HOW THERE WERE BRIDGES by Meagan Arthur
How I said, we’ve seen these same bridges. How it was dark. We’re driving in circles, I said. We wound the mountain roads away from your parents’ cabin, the yellow dashes in the middle of the black flashing by underneath us. How you didn’t say anything. The dashes flashed by like a treaty. How you turned the brights on and off, on and off, every time a car passed, which wasn’t often. How again we came upon the same fork – two bridges, splitting different ways over the river, one a little bigger than the other. One with a tunnel made of rusting metal, the other tunneling through the mountain. It was dark. But I could tell. We’d been here before.
How I was swimming in that creek. Years ago, before the bridges. When we met, I was in that creek feeling like nothing. How I flew to Louisiana. For my friend’s wedding. How I flew on a plane and took pills to keep from looking down. How everyone else came to the wedding in pairs. I took the pills so I wouldn’t have to see how far up the plane was. I was there alone, me and the creek. The pills had worn off. Which was why I was swimming. Everyone else was somewhere else, in pairs, not swimming, wearing stiff clothes in the sun. How I’d scrambled down a steep path and found a creek surrounded by smooth pebbles. How there was no one around. I’d taken off everything and smoothed my way in, displacing the water as if in communion. How I floated there, watching parts of myself reaching the surface, buoyed. How the water was warm. The water was the same temperature as I was. How it felt like the pills. Felt better. Each body part of mine broke from gravity, somehow, and became a part of that water, warm and buggy and free.
You had said, I’ll drive. We approached the bridges together, your hands tight to the steering wheel, holding the frame together. We’d been at your parents’ cabin in Idaho to celebrate New Year’s. We’d driven down the mountain as the sun was setting. Now it was dark. You’d looked down from the mountain and said, here, let me. A mountain covered in tall trees, like a luxury. Like a textured coat. We were in the dark, driving in circles, trying to get back home. It was the mark of us being fiancés, me being invited, finally, to one of your parents’ holidays. You’d said, they’re just traditional. You’d said they didn’t believe in inviting us to share a room and a bed when we weren’t joined in matrimony. But now we were close. Now we were almost joined. Tied together and sinking to our resting place. Down the mountain. When I’d offered to help with the dishes, after dinner, your mother had gone in and reloaded the dishwasher after I’d finished. I had watched her turn over every piece of silverware and replace it in a different spot, one by one. The headlights shined on the same two bridges in front of us. It should be impossible, that we hadn’t yet chosen one to drive over.
How I’d broken my ankle in that creek. In Louisiana. How we both heard it snap. I didn’t know where you came from, pastel and angelicseeming, the sun sliding into your reflection on the water. For all I knew from somewhere else. For all I knew separate. How I’d been ripped from the oneness with the water. How I was dazed, being returned to my body, returned to bones that are brittle and break. Returned to looking. How in your mind, you’d stumbled upon Bathsheba. Not from the Bible, you admitted later, but from the song. How you’d chosen that day to hike along the creek. Like a prophet. How you called the rescuers to come and take me in. How you carried me up the hill yourself. How my breathing was ruined. How I felt ruined, looking at you, sun soaked and golden tipped.
We were driving through the dark wilderness. We were watching the snow fall. I asked you again if you knew where we were going. You finally answered, soothing tones only, words that meant only words. You turned on the radio and casually switched through channels, and then static. Music. Then more static. The static started to turn over and over, in a twist, with our car, and us inside it, the mountain tunnels we refused to enter creating a conduit, us twisting in smaller intervals, a black hole of a road. I watched as the static split us into bridges.
How the moment we met I’d been broken. How you heard the beautiful song in your head. How you slid into place. In the hospital afterwards, you stayed to make sure I was okay. My ankle was in a cast. And the pills. We talked, me loopy, trying to string the things of my life together. You laughed, thinking it was the pills. You asked about my family. My gone parents, I said, phrasing it wrong. You gripped my wrist. How you gripped me like you were trying to hold me in place. You asked me how I liked Louisiana to change the subject. I tried to explain how catfish was to Pacific fish as dark meat was to light meat. How you could chew on it forever. You talked about your graduate program, about being so far from home. I told you how being in a place feels the same as watching movies about that place. How the pills turned the hospital into a curled-up haze. It should be different, I told you, being in a place in real life, but it’s the same here, with the music like in the movies, and the decks where people talk and eat things like they eat in movies. As if all of the South had been filmed the same. In the same frame. How I told you I must be missing something. I tried to explain how I knew my view was incomplete, but I felt unable to complete it. You said later you’d fallen in love with me. Right then and there. How the vulnerability of my myopia became one with your bathing effigy.
The radio found a song, static slipping away. The clouds covered the moon above the trees. I told myself to relax about the bridges, relax as the radio signals came to us. Located our car, its wheels carrying us to a different position than we had been previously. The signals that proved we were still here. I leaned my head back against the headrest and felt your arms relax on the wheel. I told myself I’d missed it, the passage over those bridges. I told myself we weren’t circling the same loop, weren’t spiraling smaller toward some kind of center. I tried to believe it.
The premarital counselor told me to try to keep track of memories. In the room next to the room with the clapping. To try to keep up. To 10 use the phrase: I remember how. I remember how, something. To get myself straight, when I lose myself. To put something into my head. Orient myself around myself, she told me. In the room our counselor is in, next to the room with the class in it, all the clapping. The counselor apologizing and shutting the door, telling us to ignore it. Telling me to make a list of things I remember. To make a list of examples of how things connect, one to another. The counselor teaching us to talk about how the other person makes us feel, not to pass sparkling judgements, sparkling like a hot surface in the sun. I feel betrayed when you go all foggy, you’d say. The clapping next door going on. I feel hurt when you won’t help me to solve this problem. You’d often use phrases like this when talking about me. This problem. Our problem. Maybe it was a dance class. Your meaning was clear. My brain, something a really good fixer could make use of, find the spare parts and mend. The clapping to the rhythm.
