Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
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From the Archives
Poetry • Fall 2025 - Diagnosis
after Tracy K. Smith
What do you have to say for yourself?
Where are the keys? Why do you shake?
Who do you hope to feed with this sweat?
Who are you fueling? With my hands
behind my back, can you guess the lucky fist?
What does your body have to say for itself?
And its body? And the one after that?
Where do you come from? Where are you going?
How far back was the greenhouse? How far
forward is the graveyard? With your hands behind
your back, can you make a fist? Can you reach
the glove box? Whose beating heart do you hope
to kill with this sweat? One of us always tells the truth.
The other one is driving.
Fiction • Commencement 2011
Aunt Sophie broke her hip tying back the peonies. There is a big vegetable garden out back, now mostly overgrown, that my great-grandmother planted with asparagus for her exacting husband during the lean years between the wars. Out front, she also trained wisteria vines up the porch and planted peony bushes at the top of the hill. Aunt Sophie felt responsible for keeping the front of the house, if nothing else, looking neat. And when the peonies bloomed in May, like they do every year, too big and heavy for their stems, she went in with a ball of twine to restrain them and tripped on a root and fell.
Aunt Sophie is my grandfather’s second cousin, but they were both the only children of only children and so each other’s childhood playmates by adult decree. Aunt Sophie is six years older, which compensated some for her being a girl. She moved into the house on the hill before my great-grandmother died; Aunt Sophie moved in to take care of her. Grandpa and his children lived more than an hour away by car, and they could not drive to Baraboo each time Grandpa’s mother felt dizzy, so Aunt Sophie came in their stead, and she stayed because she didn’t have anywhere else to go.
She managed to flag down a mailman from where she lay, supine in the garden. The mailman called an ambulance, which took her to the hospital, and the hospital called my mom. I suppose they must first have telephoned some nearer kin. Aunt Sophie has a daughter, who I met once when I was very small but I don’t remember, who ran away to California in the sixties, and ultimately received a doctorate in something called intergenerational psychology from an unaccredited university, but who, as far as anyone knows, has always had a minimal relationship with her mom. Cousin Elsa might have told them to call Grandpa, who would have told them to call the daughters-in-law.
My mom arrived as soon as she could. She said Aunt Sophie had already said something racist to one of the nurses when she got there, but the nurse explained that it happens a lot when you gave the elderly strong drugs. Aunt Sophie was in a lot of pain. They said she might not walk again, or if she did, she might need a walker from now on, and that things like going to the bathroom, or tying her shoes, anything that involved bending, would be very difficult. They screwed a metal pin into her hip that night.
The daughters-in-law, my mother and my four aunts, worked out a schedule where they would take turns visiting Aunt Sophie in the hospital and cleaning out the house. They kept her in the regular hospital for ten days after the surgery, because she was slow to wake up and she kept fainting when they tried to get her out of bed, or else trying to sit up straight and then growing suddenly weak. She had a hard time breathing and swallowing, so for a while they put her on an all-purée meal plan, which she found both insulting and gross. On the tenth day, they told her blood pressure was stable, and she demanded to go home. But she couldn’t get out of bed yet without help, or walk more than a few steps when she did stand up, so they sent her to a rehabilitation hospital in Verona, a nursing home, where she could stay for up to one hundred days, or longer if we paid.
Meanwhile, I was released from another hospital in Chicago. Aunt Sophie and I were discharged on the same day. It was clear that I would not finish the semester, and possible that I would not finish medical school. I didn’t want to go home. My mother, who had been driving round trip from Baraboo to Chicago, and only stopping in Milwaukee to change clothes for the past four days, didn’t much believe in therapy, but she believed in helpfulness and frugality, and she was not about to rent an apartment for me while I looked for work, if that was what I was getting at. She thought I should take a job at a hospital in Milwaukee, preferably something menial, like nurse’s assistant, until I got myself pulled together and decided if I wanted to finish school. And I could help the boys study for their SATs and help her with laundry and grocery shopping and trips to the dump, which she was behind on, God knows, between poor drugged up Aunt Sophie, who called her hospital gown “this ignominy” and kept trying to sneak out of her room, catheters and all, to attend to her toilette, and nervous wreck me. My mother, on some level, I think, felt that medical school was a selfish choice, and that pride goeth before a fall. I was so embarrassed that my hands had gone numb. Look, I said, if you take me home, I am going to have a panic attack.
Eventually, like Aunt Sophie, I would cease to notice the intractable, thin layer of grease that seemed to seep outward from all cracks and crevices of the kitchen, or the damp state of the carpets, or the dust that, because I have a mild form of asthma, sometimes, just before I went to bed, would make me double over and wheeze. But in those first days I, along with my mother and aunts, was appalled. They had cleaned the house from top to bottom with vacuums, sponges, brooms and mops, and nothing seemed to make a difference, they said, except the finger bowls full of baking soda that Aunt Mary had placed in all the corners, which helped absorb the close, organic smell of the downstairs rooms.
My mother said I was taking some time off, but the aunts were sharp enough, and they didn’t ask me any questions, they just kept saying I was a real saint to look after Aunt Sophie and told me about their own children’s lives. Sam was going to astronomy camp, and Silas was lifeguarding, and Janet was going to Mexico for the summer months. My mother and father got married and then had me—those things happened in very rapid succession, I believe—while they were still in law school, and I am the oldest cousin by half a generation.
We set up a bedroom for her in my great-grandfather’s, study, so that she wouldn’t have to negotiate the stairs. The aunts made casseroles and put them in the freezer. My mother made arrangements to drive out to Baraboo with Peter, my oldest little brother, who just got his license, in separate cars, and then drive back in one car, so that I could use her old van. Aunt Hattie and my mom were there on the day we brought her home, flanking her and supporting her from underneath the elbows as she made her way gingerly up the front steps. Thank you, girls, she said, and then promptly fell asleep.
***
If Aunt Sophie was surprised that I had moved into one of the upstairs bedrooms, she didn’t let on. She was selfish in that funny, childish way; she was pleased that I had moved in, would be unsurprised if I stayed, and equally unsurprised if I moved away. I drove her to and from physical therapy and heated meals for her that the aunts had frozen. She could shower alone, sitting on a chair, but she could not get in and out of the tub, so she would call me once she had undressed, and I would steady her as she climbed in, politely averting my eyes, and help her climb out again when she called to say she was done, and then we would both pretend to forget that part of our routine. They say that most people who break a hip over the age eighty do not regain full mobility, and most people over eighty-five die from complications within a year. Aunt Sophie was eighty-nine—actually, we believed Aunt Sophie was ninety, but she believed, and so the hospital believed, that she was eighty-nine—but she appeared to be rapidly recovering her strength. It must have brightened her life some, to see so many people, to have so many appointments marked in green ink on the calendar over the kitchen sink. She went from leading a solitary, intermittently extremely solitary, existence to having a live-in niece and six physical therapy classes a week.
“The instructor said something very flattering today,” she told me the second day driving back from Verona. “He said—he is a charming young man, Elizabeth, you would like him—he said I was naturally very limber and graceful in my movements. I said to myself, heaven knows I am not anymore, but once in my life I was, very limber. When I lived in Turkey I was the best dancer of all the secretaries, and I spoke the best French, which made me very useful—to the embassy, you know—and also popular with the diplomats and military men.”
She was a liar. Some held that the lies had grown more elaborate and implausible with age, were evidence of the slow onset of dementia. Others held Aunt Sophie had told outrageous lies since she was a little girl; the quirk had only grown more pronounced as her social inhibitions withered away.
She had, through family connections, briefly worked at the American military base in Wiesbaden after the war. She might have once lived in Turkey, who could say? There was a sad story about a British officer and a broken engagement, which Grandpa sometimes told when Aunt Sophie was not there. She wrote her mother to say that the British officer was going to divorce his wife and marry her, and her mother announced Aunt Sophie’s engagement to all of Baraboo. Her father, by way of his wife’s family, owned the First Bank. They planned a large wedding. But then she came home, still Sophie Mann, and her mother had to find another husband for her. That was how she married Chip, Grandpa says, and produced her one daughter, Elsa. Chip died young, and Aunt Sophie didn’t talk about him. When she was married, Grandpa must have been just old enough to understand what was going on.
“Very limber,” I agreed.
It was very hot in July, and the whole dusty house seemed to stick to you when walked through it. Neither of us slept very much. I started serving dinner late. She would nibble birdlike at English muffins if I made them for her before her therapy, and then in the afternoon we would drink coffee from tiny cups and eat store bought cookies on the porch in the heat. She had heavy, anthropomorphic silver coffee service from her mother, whose pots poured from pursed lips and stood on garland-ringed human legs. She also had an unmatched set of tiny coffee cups, ceramic sheaths without handles that sat in copper sleeves whose handles one could grasp only with a pincer-like thumb and index finger. From Turkey, she said.
She was very interested in my love life. I had had the same boyfriend all of college, a dependable, chubby poet named Jake, with whom I had had a sad but not too sad break-up in the winter of our senior year. We still talked on the phone sometimes, but we both knew all along, I think, that we didn’t like each other enough for more than that. That is in itself sad, I suppose, the idea of lukewarm romance. None of this satisfied Aunt Sophie. She would question me about Jake, what kind of people did he admire? Was he a romantic or a pragmatic character? I often said I didn’t know. It becomes harder to describe someone, the more time you have spent with them; he was a pragmatic romantic, I said. I sometimes wore a necklace he had given me, two rough silver beads he had made in a metal working class on a sliver chain he had bought. I wore it as a little memorial to my little sadness, and as a reminder of our friendship. Mostly I wore it out of habit. It was the one ornament that I had brought with me, the holes in my ears having suddenly grown very tender last winter and closed up, and it dressed up my jean shorts and tank tops, which I wore most days. Aunt Sophie was convinced that the necklace meant that hearts had been broken, that Jake and I would cherish tragic flames for each other for the rest of our lives.
