Interviews

A. E. Stallings

Champagne

There’s never enough of it. The bottle’s full,
The glass is to be filled. Call it a flute,
Call the effervescence joy or love
Or song. Demi-sec’s sweet, and extra brut
Is dry, the ratio of alcohol
To sugar posed as paradox: liquid drouth,
As rising sparkles have a downward pull
That brings the lip of crystal to the mouth.
Hold the stem: it bears a brittle flower,
Calyx of nectar, clear container of
What drains away, the bubble of the hour.
The satisfying heft’s deceptive: lift
The bottle by its throat and tilt it south,
Promise of plenty, though all pleasure’s swift
And evanescent, and no heart’s exempt, the
Vessel seeming heaviest when empty.

Interviews

A. E. Stallings

The City (After Cavafy)

Pacing to and fro
Along the autumn shore
Among the wrack and reek

With your arms clasped behind your back
And sporting your grey frock-coat
Trimmed in black

And your black hat and your lean long-legged stride,
Up and down the strand perusing
The headlines of the tide:

Casualties and statistics, futures, stocks,
The thousand natural shocks,
You clear your throat

Inspecting the ink-black seaweed tossed among the rocks
Like obsolete typewriter ribbons, rusty widow’s weeds,
Scanning the flotsam for

Morsels cast up by the remorseless gossip of the sea’s
Éminence grise,
How elegant you are, everyone concedes,

Gentleman Crow,
With your gimlet gaze, your sardonic beak,
How omnivorous, how sleek.

Life is a joke you crack,
Wry and amusing,
And death a dainty snack.

Interviews

A. E. Stallings

The City (After Cavafy)

“I want to go to another land. I want to cross the border,”
The young man out of Syria said. “I’m tired of being stuck.
Sure, Greece is nice enough if you can get a job: good luck.
I’m afraid to apply for asylum here. I’ll end up in the street,
With no place to go, nowhere to lay my head, nothing to eat.
I was working on a degree in English literature in Damascus.
And now, what’s to become of us? Nobody ever asks us.
No one cares. Europe is dysfunctional disorder.”

But you can’t get to another land, you’re never going on.
This is your future, where so many others are unemployed.
The smugglers will sell you lies, their faux passports are void.
Your Arabic is native-speaker, naturally; you speak
Excellent English. But to these skills, best add demotic Greek.
Here among this urban squalor, maybe, you’ll grow grey,
If they do not deport you back to Turkey, if you stay.
Time waiting is time running out, youth spent’s forever gone.

Interviews

Troy Jollimore

The Adventure

There will never be a complete catalog of varieties
of human happiness, human desire, or human cruelty.
Of happiness, we can say that it is by its nature
unrepeatable. The thrill is that it happens only once.
A performance, like the first taste of chocolate or
a first kiss, cannot be preserved or repeated.
At most we can hope for certain evidence
that the event occurred: photographs, recordings, rumors,
recollections that fade and grow steadily less
reliable with each passing year, none of which
come at all close to replicating the experience
of really being there. The movies, though, are timeless:
no viewing is privileged, no viewing comes closer
than any other viewing to being a genuinely
“true” or “real” experience (whatever, in this context,
true or real might mean), and there is therefore
no way to attach to a film a precise date
and time. There is only the time when you saw it,
and how it moved you then, how it changed you. Yet films are,
if anything, even more poignant in the way
they remind us of what has been lost and what we cannot
recover, if only because the illusion
is that they bring us so much closer to it
in the act of watching, and because that illusion
persists so much longer. Repeatable? Sure.
But the actors have all passed away, or eventually
will; the objects, if they were real to begin with,
have all been destroyed, or at some point they will be;
the very landscapes and places in which
the characters are placed and carry on their affairs
have, if they weren’t simply constructed sets
from the start, been altered by the passage of time,
most likely not for the better, in the years
since the film crew planted their camera and captured
their footage. The alluring sadness, for instance,
visible in the eyes of Lea Massari
in Antonioni’s L’Avventura
in the scenes that take place just before she disappears—
she is feeling a distance from her lover, Sandro,
for reasons we, the viewers, can sense but can’t quite
get inside, and which we find all the more compelling
for our very failure to quite get inside them—
reminds us that that world, that Italy, that cinematic
moment, have vanished; even though it is there,
in front of our eyes, larger, as we sometimes say,
than life, it is in fact as finally and irrevocably
gone as is Massari’s character, Anna,
who disappears from the film without explanation.

Which brings us back to cruelty. It is perhaps
the cruelty of the world, or perhaps just the cruelty
of art, which depicts and pretends to preserve
the world, to keep this vanishing constantly in view,
and at the same time gives us the illusion
that it can be avoided, defeated, overcome,
each image returned to without limitation,
resurrected any number of times for our own
reassurance and enjoyment, the film replayed
and replayed, the PAUSE button always at the ready
if we want to contemplate, at our leisure, the barren,
virtually inhuman landscapes, or Sandro’s magnificent
indifference, or Monica Vitti’s face,
which always reminds me a little of the face
of the first woman I made love to, which happened
around the time I first saw L’Avventura,
that first viewing still the most profound, the most shocking,
as if I had discovered a new and unanticipated
version of myself. I suppose the fantasy
is that no one ever needs to die,
that everything that happens survives somewhere,
if not as an object then as an image
or a thought, a strip of celluloid, or a matrix
of digitized information on a hard drive
stored in an underground vault underneath
the New Mexican desert. Or, if not that,
then in the sentimental fragmentary conversations
of people who, for as long as they can manage,
until advancing time gets the better of them,
gather to relive and recollect their chosen slices
of the past. After that first time, I walked home
and, as I recall, the moon was full. What was it
I’d located in myself? An unrecognized capacity
for greed? For brutal passion? I had always
desired the pleasures life offered, but in
moderation; now I wanted them excessively, I wanted
life itself, and also my desire for it, to be
excessive, as if—it was a ten-minute walk
back to my parents’ house, and because the night
was frigid, the air was clear like music, Chopin
or Satie, precise and far away, and the stars
were tiny distant torches looking down—as if
I’d be protected if I made myself someone whose desire
refused to concede any limit, as if I
could be safe and free and live forever if only
I could empty myself, leaving nothing but an ache
that ached to be filled, to be resolved, to find a way to be
pure hunger, absolute. To be nothing but hunger.

Interviews

Troy Jollimore

Landscape with Ambiguous Symbols

That sound that sometimes enters the world
as thunder, at others as the boisterous crashing
of waves. That rustling in the bushes

that designates either the wind or the twitching
of unseen lurkers. That smile from the bride
at the altar, expressing nothing or else

confessing I wish it were not him but you.
That siren’s wail telling you this is a test,
this is only a test, if it isn’t screaming

you and everyone here are about
to die an unpleasant and very newsworthy
death. That kiss that translates as your life

has just ended but possibly means your life
is only beginning. That buzzing that says
that you’re getting old and your hearing is going,

unless, of course, a swarm of bees
is nearby. That look from a beautiful stranger
that means keep your distance or maybe it means

come closer, I get off at eight, I have
a room on the third floor, here is the key.
That little red splotch on the skin that signifies

nothing at all, unless it’s a sign
that you should perhaps get it checked, though of course
it’s already so late that getting it checked

will not save you. That sweet post-sunset moment
of melancholy that’s there to remind you
that this life, your only life, is not really

yours, that you have assumed it like
a disguise, that you should have done what you really
wanted to do—trained as a chef,

a guitarist, traveled the world as a broke
and itinerant vagabond—and means,
as well, that on such evenings any

existence you might have pursued would have felt
like something assigned or stolen, that time flows
in one direction only, that now

it takes three drinks to make the music
sound the way it’s supposed to sound,
that the taste of the air on late summer evenings

is always a little bit bitter, always
a little bit tinged with regret, that this is
your language, your city, and no one but you

can speak it, and no one but you can save it.

Interviews

Russell Dame

Committed

They were taking apart the vacuum cleaner, Carson’s wife of less than three months inserting a hairpin from her chignon through the side of the disposable bag and pulling across sharply. Its contents—a penny, a button, some grains of rice, bits of Styrofoam—spilled onto the newspaper as if from the belly of a shark. The volume was surprising.

A film of fine gray grime covered her magnificent ruby engagement ring. He was a patient man. Sofia once told him that a friend of hers had said, “It’s impossible for him to love you more.” This was essentially true and pleased him, though he did not like to consider his love finite.

They talked about several subjects before landing on environmental responsibility. She was young, much younger than him and badly wanted to have opinions. Lately she thought his mother used too many paper towels and napkins.

“I know about this,” she said, rummaging and picking through the debris from the vacuum cleaner with the hairpin. “You should listen.”

Sofia was zaftig and dark, with eyes the deep, otter-back brown described as black in the Russian Gypsy folk songs of her youth. As they leaned over, their heads almost touched, and she fixed him with a certain intensity of gaze that often preceded her momentary exit from a room. His sister had blown into a full ashtray as a child. He was tired of the conversation already, and contemplated similar action. Instead he plunged forward.

“We’ve discussed your disgust,” he said, removing a small piece of wood, examining it, replacing it.

“Thirteen the other night alone, one for each course whether it’s used or not. Drying hands. Wrapping can lids.”

“I don’t have time to do the research,” he said, and he didn’t. “I don’t know, say, the true environmental cost of building a Prius. And I don’t want to believe anybody else’s research on faith.” This seemed reasonable, if tangential.

“Thirteen.”

She’s mad as red ants, he thought. He said, “I try very hard to look at people on balance, and you are wrong if you think my mother is anything but a net positive.”

The ruby could easily chip, but he watched her hand without comment. It was much more ring than he would have chosen to afford had it not been purchased at an estate auction. He thought diamond engagement rings were a marketing campaign. His wife had once said she worried the original couple had been unhappy.

He stopped searching and waited until she raised her head. “My mother committed her mother,” he said.

They met while Sofia was a visiting scholar. She spoke impeccable English. When she was excited, though, her mastery lagged; when she dealt cards, for instance, she relied on Russian for counting. When excited, it was as though he could watch her think.

He’d been to Samara with her, walked along the Volga eating corn in the street and stared up at the Soviet architecture of the building where her grandfather, a war hero first, then a professor of literature, had been given an apartment by the government. Carson had looked down from the balcony, the sixth-floor balcony like a gangplank where she rode her bike as a child, to the crumbling courtyard where her teenage loves gathered the white fuzz of the poplar seeds that envelop the streets there in summer. They’d gather the fluff and spell her name in script and call and call into the night until she appeared on the balcony to watch them set fire to the first letter and watch the flame chase itself until the last was extinguished, exhausted, and the night was black.

She had traveled the world as an interpreter, but he knew it was there, to that city block, that she retreated in her mind when her English failed her. And it was that tiny shotgun apartment that had housed three generations for so long that she was thinking of when she told him, “My mother committed her mother, too. We all do and will. She lost years of her life caring for her.”

For a moment he wondered if it was more common than he thought.

They were looking for a two-inch strip of painted wood, comb-decorated to simulate inlay, from a Maine two-drawer blanket chest circa 1840. The side had an old repair, and the strip had come loose. It had been resting on top of the chest for a week, waiting to be glued. That morning it wasn’t there. He was a patient man. His wife was new to antiques. Money was new. The miscommunication of shared housekeeping was new.

He closed his eyes and waited. He knew he had won, if indeed it was an argument they were having, and if indeed something as base as winning or losing could be attributed to the knowledge he held over her then.

