Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
the floods
flood #1
flood #2
flood #3
flood #4
flood #5
flood #6
we?
we? #1
we? #2
we? #3
we? #4
we? #5
we? #6
the fights
fight #1
fight #2
fight #3
fight #4
fight #5
fight #6
fight #7
fight #8
fight #9
fight #10
the failures
failure #1
failure #2
failure #3
failure #4
failure #5
failure #6
failure #7
the far-flung families
far-flung family #1
far-flung family #2
far-flung family #3
far-flung family #4
far-flung family #5
far-flung family #6
far-flung family #7
far-flung family #8
far-flung family #9
the envies
envy #1
envy #2
envy #3
envy #4
the mistakes
mistake #1
mistake #2
mistake #3
mistake #4
mistake #5
the brides
bride #1
bride #2
bride #3
bride #4
the mothers
mother #1
mother #2
mother #3
mother #4
mother #5
the weddings
wedding #1
wedding #2
wedding #3
wedding #4
wedding #5
wedding #6
the wives
wife #1
wife #2
wife #3
wife #4
wife #5
wife #6
wife #7
wife #8
wife #9
the offspring
offspring #1
offspring #2
offspring #3
offspring #4
offspring #5
offspring #6
the hauntings
haunting #1
haunting #2
haunting #3
haunting #4
haunting #5
haunting #6
the monsters
monster #1
monster #2
monster #3
monster #4
monster #5
monster #6
monster #7
monster #8
the regimes
regime #1
regime #2
regime #3
regime #4
regime #5
regime #6
regime #7
regime #8
regime #9
regime #10
regime #11
the punishments
punishment #1
punishment #2
punishment #3
punishment #4
the droughts
drought #1
drought #2
drought #3
drought #4
drought #5
drought #6
drought #7
the apocalypses
apocalypse #1
apocalypse #2
apocalypse #3
apocalypse #4
apocalypse #5
apocalypse #6
apocalypse #7
apocalypse #8
the helens
helen #1
helen #2
helen #3
helen #4
helen #5
helen #6
helen #7
helen #8
helen #9
helen #10
Acknowledgements
the author
About the Type
Copyright Page
for my parents
and
for Adam
the floods
flood #1
The old family farm is going to drown. They’ve built a dam downriver. The cow-dung meadow will be flooded, the disintegrating tractor and the dandelions. You can’t think of anything to do but throw an enormous party.
Your parents. Your sisters. Your brother. Your grandparents. Your step-grandmother. Your aunts, uncles, cousins; the greats and the seconds, the in-laws and the friends. The guy you once screamed at in the street. The person who shrieked at you in the zoo. The woman who got secretly divorced; the woman who got secretly married. The people who keep dead songbirds in their freezer. The old lady who prepares faces for burial. The couple on the L.L. Bean catalogue. Arctic brides, amateur astronomers, nine pirates, 112 magicians. All the wedding guests, and all the Helen Phillipses. The beekeeper flirting with the blind woman, Persephone flirting with the fatigued photographer, Bob Dylan grudgingly whirling the girl who thought she was a mermaid, Jack Kerouac making big promises to the Neanderthals, Anne Frank slow-dancing with St. Nick, Snow White on a hay bale braiding Mary’s hair, Eve chasing your unborn daughter, the man at table 14 trying to amuse glum Noah, Charlie Chaplin aping Adam, the detectives goading the firemen, Orpheus telling the alien the violinist can’t fiddle to save his life. Not to mention the things emerging from the dark of the woods: beast, unicorn, monster, dragon, animals lined up two by two.
Everyone! That’s all you want. Everyone!
You just want everyone to be there, drinking beer, drinking cheap red wine, eating cakes and cookies, lingering by the bonfire, you want to look up at the soft black sky with its mournful stars and then look down to see everyone standing around the bonfire, starting to dance around the bonfire, jubilant, guitar and banjo, harmonica and tambourine, trying to have the time of our lives as the river begins to rise, water coming like snakes through the tall grasses and the blackberry brambles, lifting plastic cups and paper napkins, the river rising, rising.
flood #2
Tonight an old man came in and asked for honey mead. That’s not a request we get much nowadays, and I kept a close eye on him. His beard was outrageously long. I couldn’t see the end of it from where I stood behind the bar. It had things, twigs and leaves, stuck so far into it that I wondered if they hadn’t been intentionally woven among the strands. His hair too was chaotic. A bird could’ve built a nice home there. Walt Whitman times a hundred, I thought to myself.
This old man was not like our other patrons. He didn’t glance in the direction of the pool tables, and he was oblivious to even our prettiest girl. With each cup of honey mead, he crumpled further into himself. Eventually I noticed that his beard was soggy. I leaned over the bar in a manner that has been known to make old guys tell their stories.
“I didn’t get them all,” he said.
“What all?”