How you drove me, pills in tow. Back to the resort for the wedding. How you tugged on my hospital bracelet and laughed. The perfect accessory for a wedding, you said. How my friend was worried. She’d been calling. How you, helping me and a pair of crutches out of your car, must have looked from the outside. How my friend stood in the turnaround at the hotel, where the cars drop people off, waiting for me. How she narrowed her eyes and smiled. After that you were invited to the wedding. After that we were us. You helped me around the dance floor with my new cast, and everyone watched. How at the table, we all sat in pairs, in even numbers.
We passed the bridges again. I was sure of it. This time I said nothing. This time I read the language of your face. An immobile stare. Hard and set. The world becomes a horror movie so fast. The movie shifted through my head like the static. There are always characters who understand the shift. The merry-go-round goes on forever and you can’t get off. The shift from the world before to the world during. To the world unraveling. In the horror movies they don’t scream on the merry-go-round. Driving through the snow, on a loop, forever, like this. I felt my legs and arms prick up a million times, bumps setting themselves in my body and mind. It looked like the trees outside were rustling. The trees, my body, all growth, twisting, moving, stuck in the same shapes. A supernatural breeze followed us as we passed the very same fork, over and over again.
How before we met, I drove myself around in the dark. How I drove my old loud engine through the suburban neighborhoods at night. With big gleaming houses. Lit from within, shining through big gleaming windows. How I drove around to watch people in those houses. Sitting in front of big gleaming TVs. The engine screamed. How I watched the families sitting together. Me watching them. Them watching their movies. How I could turn on the radio inside my car and change my perception of myself at will. How I could direct the shot, in my head. How I could decide the world. I’d find a fast song louder than the engine and turn myself into a movie. Driving alone listening to rebellious music. A pin on a map, solitary because I stood up, everyone else lying down. I’d become the car on the road and drive flat. The people in their houses looking out their front doors. Watching me go. How I’d switch the station and the world would lift. I’d find a soft song that wound through me like a disagreement. How I’d imagine myself in that story, just before the plot ticked upward. Just before I’d found someone to sit inside and watch movies with.
There was a time when I realized I could go anywhere. When I became a grownup I realized my body could stand any place. Orphan or not. I was free. I went to stand in the aisles of the supermarket. I went to stand out on the streets and nobody came to find me. I went to the movies. Nobody came to take me back to wherever I was supposed to be. Whichever house had been assigned to me. I diligently worked at the job that had been found for me. The social workers stopped coming to find me and said, go to work. Said something like, get on with it. Something like, leave. I left. I made enough money and then applied for a different job. I went to stand in different states. I stood in the water. I could be anywhere and not mind it. It didn’t matter. I went everywhere.
The dark road started to feel like shifting air. Like the merry-goround. The moment when someone’s face turns backward. In the horror movie. I remembered how the air shifts to different temperature and wetness and thought about the static from the radio, gone now. The music was still playing. Your face was still hard, arms holding the wheel. Everything in the same place. I thought to tap on the dashboard with my fingers. Just to make sure that there’s still air in the car. That everyone isn’t completely static. To make sure things can still change.
How your parents wanted things for you. Things like marriage. Like a mirage. Things like a long lawn in front of your house. Things like a vase. How they called you all the time to make sure you would get the things. How I told you I wanted things. Maybe not the same things. Maybe a vase. How I wondered what my parents would have wanted for me. Maybe flowers. How I wondered what I wanted for myself. How wanting is for people like you.
When you proposed, we both cried. We sat on the top of the building to look at the stars. You gave me your jacket like we were in a movie. There weren’t any. Stars. We cried and hugged each other close. I tried to melt into you and you tried to melt into me. I tried to hug you so tight like I wanted to pop. Like I wanted to mesh, to meld. I failed. We remained in our bodies. Locked in your arms I remained boundaried. I couldn’t help it. I remained fenced in and whole.
How the world had turned into a terrarium. How when everything broke there were glass walls. When I was a kid the world was a dark box. How I heated up soup for more than a week before anyone came to find me. I was eight when the walls turned to glass. When the people broke open the door after the knocking. Everyone could see in. How the empty house became full again. How I didn’t even know they’d been dead for who knows how long. How the soup pots sat unwashed on the stove. How I just stayed there and waited. Why didn’t you go outside, they said. Why didn’t you call for help. How I left the world, then, and when I came back there was gravel under my feet and see-through edges. How the terrarium was a trap. The TV was left on and shining blue from switching the movies. How the people came and knocked and took me away. They left the TV on and the soup pots sitting there. How I didn’t bang on the panes. I didn’t try to get out. I saw that I was in a tank. How I figured out a way not to see it.
The wheels were turning beneath us but I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t see the road passing us anymore. Everything was dark around us until we came to the bridges again. And our headlights lit up both paths. But somehow the car didn’t take either. We didn’t cross any bridges. The darkness surrounded us. And then we came upon them again. Over and over.
At your parents’ cabin I escaped into the sauna and turned up the heat. We hadn’t said much at dinner. I tried to lie there and find a way to be hot enough to float. I’d said I liked the potatoes. I breathed in the fire, trying to feel like the pills. Your mother had responded. I couldn’t remember what she’d said. I remembered it meant something like, leave. In the sauna I couldn’t help but come back to myself. Eventually, you came and found me. The sauna didn’t work well enough. I watched through the glass screen as you took off your sweats, your shirt, watched as the heat was sucked out the gap when you pulled the door open. You came in and lifted my head up. Placed it on your lap. You held it between your hands. Trying to be telekinetic. As if you could will me to be different. As if it would help.
How you’d seen that I was a satellite. Lost somewhere where physics still is. Floating like in an unfamiliar creek. How you’d jumped into the center of the orbit. How I was a lost void. How you finally, for yourself, found space.
In the moments when you start to lose your focus, the counselor told me, you can list the memories you know, and start there. Like, I am sitting on a couch. I remember how I sat on a couch yesterday, in my own apartment. I’m on earth. I remember how it feels to walk around my floors. I’m bigger than a worm, smaller than the world. I remember how I’m tilting and turning along with everything alive.
