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Overview
While most of the action unfolds along the East Coast—in Maryland, Maine, Boston, Philadelphia, New York—several of the women travel to Arizona, California, and Jamaica. Often the light is too bright in these glittery places and they wonder why they have come. Many seem to be searching for a sense of home, which one girl describes as a place that is "complete and full of longing all at once."
Yet this desire for a personal territory, a point of constancy, is not necessarily rewarded: in this book, separations lead to divorce, sisters continue to misread each other, cancers kill. Still, the women refuse to turn their gaze away from what the world has thrown in their path. Often as not, they pick it up, wonder at it, test its relevance, and continue on, not happier perhaps, but certainly more knowing.
With humor and insight, Charlotte Bacon illuminates the unexpected ambiguities of women's lives. A Private State marks the arrival of an extremely talented writer
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781558493971 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Massachusetts Press |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2003 |
| Series: | Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.10(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
Live Free Or Die
It is the first monday of February and Mary Ellen is teaching George Herbert to her smartest juniors. His work is chaste but ardent and far from snowplows that wake sparks from icy streets. When Mary Ellen imagines Herbert's Britain, it is always High Summer, safe and daisied. In New Hampshire, where Mary Ellen lives, people close their faces against the cold, as if they're wary of losing warmth and moisture through extraneous talk. Then again this is New England, where talk is lean even in a lush and dappled August.
The juniors aren't, as they say, "into" Herbert, though they admire the poems where form imitates theme, such as "Easter Wings," whose stanzas seem to rise off the page like a pair of butterflies. Today, Tim, one of Mary Ellen's most pragmatic students, comments that form equals function, kind of like life.
Mary Ellen envies Tim's sturdy cheer. Last fall, her husband Frank Marten, a veterinarian who hunts, began renting across town. In December, Mary Ellen found herself wearing pale sweaters and beige pants, a snow hare in transition. Now she cloaks herself in mohair shawls the shade of ptarmigans in winter plumage. She's moving as carefully as she can through a house where she still finds flea dip in dark cupboards. Mary Ellen says, "Tim, I have to disagree. Most of the time, life has even less coherence than a smashed bug." The students eye her then, tilting back on their chairs. "Don't tilt," Mary Ellen says reflexively. But it is hard to focus on the airy hope of "Easter Wings" again.
Mary Ellen begins to explain the homework--writing a poem about anger in the shape of an arrow--when Tim's chair crashes backward. He is on the floor and screaming. "What is it, Tim?" Mary Ellen shouts. "Where does it hurt?" Then at his wrist she sees a flash of bone and blood, but his face has shrunk to something dried and crumpled, like a currant. Someone moans, "Oh Jesus."
"Jesus!" Mary Ellen repeats loudly from the floor. She turns to face the huddled students: "The nurse, I mean," she yells. "Someone get the nurse!" They don't know what she wants: Jesus, the nurse, to stay, to go. Tim's blood stains her sweater the way buckshot would pepper the chest of an unwary doe.
Magically, Tuesday is worse. The pipes at school burst and Mary Ellen creeps home to suspend her disbelief in the tub. But a steely whine is all that comes from the taps. In a haze of old habit, she finds her fingers pressing Frank's work number. Repairing damage to their home had made them feel married in some dense, authentic way. Suddenly, he's on the line and Mary Ellen freezes. "Wrong numbah," she says in an accent that floats somewhere between Maine and France. Mary Ellen is from Maryland.
"Mary Ellen?" Frank says. "What's wrong?"
"The pipes have frozen," she tells him. Talking to Frank makes her acutely conscious of the ticking of her blood. Frank hangs diagrams of animal hearts in his office, fists of muscle wrapped in festive ribbons of veins and arteries. As if hearts were weird but special gifts. Mary Ellen drops on the sofa and pulls a cushion onto her stomach.
Frank sighs. "Here, too."
"What about the animals in the surgery?" Mary Ellen sits up straight. She feels Frank is rougher than need be with domestic pets. He prefers cows and border collies in muddy barns. Working animals, not pillows with a pulse, which is what he calls creatures named Fluff and Pussums.
"We went to 7-11 and bought water for them."
