Price of Silence

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2008-09-08T15:41:00.000-06:00

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Story 16: Where Water Leads Her

2008-05-06T14:36:00.004-06:00

All alone on the porch, Natalie was rocking in the metal glider, trying to match the rhythm to the waves one of the last boats of the night had just sent into the cement retaining wall around Lake Tapawingo. The stairs squeaked, and when she looked over, Chris had cracked the door open and was squeezing through, as if he didn’t think he deserved very much space, and then he was sitting next to her on the white vinyl cushions, grinning.

“I want to talk to you,” he said very quietly.

He was tan for so early in the summer. They hadn’t seen each other for months, since Christmas of their senior year. They hadn’t spoken since their separate graduations two weeks ago, his in Missouri and hers in Boulder. She thought he might be nervous, but she couldn’t remember him ever seeming nervous before. “OK.”

“In a week I’m moving to Chicago permanently,” he said.

“I know,” Natalie said. “Congratulations on your new job.”

He waved his hands to quiet her. “You said you’d make a decision by now. Remember?”

In fact, Natalie had spent an entire semester thinking about their future, or lack of it, without coming to a decision.

“You have a week,” he told her. Then he got up and, she thought, sneaked off the porch, turning once to grin at her before disappearing down the stairs. She still couldn’t believe that he’d given her an ultimatum.

Her mother came out on the porch. “Was someone here?”

“Chris came by,” Natalie said.

“Are you going out tonight?”

Natalie shook her head. “No. He just wanted to tell me he’s moving to Chicago.”

Her mother stood there, an odd look on her face, and brushed a strand of red hair out of her eyes. “I’m sorry, Natalie.”

Natalie shrugged. “Don’t be. I’ve known he would for a long time.”

Her mother paused for a moment. “Are you hungry?”

“A little.”

“Your father is having a Winstead’s craving. Care to go down to the Plaza?”

“Sure,” Natalie answered, feeling that the world was racing by.

“I can’t find Debbie.”

“She went for a drive. Said she needed to be alone. We can bring her something back.”

“Let’s go then,” her mother said.

**

Once seated in a blue booth in the center of the restaurant, they immediately ordered a chocolate shake big enough for the three of them. No one said much, but conversations swirled around them while Natalie tried desperately to concentrate. What a greeting from someone she hadn’t seen in months! She sucked on her straw in time with the words “I’m moving, I’m moving, I’m moving.” Fragments of conversations with Becky, her mother, and Debbie came to mind: When are you going to see him? Why doesn’t he come to visit? Face it, he met someone else. You should too.

When he father asked her why she was smiling so much, she realized she must have had an idiotic look on her face. She felt herself blushing.

“Are you going to tell us why Chris came by?” he inquired finally.

“He wanted to tell me that he was moving to Chicago.”

Her father’s face stilled. “Did he ask you to move with him?” Her mother’s eyes widened.

“No,” Natalie said, but she could see he was still worried. A little chocolate shake seeped from the corner of his mouth. Natalie reached out with her napkin and wiped it.

“Do you want to?” he asked warily.

“I don’t know, Dad.” He kept staring at her until she looked away, tried to pay attention to nearby conversations, but the voices circled around her like flavor stirred into a drink and turned into something else entirely. The young woman in the booth to her left bent down to talk to her toddler. He looked up at Natalie and silently pleaded, Don’t leave me alone in a strange place! But that was nonsense, Natalie decided. Chris had already lived in Chicago the previous summer, while he did an internship at the Tribune. She turned to the family of girls across the aisle. I’m too sure! one of them thought. Barely a teenager and already she had lost her sense of romance. Natalie tried the group of boys at the table behind her parents, but they were useless. They gazed at her with eyes that wanted to play Pac-Man.

The waitress dropped off their plates of burgers and fries. Natalie outlined her French fries in ketchup. Then she looked up at her father and said, “I just don’t know!” His face settled into deeper lines as she spoke.

**

Debbie was hanging off the edge of her bed, trying to find something under it, when Natalie brought her a cold burger.

“I put the fries in the oven,” she said. “Want me to heat up this too?”

“No, I like them cold,” Debbie said.

“Here’s a shake.”

“Thanks. Hey—”

“What?”

“I saw Chris on my walk back here.”

“Yeah,” Natalie said, “he came over and told me he was moving to Chicago.”

Debbie shrieked.

Natalie’s father stuck his head in the room. “Everything OK?”

“Yes, Mr. Fisher.”

Ever since Natalie had pointed out how daintily her mother ate fried food, Debbie had made a point of eating burgers and fried chicken in huge bites—but only when they were alone. Now she stuffed one-third of the burger into her mouth. Not that Winstead’s burgers were that big.

“You’re stalling,” Natalie informed her, but Debbie continued to gobble the burger. Then she went downstairs to fetch the fries, returning with a large plate containing the fries and one glob each of ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise. The arrangement was so symmetrical that Natalie ate two fries and then began fry-painting with the condiments.

“Ever considered opening your own restaurant?” she asked, but Debbie was apparently determined to do nothing but eat.

When she had finished all the fries, she glared briefly at Natalie and said, “I am so jealous of you!”

“Why?”

“Because you get to go off with this guy!”

“I’m not going off with him!”

“You’ve got to!”

Carefully removing the plate to a nightstand, Natalie moved over and hugged Debbie, then shook her a little.

“I’m not going away, Debbie,” she said. “After you leave, I’ll stay here for the rest of the summer and then take that publishing course in Boulder.”

Debbie put her head on Natalie’s shoulder. “I’ve had a feeling ever since I drove here,” she told Natalie. “That senior year was it as far as our being together in the same place all the time. And Chris just proved me right!”

“You’re getting carried away,” Natalie informed her. Debbie glared back.

“I’m allowed! I don’t always have to be practical!”

They lay down next to each other on Natalie’s bed and were quiet for a while. Then Debbie said, “Nothing like this ever happens to me. I have everything planned out, and it all seems good. But then Chris comes along and tells you he’s moving, and you know he wants you to go, and my entire life seems pathetic.”

Natalie didn’t respond. Debbie turned to face her and demanded, “And why are you so calm?”

When she woke up after midnight, alone on top of her covers, Natalie couldn’t remember if she’d answered. But the next morning, she noticed everyone looked at her differently over breakfast, as if she were—what? A kept woman? She got some coffee and went down to the dock, where Debbie joined her almost immediately.

“I’m sorry I was so weird last night,” she said. “I was startled. But I am still jealous.” Debbie blew on her coffee. “Because I’ve never connected with a guy. And Chris has always been so romantic, and you don’t even seem to care.”

“I haven’t reached the caring stage yet,” Natalie informed her. “I’m still trying to make a decision.” But she thought, I could go. But what would I do? When had she become so sensible? Perhaps all these years of friendship had caused her and Debbie to switch personalities.

“It’s your fault,” Debbie continued. “I expect relationships with men to be as good as our friendship.”

Another compliment from Debbie. That made at least five in the last two weeks from a woman who tended more toward assessment than support. Natalie asked, “What’s so good about it?” Then she was dumbfounded when Debbie had an instant response.

“Well, it’s lasted almost ten years. And we’ve never been mad enough at each other to stop being friends.”

Natalie smiled at the lake and agreed with Debbie, whose presence in her summer home, in her grandparents’ home, anchored it in her life. She didn’t know why. At times all her family had crowded into this house, almost burst out the walls with their exuberance. Yet Debbie had driven her red truck from Boulder to Kansas City and walked in the door one time, and the house had shifted from the dimension of childhood and dependence on family to the present, as real as the pink-beige sandstone buildings on the University of Colorado campus had been for the past four years. That’s why we’re still friends, she thought. Even though she knew the house would shift back when Debbie left in two weeks.

“You’ve never fallen in love because you never wanted to put in the effort,” Natalie theorized.

Debbie looked at her, exasperated. She had been growing out her blondish hair—“because you know short hair makes you look young, and I want to look old and experienced for my interviews”—and it reached to her shoulders now. “That is so rude. I make efforts.”

“Yes, but not with men. You expect it to happen all on its own, magically or something. As if love were going to drop down in front of you on the way to the UMC.”

“Thanks, O Delphic oracle,” Debbie said loftily. “I’ll become eminently practical like you and then maybe some man will ask me to move to—New Delhi!”

**

Natalie fetched more coffee and remained on the dock for a long time, content to simply sit. She noticed once that Debbie had been replaced by her mother, who was wrapped in a yellow towel and looking at her sadly.

“Don’t do it, Natalie,” she said abruptly.

“Huh?”

“Don’t follow a man around the way I did.” Then she dumped the towel in a heap on the dock, climbed down into the water, and swam out to the buoy in her matching red suit and cap.

Now I’m going just to prove I’d never be as traditional as you. Was that how women ended up where they did—because they said yes to someone years ago and were still following him? Natalie shook her head. These were dangerous musings.

Chris had been a summer romance. If she said that to herself often enough, she knew she would believe it eventually. OK, two summers, or at least a summer and a half, until her uncle had died and created distances spanning heaven and earth in her life.

She thought of how they’d gone dancing on their first date, three years ago. She couldn't remember the day, but she saw the country-rock bar, heard peanut shells crunch under her feet, and tasted the Coors. For a moment, she couldn’t wait for him to put his hands on her waist and pull her into a crowd again. Then she saw the red cap dividing the water, now coming toward the dock, and the image vanished. She stomped into the house and found her father sitting on the couch, reading the paper’s special section about the upcoming party conventions.

He looked at her and put the paper down. “What is it?”

“You can’t imagine what Mom just said to me!”

“After a quarter-century of marriage, I just might be able to.” He patted the brown fabric next to him, and she sat down. She noticed the picture of Reagan in the paper had been torn a little.

“She said I shouldn’t follow a man around like she had.”

“Really?” He stiffened, then folded the paper and tossed it across her, onto the pile on the hearth. “Well, she did follow me here.”

“But I’m not her. Why does she think I’m just like her?”

“Of course you’re not!” he said. “You’re a mixture of both of us.”

They stared at each other for a moment, both dissatisfied. Then he asked, “Don’t you want to be like your mother and me?”

“Dad, I just graduated from college. I want to find a job and start my life on my own.”

“And would going to Chicago help?” he asked. She was startled.

“I don’t know!”

“Why don’t you know?” he asked sharply. “You’ve been with him for three years!”

“Because we’ve never been together long enough for me to be certain of him,” she said.

“You don’t have to be certain before you make a decision, Natalie.” He spoke patiently, as if she were still very young.

“I don’t?” After sitting for a few moments, unable to say anything more, Natalie went upstairs to take a shower but had to wait for Debbie to finish. Her father came up shortly afterward, went into his bedroom, and closed the door, but his telephone voice was too loud for a hollow brown door to hold it in. He was still talking when Natalie and Debbie left to go hang out on the Plaza.

**

When they returned, they were startled by the sound of too many voices in the living room. Natalie walked in to find Chris, his parents seated on either side of him on the couch, chatting with her parents and eating Chinese food.

“Great lo mein!” Chris greeted her. “Have some.”

“Sit down and fortify yourselves, girls,” his mother Beryl said. “Your parents invited us over for a discussion.”

“Uh, maybe I should eat upstairs,” Debbie offered.

“No, stay!” Natalie said, panicked. A discussion with a capital D. Her parents were occupying the only chairs, so she and Debbie sat on the hearth. Chris and his father Joe handed them plates of vegetable lo mein and wontons and kung pao chicken. Her mother handed her chopsticks and a napkin and a significant look.

I had nothing to do with this, Natalie thought back, but all she said was, “Can somebody get us some drinks?” She was determined not to contribute to this conversation more than was absolutely necessary.

Her father took the hint. “While you were gone today, Natalie, I talked to a colleague of mine who teaches at the University of Chicago. I told her that you might be going to Chicago and asked if you could stay with her.”

“Oh, I might be!” Natalie said, mustering all her sarcasm. She wished the fireplace would change into a vacuum and suck her up and out. Her mother raised her eyebrows, and Natalie returned the favor.

“It’s not appropriate for you to live with Chris.”

Debbie’s eyes widened, and she almost swallowed a wonton whole. When she began to cough, Natalie hit her between the shoulder blades. Her mother asked, “Are you all right?”

“I always eat fried food in big bites,” Debbie explained, which made Natalie giggle.

“Why?” her mother asked, nibbling a wonton.

“No reason,” they said in unison.

Her father pressed his point. “Did you understand what I said, Natalie?”

“Dad! I haven’t seen Chris in six months and you think I’m going to live with him?” Did they have to discuss her nonexistent sex life in two family groupings?

“That would be a little hasty,” Chris said, smiling slyly.

Natalie glared at him. She was sure it was all a plot to get back at her for her refusal to make a decision. “I’m glad all of you have made up your minds that I should go. I haven’t.”

“We’re not trying to pressure you, honey,” her father said. “We’re just making plans in case you do go.”

“You two are young,” Joe said. “If this doesn’t work out, you can always move back here.”

Clearly they were all against her. Even Beryl was nodding, the same woman who had only tolerated her the first year she had dated Chris.

“Don’t you think it’s a little odd that all of you are so much more intent on this than I am?” Natalie asked her father.

“Chris is the only one you’ve ever loved,” he pointed out. “I don’t think you should give up just yet.”

Natalie busied herself with her food.

He continued. “And also, I don’t think following a man around is always such a bad thing.” He stared at Ashley for a while.

“You needn’t repeat everything I say, Natalie,” her mother snapped.

Debbie leaned over and muttered, “They’ve got you surrounded. Throw up your hands and pretend to surrender.”

“Thank God you’re here,” Natalie replied. Then to her father, she said, “OK. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“When I talked to Julie—Professor McClintock—she said you could stay with her for a month or two. She also said she would look into jobs for you at local presses.”

“That was nice of her, considering she doesn’t know me,” Natalie said.

“She’s very nice. I think you would be safe with her.”

To her left, her mother was rolling her eyes. Her father handed her a piece of paper with Julie McClintock’s phone number. To her right, Chris and his parents watched her accept the paper as if it were the transfer of sacred objects. Natalie stood up, and Debbie followed.

“I’ll give her a call,” she told them. “And I’ll let you know when I decide what to do. I really don’t have anything else to say.” She grabbed Debbie’s arm and walked through the kitchen and out onto the road. They had passed only three houses when Chris caught up to them, panting. His brown hair was sticking out on one side.

“That’s all?”

“Look, Chris,” Natalie said, turning around, “I thought that I would come here this summer and see you and we would say goodbye. That was my plan.”

“I didn’t want to,” he said simply.

“You’re just going to have to wait until I make up my mind.” She turned around and linked arms with Debbie, ignoring him. Eventually they heard his footsteps retreating, or maybe it was just the distance they were creating between a summer romance and their friendship of almost a decade.

That night the two of them walked around the lake twice, with a pit stop at the house to get drinks and snacks. “I want to wash away the taste of that food,” Natalie said, and luckily her mother had baked cupcakes the day before. They took six with them, along with apple juice to quiet the dust that got in their throats every time a car drove by.

They didn’t say much, just commented on the scenery of the lake here and there. Then Debbie said, “You act like Chris has done something to you.”

“He has! He keeps asking me to make decisions, and I can never decide what to do about him. I love him, but I don’t know if we have a future—I keep going back and forth.”

“When did you start being so practical? You were so impulsive when I first met you.”

“When I saw how much easier your life was when you planned things.”

“Really?” Debbie looked pleased.

“Yes. The only decision I could manage to make was that I wanted to work in publishing. So I signed up for the publishing course and I researched what presses I’d like to work at and I even looked at apartments near some of these presses. I told Chris I was doing all this, and he never said anything. So now he’s trying to get me to change my plans without ever really asking!”

“Oh, Natalie,” Debbie said a little sadly. “I do make plans all the time—I can’t seem to help it—but half the time I end up changing them.”

“Well, so?”

“So change yours.”

They stopped in front of an endless expanse of yellow, red, and white zinnias. There was no turf—only zinnias and a flagstone walkway. “Now that’s a monoculture,” Debbie said.

“You’ve all turned into Stepford wives,” Natalie complained. “It’s like Chris put a spell on you or something. I’m the only one who seems to be able to think about it.”

“Here’s something for you to think about,” Debbie shot back. “Can you live with the ‘what if’ factor?”

“I don’t know,” Natalie answered. “I’ve been too busy wondering why everyone was acting so weird.”

“I think that’s the major question. If you don’t go, will you wonder what might have happened?”

“Of course I’ll wonder,” Natalie said. “I’ve been wondering about him for three years.”

“So go then, and stop wondering.”

“I guess you’re right,” Natalie said. “But all the same, sometimes I just hate how logical you can be.”

**

The next afternoon, hot and muggy like all June afternoons in Kansas City, they were in the center of the round, wet world, lying head-to-toe in an enormous inner tube. Exactly halfway between the dock and the buoy—or at least, that’s what Debbie said. Natalie wasn’t looking, except when Debbie wiggled her toes. Natalie wanted to tickle her, but the other day Debbie had kicked her in the head when she did that. A boat went by, and its waves spread out and rocked them for a few seconds. The choices here were pure: lie in the sun and brown or roll off into the water and cool the skin.

Natalie didn’t berate herself for waiting so long to make the decision. She had needed to make it here, where her relationship with Chris had begun, bloomed briefly, and then gone into a long dormancy. She had needed her parents and Debbie to encourage her to risk this—if they had been opposed, the grief would have kept her near them. This summer, she had thought to grasp the end of her relationship with Chris, knot it up to the beginning, and hide it somewhere in this house. Ever since her uncle had died two years ago (even since her great-uncle had died when she was fifteen), summers at the lake had been lived at the edge of grief. Her memories of Chris belonged in such a place. But their future, if they had one—that needed a new place to take root.

Today, when she swam to the dock, she would climb out into a new life, one stretching before her for decades. She couldn’t wait to get started.

The End

Story 15: Deirdre, in Xeriscape: Hopes and Plans

2008-05-01T11:02:00.002-06:00

We were gathered for the last party of college. The first one had been held at Josh’s house four years ago, so we insisted that he also host the last. I was sitting next to Josh on the soft brown couch, Natalie on his other side. Then came Debbie in the big red chair and Becky perched on its arm, planning her future as an award-winning journalist. Becky was leaving for her job at the Detroit Free Press in two weeks and hoped to cover the presidential contest between Reagan and Mondale. I had no job prospects; I was staying put at the University of Colorado, beginning a master’s degree in botany next year. Jodi was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, talking to Josh’s mom about her travel plans this summer; in August she would leave for California and a degree in physics. Every time I thought of it I got a huge lump in my throat. Jodi and I had lived in the same state for almost fifteen years, and although our friendship had suffered in the past few years, the thought of being a time zone away from her hurt me.

The reason for our suffering was sitting right next to me, his arms up on the sofa behind me and Natalie, looking like a man wonderfully content with his life. Josh also had a paying job, with the Colorado Environmental Coalition. He had already asked those of us who were staying in Colorado to volunteer. I had agreed, but neither Debbie nor Natalie had been willing to commit. They were leaving to spend two weeks with Natalie’s family at their lake house near Kansas City, and then Debbie would begin her job at a local marketing firm, and Natalie was taking a course in publishing. I, however, had nothing planned for the summer; I intended to play as much as possible before I devoted myself to memorizing the flora of the world in the fall.

Jodi came over to say goodbye. She was spending the evening with family. I got up and hugged her. She said she would see me at graduation, and then Josh walked her to the door, where he kissed her on the cheek. They said a few words, and then she left. I blinked back tears, but when Josh sat down again, he was smiling.

“What are you so happy about?” Natalie asked him.

He looked at each of us in turn. “I don’t love her anymore.”

Natalie widened her eyes at me. That made me want to cry even more. I wished I wasn’t mourning Jodi’s departure, but I couldn’t help it. I also wished that I believed she was going to miss me as much as I would miss her.

Josh continued. “I loved her for all of college. I pretended I didn’t, but I did.”

“But she didn’t love you,” I said, hoping to hurt him.

He turned to me, his blues eyes calm. “No, she never did. Last week, I realized that she never would. I don’t know what took me so long.”

“I do,” I said.

Josh put his hand on my shoulder, and I started to cry. “You two have been friends forever,” he said. “You’ll stay friends.”

“I hope so,” I told him.

“At least you’ve resolved it,” Natalie piped up from her side of the couch. “I don’t know if things will ever work with Chris.”

She was curled up into a ball and had a forlorn expression on her face. What a cheery group we were.

Partly to save myself from my own bad mood, I said, “You should try one more time. Even if it seems hopeless.”

She stared at me as if I had said the most wonderful thing in the world. “You think so?”

“I do,” I told her.

“I agree,” Josh said. “Otherwise you’ll always worry about what might have happened.”

In that moment, as she looked from Josh to me, her face hopeful, I had the same feeling I’d felt years ago, when she and I and Becky drove up to Rocky Mountain National Park. That feeling of belonging to a group that I’d had so seldom in my life. I hadn’t expected to feel that way again—at least, not around her.

Natalie got up to talk to Debbie, but Josh and I remained on the couch.

“I guess we’re all moving on,” he mused. “Even those of us who are staying in town.”

“Yes,” I said, keeping eye contact. Our faces were so close that I could easily have kissed him. I wanted to confess to him that all the while he’d loved Jodi, I’d loved him, but I didn’t, and keeping that secret didn’t bother me any more. For the first time, I felt that he might someday welcome such a declaration.

“Are you coming to the meeting this week?” he asked me. “The coalition plans to send out a mailing about Mondale’s and Reagan’s environmental records.”

“Yes,” I assured him. “I’ll be there.”

Story 14: Last Chance

2008-04-24T08:30:00.002-06:00

It was the first time Natalie had been to the Country Club Plaza since the lights had been lit that Thanksgiving, and as she got out of the car, the effect of the more distant lights seeming to hang on air filled her with happiness. Surely good things could happen on such a magical night.

She had agreed to meet Chris at a French restaurant on a side street, a quiet place where they could have a conversation without shouting. He was sitting at a smallish booth when she walked in, and she settled in next to him. The waiter brought bread, and Natalie ordered a bottle of wine. When she reached for a piece of bread, he took her hand and held it. Her eyes began to well up.

“Jennifer and I are not together anymore,” he told her. “We broke up before we left Chicago in August. My problem is, I don’t know if we are either.”

“I think we’re hanging on for the sake of the past,” Natalie said.

“So over this Christmas vacation,” he said, “we need to make a future.”

The waiter came back, and Natalie ordered a lobster bisque. Chris ordered a salad.

“I’d agree to that,” Natalie said, “if there wasn’t so much from the past hanging over us.”

“Like the death of your uncle?” he asked.

“Like the death of my uncle,” she repeated. “And the fact that you met someone else.”

“That too,” he acknowledged.

“Let’s not worry about a future,” Natalie said. “Let’s concentrate on getting comfortable with each other again.”

This Christmas was the last they would celebrate as college students, which gave it a certain bittersweet quality, and the reminder of her uncle’s death only strengthened that feeling. Just after Tom had died, she had withdrawn from Chris to dwell on her grief, and now she could see how that had wounded him. But in the eighteen months since then, Chris had been the only comfort for the loss of her uncle. She moved closer to him, so that their shoulders touched when they reached for bread or picked up a fork. They sat there with their hands on each other’s thighs and kissed for the first time since last Christmas, during their junior year. When their food arrived, they ate mostly in silence, breaking it only to comment on the meal or offer each other a taste.

After dinner, they walked the Plaza until they came to the fountain outside Woolf Brothers. The store was dark inside and the fountain dry, but they sat down by it nevertheless, listening to the voices of holiday shoppers and the rush of cars down Ward Parkway. For Natalie, it recalled the sound of voices that she could hear sitting at night on the dock at Lake Tapawingo. In winter, of course, those voices moved inside, or perhaps, she thought, moved here. Kansas City had become a place of voices caught on the wind, heard for only a moment before she could decipher what they were saying. It was a place of words without context. She and Chris huddled there for almost an hour, comparing notes on school and talking about family and mutual friends. When they could stand it no longer, they walked down to Houlihan’s and warmed up at the bar by drinking Irish coffees.

The next day, Natalie found a poem in her mailbox, hand-written on thick paper. She walked down to the dock to read it and sat at the top of the ladder, cracking the lake’s semi-frozen surface with her heel.

“Hero-Worship”
by Amy Lowell

A face seen passing in a crowded street,
A voice heard singing music, large and free;
And from that moment life is changed, and we
Become of more heroic temper, meet
To freely ask and give, a man complete.
Radiant because of faith, we dare to be
What Nature meant us. Brave idolatry
Which can conceive a hero! No deceit,
No knowledge taught by unrelenting years,
Can quench this fierce, untamable desire.
We know that what we long for once achieved
Will cease to satisfy. Be still our fears;
If what we worship fail us, still the fire
Burns on, and it is much to have believed.

There was no name on it, but she recognized Chris’s handwriting. He had never given her a poem before. She read the poem again, noting how it fit their relationship: they had met more than two years ago, when he had seen her walking down the street around the lake and had stopped her. That he had found a poem so appropriate for them delighted her. Was he saying that she had made him a man complete? That he still believed in the two of them? And if he didn’t, how could she criticize him? She didn’t believe in a future for them, but she still dreamed of one every night before she fell asleep.

Natalie eye fell on these lines:

We know that what we long for once achieved
Will cease to satisfy.

She shivered and ran back to the house, where she rummaged through her father’s desk. Using his best pen, she calligraphed that line on the nicest piece of paper she could scrounge up. Underneath, she added, “But first we must achieve it.” And below that, she added these lines from “Sappho” by James Wright:

Love is a cliff,
a clear, cold curve of stone, mottled by stars,
smirched by the morning, carved by the dark sea
till stars and dawn and waves can slash no more,
till the rock’s heart is found and shaped again.

It was an austere view of love, but one that had always seemed true to her. She wanted a love that would reshape her, but instead she had one that was always receding from her. She feared that their future might never arrive. If she wasn’t careful, Natalie thought, she might wait forever.

She punched holes in both pieces of paper and tied them with a scrap of ribbon, pulling the sides of the green bow out until they were exactly the same length. Then she replaced them in the original envelope. Late that night, when she was certain Chris’s entire family would be in bed, she left her room to deliver the original and the response back to him. As she tripped going down the dark stairs, she heard murmurs in her parents’ bedroom. Her father called after her, “Natalie?”

“Yes?”

“Is something the matter?”

“No, I’m just going for a walk.”

“At this time of night?”

“Just a short one, Dad. I’ll be right back.”

Chris’s house was completely dark. Natalie knew no one around the lake locked their doors much. She amused herself with the idea of sneaking in, creeping up the stairs to Chris’s room, and sliding into bed with him. She still wanted him, but it was hard to find privacy at Christmastime. Their sex life had always been freer in the summers. But she didn’t feel courageous enough to actually try to get that close to him that night, in the dark, without permission. She left the poems in his mailbox.

Chris stopped by the next day to thank her for the poems and invited her to take a walk around the lake. As they walked, she told him about her fantasy of the night before and how she’d lost her nerve.

“I want to show you something,” he said as they rounded the other side of the lake. Two streets up from the houses on the lake proper, a new house was being built on an oversized lot. It had all its walls, but past the holes where windows would go, construction workers moved, carrying tools and pieces of wood.

“See that path?” he asked her, indicating a driveway that dwindled to a single track. “The people in the houses on either side can’t see anyone walking there because of the garage and fence in the way. And the house itself is far away from all the other houses.”

Natalie thought her entire body might be blushing. “It is isolated,” she said softly.

“Let’s pretend to go out for a movie Christmas night.”

“And we’ll come here,” she responded.

“Yes,” he said, and kissed her.

**

At least they had this brief season of being together, Natalie thought on Christmas Day, when Chris and his parents walked in the door. All of them remarked on how long it had been since they had gathered in one room, and then they sat down to the serious business of opening presents, eating dessert (Christmas dinner would come later), and drinking holiday punch.

Natalie and Chris sat on the floor, between their two sets of parents, and smiled at each other underneath all that scrutiny. Their presents for each other were singular and simple: books. Natalie gave Chris the autobiography of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the journalist who had exposed the economics of lynching, and he gave her clothbound copies of all four of Toni Morrison’s books.

“Thank you,” Natalie said. “I always need more books.”

“Always,” Chris said, laughing.

Natalie discovered that all four copies were signed. “Where did you get these?” she asked, impressed.

“In a used bookstore in Chicago,” he said. The comment hung in the air, pleasing Natalie because he had thought of her last summer, but reminding them of what had come between them.

Chris began reading the first paragraph of Tar Baby to her: “He believed he was safe…” His parents exchanged glances and sighed about the high school classes they would resume teaching in the new year. Natalie’s father mentioned how he was looking forward to his spring semester class at CU on American politics. “I’m going to recruit every last one of them to work on defeating Reagan in the 1984 election,” he declared, laughing. And her mother kept passing boxes of chocolates and plates of cookies to her left and her right.

After dinner, Natalie and Chris left, ostensibly to get his car and go to a movie, but instead they circled stealthily around her house, listening to the voices of their parents inside, and then walked around the lake to the house under construction. Once they started up the driveway, Natalie’s fears stopped her. The two of them stood furtively where the track began.

