Author’s Note: I turned eighty recently, in a world that seems increasingly crazy and disjointed. For me now, making some sense of that world is less a matter of big ideas than of small actions. Like carpenters who nail together a home for the senile, or the homeless man for whom bus routes map the city, I write poems that try to make connections among disparate scraps of experience.

Editor’s Note: “Community Gardens” is one of three poems first published in the Delmarva Review included in John Palen’s new chapbook, “Riding with The Diaspora”. With graceful language, these well-crafted poems offer powerful, relatable moments experienced from the dispersion of people into America’s heartlands. They offer readers the feelings left behind as we view our expanding diversity.

At the Community Garden

The crew at the senility wing next door
is busy making connections,
nailing studs to plates, ceiling joists
to rafters. Today’s news was Trump, Covid,
a homeless man in a wheelchair
riding buses back and forth across LA.
I squat in my rain-soaked garden,
pulling bindweed out of the onions.

I used to think gardening would help
save the world. Such a peaceable thing,
you and I and the next person
and the next, like kids donating dimes
or cleaning their plates. Now I think
it has only helped me reach old age.

The rough, wet tongues of crabgrass
lick my muddy hands. When I stand up
the air darkens, daylight drains.
I spook the sparrows. As old collections include
in sparrow years as I, they explode
out of the roofers’ scrap pile
with hard, quick wingbeats
and vanish into the leaves.

⧫

John Palen, a life-long Midwesterner, has worked as a store clerk, draftsman, newspaper reporter, editor, and journalism teacher. Over the last 50 years his poems have appeared in numerous literary publications and anthologies. He earned a PhD in American Studies from Michigan State University and was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities journalism fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. His chapbook “Riding with the Diaspora” won the recent Sheila-Na-Gig chapbook competition. His work was nominated three times for a Pushcart. He lives on the Illinois Grand Prairie.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction selected annually from thousands of submissions regionally and nationally. Designed to feature the most outstanding new work from aspiring writers, it is an independent, nonprofit literary publication. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

 

Author’s Note: My experience in the ballet world, and the close friendships and sisterhood cultivated among us dancers, provided inspiration for this story: “Coffee From Arabia” follows a young up-and-coming ballerina as she navigates growing up, identity, and desire both on and off the stage. In writing, it has been enchanting to peek behind the curtain at this life again!

Coffee from Arabia

I OFTEN MARVELED AT THE SLOPE OF ANYA’S BACK, milky skin against the bright fabric of her leotard. We’d started in light pink, then lilac, then powder blue. I’d stand behind her in adagio and concentrate on the tautness and slow uncoiling of her muscles as she moved, trying not to lose my own balance, my focus. It seemed strange and wonderful to me that I was intimately familiar with the curve of her spine, rather than my own.

We wear black, now, but Anya remains my anchor. As I study my body in the mirror, making sure my neck is long and my shoulders are square and my elbows are soft and the entirety of my core is pulled in and up, up, up, I often catch her gaze, both of us smiling. Or, I catch the steady concentration in her face, her determination to reach farther, lift higher, hit each intricate angle stronger, even when she’s not aware anyone is watching. Her grace, her beauty, her preciseness, everything I want, laid out in the mirror before me. A reflection, solid and fleeting. The casting for this year’s The Nutcracker will be posted tonight; my favorite season has finally begun. Unlike our other productions, we tour with this show. The show where everything began. The curtain rises. 

——

Anya and I met at eight years old. She was tiny, with big doe eyes that seemed to take up most of her face. We had both been cast in The Nutcracker, as the girls who attend Clara’s Christmas party in the opening act and Mother Ginger’s little clowns at the end of the second. Ours was the youngest age they started the casting, the year that students metamorphosed—like the winged, butterfly-like sylphs in La Sylphide—from casual dancers to serious, upcoming ballerinas. I like to think of my time with Anya as one of our many performances—after the overture, an opening act, intermission, a second act. A start, a middle, a continuous end. 

I had been fitted with what I considered at the time a glorious, old-fashioned party dress for the party scene. Violet and heavy velvet, with an obscene, swallowing amount of lace and ribbons and layers. I spun off while the costume mistress pinned my name to it, but when I next turned around, there was Anya in my dress. She was too small for any of the others, I remember the costume mistress explaining patiently. She gestured to the rack of cheerful colored garments that remained, the ghosts of Clara’s friends. I had ended up in a burnt, tired kind of gold, with a sometimes-there greenish sheen in certain light. 

This became a sort of truth of this new world I was being invited into, the world of ballet. An envy that was not quite green, a chameleon kind of color. Layered with other, nameable and unnamable, things. That day, what I felt was mostly a marbled purple. But Anya was made my partner for the Polichinelles dance during that first rehearsal—due to our similar height—and she squeezed my hand excitedly when the huge skirt we’d be jumping out of was described to us and when we met the man who’d sit on the ladder, dolled up and beautiful on opening night. She was as mystified and awestruck as I was by the magic we were allowed to see, to touch, on this side of the curtain, yet serious and solemn as she went over our little steps, over and over. Shy among the older dancers, as I was, but I knew that they saw she stood out, as I did. 

“We’re not even on stage very long, you know,” I’d say, as she practiced her curtsey to Drosselmeier yet again, intent on her reflection in the mirror. You cannot escape the floor-to-ceiling mirrors in a ballet studio; they always see what you are. “But we’re on stage, anyway,” she’d say, feet pointed perfectly, back straight, head bowing at just the right angle. And she was right. We sat next to each other nervously on the tour bus, heading for that first show right after Thanksgiving, hair done up in curlers the night before by our dutiful mothers, and by the end of the ride we’d become the closest of friends in that easy, unquestioning way young kids do. And after we’d done the warmup and marked the half-hearted run-through in wooly socks and sweaters, then disappeared backstage to help each other take out the curlers, pin in hairbows, carefully lay out our small costumes, and painstakingly apply stage makeup in the way our mothers had shown us—beauty queens at only eight years old—the transformation was complete. As I watched Anya twirl in delight while Clara received her nutcracker, smile reaching to her eyes, her transformation resonated the most. I hardly recognized her, and I recognized her more closely than I ever had. She deserved my perfect, violet dress. 

——

Our ballet studio was well-known, difficult to get into and prosper in, a hidden gem in the busy interior of sparse Maine. Our teacher, Ms. Iris, was as fiery and passionate as her graying red hair, a principal dancer for the American Ballet Theatre at only seventeen years old. You came to her to become a dancer, and she could make you one, if you had it, that abstract concept spoken about in hushed tones. Our parents knew this, of course, and they sent us there explicitly for this purpose. 

My mother, who played principal clarinet in the Bangor Symphony Orchestra, was ever the artist. She did not believe in wasting talent, and she did not believe in giving up if said talent dawdled in the shadows, taking its time to make an appearance. She also did not believe that any daughter of hers could not be graceful. Half her motivation for choosing ballet was my clumsiness as a toddler, my tendency to ram into things, too grabby, too eager, too impatient. She was as familiar with Tchaikovsky as I was, his Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake and, of course, The Nutcracker steadily running through my veins as I grew older. I grew up going to symphonies, imagining my mother making music, making magic, in the secret underbelly under the stage. She took me to concerts, to plays, to museums where she’d hurriedly shuffle me past the paintings of naked men and women. Never too young for art, but too young for art, I suppose. Or reality.

Nakedness, nudity, was a norm in my new world, though, the world I was beginning to keep as a secret to those outside, those who wouldn’t understand. The dressing room had the pace of an accelerated heartbeat, dances passing on the stage too fast to call for modesty. In our early Nutcracker years, speed was not a problem for us youngest dancers, appearing only in the beginning of the show and at very nearly the end. But the toy soldier who had successfully helped vanquish the Rat King had four minutes to become a Snowflake, and she did not care who watched her do it. None of us were really watching, after all; we were existing as ballerinas, together, and even at a young age this camaraderie swelled warmly inside me. I was slowly taught that the female body, our bodies, did not need to be hidden, did not need to be judged. It was a shock at first—I remember my first time in the dressing room, eyes widening at the suddenly-there, largest breasts I had ever seen as the Chocolate from Spain dancer laced up her heels before bouncing into her long, fitted, ravishing red dress. But, as with the initial iciness of the Maine sea during a summer day at the beach, your body adjusts, grows warm, becomes used to it. I was fascinated that each body was new, unique. There were no two that were the same, yet they all fit together. And I would fit, too. There was beauty here, different from the beauty of our movements on the stage, but present still. 

The dressing room—here were women in a way we were not allowed to see them, to know they existed. Reality.

——

We grew, as flowers are prone to do. Scenes passed quickly, lost in a haze of memory and a blending together of childhood years. A thousand moments that felt incredibly important or funny or joyful or sad jumbled together and forgotten. We went from curly ponytails to real ballerina buns, from soft ballet shoes to tentative pointe. To more pain—in our toes and backs and hips as we stretched, as we danced. I remember being fitted for my first pair of pointe shoes, the store owner bringing me pair after pair, until finally she slid Gaynor Mindens on my feet and asked me to relevé. I clutched at the barre and imagined that I looked beautiful. The store owner studied me for a long time. “Not many girls start with these or can ever wear them.” She clucked her tongue. “It’s a unique shoe. But if your claves bulge and they look right, feel right, then that’s your shoe. Nothing you can do about it. They’re yours, and that’s you.”

Anya and I remained partners, still almost identical in height. We were given party dresses that used to fall to the floor, too long; we graduated into battle, as toy soldiers; we peeked onstage as we always had at the dancers who were Chocolate, Tea, Coffee, Trepak, Flowers—roles we knew we’d soon be getting. We began to care more about what clothes we wore outside the studio, what we looked like, what we gossiped about. We slowly began to have a place in productions outside of The Nutcracker. Change whistled in my ears, but The Nutcracker remained my favorite. Anya remained my favorite, too.

There were other girls, of course—we’d started together and were learning to fill the mold of one of Iris’s ballerinas together. Neves, the last of us to grow out her bangs and whose mother never let her forget that making it meant everything was a competition. Elena, the one with the strikingly beautiful face who always seemed to be a half-count behind. Andi, who had the prettiest painted fingernails and whose dedication was already wavering due to her newfound love of running. Mallory,  possessor of the longest legs who tried to make us laugh at the worst moments. The two other Marys, one of them also blonde, distinguished by our last initials. Mary L., Mary C., Mary O. Millie, the most innocent, who I once handed a tampon to under the bathroom stall during the break between matinee and evening shows and explained how to insert it, while Anya murmured encouragement. A family, we liked to think, but the envy-thing pulsed louder than before, even as we tried to ignore it, for parts in each ballet of the season and for parts of each other. Mallory’s legs in the perfect arabesque; Neves’s early conquering of the double pirouette; Elena’s stability while the rest of us wobbled on pointe. Andi could eat anything she wanted and stay petite; Mary C. could bend far, far back; and Mary L. was strong in her shoulders and had a deep plié. My eyes often glanced at my feet, as if to make sure they were doing what they should, but I had natural turnout that the others had to work for. Anya; Anya stood alone. As our bodies changed more, hers changed correctly for our craft. My thighs allowed me to jump high in a grand jeté, but the power came from their thickness. Anya was slim and narrow and powerful still. All eyes were drawn to her on the stage. 

