The union was strong, but not strong enough to make Detroit Steel keep a dying man on the payroll. John shouldn’t have known this, but he often overheard his parents talking in the room beneath him until late in the evening. He was a respectful boy and was never trying to eavesdrop, but in a house that’s small with heating vents that weren’t so much vents as just holes in the floor (or ceiling, depending on your perception), there wasn’t much of a way to avoid it. He knew the other men at the mill were keeping an eye on his father, Bernard. They were propping him up at his station and bringing him water and coffee throughout the day, whatever he needed to keep him going. “I don’t know why they do it, I don’t need no special treatment,” his father complained to his mother at least once a week. But he still hopped in the car of whoever showed up for him in the morning, usually Jay Mingus’s dad Jimmy who had a 1947 Studebaker with a long front hood and wild wrap-around back window. The fathers of most of John’s friends had older cars like that, bought when they first returned from the war and were fresh hires at the mill. Some bought new ones every few years, like Joseph’s dad who bought a 1957 Buick a few months back even though his old one, which Joseph’s mom had now, was only three years old. The Bondurant’s didn’t even have one car, let alone two. His father always told John it was because he liked to walk to work and couldn’t imagine missing out on the fresh New Boston air, which John assumed was a joke like when he told him his Purple Heart was from getting stabbed with a fork in the chow line. No one, not even John, who loved his town with a ferocity rivaled only by his love for Roy Rogers, would describe the air of their town as fresh.
Last night: the wall of a mansion abandoned mid-construction.
The night before: the back garage of a boarded-up health spa.
Tonight: a section of the fence that marks the end of our skinny seaside town.
No one really comes down to this fence, no one except for surfers on their way to the beach and cyclists heading south. Beyond the fence are kilometers of forest before the next town. In front of it is where Lauren’s body washed up on the sand.
The fence was her training ground. Her minimalist tags run along it, as well as our father’s nickname for her in other styles: bubble throw ups, pichação pieces, the occasional wildstyle.
After adding my mimicry to the painted patchwork, I look at the precision of her lines and the sloppiness of mine. The contrast makes me petulant in the way I often was when we were kids and she was better at something, better at everything. But then my heart swells with pride and I have to get away from her symbols and signs.
The first ghost stepped out of the ocean in the summer, shimmering and hazy with captured light. We saw the age in her body, moving as though still burdened by a vast and lonely sea. Her wrinkles like the finest, most fragile spiderwebs we’d ever destroyed.
She came to rest on a foamy lip of shore. Her outline was set and static, her insides swirling, misty, full of translucent opals spun in an ancient hand. We realized later that every ghost was different in texture, but only when we couldn’t count them anymore, when they’d packed themselves across the sand.
Tourists surrounded her, our first ghost, asked where she came from and why. But she didn’t even try to answer. Just planted herself on that sharp beach in Maine and watched the shore birds scuttle and dive.
We spread the video of her like an invasive species, a creature introduced in the most fertile of ecosystems. Amongst ourselves, we debated whether she was a projection or performance art, a trick of the light or a stunt like Holograph Tupac. We asked one another, is she yours? Hoping one of us was the answer, some brilliant marketing ploy, some Don Draper–genius viral advertisement to be jealous of, but knowing under our skin this was something else, something new.
Once again last night, a dead woman appeared to me. She spoke my name and asked me to help her back into the world of the living. She said she was so close to me; it would only take a small caress and she would be flesh and blood again. I didn’t move. Her face hung over my bed until the dream resolved itself, and I was awake again, and this morning was gray and cold just like yesterday morning and the morning before.
This morning, I heard our neighbors’ little daughter crying in the room above us amid the crashing of furniture while her parents fought. The crying and the fighting were so loud my wife wondered if we should call the police—we decided not to, and then my wife left for work, and the fighting died down. I texted my wife to let her know things were quiet again. She texted me “okay.”
Today, I read Sherman Alexie’s poem “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel” for the first time. I have spent the last three years of my life writing a novel about the time I spent living on an Indian reservation in South Dakota, and when I read Sherman Alexie’s poem, I realized that what I had written, while true, was not useful. No one needed my novel, and I was stupid to think anyone did in the first place. I should have known a year ago when one of my Lakota friends ended our relationship because of this novel—when he heard what it was about, when I told him. We’d been drinking out in the bad-lands; the sun was coming up, and I asked for his approval—“blessing” I think I said. He threw an empty bottle at me. He told me I was selling him out just like all white people do eventually, which is pretty much what Sherman Alexie was saying also. And the next day, we were hungover, and we pretended to have blacked out the entire incident. Even so, we have not spoken since.
