By Laurie Stone
I was walking in a forest along a leaf-strewn path. The moon glowed yellow, and I could see my outline. I was seeing myself from the perspective of the moon. I was tied to the moon by a red string. As I walked along, it was my job to look back at the spilled world, and as with anything you love, I did not exactly want to do it.
When I was twelve, I followed a man who worked in a food market into an abandoned lot. He was twenty-one and slow. His legs were firm. My fingernails were dirty. I closed my eyes and listened to our breathing. When I opened my eyes, the man was stretched out on sandy ground, slipping down his shorts. I looked at the stars and weeds and wondered, Is this the way my life is going to go? His penis stood straight up. I didn’t have a brother.
I found a plant on the street that looked dead. Inside the brown husks were bits of green. I repotted the plant, fed it, and stuck it in a window. In hours leaves swirled up from the center of the stalks. Thirty times a day I looked at the plant, and each time it was more alive. Leaf after leaf unfurled. They were pointed and light green at first, then darker with striations. Dew formed on the tips. Soon there were bananas, then monkeys.
A friend said to me, “Why do you work as a servant?” She meant the catering jobs I took. She was past middle age and slowly cutting a piece of smoked salmon. She put down her fork and said, “You need a hundred Seconals to die. It takes forty minutes. My father’s Alzheimer’s came on when he was seventy-two. You need to find the right moment after knowing what is happening and before you can no longer act.” She looked at her plate and said, “Why do you abase yourself?” I said, “Servants get to eat the crusty tops of casseroles and the crispiest bits of fat.”
I liked to watch a woman in the steam room whose blond wisps curled at her neck. She had long legs and a slim waist, and she stood on the top platform, whisking away hot droplets that formed on the ceiling. When she wasn’t there, the droplets would wait, fat and indolent, before flying down. I liked the singsong recitation of her days. I did not mind she was dull. “Do you understand men?” she would say. “Not really,” I would say. I thought she was talking about loneliness.
1982. A loft space on Prince Street. Black tights and leg warmers that bag around the ankles. A boom box on the splintery floor. Light streaking through dusty windows. There’s a little black spot on the sun today. It’s the same old thing as yesterday.
A man raised his hand in the air, and the dog jumped up. There was nothing there. The man did it again, and the dog jumped higher. After my sister died, everybody looked the same. I used to meet a man for coffee who owned property in France and an apartment in New York. He said he was poor. I picked up the check.
At twenty I sailed to a Greek island with a friend. The Greek women held scarves dipped in vinegar to their faces and did not get sick. We traveled on nothing with leather bracelets. Our sunglasses came from the movies. When Kathy Acker said she was not interested in the beautiful sentences of Phillip Roth, Saul Bellow, and John Updike, she was ahead of her time. When she modeled herself on men and considered women dogs, she was a throwback to writers like Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag, who wanted to be glittering exceptions rather than run with a pack. Acker was inventing fire in her own small room while outside crowds had already built a bonfire.
A young woman dies. She is on her back, her arms and legs in the air like a bug. An older woman volunteers to lie beside her and pretend she is the one who has died. The gesture is spontaneous. A sound, a smell, a spark. She crawls under a blanket that is musty and stretches out beside the dead girl. She can feel her bones. The dead girl looks peaceful. At the gravesite, the dead girl will enter the coffin, and no one will know she has died. The older woman will go on living, but she, too, will have to vanish. She has not calculated this.
One day I moved out of the apartment I shared with the man I was married to and found a place on Charles Street. It was raining, and the streets were slick. A bakery smelled of butter all the time. It was a butter virus. The apartment was cold, the lighting low and red and good for the complexion. There was a fireplace and a bedroom large enough only for a mattress. I burned things. I felt the happiness of waves watching the shore retreat.
Laurie Stone is author most recently of My Life as an Animal, Stories. She was a longtime writer for the Village Voice, theater critic for The Nation, and critic-at-large on Fresh Air. She won the Nona Balakian prize in excellence in criticism from the National Book Critics Circle and has published numerous stories in such publications as Tin House, Evergreen Review, Fence, Open City, Anderbo, The Collagist, New Letters, TriQuarterly, Threepenny Review, and Creative Nonfiction. In 2005, she participated in “Novel: An Installation,” writing a book and living in a house designed by architects Salazar/Davis in the Flux Factory’s gallery space. She has frequently collaborated with composer Gordon Beeferman in text/music works. The world premier of their piece “You, the Weather, a Wolf” was presented in the 2016 season of the St. Urbans concerts. She is at work on The Love of Strangers, a collage of hybrid narratives. Her website is: lauriestonewriter.com.