We became the older dancers in the dressing room almost without my realizing it. I remember glancing down between the others’ legs while they took off their tights to see if there was a darkness there that matched my own. We all fretted over if our boobs would grow too much; I was relatively flat, but some of the others weren’t so lucky. I’d find myself comparing leg and stomach circumference in my head, calculating if I was safe, knowing that the others must be doing the same. 

Around the end of middle school, Anya and I were put in the Tea from China dance as partners, though she was faster and more precise in the footwork than I was. A costume mistress tugged at the black capri pants and tutted. “You have birthing hips,” she fretted, pulling at the material. In all my times in the costume room, this is the moment that does not blend together with my other fittings into one long, erratically patterned bolt of fabric. I felt heat crawl up my face as I studied the swirling gold pattern of my green tunic, somehow duller than before. “Oh, don’t worry; they’ll come in handy someday,” she added hurriedly, as if for atonement. Examining and discussing every inch of our bodies was not new, nor were the stretch marks crisscrossing over my widening hips and backside—I hoped Anya hadn’t heard her, anyway.

The first year our ankles were strong enough to audition on pointe, Anya and I were cast as Snowflakes. I remember her squealing and clutching me in a hug, her usual poise of Anya the Prima Ballerina lost in a moment of excitement. We were in, we knew—real ballerinas danced on pointe, after all. A triumph.

——

Anya and I were Drosselmeier’s dolls, brought in to enchant Clara and her party guests. Matching purple tutus and pointe shoes, jeweled masks, giant Washington-esque wigs. I remember sitting next to Anya on our downtime in rehearsals, her hip against mine, heads bent as we painstakingly colored our shoes with purple Sharpie. Anya hummed along with the Arabian dance, sewing purple, shimmery ribbons to her shoes. I watched her nimble fingers. I knew the feeling of them against my skin from our regular Thursday massage classes and at intermissions of performances, carefully smoothing out the knots in my back, my calves, my feet, before I did the same for her. I looked at my own shoes, a perfect match. We mirrored each other in the choreography, her hand holding mine strongly, steadfastly, as we went through the mechanical doll-like movements. When I came out of a piqué turn blind, the winking stage lights edging into the corners of my eyes, reaching for her hand while I lifted my leg up in a battement, I never doubted that she would be right where I expected she’d be. Our bodies were in tune—I felt her next move even as I began my own, recognized her tells. I could read the tilt of her head, the twitch in her fingers counting the music, the deepened plié before she sprang upwards, the quick inhale to set up a spin.

I did not share this synchronicity with my male partners, as we became old enough to dance with another in our classes. I had always been dancing with a partner, I wanted to protest, remembering the fairy waltz from Sleeping Beauty and the quiet shadowing of wilis in Giselle. We did not need the pas de trois that Iris kept hinting she was preparing us for; we had been our own pas de deux. But Anya was beautiful and lithe next to her partners, fitting her body against theirs, trusting them fully to lift her up to their shoulders or plunge her inches from the floor in a fish dive. She was stiff yet supple while they turned her, held her, breathed as one with her. I wobbled and doubted and could not find a big enough trust that he—whichever one he happened to be—wouldn’t drop me or forget me or let me slide past his fingers. I watched Iris purse her lips and gesture for me to try again. I watched Anya lean into her partners, skin on skin, grip their hands tight; they grasped her legs and arms and waist and then the two of them would laugh off to the side during the water break, talking through each move. Iris smiled, nodded her approval. I watched Anya pull ahead, wishing she’d stay back here with me and our previous dances.

I had always sensed her body, her elegance, her passion, but her gift had lingered underneath, like in the depths of the ocean. Now it pulsed near the surface, teetering between the moment it had been and the moment it would break free from the water, tilting its face to the sun. 

——

But there was still the Waltz of the Snowflakes, which became my favorite dance. The whisper of our pointe shoes against the stage, the swirling of pure white, the increasing speed and fervor of Tchaikovsky’s music and desperation—I began to feel I lived for it. The urgency, the agitation that rose and rose amid the snow. Before we danced, Anya and I would warm our feet up together, massage soreness and tightness out of each other’s limbs. Anya would pin my crown into my hair before we went on, ruffle my dress; I buttoned her bodice up her back, rows of tiny hooks tracing up her spine, her skin warm under my hands. We sprayed our pointe shoe ribbons with hairspray to keep them in place and rubbed rosin onto the tips and heels of our shoes—for stability, Anya always said. We flitted on and off the stage. In the wings, her hands on the back of my neck as she stood behind me waiting for our next entrance, moving to smooth my hair and brush out the fake plasticky snowflakes. At another exit, my diving to the floor to tuck in her misplaced pointe shoe ribbon; she hadn’t noticed. A few seconds to massage out someone’s ankle, fix someone’s arm puffs, catch our breath. A few seconds of reality before we were boureeing back onto the stage, tiny precise movements of our feet, all smiles, all magic. We had a story to tell. There was nothing quite like the feeling of twirling and twirling as the final notes resounded, mingled with the voices of the choir, the fake snowflakes falling onto our hair and faces and shoulders as we smiled at the ever-present audience.

And later but not yet latest, as Anya was passed over for Clara—the role we all suspected she’d get—to be buoyed up early to the more advanced parts of Coffee from Arabia and a Waltz of the Flowers Flower, we still had Snow. I progressed as expected, to the less significant Cotton Candy and ever-present Tea from China. As I waited in the wings to scuttle onstage with my paper umbrella, I’d watch the grace that was Anya. Anya, in her Arabian golden bra and harem pants, coffee hair and skin glowing, effervescent under dimmed stage lights. She seemed almost too exquisite to exist as she moved through the stage from one elegant lift to another, the lines of her body and her movements immaculate. Her body hummed with an energy I could feel. Her partner held her easily, pressed his body against hers. More pain, like the persistent cramping of my feet on pointe, but a different kind of ache, a new slinking feeling, as I watched her. 

And still, the Snow. The curtain falling to signal intermission, performance after performance, snow pooled at our feet. We’d relax from pointe and exhale together, and Anya would chatter excitedly as she held my waist or my hand on our way to the dressing room to prepare for Act II. 

——

Intermission, a pause. A bridge to change, something different, something new. And it’s always a gamble whether the audience, the dancers, like the first Act or the second Act better. In The Nutcracker, the break comes right after the Snow. I have so long been a Snowflake, but I only learned a short time ago that snowflakes—a universal emblem of uniqueness—are born the same. Their differences are from their falls, their separate, distinct descents. 

——

There are certain rules in ballet, rules all ballerinas must follow. A body shape, for one. Certain arms go with certain positions of the feet; the order of the barre that takes up at least half an hour of every class is unwavering; each step and movement has a corresponding locked position of every part of the body. There is a constant striving for length, the illusion of height, a pulling up. There must be beauty, there must be grace. You must tell the right story. There must always be improvement. You cannot do a turn without spotting. You cannot forget that you are here for the audience. You cannot show them the pain of a split toenail, the looseness of a headpiece, the falling of a costume element or a perfectly tucked-in pointe shoe ribbon, the mistakes or missed steps in the choreography. You cannot show them what you are really feeling. 

“No, no!” Iris shouts as I am lax about one of the rules, as I forget something essential, as I grimace at the blistering of my toes. “You must work harder. Again!” She taps her foot and points at the corner of the room where I have done chaines, tight turns, down. I bite my lip, I set my body and start again, dizzy. Auditions for universities, companies, intensives will be starting soon. I’ve been told I need to be ready. Anya has been ready all this time.

——

We were sixteen when Anya was made the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella, now seventeen when she’s made Katrina in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in the fall. I was to be the double-casted witch in the company’s smaller production for children of Hansel and Gretel. It’s strange, looking at casting calls, going from chatting with one of the other girls in the dressing room about the mundanities of high school, to quick hate and cursing some aspect of her dancing when you see her name next to a role you feel you deserve or want better, then going back to complimenting her sneakers or picking up her fallen water bottle during class. The swish of green in your stomach, its inevitable settling of itself. The pushing down of your want. We help each other, we dance with each other—and yet. And yet, when Mary L. twisted her ankle during dress rehearsal and I became the sole witch in Hansel and Gretel, what was I supposed to think? I didn’t want her to be injured, but I also had to congratulate myself on my gain, didn’t I?

Anya and I had both profited from injury before—in the middle of The Nutcracker last season, between Anya’s performances in the golden bra costume, the Dew Drop Fairy had hurt her shoulder and Anya, the understudy, took the stage. I remember her weeping in the wings during intermission, telling me that she couldn’t do it, there would be too many people watching and she wasn’t ready. I held her face in my hands, stroked the purple flowers woven into her hair, and felt her tears on my fingers. Of course you’re ready, I said, and I was right. In all our time, I had never felt that nebulous jealousy towards Anya. Of her, I was proud. 

After, I hurriedly wiped my fingers off on my Flower skirt, feeling somehow ashamed of having a piece of her without her knowing.

——

And now, the same certainty in Anya fills me up as after another long class I scan this year’s casting sheet for The Nutcracker. She’s to be the Snow Queen and Dew Drop Fairy in addition to Coffee from Arabia again. There’s a pulse in my stomach as I think of watching her dance the Arabian dance from the wings—the seduction and the dimmed lights, only her and her partner, intimate in their dancing. I wish I was her partner there instead, our golden bodies weaving around each other. I quickly shake these thoughts away. My parts remain the same. Soldier, Snowflake, Tea, Flower.

This year is not the same, though. As I go through our usual rehearsals and we begin to hit the road on the bus to a new venue each weekend, I feel the magic of The Nutcracker ebbing away. Perhaps this is where the slinking thing came from, which has stayed with me since last season. It adds jolts of confusion and something lukewarm that lingers in me at odd moments with Anya, a kind of ache when she laughs or smiles at me as we partner up again for grand allegro or wipe sweat from ourselves during a difficult class. 

She twirls through the snow in the snow globe of my thoughts in her impressive white and sparkling tutu. She flickers in the shadows of a desert, eyes flashing under her Arabian headpiece, her stomach flat and skin bare under the golden bra. I want her to touch me, to share with me her balletic gift, herself. 

