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The Real World, and The Other Real World

by Marcia Lewton

188 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-1356; ISBN 1-4120-0987-1; US$18.50, C$23.00, EUR14.95, £11.00

These fifteen stories bring to life a realm of characters who long for love, wrestle with art, and cling to life's possibilities by their bloody fingernails. - Margaret D. McGee, author of Stumbling Toward God

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about the book      about the author      excerpts      catalogue info

About the Book The feature these fifteen diverse stories have in common is the humor that comes of pushing the reality of ordinary life just a few inches over the edge. In the first story, Duke Drunk in the Driveway, a family funeral turns into a double funeral seen through the eyes of a little girl, Gwennie, who also tells the story in Webs. Family shames and secrets are observed by a sharp-eyed child whose parents each try to win her allegiance against the other. The Knitting Nancy and Pastures White with Clover are both told by women at the other end of life, one celebrating her 80th birthday by imagining inviting people from all her old address books to a party, the other wheeling out of the nursing home to go searching for her Own True Love. The real world looks familiar enough in Ephesus, New Jersey. Here a young wife, cowed by the moral correctness of her husband, gets help from the ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, as she takes her own stand. In Gorgonzola Suns a painter is encouraged by her husband through a bad day at an art fair. A letter carrier visists Alaska, in The Frontier, where his dream of eagles helps him break his attachment to a fickle woman. A grieving father in Concordia awaits the arrival of his paranoid son, trying desperately to stay in the present moment and not be overcome by memories of the past and worries of the future. Reality begins to escape the envelope in When the Gift Fits, when a young man finds himself the recipient of a mysterious gift that will teach him something he needs to know as he discovers its meaning. The mother of an endless brood of children escapes her family in Amelioration to live in a mini-warehouse. The next two stories in this collection are written as though the world were perfectly ordinary, but is it? A young man in The Almost Perfect Flaw discovers that his attraction to the perfect woman, who is "frail and light enough to carry in his arms with her long, dark hair swinging down over his elbow-- stricken down in youth by a death that did not leave marks." Longing to be respectable, he has to settle for a woman who is only almost perfect. The heroine of Change at the Fortune Cookie Factory inherits the family business and enhances both divisions, dough and fortunes, far beyond what her parents had accomplished. In the last two stories we move into a more altered realm. The Other Real World begins when a woman gives birth to twins, one of which is a bear cub. Raising the twins carries her into a realm of possibility other than city government and shopping malls. And the narrator of Melanchthon and the Process Server tries to save her numerous babies from disappearing from a house with sixty-five people living in it. "I can believe that there are already sixty-five only by counting them as they leave each morning to forage for their contributions to the daily soup. It is not possible. I compared the area of the house with the area of a person lying down multiplied by sixty-five; it is not possible. But there they go, out the door with their foraging implements: knives, hooks, nets, ropes, a Bible, a can of Dog-Away by which we snatch choice bones, and a ragged five-dollar bil. Sixty-three, sixty-four, sixty-five." These stories deal with life's tough issues, but always the humor rescues them from heavy solemnity.

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About the Author Marica Lewton, writing as Marcia Blumenthal, has published stories and poems in literary magazines and collections and is the author of a poetry chapbook, In the Heart of Town, Still Digging, published by Barnwood Press. She is also the author of an instructional memoir, Central Ink - A Soul's Quest through Dream Work and Art, which includes stories, poems, and pictures related to the dream work she did when recovering from a series of traumatic events. Central Ink is also to be published by Trafford Press. Marica Lewton lives in Port Townsend, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula.

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Excerpts

Duke Drunk in the Driveway

If there was trash in her family , my mama knew where is was, and although she never told me outright, I knew where it was too.

This was surprising, since none of her people did the things she pointed out as looking trashy: smoking in the street, being out with noisy people late at night, letting a sweat-stained bra show at the armpits of a sleeveless dress. Wearing lipstick so thick it smeared off on the rim of a glass, or a skirt that rode up over your knees when you sat, or high-heeled shoes with ankle straps. Having peroxided hair that hung down in a big brassy fluff.

Mama's sisters agreed. They would get together on Saturdays at Hallie's house and sit around their cups of tan coffee and talk about people. My father didn't go to the Saturday gatherings; this was during the war and he was working six days a week at the plant. My cousins and I would listen to the sisters run people down for a while, then go play outside, and when we came back, they would still be talking.

