Natalie Harris teaches fiction and nonfiction in Colby College’s creative writing program. Her work has appeared in Southern Review, Laurel Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Christian Science Monitor, Chronicle of Higher Education, Eclipse, Red Rock Review, and The Carolina Quarterly. She has had fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and recently completed her first short story collection, The Pressure of Blood, which was selected as a finalist in this year’s Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.
The Flying Brides ~ Brian Schwartz
Eden and I are in San Francisco, looking at Chagalls. It’s the summer of 2002, and there is a retrospective of the painter’s work at the city’s museum of modern art; we bought tickets in advance so we could fit the exhibition into our brief vacation. Now we are walking through wide rooms, meeting canvas after canvas. Eden wanted to spring for the headphones, so we’re hearing an actor’s voice, too, as he gives bits of context and interpretation. But no audio tour-guide is required to see that brides are all over Chagall’s work. Not just women, but women in white gowns, with silky trains so long it seems many of the female figures have no legs—they fly instead of walk, trailing their bridal finery through purplish skies, usually clutched by a groom. As varied as the landscapes are in these teeming compositions, the addition of an embracing bridal pair is like a jubilant tic in Chagall—it recurs in painting after painting. It’s an earthbound element—just a couple of village kids tying the knot—but it’s also oddly divine, because the couples defy gravity so easily.
Even if the married couples in his paintings are sometimes granted supernatural powers of flight and flexibility, Chagall’s work suggests that marriage is part of the natural order of things. The majority of brides in Chagall, buxom and red-cheeked, seem excited to be doing what their mothers and grandmothers did: taking a young husband, becoming part of a chain of tradition rooted in centuries of Jewish and Eastern European culture. I usually find the bridal imagery in Chagall both profound and a bit treacly; it’s colorful, hopeful, and obsolete. There is this weird, intriguing blend of nostalgia and eroticism. I’ve thought this before when I’ve come across his work—Chagall has a wonderful sense of color and composition, but is he just the nice Jewish boy who could paint pretty colors?
I was 28 years old, unmarried, when we flew to San Francisco and looked at the Chagalls. At that time in my life, between 2001 and 2003, I worked for a newspaper company in midtown Manhattan. The company published several free weeklies; the papers came out every Wednesday, appearing in inky stacks in the lobbies of apartment buildings, stuffed into creaky, graffiti-stained metal boxes that stood like corrupted crossing guards on Upper West and East Side street corners. These free neighborhood newspapers were trucked to their various destinations across Manhattan by a wispy, profane eighty-year-old named Sal, a salty native of Brooklyn who claimed to have been a promising minor league ballplayer long ago. Although I’d introduced myself to him a few times, Sal had no idea what my name was or what I did at the company; still, he was always more than happy to talk with me (or anyone else in the office) about his life, past or present. He was gregarious, one of those people who never seemed distressed about anything—although his job, as I imagined it, was full of hellish midnight odysseys through Manhattan in a rusty van laden with unwanted newspapers and ex-con temp-workers, arms covered with bluish homemade tattoos.
One day without warning Sal told me a gross story about his girlfriend’s dog. (I didn’t know he had a girlfriend before he told me about her dog, but it made sense that Sal, with his gold chains and verbal brio, was an actively dating senior citizen.) Sal was leaning with his arms crossed over the low wall of my desk space, dark eyes filling up the twin screens of his old man’s thick eyeglasses, lips pulled back from yellow dentures in a smile. “I was taking my girlfriend’s dog for a walk,” Sal reported. “She lives up in Astoria, in Queens, you know, that’s getting to be kind of a nice neighborhood. And in the middle of this walk, the fuckin dog squats on the sidewalk, starts taking this shit, you should have seen this, it was huge! While the dog is shitting, this nice young couple walks by, an’ they’re staring, y’know, they’re horrified by my girlfriend’s dog. They can’t believe there’s dog shit in their nice fuckin neighborhood! An’ I started laughing!”
In San Francisco, Eden and I are standing in front of Chagall’s “A Midnight Summer Dream,” oil on canvas, 1939. There is a bride close to the center of the painting, and she’s nearly as tall as the canvas. Her expression is impassive—she almost looks drowsy or drugged, but more than anything she seems to be summoning great patience. Her gown is white. There is a lacy trace in the fabric near her wrist, and a wedding band on her middle finger. She’s holding a blue fan near her hip.
A sort of groom holds the bride in his arms. The groom is not ordinary: he has a donkey’s head, with the suggestion of candy-striped horns. His giant eye is leering; there’s a rough hint of teeth between his mulish lips. His hand is not clutching but caressing, a bit too much wiggle in his fingers, something obsequious about it.
I’m troubled by the painting. The audio guide’s voice breaks in through my headphones, warning me not to conflate Chagall’s painting with Shakespeare’s play. The title is slightly different, the voice points out. The guide then urges us to notice how the bride is holding her blue fan: it’s covering the donkey’s crotch, “perhaps cooling his ardor,” says the voice. Eden and I both laugh at this. We exchange a look and move on to the next painting, still smiling.
But the painting with the donkey-headed groom defies comfortable quaintness. There’s no village scene, no sense of human community. The mule, in his wrinkled brown suit, may be an interloper, the creature who broke up the wedding and tempted the bride away. He may be an exotic stranger from outside the shtetl. Perhaps most disturbing of all, the mule-headed man might indeed be the bride’s husband, a groom transformed by marriage into a pleading ass, unfamiliar even to himself. In the summer of 2002, Eden and I are not yet married. Unlike most of Chagall’s work, “A Midnight Summer Dream” seems to counsel against marriage.
Art is beautiful and it’s rude; like old Sal, it’s more than willing to tell dirty stories that we may not want to hear.
And I think that’s why it can be difficult to pass up audio guides when they’re available at museums. It’s reassuring to let those headphones settle over our ears so we can listen to someone else’s sense of what a painting is trying to tell us. That way we don’t have to confront what we don’t know about a piece of art.
It would also be useful for me, on certain occasions, to have an audio guide for Jewish marriage and family life, a special headset I could wear whenever my ignorance of tradition (or my lack of common sense) becomes too burdensome. I could adjust the headphones until the plastic band tightened across my pate where a kipa ought to go. I could punch in a code number that corresponded to a particular scenario, and the guide, with his modulated theatrical timbre, would offer insights and advice inflected by centuries of Jewish wisdom.
In a sense, this is a vision of what it’s like to grow up in an observant Jewish family; tradition to some extent dictates what to do, say, even think at a particular time of year, on a particular day of the week. Any family, Jewish or otherwise, that regularly “prays together”—they are plugged into a current, a pre-made manner of participating in a larger circle of people as part of a temple, a church, a community. But my family wasn’t like that. My parents generated very little Judaism in our household. Tradition was pain for them, both of them. So what they gave each of their children was a bar or bat mitzvah and a whole lot of choices.
Chagall’s paintings, by and large, are images of real, planted-in-the-soil purpose. That’s on my mind as Eden and I fly from San Francisco back to New York: I think of the characters in those colorful paintings, how they belong in the vibrant settings that contain them.
The next day I return to my dead-end job working for a newspaper nobody reads.
Some years before I moved to New York, my older brother and his wife Becky lived with their kids in a small Manhattan apartment not far from the Jewish Theological Seminary, where Steve was attending rabbinical school. It was still hard to get used to the idea of my brother becoming a rabbi, but that was what he’d chosen to do.
I was living in California at the time. Whenever I called long-distance from the West Coast, Becky would pick up in New York and tell me, “Bri, you have to meet the babysitter.” I learned that their babysitter’s name was Eden. I understood that my sister-in-law wanted me to find a nice Jewish girl, but I was surprised that Becky continued to insist on the match even though this babysitter and I lived on opposite coasts. At my sister-in-law’s insistence, I called Eden on the phone during a trip to the East Coast. We didn’t meet face to face, but during our conversation I learned two appealing things. The first was that Eden had a pleasant voice—a voice I wanted to keep hearing. The second was that Eden, an English major in college, was a modern dancer. That meant she was creative and athletic. But I assumed that, like most creative and athletic women I knew, she also had a boyfriend of some kind.
I didn’t speak to her again for another four years. In the fall of 2000, I moved back east and settled in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood called Park Slope. Purely by accident, I chose an apartment that was a ten-minute walk from where Eden lived at the time; my sister-in-law discovered this somehow, and she wouldn’t let up: Bri, you have to meet her. You’re neighbors! This helped me get over my aversion to the set-up—I convinced myself that meeting Eden was about Christian neighborliness, not Jewish matchmaking.
We met for the first time at Ozzie’s coffee house in Park Slope, Brooklyn—a good choice for a chaste meeting place. Ozzie’s is well lit, filled with the homey odor of roasted coffee beans. A wall of enormous windows looks out onto the street. Inside, young children crawl and play on beat-up couches while their parents guzzle fresh-roasted java, the unsung pillar of American childcare, the sweet essential fuel powering parents through times of sheer exhaustion. Ozzie’s coffee house is more a tribute to the results of romance—kids, threadbare furniture, caffeine—than to romance itself. And yet while it wasn’t a likely setting for a memorable date, this is where I first saw my wife.
