The Norton Introduction to Literature Shorter 12th Edition

14 FICTION: REA DING, RESPONDING, W RITING it breathing and munching on hay, and feel its slow, swaying movements dis- turbing the air around them. First one elder reached out and felt its flapping ear. “An elephant is soft but tough, and flexible, like a leather fan.” Another grasped its back leg. “An elephant is a rough, hairy pillar.” An old woman took hold of a tusk and gasped, “An elephant is a cool, smooth staff.” A young girl seized the tail and declared, “An elephant is a fringed rope.” A boy took hold of the trunk and announced, “An elephant is a water pipe.” Soon others were stroking its sides, which were furrowed like a dry plowed field, and others determined that its head was an overturned washing tub attached to the water pipe. At first each villager argued with the others on the definition of the elephant, as the traveler watched in silence. Two elders were about to come to blows about a fan that could not possibly be a pillar. Meanwhile the elephant patiently enjoyed the investigations as the cries of curiosity and angry debate mixed in the afternoon sun. Soon someone suggested that a list could be made of all the parts: the elephant had four pillars, one tub, two fans, a water pipe, and two staffs, and was covered in tough, hairy leather or dried mud. Four young mothers, sitting on a bench and comparing impressions, realized that the elephant was in fact an enormous, gentle ox with a stretched nose. The traveler agreed, adding only that it was also a powerful draft horse and that if they bought some of his wares for a good price he would be sure to come that way again in the new year. ••• The different versions of such a tale, like the different descriptions of the ele- phant, alter its meaning. Changing any aspect of the story will inevitably change how it works and what it means to the listener or reader. For example, most ver- sions of this story feature not an entire village of blind people (as this version does), but a small group of blind men who claim to be wiser than their sighted neighbors. These blind men quarrel endlessly because none of them can see; none can put together all the evidence of all their senses or all the elephant’s various parts to create a whole. Such traditional versions of the story criticize people who are too proud of what they think they know; these versions imply that sighted people would know better what an elephant is. However, other versions of the tale, like the one above, are set in an imaginary “country” of the blind. This setting changes the emphasis of the story from the errors of a few blind wise men to the value and the insufficiency of any one person’s perspective. For though it’s clear that the various members of the community in this version will never agree entirely on one interpretation of (or story about) the elephant, they do not let themselves get bogged down in endless dispute. Instead they compare and combine their various stories and “readings” in order to form a more satisfying, holistic under- standing of the wonder in their midst. Similarly, listening to others’ different inter- pretations of stories, based on their different perspectives, can enhance your experience of a work of literature and your skill in responding to new works. Just as stories vary depending on who is telling them, so their meaning varies depending on who is responding to them. In the elephant story, the villagers pay attention to what the tail or the ear feels like, and then they draw on comparisons to what they already know. But ultimately, the individual interpretations of the elephant depend on what previous experiences each villager brings to bear (of pillars, water

FICTION: READING, RESPONDING, WRITING 15 pipes, oxen, and dried mud, for example), and also on where (quite literally) he or she stands in relation to the elephant. In the same way, readers participate in re- creating a story as they interpret it. When you read a story for the first time, your response will be informed by other stories you have heard and read as well as your expectations for this kind of story. To grapple with what is new in any story, start by observing one part at a time and gradually trying to understand how those parts work together to form a whole. As you make sense of each new piece of the picture, you adjust your expectations about what is yet to come. When you have read and grasped it as fully as possible, you may share your interpretation with other readers, discussing different ways of seeing the story. Finally, you might express your reflec- tive understanding in writing—in a sense, telling your story about the work. Questions about the Elements of Fiction • Expectations: What do you expect? ° from the title? from the first sentence or paragraph? ° after the first events or interactions of characters? ° as the conflict is resolved? • What happens in the story? (See ch. 1.) ° Do the characters or the situation change from the beginning to the end? ° Can you summarize the plot? Is it a recognizable kind or genre of story? • How is the story narrated? (See ch. 2.) ° Is the narrator identified as a character? ° Is it narrated in the past or present tense? ° Is it narrated in the first, second, or third person? ° Do you know what every character is thinking, or only some characters, or none? • Who are the characters? (See ch. 3.) ° Who is the protagonist(s) (hero, heroine)? ° Who is the antagonist(s) (villain, opponent, obstacle)? ° Who are the other characters? What is their role in the story? ° Do your expectations change with those of the characters, or do you know more or less than each of the characters? • What is the setting of the story? (See ch. 4.) ° When does the story take place? ° Where does it take place? ° Does the story move from one setting to another? Does it move in one direction only or back and forth in time and place? • What do you notice about how the story is written? ° What is the style of the prose? Are the sentences and the vocabulary simple or complex? ° Are there any images, figures of speech or symbols? (See ch. 5.) ° What is the tone or mood? Does the reader feel sad, amused, worried, curious? • What does the story mean? Can you express its theme or themes? (See ch. 6.) ° Answers to these big questions may be found in many instances in your answers to the previous questions. The story’s meaning or theme depends on all its features.

16 FICTION: REA DING, RESPONDING, W RITING READING AND RESPONDING TO FICTION When imaginary events are acted out onstage or onscreen, our experience of those events is that of being a witness to them. In contrast, prose fiction, whether oral or written, is relayed to us by someone. Reading it is more like hearing what hap- pened after the fact than witnessing it before our very eyes. The teller, or narra- tor, of fiction addresses a listener or reader, often referred to as the audience. How much or how little we know about the characters and what they say or do depends on what a narrator tells us. You should read a story attentively, just as you would listen attentively to some- one telling a story out loud. This means limiting distractions and interruptions; you should take a break from social networking and obtrusive music. Literary prose, as well as poetry, works with the sounds as well as meanings of words, just as film works with music and sound as well as images. Be prepared to mark up the text and to make notes. While reading and writing, you should always have a good college-level diction- ary on hand so that you can look up any unfamiliar terms. In the era of the Inter- net it’s especially easy to learn more about any word or concept, and doing so can help enrich your reading and writing. Another excellent resource is the Oxford English Dictionary, available in the reference section of most academic libraries or on their websites, which reveals the wide range of meanings words have had over time. Words in English always have a long story to tell because over the centuries so many languages have contributed to our current vocabulary. It’s not uncommon for meanings to overlap or even reverse themselves. The following short short story is a contemporary work. As in The Elephant in the Village of the Blind, this narrator gives us a minimal amount of informa- tion, merely observing the characters’ different perceptions and interpretations of things they see during a cross-country car trip. As you read the story, pay attention to your expectations, drawing on your personal experience as well as such clues as the title; the characters’ opinions, behavior, and speech; specifics of setting (time and place); and any repetitions or changes. When and how does the story begin to challenge and change your initial expectations? You can use the questions above to guide your reading of any story and help you focus on some of its important features. LINDA BREWER 20/20 B y the time they reached Indiana, Bill realized that Ruthie, his driving com- panion, was incapable of theoretical debate. She drove okay, she went halves on gas, etc., but she refused to argue. She didn’t seem to know how. Bill was used to East Coast women who disputed everything he said, every step of the way. Ruthie stuck to simple observation, like “Look, cows.” He chalked it up to the fact that she was from rural Ohio and thrilled to death to be anywhere else. She didn’t mind driving into the setting sun. The third evening out, Bill rested his eyes while she cruised along making the occasional announcement. “Indian paintbrush. A golden eagle.”

FICTION: RE A DING, RESPONDING, W RITING 17 Miles later he frowned. There was no Indian paintbrush, that he knew of, near Chicago. The next evening, driving, Ruthie said, “I never thought I’d see a Bigfoot in 5 real life.” Bill turned and looked at the side of the road streaming innocently out behind them. Two red spots winked back—reflectors nailed to a tree stump. “Ruthie, I’ll drive,” he said. She stopped the car and they changed places in the light of the evening star. “I’m so glad I got to come with you,” Ruthie said. Her eyes were big, blue, and capable of seeing wonderful sights. A white buffalo near Fargo. A UFO above Twin Falls. A handsome genius in the person of Bill himself. This last vision came to her in Spokane and Bill decided to let it ride. 1996 ••• SAMPLE WRITING: ANNOTATION AND NOTES ON “20/20” Now re-read the story, along with the brief note one reader made in the margins, based on the questions in the box on page 15. The reader then expanded these annotations into longer, more detailed notes. These notes could be organized and expanded into a response paper on the story. Some of your insights might even form the basis for a longer essay on one of the elements of the story. Like “20/20 20/20 hindsight” or perfect vision? By the time they reached Indiana, Bill realized that Ruthie, his Also like the way driving companion, was incapable of theoretical debate. She drove Bill and Ruthie go okay, she went halves on gas, etc., but she refused to argue. She didn’t 50/50 on the trip, and see things in two different ways. Bill’s doubts about seem to know how. Bill was used to East Coast women who disputed Ruthie. Is he everything he said, every step of the way. Ruthie stuck to simple reliable? Does she observation, like “Look, cows.” He chalked it up to the fact that she “refuse” or not was from rural Ohio and thrilled to death to be anywhere else. “know how” to argue? What’s her She didn’t mind driving into the setting sun. The third evening out, view of him? Bill rested his eyes while she cruised along making the occasional announcement. Bill’s keeping score; maybe “Indian paintbrush. A golden eagle.” Ruthie’s nicer, or has better eyesight. She notices things. Miles later he frowned. There was no Indian paintbrush, that he knew of, near Chicago.

18 FICTION: READING, RESPONDING, WRITING The next evening, driving, Ruthie said, “I never thought I’d see a Repetition, like a Bigfoot in real life.” Bill turned and looked at the side of the road folk tale: 2nd streaming innocently out behind them. Two red spots winked back— reflectors nailed to a tree stump. sunset drive, 3rd time she speaks. “Ruthie, I’ll drive,” he said. She stopped the car and they changed places in the light of the evening star. Not much dialogue in story. “I’m so glad I got to come with you,” Ruthie said. Her eyes were big, blue, and capable of seeing wonderful sights. A white buffalo near Bill’s only speech. Fargo. A UFO above Twin Falls. A handsome genius in the person of Turning point: Bill Bill himself. This last vision came to her in Spokane and Bill decided sees something he to let it ride. doesn’t already know. Repetition, like a joke, in 3 things Ruthie sees. Story begins and ends in the middle of things: “By the time,” “let it ride.” Initial Impressions Plot: begins in the middle of action, on a journey. Narration: past tense, third person. Setting: Indiana is a middling, unromantic place. Paragraph 1 Narration and Character: Bill’s judgments of Ruthie show that he prides himself on arguing about abstract ideas; that he thinks Ruthie must be stupid; that they didn’t know each other well and aren’t suited for a long trip together. Bill is from the unfriendly East Coast; Ruthie, from easygoing, dull “rural Ohio.” Style: The casual language—“okay” and “etc.”—sounds like Bill’s voice, but he’s not the narrator. The vague “etc.” hints that Bill isn’t really curious about her. The observation of cows sounds funny, childlike, even stupid. But why does he have to “chalk it up” or keep score? Paragraph 2 Plot and Character: This is the first specific time given in the story, the “third evening”: Ruthie surprises the reader and Bill with more than dull “observation.” Paragraph 4 Style, Character, Setting, and Tone: Dozing in the speeding car, Bill is too late to check out what she says. He frowns (he doesn’t argue) because the plant and the bird can’t be seen in the Midwest. Brewer uses a series of place names to indicate the route of the car. There’s humor in Ruthie’s habit of pointing out bizarre sights.

