people.
The titular difficult women in Gay’s collection are usually women who have been hurt,
typically by “by living under the patriarchy and under white supremacy. The injuries vary,
ranging in scope from the blunt force of unimaginable trauma to the death-by-a-thousand-
papercuts of daily microaggressions” (Grady). As in Bad Feminist, Gay’s commitment to
breaking down an archetype (feminist then, difficult women here) lies in finding the specificity
with which these women interact with the world around them, chiefly men. (“There once was a
man. There is always some man,” says the narrator in “North Country”). It’s the details that
ground the men in Gay’s stories, in the rural Midwest, for example, or a gated community in
Florida, or a strip club in Baltimore. “As a Black woman, as a Black queer woman,” Roxane said
in an interview, “specificity is incredibly important, because diverse experiences are rarely seen
in literature” (Grady). Due to a specific man named Magnus, the narrator in “North Country”
can’t concentrate on her work. “In my lab, things make sense but they don’t.” In Gay’s
specificity, she finds the paradox around which so much of the female comedic voice centers.
The protagonist wants the man close, but not too close she loses herself or he becomes
dangerous, as so many men have been for her in the past. (I used to tell a joke on stage: I want a
man to tell me that he misses me even when he’s in another room, but I want him to make sure
that he stays in the other room after he says it).
A quick anecdote: Roxane Gay is a friend of mine, and came to a standup show I was
performing in about six or seven years ago, when I was still just starting out, or as writers say,
“emerging.” The show was poorly produced, in the back room of a deteriorating Italian
restaurant on Melrose aptly named Sal’s Comedy Hole. The man who booked me was an older
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New York comic who went by the name Big Mike, and most of the other comedians on the line
up were just like him: older men. Roxane and a few other friends sat in the front row. I went up
early. Soon after me, an older man went up. I can’t remember his name. He was doing poorly—
old sexist jokes I hadn’t heard in a long time (I’d actually only ever heard jokes like that from
comedians doing impressions of guys like this), tired, sexist stuff about women who shop,
women who don’t want to have sex once they get married, women who just plain make it hard to
be a man in the world. He was—as comedians say—bombing on stage, and probably because of
that, he pointed at two friends of mine, two women married to each other, who were sitting next
to Roxane. “Which one of you is the man?’ he asked. “I don’t see any men anywhere,” Roxane
said, looking him up and down. He moved on. After, I thought Roxane would say she hated it—
the venue, the men’s’ comedy. Instead she said, “I can’t believe how hard stand up is. And how
much vulnerability it requires.” Her description of standup was so much like a description one
might use about her fiction, I still think of it today.
Danielle Evans: Humor & Trauma
Danielle Evans is the author of two short story collections, most recently The Office of
Historical Corrections, which includes a novella. In the last few semesters, I’ve taught a story
from Danielle Evans’ debut collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self called “Virgins”
which originally appeared in The Paris Review in 2007. I remember reading it when it came out
in the magazine, on an airplane, during which I kept having to set it down in my lap because it
felt too painful to continue, in the way really good writing feels painful in that very pleasurable
way. I thought I’d never read anything thing so sad, or so funny, except of course, for the writers
I’ve already discussed. Great short stories have a way of wiping my slate clean (Have I ever read
anything like this before)? and then quickly reminding me of everything I’ve ever read and loved
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before it. In recent a review of The Office of Historical Corrections, Roxane Gay wrote that
Danielle Evans “demonstrates, once again, that she is the finest short story writer working
today,” and I’d argue, also one of the finest female comedic voices in the genre I’ve set out to
define.
The female narrators in her debut collection Before You Suffocate are all in-betweeners:
between girlhood and womanhood; between the Black middle class and Ivy League privilege;
between iffy boyfriends and those even less reliable; between an extended family and living on
your own. But to say they belong nowhere would be wrong: they belong in more than one place,
sometimes many places at once. (“Do you want to sound like an academic,” a comedian friend of
mine—a PhD dropout—used to say to me, “just use the phrase ‘liminal space’ and everyone will
nod”).
The fifteen year old protagonist of “Virgins,” Erica, inhabits the in-between space of
girlhood and womanhood and all the dichotomies that exist therein—particularly innocence and
experience, good behavior and risky behavior, passive desire and active desire. We were the kind
of girls who would always be very pretty if , Erica says, but if never seemed to happen” (Evans
10). If is the space in which Erica exists. “Virgins” takes place the day after Tupac got shot, in
“money-earnin Mount Vernon” (Evans) where virginity is a loaded card, one the narrator’s best
friend, Jasmine, wants to use quickly and strategically. Erica navigates the world differently: the
more reticent of the two, thoughtful and introspective and filled with future plans. After an ill-
fated night at a dance club with much older men, Erica still finds herself teetering at the edge of a
decision in which the outcome (losing her virginity) feels inevitable: “there was no such thing as
safe, only safer; that this, if it didn’t happen now, would happen later but not better” (Evans 25).
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In this way, Virgins demonstrates the paradox of the female comedic genre: to gain anything also
means to lose something.
When Erica, who most wants to be at home with her friends; who often thinks of what
her mother would say if she was watching her; who, when asked what she wants to pretend to
study at college before they enter the club, says, “teaching;” decides to lose her virginity (if lose
is the right word), by choosing a man only because he seems safer than the alternatives. In an
interview with the Nashville Review, Evans explains her characters’ decision making:
For a lot of the characters there’s that moment when they consider the decision,
consider the possibility of a different course of action, and move forward anyway.
It was important to me, especially in thinking about adolescence and particularly
female adolescence, to write characters whose problematic behavior came from
complexity and not from lack of comprehension. Sometimes that tendency to hurt
themselves is a way of reconciling trauma. Sometimes it’s a conscious decision to
choose between what seem like only bad options, so that at least they have the
dignity of knowing in which way something will hurt (Norris).

Like many of Gay’s protagonists, Erica in “Virgins” has past trauma she hasn’t fully
processed that influences the way she navigates the world, particularly when the world seems
unsafe, which for her, it often is. Erica recalls an experience at the pool with a lifeguard when
she was eleven and he was sixteen: “We’d been playing chicken and when he put me down he
held me against the cement and put his fingers in me, and I wasn’t scared or anything, just cold
and surprised” (Evans 5). The experience is so commonplace (and maybe, already seemed to
her—even then—an inevitability) that Erica doesn’t even feel fear. Perhaps the absence of fear
is due to the absence of agency Erica has in this world—this is simply what happens to girls.
“When I told Jasmine later,” Erica remembers, “she said he did that to everyone, her too” (Evans
6). When asked about approaching trauma in her fiction, Evans said, regarding Erica in
“Virgins”: “trauma isn’t in the story, in that it’s not a thing she dwells on, but it also is in the
story, in her confusion about sexual agency and her anxiety about what both strangers and people
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she knows might be capable of, and her resolution that the decisions she makes at the end of the
story are the most control she can have” (Peelle).
Evans uses the urgent voice of a fifteen-year-old before the fifteen year old is able to
explain her decisions, before she can make connections and justifications and intellectualize it
all. Still, the reader gets the feeling the narrator will be able to do this, eventually. But that, of
course, would be a different story—a story told in retrospect, without the same dire pacing and
suspense. As we’ve seen before in this genre, the narrator in “Virgins” doesn’t explicitly name
her trauma, or her pain. Evans explains in an interview with Poets and Writers, “it comes down
to asking where is this person in relation to this moment, or this piece of information? …That
will tell me a lot about the shape of the story” (Jackson). In “Virgins,” the space between the
narrator and the events that have happened to her—Erica’s relation to the moment, both to her
assault and her decision to lose her virginity—is so small it’s practically non-existent. Her
experiences with men seem to lay one on top of the other, no pun intended.
“Virgins” requires the immediacy of a particular fifteen-year-old girl’s voice in a
particular body in a particular town at a particular time—right after Tupac died. The immediacy
of the voice is essential to Evans’ handling of trauma, and also essential to its comedy. When
Erica sees Ron, the friend’s older brother to whom she will eventually lose her virginity, she
says, “Jasmine always said how fine he was, but to me he looked like the kind of person who
should be on television, not someone you’d actually wanna talk to” (Evans 6). It’s a relatively
recent development that women’s sexual humor is explored in public—on television, in clubs—
in other words, in front of men who are often surprised to find that women have been making
jokes at men’s expense (Barreca 154). Evans’ stories are filled with jokes told at men’s expense
(like Moore and Paley) as a means of gaining agency, even when, at the end, that agency is
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thwarted, or at least, sublimated into sex. Erica is self-deprecating, too, which Gina Barreca also
cites as one of the ways in which women are able to gain and maintain power in front of men,
because the power is covert.
When Jasmine and Erica begin preparing to enter the club, trying on new (legal)
identities, Erica describes her imaginary boyfriend:
‘He’s great,’ I said. ‘He’s in college, too, and he’s gonna be a doctor, but he also
writes me love poems. And paints pictures of me. He’s a painter too.’
‘He’s so great, why you at the club?’ said Michael.
‘Umm...he’s dead?’ I said.
‘Dead?” said Jasmine.
‘Dead.’ I nodded. ‘I just finished grieving. I burned all his poems and now I wish I
still l had them.’
‘Check this chick,’ said Jasmine. Even when she makes shit up, her life is fucked
up.’ (Evans 16).

It’s the language of sitcom—the snappy and conversational back and forth dialogue, the
archetypal fake boyfriend, the ratcheting up of details—but with a sadder, more profound
uncurrent. Erica is a character for whom even an imagined, daydream life is a sad one, albeit told
in a funny way.
In The Office of Historical Corrections, Lyssa, the protagonist in “Happily Ever After”
works at a museum slash party venue built in the shape of the Titanic. Her white co-worker,
dressed as a princess, entertains children above deck; Lyssa, for the sake of “historical accuracy”
(Evans 9) stays below, running the gift shop. After a pop star rents the site to shoot a shipwreck-
themed music video, the video’s director casts Lyssa as an extra, then invites her back to his
hotel room. This potentially “bad trade” drives the plot, but the story’s real hazard lies buried in
the past: Lyssa’s mother is dead, from cancer, and Lyssa has been advised to undergo a
preventative surgery, which she keeps putting off. Her delay owes to grief, anxiety about having
children, and medical racism. And yet, even in her grief, Lyssa is still funny. When she recounts
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meeting a bartender named Travis whom she later dates, she says, “It was almost the end of
slutty Halloween; last year, even the local college kids had been bundled into cartoon character
onesies or dressed as clever puns, covered up like nuns, the real kind” (Evans 10).
In an interview with Jamel Brinkley for Bomb Magazine, Evans writes about this
relationship between humor and grief:
There’s the obvious relationship, where a character laughs to deflect what hurts,
but there are other, more complicated relationships. Humor is a way we create a
shared universe or a sense of connection. Humor can also be the way we draw
attention to the absence of that connection. When you lose someone, you lose all
the shared stories and running jokes that were only funny to that person. …Humor
can be a kind of mourning. A lot of the characters I write are laughing but also
grieving. Or they’re telling a joke that is no longer funny to anyone but
themselves.

“Happily Ever After” possesses many of the watermarks of a Danielle Evans story, Katy
Waldman writes in The New Yorker. The protagonist is terse, isolated, with an impulse toward
self-sabotage that ranges from recreational to all-consuming. The backdrop is incongruously
bright and fun, like a water park or a bachelorette party. Current events loom; there are
references to rent prices in the Bay Area, melting ice caps, the attention economy. The American
past also looms, and every horrific historical action has its equal and opposite tourist attraction—
estranged relatives take a day trip to Alcatraz; a gentrified bar called Dodge City trades on D.C.’s
plague of gun violence. “Evans evinces a special vigilance toward threats that are familiar,”
Waldman says, “in the sense of both inherited and routine.” While reading her, you become
aware of ambience, of the “peculiar iridescence that short fiction can sometimes offer—the
stories are infused with many things but not precisely ‘about’ any of them” (Waldman). In this
way, the stories are about all of it at once, with every sociopolitical observation couched in
Evans’ wit.
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In “Why Won’t Women Just Say What They Want,” Evans documents the apology tour
of a caddish “genius artist,” a premise that might as well have been ripped right from the
headlines. Here, we see Evans comedy at its height, as she describes the man’s previous,
unsuccessful attempts at making amends with his “Short Suffering Second Ex Wife”:
I do concede that I owe you an apology for the way that I phrased things. There was
probably a kinder way to express my frustration with your unreasonable
expectations than to say that you just didn’t understand why so many women I had
history with were still in my life because you’d never known what it was like to be
as successful as I am, and, as a woman, in order to understand it, you’d have to
imagine what things would be like for you if you were beautiful (Evans 118).

Yet the story—with its outrageous dialogue that could appear in an SNL sketch lambasting a
famous producer—turns genuinely profound, “an autopsy of good intentions that finally aimed
too low” (Waldman). What kind of apology is possible, Evans asks, when you lack the empathy
to fully grasp what you should be sorry for?
CONCLUSION
Why do women tell the stories of their lives in a funny way? In other words, what
accounts for the female comedic voice? Gina Barreca cites the end of Nora Ephron’s novel
Heartburn: “Because if I tell the story, I control the version. Because if I tell the story, I can
make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the
story, it doesn’t hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.” (Barreca 240). Or,
as Barbara Levy argues, a female comedic writer uses wit in order to exert control. What did the
wit control? Grace Paley sought to control the perception of women’s’ lives, “wittily
illuminating the neglected lives of women rather than attacking their men” (Levy 165). Paley
presents the foibles of men, but in a gentle, mocking tone as opposed to a bitingly satirical one.
Paley once said that she feels wit takes the place of anger in many of her stories, and we see that
again and again in the writers of this genre. The witty presentation is a palatable way of
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representing inequality, while language play (and jokes and puns) “suggest a basic optimism in
the future” (Levy 168). It’s a spoonful of sugar so the medicine goes down.
Amy Hempel wrote in a style directly influenced by Paley, dealing with death, men, the
domestic, and trauma told in bare prose and straightforward language, adopting and adapting the
fragmented structure Paley used before them. On the opposite end of that so-called minimalist
spectrum (but still, a miniaturist) Moore’s protagonists use constant jokes and metaphors in order
to reveal their alienation. In the work of Roxane Gay and Danielle Evans, we see what Levy
called “the witty presentation of presenting injustices”—they communicate what it’s like to be
not just a woman, but a Black woman (and girl) in the world among men. The wit found in the
works of these female writers becomes a strategy to win their readers over tactfully as well an
empowering technique. As Paley notes, wit masks anger: “where anger repels, wit disarms;
where anger alienates, wit charms” (Levy 169).
There were many other writers I didn’t include, like Mary Robison, Deborah Eisenberg,
Nora Ephron, Ann Beattie, Lucia Berlin, Rachel Khong, Miranda July, Danzy Senna, Rebecca
Lee, Aimee Barrodale, and many others. I chose the writers I did because I thought each brought
a specific facet to the female comedic voice, and each fit into the family tree I imagined,
influencing each other in terms of style, subject matter, and theme. Much of my project centered
around analyzing the fiction I most love to read—the genre in which I write—and attempting to
define what unifies that voice. The female comedic voice is a genre like any other genre (like
noir, science fiction, magical realism) and it deserves a central place in the cannon. As Gina
Barrecca puts it, “female humor has become a topic for examination in the way that previously
undiscovered body parts come into focus in the medical community. Suddenly everyone realizes
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that we should be spending more time looking at our spleen, for example” (262). If you gave
these writers an autopsy, what would you find? An extra heart? Or just a funny bone.
The female comedic voice is also a feminist voice, but what I have argued here is that the
female comedic voice didn’t come as a result of feminism, or because feminism opened the gate
for its arrival. The comedic voice is, instead, an integral part of feminism—it’s what helped
deliver the message. Theorists have argued that we’re now in a “Post-Postfeminist” stage of our
culture. Barreca jokes, “the classic feminist of the 60s embraced her anger; a Postfeminist of the
80s embraced anyone she found attractive; a Post-Postfeminism of the 2000s embraces her
Bowflex” 270). Or, a classic Feminist theme song was “I am Woman, Hear Me Roar” by Helen
Reddy; a Postfeminist theme song was “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” by Paula Cole; a
Post-Postfeminist theme song is “I’m Fucking Matt Damon” by Sarah Silverman. In other words,
women now freely wield the weapon of inappropriateness: turn it on themselves, on men, and on
each other.
The Internet has turned the whole world into an open mic—an endless bulletin board for
women to tack up their jokes and puns and pithy thoughts. The Internet continues to influence
the female comedic voice on stage, as well as the female comedic voice on the page, too. The
culture has changed in a way that has given women more freedom to discuss our bodies, our
desires, and our ambitions with less shame, but we still seem to require the techniques of the
comedic voice to do so. So much of women’s’ humor requires self-deprecation, including my
own—self-deprecating jokes protect me, and make me feel less vulnerable. And yet, the female
comedic voice still serves a crucial function in the lives of writers and readers, both: it makes
women realize we’re not alone.

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PREFACE
What does the female comedic voice have to do with my writing? I think it’s the genre
that most closely describes my own short stories, though it’s difficult to say exactly why. But I
think my impulse to write comes from the same impulse I have to get on stage and tell jokes. It
has something to do with childhood: my mom worked very long hours, and my dad had an
anxiety problem (maybe the word for it now is “disorder”) and wasn’t very available. Plus I
never felt like I had the time or space to say all of the (many) things I wanted to say, so I walked
around the world brimming over with words and holding them inside. Or maybe it’s out of
necessity—because my parents were so stressed and spread thin, that I felt like what I did say
always needed to be interesting, concise, or funny, in order to keep their attention, preferably all
three at once. Or maybe it has something to do with how crowded my house always felt (even
though there was only four of us), but crowded nonetheless with big personalities and a certain
kind of loud and hand-wringing worry people associate with the work of Philip Roth (Jewish).
Growing up, I felt I was a spy in the way all writers and comedians are spies: half
observing, half participating, half in half out. And maybe I write this way a little bit because of
that—because I felt out place—growing up in conservative Orange County in the 90s/2000s, in
which the Mega Churches were commonplace, and most of my friends were Christian, some
religious. I was embarrassed by my Jewish parents—my dad in his sweatpants, and socks and
sandals, while the other dads wore golf shorts and neat collared shirts—and I got used to
cracking jokes about knowing Jesus personally, though only as a friend, not a savior. Or maybe it
has something to do with being diagnosed as a Type 1 Diabetic when I was ten, which made my
anxious parents even more anxious (yet still busy), and making jokes seemed to relax and
distract them. Or maybe it’s my romantic relationships—I was in love with a woman once,
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among the several (too many?) men, so I’ve always felt a little half out. These are all reasons,
and not only are they inextricable from one another, I’m not sure that they matter anyway. Every
writer has them; the particulars of our lives that make us want to turn to the page. And in my
case, also, tell a joke.
The writer Marylynn Robinson said we always write in the landscapes of our
preoccupations. I have a few “daddy issues” sure, but I think my preoccupations manifest as
anxiety about being trapped by my femaleness—by domestic arrangements, by family, and all of
the expectations inherent to being a women. In my stories, female characters always seem to be
waking up to the strangeness of their lives, as though they don’t know how they got to this
particular place and point in time. I seem to fear that will happen to me, as though my life might
carry on without me. And I write about what interests me: performers, teachers, longing, loss,
and sex—mostly set in bars all over LA. Professor Freeman suggested I call the collection Girl
Walks into a Bar, but unfortunately, SNL alum Rachel Dratch already used that title.
The following stories in this collection, You Must Be Kidding, have appeared in The Paris
Review, Best American Short Stories, Granta, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, The Idaho
Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. I believe the stories in this
collection—my stories—serve as an example of the female comedic voice, both in terms of
technique and preoccupations. With that said, when reading it all together, I see my writing
defects and shortcomings on full display: how repetitive everything seems! How many tics I
have! (That word or phrase again?) My surplus of exclamation points! And—let’s not forget—
my em dashes, too. Yes, writers are always writing in the landscape of our preoccupations, but
my landscape seems like soil I’ve tilled one too many times. But there I go again, self-
deprecating. With no further ado, my collection of short stories.
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You Must Be Kidding: Stories

By Amy Silverberg

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THE DUPLEX

I moved to Los Angeles to sing. When was this? August? June? I was twenty-nine, and those
were shapeless months, when the days blended together and I refused to pull them apart.
My landlord was unusually close to her adult son. His name was Jeffrey, and my
landlord said he was around my age. I’d never met him even though his apartment was
apparently only twelve minutes away. I lived on the bottom floor of her dilapidated duplex; she
lived upstairs. Every night I’d fall asleep to the sound of her feet shuffling across the thin wood
floor above me.
I slept with my bedroom windows open, hoping for a breeze to carry in the burned-air
smell of the city. Instead, my landlord would wake me up in the morning by pulling aside my
curtain and thrusting her hand inside my room, offering me a gift—a spare tomato or a
pamphlet about the Hare Krishnas.
“For you,” she’d say, averting her eyes.
I always slept in the nude, though I never shared the bed with anyone. It was a shame,
because I had the distinct feeling I’d never look that good again. Don’t get me wrong—I didn’t
look great. But I wasn’t eating all that much, and from afar, I had the sinewy profile a lot of
girls were after. The last person who’d seen me naked said my body was extremely
economical. “There’s nothing extra,” he’d said. That had been a while ago and I took it as a
compliment. If nothing else, I was willing. Willingness could take you places. At the few
parties I attended, I wore my willingness like a backless dress, a symbol of more to come.
Willing to do what, was the question. I could never seem to move from willing to doing.
“Ricki, I brought you another brochure about kabbalah,” my landlord said one Monday,
when she caught me suntanning on the driveway. “I think you should read it. You have no idea
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what you’re missing here in the sticks.”
I’d never considered Los Angeles the sticks but I didn’t argue. She was big into
travel—less the act than the idea of it. I was lying on my side, so I turned over to face her and
squinted at the landlord-shaped shadow standing over me. I could feel the ridges of the brick
driveway through my bath towel. I was wearing a very small, old bikini.
“America has no culture of its own,” she continued. She tended to walk around her
property bursting with talk, as though she were a soda can that spent the day being shaken,
waiting for any human interaction to pop her open. “What is American culture? Nothing.
Trinkets and kitsch and Cracker Barrel restaurants. Anything good we’ve stolen from other
people.” She had a long list of grievances, and America ranked high in the repertoire. She had
been born in New Jersey.
I closed my eyes. Sometimes feigning sleep worked, and she’d walk away. “What are
your favorite foods?” she asked. It sounded like an accusation. She bent farther over me,
completely blocking my light. I sat up, sweat pooling in my belly button. I hoped she was
looking at my body. Someone had to.
“Eat your heart out,” I said.
“What?”
“I dunno,” I said. “I guess I like sushi.” I said it like a question.
“Aha!” she said, “Exactly. Japanese food. What is American food, even? Give me one
example.”
“Apple pie,” I said. “Hamburgers, hot dogs.”
“American kitsch!” She made a face like she might want to spit.
I didn’t think apple pie was kitsch.
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“Besides, those are descendants of European cuisine. Aren’t you Scandinavian or
something?”
I, personally, had come from a suburb outside Chicago. I’d started as the lead singer of
a new age jazz group called the Fairfax Five and Dime. We didn’t last long. There were too
many conflicts: scheduling, personality, intrinsic ways of navigating the world. I was still
having trouble finding a job. What I had thought was a temporary rut had extended into
something more permanent. I still sang, occasionally, but the difficulty of that world had
eroded my desires. Other people’s confidence had smoothed over the edges of my ambition,
made me complacent and lazy. My father was still dead, too, so there was that.
“By the way,” my landlord said now, “a position’s opened up at Jeffrey’s company.”
An office job sounded appealing: a bright cubicle waiting for me every morning, a distinct
destination to give shape to my formless days. Now, my days were like rows of oversize
sweatshirts lined up in a closet. Plus I’m sure my landlord was nervous about how I would
continue to pay the rent. I’d been depending on unemployment, which I referred to as “the
kindness of strangers.” Why not? I’d never met them. Anyway, my coffers were low, almost
empty, the last of the coins dinging against the tin at the bottom.
It turned out Jeffrey worked at a gourmet dog-food company. I’d always liked dogs.
“I’ll take it,” I said.
“Sweetie,” she said, brushing away a fly, “you know I think you’re a doll. But you’re
still gonna have to interview. And you might want to wear something that covers you up. You
know, take a shower.”
“I shower!”
She had a strange look on her face. “Nobody’s accusing you,” she said.
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Jeffrey’s dog-food company was in a utilitarian office building on Wilshire, across from a bank
and a small Korean deli I frequented for their bucket of giant pickles.
Jeffrey was an account manager, whatever that meant. He had a hint of a potbelly,
which was made more obvious by his too-tight button-down shirt. I imagined a multicolored
stack of them in his room, all purchased by my landlord. Still, there was something nice in his
face, a longtime kindness that had settled there.
It was odd finally meeting Jeffrey, considering I’d heard so much about him from his
mom. I could list his favorite foods (chicken pot pie, steamed mussels, pad see ew) and what
he had majored in during college (political science), and why he’d been teased as a child (a
brief speech impediment).
His mother visited him weekly. Why didn’t he ever come to her house? Did he wait
until I was gone to visit? But I was so rarely gone!
“It’s great to finally meet you,” he said from across a stainless steel desk. Through the
windows in his office, I could see the snake of cars crawling down Wilshire, on their way to
somewhere better than wherever they’d just been.
“You, too,” I said. “Your mom is—” I was going to say “wonderful,” but I didn’t want
to start our relationship off with a lie. She wasn’t wonderful. She was lonely and well
intentioned and I saw something of myself, or my future self, in her. “Your mom’s kind for
letting me live there so cheap,” I said finally.
“I think she likes having you around,” he said.
A high-ponytailed woman cleared her throat by the door. “Jeff,” she said, “the
Weimaraner people are on the phone.” Did people normally call him Jeff? Did the name
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Jeffrey remind him of his mother—did it place me in the company of old, lonely women? But I
wasn’t old. I pulled my shirt down a little, to remind him of my youthful breasts.
“I’ll call them back,” he said, and the woman glided away. He turned his attention back
to me. For a minute, there was something taut between us. “Listen, it’s pretty much just an
admin job.”
I didn’t know what admin meant in that context, but I nodded.
“My mom tells me you moved here to do music,” he continued. “But—”
“To sing,” I interrupted. “Mostly jazz. Classic stuff.”
“To sing,” he repeated, but didn’t ask any other details. Something I noticed: when
you’re in the midst of failing, it becomes important to you that people get the particular details
of your failure right. He’d grown up in Los Angeles, so he must have encountered plenty of
parched remains, failures just like mine. This city is a boneyard, I thought. Luckily I didn’t say
it out loud, which was a problem I had then—interior versus exterior dialogue.
“This job isn’t anything like that, of course,” he said. “Nothing artsy. So I’m not going
to make you sit here and tell me why you want it.”
“Money, mostly,” I said. He laughed, and I felt that laughter against my face.
“Well, that’s what we’ll pay you with,” he said. I told him I’d take it.
“Don’t you want to know the job description?” he asked.
“Sure.” I said. “But I’m willing regardless.” He was attractive, I decided then. Maybe
not sexually or physically, but I felt a definite pull.

That night, my landlord and I celebrated. She strung up paper lanterns and opened a bottle of
wine and invited me upstairs, all in that order. I’d been to her place a few times. It was covered
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in patterned rugs and the shelves were lined with ceramic jars and sterling silver trinkets. It
smelled close and slightly musky, like someone’s recently slept-on pillow.
I’d been thinking about Jeffrey/Jeff all day. Not in a romantic way, exactly. I just
wanted to know more about him, mostly how my landlord had seemingly made him from
scratch, raised him from the ground like a stalk of human corn.
She led me to the couch and handed me a glass of red wine. The lights were dimmed,
party lighting, though it was just the two of us.
“To new doors opening,” she said, clicking her glass against mine. I could smell the
toasted air of a bonfire outside. She was in one of her good moods—expansive. I felt as though
I could see the kind of young person she’d been, before the world had sought to protect her, to
chisel her down to a manageable size.
I decided to be bold and asked to use her computer to YouTube a song I liked, sung by
a woman with a deep, scratchy voice. The song drifted around the room and started raking
against my chest, and I thought I saw it working on my landlord, too—a slackening in her
posture. That’s when I suggested we play a game of twenty questions.
“Too many,” she said. “Let’s do ten. Five each.”
I wanted more but decided not to press my luck. After all, that seemed the root of my
problems: how much I’d once wanted. If I’d only wanted less, I wouldn’t have had to settle for
it.
“What was Jeffrey’s dad like?” I asked after she’d wedged herself between two pillows.
Since my father died, I’d become fascinated by other people’s fathers.
“Pass,” she said.
“You can’t do that,” I told her.
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“My rules.” She put her feet on the coffee table and crossed her arms. “House rules.”
The surface of the table was embedded with tiny blue tiles arranged in the shape of a whale.
“It’s Moroccan,” she said, when she caught me looking. “My turn. Where do you go at night,”
she asked me, “if you don’t sing anymore?”
“I still go to the open mics,” I said. This was true. I ghosted around the bars that
advertised a microphone and cheap drink specials. But once I took a seat and the bartender
asked if I wanted my name on the list, I’d become suddenly tight-lipped, showing him my
palms. Not tonight, I’d demur.
“Why doesn’t Jeff—” I began.
“Jeffrey,” she corrected me.
“Why doesn’t Jeffrey—”
“These questions should be about me,” she said, looking startled. “We’re the ones
having this conversation. He’s not even here to defend himself!”
I was surprised. Usually my landlord loved talking about Jeffrey. I thought all over-
involved mothers loved talking about their sons. Didn’t they shine and coddle them for that
very reason, to mention them at a moment’s notice?
I only had sisters, both of them quite a bit older. I was the favorite. Much adored. Too
adored, my father always said. My mother claimed to like us all the same, but my father never
made that pledge.
“Jeffrey has his reasons,” my landlord said, “for being the way he is.”
“Sure,” I said. “Of course.” I was unclear how to proceed. What way was he? She
refilled her glass of wine and her hand shook slightly. The song I’d played on her computer
had long since ended and now I was aware of the silence in the room, which felt like another
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person. I could hear the cars outside, the agitated line of them crawling down Crescent Heights,
their honks like sneers.
“I guess I should go back downstairs,” I said.
“Fine. But before you go, I’d like to ask you one more question,” she said, “now that
we’re on the subject.”
“Sure.”
“How did Jeffrey seem to you?” she asked.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.
“Just your general impression.”
“Health-wise?” I asked. “He seemed good. Rosy cheeks. Good posture. Definitely
eating enough.”
She looked down at her hands, sheepishly, as though I’d just handed her something
obvious, like a misplaced purse that’d been right near her feet.
“Thank you,” she said, standing up quickly. “That’s enough, I think, for the night.”

It quickly became apparent I would get no face time with the dogs or the executives—a true
middling; I could see both the top and the bottom, but I wasn’t allowed to touch either one. I
was only there to answer phones and fill out spreadsheets. I didn’t really mind. I liked the
monotony of the work, the rhythm of it. I could have been painting at an easel or using a loom.
I became lulled into a deep, underwater type of concentration by the sound of my fingers
clicking against the keyboard, hypnotized by my own thoughtless competence.
One task I looked forward to each day was getting the mail and distributing it around
the office. Mail time! I ran to meet the mail carrier, pressing myself up against the glass like a
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Labrador retriever. I liked stretching my legs, and I liked the pure, easy purpose of delivering
people their news. “Here’s your mail. I brought it to you.” It forced the higher-ups to take
notice of me, if not with actual words then at least an eyebrow raise or a quick twitch of the
mouth.
My first Friday I saved Jeffrey’s stack of mail for my last delivery, even though I’d
already passed his office once. I noticed one of the letters right away—smaller than the others,
with the words PELICAN BAY STATE PRISON SECURITY HOUSING UNIT stamped in red. The
postage stamp was an image of an animated rat. I recognized it from Ratatouille, the Disney
movie in which a rat becomes a famous chef. I’d liked the movie, how a rat could want
something more for himself and manifest it through sheer will and improvisational skills.
I didn’t want Jeffrey to think I was rifling through his mail, but I still left the prison
letter on the top of the stack. I thought maybe he’d bring it up out of embarrassment or a desire
for full disclosure. We hadn’t seen much of each other during my first week, though I seemed
to know where he was at all times. I guess that’s being attracted to someone: you grow a new
antenna with only one purpose. Maybe now, in delivering the letter, my presence would be
cathartic, and the details of his strange life would pour out. I’d be the bucket—an empty object
ready to be filled.
When I placed the mail on his desk he gave a brief, perfunctory smile. He turned back
to his computer. I walked very slowly toward the door, hoping he’d stop me. I took at least
twenty-two tiny steps.
“Ricki,” he said finally. I was lingering, my hand outstretched a few inches from the
doorknob. “My mother wanted me to apologize to you on her behalf. She said she didn’t treat
you very nicely at her house. That’s very unlike her, you know.” Here he smiled a little
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ruefully. “Her words.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But she could have just told me herself.” Had she acted any ruder
than usual? Not by a lot.
“She thought it would mean more coming from me.”
“Okay,” I said. I tucked my hair behind my ears and tried to meet his eyes in a way I
hoped was flirtatious. On second thought, I could easily have seemed deranged. “I guess you’re
right about that,” I said, but he had already been drawn back to his computer, the click-click of
his mouse the only sound I heard as I softly shut the door in exactly the way I thought a good
admin assistant would shut it—with little fanfare.

