MOTH WINGS by Erin Seaward-Hiatt A project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH WEBER STATE UNIVERSITY Ogden, Utah April 24, 2017 Seaward-Hiatt i Contents Critical Introduction 1 Abby, 2007 18 Tilly, 1918 24 Abby, 2007 30 Audrey, 1918 38 Riane, 1928 46 Seaward-Hiatt 1 Critical Introduction I write stories about silence. I think it was Alice Walker who first reached out from the page and put it in my head to write this way. She said it well in her essay "Saving the Life That Is Your Own," an intimate manifesta that digs to the root of the stories Walker has chosen to tell through her own fiction and why: "I write all the things that I should have been able to read" (Walker 13, italics in original). In short, her essay approaches the gaps in what readers and writers see as established literary canon and authorship, issuing a challenge to question not only the hegemonic filter that allows certain writers' works to circulate more readily than others, but also to pull into focus the truth behind story, all the slivers of lived experiences, often marginalized, that generate the stories that could be dusted off and packaged into literary form. Walker, coming as she has from a queer, black, feminist standpoint, questions in her essay—and on a grander scale throughout the collection, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose—the scarcity of role models that spoke to her as a young reader. In "Saving the Life," Walker indebts her own creative development to her predecessors and contemporaries who have spoken from feminist and womanist experience—writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Virginia Woolf, who without a doubt managed to do a lot of saving for me too. Yet she stays firm in insisting that each person's experience is unique, that stories calling out to us from professionally typeset pages often forget or deliberately hush great spreads of us—the Others, chopped into groups by gender or ideology or race or something just as arbitrary. The overall message of Walker's is that if a person cannot find herself wholly in fiction, she must get out a pen and write herself all over the walls. This, of course, is paraphrase, but in approaching my own work Moth Wings, my path led me several times back to the singular root of Alice Walker's essay, her fiercely inclusive honesty, and this idea of locating the part of oneself that is Seaward-Hiatt 2 underrepresented in the literary world, that autobiographical element that Donald M. Murray claims can never fully be exorcised out of even the most mechanical and functional writing (Murray 67). Alice Munro boils this autobiographical theme down even further, crediting these kernels of personal truth with creating characters that began as real people and soon took on their own lives and bizarre qualities that made them into fiction. "These are stories" (Munro xiv). All of this advice points to a call to write the Other in the self, the part that feels so solitary and boring to the writer, but that ultimately vibrates deeply through the best-told stories. The direction in Walker's essay—to say nothing of her body of fictional and poetic creations—comes as close as any piece of writing to making sense of my own scattered ambition for capturing story. To articulate story is to reach into the quiet gaps to drag out knots of personal experience, to unpack viewpoints that are authentic, with all their braided intersectionalities intact and speaking out as something that no one has seen quite this way before. My interest is in those silences. In piecing together the opening pages for Moth Wings, several attendant questions floated in and out of focus, casting a sort of paralysis over me as I sought to fill in the blank pages of my commonplace notebook. Walker's writing on telling one's own experiences through fiction spoke to the part of me that wanted to accomplish something socially engaging through storytelling, to project that deep level of meaning pursued always by the artistic writer and to realize the full promise of fiction. As I went about structuring out my plot, I studied feminism, environmentalism, and social activism within literary production, researched the work of fiction models to pinpoint a narrative strategy that would resonate best with my piece's story, and examined the narrative crafts of voice, story shape, and sentence-level mechanics to refine the piece's ultimate delivery and efficacy. By analyzing and synthesizing these ideas and narrative Seaward-Hiatt 3 models, I was able to inform my writing and steer it toward a product that emphasizes my lived experience while adhering to the finer artistic points of craft that make a novel successful for the reader. Feminism and Social Activism through Fiction When writing about the deep subconsciousness in The Laugh of the Medusa, Helene Cixous positioned feminist thought and feeling as interconnected and essential to the artistic process: "Women's imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible" (Cixous 884). The Laugh itself is a prime example of feminist writing doing its work, combining both logic and emotion in a way that defies the patriarchal, literal, heavily structured idea of discourse and approaches a new mode of writing, what Cixous famously termed ecriture feminine. Her writing is elusive but packed with meaning, a theme that is central to the feminist writings I examined in preparation for Moth Wings. Cixous's work reminds the writer to embrace the whole of a reality rather than forcing a story toward an easy perception. This defiance of the established order is central to both feminist fiction and environmental fiction, both of which aim to break down barriers and reinvent thought processes. The biggest question I encountered in planning the manuscript dealt with how to create a text that is both meaningful to a larger social justice project as well as aesthetic. Adrienne Rich details her interpretation of poetic creation as a social act in her article "The Hermit's Scream," which cites the Elizabeth Bishop poem "Chemin de Fer" and its call to follow passion with action that people will notice. Rich equates the act of shooting off a shotgun in the poem with taking real-life political action in order to erase social and environmental inequalities. She goes on to muse at to the meaning behind the phrase "political activism," how through poetics, private and secret feelings unite people and, when framed in a literary context, can have an activist force Seaward-Hiatt 4 (Rich 1158). She states that even though private realities seem individual and inconsequential on their own, "poetry, in its own way, is a carrier of the sparks, because it too comes out of silence, seeking connection with unseen others" (1159). Throughout the article, Rich makes a case for using the poetic—and, by extension, the literary—as a means of forceful activism that can affect real change. She paraphrases Barbara Deming, reinforcing that "nonviolent action [is] a way of living the future in the present, treating hostile adversaries as human beings like yourself, respecting them even as you [try] to change their minds" (1159). This breakdown of the literary activist process feels elementary when said this way, yet it sets forth a striking guideline for crafting fiction that serves a purpose while retaining the human element. Rebecca Solnit has also written about the political force of writing in her book The Faraway Nearby, detailing through Scheherazade and The Thousand and One Nights how storytelling can change the character of even a sultan who is in the habit of marrying women and beheading them after a single night together: "She spun stories around him that kept him in a cocoon of anticipation from which he eventually emerged a less murderous man" (Solnit 4). Solnit goes on to highlight the change that can come through storytelling: "The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear [stories], to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then to become the storyteller. Those ex-virgins who died were inside the sultan's story; Scheherazade, like a working-class hero, seized control of the means of production and talked her way out" (4). Like Walker and Rich, Solnit argues that in putting a name to the silences that make up individuals' stories, real change is not only possible but at its most potent when set in story. In Moth Wings, I hoped to reinforce political ideals and present them as deeply personal matters that all humans share. In the 1918 section of the manuscript, I focused the story of a Seaward-Hiatt 5 departed mother, Tilly, around the silence she created in the home after her odd and untimely death (Seaward-Hiatt 24). This instance is framed within Tilly's widower Rusty's perception of the domestic work that had taken place when she was alive, small tasks that added up significantly when she was no longer there to perform them. This detail provides exposition for the condition of the Walter family while speaking out to the still-relevant concept of domestic labor as the compulsory realm of the wife. Further, I explored sexuality and queerness in the manuscript through Willa, a voraciously independent teenager who is discovered by her younger sister Riane in the throes of a romantic kiss with a female friend. Radclyffe Hall called to attention the erasure of lesbian identity with her 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness—the year chosen to depict the kiss scene in Moth Wings—and the manuscript for Moth Wings intends to recall that erasure and its endurance into the present LGBTQIA+ revolution, of which Abby, the more modern protagonist, will ultimately explore secondhand as the novel develops. Finally, the key concept of radium poisoning that is hinted at during the Abby section as the cause of Willa's early death combines with Jordan's environmentally inflicted lung disease to form a cohesive push for environmental consciousness and sustainability as the manuscript continues to develop. Feminism and environmentalism intersect fiercely. The construct of "mainstream literature" recently has welcomed ecofeminist voices like Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood more readily, but the idea of pushing a feminist or environmental bent in novel form particularly has a tendency to fall into the literary ghetto of the speculative or the political. Often, in novels with a polemic undertone, the message can have an overwhelming affect when measured against literary craft and precision, as with Marilyn French's 1977 novel The Women's Room, overshadowing decently wrought prose with a dogmatism that fails to connect with readers. The Seaward-Hiatt 6 effect, then, is one of projecting an ideology onto an audience that has not signed up for a lesson on how to live. In preparing for my own writing, I revisited The Women's Room to get my bearings on the components of a feminist story that does not work aesthetically as a product.of artistic expression. The novel is French's jump from feminist academia to feminist fiction, and it stood out to me, even as I studied feminist literary criticism, as overly dogmatic and inauthentic despite its truth and necessity to the domestic violence conversation and its position as a critic of the American veneration of marriage and compulsory servitude of the housewife. This novel was written with a wide audience in mind, but due to its ideological gravity, the circumstances presented in the novel fell too heavily on my mind as I approached French's work hoping for a literary experience, one that would focus deeply on universality of experience rather than pushing a very clear polemic. Having been published during the height of the debate surrounding the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the novel already fell on a divided audience: one side would read it eagerly and nod in time with French's salient recounting of a marriage gone wrong, while the other would likely ignore it altogether. I stood in a third segment of the readership, one that craved beauty and craft in prose and found only a message to which I had already subscribed and need not be convinced. Even though circumstances of my early twenties tied me very closely to French's protagonist, Mira, I failed to attain a fully immersive experience in her story because the message had come off so forced, so empty of humanity in the characters and their manners of speaking and being. Creative nonfiction writer Nuala O'Faolain has found similar criticism in her re-reading of French's novel. In a 2003 op-ed piece for the Guardian, O'Faolain details her reaction to The Women's Room as largely aesthetically unsuccessful: "It is a story packed with event and Seaward-Hiatt 7 character, but as repetitive as a frieze, with all the book's heroines ending up dead, broken in spirit, or utterly solitary." She goes on to characterize the book as a cartoon, a veritable caricature that while perhaps integral to the 1970s American feminist movement and reflective of the novel's initial social necessity, fails artistically when read today by modern third- and fourth- wavers. A more modern example can be seen through Rajaa Alsanea's 2007 novel Girls of Riyadh, which has fallen on more than a few muffled ears with its candid fictionalization of the author's own experiences living in Saudi Arabia's well-to-do social strata of the early 2000s. Critics of Alsanea's, particularly in Middle Eastern and Muslim circles, view her work as a feminist polemic rather than a work of creative expression because the novel so forcefully calls out the misogyny and sexual double standards of the Saudi dating world—ideas that are fairly common to many modern cultures. Including these strong values that push toward gender parity made her work "feminist," a label that Alsanea herself distanced herself from and that divided her audience because of her culture's perceptions of feminism (Abdullah 1). Even though much of Alsanea's and French's fiction had been nothing terribly incendiary even during their own historical and cultural moments, the works read enough like preaching and not enough like art that many readers dismissed their legitimacy as novels entirely. Where Alsanea's book succeeded over French's was her attention to characterization, voice, and narrative technique— themes to be discussed later in this introduction—but her work still left a little to be desired from an aesthetic perspective in its English translation.' 