TOPPS 1959

by Garrett Rowlan

On a September night in Los Angeles, 1959, Pittsburgh Pirate pitcher Roy Face lost, and my father fell into the pool. Bill Jones pushed him from behind. We were guests at Bill’s house. The two men were drunk, fifties-style, alcoholic expansion in a country tipsy with postwar hubris. Vin Scully announced Dodger baseball on a plastic radio, his voice sailing over the city lights below.  

I’ll always remember my father’s expression as he climbed out of the water, his anger restrained under tight lips. I equate that expression with the Topps’ baseball card of 1959 depicting Pittsburgh reliever Roy Face. He’s shown poising with his arms lifted and his eyes cut toward some imaginary runner leading off first base. I have that card. A glance at it brings me back to the night of September eleventh, a date later to live in infamy. Roy Face had won eighteen straight games that 1959 season. The Pirates had come to Los Angeles. A heat wave, according to the microfilm of that September edition of the Times, had hit the city. I don’t remember the heat in particular, but they had a pool, the Jones’s, and I had gone with my parents to their house. Bill was a round-faced man with the sort of ruddy glow you get with sun and alcohol, and who bore a resemblance to the bandleader Phil Harris. His wife Rose was a husky-voiced brunette cut in the same mold as the actress Ruth Roman. They lived on a hillside on the northeast part of Los Angeles. The splash, the lights below, and Vin Scully’s voice, the card brings it all back.

I was ten years old in 1959. I was on the cusp of things. We all were. It was about to be a new decade, with a new President, and our family was about to move, choosing a better house uptown. These facts alone make the Roy Face’s 1959 card and other Topps’ for that year memorable. They set a marker. They look backward and forward. The oval-shaped pictures in the front of the card suggest a window into the past. Turn the card over and you’ll see the players’ stats. For me those numbers had the allure of the ancient and obscure, and since they include minor league totals, a hint of the American hinterland, of the smell of hay and the taste of corn and small motels like those we’d see or sleep in every summer driving north from Los Angeles to my father’s family in Kalispell, Montana.  The players, depicted on the front side, steel-eyed and strong-jawed in the sun, strike poses that are almost mythic: pitchers winding up and following through, batters poising to swing, the bat raised and cocked. Often I’ll see behind them some looming stadium from the era when Eisenhower was President, colonnades and stanchions that suggest an imperial reign in its decline, and blues skies beyond without a hint of ozone depletion.

The sort of blue that is behind Bud Daley who pitched for the Kansas City Athletics. His 1959 picture shows him captured in his follow-through pose. The photo was taken on the grounds of what I assume to be the old Monarch Stadium in Kansas City, a bit of which is visible in the background while, beside his left hip, juts the spire of some distant building or silo. The suggestion is of a Kansas stretched beyond the grass of the stadium, full of farms and prairie, home of Dorothy come back from Oz and not the slain Clutter family, who would years later be the subject of a groundbreaking book by Truman Capote. The sky is a bright blue.

I recall the splash of chlorinated blue as my father fell into the water. He had been trying to teach my mother how to dive, instructions he gave without demonstrating them himself. (He was hydrophobic. Holiday weekends we would drive up the California coast. On some beach around Santa Barbara he would, if coaxed into the water, stand in the low surf with his hands clasped across his chest and shiver.) Bill Jones, coming up from behind, must have seen the hypocrisy in the moment, and the opportunity. Looking back on that moment, I can’t help but see in it a whiff of class warfare, or at least distinction. It set a boundary. We were still lower middle-class. We had a modest house at the end of a cul-de-sac and lived next to the railroad tracks. In retrospect the Jones’s hillside house stands with a monochrome elegance, outside of the aqua-colored swimming pool, the sort of static luxury captured in Julius Schulman’s architectural photographs, the suggestion of an austere, otherworldly glory.

Otherworldly, like the hull of an abandoned spaceship, is how the batting cage behind Bobby Thomson looks in his 1959 baseball card. The athlete’s face is back-dropped by the oddly-shaped structure. On the card’s reverse side is a cartoon on the upper right hand corner that shows a smiling figure. It is Thomson being carried on the shoulders of his teammates while the caption reads, “Bobby’s homer won the 1951 pennant for the Giants.” I had dreamed of some kind of similar glory, some defining career moment culminating in fame, a hillside house, and a swimming pool. I had already projected myself into the future as a baseball star and wrote out complete statistics for a major league career beginning in 1970 or so, by which time, in reality, I was working for minimum wage. I had written that I would hit fifty-one homers in 1973 and recall thinking, even at age ten or so, that that number was a bit excessive. Remember, this number was projected a couple of years before Roger Maris broke the Babe’s record, and well before Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire began their chemically-enhanced pursuits of Maris’s record and its eventual eclipse. I’d like to state now for the record that my fifty-one home runs in 1973 were hit without the use of steroids. They were powered strictly by fantasy.

I still make up statistics about myself, though sometimes I view my career in baseball in retrospection and modesty. My life experiences have imposed upon me a regimen of lowered reverse accomplishments. I still have those fantasies I mentioned earlier, but often now I’m not a star player anymore swatting fifty home runs a year, but a utility player or a pitcher who had parlayed a tricky pitch or modest hitting skills into a brief career. The numbers I give myself are mundane, certainly nothing on the scale of Billy Pierce’s 1.97 ERA in 1955, another gleaming statistic from the 1959 Topps’ set. Usually I apportion myself a career of some five or six years, ending around 1980, with a batting average in the high two hundreds and, if I’m a pitcher, victories ranging from thirty to sixty in that span of time. What I’m saying is that I stay in pro baseball long enough to get my pension, something I think about in real life. If I’m feeling expansive and consider the fact that I was in the same profession for almost twenty-five years, and have now retired, I extend my modest achievements, lengthening my career to a dozen years and my wins to around one-hundred. I’ll even take the record of Pedro Ramos, the Cuban-born pitcher who pitched for fifteen years, from 1955 to 1970, won one-hundred and seventeen games and lost one hundred and sixty.

