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In the Autumn 2010 issue of Ink-Filled Page, we become immigrants, awkward adolescents, show animals, beauty shop owners, mourning mothers, and so much more. Revel in the words of Marguerite Greenfield, Karl Meiner, Annie Liontas, and Shawnsey Narcensio Rudolph as they transport you through this issue of literary art.
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Nonfiction
Spaz: ADHD Reflections from Middle Age
by Karl Meiner
As a child, I found the dinner table always brought a struggle—my father, a born and bred Connecticut Yankee, insisted on silence as we ate so he could watch the evening news. That toaster-shaped, black-and-white TV ushered Walter Cronkite’s sincere, sonorous voice with the clarity of a CB radio. I’d try to sit still as Mom served out a tomato paste–laden meatloaf shaped like a crop circle and Dad fixed his attention on Reagan’s face. Brief flashes of Reagan, the well-coifed codger, would capture my fancy in bursts, but I could never hold out long.
I’d slowly place my middle and pointer fingers down on the table and begin moving them like tiny legs. They’d leap from the catsup bottle to my plate in rolling fashion, mimicking the moves I’d seen Spider-Man do in countless adventures. Invariably I’d begin spewing comic-inspired onomatopoeia like karthoom! or arggh! as my fingers danced like stubby Baryshnikovs about the plain white table and the guacamole-green dining chairs. Generally, just before Cronkite met his first commercial break, my father would turn to me, eyes betraying confusion and more than a little disgust, and he’d swat the back of my head.
“The hell? What the hell?”
I’d drop my arms to my sides and turn my attention briefly to the television. Still, that grainy screen could only occupy my thoughts so long. There is a timer in my head that rings at capricious intervals; each chime signifies a new distraction. I’ve had ADHD my entire life.
A Better-Contained Mess
I remember the exact day I was first told that there was some faulty wiring upstairs. It was the day after my twelfth birthday: December 5, 1980. Two friends and I went to see Flash Gordon at the local multiplex. Jay and Martin had been my friends since the first grade, and all three of us were sci-fi geeks. As Queen’s searing soundtrack assailed my senses, I saturated my already amped system with a wide-spectrum cocktail of sugars. I polished off a large Coke and chased it with two boxes of Junior Mints. By the time Flash had confronted Max von Sydow’s stereotypical rendering of Emperor Ming, I was wild-eyed with a macabre grin on my face.
When the credits rolled and Queen was again blaring at jet-engine-like decibels, I erupted from my seat, thrashed my arms about, and screamed, “Flash! Ahhhhaahhhhhh! He’ll save every one of us!”
I then ran up the aisles with jerky spasms, which resembled an injured possum fleeing a predator more than a preteen youth. People gawked as I bounced off the sticky seats and pumped my thin legs with awkward abandon. A woman with large, round, rose-tinted glasses stared and laughed as I passed.
“Is that little kid high?” I heard her chuckle.
My friends, I managed to note, kept a solemn distance. Outside, as we waited for Martin’s mother to pick us up, I continued leaping, twisting, and hollering random quotes from the film. This wasn’t a product of effort, mind you. When the proper combination of stimulus and food combine in my system, they form a potent biochemical reaction that manifests as unfocused energy. It has always felt like someone has plugged me into an outlet and turned a switch. Sometimes that happens when there’s a lot going on. Sometimes it happens when I’m sitting somewhere that requires my attention. Sometimes it even wakes me from my sleep.
Just as his mom’s wood-paneled K-Car was in sight, Martin firmly placed his right hand on my shoulder. His curly red hair arched upward like a Promethean flame, and I swear to God he had red eyes, too—red like a rat in a Disney cartoon.
“You are a fucking spaz! Calm the fuck down before you get in the car.” The potent accent on the f-word was enough to penetrate my rabid brain. At that age, at that time, fuck was still taboo enough to freeze most any conversation.
I wiped some crusty spittle, which had dried at the corners of my mouth. My gaunt chest was heaving from chaotic exertion, and I struggled to formulate a response. By the time my respiration had settled enough for my throat to produce coherent language, my brain had moved on.
“I like when those guys with the wings in the clouds and Flash were gonna fight!” My wide smile beamed my uneven teeth, thus making my tangential utterance all the more ridiculous. By now, Martin’s mom had pulled up and was unlocking the doors to her car for us. The other two boys exchanged a glance with each other and rolled their eyes. As they entered the car, I was still chattering about my favorite scenes.
The inside of the car reeked of thick, chemical perfume. By the time my bony ass hit the faux leather cushion, I’d stopped babbling and had begun a chorus of loud and violently explosive sneezes. In later years a physician would mention during a routine physical that there exists some correlation between ADD and severe allergies. In my case, allergies served to exaggerate the bumbling persona I was developing. After a series of four eruptions, Martin clasped his palms to his forehead and leaned over to the front seat.
“Mom! Drop him off first!”
I could see her lidded, droopy eyes in the rearview mirror. She was not so subtly eyeing me as her lipstick-encrusted mouth bent downward.
“Jesus” was all she said.
* * *
During those grade school years, I found myself conflicted by an acute awareness that I had a lot more energy than my peers and the serious inability to rein in it in. My parents spent the vast majority of their time, in dedicated New England fashion, fastidiously tending to their careers and trying to maintain a Spartan, and virtually sterile, home. I was thus viewed as a frightening threat that needed constant tending. In a house where the most garish adornments were beige, wooden bookends crafted as replicas of Rodin’s Thinker, my bedroom was a discordant ferry to the Netherworld.
Keeping my belongings in any sort of perceptible order has been a lifelong challenge. At this tender age, my bedroom truly was an astonishing work of disarray. The wooden floors were invisible beneath a carpet of clothing, games, discarded drawings, and comic books. To my credit, there was never any food left about, for my mother stridently insisted that all eating was to be done in the kitchen. Having food in another room was an offense tantamount to crapping in a place other than the toilet.
My closet was a repository for anything that I wasn’t, at the moment, engaged with. My shelves were lined with action figures strewn about as if they had stumbled upon a Barbie-sized land mine, but it was my collection of comic books that provided the most accurate representation of my psyche. These prized possessions were stacked in random locations around the room. Their bright, campy covers exposed the various eccentricities of my mind like a CAT scan. Their exaggerated explosions, wild impossible sounds, and hyperbolic facial expressions became archetypal reference points for my still developing ego. Sometimes ADD manifests a certain hyperfocus on things the individual is fascinated with. Comic books, ironically, became the objective correlative for my hyperactive mind.
Occasionally, I would try to emulate the precisely organized bedrooms of my sister and parents; this was a pathetically fruitless endeavor. I would haphazardly collect a few items from the floor and then drop them like an overgrown toddler seeking his next prize. But I have managed to find coping mechanisms over the years which provide me a semblance of control over my environment. I purchased a wide array of plastic organizing bins to store my belongings—IKEA may never know the favors it has done for ADD adults. Different colored plastic bins now serve as the icon for my mind. It appears a great deal more orderly, but lift those tabbed covers and there’s still a mess inside. The mess is just better contained. Evidently, that is enough to successfully project a facsimile of maturity to the world.
A Different Animal
“Eyes front!” Mrs. Page, my sixth-grade teacher, was a caricature ripped directly from the pages of a Far Side cartoon. She was ancient, mean, and she undoubtedly lived in a gingerbread house. Our classroom, in retrospect, bore similarities to a one-room schoolhouse of old. It was a mixed-age classroom: there were both fifth- and sixth-grade students sitting in neat rows before a mammoth slate chalkboard. Mrs. Page lorded over us with a yardstick menacingly gripped in her leathery, reptilian hands. There seemed to be an implied threat of corporal punishment as she paced the room. I don’t actually recall anyone being struck, but I often felt that, had the option been there, Mrs. Page would have made an example of my bottom on numerous occasions.
