Death of the Housewife

DEATH of a HOUSEWIFE Like her mother hard work did not faze Anne, she often remarked when other girls were complaining, “I could turn twenty tricks in an hour for five dollars each if I needed a quick hundred.” One hundred dollars being the price of a ten dollar bag. Finding twenty men was the challenge, accommodating them would be no problem. She could not stand people who filled idle hours with bitching and moaning. It was always a blessing to Anne to know her goal. Growing up in a large single parent family the work and rules were always laid out in front of her. One of the reasons why she stopped after two kids. Tonight she was getting antsy because of her unmet goal, scoring a dime bag. Since the 4th of July weekend Anne had not turned two tricks in a week. Wisely, she waited not buying a boot from Fingers for twenty, for that money Fingers would shoot her up. That was bad for her personal finances. She was confident of getting the rest of the money together tonight, in fact false hope had kept her going for months long after cash from her husband’s ATM card ran out. This evening Anne spotted a dad and kids in the park across the street, as unusual as seeing a shooting star or finding a four leaf clover, the sight lifted Anne’s spirits it was sure to change her recent lack of luck. “Hey, put the fire out!” Someone yelled. With heavy steps the bartender approached their table and dumped water on the smoldering pile. At the whores’ table curls of smoke and stench continued up from an ashtray now filled with muck, on their table small glasses of beer grew flat before they were empty. Cigs in the caustic heap still threw sparks. Squawking, a gaggle of scarred, gassy, garrulous women wearing fake gold chains turning their dirty necks green intended for one of them along with rings of lusterless colored glass on nicotine stained fingers bought by some

customer on a spree then divided haphazardly among the women with little regard, it was junk. Such was their community and their treasure. Smoldering filter kings grabbed more attention than their emeralds and rubies. They held private conversations in loud voices as if to assure the stiffs in the bar that they were still a lively bunch waiting for their horny clients. “Did you see that guy in the park with kids?” Coming in the door Anne went to the window behind the whores’ table and licked her fingers to clear a peephole onto the street. After years of cooking grease, smoke and dust only silhouettes could be seen through the glass. “Don’t get me started on kids,” Jackie squinted up at Anne, blind without her glasses her eyes were a smear of silver blue makeup and crumbs of black liner. She went on to grumble to anyone nearby about how much her grandkids were costing her and how she is too good to them listing what she had bought them and the prices. Anne did not stay to listen she had heard often enough about Jackie‘s junkie daughter. Sylvia, a fellow geriatric added succinctly, “They better not get that bench dirty. I use that bench. It‘s very romantic.” “They have women’s Viagra now.” Jackie voiced prettily to get a rise. “Jackie, who the hell asked you?” “We should have it covered in plastic.” Anne joked and they laughed. “And cushions.” Sylvia added, still tearful with anger at Jackie. In the dark hours junkies would loll on the swing set and drape over the monkey bars. Anne would only pull her panties open to the side for fear of infected blood on the bench. She turned to Vanessa who made it a point to know everyone. “Do you know who that guy with kids in the park is?” “Of course, let me see.” She easily wiggled out of her

seat between Jackie and the wall. “What did he ask for?” Anne opened the door so that they might get a real view. “They’re over there.” Anne looked out and pointed across the street. “I don’t know them. Hey, but check out my new pants.” Vanessa gave a partial demonstration, navy sailor pants with two pairs of silver snaps to allow front and rear panels to slip down near her knees. “Easy access” Vanessa raved, “and no cum stains because they’re machine washable.” “That’s great.” Anne answered with genuine enthusiasm. She had suddenly entered a brighter world. It was as though she wanted to tell her fellow workers, ‘I met someone.’ “How old are the kids?” Sylvia, seated across from Jackie asked with a lisp, tonight she did not bring her teeth to work. “Stay clear of a guy like that. The ones who like kids are trouble.” “I’ve had fathers bring their sons to me.” Jackie had a story to cover every occasion. “They want to make sure their boys get busted by a pro who knows what she’s doing, not some pom-pom girl from school who only knows how to tease.” Sylvia continued, “There are all kinds of freaks you have to stay away from today. Not like when I started out. Then you just had to look out for cops and wives.” “We had syph and the clap back then too …” The incessant contradictions and conflict between Sylvia and Jackie went back to forgotten ages past, the dispute having simmered down to ongoing one-upmanship and mutual rudeness. “I’d rather have clap than another kid.” Jackie, the wiser of the two said about which both older women laughed. “How do I look?” Anne asked Vanessa on an impulse. “Turn around. You look fine. You just need to update your wardrobe.” Vanessa replied. “I know and lose thirty pounds.” Anne added as an honest joke to keep the light mood going.

“If I was thirty years younger.” Jackie tossed in from her seat at the table. Adding to herself, “I’ve got to keep saving my money for Botox.” She began an unconscious attempt to rejuvenate by pulling at the loose skin on the side of her face. “Do you think he has any money?” Vanessa asked gaily. Her dream was to blackmail a rich man. Suddenly all four of them were feeling festive. “We don’t need grown men with kids around here. Someone ought to go across the street and get rid of them.” Jackie said it like an order. Since high school Anne had been making money with her body. It was her childhood dream and she imagined this role put her in a position to be found by that elusive man who would settle her down and deliver her to a happy life. Feeling again a surge of attachment for the man on the bench, a savior, that one who would take her away, to remake her as good and honest wife. She scorned her mother’s advice, ‘It is as easy to love a rich man as a poor one,’ because she had yet to meet a rich one. Anne was still idealistic enough to join the conversation with the younger girls who explored the underside. They wanted to know, how does one go about blackmailing? Wouldn’t someone with money, a family, and an important job easily get the upper hand? Mature ladies who shared the table were filled with the hopelessness of old age and when they spoke and moved it was as if they were pacing themselves for a day of heavy labor. At best they viewed themselves as unwanted but necessary extension of their customers’ family. Their talk was mundane, Where did you get your hair done? Who does your nails? Isn’t it time for another boob job? It was a common impersonal sisterhood by the front door at the whore’s table. Disinterest was a practice, the women did not know or want to know much about each other. Mostly they talked about the customers, how repulsive they were, their bullshit and stink.

Anne had mentioned her sons long ago and the other women turned away. Children were as unwanted as VD. While all of the women used condoms on the men Anne went in an aesthetic direction as well, she kept baby wipes with her and used them to clean her clients. She mentioned it now and again to the other women but the practice failed to catch on. Washing the men was a thing she had read about back in high school when she still read, in a Russian novel. Some clients thought themselves suave because their hair was combed and they were showered and put on a clean shirt and others wanted to be thought of as demanding because they rudely asked for what they liked done. A man truly suave or demanding rarely found a need to pay. No clean, self assured, desirable man was ever found in this filthy bar on these rat infested streets. Anne’s dates were horny, lonely, isolated and emotionally disabled, they only imagined themselves to be a part of the world and surrounded by friends and/or assassins. The women at the table reminded her of the pages of books she had read when she was a bright little girl, like the pages they were yellow-grey, flaking out of existence, decayed and neglected. Suffering long after some tragedy going back to childhood as the saddest and most pathetic characters in fiction, all stamped with disappointment and pain since their earliest relationships. Unable to love or be loved, like Anne they could not carry the burden of children, so unbearable had life been for them. Some were barren and all were sexless, weighed down by imagined qualities of the female sex and frustrated by their inability to find those qualities in themselves. It left them here together in this cold smoking heap. The women were a loosely rotating amalgam with some like Anne doing prison time and returning, or going on sabbatical due to the demands of family or the police, others simply moving back to the old home or on to Las Vegas or Florida. Or hospice care.

There was an underlying restlessness to this line of work in a familiar place which no one called home with rooms and beds upstairs used but not for rest. The bartender collected from the girls, he paid the owner and the owner paid the local syndicate who paid the police. In this small city where everyone knew everyone else arrests where rare but usually with a purpose, to put pressure on the owner, teach a particular person a lesson or to appease a few voters with random and rare displays of the city fathers’ power. The first time Anne was arrested it was because someone on the street did not mind their own business when they heard whimpering coming from the trunk of her car. She figured out the seriousness of that mistake with her first stay in solitary isolation. There Anne reconstructed many of the things that had gone wrong in her life. Lesson learned she emerged from prison scared quiet, for the first time in her life she had to think for herself and tried to become a conformist. How to function as a whore was a lesson that cost her a total seven years of her life. The johns were always happy with Anne’s work before and after she went away. Only upon her recent return it was finally the way it was supposed to be, completely impersonal. And quiet. Part of the change was deeper too and Anne tried not to allow it. She was released just after her 34th birthday and sensed herself having aged, gotten old, that free spirit in her was short lived. She seemed closer to her husband in age although he was well past 40. Her relationship to her job had changed. She did her work and did it well but without the flourishes. Her professional sex life became no different than her personal sex life. Both were mechanical and she knew when it was over. Her professional life was more affectionate or cordial as required since she depended on good will for her clients to return. Her personal sex life became problematic, after years Joe was able to say what he wanted without the

need to be cute. While he was giddy with anticipation there was no talk afterward. What lingered was a dissatisfaction stemming from a sense of inadequacy because he could not control his wife. And anxiety due to his inability to fulfill a gentlemanly desire to please Anne. If nothing else self satisfaction kept him coming back. Learning his wife was a prostitute gave Joe an awesome respect for her. After that he did not worry about presenting his own excess or hurting her feelings. As a couple they became a part of the culture called ‘Kinky.’ Anne did not become addicted to heroin in a day. On Monday to cure a hangover she smoked some that was a powder Fingers sprinkled on a cigarette and on Tuesday she snorted some cut with cocaine. Wednesday she came to the bar with money, bought some of her own and brought it home, a dull honey paste that bubbled when she smoked it in an aluminum foil pipe. She heard drugs were a bad thing and Thursday had a headache and the shakes all day. Friday she looked at the needle and told herself not to be afraid then twenty dollars for one good shot she paid. “I should be a surgeon.” She heard Fingers from a great distance explain, “Because I didn‘t feel any pain.” The room filled Anne with a sense that it was an elevated and spiritual place as it faded away. It felt good to be detached from herself and the surge of energy like when first waking from a nap. Feeling slender and lithe for the first time in her life, rich with a sense of well being and mental clarity. For a moment she thought she could fly across the sky but she was bolted to her seat and really high. Years later she would say that she had been an innocent girl until heroin. With heroin she medicated her self for a lot of things in her life, her many burdens to bear. But until heroin she had never felt a sense of possibility and inadequacy, or the self hatred for the responsibility of being the one who failed, and the desire for violent revenge against others and herself. Until she met heroin she suffered in silence, living her life not thinking it could be better.

Heroin, when she had it, made life pass like a warm and pleasant dream and gave her the feeling she was charmed. It returned her to the happy state of mind she had been in back in her high school days. Once she had crossed that scary border country of using the needle and no longer afraid of breaking her skin then shooting up it was a rebirth for her of both life and innocence. The second time Anne was arrested it was for having too much fun. Even girls in the nice brothels in the big cities contained their joy. PRISON Long after the scowling face of the judge who heard the testimony and handed down the sentence had faded from memory, and after being dragged from the courtroom for her violent display over the betrayal she felt that both the prosecution and defense attorneys worked for the state and her rage had faded into a sense of irony and the realization that she had to be in shackles before allowing herself to freely express her pent up feelings and the echo of the first curse barb died out as Anne struggled against and traded insults with the brutal matron who did a body cavity search in a cold shed before allowing her through the prison gates, after she heard and dismissed the instruction by the sergeant about her attitude and the lecture by the trusty given to the entire busload of convicts being admitted that afternoon saying stepping into prison was entering a life or death situation, and until she could no longer recall the names of the dykes and racist sisters who were her cellmates who she immediately got into fights with and for which she was clubbed and maced by guards, only then when her face was pressed to concrete and she was alone in the cold and dark could Anne begin populating her isolation cell with the true witnesses, the ones who held her secret and would tell her why she was there.

She did not like being watched not only by the guards but by the other women. They spoke openly about her until enough new women arrived and she was no longer new. On the outside she had been an obedient wife, not obedient in enough ways to keep out of jail but once inside she soon became an irritable and dangerous prisoner. Not being allowed to keep to herself and being one of the only white women in the lock up irritated her. The other prisoners had names for her. She was constantly proving herself by fighting. She felt the intensity of eyes on her even when it was only her cellmates. Being arrogant and rowdy helped her survive but it also prolonged her stay. In addition to punitive segregation Anne’s attitude also got her extra doses of therapy. Group therapy gave her several eye opening experiences. Hearing another woman talk about the hate list she carries in her head was startling to Anne who carried one as well and always had a feeling that she was the only one who did. The therapist talked about what a burden keeping a list must be. Talk opened old wounds. One of her cellmates had been a child prostitutes for a drug addicted mother and like Anne saw herself as being a composite of bitter emotions which she was forced to hide. Many of the women had an anger that defied a label, they were angry at the world. But the world was just a term used for an event or person they were afraid to name. Often following group therapy Anne turned sensitive, her reactions became reflexive and she could not stand any talk, she became uncooperative with the guards escorting her back to her cell. Even the loss of weekend visits with her family did not help the warden and the bulls get a handle on Anne’s behavior. Providing more proof that she deserved to be incarcerated, deserved more punishment and above all was guilty. Seeing other women come and go with longer sentences but earlier release dates for good behavior was not enough to influence Anne as the first month became a year. A waste bucket and a food tray, in the profound

darkness her fingers identified the plastic spoon and napkin placed in a groove on the edge of the food tray by its side a bucket for Anne to squat over and stuck between the mettle handle and side, like a Christmas ornament, a rolled measure of toilet paper. The only light she could see came when a far away door opened about the time her food trays and bucket were swapped. The inconsistency of the tasteless gruel kept her guessing what meal she was eating. This was not solitary isolation this was the place of punishment, the hole. Being lead to the hole voices followed her, Keep track of the days, Exercise, Don’t sleep too much, she received advice from behind bars as the guards escorted her on the long walk down dimly lit twisting stairs into a prevailing smell of dampness seeping in through the concrete and dusty heaps of spider droppings. Like being dead in the earth but not part of the earth. Anne laid on the floor, slept, lost track of the days, pissed on the floor. For a trickle of memories she paid a price. She lost her mind, let go of it and released it to fly away like a puff of smoke against a cloudless blue sky, dissipating into nothing. The mind which got along, made conversation, went to college, might nod, argue, laugh at a joke. The mind that had been formed by watching the world around her, a mind so bursting to tell a secret that it caved in on itself and desperately grasped at the need to escape the clamp of guilt, her mind that managed the threats of pain from the outer world and from within. While she despised this mind of hers that begged for mercy she was also proud of her mind as a tool she had forged to protect her and help her live in the world without being a part of it. Now in the hole she was dismissing this mind which had at last failed her and allowed her to sink and wallow. She had been a smart girl, had done well, this was where it got her. It protected her from the outside world but could not deal with the inner pain. It was the mind of a helpless child protecting herself. A baby alone in the room in pain with no one to answer her cries. This was the intelligence

she had developed to tell herself there was nothing to be afraid of in the dark. Alone in a cell that was a pit where no one could hear her, in a darkness that never saw a shaft or a shadow of daylight, she now dismissed the defensive mind of childhood to stand naked before all of the monsters in the dark. No memory came without a price, she twisted and turned repeating words heard long ago that for the first time are to have meaning. Tearing at herself to feel the ripping, burning, stinging pain and once more to bleed that same blood tinged with shame and finally give full expression to all of the agony which until now, until this safe damp box in the bowels of the earth she had been constantly afraid to express. She did to her children what was done to her as a child and now she asked herself, why? At the age of twenty four the tiny isolation cell offered Anne a luxury she had never known before. It was a place where her screams and howls could be put out of mind by thick walls and where for the first time in her life she could collect her thoughts and sit quietly thinking. It took three years of such deprivation for her to wind her way into her own mind, memory and experiences from which to draw conclusions and on which to make a decision. Several decisions in fact but the primary one was to decide that she wanted out of that place. A decision she could not make until she assembled all of the facts and with them reconstructed her life which lead her to this place. No matter whose fault everything else was, in the hole she had control of her destiny. Lying on her wool blanket on the floor, head propped on the damp footing stone, it was a relief to be in a place where no one could not get at her, a place where she did not have to listen to them and they could not touch her. Yet they were with her. As was Anne’s mother and her mother’s mother, two generations of women who did the woman’s work for families they consider better than themselves. In addition to the humiliating meager pay was the otherwise to be