My father, you might say, had a lifetime record also on the losing side. He’d suffered various disappointments, and often he vented resentment at the stupid and powerful having so much influence. Richard Nixon was always a prominent object of his scorn. As was, I believe, Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who brought his team out West in 1958, displacing the residents of Chavez Ravine in order to construct Dodger Stadium.

It was a sort of protest, then, his taking us to see the Los Angeles Angels for their second-ever home game in 1961, the Haloes against the Minnesota Twins on Friday night, April 28, 1961. The newly-formed Angels played in front of a crowd of 9,745. The pitcher that night for the Twins, an expansion team, was Pedro Ramos. The Angels’ lineout consisted of other teams’ cast-offs. Among those was Albie Pearson, the diminutive center fielder, a pick-up from the Washington Senators. I doubt if my father wanted to see the five-foot-five Albie Pearson play as much as I did. Still, it would have suited him to support the underdog. He liked the idea of the deprived, the oddball, and those who did the most with what they had. (He would have liked David Eckstein, the Angels’ former shortstop.) He was opposed to the waste and prejudices and inefficiencies that he thought characterized American life. While my parents lived in San Francisco before I was born, he was an advocate of Technocracy, a kind of quasi-socialistic form of organization based on managerial expertise. Later on, after we had moved to Los Angeles when I was small, I recall him as being an enthusiast of the writings of Thorstein Veblen, the dour coiner of the term “conspicuous consumption.” Even our cars ran toward the offbeat. First it was the Italian Fiat and then the Borgward, a Swedish car, which was ruined after we had an accident, the result of his aggressive driving.

The game went into extra innings before the Angels won, 6-5, in the twelfth, Albie Pearson coming home from third on a hit batter. I don’t remember that. We probably left early. The results I got on microfilm. I don’t remember much about that night except my mental snapshot of Pedro Ramos releasing a pitch under the bright electric lights, and my feeling of the immensity of the surrounding stadium whose seats seemed magnified in number, so that the domino-like acres of (mostly unfilled) chairs suggest infinity.

Those 1959 cards have an-almost infinite fascination for me. They are consonant with the microfiche copies of old newspapers and photographs and other artifacts that I use to dislodge relics of recollection from the place where my father, other family members, and a few friends have gone. When I turn over a baseball card, it’s another time. It’s Bud Daley or Ralph Terry, another hurler for the Kansas City Athletics, throwing a pitch against a pristine blue sky, and it’s also like Roy Face, looking over his shoulder as if to see what’s coming next.

Garrett Rowlan is a retired substitute teacher with the Los Angeles Unified School District. He has published about 40 stories, essays, and poems, most recently in Map Literary and the Cafe Irreal.

Just One Summer

by Adrienne Lindholm

 

I was 26 when I came to Alaska. For just one summer I wanted to be part of something noble that would help preserve one of the wildest places on earth. Though I carried only a backpack and a duffle bag, my confidence was buoyed by a set of life skills I’d acquired in suburban Philadelphia, the academic skills I’d honed at an upscale university in Virginia, and my shiny new graduate degree in Environmental Studies. A couple years dabbling in environmental non-profit organizations fueled the fire in me to crusade for a better world.

As the plane to Fairbanks, Alaska, took off, I rifled through my spiral bound notebook to review the page where I’d scribbled my approach to living:

• Follow your dreams.
• Don’t let society tell you what to do.
• Be skeptical of technology. It creates more stress than it relieves. 
• Television: evil, obviously. 
• Dresses and high heels are dumb (you can’t hike in them).
• Big houses in suburbia:  bad.
• Living in a cabin:  good.

I wasn’t shy about espousing these tenets to my friends and family. They either agreed with me or tolerated me, and every one of them, bless their kind souls, supported my quest to find my own true north. They bid me farewell as I headed to Alaska, where I didn’t know a single person.

The run-down hostel where I spent my first night fit perfectly into the way I thought my world should be ordered. If only my friends could see me now, I thought. This was a real cabin in Alaska, with log construction, creaky wooden floorboards, and old metal traps and mining equipment tacked to the walls. I was assigned to a room and found my way to an empty bunk. The room was cluttered with backpacks, shower sandals, and drying laundry. They must be true travelers, I thought.

I told the other travelers I was on my way to Denali, which got a nod of approval, but I had nothing else to contribute, so I sat quietly on my bed and listened to tales of where they’d been and where they were headed. They spoke of towns and mountains and rivers I’d never heard of.

As I climbed into bed, I wrapped myself in my sleeping bag to stay warm. I waited for darkness to set in but it never did, so I put a shirt over my eyes to block the midnight sun.  The shirt helped, but my mind raced with thoughts about what the summer would be like.

The next day I took the shuttle down the Parks Highway to Denali National Park, where I’d gotten a non-paying job as a backcountry ranger through the Student Conservation Association. After spending six months thru-hiking the 2,159-mile Appalachian Trail and spending the majority of my post-college free time exploring the Rocky Mountains, I thought I had a fair amount of backcountry experience. So did the rest of the 20-somethings who had come from around the country to spend a summer in Alaska’s premier national park, where Denali, the tallest mountain in North America, rises ghostly white to over 20,000 feet and enchants the sea of green tundra that surrounds it.

