I brought some more of our announcements
in case there's anyone here who hasn't received one.
And we're mailing out the newsletter this week.
If you're not on our mailing list
and would like to receive announcements
of readings in our newsletter, please see me
after the reading.
We'd be happy to send material to you.
Set aside the next five Wednesday
nights, because we have five more readings in this semester.
Next week, Joy Williams will be reading in this auditorium.
Again, a fiction reading.
The following week, Alberto Ríos, then Ann Zwinger.
And then we have added a reading to the schedule
on Veterans Day.
Harriet Doerr will read for us.
And the semester will end with a student reading on November 18.
So it's every Wednesday night.
Elizabeth Evans has published one collection
of short fiction, Locomotion, from New Rivers Press.
Her stories have appeared in Mademoiselle, Cimarron Review,
Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse,
and several other magazines.
She's had fellowships at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony.
In 1984, she received a James Michener Fellowship
for the novel.
She's taught at the University of Nebraska in Omaha
and, for the last five years, worked in the Iowa Writers
in the Schools program.
She's come now to teach for us, and we're
very happy that she's come to be part of the creative writing
department.
I love to read short fiction, and I
love to read long fiction, and seldom read two short stories
in one sitting.
I like to read a short story and then leave it and come
back later and take another.
But the weekend that I was going to start reading Locomotion,
it was like eating peanuts.
I couldn't put it down.
Well, it ruined my morning.
I had a heavy schedule, and I just
canceled everything and stayed home
until I finished the whole book.
And it was a great joy.
And I know that you're going to have a great joy in hearing
Elizabeth read from her work.
It's a great pleasure to introduce her.
I hope you'll stay after the reading
and have some punch and cookies with us out in the hall.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks, Lois.
That was nice.
I'm going to read tonight from the book
that I'm working on right now.
It's a novel called Ancient History.
And I guess I feel like this is a pretty brave thing for me
to do, to read first chapter of a book
that I haven't yet finished.
I spent a lot of time thinking about what I'd read
and thinking I'd do cuttings and have nice interludes
between the cuttings and so on.
But I decided--
I wrote this to be read from here to there,
and I didn't want anybody to miss anything.
So I'm going to read the first chapter.
And I'm not really used to this system,
so can you hear me OK back there?
Am I too loud, or OK?
What about when I put my head down?
[INAUDIBLE]
Is that OK?
OK.
I should tell you that this novel has a lot of material
embedded in it.
And I'm going to have to give a signal just
to make sure you know that I'm now reading something
that the main character is reading.
So I'm just going to put my hands up.
It's awkward.
You wouldn't have this problem if you were reading
the manuscript yourself.
But I'll just do that to give you
a clue that I'm going into something
and coming out of it again.
This is Ancient History, Chapter 1.
"If you go into a public restroom with Grandma Casey,
she swabs the toilet seat with tissue before she lets you sit.
Dirty, she says to flesh-colored puddles
beneath soap dispensers.
Dirty to balled-up paper towels.
The severity of her judgment, a calming thing,
a reflection of her own and her companion's certain excellence.
But alone in the ladies room of Ron's Standard and Super Car
Wash, Audrey is too dizzy with excitement and fear
to consider the canons of hygiene.
Audrey vibrates.
Maybe, she thinks, this is hyperventilating.
Is this hyperventilating?
Audrey hugs to her chest a bright suitcase
with red, white, and blue majorettes high-stepping
across a silvery ground.
She presses her fingers to her mouth
to keep from laughing right out loud,
not because she feels like laughing,
but because she feels a little nuts.
And her jaws chatter as if she's been in water too long.
Nah, nah, they go.
The dull noise she knows from passing jet airplanes and power
saws groaning at a distance.
Is her face in the restroom's smudged and speckled mirror
guilty?
Au contraire, my dear, Audrey concludes
with a chest-twitching sigh.
I appear, as always, incapable of offense,
dull as dandelions, queen of the quotidian,
a harmless shrimp; in fact, the only girl
in the entire sixth grade except pathetic Rosie Shaver,
totally without secondary sex characteristics.
But perhaps, suddenly, miraculously, not so shrimpy,
perhaps substantially, irrevocably taller?
No, merely an effect of the roller
skates on her feet, her excuse to escape
the house this evening.
Audrey flicks pale bangs back from her forehead,
rubs hard at her bird-bone arms.
Cold.
Spring's warm night does not penetrate the ladies
at Ron's Super Standard.
Winter remains trapped in the blue-tiled restroom, guarded
by a blip of the monster snow pile scraped
to the back of the station lot all winter.
Now it's ankle-high, lacy with melt and dirt,
but ominous in new ways, barbed with the oak
leaves and discarded chip packages, which stood up sharp
as scalpels when Audrey skated by,
slipped through the restroom's propped-open door.