discarded food and clothes they brought home. Anne could remember her grandmother in her dotage wearing a formal gown in a field picking berries, semi circles of yellow sweat staining white cloth embroidered with silver thread. It was a warm memory and a very old one. Even as a child Anne knew she looked equally foolish in cast off clothes. Anne remembered the scene and the emotion clearly although she had not seen her grandmother since leaving Canada as a child. “One’s reputation must be spotless to work for a fine family.” Anne’s mother said looking down on her own children, the lowest of them it was well known was Anne. The family’s fall from grace and the necessity to migrate to the States was all Anne’s fault but she did not know why or for what. Three years were spent mostly in the hole or emerging after long interments to try and live a few days with new cellmates and strange faces before she was even given a parole hearing. The long list of her infractions was read by the hearing officer before her counselor spoke. “I thought you liked me,” Anne said to her counselor. “Anne, I hardly know you, you seldom speak up in group and you frequently miss sessions because you are being disciplined.” Despite being encouraged to speak in session Anne had the impression that silence was preferred. It was better to keep ones secrets to ones self to earn merit with the counselor. “I see where your family has driven up here for visits and been turned away. Even here you still have not lived up to the responsibilities to your family.” In her world of being herded around then neglected punctuated by visits to the threatening places like the dinning hall, the corridor, the showers and the yard Anne was so pressed to survive that she had no time to reflect on how her survival here affected anyone on the outside. Much

like her life before prison, she thought she was doing well living a normal life until a narc got her arrested. Anne was only being herself which was the problem that was keeping her in prison and the hole. The hole had become her latest addiction. “Do you really want me to speak?” Anne asked the therapist. On a chair in the prison dressing room Anne left folded as instructed her tan pants and shirt, a pair of soft tennis shoes and an orange jump suit with the large black letters D.o.C. stenciled on both front and back, in her final year of incarceration she was allowed to do some of the pleasant outdoor work as a model prisoner. Putting on her old jeans they looped around her like a barrel, her shirt sagged to the middle of her chest and the shoes she had once worn were stiff. Her small stack of self help and romance books her family had brought were left behind in the cell for the other girls. In the waiting room the family pictures that had once been on the wall by her cot were now in a stack on the metal chair next to her. During her wait she read old magazines and a guard who had once reviled her seemed not to recognize her, he had even brought her a coffee while she waited. She was five years as a prisoner and now had to wait two and a half hours as an out of place convict. Finally the door opened gingerly and it was Joe with a coat for her draped over his arm. It had been a long time since she had kissed him at the end of visits but now she greeted him warmly. He was surprised. If she was to succeed in the world this time then right now he was all she had. Time had changed them both. They had dated while he was in college and she had many other friends, after a year of marriage she had the boys one after another, over time she barely remembered the Joe she first met. Suddenly the arrest happened and now she was about to resume life with a hardened and embittered version of the man she once liked well enough to marry.

Joe warmed to her kiss then helped her on with her coat as one would a child with arms encircling her. “Congratulations,” he said and laughed nervously, “is that what you say to someone finishing their sentence? You lost a lot of weight. I never noticed before.” “Me neither.” She clung to his arm and he pulled open the door. “How does it feel stepping out into freedom?” “Wonderful, I think.” But in truth she was terrified. “Where are the boys?” “It’s a school day.” Joe said. Visiting day was Sundays when Joe normally brought the boys. “There’s no snow at home.” Joe referred to the small grey pile of snow in the center of a circle of oily water. “You’re shivering.” Joe observed. He unlocked and opened the car door for her. She fell into the seat as though under the pressure of an avalanche of all the reasons she would fail in her new freedom. ‘Take an inventory’ she kept repeating in her mind a phrase that was drilled into her over the years of counseling. “I can’t wait to get home and clean the house.” She said. “Just like it used to be.” She knew Joe liked a clean house along with predictability and no surprises which was why he did not allow the kids a day out of school to pick Anne up. “You look so tired, now things will go back to the way they were supposed to be. I’ll be by your side.” She stared out the window, afraid to look at him. “Yes, that will be great.” She heard only sarcasm when he spoke. “What was it like?” Joe asked. Anne remembered how his eyes could undress her but now his searching look was beyond flesh. “It was terrible. It was cold all the time and there’s constant fighting. It’s loud and the food is disgusting …” “No, not that. What was it like being a hooker? A whore? I’ve had a hard-on for five years wanting to know the details.”

She had only seen Joe accompanied by children over the last five years and had forgotten how his tone with her was always either cynical and sarcastic or horny. In his middle management culture taking the cynical approach meant he was less likely to be wrong or disappointed than if he took a positive approach. Being in the chorus of nay sayers was always safer than being an advocate. The corporate outlook was little different than that of prisoners. When Anne hesitated to talk about whoring he went on. “You have no idea what it was like for me. I’ll never forget it. Waking up that first morning and your side of the bed was empty, I thought you were killed in a car crash coming home from, you said, a PTA meeting. Back then I was afraid to miss work. I thought we couldn’t afford it. I found out later, your habit had already cost us our savings. Not only did my work suffer …” As he went on she felt smaller and smaller, sick within. Prison life had kept this source of guilt in abeyance. “The kids had to live with this too. Even though our name and your picture were only on the news for a minute it stuck in everyone’s mind. The phone calls started coming in immediately. So many I told you sos from your sisters rubbing it in and the rest of your family telling me you’re no good and they knew this would happen all along. Your family always hated me for having an education and a decent job. Helping us was the last thing they would ever do.” All the time during her trial and incarceration he had been supportive but coming home now he told her how dismayed he was by who she turned out to be. His cynicism was camouflage for someone who was very innocent, a hard exterior for a tender heart. He truly believed her when she told him she was going out to do things for the church or the public school. Those were things his mother and sisters did. During visits all the talk was about the kids. For three hours every Sunday Joe let her be a mother. Now she was to be a wife again and soon a daughter and sister. “Do you trust me anymore now that you know?”

“I don’t trust anyone anymore. It seemed too fantastic to be believed that my wife is a prostitute having sex with men to support her drug habit. You told me things and I believed you. Why shouldn’t I? If not for me then for the kids. I had no reason not to trust you before. Now … now, I am not going to let myself get in any situations where I have to rely on trusting you.” That was a hard swallow. In Anne’s mind time in the outside world had stood still while she was away. Now things were worse. Just when she was ready to open up to him he might no longer believe her. “Tell me what being a whore was like.” Suddenly he was all over her like when they first met only now he broke off to ask questions. Before he could open his pants Anne insisted they get out of the prison parking lot. “It’s a relief to know you still find me attractive. I have lost a lot of weight. Do you like that?” Anne leaned back and pressed her memory to answer honestly as Joe continued questioning while fondling her and steering with one hand. In the beginning heroin comforted her in her world and over time it became her world, she could not have a cogent thought, laugh at a joke or remember where she lived without it. The first time she went to prison she was maintained by a quest of self discovery. Out of prison she struggled to make amends with her family and live without the junk. After failing at both goals and going to prison a second time the only drive that moderated her behavior toward authority and the other girls was the reality that the better she behaved the sooner she would be out and free to stick a needle in her arm once more.

MY DADDY'S BAR

Once she was glad to be with him, back in the days when she was in school and she was working. So hot for each other only able to spend a few nights a week together. But after she avoided him like a bad memory. She went to the church, PTA meetings with neighbors who had kids and even visited her mother in law so that she could be away from her husband. As a newly wed she is tortured by constant surveillance. She counts the minutes of the day that she has broken up into an even and dull paced intervals of mindless chores punctuated by empty time in front of the television waiting for her husband to return. One more night, she takes out the trash and says as the door closes, “We need milk.” She won't be home until the sun is almost up. Shamed by him she despises being in his sight, hearing him constantly clearing his throat before correcting something he does not like or making some other withering comment about her. It makes for a very long evening at home. She panics as her night out ends. If she is late to get home she does not know who will watch the children. Another chore done by Joe and the only price she had to pay were dirty looks in the morning and a cross examination at night. She was totally honest with him about the need to get out although she honestly could not attach a reason to the need. During her only year of college she had been inside plenty of bars with flashing lights, a good sound system and plenty of chairs no bar like this would ever have gotten her notice and less likely to draw her inside. As a married woman it was what she was looking for, far from the action, hushed and poorly lit, small windows. The patrons stood at the bar or sat with their backs to the wall and the center was open like a dance floor but no one danced and the music was inaudible.

When she was still single she wanted a place that would back light her where she could advertise her presence. This establishment was a hideaway. Wandering into the door there was an immediate familiarity, the discrete tables with people absorbing their drinks, minding their own business, playing cards, or in mysterious private conversations along with the smells of booze, tobacco, and at the front table a mushroom cloud of perfume combined to remind her of her youth and the basement social club where her father went. She wins quick acceptance from the guzzlers, bikers and tattooed ladies, here no one is judging her. From her husband's gaze she shrank and into the depths of this world she sank. "Whose little girl is this?" She had followed her father around a corner and into the basement of a house. "Come and sit with me, sit on your daddy's knee and don‘t say a thing." Her father smoked and drank tea. He smoked and sat with other adults, a strange sight to see. Could it be the same club from twenty years before? An impulse said yes, but it was not. Not possible, remembering that it was back in Canada, a thousand miles away. Here she felt her youthful energy restored. Like a child she investigates where she does not belong. Here she drank hardest and laugh loudest, casting off inhibition, dashing responsibility like a stack of dirty dishes smashed on the floor. “No one can touch my reputation for inebriation.” Through excess she gathers recognition like the way it had been. Every second she expects Meme and her other old friends from high school to come through the bar door and back into her life. After two beers she became a featured drunk going from table to table making friends or being a pest. The first time a man offers her money for sex she goes along. How proud her husband will be that she’s

helping the family economy. THE BANSHEE “This is what you have to do.” She laid on the parent’s bed of a boy she had just met after school, her skirt neatly inside out around her middle like a dinner bell and underwear at her ankles. No one was home but Anne looked up hearing the insistent dog yelping outside. The boy got off the bed and pulled up his pants, he still had not shown her his. “I’m supposed to feed Lucky.” Anne got up as well, “It’s all right,” she felt a clingy embarrassment, “I still like you.” Adding, “We’ll try it again after you feed Lucky.” Outside he placed down a dish of gray table scraps and filled a bowl of water. He called Lucky once, the dog and some boys appeared in the alley. Lucky was torn between his food dish and jumping up on Anne. Having never owned a dog Anne was timid toward Lucky. “Come on, Anne, show my friends what you showed me.” With his friends at hand he was now enthusiastic. “Let them see your umgina.” “Seen it!” Anne exchanged dirty looks with her old boyfriend who she was in love with two weeks ago. “All right, let’s go inside.” Anne said. Once inside Anne made the old boyfriend stay in the front room to be the lookout. She led the rest toward the bedroom but first stood in the doorway. “No one say a word to anyone about this.” Adding like a teacher, “Is that clear?” She waited for agreement. Coquettishly she raised herself onto the parent’s bed like it was her own oversized pleasure bed. The boys looked on while she made herself comfortable. She named the parts as she had learned them from many books. The boys craned their heads to see these dirty images come to life.

“Yuk!” Someone said. “You’re just immature,” Anne responded, “Or gay.” She enjoyed the laughter that sparked. “Go ahead, touch it, she’ll let you.” Those who had lustfully fondled dry magazine pages now recoiled with a horrored look in their eyes. “I dare you.” One of the boys said. Another offered a crooked finger. At night he covered her with hot kisses and sucked her nipples. “You are so beautiful, you are my love. I would have nothing without you.” Only he alone spoke, he was the only one who ever spoke. He always urged her silence as she had been silent from the first. Later at school Anne expressed some of the words and modeled her body to show the tension of the role she was placed in. In turn every pre adolescent boy she knew who knew how and so desired to return her flirtations became the core of her life and sanity. Each make believe breakup resulted in real tears and threats. “Why doesn’t he want me? I’m just going to kill myself. He would be the perfect man for me. I just want to commit suicide. If I can’t have him I will die. Who can save me?” Even as she cried over one dead romance she asked the other girls who they thought might like her. The other girls soothed her and told her the next boyfriend would be her ultimate lover, the cure, a fix, at least for a while. Then she would be thankful for having ditched the last one, seeing clearly that he was a mistake. Her father came to her in the night mouthing the words of heated passion and Anne lived those words with the boys she knew. Lustfully Anne tried everyday to bring the passion and the pleasure to life. Each boyfriend she found was tested by her desire to find the one who would do anything for her and never leave her. Few boys her age had the life experience to play the part with her. Ten year old boys yet to develop the drives

which their teenage brothers had in overabundance. Anne played a game of romantic tag in the elementary school classroom and when she went home in the afternoon she was a toy for the bigger boys to pass around. Most of them out of decency or nature did not take their play as far as Anne was capable of going. By night, as always, she became once more and forever daddy’s girl. She told the girls at the big art table about the junior high boys who had been bringing her candy and charm bracelets. Anne went on endlessly embellishing and imagining situations until no one could read any truth at the heart of her stories. Anne wanted the other girls to believe jealously that she was loved. Teachers in elementary school frequently put her at a solitary table in class and the lunchroom, hoping isolation from the other children could stop the troubling play they saw. Since it is the credo of every teacher to manage her own classroom and because Anne’s father had instilled secrecy about “it” upon every level of her mind Anne got through all of the elementary grades without discovery or intervention by any adult at school or church. With her romantic longings and attempts at involvement there was also the knowledge she brought to school from life at home. A poor girl in colorless hand me downs or homemade clothes had a wealth of experiences. She spoke with an earnestness that told the others that it was no lie. Only the source of knowledge was never hinted at. As instinctive as the others knew what Anne described was accurate from the depth of the well of instinctive morality they knew something was wrong. But discovery was thwarted by the natural tendency to lie about sex. From infancy the acceptance of affection stood side by side with the insistence upon secrecy. Only the secrecy was darkly overshadowed, it seemed wrong to hold in secret against threat of harm when the sensations are so delicious. Erotic behavior was the major part of her childish play as was the urgency of silence. Secrecy was never much of a

problem, it was as if everyone in the room had agreed to pretend to be blind. Anne would not do a thing until there was an agreement to secrecy. Then Anne would initiate the infantile erotic. The secrecy toward sex was a response greedily accepted as a rule and precondition, it was, after all, a crime for many of Anne’s partners. Secrets are part of childhood’s conspiracy that demands of all children to do what they are told not to and rule their own lives, the conspiracy to keep secret also gave Anne control. For Anne the secrecy of the night was a detail in a dream, lingering and then gone until the return of night. Absolute obedience was a survival instinct in her mind’s impenetrable trap. She would be an adult and in prison for other crimes before she would be able to grasp the nature of the childhood memory. Entering high school as an emerging woman the competitive atmosphere reduced Anne to a child again and put the brakes on Anne’s free sex style. Having discovered an identity which she promoted for years she now stepped away from it. Her small circle in the street and the elementary school yard dissolved and after a summer was replaced by what seemed like a mature self. When once she was the arbiter of what a woman was upon entering high school she did not even measure up. She allowed herself to be swallowed by the environment so that she might survive and learn. By high school age she confronted the boy himself. Her girlfriends could read the signs and knew exactly what was going on. It is the boys who do not understand and need a demonstration in tears and with threats. Anne learned painfully there is no satisfying answer to the question, Why don’t you want to be seen with me? And the threat of suicide rarely leads to a good time. It seemed her fate to be the girl who has experienced everything sexually but never gets to have a steady boyfriend.