“Let’s make sure the coast is clear,” Chris whispered. They looked around and saw no one. The lit rooms of houses around them held little but Christmas trees and the remains of dinners. They crept across the lot and took off their shoes before entering the house. They had nothing with them except their coats, which they made into their bed, their hats and gloves for pillows, and their desire to forget they’d been apart or ever would be separated again. Once inside the inner rooms of the house, there was no light; all they could see was their eyes and the occasional flash of teeth.

“I want to make up for all the time we’ve spent apart this last year,” Chris told her, pulling her down onto her coat. “I loved every minute of the internship at the Chicago Tribune last summer, but I missed you. I wanted to be there, and I wanted to be here with you.” But Natalie wasn’t quite convinced yet.

“I need to ask you something.”

“What?”

“Are you going to wear a condom?”

But he shook his head. “I don’t need to,” he said. “I never slept with Jen. Just you for the past two years.” He took her face in his hands and kissed her.

For the first time this Christmas season, Natalie felt happy. “Why not?” she asked.

“I thought one long-distance relationship was enough. I didn’t want two,” he answered. “And I couldn’t imagine how I would tell you.”

He slid his hands under her clothes. “I’ll keep you warm,” he said, and covered them with his coat. It was so silent where they were, except for the occasional slam of a door and a burst of Christmas music into the night. They said very little to each other, and that only in whispers. The first time they had ever admitted loving each other had been over Christmas break of their sophomore year, two years ago. On Natalie’s last night of vacation, she had rushed the words out. Tonight, she was glad she’d said them, glad she hadn’t waited to be sure, because here they were two years later, and she felt that she would never be certain of him.

Afterward they lay together, shivering a little, for as long as they could stand the cold. Natalie felt oddly light. Then it came to her: she hadn’t thought about Tom all evening. In fact, she hadn’t thought about her uncle much since Chris had taken her out to dinner several nights ago. Maybe, she told herself, Tom’s loss had blended with Chris’s absence, so that when she was away from Chris, she thought she was mourning her uncle. Natalie wondered what she had been grieving these last few months.

As she tiptoed up the stairs that night, she saw that her parents had left their door ajar. They lay entwined, her father’s head on her mother’s shoulder, and Natalie felt desperately tender toward them but also jealous. She’d loved this entire day, spent with Chris and their families, but she wanted the two of them to be able to go about openly. She was tired of sneaking around. She and Chris had not been able to spend a night together since their sophomore year of college.

The next morning, Natalie stayed in bed and daydreamed. Chris had always been a good lover, but the night before she had felt closer to him than she ever had. For the two hours they had lain together on the plywood subfloor of that halfway-constructed house, she had felt like he was the only person in the world. One thing seemed clear: she had at least the possibility of a future with Chris.

She was wondering how soon they could find their way to that house again when the phone rang, and she picked it up. It was her best friend Debbie.

“Merry Christmas a day late!” Debbie said. “I was so busy yesterday, I forgot to call.”

“Merry Christmas to you too,” Natalie said.

“How’s it going?” Debbie asked, too casually. Natalie knew what she meant.

“We spent two hours last night in a new house that’s being built on the other side of the lake,” Natalie told her, laughing. “It was great.”

“I guess you’re getting along then,” Debbie said. “That’s good.”

Something in her tone resurrected a feeling in Natalie that she’d been pressing down all week, ever since their dinner. A feeling of doubt that what was happening with Chris was any more permanent that anything that had ever happened between them. A fear that her heart might be broken for a second time—her uncle’s death being the first. Natalie curled up under the covers and listened to Debbie.

Debbie was saying, “Is he still going out with the woman he met in Chicago?”

“No, he isn’t. And he said they never slept together.”

“Did you think he was telling the truth?”

“Yes,” Natalie said, realizing that she had never even questioned him. That made her feel happy again, briefly. She still had some faith in him left.

“Be careful, Natalie,” Debbie said. “Don’t rush into thinking everything’s OK. You have time to figure things out.”

“Do I?” Natalie challenged her. “How am I ever going to figure this out when he and I are apart so much?”

Debbie didn’t have an answer for that.

**

It was the last night of Christmas vacation. Natalie’s parents were out with friends, and she found herself waiting for Chris. What would they say to each other tonight? He came in with a cold breeze and a bag of cheese, fruit, and chocolate. “Leftovers,” he explained. He sat down and fed her some strawberries and Russell Stover chocolates. Then he turned serious.

“We need to make a plan,” he told her.

“A plan for what?”

“Us,” he said.

“How can I plan anything with you?” Natalie said. “I have no say in your decisions. You proved that by going to Chicago last summer.”

“You could,” he said. “If we planned our future together.”

Natalie thought of her conversation with Debbie. “Don’t rush,” Debbie had said. Now more than ever, it sounded like good advice.

“You think now is the right time?” she asked him.

“I do,” he said.

“I haven’t even started looking for a job, though I always assumed I’d stay in Boulder.”

He was silent for a minute. “I’ll apply for a job at the Denver Post, but obviously, the place where I have the best connection is at the Tribune.”

“I know,” she said, thinking she should just break up with him then. It would make things so much easier.

“Why am I always the one doing this, Natalie?” he asked.

“Doing what?” she asked.

“Keeping us together. You’re were reluctant to get involved when we met, and it seems like that’s never really changed.”

She stared at him. He was curled up in a corner of the couch, eating one chocolate after another.

“Because there’s so much against us,” she said.

“Yes, there is,” he agreed with her. “I’m asking you to disregard all that and try one more time. We’ll give it six months from graduation. If it doesn’t work, then we’ll break up.”

“I’m happy when I’m with you, but my doubts keep returning,” Natalie said. “I need time to think.”

“Will you promise to make a decision by this summer?” he asked her.

She nodded.

“All right, Natalie,” Chris said, very quietly. “Think all you want. Just be careful you don’t think yourself out of a relationship that might work if you gave it a chance.” He moved closer to her and kissed her. “I’ll call you this week,” he said, and left.

Natalie sat by herself for a long time, finishing off the fruit and chocolates. Then she went upstairs to pack.

What's Coming

2008-04-24T08:26:00.002-06:00

I've got three stories left to post. I've been debating whether to post the next two, and I've decided to go ahead. They're relationship stories that wrap things up between various characters in the book, and therein lies my problem with them. The Natalie-Chris story, especially, seems too methodical, even repetitive of the other stories. It's my least favorite story in this collection. But I've referenced it in the last story, so I'm going to include it.

Disregard the "Read More"--that's all of this post.

Meme from sex

2008-04-22T15:34:00.005-06:00

Sort of fits, doesn't it?

I'll try to keep this Tag! You're It! post relevant. Here are six random facts about me.

1. I have two born-again sisters who are, obviously, pro-life.

2. My mother and grandmother both had hysterectomies, my mother sometime shortly after I was born (never gotten quite clear on that one). How's that for Catholic birth control?

3. I was in the Legion of Mary when I was about 12.

4. My sister is the only one of six children who has children--and she has six.

5. I've been in love six times.

6. I had my tubes tied in November 2003. Before that, I was on the pill for 20 years, give or take. Something like 90 percent of American women use birth control at some point in their lives. (There. I snuck in a statistic, even if it is undocumented.)

Not sure this is really about me...hmm. On the plus side, the six entries contain a lot of even numbers.

Whatever. Here are the rules:

I was tagged by SexScenesatStarbucks.

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
5. Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment at their blog.
6. Let your tagger know when your entry is up.

And I tag:

Todd
Bernard
Jer

I know it's only three...but I had to break the even-number thing that was going on. Plus, I felt shy.

(Disregard the "Read More" on this post--there is no more.)

Story 13: What About the Way You Look

2008-04-22T08:58:00.003-06:00

They sat across from each other at Tom’s Tavern in Boulder, both eating burgers. Becky wiped some mayonnaise from the corner of her mouth, and Natalie wondered how such a common gesture could seem so graceful. But Becky was always turned out. Whenever they met, Natalie came away inspired to do more with her appearance. Too bad she didn’t hang around Becky often enough for her example to have a permanent effect.

Becky said she had just come from her hairdresser in Denver. Her hair was combed back behind her ears and turned up at the ends. It smelled a little of chemicals. Natalie wished her fine hair could hold a curl that way. Some days she still wanted a head full of auburn curls, like Anne of Green Gables after she dyed her hair with “fast dye” and then had to cut it off.

“Your hair looks nice,” Natalie said.

“She’s trying to get me to go natural, but I don’t want to cut all my hair off.”

“What if you cut it at chin length and let it grow out?”

“I could do that,” Becky said. “I have some pretty headbands. But at some point I’ll have a head of hair that’s half relaxed and half frizzy. I don’t know.”

Even though it was 80 degrees outside, Becky was wearing baggy jeans. Natalie had put on shorts that morning. As she shifted, her thighs peeled reluctantly, painfully away from the vinyl seats. Tom’s was full; all the students were getting their last hamburgers before leaving for the summer. In a week, Natalie would be at Lake Tapawingo, without Chris. Becky noticed her faraway expression.

“Dreaming of your boyfriend?”

“That’s all it’s gonna be this summer. He’s doing an internship in Chicago.”

“So you didn’t break up?”

“I don’t know what happened.”

“Do you still talk to him?”

“Yeah, we talk at least once a month,” Natalie said. “We’re very close. I just don’t know if we’re still together.”

“Well, he seemed like a really nice guy. But I talked to him for only an hour.”

“That’s the way it’s beginning to feel to me too.”

“Mike and I had some problems around the two-year point,” Becky said, dipping three French fries at a time in ketchup and then mayonnaise. She’d gotten Natalie hooked on having a little mayo with her fries. She said it was a Dutch thing that her parents had picked up on one of their volunteer work trips. “Maybe there’s a two-year itch.”

Mayo was not the only thing that Becky passed on. Natalie liked to spend time with her—even if she always had to fit into Becky’s schedule—because she learned something new every time. And Becky seemed to like teaching her things. In fact, if Becky hadn’t always told her she was going to be a journalist, Natalie would have expected her to go for teaching. She never missed an opportunity.

But Natalie wanted to resolve something today, not simply play the eager student. She said to Becky, “You must not be too mad at me, or you wouldn’t have come to lunch, right?”

Becky made a small face and kept on eating her French fries. Finally she said, “It comes and goes.”

“You were right about Susan B. Anthony,” Natalie said. “She did let southern feminists segregate …”

“Stop!” Becky said, annoyed. “Can’t we ever talk about anything besides black history?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Natalie answered, remembering how they had become friends one Saturday night at a freshman year party. Scanning the living room of a frat house for Debbie, from whom she had become mysteriously separated, she recognized Becky from government class. The only student in class who had the courage to argue with their sexist, usually drunk teacher. Right now she appeared to be having another argument, this time with a fraternity brother named Jason whom Natalie knew slightly. Natalie abandoned the search for Debbie.

“So you’re just turning me down flat?” Jason was saying in amazement as Natalie walked up to them. He glanced at her as if he hoped she would go away.

“I’m seeing someone else right now,” Becky answered, also looking at Natalie quizzically.

“Do you not date white guys?” Jason asked, in a desperate search for logic in the midst of rejection.

“I have …” Becky began.

Natalie interrupted. “You know, Jason, you’re a really cute guy, but that doesn’t mean everyone wants to go out with you.”

“Well, thanks for letting me know,” he said, now truly offended. He looked at Becky and said, “You can call off the troops. I’m leaving.” He crossed the living room and went downstairs.

Natalie felt very pleased with herself. She introduced herself to Becky and said, “I like the way you take on our government teacher. He needs somebody to snap him out of his fog.”

“Like Jason,” Becky said, smiling in a resigned way.

“Yeah. He didn’t have any right to ask that.”

“Maybe not, but this is Boulder. It happens all the time.”

“Well, not any more tonight. You want a beer?”

Walking onto the porch with Becky, Natalie felt like the escort for a VIP. Becky’s outfit was all elegance, from the Benetton sweater down to her Papagallo shoes. They stood on the back lawn and chatted about classes until Debbie found them. Natalie introduced them, pleased that her circle was expanding. Diversifying.

“Wake up, Natalie,” Becky said, startling her. Across the aisle, a couple got up and left the restaurant, holding hands. “Daydreaming about Chris again?”

“I was remembering how we became friends.”

“That’s the thing, Natalie,” Becky said. Now she was picking up the small, extremely crisp fries one by one and eating them, ignoring the half of her burger that was left. “I want us to be friends. I don’t want you to try to save me anymore, and I don’t want to be teaching and preaching all the time.”

“You’re right, Becky. It’s just that you know something about everything, and asking you is easier than looking things up,” Natalie babbled, feeling that she had unwittingly stepped to the edge of a cliff and was about to measure the drop.

“You know why I know so much?”

“Uh, books? College?”

“Because that’s how I protect myself. I can always shut up some redneck with the right fact.”

“Really?” Natalie asked, thinking of rednecks—from Boulder and Lake Tapawingo both—that she couldn’t imagine stopping for facts. But surely Becky had more experience in that area.

“But with my friends,” Becky said, “I don’t always want to be the professor.”

“Then just stop,” Natalie said. “You’re always teaching. I’m not the only one bringing it on.”

“You know, you’re not the only person who’s said that to me,” Becky said, soaking her last French fry in ketchup and chewing slowly. “My mother has told me that once or twice.”

“Maybe it’s easier to talk about race in terms of facts,” Natalie speculated. “Because that way I won’t say something that might make you angry or hurt you.”

“Like what?” Becky asked, giving her an even look that seemed like a dare.

Natalie picked up her burger, which she’d been neglecting, and took a big bite. She didn’t want to lose Becky as a friend. But then again, she didn’t want to be in a tug of war with her every time they met or tiptoe around her for fear of giving offense.

“You have to promise me something.”

“What?”

“You have to promise that if you don’t like what I say to you, you won’t just leave. Promise that you’ll … say something like it back.”

“Say something like what?”

“Oh come on, Becky,” Natalie snapped. “You must say things about white people sometimes.”

“Fine,” Becky agreed, holding her hands up as if she were facing a gun. “Talk away.”

“When I was in ninth grade,” Natalie began, “there was a black guy in my English class. It was the first time I’d ever had a black student in one of my classes. He started dating a girl in the class.”

“And this bothered you?” Becky asked.

“I remember wondering why he couldn’t date someone black. It was years later before it occurred to me that there weren’t any black girls for him to date. At least not at school.”

“Not to mention that it was none of your business.”

“That too,” Natalie said, feeling that she had got her comeuppance. But Becky wasn’t finished.

“I know just how you feel,” she said very softly. “A guy I know brought his new white girlfriend to church one day. It was Palm Sunday, and every other woman in that church wore a dress and a hat, but she was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. And she was there to meet his family!”

“Does everyone at your church dress up?” Natalie asked feebly, trying to remember if she had ever worn jeans to Mass. Her family hadn’t attended all that often since they had moved to Boulder.

“Yes, women at my church always look good. This girlfriend looked like a big mess. That must be why she didn’t last long.”

The waitress came by to take their plates and leave the check. Natalie ate at Tom’s every so often because the food was so basic and correct. It was simply what it was. Her friendship with Becky had always held an element of the unknown. The two had seemed like a good fit two days ago, when they had made plans. Now Natalie peeled her thighs from the vinyl again and sighed, remembering that the only shorts she had ever seen Becky wearing were linen shorts, long and pressed. Conversations were beginning to come into her head that she didn’t want to hear.

“Are we OK now?” she asked Becky.

“You made your confession.”

“Yeah,” Natalie said, thinking how the wooden confessionals at Catholic churches always resembled coffins stood on one end.

“But I’m not a priest. I can’t absolve you.”

“No,” Natalie agreed.

“That’s why I don’t have these conversations too often. They never turn out.”

“You just have arguments or silence.”

“I argue to protect myself,” Becky said, “but I don’t like arguing with my friends.” She put ten dollars down on the table.

Glancing at the check, Natalie pulled her wallet out of her backpack and began counting ones. She put seven down on top of Becky’s ten. “Like I said, silence.”

Becky nodded thoughtfully. “With white friends, about certain subjects, yes.”

“Doesn’t that limit those friendships?”

“Yes, it does. You’re beginning to get it now.”

It was the end of another school year, Natalie told herself. Time to close certain doors and try to open others.

“Maybe this friendship does more for me than it does for you,” she said to Becky, hoping she wouldn’t rush to agree. “But I like it.”

“I do too, most of the time,” Becky said quietly. “Sometimes I think I should invite you to dinner with my family or to a party with some of my other friends, but then I never do.”

“We can see what happens next year,” Natalie said. Becky took two of her ones, and they left. Tom’s had been so well air-conditioned that at first they didn’t feel the dry heat as they walked down the Pearl Street Mall together. When they got to Broadway, Natalie said she wanted to sit down and look at the tulips for a while. Becky had to go to class. Natalie watched her disappear down Broadway. As usual, people turned to look at her.

Natalie hoped that they smiled. A year ago, she had read a magazine article about black men. They said they felt invisible at times, too visible at others. When she finished reading the article, she had made a resolution to smile at any black man she walked past on the street. Becky had noticed when they were in downtown Denver for dinner one night.

“You certainly are smiley tonight,” she said to Natalie. They walked on for another block or two. Then she asked, “Are you smiling at black men because you’re with me?” Natalie mentioned the article. Becky laughed a little and gave her a look she used to convey how strange white people could be. Natalie had the impression, however, that she wasn’t really angry. Just a little bemused.

As usual, Natalie ended her visit to the Pearl Street Mall by visiting the Boulder Bookstore. She found herself in the ethnic studies section, looking at a copy of Go Tell It on the Mountain. She decided to buy it and read it. It would be a good way to bridge the school year, when she worked and studied, with the lazy rhythms of summer, without Chris, without Becky or Debbie or her other Boulder friends, but with sun, wind, warmth, and water. She didn’t know where any of them would be next summer, after they graduated. This summer might be her last at the lake, her last summer to read, listen, and learn.

Story 12: Deirdre, in Xeriscape: A Cake of Her Own

2008-04-12T14:23:00.002-06:00

Sometimes when I give parties I like to stand on the stairs and watch the people who’ve come to my house. For a moment I feel honored and remind myself to call them or write them thank-you notes the next day, but then, I have to be honest, I eavesdrop a little and see who needs what. For me, a party is a chance to take care of people. Everyone else may be relaxing and catching up with friends, but the hostess is the one who makes that possible. No time to relax for me.

A little bit about my apartment now. When Jodi first told me she wasn’t going to live with me, two years ago this spring, I was devastated. I was so mad I couldn’t go look for my own apartment. And then one summer night at dinner, when I was complaining to my parents, my father pointed out to me that Jodi was my best friend. Actually, he said, “Jodi loves you more than anyone else.” I was startled that he had even noticed, though she has been my friend since before we were in two digits. My mother just stared at her food after he said that. We eat at eight because they’re doctors and they work late at the same hospital. After dinner I went out and sat on my bench in the yard. When I got cold enough, I came inside, said goodnight to my parents, and went upstairs. At midnight, I was still thinking. What if he meant, “Jodi loves you more than anyone else loves you”? The next day, I rented this apartment, even though it was a two-bedroom, and got a roommate by the time school started. Natalie and Debbie could barely conceal their amazement. Once I was moved in, I didn’t mind talking to Jodi anymore. And my roommate is a graduate student in philosophy. That’s so sophisticated.

This is a small party for Natalie’s twenty-first birthday. She’s the oldest of our group. Yes, I am part of this group, and it was my turn to have a party. Debbie is here, of course, sitting on one side of Josh on my roommate’s ratty couch. She wouldn’t let me buy a new one. “I want to contribute,” she told me. On the other side of Josh—Jodi. They’ve been friends since the beginning of freshman year. One time, they were lovers. One time, Josh and I slept together, but I still don’t feel I’ve had love. Jodi gets up and goes to the keg, followed by Josh’s beautiful blue eyes. I wish mine were his color. I come down the stairs and sit beside him, waiting until he stops staring after Jodi and notices me.

“Here we all are, still friends,” he shouts near my ear, over the music.

“Does that surprise you?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I’ve seen so many people come and go, but we’re still hangin’.”

It’s true. Things shift among us, but no one has split off yet. Then he stands up and shouts: “A toast!”

Nobody notices ’cause the music is so loud. He shouts “Toast! Toast! Toast!” until everyone hears him. Becky lifts up the needle on the turntable. The Police are still singing somewhere, I suppose, but we can’t hear them.

“Toast,” he says, quietly. All seven of us crowd into the living room, between the couch and the entertainment center and my rocking chair. It’s cozy. “To Natalie, who is the only adult in this group and will have to set an example for all of us.”

We laugh, and then he continues: “I want to tell you how I met her. I was standing in line outside the UMC waiting to buy a poster, and I saw her in front of me in line. All I could see was her profile. She had the unhappiest profile I had ever seen. I said to myself, “‘I’ve got to make that girl smile!’ So I went and said hi.”

“You just wanted to move up in line,” Becky says, and everyone laughs. We all know what an operator Josh is. And he’s shameless. He doesn’t even care.

“That’s how we met. We bought our posters and sat by the fountain and talked. And then Jodi walked by, and I introduced myself to her too. That’s how this group began.”

“Good thing you were there to gather us all in, like a hen herding a flock of chicks,” Jodi says mockingly.

He smiles at her. Then he looks at Debbie. “Your turn.”

Natalie and Debbie laugh their superfriend laugh. “Eighth-grade science class,” Debbie recalls. “Frogs in formaldehyde!”

“Yeah!” Natalie shouts, gesturing with a stirrer as if she wanted to dissect something. They’re both really drunk, and I guess they don’t get Absolut too often because they’re drinking all of mine. My parents let me take whatever liquor I want. I wonder if there’s a shot left for me, but getting it right now would be rude. Now Josh is prompting me.

“I met Natalie in government class,” I tell him, smiling at both of them. If Josh had never seen Jodi at the fountain and introduced her to Natalie, would Jodi and I be roommates now? At least I wouldn’t have lowered her opinion of me by sleeping with him.

“And I met Natalie through you guys. I don’t remember when,” my roommate Robin adds. Thank you, I think. Not everybody has to worship at their shrine.

Becky is last, and as usual she brings us down to a serious level. “Natalie saved me from a racist frat boy at a party,” she says, sounding world-weary. When she says such things I always secretly wonder if I’ve ever thought as that frat boy did. Or acted. I hope not. And then there was the odd way she said the word saved. There is less of a silence than sometimes follows Becky’s pronouncements. Natalie gets some shot glasses and the bottle of Absolut and pours everyone a glass. We down them. Then she asks Robin, “Hey, can you put your stereo out on the porch so we can go out and dance on the lawn? It is just so crowded and hot in here.”

My apartment is the one closest to Goss, so at least we won’t be blasting music past people in my building. After Natalie pours me a couple more shots, I don’t worry about it anymore. We’re dancing to the Talking Heads; some people walking down Goss even joined in for a while, though they were kind of gross. I hate dreadlocks, especially on pasty-faced Boulder hippies. Or Mohawks, for that matter. You should be able to get a comb through your hair, and if your hair is standing straight up, it should be because it grows that way.

So we dance off some of the alcohol, and then Natalie starts her favorite game: truth or dare. I don’t know why she likes it so much. She asks me if I’m in love with Josh, I guess because it was just too interesting to her that I sat down next to him. I am, but I won’t admit it to her. While I say no Jodi stares at me, which just exasperates me further: she doesn’t love Josh, but apparently nobody else can either. Josh stands there staring at his beer bottle. When it’s my turn, I try to embarrass Natalie.

“Have you ever been pregnant?”

She glares at me. I’m pleased that I’ve hit a nerve. The silence grows really uncomfortable, and finally I say, “You have to answer!”

She says, really sarcastically, “Ye-ah!”

“Really? When?”

Jodi looks at me. I say, “I can ask a follow-up question.”

“It’s Josh’s turn,” Debbie says.

We go around and around, Natalie trying to upset me, but nothing she asks gets under my skin. Then my favorite song comes on: “Over My Head” by Fleetwood Mac. Every time that song comes on, I can’t help myself. I have to dance, and I do, away from these people who may or may not be my friends and into the street. The music is really loud. Even when I dance down the street to the corner, I can still hear it. I’m so into it that I don’t stop dancing and open my eyes until the music stops, and then I discover I’m standing in front of a cop car and since I’ve been flipping my skirt around, I’ve probably flashed the cop. Luckily, the officer is female. She gets out of the car and surveys me and my friends. She gestures that we should walk back to the group, so I do.

“We received a noise complaint,” she says. Big surprise. Then she asks for our driver’s licenses, which we have to go back to the house to get. Becky turns off the music. Of course, only Natalie is old enough to drink. The cop stands there in the doorway to the kitchen, surveying the bottles on the counter and the cakes covering the table.

“Do you want some cake?” I ask, pointing. “This one’s mine.”

She stares at me while Natalie and Debbie snicker. Then she pours out my Absolut and the rest of the bottles but doesn’t look any further.

“Keep the music down,” she says as she leaves. “And don’t take open containers outside.”

I pretend I don’t feel stupid. This is my house, after all. I can offer cake to whomever I please. I get myself a piece of cake, made especially for me by Natalie’s aunt, and sit down to listen to the rest of the Fleetwood Mac album. Debbie and Natalie try to smirk it up, but cake wins. Everyone has a piece of their very own cake, and then we sample each other’s. That’s how the party ends, quietly, with everyone eating. Becky told me later that on her way home she saw that cop again, accosting some frat boys. Maybe she was on her way back to check on us and bothered them instead.

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This Title

2008-04-08T08:01:00.004-06:00

I thought "The Price of Silence" was so cool when I picked it for a title. Didn't bother to research it; just settled on it. In fact, I may have had it in mind from the beginning--I can't remember now.

When I searched for it on the Internet, I found out how popular it was. There are several books with that title, a movie from 1959, and even a movie from 1916 with Lon Chaney. A band called Discharge has a song by that name.

But in the early part of this millennium (Isn't it so cool that we can say that?) I was thinking about how Natalie didn't make any efforts to use birth control on that night she got pregnant. That's the most obvious meaning of the title. But it could also refer to her reaction to her rape, or the way she concealed both rape and pregnancy from her family, only revealing them well after they occurred.

In an even broader sense, "silence" encapsulates the way Ashley and Natalie deal with problems in their lives (when Ashley learns of Natalie's abortion, she doesn't tell her parents, saying to her sister, "It would only cause problems"), and silence is the opposite of the strategies Teddy, Natalie's father, uses when confronted with something he doesn't like. In fact, as a professor, he can't afford silence--he has to talk to eat.

Anyway, I could go on, but I think I'm over the title now. I think I'd like to change it to "The Northern End of My Heart," which doesn't seem to be popular on Google. And it's a line from the title story. I've always liked happening upon the title of a book, buried in a paragraph somewhere. It's like a little secret.

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Story 11: Birthday Cakes

2008-04-02T20:32:00.001-06:00

My niece came over one afternoon on Christmas break of her junior year in college, a warm day for January. Sometimes when Natalie’s back in Kansas City for the summer or Christmas, she just shows up. I figured she wanted to talk about the party for her twenty-first birthday in February. She was having two: one with her family and one the next night with her friends, both in Boulder. I had promised to drive to Boulder a few days beforehand and make her the best cake a girl ever had for a party. I hadn’t told her that I planned to make special individual cakes for her friends, based on what she’d said about them over the years and what they’d said to me whenever I saw them. They were all turning twenty-one this year. But she didn’t say anything about cakes or birthdays, just dithered around for a while, then turned to me and raised her chin to me, the way she does sometimes—she got that from her mother. Whenever my sister has finally reached her limit with a person, which takes her about twice as long as it does anyone else, she raises her chin just that way and tells that person to stop. It always works. I try to get her to do this more often, but she never takes my advice. So up came that chin, my sister’s bones imprinted on a twenty-year-old, and she said plaintively, “Aunt Jennie? There’s something I need to tell you.”

Anyone could tell from that tone that something big and hairy was coming down the road. I got us both a coke and sat down at the round table in my kitchen, where walls, ceiling, furniture, and appliances are shades of light blue or cream. A room so open and airy that every morning when I come down here to have breakfast, drink coffee, and read the paper, I swear that I could just fly out like the birds in the trees beyond the windows. I made her sit down with me. It’s good to be close when you say important things.

“What is it, honey?”

She twisted her fingers around each other for a while. “Two years ago about this time, I had an abortion.” She didn’t look at me.

The room didn’t seem so airy anymore. It had imploded and filled with all sorts of dangerous edges. And I felt immediately guilty, as if my life had somehow moved the two of us toward this moment. Was it because everyone thinks I’m the wild one? Was that why Natalie told me, instead of her mother?

“Michael got you pregnant?” I asked and then berated myself. I didn’t know why I phrased it that way. Despite how fast I’d kept moving all my life, my old-fashioned upbringing could still catch up to me.

But she was nodding. “Yes.” She didn’t say anything for a minute, then took a deep breath.

“Did you tell him?”

“I told Debbie first.”

I was getting the picture here, and it wasn’t pretty. I had always prided myself on being honest with men, but Natalie obviously had different standards. I got up and paced around the room. I found myself at the refrigerator, took out the potato salad, and ate from the bowl.

She straightened up and caught my stare. “I did eventually tell Michael,” she said.