That night, I climbed the steps of the duplex and knocked hard on my landlord’s door. The
whole placed smelled like lasagna.
“It smells like lasagna,” I said when she answered.
“I made a five-layer one,” she said, “the American kind. With that ketchupy tomato
sauce the Italians wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.”
“Smells good,” I said. I’d forgotten why I’d come. She had that effect on me. She
turned the space around us into a vacuum, sucked every thought from my head.
Then I remembered. “Your son receives letters from a prisoner,” I said. “Why?”
Something tense crossed her face—quick as a rodent—before she nodded.
“We don’t always pick the right people,” she said.
“So it’s his wife?” I asked. “His girlfriend?”
“Oh no,” my landlord said. “I was talking about me. It’s his father. Jeffrey’s father.”
“Ah,” I said. “What did he do?” I was aware my curiosity knew no bounds, not even
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politeness or common courtesy could hem it in, but when she blanched I was embarrassed for
myself all of a sudden.
“I’d rather not say, if you don’t mind,” she said. I did mind, but I knew I couldn’t say
so. “You can stay for lasagna,” she added quickly. I had no plans other than to go to a bar
called the Pig and Whistle and watch people sing, watch them move through the fluorescent
tunnel of their ambition while I sat in the dark, apart.
“Sure,” I said, “I’d love to.”
“Jeffrey’s coming, too,” she said. “So obviously. You know. Behave.”
I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to take from that. Was I normally not behaved?
Don’t sit on his lap during dinner or don’t bring up his father’s letter from prison or don’t make
a face when she says for the hundredth time that America was not a melting pot but a sewer?
I agreed with the sewer image, but I didn’t like to picture it when I was eating.
“I know you think he’s very handsome, my Jeffrey,” she said. The my surprised me, the
possessiveness of it. Did I think he was handsome? Or was he just an open target for the arrow
of my longing? There was a pleasure in wanting, if nothing else.
“Sure,” I said. “He’s handsome.”
Just then we heard a knock at the door. “Jeffrey!” we said. We looked at each other as
though we’d both been caught.
“I’ll get it,” she said, smoothing her dress, which looked like it was shorn from burlap.
Most of her dresses looked like they might be used to haul groceries.
Jeffrey looked surprised to see me but not unhappy. “I didn’t know you’d be here,” he
said. I wanted him to say, “I didn’t know you’d be here, Ricki.” I didn’t like that he didn’t say
my name, that he didn’t make sustained eye contact. It’s a thing I hate, when someone takes up
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more space in my head than I do in theirs.
“Lasagna!” my landlord shouted. Was she nervous? She seemed so all at once. I
wondered if she was having that “worlds colliding” feeling I used to get when I was still
singing and before I moved to LA, back when I had a lot of different friends and the act of
putting them in the same room was like exposing myself, as though everyone would learn
something strange and private about me just by meeting one another. That stopped being a
problem when I stopped going out. The light in every room seemed changed, harsher
somehow, without my dad in the world.
But maybe my landlord was always nervous around Jeffrey, and I’d just never seen
them together.
“You both look lovely,” he said, which seemed like a flat-out lie—his mother in burlap,
and me in a faded T-shirt with the words CACTUS COOLER on it. But I wasn’t wearing a bra and
the material of the shirt had worn very thin, so he could probably see my nipples. “Mom makes
great lasagna,” he said to the floor.
My landlord busied herself setting an extra place for me. “Ricki’s been telling me she’s
enjoying work,” she lied to both of us.
“Sure,” I said. “I like admin!”
Jeffrey laughed, though I hadn’t meant it as a joke. “Well, she’s doing a great job so
far,” he said. Then the conversation slowed to a halt as we dealt out bricks of lasagna and
poured red wine, and I wondered, if I weren’t there, whether they’d have more to talk about.
Was my presence an albatross around the neck of the night, weighing it down?
“Are you dating anyone, Jeffrey?” I asked suddenly. It was my curiosity, and my desire
to have something to talk about, both. I thought his mother, my landlord, would be upset with
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me, but instead, she looked up, interested.
“I’m not, no,” he said. “I had a few … personal things to sort out in the last year. But
I’ve been feeling better. Probably finally up to it now.”
“Well, that’s great—” my landlord started.
“And you, Mom?” he asked. “Have you been dating?”
My landlord laid her palms primly on her lap. “Oh, I’m fine,” she said. “Just fine. I
have Ricki here anyway. Visiting all the time. Keeping me company.” I looked up at the
ceiling. It was hard to tell if I’d started something, or what exactly I’d started.
“My parents divorced a long time ago,” Jeffrey said.
“Oh?” I said. “Huh.” I’d never been very good at pretending. When I sang, people said
you could always tell what I was feeling at the time. You could see it right there on my face.
But with singing, that’s sometimes a good quality.
“She already knows,” my landlord said. “She knows where your dad is.”
“Well—” I coughed.
“It’s more complicated than it sounds,” he said.
“Well, I actually don’t—” I coughed a little more.
“It’s a funny thing,” he said. “When people hear that he’s in jail, they think they know
what kind of person he must be. But that’s the thing, people don’t know the extenuating
circumstances. Nobody knows those, ya know? That’s life,” he said. “People read the
headlines. They don’t see what’s in the margins.”
“Sure,” I said. “Makes sense.” When I looked up, my landlord was fanning herself with
a parking ticket.
“I’ve lived here so long,” she said. “And I still get these. Isn’t that strange? That I can’t
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get it through my thick skull when they’re coming to street-sweep and on what side?” She
sounded angry.
“I get them, too,” I whispered.
“Sure,” she said. “But with you it makes sense.”
“Mom,” Jeffrey said softly. “Everybody gets parking tickets.”
“No, she’s right,” I said. “I’m pretty irresponsible.”
“Some people just are,” she sighed.
What now? I drummed my fingers on the table.
“So what’s your dad in for?” I asked. Goddamn it, I thought.
“Nothing big,” he said. “White collar. Corporate stuff.” I knew as much about the terms
white collar and corporate stuff as I did about admin, so I just nodded my head in a
noncommittal way.
“So why did you leave Chicago?” Jeffrey asked me.
I wondered how much I should say. For instance, that my dad had died a few months
before I decided to leave. That I had been having trouble prying myself out of bed. That I’d
thought maybe a new city would make me feel different make me sing better or, at the very
least, more often.
“I kept getting in my own way,” I said instead. I was trying to keep it simple. “I thought
a change would do me good.” I hummed a few bars of the song from which those lyrics sprang.
They both looked at me, Jeffrey with his head cocked to the side, like a dog.
“Are you glad you moved?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I guess the things I wanted haven’t really panned out. But”—
here I paused—“I’m not sure I still want them.”
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“I know how that is,” Jeffrey said.
I let the moment between us stretch out. It reclined, catlike, right in front of his mother.
“I made dessert,” my landlord said, standing. “It’s Julia Child’s crème brûlée—the kind that
would make an actual French person turn over in his grave.”
“Great, Mom,” Jeffrey said. I looked at him across the table. He was smiling at me in a
new way, as though we’d become coconspirators.

Monday, at the gourmet dog-food company, I lingered in the doorway of Jeffrey’s office with
the mail.
“Come in!” he said.
“Ricki,” I said softly.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Here’s your mail.”
He started flipping through the envelopes as I stood at the corner of his desk, trying not
to breathe too hard or too loudly. He looked up suddenly. “Did you need anything?” he asked.
“Oh,” I said. “I guess I just. Do you need anything?”
“Oh,” he said. “Uh, I guess not. Thanks for the”—and here he slapped the stack of
envelopes against his denim-clad thigh—“mail. See you soon, I hope.”
“Yes,” I said. “Definitely.” I started to walk across the room in a way I hoped was
serious yet lighthearted. I might have been lifting my feet a little too high in the air. Once I’d
made it to the door, I wheeled around on my heels. “Tonight,” I said.
“What?”
“We could see each other tonight.”
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“Oh,” he said. “Okay. Where?”
“Do you like music?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Most kinds.”
“You could come watch me sing if you wanted. I go to this little bar. I mean it’s not a
big deal. You sign up on a sheet. Of paper. On a clipboard.”
“I get it,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
“Sure, I’ll come.”
I walked slowly back over to his desk and wrote down the address and the time I
thought he should arrive: eight twenty. I wrote it on the back of one of the envelopes I’d just
handed him, which might have been a little presumptuous, but what can I say? It was the first
slip of paper available.
“Okay,” he said. “See you.”
I closed the door as softly as a whisper.

At my own desk, I immediately began to panic. Should I tell my landlord? Did she have any
right to know? No, I told myself, and then again louder—no. Would he tell her? No, I thought,
that would be bizarre. And yet it didn’t feel right to exclude her.
What to sing? Studies show people prefer to hear songs they’re at least vaguely familiar
with, but not songs that they know too well, because they have too many preexisting
associations with those songs. I’d looked into this before. I did a few Frank Sinatra covers that
people seemed to like—not the famous ones, but the ones that should’ve been more famous.
Just then, the phone rang. (The phone that sat on my desk never rang.) “Hello?” I said.
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“Ricki speaking.” I would’ve said the name of the dog-food company but I couldn’t remember
it just then. Instead I said, “Admin.”
“Ricki, hello,” my landlord said. She didn’t say her name and she didn’t need to.
“Hello,” I said.
“What are you doing tonight?”
“Oh?” I asked.
“What,” she repeated, “are you doing tonight?”
“Just hanging out,” I said. “At a bar. With music.”
“What’s the name of the bar?” she asked, and I told her. Again, it was hard to keep
anything from her. She reminded me of my father—a man whom it pained me to refuse. If he’d
left me a note after his death that he wanted to be launched into space instead of buried, I
would’ve tried.
“Maybe I’ll come and watch,” she said, and hung up.
I spent the rest of the day tapping too loudly on my keyboard about dates and times and
dog breeds. From the corner of my eye I watched my phone’s clock cycle through its usual
numbers. At the end of the day Jeffrey stopped by my desk. “Still on?” he said, as though it
were his idea.
“Yes,” I said. “Your mom—”
“Oy.” He shook his head. “I had to tell her,” he said.
“I know,” I said, because somehow, I did.

That night, at the bar, I wrote my name down on the list and a familiar terror thumped in my
chest. The longer you stayed away, the harder it was to return. It wasn’t unlike sex, love, or the
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gym.
The bar was dark with a lot of plaid fabrics. Portraits of farm animals hung all over the
walls.
Everybody else clumped into different corners, greeting each other with an
overfamiliarity that struck me as a personal affront. Had I been gone this long? A bearded man
came in with such a strong scent of damp wind and cigar smoke it made me forget where I
was. I might’ve been back in Chicago then, or back in my childhood den, where the TV was
and where my father often sat. I turned toward the door to look. Behind the bearded man, Jeff
and my landlord walked in together. I did that kind of double take you see in those romantic
comedies Meg Ryan once starred in. Words appeared in neon in the billboard of my mind:
Here they are.
“Hope we’re not too late,” Jeffrey said.
“No,” I said, “you’re a little early.”
“I don’t like to have to rush,” my landlord said. It was strange, seeing her away from
her land—she seemed smaller somehow, meek. I leaned closer to hear her better.
“A red wine,” she said, though I hadn’t asked.
“Uh, sure,” I said. “I’ll go to the bar and get you one.”
The night progressed in jittery bursts, at least on my end. We sat around a small table. I
repeated numbers to myself (I’d heard once that repeating numbers sometimes calms you),
though I didn’t pick them in any particular order. Occasionally my landlord would whisper
something in Jeffrey’s ear, and he’d listen with the serious face of a doctor.
“Ricki,” the host said, finally. “Ricki with an i.” I never wrote my last name. It seemed
too permanent. I wanted to be as slight as a ghost, a wisp of smoke. What can I say? I stayed
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too long in Chicago and made things heavy. That was a word my dad used to say, heavy. He
was everywhere by the end.
Before the music started, I positioned the microphone in the way I liked, with the
domed beehive part just above my thumb and pointer finger. I gripped it loosely, as though I
might let it drop out of my hand and onto the floor at any moment. Sinatra’s brass section
kicked in and I waited for my cue, a trumpet’s long note in a key that seemed off but wasn’t.
I’d had one beer with no dinner and I felt I was hearing the notes clearer, as though they were
vibrating a little harder, just for me. I looked at Jeffrey and his mother in the audience. They
were staring up at me, waiting. They looked like a couple just then, not romantic, but like two
people who definitely went together. You purchased them as a set. I understood Jeffrey’s tie to
her. Whoever said love sets you free was wrong—it ties you down, it makes you loyal to
something other than your own happiness.
I know the song is going well when I’m inside it somehow, not outside it. Time passes
unnoticeably, and I get a feeling that I understand everything, that I know the world is filled
with misunderstandings, and I understand those, too. As I kept singing, I thought about a lot of
things. I thought about Jeffrey’s dad. Whatever he did, I bet it wasn’t that bad. I was sure he
had his reasons. I thought maybe this was the way I should spend all of my days: singing. I
thought about being with Jeffrey, and what it would be like. I’d only been with a few people
since my father died, and not for sex, not exactly. I just took people home and rolled around a
little. But I didn’t worry about Dad’s ghost watching me and getting upset or grossed out. First
of all, he didn’t believe in ghosts or the supernatural. And second of all, he had wanted me to
be happy. He was always in pursuit of pleasure, and thought I should be, too. He wasn’t the
most honest guy, my father, at least not when it came to business or my mother. He might even
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have been a little like Jeffrey’s dad, somebody whose ethics were his own. And anyway, my
dad might laugh, if he saw me fucking. He might laugh and say, Atta girl, and of course he’d
cover his eyes, on account of not wanting to see his favorite daughter nude.
Once, when I was twelve, I asked my father what he did for a living, and he said, “Odds
and ends.” I remember we were in the den and a sitcom was blaring in the background. My
father sometimes yelled at people on the phone outside of restaurants, while inside the rest of
his family sat waiting for him to return. But when he came to watch me sing, he cradled his
chin in his hands and sat with a stillness he never exhibited in regular life. People are
complicated.
After the song finished, I gingerly stepped offstage and moved through the applause
until I was standing in front of my landlord and her son. She was picking through her 98rench
fries. Did she miss her husband the way I missed my dad? Was there a husband-shaped
absence the approximate size of her son?
“You weren’t half bad,” my landlord said.
“An understatement,” Jeffrey said. “You were wonderful.” The way he was looking at
me just then, I felt it acutely, a shared hunger for something lost.
“It’s not that hard,” I said. “Singing, I mean.” I don’t why I felt the need to be self-
deprecating just then, but I did. I felt big, I guess, too big. I felt expansive, like I filled the
room.
My landlord was looking beyond me, at the moose head above the door.
“We could get moose heads for our apartments, Ricki,” she said. “One for each. Jeffrey
could help us hang them up.”
“I’m sure she could do it herself,” Jeffrey said to my landlord.
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“Sure,” I said. “But I won’t refuse the help.”
“You hear that, Jeffrey?” my landlord asked. “She’ll let you help her every once in a
while.”

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I SPY

I’m a spy, I tell my lover, and he laughs, because we’re naked in bed, and he’s lying on his back,
finished, no longer moving above me. I’m on my knees with my hands curled like glasses around
my eyes, looking at his dick. I’m a spy, I say again, and he says, sure, sure you’re a spy. It’s late
and he has to work to keep his eyes open. We’re in his bed, low to the ground, a record player in
the corner, a collection of hourglasses on the dressers. The hourglasses vary in shape and size, in
increments of time. Eclectic, I said, when I first walked in. That was a substitute word instead of
the word I really wanted to say—a string of words—which were how will this end, I wonder.
I’m a spy because I’ve learned what he likes in bed, and what to say to make him laugh,
and what details to offer from my own life—the slippery shadow of the truth, never the
monuments of fact. I accumulate my information the way any spy would: through careful
observation, through a catalog of memorized notes, through rote, through practice. If I could, I’d
sit under his Ikea desk like a gargoyle, secret and sinister, watching him as he moved through his
room, thinking he was alone, scratching at his thigh, readjusting a contact lens, gripping a bottle
of nasal spray.
I’m a spy because I’ve memorized the gestures he makes with his hands when he’s
explaining his mother, and the curve of his spine when he stretches, nude, in the morning, and
the particular pattern of his chest hair—the blurred, furry outline of a heart.
I’m a spy because I’m hedging my bets, always, expecting the worst outcome from this
mission, keeping the upper most corners of my heart, like attic rooms, open and empty and drafty
with wind. An old boyfriend of mine said I could never stay in the present moment. I was
obsessed with future what-ifs, linking them together like chainmail so that I might protect
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myself. I made that old boyfriend watch porn with me, but I wouldn’t let him enjoy it. I set the
computer up on his nightstand and forced him to choose something from a series of small square
stills. What are you thinking? I said, when he was trying to masturbate. Good lord, he said, this
was your idea. I told him I was only trying to stay in the present, and what I was presently
wondering was what he was thinking. Just watch, he said, pointing toward the screen with his
chin. Fine, I said. What are they thinking, do you think? That relationship ended, like most of
them do, without fanfare, a good person with a soft, familiar body moving through the doorway
of my life and into someone else’s. I wish I could spy on him even now, with his new girlfriend,
whoever she is, just as I’d wished I could go back in time when we were together and spy on him
with his old girlfriend. Was she really the way she seemed in the pictures I’d seen on Facebook,
her head cocked to one side, sly, withholding? She looked like another spy. She looked like she
could be my comrade, that she might send a code asking me to meet her on a rainy street corner,
so that she could deliver an unmarked manila envelope from the inside of her long coat. With
one curt nod, she’d whisper, the info’s all there.

I spy with my little eye, goes the old game I played as a kid. I start it now, as my lover
moves around his room, rearranging things before morning. I spy with my little eye, I say, an
hourglass in the shape of a corkscrew. He tells me he likes to know where his pants will be in
the morning. I hate to wake up and search for everything, he says. He has to be up early, earlier
than me, and he never leaves himself enough time to get ready. It’s partly my fault, I think,
always tugging on his arm, whispering into his ear to come back to bed, come back.
Now I wish I had a velvet-handled magnifying glass, or a tiny recorder that looks like a
ballpoint pen, or a special cloth to wipe my fingerprints from his bed frame and his chest of
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drawers. But he’s back in bed, moving his hands over the length of me, and it’s too late; I’ve left
too many traces.

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ONE ROUGH, ONE TENDER

Diana was sleeping with two men. One was rough and one was tender, but very occasionally, the
tender one would be rough and the rough one would be tender, and then she was back to square
one, unable to choose between them. Her friends told her she had to choose. “You must choose!”
they said. “You can’t have them both.”
“Why not?” thought Diana. “They’re completely different. Aren’t I allowed options?”
That’s why she’d moved to Los Angeles—the land of options. Before this, she’d lived in a
suburb of Illinois and there weren’t that many options there. Get married was one. Or, get a
better job, at a better university—she’d been teaching Intro to Studio Art and Photography in a
town that was almost unpronounceable, it was that obscure. She decided to move to The City, as
in Chicago. And then she thought, well, it could be any city. She liked movies, after all. She
liked sunshine. She liked palm trees. She didn’t think of palm trees that often, but when she’d
seen them on vacation in Hawaii with her mother, Diana insisted on taking about a hundred
photos of her mother leaned against them, her straw hat casting jaunty shadows across her face.
That particular vacation was a year ago, one month before her mother passed away. Diana had
just turned twenty-eight. Her life had become disheveled since then.
In LA, Diana worked for a professional photo booth company. She was the one at
weddings and corporate events, telling you to smile, smile, here’s a wooden mustache to hold in
front of your mouth, here’s a sparkly top hat. Weddings were busier and more exhausting than
corporate events, though far more interesting. Everyone was drunker, and rawer. At corporate
events, almost nobody wanted their pictures taken with a mustache or a sparkly hat. They wanted
to go home to their televisions. At weddings, peoples’ eyes were often moist, and their mouths
loose with drink, and the air was taut with a particular kind of expectancy, as though the
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commitment might be contagious. Diana wondered if guests ever looked at the photos later, saw
the sparkly top hat, or the mustache on a stick, and thought—ah, yes, I remember that wedding.
She hoped the photo might serve as a key to that night, to that particular longing in the air,
caused by the union of Joseph and Tanya or whoever, the witnessing of two disparate bodies
promising to forgo any other options.
For extra money, she took portrait photos, mostly headshots for actors, because she lived
in LA now, and that’s who needed them—and not just one set either! She tacked a photo she
took of her friend Molly on a corkboard in a coffee shop on Melrose, and before long, a man
called her asking for headshots, and that’s how she met the rough one.

The rough one was taking improv comedy classes, but didn’t seem particularly funny. He
wanted funny photos, though, and this proved hard to do. He kept making faces that made him
look deranged. Diana had never seen an improv show, and had no idea that she should tell him to
smile normally, so she furiously snapped away with her expensive camera and didn’t give him
any direction. She photographed him against the nubby stucco wall of her apartment building.
When they looked through the photos together, he said, “perfect!” so she agreed.
“I like your pheromones,” he said all of the sudden, looking over her shoulder at more
pictures of himself in which he was a little cross-eyed, grinning doofily.
“What?”
“Sorry,” he said, “I just read a thing in a magazine about how pheromones are what
attracts people, not a person’s looks.”
This didn’t sound exactly like a compliment, but Diana said, “thanks.” People were
sometimes right about Midwesterners—that dogged politeness that followed them around like a
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smell. In her own mind, Diana could be very impolite, even cruel. Maybe only her mother had
known this. Cruelty was sometimes reserved for mothers, mothers and spouses, maybe.
“This is a weird question,” the rough one said, “but are you on birth control?”
“Hm?” she said again. The “hm” was just buying time. She must have been making a
face that looked offended—her thinking face always looked offended—because he quickly
apologized.
“I only ask that,” he said, “because in this study I read, it said that women on birth
control can’t sniff out pheromones in mates.” He said it like a fact, though for some reason, she
heard it as a come-on.
“I’m not—” she began, “I’m not seeing anyone.”

When she met the tender one a few weeks later, he was holding a book called “How to
Heal with Food.” They were both standing in line at a Jiffy Lube on Beverly. He was frustrated
with the auto mechanic, but couldn’t seem to say it plainly, and she recognized a little of herself
in that—the inability to say just what you mean. She thought he must be from the Midwest too. It
turned out he’d grown up in the Inland Empire. “A hot, blank place,” he said, by way of
explanation. He studied Holistic Medicine, but used to work in finance. Maybe that transition
alone could make anyone tender. They started having sex a week later. In bed, she often
whispered filthy things into the crook of his neck, to see if she could scare him. He sometimes
laughed, a little nervously. He never said anything filthy back, even in the spasmy throes of it,
even then, when his animal brain took over, he still had decorum.
She mostly learned the dirty talk from the rough one, though when he whispered it into
her neck, she was the one to laugh or murmur softly under her breath. It was strange, how you
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could be a different thing to a different person. Perhaps the tender man was not tender to
someone else. People were like prisms, she thought, their surfaces changing in a different light.
She didn’t tell the men about each other. They didn’t ask, so she didn’t tell. “That is not a
good policy,” her friend Molly said. “Just look at the army.”

A month after she’d been sleeping with both men, she started having these strange, erotic
dreams every night. Old friends were in it. No sex took place; it was the tone of the dreams—
smoky, purplish, surreal. Everything moved slowly, even her blood through her body. In one
recurring dream, she was sitting between a woman and man she had always admired, a couple,
both professors at the Midwestern University in the unpronounceable town. In the dream, the
three of them were in some odd dreamscape—sitting in Adirondack chairs atop a porch attached
to nothing in the dark, dark darkness. She was watching them watch each other, though they had
to keep craning their necks awkwardly to see around her, and even though she wanted to get up,
she couldn’t move, no matter how hard she tried. When the couple reached out to touch each
other, they’d accidentally brush their hands across her face, her hair. She woke up always at that
moment.
She told the tender one about the dreams. He was an academic, after all, and she thought
he’d enjoy close-reading them. They were sitting with their knees knocking against each other at
a bar called Birds where fake parrots hung from the ceiling. Surprisingly, he said, “Dreams don’t
mean anything. They’re just a wacky collection of subconscious thoughts.” Maybe he was right.
Or maybe the dreams weren’t erotic at all, she thought, maybe they were about something else—
about all those weddings she photographed, about longing.
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She told the rough one this, at an arcade of all places, and he said, “Maybe longing and
sex are just the same thing.” These men, they continued to surprise her.

Finally, the rough one asked if she was seeing anyone else. She had just gotten out of the
shower in his studio apartment and had wrapped herself in one of his threadbare towels. She was
surprised, she thought the tender one would be the first one to ask her about their relationship,
but he was busy with his PhD in Natural Health Sciences, and besides that, he was timid when it
came to asking difficult questions. Plus, being an actor, the rough one had a lot of time on his
hands to think about these things. He was sitting on the bed, shirtless, flipping through a Men’s
Health magazine, which had a shirtless man on the cover who didn’t look all that different from
him.
Sometimes, they would have sex before one of his acting workshops, and afterward,
while he was getting dressed, he would stretch his mouth into different shapes in the mirror,
practicing his vowels. At those times, Diana had to look away. She’d had another life before this!
It had fewer options, yes, but fewer actors too.
“Am I seeing anyone else?” she repeated. It was a stalling tactic.
“Yes, that was the question.”
“What do you want from me,” she asked.
“The truth,” he said.
“Are you seeing anybody else?”
“Do you want me to be seeing other people?” he asked. Then, “No. I’m only seeing
you.”
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This felt like a trap, and she’d stepped into it. “Yes,” she said, “I’m seeing one other
person.”
“I want to meet him.”
“No,” she said. “Why would you want to do that?”
“I will meet him,” he said, as though that were the end of it. For the first time, she saw
how he might be compelling on stage, not just his generous height or his smoothed-over looks or
his full head of hair, but the oddness of his facial expressions and the depth of his voice. He was
extremely, and strangely, convincing.

In the days that followed, she wondered if she should warn the tender one. She felt
nervous and jittery, as though the floor beneath her had become fragile. Who knows what the
rough one was capable of, if he might happen upon the tender one unexpectedly in the tiny cubby
of an office where the tender one did his doctoral research, and where he and Diana once had
sex, very tenderly. So tender, in fact, that he tried to call it “making love” but she wouldn’t let
him.
This particular night, she and the tender one were seeing a play, which was good, because
the rough one never wanted to go to the theater. “It’s like work for me,” he’d said, “That’s like
asking you to take photos of people on your day off.”
“I do that all the time,” she’d said. But she understood. At the university in the Midwest,
when she taught Intro to Photography, it was horrible sometimes, to flip through the students’
work, which sometimes looked like they’d snapped photos mid-walk to school—blurry leaves on
the ground, an artless dumpster, a friend driving by in a Honda. When she quit, she thought she’d
never take another photo again, she was so tired of looking at bad ones, trying to explain to the
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students as they yawned or doodled just why the photos were so bad. “The best way to hate
something is to dedicate your life to it,” her mother, who taught history, had said.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” she said to the tender one, as they settled into their
plush, velvety theater seats, “are you seeing anyone else?” The lights had not yet dimmed. He
liked to arrive on time, early even.
“Would you be upset if I was?” he asked.
The way he said it, tentatively, testing, she knew the answer must be yes. She felt hurt. It
took her by surprise, the force of the hurt. She liked the tender one, and before they came to the
theater, they’d had sex that felt sort of new—not rough exactly, but quick and less inhibited,
standing up against his book shelf filled with Natural Health texts. Nobody could be all things at
once; of course, but he seemed like he could be some of them, many of them. He seemed capable
of making adjustments—a little bendy, like a wind-blown palm.
“Well if you were seeing someone else,” she said, “I’d have no reason to be upset,
because we never established any rules.” She tried to keep her voice even.
“True,” he said. He was already scanning the program.
“Are you wondering if I’m seeing other people?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I agree—it’s none of my business.”
She sat back in her chair, the hurtness starting to blister. Later, it would be a callus, one to
repeatedly press with the pads of her fingers. This whole time, she thought the tender one didn’t
pry because he was overly polite, part of his intrinsic tenderness.
“So are you?” she asked.
“Am I what?”
“Are you sleeping with someone else?”
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He pursed his lips in an exaggerated way, then felt around in his pocket. “Shoot,” he said,
“forgot my Chapstick.”
She fished around in her purse for a lip balm.
“Oh,” he said, “This is glossy. I don’t think I can use it.”
“You’re stalling,” she said.
“Hm?”
“You are seeing someone else,” she said. “And you’re stalling because you don’t want to
tell me. It is my business, you know.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “are we in a fight? I didn’t—I’m confused. It’s your business, of
course, if you want it to be. Yes,” he said finally, “I’m seeing a woman in my department. I hope
you’re not—”
“Upset?” she asked. She had an annoying way of interrupting people when she was
excited or emotional. She knew this about herself but never took any pains to stop it. She
realized there were a lot of things she knew about herself that she chose to ignore.
“I was going to say I hope you’re not sad,” he said. “I never meant to mislead you, or hurt
your feelings.”
Diana wondered if he and this woman had sex in his little office cubby, or in hers.
Maybe, in that relationship, the woman was the tender one and he was the rough one. Diana saw
now, in the way he went back to reading the program with his face as motionless as a rich
person’s indoor pool, that he certainly had the makings of roughness. Maybe it was Diana—
something about her—that demanded tenderness from him. She thought of that old sentiment her
mother liked to repeat: You teach people how to treat you. Diana wondered what the tender one
must have thought about her when they first met, at the Jiffy Lube, and she asked him where he
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was from: “the Midwest?” her voice perking up at the end, a little desperate sounding. Maybe
she had only been homesick.
When they slept together so soon after, she remembered seeing the hunger on her face
reflected back in the screen of the iPad he kept propped against the lamp on his bedside table. It
was a little feral, that hunger, when she remembered the way her face looked. Maybe the face
was even a little scary, or a little sad. She had always enjoyed sex, but it had taken on a different
quality lately; she went about it as though she were an athlete, or a binge-eater—with
voraciousness.
She wished (the wish so well-worn, it was as threadbare as the rough one’s towels) that
she could call her mother and talk about it. Not about the sex, but about her feelings.
“I’m seeing someone else too,” she would say to her mother on the phone, “who am I to
complain?” And because her mother had been a good mother, she’d let her do just that,
complain.
“That’s human nature,” her mother might say. Diana had had—the double hads of those
left behind by the deceased—a truly good mother, and she knew from being loose in the world
now for over a quarter century that good mothers were few and far between. Good mothers
reaffirmed the nice beliefs you had about yourself and refuted the bad ones. Good mothers were
liars.

“I think it’s about to start,” the formerly tender one whispered as the lights lowered. This
was the opening night of a contemporary re-improvisation of a Shakespeare play. The tender one
had heard about it on NPR. Diana had agreed to go after checking her calendar and seeing that
she didn’t already have plans with the rough one, and now, she wondered if the tender one had
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asked the other woman first. How did he decide who to ask? How did Diana decide? Her
thoughts were a snake, swallowing its tail.
“What’s wrong?” he whispered.
“What? Nothing.”
“Your lips were moving,” he said.
“My lips?”
“Yeah, you were sort of talking to yourself. Or, miming talking.”
“Nothing,” she said. She turned away from him, purposefully abrupt.
“Hey,” he said, “look at me,” and that tenderness was back in his voice, a softening, and
she turned and looked at him, waiting for him to say something that might save the night—
smooth it over.
“You have something stuck in your teeth,” he said. “Parsley, I think.”
“Good God,” she said, “I’m also seeing someone else.”
And then the lights dimmed fully, and the curtains slid open, revealing a cast of men and
women in blue jeans and t-shirts, one of whom was the rough one.

The play wasn’t great, at least not in her opinion. The rough one, however, had been a
stand out, and she thought even if she didn’t know him—even if she’d never seen him naked, or
in the midnight-colored throes of sex, in which his animal brain had no decorum whatsoever—
she would have still thought him the best. Was he funny? Was he smart? It was hard to tell. But
there was a wildness to his performance, a lack of self-consciousness, that made the whole
audience burst out in laughter as though it was being pried from their mouths against their
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control. And though she didn’t laugh, she felt herself go warm with the secret of knowing him in
another context.
As for the tender one, he never mentioned her confession, but she felt a difference in him,
a new-found pull he must have felt for her. Immediately after the play, he stood a little closer,
even, laughed a little louder at everything she said.
After the performance, the ushers led the audience into a courtyard behind the theater,
and poured wine and soda into plastic cups. The air was warm, fragrant—the night felt close and
touchable. Diana was about to ask the tender one the name of the flowers giving off that familiar
smell—a type of thing he knew—when the director stood up on a fold out chair and thanked
everyone for coming, said opening night was a success! Cheers! Cheers again! He knocked his
plastic cup indiscriminately against any cup that came near. Diana could feel her heart beginning
to thump. Where was the rough one? The director looked young, also in a solid-colored t-shirt,
his hair pushed back, his voice low. Maybe he had also been an actor, or wanted to be.
Once, the rough one told her it was embarrassing to say you’re an actor in LA. Why,
she’d asked? Isn’t everyone an actor here? He’d shaken his head, as though she didn’t
understand.
“I’m actually good,” he said. “Most people don’t know what they’re doing. But I study it.
I do know.” The way he said it hadn’t sounded arrogant, only true, as though he were stating a
fact. “It’s like, don’t people make shitty art?” he’d continued. “Or take shitty photographs? And
tell you they’re an artist? And you think, No. I’m an artist.”
“Yes,” she had said. She knew exactly what he meant. She used to feel that way—that
she was an artist. It was hard to tell now.
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And then she saw the rough one, the director taking him by the arm and making him
stand on the chair. The director said the rough one’s name to raucous applause. The rough one
waved it away, and laughed, a little demurely. “Oh,” he said, “stop,” he said. The tender one
clapped, and Diana did too, loudly, with abandon. She wanted to get the rough one’s attention.
She wanted him to see her standing there, clapping for him while he stood on his chair. They
made eye-contact, and she felt the blood rush to her face with the intensity of his gaze. She
thought about the rough one in bed, that he had good hands—that she always felt as though she
were pliable under those hands, pulling apart, like taffy. The tender one put his arm around her
right then, as though he could sense the heat coming off of her, as though he wasn’t so tender as
to not feel the warmth of competition when it was standing across from him on a chair,
triumphant. Everyone had stopped clapping, and the tender one whispered, “you can stop now”
but Diana refused. She continued to clap, only quieter.
The rough one vaulted off the chair and approached her. “Who’s this?” he said, by way of
greeting.
She said the tender one’s name. The tender one thrust his hand forward, fountaining with
compliments. “How do the two of you know each other?” the tender one asked, eventually.
“She took photos of me,” the rough one said. He could have said a lot of other things;
some of them could have even been filthy! Diana was struck by his dignity all of the sudden, but
maybe that had something to do with seeing him on stage, seeing his actual talent, upright and
walking, like a Frankenstein monster.
She wondered which of the men her mother would have preferred for Diana? The men
were now discussing some common ground—perhaps they had lots of it. Sports? No, the rough
one didn’t like sports, but the tender one did, rather, he liked watching them. The tender one also
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liked going to the theater, and the rough one had just performed in the theater, but Diana knew
the rough one didn’t like talking about his craft, in fact he wouldn’t have even called it a craft,
which she liked about him. She watched the tender one lean into whatever the rough one was
saying, his face serious with listening. She’d always liked this about the tender one.
She excused herself to the bathroom. Maybe while she was gone, the rough one would
talk about the rough way he and Diana had sex, and maybe the tender one would be forced to
react. But how would he react? Politely, probably. In the bathroom, two women were in adjacent
stalls, talking about the show.
“There was like one good-looking one,” one woman was saying to the other. “That’s it.”
The rough one? Diana wondered. She’d never been with someone so empirically good-
looking before, for a night maybe, but nothing like this, nothing sustained. She was used to
winning men over with her personality, and the very handsome men usually refused to be won
over. They knew what they were looking for—they knew it when they saw it. When the women
exited the stalls, Diana thought she might know them. Then she remembered what her mother
used to say, that beautiful people always looked familiar, like you’d seen them before.
“Who was your favorite?” Diana asked the women, as they checked their teeth in the
mirror, put on lipstick, ran their hands through their long hair. One was blonde and one was
brunette, but they looked similar, vaguely related, though one had a broader forehead and the
other had sort of close-set eyes. Still, beautiful, nevertheless.
“What?” the blonde asked.
“Who was your favorite actor? In the show tonight?”
“Oh,” the brunette said, “the one in the blue shirt I guess.”
That was not the rough one. The rough one wore green, which brought out his eyes.
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“What did you think about the one in the green shirt?” Diana asked.
“Umm,” the brunette said. She was looking at herself in the mirror. She regarded Diana
with a sidelong glance. “Not sure I’m remembering the one in the green shirt.”
Diana figured she must have established herself as strange by then. “He’s very
handsome,” she said.
The blonde laughed and showed her teeth—a flash—and Diana knew this was probably
something men worked for, that brief flash of white teeth. “Well in that case, we’ll look for him
outside,” she told Diana.
Diana stood for a while in the bathroom stall. She didn’t need to go, but she sat on the
toilet anyway, her pants still on. In the hallway and in the courtyard, she could hear the women’s
scoops of laughter trailing after them. She pictured the men outside. Who would she choose? It
was impossible to decide when you liked all of the options offered. In fact, it was completely
unjust. Sometimes a choice was like a small death. She wanted to have her cake and eat it, and
have sex with it too.
In Hawaii, on the vacation where she took a hundred photos of her mother leaned up
against palm trees right before she passed away, Diana remembered her mother could never
make up her mind about what to order for dinner. Her mother had become increasingly
indecisive as she aged, especially after she had gotten sick, probably because she knew she had
less time to eat delicious food, and it was a shame to waste what little time she had on bad
decisions. That was understandable, Diana thought. Above all else, good mothers are liars
because they never prepare their daughters for the inevitable: when their mothers will be gone.
As Diana left the bathroom and approached the tender one and the rough one, still
speaking with their heads bent toward each other, she saw the two women nearby and she held
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her head erect and smiled at them both. The women were talking to the actor in a blue shirt.
Diana approached the two men she was sleeping with, and was suddenly reminded of the dinner
she and her mother had shared on their last day in Hawaii: fried potatoes, yams, salted fish, a
suckling pig in the center of it all; in other words, a feast.

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SUBURBIA!

“Let’s make a bet,” my father said, on my fifteenth birthday. I remember very clearly being
fifteen, or rather; I remember what fifteen feels like to a fifteen year old. The age is a diving
board, or a box half-opened.
We were sitting in stiff wooden chairs on the porch, watching the evening settle over the
neighborhood, all of that harmless diffuse light softening the world.
“I bet you’ll leave here at eighteen and you’ll never come back,” he said. “Not once.”
We lived two hours outside of Los Angeles, in a suburb attached to a string of other
suburbs, where the days rarely distinguished themselves unless you did it for them.
“You don’t even think I’ll come back and visit?” I said.
“No,” he said. “I don’t.” My father was a reasonable man. He did not generalize. He was
not prone to big, grandiose statements, and he rarely gambled. I felt hurt and excited by the
suggestion.
“What about Mom?” I asked.
“What about her?”
I shrugged. It seemed she had little to do with the prediction.
“And James?” I asked.
“Not sure about James,” he said. “I can’t bet on that one.”
James was—and still is—my younger brother, someone to whom I felt little
responsibility. At ten, he was brilliant and anxious and very much my parents’ problem. My
mother adored him, though she thought she fooled me into thinking we were equal. Make no
mistake: we were equally loved but not equally preferred. If parents don’t have favorites, they do
have allies.
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Inside, my mother was cooking dinner while James followed her around the kitchen,
handing her bits of paper he’d folded into unusual shapes. Even then, he had a knack for
geometry.
“Where will I go?” I asked my father. My grades were aggressively mediocre. I’d
planned—vaguely, at fifteen—to transfer somewhere after a few years at the local junior college.
“It doesn’t matter where,” he said, waving away a fly circling his nose.
Next door, the quiet neighbor kid, Carl, walked his miniature pincher, also called Carl,
back and forth across his lawn. The weather was balmy.
“What happens if I do come back?” I asked.
“You’ll lose,” he said. “You’ll automatically forfeit the bet.”
I hated to lose, and my father knew it.
“Will I see you again?” I asked. I felt nostalgic in a way that felt new, at fifteen, as
though the day had already turned shadowy and distant, like a predetermined memory. I felt
nostalgic for my father and his partly bald head and his toothpaste breath, even as he sat next to
me, running his palms over his hairy knees.
“Of course,” he said, “Your mother and I will visit.”
My mother appeared on the porch with my brother, his finger slung into the back pocket
of her jeans. “Dinner time,” she said, and I kissed my father’s cheek as though I were standing
on a train platform, and I spent all of dinner that way too, staring at him from across the table,
mouthing goodbye.