It was a winter night. Eden hadn’t yet taken off her coat; the scarf around her neck added to my sense that she was bundled up, dressed for practical purposes, not trying to impress anyone. This was something of a relief for me. When we sat down with our cups of coffee, I could see that Eden was young and beautiful. I noticed—I couldn’t help noticing—her large, dark eyes, her delicate neck. Eden’s beauty didn’t trouble me, though, the way it would have if I’d thought we were on a date. This amounted to a moment of grace for me: we chatted away about books and dance and Brooklyn as though there was nothing at stake, as if no underground shtetl machinery was turning its gears to bring us together. I liked her. I was glad to know this person was in my neighborhood. She was not the aggressively hip Bohemian I’d expected; she was quiet, thoughtful, a little goofy. Eden had a Chaplinesque way of using her dark eyes to express surprise or emphasis. I’d presumed a ballerina; instead, here was this understated comedian.
While I’m mildly embarrassed by the family intervention—the old shtetl spirit—that helped Eden and I begin our relationship, there has always been a part of me that was ready to subscribe to this antiquated idea of Jewish matchmaking. I am, after all, a Jew. There is comfort in the notion that people you trust might help you find a suitable mate, which is akin to finding or recognizing a part of yourself—maybe a part of yourself that’s missing. We tend to think that this sort of searching involves breaking away from parentage and personal history to transcend the givens of our lives. But when the givens are distressed and ambiguous—as my immediate family’s Jewish identity surely was—then maybe we’re more likely to reach back for different elements of our heritage, examine them, value them. Eventually Eden and I were married in the same temple that my brother and Becky were married in, the temple in downtown Gloucester where Eden went to Hebrew school as a child. In a world of vanishing Jews, we became a new Jewish couple.
By the time Eden and I met, our broader culture had become innovatively alert to the possibilities of matchmaking. More and more people, it seemed, were being set up or connected by online networks and dating services. I would read articles about speed-dating and wonder what it would feel like to be serially scored by several single women in the span of an hour or so. Ultimately, my matchmaking experience was much less innovative, less instant, but still I relied on a network. Now, for me, the match that led to my marriage evokes the joyous imagery of Chagall. It tells a story about continuity and tradition.
I had to take the N train from Brooklyn every weekday to get to the newspaper company’s offices in Manhattan. One morning, as the N crawled up out of its subterranean hole onto the Manhattan Bridge, I realized that a coworker of mine was on the same train, standing just a few feet away. I had no particular desire to speak to this person—the truth is I would’ve preferred to avoid him—but before I could look away we made eye contact. Now we had to talk.
As the N train squeaked along above the glittering, almost clean-seeming East River, we exchanged pleasantries. I steeled myself for an awkward conversation. This coworker of mine was the star of the newspaper’s ad sales department, a fast-talking man with a boy’s face, a gap between his front teeth, and long hair that fell to the base of his neck. Through the office rumor-mill, I’d heard that he had an open marriage and regularly exercised the benefits. Indeed one of the first things I’d learned about the salesman, several months back, was that he was having an affair with a pretty young woman in the accounting department. “He’s married, and she’s engaged—it’s kind of her last fling,” the managing editor told me matter-of-factly during my first week on the job. “You don’t need to know this, of course, but you might as well. Everyone else does.”
Now here I was, face-to-face with the pudgy office Lothario. “Where do you live?” he asked, as the train groaned and swayed. “Okay, yeah, I’ve seen you around there. You live with your girlfriend? What’s her name, again?”
“Eden,” I told him, as a quiet but insistent alarm went off somewhere in my mind.
“How long you been with her?”
“Two years,” I said. Then, thinking (despite all evidence to the contrary) that it might ward him off, I added, “We’re thinking about getting married.”
“That’s great!” the salesman said. “Good for you. When?”
“We don’t know,” I admitted. “We’re thinking about it. We talk about it.”
“Look,” the salesman said, “don’t waste too much time thinking and talking about it. Get married, you know? I mean, you’re never totally ready. But then you get married, and it’s great. It’s the same with kids. You can’t know what it’s going to be like before you do it; if it’s something you want, though, trust yourself. Getting married and having kids, those are the best things I’ve done. I love my wife. It would have been stupid not to get married when we did, you know? You have doubts and reservations, and that’s natural, but you can’t worry about that stuff. You have to live.”
How might Chagall have painted my randy, earnest, loving co-worker? Was this happy husband an earthbound mule or a passionate bridegroom, taking flight? How are tradition and commitment tied together—by a ring? A ritual?
On the day Eden and I were married, as our wedding guests began to arrive, a trio of musicians stood together at the front of the temple sanctuary, to one side of the white wedding canopy. A tall young man with a red beard strummed a stand-up bass; a woman with thick chestnut hair played violin; another woman, black-haired and slight, cradled an accordion in her arms as though dandling a baby. The trio’s music was lilting, playful and poignant—klezmer music, but soft, mostly strings, no loud blasts of trombone, no loony forays of a clarinet. The majority of our guests, as they slid into the temple’s old wooden pews to take their seats, would have recognized the music as Jewish without remembering the word klezmer. As the members of our wedding party began to walk down the aisle, the trio played old airs from Eastern Europe that echoed strains from shtetl weddings a century or more before. I watched my parents walk ahead of me down the aisle, arm in arm; I could feel my heart beating hard as I entered the sanctuary, following in the footsteps of my mother and father. Everyone was looking at me, but I didn’t know where to look. I could barely feel my feet. The new shoes I wore, soles still smooth, made the temple floor feel like a frictionless oil slick. But the music drew me forward, helped me keep my balance, and soon I stood under the wedding canopy, listening to the song, watching Eden walk toward me in her gown. After we said our vows, exchanged rings, kissed—and after I stamped my foot down on a napkin-wrapped lightbulb—the musicians broke into a celebratory up-tempo song. The music helped give our feelings a form. People cheered and sang mazel tov as Eden and I made our way to the rear of the sanctuary. But this hint of raucousness was subdued and soft compared to the performance of the full wedding band.
Our reception was at a seaside Elks Club with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on to the Atlantic Ocean. The view was astounding; the space itself, though, was plain, its most notable visual detail an old elk’s head on the wall near the kitchen door. Our caterer had suggested that we drape peyes—the long sidelocks of hair worn by Hasidic Jews—over the elk’s furry ears, but we never found the time or the materials to pull this off. Instead, the unadorned elk’s head looked down on the far end of the dance floor, where the band was just beginning to play.
An hour earlier, at the temple, the trio of musicians had been demure, even solemn. But when they joined with their band mates to play our reception, the performance of their full septet was radically different. The band started out in klezmer mode, but this time the driving sound of the trombone gave the music an earthy, comic quality. The accordionist got everyone out on the floor to dance the hora, and for several minutes our wedding reception resembled the Jewish weddings I’d gone to as a child—resembled my brother’s wedding too, as people danced in a circle, my family, Eden’s family, our friends all wrapping around each other in that boisterous round arrangement.
Two chairs were brought forth. As soon as Eden and I sat down, we were lifted up high and flying like the village youths imagined by Chagall, held aloft by friends, raised and bounced until our heads were bobbing close to the ceiling beams.
In the space of three hours the band played polished versions of “Sheena is a Punk Rocker” by the Ramones, “Beast of Burden” by the Rolling Stones, and “If Not For You” by Bob Dylan, in addition to Yiddish folk tunes with titles like “Rumanye,” “Grine Kuzine” and “Zlatopol.” It was a confluence of popular music from two different centuries, and hearing the different types of song side by side—Mick Jagger arm-in-arm with Isaac Bashevis Singer, so to speak—allowed me to hear the spirit of rock in old Jewish music. The Yiddish songs were about love and longing, the pleasures and pains of commitment, the sorrow of understanding that the past was gone. That day, my wedding day, I heard more yearning and more blues in klezmer music than I’d ever recognized before. For the first time I understood that the yearning had always been there in the old music, when it was played right.
The name of our wedding band, Golem, references a medieval Jewish legend about a monstrous creature fashioned from clay. According to this legend, the golem was sculpted by a rabbi near the city of Prague, brought to life when a scrap of parchment bearing God’s name was placed in its mouth; the clay monster’s mission was to protect Prague’s Jews from the pogroms and pillaging stirred up by a cruelly anti-Semitic ruler. The golem, a cross between Superman and Frankenstein, shielded an entire community of Jews and helped them preserve their way of life in the face of violent bigotry. Or so the story goes. Because of this, the myth of the golem, ancient and idiosyncratic, has had a special resonance for contemporary Jews in the decades after the Holocaust. The mysterious monster has undergone many literary and pop-culture resurrections in recent years, most notably in Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay. (And that title is no misnomer, in case you’re wondering—the force with which Chabon’s book reanimates the old Jewish myth of the golem is truly amazing.)
During our wedding reception, a number of my male friends came up to me and asked about the accordionist who was leading the band. Her accordion was low-slung; she kept the instrument down near her hips, and she shook and swayed her body with purpose as she played. Until I saw the band Golem, I had no interest in accordions. As musical instruments go, the accordion seemed awkward, unwieldy and needlessly complicated—plus the instrument’s voice seemed a bit, well, nasal. Yet Golem’s accordionist, as she shook her hips and belted out Yiddish lyrics, infused her instrument with sex appeal. The violinist, too—my friends wanted to know about her. She was attractive. She was talented. And it wasn’t just the women in the band; the lead singer, a scruffy young man with a partly-unbuttoned ruffled tuxedo shirt, caught more than one woman’s eye that day.
