Things That Will Make You Cry in the First Six Weeks of Your Son’s Life
The shape of his mouth when he cries—like a thick rubber band stretched to breaking. The arc of his back as he stiffens away from you, his belly filled with gas. Your hunger for him to be soft and be held. Exhaustion so deep you sleep through a feeding and wake in a pool of...
To the Moon
I see the telescope first. It’s low and boxy, made of plywood, varnished like corn syrup. The handmade sign reads, as if hawking a tour of a kangaroo ranch or the arrival of a traveling circus,”see the moon.” The sign is small, propped against an empty bucket, but it eclipses everything else on the summertime...
Two Kinds of Light
At the northwestern edge of the United States, a left arm of the ocean thrusts into the continent up to its shoulder as if fishing for a lost wedding ring with its fingers. My home is at the inside bend of its elbow. Offshore, pods of orca whales hunt for seals and salmon, crabs crawl...
The Causeway
“Watch me, Margaret,” my freckle-backed father said. Wearing cut-off Levi’s and a silver crucifix, he stood barefoot on the cement wall designed to keep cars from driving off the causeway into the lake. “I’m watching, Daddy.” “You have to stand up close to the wall and watch until my feet disappear.” He was getting ready...
How to Say Goodbye in Front of 14 Strangers
So this is it, I think, sitting on the floor near the first floor nurses’ station at Slidell Memorial Hospital, holding the payphone, talking to my best friend, Joyce, who has been crying all day because they made an announcement over the PA system during third period that the Mesman family needed her prayers. “They...
The Swimming Lesson
Part I The girl, my neighbor, has me in the garage with her. I don’t remember what the garage looks like or what she looks like. She might have had short hair or blond hair, and living in Florida, she probably had both. We were four and a half. Her eyes, probably blue, maybe green—would...
The Secret Life of Parents, 1962
My brother and I, age sixteen and fourteen respectively, are plundering the drawers in our parents’ bedroom for money or the spare car keys or some artifact of our past (report cards, baby shoes, photos) offering whatever confirmation at that moment we felt we needed, when in the bottom drawer on my father’s side of...
Life Studies
No. 2 You’re supposed to start with the main scaffold of the body. I always begin, however, with the buttocks, then move upward with a small tremor for the spine, and finally plot out the head. My head has no eyes, no nose, no cheekbones. Nobody’s taught me how to draw them; yet somehow I...
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