She insisted that we sit rigidly and in utter silence at those old, flip top desks—she might as well have asked that we defy the laws of gravity. I vividly remember trying to focus on the long division exercises she would pass out. They were mimeographed copies that had a unique, pungent, chemical stench. The sound of the dozens of pencils scratching on those worksheets would create a hypnotic symphony that fostered distraction in my already dubious powers of concentration. Eventually the smeary blue ink would blur before my eyes, and my fingers would move involuntarily to my mouth. My eyes would drift toward the windows, and I’d begin imagining great battles in the clouds passing above.
“Pay attention!” Mrs. Page’s yellow dentures would suddenly fill my world, and I’d be ripped violently back into the classroom. All around me other children would stare in wide-eyed terror wondering what punishment our angered captor would mete out for my wanton disobedience.
Generally she’d hiss something akin to “I’ll see you during recess when you’ll work on tomorrow’s problems, young man.” It would hardly matter. As her methods were always punitive, nothing she could do would ever correct my behavior patterns. Even as she was speaking to me, her voice would mute, and inwardly I would already be thinking about movies I wanted to watch later that night on television or the comics under my bed that I wanted to reread. Poor Mrs. Page would quickly note the distant look on my face and have to smack that yardstick on the desktop to reel my focus back toward her sagging, wrinkled cheeks.
“You will learn to listen! You will learn to focus!”
She was right. I would learn to listen, and I would learn to focus. But it would be years later, after I had graduated high school.
While my friends flew about the playground with the abandon typical of grade-schoolers, I was a different animal altogether.
I can recall one game of kickball during the fifth or sixth grade: I was on first base. The ball was kicked close enough to the pitcher (a pituitary mutant with muscular, hairy arms and a voice like Ed Asner) that he snatched it straight off the ground mid-roll. Knowing it was his job to peg me with the ball and thus render me out, I began evasive maneuvers. In my mind I was executing a graceful series of deft bobs and weaves to throw off my would-be assailant. I had seen Daredevil, Batman, and of course Spider-Man all perform the same dazzling gymnastic exhibitions in order to evade bullets, punches, and a staggering assortment of deadly armaments. A mere rubber ball the size of a classroom globe should have been simple to elude.
The reality was more akin to the Tin Man of Oz dodging raindrops. I noticed my peers laughing hard as I wound my way to second base. I heard the pitcher laugh, “What a douche,” before he hurled that red bladder of death effortlessly toward my head.
There was an audible, and I’m sure very comical, thwack as the ball collided with my brow. I could see a couple girls behind me snickering as I was thrown several feet into the air and then laid heavily onto my back.
“Fucking spaz,” they giggled. It was a phrase I was to become reluctantly accustomed to over the years.
* * *
By middle school my energy levels had increased exponentially, and my ability to focus my attention dwindled correspondingly.
I began to notice much more frequently that when people spoke for any duration more than a minute, their words would be utterly lost on me. It was more severe than it had been back in Mrs. Page’s class. It would happen even when I was chatting with my friends: I’d see their mouths move; I’d even notice their facial expressions. The content of their words passed virtually unheard. Their mouths would work, and I’d think about where I might have lost my lunch money, whether or not I remembered to put on underwear, and how the hell did I get a black, smeary stain on my hands?
Then I’d rubber band back to the present.
“Okay, go ahead and finish the assignment then,” my US History teacher said. All around me students pulled papers from folders and began writing furiously. I had no clue what I had missed. As I’d learned from experience, I would attract undue attention if I asked what we were doing, so I pulled out a piece of paper and began to write. Nonsense. Literally. I would write whole paragraphs full of sentences like the following: Geehad flor mipsit doowaggy. Fleehaggen geenad ree wope fergrappen.
I could fill several pages like that. By the time class was over and students were crowding the teacher’s desk to hand in their work, I’d be stuffing the gibberish into my backpack and flying out the door. Briefly, I’d wonder how my parents would react to another shit grade. But before I was halfway through the thought process, I’d already be bounding through the hallways thinking about a half dozen other tangents.
It was the early eighties, and as far as I knew, no one was talking about attention deficit. This was not a disorder; it was a character flaw. I was told repeatedly by my parents, my teachers, my peers, and my relatives that I needed to “calm down” and “center my attention.” They might as well have been telling a chimp to evolve.
When I’d disrupt the bizarre silence of seventh-grade algebra or eighth-grade physical science, those mysteriously attentive children destined for successful futures would fire a collective rolling of eyes and dozens of reproachful glances at me. But the sheer will power it took to sit in one of those cumbersome, uncomfortable desks was sometimes impossible to maintain. The math teacher I recall best from those years wore a fat, ugly tie every day. His words, calculations, and instructions bounced off my skull like bullets off Superman. I could only see that bulbous tie swaying across his doughy chest, and every now and then it would get stuck on a button. That struck me as very funny, and I’d burst out laughing. This hilarity would generally find itself interrupting a near silent classroom. Commence the eye rolling and doling of punishment; add several years; repeat often.
* * *
My burgeoning libido served as combustive fuel, which only amplified my inability to focus. I know now that all kids this age find themselves drawn into a swirling, sweaty mess of emotions regarding their sexuality. For me, Sherry Bloom was a willowy, lovely girl with flowing, feathered, chocolate-brown hair that cascaded down her shoulders like resplendent linguini. She sat in front of me during my eighth-grade English class. I was drawn to her stillness. Like a porcelain statue, she’d stare focused on the teacher with intent concentration. She actually seemed to be hearing his words! I’d pass her desk, and my nostrils would twitch. She shared the same aroma as cinnamon waffles.
As social conventions amongst my male friends moved from trading comics and blowing things up toward discussions of the female anatomy, I realized I was supposed to “get some.” I had only a vague intimation of what I was supposed to be getting, but I did know it was supposed to come from girls.
And so before the fall dance that year, I resolved that it would be Sherry who was to give me some. I entered English class having rehearsed in my head what I sincerely believed would be a compelling invitation for her to be my date to the dance. Sherry was, as I knew she would be, sitting upright at her desk as I entered the classroom.
I meandered toward her with a twitchy smile and the grace of a newly hatched ostrich. It was, no doubt, a fearful sight for that sweet young lady. I didn’t understand the fashion of the day, and my clothes seemed to wrinkle bizarrely the moment I put them on. My jeans that day sported outturned pockets, and my shirt was on backwards. Fortunately for me, I wouldn’t have been aware of these details.
“Hi, Sherry!” It was not so much a shout I greeted her with as what Kurt Vonnegut once described as a “grackle-squawk.”
“Sothedance is thisweekend and wantogotogether and stuff?” Rapid-fire intonation aside, I vividly remember I was biting the nail on my left hand pinky finger as I tried to beguile this potential sweetheart. It is more accurate to say I was tearing at it. I didn’t bite my nails so much as gnaw on them in furtive gestures similar to an otter cleaning its fur.
To her credit, Sherry smiled politely for several moments before she started to laugh. I didn’t need a response at that point. I literally whirled myself around to my seat and collapsed into it while folding my hands over my head. Already I could hear the chuckles and guffaws spreading through the room like a virulent meme.
“Fuckin’ spaz just asked her out!”
“I wish she said yes to him! That would have ruled!”
There were some other comments I used to remember in the agonizingly reflective moments before I’d fall asleep at night.
Even my focus-deprived consciousness was able to pick up on a valuable lesson that day: don’t talk to girls. It won’t end well.
