SWIMMING IN QUARANTINE

I tune her out as I lean forward and delicately place a seashell on each of my toenails. She’s incessantly talking, saying my name or some version of it again and again and again. Her hand reaches for my mouth and I almost swat it away but think twice because I know he’s watching. I hold out a finger, a warning. Give me a minute. I find a tiny white shell, we used to call them shark teeth, and place it gingerly on my pinky toe. Before too long it falls into the sand and I shake off both feet, my masterpiece crumbling. 

“Momma,” she shrieks again. “I want to swim.”

“In we go,” I say, springing up, suddenly cheery. I throw a wicked glance over my shoulder at him, then stick out my tongue, knowing that before too long any faked enthusiasm will be gone and we’ll swap places once again. 

 She and I hold hands as we race to the shore. Be fun, I tell myself. This could be your last day. We wade into the water and of course it’s freezing cold. I get to my waist and stand, hugging myself, and tell her we’ve got five minutes tops. She ignores me, radiating pure joy, oblivious to the temperature. 

“Chase me,” she says. 

I watch the families around us, playful and happy, and in this small town, at least four people deep. 

“I’m cold,” I hiss, still smiling, wondering if they’re also watching me. One mother seems to eye us. Longingly, I think. She’s got two boys, she’s slightly heftier than I am. I imagine she’s jealous of us. Me, almost slender, with my gorgeous daughter, her stomach exposed by her strangely adult bathing suit, both of us smiling. And then she waves. A woman swims past us and right up to her. They embrace. The friend is followed by her husband, two daughters and a son. Everyone plays. 

My daughter takes them in. 

“Do you feel sad,” I ask her, “when you see everyone else playing?” 

“No,” she says. She looks up at me quite seriously. “I feel happy for them.”

She leans back onto her floatie. Five years old and still can’t swim. Sometimes I feel ashamed of myself that I haven’t taught her but then mostly I feel ashamed for her. Yesterday, a baby went into the water wearing the same contraption. I made a big show about how lifesavers are made for children of all ages. Mine couldn’t have cared less. She wants to float. I want to float unencumbered. It’s a calm day, and I roll onto my back and float and float. Sometimes I wiggle my toes so that people on shore won’t worry. I realize, too late, that no one is watching.

I’M YOUR VENUS

In the bad winter of 1994, Minerva awoke at three in the morning during the fourth blizzard and pulled her suitcase out from under my bed. Your bed is what she called it even though we’d been sharing it for six months—longer than Minerva had been with anyone else exclusively. She slept around. Not in a sexual way, but in a let-me-hold-you-while-you-cry sort of way. She was the village witch that tended to the village idiots. Her business card said Minerva Lamplighter: Professional Spooner. Soothsayer. Doomslayer. She’d been in the bed of most every local man between the ages of twenty-five and seventy-five, curled up behind them, saying: “Now, now. There, there. Mommy’s here. Tell your troubles to Mama.” She didn’t like her job. She wanted to be a carpenter. But the Universe had other plans for her. 

“Jesus didn’t want to be a carpenter, and I didn’t want to be Jesus. But here we are. We do what we’re called to do.” 

I admired her for that. Envied her, actually. I was a fifty-two-year-old math teacher at the community college. I drank enough SKYY vodka every night to kill a better man. I ate cold pizza for breakfast, right out of my hands, looking out of my glass front door at the crows. I had gingivitis, gastritis, empty eyes the color of pencil lead. I had a dead wife named Maeve who I’d never even loved, and I was obligated to spend one afternoon a week with her son from a previous marriage doing the sorts of things I assumed stepdads did. Making tough steaks on a grill I had trouble operating. Throwing a football heartlessly back and forth. The kid’s name was Justice and he had dreadlocks. My name was Dave and I had a receding hairline. I’m pretty sure I was the worst thing to ever happen to him. I know I’m the worst thing to ever happen to me.

But anyway, Minerva pulled out the suitcase while the snow was blowing insane outside, like sifted flour through a fan. She found her bikini in a drawer and put it in the suitcase, which was really not a suitcase, but rather a little fireproof safe that most people use to store deeds and wills. 

“A bikini?” I said. “That’s it? That’s all?” 

Minerva twisted the combination on the safe, opened it up and put the bikini inside. The bikini was a flimsy thing, a wad of yellow strings. A plate of spaghetti I’d like to see spilled on her. “Where I’m going, even this’ll be too much,” she said. 

“Where on earth are you going?” I said. “A nudist colony? Ecuador?” 

Minerva shut the safe and tucked it under her arm. “I’m going nowhere on earth,” she said. “I’m going to Venus. The planet.” She kissed me on the forehead like the mother she was. “It’s hot as balls there if you didn’t know. And now I’ve told you, so now you do.”

With Minerva gone, I resorted to my worst and earlier ways. To my original sins. To what I did between Maeve’s funeral and me finding Minerva’s business card under my windshield wiper. I went down to Don’s, the bar, and took the stool at the west end. Don, the eponymous owner, didn’t flinch when I sat down, though it had been 179 days since I was last there. He didn’t even take my order. He just filled up a shot glass with hot SKYY and filled up a beer glass with warm Guinness and slid them both in front of me like Thanksgiving dinner.

“Dave,” he said. 

“Don,” I said. 

When I’d had four of each, I stumbled over to Frenzy’s, the pizza place, where the manager, Nate, was fielding calls from  college kids and townies. He still had his broom-colored ponytail low and loose at the base of his skull, his stained apron, his furrowed brow, the cordless phone tucked under his chin. His hands, veined and coarse from manual labor, from the demands of dough, were the hands of an old man. His hands looked eighty, even though Nate was only twenty-four. I sat at his counter like I’d sat at Don’s, and Nate served me without taking my order as Don had. He slid two slices of Hawaiian under my nose, followed by a plastic container of ranch.

“Dave,” he said.