In high school the boys were ready customers for sex and Anne, the husky girl who wore hand me down Catholic school uniforms and no makeup was not even noticed. Girls in her high school wore glossy red lipstick, short miniskirts and fishnet stocking with round butts and real tits. Anne who could talk her way out of anything found a new means of getting attention. She became the mistress of prurient observations, double meaning and suggestive speech. She never had to do anything any more but implied everything. Her quick wit made teachers skittish and by the end of freshman year she was popular. Anne even became fashionable after she discovered jeans and tee shirts along with the ritual of popping her bra off as soon as she was out of the house. Anne evolved from a sweaty and guilt ridden little girl to happy and relaxed riding a wave of popularity. She also had enough intelligence to win the grudging respect of the teachers. Quickly she was drafted by the students to be a school officer and by senior year she was class president. Leading the other students down a merry path. A FAMILY Sitting behind his desk Nick the Greek looked over her application. “You’re not afraid to work hard?” He peered through the cigarette smoke, the hand holding the cigarette resting on his big belly, motionless in front of his face. Looking with one squinting eye over his half glasses he asked questions with a foreign accent in good English. Anne simply held up one arm and made a muscle for him. High school meant expenses and she needed a job to build upon her new independence. He looked unhappily at her, “If I hire you you will be like part of the family.” Anne new then she would get the job. Nick added, “Don’t quit on me.” Nick responded to the few seconds of silence. “What are you waiting for? Go see Jena. Get an apron and go to

work.” Before leaving to sell used cars or visit the race track Nick stopped in the kitchen and told bent old Uncle Starcos running the dishwasher how she made a muscle for him. Starcos was Nick’s and everyone‘s uncle. Later the cooks and bus boys who spoke no English would make that crooked arm gesture back at Anne with a smile or a laugh. From the rich man’s belly which seemed intent on swallowing the entire world to the skinny, nervous boys who were Anne’s age and younger fresh off the Olympic Airline jet, this was as close to a caring family as she ever got. Being treated like a member of the family meant being asked first to work on holidays, expected to come in early and stay late and allowed to run the register when it got busy along with other responsibilities all done for no extra pay. She did it all happily with only the expected complaints because she felt she was working directly for Nick the stern and shaved Santa, in a suit without a tie, a shirt that pulled at the buttons, smelling of cigarettes, garlic and basil. Nick was a father figure and a provider who had personally built a fortress empire where Anne and the others would serve for a time and feel safe. For her dark coloring, downy mustache and thick arms Anne was assumed to be Greek and treated as such. She disappeared into the army of girls serving cokes and GreekItalian cuisine. Like any girl in the family she soon became invisible to the men who ran the back end of the business. And like a member of the family she was held to a strict moral code, those men were her supposed cousins and brothers back there. Anne invited an occasional pinch or bump but the men could only screw the blond waitresses, it seemed to Anne that was what the few buxom blonds were hired for. Nick the Greeks son, Little Nick, was tall and skinny, and like a Greek man he had a strong nose. He was hairy like the rest of them, he had hair on his knuckles and even his ass. He was lazy and spent most of his time in his father’s office usually on the phone when he wasn’t making

deliveries for the restaurant or the dry cleaners next door which his father also owned. In that meek laziness there was something that attracted Anne. One winter afternoon when Little Nick was alone in his father’s office she tapped on the door to ask if she could take her smoking break in there. Little Nick was very relaxed behind his father‘s desk. He let Anne stay and was glad for the company. Little Nick was born in America, Anne asked because like everyone else in his family he seemed to have an accent. Forty five minutes had gone by when Aunt Jena was unhappily standing in the door. Nick told her he was talking about the Orthodox Church. “Never mind that,” Aunty said in a strained voice, “she has work to do.” All of them seemed sensitive about their religion, Little Nick regretted never having a real American Christmas. Anne felt the same shame toward her family since gifts were sparse and many years when they were not in their own apartment but crowded in with relatives the holiday was a heart felt blight as her family looked on jealously. Anne did not know if she was in a corresponding French or Canadian Church. Among the many framed pictures on his father’s desk Little Nick showed Anne his own family, a blond wife and American looking children. After that Anne became aware of Little Nick as a person in pain and he seemed to take special notice of her from then on as someone with a sympathetic ear. As busy as the Athens was with high school kids Anne who was a popular class president drew in more students and as they got close to graduation the place became crazy. One late night after watching her close the store, Little Nick who had been following her around talking while she mopped, offered to drive Anne home. No longer with mother and sisters Anne’s job paid her

share of the rent for a garret apartment in a residential neighborhood. Between statuesque Meme the seductress and Anne becoming truly sexually active now no man in that quarter of town was able to keep his pants on. With the slam of the car doors Little Nick’s pleasant monologue from inside the restaurant turned miserable. Nick started the car, he had a couple of pounds of keys on rings chained to other rings. “You’re lucky your parents aren’t Greek. They never liked my blond wife and now that we’re having trouble they blame me. They think because she is blond she is a tramp.” Since renting the apartment together Anne and Meme were a pair of wild women. Little Nick spent the night with Anne and for his awkward demeanor his name became a joke to the girls, afterward Anne developed an intense interest in him. At first protective of her round the clock social life Anne only let Little Nick drive her home a couple of nights a week, after graduation it became every night. Having completed school the reality hit that the little apartment, Nick and the job were all she had. Back at work she eavesdropped on his conversations. It did not matter that his father spoke mostly Greek to him, Big Nick was a very expressive man his voice was like the rumble of rocks in a landslide and the father also piqued Anne's interest. The talks in the office between the two Nicks always became heated ending with Big Nick barking in Greek. When the door opened smoke billowed out. Over time Anne gathered a collection of their phrases. Without knowing the exact meaning she used her Greek vocabulary on the bus boys, sometimes their jaws would drop. Little Nick, his head bowed looked broken while his father railed at him. When so downtrodden she could see how Little Nick looked just like his Uncle Starcos. Both were tall and skinny and neither of them receiving much respect. The old man washing dishes did not even bend an ear while all of the younger men in the kitchen strained listening, most with looks of pain a few had cruel smiles.

“What are they saying?” Anne popped in the kitchen and asked one of the cousins who she knew spoke English. “Be a man, Greeks do not divorce, the blond is making you into …” There was a thoughtful pause, “something she wipes herself with.” Anne could visualize Little Nick as a rag, soaking up what everyone else, especially his father wanted of him. She wondered why Little Nick would go to his father. Was he just a lamb going to the slaughter, everyone who was listening knew what would happen next. Anne could not be just a comfort to Nick, she had to ask. That night driving home the rant was not against his father, his family or the pressure he felt knowing as the oldest son the family empire would be his, he instead turned on Anne. “It is not your place to question me. No Greek woman comes between a father and a son. He is teaching me what it means to be a man. You are a woman, you have a very easy path to follow, have the babies and take care of the house. “I am a man, alone I fight the world to bring home money. Do not get in my way with questions, a true Greek woman respects her King because it is he who makes her a Queen.” Little Nick became unpredictable, some nights going upstairs to Anne‘s apartment and other nights not. Lately he was drunk after work and would take Anne drinking before bringing her home. He always started fights with her if she mentioned something ethnic whether it was Greek or not. Under the specter of divorce it was her desire to be with the two children with Little Nick in the picture on the desk that Anne was feeling the morning she asked, “I can pass for a Greek woman, couldn’t I?” Without hesitation Little Nick responded, “I’m sick of Greeks.” He was drinking constantly. Anne decided to start going out nights with some others still around from her graduating class. That crowd was too young, Little Nick did not want to be seen with

them. The end of summer was looming and Anne wanted to get on with her own life. Anne quit the Athens for an easy job dancing at a bar where one of Meme‘s boyfriends was a bouncer. One night soon after closing Anne thought she might check up on Little Nick. Across the half lit restaurant she saw a blond girl on the register counting the cash drawer while Little Nick mopped the floor. Anne almost tapped on the glass but instead hurried back to her car, she knew the woman, she was in the picture of the happy family on the boss’s desk. ‘This is what it means to be a man,’ Anne imagined Big Nick telling Little Nick as things were patched up. This time the pain was unequaled, the family that could have been hers was taken away from her. She cried out his name as she lurched from her car, fell to the lawn and crawled the stairs to the apartment. Her howls alerted everyone about her broken heart. With her judgment weakened by loneliness, booze, drugs and fatigue, Anne tried to kill herself. She used the first bottle of pills she found and alcohol but it was not the right pills and mixed with too much alcohol in a short time she was throwing up half antihistamines. What had happened scared Anne and with no family around she started fighting with Meme, contradicting what ever Meme said and blowing up at everything. It was intentional and transparent. Anne and Meme did not talk for a few days and then laughed about it. Anne and Meme decided soon after that night to quit the apartment. At first it was select girls from their graduating class who Anne and Meme let use the facilities. Quickly the small apartment became a dressing room and rehearsal hall for the changing mores of society. The place became so popular a bottle neck developed as the living room became a waiting room for those about to use the bedroom. Cars circled the block, bicycles filled the hall, the street was first daintily spotted with the debris of lovers, cigarette packs, foil wrappers and indiscrete balloons but

quickly the apartment became a destination just shy of a tourist hot spot and cans, bottles and discarded fast food wrappers filled the alleys and backyards of neighbors, Despite the associated filth their introduction to independent living was a success and they had learned that being women meant doing things they were told not to by everyone else because they too were also doing it. By summer’s end having become experts in married men Anne and Meme decided the place had become a dump, one that held with too many bad memories. Meme and Me When the blood came around lunchtime in school she thought she had broken it for sure. Despite all of book knowledge about her body and sex her initial reaction was fear. She did not dare to guess what was happening. Cramps and stomach aches where a regular part of her life and so that went with little noticed. She went through the humiliation of asking the man teacher at the door of the cafeteria for a bathroom pass then ran skittishly and took the first seat, the one without a door. “Can you help me!” Anne cried out after looking up from her underwear. Meme had to take the unlit cigarette out of her mouth to laugh. “It’s not funny.” Anne insisted in a tearful voice followed by big snorting laughter at herself and her predicament. “I got a dime,” Meme said. That was how they met. Meme lit her cigarette after handing Anne the pad she paid for out of the white dispenser on the wall. “This is my first time, it’s so embarrassing. Is this normal? “Normal? What’s normal? I’ve been bleeding since I was eleven. You think these girls came without a price?” Meme indicated her breasts, the talk of the school and pride of her classmates. “Their big, they look nice though.” Anne observed

looking up from cleaning herself. “Shit, they’re perfect. But they hurt like hell.” Meme held her shirt up to allow a quick inspection. They were perfect twins, high and half round with bull’s-eyes standing out from them. The Women’s room door burst open and a crowd of girls swarmed in filling the air with smoke. Leading a double life as a young girl with mature breasts Meme had learned a lot of important things which Anne did not yet know. Meme taught Anne some of the many ways to avoid pregnancy. Meme already knew Anne from classes they had together, she looked up to Anne because Anne was school smart as well as funny. Meme tried to be funny but could not pull it off and knew just like being stared at that she and not her jokes were not what they laughed at. Her boobs made her unwillingly popular, until she met Anne she had been shy and unhappy a child hidden and overwhelmed by her breast size. No one had seen her face in a long time, especially not boys. Even her father always have something to say about them and it was no longer the mosquito bite joke, the jokes now involved sacks of potatoes and gallons of milk. She was becoming a depressed young woman. The phone was constantly busy when Meme called answering the ad for models. Getting paid for her looks was a dream of hers. Finally she got through and they scheduled a shoot. This was the chance Meme had prayed for, she only worried about passing off her fake ID. Dropping her gum in an ashtray in the motel lobby Meme walked unevenly in a tight dress and on high heels which were both borrowed. She scanned the room numbers. A paper taped below one door number read, Advantage Models. She knocked once and was greeted by a white man wearing dreadlocks with a camera dangling from his neck who introduced himself as the photographer. He asked for an ID and inspected it before letting

Meme into the room. The room was hot and bright from large lights, there was a bed in the middle of the room and seated at a table in the corner were two grey haired old men. She moved with practiced cool in front of her audience, modulating her power. Back at school her friends who knew she was going for the modeling test now waited for the results with her. Only Anne and a few others were told what really happened. Meme did not want to hear ‘I told you so’ by other girls who would have never taken such a chance. It became at best a lesson for both of them and at worst a taunt reserved for when Meme‘s plans and plotting got too far ahead of reality. Eventually Meme related a modified version of this story and similar exploits. With a genuine belief in her future as a model and movie star Meme ate up the envy that came with every retelling, the tacky motel room, the repulsive moles on the old men, the smell and slippery feel of their crisp new money. While the three of them had come to take advantage of her, in Meme’s mind as she retold it, she had taken the upper hand and fleeced them. Although she did not receive the promised pictures for her portfolio and never heard again from Advantage Modeling, the fact that the young man in dreadlocks photographed everything made this an item for her verbal resume that she did have modeling experience. Meme was convinced and Anne too became convinced that it had been a professional modeling session. Meme had given the old guys everything they came for and more and she walked out of the room with almost two thousand dollars. Unlike most girls that age fixated on making a living on their looks, Meme was low maintenance with no interest in make-up or fashion. For subsequent modeling jobs she only wore her tee shirt and jeans. Meme nude was a marble statute in a sun drenched garden as she gave off the rays of healthy and pliant youth that men desire. A glowing beauty unqualified men, those

too young or too poor had to look away from, her creamy skin and perfect proportions, the bounce that was unavoidable making herself and her audiences transparent and embarrassed. Other women and even gay men saw her sex appeal, it was so strong as to wither and blunt their jealous barbs. Just to make it through the day and prevent them melting all around her Meme wrapped herself in coarseness and contempt for men, vocalizing it in ugly words. Of the people Anne surrounded herself with in high school Meme was the only one with whom she felt free to talk. Being completely self involved as her own tabloid Meme offered little response except to highlight any pause in Anne’s monologue with grunts and partial syllables or a deliberate head sway to let Anne know she was still there listening. Meme skinned off several crisp one hundred dollar bills for Anne, fun money, not meant to last. She did not go back to work at the restaurant until the money ran out. While Anne did not have the looks for modeling she shared with Meme an easy way of picking up men. Lacking Meme’s perfection Anne used her intellectual gift to know what phrases to use and which words to emphasize. In high school double entendre was one of Anne’s obsessions. She was able to spread red faced embarrassment anywhere she chose. Anne flourished in high school having both brains and personality. By the beginning of senior year it seemed she had risen above every circumstance that had brought her down all of her life, in triumph she was elected class president. For her it was not just a popularity contest, she had ideas and was motivated wanting to use her position as a platform from which to help the others. The homeless being especially close to her heart. However the administration who supervised student activities had no intention of breaking with the vain and trivial role of student government and they disallowed

Anne’s ambition. Her energy was directed back to the traditional work of class officers, spirit week, football and graduation. As inevitable as the coming of spring Anne could see her future writ large. Unable to afford college her only role models were menial laborers. She had been raised by her mother to believe the only option which life could offer someone like her was to marry well. Meaning marry for money, at least a man willing to work. But social class mixing was ruled by the same standard as racial mixing. So that the upper class does not become diluted the socially mixed family is always grouped with the lower half. This was something Anne had only read about or seen in movies or soap operas, she had been brought up to believe that she lived in a society of classes, it seemed almost impossible to rise above ones born class through marriage. Only the opposite effect was known to happen, the couple could only attain the lowest common social status. The only exception made was for males who are athletes and women who possess high sexual powers - like Meme. Frightened by what the future might hold Anne felt she had nothing to lose. Far be it for Anne to ever use anyone but if she was going to hangout she might as well hang out with a friend who could help her achieve her goal. Meme, like the juiciest of ripe fruit did not look toward the future, she wanted the man who could show her the best time at the moment. For that purpose having Anne around was a help. They became a pair who brought fire to the night anyplace they showed up. Meme had plenty of fun nights and did more modeling but Anne rarely found a male worth keeping. The ones she did meet seldom lasted, culturally she could not see beyond bars and parties. Some nights she howled out her frustration as even slightly plausible prospects slipped out of grasp. She did not think her intentions were terrible or so obvious, the most useful conclusion she reached gold digging was that the typical

man to meet in a bar would be a drunk one and they inevitably sober up. All that fire water led to bubbling and eruptions, there was only so much Cover Girl could cover. Meme decided to try cocaine and Anne slowed her drinking and enrolled at a community college. Meet Three Fingers Early in her marriage Anne needed excuses to get out of the house and find places to go. There was her mother-inlaw, the church, the old high school crowd, even nights when she parked on quiet streets with small houses like the very one she was escaping from and she wondered, Why? Had she married a man just like the father, one who she imagined she deserved? He was both critical and demanding and as a result he was never satisfied which made him more like her mother. His negativity downgraded any achievement of hers and took away the pride she might have in her home. She was once more a child listening to her mother tirade at her. In bed her husband became the child. In wanting a good man who would not remind her of the life she once led she had landed someone who made her relive that life. Kids were born and soon after Anne again sought refuge. There were not enough PTA meetings and her mother-in-law would shoo her back home, the church types were unbearable and old friends were all married and with their own children now. Other couples they were searching for or finding the happiness that had evaded Anne. Drawn by voices and laughter to a place where she could get a fifty cent beer and smoke without being cast out onto the sidewalk where Anne found a place to let lose and laugh the way she could not at home. It was a fun night out where everyone appreciated her humor and wild woman attitude. Anne always had a power of social finesse with new people and a talent since high school to mix things up and