“No,” he said. “No, you don’t understand. She didn’t send her to a nursing home. My mother had her mother put away. Institutionalized. Declared insane. Shock treatments. She was in her twenties, and no one else would step up and do what needed to be done. She made the decision, and her mother never forgave her for it. Can you imagine the strength that took? I can’t. But I try to think of that when I see the paper towel is running low.”

His wife walked from the garage back into the house without saying a word.

She was right to do it, he knew. He’d heard all of the stories, turned them in his mind. But most often he pictured his grandmother on a stool, sitting on a stool for hours, days, watching and feeling watched.

Carson folded the newspaper around the contents from the vacuum cleaner, delivered it to the trash bin, and raised the garage door. The road was quiet for a Saturday, though in several hours high school students would be dumping empty cans and miniature liquor bottles in the ditch. He and Sofia would find them on walks. He regretted fighting with his new bride. It just didn’t matter. Nothing was that important. He had a stack of Saint Valentine’s cards he’d bought with the enormous ruby ring. The woman had saved them, banded together with ribbon. Most were Victorian; all were dated between 1873 and 1909. They had a beginning and an end, and yet, more than a hundred years later, he could hold them in his hands as she had once held them in hers. Some were die-cut, freestanding pop-ups, others were mechanical and turned with a wheel. In February he’d give the first one to Sofia, and then he had thirty-six more.

Interviews

Heather Wells Peterson

Blender

June drives the thousand miles back to Palm Valley, Florida, with that darkness growing in her stomach. When she’s in New York, it’s just a small dark spot, a little rotten reminder, an ugly polyp on her soul. But the closer she gets to Florida, the larger it grows, threatening to fill her entirely, escaping the margins of her body and absorbing her until she is nothing but darkness. June hates feeling this way; it’s too dramatic. She turns up the volume on the CD she’s listening to—a mix from her ex-boyfriend. She hasn’t seen him in years, but she likes to play the mix when she’s feeling down. It reminds her of a time when she was loved.

Her hometown is kind of a hole, though she doubts anyone living or visiting there would agree with that assessment. For them, an ocean breeze and sand between the toes are the most important things in life. June thinks of the press of people on the streets in New York City, the way you’re never truly alone there, and her job in Brooklyn, working the front desk at a bike shop, the guys who work there, with their strong arms and tattoos. So many cool haircuts, weird little shops, strange interests satisfied. Meanwhile, everyone here drives, one person per car, from strip mall to strip mall.

The streets grow more and more familiar, and as they do, nausea rises in June’s stomach like the smell of damp earth. There is Mr. Frobisher, always sitting on his porch in a white tank top with yellow underarms, drinking sweet tea. The Garcías’ loopy dog materializes out of nowhere to chase June’s car, barking and nipping at the tires. June turns right, passes the two young black men who moved in just before she left. They fix trucks on their front lawn, tinkering away, ignoring the watchful eyes of their white neighbors.

“God, I hate this place,” she says as she turns into her mother’s cracked driveway, pulls up in front of the yellow door.

When June walks in, her mother is standing at the kitchen counter, wearing one of those dresses made out of towel, her finger on the button of the blender, which is roaring full-blast. Her name is Helen, which is what June calls her. Helen never wanted a mom name, never felt it made sense to learn to answer to something new. She’s got her back to June, and a sudden stiffening of her shoulders is the only hint that she knows someone’s there.

“Helen, I’m home!” June yells over the racket.

Helen lets go of the blend button and turns around, a smile arranged on her face.

“Honey,” she says. She hugs her daughter, quick and tight, then releases her.

The whole house is the same as it was when June left. She’s been gone almost two years, but here she is, back in this house, feeling the same old way again.

June goes to put her bag in her room.

“She’s outside!” Helen shouts from the kitchen. The blender starts back up.

June’s heart speeds as she approaches the sliding glass doors to the backyard. There she is, sitting in the sandy grass, talking to herself. She’s stretched out, lankier and taller than June remembers. Her face has thinned to a more adult composition. She is five years old.

“Go on out and say hi,” Helen says, still shouting.

When June slides the door open, she expects her to turn at the sound. Instead she just keeps doing what she’s doing—digging up sand with her little plastic shovel and letting it slowly spill out onto her toes.

“Polly.” June is standing just a couple of feet away now. “Hi, Polly.”

Polly turns, squinting, her little baby teeth tight in her mouth. Her hair has kinked up a little. She got that from her father. And her skin is darker, too—Helen shouldn’t be letting her get so much sun.

“Hello,” says Polly. Her voice is dull.

June smiles. “Remember me?” she asks.

Polly bites her lip. She nods.

When Helen starts her third margarita, June asks if they should be thinking about dinner.

“Should I order a pizza?” June asks. “Will she eat that?” She nods toward the other room, where Polly is sitting with her back to them, watching television, her little shoulders hunched up by her ears.

“She’ll eat what we give her,” Helen says. Her words aren’t slurred, just a little sleepy.

June would like very much to have a margarita, but she figures the atmosphere in this house doesn’t need any more tequila. She grabs a LaCroix from the fridge—grapefruit—and looks on her phone for a pizza place.

“Emilio’s—that’s new. Any good?” June is trying to stay positive, to avoid comparing Palm Valley’s Yelp offerings to Brooklyn’s.

“It’s all right.” Helen takes a loud sip of her drink. She raises her eyebrows at June mischievously.

June prefers to ignore this. “I’ll call in the order if you’ll be hungry when it comes.”

Helen leans forward. “I’m always hungry,” she says seriously.

As they wait for the pizza, June tries not to stare at the back of Polly’s head. She looks around the house, fixating on various objects, objects to which she has applied more meaning than they deserve. There’s the blender Helen was using when she arrived, which has a chip at the top from a party June and her ex threw when they were in high school, before the whole mess and the breakup. She remembers the wildness of that time—it was horrible, really, the hangovers, the no sleep, the constantly shifting alliances among her friends. At the time it all seemed so important, all that chaos, like the necessary by-product of an interesting, passionate life.

If she remembers correctly, some guy her friend Janice brought was on meth and he threw the blender at her. Luckily, the chip was the only damage the guy did, and the blender was salvageable.

“Is it all right for her to be sitting like that?” June asks.

Helen, off in her own reverie, blinks. “Like what?”

June nods toward Polly, whose small shoulders are still hunched up by her ears. “Like that,” she says, imitating the position.

Helen laughs. “Don’t worry about it,” she says, as if to say, That’s the least of her problems.

The three of them sit around the table. Helen peels the pepperoni slices off her pizza, then the cheese. She scrapes the tomato sauce from the dough, then replaces the cheese and the pepperoni. She takes a bite, grimaces.

“What are you doing?” June doesn’t remember her mother being so picky.

“The doctor says I’m allergic to tomatoes.” Helen takes another tiny bite, chewing slowly.

“You’re allergic to tomatoes?” June isn’t sure she believes this. “Why didn’t you tell me when I ordered the pizza?”

“I can have them a little bit,” Helen says. “Don’t worry about me.” She takes a third bite, a big one this time. “Besides, all I’ll do is throw up.”

“Nice.” June looks at her own slice. The crust is doughy, the sauce too sweet. She misses the huge, thin, greasy slices she can get near her apartment at home.

“What about you, Polly? The pizza OK?”

Polly, June realizes, hasn’t taken a bite. Her slice languishes on her plate, untouched.

“She’s fine,” Helen says. “She’s probably too full. Right, Polly?”

Polly squints at Helen. “No,” she says.

“Yeah, from eating her own scabs.” Helen laughs. “That’s what you’ve been doing all day, isn’t it?”

“No,” Polly says again, slowly, and with no emphasis.

June lies in her old bed, trying not to think. Helen has turned off the A/C, like she always does at sunset. She says the house doesn’t need cooling once the sun goes down. The air is damp and thick and heavy. June is in just her underwear, on top of the covers. She can’t believe her family sleeps like this every night. She can’t believe she used to, too, and easily.

Lying there, June traces the scar on her abdomen—a slightly curving line, like a smile, just under her belly. Right after the operation, it was raised and red, and every time she saw it she thought it must be angry with her. It hurt so much, too, the weeks after Polly was born—though born doesn’t feel like the right word, since she was simply lifted from the womb, no journey necessary. After the surgery, June’s whole body was in such pain it felt existential, as though her entire being, her life, were one enormous ache. Now, though, the scar has faded and flattened, just a pale, thin reminder of what her body went through, of what was done.

Polly is in the next room, what used to be the guest room. She has a little bed there, and a beanbag chair, and a dresser June found on the street before she left. Helen says Polly keeps her scabs in a little dish and eats them when she’s bored, but who knows what’s true in this house anymore?

In the morning, June wakes, unsettled. She has to reorient herself to her surroundings, remind herself that she is just here for a visit, that she really does have somewhere else to live.

There’s banging in the kitchen. June gets dressed slowly, staring the whole time at a photograph on her nightstand. It’s her, pregnant and sweating, and Helen, and Darnel, her ex. He’s got his hand on her belly as if he cares about what’s inside, and they’re all grinning, though it’s obviously hot, the sun beating down on their shining faces. The last time June saw Darnel, he told her he wasn’t coming back, but she didn’t believe him. Even now, in New York, sometimes she thinks she sees him, far down the block, walking toward her.

Polly spends the first half of the day in front of the television again, shoulders hitched up to her ears. June wants to say something about all of this TV watching, but she knows she doesn’t have the right.

Helen has sewing to do—she mends for the neighbors, and makes new stuff, too, curtains and things, in addition to her shifts at the Winn-Dixie. She worked in the bakery department at Publix the entire time June was growing up, often coming home smelling like flour, her fingernails blue with frosting, but last year, for reasons not disclosed to June, she was laid off. Now she sits at the table in the kitchen, stitching together holes in the crotches of jeans, returning buttons to their rightful locations, hemming hand-me-downs. June has a strange feeling, like jealousy, as she watches her mother’s careful ministrations, her gentle focus. She gets up and goes outside.

Here, in the backyard, is where June decided to leave. She stands now in the same spot, her bare feet hot in the sand, the Florida grass sharp against her skin, heat in her hair, and she feels it, the old pull she felt even when she and Helen were getting along, when she and Darnel were still in love and she still found peace in his body, in having it or having it near—even then, she felt that pull to leave this place, to get out from under it before it crushed her. Standing in this yard, her family in the house behind her, she gave in to the pull, and now she rarely looks back. She left these two people—people made up of the same stuff as she is, pumping with the same blood—to fend for themselves. When she’s in New York, she thinks of them as organisms—soulless, cellular, floating under the same roof, incapable of missing her.

In the afternoon, Helen gets the blender going again.

“Since when are you so into margaritas?” June asks.

“Since always.” Helen revs the blender, lets go. “Besides, they had a deal on the mix at the Winn-Dixie.”

The blender’s blades produce an otherworldly growl that is jangling June’s nerves. She can’t remember a time when Helen drank so much. It was something she used to hold over her daughter’s head—her seriousness, her immunity to alcohol’s giddy reverie. June wonders if it’s a habit her mother has picked up since she left or if it’s something she’s only doing now because June is here, reminding her of things.

The TV is off. June looks out the back door, but the yard is empty. Polly must be in her room. June goes to her own room—or rather the room that was once hers. She stands there for a moment, staring at the wall. She doesn’t like to be in this room if she doesn’t have to. She keeps thinking of Darnel, of his hands on her body, the way he’d squeeze her. She’d want him to pull on her harder and harder, she’d swell with it, wishing he’d split her open.

