by Bret Lott
Paul stood beside Kate, and she looked up at him, tried at a smile. She picked up her coffee cup, the words LIVE TO RUN, RUN TO LIVE: SENIORS 10K wrapped around it. She said, “Some for me?”
Paul nodded, took her cup to the counter, filled it and his too: on Paul’s cup a swirled painting of the bridges from Charleston to Mount Pleasant, beneath it the words COOPER RIVER BRIDGE RUN.
He looked at their two cups, the coffee inside them black, all the more black for the white insides of the cups, then opened the cupboards above the coffeemaker. There he saw what he’d seen every time he’d been here: rows and rows of coffee cups, each with a different logo or picture or slogan from six-and ten-K runs all over the South.
They were the same cups as ever. Maybe one or two or three new ones since the last time he’d been here. But they were the same.
He stood with his hands on the cupboard handles, hanging on, he felt, as though, were he to let go, he might fall away, disappear. This was about his father, all these cups.
He swallowed, said, “Look at this.”
He heard Kate behind him turn in her chair. She said, “What?”
“These cups,” he said, uncertain as to whether or not he’d spoken or whispered the words. He held on.
He heard her stand, moving toward him.
He let go the handles then, and nothing happened. Here he stood. He hadn’t fallen, hadn’t disappeared. And now he felt Kate’s hand at his back, felt her lean into his shoulder.
His father had begun running a week or so after Paul’s mother had died. Fifteen years ago, back when Paul and Kate still lived in California, back before Paul’d been transferred to Charleston. Back then they were at such a remove from his father’s life that the running had seemed to Paul a mere hobby, something talked about on the phone, like stamp collecting or cleaning out the garage on a regular basis.
But then they had visited him in North Myrtle Beach on their way out to Charleston, had stopped in for a week. That first night they’d stayed up late, Paul wound up from the day-long drive, the tail end of a trip across the country, and they’d talked, Kate and the kids already in bed. They talked of Paul’s new position with the medical supply firm, of the house he’d picked out for them in Mount Pleasant, talked too of the life his father had set up here. And they’d talked, finally, of Paul’s mother, and of how much they both missed her, how much they loved her.
Then, abruptly, Paul’s father stood, said he had to get to bed, that he couldn’t be late getting up tomorrow morning to run with his friends. He’d given Paul a hug, and disappeared down the hall.
And Paul had thought this was nice, his father’s having friends he could do something with.
Next morning he’d heard sounds from the kitchen, he and Kate in bed in the spare room. He’d gotten up, seen it was five forty-five, the sky still dark outside, and made his way down the hall toward light from the kitchen.
There sat Jill and David—they were still little then, David six, Jill four—at the kitchen table, before them bowls of cereal, his father in the middle of the kitchen, stretching.
He had on Day-Glo–orange running shorts, a white T-shirt with the stylized figure of a runner on it, all blurred blue angles and lines, in a circle around it the words RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! He had on a pair of running shoes, what looked in the light like an elaborate scheme of red and white leather pieces slung low about his feet, the soles broad and rolling high at the toe.
He was smiling at the kids, said, “Now this is to stretch the quadriceps,” and he bent a leg at the knee, reached behind him, and grabbed the toe of the shoe. “You do that so when you’re out there running, your body’ll be ready for the work. No surprises to your body that way.” Jill had giggled for some reason, kicked her legs beneath the chair, her spoon tight in her hand. She hadn’t even seen Paul come in, nor had David, who only dug into his bowl of cereal—it looked like box granola, as far as Paul could see in the kitchen light—and took a mouthful, chewed.
His father had glanced up at him, nodded, still smiling, then let go his leg, bent the other leg at the knee, reached back with the other hand and pulled at the toe. “Got to bend so you won’t break,” he said, and nodded once more at Paul. Still Jill giggled, still David ate. Neither of them saw him, only watched their grandfather stretch.
And now Paul—standing in the same kitchen his children had eaten in that morning ten years ago, their grandfather before them in a strange outfit that bore no resemblance to anything Paul had ever seen his father wearing—he wondered why he had never asked after this hobby of his father’s, why he hadn’t at least inquired of him that morning who his friends were or—every Sunday-night phone call from then on—ask why, why had he started doing this: running?