——

We sit in the back of the bus after opening night, away from the front seats we had clustered in in our younger days. All of us—Neves, Elena, the Marys, Mallory, Anya—squeeze into two of the bus seats, laughing and piling on top of each other. Anya sits on top of me, and I feel the bones of her hips poking into my stiff thighs. I don’t, I cannot, move. Her skin is warm, and it feels smooth and solid and different from all the times before.

“Truth or Dare?” One of the Marys is whispering gleefully, stage makeup still smeared across parts of her face where she hasn’t fully removed it. The others stop their gossiping about peeks and silly raids in the boys’ dressing room; I’d never found any of that amusing. It’s dark outside the bus, dark enough that we can barely see each other’s faces, only lit eerily for quick moments by strange, streaking colors as we pass by storefronts and lit up signs. 

“Truth,” says Anya, and the Mary giggles. 

“How far have you gone with your boyfriend?” she whispers, and these are the kinds of questions we ask now, the kinds of things we’re supposed to think about. When Anya first described the homecoming dance she’d gone to earlier this year, I had to force a thin smile. She’d interpreted my look in her own way, reassuring me that I’d know the right boy when he came along. I’m still waiting. 

Anya’s smile is shy and sneaky at once. I feel her breath as she murmurs, “Second base. And you know I hate sports.” The others cackle as if this is the funniest thing they’ve heard all day.

“Too bad Millie quit, we’d have to explain it to her,” Neves grins. We had not all made it this far—there is a straggling parade of girls somewhere with newly shorn hair and retired toe shoes who do not look back. Mallory says in a hushed tone, “He touched your boobs?” When Anya nods, she shrieks. 

It’s not that special, I want to say, to shout, as they bombard her with questions. We’d all brushed against each other’s chests at some point, while buttoning up costumes and lacing each other into tight bodices. We’d certainly seen each other. Not worth shrieking about, I think, as I know I’m lying, as I feel a squirming inside me. There’s the chameleon’s green in my eyes, I think, electric green, directed towards someone faceless, someone who isn’t one of us. I push it away. 

The game continues. It feels as though hours have passed when I know it’s not so. The other Mary whispers, “Truth or Dare?” 

“Dare,” I say, as I’ve had enough of chatter. 

“Kiss someone!” Mary squeals, and there’s a dissolving into high-pitched laughter again. I can feel a headache starting behind my eyes and I sigh, happy for the darkness that shadows my face. 

“Who?” I stutter. The boys are in the middle of the bus, and none of us seem willing to move from our entwined positions. “One of us!” Mallory half-yells, then covers her mouth with her hand while Elena throws a legwarmer at her. I realize that they all think this is a daring, impossible act. Then, Anya shifts in my lap.

“Oh, I’ll do it,” she says, and grabs for my face. I can barely make out the leftover lipstick smudging around her mouth before she’s kissing me. Her lips are soft; she pulls away. The others shriek in delight. Anya grins, pressing the back of her hand to her mouth. “See?” she says, “Not a big deal.” Passing lights slice her face into sections of red and blue and green. The ache is a purring in the small of my back. I look out the window, ignore the saltiness of desire on my tongue. Anya, the Prima Ballerina. 

The game continues. 

——

I don’t trust myself to look any of them in the eye anymore, but I especially cannot look at Anya. I turn away from her in the dressing room, feeling unworthy and ashamed. When we talk, I mutter, keeping my focus on the floor, on her feet. I shouldn’t be looking at her body; I see it in a way the others do not, curves and valleys to admire and explore. I can feel her looking for me, wanting to stand next to me at the barre, stretch and massage each other out, share snacks—is she wondering what has happened? I wonder, myself. But she is too caught up each show with her demanding parts, her costume changes, to linger on me and my awkwardness for long. I do not allow myself to linger on her. Save for in the wings, while I watch her swirling solos through the snow, my own shoes sticky with rosin. She is beautiful, with magnificent piqué turns and pas de chats and waltzes with her Prince. I had been her partner, once, but I don’t deserve it anymore. As we flow through performances and looming auditions, I feel I am not a part of this world anymore, that it isn’t what I thought it was. My muscles, so well-trained, feel heavy, sluggish, disobedient. My body is slow, ugly, wrong. I’m telling a story I no longer believe in.

I had before been able to differentiate my times on and off the stage, between the magical façade and the reality underneath, between the audience and the alone. I cannot seem to keep them straight anymore. I feel as if I am always being watched, judged, expected to smile and perform some charade. Leap higher, spin faster, dance stronger and with more sureness. Perhaps it is only Anya who is watching, or no one at all. Perhaps all are watching. I feel now I am always performing. 

There is the conductor’s head poking out of the orchestra pit as I wait for an entrance in Snow, and his white hair and whiskers could make him Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky, our Tchaikovsky, whose final symphony Pathétique perhaps still rang in his ears as he toasted his lover with a glass of tepid cholera. Were his tears from laughter or pain? Can I, will I, join him?

Iris tells me in class I am not concentrating, I am not reaching my potential. We are mastering fouettés on pointe. I fall from relevé again and again, kicking myself off balance, afraid that I’ll fall, so choosing to fall early and on my own terms. Anya’s are ideal form, of course, arms opening and closing as they should, pointed foot whipping in and out in succession. “Again,” Iris says, while my core crumples and I teeter off balance. Everyone knows you must be able to do thirty-two fouettés if you want even a chance to reach that dream of Odette/Odile in Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece, Swan Lake. I can picture Anya as the white and black swan, fluttering her arms, flying, as the other swans standing stiffly in the background. She pirouettes around the shimmering lake. I can see that I am not there. 

I despise my body; it won’t do what I want it to do, what it’s supposed to do. 

At the end of class, I lock myself in the bathroom to cry. I bump into Anya as I emerge, knowing my eyes are still red. 

“My contact lens flipped over,” I say in a shaky voice, “I had to fish it out.” 

“Ouch,” she says, studying me. She reaches out, slow, to tuck a stray piece of hair from my bun behind my ear. It’s the first time I’ve lied to her, out loud. Did she remember the taste of my mouth, our kiss? Had she kissed me back, really? Has she even thought about our kiss at all? Was it possible to long for impossible things?

When I remember my dreams, they’re of Anya, spinning, spinning, spinning.

——

I lace Anya into her tutu’s bodice as the number of remaining shows dwindles. I focus on the crisscrossing ribbons, make them smooth and even. I’m quiet. I do not easily chatter or laugh with her as we used to, though she gives me a small smile when our eyes meet in the vanity mirror. I chew on my lip, try to concentrate. The top of the bodice is wrinkled and crooked, and I slide my hand up her back to adjust it, pull the sides of the bodice in place. My hand slips under the bodice, from her back to her boob—it is warm and round and small and firm, and I’m not thinking save for how good and right it feels, and I’m not moving my hand. I can feel her heartbeat, I am so close to her heart; I feel my own heartbeat speed up. I ache, between my legs, in my chest. Anya draws in a breath sharply, and my eyes dart back to the mirror. Our eyes meet, again, and the look I see on her face—

I stumble to the wings, empty still before the ten-minute call to curtain, and cry. 

——

Anya doesn’t mention it. Neither do I. I owe her words I can’t taste, can’t find.

I could always read her, sense her next move. Here, I don’t know what she’s thinking, feeling. She acts as though nothing has changed, nothing has happened. Her usual poise. Uncertainty splinters through my core. Is this also a performance? Is she waiting until The Nutcracker is over to confront what happened, confront me, hate me, leave me? I feel like I’m spinning all the time, jerky, uncentered, flailing off balance.

I will not touch her. Only on stage, if we brush past each other during the dance—when we are playing parts, when we are not ourselves. Off stage, in the dressing room, at the studio, in the wings, I make myself a phantom, flit away from her when I can. I won’t wonder if she notices, how she reacts.

The first Snow after, I dashed and weaved through the other girls retreating offstage while the Snow Prince was still lowering Anya down from their final shoulder lift. Before I could disappear behind the side curtain, leave the melting winter wonderland behind, the glint of her tutu caught my eye. Inadvertent, distracted, I turned to see her start to massage out her own ankle, bent awkwardly at the waist, hand clenched into a fist. Muted light now and her face in heavy stage makeup looked garish, enchanting. She wobbled while she finished the massage and straightened up, graceful. I pushed my thoughts, my want, down, away. She unpinned her tiara herself, letting it dangle, sparkling, from her hand. She started to brush snow off her neck, out of her hair. I turned, left the stage behind.

He comes to one of our final shows. Anya’s boyfriend. He is wearing a crooked tie and holds her firmly around the waist, and her head is back, laughing. He admires her tutu, her crown, and she glows as though she is a real queen. He’s given her roses. She holds them against her chest delicately, as though they are the most precious things in the world. I pause in my usual rushing to find her and the others after a performance, to mingle with the audience together—a semblance of our lost normal—to congratulate her and the rest on another job well done before finding my chance to slip away. I pull back and linger against the hallway wall. I feel suddenly self-conscious in my Waltz of the Flowers costume, the petals that adorn my headpiece and skirt as fragile and fleeting as the petals of her roses. I had never thought to bring her roses. I turn around and head back to the dressing room early. I’m not sure if she’s seen me, if she was looking.

——

The final show of the season comes quickly. I pick up my plastic, useless sword and put on my red toy soldier sticker cheeks one last time, go into battle. Emerge unscathed, mostly. I concentrate on lacing up my pointe shoes, adjusting my crown, while the music of Anya’s flawless pas de deux wafts from the stage. We haven’t spoken much since the incident in the dressing room, despite Anya’s trying. I stand in the wings, studying the floor. Iris told us earlier this week to enjoy the few days of holidays we had, as we’d have to go back to working hard and preparing for the new year’s audition season. 

“Your futures are nearly here,” she told us, beaming, “You are so close to getting where you want to be! You cannot waste opportunity!” I no longer am sure of what I want; or if I can find it here. I think of myself at eight years old, in greenish-gold, wide-eyed in the wings watching the giant Christmas tree, the Sugar Plum Fairy I thought I’d someday be. I didn’t think I would, I could, fall out of love with ballet—or in love with something else. Yet, here I am, waiting for my entrance, my exit, the curtain. For all there was before, it unraveled very quickly, and I cannot grasp a strong enough thread to hold on to.

The Snow falls, and there is a numbness, a cold, as though the snow were real and not manufactured, plastic flakes that will only be swept away. Anya beams at the crowd, and they love her—who wouldn’t, the perfect Anya, at their fingertips but always out of reach. The brass section reaches its climax as she whirls around the stage, then leaps, airborne. The rest of the Snowflakes enter for the final time, arms up and towards the sky, the snow, feet light and quickly boureeing. I find myself standing alone backstage. Will she notice my absence, the hole in my usual spot? Not knowing is easier. I turn away.