Is this the safest place she has ever been
or the most dangerous?
Are there spy holes in the filthy tile?
Are there two-way mirrors?
Breath held as if she's about to go underwater,
Audrey crouches to examine the freckled wall
beneath the counter housing the sink, peers
into the doorless toilet compartment,
startles there at her invasion of the creepy sorrow
of a wet and dirty string mop propped against the wall.
Old drunk, filthy cripple, aging Rastafarian mourner.
Jesus, Audrey says.
A new, dusty, adult sort of word, Jesus.
A sneeze of profanity.
The floor's burr of moist grit translates into tiny shivers,
which travel through Audrey's roller skates and up her legs
each time she moves.
Gingerly, she hooks one skate-heavy foot
behind the small, littered wastebasket next to the toilet
and pulls the basket away from the wall.
Use me, commands the embarrassing basket's
embarrassing lid.
But no holes lurk in the wall behind the basket, either,
and Audrey toes the little bin back into place.
She sets her suitcase on the counter, single dry area,
so close to the muzzy mirror that only the majorettes' heads
show, hats big as garbage pails, each girl red-lipped,
tiny upturned nose, frame of blond curls.
Identical, though you could not say
so for sure, the troop grows fainter,
fades into a pretend distance.
Audrey's own lips appear purple in the restroom
mirror because she is warm-blooded.
Right this very minute, the heat in her extremities
rushes towards her core to protect her vital organs.
Audrey knows this, and from her new science
encyclopedia's convoluted, many-colored diagrams,
knows how the chill air sends a ropey message
to her spinal cord.
Vessels close to her surfaces constrict.
Plump-bottomed hairs stand on end.
And finally, the news reaches that part of Audrey
she thinks of as Audrey.
Cold, it says.
In the totally ignorant science book
Audrey must use at Garfield Middle School,
this process is carried out by tiny workers in saucepan hats
and overalls, who alternately shovel
coal or ice to the giant human being they inhabit.
Audrey can appreciate the need for simple models.
And too, she likes those little men, their cheerful ways
and cherry cheeks.
But as she told Mrs. Humphreys--
Audrey leans deep over the counter,
pulls her lower lip forward, ruefully
inspects its orchid interior in the restroom mirror.
And then despite all these wonderful distractions,
accidentally, she meets her eyes and cannot quite stop the awful
sentence she has kept down all day from rising up bitter
as heartburn.
"Do you know about knitting needles," whispered Danny.
That creepy, cryptic sentence kicks at Audrey's chest.
Despite the weight of its quotation marks,
its unfamiliar speaker, that stranger, Danny, the question
fills her head with the insistent bang
and bang and bang again of a box falling down
a full flight of stairs.
Do you know about knitting needles? whispered Danny.
So Audrey breathes deep, guilty, not guilty,
on the side of right.
So she borrowed, stole, rented, sort of checked out,
maybe filched, or if you prefer, purloined,
a stack of writing from the box which
sat under her mother's desk.
Indecorous, really, that battered box with the title
scrawled across the lid.
Visions, Revisions, Televisions.
Almost out in plain sight, really,
impersonal as a dead houseplant or a box
for the Goodwill, almost not necessarily off limits.
And look what her mother wrote.
Do you know about knitting needles?
whispered Danny.
Audrey stands a little taller.
She has done the right thing.
Later, surely, everything will be fine
because she has done the right thing.
She and her mother will just laugh over this entire period
in their lives.
And she'll say, oh, Mother, while I was at Ron's Super
Standard shivering and shaking and thinking of you
and that crazy stuff you were writing,
my lips acquired the most unfortunate grapey tinge.
An unfortunate grapey tinge?
Did Audrey's mother noticed that Audrey wore her big sister
Natalie's new hot-tamale blush tonight?
Blended with a tender cotton ball, the blush scarcely shows.
But does it not offer Audrey's cheeks a certain radiance?
Her mother should have noticed, and that Natalie
wears too much hot-tamale blush, looks,
in fact, perpetually embarrassed.
Indeed, in Audrey's opinion, Natalie
has forfeited entirely a sense of proportion for visibility
at long distances.
Sensible if you were a lighthouse, perhaps, but not so
smart for human beings.
Natalie.
Last year, Audrey would have told Natalie about Visions,
Revisions, Televisions.
But tonight, when Natalie came into the bedroom,
Audrey's heart fluttered and dipped.
Don't tell me you're going to play Barbie dolls,
Natalie said when she saw the majorette suitcase.
Oh, droll, Audrey.
Definitely droll.
For one terrible moment, it seemed
as if Natalie might try to look inside the case.
