Symbol, Allegory and Genre TerminologyThrough careful research, define the following:

Symbols (symbolism) –

Origin Story Symbols –Biblical –

Shakespearean –

Fairy Tale (Folk Tradition) –

Color Symbols –

Natural Symbols –

Freudian Symbols –

Character Symbols –

Allegory – Everything in a story is representative of something else, usually for the purpose of teaching a moral or for making a political statement.

From Northrop Frye:

Severity of Symbol – Signs- Motif-

Continuum of Allegory-Naïve- Paradox-

Genre-

Classical Genre Classifications

Drama

Romance novel

Satire

Tragedy

Comedy

Tragicomedy

Realistic Fiction

Non Fiction

Modern Genre Classifications

Classic – fiction that has become part of an accepted literary canon, widely taught in schools

Comic/Graphic Novel – scripted fiction told visually in artist drawn pictures, usually in panels and speech bubbles

Crime/Detective – fiction about a committed crime, how the criminal gets caught, and the repercussions of the crime

Fable – narration demonstrating a useful truth, especially in which animals speak as humans; legendary, supernatural tale

Fairy tale – story about fairies or other magical creatures, usually for children

Fanfiction – fiction written by a fan of, and featuring characters from, a particular TV series, movie, etc.

Fantasy – fiction with strange or otherworldly settings or characters; fiction which invites suspension of reality

Fiction narrative – literary works whose content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact

Fiction in verse – full-length novels with plot, subplot(s), theme(s), major and minor characters, in which the narrative is presented in verse form (usually free verse)

Folklore – the songs, stories, myths, and proverbs of a people or "folk" as handed down by word of mouth

Historical fiction – story with fictional characters and events in a historical setting

Horror – fiction in which events evoke a feeling of dread and sometimes fear in both the characters and the reader

Humor – Usually a fiction full of fun, fancy, and excitement, meant to entertain and sometimes cause intended laughter; but can be contained in all genres

Legend – story, sometimes of a national or folk hero, that has a basis in fact but also includes imaginative material

Magical Realism magical or unreal elements play a natural part in an otherwise realistic environment

Metafiction – also known as romantic irony in the context of Romantic works of literature, uses self-reference to draw attention to itself as a work of art, while exposing the "truth" of a story

Mystery – this is fiction dealing with the solution of a crime or the unraveling of secrets

Mythology – legend or traditional narrative, often based in part on historical events, that reveals human behavior and natural phenomena by its symbolism; often pertaining to the actions of the gods

Mythopoeia – this is fiction where characters from religious mythology,traditional myths, folklores and history are recast into a re-imagined realm created by the author.

Realistic fiction – story that is true to life

Science fiction – story based on impact of actual, imagined, or potential science, usually set in the future or on other planets

Short story – fiction of such brevity that it supports no subplots

Suspense/Thriller – fiction about harm about to befall a person or group and the attempts made to evade the harm

Tall tale – humorous story with blatant exaggerations, swaggering heroes who do the impossible with nonchalance

Western – set in the American Old West frontier and typically set in the late eighteenth to late nineteenth century

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" by Joyce Carol Oates (1966)

for Bob Dylan

Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right. Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything and who hadn't much reason any longer to look at her own face, always scolded Connie about it. "Stop gawking at yourself. Who are you? You think you're so pretty?" she would say. Connie would raise her eyebrows at these familiar old complaints and look right through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment: she knew she was pretty and that was everything. Her mother had been pretty once too, if you could believe those old snapshots in the album, but now her looks were gone and that was why she was always after Connie.

"Why don't you keep your room clean like your sister? How've you got your hair fixed—what the hell stinks? Hair spray? You don't see your sister using that junk."

Her sister June was twenty-four and still lived at home. She was a secretary in the high school Connie attended, and if that wasn't bad enough—with her in the same building—she was so plain and chunky and steady that Connie had to hear her praised all the time by her mother and her mother's sisters. June did this, June did that, she saved money and helped clean the house and cooked and Connie couldn't do a thing, her mind was all filled with trashy daydreams. Their father was away at work most of the time and when he came home he wanted supper and he read the newspaper at supper and after supper he went to bed. He didn't bother talking much to them, but around his bent head Connie's mother kept picking at her until Connie wished her mother was dead and she herself was dead and it was all over. "She makes me want to throw up sometimes," she complained to her friends. She had a high, breathless, amused voice that made everything she said sound a little forced, whether it was sincere or not.

There was one good thing: June went places with girl friends of hers, girls who were just as plain and steady as she, and so when Connie wanted to do that her mother had no objections. The father of Connie's best girl friend drove the girls the three miles to town and left them at a shopping plaza so they could walk through the stores or go to a movie, and when he came to pick them up again at eleven he never bothered to ask what they had done.

They must have been familiar sights, walking around the shopping plaza in their shorts and flat ballerina slippers that always scuffed the sidewalk, with charm bracelets jingling on their thin wrists; they would lean together to whisper and laugh secretly if someone passed who amused or interested them. Connie had long dark blond hair that drew anyone's eye to it, and she wore part of it pulled up on her head and puffed out and the rest of it she let fall down her back. She wore a pull-over jersey blouse that looked one way when she was at home and another way when she was away from home. Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home: her walk, which could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearing music in her head; her mouth, which was pale and smirking most of the time, but bright and pink on these evenings out; her laugh, which was cynical and drawling at home—"Ha, ha, very funny,"—but highpitched and nervous anywhere else, like the jingling of the charms on her bracelet.

Sometimes they did go shopping or to a movie, but sometimes they went across the highway, ducking fast across the busy road, to a drive-in restaurant where older kids hung out. The restaurant was shaped like a big bottle, though squatter than a real bottle, and on its cap was a revolving figure of a grinning boy holding a hamburger aloft. One night in midsummer they ran across, breathless with daring, and right away someone leaned out a car window and invited them over, but it was just a boy from high school they didn't like. It made them feel good to be able to ignore him. They went up through the maze of parked and cruising cars to the brightlit, fly-infested restaurant, their faces pleased and expectant as if they were entering a sacred building that loomed up out of the night to give them what haven and blessing they yearned for. They sat at the counter and crossed their legs at the ankles, their thin shoulders rigid with excitement, and listened to the music that made everything so good: the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.

A boy named Eddie came in to talk with them. He sat backwards on his stool, turning himself jerkily around in semicircles and then stopping and turning back again, and after a while he asked Connie if she would like something to eat. She said she would and so she tapped her friend's arm on her way out—her friend pulled her face up into a brave, droll look—and Connie said she would meet her at eleven, across the way. "I just hate to leave her like that," Connie said earnestly, but the boy said that she wouldn't be alone for long. So they went out to his car, and on the way Connie couldn't help but let her eyes wander over the windshields and faces all around her, her face gleaming with a joy that had nothing to do with Eddie or even this place; it might have been the music. She drew her shoulders up and sucked in her breath with the pure pleasure of being alive, and just at that moment she happened to glance at a face just a few feet from hers. It was a boy with shaggy black hair, in a convertible jalopy painted gold. He stared at her and then his lips widened into a grin. Connie slit her eyes at him and turned away, but she couldn't help glancing back and there he was, still watching her. He wagged a finger and laughed and said, "Gonna get you, baby," and Connie turned away again without Eddie noticing anything.

She spent three hours with him, at the restaurant where they ate hamburgers and drank Cokes in wax cups that were always sweating, and then down an alley a mile or so away, and when he left her off at five to eleven only the movie house was still open at the plaza. Her girl friend was there, talking with a boy. When Connie came up, the two girls smiled at each other and Connie said, "How was the movie?" and the girl said, 'You should know." They rode off with the girl's father, sleepy and pleased, and Connie couldn't help but look back at the darkened shopping plaza with its big empty parking lot and its signs that were faded and ghostly now, and over at the drive-in restaurant where cars were still circling tirelessly. She couldn't hear the music at this distance.