The question of trash in Mama's family, however, had nothing to do with being trashy-looking. It had to do with things like divorces and mortgages and, as I learned much later, affairs and abortions. On a lesser level it had to do with having a husband who got drunk and carried on. It had to do with leaving food out on the table for the flies to walk on, and keeping one glass at the sink for everyone to drink out of, and having too many dogs-- and too many fleas.

My knowledge of this was not conscious but inherent, like the knowledge of mathematics. It was there, but bringing it to consciousness took effort, and that, of course, took time.

It took putting two and two together. Mama had always told me that my father thought her people were trashy. "Just because we like to laugh and sing and we don't walk around with nails between our teeth," she said. But I figured out that is wasn't the laughing and the singing she was worried about; it was those other things, the things she told me not to tell. "Don't tell Daddy," she would say, if there was talk about hard luck with money at Hallie's on Saturday. Or "Don't saying anything about what happened," if Hallie's husband Duke was loafing around in his undershirt drunk as a skunk. I knew that the things I wasn't supposed to mention were the evidences of real trash, and being trashy-looking was different.

Being trashy-looking was different from being ugly-looking too. If you looked trashy,a ll you had to do was change your ways, but if you were ugly-looking, you'd better shoot yourself. That was what the sisters said. If we were out on the porch and someone went by that was ugly-looking, one of them would say, "If I looked like that, I'd shoot myself, wouldn't you?"

I thought about that a lot, growing up, checking mirrors.

One of Mama's sisters was ugly-looking, with a face like a Pekinese and brown crooked teeth. That was Aunt Hallie. She was not willing to shoot herself, however. She compromised and said that when she died, she would have herself cremated. "I don't want people lining up at my casket looking at my ol' ugly face," she said.

But even that compromise was called into question when Hallie got liver cancer and thought she might have to follow through.

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From the Frontier

Mr. Liveright's right shoulder had a habit of twitching outside his control, agitating at irregular intervals like a Mexican jumping bean. When he was at home puttering or watching TV, it would be quiet, unless the post office happened to flash across his mind, when it would give a little hop to remind him of his station in life. But it did its serious jerking when he was trying to rise above his station, or else at times like now when it had a long day's work carrying a mail bag to look forward to.

Monday was his heaviest day and today was even heavier than most with first of the month bills to deliver. The route was up on the bill and longer than anyone else's- a reward for seniority, he supposed. With his shoulder twitching a counterpoint to the country-western blaring from someone's radio, he stood at his case, sequencing mail and daydreaming about the possibility of a transfer to some illiterate village that shrank each year.

Jim Simpson brought him a load of flats in a canvas cart and walked away without even stopping to torment him. It was always this way on Monday, everyone slack and dull till they woke up. Everyone except Mr. Liveright, who took pride in being cheerful even when his heartburn of resentment simmered.

What did he have to be cheerful about? If the early bird gobbled worms and thrived, then rising before daylight all these years ought to have given him, with is innate potential, a more enviable wing span than he had. He smiled a lot around the post office, a teeth-showing grimace of irritation at the failings of his fellow man, followed by a chuckle to show the fellow man that he was not going to be dangerous this time.

Nights had been late and mornings early recently: from one to five, two to five, sometimes three to five, all because of Plum, who could one night promise the good life and the next night threaten the ax, and every night keep him up late. How she could alternate the good life and the ax month after month without fully delivering either he did not understand. She was an enigma unlike anyone else in his experience.

Plum knew how to live. She had style. Zest. She made it a practice to suck the juices out of life, like rare fruit at the market, pomegranate and kiwi and mango. She knew how to find the best things: the restaurant about to be rated four star, the unknown singer who would soon cut a golden record. She might sniff out a play in a broken-down attic on Ottlesby Avenue where a wino was playing Lear. If anyone else had found such a thing, it would have been a sick joke, but Plum's Lear, this stumbling wretch, would be the real Lear at last. She would dry him out and steer him into a glorious career, world-wide, and when he died, having fulfilled his potential at last, they would put him in a crypt next to Shakespeare. That's the kind of woman she was.

