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I realized not too long ago that I had produced a few pieces of fiction during my commentary for the Story-a-Day, and that the same thing was happening as I was completing the Nabokov Assignment. Collecting them all on one page, I thought, would serve two purposes: 1. it would allow readers to, once and for all, distinguish commentary from completely unrelated stories (how one could mix these up is beyond me considering my adherence to strict lines between fiction and reality, between my life and fiction, and between my life and reality), and 2. it would serve as a convenient place for people to read more fiction. I may (or may not) add comments to these stories. If you have comments, email me here.
There's this funny story about a pancake house called "The Muffin Treat" (strange name, huh?) over there on Texas street past marigold (what a flower) over yonder in the county seat of Solano wherein a boy, cash-strapped and hungry, takes his eleven-year-old date 'cross the street for an early dinner 'cause the theater kicked them out of the PG-13 movie. The boy, his mother having given him just enough for two matinees' worth plus maybe a small sodie and corn, is seriously rationing the funds when his date orders a spaghetti dinner with a salad and a large Pepsi-cola. He's actually got his wallet out (it was the kind that velcroed around the edges so he had to cough to conceal the sound it made opening) under the table leafing through the bills to see if he can square the cash necessary to get himself a bite to eat. "And you?" the waitress asks. There walking by is a boy—nine—carrying dirty plates back into the kitchen. This bus-boy-boy and the boy on the date are to become step-brothers through the workings of a death-insurance salesman with enough cajones to ask his client out on a date (fifteen years after our story takes place, notice). "I'll just have a side salad," he says, and then to his date, "I had a big breakfast, you see." I had a point...what was I talking 'bout? Oh, yes, in this American society, I was, um. Seem to have lost my train-a-thought. What was that movie, anyway? It was a comedy I seem to remember. I was sellin' the tickets at the theater and let the little ones pass when my boss comes over and says, "How old you two?" and to this they just look up innocently. "You can't come into this movie if yore not thirteen. Are you thirteen?" She was addressing the boy now. He mumbled something. "And you—are you thirteen?" The girl looked to the boy. They started walking away but I stopped them. "Wait," I said, "here's your ticket-money back right quick," and the boy snatched it just as quick as you could imagine, sort of proving he was in charge. Cindy who did the slushee machine, she was the daughter of Max somebody-or-other and Max was friends with the mom of the boy on the date. That's how I heard the whole story and what happened. About the death-insurance thing and all that—well I'm omniscient, ain't I? I can know things without having to explain how.
"Flannery
O'Connor was a Catholic," Alison says. "'Our Father' and all that."
You're not a girl
anymore, mother. I know you told me once, but I can never remember
whether to capitalize that word, "mother." It's one way if it's a name
and one way if it's a noun that just means "mother." Bill had one way
I could eat my spaghetti and you had another; I can never remember whether
I'm to slurp or bite off the ends. But let me tell you, earnestly,
what you must know, because I worry that you carry around an unnecessary
burden. You have fought so much in your life, Mother, that you have
earned your rest.
No shoes no
shirt no service, the sign read (as signs do), the sign
hanging—dangling—down from the top jamb toothpick piece of wood, as if
giving the impression that you'd have to be a moron to bump the sign with
your head and not have read it. Sherry Ann passed through and I could
see by the way the sign spun round her face that she had not an ounce of
makeup on, that her skin was smooth as a summer peach with fuzz but no dew,
that she'd persist through that door breaking all the rules for she had no
shirt or any shoes. But wait. She carried sandals in her hand,
and in a basket with string handles carried her top which she'd taken off
from the heat: underneath she wore a thin halter thing tied up with two pale
blue strings round that neck of hers. Strings of the bag matched the
strings of her neck; Sherry'd effected that coincidence for the clerk
counting the day-minutes left he had to work and wanting nothing less than
this girl through this door at this second, the manager peckin' his head
round from each corner of the store, each floating, rolling cart of clothes
as he smacked the hangers together and apart not to look so much as to sort. Italo Calvino, a fictional man and not the famous author, sits on a worn, dusty upholstered seat in a railcar; in fact, moments before, when he threw his sac de voyage upon it, the horribly stained and uncomfortable thing emitted a cloud of dust that very well could have produced a sneeze in a head of cattle standing idly beside the tracks of the passing locomotive, perhaps waiting to cross or just looking for unevenly distributed fodder. Nevertheless, he sits, quite alone, in the dimly lit compartment. He has decided, for one reason or another―his fictional books aren't selling well, his wife has left him for an imbecile with a poorly fitted toupee, his steel sphere became unjustly lodged in an ill-conceived hole at the pinball game before boarding the train―that today, August 2, at five in the evening, he will end his life. Nothing anyone could say would possibly change his mind. It's a "done deal," as they say. He no longer finds solace in the small, insignificant things a detailed observer