Three Lessons from Study Abroad
1. Book shopping can be boy shopping.
I spotted him right away, after the door jingled behind me and I stepped into the darkened and musty bookstore. The young man, let’s call him the shopkeeper (Graeme), had closely-cropped blonde hair, a round head perched on top of a reed-like body, a threadbare cardigan, black jeans (Hole in knee), John Lennon glasses, Doc Marten boots. He paid no attention to me. He kept his legs crossed, seated at his wobbly little desk, read his book whose thin pages and fine print I noted from across the room. (I had perfect vision then.)
“Excuse me,” I said.
His eyes widened, presumably from my American accent.
(This was 1990 and there weren’t many of us around Glasgow, Scotland.)
“I want a collection of Shakespeare plays. Like in one book.”
He smirked, moved from his corner, rubbed his hands together.
At that moment I observed the mug of tea on a plate, its pruny bag laying exhausted, prone on its side.
He found what I needed, easy to do in this small bookshop holding only a certain number of used books. There was no need for or possibility of computers answering the young shopkeeper’s questions about stock or placement. He had to use the old noggin, as a grandfather might say.
Pulling a thick tome from a shelf, he opened it, squinted, pushed his glasses up his nose as he surveyed a page. (Table of contents, I guessed.)
“Comedies, tragedies, histories, this should do it.”
He stole a glance at my face, placed the book in my hands.
I held it, charmed by its flaking pages and stained cover, certain I would not read much of this book. (I came to Scotland to drink legally, meet new people, escape.) I followed the shopkeeper back to his table, behind which he repositioned himself.
“Two pounds,” he said, his Scottish accent so adorable, sounding sort of like pundes. (Sort of.)
I reached in my Banana Republic Israeli paratrooper bag and pulled out my wallet, handed him the cash, attempting to hide my unease with the foreign bills.
“Is that right?” I asked every time money was exchanged.
“Do you have something smaller?”
I’d handed him a twenty. Flustered, I found a five pound note. (My hand shook a little.)
“Where are you from?” he asked.
I told him New York, achieving the usual awe-filled response.
“New York. Wow,” he smiled. (Crooked teeth) I’m sure I said a few things, asked him questions. At some point I would know where he was from (Bathgate), a place whose name meant nothing to me.
I took my brown paper book bag and headed out into the steady mist, glancing at the shop’s hours, noting the day and time of the week. I climbed the hill back to my residence, plotting my next move. I would return to the book shop at closing the same day next week, act as though it was a coincidence, help the shopkeeper close, perhaps carry in the boxes of books displayed under the shop’s front awnings. On that day, I would linger there, fixed on the cold slab of sidewalk, my Converse sneakers edging toward his Doc Martens. I hoped he’d succumb to my presence and ask me for a coffee, or better yet, a drink. I went back to my student housing, feeling a sense of purpose.
2. Sometimes we want people for no good reason.
The shopkeeper took me to see When Harry Met Sally, though I had already seen it the summer before at the Jersey shore. (Back then, movies came about six months faster in the U.S.) After that initial drink when I bombarded him at the end of his book shop shift (Say that three times fast) he was besotted with me for all of about a week, maybe two. The movie fell in that time frame. He took me to Wimpy Burger, Scotland’s answer to McDonalds, and then to the theater. He wrote our initials and the date on the paper ticket stub, a gesture even I found contrived, as though he was forcing a cliched romance on the whole thing.
The not-romantic truth: we didn’t have a chance to know anything about each other, to like or dislike each other, let alone fall in love with each other. Foolishly, I cherished that ticket stub from that one date, but I knew nothing about the shopkeeper’s life, family, interests, even his studies at the university. Back home, my brother was gravely ill with cancer, receiving a bone marrow transplant. My family was in a state of crisis, but I am sure I never shared this. (Much more fun sliding down in a movie theater seat, holding hands with a stranger.)
I was devastated when he stopped calling. Late at night, post-pub tipsy, I wandered into the echoey stairwell of my building and dialed his number at the payphone which smelled like beer even before I beer-breathed into the receiver.
“Is Graeme home?” I slurred. Of course his roommate knew it was me, the American. The (Insert adjective) American. I’d done this a few times before.
“Graemes gone to bed, they said, or “Graemes not in.”
