Alison McGhee

Light in the living room before dawn on a midwinter day: the fireplace with its flickering flames. A painting above the mantel, in shades of slate and coal and gray – a drummer and a guitarist and a bass player, all motion and youth. A soft yellow lamp haloing the saffron wall. A painting by the door, of God breathing light into Adam. The bluish glow of a laptop screen. The sun sliding slowly up over the roofs across the street, glinting on the aluminum flashing of the chimneys. A friend’s note shimmering up on the screen: “Did you see that spectacular moon this morning, like an eye closing, before it set?” A painting by the bookcase, of a small girl entering a deep wood, light from the distant sun filtering down to illuminate a clearing. Through the window, the double row of tiny white lights strung up around the porch, soon to blink out when the sun is truly up. This seven-hundred-year-old poem, “With that Moon Language,” by a Persian poet named Hafiz.

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud; otherwise,
someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us
to connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a full moon
in each eye that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language
what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?

How she wanted an older brother. He would take care of her. He would protect her. They would not have one of those I hate you, you suck relationships. They would be buddies. He would think she was a kick-ass little sister.  She would idolize him.

Her older brother would be great at sports, wise, sarcastic and funny, and at least six inches taller than her. He would have broad shoulders but he would be lean. He would play the guitar and write his own songs. He would wear old jeans and old flannel shirts and hiking boots. Occasionally, he would wear a blue bandana or a funny hat. So what if these are 70’s cliches? She wouldn’t care, and neither would her big brother.

When she was little, her big brother would take it upon himself to build her the treehouse of dreams. He would play basketball with her and coach her in the art of the pull-up, so that she would astound everyone with her pull-up score on the Presidential Fitness Test. If she was sad, her big brother would literally pick her and put her on his lap and cradle her.

That is her big brother, right there. See him? He’s the one who, when she gets to high school and he spots her in the hall, crosses over to scruff her head. She is mascot to his friends and they adopt her as their little sister too. When she gets older and prettier – she can’t stay unpretty like this forever, right? please tell her no – her big brother’s friends look at her one day as if they don’t recognize her, as if she’s a real girl.

But her big brother protects her. Nobody’s going out with my little sister unless I say so, he says. But he has good taste, he’s wise, remember, and the one friend of his that she really likes, the one she has secretly liked for many many years, is the one he gives the nod to.

And it all works out perfectly. And it keeps working out perfectly, all their lives long.

The treehouse stays solid and strong, and neither of them ever get too old or too brittle to climb up into it. And all her life she remains a pull-up whiz. At some point she too takes up the guitar and they sit up late at night making up songs that make them laugh, and they don’t care how their voices make everyone else wince. The Greek restaurant that he used to take her to when she was in junior high is still there, going strong, and all their favorite items are still on the menu, and the owners recognize them whenever they walk in together, even if years have passed.

This is the way it is, between her and her big brother, her imaginary big brother, the one she’s dreamed of her whole life long.

Why does your dog immediately do the downward dog every time he sees you pick up his leash? Why do so many people prefer their beverages icy cold? Why do you prefer yours room temperature? Is spontaneous combustion for real? Why are you so afraid to do a headstand? How did that magician in New Hampshire make that big birdcage full of doves disappear? Why are you the only person in the world unable to make it through either The Corrections or Middlesex? Why does the childhood best friend face of Cindy Schultz come shimmering up to you early each morning? Where is Cindy Schultz now? Why do you remember being born but not what came before? Why does the song Hey Ya by Outkast still make you happy every time you hear it? Whatever happened to those white pants you used to wear in middle school, the ones that said “Darwin Failed” and “Kilroy Was Here” on them? Why is it that just when you catch your breath and look around, your children are almost grown? Why do you often wake up not knowing how old you are or what year it is? Why do carbonated beverages give you a stomach ache? What would you do if there was an earthquake in your city and all the gas lines ruptured? Why does being the first to dip a spoon into a brand-new jar of peanut butter still make you so happy? Why does the ringing of a phone still make you feel as if something wonderful might be happening? Have you told your beloveds that you love them, and have you told them often, and recently, so that if you die unexpectedly on this very day, they will be able to say, “at least I always knew how much she loved me”?

Chinese Lanterns

She tried to grow them but
they wouldn’t.
She read the cautionary words –

they’ll take over
spread like wildfire
run for your life
poison will be necessary in the end –

but in the end nothing was necessary.
In her garden they refused to grow.
Like other things she feared her craving of,
in the end there was nothing left to crave or fear.