Golem may seem like a strange name for a wedding band—even a Jewish one—because the clay monster-man from the folktale is a reminder of pogroms and persecution. But then Golem is a strange band. They’re a collective of skilled performers whose work strikes me as original and new even though I know every song they claim as their own is old, well-worn, traditional. I have their oeuvre on my computer; at the touch of a button they can take me back 200 years. And listening to Golem feels like traveling back in time. But their music is also immediate, even urgent.
The band Golem is working Chagall’s side of the street, I know, but like the painter they can’t be comfortably contained by the nostalgic boundaries of the old, idealized shtetl. There’s something more there.
When your brother is a rabbi, you may find that your own wedding is a bit more Jewish than you expected it to be. You may find, for instance, that you and your betrothed are shopping for a ketuba—a traditional Jewish wedding contract, inked and illuminated by a professional calligrapher. You might buy one, and the text of it might read, in Hebrew, something along these lines: “As her loving husband you must provide for her maintenance.” Years later, you might look back on the whole thing and think, What a wonderful, meaningful event in my life and my partner’s life. The dancing, the family blessings, the rituals, the party. At the same time, in completely contradictory fashion, you might look back and also think, What an odd thing, that we agreed to do all that, that we went out and bought this ketuba, which suggests that men need to protect, that women need to serve, and that the first source of wisdom for our relationship comes not from the ongoing dialogue we build but from the tradition we barely practice in our everyday lives.
Eden and I had a relatively old-fashioned Jewish ceremony, even though neither one of us was an observant Jew. Some of our reasons for choosing this sort of ceremony are easy to name: we wanted my brother to officiate, and that meant leaning more toward tradition than we might have otherwise; the temple where we were married, Eden’s hometown temple, was a Conservative shul with certain requirements (all men were asked to cover their heads with a kipa inside the sanctuary, for instance); I’d grown up attending my cousins’ Jewish weddings and had a lot of affection—maybe nostalgia, too—for the huppah, the smashed glass, the dance of lifted chairs. I was a sort of amateur devotee of Jewish weddings, and had a hard time thinking of ways to improve on the traditions I’d been moved by so often in the past.
I suspect that a number of our friends found our wedding surprisingly—even disappointingly—traditional. As I’ve mentioned, Eden and I never made Jewish observance a very large part of our lives in New York, so it’s understandable that some of the wedding guests who made the trip from the city were taken aback by the kipa requirement, the klezmer music, the kosher food. When I look back on that weekend, even I’m surprised by the extent to which Yiddish and Hebrew informed the rhythms of the formal and informal festivities. I’d like to think that everyone enjoyed taking a turn at the traditional that day, that the sign next to the sanctuary door—We ask that all men cover their heads out of respect for the Jewish tradition—was innocuous and couldn’t possibly have rubbed anyone the wrong way. But of course it probably did. I’ve been to Catholic masses before, but I’ve never taken communion. Had no interest, didn’t want to, wasn’t even sure what the ritual meant. We are not used to trying on and taking off the symbols of a tradition. And our discomfort in such moments is itself a signal that tradition can still play a powerful role in our thinking.
Two summers after we got married, Eden had the opportunity to tour through parts of Eastern Europe with a modern dance company she’d been working with for several years. I decided to tag along on the trip. Eden and I were both excited: we could visit our friends Angharad and David in Berlin, and take a week or so at the end of the tour for a vacation. Our travels through Eastern Europe two years after Eden and I were married gave me some insight as to why our wedding band chose to call themselves by the name of a legendary protector of embattled Jews. Perhaps the members of Golem think of themselves as reviving and transmitting aspects of a fragile, often forgotten culture. The sexual charisma of the band, the pleasure they take in playing their music, suggests a vision of Jewish marriage, culture and history that skirts narratives of victimization and hardship, and concentrates instead on vigorous living. When Golem plays a song from the Yiddish folk canon, their performance is about the humanity of Jews. They are reminding us that Jews of the shtetl were more than funny farmers with daughters to marry off—these ancestral Jews drank, danced with abandon, passionately fucked and feasted when they were able. Even the most pious among them were human beings, and the traditions of the Jewish wedding, klezmer music very much included, provided (still provide) a frame for that humanity.
Usually Chagall depicts the marital embrace as an airborne dance that transcends the niggling details of domestic life. He offers Judaism as a brand of secular, somehow sexy farming. He can be sickly sweet about this stuff. Lots of kissing in the airspace above the chicken coop.
But then there is the painting with the mannish mule, the one Eden and I saw in San Francisco. It suggests that tradition and ritual are not enough. And at the Art Institute of Chicago, aside from the famous cerulean windows that Chagall installed, there is a canvas of his that is nearly all white. The white canvas is beautiful and desolate. It is not comforting to look at, not something that seduces us with color; it is about devastation, erasure. The village is bare. The sthetl is dying. There is no comfort of a Jewish past that can give us succor in the present. Looking at this painting, we yearn for the other Chagall, the celebratory, bride-crazy Chagall, to tell us, “Don’t worry! Just look closer—you’ll see happy villagers, horse-groomers, a regular Jewish pastoral. The essence of the Jewish family.” But Chagall has taken the folk out of the tale in this painting. The emptiness haunts us. Somehow, we have to define for ourselves what and who we are. The artist isn’t going to do it for us; he never meant to do that in the first place.
Golem, Jewish wedding band extraordinaire, seems to tell us with their songs that every generation must remember the Jewish past in their own way. By traveling with their music, playing their Yiddish songs in as many different places as possible, Golem disseminates the idea that Jewish culture can still live in a contemporary world strewn with memorials and museums devoted to the Holocaust. Such memorials do the crucial work of helping us remember the millions who died in the ovens that spread their cancerous smoke across Eastern Europe in the middle of the twentieth century. Golem asks: Is that enough? What parts of that culture are still alive? If we press our lips to the earth, speak the old tongue with enough zeal, what might rise up and move to the sound?
Brian Schwartz
Brian Schwartz has published fiction and non-fiction in Washington Square, The Seattle Review, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood and the San Francisco Chronicle. He can be found online at the Rumpus.net, where he writes the sports column “A Fan’s Notes.” Brian teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University.
Lee Upton
Lee Upton is the author of eleven books, including the novella The Guide to the Flying Island (Miami University Press). She has written five books of poetry, most recently Undid in the Land of Undone, and four books of literary criticism. Her poetry and short stories appear widely. She is the writer-in-residence at Lafayette College.
The Tao of Humiliation ~ Lee Upton
The guy with stringy hair was still staring at Everett, which made Everett even more nervous, as if something was going on under the table with that guy. Was he nuzzling something on his lap—a field mouse? Or was it something else—a genital tattoo? “I’ve been around,” the nervous-making guy said, without provocation. “It’s important to get around.” His hair fell in two thin fronds from a center part. His name was Barry.
“How do you afford it?” a deep voice asked from the other end of the table. The guy who asked was Lucas, some sort of businessman who was retired and spent half his life in Florida. His eyes proved it, the cracks around the edges like sun rays in a child’s drawing.
“I come from a generous family,” Barry said, pushing back strings of his hair. “They believe in travel.” With that, he stood, and Everett realized what the problem was. Barry was wearing a kilt.
Kilts. Why should kilts be a problem? Everett had watched Entertainment Tonight and saw an old clip of Sean Connery in a kilt, which looked okay. But this guy in a kilt, this guy Barry—it was like a crime against a culture. Like he tore the kilt off some giant school girl.
When Barry sat back down, Lucas said, “I had the cancer” and spread his hands and looked around the table until he had the other men’s attention. “I’m all right,” he said, “despite the cancer.”
When no one responded, Everett said, “That must have been hard.” His voice sounded as if something was wrong with his teeth.
“Hard?” Lucas said, winking at Everett and tightening his grip on a plastic bottle of Deer Park until the stag buckled under his thumb. “It’s the waiting. Not knowing and waiting. And then you’re going around giving the impression it’s no big deal that you’re dying. This featherhead—pardon my French—this idiot that my wife worked with—when things were at their worst she told me to my face, We all must die. She’s dead now so I shouldn’t stay angry. Yeah. I know. I feel guilty about that.”
“You killed her?” Barry asked. He dug at iceberg lettuce as tasteless-looking as a rice cake.
“No. Railroad crossing. She wasn’t paying attention to signals. That’s a joke. She’s alive. So am I. She has to worry about that.”
“I bet she does,” Barry said, adjusting the waistband of his kilt. “You know, I can’t remember the last time I had sex. That’s a joke too. I mean the sex I had with my wife. Not the other kind.”
Before anyone else could, the dentist named Dwayne said, “The sex you had with yourself.” Dwayne seemed like he was trying to exculpate every professional courtesy a dentist should develop. He didn’t even look clean.
Barry said, “I lied. As a joke. I’m not married. That’s why I have sex with myself.”
It pained Everett when no one at the table laughed. He himself couldn’t fake a laugh. Throughout his life he had paid for that incompetence.
Groups were about to harden. Circulation would soon be futile. Everett watched as Lucas, the retiree, scanned the meeting hall, clearly calculating if he should leave the table and set up somewhere else.