I am not on stage to see the final curtain, the thud of sudden velvet. 

⧫

 

Abby Provenzano is an MFA candidate in creative writing-fiction at Emerson College. She is the fiction editor of Redivider, a writer/contributor at Interlocutor Magazine, an editorial intern at Art + Deco Agency, and an affiliated faculty member/instructor in the Writing Studies Program at Emerson College. Her work has been published in Stork Magazine, The Black Fork Review, Blind Corner Literary Magazine, The Foundationalist, The Michigan Daily, Blueprint Literary Magazine, and Runestone Journal, among others. 

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new prose and poetry selected annually from thousands of submissions. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, it is an independent, nonprofit literary publication. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

#  #  #

 

Author’s Note: My family lived on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, when I was born, and remained there for two years before beginning a series of moves that would take us to Maryland, California, Michigan, and New York. Between Michigan and New York before our mother left us with our father. My memories before that rupture became hard to hang on to, and impossible to corroborate.

Already Broken
(Washington, 1950)
Flash Nonfiction

DOWN ON THE SIDEWALK, SOMEBODY IS SCREAMING.

A warm breeze comes from tall, curved windows, and the round second-story room is filled with sunlight. My big sister was just here with me, but now she’s not. I want to look out the window, but now more grownups are shouting, and I pull back.

This is my first memory. I was two and Patti was four, and we lived with our parents in our grandmother’s brick row house in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C.—a corner house with a round tower and circular rooms on each of three floors.

Patti and I, up before the grownups, had been playing tag. I was the one chasing and Patti was the one running, and she was going too fast and ran into the window screen. The screen fell out, and so did she. She landed on the sidewalk two stories down, just missing a spiked iron fence. Our father ran downstairs to see what happened, then back upstairs to get his car keys, and by the time he got back to the street somebody else had taken Patti to the hospital. She broke an arm and a leg.

As we say in our family, that’s the story I got.

In fact, my own memory consists only of the image of that sunny room, my sister there and then not there, shouting, confusion, fear, and shame. My next recollection—another visual memory, with no story attached—must be from some weeks later; we’d moved from our grandmother’s house to an apartment in Annapolis, Maryland. I remember Patti dressed in white wrappings, having to be helped up and down, not being much fun. I learned the term “body cast” years later.

We told about Patti and the window whenever kids compared stories about scars and accidents and close calls. Our tale always had the parts about playing tag and a window screen, and our father running up and down stairs. Sometimes she missed the fence by feet, sometimes by inches, but this version was the one we could tell without our father getting angry or our mother starting to cry.

The summer Patti went out the window, our parents were five years into a marriage that would last another decade. After they split up and our mother left, Patti ran away from home. She was seventeen, I was fourteen, and we grew up with infrequent contact, little relationship, and few opportunities to review old stories.

I’m not sure, now, exactly when it was we had the telephone conversation, only that we were both adults by then and that she had something different to say about how she went out that window.

We hadn’t been playing tag, Patti said, but we had been naughty—dressing up, putting on brand-new dresses we’d been told not to touch because they were for someone’s wedding. Listening to my sister, I had an unbidden image of brushed nylon, smocking, pastels—maybe pink and mint green?—and could almost remember the irresistible pull of something beautiful and forbidden.

Our father was the one who found us, she said, and he became enraged. She mentioned a therapist and hospital records and the fact that it had been her right arm but her left leg that were broken, and how she had recovered or reconstructed her own memory of what happened that day. Did he push her? Throw her? She was sure of one thing.

“My arm was already broken when I went out the window.”

⧫

Irene Hoge Smith is a graduate of the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis writing program. She has been published in Prick of the Spindle, Amsterdam Quarterly, Vineleaves Literary Journal, Wisconsin Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Stonecoast Review. Smith is completing a memoir about her mother, the late Los Angeles poet francEyE, who, after fleeing a bad marriage and four daughters, lived with Charles Bukowski in the early 1960s. Website: Irenehogesmith.com.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new nonfiction, fiction, and poetry selected annually from thousands of submissions. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, it is an independent, nonprofit literary publication. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

 

 

Author’s Note: “First Light” is based on a true story from my own history and my mother’s history. There are moments in our lives when we have glimpses into our parents’ formative experiences and what they might have struggled through as children. The speaker in the poem spends her own night thinking about her mother “as that little girl,” and there is a sense she can relate to her mother’s childhood loss, her worry. The poem opens with dawn and closes with a new sense of dawn, one that strengthens the connection between mother and daughter and touches on a faith that things can “be made right again.”

First Light

My mother says her favorite time is dawn.
But she surprised me when she added
she doesn’t like sunset, and then she told me
there was this time when she was nine or ten,
and her parents promised to be back
before dark, but they weren’t,
and the late summer sun went down,
and my mother put her baby brothers
to bed with stories and spent the night
thinking they might never come back.

I spent my own night thinking of my mother
as that little girl, who had already
lost her sister to spina bifida,
who might have felt that loss
was always one night away.
But when her parents were back
at first light, though she never knew
the whole story, she knew that dawn
was when everything
could be made right again.

⧫

Diane Thiel is the author of eleven books of poetry and nonfiction, including Echolocations and Resistance Fantasies. Her new book of poetry, Questions from Outer Space, was published in the spring from Red Hen Press. Thiel’s work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies. Her honors include NEA, Fulbright, and PEN Awards. She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Brown University. Thiel is a Regents’ Professor at the University of New Mexico and Associate Chair of the Department of English. With her husband and four children, Thiel has traveled and lived in Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia, working on literary and environmental projects. Website: www.dianethiel.net.

Delmarva Review publishes the best of new poetry and prose selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, it is an independent, nonprofit literary publication. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: “An Experience of Grief” is an effort to put down into words the wordless horror that is grief. The concept and the structure of the poem are inspired by a grounding technique that is popular as a coping mechanism for various mental health issues. This technique aims to ground one in space and time by using the senses to observe and reconnect to the physical world. By interrogating the feeling of grief in this manner and attaching physical sensations to it, it is my hope that the inexpressible has become slightly more expressible.

An Experience of Grief

Mourning feels like living
in the land of the polar night,
cold and eternally dark,
frozen and quiet. 

It sounds like broken promises
clattering to the kitchen floor. 

It smells like your mother’s
Sunday baking—
a distant memory.

It looks like a bruise,
jaundiced yellow and ringed
by bloody purple. 

It tastes like bitter herbs,
cloying and sharp,
achy and strong. 

You can dip down into
its hopeless waters,
but you wonder as you do so:
Will I ever come back? 

⧫

Abigail Johnson is a recent graduate of Salisbury University. She is interested in many different forms of creative expression, including music, dance, theatre, and creative writing. In addition to poetry, her personal non-fiction has been published in The Delmarva Review. When not writing or onstage, she enjoys taking walks in nature and practicing yoga.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new poetry and prose selected annually from thousands of submissions. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, it is an independent, nonprofit literary publication. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

Author’s Note: I’ve long loved Walt Whitman’s work for many reasons, and this piece—“Walt Whitman at the Playground”—echoes one of them: his enthusiastic joy at everyday moments, a joy that often strikes me as augmented by an ever-present thought for mortality. I wrote the poem at the playground in question, watching my daughters at play and the people around me, grateful that we were all alive together at this one moment.

Walt Whitman at the Playground 

To see my be-legginged daughter leap o’er the mulch,
brown hair burnished bronze!
To hear her laugh! To be a laugh!

O! To watch the penduluming swingers,
faces now toward heaven, and now toward earth!
To what arc, O my soul, could I better aspire! 

O yogapanted mothers! O cargoshorted fathers!
O floralwrapped caregivers on benches—
What song could I sing thee, O love incarnate? 

Answer: a hymn of fellowship, a litany of praise,
a reminder that the leaves have already begun their descent,
and you will not be back. 

⧫

Adam Tamashasky teaches writing at American University, in Washington, D.C. In addition to the Delmarva Review, his work has appeared in The Cold Mountain Review, the Innisfree Poetry Journal, and recently in the international anthology Singing in the Dark: A Global Anthology of Poetry Under Lockdown, published by Penguin. His website is: adamtamashasky.com 

Delmarva Review publishes the best of new poetry and prose selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, it is an independent, nonprofit literary publication. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

Writer’s Note: The unseen forces that surround us and shape our lives are so fascinating—and I mean the literal ones, like magnetism or gravity, not just the metaphysical ones, though I also have doubts about how different those really are.  If the spiritual and metaphysical are anywhere, then they’re here, they’re now, they’re ordinary and constant.  They’re in humankind and they’re also in the magnetic doorstop.

Magnetic Doorstop

You can feel the magnet in the wall reach
to clutch the magnet in the door, pulling,
straining. When they come close
enough, they spring at one another,
plunge together, drawn by just one
of the endless unseen forces
of this house: lightning hovering
and coursing in the walls, awaiting the mage-
touch on the switch; the spiral radula
of each screw biting and biting,
holding one beam or one stud to the next,
defying the strangest magic of all, the draw
of the earth toward its core, down
and down. Everything pulling at everything
else. Almost as if the whole universe runs
on love. Only you don’t know what power
drags one thing toward another: whether
love, or the impulse to devour.

⧫

Catherine Carter is the author of three full-length collections of poetry. The most recent is Larvae of the Nearest Stars (LSU Press, 2019). In addition to the Delmarva Review, her poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry, Orion, Poetry, Ecotone, RHINO, and Ploughshares, among other publications. Raised on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, she now lives with her husband in Cullowhee, North Carolina, and is professor of English at Western Carolina University. Website: CatherinCarterPoetry.com. 

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, it is an independent, nonprofit literary publication. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

Editor’s Note: “Querencia,” from the Delmarva Review’s 14th annual edition, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in nonfiction.

Author’s Note:  When I first began writing memoir, I wrote a lot about growing up in Brooklyn. I began “Querencia” while wrestling with the question of whether my current living space still met my needs. Eventually I realized that what I really wanted to explore was the idea of “home.” What draws us to certain places? Where do we feel most like ourselves, or at home? A collage format provided the flexibility to mingle my Brooklyn memories with recollections of other places I’ve lived contrasted with the journey of the hermit crab in her perpetual search for the perfect home.

Querencia

Margaret: You know, Klinger, I envy you.
Klinger: Me? What for?
Margaret …the way your face lights up when you talk

about Toledo. 

