r.kv.r.y. quarterly literary journal winter 2008 literary non-fiction
out of the blue by mary ann cain
Just before his email came, I had been back in southern Indiana for a
university conference. For some reason, I had felt drawn to retrace my
steps around the town, around campus, daydreaming, sweating in the
mid-May heat, letting random memories flow in and out. Despite the
unlikelihood, I searched for familiar names on the mailboxes of a white
four square where I’d lived with a friend my senior year. I cut north
through the student ghettos and around the pampered Victorians with
their gingerbread and high-pitched roofs, following the shade of old
sycamores and poplars. I searched for the Oriental grocery where,
one summer when I was laid off for six weeks, I bought almond
cookies for ten cents apiece to stretch my meager unemployment, but
found no signs of the store. Then I headed uphill towards campus, on
the way sizing up the sports-bar inhabitants of what had once been a
vegetarian restaurant run by a local ashram. The varnished picnic
tables and mirrored Rajasthani embroidery that had decorated the
walls was replaced by big-screen TVs and table tents touting draft
beers.
I returned to the dorm where I’d spent my first two years, a huge
limestone building in the shape of an H. Inside and upstairs, WPA-era
murals depicted different decades of student life on the cafeteria
walls. Sturdy, brass-edged tables still filled the huge room. I started
to count the chairs but gave up after a few hundred. The dish room
where I’d worked my first year and the serving line my second year,
my hair held back by old lady-style hairnets, had been replaced by a
food court that looked straight out of a mall. Downstairs, the snack
bar had been upgraded and the small grocery expanded, along with
internet terminals scattered around the lobby. The brass wall of
student mailboxes, however, had not changed. The granite floor,
brass stair rails, and imposing limestone walls transmitted a comforting
sense of permanence, yet at the same time sparked strange fears of
its weight.
Inside that building that had housed generations of students, my
weightless wandering took on a heaviness and deliberation. What
had started as simple nostalgia and a desire to wander became a
more conscious circumambulation of a place that was sacred for all it
had given. Yet that same place also bound me to old desires that had
disappeared from view but, like the cicadas that trilled without pause
as I continued to walk, were still very much present even after I no
longer listened. I searched for words similarly sacred, similarly
powerful, words of gratitude but also words of release.
As I walked, I breathed in gratitude for all I had experienced. I
breathed out my wish for freedom from desires unmet, from what I’d
lost, from whom I’d known that continued to haunt my present-day
life. I stood in the courtyard outside, where students in cutoffs and
bandanas had once thrown Frisbees and blasted Kansas from dorm
windows, and breathed in my dorm window where I’d perched big
speakers until they had crashed to the floor in the middle of a Steely
Dan song, then breathed out the memory of that sickening thud. I
breathed in the grassy courtyard, now empty but for birds and cicadas,
and breathed out the window of a guy I’d once loved, how I’d watched
for his light to come on and wondered if he had done the same for
mine.
I followed a shallow stream that cut through the heart of campus,
paused on the plain wooden bridges, and breathed in the honeysuckle
around the President’s house. I breathed in the tall, modern building
where I’d taken all my writing classes and attended readings, and
breathed out the memory of preachers who’d stood outside each
spring and warned of hellfire soon to come. Back in town, I breathed
in the deliciously bitter espresso of a coffeehouse that was a second
home when I lived down the street, and visited the goldfish that still
lived in the bathtub, then breathed out the red brick apartment of
another guy I thought I could love but never got a chance to. I
breathed in the second floor of a house sheltered by shady poplars
where a friend and former writing teacher had invited a few of her
students over to form a writing group, and breathed out the memory
of her suicide years later in the desert West. Heading back to the
courthouse square to the import shop where I once splurged and
bought a flowered kimono, I breathed in the memory of a pizza joint
with all-you-can-eat spaghetti that had given way to a much more
expensive continental café. I breathed out as I passed the café on the
way to an Afghani restaurant where I was to meet my friend from the
white four square to talk about, among other things, her son who had
signed up for war time Reserves.
When I came home, and saw his email, Out of the Blue, I realized
immediately that his apartment was, inexplicably, the one place I had
neither breathed in nor breathed out and the one I most needed to let
go of for good.
*
The last time we make love, it is hot, height-of-summer hot. But the
reservoir has bathed and rocked us, and the breeze from the Pinto’s open
windows has ruffled us dry. Inside, I feel cool and clean as a hit man.
The awkwardness and expectations, the hope and the helplessness of
nearly three years ago have given way to a more calculated set of desires.
He will say he’ll write, and I’ll pretend to want him to. I will send him off
to Paris, and out of my life, proving to myself that I, too, can act as well as
he, and enjoy playing the part.
*
He emails that he is starting a theater troupe that will perform plays as
living rituals. In leaving him out of my own ritual, I realize I’ve left
something undone. Somewhere in the dreams that housed our desires,
we still meet, we still act as if there is no end.
Breathing in, I say silently, release me from those dreams. I breathe out
the ruins of my desire.