Polly is saying something in the other room, singing or talking to herself. June goes out into the hallway and hovers on her tiptoes, listening. Polly is talking quietly. This reminds June of horror movies, of precocious children communicating with monsters from other worlds, their youth preternatural, a vantage from which to see things others won’t or can’t. Polly is speaking as though in conversation, as though she is with someone, someone who is watching over her, but she is speaking to a void—there is no one else here.

Finally June can’t take it anymore. She steps into the doorway. Polly goes quiet. She is sitting on her bed with her right knee bent up by her face, a pinch of skin between her fingers.

“What are you up to, honey?” June used to call Polly “baby girl,” but she doesn’t feel right about that now.

“Nothing.” Polly doesn’t move.

“Can I come in?”

June steps into the room. Polly reminds June of prey, the way some animals will play dead, hoping you’ll lose interest and go away.

The girl has her hair pulled back in a pouf. So much of her is like Darnel, but June sees herself in the details—the slope of Polly’s neck, the knob of her spine, the shape of her hairline, the set of her jaw. She sees Helen, too, in Polly’s broad shoulders and stumpy toes.

As June gets closer, she realizes that on the skin Polly has pinched between her fingers is a little pink crater, shining with blood. Next to Polly is a ceramic dish. June recognizes it—she made the thing in pottery class sophomore year of high school. She hated that class even more than she hated her other classes. The teacher—a soft, pale man who reminded June of a villain’s assistant in a spy movie—made a habit of leaning close over her as she worked, pretending to demonstrate some technique while he let his paunchy body rest, heavy, against her back. She was also horrible at the craft—nothing came out as she envisioned it. However simple her original concept, she was too impatient to see it through, and her corner cutting and inability to pay attention resulted in deformed, mangled objects that could hardly be called pots, let alone art. She still has them all, here in Helen’s house, unable to let go of these things she went through so much to make, but not really keeping them, either.

The little dish nestled in Polly’s purple bedspread was one of the less horrendous products of that class. The rim is uneven, collapsing in and out in ripples with no pattern or design, and though she meant it to be gold, the color is more the hue of pus or mucus. June snorts, trying hard to be amused at the sight of the thing. She’d begun to think of the feeling she’d had when she lived here, that feeling of failure buried inside her body, as an appendix—expendable and, once removed, easily forgotten. But now that she’s back here, she wonders if it is more integral to her being than she’d imagined, more like her liver or her spleen, if it had been working away inside her this whole time without her even knowing.

The dish, June sees, holds little, dark insect-like bodies, varying in color from dark brown to yellowish green. Without asking, or really thinking, she picks the thing up. Though in this context—removed from the body—it’s hard to be completely sure, June is close to certain that this is a dish full of scabs.

“Are you—” She stops, not sure she wants an answer.

Polly blinks. She seems not upset so much as put out at being interrupted mid-task.

“You aren’t eating these, are you?”

“I don’t eat them.” Polly straightens her leg back out. The little crater gleams. A small dribble of blood runs from it, down the side of her knee. “I just keep them.”

June can feel that Polly is uncomfortable with her holding the dish of scabs, but she isn’t sure what the correct response is—hand it back and let the kid get on with it? Take it away with an expression of disapproval? Call a therapist?

“Why do you keep them?” June tries her best to keep her voice level.

“I don’t know,” Polly says. “I like to. It feels good to take them off, and then I like to keep them in the same place, where I can’t lose them.”

June holds the dish out to Polly, who takes it from her and rests it carefully on the bedspread. June stares into the dish, wondering how many scabs it contains. The whole bottom of the dish is covered. From where June stands, they seem to writhe, alive.

“When did you start doing that?”

Polly frowns. “I can’t remember,” she says. “Always, I guess.”

The afternoon bleeds away. June decides to give in and have a margarita herself, which turns into two, then three. She sits with her mother at the kitchen table, both of them shiny with sweat, their shirts damp under their arms, under their breasts, in the smalls of their backs. Polly is still in her room.

“When does she go back to school?” June asks.

“A couple weeks, thank God.” Helen presses her finger into the puddle of condensation on the tabletop where her glass was sitting. “It’s been a long summer.”

A dense mist of anger gathers in June. Multiple responses rotate through her mind before she says, “She doesn’t eat them, you know.”

“Who eats what?” Helen asks.

“She doesn’t eat them.” June pushes her chair back, crosses her legs. “The scabs.”

Helen tips her glass and head back dramatically to drain the margarita, then straightens back up, smacking her lips with satisfaction.

“I’m just saying,” June says. “You shouldn’t tease her about it.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t.” Helen is still grinning, still smug. “You think it’ll damage her or something?”

June glares at her mother. The space between them is shifty from the heat and alcohol, as though some normally invisible barrier has been revealed. She looks away from Helen’s proud, condescending face. Her margarita glass—blue, with little bubbles and flecks, which reminds June of the wind chimes a friend’s mother used to collect compulsively and hang from her porch, as though to conjure more consistent weather—has just one melting sip of margarita left. The ice that remains is solid, white, grainy at the bottom, with a thin, light, green, almost oily surface layer. It’s surreal, the way everything seems to pull itself apart this way.

In the middle of the night, June is in and out of sleep. The heat has settled around her like a dropcloth, draping her body with its weight. Whenever she struggles toward consciousness, the memory that she has been in Florida for two and a half days—only three more to go before she can get back in her car and drive north again—lulls her back to sleep. This visit may have been a mistake, but it will be a short mistake. She pictures herself leaving, adjusting her rearview even though it doesn’t need it, watching this place shrink in the distance behind her. She won’t even play the mix Darnel gave her. She’ll play the radio—country, maybe—and just accept whatever it gives her.

It feels like morning when June jolts from sleep to the sounds of crying in Polly’s room. This isn’t nightmare whimpering, but full-on yelping. June lurches out of bed before she’s even fully awake, remembering how the baby would cry and she would burst from a dream as though from underwater, her body responding before her mind. She feels the baby’s soft, warm mass against her chest.

When she gets into the hallway, she can tell by the quality of light coming through the windows that the sun is just beginning to near the horizon—it’s a clearer, thinner darkness, but it’s still dark, probably only four or so, not morning at all. She hurries down the hall and opens Polly’s door without knocking.

Polly’s in bed, sitting up. June can feel, more than see, her little body shaking.

“I’m going to turn on the light,” she says. When she does, Polly blinks resentfully but keeps crying. “What’s wrong?” June asks, taking note of the ceramic dish, which is still within reach on the bedside stand.

“It’s my tooth,” Polly says. Her voice is impeded, as though she’s favoring an injury.

“Where? Show me.”

June perches on the edge of the bed. Polly looks skeptical, but she opens her mouth and points with a stubby finger. June pulls Polly’s bottom lip down a little. Blood has pooled between her gum and the inside of her lip. Polly’s tongue presses a bottom tooth, and it leans forward, loose but still attached.

“Does it hurt?”

“You’re sort of hurting me,” Polly says, pulling back. June lets go of her lip. “But the tooth does, too, kind of.” She swallows loudly. “I’m bleeding,” she says.

“Yeah.”

June tries to remember losing her teeth. She can’t remember the first to come all the way out, where it happened or when, or how, even. Had it just come out on its own, or had she helped it along in some way? Usually mothers did that, she thought, the whole string-tied-to-the-doorknob thing, but any memory of that happening to her is probably invented.

What June does remember is a friend, Sarah, losing her tooth in kindergarten class, out of the blue—it basically fell out into her hand. It was her first, and she was excited to tell her mom. June was coming over after school, and her friend made her swear she wouldn’t say anything. They both sprinted from the bus stop to the house. June burst through the door first, having outrun her, and without thinking—without really knowing, consciously, that she was going to do it—she blurted out the news. Sarah was devastated, and June regretted that her friend was mad, but she didn’t regret ruining the news, seeing the look it brought to Sarah’s mom’s face.

Polly is flicking the tooth with her tongue. June can recall the feeling of a loose tooth, the way she’d play with it with her tongue all day, worrying it. The memory is visceral, stored in the roots of her teeth, that sense that this thing that was part of you was readying to leave. The way the tooth is moving, June is pretty sure it’s close to coming out. She would just let it do its thing, but then Polly might choke on it in the night.

“I think it’s got to come out,” June says. She tries to sound authoritative, like an adult.

“My tooth?” Polly looks incredulous.

June has a flicker of a memory of a warm washcloth and a quick twist. “Hang on a second,” she says. She goes back into the hallway. Helen’s door, just six feet or so away, is still closed. Somehow she has snored through all this noise. June wonders what would have happened if she hadn’t been here for this moment. Polly would have done whatever it was June did, she guesses, though she can’t quite remember what that was.

There is a stack of neatly folded washcloths under the sink in the bathroom. June lets the faucet run on hot until it’s scalding, then she holds the washcloth under it until it’s soaked. She squeezes the extra moisture out. The washcloth is now warm and heavy in her hand.

Back in Polly’s room, June perches on the bed again. Polly eyes the washcloth warily.

“Will it hurt?” she asks.

June sighs. “Honestly? I don’t think so, but I’m not a hundred percent sure.” She remembers the snap of the root as the tooth comes out, but the sensation of pain is so much harder to recall once it’s over. “What I’ll do is hold it with this cloth. I’ll count to three, and then I’ll twist it and pull it out.”

Polly is still flicking the tooth with her tongue.

“Ready?”

Before June gets an answer, she pulls down Polly’s bottom lip and pinches the tooth with the warm washcloth. The muggy heat of it fills her hand.

“One …” She tightens her pinch. “Two …” She can feel Polly tensing. “Three.” She twists, and feels that snap, feels it in her own mouth, and then pulls. It’s harder than she’d hoped—she has to really tug—but the tooth comes free, and she’s holding it, nestled in the bloody cloth.

Polly sees the tooth and starts crying again. There’s enough blood in her mouth to turn her saliva pink.

“Here.” June finds an unbloodied part of the washcloth and presses it into the empty socket. “Hold it in there so it’s comfortable,” she says.

Polly’s little, pudgy hand takes the washcloth and presses it against the gum. She isn’t crying as much anymore. The tooth sits in June’s palm, its root revealed, longer than it should be—primitive. Polly reaches over and moves it with her finger, rolling it back and forth.

“You OK?” June asks.

Polly nods. June watches the tooth rolling in her hand. It’s hard to believe that this part of her daughter, something once so useful and integral, is separate now, inert in her hand, ready to be discarded and replaced with something better, something that will last.

“Is it still bleeding?”

Polly pulls the washcloth out, presses a fresh patch into the hole, inspects it. “Not really.”

“You should get some rest.” June takes the cloth from Polly and waits as she snuggles back down in her bed. “How does it feel?”

Polly pokes her tongue in the hole. “Weird. Like it’s missing something.”

“Does it still hurt?”

“Not really. It’s just gone.” Polly closes her eyes. “Can you turn out the light?” she asks, her voice suddenly sleepy.

“Sure thing.” June stands in the doorway for a moment, playing back through what just happened, already unsure it really could have happened the way she remembers. She flicks the light switch off and shuts the door.

Back in bed, she realizes she’s still clenching the tiny tooth in her fist. She remembers when Polly was three, when she left her. She hugged her and then stepped away, but Polly continued to clutch at the air, spreading her arms wide and then squeezing them closed, over and over. June tightens her hold on the tooth until its jagged root bites into her skin.

Interviews

Thomas Pierce

Two Bananas

—But we have to be thankful, Denise. We’ve been blessed, both of us. You have to admit that much.

—I won’t deny it. Even so, we all have our struggles.