And she was willing to share her knowledge of the good life with him, Seaton Liveright, to point out his areas of inadequacy and outline a program for his development. She was making him into the man he was born to be- the man he really wanted to be- and as soon as he had absorbed her lessons, she would marry him and his declining years would be secure in the enjoyment of the good life.

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The Almost Perfect Flaw

Every man finds himself unaccountably attracted to certain imperfections in women. Indeed, women with bony feet, fat bottoms or thin hair, and every grotesquery in between, do find partners, proving that no flaw exists without admirers. Usually the defect is slight: a mole, a malocclusion--perhaps even a strange pigmentation-- but occasionally it is so exaggerated as to be the woman's only noteworthy characteristic. Where the magnetism originates, no one knows.

Billy Malkin, too, had his taste in women, through his circumspect life at the bank did not permit him to indulge it satisfactorily. Hardly a day passed without the other tellers, older women, all of them, teasing him about settling down with some nice young lady, cackling at him when the pretty girls ignored the shorter lines at their windows so as to get their paychecks cashed by a young man with possibilites. They needn't have pushed it, because it was the respectable thing to do, and Billy wanted badly to be respectable. But he was powerless. The Friday girls gathering their energy for the weekend terrified him. They were not at all to his taste.

The woman Billy dreamed of was a perfect doll of a girl who never spoke, small and thus appealing, for Billy always felt himself shrivel in the presence of large, lively girls with their loud laughter and pushy ways. His girl would be frail and light enough to carry in his arms with her long, dark swinging down over his elbows-- and she would have been stricken in youth by a death that did not leave marks.

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The Other Real World

When the new mother had healed enough from the shock of the double birth to take the baby home from the hospital, she took the bear cub as well. They urged her to put him in a zoo, where a mother bear might adopt and nurse him. But the cub was her flesh and blood, just as the baby was, and she was going to keep him, difficult as it might be.

She dressed them like twins for a week or so: little shirts and diapers, knit gowns, bibs. But the cub had his own garment: soft bear fur was all he needed. So the baby got the wardrobe and the cub was allowed to be a bear.

She continued to care for them equally, however, and they both thrived. They slept in the room where she worked sewing shirt seams for the factory, the cub in a warm den under the baby's crib. As the months went by and the twins grew, the bars between them posed less and less of a barrier. First the bear learned to climb in, then the baby out. Inside the crib they played with rattles, the stuffed animals, the musical mobile that swung from the headboard. On the floor they played with the ball, the blocks, the rocking horse, and the chicken that clucked when dragged across the floor, all to the background hum of their mother's sewing machine.

One toy, however, that the bear failed to enjoy was the tall mirror attached to the door. The baby would look in it and smile, enchanted by her own image, while the bear smelled it and batted it with a paw, treating it like an inanimate piece of glass and growling to draw the baby's attention back to where he felt it most belonged, on him.

"How fortunate!" thought their mother. "Most little girls have no bear twin to remind them that the mirror isn't everything." And she took the big mirror away and substituted a small one.

The mother had an old fur coat of her mother's, shabby and disreputable, that she wore sometimes when she walked alone in the woods near her home. A coat to withdraw in, one for animal warmth, not human gaze. She pushed the twins into the woods in a double stroller. The path was just wide enough to accommodate them, no wider. No one else was ever there. The woman and her children had the whole woods to themselves.

"How fortunate!" she thought again. Taking the children in the stroller through the neighborhood had never been a rewarding experience. In the neighborhood they were on display, but in the woods the could be themselves.

The entrance to the woods was always the same, through a gate in the stone wall that encircled the small wild area in the midst of suburban sprawl, a little section of green saved from the endless shopping malls and tract houses. But once inside, the woman noticed that the path was different from one day to the next. At first, she attributed her changes to her unfamiliarity with the woods, but after enough walks, she realized that something else was involved, something she couldn't quite grasp.

For one thing, the woods grew larger. The path that took half an hour to travel the first time now stretched far enough to take half a day. "And I'm not walking anymore slowly," she thought.

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Melanchthon and the Process Server

Sixty-five people live in my house, none invited, none made comfortable with fresh linens and a place to hang a toothbrush, only one welcome and he the most tenuous of all. Many of them come seeking solace from the weather or their commitments and they leave when the weather changes or their commitments catch up with them. Sometimes one faction steps to the forefront and demands my attention, sometimes another. A few have been here since before I can remember. I have not control over their movements.