Perpetual Motion
In the late spring of eighth grade our school was visited by a host of high school students seeking to enlist incoming freshman in their various clubs. During lunch I wandered into our school’s auditorium, overwhelmed by the choices. Gnawing absently on my right thumb and rubbing my left hand through my hair, I ambled toward the computer club booth. I had spent a lot of time programming in BASIC on our school’s TRS-80. Sadly, most of my programs were incomplete because the patience required to save your work on the tape drive was beyond my scope.
A bespectacled youth with a mop of stringy hair staffed the station with an air of insecure superiority. There was a group of three students, two of whom I played Dungeons and Dragons with, cloistered excitedly around him.
“You like computers?” He was scrawling a program in BASIC on a piece of rumpled paper in front of him. There was a trace of spittle on the bottom of his lip. I noted, for the first time in my fashion-challenged life, that his shirt was on backwards.
“A lot!” I nodded vigorously for emphasis.
“Sign here. We meet at lunch in the computer room. We have three TRS-80s, two Commodores, and a mainframe that…”
I had already signed my name on the sheet, and a chime in my head was signaling that it was time to find something else to occupy my thoughts. A glance to my left revealed the only other booth more sparsely populated than the one I was at: the school cross-country team.
Let me emphasize that while I was an object perpetually in motion, I rarely moved in a straight line. My experiences with running were limited to the six-hundred-yard dash in grade school and experiences that required dodging projectiles hurled from other youth far more coordinated than I.
But the boy manning the booth drew even my chaotic attention. He was skinny as a ferret and displayed his wispy beginnings of a mustache like a badge of honor. An outcast with confidence! I was very intrigued.
As I flitted toward him, he sized me up. I was short and stringy as dry Top Ramen.
“Hey kid. You like to run?” His voice reminded me of Kermit the Frog, low and reassuring. “I’m Andy, and I’m captain of the cross-country team. We need some new legs.”
I don’t know if it was the familiar tenor of his Muppet-like intonation or the fact that he hadn’t disregarded me as an athletic prospect, but I responded with an unfamiliar confidence.
“I do like to run. I run all the time. I could run right now if you want!” I lifted both my arms above my head as if awaiting a bolt of lightning to emphasize my arrival.
“Uhm. That’s cool, man. Really cool. Sign here.”
I signed my name in a script that my third-grade teacher had described as “possessing virtually no semblance of legibility.”
“Great, kid. Here’s a summer training sheet. You need to be up to four miles easy by the start of school next fall. We start practice mid-August. It’s Hell Week, man. Be ready to sweat a lot, okay?” He handed me a piece of paper with the familiar blue letters of the mimeograph machines of the day.
“Ready to sweat?” Over the last six months of hormonal disorientation, I was becoming accustomed to sweating while flitting from my locker to the cafeteria. “I already know how to sweat!” I offered this with a smile that I had intended to be both clever and ironic (though irony was a concept far beyond my ken at that point).
“Yeah. That’s…totally cool. Killer, man.” And with that, Andy directed his attention toward a group of tall, lanky boys who were burgeoning stars on the middle school basketball team. “Hey! You guys want to get in shape for basketball season? Check this out—”
I exited the auditorium in a full sprint. As I hurtled up the aisles, I managed to collide with Sherry Bloom, who was on her way to visit the girls’ soccer booth.
With her typical and almost preternatural poise, she gathered herself without losing that magnificent posture or disturbing that brilliant, chocolate waterfall of feathered hair. She was almost ephemeral. It was like I existed in her plane of reality as a superfluous contradiction. I was a spastic, mortal whirligig to her lissome angel.
“OhmansorrySherry!” I offered a wiggly hand with jagged nails to her as a handshake invitation. To my surprise—my surprise to this day—she accepted that handshake.
“It’s okay. I’m fine.” Her hand, smooth as talcum, shook my sticky palm with a gentle grace.
“Okay. I guess I didn’t see you because I just joined the cross-country team and I’m, y’know, starting to get in shape.” I pumped my arms in a sad imitation of coordinated running.
The two girls accompanying Sherry, both of whom sported those cool L. L. Bean boots that had rubber ridges down the front, gently urged her away.
“Well good luck then, okay?”
With that, she eased her way comfortably into a gaggle of excited kids. I can still remember her hair against the crowd—I must have watched for at least a minute. But that shifty energy which had to be obeyed compelled me out the doors of the auditorium, into the humid asphalt air, and across the playground.
I ran a lot that summer.
A Semblance of Pace
The air of a Connecticut summer is thick and carries the pungent weight of ash and birch. New Englanders either develop an aberrant immunity to sweat (primarily those of WASP heritage), wear their sweat stains with casual indifference, or douse themselves in enough deodorant, cologne, and perfume to offset the stench of a zombie apocalypse. Running through that steamy, tangible air was the first true release from the spasmodic twitchiness that had defined my waking life.
In typically backward fashion, I recall that I had an inclination that one was supposed to take a cool, relieving shower in conjunction with the practice of running. Perhaps my ADHD has a component of dyslexia to it—I’ll never know for sure. But whatever the reason, I took my icy showers before my runs.
Once out of the shower, I’d impatiently don my running attire, barely taking the time to tie my shoes, and rush out the door to greet the open road.
It was magnificent! Pumping my arms wildly like a pathetic, fun-house mirror version of the sprinters I’d seen on television, I would race full throttle from the outset. That frozen grin gracing my face, I’d wend my way, only slowing down as my body’s anaerobic limits overtook that irresistible crescendo of energy coursing through my system. The world began to seem clearer as my pulse increased. I grew aware of things I’d never focused on before. Houses developed personalities, and I began to notice the people living in them-even their ages-the individual colors, and the yard adornments.
As I developed a vague semblance of pace, I began to recognize that I could actually reflect it upon my life. It was a metacognitive breakthrough I could never have achieved without the release of running. I wasn’t quite capable of recognizing the breakthrough, but I do remember finding myself thinking more clearly about things like homework and even my own behavior. While I didn’t make the leap toward capitalizing on this burgeoning sense of awareness right away, I immediately recognized that something about running felt right. It gave me a taste of direction.
Running was the critical first step I needed to learn that I could both start and finish something. The end of each run was a victory. As miles accumulated behind me, I began—ever so incrementally—to fasten my attention on activities in front of me. I’d visualize reading or math problems as a certain distance to be completed. Every paragraph I read was a quarter mile. Whole chapters had to be paced like several miles. I’d even stop after several pages and find myself reaching for a glass of water as if physical exertion was actually draining me of precious fluids.
This was the bridge I needed to maintain a semblance of cohesion in my life. I had just enough of an understanding of what it took to see beyond the moment to actually have a chance as I began more challenging high school coursework. Of course, with high school came a lot of other temptations that my impulse-driven metabolism would have to adapt to. At the very least, for the first time in my life, I was beginning to develop something akin to confidence. I no longer felt quite so different. I didn’t feel like such a spaz.
Decades later, I’m ready to call Sherry Bloom. I wonder if she’s on Facebook.
© 2010 Karl Meiner
***
Fiction
A Miracle on the Corner of Baldwin and Wallace
by Shawnsey Narcensio Rudolph
Theresa Mayweather, too young to care about the chocolate glaze and sprinkles on her face, told the local news reporters that a curling iron had saved her life. Delores, who had not yet spoken to Theresa about the incident with the robber, would have told Theresa how smart she was for her answer.
