by Lily Pond
What a sweet little voice she has, Moon thought. “Hey, Red,” said Moon, extending his hand to Barnaby. Barnaby totally ignored him, and kept looking out over the green water.
“Don’t mind him,” Tina said. “He’s autistic.”
“Artistic?”
“No—it means they don’t talk and they’re kind of strange and stuff. That’s all. He’s real nice, really, just you shouldn’t touch him or anything ‘cause sometimes he gets upset.”
“OK. I can understand that.” He stopped. “He doesn’t talk, not ever?”
“Well, maybe when he was a little kid or something. But he stopped a long time ago.”
“Wow. …” He said slowly. “That’s kind of far out.”
“Yeah, kinda it is. I wish I could do that too, sometimes.”
“Yeah, me too. Sometimes when I’m on the road I don’t talk to anybody for three or four days at a time. I kind of like it.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.” Tina suddenly looked down.
As if to illustrate, they stopped talking. They turned and looked at the water, which looked bluer than it had earlier, a dark blue with a grey-green tinge in the small breaking waves. Moon started whistling again.
After a minute, Tina said, “Hey, that’s from Guys and Dolls, isn’t it? I just saw that on TV.”
“Yeah, me too. I think that’s what I was thinking of it for.”
“I like that tune.”
“It’s a real pretty one.”
Again, they stood there, not speaking. Moon leaned back against a painted log railing, Tina braided and unbraided the right half of her hair. “How come ‘Moon’?” she finally asked.
“Oh I can’t tell you, ma’am.” He grinned out of half of his mouth. Then, “What about you? I don’t recall you giving me your name.”
“Oh, it’s nothing fancy. It’s Tina. That’s all.”
“I like it. I think it’s pretty. Tina.”
“My mom used to want to be a movie star, she’s all blond and pretty and everything. She bleaches her hair to make it really white, and changes her clothes a lot. She’s got all these pictures of movie stars from the old days hanging up on her wall. All in these pretty costumes and everything. She said she named me after one of them, but I could never find one with that name on it.”
“Maybe Tina Turner?”
“No, way before that. …”
Moon nodded, looked away, looked back. “Well, what do you do, Miss ‘not-Tina-Turner’,” he winked, “when you’re not down here with Red there?”
“His name is Barnaby. And the answer is, not much. Not now anyway. I just graduated high school last June. Since then I just mostly hang around with Barnaby.” She looked up at him quickly. “Just ‘til I figure things out. You know.”
Moon looked her up and down, then at Barnaby, then out to sea as he nodded again, “Yeah. I know.”
They both stopped talking as though it were time for the birds to come in with their chorus, but they didn’t cooperate, and the sound of a slow, increasing breeze filled the silence instead.
“What about you?” Tina finally asked, looking up. “What do you do?”
“Oh, you know, I’m kind of a horse hand. Grew up with them. I can do just about anything a horse needs.” He caught himself sounding earnest, and laughed at himself. “Mostly I just travel around.” He stared intently at Tina for a moment. “It’s a very beautiful country!” He laughed at himself again. “Whenever I need some money, I get gigs like this here, always horse work to be found. You’d be surprised—it’s easy.”
“That’s good,” Tina said, sounding pretty earnest herself. “That’s good.” She thought for a minute. “But where do you . … live?”
“Umm. … Nowhere, really. Well—in my truck, I guess. Stay in a motel every now and then, but the truck, mostly. Cheaper that way. …”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. …”
“Yeah. It is cheaper. …” Moon sniffed and shook his head for emphasis, smiling at her.
After a minute, Tina asked, “Don’t you ever get lonesome, though? Living in your truck like that?”
“Me? Naw. Not really,” he said quickly. “You might think that I would, but I don’t, no, not really. I don’t hardly ever get lonely.”
Tina paused. “Oh, I think I would.” She laughed. “If it weren’t for Barnaby, I don’t know what I’d do.”