Featured Art: Wooden fence with two black buffaloes by Markus Spiske
When my first boyfriend’s mother died of breast cancer, I spoke with him on the cordless, from the bathtub, trying to console him. He was calm in his grief, and I broke his heart soon after. A cruelty only vaguely acceptable at fourteen. A week before we had snuck out, in the middle of the night, and driven up the snaking mountain roads of southern Oregon. Toward what? Toward something. We could feel a pull all around us, the silence in the woods, the ghosts of the Shasta people passing below our windows.
What did we know of love? Across the screen, in the dark computer labs of our youth where we played The Oregon Trail on our soon-to-be-extinct Apple II computers, love was entering in the names of those you wanted to take with you, west, toward the promised land. We could all begin a new life together, if we purchased the right supplies. Unless we were in a particularly harsh environment, we knew to conduct a brief funeral. Here lies Laura. We wrote epitaphs across the virtual tombstones before continuing down the trail.
Sometimes you know things before you know things. Mrs. Tisdale comes to the door, and I know something is wrong. I know. From the top bunk of my bed, I watch her coming up the sidewalk, walking fast but walking like a woman who is already lost, her skirt moving quickly around her, like a wave to anyone who spies through the window.
I know the doorbell won’t ring. She is not a bell person. She is too good a friend of my mother’s to announce herself that way. She knocks once and opens the door. What she doesn’t know is the bell doesn’t work anyway. It is shorted out somewhere along its line and my father has never pulled the wires and traced down them to find the problem. I hear Mrs. Tisdale’s voice flow up the staircase, so faint I can barely make it out, strained and pitched higher than normal. Her voice sounds like an animal she is trying to keep on a leash, trying to make it heel. Because her voice wants to run away from her. I hear my mother fall back on her nurse’s voice, that healing tone. I climb off the top bunk and move closer to the doorway.
“Now, Roberta, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” my mother says. “Let’s not worry until we have something to worry about.”
Winner, New Ohio Review Nonfiction Contest selected by Elena Passarello
By Gail Griffin
Featured Art: The Kitchen by James McNeill Whistler, 1858
It is Christmas night—or, more accurately, two in the morning of December 26th. I am on the small porch at the side of my house. My cat is in my lap. The door to the living room is closed. Every window inside the house is wide open, because the house is full of smoke—a vile, stinky smoke. The porch is winterized, but I have opened one window about six inches because of the smoke escaping from the house. And what I am saying to myself is Well, at least the temperature’s up in the twenties.
The cat is unusually docile. He knows that something fairly strange is going on, and he is cold. I murmur to him that we’ll be all right, over and over. With sudden, crystalline clarity I know that I am absolutely alone in the universe, except for this small animal.
Will it reassure you or just make the whole scene weirder if I tell you that the smoke is from burnt cat food?
Featured Art: Unfinished Study of Sheep by Constant Troyon, 1850
It’s the manipulations that end you. I was told this by Sam Shaw after he learned he’d been promoted to the inside. We were on the outside of the outside in the designated smoking area. I was smoking. Sam Shaw said, “What’s suffering worth?” He broke off the shards of animal blood that had froze to his overalls.
I shook like I was caught in electric wires. The cigarette butt hissed when I let it drop into a snowdrift. I could hardly feel myself living, felt like I was alive as a series of smoke breaks.
Sam Shaw said, “Nothing’s dead-end as it seems.”
“Easy for you to think,” I said. “You’re on the inside now.”
I warmed my hands with the heat of the conveyor’s gear motor, clenched and unclenched until my circulation was good enough that I could reach for my cutter and hand it off to Sam Shaw without either of us losing a precious something. Sam Shaw cut into a plastic clamshell that contained a dress shirt and tie combo. He pulled the tie too tight. I told him he couldn’t breathe. He called himself a real professional. I lined up the next group of animals.
“You ain’t dressed for this no more,” I said.
Sam Shaw looked at me and then the cutter. “Take it easy on me,” he said, taking an animal by its pit, cutting it with no regard for the stainlessness of the shirt.