                                             – MASH, Season 10, Episode 11

August 2019—I’m eating breakfast on my screened porch on one of those summer mornings that feels more like fall than summer. Sparrows flit from tree to rooftop and back. Across the way, Milo, my neighbor’s cat, patrols the rose bushes. My dog, Blue, snoozes on a lounge chair. On mornings like this, the house feels just right. On mornings like this, I don’t think about moving. On mornings like this, the house is not too big, too old, too far from the beach, too something. On mornings like this, I feel at home. 

Where is home? Is it where you live? Where you want to live? Is it a place you used to live where you’re yearning to return? Or is it not a place at all? Is it how you feel about yourself when you’re there? An I’ll-know-it-when-I-feel-it feeling? 

July 2019—I write a short story for an anthology with the theme “beach dreams.” My narrator, Nancy, like me, lives in a house that was her vacation/weekend retreat before it became her permanent home. As her grandchildren grow up, family members visit less often. She loves living in a beach community but says, “The house feels too big, as if I’m swimming around in one of my mother’s dresses.” Nancy drives around seeking her dream house in her dream neighborhood. She fantasizes about a small, slightly run-down bungalow on a side street in an older neighborhood. But there’s a bike on the porch and a truck in the driveway. Why is she falling in love with a house that’s not available? 

Maybe I thought if I could move my fictional character into her dream house, I’d be able to find mine. 

The hermit crab has many homes in its lifetime. The hermit is not a true crab—it has a smaller, softer underbelly. It must defend itself from predators and dehydration by making a “home” out of a stray snail shell it finds on the beach. As the hermit grows, it must continually seek out larger shells. 

Pros and cons—My house is both too big and too small—too many bedrooms and bathrooms but not enough living space. My dining room is only seven feet wide. Imagine five or six people around the table. Someone will have to get up to let someone else use the bathroom. 

The house’s location, three miles from the beach and walking distance to supermarkets, was once a plus. But thanks to a building and buying boom in the last few years, newer communities now surround our older one. The left turn onto the secondary road toward town or nearby stores is an iffy proposition. 

I cherish the memories made in this house: grandchildren racing up and down the stairs, gathering towels, sunscreen, beach toys; cartoon music blaring from the upstairs den (adults pleading, “turn it down”); the aroma of bacon and French toast summoning guests downstairs; the crackle of potato chip bags as teenagers enjoy a post-midnight snack; my daughter, Michele, and I preparing Thanksgiving dinner—the same recipes each year. 

Things change. My grandchildren became adults; their visits tapered off. That was expected. Michele died six years ago. That was not supposed to happen. 

August 2020. Notes from the pandemic—I’ve been “sheltering in place” since March 15. Six months and no end in sight. I have not seen my family since Christmas. My son is a voice on the phone. I have not been to the movies or eaten a meal in a restaurant or hugged another person. 

Every ten days or so, I shop at the supermarket. Twice a week, I visit friends in their backyards, or they visit me, and we “socially distance” on my porch. 

My home—a two-story four-bedroom townhouse—is now my cage. And a cage is a prison even if it has four bathrooms, a screened porch, and a well-stocked refrigerator. 

Warm evening in July. Vacationers stroll the boardwalk in the small beach town where I live. While these temporary residents consider T-shirts, hats, shell necklaces, I peer into the window of a typical souvenir shop at our town’s other transient tenants—the hermit crabs. Most appear to be dozing harmlessly. But each would kill for the right home. Shopkeepers are careful to scatter extra shells around the inside of the habitat to prevent fights that can lead to loss of limbs or even death. 

In the wild, hermit crabs rely on scarce empty shells that wash up on shore. Not any old shell. A Goldilocks shell: the perfect size and shape. Sometimes the hermit will carry around a spare “tryout” home until she’s sure nothing better is available. 

October 1951—I’m not in Brooklyn anymore. My friend Jerry and I stand outside the New Jersey garden apartment where he lives now. The suburbs. The place seems as foreign to me as some faraway country that exists only on a map in my fifth-grade classroom. We stand in a grassy area surrounded by brick buildings with balconies. 

Where is everything? Where is the corner where your mother sends you for bagels or a quart of milk? Where’s the candy store where you buy comic books, loose-leaf paper for school, and ice cream cones? Where’s the movie theater, the savings bank, the cafeteria? Where’s the West End, the subway line that took us everywhere else we needed to go—downtown shopping or in the opposite direction to Coney Island. Most importantly, where is the water—the park by Gravesend Bay, where on clear days you could see the Statue of Liberty in one direction and Coney Island’s Parachute Jump in the other? 

We walk to the playground, but in the two months since Jerry and his family moved from the apartment above us, we’ve become strangers. We don’t dare each other to swing from the top of the monkey bars or pretend we’re cowboys on the seesaw. “Let’s go in,” Jerry says. “My mom has cake.” 

March 2018—Bulldozers level most of the trees in the wooded area that borders our small community. A skimpy strip of leafless trees remains to separate our homes from a wasteland of tree trunks and stumps, soon to become streets, sidewalks and new homes. Neighbors, who put out food for the foxes and squirrels and other animals that sheltered in that small forest, worry about the destruction of their habitat. Is this another reason for me to move? I’d always dreamed of living near the beach. How can I fault others for wanting to live here, too? 

April 2018—Through the thin border of trees, I now enjoy the sunset each evening—an unexpected (and literal) bright side to the destruction of our forest. Random pink streaks in the sky deepen gradually to a rich, rosy glow. Soon, the lower portion of the sky gleams gold and russet and orange. The sparse trees seem etched against the sky, each branch sharp and distinct, as in an Ansel Adams photograph. 

It seems to me that until now, I went where the waves took me, never really choosing a place as much as washing up there—in Long Branch, the New Jersey beach town where my son was born, then south to the DC suburbs as each career advance for my husband required a transfer. The suburbs and the rest of my life loomed, pre-packaged like a TV dinner or an egg salad sandwich from the Automat. 

April 2020—Everything is shut down except for grocery stores and other “essential” businesses. I can fill my car with gas but I have no place to go. Every day feels the same. Every day feels different in its sameness. The good news: neighbors have become more neighborly. One brings sugar cookies with a Happy to know you post-it attached. Another delivers three daffodils to my door. Each day my dog Blue and I circle the community. He pauses and howls outside the doors of his favorite neighbors—those who keep treats in their garage for him and the other neighborhood pets. At the sound of a garage door opening, Blue’s ears perk up and he pulls at his leash. “It’s OK,” Jim calls with a wave—my signal to let Blue run off to claim his reward. 

June 1968—To live in a house—a real house—once seemed like an incredible luxury to me. When I was younger, I’d imagined that the large Victorian homes on our Brooklyn street were full of intriguing rooms and stairways, places to hide away to read a book or to daydream. 

We buy a house in the Maryland suburbs because that’s what families with young children did in those days. I’m 27 years old and this is my first single family home—a small brick rambler on a corner lot. In this house my children climb the willow tree in the side yard, play touch football in the street, bike around the neighborhood with their friends. In this house I learn the difference between flower and weed, annual and perennial, maple tree and oak. I see my first red-winged blackbird, collect rocks from the side of the road to build a rock garden, throw a surprise 40th birthday party for my husband. We swim in the community pool but feel guilty about its “whites only” policy. I finish graduate school, quit teaching, take a job in the city. My husband quits his job to attend graduate school. 

Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio or Rome — there’s no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment. Theologians, sky pilots, astronauts have even felt the appeal of home calling to them from up above, in the cold black outback of interstellar space.

– Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, 

Edward Abbey 

Whenever I travel, I imagine myself living in that place—a condo in Kauai, a tiny apartment in Los Angeles walking distance to Canter’s Delicatessen, a flat over a trattoria in Positano—a list that reveals my priorities as clearly as if I’d taken a magazine quiz called “Find Your Perfect Home”—close to an ocean; interesting places to eat. By those standards I’m doing OK. 

The Canadian village of Three Pines exists only in the novels of Louise Penny. Almost everyone who reads this author’s mystery series about Chief Inspector Armand Gamache wants to live here. As befitting novels where murders and other crimes occur, Three Pines is a mysterious place. The village cannot be found on any map. Cell phone service and Wi-Fi are unpredictable. People arrive by accident, lost on their way to somewhere else. The place reminds them of something they once had but lost or never had but craved. They become permanent residents. 

In many respects, it’s a normal enough town. It has a bakery, a bookstore, a bistro, a B&B. Children play on the village green. There’s an annual art show. 

I read these books, not to find out who committed the crime at the heart of the story, but to observe and to feel part of this community. To experience a potluck dinner at the Gamache’s attended by Myrna, a social worker turned bookstore owner, Clara, an artist who paints remarkable portraits, Ruth, an elderly poet who may be mad, is usually drunk and who will not be separated from her pet duck. I sense their ease with each other as they meet at the bistro, drop into and out of each other’s homes for drinks, dinner. Someone always has a pot of soup on the stove. Someone else pops down to the bakery for a baguette. A green salad appears. 

I can see myself living here, part of this different kind of family. 

A house is a Goldilocks house until it isn’t. Until you have more kids or an in-law moves in. Until one or more of your children grows up and leaves home or reverses the journey and returns. Until you look at the dining room chandelier and realize you never liked it. Actually, you hate it. Until your husband starts staying out late, returning home with flimsy excuses. Until the trees in the wooded backyard that once delighted you appear to be moving closer to the house. Until it becomes a place to leave. 

What was it about that place—Bensonhurst, Brooklyn? Why do I keep going back there in my dreams as if I’ve lost something I need to recover to get on with my life? It could not have been the apartment where the four of us slept in the one bedroom. It was not the view of other windows overlooking an alley. It was not our fractured family life—my mother sending me out to play so she could take a nap to get through the day. 

Still, it was a place where a five or six-year-old could ask a stranger to see her safely across the street. Where you could leave a sleeping infant outside the grocery store and return to find a grandmotherly woman rocking the carriage or adjusting a blanket. And it seemed to me that the thirty-two families in our apartment house formed a kind of village. People could, and did, go visiting in pajamas or housecoats—to borrow an egg or have a cup of coffee. Moms watched each other’s kids. I was often sent to Mrs. G., the Super’s wife, who let me play with Susie, her cocker spaniel. Noticing my grimy knees one day, Mrs. G. pulled out a jar of cold cream and rubbed away several layers of dirt. 

Have I romanticized these memories? Are they a photo album version of reality where everyone is always smiling and wearing their best clothes? But who doesn’t love to idealize home? Isn’t there truth at the heart of most popular clichés—no place like home; home is where the heart is; home sweet home? And what about Home is the place that when you have to go there, they have to take you in? Don’t we all long to believe that the place Robert Frost describes exists? 

Maybe there’s something about a previous home that imprints itself on you like a first kiss. Perhaps we judge each stopover by the number of ways it reminds us of “home.” 

