New Wave Fabulists Read online

  You know the doggerel curse that’s posted on that grave: Good friend for Jesus’ sake forebear To dig the dust enclosèd here; Blest be the man that spares these stones And curst be he that moves my bones. It could have been this that kept her away—she wouldn’t have been the only one. And of course there was already a huge Stratford Shakespeare industry, and no one was about to let her dig that dust. But she didn’t even ask; for months she did nothing at all.

  Then one night, she went to the church. Why night? She brought a dark lantern, and some other articles for “the examination I proposed to make,” she wrote to Hawthorne: though what they were, or it was, she didn’t say. She stayed there for some hours. The bust of Shakespeare on his memorial was above her, but it was too dark to see him; she couldn’t see the ceiling at all, it was as though she looked into a midnight sky. After a long time she left, and soon went back to London.

  Her book was published the year after that, and she underwent some kind of mental breakdown. She had no money to eat, and so she didn’t; she ceased to leave her room. A relative in the Navy happened to be on leave in London, and called on her; he was shocked by her condition, and brought her home with him. She withdrew entirely into silence and inaction. Her relatives committed her to an asylum in New Haven, and she died there two years later. History rest in me a clue she wrote not long before her death, but what she meant by that no one knows.

  “She died of Shakespeare,” Harriet says. She’s made omelettes for us with herbs from the pots on her windowsill, and I’ve opened the wine.

  “The Shakespeare curse?”

  “Not that. Just Shakespeare. It happens. People like you, sunk in Shakespeare. It’s not good.”

  “I’m sunk in Shakespeare?”

  “You make a living from Shakespeare.”

  “Elizabethan drama,” I say. “Not Shakespeare really.”

  “Look what Shakespeare did to us.”

  “What?”

  “We were so caught up with Shakespeare. Shakespeare, Shakespeare. Just like Delia Bacon.”

  “Oh Harriet. Come on.”

  “We got sick from Shakespeare,” Harriet says.

  “Harriet,” I say. “It wasn’t Shakespeare.”

  “Oh no?” she says, with vast conviction. “Oh no? Well.”

  I say no more. Her challenge, or joke, evanesces. She drinks, looking out at the evening. The flush on her cheeks actually brightens when she gets extravagant that way, like a Victorian heroine’s. Still, to this day.

  “You should write that story,” Harriet says. “In a book.”

  “What story?”

  “Delia Bacon. Killed by Shakespeare.”

  “Oh I don’t know. A whole book?”

  “Well aren’t you supposed to write books? Publish or perish?”

  “The only book I want to write,” I say, “is the history of the free spirits.”

  That draws her eyes to me again. “It’s a secret history,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “Isn’t it already written?”

  “Some. Not all.”

  “Maybe it is, though. Maybe it’s all written down someplace. In code.”

  “Well. If Queen Elizabeth wrote the plays of Shakespeare, maybe it’s in there.”

  “Now she was a free spirit,” Harriet says. “Don’t you think?”

  “Yep. Whatever Delia thought.”

  “Secret marriages. Illegitimate children.”

  “‘And the imperial votaress passed on / In maiden meditation, fancy-free.’”

  She holds out a hand to me, and I get up to help her rise. In her tiny apartment behind the store, she can get around without her braces if she’s careful, moving like a gibbon from handhold to handhold to the big low bed. It’s where she socializes.

  “I’m listing,” she says, pausing in the door frame. “Two glasses of wine and I’m listing.”

  So I take her up, remarkably light, and lay her down on the bed.

  Harriet’s body isn’t like other bodies you’re likely to have encountered in this way. Her shoulders are broad and strong and flat, like anvils, and her upper arms look plump and soft till you take hold of them and find them to be iron. Harriet says her orthopedic surgeon could never figure out exactly how Harriet walks; she shouldn’t have the muscle strength to do it. However she does it, it’s given her washboard abs that any high-school boy would envy, and they look like a boy’s, finely cut and tender somehow in spite of being so hard. Her butt is a boy’s too: slight and soft and hollowed in the flanks. That’s where the nerve damage starts, and goes down her legs.

