“This was when my dad was still living with us, but he would come to services from work, so when we went home afterward I’d have to choose who to go home with.  I don’t know if it upset my dad, but I always went home with my mom.  Mostly because she drove the Beetle, which was so much more fun. She would play these old Patti Smith cassettes, and I’d sing with her. But the best part was she’d let me put on the dome light, so it felt like we were in this little space capsule, just the two of us. That’s my favorite memory, me and my mom going home from temple Friday nights.  That car was like a lit-up igloo rolling through the dark.” 

When I heard the washing machine finish, I put our things in the dryer and went back to roaming the house.  About fifteen minutes had passed before I realized that I’d forgotten to add the fabric softener. But when I went to put it in, there was an older woman standing in the back doorway, staring at the machine.  She looked up.

It was the woman from the picture upstairs.  I could tell, although she was older.  Her face had changed.  It continued to change as I stood there.

“I’ll call the police,” she said.

I was overwhelmed by pity. This woman was an adult, she probably owned the house, but seemed so scared.  I knew I should run, but I was curious about this feeling.  It wasn’t unpleasant.  Somehow I felt okay as long as I kept her from entering the house, her house. 

The walls of the Classroom Building were cracked down to their foundations, and the rooms scattered with fallen acoustic tiles; the ceiling’s grid of aluminum beams held only fire alarms whose frayed wires wound into space. The linoleum floor tiles in the atrium were warped and uneven. And among the yellowed paperbacks and brittle hardcover books in the Teacher’s Lounge, I found that strange notebook with the teachers’ speculations about which of us might grow up to be killers.

She remembers sensing—almost smelling—that he wanted to kill her. Or that for a split second the thought was spreading itself in his mind. She remembers the terrible little theater of his eyes, which she had always thought to be blue. But looking at them in the afternoon glare, she saw that they weren’t even a little bit blue. They were grey.

They dropped their bags off and went across the street to Outback Steakhouse. Peanut ordered a baked potato with sour cream and bacon bits. Frances ordered a full steak dinner. She had always been able to eat heartily under stress and Peanut found this unattractive, too warlike.

Peanut slouched, letting her long brown hair fall over one eye. Lewd tawny light lit the exposed half of her face. “So you’re not going to talk to me?” she asked, pissed to be the first to speak.

“You aren’t saying anything either,” Frances said impassively.

“Well, I don’t know what to say to you when you act like this.”

“What, like mean?”

“More like heartless. Like a piece of statuary.” Peanut stared at Frances. “It’s like you’re autistic.”

Frances smiled like a wolf. “Do you know what that means? To be autistic?”

“Of course I do. Don’t quiz me.”

“Just tell me what you think it means.”

“It means someone who can, you know, rattle off all the prime numbers, but not, like, say hello.”

Frances chewed her steak and swallowed. “I’m like that?”

“Yeah.”

Frances was surprised by how much this hurt her feelings. She continued to eat and wanted to cry.

“You can’t just come in here.” Cindy sat on the floor next to an open magazine.

“I loved to read when I was your age,” Joan said. “But my brother was always stealing my books.” She smiled reflectively. “He didn’t even read them. He just put them on his shelf. What he wanted was my enthusiasm.”

“Mom, get out.”

“I believe this is my book.”

“It was on the shelf.”

“You can have it.” Joan set the book back down on the bed. “It’s good, isn’t it?” she said, but there came no reply. Cindy sat with her arms crossed, a homicidal song in her eyes. Still Joan was too captivated to look away. It was a marvelous view of something utterly gone: her youth.

She set the book back down on the bed and left the room, leaving the door ajar. Then Cindy slammed it.

In the unrealistic days of their marriage there was a question whether she would read what he wrote. He was a beginner and she is a tougher critic than she meant to be. It was touchy, her embarrassment, his resentment. Now in his letter he said, damn! but this book is good. How much he had learned about life and craft. He wanted to show her, let her read and see, judge for herself. She was the best critic he ever had, he said. She could help him too, for in spite of its merits he was afraid the novel lacked something. She would know, she could tell him. Take your time, he said, scribble a few words, whatever pops into your head. Signed, “Your old Edward still remembering.”

She remembers giving him advice on how to write. How audacious that now seems. She said, you need to stop writing about yourself, nobody cares how fine your feelings are. He replied, Nobody ever writes about anything but himself. She said, You need to know literature, you need to write with literature and the world in mind. For years she was afraid she had killed something in him, and she hoped his turning to insurance meant he didn’t mind. But this book looks like a different kind of answer. She wonders how much contempt or irony lies behind his choice of subject, and she hopes he is sincere.

Despite his fine outer manner, she soon discovered he had suffered a crippling injury: his heart was broken. He had been engaged to a girl named Maria, who had jilted him and married somebody else. Jilted: a good old-fashioned word. He did not seem heartbroken. He seemed vigorous and enthusiastic about the future. But heartbroken was a secret state, which she could share. It occurred to her she was heartbroken too, on account of Jake, who was retaliating for her career choice by a program of worldwide travel and picking up girls. She and Edward could be heartbroken together. It gave them something to talk about, and it protected them from each other, like brother and sister: no need to worry about hearts since their hearts were broken.

The bluet is a small flower, creamy-throated, that grows in patches in New England lawns. The bluet (French pronunciation) is the shaggy cornflower, growing wild in France. “The Bluet” is a poem I wrote. The Bluet is a painting of Joan Mitchell’s. The thick hard blue runs and holds. All of the, broken-up pieces of sky, hard sky, soft sky. Today I’ll take Joan’s giant vision, running and holding, staring you down with beauty. Though I need reject none. Bluet. “Bloo-ay.”

