Anonymous
When your last breaths left, you shuttered and went silent. Stray vowels mixed with escaping air. This isn’t really happening. The couch was a raggedy burnt orange with three cushions. I would find your spare change after this. The addition of 911 to the town emergency services was so new that the seven-digit numbers for police and fire were still stuck to the inside of the receiver, adhesive stickers that touched my cheek every time I picked up the rotary phone for years before that and listened to the crunch-of-gravel sound of the beep that meant a ring across town or in a pizza shop. Every time I said hello or goodbye, that number tried to whisper its foreboding in my ear; the vulnerability of routine; the signs that we all missed.
It seems crazy now, but I was worried we were overreacting, had mistaken simple sleeping for something more and in fear that I might wake you, I spoke softly in my pleading. I was gentle in my shaking. They didn’t teach CPR at school till later that spring. The gym teachers turned Red Cross instructors made us memorize the order of how to save someone. Tilt head, lift chin, look, listen, feel. I saw your face in all the dummies. We repeated it out loud, knelt over synthetic bodies (some with rounded breasts like life-size Barbie dolls) on the theater stage turned examining room: A premeditated act of mass resuscitation. Tilt head, lift chin, look, listen, feel. I prayed it like a mantra, an act of contrition, hoping the wide-eyed dummy could substitute for you. When the bell rang everyone scattered like we were fleeing the scene of a bloodless crime, leaving Coach Q. to deal with the plastic carnage, a mess of folded limbs and open tongue-less jaws.
Rebecca
It turns out I could have heard them all along,
creeping spectacularly. Compiling colonies of brown
dotted with gold and holes in stacks and piles
up the center of my back. And all along I assumed
it must be the crack of the heat in the pipes.
It’s December in Massachusetts, after all.
Fragrant and unweighted, I’ll wait in the water,
realizing madness I host on my shoulders:
whole clusters of monsters eating each others’
necks and mouths and faces in divisible invisible
succession. First one and then two and then four
and then sixteen: fixed and sated, fake but unbreaking.
I bought a nickel pitcher and hoped they hop off.
But like barnacles they closed but stayed,
immune to soaking concealment and the scrubbing
of fingernails– I can only abrade my fingertips against
them, check the mirror before I go out, make
sure there’s still nothing there.
Alex
His wife told him he was going off the deep end, but Tom didn’t quite understand what that meant. As a kid, the deep end was the opposite of the shallow end in the reeking-of-chlorine swimming pool he spent his summers life guarding, and he was pretty sure she didn’t mean he was being shallow. Quite the opposite, in fact. Tom had reached a whole new level of depth, a more complex understanding of himself and his world that had previously been inaccessible to him. This was a breakthrough.
Never one to jump the gun, Tom hesitated to call it, “Enlightenment,” but deep down, Tom felt like it might be. “The universe,” Tom urgently explained, “is not based in chaos. At least, not in the traditional sense—you see, the world is, without a doubt, chaotic, but also predictable! Deterministic even!” These seemingly contradictory statements were lost on most people, Tom’s family, his coworkers, his neighbors. None of them grasped the defining characteristic of our world, the thing that unites and divides us all. “Self-similarity, don’t you see? It explains everything from ferns to the stock market to psychoanalysis! The ontological paradox of our universe…” No one cared. Tom constructed a double pendulum in his garage, hoping that such a concrete, visual example of his theory would render his thoughts transparent and legible to those around him, but it only got worse.
The sense of immediacy in him grew, sharply pressing his gut from the inside. It needed to get out. Tom bought spray paint and the hardware store and implanted a blue and white fractal on the front door of his house. And then his neighbor’s house, and then their neighbor’s, until all of the homes on Henley Road greeted their denizens and visitors alike with intricate fractals, each unique and shocking. The neighbors were furious. Spray paint was for the city and Not In My Back Yard, or front door for that matter.
The cops came. Tom tried to explain with a paint can in one hand and the double pendulum in the other. The intensity of his efforts showed in his desperation. Tom wasn’t trying to prove his innocence, however ineffective that may have been. No, Tom was trying to prove his theory, gesticulating wildly.
Heather
The Bisol Family 4th of July Pool Party was the event of the summer. Somewhere around June 15th the invitation would come in the mail. It was folded over in quarters and printed from a home computer (an exotic anomaly in the late 1980s). It was always some variation of an unfurled flag over a picnic table or primitive digital fireworks going off over a generic park somewhere in prehistoric cyberspace, faceless onlookers with toddlers on their shoulders pointing up, heads flung back in awe. I had only missed one year when I had the flu and my sisters got to go but I had to stay home on the couch and drink lots of fluid. There was no question that we would be attending this year.