But then, magically, she drifted towards the mirror,
began to practice what Audrey calls the duck
mouth, a pout favored by fashion models and certain movie stars
and the glazed women in the middle of Playboy magazine,
a pout so infuriating that Audrey forgot
to be grateful for her sister's inattention and said,
in case you didn't know it, Natalie, the way your lips
look when you do that-- that's one of the characteristics
of Down syndrome.
[LAUGHTER]
No reply.
Quack, quack, Nat, said Audrey in some despair.
Quack.
Really, to let something so personal run around naked.
A blind man could have put up his hand
and read Natalie's vanity on the air like braille.
And just last year, Natalie still had a brain.
She played etymology with Audrey and Name That Tomb,
a wonderful game Natalie herself invented in which one of them
described a real or likely burial place,
and the other tried to guess its owner.
Tonight, hastily, as Audrey worked
to align the top and bottom pieces of the flimsy suitcase
and Natalie examined left profile,
then right, Audrey invented: Natalie, this grand sepulcher
was to have housed, as well as its intended inhabitant,
a particular mirror.
But Audrey fumbled with the suitcase lock,
thin as fingernails, brittle.
It would never hold.
But, she continued, due to a change in circumstances,
due to a change in circumstances beyond her control, she,
the inhabitant-- she changed her mind.
Are you talking to me?
Natalie asked.
Natalie, Audrey cried, come on!
Name that tomb.
And the answer was the stepmother of Snow White.
It couldn't have been much easier.
Then she skated heavily, wearily, across the hall
into her mother's doorway.
Her mother did not turn but continued her writing, hunched
over her desk as if she bore a terrible weight
high on her shoulders.
Indeed, it did seem to Audrey, often,
as if some other presence filled the little room, hid
beneath the bed when she came near,
perched on one of the shelves already crowded
with her mother's considerable collection of flora and fauna,
astronomical charts and biology books and funny things
made by herself and Natalie when they were small.
Visions, Revisions, Televisions sat beside her mother's feet.
Audrey imagined a word problem including math and indictment.
If the box weighed 2 pounds before the girl stole
a part of its contents, and the girl's suitcase
now weighs 4 ounces more than it did prior to her thievery,
how much does the box weigh now?
She shut her eyes and sniffed the tangy air.
Spring's pollens and the room's exotic particles
of dust and decay instantly coated the delicate lining
of her nose.
Ah-choo.
Her mother stopped her writing then, yes.
She laid down her pencil, yes.
She even put her hands in her lap
and said, God bless you, Audrey.
But ideas continued to float over
her pale face, terrible, visible, jerky as boats
tied to a dock on a windy day.
You want to skate to Trina Alberhasky's?
Her mother repeated.
When she shifted, her great head of hair
moved, too, like a tent.
Ever since Audrey could remember,
her mother had worn her hair coiled and braided
into a kind of elaborate, rusty basket.
But lately, after work, up in her room,
she brushed it out, wore it down, wild, a burning
bush of preposterous dimension.
And she looked gaunt, too, didn't she?
Like one of those fairy-tale queens forced
into the wilderness when a mere princess; nights hiding
from wolves, survival on nuts and berries
have given her a haunted look.
She might as well have leaves or twigs stuck
in all that hysterical hair.
She might as well have her skin stained with walnuts
and wear rags and be accompanied by a cast of gentle deer
and rabbits.
What if her mother said, let's see what's in the suitcase,
Audrey?
I am guilty, Audrey thought.
But bitter, too.
Bitter, guilty, heartsick, bereft.
She continued this list of depressing adjectives
while she stuck her hand into an aquarium butted up
against a basket of shed snake skins,
a box of pine cone, a jar containing a tiny stillborn
pig.
The cayman within the aquarium lifted its head.
Audrey ran her finger down its spine.
Hi, Lolita, she said.
Audrey's mother smiled, a process
which transformed her face, gave it
the weird proportions common to certain handsome outlaw
animals--
bobcat, blue jay, fox.
Audrey wanted nothing to do with that smile,
thank you very kindly.
She wanted to shake her mother by the shoulders,
tell her to straighten up and now,
the way Audrey's dad did when she or Natalie did something
he did not like.
Audrey knew why her mother smiled,
because of the majorette suitcase,
because she thought Audrey was going to play dolls.
Oh, how nice.
A nice pastime for young girls, dolls.
Though this was exactly what Audrey meant for her mother
to believe, she resented the fact
that her mother did not understand that no one in sixth
played dolls anymore.
No, her mother just smiled that heartbreaking smile and bit
a little deeper into the red cuticle around her thumb.
And heavy-hearted Audrey offered her, in return,
a smile she meant to be remedial, also
nutritious, yeasty, fortifying.