*
I have dreamed this house before, the kind my grandfather grew up in on
the south side of Chicago, solid, gloomy, and full of dark-stained wood. I’
ve never lived in such a house, but I still know it as a familiar place: safe,
substantial, meant to last. The house I was raised in was new, bright,
and modern. I long for the mystery of my grandfather’s house. It’s that
house and its surrounding property I fall in love with before I ever fall in
love with him: the big trees, the vines on the walls, their roots large and
deep. I have been here in my dreams and beyond. I want to fall asleep
on its wide porch in a warm breeze scented by snowball and lilac bushes,
bridal veil and honeysuckle, trumpet vines and roses. Sleep and sleep,
and never wake again.
*
We email a few times more. I don’t say much about his new theater; I
expect he is working up to ask for a donation. Instead I ask about a
mutual friend and my former writing teacher, the graduate student
who had started a writing group with her students and who, a few
years later, had killed herself in the desert West. Did he know what
had happened? I’d tried to find out and gave up, but never stopped
hurting for the loss of her. He emailed me the novel he wrote about
her, which included excerpts from her journals that he had taken after
she’d died. I read the whole thing in two days, stayed up through a
fierce storm until four a.m. just to finish, stunned to find out she may
have been sexually abused as a child. Only in the novel, the abuse
occurs in a “past life.” When I ask him why he did not make the abuse
real, he writes back that he didn’t want to make her a victim. Of
course, this doesn’t stop her character from killing herself.
I decide not to offer comments on the novel. He has just revised the
manuscript and may have a publisher, so I tell myself there is no
point. I thank him for showing me the manuscript and the insight it
gave me into her.
But then he asks what I think. So I decide to tell him the truth, that
his use of my friend’s journals to tell her story is more about him and
his own need for redemption than about any redemption of her. He
doesn’t respond for two months, when another email arrives, this time
very brief, asking for my snail mail address. No comments about my
comments on his novel.
Just as I expect, a brochure arrives, asking me for support for his new
theater. It amazes me that he would ask, yet it doesn’t surprise me,
either. I have always supported his shows, played parts that were
written long before I was born. I have lived his dreams as if they
were mine. Why would he think anything has changed?
At the bottom of the brochure is a brief note, thanking me for my
comments on his novel. I continue my ritual, breathing out as I throw
away his brochures when they arrive in the mail and delete his emails
of solicitation without reading them. I don’t have to; I know his lines
well. I breathe in, still twirling that leaf, smiling that smile. I breathe
out the red-lipped girl who wanted so much to be noticed, admired,
talented, a star. Breathing in, I am grateful for having survived.
out of the blue by mary ann cain
Just before his email came, I had been back in southern Indiana for a
university conference. For some reason, I had felt drawn to retrace my
steps around the town, around campus, daydreaming, sweating in the
mid-May heat, letting random memories flow in and out. Despite the
unlikelihood, I searched for familiar names on the mailboxes of a white
four square where I’d lived with a friend my senior year. I cut north
through the student ghettos and around the pampered Victorians with
their gingerbread and high-pitched roofs, following the shade of old
sycamores and poplars. I searched for the Oriental grocery where,
one summer when I was laid off for six weeks, I bought almond
cookies for ten cents apiece to stretch my meager unemployment, but
found no signs of the store. Then I headed uphill towards campus, on
the way sizing up the sports-bar inhabitants of what had once been a
vegetarian restaurant run by a local ashram. The varnished picnic
tables and mirrored Rajasthani embroidery that had decorated the
walls was replaced by big-screen TVs and table tents touting draft
beers.
I returned to the dorm where I’d spent my first two years, a huge
limestone building in the shape of an H. Inside and upstairs, WPA-era
murals depicted different decades of student life on the cafeteria
walls. Sturdy, brass-edged tables still filled the huge room. I started
to count the chairs but gave up after a few hundred. The dish room
where I’d worked my first year and the serving line my second year,
my hair held back by old lady-style hairnets, had been replaced by a
food court that looked straight out of a mall. Downstairs, the snack
bar had been upgraded and the small grocery expanded, along with
internet terminals scattered around the lobby. The brass wall of
student mailboxes, however, had not changed. The granite floor,
brass stair rails, and imposing limestone walls transmitted a comforting
sense of permanence, yet at the same time sparked strange fears of
its weight.
Inside that building that had housed generations of students, my
weightless wandering took on a heaviness and deliberation. What
had started as simple nostalgia and a desire to wander became a
more conscious circumambulation of a place that was sacred for all it
had given. Yet that same place also bound me to old desires that had
disappeared from view but, like the cicadas that trilled without pause
as I continued to walk, were still very much present even after I no
longer listened. I searched for words similarly sacred, similarly
powerful, words of gratitude but also words of release.