I could never wake up early enough on those days and the planning went on for days before hand. Bathing suits were purchased new each year, the Fun-Tube was pulled out of its dusty box in the attic, checked for holes and inflated one breath at a time as my sisters and I passed it back and forth to each other, our distended bellies looking as though they were giving everything they had for the greater good of flotation. My parents packed a cooler full of ‘tonic’ and we drove the _ mile from our yellow house at the top of Coventry Rd. to their brown house at the bottom, set back from the street. Kathy Bisol was a school teacher in the next town over who always walked around in a poke dot bathing suit that my mom said she was too old for. Mike was an electric company lineman who mowed his extensive lawn shirtless. He looked like MacGyver.
My dad and Mike were in the Lions Club together along with most of the men on the street. I never really knew what that meant except that once a year they had a flee market in the post office parking lot where our neighbor Mr. Willis always got to wear a jeweled lion suit and wave to passing cars. (My Dad once bought me a plastic statue of a Canadian Mountie with a piece of his hat brim missing. It cost a quarter. I can still see it twirling silver in the sun on the peeling card table when he tossed it down.) The Lions Club also meant that my parents got dressed up and went to a Christmas party every year and my cousin Melissa would baby sit us. I used to boycott the night, upset my parents had left until Melissa lured me out of my room and we’d all end up laughing till we cried. She would stay over and sleep in my bed which meant I got to sleep in the other bed in my big brother’s room and we talked late into the night. I was always disappointed to wake up in the morning and find she’d already gone.
It seemed like we were always the last to arrive to the pool party and by the time we piled out of the back of my dad’s brown and white paneled Oldsmobile station wagon, we were ready to burst. My brother, already twelve and angsty, sat in the rear seats facing backwards and listened to Survivor on his Walkman even though we were only in the car for 2 minutes. The only reason he even came was because Zac Poirier (who lost the “k” on his first name sometime in early 198_) and DJ Donovan would be there and they could sit around or throw a football. It seemed like there were hundreds of people there, playing badminton and volleyball in the backyard and basketball in the driveway. Their pool was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and went on forever, like some man-made lake in their backyard. There were bigger kids everywhere and my sisters and I brought our float out and took turns sitting in the middle of the tube, making the other two promise first that they wouldn’t let us float across the yellow line into the deep end. Sometimes Courtenay Poirier would come over and say The Angell girls can’t swim and I would yell back defiantly, Yes we can, we just like to float. (Of course this was a lie. It would be three more summers before we all began swimming lessons at the state park and I’d pass Advanced Beginners only after taking it twice.) Courtenay would flip her long dirty blind hair and disappear under water for several seconds and appear at the other end of the pool. I hated her.
I knew that I was 47 inches tall, because I was an inch shy of being able to ride the Yankee Cannonball rollercoaster at Canobie Lake Park. The deep end was 8 feet at its farthest point by the diving board and it might has well have been the continental shelf. I tried not to even look at the deep end, lest some Bermuda Triangle-esque force pull me in. The Bisols had a set of neon glow sticks and the big kids from all over the street would throw them in and watch them sink to the bottom, their colors blurring like jelly fish until they dove in like trained dolphins and came up with them. I could think of no worse fate. It always reminded me of the story my sister’s teacher had told her in school about the sailors who were punished by being tied to a rope and thrown over board. They were allowed to live if they could swim under the giant hull of the ship and come up the other side. Sometimes the rope wasn’t long enough. I knew no greater terror.
My parents didn’t talk much at these parties. My dad would usually disappear with the Lions Club and every now and then I’d hear his booming laughter above me and he’d walk by and say exuberantly You girls having fun? Why don’t you go in the deep end?
Then he’d disappear again. My mom always stayed close by and watched us like a vigilant private life guard, sitting in a woven back chair, her wavy chestnut brown hair curling out from underneath a brightly striped sun visor, mahogany sunglasses covering half her face, her smile covering the other half. My parents never went in the water. In fact, the only time I had ever even seen my father swim had been the previous summer at the Bisol pool but not at the pool party. The Bisols were gone on vacation and offered my parents use of the pool. To me it was like renting a Ferris wheel. It was just the six of us and the Politos and their kids for a whole deliciously hot August afternoon. I was standing by the edge of the pool when my dad walked along the side and stepped onto the diving board. He took his shirt off and exposed his broad chest, pale and sketched with wisps of already graying hairs. He flexed his muscles with a Cheshire-wide grin and dove head first into the deep end. I stood in awe. It was like discovering your father was actually Superman. His whole body disappeared under the water and his arms looked like the submerged wings of a swimming eagle, refracting a million pieces of sunlight across the bottom of the pool floor. He made long deliberate strokes, like he was pushing away under water cobwebs, his short legs giving off bursts of motion every few seconds. He didn’t come up for air until he was on the steps of the shallow end, smiling like an Olympian who had just won the gold medal and was looking for the clock. But he didn’t need to find the clock, because he just knew he was that good. I wanted to be like that.