“Goodbye, Maggie, goodbye. Cheers.”
(Please stop calling, or go back to America, or something.)
3. Walking drunk through a park, alone at night in the rain, is always a bad choice.
Tonight was the night, I decided. I’d storm the shopkeeper’s flat. Who cared if it was midnight on a raining Tuesday? Who cared if I was drunk, that I had to walk across town, across an empty park alone? Who cared that he was obviously done with me, hadn’t called in weeks?
The multiple pints sloshing around my bodily system fueled the brazen knock.
Bam Bam Bam. No answer, another knock. After that I stood listening to the tense silence (Was that breathing on the other side of the door?) I was intrigued, enraged.
Oh come on!
I kicked the door. I pressed a cold ear to a colder door deducing whispers and a clear, “No, you do it!” Finally the girl roommate, quivering voice, said, “Who’s there?”
I hadn’t meant to be scary. (Me? Scary? No way. Not possible.)
Frigid shame flattened that bravado I’d carried with me like a shield across the Kelvingrove Park, step by step in the darkness, in the goddam endless rain. Too late to turn away, I said my name. The door opened to the shopkeeper himself standing before me wearing a set of old man striped pajamas.
“I guess you expect something, to stay?”
I nodded, swiftly lowering my expectations. His face remained blank.
(I hate you, crazy American.)
I stepped into the flat, felt the gaze of the flatmates follow me as I followed him, my beloved. (Not really.)
He entered his room. When I followed he turned and gave me the internationally accepted look of “Don’t push it.” He chucked a pair of pajamas at me and pointed at the bathroom and couch, closed his bedroom door behind him. I woke up early to a pounding head, and as soon as morning light overtook the interminable Glasgow grayness, I dressed in my damp clothes and scurried out, practically running to my own flat, where I could disappear into my unmade bed.
Offline
Birdy/May 2023
Her body wavered with each bump and brake of the lumbering bus. Without her lost device she’d never before noticed the glowing faces lined up, lit by an army of screens. Normally she was one of those faces, but not tonight. Ahead at the front of the bus, lights blinked as the route screen computed and configured. She remembered her mother telling her once about the days when there were living drivers. Sometimes, if the driver was pleasant, which wasn’t always the case, he said good morning when you got on and good day when you got off. She thought the best thing about automation was you didn’t have to deal with anyone’s mood. Although without her device, her own had soured. She had no one to talk to, nothing to read, no games to play. She stood there, hanging on, lurching inside the darkened bus.
The Last Summer on the Island
The Lit Nerds/May 2023
This was the part she loved the most, when the island’s impressive mass shifted into view. On the ferry deck, she tuned out the screaming child clinging to her mother’s legs and the green-at-the-gills teen boy gripping the garbage can. She tilted her face to the sunshine and leaned into the winds as she balanced herself on the rocking sea. Finally, Block Island, Rhode Island, with its old hotels and line of shops in the distance, inching closer every second. Of course, her own house was not visible here, perched on the other side of the island on Dory’s Cove. Her thoughts stalled and clenched at the idea of the house—her house, her family’s house. A familiar anger and bitterness cropped up. But this was her favorite view in the world. She willed herself to enjoy the sight of this place she’d loved since birth. Every crevice, building, and beach etched in her soul. A brown lab nipped at her legs, snapping her out of her reverie. The cold air inspired thoughts of a sweater. At last, the ferry pulled into the dock and Caroline Masters joined the throng of day-trippers exiting the boat.
Mr. Baxter’s Post-Probation Resolutions
Ellipsis Zine, #13
1. I will not drink on Sunday night.
I pile the empty cans in the recycling bin. Melissa hated cans beside the door. Melissa’s gone. Tomorrow’s my first day back. I need the booze to sleep, take the edge off.
2. I’ll quit smoking.
John from custodial services is smoking on the loading dock when I arrive.
“Hey, Baxter, where you been?” he says.
I fist bump him.
“A conference,” I say, shivering in February air.
“Wow, some long ass conference.”
I apply my boot to the butt in dirty snow, head in.
3. I will learn my students’ names.
“Yo! Baxter’s back!” A tall, vaguely familiar kid suggests a high five in the crowded hallway. My weak hand meets his. A vomitorious wave rises, recedes.