“That’s good,” I told her. I tried to think of the correct thing to say at this juncture, but then Natalie started looking at me expectantly, and I thought to myself, Oh, no. She wants me to tell Ashley.

“I want to get this out in the open, Aunt Jennie,” she said. “I want to tell Mom and Dad; I just don’t know how.”

I stared at her. “The same way you’ve told me, I guess.”

“No.” She turned pale. “I can’t tell Mom all by myself.”

She had a point. My big sister Ashley had been bounded all her life by desires for what she couldn’t have, the principal desire being for a large family, wild and loud. The complete opposite of our family and something I decided against when I was in my twenties—when I was young enough to think that relationships might last long enough to raise a child but old enough to understand the difficulty women in my family had in conceiving.

All my knowledge of Ashley warned me against telling her myself. She’d be terribly wounded that Natalie, her only child, had told me first. But another part of me felt flattered that Natalie had come to me first, and that part of me wanted to make this situation a success.

“Let me think about it,” I told Natalie. “Then I’ll give you a call.”

She sat there for a while afterward, drinking her coke, but I felt desperate to be alone. Finally I sent her on her way. She walked out to her car in a daze. I hoped the traffic was light for her drive home. Why did she want to tell us this? I would never have dreamed of telling my parents, but that was another time, when abortion was illegal. After I sat in the kitchen and ate all the potato salad, I got up and checked the orders I’d brought home from my bakery last night. I began to bake some cupcakes. Then I made three braids of bread from the dough that had been rising since that morning. It felt good to mix things and twist them and pound them down until they were a manageable size. In the middle of all this, Mom called with a question about the party. All Natalie’s grandparents were going to be there; Mom had forgotten where we were all staying, and a friend of hers in Boulder wanted to know. I told her we were staying at Gold Hill Inn and having the party there, since in February it might be troublesome to drive from Boulder to the party and back on account of snow. Talking to her gave me an idea.

I thought it best that Natalie air this issue before the party, so that she could use that occasion to smooth over any hurt feelings. I called Ashley and told her that Natalie and I needed to discuss something with her, something important. She said two days from now would be best. Then I called Natalie and told her that I had talked to Ashley and that the three of us would meet in two days. She agreed, not that she had any choice.

**

I’ve always loved triangles. My favorite cakes have been shaped that way, and I always like my relationships triangular too. Especially with men. If I have someone waiting in the wings, it helps to keep my main man on his toes until he makes his inevitable exit. So when Natalie and Ashley and I were sitting in my living room two days later—each of us in one chair, each by herself—I knew I could make this explanation go smoothly. It was just a matter of playing my sister off my niece.

Natalie eyed me as if she wanted to protest. Or bolt.

Ashley said, “You two have a very mysterious air about you. What did you want to tell me?”

“It’s about Natalie,” I told her. She glanced at her daughter.

“About your party?”

“No, Mom,” Natalie said.

“Natalie has something to tell you that’s really hard to say,” I said. “She asked for my help.” I tried to keep too much pride out of my voice.

“Two years ago…” Natalie began. Then her voice caught.

“Yes?” Ashley said.

Natalie coughed a little. “I had an abortion.”

There, the words were out. And so was my sister. She leapt up and advanced toward Natalie, saying, “You were pregnant and you didn’t tell me?”

At first Natalie shrank back into her chair. Then she stared up at her mother, tears in her eyes. “I was afraid to.”

That comment stopped Ashley. She began to cry too. Soon there was a regular tearfest drowning my living room—three women with cutesy names crying their eyes out. I knew I would feel disgusted with myself later, but I could never resist crying when everyone else was doing it.

Finally I got up and fetched Kleenex and some mint cookies. Ashley sat on the floor by Natalie’s chair, eating cookies and asking her questions. I returned to my chair, maintaining the triangle, but congratulating myself that I had brought them closer.

“Was it Michael’s?” Ashley asked. I already knew the answer, but I had no intention of volunteering any more information. It was Natalie’s show now. I would stay in the background.

“Yes,” Natalie said.

“He would have helped you,” Ashley said. “He would have been a good father. Why didn’t you keep it?”

Natalie shifted impatiently. “I didn’t want to marry him,” she said softly. Then more firmly: “I won’t have a child with a man I don’t want to marry.” From the tone in her voice, I knew she wasn’t just talking about Michael. In saying those words, Natalie had just exorcised the family demon of infertility. She had just as much as said to her mother, “Unlike you, I can get pregnant whenever I want to.” She knew she had more choices than her mother, and she intended to use them any way she saw fit. For a moment, I felt jealous.

Ashley persisted. “One of us could have taken care of the baby.”

I couldn’t see the point of this discussion, since we were talking about events two years in the past, so I tried to steer my sister in another direction. “Natalie always talks about having children,” I told Ashley. “She wasn’t ready. And how could it work anyway, for one of us to take the baby? A child can’t just be passed around.”

Ashley glared at me, even while she was nibbling at one of my mint cookies. I wanted to shove it right down her throat, make her swallow something whole, gorge herself for once. But she wasn’t willing to move on from this subject. She turned back to Natalie. “Just for a few years. Until you were settled enough to make a home for a child.”

“No,” Natalie said. I silently cheered her on. “Nobody but me will raise my children.”

My living room fell silent for a moment, and I noticed most of the cookies were gone. Had I eaten that many? I was mentally searching my refrigerator for another snack, when Ashley changed the subject, asking Natalie, “When you found out you were pregnant, why didn’t you tell us then?”

Natalie stared ahead blindly, searching for an answer to that question but finding none. I’d never been able to explain my own silences; why should a college girl do any better? Finally, she said, “I knew how much you wanted a big family, Mom. I was afraid of that.”

“I did,” Ashley said. “I wanted to have four children, maybe more. But then I got cervical cancer and had to have a hysterectomy.”

I could tell, watching Natalie’s face, that my sister’s grief had become my niece’s guilt. Myself, I thought it was time for Ashley to leave that grief behind. But then, I had chosen not to have children—her choice had been made for her.

Ashley continued, “What you mean by ‘afraid’ is, you were afraid we’d make the decision for you.”

Natalie nodded, a look of relief on her face. “Growing up,” she said, “I heard so often how women in my family had a difficult time getting pregnant. Being pregnant in college was hard enough—I didn’t want to take on family history too.”

Ashley combed her auburn hair back with her fingers, something she did when she couldn’t immediately think of an answer. Unconsciously, Natalie did the same thing. Again, I felt envious, but I wasn’t sure of what: of having a daughter that might as well be your mirror image, except that she had her father’s hair color? Or of the inability to escape family when they’re your children?

“Just one more thing,” Ashley said, glancing at me and then back at her daughter. “You went to Jennie in this case. Not to me or your father. Why?”

All of a sudden, my triangle fell apart. I had been excluded, by my own sister. I wanted Ashley to pay for that remark about telling me first; I wanted Natalie to come down hard on her. But of course she didn’t. Natalie tried to put everything back together. “I wanted to ask her advice,” she told her mother. “She’s known you longer than I have, after all.” She smiled at me.

“Promise me,” Ashley said, putting her hand on Natalie’s, “that you’ll come to us for help in the future.”

“Of course,” Natalie said. I was secretly pleased that she had avoided the word “promise.”

**

Picture two sets of grandparents, two parents, and an aunt, all surrounding Natalie, standing in front of the fire. She was saying that this would be the cold spell for the year, and she was having a hard time getting through it. Outside, it was snowing again. I hoped that next time I went outside I wouldn’t see mysterious tracks in the snow. They were smaller than my hand, so they couldn’t have been left by a mountain lion, right? Or so I assured myself. My sister and our parents gave one toast, and then Teddy and his parents stood up to perform theirs. Ceremonies like this always made me sad. My parents never threw us parties, but Ashley and Teddy were insistent to a fault about them. I think Natalie was enjoying the occasion.

Teddy mentioned that Natalie had never had a sweet sixteen party because they had had to go to his uncle Theo’s funeral, but “she never complained.” I stood there, drink hoisted, thinking of those, like me, who didn’t get more than one present on any birthday and who had complained, vociferously. My parents told me they held back to build our characters. I’d always thought they were cheap. Only later in life had I met people whose families couldn’t afford any presents at all. I should have gained more perspective from them, but I still had regrets. Oh well. I could always throw a humdinger of a birthday party for myself when I turned fifty.

My mother spoke of how Natalie reminded her of her mother. I could see that. My grandma was a character, always saying the silliest, funniest things. I could listen to her for hours. She loved to make fun of human foibles. Sometimes people in our family seem to alternate through the generations: Grandma, sweet and tolerant, Mom and Dad, restrictive and quick to judge.

Then Dad took his turn. Not much of a talker, he simply held up his large wine glass and said to Natalie, “You’re an adult in the family now. Here’s to family far and near, close and scattered, the family that was, the family that is, and the family you’ll have.” He said it with such resonance that we all cheered.

But later, after I had served everyone a piece of Natalie’s cake, I wondered if Ashley had told him. I caught her eye across the room, and she picked up her empty plate and came over to the cake table, where I was standing, debating whether to have seconds then or wait until someone else did first. Ashley closed her hand over mine, the one holding the cake knife.

“Feeling a little sentimental?” I asked her.

“No, grateful,” she said. “To you.”

I frowned at her.

“I was so angry at first,” she confessed. “It felt like things kept getting taken away.” She took some Kleenex out of her pocket and wiped her face. “First I had a hysterectomy. Then I had to leave my family because of my husband’s job. Then my daughter didn’t even tell me when she got pregnant.”

“If you had gotten pregnant in college, would you have told our parents?” I asked her.

She considered that. “Mom told me she had friends who had abortions. I might have.”

“But friends having abortions—that’s different from your own daughter,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Ashley said, lifting my hand, cake knife and all, and cutting a piece of cake. Then she lifted the plate and popped a piece of cake in her mouth, eyeing me.

“I didn’t tell Mom or Dad,” she said. “I didn’t see why they needed to know.”

“I didn’t think you would,” I told her.

She raised her eyebrows. “Why say something that might cause trouble?”

I laughed at her. “You’re asking me? You know I like to cause trouble.”

“I didn’t get that impression last month,” she said.

Just then I realized how much I wanted her to apologize for thinking me unfit to be her daughter’s confidante. I turned away and helped myself to seconds too. I figured if I cried into the cake, she might not notice.

“Thank you,” Ashley said.

“For the cake?” I asked her.

“For being there when Natalie told me. It stopped me from saying things I’d be regretting now.”

It wasn’t really an apology. But then, Ashley was seldom direct.

“I’m your sister,” I said simply. “I know what you need.”

She nodded and rejoined the group by the fire.

I put down my plate and tidied up the table, admiring the small cakes that I had made for Debbie, Deirdre, Josh, Jodi, and Becky. All Natalie’s friends with whom I’d spent many an afternoon when I visited Boulder. Sometimes I showed up without calling first, just to give Natalie a dose of her own medicine. She never minded. I had put all my heart into making those cakes. I’d mixed Debbie’s cake extra rich because I’ve had friends like her, but then they’ve moved away and we’ve let the distance matter. Deirdre’s cake had a pattern like grass and flowers in a meadow and some aspen leaves. She was always going on about plants. I covered Josh’s with faces made of marzipan; they were all talking to each other. That man could charm anyone. If only I were younger … Becky’s was shaped like a fedora because she was wearing a hat every time I saw her, and Jodi got a cat face. She might not be a cat person, but she always struck me that way. And then my niece. Who was my only niece by blood and would have been my favorite even if she weren’t. I dotted Natalie’s pale yellow cake with white flowers. Hovering over them, hummingbirds and moths and bumblebees, all in shimmering shades of silver or green. Everyone could have a piece with a flower and a pollinator. Whether they got the point or not, I don’t know. It was my way of saying that there are many ways to be fertile. I knew Natalie had always wanted children. I just wanted her to remember what I could make.

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Story 10: The Gathering

2008-03-27T22:32:00.003-06:00

Ashley was watching Lydia’s intense conversation with her husband when both of them turned toward her. Ashley retreated into the long, narrow kitchen and wiped her face on the inside of one of the cupboards, then hoped her tears wouldn’t spot the glasses.

“If the punch bowl were a drain,” Lydia said drily as she came into the kitchen, “our in-laws would be going down it.”

Another fencing move by Lydia. What to do when your sister-in-law always drew back after just a touch but wouldn’t let you leave the field? Ashley waited. Sometimes she ferreted out Lydia’s motives so that she could laugh at them, but it was Christmastime, and her mother would no doubt say at least once before the day itself: “Let’s all be nice to each other.” But could they comfort each other? Lydia was waiting too.

Ashley decided to begin a conversation that had been weighing on her for months. “There’s something I’m afraid of,” she told her sister-in-law.

Lydia leaned against the counter, her suit and pumps and hair all the same shade of black. “What’s that?”

“That we’ll start to go our separate ways now that Tom is gone.” Lydia frowned, and for a moment Ashley’s stomach knotted, but she kept talking. “He just seemed to have radar. He could tell when people were about to fight. I used to watch him when we were in college. He could always smooth things over.”

“No one in this family fights,” Lydia pointed out.

“I suppose you’re right,” Ashley said. “When one person in this family gets angry, all the others go off on tangents or bring up the past instead of sticking to the issue. Teddy says that’s why nothing gets resolved.”

“Oh, Teddy,” Lydia shot back. “God knows how long resolving Teddy would take.”

They laughed, but Ashley could sense an undercurrent of anger in Lydia’s voice. “If we do drift apart,” Lydia said, taking a small black leather notebook out of her jacket pocket, “it won’t be because of fights.” She handed the book to Ashley, who opened it wonderingly. It had Tom’s name on the first page and was dated more than twenty years ago.

“Think of it as my late husband’s last gift to you.” Lydia turned abruptly and strode out of the kitchen.

Ashley paged through the book, deciphering Tom’s scrawl about pre-med classes and college activities, especially anything that Teddy, Tom’s big brother, had been involved in. Then she came to a page that had her name on it. As she read, she began to cry again. She put the book down and sobbed softly, hoping no one in the living room would hear. Finally she wiped her face, hid the book in the placemats drawer, and left the kitchen in search of Lydia. She found her talking to Teddy again. The highlights in Lydia’s hair gleamed in the lights from the Christmas tree. When she smiled, all Ashley could see was dark red lipstick stretching. Maybe she’d had too much punch, but the bowl was still half full.

“Tom was the one driving the boat that day,” Lydia said. “That was the day Natalie learned to slalom.”

“That’s right,” Teddy laughed. “Nothing like a snake in the water to help you learn to stand up on a ski.”

“And then that night we roasted marshmallows in the fireplace, and you told ghost stories,” Lydia said. “Between the snakes and the ghosts, Natalie couldn’t sleep and came into our bedroom ’cause it was closer.”

“That’s right, she did. Do you remember, Ash?”

She nodded at his old nickname for her. The shadows the tree cast on the walls mesmerized her. She’d rented a sprayer and applied the orange peel texture when nobody else had wanted to, the first summer they’d spent here. The curtains were also her handiwork. Ashley could go through the house and remember the last few years by what she had sewn and reconstructed and hung on the walls. Everyone else in her family had markers outside, on a road or in a body of water. But she put hers inside, where they kept better.

Teddy kissed her. “You were swaying,” he said, looking at her quizzically. “Are you all right?”

“Just tired. I think I’ll go sit on the dock where it’s cooler.” She turned to Lydia. “Will you come with me?”

Lydia nodded. Teddy fetched their coats, and they went outside, through the porch where all the cousins, Natalie included, had squeezed in and around the glider. They didn’t notice them, too busy with their plans for Christmas break. “Will we have a white Christmas?” someone asked, the eternal Kansas City question, but when Ashley looked back she couldn’t tell who was speaking from the mass of red and gold and green sweaters and wool skirts and pants at the other end of the room. It was cold on the dock but quiet, with just a murmur of voices coming from the porch. Once she heard the glider squeak. She sat on the ladder and leaned against the railing, closing her eyes. Lydia sat down behind her, on a bench.

“It was just a kiss,” Ashley said. “That was all.”

**

A kiss. From Tom, one afternoon more than twenty years ago. Before she was engaged to Teddy, before she’d put anything on the walls in this house. She and Teddy had been about to graduate from the University of Missouri, in May in the heat of Columbia. Even now, only a matter of days before Christmas and years distant, the thought of Missouri heat could keep her warm.

Tom was only a freshman and Teddy’s little brother, but he knew more people than she did at school. People greeted him wherever he went. He was at Teddy’s apartment, helping her prepare for a graduation party. They were the entertainers. Teddy had gone out, talking about politics. She and Tom had made everything they could; no one would arrive for two hours. They were sitting on the apartment patio, on a scruffy couch that only students could love, and he said, “There’s something I want to ask you.”

“What?” she said, turning toward him.

He took her face in his hands and kissed her until she pushed him away so that she could breathe, but his hands still framed her face. She even stopped worrying about bugs in the couch.

“You seem to be immune to the heat,” he said, but his hands on her were not sweaty, just warm and soft. They smelled of avocado and bread. His eyes were a darker brown than Teddy’s, but his hair was lighter, and his face always looked a little hollow.

“It’s because I’m so pale,” she told him. One thing she admired about Teddy’s family was how they could stand in the sun for a moment or two and get a tan. Like flowers that absorbed sunlight and turned it into something colorful and full of life. She could never tolerate the sun for more than half an hour at a time.

“Perhaps,” he said, taking her hands and turning them this way and that to look at her skin.

“What did you want to know?”

He smiled a little ruefully. “Whether you think you’ve been with Teddy long enough.”

A question on the minds of everyone, apparently: she and Teddy, her friends, their parents—though the parents were considerably more subtle about it than the friends. And she and Teddy thought about it often, but they pretended that graduation was all that mattered.

She didn’t want to answer any of them, so she kissed him again, let him maneuver her closer, and stayed there for a while. Only when they stood up and he brushed couch fuzz off her dress did she feel sweat trickling down her back. People would be arriving soon.

“Let me know,” he said to her as they went inside.

And she had decided two weeks later, when Teddy asked her a question, she could never remember exactly what, and offered a ring. For a moment she had stood immobile at the Rose Garden fountain in Loose Park, but then she had begun to reach—for him and a lifetime of more than warmth and softness, for the energy he possessed. Once the ring was on, he tipped them both into the fountain, where they lay shrieking and laughing. Amazing, how many different ways there are to ask.

**

“Just one?” Lydia asked. Her voice was ragged.

Ashley opened her eyes and turned her head. It was so dark on the dock that Lydia’s red lipstick looked black, although her dangling earrings sparkled a little as she shivered.

“Yes, just that one afternoon.”

“You didn’t love him?”

“No,” Ashley said, “I did love him.”

“Then why did you marry Teddy?”

Why? Ashley asked herself now, with icy water lapping at her red holiday shoes, the brilliance of stars in the dark water. Why did I say yes to Teddy and not Tom?

“I think I must have been afraid of too much quiet,” she told Lydia. “Of being bored by comfort.”

For a moment she amused herself by switching lives, putting Lydia in her place. She began to giggle and wanted some more punch. Lydia could never have handled Teddy. He would have worn her out. She must be made of stronger stuff than anyone imagined because after two decades of marriage, he could still surprise her just by coming into a room. She must be as strong as the wall between the lake and the house.

“Tom’s not boring,” Lydia said.

“No, he wasn’t,” Ashley agreed. “But the two of us together—that would have been boring.”

Up at the house, the screen door banged, and shoes came scratching down the path.

Natalie and Lydia’s youngest daughter ventured onto the dock. “You two have been out here a while.”

“Just talking about Tom,” Ashley told them.

Natalie handed her a rum ball. “Don’t stay out here all night, Mom. It’s already below freezing.” Shivering, she raced back to the porch, calling, “She’s on the dock.”

Ashley didn’t know why that should be a revelation to anyone. They’d walked past the entire party to leave the house. After she’d spent the whole day preparing, couldn’t they allow her a little peace, a little conversation?

Lydia’s daughter held out her hand, and slowly Lydia took it and stood up. They walked up the path together. Ignoring them, Ashley turned back to the water.

She and Tom had talked about it at the engagement party his parents had thrown. Needing quiet then as she did now, she had escaped the party to sit outside for a moment, and he had followed her.

“I should have asked sooner,” he said.

“It wouldn’t have made a difference,” Ashley told him.

He put his hand up to her face, and she didn’t move away. “But we’re so comfortable together.”

“Exactly,” she said. “No passion.”

“And you think Teddy can give you that?” he asked doubtfully.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m certain of it.”

That conversation had never really ended. At parties, at family gatherings, they had relived their short moment in looks, in the way he almost kissed her on the mouth in front of their spouses, in the way she would stroke his arm sometimes in passing. Some days she had hoped Teddy or Lydia would notice, but no one had ever said anything. Until now.

When she finally opened the door to the porch, the cousins were still there, wanting to know what she had been thinking about so long. Sometimes the voices of children reminded her of Charlie Brown’s teacher, all sound and no sense. What did they think she could possibly tell them?

“It’s a secret,” she replied very seriously. They were all desperate for more of Tom, but she had nothing to add. “A deep, dark secret for a cold night.”

Her in-laws were sitting down in the living room, conversing in soft tones. She stood there in the doorway for a few seconds, listening to them weave the tapestry of reminiscence. It was nearly ten o’clock, and people began to stir and stretch. A yawn or two. She wanted them to stay longer, have a slumber party. She wanted the distraction of company, just not intense scrutiny. Ashley walked to the punch bowl, filled a glass full enough for her to get tipsy again, and tapped the crystal ladle against the bowl.

“It’s not over yet,” she said. “We haven’t watched The Grinch or A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

“Is that a family tradition?” Lydia asked brightly, even though she was slumped down in the middle of the couch, next to Teddy. He looked up at Ashley and smiled.

“I think it should be,” he said and called out to the porch. “Kids! Come in here!” All the cousins slouched resentfully into the living room. From the lake, a welcome breeze blew in the sounds of branches scratching each other’s backs.

“What?”

“We’re going to watch Christmas shows,” Teddy informed them.

“You mean home movies?”

“No way, man, It’s a Wonderful Life.”

“Noooo, not that again!”

Teddy was a big, graceful man. Without bumping the many bodies heating up the living room, he got up and seated Ashley next to Lydia on the couch, smiling at both in turn. “If you’re tired,” he said to the younger ones, “we have pillows. You can sleep on the floor.” In a few minutes he returned with armfuls of pillows and blankets, and the cousins camped around Teddy on the floor. Natalie put in the tape of The Grinch that Ashley had recorded earlier that week.

The adults had their patterns, Ashley thought. No doubt Tom’s death would change things, but they wouldn’t notice except in those moments of revelation that were always immediately followed by dismissal. Or in the middle of the night when some fading noise awoke them while their partners and children slept hoarsely and seemed to whisper directions in their sleep.

When The Grinch was over, Natalie wanted to watch Charlie Brown, but Lydia’s youngest daughter voted for Frosty the Snowman. Teddy sat up between the girls and suggested sleep: “It’s late. We should all go to bed.”

“No way,” Ashley said, laughing. “We’re watching Charlie Brown, and you’re all sleeping over.” She stood up to get more punch.

“Aunt Lydia can sleep in my room,” Natalie suggested. “That way she won’t have to sleep in the single bed in the office.”

“The kids can sleep down here,” Teddy said quickly, glancing at Lydia. “All six of you on the floor.”

Lydia’s son muttered, “Whatever.”

“Just stay away from me,” his sister said. She had just turned fourteen.

Natalie said, “It’ll be cozy!”

“I want to sleep with you, Mommy,” Lydia’s youngest said. She sat down on her mother’s lap.

And so it went, everyone claiming a place. Ashley would have watched Charlie Brown ten times or more, but the cousins began to mock it during the first showing, so she and Teddy went upstairs. As she was taking off her jewelry, he stepped up behind her and enclosed her in his arms, throwing her off balance a little. The punch was still circulating in her blood, making her feel flushed.

“What were you and Lydia talking about for so long?”

“About Tom,” she said.

Teddy kissed the back of her neck. “She found out that he loved you.”

Ashley felt suddenly afraid. “What makes you think that?” she asked him.

“Because he told me,” he said, gently turning her to face him and kissing her for a long time. “He told me the night of the engagement party.”

She looked up at him with wonder. “You never mentioned it.”

Teddy shook his head. “Why should I? I knew you loved me more.”

“Yes,” Ashley said, feeling how that statement remained true after so many years.

“I’ll talk to Lydia again tomorrow,” he said.

“Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“Yes,” he said, “because I can tell her that she was the love of my brother’s life.” He smiled down at her. “And I don’t think he told me that later just to save face. He truly meant it. She inspired him.”

“And you inspire me,” she told him, pressing up against him and wrapping her arms around his neck.

Even though they made love well into the morning, Ashley awoke before dawn and climbed up to the attic, where she had put in stairs underneath the small hexagonal window. She could perch on the top stair and look out—the closest thing this house had to a window seat. A few ducks foraged around the edges of the lake, which was otherwise undisturbed. Ashley sat there and dreamed she was a sailor who had to reach harbor before the sun rose. Before the spirits that hovered where land met sea were burned up by the sun.

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The Abortion Conversation Project

2008-03-24T20:18:00.003-06:00

When I read that this organization was founded in 2000 by the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, I thought, Hmmm. How much of a conversation can this site really spark with the pro-life folks?

But then I read this on the "Starting the Conversation" portion of the site:

3. "WHAT ARE YOU SAYING AND HOW ARE YOU SAYING IT?"
Is our own language polarizing and judgmental? Are we demonizing the anti-abortion side at the expense of understanding the issue? Are our words "battle bound" and warlike? For example: "Our side is under attack and we have to fight back." "Those anti's are crazy." The "abortion war" has impacted us all and keeps us in an us/them conflict-driven mode which obscures what abortion is really about. Taking responsibility for our own language is a first step to self-awareness on this issue.

I thought that was quite generous. And it really goes to the heart of what I wanted to accomplish with this site--getting away from language that gets people's backs up.

Here's another quote from the site that I liked. You can find the entire story here:

I've been particularly frustrated with the image of abortion providers in the past 10 years. We have been depicted as money-hungry, unethical, and murderous outcasts in the world of medicine. How could we expect the public to know who we really are when our antagonists the anti-abortion folks--were the only ones talking about us? The wrong people have been telling our story for too many years. And, because of very real security issues, most abortion providers have avoided high-profile situations in their communities. Ultimately the only people telling our stories were the people who disagree with us--or worse, actually hate us. I decided that part of my job is to speak up and speak out about our work in this honorable profession.

***

On another note, if you're looking for funding for an abortion, look here.

Story 9: Deirdre, in Xeriscape: Two Groups

2008-03-19T19:38:00.004-06:00

This is Christmas with my parents: several presents from each to each, always beautiful, always something that the receiver mentioned months ago and the giver remembered. Reminding me why they’re such good doctors. Long ago I decided not to be one, ’cause who could compete with these two?

This is the meal I help prepare and clean up, like a good only daughter: Cornish hens, twice-baked potatoes, sweet potatoes with melted marshmallows, crescent rolls, green beans with bits of bacon, key lime pie. It’s our favorite. This is the aftermath of our early dinner: a little music, maybe a collection of arias. Me, lying on the floor, looking up at my parents in their chairs, chatting about college and friends, watching them read the paper. Almost completely quiet, except for footsteps crunching in the snow.

But this year, I think of another night. Two weeks ago. I convinced Josh and Jodi and Natalie to come to Evergreen with me to look at the lights. Lots of people put up lights, of course, but I just think they’re prettier in Evergreen. And this way my friends get to see my house, which is very impressive.

Muffled from head to toe, one hand cold and the other burned by hot cider, we wandered around my neighborhood. It was a long walk because the houses are spread out on the side of a hill, with mine at the top. Natalie surged from me and Jodi, arm in arm, to Josh, like a pool ball trying to escape the rack. And about that brightly dressed too. She began bouncing up and down ahead of us, sputtering, and just then trees netted in turquoise lights appeared around a curve in the road, framing her. For the first and only time, Natalie reminded me of a poem: “She floated, a blue blossom, over the street.” Jodi and I stopped to take it all in.

Usually Natalie inspires other emotions in me than poetry. But Christmas of our junior year will bring Natalie this: family, in the Midwest. Probably no snow. This year, a period of mourning for her uncle. Here, my family is quiet and triangular, balanced just as our house balances on the ridge. There, warmth, loud voices competing, and a door open, a window ajar, a cool absence. At moments like these, something like affection for another only child, but not what you’d call the spirit of the season.

Note: The quote is from "Sappho," by James Wright.

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How forgetful of me

2008-03-17T09:42:00.003-06:00

When I posted "Cradle" (Story 7) a couple of weeks ago, I was surprised to find that I'd revised it--in fact, that I'd combined it with "Talks with Janie," the story that used to precede it. I had completely forgotten.

The genesis for the revision was a workshop I took with Viet Dinh at Lighthouse Writers in Denver. It was supposed to be an intermediate-level workshop and was, unlike most I've taken, almost all men. It was also one of the worst I've ever had, partly because of the instructor and partly because some of the people in it had no writing experience to speak of.

I'd wanted to workshop two stories together (Cradle and One Summer in Missouri) to see if they should be combined. But Viet didn't want to do that; he wanted to make sure each story "stood alone." Of course, that was the reason I wanted to workshop them at once, because I thought the first might just be background for the second and I wanted other writers to tell me if they agreed. So I was already pissed about that ...