“What about your folks?”
She looked around. “My dad died,” she said, then lowered her voice. “We’re not really sure who Barnaby’s dad is.”
Moon was also talking more quietly. “So it’s just you and your mom and your brother?”
“Well yeah, and Errol. He’s our cat. He’s black and white, real tiny. Kinda crazy, just like me, I guess. Every time Barnaby has to go into the hospital or something, Errol’s all over the house, looking around for him, and me too, I’m doing that. Even though I know where he is, I keep going around a corner and thinking he’ll be there. I’m just like the cat.”
Moon stared at her. “That’s why I can’t live in a house. I’d be always prowling around for things that weren’t there. …” After a while, he asked, “Barnaby has to go in the hospital?”
“Yeah, like when I was in school or something. … Mom always put him in the hospital. She said she’s ‘not good at that kind of thing,’ you know. . …”
“Boy. That’s kind of rough.”
“It takes her practically all day just to get ready to go out, sometimes. Sometimes she changes her nail polish three or four times or something . …”
“Sounds like a lot of work!”
Tina nodded. “But it’s probably worth it.” She spoke slowly, with lots of room between her sentences. “She has lots of boyfriends.”
Moon started wishing he had some chewing gum. He looked at his nails. “I bet you have a lot of boyfriends too.” Tina grinned at him in such a way he absolutely couldn’t tell if it meant he was right or he was ridiculous.
The light was beginning to change, and the thick curl of the first fog could be seen starting its crawl over the far-off hills.
“Ever think of leaving this place?”
“Well. … I don’t see how I can. …”
“Oh yeah. I see.” He nodded and then looked at Barnaby, and started with alarm as he saw Barnaby was staring intently back at him. It was the feeling of looking at a hillside you looked at every day, then noticing it had a fire on it. Moon looked away, and when he looked back a second later, Barnaby was staring out at the shifting water again, and Moon wasn’t really sure it had happened at all.
“Well, um . … , pretty lady. … What about a walk? Can you take a walk? With me—we can just walk up and down this drive—we won’t go far. You’ll still be able to see Red?. …” His eyes were pleading but his smile was easy.
“Well. . … I guess that would be okay. …” She looked at Barnaby who showed no sign of responding whatsoever. “I guess I could.”
Side by side, they walked up the long drive to the club house.
It was a beautiful day, what was left of it. Their shadows lengthened and walked alongside them. Tina could feel her hips move back and forth as she walked.
Neither of them could think of a thing to say, but that seemed to be quite all right with the both of them. They walked as slowly as they could. They only had the one drive and they wanted it to be forever.
The afternoon breathed them in and exhaled a slow, sweet stream.
And they walked silently, not touching, as close as they could be.
Then all in one moment a cloud passed before the sun, a wind blew up off the ocean in the direction of the racetrack, and all three people there; the wind blew the flocks of starlings from the trees, and they began to swoop. Barnaby wrapped his arms around himself and began to rock back and forth. Tina looked up and noticed him with alarm.
She turned to run to him, felt a tug at her hand, Moon pulled her to him, spun her in two waltzing turns and then, cradling the back of her head
in his hand, he kissed her.
It was a long kiss.
And from the other end of the track lot, causing both their heads to turn, riding clear on the clear air, soaring high over the pavement of the long drive, Barnaby, in a strong, pure, utterly surprising tenor, prettier even than Marlon Brando’s tenor in Guys and Dolls, began to sing: “I’ll know. … when my love comes along. … I’ll know. … then and there. … I’ll know. … at the sight of her face. … how I care … , how I care … , how I care … , how I care. …”
VIII. And Beyond
“A constellation of two.”
Commas: A Boy Writes of his Clitoris
Gary Scott
With pause,
evening aureoles appear—
a constellation of two, of mirrors.
Yet, I could not see what was most curious,
where vulva was
murmur,
and I was a mutable weave, a cat’s cradle
of new twill, a song of
small green.