Both of Aunt Sophie’s husbands were, my dad says, losers, and she didn’t like to talk about them. But she saw great loves thwarted, smoldering in the breasts of almost everyone she knew. Grandpa, for example, was supposed to have been in love with a Japanese woman when he was part of the occupying forces after World War II. According to Aunt Sophie his mother prevented the match, insisting he marry Grammy instead.
I lost the little silver necklace one Saturday at the laundromat. I was wearing it when I left the house in the morning, and not wearing it when I got back, and I went back to the laundromat and looked all over the floor and the benches where I had been sitting, and even looked in the washers and dryers I had used. I felt sad but relieved to have lost it, to have let it so unceremoniously disappear. But when I told Aunt Sophie she screwed up her wrinkled face in sympathy and cried. There is something sadder even about the little talismans that other people invest with power than the little talismans that belong to you.
After coffee she, with her old bones, would nap, carefully arranging herself on her back, but not letting her toes point in, as not to disturb the bolt in her still painful hip. In the evenings I would run, and at nine or ten I would shower, and then at ten or eleven I would make a real dinner. Aunt Sophie showed me where I could still find asparagus in the garden. She pointed out the kitchen window because she couldn’t get down the back steps. My father, and the other uncles with him, I assume, had set up a bank account for my use while I looked after Aunt Sophie. Our combined allowances far exceeded the meager pension checks she was used to living on, and, once she had been made to understand the new financial arrangements, she loaded the grocery cart with lamb chops and steak. Aunt Sophie could come grocery shopping with me because she was willing to push the grocery cart—she was not willing to use her walker in public. I would grill on the front porch, and we would eat on the wicker furniture, our plates in our laps, mosquito candles burning. After dinner, we would make milkshakes, sometimes two rounds a night. Aunt Sophie seemed to have forgotten at some point how properly to feed herself, or lost the will to do it, and had starved in the gentle way of the unattended elderly. That summer she was making up for lost time. I have to keep up my strength, she would say.
Aunt Sophie had been distributing her worldly possessions among the young and vital, as she put it, for many years. For my eighteenth birthday she had given me two pairs of gloves, because we both have small hands, and one egg-shaped, Jungendstil brooch that she said was set with emeralds. I doubted the emeralds part, but I did wear the broach in college a lot. It is the size of a sand dollar, with heavy, globular hands of soft metal holding the green stones. In August she gave me twenty-seven mohair sweaters. Before she went to college, from whence, as the only daughter of the owner of the only bank in Baraboo, she was expected to return with an eligible bank-president-to-be, her mother had taken her on a shopping trip to Chicago. There they purchased twenty-seven mohair sweaters, one of every shade.
She returned in the spring of her freshman year, for reasons that remain obscure, and all the sweaters came home too. She said they were in the attic somewhere, and that they might not fit me because I was bigger in the chest than she had been, but that I was welcome to take them if I liked. I might need them, she said. She observed at the hospital that the lady doctors dressed very well, just like doctors’ wives, under their white coats, and that, as they kept the whole hospital the temperature as cold as an ice box, they wore some very nice sweaters, even in August.
There would be a big family party on Labor Day Weekend. We believed she would be turning ninety-one, but the cake would say Happy 90th Birthday, Sophie! According to Grandpa, Aunt Sophie’s mother had disappeared for six months just after the United States entered the War, but she wasn’t married until the following June. And Aunt Sophie, according to my great grandmother, by way of Grandpa, was much too tall until about third grade. This information was already second hand, though; Grandpa wouldn’t enter the world until six years after Aunt Sophie’s birth, or seven years, depending on the date you used. And now there was none left among the living who could verify the story or deny—except, perhaps, for Aunt Sophie herself, but she, of course, one was not allowed to ask. Grandpa and the five uncles and all of their wives and kids would drive out. The daughters-in-law would bring potato salad, and the small children would be given balloons.
Aunt Sophie’s fantasies about my future were as difficult to deflate as her fantasies about her own past. Sometimes she thought I should be an opera singer. I do not know why she thought this; perhaps it was an end toward which she herself had once aspired. She told me I would have to go back to Germany for my musical training. Those were her words, back to Germany. It was the only place in the world where they still took opera seriously. Aunt Sophie’s forbearers had, after an abortive revolution in the spring of 1848, arrived here, in the wilderness. They taught their children to read Latin. They did not know how to farm. Aunt Sophie grew up seeped in the lore of the enclave, of Weimar and of wolves. Grandpa’s mother made her take dictation in Sütterlin. She thought opera was perhaps a higher path than medicine, all in all.
“My Mother, you know, was a student of Liszt.” She would say “I had a very good music teacher when I was a girl, too, Mr. Pratt. He told me with training I might have been a concert pianist, can you imagine that! Right up until, well, let’s see, right up until the bank failed. A concert pianist!”
The unselfconscious lies Aunt Sophie told about herself did not needle me, as I know they needled some of the other members, the patriarchs in particular, of our exactingly honest clan. In my home children were neither permitted to lie nor were they lied to; belief in Santa was discouraged at an early age. Aunt Sophie was unconcerned, though, about the real possibilities, the causal relationships, and the plans laid for my future, and for that I was grateful.
I didn’t like when she lied about me, though. It felt invasive and too easy. Once we had a neighbor come in, a woman who made something called “twig furniture” in her garage next door, to see if she smelled gas—she didn’t—and Aunt Sophie told her that I was spending the summer in Baraboo to rest my voice. I stiffened but did not correct her. Then another time, in late August, shortly before her birthday, I had a piano tuner come in from Pipersville to look at my great grandmother’s piano. Regardless of whether or not Aunt Sophie would play it, I thought it would give her pleasure to have the instrument in good repair, and that my father and uncles, whose patrimony it was, would not object if I sent them a bill after the fact. It had been raining for two days, chilly, unseasonal rain. The piano tuner was a barrel-shaped man with a perfectly round bald spot, almost like a tonsure, on the back of his head. He was attractive, in that unexpected way of short, muscular men. Aunt Sophie sat in an armchair behind him and watched as he worked.
“My niece, you know—actually she is my second cousin’s granddaughter but she calls me Aunt and I call her Niece—my niece is a doctor. She is an orthopedist but has taken a leave of absence to look after her Aunt—I took a fall in May, you see—to help me recuperate.”
I felt compromised. I was reading a murder mystery in a window seat, where I could watch the rivulets of water run down the outside of the glass and then seep through and pool around the unused ash trays on the sill. My hair was wet from a trip to the drug store. I had worn sandals and they had raised big wet blisters between my big and second toes. I ignored Aunt Sophie’s chatter, but after the man left I told her it embarrassed me when she said things about me to other people that weren’t true.
***
I can’t blush. In the pseudo-sciences of earlier centuries the inability to blush was sometimes linked to criminal behavior. Dark skinned people, they thought, incorrectly, did not blush, ergo they felt no shame or remorse, ergo they posed a threat to the larger society. Actually, blushing is not linked to skin color but only people’s varying sensitivity to those chemicals, which trigger the dilation of blood vessels and capillaries in the face; plenty of black people do blush and plenty of white people can’t. But my body has a fierce and varied arsenal for announcing physiologically, anxiety, embarrassment, and shame. My hands get clammy, my stomach hurts, and sometimes I get short of breath or hear a high-pitched buzzing in my ears. Sometimes I have to hide in bathroom stalls and count until an episode is past. I was embarrassed at Aunt Sophie’s birthday, first for her, then for myself, then for all of us there. We had the party in a park at the foot of the hill, Union Park, where we always do. The park has a bandstand and half of an Indian mound, the wing and body of what would have once looked like a bird in flight if viewed from an airplane; though, the mound predates air travel by many centuries, the signs say. Perhaps it was an image meant for other birds. The picture is too low and too wide to comprehend from the ground. At eye level it looks like a septic bump or low earthen wall, and in the fifties they ran a county highway through the bird’s left wing and part of his head. In one of my earliest memories I am walking the perimeter, and my father is holding my hand. I was embarrassed first for Aunt Sophie, who wore a shiny choral sheath and jacket that she had worn for her second wedding in 1964. She wore also a large hat and orthopedic shoes. She was delighted with the party, and she took too much potato salad. She was telling my father about the compliments her physical therapist had recently paid. She was thinking of having him over for dinner. He said she was very limber for her age. My father’s face gave nothing away, but I could imagine his mounting contempt—not the kind of contempt one reflects on or airs, the kind so natural it does not merit attention, not even the attention of the person inside of whom it grows. I was embarrassed for myself, too, Aunt Sophie’s ally and special friend.
Then the cake came out, white cake with whipped cream frosting and strawberries. It was actually four cakes cemented together with two long seams of cream. My mother had driven out with the individual cakes in the back seat of her car and assembled them at the house on the hill. She was worried there would not be enough to go around; there were twenty-four of us in all. In slices of strawberry arranged like scales or fallen dominos she had drawn a boarder and written across the center a large “90.” In the upper left-hand corner she used red frosting and a zip lock bag to scrawl, “Happy Birthday, Sophie!” The smallest of the cousins were collected back to the table, and we sang as my mother and Aunt Hattie processed the cake to the table from the car.
“Elizabeth has a real voice,” Aunt Sophie told my father, once we were all seated again, passing paper plates around. “I have encouraged her to study music. I have an ear for these things. Mr. Pratt believed I could be a pianist, and, as you know, my mother was a student of Liszt.”
Aunt Sophie’s mother was born in 1900. “Franz Liszt died in 1876,” I said. As soon as I said it I knew it was wrong, not factually wrong, but the wrong thing to do. Around the table the aunts and uncles looked taken aback, embarrassed for me, and my father looked particularly severe. My mother changed the subject, asking if Aunt Sophie ever got a chance to practice, now that the piano in the house on the hill was again in tune.