discerns. Just one day earlier he may have been fascinated by the howling sirens' squeak of the compartment door...but no longer. A woman, not the blonde in the station with the suitcase, Ms. Marne, nor the chief of police's wife, Mrs. Gorin, but Calvino's own estranged wife, who seems to be in the throes of unimaginable remorse (try to imagine it anyway), boards a train at an unattended station about two miles from the residence of her former lover, a man so generous that he became grotesque in recent days (the toupee scarcely helped). It being a Thursday, the train was fairly empty, and it being only three in the afternoon, Mrs. Calvino had her choice of compartment among the many. Whether guided by superstition (skipping odd-numbered compartments) or intuition (attracted to bronze letters over silver) she finally picked a vacant room in the car directly in front of the dining car. Her tight-collared dress, while en vogue and quite becoming, didn't aid much with her intake of air, so she tenaciously crawled over the dusty seat cushion to open the window. Inexperienced train passengers always have difficulty opening these windows, which, in reality, were never designed to open in the first place. After the violent snapping of the latch, Mrs. Calvino tumbled to the coach floor and found herself face-to-face with a sliver of gold, kicked, most likely, under the bench by accident. Seizing the ring―for it was precisely that―she drew it close to her hyperopic brown eyes. At exactly that moment, as she, at five past three o'clock stared cross-eyed into the golden band of the fictional Italo Calvino, the conductor flung open the rusted, screechy door and asked for her ticket. The woman looked at him with an ashen complexion. The ticket-taker took this as a response and he, in turn, provided, with alacrity, the missing piece of information: "Strange you chose this car, ma'am: 'twas just the day before this one today that we found a man deader than a doornail lying right where you are now. S'pose you read about it in the papers, miss? About 'round five the eventide, I think it was." A couple years ago I was driving through Minnesota, looking (as do most people, I suppose) at the corn fields on the side of the road. I was hungry, so I stopped for a bite to eat at some family diner. Smoking wasn't allowed yet; it must have been early in the day. Anyhow, there was this little kid hopping in the booth right behind me while I was eating. I have a fairly high tolerance level when it comes to this kind of stuff, so I shrugged it off like anyone would. But then, while I'm trying to rescue the islands of pancake from the moat of syrup that is nearly flooding off my plate, the kid leans over to my ear―almost touching it with that little head of his―and says, "I can take you into my arms." Sometimes when people say things at a low volume level they can sound ungodly; that's how this was. I turned to look at the kid, but he'd resumed jumping around, his parents ignoring him just as before while they sucked down sausage digits the size of large pharmaceutical pills. Now, Minnesota not being much related to anything you can foresee, you're probably thinking, "Well, where's the story? Where's the connection?" and that's what I'm trying to tell you. Because, see, Nabokov's story "The Thunderstorm" has this... well let me finish my story and everything will be clear. So I get back on the road―I'm hugging I-90, right along the southern border of the state―and the clouds darken. The music I had playing was lost a bit in the pressure of this massive group of clouds coming my way. In the distance I could see lightning in such a volume that it was as if someone had a Zippo and they were flicking the flint over and over across the horizon. I became mesmerized by this a bit (as anyone would, I suppose) and started daydreaming out the window. Not one with a reckless or extreme imagination, the clouds, while darkening the landscape, didn't look inherently evil. I merely suspected a really big thunderstorm, the thunderstorm. Well then I thought of that kid and what he'd said, and it began rubbing me in the wrong way. I had a difficult time imagining his face again, so that I'd wonder who exactly had said that line "I can take you into my arms." "Maybe it's a song lyric?" I thought. I must have been daydreaming too long because a long line of cars, stopped in the freeway because of some construction ahead, surprised me all of a sudden and I found I couldn't stop. My car went to the right―to the shoulder―and I hurtled through short grasses and weed bushes until a tractor came from nowhere and hit the car. It was orange―fire―everything orange. Plumes of smoke and construction workers with orange vests running to get me out. "I can take you into my arms," someone said. A bolt of lightning, closer than the rest, shocked me back to the road. The landscape was serene, the traffic sparse. I'd envisioned a terrible catastrophe, actually seen myself go through a collision, but in reality I was just making good time along the smooth pavement. I raced the storms all the way to Wisconsin, where I was meeting someone. The first thing I said upon arrival was, "You should have seen those clouds―they could have taken you into their arms." Knock-knock stick in summertime reminds me of this Missouri holiday trip I took just before the fourth of july (capitalized in other settings―I'm well aware) during which I met this man (who happened to be my cousin, estranged for something like two-thousand-one-hundred-and-ninety days) and this boy, my cousin's brother, and hence, also my cousin. So while we played around the giant bur oak, which the country-guitar-playing Rodney swore he'd cut down some day to make himself a deck or a gazebo or a dock to float down on the little lake a quarter-mile