"Telling You"

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Life is like this: one minute you're lying by your air conditioner in the heat, reading haiku and wishing you didn't have to go to see your new therapist, and the next minute you're in his office blinking at him in surprise and thinking that he looks familiar, that you've seen him someplace before.

. . .

My Buddhist boyfriend wasn't the first man to dump me. The boyfriend before him did, too. His teenage sons instructed him to dump me because I'd declined their invitation to a game of Monopoly. I'd just eaten dinner at their house, and they asked me to play, and I said no. (I had my reasons.) Then, after I'd gone home, the sons held a family conference and told their father that he could do better than a woman who wouldn't play Monopoly. And so my boyfriend told me, in a gentle voice, "I have to let you go. Let me know if there's ever anything I can do for you."

"Actually," I said, "there are three things you can do for me." But I will repeat only the first thing here, which was never to call me again.

These excerpts are from "Telling You," a short story by Jasmine Skye. The story is continued in The Sun (Issue 335, November 2003), pp. 42-46.

Liars and Saints

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Liars and Saints, a novel by Maile Meloy (Scribner, 2003). The first two thirds of this book were particularly good.

He said he was a photographer, and offered to take their picture for her husband; he said it was the least he could do for a man who was at war. So he came to the house, with a big flash umbrella and a camera on a tripod, and set his equipment in the living room. Yvette made him a highball, and because the bottle of ginger ale was open, she made herself one, too. On an empty stomach it went right to her head. It was three in the afternoon on a Saturday, and she'd dressed the girls up for the picture, but the photographer wasn't in any hurry. He was clean-cut with clear green eyes and looked like he could have been a soldier himself, in khaki trousers and a pressed shirt. They talked about the situation in Korea, and he told an off-color joke about war brides. He asked for another drink and she made him one, but Clarissa stalked in and said she wasn't wearing nice clothes another minute, so the photographer arranged them on the sofa and started to fiddle with his flash.

Clarissa sat on the ottoman, and Margot stood behind, with her hands on her sister's shoulders. Clarissa hated to be touched by Margot, and her hair was coming out of its curls. Yvette pulled the hem of Clarissa's skirt to cover her knees. Margot smiled serenely at the camera, and nothing about her was out of place. Yvette felt like her own smile might look tipsy, so she pressed her hand against her lips to try to straighten her mouth without smearing her lipstick.

"Over There" by Alan King

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From Alan King's poem "Over There," which was published in Blue Lotus Review:

You said it, pointing

at the light, thick as gravy
and almost as edible, the way
the moon ladled it over you.

Maile Meloy, Half in Love

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Half in Love, a collection of short stories by Maile Meloy (Scribner, 2002).

A few highlights:

"Tome" (from Best New American Voices 2000) For eight months, I had been telling my client he had no tort claim. . . . Sawyer had worked active, outside jobs all his life, and suddenly he could do nothing. It seemed to be the idleness, more than the brain damage, that made him crazy. He couldn't read, because the words came out scrambled, and he could barely sit still to try. He phoned me three times a day. My secretary stopped putting his calls through, so he came to the office, on foot because they wouldn't let him drive. He was a big, graying, blond-bearded man, my father's age, muscular but getting fat without his work. He treated me like a daughter, scolding and cajoling me. He wanted to sue, demanded to sue.

"Aqua Boulevard" (from The Paris Review, winner of the 2001 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction) Tati gave me the leash, a long orange strap, and the children kissed Oliver good-bye and went out the door. . . . I had not wanted a dog, but the children loved him. It was true they did not fight so much now. The day my wife brought him home, my daughter held the dog in her arms and said, "This is the happiest day of my life." Children are whores. They will say anything. But I thought it could be true.

"Kite Whistler Aquamarine" (from Witness) Then the temperature dropped overnight to twenty below, and a Thoroughbred filly was born at our house, early, before we expected her.

"Last of the White Slaves" In the house in Saudi Arabia they employed two Arab servants, Eugénie said: a cook and a butler, both discreet and understanding about the sleeping arrangements. It was an embassy house, marble-floored against the heat, with a wing for the servants. The cook, a widow, kept to herself. An older man named Ahmed was butler and valet; he had worked for the old ambassador, and Miles considered him a friend. But Christopher disliked the old man, and finally threw a fit about the way the laundry was done.