Warning: Rant coming!

while I was sitting in my workshop listening to my characters getting called a "tramp" and a "cad." I don't believe I've ever heard anyone do that before, to me or anyone else. Viet then gives me his opinion of the story, which was helpful, and then runs to the bathroom to pee, so I didn't get a chance to ask questions. In the workshop for the next victim, Viet did something so weird I hardly know how to describe it. He said to the guy, "Angry face on," and then proceeded to critique his story. Then he said "Angry face off," and I truly believe he thought he had done something clever. It's a good thing he didn't do that to me; I would've gone ballistic. WTF!

But that wasn't even...

Warning: Rant keeps going!

the worst of it.

The next week, we workshopped a piece about a bunch of Vietnam vets going to prostitutes in Thailand, I think it was, and nobody called them tramps. I was too much of a wimp to do so, and none of the men in attendance commented about guys fucking women they'd just hired, even though one of the guys in the class thought there was something wrong with my female character sleeping with a new boyfriend after three weeks.

Whatever.

OK. The rant is over. I stayed in that workshop for 3 weeks, I think, and then gave up on feeling comfortable in it. Viet no longer teaches for Lighthouse, which I think is a good thing, because he obviously didn't read the memo on being positive (which has its own drawbacks, of course).

But I realized after reading the comments from that workshop that I had two stories in a row doing essentially the same thing, and they weren't the two stories I thought they were. Both "Talks with Janie" and "Cradle" had to do with Natalie letting go of the past and moving on, but they also had to do with her breaking silence in various ways. (So the title of the book's not subtle; what can I say?) I added Janie as a frame to "Cradle" and took out the long scene in an older version of "Cradle" in which Natalie and Chris meet. So now that meeting is only referenced in a later story; it never takes place on camera.

I like "Cradle" better now that it's been revised. I got to write about a real person in my life (a woman I met at Lake Tapawingo, which is a real place outside Kansas City). But she didn't really need her own story. She's more a kind of local color than even a minor character in her own right.

Story 8: One Summer in Missouri

2008-03-13T08:07:00.002-06:00

They started coming to Lake Tapawingo every summer the year Natalie turned sixteen, and for three months each year they lived suspended—in warmth, water, the voices of families drifting down the shore. This summer, the second she spent with Chris, the suspension broke, and there was a fall.

Natalie was frightened when her father put down the telephone and took her mother in his arms. She waited until he said into her mother’s hair: “Tom was in an accident.” Then he started to shake. Natalie stepped closer to them and then stood still until they noticed her again.

**

Natalie’s uncle had left the lake right after dinner that night in late June because he had to meet a patient early the next day at his clinic in Kansas City, and Aunt Lydia and their five children had not left until nearly ten o’clock. On their way home, they found his car, which had rolled into a deep ditch barely a mile from home and crashed there.

“They pulled alongside his car,” her father told Natalie at the wake. He looked pale, more like Tom than she had ever noticed, not ruddy and lively as he usually did. He had put on too much aftershave and smelled sharp. “The right end was smashed way in where it had gone off the road and hit the side of the ditch, but the lights on the left side were still on and the radio was playing Fleetwood Mac. The engine wasn’t running. Lydia said she pried open the door on the left side and tried to find his pulse. There was blood down one side of his face and splattered across the windshield.”

Natalie wished her father hadn’t told her that last detail. The night of the accident, he had said that Tom fell asleep and hit his head on the steering wheel. That was a clean way to die. But now she had visions of Tom, brown eyes staring through blood-streaked brownish hair, mouth open, and reddish spittle coming out. All in front of Lydia and their five kids. At the wake, of course, he was dry; in fact, he felt as rubbery and cool as a Ken doll did after a night out in the yard. Just like her great-uncle Theo five years ago. She wondered if funeral directors would ever figure out how to make bodies feel natural. Or would that be too upsetting?

There were other details that remained with Natalie: the Frankenstein scar on the side of his head, where his skin had split as it met the wheel; the slight smile he was said to have had on his face, as if he were pleased that he didn’t have to see any more patients; how one arm rested on the bottom curve of the steering wheel, palm open. And she had questions: How fast had he been going to die this way? Had he been trying to outrun sleep?

The morning after the wake, Chris appeared at their door, arms stacked with casserole dishes. Natalie’s father was still in bed at 10 o’clock, but her mother thanked him and took the food to the kitchen, while Chris pulled Natalie out to the screened porch. They sat on the glider, arms intertwined, listening to a robin fluting in the distance and waves slapping softly against the wall between the yard and the lake.

“I keep thinking about Memorial Day this year,” he said suddenly.

“Why?” she asked him. Across the lake, several women were setting out brunch on their dock.

“That was the first time I felt really comfortable with your family.”

“Really? It took you ’til this year?”

He put his hand on her knee and played with the hairs she always missed while shaving. “Yeah. I liked them all, but I didn’t feel like one of the gang until this summer. Then your uncle stopped needling me, and everyone else could relax.”

“He was possessive of me when you were around.” Natalie started to laugh and rocked the glider violently for a few seconds. It produced an impressive metallic clang. “Checking on me by picking on you. Even more so than my father. My father gets things out, but with Tom, it’s more of a slow burn.”

Chris took her reaction to be grief and pulled her closer. She put her head on his shoulder and watched boats tow their skiers, creating rings in the lake water. Phrases went through her head: Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to weep.

Only a month since Memorial Day. Her uncle had joined them on the dock that afternoon and quizzed Chris about school, while Natalie had watched people eating and swimming across the lake, as she was doing now. Every time someone had dived off a dock into the water, Natalie had felt colder, so she had placed a towel over her legs to keep goosebumps from rising. She wanted to believe the chill had been a warning, but five summers at the lake had taught her how unpredictable Memorial Day weather could be. It had been nothing more than a cool day in late spring.

“Earth to Natalie,” Chris said.

She stiffened a little and then turned to face him, staring at his brown hair and eyes, feeling relieved that he didn’t have her uncle’s light hair or long face or smell of medical chemicals. He smiled at her, and the patches of sunburn on his round cheeks and across his nose became more visible. “Thanks for coming over,” she said flatly.

“You want me to leave?” he asked, startled. She nodded. He got up slowly and left, glancing back at her from the stairs, but Natalie wasn’t looking. She curled up on her side in the glider, pushing her bangs out of her eyes, but couldn’t get comfortable. There was a pillow on top of the storage box next to the glider, and when she lifted it, she saw the Ken doll underneath. Just his head was visible, as if he were rising out of a sea of toys and stuffed animals that filled the box. Natalie lay down, head on the pillow, and watched the family having brunch across the lake. Every so often a boat towing a skier sliced her view in half.

When she heard her father’s voice in the kitchen, she rolled off the glider onto her knees and then stood up stiffly. He and her mother were marveling over the food Chris had brought: brisket, shredded chicken with Arthur Bryant’s BBQ sauce, deviled eggs, macaroni and cheese with green and red peppers, and green beans in mushroom sauce. Chris and his parents were excellent cooks, skilled at making common foods seem rich and exotic. Natalie found a spoon and sampled the macaroni, which smelled like parmesan cheese and felt silky on her tongue; then her father took the spoon and did the same. Any other day, her mother would have taken away the spoon and dished up their own servings, but she remained still, watching, a grave expression on her face.

The first week after her uncle died, Chris came over every day, at different times, trying to find an hour of the day when she was willing to talk for more than a few minutes. Once he arrived at the front door when Natalie was sitting in the living room, daydreaming, and stared at her through the screen until she noticed him. She walked to the door but didn’t open it.

Chris pressed his nose against the screen and said, “My parents are at a teachers’ conference in Kansas City all day today. Want to come over?” She nodded, and he opened the door and led her outside, down the street, and into his house. Last summer at about this time, they had made love for the first time in the TV room downstairs. Now Natalie followed him blindly, running her hands down his back as soon as they got in the house. They tripped over furniture and the edges of stairs, found the floor, and moved just enough clothing out of the way. All afternoon they were inside in the dark while the lake caught reflections outside. Finally, they turned on a light, and the clock read 5. They got dressed and straightened the room.

As they walked upstairs, Natalie’s eyes watered. She had never noticed how bright Chris’s kitchen and dining room could be. She closed her eyes for a moment and saw Tom’s eyes closing and then flaring open as he pressed the gas pedal harder, trying to get home before sleep claimed him.

“Natalie?” Chris asked, tracing the curve of her eyelashes. She opened her eyes and blinked at him.

“Do you want to stay for dinner?”

She shook her head. She wanted to get home, eat something small, and go to bed.

“I’m exhausted,” she told him.

“I wore you out?” he asked, smiling a little.

Natalie shrugged, feeling irritated. She kissed him goodbye as nicely as she could and left, unable to think of anything to say that would comfort herself or reassure him.

In her room, she drank a glass of milk, ate some of the green bean casserole, and listened to Fleetwood Mac. No one could remember which song had been playing when Lydia found Tom’s car. So Natalie played all their albums and rubbed her eyes. Her tear ducts seem to have tightened, and the pressure built from her chest all the way to her eyes until, when she finally started to cry, it actually hurt for the first few seconds.

After Natalie found sleep, she dreamed that she and Chris were in a softly painted room with Tom, who was shouting, “Your last name is Burnet? You’re a salad green!” Chris’s mouth was moving, but whether from hunger or speech, she couldn’t tell, and bright green burnet leaves began to sprout from his belly and along his hips. Then Tom was gone, and when she turned back to Chris he had changed into Ben, her first boyfriend, though he had never been much of a friend, and she wouldn’t dignify him with the title of lover.

Chris’s parents attended the conference in Kansas City the next day as well, and again, she and Chris lay naked in the TV room during the afternoon. But this time, she told him about the dream.

“That comment about my name was one of the first things your uncle said to me last summer, right after I shook his hand,” Chris said. “I was really embarrassed.”

Natalie laughed harshly. “You thought he was an idiot, didn’t you?”

“He seemed a little hostile at first,” Chris admitted.

“And then he called you ‘Green’ and you were mad ’cause nobody had called you that since high school. I was afraid I’d never see you again.”

Chris traced a line down her nose. “Well, I got over it.”

Natalie curled up closer to him, learning her forehead against his. “It bothers me that you turned into Ben. The two of you have never been together in a dream before.”

“You feel unprotected,” Chris told her. “Because Tom is gone.”

“He was the one who told my parents to talk to me, that something was wrong,” she said. “He was the only one who could see Ben inside me.”

She couldn’t see Chris’s face very well, but his voice became precise and slow. “He was only there once, Natalie.”

“Physically, yes, But even that seemed to go on forever.”

Chris stroked her neck. “And your uncle got rid of him.”

“Sort of,” Natalie said, tilting her head to take advantage of the caress. “I think Ben was my ghost for a while, and Tom made other people see him.”

“That gives me the creeps,” Chris said. “As if he’s watching us.”

“Ben’s gone now. He’s been gone for a long time.”

“When did that happen?”

“A year ago,” Natalie said, smiling in the dark. “The first time we were alone in this room.”

That night he convinced her to stay for dinner. But when she saw the variety of food he took from the refrigerator and the cabinet, it made her tired. She walked over to him and closed the cabinet.

“Please,” she told him, “just something simple. I don’t want anything complicated.” She looked down at the packages on the counter and picked up a few, which she handed to him.

“Carrots, Uncle Ben’s Long Grain and Wild Rice, and cheese?”

“That sounds good,” she said. “Vegetable, grains, and dairy. Who needs meat? It’s too hard to digest.”

He smiled at her, a little confused. She knew he wanted to hug her, but his arms were full of processed food packages. “Do you want them all mixed together?”

“No. I want cheese on crackers and carrots on the side, raw and sliced.” She went into the dining room and sat at the oak table, holding up the front page of the Kansas City Star in a way that seemed familiar. Then she remembered—her father had sat at their table this morning, pretending to read the paper in just this position, but with none of his usual grunts or laughter. Natalie could feel that the information wasn’t getting over the wall he had built around himself.

Chris’s parents arrived just as he was setting down their plates. His mother stood and looked at their dinner.

“That is … spare,” Beryl said.

“And orange,” Joe added.

“It was what Natalie wanted,” Chris said.

“You always find the right word,” Natalie told her. Beryl smiled. She and Chris’s father went into the kitchen and made coffee for everyone. They returned with brimming cups. Natalie noticed that hers was just as she liked it, beige with sugar, but when she looked at the others’ cups, she was surprised that Beryl and Joe took coffee black and that Chris’s coffee was not as pale as hers. Was she forgetting things, or had she failed to notice in the past year?

“How are you, Natalie?” Beryl asked.

“OK,” Natalie said, without smiling. She had noticed that Beryl seldom grinned or laughed out loud.

“Is there anything we can do to help?”

Stop asking me questions you should know the answer to, Natalie thought, but she doubted that Beryl wanted that much honesty from her. “It was really nice of you to send the food,” Natalie said instead.

“Do you need anything else?” Clearly, Beryl was on a mission. Natalie wished she could use the Kansas City Star as a barrier, the way her father had.

“No, I don’t think so. Mom seems to have taken up cooking with a vengeance. All I want to do is sit around.”

Beryl nodded.

“Oh, and we need to return your dishes.”

“It’s not important,” Chris said. “How was the conference?”

Their voices faded as Natalie sipped her coffee. Why was theirs always better than her parents’? Surely her mother bought gourmet coffee? But theirs was less strong, more flavorful. She surveyed their house. All their furniture was clean, worn, and cushy, unlike her grandparents’ house, with its sense of style and arrangement imparted by her mother. Some of the items were clearly heirlooms, others Chris’s childhood favorites. They had been in this house for only a year, but it had more family history than her grandparents’ house that had been in the family for decades.

Natalie finished her coffee and said, “I should go home.” She realized she had interrupted them, but she had no desire to make conversation anyway, except for the murmurs she and Chris made alone in the dark. She kissed Chris on the cheek and thanked his parents for dinner. When she got home, she went down to the dock, where her parents rocked slowly in the iron chairs, and slipped between them to sit on the bench. None of them said anything. Natalie wanted only to sit and let the day’s remaining heat sink into her and the slight breeze take off the edge. And sleep with Chris. When they were together, grief fed the physical sensations and then tapered off as they did. But as soon as Chris wanted to talk, she became desperate to leave. What was so bad about silence between a couple? It could be full of all sorts of subjects that needed to rest and ripen between them.

After a few yawns, her father got up and trudged to the house, saying “’Night.” Her mother looked her over as if she were just now recognizing her.

“I don’t think I’ve really talked to you for days,” she told Natalie. “How are you?”

“OK. How’s Dad?”

“I think he’s lost ten pounds since Tom died. I don’t know what to do.”

Natalie got up and sat in the chair her father had just vacated. Iron didn’t hold a person’s body heat the way fabric and vinyl could, but the metal was still slightly warmed. Her mother was wearing a yellow linen dress that glowed in the twilight and darkened her auburn hair. Natalie placed her hand on her mother’s arm for just a second.

“Remember how at birthdays, sometimes, Dad would tell funny stories about the person having the birthday?”

Her mother smiled slowly. “Once he told my women’s group about the time we were at the Renaissance festival and a little boy ran up to me and grabbed my skirt. It was an elastic waistband, so down it came in front of hundreds of people. I haven’t worn one since.”

Natalie continued. “Why don’t we ask Dad to tell us stories about Tom? Maybe that will ease things for him.”

“I should know how to make him feel better after all these years,” her mother said, fiddling with the round neckline of her dress, “but I don’t.”

The sun had gone behind the trees across the lake. “I’m going to talk to Dad,” Natalie said to her mother, who nodded but otherwise stayed put. As she reached the yard, she heard her mother murmur, “But who will ease things for me?”

Upstairs, her parents’ room was illuminated only by the orange sunset high up in the windows. Her father lay on his back and stared at it without acknowledging Natalie. He did look thin underneath the quilt and seemed hardly to breathe, until he sighed out of the corner of his mouth and blew hair off his face. He had needed a haircut when Tom died, and now clumps of reddish-brown hair stuck out in every direction. She sat down next to him on the wide bed and said, “I want you to tell me a story about Tom, something that happened before I can remember.”

For a while her father paid attention to the light moving down the window panes. Then he laughed and looked at her. “When Tom was in medical school, I bugged him to let me see a cadaver that had been worked on. You know how people say, ‘He had some nerve?’ Well, I wanted to see nerves. So he snuck me in one night after the last class.”

“That must have been spooky.”

“It was OK when the lights were on and he was nearby. But at one point he went to the bathroom, and I was left alone with a roomful of dead bodies with their nerves hanging out. Tom had stretched a few out with clamps so I could see which one was which. I swore I could hear them jangling.” He stopped talking.

“Did you get caught?” Natalie asked, wanting the conversation to continue.

“Tom never got caught.” He turned back to face the windows, which were mostly dark now. “Ever since then, whenever I’m stressed out, I dream about those bodies, as if they were violins, and the nerves were their strings. I’ve been having that dream all week.”

She leaned over him and kissed his cheek. “But you won’t have it tonight.”

“I won’t?”

“No, not since you’ve told me.”

“Good.”

After midnight, Natalie was still awake, thinking of her father’s dream of Tom and the cadavers—the dead among the dead. It was probably too much to call it a prophecy, what her father had dreamed for years. And then there was her dream of Tom and Chris and Ben, three men connected only by her or by what she had said of one to the other. She hoped the dead would not invade her dreams. A dream could not be taken as a sign of love, for dreams were markers of invasion and experience, of the events and people life placed in one’s way rather than those one truly chose. Dreams were a reminder of what could have been, of what might happen to those who were not careful. And, Natalie had to admit, at times she could have been more careful with men.

When she went down to breakfast the next morning, her father was reading the paper, snorting at Reagan’s latest announcement about the defense budget, looking rested and more like himself. He told her, “You were right. I didn’t have that dream.”

**

After the fireworks on the Fourth, July offered nothing but endless, muggy heat. On the water or off it, the sun was as close and bright as a bathroom mirror first thing in the morning. A few minutes ago, Natalie and Chris had been rocking the largest inner tube either of them had ever seen, brought home by her father the week before. She had taught him the trick last summer: place your feet on either side of the legs of the person opposite you and lock your knees. Then rock. Her feet just barely reached the other side of the innertube, but his knees were bent slightly. Their hands clasped each other’s wrists, and they pulled away from each other, elbows locked straight, as the tube pushed the lake down and then rose up. When Chris closed his eyes, Natalie lifted up her feet and tumbled backward into the water.

Chris came up snorting and grabbed her as she tried to climb onto the tube. “Are you trying to drown me?” Water ran down through white patches of sunscreen on his ears and nose. He pressed a finger to her shoulder and watched the white impression turn brown again.

“You’re so brown,” he said, smiling. He pulled her away from the tube and kissed her. They started to sink. Natalie put her legs around his waist, and he began treading water. The inner tube drifted toward the dock.

“Are you still sad, Natalie?” he asked.

She nodded. Her chin barely cleared the water.

“You haven’t said anything recently.”

“I miss my uncle,” she said. “What’s there to say?”

“I thought I could take away your grief,” he said, breathing hard.

“Do you know why I fell in love with you?” she asked.

“Why?”

“Because you trusted me when you knew I had lied to someone else. I want you to trust me again.”

“To do what?”

“To take as long as I need,” Natalie said. “One month isn’t long enough to grieve Tom. He deserves more than that.”

As she swam after the innertube and climbed up, Natalie thought, A month since Tom died. A month until my junior year of college. During the first month, time had expanded and contracted like an accordion, but the way time was speeding by her lately, she was quite certain that the second would go far too quickly.

Chris lay down beside her and was quiet.

**

Natalie took her favorite letter from Chris, a trash bag, and scissors with her to the overflowing front garden down the road from her house. This summer, her fifth one spent at the lake, she had finally met the gardener, who liked to explain the mysteries of her plantings. Natalie had fallen into the habit of talking to her once a week. Chris had come with her once and impressed the gardener by naming the different varieties of sage he recognized, but then he and his parents were fond of cooking with fresh herbs they grew in the garden that wrapped around their house. This week, her last at the lake until Christmas vacation, she had been tending the flowers while the gardener had gone to visit her family in New York. A few more flowers needed deadheading, and then she would be done. She clipped calendula and California poppy seedheads and plucked out the blooms of petunias. This woman liked the flat blooms of various kinds of daisies, “platforms for butterflies,” she called them. She insisted that Natalie let the coneflowers go to seed so that the birds could have something to eat in a few months.

Now the garden was as neat as it would ever get. Natalie liked to compare its bright chaos to her mother’s rose bushes in Boulder, which were pruned each spring until they bloomed out of desperation. In this garden, flowers grew exuberantly wherever they could, spilling over walls and creeping into the spaces between flagstone steps. A sparrow or two hopped among the plants, and dozens of bees clung to the pale orange poppies and the Missouri evening primrose, whose yellow blooms spent the nights open and the days shriveling. Natalie sat down on the cement wall guarding the opposite house’s front door and imagined her grief for her uncle drying up in the next few months, subsiding into the earth as the garden went to sleep. Then by next March, tulips would be rising among the dry seedheads, and summer flowers would have begun sprouting new growth.

Last summer, she and Chris had often walked past this garden late at night, meeting secretly after everyone else had gone to bed, after the summer heat had subsided a little. She had told herself then that he was merely a summer romance. Months later, he had written her this letter, the day he arrived back at college after their first Christmas together:

“I hadn’t imagined that Lake Tapawingo could hold so many different experiences. First impression: a small, limited place, wholly manufactured. No real life of a city or even a small town. I asked myself, is this the way everyone will live in the future? In communities that try to resurrect a sense of togetherness that we once were able to build? Just withdrawing into a summer life of swimming and BBQs and waterskiing. It seems so easy—too easy. But in winter, now, what do these people do? Mourn the loss of open water? Do they think the lake is sleeping, resting from all the activity on its surface in the summer? Cleaning up oil and dead skin and dog hair—and other, more personal things—deposited in it? We are 75 percent water—after several summers, are we 75 percent Lake Tapawingo? And what percentage of you and me is in the lake? Just think what that water might contain.”

They had exchanged letters for months, but that one was the first love letter he had sent her: less like the newspaper articles he mailed copies of, more intimate in its musings. Perhaps he had felt more sure of her after a summer and a winter vacation spent together. She returned the letter to its envelope and the envelope to the side pocket of her shorts. She wanted it to stay crisp and folded no matter how many times she moved. There was a history of her embedded in the flowers and soil here and carried along in the lake water. A history of her and Chris that she had never really understood. He had left three days ago, going the short distance south to the University of Missouri; she would leave tomorrow for the Rocky Mountains and the University of Colorado. Would distance make them easier with each other or eager to find someone else?

Several seedpods she had missed caught Natalie’s eye. She got up and cut them; her trash bag was pretty full. She knew she should go home, but she wanted to linger here. When she turned to go home, she saw Chris’s mother coming toward her. Natalie waited as Beryl walked up and held out a pair of her earrings. As usual, she was wearing a wide-brimmed hat to shield her face from the sun. The shade it cast darkened her brown eyes.

“You left these at the house,” she said. She didn’t say where.

Eager to get rid of every trace of me? Natalie thought, blushing, but she took the earrings and thanked her.

Beryl turned toward the garden. “Chris told me about this garden. I’ve been meaning to come and take a good look at what she had.”

For a moment they stood searching the garden as if it could offer conversation tips, with the hot silence of August enveloping them.

Beryl noticed the envelope sticking out of Natalie’s pocket. “What have you got there?” she asked.

“An old letter from Chris,” Natalie said, feeling shy.

Beryl’s expression became a little sad. “He really does love you.”

“How can you be so sure?” Natalie asked.

Beryl stared at her for a moment. “I hope you won’t give up because of your uncle’s death,” she said.

Natalie shrugged. “Chris thinks I’ve given up.”

“I talked to him about that.”

Their conversation reminded Natalie of the slow climb up the first hill on a roller-coaster, the wait for the swoop down and up again. She asked, “What did you say?”

“I told him about my cousin’s death when I was in high school. No one is prepared when the first person they really love dies. I told him to be more patient.”

Natalie waited; she could feel Beryl working herself up to something. It occurred to her that Beryl might find her too quiet, even though most people did not. But she couldn’t help talking to Chris’s mother as if she were interviewing her, perhaps because his mother was tall and had a tendency to stare down at her. “How did you feel?”

“Oh, I tried just about everything,” Beryl said. “I withdrew into myself; then I got crazy and wild for a while. Finally I realized that I had to tell people what to do for me.”

“I talked to him about Tom,” Natalie blurted out. “But Chris just didn’t get it. He thought it was about him.”

“You have to give people specific instructions. I would say, ‘When I tell you I miss my cousin, say you’re sorry and hug me.’ At first I was angry that I had to explain, but then I saw that it worked.”

“Specific instructions,” Natalie repeated. They smiled at each other. Natalie put the scissors in her pocket and began walking home, dragging the bag behind her. She enjoyed the rasping sound. When they reached Beryl’s house, she turned to say goodbye, but Natalie stopped her with a question. “Did Chris ever tell you how we met?”

Beryl shook her head.

“I was out for a walk a week after your family moved here. As I went by your house, he said something to me from the doorway. I kept turning around, trying to see who was talking to me.”

Beryl laughed. “Chris always did like to surprise people.”

Natalie turned around and pointed out to Beryl where they had gone. “We walked toward that gate and stopped in front of the garden. Every time I see that garden, I think of Chris.”

Beryl studied the potholed road. Then she glanced over at Natalie and asked, “Does he still surprise you?”

Natalie didn’t immediately reply, so Beryl answered the question herself. “Because that’s all that really matters.”

Beryl went inside. Walking away, Natalie held onto the earrings Beryl had returned, as if she had given Chris to her, or back to her.

Are Women Damaged by Abortion?

2008-03-10T19:48:00.010-06:00

Not according to the Guttmacher Institute website, in its article "Facts on Induced Abortion in the United States," here.

But if you go to AbortionFacts.com and click on "Effects of Abortion" on the left, you find a long list of articles detailing abortion's negative effects on women. For example, the Guttmacher article states that fewer than 0.3% of women having abortions experience a complication requiring hospitalization. But "The Aftereffects of Abortion" by David Reardon of the Elliot Institute on AbortionFacts.com indicates that the rate is 10%.

It makes me wonder if apples and oranges are being compared. Are the abortions compared all safe and legal? Were abortions at different stages of pregnancy compared?

I did notice that a couple of the sources dated from the early 1970s, before the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, meaning that the articles were about women who had illegal abortions. That would definitely affect the safety rate and the psychological consequences for the woman. Also, the article uses the phrase "aborted women," which I find offensive, as if somehow they had the procedure done to them instead of choosing it for themselves. As if all that mattered about them afterward was that they'd had an abortion.

This subject is tremendously frustrating for me. I'm inclined to think AbortionFacts.com is full of shit, but I ought to take the time to actually check out the sources on at least one article and see if the author is cherry-picking.

If you'd like to read some stories by women who don't regret their abortions, try this site.

Story 7: Cradle

2008-03-06T09:20:00.006-07:00

As Natalie walked down the path to the dock, Janie greeted her from the picnic table, where lunch was being set up.

“Well, Natalie,” she said, pronouncing her words carefully, “how’s Michael?”

Natalie turned around and looked at her. Janie’s severely dyed hair was a hard dark red for summer. Her all-black swimsuit had a ruffle from the waist to the hips and covered as much of her flab as any one-piece could. “Fine,” Natalie said, and continued to the dock.

Janie called after her. “Now, Natalie,” she said, “don’t you swim out to the buoy.”

Natalie ignored her. She left her towel on a chair and positioned herself at the edge of the dock.

Lake Tapawingo had murky waters at best, and the rocks on the bottom underneath the ladder grew a thick coat of slimy lake plants. Occasionally a crawdad or fish would make contact. So Natalie’s preferred method of entry was diving off the dock as hard and straight and forward as possible or jumping off the boathouse, hugging her knees.

This time her body arced so perfectly that her hands sliced into the top of the water, and she skimmed for 10 feet just below the surface. She turned and looked back at the dock and the small figures at the table; Janie had not followed her down yet. Sidestroke suited her best, especially when she switched from one side to the other, exercising both sets of obliques. Natalie wasn’t a strong swimmer; she’d never swum laps or done much endurance swimming at all. Someday I’ll swim across, she thought. She reached the buoy and circled it a few times. She liked to float near it on her back and stare at it until it became abstract and her mind emptied. Then she was held in the lake’s undulating skin. The water rose slowly around her face; when it almost flowed into her nose and eyes she moved her hands and feet languidly to surface. When you’re in the water, does it still reflect the sun and make you more likely to sunburn? How big are the fish in this lake?

She turned on her stomach and looked but saw only sunlight through greenish water filled with floating specks. The water made her eyes feel full of grit. Wonder what’s in this lake water. Voices reached her from both shores, and a boat drove by, rocking her, getting water up her nose. Maybe floating was her only strength: lying down in water’s vehicle and letting it move her where it wanted. A rescuer would certainly come by eventually, though she hoped it would be someone younger and more male than Janie. Perhaps Han Solo, but then she reminded herself that he had been frozen in The Empire Strikes Back. Natalie certainly didn’t want to wait for rescue until the next episode of Star Wars came out. But then she flailed at the water, kicking droplets as high as she could. What was she doing out here, stopped by the buoy separating her from the boats and held by the water that Janie feared? And Michael would be coming down the road in a few weeks. Natalie didn’t want either of them near her, but she didn’t know how to keep them at bay. Everything at the lake this summer was conspiring to keep her in place.