4. I will not overshare with students.
“The sub made us memorize poetry,” Susie says.
Susie, what’s her last name? Chapsworth? Chapstick?
“When I was in seventh grade,” I say, “I memorized Poe’s ‘Raven.’ It still haunts me. I’ve been to therapy about it. “Nevermore! Nevermore!” I squawk.
Susie flaps her wings, takes flight.
5. I will control my emotions.
During the introduction to Hamlet, Fifth period Gabe has an elongated bit of tissue hanging from his nose. I pace to tamp down the rising storm. The walls close in.
6. I will get off double secret probation.
In eighth and final period, paper airplanes fly above a sea of necks bent in texting pose. I’m an actor on the stage, awaiting an unwilling audience.
“To die, to sleep, No more,” I say.
The room grows quiet, really quiet. I realize I am shouting.
7. I will achieve tenure.
I am told to clean out my desk. I sit alone in my classroom and free that unstoppable giggle, the one that got me here in the first place.
8. I will show them I am competent, intelligent, well-versed in my subject area.
“The rest is silence,” I quote Hamlet one last time to Steve the guidance counselor as he returns me to my car.
“Okay, man. Sounds good,” he says, slamming the door, leaving me shivering again, alone, laughing.
Former
Pressing his black trousers again, the steam hisses and sputters. I smooth out the faint lines, push in a crease. The children, who watch me from their framed faces lining the walls, are at school. In another frame- our holiday group shot-the five of us standing beneath looping words: Merry Christmas from the Phillips Family, the children are decked out in holiday greens and reds. My husband and I wear off tones. He dons a purple sweater with his black slacks, “Because it’s technically Advent,” he said at the time. For no good reason, I wear a butter yellow turtleneck. I fade into background, like an unlit candle.
Changed
Wrong Turn Lit/March 31, 2023
Leaving my Ron was not a hasty decision. It took me years to get to that point. Years of talking, my words hanging in space with no one to catch them. Years of sitting at the table surrounded by three bent heads, not in prayer, but in fixation on little screens cradled in their hands. Complaining and making rules to ban them did not work. My family considered me a malcontent, a party-pooper, a luddite.
Ron,
I’m leaving. I accept that I cannot hold your attention. You are free to focus on your more powerful distraction. I give up. I’m going to live at my parents’ house.
-Joanna
The Seagull
The Medley/Issue 8: Mosaic/March 2023
Once upon a time there was the darkest, deepest blue. A blue like no other blue. A bottomless blue. An if only, a heartbreak blue. Charlie couldn’t see his father’s eyes but thought of their color that snowy day, when he entered the house, hung his woolen coat on the hook, and walked heavy-footed to the kitchen. Charlie sat at the curtain, kept his own eyes on the street. His mother’s voice drifted from the kitchen, where she stirred nothing soup - water with some bones and an odd potato or whatever of nothing was left in their pantry. Through the window, Charlie identified another boy, around his own age,walking hand in hand with a woman. Their backs bent, they pushed into the steady snowfall.
Not Your Time
Terse. Journal/March 2023
The light must be busted, I thought. My hands reached out into the deep emptiness, floor boards creaking with reluctant steps. Murmuring voices of my elderly parents and ticking clocks echoed from downstairs. The soft-footed soldiers of memory marched through my mind: my childhood bedroom, packing clothing and coffee pots for college, returning at age 40, between marriages, my infant son, now a boisterous eight year old, sleeping on the bed. I only came up here to return a folding table to its place, lean it against a wall, and go back downstairs. Just that. I’d never been afraid here before. That night, the darkness frightened me.
In the Attic
Terse. Journal/March 2023
The winter earth here, too hard to shovel, sends corpses like mine to be placed in the attic, like all the other unused things. The fly buzzes above me. I can hear it, but cannot move my arms to swat it away. And I can smell the cold space- like apples. Now I too am an old, cold apple. In such a short time, I have turned from being one of the people making footsteps along hardwood downstairs to this frozen, yet still sensing, dead thing. I am stuck here like this, separated from my daughter whose birth put me here.