Oh, she said, oh not really. Aunt Sophie, too, seemed embarrassed, much to my surprise. One of the smaller cousins, Eric, age ten, full of promise, popped a balloon.
Aunt Sophie said she was worn out and repaired to her bedroom, my great-grandfather’s sometimes study, even before the last guests left. I suggested that we take a walk around the bird, allowing my mother to drive Aunt Sophie up the hill and help her mount the front steps, cane in hand, unobserved. After everyone left, and I had taken out the white bags full of paper plates and the plastic bin of soda cans, and the cool of the evening had set in, I knocked on Aunt Sophie’s door. Did she want her Vogues? She had accumulated many decades worth of ladies magazines which she had me move about the house in stacks five or ten years thick. Or a cup of mint tea? Mint had taken over a large swath of our largely untended garden, choking back vines that I believe, from the their flowers, may have once produced squash. I tried to prune it back, collecting rubber banded bundles in the fridge, but we never used them fast enough. She said no, but some half hour later she called from her bedroom and said, yes, please she would like her current stack of Vogues.
There is a family tree in my great-grandfather’s study, framed and mounted on the wall. In his long years of able-bodied unemployment, after the table slide factory his father left him went out of business, my grandfather’s father took up genealogy, along with astronomy, violin making, and the rugged life. He was a great admirer of Teddy Roosevelt. The male branches are complete, back to Johann the rope maker, father to Johann the physician, born in seventeen twenty-five. The wives’ names are missing, until “Gräfin Agnes van Boist, Duchess, 1826-1888” who had the misfortune to marry beneath her and flee to America the following night. Aunt Sophie referred to her with a doubled title, “my great-great grandmother, the Duchess Gräfin van Boist.” Under the weight of her two titles, Duchess Gräfin Agnes van Boist learned to kill her own chickens and pull a plow.
The tree tapers to a point at my grandfather, the only son of an only son. A facsimile of this family tree was given to Grandpa for his birthday last year, with his five sons and their families, like roots of a plant in a too small pot, appended. I imagine it must have been stifling for him, this house. What it was like for Aunt Sophie, I cannot say.
Grandpa’s mother and Aunt Sophie’s mother didn’t get along, but my great-grandfather insisted that his wife include Aunt Sophie in the after school lessons she prepared for Grandpa. Grandpa’s mother studied English and Classics, and provided for her husband and son by teaching correspondence courses from the kitchen table. It was Grandpa’s mother who, as Aunt Sophie says, kept the larder full. Her Phi Beta Kappa key is still in the silverware drawer. I believe Aunt Sophie spent a great deal of her childhood in this house, under the stern and perhaps unwelcoming tutelage of her mother’s cousin’s wife.
My own mother has speculated that Aunt Sophie could be the natural daughter of my great-grandfather and his then unmarried cousin, heiress to the First Bank. That would explain the conflicting birthdays. Aunt Sophie’s grandparents, who were also my great-grandfather’s grandparents, would have turned up a groom for their already delivered daughter. My great-grandfather was already married to my great-grandmother then. They too may have colluded to turn up a smart young man, interested in banking, not overly nice. That would make Aunt Sophie Grandpa’s half-sister, and an illegitimate stepdaughter of sorts to his mother, for whom Aunt Sophie cared in the last years of her life. Perhaps they both understood the secret and convoluted relationship by which they were bound. My mother believes Aunt Sophie knows that she is Grandpa’s half-sister, but that Grandpa does not know. My father, my mother says, would also not know, and it would only antagonize him to ask.
There Aunt Sophie lay, in what may have been her father’s study, may have been weighted, viscous with meaning. Or maybe not. I was solicitous and she was quite cold, but she let me help her change out of her wedding dress and into her bathrobe.
She would forgive me my indiscretion; though I couldn’t have said that with certainty then. We would arrive at an uneasy truce, but then in November she would fall again. The piano tuner would be back, adjusted the very lowest octave. He would strike the octave then the fifth then the thirds then the octave again. I would be upstairs in my bedroom folding mohair sweaters. I would have decided to fly by night. And there she would come, hurrying up the walk, a small figure in a large hat, and she would wipe out on the front-stairs, and I would have to stay. She would recover more slowly from the second hip replacement, spending many weeks in the hospital, and refusing sometimes for days at a time to leave her bed. She would become belligerent with the hospital staff, mildly paranoid, and come to depend ever more completely on me. I would bring her treats in the hospital, venison sausage, for which she would develop an insatiable appetite, and a kind of current bread. I would begin an affair with the piano tuner, whom I would ultimately marry. I, too, would develop an interest in furniture made of “twigs.”
When Aunt Sophie died, she was back in her own home, the house on the hill, reading Vogues from the nineteen seventies. In the real seventies, her daughter was already grown and gone, and she was about to marry her second husband, the mailman, whose mail route she would inherit at his death. I was Easter time. She had only been home from the hospital for a few weeks. I had started sleeping through the night again, suddenly and without explanation, so I was asleep when she went. When I woke up the next morning, the television was still on, and she was cold in her chair. They buried her in the family plot, on a day when the ground was newly soft, and all the lady’s heels sank down into the sod. They buried her between her parents and my great grandparents and, a few rows behind, the Duchess Gräfin Agnes von Boist.
At night, in the rolling farmland around the Rock River, you don’t see the blights of rural poverty or urban sprawl, but only the dark contours of the ground. I went for a run late, after Aunt Sophie’s birthday, once the air had cooled and she had turned out her light. She claimed that she slept little, but assumed on principle the form of sleep, eyes closed, breathing even, lights out, for a few hours every night. It could be true; the very old sometimes shed their need for sleep. I wore a reflective vest, a birthday gift from my oldest little brother, and, like a disenchanted Hermes, reflective stickers at my feet. Out on the dark county highways the shadows of the corn, early feed corn, with thick, broad leaves, stood half again as tall as me, undulating with the low hills on either side. The air carried the scent of silage, and of dirt. There is something old and reassuring about the smell fertile land. We are safe when the fields are full.
Features • Fall / Winter 2023
Fiction • Spring 2013
When we finally get home and my mom unlocks the car, I leg it up the stairs to my dad’s room and tell him, “Dad, I’ve been losing so much weight these last weeks, maybe soon I’m not gonna be the fat kid any more.”
My dad looks up from his bed, and he smiles like he usually does. Like he wants to grin like a mad dog but he’s too tired to try, even.
“I’d give it until the weekend at least, Jim.”
I can never really tell when Dad is joking. Mom says that’s just his sense of humor, but I reckon it’s dumb. Number one, because most of his jokes aren’t funny anyway, and they’re usually about things that are meant to be serious. And number two, because if a joke isn’t funny, then how do you tell it’s a joke not a lie?
Usually Dad keeps his door shut, and I’m only meant to bother him if it’s something important. I don’t really mind that Dad’s always so tired. He’s run out of steam a bit, that’s what my mom tells me, and it doesn’t matter much because Mom’s always there if I need something. Plus he’s sick—I know he’s sick— but I also know Mom thinks he’s making it up sometimes, because I heard them both arguing about it just a few days ago.
Until the weekend at least, that’s what I’m thinking as I walk down the stairs and then into my room. Mom’s cooking dinner, I can hear her in the kitchen. I shut my door. Now Mom, she doesn’t think I’m fat at all, which is why I can only bring up the whole fatness thing with my dad. You ask Mom, she’ll say I’m crazy, she’ll say I’m a perfectly normal shape for a thirteen-year-old son to be. But I know that once you’re thirteen, you’re not a kid any more. You’ve got to be a man, and you’ve got to do it quick else life just passes you by. By now I’m getting too old for the puppy fat routine. Obviously Mom’s just being nice, because she’s like that, and besides she hates to think there might be anything wrong with me. Still, I’m clearly pretty soft around the edges. (You can tell that just by touching my edges. They’re pretty soft.)
I’ve realized that it’s actually Mom’s fault I’m fat. She is feeding me things all the bloody time, these days, and I wonder if she’s chubbing me up for some reason, though I can’t think why. Unless she wants to be the only one who thinks I’m perfect, like, forever.
Mom can be too much sometimes. I really hope she doesn’t mind when I stop being fat anymore. See, I’ve been carefully watching my food intake recently. When I turned thirteen last month, I realized it was time for me to grow up and be sensible. Not be Mom’s kid any more. First I added two new lists to my List Book. “Things I should eat more of to make me skinny” and “Things I should eat less of because they make me fat.” The second list is much much longer and it’s getting bigger as I read more about this stuff. Turns out there’s fat and sugar basically everywhere. I am also learning to stand my ground with my mom now, whenever she tries to feed me fatty foods. Like last week, when Danny Zhu came over to watch the Sydney FC game, she came knocking in the morning and she wanted to make us pancakes, so I told her straight up, I said, “Mom, piss off, we don’t want your pancakes,” and she did.
I’ve been losing weight fast since my thirteenth birthday. I started keeping the List Book then, as well. I didn’t start doing all of this for Sara B., but at some point I just forgot all the reasons that weren’t her. Especially since what happened at camp—but that’s a different story.
Standing my ground is getting easier as I become thinner, because no one takes you seriously when you’re fat. That’s something my dad told me. And I need to be taken seriously soon, because if I can thin down fast enough, then I’m finally going to talk to Mrs. B. this Friday after school.
I open up a fresh page in my List Book, and I write along the top: “Things I will say to Mrs. B. at the occasion of my thinness.” Underneath I add: “Start—Hi, I know your daughter. We’re friends, maybe more. Maybe I love her. But this is about you. She needs you to be better.”