He saw what looked like pin pricks off at the other end of the hall before he recognized he was seeing antlers. A wall was lined to the ceiling with them. Some racks were so huge that Everett questioned if they had been supplemented.
After some difficulty, Everett peeled back the lid of his fruit cup. It was the kind of fruit cup that goes into unfortunate kids’ lunch boxes. How is it, he wondered, that certain people find themselves together during social occasions, or at an office, or at a retreat like this one? And would he ever feel comfortable enough to contribute to the conversation? Not that he could call what he’d been listening to a conversation—not quite. Something his uncle once told him kept him off the bridge to self-destruction: Remember who you are. A sufficiently vague piece of advice. Everett had played around with those words and their meaning for years. He preferred to think that the words meant: Don’t remember who you were.
The staff member’s voice, at least forty yards ahead, sounded like a mouse knocking around in an empty tin can. Dwayne and Barry were standing off the path, trying to make out the words as well.
Everett’s sandal straps dug into his heels. Up the wooded path, other men carrying pails were stopping. Why did they all have to go clanging around with pails? Like a herd wearing cowbells.
The staff member in a black tee-shirt, blue green tattoos twined up his arm (cobras?) was saying, “Gather them—they’re for us—not for eating now, for later. Remember. Not now. For later. Watch for the pricks.”
Barry, his jaw dropping, turned to Everett and whispered something that Everett couldn’t make out. The staff member continued: “The berries allow you to think about where your food comes from—and to work with others, to commit to the act of gathering in preparation for a greater gathering. Sustenance on a higher level. First, we think of our gratitude.”
“Funny little buckets, aren’t they?” Barry said. “I feel like a milkmaid.”
You look like one, Everett was tempted to say.
Heat writhed off the bushes. Everett could smell insect repellent up high in his nostrils. The deer flies were supposed to be the size of hummingbirds.
The bush to Everett’s left raged. It was only Barry trying to extricate himself, like a cat with a claw stuck in a drape.
Barry set his pail down and asked Everett, “What do you think of all those antlers back in camp? I’ve been wondering: what if deer owned the place? Would they hang up a bunch of human skeletons? I mean, what do you think about somebody who needs to display so many antlers? I mean, I’m not like that. I ran over a mouse with a lawnmower once and it made me sick. The bone fragments were flying and I had to stop mowing. Do you think they killed the deer first or just found the antlers in the woods?”
“It rained last night,” Dwayne said, edging over toward another bush that was so shiny it looked wet. “They’re probably pretty clean.”
Barry was still talking. “I don’t know about this fruit patch thing,” he said. “I mean, this is like manual labor. Are we getting paid for this? Although I admit it. I have learned something: do not go berry-picking in a kilt. They ought to inscribe that somewhere. Maybe I almost like this. We’ve been here only for—I don’t know—not long, and hey, we’re buddies. Buddies.”
The heat was getting more spectacular. Heat for heat’s sake. As if the men were stuck in a giant pot of jam.
“Your shirt should breathe,” Dwayne said to Everett. “You’re not dressed right. You’re wearing cheap synthetics or a blend.”
Barry stretched on his toes to examine Everett’s scalp. “You’ve got mist rising off your head,” he said, not eager to confirm Dwayne but helpless before truth. “It’s like your brain is steaming in one of those Japanese bamboo baskets for bean sprouts.”
Dwayne called out loudly, “Water—anyone got water up there?” Under his breath he said to Everett, “You’re shaking.”
“Maybe Everett is shaking with indignation,” Barry said. “Other mammals besides humans do that. You know what’s the most self-conscious animal? Other than us, monkeys, apes, and cats?” He clapped his hands. “Fish! Just kidding. Like anyone knows!”
Then somehow Dwayne was holding a water bottle out. Everett closed his eyes and drank.
“They’re trying to kill us,” Dwayne said, “from heat exhaustion.” He was looking at Everett. “You in particular.”
In the first light of sunset the tips of the antlers flashed white against the walls of the meeting hall. Everett was thinking that maybe it would be a good thing if people had antlers. Maybe some people had invisible antlers. The lucky people.
As soon as Dwayne left for a refill at the buffet table, Barry said, “You know what Dwayne’s like? He’s not like a dentist. He’s like a Komodo dragon. Komodos enjoy expressing dominance. They cripple an opponent and won’t stop. The winner rakes the loser with its claws. It’s like somebody wins an argument with you, breaks your leg, and then works you over for a half hour with a file. And that’s not all. I saw all of this in a video. A Komodo bit a water buffalo and watched for fifteen days—fifteen days—until the buffalo died. From putrefaction.”
At the far end of the hall, one of the staff members was leading to the stage an old man in a plaid shirt and chino pants. A beam of late light, pink and orange, settled around the man’s head like a fried halo.
“Forgive me,” the old man said into the microphone. He looked like a talking death’s head—like a yellow skull in an oil painting. “You’ve come here for help. For that I appreciate each and every one of you. Your strength has been what’s called me to you. The anxiety you live with, that constant anxiety—you’re going to say goodbye to that anxiety. What I say won’t put an end to it. This silence you’re going to experience, these gentle tests of character, this fresh air and enforced cabin meditation sessions—all these will put an end to it.”
Everett glanced over at Lucas, who was taking notes on a pad balanced on his knee.
“Because that anxiety isn’t you. It’s a tick that’s lodged under your armpit and feeding. You have to put a match to its head. Or you have to pull it out with long tweezers. If I feel like hell today it’s because I have reasons. Your pain, your sense of worthlessness, your despair, your self-contempt—those are things I can intuit. Your pain isn’t only personal. Remember that. I’m not well today, and so I can’t help but absorb what’s eating you. If you feel lighter in a while, think of the Bible verse; the sins cast out upon the goat, upon the swine—and that’s what’s happening here, the weight of what you are, that’s what I experience. You have to cast off your pain, burn it from the head down. You have to watch it curl and fall off.
“If I have the strength to appear before you, how much more strength do you have? Strength is gained by pitting yourself against forces that aren’t hospitable. There’s a little seed in your heart—”
Did anyone besides Everett find the reference to “a little seed” embarrassing?
“There’s a seed in your heart, and it has not been given the right conditions to grow. You have untouched capabilities.” The speaker’s voice softened. “What can I give you?”
Everett looked down at his own feet—long and skinny in rope sandals. They didn’t look like his feet should look. A wasp landed on his elbow. Until the wasp lifted off, like a hostile little helicopter, he missed a few bars of the talk. He caught up with “These few days, these few precious days allow us the opportunity to step back. Every activity is natural and reveals something of your nature to you. But remember this”—and here the microphone squealed—“there’s something within each of us that must be faced. Individually. There’s a depth you need to approach.”
Despite everything, despite his own skepticism, Everett felt it—that extreme of self-belief hanging in the air, as if the speaker had found something that eluded every other man in the hall. Everett’s eyes ached. The chord that tugged at his chest tightened.
“Some of you are afraid to see what’s in front of you. You might see your failures laid out naked for you. You might see how you made the wrong choices. Some doors are closed to us. They were open for a while—but it’s too late now. There’s a shelf life for certain behaviors. The truth was revealed, but you turned away. You couldn’t face the truth.”
With that, a suffocating smell of decay rose in Everett’s throat. He struggled out of his chair. He was able to make his way to the exit and around to the side of the building before he retched into the gravel.
When Everett returned to the meeting hall, the old man was leaving the stage, a staff member clasping his shoulder, applause thundering through the hall. He hurried to intercept the speaker. He was grateful for what the speaker had said—although it hurt like hell. The speaker was right: it was too late. Everett had made the wrong choice. The truth was revealed. He hadn’t been able to face the truth. The memory of his failure had come upon him even while he was puking, the memory thick and overwhelming as a hallucination.
As Everett was about to call out, the old man turned his head, his pupils shrinking into a chilled internal world. Everett couldn’t speak, couldn’t extract from himself a word of pained gratitude. When he got back to his seat he found Dwayne holding his head in his hands, his back pumping. He was either crying or laughing while Barry whispered to no one and everyone, “Aren’t you glad you came?”
Nothing in the preceding hours had gone well. Everett had overhead Lucas stop a brawl between Barry and Dwayne when Barry insisted that the combined weight of termites on earth was higher than the combined weight of humans. Lucas had said, “Theories should be based on evidence. Did either of you count the human population of the cheese-making states?”
Now Dwayne was saying, “I have some ideas of my own. The Tao of Humiliation.”
“The cow of humiliation?” Barry asked.
Dwayne turned away from Barry and said, “I don’t want to waste the required energy to begin to do justice to the amount of contempt I hold for you—but I’ll continue. There are various emotional responses that I’m pretty familiar with. First: embarrassment. Barry, you’re the big animal buff. You must know that even animals get embarrassed if they’re caught, for instance, digging up something dead that they shouldn’t have. Next: humiliation—that’s the stage I’m interested in. The rich stage. The third stage is shame. You have to enjoy a degree of responsibility for shame. Not so interesting.”
Barry was following this better than Everett. “No one enjoys shame,” he said.
“Give me a break. There are people who wouldn’t know they’re alive unless they were ashamed. They’re busy congratulating themselves on not being sociopaths. You should believe me. I look into mouths for a living. I know something about humiliation. People can’t keep secrets from me.”
“So why is it a cow?” Barry asked.
“It’s not a cow. Tao. The Tao of Humiliation.” Dwayne exhaled hard. His breath smelled like skin pulled off a fried chicken.