FICTION: READING, RESPONDING, WRITING 19 Paragraph 5 Character and Setting: Bigfoot is a legendary monster living in Western forests. Is Ruthie’s imagination getting the better of Bill’s logic? “Innocently” personifies the road, and the reflectors on the stump wink like the monster; Bill is finally looking (though in hindsight). The scenery seems to be playing a joke on him. Paragraph 6 Plot and Character: Here the characters change places. He wants to drive (is she hallucinating?), but it’s as if she has won. The narration (which has been relying on Bill’s voice and perspective) for the first time notices a romantic detail of scenery that Ruthie doesn’t point out (the evening star). Paragraph 7 Character and Theme: Bill begins to see Ruthie and what she is capable of. What they see is the journey these characters take toward falling in love, in the West where things become unreal. Style: The long “o” sounds and images in “A white buffalo near Fargo. A UFO above Twin Falls” (along with the words Ohio, Chicago, and Spokane) give a feeling for the wildness (notice the Indian place names). The outcome of the story is that they go far to Fargo, see double and fall in love at Twin Falls—see and imagine wonderful things in each other. They end up with perfectly matched vision. READING AND RESPONDING TO GRAPHIC FICTION You may approach any kind of narrative with the same kinds of questions that have been applied to 20/20. Try it on the following chapter of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. This best-selling graphic novel, or graphic memoir, originally written in French and now a successful film, relates Satrapi’s own experience as a girl in Iran through her artwork and words. Persepolis begins with a portrait of ten-year-old Satrapi, wearing a black veil, in 1980. The Islamic leaders of Iran had recently imposed religious law, including mandatory head coverings for schoolgirls. On September 22, 1980, Iraq invaded Iran, beginning a conflict that lasted until 1988, greatly affecting Satrapi’s childhood in Tehran (once known as Persepolis). The Iran-Iraq War was a precursor of the Persian Gulf War of 1990–91 and the Iraq War, or Second Gulf War, that began in 2003. This excerpt resembles an illustrated short story, though it is closely based on actual events. How do the images contribute to expectations, narration (here, tell- ing and showing), characterization, plot, setting, style, and themes? Read (and view) with these questions in mind and a pencil in hand. Annotating or taking notes will guide you to a more reflective response.

20 FICTION: READING, RESPONDING, WRITING MAR JANE SATR API (b. 1969) The Shabbat As the granddaughter of Nasreddine Shah, the last Quadjar emperor of Iran, Iranian-born Marjane Satrapi is a princess by birth and a self-declared paci- fist by inclination. Only ten years old at the time of the 1979 Islamist revolution, she was reportedly expelled at age fourteen from her French-language school after hitting a principal who demanded she stop wearing jewelry. Fearing for her safety, Satrapi’s secularist parents sent her to Vienna, Austria, where she would remain until age eighteen, when she returned to Iran to attend college. After a brief marriage ended in divorce, Satrapi moved to France in 1994, where her graphic memoir, Persepo- lis, was published to great acclaim in 2000. Subsequently translated into numerous languages, it appeared in the United States as Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003) and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (2004). A 2007 animated movie version was nominated for an Academy Award in 2008. Satrapi’s other works are Embroideries (2005), which explores Iranian women’s views of sex and love through a conversation among Satrapi’s female relatives; Chicken with Plums (2006), which tells the story of both the 1953 CIA-backed Iranian coup d’état and the last days of Satrapi’s great- uncle, a musician who committed suicide; and several children’s books.

Shabbat: sabbath (Hebrew).





The Shah: the shah, or king, of Iran was deposed in 1979, the beginning of what was soon known as the Islamic Revolution under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini (1900–89). An ayatollah is a high-ranking cleric in the Shia branch of Islam to which most Iranians adhere.







2000

FICTION: READING, RESPONDING, WRITING 29 KEY CONCEPTS As you read, respond to, and write about fiction, some key terms and concepts may be useful in comparing or distinguishing different kinds of stories. Stories may be oral rather than written down, and they may be of different lengths. They may be based on true stories or completely invented. They may be written in verse rather than prose, or they may be created in media other than the printed page. STORY AND NARR ATIVE Generally speaking, a story is a short account of an incident or series of incidents, whether actual or invented. The word is often used to refer to an entertaining tale of imaginary people and events, but it is also used in phrases like “the story of my life”—suggesting a true account. The term narrative is especially useful as a gen- eral concept for the substance rather than the form of what is told about persons and their actions. A story or a tale is usually short, whereas a narrative may be of any length from a sentence to a series of novels and beyond. Narratives in Daily Life Narrative plays an important role in our lives beyond the telling of fictional stories. Consider the following: • Today, sociologists and historians may collect personal narratives to present an account of society and everyday life in a certain time or place. • Since the 1990s, the practice of narrative medicine has spread as an improved technique of diagnosis and treatment that takes into account the patient’s point of view. • There is a movement to encourage mediation rather than litigation in divorce cases. A mediator may collaborate with the couple in arriving at a shared perspective on the divorce; in a sense, they try to agree on the story of their marriage and how it ended. • Some countries have attempted to recover from the trauma of genocidal eth- nic conflict through official hearings of testimony by victims as well as defen- dants. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is an example of this use of stories. OR AL NARR ATIVE AND TALES We tend to think of stories in their written form, but many of the stories that we now regard as among the world’s greatest, such as Homer’s Iliad and the Old English epic Beowulf, were sung or recited by generations of storytellers before being written down. Just as rumors change shape as they circulate, oral stories tend to be more fluid than printed stories. Traditionally oral tales such as fairy tales or folktales may endure for a very long time yet take different forms in vari-

30 FICTION: READING, RESPONDING, WRITING ous countries and eras. And it’s often difficult or impossible to trace such a story back to a single “author” or creator. In a sense, then, an oral story is the creation of a whole community or communities, just as oral storytelling tends to be a more communal event than reading. Certain recognizable signals set a story or tale apart from common speech and encourage us to pay a different kind of attention. Children know that a story is beginning when they hear or read “Once upon a time . . . ,” and traditional oral storytellers have formal ways to set up a tale, such as Su-num-twee (“listen to me”), as Spokane storytellers say. “And they lived happily ever after,” or simply “The End,” may similarly indicate when the story is over. Such conventions have been adapted since the invention of printing and the spread of literacy. FICTION AND NONFICTION The word fiction comes from the Latin root fingere ‘to fashion or form.’ The earli- est definitions concern the act of making something artificial to imitate something else. In the past two centuries, fiction has become more narrowly defined as “prose narrative about imaginary people and events,” the main meaning of the word as we use it in this anthology. Genres of Prose Fiction by Length A novel is a work of prose fiction of about forty thousand words or more. The form arose in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as prose romances and adventure tales began to adopt techniques of history and travel narrative as well as memoir, letters, and biography. A novella is a work of prose fiction of about seventeen thousand to forty thousand words. The novella form was especially favored between about 1850 and 1950, largely because it can be more tightly controlled and con- centrated than a long novel, while focusing on the inner workings of a character. A short story is broadly defined as anywhere between one thousand and twenty thousand words. One expectation of a short story is that it may be read in a single sitting. The modern short story developed in the mid- nineteenth century, in part because of the growing popularity of magazines. A short short story, sometimes called “flash fiction” or “micro-fiction,” is generally not much longer than one thousand words and sometimes much shorter. There have always been very short fictions, including parables and fables, but the short short story is an invention of recent decades. In contrast with fiction, nonfiction usually refers to factual prose narrative. Some major nonfiction genres are history, biography, and autobiography. In film, documentaries and “biopics,” or biographical feature films, similarly attempt to

FICTION: RE A DING, RESPONDING, W RITING 31 represent real people, places, and events. The boundary between fiction and non- fiction is often blurred today, as it was centuries ago. So-called true crime novels such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) and novelized biographies such as Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004), about the life of the novelist Henry James, use the techniques of fiction writing to narrate actual events. Graphic novels, with a format derived from comic books, have become an increasingly popular medium for memoirs. (Two examples are Art Spiegelman’s Maus [1986, 1991] and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.) Some Hollywood movies and TV shows dramatize real people in everyday situations or contexts, or real events such as the assassination of Presi- dent John F. Kennedy. In contrast, historical fiction, developed by Sir Walter Scott around 1815, comprises prose narratives that present history in imaginative ways. Such works of prose fiction adhere closely to the facts of history and actual lives, just as many “true” life stories are more or less fictionalized. ••• The fiction chapters in this volume present a collection of prose works—mostly short stories—almost all of which were printed within the author’s lifetime. Even as you read the short prose fiction in this book, bear in mind the many ways we encounter stories or narrative in everyday life, and consider the almost limitless variety of forms that fiction may take. WRITING ABOUT FICTION During your first reading of any story, you may want to read without stopping to address each of the questions on page 15. After you have read the whole piece once, re-read it carefully, using the questions as a guide. It’s always interesting to compare your initial reactions with your later ones. In fact, a paper may focus on comparing the expectations of readers (and characters) at the beginning of a story to their later conclusions. Responses to fiction may come in unpredictable order, so feel free to address the questions as they arise. Looking at how the story is told and what happens to which characters may lead to observations on expectations or setting. Consideration of setting and style can help explain the personalities, actions, mood, and effect of the story, which can lead to well-informed ideas about the meaning of the whole. But any one of the questions, pursued further, can serve as the focus of more formal writing. Following this chapter are three written responses to Raymond Carver’s short story Cathedral. First, read the story and make notes on any features that you find interesting, important, or confusing. Then look at the notes and response paper by Wesley Rupton and the essay by Bethany Qualls, which show two different ways of writing about “Cathedral.”

32 FICTION: READING, RESPONDING, WRITING R AYMOND CARVER (1938–88) Cathedral Born in the logging town of Clatskanie, Oregon, to a  working-class family, Raymond Carver married at  nineteen and had two children by the time he was twenty-one. Despite these early responsibilities and a lifelong struggle with alcoholism, Carver pub- lished his first story in 1961 and graduated from Humboldt State College in 1963. He published his first book, Near Klamath, a collec- tion of poems, in 1968 and thereafter supported himself with visiting lectureships at the University of California at Berkeley, Syracuse University, and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, among other institutions. Described by the New York Times as “surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the twentieth century”; credited by others with “reviving what was once thought of as a dying literary form”; and compared to such literary luminaries as Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane, and Anton Chekhov, Carver often portrays characters whom one reviewer describes as living, much as Carver long did, “on the edge: of poverty, alcoholic self-destruction, loneli- ness.” The author himself labeled them the sort of “good people,” “doing the best they could,” who “filled” America. Dubbed a “minimalist” due to his spare style and low-key plots, Carver himself suffered an early death, of lung cancer, at age fifty. His major short- story collections include Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976), What We Talk about When We Talk about Love (1983), and the posthumously published Call if You Need Me (2001). T his blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night. His wife had died. So he was visiting the dead wife’s relatives in Con- necticut. He called my wife from his in-laws’. Arrangements were made. He would come by train, a five-hour trip, and my wife would meet him at the sta- tion. She hadn’t seen him since she worked for him one summer in Seattle ten years ago. But she and the blind man had kept in touch. They made tapes and mailed them back and forth. I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Some- times they were led by seeing-eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to. That summer in Seattle she had needed a job. She didn’t have any money. The man she was going to marry at the end of the summer was in officers’ train- ing school. He didn’t have any money, either. But she was in love with the guy, and he was in love with her, etc. She’d seen something in the paper: help wanted—Reading to Blind Man, and a telephone number. She phoned and went over, was hired on the spot. She’d worked with this blind man all summer.