That’ll do for the first night, I reckon.
*
Tuesday after lunchtime we have sports day, so all the boys and Mr. Harrison mosey down to the oval for cricket. It’s hot, the kind of hot I hate, the kind where I can already feel the sunburn growing on my neck and on my arms. Usually I go walkabout at this point—as Mr. Harrison put it, I’m the worst damned player in the school and there’s daylight between me and the next bloke—but out here, today, I feel like I’m as thin as I’ve been all my life. Anything is possible, and it’s time I joined in.
I grumble under my hat in the outfield, and the kids don’t let me bowl. They put me down 10th to bat, that’s last, and so I camp out in the stands with the others while they talk all their usual horsecrap. Who pashed who, who got who to show him her tits, who got who to touch his youknow. Tom Burrows is standing up now, telling some story and gesturing like he just caught a fish and It Was This Big.
“I’m tellin you boys, she had nipples like malt balls, this girl, the size of bloody malt balls!”
It turns out he means some girl down at the surf life-saving club, so I start to zone out. I quit the life savers myself, about a year ago, back when we all used to pile down to Dee Why beach every Sunday. One time I was standing knee-deep in surf while Sam Sheffield was going on about something or other, and I couldn’t help looking at the outline of his ribs, how you could pretty much count them all and how there was hardly even an ounce of fat on his whole torso. I was wearing a rash vest at the time, because Mom and Dad both said I’d get sunburn without one, and it was tight like it’s meant to be, but when I was looking at Sam Sheffield, the thing started feeling too tight, unbearably tight, sucked in close against my gut and tubby chest, and all I could manage was to breathe deep and wonder how it looked to all the other kids. That’s when I quit the surf life savers, and that’s when I decided I would only go down to Dee Why beach on my own.
Quitting the surf club definitely wasn’t good for my popularity. Not that I’m, like, bullied or anything. It’s just I always feel like I’m on the outside, looking in on stuff. Sometimes all the boys say I’m gay, because I’m never down at the beach with them and I never have girl stories for them. They would let up completely if they knew about Sara, of course, but I’m sure as hell not going to tell them about all that. No way Jose.
It’s a tired walk back up the hill and then we’re waiting to get picked up outside the Dee Why Elementary. Danny Zhu’s dad comes and gets him right away, so it’s only me and Sara sitting there, which is just how I like it in fact. It used to be just Danny Zhu and me who got picked up, but Sara B. came new to our school this year, so now it’s the three of us. Mr. Zhu is always on time, actually, so most days it’s at least ten minutes of just Sara and me together.
At our school it’s embarrassing to get driven home, because only the rich or the precious kids get picked up, and the rest of our mates sometimes jeer on their way to the bus. It used to bother me, but now I don’t mind, not since Sara started waiting here as well. Truth is the time I like best every day is between 3:00 and 3:15.
What we do is we sit on the fence, which is made of chain links but has wood on the top. The wooden beam is a perfect height for sitting—perfect for her, I mean, because her legs are longer than mine are, whereas I have to jump a bit to get my arse up there, which is not an easy maneuver for a young man of my proportions. So we sit there and swing our legs, and they go clink each time we let them drop on the chain. My mom always turns up Flood Street from the right and Mrs. B—that’s Sara’s mom—she always shows up on foot on the street corner down a ways to the left. She parks around the bend and then they drive home from there, Sara told me.
What I know about Sara is this. She is from Serbia or Croatia or one of them, I don’t remember exactly, and either her dad is still there or he never came to Australia for some other reason. There were troubles there when she left. We call her Sara B. because her last name, which starts with B, is really long and no one can pronounce it, not even me, and believe me I’ve tried. She is new at our school this year, which means I’ve known her two months already. It didn’t work out at her old school but Mr. Harrison wouldn’t tell us why—there are plenty of rumors, though, like some people say that she was kicked out for smoking or having sex or whatever. That was in the South, down Kurnell way. The lads say Sara had a boyfriend from the eleventh grade, but he got arrested at the Cronulla race riots for beating up an Indian kid and they stopped going out soon after that. Tom Burrows thought it was hilarious when he found out, because the Cronulla riots were all about the Arab immigrants, not about Indians at all. “Who the fuck has a problem with the Indians anyway?” Alex Spiros said, in between laughing.
The other girls are pretty nice to Sara, but they’re scared of her as well, probably because she’s tall and skinny and she’s started out with decent boobs already. Sara doesn’t fit in all that well at school, either, but I reckon it’s for different reasons from me. She seems like she’s older than the rest of us somehow. Mostly she seems pretty sad, but I know her better than most people and there are times when she smiles and you can tell she really means it.
She’s grinning like a dumb mullet right now, in fact, because she just won The Game for like the third time in a row. The Game is something we do while we wait for our moms. It’s easy to play, all you do is you sit on the fence facing the street and you throw a little pebble over your head into the empty playground that’s behind you. The winner is the first person to hit the big DEE WHY ELEMENTARY sign, which is twenty whole yards away and high up in the air but it makes the greatest sounding pong when you do actually hit it. We are getting pretty good at The Game, though still some days no one manages to win. One time Danny Zhu hit the sign right away, so we secretly decided never to play it until he had already left.
“Did You Know,”Ana says, with a look on her face that shows she’s thinking mischief, “Did You Know that a woman who robbed a bank in New York City came back a few days later and returned it?”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh,” she says. “Well, she didn’t return it all. She stole a thousand bucks and brought back an envelope with only seven hundred in it, and she wrote on it ‘I stole this money from your bank on Friday. Sorry.’ Then she went to buy a bottle of whiskey, and when she got home the police were waiting for her!”
I heard this one already, but I can’t watch Sara laugh without me laughing too, so my laughing isn’t fake, not one bit. I clear my throat.
“Well,” I start, in my best game show host voice. “Did You Know. The Ukrainian army has trained a bunch of attack dolphins—and last week a few of them escaped. They say there’s now a little gang of attack dolphins lost in the ocean, guns and knives attached to their noses.”
“James. This is bullshit. I’m calling it.”
“No! I swear. Fair dinkum. On My Honor.” I offer her my pinky, and we pinky-swear like usual. “Hey, and you know why they think the dolphins ran off?”
“Why?”
“They’re all out there—these trained bloody killer dolphins—they’re all out there looking for mates! They’re looking for love.”
I laugh and look over at Sara but she’s turned away up the street already. I remember that I’m still holding onto her pinky, with my stupid sweaty needy fatboy grip, so I pull it away. I pretend to look out for my mom while I listen to Sara’s feet going clink, clink, and clink on the wire chain fence.
“Jim,” she starts.
“Yeah?”
“Nothing. Don’t worry. Sorry.”
Clink, clink, clink and now my mom’s here, 3:15 on the dot, so I grab my bag—which still has the smell of forgotten banana somehow—and I walk over to the car wondering why I thought things would be different now.
Mom is asking me how my day was, and I’m not going to say what’s bothering me, so I tell her instead it was fine. I don’t ask how hers was. Usually Mom asks me about the kids in my class, with the names all wrong half the time, and I’ll answer her as honest as I can without risking anyone for getting in trouble. The parents all talk to each other, see. So, for example, I told her last week that Sally Rourke is sitting on her own, now, but I won’t tell it’s because Sam Sheffield said he saw her pashing Alex Spiros behind the tuckshop one lunchtime and now everyone says she’s a slut. This year especially I’ve got real good at making stuff up for my mom, but the fact is still it’s really hard to tell her about a world with none of the important bits in.
“Great,” says Mom, and then there’s silence as we drive up to the Head where we live. I’m still thinking about Sara when Mom smiles and puts her hand on my hand, and I think how it must suck to love someone so much when you have nothing to talk with them about. We drive on past the beach, and I close one eye then the other, making shapes with the bird shits on the windscreen.
Dad’s door is closed when we get home, so I tiptoe back downstairs to my own room. I wanted to tell him thanks for this book he gave me—it’s like Singin’ in the Rain, which is my favorite movie and has my favorite actor Gene Kelly in it, except as an illustrated comic. I let Sara borrow the book when we were at camp, and she said she liked it but thought I reminded her more of the funny guy, the Donald O’Connor one, than the leading man, the Gene Kelly one. I pretended I wasn’t hurt, but I took the book back right away and I didn’t let her have it again.
I shut my door as well and I pull out my List Book. To the list “Did You Know,” I add a newspaper clipping that my mom left out for me about some Russians who ride bears for a sport. To the list “Things I should eat more of,” I add: lentils? Then I read two more pages of Singin’ in the Rain and throw the book away.
I hope Sara got picked up at an OK time today. You never know when Mrs. B. will come to get her— sometimes she’s very late, but then sometimes she arrives right on three and I wait a lonely fifteen minutes until my own mom gets here. See, after I started talking with Sara on the fence after school, I asked Mom to come at 3:15 every day. I said we had to stay and clean and maybe she didn’t believe me but she didn’t say anything because Mom’s nice like that. So now I wait with Sara every day, and even though Mrs. B. is unpredictable and my own mom never comes late, I get to sit with her for a while every day and think: look at us both, here, discarded and true.
One time, a few weeks ago, Mom drove me to the movies after school. It was 5:30 already and getting sort of dark when we came past the school and I saw Sara B. sitting all alone on the fence still, turning her neck one way then the other, still just waiting. As we went past, I thought I heard the clink and the clink of her feet on the fence, but I know that I imagined it, now. That was the night when I started to hate Mrs. B.
After dinner, I lie in bed and try and think of better things, but all I can picture is Sara sitting there, waiting to be picked up still, with her feet swinging clink on the fence, with her useless mom nowhere to be seen and with me stuck in the car, not getting out, not asking Mom to stop, not even wanting to explain why we should pull over and help.
