From: “Woman Walking Backwards”--
Moses Handy saw every day on his way to class a woman who walked backwards. She seemed to be close to fifty but her black hair, streaked lightly with gray, was still dense and curly, like a briar patch. She held her arms out before her, and her hands slightly above her head, and rotated them vigorously as she marched in reverse down the alley between the student snack shop and one of the dormitory buildings. When she passed, Moses could see she was smiling giddily. What an odd form of exercise, Moses thought. Who would believe it if I wrote it down, if I sent it in a postcard to a friend? “Every day I see a woman who walks backwards . . . .”
Even so, this exercise was not the most extreme that Moses saw taking place in the courtyard every morning outside the entrance to the foreign experts’ building where he kept his rooms. The possible variations on tai qi were clearly enormous. One old fellow seemed to be talking to a tree, even seemed to be barking, though Moses guessed it was really a kind of breathing exercise. Another, bald man came strutting by even on the coldest mornings in what Moses would have regarded as underpants, doing his best to kick his knees into his chest, and pumping his fists furiously. A contingent of gray-haired women simultaneously brandished swords with bright red tassels dangling from the handles. They went about their combat against the neighborhood demons in slow-motion unison, and with an obvious vow of stern silence. In another context, Moses thought, I could suppose myself walking amongst the lunatic. But all he felt now was a kind of guilt that he managed his time to sleep as late as possible to grab a quick breakfast and make it to his class on schedule. His students might show up late, but never Moses.
And he needed more exercise than he was getting just running up and down the stairs to his rooms and his class rooms. Yes, he bicycled, but Beijing was a flat city and bicycling was not aerobic, especially when you cycled in such huge crowds and were constantly starting and stopping and dodging. His students, he learned, had nicknamed him “Santa Claus,” and that was not for the generosity of his grading. He was fat, he was ruddy, he was white. OK, he told himself, I do look like Santa Claus. He didn’t want to look like Santa Claus, but he did. He looked more like Santa Claus every day. The only thing he could possibly do to make his Santa Claus image more complete would be to take up smoking a pipe--or possibly riding to class in a sleigh pulled by reindeer. Or wearing a red suit. His morning conversation class was full of beautiful, mature Chinese women, and it chagrined him to think he was thought of by them and the others as some kind of jolly, old clown. Life was going by much much much too fast. Much too fast. Indeed, so muchly too fastly, he thought as he scurried by the courtyard and the lanes where so much early morning energy was being expressed in these unfamiliar gestures.
Perhaps a month had passed in this routine, when it occurred to Moses one smoggy morning, that--although he had just caught a glimpse of her on that smoggy morning, with a hint of snow in the air--that the woman walking backwards past him as usual looked younger than usual. This impression, like most impressions these days, hit him belatedly as he pushed along through the crowd of students mobbing into the classroom building. He thought about it as he ricocheted from shoulder to shoulder in the crowd hurrying to classes. He thought about it again as he watched in agony as one after another of his beautiful women students thrust out their chests as they peeled off their jackets before settling down to their books. Could it actually be possible that walking backwards, or doing things backwards, could, maybe, just maybe turn back the clock? Well, Moses thought, that proves I am going completely insane to have such a preposterous notion. He looked down into the face of Ms. Hong Hai-ou, named for a seabird, and her serene, innocent smile made him feel his brain might melt right there and pour out of his ears. That she would call him Santa Claus behind his back was a dagger in his heart. If time could go backwards, would it go backwards for her, too? What a double curse that would be!
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From: “A Midsummer Night’s Feast”--
Jake and Larry trudged off the beach early one summer Monday with nothing to show for their night-long labors but a single bluefish apiece. Utterly disconsolate, they dragged themselves single file up the trail to the parking lot where Larry’s rustbucket blue and white pickup was waiting for them. They had only kept the bluefish for something to eat. What they had been fishing for was striped bass, which they could sell, and in fact counted on catching to keep themselves supplied with the bare necessities of life--gasoline, bait, and beer.