R AYMOND CARVER Cathedral 33 She read stuff to him, case studies, reports, that sort of thing. She helped him organize his little office in the county social-service department. They’d become good friends, my wife and the blind man. How do I know these things? She told me. And she told me something else. On her last day in the office, the blind man asked if he could touch her face. She agreed to this. She told me he touched his fingers to every part of her face, her nose—even her neck! She never forgot it. She even tried to write a poem about it. She was always trying to write a poem. She wrote a poem or two every year, usually after something really impor- tant had happened to her. When we first started going out together, she showed me the poem. In the poem, she recalled his fingers and the way they had moved around over her face. In the poem, she talked about what she had felt at the time, about what went through her mind when the blind man touched her nose and lips. I can remember I didn’t think much of the poem. Of course, I didn’t tell her that. Maybe I just don’t understand poetry. I admit it’s not the first thing I reach for when I pick up something to read. Anyway, this man who’d first enjoyed her favors, the officer-to-be, he’d been her childhood sweetheart. So okay. I’m saying that at the end of the summer she let the blind man run his hands over her face, said goodbye to him, married her childhood etc., who was now a commissioned officer, and she moved away from Seattle. But they’d kept in touch, she and the blind man. She made the first contact after a year or so. She called him up one night from an Air Force base in Alabama. She wanted to talk. They talked. He asked her to send him a tape and tell him about her life. She did this. She sent the tape. On the tape, she told the blind man about her husband and about their life together in the military. She told the blind man she loved her husband but she didn’t like it where they lived and she didn’t like it that he was a part of the military-industrial thing. She told the blind man she’d written a poem and he was in it. She told him that she was writing a poem about what it was like to be an Air Force officer’s wife. The poem wasn’t finished yet. She was still writing it. The blind man made a tape. He sent her the tape. She made a tape. This went on for years. My wife’s officer was posted to one base and then another. She sent tapes from Moody AFB, McGuire, McConnell, and finally Travis, near Sacramento, where one night she got to feeling lonely and cut off from people she kept losing in that moving-around life. She got to feeling she couldn’t go it another step. She went in and swallowed all the pills and capsules in the medicine chest and washed them down with a bottle of gin. Then she got into a hot bath and passed out. But instead of dying, she got sick. She threw up. Her officer—why should 5 he have a name? he was the childhood sweetheart, and what more does he want?—came home from somewhere, found her, and called the ambulance. In time, she put it all on a tape and sent the tape to the blind man. Over the years, she put all kinds of stuff on tapes and sent the tapes off lickety-split. Next to writing a poem every year, I think it was her chief means of recreation. On one tape, she told the blind man she’d decided to live away from her officer for a time. On another tape, she told him about her divorce. She and I began going out, and of course she told her blind man about it. She told him every-

34 FICTION: READING, RESPONDING, WRITING thing, or so it seemed to me. Once she asked me if I’d like to hear the latest tape from the blind man. This was a year ago. I was on the tape, she said. So I said okay, I’d listen to it. I got us drinks and we settled down in the living room. We made ready to listen. First she inserted the tape into the player and adjusted a couple of dials. Then she pushed a lever. The tape squeaked and someone began to talk in this loud voice. She lowered the volume. After a few minutes of harmless chitchat, I heard my own name in the mouth of this stranger, this blind man I didn’t even know! And then this: “From all you’ve said about him, I can only conclude—” But we were interrupted, a knock at the door, something, and we didn’t ever get back to the tape. Maybe it was just as well. I’d heard all I wanted to. Now this same blind man was coming to sleep in my house. “Maybe I could take him bowling,” I said to my wife. She was at the draining board doing scalloped potatoes. She put down the knife she was using and turned around. “If you love me,” she said, “you can do this for me. If you don’t love me, okay. But if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I’d make him feel comfortable.” She wiped her hands with the dish towel. “I don’t have any blind friends,” I said. 10 “You don’t have any friends,” she said. “Period. Besides,” she said, “goddamn it, his wife’s just died! Don’t you understand that? The man’s lost his wife!” I didn’t answer. She’d told me a little about the blind man’s wife. Her name was Beulah. Beulah! That’s a name for a colored woman. “Was his wife a Negro?” I asked. “Are you crazy?” my wife said. “Have you just flipped or something?” She picked up a potato. I saw it hit the floor, then roll under the stove. “What’s wrong with you?” she said. “Are you drunk?” “I’m just asking,” I said. 15 Right then my wife filled me in with more detail than I cared to know. I made a drink and sat at the kitchen table to listen. Pieces of the story began to fall into place. Beulah had gone to work for the blind man the summer after my wife had stopped working for him. Pretty soon Beulah and the blind man had themselves a church wedding. It was a little wedding—who’d want to go to such a wedding in the first place?—just the two of them, plus the minister and the minister’s wife. But it was a church wedding just the same. It was what Beulah had wanted, he’d said. But even then Beulah must have been carrying the cancer in her glands. After they had been inseparable for eight years—my wife’s word, inseparable—Beulah’s health went into a rapid decline. She died in a Seattle hospital room, the blind man sitting beside the bed and holding on to her hand. They’d married, lived and worked together, slept together—had sex, sure—and then the blind man had to bury her. All this without his having ever seen what the goddamned woman looked like. It was beyond my understanding. Hearing this, I felt sorry for the blind man for a little bit. And then I found myself thinking what a pitiful life this woman must have led. Imagine a woman who could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one. A woman who could go on day after day and never receive the smallest compliment from her beloved. A

R AYMOND CARVER Cathedral 35 woman whose husband could never read the expression on her face, be it misery or something better. Someone who could wear makeup or not—what difference to him? She could, if she wanted, wear green eye-shadow around one eye, a straight pin in her nostril, yellow slacks and purple shoes, no matter. And then to slip off into death, the blind man’s hand on her hand, his blind eyes stream- ing tears—I’m imagining now—her last thought maybe this: that he never even knew what she looked like, and she on an express to the grave. Robert was left with a small insurance policy and half of a twenty-peso Mexican coin. The other half of the coin went into the box with her. Pathetic. So when the time rolled around, my wife went to the depot to pick him up. With nothing to do but wait—sure, I blamed him for that—I was having a drink and watching the TV when I heard the car pull into the drive. I got up from the sofa with my drink and went to the window to have a look. I saw my wife laughing as she parked the car. I saw her get out of the car and shut the door. She was still wearing a smile. Just amazing. She went around to the other side of the car to where the blind man was already starting to get out. This blind man, feature this, he was wearing a full beard! A beard on a blind man! Too much, I say. The blind man reached into the back seat and dragged out a suitcase. My wife took his arm, shut the car door, and, talking all the way, moved him down the drive and then up the steps to the front porch. I turned off the TV. I finished my drink, rinsed the glass, dried my hands. Then I went to the door. My wife said, “I want you to meet Robert. Robert, this is my husband. I’ve told you all about him.” She was beaming. She had this blind man by his coat sleeve. The blind man let go of his suitcase and up came his hand. 20 I took it. He squeezed hard, held my hand, and then he let it go. “I feel like we’ve already met,” he boomed. “Likewise,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. Then I said, “Welcome. I’ve heard a lot about you.” We began to move then, a little group, from the porch into the living room, my wife guiding him by the arm. The blind man was carry- ing his suitcase in his other hand. My wife said things like, “To your left here, Robert. That’s right. Now watch it, there’s a chair. That’s it. Sit down right here. This is the sofa. We just bought this sofa two weeks ago.” I started to say something about the old sofa. I’d liked that old sofa. But I didn’t say anything. Then I wanted to say something else, small-talk, about the scenic ride along the Hudson. How going to New York, you should sit on the right-hand side of the train, and coming from New York, the left-hand side. “Did you have a good train ride?” I said. “Which side of the train did you sit 25 on, by the way?” “What a question, which side!” my wife said. “What’s it matter which side?” she said. “I just asked,” I said. “Right side,” the blind man said. “I hadn’t been on a train in nearly forty years. Not since I was a kid. With my folks. That’s been a long time. I’d nearly forgotten the sensation. I have winter in my beard now,” he said. “So I’ve been told, any- way. Do I look distinguished, my dear?” the blind man said to my wife.

36 FICTION: READING, RESPONDING, WRITING “You look distinguished, Robert,” she said. “Robert,” she said. “Robert, it’s just so good to see you.” 30 My wife finally took her eyes off the blind man and looked at me. I had the feeling she didn’t like what she saw. I shrugged. I’ve never met, or personally known, anyone who was blind. This blind man was late forties, a heavy-set, balding man with stooped shoulders, as if he car- ried a great weight there. He wore brown slacks, brown shoes, a light-brown shirt, a tie, a sports coat. Spiffy. He also had this full beard. But he didn’t use a cane and he didn’t wear dark glasses. I’d always thought dark glasses were a must for the blind. Fact was, I wished he had a pair. At first glance, his eyes looked like anyone else’s eyes. But if you looked close, there was something dif- ferent about them. Too much white in the iris, for one thing, and the pupils seemed to move around in the sockets without his knowing it or being able to stop it. Creepy. As I stared at his face, I saw the left pupil turn in toward his nose while the other made an effort to keep in one place. But it was only an effort, for that eye was on the roam without his knowing it or wanting it to be. I said, “Let me get you a drink. What’s your pleasure? We have a little of everything. It’s one of our pastimes.” “Bub, I’m a Scotch man myself,” he said fast enough in this big voice. “Right,” I said. Bub! “Sure you are. I knew it.” 35 He let his fingers touch his suitcase, which was sitting alongside the sofa. He was taking his bearings. I didn’t blame him for that. “I’ll move that up to your room,” my wife said. “No, that’s fine,” the blind man said loudly. “It can go up when I go up.” “A little water with the Scotch?” I said. “Very little,” he said. 40 “I knew it,” I said. He said, “Just a tad. The Irish actor, Barry Fitzgerald? I’m like that fellow. When I drink water, Fitzgerald said, I drink water. When I drink whiskey, I drink whiskey.” My wife laughed. The blind man brought his hand up under his beard. He lifted his beard slowly and let it drop. I did the drinks, three big glasses of Scotch with a splash of water in each. Then we made ourselves comfortable and talked about Robert’s travels. First the long flight from the West Coast to Connecticut, we covered that. Then from Connecti- cut up here by train. We had another drink concerning that leg of the trip. I remembered having read somewhere that the blind didn’t smoke because, as speculation had it, they couldn’t see the smoke they exhaled. I thought I knew that much and that much only about blind people. But this blind man smoked his cigarette down to the nubbin and then lit another one. This blind man filled his ashtray and my wife emptied it. When we sat down at the table for dinner, we had another drink. My wife heaped Robert’s plate with cube steak, scalloped potatoes, green beans. I but- tered him up two slices of bread. I said, “Here’s bread and butter for you.” I swallowed some of my drink. “Now let us pray,” I said, and the blind man low- ered his head. My wife looked at me, her mouth agape. “Pray the phone won’t ring and the food doesn’t get cold,” I said. 45 We dug in. We ate everything there was to eat on the table. We ate like there was no tomorrow. We didn’t talk. We ate. We scarfed. We grazed that table. We

R AYMOND CARVER Cathedral 37 were into serious eating. The blind man had right away located his foods, he knew just where everything was on his plate. I watched with admiration as he used his knife and fork on the meat. He’d cut two pieces of meat, fork the meat into his mouth, and then go all out for the scalloped potatoes, the beans next, and then he’d tear off a hunk of buttered bread and eat that. He’d follow this up with a big drink of milk. It didn’t seem to bother him to use his fingers once in a while, either. We finished everything, including half a strawberry pie. For a few moments, we sat as if stunned. Sweat beaded on our faces. Finally, we got up from the table and left the dirty plates. We didn’t look back. We took ourselves into the living room and sank into our places again. Robert and my wife sat on the sofa. I took the big chair. We had us two or three more drinks while they talked about the major things that had come to pass for them in the past ten years. For the most part, I just listened. Now and then I joined in. I didn’t want him to think I’d left the room, and I didn’t want her to think I was feel- ing left out. They talked of things that had happened to them—to them!— these past ten years. I waited in vain to hear my name on my wife’s sweet lips: “And then my dear husband came into my life”—something like that. But I heard nothing of the sort. More talk of Robert. Robert had done a little of everything, it seemed, a regular blind jack-of-all-trades. But most recently he and his wife had had an Amway distributorship, from which, I gathered, they’d earned their living, such as it was. The blind man was also a ham radio opera- tor. He talked in his loud voice about conversations he’d had with fellow oper- ators in Guam, in the Philippines, in Alaska, and even in Tahiti. He said he’d have a lot of friends there if he ever wanted to go visit those places. From time to time, he’d turn his blind face toward me, put his hand under his beard, ask me something. How long had I been in my present position? (Three years.) Did I like my work? (I didn’t.) Was I going to stay with it? (What were the options?) Finally, when I thought he was beginning to run down, I got up and turned on the TV. My wife looked at me with irritation. She was heading toward a boil. Then she looked at the blind man and said, “Robert, do you have a TV?” The blind man said, “My dear, I have two TVs. I have a color set and a black- and-white thing, an old relic. It’s funny, but if I turn the TV on, and I’m always turning it on, I turn on the color set. It’s funny, don’t you think?” I didn’t know what to say to that. I had absolutely nothing to say to that. No opinion. So I watched the news program and tried to listen to what the announcer was saying. “This is a color TV,” the blind man said. “Don’t ask me how, but I can tell.” 50 “We traded up a while ago,” I said. The blind man had another taste of his drink. He lifted his beard, sniffed it, and let it fall. He leaned forward on the sofa. He positioned his ashtray on the coffee table, then put the lighter to his cigarette. He leaned back on the sofa and crossed his legs at the ankles. My wife covered her mouth, and then she yawned. She stretched. She said, “I think I’ll go upstairs and put on my robe. I think I’ll change into something else. Robert, you make yourself comfortable,” she said. “I’m comfortable,” the blind man said.