Frankly, Delores was too old and arthritic to have beaten the robber all by herself—a tragedy all too familiar to what was once the most famous set of hands on the corner of Baldwin and Wallace. Hands that picked kinks, mixed garlic and whiskey into the kind of barbecue sauce all the neighbor kids would ask for at her doorstep, as they pivoted heels and looked at the sidewalk. Those hands carried the weight of her two children. And when she used a curling iron, Delores gave the sharpest ’do a girl could ask for, rollers be damned. If Delores was asked, she’d give a mighty amount of credit to her curling iron: wooden handle painted disco-green, titanium plates, an inch-and-a-half-diameter barrel said to be handcrafted by the Maurice and Marcel. The iron’s name was Andre; it was a one-of-a-kind keepsake from the original owner of Rochelle’s Beauty Shop. Andre had saved her life every day since she had apprenticed at Rochelle’s. She even named her boy after it; a fact she had always meant to tell him. Her curling iron, her salon, would give them all a home worth fighting for. But if the rumors were true—if there was magic in her hands—Delores hadn’t felt it for twelve years, five months, and four days before the boy’s incident. No curling iron in the world would change that fact.
That last day was a Friday, her day off by the routine she’d established on the day she inherited the shop. She had been sitting on the reclining part of the brown fabric couch where the cushions were hollowing to the shape her body. She had been watching The Young and the Restless, out of habit, out of curiosity of what it would be like to live a life of simple problems. And on the morning of that last day, Delores had her medication out on a gray plastic tray set on her coffee table: cotton swabs, insulin, needle, aspirin, half a cup of warm coffee, and a rubbing alcohol bottle full of vodka. Delores was pill-in-mouth, swirling the vodka in her coffee with a stern finger when she heard music thumping from Andre’s room. She yelled at him about this at least once a day, but this was the first time she had to do it in the morning. Delores was too settled to move, so she threw the contents of her tray at his door until he came out of his bedroom, shirtless, ashy.
“Should I ask what you doin’ home from school, or should I switch your attitude right here, right now?”
“That my vodka? Manners say to ask first before takin’.” He laughed, rubbed the scraggly fuzz he called a beard. Andre really liked his own jokes.
“From the way you talkin’ to me, makes me think that you’ve still got plenty left of whatever it is you’re drinking.” She looked at him with as deep a brow furrow as her aged muscles would allow. “You got about five minutes to get dressed and get to school. Any longer and you show up with bruises.”
“I ain’t goin’. Got better things to do.”
“Like what? Make that noise that’s always comin’ from your room?”
“Workin’ on something that’s going to change the game, Momma. Me and the boys, we got this sound that people need to hear. That’s why I play it so loud. Maybe you should turn off them terrible shows you watch, and listen.”
“Boy, I’m about to lose my senses!”
“Give me time, Momma. I’ll tell you I told you so. You watch!”
“Four and half minutes before I drag you there myself in my shower cap and flip-flops.”
Andre was about to laugh when his mother slammed the coffee mug on the tray and began to fumble her way to her feet, weeble-wobbling and pushing off her knees. “Okay, man, chill. I’ll go. I’ll go.”
“Hurry up!” She said as she rocked back into comfort.
Only a few moments after he’d gone to his room and searched the floor for a tank top and a pair of jeans, he was headed to the front door, walking through the sound of stunted snoring and a woman’s desperate pleas for the truth on television. When he reached the door, he made every move deliberate: carefully reached for the knob, twisted the lock, turned the doorknob, pulled, waited, waited.
“Boy, you better get on up out that door.” She drooled between snores.
He obliged. This was manhood. When he was a boy, he had refused to go to school from time to time, and Delores had beaten her handprint into his brown behind. Then, after he wiped his tears, pulled up his pants, and put his small hand in hers, they walked to school together with his big sister. This was a memory that would pull at Delores’s wrist every time she thought about her son.
A few moments after Andre’s Timberlands hit pavement, Delores fell into a deep sleep as her tape played. The woman on The Young and the Restless had found a way into her dreams and masked herself in Delores’s shape and tone. She had just received news from a man that she wasn’t who she thought she was. She was not the wife of a Texas oil tycoon, but that of an ordinary man who worked in a deli in New York. She was lost. All she had worked for was taken away from her by an uncontrollable turn of the world. She awoke from this dream to a shattering pop, a coffee mug tilted empty on her belly, dried tracks of saliva on her cheek, and tears welling in the ducts of her eyes. The tape had ended while she was sleeping, and for some time she was left watching a blue screen.
Later in life, around the birth of her granddaughter, Delores would think about how losing even the most important things was as simple as easing into sleep—a concept she had begun to understand when she heard the scream of a woman coming from the direction of Meak’s Market. Delores would not to weep. She would wish away all the tragedy that might have been before she ran out into the street to see what happened. She would be strong. Back in ’88, when the father of her children drove off with so little as even a reach or a whisper, Delores vowed that no man on this earth would ever make her cry again.
That night, after police came to her home and escorted her to the station to have her identify the body of her only son, Delores would be passed out in bed next to an empty bottle of rubbing alcohol. The news of her son’s death played on both the six o’clock and eleven o’clock news on televisions throughout the neighborhood. That night, Dolores would break her vow.
After Andre’s funeral, Fea, now Delores’s only child, had offered to do the dirty lifting. Delores told her that she should concentrate on her move, and that this woman wasn’t too old to carry her boy, even if his ghost was all she had left. When she opened the door to the clutter that was a constant in his life, she thought back to a late night three years past. Andre had been twelve. She’d been brokenhearted. The man’s name was as irrelevant as all the Ooh, baby, baby lines that had once laid thick on her body like a dress heavy with sweat.
Andre, who had been sitting in his mother’s seat watching TV past midnight for the simple fact that he thought all grown men stayed up that late, saw a foreign quiver in his mother’s cheeks as she clop-clopped in the doorway that night, and, as if on instinct, ran to her, bracing all her weight against the maturing lines in his shoulders. “Want me to beat his ass? Just say the word.” She wanted to tell him to watch his mouth, but she was too in love with the boy, with how much of man he’d become. She never went into his room after that day, as a thank-you—told him a man takes care of his own.
As she lumber-footed her way into his room, treading sheets of paper inked all over with pretty, jagged words, she pulled faded and tattered hoodies off the open closet door and balled socks to toss them in never-shut drawers; she wondered, at what age does the pace of growing up become too fast to keep up with? She saw a ratty-eared book that looked like it had been dragged from the gutter and set atop the speaker box she’d bought him when was nine; he had heard the Message when on the bus home from the movies one night while his sister stole and swallowed his share of the Jujubees. He’d begged his mother for two whole years before he got a stereo of his own. She saw the mouth of the tape deck had been left open with a tape still inside. She flipped the tape to the b-side, pushed play, and clamped two stiffening hands around the beat-up book before sitting atop his crumpled comforter. A familiar voice fought to be heard between cracks of static. She began to wonder where Andre had gotten the money to record his music before she realized where the answer ended. She decided to flip through the pages of the book instead; it was written by a man named James who wrote about the blues, streets without names or miracles. Her elementary reading level wouldn’t let her get to a point of understanding any of it. But, shutting the book and holding it to her chest, she knew that Andre understood every last rhyme and reason. She listened to the voice coming from the stereo, thinking that maybe if she listened long enough, flipping the tape over and again, he could explain it all to her.
***
Her son’s death was not the mark of changing time, but the busted glass in Meak’s door giving way to the undeniable heat of the sun was. The hustle and groove that once moved life on the streets of Baldwin and Wallace had washed down the gutters in bloated sacks and rusted away. And although Delores still had strength of heart, from that time on, her hands lost all grace. Fea Mayweather, Delores’s most loyal apprentice, had left her job on the south side of Chicago and taken over the beauty shop a few days after her brother’s funeral.