Featured Art: Death: “My Irony Surpasses All Others” by Odilon Redon, 1888
Michael, you are gone, and in this house where you once were there is an antique telephone as black as your coffin. Heavier than it looks, it is as full as the hole the men dug for you, early one morning, as they talked about summer and things they saw on TV.
Old things weigh more than they look—dead, leaden things like you and the black telephone.
You have been gone three weeks, and now my mother is gone, too. When she left for Providence she left me here with Michael, whom you left behind like a copy of yourself when you went. He doesn’t ask where you are anymore. Instead he says, nine times a day, that he’s going to call you on his telephone.
He found it at the flea market where my mother took him, to take him off my hands and take me off of his.
When I’m not looking, he lifts the receiver and talks to you. He doesn’t say your name, and I don’t ask who is on the line. I know it’s you.
Featured Art: A Fisherman’s Daughterby Winslow Homer
Late in the night after my father’s memorial service, my sisters and I stopped our small caravan at a Speedway in the stretch of US-40 between Greencastle and Indianapolis. It was early November.
“Come with me,” my sister Emily said, leading me to the back of her car and opening the trunk. She pointed to a box in the corner. “You want some?” she asked sounding like a drug dealer, which at one point she had been. I saw her slipping back in easy—my dad’s ashes were valuable and sort of dangerous—I felt like it may have even been against Indiana state law to have them, let alone scatter them, though I never checked. When I said nothing, she prodded, “You want even just a little? There’s so much to go around.” Sarah, our oldest sister, was waiting in the passenger seat—she had already been dealt her ash-inheritance. It was late and it was cold; I wanted to go to sleep. Emily looked at me intently. The way the gas station lights slanted cast a shadow across the top of her face, and I could not make out her expression.
“No,” I finally said. “I’m trying to quit.”
The nozzle on the gas pump clicked, and she sighed, shut the trunk.
Selected as runner-up for the 2015 New Ohio Review Fiction Contest by Maud Casey
By Susan Finch
Featured Art: Early Morning After a Storm at Sea by Winslow Homer
When Bob Miller slipped and fell from the rooftop deck of his ex-wife’s houseboat into the inky black of Rock Harbor, it almost appeared as if he’d done it on purpose. The fall took him feet over head, his flailing arms tightening into a V like he was performing a cartwheel. His fingers spread open in sunbursts, his legs stretched wide and long like a dancer’s, and his toes tensed into sharp points. As he tumbled the twenty-five feet into the shadowy water, his whole body seemed to expand and explode into a star.
The entire party saw Bob’s fall or, at least, when the police conducted the official investigation, partygoers would claim they had. And in truth, the spinning and twisting of Bob Miller’s body end-over-end was so spectacular that in hearing the story later in whispers passing across the marina from slip to slip, everyone felt they had seen it. Those who knew Bob assumed he’d been dared to do it. He had always been a bit of a showoff and couldn’t say no to a challenge. When he was thirteen, he’d purchased a dirt bike and had performed stunts for his friends on the weekend, vaulting over a campfire, navigating the narrow wall between the cornfield and the river, and once, after a double-dog-dare, he’d launched the bike from the hayloft of his father’s dilapidated barn and taken a nasty spill on the landing, fracturing his femur.
By Sandy Gingras Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
When the funeral director hands my father’s ashes to my mother, she puts the little cardboard box into her pocketbook—the one with all the zippers and buckles. My mother says she’ll hold off on scattering the ashes until maybe the next time my brother comes down from his farm and we’re all together. Maybe we’ll scatter them in the ocean.
“But, for now,” I ask, “Where are you going to put him?”
“In my bedroom closet,” she says.
My parents never shared a bedroom. My father’s room was the converted attic, my mother’s, the converted garage. As far away as they could get from each other within the same house. Putting him in her bedroom closet seems, at once, too remote and too intimate, but I don’t say anything.
Two years pass.
My brother only visits on Christmas and Thanksgiving, which is not the right time to scatter the ashes. It’s never the right time to scatter the ashes.
Marlene and Ralph walked up Kaanapali Beach about half a mile from their hotel. They sat in a corner of an outdoor restaurant with a floor of sand. Each of the small, round tables was shaded by an umbrella made of palm leaves. A row of tropical greenery, punctuated with orange and red hibiscus, separated the restaurant from the boardwalk. They could hear the waves hitting the sand about forty feet away.