“Nate,” I said.

Nate, like Minerva, had also answered a vocational call with a fury I could not conjure, could not fathom. While I chewed and swallowed, I watched him work. In life, it seemed, there were dough and doers, there were the needy and the kneady. I fell into the first of both categories. I was soft and helpless. The more I watched Nate work, the more I loved him. The more I watched Nate work, the more I hated myself. I saw me spooning Nate and Minerva spooning me. I saw myself weak and crying between them. The purposeless between the purposeful. Old meat between holy bread.

“My whole life is about circles,” Nate had once said. “Pizzas, pepperonis, onion slices, tomato slices, pepper slices, eggplant slices. Pineapple rings. See this slicer?” He’d pointed to the big stainless-steel machine behind him. “The circle of life. The circler of my life. When it goes, I go.”

I remembered this as Nate got a call for six Italian grinders. I watched him slice circles of salami, circles of pale watery ham, circles of provolone, circles of ruffled iceberg. My heart kept breaking and breaking. I could feel it in Nate’s hands, my sliced heart, with every back-and-forth of the machine. It was all I could do not to sob. What good was a man like me? I asked Nate to wrap the rest of my pizza. I stood and thanked him. He was on the phone. He was hard at work. I tipped him a twenty. He didn’t even notice. That night, I slept fitfully. I dreamed I looked through a telescope and saw a bikini dangling from a crescent moon. I dreamed Nate made Minerva a wooden pizza that she cut with a saw. I dreamed I was sick, over a toilet, and all that came up were circles: red, yellow, green, purple. 

In the morning, I ate the remaining circles off an old leftover grinder in the fridge while I stood and watched the winter crows out my glass front door. They arrived in the white yard like men in black business suits, commuters between trains. They strutted about in the snow like they weren’t expecting anything. Like they could give or take all or nothing. Minerva had once told me that birds liked shiny things. Winter crows especially. That they collected coins and tinsel and foil wrappers and decorated their nests with them. That there was nothing they loved more. I went and found my pants on the bedroom floor. I took some nickels from the pocket. I went outside in my slippers and robe and the crows leapt away—disgusted, not scared—and I scattered the coins on top of the hard snow. Back inside, I waited at the door for the crows to return, but the crows had moved on to whiter pastures. I ate the last three circles from the old grinder. In the bright morning sun, the nickels looked happy. I pretended I had done one good thing with my time.

Minerva was gone for a week. When she returned, she was tan, the color of maple syrup, and she carried a tote bag that said What Happens on Venus, Stays on Venus. 

“I brought you something,” she said. She dug around in the tote bag and pulled out a snow globe. Inside of it were a bunch of tiny women, the color of maple syrup and dressed in yellow bikinis, holding hands in a circle around a volcano. Instead of snow, orange glitter rained down on them. “Venus,” Minerva shook her head in awe. “What a ride, what a ride.”

“What else is in the bag?” I asked.

Minerva held the bag close to her body. “It’s all volcanic, all women. Gals and gas. Sulfur. Well, there’s one guy there, Maxwell Montes. I know. Only one guy? You’re thinking: he must be the king of Venus! But, no. You’re wrong. He’s our toy.”

“A sex slave?” I said. “What’s in the bag?”

“Your word choice is off,” Minerva said. “The cure.” She touched the bag. “That’s what’s in the bag.”

“The cure for what?” I asked.

“For what ails you.”

Minerva was only home for five days. In that time, she held me ten times and I cried eight of them. She praised me for my progress. She shook out the bed linens. She burned sage. She made her mushroom teas. She lined up her seven rainbow glasses on the windowsill and let the sunlight make chakra water. She made me gargle the water. The indigo nearly killed me. Minerva made me hold quartz crystals and talk about Maeve and math, two things I felt nothing for. At meals, she stirred my soup counterclockwise and her soup clockwise. She put her hands above my head and clapped. I just watched her, admired her, hated her. Her glossy coal mane, her decisive face, the ease she oozed. 

“It’s the midlife,” she said. “It’s got you bad.”

“How do I get rid of it?” I asked. I was desperate.

“Try or die,” Minerva said. “Try or die,” she repeated.

I hated her because she was right. I hated her because she knew she was right. I hated her because I hated myself. I hated myself because I hated her. How did she even get to Venus? Amtrak? LSD? Teleportation? I wanted to know, but I couldn’t muster the energy to ask. It’s not like I was allowed there anyway.

      

When the snow returned, the safe came back out from under the bed, my bed, and the bikini went inside of it and Minerva went off a second time. I looked everywhere for the tote bag while she was gone. I hadn’t seen her leave with it, but I couldn’t find it. Maybe she’d put it in the safe. Maybe I’d imagined it. I missed her terribly. I didn’t know what to do with myself when she was gone. I didn’t know what to do with myself when she was here, either, but when she was here, she was at least trying to fix me.

Every afternoon of Minerva’s absence, I went down to Don’s, and every night, I closed out the day at Frenzy’s. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I taught Finite Math at the community college. The kids watched me teach with the enthusiasm of the dead. I taught them nothing they’d ever use. They knew it and I knew it. It was like singing a lullaby to rocks. On Tuesdays, Justice came by for his overcooked steak and baked potato. It had grown too cold for football, so after dinner, I’d make him listen to Exile on Main Street. One night, before he left, I rummaged through a dresser drawer and pulled out an old Penthouse and handed it to him. He held up his hands and took two steps backward, refusing to touch it, but I went on and opened up the magazine and let the centerfold unfold. I figured a stepdad had to do what a stepdad had to do, but Justice closed his eyes and shook his head and left. On that particular night, I went down to Don’s and had five vodkas and five beers, and on that particular night, instead of eating anything at Frenzy’s, I sat in the parking lot, in an empty, unlocked car that I was pretty sure was Nate’s, and I waited for him to finish his work. I went in and out of consciousness, in and out of sleep. At some point, Nate got into the car and I scared him. Not on purpose, just my presence.