While Fea was taking over the beauty shop, Delores spent her days between bouts with her ever-emptying vodka bottle and her gumption to apologize to Meak, the owner of the market her son tried to rob. Upon her fourth meeting with Meak since he’d filled her son’s vertebrae with bucks, Delores decided to speak to him. Her other attempts hemmed at the sight of the hole shattered through the glass door, her shoulders buffing customers coming and going. She entered the store on this fourth try, took pink fabric flowers from the black bin, tossed them on the counter like bargaining chips, followed with palms slamming on the glass counter, looked Meak in the eye, and said, “I ain’t got much left, but all I want to do is pay my own way. That’s all I’ve ever done.”
“Okay,” Meak said in a way he hoped was heard. “I’m sorry for killing your boy. I didn’t know what else to do.”
He rang her up, carefully rolled the flowers in wax paper as if they were delicate, living things, and handed them to her. “I can get one of my boys in back to help carry—”
“Don’t you dare!” Delores seized the flowers from his hand.
This set the pattern for their interactions from that day on, including the doughnuts she bought on the day of the beauty shop robbery. Same steps, same slamming palms, same bonded look that begged the other for forgiveness, in secret, only to fall away between breaks in the silence found in labored steps and the ring of cash registers.
***
When reporters asked Fea her version of the beauty shop robbery, she was still so shocked from the experience, she forgot to mention to reporters that Delores wasn’t even supposed to be there that morning. She had forgotten the fact of Friday, on account of taking her daughter to her place of work for the very first time. She’d hoped Theresa would be impressed enough to understand why Mommy was gone so early in the morning, and why Grandma Delores had to rock and waddle alongside her all the way to the corner bus while Mommy was away. Fea wanted to give her mother a chance to rest. Theresa’s elementary had in-service that day and Fea had woken her daughter, hoping to show how the family passed down love through careful wrists and a curling iron named Andre, the way Delores had for her. She would be like her mother. She would be that strong. Even in her brother’s death, she told herself she wouldn’t shed a tear—a promise that she only broke for the length of his funeral, whenever Theresa asked what Uncle Andre’s favorite flavor of Kool-Aid was, and any time she saw boys in droopy jeans spitting verses and winging arms on street corners. The walk to the beauty shop was always rough on the eyes.
When they got to the shop, Fea took Theresa to her station, introduced Andre to her daughter, and told her he was the heart of this place. Then she began to roll and curl the black hair of the practice mannequin in front of them. Theresa sat in a chair with her black ballerina and tiny comb in hand, a doll of mimicry.
The lessons went on, and Fea was just about to kiss Theresa on her forehead for doing such a good job of separating the shears and combs when a man fumbled into the salon. She set Andre down in front of the mirror, held her daughter’s hand, and let her ginger-hop off the seat to follow her to the cash register. Fea knew that a man with ashy lips wearing Army fatigues wasn’t her typical clientele. He looked to be loose of all soft intentions, but the phone was under the front counter, and she wanted her daughter by her side in times of danger. It would take the police awhile to get there if her most repressed suspicions were right.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, hoping that her daughter saw what courage looked like in the face of danger. “Unless you’re lookin’ for a wig, I’m afraid we can’t help you.”
The man, whom police would later identify as Quentin C. Gipson, had walked hunchbacked through the glass double doors and pulled out a .357 from the inside of his tattered Army jacket as a response. Theresa, still holding her doll, saw the barrel first; it stole away her voice and told her to never stop squeezing the pink tutu crinkled around the doll’s waist. Fea saw the barrel only a second after she saw her daughter’s doll rip through the Velcro of the tutu and hit the ground.
The swell of collective tension brought Quentin to scream at Theresa. He told her she needed to get her nappy little head away from the cash register, but Theresa, having never seen a gun with this many dimensions, could only clench the doll’s tutu. Holding tight as she could to what little joy she had didn’t stop Theresa from crying. And seeing the gun in his hand didn’t stop Fea from leaping over the counter at Quentin, but her courage was smacked to the black-and-white tile by a pistol whip. She took a few more kicks to the ribs and countless more threats before she got up to the register and began to empty it, cursing herself for not being as strong as her mother.
***
Delores had woken up that morning and, after some weeble-wobbling around the house, noticed Theresa wasn’t there to share the morning sunshine with her. Theresa was, after all, the reason she’d stopped drinking and loved to walk to the corner school bus, despite what her cussing and her aching hip might suggest. Delores assumed Theresa was at the beauty shop with Fea, so she decided to surprise them with doughnuts from Meak’s Market. She knew her daughter and her daughter’s daughter would appreciate the gesture; for them, there was no I love you louder than an apple fritter and a chocolate-glazed doughnut with double sprinkles. However, after her awkward dance with Meak, she hee-hooed her way up broken sidewalks, through alleys of slimy pipes and swung-open trash cans, and creaked open the back door of the salon to see her grandchild on the floor making a muzzle out of cupped hands, and her daughter at the cash register curled beneath the barrel of a gun.
Delores had lived fifty-five years, a lot of it on government cheese and castor oil, all of it without a wedding ring, and not once had she been crushed beneath a wave of unbridled agony like what she felt at that moment. She didn’t flash to the birth of her children, or Theresa’s first tooth, or skillets of fried bologna, or even the shallow breaths that curbed her life for a full week after she heard the salon was to be all hers—she thought of Andre, and all she could do with it if granted the God-given strength to hold it one last time. That’s when the miracle happened: light flared off Andre’s titanium plates in the mirror of the station at Quentin’s back. Delores saw that Quentin’s focus would not waver from the money Fea was pulling from the cash register. She moved to the beat of her instincts, kneeling to the ground and releasing the bag of doughnuts tucked under her arm without a sound. When she stood back up and opened the back door a little wider, she took to the mirror station and grabbed the curling iron without giving a thought to how easily her fingers bent around the handle or to how swift her body was moving as she ran at him as hard as she could.
The cries of her granddaughter masked the pounding of her footsteps as she rushed forward and tackled Quentin to the floor, taking his back just as Fea released a fistful of money into Quentin’s quivering hand. Delores thrust Andre under his chin and choked back. Quentin fought, elbowing Delores deep in the cushion of her belly, but the strength of Andre continued to bend his throat. He was too slow to secure the gun; it jabbed him just under the ribs as they tumbled to the ground. He pushed out a desperate breath, and Delores, seeing him weakening, pulled Andre from his throat and beat Quentin on the top of the head until there was no more fight left in the man. When he stopped moving, she stopped moving. She pulled in her breaths until breathing came naturally, and she turned him over on her lap as she sat up. She lifted his head up to her ear to see if he was still alive. He was. She held Andre up ready to strike, as a precaution, but he didn’t move. Quentin lay limp in her arms until the police showed.
Later, after the interviews, after Fea received an ice pack for her jaw and a wrap for her ribs and was told she’d feel fine in a week or two, after listening to EMTs discuss how someone with Delores’s age, diabetes, and arthritis couldn’t have had enough strength to grab a curling iron and beat down a man nearly half her age, after Theresa’s five minutes of chocolate sprinkled fame, the three of them would go home. They would hug. They would kiss and giggle. Theresa would laugh as she stood beside her grandma, heaping spoonfuls of homemade macaroni and cheese into her grandmother’s mouth while Delores smiled and shifted to make it all fit, secretly hoping Theresa would give her a hunk with onions and toasted bread. Fea would laugh into her Kool-Aid. Later, when their plates were empty, Fea and Theresa would help Delores to the couch where they would lie with each other, and Delores would ease into mumbles and then to sleep.