Marlene slipped off her sandals and wiggled her toes in the cool sand as she looked over the menu. Mahi was her new favorite; however, she’d eaten it two days in a row and thought she should try something else. Up next to the bar, a local singer was nearing the end of his lunchtime set. He took a slug of water, traded his guitar for a ukulele, and began crooning the popular island version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Marlene wasn’t all that hungry. A shrimp cocktail and a Diet Coke might do the trick. Her husband had his cell phone out on the table in front of him, checking their reservation for the dinner cruise out of Lahaina harbor. He had decided before he left the hotel that he would order a burger; he was tired of fish already.
I’m watching The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet on the giant Admiral 21-inch console television, and I can’t wait for the commercial to raid the freezer and see if there’s any ice cream. My father, mother, and sister are in the living room; and it’s no use asking them because my father would not answer me, my sister would order me to bring her a bowl of whatever I find, and my mother would say that I should look myself if I want anything that badly. Besides, what I’m longing for does not exist in this small Brooklyn apartment. I need to find tutti frutti ice cream, and the only flavors my mother buys are butter pecan for my father and chocolate for my sister. Every time I tell my mother that I don’t have the same taste as my sister, she seems surprised and says, “Why, I thought chocolate was your favorite.” I always answer her with the truth, “I love vanilla.” But it may as well be tutti frutti because she never listens to me.
The reason I’m crazy with the tutti frutti is because in the show, the Nelsons see a story in the newspaper about a police sergeant who was keeping a lost boy happy with a large tutti frutti cone, entertaining him until his parents showed up. This is the one night the Nelsons decided to forgo dessert in order to cut down on calories. Ricky, the troublemaker, wants tutti frutti badly. Darning socks, wearing a high-necked sweater with a double strand of pearls, Harriet Nelson says, “I haven’t tasted tutti frutti in years.”
Ozzie and Harriet reminisce about their youth and where they bought large portions of this flavor. “Somehow you just don’t get ice cream like that anymore,” Ozzie says, and David follows, “You don’t get anything like that anymore.” Clearly, the Nelsons, dubbed by the announcer as, “America’s Favorite Family” who enjoys “good times together,” also agree about this lack of uniqueness in modern culture.
Even though it’s a cold night in December 1957, my mouth waters and I race to the kitchen. The freezer is crammed with tundra of yellowing ice. A carton of Birds Eye frozen peas peeks out between the craters like the first spring growth in an arctic melt; and clinging to the side, pinned against the freezer edge, is a one-pint box of pistachio ice cream, my father’s second favorite. I open the carton and there are maybe two spoonfuls caked in frost. Not bothering to get a Pyrex bowl, I take the container and a spoon back to the living room and watch Ozzie, who is now in bed, immersed in a dream.
“You could have brought me some,” my sister, Brenda, says. “I didn’t want to miss the show,” I say.
“Only an animal eats from the carton.”
I growl, pounce, and swing my arms wildly. I pull each of my brown pigtail straight from my ears and open my mouth in a huge circle, my small brown eyes like dots of surprise.
“Mother, your younger daughter is a monkey and belongs in the zoo.” “Yeah, she’s as dumb as an ape,” my father says, looking up from the
New York Post’s sports page. He sits at the far end of the small rectangular living room in his threadbare, red scotch-plaid captain’s chair, his slippered feet splayed on the matching ottoman. This is the first thing he says all evening.
In Ozzie’s dream, he and Harriet are sitting in an old-fashioned ice-cream parlor. It takes place in their youth, maybe in the 1920s. Harriet wears a cloche hat with a feather and a flapper dress; Ozzie sports a bow tie and striped blazer. Suddenly, Harriet bursts out singing “Goody Goody” in a throaty voice, as if she has smoked a pack of Chesterfields. Backing her up is the singing group, the Four Preps, echoing “goody goody for him” and “goody goody for me.”
Before long, Ricky is singing, “You got it comin’ to ya,” and the audience belts out, “Hooray and hallelujah.” The refrain “goody goody” becomes “tutti frutti,” with Ozzie and Harriet, followed by the Four Preps, singing, “Tutti frutti for me.” If that’s not enough, Harriet and other women get up to do the Charleston. Harriet pumps her arms and kicks her legs, and moves into a solo while Ozzie accompanies with his banjo.