Beneath a Winter Sky
TMP Magazine, Issue 4, February 2023
The Ten of Cups card lay upright on the cold bedroom floor at her bare feet – a silvery couple, depicted naked, hands above heads, an archway made of ten cups above them. Winnie wondered how it got there, since she kept her tarot set downstairs on the desk. She wondered further about the card’s meaning: a prediction of a long-term relationship. She peaked through the blinds. Across the frost-covered patio, Lloyd’s shadow moved inside his since-summer-abode: the shoffice (shed+office). She turned away, slipping the card in her robe pocket.
Downstairs, Winnie watered her house plants while the coffee percolated in its stovetop pot. She did not miss Lloyd’s Keurig machine one bit. Since her husband moved out she relished the space, physically, yes, but also emotionally, professionally. Her phone commenced a repetitive buzz, prompting her to put down her mug on the newspaper-strewn kitchen table.
“Winnie,” her sort-of-sometimes- best -friend-Mable sobbed into the phone. “I need you to do a healing reading,” she said. “Patsy and I got into the worst, most terrible argument about Phil.”
Winnie stroked a leaf of a Belladonna plant while withholding a speech about how Mable couldn’t control with whom her children fell in love. Instead, she simply agreed to a reading time for the following day. She filled in Mable’s name on her calendar and brought her cup to the overflowing sink.
“Oh my good and gracious god!” Winnie cried out clutching her chest. Lloyd’s woolen hatted head bobbed in the window.
“Come in?” His words hung in a cloud of frigid air, barely audible.
“No!” she shouted.
He held up a pan of scrambled eggs. “Want some?”
Winnie thought Lloyd’s eggs were magic, and her stomach had just been grumbling. She opened up, snatched the pan, slammed the back door. Sharp January air snapped in her face.
***
The following week, on what would have been Winnie and Lloyd’s 25th anniversary, Winnie noted the full moon and the Four of Wands card, with its floral chuppah and castle in the distance, propped on the kitchen windowsill.
“My oh my,” Winnie said, holding it up in the weak morning light, contemplating its significance: joy, celebration, bliss.
She peered into the backyard. No sign of her soon-to-be-ex’s balding head or hunched shoulders. Probably somewhere reading an economics textbook, she thought.
Winnie ignored the incoming messages from tarot clients, sat on the living room couch, flipping her and Lloyd’s wedding album’s dusty pages. Look at us-so young-she thought, pausing at one breathtaking photo: wide-eyed, bespectacled Lloyd watching her enter the reception room, besotted. When we were both grad students, when we still dreamed, when we imagined we’d have children, she thought sadly. She closed the book.
Would it be wrong to invite Lloyd for dinner? she wondered. The sudden impulse brightened her mind. It was their anniversary after all.
Winnie shrugged on her puffy coat and rubber boots, trudging through old snow and past her dead wildflower garden as she approached the shoffice door.
She peaked into the window. Typical. Neat as a pin, she silently scoffed, slipping a scrap of paper through a crack, inviting him for a simple supper to acknowledge our past and celebrate the more positive future.
She hurried back to the house, excitement fluttering in her chest.
***
Lloyd appeared at the door that night, a spray of stars behind his head, adorning him. He held a plate of warm brie spread with fig jam (They’d had this on their Montreal honeymoon). Winnie rolled her eyes. Of course, Mr. Perfect had to upstage her simple beef stew, she thought.
Seated at the kitchen table, they spread the cheese and jam on baguette, sipped red wine.
“I do love living out there,” Lloyd said, jerking his head toward the back door, the shoffice.
Winnie felt a dagger in her heart.
“I guess it’s better than living with me,” she snipped.
“I didn’t say that.”
Winnie pushed up from her chair, deepening scratches in the well-worn floor, went to get the stew.
When she returned, it seemed Lloyd’s chair had moved closer to hers. Her nostrils received wafts of his familiar smell. She enjoyed a mellowing sensation, stretching her back, uncrossing her legs. She fought the impulse to touch his hand.
As though he read her mind, he put down his fork, turned to her with that, I want you look, his eyes narrowing like he was contemplating a slice of apple pie. He obviously hadn’t had pie for a while. Neither had she.
“So-why have you never done a reading on us?” he asked, his face seeming to float in the candlelight.
“I thought you didn’t approve of my tarot business?” Winnie could feel her ire rising at the mere mention of Lloyd’s disdain for the tarot. Her hands shook as she reached for her wine glass.
