Pleiades Writer Spotlight

Congratulations to Kaethe Schwehn, whose book Tailings: a Memoir won the Minnesota Book Award for Nonfiction. Read the announcement from the Minneapolis Star Tribune here:

http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/blogs/300560121.htm

   

Read her story “Redirect,” published in Pleiades 32.2 here:

 

REDIRECT

by Kaethe Schwehn

 

“There is no rope swing unraveling in the moonlight. You cannot hope backwards or in reverse.” –Lisa Olstein

 

1.

This story ends with a woman scooping a boy out of the street, out of the way of an oncoming truck. This story ends with the woman kissing the boy’s cheeks, thinking of plums, of how the surface of a plum when kissed has more resistance than the surface of a cheek. This story ends with the woman thinking the word taut while setting the boy back on the sidewalk, his left hand still held tightly by her right one.

 

2.

The boy had found the broken propeller of a toy plane four minutes earlier. It was lilac season and the woman made the boy push his head deep into the honeycomb shaped blossoms. Breathe said the woman. The boy faked deep breaths. His eyes were open. He liked when a lilac petal got caught in the perspiration on the woman’s cheekbone. Then he would point and say purple tear and the woman would pull him close and say sweet boy. But at this moment there was no purple tear. The woman’s eyes were closed and the boy’s eyes were open so when he saw the gash of yellow plastic at the base of the bush it only took a second to wiggle free of the woman’s grasp and only a little scratching at the dirt with his backhoe hands before the entire propeller came free. While he was digging with his backhoe hands the woman tugged one of his wrists away from the digging to say oh your nails, Jerome. Then she let go and took a little handful of dirt herself and sniffed it, breathed it in as she was always breathing everything in which the boy knew she did to remember but still it is difficult to know the woman who takes care of you cannot catch a breath quite deep enough.

 

3.

There was a man. He was part of the story but not then. He liked neutral colors and would only hike in parks that possessed pavilions here and there in case it should rain.

 

4.

It was not raining on that day. The propeller came free of the ground and the boy wiped the dirt off on the thigh of his overalls. The propeller had a hole in the center, a place where the tip of the model plane would go, a place like the woman’s mouth that always opened just slightly while listening. The boy was thinking of an F-15, his arm and hand were the body of the F-15 and there was nothing he could do but let his body be flown, directly into the middle of the street. Far off up the street a man driving a green truck with a number of live ducks in cages in the back saw the boy. Then he saw the woman heaving her body into the street after the boy and thought of his own mother: the sound of a wooden spoon circling and circling the bottom of an empty pot. He stopped the truck.

 

Before the lilac bush, moments before, the boy was standing inside a yoga studio, was banging his forehead over and over against the door. The woman was writing a check at the desk that was higher than his head. In the yoga studio waiting room was a futon with a Guatemalan blanket for a cover and a number of plants that looked like they might strangle one another if brought to life. In the corner was a silver watering can with a cat’s open mouth for a spout. Just before sauntering over to the door, the boy had been on his hands and knees with his mouth around the spout of the can, staring into the eyes of the cat, green stones that had a lot of loneliness in them. The boy was blowing air into the can, into the cat to make it feel better when the woman said not that, Jerome. Redirect, which was their special code for do something different now which is when he decided to pretend his head was a magnet and the yoga studio door a refrigerator door. On and off went the magnet. His brain felt the pull. He knew the woman was writing a check because she was clearing her throat and tapping the toe of her shoe against the floor. He didn’t need to look. The way the woman didn’t need to look to know it was the boy’s head making that sound. The woman at the desk said Bikram and breathing but also kept saying humongous and this made the woman feel old, this was a word she would never use and the woman at the desk had such a flat stomach and such a protruding clavicle. You could balance little blue robin eggs along that bone and they would never fall off.

 

6.

The man, the man of neutral colors and park pavilions, was good at looking for shells, at digging for sand dollars with his toes while standing in chest-deep sea water, good at doing this with one arm around the waist of the woman, her breasts bare between them, her breasts in the cold of the ocean beginning to take on the blue color he so loved. He put a sand dollar to his forehead then, on that day so many years ago, like he was seven again and playing Indian poker, his eyes darting to and fro beneath the two of clubs. He put the sand dollar to his forehead and she put her forehead to his so their minds were separated by a sand dollar and the waves kept breaking just below their chins. If she leaned in to kiss him the sand dollar would fall and finally she did and it did, it dropped without fanfare into the water between them and she thought the feel of his beard was indistinguishable from the taste of the sea. He thought of the blue veins in her breasts while he kissed her and felt with his toes for the sand dollar, nestling into the sand somewhere between them.