38 FICTION: READING, RESPONDING, WRITING 55 “I want you to feel comfortable in this house,” she said. “I am comfortable,” the blind man said. After she’d left the room, he and I listened to the weather report and then to the sports roundup. By that time, she’d been gone so long I didn’t know if she was going to come back. I thought she might have gone to bed. I wished she’d come back downstairs. I didn’t want to be left alone with a blind man. I asked him if he wanted another drink, and he said sure. Then I asked if he wanted to smoke some dope with me. I said I’d just rolled a number. I hadn’t, but I planned to do so in about two shakes. “I’ll try some with you,” he said. “Damn right,” I said. “That’s the stuff.” 60 I got our drinks and sat down on the sofa with him. Then I rolled us two fat numbers. I lit one and passed it. I brought it to his fingers. He took it and inhaled. “Hold it as long as you can,” I said. I could tell he didn’t know the first thing. My wife came back downstairs wearing her pink robe and her pink slippers. “What do I smell?” she said. “We thought we’d have us some cannabis,” I said. 65 My wife gave me a savage look. Then she looked at the blind man and said, “Robert, I didn’t know you smoked.” He said, “I do now, my dear. There’s a first time for everything. But I don’t feel anything yet.” “This stuff is pretty mellow,” I said. “This stuff is mild. It’s dope you can reason with,” I said. “It doesn’t mess you up.” “Not much it doesn’t, bub,” he said, and laughed. My wife sat on the sofa between the blind man and me. I passed her the number. She took it and toked and then passed it back to me. “Which way is this going?” she said. Then she said, “I shouldn’t be smoking this. I can hardly keep my eyes open as it is. That dinner did me in. I shouldn’t have eaten so much.” 70 “It was the strawberry pie,” the blind man said. “That’s what did it,” he said, and he laughed his big laugh. Then he shook his head. “There’s more strawberry pie,” I said. “Do you want some more, Robert?” my wife said. “Maybe in a little while,” he said. We gave our attention to the TV. My wife yawned again. She said, “Your bed is made up when you feel like going to bed, Robert. I know you must have had a long day. When you’re ready to go to bed, say so.” She pulled his arm. “Robert?” 75 He came to and said, “I’ve had a real nice time. This beats tapes, doesn’t it?” I said, “Coming at you,” and I put the number between his fingers. He inhaled, held the smoke, and then let it go. It was like he’d been doing it since he was nine years old. “Thanks, bub,” he said. “But I think this is all for me. I think I’m beginning to feel it,” he said. He held the burning roach out for my wife. “Same here,” she said. “Ditto. Me, too.” She took the roach and passed it to me. “I may just sit here for a while between you two guys with my eyes closed.

R AYMOND CARVER Cathedral 39 But don’t let me bother you, okay? Either one of you. If it bothers you, say so. Otherwise, I may just sit here with my eyes closed until you’re ready to go to bed,” she said. “Your bed’s made up, Robert, when you’re ready. It’s right next to our room at the top of the stairs. We’ll show you up when you’re ready. You wake me up now, you guys, if I fall asleep.” She said that and then she closed her eyes and went to sleep. The news program ended. I got up and changed the channel. I sat back down on the sofa. I wished my wife hadn’t pooped out. Her head lay across the back of the sofa, her mouth open. She’d turned so that her robe had slipped away from her legs, exposing a juicy thigh. I reached to draw her robe back over her, and it was then that I glanced at the blind man. What the hell! I flipped the robe open again. “You say when you want some strawberry pie,” I said. 80 “I will,” he said. I said, “Are you tired? Do you want me to take you up to your bed? Are you ready to hit the hay?” “Not yet,” he said. “No, I’ll stay up with you, bub. If that’s all right. I’ll stay up until you’re ready to turn in. We haven’t had a chance to talk. Know what I mean? I feel like me and her monopolized the evening.” He lifted his beard and he let it fall. He picked up his cigarettes and his lighter. “That’s all right,” I said. Then I said, “I’m glad for the company.” And I guess I was. Every night I smoked dope and stayed up as long as I 85 could before I fell asleep. My wife and I hardly ever went to bed at the same time. When I did go to sleep, I had these dreams. Sometimes I’d wake up from one of them, my heart going crazy. Something about the church and the Middle Ages was on the TV. Not your run-of-the-mill TV fare. I wanted to watch something else. I turned to the other channels. But there was nothing on them, either. So I turned back to the first channel and apologized. “Bub, it’s all right,” the blind man said. “It’s fine with me. Whatever you want to watch is okay. I’m always learning something. Learning never ends. It won’t hurt me to learn something tonight. I got ears,” he said. We didn’t say anything for a time. He was leaning forward with his head turned at me, his right ear aimed in the direction of the set. Very disconcerting. Now and then his eyelids drooped and then they snapped open again. Now and then he put his fingers into his beard and tugged, like he was thinking about some- thing he was hearing on the television. On the screen, a group of men wearing cowls was being set upon and tor- mented by men dressed in skeleton costumes and men dressed as devils. The men dressed as devils wore devil masks, horns, and long tails. This pageant was part of a procession. The Englishman who was narrating the thing said it took place in Spain once a year. I tried to explain to the blind man what was happening. “Skeletons,” he said. “I know about skeletons,” he said, and he nodded. 90 The TV showed this one cathedral. Then there was a long, slow look at another one. Finally, the picture switched to the famous one in Paris, with its

40 FICTION: READING, RESPONDING, WRITING flying buttresses and its spires reaching up to the clouds. The camera pulled away to show the whole of the cathedral rising above the skyline. There were times when the Englishman who was telling the thing would shut up, would simply let the camera move around over the cathedrals. Or else the camera would tour the countryside, men in fields walking behind oxen. I waited as long as I could. Then I felt I had to say something. I said, “They’re showing the outside of this cathedral now. Gargoyles. Little statues carved to look like monsters. Now I guess they’re in Italy. Yeah, they’re in Italy. There’s paintings on the walls of this one church.” “Are those fresco paintings, bub?” he asked, and he sipped from his drink. I reached for my glass. But it was empty. I tried to remember what I could remember. “You’re asking me are those frescoes?” I said. “That’s a good ques- tion. I don’t know.” 95 The camera moved to a cathedral outside Lisbon. The differences in the Portuguese cathedral compared with the French and Italian were not that great. But they were there. Mostly the interior stuff. Then something occurred to me, and I said, “Something has occurred to me. Do you have any idea what a cathedral is? What they look like, that is? Do you follow me? If somebody says cathedral to you, do you have any notion what they’re talking about? Do you know the difference between that and a Baptist church, say?” He let the smoke dribble from his mouth. “I know they took hundreds of workers fifty or a hundred years to build,” he said. “I just heard the man say that, of course. I know generations of the same families worked on a cathedral. I heard him say that, too. The men who began their life’s work on them, they never lived to see the completion of their work. In that wise, bub, they’re no dif- ferent from the rest of us, right?” He laughed. Then his eyelids drooped again. His head nodded. He seemed to be snoozing. Maybe he was imagining himself in Portugal. The TV was showing another cathedral now. This one was in Ger- many. The Englishman’s voice droned on. “Cathedrals,” the blind man said. He sat up and rolled his head back and forth. “If you want the truth, bub, that’s about all I know. What I just said. What I heard him say. But maybe you could describe one to me? I wish you’d do it. I’d like that. If you want to know, I really don’t have a good idea.” I stared hard at the shot of the cathedral on the TV. How could I even begin to describe it? But say my life depended on it. Say my life was being threatened by an insane guy who said I had to do it or else. I stared some more at the cathedral before the picture flipped off into the countryside. There was no use. I turned to the blind man and said, “To begin with, they’re very tall.” I was looking around the room for clues. “They reach way up. Up and up. Toward the sky. They’re so big, some of them, they have to have these supports. To help hold them up, so to speak. These supports are called buttresses. They remind me of viaducts, for some reason. But maybe you don’t know viaducts, either? Sometimes the cathedrals have devils and such carved into the front. Sometimes lords and ladies. Don’t ask me why this is,” I said. He was nodding. The whole upper part of his body seemed to be moving back and forth.

R AYMOND CARVER Cathedral 41 “I’m not doing so good, am I?” I said. 100 He stopped nodding and leaned forward on the edge of the sofa. As he lis- tened to me, he was running his fingers through his beard. I wasn’t getting through to him, I could see that. But he waited for me to go on just the same. He nodded, like he was trying to encourage me. I tried to think what else to say. “They’re really big,” I said. “They’re massive. They’re built of stone. Marble, too, sometimes. In those olden days, when they built cathedrals, men wanted to be close to God. In those olden days, God was an important part of everyone’s life. You could tell this from their cathedral-building. I’m sorry,” I said, “but it looks like that’s the best I can do for you. I’m just no good at it.” “That’s all right, bub,” the blind man said. “Hey, listen. I hope you don’t mind my asking you. Can I ask you something? Let me ask you a simple question, yes or no. I’m just curious and there’s no offense. You’re my host. But let me ask if you are in any way religious? You don’t mind my asking?” I shook my head. He couldn’t see that, though. A wink is the same as a nod to a blind man. “I guess I don’t believe in it. In anything. Sometimes it’s hard. You know what I’m saying?” “Sure, I do,” he said. “Right,” I said. 105 The Englishman was still holding forth. My wife sighed in her sleep. She drew a long breath and went on with her sleeping. “You’ll have to forgive me,” I said. “But I can’t tell you what a cathedral looks like. It just isn’t in me to do it. I can’t do any more than I’ve done.” The blind man sat very still, his head down, as he listened to me. I said, “The truth is, cathedrals don’t mean anything special to me. Noth- ing. Cathedrals. They’re something to look at on late-night TV. That’s all they are.” It was then that the blind man cleared his throat. He brought something up. 110 He took a handkerchief from his back pocket. Then he said, “I get it, bub. It’s okay. It happens. Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Hey, listen to me. Will you do me a favor? I got an idea. Why don’t you find us some heavy paper? And a pen. We’ll do something. We’ll draw one together. Get us a pen and some heavy paper. Go on, bub, get the stuff,” he said. So I went upstairs. My legs felt like they didn’t have any strength in them. They felt like they did after I’d done some running. In my wife’s room, I looked around. I found some ballpoints in a little basket on her table. And then I tried to think where to look for the kind of paper he was talking about. Downstairs, in the kitchen, I found a shopping bag with onion skins in the bottom of the bag. I emptied the bag and shook it. I brought it into the living room and sat down with it near his legs. I moved some things, smoothed the wrinkles from the bag, spread it out on the coffee table. The blind man got down from the sofa and sat next to me on the carpet. He ran his fingers over the paper. He went up and down the sides of the paper. The edges, even the edges. He fingered the corners. “All right,” he said. “All right, let’s do her.” 115 He found my hand, the hand with the pen. He closed his hand over my hand. “Go ahead, bub, draw,” he said. “Draw. You’ll see. I’ll follow along with