—Dayton will come around eventually. Surely it’s not as bad as you think, and besides, it could always be worse. For goodness’ sake, at least you don’t have breast cancer. At least your brother’s finally off your couch. You’re one of the lucky ones. The fortunate few. We’ve been blessed, Denise. Hashtag blessed.

—Shut up.

—I’m serious.

—Oh, I know you are, Stacey. I know it. Have I ever told you the banana story?

—No, but that’s so funny, because I’ve got a banana story, too.

—What’s yours?

—No, you first. Please.

—Well, this happened a long time ago. Around the time Princess Diana died.

—God, what a tragedy that was! Is it strange to say I miss her, a woman I never met in my life? I wish we had royalty here in America. It’s one thing we’re really lacking, as a culture. We’ve got our celebrities, sure, but it’s not the same, because you know half of them were born in Indiana or Iowa or some such place. They’re not much better than us, only luckier and a little better-looking.

—Diana’s death is incidental to my story. It only situates us in time. I was still living in the city then, and Dayton was maybe five years old, and we had this crazy dog.

—King Tut?

—Before King Tut. Tut’s predecessor. This dog’s name was Fillmore. Benny named him. Something to do with Millard Fillmore, the president. I never understood it. Benny had a peculiar sense of humor. Fillmore was part pit bull, and we had no yard to speak of, just a little patio, and the dog park, which was very nearby, didn’t allow any pit bulls or pit bull mixes. Apparently there had been a few unfortunate incidents, not with Fillmore but with other pits, little fights and scrapes, and so it had been decided by the powers that be, whoever that was exactly, that pit bulls were no longer welcome. That made life very difficult for us. Fillmore was super high energy, and unless he got some exercise every day he was impossible to control. We were renting a house at the time with lovely hardwood floors, and Fillmore had pretty much destroyed those floors running back and forth all day.

—Didn’t you clip his nails?

—Believe me, Stacey, we tried. But he’d flip if we went anywhere near those nails. He was a stray, we’d adopted him from the pound, and I suspect he might have suffered some sort of terrible nail trauma. Who can say what these dogs have gone through before they wind up in our homes? It’s frightening, when you think about it, their mysterious histories. Anyway, we’d given up on the nail situation, his claws were monstrous, and he’d destroyed the floors, and I was certain we were going to lose our entire security deposit unless we kept the dog exhausted, which meant it was necessary to get him outside at least twice a day. We’d found a baseball field, about a half-mile from the house, and most of the time the field was empty, so we’d drive him there and turn him loose to run. The baseball field was next to a playground, and so what I’d usually do was let the dog do his thing for a while and then put him back in the car while Dayton played on the playground and got his fill. Just for fifteen minutes or so. We couldn’t stay too long, because Dayton had his pre-K class, and I had work.

The problem with the baseball field was that it wasn’t totally enclosed. The gate was open at the far end. Most of the time, Fillmore was really good about staying inside the fence, but this one morning he got loose. He went sprinting up a steep embankment that led up to a very busy road. Four lanes. Lots of traffic. Not a good scene for a dog. I panicked and started shouting after him, “Fillmore! Fillmore!” but either he didn’t hear me or he didn’t care. I was so sure he was going to get hit by a car. Obviously I didn’t want Dayton to see this, the family dog crushed and mangled under a car, so I asked him to please stay put right where he was on first base while Mommy ran up there and rescued the dog.

—Was the dog dead?

—Hold on, I’m coming to that. The hill was too steep for me to climb, and anyway it was covered in brush and ivy, and I’m highly allergic to poison ivy, so I had to go out the other gate and run up the sidewalk and climb some steps that led up the main road. Once I was at the top, I was relieved, because I didn’t see the dog dead in the street, a sight I’d been preparing myself for, but then I started getting upset because, you know, “Where’s the dog?” There was a guy standing on the other side of the street. He was outside a pharmacy, and I yelled over at him if he’d seen Fillmore running loose. The guy just shrugged. He didn’t care. I started screaming the dog’s name like an idiot. “Come on, boy! Come on, boy!” I was really getting worked up now. If we could have taken him to the dog park, this never would have happened. He wouldn’t have escaped. I don’t think I’d even realized how angry I was about that pit bull rule until right then, when it seemed like the rule had killed Fillmore. If he was dead, I was going to write the meanest, nastiest letter. This was their fault!

—Denise, for God’s sake, was the dog dead or not?

—No, Stacey, the dog was not dead. The dog survived. Well, he did die, eventually—a few years later, our vet found a tumor and I chose Option B, which was “Do not operate, do not spend a million dollars on a dog tumor,” God save me—but he wasn’t hit by a car that morning, thankfully. I found him one block up in an alley where he’d pulled some kind of saran-wrapped nastiness from an overturned can. Typical, right? I’m a cat person myself, but Benny was allergic to cats, so we had dogs.

To make matters worse, I’d left Fillmore’s leash on the baseball field with Dayton, and so I had to carry his fat butt all the way back down to the field, which was not a short distance. Fillmore was by no means a small dog. He was probably fifty pounds. And I was pretty shaken up. That’s an important part of this story, how worked up I already was because of the dog incident. All that adrenaline. I hadn’t equalized. I’ve always believed we are different people in moments of stress and anxiety. We transform. This is baseline me, the one talking to you now, but there’s another me whom I’d rather you never meet. She has a different voice, a different personality. I’m tempted to say she has an entirely different set of memories from me, but of course that’s silly.

—So you’re the Incredible Hulk, then?

—I’m only going into so much detail about the dog and my emotional state so that you’ll understand why I behaved the way I behaved when I got back to the field and realized Dayton wasn’t there. He wasn’t on first base, where I’d left him. Where I’d told him to stay.

—Oh, no. A lost-child story. I hate these.

—He was nowhere to be seen. The field was empty, but plenty of people were walking by the park on the sidewalk. What I mean is, anything was possible. I felt so incredibly dumb for having gone off without him. I’d done it to protect him, obviously, but that had been a gross miscalculation. My first thought was that someone had grabbed him and left, so I ran toward the parking lot just in case this kidnapper was about to leave in a car. I was covering the exits. I still had the dog in my arms, and he was wriggling to get free. I threw him in the backseat and slammed the door and—

—What is it?

—I was in rough shape, Stacey. I was crying. I’d always thought of myself as a bad mother, and now I knew it for sure. I wasn’t fit to be taking care of another human being. I’ve told you before what happened to me during college, haven’t I?

—You’ve alluded to it, yes.

—Well, it’s nothing I’m ashamed of. A manic episode, they called it. I’d never had any symptoms before then. Eventually my roommate had to call an ambulance. I spent two weeks at a hospital, but it was a year before we figured out the right drugs, and another year before I finished up my coursework and graduated. I was living at home for most of that time, and I had decided I was going to be alone for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to be responsible for anyone else’s feelings. Mine were big and gangly enough as it was. My doctor tried to assure me that I could live a normal life. I’d only had the one episode, after all, and so it was possible I’d never have a relapse, but I had trouble trusting myself. Anyway, then I met Benny, and the rest is history, as they say. I was happy when Dayton was born, I really was, but I think it was always there, in the back of my head, this basic uncertainty about whether I was qualified to be taking care of him.

—So you had another episode that morning?

—No, no, in retrospect, it’s very clear to me that I wasn’t anywhere close to another episode, but at the time I feared I was coming unhinged. I was having trouble thinking clearly. I couldn’t seem to formulate a proper plan. I had these little flashes in my head, little images. They were like two-second waking nightmares. Various scenarios involving kidnapping and abuse and torture. It was awful. The dog was barking like crazy, lunging at the glass, and I was going from car to car to make sure Dayton wasn’t in one of them. And then I saw him.

—God, you found him in another car?

—He was on a bench at the far end of the playground. Just sitting there, his little feet swinging back and forth, very content. I ran at him, screaming, “You weren’t supposed to leave the field! You weren’t supposed to leave the field!” I was scaring him. He had this terrified look on his face, and I was trying to get ahold of myself, to calm down, when I saw that he was holding a piece of fruit.

—Ah! The banana. I was beginning to wonder.

—He’d already eaten half of it. But Stacey, here’s the thing. I hadn’t brought any bananas with us to the park. The banana did not belong to us. I hadn’t packed any snacks for Dayton. None whatsoever. So where had it come from, this banana? He was about to take another bite when I grabbed it from him and demanded to know where he’d gotten it. I was so mad, Stacey. I can’t tell you how mad I was. Dayton made a whiny sound. He was a whiner. Always he was whining. He wouldn’t use his words. He’d just skip to the whine. He wouldn’t cry, just whine. Very high-pitched. Very embarrassing. Finally he muttered something about finding the banana over there somewhere, over near the slide. “Like, on the slide or on the ground?” I asked him, and his eyes just dropped to his shoes. If he’d found the banana on the ground, I said, then it was trash.

We’d had this talk before. We weren’t supposed to eat trash, were we? Were we? Then, suddenly, he changes his story. He didn’t find it, he says. The banana wasn’t trash. It was a good banana. He reached for it, thinking I might return it to him now, but I said, “OK, if it’s good, then where did it come from?” He started whining again, and I told him whining wasn’t going to get the banana back, letting him think that maybe if he told me straight I’d actually let him have it. Finally he says to me, “It isn’t trash, Mama. Somebody gave it to me.”

—Oh, God. This isn’t funny at all, Denise.

—I never said this was a funny story. Not once did I indicate it would be humorous.

—Who gave it to him?

—When I demanded to know, he said it was just some guy. “Some guy,” he kept repeating. “Some guy. Some guy.” “Show me this person,” I said. “Where is he? Where did he go? Point him out to me. Where did he come from?”

—You were the only ones on the playground?

—The playground was empty except for us. No other kids. No other parents. There was no one around except far off, on the sidewalk, people on their way to work. “Dayton,” I said, “you have to tell me. This is very important. Please.” He tells me it was a man, a man with a green jacket, and he was walking along by the fence near the sidewalk when he offered Dayton his banana. According to Dayton, the guy stuck it right through the fence.

—Gross.

—Dayton took it, no questions asked. Apparently all a stranger had to do to get my son’s interest was offer him a banana. I was coming apart now. I had the banana in my hand. I wanted so badly to fling it away into the trees, but I wasn’t sure if I’d need it later. As evidence, I guess. I don’t know. Already in my head the trial was under way. My son was dead and buried, and I was sitting in some courtroom, studying the jury, and the artist was doing one of those little sketches of the defendant. I could see it all. I’d be in that courtroom, and I’d be one of those sad mothers on the courthouse steps doing interviews on the evening news. One of those moms with bad hair and the gray roots showing and the worried eyes and the necks all flushed red. They stand behind microphones and dab at their eyes as they read prepared statements.

—I’m familiar with these mothers.

—Nobody suffers like these mothers do. They want their children back or they want justice for the killer or they want more gun control. Their wants are so fundamental and understandable and useless. You just know they’ll never get what it is they want. They’re out there right now, these mothers, thousands of them, suffering jointly on behalf of us all. Now it made sense why I’d had Dayton, why the universe had brought him to me. I was being recruited into their ranks.

Stacey, I was trembling. I said to Dayton, “So let me get this straight. A man offers you a banana and you just, like, fucking take it, no questions?” I didn’t say fucking—at least I don’t think I did—but I might as well have. That was my tone. He just kept shrugging at me. Where had he learned to shrug like this? From other kids? He’d perfected the shrug. We went back and forth for a few minutes before I dragged him over to the car, threw him in the backseat with the dog, and asked which direction this man had gone. Dayton pointed right, which was fortunate, because the street was one-way. I started driving, very slow, watching out for any green jackets. I didn’t really have a plan, but I figured if I could see him and get a look at him, I’d know whether I needed to be worried.