And that’s why I love Harriet above all the other TV moms. She is not Margaret Anderson making dinner and kissing her husband when he gets home from his important job at the insurance company, convinced that father knows best. She is not Mrs. Goldberg yoo-hooing out her window while awaiting her family’s arrival. She is not Alice Kramden making fun of her wacky husband as he schemes away her poverty. Beneath Harriet’s short, modest bob and no-nonsense clothes, she is her own woman, even in Ozzie’s dreams.
I’m whipping my spoon around the bottom of the pistachio container because I like it best when it has a creamy consistency, and I scrape the bottom. Finally, I plunge in my pointer finger, wiping it along the edges, licking it to get the final taste.
“Stop making those annoying noises!” Brenda says. “I can’t hear the show.” The front door slams; and because Brenda, my mother, and I are still in the living room, I know my father has gone out and he isn’t looking for ice cream. My mother’s shoulders pop up and she turns her head toward the hallway and then resumes reading her book. She is a big-time reader, taking out at least one book a week at the library. Her favorite subject is British royalty, and she knows every king and queen in succession, plus their offspring. All I know is that Henry VIII was ugly and wore a funny collar that looked like my crinoline squashed into a beehive.
“You girls better stay off the phone tonight,” my mother says.
I don’t question her because I don’t want her to realize that it is after 9 P.M. on a Wednesday, and most mothers would say it was getting too late to be on the phone on a school night. Not that my mother is like most mothers. With her perfect pink complexion, dimpled nose tip, and thick upswept hazel hair, she is prettier than Harriet Nelson and even Loretta Young. Not that prettiness ever helped her. It is both good and bad that, when it comes to being like other mothers, she leaves me alone.
My mother probably doesn’t remember, too, that Wednesday night at nine is the absolute cutoff for Brenda to receive calls for a Saturday night date. Brenda wouldn’t pick up the phone if I gave her an Elvis record. She would rather parade around on a Saturday afternoon on Flatbush Avenue, her long legs sticking out from her tight black pencil skirt and with hair in rollers (not that she needed them since she gave herself a smelly Toni home permanent) under a scarf, and pretend she was having a date that night than accept an offer on Wednesday at 9:15. Just turning sixteen, Brenda was an expert on the teen rules for dating.
Mostly I don’t want to remind my mother about phone etiquette because I know what she is thinking and it isn’t good. Last Friday night, I was on the phone with my best friend Francine and then Brenda was on the phone with a boy for at least an hour, and my father came home after the news stinking of whiskey.
Proudly, he said, “I was in jail.” My mother for once was silent.
Brenda said, “You’re kidding, Daddy?”
“No, there I was with the boys at Angelo’s playing poker and we got busted by two cops for gambling. Can you believe it? They even took my shoelaces.”
“Why?” I asked, more startled at this than the fact that my father was in jail.
“So he wouldn’t hang himself, stupid,” Brenda said.
“So, Bill, why didn’t you call and tell us where you were? We were getting worried.”
Of course, I didn’t correct my mother then; I didn’t think anyone noticed that he wasn’t home since he had been either sitting in his chair all day not talking, still wearing his soiled striped pajamas, or sleeping in the bedroom for huge chunks of time, my family almost got used to his absence. My father had been lucky that night. He had explained that the judge laughed and let them go.
“Did you get your shoelaces back?” I asked.
My father went into the bathroom without answering. All I could hear was the long, steady stream of his pee, which I had to wipe from the toilet seat that he forgot to lift.
I place the empty ice cream carton on the coffee table and cover my lap with an old afghan, pulling it up toward my mouth so I can bite my nails without Brenda noticing.
After the Charleston, Ozzie wants to charge the two ice creams, but Dave, who acts as the waiter, won’t allow him. Before Ozzie and Harriet can taste them, Dave takes away the two multi-scooped ice cream tulip sundae glasses from the table. In a semi-sleep, Ozzie pleads, “David, come back and give me my tutti frutti.” I don’t know why this makes me cry. I can’t take Ozzie’s frustration. I want him to have his ice cream already.
At this point, Brenda forgets that she just ordered me to shut up and starts to hum, “Tutti Frutti au rutti, a-bop-bop-a-loom-op, a-lop bop boom!”
“Shh,” I whisper.
“Brenda, please,” my mother says, one of the rare times she seems to be on my side.