So her mother leaned back in her chair, an old office thing
from Grandma and Grandpa Casey's,
which tipped precariously, as always, and yet seemed
to take her mother by surprise, as always.
Help!
Yelped her mother.
And both of them scrambled, her mother's legs thrashing air
to keep the chair from toppling.
Whew, her mother said, and then, thanks, Audrey.
Her cheeks bore twin pink rectangles
from the little scare, the silliness.
Audrey stole a look over the flame of her mother's hair.
A page of writing lay on the desk.
But erasure and revision at the hot hands of her mother
had turned the paper into the landscape of a forest destroyed
by fire, ashes, blackened logs.
Ka-rang.
A terrible noise crashes through the gas-station restroom.
Even when Audrey recognizes the source of the sound--
dropped auto part or tools-- she thinks, sick with fear,
perhaps I will faint.
Let me faint.
A great goose egg on the back of the head or a blackened eye--
these would necessitate explanation.
Bad enough, they would perhaps excuse her thievery entirely.
Her mother would realize the error of her ways
and knock it off, and the world would be set right again.
Audrey clutches at the counter, but the need has already
passed; the dizziness, a brush with a stranger,
gone with a stranger's hurry and chagrin.
So, so.
She beats a nervous tattoo on the suitcase,
looks away from it, blows into her bangs with spouted breath.
Phew.
That's what Nancy Drew always says when
she needs to blow off steam.
Carolyn Keene tells you, phew, says
the attractive blue-eyed blond, friendly blue-eyed teen,
Titian-haired girl detective.
[LAUGHTER]
Visions, Revisions, Televisions.
Audrey's mother's idea of a joke, no doubt.
The box was full of writing, writing on blue-lined notebook
paper and typing paper and the backs of information requests
from her job at the library, scraps
of writing on cocktail napkins and airline tickets
and even on a corner of a Cheerio box.
In one crosshatched paragraph, purple martins
swooped through a summer night's still pale sky
and into the ink gathered beneath apple trees.
Her mother had written on a flyleaf torn from Middlemarch
two quirky questions.
Relationship between making love and the Japanese tea ceremony?
Contemplation of the physical?
There were longer pieces of writing,
too, one in which a father bounced his daughter
off the wall with, quote, "the satisfaction of an athlete too
long confined by bad weather," unquote,
another, also unfinished, in which
a college girl with impacted wisdom teeth
lay on the floor of her parents' fancy home
and tried to send a perfectly terrible person
a mental message.
"I still love you.
I will always love you," while he
rambled on about a counting dog he
had seen on The Tonight Show.
Had the box not contained a few magazine articles and brochures
ironed crisp by long residency, information on voodoo,
on polar exploration, a list of wildflowers
of the upper Midwest, a recipe for chicken tandoori,
Audrey would scarcely have believed that the box belonged
to her mother at all.
Visions, Revisions, Televisions.
Even before she opened the lid, Audrey
knew it was the letter you hoped would never arrive,
the mattress smoldering while the dumb family slept,
the inherited disease about to blossom in stub arms
and blindness and hearts which sway
outside the walls of the chest.
Do you know about knitting needles?
whispered Danny.
Audrey could barely contain herself tonight
when her mother smiled at the suitcase and said,
be back before dark, sweetie, and then teasing,
you know dark, right, Aud?
That's when the cones in your eyes quit doing business,
and your rods have to take over.
Audrey loves her mother dearly.
The thought of her mother makes Audrey lean up
against the little restroom's cold tiled walls
and almost weep.
But that cone business felt like a ruse,
her mother pretending everything was absolutely normal.
That cone business resembled one of the factual tidbits
her mother used to dispense throughout ordinary days,
bright-eyed as if she might break into tears, really.
Her mother would lay down her fork
at dinner to deliver the happy news,
that the Roman legions preferred-- yes, girls,
preferred-- grain rations to meat.
Or, breathlessly, she might pop her head
into the bathroom to tell showering Audrey
a current speculation that the structure of the universe
just might be that of a giant sponge.
Audrey twists one hand with the other,
watches the restroom mirror catalog
her despair and anger, too.
Out by the gasoline pumps, bells signal
the arrival of a customer.
Audrey moves close to the door, tests the lock.
Perhaps she should sit on the toilet,
for authenticity's sake, in case someone should find her here.
She pulls down her shorts, which hang loose about her waist,
long as a skirt.
Her father sent them.
Girls size 10.
Are they meant to encourage her thyroid
and pituitary press on, oh slaves of growth?
Hoping for the same miracle, Audrey has worn the shorts
every day for the last eight days,
washing them out by hand each night so her mother cannot
complain of dirt, if she should happen to notice.
She probably has not even noticed.
Better pull down the underpants, too.
To Audrey's surprise, she pees, just as if she meant to.