“Well. I’ve reconsidered. I regret my words,” Lloyd said. She froze, caught in his grey-eyed gaze, then sighed, walked to the desk, emerging with deck in hand.
“We must set our intention,” she said.
“We’d like to know the status of our marriage,” Lloyd said firmly.
She pulled a card, placed it between them.
“The Lovers!” they said together, voice volume magnified. Lloyd’s lips upturned into his know-it-all smirk. The unclothed man and woman on the card faced them beneath a blazing sun.
Lloyd grunted as he lifted Winnie, carrying her, she presumed, upstairs.
“Your back,” she gasped.
“I am,” Lloyd said, kissing his wife’s neck.
“No, I mean don’t pull your back, remember that time at-”
Winnie’s words ceased. She pressed her cheek against Lloyd’s, fixed her eyes on Jupiter’s insistent glow through the stairway window, surrendered to the universe.
Bodies in Water
Fast Flesh Literary Journal/Issue 4 (Conscious)/February 2023
Hilary entered the sparse room, her new home. At the window, fog hovered above the lake. A sailboat lingered from the faded summer, bobbing at water’s edge. A steady white light glowed above the surface, moving with insistent ripples, piercing murky air. Hilary assumed it was some kind of optical illusion, a reflection. She focused on the utter silence muzzling the replaying mind sound of gunshot, body drop. Her hands still shook. She imagined her own form transforming, shimmering, levitating, rising from the mess of remembered old blood, hovering above the scratched wooden floors of the cold room. She turned from the window, tossed her backpack on the bed. This and the clothes on her back, her only possessions…
The Estranged
Tuxtails Publishing/February 16, 2023
Avoiding the clock, Anna sat beside the window, wishing it were summer, when the roses would bloom. Finally, she rang the bell, a jarring buzz, not the tinkle she would’ve liked. She awaited the housekeeper Judy’s slow appearance, eyeing the dust thickening on her nightstand, the overflowing floral garbage pail in the corner. Her bald head itched where new hair prickled, tickling beneath her woolen cap.
“Morning, Mrs. Stern,” Judy said, setting a green smoothie on the table beside Anna. “You’re looking well,” she added, stiff grinned.
“What, is your leg broken?” Anna said.
“Broken — ?”
“I could’ve been dead.”
Judy straightened the blanket, fluffed the pillow, jerking Anna forward.
“I’ll be back at noon, unless you die before lunch.”
She closed the door, leaving Anna alone.
The Queen
Amethyst Review/January 2023
The Hive
This is her most pure sanctuary. She sits near enough to hear the throng of bees in their hives. It is honey season, and the hives are busy with their relentless productivity. She reclines on her lounge chair, her robes draping, trailing the grass, the lawns stretching out around her, acres of gardens, woods. The somber dong of the church bells. She wishes to linger here, beside this weeping willow. Hazy light filters through branches, enough to warm but not overheat. A breeze moves the trees, liberates hair from the veil. Her beauty is bone deep now, unchangeable.
She rises, pulls herself away from the ancient sound, as old as the dinosaurs, perhaps the oldest sound on earth, the droning buzz of the honeybee. She begins her slow journey to the chapel, where the brothers will be conducting their own droning buzz. She will be late, which will be noticed. They will have news for her, but it will not be new.
Two Flash Stories
Cosmic Daffodil/January 2023
“The Flawless and the Flawed”
Sydney stretched a bejeweled hand across the diner table.
“My grandmother had a ring exactly like that.” Rosamond squinted, examining the emerald ring pushed under her nose.
Sydney’s outstretched fingers recoiled.
“Lee bought it at Smithfield’s antiques. It’s flawless. It’s vintage,” she said.
“Jeez. What’s with the service here today?” Rosamond signaled for the waitress.
“There’s no other ring like it. And, if and when YOU get engaged, if we’re still friends, I’ll be happy for you.”
“I’m getting eggs, that’s what I’m getting. Do you know what you’re getting?” Rosamond said, placing her menu to the side.
“Victorious”
The light shifted, the office growing darker as afternoon progressed. I am looking for new experiences in the retail market. The sentence trailed through his mind like one of those biplane banners across the ocean at the shore. Alan conjured the sensations of summers past: the fine sand stuck to his lean body, the smell of cigarette smoke and old beer.
The snow fell.