My eighteenth birthday arrived the summer after I’d graduated from high school. To
celebrate, I saw the musical Wicked at a theater in Los Angeles with four of my friends. The
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seats were deep and velvety-feeling. My parents drove us, and my father gave us each a glass of
champagne in the parking lot before we entered the theater. We used small plastic cups he must
have bought especially for the occasion. I pictured him browsing the plastics aisle, looking at all
the cups, deciding.
A week after my birthday, my father woke me up, quieter than usual, and solemn. I still
had my graduation cap tacked up on the wall, its yellow tassel hanging jauntily.
“Are you ready to go?” he asked.
“Where are you taking me?” I wanted to know.
“To the train station,” he said. “It’s time for you to go.”
My father had always liked the idea of traveling. Even just walking through an airport
gave him a thrill—made him buoyant, seeing all those people hurrying through the world on
their way to somewhere else. He had a deep interest in history, and the architecture of places
he’d never seen in person. It was the great tragedy of his life that he became a real estate agent.
As for my mother, it was the great tragedy of her life that her husband was unhappy, and didn’t
take any pains to hide it. I can see that now, even if I didn’t see it then.
“Where’s Mom?” I asked. “And where’s James?”
“The grocery store,” my father said. James loved the grocery store—the order of things,
all neat in their rows. “Don’t cry,” he said now, smoothing my pillowcase, still warm with sleep.
He had a pained look on his face. “Don’t cry,” he said again. I hadn’t noticed it had started. My
whole body felt emotional lately, all welled up like a human tear.
“You’ll be good,” he said. “You’ll do good.”
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“But what about junior college?” I asked. “What about plans?” I’d already received a
stack of glossy college pamphlets in the mail. True, I didn’t know what to do with them yet, but I
had them just the same.
“No time,” my father said, and the urgency in his voice made me hurry.

We stood on the platform at the train station—just like I’d pictured at fifteen, like I were
a character in a history book, Manifesting My Own Destiny! He held my face in both palms and
squeezed, a gentle vice.
“You’ll miss me,” I said. I said it like a question.
“Of course,” he said.
“Will I do okay?”
“Of course,” he said. “Of course, of course, of course.” The series of “of courses”
worried me, as though he were trying to convince us both of something.
“Doth protest too much,” I said.
“Ha!” My father pointed at a pigeon, pecking its head in an odd little dance.
We hugged for a long time. My dad was tall, and he rested his chin against the top of my
head. “Don’t forget to shake my hand,” he whispered into my hair. “We have an agreement after
all,” he made a choking noise—a sob?—and ruffled my too-long bangs. He stuffed a sweaty wad
of money into my palm. I put it in my purse. He handed me another.
“That’s it,” he said, “I wish I had more.”
“Where will I go?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Wherever you want, I guess! You can buy a ticket when you get
on the train. You used to talk about New York all the time.” That’s true, I did, but in an abstract,
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watercolor way. I knew nothing about living on my own, especially in a city that “stayed up all
night.” I was usually in bed by eleven, quick to fall asleep, books always falling open onto my
chest after I’d only read a few words. In fact, I’d only just started doing my own laundry last
week, and I had to keep calling upstairs to my mother, about the separation of darks and lights,
and when to put in the detergent, when?!
I could hardly manage to think about my mother, who is very pretty I realized all of the
sudden, and maybe always had been. (My mother had red hair, and I once heard a man at the
post office tell her that from far away she looked like she was on fire. He had an odd look on his
face, a half-smile, like he’d won something when she responded).
“Shouldn’t I wait to say bye?” I asked. “Won’t Mom be mad?”
“It’s for the best,” my father said, “she’ll only try to convince you to stay.”
“But what about my friends,” I said. “I haven’t said ‘bye’ to anyone!” I started thinking
of odd people—our neighbor Carl and his miniature pincher, my debate coach Mrs. Swanson
who took Improv classes at the junior college, the boy with the unusually deep voice who
worked the counter at CVS. “And James?”
“You’ll see them again,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, turning away from him. I hope my back looked brave. From the train, I
watched him through the window until I couldn’t see him anymore, and the hand he’d been
waving became like the minute hand of a clock—tiny—and then nothing at all.

After all that, I only went to LA. I didn’t have enough money to get to New York, and
anyway, that would have taken a long time on the train. On the ride, I met my first adult friend.
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He was sloshing down the aisles as though drunk. He wasn’t drunk though, just prone to motion
sickness. His name was Charlie.
Charlie sat down with questions, I could tell. They animated his face before he spoke. He
had just graduated from college, he told me. He had had three beers in the dining car, he
volunteered, but was not drunk, just prone to motion sickness.
“Are you on your way back to school?” was his first question.
“No,” I said, “I’m just leaving home. I might not even go to college.”
He leaned forward, pushing the armrest up between us. I wasn’t scared, just curious. He
had a harmless face—too round for murder. My mom was a big believer in physiognomy, and it
had stuck with me. Your long limbs, she said, means you’ll always be efficient. I’ll always be
awkward, I’d say, but she assured me I was misreading my own body.
“Are you a runaway?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “not exactly.” I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea about my family, that
it was bad somehow, damaged. But then I wondered what sort of value that might have, the
wrong idea about me—that I’d withstood something traumatic, that I was wise or strong. I
decided the fewer words I said, the better. I’d be a person who spoke very little, but when I
spoke, it would be especially important.
“I just left,” I said, “I got up one day and left. Didn’t even say bye to my mom.”
“That’s terrible,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
A silence fell over the two of us, one that made my pulse bang in all the wrong places—
my wrist, my throat—and I asked him to tell me more about college. He’d studied Political
Science, he said, “a stupid major, because it only made me cynical.” That’s what I wanted to be
too, I decided right then, cynical. It seemed fitting for the new personality I was cultivating.
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“So,” he said, leaning closer. “What were your parents like?”
I understood where this question was leading. “Terrible,” I said. I felt the pin-prick of
tears somewhere behind my eyes. “Scary-awful.”
Just then the slot of air between us lessened. He was leaning even closer. He had very
nice teeth, prep-school teeth. I, too, leaned closer. “I’m so sorry,” he said.
“Don’t worry. I’m on my own now.”
“Geez, I should never complain about my parents,” he said. “They really are nice to me. I
mean my dad asks stupid questions all the time, and never listens to what I tell him, but geez,
nothing like you went through.”
I nodded. Maybe I would be an actress. Why not?

Charlie said I could stay at his place until I found something more permanent. He lived
off of Pico in a brown stucco apartment with palm trees cemented in the sidewalk. Someone had
scrawled the words HERE FUR GOOD on one of the garage doors. He had two roommates who
were rarely there, and when they were there, they were always on their way out. I only ever saw
them in motion—dashes of solid colored t-shirts, streaks of floppy, surfer boy hair. They seemed
used to having a visitor.
“Hey Boss,” they’d say, like it had always been my nickname.
“Maria,” I’d correct them.
“Right,” they’d say. “Cool.” Or, in a singsong voice, “Maria, Maria, how do you solve a
problem like Maria,” before closing the front door.
I was always worried about becoming a problem.
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I’d spoken to my father a few times. “You’re doing great,” he assured me. My mother got
on the phone, tearful-sounding sometimes, but mostly relegated to curt sentences with her voice
all choked up, like the sadness was lodged in her throat. I thought their voices sounded different,
higher-pitched somehow, or smaller. I wondered if my mother knew about the bet, but I couldn’t
tell her; I couldn’t sell out my father. Regardless, she never told me to come home, just asked if I
was happy—are you? Yes, I said, I’m pretty sure I am.
After a few months, James started writing me emails. He was thirteen now, and had
become suddenly articulate. When we were living together, I hadn’t realized it, or else, he kept it
from me. Maybe he was just better on paper. I started to rethink his and my mother’s
relationship—maybe they were true confidantes, as young as he was, and as mom-like as she
was. The boys I lived with all loved horror films, and I would write James long movie reviews
about whatever we’d just watched. He seemed to like it. I was getting to know the boys better—
though they still usually called me Boss—and I would write to James about them too.
How are Mom and Dad, I’d write. How’s school?
I’m writing poetry, James wrote, and I no longer care much for math.
And Mom and Dad? What about them?
I’m thinking of going to boarding school, he said. In fact, I’m sure I’ll go. Sometimes
he’d only respond with poetry: Thank you God/ for this most amazing day/ for the leaping,
greenly spirits of the trees/ for the blue dream of sky and so on.
What is that? I wrote back. Some kind of prayer? That’s not an answer! How are Mom
and Dad?!?
EE Cummings, he wrote, and you really should read more.

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The seasons changed. I moved into a small studio apartment by myself, and I did laundry
remarkably often, at a Laundromat down the street. Charlie said he was sad to see me go. I’d
gotten a job as a waitress and I took classes at Santa Monica City College in Accounting and
Studio Art. Eventually, I even managed to buy myself a used Jetta. “Wow,” my father said, when
I told him over the phone, “that all sounds amazing.” He kept telling me I was bohemian, that I
was following my own path, and he said it in a weird far-off voice like he must have been sitting
on the porch again, looking into the distance, at the purplish foothills.
Often, customers at the restaurant asked if I was an actress. All the waitresses in LA were
actresses, and I had straight teeth and too-long legs, so sometimes I said yes. That was very meta,
I thought—acting if only by telling people I was an actress. Meta was a new word I’d learned in
community college, in the accounting class, of all things. Still, sometimes, at night, I’d rub my
eyes and the tips of my fingers would be wet. I’d been crying and hadn’t known. I was quick to
cry, but I wasn’t sure if it was connected to any emotion. Like my mother said, sometimes I
misread my own body.
After a while, I got a promotion at the restaurant and suddenly I was a manager, telling
the other actress-waitresses which territory of tables to serve. Sometimes, in the kitchen, they’d
talk about their auditions—how often they were told to say “Hi, Welcome to Applebee’s!” over
and over—but more cheerful this time; no, more intense. “A waitress playing a waitress,” I’d
say, “very meta!”
I started seeing Charlie every weekend. There was something about him I liked, a
familiarity. We’d run errands—the grocery store, or the comic book shop—so that the time we
spent together passed unnoticeably. Being with him felt similar to being alone, only better,
heightened. That’s the best way I can describe it—we glided right along side each other.
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I started asking my father when he would come visit. “I’m no longer adjusting to my new
life!” I said. “I’m adjusted. I’m an adult. I’m living an adult life, as an adult person.” He started
stacking up excuses and handing them over one by one. I knew they were stacked up, like
plates—I can’t explain it. The excuses were lodged in the back of his throat, waiting. I felt angry
and gypped. “You’re not holding up your end of the bargain,” I said. “You told me we’d see
each other!”
“It’s complicated,” my dad said, “But I love you and miss you. We all do. It’s not what
you think.” After a while, I started wondering why I shouldn’t just go home. What did I even
stand to lose?
“You can’t,” my father would say, and something about the weight of his words held me.
Still, I became resentful. I started noticing all of the things I’d inherited from my father
that I didn’t like. My mother too! She was not exempt. I listed these things in my emails to
James: passive aggressiveness, knobby knees, indecision, weak ankles that made ice-skating
difficult, an allergy to shrimp, the list went on. Dad chose to be a real estate agent, I wrote in
one email, what sort of job is that!
You’re saying that out of anger, my brother wrote. Then, he’d include another poem.
He’d moved onto a life I couldn’t begin to imagine, in which he made his own lattes and
collected vintage typewriters. Mom’s into poetry now, he wrote. Of course she is, I thought. But
you still want to go to boarding school? I asked. I’m already packing, he wrote.
Charlie also read books, and there was a line he liked to quote whenever I complained
about not understanding my family: “The awful thing about life is this—everyone has their
reasons.” Meanwhile, I’d built my own kind of life for myself. Whatever it was, I knew it was
distinctly mine. One week I ate every meal at the Russian deli across from my apartment. The
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next week, I went out for a lobster dinner. The week after that, homemade spaghetti. Still, my
freedom made me restless. I saw Charlie almost every day now, usually after long shifts at the
restaurant that made my clothes smell smoky like barbecue. He said my freedom made me brave.
I never told him the truth about my parents, that they weren’t awful, only strange. Actually, they
had always been kind.
“I’m tied down,” Charlie said, “by my parents’ expectations. You just get to do whatever
you want.” Charlie worked at a law firm. He was rarely able to do what he wanted. With you, he
said, I feel the rope around me slacken. By now, I knew he was subtlety trying to sleep with me,
and maybe always had been. We’d watch movies on the couch, and we’d start on opposite ends,
and when the movie finished, he’d be right up against me, like we were two blocks getting ready
to build.
“You’re so brave,” he said one night, after we’d eaten Spaghettios from a can. We were
sitting at my small Formica kitchen table, and he kept dipping his head toward me, as though
trying to close the gap between our mouths. It’s not that I didn’t want to. The shape of his lips
told me it would be good, and though I hadn’t kissed that many people, I’d kissed enough to
know shape mattered. It was the lie that kept me from pressing my lips to his.
“I haven’t been honest about my parents,” I said.
“Oh?” he said, “you can tell me anything. Anything they did to you—”
“I’m not as brave or as cynical as you think.” I told him the whole story of what I’d
promised my father.
“Well you should go home and see them,” he said.
“But then I’d lose.”
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“Who cares!” he shouted, and maybe he was right. But I did care. I hated to lose. What’s
more, I hated to disappoint my father.
“I’ll go with you,” he said.

We took the train. “Remember when we met?” he asked. And of course, I did. He hated
his job—at the law firm—and he talked about that as we rode, buildings flipping by like cards in
a deck.
“Quit the job,” I said. It was a simple answer and I said it simply. He looked like he
wanted to kiss me again and this time I let him, or I kissed him, and he let me. It was one of
those kisses that felt equal—where you’re giving as much as you take. Also, I was right about
the shape of his mouth, and happy that I’d read my body correctly. There was pleasure in
knowing what you wanted and acting accordingly. It was a different kind of freedom.
We kissed for most of the train ride, so that by the time we arrived at my stop, I felt dizzy
and short of breath, as though I’d ran the whole way. Once we reached the platform, we took an
Uber to my house, and debated the whole way whether or not I should have told my parents I
was coming—prepared my dad at least. I had decided not to; I wanted to catch them off guard.
Charlie thought I should have told them. He thought it would have been more considerate.
“Consideration?” I scoffed. “I’ve already outgrown it.”
When we drove up the familiar street toward my cul-de-sac, I didn’t realize I was nervous
until I felt my insides twist up. Still, the neighborhood looked like you might expect it too—neat,
prim, safe.
“Why are you nervous?” Charlie asked. “To see them?”
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“No,” I said, “Nervous to lose the bet.” More so, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d so
blatantly gone against my father’s wishes, if I ever had before.

“Is this it?” the cab driver asked, looking at his GPS again, and then at the empty lot. The
curb was still painted with the numbers of my address, but it was filled with grass and dandelions
and other unnamable weeds.
“This can’t be right,” I said.
I saw a glimmer of something in the empty lot. Where were my parents? My brother?
From afar, the something shone in the sun like a tin can. When I came upon it, though, I saw that
it was an exact replica of the house I grew up in, just tiny, a little larger than a Matchbox car. I
got down on my knees, then lowered my body to the ground as though I were preparing to do
push-ups. “Hello!” I shouted through the windows. I flicked open the front door with my
fingernail. “Hello?” The tiny curtains blew with my breath. The mailbox I remembered from my
childhood was still there, only teeny-tiny now, but still sponge-painted red, a task my brother and
I had completed when we were in elementary school.
I thought I heard something coming from inside the tiny house, a tiny, high-pitched
voice. I saw my tiny father in the tiny foyer, shaking his head at me.
“I told you not to come,” he said. “You didn’t listen!”
Charlie was behind me. “What is it?” he asked. “What’s that little box?”
“My house,” I said. He stood behind me, and the shadow he produced made it difficult to
see anything else. “Back up,” I said.
“I didn’t want you to see us like this,” my father said.
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“It’s okay,” I told him, “don’t worry.” Still lying flat, I talked to my parents through the
tiny doorway, and told them a few details about my life, mostly about junior college and
waitressing and Charlie. My mother was trying not to cry. I could still see her red hair, like the
tip of a match now.
“How are you?” I asked. I wanted to reach out and stroke the top of her head with the pad
of my finger.
“Okay,” she said. Her voice was soft like a faint whistle and I had to lean close to hear it.
“Dad and I are seeing a couple’s therapist,” she told me, and I wondered if the therapist was also
miniature. My dad turned away, as though embarrassed.
“That’s great,” I said. “And James likes boarding school?”
“Loves it,” my dad said. “You should see him now. We hardly recognize him.”
I looked around for Charlie, wanting him to get down on his knees at my parents’ tiny
door and introduce himself. But no, he was waiting in the cab, giving us our privacy. From
where I stood, he also looked smaller. I thought this was a funny thing, the way the past and the
future could both shrink down to a manageable size, like a pill to be swallowed, or the head of a
match.

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THE CHECK UP

I went on a date with a man who was a doctor of Pediatric Oncology.
“You mean child cancer?” I’d asked. We were in an Irish themed bar, wood-paneled and
velvety, like in the inside of a jewelry box. He said he loved his job. I asked him what it was like
to meet all those people—those parents—on the worst day of their lives.
“Better me than other doctors,” he said, “I’m good with people.” I liked that answer; it
had both selflessness and ego in it. As it turned out, so did the man.
Eventually, we married. Much later, we divorced. In between, life became muddled, like
the crushed mint in a cocktail. Like marriage, mint in a drink seems like a good idea at the time,
but then it becomes shredded and soggy and gets stuck in your teeth. For a long time, you are
continuously picking it out from between your molars. Also, a bartender once told me a mojito is
the worst drink to make. It requires the most effort and is sent back the most often. But that is
beside the point.
Today, my ex-husband and I ran into each other in the elevator of his office building,
which is filled with doctors.
“The chances!” he said. We are very cordial. He told me I looked good, which might
have been true, I was wearing make-up and my hair was sort of carelessly windblown, in a
purposeful way. I wondered if I looked the same to him as I always had. He looked the same to
me, even though we have been divorced long enough that the memories of each other’s bodies
are now smudged.
I told him a story I thought he’d find funny, about driving down an empty street late at
night and seeing a naked man standing alone in a McDonald’s. The restaurant was closed but the
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lights were still on, and I could make out the naked man’s body very clearly, illuminated under
the fluorescents. The street was dark and lonely, but there he was.
My ex-husband laughed. “What do you think he was doing in there?” he asked. “Getting
naked just for kicks? Waiting for someone?”
“Who knows,” I said, and a small silence followed—it stretched out and reclined between
us.
“I never see anything interesting,” my ex-husband said. “Those things seem to follow
you around.” I could have said, “Maybe it’s because you never notice anything,” but that’s
something a married person might say. Me, I’m cordial, and divorced. Don’t forget: I only
remember his naked body as though from far away, blurred at the edges. I don’t quite remember
the definition in his calves, or the reddish island of a birthmark across his right hip. Surely these
are the things that fade.
“Was the man in McDonald’s handsome?” My ex-husband asked. We had to stop at
almost every floor. People of varying sizes and sexes got on and off. I hardly noticed. We were
both heading to the top.
“He was very handsome,” I said, though the man wasn’t handsome at all. He had a
rounded belly and a very hair chest. I’m not sure why I lied.
“Who are you going to see?” My ex-husband asked. Not only had he been my husband,
but also a doctor, so perhaps he felt it was okay to ask.
“A cosmetic dermatologist,” I lied.
“Oh? Steiner?”
“Yes.” Then I said, “Are you coming back from lunch?” and he nodded.
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A schedule is easier to remember than a naked body. A schedule imprints itself into your
mind; no, into the pads of your fingers—along with the drink someone habitually orders, and
their pager number in 1994.
It is so good to catch up, my ex-husband said, as we reached his office on the 25
th
floor.
This building has 26 floors and he said, “I guess you’re going to the very top.”
“I guess,” I said. “You know, maybe we should see each other more often.” I said it like a
question.
“Maybe we should,” he said, the faint wink of it in his voice. I watched him—the owner
of two unusually broad shoulders—move down the hallway and through a serious looking door.
Then, I rode the elevator back down again. I didn’t need to see another, different doctor. I had
only needed to check on the one I knew. No, I needed to check on his body—to see how much
space it still took up in the world, to make sure I still had it right in my mind. Oh, but I did.

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MURDER SOUNDS

I thought I heard someone being murdered. What can I say—that’s what I heard. I woke my
husband up. “Get up,” I said. “Someone’s being murdered.”
“Carly, please,” Mark said, turning over. “Come on, please.” He said it sort of like a
moan, like he might be asking for something else in another context.
“Please get up,” I said, “or I’ll call 911.”
He moaned again. He sat up in bed, his hair smashed against his forehead. I pulled the
covers off of him. He was naked, and his penis was soft and worm-like. I almost told him that,
but I didn’t. That’s where we were in our marriage—I said too much aloud. “You say every
single thought that enters your brain,” Mark accused, but that wasn’t true at all. I had so many
thoughts that went unsaid! They multiplied and sat untouched, a pile of something wasted. This,
too, was marriage.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “Why do you look so creepy?”
I hadn’t slept well all night and now I was sitting at the edge of the bed trying to remain
very still, listening. Also, lately, I’d been working on my posture, so I was very cognizant of
trying to keep my back straight. It was around two am.
“Look through the window,” I said. “Try to see what’s happening.” The window in our
bedroom looked down on Ventura Blvd. We lived in the Valley, which I hated, out-loud, every
chance I got.
“Why don’t you look,” he said. “I can tell you nothing’s happening.”
Just then, another sound. The sound was large enough to fill the room—not a scream, but
a metallic bashing of some kind. Instead of feeling scared, I only felt vindicated.
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“Murder!” I shouted.
“Stop,” Mark said. He swiped his hand in my direction, as though trying to mute me.
Still, I could tell he was taking me seriously all of the sudden, he sat up straighter too.
“Put on some shorts,” I said, still looking at his flaccid penis.
“Shh,” he said, “I’m trying to listen.”
And that’s when we heard the unmistakable word: help.
I was already holding my iPhone. I’d been playing a game on it when I heard the noise,
where you line up rows of dinosaurs of the same color and make them disappear. I’d been
playing it late into the night for a few weeks now. It relaxed me. It quieted my mind.
“I’ll call 911,” I said. “Should I?”
Mark shushed me.
“I’ll call,” I said again, louder and higher-pitched. I was holding the phone away from my
body, as though it might turn on me.
“Just relax,” Mark said. “We’re not calling 911. It’s probably nothing.” Mark hated to
overreact. Rather, he hated to be caught after having over-reacted. It had something to do with
his father, I think, one of those stoic types who sat in his car for too long in the driveway while
the rest of his family waited for him inside. Still, Mark’s father also loved show tunes and fancy
calligraphy pens. People are complicated.
Mark pulled on running shorts and a t-shirt. “I’m going out there,” he said.
“Should I come?” I asked. He didn’t answer. “I’m coming,” I said. Here’s another thing
about marriage: so many questions go unanswered. They hang in the air, only occasionally
drawing attention to themselves, sort of like wind chimes.
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Anyway, I didn’t want to be left behind, alone in the apartment. This wasn’t a dangerous
neighborhood, and alit in the wash of bright streetlamps, young boys often skateboarded so late
and so loudly, we’d have to knock on their parents’ doors so they might corral them. Sometimes,
I liked the sound of their skateboards echoing against the asphalt over and over until they finally
mastered a trick, or even when they didn’t—I liked the sound of their repeated trying. When I lay
awake, playing my dinosaur game while Mark slept, his soft measured breathing filling the
room, I felt like it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to go outside and join them. I guess I’m saying the
Valley wasn’t all bad, but in the summer, with the sun at its highest point and the grass brown
and dead, it did a decent job of trying to convince you. Mark and I had talked about moving for
years now.
“Just relax,” Mark would say, when I brought it up too many times.

Now, we stood together on the sidewalk, Mark in his running shorts and t-shirt, and me in
a nightgown that was actually just a very long flannel shirt I only called a nightgown. The night
was warm, but Mark liked the bedroom very cold. There was the hint of a moon.
We looked around for the source of the noise. Across the street, we saw a couple sitting
on the curb outside of their car, a red Honda Civic.
“Help,” the man was saying, to nobody really, or at least not to the girl, who right then
was refusing to look at him. They were young—younger than Mark and I, wading somewhere in
the shallow end of their twenties. The girl was crying. I can call her a girl, I think, in my thirties.
Aren’t I owed that?
“Are you okay?” Mark asked.
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The man got up and started pacing around the car. The girl was still sitting on the curb,
telling the man he was a motherfucker. I couldn’t hear him apologize, but he had apologetic
posture—his head bowed, his palms open.
“I guess they’re just fighting,” Mark said.
“I guess,” I said. He must have heard the disappointment in my voice, because he took
my hand and we approached them.
“Can you guys please be quiet?” he asked. “My wife thought you were being murdered.”
I thought the girl might say something coy like “my heart is being murdered.” I might
have laughed, had she said that.
“Fuck off,” the girl said, instead, “this is a private conversation.” Her hair was dyed
blonde and in the yellowish glow of the streetlamp, I could see her dark roots.
“Fuck off!?” Mark repeated, in a lower version of the girl’s nasal tone. “Fuck off? You
fuck off! You’re loud and it’s two am. We could call the police.”
“Do it,” she said. “Go ahead and do it.”
“I’m sorry,” the man said, “she’s just upset.”
“Well so is my husband!” I shouted. It felt good to be on the same team.

It reminded me of when we were young—when Mark and I worked together at a bar, in a
plain room with too many pool tables. I was always watching people bump their knees and
elbows. “Fuck,” they’d say, “what the fuck.” Mark was the bar-back, perpetually wiping the bar
down and filling the glasses with ice. I bartended with a female friend. I was perpetually handing
people their drinks while she was perpetually throwing her hair back, exposing the paleness of
her throat. All the men flirted with her. I never spilled. My hands were very steady. Regardless,
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we were forced to share the tips, and we could never decide who was benefitting more: me or
her.
“We’re living the dream,” my friend would say, half-ironic. We loved irony, and we
thought we’d mastered it. This would be after the bar closed, while we were splitting our tips on
the rooftop, the moon washing over our crumpled dollar bills, over George Washington’s smug
little face. I was always strapped for cash. “Are we living the dream?” I’d ask, “Or are we
stagnating in a hell of our own making?”
Mark took me home one night, and revealed that he had another job—as an accountant—
and that he only worked the bar at night for fun. I’d never heard of someone doing a job they
didn’t have to do, and that alone made him exotic.

The girl stood up and approached us. She had those mascara raccoon eyes, and I saw now
that she was holding a tire iron. When I stepped closer to the car, half-lit beneath the streetlamp,
I saw that she had been bashing it in. The passenger door looked like it were made of paper,
beginning to crumple.
She sneered—I can only call it a sneer—at the two of us, and gently tapped the tire iron
against her open palm.
“We’ll call the police!” my husband said. “Don’t come near us with that thing.”
I almost laughed out loud. What an overreaction! We weren’t in danger. I’m not sure how
I knew it, but I was sure. While the girl’s anger was fierce and singular, it wasn’t directed at us.
There was something in her face—a determination—she could hardly draw her eyes from the
man. Still, she swung the tire iron again indiscriminately.
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“Stop!” Mark yelled, and took a dramatic step in front of me, as though to shield me.
“Don’t move another inch,” he told her. I laughed—more like a bark, I couldn’t help it.
Mark turned to look at me, and I saw a brief flash of confusion move over his face. I
would think about the confusion on Mark’s face for a long time after. It seemed to represent
something to me, maybe on the girl’s behalf, about how the world is filled with people getting
you wrong.
The girl turned on her boyfriend, but it was only the car she started torturing again, and a
few apartment lights went on and soon after we heard sirens. A neighbor’s dog howled along
with the sirens, almost in tune.

Back in our bedroom, my husband said, “I’ve never done anything that crazy.”
“Hit a car with a tire iron?”
“No,” he said, “I don’t know. I mean, I’ve never been in a situation like that. Where
someone wanted to kill me. Have you?”
The room was cold again, and I moved closer to him. It was odd, having this
conversation. It felt like going back to the beginning, when you still might say something to
shock the other person.
“Once I went to France with a woman,” I said. “Did you know that?”
“With a friend?” He looked confused.
“No,” I said. “Not with a friend. And not Paris, either, but one of those country-sides with
the squares and squares of perfect farmland, where you just drink wine and have sex all day.”
I thought about it. This woman had loved me. She used to come into the bar and watch
me hand off drinks, as though I were giving a performance. She had taken me to France as a
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means of convincing me that I could love her too, and for a little while, I believed her. Now, I
wondered if I had just been terribly confused. I was in my twenties for what felt like forever. She
was older than me and held many strong opinions. I’ve always been unusually susceptible to
persuasion.
“That can’t be true,” he said. “Really?”
“It’s true.”
He smacked his hands against his thighs like he got a kick out of it. “How did you never
tell me that?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. I hadn’t wanted it to be a wasted thing, or a question that hung in
the air.
The woman hated me by the end. She called me filthy, terrible names outside of a
picturesque bakery with red awnings and rows of baguettes in the window. I stood there and let
her, like I were the car and she were the tire iron. I remember thinking it was strange that there
were so many young children around, watching. I remember, too, that she had a look in her eyes
like she wanted to kill me. I’d never seen anything like it. I had gone home with a busboy the
previous night. I’d let him bend me over in a coat closet. (I was still terribly confused).

I would meet Mark one year later, at the perfect time probably, when I was still going
home with men and asking them what they thought about me—letting them tell me things I
should have already known about myself. “You’re funny,” they’d say, “and isn’t this apartment
awful? Wouldn’t you like to get a better job and move?”
“I like this apartment,” Mark said, when I brought him there. “I like you.”
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“Tell me why,” I remembered saying, waiting for him to tell me something I didn’t
already know about myself.
“Because you’re so different than me,” he said, and now I think that’s the basis of
marriage: a study in opposition. I came to know myself in relation to Mark—isn’t that the point
of love?
The woman who had taken me to France was married now, to another woman. I knew
from Facebook. I wondered if thoughts between them ever went unsaid, or if they told each other
everything—every confession a tiny loss of its own.
“Would you murder someone for me?” I asked Mark suddenly, which reminded me of an
old game we used to play, in the beginning of things, when we used to wake each other up with
our hands in the dark, as if they had a mind of their own. Would you cross a desert for me, would
you swim an ocean, would you rob a bank, would you kill a person? Yes, we’d say, over and
over—yes, yes, yes, yes, until the word “yes” lost its meaning and was merely a noise, like a
moan or an exclamation.
But Mark was already drifting back to sleep. He had to wake up early; he had to go to
work.
“Please,” he said, before he was lost to the world.

143
TEACH ME SOMETHING

I tell my English 101 students their papers must be compelling. “They don’t have to be boring,” I
shout at them from the front of the room. “You’re allowed to entertain me!”
After this lecture, and perhaps because of it, a student turns in a paper written in the form
of a ransom note.
Hilarious! I write in the margin. But it has nothing to do with the topic. He receives a D+,
the plus for entertainment value.

A few things I’d write on their papers if I could:
You’re a complete tool, but it’s all your parents’ fault.
I see you picking your toenails while I lecture.
What fresh hell is this?

But this characterization is unfair. I shouldn’t let a few rotten apples ruin the bunch, even
if those apples sweat more than the others, stinking up the classroom, hulking in the back row,
swiping at their cell phone screens with oversized thumbs.

The night before, I had a dream about a painting and when I woke up, I tried to paint
what I dreamt. I used to paint as a teenager, but I hadn’t tried for years. What I painted was
hideous. It looked like a bruise, but without the artful blueness.
Now, I feel like telling the students about it. It seems like an anecdote that might benefit
them. I lean on my desk and stare at them one by one, until the air in the room becomes taut with
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their discomfort. “Sometimes things are in your head,” I say, “and those things don’t translate
onto paper. Do you know what I mean? Do you?” I ask, a little desperately. They must! Their
papers often make no sense. Something goes wrong in the translation.
They look at each other and then away. When the bell rings, they file out, smiling sadly
as though they’re viewing me through glass, a patient at the ward.
“What’s in her head?” they must be thinking. Things! Things I can’t articulate, but please
let me try.
“Have a good weekend,” I tell them, instead. “Be safe. Be happy!” I shout that last piece
of advice through my cupped hands, like I’m using a bullhorn.

Tonight is Halloween and an ex-boyfriend comes to take me to a party. It seems there
aren’t enough men in this city, so I must recycle them, revisiting the ones I’ve already loved. At
one time, I thought this man and I would get married. His bed—low to the ground, no side
tables—had been an island, and I could have lived isolated there, only swimming to shore for
what little food I’d needed. Now, I’m voracious. At one time, I’d texted him 73 times in a row:
How could you? Each time, I added an exclamation point. Now, this seems long ago. Now, we
eat buckets of chow mein and then complain about our stomachaches. We were not, in the long
run, compatible. Still, there are times when a body part of his, when exposed, still moves me.
Tonight, it’s the back of his neck.

He leans against my fridge, a skeleton in a top hat. “What are you dressed up as,” he asks,
“a housewife?”
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“I’m Betty Boop!” I shout. “Don’t you see the red dress? The sex appeal? The slicked-
back hair?”
“Oh,” he says, “I thought you’d just been rained on.”

It has rained, and now the sidewalks outside are slick and shiny. It smells like charcoal
and wet matches. Autumn has arrived, and I can taste the tang of it under the air. There’s
something else, too—that familiar, shivering expectancy. I picture children pulling on their
costumes, setting out for the night, or if they’re small, returning. Soon, several autumns from
now, they’ll be old enough to fill the seats in my class. I can already picture them—training their
beady eyes on me, waiting for me to teach them something they might walk out into the world
and use.
“Comma splices,” I’ll say, and watch their shoulders droop.

The ex and I take my car to the party. He drives. He used to be called Joey and is now
called Joseph. Why did he skip Joe? I can’t remember when this change occurred. Was it self-
proclaimed or did it happen naturally? A plastic piece beneath my bumper has been loose for a
month, and when we go over a speed bump, the piece drops completely off. We run over it and
Joey shakes his head at me, not unkindly. I’m thinking now of something he said when we were
together—about the way I always let things fall apart. It had been a recurring theme. I was
always telling him to loosen up, when really what I needed was to tighten.

By the time we get there, the party is in full swing, filled with the usual people,
haphazardly costumed, clustering in the corners of the living room and kitchen like an organism
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beginning to grow. They are mostly people I see too often, or I don’t see often at all,
purposefully. Are there so few parties or do I know so few people?
The host is dressed as a homeless person, charcoal rubbed beneath her eyes, pieces of a
cardboard box hanging jauntily around her shoulders. She kisses me on both cheeks, and stands
back so she can take me in. She looks at my face as though reading a few lines there. She’s an
actress, after all.
“Girl from the twenties,” she says, “I mean, flapper.” I shake my head. “Teacher?” she
asks, but her back is already to me, filling someone else’s drink.

“Miss H,” a girl’s saying now, “Do you remember me?” She’s dressed as a hippie, young
and pleasant-looking, her features all smoothed over. I half remember her, in the way you might
remember someone who drives quickly passed you in a car, but on a long, sluggish day, when
you’re paying more attention. “I was in your class,” she says, “like a million years ago.”
I make my mouth into the shape of a smile. I wish she wouldn’t exaggerate time. I could
pick a name out of a hat, but it won’t be hers, so I don’t bother.
“I’m old now,” she says, and I try not to grimace.
“How have you been?” I ask, instead.
“I’m in law school,” she says. I remember that she was very agreeable and good at
making sustained eye contact. I can’t remember much else about her, but I think she had an
interest in ballet or modern dance, something like that. Perhaps, at eighteen, she had already
pictured her life as a different shape than the one it had become. “I still remember things you
used to say,” she says now. “How we should try to make our papers interesting.”
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I wore an old green army coat that winter, which had begun to fall apart. I’d developed a
habit of pulling loose threads when I was nervous. I was putting off getting a new coat, because I
thought the cold would pass and sure enough, it did.
“You were always in a rush,” the girl is saying now, sizing me up, as though we’d been
through a war together, or a sorority pledging, and now we could speak honestly. “Harried,” she
says, shrugging, as though to soften it.
I’m remembering that time now. She sat in the front row with a brash sort of confidence,
an ambition she carried around like a handbag. I’d received bad news that winter. According to
the doctor, I’d let a particular set of pains go on too long, had attributed them to the weather, or
to the natural turn of seasons, or to external disappointments, and had assumed they would pass.
Instead, it was a problem I should’ve look into earlier, before—unbeknownst to me—internal
parts had begun to fall apart.
“Well I hope I taught you something,” I tell her now, desperate to walk away.
“Definitely,” she says now. “I remember you were very funny. You never took things too
seriously.”
I’m surprised, as always, at being so dramatically misread. I take everything seriously,
I’d like to tell this girl. I take every single thing to heart.
“Of course,” I say, instead. “Otherwise you’ll never get out alive.”