“Oh Mother, that was a Little Richard song,” Brenda says. “You know the guy who was in that Alan Freed movie. You’ve heard him on the radio lots of times.”
“You think I know Little Richard from Big Daddy?”
“No, but you know Richard III,” I say, swearing I could see an upturned crease in my mother’s penciled cat’s eyes.
Poor Ozzie is now a crazed man and goes to his neighbor Darby in the middle of the night, begging him to look in his freezer for tutti frutti. No luck. Later, Harriet and Ozzie get dressed to go out and search for tutti frutti.
There’s a commercial. In the beginning of the show, Ozzie introduced the new Kodacolor 135 film, the “biggest 35 mm news since color slides.” But now, it’s not Ozzie, but another man, and he presents “one of the world’s great cameras,” a Kodak Retina Reflex, for the professional and advanced amateur. But these people at Kodak are smart. They know their audience. The man now takes out the Pony II, for those people just getting started in color slides. He says it’s amazingly simple to use and only costs $26.75, adding the kicker: the Nelson family found it a real pleasure to use.
I want to punch the television screen and wipe off his royal smugness. Of course, the Nelsons can afford any camera they want and can probably get a Kodak for nothing. Who are they fooling? The only thing the Nelsons can’t seem to get is tutti frutti ice cream.
This Pony still looks very fancy, and I wish I could have a camera even if it’s only a Brownie. But since my father lost his sweater business over a year ago, partly from investing in a new sideline of taffeta cocktail dresses, I am lucky that I still get money for an occasional Archie comic.
Ozzie and Harriet find a drugstore with a light on, and the druggist searches his freezer. The closest he can come to tutti frutti is cherry. When they return home, the whole family is awake and gathers at the kitchen table. Ever resourceful, Harriet serves them fruit cocktail to mix with the cherry ice cream, her approximation of tutti frutti.
I remember when I made ice cream with Francine three years ago when I was nine. In her kitchen on East 22nd Street in Flatbush, two buildings from mine on the dead end, I helped Francine search her mother’s cookbooks for an ice-cream recipe. I was impressed that Francine’s mother, Mrs. Nederlander, had a cookbook with food stains on the red-and-white checkered cover. As far as I know, my mother never consulted a recipe, though she once read an article that said it was healthy to have two different colored vegetables for dinner and the only thing she could think of besides green was yellow. So every other night, Brenda and I ate waxed beans. At least, this got my father to say something funny, that for a long while I thought he made up: “Beans, beans, the musical fruit. The more you eat, the more you toot.”
Anyhow, Mrs. Nederlander’s cookbook contained a recipe for ice cream and it was for vanilla, my favorite. Francine and I got out a carton of eggs from the refrigerator and had no trouble assembling the other ingredients. Then the recipe called for separating the eggs and setting aside the egg whites and we were stuck. “What does separate mean?” Francine had asked.
Being a year older, I had been too embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know. “Put them in separate rooms,” I said, hoping the joke would cover my ignorance. Then I got a brainstorm, “It must mean that you make hard-boiled eggs and then you can get whites and yellows.”
Without missing a beat, Francine got out the biggest pot in the cabinet, and we boiled the eggs until most cracked. Gently, with a large spoon, I lifted each out of the boiling water and, when they cooled to the touch, Francine and I pealed the shells, pried open the eggs, scooped out the yellows, and deposited the egg-white chunks into Mrs. Nederlander’s brand-new red electric mixing bowl. I may not remember that I didn’t know what “fold” meant and left that chore to Francine, but I’ll never forget the entrance of the Nederlanders.
“P-hew, what is that odor?” Mr. Nederlander had asked, pinching his nostrils together.
“Are you girls cooking something?” Mrs. Nederlander asked, looking toward the kitchen as if she were expecting the Fire Department with hoses drawn.
“It’s like a sulfur factory in here,” Mr. Nederlander said.
But unlike my father who would not have missed an opportunity to point out that my friend and I were dimwits; and unlike my mother, who would have shrieked louder than she did when she came home every night from her new job as a bookkeeper and I didn’t clean the house to her satisfaction, Mr. Nederlander opened the kitchen window and his wife dusted hard-boiled egg bits from her cookbook. Afterward, I heard them laughing hysterically in the den they used for a television room. In a cage hanging from a hook near the window facing the courtyard, Francine’s parrot, Timothy, screeched, “happy happy,” and I left Francine’s yearning for a bird who talked, among other things.
