The Apple Trees at Olema Read Free Page B

her head and laughing
    and sobbing. The man is watching the road, listening,
    his own more diffuse unhappiness in abeyance,
    and because, in the restaurant before the film
    the woman had been describing the end of her marriage
    and cried, they are not sure whether they are in the theater
    or on the mountain road, and when the timber truck
    comes suddenly around the bend, they both flinch.
    He found that it was no good trying to tell
    what happened that day. Everything he said
    seemed fictional the moment that he said it,
    the rain, the scent of her hair, what she said
    as she was leaving, and why it was important
    for him to explain that the car had been parked
    under eucalyptus on a hillside, and how velvety
    and blurred the trees looked through the windshield;
    not, he said, that making fictions might not be
    the best way of getting at it, but that nothing he said
    had the brute, abject, unassimilated quality
    of a wounding experience: the ego in any telling
    was already seeing itself as a character, and a character,
    he said, was exactly what he was not at that moment,
    even as he kept wanting to explain to someone,
    to whomever would listen, that she had closed the door
    so quietly and so firmly that the beads of rain
    on the side window didn’t even quiver.
    Names for involuntary movements of the body—
    squirm, wince, flinch, and shudder—
    sound like a law firm in Dickens:
    â€œMr. Flinch took off his black gloves
    as if he were skinning his hands.”
    â€œQuiver dipped the nib of his pen
    into the throat of the inkwell.”
    The receptionist at the hospital morgue told him
    to call the city medical examiner’s office,
    but you only got a recorded voice on weekends.
    Setup without the punchline:
    three greenhorns are being measured for suits
    by a very large tailor in a very small room on Hester Street.
    Once there were two sisters called Knock Me and Sock Me;
    their best friend was a bear named Always Arguing.
    What kind of animals were the sisters? one child asked.
    Maybe they could be raccoons, said the other.
    or pandas, said the first. They could be pandas.
    â€œWhy?” he asked. “Because she was lonely,
    and angry,” said the friend
    who knew her better,
    â€œand she ’d run out of stories.
    or come to the one story.”
    It is good to sit down to birthday cake
    with children, who think it is the entire point
    of life and who, therefore, respect each detail
    of the ceremony. There ought to be a rule,
    he thought, for who gets to lick the knife
    that cuts the cake and the rule should have
    its pattern somewhere in the winter stars.
    Which do you add to the tea first, he ’d asked,
    the sugar or the milk? And the child had said,
    instantly: “The milk.” (Laws as cool
    and angular as words: angular, sidereal .)
    Stories about the distribution of wealth:
    once upon a time there was an old man
    and an old woman who were very, very poor.
    How Eldie Got Her Name
    The neighborhood had been so dangerous,
    she said, there was one summer when the mailmen
    refused to deliver the mail. Her mother
    never appeared and her grandmother,
    who had bought a handgun for protection
    and had also taught her how to use it,
    would walk her to the post office for the sweet,
    singsong, half-rhymed letters that smelled,
    or that she imagined smelled, of Florida.
    She had, when she was ten, shot at an intruder
    climbing in the window. The roar,
    she said, was tremendous and she doesn’t know
    to this day whether she hit the man or not.
    (A big-boned young woman, skin the color
    of the inside of some light-colored hazelnut
    confection, auburn eyes, some plucked string
    of melancholy radiating from her whole body
    when she spoke.) Did her mama come back?
    They had asked. She never came back.
    The mail started up again but the letters stopped.
    Turned out she was good in school, and that
    was what saved her. She loved the labor
    of schoolwork. Loved finishing a project
    and