  It’s like making love to a marionette, I said to her once, lifting and propping apart her stick-thin legs, and she started laughing and had a hard time stopping and going on. But it had taken her a long time to uncover them when we were in bed, let them be part of our lovemaking.

  Two crips like us Harriet says sometimes, but that’s only a funny kind of politeness, to include me with her in a commonality, not to make me feel an outsider.

  “So you’ve been thinking,” I say. It’s late in the night.

  “Yep.”

  “And?”

  “Let me pull this sheet up over me.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “Reach me the bottle, will you?” she says. Still a lot of Hoosier in her language. I struggle up to get the bottle and glasses, which leaves me outside the underside of the sheet with her, and posted on the bed’s edge.

  “So how come you asked me this, by the way?” she says. “Just so I know.”

  “Because I love you.”

  “You do?”

  “Harriet,” I say. “I love you. I’ve always loved you, even when I didn’t know it. I’ll love you till the day I die.” The wine is sweet and still cold. “That’s how come.”

  She drinks, and thinks; or maybe she already knows what she thinks, but not whether to say it.

  “So you’re not afraid?”

  “Of what?”

  “My history. I mean it’s not like I’ve been waiting for Mr. Right. There’s reasons I’m alone.”

  “I know.”

  “Not lonely. Alone.”

  “I know. I’m not afraid. Maybe I should be, but I’m not.”

  “Okay then.”

  She isn’t done. Far off there’s a borborygmic rumble of thunder, the uneasy sky heaving.

  “So have you heard about this new thing we get?” she says.

  “What thing we get?”

  “They’ve just started to discover it. A syndrome. Us old polios. My doctor told me about it last week.”

  “You were at the doctor?”

  “I started getting tired,” she says. “Or not tired, exactly. More like weaker. I wondered. And he told me. He’d just been reading about it himself. Postpolio syndrome.”

  “Explain,” I say. I say it double-calm. That’s a word Harriet invented for how actors say certain things in movies.

  She hands me her glass, so she can hike herself up with both hands. “It seems,” she says, like a joke’s opening, “it seems there’s this thing about the nerves you use. I mean everybody. The nerves that get used all the time to do things, in your hands and your arms and so on, they have like redundancies. Backups. As you live your life, the nerves wear out. Their coverings get worn away. Used up. So by late in life you’re using the backup ones.”

  “Ah.”

  “But in polio, the nerves get damaged. The ones you’d normally use, and even the backups in some places. So you’ve got nothing. And in the places where you’ve still got something, you’re using the backups, you’re using the surplus. Even if it’s nerves you think have always been fine: sometimes it’s really the backups you’re going on. So.”

  “So you wear them out sooner.”

  “It’s how you come back,” she says. “You somehow discover these backup nerves, and how to use them. Or you find other muscles, maybe without so much backup, because they’re like minor for most people, and you us
e them like nobody else. It’s how you get better. I got better. Even some of the iron lung kids got way better. Now they’re old, and the surplus is gone. So we start to lose.”

  I wonder if I’ve noticed any of this, in myself. I can’t tell. Maybe I’m more tired, have a harder time with the long walks across campus. Maybe.

  “You know what’s sad, though,” Harriet says. “It’s the ones who worked the hardest to come back, get function back, that are going to be losing it soonest. All those exercises, all that grit. The ones who weren’t going to be beat.”

  I put my hand on her leg. She puts her hand on mine.

  “So,” she says, double-calm. “Get it?”

  I get it. I do. It’s my answer: Harriet’s got a lot less function than I do, and if she knows she’s going to start to lose what she has, she can’t say yes to me: can’t, because it wouldn’t seem like a free choice, would seem to have a reason, an urgent reason; it would seem like a way to get the help she knows she’s going to need. Would seem, even if it isn’t. We’ll talk more, talk into the night, and I’ll say Don’t fall for that, Harriet, don’t fall for that no-pity stuff; I’ll say Don’t believe all they tell you, you didn’t believe them when they said you’d never walk; I’ll say What about me, Harriet, what about the fact that I want to be with you no matter what, for better or for worse. But it won’t matter.