have fun by talking dirty. Soon she was flying from table to table in the front of the bar like a social pinball. Yet the light that came from the back of the room of Three Fingers’ laser gaze put up a wall that Anne dared not cross. Not at first, until she had grown weary of her own flightiness at the edge of his territory. She had watched his trade come and go, Anne was experienced enough not to go where she was not wanted. Boredom with the border he had put up and curiosity finally won out. Three Fingers was so called for the placement of three fingers like the manipulating grip of a baseball pitcher on the ball. Although this man never spent an afternoon in the sunshine or had any skill to display before a cheering crowd. Fingers lived in a dark dreary place intentionally out of view. His product and service was dispensed with three fingers, a thumb on the plunger and two fingers in the handle of a syringe. Tucked away in the back of the bar, hidden like a creature ready to pounce or flee, his presence was felt before he was seen. At his table others were motionless and those approaching or leaving moved with extreme deliberation. Quick movement was suspicious. Three Fingers piercing gaze distinguishing bar patrons, his helpers, personal customers and the cops. It was a night when her husband asked her not to go out. The master of his home was not very masterful. Anne felt her place was at the bar and despite the rain and ominous road conditions she was off to take her place. That night she had seen a car wreck and talked about it with concern yet laughed at the victims without care. She and others spoke of wrecks they had seen or could recall. Bored with tales of blood Anne could see Fingers stretched out in his corner smoking cigarettes sleepily as even he seemed to wish he had somewhere else to be. Anne moved with rhythm of the music of the rain making bold steps and cutting off the waitress to grab a pitcher off the bar and deliver it to his table. “I know what your looking at,” without looking at him Anne directed her

comment. “What’s that?” His voice sounded dry from chain smoking. “Here‘s your beer.” She used the pitcher to lead her approach. “No, thanks,” he placed a hand on top of his half empty glass. Anne continued her approach. Once fully in Fingers’ dark region she asked, “What’s do you do here that’s so interesting?” “If you like to try I can make you feel real good.” Anne thought he was being flirtatious and responded in kind, “ You’ll have to be pretty good to please me.” With a thumb plunging down on two fingers he indicated his trade. Years later she would tell her husband that she had been an innocent girl until heroin. The way her father used her and her mother ignored then abused her, the cruelty and mistreatment from her older sisters, the burden of caring for younger brothers, the way her husband looked down on her and treated her as if she was a moron, all of those things had been her lot in life, her burden to bear. Until she met Three Fingers and he opened for her the way to drugs she had never felt a sense of inadequacy and self hatred, or a desire for violent revenge. Monday, she smoked a line that he sprinkled on a cigarette. Tuesday, she bought some that was caked and yellow, at home she made an aluminum foil pipe, it bubbled, the smoke was hot but numbing. On Wednesday she snorted a powder he had saved for her before starting her car to drive home. She smoked some more of the yellow once Joe left for work. Having gone through the grocery money on the way to the bar she stopped at an ATM and withdrew the limit. That was Thursday and on that day she thought drugs were bad. Friday she woke up feeling nervous and hungover. Needles were always a phobia for Anne. She paid Fingers the twenty and could not look as he fixed her arm

for the injection. “When it comes to needles I am still a virgin.” She clenched her jaw but then relaxed, she wanted to giggle, seeing double made everything twice as funny. It gave her a sense of happiness and well being like she had never experienced in her life. She wanted to dance but was pinned in her seat. She felt both weightless and anchored. Anne was light for the first time in her life. In the beginning it comforted her in her world, over time it became her world, she could not have a cogent thought, laugh at a joke, or remember where she lived without it. The first time in prison she thought she had found within herself a desire to make amends with her family and live without the junk. Having failed at both goals and going to prison again the only drive that moderated her anger toward prison authorities and the other girls was the reality that the better she behaved the sooner she would be out and getting high once more. As to the whores’ table she remained clueless until after she looted enough money from her husband and then she became one of the tired, quiet women sitting by the front window with men passing hourly though their lives. Breaking her skin to get high had been a far harder decision for her than allowing strange men to enter her for money. Prostitution as a way of life had always been in the back of her mind. It was in prison the first time that she learned everything she need to know about the business of sex. Being a whore and supporting her own habit gave her independence from her husband and the pride of no longer pilfering his wallet, credit card and bank account. HOW WE MET

Almost eighteen, free of oppression and responsibility,

a leader in her high school class, respected by teachers and looked up to by classmates, in the tiny garret apartment she shared with her best friend, Anne breathed for the first time she sweet air of freedom. Upon leaving her first real job as a waitress for a job with shorter hours that she did not leave feeling tired at the end of her shift, with no responsibility for money except her own tips and which paid an inconceivable amount more than the old job, Anne discovered the emptiness and heart break that would follow her. She missed her adopted family at the restaurant and she especially missed the two Nicks. It was a job she got through Meme, models worked the nights but the club always needed dancers for the day shifts. It came naturally for Anne as Meme predicted it would. When she didn’t feel like dancing she would just strut on the stage and if she needed a break she sat on the floor and opened and closed her knees. From the stage customers could not see past her tits to her face but Anne could see them and she recognized a few of her old teachers and as she got to know others, there were bankers, construction workers, students and jocks. The tips were amazing and from what she heard they did not even compare with the girls who danced at night. She wondered what someone would do with that much money. Anne quickly grew attached to her regulars and would not trade shifts - not that anyone was offering it to her. She did not know her daytime regulars were also nighttime regulars. The work was easy but sometimes the customers could be jerks, the jerks were almost always either the drunks whose interest was alcohol and not the entertainment, or younger guys who wanted to do more than just watch. That afternoon Joe was at a table full of young drunks, while they were loud he was serious and soon wandered away from his table to stand at the edge of the stage. Out of boredom with the small cheap crowd that day Anne decided to play ‘eye contact’ with a cute one and slowly danced her way over. He still looked cute when she danced out of the glare of the spotlight and close enough to

see him better. She winked at him and blew kisses and watched the guys he came in with react, they cheered but were too rapt in each other’s drunken gaze to get out of their seats and join him. Joe shared a stash of pornography with his next younger brother Ray just as he shared a separate stash in a different hiding place with his next older brother Terry. For young teens needing an outlet from a large family crammed into a house several times expanded meant stores of dirty books could be discovered under every loose floor board and propped against every joist that was not wrist breaking to reach. Material was hidden underfoot instead of under beds because beds were so often moved as alliances shifted and change of resting place replaced the search for privacy. Seeded by the first half a generation for the latter the fertile mixture was found in tree houses, under car seats and in trunks, even the milkman was treated to a quick and desperate stash. Joe delighted in a compulsion to show the thick glut of magazines to littler kids, like skinny and innocent Raymond. It was in part a response to the corpulent and grownup way he felt when he and Terry opened their stash of treasure. But even that was unsatisfying because there was something false about dirty pictures. Joe’s birth grouping was near the end of the utero parade. He had adult brothers and sisters as well as sistersin-law who were nursing a lot of babies which meant there were plenty of boobs for eager pairs of darting eyes and craned necks of spurting adolescent boys to discover and save for their dreams. In the gathering of brothers, boy cousins’ and nephews’ the meat books were conversation items which they gathered around. Loosely following a rule that no one looked at the magazines alone in hushed groups they approached the dusty piles. Like the two man failsafe system to guard against nuclear war the result was that rarely did any of

them set eyes on their porn. When they did look the boys’ made highly considered comparisons and touched the pages. They spoke of fantastic adventures and conquests involving themselves and females often ending in a circle jerk. Followed by disgust, guilt and a shift to other manly subjects. Sadly, while Joe and the family welcomed any strangers to the block, the feeling in the neighborhood was decidedly not returned. The family’s house was the local eyesore, the parents had once suspected as much but that concern was sent to the rear and forgotten, other matters needed more urgent parental attention. People who bought homes nearby at the same time were dismayed by the one sinkhole of a residence bringing property values down. Filled with dead cars the yard had no grass, in time it became like Woodstock with the endless parade of unfamiliar teenagers and whenever the immediate family gathered for a summer barbeque the city police were called in to handle traffic along with assorted but mostly unwarranted complaints. Joe’s family were guilty people who took too literally the directive, ‘be fruitful and multiply.’ Joe emerged from his family hard working and equipped to handle life’s surprises. Being good willed, flexible and with few expectations he was set to make the most of what he was about to discover in the world beyond the family. By his conservative nature and for financial reasons Joe wanted to live at home during college but the sameness of it fast became a depressing distraction. He always had money because he saved and like every sib in his family he worked. His family was a source of labor for the neighborhood and the children from age 10 on up were constantly comparing incomes and bank accounts. It was a sad awakening for Joe when he realized he had to get out of the house if he was to continue his personal growth. He roomed with different guys every semester and had formed no more friendships in his graduate year than as a

freshman. Graduation was like retiring from a company who after forty years were indifferent about him. Celebrating with the family did not feel like a milestone because it lacked new faces. The day after graduation was reserved for a more rowdy celebration, he would go out with other seniors he knew from his apartment building. The halls had been echoing with the sound of celebrants since about noon of the previous day. Nervously Joe drank, drinking was something he almost never did, while others made decisions where to go he inventoried his life. Starting at the highlight, a fresh degree, Bachelor of Science with a minor in business, he progressed down the warehouse of his life into the darkness of a typical unremembered and uninspiring youth and childhood. When someone shouted, “Who wants to go to a strip club?” Joe, a twenty two year old virgin, nursing a warm can of beer joined the cheer. They piled into someone’s car. “Drunk in the middle of the day.” At his shoulder a red faced English major wet Joe with his words. This was not his crowd, these guys did not have to search the internet to find the strip club. Fearful for his life with a drunk at the wheel Joe closed his eyes trying to visualize himself on the job next week, praying that if he could see himself alive in the future it would vouchsafe him to that point in time. Recalling that he had already signed insurance forms with his new employer Joe relaxed a notch. They parked the car in a squalid section of town and from a cool, clear and dry May day entered a dark, steamy and rank smelling strip club. Uncomfortable with the guys at his table, building and apartment mates who never had more than a head nodding acquaintanceship with him, Joe got up to wonder around and inspect the premises. He had been looking at the sound system when a dancer flirted with him. A padlock on his wallet Joe flirted back. Joe made the most of the show she put on for him, especially the crotch shots. Head frozen but eyes working feverishly. She put a display on for several minutes playing

with her g-string making a peep show just for him. He appeared angelic as he kept his distance, she wondered if he had ever gazed with that same longing at a penis. He was contorting himself in his seat to catch a glance into her pussy. Spinning around, rolling over and stretching out then slowly raising her butt, her head resting at the edge of the stage she spoke to Joe, “See anything you like, cutie?“ He was so cute that he seemed weak, effeminate, and very non threatening. “Why are you up there doing that?” It was an unexpected response and Anne almost took offense to it but then backed down when she saw the unflinching sincerity in his look. “Hey, Joe.” “Hey, Joe.” The guys from his table were calling. Then one brash voice, “Get away from her, you’ll catch something.” A gale of cruel laughter rose from the table. “Stay here and I’ll give you a free lap dance.” She got up and danced away. When the next girl was on stage Anne came as promised to Joe seated alone at a table. Dancing half the width of a hair from touching him, offering all of her body and breathing hot words into his ears she described the things she wanted to do to him, Joe became unashamedly aroused. “Your friends just left, Joe.” Anne told him as his forehead touched her bellybutton ring. Having shrunk from her in his seat he shrugged at the news and when he shrugged his shoulders released immeasurable pent up nervous energy. The imperceptible boundary between them was shattered as Joe’s with his shrug uncoiled like a spring and he fell backward in his chair and she fell with him landing her crotch in his face. “Are you all right?” Joe asked with his mouth full. “What is this hard thing?” An old line, she squeezed Joe then rolled to the side. After going out for burgers they went to Joe’s apartment, his roommates were still out. They watched TV

for a while. She was about to ask Joe if he was gay when he started putting his moves on her. Joe hesitated starting anything because he was unsure if she was just a dancer or a hooker who would do the things she whispered while dancing between his legs then present him with a bill and a big guy to collect it. It occurred to him to keep quiet and wait. If he learned she was a hooker then the party would be over, he didn’t have any more money. After placing a couple of cans of soda on the coffee table he leaned over and kissed her and she returned the kiss. He could do whatever he wanted, all of his school papers were handed in and he was a graduate.

RAZOR WALKER This early summer had brought an unexpected dry spell for Anne’s business, just a few percs and vikes given to her by friends to take the edge off. Without money she had nothing to shoot for two days. It was available, Fingers had a stream of happy clients, for them it swirled like snow in the winter and was kicked around like heaps of brown leaves but for Anne it was dry. Abundance was even absent from her memory. Only the strong yearning and a vague sense that it was not always like this remained. Earlier when she walked past the park her radar picked up on a stranger. She prided herself on her radar, the joke was, ‘Anne’s radar could find a stiff in a car trunk.’ Now she could hear the sounds of kids on the swing set. Rarely did she ever look toward the park unless she was coming out of the bar and crossing the street with a john. The only sound to come out of the park then were the groans and grunts of other girls at work or junkies tying off and shooting up. Her radar was wrong, this man was not alone. The presence of a man and kids made Anne increasingly uncomfortable.

She had never intended to speak to him but in the bar it was decided that their presence might be bad for business. The job fell to Anne since she was the first to spot him. Seeing him still there she crossed the street but did not look at him. He turned but she could not tell if he said anything. Her mind clamored for the familiar, to return to the table at the front of the bar where the coughing, yelling and the jukebox limited the toil of conversation. Where like the others, between tricks Anne would settle down to cough a lung out into the acrid air is as thick as beer foam. A safe place for her. She thought she heard a gentle voice one that made her highly suspicious. ‘Want a blowjob and a good fuck?’ Rehearsing unnecessarily the phrase in her mind twisting on the edge of her lips. This fear filled moment was rubbing her raw as she tried to regain her voice. She tried again, “Hi Sweetheart, looking for a blowjob and a good fuck?” His response was a lack of comprehension. “I said, do you want the best blowjob you ever had? Twenty dollars.” Now she could tell he had heard her although he was poised to speak he seemed an astronomical distance from her. “I can remember every woman with whom I ever had sex. And every one told me that her skills were the best or her body was the best and I should never expect to have it any better. Except for a few who used guilt to gain the upper hand.” Adding, “I don’t think I can help you. Being called on to perform sexually would be more pressure and of the sort that would add nothing positive to my situation.” He turned from her and looked around. “Mikey, don’t swing so high. David, stay away from that garbage.” Anne’s voice shifted from the deep and solicitous to peaked with concern, “Why did you bring children here?” “Don’t worry, I’m watching them. We’re not going to be here long.” “Are you waiting to buy some dope? I can help you out.

You don’t want to get busted with your kids along. Believe me, I know, 5 years.” She pointed at her self and gave a sadder but wiser nod. “My kids are visiting me. I live over there.” He indicated up ahead somewhere indistinct, likely the grey row houses leaning against the hill. “Their mother and I are having a trial separation and the rent around here is cheap.” “Do you get to sleep much with the screaming, the gunshots and the sirens all night long?” “My neighbors are almost all alcoholics and they settle down pretty early with a few exceptions.” “Why did you leave your wife?” “Philosophical differences.” “What?” She shrieked. Mouth wide open Anne’s head rolled back with a roaring laugh. “I thought I had heard them all in my line of work but now I have really heard them all. Is that why you don’t want to fuck me, I don’t appeal to you philosophically?” “Of course, why else wouldn’t I?” He waited for a little respect before going on. “In the marriage I was roll playing. I was living a narrow, stereotype identity but now I am a born again bachelor and I want to be myself again. Maybe for the first time.” In prison Anne had spent years in counseling and group therapy, she could understand what he was saying. “How did your wife take the news? Philosophically?” “She immediately thought there was another woman. After I convinced her there was no one else she thought I needed for her to ‘spice up’ our sex life. I responded at first like a typical hormonal male but after a while I didn’t want to go through all the moves and preparation when really my self image had become so distorted by my need to please people. In fact didn’t want to have sex with anyone - which of course made her think I was turning gay. My philosophical and spiritual life is headed in another direction.” “Hmm … I see … Sounds like bullshit to me. If there isn’t another woman maybe there should be. If you aren’t turning gay.”

“Now you’re talking out of your own pigeon hole. You don’t know me.” He sprang to his feet, a nervous father, guilty for allowing himself to be distracted. “Michael, David, come on boys, it will be getting dark soon.” “Five more minutes, dad, please?” Asked David, older, looking up from tracking something in the uncut grass. The younger one closer by digging in the sand box dropped his shovel and ran to his father’s knee, “Please, Dad, please?” the little one begged. “It won’t be dark for two hours.” Anne said softly. “Okay.” He relented. “What were we saying?” Anne continued. “You said you were caught buying drugs with your children and were given a five year sentence.” “I like you,” she laughed and her body shook. Wearing a totally revealing body suit which an hour ago putting it on made her feel confident, she now felt as sexy as Santa Clause. The confidence she had worked at did not exist with this man, talking with him touched on thoughts better left forgotten. In her line of work personal reflection was something she had to struggle against, it was always charm that overcame it. “You’re a good listener,” she observed, “you could do good on the street.” Continuing, “Not just a five year sentence. I was never put up for parole. I served everyday of five years in prison. That was the first time.” “Why no parole?” He asked sheepishly, interest tempered with disgust and disinterest. “I wasn’t a good conformist, I was a slow learner and I had issues.” Now he really did not want to find out anymore, he crossed his legs and tried to project the image of idle relaxation on the bench. “My second time up was only two years. I left my boys at home with their father but because it was the second time I got a seven year sentence, narcotics and prostitution. But I learned my lesson and was in and out in two.”