No cars had passed us in hours. I continued to drum my fingers on every surface of the car, on my knees, on my temple. I tried not to panic. We could be driving by these bridges forever, I told myself. The momentary panic would be useless. Like the moment before the song ends. Like the static at the end of the movie that would play forever in that empty house. Like a ring around someone’s finger, a clock hand that traverses the same path over and over. It’s a mundane trap. There is no point in panic. You learn to live inside the looping. You forget there was ever anything else.
How I realized the pills could bring me out of myself. I realized the pills made people like me. How the dinner table was a mirror. How it was glass. How I looked at myself in the table, at dinner, and realized. I realized I could become like other people. People who have glass tables. How people who weren’t cared for don’t know how to care for. The words your mother told you in the kitchen when she didn’t think I could hear her. After dinner. How you’d defended me needlessly. You’re seeing it wrong, you’d said. How it’s all about seeing. How your mother was right.
When someone begins life with trauma, our counselor said, she spends a lot of her time trying to catch up on receiving care. You started off life wounded, she’d said to me. Sitting on the couch you nodded along with her, rolling up your sleeves. Cracking your knuckles. Ready to mend. Still, the clapping next door. I sat in the counselor’s office watching myself as a fishing pole. Unwound. My line loose.
How it feels to look at you, sitting in the car, your arms moving the way arms should move. Driving us back home. How your eyes are staring like eyes. Looking for our home. How we pass the bridges over and over. How it feels to look at real people. How it feels like a movie.
I wonder what my life would be like if I’d grown up with your parents, spending New Year’s at the cabin, I said to you, as we passed the same bridges. I didn’t wait for a response. When I learned how not to need anyone, I wanted to say. I learned how to keep other people around by not needing them. That was how I made a friend. The one who got married. In Louisiana. That was how I met you. I could explain all of this to you. I could say it aloud. But you’re already driving. We’re already stuck in a time loop. The tense has already changed. It won’t make any difference.
How right before we met I’d been floating in a creek. Under a tree. How all of a sudden I’d forgotten where I was. How I’d forgotten why I was there. How I got scared. How the wet hot air became a vacuum, sucking out all of me. Leaving only my eyes. Seeing and confused about the trees. How they were different trees. How the bugs were a symphony, one that would be played when floating with Charon, loud and buzzing and hurt hurt hurt in my ear. How I’d jumped up in surprise when your foot made a twig go, crack. Ending the symphony on a low note. How we’d both watched my ankle go, snap.
You reach over silently and grab my hand. I watch the bridges out the window. I watch them passing us, instead of the other way around. I watch me loving you. I watch me not. I watch the loop the same way. I watch it not make a difference.
How we are driving in circles. Coming upon the same two bridges. Over and over again. How we always come back to ourselves. How both of the bridges are tunnels. How both of them are pitch black inside.
Meagan Arthur’s work has appeared in Quarter After Eight, Cream City Review, Identity Theory, Pontoon, Figure 1, and California Quarterly.
ERASER by Lauren Alwan
When Gillian pockets the red licorice, the boxes on the shelves begin to rattle. The supermarket aisle is deserted, and Gillian, being six, reasons that if no adults are nearby, then there’s been no actual theft. She’d meant to eat a piece right away, a reward for taking the candy no one would buy for her, but she’s distracted by the overhead lights which have begun to sway. In the next aisle, she hears a woman call out to someone – her child? – to run. It occurs to Gillian that her grandparents will be looking for her. She’d left them in the produce section, her grandmother inspecting a cantaloupe and her grandfather insisting it wasn’t ready, the scent not yet sufficiently floral in the way of a ripe melon. A trio of canned nuts falls to the floor, and at the end of each aisle, shoppers are running but Gillian stays put, hand in pocket, the cellophane of the box smooth against her fingers as the ordinary things of the world crash down around her.
She’d been eyeing the licorice for months, having asked her mother for it only to be refused. Once, at the store, she’d asked her grandmother, who after inspecting the package, pronounced it inferior and returned it to the shelf. On another trip she’d asked her grandfather, and he’d patted her shoulder which she took to mean another time. When this morning she’d ended up at her grandparents’ house and heard there would be a trip to the market, she knew the time had come to take matters into her own hands.
Her grandmother appears and takes her by the wrist. “Where were you?” she cries, and they hurry through the glass doors. Outside, shoppers stand astonished in the unsparing San Gabriel Valley light. Where was she? Right where you found me, Gillian thinks, in the candy aisle, but says only, “Nowhere.”
Gillian has been known to defy rules, embroider truths, to invent things even when invention proves unnecessary, but this time, her words have the ring of truth. Nowhere, it seems, has become a place she increasingly finds herself.
***
She’s an only. That’s what her mother tells people. This is Gillian. She’s my only. An only what, Gillian wonders? Her father, who this year decided to live somewhere other than their house, does not describe her this way. She’s his kiddo, his buddy, his girl. There was a time when he brought her along on work appointments and introduced her as his daughter. This pleased her immensely, the feeling of pride that came from hearing him say the words. Davud Almasi is her father, and it’s been weeks since she’s seen him, but knowing she’s his daughter, the thought steadies her. She imagines a game board in which all the pieces have been overturned and the word daughter sets them upright again, enabling her to move, strategize, conquer.
It’s summer, when Mondays are normally spent at home, but this morning her mother announced Gillian was going to her grandparents’ house. Gillian often ends up at her grandparents’ on short notice. She never protests going since being there means she’ll be catered to, while at the same time, being left to do as she pleases. She’s fed more than she can possibly eat, naps on any bed she likes, watches television in the middle of the day, and if the urge strikes, disappears into the overgrown reaches of the garden. She found out the hard way not to pinch the balloonish buds on the fuchsia until they burst, or strip her grandfather’s ferns of their leaves – though how elegantly they came off in her hand, in one clean pull from the base of the frond to the top. She’d gotten a rap on the hand for that, along with a stern warning that still echoes when she walks that stretch of garden path. Today her mother has promised to be back by three, but Gillian would prefer it were later, as late as possible, in order to have a plate or two of steaming rice upon which she’ll lay a pat of 17 butter, or spend time in the shade eating apricots beside her grandmother, or bide her time in the living room where there is rarely conversation between her grandparents, and in the silence, Gillian, belly down on her favorite silk cushion, can devote herself to her books and games without interruption.