But twirls shush the syntax, redefine lace, possess and I.
Fingers spread with structure,
(I can see that now),
houring space,
thick silk, outlining
orchids,
the evolving O, and then O the tightness of heat
threading away like static, like clarity.
Songs
Melissa Holmes
I too overflow; my desires have invented new desires,
my body knows unheard of songs.
—Helene Cixous
Timpani of clitoris, bass note of nipple,
fugue of fingertip and skin.
in remembrance of the body
in remembrance of the blood
this swell of self—
polished wax of apple skin,
hips of perfume bottles,
magnitude of hands
mine, his, hers
all the flawed possessives.
If you listen long enough, syntax
is inconsequential
it’s the frequencies of flesh that gather
the tone and pitch of pleasure
playing with its shape.
This is a game I’ve always played
stretch the string free of knots,
see what my two hands can do …
windows opening into, outward
this mutability of metaphor
the vulva is.
I am obvious textures—velvet,
the tease of feathers,
smooth curve of soup ladles,
granite,
a shift of particles
purple behind closed eyes.
Think of where
to touch—
translucence of wrist, stone of ankle, silk of cervix
slipperiness with words and without—
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
HEATHER M. BELLSON After spending her childhood in the Midwest and the South, Heather Bellson received a B.A. in English Literature from the Colorado College in 1996. She now lives in Berkeley, California.
MOLLY BLACK One of the writing Black sisters, Molly enjoys birdwatching and raising tropical fish.
AMY BLOOM Amy Bloom is the author of short story collection Come to Me (nominated for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Prize in First Fiction), and of the novel Love Invents Us. Her nonfiction and fiction have been published in The New Yorker and other magazines, and her stories are included in Best American Short Stories and in other collections.
CARMELA DELIA LANZA Though originally from New York, Carmela Delia Lanza now lives and works on the Navajo Reservation in Crownpoint, New Mexico. Having received an M.A. in writing at the University of New Mexico, her work has appeared variously, including Southwestern Women: New Voices and her own chapbook, Long Island Girl (malafemmina press, 1993).
JAMES DICKEY Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, James Dickey’s first book, in 1960, was Into the Stone and Other Poems. He won the National Book Award for Buckdancer’s Choice in 1966, his second poetry collection. In 1970 he wrote the novel Deliverance, which would become a major motion picture in 1972. Mr. Dickey died on January 20, 1997, from lung disease complications.
MARIELA DREYFUS (tr. Alfred Mac Adam) Born in Lima, Peru in 1960, Mariela Dreyfus is the author of poetry collections Phantom Pleasure (1993), Memories of Electra (1984), and Onix. She is preparing the second edition of Poet’s Life: Some Letters Written by Cesar Moro in Mexico City Between 1943 and 1948 (Caracas, 1998), and teaches Spanish-American poetry at Auburn University.
MARY GORDON The author of novels The Company of Women, The Best of Life, and The Other Side and the memoir The Shadow Man, Mary Gordon has won the Lila Acheson Wallace Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 1996 O. Henry Prize for best short story. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City.
SAMUEL GREEN Samuel Green co-runs Brooding Heron Press from tiny, remote Waldron Island, off the northwest coast of Washington State, with his life companion Sally. They live and work in a log house they built themselves. His eight collections of poems include Vertebrate (Eastern Washington University Press) and Working in the Dark (Grey Spider Press.)
CATHERINE HAMMOND With poetry anthologized in Fever Dreams: Contemporary Arizona Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 1997), Catherine Hammond teaches through the Artist Roster for the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and lives in Chandler, Arizona with her husband. Her work has appeared or been nominated for awards in The Chicago Review, Laurel and elsewhere.