“But you’re still here so really you didn’t learn your lesson.” Reluctantly he was dragged into the conversation. “You have beautiful kids.” Anne said. “Thank you.” He could not help but light up despite the fact she did not know them or would he want her to. “I have two boys also, fifteen and seventeen, about ten years older than yours.” He nodded with his heart suddenly open to her. “I spent half of their lives locked up. I couldn’t be much of a mother three hours every Sunday. And some of those Sundays I missed because I was being punished for fighting or being such a bitch to the guards and the other women. Imagine that, my family drives three hours to see me and ’Surprise, she can’t have visitors today.’ It might be for something I did that morning or the day before. I just didn’t want to see them and I did not want them to see me.” “You were ashamed of yourself, I guess.” He talked now without looking at her, clearly he did not care for trendy psychobabble it would only serve as an indicator of ignorance. Anne had lured him into empty chatter, he much preferred silence but it was too late. “That’s what you’d think at first but it was deeper than that, like I told you …” “You had issues.” He was on the brink of being rude. “That’s right … I was sexually abused by my father.” “Was he an alcoholic?” He looked her way again while imagining the fallen men he lived near. “No, quite the opposite. I don’t think he ever took a drink although most of my memories of him are from below the belt, if you know what I mean. He was always shy and quiet, never threatening, a gentleman. He would ask me how much I love mommy and we would play a game, Daddy and Mommy. He always had me show him how much I love daddy and how much mommy loves daddy. He’d point to their silent bedroom, Mommy doesn’t cry, you must stay quiet. It was always quiet when daddy was around. Scary quiet … “My mother says, ‘That’s impossible. You are making it

all up. He left when you were only six. You can’t remember that.’ But I would correct her, ‘He did not leave us, we left him.’ Telling her that would shut her up. I could go into every detail of how he looked, even how he smelled. I would describe this father I supposedly had never seen and she would go all crazy. She was in love with him. Then she would accuse me of stealing him away. That I had destroyed their happy home. “It was crazy.” Ed listened inattentively, scanning the park and interrupting to give encouragement to his boys. It was a rule of his to pay attention to that which was positive and spiritually uplifting. And to block out what is base and degrading to the human spirit. “The sexual abuse, as far as I can tell, started from birth. My mother confirmed some of it but not until I asked the right questions and I was already an adult by then. That’s why I have so many issues.” The story of her life was like a confession but she had done nothing wrong. Ed understood. “You see that behavior is precisely what I am philosophically rebelling against. I don’t know your father but it sounds like he was a slave to his urges. Sex is a survival urge, very low and primitive and it should be treated that way. Yet for so many sex is the focus of their lives. To me it is a source of embarrassment and for you a source of pain.” “What is embarrassing for you? Because I have heard it all and if it is something new I’d like to try it.” The mood was broken for Anne. “That’s not what I mean at all. I married a sexy woman who really turned me on when I was thirty. Now that the thrill is gone when she opens her mouth I cringe. That’s the kind of embarrassment I’m talking about.” “At least you sound more like my husband and not my father.” Something about this strange man plucked certain chords and Anne responded. “That’s why I thank god for divorce.” They shared a

laugh about that. “Sex is a source of income for married women too.” Anne mentioned that now having held off saying it before, too revealing. She envied the intimacy he had with his children like the way she imagined her X related to their children when she was not around. Her husband was so critical of her that it overturned her instinctive mothering and made her return to the way she was raised by her vindictive sisters and unhappy mother. Anne and Ed’s conversation moved on to which magazines have the best coupons and how to stretch the food and clothing budgets. The ways of frugality were native to her but something Ed as an initiate to self imposed poverty and a newly divorced dad was learning. She had some unique meal ideas from her French Canadian background. The style of cooking heavy on potatoes, oils and certain seasonings that her husband would get so angry about. Mostly she and Ed shared a desire for polite conversation without intimacy as refugees from relationship failures. Two people should be together only when both want to be together was his philosophy about how men should relate to women. He could not read the reality that was all around him. Anne knew that men want to keep women and women do not want to be kept. And both sides always want their options open without admitting it or letting the other person do the same. No one in a relationship should be trusted. She in turn nodded when he spoke of his philosophical anguish but inside she thought he was simply like a lot of meek guys she met on the job who kept his hands to himself and is afraid of women yet she found this single dad with his two boys compelling. He explained his life further. “I married a woman I hardly knew and saw us like my parents. My parents never came to anything. They never taught me anything. They were a couple and we were kids at loose ends around them. ‘Eighteen and out,’ my father said more than once, ‘then me

and your mother can finish our honeymoon.’ Over the years those phrases grew in meaning for me but by then it was too late. He made me feel completely unwanted which carried over into my marriage. Later in life it became impossible for me to form a relationship. My parents never imparted any wisdom. They were a horny, loveless couple.” Ed wore on his face all of the tension and pressure, the edginess over so many things, he looked like he had stumbled and fallen in a field of razor blades. The furrowed brow, lines around his mouth and down his cheeks running to his chin that was wrinkled by his fingers constantly drawing on it, or tugging at the hair around his ears as he spoke, darting eyes looking after his two kids and a nervous twitch of the head, he was evidently torn between worlds and undecided about some things . Eventually the conversation began to ramble. “Why is it so dark here?” Two hours had flown and suddenly they both noticed. “Whenever the city fixes the lights the junkies come and shoot them out again.” She pointed at one of the tall lampposts with its fixture hanging shattered and motionless. Anne was self conscious about this place, her second home. “Let me get Mikey out of that grass.” Said Ed, suddenly standing up from the bench. Anne stood to get the other boy. They walked together a few steps. “Is your name Dave or Davy?” Anne asked approaching the boy in the sand box. “My name is David.” He stopped digging and held her in his gaze. “Let’s go sit on the bench with your dad and brother.” “All right.” He stood to walk but she awkwardly lifted him. Overseeing Anne Ed walked with Mikey back from the grass. All four of them reached the bench together. “What a dirty face.” Anne said in a melodic voice, she felt around in her big bag that rattled as she brought out a box of baby wipes. At that moment it was as if she was an old family friend.

“I thought your boys were teenagers.” He observed. “They are, I use these for my business. It makes such a difference to have a clean face.” Adding aside, “and other places.” At that moment he blanched, if a stick were handy he would have chased her away with it. “Thank you,” she said, “for trusting me with you kids for a few minutes. I don’t have much contact with babies anymore.” “Hey!” and “We’re not babies.” Both brothers responded at once. “You are to me.” She hid David’s and her own face together behind a curtain of her wild brown curls where she kissed him. “I’ve been cut off from my nieces and nephews. Maybe we can do this again sometime. I won’t press you. I just work over there … “ He had never noticed the barely lit bar and grill across the street before. “Okay,” he said gathering his kids and leaving without a ’good-bye’. His stomach churned, he was nauseated at the image in his mind which she had suggested of filthy penises inside her repulsive whore body. Ed was born to be a wandered and soul searcher, he had no right to take a wife and have a family but could not help it. The path for him had long been barren of fellow seekers and when loneliness and the desire from within for a woman combined, he had not the strength, the community or the spiritual knowledge of how to sublimate desire and turn away. Unnourished though it was the spirit of a mystic seeker inside of him refused to die while the shadow over the life with a woman and children grew long. After only a few years he could not find his way as married man and father. Ed’s own father referred to Ed and his sister and brother as his prison sentence. Both of his parents seemed happier after the kids had gone to camping with cousins or to sleep at the grandparents for a weekend. They were a friendless, horny,

go nowhere couple and Ed had inherited two of those same qualities. In the chaos and din of having a wife and their own two children Ed was soothed by the sound of a distant choir and the rhythm of a drum. Like the swelling seed that breaks rock and shifts continents he did not resist the flowering of his soul that would destroy his family, wife and children. The most important thing he came to realize is that he should protect his children but not try to change them. The role of being a father was instrumental in changing Ed. He could not accept the self and society’s imposed godlike status as a parent when he felt so much like a child himself. Once his wife started acting on her suspicions his lofty self image made a fast and graceless descent. She had always been able to smile with one side of her face while sneering from the other. So long as he was on the smiling side Ed felt smart, in control and even superior to other men. It was in that Ed felt the contradiction once the honeymoon was over. He did not like gaining his identity and self esteem from her acceptance. The fire had died out early in the marriage. As a grandparent Ed’s father still wolf whistled for Ed’s mother and told everyone that he was a man who did not need Viagra. Ed’s father was happy to be led around by a handle made of skin. Ed could not remember an interesting conversation he and his wife ever had which he did not initiate. And those were years ago. Generally she swept aside his need for intellectual stimulation. He did not have to reject sex more than a couple of times for her to put together the big picture as she imagined it, another woman. By the look in her eyes Ed could mark the minute that it was over. He winced at the speed with which she landed a new lover. Still thinking of her as shallow he envied his X’s ability to change. Day by day he wanted to live and breath freely again as he remembered in a past life. He partially succumbed to the tremendous urge to throw off a multitude of obligations to the present and the future. The decisions he needed to

make could no longer be put off. As the two choices revealed themselves to him. He saw now this budding relationship with a whore as a new punishment for lacking the strength to cast away his children. Here I go again, Ed thought to himself, my brain is going spongy once more. I must start dating a regular woman I can’t spending time with a whore. But the weight of the world that Ed felt filled him with inertia and a week later he was back on the park bench. A PARENT’S SECRET “Get away from those men!” Anne’s mother demanded with a stage voice and an unusual vehemence for the benefit of history and nosy neighbors. Anne responded as if shocked, she certainly wasn’t doing anything other than watching their furniture being carried and lifted onto the big truck. Mother had warned Anne about talking to the men and upon arrival mother warned the men to stay away from her daughters. Sisters made a show of holding Anne’s hand. None of them wanted to but for anyone watching they put on a display of being dutiful. They managed to lose Anne anyway. Jeanine, the oldest, had threaten to throw her under the wheels if she did not get away from the truck. With her next sister, Ellen, she several times brought her to the side of the house pushed Anne to the ground and ran away from her. “You are not to tell anyone where we are going,” mother warned Anne’s sisters, “and if you think you know don’t say anything in front of... ” Mother shook a finger at Anne that could as easily have been a fist. “What is wrong with you?” Screaming, pleading, yelling, begging, head scratching the same question had repeatedly been asked of Anne for the last month. The answer, a secret, literally stretched back to the first days following Anne’s birth. Out came the shining couch to remind the family. Empty without father in glorious repose. Anne asked,

“Where’s Daddy? When is he coming?” Mother answered, “He is not coming and he is not your father. I am so sick over this. Get away from me … Come back here where I can see you. Hold my hand. What is wrong with you? Go and hold your sister‘s hand. You make me so sick.” The teamster gave a strong pull on the strap and the door of the truck slid closed. Holding mother’s hand during the final inspection Anne made her steps echo, the empty apartment still smelled of guttering candles, cigarettes and vanilla. A man came from behind and mother signed his clipboard. He counted the pastel bills into her hand, Anne could not contain her excitement over money, “Oh mother, you are so lucky.” “This won’t be enough to wipe our asses with at cousins’.” The shake of her head and the pained look in her eyes said the rest, Anne had heard it so often lately, ‘It’s all your fault.’ Helene purchased of the vinyl leather suite for the parlor. She begged Joe’s permission to buy the set because he looked so regal and important framed by the thick arms of the good sitting chair and she felt as a hard working, intense loving newly wed she deserved it for her man. The faux leather was soon highlighted by the tankard of Vitalis to which Joe daily treated his hair. Joe’s oily head had brought the living room couch to a magnificent high shine. The luster had spread to the seat cushions, it was Joe’s routine of sitting and napping, and later slouching and snoring, followed by going out to play cards then returning to sit, slouch and lastly sleep for the night. The suite came with a payment book to Baron’s Discount House of Furniture the payment book was thicker than the bible. The race was on to see which would last longer, the couch or the payment book. Both had outlasted the marriage. But at the time when Joe was hers he was well worth the price. His proud shimmering black pompadour was unmatched. Joe was a household god basking on the oiled

faux leather. In private moments he listened to Helene’s prayers to fix the drip in the sink or slap a sandwich together if any of their kids came home hungry from school. He would nod with agreeable disinterest and remind his wife when it was time for her to go to work. During the day she spun yarn at a mill once powered by an arm of the nearby Quebec River and at night she bathed and put to bed elderly patients in a nursing home. Between midnight and two Helene was often able to steal a little sleep after the patients were tucked in and before they began reawakening one another with stomach aches, fits of coughing and lonesome moans. At the mill she slept during her breaks, if the weather was favorable she stood on the loading dock to sleep leaning on the wall soothed by the sound of the river and when the wind was right refreshed by its spray. She bent over the couch for her husband’s kiss and his sweet words every morning before she once more headed out to catch the bus. Fighting sleep so exhausted that one wrong blink would place her back in her dreams and she would miss her stop. Helene made her own good clothes and dresses for her daughters but she bought her work outfits and other clothing for the kids at the Salvation Army Store. Every leftover dollar she had at the end of the month went into dressing Joe. Dressed and coifed, displaying Joe was her reason for living. He silently went along to every family and church function that Helene could sneak away from her jobs to attended. Joe turned heads and Helene gobbled up every remark about what a good looking man he was. She worked herself to the bone, worked herself stupid for her man to lay around oiled and scented. Helene grew prickly and calloused. She came home smelling of the factory and sickness every night making her unapproachable. Even before he married Helene Joe always found adult women too course for him and he was especially repulsed when they were so willing. His temperament had been only to struggle lightly for what he wanted and not to

take without asking first or being properly asked. There was a new pair of patent leathers or lovely wingtips in the closet for every time he was inside of his wife. Helene provided for Joe and protected him, she displayed him. He was always a gentleman of quiet virtue. Their life together was always connected with the church where they had first met. The couple had two daughters, one born less than a year after the other. The house swarmed with the female influence, a castrating atmosphere for Joe who spent such an unnatural amount of time at home. The daughters were wild and boy like, there was an interval of several years before Joe could even consider a new pair of shoes. Joe desired to keep Anne apart from those feral sisters. He wanted Anne to have something he had been long deprived of, tenderness, something none of the other woman around him possessed. Because of the restraint in Joe’s nature he could take the quality of his daughter that he was driven toward and hold it inside himself, not release it. Not like virginity that a sexual creature takes and is then lost, as the desire for it is also lost. With Anne from infancy he was able to imbibe that quality without consuming it. Slake a deep thirst for with a mere taste. New born an infant has a sucking power able to stretch and inflame the leathery areola, in like wise she damaged her father’s sensitive tissue. Jealousy is not a complex emotion, household pets and farm animals display jealousy, as a one year old she understood both the words and the significance of his finger waving instruction to her, “Do not tell your mommy.” Before long the threat of pain was added, “We don’t want to hurt mommy’s feelings.” If there is nothing wrong with it then why is it a secret? A smart girl, Anne posed the question. Like all of the other women in his life Anne now treaded on his timidity. But there was no need of further threats because it felt good and she liked it. No longer was it a solitary act of pleasure. It

began with him doing something he knew he should not but in time it became secret pleasure that was shared. The terribly selfish part had gone out of it. Even a baby knew that disinterest was about to follow. It became a test, who would be the first to crack, to cry out? At four she could accommodate him and play the game of jealousy and secrecy. Anne became proud that she could manipulate him and fancifully it entered her mind to do the same with other children and adults. No one violated the silence, she impressed all with the need and the threat never to say a word to anyone about anything. “Who did this to you?” The nurse asked of the medical evidence that was obvious from across the room to the people who stood looking and shaking their heads. A room filled with adults staring into her butt. In kindergarten Anne thought her play was being watched by teachers because they liked her. But she was escorted to other rooms where adults questioned her. She did not know anything except to say nothing. One thing was constantly in her mind even when mom joined in with the others questioning her, she could hear her father telling her not to tell anyone. The teacher and the principal of the school held a plump doll up for her, ‘Don’t touch any one There, or There, or Here.’ And never let anyone touch you. As a six year old Anne did not yet have a sense of the absurd, sitting in the judges chambers with mother describing how she had found the two of them together. Together Anne and dad denied even what mother had seen them doing. At least her father was right about one thing, by never saying a word Anne did not get into trouble. “They must think we are such filthy and disgusting people.” Anne’s mother cried. Anne was beaten that day and many others, shoved and slapped, when she did not cry she was ignored. Her mother slapped her so often that Anne lost most of the sight in one eye. Anne flinched automatically at any blur coming from her blind side. She learned to keep away from her mother, it was her sisters who were mostly