 

7.

The woman thought of the sand dollar. Thought of the sand dollar on the Metro Transit bus on the way from the apartment to the yoga studio. The boy was standing between her legs, facing her, pretending her knees were a workbench and his hands were hammers while the bus belched through the city. When she thought of the sand dollar she drew the boy onto her lap and faced him away from her and nuzzled her nose into the back of his neck, the right side below the earlobe, which is what she did when she wanted to show the boy love but did not want to see how he was receiving it. The boy gazed at the advertisements above the windows of the bus. One had a dinosaur that looked like a turtle riding in a car. I could draw a better dinosaur than that, he thought, and kicked his heels lightly against the woman’s shins. The woman kept remembering the sand dollar and more specifically objects in life that have complete significance for all of three seconds before you forget them altogether. Then she leaned forward to kiss the boy again and let that thought drop and disappear into the sea.

 

8.

When they arrived at the bus station (before getting on the bus to think about sand dollars and dinosaurs) there was one man on the bench. He was sitting in the middle of the bench with his arms stretched out along the backrest—like an eagle, thought the boy—like some idiot man who thinks he owns the bus stop, thought the woman. The boy shook off the woman’s hand and climbed onto the right end of the bench and squatted and jumped and as he jumped he made the sound of a parachute unfolding and as he landed he made the sound of artillery fire. He repeated this again and again while the woman held her rolled purple yoga mat tightly to her chest and tried to look like someone who clearly deserved a place on the bench although, in truth, the bench had names etched deeply into its wooden slats and the woman had difficulty not imagining those words somehow adhering to her thighs if she sat on them long enough. This was a problem she had with benches. Meanwhile the boy was putting his tongue inside the “T” of “Todd Likes Pussy” just to see if the bench tasted different inside a letter but it didn’t, really. The man on the bench was sporting forest green corduroy pants with grooves somewhat like the letter grooves on the bench. So the boy snuck below the bench very carefully as though he was in a desert storm like the desert storms on the television and touched his tongue—just his tongue, not his chin or his nose—to one of the grooves just behind the man’s calf. The pants smelled of new washing but also of smoke and the boy wondered if this man was his father. The woman was thinking of all the words that begin with “arch” like archangel and archenemy but then she turned slightly and saw the boy’s head between the calves of the man and the boy’s tongue pointedly outstretched. Jerome, she said in the voice she used to be heard above the noise of the street, Jerome, redirect.

 

9.

Most people, upon hearing a train whistle, experience a feeling of longing or pining or wishing or nostalgia. This is because of the nature of sound itself, of course, its repetition, how it sounds like breath but the breath of a machine, how at the center of the sound is an exquisite hollowness. How the sound is always moving away from you, off to greener pastures, tired of you before it has even arrived.

 

Train whistles reminded the man of needles. On three occasions during early childhood his inoculation shots corresponded with a train rumbling through the small town in Montana where he grew up.

 

And these markedly different associations are why, on the first night of their honeymoon, when a train whistle sounded in the distance as they lay together in bed, the woman ran her fingers tenderly over the man’s throat, his clavicle, around each nipple, and this is why the man’s jaw tightened, this is why he clenched his hands. And the woman felt him stiffen and drew back a little, just slightly. Both of them closed their eyes then and the woman could smell the lavender in the bud vase on the white wicker nightstand beside the bed and the man smelled nothing because it wasn’t like him to want to.

 

10.

Before the bus stop was the walk to the bus stop. Before that was clomping down the stairs of the apartment building where the woman and boy lived together, the woman’s shoulder bag continually falling off her shoulder and banging her in the leg and the boy saying it smells like curry and indeed it did and indeed it always did in that hallway, morning and night. How could the neighbors, thought the woman, always be so hungry for curry? Then she was opening the door for the boy and he was hopping—no, jumping—over the threshold and then she was saying take my hand and he was lifting the collar of his shirt to his nose and saying in a slightly muffled voice I smell like curry, smell me, smell me. The woman was finally forced to squat beside the boy (bag falling off her shoulder again, the yoga mat touching the crushed berries on the sidewalk) so that she could smell him, something she would always do, always, and the boy knew this but only used this knowledge to manipulate her gently, whenever he wanted her close for a moment and then gone.