42 FICTION: READING, RESPONDING, WRITING you. It’ll be okay. Just begin now like I’m telling you. You’ll see. Draw,” the blind man said. So I began. First I drew a box that looked like a house. It could have been the house I lived in. Then I put a roof on it. At either end of the roof, I drew spires. Crazy. “Swell,” he said. “Terrific. You’re doing fine,” he said. “Never thought any- thing like this could happen in your lifetime, did you, bub? Well, it’s a strange life, we all know that. Go on now. Keep it up.” I put in windows with arches. I drew flying buttresses. I hung great doors. I couldn’t stop. The TV station went off the air. I put down the pen and closed and opened my fingers. The blind man felt around over the paper. He moved the tips of his fingers over the paper, all over what I had drawn, and he nodded. 120 “Doing fine,” the blind man said. I took up the pen again, and he found my hand. I kept at it. I’m no artist. But I kept drawing just the same. My wife opened up her eyes and gazed at us. She sat up on the sofa, her robe hanging open. She said, “What are you doing? Tell me, I want to know.” I didn’t answer her. The blind man said, “We’re drawing a cathedral. Me and him are working on it. Press hard,” he said to me. “That’s right. That’s good,” he said. “Sure. You got it, bub. I can tell. You didn’t think you could. But you can, can’t you? You’re cooking with gas now. You know what I’m saying? We’re going to really have us something here in a minute. How’s the old arm?” he said. “Put some people in there now. What’s a cathedral without people?” 125 My wife said, “What’s going on? Robert, what are you doing? What’s going on?” “It’s all right,” he said to her. “Close your eyes now,” the blind man said to me. I did it. I closed them just like he said. “Are they closed?” he said. “Don’t fudge.” “They’re closed,” I said. 130 “Keep them that way,” he said. He said, “Don’t stop now. Draw.” So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now. Then he said, “I think that’s it. I think you got it,” he said. “Take a look. What do you think?” But I had my eyes closed. I thought I’d keep them that way for a little longer. I thought it was something I ought to do. “Well?” he said. “Are you looking?” 135 My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything. “It’s really something,” I said. 1983

SAMPLE WRITING: READING NOTES Wesley Rupton wrote the notes below with the “Questions about the Elements of Fiction” in mind (p. 15). As you read these notes, compare them to the notes you took as you read Cathedral. Do Rupton’s notes reveal anything to you that you didn’t notice while reading the story? Did you notice anything he did not, or do you disagree with any of his interpretations? Notes on Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” What do you expect? • Title: The first words are “this blind man,” and those words keep being repeated. Why not call it “The Blind Man” or “The Blind Man’s Visit”? • The threatening things the husband says made me expect that he would attack the blind man. I thought the wife might leave her husband for the blind man, who has been nicer to her. • When they talk about going up to bed, and the wife goes to “get comfort- able” and then falls asleep, I thought there was a hint about sex. What happens in the story? • Not that much. It is a story about one evening in which a husband and wife and their guest drink, have dinner, talk, and then watch TV. • These people have probably drunk two bottles of hard liquor (how many  drinks?) before, during, and after a meal. And then they smoke marijuana. • In the final scene, the two men try to describe and draw cathedrals that are on the TV show. Why cathedrals? Though it connects with the title. • The husband seems to have a different attitude at the end: He likes Robert and seems excited about the experience “like nothing else in my life up to now.” How is the story narrated? • It’s told in first person and past tense. The husband is the narrator. We never get inside another character’s thoughts. He seems to be telling someone about the incident, first saying the blind man was coming, and then filling in the background about his wife and the blind man, and then telling what happens after the guest arrives. 43

44 SAMPLE WRITING • The narrator describes people and scenes and summarizes the past; there is dialogue. • It doesn’t have episodes or chapters, but there are two gaps on the page, before paragraph 57 and before paragraph 88. Maybe time passes here. Who are the characters? • Three main characters: husband, wife, and blind man (the blind man’s own wife has just died, and the wife divorced her first husband). I don’t think we ever know the husband’s or wife’s names. The blind man, Rob- ert, calls him “bub,” like “buddy.” They seem to be white, middle-class Americans. The wife is lonely and looking for meaning. The blind man seems sensitive, and he cares about the poetry and tapes. • The husband is sort of acting out, though mostly in his own mind. Asking “Was his wife a Negro?” sounds like he wants to make fun of black or blind people. His wife asks, “Are you drunk?” and says that he has no friends; I thought he’s an unhappy man who gets drunk and acts “crazy” a lot and that she doesn’t really expect him to be that nice. • It sounds like these people have plenty of food and things, but aren’t very happy. They all sound smart, but the narrator is ignorant, and he has no religion. All three characters have some bad or nervous habits (alcohol, cigarettes, drugs; insomnia; suicide attempt; divorce). What is the setting and time of the story? • Mostly in the house the evening the blind man arrives. But after the intro there’s a kind of flashback to the summer in Seattle ten years ago (par. 2). The story about the visit starts again in paragraph 6, and then the wife tells the husband more about the blind man’s marriage—another flash- back in paragraph 16. In paragraph 17, “the time rolled around” to the sto- ry’s main event. After that, it’s chronological. • We don’t know the name of the town, but it seems to be on the U.S. East Coast (five hours by train from Connecticut [par. 1]). It can’t be too long ago or too recent either: They mention trains, audiotapes, color TV, no Internet. No one seems worried about food or health the way they might be today. • I noticed that travel came up in the story. Part of what drives the wife crazy about her first husband is moving around to different military bases (par. 4). In paragraph 46, Robert tells us about his contact with ham radio operators in places he would like to visit (Guam, Alaska). The TV show takes Robert and the narrator on a tour of France, Italy, and Portugal. What do you notice about how the story is written? • The narrator is irritating. He repeats words a lot. He uses stereotypes. He seems to be informally talking to someone, as if he can’t get over it. But then he sometimes uses exaggerated or bored-sounding phrases: “this man who’d first enjoyed her favors,” “So okay. I’m saying . . . married her childhood etc.” (par. 4). His style is almost funny.

READING NOTES 45 • Things he repeats: Paragraphs 2 and 3: “She told me” (3 times), “he could touch her face . . . he touched his fingers to every part of her face . . .” (and later “touched her nose” and “they’d kept in touch”). “She even tried to write a poem . . . always trying to write a poem” (and 4 more times “poem”). The words “talk,” “tape,” “told” are also repeated. What does the story mean? Can you express its theme or themes? • The way the narrator learns to get along with the blind man must be important. The narrator is disgusted by blind people at first, and at the end he closes his eyes on purpose. • I think it makes a difference that the two men imagine and try to draw a cathedral, not a flower or an airplane. It’s something made by human beings, and it’s religious. As they mention, the builders of cathedrals don’t live to see them finished, but the buildings last for centuries. It’s not like the narrator is saved or becomes a great guy, but he gets past whatever he’s afraid of at night, and he seems inspired for a little while. I don’t know why the wife has to be left out of this, but probably the husband couldn’t open up if he was worrying about how close she is to Robert.

SAMPLE WRITING: RESPONSE PAPER A response paper may use a less formal organization and style than a longer, more formal essay, but it should not just be a summary or description of the work. Indeed, a response paper could be a step on the way to a longer essay. You need not form a single thesis or argument, but you should try to develop your ideas and feelings about the story through your writing. The point is to get your thoughts in writing without worrying too much about form and style. Almost everything in the following response paper comes directly from the notes above, but notice how the writer has combined observations, adding a few direct quo- tations or details from the text to support claims about the story’s effects and mean- ing. For ease of reference, we have altered the citations in this paper to refer to paragraph numbers. Unless your instructor indicates otherwise, however, you should always follow convention by instead citing page numbers when writing about fiction. Rupton 1 Wesley Rupton Professor Suarez English 170 6 January 2017 Response Paper on Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” Not much happens in Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral,” and at first I wondered what it was about and why it was called “Cathedral.” The narrator, the unnamed husband, seems to be telling someone about the evening that Robert, a blind friend of his wife, came to stay at their house, not long after Robert’s own wife has died. After the narrator fills us in about his wife’s first marriage and her relationship with the blind man, he describes what the three characters do that evening: they drink a lot of alcohol, eat a huge dinner that leaves them “stunned” (par. 46), smoke marijuana, and after the wife falls asleep the two men watch TV. A show about cathedrals leads the husband to try to describe what a cathedral looks like, and then the men try to draw one together. The husband seems to have a different attitude at the end: he likes Robert and seems excited about an experience “like nothing else in my life up to now” (par. 131). The husband’s way of telling the story is definitely important. He is sort of funny, but also irritating. As he makes jokes about stereotypes, you start to 46

RESPONSE PAPER 47 Rupton 2 dislike or distrust him. When he hears about Robert’s wife, Beulah, he asks, “Was his wife a Negro?” (par. 12) just because her name sounds like a black woman’s name to him. In three paragraphs, he flashes back to the time ten years ago when his wife was the blind man’s assistant and the blind man asked if he could touch her face. . . . She told me he touched his fingers to every part of her face. . . . She even tried to write a poem about it. . . . . . . In the poem, she recalled his fingers . . . over her face. In the poem, she talked about what she had felt . . . when the blind man touched her nose and lips. (pars. 2-3) The narrator seems to be going over and over the same creepy idea of a man feeling his wife’s face. It seems to disgust him that his wife and the blind man communicated or expressed themselves, perhaps because he seems incapable of doing so. When his wife asks, “Are you drunk?” and says that he has no friends, I got a feeling that the husband is an unhappy man who gets drunk and acts “crazy” a lot and that his wife doesn’t really expect him to be very nice (pars. 8-13). He’s going to make fun of their guest (asking a blind man to go bowling). The husband is sort of acting out, though he’s mostly rude in his own mind. There’s nothing heroic or dramatic or even unusual about these people (except that one is blind). The events take place in a house somewhere in an American suburb and not too long ago. Other than the quantity of alcohol and drugs they consume, these people don’t do anything unusual, though the blind man seems strange to the narrator. The ordinary setting and plot make the idea of something as grand and old as a European cathedral come as a surprise at the end of the story. I wondered if part of the point is that they desperately want to get out of a trap they’re in. I noticed that travel came up in the story. Part of what drove the wife crazy with her first husband was moving around to different military bases (par. 4). In paragraph 46, Robert tells us about his contact with ham radio operators in places he would like to visit (Guam, Alaska). The TV show takes Robert and the narrator on a tour of France, Italy, and Portugal. The way the narrator changes from disliking the blind man to getting along with him must be important to the meaning of the story. After the wife goes up to “get comfortable,” suggesting that they might go to bed, the story focuses on the two men. Later she falls asleep on the sofa between them, and the narrator decides not to cover up her leg where her robe has fallen open, as if he has stopped being jealous. At this point the narrator decides he is “glad for the company” of his guest (par. 84). The cooperation between the two men is the turning point. The narrator is disgusted by blind people at first, and at the end he closes his eyes on purpose. The two men try to imagine something and build something together, and Robert is coaching the narrator. Robert says, “let’s do her,” and then says, “You’re doing fine” (pars. 115, 118; emphasis added). I think it makes a difference that they imagine and draw a cathedral, not a flower or a cow or an airplane. It’s something made by human beings, and it’s religious. I don’t

48 SAMPLE WRITING Rupton 3 think the men are converted to believing in God at the end, but this narrow- minded guy gets past whatever he’s afraid of at night and finds some sort of inspiring feeling. I don’t know why the wife has to be left out, but probably the husband couldn’t open up if he was worrying about how close she is to Robert. The ideas of communicating or being in touch and travel seem connected to me. I think that the husband tries to tell this story about the cathedral the way his wife tried to write a poem. The narrator has had an exciting experience that gets him in touch with something beyond his small house. After drawing the cathedral, the narrator says that he “didn’t feel like I was inside anything” (par. 135). Though I still didn’t like the narrator, I felt more sympathy, and I thought the story showed that even this hostile person could open up. Rupton 4 Work Cited Carver, Raymond. “Cathedral.” The Norton Introduction to Literature, edited by Kelly J. Mays, shorter 12th ed., W. W. Norton, 2017, pp. 32-42.

