The Exit Coach
Page 19
She put on her jacket and softly drew the door closed. Outside, everything was hushed. The trees and grass were breathing, fogging the chilly air. She lifted her suitcase, but it was too heavy, so she slid it from step to step, trying not to make any noise. There was a light on at the back of the house, but she skirted it, walking through the plantings and then all the way to the end of the lane, past the other dark residences. At the sign for Lilac Estates she set her suitcase in the grass and used it as a bench. The zipper popped, she heard it. She could hear everything, her heart, her breath. It would be a long wait and there was nothing to see in the sky, no stars, not even a moon, because it was cloudy. But somewhere close there was the companionable sound of water gurgling in a stream and later, when headlights came towards her, then slowed down and stopped, a single bird had started to sing.
The van had a sign on the door, Lilac Transportation. A man leaned out the window and said, “You the one for the Amtrak?”
He saw the problem with her suitcase and lifted it into his arms like a child, set it into the back, and slid the door open. But before he would let her get in he said, “Cost you fifty, up front.”
She gave him the money, and as the car sped through the suburbs she sat very still. Her various selves crowded her being, but within the commotion she could feel something singular take hold, something wavering that she wanted to concentrate on.
It lasted all that long day, as she retraced her steps backwards across the top of the state and then down along the Hudson to New York. She focused on that something in the center of her chest; it was entirely her own, and it was gaining in strength.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the editors of the literary quarterlies where some of these stories were published in slightly different form: “Mischief ” in The Common; “Leaving the Meadows” in The Northwest Quarterly; and “Mocked And Invaded,” “Arrogance,” “Tertium Quid” in The New England Review.
“American Pictures” and the idea of a traveller who agrees to all proposals is borrowed from a 1985 book by a Danish wanderer named Jacob Holdt who published his experiences in a book of that title. I am grateful to Ann Hamilton for permission to use her photograph on the front cover. Of the several books written about the great choreographer Bob Fosse, Razzle Dazzle: The Life and Work of Bob Fosse by Kevin Boyd Grubb, as well as Fosse’s dance routines, many of them collected on YouTube, were enormously helpful to my understanding of the performance world in the nineteen seventies. Thank you to Cody Prince and Susan Bain-Lucey for generous help with my questions about massage and public school governance.
Though a work of fiction begins in the sealed environment of the author’s imagination, it collects light and air as it moves towards publication. This happens with the help of outside readers to whom I am deeply grateful: Liam Callanan, Greg Pierce, and Nathan Poole. Martha Rhodes’ editorial vision was crucial to the realization of these stories and the finished book is the inspired work of Ryan Murphy, Clarissa Long, and Mari Coates at Four Way Books.
Big thanks to Graham Marks, sweetheart and reader extraordinaire.
Megan Staffel’s stories have been published in The New England Review, Ploughshares, Northwest Review, Seattle Review, and other journals, and collected in Lessons in Another Language (Four Way Books, 2010). She is the author of the novels, The Notebook of Lost Things (Soho Press) and She Wanted Something Else (Northpoint Press) and a first collection of stories, A Length of Wire And Other Stories (Pym Randall Press). She has published essays on craft in A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on their Craft edited by Andrea Barrett and Peter Turchi; Letters to A Fiction Writer, edited by Fred Busch; and Cerise Press, Spring, 2013. She divides her time between Brooklyn, New York and western New York State and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Publication of this book was made possible by grants and donations. We are also grateful to those individuals who participated in our 2015 Build a Book Program. They are:
Jan Bender-Zanoni, Betsy Bonner, Deirdre Brill, Carla & Stephen Carlson, Liza Charlesworth, Catherine Degraw & Michael Connor, Greg Egan, Martha Webster & Robert Fuentes, Anthony Guetti, Hermann Hesse, Deming Holleran, Joy Jones, Katie Childs & Josh Kalscheur, Michelle King, David Lee, Howard Levy, Jillian Lewis, Juliana Lewis, Owen Lewis, Alice St. Claire Long & David Long, Catherine McArthur, Nathan McClain, Carolyn Murdoch, Tracey Orick, Kathleen Ossip, Eileen Pollack, Barbara Preminger, Vinode Ramgopal, Roni Schotter, Soraya Shalforoosh, Marjorie & Lew Tesser, David Tze, Abby Wender, and Leah Nanako Winkler.