Next morning June asked her how the movie was and Connie said, "So-so."

She and that girl and occasionally another girl went out several times a week, and the rest of the time Connie spent around the house—it was summer vacation—getting in her mother s way and thinking, dreaming about the boys she met. But all the boys fell back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face but an idea, a feeling, mixed up with the urgent insistent pounding of the music and the humid night air of July. Connie's mother kept dragging her back to the daylight by finding things for her to do or saying suddenly, 'What's this about the Pettinger girl?"

And Connie would say nervously, "Oh, her. That dope." She always drew thick clear lines between herself and such girls, and her mother was simple and kind enough to believe it. Her mother was so simple, Connie thought, that it was maybe cruel to fool her so much. Her mother went scuffling around the house in old bedroom slippers and complained over the telephone to one sister about the other, then the other called up and the two of them complained about the third one. If June's name was mentioned her mother's tone was approving, and if Connie's name was mentioned it was disapproving. This did not really mean she disliked Connie, and actually Connie thought that her mother preferred her to June just because she was prettier, but the two of them kept up a pretense of exasperation, a sense that they were tugging and struggling over something of little value to either of them. Sometimes, over coffee, they were almost friends, but something would come up—some vexation that was like a fly buzzing suddenly around their heads—and their faces went hard with contempt.

One Sunday Connie got up at eleven—none of them bothered with church—and washed her hair so that it could dry all day long in the sun. Her parents and sister were going to a barbecue at an aunt's house and Connie said no, she wasn't interested, rolling her eyes to let her mother know just what she thought of it. "Stay home alone then," her mother said sharply. Connie sat out back in a lawn chair and watched them drive away, her father quiet and bald, hunched around so that he could back the car out, her mother with a look that was still angry and not at all softened through the windshield, and in the back seat poor old June, all dressed up as if she didn't know what a barbecue was, with all the running yelling kids and the flies. Connie sat with her eyes closed in the sun, dreaming and dazed with the warmth about her as if this were a kind of love, the caresses of love, and her mind slipped over onto thoughts of the boy she had been with the night before and how nice he had been, how sweet it always was, not the way someone like June would suppose but sweet, gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs; and when she opened her eyes she hardly knew where she was, the back yard ran off into weeds and a fence-like line of trees and behind it the sky was perfectly blue and still. The asbestos ranch house that was now three years old startled her—it looked small. She shook her head as if to get awake.

It was too hot. She went inside the house and turned on the radio to drown out the quiet. She sat on the edge of her bed, barefoot, and listened for an hour and a half to a program called XYZ Sunday Jamboree, record after record of hard, fast, shrieking songs she sang along with, interspersed by exclamations from "Bobby King": "An' look here, you girls at Napoleon's—Son and Charley want you to pay real close attention to this song coming up!"

And Connie paid close attention herself, bathed in a glow of slow-pulsed joy that seemed to rise mysteriously out of the music itself and lay languidly about the airless little room, breathed in and breathed out with each gentle rise and fall of her chest.

After a while she heard a car coming up the drive. She sat up at once, startled, because it couldn't be her father so soon. The gravel kept crunching all the way in from the road—the driveway was long—and Connie ran to the window. It was a car she didn't know. It was an open jalopy, painted a bright gold that caught the sunlight opaquely. Her heart began to pound and her fingers snatched at her hair, checking it, and she whispered, "Christ. Christ," wondering how bad she looked. The car came to a stop at the side door and the horn sounded four short taps, as if this were a signal Connie knew.

She went into the kitchen and approached the door slowly, then hung out the screen door, her bare toes curling down off the step. There were two boys in the car and now she recognized the driver: he had shaggy, shabby black hair that looked crazy as a wig and he was grinning at her.

"I ain't late, am I?" he said. "Who the hell do you think you are?" Connie said.

"Toldja I'd be out, didn't I?"

"I don't even know who you are."

She spoke sullenly, careful to show no interest or pleasure, and he spoke in a fast, bright monotone. Connie looked past him to the other boy, taking her time. He had fair brown hair, with a lock that fell onto his forehead. His sideburns gave him a fierce, embarrassed look, but so far he hadn't even bothered to glance at her. Both boys wore sunglasses. The driver's glasses were metallic and mirrored everything in miniature.

“You wanta come for a ride?" he said.

Connie smirked and let her hair fall loose over one shoulder.

"Don'tcha like my car? New paint job," he said. "Hey."

"What?"

"You're cute."

She pretended to fidget, chasing flies away from the door.

"Don'tcha believe me, or what?" he said.

"Look, I don't even know who you are," Connie said in disgust.

"Hey, Ellie's got a radio, see. Mine broke down." He lifted his friend's arm and showed her the little transistor radio the boy was holding, and now Connie began to hear the music. It was the same program that was playing inside the house.

"Bobby King?" she said.

"I listen to him all the time. I think he's great."

"He's kind of great," Connie said reluctantly.

"Listen, that guy's great. He knows where the action is."

Connie blushed a little, because the glasses made it impossible for her to see just what this boy was looking at. She couldn't decide if she liked him or if he was just a jerk, and so she dawdled in the doorway and wouldn't come down or go back inside.

She said, "What's all that stuff painted on your car?"

"Can'tcha read it?" He opened the door very carefully, as if he were afraid it might fall off. He slid out just as carefully, planting his feet firmly on the ground, the tiny metallic world in his glasses slowing down like gelatine hardening, and in the midst of it Connie's bright green blouse. "This here is my name, to begin with, he said. ARNOLD FRIEND was written in tarlike black letters on the side, with a drawing of a round, grinning face that reminded Connie of a pumpkin, except it wore sunglasses. "I wanta introduce myself, I'm Arnold Friend and that's my real name and I'm gonna be your friend, honey, and inside the car's Ellie Oscar, he's kinda shy." Ellie brought his transistor radio up to his shoulder and balanced it there. "Now, these numbers are a secret code, honey," Arnold Friend explained. He read off the numbers 33, 19, 17 and raised his eyebrows at her to see what she thought of that, but she didn't think much of it. The left rear fender had been smashed and around it was written, on the gleaming gold background: DONE BY CRAZY WOMAN DRIVER. Connie had to laugh at that. Arnold Friend was pleased at her laughter and looked up at her. "Around the other side's a lot more —you wanta come and see them?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Why should I?"

Don'tcha wanta see what's on the car? Don'tcha wanta go for a ride?"

"I don't know."

"Why not?"

"I got things to do."

"Like what?"

"Things."

He laughed as if she had said something funny. He slapped his thighs. He was standing in a strange way, leaning back against the car as if he were balancing himself. He wasn't tall, only an inch or so taller than she would be if she came down to him. Connie liked the way he was dressed, which was the way all of them dressed: tight faded jeans stuffed into black, scuffed boots, a belt that pulled his waist in and showed how lean he was, and a white pull-over shirt that was a little soiled and showed the hard small muscles of his arms and shoulders. He looked as if he probably did hard work, lifting and carrying things. Even his neck looked muscular. And his face was a familiar face, somehow: the jaw and chin and cheeks slightly darkened because he hadn't shaved for a day or two, and the nose long and hawklike, sniffing as if she were a treat he was going to gobble up and it was all a joke.

"Connie, you ain't telling the truth. This is your day set aside for a ride with me and you know it," he said, still laughing. The way he straightened and recovered from his fit of laughing showed that it had been all fake.

"How do you know what my name is?" she said suspiciously.

"It's Connie."

"Maybe and maybe not."

"I know my Connie," he said, wagging his finger.

Now she remembered him even better, back at the restaurant, and her cheeks warmed at the thought of how she had sucked in her breath just at the moment she passed him—how she must have looked to him. And he had remembered her.

"Ellie and I come out here especially for you," he said. "Ellie can sit in back. How about it?"

"Where?"

"Where what?"

"Where're we going?"