“I don’t know what Tao means,” Barry said. “I actually don’t know. I usually know these things. If you’d asked me about cows…”
“Everett,” Dwayne said, kicking at the path, “will you help out for once? I bet you know something about the Tao.”
Everett didn’t know anything about the Tao, and he would bet that Dwayne didn’t know much either. The only reply he wanted to offer was, There’s a lot to be said for the cow of humiliation. But he thought that would be humiliating to Dwayne, so he kept silent.
“In India cows are sacred,” Barry said. “Maybe our cows should move.”
Dwayne ignored Barry and poked at Everett’s shoulder. “It was like they had a microphone right where you were puking today. It was magical.”
Behind Everett the sound of voices died away. The path was thinning out, becoming invisible under pine needles. What did Dwayne mean when he talked about humiliation? Dwayne had the ability to be irritated, but he didn’t seem easily humiliated. And Barry—he was so out of touch that he came in costume to his own life. Everett couldn’t blame Lucas the cancer-survivor for ditching them halfway through the hike. Today he himself couldn’t resist peeling off from the group early.
The woods were silent except for the sawing of pine branches. The dry grasses gave off an almost sweet smell. For a long time he walked aimlessly before he saw the deer.
The animal was motionless amid birches and pines. To brace himself, Everett rested his hand on the trunk of a pine. He drew his hand away slowly, taking a step toward the spot where the deer stood, as if he could walk through an apparition. His memories dropped over him—memories of himself and the woman he had known since they were children. The two of them had come upon a clearing in upstate New York and saw a nearly identical sight as the one before him now. A buck like this one, with enormous antlers. What he remembered most was their looking together, looking for once in the same direction. He and the woman waited, while just ahead of them, the animal’s skin rippled. The eye lid flicked over the wetly shining globe of the eye. And now, after all these years, in the space where the deer was standing, a concentrated afterimage clung. Some desire in his mind had cut out that space.
He was there with that woman—it pained him to say her name to himself—the two of them, suspended, united in a way he never had been, before or since, with another human being.
He held back, not wanting to spook the animal or break the hold of memory. Suppose people we lost could come back to us in time? What if their genuine arrival was only delayed? His mind whirled toward Lisa King—that was her name, the name he had been avoiding saying to himself. She had such a common name she could be in all fifty states by now, if she were still alive, which was doubtful. He couldn’t bear to find out. Back then she couldn’t be in his car on a winding road without asking him to pull over. He had to walk back and forth with her on the side of the road until she could go for another ten miles. She had a bad heart—already, in her twenties. And yet somehow she made him think of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, a book he read as a college sophomore. The major activity of women in that novel was blushing, their cheeks suffusing with blood. So too the tips of their ears. If she was feeling all right, she could blush as profusely and disarmingly as the Russians. But then she didn’t feel all right too often. Her skin was like cool glass.
The next memory blotted out the first: a dark room—a fish tank illuminated with a hand-written sign propped against it. Don’t feed the fish, in magic marker. The feel of her cheek under his, cool and fragrant and then the shock again—the knowledge that he was not enough for her. And then the other memory, the worst: the sheet on the bed drawn back, purposefully, the way someone from another century might pull a curtain to show an impressive oil painting. My Last Duchess. He knew she wasn’t asleep—but almost dozing. The soft dimples at the small of her back, the curves of her, the white sheet. Her body looked doughy, unreal. Even if she was a small woman, at that moment her body filled the horizons of the room. Her body that he had loved—it seemed to go on and on, stretching to the ends of his sight, a place more than a body, stunning and endless, this landscape, this world he had known, this love of his life. Like a shooting pain the woman was back in his mind, lying naked on the bed, posed for him to see her.
And what was Everett to do—to stand and witness—to see what a woman he loved would allow, what lengths she would go to as a way to demonstrate that he was not included in her life anymore. He had walked out, his mind hot with revulsion. She had been lying naked on the bed in his new friend’s apartment. She had known he would be coming over to see his friend.
Gradually the deer, the actual animal, impressed itself more fully upon Everett. Its hide was mottled, diseased. Something stuck out from its side, an arrow, broken. At last Everett realized.
He hadn’t known such life-like replicas of bucks even existed, but here it was. It must be abandoned from a bow and arrow shooting range. A crusty old model of a buck. That was all. He’d been fooled by a fake.
Except for his breathing, no sounds broke the surface around him. He headed toward a copse of birches that he thought he remembered. The grasses in the hollow were singed gold and white. After long minutes he shouted “Where are you?” as if the others from the camp were lost.
He didn’t know what was more humiliating: to be lost in the woods or to be found dead in the woods and have the newspapers report that he’d been on a strength retreat.
It would be humiliating if a rescue party had to be sent out. He already had enough to be ashamed of, given the puking that Dwayne said every one heard. Now: disappearing in the woods. Anybody who didn’t know him would think he was deliberately self-destructive. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t like the woman he had loved who must have wanted to humiliate him. To get rid of him. She had branded him instead. At unexpected times the image of her laid out like that punched through him. He should have grabbed her and set her upright and shouted at her: why the fuck are you killing me?
After more walking he gathered twigs, acting purposeful, trying to lose himself in the task. He took a birch’s fallen branch and brushed off the loose peel. He put it beside other branches and twigs. He’d seen other men at the retreat making these little overgrown basket-like contraptions big enough to hold a crouching body. It calmed his nerves to behave as if he had something to do—some bizarre activity like every activity assigned at the retreat. He walked in the direction where he thought he smelled a stream.
Through the clearing ahead of him shrubs swayed. A bear? They’d been warned of bears. It smelled like a bear—the air was broken into particles. The huffing and coughing of a bear. He crouched down to make himself invisible.
And then, hurtling into view, saddle bags of sweat under each arm, his kilt lopsided: Barry.
“I thought I saw a girl—“ Barry said, looking baffled to find Everett.
“A girl?” Everett shot up, trying to tamp down his embarrassment. Then he could feel his face relax, as if it were slowly unsticking. He was so glad to be found by Barry. Barry only noticed Barry.
“It wasn’t anything. Something. Nothing. A girl.”
“You saw a girl?” Everett asked again.
“Are we lost?” Barry asked.
Everett should have picked Lisa King up in his arms—he should have taken her out of that apartment, gathered the sheet around her. He should have told her she didn’t know what she was doing. She was sick. The friend whose apartment she was in was a reckless guy who must have put her up to it—being with a guy like that could have killed her. She was that fragile. Maybe she did it because she would get sick if she confronted Everett. Show and don’t tell was easier. Maybe she was afraid of what he would say. Maybe she was afraid of herself and her temper. Maybe he wasn’t the only guy that something like that had happened to. Maybe it’s happened to every guy that’s ever lived. He was so relieved to see Barry that he was almost ready to forget Lisa King. His heart was loosening, flopping open. If he didn’t watch it he’d cry.
Barry asked, “We’re not really lost, are we?”
To which Everett replied, “We just have to wait. Wait long enough and they’ll come for us.”
“You’re sure?”
“Eventually they’ll realize. We may have to wait a long time. They’ll miss us.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if they’ll notice we’re gone.”
Everett didn’t have to think hard before he said, “They’ll miss your kilt. It’s unforgettable.”
“Oh. You think so?”
“Your kilt will save us.”
“Great.”
“Or else it will get us killed. It’s kind of shouting ‘Kill me.’”
Barry said, “I kept thinking I saw a girl. Running. Like out of the corner of my eye. Just flashing by. I think it’s a hallucination. You know that guy Lucas? The cancer survivor? He’s writing a book.”
“Oh yeah?”
“He says that before you kill yourself or maybe he said before you die—I can’t remember—anyway, either way, he says you’re hallucinating.”
Everett asked, “Did he try to kill himself?”
“After the diagnosis. So he wants to write a book about how not to kill yourself. That’s why he’s at the camp. For tips. But you know what?” Barry lowered his voice. “ I wouldn’t trust Lucas not to depress a clown. Although clowns are often depressed individuals.”
Barry couldn’t stop talking—about depression, about clowns, about how you can’t go back into the past and survive the present. On the later point it was like he was reading Everett’s mind.
Neither man told the other, but they both hoped Barry’s eyes weren’t playing tricks and that an actual girl was lost or in trouble, so that the two of them, although they themselves were lost, could save her. They walked deeper into the woods. Their shadows fell ahead of them. Frogs were starting up.
By then the girl had run back in the other direction, far on the other side of the rushing stream, and could not have heard the men who would so gladly have saved her, not even Everett, loud with theories.
Mary Elizabeth Pope
Mary Elizabeth Pope is an associate professor of English at Emmanuel College in Boston. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Florida Review, Sycamore Review, Fugue, Dos Passos Review, Clackamas Literary Review, and Descant, as well as the anthologies The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction (Longman) and Peninsula: Essays and Memoirs from Michigan (Michigan State University Press). She lives with her husband in Boston.
