New England Review

The Wallet Lady | By Elizabeth Kadetsky

LandscapeExcuse me, a woman in the hallway calls to us. Do you know where the manager is? I’ve left my wallet in my room and I’m locked out. She carries a sturdy pocketbook, which she holds open for us to show it is missing its wallet. She’s dressed to go out — it’s spring. Miss! Miss! She cries when the aide passes.

You lost your wallet again? The aide is from St. Kitts.

How will I go out?

Terrible. The aide tsssks. It’s not in your purse now?

The woman holds it open to her.

My mother shrugs her SOL shrug and raises her eyes at me. C’mon, honey. We pace to the end of the hall. Where now? She asks.

How about down there? I point to the other end of the hall.

Yeah. Yeah. C’mon. Doopdy doo. She grabs me in an elbow lock and makes a dancer’s kick with one leg for her first step, then the second. I join her. We’re winded by the end of the hall. That was fun. Again?

Again!

At dinner, the missing-wallet lady sits with us. She leans forward and cups her mouth in a whisper. I’m terribly sorry. This is awfully embarrassing. I’ve lost my wallet. All my credit cards. I’d meant to treat you.

My mother pats her pocket-less genie pants and gives me an alarmed, private look. Her eyebrows meet in tips between her eyes. She checks the back of her chair. Honey, do you have any… Because… My purse… Do you have keys?

It’s on me, I tell the table, with my magnanimous grin.

My mother sighs in relief. Thank god.

You’re very kind, says the wallet lady. You’re her sister?

Daughter.

Daughter!?

My mother is on to the next conversation in her head. She’s staring at a bald man on the other side of the room eating at a table of only men when he starts shouting racial epithets in front of the all-Caribbean staff. All the employees have just stopped everything and started shouting: Enough of that! None of that! You stop that now! They look at each other and some of us and smile and hoot. You don’t say that! Enough of that!

My god, some people have not even a little bit of class, the wallet lady says.

I’ve seen that man before, my mother says, staring at the racist. I feel like I know him. It’s like déjà vu but something else. Do you recognize him, honey?

Yes, he’s always here. He lives here.

What!? No. I mean, it feels… misty… I have a vague memory… like from a past life.

After dinner I sit on the other double bed in her room and she strips off her clothes for no reason and asks when we’re leaving.

I’ll have to go home pretty soon, I confess to her.

You’re taking me with you, right? You have the keys? Her eyes are lost and angry and panicked. Also, she’s topless. Take me home.

There is no home. And you’re not dressed.

Then with you. She slips on a white tunic from the closet. I have to go. We’re leaving. Okay? C’mon, honey. She walks to the door and peaks out, then peers back with the conspiratorial expression. C’mon honey. Now. We have to go.

*

Secret Americas features writing about images from the U.S. National Archives.

Image via Flickr: “Lunch-Hour Nap in Battery Park, 05/1973,” National Archives and Records Administration.

Elizabeth Kadetsky’s short stories have been chosen for a Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices and two Best American Short Stories notable citations. Her personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her memoir First There Is a Mountain was published by Little, Brown in 2004. She is assistant professor of fiction and nonfiction at Penn State.

 

Floor Models | By Elizabeth Kadetsky

Portrait

Tante Annette was a model at Peck’s, where there’s an L.L. Bean outlet now.

Annette was so tall, Grandmaman used to say.

Oo, ooo la la, my mother said. Tante Annette was my role model, said my mother.

Peck’s was near the mouth of the Androscoggin, just inland from where the Bates Mill gave off its effluent to the river. The Androscoggin, during the mill days, was the most polluted waterway in America. On the town side of the factory, girls called out the windows to the boys from Bates College, my father’s alma mater. Oooo mechant canard — Oh, wicked duck. Alouette, gentille Alouette…— Oh, pretty goose. They made thick, navy wool blankets. I still have one, with a red and white striped satin border and my name on a white label sewn for summer camp.

My mother was a model, too, and she made it out of Maine and went on to New York, where she became the floor model at Lord & Taylor, circa 1976. She walked the main floor greeting people and looking tall, in Charles Jourdan shoes.

Your mother was a floor model at Peck’s, Grandmaman said to me, another time.

That was Annette, I say. Mom worked at Lord & Taylor.

She was so tall and pretty. Jolie. Mon dieu, Grandmaman said, crying, drinking straight from her bottle. Why was Grandmaman crying? Why did she ever cry? Life, joy, remorse. Her second baby died of a disease. Congenital, or environmental, perhaps.

It’s my mother who worked in New York, I repeated, and she looked at me and said, You’re so pretty. The bottle was Grandmaman’s pollution.

After 1917, every mayor in Lewiston was French. Grande-grandmaman Léa came by Grand Trunk Rail in 1895, a middle child among nine. Féline, her sister, worked at the mills. No one else in the family worked in the mills, said Grandmaman, only they did. The family talks, instead, about the cousin who also became mayor, and how Léa made magnificent hats for Anglos and was tailor to the wealthy of Auburn, across the frothy Adroscoggin. She rode in a carriage with her hair piled high wearing tailored dresses. They talk about Grand-grandpapa Philippe, who died early, of meningitis or some other toxin, possibly alcohol.

My mother talks about how she used to be the floor model at Peck’s.

No, that was Tante Annette, I remind her. You were the floor model at Lord & Taylor.

Oh, Annette. I loved Annette. She was so elegant. Who did you say?

Annette.