He looked at her. He took off the sunglasses and she saw how pale the skin around his eyes was, like holes that were not in shadow but instead in light. His eyes were like chips of broken glass that catch the light in an amiable way. He smiled. It was as if the idea of going for a ride somewhere, to someplace, was a new idea to him. "Just for a ride, Connie sweetheart."

"I never said my name was Connie," she said.

"But I know what it is. I know your name and all about you, lots of things," Arnold Friend said. He had not moved yet but stood still leaning back against the side of his jalopy. "I took a special interest in you, such a pretty girl, and found out all about you—like I know your parents and sister are gone somewheres and I know where and how long they're going to be gone, and I know who you were with last night, and your best girl friend's name is Betty. Right?" He spoke in a simple lilting voice, exactly as if he were reciting the words to a song. His smile assured her that everything was fine. In the car Ellie turned up the volume on his radio and did not bother to look around at them.

"Ellie can sit in the back seat," Arnold Friend said. He indicated his friend with a casual jerk of his chin, as if Ellie did not count and she should not bother with him.

"How'd you find out all that stuff?" Connie said.

"Listen: Betty Schultz and Tony Fitch and Jimmy Pettinger and Nancy Pettinger," he said in a chant. "Raymond Stanley and Bob Hutter—"

"Do you know all those kids?"

"I know everybody."

"Look, you're kidding. You're not from around here."

"Sure."

"But—how come we never saw you before?"

"Sure you saw me before," he said. He looked down at his boots, as if he were a little offended. "You just don't remember."

"I guess I'd remember you," Connie said.

"Yeah?" He looked up at this, beaming. He was pleased. He began to mark time with the music from Ellie's radio, tapping his fists lightly together. Connie looked away from his smile to the car, which was painted so bright it almost hurt her eyes to look at it. She looked at that name, ARNOLD FRIEND. And up at the front fender was an expression that was familiar—MAN THE FLYING SAUCERS. It was an expression kids had used the year before but didn't use this year. She looked at it for a while as if the words meant something to her that she did not yet know.

"What're you thinking about? Huh?" Arnold Friend demanded. "Not worried about your hair blowing around in the car, are you?"

"No."

"Think I maybe can't drive good?"

"How do I know?"

"You're a hard girl to handle. How come?" he said. "Don't you know I'm your friend? Didn't you see me put my sign in the air when you walked by?"

"What sign?"

"My sign." And he drew an X in the air, leaning out toward her. They were maybe ten feet apart. After his hand fell back to his side the X was still in the air, almost visible. Connie let the screen door close and stood perfectly still inside it, listening to the music from her radio and the boy's blend together. She stared at Arnold Friend. He stood there so stiffly relaxed, pretending to be relaxed, with one hand idly on the door handle as if he were keeping himself up that way and had no intention of ever moving again. She recognized most things about him, the tight jeans that showed his thighs and buttocks and the greasy leather boots and the tight shirt, and even that slippery friendly smile of his, that sleepy dreamy smile that all the boys used to get across ideas they didn't want to put into words. She recognized all this and also the singsong way he talked, slightly mocking, kidding, but serious and a little melancholy, and she recognized the way he tapped one fist against the other in homage to the perpetual music behind him. But all these things did not come together.

She said suddenly, "Hey, how old are you?"

His smiled faded. She could see then that he wasn't a kid, he was much older—thirty, maybe more. At this knowledge her heart began to pound faster. "That's a crazy thing to ask. Can'tcha see I'm your own age?"

"Like hell you are."

"Or maybe a couple years older. I'm eighteen."

"Eighteen?" she said doubtfully.

He grinned to reassure her and lines appeared at the corners of his mouth. His teeth were big and white. He grinned so broadly his eyes became slits and she saw how thick the lashes were, thick and black as if painted with a black tarlike material. Then, abruptly, he seemed to become embarrassed and looked over his shoulder at Ellie. "Him, he's crazy," he said. "Ain't he a riot? He's a nut, a real character." Ellie was still listening to the music. His sunglasses told nothing about what he was thinking. He wore a bright orange shirt unbuttoned halfway to show his chest, which was a pale, bluish chest and not muscular like Arnold Friend's. His shirt collar was turned up all around and the very tips of the collar pointed out past his chin as if they were protecting him. He was pressing the transistor radio up against his ear and sat there in a kind of daze, right in the sun.

"He's kinda strange," Connie said.

"Hey, she says you're kinda strange! Kinda strange!" Arnold Friend cried. He pounded on the car to get Ellie's attention. Ellie turned for the first time and Connie saw with shock that he wasn't a kid either—he had a fair, hairless face, cheeks reddened slightly as if the veins grew too close to the surface of his skin, the face of a forty-year-old baby. Connie felt a wave of dizziness rise in her at this sight and she stared at him as if waiting for something to change the shock of the moment, make it all right again. Ellie's lips kept shaping words, mumbling along with the words blasting in his ear.

"Maybe you two better go away," Connie said faintly.

"What? How come?" Arnold Friend cried. "We come out here to take you for a ride. It's Sunday." He had the voice of the man on the radio now. It was the same voice, Connie thought. "Don'tcha know it's Sunday all day? And honey, no matter who you were with last night, today you're with Arnold Friend and don't you forget it! Maybe you better step out here," he said, and this last was in a different voice. It was a little flatter, as if the heat was finally getting to him.

"No. I got things to do."

"Hey."

"You two better leave."

"We ain't leaving until you come with us."

"Like hell I am—"

"Connie, don't fool around with me. I mean—I mean, don't fool around," he said, shaking his head. He laughed incredulously. He placed his sunglasses on top of his head, carefully, as if he were indeed wearing a wig, and brought the stems down behind his ears. Connie stared at him, another wave of dizziness and fear rising in her so that for a moment he wasn't even in focus but was just a blur standing there against his gold car, and she had the idea that he had driven up the driveway all right but had come from nowhere before that and belonged nowhere and that everything about him and even about the music that was so familiar to her was only half real.

"If my father comes and sees you—"

"He ain't coming. He's at a barbecue."

"How do you know that?"

"Aunt Tillie's. Right now they're uh—they're drinking. Sitting around," he said vaguely, squinting as if he were staring all the way to town and over to Aunt Tillie's back yard. Then the vision seemed to get clear and he nodded energetically. "Yeah. Sitting around. There's your sister in a blue dress, huh? And high heels, the poor sad bitch—nothing like you, sweetheart! And your mother's helping some fat woman with the corn, they're cleaning the corn—husking the corn—"

"What fat woman?" Connie cried.

"How do I know what fat woman, I don't know every goddamn fat woman in the world!" Arnold Friend laughed.

"Oh, that's Mrs. Hornsby . . . . Who invited her?" Connie said. She felt a little lightheaded. Her breath was coming quickly.

"She's too fat. I don't like them fat. I like them the way you are, honey," he said, smiling sleepily at her. They stared at each other for a while through the screen door. He said softly, "Now, what you're going to do is this: you're going to come out that door. You re going to sit up front with me and Ellie's going to sit in the back, the hell with Ellie, right? This isn't Ellie's date. You're my date. I'm your lover, honey."

"What? You're crazy—"

"Yes, I'm your lover. You don't know what that is but you will," he said. "I know that too. I know all about you. But look: it's real nice and you couldn't ask for nobody better than me, or more polite. I always keep my word. I'll tell you how it is, I'm always nice at first, the first time. I'll hold you so tight you won't think you have to try to get away or pretend anything because you'll know you can't. And I'll come inside you where it's all secret and you'll give in to me and you'll love me "

"Shut up! You're crazy!" Connie said. She backed away from the door. She put her hands up against her ears as if she'd heard something terrible, something not meant for her. "People don't talk like that, you're crazy," she muttered. Her heart was almost too big now for her chest and its pumping made sweat break out all over her. She looked out to see Arnold Friend pause and then take a step toward the porch, lurching. He almost fell. But, like a clever drunken man, he managed to catch his balance. He wobbled in his high boots and grabbed hold of one of the porch posts.