They stowed the bluefish none too carefully in the fishbox which had optimistically been loaded with ice to cool down the bass they had hoped to catch. One of the tests for freshness at the co-op where they sold their catch was the temperature of the fish brought in, and Jake and Larry observed the etiquettes and formalities of handling fish to the limits of their abilities. They had been known, however, to borrow the services of their friend Solarz’s freezer, though Solarz may only have been dimly aware of it, if at all, to lower the temperature of a bass they had buried in the sand to keep it out of the gaze of passing fishermen or just to save themselves the hassle of hauling it around to other fishing spots. They’d bury the fish close to the dunes in some moon-shadowed cranny and dig it up on their way off the beach. Sun-warmed summer sand, of course, did not exactly cool the fish and so Larry and Jake resorted to other measures sometimes for the sake of getting top dollar for their catch--or getting it sold at all.
They were also not above stuffing a fish belly with ice, sand, or even rocks sometimes to get the weight up a little. If they came in with four or five nice bass, this could make an appreciable difference in the quality of their lives for the next few days. Larry might get a haircut, for example. They might upgrade their brand of beer or actually have a breakfast in a restaurant. Jake might invest in an eel trap or a sand eel rake.
Larry was tall and frazzled and had bad dreams ever since he fell off the deck of the aircraft carrier Wasp on a Mediterranean tour of duty twenty years before. He had been married once to a woman who was now the owner of a successful local real estate business and who nevertheless moved in a world far away from Larry’s now, one which he, who lived in a trailer down by “The Bight,” as local folks called the place, could not fathom and did not care to fathom.
Jake, who was shorter, was nevertheless heavier than Larry, and although he was never frazzled as Larry was, was constitutionally solemn. It would take a great mass of contradictory or contrary experience to move Jake from his habitual dour demeanor. Once when a propane lantern exploded in the camper he and Larry had shared for fishing purposes, Larry had badly cut himself thrashing his way out through the narrow side window. Jake had simply rolled the flaming mess up in a sleeping bag and carried it over the tailgate down to the water and pitched it in. Other fishermen on the beach that night said they had witnessed this odd spectacle of the camper suddenly aglow and then an odd, bouncing incandescence that threw itself into the sea. When asked how he had come by such courage and self-possession, Jake--whom the incident, by the way, had made permanently bald when his plastic weave, baseball-style cap had caught fire and melted onto his head--said only, “Well, it was too hot to sit in there with that lantern blazing and Larry was blocking the window, so it was the only thing left to do.”
contact: robert.abel@the-spa.com
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From “Appendix Seven”--
Astonished and confused, Hector Holt sat across from his father in the nursing home. Mark was having one of his rare lucid days and Hector was debating with himself whether it had all been a mistake to have brought him here, with all that entailed--including the bouts with his father’s hatred of nursing homes, and Hector’s bouts with his own ideals about the need and necessity for a dignified way for the infirm elderly to be guided to a dignified end. Hector should have been glad, he supposed, for his father’s relapse into clarity; instead, it was piercing him with guilt.
If father were still at home, the home would not have been sold to pay for the “geriatric care” he was now receiving at Shining Tides. If father were still at home, Hector continued to muse, trebling his guilt, would this pale smell of urine be present? Would his father’s sparse flock of stark white hair jet out over his ears in mangled fistsful? That tin chair with the pillow on it--would that be how his father was enthroned? Would he look, in those blue, pin-striped pajamas, so much like a patient, or a prisoner?
Hector put the tips of his fingers together and shook them slowly up and down until he achieved the pleasant sensation of there being a pane of glass between his hands. The illusion was really quite remarkable, sensory magic of a kind. Hector was distracting himself so because father, in his clarity and after a brief spasm of apparent happiness with Hector’s visit, which was not unusual, had regressed to the old, painful topics of Hector’s Big Mistake In Life and the woman who had caused it. Of all the memories his father might have retained about Hector himself, Hector thought, why does it have to be this particular loop? We had this argument thirty years ago. But Hector wasn’t wasting any time arguing now when there was absolutely no point to it. He only wished his father would remember other things, more mercifully conceived things, about him, and continued intriguing himself with the sensation of a pane of glass between his fingers.