Arriving that morning, she’d found her grandfather at the kitchen table reading the paper and her grandmother at the sink peeling hardboiled eggs. Gillian loves their kitchen in the morning, more than any room in the house. The long counter, the bank of east-facing windows, the cupboards that hold items for which she has no name but regularly takes stock of, turning a jar or shaking a bag to assess its unfathomable contents. Outside is a towering bougainvillea, and when the sun tops the mountains, the cresting sun penetrates the vines and light floods the windows in spectacular array, filling the room with eastern sun and turning her grandmother’s curtains to thrilling pleats of light and shadow.
That morning, her mother wore a navy blue dress and heeled shoes, and her grandmother took notice.
“You’re going somewhere?”
“A job interview.”
“At the bank,” Gillian added.
“No jewelry?” her grandmother said.
Her mother touched her throat, at the place where a gold pendant might have been had she thought of it. Gillian’s mother isn’t like her grandmother, who’s inclined to ideas about how women should look. Her mother’s concerns center on practical things, like money, and as she’s put it, on paying the bills now that things are different. Gillian observes, but cannot yet articulate, the incongruence of old and new between her mother and the world of her grandparents. She gleans the difference in purely visual terms: her mother’s bare wrists versus her grandmother’s braceleted ones, her mother’s disinterest in food versus her grandmother’s preoccupation with feeding others. Though inevitably, each time her mother comes through the kitchen door she becomes famished, and Gillian’s grandfather makes a plate for her. That morning, there was a row of mason jars on the counter, newly cured olives floating in brine.
“You’ve been busy,” Gillian’s mother said to her grandfather. He did most of the serious cooking.
“Take one,” he said, nodding to the jars.
“You’re sure?” She seemed surprised and clearly pleased.
Gillian wished her grandparents wouldn’t give any of the olives away, and instead, keep them strictly for her. She dislikes store-bought olives, with their sad routed centers and briny flatness. She eats only her grandfather’s olives, habituated to the glistening bitterness and a ritual of lining the pits at the rim of her plate.
Holding the jar her mother declared, referring to Gillian, “She’ll behave while she’s here.” Then turned to Gillian. “You’ll behave.”
What was there to say? It was impossible to know in the moment whether an act was wrong or right. There might be inklings, distant hunches that certain things – the fern leaves for instance – might cause trouble, but Gillian’s desire in the moment inevitably skewed the impulse and erased any pangs of conscience.
“She’s a good girl,” her grandfather said, opening the newspaper.
“A pistol,” her grandmother said, and set a hardboiled egg into the slicer.
Her mother gave her a look. “Go on then.”
And with that, her mother was gone. Gillian was now given the task of slicing the egg, a task she relishes. She set it into the slotted base and pulled the hinged frame over it. The taut wires sliced through the gelatinous white – and what a miracle that was, eight perfect circles, each with its yellow middle that sat appealingly offcenter. Once, her father showed her how to remove the shells without spoiling the egg’s pristine surface, by cracking the shell and rolling it against the counter until the membrane pulled away in a single neat layer – the mystery of a hard-boiled egg revealing itself yet again.
The bread was set down, the rounds of egg laid upon them. The slices suggested planets, suns and moons, and the pepper and salt tiny stars. Gillian, as always, eats the egg’s white outer circle but never the yolk, which though visually arresting, she dislikes. The habit always annoys her grandmother and will account for the first in a series of willful acts that punctuate this day. But then, Gillian is a girl who wants what she wants, and this too would be hers: the soft white bread and mayonnaise, the slight resistance of the egg as it met her teeth, the crystalline salt and spark of peppercorn. How simple a thing it is, the sandwich reminding her yet again of those things she wants: a full mouth, people to do what she says, all her unfillable needs unequivocally met.
***
Outside the supermarket, a few remaining shoppers mill about. They look stranded on the asphalt, as if their curtailed marketing has left them at loose ends. Similarly, her grandparents have no groceries to bring home, their cart having been abandoned in the produce section.
Gillian watches her grandfather in the telephone booth outside the store. He’s calling for a cab home, but is likely first checking on 19 the family grocery. Though not nearly as large and bright as Market Basket, her grandfather’s store has shelves of cans and boxes, cases of cheese and olives, trays of pastry. Gillian imagines it all shaken loose and scattered on the rough wood floor, and this saddens her in a way the fallen goods in Market Basket do not.
Her grandfather pays her uncle to work at the store, or so Gillian presumes. Her grandfather doesn’t go there every morning like Uncle Naj does, but all the same, according to her mother, nothing there happens without his knowledge. Her grandfather once offered the job to her father, but shopkeeping isn’t his sort of work – which is how he put it. According to her mother, her father has been adrift ever since. There’s the suggestion of a bad turn, though to Gillian’s ear, adrift sounds like something lovely. She imagines a small boat on hand-drawn waves, though clues tell her otherwise. Adrift may not be what it seems. She gleans this in the way her father ends their phone calls before she is ready, and in the worry she sees on the faces of her grandparents when they talk about him, and how, when Gillian enters the room, the discussion inevitably switches to the Arabic she doesn’t understand.
In the parking lot, her grandmother watches the glass front doors. Inside, clerks go about the work of restocking shelves and pushing brooms. “The shake’s over,” she observes. “But it always comes back.”