"Honey?" he said. "You still listening?"

"Get the hell out of here!"

"Be nice, honey. Listen."

"I'm going to call the police—" He wobbled again and out of the side of his mouth came a fast spat curse, an aside not meant for her to hear. But even this "Christ!" sounded forced. Then he began to smile again. She watched this smile come, awkward as if he were smiling from inside a mask. His whole face was a mask, she thought wildly, tanned down to his throat but then running out as if he had plastered makeup on his face but had forgotten about his throat. "Honey—? Listen, here's how it is. I always tell the truth and I promise you this: I ain't coming in that house after you."

"You better not! I'm going to call the police if you—if you don't—"

"Honey," he said, talking right through her voice, "honey, I m not coming in there but you are coming out here. You know why?" She was panting. The kitchen looked like a place she had never seen before, some room she had run inside but that wasn't good enough, wasn't going to help her. The kitchen window had never had a curtain, after three years, and there were dishes in the sink for her to do—probably—and if you ran your hand across the table you'd probably feel something sticky there. "You listening, honey? Hey?"

"—going to call the police—"

"Soon as you touch the phone I don't need to keep my promise and can come inside. You won't want that." She rushed forward and tried to lock the door. Her fingers were shaking. "But why lock it," Arnold Friend said gently, talking right into her face. "It's just a screen door. It's just nothing." One of his boots was at a strange angle, as if his foot wasn't in it. It pointed out to the left, bent at the ankle. "I mean, anybody can break through a screen door and glass and wood and iron or anything else if he needs to, anybody at all, and specially Arnold Friend. If the place got lit up with a fire, honey, you'd come runnin' out into my arms, right into my arms an' safe at home—like you knew I was your lover and'd stopped fooling around. I don't mind a nice shy girl but I don't like no fooling around."

Part of those words were spoken with a slight rhythmic lilt, and Connie somehow recognized them—the echo of a song from last year, about a girl rushing into her boy friend's arms and coming home again— Connie stood barefoot on the linoleum floor, staring at him. "What do you want?" she whispered.

"I want you," he said.

"What?"

"Seen you that night and thought, that's the one, yes sir. I never needed to look anymore."

"But my father's coming back. He's coming to get me. I had to wash my hair first—'' She spoke in a dry, rapid voice, hardly raising it for him to hear.

"No, your daddy is not coming and yes, you had to wash your hair and you washed it for me. It's nice and shining and all for me. I thank you sweetheart," he said with a mock bow, but again he almost lost his balance. He had to bend and adjust his boots. Evidently his feet did not go all the way down; the boots must have been stuffed with something so that he would seem taller. Connie stared out at him and behind him at Ellie in the car, who seemed to be looking off toward Connie's right, into nothing. This Ellie said, pulling the words out of the air one after another as if he were just discovering them, "You want me to pull out the phone?"

"Shut your mouth and keep it shut," Arnold Friend said, his face red from bending over or maybe from embarrassment because Connie had seen his boots. "This ain't none of your business."

"What—what are you doing? What do you want?" Connie said. "If I call the police they'll get you, they'll arrest you—"

"Promise was not to come in unless you touch that phone, and I'll keep that promise," he said. He resumed his erect position and tried to force his shoulders back. He sounded like a hero in a movie, declaring something important. But he spoke too loudly and it was as if he were speaking to someone behind Connie. "I ain't made plans for coming in that house where I don't belong but just for you to come out to me, the way you should. Don't you know who I am?"

"You're crazy," she whispered. She backed away from the door but did not want to go into another part of the house, as if this would give him permission to come through the door. "What do you . . . you're crazy, you. . . ." "Huh? What're you saying, honey?" Her eyes darted everywhere in the kitchen. She could not remember what it was, this room. "This is how it is, honey: you come out and we'll drive away, have a nice ride. But if you don't come out we're gonna wait till your people come home and then they're all going to get it."

"You want that telephone pulled out?" Ellie said. He held the radio away from his ear and grimaced, as if without the radio the air was too much for him.

"I toldja shut up, Ellie," Arnold Friend said, "you're deaf, get a hearing aid, right? Fix yourself up. This little girl's no trouble and's gonna be nice to me, so Ellie keep to yourself, this ain't your date right? Don't hem in on me, don't hog, don't crush, don't bird dog, don't trail me," he said in a rapid, meaningless voice, as if he were running through all the expressions he'd learned but was no longer sure which of them was in style, then rushing on to new ones, making them up with his eyes closed. "Don't crawl under my fence, don't squeeze in my chipmonk hole, don't sniff my glue, suck my popsicle, keep your own greasy fingers on yourself!" He shaded his eyes

and peered in at Connie, who was backed against the kitchen table. "Don't mind him, honey, he's just a creep. He's a dope. Right? I'm the boy for you, and like I said, you come out here nice like a lady and give me your hand, and nobody else gets hurt, I mean, your nice old bald-headed daddy and your mummy and your sister in her high heels. Because listen: why bring them in this?"

"Leave me alone," Connie whispered.

"Hey, you know that old woman down the road, the one with the chickens and stuff—you know her?"

"She's dead!"

"Dead? What? You know her?" Arnold Friend said.

"She's dead—"

"Don't you like her?"

"She's dead—she's—she isn't here any more—“

" But don't you like her, I mean, you got something against her? Some grudge or something?"

Then his voice dipped as if he were conscious of a rudeness. He touched the sunglasses perched up on top of his head as if to make sure they were still there. "Now, you be a good girl."

'What are you going to do?"

"Just two things, or maybe three," Arnold Friend said. "But I promise it won't last long and you'll like me the way you get to like people you're close to. You will. It's all over for you here, so come on out. You don't want your people in any trouble, do you?"

She turned and bumped against a chair or something, hurting her leg, but she ran into the back room and picked up the telephone. Something roared in her ear, a tiny roaring, and she was so sick with fear that she could do nothing but listen to it—the telephone was clammy and very heavy and her fingers groped down to the dial but were too weak to touch it. She began to scream into the phone, into the roaring. She cried out, she cried for her mother, she felt her breath start jerking back and forth in her lungs as if it were something Arnold Friend was stabbing her with again and again with no tenderness. A noisy sorrowful wailing rose all about her and she was locked inside it the way she was locked inside this house. After a while she could hear again. She was sitting on the floor with her wet back against the wall.

Arnold Friend was saying from the door, "That's a good girl. Put the phone back." She kicked the phone away from her. "No, honey. Pick it up. Put it back right." She picked it up and put it back. The dial tone stopped. "That's a good girl. Now, you come outside."

She was hollow with what had been fear but what was now just an emptiness. All that screaming had blasted it out of her. She sat, one leg cramped under her, and deep inside her

brain was something like a pinpoint of light that kept going and would not let her relax. She thought, I'm not going to see my mother again. She thought, I'm not going to sleep in my bed again. Her bright green blouse was all wet.

Arnold Friend said, in a gentle-loud voice that was like a stage voice, "The place where you came from ain't there any more, and where you had in mind to go is cancelled out. This place you are now—inside your daddy's house—is nothing but a cardboard box I can knock down any time. You know that and always did know it. You hear me?" She thought, I have got to think. I have got to know what to do. "We'll go out to a nice field, out in the country here where it smells so nice and it's sunny," Arnold Friend said. "I'll have my arms tight around you so you won't need to try to get away and I'll show you what love is like, what it does. The hell with this house! It looks solid all right," he said. He ran a fingernail down the screen and the noise did not make Connie shiver, as it would have the day before. "Now, put your hand on your heart, honey. Feel that? That feels solid too but we know better. Be nice to me, be sweet like you can because what else is there for a girl like you but to be sweet and pretty and give in?—and get away before her people come back?" She felt her pounding heart. Her hand seemed to enclose it. She thought for the first time in her life that it was nothing that was hers, that belonged to her, but just a pounding, living thing inside this body that wasn't really hers either.