around and they were easier in their brutality. With mother a slap followed every encounter, sisters were unpredictable. What happened to father was a mystery, he disappeared. Mother and Anne’s sisters said it was Anne’s fault but how could it be, she never said a thing. Such hatred they heaped on her father that in time Anne assumed it was he who had said something. The lesson learned then was one of secrecy. “Want to feel something nice?” The question and the touching and probing just flowed out of her, the only part she could control was with whom and where. A renewed need for secrecy in the new school and the new country where mother had brought the entire family without dad. If nothing else held them together it was the blame they had for Anne of everything that was wrong now with the family. Because of Anne they had lost a husband and father. The other girls took direction from mother, their jealousy and rage toward Anne seemed to never end. WEDDINGS AND FUNERALS The family gathered once more as they did for weddings and funerals and a rare day at the beach. The funerals far outnumbered weddings. Boys seemed to die young more frequently than girls and their deaths in youth made them a rare commodity as young men and eventually put them at a premium as grooms. Those facts accounting for the paucity of weddings. If it put them at a premium, the boys, by their actions did not seem to know it. They seemed to die haphazardly in train yards, at the foot of grain silos, in fire balls or poisoning themselves with alcohol. They drove themselves to these deaths as though opening forbidden doors marked Men Only, to get a glance into the world which they would not live to enter. The girls of the same ages prayerful for that day which they feared might not come played games as prospective brides and rehearsed imaginary weddings with secret

anxiety. The factory town was still near enough to the great forest on the other side of the river that flowering Lady Slippers and Babies’ Breath could be found growing wild at the base of stone walls, along foundations and in the shadows between garages. Wishfully the girls gathered their own bouquets. The low stone wall around the cemetery where PJ was buried protected a long line of the tiny iridescent white blooms. Every spring handfuls were left as tokens on her brother’s grave. It was an annual day out for Anne’s mother and on the way home they hunted for mushrooms and picked dandelion leaves and fiddleheads for dinner. Anne’s mother had these babies, two brothers and a sister in the hopes of catching a man. As the older sisters were assigned to watch Anne they followed through by forcing Anne to watch the younger ones. All failed in the purpose of bringing Anne’s mother closer to marriage, money or US citizenship. Her mother was busy working and her sisters were caring for their own children, making it Anne’s job to raise these siblings. That chore was finished by the time Anne entered middle school. After school the boys roamed the streets around the house at the same time Anne had grown free to roam the town. No one was shocked that a fifteen year old who did not go to school was drinking and experimenting with drugs. PJ’s death was not looked into, his family had no social standing the authorities did not care. The risk was what made life fun and exciting for those people who lived in the row houses. He was just one of a number of statistics to be expected in Little Quebec. Anne’s sisters knifed Joe with their looks and arguments kept breaking out. Heaps of flowers arrived from schoolmates who did not know PJ, from the high school he seldom visited. For lack of chairs Anne’s sisters sat on one side of the grave, the restless kids laid on the mounds of dirt by the deep opening in the earth and laughed rolling in pebbles and dirt clods. Before the service began Joe tailed behind

Anne and her mother as they took seats on the opposite side of the grave. “Look at the beautiful flowers.” Anne observed adding her freshly picked handful. “It must have cost a fortune.” One of the sisters spit back across the open hole, “We could have used the money.” There was someone ready to clash over anything Anne said. Joe was sure he too would get his drubbing. When the ceremony began the immediate family was seated flanking the coffin. The kids, young cousins who lived side by side in the row houses near their mermer‘s, were stunned into silence and then released by their mothers to run wild. Seeing no sign of either grief or solemnity, it was strange to Joe, he was used to his own thoroughly repressed family who used the funeral as time to grieve. There was only a few words spoken over the grave which did not interrupt the constant grumbling, snorting, throat clearing, of the older folks, the playful screams of the kids or the unconcern of teenagers in the far back passing joints, drinking beer and laughing. Anne’s family was close in the sense that they were all at each others throats. The fighting never stopped and it went back generations. They seemed to celebrate a lack mutual respect or self esteem. “I expected this, he was marked to die.” With her words their mother displayed a sculpted superiority. “The men in this family are cursed.” The coffin was lowered and everyone stood, a family brawl followed. Joe hesitated to stand, he could not recall hearing a single prayer. The young girls flocked around his open grave, from their hands white blossoms snowed down while the guys who knew PJ heaped dirt onto the polished wood and a toneless staccato rose from the ground. The older and beefier sister came over at once, with the bravado of being unapproachable because of a cigarette in her maw she pushed Joe away going up to speak to Anne.

“This is all your husband’s fault. You had no right to get married without permission before any of us.” “You‘ve never even met my husband.” Anne said in voice Joe had never heard from her before, the choked voice of a child about to cry. Seeing her this way, at the mercy of these furious women was a revelation of who Anne was with her family. Normally she was happy, loud, joking, friendly, provocative and uniquely defensive with that hard shell of sexual knowledge without the labor of being sexy. While in the midst of her family she was beaten and pulverized but still flinching, defeated long ago, a silent punching bag. Celine knew Joe on sight, “Here’s the child fucker.” Jeanine, her blank mind was quickly filled, she was less aggressive but more bitter to Anne, “Make sure he buys you a nice house. It’s not fair, how could you have a steady boyfriend and get married? You should be punished for not watching PJ.” She turned to Joe, “Does he know what a whore slut you were when you were young? She sucked every dick on the row.” “Please, your sister is no fool,” softly the mother broke in, “your sister has always known how to get whatever she wants. She took your father away from us. Now this, Mr. Fancy pants.” “You don’t have to stay here listening to this.” Joe said. Dropping Joe’s hand she ran toward the cemetery gate. Later the only memory she would have of the funeral was constant regret that she did not get to place a shovelful of dirt on her brothers coffin. “You don’t have to follow me.” She yelled back to Joe. “You don’t want to be seen with a slut.” Walking fast behind her, “I don’t want to be seen with a slut, I want to be seen with you.” Joe shouting, “You’re no slut,” the dramatics went unnoticed by most of the other mourners. In the car she was silent and shrugged off Joe’s question, “Where do you want to go?” He waited until he could see some of the crowd from the cemetery headed their way. “Let’s go home then.”

Puffing a cigarette into a taper of red, “No. Go this way.” She said indicating direction with a turn of her head. “You should dump me, I’m no good. I am just going to bring you down.” “I’m from a big family too, I understand.” Joe cursed his annoyance at other drivers while he made the wild turns in the directions Anne indicated with the tilting of her head. “Here.” Cars filled the street in front of a long row of old factory houses, granite like the old factory itself and trimmed with vinyl. Skinny dogs reluctantly shared garbage in the road near a dumpster. Inside their mother’s crowded, noisy and sweaty duplex everyone had a beer in hand and there were bottles of hard liquor and Dixie cups on the kitchen table. Celine started screaming at PJ’s friends who were drinking. PJ died drunk, throwing up then falling out the window of a car full of kids speeding down the Turnpike. “You should have been watching him.” Jeanine fired off at Anne. “I was working, I don’t live here anymore and he was old enough.” Anne was in the circle of accusation with Joe at her side. Joe tried to be supportive and looked concerned but he was clearly not in the bullring. He had never seen people like these, all habit and dependency, smoking and drinking. Like loose hands at an orgy, reaching out to grab onto any vice. A succession of girls who were PJ’s age came by to chat Joe up. Joe was beside himself unable to manage his reactions, these women were making themselves known to him and the fragrance of lust and death twirled together entering his nostrils and stabbing at his conscience. He had seen but never been close to these goddesses. No longer girls and not yet women. Yesterday they would have spit at him, today they offer themselves. Joe clutched at his coke and struggled to keep his grip on the bottle. After hours of this all he wanted to do was get home and fuck his wife, thoughts churning in a personal circle of

guilt. “I love her too,” he told himself, eager to express the damned up first trickle. JOE, ANNE’S HUSBAND When Anne was with Joe she felt like she was in a supermarket or with a bank teller, he had the expression of urgency of a DMV worker who wanted his line to move fastest. Without his glasses she saw the liquid, semi squinting eyes which seemed to spend many hours studying her body like an application form full of tragic mistakes that made him smile. At college he was often the vocal center of a circle as lights were being turned down in the campus dining facility, arguing trivia with like minded students. He was especially comfortable in groups and spent many free hours in pointless cafeteria debates and stagnating in library lobbies splitting hairs in a hushed voice. He grew up in a house that would have cramped a typical family. Every bedroom was filled with bunk beds and for a while there were bunk beds in the hall. He did not like the shaking if he slept on top or the thoughts of being suffocated in the bottom with something so close above his head, often when the weather allowed he would sleep outside in one of the many cars that filled the yard. When sleeping outside he liked a dog to come with him, he slept contented with his fingers in its fur. By college Joe’s enjoyment of esoteric knowledge led him into technology which he could passionately argue about with other men among whom there was never a raised voice. Part of the crushing experience of being raised in a clutch of middle children was something he felt as a fear of being found out. It came with all the hand-me-downs and the lack of a set bedroom, and no bathroom privacy, it was rooted in being raised by a convenient sibling and having to search and fight for a parents’ hand to hold when lost in a

forest of knees. His parents were educated and like all of the family Joe aspired to being smart which simplified to a child’s perception means being always right. Yet being lost in that crowd he did not want to be noticed for his achievements out of a fear of sibling jealousy and reprisal. It was a family where being laughed at was as harsh as things got yet Joe felt he had swallowed a time bomb of being discovered which would lead to everyone ridiculing him. While he did have the patience of the super efficient bureaucrat along with his self assurance he also had a tendency to be smug and arrogant, one who laughter at others the moment backs are turned, the exact treatment he fears for himself. At college Joe was always the last roommate to move in and drove around with all of his books in the back seat of his car and clothing in bags in the trunk. He kept his twenty year old Corolla in pristine condition always having time to work on whatever was about to break. But the most remarkable thing about Joe was that of the ten undergrad guys sharing the three bedroom apartment he was the only one after graduation with a steady girlfriend. Anne only put in an appearance once a week but she was there when she said she would be. She had her own apartment where they occasionally slept together and when he couldn’t find her she was probably at her mother’s. College days proved to be the happiest of their relationship although the days spent together were few in number. What was deemed a cozy boyfriend-girlfriend relationship could be called infidelity in a marriage except Joe never saw her that way. His role, as he saw it develop, was to share Anne with the world. He laughed at Anne from the moment he met her and invited his friends to laugh as well. Like the boy who picked the worst dog in the litter he loved Anne because he knew only he could love her. Joe admired other women, the ones

he considered too beautiful for him to bother. His love for Anne was physically hot but emotionally cold and full of regret. With Anne by his side he felt as if he was telling the world, ’I know I can do better but I am not going to try.’ Privately he did not think too many other men were getting what he was getting. Sexually Anne was completely uninhibited and could excite Joe into wants and desires he never before knew he had. After she helped him reach satisfaction he sometimes spoke from genuine anxiety, ‘If I ever lose you no other woman could take your place, she would think I am sick!’ Like a body in a shallow grave he had a sense that their marriage would not last forever. After marriage Joe had to deal with his own stereotypical expectation that his wife be home at night with him. The sort of middle class existence Joe was aspiring toward as he struggled to put himself through college. She had told him plainly her feelings. Hearing her explanations were like knives to Joe, she told him she felt smothered, suffocated, closed in and caged she did not like his pushing himself on her or his possessiveness. He did not know why she saw spending nights with her husband would be so difficult. Neither of them could understand why she needed to get away. After she said she wished they where still going out and never got married Joe suggested they simply forget they ever did. Both of them laughed joyfully at that idea and in it they found some relief. Little else changed except their mindsets. They never found out if they were doing the right thing as their happiest time in marriage was spent drifting apart and their life together swiftly crumbled after the boys were born. The policeman pounding on the door shook the frame of the house before waking Joe. From four o’clock in the morning the longest day in Joes life unfolded until late that night when he was finally able to return home with his two babies. The boys had been placed and then misplaced by the foster care network of Child Protection. Joe had to take a

drug test to prove he was not a drug user and talk with a mental health worker to establish his suitability to have his own children returned to him. He sat before a judge in restaurant booth while the judge ate his lunch after calling a list of lawyers to find one free enough to work charging many times his normal hourly fee for a couple of minutes that day. Joe spent hours sharing benches in waiting rooms with the people who he had tried all of his life to avoid. He did not encounter a single happy, smiling or even pleasant person during his entire journey through the legal system. If a receptionist was sharing a joke with someone behind her the mirth fled her face turning toward the sliding glass to see Joe. The judge said it is unfortunate that someone like Joe has any rights. Until that morning Joe had no clue how wrapped in each other the lives married people are expected to be. The halls of justice were so jaded by the endless stream of misery they deemed a successful union to be based on suspicion and control. No one believed Joe who said he believed his wife who told him she was out visiting one of her sisters and they were doing work for the church. She brought the kids because she loves to be with her kids and is still nursing the little one and they are hers to do with as she thought right. Knowing Anne that last reason even sounded bad to Joe. He was told to take more responsibility and was scolded both verbally and by looks for his strident attitude. When it started getting dark the officials suggested he come back tomorrow but he insisted he would not go home without his children. It was late that night Joe when Joe returned home with the boys and making a bottle. He had yet to speak with Anne. Anne learned to relive in detail what she could not even see herself doing at the time. Such was the gift of years of isolation and months spent in the punishment box. The memories had returned to her of so much that was frightening and wrong even to her barely formed mind as a

child. Her father stuffing his penis in her infant mouth, the harsh and threatening voice and sucking without satisfaction. The same words he had used on her she said to her children as she placed them in the car trunk, she swaddled them in blankets to keep them warm and motionless. She had never probed them, only abandoned her children before she went off to seek her place in the world and do what she had to do to know peace. “Baby, you’re hurting me be careful.” She nursed her boys in a way that was frantic and desperate, suffocating them until the dark skin around her nipple bled. Sucking toothfully resulted in a pinch as her father had pinched her cheeks together, “Be gentle.” In the end she forced her own mind opened to see the past but there were still things she could not express involving her own children and the future. She was jealous of her sons for having a capable and virtuous father. This was punishment for having been made happy by her sisters who had babies but no men, opening a place for Anne in their lives to be a helpful auntie. The reverse now of her own family, arriving home after years in prison to find they had only a small and unsentimental place with no special need for Anne in their lives. TAKE ME TO YOUR DEALER “I want to make a birthday party for you. To make up for the ones I missed and so I can see all of your friends.” Joe’s response was a sound of the foreknowledge of tragedy that modulated between a grunt and a whimper. Accompanying the sound of a teenage boy embarrassed and under pressure. With words to match, “Ma, I am fourteen years old. Just give me some money so I can go out with my friends.” Lacking any tact he added, “You don’t even know me. I don’t want my friends to meet you. Most of them think you’re dead - that’s what I told them. ” Twelve year old Bryan went immediately to hug his

mother. He had always sought her love, remembering from infancy that he was getting a lesser measure always seeing the shadow of the competition looming above. Their little Joe had grown into a teenager while Anne was away. When he was not hungry or sleepy he wore a thick protective shroud of boredom or petty bickering. He was always annoyed with big Joe’s attempts to keep the family together. Like his father he was shy and did well in school. He did not do drugs and never drank. But Anne paved the road for others to have the expectation of him to develop into a drunk or a druggy. Sometimes he pretended to be like his mother to gain points with other angry kids his age who did not know him. Like his father he did not care what others thought. The first time Anne returning from prison she fought to rejoin the circle of the family even if it was not on a par with her husband she was willing to work her way up first by being accepted as one of the kids by the kids themselves. The kids then at six and eight years were willing to take a chance with the woman they had visited for so many years. It was a struggle against the slow lapse back into old habits. Joe was more inclined to laugh at her than to be supportive, for Anne being a parent was a painful role to play. Made painful by Joe’s constant supervision and mistrust being a parent and staying clean became mutually exclusive goals. The first night home when the boys resisted going to bed Anne wanted to allow them to stay up late but Joe turned that heavy disapproving look at her, it had her trembling for a fix. She could not discipline the kids, take sides when one was being a bully or a baby, or withstand her husband’s withering looks without the craving rising up from the depth of her being. She joined Narcotics Anonymous upon release as the parole board required and she made many calls to their support people when she was climbing the walls. At the meetings others talked about the difficulty of staying clean which Anne experienced but as for the better life without dope she was never able to get that far along. She could