Mary Ellen wants to ask if he got Poland Spring, but doesn't. She wonders who the "we" is. His assistant, Carlos Morales, nearly the only Latino in the county, is off on Tuesdays. "Mary Ellen?" Frank says.
"I don't want to know." She pulls the cushion over her head. "Just don't tell me she's seventeen."
"Her name is Dawn. And she's not seventeen." Dawn. It is remarkably close to "fawn."
Why Mary Ellen married Frank, a list Mary Ellen makes from the tub, after the plumber has visited and left her an appalling bill. Bubbles sink from peaks to flat and ratty foam.
A) He never lied: if a dog was going to die, he said, "Tiger is going to die."
B) He could build anything. They had the bluebird houses to prove it. And a hutch for black lopears, who'd escaped and mingled with the local rabbits. Summer nights, they'd wait for a half-breed, brown bodied, one dark ear coquettishly limp, to nibble its way across the yard. A little wild success.
On Wednesday, Mary Ellen receives an announcement that faculty will spend the next four Saturdays learning what to do in case of "malfunction" at the nuclear plant. As everyone within five states knows, the plant's a shaky affair, though protesters long ago stumped back home, throats hoarse. From her classroom, Mary Ellen sees the funnels of the cooling towers. It occurs to her, not for the first time, that if the plant does explode, not even Manitoba will be safe. It occurs to her safety is a relative issue.
In the faculty lounge, Mary Ellen spots a notice about training emergency-medical technicians. She immediately glances away. Cars wrapped around oak trees. Blood on windshields. Part of what is so terrible about hunting for Mary Ellen is that what's supposed to stay inside a body does not: she cannot even look at the word "appendix" in a table of contents without feeling queasy. But her eyes dart back to the flyer. She thinks of Tim in the rigid mitt of a cast. Two nights a week, the red poster says. Learn lifesaving techniques.
"Welcome to EMT-land!" Keith, the instructor, spare and brown as a winter twig, bursts into the room. Mary Ellen has never thought of traumatic injuries and their treatment as an actual destination. She imagines it as a place of gleaming ambulances, citizens with arms in tidy slings. The other students--firefighters, moms, and kids who want to join ski patrols--seem nonchalant about crossing the border from daily life to crisis management. Everyone's notebook is cracked open to the first ruled page.
Keith wears a T-shirt printed with endangered bugs despite the fact it's glacial outside and in this drafty classroom at the back of a fire station. He ticks off the topics they will cover: anatomy, CPR, trauma, poisoning, animal bites. They have to spend fifteen hours in an emergency room. In three months, Keith says blandly, they'll be ready to handle train wrecks.
There may arise an occasion when a disaster situation is so horrible that you are paralyzed and unable to respond. Do not be ashamed of those feelings, which affect approximately 20 percent of all people who are involved in such events.
EMTS in training don't start with trauma, though. They start with CPR and Little Hans, who lives in a piece of American Tourister luggage. Little Hans is a head and a chest. His mouth is slightly open and he is horribly pale, even paler than Mary Ellen and most of the other students, who, like all white people in the middle of a New Hampshire winter, have a greenish tinge. He looks depressed and northern European, something sprung from Edvard Munch.
Keith plops Little Hans on the table, so the class can see his clean, sad profile. "Now," he says, "The first step is to make sure your patient is truly unresponsive." Keith walks up to the dummy and shakes him so that all his moving parts rattle. "Little Hans, Little Hans," Keith says loudly. "Can you hear me?"
Keith goes through the motions of performing one-person CPR--he blows air between Hans's rigid lips, pumps on his sternum. The students look on earnestly, but when they've finished taking notes, their fingers press through wool and cotton to feel the bones and motion below the layers. It is impossible, Mary Ellen finds, not to make sure your own heart is still following its steady, two-step rhythm.
"ABC," says Keith, his palm on Hans's nose. "Airway, breathing, circulation. This is bread and butter for the EMT. When you don't have ABC, what you have is someone very dead." Hans appears to qualify. But what about D, E, and F? Dismemberment, eczema, flat feet. It is calming to think of all the body's problems parceled into neat groups of letters. Mary Ellen tells herself she will like this class.