I open up to the list of “Things I Will Say,” but I don’t know what to add. It’s alright. I have time, still, at least. I have until Friday.
*
On Wednesdays, we get an earlymark because the French teacher got fired for saying fuck to a student, and the school hasn’t been able to find a replacement yet. I wonder why we bother learning French when there aren’t any French in Sydney anyway, not even one who can teach us.
I still have the taste of almonds in my mouth from lunch. Almonds are very healthy, it turns out, even though they taste like cardboard and they stick in your teeth. We’re doing history, and Mr. Harrison is talking about the Gold Rush—how once the Australian prospectors rose up and chased all the Chinese miners off their settlements. Sara is paying attention when I look over, so I find myself watching the slope of her shoulders and I wonder what it would be like to hold them both. I can’t really imagine it. I was never very good at imagining. I keep thinking: could I do that, really, with this body? with these hands?
I wish we could just talk about camp, Sara and me. It got hard to talk to her right when I thought that it would get easier. Last week the school took us all out to this old Gold Rush town—it’s the same one every year—and we were supposed to be panning for nuggests in the muddy little tourist pond all day. Sara looked bored as hell, and I was too, and then I started watching the curve of her neck as she pretended to pan, and how her things nearly touched where her skirt ended but didn’t. She caught me looking, I blushed, then she came over.
“This camp is shithouse,” she announced.
I agreed and she led me off away from the group and into a fake mud hut, which was filled with a fake miner family cut out of cardboard. It was cool inside, and we got to talking like we used to. I told her I missed home, still, kind of, and asked her did she miss home as well? That’s when she turned to me with her eyes wide open and said, “You have no idea about my home, do you, Jim?”
She never really talked about her family before, especially not her mom whenever I asked. But in the hut she told me everything, or it seemed like everything at the time. Sara said camp was a holiday for her, because at home she finds there’s so much stuff to worry about. Things had got better, but still some days, she hardly ate anything at all. She said at her old school, they called her a wog because her mom didn’t speak much English and she didn’t dress the right way for school at first. Before they moved she was in big trouble at school because she refused to sing the national anthem in assembly—she hasn’t sung it once since a window of her house got broken by a brick wrapped in an Australian flag.
And her mom? Well, Sara loves her like mad, but she is always looking out for her, always translating and running around helping her with moving, looking for jobs, getting her a driver’s licence because the government won’t recognize the one she got back home.
I said I didn’t think it was fair for her, for Sara. I couldn’t imagine my own mom asking me to take care of things like she does.
“It’s not the best,” she said, “Of course it’s not. But my mom and me, we’ve been through stuff. I never had a dad—it’s just her and me. Maybe you don’t get that.”
I didn’t say anything. What do you say to that? All I could think of was Sara sitting there alone on the fence while she waits, not even angry, only worried. Girl like her should be in the middle of everything, not the one worrying.
But still she put her hand on my shoulder, and I felt light underneath her for some reason, as if all of a sudden she was the fat one and I myself weighed pretty much nothing.
“It’s just—it’s good to know there’s guys like you.”
We stayed there saying nothing for a while, and the she turned around and asked me if I wanted to kiss her right there, just this once, and I must have said yes super quick because she laughed and smiled and moved her mouth to my mouth, then I felt her breath all warm on my lips, and I began to relax, met her tongue with my tongue, closed my eyes to shut out all the cardboard miner kids. It felt like I was swimming. Then I put my hand in her hip, which I thought was what you’re supposed to, and started lifting up her top, but then she pushed it away, frowned, and rushed off so I had to follow her to the rest of the group where Lily Kim was sure she’d struck gold but hadn’t.
I don’t know what I thought would happen when we got back. Maybe she felt bad for telling me all the stuff about her mom. Or maybe she felt dumb because she went and kissed the fat kid on school camp. I wonder if she’ll be my girlfriend when I stop being fat anymore. Or if she’ll be my girlfriend me when I show that I can stand up to Mrs. B. for her.
It’s 2:30 and Mr. Harrison lets us out early like usual, and we go for a walk around the school, which is usual for us on a Wednesday. We walk without saying anything. I start trying to tell her about the Russian bear riders but she cuts me off.
“Jim, I’m sorry about camp. It was stupid. I was stupid.”
My hands are sweaty. I can’t think of anything to say, just a whole load of half-things. I try to grab her hand but she yanks it away. I need to not be nervous. I need to not be the fat kid, and now.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I just wish you didn’t have to worry all the time. I just wish your mom—”
“Jim, you don’t get it. There are some things you just don’t get, alright? And you’re not going to get them. So quit.”
It’s 3:18 by the time we get back to the fence, and we part ways when we see her mom on the corner, black sunglasses and crazy hair, and my mom in the car, and it’s all quiet on the street while the both of them are just waiting.
When I get in the car my mom says: “You are sunburnt.” I shrug my shoulders. I don’t want to talk to her. Not now not ever.
“You don’t have the skin type for this kind of exposure, Jim, not in the summer. Look, your face is pink. Do you even wear your hat?”
“Whatever.”
“Who was that girl, the one you wait with? Is she your friend?”
“Uh-huh.”
“She’s pretty, isn’t she?”
Mom has no idea what she’s talking about. I start to feel very tense. Why does she want to know all this stuff? What will she get out of having this information?
“What’s that game you play, Jim, when you’re throwing the rocks?”
“Mom,” I say. “Whatever.” I can see in the mirror that she’s hurt. Now I want to say sorry. But I don’t know how.
Back at home, I rush off to the beach, which is where I go after bad days. This is a bad-bad day, so I don’t swim, I just run all the way to the boardwalk and then I sit on the bench, red and sweaty, watching the ocean like I’m so thirsty I would drink the whole thing if they let me.
There are still people hanging around on the sand and in the surf. It really is bloody hot, still. On a day this hot, people stagger around like they’re carrying a weight on their shoulders—they move slow, sweating just from the exertion of being there. It’s weird how the word for light means the opposite of heavy but it also means the sun, which seems to weigh everyone down so much. There’s a bottle rolling along the boardwalk, and it’s about to roll into the ocean. I take two steps to stop it, but then I feel awfully tired, and I remember how stupid I look when I run, so I let it go and it plops into the sea, probably on its way to kill a dolphin or something.
Back home, I can’t even face Singin’ in the Rain. Maybe I am the Donald O’Connor one, after all that, maybe this is how it goes for old Jim. I want to be the leading man, damn it, her leading man. I turn over and add a note to my List Book that I should eat dark chocolate instead because milk chocolate makes me fat. And then I go to sleep.
*
On Thursday, when we get out of class, we wait in silence for a few minutes. At 3:04, I see Mrs. B. appear on the corner, with those sunglasses still on and talking on her cellphone like she does. Sara gives me a look, then hops down to meet her. I usually feel robbed on days like this, watching them walk off down the street together while I wait up here alone.
After what Sara said about her mom’s licence, I decided probably they don’t have a car. Sara must lie for her mom’s sake. I wonder why Mrs. B. wears glasses all the time, who she talks to on that cellphone, all that stuff. I am losing The Game while I think about these things. I know that Sara should have it better, but I can’t figure out what I could say to Mrs. B. to make her fix it. Still, I’ve got to do something.
When Mom comes, I tell her my day was fine and she seems happy enough to sit in silence.
Today was a good-bad day, so I walk down to Dee Why to swim. I let Mom put a hat on me as I run through the door. I also wear my rashvest. Despite being English, Mom tans OK, but Dad is really pale too and I can’t tell if it’s just because he never goes out except for work. I can’t see tired old Dad carrying the weight of the sunshine for long. I wonder what he’s scared of, my dad, that my mom isn’t.
The ocean is wild today, and there is seaweed absolutely everywhere on the beach. It’s alright in the public baths, though, and that’s where I usually swim anyway because there’s no one there in the evening. I strip down, jump in, and lie backwards on the water, watching stars and clouds up above me. If I stay totally still, then all I can hear is the waves on the cliffs, nothing else, just the sound of the ocean and me—and then when I move in the water all I feel is the water rushing past, first it’s slow like I’m slow, then it’s just as fast as me when I speed up, start to take over, splashing and kicking at the water around me thinking this is it, alright, this is how you stop being scared of the dark.
On the way back up to the street, I see her there, Mrs. B., on the same park bench that I sit on after bad-bad days, holding her hung-up cellphone in one hand and staring out to sea with the sun going down behind her. Does she just likes to sit there, I wonder, or did she have a bad-bad day as well. Mrs. B. is slim, and her skin is really tan—she looks like she belongs here, on the beach, more than I do at least. The pasty bugger I am. For a second, I wonder if I should talk to her, but I think of my list back home that I haven’t even finished and I realize that I’m nowhere near ready at all. Plus I can’t figure out what she’s doing here, or even what she might be thinking.
*
I’m jumpy all day, on Friday. Not even the beach calmed me down entirely, and I added a heap of stuff to the “Mrs. B.” list last night that I’m not really sure about. At recess, I try to go over all that stuff. I would start by introducing myself and saying how I got to know her daughter. That would lead into something about how sad Sara has been, and how she has to worry about things she shouldn’t. And so on. I join in the lunchtime cricket and I do OK bowling. When I yawn and stretch, it feels like my whole body is thinning, growing. I grab around my gut, and there’s still soft there, but I don’t know if there’s enough to call me fat anymore. I reckon my Dad had it right, after all. I wonder what I can’t get done today.
In afternoon math, while I wait for the bell, I look over at Sara and I wonder what she will think. Obviously I am trying to help her, not hurt her. But maybe she is angry at me because of all that. I try to catch her eye. She does not look over. Today it’s just me.
At 3:05, I am going over it all in my head, but it sounds stupider and stupider the more I do. Sara and I are playing The Game without talking, always missing.
