The Paris Review's Blog, page 172

Nobody’s Fault

© Vladimir Liverts/Adobe Stock.

Mom would give us bowl cuts with a breakfast bowl over our heads, I’d catch pieces of hair in my toes. There were sheets all over the furniture. I don’t know why there were sheets. When it was quiet, I’d pick at the skin around my nails. I’d stand behind doors listening for the consonants of my name. Mom would rip at Hank’s shirt so that buttons would roll off and toward me.

You’re a piece of fucking shit, she’d say, and yank his shirt like she was ringing a bell.

When Hank learned that Charmian died, he struck up a conversation with her family. It was decided that we’d move over there, pay a lot less in rent.

We’re moving, Hank had said, taking Mom by the shoulders. She was wiping something yellow off of Gunner’s forehead.

Where are we supposed to fucking go, Hank? she said, not looking, her back to him.

Next door, Charmian’s, he said, gesturing all around. It’s so fucking cheap.

Mom wiped her eye with the back of her hand.

It’s the only idea I have, Marie.

You’re a piece of fucking shit, she’d say through her front teeth, noise coming from her cheeks.

When boxes started to appear in all the corners, Mom and Hank would go work on Charmian’s house and leave me alone to watch the babies. They’d leave me with the one-way monitor and say, If you need anything, just tell us, talk into this, and they’d poke at the plastic. That emergency precaution felt vacuous, like everything else. I’d lie in bed awake and pick at my cuticles. I’d pick them all the way out, lick them. I’d look out the window at the wet-looking spot of old oil stains in the driveway where the car had been before they took it and think about Mom calling Hank “dog meat,” I’d play her voice in my head like a song.

Dog meat, Mom said, and ripped at his shirt.

*

When the car got repossessed, Hank was out of town looking for work. I was standing behind Mom looking at this giant red button by our front door that I was told never to touch. I think it was a defunct alarm system from some tenant before us. I was haunted by it, felt forever tempted to touch it. Never did. I loved that car.

Mom had carried me out to it once like that scene between Chiron and Juan in Moonlight—the beach scene, where Juan is holding Chiron in the waves. She set me in the car—a silver Toyota Cressida—I was six. The car smell was thick, fries between the seats. My ear was on Mom’s chest, her insides in my head. She put me in the car wrapped in a blanket and the sky looked like a broken screen because it was four-in-the-morning blue. I’d never remembered seeing that kind of blue. She made me the hot chocolate that I loved with the chalk marshmallows already in the packet. I got to hold the hot chocolate myself. It was all of us in the car, but I smiled in the back seat because when we stopped at lights, Mom would put her hand on my knee like, I’m excited to show you something, especially you. We were going to look at hot-air balloons. It was some kind of launch in a field near Sacramento. The crash of fire is what I remember.

The man in a gray flight suit handed Mom a car seat from the Cressida that they were about to tow. They could have just driven off with it, he was being nice, he shook his head. She started crying.

Behind us, Gunner was playing with the broken pieces of a board game. He laughed and pushed one of the pieces into his nose. I watched his face contort. He whimpered. I backed away.

Mom didn’t look at us when she came inside holding the car seat. She strode into the kitchen and pounded at the yellow wall with an open palm. Her shoulders shook, heart bent toward the floor.

Gunn was screaming.

She pulled the phone off the wall and sat on the floor with her legs widespread.

Gunn’s got something up his nose, I said.

She waved me away.

I stood in the doorway and listened for my name.

She didn’t look at me, just held the phone like kissing, cupping its receiver closest to her mouth, whispering, looking down.

I listened to Gunner cry. Mom said Jeb twice—Jeb, the guy who had muscles all the way up his neck, hair that traced the whole of his body. He’d come by sometimes wearing incredibly crisp collared shirts, the kind with a white pressed collar and cuffs. He had a little tuft of hair on his head that resembled a small dog, was the top pediatrician at a big hospital nearby.

Mom cupped the phone and then let it hang, it dangled on its cord, twisting, pushing the low dial tone through the house. She wiped her eye with the back of her hand and sat up, hoisted herself off the floor and stood.

He’s gonna come over and fix it, okay, guys? She spoke at us, not looking up. Okay, guys? He’s going to come help us.

She brushed past us for the stairwell. Gunner’s cries were whimpers now against the dial tone. He was sitting up, putting toys into a pile, knocking them over.

When there was a knock on the door, Mom raced downstairs in different clothes, she’d smoothed herself into a blue blouse and tighter, darker jeans. She was barefoot, wiping her nose, red nails raced to the knob.

Jeb and his great wave of shaving cream, the fluorescent scent of faux rainwater, fought through the door.

Mom hugged him. He hugged her back, left his hand at the small of Mom’s back as he did.

They stood in the hallway, their bodies almost touching. Mom pointed toward the driveway, then at Gunn. They stood so close. In one movement, Jeb pulled a thin flashlight out of his front pocket and brushed Mom’s hair back from her eyes.

This will just take a second, little man, Jeb said, reaching to turn on the light. He knelt in front of Gunn. Gunn thrashed around. Mom wrapped herself around him, scattering a pastel pile of his toys. The plastic piece fell out before Jeb could do anything. Mom grabbed Jeb’s face, kissed him on the side of his cheek, his forehead. They handed the plastic piece to me.

*

Hit me, I kept whispering.

No one was listening.

Hit me, I’d say in the mirror or in the dark.

The feeling came from nowhere, really. I would have had it without this childhood, I know that. My hatred for embodiment meant I rubbed my hands red. Did I want to feel or to smother feeling? The light in the room was everything.

You know how fruit actually has the fruit fly eggs just on it, really, waiting and ready, and when the fruit starts to rot, that’s when the flies burrow inside and eat up, or whatever, and we see them? This ache was like that, always ready, just waiting for decay of some kind to swarm, nobody’s fault.