My abstention from the Park

is for Billy Nichols who went

bird-watching there and, for

his binoculars, got his

head beat in. Streaming blood,

he made it to an avenue

where no cab would pick him up

until one did and at

Roosevelt Hospital he waited

several hours before any

doctor took him in hand. A

year later he was dead. But

I’ll make the park: I carry

more cash than I should and

walk the street at night

without feeling scared unless

someone scary passes.

Wigging in, wigging out:

when I stop to think

the wires in my head

cross: kaboom. How

many trips

by ambulance (five,

count them five),

claustrated, pill addiction,

in and out of mental

hospitals,

the suicidalness (once

I almost made it)

but – I go on?

Tell you all of it?

I can’t. When I think

of that, that at

only fifty-one I,

Jim the Jerk, am

still alive and breathing

deeply, that I think

is a miracle.

My mother supports an agency that every week or so sends her a list of the world’s political prisoners who are known to be in immediate danger of their lives. She sits over a chunky Adler typewriter and composes polite pleas to jailors and torturers and killers on behalf of their victims. “In the name of liberty, of decency, Your Excellency…”

These petitions for pity and reason, strangled as they are by formality, necessarily without anger, she types on personal stationery of pale yellow or pale tangerine or aqua—the kind got at a pharmacy. Her bursitis makes the typing difficult, and the text is unevenly imprinted, since some of the keys have more bite than others, the way she works them. All the same, her handwriting is impossible.

Sissy and I had, the year before when we still enjoyed the good graces of both our sets of partners, gone to Bermuda. Sissy was out on the beach one afternoon, asleep in a vinyl lounger, the kind with a walloping big tricolored umbrella attached. As she slept, the tide moved on her. I was watching from back in, where I had taken my towel. The sea wash was gulping at the pebbles around Sissy’s chair legs, and then at the chair legs themselves, and then the waters lifted up her nylon duffel and tipped it. Sissy was asleep, and I waded out and rescued her duffel, but I let her stay in the cold tide. I went back in-beach and watched her sleeping until she was like a person on a raft. Still she didn’t move, didn’t wake up. There was the raft and then the big straw circle of her sun hat and then the big circle made by the umbrella. “How Sissy looked, setting sail for the horizon,” I said to them.

One Sunday, they got particularly drunk, and Enoch put a cigarette burn in the cushion of Billy’s silk-covered divan. “Look, do you think that matters?” Billy said to Enoch, who was being contrite. “I’m happy to see signs of life in this place, even if they’re only your cigarette scars.” To show how little concerned he was about the ornaments in his home, Billy dropped and broke a piece of pottery, a crackle-glazed jug that his dead wife had brought from Mexico.

Orion shot rabbits, but to tell the truth, it almost sickened Cora to clean and cook them. Stripped of its pelt, the taut body glistened. The small legs put her in mind of fingers. On her plate all she could think of was the pleading eyes. Somehow this did not trouble her about chickens, which she took the pains to behead herself, sometimes chasing the headless flapping bird around the chopping block. Orion plucked the bird for her, and the feathers were saved for a sleeping crib for Madge.

Cora was troubled at night by the thought of the child lying in the cold earth. Had they put it in a box? Or had they merely wrapped it in the flour and sugar sacks used for dishcloths? She wanted to know, but she dreaded to hear what Belle might say. She was shocked too deeply to speak about it, yet she understood in her soul what had happened. Belle had not liked the child. She wanted to forget that it had ever existed.

What would her husband think if he knew that she enjoyed it? Her pains to deceive him relaxed when it seemed clear that it hardly mattered. She had assumed it would end with her pregnancy and was part of a new bride’s remarkable sensations, but with the child born she had felt desire for her husband. That she concealed, of course, scarcely admitting it to herself. She had no way of knowing if Ned was aware of her reluctant-willing collaboration. She feared what might happen if she took the initiative. Now that she was pregnant again he turned on his side and was usually snoring while she brushed her hair. She liked his snoring. What would it be like to have a man who lay snoreless and awake?

Still behind him was that damn coyote. A determined critter, he was. He hadn’t caught sight of him for at least an hour, but he felt his presence out there. At first he had feared him. Now he didn’t. If circumstances were different he might have welcomed the company of a coyote on a lonely walk on a snowy night. At best, the coyote’s presence was disconcerting. He was puzzled. Why would a coyote be so determined? Poor animal. It had been such a hard winter for man and beast.

He had got to drinking after Laurene died, he was so torn up about her death, and somebody at the Bureau of Indian Affairs came along and took his kids. Some social worker. By the time he sobered up, and that was several weeks later, he was told he had signed papers giving up his kids permanently and they were in a home near Mobridge, South Dakota. A Catholic home. And he couldn’t go up to visit them. It wasn’t allowed, they told him. He tried once to get in to see these two, a boy and a girl, like the two he had now. He never succeeded. He still wondered about them a lot. He knew they had to be mostly grown by this time, and he wondered if they ever thought about him.

My God, he thought again. Now it is murder. It has gone that far. Before, he was a drunk, sometimes a disagreeable drunk. But he was a drunk who didn’t or hadn’t gone around killing people. Now he had. He was little better than Little Bald Eagle and others like him who he had told Doris Mae were evil and to be avoided. And to think he had bragged to Bennion how all the whiskey and wine in his life had not brought him so low that he had never needed to beg. And now he had gone so much lower and killed a man.