 

11.

Before clomping down the stairs there was breakfast, Cheerios and strawberries for him, coffee with too much cream for her.

 

Before that there was making a spider web in the living room for him and crying mildly in the shower for her. Mild crying meaning shedding a few tears and then getting a grip. Getting a grip usually meant shaving her legs. Shaving her legs meant she was ready for sex, ready and not dwelling on the past or the future. Shaving her legs meant she was inhabiting the present moment completely.

 

12.

On her fertility charts, the man drew a stick figure climbing. The figure was climbing the line that was her temperature rising, the line that should have meant she was fertile, the figure’s body intent on ascension, the figure’s face meeting the watcher’s gaze with bulging cartoon eyes and a thin smile. The man liked to draw these figures after they made love while she lay on her back, a pillow under her hips, her fertility CD whirring on the disc player between them. The woman liked to close her eyes while she listened, liked to visualize a tiny blue explosion as the sperm met the egg, liked to breathe her strength inward and exhale her worry through her toes as the CD instructed her to. Sometimes while she listened the man would leave, down to the kitchen to get a glass of orange juice or to the end of the hall to crank open a window. She would feel the cool air from the window first, slithering over her toes and her ankles and her knees until it wound its way inside of her and extinguished the warm blue explosion. Then all she could see in her mind was a pile of ivory-colored moth wings and all she could see beside her when she opened her eyes was the slightly wrinkled chart: days along one axis, Farenheit degrees along the other, a jagged line, and the figure, lithe and unconcerned, the mountain already, almost, beneath him.

 

13.

While the woman was in the shower the boy was unrolling a spool of gray thread. He liked the feel of the spool bobbing nervously in his left hand as he pulled out further and further lengths with his right. One end of the thread he tied to the leg of the coffee table that held the woman’s Precious Things: a shell coated with dust, a small turquoise porcelain boot, a half melted candle that the woman never lit anymore. He drew the thread across the room and wrapped it around the back of the green recliner. Then over to the philodendron on the windowsill. Gentle with the leaves. Then to the wicker rocking chair, back around the bottom rung of the end table. Then he cut the thread and gently he tied the loose end about the tail of the cat, Ginger Bean, who was sleeping on the cushion of the green recliner. Ginger Bean could then be made to move and the whole web would shake. But for now the cat was asleep and the boy, content with his work, sat with his back against the radiator, rubbing his shoulder blades back and forth across the warm columns, admiring the web and the way that when the sun shone through the drooping clouds the web was illuminated and when the sun went away the room seemed threadless and unconnected.

 

Impatient for Ginger Bean to move, the boy picked up the wooden stick with the pink feather attached and slithered it like a snake or a mouse and Ginger Bean pounced and swatted and grew still and pounced again. The whole web quaked and shivered but after awhile the boy grew tired of this too, he simply wanted Ginger Bean to lie still and sleepy in his lap so he could pull her tail lightly through his clasped hand but she was wild now because of the feather and did not want to be still. She twisted in his lap and when he tried to hold her firmly she scratched him, a scratch along the inside of his forearm that lit up with blood like a bar of neon. He let Ginger Bean go and carefully pulled his shirt over the scratch but the shirt lit up too, in a way that pleased him but would not please the woman so he got up and crawled below the web of gray thread over to the kitchen where his sweatshirt hung by its hood from the corner of one of the kitchen chairs. The boy put the sweatshirt on over the shirt. Luckily, the blood did not come through the sweatshirt but he was waiting for it to, staring stoically at his sleeve, when the woman emerged from the bathroom in her soft brown yoga pants that swayed a little at the ankles. Water drops speckled her shoulders. By then the sun had disappeared again so when she turned toward the living room it looked so clean and she turned toward her sweet boy with his sweatshirt already on she took this as a sign from the universe that things were going to be OK and that this day was going to be alright.

 

14.

Before the showering and the web-making and the scratching, before the line of blood and the boy’s head against the yoga studio door, before the corduroy sag of the bus stop man’s pants, before the woman bending to smell the boy’s curry-scented collar, before all of this was the waking. Before that there was sleep.

