Category: Art Feature

Bombay Time

By Thrity Umrigar

Picador, 271 pp., $24

Bombay, on the west coast of India, population today: 10 million and climbing. Bombay: once a string of islands, then an island city, then a port city, then Gateway of India — a trading, cosmopolitan, westernized city, but home too, after the rise of Islam, to emigrants from the east, from Persia, Zoroastrians (Parsis) who formed their own island population among the city’s Hindus and Muslims, Christians and Jews. Parsis: industrious, middle-class, dedicated to self-betterment, to education, to economic and social advancement, possibly a little smug, possibly a little superior in their attitudes, no obvious enemies of the Raj, no necessary champions of Indian independence but maintaining an ancient dedication to one God.

And what of Bombay in the eyes of the Parsi families who inhabit a single apartment building called Wadia Baug and as Thrity Umrigar observes them in her remarkable debut novel, Bombay Time? To Rusi Bilimoria, the Bombay of his youth, the Bombay where marine bands played and fountains actually worked, “had given way to a fetid, crowded, overpowering city that insulted his senses” — a “time bomb of a city,” he calls it, a city with streets prowled by “shadowy, vicious creatures,” “invisible outsiders,” “vultures,” “them.” And to his mother Khorshed, it isn’t just Bombay: Simply put,”the country had gone to hell after the British left.”

This is the subtext, not the substance (until its very late pages), of Bombay Time. And simply put, Umrigar writes not sociologically but individually of disappointment and loss, of envy and regret, of dreams deferred when those dreams are not, as is more often the case, dashed, and she writes of all these within the framework of a single evening: a wedding reception held in honor of a Harvard-educated son and his bride as hosted by an Oxford-educated father and highly successful lawyer named Jimmy Kanga. Among Kanga’s guests are the boyhood friends and neighbors he knew growing up in Wadia Baug. It’s their stories, told in flashback, that form the novel’s wide basis.

Consider one Soli Contractor, “neighborhood clown,” who this night is seeking Rusi’s advice on a letter he received from his lost love, Mariam, a “Jew girl” who broke his heart when she and her family moved to Israel after World War II and after she had opened his heart to something in himself finer than he’d ever imagined.

Or consider one Tehmi Engineer, whose dual tragedies — a father’s death, a husband’s death — and the mysterious illness that followed have forced her into virtual exile until this night.

Or Adi Patel, neighborhood drunk, who at age 19 raped then ended up haunted by the daughter of one of his landowning father’s laborers. Adi, a drunk this night too.

Or the widow Dosa Popat, neighborhood midwife of medicine and gossip, who aimed to become the first Parsi woman doctor but who saw that ambition crushed by an arranged marriage then crushed the ambitions of her son. This to save that son the disappointment of possible failure. Or to feed her gargantuan envy?

The book belongs mostly, however, to Rusi Bilimoria and his wife Coomi. He, in his youth, bragged of his guaranteed, future success in business; she, in hers, fell for him and that guarantee. But since that time, what? Mild to uneven profits from Rusi’s paper factory. Savage words followed by tender ones and beggings for forgiveness from Coomi, words never entirely out of earshot of Rusi’s live-in mother Khorshed and words, for good or ill, never less than fleeting. The sole bright spot here? Daughter Binny, whom the couple do agree they did right to prepare for a life in England rather than a life in this “wretched country” India. Umrigar performs the dissection of this marriage beautifully, but it’s Rusi and Coomi who do the hurting mutually. Until, that is, “a gift from the shadows,” a hurled rock, brings what was past tense in Bombay Time violently into the present and the wedding guests out of their remembering.

Not for nothing has Jimmy Kanga hired a sentry to guard his party from the crowd that’s begun to collect outside the reception hall, there to wait for the guests to clear and the Dumpster to fill. And not for nothing has Rusi Bilimoria’s life, despite its grave disappointments, prepared him for the compassion he shows this evening. As for the others, let them, these Parsis, as Umrigar writes, “choose memory over imagination.”

For his part, Rusi had already learned to “navigate between contentment and complacency, between caution and fear, between the known safety of Wadia Baug and the unknowable world outside its walls. Just as his ancestors had occupied the safe small strip of space between Hindu and Muslim, between Indian and English, between East and West, he had to live in the no-man’s-land between the rage of the stone thrower and the terror of the stoned. But where to begin, he didn’t have a clue.” He, more than most, knows to just begin.