She wanted their papery orange boxes
crowding her empty garden,
filling her autumns with final flames.
She shouldn’t have studied, read up, considered so
carefully her ending-poison options.
She should’ve thrown caution to the spring winds and
bedded them in the richest compost, watered them every day,
not been so meager, afraid to let them know her secret:
I care.  I want you.
Hers is a fearful field, thought they,
and they, in scorn, withered.

If Chops Tick had a Facebook page and decided to join the rest of the Facebook world and write a 25 Random Things About Chops Tick list, this is what that list might look like.

1. I can be made of many materials, including plastic, jade, wood and ceramic.

2. I am sometimes connected by a rubber band or other type of hinge, the better to train small children into using me.

3. The wooden version of me is easiest to use.

4. The plastic version of me – not preferable – often can be found stacked in tall containers on restaurant tables in Taiwan and China.

5. I can be used to retrieve burnt toast from a plugged-in toaster when the owner of said toaster is too lazy to unplug it.

6. I can be used as a bun-holder by longhaired people skilled in bun-making.

7. If necessary, I can be used to poke out your eye.

8. Grown people have been known to toss me onto tables in frustration and demand a “fork instead of these damn sticks.”

9. I do not appreciate being referred to as “damn sticks.”

10. At one time, the jade version of me could be purchased for five yuan at a certain department store in Guangdong.

11. The jade version of me breaks easily, leading jade-version-owners to conclude that I may not be real jade. (What did you expect for five yuan?)

12. Do not run with me. You could poke your eye out (instead of someone else’s, which – again – may be necessary in times of extreme bodily danger).

13. In an emergency, the slender tip of me can be used to plug a tiny hole in a dike.

14. The slightly bigger end of me can be used to plug a slightly larger hole in a dike.

15. Chinese food should only be eaten with me, as it will not taste the way God intended it to taste with a fork, and why would you want to mess with God?

16. I can be placed inside nostrils to simulate walrus tusks.

17. In a pinch, I can be used to clean out an ear, but that is only if you are an ear-cleaning obsessive, and anyway, don’t you know that you should never put anything smaller than a finger into your ear?

18. You can find internet images of “chopstick bras,” a phenomenon not understandable to me.

19. You can use duct tape or super glue to attach hundreds of chopsticks to a long coat and go to a Halloween party dressed as Super Chopstick Coat Person.

20. I can be used as a bookmark if you don’t mind permanent damage to your book, and many of you don’t, which is unfortunate, but a comment on the age in which we live.

21. If you paint a tiny face on me, and then do the same to several others of me, you will have a little Chop Sticks family, and think how much fun you could then have playing Chop Sticks House.

22. If you cave in to  your inherent laziness and put the wooden version of me in a powerful dishwasher, expect that I may emerge bent, warped, or broken.

23. I can be used to stir cream into coffee.

24. Lazy children have been known to use a single stick to stab a dumpling through the middle rather than make the effort to learn how to use chopsticks as nature intended and nimbly pluck said dumpling up.

25. In a pinch, famous orchestra conductors can use me to conduct symphonies.

Once, a Redwing pottery mixing bowl was given to a young woman by an older woman she loved, respected and feared. At first the young woman didn’t much care for the bowl; it was thick, uneven, hairline cracks here and there. This was a long time ago, when the young woman didn’t appreciate thickness and unevenness – Redwing pottery-ness – the way she does now, in her middle age.

But she used the mixing bowl anyway, because she didn’t have many bowls, and she was both a maker of pancakes and a baker of cookies. After a few years the green bowl became her bowl of choice, to the extent that she didn’t enjoy baking nearly as much if the green bowl were dirty or already in use. The green bowl had grown on her, and she realized that she loved its uneven thickness, its heft, its muddled green glaze.

The bowl was used, always, for salads, and the mandarin oranges and toasted sliced almonds of a particular salad – the salad of choice for six or seven years in the ’90’s – were beautiful against its sloped green sides. When the woman had to move suddenly, and then moved again, and then again, the green bowl was transported carefully, wrapped in newspapers, carried by hand.

One day the woman looked at the green bowl and thought, “This will be a bowl that I pass on to one of my daughters.” Not because it had great monetary value, but because it had held so many batches of cookies, so many pancakes and so many salads.  Thousands of times, a wooden spoon had beat against the sides of the green bowl with that soft, soothing wooden sound. The warmth of kitchens, one after another, had always been with the green bowl.