remember a time without heroin when her arms were clean and unscarred but there was no time when she did not have the aching pain, the desire not to be squeezed to death by the looks and wants of the people around her which only smack could relieve. Prison was an exception, the children were far away and safe, and no one knew her well enough to get under her skin. Prison conflicts could be resolved on an equal basis even if that meant cat fights, hair being pulled out and knifings. She was a guest of the state for only two years the second time despite a longer sentence than the first one she served. As a model inmate Anne did not miss a single visit from her kids. When she got out her oldest boy was sporting a pink mustache, he was months away from thirteen and Anne was finally showing signs of maturity although she was unsure if she would survive it. Anne had learned her lesson and easily did two years with the knowledge that if she was a good girl she would be out faster and be getting high again sooner. When life on the outside became impossible, and she could not talk to Joe without him looking at her like she was a liar she began doing the things she had once lied about. Her criminal record may have prevented her from working with children or volunteering at a hospital but no one stopped her from volunteering at nursing homes. She fed the elderly, read to some and changed diapers on others. Charity work brought her back in contact with the poor and needful folks she left behind when she married Joe. It seemed to her like most people were making it up the slippery slope even though they were often short of money, or help and without enough hours in the day. It was ironic in her mind to be driving people from the homeless shelter to their jobs and drug treatment when she found herself unemployable and still yearning for the needle. Most of her motivation was to keep out of the house

and away from Joe, Narcotics Anonymous had meetings around the city every night of the week and often more than one. She even went to AlAnon just to play it safe, having been raised in a web of lies maybe there was alcoholism in her past, as the support group emphasized people were prone to lie about drinking. If these groups did not change her own habits and feelings at least she stayed well informed. At meetings there was no doubt that people were moving up the same ladder she was going down. At N.A. she welcomed the applause when she stood up for her 30 day key chain. The people surrounding her supported each other in fighting a common foe but Anne’s was a different foe. Crumbling within, Anne envied even those making no progress, from her perspective they were rushing far ahead of her. Often in her charity work she was invited in and met families who reminded her of her own, both the one she was raised in and the one that came out of her body, disparate individuals pulling against each other, forced together by circumstance and kept together by outsiders pity. Or like Anne and her sisters, hurt angry people keeping each other down and feeling superior as they spread family misery. In Anne’s mind there was only one cure for such agony. Only one refuge from the things that made her feel bad. Anne had grown quietly paranoid in prison and remained so on the outside, she was suspicious of everyone especially those who were not engaged in commerce with her. The question she asked was, Why would someone talk to me for free, what did they really want? During her second stint after being arrested for soliciting she received the standard second offender sentence. She had her syringe but did not have any drugs with her and with the secret being out she was able to leave the boys with their father. Now she knew how to play the prison game, unfilled hours were spent fantasizing about what drugs she would do upon release. Just as she coasted

through her second incarceration she new she would never get busted again, experience was a great teacher and she had grown too smart. And too tired. After the hugs upon release she got into the car with her now X husband and her sons. She had always approved of little Joe having long hair, “Do you get high?” she asked getting cozy beside him. “Sure, Mom.” Anne had yet to learn her teenage son was almost always sarcastic. “Well come on, this is a getting out party. Take me to your dealer.” Immediately Joe and the boys began yelling at her. “I was just joking. Can’t you tell when someone is not being serious? Joe I am very shocked, at both of you. Joe, how can you allow our child to know about drugs?” She immediately took an authoritarian tone like she recalled of her X husband but it was farcical on her and she backed down to a ’caring buddy‘. With no guards overseeing their contact the family found Anne unpredictable and threatening. She was constantly shifting between being strident and conciliatory. Anne might begin apologizing and asking forgiveness for locking the boys in a car trunk but then adding in total sincerity, “You see, even in the condition I was in I still wanted to keep you safe.” “But it was cold and we could have died.” The boys would argue back at her. Her tears and pleas at home put Joe and the children off and in her own way she was afraid of them. The boys went from babies at her breast overnight to miniature adults with accusing eyes. The memory of their childhood as irretrievable as her own and in some way bound up with it. The period his mother was away left Bryan a blank, it was his cries wrapped in a baby blanket that alerted the police, to soothe his own mind Bryan always carried the implication that his mother had to go away and assumed she was innocent of something he could not understand and did not seek to know.

”Stop“, she said softly and held Bryan off. “Why won’t you let me do this for you? I want to be a part of your life again. I need to catch up. Won’t you help me.” “Maybe you should have got to know me first so you would know I hate surprises. And Chuckey’s is just for little kids. I am not going. Go without me then you can see what my life was like when you were away.” The euphemism was sour on his lips after so many years. They told people their mother was away. “No, it’s your birthday and I want to be with you like I was ten years ago.” “What are all your friends and our relatives going to say when even you don’t show?” The boy relished the concept of ‘turn about’. Observing from outside the mother-child circle, in the hallway, big Joe broke his silence. “They’ll assume your mother had to go away again.” Joe’s sudden presence killed the attempt at mother and son bonding. And any feeling that the family might need her. “Joe would you be a sweetheart and do me a favor?” Anne turned to him, “The guest list is upstairs in the drawer under the phone on my side of the bed. Just call everyone, tell them I’m sick. I want to spend the day with my son.” “Can I come too?” Little Joe asked. “We’re not bringing him along.” “I’ll take you out for a special day when it’s your birthday.” “You might not be here then.” Little Joe objected. Before he left the room big Joe spoke again, “Joe, this will be a day for us. You can help me do some yard work. “Did you already pay for the party?” Joe asked before attending to his assignment. “A deposit,” Anne told him. “Oh brother.” Joe lapsed into what was most familiar to him, grousing about money. Little Joe grew enthusiastic about working with his dad who it seemed had been pushing him away since mom‘s return.

WHAT’S YOUR NAME AGAIN? That hot summer night on the park bench Anne demand an additional twenty dollars in her hand before she allowed an insistent john to stick it up her ass. Something about the conversation with Ed helped her assertiveness, it had a profound effect. Everyday Anne’s radar was up for the man in the park with his children. She was an emotional whipsaw about what to do next. She must have had some kind of glow, since meeting him, her business was up with many new faces. She had money and was able to get high not just out of habit but for pleasure and to help herself think. What would she say and how would he respond, questions rang in her head like a bell getting louder each day. Alone in his tiny apartment from where he could almost see the unlit park he thought about her again, “At least she does wash them.” He fought the memory of how the bench sagged when she sat and his disgust when she spoke. It had been a good night, she had made well over one hundred dollars. One hundred went for a dime bag and the extra let her take the next night off, shooting up in the car then spending the evening in the back of the bar. Exactly one week later Ed and his children returned, they were once more on the park bench. Unable to contain herself Anne, now constantly stoned was happy to see them. She raved about wanting to drag Ed into the bar to meet her friends. It was as though she was reunited with someone she had known all of her life yet she knew nothing about him. There had never been anyone like him in her life. Her stoned mind sizzled with dead end comparisons. While Anne got to know Ed’s children she never

learned much more about him or his X. He mostly talked about his philosophy along with a few generalities about the condition of the world. It was clear to see the reason for his divorce. He had no clue of how to keep a woman. No wife who makes as much money as her husband is going to stick around. A little of his philosophy was about the relationship between men and women. He mostly called sex, marriage, and relationships ’clutter’, “things the ego requires that clutter up the mind.” It was mostly reality and the mind that fascinated him. He had little interest in women The life of a junkie is withering and filled with crisis both real and imagined brought on by the drugs or its lack. “Wow,” Anne said after a week on the street bouncing hip to hip from one corner of the street past the bar and a few empty stores to the other corner on the far edge of the parking lot the edges of her world. Home with her husband and children was only a refuge. The dope bag was never again empty and she had grown fearless. “You’re back.” Lacking the energy to sound surprised she offered a phony warm embrace. “Dave, right?” It was relatively early and she was tired like someone who had overslept. Most of this day was spent at home unconscious but restless on the couch. He had thought about her often during the past week but was shocked now by the sight of her. All he saw was a sloppily painted on face, an overflow of tits and under the bath of cologne was the persistent smell of gym socks hung out to dry in a smoky bar. During the week he recalled her compassion for others amid personal destruction. He equated in his mind her years in prison to the time he spent under false perceptions and in obedience to the social norms. While his prison was the daily functioning in the world she was the opposite and had to be locked up by that same society. Because he had helped support that society he considered himself one of her jailors. In guilt he identified with her absent father who caused her life long pain much

like he was sure he was doing to his own children. “I’m Ed, David is one of my kids, remember? How are you and your boys doing?” She made her self overly familiar as she came around the bench and sat. He touched her knee, now stockinged and revealed by a short skirt, and moved to give her plenty of room on the bench. “The boys are fine … Sort of like the girls are fine,” with a shake the overflow of her breasts were set in motion, bubbling, demanding attention and threatening to escape. She laughed in a cold and mechanical way. “My husband’s the problem. I’ll bet a good looking guy like you hears that all the time.” Ed did not offer any response and with that Anne’s demeanor shifted as she recalled the gist of their previous conversation. “I contribute what I can, I work pretty damn hard the way my husband treats me I am like a stranger in my own home. Or an unwanted guest. Most nights I sleep on the couch. But that is a mutual decision. Believe me, any night I want to I have his number. When he laughs he thinks he’s laughing at me. It doesn’t bother me.” Ed felt overwhelmed and in desperation asked the thing that he had wondered about most since having met Anne, something he scorned himself for being curious about as it was so middle class, “Doesn’t it bother him, all these men that have come between the two of you?” “I don’t think you would make it in this business. It’s obvious you don’t know too much about men. You see I survive on my steadies, the return business. You see every man has the same three or four fantasies, come in my mouth, shoot it up my ass, two women at once, …” “I used to have the same fantasies,” Ed said in amazement thinking back to the domestic state of rut. Anne continued, this was a speech she had often made in her own mind derived partially from her year of community college it was sometimes said aloud when no one was listening “ … or a few other things that the particular wife or girlfriend might consider threatening, and those

things are easily satisfied for a few extra dollars but what keeps them coming back for more is the stuff that they are truly, deeply ashamed of and that is what keeps me going.” A planned pause. “But I can’t think of anything I am ashamed of.” “Oh, me neither. I am just talking about sick pervs like my husband and my customers. And they come here knowing what sick, disgusting thing - in their minds - that they are after. Straight sex is just a warm up and usually right after that they spill their guts because if they just wanted sex they would stay home with their wives or get a girlfriend.” “You mean like spanking?” Ed was grasping at straws, he did not know if he should be proud of not being a potential customer. “There is that element, spanking. There is dressing up. Playing little girl and school teacher, or priest and parishioner. Anal sex, like I said. Then there are diapers and the entire urine and feces scene but that requires to much special equipment and a place to wash-up. But most of that stuff is easily satisfied and those freaks go on TV, they’re not even ashamed.” Anne wound up to deliver some insight. “No, there is another world out there, another level. Once you learn what that is and how to massage it, you can just go for cokes and he’ll pay a hundred bucks for the hour just talking. “That’s how I would like to keep a roof over my head and a couch under my ass. Just by talking about it without getting on my back. I was on some thin ice when they let me out of jail. It didn’t bother my husband that I had a secret life, or that I lied when I told him I was doing volunteer work at the church or going for a nine hour walk. It did make a difference and aroused his interest when he found out what my life was. “It’s a three hour ride from the State Penitentiary and it was the first time we were alone since that night five years before. We never talked about it during visits when the kids

were around and I couldn’t read him during the visits either. He had completely masked himself for the sake of the kids. I’ve got to give him credit for that. But as soon as we were in the car together it was the first thing he wanted to know. ‘What was it like fucking all those guys?’ I knew I had him and felt safe with him after that. Because I was so scared he would turn me out. “I was desperate to get back with Joe and the kids. Tony and Three Fingers are nice guys but I didn’t want to be completely dependant on them. The days of slavery are not over.” “Are you talking about your pimp?” Ed asked, completely out of his element. “I don’t have a pimp. I am an independent contractor.” Anne laughed. “Three Fingers is my dealer in there,” she made a gesture using three fingers to give an injection, “and I pay Tony the bartender ten dollars for every john.” “I take it there are girls who do not have such tidy arrangements?” “Oh yes.” She trembled involuntarily at the thought. “These might be days of racial equality in this country but there are still places where a white woman commands a price. And an American. The human cargo goes both ways, my dear. But its good for the ego.” She laughed. Ed was appalled. “The marriage was never any good. At first I thought the pain I felt was love. But the pain was bigger than our marriage. It took time away and a quiet place for me to realize that.” Ed had been trying to identify with the husband that he almost forgot, “It was your father, wasn’t it?” “That’s right,” she said in a sing-song voice. “I spent half of my incarceration in the box. The best thing that ever happened to me. Everyone should try it. It was there that all of the buried memories came back to me. From there I began to understand some of the things I did.” “Like what?” Ed asked then feared he had taken the bait.

“Think about it. I locked my children in a car trunk on a November night and thought I was a good mother for doing it. Their father was home and I could have easily made an excuse to him. That was what I sometimes did. Maybe if I had felt something, if I had realized the cold night for what it was. But I was desperate, I was too far gone and I was taking them with me. I nursed my babies until they were a year old and could bite, suffocating them with my boob I held them as they fought for air biting me and crying. “Babies cry when they are full and push away. I had watched my mother do it. Or they squirmed a little first and then she rocked them. But I was pinching their cheeks telling them not to bite and then using my breast to silence and suffocate them. “I thought I wanted a second one but right after he was born I was sure I didn’t want him. The funny part was I did not suspect anything was wrong with me until I was in prison talking about it with other women who also took the past out on their kids. “Remember that mother who killed her family then laid them out in their Sunday best? I understood her completely. I had no qualms about what she did. That’s how close I was.” Listening to this disturbing confession Ed tried to put a positive light on it, “It was a cry for help. You’re lucky your kids survived.” “They were lucky they survived. For a long time I believed it was my right to kill them and I wanted to get away from them. For the longest time in my mind I wasn’t in jail. When I was locked up I was free, I had escaped temptation and escaped my past. Sometimes I would forget but they were his responsibility now and like endless torture he would drag the kids up to visit and remind me. “And I heard it in the other women. Not the ones who cried and worried and were sorry for what they had done and how they missed their children but the other ones, like me who were glad to be removed from their sight and were now finally able to put aside the anger. Especially because

they were boy children. “If I lined up all the women who killed or tried to kill a man and were glad they done it, and would do it again …” The big raucous laugh returned to Anne now in an ironic cast. She continued but unsure of where her speech, a self revelation was headed, “the women who were glad to be locked up and felt relieved from the prison without bars they had been living in of raising kids and serving some man … a lot of us in there. Most of us would do it again.” “It sounds like we were both miss understood. When I told my wife how bored I was with weeding and trimming the lawn she was right that I was talking about our sex life but she was wrong to assume I was cheating the way she was taught all men do. Even when she turned inward all she found there were clichés. The misunderstanding blew up and I was happy to leave. When she told me to get out I packed quickly, for once I did not resent being told what to do. I saw myself dancing my way out. How could I have any anger for what was handed me, this gift of freedom?” Ed then paused awkwardly, “But I don’t hate my kids.” This was like a reunion of war veterans from opposing sides. In a flash she had answered the question of what it was that attracted her to him. “What made you change?” He asked, “You have changed, haven’t you?” She could tell her story any way she wanted. From another country, families ago, under different skies, she told Ed about the remote summer of her youth as she remembered. “In Quebec every house on the avenue is big and beautiful but turn the corner onto the street and they are rundown bungalows. As the homes on the avenues grew rundown the houses on the streets got terrible. Our house was so far back there were no neighbors behind us, only the woods. “My father couldn’t do anything. He kept a sharp crease in his pants while laying on the couch. Mother gave him chores to do which he gave to the girls. His excuse being that he was dressed. One time the door fell off of the outhouse and my father whose hands were so soft did not