Then Mrs. B. is at the corner, and I take off like a rabbit down the hill towards her. “Hey,” I call. “Mrs. B.!”
Only then do I realize no one calls her Mrs. B. who can pronounce her last name, and I don’t know her first name either, so I don’t have anything to call her at all. I’m really going to shit this up, now, aren’t I.
“Hi,” I say, catching my breath as I stop. “Hi.”
Mrs. B. takes off her glasses. She has bright green eyes. My palms are sweating.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.” I can hear Sara coming down the street. The trees are losing their leaves already. I see a little dirt on my school shoes. “My name is Jim. Jim Watson. I’m, um, I’m Sara’s friend.”
“Yes. Jim. I know Jim.” Her eyes are very green. And soft. Sara’s just arrived behind me. I summon my accusations. My bag is still giving off banana smell.
“Well, Mrs. B. Um, I’ve been talking to Sara a lot recently, and—”
“Sara, you are right!” Mrs. B. calls over my shoulder. “He does look like the funny one.”
My palms are still sweating. Sara is scared, I can feel it without looking. What does she think I’m going to say? I can feel my neck burning in the sun. What am I supposed to know, and what not?
“Yeah. So I just wanted to meet you, basically.” I put my pudgy, sweaty hand towards Sara’s mom, and
Sara sighs with relief when I do.
Mrs. B. shakes my hand, really gentle. Sara and her mom seem to think this is funny. I can’t tell if I’m being weak or strong. All I know is I’m tired, and it’s hot, so bloody hot, and I just want to go home. “Cool,” I mumble, turning back up the street, and I think I see a smile on Sara’s face as I go. Which seems more important, now, anyway, than whether I’ve messed this up or not. So now I’m smiling too, a little, while I limp up to where we usually sit on the fence.
When Mum finally pulls up on Flood St., I am still throwing pebbles over my shoulder. Only I’m not swinging my feet, because there’s some kind of miracle that’s happened and I don’t want to break the spell, not with anything. Every time I throw a stone, I hear a little pong, literally every single time, and now I’m in the zone and every single bloody pebble’s going straight bang smack onto the DEE WHY ELEMENTARY sign then bouncing off onto the ground. I can only imagine how the pile looks underneath.
But Mom’s here, now, and I’ve got to run, I’ve got to go, so I don’t even have a look at the sign, I just jump in the car and she drives off while I try to explain to her the rules of The Game and why no one will believe what just happened when I tell them, no really, Mom, no one.
Features • Spring 2010
Contributor’s note: Rebecca Cooper wrote this in the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland, give or take some subsidized time.
“No no no. So let me tell you. I did this quiz in the* New York Post*: ‘How Much of a New Yorker Are You?’ Or some shit*.* Man, I've lived here my whole life, so I was like, I got this shit. But *shit* man. The quiz was hard. It's like *I don't know this stuff*: ‘'What's the highest Subway station in New York?’'”
I shrugged.
“Smith-9 Street in Brooklyn. *What*!” the man continued, his flailing arms almost thwacking a girl in a fuchsia jumpsuit. She mashed her gum loudly. The man didn't notice. “Who knows that shit? That's not New York. Here's the one I got. What's the only borough that's connected to the mainland?”
I should know this. I'm walking down the length of Broadway to hand out blank *maps* of Manhattan to strangers. My roommate Ama Francis and I have 480 more maps and just over 12 more miles ahead of us.
“The Bronx?” I say.
“Yea! My friend liaves there ‘cause it's the only part of New York that's connected to the mainland, so if shit goes down, he can just keep running. You know. Cause elsewhere, it'd be like: *Run—water! Ah*!”
The stranger pretends the boundary of his concrete block is the edge of the island.
“*Run!*” He hits the crack in the pavement closest to me. “*Water! Blah!” *He spins 90 degrees and runs north on Broadway toward 214th Street—*“Run!”*-- until he hits the edge of the concrete tile, spins again over his right shoulder, runs away from me, his black high tops practically screeching on the hot July pavement—*Water*!—spins again, runs. He looks like a pinball or a frenetic toddler in a tiny playpen.
“But in the Bronx he could just keep running.” He breathes hard. “9 /11 did different things to people.”
The summer air hangs above the asphalt as if it’s thick enough to stir.
“Anyway, girl, I'll take your map. I'll do it for you. You want me to map the shit that means something to me? What Manhattan is for me? Okay. You got it, babe. Good luck.”
My blank maps are 3.5” x 7” postcards with a cartoon outline of Manhattan on the inside. The island looks like, as Truman Capote puts it, “a diamond iceberg” floating between the East and Hudson Rivers. Or as Pat Flanagan writes in his postcard to me, months after handing him a map, “an abdomen without the appendages necessary for life,”, “a halved steer,”, “a leg of lamb” one meat hook shy of a slaughter house. I think it looks more like a jalapeno pepper, with a vein down the middle for Broadway, a transverse line for Houston Street, a rectangular blemish for Central Park and a baby pepper, or maybe a stray leaf, by its side for Roosevelt Island.
It’'s nearing the end of the first hour, the noon sun is just about standing over us, and Ama and I are finally past Inwood Hill Park. We’'ve handed three maps to the Watchtower ladies sitting on the edge of the park, giving out the religious pamphlets. In return for their accepting our maps, we took our own reading material—two brochures, one on depression and the other on “Global Warming?”. I hand a map to a woman tending a churros stand at the corner of 198th and Broadway by trying to pass my Italian off for Spanish. *Draw your mind* is the phrase that finally got her to take it. A post office worker, dripping with sweat, palms one without listening to the explanation.
Ama spots a tall, burly man leaning against an M100 bus post on Dyckman Street, where Broadway meets with the final segment of Riverside Drive. A baseball bat and a duffel bag large enough for four basketballs drape from his sides. Ama approaches him. Even with the sun almost directly overhead, she stands in his shade.
“Hi! We're doing a mapping project of Manhattan and we were—--”
He pulls out an earbud from under his sweatband. “Huh?”
I realize it looks like he could eat her.
“We're doing a community art project, giving out blank maps of Manhattan, and asking people to represent Manhattan in a way that'’s meaningful to them. You can draw, write, label. And—--”
“Wait what?”
“We... we want you to record the stuff in Manhattan that makes it home. Whatever you like. ”
“I take this and draw anything I want on it?”
We both nod.
“Anything?”
“Anything,” Ama says, “and then you mail it back to us.”
He puts out a hand. The skinny map looks even more miniature in his grip.
“Thanks!” Ama says, turning back south on Broadway.
“Wait. Have you guys been to Inwood?” he asks, pointing uptown. “Some *great *basketball courts up there. Real good places to picnic.”
“We just passed by—”
“Because one time in that park I saw this hummingbird by a flowering tree, just like beating its wings a million times a minute. And I walk up close and that thing is beating faster than anything I’ve seen in my life. Its little heart going ba-boom ba-broom in its chest. Have you ever seen a hummingbird?”
Ama says in Dominica, where she grew up, yes.
“I can map that?” he asks.
“Of course.”
“Because really. Have you seen a hummingbird from* up clos*e?”
Broadway runs north-south across the length of Manhattan. It starts from Bowling Green in the south and cuts northwest across the island from 10th Street to 79th, where it unkinks itself, rejoins the grid, and forms the spine of the Upper West Side. From there, it runs almost perfectly straight the rest of the way to Inwood, jumps over the Broadway Bridge, continues through Marble Hill, a sneaky little part of Manhattan that'’s not actually connected to the island, and goes up through Yonkers and Sleepy Hollow before disappearing into Route 9.
It used to be a Native American path, cut through the brush and swamps of old Mannahattan, called the Wickquasgeck Trail. When the Dutch came, they took it as their main highway and renamed it *Breede Weg.* Then the English won out, and anglicized it to *Broadway. *But it wasn’t until 1899, when Mayor Robert Van Wyck signed a law changing the name of Western Boulevard—the segment above Columbus Circle—to Broadway that the whole avenue became unified under the same name.
It’s hour three and it’s starting to feel like Broadway' is a conveyor belt with Manhattan zipping by on either side. English appears out of the Spanish. Awnings for “CA$H LOAN$” and C-Town morph into red brick facades laced with ivy. The metal skeleton of the IRT subway line sinks into the ground at 122nd Street.
Ama and I have started taking bets on who will and won’t respond agreeably. A woman hobbles out of RiteAid near 110th street, dragging her left foot behind her right. Ama says no. I say yes:
“What? What do you want? Directions or money?”
“Actually we’re doing a mapping project...”
“And how much do I have to pay for it?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh in that case, thanks sweeties.”
Empirically, the hipsters are too snide. Three of four Columbia undergraduates stop, but the Columbia Medical Students can’t be bothered. Ama considers doing a sociological project in tandem with my cartographic one.
An elderly man, hunched over his empty shopping cart, shuffles uptown on Broadway. We both bet no. He looks up from staring at his brown orthopedic shoes when I ask him to join the project.
“Map my memories? All my memories are from here for the last 80 years.”
His accent is the thick Polish-Yiddish one I imagine my father’s grandparents had when they settled in the tenements on the Lower East Side. He lingers on the r’s. I wonder if he was around as *Jewish Harlem* changed to *Italian Harlem* and changed again into *Spanish Harlem. *I wonder what he thinks of the Whole Foods opening 10 blocks away. Or of the mannequins in mesh underwear bent over in the American Apparel store window behind him.
He takes a map.“This is all I know. Is that okay?”
In 2000, the city of New York dedicated a division of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunication (DOITT) to geographic information system (GIS) mapping. Its prize creation, NYCityMAP, is possibly one of the most complete maps of any city ever made. It was designed to be the first fully integrated map of the city, for use when multiple agencies need to be working from the same document, like in the event of a water main break.