You sit on the toilet, you pee.
Once, when she and Natalie and her mother
did charcoal drawings during the period
her mother called family hour--
hyperbolically, according to Natalie--
once, during family hour, their mother
got up to go to the bathroom, and Audrey and Natalie
started to debate whether they could just sit there
at the table and just pee.
And Audrey said, no way.
And Natalie said-- for this was last year when she remained
fun--
confidential, if you clean it up, Aud, I'll do it.
And she did.
[LAUGHTER]
That showed force of character, but I'm not
sure which of you came out ahead, said their mother when
she returned that evening to find Audrey rolling
hysterical on the floor and Natalie
prancing in wet blue jeans.
A fluff of the tiniest possible wedding dress, minuscule pearls
sewn to a butterfly wing of bodice,
a fully-lined sports jacket no longer
than Audrey's middle finger, ice-skating skirt the size
of a cocktail umbrella.
These press forward when Audrey undoes
the clasp on the suitcase.
She reaches beneath them.
Her fingers bump the stiff limbs of Ken and Barbie.
She extracts a sheaf of paper--
reads, do you know about knitting needles? whispered
Danny--
then looks away from the familiar scrip, the stuff which
has composed her excuses for trips to the dentist
and permission for scout activities,
written her birthday cards and X's and O's across the bottoms
of letters.
The manuscript sits cool as water beneath Audrey's fingers.
Put it right back in the suitcase.
Skate right to Trina Alberhasky's.
Drink RC Cola and eat potato chips
and talk like you're 12 and loving it and say,
casually, Jesus, Trina, did your mom just act totally spaced
lately?
But this is not Audrey's nature.
I am weak, she concludes, and prays the one line
to a prayer learned at Grandma Casey's church with which she
has no argument.
I have followed too much the devices
and desires of my own heart, and there is no helping me.
I am blanc-mange.
Worse, I am an oyster, a cold, rank piece of slime,
deceitful, a thief.
One eye squinted, she looks down again.
Do you know about knitting needles? whispered Danny.
I looked away.
The hall was dark and cool, and I knew it
as well as I knew anything.
In the big, gilded mirror at its far end,
which I never looked at when alone, we
were ghosts of ourselves, silver, a handsome and drunk
young man kneeling before a girl in white.
I stroked Danny's hair, gray in the shimmer of the moon,
and stared at the wallpaper, a respectable fleur-de-lis
in daylight, a perfect match to the settee's green.
This was not a successful distraction.
My love shrieked like a buzz saw.
And what Danny did not hear, I heard double.
Echoes.
You take a knitting needle, whispered Danny.
I laughed.
The back of my head ached as if I'd fallen on my skates
like the old days, breath knocked far, far above me.
I must have heard somewhere stories about knitting needles,
stories dark as blood.
I knew, as soon as Danny said the words--
before he said them-- what he meant to tell me to do.
I pressed my hands over his lovely mouth, his lips
with their silvery pallor.
I thought, please, please don't say anything else.
Your hands, Danny said.
He kissed my hands.
Please don't laugh, Niely.
You have the most beautiful hands in the world.
I pulled those hands away, not because I wanted to deny him.
No, I did it from shame, that he imagined me so simple,
a compliment might make his instructions palatable.
When Danny spoke again, he kept his head down.
First, you take as cold a bath as possible, he said.
Ice cold.
I looked over his bowed head.
I tried to breathe.
I thought of how whenever I came down
the front-hall stairs over there, I'd jump from step four,
landed hard near the dresser where Mother kept her purses:
snake, lizard, rarely used, cracks in the skins,
gray with dust.
I jumped because I swore never, never to be old and slow
and beaten by life.
But we've never actually done it, I whispered to Danny.
Had we done it, and I didn't know?
Amidst all that furious bumping, a mistake
by the insistent little blind man
glimpsed just once when Danny pushed it close to my face,
frightened me.
Cheeks burning, Audrey looks down at her feet.
She has fallen on her skates before, too, her breath
knocked out of her, chest ringing with clear, cold, pain.
She knows that.
That is called identification with the narrator, or empathy.
But unfortunately, she also knows the green settee
which sits in the front hall at Grandma and Grandpa Casey's
house, and the wallpaper, too.
Grandma Casey came up from her basement in triumph
when visiting.
Audrey worked on her France report for talented and gifted.
Fleur-de-lis, Grandma said, waving a long curl
of the green-and-white paper.
The perfect thing for your report's cover, Audrey.
Audrey rolls her skates across the moist and gritty floor
back and forth.
Do it long enough, she thinks, and the wheels will wear down
to the bite of the metal rims.
She reads, music of tropical steel bands
vibrated within my parents' cochleas.
They were too far away to help or hurt me now.