I walk outside, where the sidewalks are no longer slick or shiny, only dark. Already
things are changing. From where I’m standing, I can see Joey through the window, standing in
the kitchen, making the party rearrange itself around him. His attitude seemed foreign to me
when I met him—something uniquely Californian—he wore a backward baseball cap and asked
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frequently for help. After a while, I see that he’s no longer talking. He’s searching the room now,
worrying about the person he came with. I wait until I see his mouth form my name. Only then
will I go inside and ask to be entertained.

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A WORLD OF WOMEN

Reid was dating a younger woman, whose family was big and loud and incapable of small talk.
They wanted you to get right to the point, to tell them your secrets. Reid always worried he’d say
something private he hadn’t meant to reveal.
In the car, on the way to a dinner at Sylvie’s aunt’s house in upstate New York, they
listened to music, a scratchy blues song he’d never heard before.
“Big Al from New Orleans,” she said, “he was very popular in the forties.”
Sylvie made a point of liking odd things, things someone her age wasn’t expected to like.
Little did she know, this was not so odd. The truth was, he’d known women like her all his life;
women with painstakingly messy hair and beautiful mouths, who polished their opinions like
they were little brass knobs on a mysterious set of drawers, drawers they hoped you would pull
open to reveal something new.
Sylvie mouthed the words to the song. The lights along the coastline gleamed.
He did not doubt her intelligence. He knew there were things Sylvie didn’t bother to
explain to him, and if she tried, he wouldn’t understand. She was in graduate school and worked
as a teacher’s assistant in Rhetoric. She talked about her students intimately, like they were
friends of hers. She gave everyone nicknames. “Becca Six Head,” she said, as they stopped at a
light, “never talks in class even though she has the most interesting things to say.” Six Head was
because her forehead was so large, two notches larger than a forehead. She had a way of
unpacking the truth about other women that was both ruthless and impressive. He could see why
other women liked her—wanted to be her friend. “My friends are very important to me,” she’d
said, when they’d met.
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“What was mine?” Reid asked.
“Your what?”
“My nickname?”
“You were the tallest man there,” she said. “I remembered you.”
Sylvie was twenty-two years his junior and looked it too. They met at a fundraiser for
Jewish youth, or Jewish elderly, or Jewish midwives, something like that, he couldn’t remember.
They’d both attended at the prompting of respective Jewish aunts.
He drank in the sight of her as he drove, her dress sleeveless, her arms tanned. It was still
surprising, the sight of her beside him.
“Did you talk to the girls this morning?” Sylvie asked, her fingers brushing against the
steering wheel, his upper arm, his thigh. This woman and her hands! They never stayed put.
“No,” he said. “But I talked to Jules yesterday.”
Reid had an ex-wife and two grown daughters, whom he felt he never saw frequently
enough. For some reason, Sylvie liked to talk about them. They lived nearby, in the city, in
different parts of Brooklyn. Julia, Jules, his youngest daughter, had two female roommates and
drank too much. She worked in public relations—in what capacity, he was never sure. He called
her often, favoring her, the haphazard way she lived. His other daughter, Caroline, lived with a
quiet, serious man, a soft-spoken scientist who made Reid feel large and clumsy.
At the end of a narrow street, Sylvie’s aunt’s house rose like the beginning of a cruise
ship, the windows lit, the mass of it dark and gigantic. As Reid unbuckled, Sylvie laid a hand
across the back of his neck, and he felt something inside him loosen. He hoped he wouldn’t say
too much.

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Amazingly, there were no men in Sylvie’s family and Reid was glad for this. He fared
better around women, felt more comfortable with them—the roundabout way they dealt with
conflict. All he had to do was be polite and vaguely complimentary. He would laugh at their
jokes and tell a few self-deprecating (always self-deprecating) jokes of his own.
Other men were another story, his gender, somehow more difficult for him. He’d grown
up in the long shadow of his father’s neglect, and other men were still a mystery to him. He
clammed up around knots of men in bars together, their straight-forwardness—their straight-talk,
straight-shots, whiskey straight-up. No thank you. He’d drink his liquor lightened up with ginger
ale.

“I used to be a drunk,” Sylvie said now, smiling, so that he didn’t know if she were
joking. She sat Indian Style on the living room carpet, lithe in front of a glass-topped coffee
table, surrounded by women—her cousins and her friends. This was supposed to be a coming out
party for Reid, he saw now. It was time to meet everyone. If Sylvie met his daughter, Jules, in a
coffee shop or at a party, would they be friends? Would they find things in common—music they
liked, men they had dated?
“Who says you’re not a drunk anymore?” asked her curly haired cousin, lips shining.
This cousin was Reid’s least favorite, with her too loud voice and cartoonish facial expressions,
too insecure to think anyone would be interested in hearing what she had to say otherwise.
Sylvie laughed, and tapped her front tooth with a fingernail. He knew the tooth was
fake—she’d lost a fragment of the original against a beer bottle in college. “I’m only a drunk
occasionally.” She was young enough to be Reid’s daughter. This was not lost on him. He knew
this was not lost on anyone.
152

“She can’t believe I’m fucking you,” Sylvie had told him once, about that same cousin.
He winced when she cursed like that. Not because he didn’t like it, but because it still surprised
him. This was when they were in bed together, and she’d just finished going down on him. These
were the times he couldn’t believe the sight of her. Look at this, he’d think to himself. Look what
she’s doing. Moments ago, he’d been a hundred feet tall.
He felt around for his glasses on the bedside table. “Why can’t she believe it?”
“Just compared to guys I’ve dated before,” Sylvie said. “They were younger than you.
They were mostly my age.”
He pictured her with someone younger, another grad student in his late twenties, eager
and thick haired—hair still dark, not yet grayed by time, by life. Or maybe she wouldn’t want to
date someone like her. Maybe he’d be ropey with muscles, work a job in construction. He’d
smell of sawdust and sweat. He’d fuck her from behind.
“Your cousin doesn’t like me?” he asked, sitting up in bed. This bothered him. It was a
weak spot, his desire to be liked.
“She likes you,” she’d said. “Just for someone like her mother. Or for mine. One of the
aunts,” she said, smiling. The sheet had slipped down below her breasts. Then she said
something else. Her nipples were hard. Concentrate on her mouth, he’d reminded himself.
“That’s just how my family is,” she said. “All in each other’s business.”
Most of the women in Sylvie’s family were all man-less. Maybe it was this closeness that
kept men out. They were a horde, a sorority—a living, breathing organism made up of lady
atoms.
“Man-eaters,” he said, joking, but Sylvie didn’t seem to hear him.
153

The aunt whose house it was, Eleanor, led him into the kitchen—all sparkling stainless
steel and polished granite. “You can help me cook,” Eleanor said. She and Reid were probably
around the same age. She had glamorous white hair, and an unusually smooth forehead. “I love a
man in the kitchen.” She had a faux, exaggerated way of flirting, like the mothers of his high
school girlfriends. When she opened the refrigerator he saw that it was labeled and organized
like a restaurant’s. His own refrigerator was sparse, but clean. “Your bachelor pad is killing me,”
his daughter Jules had said, offering to stock it. She had not met Sylvie yet. Nobody in his family
had.

The women told stories in the other room. He heard bits and pieces as he helped Eleanor
chop vegetables.
“I thought you were trying on lesbianism in college,” another cousin, whom they called
Tony, said. Tony was his favorite, though he’d only met her twice. She had a low, raspy voice
and a good sense of humor. She seemed to have a calming effect on the rest of the women,
Sylvie included.
“I had a boyfriend!” Sylvie said.
“We all assumed he was gay,” the loud, drunk cousin said, and the glass-topped coffee
table shook with their collective laughter.
“He wasn’t gay. He just talked with his hands. He was just Jewish,” Sylvie said.
“Some are both,” someone said.
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“Oh the best looking are both!” Eleanor shouted from the kitchen, which made all of her
nieces collapse into more frenzied laughter. Reid went back to chopping. Ask Jeeves, baby!
Somebody kept repeating.
The sound of the women together made Reid think of his own daughters. During their
teenage years, the house had been filled with their friends, with the trappings of girlhood. He
pictured the girls now, but their faces were distorted by all the versions of their faces over the
years.

Stew simmered in Eleanor’s pot; the dark smells ghosting around the room. Reid’s phone
jingled on the coffee table.
“Reid,” Sylvie called from her post on the floor, “the Mrs. is calling.” Sylvie referred to
his ex wife as the Mrs. Instead of jealous, Sylvie seemed amused and fascinated by his former
life, the fact that he once had a wife, and together, they’d made children. When he considered
this, he wondered if Sylvie thought of him only in a passing way. Would she refer to this period
in her life to her next boyfriend as the time she dated an older man? He had grown children,
she’d say, as she lay naked in her bed—legs splayed open on the denim duvet he’d first thought
of as girlish. There were framed photographs of her friends and her cousins on the bedside table,
smiling girls at the beach, and Vegas, and in front of an elephant. They all had beautiful teeth.
He’d noticed a picture of a young, lean guy and hated him instantly. Just a friend she’d grown up
with, she’d assured him. When had he become the jealous one?
“Reid,” Sylvie said, louder. “She’s calling again.”
When he finally answered it, it was his youngest, Jules, sobbing hysterically.
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“Do you want to put Mom on?” He only referred to his ex-wife as “Mom” now. After the
piled-up years of their marriage, all of that sediment, it had become impossible to say her actual
name. “But you’re with mom?” he tried again, steadying his voice. “Are you in the city?” He
turned away from the women, created some privacy for himself.
His daughter couldn’t make words. Panic arose in him as though it had wings, turning all
conversation into questions.
“Reid,” his ex-wife said, coming on the line, all business. He had always appreciated his
ex-wife in a crisis, her accountant’s mind. “Jules did something bad,” she said. The way she said
it, as though Jules were a child again, almost made him feel nostalgic. He’d been very involved,
as a father. He’d been a good dad, he thought suddenly, in spite of himself, in spite of this phone
call.
“What is it?” he said. He sensed the horde of eyes watching him and he looked up. Here
were the women, their collective gaze tribal in its intensity.
“I’m going to step outside,” he said, worrying he’d say too much. If nothing else, his
parents had taught him loyalty. Everyone else is an outsider until proven otherwise by time or
ceremony. And even then.
On the large porch, he held the phone to his ear and listened to his daughter cry. “Tell me
what you did,” he said now.
“I can’t,” she said. “Not over the phone. I want to see you in person.”
“I’m not home,” he said. “But I can come meet you wherever you are.” He would leave.
He would tell the women there’d been an emergency with his daughter—they would understand
that, they were all daughters.
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“I can’t stay here. I’ll come to you,” she said. “Just tell me where. I want to leave. I can’t
be in the city right now. I’ll Uber.”
“Where are you?”
“The police station.”
He was so stunned he simply recited the address. She was allowed to leave, he thought,
once he hung up, so that meant the crime wasn’t terrible or his ex-wife had paid some exorbitant
fee. He’d hear about that later, of course. Drunk driving, probably? He was already preparing the
lecture in his mind: running his tongue over the words. He wouldn’t yell; he never yelled. But he
wouldn’t tamper down his disappointment for her benefit, even as she cried. She would bear
witness to her father’s disappointment. At another time in her life, that had meant something.

“My daughter’s coming,” he announced to the women. “She”—he faltered here, what to
reveal and how much?—“she has a problem, and she needs me.”

By the time Reid expected his daughter to ring the bell at any moment, the women had
drunk too much, Sylvie especially.
It occurred to Reid that maybe Sylvie’s nonchalance had all been an act, meant to cover
something else up, some deep-seated insecurity she had every right to feel. He was older and
he’d had a family. Had a family, currently. Of course. How had he tricked himself into thinking
otherwise? The alcohol had loosened something in her posture and in her words. There was a
gracelessness to her now that he found disconcerting. Suddenly she seemed young in a way that
worried him, as though she were a reflection of his own creepy predilections. Maybe the
impending arrival of his daughter had thrown everything into relief. How would he explain this
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to Jules? This annoyed him more. She should be the one who was nervous to see him! He was
allowed this, to date anyone he wanted. This guilt—he hated even the word, it was so overused.
It had become a shortcut, a caricature of the time and place and context in which he grew up—
Jewish guilt, he thought, the guilt Philip Roth described, the guilt all Reid’s male relatives
suffered before him—it swelled in the lower regions of his stomach, a familiar kind of
indigestion.
They were wading passed the end of dinner, still picking at their plates, the silver
tablecloth hardly visible beneath so many platters of food. Nothing good ever came from sitting
around, his father used to say. He had tried his whole life to drag his father’s impatient attention
to him, to hold it for a little while. Though Aunt Eleanor hardly touched the food she’d made,
Sylvie and her cousins were all voracious eaters. He’d found that attractive, too, that hunger in a
woman, and her body’s mysterious ability to digest it all without a trace. Now he wished she’d
eat slower, calm down. Please, he thought. Relax. This was not unfamiliar to him, this need to
control a situation that seemed to be spiraling out of control.
“What are you thinking about?” asked Tony, in her low, kind voice. “You seem worried.”
He made a wheezy noise into his napkin. “Just my daughter, I guess. Not quite sure yet
what the problem is.”
“He’s the best Dad,” Sylvie said, too loud. “Always making sure they’re okay. Calling
like, ‘hey it’s your Dad! Just making sure you’re good.’ Like, that’s not typical. Not the normal
thing. When did my dad ever do that, when he was still alive?” The way she spoke now, she
seemed hardly distinguishable from the other girls at the table.
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“Your dad did his best for who he was,” Eleanor said now. It sounded to Reid like a rote
response, a story Sylvie had been told many times. He took another long drink of the wine
Eleanor opened, smooth and deep. It tasted expensive.
He’d heard a little bit about Sylvie’s dad, but it had always made him uncomfortable.
He’d been some sort of high-powered finance guy, a womanizer, had chosen those women over
Sylvie. “I don’t blame them,” Sylvie had said. “I blame him.” Reid always quickly changed the
subject. Her father had been around Reid’s age when he’d passed away a few years ago.
“At least I had Mom,” Sylvie said now, her mouth bruised-looking from the wine. “What
about your wife?” Sylvie said to Reid now, a new edge to her voice. Is she as good of a mother
as you are a father?”
“Sylvie,” he said, his voice low. He shook his head at her.
“What?” she asked, louder. He saw a cousin across the table—Jennifer? Jackie?—shift
uncomfortably. “Was she a good wife? I don’t think I ever asked. Did she make you happy?”
“I loved my wife,” Reid said now, to the other women at the table. He felt accused of
something, on trial. He could feel the back of his neck sweating. “I still love her—as the mother
of my children.
“See!” Sylvie shouted. “Very mature. A very, very, very mature man. An older mature
man.”
The doorbell rang, blessedly.
“My daughter,” Reid said, pulling out his chair so quickly the dishes rattled. “If you don’t
mind, I’ll go get it.”
“Of course,” Eleanor said.
“Ab-so-lute-ly,” Sylvie sang, and he swallowed hard.
159

Oh, daughters. He felt the smallish bones of her shoulders through her hooded sweatshirt.
Her hair was wet. Had it rained? She murmured into the buttons of his shirt.
“Are you okay?” he asked her. Hadn’t someone warned him at the hospital after his first
daughter was born: to prepare, to buy glue or a sewing kit, so you can repair the broken heart a
daughter’s mere act of living will cause you?
He closed the door behind him so they could talk on the lit porch. He sat her down on one
of Eleanor’s expensive looking rocking chairs and sat on the floor beside her.
“Is this your girlfriend’s house?” she asked, and he remembered.
“Sort of,” he said. “Tell me what happened.” He felt a trace of gratitude rise up in him—
could it possibly be gratitude?—for a reason to change the subject.
“I got married,” she said. “I eloped.”
“To—”
“To my boyfriend, Dad.”
“Right,” he said. He remembered this boyfriend now. He hadn’t even realized he was a
boyfriend! He thought he was just a fling. The boy—just a boy—was tall and quiet; he’d gone to
an International high school in Japan. His name was Andy, Andrew, something like that. Reid
thought they’d broken up. She told him they had. He swore she’d told him.
“What did you do?” he asked.
“We went to a courthouse last week.”
“No, I mean, what did you do tonight?”
“He called the police on me. I was—I don’t know. I went a little.” She stopped talking
and leaned her head against her palm. Was she deciding how much to tell? Maybe he didn’t want
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to hear everything. How could he possibly stand to hear everything? “I went a little crazy,” she
finished.
“Violent crazy?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.
“I sort of tore the place up a little,” she said. “He had, you know, another woman. More
than one. Women.” She laughed then, a little absurdly. It frightened him, the power men held
over his own daughters. They would move to different states for men, change their lives, go
crazy. Hadn’t he tried to prevent that? He’d taken an interest in their friends, played the games
they liked, encouraged their hobbies. Wasn’t that the only protection he could offer—to love
them? But then, he’d left their mother. He’d been in love with someone else. Had that cancelled
everything else out?
“I assume you’re not being charged with anything by the police.”
She shook her head.
“I know this whole experience must feel really awful,” he said. His words sounded
stilted, as though he’d memorized those lines. It still felt awkward, more than awkward, deeply
embarrassing, to broach the subject of infidelity.
Years ago, he cheated on his wife, his daughters’ mother. It was a crime for which he’d
paid dearly, and was still paying. The string of months when his daughters were teenagers and
refused to speak to him were the worst of his life. He’d vowed to never give them another reason
to banish him again.
“I just feel like such a fucking idiot,” she said.
“You definitely aren’t that,” he said. His older daughter had called him a fucking asshole
when she’d found out about the other woman so many years ago. Now, he wondered if their
relationship had ever really recovered.
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The door swung open to reveal Sylvie, in all of her sullen glory.
“The daughter,” Sylvie said, sounding solemn. Then, in an exaggeratedly quiet voice,
“I’m sorry to hear you’re having a bad night.” She was trying to look sympathetic, but the
muscles in her face had gone too slack to seem convincing. She knew about the affair, though
only the outline of events—the skeleton. Reid had perfected the telling now, the mix of self-
loathing and dogged honesty. She thrust a hand out toward Jules. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet
you. I’ve heard so much about you.”
His daughter’s eyes widened. How to explain Sylvie? It was not the same way he would
have explained the woman with whom he cheated on his wife, that was different. He’d been in
love then, with a woman from his law firm. At a work retreat, they’d sat side by side in the
boss’s motorboat, Reid driving. It had been a clear day, the sky the color of baby clothes. He’d
glanced at her, the wind in her hair, her face with its beautiful discrepancy, as though the top half
and bottom half had been fitted together arbitrarily. When he’d turned the boat sharply, she’d
thrown her head back and laughed. This woman’s laugh—making her laugh—had roused in him
a breathless kind of happiness unfamiliar in its shape. Its shape was the exact size of his body. It
kept him up at night. How could you explain that to your wife and daughters?
“Sylvie and I are just casually dating,” he said, suddenly firm.
“Oh fuck you,” Sylvie spat. “Now it’s casual?”
“Dad you can date someone,” Jules said. “It’s fine. You’re allowed.”
The two women shared a look. He was already being left out of something new; they
were making judgments about him, around him—erecting new barriers.
“It’s you,” Sylvie said, not unkindly. “He’s probably just worried about you.”
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His phone vibrated in his pocket. It was his ex-wife, asking if Jules were there, if she
were okay. He could hear the other women inside, shouting, laughing. Warlords, he thought.
Right after a kill. Jules asked to talk to her mom and he handed over the phone. “Dad will stay
with you,” he could hear his wife say through the phone.
“I shouldn’t have said fuck you,” Sylvie said, a few minutes later. Shouldn’t have was
different than didn’t mean it, Reid knew.
Eleanor had taken his daughter inside and shown her to a guest room. She’d put her arms
tightly around Jules’ shoulders, and guided her up the stairs, as though this kind of mothering
were second nature.
“Maybe I’m just jealous of your daughter tonight,” Sylvie said now, in a voice that was
smaller than any he’d heard her use before. “My father wouldn’t have known how to comfort
me. Even if he wanted to—and who knows, maybe he did— he wouldn’t have been able to. He
just wasn’t that kind of guy.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it.
She shrugged. “He was old school. What can you expect?”
“Seems like a poor excuse,” Reid said. But he’d made plenty of poor excuses over the
years. “Anyway, thank you for saying that. For apologizing.” He felt the new strain between
them. It made him search around for what to say next. “And for letting her come over. My girls.
They haven’t—it hasn’t always been easy between us.”
“If my dad was still alive I’d forgive him,” she said. “For not being who I wanted. That’s
the one thing I’d do.”
“That’s big of you,” he said. He remembered his oldest daughter had screamed, “I’ll
never forgive you,” from the top of the stairs after she’d found out about Reid’s affair.
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“Well easy to say for me to say now that he isn’t here, right?” Sylvie said. “Easy to take
the high road.”
Even now, he thought of Sylvie in past tense. Her body, the way she moved. He looked at
her now, in an attempt to memorize her, and the space she took up in his world of women.
Later, he’d go to check on his daughter, sleeping soundly in one of Eleanor’s luxurious
guest bedrooms. But right now he watched Sylvie walk back into the house—the sounds of her
cousins and friends still loud within—and when she tripped on the stairs, she cursed and laughed
and said his name. He didn’t respond. He didn’t go to her. He knew the women inside would
know how to comfort her.

164
WORKING FOR THE MAN

At the door, there’s a man. He’s so large he blocks the light. This is the second time he’s come.
Both times, the twins have intercepted him.
My twin daughters are twelve—an age at the very beginning of something. I try to tell
them this. Mel rolls her eyes, shows me the whites, something she knows I hate. She’s picked it
up from television, I’m sure, a symbol of an angst she doesn’t really have. Or maybe she does
have it. Who am I to guess at her feelings? I have a mother. She usually guessed wrong.
Lisa, the other half, imitates her sister’s eye-roll, but she doesn’t have the constitution for
it. She stops halfway through the roll, laughing, trying to catch me watching.
They’re both good girls. Some nights, they still crawl into bed with me, curl up like
larvae on either side, and wrap their legs around each of my legs. I picture us looking like that
Indian statue. What’s the name? I should know, but I don’t.
“Mom,” a twin says from the entryway, because the sound of their voices—unlike the
rest of them—is truly identical, “the man is here again.”
I had a feeling he would return.
“Ma’am,” he says, tipping his head, like I’ve stepped into a Western. His hair is pushed
back and he touches it now, as though missing a hat. I can tell, instantly, that he’s younger than
he looks. It’s in the skin around his eyes.
“You’re back,” I say.
“I hope you got the pamphlet I left last time,” he says.
“Um, the babysitter had it,” I say, “I’m not sure where she put it.”
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The first time he came, I was out with a date. We had Chinese food. I came home early,
and the girls recreated the man at the door in painstaking detail, like I was preparing to draw a
police sketch.
“Your daughters are beautiful,” he says, “Mel and Lisa, if I recall correctly.”
At the sound of their names—talismanic—the girls appear again. Lisa stands behind Mel,
kicks at the scuffed wood floor.
“Hello again,” Mel says, showing him her teeth. She is less pretty than Lisa, but there’s
an ease about her, even now, at eleven, an untroubled way of being in her body. I already know
she will attract boys, and because of the boys, trouble.
“By chance, ma’am,” the man addresses me, “can I give you another pamphlet?”
“It has to be somewhere.” I scan the table by the door, covered in old mail and takeout
menus.
“I can explain it to you if you want. It’s about our heavenly Father,” he says, “and our
savior Jesus Christ.” His voice has become something firm and solid. My daughters look at him
as though he’s grown antlers and a snout. They know nothing of religion, at least not the earnest,
heavenly kind, delivered orally on doorsteps. They go to a liberal school in Los Angeles. Their
best friend has two dads and spends Christmas in Key West.
“Whose father?” Mel asks, suspicious if not downright rude.
“Everyone’s father,” the man says, and the girls look at each other, and then at me.
Fathers are a tricky subject in our house. When the girls were small, and all they knew of
the world was what they saw from the backseat of my car, I would play Joni Mitchell and the
Beatles on repeat, and tell them the song “Nowhere Man” was about their dad, who was
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nowhere. I was meditating at that time and this seemed like a good explanation—vague and
wise. Plus the girls were young and trusting, they believed everything I said.
Recently, I heard Mel telling her friend in the twins’ bedroom: “Our dad left us when we
were too little to remember. He just up and left.” She must have gotten this phrase from
television, or maybe from me. It turns out, it was not a smart idea to tell the girls their father was
nowhere. It’s the same as saying everywhere, and now they’ll smash themselves against his
absence for the rest of their lives.
“We’re okay,” I tell the man. “The pamphlet won’t be necessary.”
“Well I don’t mean to pressure you ma’am,” he says, like he means it. Then he hands me
another.
“What church are you with?” I ask. The girls are still eyeing him, faces clouded over with
interest. He’s not wearing any uniform I recognize—no short sleeve white shirt, no nametag. Just
a flannel and worn-in jeans.
“I’m with the man upstairs,” he says, winking at the girls.
“Workin for The Man,” Mel says, which makes him laugh. She’s picked that up
somewhere recently. Whenever I ask her to do the dishes, she says, “Here I go again, working
for The Man.”
“I might encourage you just to look at the pamphlet,” he says, “if you ever get a chance.”
“Okay,” I say, “I’ll keep it in mind.”
“It might change your life,” he says.
“Thank you,” I say. “Good to know.”
“It could be everything you’re missing,” he says.
“Okay,” I say. “I got it.”
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He turns to leave, and the girls and I watch him walk down the street, until he’s the size
of a flannelled stick-figure, until he’s the size of something I’ve pulled from the dryer—a piece
of lint or dust. He walks very fast, like someone with a plan.
“Do you think he’ll come back?” Lisa asks, her voice quiet, reverential.
“I hope he comes back,” Mel says.
“Why?” I ask them. “He’ll just keep asking us a question we have to say ‘no’ to.”
I look at the pamphlet. It looks homemade, like he took time to fold the photocopied
pages, run his fingers over and over the crease.
“I don’t mind saying no,” Mel says, “Sometimes it’s just nice to be asked a question.”
“I hope he comes every day,” Lisa says. “Even if all we get to do is watch him leave.”

168
PETER

She turned over in bed, toward the wall, so that her back was to him. He was whispering
something in her ear, but she couldn’t quite hear it.
“What?” she asked.
He whispered again.
“What did you say?” she asked again.
“You have a birthmark,” he said softly, “right in the middle of your back.” He touched
her there, in a way she guessed was meant to be tender or soothing, or both.
“Yeah,” she said, “I know.”
“Because other men have told you?” It was the shape of a shovel but located just between
her shoulder blades, where It might be difficult to see In the mirro’ on’her own. In fact, an ex-
boyfriend had taken photos of her nude, from several angles, and she’d studied the birth mark
carefully. Somehow she’d known about it before the photo too, in the way you have a knowledge
of your own body without your knowledge.
“No,” she said, “you’re the first person I’ve ever been with.” She’d meant the sarcasm in
her voice to be dull and harmless, but instead, it gleamed in the lamp light, and she shut her eyes,
ashamed.
“I was joking,” he said.
“I know.”
He took a deep breath then and moved a little closer to her. She could feel him against
her butt, as he slipped his finger back inside her, where it had been before he started whispering.
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It didn’t feel bad, but she wouldn’t say it felt good exactly, either. She was a little numb down
there lately—she felt a little underwater.
“Do you want to stop,” he said. “We can stop.”
“What?” she asked. She was still facing away from him.
“I dunno,” he said. “You seem…not into it.” He turned onto his back and laid his hands
primly on his thighs. “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” he said.
“I know that,” she said. “You think I don’t know that? I called you.” She turned onto her
back too, so they were laying next each other with their hands barely touching, like a set of paper
dolls. The ceiling fan continued its usual whirring, as though nothing strange was occurring
beneath it.
“I’m sorry to hear about your sister,” he said.
She turned to face him. “Listen,” she said. “Can you just fuck me from behind? I don’t
really want to talk.”
He sat up.
“What?” she said.
“I guess I’m not really in the mood anymore,” he said.
“Fine,” she said.
“Fine,” he said. “Wait hold on—"
He moved toward her. That’s when she realized her eyes were wet, her whole face
actually. This had been happening more and more lately. “Here, here,” he said. “Here.” He was
wiping her face with the pads of his fingers.
She figured she should tell him to stop but she didn’t, she simply cried onto his hands as
he continued to wipe her face with her own tears.
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Eventually, the crying slowed nearly to a stop, and he said, “you look great naked by the
way,” which made her genuinely laugh. “I mean, I always knew you would, but my suspicions
were confirmed,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said. “You too, you’re—” she gestured toward his body, which was
compact—wiry and urgent, like a boxer’s. “It’s more than that,” she said. “I’ve always liked
you.”
“I wouldn’t have known,” he said.
“No?” she asked.
“You barely talk to me.”
“That’s not true,” she said.
“It is!”
“We’ll agree to disagree,” she said. “I talk to you! It’s hard. You’re the boss’s son.” His
father owned the SAT Prep Course where they both worked.
“Oh, come on,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s not like that,” he said.
“You don’t know what it’s like! That’s the definition of being the boss’s son: to not know
what it’s like.”
“My dad’s not some tech mogul,” he said.
“So like a rich person,” she said, “to not know they’re rich.”
He turned toward her and so she turned toward him. How many times had she done this
already in her life, she wondered, mirrored a man? His face looked grim, and for a second, she
thought what she said offended him—about being rich—but then he smiled.
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“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.” His mother
was a doctor, and a few times she’d overheard him talk to his mother on the phone in a polite
way she didn’t usually associate with parents and children. You could tell by listening—he
wanted to please her. She, too, had a mother she wanted to please, who wasn’t very available to
her. Maybe that’s where the politeness came from: he and his mother were a little bit like
strangers.
She wanted to ask him about that but instead she asked, “Did you always know how
much money you had growing up? That’s usually how you know. I always knew how much
money we had. Down to the dime. Rich kids, though. They have no idea.”
“I guess I didn’t know,” he said softly.
She was 24 and he was 29, but at that moment the gap between them seemed to lessen to
her in a way she found attractive. She picked up his hand and began to guide it between her legs
again. Then she stopped, and just held it in her own hand.
“Well anyway, I was glad you called,” he said.
“I’m not normally like this,” she said.
“Like what,” and then, before she could answer, “I know that,” he said. “You don’t have
to apologize.”
“I wasn’t apologizing. I was just explaining.”
“Okay,” he said. He looked around the room, at the paintings on the wall. She could
sense him taking things in, as though he were feeding information through himself like an old-
fashioned film strip through a projector—slowly and steadily, with intention. “I like your
apartment,” he said finally.
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“I think of it more as a room but thank you.” It was a very small studio, there was just a
bed in the corner and a tiny kitchenette. There wasn’t even room for a desk. She’d lived there for
one year.
“It’s a good room,” he said. “I like that painting.” He gestured to a small, square canvas
hanging on the wall opposite the bed.
“My sister did it,” she said.
“It’s nice.”
“Thanks,” she said.
The painting was of a small black poodle, regal and precise, like something Victorian or
British or both? She wasn’t quite sure how to describe it. The poodle sat happily on a sunlit patch
of grass. “My sister hated dogs,” she said, “but she liked painting them. They just didn’t appeal
to her in real life.”
“What about cats?” he asked. He slipped his arm beneath her neck just then, and they
both stared at the fan for a while. She thought about how she and her sister had those little glow-
in-the-dark stars pasted all over the ceiling of their shared bedroom when they were growing up.
They kept them longer than was probably typical for girls their age. The memory made a feeling
bubble up in her that she couldn’t quite name.
“No, my sister hated animals. She hated especially when people were very into animal
charities, or like saving the animals, but not into saving people. She thought that was so
hypocritical. Like yes animals are living beings and they’re important and deserve to be saved,
but not over people. At least, not as important as people. Our step-mom used to go around like
collecting cats and my sister would say, she’d step over a homeless person to get to a cat.” She
shrugged, a little embarrassed letting a story spill out like that.
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“Right,” he said. “I guess I agree with that. That’s always seemed strange to me too.”
“Do you have a dog?” she asked.
“I do. His name is Peter.”
“Well I like dogs,” she said.
“You’d like Peter.”
They both looked at the dog painting on the wall. Finally, she said, “will it be awkward at
work tomorrow? Now that you’ve seen me naked?”
“Now that we’ve seen each other naked,” he said.
“Right,” she said.
“No,” he said. He was technically her supervisor. She was an SAT tutor who also
sometimes ran the prep classes for high school students. Math came easily to her, and so did the
definitions of words. Reading comprehension, especially lately, had been more difficult. When
students spoke to her, she had to ask them to repeat themselves sometimes three times over.
She’d been like a sleepwalker the last month or two, or an elderly person. She couldn’t
remember where she put her keys, or how to turn on the stove. She stared at objects in her studio
apartment as though they’d just appeared.
Just then a car alarm blared outside and a male voice shouted, “it was before they got a
divorce!” to somebody else.
She moved her hand onto his thigh and his breath caught in his throat. “Oh,” he said
softly, when she gripped him. She continued, and so did the natural course of things, and it was
better than she usually remembered it—sex? Intimacy?—a little heightened. She was glad she
hadn’t taken the pills she’d been prescribed, which made things cottony and day-dream-like and
slowed everything down.
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“I hope that was okay,” he said after.
“It was,” she said. “Better than okay. It was. It was good.”
“Good,” he said. “Me too. I mean it was good for me too. Better than good.”
She laughed. “Well it’s not a competition.”
“What’s that?” He was pointing at a photo on her bulletin board, tacked up with other
photos—smiling girls in swimsuits piled on a raft, friends in graduation caps, an ex-boyfriend at
Disneyland. People who’d moved in and out of her life and some who were still there. “You pole
vaulted?” he asked. It was a picture of her, alone, squinting against a blue sky, holding a pole-
vaulting pole.
“Yeah,” she said. “Only in high school. I was so bad I wasn’t allowed to participate in
meets. I just goofed off, poked everybody with the stick. My sister was on the team and that’s
why I joined, because she did it. I did a lot of things because she did it.”
“It’s a nice picture,” he said.
She didn’t think it was a particularly good picture, it was sort of blurry and washed out,
but it reminded her of a nice time in her life—an easier time, an above water time—and that’s
why she kept it.
“I think your dad’s really nice, ya know,” she said. “What I said earlier about you being
the boss’s son. I dunno, that seems rude now. Your dad’s always been really nice to me.”
“He likes you a lot,” he said. “He thinks you’re ‘one of the smart ones.’” Did he know, or
could he sense somehow, how important it was that authority figures liked her?
“That’s nice,” she said, “thank you.” She wanted to take out the polaroids in her bedside
drawer, the naked ones an ex had taken a while back and show him the shovel birthmark and ask
him if it looked the same to him, if it had changed at all. Those photos, too, were from a different
175
time, when her sister still moved through the world, and the light was different in every room.
Instead, she asked about his dog, Peter.
“He’s not really a good dog,” he said. “He’s one of those big, cheerful Labradors. But he
pees every time I come home and he chews up a lot of sneakers. Plus he barks a lot.”
It was nice to think of a dog doing all those dog things, barking and chewing and panting
and running. When she closed her eyes, she thought of Peter—a big, happy dog—and she
pictured how Peter might look on her wall, frozen in a painting, rendered happy and care-free
forever.