May 1979—Our second house, larger than the first, sits on a hill on a wooded lot in Northern Virginia. This is the house everyone will leave. 

Except me. 

We move in on Mother’s Day when the trees outside our bedroom window are that shade of new green you see only in spring. In this house the trees alert us to the changing seasons. In this house our daughter graduates from high school and starts college. Our son and his friends form a rock band that practices in our basement. My husband receives his PhD. I work by day and start law school at night. I throw my husband a surprise party for his 50th birthday. He throws a party to celebrate my graduation from law school. My daughter marries her high school sweetheart. My son decides to try life in California. 

In this house in the summer of 1989 my husband and I separate, and I am living alone for the first time in my life. 

How long does that Goldilocks feeling last? For the young hermit crab the new shell fits until she grows a bit, and the search for a new home begins. You could say the crab’s life is an unending search for the right home. 

January 2002—I am sixty years old and finally choosing a place to live by myself. I look for this place the way I might have once sought a mate. I want to fall in love. 

I find a condo in an Olney, Maryland community overenthusiastically named “Waterview.” The apartment backs up to a small lake (okay, a pond) on which geese swim and from which a bull frog sings (okay, croaks) all night. My grandchildren can ride their bikes the two miles to my home from theirs. 

The place is half the size of the multi-level home I’m leaving. Downsizing consumes two months of planning, trips to drop off stuff at thrift shops and trips to the dump for the rest. But I love looking through the patio door to the shimmering water beyond. The landscape feels lighter and so do I. 

Olney functions like a small town. Minivans fill parking lots outside strip malls. Visiting the supermarket, bank, or library, I almost always meet someone who knows me only as “Rachel’s Grandma.” This both pleases and disturbs me. In this town, where the primary business is running a nuclear family, I feel invisible. 

Leaving Olney means leaving two grandchildren, a daughter I’d grown closer to as we both grew up. A new life in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware is calling to me—new friends, a community of writers, seeing the ocean every day. The debate I have with myself about where to live becomes an essay entitled No Place like Here. It wins second prize in a writing contest. Still, I don’t decide. Until I do. 

This, then, is home. What is home? Is it a sort of lap of location, that exists only if certain conditions are in place? Is it the intersection of rigidity and comfort—a junction of familiarity that you curl into? Is it a feeling? I don’t know, but I’m being hugged hard against it, and I can’t tell when I’ll be let go.

– Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood 

July 2020—Four mornings a week I visit our community pool. Seven or eight regulars lounge on floats in the water or on chairs spaced six feet apart. Each person hails me by name with a “hello,” “how are you?” or “where were you yesterday?” Once I might have found these multiple greetings intrusive, when what I really wanted was to swim, exercise a bit and then recline in a chair and read. Now, I’m happy to tread water in the deep end while making small talk with others about what we’ve ordered from Amazon, best places to get takeout and what to watch on Netflix. 

May 2009—This time, I fall in love with the place, not the house. A place where I can be Sarah, not Grandma or Mom. A place where I can see the ocean every day, mark its moods, allow it to temper my own. A place where I can be myself. 

After three years of using the Rehoboth Beach house for weekends, holidays and summer breaks with family and friends, I make it my permanent home. It might sound absurd but some things about Rehoboth Beach remind me of Brooklyn. Maybe it’s the proximity to the ocean, or the large homes with generous porches on some of the town’s shady streets. Maybe “free writing” with a small group of writers once or twice a week— sharing stories about growing up, our families and yes, our quirks and neuroses—fosters the formation of easy friendships. 

It takes a while for me to feel “at home” here. A few months until I can greet most neighbors by name, a year or so to experience the happy surprise of almost always meeting someone I know in the supermarket, the library, or on the boardwalk. It takes having people in my home for book club and inviting friends to visit for the film and jazz festivals. It takes reading my work in public, thinking, Is this me? Spilling family secrets? Mocking my foibles? It takes other writers telling me my work is funny, that it reminds them of something in their childhood, that my mother sounds like their mother. 

People think of home as a single fixed place, but when I went traveling, I found the community of extended family I’d never had. Later, I learned there’s a Spanish word for this: “querencia.” It refers to that place in the ring where a bull feels strongest, safest, where it returns again and again to renew its strength. It’s the place we’re most comfortable, where we know who we are—where we feel our most authentic selves.”

– Everything Here is Beautiful, Mira T. Lee 

Summer 2020—Inertia sets in. I weigh the hassle of downsizing and moving vs. the possible gains. A smaller space, an easier drive. But what about the stuff? In the garage—eight beach chairs, two boogie boards, a scooter. Upstairs in one of the bedrooms—a deflated football and basketball in a box with a couple of Frisbees. Games in the closet—Scrabble, Boggle, Who- nu? Apples to Apples. In another closet—several cartons filled with family photo albums and piles of loose pictures. In the upstairs master bedroom, I find a memo pad in Michele’s desk: a to-do list, three pages of Hangman games, and a note in childish printing: Dear Mom, I’m reelly (sic) sorry about what happened. Love you. Good night. 

October 2020—One happy result of the pandemic, is that I’ve made peace, at least temporarily, with my house. My dining room is the perfect size for dinner for one. The table doubles as my writing desk. Even the rarely used upper level has become a retreat of sorts. Upstairs I revisit the family photos that line the hallway; I stand by a window to watch for the mailman or enjoy a bird’s-eye view of the neighborhood. The den has a comfortable couch for reading and napping in the afternoon. Blue dozes on the floor next to me. I was happy for the extra space when, a few months ago, my granddaughter Rachel phoned to ask if she and a friend could stay with me. It was late, they’d been in Ocean City and were too tired to drive home. 

The summer crowds are gone. I can walk Blue on the boardwalk. His unusual appearance—black coat, intelligent blue eyes—draws comments from passersby. Someone always stops to ask what kind of dog he is or if they can pet him. I explain he’s a mutt from the shelter who loves attention. Shelter, I think, another word for home. 

After a while we head down to the beach and walk along the shoreline for a mile or so. I keep my eyes on the ocean, watching it form and reform itself continuously into something new. 

♦

Sarah Barnett has had careers as a teacher, librarian, and lawyer before retiring to Delaware. She is Vice President of the Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild and enjoys leading Free Writes, teaching writing classes, and composing essays and short fiction while walking her dog on the beach. Her work has appeared in Hippocampus, Brevity Blog, Delmarva Review, Delaware Beach Life, and other publications. 

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

 

Author’s Note: Sometimes poets have epiphanies—sometimes we simply turn on the radio. I was listening to NPR when I heard the delightful tidbit that inspired this poem. I took words cut from magazines and arranged them in a playful way like you would arrange a set of poetry magnets. That’s how I ended up with the first line, this idea of subscribing to shooting stars. From there, the poem took off. No pun intended.

Away We Go

“On Wednesday, for the second time in six weeks, an unidentified
person was seen flying using a jetpack near Los Angeles International Airport.”
NPR, October 15, 2020

It’s time to subscribe
to more shooting stars.
To love, a passage of peace.
Press pause, take this outside
to pucker and crush as
we untangle our identities
and bird around the world,
glued-hip experts above
the peaceful rain forest.
Twinkling little flowers,
overflowing, magnifying,
warm and earthy,
we glow back, they glow
back at me. I witness new
know-how, frozen corn
confidence, glittering
infamy, Milky Way
footprints, celestial
breadcrumbs, the rush
of breath and wind,
blinking light beauty,
the ants, the fireflies,
the grace of instant small,
the granular goodness.
I fly and fly.

⧫

Jessica Gregg is a Maryland writer and former journalist whose poetry has appeared in Broadkill Review, Canary, Yellow Arrow Journal, Global Poemic, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, and Art in the Time of Covid-19 from the American Writers Review. Her chapbook, News from This Lonesome City, was published in 2019.
Delmarva Review publishes evocative new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: “Something, Somehow, Somewhere” tells the story of a young Brooklyn farmer who travels across the country to meet her estranged father and his seemingly perfect family while a hurricane threatens to destroy everything she was hoping to return to. It is set in the same near-future world as my forthcoming novel Fragile, but earlier in time, focusing on a transformative moment in the life of one of the novel’s protagonists. 

Something, Somehow, Somewhere

IT WAS MY LAST FLIGHT OUT OF JFK, but I couldn’t have known that at the time. 

It was also the last time I saw my father, and I didn’t know that, either. But my father had always been an enigma to me. Rich, famous, and entirely out of reach, he’d been an absence in my life who only showed up in my mother’s occasional rants. So, I could only guess when he invited me to meet his family on the other side of the country, it was somehow related to Mom’s recent death in the riots, which I felt responsible for, though he never said anything to that effect. Only that he was sorry for my loss or something equally generic. 

Whatever the reason, he had invited me to visit his big house in Palo Alto, filled with the half-brother and sisters whose faces I had only ever seen in pictures and on screens. And, unlike Mom, I’d given in. Perhaps I was curious to finally meet my father as an adult and understand why my mother had ruined her whole life for him. Perhaps I was still too numb to think things through. Or perhaps I just wanted to find out why he wanted to see me, now that Mom was gone. Whatever the reason, I went. 

My father belonged to a different world. He’d booked a transcontinental flight to San Francisco for me like it was nothing. After boarding the plane, I found myself staring at my seat number and the corresponding seat. I asked the flight attendant to scan my fingerprints again and confirm that, yes, this was indeed my seat reservation, as were the 3-D entertainment system, earphones, face mask, and personal sanitation kit that came with it. For the first ever flight of my life, I sat in Business. Wearing my usual jeans and bright red tank top, I looked like I was making a deliberate statement against the uniform gray, black, and blue of the suits surrounding me. But for once, I wasn’t interested in political gestures. 

Feeling incongruous and overwhelmed, I studied the drinks on the menu. Knowing what was ahead of me, I contented myself with the complimentary champagne offered by the impeccable flight attendant who seemed to know everything, including the fact that I’d just turned twenty-one. I sipped carefully, my gaze on the world beyond the cabin window, where the waterline lapped right up against the airport perimeter fence. Behind it, the waterlogged houses of Brooklyn’s permanent evacuation zone gave me a perverse kind of comfort. 

Once we were airborne, the plane tipped to the right and turned westward to San Francisco, granting me a panoramic view of the place I was leaving. There was a beauty to it from up here, the blazing morning sun turning the flooded streets of Howard Beach into long channels of silver and gold. As we approached the East River, I craned my neck to see whether I could make out our farm on one of the roofs below. But the bird’s-eye view was too unfamiliar and, truth be told, a few dozen containers of struggling veggies probably weren’t enough to produce the bright splash of green I was hoping for. 

I will always be grateful for that moment, that memory. For how peaceful and quiet it all looked from above, just a few months after the riots, and just a few days before the storm. And I find it quite ironic that I owe that memory to my father. 