Still, Danny whispered when he said,
something might have gone through your panties, baby.
We have to consider.
He pressed me against the settee.
He moved his hand beneath my bra and whispered things
less beautiful than I would have liked him to whisper.
He did not understand that just the summer before, at camp,
they had connected my mouth to one end of a string attached
to the mouth of a boy so small I could
have sailed him like a kite.
Brace on his leg, snarled teeth, lank hair,
standing on the stage at the log-cabin lodge, the boy
and I were to race to a marshmallow slumped
on the string's middle.
I knew why the counselors had paired me with him.
They could count on me to be kind to misfits,
fat kids, bedwetters, the boy with a cleft lip.
They saw me as blessed and missed my hunger entirely.
They did not know that at the prospect of my first kiss,
I was ready to love that small, crippled boy forever.
I devoured string so fast, the tiny boy's eyes
bulged with the silky insistence of horse chestnuts
splitting their husks.
All he has to do, I thought, as campers stamped their feet
and whistled and hollered at what they took from
my good-natured playing along--
all he has to do is show me passion,
and I will show him compassion.
My nose bumped the marshmallow.
I waved my hand to signal done, done.
The boy looked up at me in alarm, his face red.
Oh, I said.
My eyes filled so suddenly, I hardly
knew to what to attribute the tears.
I whispered, lips close to his little ear,
smooth and tan as one of the stones from the lake
shore below, that's OK.
We don't really have to kiss.
Just pretend.
And he had nodded, relieved.
The worst thing about doors is the way they can open so fast.
If you pile rocks outside a door,
you will hear an invader approach, the frying pop
and chuckle of moving stone.
You can plan a defense if you barricade your door
with railroad ties or junked cars.
But a lock can be undone with just a key and that
fast, while the widening bar of black and coral
becomes a full square of great, fat lady and Ron's Super
Standard parking lot.
Audrey drops her mother's manuscript into the basket
beside the toilet, grabs up naked
Ken in instant fascination for the benefit of the intruder,
who comes on laughing.
I picked up the key out front.
Didn't know anybody was back here.
What are you doing in those skates, hun?
Barbie dolls?
In the shadow of the woman's coral bulk,
the overhang of her juicy fruit breath.
Cheap, Grandma Casey would say.
A lady never, never chews gum in public.
Audrey concentrates on the hard feet of the Ken doll,
which makes such hard work of pulling on his skinny leg
pants.
Say, the lady presses a purse large as a portable TV
set to her front and leans forward
to poke her fingers into the open case.
You've got a regular gold mine here, dear.
That's the original Barbie wedding gown there.
And that there is the ensemble for Ken
and Barbie's summer barbecue.
If you've still got the little chef's hat and the hamburger
flipper--
and this here is the Jackie Kennedy look.
Where did you get hold of these, anyway?
They were my mother's, Audrey says.
She pass on, dear?
Asked the woman.
No, she just doesn't play with them anymore, Audrey says.
[CHUCKLING]
Out the corner of her eye, over her shoulder,
Audrey can just make out the way one triangle of manuscript
lapsed the edge of the waste bin, crooked arm
of an escaping prisoner.
Ponytail Barbie.
Lord, I haven't seen one of those except at the shows
since--
the woman shakes her head in amazement.
Perhaps she is a spy sent by Audrey's mother, perhaps
a psychopath.
Makes the kids comfy before whipping out the gag
and weapons of mutilation.
[CHUCKLING]
Once, outside Glick's Market, a man
tried to get Audrey into his car.
He wore a hat meant to be funny.
It made him look as if a fish stuck right
through his cranium.
Don't you think you'd like to put my penis in your mouth?
He asked.
Audrey was so frightened she wet her pants.
Good grief, said the man.
And he made a disgusted face, and he drove away.
Your mom waiting for you out to the pumps?
Asked the lady, as she smooths the Barbie wedding
gown in her hand.
My mom?
Yeah.
She's out there.
Now, my daughter never had the Barbies,
the woman says, moves this information about in her mouth
as if it is a bitter but therapeutic lozenge,
sucks it's unsavory news with a resigned smile.
That's too bad, Audrey says.
The woman nods and draws a black-and-gold box
of bath powder from her purse and smacks at her face
with a large, peach puff.
Now, my girl had the dog called the Sweet Sue doll,
she continues.
Doesn't bring near as much.
And besides which, that little devil
cut its hair off and drew ballpoint all over its face.
The woman puts the puff back in the box, shrugs.
Of course, that's water under the dam.
But you and your mama ought to go to the antique shows around.
You would see, if you've got the box they come in,
the clothes are worth more, and the dolls, too, like with Avon.
Audrey peeks along her side, half expecting
to see the manuscript slink along the floor, almost
at the exit by now.