To this day, I watch outward expressions of violence with total remove. The whole time I lived with these people, it was as if I was watching them on film. Something shut off. Before we’d moved to California, I loved New York and I loved my grandmother. My dad lost his job in Dallas when I was two weeks old and we moved in with my grandparents, who were living outside of New York at the time. My mom and dad split when I was eighteen months old, but Mom and I stayed at my grandparents’ until Mom met Hank. They met in New York because Mom was a secretary in his office. When they got together, I was two. They had a huge fight on the turnpike heading into the city and Hank was going to call off the marriage, but then he thought about me, he says, and my little sad face. They married. We eventually moved to California, myself, Mom, Hank, and their first son, Tye. Gunner was born in Sacramento.

While I was living with her, Grammy would give me 7-Up and make baby back ribs and lace cookies and I’d sleep on her couch and watch out the window for deer. The distance that swelled between me and my mother once we moved to California was a grind, Charmian’s house smelled like tobacco and rotting linoleum, drooping awnings and weeds.

Mom frightened me with her body. She loved her body against the air and its childishness, a freedom that felt too intense, too out of control, even when it was light. She’d talk in voices and make noises with unyielding energy—she’d talk to the birds and to the squirrels and had a register of her voice that seemed adult, but was never fixed. She’d flit off into a kind of dream realm easily and fully and we’d do things like cover the car in chocolate Jell-O pudding or let the hose run in the front yard to make mud, she’d roll in it with us and show us how the mud would stick to the white stucco of the house if we raked it with our hands. She made up endless games, hung donuts from the living room ceiling with pushpins and string, had us eat them like that. She made up an entire language, too, it’s near unintelligible and difficult to re-create, but it comes from a small part of her throat and fixes words together, there are no r’s and for instance, green crawly became geencawdie and means lizard. I was fluent in this way of speaking, I still am.

I watched the movie Nell when I was at a friend’s in high school and I had a 40 between my legs that I kept tooling with the whole time, I drank it as fast as I could and then spent the rest of the movie picking off its label and trying to drink everyone else’s. Jodi Foster was this adult with this voice and was sexual somehow and a child and I’d watch just to the left of the screen so nobody knew I couldn’t watch the screen itself. She spent nearly that entire movie in a nightgown shirtdress thing with these eyes that made her so naked. Mom, too, had that texture sometimes and I wanted to fold her into me and make sure she wasn’t hurt or threatened and I was hers so it was really only me who could do it. It felt as if we were being tugged toward the center of a sea, not touching. Her body felt like my fate.

*

This will only take a minute, this will only take a minute, Mom was saying. She was steering, pulling my hand toward her chest, it had slipped, so she was just gripping the fabric, I was wearing a cotton dog costume and she was pulling me down the sidewalk. The crotch of the costume was so low I had to sway my hips to move, had to walk like I was wagging. This was Halloween. I was a dalmatian. Mom’s body was so heavy, like the sidewalk. I felt magnetized twice, toward home and away, I wanted to go home and at the same time I wanted away from everything, her hand. Mom tugged me and I tripped over a woman waiting at a bus stop with several sizable plastic bags and her own children. The two kids I tripped over were dressed as Jasmine. Mom sped us up, she’d seen somebody leaning against the bus stop, somebody whose legs were crossed at the ankles, hanging with muscles and hair. Mom tugged harder toward the body. It was picking at something on its shirt.

It was Jeb.

I found out later that Mom had been seeing Jeb nearly the whole time we’d been at Charmian’s. Hank lost his job and was scouting for other jobs in Texas and Jeb would come over and over and they’d started to date.

We’re here! Mom said, exaggerating her breathlessness, letting go of my hand.

Remember me? he said, crouching.

I shrugged.

He moved to shake my hand.

When I lifted it, Mom went to hug him and they embraced while I stood there, dangling. I watched their fingers mingle. The mingling looked red, his hands were red, he was wearing a yellow Hawaiian shirt, gesturing across a small lawn to a white apartment with thin stairs. They walked slightly ahead of me, talking.

Great to see you again, kiddo! he said over his shoulder as we climbed the stairs. There was a fruit bowl of candy by the door, it wasn’t full. Help yourself, he said like I was forty.

He moved slowly, swept himself around the kitchen, gesticulated with the wet armpits of his shirt. Mom followed him, grinning.

Look at these, honey-pie, Jeb said. He crouched down and held something into my face. I looked at the hairs on his knuckles that curled over.

It’s a model airplane, Jeb said, turning it around.

Mom ignored him.

Why don’t you sit here and watch this for a little bit, Mom said to me, spinning toward the kitchen table. She pulled out a chair for me and patted it.

She smelled like heat.

What about trick-or-treating?

Later, she said, and tapped the back of Jeb’s chair. I sat down. The vinyl seat squeaked. She took my plastic pumpkin, set it on the table and turned on the TV. I put my cheek on the table, it smelled like old fruit.

Mom and Jeb left for another part of the apartment. Their voices were thin and stretched out against the plaster walls, white carpet, his fat leather sectional. An ice cream truck played “Pop! Goes the Weasel” so slowly outside, the sound like licorice, was loud. A beige-looking woman on TV, flat-faced and staring into the camera, waved her arm. The kitchen lights grew bright against sunset, the outline of a palm tree moved.

I squinted at my own shadow, it moved into nothing on the floor.

I tugged at my collar, my costume, a stain in the dark.

 

Emerson Whitney is the author of Ghost Box. Emerson teaches in the B.F.A. creative writing program at Goddard College and is a postdoctoral fellow in gender studies at the University of Southern California.

Excerpt used by permission from Heaven (McSweeney’s, 2020). Copyright © 2020 by Emerson Whitney.

Quarantine Reads: The Secret Garden

In this series, writers present the books getting them through these strange times. 

I can’t be the only one who’s been having trouble focusing on books lately. Everything feels either depressingly dark or depressingly light; I don’t want to be reminded of the news, but how can I care about anything else? I’ve tossed aside several novels in the last week. Only The Secret Garden has held my attention. Only The Secret Garden takes place in a universe I recognize.

