STORIES

Vital Signs

As far as I can tell from digging in my notebooks, I began working on "Vital Signs" in 1979. For most of its life, before it got published in 1987, this story was known as "Building" and was much longer - a novella, a form that an editor assured me no magazine would publish. It had a complicated evolution, and countless hours of writing underlie the version that appears here. What may be more interesting to fans of the creative process is that much later, this same kernel of an idea became the novel Over the Fence, which is both very like and absolutely unlike "Vital Signs."
This is one of the many reasons why I believe that no writing is ever wasted.

It was a hot day in Little Dixie as Tom Hardison drove north out of Columbia, Missouri on U.S. 63. His black Bonneville with the red interior was only two years old and worked fine but he was fed up with paying for it. No satisfaction in the machine any more - except the air conditioning; he wished he had bought a VW like Kate's instead, but the clients and the company had certain expectations. He wrenched the car around a curve and over a slight hill. On the other side a railroad track jolted him into slowing down for a moment. The highway burned in front of him, melting into mirage-pools floating on the blacktop; the horizon wavered with heat, but the trees, heavy with thick midsummer leaves, did not stir, and no one was in sight. Then some sad bastard in a John Deere hat and a sweat-soaked work shirt, crawling down the shoulder on a tractor. Tom passed him at sixty-five. Sometimes he drove slower and waved to the oncoming pickups as you're supposed to do on country roads, but today he couldn't bother with that. Read more »

The Cold Room

In 1977, I lucked into co-teaching a fiction writing class with Ursula Le Guin, at UC San Diego. One day she gave an assignment: write a love story. I did, and many drafts later it became this, which was published in the short-lived little magazine Stories and then was chosen by John Updike for Best American Stories 1984.
This story draws heavily on my two years (1969-71) as a conscientious objector in Columbia, Missouri, working in a lab at the medical school.

The dogs were the worst. He found it hard to work up much sympathy for rats, and he was thankful they were the only animals he had to work with - injecting them, sticking tubes into them, changing their plumbing, draining their blood for analysis. Some technicians had to deal with cows or pigs, which were too big to be moved from place to place, and usually ended up imprisoned in a lab built around them, where no one ever saw them but the people who tended their cables and tubes. Bats were too small and strange to care about, and laboratory rabbits were almost too stupid. But the cats bothered him, and the dogs were the worst. Especially when at the end of the day he took the dead rats - bulges in bloody plastic bags, their dead tails no longer pink but white like the rest of them - down to the cold room. He opened the heavy door, like that on a meat locker, and threw the sack toward one of the garbage cans inside, trying not to see the fifty-five-gallon drums of dead dogs. The dogs that wouldn't fit into the drums lay stiffening in transparent green bags on the floor. He held his breath while doing this, and if the rats missed the garbage can he didn't go inside to pick them up. Read more »

No Kick from Champagne

This is the other story I've published that is relatively autobiographical in a literal way.

It was hot again first thing in the morning, not terribly hot for August compared to being at home, but in a strange place - an apartment with floorboards turned gray by millions of strange shoes, and bulging scratchy furniture in the living room - Lemuel felt like he couldn't breathe. He turned his radio on, the one he had insisted on bringing from home, and a man told him it was seventy-seven degrees at five minutes till eight. Down the hall he could hear his mother taking a shower and knew that if he didn't get up she would come in next thing with dripping hair and tell him that if he didn't hurry he'd make her late for class. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, sat up and scratched his head because it felt good to scratch in the morning. The floorboards were still cool. There was a marble parked against the bed leg, and he scooted over to hook it with his big toe and send it rolling and knocking into the same corner of the room where the other marbles were. Read more »

Meditation on Bangs

Who knows where some ideas come from?

I have declined to comment on the appearance of small clouds of black smoke over distant parts of the city, or the ubiquity of buzz-saws, but lately I have devoted a great deal of thought to the investigation of mysterious bangs.

You are so familiar with them, perhaps, that you no longer notice them. But they seem to occur more often at night, or perhaps they merely reach the awareness better at that time. Was that a gun? you ask yourself. A backfire? A cherry-bomb? Did anyone else notice it? Read more »

Barranca, King of the Tree Streets

I lived in Princeton, New Jersey, for six months in the latter half of 1977. Life there was in some ways peculiar, but not half as peculiar as this story.

My friends lived on Chestnut Street, and when I was looking for a place to live they said, "Go see Barranca, up at the barber shop, he owns half the tree streets."

"Tree streets?"

"Chestnut, Maple, Spruce - right around here."

"Oh."

In the grocery store (if I remember right) I saw a young woman who looked like a girl I was in love with in college. They had been called girls, twenty years before. She said "hi" to me in the checkout line and also later, on Chestnut Street, as if I looked like someone she knew, too. I noticed the unselfconsciously arrogant way she held a twenty-dollar bill between two fingers as the clerk bagged her groceries. Outside the store, I passed a couple of other women and caught a whiff of some perfume, like an odor of sanctity, that went right into me and hit the mark. Read more »

Naked Women

I was teaching in the Expository Writing Program at Harvard at the time I wrote this story. Expos was my second graduate school, the one where I learned invaluable lessons on writing from colleagues such as Alex Gold and Nancy Kline (who gave me good advice on the ending). Writing it was an enormous amount of fun.

The fight began on a Tuesday when my wife, Elaine, was rummaging around my workshop area in the basement, looking for a can-opener that could not possibly have been there, and found the pictures of my old girlfriends. The nude pictures, that is, the ones I had put inside the service manual for a VW Bug I hadn't owned in twenty years, which just shows that the can-opener story was not to be believed for a minute. I had almost forgotten they were there. There was a scream from the basement and then fascinated silence - I reconstructed this from the testimony of Naomi, who was only six at the time but had the observational and deductive powers of thirteen. When I got home from work that day Naomi said to me, in the tone of someone repeating a lesson, "Mommy says she has something she wants to show you in the basement." Read more »