The Marionette Theater ~ Mary Elizabeth Pope
They had arrived in Prague in the middle of a rainstorm, the water pooling in gutters that ran down the center of the streets and prevented puddles as they rolled their wheeled suitcases over the cobblestones of Sokolovska to the apartment where Jonathan stayed on business trips, and to which he had returned each afternoon from his meetings to whisk Josie off on a tour of the castle, or a walk over the Charles Bridge, or a lecture on the history of the Jewish Cemetery. It was not their honeymoon—a cruise to Barbados that would leave port the day after the wedding—but Josie’s friends kept calling it one anyway. “The first honeymoon,” they said, and when Jonathan overheard them, he flashed the women a smile. “We’re so happy,” he told them, “we need two!”
And now they were here, and the city was every bit as beautiful as Jonathan had promised it would be, if not moreso, in the slanting August light. But as they strolled along the cobblestones of the Golden Lane, stood in the tiny house where Kafka had written The Metamorphosis, took an evening cruise down the Voltava sipping champagne from slender crystal flutes, Josie could not shake the feeling that none of it was real. The castle looked like the one she had seen at Disney World, the Charles Bridge as if it were built of styrafoam bricks, the exterior of St. Vitus like a façade supported by scaffolding, so that when they had walked inside, the organ pipes and pulpits had surprised her.
It was a feeling that had dogged her long before their arrival in Prague. Ever since Jonathan had pulled the diamond ring from his pocket and slipped it in on her finger in the horse-drawn carriage he’d hired to take them around the park at Christmastime, nothing had seemed real. The ring itself was so bright and gold it could have dropped from a gumball machine, and when Jonathan said, “Will you marry me?” his words did not seem to come from deep inside him, as Josie felt a question like that should. And then there were the wedding preparations: cakes that looked like sculptures, flowers so perfect she had to touch them to know they weren’t silk, wedding gowns so white they looked almost blue. And the showers: Josie sat amidst grinning women who stroked her arms as if in welcome to the world of mixmasters and food processors and something called “the clean up factor” but as she unwrapped each new blender or microwave or toaster oven, they felt as flimsy as the cardboard kitchen set she’d had as a child, which had disintigrated into pulpy lumps when the basement had flooded.
Tonight they had tickets for the National Marionette Theater, the event Jonathan had saved for their last night in Prague, and as they ordered plates of goulash under the awning of a café in Old Town before heading to the theater, Josie thought back to their first date when he’d described it all to her—the performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the black-cloaked puppeteers that made the darkness behind the set seems more alive than the puppets themselves, the way the tradition stretched back for centuries. “And the puppets,” he’d said, reaching for her hand across the table of the trendy bar where he’d taken her that first night. “You will love the puppets.” But in truth it had never been his description of their painted faces, or their elaborate costumes, or the crowds that packed the theater to see them each night that convinced her that she would. It was the way he had said will, as if this was already their future together, because she was thirty-one years old and tired of the men her parents kept inviting over on the Sundays she joined them for dinner at their house in Gladstone. “A Chiefs fan,” her father would say by way of explaining why a young man from the gun club or the son of one of the Elks was joining them, and to prove this wasn’t a set-up, Josie’s father would hand him a beer and lead him downstairs to watch the game.
And now she was in Prague with Jonathan just as he’d promised she would be on that very first date, but even Jonathan did not seem real to her, hadn’t seemed real since the moment he’d reclined in the carriage after proposing and began rehearsing all the things he’d soon be saying. “I’d like you to meet my wife,” he tried. Or: “My wife always says . . .” Then: “I was just telling my wife.” It was supposed to be a joke, but Josie had the feeling he wasn’t telling it to her, and she’d felt a sudden hollowness in her stomach then that hadn’t gone away. But ever since they’d called their parents from a pay phone at the west end of the park she hadn’t had time to think about that hollowness because there were invitations to order and venues to reserve and the registry to fill out, and then the engagement party Aunt Mildred had planned and that family reunion of Jonathan’s they’d promised to attend in Vermont, and now the wedding was only three weeks away and Josie knew that she did not want to marry him.
For a week she had been trying to tell him. They would arrive at the apartment after a concert in St. George’s, or find themselves alone in the Palace Gardens, or pause to inspect a set of vases in the window of a shop in Wenceslaus Square, and there would be a lull in all their forward motion, an opening, and she’d turn to him to say look or listen or we need to talk. But whenever she tried to speak, her mouth would not form the words. And now the week was over and they were leaving Prague in the morning, and as soon as the plane touched down in Kansas City there would be the response cards to count and the seating charts to arrange and the second alteration with the shop girls who wanted her gown to be more fitted, though she could not breathe in the thing as it was, and before she knew it they’d be on that cruise to Barbados, the wedding already behind them.
Now she faced Jonathan across the table, watching him lift spoonfuls of soup to his mouth. She stared at him so long that he paused, his spoon in midair.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
She did not know what would happen afterward. She could not picture his expression, nor the shock of their parents and neighbors and friends, nor the magnitude of the plans that would have to be undone. She only knew she had to tell him the truth.
But she heard herself answer, as if from a distance: “Nothing, darling.”
“Are you sure?” he asked. “You look pale.”
“I’m fine,” she said.
They were words that did not come from inside her. They came from somewhere else instead, and they satisfied Jonathan, who turned back to his soup, nodded at a passing waiter, smiled when the Orloj in the square behind them began ringing out seven o’clock. But with each clang Josie felt herself growing numb, and by the time the waitress delivered their goulash, she realized she could not feel her limbs. Then Jonathan paid the bill, and Josie felt herself being steered through the narrow streets to a tiny theater at the top of a cramped staircase that smelled of the Voltava. There was a moment before they entered when she might have spoken, and another when Jonathan paused to adjust his tie, and another after they were ushered down the aisle just before the show began. But by then it was too late. The doors had closed and the curtain had lifted and the puppets were already clattering away, whirling through the dance they’d been performing for centuries.
Brad Felver
Brad Felver recently completed his first novel. He is the Managing Editor of Mid-American Review and a 2010 recipient of a Devine Fellowship in fiction at Bowling Green State University. He writes and teaches writing in northern Ohio.
Throwing Leather ~ Brad Felver
Back then we were mean kids, both of us. We knew it and celebrated it. We salted slugs in the street and watched them melt. We caught brook trout and plucked out their eyes with a corkscrew, leaving their wriggling bodies for the bears. We slathered each other’s sandwiches with gear grease when the other wasn’t looking. When we got hurt or punished, we took it as a sign that we were doing something right, we were being mean enough. But Charley was especially cruel. Even his mother was afraid of him, which meant he mostly did as he pleased.
Charley was an angry kid, not overly large, but ferocious. He had no interest in kids our age or their television and video games. When he bothered to go to school at all the other kids shied away from him because he smelled like diesel fuel or gunpowder or carcass. He sneered at teachers. He inspired awe even from the most seasoned kids because he would disappear for days at a time, trudging through the unkempt cemetery that bordered our backyard and into the dense woods, and just when rumors started to circulate that he was gone for good, he emerged with crusted blood on his arms and face and never bothered to tell anyone where he’d been or how he killed whatever he killed.
This was Cut Bank, northern Montana, grizzly country, where goofy tourists wore bells on their belts and carried bear spray that claimed to be napalm in a can and was sold at every corner gas station. It was a fine product if you encountered a black bear, but they were basically pets, anyway. Trailhead signs even advised hikers to punch them right in the nose, and they would run away, which they did. Grizzlies, though, were part dinosaur, remnants of an earth where animals the size of Volkswagens stomped around and ate goddamned whatever they wanted. Your only hope with a grizzly, the saying went, was to punch its stomach walls enough that it might digest you faster. Even the traps poachers left in the hills looked like medieval torture devices, enough rusted, toothy steel to keep a Gulf Stream tethered to the ground. Every couple years, it seemed some determined suburbanite wandered into the wild looking to prove something to his kids or wife or mistress. Within a few days, Charley and I would see the vultures circling high above his heading, swooping around in their cockeyed figure-eight formation, and then a couple days later, we’d read in the newspaper what we already knew.
Cut Bank was a raw world, a place that progress had ignored, and we were fine with it. Everyone was a bit crude, like we had first wandered out of the wilderness only weeks earlier—the men always unshaven and frowning, the women with tangled, knotty hair. A place like Missoula might have been New York City to us. Only our proximity to the national park forty miles west was proof to the tourists that we could behave like civilized folk.
Charley wandered the hills and the streets of Cut Bank with what had been his father’s Winchester .444 and had no fear of grizzlies or tourists or anyone except my father. Even when he stayed with us in civilization, he liked to invent violent games with strict parameters that tested your manliness. “New game,” he would always say, and then we would practice it, always fine-tuning the rules to eliminate the nudge—the pussy, the chicken liver, the weakling—which was the worst thing a human could be.
~
Years earlier, my mother and Charley’s father died in a car accident that left many questions unanswered. (His trousers had been at his knees and she hadn’t been wearing her seatbelt.) We became a sort of leftover family. Charley and his mother moved into our squat concrete house, which had only two bedrooms. My father never claimed it was something other than the obvious. They shared a room and a bed, and Charley and I did the same, and I suppose this was some kind of misguided justice. Starla, Charley’s mother, was a thin, doe-eyed woman who smoked more than she ate and found a way to over-boil a hot dog. When she did speak, it was so quiet that you learned to just nod at things you couldn’t quite hear.