Moments after, they would see themselves on the news, the promo showing Delores waving interviewers and cameramen toward her daughter, unaware that the camera stayed on her while she watched the robber get wheeled out of the salon. While they waited for their own appearances, Theresa asked her mother, “Why was grandma hugging that man?” Fea shushed her daughter away from such nonsense as she sifted through the sticky delirium of her memory. Truth is, she did not know how to answer the question. Perhaps the cowardice of light was to blame—in the shadows, gone again in the flashing red and blue, she remembered seeing her mother strong-arm the robber to the ground and hold him still. But in the way she held him, gently, his cheek wrinkled against the firm hold of her forearm, Fea could see what her daughter saw: a beaten child resting in the arms of a mother looking for every chance to forgive.
© 2010 Shawnsey Narcensio Rudolph
***
Ironbound Elephants
by Annie Liontas
Eleven elephants step out of a train and into lime-scale fog. Crisscrossed by tracks and rats, the rail yard forms a rusty horizon, an obstacle course, a training ground. Overhead wires hang like slack tightropes. Railway signals flash clown red. A pride of PATH trains awaits morning like pack horses, like ponies. Headlights sear the hazy darkness, and the animals think the show must begin.
The last elephant is guided out of a car and down a ramp. He bends low—a stiff, overworked conductor—so his humped back won’t scrape against the door. His great gray ears flap against the steel frame like stingrays. Another balances on back legs until a trainer pulls her down to the gravel. She trumpets in discomfort, embarrassment, relief.
From rail yard to arena, eleven elephants walk. They travel single file through the Ironbound, trunks latching onto tails so that none will become lost. Their breath plumes in the early chill. Their eyes wink like the metal buttons on the harnesses they hoist. The elephants step over curbs, through puddles and dirty mud. Legs sway like pendulums, hips and shoulders rise and fall. Their giant sloping bodies obstruct then reveal the dull neon glare of Kwik Discounts, the flaking signage of Dollar Power. Their shadows huddle over cracked walls, obscuring spray paint that sprouts like moss. Led by possums that hide inside gray work coats, instinct tells them that they are the lone animals here; only an escaped bull and some horses, calmed by modern cowboys, have ever clattered over these streets.
The traveling company parades down Kinney through stop signs and traffic lights. No one watches but a young black prostitute. Children with tickets are at home asleep; businessmen have long gone. This is as quiet as Newark gets, but still the elephants sense the rustle of a city unable to rest. Vibrations resonate as on the head of a drum. Still faint are the cries of the afternoon vendors—the hiss of grills, the palpitations of bass. A mile away wheels squawk on a turn; a man is sprinting. The elephants hear this all through their feet. They feel the sirens before they sound.
The elephants walk and grope for food, foraging blindly. They reach for seeds, flowers, bark. Instead of branches or roots, their trunks grasp broken bottles. They chew discarded newsprint and food wrappers. Newark has been reduced to a woody cover, but like its citizens, the elephants continue to graze, hoping something has grown.
Past construction, past the still cranes that arch their necks like giraffes, past the grease-smeared windows of King Fried Chicken that glisten falsely under street lamps, through air that clings to the scent of pulpy garbage, ham, vomit and recesses, baking bread, and grime, until the eleven elephants stop and raise their trunks like periscopes. They are urged forward, but they do not obey. They listen, attentive to some subsonic rumbling: they know what awaits them even before they are pressed forward by the trainers.
From buses, alleys, cars, houses, apartments, from basements, corners, and jobs come the viewers without tickets; sleep-empty workers, criminals, children, and restaurant owners, parents who walk the blocks with children on their shoulders; teenagers who hop the light rail, outrunning police checking for fare; homeless neighbors wrapped in blankets; ageless hooded men riding thin-framed bicycles; the melancholy night-shift taxi drivers finishing their runs. Out come the hungry, the bored, and the joyful who heard that elephants have come to town.
Eleven elephants arrive. Pulled up next to one another like parked cars, they feel the people’s anticipation pulse beneath the ground—unfettered, eager. Excitement surges through power lines, through metal railings and light fixtures, catching in long banners that swathe the columns of city hall. It is nothing like the foiled tarpaulin of the circus tent. It is new for the elephants; it is new for the residents. A vendor parks his cart, scoops coconut ice into waxy cups and charges half price. Boys wave ball caps like flags and shove each other into moist elephant patties. Children reach out to tug on patches of elephant hair, their heads no higher than the animals’ knees. The elephants don’t seem to mind.
The smallest elephant, a calf with milk teeth, knocks over a trash can. He steps onto its belly, the metal sinking beneath him. His tail switches like a cat’s. Even the gagsters, who hide beneath their glinting teeth and tightly wrapped Swisher Sweets, are conned into a smile. There is no ringmaster, but beneath the gold dome of city hall begins the greatest show on earth. There are no buoyant, drifting balloons, no yellow or orange streamers, but children, small enough not to know any better, have dreamed the circus onto Newark’s streets.
The traffic light changes to green. Out rings a single trumpet, a chorus of calls. Up the elephants go, one by one, holding out heavy feet that resemble mushroom caps. Each leans on another’s shoulders, and the group moves like an oversized, clumsy conga line. The crowd applauds; the trainers try to dismantle the performers, but the elephants take no notice. The arena is still a quarter mile away, and the trainers cannot make them heel.
Without costumes, without dancers or drums or the blare of trumpets and horns, eleven elephants gait. The crowd presses forward to watch, but this trick is not for them. For the eleven elephants can feel the penetrating, pounding pulse of the angry, the weary, the resigned, the rageful who stayed home; the busy, the used, the drunk, the rusted who remain in their apartments, their cars, their buses, their basements, their squalor, their confinement. The elephants sense it through their feet; they feel it in their trunks, sorrow keen as the keeper’s whip. Because they understand absence, eleven elephants perform. They saunter into teetering, heartfelt spins.
In the distance, an approaching train bellows. The shudder of metal on metal, the lurch, the squeal of brakes disrupts the dance. The elephants drop back to the asphalt. They blink at the streetlights, the faint mist, and the expectant crowd. They shake their heads like loose boulders, free from a spell. The city is gone, the people are gone. They return to a single line, trunks latched to tails. Tame again, the elephants will follow the masters to the stage.
The crowd calls for more. Unaware of what they long for, unaware of what the elephants bring and take away, Newark’s residents are hesitant to disperse.
Without looking back, eleven elephants recede down a dark, pocked street. They call to the city—and the city, unable to answer, forgets them.
© 2010 Annie Liontas
***
Faithful Translation
by Marguerite R. Greenfield
Each day I change the nasal, flat, and grinding tones which in my country suggest disdain or dissimulation into the singing language of my homeland. The arguing, demanding voices bark and crow; the denying, explaining voices mutter and quaver. Fear and anger float in the air like motes in the sunbeams streaking through the courtroom window. The judge bangs the gavel, the witness takes the stand, and the court reporter’s hands hover over the keys. The lawyers contract on their chair rims, everyone taut but me, who has nothing at stake, just speed and accuracy.
I stand next to the witness, his words vibrating in the air and flashing neural signals to my brain, converted and returned in quiet, unaccented English. I am a telephone wire; the current is fast and electric. Sometimes the words sparkle and dance before my eyes and I seize the perfect jewel among the English synonyms for afraid (fearful, apprehensive, terrified), disappear (vanish, fade away), anxious (uneasy, worried, fretful), or hide (conceal, stash). When a witness falters and his memory fails, my breath comes short and my hands get damp. A good interpreter is invisible and almost simultaneous. I am not a woman or a witness; I am input, output, operating with cool efficiency in chilled marbled rooms.