Of course it would have to do with his mother, her death. He knew this, figured all these years it was something to do to fill the empty void of time his life must have then encountered, the time Paul himself knew well enough was already consumed by itself in a way that seemed in fact to deny time: here was his son, sixteen and driving already, when in only this moment he had been six years old, his daughter four, the two of them watching their grandfather in a house dark save for one light above this kitchen table, him warning them to bend so they wouldn’t break.
He looked at the cup in his hands, at the white inside it. The black coffee there swirled with the slightest movement of his wrist, and he wondered what he knew of his father, what he really knew.
And things came to him.
This: His father is driving the family out to San Fernando from Buena Park Sunday afternoon to visit grandparents; to get there, they pass through the Hollywood Freeway tunnel, and each time they do Paul’s father honks the horn, just a quick snap of sound in the dark that echoes a moment and disappears. Each time they pass through the tunnel, each time he honks the horn, other cars do the same in what seems some tacit code of disobedience. Each time, too, no one in the car says a word, only watches, Paul and his brothers and sister all smiling, waiting for their father to honk, then turn in his seat, smile back at them, nod as he does every time, and it is this waiting that is important to him, waiting for his father to do what they know he will do, and does. This predictable rebellion he sees in his father.
This: One evening when Paul is seven his father comes home from the newly vacant house two doors down, his right hand wrapped in the tail of his white shirt, that tail brilliant red with blood, his left hand holding it tight; with him is Mr. Murray from the end of the block, Paul’s best friend Steve’s dad, who’d had in mind to swap out the garage door springs from the empty house for the old rusted ones in his own. Now his father is hurt, he’s trying not to cry, Paul can see in his eyes as he stands just inside the kitchen and holding that shirttail too red, Paul and his brothers and sister moving back and away from him while Mr. Murray and Mom hover around him, Paul’s mother peeling back the tail to take a look, silent the whole time while Mr. Murray keeps saying I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s all my fault. Paul’s mother’s face reveals nothing at what she sees and what Paul cannot, his mother and father and Mr. Murray then leaving for the hospital, Mrs. Murray showing up a moment later with Steve, all of them puzzled, even Mrs. Murray, as to what to do next in an empty kitchen. That is when Paul looks down at the linoleum in front of the sink, where the three adults had stood, and sees three thick drops of brilliant red, a perfect triangle of his father’s blood.
And this: His father stands at the stove in the kitchen of that same house in Buena Park, poking at a pan of burning scrambled eggs, the smell a thick and ugly reminder throughout the house that their mother is in the hospital, Paul’s baby sister born just the day before. But his father is here, smiling with the pan in hand and scooping up the blackened stuff onto their plates.
His father, making dinner.
He feels Kate’s hand on his shoulder, the two of them side by side at this kitchen counter, and he looks a moment longer at the coffee, swirls it again with the slightest movement of hi
s wrist, a world of movement in this small cup, and turns to his wife, meets her eyes.
She says, “It will be okay,” and though he knows the words to be hollow, he knows them too to be the best ones available, the truest lie he can hear right now.
He shrugs. He thinks of the shoes, of all those coffee cups.
He thinks of his mother, and of her smiling in the smallest way each time Paul’s dad honks the horn; the corners of her mouth turned up only a fraction, he’d seen there in the dark of the tunnel each time.
And he hears the instant of sound the horn makes, the echoes of others behind and around them. Small sounds, inconsequential. But there, real.
He sees his father running, and running, and begins, this moment, to understand.
He says, “How long before the kids get back?” and before Kate can answer, before she can leave his side to find this morning’s newspaper, a paper delivered to the home of a man no longer alive, his father, Paul begins to line up stories to tell them of his father’s life, and hopes in the same instant, though he knows it may be a chance as slight and ephemeral as an instant of sound echoed off the walls of a tunnel, that his children might have already begun forming their own stories of him.
He will make them dinner, he decides. Perhaps scrambled eggs.
It is an empty gesture, he knows. A move that will serve only as a symbol to himself: his children’s father, making dinner in his own father’s house.
But what more can he provide? What else is there left to do, save feed his children, and begin now to grieve?