I wanted Annette out of there. I wanted her here. My child. My third child. I could help her. I would be better for her. Because Neva was either crazy, or a whore, or both. Not a mother.

God bless the child that’s got his own.

— Billie Holiday

When Bill came home, he found no dinner. The house was a mess. I was hiding in the closet from the children.

It was after seven. The time, where had it gone? We had played hide-and-seek for three hours.

Bill’s feet were wet, had been all day. He was painting a maintenance-free house out east, and he and the other painters’ feet were sprayed every day by a sprinkler system that went off at the wrong time like clockwork. He took off his shoes, kissed Frankie and Sarah, said hi to me and Annette. He went to the kitchen, made and ate five peanut butter sandwiches and drank a quart of milk. Then he went into our bedroom and fell asleep with his clothes on.

Of course, when the children saw him eating, they jumped around the table begging for food. Bill just ignored them, staring at his newspaper. I led them out with the promise of making dinner. I boiled water for macaroni and cheese. That, and peanut butter, was all we had. I found myself wishing.

I knew better than to wish.

As the children ate their macaroni, I felt wishes knotting my stomach, just the same. All there was for breakfast was cornflakes. Bill would want more than that, but at least it would be Friday. If he didn’t have to work late, we could grocery shop right after he got off work.

When you fill your stomach with worry, eventually you burp. The children laughed as though gastric problems existed only for their entertainment.

I had been keeping Annette every day for two weeks by then, but her mother hadn’t paid me yet. When Bill asked last Friday, I said I wouldn’t get paid for another week. He rolled his eyes, but said nothing else. He predicted this would be an act of charity, which he didn’t mind, I don’t suppose, but it couldn’t go on forever. I wanted to earn some extra money, but money wasn’t the only reason I kept Annette.

And money wasn’t my only worry. I was worried I’d have to report Neva, Annette’s mother, to AFDC.

Neva and Annette lived down the street in one of those garage apartments that looked ready to lean over and die. I noticed Neva right after she moved in, because Neva was a woman you had to notice. Every afternoon she strutted down the street to walk Annette home from school. I mean, she rolled and ambled to the full force of her weight. She looked like Mae West in tight blue jeans and her makeup arrived five minutes before she did. She always had fancy combs in her short blond hair and wore large dangling earrings. Often she talked loudly to herself.

But on her way back with Annette, she seemed to shrink to her daughter’s size. They were always engaged in laughter and chatter. Every day, as I sat on the porch watching my children, I marveled how the conversation with a child made that woman’s garish face so pleasant.

When they passed in front of our house, Annette’s chatter quieted and she stared at my children and their toys.

One day, she just stopped and begged her mother, “I wanna play there, Mommy, please, Mommy, please.”

“Can Annette play with your kids here?” her mother yelled to me.

“Uhh, yeah,” I answered.

“Okay. Make her be good,” she said to me, and winked. The mother eased down the street, the daughter scampered into my yard. At the time, I didn’t even know their names.

Annette was one of those strikingly beautiful children that are sometimes born to interracial couples. Her hair was white blond and hung in soft kinks past her shoulders. Her skin was a milky brown. She had almond-shaped gray eyes and soft African features. I was embarrassed that the first adjective I thought of to describe her was sensual. Yet she possessed that lanky, carefree grace that models affect through camera angles and strict diets.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Annete Juanetta Morgan.”

“Hold are you?”

“Eight.”

I remembered the requests of men, uncles, and friends of my father, the smell of beer spilling out with their laughter, “Pretty girl, let me touch your hair, come sit in my lap. Have some candy.”

“Be nice to your uncle,” my mother said, gesturing at me with her beer can.

Pictures that never get taken from the wall.

Annette played well, asked for candy and fought for toys.

Her mother never came for her.

When it was almost dark, I walked her home. She didn’t want to go and insisted her mother wouldn’t mind if she ate with us.

The door to their house was open; I could hear a woman’s laughter. Her mother was dancing by herself to synthesized music, turned down low. She was surprised to see us, stopped dancing, arms in mid-air, and glared, momentarily.

She dropped her arms and said, sweetly, “Was she bad?”

“No, not at all, she was fine. What’s your name?”

“Neva. Neva Morgan.”

“Well, my name’s Katy Thomas. Annette can come to play with my kids anytime,” I said, leaning close to her to check her breath. It was an old trick. I used it on my parents. If there was alcohol on Mom’s or Dad’s breath, I could better predict the future.