They’ve released an online version for anyone to use. Click on any building in the five boroughs and the map will tell you the year it was built, the real estate owner, the number of floors, the approximate number of units. Select from the menu on the right and you can see all the subway entrances, all the traffic cameras, every garage and off-street parking lot. Last month they added the ability to scroll between aerial views of Manhattan in 2008, 2006 and 1924. Now you can watch old Penn Station emerge from where Madison Square Garden currently buries it.
The Map “may be the first great map in which the old cartographic function, to point a path, matters less than a new one: to provide a picture of everything, in depth, in case, for now,” Adam Gopnik wrote in 2000 when the base map of NYCityMap was unveiled. “Yet the Map, being all maps to all men, will, in its nature, remain forever unfinished.”[[1]](#_ftn1)
On 86th and Broadway, Ama and I spot in a floppy fisherman’s hat man surveying the table vendors selling old books and wire jewelry. Pat Flanagan, he says his name is.
“I just love this,” he says. “You know why? I just moved up to the Bronx, but for the first seventy years, this,” he gestures to Broadway, “this was it. It’s ALL memories. Nights out drinking. Old lovers and heart ache. People think they know this area, but you see that grille?”
He waits until I follow the line of his pointing finger and face the street.
“People pass by this street every day but they never notice that cast-iron fence. It’s got to be over 100 years old. If the subway was built in 1904, and the grilles needed to be there for ventilation from the very beginning… Well let me tell you. Your project is about creativity, yes?”
I nod.
“Well there’s nothing more creative than a bunch of 12-year-olds left to their own devices. I used to hang out there with the neighborhood boys when I was 12 and we would all go exploring. We’d never get in trouble or anything like that… but those grilles are the access points to the subway tunnels. And let. M. Tell. You. It’s like the 19th century down there. I’ll map all of it for you. You’ll be hearing from me, Rebecca.”
The summer after my freshman year of college, I worked on my own Sisyphean project for a nonprofit called CultureNOW: a giant map of all the public art work in Manhattan. My boss insisted that every street be named, every piece of artwork be both labeled and pictured on the front, and cross-referenced on the back, with information about the provenance, artist, location, and material. The selling point of the map, according to my boss, was that it was the “largest compilation of art in the public realm to date.”
For a while, the file was so unwieldy that every time I tried to open it, Adobe self-destructed.
I doubt very much that anyone can make sense of the final product. It’s little more than noise, really—with a super baroque system of organization.
Yet for all that effort to be complete, the map still became, secretly, my vision of the city. Inside my lime green office, I decided what counted as public and what counted as art. Should a carousel count as a piece of public art? What about the statues in the gardens at the UN? Does the UN count as a public space? What about the artwork inside public schools and hospitals?
It’s from this mess that this fractured map project—with its aim to put the work of one cartographer into the hands of many—emerged. The idea was not just to acknowledge, but to *celebrate*,* * * *the bias of the mapmaker, and to recognize the impossibility of completion from the start.
2PM: Ama and I are skidding just west of Central Park when the sky cracks and it starts to pour. Fearing a shoebox full of 200 moist maps, we seek shelter in the cafe by Lincoln Center where I run into my old high school history teacher. We make small talk; I hide my mid-afternoon mojito. Rain slides down the sheets of glass. I jot down notes about the expedition—something about New York starting to feel like a small town, the fear of going up to strangers, wearing off.
The rain lets up, and we stumble out to 66th street. The air smells fresher, and it sticks less thickly. I slip three maps in quick succession through a McDonald’s store window, through the vent in a movie vendor’s ticket booth, into the hands of a Mr. Softee driver.
Just past Columbus Circle, a man is digging through the recycling.. “Can I have two?” he asks. “ So I can keep one?”
42nd street speeds by. Or maybe we speed by it. I’m reminded of David Letterman’s description of it as a petting zoo now that they’ve closed the street down and have reserved it for “pinkening Brits and pooped grandmothers.”[[2]](#_ftn2) I’m also reminded of my Russian roommate’s description of it—it really does look like an airport. But the signs *are *shiny and the theaters really *are* impressive. We hand a couple of cops some maps and they stuff them in the fronts of their uniforms.
34th street zooms by.
Ama and I cut through the Flatiron District, and pass through the nondescript stretch of Broadway between 18th and 13th, where Broadway is the borderland between the Meatpacking District and Union Square. Distracted by some conversation about food—we’re starving by this point--we lose Broadway near 10th street. Finding our way takes 15 minutes. Ama teases me about getting lost in the city I grew up in.
“Where is what you were looking for?” a voice calls after me. High-pitched, giggling.
I look down at a head of duckfluff blonde hair, clumped from the humidity, and further down still at a set of bloodshot blue eyes hidden by glasses. “Truman,” he says, shaking my hand. “And, by the way, what *are* you looking for?”
He slips me a piece of paper: “It is a myth, the city, for anyone, everyone, a different myth, an idol-head with traffic-light eyes winking a tender green, a cynical red. This island, floating in river water like a diamond iceberg, call it New York, name it whatever you like; the name hardly matters because, entering from the greater reality of elsewhere, one is only in search of a city, a place to hide or lose or discover oneself, to make a dream wherein you prove that perhaps after all you are not an ugly duckling, but wonderful, and worthy of love.”[[3]](#_ftn3)
I have to admit, he says, that there is something *essentially elsewhere *about New York. It is a place that people come to precisely because it doesn’t ever offer itself fully.
Truman asks if I can hear it—the typewriter*, *a mile uptown, going clackety clackety schpling in pursuit of *Here Is New York*. “There are roughly three New Yorks,” E.B. White bangs out in his room at the Algonquin during the feverish heat spell of July 1948*.* “There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there... and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal.”
Or what about those shears? Truman asks if I can hear Gay Talese, a few blocks down the street, splicing together ledes from *Times* articles. “New York is a city of things unnoticed. It is a city with cats sleeping under parked cars, two stone armadillos crawling up St. Patrick'’s Cathedral, and thousands of ants creeping on top of the Empire State Building. The ants probably were carried up there by wind or birds, but nobody is sure; nobody in New York knows any more about the ants than they do about the panhandler who takes taxis to the Bowery; or the dapper man who picks trash out of Sixth Avenue trash cans; or the medium in the West Seventies who claims, '‘I am clairvoyant, clairaudient, and clairsensuous.'’”[[4]](#_ftn4)
New York is always *here *and *there*, n'’est-ce pas? he says*. *You can live here your whole life and never own it. Have it always remain just beyond your reach. It'’s intoxicating. Keeps you on your toes, keeps you drinking coffee, and keeps you walking.
Listen, he says, and Adam Gopnik whispers, “New York is always somewhere else,. “Across the river or on the back of the front seat of the taxi... We keep coming home to New York to try and look for it again.”[*[5]*](#_ftn5)
“How can you map something you'’re still looking for?” Truman asks and skips off.
Our knees ache by the time we reach SoHo, when the numbered streets give out to “Prince” and “Spring” and “Mercer.” It'’s about 4:30pm and the easy conveyor belt of the Upper West Side has disappeared. We'’re pulling ourselves along now. Fifteen maps remain to give out.
“And what, by the way, *are *you looking for” echoes in the Canyon of Heroes.
“Merci beaucoup,” I say, handing the last map to a young Parisian girl sitting at the edge of Battery Park, sketching the water into her book.
Ama and I fall into a bench a few down from her. I’m sore and covered in dirt—literally. I swipe my finger across my chest, and it comes up black and greasy. I am hungry and tired and lost and satisfied and exhausted. We check the time: 6:27pm. I mark it down.
It just feels so good to sit down. To sink into a bench warmed by the summer. We stare blankly ahead, at the pedestrians and the bike riders, at the waterfront just beyond, at the confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers in the distance
I try to remember why this map project meant so much to me. Why I needed to know that I could put a little bit of New York down on paper. Why I would walk 13 miles to capture just a fraction of it. Why I needed to believe that Manhattan would arrive piece by piece to my P.O. Box over the next few weeks.
The waves lap at the base of the Statue of Liberty. My knees ache, my shoebox of maps is empty. I’ve tried my best to find it. I’m physically unable to go any farther—the street stops and the water laces protectively around. Yet the Statue still rises up in the distance, almost mocking my *here*ness. The city is still just ahead, essentially elsewhere. *There*.
[[1]](#_ftnref) Adam Gopnik, “Street Furniture,” *The New Yorker*, November 6, 2000.
[[2]](#_ftnref) Lauren Collins, the New Yorker talk of the town, “Zoo York,”*The New Yorker*, September 14, 2009. http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2009/09/14/090914taco\_talk\_collins
[[3]](#_ftnref) Truman Capote, “New York” *Portraits and Observations, *1946. (p. 10)
[[4]](#_ftnref) Gay Talese, “New York is a City of Things Unnoticed,” *The Gay Talese Reader.*
[[5]](#_ftnref) Adam Gopnik, Iintroduction to *Through the Children's Gate*.
Features • Winter 2016 - Danger
*Mark Chiusano is a Features Board alumnus who, during his time on The Advocate, published six feature articles in the magazine, as well as six short stories. Following Chiusano’s graduation from Harvard in 2012, his creative thesis, the short story collection Marine Park,was published by Penguin and received an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Mark is currently an editorial writer for Newsday and amNew York (you can read his column at [www.amny.com/amexpress](http://www.amny.com/amexpress))and is at work on his second book. *
**You were able to professionally publish your creative thesis, the short story collection Marine Park. What is it like to have succeeded so quickly?**
So many of these things are luck. It was kind of…I was in the right place at the right time, having a book that was finished, and usually agents don’t want to waste their time on you unless you have a finished book to show them. The nice thing was, I was doing stories, but they were fairly linked stories, and it kind of formed a somewhat comprehensive whole, so I had a full project to show people. But you know, it was amazing. It’s one of those things that kind of happens in little leaps before bounds, I guess. By the time the book comes out you kind of forget how awesome it is. But the whole thing was so much fun, and so lucky.