IT SEEMED EACH MORNING HE WOULD NEVER FIND THE RIGHT words for the story. Things happened around him: His children came in with Lego problems, his friends called, his mother grew old, his father up and died on him, his children left the house for hours on end with the car, then came back, years later, with other children, children of their own. And still his wife called to him with chores, chores that seemed only more clutter: Take the garbage to the curb, mow the lawn, oil this door, pack those boxes, sign here on this line and drive the truck four states west, then help me with the corn, keep the silk inside the sink.
All this, while still he sat with these words swirling about him in absurd order, words lined up like drunken soldiers, like harlots with painted lips slurring just as drunkenly as those soldiers he’d thought up. But even that idea of words like harlots and soldiers lined up before him began to stink of a lie—how could words line up like drunken soldiers and harlots?—while around him now his mother died and still more children paraded through the house and his own children, the children who had had those Lego problems only this morning, came into the afternoon light of his office where still he tried to work to tell him of mortgages and insurance and tuition, all cares of a world he wanted out of in order to get these words right, get these lost and swirling words in line before him in some sort of order so that they might bow to him, might surrender to him perhaps a moon over a midnight lake, that lake flat and black and clean, the surface so smooth that next there might come a second moon just beneath the first, a moon descending into its own black sky, this lake, the higher its sister moon rose over this lake of words he wanted smoothed for him.
That was what he wanted: that moon. Both of them. Maybe even that black sky thrown in for good measure.
But nothing came to him. No moons, no midnight lakes. Eventually, too, his wife stopped calling to him and oiled doors herself, kept the silk inside the sink, kissed the children good-bye, until finally he looked up, saw outside his window a sky gone the perfect black of a midnight sky, a perfect moon rising just like a moon.
One moon, all by itself. No help from him at all.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank the editors of the following magazines, anthologies, and radio programs in which these works originally appeared:
“Family” in Prairie Schooner
“The Difference Between Women and Men” and “A Way Through This” on National Public Radio’s The Sound of Writing
“Somebody Else” and “An Evening on the Cusp of the Apocalypse” in Ascent
“A Part of It” (in slightly different form) in ACM (Another Chicago Magazine)
“Rose” in Shenandoah
“The Issue of Money” (in slightly different form) in Gambit
“Nostalgia” in Hunger Mountain
“Gesture” and “Halo” in Arts and Letters
“Everything Cut Will Come Back” in The Idaho Review
“Postscript” in Sudden Stories: A Mammoth Anthology of Minuscule Fiction
“The Difference Between Women and Men” also appeared in the anthology Listening to Ourselves: NPR’s Short Story Magazine of the Air
“The Train, the Lake, the Bridge” appeared in the anthologies Ghost Writing: Haunted Tales by Contemporary Authors and Year’s Best Horror and Fantasy Stories, 2001
“Rose” also appeared in the anthologies Crossroads: Southern Stories of the Fantastic and A Confederacy of Crime
A CONVERSATION WITH BRET LOTT
Random House Reader’s Circle: Though you are primarily regarded as a novelist—you have published six of them, the seventh due out soon—this is your third collection of stories. What do you find so compelling about this fictive form?
Bret Lott: I love the short story because of its ability to work under your skin in a way a novel can’t. Novels are big animals that can wander around a bit, and can park for a while and mosey and all kinds of things. But a story is a pinprick, a kind of jewel outside of its setting—a diamond in the palm of your hand you can appreciate for its simplicity. I know I’m allowing my metaphors to run riot here, but it’s difficult to say, save for the fact there is a purity to the short story form, a kind of guerilla tactic to them that makes them all the more surprising and a lot of times more memorable than a novel.
RHRC: What are some of the challenges to writing stories that you might not have to face when writing a novel?
BL: Keeping it to the point. Not that a story has to have a point. Rather, it is that a story has a much smaller canvas than a novel does. I like to think of novels as murals, whereas a story is an intricate cameo. The challenge, therefore, is to stay in scene, stay on character, stay on detail. Stay on target. I love the short-story form above the novel because it calls for a kind of precision that makes one see as deeply as possible the characters and situation the story has to reveal. A novel can wander, make side trips—excursions, if you will. Which isn’t to say it can be sloppy—there has to be the same precision in a novel as in a story.