Yes, she says, maybe.
But right now, my mom and--
Audrey inverts grammar for the occasion.
Mom and me-- we're on our way to Texas.
San Anton, Texas.
Shortened, a discount-house version of its full length,
maybe a little worn around the edges.
San Anton strikes Audrey as breezy,
an appropriate disguise.
Probably, she and her mom drive a pitted station wagon
of murky green with things like rusty potato mashers and lawn
chairs and worn-out toys in the rear end.
She yawns elaborately.
She closes the suitcase, rolls a bit
of toilet paper towards herself.
The woman will at least allow her privacy for wiping,
won't she?
No.
Smiling down on Audrey, the woman
removes the cap from a tube of brownish lipstick
and, without reference to the mirror,
applies it quick and thick as apple butter to bread.
Whenever you're done there, she says, and taps at her lower lip
with a pinky, I'd like to chat with your mom
about those dolls.
Audrey steadies her rolling self with the toilet-paper dispenser
as she gains her feet, yanks up the baggy shorts.
I'm sure she'd like that, she says.
But you see, my mom is deaf and dumb.
That is, she has trouble communicating.
The woman seems to wait for more.
What more does she want?
Well, she's blind, too, Audrey blurts--
[LAUGHTER]
--hoping at least this handicap will garner her poor mother
a little respect and sympathy.
But the woman tips her head back.
And eyes squeezed tight, she begins to laugh.
Pardon me if you should happen to be telling the truth,
hun, she says between gasps for air.
But for goodness sake.
Audrey rips out the door.
And into the alarming dark beyond the white-light
threshold surrounding Ron's Super Standard,
she skates fast, her legs strong.
She knows the spots where the patient power of oaks
and maples have heaved the sidewalk into broken peaks
and, too, where the concrete is smooth like sucking
on a popsicle, where it is old and pebbled
and makes her cheeks quiver in passing.
She does not stop or even yelp when
a branch poking out from between a picket fence snaps her face.
She transforms panic into speed, brings fear down,
wide-eyed as a rodeo calf--
struggling, lively, but not going anywhere.
Rods, cones.
In less than two blocks, her eyes
have found the initial dramatic dark to be dusk.
She recognizes the temporary insanity.
An old fat lady, that's all.
Some fat, old lady with a thing for Barbie dolls.
And soon, someone from the gas station
will dump that waste basket into a mountain of trash
or a furnace or will call her mother,
the name printed so brazenly on the top pages'
upper right-hand corner as if she meant to hand it
in to a teacher or something.
And people at the gas station will say, well,
after this young girl on roller skates took off out of here,
we found a piece of your writing in the trash, ma'am.
And we just wanted to check.
Audrey skates slowly past the fine, big houses on Global.
What's the rush?
If she could only engineer some kind
of relatively painless but gaudy injury,
well, they would have to take her in here, at least
for a while.
She could pretend to be mute and deaf.
She could, for a time, be utterly anonymous,
a state which, at the moment, seems to Audrey
a comfort beyond measure.
Grandma and Grandpa Casey live in a big house, bigger
even than these.
Tudor, a style which survived a reign.
She could go live with Grandma and Grandpa Casey
if her mother hates her forever and ever for stealing
and losing the writing.
Grandma and Grandpa Casey would take her in.
They would say, oh, poo to her mother's missing work.
Grandma and Grandpa Casey consider her mother--
all their children-- nutty as fruitcake.
Or maybe Audrey could live with Trina Alberhasky.
Just up ahead, Trina Alberhasky's house
sits long and low.
Small lights burn along the pretty path
to the car front door.
In her room, Trina Alberhasky has a wonderful double water
bed with special sheets and comforters
on which the message "not necessarily so" appears
over and over in a bold, cursive hand.
Maybe Trina could get the manuscript.
Maybe Audrey and Trina could tell Trina's mom and dad
they want to buy beef sticks from the gas station.
They watch TV at the Alberhasky's.
It will be Joe and Pam on the matching corduroy
couch and chair and Trina on the new orange carpet.
Bittersweet, Trina calls the carpet,
as if that makes it better than orange.
And it does.
Bittersweet.
Audrey envies the word, the carpet, the Alberhaskys
with their stupid, happy life.
wide-thighed, flaxen-haired, Joe and Pam Alberhasky
resemble brother and sister, old dogs, predictable, friendly.
Not only do they allow Trina to watch the Martin family on TV,
but they watch it, too.
They do not worry that it rots their brains
or robs them of intellectual fire
or condemns them to a life of purchased opinions
and yada-yada-yeah.
Audrey skates past the Alberhasky's
fast towards her own block of rentals and duplexes.
Impossible to tell Trina Alberhasky what she has done
or about this horrible stuff her mother has written.