“Man,” Nate said. “You scared me.”

“Show me where you live,” I said. “Show me how you live.”

“What?” Nate asked. “Show you how to live?”

“That too,” I said. “Where you live and how you live and how to live.”

Nate said okay. I could tell: he was a worker in every way. Not just at Frenzy’s. He was assignment-oriented. A tasker. He did what was asked of him. He didn’t strike me as particularly smart, just industrious. I could tell he would have liked Finite Math. He would have made me feel like I was contributing something to society. I saw his face in my classroom. I saw his face in the glow of the moon. He started the car.

“You could have frozen to death out here,” he said.

“Have you ever been to Venus?” I asked.

“What’s Venus?” he said. “A restaurant?”

“It’s a planet,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Then no.”

Nate’s car wasn’t much. It was some old two-door that rattled and whistled in the cold night.

“There’s a hole in my floorboard,” he said. “Down by your feet.”

I looked down, but I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t speak.

“Sorry,” Nate said.

His house was a little red rental. It had a purple porch light. Nate helped me out of the car. He showed me his kitchenette, his leather couch, his glass bong, his girlfriend. Her name was Nicole, and she had on a tank top. She had large breasts with wings tattooed on them. There was some makeup smudged under her eyes. Her face was scared.

“He doesn’t look good,” she said to Nate. “You need to call an ambulance.”

Nate shook his head. “We can do it,” he said to her. “You and me.”

They put a comforter on the leather couch. They put me on the comforter on my side. They put a blanket on me and then Nate climbed behind me and spooned me. Nicole laid on top of both of us.

“This’ll thaw him,” Nate said.

I felt myself thaw. I felt Nicole’s breasts and Nate’s breath. “What good is a man like me?” I whispered. “What good am I in the world?”

“He needs something to eat,” Nicole said to Nate.

“Where am I on the circle?” I said. “The circle of life. Where on it am I?”

“I’ll heat up some slices,” Nate said to Nicole.

I didn’t want him to leave me.

“I’ll do it,” Nicole said.

I didn’t want her to leave either.

“Tell me I’m either at the very beginning of the circle,” I said, “or the very end.” Nate and Nicole both sat up. They tucked the blanket around me. “I either need more time or no more time.”

Then I was quiet. They were quiet. They left me. I heard them in the kitchen. I heard a timer ding, and I smelled pizza getting warm. I was getting warm. I fell asleep. I opened my eyes at one point and saw Nicole take off her tank top. Her nipples were as brown as maple syrup. She walked out of the room. At another point, I heard the sounds of sex, but I couldn’t open my eyes no matter how hard I tried. In the morning, I heard another timer ding. I saw Nate walk by the couch. He was naked. His uncircumcised penis flopped as he walked, like a wet sock between his legs. He made life look easy. He moved about with more than confidence, he moved about with relevance. When I woke up a final time, Nate and Nicole were gone. I folded the comforter and the blanket and sat for a while with my face in my hands. When I quit doing that, I found a note and a set of keys on the dining table. Nate had left his car for me to drive to my house, but I was too embarrassed to see him again for a while. I’d have to get drunk all over again to face him when he picked his car up. So, I went outside and walked around the little red rental to think. In the snow under Nate’s bedroom window were four used condoms. Red, yellow, green, purple. Circles unfolding. I wondered if they were all from one night. When was the last time it snowed? I was equally amazed and depressed.

I decided to hitchhike without using my thumb. I walked along the main road until a man in a truck slowed down and gave me a ride. He didn’t talk and I didn’t talk, and it was starting to feel like one kind thing after another. When I got home, I shook the snow globe until all the women detached from the bottom and floated to the top. I was trying to get Minerva back home.

Minerva eventually came home on her own time. This time, she was as tan as French roast and smelled of sulfur. Like old eggs with fresh insides.

“I’m hot enough to melt lead,” she said. Out of her tote bag, she brought out a souvenir spoon, an iron-on Aphrodite patch, and a T-shirt that said My Girlfriend Went to Venus and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt. 

“What about the cure?” I said. “For what ails me?”

Minerva held her tote close to her body. “There’s only so much to go around,” she said. “There are men much worse off than you, David.”

I was incredulous. “You can’t be serious,” I said. “Don’t you know me? Can’t you see how bad off I am?”

Minerva was unmoved. “What I see,” she said, “is how unbecoming all of this is.”

I didn’t know what to say. I looked at the souvenirs on the kitchen counter. I tried to find the words, but only a single word came to mind: frenzy.

Minerva sighed a loud sigh. Her breath filled the kitchen with a tangerine haze. “I’m retiring,” she said. “I’m done doing what I was asked to do. I’m moving to Venus for good. I’m going to be a carpenter there. Build some decks, some boardwalks by the volcanic fields. Like in Yellowstone. You should go to Yellowstone. Walk on the boardwalks. Get close to the earth’s crust. Try or die, Dave. I just came back to get my things.”

I hung my head. “It’s that Maxwell guy, isn’t it?” I asked.

Minerva went over to her little safe on the counter and turned the combination dial. “Of course, you think it’s a man. Because you’re a man. A man can’t possibly imagine what a woman would do without one.” Minerva opened the safe and took out her bikini and tossed it to the floor. Then she brought out a little vial and unscrewed its top and picked up the souvenir spoon and filled it with a circle of green liquid. “Open wide,” she said to me. “Down the hatch.”

I did as directed. It tasted like eggs. Bad ones. I winced, resisted the urge to gag.

“When you get the call,” Minerva said. “Pick up.” She put the bikini and the vial back into the safe. She started going around the kitchen, collecting her things. It was ending. It was over. I never see anything coming until it’s already been gone a while. “When you’re called, you’re called. You can pretend you don’t hear it, but that’s what makes you miserable. The denial. The feigned deafness.”

