Somewhere there are photos, color slides taken in the late 1960’s of me sitting on top of a large rock. Buck teeth, hair held back from my face with a kerchief, and scrawny legs. My parents have just purchased a piece of land. It is a nice lot, seven-eighths of an acre in Truro, Massachusetts, near the tip of Cape Cod. * Every July during my childhood we’d visit this land to pick blueberries. We could pick them near the dunes, but these were our blueberries. The lot began at the top …
Back in San Francisco, I would press up behind Leon on his Harley, curving up Market Street and the Portola. When he’d told me it was over, I bawled his name into the night air. To stop making a goddamn fool of myself, I soon accepted a blind date with a Wyoming native who lived in Los Angeles. His being from Wyoming was one of my favorite things about him. He wore cowboy boots and owned a truck. Soon we were engaged. Leon tracked me down. I agreed to meet him at an Italian place in …
1. I Do Believe In Spooks The last time I thought about ghosts, I was in a McDonald’s. I had left my grandmother’s house in Des Moines at bedtime, assuming my children would fall asleep in the car, but an unnatural energy possessed them all the way across Iowa. No matter how steadily the engine hummed or how smooth the ride was, no matter what boring talk radio station I tuned into, they did not fall asleep. Eventually they even got hungry. I saw a billboard on I-80 advertising a 24-hour …
Krista has the personality of supermarket cereal—an aggressive love of color and cartoons, easily swayed by sweetness. I make myself indispensable to her, knowing her weakness for chocolate tree stumps and peach chews and Costco tanks of jellybeans. She came over like usual and I unwrapped each candy for her until plastic flossed my teeth. We kiss during the commercials that try to sell us fate in flavors we have yet to taste: new Polly Pockets, grape syrup to help you sleep and sleep, girls …
Things go missing in the nursing home. Helen’s weighted blanket. A letter from her late-husband. An abalone button. A cassette tape of crashing waves she bought at Acadia National Park after she stepped into the ocean for the first time, age fifty-two. A cassette player. A scratchy afghan knitted by she-forgets-who. A photo of herself as a child, mummy-wrapped in jackets and scarves, taken the winter when snow fell so hard it vanished the mailbox, the garden gate, the rhododendron …
Wichita Fridge Day-old fried cheese curds. Three Vortex IPAs. Pickles. More pickles. Low-sodium soy sauce (brand: Dillons), jumbo ketchup, two packs of brown eggs (organic but not free range). Whole milk, low-fat milk, whole cream, half cream. Deviled eggs, butter, one full wasabi tube. Greens going bad. Portland Fridge Trader Joe’s carrot juice. Farmers' market greens. Goat cheese we can’t afford. Beer, beer, beer. Three different hot sauces, full-sodium soy sauce. Bread so dense you …