The next morning she was in the little kitchen at work when he walked in. She was
studying a coffee pod, trying to figure out why it hadn’t punctured correctly in the machine.
“I can help with that,” he said. “It never works. We need a new Keurig.”
She let him take the pod out of her hands, and when their fingers brushed together, she
could feel the heat of him all down her. His father—her boss—cleared his throat in the doorway.
“Is he treating you okay?” his father said to her, as a joke. He was tall and silver-haired and had
the paunchy stomach of a married man. That’s how she thought of it, anyway.
“Yeah,” she said, “he is.”
She remembered a conversation she’d overheard between father and son, his father
saying, “you know how your mom is.” She’d stood in the hallway then, wanting to hear more,
the intricacies of a family that wasn’t her own.
The father left and the two remained alone in the kitchen—which seemed to be growing
smaller every moment—grinning at each other under the fluorescents.
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“Just once in my life,” her sister used to say, “oh—when have I ever wanted anything just
once in my life?” It was from a book they both liked. She hadn’t been in touch with her sister for
the last year of her sister’s life, a shame greater than any other shames in the pile. Too much had
gone on between them—too much to dig through. Her sister the risk-taker had used up all the
risks.
“I’m gonna bring Peter to the office tomorrow,” he said. She blinked at him, as though he
just appeared. “It’ll be nice to have him, right? Roaming around? Barking at the students?” He
handed her the cup of coffee. He’d fixed the machine and she hadn’t noticed. Down the hallway,
a class of students—17-year-olds, on the cusp of something—waited. They wanted to make
sense of their math problems and memorize their vocabulary; no, they wanted to get into college,
to start anew. They were waiting for something else to begin. She, too, was waiting for the future
to arrive. Like a pole vaulter coming down from great heights, or a happy dog bounding around a
sharp corner, it would appear with a great and sudden wildness.

177
THE ACTOR’S DEN

On Monday nights, Shelly goes with Jack to this bar called St. Mark’s that used to be a dive, but
is suddenly and without explanation, cool. Now, Hollywood-types fill the leather booths, with
their mussed up hair and good shoes, discussing who’s getting deals and who’s getting fired.
Shelly sees it every day, in outdoor cafes all down Third and Beverly, the agents leaning back in
their chairs, adjusting baseball caps, thumbing cell phones.
Because he’s written television for as long as Shelly has known him, Jack drags her along
on these nights, to watch staged readings of other writers’ scripts in the attic above the bar—a
cramped, airless room they call the “Actor’s Den.” The television Jack makes rarely finds its
way into peoples’ homes, but he makes it, one way or the other—even if he only guides it along
its path to destruction, like a doomsday chauffeur. The bar is dark and drafty, like an
afterthought. The owner drinks ancient scotch out of a miniature crystal glass and pulls
constantly at his handle-bar mustache. He’s a collector of old timey things. When they arrive, he
tells Jack about the two screenplays he’s writing: one comedy, one horror.
“It’s all just a veneer,” Jack whispers in Shelly’s ear, when the owner turns his back, “a
hologram image. It’s just making up for a lack of substance.” But Shelly knows he points these
things out because he is often guilty of them. It is a condition he cannot escape. This is his bread
and butter, he says, even though it tastes like shit. Mostly, he says these things while they’re both
naked, having sex, and Shelly is on top, rocking back and forth until they both forget their lives.
Shelly lives in a desolate part of town, teaching students who rarely want to learn. They
want to talk about cars and baseball and sometimes even television. Most days are like hostage
negotiations.
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“Shut up, you idiot. You stupid idiot. Get out.” She says this to herself every morning,
looking in the rear-view mirror while idling in the parking lot, debating if she should open the
door. This teaching was something she fell into, splashed hopelessly around in, like a puddle.
Now she rushes in late to class, Monday through Friday, the bottom of her pant legs wet and
dragging.
“You should write a screenplay,” Jack says, when she complains. “I could teach you.”
They met at a bar, not St. Mark’s though it might as well have been. “Life is long,” he
said, when she tried to make small talk. She liked him immediately.
I’m writing a book, she tells people, though she’s not. She has ideas, but who doesn’t?
When they press her, she talks of her influences. Chaucer, she says, and Beckett, though she’s
never read either one.
Early on, she learned that talk of literature renders television people speechless.

In the Actor’s Den, there is one row of wooden tables built into the wall, but those are
reserved for the decision makers, and the rest of them sit in fold out metal chairs, close enough to
smell the shampoo in one another’s hair.
Today, a writer in a lumberjack style flannel shirt introduces his tv pilot. “It’s a modern
day Great Gatsby,” he says, “but with teenagers.”
At St. Mark’s, they refer to the scripts as teleplays. The writer has a small, comma-
shaped mouth, as though he’s punctuating his own sentences. Inside his shirt pocket, there are
four ballpoint pens of varying length and one number two pencil, extra sharp. He is trying hard
for serious.
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“Think 90210, if it took place in the twenties,” he says finally, and then glances around
the room to cast the actors.
The actors. They are hungry—they ache with it—but they are trying for nonchalance.
Still, their voices carry, loud and animated. Regardless of their body types, their ethnicities, they
all have beautiful teeth—long, gleaming white doors. They come every Monday for a chance to
read out loud, to hold a script on its way to creation or demise, to hope one of the baseball caps
will look up from his I-phone and notice. Notice what? Shelly’s not sure, though she’s overheard
the baseball caps speak of the compelling angles of a young man’s face, and the funny, yet
heartbreaking way in which a praying-mantus-bodied actress said the word, “Hi.” No one is paid.
They call it a workshop.
Next to Shelly, a Midwestern-looking girl smiles at her. She’s new here, Shelly can tell.
The girl is too eager, too nice, and she’s dressed up in a blazer, as though on her way to a job
interview. Still, when she flips her hair back and wipes away the bangs now beginning to tendril
with sweat, Shelly sees that she is beautiful. These actresses, they know instinctively when they
are most attractive. They can turn it on and off. Jack, across the room, flips pages, speaks in an
assistant’s ear. When he looks over at Shelly in her fold out chair, he sees the Midwestern girl,
and his face changes, as though he’s been presented with a math problem or a riddle. Beautiful
women create problems for men, Shelly knows. Shelly has always been on the verge of beautiful,
her face creased with the effort of almost, and this has created a problem for her.
Jack has one rotten tooth. His head swings back in laughter, like a door opening, and
that’s what Shelly remembers while looking down the shadowy part of his throat: his rotten
tooth. Soon, the writer in flannel appears, asking the Midwestern girl to read the part of a
Midwestern teenager, fresh-faced and over-eager, is exactly how he explains it.
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“You’re supposed to be 18,” he says, “but you can pass, can’t you? However old you
are.” The actress can’t decide if this is a question to be answered out loud.
Shelly looks up from the rigid lip of her book, and he says, “Jack’s getting you a drink
downstairs. You like scotch? Whoever you are,” and Shelly says, “Not at all.”
Now, the writer and the Midwestern girl discuss the Midwestern role. She has a hint of an
accent, words curling at the edges like paper beginning to burn.
“I get it,” the actress says, sounding serious, her lips pursed, nodding deeply. Shelly notes
that the firmness with which she presses her lips will surely lead to wrinkles, then heartache, then
lip injections, then divorce. Shelly folds her arms on the table and sets her head down. She
breathes deeply, counting, like Dr. Wasserman suggested.
She feels Jack behind her. He sets her drink down with a shivery thump of glass and
places both hands on her shoulders. Shelly, too, is from the Midwest—a safe state cushioned by
other safe states, a region of slow-moving people. Here, they talk slow but their eyes dart around,
as though hunting for something just out of sight. It’s a common habit Shelly finds disconcerting.
It is exotic to have moved here for a teaching job. On her way to school, Shelly counts the palm
trees ticking by, cemented in the sidewalk. This is partly what attracts Jack to her, Shelly knows.
As it turns out, exoticism comes in many forms.
Jack whispers in her ear, “You don’t have to stay,” and Shelly says, “Neither do you,”
and then takes a long drag on her drink’s straw, like she’s wandered into some noir film. The
Midwestern girl has taken Jack’s seat. When she offers it back, he smiles in an easy, Midwestern
way. “You sit,” he says. He speaks in a tone Shelly knows well—nasal, deadpan—the one he
uses when he’s trying to win you over.
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The girl inhales the perceived kindness. Jack pulls up a chair and wedges himself behind
the two women, in the triangular gap between them.
On the other side of Shelly, yellow-haired girls are quoting Shakespeare. No, Shelly turns
to see, they are simply reading from a script. They are trying out for an off-off-off Broadway
play.
“It’s all happening in New York,” says one blonde to the other. “Brooklyn’s the only
place to be,” the girl continues, and Shelly feels old, past her mother old, lowering into the
ground, grandfather clock old. This week alone, she’s heard this Brooklyn refrain at least a dozen
times.
“How’s that script look?” Jack asks the Midwestern girl, leaning over her shoulder where
he can surely smell the citrus notes in her shampoo. In her mind, Shelly has begun to refer to the
girl as Daisy.
Daisy nods excitedly before she speaks. “Oh it’s good. Really great. A lot of depth.”
Jack smiles in his hemmed in way, though of course, Daisy probably thinks that’s all
there is; she’s receiving him in his entirety. It took me years to get the full thing, Shelly thinks,
but the thought is too depressing to dwell on. And what she has isn’t full, not at all. What has she
been doing all this time? Her life has a funny way of moving on without her.
“Do you direct?” Daisy asks Jack, “you look familiar.” He smiles, pressing his fingers
into a church steeple.
“No,” he says, poking Shelly’s back with the steeple. Jack is Jewish, but in the casual,
dinner party way. It hardly counts. Another thing he likes about Shelly, she thinks: her waspy-
ness. Her hemmed in Midwestern sensibility.
182
“I write television,” he says. “But you should talk to her.” He gestures toward Shelly.
“She’s writing a book.”
“Are you?” Daisy asks, and Shelly says, “No.”
Daisy’s smile trembles, unsure.
“I’m just teaching,” Shelly says. “I’m just hanging around in bars.”
“Do you act?” Daisy persists.
“She’s never tried,” Jack says. “But she should.”
Daisy nods. “You have a very animated face,” she tells Shelly, who can’t decide if that’s
a compliment.

The flannel shirt clears his throat, scraping his Doc Martins on the small wooden stage.
“If we’re all ready,” he says, and when nobody responds, he continues, “Let’s get all the actors
up here.” The fold out chairs snaking across the stage gradually fill. Pages flip. Throats hum.
While rushing to stand up, Daisy hits Jack in the knee with her chair.
“Don’t worry,” he says, “they won’t start without you.”
Her laugh is high pitched, as though she’s unsure whether to believe him. When she
fishes in her too large purse for a mirror, Shelly sees the purse is almost empty. The cheap fabric
swallows Daisy’s small hand. Shelly knows this girl: she lost her virginity late; she takes
Christmas card photos every year by a lake, Mallard ducks in the background. For Grandma’s
card, she draws a speech bubble above one of the Mallards, “Miss you.”
But when Daisy approaches the stage, flipping her hair back, flashing yards of denim leg,
Shelly remembers that she’s beautiful. Somehow, at exactly the same time, Shelly feels Jack
remember too.
183

Moving down the row of chairs, each actor introduces himself and the part he’ll be
reading. Some character-types: round-bellied, red-faced. Some long and lean. There’s a nerd, a
leading man, a harried housewife. A black girl with a springy afro, sliding an ice cube across her
neck. Beautiful teeth, all down the row. The room grows hotter. Each actor speaks too loudly, as
though warming up, the expressions on their faces loose like elastic. Each has the buzzing, pried-
open quality of coming alive on stage. Here, wings fan out, colors brighten.
Shelly, in the audience, feels her ass go tender from the hard, metal chair. She has the
thin lipped, squinty-eyed quality of rarely being watched.
During the reading, Shelly’s attention span drifts—spools near and far, thin as twine. The
only line which hooks her attention, is the one lifted from Fitzgerald’s book. Though in this, the
harried housewife shouts it: “I hope she’s a fool! A beautiful, little fool!” End scene. The room
bursts in applause, like a flower opening.

Afterward, the actors and writers mill around. Those who descend from the stage are
glowing, as though Chinese lanterns have been lit just behind their cheeks.
“What did you think?” the flannel asks Jack. After Jack sings his praises, the writer turns
toward Shelly.
“I think the kids I teach would like it,” she says. It’s neither a compliment nor an insult,
merely a fact.
“You teach them Gatsby?” the writer asks.
“No,” she says, and turns away.

184
Downstairs, she orders a drink. A Bloody Mary, though it’s late. Through the window,
there’s a thin, white wisp of a moon. “Very little blood,” she tells the bartender. “Mostly Mary.”
She thinks of her students—what do they like? Poking each other with rulers. Talking
over her while she speaks. Revving their engines in the parking lot. But there is more to them,
she knows, she simplifies to make a point—she always has.
Before she met Jack, on nights when she was lonely, she would try to masturbate and cry
at the same time. It seemed poetic, though it always proved too difficult. Inevitably, she’d have
to do one then the other. She’d never been very good at multi-tasking.
Some of her students are smart and creative. Some of them are hopeful. They are
hemmed in by circumstances—where they grew up, who raised them. Like me, Shelly thinks, but
that isn’t true. She moved here. She chose her circumstances. She chose Jack and all that he
entails. Really, what little he entails—what small amount he requires from her. Wouldn’t it be
nice to be required to give something huge? To give and give and give and still never give
enough.
The bartender hands her the Bloody Mary and she asks to put it on Jack’s tab. Down here
at the bar, the attic sounds like a party—stomping feet and lilting laughter. Up there, it’s only
people aching for things.
“What’s your boyfriend’s last name again?” the bartender asks, a Minnesota accent
rounding his words. He has floppy, surfer boy hair and a square jaw. Shelly wonders if he wishes
he were upstairs.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Shelly says, but she still gives his name.

185
In the Actor’s Den, she scans the room for Jack, then for the Midwestern girl. She doesn’t
find either one. She sits down in her chair. Moments later, Daisy appears at her side, flushed. She
seems bursting to talk, so in an act of kindness, Shelly says, “Great reading, by the way.”
This is enough to open the floodgates: the baseball caps she’s talked to and what they’ve
said. She moved here from Arizona, Daisy says, Tucson. Actually, her name is Janet. But Shelly
refuses to believe it. She’s from the Midwest, this Daisy, she must be. All the while, Shelly
watches for Jack over Daisy’s head. This is how she’s become one of them: talking slowly, eyes
darting, looking for something just out of sight.
She stays through another pilot, then the first act of a movie. Finally, intermission: Jack
appears. A blonde hovers near his ear, one of the Shakespeare readers, biding her time until the
Big Apple! That’s how she’d say it, Shelly thinks, Big Apple! Or maybe not. She’s probably far
cooler than that, far cooler than Shelly was at her age. Across the room, Jack wears his problem-
solving face. This blonde, she’s causing a problem, Shelly sees. He’s listening to the girl talk—
about what? Shelly can guess: about depth, about Brooklyn, about Scorcese and Claire Danes.
He thumbs through his business cards. When she takes one, he pulls at the end of her blonde
hair. He leans close, as though sniffing for something. This is not LA Jack, or Midwestern Jack.
She’s not sure who it is. Rotten tooth, Shelly thinks, disgusting rotten tooth. Another writer
approaches the stage, a petite woman with cropped hair. She wears dangly earrings in the shape
of Texas.
“I’m gonna leave,” Shelly whispers to Janet from Tucson.
This is not the first time Jack has spread himself thin, cut himself up and offered what
little there was to everyone at the bar.
186
“Wait,” formerly Daisy says, “You’re so nice. Let me take your number.” But already,
there’s a baseball cap motioning for Daisy/Janet to stand. Good for you, Shelly thinks, tiptoeing
down the slanted staircase. Knock them all dead.

On her way home, the sky is dark, filled with movement, oceanic. Shelly hates the
ocean—it makes her nervous, the way it seems to stretch out beyond her grasp. She hates outer
space too, the idea of infinity. Shadows of palm trees, safe in their cement, tick by. She thinks of
all the men she’s loved, and all the plans she’s had. She feels small.

Hours later, in her bedroom, lying face down on the strange smelling duvet, her phone
rings. “What are you doing?” Jack asks, that funny, serrated edge to his voice he adopts when he
wants Shelly to forgive him. He doesn’t ask why she left.
“I’m masturbating,” she says.
“No you’re not.”
“How would you know?”
“I’d be able to tell,” he says.
“Would you?” She moans once, loudly. “See, done.”
“Let me come over then,” he says. “Let me help.”
She hears the rustle of his breath against the mouthpiece. “Why?” she asks. “And ruin my
fun?”
“You’re not happy with me,” he says, using the same voice. She can hear him readjust, as
though battening down his hatches, as though preparing for a storm.
“I’m just tired.”
187
“Life is long,” he says, and she nods, knowing he can’t see her. She catches her reflection
in the mirror above her dresser, and she wonders if she always looks like this: on the verge of
something. Sallow, average. She is not quite. She is almost. Downstairs, her Ethiopian landlord
watches television, and thinks—Shelly is certain—of home.
“It’s part of my job,” he tells her. “Talking with the actors. It’s part of networking. It’s
my bread and butter.”
Placing the phone in the hollow of her chest, she stares at the wall and tries to conjure up
the Midwest. She pictures lakes with Mallard ducks. Daisy scanning a script, stretching her long
horse legs. A dimly lit community theater stage, and in the periphery, a red, threadbare curtain
left piled in the dark. She can picture Daisy’s dreams piled there too, thrumming quietly in the
velvet, waiting.
Shelly’s heart beats, lonely in her chest. She nudges the phone, so Jack can hear it. She
thinks of her heart as lonely, literally, looking around for the lungs, the kidneys. Where is
everybody? She pictures her heart with a face: beady eyes, thin lips. Then she reminds herself to
breathe—the good, deep breathing—like Dr. Wasserman suggested. She feels the vibration of
Jack’s voice on her ribcage. It sounds like he’s humming, like he’s an actor warming up. She
hangs up the phone. Heart, she thinks, be still.

“Hey you,” she shouts, lumbering into St. Mark’s again, a coat over her arm. She’s
talking to the flannelled writer. Alone, at the bar, he could be a lumberjack. Everybody else has
left. He could be anyone.
“I remember you,” he says.
188
She presses the pad of her pointer finger to the very sharp pencil still in his pocket. Then,
as though acting out her own asinine script, she says, “Hm. Sharp.”
When he buys her a drink, she tells him she’s writing a movie. “Two,” she says, “One
comedy, one horror.”
“What’s the comedy about?”
“It’s sort of sad,” she says.
“A dramedy?’ he asks.
But Shelly doesn’t know what that is. “Maybe.”
“Based on a book?” he presses. His eyes narrow: half interested, half annoyed. People
don’t like their bread and butter squandered.
“Based on a life,” she says. And then she folds her arms across the bar, rocks her head
forward, hides her face behind her hair. She wonders if he can see her teeth, if she looks
beautiful, if she looks shy. She can act. It’s not that hard.
“Isn’t this place weird,” he says, and suddenly—like a door opening—she likes him.
For a moment, she catches her reflection in a glass as the bartender moves it, but she’s
careful not to look too closely. What she sees is a smudge, a brown haired blur. She sees herself
in motion.
“Tell me about your screenplay,” the man says, again.
And so the story of a life, filled with longing and mystery, begins.

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DESERT TOWN

For a while, I lived in a tiny, hell-hot border town in between California and Nevada. This was
the summer everyone worried about me. It was a strange place to live, with so many people
passing through, stopping briefly and meanly with their flat tires and steaming, overheated
engines. They’d stand in the shade of their opened car hoods, demanding assistance. When you
finally came to their aid, they’d watch sadly while you changed their tires, like you didn’t even
know how bad you had it. Poor thing, they’d think, there’s a whole world outside. But the town
wasn’t all bad. If you stayed long enough, you might think it was cozy.
I told my friends and family I’d moved for a job teaching at the local high school, but I
was only editing textbooks. I was approaching forty, and time had scattered and married off all
of my old friends and ex-lovers. It made sense to me to be among other people’s old friends and
ex-lovers. And anyway, I worked from home—it didn’t matter where I lived. I specialized in
biology and chemistry, though I’d always received poor grades in science. I just had an
expansive vocabulary I rarely used out loud. Occasionally, I wrote poetry, but nobody
understood it. Not even me.

One Sunday, I called my best friend, Suzy, and told her I was thinking of making movies.
“How do you plan on doing that?” she asked. I was walking down the aisles of the town’s
7-11, the fluorescent light shouting its reflection up from the polished floor.
“How does anyone do it?” I asked. “You just buy a camera. You make up your mind and
you point it at things.”
“Make up your mind? You’ve never been very good at that,” she said, and I hung up on
her.
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When I tired of poetry, I would call my old friends and try to talk to them about my life.
Not Suzy, because she always gave me trouble. When they didn’t answer, I called my mother.
The town had a lot of open porches, and in the summer, it was too hot for anyone to come out of
their houses and shoo you away. It was too hot for most everything.
“The thing is,” I said to her, “I have so many feelings. I feel heavy, you know, weighed
down.” With the phone tucked under my chin, I twisted my hands together, as though I were
wringing myself out. Across the street, a group of kids blared hip-hop music from their low
rider—a dented red boat of a car I figured they would never fix up. I felt unusually sad about
that. “Mother, I am overflowing with feelings,” I said, over the noise. “I’m practically
drowning.”
“No you’re not,” she said.
“I’m approaching menopause.”
“Get some exercise,” she said. “Menopause is a ways off.”
“It’s too hot.”
“Take a swim,” she said, and I set the phone down on the porch. What did she know?
She’d welcomed menopause with a newfound bridge club. She bought magnets with pithy
sayings about chocolate and red wine. Right now, she was probably sitting at home on her sofa,
waiting for me to finish talking, studying her paused television. Or maybe she had a whole
fascinating life she didn’t want me stepping on. She lived in a condo in California, and when her
second husband died, she would tell anyone who asked, “I still feel him in the water.” It was
only later I realized she’d dumped his ashes in the Pacific without telling anyone.
I lifted the phone again. “Life is just too long,” I said.
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“What’s with you,” she said. “Are you on drugs?”
“No!” I shouted. “I’m a teacher, for God’s sake.”

The thing is, I did do drugs occasionally. Mostly pot, which I scored from a lanky kid
with a pencil-sketched mustache, who stationed himself behind the 7-11. At first, I pretended as
though I’d found myself there by accident, or I was simply doing research, my nose held high,
my voice dull and even. He never smiled, but nodded sagely, and after a while, I stopped
noticing the Orion’s belt of acne scars across one of his bare shoulders and I told him I only
wanted the Grim Reaper, the strongest strain he had. Don’t tell anyone, I said. I’m a pillar of this
community, I said.
“Listen lady,” he’d responded, “who am I gonna tell?” Once, I asked him if he’d ever
read my textbooks. He said he didn’t know for sure, but probably not.
I spent a lot of time high, in my darkened room, the covers pulled up to my chin and the
air conditioner rattling. I’d get the room so cold it goose-bumped every inch of exposed skin. I
think it goes without saying: it hadn’t always been this way. I’d had a marriage once—a life.
Now, I found the misery of small town life and endless sun a big draw. I thought maybe it
would teach me something about myself. In retrospect, I was tired and lonely, and looking for a
place to reflect that. I wanted so many things I didn’t know how to ask for.
No, that’s not right. What I wanted was probably very simple, and therefore terrifying to
ever ask for outright: a connection, I guess, a little bit of intimacy—I’d had it once, but I’d lost it
somewhere. In the desert, there was a lot of open space. Love could easily hide there. It could
come out from behind a gray, squat building and find you. What a place. I felt hidden in plain
sight.
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Later that same day, while I browsed the new mixed nut selection at 7-11, my friend Suzy
called again and told me her little sister was pregnant.
“What happened to her boyfriend?” I asked. I remembered he was also seventeen, but
looked older, tan and tightly muscled. I’d seen his photo on Facebook and had felt a brief but
embarrassing brand of arousal I thought I’d long since stashed away somewhere, on a very high
shelf I could no longer reach.
“He disappeared. Couldn’t commit to raising a baby.”
“That’s a shame,” I said.
“He couldn’t make up his mind about anything,” Suzy said, and I hung up on her.

High noon, and the horizon wiggled in the heat. That week, I started doing errands for my
downstairs neighbor, a middle-aged man with a young son. The man’s most remarkable
characteristic was his complete lack of chin—his mouth led right down to his neck. He always
offered to pay me for the odd jobs, but I usually refused. It felt good to be useful, and often while
being useful, I hid in the shade to smoke pot, so it felt doubly good.
While I weeded in the front yard, the single, chinless father approached me for a talk.
Dog posed on my hands and knees, I noticed his shadow falling across the dry dirt in front of me
and my heart banged in my throat. I assumed he was going to ask if I was on drugs.
“Laura,” he said. “Can I ask you something?” My thoughts flitted away like scared,
stoned birds.
“Sure,” I said, sitting up to face him. We were in the thick grip of summer and I could
feel my scalp sweating. I smelled my own tropical scented deodorant.
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“Do you think you can watch Ellis for a few days?” he asked. Ellis was his son. He was
smiley and well behaved and hypo-glycemic. As far as children went, I liked him.
“Okay,” I said, because the other stoned bird thoughts were up in some tree, and this
desert town had no trees.
Plus, there had been a moment with the chinless father a few weeks prior, and I still felt I
owed him something. He’d taken me to dinner at the one and only sit-down restaurant in town.
He’d worn a sport coat and combed gel into his hair. When he picked me up, I hadn’t even
smoked anything. But when our second glasses of Chianti arrived, he asked too many questions.
I felt on edge, accused of something. The truth was, he probably only wanted to talk about
himself, and was just starting the conversation on me to be polite. I was out of practice. I forgot
how these things went—the volleying of questions, the way a too tight sports coat looked on a
first date. I spent too much time alone—any prolonged question asking became an Inquisition. I
excused myself and lit up in the narrow alley behind the building. When I came back, he said he
felt tired, and I agreed. I was tired.

“So Ellis,” I said, the two of us sitting on his father’s porch. “What should we do today?”
Ellis had a porch, and I, who lived above him, only had a metal step, which led to other metal
steps and finally down to dirt. The injustice of this I still feel today.
“Let’s go to the fair,” he said. “Nights are free at the fair.”
“It’s a few hours away,” I told him.
Ellis had a pale complexion, and the wispy, swept-back hair of an aging man. “We have
time,” he said.
“How old are you?” I asked.
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“Nine,” he said. “How old are you?”
“Never mind,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Ellis was right about having the time. In the desert, time crawled across the sand and
often stilled, dazed, like a sun-bathing lizard. It felt like a trick, the way the hours seemed to
lengthen. But it wasn’t all bad. In the car with Ellis, the sky was silky pink and beautiful. Sunsets
gave the whole scene—the whole town—a new meaning, made me feel part of something
profound and underestimated. Once, I wrote a poem called “Still Life in Sunset” but nobody
understood it, not even me.
We drove down the town’s wide, black streets, named after semi-precious stones. On
Garnet, Ellis started waving at a willowy kid spinning donuts on a scooter and insisted I pull
over.
“Hey Vincent,” Ellis shouted. In my ear, he said, “That’s Vincent. He babysits me
sometimes.”
It took me a while to recognize Vincent, the way you hear your mother’s name and can’t
immediately place it, because you only ever call her Mom. Vincent had bare, sun-darkened
shoulders and a pencil sketched mustache. Occasionally, Vincent sold me pot.
Through Ellis’ window, Vincent said, “Hey lady,” and looked quickly away, his face
sheepish. He nodded at Ellis, “Where you going?”
“To the fair,” Ellis said. “Wanna come?”
Vincent looked at his watch-less wrist and shrugged. Then he looked over at me, in a way
I could only describe as hopeful, and I said, “sure Vincent, come.” He wore a white tank top and
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long black shorts that draped over his knees. His Adam’s apple bulged, looking very
pronounced. He seemed very young just then.
“That cool?” he asked, and I revved the engine in response, though I drove an old VW
Rabbit, so it hardly revved.

We left the town behind, a scattering of squat buildings in the rear view mirror. Under the
cool pink-orange sky, it could have been any desert postcard from so far away. The town only
seemed gray and grease-stained up close.
“All the houses look like turtle shells,” Ellis said, and I agreed.
We drove through Joshua trees and stillness, the yellow headlights extending through the
dark and into more darkness beyond that. Nobody spoke for a while, and it was so quiet I forgot
myself, forgot my own presence in the car. Finally, Vincent said, “Your dad went to find Lainie,
I guess.”
“Who’s Lainie?” I asked.
“My sister,” Ellis said. He had an expression like this should have been obvious. Kids
think everyone should know the intimate details of their lives.
“I didn’t know you had a sister,” I said.
“We followed her here. But then she left again,” he said, “and we stayed.”
“Your dad’s a good man,” Vincent said. “He’d follow that girl into any shit hole and try
to pull her out.”
“Where does Lainie live now?” I asked.
“Somewhere else hot. In New Mexico I think. We’re from Utah,” he said. “We’ll go back
once we get her.”
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“Your dad just took you out of school?” I asked. “Brought you on some wild goose
chase?”
“What’s a wild goose chase?”
“He’s a good man,” Vincent said, and I shut up about it. I hadn’t taken Ellis’ dad for the
type of man who would hunt for someone, chase down his daughter, pick up his life and drop it
off somewhere new. Watering his plants with a mild expression, his hand smoothing over his
bald spot, he seemed more like a man who would shrug his shoulders and accept the way things
turned out. Maybe he was just thoughtful—the quiet, serious type. I wished I’d paid more
attention. People are always mistaking weaknesses for strengths and strengths for weaknesses.
The car went quiet again, except for the rattling of Vincent’s scooter in the trunk. Ellis
rolled the window down and the hot wind whistled through the car and stung the rims of my ears
until I gestured for him to roll it up again. The sky was low and bruised. A big-rig rumbled by
and Ellis waved.
“Do you hear from her often?” I asked. “Your sister?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “But she’s usually upset. It’s hard to understand her.”
I wondered about Ellis’ sister, what she was chasing, or running from, if a man was
involved. I hoped it was more complicated—she’d become enmeshed in a drug-mule-trafficking
scheme or she’d had a nervous breakdown and started hearing voices. But then I looked over at
Ellis, rubbing the length of his face with a palm, looking like he’d just finished a full day in a
factory handling heavy machinery. I hoped his sister’s problem was as simple as a broken heart
or a bad investment. Of course, those things had a way of doubling back and complicating
themselves. Maybe she was just taking some time out—getting her head straight, as my mother
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used to say. Whatever she was doing, she must have known everyone was worried. In my
experience, life meant doing the wrong thing despite everything you knew.
“I always wanted a sister,” I said, after a while.
“I got four, and they’re all crazy,” said Vincent, from the back seat. “You can have one.”
I thought of my friend Suzy, of her little sister, her stomach growing full and heavy with
another life. I remembered when Suzy’s little sister was born, by accident, and Suzy was old
enough to be her teenage mother. Even more clearly, I remembered when Suzy’s sister was a
toddler, and we’d tied her on a leash and dragged her around. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. In the
home videos, she’s smiling.
The more I thought about it, the more I would have liked to become pregnant so young—
it provided a neat, easy solution for all of your future failures and disappointments. “Well you
know,” you could later say, “I would have gone to business school, but I had a kid so early.” And
everyone would feel pity for your misplaced potential. “She made that one mistake,” people
would say. “She had that one night with the flickering candles and the lying, no-good-son-of-a-
bitch who told her he loved her.”
That happens to girls when they are young and know no better. Sometimes, it happens to
women when they are old and should know better.
Having a child would ease a lot of life’s pressure, which weighs heavier and heavier each
passing year, until you move to a tiny, armpit desert town and think of no one and nothing but
your shiny square of freedom. I thought about that as we drove—how free I was—free, free, free,
like a thoughtless, stoned bird.

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When we stopped at a gas station, I called Suzy. “I’m sorry to hear about your sister,” I
said. “And I’m sorry I keep hanging up on you.” I was leaning against the pump, waving at more
truckers as they passed. “I bet it won’t be so bad for her.”
“Yeah,” she said, “you’re probably right.” I heard the soles of her sneakers echoing
against linoleum, meaning she was at work. “What are you doing?” she asked, a little breathless.
Suzy was a nurse, which she’d always planned on, ever since we were kids. I think Suzy is a
good nurse name. It is simple and kind, like a cabbage patch doll chosen by a child.
“I’m going to the fair,” I said.
“Where is it?”
“In the desert.”
“Who with? A date?”
“Some kids,” I said.
“Why?’
“Don’t make me hang up on you again.”
“Fine,” she said. “Do what you want.”
“You bet,” I said, but I sounded off-kilter, my voice too high.
“I’m worried about you,” Suzy said, before I hung up. Who isn’t, I thought, but I told her,
“Don’t be.”
I stood by the gas pump after the tank was full, watching the boys in the car. Vincent was
showing Ellis something on the screen of his cell phone, stretching up from the back seat where
he perched on his knees. It was probably pornography. I thought about a lot of different things,
standing there. I watched two more big rigs pass, and I pictured the men inside. I felt the
presence of my heart in my chest and I willed it to slow. Suddenly, I wanted to make a big
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decision—make a change in my life—but I’d never been very good at that. The last big decisions
I’d made weren’t very good ones.
“Let’s go,” I said rapping on the car window. “It’s already eight.”

“How late you stay up nowadays?” Vincent asked Ellis, when we were back on the road.
I felt sorry I hadn’t asked. Ellis looked over at me and made a thoughtful face. “I can stay
up late when there are special circumstances,” he said, and I ruffled his hair like he was my own
flesh and blood—a little, aging man sprung from my own aging loins.
“You’ve eaten enough?” I asked, feeling proud I’d at least thought of that.
“Sure,” he said. “I eat whatever.” Vincent handed him a thick shred of beef jerky, the
sweet, processed meat smell wafting through the car.
“Have some,” Vincent said to me, and I did.

Here’s what a desert fair looks like during the summer everyone worried about me:
another expanse of sand and cacti and desert flowers, but covered by the grinding, colorful eye-
sores called carnival rides—the tilt-a-whirl and backstabber, the pirate ship and brain thumper.
There was an old wooden sign, but it had cracked in half, so it only read “—INGS FAIR” and
even those letters were faded. The people were mostly overweight, far too excited in their
hooded sweatshirts and ill-fitting jeans. But who was I to judge? I had two children with me who
weren’t my own, whom I barely knew. I was practically a kidnapper. In line, locals told me the
fair had sprung up as though overnight, the rides and games they could see from their windows. I
talked to an older couple, an oxygen tube attached to the woman’s nose. Her husband held the
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tank, which was covered in flowered fabric and had wheels, but he was careful not to drag it too
quickly. That’s nice, I thought. That is almost romantic.
“We can’t sleep through the noise,” the woman said. When she lifted her arms, the skin
hung off and wobbled. “We figured we might as well join in,” she said. Laughter drifted over
from the tilt-a-wheel.
“If you can’t beat them,” the man said, nodding. “So here we are.”
“That’s right,” said the woman, worrying her oxygen tube with her fingertips. She took a
shallow breath. “So here we are.”
When it was my turn to pay, I said, “Three please.”
“If you’re this late, it’s free,” said the small, wizened woman at the turn-style. She
stamped each of our hands with the inky, blurred image of a dinosaur.
“Life is grand,” I said, studying my hand.

Once inside, the boys wanted to go on the upside-down rides, and I sat at a blue painted
picnic table and watched them. I ran my fingers along the wood, feeling around for splinters. I
found no less than four, pressing the pads of my fingers into the wood as hard as I could before
bursting the skin. I hadn’t always courted pain. In high school, Suzy spent a summer threatening
to cut herself, and I begged her not to and she didn’t. Suzy was always dramatic, even then.
Once, I’d been a voice of reason.
Ellis kept running back to the table and telling me about the last ride they’d been on—if
he felt sick or elated—and I acted like he was telling me something new, even though I could
often see him on the rides from where I sat, and his face always betrayed him. I held his box of
gas station crackers and offered them whenever he appeared. Vincent followed a little behind, as
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though watching over Ellis, but he couldn’t conceal his enjoyment. Even when he wasn’t
smiling, there was a hint of it behind his lips, a gloss of happiness lingering there. When he did
smile, I noticed one of his canines was capped in silver. This aged him, I thought, but not in a
bad way.
Ellis looked exactly nine years old, cresting the top of the night sky in the rattling metal
ferris wheel, and Vincent looked younger than he probably was, and happy. His mustache and
silver tooth, his profession—I had trouble deciphering his age. I liked that about him, as though
he were a mythological creature, ageless, making his way through the world with whatever he
found, like a young Johnny Appleseed.
I tried picturing myself at nine, then at fifteen, seventeen. I tried picturing myself in my
twenties. I saw familiar faces, but they weren’t mine. They were probably from movies I’d
watched.
When the boys appeared again, I handed Vincent a ten dollar bill so he and Ellis could go
play a few games, win a useless over-sized teddy bear or a hat with rabbit ears. It was odd,
handing him money and not getting a small, plastic bag in exchange. I felt a little ashamed about
the drug deals now, but Vincent showed no signs of remembering our previous encounters. What
was it about men—even young—that allowed them such an uncanny ability to
compartmentalize?
When I was married, briefly, I’d existed in a compartment for most of that time. My
husband would walk through the door and look at me as though I were somebody new. For a
moment, we had a child—or thought we did—but he or she never came to fruition. It was
complicated. Or maybe it wasn’t. Either way, I’m sure I stayed longer because of that. Shortly
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after, I moved to the desert, feeling liberated and alone. At first, I refused to answer phone calls.
Later, people refused to answer mine.