  “I think it’s rotten,” she says.

  She’s crying now. Only a little.

  “I don’t usually feel sorry for myself,” she says. “Wouldn’t you say that’s so? Have you seen me being sorry for myself much?”

  “Never,” I say. And it’s so.

  “I wish it would rain,” Harriet says.

  It does, toward midnight, wild nearly continuous lightning and hellacious thunder, almost Midwestern in its intensity, and Harriet clings to me whooping and laughing as though on a carnival ride; and when at last it’s gone, and quiet, and we’ve lain a long time listening to the gutters running softly, she sends me home.

  The next day she gets up early again, though not quite so early, to go out and make pictures. The day is terribly beautiful, sunshot, raindrop-spattered, mist-hung. She loads her film holders, planning her moves from house to car with all the things needed, hoping she won’t miss the light, knowing she can’t hurry. Hurry is slow; hurry costs time. Festina lente.

  By midmorning she reaches the place she set out for, that she imagined in advance. But a vast wind has come up, moving through the leaves of the huge trees, passing amid them, and then going around again. The trees are moving too much for Harriet’s slow exposures. She stands by her tall patient camera and watches. The wind stirring the heavy masses of leaves lends the trees one by one a momentary animal life different from their usual vegetable one, a free will, or the illusion of one; and they seem to be glad of it, to delight in it even, raising and shaking their arms and shivering in glee.

  On her way back to town she cruises the tag sales. The families have just put out their stacks of mismatched dishes and white elephants and National Geographics, the pole lamps and tiered end tables unaccustomed to the outdoor air and looking as though they feel uncomfortably conspicuous on the dewey grass. Harriet is an Early Bird and picks up a few “smalls” for the shop—a set of twelve silver “apostle” spoons and a nice set of wartime tumblers with decals on them of pinup girls in scanty uniforms. At one place she finds a game of Shakespeare, a board game which she has known existed and seen around but never played. The box is shut with a bit of masking tape, and is going for a quarter.

  “It’s all there,” the householder tells her. “Complete.”

  Harriet gives her a quarter.

  Back home again, she unloads her camera and brings in the shoulder bag she carries for purchases. The game of Shakespeare in its box. She thinks a while there, poised on her crutches like Chaplin on his stick. Then she goes to her closets—Harriet has no basement or attic, wouldn’t be able to use them, but she has many closets—and after some searching she pulls out a small blue suitcase, one of a matched set that once included a round hatbox; there’s a poodle appliqued on it. She humps the suitcase—it’s heavy—to the dining table, which she uses more for laying out and mounting pictures than for dining, and snaps open its clasps. Inside she has yearbooks and photographs and mimeographed programs from long-ago recitals, awards, blue ribbons. Scrapbooks too. She takes out a ragged manila envelope, addressed to her old house in Indiana, and from it the journals she kept and the letters she wrote home that summer, the program of Henry V, the eight-by-ten of Robin she took from the bulletin board in the theater.

  She has all that piled on her dining table, now in the summer of 1980. She adds the book I brought her, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines. The game of Shakespeare too. She picks that up, hefting it in her hand—heavy, heavier than she expected, or is it some new weakness in that hand, which is not her good hand? Gripping tighter, she picks at the tape holding it shut, and maybe because she’s holding it too tight, she loses control of it and the box opens and spills its contents before she can recover. Among the contents are a dozen tiny busts of Shakespeare, the counters in the game, and they go bouncing over the table and onto the floor, rattling into corners and under things in that purposeful way that small dropped things have, as though trying to escape.