Really, she ought to just leave the manuscript where it lies,
good riddance to bad rubbish, and get rid
of the rest of the box, too.
Oh, yeah, I put it out with the trash.
Was there something you wanted in it, Mom?
Forearms slamming the metal, Audrey
yanks herself to a sweaty stop on the handle of a US mailbox.
The pain is dull, distant, like a reminder of some other injury
rather than the thing itself.
From here, the base of the hill, all she can truly
see of the duplex she lives in with Natalie and her mother
is her mother's bedroom, the light
the study lamp casts on the ceiling,
a tiny spot for a tiny dancer.
Very cozy, very friendly.
At night, golden-eyed, the shabby houses
of Audrey's neighborhood seem like something out
of those stories in which poor people get along
even better than the rest.
Care burnishes circumscription into a golden circle.
The families in such houses sing songs at night or crack butter
nuts gathered--
no, the word Audrey wants-- gleaned.
Butter nuts gleaned from a kindly farmer's yard.
No one can afford to be less than sane in those houses.
No one can afford to sit up all night in the dark,
thinking, jotting notes on paper, their hair wild all
over their shoulders, smoking cigarettes, which give you lung
cancer, emphysema, heart disease.
Audrey skates uphill fast and furious, passing the duplex
like a stranger.
From the kitchen, Coco gives one rusty bark, then stops,
a dismissal Audrey does not entirely appreciate.
Perhaps no one has even noticed her absence.
She could be dead in the streets,
and it would not have occurred to either of those goofballs
inside that sirens in the distance
might have a thing to do with their Audrey.
Where's Audrey?
Oh, I think she went to bed or something.
While unidentified, her body floats through the corridors
of a gray and dank hospital, becomes the amusing meat
of student surgeons.
Skates extended before her, banked
against the edge of the sidewalk,
Audrey perches gingerly on the fire hydrant
at the top of the hill.
Visible, vulnerable now in the twin golden windows
of her bedroom, cloak of red curls
frothing beneath the lamp, her mother looks out at the night.
And Natalie, in the kitchen, her hands on the rim of the sink--
she looks out, too, rocks on her heels back and forth.
The sink under Natalie's fingers will be cool.
Or perhaps she's been there for a long time
watching her [AUDIO OUT] because I was so worried about you.
And her mother would smile and smooth
Audrey's hair back from her face,
and they'll call the gas station.
But oh, Jesus, hisses Audrey, as Natalie pushes her mouth
into those duck lips again.
And Audrey remembers the way the night-backed window becomes
mirror.
Close the curtains, you ridiculous people,
she says and chokes back a sob.
You could at least close the curtains,
you ridiculous people.
Geography and anger take Audrey faster and faster
on the downhill skate.
For the first time in her life, she does not run onto the grass
as she nears the foreway at the base, but bends her knees,
makes the hop off the curb like one
of the big boys who sometimes whiz through the neighborhood.
Oh, her teeth slam together.
Eyes water with wind and ache.
A station wagon quite like the one she imagined for her trip
to San Anton sits under the big lights of Ron's Super Standard.
And several tattered children climb in and out
its many windows and doors, hit each other with fists,
whisper threats.
Booger, says one boy.
Poop, says another.
Audrey is relieved that they are too absorbed
to notice her skate past.
Quickly, she clumps up the step and into the station.
A scrappy woman laying bags of pretzels and chips
on the counter turns at the sound of the skate.
Look at that, she says to the attendant.
The attendant looks.
That's $12.32 altogether, ma'am, he says.
Believe it or not, I used to skate myself, says the woman.
I believe it, says the attendant.
That's $12.32.
[CHUCKLING]
The heat of the skate has left Audrey sweaty, tingling.
The woman and the station attendant
both appear fogged, as if she views them
through a steamy window.
Can I have the key for the restroom?
She asks.
The attendant flips the heavy tag onto the counter.
Bring that back after, he says.
Don't leave it in the door like some do.
Audrey nods.
She prays as she rolls to the door.
Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders.
Spare all those who confess their faults.
Is that enough?
Restore thou those who are penitent.
A disposable diaper and an empty can of Orange Crush
sit on top of her mother's writing,
but the paper remains miraculously clean, unharmed.
Audrey can scarcely believe her good fortune.
And without quite meaning to, while she straightens
the pages, she begins to read again, deeper in the stack
this time, something different.
A grown woman driving through her hometown,
considering the various ways in which she
might smash her car into a particular office building
so that the man inside would have to come outside,
and she could tell him how much he hurt her once upon a time
and how she does not love him anymore.
Two small children rode in the back of that car,
little girls strapped into safety seats.
And every now and then, the older
one would ask, can we go to the bakery now, mama?
Is it time?
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks.
Thank you.