Two of the sixty-five are my parents. Though they are supposedly retired, they continue to interfere with my life and boss the house. They are old and their worst tendencies have taken them over. They quarrel, making lists of each others' faults, bitter lists, and instruct the members of the household in how they ought to behave, yet never agree on what proper behavior is. My father built the house, a sturdy fieldstone cottage, as a wedding gift for my mother. He points out its features and her lack of appreciation each time a newcomer arrives and at other times as well. My mother ignores his recitations and hums the threads of wisdom she learned as a girl. She sings in a clear voice about the way of the world, the evil and necessity of money and men. She tries to comfort me, about to bear another child without yet having found a proper father for it, but her comfort is an accusation.

My father brushes ash from the stones of the hearth and grumbles about the sloppiness of the young, which means me, and their sluttish ways, which also means me. He stands every morning, as the sun comes up, and intones the message of the day which he reads from the stained glass spider web window over the door. Long ago he built the hearth, hoisting the heavy stones into place with strength and cunning, and the spider web window, staining and placing each morsel of glass with fingers directed by the god within him. My father was a mighty man when he was young.

The spider web window is magnificent, fit for a cathedral, an oval held by eight silver guy wires. The scene in it changes with the cycles of the winds and the tides, with the solstices. Newcomers are impressed and rise early to hear my father's morning reading. My own reading is far from my father's: he sees riot yielding to rot, and approaching dust storms; he sees ashes sifting down to cover the world, while I have seen since last Friday nothing but ducks- ducks swimming, ducks falling from the sky, ducks grooming themselves and preening, ducks laying eggs, ducks taking flight. I tell no one of my window readings.

And there is no one to tell. Certainly not my parents, nor these people who live here. As I said, not one of the sixty-five was invited. The ones I invite never come--only these rag-tags who struggle through the snow or the desperate sunlight to reach my house which is strong but not adequate for such numbers. It is a great disappointment. I compare these people with the ones I invite, significant people who receive well worded invitations... "Dear Gov. So-and-So," I write, (or "Dr." or "Pres." or "Hon") "It brings me great pleasure to offer you the comfort of my home over the holidays," etc., ending with my best wishes for their continued good fortune. But my invitations are not acknowledged and my situation grows more urgent with each day.

Oh, if only I could find a proper father for my child before he is born! I sleep with each newcomer, hoping to add his qualities to the heritage of my child, but these people are not the kind I want. There is no richness, nothing but a dribble of mediocrity leaking out in their pathetic semen.

Only the newest, upon who I dare not place my hopes...But he will go, just as the others do, when he is ready; I have no control.

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Webs

We were at the supper table one evening the summer I was almost eight when my father, who had come home from the plant bent over and pale around the eyes, cleared his throat and broke the bad news.

"They laid off another bunch of men today," he said. His big hands mumbled over the knife and spoon, the fork. His forehead pinched together, and when Mother gave him a questioning look, he nodded yes.

Mother put down her chicken leg and closed her eyes without saying a word, without even wiping the grease off her fingertips.

My father saw her. His eyes fired up. "If you're praying. Don't bother." He sat up straighter and looked like his usual self. "It's not going to help. We're in a depression."

She flashed back, "I wasn't praying, but it might help more than you think. It's possible your attitude's not helping either."

I looked at my spinach and stopped taking breaths. That was what I did to avoid the air that had their fights in it.

"Stop it, Gwennie," said Mother aside to me.

"If there's a God up there, He sure doesn't care about the working man," said my father. "If you want to pray to a God like that, thanks anyway."

Mother closed her eyes again, the opened them. "This didn't happen through any fault of your own." It was not quite a question.

"You're damn right it didn't," he growled, "If the hogs on top hadn't swilled off the cream and gambled it in the stock market, there's be a cushion against hard times."

She reached out her hand towards him. "You'll find another job, Clark," she said. "We'll be all right. We can get along on what I make for a little while. There's the garden. And you can fish." She swallowed a lump of air. "And if a rainy day really comes, we can use some of the savings."

"Sure, and burn the furniture to keep warm."

Then they stopped talking to each other and concentrated on my noisy celery and my elbows and my foot that kept kicking the table.

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Catalogue Information

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