Ann Patchett, Anne Lamott, and Alice Munro

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State of Wonder, a novel by Ann Patchett (Harper, 2011). A surprising, often beautiful book.
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Imperfect Birds, a novel by Anne Lamott (Riverhead Books, 2010).
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Too Much Happiness, a collection of short stories by Alice Munro (first international edition by Vintage Books, 2010; originally published in Canada by Toronto's McClelland & Stewart and then in New York by Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).

From Alice Munro's story "Deep-Holes": Sally stumbled along faster than was easy for her, with the diaper bag and the baby Savanna. She couldn't slow down till she had her sons in sight, saw them trotting along taking sidelong looks into the black chambers, still making exaggerated but discreet noises of horror. She was nearly crying with exhaustion and alarm and some familiar sort of seeping rage.

I'd read several of these stories before--they were all from either The New Yorker or Harper's--but most were new to me. "Too Much Happiness," for example, which closes the collection, is about Sophia Kovalevsky, a nineteenth-century mathematician and novelist.

Parenting anthology

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Last year, one of my poems appeared in an anthology called Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting, edited by Alys Masek and Kelly Mayhew (City Works Press, 2010).

Here are a few other pieces from the collection:

Often I dream I have forgotten
you somewhere.
Like a parcel, I leave you
in the backseat of the car . . .

An excerpt from "Long Night," a poem by Sharon Dornberg-Lee, pp. 205-206.

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Lump

Of coal. In your stocking. Solid mass in the toe. Or in your throat if you're a coal miner right before the rush of rock like rain . . .

"Lump," a prose poem by Julie L. Moore, is continued p. 222. It was originally published in Alaska Quarterly Review. (Two other poems by Julie L. Moore appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of the Apple Valley Review.)

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I knew something was wrong as soon as the baby was placed, warm and sticky, on my chest. Something failed to click. . . .

It was one of those moments that made me wish I'd never seen a movie. Other moments like this include: the moment my father told me he was dying, the moment my father actually died, the moment my mother stopped breathing, let go of my hand and started to turn purple. No soft-focus was there. No voice-over telling me how to feel, no cut away to rain running down a windowpane to give me time to digest the scene I had just witnessed. Just one brutally continuous shot, hard light and worst of all, reality.
. . .
We got home and went straight to bed. Four of us: husband, dog, baby, mother. Everyone fell asleep and I awoke to find my dead mother wearing a blue and pink stripy hat and crying. I pulled the covers up towards my face and stuffed the comforter between us. I did not want to touch her, whoever she was.

An excerpt from "403 Days Later," an essay about post-partum depression by Ella Wilson, pp. 199-204.

Two memoirs, a novel, long and short films, and two poems

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My name is Howard Dully. . . . In 1960, when I was twelve years old, I was given a transorbital, or "ice pick," lobotomy.

My stepmother arranged it. My father agreed to it. Dr. Walter Freeman, the father of the American lobotomy, told me he was going to do some "tests." It took ten minutes and cost two hundred dollars.

. . . I hadn't been a bad kid. I hadn't ever hurt anyone. Or had I? Was there something I had done, and forgotten—something so horrible that I deserved a lobotomy?

From My Lobotomy: A Memoir by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming (Three Rivers Press, 2007).
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Scaredycat, 2006, a 15-minute short film (and official selection at the Sundance Film Festival) which was included on the DVD Fifteenth and Taylor: Dispatches from a small apartment and packaged with the full-length film The Adults in the Room, a thoughtful documentary/drama hybrid by Andy Blubaugh.
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Pauline said, "Once upon a time, there was a woman who had a birthday."

Michael stopped pouring his cereal and looked across the table at her.

"It was January fifth," Pauline said. "The woman was twenty-three."

"Why, that's your birthday, too!" Michael's mother told her. "That's how old you turned, only yesterday!"

"And because this woman happened to be at a low point in her life," Pauline went on, "she was feeling very sensitive about her age."

Michael said, cautiously, "A low point in her life?"

From The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).

I recently reread this one, along with Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and Celestial Navigation.
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"The Lost Strudel" (originally published in The New York Times) and "On Rapture" (originally published in O, The Oprah Magazine) from I Feel Bad About My Neck: and other thoughts on being a woman by Nora Ephron (Vintage Books, 2006).
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"Your Marriage Gets Louder as You Get Older," a poem by Amorak Huey, and "Half-hearted Apology," a poem by Nicole Koroch, from Ramshackle Review, March 2011.