Gillian has heard of earthquakes, but until today, never truly understood the concept. She’d been thrown off by the word earth, and in her confusion imagined the entire planet, thinking of the childhood globe in her uncle’s room, shaken in the vast atmosphere of space. The word quake was a mystery, but according to her mother, it was a word for shaking, as when you’re afraid. You quake in your boots, is what her mother had said, and as Gillian watches her grandfather in the phone booth, his eyes fixed on some detail she cannot know, she imagines the earth, smooth and pale and sheathed with green continents, sporting small legs in boots, trembling in an indifferent universe. Her grandmother, on the other hand, is familiar with earthquakes, having been born in a place she calls Constantinople, where shakes are evidently a common occurrence.
“My father talked about a shake before I was born,” she is saying. “On the coast, in S¸arköy, so strong it knocked people off chairs in Beyog˘lu.” The idea has its appeal, Gillian thinks, imagining a jolt catapulting her off a chair. Her grandmother goes on. “We lived in a wood house, and a wood house is better. The stone houses in S¸arköy fell down, and one family, the children and the grandparents too, were buried alive under stone.”
Gillian is eager to know things of the adult world, but less so of 20 what it was like being buried by fallen stones. Frightening as the thought is, she speculates it’s something like pushing sand over her legs at the beach, that same heavy cold weight on her limbs. Stones of course would be heavier, and there would be little windows of light between the shapes, tunnels to a world you couldn’t reach.
“I don’t like shakes,” she says.
“Who does?” her grandmother says, and at that moment her grandfather emerges from the telephone booth and tosses them a wave.
The wave, Gillian understands, means the cab is on its way. She fingers the licorice in her pocket, debating whether to eat a piece now and risk curiosity about where it came from, or wait until she is beneath the branches of the fig tree in a far corner of the garden where she can finish the box in private. She knows it’s wrong to take things without paying for them, and knows too the act must remain secret. All the same, a part of her would like it to be known. She feels a certain pride in the act, of having taken what she wanted.
At home, the cab drops them at the foot of the driveway. Her grandmother hurries ahead, and Gillian stays behind with her grandfather. He takes his time, folding and unfolding himself until he is out and upright again. The driveway’s incline is becoming difficult for him to manage, and as they walk beneath the mottled light of the deodar boughs, he explains he’s yet to find a driver who’ll come up the narrow drive and drop them at the kitchen door. Gillian listens, her hand in his, saddened by how old her grandfather has become. And yet, she imagines he has always been old. Even as a young man, he must have had the same heavy gait and clipped mustache, sported a shining bald head, brown from the sun, and wore a baker’s apron as he served customers in the store.
When they reach the kitchen door, her grandmother is there, handbag over one arm and a look of astonishment on her face.
“Davud’s here,” she says, looking toward the garage. Ahead, parked beneath the shade of a pepper tree, is her father’s Cadillac, dark green under the sun, the hot engine still ticking beneath the hood after the long drive from the place he lives, the one with the strange name. Tuolumne.
***
“Did you feel the earthquake?”
They find her father in his old bedroom off the kitchen, and it’s the first thing her grandmother wants to know. He sits on the carpet rifling through boxes pulled from the closet, looks up only briefly then goes back to his work, but Gillian takes notice of his eyes. Round, the 21 color of a graham cracker, and a sad cast she watches for, knowing it will come sooner or later.
Is he happy to see her, Gillian wonders? If not, she hangs back. She’ll wait for a sign, or a look. Not long ago, a friend of her mother’s visited the apartment, and the two women spent the afternoon on the couch talking, glasses of wine in their hands. Gillian, normally eager to eavesdrop on adult conversations, found the talk tedious and went to her room, but not before hearing the friend ask her mother a question that struck her as odd. Will you separate? the woman asked. We already have, her mother answered, and it was only after her father began to stay away that Gillian suspected the word referred to her parents. Milk separates, rockets separate, but parents? No matter how she turns it in her mind, the idea doesn’t add up.
“Gilly,” her father says. He holds out an arm and she rushes forward. There is contact: the heat of skin, the bristling hair on his arms, the broad stretch of his back beneath her hands. This is what she wants. She wants nothing else but this. The grit of his unshaved chin, fingers paint-stained gray, thickset arms beneath her hands. Her father is a wonder of scale and tactile sensation, and the only one who calls her Gilly. He’s also the only one who cleans her glasses, exhaling a cloud of warm breath on the lenses then polishing them with the tail of his shirt. The process has a special term only they use, hah-ing – as in, Can you hah my glasses? He’s also the only adult who entrusts her with meaningful work, and she hangs on a moment longer in the hope a task is forthcoming. He pats her shoulder twice, a sign she must let go.
“You didn’t feel the earthquake?” her grandmother says again.
“I was in the car. You can’t feel earthquakes in a car.”
Gillian finds this fact fascinating, like knowing cardboard boxes are made from trees, something her father told her the day she’d sat beside him in the apartment and watched him pack these same boxes.
In the open box before them is a collection of things she associates with her father: mechanical objects with plugs and switches and gauges with neat red and white numbers, along with stray folders of papers, a box of old erasers. He’s an artist, but his pictures, he’s told her, are ad art – a term that continually occupies her thoughts – for spare parts, ones you might need for cars. In the pictures he creates, the gadgets gleam in gray tones against a glossy white background, and Gillian finds them cryptic and beautiful.
“You’ll go to Malek’s?” her grandfather says. Uncle Malek lives in a place called Phoenix Arizona, a place Gillian knows nothing about, only that it takes seven hours to drive there.
“For awhile. I’ll need my light box, the tripod, a few things.”
“For how long?” her grandmother asks.
“Pass me that cord, Gilly.”
“But why Phoenix?” her grandmother says. “One boy there is enough.”
“Work, Ma. A month or two depending. Malek knows people. The money’s good.”
Her grandfather says something to her grandmother in Arabic, though it’s clear to Gillian her grandmother wants her father to stay. In the course of this summer, Gillian has been assembling stray details, drawing her own conclusions. Not only from her grandparents, but conversations not for her ears, as her mother says, the endless back-and-forth between her parents. Her: You struggle when you don’t have to. Him: I do fine when they pay their accounts. Her:You should have gone into the business, the store would have bought you time. Him: I’ve studied too long, worked too hard to end up working in a grocery. Of all the exchanges Gillian heard, she was most shocked to learn that time, like a box of licorice, could simply be bought.