When I was a teenager and my little cousin Anya was a toddler, I indoctrinated her into loving Agnieszka Holland’s 1993 film adaptation. I dusted off my beloved videotape (it came with a free locket necklace) and played it for her. Then I played it again, and again and again and again, until the two of us could act it out from memory. Anya was always the heroine, Mary Lennox; I played all the other characters, Peter Sellers–style. One perk of having a cousin twelve years younger than you: it gives you an extra window of time—long after you’re supposedly too old—to play make-believe.

My little cousin Anya is not little anymore; she was about to graduate from college before, you know, all this. Now she’s staying with family in Connecticut. She’s just a half hour drive from my New Haven apartment, but of course we can’t visit each other. We’ve been texting a lot. Yesterday I awoke to this text from her:

Going to get through this by going back to doing Secret Garden re-enactments. Honestly, it’s a parallel situation—I have to leave home because of a contagious illness and live out in the country, finding hope and new life as spring blooms—only issue is I wouldn’t be able to hang out w Dickon because of social distancing [plant emoji]

As a substitute for the hug I wish I could give her, I’ve decided to reread The Secret Garden. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel is available for free on Project Gutenberg, so you can read it, too.

I should warn you that it may not take your mind off things. As Anya correctly recalled, the plot is set in motion by an epidemic. The 1993 film changes it to an earthquake, which is more cinematic but (I now think) less harrowing than the novel’s opening chapter, titled “There Is No One Left”:

The cholera had broken out in its most fatal form and people were dying like flies…. There was panic on every side, and dying people in all the bungalows.

During the confusion and bewilderment of the second day Mary hid herself in the nursery and was forgotten by everyone. Nobody thought of her, nobody wanted her, and strange things happened of which she knew nothing. Mary alternately cried and slept through the hours.

…When she awakened she lay and stared at the wall. The house was perfectly still. She had never known it to be so silent before.

With brutal swiftness, nine-year-old Mary is orphaned, removed from colonial India—the only home she’s ever known—and taken to stay with a distant relative in England. But the pathos of her plight is complicated by the novel’s constant, peculiar insistence on her personal unpleasantness. We’re informed in the opening passage that Mary is “as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived,” and hardly a paragraph goes by without a reminder that she is “disagreeable,” “a self-absorbed child,” “spoiled and pettish.” Back in India, “Mary had always slapped her Ayah in the face when she was angry”; in England, she demands to be dressed by servants “as if she had neither hands nor feet of her own.” Upon learning that a servant girl expected her to be ethnically Indian, Mary throws a fit and screams, “You thought I was a native! You dared! You don’t know anything about natives! They are not people—they’re servants who must salaam to you.”

(I’ve occasionally seen The Secret Garden criticized for colonial attitudes, a complaint that has always puzzled me. The novel has aged poorly in several ways, but I don’t know how you could miss the message that colonialism is a soul-eroding abomination, even for those who benefit from it.)

Mary is terribly alone at Misselthwaite Manor. The house has a hundred rooms, most of them “shut up and locked”; outside is nothing but windswept Yorkshire moor, and Mary feels “so horribly lonely and far away from everything she understood.” Sometimes she hears a voice in the walls—it sounds, she thinks, like “someone crying.” The servants tell her it’s only the wind, and indeed Mary can “scarcely distinguish it from the wind itself.” But late at night, the sobs are unmistakable. She finally goes investigating and finds a little boy, Colin, hidden away in a secret room. They mistake each other, at first, for “a ghost or a dream.” Neither is sure the other is real. They can hardly believe they’re not alone.

(My downstairs neighbor is sick. All day and all night, through the floor, I can hear her coughing. I never knew the floor was so thin.)

Colin has been hidden away, it turns out, because he’s chronically ill; his father doesn’t want to be reminded of him. “No one believes I shall live to grow up,” Colin tells Mary (“as if he was so accustomed to the idea that it had ceased to matter to him at all”). Like Mary, Colin is both a victim of tragedy and a monster of privilege, and Mary is reminded uncomfortably of herself as she watches him abuse his servants. “When she had had a headache in India,” she reflects, “she had done her best to see that everybody else also had a headache or something quite as bad. And she felt she was quite right; but of course now she felt that Colin was quite wrong.”

What could have been a saccharine story—a little girl discovers a secret garden, makes friends, and helps a disabled boy learn to walk—has uneasy psychological stakes. You might even call them spiritual stakes. Tending a secret garden is meaningful work that teaches Mary about human connection, but her character growth goes deeper than that. She comes to understand, I think, that her former life was steeped in evil.

(Evil is a heavy word to hang on anything, let alone a little girl, and just a few weeks ago it wouldn’t have occurred to me to use it. But some things—violence, exploitation, dehumanization—are evil. We shouldn’t be afraid to say so.)

I used to consider the second half of The Secret Garden inferior to the first. As I recalled it, Mary was increasingly sidelined from the narrative until she disappeared altogether, replaced by Colin as protagonist. This unexpected point-of-view shift always frustrated me. Why should Colin’s story take priority over Mary’s? Was it just because he was a boy?

On this reread, however, I realized it’s not so simple. Mary does recede into the background, but the shift isn’t a neat swap from Mary’s perspective to Colin’s perspective. It’s a shift from Mary’s perspective to multiple perspectives. The first half of the novel is omniscient but locked into Mary’s mind, almost claustrophobically so. There are times, in fact, when the narrator doesn’t sound omniscient at all, but more like the dissociated interior monologue of a depressed person:

She had begun to wonder why she had never seemed to belong to anyone even when her father and mother had been alive. Other children seemed to belong to their fathers and mothers, but she had never seemed to really be anyone’s little girl. She had had servants, and food and clothes, but no one had taken any notice of her. She did not know that this was because she was a disagreeable child; but then, of course, she did not know she was disagreeable.