As I walked, I breathed in gratitude for all I had experienced. I
breathed out my wish for freedom from desires unmet, from what I’d
lost, from whom I’d known that continued to haunt my present-day
life. I stood in the courtyard outside, where students in cutoffs and
bandanas had once thrown Frisbees and blasted Kansas from dorm
windows, and breathed in my dorm window where I’d perched big
speakers until they had crashed to the floor in the middle of a Steely
Dan song, then breathed out the memory of that sickening thud. I
breathed in the grassy courtyard, now empty but for birds and cicadas,
and breathed out the window of a guy I’d once loved, how I’d watched
for his light to come on and wondered if he had done the same for
mine.
I followed a shallow stream that cut through the heart of campus,
paused on the plain wooden bridges, and breathed in the honeysuckle
around the President’s house. I breathed in the tall, modern building
where I’d taken all my writing classes and attended readings, and
breathed out the memory of preachers who’d stood outside each
spring and warned of hellfire soon to come. Back in town, I breathed
in the deliciously bitter espresso of a coffeehouse that was a second
home when I lived down the street, and visited the goldfish that still
lived in the bathtub, then breathed out the red brick apartment of
another guy I thought I could love but never got a chance to. I
breathed in the second floor of a house sheltered by shady poplars
where a friend and former writing teacher had invited a few of her
students over to form a writing group, and breathed out the memory
of her suicide years later in the desert West. Heading back to the
courthouse square to the import shop where I once splurged and
bought a flowered kimono, I breathed in the memory of a pizza joint
with all-you-can-eat spaghetti that had given way to a much more
expensive continental café. I breathed out as I passed the café on the
way to an Afghani restaurant where I was to meet my friend from the
white four square to talk about, among other things, her son who had
signed up for war time Reserves.
When I came home, and saw his email, Out of the Blue, I realized
immediately that his apartment was, inexplicably, the one place I had
neither breathed in nor breathed out and the one I most needed to let
go of for good.
*
The last time we make love, it is hot, height-of-summer hot. But the
reservoir has bathed and rocked us, and the breeze from the Pinto’s open
windows has ruffled us dry. Inside, I feel cool and clean as a hit man.
The awkwardness and expectations, the hope and the helplessness of
nearly three years ago have given way to a more calculated set of desires.
He will say he’ll write, and I’ll pretend to want him to. I will send him off
to Paris, and out of my life, proving to myself that I, too, can act as well as
he, and enjoy playing the part.
*
He emails that he is starting a theater troupe that will perform plays as
living rituals. In leaving him out of my own ritual, I realize I’ve left
something undone. Somewhere in the dreams that housed our desires,
we still meet, we still act as if there is no end.
Breathing in, I say silently, release me from those dreams. I breathe out
the ruins of my desire.
*
I have dreamed this house before, the kind my grandfather grew up in on
the south side of Chicago, solid, gloomy, and full of dark-stained wood. I’
ve never lived in such a house, but I still know it as a familiar place: safe,
substantial, meant to last. The house I was raised in was new, bright,
and modern. I long for the mystery of my grandfather’s house. It’s that
house and its surrounding property I fall in love with before I ever fall in
love with him: the big trees, the vines on the walls, their roots large and
deep. I have been here in my dreams and beyond. I want to fall asleep
on its wide porch in a warm breeze scented by snowball and lilac bushes,
bridal veil and honeysuckle, trumpet vines and roses. Sleep and sleep,
and never wake again.
*
We email a few times more. I don’t say much about his new theater; I
expect he is working up to ask for a donation. Instead I ask about a
mutual friend and my former writing teacher, the graduate student
who had started a writing group with her students and who, a few
years later, had killed herself in the desert West. Did he know what
had happened? I’d tried to find out and gave up, but never stopped
hurting for the loss of her. He emailed me the novel he wrote about
her, which included excerpts from her journals that he had taken after
she’d died. I read the whole thing in two days, stayed up through a
fierce storm until four a.m. just to finish, stunned to find out she may
have been sexually abused as a child. Only in the novel, the abuse
occurs in a “past life.” When I ask him why he did not make the abuse
real, he writes back that he didn’t want to make her a victim. Of
course, this doesn’t stop her character from killing herself.
I decide not to offer comments on the novel. He has just revised the
manuscript and may have a publisher, so I tell myself there is no
point. I thank him for showing me the manuscript and the insight it
gave me into her.
But then he asks what I think. So I decide to tell him the truth, that
his use of my friend’s journals to tell her story is more about him and
his own need for redemption than about any redemption of her. He
doesn’t respond for two months, when another email arrives, this time
very brief, asking for my snail mail address. No comments about my
comments on his novel.
Just as I expect, a brochure arrives, asking me for support for his new
theater. It amazes me that he would ask, yet it doesn’t surprise me,
either. I have always supported his shows, played parts that were
written long before I was born. I have lived his dreams as if they
were mine. Why would he think anything has changed?
At the bottom of the brochure is a brief note, thanking me for my
comments on his novel. I continue my ritual, breathing out as I throw
away his brochures when they arrive in the mail and delete his emails
of solicitation without reading them. I don’t have to; I know his lines
well. I breathe in, still twirling that leaf, smiling that smile. I breathe
out the red-lipped girl who wanted so much to be noticed, admired,
talented, a star. Breathing in, I am grateful for having survived.