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You’re Weird, Irene

The woman sits there a while and then we can see her face changing. It looks like she’s got all the troubles in the whole world. Her face crinkles up and she starts to cry. She wipes away her tears but they keep coming down and flowing into her toothless mouth.

Relieving Ramona

I like Ramona. I want to win the lottery, pay her brother back for the car, bounce her and the baby out of the attic apartment.

Visiting Parents

A noodle kugel, some missing underwear, a “magic cube”

The Smell Of The Vineyards

Luz lived with her mother and sister in the Raisin Capital of the World. In September, when the grapes were drying between the vines, the whole valley smelled of wine.

Red Dawn Over Tweetsie

When I saw “Red Dawn,” I realized that a private and relatively innocent part of my adolescence had become tribalized on a mass scale, and from that fact flowed a palpable undercurrent of menace that had never been there for us.

The Secret Of Life

I recall another day back in junior high. He wrote upon the blackboard large: DNA/RNA. He pointed to the letters lying there like some Kabbalistic mantra, then said, “This is the secret of life.”

For You

I did my job. I picked her up when her mother threw her away, I handed her over to the shrink when the time came. I did my job. I’m the stepmother, not abnormally wicked.

Pornography’s Child

The Cripple Liberation Front Marching Band Blues

(Part II)

Paradise. Paradise of Meriwether County, Georgia. Warm Springs. Two support personnel for each patient. Campus of the gods. Food of humans — prepared to be eaten at civilized times.

Precedent

In 1975 I came to love Faye Henry. She was thirty-five years older than I and necessary for my mother, who had no friends at Harvard until she and Faye Henry fell asleep together in the back of “Practicum in Ethnographic Futures Research,” knew they were destined to be friends, and have been ever since.