1 Having no reading fluency in Arabic, I cannot comment on the poetic efficacy of the original text, which was published in Arabic in Lebanon before being translated for English-speaking audiences. Seaward-Hiatt 8 The challenge, then, in starting a novel with strong ideological messages like those I wanted to express in Moth Wings was to locate a stylistic space that allows for the message to come through without overtaking the reader's experience of accessing fiction. I revisited and researched several works that handled feminism and social ideas effectively in order to separate out what nebulous element had been missing from the earlier feminist fiction I read. Under Alice Walker's advice to search first for role models, I reached out to her fictional work The Color Purple as well as Toni Morrison's Reconstruction-era story told through the novel Beloved. These works led me further into the world of well-crafted historical fiction pieces to examine as models for Moth Wings and toward Cristina Garcia's novel Dreaming in Cuban, which includes contemporary stories interwoven with historical narratives to project a sense of the permanence behind experience and the social issues the novel covers. Thus, my basis for craft came from examining role models and then taking Walker's further advice, to add in the parts of the ecofeminist narrative that make my story unique, the parts that I have not had a chance to read in other writers' work. Living, Breathing Characters: An Exercise in Voice and Characterization Perhaps the most encompassing theme I examined in writing Moth Wings is Mary Wollstonecraft's early contribution to the feminist novel and her aid in developing a narrative voice strategy that bridged the gap between polemic nonfiction and what was seen in her cultural moment as sentimental women's fiction. In his introduction to Wollstonecraft's fictional works Mary, a Fiction and Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, literary scholar Gary Kelly praises Wollstonecraft's use of "free indirect discourse," or a method of storytelling that reveals to the reader a sense of the narrator's thinking as well as her feeling (Kelly xviii). Through this technique, Seaward-Hiatt 9 the omniscient third-person narrator represents, at times sympathetically and at times ironically, the subjective life of the protagonist, fusing third-person and first-person narration, engaging the readers in the protagonist's inner life yet also holding readers at a critical distance from complete emotional identification with [the] character. (Kelly xviii) Kelly goes on to quote a stretch of Wollstonecraft's novel Mary, praising her use of sentence- level mechanics as a tool for drawing in the reader in a passage that makes use of rapid switches between objective narration and inner reflection that is specific to the protagonist. Of Wollstonecraft's technique here, Kelly notes that this use of perspective and poetic language is characteristic of Sentimental poetics in its 'lyrical' and expressive style—using dashes, exclamations, disrupted phrases, and broken sentences to achieve an effect of immediacy, to suggest strong feelings, and to mimic the vicissitudes of emotion, engaging the reader. But the passage also moves from the narrator's perspective to Mary's own thoughts and back. ... In following the movement from 'outside' to 'inside' and back 'outside' the protagonist's subjectivity, the reader is drawn into sympathizing yet reflective attitude towards the novel's central subject. (Kelly xix) In other words, this syntactic and semantic manipulation of Wollstonecraft's makes use of the growing body of novel readers who wanted fiction, a group that expanded during her tenure as a writer in the late eighteenth century, without slipping fulling into the realm of "the sentimental novel," what critics at the time, and Wollstonecraft herself, characterized as largely beneath the scope of the literary (Kelly xii). Kelly credits Wollstonecraft with absorbing her own literary influences to create a new kind of Seaward-Hiatt 10 women's novel, one that blended the twin necessities of thought and emotion in the feminist story. This feminist fiction method—new in the late eighteenth century but enduring in similar iterations in contemporary feminist literature—dodges the aesthetic shortcomings that O'Faolain asserts in regard to The Women's Room and its overemphasis on pathetic emotion at the expense of craft. Kate Zambreno adopts a similar technique in twenty- first-century fiction, creating a unique connection between emotion and consciousness immediately in her novel Green Girl. She opens the narrative with an ethereal section describing the protagonist Ruth's birth before cutting to her as an adult. The novel begins with emotion, speaking inside a mind from first-person perspective about the new being that has been created: "Now I must name her. Ruth. A hopeful name. No, maybe not Ruth. Perhaps Julie or Kathy. Aah, that's it Julie or Kathy. No, no. Ruth. She is a Ruth. She is Ruth" (Zambreno 2). The section is short and filled with the same rapid stream-of- consciousness style that Kelly describes in Wollstonecraft's Mary. Zambreno's next section jolts to third-person perspective, focusing on the adult Ruth and dwelling on a rapid-sequence style that focuses heavily on image: "She is going to be late. Eyes will swivel to regard her as she hurries in to work. Eyes will swivel. Eyes will roll. The terrible girls with their bloodless faces. She will not fall into the pits of their cruel eyes" (Zambreno 4). This strategy details the action of the novel, the nuts and bolts that a reader needs in order to keep moving, while drawing the reader deep into emotional territory. This mix of mind and heart, also examined in Adania Shibli's heavy use of sensory language in her novella Touch, mimics Wollstonecraft's style to the extent that it focuses outward action Seaward-Hiatt 11 on deeply personal sensations. By zeroing in on kernels of experience, Zambreno and Shibli draw the reader back from the ordinariness of the story's actions—like experiencing a fragrance—and defamiliarizes them through action and peculiar description to synthesize a unique and provocative emotional response. Toni Morrison is also a master of this style, applying rapid language and dips between thought and emotion in the opening of The Bluest Eye in addition to her section changes of perspective throughout Beloved. In the case of the latter, the novel opens with a simple fact, delivered directly and in the third person: "124 was spiteful. Full of baby's venom" (Morrison 3). As Morrison goes about unraveling the story of how a mother came to murder her toddling daughter, she switches perspectives with various sections but also flows in and out of a broken language that is reminiscent of Wollstonecraft's poetics in Mary and blurs the distinction between third-person storytelling and emotional attachment deep within the protagonist. In the novel's final section, Morrison abandons the mere logical reporting of the previous section and dwells in a freer, inner style that forces the reader into the protagonist's actual emotional state at the close of the story: "There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind—wrapped tight like skin. Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down" (Morrison 323). In this way, Morrison succeeds over French and Alsanea in that she does not tell the reader how to feel but rather shows the reader a feeling. This extreme focus on detail and inner perception comes into play heavily in Moth Wings. Early in the narrative, Abby attempts at describing an act that is common to all living humans: one's own birth: "I put down in my notebook all this fluid imagery," Seaward-Hiatt 12 Abby says. "Water—womb—flow, describing my mother's nethers like I'm Helene Cixous all of a sudden, only rocking Chucks and an asymmetrical pixie cut" (Seaward- Hiatt 19). By employing a deeply personalized, inner image based on Abby's experience, the familiar and universal act of birth becomes unfamiliar, causing the reader to seep into Abby's consciousness and take more notice of her direct experiences. Abby's narrative at this point in the manuscript occurs in the form of a journal entry, and this repeated focus on snapshot sentences—as well as on fine art and photographs—reveals her visual orientation toward memory, the quick snaps of image that sear in the mind and cause the reader to see things in a way that defies a more direct description couched in a more conventional sentence structure. The model works I examined also displayed a fierce sense of voice behind characterization, which added a layer of authenticity atop Wollstonecraft's narrative style. Alice Walker's Celie (The Color Purple) and Garcla's Pilar {Dreaming in Cuban) possessed singular manners of speaking that made them rise off the page and into reality, an immersive strategy that goes a long way toward telling a story that lasts. This unique use of voice, distinct from other characters explored in the novels, served as a profound influence on the voicing of not only my piece's protagonists but the supporting characters as well. Alice Walker created a workable social justice model in the storytelling behind The Color Purple, and one of the novel's major strengths is the way that the characters speak. Walker writes the narrative in epistolary form, in letters from Celie to God that situate her as a bright but uneducated, poor woman living in the South. Throughout the text, Walker creates distinctive voices that help to signify each character. Walker also develops Celie's dialect with her Seaward-Hiatt 13 emotional education and her coming of age, a move that tells the reader more about Celie than her first-person self-descriptions can. In a podcast for Tin House, Dorothy Allison stresses the importance of this same attention to dialogue as a key craft move that will make or break a story's authenticity, an idea she upholds in her own similar southern, poor, queer, feminist novel, Bastard Out of Carolina. In essence, Allison's advice is to avoid writing in the sounds of a character's dialect—the dropped Gs or bent vowels—and focus instead on the idioms, the manners of speaking that put a personal stamp on what people say. This craft advice, together with Walker's voicing in The Color Purple, provided a model for understanding how to capture the rural characters' essences as I approached Moth Wings. On first or second drafts, characters like Mrs. Cleckler and even Riane, as she approached old age, came off sounding wooden, a kind of stock old-woman character that is all too common in popular fiction and does not succeed in bonding emotionally to the reader. By incorporating Allison's and Walker's examples in dealing with the voices of rural folks, my characters not only gained their authenticity but also seemed to form into real people as I wrote them; once I had developed unique dialects for each of my characters, I learned more about them and was able to even built in more exposition through how they said things alone. A fairly transparent example is Abby's casual speech and use of slang, demonstrating, along with expositional cues, that she is college aged and approaches her conflicts with the same spunk as her great aunt, Willa. The conversational writing style in Abby's section is in keeping with a first-person journal-style narrative that reads like an exchange between friends rather than a rote explanation of what has happened to Abby. The effect is a passage that aims to build in the kind of exposition that is needed so early in a novel while carrying the reader along emotionally on the strength of voice. Seaward-Hiatt 14 Cristina Garcia makes similar voice decisions in Dreaming in Cuban, though this example provided the stark variety that Moth Wings required. Because my manuscript bridges more than ninety years in its time stamps, I wrestled at first with the idea of voice and the question of whether too radical a voice or perspective shift might divide the manuscript and derail the story, as with Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and the disconnect between Gilbert Markham's narration and Helen Graham's journal entries. The voice changes would need to earn their places, or the manuscript would not feel continuous and interrelated. Garcia makes her dialect changes in stark contrast, with each section belonging to the voice of its subject. Historical sections had been removed to a third-persona perspective—in particular, because Pilar, the young 1970s character, is privy to her grandmother's memories as though having watched them objectively on a screen, through Garcia's use of magical realism—while Pilar's sections had remained in first person and contained the irreverent dialect stamps of a rebellious teenage artist coming of age in New York City in the 1970s, several generations after her mother's flight from Castro's Cuba. This strategy called the reader to a greater emotional alliance with Pilar than with her mother or grandmother because of her vibrancy and authenticity, rooting the narrative firmly to her as the focus of the novel. This idea pulled its weight in Moth Wings toward keeping the relationship between Riane and her granddaughter Abby as the focus of the story, even though the novel explores a range of events, characters, and time periods through the course of the storytelling. Garcia's use of irreverence and idiom in Pilar's storytelling influenced Abby's down-to-earth irreverence about the act of childbirth early in the manuscript and continued with her ironic detachment from serious incidents in her life, like her time spent in a support group after her brother's death and a romantic crisis with her married friend Marty. Seaward-Hiatt 15 In reviewing Walker and Garcia, the methods of releasing details also factored heavily into the storytelling craft for Moth Wings. Even though The Color Purple stands as a great pioneering work in queer fiction, Walker had handled Celie's sexuality almost as an afterthought, focusing instead on dwelling deep within her thoughts in order to connect her more fully with those who read about her. In writing Moth Wings, I aimed to make a clear statement in the historical section about Willa's sexuality and its invisibility in 1920s middle-American life; however, the greater story, I believed, lay in the protagonist Riane's feeling