RHRC: In the Washington Post review of The Difference Between Women and Men, Carolyn See writes, “If not for Bret Lott, who would tell us about the RC Cola salesmen, the food brokers, the small-time insurance agents, the couples who are about six steps away from being homeless, if they stop to think about it, except that they don’t have the time to stop and think about it?” Do you agree that your work addresses these issues of class?
BL: I do. Class issues are always present in my writing, though it’s not anything I think about when I sit down and begin to see the world I am going to write about. Thinking about capital-I Issues and that sort of thing while you write would be like a jazz musician thinking abut the scales while he reels out a beautiful line he hasn’t ever played before. I hope the class issues aren’t the focus so much as the inherent value of the lives involved. The fact that Carolyn See, having read the stories, asks the question she does is the very essence of the “special value” I would hope my work has. I want readers to see the lives of other people as being valuable in and of themselves, and to have to pause and think of RC salesmen and financially troubled couples as being people. An editor who rejected my first novel told me that the most important thing she got out of reading The Man Who Owned Vermont was that she would never see the people who work in a grocery store—the salesmen and clerks and cashiers and stockers—the same way again. Although she didn’t take the book, I still look back at that moment with the
greatest sense of fulfillment: the story made someone see people around her whom she had previously ignored as being worthy of her attention—she was seeing them now with empathy.
RHRC: How do you know when you begin a piece of writing that it will be a story, or a novel, or a work of nonfiction?
BL: Some stories have turned into novels, some novels have yielded stories; some essays have been written because the fictive form seemed to cheapen the true experience. This may sound cheesy, but it’s about listening to what the story itself wants to be, and not making it what you want it to be. Listen, and write.
RHRC: Throughout your career as a writer, you have also been a teacher of writing. How did both your writing life and your teaching life begin, and how do they work together (or not)?
BL: I got started by reading my brains out when I was a kid, though back then I wasn’t reading with any idea of becoming a writer. I simply enjoyed stories, enjoyed going somewhere else, enjoyed finding out what people do in certain circumstances. That is, I wanted to find out what happened and why, which is all a good story gives us. I ended up having four majors in college: forestry, marine biology, education, and then, finally, English. In addition, I took a year off halfway through college to become an RC Cola salesman, believing at that point that college wasn’t for me. But after a year of that, I knew I wanted to go back to school, and so, before reenrolling at Cal State Long Beach, I took a course at Golden West Community College to get myself used to having assignments again, readings and deadlines and all that. The only nights I had open were Tuesdays, and the only course that was open on Tuesday nights was creative writing, so I used to show up to class in my RC uniform on Tuesday nights, and I had a blast writing things, though I still had no notion of becoming a writer. I then took another creative writing course once I was back at Cal State, and the professor read out loud a single sentence of an entire story I’d written for class. Then he said, “That’s a writer’s sentence,” and I remember thinking, Maybe I want to do this. I know this is a long-winded answer, but it is to say that my writing life has been inextricably entwined with that of teaching; without my teachers, I wouldn’t be here today. And as a teacher now, I continue to be invigorated by my students, as the things I teach them are things I must—I must—practice every moment I am writing. I tell my students on the first day of class that the things I wrestle with as an author are precisely the same things they will have to wrestle with: How does this character hold her coffee cup? What does this character see as he walks from this room into that room? What is she thinking as she parks the car in the lot outside the grocery store? These are what I work with, and there have been no breakthroughs beyond this in storytelling, ever. So my students are always, always my peers: we are all in this together, trying to tell stories. I am always preaching the basic elements of writing: true dialogue, detailed settings, pace, character development. And in preaching that relentlessly, I have no choice but to see in my own writing the need to keep to the basic elements of writing: make that dialogue sound true, make this room seem real, make this character seem alive. There’s nothing more than that, and it is what informs every class I have ever taught, and so I have no choice but to let it inform my own writing life. I also value the joy that young writers bring to the art form, their wonder at reading for the first time a terrific story by one of the masters, and then finding in each others’ writing what works and doesn’t work. I treasure working with students who are actively trying to find their own voice and vision—that is invigorating, and reason enough to continue to find that kind of joy in my own writing.