Minerva packed her rainbow glasses and her dried mushrooms. She went through my drawers and gathered her scarves and finger cymbals and soap flakes. I couldn’t bear to watch her leave, so I left first. I went down to Don’s and sat on my stool, and he served me without me having to tell him how to serve me. I sat there with my warm drinks and waited. I waited for the cure to cure me. I waited to feel better. But instead, the snow picked up outside and it went past the window like Minerva’s soap flakes. A television played a silent hockey game. It was all so sad. I was almost too sad to drink. And then there was Don, in front of me, with the bar telephone, holding out the old dough-colored receiver like a hand extended to a drowning man.

“It’s for you,” he said, and I put my ear to the phone, but he didn’t even have to ask. I knew it was Nate and I knew he needed me to return the favor, all the favors. I knew he was calling for me and only me, and I just said, “Wait. Wait right there. I’m on my way.”

I got up from the stool and ran down to Frenzy’s, and the run and the snow felt good, exhilarating. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d run. When I got to Frenzy’s, there was Nate, standing on the deck of the pizza place, holding the big stainless-steel slicer like he was holding a wounded woman. For a flash, I saw Nicole, draped in his arms like she needed a ride to the hospital, but then I blinked and it was the slicer. Nate’s other love. His maker of circles.

“It’s in pieces,” he said in a voice I’d never heard him use. Was he about to cry? “You have to hold it together while I drive. Hold it together, man. Hold it together.”

I reached out for the slicer, and he transferred it to me, and I nearly fell from its weight. Nate went to his car and opened the passenger door and slid the passenger seat all the way back, and I staggered over with the slicer and got in and Nate shut the door. Then we were off, speeding down I-90 in the black night with the snowflakes whizzing by like stars, and I was in space—we were in outer space.

Nate said nothing, but I could tell he was grateful. He drove faster and faster. Past Ilion and Utica, past Rome and Verona. I was ancient. I was relevant. We went speeding down the highway with the silver slicer, with the wind blowing up through the floorboard, and joy washed over me like lava. When the slicer was fixed, I’d let the joy melt me down. I’d let the circular blade of the slicer slice me up, into molten circles, into shiny coins. Nate would drive, and I’d spill out into the night, or the morning, whenever it was, from the floor of the car and out onto the white snow. The birds would have me. They wouldn’t be able to resist. They’d pick me up, all my pieces, and take me back to their nests. I would be lain on forever. Cherished.

The Amon Liner Poetry Award PYGMALION

Your hands dig me
Out of my tomb of ivory,
Carve the mark of my eyes,
Open so the whites are white and
Guileless, onlooking, sand down
The apple of my hips, chisel
The dips of my back, every stroke by
Calloused hands, those yellowed
And aching hands, those coarse and
Clawing, cloying hands that wrench
Me into unmovingness. I’m made
More perfect by the cold, skin
Unknown to blemish but by the
Weathering of your running hands,
The wearing of your knobby hands
Only a man’s gaze to awaken me
To praise the pure expanse of
My impassive beauty, to linger
On the sheen of my jaw and my
Roman-column neck, earthly-globen
Breasts, the way I gleam under summer
Sun or by cavernous torchlight.
How your eyes frighten me, lingering
And you finger every mountain,
Every cavity, wish me awake, fervently
Pray I would take to your breath
Step down from the dais and down
To your feet, plead Aphrodite make
Me soften and melt at your body
But if heat came to me, it would come
First to my legs, like fire, and burn
All at once, and I would roil and churn,
And I would run, I would run, I would run.

BRAYER

From four fields down this morning, the Walkers’ mule
is braying as if he’s had enough, as if he’ll kick off
the human arms bringing his burden, as if he’ll have
no more of those days he works straight through.

Here is a flower. And here is an imperial moth.
Here is a kitten playing with a tennis ball. Here
is the shooter taken without incident. And here
is a child. Here is a congressman calling for prayer.

There goes the Walkers’ mule again, unbowing his head,
stretching his muscled neck, and letting out a bray
like a peal of trumpet and kettledrum as if he could make,
by breath or will, yesterday’s burden dissolve today.

ORION

This evening’s worn on. It’s late
by the time Orion peeks from the alley
(after the bar, the band, the brawl,
the last call). He rises, he peers around,
he steps out further, he cinches his belt.
He stands proud. He swears,
                                   every so often moved
by a well-worn notch or two, this
is the one belt he’s always worn—
forget his full belly bulging above—
since the days, seems just eons ago,
when he was young, a sparkle in your eye.

YOU ARE NOT MY MOTHER, MISSY GALLAGHER

“Baby in a glue trap,” says Sam, the oldest, as he steps out the kitchen door, down the back steps and onto the driveway.

He doesn’t close the door behind him so the autumn evening chill blows in. It’s soccer season, fifth among Sarah’s most despised seasons. (The first, hands down, is Halloween. Ice Hockey is number two. There are others.)

Sarah looks up from the sink filled with sippy cups and suds and, out the kitchen window, watches Sam step into the waiting minivan of Amelia, pretty Amelia. Sarah likes her smile and the way she rocks back on the sidelines, steaming chai tea in her travel mug, as the soccer players soccer around the field. Sarah feels good around Amelia. Around Amelia, she does not feel judged or lesser than.

Sarah turns off the faucet and watches Amelia’s minivan disappear down the street with Sam in it. She does feel it all disappearing some days. She was an English major at Vassar, and she still gets the poetry feeling, that tickling, airy sensation in the pit of her stomach and on the tender spots of her skin.

Stepping toward the open door, she finally registers what Sam has just said.

Baby in a glue trap.

Recently there has been an invasion of chipmunks. Sometimes they are outside. Sometimes they are inside. Derek is generally the one who takes care of such things, but Sarah is not squeamish. She will shoo them out with a broom. She will dispose of the terrified critter frozen in place, paws gnawed but unbreakably locked on the pad of glue. 