of disconnectedness and loss of control for having stumbled upon this secret of her older sister's, a theme that is reiterated later through her granddaughter Abby and her loss of control after her brother's death. As a student of feminist theory, the temptation is to write in young Riane a dynamic little sister who immediately accepts her sister's "queerness" and cheers her on. The more enduring and authentic story, though, deals with this realization in stages, as a process that starts with a jolt that physically knocks Riane down and calls her to question what is happening around her, a character trait that follows her throughout her life. Riane struggles inwardly with what she has seen, and her thoughts shift from logic to abbreviated snapshots of feeling and image to communicate her disorientation to the reader. This scene figures prominently in the brevity of this project but is meant to stand as a mere detail in the grander arc of the story that exists between Riane and her sister Willa, who continually "disappears" into a space that is unfamiliar to Riane. Moth Wings, as it stands here in manuscript form, is part of a larger ongoing project that aims to focus the critical ideas discussed here into a full story arc and a complete novel. As I work deeper, the theories I have outlined pertaining to this early section of the work give way to critique of race, of belief, of class struggles, ageism, and any other topics that organically find Seaward-Hiatt 16 their way to the page through the characters' thoughts and emotions. The mine is never ending, and that unending deconstruction is the promise of fiction. When stories are captured and put to something people want to read, as Solnit described through Scheherazade, silences fill in, and the projects of political literacy and social justice seem that much more doable. People stop, and they listen, maybe for the first time. My critical focus on literary marginalization extracts social incongruities in written work, spelling out for me a clear idea of what we need to see more—or less—of in fiction, of how I can draw from my own identity and standpoint to be inclusive, to check my privilege, and to say something in a way that readers do not necessarily feel they have already heard before. It tells me how I can sift through my fascinations and experiences to come up with a cultural artifact that drives toward a goal without sacrificing aesthetic. It tells me how to communicate logic and feeling together in a way that comments on important human issues while becoming something artistically separate from soapbox storytelling. Seaward-Hiatt 17 Works Cited Abdullah, Mariam. "Rajaa al-Sanea: Beyond Girls of Riyadh." Al-Akhbar English. October 20, 2011. Web. Accessed April 17, 2017. Allison, Dorothy. "On Dialogue, with Dorothy Allison." Tin House Podcasts. September 7, 2016. Web. Accessed April 17, 2017. Cixous, Helene. "The Laugh of the Medusa." Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 875-893. Print. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage International, 1987. Print. Munro, Alice. The View from Castle Rock. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2006. Print. Murray, Donald M. "All Writing is Autobiography." College Composition and Communication, 42, no. 1 (1991): 66-74. Web. O'Faolain, Nuala. "You've Come a Long Way, Baby: Re-Reading The Women's Room" Guardian. September 12, 2003. Web. Accessed April 17, 2017. Rich, Adrienne. "The Hermit's Scream." PMLA 108.5(1993): 1157-1164. Print. Seaward-Hiatt, Erin. Moth Wings: A Novel Excerpt with Critical Introduction. Master's thesis, Weber State University, 2017. Solnit, Rebecca. The Faraway Nearby. New York: Penguin, 2013. Print. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt, 1970. Print. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harvest, 1983. Print. Wollstonecraft, Mary. Mary and The Wrongs of Woman. Ed. Gary Kelly. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print. Zambreno, Kate. Green Girl. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. Print. Seaward-Hiatt 18 ABBY 2007 Come to think of it, I don't know that I've seen any photos from the actual day I was born, except for that one in the nursery. There's a CNA in beige teddy bear scrubs, frozen in the act of care, taping a hand-written paper name sign at the feet of a purple infant shrieking away like a pterodactyl. That's about it, as far as hard-copy visuals go. I can probably sum up the rest of the experience though, even without the pictures—the fine educators over at Providence West painted a pretty detailed image for us in health class. Back then, in the innocent days just before everyone would rationally come to expect teenagers to look up the more unsavory facts of life on the Internet, we all huddled in classrooms around these ancient '80s TV and VCR sets that had to be wheeled in on tall carts from down the hall. Ms. Peyton had to pretty much yell over us when we got past the sweaty, noisy, precautionary agony of labor and on to the delivery part. "You guys had better zip it, or you're all failing this unit," she'd said, poised to loop out red zeros next to our names in her boogie board-sized grade book. I have it on good authority that no one ever says "zip it" anymore, but Ms. Petyon did what she could to keep the anachronism alive. It never went very far toward calming down a room full of unruly teens who were twenty minutes from lunch period and smack in the middle of a film about lady parts. Especially not during all the crowning stuff. "Sick! It looks like a hairy hot dog bun!" This was from Chad, an illogical mix of quarterback and Star Trek enthusiast who took a break from darting freshly sharpened pencils up at the ceiling tiles to offer up his commentary. It was a pretty dumb comment—sexist, crass, rude to yell out right after being told by a nice, older gym teacher in mom chinos to kindly zip it, but Seaward-Hiatt 19 we let the skittish giggles erupt anyway. We had to do something with the mixed-up emotion, this secondhand witness of life at its turning point, emblazoned onto VHS and delivered as an educational experience that went right along with proper nutrition and knowing which STDs might kill us. I sketched out a hot dog bun in Bic pen next to a female figure study in my sketchbook, squiggled on some hair, topped it all with chili chunks and steam lines. And now, four full years and roughly 340 tampons later, I that's what I think of when I try to put an image to what my birth must have been like. Chad. Pencils poking out of the ceiling like cactus needles. Hairy hot dog bun. It's grandma Riane who's been trying to get me to put an image to basic stuff. Birth and all that. "You'll want to remember it later," she'll say while embroidering something onto a scrap of cloth or whittling out a pepper mill shaped like an upright black bear—the signature hobbies of aging loners displaced from the heartland and into olive velveteen arm chairs in the roaring city. "This boring, old moment you're putting up with right this second, someday you'll want it back." Then she'll go on stitching an elegant "go fuck yourself' in a copperplate from my old typography book onto her great-grandmother's hankie, give the bear a tuxedo t-shirt. She's always doing stuff like that—hoarding up old rags and basically junk that people don't want, then giving it a second chance to make everyone stop and notice that it's still around. It's kind of that way with writing down what my birth must have been like—my very own superhero origin myth—only I tend to go the other way with it. I put down in my notebook all this fluid imagery. Water—womb—flow, describing my mother's nethers like I'm Helene Seaward-Hiatt 20 Cixous all of a sudden, only instead of shouting up from a textbook page to a bunch of Gold Coast sorority girls, I just rock Chucks and an asymmetrical pixie cut. But this deal with my birth—it gets ethereal and abstract fast, with bits of language I picked up while yacking with Big Mary about some granola's new baby, at my parents' co-op over in Roscoe. I keep trying to force terms like that, all spiritual and earthy, because all said and done, squeezing out a new human seems like a pretty neat thing. And to be honest, earthy is my life now, ever since Mom and Dad have started paying all this attention to the Environment, a word they say with a capital letter, like God. I want to give the moment of my birth its gravity, scribble down in words the kind of legitimacy I'm shooting for in the middle of this great, big mess I'm in. Missing Jordan. My stupid textbook-existential crisis. This soap opera bullshit between Marty and me, with his wife standing in the middle, whipping the cadmium yellow at me and shouting in Ukrainian. Grandma Riane says to just begin at the beginning. Every time I touch the pen to the paper though to write out something clever and deep about where I've come from, my mind whips back to that hairy hot dog bun. The Bic pen. Grandma wasn't joking when she said the stupidest things are usually the best way to really capture the moment in a way that will make you remember it forever. These days, I've taken to sketching out the moments when I can't find the words. Down at the group, they just want me to write down something. Dad picked me up a gray-blue leatherette journal with an elastic strap to hold all my magazine clippings in there, and dots all over the pages instead of lines. That way, I have a faint grid to work with rather than straight-up horizontal rules that keep me chugging deeper into the organized, the verbal, when all I need is a second to be messy. I come off more authentic this way, I think—switching from words, to Seaward-Hiatt 21 sketches, to lists, and back again to start the whole messy process a second time, a third. Mom says it like it's a bad thing, but it really is true: I do better without rules. Anyway, they say it's all the same to them, at group. Whatever works. They just want you to "process," to "live now" while "reflecting" and all that crap that I would have rolled my eyes at before all this happened. It's supposed to help you understand where you're headed, contextualizing yourself at a certain point in time and then putting yourself more fully into the spectrum of existence, seeing how you fit into the big picture, noticing that you actually matter. It's really just a fancy way of saying that I need to stop and think about other people for a second, to learn to appreciate the good around me instead of necessarily dwelling on all the pain- in-the-ass stuff It's really not so bad—even the idealistic stock phrases like "find your center" and "feet on the ground," at least not when they come from a chill city construction worker in his girlfriend's boho walk-up, instead of some lame self-help book with a cross-armed psychologist on the cover. When we get together, we share. One girl even brings in little sculptures she's made out of crap from around her apartment. "The Brillo pad," she points to it, all tangled with the whorls of yarn and cushion batting, gnarled and with a rusty spot from scrubbing dried macaroni out of a sauce pan. "That. That's how my week went." I like it. It doesn't feel all fake like how they show support groups on TV. There, it's always done in a fifty-year-old church that's right off a rattling el-train line, and there's some underpaid gaffer like my buddy Merrill, hidden outside the frosted windows and adjusting an industrial light fixture to imitate the sun. Do we want it here? Or here? Maybe back where it was? There are always dust motes suspended like a caustic snowstorm, and metal chairs forming Seaward-Hiatt 22 an arc with a boring guy at the center—clipboard, comb-over, secondhand necktie done up wrong, short-sleeved dress shirt the color and transparency of a glassine envelope. He's got the look like you wouldn't be surprised if he started a cult or drowned a family of cats in a rusted-out claw-foot. I did go to a meeting like that once, to be fair, after Dr. Chatterjee mentioned that it might help. "Trauma can surprise us," she'd said, waving away my genial protest while brushing a dark curl like an old telephone cord away from her cheek. Then she glided across the sterile, flecked tiles on her little vinyl wheelie-stool to hand me a photocopied list of addresses that the medical assistant had brought in after she ran off with my blood and pee. On the day I went down to the first listing, I roamed from room to room like a refugee, peeping through narrow doorways until I came to a part-time basketball court and a silent arc of human beings who all looked up from their laps the second their leader forced out an, "Oh . . . welcome." My soles screeched against the floorboards in an about face, and I spat out something about looking for the pisser. This new place I go to, I found on MySpace, though it was my art school buddy Rupa who actually turned me on to it. Said she'd heard good things from a cousin, or a roommate—I forget who. But Rupa is a good egg and always knows where the best shows are going down, so I trust her. When I clicked on the link she sent, this Icelandic band Seabear started playing over a dark field of stars, and that alone swept the weepy mood right out from under me. The next day, I'm sitting on a brocade cushion on someone's living room floor in Wicker Park, slurping at a chai cup and talking like the wind with a trans-woman named Bongo about big brothers, loss, the air, clean water, zines from the nineties. Call it fate. Seaward-Hiatt 23 Grandma Riane is always spewing that crap about how stuff happens for a reason, that even something that sucks can set us moving toward this whole new thing that makes a lot of sense later on, if you just learn to walk it off. She said that again the other day—through the door—while I was locked in my room, wallowing like a cliche starlet in a cloud of snotty tissues and replaying the whole deal with Marty on a loop in my head. She trailed a little, like you do when you're in your nineties and have one eye on a Bulls game, but she kept circling back to the same point: that things might just turn out for me, if I get the good sense to keep it all in perspective. I trust the woman. But I don't know about that. Seaward-Hiatt 24 TILLY 1918 "They were just sitting down, having dinner—Tilly and the girls," Mrs. decider said a few weeks after it happened. "Pork loin, Laney says. She used to fix it with rosemary