Until that trip, the only other noteworthy memory I had of my father—my only memory of him—was a scorching summer day many years earlier when he bought me a giant cone of ice cream. It wasn’t long after the Second Pandemic, so I must have been seven at the time. I knew that the tall, slim man with the megawatt smile on Mom’s old phone was my father. But he didn’t look, or speak, or feel like a father as he towered above me in his white doctor’s coat and shook my hand before splashing his own with a generous amount of Purell. He must have noticed my stare, his squinting eyes suggesting that behind his mask he was smiling. And then he took the bottle from his pocket again, offering. Mechanically, I reached out my hands. My mom, always the nurse, mumbled something about this being sensible, and then her hands got disinfected as well, even though she hadn’t even touched him. 

We took a walk in Central Park, and it seemed endless to me, umbrellas and trees protecting us from the sun but not from the heat. I felt it rise from below and was worried about the soles of my only pair of sneakers. My father asked me about school and such things in between offering money for me to Mom, sounding more annoyed every time she refused with a voice barely audible and eyes that seemed to be looking for something lost on the ground. Her whole demeanor was oddly diminished, like it belonged to a lesser woman and not the mother I feared and admired and loved for the limitless passion she brought to everything. Now she was quiet and evasive, so intent on keeping her distance from him that she stepped onto the brown grass while he walked right in the middle of the path, oblivious or indifferent to her inconvenience. Confused and overwhelmed by all this strangeness, I tried to answer my father’s questions and to coax Mom into being just a little less adamant in her quiet refusal. I wasn’t sure whether I perhaps did want to get some money from him to buy another pair of sneakers, although what I was really hoping for was some ice cream. 

He seemed to understand. Just before we were ready to leave, he stopped at one of the green ice cream carts. He asked me what flavor I wanted, and for some reason I said vanilla and chocolate and hazelnut and a bunch of other things, ignoring the alarm in my mother’s eyes as well as her warnings and protests. He looked rich, and I wasn’t getting ice cream often, and never this kind. So, I took my chance, determined to finish the whole giant thing even though I felt the sickness coming on after half of it. 

By the time my guts started cramping in earnest around the unfamiliar cold mass of the first-ever dairy in my life, I was already in the backseat of my father’s fancy car. My mom was livid, calling him careless for feeding cow’s milk to a vegan child. He said I was old enough to make my own choices and stepped on the accelerator. I had been in a car before, but never in one that darted forward and stopped dead, then suddenly lunged again at the random will of its driver, so I was terrified. The cars I knew were well-behaved self-driving things, their movements so smooth you barely noticed them until you looked outside. But not this creature. It was fierce and furious, acting in concert with my father’s movements and in response to my mom’s yelling. I could see the other, better-behaved cars stopping and swerving to avoid a collision. But it was when one of them honked, a distress signal I had never heard before, that I started, and my bowels could no longer hold the liquid that had formed in them. By the time we reached the hospital where my parents worked, the air was foul despite the open windows, and my embarrassment so complete that I was glad I’d never have to see that man again. 

And now, almost fifteen years later, he had paid for my ticket. Not long after takeoff, I was presented with a three-course meal preordered with my booking. And what a meal it was. I lifted the top of the first container and stared at the colorful array of veggies, dal, and rice, not a single substitute, the real deal. Amazed, I ate all of it while watching reports on the new storm that was barreling toward the East Coast. 

Tara had called in the morning to warn me once again that I might not be able to come back in time for the Grand Opening of our makeshift community farm, that my red eye back to New York might get canceled. 

“It’s only a long weekend,” I’d said to her on the phone, surprised that she seemed so worried about this. The opening wasn’t until Friday next week. 

There’d been a long silence on the other end of the line, prompting me to ask whether she was still there. “You will come back, right?” Tara had asked instead of answering. 

I’d laughed then and was smiling now. Tara didn’t worry easily, and it seemed so absurd to question my return. When I told my father about the storm, he just said he would buy me a return ticket on the transcontinental bullet train if everything else failed. Nursing our scrawny crops in the small, battered world of Brooklyn, I hadn’t even known there was such a train. 

I switched off the screen and looked out the window again. Gliding like this, lighter than air and high above the clouds, you could easily think there were no storms or heatwaves or blackouts or rationings at all, that life was bountiful, and things down below were going just splendidly. I wondered whether this was a permanent state for him, fancy drinks with lunch and daily desserts, glossy mags, and in-flight entertainment. It all seemed so unreal. 

Somehow, his family looked even less real to me when I finally met them. Nicole, the wife, was the one who opened the door, all white teeth, blue eyes, and blond tresses. She looked young, much younger than my mom had looked before she died, although I knew Nicole was almost ten years older. Everything about her seemed weirdly perfect, perfected in a way Mom never had been, and I wasn’t, either. 

“There you are,” she said with a happy smile, like it was the most natural thing for me to show up here. Before I could retreat, she hugged me, her skin pale and smooth against mine, the golden bangles jingling. She asked about my trip as she led me past their virus testing unit like I truly was family. But then again, she knew I had been tested before boarding the plane. “I hope you like window seats?” she asked, concerned, like that was important. And “Did you get the right meal?” As I dutifully answered her questions, it dawned on me that she, not my father, had arranged my travel. I wondered whether, behind the façade, she resented me as I followed her through the cool, light-suffused house to the outdoor terrace. 

My father was standing by the pool, looking almost exactly the way I remembered him from the park, and just as towering, though I was almost his height now. He wasn’t wearing a mask this time, and a blue shirt and shorts had replaced the white coat. There was no welcome hug from him, just his blinding smile, and he gestured toward the table that had been set up in the breeze of two outdoor aircon units. 

“You must be starving.” 

I wasn’t hungry after my extended meal on the plane, but Nicole went inside and returned with three people, well- nourished and gorgeous, who I knew were my half-siblings. Joe and Sarah I recognized immediately, but Meryl had been so young when I last saw a picture of her that I could only guess. Apparently, it was the same for Meryl, but for different reasons. 

“You’re so thin,” she almost screamed, looking at me in shock and admiration. 

I hid my hands behind my back, as if that made a difference, and didn’t know what to say. Everyone was looking at me, measuring the degree of our misery by the lack of pounds on my bones. 

“Let’s eat,” Nicole said simply, helping me out, and we all sat down for a feast that was even more opulent than what I’d had on the plane. The hour that followed felt like an amiable grand jury interrogation. If there was any resentment toward me, my half-siblings hid it as well as Nicole. Their wholesome faces lit up with kind curiosity as I politely replied to their constant flow of questions. They wanted to know what I did and couldn’t believe I was serious when I said I was an urban farmer. They wanted to see the farm and could barely suppress their laughter when I showed them pictures of the tattered old filing cabinets we used as planters. They were curious about our situation in Brooklyn, about the rationings, the protests, the curfews, the riots, and the supply shortages that had caused it all. They wanted to know whether it had been as bad as it was on the West Coast. 

Once again, I didn’t know what to say. All I knew was how many months we’d gone without proper food and medical care after the supply chains broke down. How many weeks we were cut off from Manhattan after the riots started and the National Guard sealed off bridges and tunnels. How many hours it had taken me to get my bleeding mother to a functioning hospital. 

Too many. 

But I didn’t want to talk about any of this. It seemed so out of place in this outrageous palace filled with food and flowers and ocean breeze, and no more than a whiff of the wildfires ablaze farther east and down south. So instead of answering whether it had been as bad, I asked: “Well, how bad is it here?” 

That did the trick. They leapt into a barrage of complaints about how it had been all downhill for the past ten years, something they seemed comfortable with. And I could finally be silent and wonder whether my father, a doctor, a medical surgeon, had any sense of what I had gone through. How he felt about the dark irony of Mom’s death, about the fact that she had worked day and night to take care of the wounded only to get hit by a stray bullet on the way home. About the fact that she had instructed her own daughter how to keep her alive until the ambulance arrived. And about the fact that I had failed, in part because the ambulance never came. But I didn’t know how he remembered her. Perhaps as the pretty young thing she’d been when he started his career in New York and not as the drained and overworked woman she’d become by the time she died. On the day he bought me that ice cream in Central Park, she’d never looked at him, not even when she started yelling at him in the car. As if looking into his eyes might infect her in some way that couldn’t be wiped clean with his Purell. 

Now that I was finally facing him again, I, too, was avoiding his gaze. I could feel him looking at me across the table, assessing me, the illegitimate daughter from a reckless extramarital affair with one of his nurses. Comparing me, perhaps, either to Mom or to his real family, the contrast so stark. Not once did he ask or say anything to me during that first meal. And not much changed after Nicole called in the maid to clear the table and led me to a guest room so I could unpack and relax. He left it to his wife to navigate our conversations, show me compassion as well as the house. And since I’d asked about the state of affairs on the West Coast, he deputed his children to give me a tour of the parts of the Great Bay that were still safe and above water. 

They drove me around, Joe behind the wheel of his Tesla, Sarah in the passenger seat and Meryl next to me in the back, chatting me up and still expressing her unending amazement about how skinny I was compared to my pictures. Deeply relieved that, unlike his father, Joe was perfectly happy to leave the driving to his car, I didn’t mind Meryl’s tactless chatter. She was two years older than I was, yet still a girl who didn’t know any better. We drove down Market Street, to our left the glittering facades of San Francisco’s Financial District, to our right roadblocks and military checkpoints that looked like the ones I had to pass whenever I wanted to cross over to Manhattan. They seemed open. 

“Can we go in?” I asked when we drove past another one. 

A long moment of silence told me that we really shouldn’t. But then Joe told the car to slow down and turn around. I reached for my ID card, but we didn’t even get stopped. A nod and a slight wave, and we had cleared the checkpoint. I wondered whether it was the license plate or the expensive car that made it so effortless, passing from one world to another, from the dazzling perfection of downtown San Francisco into one of the city’s many broken parts. I looked at Meryl, but she was busy searching her purse. In front of us, Joe and Sarah seemed taut and more erect in their seats. “At least it’s daylight,” Sarah said. 

It all looked familiar to me. The boarded windows, the layered flood marks, the hawker stalls, rooftop gardens, pop-up restaurants, and makeshift stores. Signs of precarious living, always on the move, always on the run, always waiting for the next flood or storm. Inescapable facts of life ever since an earthquake had breached the Mission Bay seawall. So yes, I thought, I could now answer my siblings’ earlier question. It was as bad here as it was in Brooklyn. I stared at the faces of the people outside when the car stopped at a red light. Eyes alert, jaws clenched, chins doggedly raised to meet the next challenge. Strugglers. Survivors. I was one of them, inside this luxury ride, looking out through tinted windows. 