 

The woman and the boy slept in rooms adjacent to one another in the apartment. Their beds shared a wall except on the rare occasions when the woman let a man into her room in which case she always insisted on pushing her bed to the opposite side of the room. The woman had a lamp on her bedside table and a purple scarf from India draped over the lamp. The boy had 17 plastic dinosaurs arranged by teeth size on the bottom shelf of his bookcase. The boy made airplane noises in the very back of his throat as he fell asleep. The woman liked to close her eyes and run the fingers of her right hand over the tender skin on her left forearm while pretending the right hand belonged to someone else.

 

The landscape of their dreams was always the same although the inhabitants and events were always different. Both dreamed a desert landscape, brittle tawny rock, great cracks criss-crossing the open areas. In his dream the boy floated above the landscape in a red hot air balloon. In hers the woman was on all fours, lapping from a pool of water the size of a coffee table. She was so thirsty. Tiny green organisms with flicking tails zig-zagged through the water but she went on drinking. When she had drunk her fill, her tongue, her animal tongue, licked around the perimeter of her lips, catching the excess moisture. This is what startled the woman in the dream, a tongue not her own inside her mouth.

 

15.

Before the sleeping was the getting ready for sleeping. The brushing of the teeth and the cleaning of the ears and the tying of dental floss around the tail of Ginger Bean, poor long-suffering Ginger Bean. The floss was still attached at the other end to its little octogonal receptacle and even the woman (who had just poured water over a tea bag and was pausing to smell the steam), even the woman laughed at the sight of the cat dragging the floss container across the hardwood floors, the tiny scraping sound and then louder clunk when it slammed against the baseboard. Just before all this the woman had read the boy a story in the living room. She sat on the carpet with her back against the sofa and the boy lay on his back, perpendicular to her, bare feet pressed flush against her thighs. Eyes closed, the boy liked to move his arms over the carpet in a motion similar to making a snow angel in the yard, and though the boy was old enough to know he was not actually pressing a figure into the carpet he was still young enough to check, just in case, every time he rose. The woman was reading Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel and sometimes at the end of a page she would pause and watch the boy move his arms, his eyes moving to and fro under his closed lids. His nose was not her nose and not the man’s nose. It was the nose of a Cabbage Patch Doll or a baby on a diaper box. The boy’s hair was brown and fine and in places stuck together a little from perspiration or food or paste. Then woman’s examination was interrupted by the boy curling his toes into her thighs which was a sign he knew he was being watched and so she turned her eyes back to the book and continued reading, making Mike Mulligan’s hole deeper with every word she read.

 

16.

Before this, at the heart of the day, at 2pm, the woman and the boy sat in the office of the assigned foster care therapist. The woman sat at one end of a gray couch with pale pink roses faded into it. The social worker sat on a black desk chair with wheels. Whenever she re-crossed her legs or adjusted the yellow pad on which she was writing the chair would scoot, almost imperceptibly to the right or left. The boy lay on his back on the sofa with his head in the woman’s lap, raising his right leg like a crane, pretending to drop precious cargo off the side of the couch until the woman pulled him into a sitting position and pointed with her arm—at exactly his eye level so he could see where her pointer finger was going—at the bottom shelf of a low bookcase. The bookcase was painted red and across the sides and the top verdant-green frogs leaped, arms and legs outstretched. On the upper shelf were books, on the lower shelf, the one the woman was pointing to, were a couple of orange trucks that looked to be missing parts, some Legos, a lavender pony with over-brushed pink hair and some kind of game in a cardboard box. So the boy followed the woman’s finger to the truck that appeared to be the least bedraggled and he filled it with Lego pieces and tried to pretend the plastic pony did not exist.

 

As soon as the boy moved from her lap the woman’s face fell, crepe paper coming un-stuck after a party, and she shivered a little and wrapped her arms around herself. The therapist said so and let her voice trail off and the woman traced the outline of one of the pale pink roses on the couch. On the table between them was a clock the therapist used to mark the time during sessions, an alarm clock with a hula girl smiling all the way up the right side. The therapist liked campy things, she had a number of Rainbow Brite lunchboxes at home and on the weekends she wore tight fitting Hello Kitty T-Shirts when she took her dauschund, Rolx, for walks. The therapist already knew what the woman was going to say and regretted that she would have to spend at least half an hour coaxing it out of the woman and another half hour assuaging the woman’s guilt.