Neva smelled only of perfume. I said good-bye and left. I felt bad about suspecting her. Bill says I can’t go around suspecting everyone to be like my parents. But what kind of mother would leave her child all day with someone she didn’t know?

Perhaps she is naive, I thought.

Neva left Annette with us almost every afternoon. On Saturday and Sunday, Annette would show up in the mornings and not leave until sundown.

“I guess we got our third child,” Bill said, sitting on the porch with me on Sunday.

She wore her welcome quite thin. When I told her we were going somewhere, or that the children couldn’t play, her lip would poke out and she’d drag her feet home. Once, she just sat on the porch, glaring at us as we drove away.

About a week after school was out, Neva came over with Annette just after Bill left for work.

“Can you keep Annette today? I gotta find me a job. Them folks down there are tryin’ to move me outta my house. I ain’t got no food! The school used to give Annette breakfast and lunch. Now I gotta do it and I cain’t. She ain’t ate since yesterday. That ain’t right.”

Not since yesterday! I looked at Annette, hugging her knees in the easy chair, sucking her thumb.

“Neva, have you tried to get food stamps?”

“Yeah, I got them damned food stamps. AFDC too. It ain’t enough. It don’t last ‘til the end of the month. I got to find me a job. If I cain’t I’m gonna have to sell my pussy. I don’t wanna haveta sell my pussy again. But that what they want. That’s what everybody want is for a woman to be down so low she gotta sell herself. That’s what welfare want. Want to keep you hungry so you sell you pussy. Get a job, they take that welfare away so you still gotta sell yourself. I don’t want to. I don’t want to do that again. But I cain’t let this baby starve. I gotta find me a job.”

There wasn’t one thing I could think of to say. I felt dazed watching her pace around the living room, her arms flying in all directions. Sarah and Frankie were quiet, mesmerized by this large, raving woman. Annette hugged her knees.

She was going on and on. Her language was getting fouler, her voice louder.

I had to yell to stop her, “Yes, Neva. Yes. I’ll keep her while you look for a job.”

She looked around as if she didn’t know where she was. Then she smiled, “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll pay you. I’ll pay you as soon as I get a job. Gotta. Gotta find me a job.”

“I’ll feed Annette,” I said.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Thank you. She don’t eat much. Skinny thing. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”

When Neva left, Annette sprang back to life. Her thumb came out of her mouth, and she said, “Let’s play red light green light.”

Stirring batter and putting together sandwiches controlled some of my fear of what Neva had said. Annette ate like a horse. Then she laid on the couch and slept.

I looked at her stretched out in sleep, listened to the rhythm of her soft snores. Who was her father? Was he a John or a trick or whatever they call those men?

I wanted Annette out of there. I wanted her here. My child. My third child. I could help her. I would be better for her. No, she shouldn’t have to live with that woman. Because Neva was either crazy, or a whore, or both. Not a mother.

Watching Annette sleep, I barely paid attention to my own children. I noticed how well she fit on the couch. I was in love, noticing only her, not the holes in the couch, the unpainted walls.

I was slicing potatoes when Bill came home. He was shocked by what I told him.

“She said that? In front of the children?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think, is it possible, that she’s, uh — off?”

“Yes. I suppose it’s possible and likely. But she could be off and have been a prostitute too, right?”

He stood there with his hands in his pockets, his face dusty with blue specks. He had been scraping a blue house. Blue was out of fashion.

“Maybe you should ask John about her.”

I had already thought of that. I would talk to John.

Before I got married, John, Bill, and I shared a floor in an apartment building. I had gotten out of my parents’ house. I went to Shelby State during the day and waited tables at night. The tips were tremendous. I felt so lucky, the men taking their unwrinkled bills from their smooth leather wallets. This is for you, honey. I smiled. They swallowed the last of their wine.

Thank you. It seemed like so much money.

It was my first job. I was on top of it for a while.

Something happened to me, though. I started to feel the weight of the past was pinching off my nerves. Sometimes it felt as if my arms would drop off, or my head roll away. I was eighteen. I began to envy the customers, their fine fabrics, glossy nails, and perfect white teeth. They smelled of soft colognes. There was too much ugliness in me, I thought. I imagined the past seeping out of me, marking me like a skin disease. I dropped a tray. I couldn’t hear their orders. “What? What did you say?”

They left smaller tips. Left while I wasn’t looking.

I couldn’t remember what key opened my apartment door. I couldn’t remember why I had so many keys. The past kept blurring the present. There was no reason to cry. I was out of my parents’ life.