The babies. There are two. Twins, eight months old. Jack and Ben after their great-grandfathers. (With five children, Sarah and Derek have run out of the obvious namesakes.) Rebecca, the twelve-year-old, is on baby duty as part of her allowance. She treats her work as seriously as a lifeguard, meaning seriously, but also not seriously enough.

“Rebecca!” Walking out of the kitchen, Sarah grabs a dingy dishrag from the counter and dries her hands. She doesn’t panic. There’s nothing to panic about. Five kids, a house like a collection of aged wood and kindling, a financial landscape bleak as a Cleveland February—these things have taught her the limited utility of panic. She will later tell Derek that she knew immediately what she’d find under the family room’s side table, which on its surface is true, but how could she really understand what was coming?

The family room has been converted into a toppled warehouse of choking hazards, the hard angles of toys and game pieces covering the ground like the opposite of twigs and leaves. Sarah steps in and scans. “Jesus, Rebecca! You can’t leave all of these toys out! The boys will chew on these things. You know that! Where are you?”

Rebecca appears at the top of the steps, wearing her pajamas. Of all of life’s pleasures, Rebecca likes sleep the most and so changes into her sleeping clothes as soon as she gets home from school. “Calm down, Mom. I was in the bathroom.”

“The babies. Where are the babies?”

“I left for, like, four seconds. They were playing.”

Stevie, the third of the five, wanders in from the kitchen. He’s been outside, collecting rocks it appears. He is eight, and he cradles a pile of what appears to be dead chipmunks before Sarah realizes it’s actually a collection of muddy stones. She also sees that, like his older brother, he has not closed the door behind him. October cold mixes with the room’s stale air. 

“Jesus, Stevie. You know you can’t bring the outside in. Outside things stay—” Her breath catches because she sees a flash of flesh on the floor. Two flashes really. She bends down and peers under the side table where she finds the kicking feet of an otherwise still and content baby.

       

At Vassar, Sarah once gave thought to sleeping with her Art History professor, a rugged man named Arthur Simmons who was covered in fur rather than hair, fur that his rolled-up sleeves and V-neck undershirts exposed casually and exotically. She felt herself soften whenever he was near and would lose herself during his lectures on the Renaissance as she pictured their affair and then their marriage and then their life on the bluffs of Tuscany, a braless, workless life filled with grapes and sun and oil paint and wild fights and then the fucking on countertops and beneath marble statues, beautiful marble people frozen in time, their hands cupping crowns and oranges.

She never did much more than imagine this life, though. She did well in the course, earning an A- on the final exam.

       

Sarah pulls on the baby’s foot and slides him from under the side table. He wears a white onesie with the ghost stain of pureed peas. He also wears a moderately full diaper. It is Ben, the more adventurous of the twins. He is generally a happy baby with a rolling laugh. At this moment, though, his face is serious and perplexed because one of his wrists is stuck to a tray of glue. It is a rectangle roughly the size of an ice cube tray. It covers Ben’s arm from the bend of his wrist to the bend of his elbow.

“For fuck’s sake.” Sarah exhales, sliding her hands into Ben’s armpits. “How did you even get to this thing? We hide them so you can’t reach them!” The baby doesn’t respond. “You guys, find Jack now!” She is not panicking. She bites the inside of her cheek to push it all back, and suddenly she feels calm. A baby in a glue trap. Who hasn’t had one of those?

It is Stevie who finds the other baby underneath the curtains and on his back, gnawing on a wooden block. 

“Got him!” Stevie shouts. He deposits his armload of wet rocks on the couch before picking up his brother. She does not react. What is there to react to?

“To the bathroom!” she commands. “Now! Everyone! Don’t stop.”

Rebecca steps toward her. “Is he okay? It wasn’t my fault.” For an instant, Sarah sees a woman in her daughter’s face, the lines on her forehead, the defensive flare of her nostrils. Some days, Sarah wants that, wants them all to be older so that she can breathe again, but she stops herself. She’s heard too many women at grocery stores and in line at the pharmacy gush over her five kids. She hears in these women’s voices the bare landscape of childlessness, and, though the political implication slays her in some ways, in other ways she understands their mourning. She understands it intimately. 

Still, now, with a baby in a glue trap, and three others trailing her up the stairs, she wonders what it will feel like when they are all gone, gone, gone. What kind of couch will she own? What kind of silence will greet her in the evenings as she waits for Derek to return home?

       

The adhesive in the most popular and affordable glue traps is derived from mineral oils, resins, and synthetic rubber. The major pest control conglomerates then lace this substance with rodent-attracting flavors to lure rats, mice, and chipmunks. In college Sarah would have found these traps cruel and indiscriminate and, likely, would have seen them as an elaborate metaphor about men or capitalism or her relationship with her own mother or even God —but now, there is no metaphor here, only the industry’s most effective viscous adherent, the color of semen, the consistency of deeply chewed gum. 

“Goddamn it,” she mutters. She holds Ben by his armpits with both her arms fully extended like she would hold a cat she’d found on her front porch. She hates cats. She hates how her culture has told her that she must find them adorable companions. “Fuck that,” she told her college roommate Missy. “I fucking hate cats.”

Sarah does not hate Ben, of course, but she does hate Missy, or at least her voice. Sometimes she mistakes it for her own—or maybe vice versa. She cannot tell.

She also hates being the one who must clean everything up. Derek is gone but not absent, which, she’s come to think, makes it even harder because she has no foil, no enemy. He loves her and the kids. He sacrifices for them all. Without a hint of complaint or exhaustion, he cleans the house every Saturday. He is a generous lover, sometimes going down on her in the morning before she’s showered and not even expecting anything in return. “I got the feeling you needed that,” he says to her as he slides back up, her fingers still clutching his scalp. Sarah does not hate Derek or the children. But she hates this. She has begun to worry that she hates herself too.