Last night she had said to Michael, “I’ve never kept anything from you before,” and he had agreed. She had expected him to point out that she hadn’t been honest with him for months, but instead he had said “True” and then waited for her to respond. She had nothing new to say. She had confessed that she’d had an abortion before she told him she was pregnant, and now she wanted the entire situation to be over.

Natalie sighed and ended her buoy ritual by swimming in on her back, frog-style, orienting herself by staring at the house across the lake. She forced herself not to look directly behind her—she wanted to navigate by something other than sight, by the slant of sunlight or shapes in her peripheral vision. She almost ran into the boathouse—not too far off—and turned around to face Janie standing at the point where the path met the retaining wall. Natalie could have climbed up the ladder to the dock, but she liked finishing her swim by picking her way over rocks in the shallows. It reminded her of how decisions can be made too quickly, like her impulse to sleep with Michael last Thanksgiving without using birth control. Back here, she could see everything ahead of her. As she teetered on one slimy, unstable rock after another between the dock and the boathouse, Janie had plenty of time to comment on her love of danger, and she didn’t restrain herself. Natalie tried to ignore her, get past, but then she tripped and hit her knee on a rock just as Janie reached her peak.

“You scare me, Natalie, you really do! I’m not strong enough to swim out after you!”

Natalie’s knee bled a little, which made her speculate again on the composition of the lake water. She stopped on the path next to Janie, dripping, and said loudly enough for those at the table to hear, “Then go home where you don’t have to see it. Go home and sleep it off!”

Natalie retrieved her towel and trotted back to the table, wrapping it around her waist, over her plaid bikini. Janie followed her but kept walking, through the yard and across the street.

“Where is she going?” Natalie’s mother asked.

“Home. And I hope she stays there.” Natalie combed her hair back with her fingers so that it would drip down her back, not in her face. She felt embarrassed but relieved.

“She’s our neighbor and our guest, Natalie,” her mother scolded, shaking her head. “I’d rather she didn’t leave hungry and angry.”

Natalie smiled at Chris, who had just moved to Lake Tapawingo last week, and at his parents, who introduced themselves as Joe and Beryl Burnet. She squeezed in next to her mother. The white picnic table barely accommodated Chris and his parents, Natalie and her parents, her aunt and uncle, and their five children, who tended to act and speak as if they were a unit.

“I was just talking about my job with Janie,” Chris said, “but she seemed a little too drunk to understand.”

“I didn’t think she was drunk,” Natalie’s mother said. Chris let a little smile hover around his lips, which, Natalie noticed, were very red. His tan cheeks rounded even more when he smiled.

“What job?” Natalie asked.

“Actually, it’s an internship at the weekly in Lee’s Summit. Three days a week, but I don’t need to show up until 10.”

“We’re both working at weeklies!” Natalie said. “I work for the paper at the lake.”

“I didn’t know you were a journalism major,” Chris said.

By now their parents were listening intently. “No, English. I want to work for a book publisher, but there aren’t any around here.”

“You could start your own,” her uncle suggested. He handed her a plate with an undressed burger and macaroni salad. Condiments arrived from various corners of the table, and Tom arranged an onion-and-pickle-relish stick person on top of her hamburger.

“If you give me the money,” Natalie laughed, digging into the macaroni. Then she noticed the relish. “Uncle Tom, you know I don’t like pickles!” He laughed at her and smashed her bun down onto the burger.

Chris hadn’t finished his thought. “Well, I’m a journalism major. At MU.”

“Good place for it,” Tom said.

“I write a column for the student paper, under the pseudonym ‘Green,’” Chris said.

“Green,” Tom said, drawing out the word. There was a pause in the conversation. Then he laughed. “Oh, I get it. Your name is Burnet, which is a salad green, and your nickname is Green. Very clever.”

“Is it now?” Chris asked softly. His parents whispered something to each other.

“You write such inflammatory stuff you need a fake name?” Tom asked.

“According to some guys.” Chris looked more and more nettled.

But Tom was not quite done. “A salad with burnet is like love without a woman,” he said. He raised an eyebrow at Natalie, as if to ask, “Who is this person?”

Natalie decided to change the subject. “Well, I don’t write anything for the paper. I just catch other people’s mistakes. They told me last week I was the best proofer they’ve ever had.”

“I’m sure you are,” her father said, smiling. “Chris, why don’t you write an article about moving here? Then Natalie can proof it.”

“My articles don’t need checking. They’re perfect,” Chris said, laughing.

Natalie’s parents exchanged a glance. “That sounds like a challenge,” her father said.

“I think it is,” Natalie said, turning to Chris. “I’ll take you up on it.”

“For that, you need hotdogs,” Tom said, getting up and circling the table until he found them and taking them to the grill. Natalie laughed out loud. He returned with twelve of them, cooked and impaled on a metal skewer. To Natalie he seemed to come and go magically in his orange swim trunks and ratty white tank top, each time bringing more food. One by one, they plucked off the hotdogs. Natalie’s father passed the buns down the table, then the mustard.

“I want ketchup,” Natalie said. “And cheese and chopped onions.”

Chris and his parents finished their burgers and said they had to get back home. Natalie walked them to the street, trying to ignore the feeling that each person at the table was critiquing them and her conversation with Chris. The three of them said goodbye to her as if from a great height, at least half a head above her. A curtain moved slightly in the front window of Janie’s home. But when she sat down, no one said anything. With an evil grin, Tom picked up a plate of brownies from the seat next to him, and the cousins went to fetch their ice cream from the refrigerator. Soon hot fudge sundaes were circling the table.

**

At noon on Tuesday, Natalie slumped over the desk at the Lake Tapawingo weekly, reading an article about boat engines for the third time because the author rewrote it obsessively. “Once or twice more and I’ll be an expert,” she muttered to herself. Just then the door opened.

“Talk to yourself a lot?” Chris asked.

“Only when I’m really bored.”

“Are you the only one here?”

“The editor went out to lunch with the production department and left me in charge.”

He sat down in a chair beside her black metal desk, turning the furniture in the room shabby next to his white t-shirt and blue chino shorts. Ironed, Natalie noticed, unlike most of the shorts she saw during the school year in Boulder. He was holding two sheets of paper in his hands, which he held out to her.

“Here’s my article on how weird Lake Tapawingo is.” He shrugged. “I tried to be diplomatic, but it’s still pretty blunt.”

“That’s what I would expect from you,” Natalie said. He nodded.

“That barbeque on Saturday,” he said. “Do you always get in fights with your neighbors?”

“That was a first,” Natalie said, resting her chin on her hands, proofing neglected for the moment. “Janie’s been after me as long as I can remember.”

Chris leaned toward her. “I could smell it too. She likes vodka.”

“Oh, don’t I know it.”

“To make up for it,” Chris said, “we’ll just have to be really nice to her from now on. Nice, but firm. And brief.”

Natalie laughed. “We?”

“She’s my neighbor too. But you’re my favorite neighbor so far,” Chris said, “though I hope that’s not all we’re destined to be.”

“You and I have a destiny?”

“Why not?” he asked.

She laughed and shook her head. “Well, I have a boyfriend,” she said. “He’s coming to visit in July.”

“You don’t seem very excited about the old home-town honey,” Chris observed.

Natalie had nothing to say to that. Michael was a topic too complicated to explain at work.

“You know,” Chris said, “if you went out with me—”

Natalie stared at him.

“—just for one night, just one night, you’d have a basis for comparison.”

“That’s true, I would,” Natalie said. Then she felt suspended, as if her ordinary life had suddenly fallen away, leaving her in midair.

After he left, she read his article. As he had said, its grammar and spelling were perfectly correct. One phrase stuck in her head all that day: “The cradle that is Lake Tapawingo.”

**

Chris took Natalie dancing at a country western bar off I-70, on Crackerneck Road. “I’m not really a fan of country,” he told her in the car, “but this bar is the closest and the band does play rock and blues.”

Where Michael was respectful, Chris was confident. When he took her in his arms on the dance floor, she followed him without hesitation. He spoke close to her ear, telling her he was going to be a journalist because he liked to ask people questions.

“I don’t,” Natalie said into his shoulder, raising her voice to be heard over the music. “I wait for them to tell me.”

“Tell you what?” She had to lean closer to him to hear. Their faces brushed against each other.

“Their histories,” she said, turning her head in what she hoped was a casual way.

“Afraid I was going to kiss you?” he asked, grinning.

“No!” Natalie said.

“Liar. I was thinking of it, but I could tell you were chicken.”

“I’m not afraid,” she said. “But why so eager? You hardly know me.”

“I saw you and I wanted to be with you,” he said.

At home that night, she made a list in her diary. She hadn’t written since January 30, the day before her abortion. She put his name at the top: Chris

is a journalism major (who, what, where, when, why, and how).

decided to become one sometime after a teacher told him he asked too many questions. Still can’t stop asking questions (who).

likes to talk. Obviously (who).

works hard in school because his parents are teachers and he’s an only child. I work hard because my father is a professor and I’m the only child (who and why).

hasn’t ever skied on snow, just on water (what!).

thinks Midwesterners are the strongest Americans (who).

She had challenged him on that, and he said: “Easterners act tough, and Westerners think the landscape makes them tough, but Midwesterners put down roots. Other people settled in the East or chased their dreams to the West, but we knew there was work to be done right here.”

That was another “why.” Or a “who.” Natalie forced herself to stay awake long enough to complete her list: Chris

doesn’t drool when he kisses (and how!).

wants to live in a big Midwestern city, like Chicago or St. Louis (where).

wants me to come over on Friday (when).

She’d said “yes” to the last item, but then she wondered what category her answer fell into. Did how she’d said it mean something? He’d parked the car at his parents’ house, gotten out and opened her door, and grasped her hand. The car, interior cold from the air conditioner, let the night air slip in as he pulled her close to him again. Natalie hadn’t thought about how their date might end, but apparently he had. He brushed her hair away from her face and kissed her. Then he asked, “My house on Friday? We’ll have it mostly to ourselves.” She nodded. “Was that a yes?” he asked, and kissed her again. “Yes,” she said, and put her arms around his neck. He pressed her against the car and kept her there for a long time before walking her home. As she lay in bed, sliding into sleep, Natalie could still feel the imprint of his body on hers.

**

It was dusk on Friday, and they were sitting on Chris’s dock, their fingers orange from the Cheetos they ate, one by one. Watching him, Natalie placed another one on her tongue and let it dissolve, her mouth open so he could see. Chris grew nervous.

“I feel like a mouse sitting next to a cat.”

“That’s what boys in high school called me. ‘The cat.’”

He looked at her oddly. “Why?”

“’Cause I never went out with anyone for very long until my senior year. That’s the way they thought I was with guys.”

“So let me see … you chased them, pounced on them, batted them around, and then dropped them dead at your parents’ feet?”

Natalie didn’t care for that description, but then she wondered if Michael would agree with Chris. “Well, the first two might be true, but not the second two.” She shifted away from him, toward the road. A light flickered on in Janie’s living room, and Natalie could see her moving around, straightening up.

“I must have hit a sore spot,” Chris said.

“Not really.” Natalie shrugged. “But I feel guilty about being here with you when I have a boyfriend.”

Chris was silent for a moment. Then he grinned. “How’s the comparison going?” he asked.

“It’s just until the Fourth of July,” Natalie informed him, a little resentfully. “Then he’ll be here.”

“Oh, a month is all I get?” His tone was rueful, making Natalie sad and frightened at once. She was revealing herself to him almost in spite of her intentions. Chris turned her face up to his. “I’m not sure that’s enough for me.”

“This is only our second date.”

“I know. But you’ve made a good impression.”

Then she wanted to cry. Wait ’til you hear the whole story, she thought, and it must have shown on her face.

“Aha!” he said. “You have more secrets. Tell me.”

She took off her shoes and dangled her feet in the water, which was still warm, and he sat down behind her, wrapping his arms and legs around her. “Now,” he said. “Let’s talk about boyfriends and girlfriends.”

Natalie didn’t say anything.

“You go first,” he said. “I have a feeling that your love life has been more eventful than mine.”

Half-forgotten rituals of Catholic confession came into Natalie’s head. Forgive me, for I have sinned … it has been … five years? After a few minutes he tightened his arms around her, just a little. Then she focused on a small light on a dock all the way across the lake. She had not expected that she would find this secret so hard to share. “This boyfriend?”

“Yeah?”

“I got pregnant last Thanksgiving and didn’t tell him until after I had an abortion.”

His chest tightened against her back, but he was quiet. She stared at the light without blinking until her eyes watered.

“You lied to him,” Chris said, finally breaking the silence. “Why?”

“I was afraid he’d want to marry me, and I knew I couldn’t.”

“You don’t love him?”

Natalie shook her head. “I did at first.” But after her last semester of high school, she had come to Lake Tapawingo without him, enjoying the simplicity of aloneness, of not having to do. She read books without analyzing them. She argued Reaganomics with her father without thinking it through. With Michael, she’d realized, she had constantly to reach for her best, and it was wearing her out. “And I wasn’t going to bear a child to a man I didn’t want to marry.”

“It’s not as if I’ve never had a pregnancy scare,” Chris said. “I know girls who’ve had abortions; you’re not the first. It’s the lie that bothers me. I wonder what you’ll tell me.”

“I told you what happened.”

“True.” He leaned against her, speaking close to her ear. “You know, I’ve been looking for an imperfect girl. You just might fit the bill.”

Natalie stiffened. “It’s your turn,” she said into his shoulder, wiggling a little, wondering whether her urge to confess had been sound.

“I think we’re a lot alike,” he said.

“In our imperfection, you mean?”

He laughed a little harshly. “Yes. Both of us have had one serious relationship. Both of us have played a little. I lost my virginity when I was fourteen. How old were you?”

“Sixteen.”

“That was your junior year. Tell me about him.”

“His name was Ben. I’ve spent enough time talking about him, I think.”

“OK!” His voice carried across the lake, Natalie thought, and woke up early sleepers who had their windows open. He asked her, “Was he the reason you got the rep as the cat?”

“No, that was before him. I’d go out with a guy for a month and get bored.”

“I had a serious girlfriend my senior year,” Chris said, stroking her arms. “We thought she was pregnant once. That freaked me out, so I slept with someone else, which kinda ruined things.”

“I can imagine,” Natalie said.

He sighed. “Everyone loved Susan, so the last three months of high school were hell. Luckily she decided not to go to MU at the last minute.”

“I think my guilt trip is a little worse than yours,” Natalie said.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I’m not shocked very often, but I’m shocked that you didn’t tell him right away.”

“I lied,” Natalie said. “I know. It’s practically all I think about.”

“You didn’t have to tell me about Michael,” Chris mused. “You get points for that.”

They were silent for a minute. Then Natalie turned around and asked. “Why are we still here?”

He pulled her back until they were lying down on the dock facing each other. Starlight reflected from the lake back up to the sky. “I’m here because you draw me. What about you?”

“The same,” Natalie said.

“Here’s the deal,” Chris said, with firmness in his voice. “You break up with Michael, and I’ll trust you.”

No boats were allowed after dark, and Chris’s parents had only dim lights in their back yard. “They’ve gone to bed,” he told her when she looked up at the house. He wrapped his arms and legs around her and kissed her for a long time. They stayed out on the dock until the spiders came up from their webs underneath and started biting. Then he walked her home.

One day in mid-June, Natalie came home from a walk with Chris to find her mother at the sewing machine on the screened porch, surrounded by yards of green madras. She turned and smiled at Natalie, who was distracted by the sight of Janie sitting in the glider.

“It’s a wrap skirt to match your suit,” her mother said, holding up the bikini bottom of Natalie’s blue-and-green-plaid swimsuit to the fabric. “I’ll have it finished today.”

Janie asked Natalie, without looking at her, “How’s Chris?”

Her mother was stretching out the seam, getting ready to sew again. She paused almost imperceptibly.

“Fine,” Natalie said.

“That’s what you said about Michael the other day.”

“They’re both fine,” Natalie repeated.

Janie turned to face her. “I know you think I’m a fat drunk,” she spat, her breath smelling of onions at the moment, “but I’ve never cheated on anyone. I’m too romantic for that.”

Then Janie got up and handed something to her mother, whispered in her ear. She left the screened porch without looking at Natalie. Natalie’s mother sighed, and her shoulders collapsed backward: she did these two things every time someone spoke to her in a way that presaged a fight. Natalie had watched animals approach each other the same way, one walking up aggressively and the other backing off subtly. Her mother seemed to get stuck in these situations an awful lot, except now the fight was over.

“Why can’t I complete a simple task without being asked to serve as referee?”

Natalie had no answer to that question.

Her mother continued. “I like to make clothes for a girl who doesn’t have any bulges or bumps. It reminds me of being young and taut…without so much history behind me. …”

Not that Natalie’s mother would have allowed a bulge to show if she had one—she would have dieted or girdled it into submission. She meant the scars on her stomach from a cesarean and a hysterectomy, both occasioned by her only daughter’s appearance in the world. Natalie had seen them only a few times. On the rare occasions when her mother dressed or undressed in front of people other than her husband, she exposed as little of her body as possible. And when she was sad, she would often slide down into a chair and rub her stomach, as if the incisions had awakened and needed to be soothed back to sleep. When Natalie occasionally dreamed of them, they served as evidence of her violent desire to get into the world.

During the abortion, Natalie remembered, she had thought her uterus would never stop contracting. She had wondered how many contractions it had taken to expel her 2-inch fetus and how much of the rest was just blood. She imagined the sensation of contractions around a full-term baby.

The seam was finished. Her mother called her over to try on the skirt. Natalie took off her shorts and slipped into it. There was a small silver picture frame resting in her mother’s lap. As she knelt down to pin the hem in one liquid motion, she placed the frame on the sewing machine. The girl in the picture had a heart-shaped face, dull blonde hair, and an engaging smile.

“Do you recognize her?” her mother said, her mouth full of pins.

“Janie?” Natalie guessed, squirming as the raw edge of the cotton fabric tickled her calf. Then she added, looking down on her mother’s dark red hair, “She’s dyeing her hair to match yours. She wants to be you.”

“Why don’t you return it to her later,” her mother said, but it wasn’t just a suggestion.

“Why?” It seemed everyone demanded something from her these days—Michael, their relationship as it once was; Chris, to break up with Michael; and her mother, friendship with Janie.

“So you can talk to her. It’s awkward, having to tiptoe around the two of you.”

“When she’s drinking, she won’t leave me alone.”

“Sometimes people act in annoying ways because they’re disappointed, Telie,” her mother mumbled, scooting a quarter of the way around her. “They think they see other people going the same way they went and want to warn them.”

“You think I’ll end up with badly dyed hair?” Her mother laughed, a couple of pins hanging from her lip, and then stopped abruptly. Natalie knew she felt guilty for mocking Janie.

“Did it ever occur to you simply to tell her to stop?”

“I guess I never thought she could act any other way.”

Her mother looked up at her with a smile that seemed a little too broad. “I know you think I’m not direct enough with people. But this is the way I do it. First I wait to see if people will stop annoying me on their own. Obviously Janie won’t. Then I try to give them a hint—which you did at the barbeque.” Natalie grinned to herself. Her mother wasn’t joking, wasn’t even being ironic. She simply thought Natalie had no tact. “Then I ask a question, as in, ‘Do you always act this way?’ Finally I ask them to stop.”

“Do you ever tell them?” Natalie inquired, pretty sure what the answer would be.

“Well, I did just now.” Natalie twisted around to look at her. Her mother was smiling again as she placed the last pin, tugged on the skirt to make sure the edges were even, and stepped back to look.

“What’s so funny?”

“Well, Natalie,” she said, directing her to turn slowly while she checked the hem, “I think you always wanted me to tell people. Not you. Now take that off and I’ll sew it up.”

**

That night, as she swam back and forth along the moonlight’s path in the lake, Natalie made a decision. She had been avoiding Michael, not returning his phone calls, out of guilt and reluctance to make a scene. Now was the time, she figured. Time to clear out her system, enjoy Chris for the rest of the summer, and return to school ready for a new start in her sophomore year of college. She called him the next day, right before lunch break.

“Don’t come visit,” she said, without preamble.

“I have to,” he insisted. “We need to work through this.”

She tried to tell him that the distance made it impossible. She explained that she was tired, but tiredness is not very compelling to someone who’s desperate.

“I know it’s a challenge. But that’s what I love about you. You’re not easy.” Natalie could hear coworkers chatting in the background. She wondered if he would cry in front of them or hide his tears.

“I want less work and more fun,” she said.

He was quiet for a few seconds, and then he asked, “Did you feel this way at Thanksgiving?”

“A little bit.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was hoping I could get back what we had.”

**

By the time Fourth of July weekend rolled around, Natalie and Chris had spent every possible moment together for several weeks. His parents were going to a big party in Kansas City, but Natalie’s family was gathering at her grandparents’ house, so Chris invited Natalie over. “If I can tear you away from your family,” he said, laughing.

Natalie came downstairs and tried to slip out the door, but she couldn’t get past her uncle quickly enough.

“Someone has a date, I see,” Tom laughed. “With Mr. Perfect Journalist.”

“And he’s the boy next door,” Aunt Lydia added.

“He’s more interesting than her family,” her father said.

“Bye!” All the cousins waved.

As Natalie turned to leave, Tom ejected himself from the couch and walked her to the door, where he took her wrist in his calloused, well-scrubbed doctor hand. “It hasn’t been a good year for you so far, has it?” he asked her softly. Behind them, the rest of her family laughed at her father’s latest story about an obnoxious student.

“No,” Natalie admitted, smiling up at him. He could always tell when she was troubled. He had concluded something was wrong after she’d stopped seeing Ben, after the rape and its unpleasant aftermath at school. Was a breakup always a signal, for her, that something was wrong? If that was the case, Natalie thought, then she’d never be without a man. She felt hemmed in.

“Chris seems to have brought back your sparkle,” Tom said. He kissed her hand and tossed it away, saying, “Off with you!”

Natalie scooted by Janie’s house as fast as she could, remembering the picture frame still sitting on her dresser. She could smell onions and wood smoke. Chris was grilling steaks. He had already heated rolls and made salad and put them on the table, along with red wine. They ate while a warm wind blew through the house and talked about what their families must be doing. Natalie said her mother would be trying not to argue with Tom’s wife. “There’s always a little tension between them.”

“My Mom would never let that go on,” Chris said. “She’d drag her upstairs for a serious discussion.”

“I believe it,” Natalie said. She had spent one or two evenings watching movies on TV with him while his parents were around. They had kept a keen eye on her. “Did you tell your parents anything about me?”

“Just basic stuff, where you’re from and where you go to school. Why?”

“Not about Michael.”

“Oh no,” he said. “They still don’t understand why Susan and I broke up. They thought I was really stupid to give her up.”

“Do you miss her?”

“No, I really don’t.”

“I don’t miss Michael either.”

“No, but you still feel guilty.” Natalie frowned at him, and he laughed. “Come on, you know you do.”

“Not really,” Natalie said, crushing the remaining croutons with her fork. Chris’s plate was clean; he’d used the last roll to mop up the juices from his steak. “It just that I feel I’ve gone from one man to another.”

“Well, we’ll be by ourselves all next semester,” Chris reminded her. “Take what you can get while you can get it.”

They laughed and clinked their glasses together.

“Michael sounds like the male equivalent of my girlfriend Susan,” Chris went on. “And people like that, I’ve discovered, will keep you feeling guilty to hold you close.”

He did the dishes, refusing to let her help. Then they went downstairs, where he had laid a blue-and-green star quilt on the floor and piled up bed pillows. “Are you always this prepared?” Natalie asked him, feeling a little managed.

“Tonight I’m taking care of you. Feel free to do the same for me sometime.”

As they lay close to each other on the quilt and watched the Fourth of July celebration on the Mall in DC, Natalie considered what he might mean. She’d always associated taking care of someone with martyrdom on the part of the caretaker and passive acceptance on the part of the receiver. But she was beginning to believe Chris intended a quite different thing.

Since the revelations about their romantic lives, they hadn’t done much more than kiss. All week she’d worried about this evening. She remembered the night on the dock, how since then he’d held himself a little distant from her. All without saying anything direct. If he had dismissed it, she would have worried more, but she hadn’t wanted to sue for forgiveness. She’d apologized to Michael for lying; that was enough. She had no such duty to Chris, and that freedom attracted her.

Natalie turned off the TV with her toe and pulled him closer.

He made love the same way he danced, with confidence. Briefly she wondered just how many girls this much experience required. And she had to laugh when he pulled a condom from underneath one of the pillows. “Good thing I didn’t rearrange them when I sat down,” she teased him.

“I wanted tonight to take away any doubts you have. Because I have none.”

When Natalie walked in her front door that night, Tom and Lydia and her parents were curled up on the couches, talking. The cousins lay sprawled on the floor, asleep. As Natalie picked her way over them to get to the stairs, Tom said softly, “Did you celebrate independence?” He was looking at her earnestly, while the rest of them, in the way they feigned indifference, magnified their concern. Just then Natalie realized how closely they followed her. This is what being an only child means, she thought, glad that she and Chris shared that trait.

“Yes,” she assured him, “we had a good Fourth.” On her way upstairs, she added under her breath, “And our own little celebration.”

**

Natalie didn’t go to bed right away. She waited until the house was quiet before putting Janie’s picture frame in her shorts pocket, where it fell heavily against her leg, and going across the street. All the windows were dark. She raised her hand to ring the doorbell, stopped, and looked at her watch. It was midnight. Natalie loved summer nights and always stayed awake as late as possible, especially on a night with a slow breeze. What didn’t Janie like about them? She considered coming back in the morning but then rang the bell three times anyway. When Janie came to the door, Natalie could tell she had woken her up, which gave her a certain satisfaction.

“Mom showed me your picture,” Natalie said, holding it out. “It’s pretty.” Then she turned around, walked down to the dock, and dove in, shorts and all. She hoped Janie was watching and that it kept her up with worry. At night, at least, with everyone indoors, no one would bother her about how far to swim.

Banning Abortion Will Not Lower Rates

2008-03-03T20:22:00.007-07:00

The Guttmacher Institute has lots of statistics on abortion (and other subjects). Here's a link to a page about the incidence of abortion worldwide.

Facts on Induced Abortion Worldwide

Near the top, the article states that abortion declined most in countries where it is legal.

Go to the third head, "Abortion Law," for the information below.

According to the article, abortion rates are about the same in Africa (29 per 1,000 women per year) and Europe (28 per 1,000 women per year).

But in Africa, abortion is generally illegal (and unsafe). In Europe, it's generally legal (and safe). Please note that the rate in Europe is somewhat skewed by the incidence of abortion in Eastern Europe, which has declined but is still high (because under the communists, abortion was contraception).

Thoughts???

Story 6: Deirdre, in Xeriscape: Geometry

2008-02-27T20:11:00.006-07:00

I can always tell when Jodi has done something I won’t like. The first time she sees me, she ducks her head and gives me that Princess Di look, only Jodi’s eyes and hair are dark. Otherwise the resemblance is uncanny. But I have learned to wait. So we go to lunch and talk about the end of this semester. About being sophomores next year. Not that I was ever a freshman. But nobody cares about this one little sexist word like I do. I look up and see that Jodi’s eating like a pig, wolfing down an enchilada in seconds while I’m just picking at my lunch because let’s face it, Food Court food is always greasy or bland or salad. Which is what I got. She stops and stares at me, finishes her bite. Then she starts to talk.

“You know Natalie and Debbie have found an apartment?”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, a three-bedroom up on 30th near Valmont. They were looking for a two-bedroom, but somebody recommended this place and they liked it.”

“Oh,” I said. I find it easier to be friends with Natalie and Debbie when they’re not together. When they’re in the same room, they focus on each other until I feel like I disappear. It reminds me of being around my parents when they’re talking about their patients; it just makes me crabby.

“They asked me to live with them.”

That revelation frees her to devour the second enchilada, apparently. I’m stunned. I crunch croutons for a while, then ask: “And where will I live?”

She says defiantly, “How am I supposed to know? Do I look like a housing service?”

Now Jodi never talks to me that way. Sweet is the only word that really describes her. I say, “You don’t want to live with me?” Then I try to cover it up, but I can’t. I stutter a few words and blink so tears will stay in my eyes. Of course, she’s done eating now. She gets up to bus her dishes.

“I want my own place,” she tells me when she sits down again. “But I can’t afford it right now. And if I lived with you, it’d be your place. You had everything planned.”

Well, excuse me, but that’s what she’s always liked about me. I took her to Rocky Mountain National Park once in high school, and she told me afterward how nice it had been not to have to do anything, just follow me up the trail and eat my picnic, right at the edge of Alberta Falls. My favorite place. Jodi told me that day I was better than a boyfriend. I’m good at detail. I know what works best. Just look at the Food Court, for instance. All these round tables placed an equal distance apart. It needs a couple of obvious lanes, front to back and side to side. Then people wouldn’t mill around with trays held at diners’ eye level and hit people in the head with them, which happens to me at least once a month. But while I’m musing, Jodi gathers up her stuff.