INGRID HILL Born in a snowstorm in Manhattan, raised in New Orleans, now in Iowa City, Ingrid Hill has published in The Southern Review, North American Review, STORY, Chicago Review, Indiana Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She has taught fiction writing in Michigan, Iowa, and Washington State, and is the mother of twelve children.
JANE HIRSHFIELD Jane Hirshfield’s books include poetry, The Lives of the Heart (HarperCollins, 1997), Of Gravity & Angels and The October Palace; translations, Women in Praise of the Sacred and The Ink Dark Moon; and essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. Her work has appeared widely and she has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and other awards.
MELISSA HOLMES Having received her M.A. in English from Western Washington University, Melissa Holmes has had work appear in The Spoon River Poetry Review, and in Northwest Review. She lives in Seattle.
YURI IKENO Ikeno Yuri, as her name is written in Japan, has published poetry in YELLOW SILK JOURNAL. She says that she misses Kyoto.
IVAN KLíMA (tr. Gerald Turner) Born in 1931 in Prague, where he still resides, Ivan Klíma edited the journal of the Czech Writers’ Union during the Prague Spring. His novels, plays, and stories, many of which have been first published outside his own country, where he was banned until recently, include The Ultimate Intimacy (Grove Press, 1997), Love and Garbage, and My Golden Trades.
DANY LAFERRIéRE (tr. Carrol F. Coates) Born in Petit-Goàve, Haïti in 1953, Dany Laferrière’s novels include The Charm of Unending Afternoons (Lanctot Editeur, 1997), Dining with the Dictator, An Aroma of Coffee, How to Make Love to a Negro, and short stories, The Flesh of the Master. His ongoing nine-volume masterwork, American Autobiography, takes place in Haïti, Canada, and the United States.
VICTORIA LANCELOTTA Currently a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, native Baltimorian Victoria Lancelotta’s stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, The Threepenny Review, Fiction 2000, and elsewhere. An award-winning author, she has also been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Djerassi Foundation, and the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference.
DORIANNE LAUX Dorianne Laux is the author of BOA collections Awake (1990) and What We Carry (1994). Co-author of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1997), her awards include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the Director of the University of Oregon’s Program in Creativ
e Writing and is widely published.
MICHELE LEAVITT Born in Jacksonville, Florida, Michelle Leavitt has worked as a chambermaid, an office clerk, a factory worker, a field hand, and a trial attorney. Now teaching writing and tending bar, she lives in Salisbury, Massachusetts, between the ocean and the marsh. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Humanist, Sojourner, Ashville Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
JOSEPH LEON After spending his formative years in the slums and shtetls of Brooklyn, and dropping out of CCNY, Joseph Leon spent fifty years in theater, television, radio, and films. He began the autobiography excerpted here at the age of seventy while living in Aix-En-Provènce in France with his partner of thirty years, Robin, and the two now live in Saugerties, New York.
LYNN E. LEVIN Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1953, Lynn Ellen Levin was graduated from Northwestern University and is currently in the M.F.A. in Writing Program at Vermont College. Author of the poetry collection A Few Questions About Paradise (Loonfeather Press, 1999), her work has appeared in Poetry New York, The Lyric, Potato Eyes, Reconstructionist, and elsewhere.
LI BAO LI Li Bao Li writes in English and lives in California.
CAROLE MASO Carole Maso is the author of five novels: Ghost Dance, The Art Lover, Ava, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, and Defiance (Dutton, 1998), and Aureole (Ecco Press, 1996), a series of prose works. She is the recipient of many awards, including a Lannan Fellowship in Fiction.
GRACE MATTERN Grace Mattern lives in New Hampshire. Her poem was first published in the periodical Victory Park.
ED KLEINSCHMIDT MAYES Edward Mayes’s books include First Language, To Remain, Bodysong: love poems, Speed of Life, and Works & Days, and publications, APR, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Recipient of a 1997 NEA Poetry Fellowship, he is Director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Clara University and lives in San Francisco and Cortona, Italy, with writer Frances Mayes.