“I think I’ll sit here by you,” said the woman with the oxygen tube. I waved her over,
happy for the company. Her cheeks were pink and moist with sweat. As it turned out, carnivals
were hard work. This time, she dragged her own tank. The night had turned cold, and she wore a
shearling coat over a pilling, Peptobismal-colored sweater. “My husband’s on the tilt-a-whirl,”
she said, though I hadn’t asked. I thought that was strange, her husband riding by himself, but I
kept my mouth shut.
“Your kids having fun?” she asked. Ellis and Vincent were at a nearby booth, squirting
streams of water into clowns’ gaping mouths.
“Yeah,” I said, “they love it.”
“One’s got a different dad?” she asked. Presumptuous, I thought, but I didn’t mind.
“Adopted,” I said. “I don’t know much about his dad. Chuck was his name. He was a
truck driver, but with an extremely high I.Q. Could have been a physicist, but loved driving
trucks. Passionate about it. He always followed his passions. It says that on his tombstone.”
“He’s dead?”
“So I hear,” I said.
She shut her eyes for a moment and I wondered if she were thinking of another life she’d
once led. I almost asked. Instead, I shoved a wad of cotton candy in my mouth, until it dissolved
on my tongue into a sickening mass of sugar. Finally I did ask.
“I was a schoolteacher,” she said. “What do you do?”
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I thought I’d tell her I was a movie person, make up an elaborate lie about a film I’d been
shooting—a heist at the local 7-11. I looked over at her, working hard on breathing, and I felt too
tired to lie. “I edit textbooks,” I said. “I’m pretty good at it, actually. Sometimes I edit even when
I’m stoned, but I can still do it just as well. I’m that good.”
“Oh, lord,” she said, widening her eyes. “My daughter loves that stuff too. It’s easy to
find now I guess. It didn’t use to be.” She hawked up something like a laugh, and I had the urge
to stroke her perm, brush the hair behind her ears. I had become very maternal all of a sudden.
Instead, I watched Ellis and Vincent. They looked concentrated, holding their water guns.
I wanted to say something specific about the boys—one loved gymnastics or still wet the bed—
but I couldn’t access anything. I just kept staring, opening and closing my mouth like a slowly
swimming fish. Next to me, the woman breathed through her tube, awkward puffs of breath,
each one distinct. I could have told her everything, but I had some principles left. I wasn’t sure
where these principles had come from, but they lingered regardless. A couple of teenagers
walked by, the girl dressed in black rags, black studded jewelry, black eye-shadow—even her
hair dyed that way. This was probably a direct message to her father.
“My daughter did that for a while too,” the woman said, gesturing toward the girl.
“Kids will do that,” I said.
We heard a sudden commotion over by the games, a cloud of people circling. The bell—
signaling someone had won—was trilling. Through a gap in the crowd, I saw Vincent lying
there. I hurried over, the woman dragging her oxygen tank behind me. “Make way,” she shouted.
“Mother coming through.”
I could picture her as a schoolteacher then, it wasn’t hard.
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“What happened?” I yelled. Two athletic-looking men in pristine paramedic outfits had
come to kneel on the ground next to Vincent. They looked excited to be doing anything. Another
paramedic showed his palms, urging all of us to stand back. Vincent was propped up on a
gurney, and one of the uniformed men made slow gestures around his face, as though conducting
a show.
“Some guy socked him,” Ellis told me, in a remarkably calm voice he’d probably used on
his sister. “Vincent knew him, and they were talking for a while, like in a weird fake friendly
way. Then the guy said Vincent knew what was coming, and not to fight it. He just knocked him
down. One punch, real hard.”
“Where’s the guy now?” I asked.
“Oh, gone. I’m sure,” said the old woman behind me. I could hear her labored breathing.
Vincent’s nose gushed blood. He looked paint splattered. If pressed, I could list the particular
parts of the nose, the very parts responsible for all of that blood, due to a physiology textbook I’d
recently worked on.
“I’m responsible,” I said, though nobody asked. The paramedic still had his palms up.
Around us, more mothers and excited children strained on their tiptoes for a look. There were
enough people to fill a classroom. “I’m here, Vinnie,” I shouted, though I didn’t know if anyone
called him that.
“Maybe we should call his mom,” Ellis said, and I shushed him.
“I’m here,” I said, my face edging over the paramedic’s arm. I waved my hand in
Vincent’s periphery. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m hungry,” Ellis said softly.
“Shush,” I said. “I’m here.”
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“No seriously, I don’t feel well.”
“God damn it,” I said, shielding his eyes with my palm. “Don’t look at the blood.”
One of the good-looking paramedics approached me, starting in with his questions. I still
held a plastic wrapped wad of cotton candy. “You his mother?” he asked.
“Sure is,” said the old woman, behind me.
I could feel an awareness emanating from Ellis, a ticking in the air as though he had
antennae twitching around, struggling to soak it all in. This was a kid who’d spent most of his
life soaking it in—absorbing other peoples’ bad decisions. I pushed the cotton candy into his
palm and squeezed.
“I’m hypo-glycemic,” he said.
“Not now,” I shushed him.
There were more questions, enough to make my head swim. They started specific: Blood
type? Allergies to any medication? When I couldn’t answer those, the questions became both
louder and more general: Did I see it happen? How old is he? Nearby, I could hear the rattle of
rides, the joyful screams.
“Stop badgering her,” the old woman said, putting a heavy hand on my shoulder. “How
old is he, honey?”
“Sixteen,” Ellis piped up. I shook his shoulder in appreciation. My savior.
By this time, Vincent was sitting up on the gurney, conscience but dull-eyed, getting
dabbed at with cotton swabs. “Seventeen next week,” he said, to everyone. He was holding one
of his own bloody cotton pads in his hands, looking sick from the sight of it.
“This has to change,” I said. “I’m worried about you.”
Ellis nodded in agreement, hands in his hair.
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“Mothers never stop worrying,” the woman said, behind me. “We can’t help it.”

207
ONLY A JOKE

I kissed someone for the first time last night. It wasn’t the first time I kissed anyone but it was
the first time I kissed this person. He’s about to be famous—or already is, a little. He tells jokes
on stage. He’s done this for years, and only now does it make him money, does it get him
recognized in a coffee shop on Melrose or in line at the DMV, this ability to make mountains out
of mole hills; and the mole hills are his family, his friends, his relationships, all of his neuroses,
those thorns that he’s taken out of his side and plunged into yours.
This particular night, someone walked up to him and quoted a line from his own life right
to his face. At least, it was a version of his life—his staged life. We were in a sleek, dark bar on
Venice, the walls metallic, and I’d drunk enough red wine so that you could see the shadow of it
on my teeth. I only noticed the reddish stain later, in my own bathroom mirror, and I thought,
shit.
I’m in my twenties, and I’ve kissed a lot of people, depending on what you think a lot is.
I think it’s a lot in that I can’t name them all; I can’t say for sure that some of them were ever
given names. For all I know, they could have wandered the world nameless up until the moment
we kissed, and then after that, who knows.
My date was bending his head toward mine, holding a cranberry juice because he doesn’t
drink, and I was wondering if my breath smelled sickly sweet, like it does sometimes after too
much wine. That’s when a guy wearing a baseball cap and fitted jeans approached, and asked my
date if he really was the comedian, and once that fact was verified, told him the joke.
My date nodded good-naturedly. “Glad you liked that,” he said.
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The joke was about depression, and the guy in the baseball cap said, “Is that true? I mean,
I’m guessing it’s like sort of true?” And my date said, “Exactly.”
This guy—this fan—didn’t walk away. He stood there, nodding, his baseball cap looking
hopeful in its stiffness, and I understood what he was waiting for: to see the person on stage
come to life right here in this bar. My date shouts on stage—he yells at audience members, but in
his daily life, he’s soft-spoken, you have to lean in near his mouth to hear what he’s saying.
That’s what I did to hear what he said next, I leaned forward, and he said, “you want a
picture, man?” and the fan said, “Nah, I just wanted to buy you a drink or something,” and my
date said, “I don’t drink.”
The man said, “Oh I thought you talked about drinking on stage,” and my date said, “I
probably did.”
“Ah, I get it,” the man said, “just a joke,” he said, “only a joke,” and he pumped my
date’s hand again, one too many times.
“That happens sometimes,” my date said, after the man left, and I said, “I know,” though
I didn’t really.
This was before we kissed, but after he said I seemed difficult to read, that I didn’t wear
my feelings on my sleeve, did I wear them at all?
“They’re in my back pocket, bundled up like dirty underwear,” I said, as a joke.
I also tell jokes on stage but I’m not famous and they’re not always funny. That’s how we
met, at a show. I was the opening act and he was the headliner.
“We’re the bookends,” he said, when we shook hands. Already, he’d seemed different
than he was on stage, and in that margin of difference I noticed the shape of his lips, which I
liked.
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Now my date leaned close and said, “you’re one tough customer.” Normally I think that’s
just something men say when they’re wondering how difficult it will be to see you naked, but it
didn’t feel predatory coming from him, just curious. “I wonder if it’s even possible to hurt you,”
he said, which I also thought was interesting.
Right then was when he kissed me, or closed the gap between us, just barely, so that I
hardly noticed it until our lips were touching; in fact I was still talking, saying some half-lie
about my career—how well it was going. The kiss was tricky. I thought he was going to lean in
more, maybe a little aggressively, maybe like he is on stage, but instead, he hung back, and I was
the one leaning in, I was the aggressor.
When the kiss ended, I was still leaning forward. My lips still held the shape of the kiss,
as though it were still happening. That was a little embarrassing. It took me a few seconds to
recover.
I moved to kiss him again, and he said, “Maybe we should take things slow,” which
surprised me. I wondered if he knew how many people I’d kissed, if he could sense that from the
shape of my lips. “I don’t want to mess anything up,” he said, which is also something men say
when they want to see you naked.
“I think I’d be the one to hurt you,” I said.
We kissed again, and time passed the way it passes on stage when the jokes are going
well—unnoticeably. When the kiss ended, years might have passed. It felt like the beginning of
something, maybe something long. If, much later, he made a joke about our relationship on stage
and a different fan approached him in a different bar when he was with a different girl, I hoped
my date would say yes, the story is true, and I hoped he would use my name.

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AMONG MEN

This was the summer I kept my mother awake at night, the summer I turned fifteen. I planned a
visit to Catalina Island, where my father lived. Lately, I only saw him a few times a year, and
when I did, he always came to the mainland, to Long Beach; I’d never been to his new house.
My parents had divorced when I was eleven, after my father had come out of the closet,
slinking nervously out at first, then later shouting, can-canning out of there. Now, he marched in
parades. He gave guest lectures at the community college about gender and societal expectations.
Sexuality is fluid, he told me over the phone. It is an ever-changing spectrum, he said. Had I ever
read Walt Whitman? Had I? Had I?
But this visit wasn’t why my mother was worried. I was going on a boat for the first time,
and I’d never learned to swim. It wasn’t that she refused to teach me or invest in lessons, it was
more that she kept forgetting, and because I was terrified of drowning, I kept forgetting to
remind her. My father had always loved the water. Unfortunately, he also loved men. Maybe this
was my mother’s version of revenge: let’s see how he liked it when his own daughter couldn’t
partake in the one and only activity that—regardless of anything else—had always given him
peace of mind.
In e-mails, my father wrote about how cosmopolitan Catalina had become. “It’s like a
modern day Nantucket,” he’d said, “everyone passing through from one place to another.
Stopping in for a quick vacation.” How strange, that a vacation spot sounded to my dad like a
good place to build a permanent life.

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The morning of my departure, the sky was bright blue and wide open, as though shucked
from a duller sky. I wore a sleeveless dress and my arms were tanned.
I’d only met my dad’s boyfriend once. When my father visited, he usually came blessedly
alone. Q was tall, Swedish, and difficult to look at straight on—like the sun—he was that
handsome, a jaw so angular I averted my eyes. Q was a nickname, though I still don’t know for
what. I knew he didn’t wear tank tops like my father did. He wore dress shirts. He liked to scuba
dive.
We were in the thick grip of summer and I hadn’t seen my father for six months. At
fifteen, this felt like a breach of some father-daughter contract I couldn’t remember signing. As a
result, I’m told I was always moody. Mostly, my mother got the brunt of this, the parent who
stayed. Everything she said annoyed me. Everything she did was either too little or too much.
That’s the thing with mothers; they’re always guilty of something.

I took my seat on the top deck of the boat. I looked around, noticing something strange: I
was surrounded by women. They were mostly middle age. There was not a single man in sight,
like I’d stepped into some alternate kind of universe. It was a relief, I think. Men made me
nervous.
“We’re on a field trip,” a drooping woman I guessed was in her fifties said to me, leaning
over the aisle to shout over the wind. “The Auxiliary Womens’ League of Long Beach,” she
said. Over the loud-speaker, I was assured the trip would be quick, less than an hour.
In the land of women, I closed my eyes and thought of Q, who was much too interesting
to allow thought of anything else. Plus, after only (only!?) four years, I still wasn’t used to the
thought of my father with a man. Maybe I still wasn’t used to my father with anyone other than
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my mother, however estranged they were, however ill-fated. What’s more, my mother was alone,
dateless. Was it a lack of interest or a lack of trying? A lack of available men? There was a lack I
couldn’t quite put my finger on. Of course, I registered every lack in my mother—a daughter’s
singular job.

“I’d never been very good at choosing men,” my mother had said recently, over the bland
red-sauced pasta she made once a week, having decided I was old enough to have that kind of
conversation. We kept the television on at a low roar in the background, accompanying us during
our nightly routines.
“I’m not good at it either,” I told her, because, though I had little evidence so far, I
instinctively knew this was true.
“Oh, honey,” she said, “I’m sorry. That’s probably all my fault,” and I nodded, because it
probably was.

This weekend, I planned to find out more about Q. I knew so little about him! Where did
he come from? Did he also have an ex wife? Children? Did he and my father hold hands in
public? In private? I could hardly stand to think about private, and yet, I couldn’t think about
anything else. What had he thought when he’d met my father on his boat—had Izzy (here, I tried
to pictured my father as others saw him) seemed like an oasis to him, his own personal island, an
escape?
Of course, there were things I wanted to know that Q could never tell me. How long had
my father wished for another life? I knew that he loved my mother and me. Maybe not in all the
right ways, but he loved us both, I was certain. Had his love for us made him feel trapped? I
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knew enough about love to know it didn’t offer freedom. It offered shelter, maybe, but so did
prison.

My eyes had been closed and the woman next to me, holding a mimosa in her plastic cup,
tapped me on the shoulder. She looked as though she’d never seen land before.
“Look, honey,” she said, wide-eyed, “Catalina.”
“It’s bigger than I thought,” I said, thinking only of my mother now, how she’d come
home from work and find the house empty, though she knew I was leaving, she would likely
have forgotten it by then, surprised to find the living room dark and the television off.

I could see the small, mismatched figures of Q and my father waiting on the pier, smiling
squinty-eyed up at the boat, though they couldn’t possibly distinguish me from the other
passengers yet. I thought maybe it was only the sight of a boat that made my dad smile.
I filed down the gangway with the women my mother might have been friends with, at
least when she wanted friends. She had phases. Like mysterious weather patterns I couldn’t
comprehend, I had no way to predict their arrival. The women, in their cardigans and sensible
haircuts, walked straight into the blue-painted tourist office and collected brochures and made
arrangements—glass bottom boats and bicycle rentals, probably. At the sight of all that
predictability walking away, I felt unmoored, especially when my father and his boyfriend
approached.
“There’s my girl,” my dad said, wrapping me in his arms and lifting me a few inches off
the ground, though I knew it couldn’t have been as easy as he’d thought it would be. In the last
six months, it seemed to me, hips had appeared. I’d grown heavier. Of course, this might just be
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in retrospect. They weren’t hips so much as knobs on each of my sides, but still, I felt as though I
were made of sand, taking lumpy, unfamiliar shapes. Meanwhile, my dad looked slighter than I
remembered, though fit—slimmer and more sinewy, with no wasted space. The result of having
a partner with whom he could run, swim, and bike? The result of happiness, I decided suddenly.
“Welcome,” my father said, spreading out his arms. “My island.” The possessive pronoun
surprised me, though it shouldn’t have. He felt a strange ownership over Catalina, as though he’d
discovered it himself. He wore a loose, knit fisherman’s sweater and white linen pants.
Instinctively, I knew they were expensive. He wrote movies for television—programming which
landed mostly on Lifetime or in some recycling bin belonging to an executive—but he was paid
whether or not it ever got made, or so my mother said.
“And you remember Q.” Dad placed a palm on the small of Q’s back; I could sense the
trace of his hand there, gently urging Q toward me.
“Good afternoon,” I said, suddenly prim. I stopped short of curtseying, but not by a lot. I
noticed for the first time that Q had a tattoo on his chest, unbelievably, especially in contrast with
his starched, white collared shirt. At first glance it looked like a smudge of dirt or a patch of
tightly curled hair, creeping up from beneath his collar. But no, it was definitely a tattoo, a
permanent stain from some past life. (A straight life? Had he been wild once—a drinker? In the
military? In a rock band?) The tattoo was a geometric shape, difficult to decipher.
“Hello Jennifer,” Q said, startling me with the deepness of his voice, the formality of its
tone. “I hope your trip was not too long or too rough,” he said, bowing slightly. I’d forgotten
what he sounded like, with his faint unplaceable accent—a result of having moved around
frequently as a child. He’d come from money, my father had once told me, in his unusually
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concise description. I was surprised. That used to bother my dad, the idea that someone could
spring from unearned money like a sapling from the ground.
“Well where did the money come from?” I’d asked.
“His father’s father,” he said dismissively. “Some kind of paper towel royalty. His dad
owns a small private island off the Bahamas.”

“Are you excited?” my father asked now, and I wondered if he was nervous. He seemed
giddy, pelting me with a barrage of questions about school, and friends, and what I’d been doing,
how did Mom and I like the new house?
We’d recently moved into a small, tidy track home in a small, tidy neighborhood, a row
of stucco-faced buildings that had appeared suddenly near a new shopping center, a segment of
suburb with no built-in history and no built-in regrets. My mother was a speech therapist; she
taught children how to speak clearer and listen better, a steady salary though it wasn’t huge. Still,
my father had bought the house for us, and I knew what he hoped for—that we might move into
a blameless place with brand new sinks and counter tops, where we might make our own
mistakes.

“It’s nice here,” I told him finally, as we walked down the main drag—fish and chips,
Italian food, a candy shop with taffy pulled fresh in the window, an old fashioned creamery, the
smell of waffle cones and fried food and salt air ghosting around the whole place.
“You’ll have to get some ice cream,” he said.
“Not now,” I told him. “I’m not hungry.”
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“Well before you leave.” He was a little breathless. “They’re known for it here! They
make the waffle cones fresh,” and I said, “Okay, fine, I’ll have some later.” I could never hold
out on what my dad wanted from me, especially when he was like this. Eagerness was not
unbecoming on him. He acted like a puppy—lovable, blessed.
Q was restrained, but not at all unfriendly. “You know the history of Catalina?” he asked
me. He was very tall, and I had to crane my neck to meet his eye.
I knew a little. “I know my dad calls it Nantucket,” I said, and Q laughed. I felt spot-lit
with the attention.
“You know Wrigley?” he asked, and I nodded. The gum tycoon. “Maybe we can see the
Wrigley mansion while you’re here,” he continued. “Or the Holly Hill house.” He paused, and
looked at me again. “You know what that is?”
I liked the way Q asked questions, the pauses he took, with the assumption I might know
something, as though he didn’t want to bore me with a lecture, with information I might already
have. It seems to me now I knew so little at the time. “I kind of forget,” I lied.
“The Holly Hill House was built by a man trying to woo a woman on the mainland.” His
accent placed emphases on the wrong words, rounding out some and cutting sharp edges on
others. “It didn’t work. Not only did she not want to marry him, but she liked him even less after
the house.” He half-smiled, revealing one of his very white canine teeth. “She thought him
desperate.” He pronounced it “desper-it.”
We walked by the very house, curled around the edge of a bluff, all conical roofs and
large, ocean-facing windows. As high as it perched, I could just make out the red trim, as
intricate as lace, as though it had been cut with those pattern-making scissors. My mother used a
pair for scrapbooking.
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“Who lives there now?” I asked.
“A businesswoman,” my father said. “She didn’t need a man to build her a house.
Independent,” he said, “just like you’ll be.” He winked, but it looked instead like a tick he’d
developed.

I couldn’t help but compare Q to the one and only man my mother had dated since my
father. His name was Dan, and he was hearty and red-faced, incapable of irony. He was a real
estate agent who’d also been married. Before any story he told about his ex wife, he’d preface it
with “don’t get me wrong, we still get along great.” Also, he claimed to love practical jokes but
couldn’t recall a single one.
Q was different, of course. If he’d been a dad standing on the sidelines of one of my
soccer games, he wouldn’t have belonged. Not in a bad way. He would have looked like a
vacationer from somewhere else—a little too young, a little too handsome—as though something
so mundane should have bored him. When my father spoke, Q smiled and nodded thoughtfully,
and sometimes quietly responded, as though he were usually on a higher plane of thinking, but
came down occasionally to spend time with my dad, a welcome reprieve. According to my dad,
Q was very smart, a former marine biologist now turned charter fisherman.
“What do you want for dinner?” my father asked. He was pointing toward a golf cart in a
miniature parking spot. It was painted red, and it belonged to Q. I’d noticed that about the island
immediately, how few cars there were except for the occasional shuttle or taxi, mostly just golf
carts and bicycles. He gestured for me to sit in the front, but I took the back, forcing him to turn
around in order to talk to me. Q drove. “There’s not that many restaurants to choose from,” my
dad said, “but there are a lot of gems. Most are gems,” he said.
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“Okay,” I said.
“Or we could eat in. Q’s a great cook!” he said quickly.
“Whatever’s fine,” I said. My father’s nerves relaxed me a little, as though only one of us
could panic at a time.
Q shrugged and touched my father’s wrist even while he navigated the windy, narrow
road up the bluff toward their house. “If cooking’s what you want to call it,” Q said softly. “I can
boil something in a pot, or put it in a pan.”
My father went quiet, as though he recognized this touch as a signal—relax. I was struck
by the intimacy of the gesture. More so, I was struck by the two of them as a couple, a couple
who communicated without words, who’d probably communicated in every kind of situation,
probably in every kind of way.

Lately, at home in Long Beach, I’d been clutching my virginity loosely, in one hand, as
though waiting for someone to drive by and snatch it like a purse, a robbery for which I’d be
prepared. Next summer, I would turn sixteen. That particular birthday loomed on the horizon, my
own ship at a distance; it held all my dreams on board.
What I knew of sex was mostly cinematic, dream-like in atmosphere and orgasmic in
sound. Much like the rest of life, I thought, it would make more sense once I was in the midst of
it—once it was too late to stop what had already begun. I pictured sex the way I pictured
speeding down a hill, propelled mostly by momentum if not desire. I had no way to know yet the
myriad of ways it could go right, wrong, or just okay.

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The sky turned gray, just a sliver of clouds, my father said, just some baby clouds passing
through, he said, in a sing song voice. Q touched him again, this time on the upper arm, and my
father blew a stream of air through his mouth and rearranged himself into quiet repose in the
seat. I looked at the sky—storm-like and prophetic in its grayness, somehow more profound than
the sky I was used to seeing. Wasn’t it too hot for those thick, wet clouds? I looked at the backs
of their heads in front of me—my dad and his boyfriend—and I thought of all the things about
the world I didn’t know, but vowed to learn.

Their house was one story, all blonde polished wood and wide, ocean-filled windows. Q
carried my bag to the guest room, which was done up in blue and white fabrics, nautical-themed.
I wrote a quick text to my mother: all good so far, and she responded: have fn, be safe. Tell dad I
saiipd hi.
Tonight, they’d decided Q would cook dinner and we’d eat at home. “So you can
decompress,” my dad said, as though I’d been through a great journey. He showed me to the
“scenic shower”: an outdoor enclave connected to the guest room, where I could see the ocean,
but no one could see in. There were no others houses on the same level, on the same bluff. When
viewed from sea level, the houses on this side of the island looked like multi-colored boxes
stacked one on top of the other, layered sloppily.
I was still nervous about being unclothed in open air, and I made my dad reassure me of
the privacy three times over. At fifteen, I treated my nakedness like a disorder—something to be
covered up, and once uncovered, apologized for. Once I turned sixteen, I thought, it might all
change. I’d become a butterfly after having shed my cocoon, freed of my awkwardness,
surprised at the brightly colored wingspan I hadn’t known I had. Or else, I might only be slightly
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taller and my breasts slightly larger, and there’d be another year for me to live—to shudder
through, half-winged or wing-less—without incident.
In fact, the shower was spectacular. Surrounded by all of that expansive blue, it was like
being suspended in a giant, graceful drip. I was humming something tuneless and off-key as I
shampooed my hair, digging my fingers into my scalp, thinking of what I most often thought
about while in the shower at that time: adulthood. More importantly, what future happiness
adulthood would bring me: college, boys, love, money, success, hopefully in that order. The
details of the plan were haphazard. Regardless, I had faith that everything would come together
in the best possible scenario. Even after my parents’ marriage ended, I saw how lives could be
reordered in a way that made sense, at least to the people living them.
I turned off the shower, but still stood inside of it, toweling off distractedly, still warm
with my future thoughts, when I saw him: Q. Completely naked.
The sight was like being drenched in cold water—a kind of giddy surprise. I’d been so
concerned with being exposed in front of unknown neighbors, I hadn’t realized the outdoor
shower also had a view of the sundeck off of Q and my dad’s room. The sundeck ran along one
entire side of the house, but you could only access it from the master bedroom, down a small,
narrow stairway. Q, apparently, hadn’t known I’d been showering, though I’ve never been able
to confirm that fact. He lay stretched out on a chaise lounge with his arms above his head, eyes
closed, face angled toward the clouded-over sun, his legs splayed. I couldn’t seem to draw my
eyes away from his body, and later, I would replay the scene over and over in my mind. I don’t
mean the lines of his figure, taut and smooth as they were, were sexually compelling to me so
much as emotionally. This man: he shared a bed with my father. My father: he shared a bed with
this man. I thought of my mother. (How could I not?)
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I had not yet seen a man’s penis in real life, so here was the first. I’d seen them online, of
course—I wanted to be prepared. But those men were always very aware of their audience,
leaning against an outdoor shower, let’s say, their muscles flexed, their eyes drifting up toward
the camera, faux-innocent, sly. This was something different: Q touching himself absent-
mindedly, bending to scratch at his toes, at the pale, tender skin of his inner thigh. It was
something else to watch a man without his knowledge, and the intimacy of it was almost too
much to bear. Finally, the last thing I noticed about Q’s naked body: his tattoo was much larger
and more intricate than I’d originally thought.

I worried about dinner as I dressed. Where would I direct my eyes? Nowhere seemed
appropriate now. I blushed even at the thought of my new knowledge, let alone parading it in
front of my father. What to wear? I laid everything out on the anchor-patterned bedspread. I
needed something demure, yet casual. Something that didn’t shout: I’ve seen my father’s
boyfriend naked! I picked a pair of white denim jeans and a navy, pilling sweater. As a result, I
blended into the nautical décor. Better to blend, I decided, than somehow expose myself.
In the kitchen, I could hear my father and Q—now dressed—discussing dinner. My dad had
always been a good cook, confident and patient, never second-guessing his instincts. I doubted Q
could possibly cook as well as he did. The probability that my dad found someone with so many
of the same interests (likes boats: check; likes cooking: check; likes men: check) seemed
impossibly lucky. And did he deserve that luck, when my mother seemed to have so little?
In the kitchen, Q was chopping vegetables while my father sat alone at the table, eating a
string cheese. Sunlight pooled around him. The peculiar dignity of a man seen eating alone. The
line came to me suddenly, a fragment I’d once heard someone say, probably my dad.
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“Do you want something Doll?” he asked, when he saw me standing there, nautical
themed and pawing at the doorway, like a skittish animal. “Hummus?” he asked. “Olives?”
Q looked at me over his knife, the serrated edge glinting under the overhead light. “We’re
having crab legs,” he said softly. Jazz played in the background, oozing through the state-of-the-
art speakers.
“I’ll just wait for dinner,” I told the floor.
When I finally looked back at Q, he was dropping individual crab legs into a pot of
boiling water. I thought they would make the same sound as lobsters—air escaping from shells,
like a prehistoric scream—but they made no noise at all. I realized eventually that it was Q who
was imperceptibly hissing through his teeth.

I stared at my plate through most of dinner, addressing the empty shells while my dad
asked about my favorite school subjects, if there were any boys I liked.
“Only the principal,” I said, “Mr. Adams.” I meant it as a joke, but my dad just smiled
nervously and moved the conversation smoothly along. I wondered if he was self-conscious
about our shared preference for the same sex. Suddenly I was.
I asked for the salt, and Q held it out to me from across the table. Our hands brushed
together—a moment so long, it seemed suspended in time, as though preserved in amber—and I
immediately looked up at my father, guilty. Of course, he was oblivious, chewing happily along,
relieved probably, that I hadn’t yet cried. The last time he visited, I’d felt unexplainably moody,
all welled-up like a human tear. Before he left, I’d heard my mother explain from the next room:
“well what do you expect, Izzy? She’s upset. She’s fifteen for God’s sake.” Instead of
appreciating my mother’s understanding, it only made me angrier, just one more injustice to add
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to the pile. How dare she try to explain my moods away. Partly, I knew, I’d wanted my dad to
react to me, and when he didn’t, I’d felt worse, and caused a scene.
“Better get a good night sleep,” Q said, stacking the dishes with the skill of a former
waiter. “We’ll leave bright and early. Take a short fishing trip. See if we can’t find him.”
“Find who?” I asked. My father made a tsk sound with his tongue, like a teacher.
“There’s a whale I’ve been after—” Q began, before pausing with his lips slightly parted,
as though considering the best way to proceed. My father’s mouth tightened, and I wondered if
I’d stumbled over the first crack in their shared happiness. Was this a sore spot, the source of a
previous fight?
Q kept on, as though he hadn’t noticed my dad’s reaction. “Well, it’s actually a fish, but
it looks like a whale. I’ve been trying to study it for years,” he said.
“Study’s one thing to call it,” my Dad said, giving me an exasperated look, as though we
were suddenly on the same team. Isn’t that annoying? The look seemed to say, when your
boyfriend’s obsessed with a fish? I nodded.
“It’s an oarfish,” Q continued, “18 feet long. The only one known of its kind.”
“I thought you gave up biology,” I said, and Q stopped short near the sink, his hands
thrust in the soapy water, considering my face though I’d just appeared.
“Says who?” he asked.
“Dad, I guess,” I said softly. He’d told me at the same time he told me about Q’s
moneyed past, his father of the Paper Towel Empire.
“You said that, Izzy?” Q asked.
My father cleared his throat. “I only meant you’d given it up as a profession. As a way to
make money. Of course, you still study whales—fish. Whatever.”
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“It only looks like a whale,” Q said, addressing only me now. “Bony fish, the specie’s
called. It’s the largest in the world, and it’s been spotted off my—our coast.” I looked from Q’s
face, to my father’s face, to Q’s face, and back again. Were they in a private fight right now, at
this very moment? I hoped I’d be able to hear any arguments from my room. I felt differently
than when my dad had fought with my mother. Then, I’d felt only the need to escape, a bristling
at the back of my neck at the deadpan sound of their passionless disagreements: My mother, her
voice tightening, trying to stay quiet; my father, the consummate pacifist. As it turned out, his
passion had just been invested elsewhere.
“Well I hope we find it,” I said, quietly. I was the pacifist now, the referee. I’d claimed
my position on the sidelines, and I looked from Q to my dad then back again, as though watching
a tennis match that refused to take place.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I thought of Q and the mysterious fish. Insomnia hooked its
claws into my shoulders, tightened its grip, refused to let go. I heard the faint ocean sounds
through the window, like a recording to induce relaxation. Instead, it made me tangle up in the
sheets, sweaty, dreading tomorrow. I was too warm and then not warm enough. I considered
masturbating. I’d tried it before, with varied success, but the process always felt in equal parts
vaguely arousing and vaguely hopeless, as though I were trying to complete a puzzle while
missing an integral piece. I think the problem now was a question of narrative. I needed a story,
one with emotional resonance, in order to induce pleasure. I thought of Q, my palms laid primly
on my thighs, until the breeze through the open window passed over the plane of me and carried
the room into sleep.

225
The next morning, we took the golf cart to Lover’s Cove, a private marina used only by
locals. Q’s boat was smaller and less impressive than I’d pictured. No yachts here, no masts
gleaming in the sunshine. That was in Avalon, where all the tourists’ boats were, where all the
money laid out beneath the palm trees, sunning itself. Q’s boat seemed to distinguish itself as a
utilitarian, as opposed to a cruiser—a pleasure-seeking vessel. I didn’t recognize all of the
equipment rusting near the bow. The boat had a tower, maybe ten feet tall, where the Captain (Q,
I supposed) sat and steered. There were a few fishing poles, and maybe a sonar, leaned against
the railing, though I wasn’t sure what a sonar even looked like, let alone its function. It might
have just been an electrical box. I made a big deal about walking the length of it—36 feet, I was
told—making impressed-sounding noises. It seemed to satisfy my dad. Q, on the other hand,
became immediately immersed in preparing the boat for departure, reeling in lines and adjusting
knobs. He moved quicker than usual, his typical calmness replaced by a new, vibrating intensity.
I tried not to seem nervous, though of course, I was. I shrugged off the idea of a man-sized
orange life preserver. If nothing else, I’d try to look the part. I didn’t remind my dad that I’d
never learned to swim, and I wondered if he remembered. Maybe he thought I’d picked it up
somewhere.
“All aboard,” my father yelled cheerfully, and I sent a text to my mother before we were
surrounded only by sea and I had no service: on boat now. There were two lawn chairs on the
deck, and my dad gestured for me to sit down with him. From the captain’s seat above us, Q put
the boat in reverse, and steadily backed away from the slip. It felt not all that different from
being in a car, and I wondered if the rules of the sea were at all similar to the rules of the road.
Another thing I anticipated about my sixteenth birthday: the freedom of a driver’s license.
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The day was the blue-dream color of poetry. Seagulls swooped and cawed. My dad held a
Corona, sipping it slowly. The island shrunk as we glided farther away, until it appeared like the
hump of an exotic animal, lowering itself into the sea. The rush of wind in my face felt good,
refreshing, like a baptism. I felt a fullness in my chest at the presence of my dad next to me, the
glint of sunlight off the boat’s silver railings. He and Q had both taken off their shirts, tying them
around their belt loops in an eerily similar fashion.
“You want a beer?” he asked.
“Really?”
“You’re on vacation,” he said, springing up from his seat to go get me a bottle from
inside the cabin. “Sip slowly,” he said, as though I’d never tasted beer before. I didn’t want to
wreck it for him. If he wanted to think he was offering me something new, then let him. I could
have said, you have sex with a man! There is nothing newer to me than that.
The beer was cold down my throat. I felt immediately relaxed. Maybe that had been my
father’s goal. I felt the effects after only a little while, sitting jauntier in my lawn chair, my whole
body looser. I looked over at my dad. He didn’t look bad, I thought, for his age. I was glad Q was
not in my eye-line so that I’d have to draw my eyes continuously away—what effort that might
require.
“So Dad,” I said, leaning closer to him, “what’s Q’s obsession with this fish?”
He sighed, as though he were the long-suffering spouse. “It’s awful,” he said. “I can’t
even describe to you. I mean, the level he takes it.”
The boat bucked over a wave, and I splashed beer on my white t-shirt. Did this mark the
moment when our relationship would change? Were we something else now—a father and
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daughter who confided in each other about men, about boys? The thing my mother always
wanted, I realized, sad for her all of the sudden.
“How so?” I asked.
“He has a personal vendetta,” he said now, his voice lower, as though Q could possibly
hear us over the sound of the outboard motor.
“What did the fish do to him?” I asked.
My dad shook his head. “Ruined his career,” he said. “Nobody in the scientific
community believes him. The whole,” and here my dad made those air quotes with his fingers, “
‘charter fishing company’ makes practically no money, not that he needs it. It’s just so Q has a
reason to hunt down that fish.”
“And when he finds it?” I asked.
My dad looked at me. He reached over slowly and touched my hair, brushed it out of my
eyes. I felt the blood rush to my face. “You look pretty with your down hair like that,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“When he finds it,” he continued, “I guess he’ll try to study it. I guess he’ll try to prove
he wasn’t nutty.”
“People thought Q was nutty?” I asked.
“Oh honey,” he said to me now, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes against the
sun, “the world is full of people getting you wrong.”