“The shake was bad luck,” her grandmother says.
“Where’s my newspaper,” her grandfather says to no one in particular, and turns back toward the kitchen.
“Bad luck?” Her father laughs. “It’s geology, Ma. Land masses bumping against each other.”
“What an idea,” her grandmother cries.
Once, Gillian and her grandmother were in the kitchen when a jolt nudged the house. One quick thud and it was over. Her grandmother said a prayer, quickly, in Arabic, then picked up where she left off, washing mint as though the quake were a stranger she’d bumped into on her way to someplace else. At the time she’d seemed immune to the forces that caused the shaking, but now Gillian isn’t so sure.
Her grandmother turns to go. “You’ll stay for lunch?”
He will, her father says, and Gillian is pleased. Staying for lunch will mean they’ll eat in the dining room, a room designated for meals that are special. Gillian loves the room’s dim light, the murky chandelier overhead, the scent of cedar that lines the cabinet that holds the porcelain plates and gold-rimmed glasses. Lunch will also mean freshly made rice rather than reheated, and the thought occurs to Gillian that if her father cannot live with her mother, as he’s said he cannot, he could easily live here. Then meals would always be in the dining room, with the lace cloth and the framed pictures on the sideboard and the windows shaded by blinds and drapes and the deodar’s dark boughs.
“Gilly, give me a hand here, will you?”
He passes a box of blackened erasers and a square of cardboard 23 on which to rub them clean. She’s done this before. A few of the erasers are the gum type, the grey putty blackened by pencil lead and misshapen from being rolled, smashed and otherwise manipulated to remove any evidence of a mistake. Gum erasers are cleaned by pulling and stretching until the carbon miraculously disappears. Cleaning the Pink Pearls, on the other hand, is more laborious; they must be scrubbed against paper until all traces of the blackened surface is gone.
Gillian takes her time – especially with the Pink Pearls – a job she’d much rather do than setting the table. As she works, she can hear the sound of rice being washed, followed by the ignition of the gas burner, the sizzle of butter in a pan. It’s new, working like this with her father while her grandmother cooks. Given the choice, Gillian would prefer to apply her energies to the strictly interesting things her father does, to calculations such as he makes now, of how many rolls of film to bring, of sketches that must be examined and assessed, and which pencils to bring with their leads that vary in hardness. As Gillian sets the last of the cleaned erasers in the box, she thinks of Phoenix Arizona, a place she doesn’t know, and her Uncle Malek, a person she only faintly recalls, and worries her father might never come back.
He looks over a page torn from a magazine, and she studies him. His gray-stained fingers, the knuckles that are large and callused, the color of strong tea. The temple-pieces of his glasses are heavy and dark yet translucent, and there are bristles of hair in his ears – it’s something of a revelation that hair grows there as well as on his head and arms and chest. In the stubble on his chin there are patches of gray, and gray too in the sideburns, shaped like dominoes and carefully trimmed. Her father’s body is a looming presence, in the weight of his footfalls as he crosses a room, or the length of couch he occupies while watching television. There’s a sheltering quality, and she feels it now, as she sits beside him. Tomorrow, or the next day, he’ll be gone, with no guarantee that Phoenix Arizona will make him happier than anywhere else. She could remind him of the laundromats he owned, and before that, the mail order business, neither of which made him happy. Or the job running her grandfather’s store, still his for the asking. But she knows better than to raise certain matters, and the store is one of them. Mention of her mother, especially, makes him irritable, so it’s best to keep silent about news of home – even ordinary things, the egg she dropped on the linoleum that the cat lapped up, the portable color TV her mother brought home from Fedco – can cause a dark sadness to come over him. With most people Gillian says what she pleases, she might test the bounds and break 24 rules when the mood strikes her, but never with her father. With him, there is so much she cannot say, a wealth of subjects better left alone. What does that leave? She’s out of ideas, and that leaves nothing but silence, and with her father, silence feels the same as his being gone. At that moment, having nothing else, she takes the package of licorice from her pocket, and tipping a few pieces in her hand, offers them.
He looks up from the magazine page. “Ah, the red kind,” he says, taking a piece delicately between two fingers. Her father dislikes black licorice, finding its taste too aggressive. “The old man buy it for you?”
The old man. The old lady. Her grandparents are in fact old, but calling them old, instead of Mom and Pop as her Uncle Naj does, strikes her as disgruntled. The words make the world feel small and miserable. Gillian has always been fond of the names her father uses for her. Gilly, Gil, and sometimes Gigi, all of which she loves for their intimacy, their familiarity. But her father’s names for her grandparents fill her with unease. They make the world feel off-kilter, wrongheaded, as though a mistake has gone uncorrected.
“No,” Gillian tells him, her grandfather didn’t buy her the licorice.
He doesn’t say, Well who did? It’s a question Gillian would certainly ask, though she knows how effortless deception can be, how irresistible it is to lie in the face of a bothersome truth.
“Okay,” he says, apparently unwilling to press her further.
But she’s not ready to let the matter go. Who knows when he’ll be back, or if he’ll ever know how she felt and what she was thinking in that moment before the shaking started?
“I took it. At Market Basket.”
He doesn’t look up from the open magazine in his hands. “I see.”
The moment the words come out, she sees her miscalculation. It’s there in the tightening of his expression, in the uncertainty at his brow. She’d been gripped by the audacity she felt in the supermarket, and wanted him to see her as bold, but as he sets the magazine into the folder, and the folder into the box, she suspects otherwise. He sees through her story, and the knowledge brings a familiar prickling of shame along her back, her neck.
Adults have rules and reasons that in the scheme of things seem needless, and knowing this, she readies herself for a scolding. But he doesn’t look angry, far from it, and in fact, her father’s manner suggests she’s told him something he wishes she hadn’t. In that moment, Gillian reverses course. She’s nimble that way, in her ability to improvise. She concocts a rationale, pulling it out of the air as she often does when she’s out of explanations.