“Bye,” she says. “Got to get to class.” And that’s it. Then I cry. I even put my head on the table and sob a few times. Then I get an ice cream bar and coffee and blow off my history class. It’s only review, and I know more than everyone in the class put together, probably. Finally, I go back to my dorm room, and luckily Jodi doesn’t come back until much later. I force myself to calm down when I hear her turning the key in the lock. When she gets in, I look up, say “Hey,” and go back to my book, but the whole time we’re in there before dinner, I keep mentally surveying the room, thinking about the pretty curtains I made, and the little cabinets I bought and hung near each bed so that we could just grab our shampoo and stuff but not have tampons all over the room. You know, when boys come to visit. Girls can cope. And I think of my toolbox. How many freshwomen own complete sets of screwdrivers and wrenches?

It’s time for meal number two of this day, but I’m not that hungry. When we go down to the cafeteria, I pretend. I get the macaroni and cheese and eat it methodically, two ’ronis on four tines, over and over. Then Natalie and Debbie come over to chat, and Jodi asks them, right in front of me, when they need to go sign the lease. They all look at me sideways, thinking, “She knows!”

“Let’s go tomorrow,” Debbie says, finally. Then they leave. By this time, I’ve progressed from the main course to dessert, which is a spongy chocolate cake with thin frosting that I just adore. But tonight I’m not enjoying it so much. I look up, and Jodi is staring at me.

I say, “You won’t live with me because I slept with Josh. Isn’t that it? You think that once you’ve slept with him, he’s yours, all yours. Even though you don’t love him, and I do.”

This look crosses her face that I’ve never seen before. I realize it’s contempt. I get my fork underneath the cake and flip it at her, right in her face. Then I walk out as fast as I can and go to our room. Jodi comes back after I’ve gone to bed. I lie rigid under the covers because I’m waiting for her to throw something at me. But she just gets in bed. That’s it.

Why I Love Deirdre Cannon Most of All

2008-02-25T19:44:00.014-07:00

Planttalk is my favorite story in this book. It's a variation on the theme that began in the first Deirdre story, "Tundra Trail," which is, "Does anybody really like me?" That theme informs all the Deirdre stories.

Deirdre really has only one friend--Jodi--and Planttalk tells us how Deirdre almost loses her. Not intentionally, which at least would show some gumption. And, what's even worse, because of a man who bores Jodi. Deirdre wants him, and gets him in the way just about any woman can "get" Josh. He likes people, and he likes physical intimacy, and he's not particular about sharing like Jodi.

So a love triangle forms: Josh pines for Jodi, and Deirdre pines for Josh. He's had Jodi, and afterward she's forever out of his reach. He doesn't know what to do because he's used to standing around and waiting for people to fly to the warmth of his personality.

Originally there was a scene in the title story in which one of Natalie's lovers, the one who got her pregnant in that version, wonders if Josh has a "magic dick." I took that scene out because it didn't fit Natalie. But it is an apt comment about Josh.

Some of the readers of these stories commented that the Deirdre stories weren't really stories per se: Where's the conflict? What's the point? and so on. I suppose they're right; her stories are more like sketches or moments. I meant for her to comment on Natalie and Debbie, since those three never really get comfortable with each other. I'm not sure her stories actually do what I intended, but still her character is close to my heart.

Story 5: Deirdre in Xeriscape: PlantTalk

2008-02-21T10:00:00.006-07:00

From my stone bench between the spruces, I call Planttalk on the cordless phone. Even though the sound isn’t as good as our other phones, I like using it from the bench in the yard, where all the neighbors can see me and my cordlessness. If they are looking. I want to hear that man’s deep buzzy voice again. It’s Friday night, and since I’m stuck here at my parents’ house for spring break and Jodi is on vacation with her parents, I have no plans other than to garden tomorrow.

Depending on which way I face and whether I bring my binoculars out with me, from this seat I can peer into the other houses perched on this hill. I always think they look like those big gaudy pins that old ladies wear, hanging off their chests and weighing down their polyester blouses. Our house is the hill’s cap, and it fits, snugly. Or I can turn inward to the yard I have been slowly revising, square foot by square foot, since high school. My neighbors don’t understand xeriscape. They don’t think it applies in a mountain town like Evergreen. That’s why we’ll have a water crisis in twenty years. Just you wait.

I settle for number 2013—“spring frosts and snows”—and wait for the voice, which really says, “Snow is a great insulator.” But I hear, “You have great tatas! Lay here!” Well, I do. Even if lay isn’t grammatical. I wonder if this man’s voice would sound sexy in my bedroom. The log walls tend to absorb sound, but I’ve never had a man there to really test them. After I listened to this entry the first time, two falls ago, I dug up all the south-facing tulips and planted them on the east side of the house. My tulips will not be seduced by the southern sun, at least, not before they are truly ready. Now they bloom long after the ones at the University of Colorado, which I secretly enjoy. Everyone else is talking about summer, but at home, in the mountains, the seasons take their sweet time. And I have the latest tulips. I want to have the latest of everything.

Sweet time. I lie back on the cool stone and absorb the man’s voice for a little longer. Then I turn off the phone, close my eyes, and remember the night Josh and I made love in the grass along Boulder Creek. We had been walking along the creek, using a book I had just bought to identify plants. In one especially marshy spot, he took my hand in his and ran my fingers along the sedges. “Sedges have edges,” he said. “That’s how you tell them from grasses.” We teetered from one hummock of grass to another and happened on a meadow surrounded by bushes. The ground there was dry but cool. I told him the sound of trickling water soothed me and lay down, propping the book on my chest. Neither of us was wearing a coat. An extremely warm night for March, that’s what it was.

“I need a pillow,” he said, rearranging himself with his head on my stomach. After a while, the feel of his hair through my thin shirt drowned out the creek, and I reached down and mussed his hair, not that it was ever that neat. He turned over and kissed my belly.

Jodi had told me all about Josh: he was exactly as slow and thorough as she’d described. Jodi doesn’t love that about him; she likes men who take control. I don’t know exactly what type I like, since Josh was my first, but I didn’t anticipate a problem with sharing. Jodi, it turns out, had a different view. When I told her, she acted as if Josh were a plant in her garden. I explained that I’d always liked him but that she got there first. Then when she said how gentle he was and how she thought he might bore her, I decided I could like him again. It didn’t help. I don’t understand why she wants to claim plants for her garden that she doesn’t love. And I never got the impression that Josh thought he belonged to her.

The bench is cold. Even the memory of Josh doesn’t change that. I want to see how long I can stand it against my shoulder blades. I try to flatten the part of my back between into the bench but can’t. The stars are really clear now. The phone is silent. Tomorrow I’m going to buy a plant that reminds me of Jodi and install it in a secret corner of my yard. Maybe pussytoes, with its soft flowers and distinctive gray leaves. I won’t tell anyone, but that way Jodi will have to forgive me. It will be like casting a spell.

Sometimes people remind me of nothing so much as perennials. When they overgrow one bed, I can divide them and move part of them to another. To make a match, I can try one plant and then another for the contrast—as long as their seasons of bloom follow each other from June until September. In the mountains, with their abbreviated growing season, that is all I can hope for.

Must we be logical?

2008-02-18T20:15:00.005-07:00

On Valentine's Day, I published a letter to the editor in the Broomfield Enterprise. I was responding to a letter by John P. Cardie, "Definition of life must be logical," dated January 6. In that letter, Mr. Cardie stated that if we defined death as the absence of brain waves, then we must define life as beginning at that point when brain waves can be detected in the fetus--about 8 weeks. Here is my response:

Definition of life not right answer

I write in response to John P. Cardie’s letter of January 6, 2008, “Definition of life must be logical.”

Mr. Cardie makes an interesting point about defining human life to begin when brain waves can be detected in the fetus. I am not a doctor or medical researcher, so I will not challenge the information he presents. I would like to make another point, however.

When people say that human life begins at conception, they often fail to mention that defining human life that way changes the definition of personhood under the law. A “person under the law” has certain rights, including the right not to be killed. One’s enemy in war is not a person under the law; nor is someone sentenced to death a full person under the law: both of them may be killed without that killing being defined as murder under the law.

In the history of US law and English common law on which it is based, an unborn child has never been defined as a person under the law.

Some people in the United States sincerely want to change that, thinking that they will save lives. However, to define human life as beginning at conception would change that ancient precedent and create a kind of civil rights conflict that we have not faced before: two persons in the same body competing over rights. That situation would not be good for anyone.

If fetuses became persons under the law, that new status would not be used to benefit them, for example, to guarantee prenatal care for those women who wished to be parents. It would instead be used to further restrict the ability of women to have abortions when they do not wish to be parents.

Reducing the number of abortions is a laudable goal that should be accomplished by providing comprehensive sex education and making contraception easy to obtain. Trying to reduce abortions by redefining the beginning of human life will only cause more problems and lead to lawsuits.

***

Let me know if you agree or disagree.

Story 4: The Contest

2008-02-13T16:40:00.002-07:00

“For the next week,” Dr. Porreco said, his discolored, crowded teeth showing, “we will be conducting an experiment, a contest in your ability to change. For one week I want you …” He stopped for a moment to enjoy the hilarious giggles at the phrase “I want you” and then continued, “to act completely out of character. Not every minute of every day, mind you, but at least five times a day, for seven days, you must do something that is difficult for you, frightens you, even.”

The class shuffled around me. I whispered to Natalie, “Maybe you could try being honest.”

“And maybe you could try being my friend!” she shot back.

“Enough explanation,” Porreco said. “Now it’s your turn.”

I checked my watch: only five minutes into the lecture. Porreco usually talked for an hour and answered his own questions. All this on a Monday too. Jeff sighed, which instantly got the teacher’s intention.

“You, Jeff, tell us your plans. What’s out of character for a CU running back?”

Jeff appeared stunned. He hadn’t spoken in class all spring, and now he had to show self-awareness too. He leaned on his left elbow, hoping the appearance of indecision would rescue him. Porreco assumed an intrigued expression, folded his arms, and waited. Then from the back of the room a clear female voice called, “Communication!” I laughed out loud when Porreco compelled the woman-in-the-back to admit to a bad habit of finishing people’s sentences, and he glanced my way for a second. “Your assignment,” he told her, “is not only to listen until every woman you are speaking with finishes a statement, but also to nod for a few seconds afterward to encourage her to continue speaking. Because God knows men don’t need encouragement. They love to hear the sound of their own voices.”

And so it went around the room. Most students admitted something. We all knew the psychology majors in the front row would dig down for the behavior they most wanted to change. As usual, Porreco avoided calling on them.

Ending his classes by quizzing me and Natalie always amused him. Natalie usually had an answer ready, but by the time he asked her what assignment she planned, it had fled from her mind, as my grandmother used to say. She sat there, trying to get it back. The class began to mutter, and finally I shouted: “Say the first thing that comes into your mind!”

“Well, Natalie,” Porreco said, “I think Debbie has chosen for you. Now you may choose for her.” He grinned at us. I knew he had planned it.

Natalie found it much easier to devise a regime for me than for herself. How typical. She said, “You can’t plan anything. As soon as something occurs to you, you have to do it.”

The class laughed, but I was pissed off. Natalie pretended to respect the way I planned ahead, but really she thought I was nothing but utilitarian, no romance about me. When I recently pointed out that my unromantic nature had kept me from getting pregnant and having an abortion, as she had, she abruptly reminded me that she was on the pill. I told her that was a step in the right direction, but not nearly enough.

“So what would be enough?” she asked me. I didn’t answer. It seemed so obvious.

Porreco was finishing up over the din. “Begin tomorrow by doing five things out of character. Be prepared to report in class on Wednesday. I’ll try to get at least one verbal report from everyone by Monday. Also on Monday, turn in a written report of your week’s experiences. This will affect your grade.”

“Thanks a lot,” I told her as we left class. She just smiled. Natalie was always saying I tried too hard, but she did have certain attitudes about herself. Oh yes, she did.

Tuesday

We sat up in our twin dorm beds and looked at each other. “Tuesdays suck,” Natalie said, and I lay back down. “I can’t plan anything,” I said, feeling small. Maybe it was the green cement-block walls.

“You can’t even talk about planning,” Natalie told me.

“Well, saying ‘Tuesdays suck’ doesn’t count.”

“Sure it does. Normally I would just grin and bear it. Now go take a shower without doing inventory of every toiletry you have.”

I obeyed, which is just easier sometimes with Natalie. Once the shower water was hot enough, I closed my eyes and grabbed a bottle from my basket. I squeezed some into my palm and applied it to my hair. From the smell and feel of it, I realized I was washing my hair with body lotion. Trying hard not to calculate which bottle was closest, I grabbed another bottle and repeated the process. Five bottles later, my hair was clean, I smelled like everything in my basket, and I had wrapped my robe around myself to dry because I kept taking stock of which body part to towel off first.

As I approached our room, I could hear Natalie shouting, but I couldn’t make out the words.

“You’re not allowed to practice!” I said as spontaneously as possible, just as soon as both feet were in the room. “That’s not saying whatever comes into your mind!”

She shrugged and then laughed. “I know!” she said. “I’ll call my father. I can tell him anything, and he won’t get offended. I’ll call him every day.” She stretched languidly under her bright floral comforter.

“And tell him about your abortion?” I asked.

She glared at me and said, “You have to give me your To Do list and your address book and your calendar.” She held out her hand. “Now!”

“No!” I rubbed my robe around my ankles to dry them. “I have all sorts of important meetings this week. I have to have my calendar!”

“Give it to me so that you won’t be telling me what to do for a week!” Natalie said, sitting up. First she tried to take everything I needed to get through the day, and then she acted like a bitch. Then Natalie added, “And I think I should only have to be honest with each person once a day.”

“I’ll agree to that.” I opened my closet to look for my favorite sweater.

“Just pull out pants and a shirt and shoes and put them on.”

“OK, OK! But I’m going to follow you around as much as possible and make sure you’re really honest with people.” I didn’t believe she’d really open up.

“You can’t plan like that,” Natalie said, laughing.

“Well, then, I’ll just drag you around campus until we find someone!”

I saw Natalie looking suspiciously at my outfit and gave her a reproachful look. So everything in my closet was color-coordinated! She could do the same. I handed Natalie my To Do list but said I had to check my calendar once in the morning and once at night. She could have it during the day. Maybe I could take it to bed with me and memorize it.

After allowing her a little bit of a lead, I shadowed Natalie on the way to her Chaucer class, remembering how both of us once got lost among these pink stone and red-tile-roofed buildings that gave the CU-Boulder campus its characteristic look. Every so often, she muttered to herself about the shapes made by cracks in the sidewalk, desperate to keep her mind blank and avoid seeing anyone she knew. But Josh outmaneuvered her. Just as she veered right to cut through the Mary Rippon theater, he touched her arm. I came as close as I could, and she sighed and looked at the snow on the red stone seats encircling the stage.

“I’m doing an experiment for psychology class,” she told him.

“What’s that?”

“I have to say the first thing that comes into my mind.”

He grinned at her. He still hadn’t seen me. “You’re stalling.”

Natalie took a deep breath and asked, “Have you had sex with everyone in our group but me?”

He didn’t even look embarrassed, just nodded. Why did she have to ask that question?

“You slept with Debbie and neither of you told me?” She looked in my direction, but I ducked behind a really tall man who was just standing there, reading his notebook. I knew I was in trouble now.

“It was just last weekend. When you were too tired to go out. Debbie was telling me how she’d decided not to get involved with anyone for a while but she still wanted to have sex occasionally.”

“Oh. So you offered yourself.”

“I’m here to serve.”

“Slut,” Natalie said viciously. Josh stiffened. I backed away from the two of them, but I still heard the end of the conversation. “You slept with Jodi and Deirdre?”

They were quiet until Natalie said, “But they’re best friends.” Josh’s face was a little sad. Then Natalie stomped off to class. I could hear the April slush fly in every direction.

Wednesday

A buzz ran through psychology class on Wednesday as people filed in, smiling slyly at each other or furtively sliding into their chairs. Porreco commented that everyone appeared to be in attendance and asked if anyone wanted to volunteer a story. I had nothing to say. Since Monday, I’d bumbled around trying not to think about what I was doing, which as yet hadn’t been disastrous. But I wondered if I was planning how not to plan. And I worried when Natalie would confront me. Why hadn’t I been honest about my sex life?

While I was distracted, Natalie raised her hand. With the other hand she was pushing her reddish-brown hair behind her ears, which she did when she was nervous. Oh no, I thought, and then she was telling a college professor and everyone in the class about the conversation she had with Josh. Porreco looked at me, amused or a little shocked, I couldn’t tell, and I felt my face go bright red. I slumped down in my seat, noticing how pleased with herself Natalie looked.

Then Jeff stood up, silencing the women in the class by standing with his hands on his perfect hips, while the men muttered. It was hard for me to admit about a football player, but I would always be grateful to him for his self-absorption at that particular moment. He proudly told all of us about his “communication” with his roommates: “I told them they had to clean out the tub after hairing it up and that they should stop leaving my CD player open all the time because the dust will break it. That was all I had time for before my workout, but I’ll try to make it up by the end of the week.”

“We wouldn’t want you to neglect your health for this, Jeff,” Porreco said seriously. Jeff appeared pleased.

For the rest of class, Natalie faced straight ahead, not looking at me. She had never given me the silent treatment before. When class ended, she stood up and pushed past me. I stayed in my seat, arranging and rearranging books in my backpack, until everyone had left. Porreco studiously flipped through his papers, ignoring me, but I could hear his thoughts circling from across the room. I walked out as if nothing had happened. I had no idea what I would say to Natalie when I saw her next, so I avoided her for the rest of the day.

Thursday

After informing me that she’d already made four out of five honest statements for the day, Natalie stood in line for a taco salad. I followed her, quiet. The Food Court was packed full of chattering students. People constantly sidled through the lines, reaching for a bagel or a drink.

Then Natalie turned around and spat this question at me. “Wasn’t it just Monday that you were telling me to be more honest?”

I stood there, holding my tray. People surrounded me. There was no room to move.

She continued. “When are you going to be honest about screwing Josh?”

“Not right now!” I said, getting more and more furious.

Natalie spoke even more loudly this time. “Don’t you know he’s been with everyone? He probably has five different diseases.”

Several people in front of us turned their heads, the better to hear our conversation. “We used a condom,” I said in a low voice.

“And that makes you responsible?”

“More responsible than you,” I said.

“Sometimes birth control doesn’t work,” Natalie pointed out.

“But that’s only if you use it!” I snapped. “Besides, this conversation isn’t about me not telling you. You’re just angry because he hasn’t slept with you.”

“For your information,” Natalie replied, “my love life has always been better than yours. I think anyone would say so.”

Natalie moved closer to the counter and ordered a salad with “halapee-nos” but no olives. I followed her to the counter and spoke to the woman taking her order. “She means jalapeños. She just forgets how to pronounce it.”

Natalie didn’t bother to lower her voice. “It’s in the dictionary both ways!”

“I don’t see why you can’t learn one common Spanish word!” We were shouting at each other, and people began to sidle away from us.

“Hey, people don’t even say my name right sometimes! I don’t yell at them in front of the entire Food Court!”

The manager came out of the back and put his hand on the woman’s shoulder, thinking we were yelling at her. To Natalie he said, “Don’t yell at my employees. Here’s your salad.”

Natalie pointed at me. “I was talking to her.”

I left to get my soup and sandwich. When I got to the cashier, Natalie was waiting for me. I wished, for the first time ever, that she would just leave me alone. She said, “I can’t believe you yelled at me for mispronouncing a word.”

The cashier, an older woman, laughed and asked her, “You’re here to learn, aren’t you?” Natalie stood there glaring until I pulled her over to a table.

“I think you’re taking this assignment a little too seriously,” I told her.

She shouted, “You’re always criticizing me!”

I banged my tray down on the table. “You should know how to say it. You’re always saying Spanish words incorrectly. I’m surprised somebody hasn’t corrected you before now.”

“Well, I think my best friend could have waited until we were alone.”

We didn’t say anything else during lunch. Natalie threw her tray into the dirty dishes rack and stomped off to government class. She was doing a lot of stomping this week. And then she came back early. When she opened the door to our room and saw papers and books and clothes covering every available surface, she pushed some off her bed, lay down, and cried. I continued what I was doing, saying only, “I’m not organizing. I’m working on a portfolio for writing class, and I have to spread things out.”

But then I began to feel guilty. Maybe because of Josh, but is it because I slept with him or because I didn’t tell her? Why can’t I have some things to myself? Or had I been too hard on her for keeping secrets from her boyfriend and her family? I cleaned up the room, pulled the comforter over Natalie, and wheedled a piece of chocolate cake out of the girl down the hall. She got a care package every week, so she could certainly spare some. I even poured Natalie a glass of milk from our tiny refrigerator and left the snack by her bed. I am her best friend. I always have been.

Friday

It was wild in class. Following Natalie’s example from Wednesday, the other students competed to tell the best story and mocked each other’s failures. Even Porreco could hardly control them. I admitted that I hadn’t actually done anything spontaneous, but I had refrained from planning anything that hadn’t already been planned. Porreco yawned. Natalie huddled in her seat, gloomy. When class ended, she joined the crowd around Porreco, everyone eager to get at least one anecdote in, and told him, “I hate this assignment. It’s exhausting.” Then she escaped before he could respond.

**

Friday night I dragged Natalie to the party at Josh’s Mom’s house. We had been invited, and I wasn’t about to miss one of his parties to satisfy Natalie’s pique. Armed with bottles of beer from the refrigerator—I didn’t want a man slipping me something—we squeezed into the large red chair, the only empty space left besides the floor. I talked about my writing portfolio, and we sang along to the new ’Til Tuesday album. We were pretending to be friends, and it hurt me. Josh and Deirdre wandered through the living room and chatted. Luckily, not too long, because Natalie was starting to glare at them after two minutes.

Then I noticed Jeff, standing in the arched doorway to the kitchen, hoisting a bottle to his lips and talking to someone in the kitchen with the mock-seriousness of college men. The skin along his profile glowed. I walked up behind him and shouted over the music, “Have your roommates cleaned the bathroom yet?”

He was talking to Josh. Both of them swung around to me, startled, and then eyed each other.

“Debbie,” Jeff said, “we were just discussing psychology class.”

Josh grinned. I blushed and pointed to Natalie, who had fallen asleep in the red chair, which was faded enough to match her hair. “You’ll have to talk to her about that. She was the one who announced it in class.”

“Wouldn’t want to interrupt her beauty sleep,” Josh said. He turned away to fetch his mother a drink and then left the kitchen.

Perhaps I was seeing with beer eyes, but up close, Jeff had long, dark blond eyelashes and green irises. Josh’s secret was his Elizabeth Taylor eyes. They had worked on me and, from what I heard, just about everyone else. Usually I avoided men who went through women the way he did, but his honesty saved him from any resentment—at least on my part.

Jeff said, “It’s hot in here. Want to go outside?”

In general, at parties, I don’t accept invitations from men to leave the main room, but the terms of the contest forbade me from thinking about anything too much—that would have been tantamount to planning. I let Jeff lead me outside. Josh’s house, like the others in his neighborhood, had a big yard. We walked to the end to escape party noise. Jeff took a big drink from his beer and said, pointing, “Do you know which constellation that is?”

“Which one?”

He tried to show me the stars under Orion’s belt, explaining that I’d have to look at them sideways, but when I turned my head, he kissed me gently.

“I’ve always wanted to do that,” he told me.

I felt sleepy and a little bit drunk. Last week, Josh and I had started out on the bench in the corner of the yard. Josh had built it from scraps of wood when he was a teenager. Jeff backed up to it and sat down, beckoning to me.

“Did you bring me out here because of what Natalie said in class?” I asked, still standing.

“Well,” he said, “I thought that if you could like Josh, you might like me.”

“I might,” I confessed. I sat sideways on his lap, noticing the way the light in the yard behind us turned his hair dark and shiny but hid his face. He could be anyone: Jeff-the-football-player, Jeff-the-astronomer, surprisingly-nice-guy-Jeff.

We stayed outside on the bench, kissing and speculating about constellations, until the moon set behind the mountains. I woke Natalie and dragged her home, thanking Josh on the way out. He didn’t look angry about anything; obviously he didn’t mind sharing, unlike some people I could name.

Saturday

By the weekend, I had decided enough was enough. I took Natalie to Tra Ling’s for lo mein.

“There is no lo mein as greasy as this,” Natalie said. Our table was right by the big window. Cars and people streamed up and down and across Broadway. “I can’t ever move away.”

I didn’t want to think right then about graduation or Natalie moving away. We ate in silence until Natalie laid down her chopsticks with a sharp click and raised her chin to me, which I just hated. I knew she was about to make a speech. I poked her face with my chopsticks, but gently.

Startled, she frowned and then said: “When I found out about Josh, I was so angry, but I don’t want to sleep with him, Debbie.”

I was still holding my chopsticks, poised to strike again. For a moment we glared at each other.

“Just admit it,” she said. “You’re a hypocrite. You did the same thing I did.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head in exasperation that she didn’t get it. “It wasn’t the same. I was just having fun with Josh. You were lying to Michael when you were with him over Thanksgiving.”

“And you lied to me,” she said.

“I didn’t lie!”

“You’ve always told me about your guys, but not this one,” she pointed out.

I went on the attack. “I can’t take it anymore, Natalie. The way you just won’t tell people things.”

“I tell you everything! Obviously you don’t.”

“Well, now I think you should tell everyone everything.”

She shook her head. “When are you going to stop being mad at me?”

“I don’t know,” I told her.

“I need you to stop. I need someone to talk to about the abortion who isn’t always judging me.”

I did judge her for it. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t promise just then to be more accepting, so I got up and ordered beef with broccoli and some cream cheese wontons. When I sat down again, I told her, “My week was better than yours.” But not in a triumphant way. It was just a fact.

“You got to be on Josh’s bench two weekends in a row,” Natalie said, too sweetly.

“You do want to sleep with him, don’t you?”

“I don’t want your backwash,” she said through a mouthful of noodles.

“Bitch.” One minute she was asking for support, the next minute, a remark like that. The food arrived. I tipped the waitress $5.

Natalie didn’t waste any time helping herself to half the wontons. “You’re feeling generous.”

“It has been a good week,” I repeated, trying to stay positive. “I think it’s even been good for you.”

“I don’t know. I’m beginning to see the value of my mother’s approach to conversation.”

I didn’t tell her she was already an expert at concealing her feelings. I simply said, “No way. You just need to practice more.”

“You do too,” Natalie said, suddenly all bristly. “Have you put Josh in your report?”

I stared at her. “I don’t need to. You announced it in class, remember?”

“I did, didn’t I,” she said, lowering her eyes and chin.

After lunch, I obeyed my sudden urge to sit by the fountain in the sun and read a romance novel. On Monday I planned to ask Porreco something that had puzzled me: if I had an urge to do something fun and followed it and then had a compulsion to do something responsible like study, did I then have to give up the first for the second? Did acceding to a desire to be responsible fulfill the requirement of acting on impulse? Or did it fit the letter but not the spirit of the contest?

I was pondering such things between medieval bedroom scenes when Jeff plunked down next to me, holding two pieces of carrot cake. My slice boasted the largest, orangest carrot I had ever seen, and I was tempted to lick it. Then I noticed his expression: serious, even a little nervous.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” he told me. I had just read a passage in which a yeoman said that to a milkmaid. Maybe there was some truth in romance novels after all. Jeff lowered his eyes.

“Last night was really nice,” he told me. “Romantic, even.”

I’ve heard this tone before, I thought.

But he didn’t blow me off. Instead, he said firmly, “I think we should have a real date.”

Suddenly the orange carrot seemed terribly suggestive. “Jeff,” I admitted, “I do like kissing you.”

“That’s a start,” he said.

He fed me a bit of cake before I could ask what he meant. It was everything I had expected at one glance: rich, filling, and sweet. Then he kissed me.

“Friday?” he asked me. I nodded.

“We’ll talk about it in class,” he said, and got up.

“Thanks for the cake,” I said, thinking, This is going in my report to Porreco. I’d better get an A in this class. And wait until Natalie hears I have a date with a football player!

I stayed at the fountain until I finished the novel. I even sang a few lines from “Wild Thing” under my breath. The yeoman and the milkmaid went their separate ways, so the novel wasn’t entirely predictable. It had some good sex and some bad sex and interminable discussions about what women and men deserved in that area. Maybe that was a romance novelist’s idea of feminism.

Sunday

Natalie was still in bed when I went to shower. She said she had too much to think about to get clean just yet, especially before eight o’clock on a Sunday morning. When I got back, it was too quiet. “What happened?” I asked, sitting down after I’d dressed.

“Michael called. I told him about the baby.”

“Oh my God,” I said, a little shocked. “I thought you had decided to leave him out of that loop.” Part of me was pleased. Maybe my pressure had worked.

Natalie continued. “He told me that I had seemed distant for the past couple of months, and I said, ‘Well, that’s because I got pregnant and didn’t tell you.’”

I imagined those words coming out of my mouth. They sounded so harsh. “Did you tell him about the abortion?” I asked.