Most visitors to Denali National Park ride the bus into the park in hopes of glimpsing the great mountain and seeing grizzly bears, wolves, caribou, Dall’s sheep, and moose. There is only one road in six million acres and virtually nothing else to interrupt the vast expanse of wilderness: no settlements, developments, or infrastructure that make it easy for people to get there and be there. One of the things I hadn’t considered when I applied for the backcountry ranger position was the fact that I’d never traveled through country with no trails, no bridges, no signs, no campgrounds. I’d also never traveled through country with grizzly bears and wolves.

When my supervisor paired us up and assigned us our first backcountry patrol, I found myself matched with the only member of the backcountry ranger staff who actually lived permanently in the area. The other rangers sat with their partners and excitedly pulled out maps, speculating what they might encounter. They decided what gear they would share and how many days of food to plan for. Hoping to make eye contact, I glanced across the room at Jeff, but he seemed to roll his eyes as he looked over the group of rangers that were about half his age. As I walked toward him, he turned his back to put on his jacket. I paused beside the large wall-map of the park and searched for the drainage we’d been assigned to. When Jeff scooped up his belongings and headed for the door, I sheepishly intercepted him. “So, you know where we’re going?”

“Been going there for decades,” he said with a look that added “how about you?”

“Anything in particular I should bring?” I asked.

“Standard stuff.” he said. “We’ll take the camper bus tomorrow 10am, see you there.”

Part of me could understand his resentment at being an equal member on a team of overly excited kids from the Lower 48, but still, he had no right to treat me like that. How could my supervisor have paired me with him?  I returned to my cabin wondering if I’d made the right decision to come here. I threw my bag across the bed and sat down with a sick feeling in my stomach.

Our patrol began on a trail that went for only ¼ mile before fading into alders and willows along the river bar. Feeling like I needed to prove my strength, I hiked faster than he could on the trail section, but as soon as we hit the brush, I came to a near halt. I’d never hiked off trail before. Jeff sensed this and blazed ahead, thrashing through the alders and willows, wisely choosing a route through the thinnest branches and keeping us on course. I could barely keep up and had no idea how he knew where to go. I tried to look up out of the brush to get my bearings, but when I looked up, I stumbled over branches and rocks. I powered through as fast as I could and tried not to lose sight of Jeff’s back.

When we got to a point where we had to cross the river, Jeff simply trudged through it. Accustomed to dry Rocky Mountain hiking with few creek crossings, my instinct told me to sit down and take off my boots before wading across in order to keep my feet dry. But after seeing Jeff cross, I wasn’t sure if this was a test to see if I was dumb enough to get my feet wet, or if it was a test to see how well I could ford a river. Jeff looked at me and then looked impatiently at his feet and sighed. Forget wet feet, I thought, I can’t let him leave me. I stepped into the coldest water I’d ever felt, restrained a grimace as the icy water seeped through my hiking boots and socks, and felt my way across. I pretended it didn’t hurt that much as I stepped out of the river with feet that were burning from cold.

Fortunately, I had enough sense after the first day to realize that I didn’t know much about this country and that Jeff did. As much as I didn’t want to admit it (I’d worked hard to cultivate my confidence and independence), I could probably learn something from him. So I began asking questions. And he began, slowly, in his characteristically gruff style, to let me in. By the last day of our patrol we sat side by side on a grassy hillside above a wide river bar.

“You need to pay attention,” he said.

He noticed my confusion. I knew I had to look out for wildlife and make sure no animal surprised me and got any of my food.  Our week-long training had established this as the Golden Rule of Denali. It was the only way wild animals will stay wild and safe. I knew this already. I told him I was scanning the river bar for bears.

“You might be looking at the river,” he said, “but you gotta look behind you, too, so you can see the wolf coming down the hill. You gotta be alert and look in all directions. All the time.”

He wouldn’t let me lounge back and take a nap in the sun. “This isn’t the Rockies,” he sniggered. “There are animals all over the place that want your lunch. And I have to shoot ‘em when some goddamn hiker lets ‘em get food,” he said shaking his head.

“And besides,” Jeff told me, “these here are critters people come from all over the world to see. Why you’d want to waste a nap over that…”

“Is that why all these people come then? To see the animals?” I asked.

“No…” he started, “I mean, yeah they do, but…. Look, you could go to a zoo and see every animal out here, right?”

I nodded.

“There are big mountains that are a lot easier to get to. These people are paying huge bucks, spending 15 hours on an airplane, and then cram into a shitty school bus for eight hours into the park.” He paused, and said, “No, it ain’t just the animals.” 

I returned from that patrol hungry for more, hungry to understand exactly what Jeff was talking about, and I anxiously awaited my next assignment. It would be a little while. We earned our patrols only after a week or two working in the visitor center, talking to tourists and helping them plan their trips. It didn’t take long to confirm my suspicion:  people came long distances at great expense because they believed it was unlike any other place on earth.

One evening an elderly couple with a southern accent returned from a trip into the park. The woman smiled at me and said, “It wasn’t just seeing the bear. It was seeing that bear leading her cubs through the tussocks, rooting up ground squirrels, and those snowy mountains behind her. The light, it was early in the morning and the sun was low so her fur was glowing and the yellow light reflected off the side of the mountain.” She turned to her husband, “Was that something or what?”

Her husband leaned in and said thoughtfully, “You can imagine that bear doing that for the last thousand years. It’s like getting to see where life came from, where we all came from.”

“Where are you all from?” I asked.