“We were going to pay, but we had to leave. Because of the earthquake. We’re going back tomorrow and pay.”
He doesn’t look at her, but at his belongings in the cardboard box, as if a more reasonable explanation might be found there. “Sure,” he says. His tone is uncertain, his eyes not meeting hers. “That sounds right.” He stands and brushes the front of his khakis.
Gillian stands too, and brushes the front of her shorts. Her face burns and her hands are gray with carbon residue. Ahead of lunch she’ll be told to wash them, to use soap, but those gray smudges came from her father’s pencils, from his drawings and his lettering, and how sad it will be to wash it all away, the only remnants she has of the work he does when she isn’t there.
***
At lunch, there is the consolation of rice with vermicelli, and a bowl of her grandfather’s yogurt, made earlier that morning. There’s a dish of chickpeas in tomato sauce. A plate of olives. A pitcher of lemonade. Gillian eats with gusto, though her stomach has been jumping – or as she knows now, quaking, since telling her father about the licorice. That sounds right.
“Gillian,” her grandmother says. ”Get the glasses from the cabinet.”
The cabinet is normally off limits, but today she’s allowed to open the paned doors and reach into the shelves of breakables. She loves the dark wood, the ripe scent of old varnish, the way the glasses and china plates twinkle in the shadows. There are rows of delicate sherbet dishes etched with vines and clusters of grapes, and tiny glasses rimmed in gold, no bigger than her hand. She carefully takes four glasses from the shelf, feeling a competency and adult prerogative as she sets them on the table. She returns to the cabinet to shut the doors, anticipating the satisfying catch of the latch, when in the shadows, she sees it. There, behind the row of sherbet glasses, flickering like a spider web, is the small glass globe her father received in high school, won after he placed first in a national science competition. But it’s in pieces, broken to shards, a tiny heap of razored crescent moons. She’s always loved staring at the globe through the glass. Once, she opened the door in order to get a better look and was delighted to find her father’s name inscribed across the equator, as though his abilities had planetary magnitude. Now, the object is in pieces, nothing but translucent claws and angry teeth. She worries she’s the one who broke it, but then remembers the earthquake, which was surely the cause. And yet, her propensity for untruths and errant acts hangs over an otherwise simple explanation. She is certain to be implicated 26 no matter what. The damage will be found soon enough, later that day, or the next, but by then Gillian will be home where she can plead ignorance at a remove.
As they eat, no one speaks, a feature not uncommon at her grandparents’ house, but few things make her more anxious than a meal at a silent table. Relief comes when her grandfather looks up, and seeing her across the table, smiles. His starched collar is bright against his sun-browned skin, his grip loose on the fork, his movements slow. His gaze falls to Gillian’s plate, which is already clean but for the olive pits set carefully along the rim.
Thinking of her father’s name for him, she understands her grandfather is indeed an old man. When he’d sat down to lunch, she was struck by his stiff descent into the chair, his body that seemed incapable of lowering until dispatched by gravity. He seems to grow older each day, each hour. He looks older to her now than when they returned from Market Basket, older than when the cab pulled up to the house. And when they’d walked up the driveway, the weariness of his steps made her fearful. She cannot imagine time when he is not there, sitting across from her at the table or his hand in hers as they walk under the deodar trees.
Now, his gaze falls to Gillian’s plate, which is already clean but for the olive pits.
“Give her more rice,” he says to her father.
Her grandfather’s tone is stern, as though her father has done something wrong. His tone is harsher than when she’d pulled the leaves off the fern or popped the fuchsia buds. What, Gillian wonders, has made him angry? That her father won’t work at the store? That he’s going to Phoenix Arizona?
Her father forks the last chickpeas on his plate. “She’s had enough.”
More than once her father, and her mother, have remarked on her eating habits, that she’s grown plump, and should, as they say, watch herself.
“She’s hungry,” her grandfather says. “Give it to her.”
Gillian knows how it feels to be told what to do, and is stunned by the realization that she’s not the only child at this table. Her father, after all, is her grandfather’s son, and when he sits here, he must do as he’s told, or, as Gillian herself had so often been reminded, face the consequences. She’s old enough to know adults don’t say such things to each other, but the threat feels likely all the same. The fact of consequences can leave her at a loss for words and that perhaps is what accounts for the silence. Her father is no doubt glad to be going to Phoenix Arizona, a place apparently far from this table, from 27 her mother, and from her grandfather’s demands. Gillian tells herself he’s not glad to be away from her, an equation that doesn’t quite add up, but which serves for now.
The look on her father’s face suggests he’d like to be somewhere else, and reluctantly, he spoons the rice onto her plate. Gladdened as she is by the extra helping, as the spoon travels between the bowl and her plate, she’s thinking of the glass globe. How to remove the evidence, how to spare her father from yet another disaster, one he might be inclined to associate with her.
Years later, when she’s forgotten that day’s earthquake, when it’s buried in memory with the numerous other times she’d leapt to the nearest doorway, she’ll remember the lie she concocted to cover her theft of the licorice, and the way her father accepted the falsehood, or rather, overlooked it. There will be decades of similar exchanges to come – her willingness to lie, his reluctance to challenge her – but the licorice will be the first, the blueprint for all that’s been false and misunderstood, all that’s been wrong between them.
Though that afternoon, she sits beside her father at the lacecovered table in the dining room with the dim chandelier overhead and the musty smell of the china cabinet at her back. She could mention the broken globe, but is unwilling to risk it given all she’s guilty of. Soon her father will leave, and she’ll forget the meal, just as the licorice will be forgotten beneath the memory of the broken globe, but she’ll remember the erasers, how well she cleaned them, how she removed all evidence of carbon from their soft surfaces, and the care with which her father took the collection from her hands.