But as the novel goes on, the narrator’s consciousness expands. It begins to inhabit other points of view. We get to see through the eyes of Colin; his doctor, Dr. Craven; the housekeeper, Mrs. Medlock; the groundskeeper, Ben Weatherstaff; everyone’s first literary crush, local boy Dickon; Dickon’s mother, Mrs. Sowerby; and, in the end, Colin’s reclusive father. There’s even an entire chapter, whimsical and wonderful, that takes the perspective of a wild robin:

One day the robin remembered that when he himself had been made to learn to fly by his parents … he had taken short flights of a few yards and then had been obliged to rest. So it occurred to him that this boy was learning to fly—or rather to walk. He mentioned this to his mate and when he told her that the Eggs would probably conduct themselves in the same way after they were fledged she was quite comforted and even became eagerly interested and derived great pleasure from watching the boy over the edge of her nest—though she always thought that the Eggs would be much cleverer and learn more quickly. But then she said indulgently that humans were always more clumsy and slow than Eggs and most of them never seemed really to learn to fly at all. You never met them in the air or on tree-tops.

The world seems to be getting bigger and fuller, and Mary doesn’t vanish but merely takes her place in it, among all the others. It’s no coincidence, I think, that the shift in perspective occurs right after this monologue from Dickon’s mother:

“When I was at school my jography told as th’ world was shaped like a orange an’ I found out before I was ten that th’ whole orange doesn’t belong to nobody. No one owns more than his bit of a quarter an’ there’s times it seems like there’s not enow quarters to go round. But don’t you—none o’ you—think as you own th’ whole orange or you’ll find out you’re mistaken, an’ you won’t find it out without hard knocks.”

No one owns the whole orange. Everyone has a right to their own bit of a quarter. There’s enough orange to go around—or there can be, if we share.

There’s real beauty in the universe of this book. The garden scenes are ecstatic, charged with a childlike, polymorphous-perverse eroticism:

“See here!” said Dickon. “See how these has pushed up, an’ these an’ these! An’ Eh! Look at these here!”

He threw himself upon his knees and Mary went down beside him. They had come upon a whole clump of crocuses burst into purple and orange and gold. Mary bent her face down and kissed and kissed them.

…They ran from one part of the garden to another and found so many wonders that they were obliged to remind themselves that they must whisper or speak low. He showed her swelling leafbuds on rose branches which had seemed dead. He showed her ten thousand new green points pushing through the mould. They put their eager young noses close to the earth and sniffed its warmed springtime breathing; they dug and pulled and laughed low with rapture until Mistress Mary’s hair was as tumbled as Dickon’s and her cheeks were almost as poppy red as his.

Years ago I read an article that referred to the garden as the “central symbol” of this novel, which is an uncontroversial statement, but the phrasing galled me. The garden is a garden is a garden. As symbols go, springtime is surely the most hackneyed of them all—but springtime, like so many other clichés, is also a stark reality. It’s happening for real outside my window as I write this. The sun is really shining, a real live robin is singing somewhere, and actual daffodils are blooming in the grass beside my stoop. (My downstairs neighbor planted them.)

And over walls and earth and trees and swinging sprays and tendrils the fair green veil of tender little leaves had crept, and in the grass under the trees and the gray urns in the alcoves and here and there everywhere were touches or splashes of gold and purple and white and the trees were showing pink and snow above [Colin’s] head and there were fluttering of wings and faint sweet pipes and humming and scents and scents. And the sun fell warm upon his face like a hand with a lovely touch…

“I shall get well! I shall get well!” he cried out. “Mary! Dickon! I shall get well! And I shall live forever and ever and ever!”

There was a time, once, when I would have scoffed at this passage. Of course Colin isn’t going to live forever—no one does! As if Frances Hodgson Burnett didn’t know that. She had a son who died of tuberculosis when he was sixteen. He’d been dead for twenty years when she wrote The Secret Garden. It’s easy to forget—or it used to be easy to forget—the nearness of death in those days.

Her narrator continues:

One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands alone and throws one’s head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one’s heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun—which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so.

It’s easy, too, to overlook the point of this passage: that this feeling comes “only now and then,” and only “for a moment or so.” Then it’s gone again.

I have one very distinct memory of playing The Secret Garden with Anya. We were acting out the final scene of the movie: the three children are playing blind man’s bluff, and Colin, blindfolded, runs into his father, who doesn’t yet know that Colin can walk. Colin runs his hands across his father’s face, puzzled, before removing his blindfold. Since I was playing all the non-Mary characters, this scene was my time to shine; I was a high school theater kid, so I really hammed it up. As Colin, I closed my eyes and ran my fingers breathlessly through the air, tracing the shape of an invisible person, my mouth open in amazement. I dragged it out so long, toddler Anya lost her patience. “Hurry up!” she yelled from the sidelines, and I laughed—I’m laughing now, remembering it—because I’d been so wrapped up in myself that I forgot (how could I forget?) that she was in the room.

 

Frankie Thomas is the author of “The Showrunner,” which received special mention in the 2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her writing has also appeared in The Toast, The Hairpin, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. She holds an M.F.A. in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 

Return, Investment, Return

Cross section of plant stem under the microscope [adobe stock]

“I was wakened from my dream of the ruined world by the sound of rain falling slowly onto the dry earth of my place in time.” —Wendell Berry

Spring has no reverence for pandemic. The world is all at once shutting down and opening up, the velocity of change in opposite directions creating a vacuum for each of us.

Last night my nephew was born, and I can’t help but think that he opened into the middle of history.

Nine days before, my cousin Daniel’s body shut down. He had struggled for much of the last decade with addiction and depression. I had been an emotional support for him, perhaps since childhood; we were close our whole lives. He was thirty-three.