—So you thought he’d given Dayton a poison banana or … ?

—Honestly, Stacey, I don’t know what I thought. Let’s just say if Dayton had started vomiting or choking or acting groggy, I wouldn’t exactly have been shocked. Poison seemed like a real possibility, the world being what it is. Don’t you ever feel like the world’s full of more poison bananas than regular ones? Around every corner, another poison banana lurks, waiting to kill you. It’s a terrible way to go through life, granted, but if you’re even a slightly informed person, you’d be a fool not to suspect a poison banana.

—It doesn’t help that bananas are so phallic. How not to regard them with a vague suspicion?

—Plus, like I said, I was already agitated because of the thing with the dog. Driving around, looking for this guy, I had the strangest feeling that my life had become latched onto this single moment. It’s like when you’re walking and the doorknob catches your shirt. Or no, that’s not quite the right analogy. I felt as if I’d reached a fork. All the mornings before now had just been preparation for this one. Life would either dart one way—or the other. The other way was dark and sad, this long, wet tunnel with little needle-swords sticking out of the walls. But I didn’t want to focus on that too concretely. If I focused on it, I’d make it real.

—Denise, I’m sorry, but I have to ask. Were you on your meds?

—God, Stacey. Please. I was, but like I said, this wasn’t an episode. I wasn’t having a breakdown. I wasn’t delusional. I was just a freaked-out mom who was under too much stress at work. Benny—you never actually met him—but he was almost forty years old at this point, and he was still working at a bar. Those were not easy days.

—For some reason I’ve always had it in my head that Benny owned that bar.

—He only worked there. I’m not sure where you got that idea.

—So, the green jacket.

—Four or five blocks later we found him. Unfortunately, he was an unusuallooking man. The jacket was cotton, with lots of pockets, like something from the army surplus. Why would a person ever need so many pockets? Anybody who needs more than two regular pockets is up to no good, is my position on it. He had large, bulging eyes and brown, greasy hair that was parted very neatly down the middle. His face was sort of white and puffy and off-putting. He was the guy in college who thinks it’s OK to wander the girls’ dorm in jeans and a bathrobe. You know the type.

—I’m afraid I do, Denise.

—Nothing was wrong with him, but nothing was right, either. I immediately disliked him. He was eating a muffin as he walked, some kind of foul carrot-multigrain thing. Like a bunch of shredded vegetables mushed into a ball. I drove ahead of him and stopped alongside some parked cars with my emergency lights flickering. I still had the banana, and I walked up to this guy waving it at him like a gun. He had this look of … I don’t know how to describe it. Sick embarrassment, maybe? I was sure I’d caught him in some terrible child-murder-sex scheme. I asked if he’d given the banana to a little boy, and he nodded nervously. “Who does that?” I asked him. “Who just randomly gives a kid a banana? You can’t do that!” I don’t think I’d ever yelled at anyone like that. People who were walking by weren’t even looking at me. They were staring ahead, into space, avoiding eye contact.

—You were making a scene.

—Not to mention, the street only had one lane, and the cars were backing up behind mine. Like thirty cars, all the way back to the light. All of them were honking their horns. Everyone was trying to get to work. I was making them late. They were screaming at me to get back in my car and go, go, go. I wasn’t sure what to do now that I’d confronted this guy. He started to walk away, and I stopped him with my hand. “You can’t do that,” he said. “You can’t touch me. You can’t put a finger on me. That’s assault, OK?” His voice was high but also a bit gravelly. A smoker, probably. He had a satchel over his shoulder, and it sagged at the bottom, and I kept thinking, “What’s in the bag? What the hell is in this bag?”

I demanded he give me his name and his address, over and over I asked for it, but he refused to tell me. He said he was late, and I asked what he was late for, thinking it might help me figure out who he was. He tried to get by me again, but I swiveled around in front of him. If I let him leave, then he would have won, and I couldn’t let that happen. Real quick I leaned forward and reached around him for his wallet in his back pocket.

—You did not!

—I didn’t have a good grip on it. He swatted my hand as I was pulling it loose, and it fell onto the sidewalk. A brown leather bifold. Some of the cards fell out. His license, his bus pass, gym card. I was shocked I’d done it, and so I hesitated too long. He was down on the ground before me, gathering up everything, and I only managed to catch his first name off the license—Kurt—so I said, “Listen, Kurt. I know who you are now, Kurt. I can find you whenever I want, Kurt. I know where you live. I have your address, and I can call the cops, Kurt, I can call the cops.” He seemed a little shocked to hear me using his name. I said, “Listen, Kurt, you can’t just offer little kids bananas. You can’t just do that. That’s not all right.” And then he looked up at me with this confused, sort of frustrated face, and he says, “Lady, I have no idea what your kid told you, but I didn’t offer him anything. I don’t like what you’re insinuating, OK? I’m not some fucking pedophile, OK?”

—Oh, no.

—A guy who has to insist he isn’t a pedophile is, like, ninety-six percent of the time a pedophile. Besides, he’d already admitted that he’d given Dayton the banana, so I figured he had to be lying. I still had the banana in my hand. I shook it at his face and called him a liar. “I’m not a liar,” he said. “I’m not lying to you. I promise you I’m not a liar.” We were both yelling now, and a couple of people had stopped just a few feet away from us. Maybe they thought we were about to get violent. Then the guy, Kurt, he says, “I promise you I’m not lying. I was just walking by, minding my own fricking business, when your kid came over to the fence and asked me for my banana. He said he was hungry and that he missed breakfast, and so I gave it to him. That’s it. End of story. I did nothing wrong.”

—Was that true?

—I threw the banana, what was left of it, at his feet and got back into the car. I felt so deflated. Just totally exhausted. Dayton didn’t say a word. He’d been watching all of this through the window, and now he just stared down at his dumb little shoes. We were almost at his school by the time I was calm enough to question him. Dayton, very sheepishly, admitted that, yes, he had in fact asked this weirdo for his banana. He’d gone over to the fence and asked him for it! I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to slap him, Denise. I hated him. I really did. A little window had slammed shut in my head, and he was on the other side of it. I couldn’t even look at him. Who was he? Because, you know, really, when you think about it, who are any of them?

—Any of who? Oh, children. Denise, we all feel that way about our kids sometimes.

—This wasn’t just about the banana. I think this had been building for a while, but only now was I fully aware of the feeling. Only now could I identify and label it. My son and I were not going to be close, that much was clear to me. We weren’t going to be friends. He was going to move away one day and never call and I was going to be OK with that. I was a custodian, nothing more.

—But Denise, he was only five. You’re projecting. It’s easy to look back and feel that way, given everything that’s happened, but you couldn’t have known it then.

—So you say, but here we are. I don’t even know where he’s living now. I couldn’t tell you. Last I heard it was Pittsburgh.

—I didn’t realize it had come to that.

—It’s not something I like to talk about, generally.

—Well, I had no idea it was that bad. Surely he has a phone, though?

—Of course, yes. Who doesn’t have a phone, Stacey? I called him a few months
ago and left a message.

—And he never called back?

—Never.

—Well.

—I feel like I’ve said too much.

—Not at all, Denise. Certainly not. I’m glad you told me. Though I do wonder what happened to the man, the one who gave Dayton the banana.

—Why?

—No reason, really. Just curious. I mean, imagine what that must have been like for him. Being accosted in the street like that by some lady over a banana.

—You’re taking his side, then?

—Oh, Denise, please. There are no sides here. And if there are sides, I’m on yours, obviously. I’m in your corner, always.

—I couldn’t care less what happened to that guy. He got what was coming to him.

—You mean to tell me if a kid asked you for your banana, saying he was hungry, you wouldn’t even consider giving it to him?

—Not if I didn’t know the kid or the parents, no.

—I’d be on the fence, at least. I’d have to mull it over. Especially if the kid was just alone on some playground in the middle of the city.

—I was only gone for like five minutes! It was an emergency!

—I’m not blaming you, Denise. Not at all! I’m only trying to put myself in the man’s shoes for a quick minute. You say he looked like a weirdo, but that was hardly his fault. One of my best friends growing up, her right eye bulged because of a skull defect. People always assumed the worst about her.

—That’s terrible.

—In all honesty, she did have a bit of a mean streak. She could be a real bully sometimes. She used to make me cry on a regular basis, as a matter of fact. But her personality had nothing to do with her looks, you understand.

—I’m sure that guy is doing just fine, wherever he is. I doubt he ever thinks about this.

—You’d be surprised what sticks in people’s memories, Denise. I remember the first time I ever met you, we were at Sandoval’s, for that orientation party for all the new music teachers, and you told me I had a piece of toilet paper stuck to the back of my skirt. I was so embarrassed! I remember it clear as day. Billy Mixson, of all people, was standing right there with us.

—I was only trying to help you.

—Anyway, Denise. You’ve got your health. You have your house. No one’s thumb is greener than yours. Your students adore you. Your evaluations are always top-notch.

—I know I shouldn’t wallow. No one likes a wallower less than me. So what about your banana story?

—Mine? Oh! I almost forgot. Well, now I’m embarrassed to say. It’s hardly a story at all, not compared to yours.

—That doesn’t matter, Stacey. Just tell it.

—Well, last week someone left a banana in my chair. It wasn’t even a fresh banana. It was brown and mushy and squishy, and I sat down right in it.

—Ugh.

—Yes, it was very annoying, but what’s so odd is, I couldn’t help laughing. I must have sat there laughing at myself for a solid ten minutes.

—Bananas often have that effect, I’m told. Did you figure out who left it in your chair?

—One of my students, I assume. Not out of spite, I don’t think, but you never know.

—So what did you do?

—Not much. I went into the bathroom and cleaned it all off my skirt with some paper towels.

—And then what?

—And then nothing. I suppose it’s more of an anecdote than a story, isn’t it? It’s got a beginning, something like a middle, but no end.

—If you’d confronted a student, maybe.

—Or it could be my banana story’s still happening. Right now. Yours might be part of mine. This could be my ending.

—The ending to your banana story is us talking?

—Yes, maybe mine ends here, with this conversation, with your banana story. It feels very coincidental, very symmetric, you telling this to me just a few days after I sat in a banana.

—But does that mean when you tell people your banana story from now on, it will include mine, too?

—I’ll change the names if you’d like. To protect the innocent and all that.

—Use my name. I don’t care. I have nothing to hide.

—Even the part about the breakdown?

—Why, would you hide that from people if you were me?

—I worry we’re wandering into dangerous territory now, Denise. I don’t want to upset you.

—We all have our struggles, Stacey.

—I won’t argue with that.

—Even you.

—Oh, I do, of course I do.

—I’m not saying we haven’t been blessed.

—Of course not.

—But I’m sure even you have had your private struggles. Your depredations and traumas.

—Half the battle is putting on a good face. I’ve always said so.

—I’m glad you’ve found some resolution, Stacey. It’s not something most of us ever find.

—Never in a million years would I have suspected my story would end like this, of course. How could I have known yours would be the end of mine?

Interviews

Ryan Ruff Smith

New Neighbors

The first person I met when I moved to Cincinnati was a guy named Mike, who lived in my apartment building. He held the door as my partner, RL, and I struggled up the stairs with my couch. When we came back down, he was waiting for us. He was a large man, maybe five-eleven, two-fifty, and he was rocking on the balls of his feet like an excitable child. I would guess that he was somewhere between forty and fifty, and I had the impression that he hadn’t paid any attention to the finer points of his personal appearance in years. It’s odd that you can tell when someone’s clothes need washing just by looking at them, but you can—it has something to do with the way they hang.