Fifteen years after the bowl was given to the then-young woman, she mixed up a batch of chocolate chip cookies in it. When  the cookies were all baked, she left the bowl on the countertop, to return to it later and wash it. An hour later, a crash was heard from the kitchen, and she went running.

The dog of the house, butter-crazed, had managed to paw the bowl off the counter. The bowl fell to the tile floor and shattered. Shards of green lay under the table, the refrigerator, the oven.

The woman is not much of a crier, even at funerals and hospitals and in the face of heartbreak, her own or that of someone she loves. But the green bowl brought her to her knees. She doubted that her children would remember it at all.

Consider the dumpling, if you will. In all its incarnations – fried, steamed or boiled – it is the food of my dreams. In Taipei, in 1981, you could buy them for a penny apiece – yes, that’s $.01 apiece – and I ate them every day in a dumpling restaurant in Food Alley, where the tables were rickety, the floor was dirt (is that possible? am I just making that up? Honestly, I don’t think so), and each tabletop held a diner creamer filled with dried crushed chilis floating in peanut oil, soy sauce, and – at this particular restaurant – a coveted tiny bottle of sesame oil.

Take a look at that above paragraph. It was my goal to construct every sentence of this entire entry so that it contained a clause suspended in dashes – like this – but already I have grown tired of such a conceit, and if another such sentence appears from here on, it will not be intentional, but will have grown organically from the forest of surrounding words, the way a sunflower will suddenly appear halfway through the summer, just below the bird feeder. That was a very long sentence there, wasn’t it.

So anyway,  the various kinds of dumplings at this particular penny-apiece dumpling restaurant were listed on a blackboard. Since my knowledge of Chinese characters, even back then, when I used to work at them, isn’t good, I didn’t know what half the offerings were. Nor did I care, because what could be better than the tried and true pork+vegetable dumpling? Nothing, in my opinion. Were it not for the pig, I could easily be vegetarian, but the pig exists, and so do pork+vegetable dumplings, and there you have it.

Next week will mark our annual dumpling party in celebration of the Chinese New Year. Two giant bowls of dumpling filling will be prepared, one traditional and one veggie. Stacks of gyoza wrappers – because I’m too damn lazy and unskilled to make them myself – and here we have another dash-dash sentence,  don’t we, a triple dasher –  will stand at the ready. Dumpling eaters of all ages will try their hand at filling them, pinching them shut, curving them into the requisite crescent. The Dumpling Master will stand at the stove, frying and boiling batch after batch.

Chopsticks will be scattered about, as will small dipping bowls containing the hallowed mixture of soy sauce and rice vinegar and garlic and sesame oil.

A couple of pans of brownies will also stand at the ready, because brownies – as everyone knows (and here we go again; these sentences are out of control) – are the traditional dessert of the Han people.

In Minneapolis and St. Paul, the best dumplings can be found at my friend Ping’s house. Barring a visit to Ping’s kitchen, try the Grand Shanghai, on Grand Avenue, six blocks east of Snelling in St. Paul, and the Evergreen Taiwanese Restaurant on Eat Street in Minneapolis. In New York, try Prosperity Dumplings in Chinatown (5/$1.00!). Or if you find yourself near Madison Square Park, try the Rickshaw.

Yum. Duo chi yi dianr.

A Place that Wants Only to Take You

away from everything you know
into everything that was known.
You and your sisters, clutching berry boxes.
Brambles next to the pond, canes yearning over the creek.
Blackberries, thick tapered bodies
like bumble bees, darker than blue.
Work your way down the creek without knowing.
Drift away from this sister and that one.
Find your way into the heart of the patch.
This is where you are – a still summer day.
Your hair red-brown silk,
drifting waistward.
Sweet tang of berries
on your tongue.
Drone of insects.
Beat of sun.
Faraway days.

 

You were driving down the street toward your house when you saw a giant turtle at the crosswalk with a long stick protruding from his shell. For some reason, the sight of a giant turtle struggling to cross the street in the middle of the coldest January you can remember didn’t strike you as strange, although maybe it should have. You thought, “how odd, a giant turtle right there on my street,” and kept driving.