Ohhh. My mother peers off. Who’s Annette? She looks round. We’re at a family reunion, hosted by Cousin Roger with the Gallic chin and Vichy mustache. Tante Terry is here, and my mother’s childhood best friend, Cousine Raimonde, who lived with the family in Lewiston. Tante Simone, Tante Annette, Tante Fleurette: they have all passed on by now, of old age. Oncle Roger, he died jumping from a train near a lumber farm outside Montreal. Oncle Raymond, who never got over World War II, they say alcohol took him as well.

My mother takes my hand. She never drank, never worked in the mill. What was her toxin? Who are all these people? She asks me. They keep hugging me and asking How do you do? She is very slim and her hair is dark and dramatic, and she is beautiful so people hug her.

They’re your cousins. Remember Raimonde? You called her Taffy.

Taffy, my mother says. The past is there before her, across a spray of water.

*

Secret Americas features writing about images from the U.S. National Archives.

Image via Flickr: “Foam on the Polluted Androscoggin River, Seen from the North Bridge at Lewiston, 06/1973.” Photograph by Charles Steinhacker, National Archives and Records Administration.

Elizabeth Kadetsky’s short stories have been chosen for a Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices and two Best American Short Stories notable citations. Her personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her memoir First There Is a Mountain was published by Little, Brown in 2004. She is assistant professor of fiction and nonfiction at Penn State.

Wave | By L. S. McKee

 

That day, the water bent the sun like radio waves. We’d learned it was how voices reach across distances. In class, when we asked how things worked without wires, Mr. Jones outlined in chalk what sound would resemble if you could see it—not like a tide’s in-and-out or an elevator’s lowering, but like the mountains’ undulations, their ridges mumbling at dusk.

At the pool’s edge, I closed my eyes. But I could hear nothing except the gulp of the surface divided, the splash of a cannonball, a tangle of boys vying to hold their heads above water. The ones who lost snotted out chlorine and punched at the surface as if it would hold.

I wonder how far the ruckus traveled—if our fathers could hear our yelping in the rooms of the mountain. Over the coughing shovels. Or veins crumbling in their hands.

We practiced their curses, the work-shirts of their language, even the voices we couldn’t remember—like Billy’s dad who was somewhere in France, buried by the only ocean he’d ever seen. His son swam the hardest, demanding race after race until he collapsed on the bench. His face turned away from the chain-link fence.

*

Secret Americas features writing about images from the U.S. National Archives.

Image via Wikimedia Commons – “Miners Memorial Swimming Pool, West Virginia, 1946,” Photograph by Russell Lee, National Archives and Records Administration College Park.

L.S. McKee’s work has appeared in Gulf Coast, BODY, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, New South and elsewhere. Originally from East Tennessee, she lives and teaches in Atlanta.

Short, Unhappy | By Imad Rahman

5008809952_a7ee933d8c_o1971. You are born. It is Pakistan, and it is hot. Ceiling fans hum overhead in the small, cramped rooms and small, cramped corridors of a small, cramped hospital. There is a war on. Move, they say, we need storage space for the dead. Spend a week in the home basement while outside planes swoop and weave in the sky. Someone sings you to sleep, an androgynous croon.

1975 is just like 1974.

1979. Riots in the street. At school, a girl tells you a ghost story and you believe it. Gummy worms snake out of stumped arms in your dreams. Next day, refuse to go to school. Lie, say you miss your mother. Realize right away it would have been better to have just told the truth, mama’s boy.

1983. Move, Karachi to Kansas with your father after your mother disappears – supposedly there’s been a plane crash. Your new town is all strip clubs and churches, the geometry of sweaty desire bisected by loud faith. Later, you learn she is still alive and living in Amsterdam under an assumed identity. At school they have a hard time with your name. Your father, of course, is a liar, but your mother is crazy.

1987. First kiss, at dusk, leaning up against the crumbling white brick wall of a café known for loose meat sandwiches. She can’t pronounce your name either. Don’t care. Your father has found religion. Arguments ensue. Your mother shows up. Legalese ensues. You hang out with others displaced, others dispossessed, drift into the second kiss. Then the third. Every time you look into someone’s eyes you feel empty.

1991. Don’t go home for Thanksgiving. Get money wired to you for a root canal and spend it on a flight to Amsterdam. One night, lose your virginity to a prostitute. Like you, she is from someplace via someplace. Your bicuspids, once sturdy, start to hurt.

1995. Get a job.

1999. Go back to Amsterdam. Take money from dad’s wrongful death settlement, invest in a bar called Café Kansas. It is big and made of brick, which reminds you of both a church in Kansas and of your mother. In 2006, all potential immigrants of Pakistani origin will have to demonstrate fluency in Dutch. Lucky for you this is 1999.

2003. They mispronounce your name.

2007. There is a woman. The color of your skin turns her on. The color of her skin turns you on. She has firm breasts and sings unfamiliar songs in unfamiliar languages in bed before the lights go out. A ceiling fan whirs. The woman has a husband with powerful arms. You have an upset stomach. He works construction. You do yoga. Find yourself in an unfinished construction site suspended from a great height, the wind slipping through the hollow cavity of your body in great furious swoops. As you fall, imagine yourself swooping and weaving. When you drop, think nosebleed. Below, concrete closes hungry, like an unexpected lover.

There is no 2011.

*

Secret Americas features writing about images from the U.S. National Archives.

Image via Flickr – Wonderland Arcade, 1200 Grand Ave. Kansas City, Missouri, 1968,  National Archives and Records Administration.

Imad Rahman is the author of I Dream Of Microwaves, a book of connected stories. His stories have appeared in One Story, Gulf Coast, The Fairy Tale Review, Willow Springs and Chelsea, amongst others, and in the anthology xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths. He currently teaches creative writing at Cleveland State University.

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