After a while, Q yelled from the captain’s seat, and we both jumped, as though we’d been
caught badmouthing him.
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“A little rough,” he said. “Just warning you guys to hang on.” I wished the seats were
cemented to the ground. The boat tilted and my chair slid across the deck. I yelped—an
embarrassing noise, like helium escaping.
“Don’t worry,” my dad said, a coaxing tone, “just a little rough patch. Just a little rough
patch of waving waves,” he said, in that sing-song voice, as though I were a child. I didn’t resent
it just then. If anything, I missed my mother—her endless capacity for holding me in her arms,
for treating me like a child who needed comfort. Maybe that’s exactly what I was, what I always
had been.
“What are you doing up there?” my dad shouted, because Q seemed to be ignoring the
waves—ignoring the path of least resistance—scanning the ocean with his large, heavy-duty
binoculars, his gaze somewhere far off, knee propped against the wheel.
“I might see him,” he shouted.
My dad sighed, his feet planted firmly, while my lawn chair skidded across the deck and I
made another yelp, reminiscent of a terrier.
“He always thinks he sees it,” he said. “Hold on, Jen.”
“It’s him, Izzy.” Q yelled. “I’m pretty sure it’s him.” The boat was bucking now. I didn’t
know if it was the ocean, or Q’s poor driving, or both. I felt nauseous. I could feel myself
perspire in all the weird places sweat didn’t belong. I thought I’d vomit.
“Shouldn’t you go up there?” I shouted at my dad.
“Q,” he said, “don’t make me come up there.”
Another large wave struck the side of the boat, and Q made his own, deeper
unadulterated yelp. I stood up, trying to see what was going on. Q made another sharp turn, and
the boat pitched deeply to one side, and with it, me—thrown overboard.
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The water was colder than I’d expected; it took the breath right out of me.
In the water, I flailed my arms. I remembered an image of myself as a child, making this
same gesture when I’d wanted my father’s attention at the park. He’d sometimes pause, waiting
with his perfect posture, as I kicked a soccer ball. At the time, he was consistent in his air of
distraction. What did that make me? The heir of distraction.
Now, I bobbed up and down, the water sliding over my head and into my mouth. I tried
to float, but it was difficult to get on my back, to do the Dead Man’s float I’d done before. I
swallowed gulps of seawater. As I fought for higher positioning, my arms growing tired,
something new occurred to me: Q’s tattoo was the whale-fish, curled up on his chest like a
burden he carried.

What I didn’t know at that moment was that Q would not be my dad’s boyfriend for
much longer. It was not an arrangement that suggested permanence, my dad told me later, though
at fifteen, I hadn’t known that. It hadn’t occurred to me that my father The Leaver could be the
one who was Left. It didn’t occur to me that Q wasn’t the exotic—my father was, a family man,
a stable enterprise.
Later, in my twenties, Q would invite my father to his wedding, and Izzy would take me
as his date, and the man Q married would be built very similarly to Q, a yachtsman and an
athlete. They look like they could be brothers, I’d whisper to my dad, when the groom kissed the
groom. Eating his salmon filet, Izzy would look pale and out of place, like a teacher at a school
dance. I’d wonder then what Q had said about him to his friends while they were living together:
“I’m dating this old guy with a kid. But he tries awfully hard. He’s very sweet.”
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At the wedding, my father and I would dance to Why Do Fools Fall in Love, Izzy leading
me smoothly around the dance floor, complimenting my hair. By then, I’d be firmly planted in a
bad relationship—a man my mother hated for me—in which he was always leaving and I was
always trying to lure him back, or else coax some love out of the empty space he left.
“I saw you naked,” I would tell Q that night, drunkenly, my breath hot in his ear, as I
pretended to congratulate him. Later, I’d wish I’d said something else: did you really love my
father, maybe, or did you ever find your fish?

But here, right now—I choked on seawater and felt dizzy, flapping my arms uselessly,
sun/sea/sun/sea, until I couldn’t tell up from down. Strangely, I called for Q, thinking he would
be the one to save me.
Instead, my father shouted directions slowly and calmly from the deck of the boat. “First
one arm, now the other,” he said, “kick your right foot and then your left,” he said, “take a little
breath,” he said, in his sing-song voice, teaching me from afar how I might survive.

231
US GIRLS

A friend starts in, “I’m not saying every straight man wants to sleep with me. But most of them,”
she says, “most of them do.” It’s a group of us girls. Women now, though we’ve known each
other since girlhood—since college, which is a form of girlhood, the tail-end, if you ask us. One
of us is getting married, so we’ve rented a small motor boat and packed it with wine and cheese
for a sunset cruise around a neighborhood none of us can afford so we can say farewell to a sex
life—like Vikings, one of us says—as though we might set it aflame and watch it float away.
None of us can afford this neighborhood, though we all have careers in the greater Los
Angeles area. “Career women!” we sometimes shout. Earlier in our twenties we used to say it
proudly—sometimes we still do—but now we use it as a punch line too, or like a brick or a
doorstop, dull and heavy.
Eventually, we begin talking about some of the men we’ve known, laughing at them, not
kindly. Our teeth are already stained with wine, and one of us starts listing them, so we all do,
the men who wanted something from us that we refused to give.
The big-time editor visiting from a New York publishing house who said he loved our
stories and wanted to meet at an expensive restaurant to discuss them, who quoted our writing to
us aloud, who was married, who asked us to come back to his hotel room with him then, his
voice low, who wouldn’t look at us or speak to us when we said no.
The comedian who pulled us aside in the green room after our show, who said that we
were pretty funny—pretty funny and pretty raunchy, for a girl especially, as though joking about
sex meant we wanted to have it—and tried to kiss us then, without hesitation, without so much as
a look to see if we were interested, which of course, we weren’t.
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The coworker at the real estate office, who led us into a photo booth at the company
party, who squeezed our thigh and smiled grimly into the camera, who looked pained when we
said we had a boyfriend, which was a lie. We still have the ticker tape of miniature photos.
The professor, the boss—oh authority figures! Don’t get us started on authority figures.
Too many to tick off on our fingers. We shake our heads; we laugh a little wildly. Men at bars,
men at work, men who were friends with friends of ours, men who seemed to want nothing, men
who said they wanted to give us everything. Those corny lines! As though lines would ever work
on women like us. We look away here, shifty. So many men.
Dusk has turned the sky orange-streaked and the alcohol has made our voices loud. We
idle the boat in a little lagoon, in the man-made seaside neighborhood none of us live in. The
houses appear monstrous.
A toast, one of us says, though the one getting married waves it away.
But we are not the type of girls—women—to say something like “to finding one of the
good ones!” because there are plenty of good ones, don’t get us wrong. We’ve been with the nice
ones—slept with them, dated them. And we have careers. We’re not idiots. How many times do
we have to say that?!
“To us girls,” we shout, and we cheer at varying volumes. Eventually we go quiet for a
little while.
“You know sometimes it’s nice to give into a man like that,” one of us says, and we know
what she means. Sometimes it’s a relief to finally relent, to go soft and pliant in his arms, to let
him kiss us like he’s trying to take something from us, and then to kiss him like we’re trying to
take it back.
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We drink more; we let our fists clench. We’ll stay out here all night if we feel like it,
burning on the inside.

234
HAVE YOU MET HUSBAND?

The first time I saw Ray was at a car dealership. It wasn’t actually the first time, but it was the
time that mattered. I’d gone with my mother to help her pick out a new car.
My mother is a single woman, which she reminds me of often, flipping her hair back and
laughing loudly. Whenever she does this—when we’re out to lunch, for instance—everyone
stops speaking and stares at her. She thinks she’s getting their attention. No, I tell her, you’re
stopping them cold. It’s not the same thing.
“You don’t understand,” she often says, “I’m not used to being single.”
I take this to mean I should be used to it.
It was at one of these lunches I’d agreed to go with her to get a new car. Normally, when
she asks something of me, I tell her I’ll think about it. I need time to prepare my excuse. This
time, I’d had an oyster sliding around in my mouth, threatening to slip behind my tongue. The
oysters were her idea, a way of catching me off guard. I’d accidently said yes.

Outside of the dealership, sunlight glinted across the roofs of new and used cars parked in
color-coded rows. A man I went to high school with was helping us. His name was Ray and he
was bald, or rather, his head was shaved. I didn’t know whether to trust a man with a shaved
head, it seemed misleading—pretending the hair there had never existed. It depressed me
sometimes, to think that this was my dating pool. When I caught my reflection in the glass of the
dealership, I saw myself in my button down cardigan, which was also strange. The cardigan was
brown, shapeless. I looked like a woman in her forties wearing a cardigan. It wasn’t a bad thing.
I had just had other plans for myself, plans to lead the life of a woman who’d never be caught
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dead in a cardigan. I once had plans to be the kind of woman I sometimes noticed from afar,
leaving a show or laughing through the window of a bar.
Ray was flirting with my mom, and then with me, like a ping-pong game, one in which I
didn’t want to play.
“What do you think,” she said, regarding me behind her large sunglasses. “A convertible
for your mother?” She laughed again. She pulled her sunglasses down low on her nose and said
in a breathy voice, “She’s my daughter.”
“And the two of you look like sisters,” he said. “Beautiful sisters.”
My mother looks nothing like me—darker hair, darker eyes. She’s quicker to speak,
which makes her look different too, as though she’s always in motion.
I wanted him to know he shouldn’t bother with me, he should concentrate on her. “I’m
celibate,” I said. “Get thee to a nunnery.” I laughed, but it was a different laugh than hers—a
dull, deadpan sound meant to shut things down.
Ray looked confused. My mom said, “She’s joking with the nunnery stuff.”
“Shakespeare,” I said, and my mother shook her head at me. “Anyway,” she said, turning
away from me and toward Ray, “what about an SUV? Like the hip hop men.” She made a small,
tight shimmy. I blushed despite myself. Any sexualized gesture of hers and I still felt fourteen.
Inside the dealership, a woman was watering the plants. Her hair was piled tall on top of
her head and she wore a collared shirt and held an official looking black watering can. I watched
her through the window, passing each plant and dipping her can, slow and methodical. She paid
no attention to the red Lamborghini which the plants flanked. The leaves were a glossy green. I
wondered if this were her only job—a plant caretaker. It didn’t sound bad to me.
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I almost asked Ray about it, but when I turned back toward him he was opening the door
of a new bug-looking car, those Beetles with the rounded, convertible tops. He gestured for my
mother to sit down.
“How do I look?” she said. The door was open, and one leg was in the car and the other
leg was out.
“Ridiculous,” I said.
She waved me away. Ray wrote furiously on his clipboard. “Great deals on these,” he
said.
Summer was on its way out and I said, “Soon it’ll be too cold for a convertible.”
She tossed her lemon-colored scarf around her neck as though the air were whipping it
back. She placed both hands on the wheel, arms locked in racing position, pretending to drive.
“Stop,” I said. “Mom, stop.” I shivered a little. I hated to see summer end. Even the Fall
was too cold for me, I could never get warm. I’m cold-blooded, I guess, reptilian.
“Hunny,” my mom said, reaching out of the car to hand me her cell phone, “take a picture
of me in my new car.”
“Mom,” I said, “Come on. Get out.”
She held the phone out to me, steadfast.
“Joy,” I said, using her name. She ignored me. Ray kept watching, his eyes still
ricocheting between the two of us.
“Fine.” I took the photo.
“Sold,” she said.

237
In Ray’s office, my mother signed the paper work and Ray opened a bottle of sparkling
cider to celebrate the purchase. Then he asked us both out to dinner. “My Uncle would be perfect
for you, Joy.” He was smiling at my mom, but I could feel the nagging interest out of the corner
of his eye, like a tiny, pale hand, reaching for me. I went back to staring at the faded diploma
framed in plain, dark wood on his wall. I wasn’t wearing my glasses, so I couldn’t even read it. It
might have as well have been a fake.
“How could we resist a date,” she said.
“Frailty thy name is woman,” I said, and Ray laughed, though it was more like a shudder.
“Shakespeare,” I said.
“He knows,” Joy said, shaking her head. “It’s not that hard.”

That Friday, my mother came to my apartment to prepare for our double date. After the
trip to the dealership, I’d bought plants to set up around the entryway. It was just as I’d expected.
The sight of them—and the fresh, wet smell—cheered me up. They’re harder than you’d think,
plants, harder than fish to take care of. I thought maybe I’d ask Ray about the plant lady at the
dealership; ask how she got those leaves so glossy.
I’d cleaned the place up for my mother’s arrival. An hour ago, my apartment had been
strewn with my discarded underwear from the past week, my ripped open bills and magazines.
Now the place looked immaculate.
Sometimes, I stood at my refrigerator in my bra and underwear or sometimes naked—
feeling the whir of cool air brushing my skin—and tried different things out of cartons with a
spoon. I’d prod the leftover Chinese noodles, my pulse quickening, as though this wasn’t even
my food to begin with. I’d look over my shoulder as though someone were about to catch me.
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Then I’d feel stupid, knowing there was nobody there but me. It was something I’d started doing
right after my husband left, and lately, I’d started doing it again—for the past month, I’d say.
I’d dressed for the date before my mom arrived, so she couldn’t make any suggestions
about my outfit, couldn’t have any say in my choices. I wore a skirt, and traded the cardigan for
an average, indiscriminate looking blazer. She, on the other hand, brought an overnight bag with
toiletries, make-up, and a few costume changes.
“Mom,” I said, watching her in my bedroom mirror as she twirled. “You look fine. Let’s
not make this into more than it is.”
She turned and looked at me pointedly. “And you, my dear, shouldn’t make it into less.”

We were going to a restaurant called Alfred’s, the type of place that used fancy cloth
napkins but the silverware had permanent smudges. I’d insisted we meet them there—my
mother’s only concession to me. She drove us in her new convertible. On the way, she said to the
rear-view mirror: “This will be something good.” She is a woman who believes in positive
affirmations.

When we arrived, the men were already sitting at the table. I saw them immediately. She
and I both stood at the doorway, watching them, one of those rare moments—spying on
somebody’s’ perceived privacy. Of course, there were other people around, but I thought just
standing there for a moment, spying on them, could possibly reveal something about how the
date would go, if, let’s say, Ray had his feet up on the table, lounging, or he was gnawing at his
fingernails. Instead, Ray and the uncle talked quietly, laughing occasionally, other times looking
serious. They had similar gestures—small, incremental ways of moving.
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My mom whispered in my ear as we approached the table, “After dinner, we’re supposed
to go dancing.” She timed this so that she finished the statement just as Ray pulled out my chair.
He smelled of soap and some mild, department store cologne.
“Beautiful,” he said, affably. “The two of you.”
He and the uncle, Frank, were dressed similarly, in brown blazers with a Houndstooth
print, a fabric that made me picture old fashioned dens, the wood freshly polished, filled with
books. Uncle Frank looked to be about my mother’s age. It was hard to tell, he was in that gray
area of older men, the time when their aging seemed to slow down while women’s seemed to
speed up.
In the restaurant, there was the noise of a Friday night out, a kind of unfolding, and the
dining room was dimly lit, flattering us all. Ray looked better than I’d remembered him at the car
dealership. Not great, but better. His shaved head looked sort of distinguished. But he had
chapped lips that now preoccupied him. He kept squeezing his lips together.
We ordered Caesar salads, all four of us, to make it easier on the waitress. She had a
huffy, impatient way of coming and going, reminding us of all the places she would rather be. I
jiggled the ice in my water. I swallowed a sip. I did this a few times.

Our salad forks scraping across our plates, the four of us made polite conversation about
my mother’s new car and the local high school Ray and I had both attended. I hated talking about
that sort of thing, how close I’d stayed to home, how few places I’d been or things I’d done. I
sensed Ray felt the same. He wanted to talk about my mother’s car, how she liked it, but not
about his actual job—the selling aspect—and not about how he’d ended up there. I didn’t blame
him.
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The waitress came to ask what we’d like for our entrees. “Can I order for you?” Ray
asked. I wondered if he’d heard somewhere that women liked this. Then, I wondered if
somewhere some women did.
“Sure,” I said. I didn’t know if this meant he was going to guess what I wanted or I was
supposed to tell him, and he would just repeat it out loud to the waitress. We both waited a
moment.
“The salmon,” I said softly.
“Sure,” he answered. “Salmon.” The waitress, blonde ponytail swinging, wrote it down.
Suddenly I wanted to ask Ray if he’d been married. He was the age for it, and he had that
slow, careful demeanor, like he’d been considering someone else’s opinions for a long time.
I didn’t ask. “I’m separated,” I said. I spoke it like an exhale.
“Me too,” said my mother.
I looked at her as though she’d just appeared. “She was widowed, remarried, then
divorced. Then, for a while, living with a boyfriend from whom she is now separated.”
“I’m the most experienced of all of you,” she said, in a singsong voice. She mimed
checking off boxes. “Did it, did it, did it. But single now. Single and mingling.” She laughed,
throwing her head back as though she weren’t herself, but a mother-aged character on television.
I looked around to see if people were watching.
When I looked back at her, she was staring hard at Frank, conveying all sorts of things I
didn’t want to consider.
Ray looked as though he were about to speak. I cut him off with more car questions. It
turned out I knew more about cars than I thought I did. After the waitress brought our entrees,
the conversation moved smoothly along about nothing in particular.
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Finally, I flopped my napkin on the table. “Are we all finished?” I hadn’t meant it like
that, in the job interview sense. But nothing good came of sitting around, waiting to reveal things
you might not have revealed had you just paid the bill.
“Where now?” asked Uncle Frank. I thought of my new plants, sitting in the quiet
darkness of my apartment. I would have invented a dog, had my mother not been sitting across
from me.
She pressed her hands together. “Dancing!”
“Wait, Mom. It’s late, and we’re old.” I gestured between Ray and me. He smiled,
nodding.
“True,” he said. He turned toward me, jerking the table. My water almost spilled. “What
about a compromise and we just go to a bar?”
“Okay,” I said, surprising myself.

We went to a place within walking distance. It was too brightly-lit, in my opinion. An
older couple was dancing near the bar and the man kept knocking the edge of a barstool with his
elbow. He had a small hoop earring, which I thought was interesting.
“We could dance,” my mom said.
“Joy,” I said. “Please.”
She put a hand up to stop me from speaking. “Don’t start,” she said, though I’d been
trying to end it.
I told Ray I wanted a glass of white wine and he ordered the same for himself. It was
similar to the Caesar salads—making it easier on the bartender, and easier on himself, maybe,
because he didn’t have to decide. Easier on everyone. The truth is, he was growing on me. He
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had a nice way of speaking, and he listened to other people talk with a small, wise smile on his
face. When I said something funny, he shook his head with that smile, as though he were
resigned to the strangeness of life. He did it especially when I talked about my marriage. I didn’t
say a lot, just enough to keep the conversation moving—enough to turn subjects. I told him a
story about buying a dog when my husband didn’t want one, and calling the dog Husband.
“Where is the dog now?” Ray asked.
“He has him,” I said. “He’s got Husband.”
Ray was different than how I remembered him at the dealership. As far as high school
went, I only remembered he ran track and he always looked a little too pleased with himself. It
was strange, all of the incorrect impressions you had about people, impressions that were usually
never cleared up. I pictured all of those impressions walking around, bumping into each other,
confused.
Ray and I were sitting at the bar. Frank and my mother were sitting at a small, corner
table with their heads bent forward, toward each other. She looked shy. Maybe she felt that way
all of a sudden. She acted different around the men she liked—quieter and softer.
She is a romantic, my mother, in her own way.
After our third glasses of wine, Ray asked me if I wanted to go home with him. I thought
of my own apartment; now immaculately clean with that fresh, wet plant smell in the air. I
invited him over to mine instead.

While I fumbled with the lock, he said he usually didn’t ask this of a woman on a first
date.
“Ask what?”
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“To come home.”
I said it didn’t matter; I usually didn’t go on first dates. We sat on my sofa, and I brought
up the plant lady from the dealership.
“Truthfully,” Ray said, “I don’t know all that much about her.” We were sitting side by
side in the dimness, facing the television, as though we were watching something in the
blackness there. He turned to kiss me so suddenly I made a noise in surprise, which came out like
a whimper. I didn’t have time to position my hand correctly, so now it was pressed in between
the two of us. For a while, it was just the sounds of all that stuff—the breathing, the squeak of
the couch beneath us. The house was so silent that when we paused, and he rubbed his hand
against his faint beard beginning to show, I heard that too—that soft, scuffing sound. Ray’s lips
seemed to have moisturized somehow, naturally. Or else his chapped lips no longer bothered me.
I was very aware of my body. My blood felt thick, clogging my veins. It might have been
the wine too, slowing everything down. We moved the activity to the bedroom. Just like that—as
simple as I said it. I thought it would be way more complicated, and I’d be unraveling by now,
thinking of a million things. My husband, for instance. But I wasn’t. I felt pretty clear-headed.

The next morning, I made us both omelets and then we went on a hike in a canyon near
my house. I’d only been there once before.
“That’s crazy,” Ray said, leaning his head back to look at the canyon wall, casting
segmented shadows over our path. “You have all of this around you and don’t use it.”
It was depressing when he put it that way. “I don’t know,” I said, “Maybe I’ve been here
a few other times.” I didn’t want him to think my life was that small, that shrunken. We stood at
the top and took in the view. It was getting chilly. We were high enough to be above the fog, so
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the city looked linty and opaque beneath the haze. Ray slipped his arm around my waist and I
leaned into him. It was new, that heat coming off of him, a person seeing you naked and wanting
to see you again, the next day, clothed. It was definitely the beginning of something. During the
hike, I had my hair piled under a stupid looking baseball cap. Now, when I took it off, my hair
was sweaty, plastered against my forehead. Ray took my hand and brought it to his mouth. He
didn’t kiss it; he just held it there.
“This is happening fast,” I said, when we neared the bottom of the canyon.
“The hike?”
“Well, that too,” I said.
“I’m kidding. Getting to know someone always does. Feels fast, I mean.”
I nodded, though it wasn’t really what I meant.

As it turned out, the hike was the beginning of something. We started doing more things
together, falling into a relationship. I barely noticed it happening, like slipping into warm water.
He’d show up in the evening without calling and I’d make him something to eat without his
asking. He called to say hello, to hear my voice, to talk about nothing in particular. I stopped
quoting Shakespeare. My mother could hardly contain herself; she loved the idea that she’d set
the whole thing in motion.

One night, a few months later, Ray and I were sitting on the sofa flipping through
magazines when we heard a dog barking. It had a raw sound, like it was hurting the dog’s throat.
It was a bark I recognized. It sounded like Husband, my yellow Labrador.
“Did you hear that?” I asked.
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He looked up from his magazine. “What?”
“That barking. It sounds like Husband.”
Ray looked confused, trying to place the name Husband with the word “bark.” He’d been
so relaxed, his feet up on my coffee table, now he looked like I’d woken him up from a nap. He
glanced around my apartment.
“Who?” he asked.
“Husband,” I said, “my dog.” I was already up from the couch, moving toward the door.
When I opened it, there was Husband—both Husbands, actually. The dog sat there with his head
slightly tilted, the pink tip of his tongue hanging out. My husband was standing with his hands in
his pockets, looking down at the dog. He looked up at me and asked how I was doing. The dog
started to pace through the hall, his haunches shifting like machinery. I didn’t how to respond, so
I didn’t say anything, I just watched the dog padding silently back and forth.
I hadn’t seen my husband, Mike, for about six months. This isn’t to say we hadn’t
spoken. He would call, breathing on the line, and then I would say his name, and he would sigh
hello. Usually, he pretended that he’d called for a specific reason. It was always something
mundane—did I know how to turn on the humidifier? What was the name of the Chinese
restaurant we loved in Vancouver? I hadn’t told Ray about the calls. I wasn’t trying to be
deceitful; it just wasn’t something I thought he needed to know. And Ray had been married, so
he might have understood—the way these things continued even after they’d ended.
I was still staring at Mike and our dog. I thought around for something to say. Ray
walked over and stood behind me. I could feel him breathing. I gestured toward the dog, now
lying in front of the doorway, his paws crossed politely.
“Have you met Husband?” I asked.
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Suddenly Ray moved past me and said, “Give us a second to talk,” shutting the door
behind him. I tried to listen, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying, their voices low and
steady, like doctors.
It felt like they were out in the hallway for a long time. Occasionally, I heard Husband
yawn a low whine through the door. When I finally opened it, Ray was gone. Mike was on one
knee, petting the dog. He looked up at me like he’d forgotten why he came. Then he shook his
head a little. “So many plants,” he said. He moved back in the apartment that week.

That was one year ago.
My mother is still dating Frank. I don’t think about Ray all that much anymore. I go the
dealership sometimes, to talk to Kathy, the plant lady, and when I see him, we smile at each
other. It was strange, my husband coming back the way he did, all of those cardigans in my
closet, the half-eaten containers of yogurt in the refrigerator. Mike and I just fit back together,
like puzzle pieces, though the worn kind, after the edges are blurred with damage. It was hard to
explain to Ray. It was hard to explain to anyone, really, the way things unfolded without me
trying for them. Maybe when I stopped trying. Maybe it was Ray. Something he said that night,
standing in the hallway with Husband and Mike. I never asked what they discussed, and nobody
offered to tell me.
Any good-looking woman I meet, I still send to Ray at the dealership. I’ve sent five
different women there. I don’t know if he’s ever dated any of them, but I hope so. Something to
do with karma, I think, the way I’m hoping for his happiness. Karma or guilt, either way, there
are things I don’t want coming back to me.

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THE ESCAPE ARTIST

I’m sitting on a bench in Central Park, waiting for my mother. I watch a man run through the
park in a three-piece tuxedo, his coat over his arm, his vest flapping in the wind. The vest is
silver and it shines in the sunlight like the metal of a car. The man’s tuxedo makes him look like
an out-of-style groomsman. Or possibly a groom.
If so, I wonder if he is running to a wedding or away from one. I wonder if he is making
an escape. I would like him to turn and look at my face in the split second when our faces align
as he passes. I would like him to make eye-contact with me and indicate, somehow, whether or
not he is happy, whether or not he is on his way to a better life, with or without someone.
If the man running by me in a tux were to stop and ask for my advice, I would tell him I
have a history of making escapes. I would tell him I once had a husband, but I escaped that
husband to join the circus, and then I escaped the circus to live alone, and now I’m still trying to
escape myself.
The man in the tux might ask, “What are you doing in Central Park?” And I would tell
him I am here to meet my mother, who is happily married, who does not like to move even from
one house to another, nor travel, and therefore worries about me.
“I wouldn’t escape if I didn’t have to,” I have told her. It is pathological. I cannot help
myself. She has begged me to see a doctor, to allow a specialist to explain me to myself.
“You need to find your place in the world,” my mother says, “another person is like a
sign post, or a star—a way to locate yourself.” I, for one, have never liked maps.
The man in a tuxedo would be very handsome up close, with the faintest crows feet and
teeth as white as eyeballs. He certainly looks handsome from far away. Probably he would want
to know what my husband did to warrant my escaping. Here, my relationship with the man in a
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tux would already become fraught. Here is where I would be tempted to make something up in
order to seem like the hero and not the villain, but I wouldn’t make anything up, because maybe
this man in a tuxedo running by is my soul mate, and maybe he can only fall in love with the
truth. Maybe if I did lie, if I retold a story I once watched on the Lifetime channel about a
women escaping her insanely jealous husband or if I just uttered one, weighty word like
“infidelity” and then looked away, maybe even if I said it very convincingly, and even if I made
my voice go watery with emotion and I made my eyes turn soft, the man in the tux would still
say, “I’m not sure you’re telling the truth,” and he would be right, because instinctively, he
knows me.
Maybe I would jump up and begin to run alongside him and this is when the conversation
would take place. He would be on his way to catch a cab to the airport. I would offer to
accompany him. Why not? I would say. He would say, “You’re crazy, don’t you need a
suitcase?” and I would laugh at the idea of all of my worldly possessions fitting neatly in a box
with tiny wheels fastened to the bottom, and I would say, “I’m unattached in every way.”
Secretly, of course, I would worry briefly about my apartment and my job as a paralegal, but I
would allow myself this adventure, and I would say that out loud. “I’m allowing myself this
adventure,” I would say.
By now, the man in a tux would be panting from how far and how fast he’s run, and I
would be gliding along smoothly because suddenly I’m a very skilled runner, hardly out of
breath. I might even turn around and run backward so that I might clap my hands a few times to
encourage the man to run faster.
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After we’d thrust ourselves into a cab and tapped once on the plastic divider and shouted
(not unkindly) “Airport, please!” he would ask again, breathless, and this time softly, “Why did
you escape your marriage?
And I would say, so as to show my attentiveness, which was an issue with my ex-
husband who said I barely listened to him when he spoke, “You go first. I love to listen.”
And the truth is simple—the ordinariness of our life together became unbearable.
Here, the man in a tux would take a second to loosen his bowtie, and I would notice the
sweat stains coming through his shirt, but I would not be repelled, in fact, quite the opposite. I
would inhale deeply. He would tell me that his bride to be had been his high school sweetheart.
He would tell me that she’s very beautiful and I would assume he meant not more beautiful than
me and this would be correct. He would tell me that she is his best friend, still, even now, while
he’s running away. He would say it all a little sadly.
This would make me think of my best friend, the man who trained animals for the circus.
The truth is, I did not escape my ex-husband to join the circus, I only started dating an animal
trainer, an event in my life I now refer to as “the time I joined the circus.” The man in the tuxedo
would find the turn of phrase charming. “Lies are merely turns of phrase,” I would say, and he
would throw his head back in laughter.
“The circus?” he’d ask, his face still animated from laughing, “was it really that bad?”
And I would correct the man in a tuxedo, that it was actually quite lovely, though the apartment
often smelled of large animals and sawdust, because on occasion the animal trainer would bring
them there, to house them for a night or two.
“If it was lovely then why escape?” he would ask me.
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This is a reasonable question. Happiness evaporates as soon as it’s acknowledged. The
circus trainer had bills to pay and a child to please. And he was not the only person trying to
please someone—I have a mother, after all. “Come home,” she said, “Please come home.”
Here, again, I would urge the man to tell me more about his fiancé whom he is in the
process of escaping.
He would say something vague and kind about being with someone for so long that you
begin to forget why you ever got together in the first place—it becomes very difficult to stop
your progress, like sledding down a hill.
“There is more to the story,” I would say.
“There is,” he’d say, “but I’m giving you a summary.”
Here, a beat of silence would pass between us, a beat so important it would have its own
pulse. Here, I would think the man in a tuxedo might be about to kiss me, but really, he is only
waiting for my side of the story.
“Why did you escape?” he would ask again.
Here, I would say something vague, both true and untrue: “I don’t like the world to feel
small.” Though, to address the counter-argument, when you’re alone, the world can feel far too
big, and this is when I might lean closer to the man in the tuxedo to indicate we should kiss, to
indicate this might be the beginning of something new. I have always liked beginnings.
“Why should I trust you?” he would ask, before he kissed me. “Why should I trust the
woman who always escapes?”
Kiss me quick, I’d be thinking now, before time passes and permanence sets in, renders
this stale and problematic. That’s the thing about time; that is its one true function.
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But before I can answer, and before he can kiss me, my mother arrives. She is laying out
her tablecloth printed with zebras. She is taking out her tuna fish sandwiches. She is asking me
how I’ve been. She is asking me what I’m looking at, as I search out the blinking silver vest of
the man running in his tuxedo. He is long gone by now. He has already escaped.

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THE ELASTICITY OF THE BRAIN

When my brother-in-law arrives, I’m driving a rental car to pick him up. My car is at the
mechanics with intestinal problems. I’m not accustomed to the sensitive brakes, so the car
shudders down all of my familiar streets.
“How’s Marlene?” I say, when he opens the door, but he doesn’t answer. He’s on me too
fast, all over me, like a uniform or a vacationer’s tan.
Once home, it’s too fast and then not fast enough, and then it’s stop, stop, stop, though he
always knows not to.
When that’s over, we try and discuss Marlene. I make lattes in the fancy espresso
machine I’d ordered from a catalogue Marlene once left here. The machine looks out of place on
my kitchen counter, baby blue and too large, a relic from the 1950s, stolen from a housewife I’ll
never meet. We discuss Marlene as though we are doctors. At times, I lose the doctor monotone
of my voice, and I puncture the sad, fluid thing beneath it.
I can only talk about my sister in neutral terms, the unfeeling, dispassionate terms of the
inoffensive. My sister Marlene has a brain problem. No, more neutral: Marlene has special
needs. She didn’t used to but she does now. She had an accident, and now her brain isn’t the
same and it never will be. It might be similar to a heart attack or a seizure, except it wasn’t. But
the effects were the same: a terrible thing to bear witness to, because you couldn’t do anything to
stop it.
I didn’t see it happen, but I can imagine.
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“She asks about you,” he says, after we’ve moved to the sofa. We’ll make our presence
known; imprint it on every surface of my house. “She always asks when you’re coming,” Ted
persists. “Debbie’s been out twice this month.”
Debbie is my mother. Debbie knows nothing. I don’t know a lot, but Debbie knows less.
“What else does she say,” I want to know.
His hands are addressing the arch of my left foot. “Who, Debbie?”
“No,” I say, “Marlene.”
“She asks where I’m hiding you,” he says. This makes me want to laugh, and I give into
the feeling, until my laughter is the only sound in the room, as raucous as applause. When I’m
done laughing, I’m exhausted, like a cried-out child, and then he’s on me again, a vacationer’s
tan, or I’m on him, like a uniform. Soon after, I fall asleep with my head hung off the couch, all
the blood rushing the wrong way, and I sift through a few gauzy thoughts, in which Ted and I are
in a garden, and Marlene is a business woman, and our lives have rearranged themselves into
lives other than our own.
At one point in my dream, Ted says, “You need to come visit Marlene,” and in the
dream, I agree. I can hardly believe it, but I do. A few hours later, when he says I hadn’t dreamt
our conversation, I still don’t believe him.

There are the travel procedures—the airport, the crying child kicking the back of my seat,
the nausea, the metallic taste in my mouth, the lunging of heart into throat as the plane
descends—(What if my car costs a fortune to fix? Who will come to my funeral?)—and then I’ve
arrived, only days after Ted, in the muggy armpit where the Carolina’s meet.

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Ted and Marlene live next door to a veterinary clinic. At night, the cats make high-
pitched noises of mating or pain, and every now and then, they sound like people, airing petty
grievances. When I’d first visited years ago, I’d watched a blue-smocked woman covered in
blood wander outside, blinking in the sunshine, and I told Marlene the place was bad luck. Years
ago, Marlene’s luck was good enough to joke about.
Marlene has a full-time caretaker. She is Jamaican and cheerful and goes home every
night to her family across town, where shells of cars and old tires decorate the driveways. She
calls Marlene “Miss Marly,” which makes Marlene smile blandly, like a blind woman being led
around by the elbow. Marlene talks slowly but often. The effort required to speak drags her
whole face down, as though she’s always on the verge of melting. We must repeat ourselves so
she can understand. Her lips are perpetually wet, but her caretaker, Rani, is always one step
ahead, a tissue poised, an extra in her pocket.
This is the picture. This is the aftermath of something that could not be helped.
We sit around the back porch drinking mint juleps, which Ted has prepared. He has gone
to the trouble to drive to the store, to call to see which liquor I preferred, to come home and crush
the mint with a special silver tool I hadn’t known existed, and this embarrasses me for both of us.
What is there to say about Ted to make someone understand? He is a man for whom life
has always spread itself out in welcome, like plush carpeting. Now, women bring him casseroles.
They touch his tan forearm, asking after Marlene, asking after the scar above his lip they hadn’t
noticed before.
On the porch, he’s dressed in seersucker shorts and a polo shirt, as though he might run
out for a game of tennis. Marlene drinks lemonade and recounts an animated movie she watched
today, which came out years ago, a blockbuster hit for the elementary crowd. The sky is deep
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blue bath water. It exhausts me. Insects zip around the Citronella candle, large and swollen-
looking. Ted pats Marlene’s hand, asking about her favorite character, her favorite scene. I find
his patience both touching and off-putting. I’d like to look away but I don’t. He and Marlene
never had children, though they’d tried, and now I wonder if the trying was in earnest or a little
halfheartedly. Marlene never talked about it, and now I wish I’d asked.
Marlene looks at me across the table as though I’m half-familiar, like her bank teller or
mail woman. She reaches forward to touch my hair, tugging hard enough to make me wince.
“Aw,” she says, “don’t be old,” she says, and I stand up and walk inside.
In the kitchen, I hear Ted correct her, “You mean ‘don’t be upset,’” but how would he
know? I am looking old.