and diced- up apples. And anyway her Rusty was off at the Trotters' place looking after Todd, you see." "And the little ones? They were there in the thick of it?" A series of nods from Mrs. Cleckler, one bob, then another, an austere drop and lift of the chin, as though it were on a hinge and marking time to a funeral march. "Well, I'll be darned, the poor things! Just like that, huh? And how silly, after all." When it came right down to it, a person could blame it all on a tender hunk of pork no bigger than an acorn. Mrs. Walter, mother of two, had clutched her neck with both hands, holding them there for a moment as though she were just clearing a bit of tickle from her throat. She opened wide her mouth to sip in nothing, while her oldest daughter Willa, nine then and no bigger than an antique butter chum, slapped at her back as though swatting a flurry of mosquitos. The little one, Riane, had run toward the telephone, yelled for the Trotters' place, waited for her father's voice. He was a figure that everyone—even his daughters—knew directly and simply as Rusty, though he was regarded by the more aristocratic south-end clique as the Young Doctor, notorious for having gathered up the clientele that fell away in clumps from the ageing Dr. Moses, whose cataracts had begun to fill up his eyes like milk into bowls. By the time Rusty had blown in through his own front door and dropped his dark bag of gauze and instruments on the carpet, several neighbors were clustered in a ring around a woman lying on her side, with Ed Miller slapping at her back and pleading "Come on, girl!" as though aiding in the delivery of a breached calf. Tilly lay on her dining room carpet—swept clean and spritzed with lavender oil just that morning—her body arcing to the side as though she were Seaward-Hiatt 25 taking a little nap after a hard spell cleaning out the flue. The knot of neighbors parted fast when Rusty came. Ed pulled him hard by the sleeve. Rusty went to work, but Tilly had already shown herself out, like a maid announcing a visitor before dipping backward into a still and inky hallway. "Just like that," Mrs. decider had said. With Tilly gone, the housework had a way of piling up at a pace that overtook what little free time Rusty could claim in the wake of the torrid fevers that sent a shock wave through middle America. People were catching so fast that Rusty and his reinforcements had to improvise, to quarantine the more severe cases in the church basement and use the new township high school gymnasium—ribbon cut and signage hoisted into place just months prior—as a makeshift morgue. Rusty would finish with a patient deep into the night and check in with Rosa, whose custodial job at the school lately involved dragging bagged-up bodies of her neighbors to an under-stage compartment that had been designed, originally, for storing fold-away chairs. Back in his own study, removing his mask and wiping the strain from his eyes, Rusty found that he could not summon the urge to eat and be full. Lucky enough for everyone, Willa had not born witness directly to what was happening down at the gymnasium, so her appetite could not afford such a prolonged holiday. She had taken to mixing up cornbread at her mother's side in the weeks before the evening of the pork loin. When Willa's little eyes took up the lists of dry goods and the careful steps laid out in her mother's recipe box, no one could guess that she was in training to fill a position. All she saw were the neat, little steps slanted in navy ink by her mother's hand, strict commandments that when followed always turned up fresh coffee cake or a plate of scrambled eggs with ribbons of seam rising off of them. She saw in the recipes a step stool that placed her alongside her mother. Seaward-Hiatt 26 When she opened the box, she could smell cardamom, fetched from her parents' travels to Bombay and tucked away in a glassine pouch at the bottom, under all the cards. Willa had wanted to taste the pouch full of stuff, with its heavy ecstasy that reminded her of Christmas. She wanted to cook the fragrance into something sweet and dripping with glaze, to bring it out to the dining room table on the special serving platter—with two hands, carefully—to set it before the hungry family. But Tilly had been saving it. "This way, you start with the pretty smell each time you make something," she had said, looking down at little Willa. "And it's the same beginning every time, whether you're going to make peach pie or pot roast. It sets your mind right for the task ahead, is all." Willa came to see a dip into the recipe box as a ritual, and the cardamom's thick scent as something to hold onto, a kind of ethereal good luck charm that hung in the air and kept her on sure footing. Take this and that, plus a pinch of something or other. Add dry to wet. Mix. Bake. Coffee cake. Cleanup, though—that was little Riane's job. Despite a voracious protest involving slammed doors and a shattered mixing bowl, she'd been elected the summer before by a three-to- one margin as the household dishwasher. Dinner hour came and went, but Riane seized every opportunity to slip away from the cherry dining room table, creep past the grandfather clock and up the narrow staircase to her bedroom closet. Each night, Tilly had waited until 7:15 on the nose to lift up her skirts, climb the stairway, swing open the closet door, part the school dresses that Seaward-Hiatt 27 hung over the small, squatting figure like a curtain, and break the news to the younger of her little girls that she indeed meant business. "I let her have a little fun first," Tilly had said one evening to Tommy and Adele Mason, who had come by to have a drink and a laugh or two, and to sample her fresh apple turnovers. "She's a little one yet." After swallowing a bite of crust, Tilly had eyed the clock face as it inched toward 7:15. When the minute hand had snapped horizontal, she cleared away the ivory dishes, stacked them next to the basin, and took the stairs slowly, deliberately, on her way up to coax a sense of shared responsibility into her youngest while Rusty got out the blue-backed deck of playing cards from the buffet drawer. Now that Tilly had gone away, there was no time-keeper to lift out Riane by the arm, and she stayed crouched there like a secret immigrant stowing away in the cargo hold and hoping for a life that would promise better things. It took a few days for the stack of everyday ware in the basin to turn to a variegated pile that included the fine china used only for company, the layers stacked on each other like strata, with fossilized bits of Willa's cornmeal, snap peas, and the other recipes that Tilly had marked "easy." In a week, the heap overtook the kitchen basin and sprawled onto the counter, encroaching on the cutting board and displacing the three embossed tin canisters that held tea and sugar cubes. With her mother gone and buried clear over a month, Riane had made use of every dish that had come to her parents on the wedding day and ever since, setting out a place for Rusty, Willa, and herself before barreling through her own meal and making her flight to her closet. The ivory plates went quickly and were followed by the saucers with the scalloped edges and the Seaward-Hiatt 28 feeble teacups glazed with china-blue sprays of rosebuds. Each night Willa spooned the family dinner into whatever Riane had thought to put out, and the three remaining Walters would eat a tiny caricature of a meal, sipping up tomato soup from a juice tumbler or the good sugar bowl with the rooster on it. With the forced meagerness of those doll-sized meals, Riane overcorrected. Another week's worth of dinners came daubed in the centers of serving trays and slopping over the edges of cookie sheets. Rusty ate mashed carrots out of the crystal punch bowl that had made its way home after a devotional function in the church basement. Willa gulped down her milk from a measuring cup. Riane tipped back and drained the ceramic cow that once held cream. Willa cut a slight figure, unremarkable except when standing pin straight on a footstool, muttering away over the buzz of the radio about household responsibility, and wearing her hair turned up like a real lady's. Her angular form drowned when draped in her mother's cotton apron, and the whole image had the effect of a spaniel puppy that had made off with a clean set of underclothes from the wash basket. Despite her youth, no one could argue that someone had to fix the meals, busy as poor Rusty was with this dreadful flu and going clear out to the edge of the county for house calls and whatnot. The family was in a pinch—a real pickle, Mrs. Cleckler had said into her telephone receiver a few weeks after Tilly's accident. Willa had been the best Rusty and that little one had at the moment, the de facto matriarch of the Walters' crumbling, little idea of home on the outward edge of town. As Willa's full dowry lay rotting in the basin, crusted over with forgotten meals and a sparse colony of maggots, the little problem solver had dragged the tufted leather piano bench in from the study and braced herself against the hutch as she reached. Seaward-Hiatt 29 The hand-me-down platter was sprayed with bluebells and looked out at the dining room from its pinnacle above where the crystal had been. The glossy thing shone like new but betrayed its age in two discrete flaws, one chip just under the rim and a spidery vein of stress cracks edging out from the center of a spray of flowers. Mrs. Walter had grown frazzled whenever the girls played anywhere near the hutch. They were known, on rainier days, to drape tartan throw blankets overhead and run about like plaid ghosts or unrealistic nuns, bellowing out dialogue and knocking into the cupboards. Their rustic fun and games would cause the hallowed porcelain birthright to stagger forward and back on its metal frame, daring to crash toward the floorboards. Watching Riane lock her small lips around the ceramic cow's tiny muzzle, Willa eyeballed the platter on its high shelf. Five full decades after the thing had been unwrapped from the calico scraps that had nested it in a trunk on a steamer trip over from the Old Country, little Willa decided that these were desperate times. By the afternoon when Mrs. decider poked her head past the screen door in a vibrato "halloo" and edged inside with a warm pot of Italian beef, Riane had been lapping up milk like a barn kitten from an overturned butter dish. Mrs. decider set down the pot of beef and held a free hand under her nose to wave off the stench in the kitchen, a thick sludge that paused over her in the air and smelled more like Ed's old outhouse after the chili festival than Tilly's proud, little kitchen. She excused herself backward, through the parlor and out into the moving breeze. The screen door snapped against its jamb, freeing her back into the sunshine that had streaked in through the cobwebs that hung like crepe over Tilly's bright drapery. She took the sidewalk eastward in the busy waddle of a mama duck. When she was barely inside her kitchen doorway three blocks over, she snatched the bell of her old telephone receiver off its stirrup, curled the worn-out cord over her left index finger, and asked Betsy for her niece out in Symmerton. Seaward-Hiatt 30 ABBY 2007 I won't lie: the journaling is nice. I find it's easy for me to get cozy thinking about the good old days, like I'm plopping down backward on my old unicorn sheets and eating up Fun Dip with TRL making up a rowdy background noise. Back then, I didn't have to care about shit. Of course I thought I did, but I realize now how easy I had it, and how much I would dwell on stuff that wouldn't matter at all in the grand scheme of things. I cared that I'd just barely missed No Doubt coming through town, that our neighborhood was getting a Portillo's, that scented lip gloss was making a comeback. It was all sunshine and roses before everything started to feel like breathing in muddy water, before Jordan got sick. Before the night our parents were called up and notified that he had been in an accident, before they floored it to St. Joe's toward a smiling and slightly dinged-up version of Jordan wearing a neck brace. Before the x-rays came back and showed us all the real catastrophe we were about to put up with. Watching your brother go away slowly, now there's something that'll take the spring right out of a person's step. It put a special kind of fear into my parents too. The change happened in the same way a lot of people lose hold of a kid and find God or model airplanes. Only my folks, a pair of frizzy-haired botanists who met fighting over a library microfiche station in 1979, they found the community garden, reusable shopping bags, quinoa. When Jordan got sick, they ditched their 3,000-square-foot split level out in the 'burbs and packed the essentials into a three-bedroom apartment on the near West Side, closer to university hospital and the specialists and off the path of the freeway commute. It's not home, but I like it all right. I get to save the money I was blowing on rent by shacking up with my family, and there's primo Greek food everywhere. Walking past the Seaward-Hiatt 31 Haymarket memorial every day, you get the feeling that a lot of important moments happened in the city. The sculpture itself is not what I would call a work of modern art, but more just another example of minimalist civic art that's missed the mark a little. The clay-red figures are standing up on a cart, demanding their eight-hour workday with fists raised to the skyline. But instead of looking like humans, they are faceless, blocky caricatures that read more like the sign on a bathroom door than the group of radical anarchists we read about in my labor studies seminar. The aesthetic is not my cup of tea, as Grandma Riane would put it, but you have to hand it to the sculptor for at least commenting on something important, demonstrations that incited riots and really mattered to people. Not like my work, if you can call it that. I bet the woman who planned out the rioting bathroom figures hadn't dropped out of art school a week before her senior exhibition and started creeping up on tourists wearing studded jeans and Cubs hats, asking to sketch them standing up against Buckingham Fountain or next to the lion outside the museum gift shop. Then again, considering that most of my friends who actually have their degrees are mopping