“North Carolina.”

“You came a long way,” I said.

“There’s not much left in the world like this,” she said, contemplating. “We wanted to come for a long time.”

 

We backcountry rangers were proud of our jobs as protectors of one of America’s largest, wildest, most special places. We were thrilled to work there and contribute to something we saw as good and noble. We worked hard. We worked long hours. We were polite to every visitor, even when they were impolite to us. We answered all their questions the best we could. We lived together in small, cold cabins with no running water. After dinner, we drank cheap, cold beer and played cards. During the night we peed in milk jugs. Over the course of that summer, those big wild spaces did something to my psyche that I hadn’t expected. I had planned to stay just four months. Twelve years later I’m still here.

I now manage the wilderness program for all the national parks in Alaska, and it’s still an honor, though I spend more time behind a desk than I’d prefer.  Every time I leave the state, I meet people who tell me that Alaska is on their bucket list. They light up and I wonder what images are filtering through their brains. Perhaps an igloo, a wolf, or snowy mountains. Maybe they’re thinking of the American frontier, of independence and freedom, of bigness and greatness, of the world before we messed it up.

Sometimes I think of the wilderness as being comprised of two different things. There’s an outward appearance that we can point to and quantify (wildlife, clean air, clean water, rivers and coastlines, cliffs and canyons). These are the things on the glossy brochures and television ads. Secondly, there is what all those things add up to. It’s what the tangible things collectively represent. The way a place makes us feel, the mystery, the connection to something larger than ourselves, the inspiration, peace and awe – this is the soul of the wilderness. Like the human soul, it is hard to define and impossible to quantify; and also like the human soul, perhaps what is most compelling is that it has the power to shape a person.

Over the course of a dozen years, just as the rain and wind and ice have continued to shape topography and sustain dynamic ecological systems, this place has filtered into my psyche and sculpted my inner landscape. I get it now, and I believe it is these things, not just the big mountains and bears, that made Ranger Jeff speak with passion. And it is because of these things that places like Denali continue to appear on bucket lists the world over.

 

Adrienne Lindholm lives in Alaska where she works in public lands conservation. She's the author of A Journey North: One Woman's Story of Hiking the Appalachian Trail and is at work on a collection of essays about life in the Alaskan wilderness.

Once

by Louis Gallo                                

Grandma told us that it officially began when he said he wanted a little boy sailor suit for his birthday. He said he always got new clothes on his birthday and holidays, like the crinkly seersucker on Easter when he made his communion or the striped flannel pajamas for Christmas. She had noticed signs all along but kept them to herself: he dropped things, forgot what day it was, couldn’t find his way to the bank or Southern Radio, where he practically lived. “Not all the time,” she said, blowing out some extra air so that her lips buzzed like a small motor, “just every now and then. But enough to worry me. I didn’t say anything because it would make him mad. He said he had too much to remember and the days were shorter.  ‘They’re stealing a little more time each day,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Who’s they?’ I asked. He just sighed and told me I knew what he was talking about.”

I remember the day of her announcement. We had finished Sunday lunch and were loitering at the table, picking at a little more crumb cake, a little more pecan pie, just sort of making pigs of ourselves. Grandpa left the room suddenly—he looked sort of dazed—and went for his nap. He didn’t tell the usual World War I stories or even excuse himself; he stood up, gazed at us as if he had never seen us before, and started out.  He looked skinny and fragile and his fingers trembled a little. We all knew something was wrong, except maybe my sister Ruthie, who was still too young.  Mom and Dad looked at each other with raised eyebrows. I had seen a few old people get skinny all of a sudden, like Uncle Ambrose, and they didn’t last long after that. Grandma came in from the kitchen, where she had taken some dishes, wiped her hands, and sat down in her husband’s chair. She had never done that before. Grandpa’s chair at the head of the table was sacred. 

“I have something to say,” she began, “and you’re not going to like it.”

“I think we know already, Ma,” Dad said. He looked sad as an old rag. Dad was devoted to his father.

She ignored him. “Grandpa is sick. His mind’s going. It’s like he’s daft. Yesterday he went out the door in his underwear.  He said he was driving up see Alphonse at Southern.  When I told him he needed to put on some clothes, he blew up, told me to mind my own business.  But he walked back into the bedroom and put on some clothes anyway. He stormed out of the house and slammed the door like I was his worst enemy.  Not ten minutes later he came back.

“‘Can’t find my keys’ is all he said and then sank into this very chair and stared at the wall. I don’t think he knew where he was. ‘Maybe we ought to see a doctor,’ I said.  Well, he understood that all right and exploded again. ‘I’m all right!’ he shouted and pounded the table. Then he belched—you know those big cochons he makes—and smiled and everything seemed normal again. Except his shirt was buttoned up wrong and he wore two different shoes on his feet. ‘Jake,’ I said, ‘I know you’re all right, but it wouldn’t hurt to see Dr. Mosby. You need to see him about your heart anyway.’  Well, he started to rant and rave about how I wanted to get rid of him and how I fed him the wrong food and it wasn’t him but the blood pressure medicine. Then he put his head down on the table and went to sleep. Just like that. So what I’m telling you all is that Grandpa is ill, and he needs to see Dr. Mosby, and I can’t do it all myself. I’m so stiff as it is.”

And then, for the first time in my life, I saw my grandmother cry. She twiddled with a linen napkin and wept softly. “He’s getting so old right before my eyes.”

“What’s the matter, Grandma?” Ruthie asked.

Grandma reached over with her gnarled fingers and patted Ruthie’s hand. “It’s ok, sweetheart,” she said, “your grandpa just needs to go to the doctor.”