“Mike,” he said, thrusting out his hand, and I took it. As he repeated my own name back to me, there was a glint in his eye that seemed a bit frantic. He had trouble hearing RL. “Carl? Errol? Oh, Are-Ell. What’s that short for?” RL, who is much better at handling strangers than I am, didn’t even acknowledge this question. My default mode, when talking to someone new, is to try to rise to his level of friendliness and enthusiasm, however outsize it may be. This is not a conscious choice, and it’s gotten me into trouble before. I grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis, perhaps the most outwardly friendly place on earth, and even there people thought I was too nice. A desire to please—to conciliate and to please—are my deepest bedrock instincts.

RL and I went back out to the U-Haul and Mike drifted off somewhere, though he’d left some kind of presence or trace behind, and I had the sense that he was still lurking around the edges of the property. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes later, while RL and I were making separate trips, lugging boxes up two flights and down the long hallway to my new apartment, Mike reappeared in front of the building, holding a rumpled fast-food bag in one hand and a half-eaten hamburger in the other. “Ryan!” he said. “You guys need any help, or anything like that?”

I thanked him but said I thought we had it under control. The box I was holding was full of vinyl records, and it was unbelievably heavy.

Mike leaned in confidentially. “Will you be working late tonight, Ryan?”

“No, no,” I said. “If we can’t finish it all today, we’ll just stop.”

“Before eleven?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Ten at the latest.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Ryan.” Mike paused to chew reflectively on his hamburger. I shifted the weight of the box I was holding. “These wood floors,” he said. “You hear everything. Nice, though! Those high ceilings?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “It’s a nice place.”

Mike started to turn away and then stopped. “You have blue eyes, Ryan?”

“Yeah,” I said, after a pause, startled by the oddness of the question.

Mike nodded and went on his way. I made a mental note of the conversation so that I could tell RL about it later. At the time I thought it was funny. I thought it would make good dialogue.

RL had been on testosterone for almost two years now, but this trip was the first time he had been consistently read as male. We weren’t sure whether this was because the T had suddenly taken its full effect, or whether it was because we were in a new place where nobody knew him, and the people we’d encountered—both in Cincinnati and in Lexington, Kentucky, where we’d stayed overnight on the way—were unaware of the gray areas of transgender experience and had no option but to push him to one end of the spectrum. Whatever the reason, it was a striking change, and it also meant that for the first time I was consistently being read as a gay man. Before RL, I’d always dated women. Of course I knew that this was the terminal point I’d been heading toward, that the further RL’s physical transition went, the more gay it would make me. And yet it was still strange to me, this arriving suddenly at a new identity after having lived so long in the liminal space we’d carved out together, like being dunked into cold water after gingerly wading for years in the shallows. As far as our inner lives were concerned, that liminal space was actually a permanent state—RL’s gender identity wasn’t binary, and I still wasn’t gay, exactly—but among new people in strange cities, our inner lives weren’t visible.¹ We were whatever they saw; we were at the mercy of their seeing. Or, put another way, they couldn’t really see us at all.

The night we moved in, I walked up the street to pick up some takeout Indian food just as the restaurant was closing. RL and I were moving from Gainesville, Florida, where we had met. He was just in Cincinnati temporarily, for the month of August, before going to start his own PhD at Princeton. Gainesville is a weird, swampy North Florida college town, and our three years together there, getting our master’s degrees, already seemed like an idyll. Rent was dirt cheap, and I’d reflected as I packed my stuff that I might never live in an apartment as nice as the one I had there. In Cincinnati, I couldn’t afford a place so nice; in New York City, it would have cost me thousands of dollars a month. I’d turned thirty in Gainesville, and the idea that I was going downhill, that I’d hit an early peak in terms of my quality of living, depressed me no end. I’d spent most of the summer inventing new ways to displace this anxiety. One night, I found a free computer program that allowed you to arrange furniture in a customized floor plan and then simulate walking around the space in three dimensions. You could not only climb up on top of the couch if you felt like it, but you could jump, crouch, and swivel your torso to view the room from different angles. I stayed up until seven in the morning, arranging and rearranging the furniture, adding and removing credenzas, using an eyedropper tool to give the couch the same floral pattern as my actual couch, and pacing restlessly up and down those virtual floors. And that was all for a Cincinnati apartment I didn’t even take in the end. RL solemnly joked that he would leave me if I ever pulled another all-nighter on the program. I was lucky to have him.

Now I was in a new city, not quite large enough to qualify as “the city,” but not quite small enough that I could walk or bike to every place I wanted to go, as I’d done in Gainesville. I lived on Ludlow Avenue, a busy street lined with shops, and even if this commercial district only stretched a few blocks, I still got a small thrill out of stepping out of my apartment onto the street, strolling past a few small businesses, arriving at the Indian restaurant (clean and empty and air-conditioned, thank God, yet still aromatic with spices), paying for my takeout, and carrying that warm little cargo under my arm—the paper bag with plastic containers stacked neatly inside, steam condensing under the tops of their lids—back home, just a block and a half, glancing up the street at the movie theater and the ice cream parlor and the two dreadful coffee shops I could now call my own.

Back at the apartment, we realized that we hadn’t yet unloaded the silverware or any of the dishes. As we walked back out to the U-Haul, I downloaded and installed a flashlight app on my phone. I knew exactly which box the silverware was in—it was irregularly shaped—but the rest of the kitchen boxes were just labeled kitchen, so I took my best guess as to the dishes. I guessed wrong, and in the end we ate out of the takeout containers. It occurs to me that most people, when they get takeout, probably eat out of the containers, but about things like this RL and I are both very particular,2 which had made the whole process of moving—those in-between days of making do with whatever you hadn’t yet packed up, of sleeping on air mattresses and eating out of pie tins—challenging for both of us. What made it more challenging was that we were moving at the same time but not together, so that we were both consumed by our own moves at the precise time when we most could have used help from each other. RL, being more forward-thinking, had packed a week earlier than I had, even though we were loading my stuff first, so he was constantly getting the short end of the collaborative stick, and he had to deal with my panic and self-absorption as I scrambled to get everything together on the last night before we headed off. What was worse, our worldview had been reduced almost entirely to the practical details of moving, so that for weeks we were like an old couple who had run out of substantive things to say and could find common ground only in matters of logistics—packing tape and tie-down ropes, box sizes, how best to cut cardboard to protect a painting.

So we’d been living for small moments like these, when the task at hand narrowed to something as uncomplicated as eating. Naan, chicken tikka masala, chana saag, and lots of basmati rice. We rinsed the spoons and forks in the sink and ate out of the takeout containers, and even if the food wasn’t as hot as it could have been because of the time I’d wasted digging around in the truck, it was a brief moment of rapture.

The next time I saw Mike was in the front hallway. I was trying to wrestle my mailbox open with the small key I’d been given. The boxes were tucked behind the stairs, and I was cornered back there. Mike had the same aggressively friendly manner, the same unsettling glint in his eye as before. I wasn’t happy to run into him, but he hadn’t yet raised any serious alarm bells in me, like he had in RL. When I’d told RL about my last conversation with Mike, the question about my eyes being blue, he hadn’t laughed as I’d expected, but gave me a stern look of worry. In spite of his oddities, I still imagined Mike was harmless. Perhaps it was because I wasn’t used to being perceived as gay, or perhaps it was because RL had been socialized female and had developed better instincts about creepy older men. Whatever the reason, I kept up the same surface friendliness, the charade of enthusiasm I’d entered into when I first met Mike.

“You settling in?” he asked. He had a sense of being in a hurry that belied the intensity with which he was fixing his attention on me.

“Yeah, you know, it’s coming along,” I said.

“It’s a nice place, isn’t it? High ceilings, wood floors. You’ll like it here.”

“Yeah, it’s nice.” I wasn’t sure whether he realized he was repeating himself.

“Well, I’ll see you later, Ryan. Now that is Ryan, isn’t it? R-Y-A-N?”

I nodded. “And it’s Mike, right?” For a moment I was actually worried that I’d misremembered.

He grinned broadly. “Yep! That’s an easy one, right?”

He left me there nodding, mirroring his grin.

I was finishing up the last week of my long-distance freelance job, working from home, and so the unpacking had been happening in fits and starts. At first I’d hated the apartment. My anxiety about settling for something less than I’d had in Gainesville had tarnished every corner. The more we unpacked, though, the more I grew to like it. By the end of the first week, we’d done just about everything except hang the pictures and unpack the books. I also had two large bookshelves, still in their boxes. I’ve heard that many relationships have ended in IKEA stores, and ours had certainly taken a bump. We made the mistake of going right at closing time. It was late, and we hadn’t eaten yet, and the maze of showrooms you have to pass through to get to the checkout became increasingly confounding. In the lightbulb section, I found the model I needed for my lamp back home, but I couldn’t find one that was dimmable, and I needed dimmable or the lamp wouldn’t function, and I suppose I must have directed some of my frustration outward, at RL. I was contrite for days afterwards. If people think that I am an exceptionally patient person and have no temper to speak of, it is only because I know that if I lose my temper, I will be the one to suffer for it. I can’t say an impatient word without going up onto Golgotha. I was still repentant for days after RL had forgotten about it.

Our first Friday night in Cincinnati, having things mostly unpacked and feeling ready to celebrate my finally being done with work for the summer, we went up the street to see a movie. I was happy but a bit dazed, and still stupid from lack of sleep and days on end of thinking about nothing except for work and moving, and I was trying to recover my faculty for intelligent conversation, trying to remember how to relax into it and get caught up in the flow of ideas. RL always had something to say. He had always just read something that made him think of a novel or a theorist or a movie in a new light—he was always synthesizing—and I felt sheepish that for weeks I had not been able to rise to meet him, to engage with his ideas any further than to acknowledge them, grunting monosyllabically like a philistine husband. But that night I was starting to come back, as if out of a thick fog, and I was startled to see RL in sharp focus again—frankly, I was dazzled. We came back up the street from the theater holding hands. I’d started to notice in Lexington that this sort of thing drew glances, not always friendly, and I’d already become more cautious about public displays of affection, but that night I felt easy and content and let myself not worry about it.

I would be embarrassed to report much of our dialogue directly, consisting largely, as it did, of ongoing personal jokes and silly terms of endearment. It was a private language. We both valued cuteness in conversation but were suspicious of cutesiness on the page. Written, our dialogue would probably sound childish, show-offy, and demented, by turns. Some things just don’t translate.

When we got back to my apartment, we were laughing about something. We flopped down happily onto my couch, and then almost immediately we heard a scream.

That in itself wasn’t so unusual. In cities, sometimes, you hear a scream, and you don’t know where it’s coming from, and you don’t know whether it’s serious or playful, or, if it is serious, how you’d ever be able to find its source and get a handle on the situation and do anything about it. But this scream was very loud and didn’t sound far away. We stopped and listened. There was another scream, followed almost immediately by distinct cries for help. We both stood up. “Is this real?” I said. We went to the back window in the kitchen. There was a door in the kitchen that led to a fire escape, and beyond that a parking lot for the building next door. We thought the screaming was coming from the lot, or perhaps from the street, out of view. We couldn’t see anyone. The cries for help gave way to a strange sort of moaning, which gradually became more verbal. The person seemed to be yelling a name. Also, the pitch had dropped, from a shrill falsetto to a guttural bass. The screamer kept repeating this name, over and over, and slowly it started to sound like my name. I was incredulous. Maybe he was saying “Brian.” The voice kept yelling, and it became undeniable that he was saying my name, saying “Ryan,” over and over. “What the fuck,” I said, feeling a chill whip through me. “I don’t even know anyone here.”