She’s made it up the stairs and stands in front of the open bathroom door. She gazes upon the foul and filthy closet-sized room where her children purportedly clean themselves. “Everybody in,” she commands. “Rebecca, go get my cell phone first. It’s in the bedroom.”

Rebecca does as she’s told. Sarah can see that Rebecca has absorbed the significance of this moment perhaps more than she herself has. She feels it rising now and so sucks in a quick breath and steps into the bathroom with Stevie following, the other baby, Jack, sideways in his arms like a load of firewood. 

       

According to the poison control hotline, there are no specific treatments for a baby in a glue trap. The man who picks up is remarkably nonplussed. “No problem, Ma’am,” he says. “Let me look up what we know. You just stay calm. We’ll get through this together.”

Sarah nods. Ben is in her lap. The plastic tray pokes her stomach, which is not a firm stomach, but it’s not a bag of uncooked dough either. Around her are the other kids. Rebecca has Jack now. Stevie sits Indian style—Criss-Cross-Apple-Sauce, she corrects herself—in the corner, tracing his finger in the grout surrounding the floor’s square tiles. He is lost in his imagination, and the others are calm, which makes Sarah release a sound she hasn’t heard herself make before. Maybe it’s okay, she thinks. Why am I okay?

The fluty music on the other end of the phone stops. “Well, Ma’am, it looks like these guys keep their trade secrets to themselves. That’s okay, though. We looked up what we know, and we’re going to treat this like we’d treat any other adhesive situation.” He pauses. “How’s the kid doing?”

Sarah realizes that she needs to call Derek. First, though, this man needs to finish. “He’s fine,” Sarah says. “Now what do I do?”

“Run a warm bath with gentle soap, perhaps a dish soap without perfumes and whatnot. Let it soak. And then it looks like you can use some vegetable oil, like a canola oil or perhaps a corn oil, and slather the kid up. Go slowly, Ma’am. Don’t start pulling too hard. Eventually, it should release.”

“Release?”

“You’ll have to pull a bit of course. But slowly, Ma’am. You can always take the child to the emergency room as well.”

Her body emits a groan. She knows this is true, but she can’t envision it. Not yet. A baby in a glue trap. It just confirms too much.

“Thank you,” she says and hangs up. She realizes that the bathroom is silent, which she appreciates. She really does have wonderful children. She holds her breath for a moment, just a moment, then leans back and reaches for the faucet on the bathtub. The lunge makes her lose her balance slightly. Beneath her, Ben instinctively clutches her as the room fills with the sound of flowing water.

       

When they were babies and before the twins arrived, Sarah used to place the three oldest kids in the tub at the same time: Sam, Rebecca, and Stevie. Downstairs in the basement are photo albums with picture after picture of kids in the bath, three kids with gleaming, goofy smiles and bodies covered with suds. Once they were scrubbed and shampooed, Sarah would sit with her back against the wall and let them play, a mug of Chardonnay at her side. Almost always, she would imagine them older, but sometimes she would also imagine all of it catching up to her, and so they were sick or hurt, arms in a sling, heads shaved, IV drips worming into the veins on the top of their hands. More than once Derek walked into the bathroom, arms filled with towels to help with the drying, only to find Sarah seated on the floor, red-nosed and quietly crying with her three giggling children in front of her.

Now, there is only one kid in the tub, Ben, and he bangs the water with his arm’s new appendage. He is not panicking. He seems curious about his arm, though. He stares at it intensely while he splashes. 

“Can I go to my room?” 

Sarah swivels toward Stevie. “No,” she says. “No one leaves the bathroom until this is over.”

“How long will that be?” His voice pinches, and his eyes narrow.

“I don’t know. This is all new to me.”

“But I’m bored.”

“Listen,” Sarah snaps. “Your brother is having a much worse day than you, and he’s making it work.”

“He’s a baby. He doesn’t know anything.”

The first thought that comes to her is Well, who does? But she bites down on it. She doesn’t like to use sarcasm with her kids. “Well, he knows he shouldn’t have a third arm.”

“When do we do the oil?” Rebecca asks. She’s the one who had zipped downstairs and found the dish soap from the kitchen counter and pulled the family-sized jug of vegetable oil from the bottom of the pantry. Sarah sometimes jokes to her friends that her daughter has the middle-child compliance that will make her a valued sorority sister and a thirty-five-year-old divorcée. Now, though, Rebecca’s constitution is perfect. It’s ideal. It’s exactly what is needed.

“Oh no!” That’s Stevie who no longer sounds bored. He’s pointing at the bathtub. “He pooped!”

“For fuck’s sake!” 

In one practiced swoop, Sarah plucks Ben out of the tub and holds him in front of her like a child sacrifice. “Towel!” she shouts, and Rebecca stands up immediately and pulls a damp towel from the hook on the back of the door. Before she swaddles her son, she checks to make sure he is done relieving himself, which he isn’t. Sarah feels a surge of adrenaline and exhaustion, and the smell begins to bloom just as Ben, shivering and naked, begins to wail. 

       

Sarah took Biology in high school, so she knows that the skin is the human body’s largest organ. She remembers Mr. Hoffman making the class stand in a circle to demonstrate how much space the epidermis would fill: twenty square feet. Sarah thought it was nonsensical and misleading on Mr. Hoffman’s part to stand in a circle rather than a square, which is why more than two decades later, she can remember this detail and relay it to Stevie, who is now riveted by the action in the bathroom. 

Ben’s cries fill the air, but Stevie doesn’t seem to notice. He is instead fascinated with how the tray of the glue trap pulls on Ben’s skin as Sarah tests whether it seems looser after the bath. It does, in fact, seem like it’s getting looser, but not much.