SAMPLE WRITING: ESSAY Bethany Qualls wrote the following first draft of an essay analyzing character and narration in Carver’s Cathedral. Read this paper as you would one of your peers’ papers, looking for opportunities for the writer to improve her presentation. Is the tone consistently appropriate for academic writing? Does the essay maintain its focus? Does it demonstrate a steady progression of well-supported arguments that build toward a strong, well-earned conclusion? Is there any redundant or other- wise unnecessary material? Are there ideas that need to be developed further? For a critique and revision of this essay’s conclusion, see ch. 28, “The Literature Essay,” in the Writing about Literature section of this book. (For ease of reference, we have altered the citations in this essay to refer to para- graph numbers. Unless your instructor indicates otherwise, however, you should always follow convention by instead citing page numbers when writing about fiction. For more on citation, please refer to ch. 31.) Qualls 1 Bethany Qualls Professor Netherton English 301 16 January 2017 A Narrator’s Blindness in Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” A reader in search of an exciting plot will be pretty disappointed by Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” because the truth is nothing much happens. A suburban husband and wife receive a visit from her former boss, who is blind. After the wife falls asleep, the two men watch a TV program about cathedrals and eventually try to draw one. Along the way the three characters down a few cocktails and smoke a little pot. But that’s about as far as the action goes. Instead of focusing on plot, then, the story really asks us to focus on the characters, especially the husband who narrates the story. Through his words even more than his actions, the narrator unwittingly shows us why nothing much happens to him by continually demonstrating his utter inability to connect with others or to understand himself. The narrator’s isolation is most evident in the distanced way he introduces his own story and the people in it. He does not name the other characters or himself, referring to them only by using labels such as “this blind man,” “his wife,” “my wife” (par. 1), and “the man [my wife] was going to marry” (par. 2). Even after the narrator’s wife starts referring to their visitor as “Robert,” the narrator keeps calling him “the blind man.” These labels distance him from the other characters and also leave readers with very little connection to them. At least three times the narrator notices that this habit of not naming or really acknowledging people is significant. Referring to his wife’s “officer,” he 49

50 SAMPLE WRITING Qualls 2 asks, “why should he have a name? he was the childhood sweetheart, and what more does he want?” (par. 5). Moments later he describes how freaked out he was when he listened to a tape the blind man had sent his wife and “heard [his] own name in the mouth of this . . . blind man [he] didn’t even know!” (par. 5). Yet once the blind man arrives and begins to talk with the wife, the narrator finds himself “wait[ing] in vain to hear [his] name on [his] wife’s sweet lips” and disappointed to hear “nothing of the sort” (par. 46). Simply using someone’s name suggests an intimacy that the narrator avoids and yet secretly yearns for. Also reinforcing the narrator’s isolation and dissatisfaction with it are the awkward euphemisms and clichés he uses, which emphasize how disconnected he is from his own feelings and how uncomfortable he is with other people’s. Referring to his wife’s first husband, the narrator says it was he “who’d first enjoyed her favors” (par. 4), an antiquated expression even in 1983, the year the story was published. Such language reinforces our sense that the narrator cannot speak in language that is meaningful or heartfelt, especially when he tries to talk about emotions. He describes his wife’s feelings for her first husband, for example, by using generic language and then just trailing off entirely: “she was in love with the guy, and he was in love with her, etc.” (par. 2). When he refers to the blind man and his wife as “inseparable,” he points out that this is, in fact, his “wife’s word,” not one that he’s come up with (par. 16). And even when he admits that he would like to hear his wife talk about him (par. 46), he speaks in language that seems to come from books or movies rather than the heart. Once the visit actually begins, the narrator’s interactions and conversations with the other characters are even more awkward. His discomfort with the very idea of the visit is obvious to his wife and to the reader. As he says in his usual deadpan manner, “I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit” (par. 1). During the visit he sits silent when his wife and Robert are talking and then answers Robert’s questions about his life and feelings with the shortest possible phrases: “How long had I been in my present position? (Three years.) Did I like my work? (I didn’t.)” (par. 46). Finally, he tries to escape even that much involvement by simply turning on the TV and tuning Robert out. Despite Robert’s best attempt to make a connection with the narrator, the narrator resorts to a label again, saying that he “didn’t want to be left alone with a blind man” (par. 57). Robert, merely “a blind man,” remains a category, not a person, and the narrator can initially relate to Robert only by invoking the stereotypes about that category that he has learned “from the movies” (par. 1). He confides to the reader that he believes that blind people always wear dark glasses, that they never smoke (par. 43), and that a beard on a blind man is “too much” (par. 18). It follows that the narrator is amazed about the connection his wife and Robert have because he is unable to see Robert as a person like any other. “Who’d want to go to such a wedding in the first place?” (par. 16), he asks rhetorically about Robert’s wedding to his wife, Beulah. Misconceptions continue as the narrator assumes Beulah would “never receive the smallest compliment from her beloved,” since the compliments he is

ESSAY 51 Qualls 3 thinking about are physical ones (par. 16). Interestingly, when faced with a name that is specific (Beulah), the narrator immediately assumes that he knows what the person with that name must be like (“a colored woman,” par. 11), even though she is not in the room or known to him. Words fail or mislead the narrator in both directions, as he’s using them and as he hears them. There is hope for the narrator at the end as he gains some empathy and forges a bond with Robert over the drawing of a cathedral. That process seems to begin when the narrator admits to himself, the reader, and Robert that he is “glad for [Robert’s] company” (par. 84) and, for the first time, comes close to disclosing the literally nightmarish loneliness of his life. It culminates in a moment of physical and emotional intimacy that the narrator admits is “like nothing else in my life up to now” (par. 131)—a moment in which discomfort with the very idea of blindness gives way to an attempt to actually experience blindness from the inside. Because the narrator has used words to distance himself from the world, it seems fitting that all this happens only when the narrator stops using words. They have a tendency to blind him. However, even at the very end it isn’t clear just whether or how the narrator has really changed. He does not completely interact with Robert but has to be prodded into action by him. By choosing to keep his eyes closed, he not only temporarily experiences blindness but also shuts out the rest of the world, since he “didn’t feel like [he] was inside anything” (par. 135). Perhaps most important, he remains unable to describe his experience meaningfully, making it difficult for readers to decide whether or not he has really changed. For example, he says, “It was like nothing else in my life up to now” (par. 131), but he doesn’t explain why this is true. Is it because he is doing something for someone else? Because he is thinking about the world from another’s perspective? Because he feels connected to Robert? Because he is drawing a picture while probably drunk and high? There is no way of knowing. It’s possible that not feeling “inside anything” (par. 135) could be a feeling of freedom from his own habits of guardedness and insensitivity, his emotional “blindness.” But even with this final hope for connection, for the majority of the story the narrator is a closed, judgmental man who isolates himself and cannot connect with others. The narrator’s view of the world is one filled with misconceptions that the visit from Robert starts to slowly change, yet it is not clear what those changes are, how far they will go, or whether they will last. Qualls 4 Work Cited Carver, Raymond. “Cathedral.” The Norton Introduction to Literature, edited by Kelly J. Mays, shorter 12th ed., W. W. Norton, 2017, pp. 32-42.



Telling Stories AN ALBUM Is it human nature or human culture? Is it hardwired in our brains or inspired by our need to live with others in a community? Whatever the cause, people tell stories in every known society. Professional and amateur storytellers, as well as scholars in the humanities and sciences, have been paying more attention to the phenomenon of stories or narrative in recent decades. Online forums and organizations around the world are dedicated to a revival of oral storytelling, rather like the twentieth-century revival of folk music. Educators, religious lead- ers, therapists, and organizers of programs for the young or the needy have turned to various publications and programs for guidance on how the techniques of story- telling might benefit their clients. Stories are part of our everyday lives, and everyone has stories to tell. Perhaps you have heard the life stories broadcast every week on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition in conjunction with the StoryCorps project, which allows ordi- nary Americans to record their own interviews with friends or family (often in a traveling “studio” van) and have their recordings archived in the Library of Con- gress. Most likely you are familiar with blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube videos, and other means of producing or sharing some version of yourself, some aspect of your experience or your life. Authors of short fiction have often reflected on the irresistible appeal of stories by making storytelling part of the plot or action within their fiction. We include here three stories that do just that. As you read the stories, think about what each implies about how stories and storytelling work and what they can do for us. When and why do we both tell stories and listen to those of others? What do we derive from the act of telling or listening, as well as from the story itself? What makes a story compelling, worth listening to or even writing down? How might the sorts of choices we make in telling a story resemble those a fiction writer makes in writing one? As listeners or readers, how are our expectations of a story and our responses to it shaped by our knowledge of or assumptions about its teller? In what different ways might stories, whether oral or written, be “true”? 53

54 TELLING STORIES: AN ALBUM SHERMAN ALEXIE (b. 1966) Flight Patterns Sherman Alexie grew up with his four siblings on a reservation near Spokane, Washington, an experi- ence he once described as the “origin” of “everything I do now, writing and otherwise.” After attending high school in nearby Reardan, where he was the only Native American other than the school mascot, he earned a BA in American Studies from Washington State University and soon after published the first of over twelve collections of poetry, The Business of Fancydancing (1991). Named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, it also earned high praise from the New York Times Book Review, which hailed its twenty-six-year-old author as “one of the major lyric voices of our time.” Yet Alexie is perhaps better understood as an accomplished storyteller in verse and prose. His first collection of fiction, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), received a PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Book, which Alexie followed up over fifteen years later with a PEN/Faulkner Award for his fourth collection, War Dances (2010). In between have come novels—including Reservation Blues (1995), Flight (2007), and the National Book Award–winning young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2009)—as well as radio scripts and screenplays: Smoke Signals (1998) was featured at the Sundance Film Festi- val. A sometime stand-up comedian and four-time champion of the World Heavyweight Poetry Slam, he lives in Seattle, Washington, with his wife and two sons. A t 5:05 a.m., Patsy Cline fell loudly to pieces on William’s clock radio.1 He hit the snooze button, silencing lonesome Patsy, and dozed for fifteen more minutes before Donna Fargo bragged about being the happiest girl in the whole USA. William wondered what had ever happened to Donna Fargo,2 whose birth name was the infinitely more interesting Yvonne Vaughn, and wondered why he knew Donna Fargo’s birth name. Ah, he was the bemused and slightly embar- rassed owner of a twenty-first-century American mind. His intellect was a big comfy couch stuffed with sacred and profane trivia. He knew the names of all nine of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands and could quote from memory the entire Declaration of Independence. William knew Donna Fargo’s birth name because he wanted to know her birth name. He wanted to know all of the great big and tiny little American details. He didn’t want to choose between Ernie Heming- way and the Spokane tribal elders, between Mia Hamm and Crazy Horse, between The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Chief Dan George. William wanted all of it. Hunger was his crime. As for dear Miss Fargo, William figured she probably played the Indian casino circuit along with the Righteous Brothers, Smokey Robinson, Eddie Money, Pat Benatar, RATT, REO Speedwagon, and 1. Reference to country music singer Patsy Cline’s recording of “I Fall to Pieces” (1961). 2. American singer (b. 1949) best known for her recording of “Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.” (1972).