She gave me a sideways look and fiddled with the comforter. “He said that we should get married. And then, Debbie, I couldn’t stop. This whole week, it’s been so hard to tell people what I really felt as soon as I felt it. But with Michael, I guess I’ve been wanting to say something for a long time.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him exactly how I’ve been feeling since the fall and how I was hoping things would be better when we were together, but they weren’t. I told him what the abortion was like.”

“So you’ve broken up?”

“I guess so.” Natalie started to cry.

I asked the contest gods: Is that enough for us both? Can we stop being honest and impulsive now? I put my arms around her.

After a while, she said, “It’s finally in the open.”

“Do you feel better?”

“No, relieved,” she said. “But I’m dreading the next phone call.”

“The last time he was mad at you, he wrote letters,” I reminded her.

I realized how alike Natalie and Michael were. He hid behind letters; she hid behind silence.

Monday

The moment we held out our reports to Porreco, I wanted to snatch them back. I had a feeling he wouldn’t be teasing us as much afterward. He might not want to speak to us at all. Last night, after Natalie and I had proofread our reports for the second time, I pretended I was typing something for another class, but really it was an epilogue for my report. This is what I wrote:

“Natalie is pretty hard on herself in her report, but really she’s very romantic. I’m not. I thought relationships were something I could approach like any other goal, and I tried to get Natalie to see things that way, but I’ve decided that in love, what you plan for doesn’t always come to you. The person who appears to be the best choice for a lover often isn’t what you need at all.”

We got our reports back the following Monday, and I got a B. Porreco answered my question about impulse versus duty by saying, “This may sound strange, but acting on your feelings as you have them will protect you.” I was puzzling over that remark while Natalie paged through her report, and I peered over her shoulder. I was so relieved to see that Porreco hadn’t included my little confession in her report that I didn’t even notice her grade. But I kept wondering about his response. I had tried to be honest with Natalie about her treatment of Michael. She had tried to be honest with me. But if all that had protected us, I guess I didn’t know what the word meant.

Middle Ground or Not?

2008-02-11T21:38:00.004-07:00

Here's an interesting 2006 article about dueling abortion demonstrations.

San Francisco Abortion Showdown

Story 3: Price of Silence

2008-02-07T10:59:00.003-07:00

Most people don’t associate an abortion with a BLT. But I do.

**

“The ineluctable modality of the visible,” I quoted to my high school boyfriend, Michael. A very nice boyfriend, like well-salted mashed potatoes with brown gravy. In his parents’ living room, which had an elegant Berber carpet. “What the hell does Joyce mean by that?”

“What don’t you understand?” he asked.

“I know what the words mean,” I said in a snotty tone. “OK, so I had to look up ‘ineluctable.’ But what if you’re blind, for instance? You could escape the visible that way.”

“But you’re not blind, Natalie.”

“No, but what’s more important? That you can’t escape seeing? Or is he really talking about how we see? Modality means “one of the main avenues of sensation.”

“You had to look up two words out of six?”

I shrugged.

“Especially when two of the six are ‘the’?”

I glanced sourly at Michael, who was grinning at me. I could never find anything wrong with him. No matter how hard I looked into him, his good qualities always confounded me: his teeth were straight, he was kind, he had wavy but short brown hair and brown eyes, and he liked me. Everyone thought he was quite the catch. I examined him again, carefully.

“I can explain it to you,” he said.

“Really?”

“Turn around,” he said, “and don’t look at me again until I tell you.”

I complied. Fabrics moved and disturbed the air behind me. I began to blush.

“Now you can turn around.”

He stood by the couch completely naked. I realized I had never before seen a whole, nude male body—I had only felt parts in the dark. The couch was beige. I shook my head. There was a red throw folded over its back. He spread it over the cushions.

“I’ve never heard of a girl bleeding every time,” he said.

“The second time,” I informed him. I stood up, and my arms hung at my sides, relaxing. I was tired of maintaining distance.

“I think second place is better than first,” he said.

**

We parked twice over Thanksgiving break my freshman year of college. That first evening, on Thanksgiving night, we stopped behind a row of shops on 28th Street, north of Pearl, in Boulder. I hadn’t brought a condom, but Michael always had one, so I didn’t worry. And besides, once we had curled up close together on the front seat, I didn’t want to talk about birth control. I didn’t want to talk at all. I wanted to be nothing but physical.

He rested his chin on my head and played with my hair, twisting it gently this way and that with his fingers. I put my hand up to where his pulse was beating rapidly in his throat. I had hoped that seeing him again would bring back my old affection for him, and it seemed to be working.

As our bodies arched and lengthened across the back of the seat, he pulled me on top of him and pushed up my skirt. I didn’t even bother to take off my underwear. I found myself wondering over him: curly hair in need of cutting, soft blue wool sweater, brown eyes closing to reveal how long his eyelashes were, breaths that began to show as November air seeped into the car. I felt lost.

When we had finished, we turned on the heater and huddled until the car warmed up. He pulled a photograph from his jacket and pressed it into my hand. It showed a jagged, scarred piece of metal.

“That’s my UFO,” he said. “Come see it in New Mexico next semester?”

I nodded, and he drove me home. He kissed me for a long time before he let me go, promising to call first thing in the morning.

I knew in October I didn’t want to be with him anymore. I caught myself enthusing over him to other people, mostly women, and the looks they gave me told me how fake I was. But I couldn’t help myself. I had to dredge up every ounce of feeling for him, wring it out, and hang it up to dry in my soul. He was my second boyfriend. I felt he had saved me from rusting into disuse after my first boyfriend, Ben, who didn’t think to ask before he deprived me of my virginity. It’s not that he took it that bothered me; it’s that I didn’t have the chance to give it to anyone. I’m left with the memory of a gift that has no practical value.

By the week before Halloween, I had picked up the phone five times to call Michael and break up with him, and it hurt me to mouth the words that I would have to use. I couldn’t bring myself to say “I don’t love you anymore” to my second lover.

But he was also second in another way—second in my emotions. I hadn’t loved Ben—it’s not that. I realized I didn’t love Michael either. I had mistaken gratitude for love. And I also realized that if I had avoided Ben, Michael would never have appealed to me. Ben and Michael, Michael and Ben—they were a perfectly matched pair. To staunch the bleeding caused by Ben, I had to have someone who bored me. After less than a year, I was ready to move on.

**

After I came back from Thanksgiving break, I didn’t get a pregnancy test right away. I hoped for my period for one week, then two—the strangest weeks of my life.

I was clenched tight the entire time, but a few times every day a word would erupt into my consciousness: “Pregnant!” I was so afraid that word would come out of my mouth that I’d lose focus on whatever I was doing, and people began to give me odd looks. Debbie, best friend that she was, told them it was a reaction to finals, but I knew people were talking about me since I’d gushed so much about Michael in the weeks before Thanksgiving, mostly in an effort to convince myself that I would be happy to see him again.

Finally, Debbie took me with her to the drugstore one day to purchase a test and then went to the library so I could be alone. I sat on my bed and watched the test go positive. An alarm was going off in my room, and I couldn’t turn it off.

Debbie came back earlier than she had promised. “I couldn’t stand the suspense,” she said, picking up the test. Then she put it down and sat at her desk.

I plucked the picture of Michael’s UFO from my shelf, remembering Michael’s arms around me. Over Thanksgiving, his sensuality had reminded me how I’d fallen in love. Now, looking at this picture, I could easily imagine him proposing as soon as he knew I was pregnant.

Suddenly, Debbie said, “I blame this on Ben.”

Startled, I looked over at her. She had turned away slightly, her hands upturned and open on her knees. I knew what that meant: she was trying to be gentle but say what she really thought.

“Ben!” I said, brightly. “Now there’s ancient history.”

“With Ben, you were cautious, but I told you not to be. And ever since Ben, you’ve gotten more reckless.”

I glared at her. I wasn’t in the mood for this conversation. “Oh, so now I’m reckless.”

“I’m trying to apologize!”

She got up and came over, leaning against my part of the wall-long desk. “You keep trying out different things since Ben. Not dating. Dating a nice guy who’s boring.”

One part of me still wanted to defend Michael, but I said nothing. Debbie stuck to her program. “Ben didn’t let you choose whether to have sex. I think you’re trying to choose. Two years later.”

My hands were folded quietly in my lap. “I don’t understand why you’re apologizing for Ben.”

“Because I encouraged you to go out with him. I’m sorry.”

After that, I was afraid to open my mouth the rest of the evening because a scream might come out. I might walk up to her and break her nose. Or maybe I should hit myself instead.

The morning after Thanksgiving, Michael and I drive all the way to Cherry Creek North in Denver to ogle the shoppers desperate for bargains. I sit on his lap outside a coffee shop, feeding him thick coffee and chocolates in the cold. As if he were my baby bird, just fledged.

I say, “What if I got pregnant last night?”

His eyes brighten. “Then we get married. You quit school and live with me and my UFO in the desert for seven years. You support me and our children (I laugh at the plural, because I know I want a big family) through law school, and then I take over. I get a job with a New York law firm and you get your degree from NYU and a job with a publishing house and discover all the great new writers. Everyone who told you not to quit school will envy us for how well our lives turned out.”

And that is how it happens. Every year, on our anniversary, we fly from New York to Denver and have coffee and chocolates again, at that same spot. The shop changes, becomes a restaurant and a bar and an office, but we are there every year, always the same.

**

Did you know that the first subject in the Yellow Pages is Abortion Alternatives? “For businesses that advise against abortions and provide assistance, counseling, and/or information on abortion alternatives.” In early January I called one of the pregnancy centers and told them I was pregnant and exploring my options. Strange to offer such an intimate detail after only a few seconds of conversation. The voice on the other end said quietly, “We think abortion is murder, but we don’t condemn those who have one. We just try to get people to see the beauty of life.” Right then, I saw myself shoehorning my belly into desks at the beginning of class next fall, trying to find an adoptive family, having conversations, enduring the looks. I saw myself in the delivery room, with my mother and her mother, both smiling, delighted at the ease with which I’d conceived. But the woman on the other end of the line, safe in her telephone receiver, wouldn’t be traveling with me. She wouldn’t be standing beside me while I made explanations to everyone I knew. What a Pharisee. It was like waking from a dream in which something pressed down on me. I hung up.

And then I waited. I was early in my second month, I figured, and still unsure of my decision. Since Christmas break ended, Debbie had asked me twice what I intended to do. I had no answer for her.

Conversations with my parents gained a new subtext. My parents were both pro-choice; I knew that. But I didn’t believe my mother would support a pro-choice decision by a daughter she’d just managed to bear to term. Every time I tried to tell her, I saw the delivery room again, and one of my female relatives lifting a child from my arms and carrying it away.

Michael knelt down in front of me. “Natalie, will you marry me?”

“No,” I said. I regretted the words as I said them. Not because I wanted to say yes, but because I was being forced to say no.

Once I refused Michael, everyone began to talk to me as if I were a child. I couldn’t stand it. I wrote a letter to my parents, Michael, Debbie, the world:

“I’m going off by myself to have this child. I’ll tell you where I’m going, but don’t come after me. I need to do this by myself.”

I chose Columbia, Missouri. Two hours from my grandparents in Kansas City. More than 600 miles from Boulder and Michael and my parents, those who wanted to make me into a child. Another college town, with lots of people my age. The University of Missouri, if I could ever afford to attend. But I didn’t worry about that at first. I just took a temp job in an office, enjoying the busyness and, I must admit, the necessity of sitting down most of the day. I knew I couldn’t take a job that required me to stand.

I had never been so alone before. In my one-room apartment, three flights up at the top corner of the building, I often stood on the balcony, watching students walk below me, my hands just clasped underneath my belly, feeling her move. I always assumed it was a girl. It was a family tradition, after all: no woman in six generations had given birth to a boy. As the months progressed, her movements became sharper. She seemed anxious about how we would live when she was born.

“I have a plan,” I told her, pulling my belly up slightly.

I wondered if she heard, wanted to answer. I went on musing to myself. I had enough money to live on for a year. I would stay home with her until the next summer, work for a few months, and then enroll in school after I became a Missouri resident. The university had all kinds of programs for students who were parents.

“You’ll be taken care of,” I assured her.

A swirling sensation inside me, as if she’d turned over and gone to sleep.

**

I’ve taken the feminist studies courses. I know the history of abortion is long but not celebrated. Some would have you believe it began with Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, eleven years after I was born, but let’s face it: no woman wants to be number 7 baby machine. We’ve always used whatever we’ve had at hand to dispatch unwanted children.

On the other side, people have always disapproved. Tried to limit us. Tried to confine us to the “natural.”

You’ll notice none of these people refuse medical treatment or forgo flush toilets. They just want conception to be natural—that is, naturally unimpeded.

**

The second entry in the Yellow Pages is Abortion Providers: “For businesses that provide assistance, counseling and/or information on abortions and either perform abortions or refer clients to businesses that do.”

After Debbie prodded me the third time, I said to her: “If I have this child, I’d have to marry Michael.”

It was late on a Sunday night. I was straightening up my side of the room, preparing for Monday’s classes. Debbie sat at her end of the desk, everything in place, doodling with colored pencils. She snorted and scrawled large, multicolored spirals down the page. “I don’t see why!”

“Think about it. Who’s going to take care of the kid while I’m in class or doing homework? You?”

“A babysitter,” she argued.

“Who’s going to pay for that?”

She took her time answering, carefully filling in some of the spirals. “Your parents,” she admitted.

“So why shouldn’t they just raise it? Or one of my aunts?”

Debbie fiddled with her streaked blonde hair. “I think you should make one decision at a time. Do you want this child, or not?”

“I do want to have children,” I said, considering, “but I want to get married first.”

“To Michael?”

The picture of his UFO had migrated to my desk. Debbie walked over and held it up. I tried to hold in my laughter, but my guilt wasn’t equal to the task. Debbie had asked and answered the question for me. Michael didn’t belong in my life anymore, and I wouldn’t bear a child to a man I didn’t want to marry.

I called an abortion clinic the next day.

**

The procedure itself depends on where you go. Some places have you come in twice: on the first day they insert a laminaria, which is a kind of natural dilator, in your cervix, and then the next day they vacuum out the fetus and maybe use another tool to scrape out any remaining tissue. But the place I went to dilated me right on the table. That hurt, but it wasn’t the most disconcerting part.

Inside my belly, a muscle began to cramp rhythmically. It clenched and unclenched, and I remembered those balls, half as big as we were, we used to play kickball in grade school. The ones that were an odd shade of red and textured, that yielded to a foot or a hand. When it was my turn, the kids on my team would start chanting—“Natalie! Natalie! Natalie!”—because I could kick it farther than anyone. It was the only time in my life I felt truly popular. But now, this morning, I couldn’t look at my stomach because there was a hand just under the skin, squeezing my own personal kickball: I lay there with my feet in the stirrups, with the vacuum tube finally inserted through my cervix, my belly cramping rhythmically. I stared at the cheap travel poster on the ceiling and wondered how far inside it had gone. Would it touch the top of my uterus? Cause a perforation?

Afterward, they twisted a tie around a plastic bag, the kind people use to carry goldfish home from the store. The liquid in it was uniformly red. I couldn’t help searching for some form in it, but there was none: only blood, now separate from me.

I told no one but Debbie.

It stuck with me, that feeling of being vacuumed out.

Once I’d had a conversation with my Aunt Jennie, my mother’s sister, about her refusal to have children.

“I couldn’t stand the waiting,” she told me. “I knew it would take me years to get pregnant.”

“It didn’t take Mom more than a couple,” I reminded her.

“True. But then she had the hysterectomy. Not being able to have any more children hurt her so badly that I just didn’t see how having a child could be worth it.”

I shrugged. Sometimes Aunt Jennie doesn’t concern herself with how she sounds to others. I thought she was making excuses for her inability to stay with a man long enough to raise a toddler, at the very least.

I finished school in Boulder. Then I went to New York. I found new writers for a whole string of publishing houses. They may not have been the best writers in the country, but they were by far the strangest. I enjoyed how they reconstructed reality.

My life didn’t turn out the way I expected. I fell in love again and again and came to crave that new beginning. I sought it in work and men and I always found it. A life of newness is a life of constant movement, appropriate for a city like New York. It was hard to explain my life to my family or to old friends in Colorado. Even Debbie told me my life was unstable. But it wasn’t. After all, a river isn’t unstable, yet it moves constantly. I thought of myself as one of those small Western rivers, transplanted to the East. To people who are accustomed to the seemingly slow-moving, wide rivers of the East, I was nothing more than a creek. I didn’t mind that I couldn’t carry much on my back.

**

When I think about the abortion itself, whether it was a good or bad thing, it confronts me like a monument; like the Missouri River that I must swim, right now; like the keyhole before the narrows on Longs Peak. It was such a relief. I can’t imagine myself without it. How do you approve of or condemn such experiences?

It was so easy to get pregnant. I told myself I had escaped the family curse. My uterus worked the way it was supposed to. So why rush to be a mother?

I always knew it would happen again.

Despite family history, despite mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers longing to be pregnant like so many unmilked cows, I knew my body would have to choose for me, as it chose when I was eighteen and conceived Michael’s child.

But once I’d had the abortion, my attitude about children changed. I had thought they’d be so easy for me, that I’d broken the family curse. And I guess my pregnancy proved that theory correct, in a way—but my certainty that I didn’t want that first child exiled my family ambitions to the hinterlands of my life.

The intervening years can be quickly dispensed with. Finishing school; work: five writers I’m truly proud to have introduced to the world in eighteen years; a string of lovers; travel to every continent.

And then I met Mitch. I saw him across a new restaurant I had been trying to get into for months. I was with friends; he sat with a large group in my line of sight, though several tables away. I glanced at him throughout the evening; he always met my eyes. My friends left for other engagements; I was alone in the booth finalizing the bill when he sat down next to me.

“Have you had dessert?” he asked. I hadn’t.

It started like that, with food, and him asking me if I had had enough. When he was around, I felt as if I could have so much more.

This close, his eyes were calm, not appraising. His hair was so black that I had to touch it before dessert arrived, trailing my fingers through the curls just behind his ear. Then I rubbed my fingers together to see if the color had come off. He paid the bill for dinner and dessert. We went back to his apartment, which overlooked a tiny park.

“It’s not Central Park,” he said, “but it’s the best I can do.”

His best was good. Once I got into his four-poster bed, I didn’t want to leave. With the bed curtains down, we were completely enclosed. They shut out the traffic sounds and, if we wished, all the light. When we opened them, I could read the manuscripts I always carried with me. I stayed for three days, telling my boss I was working from home.

It didn’t happen just then.

Several months later I noticed that my period was late. My fortieth birthday was approaching. My birthday comes three days after Valentine’s Day, so I never get depressed about that holiday. I have always had something to celebrate that time of year. So I figured, what the hell, and bought a pregnancy test on Valentine’s Day. Yep, it was positive. I told Mitch that night, at dinner at his apartment.

He stilled. Even his hair, which had its own electric life, stuck out less righteously.

“Isn’t it romantic?” I asked hopefully.

“It’s a surprise,” he said. It was unlike him to be so diplomatic.

“I’m forty. It’s my last chance to have a baby.”

He shook his head. I hadn’t told him about Michael. Now I wouldn’t. Would I have wanted this child if I had kept Michael’s? So many questions lined up in back of that one I just cut them off.

“No,” I said.

“No?”

“I won’t have an abortion.”

Our relationship didn’t last long after that. He was there for the birth, and I was glad, but I told him soon after, “Only have a relationship with this child if you truly want to.”

He didn’t.

**

The Receipt

Every so often I get out the receipt and look at it. The name, address, and phone number of the clinic were stamped in the lower right-hand corner, with someone’s initials scrawled in large curly letters over them. In the lower left-hand corner, the amount paid: $175. The price of an abortion in 1981. This receipt had my name and the name of the clinic—no, it wasn’t the one in Boulder. I was afraid of someone seeing me there. Not to mention the “sidewalk counselors.”

**

Ten years later, after spending Christmas vacation with my parents, my husband and children and I were driving east along I-70 in Kansas. I woke up drooling, my neck in an unnatural position. Just then we passed a faded billboard: “Abortion stops a beating heart.” And another, and another, all with similar messages. Then a phone number: 1-877-GRIEVE.

It’s as if I were a lake, with a cold current circling from the bottom to the top. By the time we reached Chicago, I had to lie down and weep.

I’d thought having children had erased the abortion, but no. It was still there, hiding, waiting to surface.

**

Countermemory

Now everything seems to radiate outward from the abortion in all directions. It seems to have become the sun in my solar system. Or should it be a black hole? I don’t know, but it does illuminate things about me that I’d rather not see: the limits to my desire for children; how easy it was to say nothing to Michael, to lie by omission. I keep hoping for dusk, but I’m stuck in the northern end of my heart, where the sun hardly ever sets.

After I emerged into the waiting room and wakened Debbie, we went to lunch. Sometime in the middle of my ten-week pregnancy, food had lost its flavor and begun to resemble nothing so much as cardboard. I was lucky I never threw up, but just getting through the day and eating took so much effort. So I’ll never forget the sandwich I had for lunch, two hours after the abortion. We sat at a counter, with Debbie to my left, and I took my first bite of a BLT. The bread was toasted and smelled of butter and wheat. The iceberg lettuce crunched between my teeth. The bacon was crisp at some points and soft at others, as it should be, the tomato firm and a little sweet. I had never noticed before how one plain little sandwich could contain so many flavors and textures.

It tasted like freedom.

Story 2: Deirdre, in Xeriscape: Tundra Trail

2008-01-30T09:12:00.003-07:00

Three CU freshwomen got into a car one Saturday in October because of Josh.

Becky and Natalie and I were making our way out of government class yesterday, having survived another slurred discussion of the Articles of Confederation by our lush of a teacher, when we bumped into Josh. That is, I bumped into him, chest first. Then we stopped in the hall and talked while hungry students flowed around us on their way to lunch.

“Do you want to come to lunch?” I asked him, feeling hungry too.

“Can’t,” he said, in that abbreviated way of his. “I’m taking my Mom up to Rocky Mountain National Park to hear the elks bugle.”

“I haven’t done that for years,” I told him.

“Well, come along then,” he said. Josh is a human magnet. He collects people as he saunters through life. He met Natalie while they were standing in line near the University Memorial Center on the first day of orientation and invited her to a BBQ at his house in Lafayette. While they were talking, my best friend Jodi walked by, and Josh had to meet her too. (I know why: in profile, her face is perfect, set off by thick black hair.) Jodi, of course, invited me to the BBQ. Now it was a month later, and I thought I might, for once in my life, be one of a group of friends.

“I have two more classes today,” I said, feeling deeply disappointed. I would love to spend an afternoon with Josh. And his Mom, though maybe we could lose her in the woods and find a nice flat make-out rock to lie on.

“Well, I have to go,” he said. I watched him walk down the hall.

Becky, whom I had forgotten was even there, mentioned how dark blue his eyes were, and then Natalie added, “Yes, we’re all a little bit in love with Josh.” Becky just smiled at me. She doesn’t miss much.

“Why don’t we go up to the park tomorrow?” she asked. “I can drive.”

So there we were at 11 a.m. on Saturday, all ready for an afternoon of wildlife and driving—to the park, around the park, and home. I was sitting in the passenger seat, and Natalie was asleep in the back seat. She said she had stayed out until 3 this morning. She even brought a pillow, but I worried that when she saw all the stuff I brought, she’d make fun of me for being so prepared. I overpacked, as usual: my backpack was full of apples and a guide or two and binoculars and cheese and crackers. Mountains and gouda—they go together.

Becky was driving an older dark blue Honda, which chugged up the red hills between Lyons and Estes Park at 48 miles per hour. I checked without her noticing. Trucks passed us when the road widened and then fell in just behind when it narrowed. I asked her what classes she was taking.

“Government, intro to journalism, political theory, Spanish, and biology.”

“So you’re going to major in government?”

“Probably, or maybe journalism,” Becky said. “I haven’t decided.”

“You could major in government and then go to the journalism school at CU,” I suggested.

“Yes, but I’d rather be writing, even at some small-town paper, than spend more time studying it,” she said. “I want to finish school and get a job as soon as possible.”

That’s an attitude you don’t hear much from college freshwomen. I admired it, but I didn’t share it. I asked her, “What do you want to write about?”

“Black people in the West,” she said, so quickly I thought she’d rehearsed it. She kept her eyes on the road. “There are so few of us, we’re practically invisible.”

“Are you going to write about the buffalo soldiers?” Natalie piped up from the back seat.

Becky smiled briefly. She was wearing eye shadow, blush, and lip gloss, and her hair looked styled, which struck me as a bit much for hiking in the mountains. My hair was in a ponytail, and I wasn’t wearing any makeup. Natalie wasn’t either, and from the way her reddish hair stuck out on one side, she must not have washed it. I wondered how bad she’d smell at the end of the day.

Becky said, “Yes, for my journalism class portfolio. There was one woman, Cathay Williams, who posed as a man and joined the 38th U.S. Infantry. My family is distantly related to her.”

“Cool,” Natalie said. “They never found out?”

“Found out what?” Becky asked.

“That she was a woman.”

“Not until after she left the army,” Becky said. “Where did you hear about buffalo soldiers?”

“From my Dad,” Natalie said, leaning her head against my headrest, if you please. She smelled a little dusty, but not bad. “He teaches politics at CU.”

“Professor Fisher is your father?” Becky asked, sounding surprised.

“Yeah. Why? Did you meet him?”

“No, but somebody told me to take his class.”

“I don’t need to,” Natalie sighed. “I hear it every day.”

We laughed at that. Maybe Natalie was more aware than I had thought. We’re still in that introductory stage, talking about classes and parents and what we wanted in life, as if we knew at age eighteen. I knew what I didn’t want—to be a doctor like both my parents and never have any time. If I could be a doctor and have a forty-hour workweek, I might consider it. But that was impossible. And think of all those people complaining and racing into the emergency room or being wheeled from ICU to a private room on a gurney! I’d much rather plant a garden. Most plants stay put, unless moles dig them up, and they don't communicate in words.

“A deer,” Natalie said, pointing between us at the right side of the road. It was grazing, half-hidden among reddish bushes.

“There’s a herd of deer that comes down by my parents’ house to graze every morning in the winter,” I said. “I can see them from my window.”

“Where do your parents live?” Becky asked.

“In Evergreen.”

“Yeah, we get deer sometimes near our house,” Natalie added. “They like to eat our neighbor’s plants.”

“Do you ever see fawns?” I asked her.

“I’ve seen one once.”

“I love them. I give them names, but then when they get older I can’t tell them apart. And just outside our fence, I planted a big patch of side-oats grama and blue grama—”

“Grama?” Natalie interrupted. “Like your grandmother?”

“It means grass,” I explained, blushing at how much xeriscape excited me. Then I finished what I had been saying: “I’ve seen deer over there eating, but my neighbor hasn’t said anything yet.”

“Wow,” Natalie said softly near my ear, “isn’t that plant vandalism?”

I twisted around and looked at her. She was smiling sleepily, her green eyes half-closed. I’ve always loved that color of eyes, like cottonwood leaves. The one time I met her parents, for about five seconds, I noticed her mother’s eyes were the same color.

“The deer are there anyway,” I said. “If they eat the plants I put out, then they won’t eat other ones. I don’t see that it hurts anyone.”

“I guess not,” Natalie said. We were silent for a while, and then Becky’s overtaxed car picked up speed on the long hill down to Estes Lake. We went sailing by the water, hooting and hanging out the window. At least, Natalie hung out the window, and I hooted a little. Becky said she was too busy driving. The traffic through downtown Estes Park moved sluggishly, as usual, and Natalie suggested that one of us could jump out, race into the nearest ice cream store and pick up a pint, and get back before it was our turn to go through the light. When we reached the visitors center at the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park, we remembered that the cafeteria was at the Alpine Visitors Center, not this one. We stood outside the entrance and debated whether to drive up Trail Ridge Road. It was almost one o’clock, and I was already feeling hungry.

“I wouldn’t mind going up there because I like to look at the wildflowers,” I said, pulling Alpine Wildflowers of the Rocky Mountains from my pocket. Natalie gently took it from my hands and looked at the pictures.

“Pretty flowers,” she said.

“They bloom in the summer,” I told her quickly. “But I like to see if I can identify them by their leaves.”

“You know a lot about plants,” she said. “Will you show me some?”

“Sure,” I said, feeling pleased. Very few people care about alpine plants—they look like a weird kind of lawn, so people walk right over them. Even Jodi only humored me when I talked about tundra. Natalie returned the book, and we joined Becky in front of a sign. She had her arms folded and looked cold in her denim shirt.

“Let’s drive up Trail Ridge and get some lunch,” I said. “The elk are probably all down in Moraine Park, but we can go there later.” We got back in the car again, and I cut off chunks of gouda with a pocketknife and arranged them on the back of my book. Even Becky seemed impressed. The car drove even more slowly here than on the highway to Estes Park, and soon we were leading a line of cars and RVs. I had forgotten the crowds the park attracts, especially people who want to snag a site at Moraine Park campground before it fills up. You’d think people would have other things to do in October than go out in the woods and shiver all night in a tent, but still they come.

“Pull off up here, Becky, and let these cars pass,” I told her, and she did, skidding a little on the gravel pullout but managing to stop in time. She didn’t seem to mind being told what to do.