“Madam.” He looked at me for the first time. His eyes were golden, no kidding. “There were small elephants. Beautiful little elephants no larger than housecats.” I nodded. “Madam, there were mice the size of rhinos and rhinos the size of this building. Fire-breathing iguanas with gentle dispositions. Six-eyed crocodiles that spouted like whales. Squirrels as ferocious as lions. Turtles with opposable thumbs. Miniature foxes living in treetop nests. Cranes as big as cranes. Dragonflies that flew faster than your airplanes. Doves that flew backward. Blue giraffes. Vegetarian tigers. Bloodthirsty mountain sheep. Antelope with wings.�
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I stroked his wobbling hand. His beard was getting downright wet. I hung on to his finger. I’ve seen a lot of sad crazy old men. But this guy, he was different. He was not crazy, and he had every reason in this godforsaken universe to be sad.
“The rain kept coming,” he said. “It became difficult to gather them two by two.” I was stricken by the length and filth of his nails. “At times,” he said, “impossible.”
flood #3
On a planet other than our own, Eve and Noah stroll through an apple orchard at sundown. Swallows dip and whirr above them. The honeybees have vanished for the night. Soon the bats will come out. The grass is wet from an afternoon storm. Above, the sky darkens from light blue to blue. It is impossible to avoid stepping on and crushing clover blossoms. Eve reaches for Noah’s hand. They have lived on this farm for many centuries. They are very old, but tonight they don’t feel so old.
Once, long ago, when Eve was a young wife, she ate a gleaming apple off a tree in this very orchard; and nothing happened. And Noah, when he was a young husband, became convinced that a large wooden boat ought to be built. Every night he had these dreams, and every morning he recited to Eve a litany of horrors: enormous oaks struck by lightning, a rainstorm that lasted forty days, the death of every single creature they didn’t personally rescue, a lone mountaintop poking above the water, the barren mud flats where their farm had been, monstrous solitude. Eve, a good and patient wife, helped him, holding nails in her mouth while he hammered.
The half-built ark still sits there behind the cottage. Honeysuckle, wild ivy, and squash vines have grown up and over it. Partway through the construction of the ark, their daughter was born; the nightmares ceased; and Noah turned his attention to coaxing things out of the soil, which was suffering from a lack of water rather than an excess of it. Eve sighed with relief, baked a batch of her bitter almond cake, kept her daughter strapped to her all day because her breasts produced an ungodly amount of milk, and grinned privately when she noticed tendrils creeping over the abandoned boat. Sometimes, on nights such as this, when they lie in bed with their skeletal limbs entwined, Eve mocks Noah for his youthful belief in nightmares, in obedience, in orders from someone other than her.
flood #4
So often that spring, my parents were worried. They woke early and looked at the falling rain. It rained and rained. The days were warm and wet. It was the kind of weather that makes worms and crocuses rise. Mom groaned. Dad kept saying, “The basement better not flood, then we’d have a goddamn problem on our hands.” I almost laughed whenever Dad said goddamn.
“How deep will the water be?” I said.
“That’s not the way it works,” Mom said. “It seeps, that’s how it works.”
“It’s not going to be deep and it’s not going to seep,” Dad said, “because it’s not going to flood at all.”
“Deep and seep!” I said. “That rhymes. You’re a poet and you didn’t even know it.”
But my parents weren’t listening. They were looking at the rain.
A flooded house! It sounded wonderful, like a swimming pool; I pictured myself swimming around, gazing at all the familiar objects preserved and undisturbed in the blue chlorinated clarity.
I wanted the house to flood oh how I wanted it to flood!
I’d use my nascent swimming skills to propel myself into the kitchen. I’d look at the table beneath me: half a grapefruit and a toothed spoon. Mom’s food. In the living room, I’d float past the underwater books, Dad’s old leather books, stroking them with my tiptoes. The bathroom would be funny, the toilet far below, its water joined to the floodwater, and the bathtub submerged. In my bedroom, the dolls would be transformed into mermaids; they’d stare up at me, a green cast to their hair. Perhaps the sun would break through, glowing in the window, and I’d do a water somersault. Next my parents’ bedroom, the large maroon pillows still puffy as ever, and then the guestroom, which was now my dad’s bedroom.
