Traveller_Levin's Blog

Poor Devil

CHARLES BAXTER AUG 1 2005, 12:00 PM ET

My ex-wife and I are sitting on the floor of what was once our living room. The room is empty now except for us. This place is the site of our marital decline, and we are performing a ritual cleansing on it. I've been washing the hardwood with a soapy disinfectant solution, using a soft brush and an old mop, working toward the front window, which has a view of the street. My hands smell of soap and bleach. We're trying to freshen the place up for the new owners. The terms of sale do not require this kind of scouring, but somehow we have brought ourselves here to perform it.

We're both battered from the work: Emily fell off a kitchen stool this morning while washing the upstairs windows, and I banged my head against a drainpipe when I was cleaning under the bathroom sink. When I heard her drop to the floor, I yelled upstairs to ask if she was okay, and she yelled back down to say that she was, but I didn't run up there to check.

When my wife and I were in the process of splitting up, the house itself participated. Lamps dismounted from their tables at the slightest touch; pictures plummeted from the wall, the glass in their frames shattering, whenever anyone walked past them. Destruction abounded. You couldn't touch anything in here without breaking it. The air in the living room acquired a poisonous residue from the things we had said to each other. I sometimes thought I could discern a malignant green mist, invisible to everyone else, floating just above the coffee table. We excreted malice, the two of us. The house was haunted with pain. You felt it the minute you walked in the door.

Dreams

By Raymond Carver

My wife is in the habit of telling me her dreams.

I go downstairs to take her some coffee and juice and sit in a chair beside the bed while she wakes up and moves her hair away from her face. She has the look that people waking up have, but she also has this look in her eyes of returning from somewhere.

"Well?" I say. "What'd you dream?"                               

Only you

 by Amy Bloom

Marie, who is not a very sexual person, who cannot forgive her body or its middle-aged alterations, gets almost all her needs met at The Cut Above, Alvin Myerson's beauty salon. When Alvin opened the shop, some friends told him to change his name to Andre or even to Alain. He couldn't be bothered and put his licence, with ALVIN ROY MYERSON printed in large type, in the very front of the salon. 'I traffic in illusion,' he said, 'not in lies.' Marie, who cherishes her sons and loves and resents her husband, likes Alvin. She thinks they have something in common. All of Marie's women friends seem happy enough with their lives, those who aren't come over to Marie's house to make eyes at her handsome husband, who sometimes makes eyes back at them. Marie knows what attracts Henry and it isn't women like her friends. They are all too maternal, too dark, too much like Marie for her to worry about. 

Blues Ain’t No Mockin Bird 

Toni Cade Bambara

The puddle had frozen over, and me and Cathy went stompin in it. The twins from next door, Tyrone and Terry, were swingin so high out of sight we forgot we were waitin our turn on the tire. Cathy jumped up and came down hard on her heels and started tap-dancin. And the frozen patch splinterin every which way underneath kinda spooky. “Looks like a plastic spider web,” she said. “A sort of weird spider, I guess, with many mental problems.” But really it looked like the crystal paperweight Granny kept in the parlor. She was on the back porch, Granny was, making the cakes drunk. The old ladle dripping rum into the Christmas tins, like it used to drip maple syrup into the pails when we lived in the Judsons’ woods, like it poured cider into the vats when we were on the Cooper place, like it used to scoop buttermilk and soft cheese when we lived at the dairy. 

"Go tell that man we ain’t a bunch of trees.” 

“Ma’am?” 

BUTTERFLY DREAMS

Beatrice Lamwaka

Labalpiny read out your name on Mega FM. This was an answerto our daily prayer. We have listened to the programme every dayfor five years. You and ten other children had been rescued bythe soldiers from the rebels in Sudan. For a minute we thoughtwe heard it wrong. We waited as Labalpiny re-read the names. Hementioned Ma’s name. Our village, Alokolum. There could notbe any other Lamunu but you.

During the last five years, we had become part of the string ofparents who listened to Mega FM. Listening and waiting for thenames of their loved ones. We sat close to the radio every day.Our hearts thumped every time we heard Lamunu or Alokolum.Without saying words for one hour and each day we sighed afterthe programme. When the days turned into years, we prayedmore often. Your name seems to have disappeared and ourchance of seeing you faded. We waited. We bought Evereadybatteries to keep the radio going.