***
When the meal is finished and the dishes are washed and drying on a tea towel, Gillian returns to the dining room. As is customary after the midday meal, the house is quiet. Her father has returned to his boxes, and her grandparents to their respective chairs, where, as always happens on full stomachs, they fall into a post-meal slumber. She opens the cabinet door and retrieves the pieces of the broken globe, drops them into the pockets of her shorts, and as she does, imagines the warnings from her mother, her grandmother, her grandfather. So sharp! Watch yourself!
Quickly she goes to the garden, though she takes the roundabout route, out the kitchen door and to the end of the driveway where a set of smooth concrete steps lead to the garden’s furthest reaches. She’s headed to a place no one knows, her favorite spot. It runs along the chain link fence at the property line, a desolate and untrod corner rife 28 with dust and the clutter of decaying branches where the ground is thick with moldering leaves. She clears the detritus away and takes the pieces of glass from her pocket.
It’s quiet at midday, even the jays are silent. Her fingers part the rotting leaves, where beneath there are rotting clumps of barley grass and dandelion, stray rose hips likely fallen from a jay’s beak now dried to an unappealing wizened brown. And squatting in the cover of a nameless shrub, she begins to dig.
The cast-off nature of this corner allows her to imagine a kind of ownership, a miscalculation that in years to come she’ll reckon with – that in fact, nothing of the ground in which she digs, or the garden, or the house or the land on which it sits, are hers. None of it belongs to her. But for now, in that moment, the place is hers alone. She knows well the sandy loam in her hands, its toasted color and grit, the brittle leaves at her feet, the San Gabriel Valley dust that coats the leathery leaves on the tree branches. All are a constant, deeply known, and allow the illusion of ownership to go unquestioned.
It proves easy enough to dig through the topsoil, but the ground beneath is hard, compact. It gives off a mineral scent, like clay and heat. Its iron stains her fingers orange. There’s only the sound of her digging, the rasp of each stroke and the short, sharp sound of her breath. She reaches hardpan – she doesn’t know yet that’s what it’s called, but it’s clearly impervious and will require the aid of a rock. Even then, her efforts produce no more than a gentle hollow, so she keeps going until her work will accommodate the pieces of glass.
Finally, she lays each shard down, and together they are all but transparent in the shadows beneath the trees. The act recalls known things, things of her father she’s sure of. Her father the artist. Her father the photographer. Her father the man who drives from Tuolumne. The father who cooks, gardens. The glass disappears beneath handfuls of loose earth, beneath an artful camouflage of leaves and stray twigs. She must be thorough. Should the glass be found, it would require too many explanations, too many shaming admissions.
There are secrets that Gillian keeps easily – trouble between her parents for example – and yet, with her own secrets, she tends to speak of them in veiled terms. Even as she’s careful to cover her tracks, to keep the worst parts hidden, there’s a part of her that wishes to be known. Earlier, as she sat beside her father in the dining room, with the dim chandelier overhead and the musty smell of the china cabinet at her back, she considered announcing her discovery of the broken globe. What if she had? Her grandmother might have blamed her, but her father knew earthquakes, understood the dam- 29 age they could do, and he would have likely defended her. Though in the end it was a gamble she’d been unwilling to take, given all she’s guilty of.
Before leaving the garden, she removes all traces of evidence. She brushes the leaves that cling to her knees, runs the hose over her hands to wash away the stains on her fingers. Her plan, of course, is to come back for the globe, and soon – to dig up the pieces, take them home, and somehow put them back together. But in fact, years will pass, and by then she’ll have lost track of where they’re buried. By then, the garden will have changed. The shrubs will be different, the lay of the garden’s neglected tract will have shifted, altered over seasons until it’s unrecognizable. Sometime in middle school, she’ll spend an afternoon digging there and will find nothing. At sixteen, she’ll make a second attempt, since by then, on the days she misses her father, she’s more inclined to search the ground for broken glass rather than phone him, telling herself the pretense of an amiable chat won’t make up for all that’s gone unsaid.
But that afternoon, when she returns to the house, there’s the familiar shift from bright sun to shadowy interior, sun blocked out by window shades and venetian blinds, by heavy drapes pulled to block the hard light. The rooms are quiet. There’s freedom in this darkness, this emptiness, in the bounds of the house with its meandering rooms, all empty, all available to her, and when she goes to look for her father, she finds the boxes in his room are gone. The narrow bed with its colorless spread, the bureau with its archive of objects that go unused, and the dun-colored carpet on the floor look as though he was never here, a room that waits for her father to return in order to be occupied again.
She goes to the driveway, knowing his car will be gone, but seeing the empty driveway she is crestfallen all the same. He sometimes calls to say goodbye after he’s gone, an odd custom, she thinks, because the goodbye has already happened. She’s about to go back inside when she stops, drawn by something in the air. It’s a stillness, a feeling of space and scale she doesn’t yet have words for. She feels the sensation of being a small figure beside a towering house, beneath vaulting palms and cypress and vaulting sky, and something in it feels meaningful. She’s only six, but Gillian senses the moment and takes it in. She doesn’t know then, but the feeling is one of being anchored to a place, knowing how you fit within it, seeing its outlines that define you in sure, bold fashion.
Years will pass. Her grandparents die – first her grandfather and her grandmother years later. The house is dismantled and sold, but the feeling of scale, the rightness of that place, remains. By then, having grown to a sensible and compliant adult, Gillian no longer imagines stealing back into the garden in a desperate attempt to unearth the cache of broken glass. Instead, she carries the idea privately. It no longer matters that the place and the house as she knew it – dim-lit, shadowed corners, the dark wood of old furniture – is gone, vanished as though it were never there. She’s satisfied knowing the evidence remains, that her father’s name is there, somewhere in the ground. She buried it in the sandy loam in the foothills of the San Gabriel Valley, a watershed given to the atmospheric whims of a small spinning earth and the force of colliding tectonic plates, in the garden of a house that was never really hers.
Lauren Alwan’s fiction and essays have appeared in The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, Catapult, StoryQuarterly, Nimrod, and O. Henry Prize Stories.