My partner and I, and our two young daughters, grow most of our food for the year in the garden, and raise chickens and trout. We heat with wood from the forest in which we live, half an hour from the nearest small town, and have no internet at home. Before this week, we might have taken the phrase “shelter in place” as spiritual instruction. Last week, just before gatherings were prohibited, we traveled to a metropolis for the funeral where, to prevent further disaster, we tried our hardest not to hug Daniel’s parents and sister.

My life decisions, like those of many, are attempts at joy. Some of the choices my partner and I have been able to make are motivated by the desire to disentangle ourselves from systems whose interconnections rely on hidden suffering. But my hope, and I think the greater truth, is that our decisions are also motivated toward interconnection, toward joy.

Each of us who pooled our tears at the funeral last week is now in an isolated cell. Each of us in the United States now is in a cell, and countless of us the world over. Prisoners live in cells, but so do monastics. So does all of biological life, isolated and interconnected into the formation of organisms: apple, deer, human being. Cells are discrete but they are not separate; there is the larger body.

The physical world escalates its refrain: nothing is abstract. Neither virus nor spiritual truth. The garden and woods have been for me a kind of proof of what Thich Nhat Hanh would call interbeing. I believed in interbeing before I depended directly on a garden, but in the garden, the visible proof is delightful: the seed contains the melon, the melon contains the seed. My life is made, quite physically, of the melon—and the apple, and the deer that I eat—of the life of the garden and woods. Without them, I have no body. Without my body, my children have no bodies, no gestation, no milk; nothing to eat. This is true everywhere. The garden and the woods make the lesson slow enough, clear enough for me to grasp. Likewise, pregnancy and nursing clarify patiently that my partner, children, land, and I, comprise one another. The slow gestation and weaning of a child—a body inside a body, a body in need of a body—make real the questions, Where is it that I end, and the child begins? Where do I begin? And you?

We are interconnected. Right now, we are interconnected by a virus: infinite filaments between us made apparent, connections which are tethers, which are lifelines. Because I’m not abstract, my cell walls are vulnerable, semipermeable—they are able to give and receive.

Perhaps I love poetry because it joins in the world’s refrain: nothing is abstract. Every memory and feeling is contained by something. It is the fulcrum of metaphor: to relate the intangible to the tangible, the unknown to the known. And it’s the business of the human brain. I think “patriotism” and I see something. “Fear” is always hitched to what flashes behind my eyes. I have to keep reminding myself, in this strange time, that I don’t know anything. The brain’s first instinct links experience with expectation, and everything I learn this month hitches to something I think I already know, and takes off.

I love poetry because it translates the abstract to the concrete, the universal to the specific, and then translates it all back again. Poetry locates a specific person in a body, connected, necessarily, to all bodies in all places. It’s a signal between cells that connects the larger body, enables it to feel.

The four of us made it home from the funeral to our place to shelter in. We are here now, planting, working, and watching the garden and the woods, which do not shut down, which still bear investment and return, just as humans do in one another.

It’s from here I send this bottle to the waves. If there is a message in it, it’s that, from here, I see systems that still function. I can see them. The seed, the soil, the streams and springs, the lives of animals and plants that have evolved in response to one another’s needs. They are the systems we are all depending on, from our disparate cells, to provide the still-unbelievable miracle that is food, the need that is water. These systems are everywhere, no matter how visible. They are larger and deeper than any of the ones we are watching fall apart, and we’re integral to them—semipermeable, vulnerable: able to give and receive. Our relationship to these systems, like any relationship that endures, is both responsibility and gift. They are still carrying us. We can still let them.

Daniel is good company to me in all this—I know, I know, no present tense to apply here, and perhaps no “him.” And to whom is it a surprise that grammar’s structure does not match reality’s? Grief is a cell. But Daniel’s company has been real and healing; he laughs often at the things I show him. And this raises for me the question of how much the Daniel I know—the Daniel I sat and spoke with—has always been a Daniel within my consciousness. Now, there’s no pretending otherwise. If we all exist like this—in part in the world and in part in one another—then I want to try to take good care of everyone I love from right here. I want to call them all (I’ve been doing some of that. I do have a phone). But, more than that, I want to allow myself the full force of my love, of their individuated loves for me, right here in the place where I shelter them.

As I write, my children run in and out of the room dressed in various states of pajamas and tutus, and it’s only reasonable they should; I am working in their bedroom. My first book, published earlier this week, lies mostly dormant, along with the work of so many people on so many things. My nephew’s early induction kept him only briefly in an otherwise needed hospital. My partner and I are concerned for our tenuous jobs. Life is not without its complications.

I will just keep loving Daniel. That does not change. The hand sanitizer he stockpiled now protects his sister and parents in a time I’m glad he did not have to navigate. I will keep loving the people in my house, full of need and noise. We are together and will not always be. Certainly we will not always be in these forms; the two- and five-year-old faces are not here long at all. I am looking at them with eyes that will not always be able to look. They can look now. The calendar, like the jet trails, clearing, everything letting go of where it was going, for a moment.

Here it is morning, and raining. On the other side of this pandemic, there will be celebration in events full of relief and gratitude. We will have much to share with one another. In the crevasse of it, we feel our way through the dark. We dwell with those within us. We keep one another warm until we can climb out. There is so much to receive and give, so much living here, in our cells.

 

Leah Naomi Green is the author of  The More Extravagant Feast (out this month from Graywolf Press), which was selected by Li-Young Lee for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches English and environmental studies at Washington and Lee University, and lives in the Shenandoah Mountains where she, her partner, and their daughters homestead and grow food. 

Poets on Couches: Shane McCrae Reads Lucie Brock-Broido

In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances.

 

“Periodic Table of Ethereal Elements”

by Lucie Brock-Broido

Issue no. 154 (Spring 2000)

for Harry Ford

I was not ready for your form to be cold

Ever. Even in life

You did not inhabit, necessarily, a form,

But a mind of

Rarer liquid element. It had not occurred to me

You would take

Leave and it will be winter from now on, not only

Here, in the ordinary,

But there too, in the extraordinary elegance

Of calcium and finery

And loss. Keep me

Tethered here, breathtakingly awkward and alive.

