The placards I walked through. The wet raincoat on a hook. The questionnaire on a clipboard placed before me. Couples sat around me in the waiting room. They were young. What am I saying? I was only thirty-two. But I remember, the men seemed the more bereft. Facing forward, their elbows resting on knees, their...

A riddle: Something belongs to you alonethat you give away when you meet someone,over and over and over again. I didn’t change my name until I was almost thirty. Like sex, like your face, like the small patch of skin at the base of the neck where people like to be tattooed, a name marks...

So you want to know why I love old men. You already know the story: The first man I ever loved was my grandfather Poppy, and I loved all six-foot-two-inches of his cigarette-smoking, car-fixing, meat-and-potatoes-eating, cancer-riddled manliness, right up until the day we all watched him die. I was only ten at the time, but...

I swear to you, I heard someone on Avenida Santa Fé shout my name, but I ignored it. Who knew me in this city anyway? I’d come here trying to forget the woman whom I’d made love with every night for three weeks – in another August, in another city whose once-in-a-lifetime dog-licking summer stewed...

My English teacher’s daughter had chestnut hair and bold eyes and what the boys in our class boisterously called breeder hips. My English teacher’s daughter was one year younger than me, but seduced me in that clever way Catholic girls have of making you think it was all your fault. Being Catholic, too, I eagerly...

I visit him for the first time since he was taken away. I take an elevator to the eighteenth floor of Bellevue Hospital and check in at a security station where I’m told to keep my laminated pass visible at all times—so the orderlies won’t make any mistakes. I walk down the hall unescorted. The metal-meshed...

We stepped outside the restaurant onto a tiny concrete landing. Melting snow made a dull pinging sound as it dripped from the roof onto a hollow pipe railing. A little hill of ice was growing on top, and icicles were forming on either side, underneath. It was the first time he suggested we share a...

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...

Click a tape into the VCR. And play. As the song begins, a girl in a pink lace dress and white lace gloves sits on the edge of a faded plastic chair in the middle of a high school gymnasium. She and a troupe of a dozen other girls cross their legs, tap their toes,...