up bathrooms at CVS, I'm calling it a win. Our old house is still out there, a lifetime away by freeway, frozen right in the middle of an average day, like the town outside Chernobyl with its overgrown bushes and creepy abandoned carnival rides. We still own it—Mom made some kind of breakthrough about Japanese beetle migration just before it all went down, so at least we had the extra money from her promotion going for us. I've never been back, personally. I tried once, but the second Dad slid the key into the lock, the old sound flipped a switch in me, and I hurled all over a pot of begonias. I waited in the car, breathing in the stale pitch of vinyl cleaner mixed with the iced coffee slopped in the cup holder, with my head wedged between my knees, while Dad rifled around inside for whatever he was trying to find. Seaward-Hiatt 32 It's the house they took me home to a few days after Dad's picture in the hospital nursery. This part of my birth is easy to piece together, because Dad loves to tell the story. "She's only a few centimeters, so I figure I'm going across the street to get me a roast beef," he says, a preamble to a story we all know like a Simpsons rerun. "I come back up to the eighth floor, I've got my Freddie's bag in one hand, with the juice dripping out the corner, and a fistful of those gift shop carnations in the other. And wouldn't you know it, the two of you had gone and started without me." He says it with a slap of his thigh, and rather than feeling a loss at having missed the moment when I poked my bald, little head out into the world, he rushes toward the opportunity to tell us a story. "I had the camera all set around my neck, but you try remembering to use the damn thing after waiting around all day for your girls to get it together." My parents were never shutterbugs, even during the '90s climate of overzealous parenting, and neither of them had an opinion either way on what art was, or whether everyday snapshots even qualified as worth saving. Still, after my brother had emerged on the scene, an ambulatory toddler staggering out into the world undocumented, and me just a volleyball bump under my mother's lab coat, my dad laid his plans to change all that. "I sent off for a Kodak." My mother blinked as though trying to decipher Coptic writing on an urn. "You know, for the big day." He poked her baby bump in time with the last two words, and she swatted him away to go back to her field report on all the ash trees that had died left and right. On the afternoon I was born, Dad snapped the photo of me lying behind glass like a featured kitten at an animal shelter, then raised up his left hand for a celebratory bite off his cold Seaward-Hiatt 33 roast beef. It was the beginning and the end of his photography habit, and the minute the heavy, plastic thing was lowered into its canvas bag and dropped to the hospital floor, Grandma Riane draped the strap over her shoulder and wore the thing like a Miss America sash for the duration of my infancy. The next photo on the reel was from the day we came home. I can picture my mom shifting around the diaper bag and the baby carrier before finding a good balance. My dad is behind her with the overnight bag, her purse, and a new fleece blanket draped over one shoulder. Grandma Riane is closing the door to the Chevette and carting in Jordan by the elbow before scrambling up the walk to push the key through the lock. When we get inside, the camera snaps on Dad as he drops the bag and slips off his slushy cross trainers before stepping onto the carpet. Another snap as he takes the baby carrier, looking down on me while Mom ducks out of her grayish parka out-of-focus in the background. There's a shot of Mom staring into the lens, blazing pupils from the flash, with a cardboard reindeer taped to the closet door behind her. She is caught in the middle of a sentence, her lips pursing at the moment the camera catches her. Grandma Riane keeps these photos all in order in a red checkered album dated 1985, and the next one is of mom in a fresh angora sweater and recently feathered hair, looking down at me, a tiny freeloader cradled in her young arms. She is twenty-five and on her second run with caring for an infant. She knows enough to have the gingham burp cloth spread out over her shoulder, but still she looks like she's been formed out of porcelain. She isn't frowning, but the austerity in her expression betrays that she is scared fairly shitless. Jordan is at her feet crashing metal trucks into one another on the rust-orange fingers of the old shag carpet that the previous Seaward-Hiatt 34 owners picked, the stuff that made the whole place stink like a damp basement until we peeled it up and made the switch to hardwood. In the next photo, Christmas morning and a week into my life, someone has pressed a self-adhesive paper bow to my forehead and laid me in a shoebox at my brother's feet, like a present. He is wearing a set of pajamas with a Thundercat on the front and a price tag dangling from the armpit. His pin-straight hair forms a messy, little beanie with a few loose strands blustering up like silk on an ear of corn. I'm looking up at him side-eyed, and my baby-soft skin is blown out in the frame just like the snow that's clinging outside the windowsill. My face says that I am trying to figure it all out—the little boy kneeling over me, the clicking plastic with its flashing light, the must of pine needles and stale peanut brittle, the paper bow. Grandma Riane never stopped taking pictures after that. It was a phenomenon that came on late in her life, this brand-new thing with all its irritation and promise rolled together in one—like menopause, only constructive. In a way, I felt responsible for my part in sparking the habit. Her glossy photo envelopes came along well after the tabletops decoupaged with mid-century postcards, and the macrame owls that hung in an aviary over the kitchen sink back at her house out in the sticks, down the road from where the nuke plant went up. The old place was full of reminders, so Mom says, before the fire skipped the divide between the old out building in the late seventies and burned out the back half of the kitchen before creeping sideways into the library. Mom says the word "reminders" pausing a little, like everything in that place had a mind to it and could hear her judging. Like all the old knick-knacks and furniture in Grandma's old place had a motive to jump off the shelf and force themselves into conversation at the moment when they were least welcome. Seaward-Hiatt 35 "Your grandmother's a pack rat," she'd said more than once, and each time I thought of this special I saw on TV, where people kept clouds of dryer lint and stacks of old pizza boxes in unsound towers all over their living rooms. True, Grandma Riane's corner of the apartment is overstuffed with old junk dragged in by van from her sunny room at the old house. After the fire, that woman had kept virtually everything she could save that hadn't been eaten up in the flames or ruined from water damage, and almost all of it is still taking up space in our old garage. She even has a box full of books with the boards singed off of them and the pages frozen in a wave, like the delicate lines in a wooden board. In our apartment, there's a picture of Grandma's sister, who died young, and the paper is burned all around the edges except for on her face, grinning away all toothy like Eleanor Roosevelt and holding her straw hat in place with one arm. It's weird how fire will eat up so much but has a way of showing a little mercy in a way that makes no sense to me. "It's because of the frame," Mom says whenever Grandma Riane brings it out as Exhibit A, proving that the most important parts of us go on long after the rest is charred and used up. "The thing had glass over it, right? The fire ate away the edges and was oxygen starved as it worked toward the center." Then she walks away rolling those hazel eyeballs of hers way back into her skull, and I worry they'll get stuck like that. "It's science, Ma." She likes to ruin the mystique, the spooky pattern that Grandma and I are always trying to find whenever a rocking chair creaks by itself or ajar or cardamom jumps out of the cabinet, while everything else stays in its neat place. Maybe it's natural for Mom to push back against the person who raised her, a single woman who impressed her small-town newspaper back in 1960 by giving birth, at age 47, to a healthy baby girl, and who ran a yoga studio in her front room during the better part of the 1970s. I can see it now, as though it's happening right in front of me: Seaward-Hiatt 36 Grandma's showing a few ladies the downward dog on the antique rug, while my mother, then a teenager and embarrassed by even a house fly looking at her wrong, dragging her friends through by the wrist before dashing upstairs to grab her French textbook. It's easy to put a mental picture to it all because I've seen it play out in modern form. Grandma doesn't act a second over fifty, even though she was born as Taft was leaving office, so when she has a group of seniors over to the apartment to meditate, Mom talks about it like she's out in Grant Park burning an effigy of Richard Dawkins, instead of getting a few of her raucous old-lady friends together to hunt down a slice of inner peace. "She's over there carrying on with her crystal bullshit again," I heard her say into her cell phone once, chopping up a carrot in furious, guillotine strokes that raised scars on the pebbled cutting board. After her friends had gone, Grandma Riane snapped a picture right up in Mom's face, picked up a potato peeler, and butted softly into Mom's hips, knocking her a little off balance and coaxing out of her a tight, little shadow of a smile. Last I saw, that old camera of my dad's was lying on the night table in Grandma's bedroom, holding down a weeks' old TV Guide and displacing a stack of large-print romance novels from the city library—main branch, the one with the gargoyles on it, she reminds me when I drive her there. I only know it's the same camera because I cornered her about it once. "You know, these things are digital now," I had said waving the twenty-year-old hunk of plastic through the air like a dying match. "Plug it right into your computer, and you don't even have to develop it." But she just smiled at me in that way of hers, what my dad calls Grandma's shit-eating grin, the one that says without language that she knows something you don't. Seaward-Hiatt 37 "I like it this way." She took the camera away from me and set it down again on the night table. Its dull hit against the wood was like punctuation. "It gives you something to hold onto. Before things go and disappear on you." I thought of the expressionist butt painting that Marty had smeared onto an old skateboard deck and propped up in my old studio as a joke. I pictured his long fingers dragging a brush across the paper, the mess of purple and orange pigments that when pushed just right, made out a human form. The inscription, scribbled in charcoal, on the back. Grandma Riane managed to catch all that and nodded, sealing off her point. Then she went back to reading Love, Texas Style with one arm tucked behind her head and her feet crossed underneath a handmade afghan, flipping past the boring expositional parts before leaning in, during the middle, when things really got good. Seaward-Hiatt 38 AUDREY 1918 She came to live with the Walters just before the Armistice, in the way that weary reinforcements trickle into embattled territory: circumstances in the little township called for a helping hand, and Audrey had nothing else going on. Rusty had been aging fast under the pandemic, not to mention the love of two messy-haired, lisping little girls who, with the premature death of their mother, had a way of eating into a fellow's time. This was not to say that their sudden wide-sprawling need for his attention was unwelcome. In the days before everyone started dropping off from the war or the influenza or just home-grown anxiety, Rusty could never have said no to a sundae at the Whitmore's counter or a bicycle ride over to Old McCreary's fallow block of earth that lay kitty-corner from the fire house. Before his wife's departure, he had simply never stopped to think about the organizing force that kept the girls at bay while he set the Binns boy's ulna or saw to the fevered cases that kept his little desk phone clanging well into his nights, and had him stealing his shut-eye on a roll-out mat on the office floor. Until that force was gone, he took for a fact of nature the calls of an orderly mother to restrain the older girl from swinging open the door that separated parlor from examination room to go on and on about Joan of Arc, or the younger from coloring greasy oil pastel butterflies onto the rose wallpaper that her mother picked special from a catalog, or over diagrams of the human thoracic cavity in his old copy of Gray's. Tilly's orderly voice had always been there in the background like a pulse, keeping time and seeing to the little things that would understandably escape the only practicing physician in town during what the big Chicago papers were already calling a worldwide health crisis. Seaward-Hiatt 39 In the end, all it took to shut it off was one half-hour stretch of sunny evening, that fluorescent time of day in early summer, with the sun edging toward horizon and the cicadas raising hell, to put everything all out of sorts. And like a picture book slapping shut at its midpoint, Mrs. Walter had been overflowing with thoughts and breath one moment and quietly slid into place onto a dusty, old shelf in the next. Audrey came in a hired car, swaying and jagging with the ruts on the old County Line road and scratching a Waterman with a bad nib over a torn-off sheet of butcher's paper. Her handwriting skipped and the ink pooled in sloppy clots as the car convulsed over the dirt and gravel that gave way into town streets set in a meticulous grid and named after trees and early presidents. For a hotcake-flat stretch of country, the back roads had the peculiar texture and violent ups and downs of the pockmarked face of the moon. Her writing came out in a stutter, in part from the terrain but mostly because she couldn't be bothered anymore with the flowery language of Saint Augustine, with his penitence and formality and all that. Not for a long, long, time, anyway. Mother Amelia. . . deepest regrets . . . not be joining the novitiate . . . got me a new situation . . . All of it passed over once more in a cursory proofread and sealed off with the spidery insignia of Miss Audrey Grun. She folded the undersized sheet and creased it in one uneven smack before forcing it into and envelope and poking on a wet stamp—a historical etching of Washington in profile, gazing over at the blank return address with presidential austerity. The nuns would have to understand, and start courting a new girl to copy out The City of God and scrub stiff pigeon crap out of the carillon. Seaward-Hiatt 40 When the car screeched to a pause in the barely familiar town, Audrey poked through her clutch purse, paid exactly with a fistful of coin that clanked into the driver's open palm, and swung her feet onto uneven ground. Mrs. Cleckler dropped the edge of her lace curtain in the front room window and shuffled outside as though propelled from behind by a stiff gust of wind. Audrey drew an arc with the toe of her shoe in the loose dirt at her feet, and staid herself against her aunt's enveloping hug. The woman had an embrace that rivaled a castaway's cling to debris following a vicious shipwreck. She always held on long after the object of her affection would drop his or her arms and tense up, chuckling nervously and repeating over again, "All right, then." A whirl of how-are-you-you-must-be-exhausted-come!