"You don't want them to get hurt," Arnold Friend went on. "Now, get up, honey. Get up all by yourself." She stood. "Now, turn this way. That's right. Come over here to me.— Ellie, put that away, didn't I tell you? You dope. You miserable creepy dope," Arnold Friend said. His words were not angry but only part of an incantation. The incantation was kindly. "Now come out through the kitchen to me, honey, and let's see a smile, try it, you re a brave, sweet little girl and now they're eating corn and hot dogs cooked to bursting over an outdoor fire, and they don't know one thing about you and never did and honey, you're better than them because not a one of them would have done this for you."

Connie felt the linoleum under her feet; it was cool. She brushed her hair back out of her eyes. Arnold Friend let go of the post tentatively and opened his arms for her, his elbows pointing in toward each other and his wrists limp, to show that this was an embarrassed embrace and a little mocking, he didn't want to make her self-conscious. She put out her hand against the screen. She watched herself push the door slowly open as if she were back safe somewhere in the other doorway, watching this body and this head of long hair moving out into the sunlight where Arnold Friend waited.

"My sweet little blue-eyed girl," he said in a half-sung sigh that had nothing to do with her brown eyes but was taken up just the same by the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him—so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it.

The GraveBy Katherine Anne Porter

The grandfather, dead for more than thirty years, had been twice disturbed in his long repose by the constancy and possessiveness of his widow. She removed his bones first to Louisiana and then to Texas, as if she had set out to find her own burial place, knowing well she would never return to the places she had left. In Texas she set up a small cemetery in a corner of her first farm, and as the family connection grew, and oddments of relations came over from Kentucky to settle, it contained at last about twenty graves. After the grandmother’s death, part of her land was to be sold for the benefit of certain of her children, and the cemetery happened to lie in the part set aside for sale. It was necessary to take up the bodies and bury them again in the family plot in the big new public cemetery, where Grandmother had been recently buried. At long last her husband was to lie beside her for eternity, as she had planned.

The family cemetery had been a pleasant small neglected garden of tangled rose bushes and ragged cedar trees and cypress, the simple flat stones rising out of uncropped sweet-smelling wild grass. The graves were lying open and empty one burning day when Miranda and her brother Paul, who often went together to hunt rabbits and doves, propped their twenty-two Winchester rifles carefully against the rail fence, climbed over and explored among the graves. She was nine years old and he was twelve.

They peered into the pits all shaped alike with such purposeful accuracy, and looking at each other with pleased adventurous eyes, they said in solemn tones: “These were graves!” trying by words to shape a special, suitable emotion in their minds, but they felt nothing except an agreeable thrill of wonder: they were seeing a new sight, doing something they had not done before. In them both there was also a small disappointment at the entire commonplaceness of the actual spectacle. Even if it had once contained a coffin for years upon years, when the coffin was gone a grave was just a hole in the ground. Miranda leaped into the pit that had held her grandfather’s bones. Scratching around aimlessly and pleasurably, as any young animal, she scooped up a lump of earth and weighed it in her palm. It had a pleasantly sweet, corrupt smell, being mixed with cedar needles and small leaves, and as the crumbs fell apart, she saw a silver dove no larger than a hazel nut, with spread wings and a neat fan-shaped tail. The breast had a deep round hollow in it. Turning it up to the fierce sunlight, she saw that the inside of the hollow was cut in little whorls. She scrambled out, over the pile of loose earth that had fallen back into one end of the grave, calling to Paul that she had found something, he must guess what. . . . His head appeared smiling over the rim of another grave. He waved a closed hand at her: “I’ve got something too!” They ran to compare treasures, making a game of it, so many guesses each, all wrong, and a final show-down with opened palms. Paul had found a thin wide gold ring carved with intricate flowers and leaves. Miranda was smitten at sight of the ring and wished to have it. Paul seemed more impressed by the dove. They made a trade, with some little bickering. After he had got the dove in his hand, Paul said, “Don’t you know what this is? This is a screw head for a coffin! . . . I’ll bet nobody else in the world has one like this!”

Miranda glanced at it without covetousness. She had the gold ring on her thumb; it fitted perfectly. “Maybe we ought to go now,” she said, “maybe one of the niggers’ll see us and tell somebody.” They knew the land had been sold, the cemetery was no longer theirs, and they felt like trespassers. They climbed back over the fence, slung their rifles loosely under their arms—

they had been shooting at targets with various kinds of firearms since they were seven years old—and set out to look for the rabbits and doves or whatever small game might happen along.

On these expeditions Miranda always followed at Paul’s heels along the path, obeying instructions about handling her gun when going through fences; learning how to stand it up properly so it would not slip and fire unexpectedly; how to wait her time for a shot and not just bang away in the air without looking, spoiling shots for Paul, who really could hit things if given a chance. Now and then, in her excitement at seeing birds whizz up suddenly before her face, or a rabbit leap across her very toes, she lost her head, and almost without sighting she flung her rifle up and pulled the trigger. She hardly ever hit any sort of mark. She had no proper sense of hunting at all. Her brother would be often completely disgusted with her. “You don’t care whether you get your bird or not,” he said. “That’s no way to hunt.” Miranda could not understand his indignation. She had seen him smash his hat and yell with fury when he had missed his aim. “What I like about shooting,” said Miranda, with exasperating inconsequence, “is pulling the trigger and hearing the noise.”

“Then, by golly,” said Paul, “whyn’t you go back to the range and shoot at tin cans?”

“I’d just as soon,” said Miranda, “only like this, we walk around more.”

“Well, you just stay behind and stop spoiling my shots,” said Paul, who, when he made a kill, wanted to be certain he had made it. Miranda, who alone brought down a bird once in twenty rounds, always claimed as her own any game they got when they fired at the same moment. It was tiresome and unfair and her brother was sick of it.

“Now, the first dove we see, or the first rabbit, is mine,” he told her. “And the next will be yours. Remember that and don’t get smarty.”

“What about snakes?” asked Miranda idly. “Can I have the first snake?”

Waving her thumb gently and watching her gold ring glitter, Miranda lost interest in shooting. She was wearing her summer roughing outfit: dark blue overalls, a light blue shirt, a hired-man’s straw hat, and rough brown sandals. Her brother had the same outfit except his was a sober hickory-nut color. Ordinarily Miranda preferred her overalls to any other dress, though it was making rather a scandal in the countryside, for the year was 1903, and in the back country the law of female decorum had teeth in it. Her father had been criticized for letting his girls dress like boys and go careering around astride barebacked horses. It was said the motherless family was running down, with the grandmother no longer there to hold it together. Miranda knew this, though she could not say how. She had met along the road old women of the kind who smoked corncob pipes, who had treated her grandmother with most sincere respect. They slanted their gummy old eyes side-ways at the granddaughter and said, “Ain’t you ashamed of yo’-self, Missy? It’s aginst the Scriptures to dress like that. Whut yo’ Pappy thinkin’ about?” Miranda, with her powerful social sense, which was like a fine set of antennae radiating from every pore of her skin, would feel ashamed because she knew well it was rude and ill-bred to shock anybody, even bad-tempered old crones; though she had faith in her father’s judgment and was perfectly comfortable in the clothes. Her father had said, “They’re just what you need, and they’ll save your dresses for school. . . .” This sounded quite simple and natural to her. She

had been brought up in rigorous economy. Wastefulness was vulgar. It was also a sin. These were truths; she had heard them repeated many times and never once disputed.

Now the ring, shining with the serene purity of fine gold on her rather grubby thumb, turned her feelings against her overalls and sockless feet, toes sticking through the thick brown leather straps. She wanted to go back to the farm house, take a good cold bath, dust herself with plenty of her sister’s violet talcum powder—provided she was not present to object, of course—put on the thinnest, most becoming dress she owned, with a big sash, and sit in a wicker chair under the trees. . . . These things were not all she wanted, of course; she had vague stirrings of desire for luxury and a grand way of living which could not take precise form in her imagination, being founded on a family legend of past wealth and leisure. But these immediate comforts were what she could have, and she wanted them at once. She lagged rather far behind Paul, and once she thought of just turning back without a word and going home. She stopped, thinking that Paul would never do that to her, and so she would have to tell him. When a rabbit leaped, she let Paul have it without dispute. He killed it with one shot.

