by Lucy Corin
IV: OTHER PEOPLE’S OBSESSIONS
Having decided her personality, I turned my mother’s routine actions into something I could understand. If she put down her fork and reached across the table for salt, I forgot the fork and the salt, and saw only the area of space cut by her motion. If she buttoned her shirt, I saw only her hands like dying spiders in the air.
In this way, my mother could seem to operate in pantomime, moving her hands and exaggerating her facial expressions as if searching for a right word that never surfaced. I took each silent gesture she made and isolated it.Then, I took each conjured notion to be a microcosm of a great profundity.
After all, some people collect pig icons, go bargain hunting, search for long lost brothers, study obscure bugs, or bury money.
We strapped ourselves into the truck and bumped toward the feed store. Here, on the edge of the state, people in trucks wave to other trucks.When cows get out, we know whose they are. The neighbors get together because the Wilsons are out of town. We push the cows back off the road and seal the fence.
My mother was one of the children who rode luxury ocean liners from California to Hawaii to mark off the seasons, bunny-hopping around the deck with libertines.
Years ago, I knew a skinhead named Uncle. This is where I’m coming from.
The older she grows, the more her body sneers at her. Moment to moment she must behave spinelessly, blindly, or spleenlessly, and many of her gestures are instigated by a desire to avoid pain.
“Go ahead and hate it, but don’t let it stop you from doing what you love,” I say, which is what Uncle said about heroin.
The feed store is an attachment to a convenience store. Besides feed, you can buy rawhide for your boots, beer and cigarettes, screwdrivers and crowbars, wire fencing, fluorescent ribbon, baseball caps and down vests, and chewing gum, canned beans, and fresh onions.
My mother has taken to waving indiscriminately—at dogs, fences, trees, and the spaces between. “Everything has led to the place where you are,” I say to make sense of it, which is a fact, and specifically not an affirmation of destiny.
V: THE EVERYONE OF WHOM WE SPEAK
Summer, and the squash is over our heads as it was when I was a child. The older we get, the higher the squash. We are fine gardeners. We eat and throw the scrapings in a heap outside and the next year . . . it goes to show.
We actually hold pieces of manure to the sun, imagining the lives represented there. It’s all terribly warm, the huge leaves like stained glass, the yellow tiger spiders.
This is death: a cessation of spontaneous function, unresponsiveness to an isoelectronic electroencephalogram in the absence of hypothermia or intoxication by central nervous system depressants, recognition and deletion of T lymphocytes that have been induced to proliferate by receptor-mediated activation preventing their overgrowth, or there’s somatic death, which is basically death, or neocortical death, which is death, or there’s a persistent vegetative state. I record none of this in protest. It’s simply that everyone wants to know.
At night, we collect cabbage worms and put them in our jacket pockets, these little gray toes. Each clumsy attribute we employ while doing so should be recorded, but here, our knees, our bumpy backs, the cricks in our necks and hips, these should be enough for everyone.
Underground, eubacteria, prosthecate bacteria, budding bacteria, gliding bacteria, filamentous bacteria, spirochetes, rickettsiae, chlamydiae, mycoplasma, and blue-green algae float around in the dirt with everything, breaking it into simpler components.
VI: A GOOD DAY
My mother is washing the dishes, and handily. She has let the horses out of their paddocks and they are grazing on the lawn, feeling this moment as hard as they can, because they are not often allowed to graze the yard.
My mother has also done the bills, found the misplaced two in her checkbook, and written a letter to the governor. All around, a smooth five-dollar wine, a well-risen cake, no lines at the grocery, a rare day, one so unrumpled it is a wonder there is time to notice how easy it has been to travel from one end of it to the other.
The sound of the water and the dishes, the way I have a cup of tea and am watching her wash without guilt that I’m not drying, the way I notice the silence more each time I hear a sound, all of this is a fine, fine state.
My mother is not herself after all, I think, and the thought lands immediately in the past, a car in the lane next to me, slamming its brakes. For the moment, I think I have ceased to summarize her.
I tell her how my day has been, now that I know hers.
I say, “Mother, I think I have ceased to summarize you,” and knowing the correct responses—“Have you, now?” “Really?” and “Good”—she says, instead,“Your day was fine, now, wasn’t it?”
I tell her how lovely the horses look in the yard, how their lips are frothy and green, how the old gelding is teaching the filly to scratch his withers for him, how I long to break through the wall in front of the sink and give her the window she’s always wanted there.
The silence is fine—the lack of my voice or the voice of another—and I know that if I continue to speak, some recognition of difficulty will materialize, as if difficulty is produced from the interaction of my voice with the air it encounters.
It comes back to this condition. Sometimes I want to speak, and so I continue.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my family, my writer friends, my colleagues at UC-Davis the folks at Tin House, the editors who published the first versions of these stories, copy editors of the world, and Carol. Some of you belong in multiple categories and don’t think I don’t know it.
Copyright © 2007 Lucy Corin
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2601 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.
Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and New York, New York
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Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West, 1700 Fourth St.
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First U.S. edition 2007
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Corin, Lucy.
The entire predicament : stories / by Lucy Corin.—1st U.S. ed. p. cm.
eISBN : 978-0-982-50302-7
These stories have appeared, in slightly different form, in the following publications: “My Favorite Dentist” and “Airplane” in the Southern Review, “Wizened” and “Who Buried the Baby” in Ploughshares; “Rich People” in Shenandoah; “Midgets Often Marry Each Other” in Double Room; “A Woman with a Gardener” in Fairy Tale Review; “The Way She Loved Cats” in Strictly Casual: Women on Love; “Some Machines” in Notre Dame Review; “Baby in a Body Cast” in Other Voices; “Incognito” in the Cincinnati Review; “The Entire Predicament” in Fiction International; “Mice” in Tin House; “Simpler Components” in Mid-American Review (under the name Lucy Hochman).
“Mice” contains phrases from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.