Sarah shouts the facts about the human skin just so Stevie can hear over the baby’s cries. The shouting also distracts him from looking back at the floater in the tub. She knows he wants to get on his knees and stare at it, and that repulses her, not because she’s squeamish—she has five children—but because it suddenly seems to mean something, to say something about her as a mother, which is absurd, she tells herself in the moment, but still.

“So your skin is like a heart?” Stevie asks, his eyes wide. The whole world is like this for Stevie. 

Rebecca cups Sarah’s elbow. “Mom, what are we going to do?” 

“Let’s try the oil.” Sarah’s mouth is dry. She’s beginning to panic.

“Should we call Daddy?”

Sarah shakes her head more vigorously than what’s called for, but the reaction is instinctive and total. She’s realized that she does not want to call her husband after all. Not yet. Rebecca does not protest. Instead she sets Jack on the ground and grabs the jug of oil. She twists the lid off and looks up at Sarah with doubtful eyes.

       

Sarah buys staples like vegetable oil at Costco, but she doesn’t talk about it like some of the other middle-aged people she knows. She doesn’t share information about the size and quality of their salmon fillets or reveal the secret that March is the best time to buy their home electronics or go on and on about the speed of their oil changes and tire rotations. All of that talk turns her stomach. It makes her feel lost. It makes her feel dead.

That said, she does appreciate the liberation of buying in bulk because, within an hour or two, she’s able to complete the transactions that seem to occupy other people’s whole lives. 

Sarah can’t remember when she bought the two-and-a-half gallon jug of vegetable oil or how much she spent on it, but in this moment it settles her because the plastic bottle is so large that it doesn’t seem possible for it to ever run empty. Ben squirms in her lap and continues to wail. His face is swollen now with tears and snot. She tries to soothe him while Rebecca does the same for baby Jack, who has begun to whimper too. “It’s okay, bunny gooses,” Rebecca says. “It’s okay.”

Sarah also can’t remember when she invented the phrase “bunny goose” to express affection for her children, but it’s stuck.

The vegetable oil comes out faster than Sarah expects and spills down Ben’s arm and onto her jeans and then the tile floor. Ben begins to shake his arm wildly, spraying oil across Sarah’s face. “Jesus,” she blurts and then grabs the baby’s arm to stop him. She squeezes. From the look on his face, she may be squeezing too hard.

It takes a few seconds of soothing, but eventually Ben calms down enough to let Sarah test the trap again. She pulls lightly, lifting the skin of his forearm with it, like lifting a shoe that’s just stepped in a wad of gum. But then she senses just the slightest release. Ben yelps then cries. 

“You’re hurting him!” shouts Rebecca. 

“It’s okay,” she says and stops with the pulling. She lifts the oil jug again. “Scissors. I need scissors.”

“For what?” Rebecca sounds alarmed and full of judgment.

“Just get me the goddamned scissors, okay?”

Sarah is crushed when she sees what her voice has done to her daughter. She feels the urge to apologize, but before she can, Rebecca has done what she’s been told. She is up and out the door, and all Sarah can think about is what Daisy Buchanan said about her daughter in The Great Gatsby. She can’t remember the precise words but it was something about hoping her baby girl grows up to be a fool just like her.

       

At Vassar, Missy Gallagher was Sarah’s freshman year roommate. She was from Dallas and had the flaxen hair of a miniature horse that, as a child, Sarah once rode and fell in love with at a pumpkin-picking farm. Missy Gallagher said things like: “Oh, Sar! I love that blouse! Can I help you iron it?” and “Your mother is just adorable. I just can’t see why you’re so angry with her.” She was a round, often unpretty cloud of doubt and judgment that followed Sarah around her freshman year and then disappeared as if she were a cloud made not of water and air but of birds, a flock of starlings darting through the sky in one dark mass and then, suddenly, breaking apart in a million black dots.

Missy Gallagher disappeared from Sarah’s life just like that in May of 1990, but her voice had somehow remained. For the last twenty-five years, Missy Gallagher has whispered into Sarah’s ear more than even Sarah allows herself to consider. 

Here in the bathroom, Missy Gallagher says, “Sarah, you’re being stubborn! There’s no shame in admitting you’re a fraud and a bitch.” Sarah shakes her head and then lifts the trap so that Ben’s screams fill the room and the strands of glue pull off his skin enough that Sarah can begin to snip the thin strings with the scissors.

“It’s okay,” Sarah soothes fruitlessly. “It’s okay.” Jack is on fire now too, his face narrowed into a soggy fist, and Sarah knows without looking up that Rebecca is watery and anxious as well. They’re in a moment now that they will all remember, she knows. It makes her nauseated, but she has no choice. She lifts harder, exposing a jungle of glue vines. She snips and then snips again.

       

Missy Gallagher has an opinion about Sarah’s choices, but thankfully Sarah can’t really hear it because the room is a jet engine of noise and echoes. Even Stevie has joined in. “Momma, you’re hurting him!” 

It’s almost done when the lights flick off and on, off and on, and Sarah turns to see Derek and Sam, standing sweaty in the doorway, their faces shocked and curious.

“Someone shit in the bathtub!” Sam says. He’s recently started swearing. He’s fourteen. Other things will soon change too, Sarah knows.

“Jesus, Sarah, what happened?” Derek’s face slides into disbelief. “Why are you covered with oil?” 

She is crying herself now, and she closes her eyes for a long time. The room quiets. When she opens them again, Derek is ushering the parade of her family out of the bathroom until all the noise in the room belongs to the boy in her arms and her own pounding heart.

She looks back down, and Ben’s arm is almost entirely exposed now, a red, pulsing landscape of hurt. She lifts the tray and cuts the final strings.

