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Michael’s Marriages

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It’s not a long story, but it’s a story as old as time. Michael’s family is filthy rich. They invented Jell-O or something. Michael will never work a day in his life. These are Michael’s marriages. (I have not been married myself.) Marriage #0 This marriage lasted one second. Her smile felt stale. Her tongue […]

Her Past Was Stronger than the Pull of Our Present

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“Let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest.” — O. Henry My mother is the ghost of my life, like her mother was the ghost of hers.  In deciding not to have children, this is how I have ensured no more children will see ghosts. Or become them. In […]

Museum of Beautiful Women

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Natalie Wood’s motion sickness pills / the pajamas Whitney Houston wore for seven months / Caroline Flack’s sweatshirt & matching sleeping mask / the suicide note Margaux Hemingway never wrote / the pink hyacinths in Sharon Tate’s hair on her wedding day / the inkwell Frances Farmer threw at a judge in 1943 / Peg […]

Chasing the Goose

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An email arrives from BOLD Nebraska. I no longer live in Nebraska and have never been bold, but I do like to know when it’s time to plant the sacred Ponca corn, and if plans to build Keystone XL have finally been buried, and if Jane Kleeb is a real person because  what would the world be like if […]

THE OTHER WOMAN

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It is simply unconscionable that, when the New York Review of Books recently elected to republish two books by Diana Athill, After a Funeral wasn’t one of them. Easily Athill’s best work, After a Funeral recounts her relationship with Waguih Ghali, an Egyptian writer who committed suicide inside her London flat in 1968. Ghali lived […]

PREVIOUS WORK EXPERIENCE

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He sucked his thumb.  His most encrusted secret, which I now betray.  I, Sole Custodian Of The Vault of Him, witness, bearer of his shame, his rage—watching him breathe, soft, like a baby, next to me, lips pulsing full and round, his sculptor’s thumb—large, hairy—his hammer hands at rest, eyes cradled under his lids, looking […]

Oh, Mom

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JEANETTE PAUL WORE a point-hemmed black smock top and black stretch pants. She clickety-clicked auburn-painted nails on the fake stick shift. She recognized her beast of an emotion through the behavior of other drivers. After getting on the New Jersey Turnpike, she was thrown into a nervous rage by the flashy lane-changing of drug dealers […]