“Do you ever come here?” I asked. 

“Sometimes,” Meryl said, the flickering in her eyes suggesting that the data glasses, which she had finally retrieved from her purse, were now projecting something more entertaining into her vision field. “When it’s open and safe, they’ve got some kick-ass ethnic food.” 

We left through the next checkpoint and drove on to their favorite spot, an elusive bar perched on top of a cliff with a stunning view of the sunset over the Pacific. It looked peaceful from here, vast and blue and beautiful, until you walked to the banister and looked down where the water was lapping around the foundations of abandoned houses, another familiar sight. We ordered drinks, and I thought this was exactly fitting, this was their life. Hovering high above the disaster, drinking margaritas. 

“Will you stay here?” Joe suddenly asked and caught me so unprepared that I very nearly spat my drink across the table. He looked worried, like my stay was a legitimate concern. 

“No,” I returned after I’d managed to swallow. “I have to go home.” 

The relief he felt must have been so profound he couldn’t keep it out of his face. That was the only time that any of them came near admitting that I was more than a casual visitor in need of entertainment. We never spoke about their father’s betrayal or about how and when they’d learned about my existence. The ease and self-control with which we all navigated what should have been an impossible situation still amazes me. 

My father seemed strangely content with it all, presiding over our meals, taking pictures of us to share with the world. Whenever I felt I could risk it, I studied him. I tried to see in him what his other children did, a real father. But I had no idea what that might look like. I tried to see him with my mother’s eyes when she first met him, on that fateful day when the rising star of the Cardiology Center laid his eyes on her, brilliant as surgical lights. He and Mom seemed so utterly incompatible to me. She devoted, lonely, and eternally miffed, always there for me when I needed her but only a sentence away from telling me exactly how I had failed her. He so dazzling, aloof, and self-possessed, stepping into every place like he owned it. She knew he was married, of course, she’d admitted to me one late Sunday evening when I was seventeen and pressing the issue. It was not what I’d wanted to hear. “He was a surgeon,” Mom had said, as if that explained everything. 

Now, watching his family and myself dancing pirouettes to my father’s tune, I remembered my mom’s weary footsteps on the grass that day in the park, her demonstrative distance, her quiet refusal. And his car’s reckless fury, the way it bullied its way to its destination. 

By Sunday morning, it still wasn’t clear why he had brought me over. He hadn’t taken any time off from the hospital for the duration of my visit, so I only saw him in the mornings and evenings, when we went out for extravagant dinners. The only time we spoke alone was Sunday morning, when we ran into each other in the kitchen, he returning from an early run, I on the hunt for another cup of their amazing coffee. 

“So, can I ask you—what is it really you do over there?” he asked as he walked past me and opened the fridge. “You and your farmer friends?” 

It startled me, his sudden interest. We were alone in the kitchen. He had flown me across the country so we could meet. That hadn’t made any difference over the last three days, but now here he was, looking at me, his steel gray eyes demanding an answer. 

“We’re building a community farm,” I said, as I had said before to his children. I wanted to say more, but I felt frozen, transfixed by his gaze. 

“A community farm,” he repeated slowly, closing the fridge. 

“Yes. We’re putting community needs at the forefront of reverse gentrification and the fight against climate change.” That was taken almost verbatim from the website Tara and I had created for the farm. “We’re growing local, organic produce,” I stumbled on, “and we educate community members about creating a thriving farm ecosystem.” I was terrible at this. 

My father nodded, slowly. “And where’s that gonna get you?” he asked. 

“Get me?” I asked back, my voice laced with irritation. “It’s not about getting me anywhere. It’s about creating a better future for the community. It’s about resilience.” 

He threw his head back and laughed out loud, two rows of impossibly white teeth still on display when he returned his gaze to me. “You remind me of her,” he said. “Just as pretty and just as full of surprises. Same misplaced idealism, too.” 

At the mention of my mother, something near my sternum became dislodged. I wanted to ask if I was the product of Mom’s misplaced idealism. Instead, I made myself breathe evenly. 

“I’ve observed you,” my father continued. “You’re weird but smart. So use your brains to get somewhere. You need an education, and I can help you with that. Your stubborn mother would never let me, but things are different now. I can pay for your education.” 

So, there it was, the reason he had invited me. One hundred grand sitting right there, an imaginary heap on the kitchen counter, waiting for me to say yes, change the course of my life. I knew what Mom would have wanted me to say, but she was gone, drained away from me on Williamsburg Bridge, two hundred feet from the checkpoint to Manhattan.

I tried to think as I watched him place a container of milk on the counter. “Med school would be good,” he continued, his voice flat and practical, his eyes now on the spaceship of a blender he was filling with copious amounts of nuts and fruit. “It’s the only guaranteed career nowadays unless you want to go into the funeral business. You’ll go to school over here. Nicole will find you a place to stay in the city.” He must have noticed my silence because, looking up momentarily from his blender, he added: “Don’t worry, you’ll get in. I got everyone else in, I just need to let them know you’re one of mine.” 

With that, he picked up a container of protein powder while I was trying to formulate a response that would conceal the flood of feelings I could barely contain. He cut me off before I could open my mouth. “You can deal with blood, right?” he asked, the spoonful of powder suspended above the blender. “You don’t faint or anything, do you? We can’t have fainters, but your mother never did, so I guess we’re good there.” 

I hated him then. It was sudden, a flare shooting up from my sternum as the vortex of his words sucked me back in time, back to Williamsburg Bridge, back to the warm, sticky flood drenching my mom and me as I improvised pressure bandages out of my own clothes to cover her wounds according to her instructions. I could deal with blood, all right, but not with this shit. I stood there in his ballroom of a kitchen and knew I was going to be sick again, but this time dairy had nothing to do with it. It was pure rage and revulsion. Before he could say another word, I was off to the bathroom to puke my guts out. 

We talked very little for the remainder of my visit, helped by the fact that he spent most of Sunday at the hospital. My half- siblings had gone off to some barbeque in Marine County, so it was only Nicole and me, the screen wall in their living room offering a welcome distraction. We spent the day staring at the floor-to-ceiling spectacle of a coming hurricane, now a Cat 4, churning up the East Coast. Nicole, her face even paler than usual, suggested that I stay with them for another week. But that option sounded more disastrous to me than anything that could happen on my way back to New York. 

I called Tara to see how they were doing on the farm. She was in a rush, talking to me while carrying containers down from the roof to the third floor of the abandoned office building we were squatting in. It was coming our way, she said, breathless. And it would be bad. 

“There’s no way we’re going to have that opening on Friday, so stay where you are, okay?” she said. “We’ll be lucky if Brooklyn is still around once this is over.” A door slammed somewhere behind her and then she was cursing. “I gotta go. Stay, all right? Just stay there.” 

I felt the rage returning that had overwhelmed me that morning, but this time it was directed at myself. For being here, trapped in my father’s obscene kingdom, when I was needed at home. I imagined Tara running up and down the stairs, schlepping our improvised planters, cursing but undeterred. Tara, who had held me upright when the ground was shifting below, who found her way to me that harrowing night on Williamsburg Bridge. Lenny and Judy, who’d given me a home, however temporary, when I couldn’t bring myself to return to the tiny apartment I had shared with Mom. And all the other people who had come on board the daring little farming project we decided to call Roots. People written off, counted out, mocked as misplaced idealists by men like my father. And yet, against everyone’s expectations, still hanging on. Stubborn people, precarious farmers, who had it in their minds that they would help feed other people hit by disaster. There was nothing more terrifying than the thought that they might finally meet their match and I wasn’t there. My red eye still hadn’t been cancelled, and I was determined to board, hoping the plane would be faster than the beast above the Atlantic. Nicole tried to talk me out of it, but I was adamant. 

My father didn’t return in time for my departure, a relief because I had no idea what to say to him. It was once again Nicole who took care of me. She was silent on the way to the airport, looking out the side window as the car did the driving. I thought she had finally exhausted her reservoir of friendliness, and so I spent the time texting Tara, trying to somehow be of help, somehow be part of what they were about to go through. 

“We had a prenup,” Nicole said suddenly. “That’s why I didn’t leave him after what happened with your mother. You must have been wondering about that.” 

Maybe I had, but now my mind was elsewhere. 

“We had a prenup, and I didn’t have much when I married him. And seeing what was happening to the world, I wasn’t going to do that to my children, the things you are going through now. I didn’t want them to have to live like that.” 

“It’s not that bad,” I returned sharply, realizing instantly that this was exactly what my mom would have said. It was the first time I had ever said it, and it was preposterous to boot, given that our sorry existence was about to be washed away for good. 

And yet, I immediately knew it was true. It was hard, the constant living with disaster, but the only thing that mattered to me was that the others survived this ordeal. Then we would go on and, against all odds, rebuild something, somehow, somewhere. 

“Why does he want to pay for my education?” I asked Nicole since, clearly, we were done pretending. 

“To give you a future,” she said. “He doesn’t like you digging around in the dirt like that with a bunch of have-nots. It’s embarrassing for him.” 

“For him?” I echoed. 

She turned to me, features frozen. “You are his child after all, that’s what he has decided. And you should be grateful for his generous offer. It’s your only way out.” 

“There is no way out,” I snapped. “And I’m not going to be one of his possessions. If he really wants to help me, he can go to our website. We accept donations.” 

She stared at me. I couldn’t tell whether it was envy or spite, but it was the end of our conversation. Soon after, she dropped me off at the terminal. Her goodbye sounded as relieved as mine when the car closed the door between us. 

Given the news from the East Coast, it seemed impossible that the plane would even take off, but eventually, it did. As we left the ground, I felt a pang of satisfaction, like I had accomplished some arduous task. I waited until they had dimmed the lights before allowing myself to cry, mourning the loss of my obstinate, resilient, wonderful mother—whom I had, for once, not failed—and scared of the losses to come. 

It was when I went to the bathroom to wash my face that the captain announced we would be rerouted to Boston due to severe weather conditions in New York. I looked into my swollen eyes in the mirror and heard him say the name that would turn my life upside down once again: Hurricane Shelby. 

Tara was right. I didn’t make it home that night. Or even by the end of the week. In fact, no plane would ever touch down at JFK again. It remained permanently closed, like the flooded beachfront communities along Jamaica Bay. 

But our farm survived, beaten and bruised around the edges, and so did we. 

⧫

Alexa Weik von Mossner  is a writer and ecocritical literary scholar living in Austria. On the fiction side, she has written 163 episodes of the German TV drama series FABRIXX. Her first short story was published earlier in 2021, in Orca literary journal. Website: www.alexaweikvonmossner.com 

Delmarva Review publishes the best of new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Financial support comes from sales, tax-deductible contributions, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.