 

The woman didn’t want the boy anymore.

 

She couldn’t say this exactly because the boy was there so she had to stumble and half start and eventually use a terrible metaphor about buying angora sweaters because you were living a certain kind of life but now you couldn’t abide angora anymore, you could think only of a dead rabbit while wearing it, could see the blood pooling into the white of the rabbit’s eye and the lone ant approaching its still-damp nose. While the woman talked the boy used the bulldozer and the steam shovel to move all the Legos from the shelf. Then he laid both trucks on their sides so they could sleep.

 

17.

Before the truck hurtling down the street, before the yellow propeller and the lilacs, before the yoga mat and the grey thread, before the blood-stained shirt and the bus stop, before Mike Mulligan and Ginger Bean, was the morning before the meeting. The woman let the boy take extra time to zip his jacket, extra time to move stray Cheerios into the form of an alien spaceship on the wooden kitchen table.

 

Before that morning were the five days leading up to the appointment, days in which the woman prepared what she would say in her head, days in which she justified and re-justified her decision to friends in Montreal and Seattle and Phoenix. The wine bottles left purple rings on the countertop.

 

Before the five days was the day on which she called to set up the appointment and before that the three months during which she almost lost her mind.

 

18.

Somewhere in the middle of those three months was February. An ice storm dragged down power lines and coated her windshield in ice so thick that her winter scraper made not an ounce of difference. It was Saturday and she was hoping they could go to the museum or the grocery store. Anywhere but the apartment. But there was no going anywhere. So the woman clomped back up the stairs in her Sorrel boots, pulling off her winter hat and scarf as she went, her glasses fogging with the scent of curry. She had told him to wait, the boy, just five minutes while she got the car going (it was a dangerous venture, she knew, to leave a car running in the city, but it would also be dangerous, she felt, for her to remain in the apartment a second longer). When she entered the apartment she knew something was wrong, though her glasses were still fogged, she knew. And when she took off her glasses, she saw.

 

19.

All four of the dining room chairs were on their sides—not pushed, more laid down to rest. Under the table, cross-legged, wearing the swim goggles that were his aviator goggles, was the boy. You are in the way, Mama, he said, you are going to get hit. She saw that he was gripping an invisible steering wheel that was mounted invisibly to one of the chair legs. She saw that he was driving the whole invisible contraption—the whole contraption but also the kitchen the living room the apartment the ice storm—he was driving it into her but also he was giving her fair warning.

 

Well, she said, we’re not going anywhere today, Jerome. And the boy made machine gun fire in his mouth. Then sirens. Then missile sounds.

 

The woman wished he’d left the bathtub running, wished she’d caught him trying to drown the cat or attempting to cut his own sweet skin. She wished he’d found the baseball bat tucked behind the door of her closet, wished he’d swung it into the windows with the bars and the ice on them. But he was simply just still there. In need of words spoken to him, in need of a feigned death scene, in need of a cup of juice with a bendy straw, in need of a turtleneck free of black bean stains, in need of Velcro shoes and stories featuring vehicles with smiling mouths and cartoon eyes. This is what was wrong. And this was no reason to give up a child. The never-endingness of it was not reason enough.

 

When the man was there, in June in July in August, when the man was there he and the woman entered the boy’s world together. They were in his world and observing it at the same time. They would get down on all fours below the table with the boy and whisper military code into empty Kleenex boxes but also they would look at one another from time to time—raised eyebrows, the suppression of a smile—and in looking exchange the knowledge that they also belonged to a different world, one with bigger words where women in pencil skirts used chopsticks to effortlessly lift morsels of sushi to their wine-stained lips. But now the man was gone and there was no one to remind the woman of the other world—or only rarely—and the world of the child was interminable, in went on forever in all directions, repeating itself with only slight alterations and peppered with occasional moments of affection or real laughter. As a world within her world, it was beautiful. As her entire world it was—it had to be—the end.

 

20.

A woman scoops a boy out of the street, out of the way of an oncoming truck. She kisses the boy’s cheeks, thinking of plums, and sets him back on the sidewalk, his left hand still held tightly by her right one.

 

[End]