But they haven't finished with ABC. Keith tells them there are some exceptions to routine attempts at resuscitation: rigor mortis, decapitation, charring, and other injuries not compatible with life. Mary Ellen knows what's not compatible with life. Husbands who date fawns. Fearing New Hampshire is permanently tilted away from the sun. Fearing your life is permanently tilted away from the sun. Mary Ellen's hands drop to her lap. G, H, I. Grand mal, hostility, inertia.
It is early Saturday evening and Mary Ellen is as usual on the phone with her younger sister Louise, a math teacher who lives in Atlanta because it's a city deeply in its region. They grew up on the Eastern Shore, in a state that wanders uneasily between the North and South: Maryland has its slave-owning past, but isn't swampily mythic enough to be truly southern. Louise likes Georgia's unequivocal heat and fatty food though she herself is trim as a nail. "Four out of five people die even with CPR," Mary Ellen tells her. "When you do it, you break ribs. You hear them crack. It's called crepitus."
"I don't care what it's called. It sounds disgusting. Hold on, I have to find my sandals." The phone falls with a thud. Louise is often dressing for a date when they talk, inching herself into pantyhose and testing lipstick colors on the back of her hand.
Mary Ellen waits and tries to imagine being warm enough to wear sandals. She doesn't try to imagine having a date. That's beyond her right now. Like her sister, she'd been in search of an authentic place and had tried to embrace New Hampshire for Frank. Five years ago, she'd imagined Yankee initiative would help her dust more often. She hasn't even swept Frank from the house yet, though she has started to toss his stray belongings into a refrigerator carton in the front hall. The box is halfway full, and late at night, she hears things inside it settle into sedimentary layers of golf balls and training leashes.
When Mary Ellen talks to Louise these days, she has more than likely wrapped herself in a huge white robe, and, if she's washed her hair, to have crowned her head in a towel. She feels then like a sinking peak of whipped cream, the kind that rapidly loses body. In this insubstantial state, her mind starts to wander.
Every morning Mary Ellen reads "Live Free or Die" on countless license plates and studies the green profile of the Old Man of the Mountains. She wonders how many people know that if the state lived up to its motto, the Old Man would die. It is thanks to massive surgery with stout wires and superglue each spring that the formation can stand the granite's shifts and swells. Otherwise he'd tumble to the bottom of Profile Lake. "Louise? Did I ever tell you the Old Man of the Mountains has wires up his nose?"
"How did we get from CPR to the Old Man?" Louise asks. "I gotta go. Glen's coming in half an hour."
Mary Ellen half-listens to Louise's rating of Glen as potential mate and partner. Louise screens her dates through a fine filter of assessment. She has turned down men because of how they set a table. She does, however, entertain tempered hopes for Glen. "Mary Ellen?" asks Louise. "Are you all right?" Mary Ellen tightens the belt on her robe and turns the three-way bulb in the lamp down to the dimmest setting. She thinks Louise goes out with men whose names sound like they could hitch themselves with ease to developments: Glenwood Pastures, Ellis Estates, Cartwright Bluffs. But Frank, what could you do with Frank? Frank Manor. Acres on the Frank. Frank has great big red hands. He could have been a butcher with those hands. He is a butcher. He hunts those fragile deer all fall. How could he look at the holes his gun tears in their necks and not notice their blood is the same color as his?
Mary Ellen can't stop thinking about the futility of rescue efforts; the crumbling emblem of her adopted state; a marriage she thought was as gray as an old steak at the back of the icebox that turned out to be fresh and bleeding after all. "Louise, we have had twelve feet of snow already this year and the deer are starving in the woods."
Louise snorts. "Stop sounding wispy. Are you eating?"
"Yes," Mary Ellen says but she doesn't say that the only dishes in her sink are bowls and spoons. She only touches food that can be served in things she can cradle to her chest. Sometimes the beat of her heart is so strong it sends a faint ripple through her soup.
That week, Mary Ellen slices her thumb nearly to the bone while opening a can of cream of tomato and thinking about Frank and his Dawn. The blood tendrils into the soup, maroon against the orange. Mary Ellen can't quite believe she's responsible for that strangely lovely blend of colors. She has suffered what her textbook would call a laceration: an incision with a neat edge. Then it starts to hurt.