When she came up with him, he was already kneeling, examining the wound, the rabbit trailing from his hands. “Right through the head,” he said complacently, as if he had aimed for it. He took out his sharp, competent Bowie knife and started to skin the body. He did it very cleanly and quickly. Uncle Jimbilly knew how to prepare the skins so that Miranda always had fur coats for her dolls, for though she never cared much for her dolls, she liked seeing them in fur coats. The children knelt facing each other over the dead animal. Miranda watched admiringly while her brother stripped the skin away as if he were taking off a glove. The flayed flesh emerged dark scarlet, sleek, firm; Miranda with thumb and finger felt the long fine muscles with the silvery flat strips binding them to the joints. Brother lifted the oddly bloated belly. “Look,” he said, in a low, amazed voice. “It was going to have young ones.”

Very carefully he slit the thin flesh from the center ribs to the flanks, and a scarlet bag appeared. He slit again and pulled the bag open, and there lay a bundle of tiny rabbits, each wrapped in a thin scarlet veil. The brother pulled these off and there they were, dark grey, their sleek wet down lying in minute even ripples, over pink skin, like a baby’s head just washed; their unbelievably small delicate ears folded close, their little blind faces almost featureless.

Miranda said, “Oh, I want to see” under her breath. She looked and looked—excited but not frightened, for she was accustomed to the sight of animals killed in hunting—filled with pity and astonishment and a kind of shocked delight in the wonderful little creatures for their own sakes, they were so pretty. She touched one of them ever so carefully. “Ah, there’s blood running over them,” she said, and began to tremble without knowing why. Yet she wanted most deeply to see and to know. Having seen, she felt at once as if she had known all along. The very memory of her former ignorance faded, she had always known just this. No one had ever told her anything outright, she had been rather unobservant of the animal life around her because she was so accustomed to animals. They seemed simply disorderly and unaccountably rude in their habits, but altogether natural and not very interesting. Her brother had spoken as if he had known about everything all along. He may have seen all this before. He had never said a word to her, but she knew now a part at least of what he knew. She understood a little of the secret, formless intuitions in her own mind and body, which had been clearing up, taking form, so gradually and so steadily she had not realized that she was learning what she had to know. Paul said cautiously, as if he were talking about something forbidden: “They were just about ready to

be born.” His voice dropped on the last word. “I know,” said Miranda, “like kittens. I know, like babies.” She was quietly and terribly agitated, standing again with her rifle under her arm, looking down at the bloody heap. “I don’t want the skin,” she said, “I won’t have it.” Paul buried the young rabbits again in their mother’s body, wrapped the skin around her, carried her to a clump of sage bushes, and hid her away. He came out again at once and said to Miranda, with an eager friendliness, a confidential tone quite unusual in him, as if he were taking her into an important secret on equal terms: “Listen now. Now you listen to me, and don’t ever forget. Don’t you ever tell a living soul that you saw this. Don’t tell a soul. Don’t tell Dad because I’ll get into trouble. He’ll say I’m leading you into things you ought not to do. He’s always saying that. So now don’t you go and forget and blab out sometime the way you’re always doing. . . . Now, that’s a secret. Don’t you tell.”

Miranda never told, she did not even wish to tell anybody. She thought about the whole worrisome affair with confused unhappiness for a few days. Then it sank quietly into her mind and was heaped over by accumulated thousands of impressions, for nearly twenty years. One day she was picking her path among the puddles and crushed refuse of a market street in a strange city of a strange country, when, without warning, in totality, plain and clear in its true colors as if she looked through a frame upon a scene that had not stirred nor changed since the moment it happened, the episode of the far-off day leaped from its burial place before her mind’s eye. She was so reasonlessly horrified she halted suddenly staring, the scene before her eyes dimmed by the vision back of them. An Indian vendor had held up before her a tray of dyed-sugar sweets, shaped like all kinds of small creatures: birds, baby chicks, baby rabbits, lambs, baby pigs. They were in gay colors and smelled of vanilla, maybe. . . . It was a very hot day and the smell in the market, with its piles of raw flesh and wilting flowers, was like the mingled sweetness and corruption she had smelled that other day in the empty cemetery at home: the day she had remembered vaguely always until now as the time she and her brother had found treasure in the opened graves. Instantly upon this thought the dreadful vision faded, and she saw clearly her brother, whose childhood face she had forgotten, standing again in the blazing sunshine, again twelve years old, a pleased sober smile in his eyes, turning the silver dove over and over in his hands.

CathedralBy Raymond Carver (1981)

This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way tospend the night. His wife had died. So he was visiting the dead wife’srelatives in Connecticut. He called my wife from his in-law’s. Arrangementswere made. He would come by train, a five-hour trip, and my wife wouldmeet him at the station. She hadn’t seen him since she worked for him onesummer in Seattle ten years ago. But she and the blind man had kept intouch. They made tapes and mailed them back and forth. I wasn’tenthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blindbothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, theblind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeingeyedogs. 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 anymoney. The man she was going to marry at the end of the summer was inofficers’ training school. He didn’t have any money, either. But she was inlove with the guy, and he was in love with her, etc. She’d seen something inthe paper: HELP WANTED—Reading to Blind Man, and a telephonenumber. She phoned and went over, was hired on the spot. She worked withthis blind man all summer. She read stuff to him, case studies, reports, thatsort of thing. She helped him organize his little office in the county socialservicedepartment. They’d become good friends, my wife and the blindman. On her last day in the office, the blind man asked if he could touch herface. She agreed to this. She told me he touched his fingers to every part ofher face, her nose—even her neck! She never forgot it. She even tried towrite a poem about it. She was always trying to write a poem. She wrote apoem or two every year, usually after something really important hadhappened to her.

When we first started going out together, she showed me the poem. Inthe poem, she recalled his fingers and the way they had moved around overher face. In the poem, she talked about what she had felt at the time, aboutwhat went through her mind when the blind man touched her nose and lips. Ican remember I didn’t think much of the poem. Of course, I didn’t tell herthat. Maybe I just don’t understand poetry. I admit it’s not the first thing Ireach for when I pick up something to read.

Anyway, this man who’d first enjoyed her favors, this officer-to-be,he’d been her childhood sweetheart. So okay. I’m saying that at the end ofthe summer she let the blind man run his hands over her face, said good-byeto him, married her childhood etc., who was now a commissioned officer,and she moved away from Seattle. But they’d keep in touch, she and theblind man. She made the first contact after a year or so. She called him upone night from an Air Force base in Alabama. She wanted to talk. Theytalked. He asked her to send him a tape and tell him about her life. She didthis. She sent the tape. On the tape, she told the blind man she loved herhusband but she didn’t like it where they lived and she didn’t like it that hewas a part of the military-industrial thing. She told the blind man she’dwritten 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’tfinished yet. She was still writing it. The blind man made a tape. He sent herthe tape. She made a tape. This went on for years. My wife’s officer wasposted to one base and then another. She sent tapes from Moody AFB,McGuire, McConnell, and finally Travis, near Sacramento, where one nightshe got to feeling lonely and cut off from people she kept losing in thatmoving-around life. She got to feeling she couldn’t go it another step. Shewent in and swallowed all the pills and capsules in the medicine chest andwashed them down with a bottle of gin. Then she got into a hot bath andpassed out.