“Is Grandpa ok?” Ruthie asked. She had not digested a bit of what her grandmother had said.

“I’ll make the appointment,” Dad said. “He’s not going to like it.”

“He’ll fight you and make you feel like scum,” Grandma said.

“Can I come too?” I asked.

Dad smiled. He looked older and seemed beaten down.  “No, Jakie,” he said, “it’s not a fun place to go.”

“But I don’t want Grandpa to be sick.”

“None of us do, Jakie,” Grandma said. “He’s an old man though. Old people are always sick.”

“Are you sick, Grandma?” Ruthie asked, as if suddenly she too knew the family had changed. 

“Oh, just my usual rheumatism. You know me. My feet hurt so much.”

And that’s the first time we heard that too. Grandma came from a long line of stalwart forebears who refused to complain about anything.  Their hands might be burned to char and they would remain dignified and poised and go on chatting as if valentines throbbed above their heads. If Grandma admitted that her feet hurt, they must have ached in a way none of the rest of us could stand for one minute, much less year after year.

I remember looking at the screen door. One edge of the mesh had come loose and had curled up at the joint. The metal latch hung down like a tiny anchor. Sunlight eased through lace curtains that had begun to dry rot. I felt massive forces at work, forces over which none of us had any control, and I stormed out of the room, out the door and plopped down on the concrete steps of the small porch. I tried to think about everything Grandma had said, but I couldn’t.  My mind had gone blank, maybe like my grandfather’s. I heard the bells gong over at St. Rosa de Lima. Honeysuckle and sweet olive wafted in the breezes. The tall wooden fence that separated Grandma’s house and the one next door looked soggy, gray and soft. Only a few years before I had climbed that fence with abandon. It dawned on me that I would never climb it again, nor did I want to climb it. Something new had begun, something I didn’t like and wanted to brush aside as if it didn’t count. But whatever was going on seemed inexorable. We had to live with it. And it would hurt and diminish us all.

 

Louis Gallo’s work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Missouri Review, Southern Review, New Orleans Review, Baltimore Review, Portland Review, storySouth, and Sojourn, among many other journals and anthologies. He teaches at Radford University.

The Woman in the Window

by Jean Venable

           

            It seems odd that at a terrible time in my life, the person who helped me the most was someone I didn’t know, someone who was unaware of my existence. She lived in a building across East 76^th Street from me in New York City, our windows directly opposite each other. It was on my third night home after visiting my husband in the hospital that I became aware of her.

            We had received horrible news. “You have a brain tumor,” the doctor told my forty-seven-year-old husband. “It’s in the speech center so it’s inoperable.” As we sat stricken-faced, he proposed a course of radiation that would not eradicate the tumor, but would--as he put it--”shrink the hell out of it,” giving my husband more time. The treatment meant that my husband would have to stay in the hospital for five weeks.

            I made my way home, the streets a blur, to face the apartment we had so happily moved into the week before. Maneuvering through stacks of boxes to the kitchen, I poured myself a glass of wine and took it into the bedroom, setting up camp on a mattress still wrapped in plastic on the floor, to make the dreaded calls. Hearing myself say the words that the doctor had said made them harder to disbelieve. I gratefully accepted one friend’s offer to make some of the calls for me.

            As I returned to the kitchen for a refill, I glanced at the window across the street and that’s when I noticed her. She appeared to be in her mid sixties, with neatly cut gray hair, wearing a dark green robe which zipped up the front. She was headed to a table by the living room window, her headquarters, I was to learn, for her habitual evening’s reading.  It was quite late by now, and few of the other windows in her building were still lighted. As I changed into my nightgown, I found myself appreciating her presence.

 

            The next day my husband started his radiation treatment. We tried not to notice the condition of some of his fellow patients. That night I opted not to call anyone, which would involve reporting things I would rather not think about. I glanced across the street and saw that my anonymous friend had emerged from her bedroom in her reading attire. I was grateful for a form of companionship that did not require answering questions.

            With no appetite, I attempted to eat my dinner, which consisted of a large glass of wine and a linzer torte, the wrapper of which I used as a plate. As I munched, my stomach in knots, I observed the surroundings of my new acquaintance. Her living room was attractive and uncluttered, with dark wooden bookcases on two of the walls. As I looked around my own apartment I realized that the disorder of the unpacked boxes was adding to the grimness of the situation, as was my constant pacing, wineglass in hand, increasingly gravitating back to the bottle of Chardonnay. 

            At the beginning of the second week, it occurred to me to wonder what was in the glass being refilled periodically across the way. The next time the woman headed to the kitchen I turned out the light and grabbed my binoculars. What she was drinking was ginger ale, and I surmised that she was probably feeling a lot better in the mornings than I was.  The next day I made two purchases: a box cutter from a hardware store near the hospital, and on my way home that night, a six-pack of ginger ale from the deli across the street. I began with the box cutter, extricating two table lamps, their warm light an immediate improvement over the glaring ceiling fixture. With the help of the super, I got the mattress out of its plastic shroud and onto the bed frame. At supper, I had one glass of wine and switched to ginger ale.     

            At the hospital the next morning I tried to describe my new relationship to my husband. He regarded me quizzically at first, but grateful for anything that could be of help, came to appreciate this stranger whose order and serenity I was attempting to emulate. He did not encourage me to share this one-sided relationship with others.

            Back at the apartment, I settled into a nightly routine, which began with a call to my husband to report that I was safely home. I had often procrastinated taking my showers in the evening, but I started timing them so that my friend would still be reading when I emerged. I found it helpful, when trying to ward off morbid thoughts, to get into bed and turn out my light while she was still up, revisiting childhood days when I could hear my parents quietly talking after I was put to bed.