I think it struck us at the same time. That weird guy in my building. Could it possibly be him? He had been very intent on getting my name right. But I didn’t even know him.

That was when the yelling got ugly. “Where’s my faggot?” he suddenly burst out. “Ryan! I need my faggot.” These verbalizations were punctuated occasionally, still, by strange falsetto screams. “Wake up, faggot!” he called. “I’m going to beat your ass. Do you want to get your ass beat tonight, faggot? Ryan!” Again he screamed.

I ducked back, keeping away from the windows. We thought he must be down there, in the parking lot or at the bottom of the fire escape, yelling up at my back door. “This is the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me,” I told RL in a whisper.

“I know,” RL said. He was listening intently.

“Should I call the police?”

RL nodded.

I went into the bathroom and dialed 911. My account of the event was confused and confusing. None of it made any sense, really. I didn’t know if we were in immediate danger. The doors were locked, but I thought it might just be a matter of time before Mike lumbered up the fire escape. I tried to explain where we thought the yelling was coming from, and the dispatcher said that some officers would be on their way.

When I came out of the bathroom, RL was still in the kitchen. He was trying to see, to hear, to keep tabs on where Mike was and what was going on. I wanted to tell RL to get out of the kitchen, away from the windows, but I didn’t want to reveal myself, in case that might send Mike over the edge. We weren’t sure whether he knew we were home. I went around the corner into the entryway, away from all the windows, and waited. I could still hear most of the yelling—it was unbelievably loud. Mostly he was just repeating the same stuff over and over again and screaming, but later RL filled me in on a couple of phrases I’d missed: “I’m sick of faggots moving into this building” and also, inexplicably, “I need you to do some work.”

I had to call the dispatcher back to discover that the police had arrived. She told us to go out the front door on the Ludlow side and talk to them. In a rush of adrenaline, we put on our shoes and hurried down the musty hallway, down the stairs, and out the door. The officers weren’t there. RL had seen them sitting in their squad cars on the far side of the parking lot out back, so we started walking toward the corner, but I didn’t want to go all the way around—we still didn’t know where Mike was exactly. I called the dispatcher back, and she said the officers would pull around and talk to us. We met them on the corner of Ludlow and Middleton. The one in front was a beefy, skeptical guy who seemed to think we were wasting his time. There was a female officer in the car behind him; she didn’t speak to us at all. The first officer said that they’d been sitting back there for ten minutes and hadn’t seen or heard anything. It occurred to us only then that Mike must have been yelling from his own apartment. I told the story again, explained why we thought it was Mike. The officer said there were a lot of people named Ryan, and then muttered something about the First Amendment.

I wilted almost immediately in the face of the policeman’s authority, but RL stood firm. “Listen,” he said. “Of course I’m concerned about Ryan, but this guy also sounds extremely unwell. He probably needs help.”

Begrudgingly, the officer agreed to go back to the building with us and get out of his car to see if he could hear him. He said the most he could do was treat it as a noise complaint and ask the guy to be quiet, and we were prepared to settle for that.

When we met the officers out back, Mike seemed to have calmed down a little, but he was still going, screaming and whimpering, less verbal than before. His apartment was the one directly below mine, which explained why it had sounded like he was standing outside my window. I realized that I’d passed by his window several times, bringing boxes up the fire escape, and what decorations I could see had made me think that an old woman lived there, or maybe a veteran of the local theater. There was some kind of trellis, frilly curtains, and a red lampshade. The officers prepared to knock on his door and told us we were free to go. RL and I hurried back around to the front, not sure whether they would wait until we were out of view.

When we got back to my apartment, the yelling had stopped. We spoke in whispers, trying to make sense of what had happened, which proved difficult. We cast about for a while trying to guess at Mike’s motivations—what his deal was exactly—but we kept coming up short. This was unnerving, because it meant that we had no idea what might come next. We weren’t sure whether this was the end of it or just an overture to still crazier acts—whether he was a serious danger to us, himself, or both.

RL said he would stay up all night. I was desperate for sleep and probably would have passed out before long even if we hadn’t been able to secure the apartment. In fact, we did discover that the kitchen window didn’t lock, and we wedged a spirit level into it as a temporary measure. Then we talked briefly about whether I would have to move out. At this point I was still fixated on logistics—whether the rental company would let me break my lease; whether, God help us, I could summon the energy to move again. We agreed that it was important to document everything while it was still fresh in our minds, so I wrote a long email to my rental company, revised and proofread it, sent it, and went to bed.

Shortly after the sun rose, RL crawled into bed beside me.

“Hey,” I said. “Have you been up this whole time?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t stay up with you. I was so dead.”

“It’s OK,” RL said. “I wanted to. I got a lot of reading done.”

We curled up together. It was comforting to know that he’d been keeping watch, and I was glad that he was with me now. My protector.

For a couple of hours after I woke up, things seemed less bleak. The sun was shining and the apartment was almost fully furnished and I made coffee while I waited for the rental office to open for business. Maybe what happened had simply been a fluke. Maybe Mike had gone off his meds or had a bad drug trip and it would never happen again. Or maybe—did a part of me even hope this?—his outburst had been part of a larger psychological break, and after the police left he had killed himself. We hadn’t heard a thing from downstairs since the yelling stopped.

I was tired but not sleepy, dulled and yet fully alert. After a while RL got up too, groggy but uncomplaining, and we drank coffee together and ate the last of our granola bars and talked in low tones about contingencies. I was still clinging to the vain hope that I wouldn’t have to leave the apartment. Despite my initial anxieties, I’d grown into the place—I’d almost come to love it, even. Though we’d been there only a week, there were already memories and attachments. The fire escape out back—that was where we’d taken RL’s picture for the Princeton website, where we’d both stepped out on pleasant nights to make phone calls, where we’d planned to sit some evening and have cocktails, once I found a decent liquor store and unpacked the bar supplies. It had been ours, something we had shared. Now I doubted I would ever use the fire escape again, knowing that Mike was lurking below us. Even if he were evicted, Mike would know where I lived, would know exactly which landing to come to. No, it was not conceivable to stay.

Shortly before nine, we started out for the rental office—on foot, since it was in the neighborhood. I found that I was jumpy, not only as we were leaving my building, but on the street as well, looking around me all the time, laser-focused on the destination, unable to sustain a conversation for more than a sentence or two at a time.

The office was a squat one-story 1970s building atop a steep hill. The young man we met with was apologetic, worried, and powerless to help us immediately. He was also—I was fairly certain—gay. He listened with clear alarm to the story I told, and when I asked what he would do in my situation, he answered cautiously that this was why he didn’t live in the city center himself—he was from a small town originally, and safety was a big priority. The property manager was out for the weekend, but the young man assured us that they would deal with it first thing on Monday. He was pretty sure they would be able to move me into another one of their buildings, but he couldn’t make any promises. It didn’t occur to me to ask whether there was such a thing as an emergency in his profession, and what exactly one might look like, if this wasn’t one. I was overwhelmed and had no clear sense of my rights, and I left just feeling grateful that I wouldn’t have to pay a fine for breaking my lease. For me, fear led not to anger but to logistical worry.

RL and I left the office with no clear destination. I was half inclined to go back to the apartment, to reclaim what was ours, if only until Monday. How could we just let Mike win? But it was impossible to imagine being comfortable there. We wouldn’t even be able to have a conversation without wondering if he could hear us, our attention always veering downward.

We wandered through a mostly empty parking lot and sat down on some concrete steps that led up the hill toward Ludlow. I made a few phone calls. I hadn’t yet connected with anyone from the English Department in person—I’d been waiting until I was done with work and unpacking—but there were a few people I’d been in touch with over the summer, and I thought we could probably find someplace to stay. As it turned out, there was another PhD student who had a guest room we could stay in, and in fact she and her husband were going to dog-sit for someone else the next day and would be happy to put us up for as long as we needed.

Still, we would have to go back to the apartment to pack. There wasn’t any way around that. We resolved to do it as efficiently as possible. There was even some debate as to whether I should take the time to pee in my own bathroom or whether I should wait until we got to my classmate’s house—that was how eager we were to get out of there.

As we threw clothes into my suitcase, we kept glancing out the windows. Maybe five minutes after we’d gotten back, Mike walked out the front door of the building. RL and I crowded at the window and watched him shuffling toward Ludlow. He looked tired and dejected, but I couldn’t say for sure whether this affect was different from his usual state. He was only gone a few minutes, and then he came shuffling back, holding a plastic cup, which he sipped from occasionally—soda, probably, from the gas station.

Just before we finished packing, we saw Mike again, this time through the dining room window, at the back of the building. He was sitting in a lawn chair in the courtyard and unambiguously staring up into my apartment. Because we immediately shrank away from the window, it was hard to get a good look at him. I saw that he still had his beverage in hand and that he did not break his gaze even to drink from it. If he’d looked unkempt before, he looked ruined now—pale, eyes hollowed, bedraggled.

We got out.

The days that followed were long, formless, and stifling. I have trouble now differentiating them, and perhaps it’s better that way. Of all the varieties of short-term and long-term damage that Mike’s outburst did us—psychological, financial, emotional, temporal—being thrust back into the experience of moving was perhaps the one we resented most. Suddenly life was again stressful, logistical, tedious, exhausting. We’d deliberately left ourselves one week between the end of work and the beginning of my PhD orientation to read, write, explore the city, and spend time together before RL headed off to Princeton. Now that week was slipping away.

The rental company did agree to move me into another building, and we found an apartment that was good enough. A week before, the chipped, faded tile floor in the living room would have made my heart sink, but now it seemed acceptable. Yet we agreed that we couldn’t do the move ourselves. Going up and down the stairs of the old building with our hands full, leaving the door unlocked, making noise—it was too vulnerable a position to put ourselves in. RL had a family friend who had set us up with movers to load the U-Haul back in Gainesville. Jason had been almost impossible to get hold of, but he’d come through in the end, and now we tried to get back in touch with him. We wasted several days waiting to hear back from Jason, making do with an air mattress and the small quantity of kitchen supplies we’d managed to smuggle out of the old apartment. Finally, at the end of the week, we rented another truck, hired cut-rate contractors via U-Haul’s website, and got the job done. The movers were brothers from rural southern Ohio who looked like neo-Nazis and had impeccable manners, though I did catch one of them gawking openly when RL walked into the living room wearing a T-shirt tucked into short denim cutoffs, and I felt again the wrench of protectiveness and worry that had of late become so familiar to me. It was as if Mike’s tirade had vaporized and scattered and left a residue over the whole city, so that I was constantly turning back and scrutinizing glances to see if they were hostile, transphobic, or violent. RL and I had ourselves discovered a new access to violent thinking, and we shared with only a little guilt and hesitation our fantasies of what we’d do to Mike, given the chance. In my case, the fantasies usually consisted of a few choice words, devastatingly pronounced, emphasizing, I suppose, my privileging of the verbal and the emotional. RL just wanted to smash him. And though it was hard for me to visualize the precise nature of the smashing, given the considerable difference in size between RL and Mike, I did not for a moment doubt that RL could do it. He was scrappy. And unlike me, he could own his anger.