Charley ignored her so casually it seemed Starla could have been his pestering younger sister. She asked little of him—to go to school at least twice a week, not to leave his loaded rifle on the counter, not to talk about her dead husband at dinner—but Charley couldn’t do it. He chose not to. But when he disobeyed long enough or called her something too ugly, my father would step in, telling Charley to apologize or get thumped, and Charley always sneered his sorries and wandered off somewhere. My father took Charley on as an accessory to having Starla move in. Charley dealt with my father because he couldn’t sleep outside during a Cut Bank winter.
“The first one to complain about your mother’s cooking,” my father said early on, “becomes the new chef.” He pointed to Starla when he said “mother,” but spoke to us both. “I don’t enjoy thumping you boys, but you know I will,” he added. Starla looked at the ground as if embarrassed that someone would take so much time to defend her. So we never complained.
“New game,” Charley said when we avoided the house. Then we stole bikes from outside the convenience store, tucked push-brooms under our arms, and jousted each other down the middle of the street. First one to get knocked off had to eat a pinecone. First one to complain about soreness in the ribs lost use of his chariot for the next round and had to run down the spray-painted joust lane. First one to bleed was a nudge.
When we tired of bike jousting, we took up cat hunting.
“We can’t steal BB guns,” I told him. “They’re locked behind glass. And the .444 is too loud for town.”
He looked around the dark garage. “Here,” he said, picking up a pry bar and a hatchet. Whoever brought home the most cat tails won. No time limit. If you tried to pass off road kill and got caught, you had to eat it. If you came home empty handed, you were a nudge.
The first time we played, I killed three—all mangy, hopeless looking things—and came home at dark. Charley stayed out all night. He shook me awake before sunrise with eleven cat tails dangling from his belt loops, looking like a Blackfoot Indian returned from the hunt.
When my father found the cat tails under our bed, he thumped us. At first, Charley stood with him, tried to make an honest showing of it, but my father was a large man, a real bruiser, and Charley ended up with a fat, red face. “Wherever the bodies are, boys,” my father said when he’d finished, “go find them. You kill it, you eat it.” So, we trudged back out, both on the same team, to find our cats. We skinned and gutted them, then tossed their bones and guts into a shallow pit in the cemetery. We roasted the rest over a backyard bonfire until they tasted like charcoal, both to burn the rot out of them and because neither of us wanted to know what cat tasted like. Charley cursed my father under his breath, but he also ate his share.
We hid our cat tails better after that.
~
At night, when we couldn’t compete, we closed our bedroom door and pretended, smoked Winstons and set up hypothetical scenarios to root out the nudge. We stayed up for hours debating which was the better option and how that proved we were tough, men. That we had to disagree for the game to work was understood.
You’re in a cage with another man. Do you want a .22 with only one round or dull Roman gladius?
You’re interrogating a terrorist, do you want a scalpel or a masonry jar full of lava?
The neighbor’s dog keeps barking all night, do you kill the dog or the neighbor?
What wild animal would Starla be? On this alone, we agreed: pigeon.
~
Then my father brought home a set of boxing gloves and taught us to throw the leather. He could only afford one set, so one hand threw the leather and the other hand threw the flesh, which hurt a lot more. At first we just attacked each other like wild dogs, but we soon learned that you couldn’t keep up that sort of pace for more than a minute or so. Those fights ended early, before there was a clear winner and a clear nudge, and so we had to learn a more measured approach.
It was humiliating at first. Nothing natural about throwing a punch. Range of motion is too loose, too many options that beg to be combined and leave you wide open. You have to commit to one, be precise. Speed and precision over power, always.
The second week Charley caught me high on the neck, right on my Adam’s Apple. “Christ, Jack,” he said when I sat on the ground sucking air in between rounds, “your neck’s the size of a watermelon.”
I hadn’t felt anything before that. There’s no pain during a fight. That usually surfaces in the morning. Charley ran inside and took Starla’s makeup mirror and showed me. It was already red and bulging, and when I opened my mouth to talk, the Adam’s Apple bobbed around as if loose from its hinges.
When I told my father I couldn’t eat dinner that night, he thought I was getting smart with him. “We had the talk about your mother’s food,” he said. “Sit.”
But then he saw my neck, laughed and told me to sit still, someone had plucked my apple and that it wasn’t all that uncommon for fighters. He looked over at Charley, smirked.
He felt around the swelling, and I gripped the table ledge until the blood drained from my hands, and then all of a sudden he jostled it in a quick movement, and I felt a click, like a kneecap sliding back into place. “There,” my father said and turned back to his chicken.
In a couple days, when the swelling dropped all together and we went back to tossing punches as hard as we could and gassing before we bloodied each other, my father stood watching us, shaking his head. The injury had piqued his interest. We knew he’d boxed in the Marines, and that earned him some respect. “Keep your chin down and elbows tight,” he said and demonstrated. “Pivot at the hips. Bend your lead knee. Twist into him to dodge. Don’t lean back or you’re wide open, and if the other guy knows what’s what, he’ll pancake you.”
Our hands turned rough, leathery, and our exposed knuckles bulged like old tree roots and dislocated often enough that it stopped hurting. We snapped jabs and didn’t pull punches, not ever. Charley’s nose pudged flat from my straight right, but he didn’t mind once my father told him he looked like Primo Carnera. After this, he led more with his face, daring me to pancake him, which I did.
I was better, but Charley was tougher. I was a full head taller and still growing. But Charley was short and skinny and hadn’t grown an inch since he was fourteen and never would. Still, even his measured attacks were ferocious. His eyes yellowed as if infected with some jungle disease. The primal nature of it all seemed to satisfy something in him—a stripped down exercise that determined who would survive.
We spent weeks at the edge of our backyard, down in the bowled out depression, where we used the wrought-iron fence of the cemetery as one rope and landscaping timbers as the others. It was our training camp. What we were training for wasn’t clear, but we would be ready, prepared for any kind of attack from bears or Arabs or imposing fathers. When we went to school, we wore the bruises and cuts like badges, and when the other kids asked us what had happened we shrugged them off and smirked like they were stupid shits, nudges, all of them. Our muscles went taut as we sweated out the pudding cups and grape sodas, and Charley began to resemble one of our skinned cats—all rib cage and pale flesh and sinewy muscle clinging to an undersized skeleton. Our arms lengthened from the constant torque, our joints loosening up. I twisted my hips like my father told me, bobbed my head, weaved around Charley’s haymakers and dropped a stiff jab or full overhand right often enough that it was clear I was in charge, that Charley was the nudge.
~
“New game,” Charley said when he had tired of straight boxing that he clearly wasn’t winning. He dropped a 2×8 onto the ground and walked it like a plank. “Get on.”
We threw leather on the 2×8. If you accidentally stepped off, the other guy got a free shot to the body. If you got knocked off, it meant a free shot to the face. If you stepped off on your own, which almost never happened, you got punched in the dick.
Charley rarely backed up. He liked to swim in deep, taking shots to the nose, hoping to land a bare knuckle on my ribs. But I pawed at him with my longer arms, keeping him at a distance, waited for him to commit so that I could belt him with an overhand right.
We threw leather in the dark, that being most of the time in Cut Bank. Either we had short winter days or the mountains blocked the sun. The light on the back porch was far away from our ring, and by the time it filtered down it was pale. But through it, we could see each other’s eyes, Charley’s always flickering like a predator.
When winter landed early, we pulled on our Carhartt chore coats, steam funneling from our heads, and we threw more leather. The padding in the gloves went hard with the cold, and felt like cinder block slamming on our temples. Our free hands struck harder, too, like frozen t-bones, though to punch with the bare hand in the cold hurt more than the damage it delivered. We slipped from frost on the board often, and the free shots piled up. Still, neither of us stepped off the board on purpose, knowing that a free shot to our frozen, shriveled dicks in that kind of cold might just jam the whole package up into our small intestines and truly turn us into nudges.
~
In March of the year we turned sixteen, when we’d been throwing the leather for more than a year, Charley got himself kicked out of school.
I arrived halfway through, never saw how it started. All the versions had him standing in the locker bay between classes, his arm hanging from Carla Depusio, a thoroughly unattractive girl who wore tight shirts and lived down the street. This was around the time I’d nailed Charley with a bare-hand left cross that sliced through his eye. The eyeball bulged out and the cracked cut refused to close in the cold, just seeped a tea-colored liquid, and so he resembled some menacing mugger, always eyeball fucking you.
From there, things went cloudy. Everyone claimed to have seen it first hand, that it was the craziest shit they’d ever seen. The guys tended to claim Charley was a bad dude, a fucking hero. That dude could skin a bear with a spoon, they said. The girls shook their heads and said it didn’t matter, he was an animal who belonged in the wild.
Max Woods, a nice enough kid who lived in a two-story with vinyl siding and wore braces and started as a forward on the basketball team, told Charley to leave Carla alone. Some versions had him asking like a nice boy, being chivalrous, saving the young girl from the wolf. Other versions, though, had him demanding, looming over Charley to his full six foot plus However it started, at one point, Max raised his hands, and Charley went berserk. He hit Max six times before anyone knew what was happening. I got there just in time to see him timber Max and then pounce on him, dropping fists and elbows, mauling him until he was punching a bloody stump for a face, and through the shouts and moans what rose was the sound of Charley thumping on Max, like the dull thud of a rubber mallet pounding on a decomposing log. He kept punching. Teeth clinked onto the floor and his braces broke loose and jammed through his lips, hung there like dental floss. Carla tried to pull him off, and he backfisted her in the temple, and she dropped. When Charley finally stood up, his knees a dark, purple-red, Max Woods had swallowed two teeth the doctors had to wait for him to shit out.