John Maxwell found me sitting on the hall floor, practically incoherent. He invited me to his apartment, brewed some thin yellow tea, and put it in a thin china cup in front of me. He said he did the entry counseling at the Methodist Mental Health Facility.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

He suggested I join Adult Children of Alcoholics. I went to meetings and clung to the stories of others who were cast out like lifeboats.

Our parents had marked the tempo of the room, the beat of the pain, then we each had our chance to improvise, like jazz musicians who close their eyes and tell.

The next time I couldn’t find my key, I just waited. That time I met Bill. I lived between a counselor and a lover. In a way I married them both.

When Bill found the right key, he opened the door, then took the key chain back to his apartment, where he wrapped the key in bright red tape. “My mother had trouble with her eyes, too,” he said.

I had never had my eyes checked. Sure enough, I was farsighted.

Bill never tried to solve my other problems. I was talking and talking about the past, splintering the story into its infinite variations, when he said, “Just stop. You know you can have a happy childhood any time you want. Have one now. Take it. It’s right there. Imagine any damned childhood you want.”

Bill’s eyes were the deepest brown, almost black, almost a bed of earth, his eyes. Then, he wore the face of a man who saw the world as a challenge. He was going to walk through the week knocking days out of the way.

After marriage and children, at times he looked stunned, by his empty wallet, our empty accounts. Yet each night, the children asleep, he checked them, studied their peace.

“I guess it’s not about money,” he’d say, pushing his hand through Frankie’s hair. Even in his sleep, Frankie pushed that hand away.

Soon they’d need separate bedrooms. Soon we’d need a bigger place.

I didn’t want to tie up the present in wishes for the future.

It was nine at night before Neva came for her girl.

“I got a job,” Neva announced. “I got a job at the IHOP. I’ll be a night waitress. Uh, can you keep Annette, three to eleven? I won’t get paid for two weeks, but they give me meals and I get tips.”

“Yes, I can.”

Neva hugged Annette. Immediately they talked of what they would buy with the money, a fantastic list of I-wants as if the IHOP paid you real wages. With a face flushed like a child telling secrets, Neva asked me, “You won’t tell, will you?

“Tell? Tell what?”

“Tell nobody at welfare I got a job.”

“No. No, I won’t tell.”

Neva pushed her hand through the kinks of Annette’s hair. “Their hair’s a mess,” she said to me. Annette closed her eyes. “She the only one I got left,” Neva said. “I just hope someday I can get my others back.”

“You have other children?” I asked.

She withdrew her hand from Annette’s hair. “I had me 10 children. All of ‘em dead, so I thought. My husband told me they was born dead. Never let me see the bodies. I heard ‘em crying. I’d go to sleep. He’d say they was born dead. Didn’t get no pictures, nothin’. No funeral. Said the hospital disposed of ‘em. Now I know they wasn’t dead. He was sellin’ my children. I talked to the folks at the hospital. No way I could have had 10 children they said, cause they were in on it. He paid em off. I know he did. I told him to get me back my children, get ‘em back. At least let me know where they are, but he beat me up and left me. Don’t know where, but I’m gonna hire me somebody to find him, when I get me some money. I had to do something for money. Sell my ass, but I knew I wasn’t no mother of dead babies. Five girls, five boys — a mother knows!”

Her face was red. Her breathing was heavy. She spat the words. I stepped back from her, lest her waving arms strike me.

“But I had Annette, by God. Alone. She popped out screaming, alive. Annette was God’s message that my babies wasn’t dead. I’m gonna get ‘em back, I been lookin’ around for children that look like me and I’m just gonna tell em that I’m their real Momma. I’m the one that bled and screamed . . . “

Bill walked into the room.

Neva’s face changed to a smile. “Excuse me. We’ll be leaving now. Thank you for letting Annette stay, thank you for helpin out. You’re real good people.”

“Uh, no problem,” said Bill.

The door closed. The house was quiet.

I tried not to wish for an unfettered life.

Annette was there at 2:30 the next day. Her mother waved from the sidewalk, her tight uniform decorated with smiling pancakes.

I waited until after I fed Annette to ask, “Where is your father? Do you know your father?”

She took a strand of her hair and began to curl it around her finger. “We don’t know my father,” she said. “My father was someone who raped my mother.” She watched the shock on my face. “But my mommy loves me anyway. She says I’m a gift from God. Can I go play now?”