Statements such as "Everything will be all right" or "There is nothing to worry about" are inappropriate. A person trapped in a wrecked car, hurting from head to foot and worrying about a loved one, knows very well that all is not right.
After EMT class one night, Mary Ellen talks with Keith about cars that provide the greatest protection during collisions. Of course he recommends the big-boned Scandinavians, hugely expensive and prone to breakdown. The next day, Mary Ellen takes out a loan and purchases a blue Volvo she names Sven.
They are lurching toward the tense goofiness of Valentine's Day when Mary Ellen succumbs to the request of her juniors to stage a reading of Romeo and Juliet, a play she's never really loved. How could they be so stupid to marry after meeting only once? And all those selfish adults. At least Mary Ellen insists the girls play men's parts and the boys play women's. This appeals to the students in a slightly giddy way. Besides, it is still snowing. The Farmer's Almanac, right on the money for the past three years, predicts storms like cold wet compresses 'til April. Sven takes the bad weather majestically.
Frank hates the winter. It keeps him indoors. They used to play Scrabble, and Frank would insist he could use medical terms. Mary Ellen let him get away with it. She made up words that looked like they had Greek roots and said they were used in prosody. Their final game, she'd achieved a splashy win using the T in "moot" to spell "disquiet." Last night, she threw the board in the refrigerator box and listened to the sharp rain of the tiles as they hit the cardboard sides.
The students are deep in Verona, where civil hands make civil blood unclean, but Mary Ellen's eyes keep drifting toward the cooling towers. Kimberly, plunging into Romeo's wretched farewell to Juliet, draws her back to the classroom. "Here will I remain / with worms that are thy chambermaids; O here / will I set up my everlasting rest, / and shake the yoke of inauspicious stars / from this world-wearied flesh." Kim makes a bold sweep with her sword, a metric ruler she's borrowed from Mary Ellen.
The class starts to clap and it's not even over. From the floor, Tim, as Juliet, says, "God, that's good, Kimberly."
Mary Ellen wonders if she's the only one unmoved. She tells Kim to take it down a notch or two. This is not opera. Juliet has to have his moment, too.
No one else says anything. Is she merely being crabby? Is it because she can no longer imagine anyone feeling so strung out about love? It has always bothered Mary Ellen that Romeo and Juliet don't know a damn thing about the toll of ordinary days and how that slows the pulse and grays the hair.
Tim says, sitting up, "They love each other. They can't live without each other." Kimberly flushes and tries to pull her turtleneck over her mouth. Mary Ellen notices the purple "Kimmy" on Tim's cast and the lopsided heart over the "i." There's the brink of a sneering giggle in the room that doesn't quite break out. They are all paying attention.
These days, Mary Ellen doesn't have time for love; she spends her evenings peering at bald photographs of fractures and burns. It has perhaps made her a little implacable.
"OK," she relents. "Go to town." They plunge in: Romeo and Juliet are united in death. The Capulets and Montagues relent, forgive. As the bell rings and makeshift Verona disperses, Mary Ellen hears Tim say to Kimberly, "This is so deep."
deep: pertaining to or situated inside the body and away from the skin.
Mary Ellen is talking to Louise, who is staying at home tonight with Glen, to see a movie. She'd like to ask Louise if she has ever been really aware of her heart. Did she know, for example, it was only the size of an orange? But what an orange, with its separate circuitry, its dire need for air. Instead, she tells Louise the rib cage is a poor design for protecting vital organs. Too many gaps.
Louise is silent on the line. "Do you think this class is a good thing right now?" she finally asks.
"Louise, I'm learning to revive people!" Mary Ellen says. "It's very good for me."
Mary Ellen knows Louise is feeling like she wants to see hearts as they appear on packs of cards; she doesn't want to think about the tangle of aortas and valves that thunk away in everyone's chest, even those of new boyfriends. She can understand that. The heart is so ugly really. The organ of romance and it's just dark, muscled chambers.
"What movie are you going to see?" Mary Ellen asks, propping up her turban.