Thirteen years I have been doing this, speaking other people’s words for money that I send home to feed my mother and daughter and to bring them to safety. The work fills my brain with words that deaden my heart and stifle my fears. Their weight and multitude soothe and distract. I forget myself until the court adjourns.
With each day come new calamities told by the innocent and the unfortunate, the foolish and the wrong. This week it has been another immigrant boy, bold with hunger and bravado, caught between desperation and the law. His name is Chang-Hua, but his American name is Jack. From his second name, I know he is from Fujian, where I grew up, where my cousins live, where my daughter now seeks a home. His mother was taken from the courtroom yesterday after she called out to him, “Forget those boys. Tell the truth. It is America!” The men in uniforms recognized only the word America, and it made them uneasy.
Men wear the badges and bang the gavels, but the images here are of women, carved in marble statues and plaster friezes, looking down from brightly painted ceilings. They stand with torches, scales, and swords, promising guidance and protection. They are called Wisdom, Truth, and Mercy Hailing Justice. But the breathing women in this courtroom, the ones who have borne children and loved unwisely, are left to sit and weep. Some rant and bang on office doors; some wait like stone, their rage and panic hardened to despair. Jack’s mother looked at me as the deputy walked her from the courtroom. She left her son with me, a country-woman, another mother. They took her to the hard benches in the corridor where no one spoke her language or explained anything, and she waited, helpless.
I sit as fixed as the brass statue on the judge’s desk: a woman blindfolded, holding the future in equipoise. I have not held the gavel, weighed the evidence, or given judgment, but I have been part of it. I wear suits as dark and cautious as the judge’s robes. I must be neutral and reliable (steadfast, unswerving, consistent). I serve the state which pays my salary, the state that took my daughter. She, who ran and hid, now cries for me and cannot return. I close my mind to her when I start my work.
The boy has been on the stand all day. His lawyer has taken him through his story, and the prosecutor is revisiting every detail. He was arrested at his friend’s house, a bag of marijuana in the backpack under the bed that he rents for twenty-five dollars a week. White children in suburban towns will not go to jail or lose their future if they are caught. They pay a fine, maybe, do community service, or attend classes on the dangers of drug abuse, but they will return to sleep in their parents’ homes. The backpack was not his, the boy says. He has a green card, but he will be deported if convicted.
Jack keeps his eyes on the middle distance and recites his answers. He is stubborn and patient, insisting on his story calmly—even when the documents do not support him, when he contradicts himself, when the lawyers’ faces turn red and their voices loud, and the prosecutor shouts, “Objection!” and the judge leans over the side of the bench, his glasses sliding down his nose as he wrinkles his brow. The words today rush like cataracts (waterfalls, gushes, cascades). They pile up in logjams, spilling over each other, and it takes all my concentration to keep up. I reach back for my water bottle on the table next to the court reporter. While the lawyers argue and the clerk marks the exhibits and enters them into the record, I take a long drink and feel cool, clear water rinse away the crowds of words.
When Jack looks up, his eyelashes stick straight out—like Katy’s, stiff and proud. “I am sorry,” Katy said. “You wasted your money.” She would not let the jailers see her cry.
The boy’s bony shoulders stand at attention under the thin shirt his lawyer brought. He is as slight as most of the boys from home, without the milk-fed height of cousins raised in the States. He pulls at the unfamiliar collar, his chin twitching in discomfort as if he were already in chains. It has been two hours since the break, and the prosecutor’s tone is now numbingly quiet.
“Where did you meet these friends?”
“At the center where we look for jobs,” Jack says.
“And when was that?”
Jack is getting tired now, and careless; “I forget” is what he says, and I see his lawyer wince at the word, the implication of carelessness or duplicity. I choose a softer phrase.
“I don’t recall,” I say, and his lawyer’s head jerks up. He knows the language but not the dialect. He stares at me, but I keep my eyes upon the witness.
“They gave you the backpack on the street?”
“Yes,” Jack says.
“You brought it inside your house?”
“It is not my house.”
“Ah yes, your uncle’s house. But he is not your relative, is he?”
“No,” Jack says. “It is a term of respect. He has opened his house to me; I am in his debt.” I hope the judge will understand the ties of honor and expectations that bind him to the men who give him work, the boys who share their rooms. He had nowhere else to stay; his mother had a live-in job, and her cousin had no room. “Hold this,” someone had told him, and he could not say no; he was expendable (superfluous, dispensable, disposable).
“Where did you take it?”
“I brought it upstairs,” Jack says. He said, “to our room,” but I translate it as “to their room” because these boys have nothing of their own. This is how life is for them, sleeping six to a room, not one of them on a lease, doing whatever job they are told to do: hosing garbage-strewn alleys, peeling bushels of onions, or scrubbing toilets in someone’s restaurant—the dirtiest, ugliest jobs for no wages in trade for a bed and a roof overhead. Katy knew such boys and sometimes brought them home. I would cook abalone and sea mussels sliced fine and steamed in broth, fried dates, and twists of dough, foods their mothers used to make before they left Fujian for Burger King and a better future.
The judge adjourns for the day, and I buy the Chinese paper at the newsstand. It has a headline about Homeland Security and deportations, but the photos on the front page are of businessmen who own restaurants and funeral parlors, travel bureaus and employment agencies, and wear little gold pins in their lapels. They make their money in cash and pay little of it to the boys and girls who do not have papers, who dream and work without benefits. Inside are pages of want ads for people to serve the country of I Want. This is what they want: cheap food delivered to their door, toenails groomed and painted, someone to wash the sweat and soil from their clothes and return them in clear plastic. This is what they do not want: to know these someones, their names, how they’re paid, or how they live.
It is six o’clock when I return to the house without Katy. There are children playing in the street, and they come home when their mothers call them for supper. I heat some soup, leaving the bills piled unopened on the kitchen table and the pots of herbs and baby greens dry and untended on the fire escape. I put on the track suit she left in the closet and begin with the Eight Brocade exercise. The first posture is called Push Up the Heavens. I stretch my palms before me and lift them slowly upward, my eyes on my interlaced fingers, not on the photos on the shelf: Katy in a row of children in navy skirts and sky blue kerchiefs, and Katy as an infant in her father’s arms. Tai had been a teacher until he signed a petition and went to the wrong meetings—another boy caught up in things beyond him; taken away. I concentrate on my breathing. It is correct practice, not striving, that brings strength and balance.
In the night, I dream, as I always do, of Katy. She is a baby reaching her hands through the rails of her crib. Jack is in the dream, and Tai.
***
The next morning, the prosecutor returns to the backpack.
“This Duen Li, who gave you his bag, did he tell you what it held?”
“He had come from school. I assumed it was his books.”
“Did he tell you what it held?”
“No.”
“Did you look inside?”
“I did not.”
“You already knew what was inside.”
Jack shook his head.
“You must answer the question,” the prosecutor says.
“I did not know.”
“The bag was unsealed?”
“Unsealed?” Jack says.
“It was not tied or fastened closed?”
“It was a backpack. It had a zipper.”
“You knew it was drugs.”
“I did not know.”
“You did not open it?”
“No.”
“You did not put anything in the pack?”
“No.”
“Or check what was inside?” Jack shakes his head, but the prosecutor continues. “Yet you hid it. You treated it as something valuable.”
“It was not mine. I wished to keep it safe.”
The prosecutor nods with satisfaction. He is leading Jack down a long passageway, and when he gets to the end, there will be no exit, and his mother, waiting on the bench, will have no voice or power to rescue him.