Technically, I met Ted first, before Marlene knew or heard of him. I was twenty-three,
Marlene twenty, and at certain angles, you could count the ridges of my rib cage, my body that
stalled in adolescence.
I had flown out to spend Christmas with Marlene, where she was attending college in
Miami. I relished my role as older, wiser sister, of having done it all before—“no pot for me,
Marlene, I didn’t like it in college either”—of being an expert on all things she might so much as
even think of trying. Growing up, Marlene fared better in love, though I fared better in life. I was
self-sufficient, excited by my own thoughts, my own concept of the world. I spent my girlhood
surrounded by friends. Marlene was a bundle of anxieties, too tightly wound to ever really enjoy
herself. Men wanted to take care of her, they whispered in her ears at parties and bars, their
hands on her lower back, their faces rearranged to comfort her. Later, after she was married and I
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was still single, our roles would reverse, and she would look after me, worrying how I was, what
I was doing. Self-sufficiency loses its power when there is nobody around to see it.
During that cool December in Miami, I was still the one in control. We were at a bar
called The Old Something—Stout, Goat, Perch—with walls scribbled over in Sharpie and large,
over-filled beers, and I was annoyed with Marlene for acting too drunk, for putting on her damsel
in distress act. In retrospect, maybe she was in distress. “You’re not my mother,” she’d said, and
I’d responded, “Thank God for that.”
To spite her, I refused to laugh at Ted’s jokes by the bar when I met him, though I knew
he wanted me to laugh. I could feel it all down my arms. I said that he should probably save the
jokes for my sister, who would be pliant in his hands, a girl who falls into traps men hadn’t
known they’d set, she made it that easy. I pointed her out, leaning against the old-fashioned
jukebox, hands in her hair.
Having a sister is like being in a long-term marriage, ours sins too deep and familiar to
ever extricate one from the other—we were, and are, forever linked. We sat in a booth with Ted
and his stocky fraternity brother, and Marlene kept throwing her head back in horsey laughter
when I shouted, not kindly, that she was blinding everyone with her fillings. Ted laughed, said he
wished he had a brother, because were there any two people closer than siblings of the same sex?
I said, “You can take her,” and his friend said, “Is that a challenge?” and when Marlene and Ted
left together for his place, I booked an early flight home and couldn’t shake the sadness I felt,
like a small, dark pit I’d somehow swallowed.
At their wedding three years later, Ted’s friend, still just as stocky, told the story of that
night during his toast, making it sound as though we’d set them up and pushed them together,
like benevolent matchmakers. Later, this friend and I danced to some slithery Marvin Gaye, his
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hands smoothing down the length of me, pressing into my hips. Grinning, he said, “some things
just work out,” and I said, “sure, some,” and headed for the bar, my too high heels clicking over
the song’s last refrain, in which a man begs a woman not to go.
Their wedding was seven years ago, and what I remember most—more than the stocky
fraternity brother—is my father, a month before he died. My father the peacemaker, shushing our
mother, admiring my sister’s dress and my dark hair twisted up like an elaborate pastry. My
father, standing slightly stooped right before he walked down the aisle with Marlene on his arm.
I remember waiting for him to say something profound, practically begging for it. “Dad?” I
finally asked, and he shook his head.
“It’s strange,” he said, “I never got used to having girls.”

In Marlene’s blue gingham guestroom, I call the mechanic back home. The front desk girl
answers, her gum snapping against her teeth, and she says, “You can pick it up whenever.”
“Well why didn’t anyone call me?”
I hear pages flip. “Somebody should have,” she says.
“Well now I can’t come. Now I’m out of town.”
“So then what’s the hurry,” she says.
“Am I being charged for the rental car?”
“Good point,” she says, “That’s gonna cost you.”
I think about pleading with her, about asking, “Do you know where I am? What I’m
doing? Do you have any idea?” but I only hang up. There had been a few months after Marlene’s
accident when I would over share with anyone who so much as looked at me, but the crazy
impulse passed, as most of them do. It might be partly from the pills I’d been prescribed, which
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hem me in, but don’t help the dryness of my mouth or the frequency of my smoky, purplish
daydreams.
After I hang up, Ted brings Marlene into my room to say goodnight. When she’s not
trying to talk, she looks normal, so much so that it takes strangers by surprise when she begins to
speak. In shops and in restaurants, their faces undergo a flash of recognition: There’s something
wrong with her. They smile sweetly or turn away, to give her privacy. There are many different
versions of people trying to be kind.
Marlene bends down to give me a wet kiss on the cheek, which reminds me of a
childhood vacation we spent at a lake house. She was in love with me then; I had just turned
fourteen and she followed me around as though attached by a string, enamored by my very
presence. This is the way it is now with Marlene, everything reminds me of something else.
Everything has become a symbol.
“Good night, Jillian,” she says, and I say, “Good night, Marlene,” and she winks both of
her eyes, more like a twitch, and Ted says, “Be right back,” and then I say nothing.
When he appears again, alone and sheepish, he sits at the edge of the bed, careful not to
touch me, careful not to rearrange the blanket and bedspread I helped his wife pick out. “I
thought we could go to the outdoor market tomorrow,” he says. “Marlene likes it, and you might
too.”
“Okay.”
“How is this for you?” he asks the ceiling fan.
“Fine,” I say. I think about a book I began on the plane, about the elasticity of the brain.
It might explain some of Marlene’s flashes of lucidity, when she appears as the old Marlene, if
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only for a moment, as though the brain is remembering its old shape, feeling around for its old
habits.
Here in South Carolina, my thoughts are unusually clear. Also, I’ve cut back on the pills.
Next door, cats whine in their crates. “Maybe Marlene would like a dog,” I tell him.
Ted pulls at his shirt collar. “Okay,” he says, “I’ll let you sleep.”

One thing to be considered: when Marlene had her accident, she had been driving to the
airport. She did not have a plane ticket but she did have a bag packed. She must have been on her
way to meet someone somewhere, that’s all Ted has ever been able to tell me. So there were
things about Marlene neither of us knew, sinister, lusty parts of her brain and heart she kept
completely secret.
When Ted visited me without Marlene, soon after her accident, I had recently been in
love with a man six years my junior, who had freckles even on the backs of his knees. I could
have poured myself into him, made him walk around carefully through the world with me
sloshing inside of him, as though balancing an over filled glass. It didn’t work out; he moved to
the Middle East to study minerals or sand or maybe oilrigs—I hadn’t been listening, I’d been
spilling all over the floor.
Ted appeared at my door, looking desperate and tall, and I was a different shaped
container. He poured himself right in. Most importantly, he was the only person who knew
Marlene better than I did, and there was some sickening appeal in that. Now her brain is
unknowable. Maybe it had always been that way, and we tricked ourselves into thinking
anything different.

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The next day, we drive into Charleston and walk down the cobblestone roads to the
outdoor market, panting in the humid, rose smelling air, listening to the clomp-clomp of horse
drawn carriages, when my mother calls.
“You don’t tell your mother anything,” she says, in lieu of hello.
“Let’s ride the horses,” Marlene says, in her stretched out words, and Ted says, “No,
honey, that’s just for the tourists,” which I guess she might as well be.
“It was a spur of the moment thing,” I say into the phone. “Just to check on Marlene.”
“I could have come spur of the moment. We could have made a trip out of it. Gone down
the coast.”
“It’s nothing like that,” I say.
After a drop of dead air passes, she says, “Then what is it, I wonder.” My mother, the
queen of rhetorical questions. I think she suspects something, in a way only mothers can, even
when they’re not very close to their daughters, even when they’ve squeezed out the juice of their
mother daughter relationship until it resembles something like an old, dry sponge. Occasionally,
when she really wants to hurt me, she accuses me of becoming like her—hard, guarded,
incapable of intimacy. It is a fate worse than the one I’ve already chosen.

Today, Ted has given Rani the day off. “Marlene has two of us,” he says, “three seemed a
little excessive.” So that’s how we walk through the market, one of us on either side of Marlene,
as though she is our child, though I am often ignored, like a recently acquired stepmother, kept at
arm’s length.

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I remember a time in junior high, when Marlene and I were getting along particularly
well, in which we both had crushes on the same boy. I remember lying on our backs in the grass
behind our house after our parents had gone to sleep, making up rhyming songs about him—
Chris who lives at the end of Colby, Chris whose bread never gets moldy—each of us singing a
verse, and then shaking with laughter, as though there could be nothing funnier than sharing a
boy, breaking him in two between us. Now I think about retelling the story, but then I realize
Ted’s heard it before, and Marlene wouldn’t remember it anyway.
When we first started sleeping together, Ted would confess the worst of their marriage—
the terrible things he’d thought, the mistakes he’d made—and I’d listen, as though this would
somehow atone for what we were doing, for wearing each other out like comfortable socks.
Once, while moving above me, he said, “I used to picture her mother. Naked, on all
fours.”
“Hm,” I said.
“All the time,” he continued, breathless and sweating. “Early on at least. Even on our
honeymoon.”
With him still pressed against me, I said, “She’s my mother, too,” and he said, “I’m
sorry,” and kept going, slower.

Marlene likes an area of the outdoor market best, a strange, garage sale region in the back
corner under a blue tent, where scattered among the homemade items, like woven baskets and
silver pounded pendants, people sell old keys and used stockings with long runs. Marlene is most
interested in these things, which are of no use to anyone, least of all her.
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She wants a green velvet hat, which is partly crushed in the middle. She picks it up and
fingers the frayed edge. The man selling it smiles at her, gap toothed and surprised, like he
knows he’s taking her for a ride. She tugs on Ted’s arm like a child, and like a father, he relents,
looking worn out around the eyes. I watch his hands—large and tan—on the small of her back, a
back still the same shape and size as any woman’s back (similar to my back), as he presses her
forward.
“Whatever you want,” he says, smiling indulgently, and she picks a large rusty key, and
says, in her slow, heartbreaking way, “This too.”
After we leave, Marlene swings the plastic bag back and forth so that the rusty key keeps
knocking against my leg. She runs square into an old woman and Ted puts his hands on her
shoulders and tries to direct her.
“Don’t be upset,” she says to Ted, and I look at him. He looks tired—prematurely aged.
He puts an arm around her, squeezing, which she attempts to wiggle out of, but after a while, she
just walks that way, between us.
“Don’t be old,” she says to me, and I say, “Too late.”
Ted agrees to go on a horse drawn carriage ride, because, I remind him, how often are we
all in Charleston together? This is sort of a vacation—close to a vacation—an upstairs neighbor,
a cousin, a mutant vacation. I try to sit in the bench seat across from Ted and Marlene, but this
makes Marlene uneasy, and Ted says, “Here, sit between us.”
We clop down the strange streets of this town, with its jarring, confederate flags in the
windows, its stubborn sense of history, its permeating nostalgia. The air is heavy, fragrant with
citrus, noisy with bugs. Our huge horse, called Freddy, flicks its long eyelashes and brays. I
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watch Freddy closely, the way he turns his head as though checking for cars—the delicate flaring
of his nostrils, the swell of his belly as he breathes.
Marlene tries to speak, but it is difficult to hear her over the tour guide’s drone through
the microphone and the clang of the carriage’s wheels. The tour guide is old and grizzled. He
points out the fourth Pentecostal church we’ve passed.
My sister smiles at me, her mouth shut primly, my brother-in-law’s arm around her, and I
forget for a moment the new twisted permutations of our lives.
Ted snakes his arm around Marlene, and touches my shoulder. It is brotherly, I think,
though he might mean for it to be romantic. Still, I feel the heat of him all down me, and I think
of that night at the bar, so many years ago, and the way our lives have unfolded, the deep creases
you cannot smooth out.
Between us, Marlene is smiling, touching my hair, talking nonsense—no, not nonsense,
because it makes sense to her, to the new grooves of this new brain. I resist the urge to shake her.
I’m thinking about my stupid car, and the stupid rental car, and how nobody ever cuts
you a break, when our carriage suddenly lurches into the carriage in front of us, and I can see it
all happening the moment before it actually happens: Marlene throwing her arms up as though
on a roller coaster, and Ted diving in front of her, to protect her. My hands move nowhere; they
remain plastered to my knees. We stay that way, arms around our loved ones, until the carriage
comes to a stop. The tour guide coughs into his microphone and says, “Well that could have been
worse.” Marlene nods wisely, like nobody knows that better than her.

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THIS MAY SURPRISE YOU

My friend, she wants to win a man over with a story. “He loves to read,” she says, “and I want to
impress him. Could you write me something?”
“Sure,” I say. I sit up a little straighter. “Well, maybe. What’s he like?” We’re sitting at
the sleek marble countertop of a fancy LA brasserie, a place that is trying to make us forget
about the drone of traffic outside. In fact, it’s trying to make us think we’re in France.
“I need details,” I tell my friend, “I’ll write something better if I know what he’s like.”
Her eyes go soft. “He’s tall,” she says, “but with terrible posture.”
I picture his body like the letter “S,” or a stiff, tapered candle beginning to melt. “How
well do you know him?” I ask.
She goes through a list of details. She says, “I know he takes baths instead of showers,
that he’s been engaged twice before but never married, that he plays hockey in a rec league but
isn’t that good, and the only other country he’s set foot in is Cabo.”
That’s not a country, I tell her, and she says, “It might as well be.”
I jot these down. She remembers the first time they met in line at the cafeteria. He had the
Salisbury steak, reluctantly. They are both Certified Public Accountants, though my friend was
once a drinker. She used to tell filthy stories about her sex life over gin gimlets. Now, she orders
Iced Tea on the rocks like a joke. We’ve known each other for a long time, since we were kids,
when we once made our stuffed animals kiss on the mouths. Now my friend is divorced.
Lately, when I’m with her, I’ll feel the passage of time so acutely I get a little sick to my
stomach with the speed of it, and I’ll have to press my palms against something solid, like a
table, or my own thighs, which are not nearly as firm as they once were.
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“What should the story say?” I ask her.
“I don’t know,” she says, “you’re the writer.” This is a loaded accusation. I am, in fact,
unemployed, or maybe unemployable—both. I used to write for an online newspaper, but I don’t
any longer. I was in charge of the section titled This May Surprise You. When I asked to write
something else, my boss refused. This did not surprise me. I started writing whatever came to
mind. “These aren’t surprising events happening in the Greater Los Angeles area,” my employer
said. “These stories are obviously only happening in your mind.”
“This may surprise you,” I said, “but I quit.”
“Write something to make him fall in love,” my friend says now. She pushes a pen and a
soft moleskin notebook in front of me. I flip through the empty pages. It is dangerous to make
someone fall in love with a story. It is more dangerous than it is romantic.
I too am divorced, so I should know. There is a fine line between story and seduction,
between the truth and a lie. My husband was a writer/liar too. He told lots of half-truths, and also
bald faced lies. As for me, I still drink, if it matters.
When I was married, I used to come home from my job at the online newspaper and tell
my husband about things that had gone on in the Greater Los Angeles area, things that might
surprise you. He, in turn, would tell me about where he’d been all day. He’d talk about the way
the sunlight looked filtering through a canopy of treetops while he was walking through the park.
Or, he’d tell me a story about the child who yelled at his mother “That’ll do, Miss!” in the aisle
of the grocery story. He would exclude the times he’d been with other women—in their one
bedroom apartments, or in the Radisson by the airport, where you can hear the planes pass
overhead. I was very in Love then, in a way that felt capitalized. Our love was a proper noun. It
needed a name, and a parking spot in front of our apartment.
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“Why don’t I just write you something true,” I say, “something honest. Something about
you.”
“Oh God,” she says, “like a biography?” I am quiet for a little while, listening to my
friend drag her fork across her plate.
A few seats down at the bar, another woman is talking on the phone while she flips
through a catalogue. She’s saying, “Geez, I’m sorry. That sounds hard.” She turns another page
and scans —what looks like from here—living room décor. “Mmhm,” she says, “that sounds
incredibly difficult.” She sounds sincere. Her voice belies her distraction. I think that if I were on
the other end of the phone call, I would think that I had her full attention. I would feel
understood.
I realize now that my own friend is tapping me on the shoulder. “I just want you to write
something that sounds true, but isn’t, necessarily.” I nod. I know what she wants. She wants me
to fill the margin between how she acts and how she feels—she wants me to describe the
indescribable.
When we were in college, this friend and I once showered together, because we had both
drank too much and had I vomited on myself, and a little on her. We stood in opposite ends of
the shower, which was large—the handicap stall. I think we stood with our backs toward each
other, though I was drunk, and can’t remember exactly. If I were to rewrite that story now, I’d
say that she had taken care of me, that she’d done something tender to help me in my time of
need—washed the sick out of my hair with the tips of her fingers, then gently towel-dried my
body while tears streamed down my face. Maybe it is not that different from the woman near us
on the phone, now saying, “Wow, that seems hard,” with her voice soft and sodden with
emotion, while she picks her teeth with her fingernail and circles lamps with a pen. Maybe she
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means what she says. Maybe she is just good at multitasking. On another drunken night, my
friend would have showered me and towel-dried my hair and held me like a baby, no question.
I decide just then that I’ll write the story of her washing a man in the shower like a baby.
When she hands him the story, she could say, “This may surprise you,” which would make for a
good opening line. This feels like it might win him over. In fact, it feels just like the truth.

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APOLOGIZE!

My ex-husband visits during his apology tour. That’s what I’m calling it, anyway. I live in a
condo now, which overlooks a particularly glossy strip of the Pacific Ocean, due in part to the
money he’s made as a financial advisor.
“You deserve it,” is what my friends say, “you put up with a lot.” Most of my friends are
divorced. A common theme after a few glasses of wine is what we used to put up with but don’t
any longer. After a while, someone will always make that sighing noise, that “ah well” sound of
a conversation dying out, which can sound a lot like nostalgia if you aren’t careful. I’m usually
the one to try and scare that noise off, to say something overly cheerful like, “and now we’re
better off!” which usually locks the door on the night and closes it down.
When my ex-husband visits, he’s wearing a backpack slung low like a teenager.
“Where are you headed after this?” I ask.
“Nowhere,” he says, “but I can’t use a purse.” He opens the backpack at my kitchen bar.
“I like this thing,” he says, meaning the bar. “I like that can you just sit here and have breakfast
by yourself. It’s less formal than a table.”
“Okay,” I say, “that’s true.”
He pulls a banana out of his backpack and starts to unpeel. Somehow, he has not grown
any less self-conscious since our marriage.
“I have bananas,” I say, “you could have asked for one.”
“I bought too many,” he says, before the conversation stalls. I can see the swollen outline
of banana in one of his cheeks.
“Phallic,” I say, and he smiles with his mouth closed. I remember a recurring fight we
used to have about his eating—that he took too large of bites, and then would have to force food
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down his gullet like a snake. Slow down! I’d say. Just take your time. During our marriage, he
was always in a hurry, perpetually on his way to somewhere else.
This is the third time he’s come to visit in a month. My condo is just one stop on his tour,
and dare I say, his favorite. He’s had two ex-wives before me—I’m the youngest and according
to everyone else, the least upset.

“Anger’s not really in her nature,” one of the other exes, Susan, said, when we all met for
coffee in a small, expensive I made to look like a clapboard house on the beach. Susan was the
middle wife, a businesswoman, in a vague way I never really understood. Mostly, this was
something she liked to declare: “I’m a businesswoman!”
It was ironic, this meeting of the minds, three ex-wives at a corner table in a cozy house.
Nearby, a group of women—an inversion of us: younger, easier—were also talking about a man.
“So then he starts in,” one of them was saying.
“How do you know what’s in my nature?” I asked Susan. I think of myself as very angry,
so this was a surprise, the fact that it wasn’t seeping out of my pores like a smell.
“Oh, trust me,” Susan said, “I know.” The tail end of her marriage intertwined with the
beginning of mine, so in a sense, we waved to each other as we moved through Joe’s rotating
doors. Well Susan was furious, so she didn’t wave. But to her credit, she was angrier with Joe
than she was with me. She treated me like a teenager—inexperienced, desperate, naïve. I was
young and I couldn’t be helped. She wasn’t totally wrong.
When we met for coffee, our ex-husband, Joe, had just been arrested for fraud. He didn’t
spend any time in jail, and now he’s only slightly less rich than he was, but nevertheless, he’s on
probation.
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“But it isn’t just that,” he says now, in my kitchen. He’s in therapy. He’s righting his
wrongs. This is a well-worn conversation.
“Only rich people are allowed to right wrongs,” I tell him. I’ve started to unpeel my own
banana. I do it delicately because unlike Joe, I’m someone for whom movements are always
second-guessed. “Poor people can’t always right their wrongs,” I say. “Sometimes they can’t get
a hold of anyone. People won’t take their calls. And sometimes they don’t have a car to go on
apology tours. Some of them can’t even afford Uber. But you,” I say, and here I get a little
choked up. I was poor once, before I met Joe. I know how poverty wears you out—how it grows
a mouth and starts to chew.
“Geez,” he says, and I’m hoping he can smell my anger now that it’s starting to stink up
my lovely bright kitchen with the yellow walls I painted by myself shortly after the divorce, with
my hair tied back in a bandana, like I was in a movie starring an attractive middle-aged woman
who’d also been divorced but was putting on a brave face, and is later seen at those award shows
wearing tuxedo gloves with a younger man by her side. Do you see what I’m saying? Life is
long.
“What?” my ex-husband says. He’s still chewing.
I get an image in my mind—one that recurs often—of my ex-husband wearing my
underwear. He used to try it on as a joke. No, it really was just a joke; there was no trap door
behind it leading to a secret life. Still, I took about a million photos on my phone and I still have
them.

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“I have those pictures,” I’d whispered in his ear, after two policewomen had knocked on
our door and stood stiffly by Joe’s side right before he was handcuffed and escorted gently, very
gently, because he’s rich, to the squad car. Suddenly, I worried the police would search my
phone and the photos would leak and because Joe was important, his life would be ruined, and in
that moment, it was still our life, so mine would be ruined too. That’s what I thought about: a
photo of my husband, with his slight potbelly, wearing my lacy blue underwear over the bulge of
his dick. As it turned out, nobody cared.
Later I’d find out the details of the arrest—that he’d been swindling investors, and my
mother would ask, “Is he some sort of Bernie Madoff?” and I wouldn’t respond, because yes, he
sort of was. I would begin divorce proceedings immediately.

When I met with the other ex-wives, Susan and Ellen, they said they had a right to be
angriest because of their reputations, because of how long they’ve lived in this town—a suburb
an hour outside of LA, hardly distinguishable from the others, in which each day is tirelessly
bright and blue, in a way that now feels accusatory. He wants to apologize, I told the women. I
was the only one speaking to him.
“Thank God we never had children,” Ellen said. Ellen was the first wife, a redhead, who
spoke softly and had strangely long nails. Before she met Joe, she was a dental hygienist.
“Apologize!” Susan said. “Good grief.” Susan never cussed though the tone of her voice
serrated every word. She was, after all, a very important businesswoman.

“Well now everything’s on the up and up,” Joe says now, in my kitchen. “I can’t say that
often enough. Truly.” He’s eaten the banana down to a nub, and now the peel flops around,
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pinched between two fingers, as he gestures toward my large bay windows. “What a view,” he
says, “you got a good deal on this place.” He would know; he paid.
I look where he’s pointing, at the boats in the bay, and I think about an early date we
went on, yacht-shopping, which of course was an activity I hadn’t known existed. I remember
when we walked the slippery-white deck of a fifty-footer, and I was sure he was picturing
himself as a sea captain, and picturing me as his wife. Little did he know, I was also picturing
myself as a sea captain, though in my fantasy, I was alone at the bow, looking out into a future
that was buoyant and easy, the kind only money can buy. I must have made a decision then, no
matter what I’d keep my eye on the horizon line, like a horse or an athlete, I’d simply stare
straight ahead.
My ex-husband shows himself to the door. “I’m sorry,” he says again, in lieu of goodbye,
and I say nothing, as though I’m not at all to blame.

273
I THREW RICE AT A WEDDING ONCE

I threw rice at a wedding once, showered the happy couple as they passed. I didn’t want to,
because I was thinking about the person who would have to clean it up later, painstakingly, but I
threw the rice anyway. Maybe someone wouldn’t have to clean it at all, because we were outside
on a lawn in front of a small white church with walls as smooth as cake, and rice is
biodegradable. But what about the birds who might peck at the rice, would it get caught in their
beaks, would it be bad for their digestion? It’s uncooked rice after all. The grains can be sharp.
Would the bride have the rice stuck in her hair for a long time after because she wore it in
elaborate curls and it looked like the roots were teased up, in other words, a rice trap? Would her
new husband, my best friend from high school, be picking the grains out of her hair when they
were naked and laughing and murmuring to each other in the darkness of their hotel room, I
can’t believe we’re husband and wife? Would he remember that I was there throwing rice at him,
while his cheeks were flushed with happiness and his wife’s chin jutted out as she folded the
space in two with her long strides because she’s much taller than me? I thought I saw a single
grain smack him in the forehead and I thought it was one of the grains I’d thrown but I couldn’t
be sure. I wish that grain could’ve grown a mouth and opened it and said, Hey! Don’t forget we
were once naked, we once murmured to each other, ‘I can’t believe we’re here alone. I can’t
believe you look like this, or feel like this, or taste—.’ Historically, grains of rice do not have
mouths and are unable to grow them. So after I threw the rice at this wedding, I stood there with
a few loose grains in the pit of my hand and I licked my palm while the future drove away in an
old-fashioned car. I couldn’t shout congratulations on account of my mouth being busy with
chewing because I was still worried for the birds.
274
THE PARTICULARS OF BEING JIM

For a while, I was sleeping with a man I’d met through a friend. He had a bad reputation for
sleeping with women and never calling them again. He wanted to be a stand-up comedian, and
though I’d heard jokes like his before, he had a deliberate way of delivering them that tricked
you into thinking they were something new. It had to do with timing. Especially when he was up
on a stage and the audience was drunk and susceptible—everybody laughed. That’s how I met
him. I was watching him tell jokes in this dive bar called Pete’s that had a rotating globe with
multi-colored shapes, and my friend said, “Do you wanna meet the asshole? I’ll introduce you.”
My friend Tina can be a real ball-buster, at least that’s what the men say. Really she just
talks out of turn, without thinking, so much so that men need a name for it. For a few years, she
worked as a flight attendant, and a lot of men really liked her. She’s a redhead too, which seemed
to help. She could tell you stories about those years that would make you never want to leave the
house. Actually they might excite you. It depends.
When I met Jim that first night, I was sitting under the rotating globe watching red
triangles and green trapezoids float over my hands. He walked over to me and said he’d like to
take me home. He had the posture of a man uncomfortable with his weight, maybe with his
whole body, his hands placed delicately over his stomach as though to hide it. I knew the posture
because I’d recently gone through my own kind of transformation. Was this part of his trick for
taking women to bed? Approaching them with a kind of humility he never showed on stage? It
worked. Whatever it was, it worked. And anyway, I was sure Tina had told him to talk to me,
flapping at the winged ends of her red hair, flashing teeth as white as paper.
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She was trying to help. My parents were separating and I was working as an accountant.
I’m in my thirties, so their separating shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. I can’t explain it. My
younger brother wasn’t doing well, mental health wise, so there was that too. I spent a lot of time
napping and looking at old photo albums. I had this one leather-bound album my parents had
given me for my high school graduation, and I studied each photograph as though I were
preparing for a test. One in particular, in which my brother had a parrot on his shoulder, and their
heads were bent together, as though conspiring. I won’t even go into it.
I went home with Jim that night, telling myself we’d just talk, but there was a corner of
my mind—like a light on in the top floor of a dark building—knowing maybe I’d let him get
away with something. He lived in a basement apartment. Through the window, there was only
dirty horizon line, as though the building were sinking into the street. For a moment, I
entertained the thought of staying too long and being buried. What I remember most about that
night was that fucking Jim was pretty similar to fucking anybody. Nude, I didn’t notice the extra
weight of him—he was like anybody else, an arrangement of skin and body. He moved like an
athletic person and he smelled like green chewing gum. It was only afterward when he pulled the
covers up to his chin that I remembered the way he looked in clothes, how uncomfortable. I
could relate. It was hard to navigate the world in your thirties.
He was a sensitive guy, more than you’d think by the way he told jokes. When he spoke
to me, it was in a calm, serious tone—like the voice of a recovered addict, of having been
through something and survived. He wanted to know about my parents and my brother. He
wanted to know because I kept hinting at it, wanting to be asked, the way you want to rub a
canker sore with your tongue. The fact that he had a bad reputation made it easier. And he had
stories he wanted to tell too. He told me everything—how he gained the weight and why. It’s a
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funny thing about people, how much they’re covering up. He told the story of his life in the same
dead-pan delivery he’d used on stage and I said, “That’s it Jim. That’s your stand-up act.” I
wasn’t wearing any clothes and we had sex again, this time standing up against the doorway. It
was the sort of sex you’d be interested to see yourself having—the kind that rarely looks as good
as it feels. After that, we wrapped ourselves in blankets on the cold, tile floor of his kitchen, and
I asked what was the worst thing that ever happened to him, and for some reason he told me. I
won’t repeat Jim’s story here, but it was the kind of thing that broke your heart even while you
were laughing, only you didn’t feel the break until much later. It had to do with a woman.
I felt it that morning during my cab ride home, in the orange wash of dawn, looking into
the windows of other people’s cars. The driver talked in a thick, Nigerian accent. He wore multi-
colored beads in his hair and every time he turned to check his blind spot, the beads clicked
together. I felt everything all over again.

Jim and I kept sleeping together. We sort of fell into a relationship, the way you slip into
warm water, as though you don’t notice it at all. It was definitely unexpected. He often made me
this pasta dish. It was nothing special—garlicky red sauce, penne. But he always went to the
trouble of carefully grating tiny curls of Parmesan, the same sized heap on each of our pasta
piles. Something like that, when I look back on it—something like that sticks with you.
Still, it didn’t last. Sleeping with a comedian is not the same as dating one. It was strange,
to hear a long, terrible fight shrunken into one of Jim’s punchlines. Or worse, to hear my own
bad qualities—the way I chopped vegetables very loudly so that the cutting board rattled, or the
high-pitched turn my voice took on whenever my father called—tossed off at a bar in Jim’s nasal
voice.
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“Don’t worry,” Jim said, when I protested. “The world is full of people having the wrong
impression of us,” as though he didn’t have anything to do with it.

After our relationship ended, we did become friends, which isn’t something I normally do
with people I’ve seen naked. But I’d confided so much in Jim, the confessions felt like entering a
series of doors I couldn’t return through. It seemed like there could be nothing worse than letting
him loose in the world, suddenly just a stranger filled with my secrets. Plus I assumed he was
still hung up on me. I was still hung up on him, and occasionally I’d walk into a room and smell
the same peppery scent of his cologne and that would be enough to unhinge me. It’s strange,
when the smell of dinner seasoning is enough to unhinge you.
A few months later, I went to another one of Jim’s shows and I brought Tina with me.
When we arrived, people were waiting in line, stomping out the weather on the sidewalk and
exhaling puffs of white breath. People were paying for tickets. When Jim and I had first met,
he’d been lucky to get an actual stage, let alone get paid for it. I told the bouncer my name and
he waved us in. Tina and I sat in the front row.
As soon as Jim began, I knew his act was worth the money people paid. It wasn’t just his
delivery or his timing. He was saying things no one had heard before, the particulars of being
Jim. I saw it in the audience’s reaction, which was what Jim had taught me to look for—the way
they looked at each other in surprise, as though they couldn’t believe what was happening, being
made to laugh this way. Tina kept doing it to me, looking at me with her mouth wide open like a
cornhusk doll in which all of the features are exaggerated. In my ear, she whispered, “This is the
best he’s ever been.”
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Jim took a sip of water and scanned the audience. I could see the shine of sweat on his
forehead, slick in the overhead light. He placed his hands over his stomach, the unconscious
gesture he made in between thoughts. I felt him pause over me and I wondered if the rest of the
audience saw it too—if they knew we’d been in love.
Jim wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, “I’m gonna tell you all
something I hadn’t planned on saying.”
Tina jutted her elbow into my ribs. “This’ll be good,” she said.
I hoped he would launch into the story he told me, the one about his sister falling into a
lake and almost drowning when he was twelve, and that night, he’d been so stressed he’d eaten
all of the junk food his mother had brought for the trip, until he had to vomit because there was
nowhere else for the food to go. Ever since then, he had trouble with eating—a conundrum, he
called it. It wasn’t funny the way I said it, but Jim had a way of slanting it differently, you
couldn’t help but laugh. I was glad I hadn’t ever repeated the story, especially to Tina, who I’d
been tempted to tell. I would have butchered it.
“I want to tell you guys a love story,” Jim began. I felt my pulse quicken. I thought
suddenly of the pasta, of the tiny Parmesan curls.
But it was a different love story than the one I had in mind. It was a story about a woman
back home, in Nebraska, who had wanted Jim to marry her. “We’d been together a long time,”
he said, “before I moved out here. I tried to meet somebody else. I tried to forget about her; I
tried to lose myself in other people.” He told jokes about her, about their relationship, but it
wasn’t like the jokes he’d told about me. There was a new tenderness in his voice, even the way
he said her name, as though the name alone was not just a name, but a feeling.
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“Well I thought, why not announce it here? We’re getting married,” he said, and whole
room erupted in applause, like a studio audience prompted by a cue card.
I remembered what Jim said about the world being filled with wrong impressions, and I
couldn’t decide just then if his bad reputation was wrong, or exactly right. It had not occurred to
me that he had also been looking for a temporary salve, for a little pain relief in the form of an
arrangement of skin and bones, of another body.

Tina and I looked at each other. When I managed to look up at the stage at Jim, his face
was grim. I felt Tina’s small hand grip mine. Tina knew my family, too, she’d come to the
hospital for people with emotional problems to visit my brother, and she was capable of staying
on the phone for a long time just listening to me breathe. We knew each other from high school
time, which now felt like a few lives ago. A lot of people had the wrong impression of her.
“He’s always been a fucking asshole,” Tina whispered.
I didn’t wait for anything else. I stood up and walked slowly toward the door, past rows
of sitting people, knocking against their knees, feeling everybody’s eyes on me.

It was cold outside. Though I couldn’t feel it, I saw my breath as I hailed a cab. The red-
faced driver asked me where I wanted to go. A pigeon careened drunkenly passed the window,
and I thought about the parrot my brother used to own. In those last days, it survived eating stale
cheerios out of a box it had found wedged beneath the kitchen pantry. It was strange what you
could get used to.
Inside the damp smelling taxi, a laminated photo of a smiling woman hung from the rear
view mirror.
280
“Tell me a joke about your ugly wife,” I said.
The driver turned to look at me over the seat, and I saw my own sickened face in the rear
view mirror, waiting for my insult, to receive whatever I deserved. He shifted the car into drive.
He said, “Just repeat the address please.”

281

DARK ARTS

I have a crush on an old version of myself, and a crush on an old version of my lover, and
somewhere in my mind, we keep running into the old versions of ourselves—on the street, in
coffee shops—and there, we fall in love with the beginning again. My lover thinks this is insane.
“We’re happy now,” he says, while we’re grocery shopping, and he’s studying the label
on a jar of fancy olives. Off of my look, he says, “we are!” He hates having to convince me.
“Where did the magic go,” I say, in bed at night, after we’ve stretched and yawned,
turned our backs to each other, flipped open our books and magazines.
“Do you mean where did the fucking go?” he asks, because he likes calling things by
their names. “We still do! It’s not gone!”
Me, I’m into abstraction, and I say, “Who knows what I’m looking for! I’m just nostalgic
for the past.”
My lover is not; he views the past as long-gone, as a time when the future between us
was fraught and uncertain, a plank hovering above dark water. I think that uncertainty was the
foundation for a skittish kind of arousal, as opposed to the arousal I feel now, as familiar to me
as my own name.
“You want magic,” my lover says, closing his eyes. Every time he opens them, he
pretends to be relieved to see me. “Poof!,” he says. “You’re still here, and so am I! Magic!”
And maybe he’s right, and this is a different kind of sorcery—that someone could see me
naked, and then want to see me again, the next day, clothed. (And the next day, and the next day
after that). Maybe I’m a witch or a vampire, skilled in the dark arts. Maybe I’m a wolf dressed as
282
a grandmother or a girl lost in the forest, surprised and fearful, to have found herself somewhere
new.

Abstract (if available)

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Asset Metadata

Creator Silverberg, Allison "Amy" Leah (author)

Core Title So funny I forgot to laugh: the female comedic voice in contemporary American short fiction

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Degree Conferral Date 2021-12

Publication Date 02/09/2023

Defense Date 04/14/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American Literature,Amy Hempel,comedy,Danielle Evans,domesticity,Female,Grace Paley,jokes,Lorrie Moore,OAI-PMH Harvest,Roxane Gay,short fiction,stand up,voice,Women

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Bender, Aimee (committee chair), Freeman, Chris (committee member), Rosenthal, Margaret (committee member)

Creator Email Asilverberg88@yahoo.com,bigjugsrule@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC15720636

Unique identifier UC15720636

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Rights Silverberg, Allison "Amy" Leah

Type texts

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