In the first full summer of our marriage, when Karen and I were expecting our first child, someone tried to break in one night through the back door. Before that, I’d been going on a lot of solitary night walks. It was one of the hottest summers on record. We were renting the ground floor…
The crab apple tree had just fluttered its pink petals over the front lawn when Mary Dooley pulled up to the curb in the small U-Haul. I was on my balcony polishing my toenails—a deep red to contrast with my winter pallor. I paused, the tiny brush suspended over my baby toe, to watch as…
I got involved with Gregg Evans Langley through my friend Xandy, a young mime artist I had befriended when we were teaching at Chautauqua once. Xandy phoned to tell me he’d met a guy at a Chelsea opening who had a weekend place near me and he’d given him my number. The only details Xandy…
Many years before Zhao lost her right arm, she had used that arm to slap her husband, Yue, in a public denunciation in Wantu. Her hand had hurt after the slap, tingling at her side as she stood and watched Yue kneel in the dunce hat, so that even now when she remembered the incident,…
Scientists are a strange tribe. I was strange too, by the time of that long summer of 1995, but I wasn’t part of the tribe. A little over fifteen when my uncle brought me to the lab, I was too much trouble to be left alone, and the lab, less a means of keeping me…
From my stool behind the cash counter, I watch you through the window. Watch you double-park your Mercedes, turn the car off but leave the music system blasting hits from a time when your life was simpler: Anand, Mughal-e-Azam, Love in Simla. Cars swerve and honk, angry Queens drivers shoot curses as they whiz past….
One morning, I meet three Boers in the Pietersburg laundromat. It is a Saturday. I have half a load going—the full extent of my wardrobe—and I am reading a book called In the Heart of the Whore, a book about Boers, coincidentally. There are three of them, two guys and a girl—big primordial-looking people, red…
“Please, Sylvia, give me a moment to think.” These are the last words you hear your father speak. You are eleven, and the two of you are traveling midsummer through eastern Idaho headed for Glacier National Park. It’s the year your mother passed, and so much has been hard and empty since the long suffering…
In the fourth week of drought, at the third and final performance of the Roundabout Traveling Circus, the elephant keeled over dead. Instead of stepping on the tasseled stool, she gave a thick, descending trumpet, lowered one knee, and fell sideways. The girl in the white spangled leotard screamed and backed away. The trainer dropped…
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