-come-have-some-limeade, and Audrey was swept into the kitchen to set down her bag and detail the ride over, the weather in Symmerton, the origin of this lovely tennis bracelet on her wrist—my-word-GENuine-crystal- you-say? Exactly twelve minutes of pleasantries ticked away before Mrs. Cleckler started rattling on about the butter dish, the girls dropping in all the time on poor Rusty, who by the way was a very nice, very smartly dressing man. At length, she rose, took Audrey by her crystal wrist, and led her upstairs to her vanity table. "I have just the perfect touch for you." Audrey swatted away the cloud of vanilla perfume as though she had stepped through a cloud of gnats. "I don't see where that's necessary. I'm just going to be cleaning up and whatnot." Mrs. Cleckler took her niece's face in both hands, like an antiquarian unpacking a rare vase. "I know it, love. But a little spritz behind the ears can't hurt a thing, now can it?" Seaward-Hiatt 41 Audrey stepped back into the afternoon wearing fresh stockings—a little on the large side—to account for the thin run that ripped on the door frame of her rented room back in Symmerton and crept up her right calf while the driver had gone on about the rains and all the workers who were coming into the county these days. Fresh and perfumed now, she took to the sidewalk arm-in-arm with her aunt and tried to picture in her mind the kind of place she had gone and signed up for, after draining half a bottle of white wine and staring out her window screen at the robins. She recalled the newspaper snipping Mrs. Cleckler had sent, express overnight mail. A light set of eyes, with irises, she imagined onto the black-and-white newsprint, the same garbled shades of blue she'd seen smeared on canvases to approximate oceans. The dark hair, peppering at the temples and swooped to the side, and the tall but slightly thin form that gave way to a white doctor's coat, a surgical bag, an old-fashioned watch that hung on a chain and seemed an anachronism against that sly, young smile, the stylish dark oval glasses. It was the kind of accessory suited to an older gentleman rather than a man of reportedly only thirty-five years—a well-worn habit of a thing that might be inexplicably fished from a breast pocket, fidgeted with, flipped open and closed every few minutes. From the thumbnail image her aunt had clipped, Audrey invented a sprawling bungalow house on a street called Chestnut or Poplar, where she would take her meals and get some well- needed sleep after carting off two savage little girls to their brass-posted beds. Perhaps one night after the children's bedtime, she and this very nice, very smartly dressing Rusty would flop backward onto the wicker porch swing in a mutual attitude of exhaustion. He would remark that it was getting late, that the light from the house across the way looked kind of pretty cutting through the dark like that. That he could talk about old Woodrow Wilson and the fireflies with Seaward-Hiatt 42 her all night, if not for the gentle chill, the responsibilities that waited for the both of them in the morning. Her hand would tremble and lift off the percale of the cushion. There, she stopped, and waved it all away like a pestering house fly. She could be all wrong about him, after all. And besides, could a young doctor even afford the kind of lush image she had spun for him in such a little town, a hamlet that was on the books officially as a village, grasping so lightly onto modernity that Audrey had not even seen a florist or an auto shop? Should she have pictured instead a tarpaper shanty or a modest clapboard, maybe a school of migrant neighbors who had come up from the Carolinas to work in the mines? Lovely folks who hugged as easily as they shook hands and brewed up the constant and delirious aroma of pulled pork on a backyard spit? Audrey's mind sped up as she negotiated the uneven slabs of concrete leading down toward the edge of town, wobbling every so often in the borrowed shoes Mrs. Cleckler had laid out for her. Whatever was behind the walls on 683 Oak Avenue had to be better than where Audrey had been before. The nuns were nice enough, and Father MacElroy had seen to Audrey's every need back when her mother had passed and her aunt was still overseas in Tonga or Samoa or some such dot floating around in the south Pacific, preaching away about her own discovery of the Good Word and sewing up baptismal gowns. No one had ever rapped her knuckles to a bloody mess with a ruler, the way one reads about in serials, and she had never even seen Mother Amelia angry, apart from the day the war broke out and she stormed up the steps to her chamber to ask God what he meant by all this nonsense over in Europe, and why he had to go and drag nice people into blowing each other up. What cinched the flight from the convent for Audrey was not so much the abandonment of rigidity or the promise of "finding a husband," which the girls at Catechism all said as casually as though they were scouring a department store for the Seaward-Hiatt 43 perfect stole. In the end, her change of heart was born the moment the shine that came off of Mrs. decider's front teeth as she dropped in on Audrey after her slow trip back to the States, the gloss over her irises as she knitted loose bandages absently while going on and on about charity, the tropics, grace, pineapple. If done deliberately, with a measure of patience, caring for people on a blank canvas that hadn't been all laid out for her yet, unbound the way Mrs. decider was, now that could take a person to the stars even, as long as she wanted to go there. Riane was just a little thing when Audrey came to stay, just five then. "And a half" she would correct every opportunity that arose. Still very much steeped in the habit of holing up in closets and feasting eyes on picture books, Riane did not rise or dust off the back of her house dress when Mrs. decider's stately tap tap tap landed on the wood frame of the back kitchen screen door—the entrance that had been set in stone, per Tilly's mandate, as reserved for family and very close acquaintances only. Riane turned over the boards of her book about owls, pinched a stack of pages to hold her place, and listened through the grate that fed into the kitchen below. Willa though, having amassed nearly four extra years on God's green earth, took pride in doing the remembering for her little sister, at least where the early days were concerned. To hear her tell it, Audrey showed up hovering like a ghost, raising off the floorboards, it seemed, in an opaque pillow of Mrs. Cleckler's heavy cologne. "It was like she'd soaked a towel in the stuff and slapped me upside the face with it," Willa would say, throwing head and shoulders backward in a throaty laugh, years later, when she was mostly grown up and they were all on an even footing. On the day she arrived, Audrey had rehearsed her how-do-you-do, with a stately little nod on the last syllable, in her aunt's front room mirror. When little Willa opened up the back door on 683 Oak Avenue, she did not wait for Seaward-Hiatt 44 pleasantries as her mother had schooled her years before. She did not stand back and invite her guests in for something to refresh themselves, and she did not take their things and get them seated in the parlor before calling on her father to come in and receive them, like he might a gift or an important letter. Instead, her little mouth spread out in the wide smile that would come whenever she was finished with etiquette and ready to get down to work. She reached out her little hand, roughly the size and spread of a monarch butterfly, pawed Audrey by the wrist, and dragged her past the threshold. And in her plain way, Willa led Audrey toward the rancid- smelling basin. "We need your help over here first." A year went by in a series of tasks set in order by Audrey's hand and followed with all the gravity of troops marching onward in a phalanx. The dreadful spring and summer of the epidemic had the family largely indoors, hiding away from churches and libraries for fear of catching the quick disease that traveled on the air and would kill one person as surely as it would leave another one merely under the weather for a spell. Rusty came and went all hours, peeling away his soiled coat before edging into the bathroom to scrub his hands and arms up to his elbows in steaming water. Fall came, and as the leaves began to amber and dance off their perches and onto the sidewalks around town, the deaths in Rusty's rotation came to a slower pitch, then tapered off. Rusty brushed a freshly scrubbed hand over Audrey's little finger one night as he handed her a week's pay for tending the kids and keeping the house smelling of lilac and fresh linen. He noticed her eyes, the spray of freckles that dusted her nose and fell onto her cheeks—that one strand of hair at the back that never wanted to stay turned up with the rest of the orange, fiery Seaward-Hiatt 45 mess. It wasn't a cozy rattan porch swing at twilight, or the stuff of Victorian romance. It was rather a hasty work break for Audrey—in the unflattering kitchen lighting that buzzed overhead whenever the girls did too much stomping around. Just a break, taken between mopping up the floors and pegging laundry out on the line. And in the way of modern realism, thrilling to the bone when you ask the people who were there, and dull for the rest of us, Audrey became what Rusty referred to up until decades later—as he coughed sticky phlegm into a machine that breathed for him—as his other half. At the ceremony, Riane carried the little homemade satin pillow with the golden rings tied to it. Willa chased Ed's black lab through calf-deep snow when it made off with Audrey's bouquet. Rusty wiped dry his eyes three times before the night was out. Adele Mason cawed to this neighbor and that, over the little backyard reception's din, that he was in over his head, that Rusty would regret jumping into it, once the party was over and it was all said and done. But Mrs. decider had sat at her little picnic table nodding all throughout, bobbing as if to a song, her every move an underscore to the silent message that she, all along, had gotten it right. Seaward-Hiatt 46 RIANE 1928 Willa had just finished reading Little Women aloud in the den the morning she started going on about charity. She was the family do-gooder, a word Audrey tossed off with a smirk, but in a tone that marked the way other people said hobo or crumb grabber. Though Willa winced a little at her step-mother's casual mocking, she was as unrelenting as Robin Hood when it came to evening things out. Her sights were set, this time, on her friend Sadie, whose father had his hand badly injured while righting a jam at the paper mill. Willa had been sure to drop mention of the whole thing—mangled hand and all—for only the third blessed day in a row at the breakfast table. She followed a tale of the three crushed fingers—thank God it hadn't taken the whole hand—with a call for Audrey to take inventory of any extra food—pillbug-ridden flour sacks, then, or the syrupy jars of last-season beets that cluttered up the top shelves, even— anything that could fill up a dinner table while making room for the new peaches. "And anyhow, her mother is in tending little Emma, and Sadie makes all their money now, painting with us girls," Willa had said, rambling out a mile a minute and spooning less than her share of oatmeal into a dramatically undersized sundae dish she'd set at her place, overemphasizing the family's plenty. "We ought to lend a hand, for those poor little ones, anyhow." Riane understood where her sister's heart was, but in the way of little sisters, she shied back from what she knew from experience would wind up a bitter loss against their caretaker's legendary frugality. With Willa though, there was always talk about making more room for the unfortunate folks down the street or in far off places with biblical-sounding names. Riane couldn't help but feel that the scene laid before her at the breakfast table had been staged a little, Seaward-Hiatt 47 and that Willa was playing a part, delicately pored over beforehand, annotated in the margins, and directed from the dining room theatre toward their step-mother, reclined on threadbare velveteen way back in the cheap seats, shaking her head in anticipation of the punch line and shedding crushed peanut casings on the sticky floor. One could never be sure, with Willa's mind as gauzy and far as it skittered off sometimes, but Riane suspected the whole thing was probably a holdover from the beet-maroon hardback that lay perched like a roof over the arm of the old chesterfield in the parlor, an artifact fished out of the township library trash bin. Willa had rescued the buckled, water-stained thing from certain death, brushing off the rain splatters and hauling it through town underarm in a soggy beeline toward home. Nights expanded and contracted on themselves when Willa and Riane passed a story between them, reading through