**What kind of relationship does it put you in with other writers your age, who are still trying to get published for the first time?**
I think that most people understand that there’s no rush to getting published. Actually, a handful of mentors of mine, and friends, advised me not even to try to get this first book published…saying that it’s best to wait and make sure you get going with your best foot forward. But I kind of felt that this was what I had at the moment that was worth putting out. I think that it’s…very near a competitive game, but it’s better to avoid that sense of competition. Hopefully, one person is publishing your book, and another person is publishing another person’s book.
**You’re not currently pursuing an MFA. How do you feel about MFA programs?**
I thought I was going to try for an MFA. I was going to take a year after college [to apply]. I took the GRE, which was a horrible waste of time. And sadly, I think my GRE scores are about to evaporate. But I think, when I was graduating from college, I sort of wanted a break from the workshop environment, which I love, and which really helped me a lot. But at some point you have to go out on your own and make terrible, terrible mistakes, and not really have anyone to point them out so quickly. The other thing to say is that most of your readers in an ideal world aren’t college students or MFA [students] or in an academic environment. They’re usually in a working place environment. So it’s useful to have a sense of what actual occupations are like…what an office job is like. So I was kind of interested in going into the “real world,” or work world, and learning what that was like. The thing about the MFA is it gives you time to write, but through the Advocate I had already had that for two, three years.
**How do you balance having a real job with having time to write?**
It’s a constant struggle, and I’m figuring it out as I go along. But what I did from the beginning was do my writing first thing in the morning, for as long as I could—half an hour, an hour—then essentially forget about it for the rest of the day. Which is useful when you have a full time job. For a while I would write at nighttime when I got home from work, but that was just really depressing. You know, I would be tired, I would want to go out and meet friends. And if you do it at the end of the day, it’s easy just to decide not to do it, whereas if you do it in the morning it’s kind of out of the way.
** **
**Have your literary tastes evolved since leaving college?**
I think in college I was reading pretty much exclusively fiction. And after I left college I started working at a publishing house for a nonfiction editor, so I started reading a lot more nonfiction. That’s kind of what I’ve been floating toward these days. So I probably read about 50 percent fiction, 50 fifty percent nonfiction. I feel like we read so little nonfiction in English [at Harvard], which makes sense. But now I’m sort of catching up from college.
**Is that more because you enjoy reading it, or because you think it has a positive influence on your writing style?**
It is definitely very crucial for research. I read a ton of nonfiction for the fictional characters I’m writing. But I also think there’s also something to be learned from the prose style of nonfiction writers—very simple, very to the point, just getting across the information. And it’s good to have that in your arsenal.
**What’s the trend that poses the greatest threat to literary fiction today? What do you hate about contemporary fiction?**
I think there is a trend in contemporary literary fiction to be preaching to the choir...and the fiction that I like the most is the fiction that feels most urgent, and speaks to the broadest population. I worry that if writers screw themselves even more into academia and the MFA path and are writing for those people… The last line of *MFA vs NYC *says something like, “eventually we’ll make writers of us all.” So, if you have everyone with an MFA that’s fine, and you can write totally toward MFA students, but right now I work as a journalist and I think that that informs my writing a lot. I enjoy being out of the world, thinking of real problems, if not all problems.
**Who are some contemporary writers that you enjoy reading, and why?**
I just finished Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s *Americanah*, and I really like her. [Americanah] is in one sense a phenomenal inward-looking story. It’s a beautiful love story, but it’s also a fantastic picture of race relations in America, and also of immigration patterns in both England and America. So there’s so much in it; it’s such an outward-looking book, in addition to having characters who are incredibly real.
**After you started working as a professional writer, what is the first thing you realized about the real world, that Harvard insulates us from?**
I think that at Harvard I was a lot more interested in aesthetic concerns…character, how beautiful a sentence was, etc. I read the Jennifer Egan book, *A V**isit from the Goon Squad*...I always really liked that book, but I think that what I liked about it changed after I graduated. In college…there’s one story that’s in the second person, and is very technically impressive, and I love that story. Then the last section of the book goes into the future and talks about this strange world controlled by corporations…. In college I sort of thought, well, whatever, unrealistic, that doesn’t have anything to do with me. But after graduating and being in the real world, and seeing what “real people” worry about, it became much more powerful. What you focus on does change, when you have to make money. I think that both sides of that real world divide are very valuable.
**What is the best thing that you’ve read all year?**
A really fantastic thing that I read recently is the Jimmy Breslin autobiography, *I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me*, which I have been sort of reeling from ever since. He’s a columnist, a New York columnist, one of the very first newspaper columnists, as we think of them now, and it’s a memoir about being sick and recovering. And he has a great line about the way he wrote this very famous column right after JFK was killed. He had to cover it, and the way he decided to cover it was to talk to the gravedigger. It’s a great story about journalism from the inside, and looking at a different perspective, which I think is useful in journalism class, but very useful for fiction as well.
**One of the reviews quoted on your website says, “Chiusano’s voice isn’t fresh. It is knowing.” What do you think of this description? How would you characterize yourself as a writer?**
What I feel like that person was trying to get at was that [Marine Park] is not a flashy collection, but ingrained in place and neighborhoods, and I do agree that that’s very important…that focus on the people I’m writing about, the places I’m writing about, that I’m trying to get at knowledge of them as opposed to a superficial, flashy picture.
**Do you think you will continue to write about similar things? Or will you ever take on a project that’s wildly different?**
In terms of the book I’m working on now…it’s mostly set in New York but is definitely much larger than the neighborhood of Marine Park. It sort of jumps back and forth in time…and even includes something outside of New York entirely. So who knows, if I’m lucky enough to finish a third book, maybe I’ll be outside of America. It’s important to keep changing and keep writing, but I am finding that I do always return in some way to Marine Park or to that part of the world.
**Do you find the challenges of writing a novel different from those of writing a short story?**
It is definitely a struggle. I think the hardest thing is continuing day after day…continuing to write the same story day after day. One thing I like about short stories is that you can follow your interest. Obviously there is a certain amount of time that you’re working on a short story, but maybe that’s two weeks, and then if you have a really good idea for a new story, you can just run down that rabbit hole for a while. With a novel…I’ve been trying to channel what I’m interested in into writing the novel, but you do still have to open that page of the novel, where you are at the novel.
**What do you think distinguishes the emerging generation of writers from previous generations? **
One thing, maybe, is a hopefully more inclusive group of writers… We’re hearing from more voices, or we should. I wonder…if there will be a move away from the small, precise short story collection—the idea of writing that first and then moving on to a novel. I wonder if people will be working on big entertaining novels from the beginning, depending on how tastes change. I wonder, are novels going to become something that’s for very few, almost like poetry in some ways…or will novels be this very important thing that people search out, because it’s the only form of media that lets you kind of drop into it without the interruptions of Twitter, or whatever. Maybe that’s the direction.
**How has being a young, published writer impacted your social life?**
I’m not so much in the sort of published writers scene, partially because I haven’t been invited into it yet. I worked in a NY publishing house for a while, so most of my friends were editors. Really most of my close friends are journalists…which is great because I think journalists are probably the smartest people in the world. You can so much from listening to journalists.
**Is there anything that happened at the Advocate while you were there that you would like us to remember happened?**
I love the *Advocate*, first of all. There were two readings in particular that I loved for different reasons. The first one was a Denis Johnson reading. He was the hero when we were there. He came and read…and someone asked him about his process, how he wrote. And he said that he made a pledge to write every day. He started out writing three minutes a day, that’d be his minimum. Some days only three minutes, sometimes more. But he could always find three minutes. And after I heard that I tried the three minute a day rule, and it totally works. It’s incredible. It’s a really good way to get yourself started. And I’ve written at least three minutes a day ever since then. The other one was a Jim Shepard reading…. I was the one who organized it, and he sent me a funny email on the before, asking if we were advertising for it, will there be any people there, and I said no worries, there would definitely be people there. But then I started to worry. So I started telling all my friends, go to the reading. And I got to the reading, and was letting him in, and was still kind of worried, and…you couldn’t move, there was standing room only… And he read his story “Boys Town” from the *New Yorker*, which is a pretty long story. He read the whole story, it was like 45 minutes long, and everyone was so into it. It was such a great example of how if you’re a great writer and a great performer you can hold a room captive by doing nothing else but reading your words.
**Do you have any advice for current Advocate members who want to pursue similar things?**
First of all, you’re in a really good place for it. I learned a ton from other *Advocate* members. I would learn a lot from them when we were in fiction classes together, but also on the side, reading each other’s work. Personally I borrowed techniques and tactics from other writers, and I’m sure they did same with me….But I think that really it’s just finding a way to keep writing. I mean it’s easy to not do it. So I really do think that writing everyday is a good tactic. Just keep going, and don’t worry so much about how much you’re doing, or if it’s good or bad. It does add up after a while…you look back, and you have a couple months’ work that really gets you somewhere.
**In honor of the issue theme, what is the most dangerous thing you’ve done recently?**
I as a rule am pretty danger averse. This is a good example of how risk averse I am: For a long time I wanted to jump into the tracks at the subway. It’s a fascination I have; almost every day I think about it. And a couple of nights ago I was waiting for a train, and you know, the garbage train comes by, there are workers on track. So there were probably no trains coming. And I thought to myself, this is the time! I can jump on the tracks, and pretend like I did this successfully, and you know, take care of that. And I was kind of bending down, giving it a shot, about to do it, then a worker looks at me and is like “what are you doing,” and I was like “sorry, I’m so sorry,” and I just walked away.
2026