The Battleship Potemkin, crows Louise. "He says it's one of his favorites." Score one for Glen. He must be lying to please Louise. No one but hoary professors of film and Louise like The Battleship Potemkin, could actually have watched it more than once. She hopes Glen will have the sense to keep his hands off Louise during the movie. She watches every frame.
They say good-bye. Mary Ellen turns off the dim lamp, but it is still not black enough. Mary Ellen is jealous of Louise, of the tingle of attraction she and Glen are feeling. Hand touching hand and seeing it whole. Reveling in contact.
In EMT class, Keith announces they will break into groups of three to practice binding soft-tissue injuries on Junior Hans. Junior, the size of an eight-year-old, has feet made of foam, but he sports real Keds. Red ones. Mary Ellen works with one of the firefighters and a girl who wears what Mary Ellen thinks of as a Stevie Nicks dress.
Keith shows them the assortment of plastic horrors that strap onto Hans with Velcro. There are avulsions, punctures and gunshots--entrance and exit wounds--from which to choose. The skin around the gashes does not match Junior's skin. The firefighter introduces himself as Bruce. The girl says her name is Dawn.
Dawn. Mary Ellen feels her face freeze. Frank's Dawn? She mustn't say her real name, just in case. No one in this town is double-barreled. Frank will surely have complained of some terrible intimate habit of the old wife as a sign of allegiance to the new woman. How she propped her heel on the edge of the sink to trim her toenails and that was hardly the worst. "My name is Murray," she blurts.
"Murray?" Dawn says, frowning a bit.
"Yes," Mary Ellen hears herself say. "Murray." The firefighter also looks at her.
Dawn takes Junior and smoothly attaches and binds a nasty avulsion. Mary Ellen eyes her. It is quite possible she is Frank's girl. She might not be seventeen but she's not that far past twenty. So he liked his women the way he liked his deer. Tender. "Want to try?" Dawn says to Bruce and gently passes Hans's spongy body over.
Mary Ellen toys with a gunshot wound and asks Dawn, "So what do you do?" When Dawn says that she's working part-time at a vet's office, Mary Ellen runs a hand through her hair and raises a field of static that causes several strands to levitate like nervous antennae.
For the first time, Mary Ellen understands what might push Frank to the woods with a gun. Legal annihilation. Sanctioned stalking. And underneath that, the desire to see what was once alive, wild, and inviolate opened wide and stopped.
Mary Ellen drops the wound on Junior's thigh and asks Dawn if she'd like to attend clinical observation together.
Mary Ellen starts thinking of Sven as the Fawn Tracker. She lurks in the parking lot and follows Dawn one night and discovers she is indeed living with Frank. Mary Ellen could scream at the top of her lungs inside Sven and no one would ever hear her, he's that substantial.
Mary Ellen can't bring herself to tell Louise about Dawn. Her sister is too excited about Glen. Not only does he like The Battleship Potemkin, he wrote a master's thesis on Eisenstein. He runs a classic-film society in Atlanta. He's taking Louise to Paris for a Chaplin festival. Louise is in the grip of something big. She sounds thrilled and stiff with fear at once. It is as if she has glimpsed for sure some creature that's been rumored to live in the woods. Louise is in the woods.
The students beg to stage the playreading before the whole school. During the performance, Tybalt, a basketball player named Samantha, lunges at Romeo and hits a plywood column instead. Her sword promptly snaps in two. Tybalt, staring at her maimed weapon, cries, "Shit!"
Mercutio says, "Tybalt, thy wit is mightier than thy sword." Later that day, Mary Ellen receives a note in her box from the principal, saying, "M.E. West: come see me re: assembly." Mary Ellen hasn't noticed in a while that her initials spell "mew."
Mary Ellen waits for Dawn at the entrance to the emergency room. "Hi, Murray!" Dawn calls cheerfully from the parking lot. "Ready?"
"No," says Mary Ellen, just as cheerful.
The E.R. smells of cotton and hydrogen peroxide, prim and almost cozy. Mary Ellen wants to report herself to the triage nurse. So soothing, that nursely touch, those pearly nails. What's the matter, dear?
Well, nurse, I suffer from jealousy so severe it's warped my liver. My husband is in love with a girl named Dawn. I am dying from Dawnorrhea.