The pool party day always ended too soon and we went home pruned and wrapped in big soft beach towels purchased for the occasion and ate a big dinner. Water always makes you hungry, my Mom said as she turned over sizzling hamburgers on the stove and asked who wanted cheese. We fell asleep on the couch trying to stay awake to watch the Pops concert and fireworks over the Hatch Shell on TV, baby cream on our sunburns, and our hair smelling faintly of chlorine.
Lynn
I.
A was really upset. All this talk about Jesus Christ being F’s personal savior—and F returning to his true home with his true father. F was A’s best friend and he was certain that F did not identify with the devout Baptist faith of his parents. I marveled at the sheer power of such a theology. F’s mother wanted to/needed to hear that sermon. She took great comfort in these promises—she wanted to hear about F’s salvation and ascension—looking forward to the moment she and F would be reunited in the kingdom of heaven. The minister kept talking about F’s real mother and father. I wonder if F knew that he and his 7 brothers and sisters were rentals. More troubling to me: what then does that make A?
II.
E was indignant about R’s presence that morning. His lack of patience for R—in general, as a person—was no secret to me but I couldn’t believe the amount of energy E spent groaning about who should and who should not have attended C’s memorial. He was certain that R was only there for herself. That she had seized this opportunity to feign compassion and sympathy. And why would she do that? Is she in fact a heartless, egoistic drama queen—or was she just someone with a nearly perfect high school GPA who had a long history of irritating E? I wished that I had sat in the pew with my friend D—yet another target of E’s callous criticism.
III.
When I asked S if she was going to the mass for J, S told me that she had no right being there since she “never gave J the time of day” when she was alive. S couldn’t fool me—I would never mistake her mother’s words for anyone else’s. J was three years younger than S and two years younger than me. She lived across from Pond Street in that house with the beautiful stonewall and the mysterious little green door—it always reminded me of The Secret Garden. J’s mother was a twin and the two sisters were grammar school teachers we all struggled to tell apart. It seemed weird to me though: S had never gone out of her way to insult J so why should she start now.
IV.
Friday afternoon leaving Boston heading to New Hampshire at 3pm. Sheets of rain pounding on the windshield and roof. If we hadn’t been in bumper-to-bumper traffic it would have been nearly impossible to see. I was concentrating on the road and the clock. M—well I don’t know what he was thinking about. Few words passed between us during those two and a half hours. When we finally arrived, we stopped at a small café so I could use the restroom and get a cup of coffee. I told M to wait in the car—no need for both of us to get soaked and all the more justification to double-park. I confirmed the directions to the funeral home with the girl behind the counter and ran back to the car worried that this little stop was going to make us late. The house sat on the edge of hairpin turn, but the parking lot was completely empty. Again, I told M to wait in the car while I ran inside. The woman was attentive and sweet but when I told her who I was and confessed that I thought I may have gotten the time wrong, I could see her break right before me. Her eyes sunk at the corners as she reached out to touch my arm. I could feel M’s eyes follow me as I walked from the front door back to the car. I have never experienced such feelings of lament. ” Its next Friday.”
Anonymous
“I don’t know whether to say this over a voice message or an email,” she said on the recording. Then she was quiet, as if waiting for me to respond. “Ok, email.” She’d left this message a couple hours before, and I’d already read her email telling me that Figgy’s car had rolled a couple days ago up on some Maine highway. I hadn’t seen him for close to ten years, during which time he’d apparently transformed from a skinny deadbeat in oversized clothes to a husband and dad. I deleted her email, and tried to figure out how I should feel, and how I did feel.
That summer I had two jobs. In the first, I scooped ice cream for tourists who refused to tip, citing the price we charged. They’d sigh with outrage as I’d ring up their cones, and pointedly stuff the change into their wallets. The sweet shop was owned by a large woman who had shot her husband years before, pleaded self-defense, and then opened the store as her fresh start. In the second job, I handed lobster rolls through a portside take out window. My uniform was white jeans and a white shirt and I called meal-order numbers over a cackling intercom, and then pushed a tray of food through to the outside. At the first job, I was accused of stealing $100 out of the register after closing up one night. I hadn’t. In the second, the institutional girls, who had been working there for years, gave me the silent treatment, while the boy employees would flirt with me. They’d dangle live lobsters in front of my face, and as the lobsters swung before me their beady eyes would bulge out and meet mine, their taped pinchers swimming through the air, before their swift drop into water boiling in a pot on the stove.
I quit the take-out window job a month in, on a busy week, to spite the girls and to escape the boys. Then I went to the beach where the other local boys, our friends who spent their days playing volleyball and their nights bartending, would tease me for having screwed Figgy, the town’s roofie-head. I’d fail to come up with any smart retort, dig my toes into the warm sand, or stand up and walk into the ocean’s small waves. The Atlantic up there is cold, a painful cold, and my legs would go numb after a minute submerged. I’d walk into that cold up to my waist to see how long I could stand in it. I don’t think I ever made it in any deeper. (more…)