If you had a psyche it was not known to me.

If you had a figure it would be heavy ivory.

If you were a man, you would be

An autumn of black carriages filled red with leaves

From sycamore; trees,

Not scattering. I was not ready for such

Eanhward and unease.

Good-bye to the imperium, the rinsing wind. You, cold

As God and the great

Glassed castle in which I’ve lived, simply

Now a house.

A girl ago, a girlhood gone like a vial of ether

Thrown on fire—just

A little jump of flame, like grief, or,

Like a penicillin that has lost its skill at killing

Off, it then is gone.

 

Shane McCrae’s most recent books are The Gilded Auction Block and Sometimes I Never Suffered, both of which are published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

Staff Picks: Angels, IUDs, and Books in Threes

John Prine.

The first line of John Prine’s song “Angel from Montgomery” is a sentence that captures the listener with its simple introduction: “I am an old woman named after my mother.” The song played many times during the Louisville-based radio station WFPK’s all-day tribute to Prine, who died Tuesday at age seventy-three. During this airwave vigil, strangers’ voices would speak through the warm fuzz of their cell or landline connection, often to share a memory alongside their song request. One man had been the sound guy at a Prine show in the eighties, meeting him for a moment backstage, just long enough to clock how stoned he was. Another had met him briefly while standing one urinal over in the bathroom at the Bluebird Café in Nashville. A man remembered his daughter calling late one Saturday night during her freshman year of college, tipsy and in tears because nobody at the party she had gone to wanted to listen to her music and she missed home—he stayed up and listened to Prine’s albums with her, letting the music connect them across the miles. I let the station play, and the songs unspooled in randomness. I probably could have opened Spotify, pressed shuffle play on the artist page for Prine, and achieved much the same effect. But this wasn’t the algorithm steering. It was a chorus of stories befitting the man it paid tribute to. —Lauren Kane 

Awash with quarantine anxiety, I’m finding it hard to engage with anything that requires much thought. I stare despondently at the stack of literature on my bedside table instead of reading it. Emails from the Criterion Channel taunt me. Galleries that I would normally pop into after work now inundate my inbox with promises of virtual openings and exhibitions. In this brave new world of solitary artistic engagement, it’s tough to know where to start. This Wednesday afternoon, however, I received a note from DC Moore Gallery that seemed distinctly different. It was the first installment of the space’s From the Studio newsletter—personal notes from DC Moore artists on life and work in social isolation. The inaugural letter is written by Eric Aho, a Vermont-based painter who most recently exhibited at the gallery in 2018. This isn’t an invitation into the sterile space of an online gallery but rather into the artist’s country home. Aho takes us on a morning walk to his studio across the Saxtons River Falls. The impasto and the lively blue greens of the paintings he shares are a direct reflection of the craggy, wet landscape. “We can joke that life in Vermont is a form of social distancing under normal circumstances,” Aho writes, but “something is different … Time feels different.” The second installment, sent today, is an update from Robert Kushner, the bright pinks and lilacs of his paintings jumping off large, Matisse-like canvases. These notes read like long letters from old friends, a welcome gesture in times of isolation. —Elinor Hitt

 

Still from Johnny Guitar.

 

Johnny Guitar (1954) is the world’s first and perhaps only work of art. This Western, directed by Nicholas Ray, is Johnny Guitar’s in name alone: it is possessed, wholly, by Joan Crawford. Crawford plays Vienna, a saloon owner in the windy desert, waiting for the railroad to be laid as disappointing men pass through—among them Johnny, her ex. Vienna runs a Wild West saloon like Joan Crawford running a Wild West saloon; it is at once an immaculate impression and a radical invention. She delivers every line as if she were trying to summon the dead and moves through space with the authority and precision of a queen on a chess board. This film is only tangentially of this world. Everything is improbable, from the decor and the vivid colors to how perfect each element is. The film is as camp as Joan Crawford playing piano beneath a chandelier as she awaits a mob—which is to say it is camp. Nominally, there is, as in some other films, heterosexual lust, though here it is as vague and played out as it should be; it evaporates before the feelings between Vienna and Emma (Mercedes McCambridge), an off-camera enmity so ardent it was hammed down for the screen. Emma rallies a mob to drive Vienna out of town and claim her land; her torrid hatred for Vienna is all-consuming, electric. Johnny Guitar has a liberating disinterest in sublimation. In its brazen strangeness, the film jettisons Western clichés and sentimentality for an unreal theater of desire. Johnny, drunk and oozing self-pity, asks Vienna, “How many men have you forgotten?” Vienna moves closer, then answers with a bull’s-eye: “As many women as you’ve remembered.” Without breaking his gaze, she flings Johnny’s glass against the wall. —Chris Littlewood

After having my own IUD-related health difficulties last year, I picked up Caren Beilin’s Blackfishing the IUD, published this past October by Wolfman Books, in the hopes that I would find in it some kind of mental companionship regarding the anxieties and questions I still find myself dwelling on. Beilin offers that and more: Blackfishing the IUD is an elegant and angry riposte to the recent widespread popularity of the birth control method among millennial women, as well as a chronicle of the health complications that many have consequently endured. My own experience was mild compared to those recounted here, in chapters that alternate between real women’s testimonies found on the many IUD-related forums online and Beilin’s own painful experience with the Paragard (which triggered rheumatoid arthritis for her at age thirty-three), as well as her meditations on philosophy, art, books, academia, writing, and gender. This is a book that I know I’ll pass along. —Rhian Sasseen