the lines and dragging their fingers across the faint debossing where the letterforms had smacked down on paper, leaving behind their little inky graphs of meaning. Riane was better reading in her head than aloud—more reserved, Miss Selma had put it on Meet the Teacher night—but Willa soared through Little Women like an ingenue, doing a special voice for Jo and summoning a rash of stifled laughter between them that incurred Audrey's snapped warning to quit burning all the damned kerosene and get into bed, for heaven's sake. Willa got lost in words the way other people got mixed up changing trains in the Loop. She would start rumbling down the track of a novel, derailing on a phrase about pinecones and spending the rest of her day gobbling up field guides and dreaming over picture books about far- off places like Yosemite or the Appalachians. So when Willa peeped out the nondescript dialogue of Louisa May Alcott's little moralist Beth, her eyes had grown glassy, taxidermied in gray clouds—and Riane knew she was thinking of Sadie, her father, that hand that had missing Seaward-Hiatt 48 thumb and fingers, forced from his body by industry, and the world's hungry need for almanacs and the Sears catalog. As Riane scooted the grits around her plate and breathed in the thick summer breeze that crept in from the opened window, she beheld in Willa the pleas of a transcendent angel, a soliloquy that cooed out of her with the aim of breaking down the cynical audience of moderns into a mutual attitude of charity. Images picked out of fiction pasted themselves over real life, like new wallpaper. The cornbread transformed into steaming sticky rolls heaped into a basket and covered from the bite of a romantic winter chill with a nubby kitchen towel. Riane saw the abandonment of self, the petticoats lifted from the damp, the snow shoes fastened over old- fashioned lace-up boots, a singsong hike through two miles of front-on Midwestern wind and sleet and into their neighbors' hearts. On Christmas. But around the breakfast table and nowhere near the kind of season that would produce a picturesque drape of snow over the ground, reality had a way of buckling the pretty images, refusing to let the glue take and calling out the blind spots left by Willa's idealism. Then too, the role of little Beth March came off comically overwrought when set in a high whine and delivered, in late summer, by a freshly bobbed eighteen-year-old who perched in a lavender- tinged hint of store-bought perfume—imported, so the vial claimed, from Paris. It didn't help that it was the time of year when abstractions like charity and goodwill sat gathering must in the attic, boxed up along with the felt stockings and a few garlands of stale popcorn that had been nibbled on, gradually, by intruding field mice. Audrey evaded the role of Marmee when she tapped a cigarette ash on the slick butter dish and muttered something or other about that dangerous old mill, that the church has a charity drive, for heaven's sake, and that things were hard enough around here as it was. She was more shrewd than cruel, and the display was more Seaward-Hiatt 49 for Willa's overacting than it was in favor of denying someone the help that this very moment, Audrey knew, Mrs. Cleckler was rushing on over to her neighbors in need. Willa had stalled, pinched her lips tightly to swallow what came next, but Riane knew she was saving it, like the mice with their warm cache of popcorn. When Riane first saw Willa evaporate into the Berta's field under cover of a waxing gibbous moon—The Elementary Guide to the Night Sky, volume 1—she had Sadie and that poor man's crumpled-up hand in mind. Willa wasn't gone long, just enough time for Riane to finish off reading her serial and peep at a moth that the breeze from the window had forced up to her desk lamp. Willa's hands were empty when she caught a toehold in the trellis, made her way up the clapboard, and crouched back through her bedroom window. So it wasn't about corn, then. Riane's mind floated toward the dog-earned magazine lazing on her nightstand, and the sweeping tale about a pair of lovers. A boy, maybe? A clandestine hero who was free to meet Willa only by the heavy romance of moonlight? But who? All she could think of was Bobby, and Willa didn't even seem all that keen on him, besides as friends. She punched his shoulder all the time and called him Jack, even when he took her to the harvest social and she wore the white taffeta and granny's amethyst butterfly pin. Riane tried to picture Willa rushing through the papery stalks to fall into Bobby's arms like in the love stories, but the image just wasn't coming. It wasn't Willa. As the summer lazed onward and Thursday afternoons bled to evenings, Riane watched the clock hit 9:20—never 9:18 or 9:34—then waited for the cue of her sister's window dragging upward in its frame. It seemed that Willa had gotten her disappearance down to a neat sequence: an elaborate pretense of bedtime routine—teeth polished, hair combed, hands and feet massaged Seaward-Hiatt 50 and exfoliated with ivory soap—followed by a few small creaks of bedsprings and the careful gymnastics of sliding out her window and down to the ground, then padding like a young doe toward the edge of the fields. Willa wouldn't bother to look back before she dissolved out of the sticky night air and into what had turned out to be an unusually tall crop, even for this late in the season. Just a faint hiss of waxy leaves dragging against one another, and she was gone, out doing God knows what in one of her nicest dresses. On a clear night toward the end of summer, the sky draped overhead like a velvet cloth concealing a new statue, and the crickets were chirping away, making a percussive ruckus that sounded like it was orchestrated just to hint at a mystery. A rash of stars peeked tiny holes in the dark pile of the night as Riane lay ready in an upper bedroom, listening for the far-off drag of wood on wood—Willa's window, her cue. Riane leaned deep over the edge of her bed to pull open the bottom pine drawer from her nightstand. She went by feel alone. The thing she wanted was cool for having been hidden away all day from the summer sunshine, and circular, with brass edges that winked a little in the moonlight when she brought it to view. She traced the rim with her index finger and made her way soundlessly toward the open window, careful to dodge the three floorboards that she knew would creak and call out for Audrey and her father. The curtains yawned toward her in the night air, and her granny's lilac bush sent up its heavy calm from the backyard down below. She turned the tiny knob that lit up the Coleman on her rolltop, and right away the moths came in to dance. She drew up her brass magnifier and brought a moth's little features into focus. A tiny body on this one, not large and wooly like the kind that just last week had sent Rudy Flagg bolting in a panic before crouching behind the wood pile for cover. Seaward-Hiatt 51 Riane's moth fluttered to the top edge of the lamp, and she brought her magnifier closer. The wings, which had been all white a moment before, were a shimmery, glowing chiffon now, stretched over a fretwork of wiry veins that supported and fed the little thing's inclination to fly. It reminded her of the smudged watch dials that Willa would bring home from the factory. "This one, the paint got too thick, so it's all goofed. But they said I could have it," Willa had said, handing over a watch face minus the glass, dotted with the eerie, lasting glow of radium paint. One time, she'd smuggled home a nearly empty bottle of the stuff and painted the glow onto Riane's fingernails. "Don't worry," she'd said. "Audrey won't see it and fuss. It only glows at nighttime." The moth, with its glowing wings, walked a slow circle on Riane's lamp, then blustered into the sky and down again toward the dim porch light below. It was a typical colorless thing, so common an exhibition for the children's insect tent at the LaSalle County fair and featured without fanfare in Moths and Butterflies of North America, which she'd saved up for and ordered special from the Nature Library. Other people looked at moths and saw flying tissue paper, but Riane saw something new every time the little things congregated around a burning porch light or one of the old gas lamps. With the quick dash of the insect's wings came a heavy memory, a projectile that had hit the front-room window hard the winter before, while she was having black tea and listening to Willa read from Emily Dickinson. The thud had come out of nowhere, with the heavy whack of what Riane could envision as a leather boot being hurled overhand at the picture window. Afternoons were typically quiet, especially on the far end of town, away from the busy streets, so that first time she heard it, she ran to the parlor expecting to see Rudy, maybe, tearing off laughing, hopping along through a dusting of snow, with only one shoe on. At the very least, she Seaward-Hiatt 52 hoped for a muddy print smeared onto the glass—something, anyway, to shine a light on the sudden and jarring sound that had broken up the trance of Willa's voice and called them both toward the chill that rose off the window. If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain— The boom came. But as the two skittered toward the window, all that was there was a portrait of the Mason's place across Oak, framed neatly between linen curtains, and in the middle, a burst of delicate feathers concentrated around a single, light smudge and stretching outward before fading into nothing. On the day when it happened again, she had been sitting in the front room, ready this time, curled up with a book and periodically glancing out at the falling snow that looked like cottonwood filling up the air. With the heavy whack came a muffled chirp, and she was near enough then to catch in side-eye something dark whirling downward through the air outside. Her library book skidded off her lap and smacked corner-first onto the hardwood as she sprang up and through the heavy front door. Willa was gone this time, off at Sadie's or Emma's, but still her stage voice, dressed up for the theater and delivered with the gravity of a eulogy, rang back into Riane's mind. If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain . . . The thing was still struggling when Riane dashed outside—a petite rust-colored creature that fluttered in a downward spiral, taking off in short, intermittent arcs before angling toward the ground again. Riane darted inside toward the kitchen and slid a little on the waxed floor. She threw open a cupboard, rifling this and that and dumping out a half-full coffee tin in the basin. Seaward-Hiatt 53 Like a hot wave, she heard Audrey's words ring though her: "Don't go fooling around with wild animals." She always said it that way, lingering on "wild" as though she were talking about a rabid bobcat instead of an injured young robin. And Riane was already in trouble over the silly broken ironing board leg. Skating on thin ice, Audrey had said. Unable to forget the bird but afraid of having the earth crack out from under her, Riane scooped several pinches of coffee grounds back into the tin and rinsed the rest down the drain and out of sight. She saw the little thing again that night, just before bedtime, a small mound under a downy blanket of powder on the flat stretch of ground just below her window. She knew better than to touch birds—"disease," Audrey would nearly screech before yanking either her or Willa or sometimes Rudy in by the shirt sleeve. So she sneaked out to the little thing after dark, once Audrey and her father's light had gone out and their low voices had tapered off into quiet. She had to know, wanted to see if this was maybe just a clod of dirt or a wadded dish towel that had fallen from the basket on its way out to the frigid drying line. But when she brushed away the snow, it wasn't a dish towel or a clod but the poor rust-breasted little thing, no longer swooping in arcs or breathing in, no fiery little chest rising and falling in a constant pulse. Just a bit of water streaked from the slit of the closed eye, not frozen to the touch, but cold. The bird had hit the pane dead on, was probably doomed the moment it failed to recognize its own fast-advancing reflection as a barrier. Still, Riane wondered if she had gone outside earlier, pulled back from Audrey and wrapped the thing up in a scarf and laid it away in the coffee tin jammed with picked grass—its very own hospital bed—would it have survived freezing at least? Or was this better, the quick flash of cold that spread out after nightfall, a kind of mercy that came on naturally and eased the little thing's pain? She ran to the study, streaking out tears with her palm. She upset a bottle of ink in her search for Eniily Dickinson, set it right Seaward-Hiatt 54 and threw down some newspaper to blot it up in a hurry. She wanted to remember the rest of the poem, the part where Willa had raised her voice to a quavering altissimo. She tracked down the page with its ear turned over like a dog's. She read. If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin Unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain. "What's all this fuss, then?" Audrey said from the doorway, flipping the electric switch and yawning into the sudden bath of light. She noticed the book of poems, the quick sniffle and the little hand that brushed away a dribble of snot from an upper lip. Audrey's expression betrayed a hint of feeling, of wanting to ask what the problem was. But as a newcomer to the motherhood role, all she could manage was a directive. "Bedtime, is bedtime, little lady." When Riane started toward the staircase, Audrey lifted the book out of the pooled ink, wiped its cover as best she could with blotter paper, and followed Riane up the staircase. "Here." Audrey handed the book to Riane in a stiff push as the little thing made her way under the quilt. "Just don't keep the lamp burning too late, now." On the night of the moth, Riane waved a halfhearted goodbye as the little thing flew away in one piece. She noticed the moon—full tonight, a gleaming communion wafer with a sad woman's face, stuck to a spot in the eastern sky and looking down with care on the fields, which moved nearly imperceptibly, rolling in the air like a quiet sea. Riane brought her magnifier to her face Seaward-Hiatt 55 again, closing