            My favorite nights were Saturdays, when the woman’s doorman would bring her the Sunday Times as soon as it was delivered to the lobby late Saturday night. This was a guarantee that she would be up half the night working on what I figured out was the crossword puzzle. If I were feeling desolate, I could crook up on one elbow in my bed, and no matter how late it was, she would be intently bent over, pen in hand, the light of her lamp enabling her to do her puzzle, and me to fall asleep not feeling alone.

            When my husband’s treatments were completed, he was discharged with a prognosis of one year and lived six, during which time we had a son. Our life was now centered in the apartment; shades were pulled at night, and I was no longer thinking about the woman in the window.

            Several years later, shortly after my husband died, some activity across the way caught my eye and I realized that the furniture was being moved out of the apartment on which I had once been so focused. The next morning when I pointed up to her window, her doorman confirmed that the woman had died. She was never to know the measure of solace felt by an anguished young woman who, one long ago summer, kept company with her across the darkness of East 76^th street.

 

Jean Venable was a writer/producer for NBC Network News for 25 years in the Documentaries division and spent the last seven years of her career with the TODAY Show. Now retired from NBC, she writes from Poughkeepsie, NY where she lives with her second husband. She has one son, who is a cameraman for News 12, Westchester, and seven stepchildren.

The Sounding Board

by Natasha Lvovich

 

“I looked inside the temple and saw a single monk praying. From his body came several voices…He produced these voices from within his body, offering a sounding board to storytellers who themselves had none…I began to pay attention to these voices as I spoke. Telling stories no longer took the place of listening: rather listening gave rise to stories.

 

Perhaps the ear is the organ of storytelling, not the mouth. Why else was the poison poured into the ear of Hamlet’s father rather than his mouth?”

Yoko Tawada, Storytellers without Souls, in Where Europe Begins (p.111-112)

 

I am often asked: How did you learn English so well? What’s the secret? So for about twenty years, I have been searching for an answer, telling tales of language and immigration, which, like childhood memories, never fade and never end. To my own surprise, an embarrassing story has recently popped out of a dusty memory drawer, and it seemed like the best answer ever.

In the building in Brighton Beach where we rented our first apartment in America, a neighbor befriended us. In his early sixties, tall and athletic, with a thick mustache and a patch of hair combed over his bald head, he was loud and exuberant, just like we imagined true Brooklynites, and he constantly spat out a mish-mash of words we were unable to decipher. Since pretty much all speech was indecipherable anyway, it did not make a difference one way or another. His name was Michael.

Michael would greet us in the lobby with a thunderous “How are you" (which we soon discovered was not a question) and would hold us there forever on our way back from the supermarket, shopping bags painfully hanging from our hands. He occasionally invited us for dinner to neighborhood Chinese restaurants, where he rambled, his mouth full, about still-incomprehensible American topics: baseball, Hollywood, TV, food, money, politics, as well as himself. He would go on and on and would get so worked up, bubbling and boasting, that he seemed on a verge of a nervous breakdown. No comments or dialogue were expected, so we just sat there and nodded, acting as a sounding board and painfully longing to go home to exhale the tension of our cluelessness.

At some point during these so-called interactions, Michael confessed to us that he was passionately in love with a young Russian woman he had met somewhere in Brighton Beach. The drama included convoluted descriptions of his encounters with her, his elaborate secret fantasies, and recitations of poetry. To us, there were some practical implications to the matter: Michael wanted to learn Russian to speak to the Love of His Life. He wanted to impress her and to understand her down to the core of her very being, from her Pushkin-immersed childhood to her adult Brezhnev stagnation years--in her native tongue. And he was willing to pay for it.

On my meager $12 per hour teaching, we were struggling to pay our rent. A little extra money would certainly help, especially so close to home--quite literally, next door. Always a conscientious teacher, I started preparing my Russian lessons—only to discover in disbelief that tutoring Michael basically meant doing exactly the same thing we had been doing in Chinese restaurants and in the building lobby: being a sounding board. For the first few weeks, Michael promptly paid me for the “lessons,” but then problems surfaced with the cash flow from the business that he supposedly managed. Still I faithfully showed up at his door every night.

In the spirit of classic immigrant mythology, my then husband, a former jazz musician, was washing dishes in a Russian restaurant, and this injustice deeply upset Michael. So one evening, he slapped his hand to his forehead, suddenly recalling that he had a great deal of useful contacts in various broadcasting companies and recording studios. He promised to help the “good Russian man” get a foothold in the music business, where he rightfully belonged.

Later in the week, Michael produced a piece of paper with a scribbled name on it. The address? OMG! Get it in the Yellow Pages! Phone number or extension? Are you kidding me? Everyone knows this person there, just go and say the name at reception. And don’t forget to mention my name. Wink, wink.

Oh, the comic scene of a heavily gesticulating Russian man, speaking a few English words from the Ray Charles repertoire and showing a crumpled piece of paper to a stunned front desk receptionist at NBC, ready to call security. Oh, those frantic calls home, even more frantic (unanswered) calls to Michael, and the excruciating return to Brooklyn, filled with the inexhaustible reservoir of Russian dark humor…Michael would reappear, several days later, mumbling excuses and pulling out another piece of paper with a name scribbled on it. The saga, amazingly similar in every detail of immigrant gullibility, would repeat itself several times, with the trips to the city, a bewildered receptionist, and a bitter trip home.