But instead of dying, she got sick. She threw up. Her officer—whyshould he have a name? he was the childhood sweetheart, and what moredoes he want?—came home from somewhere, found her, and called theambulance. In time, she put it all on tape and sent the tape to the blind man.Over the years, she put all kinds of stuff on tapes and sent the tapes offlickety-split. Next to writing a poem every year, I think it was her chiefmeans of recreation. On one tape, she told the blind man she’d decided tolive away from her officer for a time. On another tape, she told him abouther divorce. She and I began going out, and of course she told her blind manabout it. She told him everything, or so it seemed to me. Once she asked meif I’d like to hear the latest tape from the blind man. This was a year ago. Iwas on the tape, she said. So I said okay, I’d listen to it. I got us drinks andwe settled down in the living room. We made ready to listen. First sheinserted the tape into the player and adjusted a couple of dials. Then shepushed a lever. The tape squeaked and someone began to talk in this loudvoice. She lowered the volume. After a few minutes of harmless chitchat, Iheard my own name in the mouth of this stranger, this blind man I didn’teven know! And then this: “From all you’ve said about him, I can onlyconclude—“ But we were interrupted, a knock at the door, something, andwe didn’t ever get back to the tape. Maybe it was just as well. I’d heard all Iwanted to.

Now this same blind man was coming over 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 wasusing and turned around.

“If you love me,” she said, “you can do this for me. If you don’t loveme, 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.“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 losthis wife!”

I didn’t answer. She’d told me a little about the blind man’s wife. Hername 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 thestove. “What’s wrong with you?” she said. “Are you drunk?”

“I’m just asking,” I said.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 beganto fall into place.

Beulah had gone to work for the blind man the summer after my wifehad stopped working for him. Pretty soon Beulah and the blind man hadthemselves a church wedding. It was a little wedding—who’d want to go tosuch a wedding in the first place?—just the two of them, plus the ministerand the minister’s wife. But it was a church wedding just the same. It waswhat Beulah had wanted, he’d said. But even then Beulah must have beencarrying the cancer in her glands. After they had been inseparable for eightyears—my wife’s word, inseparable—Beulah’s health went into a rapiddecline. She died in a Seattle hospital room, the blind man sitting beside thebed 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. Allthis without his having ever seen what the goddamned woman looked like. Itwas beyond my understanding. Hearing this, I felt sorry for the blind manfor a little bit. And then I found myself thinking what a pitiful life thiswoman must have led. Imagine a woman who could never see herself as shewas seen in the eyes of her loved one. A woman who could go on day afterday and never receive the smallest compliment from her beloved. A womanwhose husband could never read the expression on her face, be it misery orsomething better. Someone who could wear makeup or not—what difference\to him? She could if she wanted, wear green eye-shadow around one eye, astraight pin in her nostril, yellow slacks, and purple shoes, no matter. Andthen to slip off into death, the blind man’s hand on her hand, his blind eyesstreaming tears—I’m imagining now—her last thought maybe this: that henever 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-pesoMexican 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 washaving 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 thecar and shut the door. She was still wearing a smile. Just amazing. She wentaround to the other side of the car to where the blind man was alreadystarting 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 thebackseat 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 tothe 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 byhis coat sleeve.

The blind man let go of his suitcase and up came his hand.

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 carrying his suitcase in his other hand. My wife saidthings like, “To your left here, Robert. That’s right. Now watch it, there’s achair. That’s it. Sit down right here. This is the sofa. We just bought thissofa 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, youshould 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 on, by the way?”

“What a question, which side!” my wife said. “What’s it matter whichside?” 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, anyway. Do I look distinguished, my dear?” the blindman said to my wife.

“You look distinguished, Robert,” she said. “Robert,” she said.“Robert, it’s just so good to see you.”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. Thisblind man was late forties, a heavy-set, balding man with stooped shoulders,as if he carried a great weight there. He wore brown slacks, brown shoes, alight-brown shirt, a tie, a sports coat. Spiffy. He also had this full beard. Buthe didn’t use a cane and he didn’t wear dark glasses. I’d always thought darkglasses were a must for the blind. Fact was, I wish he had a pair. At firstglance, his eyes looked like anyone else’s eyes. But if you looked close,there was something different about them. Too much white in the iris, forone thing, and the pupils seemed to move around in the sockets without hisknowing it or being able to stop it. Creepy. As I stared at his face, I saw theleft pupil turn in toward his nose while the other made an effort to keep inone place. But it was only an effort, for that one eye was on the roamwithout his knowing it or wanting it to be.

I said, “Let me get you a drink. What’s your pleasure? We have a littlebit 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.”

He let his fingers touch his suitcase, which was sitting alongside thesofa. 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 goup.”

“A little water with the Scotch?” I said.“Very little,” he said.“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 hishand 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 ineach. Then we made ourselves comfortable and talked about Robert’stravels. First the long flight from the West Coast to Connecticut, we coveredthat. Then from Connecticut up here by train. We had another drinkconcerning that leg of the trip.

I remembered having read somewhere that the blind didn’t smokebecause, as speculation had it, they couldn’t see the smoke they exhaled. Ithough I knew that much and that much only about blind people. But thisblind 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. Mwife heaped Robert’s plate with cube steak, scalloped potatoes, green beans.I buttered him up two slices of bread. I said, “Here’s bread and butter foryou.” I swallowed some of my drink. “Now let us pray,” I said, and the blindman lowered his head. My wife looked at me, her mouth agape. “Pray thephone won’t ring and the food doesn’t get cold,” I said.

We dug in. We ate everything there was to eat on the table. We atelike there was no tomorrow. We didn’t talk. We ate. We scarfed. We grazedthe table. We were into serious eating. The blind man had right away locatedhis foods, he knew just where everything was on his plate. I watched withadmiration as he used his knife and fork on the meat. He’d cut two pieces ofthe meat, fork the meat into his mouth, and then go all out for the scallopedpotatoes, the beans next, and then he’d tear off a hunk of buttered bread andeat that. He’d follow this up with a big drink of milk. It didn’t seem tobother him to use his fingers once in a while, either.

We finished everything, including half a strawberry pie. For a fewmoments, we sat as if stunned. Swear beaded on our faces. Finally, we gotup from the table and left the dirty plates. We didn’t look back. We tookourselves into the living room and sank into our places again. Robert and mywife sat on the sofa. I took the big chair. We had us two or three more drinkswhile they talked about the major things that had come to pass for them inthe past ten years. For the most part, I just listened. Now and then I joinedin. I didn’t want him to think I’d left the room, and I didn’t want her to thinkI was feeling left out. They talked of things that had happened to them—tothem!—these past ten years. I waited in vain to hear my name on my wife’ssweet lips: “And then my dear husband came into my life”—something likethat. But I heard nothing of the sort. More talk of Robert. Robert had done alittle of everything, it seemed, a regular blind jack-of-all-trades. But mostrecently he and his wife had had an Amway distributorship, from which, I

gathered, they’d earned a living, such as it was. The blind man was also aham radio operator. He talked in his loud voice about conversations he’d hadwith fellow operators in Guam, in the Philippines, in Alaska, and even inTahiti. He said he’d have a lot of friends there if her ever wanted to go visitthose places. From time to time, he’d turn his blind face toward me, put hishand under his beard, ask me something. How long had I been in my presentposition? (Three years.) Did I like my work? (I didn’t.) Was I going to staywith it? (What were the options?) Finally, when I thought he was beginningto 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, andI’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 tothat. No opinion. So I watched the news program and tried to listen to whatthe announcer was saying.

“This is a color TV,” the blind man said. “Don’t ask me how, but Ican tell.”

“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 hisashtray on the coffee table, then put the lighter to his cigarette. He leanedback on the sofa and crossed his legs at the ankles.

My wife covered her mouth, and then she yawned. She stretched. Shesaid, “I think I’ll go upstairs and put on my robe. I think I’ll change intosomething else. Robert, you make yourself comfortable,” she said.