It’s Because We’re So Poor

by Juan Rulfo

translated from the Spanish by Ilan Stavans

Everything’s going from bad to worse here. Last week Aunt Jacinta died, and on Saturday, after we buried her and the sadness began to fade away, it started raining like crazy. This upset my father since the entire barley harvest was drying in the sun shed. The downpour started suddenly, in great waves of water, giving us no time to stow even a handful; the only thing everyone who was at home at the time could do was to huddle under the shed and watch as the cold water fell from the sky and burned the yellow barley we had just harvested.

And just yesterday, my sister Tacha’s twelfth birthday, we found out that the cow my father had given her for her saint’s day had been swept down the river.

The Blind Dog

R. K. Narayan

IT was not a very impressive or high-class dog ; it was one of those commonplace dogs one sees everywhere, colour of white and dust, tail mutilated at a young age by God knows whom, born in the street, and bred on the leavings and garbage of the market-place. He had spotty eyes and undistinguished carriage and needless pugnacity. Before he was two years old he had earned the scars of a hundred fights on his body. When he needed rest on hot afternoons he lay curled up under the culvert at the eastern gate of the market. In the evenings he set out on his daily rounds, loafed in the surrounding streets and lanes, engaged himself in skirmishes, picked up edibles on the roadside, and was back at the market gate by nightfall.

This life went on for three years. And then occurred a change in his life. A beggar, blind of both eyes, appeared at the market gate. An old woman led him up there early in the morning, seated him at the gate, and came up again at midday with some food, gathered his coins, and took him home at night.

The dog was sleeping near by. He was stirred by the smell of food. He got up, came out of his shelter, and stood before the blind man, wagging his tail and gazing expectantly at the bowl, as he was eating his sparse meal. The blind man swept his arms about and asked : " Who is there ? " At which the dog went up and licked his hand. The blind man stroked its coat gently tail to ear and said : " What a beauty you are. Come with me " He threw a handful of food which the dog ate gratefully. It was perhaps an auspicious moment for starting a friendship. They met every day there, and the dog cut off much of its rambling to sit up beside the blind man and watch him receive alms morning to evening. In course of time observing him, the dog understood that the passers-by must give a coin, and whoever went away without dropping a coin was chased by the dog ; he tugged the edge of their clothes by his teeth and pulled them back to the old man at the gate and let go only after something was dropped in his bowl.

We Didn’t

Stuart Dybek

We did it in front of the mirror

And in the light. We did it in darkness,

Letters from My Father

by Robert Olen Butler

I looked through the letters my father sent to me in Saigon and I find this: “Dear Fran. How are you? I wish you and your mother were here with me. The weather here is pretty cold this time of year. I bet you would like the cold weather.” At the time, I wondered how he would know such a thing. Cold weather wounded very bad. It was freezing, he said, so I touched the tips of my finger to a piece of ice and I held it there for as long as I could. It hurt very bad and that was after only about a minute. I thought, How could you spend hours and days in weather like that?

It makes no difference that I had misunderstood the cold weather. By the time he finally got me and my mother out of Vietnam, he had moved to a place where it almost never got very cold. The point is that in his letters to me he often said this and that about the weather. It is cold today. It is hot today. Today there are clouds in the sky. Today there are no clouds. What did that have to do with me?

He said “Dear Fran” because my name is Fran. That’s short for Francine and the sound of Fran is something like a Vietnamese name, but it isn’t, really. So I told my friends in Saigon that my name was Tran, which was short for Hon Tran, which means “a kiss on the forehead.” My American father lived in America but my Vietnamese mother and me lived in Saigon, so I was still a Saigon girl. My mother called me Francine, too. She was happy for me to have this name. She said it was not just American, it was also French. But I wanted a name for Saigon and Tran was it.

On the Rainy River 

by Tim O' Brien 

This is one story I've never told before. Not to anyone. Not to my parents, not to my brother or sister, not even to my wife. To go into it, I've always thought, would only cause embarrassment for all of us, a sudden need to be elsewhere, which is the natural response to a confession. Even now, I'll admit, the story makes me squirm. For more than twenty years I've had to live with it, feeling the shame, trying to push it away, and so by this act of remembrance, by putting the facts down on paper, I'm hoping to relieve at least some of the pressure on my dreams. Still, it's a hard story to tell. All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit. Certainly that was my conviction back in the summer of 1968. Tim O'Brien: a secret hero. The Lone Ranger. If the stakes ever became high enough—if the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough—I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside me over the years. Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It was a comforting theory. It dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily courage; it offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the future.