Michael’s next philanthropic action was directed to our friends, Sasha and Irina, frequent guests in our house. Sasha, today a reputable doctor, was then studying for his medical license exams, and his wife's job as a receptionist supported them. Dirt poor, they were renting a tiny decrepit attic. Hearing their story, Michael offered one of his apartments—of which he had plenty, all over the city. Of course, for his Russian friends, he would immediately make a gorgeous one-bedroom available, in a brand-new building, with all new appliances. He even took Sasha for a tour so that he could see for himself the friendly neighborhood and the building, and stare in awe at his dream apartment windows--from the outside! The lease was signed. Sasha and Irina paid Michael the security deposit and the first month rent. They started packing, ready to move in, when it occurred to them to contact the super, just in case. The super had no clue. And Michael was not home. 

It was only much later that somebody suggested that Sasha file a complaint about that rent money in small court. By that time, we had moved out of the building and Michael had completely vanished. For the next year or so, as we were emerging out of culture shock, Michael’s case became a taboo in our households. One day an older woman contacted Sasha and paid back his deposit, apologizing profusely. She introduced herself as Michael’s legal guardian and explained that he was severely mentally disabled and not responsible for his actions. She also added that he had to be committed to an assisted living facility, since he couldn’t manage life on his own.

And that is how I learned English.

 

Natasha Lvovich is a writer and scholar of second language acquisition and bilingualism. She teaches at CUNY and divides her loyalties between academic and creative writing. She is an author of a collection of autobiographical narratives, The Multilingual Self, and of a number of articles and essays. Her creative nonfiction recently appeared in the academic journals Life Writing and New Writing, in the anthologies Lifewriting Annual and Imagination and Place, and in many literary magazines, including Big.City.Lit, WHL Review, Post Road, Paradigm Journal, Nashville Review, and Two Bridges. Her piece, Balakovo, was nominated for 2011 Pushcart Prize.

All the Way Through to the End

by Elizabeth Stainton Walker

 

Years later, sitting in my college physics class, I would learn about Schrödinger’s cat, and my thoughts would go immediately to that hour between the time I woke up and the time I found her. That time when my mother was neither alive nor dead.

            For as long as I can remember, she had been a night owl. She would stay up reading into the early morning, the light in her room still glowing hours after I had put myself to bed. In the years before I could drive, I would have to wake her up two and three times to get her to take me to school in the morning. So, no, it was not strange. Her room was always quiet in the morning. She was not missed.

            When I called 911, the operator told me, “You have to turn her over on her back.” I tried to tell him that because of her extreme obesity and her proximity to the edge of the bed, moving her was simply impossible. I could only rock her back and forth. Each time I rocked her, I saw her cheek, blue from lack of circulation, and her swollen mouth. The operator kept telling me how important it was that I roll her over. It turned out not to matter anyway. She had been gone for hours by that time.

            The first person I called was Kathy. Red-haired and busty, my mother’s best friend had only recently moved back to Little Rock after twenty years in Atlanta. It had been cute to see my mom act like a teenager again. The two of them would spend whole days together, shopping and drinking limeades, the same things I did with my own best friend. Kathy and my mother made sex jokes. They would giggle and talk about men.

            Kathy had recently begun online dating, and my mom would help her navigate these new interactions. Because of my mother’s weight and her frequent bouts with depression, she had not been on a date in my living memory. It was strange to hear her talk about condoms and penis pumps. Riding in the car with Kathy, with me leaning forward from the back seat, my mom told stories about men from her past. These were anecdotes I had not heard, like the time Jimmy Buffett asked her to a party after one of his concerts. “You never told me that!” I would shriek, squeezing the fat on her upper arm. But then, at sixteen, I had never been on a date or kissed a boy, so I suppose there is no reason the subject would have come up anyway.

            It was only after I phoned Kathy that morning that it occurred to me to try to reach my aunts and uncles who lived two hours away, outside of Memphis. It must have been around eight by that time, and while I was on the phone with Uncle Joe, my mother’s favorite of her three brothers, the paramedics came and told me my mother was dead. Looking back, I cannot think why Uncle Joe would not have already left for work by this time. As an ophthalmologist, he had his father’s habit of getting to his practice hours before he saw the first patient. I am sure if I were to ask him now, he could not tell me why he was still at home when I called. I do know that it was he who was on the other end of the receiver when a female paramedic looked at me and nodded. I am certain that I was speaking to Uncle Joe when my story changed from, “Something’s happened to my mother” to “Yes, she is definitely, definitely dead.”

            Kathy and her sister Bonnie appeared at the house a few minutes later. Bonnie was shorter and slimmer than Kathy, dark from the tanning bed, and more tightly wound. She had arrived in her bathrobe and wanted me to get her clothes to wear. “You’ve got to get your Aunt Bonnie something to put on!” Ten years later, this still strikes me as an odd request.

            A few minutes after the sisters’ arrival, our house phone rang, and it was obviously a telemarketer. She mispronounced our last name when she asked for my mother, and I remember screaming into the phone, “She just died!” and slamming down the receiver. As an adult, I wonder now what the poor salesperson must have thought, if she imagined I was making it up, just a rude teenager who thought death would be a funny thing to joke about.

            For the record, it was an arrhythmia. She had died in her sleep and without pain.

            In the following hours, I was swept away to Bonnie’s house. I have no idea who locked our home after the coroner removed the body. These are the questions you do not think to ask at the time: Who locked the house? Why is Uncle Joe not at work? I can remember so many strange details of the day, like my friend’s mother gathering my dirty laundry to wash at her house. But then there are things I cannot remember, like who locked the house. And in thinking about it, I know I must have been the one who locked the house. But I cannot say for sure.