INVENTORY

        —garage

The wooden workbench,
scattered with half-finished
projects. The saw and drill,
the red tool chest,
its internal mechanism
allowing only one drawer
to open at a time. The
pneumatic jack, its long,
white handle. The cabinets,
bought from an online posting,
hung and painted gun-gray.
The carburetor, sitting on a table,
the spring that makes it work.
The bin with empty cans,
the overflowing ashtray,
measures of the time
he’s logged here.
The gas-powered heater,
its flame, the soft blue glow.
The overturned metal-bottom
boat. The mouse nest,
the baby mice, their wriggled
mass. The smoke-stained
posters, the boxes and boxes.
The vice clamps, the free weights,
the picture of the two of us,
tacked to the wall. His feet,
sticking out from beneath the car.
The draining oil. The mind
that knows the problem,
how to fix it. The delivery,
picking the right tool
from the box,
carrying it across the cold
cement floor. Its destination.
My father’s anticipating hand.

 

ORACLE

You will stand at the edge of the river, pouring out
every memory of your father—his virtues and shortcomings.

A lion will be watching from the other bank, shaking ice
from its mane. Like a child, you will sense the mystery of your own

body, living and somehow new. Having done this, you will see
the cup in your hand, hear a voice calling someone’s name.

 

ALL THE TELEPHONES

At the beginning of an affair
there is always one person saying
Red rover, red rover,

let me come over while the other
person sways to the side and
kicks a rock. I’m the pirate.

If I were greedy, I’d take all
your percocet. I have been here
before minus the stripes

and your country’s four-digit code.
All calls end in similar ways.
Time to sleep, time to eat

time to put down your voice now.

 

KILLERS

We all play a game sometimes, when we get too fucked up.

It’s a game of predator and prey—of boy and girl.

 

Huge cabins hang on the mountain—empty all year.

We come on the first of December, let out early on our names. Our bags are packed for us; flight reservations are booked. When we all arrive, someone’s already been there. Everything is dusted and fresh.

 

We all talk about the girl who died. A couple seasons ago she tiptoed from the house—out the back door, down the deck steps and into the frozen air. Her tiny bare feet made footprints in the snow—winding around trees, up and over snow drifts. She wanted the boys to come looking for her, all full of concern and heroism—kiss her icy lips to life. But they got distracted, as heroes do, and didn’t notice. So she slumped down at the base of a tree with long green needles to wait.

 

There is a bar in each of the houses. Off the kitchen or off the dining room sits a pool table and dark wood bar stocked with bourbons and vodkas and scotches and decanters refilled each night with red wine. Leather barstools sit, permanently pushed in just below the bar so everyone can mingle. The party never starts until five or six; we get our drinks early so our parents won’t see.

We say, “Alfred, make us drinks.”

He says, “That’s not my name.”

We snap our fingers at him. “Alfred! Drinks!”

He makes them, and we slide off—socks like skates on the new wood floors.

 

Me and the girl who died used to tease my brother’s friend. We’d pretend we didn’t know he was over, walking down the carpeted steps in our underwear to make a drink, or feed the dog, or check the news, or get an apple, or look out the window that leads to the back deck and then out to clear, cold air. He’d watch us the whole time, but we’d never turn toward him and we’d never turn away. We’d just walk straight by, then turn around and walk straight back—models on a dim runway.

 

I come downstairs late every morning to my mother slicing fruit she won’t eat and my father commenting quietly on the newspaper spread in his lap, uneaten eggs before him on the table. My head always hurts, and my mouth’s always dry. I drink orange juice and eat grapefruit with a serrated spoon.

She says, “Clean up your dishes.” But she is just saying this because she thinks it is what mothers say to daughters in the mornings. She’s like an actress. Putting on plays for dinner party guests, extended family members, empty rooms. I leave my dishes on the counter, or the table, or dump them in the sink. We have maids fluttering around the house fixing things and cleaning things like birds in a fairytale.

She says, “Dress nice for dinner tonight. The Stewarts are joining us.”

 

Just before she died, the girl stole pills from her mother’s bedside drawer. We’d take them together and stand out on the deck in the freezing wind to stay awake until we weren’t so tired, and then we’d go back in and get under the covers together, giggling from the drugs and the adrenaline of the cold, our skin touching under the sheets.

The boys would come over and we’d tell them, “Oh, not much, we were just in bed together,” our hair wild and our minds full—stomachs empty.

They’d say, “Really? Show us.”

And we’d say, “Make us,” and run down to the basement together.

 

Everyone is starting to arrive; I’ve put on something nice like my mother instructed. And I’ve taken something nice from the pills the girl left behind. I take one more and get a drink from the bar before the adults work their way in. The Stewart kids have the same idea. They are already standing with my brother by the basement stairs, glasses in hand.

In the basement, we put on music and sway around on the carpeted floor. We let some neighborhood kids in the basement door and turn the music up. Someone brought a bottle and we pass it around, drips falling from our lips as we twirl, dresses flying up around us like popped umbrellas.

We cling to the boys, draping ourselves over them, hanging from them, letting them lift us and push us between them—trading us. We stand on their feet, and they walk us around. They walk us to the couch or the corner or the guest bedroom. But when they plop us down wherever they’ve dragged us, we run screaming back together like shrill magnets.

 

The girl who died, on the night she died, kissed me in front of the boys.

They said, “Kiss.”

And we said, “Okay.”

She sat down across from me on the soft floor in the dim basement with the music low and everyone watching. We sat with our legs crossed, knees nearly touching, and she put her hands on my thighs when she leaned in.

 

The heat is always up so high in the house to keep out the cold; it makes us crazed—tugging off clothes, sucking down drinks on ice, sprinting into the night and back again.

 

Upstairs, the adults are winding down—putting on wraps, collecting parkas, and saying goodbye. But downstairs, things are only just beginning. The boys are sweating. The girls are nearly naked. We keep drinking and dancing, thinking we might really dance until we drop. They put their hands out for us from where they sit watching, and we glide our hips or legs over them.

They say, “You tease.”

They say, “You better not be wasting our time down here.”

They say, “Come closer. Come here.”

Finally they grab us. They say, “You’re acting crazy.”

“So kill us,” we say.