The charge nurse, a blonde with great skin welcomes them with a pair of yellow nametags. After "Hi, my name is," Mary Ellen pauses for a moment then writes "Murray." The nurse peers at the tags stuck just above their breasts and says, "Who do we have here? Dawn ... and Murray."
"It's her mother's maiden name," says Dawn quickly.
Mary Ellen gives the nurse a rueful smile. Dawn is smarter than her feathery hairstyle lets on. Mary Ellen wonders how much her smarts show up with Frank. He liked to be the one in charge of knowing. But maybe that has changed. Maybe love has made him a better person.
For the next few hours, it`s everything from separations of the shoulder to dogs turned vicious on a master's hand. Mary Ellen remembers the stars of healed bites on Frank's palms. He treated the punctures himself, swearing and splotching his fingers with iodine. But mostly, she and Dawn see broken bones. The nurses and doctors handle the bad ankles and wrists as if they weren't quite attached to the rest of a body. "Look at this," they say and lay the injured part back down. Then there's an invitation to look at someone's cervix. Mary Ellen declines.
In the staff room, fingers laced around a cup of black coffee, Mary Ellen plans her next move. She'll lure Dawn to the house, load the box of Frank's possessions into Sven and deliver the old goods and the new girlfriend in one fine ironic swoop. In a mood of utter cool, with a slightly tilted smile, she'll appear on his doorstep, the flaps of the box neatly tucked in, and say, "Well, Frank, here are the last remains." Louise would approve. It's very Bette Davis.
"You're in luck," says a nurse. "We've got a code coming in."
"Great," says Dawn, looking sparkly after her encounter with the cervix. Mary Ellen hopes Dawn won't feel compelled to describe it. Maybe it's just the approaching heart attack that's got her happy.
"Come on, you two," says the nurse. "It's quite a show."
Mary Ellen as Murray is tucked into a corner of the trauma room, her back against the cold cylinder of an oxygen tank. She can't quite believe she and Dawn are allowed to witness such wildness in the body of someone whose name they do not even know. There's a cool, carbolic smell of medicine and, just as sharp, the stink of sweat. The patient, an elderly woman, looks as if she'd been caught in a thunder shower. Every inch of skin gleams with wet. Strands of hair curve as distinctly as scars on her cheeks. Nearly the worst is watching the body's mindless jump as the current flows from the paramedics' paddles into the chest. "Doc!" someone calls. "The nitro's not doing it." A nurse plugs another plastic tube into the IV already in the left wrist. The patient's eyes have flown open. That is the worst. They are a dark, speckled brown.
Two doctors bend to decode the EKG as it spews its spikes and valleys onto graph paper. A paramedic crouches near the monitor where the slight hills of heartbeats blip past. A professional buzz of people in soft-soled shoes surrounds the patient and her shiny gurney, her tubes, her unsteady heart. The woman's lips are flushing blue. "Doc!" a paramedic calls again and one of the doctors turns around to see what's going on.
What's going on is that the heart is giving out. Its special circuits have refused to fire. Mary Ellen and Dawn, their nametags curling slightly at the edges, stand in the corner and watch. In the woman's face, there is something wild and lost and slipping.
Frank always said he could tell when an animal was going to die. They got this look, he'd say, turning his hands palm up. Even vicious ones just lie there.
After fourteen minutes, a doctor says, "That's it. I'm going to tell the husband." A nurse gently tugs the needles from the arm, whose skin is already looking, in some small, intangible way, unalive.
At the nurses' station, Mary Ellen can see the white back of the doctor as he tells the husband that his wife has died. "I want to see Maria," they hear the man say. He comes straight to Dawn and Mary Ellen and says, "Did you see it? Did you see Maria die?"
Dawn takes the man's hand and says, "I'm sorry Maria died." Maria. Knowing her name makes it a hundred times worse. It occurs to Mary Ellen, too, that Maria is not so many letters away from Murray.