know how to fix it. My mother insisted by pleading that he do something. So instead he gathered my sisters around the outhouse while he supervised, he told them to grip the corners of the little box and turn. Now the outhouse still had no door but faced into the woods where only someone gathering ferns or a hunter might see. He had no sense of what was proper and no shame. “Summer days when mother worked he promenaded us to the gates of the Frontenac, he told us it was built by the French Army to be a fort. It is so huge and powerful that it split the river in two. It seemed to sadden him, a relic of French supremacy and power over land and sea. A splendid residence from the past. A castle, a residence for kings and conquerors, that was his dream. My mother more plainly put it, a hotel for our betters. He dressed us in white like the tourists and he showed us off in front and up to the gate then we took a taxi home where we had our own bare shame filled castle. “For a long time it was all secrets and lies. There were knowing looks behind my mother’s back as her mother and sisters increased the tension among us kids and our cousins. But when my brother died that all changed. From then on we were marked, liked the old ladies dressed in black mourning clothes. “That put the stamp on us, the world was free now to offer open pity. Since coming to America my mother hung on shreds of hope but now she was free to turn on her children and like back in the old country it was again my fault because I did not watch over my brother and protect him. Just like everything else because she did not know how to care for her children and love them. It was more important for her to have a husband.” ANNE TALKS TO HER BOYS She had mentioned the man and his two boys to her own two sons at home. Her boys were thirteen and fifteen

and looked at Anne with fear, pity and contempt. If their mother had a special relationship with their dad they had no knowledge of it. What they did have was a slight suspicion, as men well into their teens, they sensed things that were wrong which they could not explain, yet. Only the image of her boys as babies lived in her mind. Her lengthy prison sentences had destroyed the connection. The bond threatened to be a weak one under any circumstances as she went from party animal before her first son was born to junkie after the second child arrived. While she was in prison Joe divorced her. Anne in the eyes of the State was no longer a parent. “Why would the Child Protection Agency take children away from their natural father?” She asked innocently, not knowing if it was only the pressure of the CPA that forced the divorce. In prison she had heard and believed the stories of other husbands who fought and saved their marriages. Even though she knew they made a better pair of singles than they did a married couple it hurt her that he went through with it. Well educated and well paid Joe could not let home life impinge on his work. When Anne went away he immediately hired women to help him with the children. Despite the large family he came from who would have been willing to help he was ashamed of the turn his life had taken and being able to pay he maintained the privacy from his family in his own home which he lacked growing up. Her incarceration and the psychological intervention were not sufficient. When she was rearrested Joe had already turned his back on her financially. After her first imprisonment Joe refused to help support her habit. Despite their sexual adventuring as a couple he found drugs to be unacceptable. “Our mom is away,” the children mentioned her cutely when they had to mostly she was not spoken of at all. She always struggled to catch up on the life she had missed but they treated her like a distrusted housekeeper in their home. Often she had to pretend to be deaf and blind. The boys asked quite reasonably for their father to keep on the

housekeeper but he explained that he could not afford both and said to the boys that things would be better if mom did her job. Anne could not bare the realization that her family was being punished for what she had done. Despite the guilt for deserting them she could not change, she needed drugs once more just to keep her thoughts superficial enough to function. Joe could not comfort her, he was ruled by guilt over his desires for which she was equally to blame. Years ago he tried to master the anxiety he felt for their having sex not sanctioned by marriage. In his spirit that desired forgiveness for himself Joe was able to forgive Anne of anything she did or was to do. Joe tried to make an example of the meaning of forgiveness under the Eyes of God. Joe was aggressive at work and had steadily advanced his career. At home he was a different man. He often complained that no one else where he worked had to deal with the sort of problems Anne created for him. None of Anne’s sisters or cousins could say that they had found a man who lifted them out of poverty as Anne had done and for that Anne wanted to keep Joe happy. It was as though the nightmare of her childhood developed into a beautiful dream. One with a nightmare lining. Following prison Anne found that Joe had changed. Once divorced he acted out of resentment and brought home the values he used in the office. Anne was now renting a room in her X husband’s house. No longer would they make love, now she preformed for him. The education she had given him in lovemaking was perversely turned against her. When they were still married Joe was shy and with difficulty asked for the things he had seen in his porno movies. There was a thrill of discovery for Anne who found stashes of tapes by following the trail of torn cobwebs in the basement. For his enjoyment it was her idea to barter new moves for chores, she enjoyed his enthusiasm more than some of the things he wanted to do and their arrangement gave Anne some control in the relationship.

But after prison Anne was bartering for food, shelter and contact with her children. Joe became savage in his demands and his tone was humiliating and no longer playful. Clearly Joe was getting revenge for the heightened humiliation he had suffered in front of his family, friends and the guys at work for a wife he could not control. Just as in prison, with few exceptions, there is a mutual assumption of innocence so too Anne realized that in the office and in front of the football game on TV men assume all women are guilty. Anne turned to exchanging sex for cash, she felt a complete equal to men who spend their lives at work for the exact same reward. Anne knew the secret that women are born able to make the same amount of money on their backs with their eyes closed for which men go to college, compete with each other and work themselves to death. The advantage went to the women who became equal partners while only giving up a few minutes a day. Joe had pushed Anne into a position where there was no difference between a whore and a housewife. Mentioning Ed’s young children Anne’s boys read her immediately they found it impossible to be kind to their mother. She tried to do everything she could for them to make them love her once more but her resources were few. She did not know that she had no credibility, long ago they had determined mom was crazy and left it at that. ANNE AND ED IN THE PARK For a week Anne disciplined herself, his visits to the park were like Joe and the kids visiting her in prison except then she felt dread and this time she tried to be on her best behavior. Prison was a place where Anne had had the time to perfect and repeat her story. Where she had an audience of other women like herself who were also honing and refining

similar stories. Despite how often she told her pleading saga when she was with her family again the tale was an embarrassment to them. Now it had been a few years since she told it and it comforted her to hear the story of her innocence once more. They talked while children played unseen. The slowly assembling nighttime population of the park shuffled nearby or paused to look on, annoyed by the lively sounds of children. “By the time the top of my head reached his belt buckle he was gone. He used me like a handkerchief for his sexual needs. “My mother had enough and when I was six we left Canada. We never saw our father again. “My mother made no secret that she blamed the families’ plight on me. She thought I corrupted and stole her husband. “Like a natural fool our mother tried to land a man while working nights in a textile mill and cleaning other people’s homes by day. She ended up with six children. The way my mother talked she cared more for her employers children than us. Those children were always good looking, smart and talented while we were her cross to bear. We were crowded into a small damp apartment that shook when the trucks thundered by bringing stuff to the stinking mill across the street. The apartment and the neighborhood always stank so bad of burning plastic that it would make your eyes tear. Our cousins who lived next door and upstairs were constantly teasing us that they had seen our father in the area and he was looking for us. “There were men but when a woman with six children brings home a man he is only interested in one thing.” “Or she is.” “What?” “She could be interested in that same thing too.” Anne’s story used to sail through any interruptions she was not used to anyone listening and asking questions. However she had built up too much momentum in the

retelling to discuss any side issues. “My two miserable older sisters cared for me. Mostly I got the backs of their hands. I was outcast from my family and I had only one coping skill I could use to find other places to live. By the time I was twelve I thought my name was Little Tramp. “Thank God before I could get pregnant I learned that I didn’t have to act dirty to be popular when I could get the same results by just talking dirty. Acting dirty and talking dirty amounted to the same thing. Through middle school and high school I never had a boyfriend, but instead I always had a heavy crush which it never failed resulted in a broken heart. I am a passionate woman, mostly I cried and got drunk over love much like the passionate women I grew up around.” Anne talked until Ed jumped up at the sound of a child crying in the dark. The little brother had fallen and the older one was immediately defensive. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” Ed’s words were comforting to both boys as he emerged from the dark. The father and children gathered on the bench, Anne looked on. “What happened?” Ed asked. “Look,” the little one thrust in the adult faces a badly scrapped arm pitted with dirt and small pebbles. “I am never going to hear the end of this.” Ed staunched the blood and made a bandage from paper napkins. “Come with me.” Anne said and they followed. “It’s all right,” she said sensing their hesitation at the door, “I know everyone inside.” But Tom and the kids slowed to a stop. “Then wait here.” Anne was undeterred. She returned with a handful of band aids and carrying a stench. “I couldn’t find anything else to clean the wound.” She held up a shot glass, “Vodka,” and trickled some over the bloody scrape. Ed held the boy and plastered the injury with band aids. “Are you going to be okay?” Ed asked his son. The pout faded and the boy nodded heroically.

Anne lifted Ed’s son and kissed his cheek then handed him to his father. And with determination she gave Ed a soft kiss. He shook his head with surprise. “What’s wrong? Do my kisses disgust you, like my X husband put it so tactfully.” “No, I just wasn’t expecting it.” She grew clumsy. “This is where I work.” She said. “Thanks.” Looking at his family around him and Anne he felt undeniable connectivity, “We better go,” and added, “See ya.” “Bye,” the older boy turned to her quickly before they entered the street and ran back across to the park. Anne scored the rest of the money she needed and retired early to her X-husband’s car to shoot up. Once freed from the need that was consuming her she recalled Ed like a visit from a ghost or someone she knew in another life or her own childhood. Some one she could talk to, someone who might understand and more. Then all the self help thoughts drilled into her from lectures and programs she had attended both in and out of prison began coming back to her. The idea that a handsome stranger might rescue her became absurd. ED’S APARTMENT She followed her feet up a slight rise, stopping at the base of a tremendous hill, the deadly incline rising to the clouds and the address he gave her, 27 Walnut, the third floor, back apartment overlooking the park. No elevator. It was all up hill, everything in New England is up a hill, either up a hill or around a corner. Or as in this case first around the corner and then up a hill. Easy walking distance yet she had never walked beyond the corners of her block including across the street to the park. Someone was watching her hidden by drapes, another peeking out from behind trees and then ducking her by

running hunched over behind the cars parked on the other side of the tree lined street. The numbers on the houses changed quickly and then she was in front of the concrete steps leading to the front door. This must have been how her mother felt leaving her native country to search for the peace that she had been barred from at home. Anne attempted casual deliberateness entering the foyer of the apartment house but three stories of stairs to climb would drain her of that disguise. Never before did she feel like she was cheating on Joe, ’I’m cheating on my X‘, she thought to herself, she tried to recall the years and would have laughed at the irony, of the layers of betrayal, if she were not gasping for air. She saw blood and sweat had covered the inside of her forearm. Shooting up this morning she had been very nervous and poked around a bit, now she bled. Ed had knocked her completely off her schedule. Since getting out of jail her second time almost two years ago the supply of drugs had been steady and of good quality, supposedly the reason we were fighting in Afghanistan was to guarantee America’s drug connection. Anne’s only shortages came when she was short of cash. Generally her habit was like a medical treatment to keep her functional. But this summer tranquility had eluded her, she had hoped to get clean for the summer and spend time with the kids. Summer was over and that had not happened. Attempting to quit made her anxious when she needed to be relaxed and mellow and when she got mellow then returned the old craving out of hiding to haunt her, the pressure once more wanting her to get high, blinding her to everything but drugs, unable to remember why she wanted to get straight. Giddy to escape through the needle. She stopped to mop up the blood and sweat sluicing down from the crux of her arm. The pause gave her time for her head to stop swimming. Full of regret for what she was doing, Ed had emerged with a new mastery over her. With summer over and the kids out of the way he tipped her off

as to his address, the apartment that looked down on the park. She suspected he was watching her coming and going with men all night long. ‘No,’ she shook off her suspicion, ’that fetish belongs to my husband.’ Now she expected to find out Ed’s fetish. Music was coming from the apartment, there was an autumn wreath on the door, dead leaves, pine cones and dried flowers, the wreath was small, with a single artificial candle with plastic reflector little more than an inch high in the center. It told her the final detail about him that she had to come to his apartment to learn. All along she had seen him as strong and self sufficient yet she did not see him as the loner he claimed. He was the sort of man she had seldom met and did not understand. Imbued with a peculiar elegance he had little need for a woman. Anne’s only competition for Ed was Ed. She straightened her skirt and pulled back some of the mass of her course hair then knocked on the door, waited then called his name and knocked again. “Anne, come on in.” He seemed happy to see her, not in a paranoid or rueful way but genuinely happy. The door opened into the kitchen, a round table with four chairs, and directly across were the sink, fridge and stove , the ceiling was low and peaked, like a church in miniature. Unable to feel her legs Anne grabbed the first chair, “What’s this?” A pile of clothes on the kitchen table. The kitchen was scrubbed clean and the twenty year old appliances seemed new. Without getting up from the seat she could see the whole of his apartment, on the right a bathroom then a bedroom with a single bed and the opposite wing the TV room with children’s toys stacked against the wall. He hung up the towel he had tucked in his pants, “My sewing pile, mostly socks. Can I offer you anything? Coffee? I just put some cookies in.” He poured the coffee while she picked up his sewing. “This feels nice.” She said. Kind smile, warm food, clean bed, nice place, being happy, a ray of sunshine on a smiling little

face. She felt like she was one of his children and he was the father she should have had. “You sure can sew.” No one ever admired her handiwork. “My mother used to take in sewing when I was a girl. The young ones would get to do the darning. This is darning, sewing is when you make something or alter it.” How strange and rare it was to be with a man and proud to do something with her clothes on. “I don’t think I ever saw my wife sew a button.” Now she was experiencing an agony of passion more elusive for her than the mythological orgasm. This was what the French Canadian women lived and died for, it was what could energize her mother to carry her family across the country and alone raise six children. It is a thing that can not be explained, it is a missing star that turns dark night into brilliant daylight, a single color that flowers into a rainbow, when one finds the simple He who completes the complex She. “I wish I had found someone like you back when I was still looking.” He brought out sugar and milk, cups and spoons. For the first time she was seeing a man who was good for more than that one thing. What made all of the fish in the sea impossible to deal with was how many had to be thrown back until now. “And it is not just the kids either. I had a wife, a good job, a fast car to get me to work from my big house. That was an illusion and involvement in a relationship is another form of materialism. All I want is something simple, a mat to sleep on and chores to earn my keep.” His words had to echo down a long empty hallway to register meaningfully. “This is nice,” she said. Stating the obvious, “Sitting together over coffee.” “Domestic bliss,” He raised his cup like a toast. She always blacked out at this time of day, she learned by wrecking several of her husband’s cars. She liked to be home by the time the sun was fully up, off the road, on the

couch or preferably a bed when the blindness hit her. Now Ed was talking and she was not sure if her eyes where open or closed, if she was sitting up or her head on the table. “I just want to pull down the illusion. I think that’s why you and I can talk and I would never say this in front of my kids but I think in the larger philosophy of the tools we might use to unseat the mind from its dominance in this illusion there is a place for drugs.” He shook his head, “It’s a real dilemma, how to proceed without lying to your children. That’s why I asked you up here now that the kids are away. I think heroin might help me focus my meditation.” This was Ed’s reason for inviting her up, he wanted a tourist pass into hell and for Anne who was trapped there to be his guide. Worse than a slave Anne was an addict, as she filled with anger and resentment she had no one to vent at. She wanted to but could not rage at Ed, unable to release this ideal man who transformed into a jackass. She hated herself for it as well, didn’t she remember what her mother said, that how she appears to the world would determine the sort of men she would meet. This was nothing less than a disaster. When she got home she wanted to make love to the man who used to be her husband but he was away at work and she knew when he got back he would be cold and mocking as he always had been. At thirty eight, still months away from thirty nine she thought how she could change. She began as a victim then she found the truth of her life, lived with that truth, now she was ready to overthrow it. With force she tied off her arm as she had been shown, just one more time to relieve today’s pain. The only thing that makes me feel good in this world but this world is about to change. Look at me sitting on a toilet bowl to have my fun … It was as though she had escaped her own body and skin, Ed’s so called ‘illusion.’ She was so good at bulk buying, economizing and

getting value for her smack, who cares anymore? This is the last time and heaped all of what was bought today to be a week’s worth in the metal lid from a tin of fragrant bath salts. Locked in the bathroom at home she studied her face in the reflection of the metal cover while the smack dissolved and mixed with the water. Once more she inventoried the many ways she had been used. Soon she would announce to her family she was going out. It would not be questioned. Before the arrests, before the drugs, and the divorce, before the children, her husband once begged her to stay home with him. But quickly her time out became his personal time home alone. She could walk out the door now without saying a word and imagined a cheer going up when she was gone. My face is still young, she told herself searching as liquid oozed over her image. Ed had been the proof she was still attractive. She could feel her fingers searing holding the lighter in one hand and the metal lid with the other. Finally dissolved she put the lid down and slowly sucked the liquid into the syringe with those three fingers. Downstairs Joe heard something drop onto the floor above, Clumsy oaf, he thought, what’d she break now? Clearing his throat to call up to her but stopped, he would wait for the ads, he was watching TV news the teaser was about a another woman arrested for locking her children in the trunk of the car while she was on her back earning money to score drugs.