SHERMAN ALEXIE Flight Patterns 55 dozens of other formerly famous rock- and country-music stars. Many of the Indian casino acts were bad, and most of the rest were pure nostalgic entertain- ment, but a small number made beautiful and timeless music. William knew the genius Merle Haggard played thirty or forty Indian casinos every year, so long live Haggard and long live tribal economic sovereignty. Who cares about fishing and hunting rights? Who cares about uranium mines and nuclear-waste- dump sites on sacred land? Who cares about the recovery of tribal languages? Give me Freddy Fender singing “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” in English and Spanish to 206 Spokane Indians, William thought, and I will be a happy man. But William wasn’t happy this morning. He’d slept poorly—he always slept poorly—and wondered again if his insomnia was a physical or a mental condition. His doctor had offered him sleeping-pill prescriptions, but William declined for philosophical reasons. He was an Indian who didn’t smoke or drink or eat pro- cessed sugar. He lifted weights three days a week, ran every day, and competed in four triathlons a year. A two-mile swim, a 150-mile bike ride, and a full marathon. A triathlon was a religious quest. If Saint Francis were still around, he’d be a tri- athlete. Another exaggeration! Theological hyperbole! Rabid self-justification! Diagnostically speaking, William was an obsessive-compulsive workaholic who was afraid of pills. So he suffered sleepless nights and constant daytime fatigue. This morning, awake and not awake, William turned down the radio, chang- ing Yvonne Vaughn’s celebratory anthem into whispered blues, and rolled off the couch onto his hands and knees. His back and legs were sore because he’d slept on the living room couch so the alarm wouldn’t disturb his wife and daughter upstairs. Still on his hands and knees, William stretched his spine, using the twelve basic exercises he’d learned from Dr. Adams, that master prac- titioner of white middle-class chiropractic voodoo. This was all part of William’s regular morning ceremony. Other people find God in ornate ritual, but William called out to Geronimo, Jesus Christ, Saint Therese, Buddha, Allah, Billie Holi- day, Simon Ortiz, Abe Lincoln, Bessie Smith, Howard Hughes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joan of Arc and Joan of Collins, John Woo, Wilma Mankiller, and Karl and Groucho Marx while he pumped out fifty push-ups and fifty abdominal crunches. William wasn’t particularly religious; he was generally religious. Fin- ished with his morning calisthenics, William showered in the basement, suffer- ing the water that was always too cold down there, and threaded his long black hair into two tight braids—the indigenous businessman’s tonsorial special— and dressed in his best travel suit, a navy three-button pinstripe he’d ordered online. He’d worried about the fit, but his tailor was a magician and had only mildly chastised William for such an impulsive purchase. After knotting his blue paisley tie, purchased in person and on sale, William walked upstairs in bare feet and kissed his wife, Marie, good-bye. “Cancel your flight,” she said. “And come back to bed.” “You’re supposed to be asleep,” he said. 5 She was a small and dark woman who seemed to be smaller and darker at that time of the morning. Her long black hair had once again defeated its braids, but she didn’t care. She sometimes went two or three days without brushing it. William was obsessive about his mane, tying and retying his ponytail, knotting and reknotting his braids, experimenting with this shampoo and that condi- tioner. He greased down his cowlicks (inherited from a cowlicked father and grandfather) with shiny pomade, but Marie’s hair was always unkempt, wild,

56 TELLING STORIES: AN ALBUM and renegade. William’s hair hung around the fort, but Marie’s rode on the war- path! She constantly pulled stray strands out of her mouth. William loved her for it. During sex, they spent as much time readjusting her hair as they did readjusting positions. Such were the erotic dangers of loving a Spokane Indian woman. “Take off your clothes and get in bed,” Marie pleaded now. “I can’t do that,” William said. “They’re counting on me.” “Oh, the plane will be filled with salesmen. Let some other salesman sell what you’re selling.” 10 “Your breath stinks.” “So do my feet, my pits, and my butt, but you still love me. Come back to bed, and I’ll make it worth your while.” William kissed Marie, reached beneath her pajama top, and squeezed her breasts. He thought about reaching inside her pajama bottoms. She wrapped her arms and legs around him and tried to wrestle him into bed. Oh, God, he wanted to climb into bed and make love. He wanted to fornicate, to sex, to breed, to screw, to make the beast with two backs. Oh, sweetheart, be my little synonym! He wanted her to be both subject and object. Perhaps it was wrong (and unavoidable) to objectify female strangers, but shouldn’t every husband seek to objectify his wife at least once a day? William loved and respected his wife, and delighted in her intelligence, humor, and kindness, but he also loved to watch her lovely ass when she walked, and stare down the front of her loose shirts when she leaned over, and grab her breasts at wildly inappropriate times—during dinner parties and piano recitals and uncontrolled intersections, for instance. He constantly made passes at her, not necessarily expecting to be successful, but to remind her he still desired her and was excited by the thought of her. She was his passive and active. “Come on,” she said. “If you stay home, I’ll make you Scooby.” He laughed at the inside joke, created one night while he tried to give her sexual directions and was so aroused that he sounded exactly like Scooby-Doo. 15 “Stay home, stay home, stay home,” she chanted and wrapped herself tighter around him. He was supporting all of her weight, holding her two feet off the bed. “I’m not strong enough to do this,” he said. “Baby, baby, I’ll make you strong,” she sang, and it sounded like she was writ- ing a Top 40 hit in the Brill Building, circa 1962. How could he leave a woman who sang like that? He hated to leave, but he loved his work. He was a man, and men needed to work. More sexism! More masculine tunnel vision! More need for gender-sensitivity workshops! He pulled away from her, dropping her back onto the bed, and stepped away. “Willy Loman,” she said, “you must pay attention to me.”3 “I love you,” he said, but she’d already fallen back to sleep—a narcoleptic gift William envied—and he wondered if she would dream about a man who never left her, about some unemployed agoraphobic Indian warrior who liked to cook and wash dishes. 20 William tiptoed into his daughter’s bedroom, expecting to hear her light snore, but she was awake and sitting up in bed, and looked so magical and 3. Protagonist of Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman (1949); Willy’s wife, Linda, says of her hus- band, “Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”

SHERMAN ALEXIE Flight Patterns 57 androgynous with her huge brown eyes and crew-cut hair. She’d wanted to completely shave her head: I don’t want long hair, I don’t want short hair, I don’t want hair at all, and I don’t want to be a girl or a boy, I want to be a yellow and orange leaf some little kid picks up and pastes in his scrapbook. “Daddy,” she said. “Grace,” he said. “You should be asleep. You have school today.” “I know,” she said. “But I wanted to see you before you left.” “Okay,” said William as he kissed her forehead, nose, and chin. “You’ve seen me. Now go back to sleep. I love you and I’m going to miss you.” She fiercely hugged him. 25 “Oh,” he said. “You’re such a lovely, lovely girl.” Preternaturally serious, she took his face in her eyes and studied his eyes. Morally examined by a kindergartner! “Daddy,” she said. “Go be silly for those people far away.” She cried as William left her room. Already quite sure he was only an ade- quate husband, he wondered, as he often did, if he was a bad father. During these mornings, he felt generic and violent, like some caveman leaving the fire to hunt animals in the cold and dark. Maybe his hands were smooth and clean, but they felt bloody. Downstairs, he put on his socks and shoes and overcoat and listened for his 30 daughter’s crying, but she was quiet, having inherited her mother’s gift for instant sleep. She had probably fallen back into one of her odd little dreams. While he was gone, she often drew pictures of those dreams, coloring the sky green and the grass blue—everything backward and wrong—and had once sketched a man in a suit crashing an airplane into the bright yellow sun. Ah, the rage, fear, and loneliness of a five-year-old, simple and true! She’d been espe- cially afraid since September 11 of the previous year4 and constantly quizzed William about what he would do if terrorists hijacked his plane. “I’d tell them I was your father,” he’d said to her before he left for his last business trip. “And they’d stop being bad.” “You’re lying,” she’d said. “I’m not supposed to listen to liars. If you lie to me, I can’t love you.” He couldn’t argue with her logic. Maybe she was the most logical person on the planet. Maybe she should be illegally elected president of the United States. William understood her fear of flying and of his flight. He was afraid of fly- ing, too, but not of terrorists. After the horrible violence of September 11, he figured hijacking was no longer a useful weapon in the terrorist arsenal. These days, a terrorist armed with a box cutter would be torn to pieces by all of the coach-class passengers and fed to the first-class upgrades. However, no matter how much he tried to laugh his fear away, William always scanned the air- ports and airplanes for little brown guys who reeked of fundamentalism. That meant William was equally afraid of Osama bin Laden and Jerry Falwell wearing the last vestiges of a summer tan. William himself was a little brown guy, so the other travelers were always sniffing around him, but he smelled only of Dove soap, Mennen deodorant, and sarcasm. Still, he understood why people were afraid of him, a brown-skinned man with dark hair and eyes. If Norwegian 4. That is, September 11, 2001, when hijacked planes were flown into the World Trade Center in New York and into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., killing thousands.

58 TELLING STORIES: AN ALBUM terrorists had exploded the World Trade Center, then blue-eyed blondes would be viewed with more suspicion. Or so he hoped. 35 Locking the front door behind him, William stepped away from his house, carried his garment bag and briefcase onto the front porch, and waited for his taxi to arrive. It was a cold and foggy October morning. William could smell the saltwater of Elliott Bay and the freshwater of Lake Washington. Surrounded by gray water and gray fog and gray skies and gray mountains and a gray sun, he’d lived with his family in Seattle for three years and loved it. He couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, with any other wife or child, in any other time. William was tired and happy and romantic and exaggerating the size of his familial devotion so he could justify his departure, so he could survive his departure. He did sometimes think about other women and other possible lives with them. He wondered how his life would have been different if he’d married a white woman and fathered half-white children who grew up to complain and brag about their biracial identities: Oh, the only box they have for me is Other! I’m not going to check any box! I’m not the Other! I am Tiger Woods! But William most often fantasized about being single and free to travel as often as he wished—maybe two million miles a year—and how much he’d enjoy the bene- fits of being a platinum frequent flier. Maybe he’d have one-night stands with a long series of traveling saleswomen, all of them thousands of miles away from husbands and children who kept looking up “feminism” in the dictionary. Wil- liam knew that was yet another sexist thought. In this capitalistic and demo- cratic culture, talented women should also enjoy the freedom to emotionally and physically abandon their families. After all, talented and educated men have been doing it for generations. Let freedom ring! Marie had left her job as a corporate accountant to be a full-time mother to Grace. William loved his wife for making the decision, and he tried to do his share of the housework, but he suspected he was an old-fashioned bastard who wanted his wife to stay at home and wait, wait, wait for him. Marie was always waiting for William to call, to come home, to leave mes- sages saying he was getting on the plane, getting off the plane, checking in to the hotel, going to sleep, waking up, heading for the meeting, catching an earlier or later flight home. He spent one third of his life trying to sleep in uncomfortable beds and one third of his life trying to stay awake in airports. He traveled with thousands of other capitalistic foot soldiers, mostly men but increasing numbers of women, and stayed in the same Ramadas, Holiday Inns, and Radissons. He ate the same room-service meals and ran the same exercise-room treadmills and watched the same pay-per-view porn and stared out the windows at the same strange and lonely cityscapes. Sure, he was an enrolled member of the Spokane Indian tribe, but he was also a fully recognized member of the notebook- computer tribe and the security-checkpoint tribe and the rental-car tribe and the hotel-shuttle-bus tribe and the cell-phone-roaming-charge tribe. William traveled so often, the Seattle-based flight attendants knew him by first name. 40 At five minutes to six, the Orange Top taxi pulled into the driveway. The driver, a short and thin black man, stepped out of the cab and waved. William rushed down the stairs and across the pavement. He wanted to get away from the house before he changed his mind about leaving.

SHERMAN ALEXIE Flight Patterns 59 “Is that everything, sir?” asked the taxi driver, his accent a colonial cocktail of American English, formal British, and French sibilants added to a base of what must have been North African. “Yes, it is, sir,” said William, self-consciously trying to erase any class differences between them. In Spain the previous summer, an elderly porter had cursed at William when he insisted on carrying his own bags into the hotel. “Perhaps there is something wrong with the caste system, sir,” the hotel concierge had explained to William. “But all of us, we want to do our jobs, and we want to do them well.” William didn’t want to insult anybody; he wanted the world to be a fair and decent place. At least that was what he wanted to want. More than anything, he wanted to stay home with his fair and decent family. He supposed he wanted the world to be fairer and more decent to his family. We are special, he thought, though he suspected they were just one more family on this block of neighbors, in this city of neighbors, in this country of neighbors, in a world of neighbors. He looked back at his house, at the windows behind which slept his beloved wife and daughter. When he traveled, he had nightmares about strangers break- ing into the house and killing and raping Marie and Grace. In other nightmares, he arrived home in time to save his family by beating the intruders and chasing them away. During longer business trips, William’s nightmares became more violent as the days and nights passed. If he was gone over a week, he dreamed about mutilating the rapists and eating them alive while his wife and daughter cheered for him. “Let me take your bags, sir,” said the taxi driver. “What?” asked William, momentarily confused. 45 “Your bags, sir.” William handed him the briefcase but held on to the heavier garment bag. A stupid compromise, thought William, but it’s too late to change it now. God, I’m supposed to be some electric aboriginal warrior, but I’m really a wimpy liberal pacifist. Dear Lord, how much longer should I mourn the death of Jerry Garcia?5 The taxi driver tried to take the garment bag from William. “I’ve got this one,” said William, then added, “I’ve got it, sir.” The taxi driver hesitated, shrugged, opened the trunk, and set the briefcase 50 inside. William laid the garment bag next to his briefcase. The taxi driver shut the trunk and walked around to open William’s door. “No, sir,” said William as he awkwardly stepped in front of the taxi driver, opened the door, and took a seat. “I’ve got it.” “I’m sorry, sir,” said the taxi driver and hurried around to the driver’s seat. This strange American was making him uncomfortable, and he wanted to get behind the wheel and drive. Driving comforted him. “To the airport, sir?” asked the taxi driver as he started the meter. “Yes,” said William. “United Airlines.” “Very good, sir.” 55 In silence, they drove along Martin Luther King Jr. Way, the bisector of an African American neighborhood that was rapidly gentrifying. William and his family were Native American gentry! They were the very first Indian family to 5. Guitarist (1942–95) for the Grateful Dead, a rock group noted for its live concerts and fiercely devoted fans.