The second you drove past the giant wiggling turtle, you screeched the brakes and crunched to a stop in the middle of what you call a curb snowbank and the city of Minneapolis calls a plowed street. This was not a giant wiggling turtle, it was an old, large man in a dark green nylon parka, and he was fallen down onto his stomach. The long stick? His  cane, extended before him.

“Sir, what’s the best way for me to help you?”

“Up. Help me up.”

“No problem.”

You bent down and got your arms around his chest and lifted. He made it partway up and then lowered down again. He was heavy. It seemed that he had been struggling to get up for some time; he was shaky and he had a slightly panicky look in his eyes.  You remembered the woman you used to live down the street from, who had ripped her back apart trying to lift a patient out of a tub. You realized that you had no idea at all of how to get this man to his feet.

“Okay, this is what we’re going to do, sir. I’m going to lift slowly as you brace yourself on one leg. We’re going to rise together very steadily as you keep putting your weight on that leg. When we’re halfway up, you can put weight on your other leg as well.”

Where the hell did that come from? You know nothing about lifting heavy people off the ice and snow and onto their feet. Good God. And yet the words kept coming out of your mouth, soft and reassuring, as if you were some  kind of expert.

“Are you ready? On the count of three.”

He braced his weight on his left leg while you lifted slowly and steadily. Halfway up, he put weight on his other leg as well. Then he was fully up, and you handed him his walking stick.

“Can I give you a ride home, sir?”

No.

“Shall I walk you across the street?”

Yes.

Across the street you hobbled together, until he was on the other side and making his way down the poorly-shoveled sidewalk. Thank you, miss. You’re welcome, sir. Treacherous walking out here. Horrible winter. Stay warm. And off he went, and into your house you went, to stand by the fire and try to keep yourself upright and steady. For how long?

Here is a 250-year-old house in upstate New York.  Go on in and, if you dare, open the door that leads to the cellar. That’s right, cellar – no basement here. Make your way down the creaking steps, if you dare, and peer into the darkness, but since you probably don’t dare (and I don’t blame you one bit), I’d be happy to tell you what’s down there, or at least what I suspect is down there, since empirical evidence is hard to come by, here at the Homestead.

What’s down there, besides forgotten jars of 100-year-old home-canned bread and butter pickles? A whole bunch of dirt, scraps of wood, mouse skeletons, possibly a human skeleton for all I know, and a furnace. I think, anyway. So far as I know, it’s never been turned on.

That’s because we’re tough, here at the Homestead, and we heat our house with wood. Wood which we (meaning Don the Magnificent) cuts himself, legally (not always the case in upstate New York) from orange-circled trees up on state forest land in the Adirondacks.

Chainsaw the tree – ROAR – to its knees.

Chainsaw it into giant chunks.

Chainsaw it into smaller chunks.

And yet smaller chunks.

Gather ye daughters, while ye may, and, with their help, heave the chunks into  the back of the red pickup.

Head back to the homestead.

Gather ye daughters again, and, ignoring their whines, unload the chunks down by the big barn.

Take your maul and your wedge-thingie and set one of the chunks onto a giant stump and drive the wedge-thingie over and over into each of the the smaller chunks until they split into woodstove-size chunks. With daughters’ help, load up the woodstove-size chunks into the pickup and drive it up the dirt road to the Homestead.

Daughters, unload the chunks onto the porch. Form an assembly line and stack them the way I taught you.

Stack, stack, stack. This is my favorite part.  How I love to stack, and I’m good at stacking, and stack I do until that porch is filled with 6′ stacks of wood, until the small barn is filled with 6′ stacks of wood, until there is enough wood, an amount determined by Don the Magnificent.

Settle back and wait for winter, never a long wait in upstate New York, and then fire up the woodstove. Note, the woodstove, not the woodstoves. One woodstove to heat the entire house, which, being 250 years old, is beautifully insulated and airtight – kidding! – so that one woodstove in the kitchen is more than adequate to keep everyone toasty warm.

But what is this we see? Three daughters and their tiny brother, huddled zombie-like around the woodstove. Crouched, hunched, their hands under their armpits. This is where the furnace comes in, if only because it is never turned on. It could be turned on, or so we conjecture, but it is not. That is because we are upstate New Yorkers, and we are tough. Or at least Don the Magnificent is. The rest of us wouldn’t mind a hit of furnace every once in a while. Even once a month, say, during the winter months, which in upstate New York go from late August to early June.

Just a hint of fossil-fueled warmth? A whisper of petroleum-based relief?

Bwahahaha.