***
Katy’s message had been frightened and urgent, the tone furtive, her voice low, and the reception poor. I heard the words arrest, immigration, lawyer. And help. But my call went directly to her recording: “I cannot take your call right now.” I went looking, to the café where she sat with her friends, to the immigration rights center where her boyfriend was an organizer, and then across town, to the takeout restaurant where she worked the register. They told me there had been a sweep and that they did not know where she had been taken.
Immigration told her lawyer she was in a detention center in the Bronx, but when we found our way there, she had been moved to Queens, and in three weeks, she was on a plane to a place she didn’t want to call home. The lawyer said she had “fallen out of status.” And when she was falling she called to me, but I did not hear, could not reach her.
“But I filed the papers,” I told her lawyer. “She was on a list.” Her application had been pending, backed up with the thousands of others who had applied, paid the immigration lawyers, and waited for approval. I had filled out affidavits of financial status, certifications of family relationship, records of health examinations; and I did it all over again when they lost the paperwork. We had waited and waited.
“She did not have a visa,” her lawyer said. “I told her to return home and wait, but she was afraid she would not get back in.”
Four years I had sent money home for university, but Katy would not stay for a factory job in a small village while she waited for her papers. When my mother died, Katy sold the small house I had grown up in and paid many thousands to men who brought her across the sea, the last few miles in a rubber dinghy dropped from a freighter in the sea lanes off the New Jersey shore. When her number came up, she said, she would leave the same way she’d come in and return with the approved documents. She met a boy and worked in a restaurant, paid under the table, until she had money to buy papers to let her work. The papers had not been good enough.
“This will compromise her status,” her lawyer said.
“What is compromise? They will let her in later?”
“They may not let her in at all.”
***
In the courtroom, I watch the prosecutor turn, drop his papers on the table, and return to his chair. Jack exhales, and I sense the minute shifts of relaxed muscle. I wait for the snap, the sudden shift, the “just one more thing.”
“Oh, yes,” the prosecutor says, looking up. “This was a gray backpack, was it not?”
“Yes,” Jack says.
“With a dragon drawn on it? And a pair of yellow dice hanging from its clasp?”
“Red,” Jack says.
There had been dice on Katy’s backpack too, and the bobbing scarlet cubes were the last thing I saw when they led her down the ramp to the boarding gate. She had cast the dice and lost.
“You bought it on the street?” The prosecutor’s tone was still calm and quiet, the question an afterthought.
“I did.”
I translate, “I did not.” I speak from instinct, not from calculation. The boy was tired and had lost his focus. They had covered the ground so often. It was not his backpack. He had said so. He had come so far.
“Objection!”
The prosecutor is on his feet. “The witness just said yes. The interpreter translated it as no.”
“You don’t speak Chinese,” the defense attorney says. “And it’s your interpreter. Certified, you said. You can’t start challenging the translation now just because you don’t like the answer.”
“He nodded his head,” the prosecutor insists. “He admitted it was his.”
The judge turns to me. “Did the witness say yes, he bought it on the street?”
“No,” I say. “He said, ‘I did not.’”
“This is outrageous, Your Honor!” The prosecutor is yelling now. “I insist that the record be played back.”
“The microphone records only the translation; you know this, counsel,” the judge says. He turns to me again. “Might you have misspoken?”
I keep my face impassive (expressionless, blank, inscrutable), just as I did at my husband’s trial when I denied I had known about the meetings, when I let him go so I could save my daughter. “No, Your Honor,” I say.
“Next question, counselor,” the judge says.
I have translated the lawyers’ words and the judge’s replies. Jack looks at them, then back to me.
“I don’t understand,” he says, and I translate his words.
“Wait until you are asked a question,” the judge tells him.
The boy pulls at my sleeve. “What are you doing?” he asks me. I make a halt sign with my hand, low below the frame of the witness box.
The lawyers look up as the witness speaks again.
“The witness asks to use the restroom, Your Honor.”
“It’s four o’clock,” the judge says. “We’ll adjourn until nine thirty tomorrow.”
Jack is taken through a side door and returned to handcuffs. His lawyer looks at me again and then turns as the prosecutor calls him. In the hallway they argue about plea agreements, scribble notes on yellow pads, and call their offices. No one speaks to the boy’s mother.
I return to the office I share with the court reporters. I translate the papers stuffed in the backpack that have been offered into evidence; words on the wrappers that held the drugs, flyers from the youth center, and something else: an empty envelope with a postmark from Fujian City. It is addressed to Jack, at his uncle’s address. The prosecutor may have recognized Jack’s Chinese name. Or not.
I write a letter of resignation, but I do not mail it. I fold the letter into my purse and walk down the long stairs, under the painted dome, through the impassive gazes of Justice and Wisdom, past the plasma screens, the scanners and magnetized doorways keeping out metal and guns and bombs and people who do not belong.
I took an oath when I was married, when I became a citizen, and each time I climbed the courtroom dais. Parents take no vow, but fidelity is fixed in every cell and pledged with every breath. I have been faithful, but it is a foolish, futile thing that I have done. Katy will not return—and Jack, if he returns, will not return to me. The Tao says you cannot change the happenings of the universe. But our every act is part of its unfolding.
© 2010 Marguerite R. Greenfield
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Author Bios
As a federal employment lawyer, Marguerite Greenfield has told the stories of abused workers for thirty years, but only recently turned to fiction. She recently received an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her writing has appeared in the Bennington Review, The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry, Voices of Alzheimer’s—an anthology published in 2007—and will appear soon in Long Story Short.
Karl Meiner fled the East Coast over twenty years ago. He has lived in Portland since 1992 and cannot see himself living anywhere else. His daughter has been more articulate than he since she was three years old, and Karl accepts her edits graciously. His muse is a gifted, beautiful monkey named Van Weffles and she is the most brilliant artist he’s ever known. Karl teaches full time at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, and his director is the coolest boss in the world. In his off hours, he wonders about time travel and looks forward to Shark Week.
Annie Liontas, an urban educator, appreciates volunteer travel and couchsurfing. In 2000 and 2003, Annie received the Edna N. Herzberg Creative Writing Award for Short Fiction. She self-published the poetry zine Parting Paper Sea in 2004 and unveiled Body as Bed, Cradle Star, a grant-funded multimedia poetry installation, in 2003. Since 2004, Annie has raised nearly $34,000 in grants for public education as an educator in Newark, New Jersey. Love Bombing, her first novel, received Second Honorary Mention in the 2010 Dana Awards. Her short story, “Personal Property,” will appear in the online literary magazine Night Train.
Shawnsey Narcensio Rudolph hopes to someday live up to the grandiosity found in the sound of his name. Until then he will take the knowledge he acquired while earning his MFA at Georgia College & State University and continue to pursue a life of literary citizenship through teaching, writing, reading, and hoping for balance.
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Artist Bio
Ashley Kimbro, a proverbial black sheep, is also a poet, graphic designer, and illustrator working primarily in graphite. She graduated with honors, receiving a Bachelor’s of Fine Art in 2008 from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. Ashley has since moved to her quaint home in Illinois where she writes, draws, keeps a small window garden, and is learning again how to appreciate a good book and some peace and quiet. During occasional bits of spare time, she might be found reading Austen, consuming mass quantities of tea (preferably Dragon Well), or observing art. “Downtown, no. 2″ was taken with a Minolta 35mm camera this summer during a road trip through the tiny town of Donora, Pennsylvania.
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Ink-Filled Page Autumn 2010 copyright © 2010 Indigo Editing & Publications
Cover Design: Jon Wise
Cover Art: Ashley Kimbro
Production Editors: Amanda Flagg
Senior Editor: Ali McCart
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