  Plastic Shakespeares red and white, black and brown. Two or three roll—Harriet catches them in the corner of her eye—under the tall armoire that holds more of her stuff. Now that’s a drag. Box still in hand, Harriet stares unmoving. She’ll have to get her braces off, lie full length on the floor, grope around in the narrow dark space under there maybe with a broom or some such implement, and knock them out from where they’re stuck. And she won’t be able to reach them, and she’ll have to get someone to shift the wardrobe and reach down the back to extricate them. Someone. Unless she chooses just to leave them there forever.

  Lull

  Kelly Link

  THERE WAS A LULL in the conversation. We were down in the basement, sitting around the green felt table. We were holding bottles of warm beer in one hand and our cards in the other. Our cards weren’t great. Looking at each other’s faces, we could see that clearly.

  We were tired. It made us more tired to look at each other when we saw we weren’t getting away with anything at all. We didn’t have any secrets.

  We hadn’t seen each other for a while and it was clear that we hadn’t changed for the better. We were between jobs or stuck in jobs that we hated. We were having affairs and our wives knew and didn’t care. Some of us were sleeping with each other’s wives. There were things that had gone wrong, and we weren’t sure who to blame.

  We had been talking about things that went backwards instead of forwards. Things that managed to do both at the same time. Time travelers. People who weren’t stuck like us. There was that new movie that went backwards, and then Jeff put this music on the stereo where all the lyrics were palindromes. It was something his kid had picked up. His kid, Stan, was a lot cooler than we had ever been. He was always bringing things home, Jeff said, saying, You have got to listen to this. Here, try this. These guys are good.

  Stan was the kid who got drugs for the other kids when there was going to be a party. We had tried not to be bothered by this. We trusted our kids and we hoped that they trusted us, that they weren’t too embarrassed by us. We weren’t cool. We were willing to be liked. That would have been enough.

  Stan was so very cool that he hadn’t even minded taking care of some of us, the parents of his friends (the friends of his parents), although sometimes we just went through our kids’ drawers, looked under the mattresses. It wasn’t that different from taking Halloween candy out of their Halloween bags, which was something we had also done, when they were younger and went to bed before we did.

  Stan wasn’t into that stuff now, though. None of the kids were. They were into music instead.

  You couldn’t get this music on CD. That was part of the conceit.
It only came on cassette. You played one side, and then on the other side the songs all played backwards and the lyrics went forwards and backwards all over again in one long endless loop. La allah ha llal. Do, oh, oh, do you, oh do, oh, wanna?

  Bones was really digging it. “Do you, do you wanna dance, you do, you do,” he said and laughed and tipped his chair back. “Snakey canes. Hula boolah.”

  Someone mentioned the restaurant downtown where you were supposed to order your dessert and then you got your dinner.

  “I fold,” Ed said. He threw his cards down on the table.

  Ed liked to make up games. People paid him to make up games. Back when we had a regular poker night, he was always teaching us a new game and this game would be based on a TV show or some dream he’d had.

  “Let’s try something new. I’m going to deal out everything, the whole deck, and then we’ll have to put it all back. We’ll see each other’s hands as we put them down. We’re going for low. And we’ll swap. Yeah, that might work. Something else, like a wild card, but we won’t know what the wild card was, until the very end. We’ll need to play fast—no stopping to think about it—just do what I tell you to do.”

  “What’ll we call it?” he said, not a question, but as if we’d asked him, although we hadn’t. He was shuffling the deck, holding the cards close like we might try to take them away. “DNA Hand. Got it?”

  “That’s a shitty idea,” Jeff said. It was his basement, his poker table, his beer. So he got to say things like that. You could tell that he thought Ed looked happier than he ought to. He was thinking Ed ought to remember his place in the world, or maybe Ed needed to be reminded what his place was. His new place. Most of us were relieved to see that Ed looked okay. If he didn’t look okay, that was okay too. We understood. Bad things had happened to all of us.

  We were contemplating these things and then the tape flips over and starts again.

  It’s catchy stuff. We could listen to it all night.

  “Now we chant along and summon the Devil,” Bones says. “Always wanted to do that.”