Back in his Jersey days, Alan saw Karin from across a crowded room, the car dealership showroom where he worked since high school. On the test drive - a Chevrolet Malibu- he noticed her quick laugh, not to mention her bare knee that moved slightly as she pressed on and off the gas.
Karin had a plan and Alan followed it. They married, packed their suitcases, and moved here, her hometown. She’d accepted an assistant principal position for the super great school district. Returning victorious, she had a degree, a husband, and a job to boot. Of course, Alan knew there were problems. He knew she made excuses, she spun the car dealership to her family and friends so it sounded like some great entrepreneurial act. He knew her love had its limits.
But still, somehow, he didn’t expect what happened. Alan whistled, he whistled, as he came through the door that day, the day he found out. He remembered his wife’s down-turned mouth. “You can’t be surprised. Please,” she said, hands on her hips, like he should be ashamed for not guessing, for needing to be told about Phil.
Grounded
Perspectives Magazine/January 2023
Fifty years ago the boy died here within my boarded bones. Fifty years before that I was hammered together in this spot against my will.
Gill Jordan, a construction man from a construction family, one with sallow skin, sunken eyes, and a pronounced limp, built me high on this hill overlooking the Rhode Island sea-a gift for his understandably reluctant bride, Rebecca.
The summer after the marriage, she gave birth here, tended by the island midwife. But as it often happened then, Rebecca died in childbirth. Soon after, Gill drove nails into my already wind worn skin and crossed to the mainland for good.
I have never been happy here. I sense the unwelcoming soil beneath me. I wince at the relentless wind, sag beneath the snows of winter, the slanting rains of spring and summer.
Over time, a new owner came, loosening the boards nailed across my openings, adding indoor plumbing and a modern kitchen, loading me with the burden of pipe and wire. Thus began my new life as a rented vacation home. A stream of bickering couples, teething babies, and sullen teenagers pounded my floors, pushed against my walls. The dogs, tied to the tree, yelped from the side yard. The cats padded around the furniture, pressed into wooden legs, hoping for a lap, sensing my discomfort. Every kind of unhappiness flourished within me. I sighed each time the suitcases landed on my porch, followed by the skeleton key jiggling in my lock.
Ultimately, the fresh faced boy came, unrolled his kite, and sent it into the sky. The mother coated chicken in flour and salt and pepper, fried it crisp in oil. A blueberry pie, a store-bought surprise from the father, awaited them on the counter.
That last night, the mother laughed, watching the murmuring box in the corner while the fresh faced boy and the father worked a puzzle. I held their content like a foreign substance, a pocket of air tight in the cold cellar of my gut.
My spine, the woeful staircase, Gill’s folly, was too narrow, too steep, preposterous Rebecca had said.
I knew from the start things would end this way, yet grief rattled my windows, peeled and shredded my grey paint. The fresh faced boy, in socks, talking about something or other, carrying a toy boat, slipped on my preposterous steps. The mother, having heard the emergency of sounds-rumbling and bumping and a thud followed by terrible silence-dropped her kitchen scrub brush and ran to find her son broken, ended on my scarred planks.
So, I am boarded and bound again, infested and infiltrated by mice and moth. Vines grow up from the receding ground, fingers moving up to choke. The ocean rises, promising to sweep in, break me to bits, releasing me out to sea.
Those Who Occupy
Twist and Twain/January 2023
Thank goodness, almost the whole Redson family-all five of us- gathered together, preparing, all except one of course, but Bethie would arrive soon enough. Father made a quick visit to Sandy Acres and told us Bethie was resisting a bit but she wouldn’t be much longer. Beau’s transition was a real slog-Alzheimer’s-but he finally made it back. Bobby came quick with a heart attack-or was it a stroke? Never mind. I got off easy-died in childbirth-so I’ve been here alone, watching everything go to pot, for eons, even before Mother and Father. I think Father would love to have the grandmas and grandpas also with us, but Mother is not willing to share her home with the extendeds, as she calls them. Mother tends towards closing off – that’s just her way. Of course, everyone blamed me for the state of things, but what could I do, all on my own? Anyway, I was simply on pins and needles awaiting Bethie. In life, I considered her to be a bit goody-goody and spoiled, with her blonde hair and all, but I hoped things would be different, now that we’re all in the same place.