The man's hand is loose in Dawn's. It is as if he's not aware of the girl's fingers, the push of a pulse in her thumb. He says, "She was old. Put she was younger than I was." It is time to go. The nurses wish them luck. The fractures keep flowing. A new shift starts. The fresh nurses unwrap the steamy layers of their coats, ask if it's been busy. The ones still on duty say no worse than usual.
Dawn's battery has failed in the cold night and Mary Ellen offers to give her a lift. She can put her Bette Davis plan into action, but feels no excitement at this idea; all she thinks is that she'll have to ask Dawn to help her with the box. They are still wearing their nametags, but Mary Ellen doesn't bother to tear hers off. Since Maria died, Mary Ellen has felt more like Murray than Mary Ellen. Having an alternate name to slip into has proved useful. It has made certain things possible.
Frank once admitted he had a totem name for himself when he hunted. A sort of secret, tribal invention. He would never tell her what it was. She understands that he was right not to speak it aloud. She doubts as well his secret name was Murray.
Dawn says she'll call a garage, but Mary Ellen tells her, "I'll take you home." She doesn't want to expose Dawn to lewd and barrel-shaped mechanics. The girl's arms are so spindly. Besides, it is snowing again and Frank will worry if she's late.
Sven revs up nicely. "Great car," says Dawn. She yawns and shivers at the same time. It is past midnight and windy. Mary Ellen tells her there's something she has to pick up at the house before she can drop Dawn off. Dawn nods. They are halfway there when the young woman says, "Murray's not your real name, is it?"
Mary Ellen agrees. "No," she says, "that's just a nickname. My real name is Juliet." A third self slips in to join Mary Ellen and Murray. Sven is getting full.
"Juliet," says Dawn. "That's pretty. You don't hear it a lot."
Dawn asks her about her family and they tell each other who was oldest and how things were. It's remarkable how comfortable it is. Mary Ellen doesn't even feel jealous anymore; she's just sort of curious. Maybe Juliet is less prone to envy.
Mary Ellen realizes, as she's listened to Dawn, that she's taken a series of wrong turns. She is on the outskirts of town, a neighborhood she doesn't often frequent, where developments replaced lumber yards, which replaced woods. Mary Ellen squints through the light haze of flakes on the windshield and sees they have just entered a community called Deer Springs. "I'm lost," Mary Ellen says. She slows the car and cuts the ignition, letting Sven's nose angle softly into a drift on the empty street. Satellite dishes, cones of snow sitting on central antennae, cast shadows the shape of angular overgrown flowers on the white lawns.
As flakes drift down, it seems to Mary Ellen she and Dawn might never get out of here. They might become a permanent fixture in Deer Springs, another thing the children could play on instead of swing sets and plastic slides in primary colors. Startlingly lifelike sculptures of a separated woman and a girlfriend. A hunter and prey. One woman on the cusp of despair, the other on the brink of voting age. There were lots of ways to look at it.
"Juliet, would you change your name if you got married?" Dawn asks her.
Mary Ellen hadn't, even with the short, tough link of a hyphen. Marten and West, it said on the mailbox Frank had built. Brisk as lawyers. Their lives were so distinct she felt hugely betrayed when he said he had to leave because he was lonely. Didn't that just happen? Wasn't that how they'd arranged it? Hadn't it been safer like that?
"Why can't you try?" Mary Ellen had asked then.
"I have tried. I have," Frank said, as he took a buck's head from the wall. "I have," he said, stroking the muzzle. It was true. She remembers one night last winter, when Frank won Scrabble with "torque." Turning tiles to their blank side, he told her about stitching together a German shepherd that afternoon. A leg torn from a hip socket, fractured ribs, a ruptured spleen, nasty injuries. Critical, not fatal. Frank looked at the animal, the glint of his tags, the sweep of the tail, and all the bloody tangle in between and felt a strange sensation in his chest. "What's he called?" he asked Carlos.
What People are Saying About This
Bacon writes with grace and wit, and an appreciation for the magic of language. She also possesses the accomplished writer's remarkable blend of control and daring, and isn't afraid to surprise her reader.... A Private State is impressive in every way, a splendid debut and a rare achievement.
Her stories are witty, swift, beautifully crafted, and grounded in emotional reality.
Bacon's collection of finely wrought stories examines the human condition with rare power...Accomplished and complex...