At various points of conflict in Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, Cromwell wonders why he left Italy. Me, too. “If I had stayed in Italy I could have had a house in the hills, with white walls and a red-tiled roof. A colonnade shading its entrance, shuttered balconies against the heat; orchards, flowery walks, fountains and a vineyard; a library with frescoes … At the Frescobaldi villa the girl came every morning with her basket of herbs. You struck the jars of oil as you passed, and the note told you how full they were.” By the end of The Mirror and the Light, book three of Mantel’s outrageously generous series, we’ve been at Cromwell’s finely wrought sleeve for nearly two thousand pages, and we have plenty of regrets and big dreams of our own. Italy is where it all began. Thomas moved from sharp kitchen boy to sharp banker’s clerk to consigliere to maker of death. I’m sure there are few books that have better lessons about human greed and desire than these, though reviews for the final installment have been less laudatory than those for the previous two. I think Colin Burrow’s critique in the London Review of Books is a particularly cheap shot. He suggests Mantel is overawed by the beauty clinging to the crust of the Tudor court. It is Cromwell, though, who allows his eyes to mete out the cost of a weave, the lay of tile, the drop of a pendant, and the worth and value that humans have learned to stack against the dark and the cold. Heaven for Cromwell isn’t only a list of figures in his favor; it is a stack of figures on fine paper that amount to a very fine orchard in a choice bit of countryside. My family and friends teased me that there couldn’t be any spoilers about the end of the series. My beloved especially enjoyed the joke that Cromwell of course wasn’t still alive now—in 2020. But I couldn’t countenance the loss of such a fine head. If only he’d stayed in Italy, perhaps he’d be calling in to the BBC even now, some dark Arthur, in our hour of need, taking press conferences, arranging mask shipments, and fixing up a trade deal or two to keep the national coffers in fine health—with just a little skimmed off the top, as befits such a loyal knight of the realm. —Julia Berick

 

Hilary Mantel. © Els Zweerink.

A Story in One Sentence

To showcase the variety of the short stories published in the Spring issue, we asked the six writers to select a single sentence that marked the moment they first knew what story they were writing. All but one played ball: Jesse Ball could not choose one. Luckily for Jesse, Andrew Martin highlighted two sentences. Read on for discussions of narrative slipperiness, places of disjuncture, and happy things.

This story was stuck in my head for months, so by the time I started writing it, I felt like I knew more about it than anyone needs to know about anything. Drafting is often a sweaty, anxious process for me, but there are always surprises that make it worthwhile. I wanted the story to have a slippery quality to it, but nailing down the narrative voice was a series of small discoveries. Writing the opening, and writing this sentence in particular, is maybe the moment when the story and its somewhat capricious voice slid into proper focus for me. —Senaa Ahmad, “Let’s Play Dead” 

 

 

I don’t feel my way into a story with sentences but with setting and plot. I wasn’t sure what was at the moral core of the story, though, until the line “sometimes furious there was a place on the earth he didn’t belong.” —Rebecca Makkai, “A Story for Your Daughters, a Story for Your Sons”

 

 

I initially thought I was going to explore this incident that happened in a neighboring town back home involving an elderly woman and her young-man neighbor. And I knew I wanted to start with the woman, Clara, at her kitchen sink, washing dishes and looking out her window. But I had no idea the story would unfurl like it did, and I ended up discovering the story wasn’t even about the incident after all. I love a good surprise. —Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, “An Unspoken”

 

 

I think it was this pair of sentences that made me realize what the story was about, or at least how it would move forward. I think this was the moment where, to use the classic Gornick formulation, it went from being a situation (a fractious book club) to a story (a member of fractious book club has a hopeless crush on another member). —Andrew Martin, “Childhood, Boyhood, Youth”

 

 

I often find myself writing from this place of disjuncture. The friction between what we wish we felt and what we actually feel can make a story light up in my mind. —Clare Sestanovich, “By Design”

 

 

The text appears by itself as itself. All of it … is it. The earlier words appeared before the later words. In a sense, the early words are not connected to the later words by their own commitment. It is the commitment, as a tale proceeds, of the later words to the earlier words that creates the work. The first sentence of a story therefore could be the first sentence of many stories, et cetera. I wrote this one in the State Library in Berlin. I sat down and there it was—a happy thing. —Jesse Ball, “Diary of a Country Mouse”

 

Dive into the Spring issue.

I Want You

Originally serialized between 1996 and 1999, Blutch’s comic Mitchum plays host to the legendary French cartoonist’s virtuosic range. Modulating from harried pen work on one page to lush, blocky tableaux on the next, he sorts through the surreal stew of his subconscious in dreamlike episodes, mixing in bits of American pop culture along the way—including, at one point, a sinister, lascivious Jimmy Stewart lurking in the shroud of a detective’s trench coat. “Mitchum was my laboratory at a certain point,” Blutch said in a 2016 interview with the journalist Paul Gravett. “Every kind of experiment was permitted. Their success or failure were secondary.” This week, New York Review Comics released the first complete English translation of Mitchum. An excerpt appears below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blutch (born Christian Hincker) is an award-winning, highly influential French cartoonist. He has published almost two dozen books since his 1988 debut in the legendary avant-garde magazine Fluide Glacial, including Le petit Christian, So Long, Silver Screen, and Peplum. His illustrations have appeared in Les Inrockuptibles, Libération, and The New Yorker.

From Mitchum , by Blutch, translated from the French by Matt Madden, English lettering by Dean Sudarsky. Images courtesy of New York Review Comics.

Poets on Couches: Timothy Donnelly

In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances.

“Rain Moving In”

by John Ashbery

Issue no. 90 (Winter 1983)

The blackboard is erased in the attic

And the wind turns up the light of the stars,

Sinewy now. Someone will find out, someone will know.

And if somewhere in this great planet

The truth is discovered, a patch of it, dried, glazed by the sun,

It will just hang on, in its own infamy, humility. No one

Will be better for it, but things can’t get any worse.

Just keep playing, mastering as you do the step

Into disorder this one meant. Don’t you see

It’s all we can do? Meanwhile, great fires

Arise, as of haystacks aflame. The dial had been set

And that’s ominous, but all your graciousness in living

Conspires with it, now that this is our home:

A place to be from, and have people ask about.