one eye and squinting the way Miss Selma had when she brought in her telescope to teach the sixth-grade class about optics and how a faraway grain silo could be seen in vivid relief, just like that. Maybe she could test the magnifier on something far away, to see if she could spy into Willa's cornfield and learn the mystery behind her disappearing act. But instead of seeing the crisp, cratered moon in detail, all she saw was a blur, a glow hovering like a ghost over the fields. So instead, with her naked eyes she looked upon the sad gray divots the moon had for eyes, the rocky bridge of the nose, and that vast mouth, aching, or maybe rapt, ready to receive a gift or maybe weep at something that was just too much to take in all at once. It was hard to tell, with the moon. A light commotion from one room over broke her fix—the slow drag of wood on wood as Willa slid the window open and made her way out. Riane heard the controlled knock of the trellis against clapboard and a final dismount into the padded grass. With the bright moon full and her moth descended away from her, Riane stepped through her own window and made her clumsy way, a few safe steps after the retreating silhouette of her now carefully groomed sister, in the navy drop-waist and a beaded headband. The eastern papers could say what they wanted about the company, the factories, radium—the stuff came with freedom. In the earlier years of Willa's adolescence, she had been made to stage elaborate presentations before Audrey and Rusty, persuading at length as to why she, of all people, deserved to be given a special set of stockings or a crystal necklace. Rusty, having been brought up from nothing, believed that a little want in life is not such a bad thing. Willa would have character if she worked for the things herself. Expecting her to drop the issue at the prospect of giving up her afternoons spend in the den with the strain of good, hard work, Rusty was taken aback when two days after her high Seaward-Hiatt 56 school graduation Willa swept into the kitchen on an air of ecstasy. "And the man said, they'll pay us handsomely." The following week, Willa learned to tip eerie dots of radium paint onto watch faces and airplane gauges. She came to respect the worth of money and integrity, the two things their father had worked so hard over the years to bring into his daughters' lives. Still, she found that when her purse was full, she could do little to resist the call of fine things as she tried to walk past them peering out at her from display windows on an excursion to the city with her new girlfriends. Every time, she came home with bags over-spilling with pretty things that she didn't even need. But with every Marshall Field's bag came her wide, eager smile, and a reach deeper down past the blouses and scarves to grasp something special—a book, or a box of candies—held out, after her father and Audrey were long asleep, for Riane. "How could I forget you, kiddo?" The grass hung onto the day's warmth even into night, and the little blades tickled Riane's ankles with each quiet step after Willa. When she reached the field's edge, she tiptoed over the tilled ridges of dirt that rooted the corn, stumbling on hard clods and wishing she had thought of shoes. Willa was widening her lead, but the shape of her body still cut out a dark space in the bath of light shining down from the moon. She paused once, spun to look over her shoulder, and Riane dropped to a crouch until Willa went back on her way. The sound could have been a crow lifting off the stalks, or just the breeze. Riane wanted to be as inconsequential as either, a non-entity on her sister's radar. Willa faced ahead of her again and continued, parting a few short stalks that opened to a clearing—one of those dips in the earth where the grain hadn't taken to the soil. Riane balanced Seaward-Hiatt 57 on a groove of dirt, peering through the leaves like an explorer. A second body came into view out in the clearing, this one with shiny hair and wearing a cotton sleeping gown and a gawky pair of men's work boots that were too big for her. It was a girl Riane didn't know. Not Sadie, or anyone that would walk home with her sister after classes had let out, each one splitting off to wave a smiling "so long" before heading into her respective front door. Leaning closer toward the scene, Riane saw that the girl had the same pep squad smile and wavy bob as Willa. Someone who worked at the dial painters, maybe? A chummy girl who would sit next to Willa at the long work tables, elbowing her and rocking back with a laugh while parting her mauve lips to point the tip her brush for the extra-fine, glowing details. Someone who had somehow managed to be cut out of Willa the Chatterbox's mealtime Louisa May Alcott dramas about beat-up hands and spare sacks of oatmeal. Riane tried to hear, drawing shallow breaths as a tear of sweat trailed down the center of her back. The girls in the clearing were still, but their low words muddied with the sound of the breeze raking through the field. Willa laughed at something the girl said and stepped closer, reaching out to trace a line down the girl's forearm. The girl touched Willa's jaw, and the little dance went on, step by step, as if it had been written down on a paper napkin and rehearsed. Thinking back later, Riane couldn't remember who had leaned in first, whose mouth seamed more eager to meet the other's. All she remembered was the physical jolt that shot through her, the posture of Willa drawing the girl in closer, with her hand pressed to this stranger's nape the way Rusty did with Audrey when he thought no one was watching. The dizzy current spun Riane's brain all to pieces and caused her to wobble on her little dirt mound and snap off a half dozen stalks on her way to the ground. She came down with an Seaward-Hiatt 58 indelicate "oof!" her feet sent skyward and tangled with the cornhusks. Willa's bellow filled the hungry air. "Who's there? Come out, you! All I got's a paring knife, but I damn sure know how to use—" "It's me!" Riane moaned. "Only me!" She regained a sure footing and stumbled into the clearing. Willa's ferocity dropped when she saw her barefoot sister, and the nightdress ripped at the hem from the mighty spill, the ruffle trim hanging low by Riane's left foot, dangling, like a mouth caught in a gesture of surprise. "Gee whiz!" Willa stretched out the syllables and rolled her eyes far back into her head. "Just my kid sister. Who's supposed to be in bed." The first part was quiet, meant for the shiny- haired girl who had shot backward with a hand to her cheek, as though retreating from a hot wave that had burst from an opened oven. The second part was unmistakably hurled at the spot where Riane had taken her fall. Riane always grew hot in the face when someone referred to her as "kid," especially Willa. She loathed the mention of bedtime, a kind of daily moratorium on getting out of the house and having any fun. "When you turn sixteen . . ." Riane conjured in memory Audrey's verdict, delivered time and again while shaking her head side to side the way Mrs. Cleckler did whenever she testified on the street corner after Mass let out, feeling the Baptist Word bob around like a song. Bedtime, along with a lot of other things, was written in stone, and no matter how much Riane hated being considered big and brave only in relation to bed-wetter Rudy, there would always be a long stretch of shaky adolescence between her own knobby knees and twin braids, and her sister's elegant freedom that spread out and filled in quiet air like an aria. Seaward-Hiatt 59 Willa could not stay mad though. She never could. She stepped closer to her sister and began to brush away dirt, which only ground deeper into the cotton fibers of the nightgown. "Put it in my hamper, so Audrey won't see." She spun her little sister around and started working on the back. She knew the routine. Even though Willa lived under the roof—same as Riane, Dad, and the dog—the matriarch had made it a byword that she was no longer a damn maid, and that Willa, now a bona-fide wage earner and a big girl, could scrub out her own intimates. Audrey. A cool panic shuddered through Riane as Willa turned her around to face the broken stalks that marked her entrance. She pictured their step-mother sliding galoshes over her flannel slippers, lighting a hand lantern, and tripping after them over the dirt clods and through the tall stalks. She pictured their aunt in just this spot, just a minute earlier, watching, dumb with disappointment and hair weighed to the sides by curlers, as her youngest girl ruined her handmade nightgown and her oldest girl got all caught up in what looked like a bridal kiss, only without a groom. Riane spun to check behind her, expecting to find her step-mother looming there, but instead she saw a dark crowd of cornstalks that looked still but rustled violently against the wind. "Let's get you back." Willa half-turned to face the shiny-haired girl, whose mouth pursed in the scrunched-up way of someone who's been walked in on while using the toilet. "Sorry," Willa said to the girl, pinching her chin before stepping away. The girl offered up a shaky wave and stepped quickly, wordlessly through the opposite edge of the clearing. Willa pointed the way they had come, and Riane turned and marched. Seaward-Hiatt 60 She walked on a few long steps ahead of Willa, and her nerves pulsed worse than the time she left the bath water running and drenched the new Sears Roebuck catalog before Audrey got to mark out the seeds she wanted planted. The questions swam through her, dipping away into the darkness before resurfacing with new ones. She focused on her small feet that struggled for a good footing through the soil. What, exactly, had she seen? Willa and the mystery girl had made it pretty clear that Riane had stumbled in on them without welcome. They were practicing, maybe, like for when Willa got up the nerve to admit she was head over heels for Bobby. The shiny-haired girl was just a prop, a dry run to get her all settled to deal with a boy, then, on the day they finally dropped their roles as chums and slid into their purpose as fully fledged grown-ups, eager to stand up in the church together, to rent a house of their own over on Third, to send away for catalogs and chase after twin baby boys who, for the life of them, could not manage to keep their tiny hands away from the cat's tail and the flocks of weevils that congregated out on the porch. "Who's that?" Riane decided to be direct. She let slip the question like a casual pleasantry a little way toward the homeward edge of the field, as though she had been asking about a book Willa had been reading. A pause, sticky, like new tar, smeared between them and sealed up the rivulets that led Riane toward the other questions that had tunneled away at the thick night air between where she walked and her big sister followed. "She's nobody. A friend." "One of the dial painters?" Seaward-Hiatt 61 "Yes." Not yeah or m-hmm, in her usual way. No life story, no long description about what the girl's father did, or the stylish dress she had in her closet, that Willa positively envied like the stars. The silence was too big and didn't fit. "She got a name?" The pause gobbled up the wind and the cicadas, and with its weight Willa built a five- foot-tall wall that shut out her sister. "A friend, is all." Her long, slow sigh hung a sign in the air between them that read Keep Out, in rolling script. The warning was polite but official, unchangeable. The questions swam in Riane's stomach, a greedy whorl of tadpoles eager to wriggle their way up her throat and fall, as fully formed bullfrogs, ugly, right on the ground between them. Getting on in years was a shadowy thing. There were the boy-girl dances in the township high school gymnasium, the buntings left over from election year recycled to dress up the shining, new basketball court. There were rose-colored lipsticks hidden at the bottoms of stocking drawers, and genuine leather shoes made in Chicago. That nebulous Kotex display at Whitmore's, standing by the register like a modest shrine to the slippery essence that comes with femininity, the new person you would go off and become one day, the secret ladies' club. Was the shiny-haired girl a part of it all, a living artifact of growing up? Or something else? The skeletal cornstalk shadows spread out under the moonlight. A touch of the cheek. The hiss hiss hiss of leaves. Oversized boots, just thrown on. The pinched chin. Riane kicked aside an ear of corn on the ground, one that had been nibbled at halfway by some unseen force before being abandoned. She breathed. Seaward-Hiatt 62 She was ready to demand that her big sister dish it up, the way she had about the secret make-up, the shoes—all the other teenage rites—but Willa snipped off the conversation just like that, like paring off a young bud with a set of freshly sharpened kitchen shears. "Just, don't say anything, will you? To anyone?" The four-year chasm that separated them, the brand-new wall that went up to her eyeballs and cut off too much of her view, all of it crowded in Riane's throat and threatened to spill out all at once. Willa was never short, not with her anyway, and never in earnest. The hot tears threatened to seep out, but Riane braced them back in a hurry and stabilized the salty vibrato that was working its way up her throat. "I looked at a moth tonight. Up close," Riane said. "Yeah?" "Book says it's from the Pieridae family." The Latin was strained, and her voice fluttered away toward the end, like the moth had. "Pieridae. Tell me about that." "They're all different colors, you see. This one was white—all white. Sort of glimmery in the light." "Sounds kind of pretty." "Yeah. You wouldn't know though, from just standing back." Riane smeared away an errant tear, streaking dirt across the bridge of her nose and pasting a stray hair down to her freckled cheek. Willa quickened her pace and overtook her sister, pulling on her nightgown sleeve and forcing her to let up for a minute. She punched her sister's arm, soft, like a daydreaming housewife kneading dough while humming a tune she'd heard floating out of the Seaward-Hiatt 63 calliope at the county fair. The breeze drifted away, and the clods ceased their dry crunching with Willa's spacious pause. "Tomorrow night," she said. "You and me, just the two of us. Let's see those moth wings."