60 TELLING STORIES: AN ALBUM ever move into a neighborhood and bring up the property values! That was one of William’s favorite jokes, self-deprecating and politely racist. White folks could laugh at a joke like that and not feel guilty. But how guilty could white people feel in Seattle? Seattle might be the only city in the country where white people lived comfortably on a street named after Martin Luther King, Jr. No matter where he lived, William always felt uncomfortable, so he enjoyed other people’s discomfort. These days, in the airports, he loved to watch white people enduring random security checks. It was a perverse thrill, to be sure, but William couldn’t help himself. He knew those white folks wanted to scream and rage: Do I look like a terrorist? And he knew the security officers, most often low-paid brown folks, wanted to scream back: Define terror, you Anglo bastard! William figured he’d been pulled over for pat-down searches about 75 percent of the time. Random, my ass! But that was okay! William might have wanted to irritate other people, but he didn’t want to scare them. He wanted his fellow travelers to know exactly who and what he was: I am a Native American and therefore have ten thousand more reasons to terrorize the U.S. than any of those Taliban jerk-offs, but I have chosen instead to become a civic American citizen, so all of you white folks should be celebrating my kindness and moral decency and awesome ability to forgive! Maybe William should have worn beaded vests when he traveled. Maybe he should have brought a hand drum and sang “Way, ya, way, ya, hey.” Maybe he should have thrown casino chips into the crowd. The taxi driver turned west on Cherry, drove twenty blocks into downtown, took the entrance ramp onto I-5, and headed south for the airport. The freeway was moderately busy for that time of morning. “Where are you going, sir?” asked the taxi driver. 60 “I’ve got business in Chicago,” William said. He didn’t really want to talk. He needed to meditate in silence. He needed to put his fear of flying inside an imaginary safe deposit box and lock it away. We all have our ceremonies, thought William, our personal narratives. He’d always needed to meditate in the taxi on the way to the airport. Immediately upon arrival at the departure gate, he’d listen to a tape he’d made of rock stars who died in plane crashes. Buddy Holly, Otis Redding, Stevie Ray, “Oh Donna,” “Chantilly Lace,” “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.” William figured God would never kill a man who listened to such a morbid collection of music. Too easy a target, and plus, God could never justify killing a planeful of innocents to punish one minor sinner. “What do you do, sir?” asked the taxi driver. “You know, I’m not sure,” said William and laughed. It was true. He worked for a think tank and sold ideas about how to improve other ideas. Two years ago, his company had made a few hundred thousand dollars by designing and selling the idea of a better shopping cart. The CGI prototype was amazing. It looked like a mobile walk-in closet. But it had yet to be manufactured and probably never would be. “You wear a good suit,” said the taxi driver, not sure why William was laugh- ing. “You must be a businessman, no? You must make lots of money.” “I do okay.” 65 “Your house is big and beautiful.” “Yes, I suppose it is.” “You are a family man, yes?” “I have a wife and daughter.”

SHERMAN ALEXIE Flight Patterns 61 “Are they beautiful?” William was pleasantly surprised to be asked such a question. “Yes,” he said. 70 “Their names are Marie and Grace. They’re very beautiful. I love them very much.” “You must miss them when you travel.” “I miss them so much I go crazy,” said William. “I start thinking I’m going to disappear, you know, just vanish, if I’m not home. Sometimes I worry their love is the only thing that makes me human, you know? I think if they stopped lov- ing me, I might burn up, spontaneously combust, and turn into little pieces of oxygen and hydrogen and carbon. Do you know what I’m saying?” “Yes sir, I understand love can be so large.” William wondered why he was being honest and poetic with a taxi driver. There is emotional safety in anonymity, he thought. “I have a wife and three sons,” said the driver. “But they live in Ethiopia with 75 my mother and father. I have not seen any of them for many years.” For the first time, William looked closely at the driver. He was clear-eyed and handsome, strong of shoulder and arm, maybe fifty years old, maybe older. A thick scar ran from his right ear down his neck and beneath his collar. A black man with a violent history, William thought and immediately reprimanded himself for racially profiling the driver: Excuse me, sir, but I pulled you over because your scar doesn’t belong in this neighborhood. “I still think of my children as children,” the driver said. “But they are men now. Taller and stronger than me. They are older now than I was when I last saw them.” William did the math and wondered how this driver could function with such fatherly pain. “I bet you can’t wait to go home and see them again,” he said, follow- ing the official handbook of the frightened American male: When confronted with the mysterious, you can defend yourself by speaking in obvious generalities. “I cannot go home,” said the taxi driver, “and I fear I will never see them again.” William didn’t want to be having this conversation. He wondered if his 80 silence would silence the taxi driver. But it was too late for that. “What are you?” the driver asked. “What do you mean?” “I mean, you are not white, your skin, it is dark like mine.” “Not as dark as yours.” “No,” said the driver and laughed. “Not so dark, but too dark to be white. 85 What are you? Are you Jewish?” Because they were so often Muslim, taxi drivers all over the world had often asked William if he was Jewish. William was always being confused for some- thing else. He was ambiguously ethnic, living somewhere in the darker section of the Great American Crayola Box, but he was more beige than brown, more mauve than sienna. “Why do you want to know if I’m Jewish?” William asked. “Oh, I’m sorry, sir, if I offended you. I am not anti-Semitic. I love all of my brothers and sisters. Jews, Catholics, Buddhists, even the atheists, I love them all. Like you Americans sing, ‘Joy to the world and Jeremiah Bullfrog!’ ”6 6. Made famous by the band Three Dog Night, the song “Joy to the World” begins, “Jeremiah was a bullfrog.”

62 TELLING STORIES: AN ALBUM The taxi driver laughed again, and William laughed with him. 90 “I’m Indian,” William said. “From India?” “No, not jewel-on-the-forehead Indian,” said William. “I’m a bows-and- arrows Indian.” “Oh, you mean ten little, nine little, eight little Indians?” “Yeah, sort of,” said William. “I’m that kind of Indian, but much smarter. I’m a Spokane Indian. We’re salmon people.” 95 “In England, they call you Red Indians.” “You’ve been to England?” “Yes, I studied physics at Oxford.” “Wow,” said William, wondering if this man was a liar. “You are surprised by this, I imagine. Perhaps you think I’m a liar?” 100 William covered his mouth with one hand. He smiled this way when he was embarrassed. “Aha, you do think I’m lying. You ask yourself questions about me. How could a physicist drive a taxi? Well, in the United States, I am a cabdriver, but in Ethiopia, I was a jet-fighter pilot.” By coincidence or magic, or as a coincidence that could willfully be inter- preted as magic, they drove past Boeing Field at that exact moment. “Ah, you see,” said the taxi driver, “I can fly any of those planes. The prop planes, the jet planes, even the very large passenger planes. I can also fly the experimental ones that don’t fly. But I could make them fly because I am the best pilot in the world. Do you believe me?” “I don’t know,” said William, very doubtful of this man but fascinated as well. If he was a liar, then he was a magnificent liar. 105 On both sides of the freeway, blue-collared men and women drove trucks and forklifts, unloaded trains, trucks, and ships, built computers, televisions, and airplanes. Seattle was a city of industry, of hard work, of calluses on the palms of hands. So many men and women working so hard. William worried that his job—his selling of the purely theoretical—wasn’t a real job at all. He didn’t build anything. He couldn’t walk into department and grocery stores and buy what he’d created, manufactured, and shipped. William’s life was measured by imaginary numbers: the binary code of computer languages, the amount of money in his bank accounts, the interest rate on his mortgage, and the rise and fall of the stock market. He invested much of his money in socially responsible funds. Imagine that! Imagine choosing to trust your money with companies that supposedly made their millions through ethical means. Imagine the breath- taking privilege of such a choice. All right, so maybe this was an old story for white men. For most of American history, who else but a white man could endure the existential crisis of economic success? But this story was original and aborig- inal for William. For thousands of years, Spokane Indians had lived subsistence lives, using every last part of the salmon and deer because they’d die without every last part, but William only ordered salmon from menus and saw deer on television. Maybe he romanticized the primal—for thousands of years, Indians also died of ear infections—but William wanted his comfortable and safe life to contain more wilderness.

SHERMAN ALEXIE Flight Patterns 63 “Sir, forgive me for saying this,” the taxi driver said, “but you do not look like the Red Indians I have seen before.” “I know,” William said. “People usually think I’m a longhaired Mexican.” “What do you say to them when they think such a thing?” “No habla español. Indio de Norteamericanos.” “People think I’m black American. They always want to hip-hop rap to me. 110 ‘Are you East Coast or West Coast?’ they ask me, and I tell them I am Ivory Coast.” “How have things been since September eleventh?” “Ah, a good question, sir. It’s been interesting. Because people think I’m black, they don’t see me as a terrorist, only as a crackhead addict on welfare. So I am a victim of only one misguided idea about who I am.” “We’re all trapped by other people’s ideas, aren’t we?” “I suppose that is true, sir. How has it been for you?” “It’s all backward,” William said. “A few days after it happened, I was walking 115 out of my gym downtown, and this big phallic pickup pulled up in front of me in the crosswalk. Yeah, this big truck with big phallic tires and a big phallic flagpole and a big phallic flag flying, and the big phallic symbol inside leaned out of his window and yelled at me, ‘Go back to your own country!’” “Oh, that is sad and funny,” the taxi driver said. “Yeah,” William said. “And it wasn’t so much a hate crime as it was a crime of irony, right? And I was laughing so hard, the truck was halfway down the block before I could get breath enough to yell back, ‘You first!’” William and the taxi driver laughed and laughed together. Two dark men laughing at dark jokes. “I had to fly on the first day you could fly,” William said. “And I was flying into Baltimore, you know, and D.C. and Baltimore are pretty much the same damn town, so it was like flying into Ground Zero, you know?” “It must have been terrifying.” 120 “It was, it was. I was sitting in the plane here in Seattle, getting ready to take off, and I started looking around for suspicious brown guys. I was scared of little brown guys. So was everybody else. We were all afraid of the same things. I started looking around for big white guys because I figured they’d be under- cover cops, right?” “Imagine wanting to be surrounded by white cops!” “Exactly! I didn’t want to see some pacifist, vegan, whole-wheat, free-range, organic, progressive, gray-ponytail, communist, liberal, draft-dodging, NPR- listening wimp! What are they going to do if somebody tries to hijack the plane? Throw a Birkenstock at him? Offer him some pot?” “Marijuana might actually stop the violence everywhere in the world,” the taxi driver said. “You’re right,” William said. “But on that plane, I was hoping for about 125 twenty-five NRA-loving, gun-nut, serial-killing, psychopathic, Ollie North,7 7. Oliver North (b. 1943), an ex–marine officer, now author and political commentator, first became famous for his involvement in a secret weapons-for-hostages deal with the Iranian government.