away, while we ran down the hill and back up through the long grass, whipping our bare shins, and the short grass, tickling our open toes, the world went on, the adults spoke of something highly significant, something that would probably be discussed on the nightly news (not discussed so much as presented―not presented so much as alluded to), and the sky grew duskier and duskier until the glowbugs or fireflies (depending on your preference) began lighting up in little patches―then swarms―over here by the oak, and then down there by the path to the gravel driveway, and then right up on the porch. We three, me in the middle and insisting we remain silent when the fireworks first went off, we came to some sort of understanding that day, as if seeing someone else and hearing someone else is enough to make you more sure of who you are, and of what you are and what you think and believe. Crack, the fireworks would crack and spit up into the air from anonymous neighbors in such a rural, grassy area. We breathed heavy from the tag game―that was the point of this whole thing―and watched the assault on the sky, told the fireflies they finally had some competitors. A cousin―I don't remember which―lighted firecrackers that sprayed sparks and exploded with a sound that rattled the house's windows a hundred feet away, then lighted roman candles, glorified paper towel tubes that shot flaming cannonballs toward the direction they were pointed, while I, unadjusted to the humidity in a summer month, waved my arms like flightless chicken-wings to dry them, wipe away the moisture and dampness that was so bad my aunt ran the air conditioner all night inside; and I watched...watched the people, simple, having fun with fire, with risk, and listened to the muted sound of crying from behind me through the ajar porch door. This guy Victor is messed up and drunk and Shigaev helps him out. Now Shigaev is dead and Victor remembers him. I'm old enough to remember this guy Shigaev. I remember him standing and shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He was impatient. I remember that since he was older, his feet would drag a little more in the thick carpet of his two-story house down the street from mine. We were renting; he had bought. In the summers (there were only two) I would walk down and sit with him, me a boy, Shigaev an older man. He would talk to me about his life, his bachelorhood, a state that only seemed to serve the purpose of giving him a void to fill. Let me tell you about Olga, he'd say, or Tatiana, he'd say. Let me tell you about when I was younger, he'd say. He'd drag his feet a bit and bring a plate of cheese from room to room. And here, he'd say, here is where I first realized the key to happiness. He'd walk me all over that stale-smelling house. It was his life, that house. I knew they'd have to pry him out of there if he were ever to die. He'd be holding onto the railing of the staircase as they tried to drag him, I imagined. I saw the people who take the dead and they about nearly gave up on old Shigaev. That was what I imagined, anyway. I was out of school but going back in a couple weeks. Shigaev said we should take a trip somewhere; I said I'd have to ask my parents. Then he said, No, no, not a trip outside, but back in time, son. He pulled out his faded monochrome pictures filled with blurry subjects and dreary settings. This, he said, is Anna. Anna was the one, he said. He could have been crying when he said this―I don't really remember. That was the tone of his voice, though: desperate. He wanted all of those memories back, Shigaev did. When he asked me about my friends or what I did and what I saw, he only listened long enough to spark a memory of his own. Yes, he'd say in a moment of recognition, that's how it is. We spent two summers in that city, that rented house, and then we moved away, not far, but too far for me to see Shigaev by foot. Before I left him for the last time (neither of us knew it would be the last time) he gave me something―just a tiny trinket or a toy he'd had. I didn't think much of it, didn't examine it or pry into his past to find out its significance. I just took the thing (it was small enough to fit into my hand, my pocket) and went away. Then the move. The autumn―it came. I grew up slowly from the inside but quickly to others. I lengthened and matured a bit. One Saturday at the breakfast table my mother said, It's horrible, that man Shigaev is dead. She asked if I'd known him at all, asked if I'd ever been inside of his house. Of course I thought of the smell, the smell of Shigaev's house. I imagined his dead body clutching the railing in a desperate attempt. Surely he'd dropped the cheese plate―cubes scattered making patterns on the rug―and died trying to pull himself upstairs, up where I'd never been, where there was mystery, intrigue. Did you know him? my mother asked. I shook my head. Only as well as anyone, I said. I chewed my cereal. I felt sick. Later in my room after nothing in particular I tried in vain to find what it was Shigaev had given me before we moved. I tried to retrace my steps in reverse―the unpacking, the packing, the setting down in my room, the stuffing into my pocket, the closing of my fingers around it when Shigaev placed it in my hands. The problem, I realized, was that my eyes had been focused entirely on Shigaev and not his hand or the object. I was looking in the wrong direction entirely. Newspaper fades too quickly anymore. It fades and crinkles, becomes brittle. It flakes away in shapeless yellow specks―large dust―and someday even the clipping of his obituary will be as absent as my memory of the man behind it, and that two story house, and all of his lovers, and that thing he gave me, whatever it was. |
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Irkland
1998-2005