There is a good and necessary organization in Ohio that keeps records of things like this, hate crimes against LGBTQ folks. They maintain a database and also provide informal counseling over the phone, someone to talk to. My friend Mary, who works for Legal Aid back home in Minneapolis, had done a lot of research on my behalf in the immediate aftermath of the encounter with Mike, and she pointed me in their direction.

Shortly after the second move had been executed but before I was fully unpacked, I gave this organization a call. It was midafternoon, and RL was out at a coffee shop, working. I paced around the kitchen and told the woman who had been assigned my case the whole story. She was sympathetic and precise and gave me helpful ideas about how to navigate my neighborhood, how to form contingency plans and escape routes should I run into my aggressor again.

At the end of our conversation—which was longer, richer, and more comforting than I’d anticipated—she asked if I’d be willing to share some demographic data for their records. First she asked me about Mike. What was his gender identity? I could confidently assume it was male. His sexual orientation? If he wasn’t straight, I told her, he clearly wasn’t comfortable with that. Then she asked about RL. It felt good to hear someone ask.

Then she asked about me.

I hesitated, worried suddenly that I would be found out as an impostor. My queerness, such as it was, was strictly relational. But then, what identity isn’t? Orientation is a facing outward, an attraction toward—it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Still, I was protected to a degree by the contingency of my situation, its ambiguity, its reversibility. I didn’t know if I had a full claim on the identity. I’ve always paused at declarations.

“Well, that’s the weird thing about it,” I said. “Before RL, I’d always dated women. This is my first queer relationship. So it was weird to feel the privilege I’d been walking around with suddenly taken away.”

I waited for her to dismiss me. Instead she said, with great sincerity, “Thank you so much for sharing that.”

It was a strange thing to feel, after such a jarring arrival—this unqualified welcome.

Inevitably, things between RL and me were thrown slightly askew. The worst part about moving again was that it forced me to live with my worst self. I was trying with all of my willpower not to be obsessive, self-centered, and peevish, but in the strange purgatory of always moving, I was forced to stand aside, as if at some small but unbreachable distance, and watch myself become obsessive, self-centered, and peevish. Ever since our spat at IKEA, I’d noticed that something small in RL had been shut off—some modicum of companionability, some modicum of warmth—and I didn’t know how to turn it back on. This had happened a few times before in our relationship. RL always took time to process things. He preferred not to talk about something until he fully understood it. If I forced an issue too soon or too stridently, he might shut down; if I waited too long, the issue could become overgrown and unmanageable. For my part, I was almost physically unable to live with uncertainty. My tendency was to discuss something as soon and as rashly as possible, in the interest of dissipating any temporary unease, even at the cost of a worse outcome in the long term. As we’d spent the past three years poring over each other’s instruction manuals, we’d found that this was the key calibration between us. Often I miscalculated, and RL had already broken up with me twice. What was heartening was that we seemed to be learning and progressing—I could now manage to sit back for a couple of days while RL worked through something, and he could provide enough periodic affirmation to keep me from boiling over into emotional distress.

The strange thing was that whenever I finally discovered the source of RL’s shutting down, it almost always came as a surprise to me. I consider myself an intuitive person, so this obliviousness was humbling. But really, intuition is a mixed blessing. It tells me too much to rest easy and too little to understand. My point of view is strictly close first person.

After our purgatorial week had ended, once we’d more or less settled into the new apartment, I had a sense that the proper moment had arrived to discuss our latest tension, but I was anxious about it. So much was in flux, with RL leaving for Princeton in less than two weeks, and I didn’t want to risk a conversation that could break my heart. As always, I didn’t understand the source of RL’s closing off, and therefore I resented it. RL knew I needed affection, the way a finicky houseplant needs direct sunlight, and it seemed to me that he was choosing to withhold it.³ After all I had been through, I thought I had a right to that affection, that whatever my own sins of omission may have been, I deserved it.

“Can we have a feelings check-in?” I asked him. This was our term for these conversations.

It was late afternoon. We were sitting in the bedroom of the new apartment.

RL looked startled, as nervous as I was. “Can I finish just this one thing?” he said. “Five minutes.” He was working on his laptop.

For a moment I felt brushed off, but now I’m glad he gave me those five minutes. I’d been planning to come at it in my usual way, haphazardly, from a blinkered perspective, detailing my hurts and anxieties and asking for comfort.4 But in the brief intermission, it occurred to me to wonder what this all must have been like for RL. I tried to imagine how I would have felt, having been displaced from the stability of even a temporary home by a tedious and frustrating drama that was not even my own.

So when he closed his laptop, what I told him was “I’m sorry.” I said, “I just realized that I’ve been totally inattentive to your needs.”

The conversation that followed was thoughtful, detailed, and considerate, and there’s no need to report it here. I could see on RL’s face from the beginning that I had found the proper valve.

I saw Mike three more times. My new apartment was several blocks from the old one, but I was still in the Clifton neighborhood and did my shopping in the same places. The first time I saw him, it was from my car. He was walking up Ludlow as I drove past, and I felt an unfamiliar combination of primal aggression and fear wash over me. This was when I was still at the height of my anger, and it was hard not to imagine running him down. Instead I fixed him with a murderous stare. It seemed safe from the car, and maybe it would send a message. He didn’t look up.

The next time, I was in my car again, but RL was with me. We were going to check my mail at the old apartment—a procedure we’d risked a few times already—but as I pulled up I saw Mike across the street, talking to someone outside the CVS, and I kept driving. RL very seriously asked me to turn around. He wanted to confront Mike. I didn’t turn around but kept on going, out of the neighborhood. I said that I was actually going to have to live here, and who knew how often I’d see this guy around? I said that the last thing we wanted to do was allow things to escalate. I suppose I was right, but it would have felt good to take decisive action. I’d like to know what RL would have said, if I’d cut him loose, if we’d actually done it.

The last time, I was on foot. It was evening, just after dark, and I was going to meet some of my new friends for ice cream. RL was staying in. As I neared the shopping district, I saw Mike on the opposite side of the street, walking in the other direction. As before, he didn’t look up. I’m almost certain that he didn’t see me. He was carrying something—a large envelope—and as he turned onto Clifton Avenue, it occurred to me that he might be going to our rental office. The property manager had told me they’d sent him a letter, asking him to contact them, after he’d ignored their phone calls and knocks on the door. Perhaps now he was delivering his reply, or a bomb, or some anthrax. Anything seemed possible.

I kept going up Ludlow and met up with my friends, and we sat outside with our ice cream. The whole time I was jumpy, constantly looking over my shoulder, expecting him to come back up the street at any moment. But he never came. He must have taken a different route home, or maybe I’d missed him.

It’s been two months now, and that was the last time I saw him.

But I did find out what was in his letter. Earlier this week, I called the rental agency to ask what had come of the whole thing—whether Mike had ever explained himself, whether he’d been evicted. At first the property manager seemed reluctant to talk. “Well,” she said. “His reply was very interesting.” She paused, and then went on to explain that Mike had told them that he suffered from night terrors. Sometimes he would sit up in the night and start screaming, sometimes he would yell things, but he could never remember what in the morning. He told them he had no recollection of that night, except that he’d woken up knowing that something had happened, that he’d had one of his night terrors. “Of course, what he was yelling was very disturbing, regardless,” she said. “But if he really couldn’t remember any of it, well, it didn’t seem fair to—you know. We gave him a very serious warning.”

I didn’t believe any of it. Even so, it stopped me. What if some element of the story were true? The whole thing had had such a nightmarish quality. I’d never entertained the idea that the bad dream might not have been just mine, that it might have been his, too. But then, too, there was the aggressive staring. The absurd duration of the yelling, the targeted nature of it, the creepy encounters in the hallway. Even if his outburst had been largely the product of his subconscious, it was still damning—it was such an ugly thing. But all the same, there entered into the equation an element of doubt. I would not be allowed anything so
uncomplicated as a villain.5

I’m in the new apartment now. It’s very quiet here. The last names on the mailboxes are mostly South Asian, and in the hall there are wonderful cooking smells. I haven’t exchanged more than a nod with my neighbors. I’ve come to feel at home.

RL is gone, off to Princeton. Our month together went by quickly. It wasn’t all bad. I find myself feeling nostalgic for even the worst times, because RL was here.

When we first started dating, early on, I was very cautious in the way I talked about our relationship. I told friends back home that it was temporary, tied to a specific time and place, not likely to last. Partly, I was protecting myself—I didn’t know whether RL would keep me. Mostly, however, I think I was trying to protect my friends, their ideas of me. To conciliate and to please them. Of course, none of them would object for political reasons to my dating a trans guy, but I worried they would think I wasn’t being genuine. I didn’t want them to think I had changed in some fundamental way that might exclude them, that might mean they didn’t know me anymore. Leaving home had allowed for a kind of evasion that I kept trying to renew—I wasn’t gone, I was just away for a while. If I couldn’t preserve my former self, that past identity, then at least I could suspend it, suggest its eventual return, and put it off forever.

I still think sometimes about the old apartment, the one I lived in for only a week. How important it seemed that I get everything right, how permanent those decisions seemed. It was not a vacation property. It was mine. It was where I lived. The fire escape, the scuffed wood floors, the light in the morning, the sounds of the dishwasher at night—these things were meant to figure in my life. I still feel the loss, but not the deprivation. That something that seems permanent can prove to be temporary is not surprising—it’s the basic plot sketch of most narratives.

What’s surprising is that sometimes it can go the other way, too.

1. We ourselves are not innocent of occasional acts of flattening and oversimplification. RL’s preferred pronoun is “they”; the use of “he” here, and frequently in conversation, is just one of many microconcessions we both make daily to make ourselves more legible.

2. RL, reading an early draft, pointed out that one of us is perhaps more particular than the other.

3. Before I added the qualifying phrase “it seemed to me,” this sentence itself was the source of another minor rift, another humbling obliviousness on my part. It was not the first time in my life, and will surely not be the last, that a writing problem became a personal problem.

4. David, the editor of Subtropics, suggested that perhaps I am being a bit too hard on myself here, in a way that is symptomatic of the very tendency to be hard on myself that I diagnosed earlier, and kindly suggested that I cut the words “from a blinkered perspective.” This was a shrewd suggestion, and I’ve retained the phrase only for the purposes of this footnote.

5. This business of the night terrors is the one detail I’ve made up. So perhaps it’s not so much that I wasn’t allowed a villain as that I couldn’t abide one. Where no explanation exists, you’re sometimes
obliged to invent one, and this rings true enough for me.

Interviews

Alan Michael Parker

A poem for Sally

He thought he might swallow whole
his youngest daughter, if she didn’t stop
hurting herself. She would complain,

of course, carry on inside his big dad-belly,
but she would be safe there
until she was ready to come back.

He would swallow the moon
to keep her company, one white slice
sliding down to arrive in her arms,

and he would drink and drink a river
so she could see how beautiful.
Things would be comforting—stuff to touch—

but she would probably need something to do.
Maybe he would swallow for her
a rowboat with a trolling motor,

and maybe a jug of OJ,
and maybe even an MP3 player.
Ashore, she could ride her own small horse

if she wanted. She could eat cheesecake,
wear the bangled green skirt,
sing badly, softly, always shy,

no need for pain.
Peace, the fish dreamy, all music,
as the cranes or egrets—

some kind of giant bird—would unfold
awkwardly their paperclip bodies,
flap in slo-mo their wings,

and then launch themselves
wide and low over the marsh grass.
The stars would burn into the sky behind her,

and she would row into the middle of the river,
where there’s never a mirror,
to drift, oars up.