Charley never bothered to tell me his full version. He merely claimed that the bitch had it coming, though I never knew who exactly he meant. “Besides,” he said, “School is for nudges.” It was fine, he needed train. He was going for the gold gloves now. He’d tasted combat blood, and he needed more. Maybe he’d go box in the Marines, too. But his ego outgrew his muscles. Charley was a tough kid, but he was no pugilist.
My father thumped Charley when he found out. He wasn’t an educated kind of man, but his kids didn’t need to be getting booted out of school. Just because we were near-on the border didn’t mean we had to act like some bear-poaching Canadians who belonged up in Sweet Grass.
Charley told him piss off, go bully his own son. I wanted to step in between them, act logical for once, but there way no way for my father to get his justice and Charley to avoid being a nudge. We all knew the rules to these games.
My father thumped him more then, got really rough. He tossed Charley up against the cemetery fence, kicked-in his ribs. He picked up one of our jousting brooms and caned his back while Charley writhed on the frozen ground. “Should I still piss off?” my father said.
Charley coughed. “Shit yes, you should.”
The thumping continued with steel-toes to the gut and hard, loud slaps to the face, slaps that left red, hand-shaped splotches. Charley pulled himself up by the fence, wobbled there, waiting for my father to keep hitting him. Eventually, my father quit. He threw his hands in the air, grunted, and stomped off to the house, as if defeated because Charley outlasted him.
~
So Charley stayed home and ate bologna sandwiches with extra mustard while I went to school and earned my bad grades and dirty looks from the teachers who saw me as some sort of accomplice. But then Charley told me that if he was going to train proper, he needed someone to spar with. I resisted at first, having a bit more fear of authority than he did, but I agreed to stay home a couple days a week and train with him.
We stole Starla’s couch cushions and taped them around an aspen for a heavy-bag. When our bare hands broke open from scraping too much, we doused them in snow and switched places. When we’d punched all the stuffing from the cushions, I stole new ones from the school library and tied them up as replacements.
Starla peeked her head out the back door one morning and watched us on the 2×8 for a minute. She looked over to her cushions wrapped around the tree. “You boys should probably get to school,” she said.
Charley looked up at her without moving. “Piss off,” he said. “We are at school.” Then he turned back to me, and we threw the leather.
She stayed inside after that, watching her soap operas and smoking her menthols.
With no school to punctuate our leather throwing or our new games, Charley started to run wild. He disappeared into the forest for longer stretches and returned with scratches on his face and painful looking limps. He talked back to Starla more when my father wasn’t around. And at night, when we used to sit in our room and debate our scenarios, he shadow boxed in the foggy backyard light, the tombstones of the cemetery rising up behind him like giant obelisks with long shadows that pointed toward the forest.
One morning, I woke and looked out the window to see him hopping tombstones. He jumped from one to the other without touching the ground like some sinister slack-liner who’d lost his rope.
“New game,” he told me. “Something I can play while you’re at school or sleeping away your life like a nudge.”
“Charley,” I said and stayed on our side of the fence.
“Don’t go puss on me now, Jack,” he said. “Go get the gloves, we’ll throw the leather like this. None of your dodging nonsense this way.”
He grinned. I told him I didn’t think so.
“What’s with you?” he said. “You’re going soft on me.”
I told him to piss off, and I walked back to the house to get ready for school.
That night at dinner, I could tell he was still angry with me. I’d broken our pact, drawn a line in the sand that said I’d gone far enough and he was on his own. He clanked dishes together, slopped his cream chicken down so it splattered, and slammed his glass down every time he drank. My father was still gone, working late that night, and Charley knew he was the only man around.
“Would you please settle down?” Starla asked and exhaled her cigarette. “You’ll break my dishes that way.”
“Piss off,” Charley said and glared at his plate.
We sat quietly for a while again, an angry, awkward silence.
Then Starla said, “I saw you out in that cemetery this morning. You need to stay out of there.”
“Or what?” Charley said very quickly, too quickly.
“Your father’s buried out there. It’s not some place for you to practice acting like a jumping frog.”
“I should’ve left a fat boot print on his grave,” Charley said. “I’ll make sure to do that tomorrow.”
Then Starla stood up and smacked Charley in face. It cracked loudly, but it couldn’t have hurt much. It was more of a gesture than a punishment and felt like a piece of theater, something Starla had planned and wanted to do for so long that when she finally did, it seemed forced.
For a moment Charley was too stunned to do anything. He took short, shallow breaths and touched his face. And then he leapt across the table, scattered the dishes onto the floor and toppled the chairs, and started whaling on his mother. He went off, thumped on her until she was a bloody, moaning pile of human, her cigarette still somehow clamped in her jaw, still smoking. When I finally managed to pull him off, she made no movements, just moaned as the smoke rose from her as if she were starting to cremate.
Charley stared down at her and then looked up at me. His breathing quickened as if he just realized what he’d done and what that meant when my father got home. “Shit!” he said. He shuffled off, grabbed his Winchester and his pack and disappeared through the cemetery and into the woods.
I carried Starla over to the couch, laid her down, covered her with an old afghan so she’d stay warm while she squinted at her soap operas. I found myself tending to her, even lighting her cigarettes, somehow proud of her for what she’d done because she must have known how Charley would react.
“That’s it,” my father said when he got home that night, and he didn’t speak about it anymore. I was scared for Charley, and I kept my eyes peeled for vultures, wondering if perhaps that was the better way to go.
~
When Charley emerged from the forest six days later, gaunt and pale, he looked like some extinct species, re-discovered. He picked his way through the cemetery and hopped the low fence. My father and I had been in the backyard, pulling icicles from the moldy soffit, and Charley must have seen us, waited until we were outside. He carried his father’s Winchester on one shoulder, the chamber levered open, and on the other I saw the rusty linkages of chain.
My father slowly unlatched his thick leather belt and stripped it out of his Carhartts. It was a menacing image, a Cut Bank knight drawing his sword, and I knew Charley was in for it. But he strode right past us as if indifferent to our existence, and I saw the dangling jaws of a grizzly trap hanging over his shoulder. I looked over at my father, who simply stared.
Charley disappeared into the garage and emerged with his cat hatchet. He breezed past us again and hacked with the grain of our 2×8 to get a thick sliver that he used it to pry the jaw of the trap back and set the trigger. He stepped away, looped the chain links around the cemetery fence and latched the steel carabineer. Then he dropped our 2×8 in front of the trap, like a plank descending into the leviathan’s throat. He stepped on, right in front of the trap, waited.
My father and I stared, neither of us moved.
Charley raised his little fists. “New game,” he said.
Still we didn’t move.
He shuffled back, his heel bumping the trap. “Get on, Jack,” he said.
My father looked to me, motioned toward the 2×8 with the hand that held his dangling belt, folded over onto itself. I hesitated, not knowing if I was doing my father’s bidding or Charley’s.
“Don’t be a nudge,” Charley said.
I stepped on. Charley glared at me like I was the enemy, like I was prey. His bloodshot eyes bulged. We had no leather, just our cracked, frozen fists. We all knew how it would end, knew that Charley couldn’t out-box me.
Charley attacked, came at me and I bent my lead knee and snapped a jab. I pawed at him, didn’t let him inside. He slipped off the frozen board and I cracked him in the ribs. He came at me again, and I caught him with a straight right, flattened his nose, and it started to pour blood into his mouth. I waited on him to attack.
“Come on!” he said. “Come at me. Don’t be a nudge!” He had to breathe through his mouth and spit the blood onto the snow.
I pushed forward, swaying as I dropped lefts to the face and rights to the body, and Charley fell back. His heel pushed onto the trap again, nudged it back. He stood there, covered up his bloody face, and I sliced through his arms with an uppercut to his open jaw.
When he fell back, his right leg stomped into the bear trap as if on purpose, and the teeth sliced into him without a sound. No crack or thud, just the soft whisper of a fillet knife being thrown into wet sand. Charley fell immediately. It sliced and he fell like a switch had been tripped. He wailed, yelled out the kind of pitiful shriek normally reserved for the far reaches of the wilderness.
My father and I didn’t move. We knew his leg was broken, that he’d limp for a long time, maybe forever. Charley howled and clutched the cemetery fence. But I remember thinking, too, that what I saw couldn’t have been what my father saw. I’m sure he just saw justice stolen from him again. A pathetic kid cuffed to a bear clamp, crying for his mother. But I saw a mean kid who had sacked a trap from a bear’s clutches, and for a long time I stood in between them and didn’t move to help while he moaned and fought his way up the fence like a wild animal thrashing against his shackles.
Tatjana Soli
Tatjana Soli’s stories have been published in The Sun, StoryQuarterly, Gulf Coast, Other Voices, Nimrod, Confrontation, North Dakota Quarterly, Carolina Quarterly, Sonora Review, Third Coast, and Blue Mesa. In April 2010, her novel, The Lotus Eaters, was published by St. Martin’s Press. She has been twice cited in the 100 Distinguished Stories in Best American Short Stories and twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Most recently she was awarded the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Prize, the Dana Award, and scholarships to both the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Bread Loaf. Currently she teachs through the Gotham Writers’ Workshop.