excerpts

From “Wake” [originally published in The Kenyon Review, Summer 2010]:

Long ago, in a place now so remote to her that Marina could not even be certain it existed, her uncle had told her a story about the waters of Lethe, and while she sat alone with The Mrs. in the unfamiliar drawing room, Marina tried to recall what her uncle had said, but all she could remember was the hypnotic thrumming of his fingers on a small drum, and how the drum sounded like water lapping at the shore. Her husband’s voice called to her again from the kitchen. Marina blinked and sat up straighter. From her seat in the second row of wooden folding chairs, she studied her mother-in-law’s enormous ivory casket behind its bank of lilies and pale rose wreaths. Even in the room’s subdued light, the casket was so radiant that it appeared as if The Mrs. had been placed inside a long luminous pearl. And yet, the longer Marina remained still, the more she had the unsettling sensation that the drawing room had shrunk around her while the casket had grown more enormous until everything, even the side tables and the overstuffed armchairs now crowded against the walls, even Marina herself, seemed dwarfed by its presence.

Marina!

She ground her teeth. Marina wasn’t her name. No one here could pronounce her name. She still wasn’t accustomed to responding to it: Marina. When her husband gave her the name, wrote it on a piece of paper for her, she took it to the dictionary. She’d had to stifle a laugh. What a joke! Dockage to service small craft. Yes, that summed up the new Marina perfectly. She later overheard him tell a friend that he chose the name because it sounded exotic, but something his tongue could still manage.

Marina edged her way through the lilies and stood over the old woman, examining the ruffle drawn tightly around The Mrs.’ wrinkled neck, and Marina noticed that the pale peach fabric had a peculiar sheen and she was surprised to see that the dress wasn’t a dress at all, but rather a nightgown, which struck her as obscene, or at least impolite to be staring at this dead woman and her spent breasts lying so flat in her nightie. The drawing room was stuffy, and the flowers could not mask the odor rising off of The Mrs.: a strange perfume of baby powder and the foreign luxury of formaldehyde. Marina scowled. A nightgown! So typical of these people to need the comforting illusion that the old woman was only sleeping. Perhaps, Marina thought, they should be informed that this woman, she is not likely to wake up anytime soon.

Marina. Her husband’s voice was growing impatient.

Marina turned. The stiff rows of empty wooden chairs reminded her of a transit station after the last refugees have stumbled aboard the final bus and been driven off into the night. Marina’s navy wool dress itched around her neck and wrists. The emptiness troubled her. The chairs’ perfect indifference troubled her. With the toe of her pump, she quietly pushed at one of the chairs, pushed it with some satisfaction, out of its alignment.

. . .

From “Curses” [originally published in Quarterly West, Winter 2010]:

1

Yesterday in the village square of Madurje, after a dreadful lunch of the local fish soup, an old woman ran up to us and placed a curse on Mother. This crone had a startling mole, dark and fleshy, centered between fierce eyebrows, and she pushed so close that I could smell her breath. In an oniony blast she spat out the curse in a language none of us understands. But Father was confident it was a curse and he’s never wrong.

Liesl clapped her hands, delighted at the spectacle. Mother’s hands flew to her throat and began to twist and twist the knot of her pale silk scarf. The air became still. The shadow of a passing bird skimmed Mother’s face, and I was suddenly aware of the lingering taste of that awful soup coating my mouth. A young couple crossed themselves. “What did she say?” I asked, but they hurried away. Mother’s aqua eyes followed the old woman’s hobbled steps back across the square. Mother was terribly pale, and other than a slight trembling around her lips, she seemed to have ceased breathing.

Then she shook her head, blinked, and said, brightly, “Cupcakes! Who will join me for cupcakes?”

We looked at one another. Father leaned into me, but kept one sharp eye on Mother. “Hannah, darling,” he whispered. His voice was a hot dry wind in my ear. He had a firm grip on my elbow. “Inform your mother that this village doesn’t have a word for cupcake.”

2

Each day we trail Father through the village while he records notes in his hide-bound ledger about Saint Klarigunde the Incorruptible. His mission is to document the festival of every saint on the continent, and we are currently working our way through the obscure martyrs. We traipse along, bumping into each other as we try to give Mother a wide berth. To outsiders we probably appear like any other family on holiday, but secretly we are terrified. We don’t speak of it, but the curse follows us like the shadow of a rabid animal. We’re worried for Mother, of course. But our unspoken and shameful fear is that the curse’s execution may be haphazard. What if that crashing boulder or wayward arrow misses its intended mark and instead fells the nearest bystander, meaning any one of us?

Father and Liesl manage to keep their distance. But at every turn, I find Mother clutching my arm and giving me a tight-lipped smile as if holding her breath under water. If the curse were to strike her down, I fear she and I would be going down together.

. . .

From “Rondo” [originally published in Santa Monica Review, Fall 2009]:

First, mother forced me to take the table, a table I’d never seen before, though she swore it had been there all along. For emphasis, she rapped the tabletop, as if its solidity proved her point. The table was solid oak, the color of amber; sturdy enough for a farm family, but we weren’t farmers. Large enough for a family – period. But we weren’t that either.

“Your father made this table before he left for the war,” she said. “It’s all we have.”

A table wasn’t what I wanted; besides, I had no room for something that massive. The table’s surface was smooth, glossy with varnish. In its reflection, my face was shadowy. My mother’s grim features stared back at me.

“Time to go,” I said, and made a move for the door. I was practicing twice a day for a bass flute recital, a complicated rondo that made my stomach somersault just looking at the score.

“The table,” Mother insisted. But getting it home was not something I was prepared to do. Mother certainly couldn’t be expected to help. She had just announced she was dying.

“You’re too young to die,” I said.

“Babies die!” she said and waggled her hands at me. “Your father!”

True. He had been just twenty-five when he hadn’t come home from the war. Not even his body made it home, she’d told me. Swallowed up by a black swamp on a night rescue mission. So young, twenty-five, he was and always would be. And in death, he was young enough that now my mother could be his mother, too.

On my next birthday, I would be his age. Whenever I thought of this, I wondered what kind of conversation we might have. I liked to think we would chat easily, as people our age naturally do, tumbling from subject to subject. I doubted Mother could even understand us, our coded talk, our silent signals. Would Father and I roll our eyes at her and break into conspiratorial laughter? When our conversation picked back up, would he flirt with me?

Mother shoved a tablecloth at me. “You have to take this, too. You can’t take that without this.”

The tablecloth was crocheted in variegated yellow and gold. Mother was crazy for anything involving hooks and needles. “It’s an open pinwheel pattern,” she explained and held it up for me to see. The golden pinwheels looked as though they were spinning.

“I’m getting dizzy. Put it down.”

“I only made one of them. There’s no other like it.”

“How could there be?” I said and balled it up in my arms. She looked nervous. “Don’t worry,” I told her, “I’ll come right back for the table.”

“You have to,” she said, wringing her hands. When I returned with a strong neighbor boy, she was standing in the exact same spot next to the table, her left hand flat on the top as if it were holding her up. Her expression was so solemn, she appeared to be swearing an oath.

Mother told me once that my father died on the day I was born. This detail, along with the heroic swamp business, was all she would say, and eventually I grew weary of asking. But, oh, that night rescue mission – that was mine, and in childhood, in that drifty free-floating state just before sleep, I played it out on an endless, murky reel.

I imagined our paths crossing – me, on my way into this world; Father, on his way out – passing just long enough for a melancholy wave across the ether: hello… goodbye.

. . .

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