“I’m comfortable,” the blind man said.“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’tknow if she was going to come back. I thought she might have gone to bed. Iwished she’d come back downstairs. I didn’t want to be left alone with ablind man. I asked him if he wanted another drink, and he said sure. Then Iasked if he wanted to smoke some dope with me. I said I’d just rolled anumber. 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.”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 itand inhaled.

“Hold it as long as you can,” I said. I could tell he didn’t know thefirst thing.

My wife came back downstairs wearing her pink robe and her pinkslippers.

“What do I smell?” she said.“We thought we’d have us some cannabis,” I said.

My wife gave me a savage look. Then she looked at the blind man andsaid, “Robert, I didn’t know you smoked.”

He said, “I do now, my dear. There’s a first time for everything. But Idon’t feel anything yet.”

“This stuff is pretty mellow,” I said. “This stuff is mild. It’s dope youcan 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. “Whichway is this going?” she said. Then she said, “I shouldn’t be smoking this. Ican hardly keep my eyes open as it is. That dinner did me in. I shouldn’thave eaten so much.”

“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?”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 thissince he was nine years old.

“Thanks, bub,” he said. “But I think this is all for me. I think I’mbeginning 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 withmy eyes closed. But don’t let me bother you, okay? Either one of you. If itbothers you, say so. Otherwise, I may just sit here with my eyes closed untilyou’re ready to go to bed,” she said. “Your bed’s made up, Robert, whenyou’re ready. It’s right next to our room at the top of the stairs. We’ll showyou 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 backdown on the sofa. I wished my wife hadn’t pooped out. Her head lay acrossthe back of the sofa, her mouth open. She’d turned so that he robe hadslipped away from her legs, exposing a juicy thigh. I reached to draw herrobe back over her, and it was then that I glanced at the blind man. What thehell! I flipped the robe open again.

“You say you when you want some strawberry pie,” I said.“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. “ Helifted 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 could before I fell asleep. My wife and I hardly ever went to bed at thesame time. When I did go to sleep, I had these dreams. Sometimes I’d wakeup from one of them, my heart going crazy.

Something about the church and the Middle Ages was on the TV. Notyour run-of-the-mill TV fare. I wanted to watch something else. I turned tothe other channels. But there was nothing on them, either. So I turned backto the first channel and apologized.

“Bub, it’s all right,” the blind man said. “It’s fine with me. Whateveryou want to watch is okay. I’m always learning something. Learning neverends. 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 hishead turned at me, his right ear aimed in the direction of the set. Verydisconcerting. Now and then his eyelids drooped and then they snappedopen again. Now and then he put his fingers into his beard and tugged, likehe was thinking about something he was hearing on the television.

On the screen, a group of men wearing cowls was being set upon andtormented by men dressed in skeleton costumes and men dressed as devils.The men dressed as devils wore devil masks, horns, and long tails. Thispageant was part of a procession. The Englishman who was narrating thething said it took place in Spain once a year. I tried to explain to the blindman what was happening.

“Skeletons,” he said. “I know about skeletons,” he said, and henodded.

The TV showed this one cathedral. Then there was a long, slow lookat another one. Finally, the picture switched to the famous one in Paris, withits flying buttresses and its spires reaching up to the clouds. The camerapulled away to show the whole of the cathedral rising above the skyline.There were times when the Englishman who was telling the thingwould shut up, would simply let the camera move around over thecathedrals. Or else the camera would tour the countryside, men in fieldswalking behind oxen. I waited as long as I could. Then I felt I had to saysomething. I said, “They’re showing the outside of this cathedral now.Gargoyles. Little statues carved to look like monsters. Now I guess they’rein Italy. Yeah, they’re in Italy. There’s paintings on the walls of this onechurch.”

“Are those fresco painting, bub?” he asked, and he sipped from hisdrink.

I reached for my glass. But it was empty. I tried to remember what Icould remember. “You’re asking me are those frescoes?” I said. “That’s agood question. I don’t know.”

The camera moved to a cathedral outside Lisbon. The difference inthe Portugese cathedral compared with the French and Italian were not thatgreat. But they were there. Mostly the interior stuff. Then somethingoccurred 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? Ifsomebody says cathedral to you, do you have any notion what they’retalking about? Do you the difference between that and a Baptist church,say?”

He let the smoke dribble from his mouth. “I know they took hundredsof workers fifty or a hundred years to build,” he said. “I just heard the mansay that, of course. I know generations of the same families worked on acathedral. I heard him say that, too. The men who began their life’s work onthem, they never lived to see the completion of their work. In that wise, bub,they’re no different from the rest of us, right?” He laughed. Then his eyelidsdrooped again. His head nodded. He seemed to be snoozing. Maybe he wasimagining himself in Portugal. The TV was showing another cathedral now.

This one was in Germany. The Englishman’s voice droned on. “Cathedrals,”the blind man said. He sat up and rolled his head back and forth. “If youwant the truth, bub, that’s about all I know. What I just said. What I heardhim say. But maybe you could describe one to me? I wish you’d do it. I’dlike 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 evenbegin to describe it? But say my life depended on it. Say my life was beingthreatened 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 intothe countryside. There was no use. I turned to the blind man and said, “Tobegin 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 ofthem, they have to have these supports. To help hold them up, so to speak.These supports are called buttresses. They remind of viaducts, for somereason. But maybe you don’t know viaducts, either? Sometimes thecathedrals have devils and such carved into the front. Sometimes lords andladies. Don’t ask me why this is,” I said.

He was nodding. The whole upper part of his body seemed to bemoving back and forth.

“I’m not doing so good, am I?” I said.He stopped nodding and leaned forward on the edge of the sofa. As he

listened to me, he was running his fingers through his beard. I wasn’t gettingthrough 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 tosay. “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 importantpart of everyone’s life. You could tell this from their cathedral-building. I’msorry,” I said, “but it looks like that’s the best I can do for you. I’m just nogood at it.”

“That’s all right, bub,” the blind man said. “Hey, listen. I hope youdon’t mind my asking you. Can I ask you something? Let me ask you asimple question, yes or no. I’m just curious and there’s no offense. You’remy host. But let me ask if you are in any way religious? You don’t mind myasking?”

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. Sometimesit’s hard. You know what I’m saying?”

“Sure, I do,” he said.“Right,” I said.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’vedone.”

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.

Nothing. Cathedrals. They’re something to look at on late-night TV. That’sall they are.”

It was then that the blind man cleared his throat. He broughtsomething up. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket. Then he said, “Iget it, bub. It’s okay. It happens. Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Hey, listento me. Will you do me a favor? I got an idea. Why don’t you find us someheavy paper? And a pen. We’ll do something. We’ll draw one together. Getus 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 inthem. They felt like they did after I’d done some running. In my wife’sroom, 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 talkingabout.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, I found a shopping bag with onion skins inthe bottom of the bag. I emptied the bag and shook it. I brought it into theliving 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 thecarpet.

He ran his fingers over the paper. He went up and down the sides ofthe paper. The edges, even the edges. He fingered the corners.

“All right,” he said. “All right, let’s do her.”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 alongwith 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 hose. It could havebeen the house I lived in. Then I put a roof on it. At either end of the roof, Idrew spires. Crazy.

“Swell,” he said. “Terrific. You’re doing fine,” he said. “Neverthought anything 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 greatdoors. I couldn’t stop. The TV station went off the air. I put down the penand closed and opened my fingers. The blind man felt around over the paper.He moved the tips of the fingers over the paper, all over what I had drawn,and he nodded.

“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 toknow.”

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,” hesaid. “Sure. You got it, bub. I can tell. You didn’t think you could. But youcan, 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 oldarm?” he said. “Put some people in there now. What’s a cathedral withoutpeople?”

My wife said, “What’s going on? Robert, what are you doing? What’sgoing on?”

“It’s all right,” he said to her. “Close your eyes now,” the blind mansaid 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.“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 alook. What do you think?”

But I had my eyes closed. I thought I’d keep them that way for a littlelonger. I thought it was something I ought to do.

“Well?” he said. “Are you looking?”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.