 

Timothy Donnelly’s most recent publications include The Problem of the Many (Wave, 2019) and The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010), winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, he is currently director of poetry in the writing program at Columbia University School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with his family.

The Paris Review’s Poetry Crossword

Jigsaw puzzles are sold out around the country, but here’s an absolutely free, no-shipping-required, Paris Review crossword puzzle. Celebrate Poetry Month by taking your mind off the world. Can you find all the poets clue-ed from our archives? Play below, or print it out by clicking here.

Adrienne Raphel is the author of Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures With Crosswords and The Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them.

All Love, All Beauty

Kay Ryan examines a favorite Philip Larkin poem.

Philip Larkin.

Dublinesque

Down stucco sidestreets,

Where light is pewter

And afternoon mist

Brings lights on in shops

Above race-guides and rosaries,

A funeral passes.

The hearse is ahead,

But after there follows

A troop of streetwalkers

In wide flowered hats,

Leg-of-mutton sleeves,

And ankle-length dresses.

There is an air of great friendliness,

As if they were honouring

One they were fond of;

Some caper a few steps,

Skirts held skilfully (Someone claps time),

And of great sadness also.

As they wend away

A voice is heard singing

Of Kitty, or Katy,

As if the name meant once

All love, all beauty.

—Philip Larkin

This poem sends feeling down a narrow channel, and you don’t even know it’s feeling until it explodes in a delicious mist at the end. It looks like a lot of scenery, local Dublin color, first the “sidestreets” with their “pewter” light from the “afternoon mist” that causes the lights to be on in the poky shops of a particularly stock-Irish description “above race-guides and rosaries.” Larkin’s art is on intensely quiet display: so much atmosphere is generated in so few words. It’s gray, it’s low, it’s mean, it’s tight, and something is coming. Nice to start with that preposition, “Down stucco sidestreets.” Each element moves into the next: street>light>mist>light bulbs hanging over “race-guides and rosaries.” It feels cozy, damped down, dim. A channel, but for what? Larkin is so good at creating motion in a poem.

A funeral! This is a tiny poem, so all of this happens before it registers. But if one were to anticipate what kind of funeral this would turn out to be, you’d expect it to be … narrow and gray. Which is just what it isn’t. It’s loose and colorful, filled with warmth and exchanges, capers, clapping, song: “A troop of streetwalkers … honouring / One they were fond of.” Larkin gives us their dress, which feels so flowery and flouncy and animated, the opposite of the narrow street—“wide flowered hats, / Leg-of-mutton sleeves, / And ankle-length dresses.” Consider this attention to dress that sounds anachronistic even for the time. These women sound like Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke, attractive like that. And there’s a gang of them, they are their own self-approving community, progressing down the streets after the hearse, flamboyantly what they are, warm, united, and sad.

The poem moves to the interior so seamlessly. The static streets are invaded—the Dublin mist is rent—by this gaudy funeral. First the women’s clothes, then their women’s capers. Things are getting more and more animated. The poem brims with warmth by the end of stanza three, and stanza four brings it home through a single exquisitely baffled detail, a specific so specific that it becomes unspecific: are they singing of “Kitty, or Katy”?

This stanza is a marvel. First notice how cinematic it is. This whole poem has been movie-like; the passage of the procession into and then out of the frame of the poem.

In this last stanza we don’t see them at all, just the disembodied voice “heard singing,” just the trailing voice raised in song. That means we have come to Larkin’s real stage, always: the pure interior. This place tends to be troubled when he gets there, but in “Dublinesque” it is incredibly sweet. Maybe because Larkin has watched like a camera, he hasn’t got his usual gloom spiral going. It’s a sound camera, and doesn’t quite catch the name: Kitty, or Katy. And now the relaxation of this camera discipline: “As if the name meant once / All love, all beauty.”

Enough cannot be said about this ending. Let me point out first the parallels in the rhythm and single instance in the poem of rhyme: of Kitty, or Katy / all love, all beauty.

The unrhymed poem ends, then, with a rhyme, and it opens on two of the great themes in all poetry: love and beauty. It invokes all love, all beauty. And guess what? It works; we feel the tide.

Because Larkin has succeeded in narrowing the opening to the point of blur. Kitty or Katy. This is so specific to this Dublin moment that it isn’t at all specific. Exact identity is lost as love and beauty are lost except absolutely available at the same fuzzy moment. First Larkin goes to the trouble to create a rich moving picture; then he erases it, or at least erases the object of it, Kitty or Katy, then he claps on the two biggest abstractions in English poetry: love and beauty. And it works like a charm.

This is one of those moments when everything coalesces. Everything is available because everything’s gone: no one is there; the street is empty.

I want to think about the genius of “Kitty, or Katy.” Everything depends upon this dislocation, this paradoxical exact focus of all love, all beauty.

It’s an exact focus that can’t find its mark and is therefore slippery and silky word-mist. The focus is baffled and ramified; it’s tiny. We don’t know if it’s Kitty or Katy and we can’t settle. Now Larkin can dump whatever he wants into us because we are between places; that’s exactly where we are: between. It’s perfect for poetry that has to get into the cracks, has to find and work the cracks. There has to be some way to let in the dazzle, to perfume the works.

This poem succeeds because it’s short and brisk; the deep dwelling occurs at parade speed. The parade of bright flowery streetwalkers becomes a gesture, taken all together, a single surprise flowery sweep across pewter. They are the same gesture that Frost’s crow makes in knocking snow onto Frost and giving his heart a change of mood. They bring a gift, then; they change the poet. Larkin is left in the street with the fumes of all love, all beauty.

 

Kay Ryan was appointed the Library of Congress’s sixteenth poet laureate in 2008. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and other periodicals. She has been the recipient of numerous accolades, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. Read her Art of Poetry interview.

Excerpted from Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose , by Kay Ryan. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.