Ozzie calls the police officer, Sergeant Dolan, from the newspaper and asks him where he bought the tutti frutti he gave to the lost boy.
Brenda stretches and says, “Enough with the tutti frutti! I still can’t believe that Jerry Lee Lewis got married today.”
“Yeah, I heard,” I say. “It was his cousin.”
“It’s unbelievable. She is only a year older than you.”
“What’s that?” my mother asks, her voice louder than her usual loudness. “She was only thirteen,” I say.
“Who is that?” my mother says as if she never asked a question.
Just then the phone rings. Brenda and I exchange raised eyebrows. My father hadn’t been out long enough for him to go to jail again.
“I’ll get it,” my mother says, with a tone of annoyance. Even she realizes it can’t be my father.
“Oh, no,” I hear my mother say from the hallway where the black rotary sits on the mahogany secretary.
“When did it happen?” she says in a voice rushed with worry. “Of course.” After a few more words that I can’t make out, my mother stands in the liv-
ing room entranceway, her rosy cheeks blanched. “What?” Brenda and I say simultaneously.
“I have some terrible news,” my mother says. “Was Daddy in an accident?” I ask.
“No . . . it’s my sister,” she says in a slow, barely audible voice, followed by an “oh-h-h,” and a choking, crying sound.
Aside from a loud fight with my grandmother Mashie last summer, I had never seen my mother cry. Terrified, I say, “Aunt Louise?”
“Yes,” my mother mumbles. “She just died. Nadine will come here to stay with us while her father takes care of things.”
My heart sinks and then explodes in my chest. It feels like I just swallowed the whole thing, like it swiveled up my windpipe and is beating in my mouth. My aunt was only forty-two, two years older than my mother. Their brother Bernard had been killed in World War II; Brenda was named after him. My mother’s other sister Rachel has mental problems, though nobody talks about her except to say that she used to be a beauty. Aunt Louise was fine until six months ago, and then before I knew it, she had some bad headaches and acted strangely and now she is dead from a brain tumor. I wonder if this is inherited. I wonder if my mother’s family is doomed.
No matter how much my mother and father act strangely, I can’t imagine them ever dying. If my mother ever gets really sick, I expect her to fall down and bang her fists on the linoleum floor in the kitchen, refusing to give in to fate. I remember seeing The Eddy Duchin Story and how I cried when Tyrone Power, as Eddy, died of leukemia at forty and that was a real life story. When my mother does her New York Times crossword puzzle on Sundays, she plays the movie music on the Victrola, something by Chopin. She claims that Chopin is schmaltzier than Beethoven, but that doesn’t stop her from playing the record so many times, there are permanent skips in three places.
“Amanda,” my mother says as she pivots toward her bedroom. “being the same age, it’s up to you to be extra nice to Nadine. Remember when your aunt was first diagnosed, how much she counted on you to spend time with Nadine.”
My mother slips into her room and closes the door. Brenda gets up and turns down the volume on the television.
“Oh my God,” she says. “I can’t believe Aunt Louise is dead. Poor Nadine.” “I know,” I say, remembering one girl in my class, Rhoda, whose father died from a heart attack. Everyone in the class talked about it and looked at Rhoda as if she had leprosy.
I listen at my mother’s door. There are no sobbing noises. I hear something that sounds like furniture squeaking and then my mother yells my name and says, “If that is you spying by the door, please go away and leave me alone. Finish watching your show.”
Brenda turns up the volume and we both sit on the sofa transfixed.
I had missed what seems like Ozzie and Darby getting lost in trying to follow Sergeant Dolan’s directions. Finally, they find a drugstore that has tutti frutti. In the next scene, they delight in their piled-high ice cream cones with none other than Sergeant Dolan. Ozzie calls Harriet and says, “Why don’t you and the boys get lost and come down here.”
But I can’t concentrate on Ozzie and Darby. I keep thinking that any second now, my cousin Nadine will be here. What will I say to her? How will she behave? I know this is terribly selfish, but I can’t stop thinking about Nadine moving into my room and sharing my bed. Not that I mind the squishing together, but it is Nadine that bothers me. She thinks she is a big shot because she has a television and a piano in her bedroom, and she won’t let me touch either one. I once heard my mother say, “Louise and Jack spoil Nadine as if this can make up for their absences.”