Mark had fallen into the old loop when, out of the seeming blue, he had asked: “That Vietnamese girl who ruined your life, where is she now?” . . .
From: “The PC”--
When Sharon’s brother died, her parents called on her to help them deal with his effects, which they felt they didn’t properly appreciate or know what to do with. His books, for example, were books mainly with titles they didn’t recognize, and whether or not they had any value or use they also couldn’t say. His clothes, of course--there was nothing to do with them but box them up and have the Goodwill collect them. What was his piano worth, if anything, without Roger to play it? There were just so many bewildering things--private papers, food processors, electronic equipment of the latest kind, sporting gear, shoes--”you can’t possibly imagine how many pairs of shoes he had,” Sharon’s mother said over the telephone, a kind of cosmic wonder in her voice-- “baseball shoes, running shoes, dancing shoes, maybe, winter shoes, loafers, slippers, boots. Not quite on the level of Imelda Marcos, but there must be three boxes full at least.”
Roger had also left behind a personal computer.
“It’s not the kind I’m used to from work,” Sharon’s father said. The telephone seemed to accentuate the deliberateness with which he spoke. “Maybe you need a computer. I don’t. I don’t know if it’s up to date or what. It seems a shame just to throw it out. It’s in the bedroom, I don’t know why. Last thing I’d think of in a bedroom is a computer.”
Sharon was thinking to herself that it was not going to be any easier for her to deal with all the things so intimately connected with Roger’s private life, but she also recognized the burden it represented to her parents to have to make so many little decisions, like the decisions you have to make when you move from one home to another, but with a layer of grief added, and a layer of shock, and all the rubble of shattered hopes and regrets. “If it’s all right, I’ll meet you early Saturday at his apartment,” she said. “Of course I’ll do what I can to help.”
Which, she thought, might not be as much as her parents would like. Of course she’d loved Roger, like a brother, but she also didn’t feel she knew him very well, and especially in the last five years her communications with him had been pretty perfunctory. It mystified her that he seemed to have become so conservative and a little cynical and more than a little angry with women in general, an attitude that swept Sharon into the same dustbin as those women, whoever they were--Sharon had brushed against only a few--whom Roger perceived to have dashed his romantic hopes or somehow to have taken advantage of him. He had become pretty quick to snap at her regarding anything remotely related to women’s issues or “PC feminism,” as he had come to state it, with a sneer.
Clearly it had started when he’d been passed over for a promotion, or so he felt, and his new supervisor was the woman he’d trained to begin with. Inside of a year, he was out on the streets--fired! because he couldn’t get along with the new boss--and it had taken him almost two years to find another job. Meanwhile, his personal savings was totally decimated. Five years later he was still full of bile about it. The new job paid less than the one he’d lost, he said, seemed even more dead end and was even less interesting, and he blamed, not the men who had promoted her, but the woman who had been promoted over him, and then women in general.
Sharon understood his outrage at the (possible) unfairness of the woman’s climbing upward over his back, but she wasn’t convinced that Roger always and forever had the best perspective on things, including his own life. She had no idea who actually deserved the promotion more, or what Roger might have done, in his bitterness, to contribute to his own fate at Hyde Electronics. Or, for that matter, to his fate with the other women who came into his life, the ones who universally seemed to duck out on him, or to wound him. Sharon thought it entirely possible that Roger might very well have tried to bushwhack his new supervisor; and in any case, it was easy to see her becoming pretty tired of working with someone who could conduct himself with such ready sarcasm and smoldering disdain. Maybe the woman had done Roger a favor, who could say? And how much of his difficulty with women in general was due to some kind of self-subversion? Roger hadn’t seen it that way, Sharon knew, but that was all she knew for certain.
contact: robert.abel@the-spa.com
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