In June of 1968, a month after graduating from Macalester College, I was drafted to fight a war I hated. I was twenty-one years old. Young, yes, and politically naive, but even so the American war in Vietnam seemed to me wrong. Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons. I saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law. The very facts were shrouded in uncertainty: Was it a civil war? A war of national liberation or simple aggression? Who started it, and when, and why? What really happened to the USS Maddox on that dark night in the Gulf of Tonkin? Was Ho Chi Minh a Communist stooge, or a nationalist savior, or both, or neither? What about the Geneva Accords? What about SEATO and the Cold War? What about dominoes? America was divided on these and a thousand other issues, and the debate had spilled out across the floor of the United States Senate and into the streets, and smart men in pinstripes could not agree on even the most fundamental matters of public policy. The only certainty that summer was moral confusion. It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

In any case those were my convictions, and back in college I had taken a modest stand against the war. Nothing radical, no hothead stuff, just ringing a few doorbells for Gene McCarthy, composing a few tedious, uninspired editorials for the campus newspaper. Oddly, though, it was almost entirely an intellectual activity. I brought some energy to it, of course, but it was the energy that accompanies almost any abstract endeavor; I felt no personal danger; I felt no sense of an impending crisis in my life. Stupidly, with a kind of smug removal that I can't begin to fathom, I assumed that the problems of killing and dying did not fall within my special province.

Flights of Fancy

by William Trevor

IN HER MIDDLE AGE Sarah Machaen had developed the habit of nostalgically slipping back into her childhood. Often, on a bus or at a dinner party, she would find herself caught in a mesh of voices and events that had been real forty years ago. There were summer days in the garden of her father’s rectory, her brothers building another tree-house, her father asleep in a brown-and-orange striped deck-chair. In the cool untidy kitchen she helped her mother to make strawberry cake; she walked with the old spaniel, Dodge, to Mrs. Rolleston’s Post Office and Stores in the village, her shoes dusty as soon as she took a single step. On wet winter afternoon, cosy by the fire in the drawing-room, the family played consequences or card games, or listened to the wireless. The war brought black-out curtains and rationing, and two evacuees.

At forty-seven Sarah Machaen was reconciled to the fact that her plainness wasn’t going to go away. As a child she had believed that growing up would put paid to the face she couldn’t care for, that it would develop prettily in girlhood, as the ugly duckling had developed. “Oh, it’s quite common”, she heard a woman say to her mother. “Many a beauty was as plain as a pikestaff to begin with.” But no beauty dawned in Sarah’s face.

Love in the Tall Grass

by Claire Keegan

Cordelia wakes on a frosty afternoon, watches turf smoke drifting past her bedroom window. She rises, opens the window, and hears the swoon of matinee music in the road. Winter air teems in, on this, the last day of the twentieth century. Cordelia strips naked, pours water from the steel jug, half fills the basin, wrings out the washcloth, and soaps her hands, her face. When the pipes burst in November, she didn’t bother with a plumber, broke the ice in the rain barrel and dipped the bucket down. This water’s cold. She dries herself and dresses, slowly, in a green dress, fastens the chain of a platinum locket around her neck. She bends and laces up her black shoes, knowing that when this day is over, nothing will ever be the same.

In the kitchen she lowers a bantam’s egg into a sauce-pan, puts the kettle on, takes out the stainless-steel eggcup, its tarnished spoon, the stripy mug and plate, and waits until it’s ready. Somewhere somebody is chopping wood. This kettle always sings before it boils. She undoes the bolt and sits beside the shell, salts the egg, spreads butter over bread, pours tea. The wind blows withered leaves across the linoleum. The Burmese believe that wind carrying betel leaves into the bride’s house will bring bad luck and unhappiness to be married couple. So many useless facts rattle like old currency inside Cordelia’s head. The clock on the mantel ticks happily. Not long now, it seems to say. Not long now. When she’s finished, she turns the eggshell upside down, a trick she played in childhood that turned to habit. She takes a handkerchief from her sleeve and wipes her mouth. It is time. She undoes her braid and brushes out her hair. She know no other woman whose hair’s turned white at forty. Finally, she takes her good black coat fromits crook and goes out into what’s left of December. 

It’s been nine years since Cordelia walked this road, a steep road leading to the ocean. Not much has changed. The national school’s been painted, but the Silver Dollar Take-Away is still there and the ice-cream van with its sign well faded, but there’s a light at the Lone Star Guest house and the little souvenir shop’s door is open. She suspects that after the new century’s ushered in, they’ll close again, wait for summer’s tourists and the trampoline kids. She becomes aware of faces behind net curtains. A boy free-wheels past her on his bike. She stops at the chapel, slides back the glass door, blesses herself at the front. The porch smells of wet marble, old stone, damp coats. She used to imagine standing here in a wedding dress with her father giving her away.