            I do remember dialing the number of the boy I liked, the line ringing with hope as I paced around the tree in our yard waiting for him to pick up. His name was Colin, and even with my only parent now dead, I felt a bit excited I finally had a reason to talk to him.

            That evening, I went my friend Anna’s house and waited to receive visitors. My high school friends got off work or returned from sporting events and made their way to Anna’s living room.  The film Zoolander was playing. Someone must have brought it over, and to this day, I have never seen it all the way through to the end. I remember looking around the room, thinking, “All my favorite people are here” and “It’s nice we can all get together like this.” Then I would remember why everyone had gathered in the house in the first place, and my stomach would sink.

            Colin arrived around nine. Truthfully, I do not remember what he was wearing, but odds are it was his navy Transformers tee shirt. He wore it most days that year. I walked outside with him, and we sat together on Anna’s porch swing.

            “How are you doing?” he asked.

            I shrugged. I had been asked that question one hundred times and was still without an answer.  I was too tired to feel anything. “You know,” I told him, “I think everyone is waiting for me to cry.”

            He smiled warily. I wonder now, knowing what I know about men in general, and young men in particular, if he might have feared I would in fact start sobbing uncontrollably and that he would be left sitting there, unsure of how to get me stop.

            We were on the porch for maybe twenty minutes. The warmth from the day was still hanging on, and Anna’s mother’s lilies combined with the Arkansas humidity to make the air smell heady. The cicadas hummed in the darkness. A grey tabby jumped up on the swing with us. Colin stroked her and told me about his allergy to pet dander. He was on Claritin, he said. It had helped.

            When he fell quiet, I put my head on Colin’s chest and felt the worn cotton of his Transformers shirt, or whatever tee shirt it was that day. This close, he smelled like chorine. His long arms folded around me. His chin stubble sanded my forehead.

            Inside, my school friends talked about what would happen to me now that I was an orphan. Outside, my life was perfect, and still.

 

Elizabeth Stainton Walker is completing her M.A. in English at the University of Arkansas, where she also works as the English Department secretary. Her story, "Detritus," was published on the MonkeyBicycle website. She and her husband are both great dressers.

Alachua Autumn

by Carla Charleston

 

My North Florida world is about to change.  Dark billowing clouds suspend above the earth—a cold front is on the way.  Hurriedly, I move pots of anthurium from the pool deck to the living room for a warm transition into spring.  In Alachua, “Latchuway” according to locals, tropicals don’t survive outdoor winters.  

A gust of wind rattles the trees and spills handfuls of confetti-colored leaves.  Flame red crepe myrtles, magenta dogwoods, and golden oaks.  Alachua autumns inspire a Miami girl who grew up thinking such color transformations only happened “up North,” in colder climes.

A leaf in salmon shades floats down onto the birdbath.  Yellow butterflies circle purple lantana and sip nectar from wine-colored periwinkles.  Satsuma branches hang like willows, heavy with mottled orangish fruit awaiting winter’s alchemy for transformation into golden oranges.  A squirrel darts under a Margarita daisy bush to scavenge long-buried hickory nuts.  Fresh sand mounds appear around the armadillo’s burrow in a far corner of the yard.  Will anyone mind if she remains?  Or if during summer drought, the deer munch the daylilies down to their roots?

Ginger leaves, so lush in summer, rustle like brown wrapping paper.  I pull up dried stocks of daisies, zinnias, and cockscomb, break off the seed heads, and shake them over upturned soil—the beginnings of next spring’s garden. 

My friend Wanda will arrive any minute.  She can use the seeds, too.  I jam desiccated plants and stacks of plastic seedlings pots into a yard bag to await her arrival.  I add other garden treasures for Wanda’s collection.  Amaryllis, epiphyte orchids in baskets and terrestrials in soil pots, a small Meyer lemon, and three knock-out roses.

In the distance I imagine golfers, a ruckus of laughter, curses, and whizzing balls.  No fairway chatter today.  No games.  Course closed.  For sale.  A sign of the times.

Don’t forget Wanda’s frangipanis, beautiful flowers in Hawaiian leis.  We’ve had “Whitie,” our oldest, for twenty years.  Her branches almost fill one side of the pool deck.  Last summer, a smaller frangi swelled with multiple shades of pink flowers.  In Alachua, whites grow more easily than pinks.  This year Whitie won’t have her blanket and electric light bulb by the pool.  Instead, we’ll pull her in close, under the roof, and wind her branches with sparkling Christmas lights for warmth and color.  Will she stay warm?

I set two young frangipanis by the lemon.  Overhead, a gaggle of Sandhill cranes stream south in v-formation.  Like colorful leaves, Sandhills are part of North Florida autumn.  The pomegranate, another long-term survivor, beckons me.  Now a collection of caramel-colored sticks with yellow leaf-fringes, in spring he’ll sprout orange tissue-paper blossoms.  

Wanda’s white pick-up truck pulls in the drive.  Quickly we load the plants and garden tools from my garage, and then say good-bye.  No more annuals or perennials for me.  I have no need for tools.  I’m moving to a new condo in Jacksonville.  Like pomegranate and Sandhill cranes, I must transition.  But will I survive there?

 

 

Carla Charleston is a freelance writer from Jacksonville, Florida.  Dr. Charleston was a professor and scientist in the field of communication sciences and disorders.   She has published six books and over fifty refereed articles in her field.  She is currently marketing her novel, Finding Faustena, the story of Americans rebuilding Naples after World War II.

 

Photos courtesy of Carla Charleston