“My trusty Honda,” she said, patting the dashboard. “It’s just not made for mountain driving.”

We drove that way for the next hour. The higher the altitude on this road, the more scenic views there are for tourists. As Becky guided the car around hairpin turns toward the visitor’s center, we had plenty of opportunities to pull off and listen to the pica shriek. Toward the top, there were places where the land sloped down sharply from the road, and in those places the tourists slowed way down. Maybe they were afraid they were going to roll right down to the bottom of the valley. I asked Becky to stop twice near the top. A view of a river shining far below is a sight I can't resist. My heart expands to fill all that space.

The Alpine Visitors Center was a zoo. Today, everyone in Colorado must have woken up and panicked, “Trail Ridge Road is about to close for the winter!” Then they fixed their hair and converged on the park. I had never seen so much big hair in my life. This time of year, the parking lot was always in slow motion: people went in and out doors, hung over the concrete walls around the center to look for elk in the valley, and climbed up the Alpine Ridge Trail. We went inside to eat first, weaving through the clothes and jewelry and veering left to the cafeteria. Becky and Natalie had half-sandwiches and salads, but I had a hot open-faced turkey sandwich with mashed potatoes. They laughed at me for eating so much after we’d just had cheese and crackers, so I said that I must have Thanksgiving on the brain.

Natalie perked up then. “My boyfriend will be back in town then!” After such a display of excitement, of course we had to discuss him. Natalie began to list his high points.

“Wavy brown hair, brown eyes, a little thin…” She paused.

“Thin is good,” Becky said. I looked down at my sandwich, which couldn’t be described as “thin food.” Thank god for baggy jeans.

Natalie grinned. “He loves the modernists. I can’t wait to take that course on Joyce so we can talk about it.”

Obviously she had big plans for their relationship, or she wanted us to think so. The course on Joyce, Eliot, and Pound was an upper-level course. I always feel that girls describing their boyfriends are hamming it up, but maybe I am spiteful. I’d never had a boyfriend, not that I admitted it when she asked. I muttered, “No one special right now,” and mopped up the turkey gravy with the corners of the bread. Just in case there was any self-pity in my tone, I asked Becky about the guy who met her outside government class one day.

“That’s Mike,” she said, beaming almost as much as Natalie. “I met him at church. We’ve been together for a year.”

After a few minutes of silence, I ask Natalie if she wanted to walk up the trail and look at some plants. If I were alone here, I would sit down on the side of the trail, careful to keep my feet on the steps and off the tundra, and look at the leaves of alpine plants until I could identify them. But I didn’t suppose Natalie and Becky wanted to watch me stare at leaves. For these two, I found a patch of alpine forget-me-not. According to my book, it bloomed in June and July, so we were well past flower season, but it was my favorite because of its woolly leaves.

I told them its name and then said, “Feel it.” They ran their hands over its leaves.

“It’s hairy,” Becky said. “It feels nice.”

“That’s its winter coat,” I told them. Natalie was watching me and smiling a little. I looked around. There was no one nearby; must have been a lull in the human traffic after lunch. Quickly I pulled off a couple of leaves and handed them to them.

“Taste these,” I said, trying not to grin.

Natalie spat hers out after a second. “That’s nasty!”

Becky actually chewed a few times and swallowed hers. Pretty tough. Even I wouldn’t eat an entire leaf from that plant. “Alpine forget-me-nots are in the borage family,” I told them. “Borage is an herb with the prettiest blue flowers, like dangling stars. You can put it in your garden, and it will reseed itself and attract bees all summer long. But it tastes bitter because it has alkaloids in it, like morphine.”

“Maybe after you graduate you can open a plant store and pharmacy,” Natalie said, laughing. She took a drink of her apple juice to wash away the taste. “You know more about plants than some of the professors at CU.”

I laughed with her then, but later that afternoon, I had a silent anxiety attack. We were parked by the side of the road, listening to the male elks, which sound like your next-door neighbor learning to play the trumpet. Once again, I thought suddenly, I’ve been labeled a “brain.” Natalie didn’t dislike me for it—yet. But other people had been impressed by what I knew and then had come to resent it. If that happened, I wouldn’t be able to show all of myself to her. And Becky had her own life—she didn’t live in the dorm—so how much of a friend could she become? I hate these moments of panic; they're just like noticing a mosquito after it bites me. To calm myself, I pretended we were old friends from college who’d met again after many years.

Story 1: Afraid to Say

2008-01-23T21:07:00.004-07:00

[Note: Parts of this story used to be in screenplay format. Now they're all flush left.]

Toward the end of my junior year at Boulder High School, I bought a stern dining room chair that barely rested on all four legs. Its last owner had painted it soothingly blue, I suppose to give it an air of comfort. I kept it pushed into a corner, piled high with books, and partially covered by a coat.

One night I pulled that chair into the center of the room, pushed everything off, sat down on my bed facing it, and began to talk. I didn’t leave any possibility out.

I said, “What becomes of the absence of a question?”

That’s the question I wanted my chair to answer, but it didn’t tell me, of course. As my high school counselor used to say, my chairs were just devices to trick me into opening up. The ones I bought didn’t cost much, and nobody but me knew why they were there or what I said to them.

This is how it began. Three weeks into our relationship, in the fall semester of my junior year in high school, we began to fool around. It was like fencing: one of us advancing, the other deflecting. I suppose I should tell you his name, but I’d like him to remain anonymous, as if that would secure my control of the situation. Does a man’s name really matter? The two men I’ve had inside me have wildly different personalities, but they were both seducers. Sometimes I think I could go indefinitely without the full length of another body alongside mine. Now that I’ve had more than one boyfriend, I don’t always want someone so close to me.

OK. His name was Ben. Flug. The first time we talked about him since it happened, Debbie made a joke out of his name, trying to get me to dismiss him.

“A fluke, you know?” I smiled, weakly, and then corrected her.

“A fluke is a stroke of luck, Debbie.”

She paused, trying to recover her momentum. “Forget that.” Then she had a brainstorm, “Forget him!”

“He was the first one, though. He’s hard to forget.”

Debbie put her hand on my shoulder, tried the sympathetic-but-tough friend routine. “The more men you put between him and yourself,” she advised me, her brown eyes narrowing thoughtfully, “the easier it will be to forget. Just wait a few years.”

We laughed at the images that came up: a line with me at one end and my true love/husband at the other, a dogpile, a Natalie sandwich. Maybe she was right. But using men as a buffer—how cynical is that?

“No, no, no!” she said. “Just find some neutral man, somebody who’ll make you feel good.”

“How?” After a few failed romances her freshman and sophomore years of high school, Debbie gave up on arranging romance her way. It kept her, she said, from offering her heart to the next football player who came around. I told her she needed parents like mine, who didn’t let me date until I was sixteen. Then she rolled her eyes but kept on talking.

“Don’t put too much weight on it; that’s how. Just go out and pick one of the first guys who looks appealing and give him the right signals.”

“Just let me be, Debbie,” I told her. “It’ll all work itself out in time.”

“When?” she wanted to know, exasperated by my stubbornness.

Signals, now. That was another sore subject that we hadn’t really touched on, and another reason why I liked talking to chairs—no need to interpret body language or tone or look in the eyes. Fabric and plastic may wear with time, but they don’t require analysis. What had my signals said to Ben, exactly? What had his said to me? Were there signals neither of us understood?

To return to the fooling around: It began as furtive touching in between our friends running out of their bedrooms to get something. Occasionally Debbie had caught the two of us kissing, our hands in those odd places you move them to so you’ll seem innocent. She was never fooled, but she didn’t lecture me, either. She thought Ben was good for me because he was steady, following what he wanted with the patience of a hunter. My approach to men, in contrast, resembled that of a house cat: give chase until they wear out and stop, then play with them. Inevitably, I was bored after a few dates. Debbie said I was getting a reputation as a tease.

“So what are you saying, that I should just go all the way and then become the school slut? Get my name and phone number in the boys’ bathroom?”

“I’m told they’re already there, Natalie,” she said, grinning. Moderation was her mantra. She had rules for everything, which made her life disgustingly orderly compared to mine. Debbie was a human closet organizer: let her into your life, and within weeks, all your deepest problems would be rooted out and properly labeled. With me, she had her work cut out for her.

“So you’ll never go beyond second base?”

Debbie shrugged. She was wrestling with the same problem of how far to go, but she planned everything out in advance. This week she’d decided she’d let her boyfriend take off her panties, though not until Friday or Saturday. For her, sex was strictly a weekend activity.

“And then what?”

She smiled. “I want to see if all his years of piano playing have paid off.” This from the girl who denied she’d ever masturbated.

“What if they haven’t?”

“I’ll have to teach him.”

“And how will you do that? Since you claim never to have touched yourself.”

When I made remarks like that, she always stood up and found something to occupy herself while she blushed. I drifted off, thinking about Ben’s hands. He hadn’t ever played any instruments, as far as I knew, but the way he touched me could go from gentle to insistent, even stinging, when I least expected it. He knew I liked that about him, giving him an incentive to push me into more and more intimacy, even though I told myself when I was alone that what he had just gotten from me was the limit. He’d even asked me to the February dance, although his friends told him I’d never stay with him that long. They turned out to be right, although not for the reasons they expected.

In the process of putting myself into Ben’s hands (literally), I became public property. All of Boulder High School wondered about the results, especially the day I came to school with a hickey at the base of my neck, toward the back. I was blissfully unaware of it until one of the popular girls sidled up to me in the bathroom and said, in that tone of wonder and snottiness that popular people use for the rest of us, “What is that?” She pointed to my neck. Every head in the bathroom swiveled over to me. I blushed furiously and stammered, “Do you have any cover-up?” She did. She stuck around while I plastered makeup on the back of my neck, asking me, “So what were you doing, exactly?”

“Just…watching TV.”

“You’ve gone out with a lot of guys, haven’t you?”

I wasn’t sure where this line of questioning was going, but since she was saying something other than “hello” to me, I played along. “A few guys. Nobody serious.”

“That’s what I’ve heard,” she said. “Here, let me help you.” The bell rang, but instead of rushing to class, I examined my neck in the mirror and smoothed out a place where the coverup still showed.

FADE IN

INT. BOULDER HIGH SCHOOL GYM—NIGHT

The room is decorated for homecoming: streamers, balloons, a large banner. Round tables covered with white cloths take up the back half of the room, and in the front boys in suits and girls in long dresses crowd together at the stage. There are three couples on stage.

EMCEE

And the homecoming queen is … Natalie Fisher!

NATALIE screams and throws up her arms as she walks onstage.

FADE OUT

Entertaining the rest of my high school class became part of the program with Ben, the reason, no doubt, we sneaked into the Boulder reservoir that Friday night and soon enough found ourselves completely naked, Ben insisting that I take off two pieces of clothing for each one of his. “Girls have more clothes,” he explained. The temperature had reached 70 that day, even though it was November, so the friction of our hands on each other’s bodies kept us reasonably warm.

“I don’t want to have sex yet,” I told him at some point.

“No problem,” he said. “I can wait.”

When Debbie and I discussed that exchange in detail the next evening, she nodded wisely. “He has plans for you,” she said, which gave me the creeps.

“You make him sound like a serial killer.”

“No. I mean he wants to be with you. This is the perfect guy to get it over with.”

“Not everyone wants to plan everything, Debbie,” I pointed out. “I’m just…just…”

She laughed and said, “Feeling your way?” That made me laugh along with her.

She went into the bathroom to heat up her new curling iron. We were going out for pizza later.

“But seriously, Debbie…” I said to her back.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t you think he’s a little pushy?”

“He’s a guy.” Drawers opened and shut. “Where is my lip gloss?”

“I’ve got it in my purse.” She came out and rummaged until she found it, then put everything back in its place. I never had to worry about her borrowing my clothes and ruining them or forgetting some important detail. In fact, most times I wished she would forget more. She was a little too good at reminding me of things. But I could tell this conversation was turning serious by her slight frown.

“Do you know where you want this to go?”

I adjusted the chair with my foot. “No.”

“Well, he seems to know what he wants. The question is, do you want to go there with him?”

The reservoir. It was a favorite high school spot for a sleazy rendezvous, despite the bugs, which promptly began biting my breasts. Ben got down on his hands and knees on top of me and kissed me. He proceeded quietly down my body, finally rubbing himself between my legs and distracting both of us from the bugs. Sometimes I wonder why he didn’t do it then. It felt like the friction between us might burn me, and I told him so.

He looked down at me and smiled. He still had braces. “You’re just excited.” He pushed me into an orgasm, the first one I’d had with a guy.

“I knew you were close,” he told me afterward, “so I didn’t stop when you said I was rubbing too hard. Things get really intense beforehand.”

Right then, when we were pulling on clothes to escape the increasing chill, a flashlight shined on my face. Both of us turned to stare at the cop, terrified or mortified, we couldn’t decide.

“Put your clothes on,” he ordered us.

Debbie didn’t believe this part. “He didn’t even take a look?” she asked incredulously.

“You’re such a pervert! I probably reminded him of his daughter.”

After quizzing Ben for a while, he let us go. Ben convinced him we’d been together for six months. I was trying to decide how my body felt, good or bad or neutral. Had I wanted him to be the first for this? Why did I always ask these questions afterward? And why didn’t the cop ask me anything? Despite being naked, I had felt nearly invisible.

“The first time you come is more important than anything else,” Ben assured me on the way home, as I was pulling grass off my clothes and out of my hair. No doubt dreams of immortality were filling his head.

Anyway, it made a good story at school; I think I told more people than Ben, girls, of course. After Ben talked with his friends, as he did every morning, they glanced across the hallway at me with a little smile. Later I would understand that all these statements, these stories, these looks, were signals. But at the time, I didn’t know exactly what they meant. After all, I did say “yet,” and he did say, “I can wait.” That’s pretty clear, as Debbie told me. But why did everyone discount the “I don’t want” part of my statement? Shouldn’t three words have more weight than one? Maybe it’s the timing: you remember what you heard last. So the word “yet” filled Ben’s head, and “wait” filled mine. In the end, I was left with weight, just another kind.

Ben did last more than a month. That incident at the reservoir, although good for a laugh, unnerved both of us: Ben because our relationship had become public property, and me because I already had a dominant male in my life and wasn’t sure I wanted two. My father intimidated all my friends at first, even Ben. I could tell my father was equally startled by Ben’s confidence, so he launched into the five questions: grades, jobs, sports, parents, and previous girlfriends. Ben answered every question but the last directly. To that one, he replied, “I haven’t dated as many people as your daughter, sir.”

It amused me to watch the two of them sparring, especially when Ben calmly turned aside my father’s most provocative remarks. My father had big opinions about everything: this week, he thought Carter wasn’t going far enough in pressing countries on their human rights records, but last month he’d complained that Carter thought he was smarter than anyone else. When he was teaching his upperclass seminar on the United States and the Third World, you couldn’t make a statement about the weather without triggering an argument. From January to May, he would talk for hours about the dangers of American arrogance. Once he got into a very loud argument at a restaurant in Nederland when a knee-jerk patriot accused my father of being a commie sympathizer because he hated Pinochet. Oh yes, I knew all about Pinochet. That explained my popularity.

Two weeks went by before Ben and I were alone again. I’d spent plenty of nights thinking about the pleasure he’d given me and discussing it with Debbie, who seemed to think it a good thing that he wanted to please me. But as I tried to tell her, it felt more like control, as if he wanted to make my body respond a certain way. And he always undressed me completely before we’d even done much, even though I usually wanted to keep some clothes on. In a very dispassionate way, too, staring at me as if I were a shipment he needed to take out of its box.

Debbie’s reaction to all this puzzled me. I believe now that she envied me my very determined lover, one I wasn’t sure I could control. But that’s typical of someone like her who arranges everything for the best possible result. Her life lacked surprises; between my father’s volatility and Ben’s approach to sex, mine offered more than I wanted. Many times I told the chair that Debbie and I should have switched places while I was dating Ben. And the chair always agreed, especially when I sat in it and pretended to be Debbie.

So I found myself alone again with Ben, at his house, his parents gone to a concert, which meant they wouldn’t come back until 10:30 or 11. He looked at my outfit, my gray corduroy pants and striped white-and-gray shirt with the matching tie, and said, “You look so nice, I should take you out.” But he didn’t. We watched TV and then started making out. Sometimes I wonder if we ever really talked about anything. I don’t remember many details of conversations, and I think I enjoyed talking about dating him more than actually going out with him. My response to him began in the part of me that wanted to be interesting and not uptight. There I was, on the floor, letting him touch me and remove my clothes that he liked so much. Despite being naked on one of those loud 1970s shag carpets at the beginning of winter, I felt warm. I liked his body pressed against mine. When we were kissing, I could stretch out my legs completely and still rest my feet on his. He pushed me back a little, gently, and looked at me. We lay there touching each other while he slowly moved on top of me. Then he spread my legs with his knees and shoved it in. I was stunned. I lay there like a mattress he was using for friction, breathing only when I had to and saying nothing. He held my hips and took his time, staring down at me until his eyes closed at the end.

“Are you OK?” he asked as he lay down next to me.

I didn’t remember if I answered, but he seemed concerned.

“The first time is always weird for girls, Natalie. It’ll be better next time.” Awkwardly, he tried to hold me. I could see he believed what he was saying to me. I mumbled, “I have to go home,” got up, put on my clothes, and walked home. I didn’t cry much, and when I took off my underwear at home and checked, there were only a few red spots and the sticky remains of Ben. I felt hollowed out and a little sore. Shouldn’t there have been more pain? I began to dream of police cars and sexual assault nurse-examiners and castration, so I wiped myself with my underwear and stowed them under the bed. Then I sat on the floor, leaning against my bed, and called Debbie.

Usually I talked while Debbie categorized what I was saying and filed it away, but all I managed to say that night was, “Hi. Ben and I had sex.”

“You did?” She paused and added, “You don’t sound good.”

“No,” I said, and then I started to cry again. Luckily, it was only 9:30. Debbie came over immediately and tried to comfort me, but instead she made me angry. I sat there in a shirt and no underwear while she put her arm around my shoulders and made excuses.

“He should have asked first,” I told her, but she tried to present other possibilities. “Maybe” turned out to be her favorite word. Maybe he got too excited. Maybe he’d dated other girls before who said no because they didn’t know exactly how they wanted things to go. Maybe he was used to girls letting him set the pace.

“Shut up!” I yelled finally. “I don’t care what he thought.”

That was the first time I ever shouted at Debbie, very effectively, I might add.

“He did mess you up, didn’t he?” she said quietly. “I’m sorry, Telie. I thought he’d be good for you.”

“Not really.”

She held me for a while, asked me what I wanted to do. I told her about the underwear, and she got me a zip-lock bag to keep them in.

I fell asleep immediately after Debbie left at 11, and when I woke up in the morning the previous night was still taking place by the side of the bed, unfolding like a movie.

**

Ben sat down in the chair. “You want to accuse me, Natalie?”

FADE IN

INT. FISHERS’ KITCHEN—NIGHT

TEDDY and ASHLEY FISHER and DEBBIE HUNTER cluster around NATALIE FISHER as if she is an egg that needs warming. A POLICE OFFICER sits at the head of the table. He opens a notebook and proceeds to fire questions, seldom looking up.

OFFICER

You were at his house? Were his parents there?

NATALIE

They were at a concert.

OFFICER

How long were you there?

NATALIE

About an hour.

OFFICER

Tell me what happened.

NATALIE

We watched TV for a while, I think it was Charlie’s Angels. We started kissing.

Teddy stares at his daughter. She lowers her eyes and speaks to the kitchen table.

NATALIE

Ben … um … likes to take my clothes off, so he did, and then he took off his.

Natalie shrugs miserably. The policeman makes encouraging noises as he writes.

NATALIE

We were lying on the carpet, touching each other.

She stops again. The policeman is silent until she continues.

NATALIE

I was giving him a hand job. He was … doing the same to me.

Teddy blushes and stares into a corner.

NATALIE

And then he was having sex with me.

OFFICER

Did you tell him to stop?

Ashley moves her hands so that they cup Natalie’s shoulders. Natalie starts.

NATALIE

I don’t think I said anything. I just got dressed and came home.

OFFICER

How old is he?

NATALIE

My age. Sixteen.

OFFICER

Too bad. We could have gotten him on statutory.

The policeman finishes taking notes and gets up. Then he turns back to Natalie.

OFFICER

You should go to the hospital, get a rape kit.

FADE OUT

Ben was still in the chair. He spoke softly. “Go to the hospital, Natalie. After all, what other evidence do you have?”

I looked from him to the bathroom door. I wanted to take a shower. Could I get past him?

**

I stayed in my room for most of the weekend, telling my parents I thought I was getting a cold. I lay in bed and reread The Silmarillion. As long as I did, Ben stayed out of the chair. When I put the book down, tried to nap, he would reappear. At first I made him disappear by reaching for the zip-lock bag, but that didn’t work for long.

As Sunday progressed and I refused to take Ben’s calls, my parents watched me more and more closely. I tried to cough occasionally, but I didn’t really feel like faking a cold. I ignored them.

When I woke up Monday morning, I huddled under the covers for a while. I knew I couldn’t stay home without explaining, but if I went to school, I’d have to see Ben. For a few minutes, I held the zip-lock bag. Then I shoved it farther under the bed and got up to take a shower, the first since Saturday night. I smelled bad for someone who had sat around all the previous day. Even though I washed my hair twice, dressed carefully, put on makeup, and curled my hair, that scent lingered all day.

Debbie was waiting for me by the front doors. I hugged her.

“I’ll be your escort today,” she said. “I’ll get to your classes as fast as I can. Just think of some questions to ask your teachers after class, and then you won’t have to go out into the hall by yourself. And we’ll go to Crossroads for lunch.” For once, I was thankful for her tendency to overplan.

Debbie’s strategy worked until chemistry class, the next to last of the day. Ben and I always met outside the door because he had chemistry the period after I did, and my last class was just down the hall. I scooted out the door and sprinted to the women’s bathroom, but Ben casually stepped in front of me, grinning happily. I almost knocked him over.

He grabbed my arms to steady me and then slid his hand down to my wrists, loosely holding them while he looked me over. “You look nice.”

I jerked away. He frowned.

“I called you three times yesterday. Is something wrong?”

I opened my mouth and said, “You …” Then I felt someone behind me and backed into her, thinking it was Debbie. But the citrus perfume identified her as Mrs. Harvey, the school counselor.

“How have you been, Natalie? I haven’t talked to you for awhile,” she said, moving next to me. I stared from one to the other, dumbfounded. Mrs. Harvey frowned, took my arm, and pulled me down the hall into her office. Ben tried to follow, but she shut the door in his face, saying, “I’ll talk to you later, young man.”

I felt frozen. She led me to the chair by her desk and sat down diagonally from me.

“What’s the matter, Natalie?”

I raised my head and saw Ben and Debbie, separated by a good distance, staring at me through the window. The bell rang. Mrs. Harvey angrily waved them away.

“You looked afraid of him. Does he hit you?”

“No!”

To a stranger, Mrs. Harvey appeared soft: sagging cheeks and neck, generous lap, teased brown hair, and a gray dress with black flowers. But when she leaned closer and met my eye, I couldn’t look away—though I couldn’t cry under such a penetrating gaze either. I was grateful for that.

“What did he do?”

“Uh…”

“Are you sexually involved?”

That made me flush and stare at the floor again. I seemed to be doing a lot of that the last few days. I was suddenly furious at the thought of Ben turning me into a mouse-girl who slunk along walls.

“Was that what you wanted?”

Finally I made an honest reply. “I don’t know.”

“But it was what he wanted?” she continued.

I nodded.

“Happens all the time, Natalie. Have you told your parents? Called the police?”

I shook my head. All these suggestions made me feel extremely tired. I asked her, “May I stay here this period?” She nodded, and I took out my chemistry textbook. I looked at the pages but couldn’t focus on the characters. They kept blurring out. For the rest of the period I pretended to read, though, to prevent her from asking me any more questions.

Finally, the bell rang again. Not too long after, Debbie’s face appeared at the office door. Mrs. Harvey left with me, heading down the hall with a determined air. It was only the next afternoon, when Ben confronted me, that I realized what she had been planning. He blocked my path, two of his friends backing him up. All three of them held notebooks at their hips, too casually.

“What did you tell Mrs. Harvey?” he demanded of me.

I said nothing, hoping that someone would come along and rescue me before fear and anger made me attack all three. Avoiding him had been the easy part, I saw now. It had fooled me into believing I mourned less than I truly did.

“Well, what?” He came a little closer.

“She asked me a lot of questions,” I said softly, which was true.

“And what did you say?”

“She did most of the talking.”

“That had better be true,” he told me. “Because there’s really nothing for you to say.” They headed down the hall, brushing me not too subtly as they went by. I ran to the bathroom and cried through most of the last class, then holed up in Mrs. Harvey’s office again. She steadied me considerably. That day she taught me all about chairs: how to imagine someone in the chair, talk to that person, and imagine what he might say. How to practice.

“This way, Natalie,” she advised me, “you’re prepared if there’s a confrontation like the one in the hall. You’ll know what to say next time.”

I never told her how soon Been took over my chair. I bought a new one and another and another, but no matter how feminine or small they were, he would eventually appear, though one time, to my great satisfaction, he got stuck and broke the chair before he got out. That was hard to explain to my parents, though. They wondered about the noise.

And I didn’t tell Mrs. Harvey the kind of practice that really interested me, all that spring of my junior year.

FADE IN

MONTAGE SEQUENCE

INT. NATALIE’S BEDROOM—NIGHT

Ben sits in the chair across from Natalie, pointing his finger accusingly at her.

BEN

You really should learn to communicate, Natalie.

NATALIE (VOICE OVER)

I had no intention of just talking the “next time.” After so many nights dreaming of my stillness, my silence underneath Ben’s body, I had settled on a new hobby.

EXT. SALVATION ARMY STORE, BOULDER—DAY

Natalie walks into the Salvation Army store.

INT. SALVATION ARMY—DAY

Natalie goes to the housewares section. She buys three small knives.

EXT. BOULDER RESERVOIR—DAY

Natalie throws knives again and again at a dead tree.

NATALIE (VO)

I really do recommend some kind of physical activity as a remedy for depression. Some kind of practice.

INT. BOULDER HIGH SCHOOL—DAY

Ben is lounging against the wall beside a bulletin board that says “German Club.” Inside a nearby classroom, a lovely blonde girl is giving a speech in German.

Natalie walks up behind Ben.

NATALIE

Ben!

He turns around, looks surprised. Wasting no time, Natalie starts slinging knives at him, one by each ear. He pushes himself up against the wall. He has a terrified look on his face. She throws the third knife at his groin. A low choke comes out of his mouth. She walks up to him and retrieves her knives, none too gently.

END MONTAGE SEQUENCE

FADE OUT

For once I felt that I was truly my father’s daughter—and, of course, anger is a more respectable emotion than fear. Ben and his friends did plenty to stoke both feelings. They started harassing me in school, whispering “bitch” or “On the rag again?” to me as I walked by or bumping me into corners. After three weeks of it, right before Christmas break, I turned around in the middle of the hallway and screamed: “Learn to take no for an answer!”

Mrs. Harvey saw all this, of course, and spoke to Ben. It tapered off around Christmas. But what frustrated her most was her inability to get me to tell my parents.

Honestly, I hoped they would force me to tell them. I dropped little hints about how aggressive Ben had been; Debbie and I almost had a conversation about rape right in front of them. And I kept buying chairs—but my parents never asked exactly the right question about my chair collection, never seemed worried enough about me.

Meanwhile, people formed camps at school. Girls sidled up to me all spring semester and told me how aggressive they’d heard Ben could be, and then an hour later they’d be flirting with him outside my next class. Other girls asked me bitchy questions I never could answer: “Did you say anything?” “Did you poke him in the eyes?” And Ben and his friends did everything from calling me a slut to ignoring me to pointedly giving party invitations to everyone in a group but me.

“Back to the middle of the crowd,” I told Debbie resignedly, but we knew it was worse than that. Nobody really wanted to be friends with a rape victim. They wanted it to fade away, or they wanted me to be strong. She wanted to fix it for me. Those seemed to be my only options, so I let it slide until the summer before senior year, the second full summer we spent at Lake Tapawingo. My parents finally sat me down for a talk, prodded by my uncle, the doctor, the caretaker of our whole family, who was surprised by my new meekness. Once I started, I was amazed how quickly the words flowed. After that summer, I rediscovered the courage to go out in groups again, generally of girls only. When I felt lonely, I pulled out the latest chair and talked to it. By the next Thanksgiving, when I had been devirginised a little more than a year and after I had ruined a couple of chairs trying to dislodge him, Ben stopped dominating the chair.

Yet I still couldn’t bring myself to say, “Ben raped me.” In fact, I’ve never said it, though I did tell my parents, “I was raped.” I don’t know whether I’m afraid of people challenging me or of my mind doubting me. Maybe the passive voice is easier because then Ben disappears from my language. Then he can’t remind me anymore of the changefulness of words. There’s another three-word phrase I prefer: “He didn’t ask.” That lets me off the hook. I haven’t exactly been victimized then. It’s merely a slip of the tongue (or some other part); a failure of communication. It could be my fault, in this second version; I could have changed things—I just didn’t. It wasn’t something that was done to me over which I had no control.