The basement did flood, and that made the septic system flood, and there was old poop all over the carpet, and my parents had to clean it up, and they were not happy, not happy at all.
flood #5
The floodwaters are rising. First, we notice starfish in the subway (initially mistaken for the handprints of homeless men smeared on the tile); we notice sea cucumbers on the tracks (initially mistaken for the discarded produce of tired old Russian ladies). We are charmed by the appearance of these oceanic creatures (indeed, we give them credit for their gumption, to end up here) until we realize what their appearance reveals. . . . And in the park we come upon a lone white duck with wild, filthy feathers; he marches along the shore of the lake, waiting for the water to come to him. This duck—he scares us. He’s a brave crazy fellow, and delighted that the floodwaters are rising; he’d kill us if he could. A handful of tiny birds takes flight from a chokecherry bush. It is impossible to decipher their feelings about the floodwaters. They are so stupid and beautiful, always following one another in perfect formation, moving up and down in the air like black pearls strung on an invisible net.Oh—darling—watch those metaphors, you’re getting ornate, you’re starting to use metaphors from the sea, do you even know what a black pearl is, because I don’t. You wouldn’t be talking about black pearls if you didn’t know, somewhere deep inside, that the floodwaters truly are rising.
We go to the grocery store, where we These fragments I have shored don’t know what to buy we try These fragments I have shored against to think logically but fail so we These fragments I have shored against my grab tofu Oreos cinnamon bananas birthday These fragments I have shored against my ruins candles chicken who keeps saying that anyway someone keeps saying something I keep hearing it—Please—darling—you’ve got to focus, and stay calm. The floodwaters are rising. Didn’t you see the tree that got struck by lightning? Didn’t you see how the top fell to the bottom, and how all the leaves and red berries that were once out of reach are now on the ground?
flood #6
They tell us our apples have poisonous skin. We smile, thinking of Snow White, most beloved fairytale. But they’re dead serious. They send lists out to the newspapers: Apples, Carrots, Grapes, Lettuce, Peaches, Peppers, Potatoes, Tomatoes. Virtually the only produce to which we have access, and all poisonous! We’re warned that our babies will be born blind, or twoheaded. Clutching our abdomens, we attempt to reassure one another. Tea? someone proposes, and we nod, until we discover an article about the dangers of tap water. When boiled, it unleashes substances that cause babies to be born without fingers. We sit in the kitchen, neither drinking tea nor eating apples. Sitting there bored, frightened, we’d take comfort in breathing deeply, but already our lungs are dangerously black. Your chromosomes will crack. You’ll lose the ability to hold a fetus. Breathing shallow, as we’ve been trained, we look out the window and pity the air. Once upon a time, that air was as clean as it looks! It entered joyous lungs. It powered great feats of athleticism and song. At sunset, it was reminiscent of honey. Nowadays the sky gets red and purple. The sunsets of our era are grander than the sunsets of any other. Our ragged air does something miraculous and terrifying to light. We recall the tips for tranquility our mothers offered us before we abandoned them. Eat apples. Drink tea. Breathe deeply. Go to the park. Our dear idiotic mothers! In the park, garbage blows like snow and a plastic bag frozen into the lake looks like a duck trapped under ice. Take care of yourself, our mothers said. We go to the pharmacy to pick up our necessary prescriptions, the prescriptions that will keep us normal and secure, but we mistrust the pharmacists. What if we threw these prescriptions into the overflowing puddles beneath the bus? What if we buried them in the soggy park? We hear of babies born with traces of twenty-seven poisons in their umbilical cords. We sit in the kitchen, eating nothing.
we?
we? #1
Man and Woman, very old, stooped over, waiting at crosswalk.
Meanwhile, we’re discontent with the bodies of our youth. Our legs seem too short, ou
r spines insufficiently elongated, our stomachs flabby. We don’t live in a swoon of desire. We’re no Adam and Eve. We don’t chase each other nakedly, ecstatically, around the bedroom. Yours cannot be compared to a tree, nor mine to a flower. We don’t wake desirous in the night. No matter how much we scrub, our feet stink. Our breath smells inexplicably of cheese. We’ve seen a rock-star with the nose of a king; we’ve seen a girl on the bus with the lips of a queen. But we are not they. Several white hairs have already emerged. Thousands of meals lie ahead of us; someone will have to clean the kitchen each time.
Eventually, it will become a practical matter, millions of yours searching for one of mine. A little beast will develop between us. When it’s born it will be a skinny, flexible thing with untouched skin. Our hearts will explode, expand. Wearily, we’ll embrace, and someday soon, we’ll be old.
Forgive me. A revision:
Meanwhile, we’re grateful for the bodies of our youth. Our legs are strong, our vertebrae stacked like a row of faithful turtles, our stomachs covered with a layer of fat like mammals preparing for hibernation. Beneath our blanket, we cling to each other. We’re Adam and Eve living through the first winter on Earth. When one of us stumbles naked to the toilet, the other is left behind, getting cold, listening to the sound of pee. When the pee-er returns, the bed becomes warm again, and words are exchanged. Spend enough time around a bad smell, and you no longer smell it. Kings and queens are unwelcome here. I count your white hairs like a kid counting starfish.
The light changes. Man and Woman begin to cross the street. They’re so stooped over it looks as though they’re searching for things on the pavement: pennies, lost tickets, apple seeds.
And Yet They Were Happy Page 1