Nadine also brags about Jerry Feinstein in my class. She calls him her boyfriend just because he once came to her house and they watched I Love Lucy on her tiny television and he kissed her. But I know for a fact that he called Francine and asked her to go to a party, and Mrs. Nederlander said she was too young to go on a date without a chaperone.
“Ugh,” Brenda says. “What?” I say.
“All that ice cream in the middle of the night.”
I have to admit that Ozzie and Darby’s tutti frutti ice cream looks pretty disgusting. It reminds me of that icky fruitcake people eat at Christmas. By now, I am getting a little nauseous. I am happy that Ozzie and Darby got what they craved. I am happy that the whole Nelson family joined in the search and accompanied Ozzie in both reality and in his dreams.
And while I realize that this Nelson family is not real, that Ozzie never seems to have a job, that Harriet never acts annoyed, that Ricky gets the attention, and that Dave, though pretty cute, always suffers from his brother’s talent, still they are really the Nelsons. They aren’t what they seem, but they are America’s Favorite Family, enjoying good times together.
The doorbell rings, and I catch my breath, startled. I know it’s not my father because he would use his key. My mother comes out of her room, her full lips freshly painted with Hazel Bishop’s no-smear secret red, holding a lit Chesterfield with the ash almost as long as the tip.
“I’ll get it,” she says, the same thing she said when she picked up the phone only minutes ago.
My mother opens the door and Cousin Nadine is standing there with her cleaning lady, Gladys.
“Darling,” my mother says, clutching Nadine to her chest. “This is so, so terrible.”
Nadine breaks away from my mother’s grip. She unbuttons her camel car coat, throws it on my father’s empty chair, and lumbers to the sofa. “Make room,” she says to me. “Did I miss Ricky and David?”
It’s the end of the episode and Ozzie comes out with news of a new Kodak Signet 50 camera with flash, only $82.50.
“I’m going to get that,” Nadine says.
Now is not the time to remind Nadine that her father has a brand-new 8 mm movie camera. I watch the credits and hear the announcer say that Ozzie and Harriet are brought to you on film from Eastman Kodak Company . . . “your guarantee of quality.”
Andrea Simon is a writer and photographer who lives in New York City. She is the author of a memoir/history, Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest, now in a paperback edition; an award-winning historical novel, Esfir Is Alive; and her new novel-in-stories, Floating in the Neversink. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York where she has taught introductory writing and creative writing. You can visit her website here and check out her Facebook and Twitter
She was naked on the embalming table and I just couldn’t stop staring at her nipples. This happened two years ago when Ginny Pazinger ran a red light while she was text-messaging a friend. One of those big SUVs ran into her car and she spun around the intersection like a top. Shattered glass and chunks of vehicle burst into the air, explosion-like. My family has been in the funeral business since 1882 so we expected Ginny’s body to be banged up pretty badly, we thought it would be a closed casket for sure, but her remains were in good shape thanks to the side airbag.
Six days after my father dies, seven blind masseurs hold hands and leap from the Han River Bridge in downtown Seoul, into the shallow water beneath the lighted apex, their bodies a disruption in a mirror they’d never seen. I read about this in the newspaper I collect from the front of my father’s house, all damp and bleeding ink from the past week’s frost. In my father’s office I spread the papers out on his desk and trace my fingers down the pages, to see if I’ve missed anything. I’m looking for murders, plane crashes, natural disasters, economic collapse, impending apocalypse. I stop at the society pages, the comics, the crosswords. For several minutes I consider an eight-letter word for “felicity.” The only answer I can come up with is, “felicity.” Sometimes it happens that way.
The Korean masseurs’ story catches my eye because they have a large color picture of the bridge. It must be one of those time-lapse photos, where the car lights ghost into a gold blur and the surface of the river is steely and reflective. Four vaulted columns rise from the river and hold a statue of a torch, under which I imagine the masseurs must have jumped. How could they have jumped from anywhere else on that bridge? But then, how would they know? How would they know that that was the center? Did they feel the wind die down under the canopy? Did they hear it slice through the steel cables? Did a sighted woman lead them there and say here, here is where you would jump if you were going to jump, not that you are, and then they laughed, and took off their glasses, wiped their eyes of sleep, or of drink, said thank you, you’re kind, leave us now, we just want for a moment to enjoy the view.
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