“Yes, yes, go play.” Who would tell a child of eight her father was a rapist? I felt ill. I felt the illness that medical students must feel, learning the truth of the body.

What was the truth of Neva?

I played running games with them. Freeze tag, hide and seek, anything to keep moving. I could find both Frankie and Sarah easily, but Annette hid well. Often I had to give up.

I didn’t want to face what was required of me.

There was a free concert at the park that night and we walked there with the kids. Bill pulled Annette, Frankie and Sarah in the wagon. Once they all tumbled out. Annette cried a little, then decided only she should be in the wagon.

“No, we have to share,” I said.

She looked at Bill. “You’ll let me ride by myself, won’t you?” She smiled, licked her lips and batted her eyes.

Bill grabbed the wagon handle and told her, “You heard her, got to share.”

She turned, stuck out her tongue and crossed her eyes at me. She walked beside the wagon rather than get back in with the other kids.

The crowd made her forget her bad mood. It was the first time I’d been in public with her. People I knew asked about her. “Who is this beautiful girl? This is the prettiest child I ever saw. Whose pretty girl is this?”

Annette smiled, closing her eyes with pleasure as the compliments rained down on her.

Men I didn’t even know asked, “Is she your daughter? She’s so beautiful.” Their hands reached toward her as they asked. I pushed her behind my back.

I called John when I got home.

I slept with Sarah in her bed that night, after Neva picked up Annette. Sarah’s body rolled toward me, then away.

John was there when Neva came with Annette the next day. It was easier to get her to go off than I imagined.

“Any news on your other children?” I asked.

She looked into my eyes, puzzled, as if she was trying to figure why I was asking. I kept my face still, hoping no guile would show.

“No, damnit, no . . .” and she was raving. She showed no modesty in front of John. I wonder if she saw him, quietly smoking, watching her. Foulness punctuated her rage like thunder punctuates a storm. Trying to stop her was like trying to stop thunder.

“Yes, but . . . yes, but . . .” I said, but she didn’t listen. I found myself with my arm on her shoulder, then she was easy to turn. I turned her and led her to the door.

“You’ll be late for work,” I said loudly in her ear.

She looked at me as if she had never seen me before.

“Work, shit,” she said hoarsely, “Bull shit, that’s what.”

I watched her as she walked toward the bus stop, slowly with her head down, muttering.

You want anything to eat?” I asked Annette.

“No. Can I go play?”

She joined Frankie and Sarah in the backyard. Squeals from them filled the silence Neva left.

“Looks like schizophrenia, to me.That stuff about the hospital plotting with her husband to steal children. That stuff about a message from God, sounds real familiar. She hears that stuff in her head, all those plots and things. It’s a disorder. You can say something to her and she’ll read some paranoid message in it. You can report her to AFDC. They’ll get her with Memphis Mental Health Center. They have to use drug therapy. That’s the only way.”

“What’ll happen to Annette? Will they give her to the state? Can they give her to me?”

“Well, if she goes in voluntarily, they’re very supportive. They like to keep the family together.”

The family? Were Neva and Annette a family? I had thought of them as an accident, a mistake, even.

“I don’t really know. If she wanted you to keep her while she went in for treatment, that might work. But chances are if you report her, she’s not going to want you to keep Annette. A lot of times, they’re hostile, even after treatment they’re hostile. Of course, you can wait. Looks like she’ll blow up at AFDC eventually. AFDC’ll probably find out on their own.”

He stubbed out his cigarette, got up, kissed me on the cheek and left.

You can always tell who is having that treatment, those drugs. The way there is no spirit in their walk, the way they roll their hands around an invisible ball, the way they look at you on the street, confused and embarrassed.

I rubbed the spot where the memory of John’s kiss lingered on my cheek. I could wait. I could wait for someone else to report Neva. Someone else would, surely. Then Annette wouldn’t remember me as the one who broke up their family.

I remembered how I loved my parents at eight. How even though they were lost to me and I needed out of there, how I loved them, when, occasionally, they let me close.

Sarah ran in screaming, “She hit me, she hit me!”

Annette and Frankie ran in after her. “She did hit her,” Frankie said.

“She said a nasty word,” Annette cried. “She said the s word and the f word.”

“She was just sayin’ what Miz Morgan said. She was just sayin’ what your mother said,” Frankie yelled at her.

Annette’s face went pale. She put her thumb in her mouth. All I could do was give them cookies. They forgot all about it with the sweets in their hands.

I tried to hug Annette but she turned from me.

That night, Neva said she was fired. “You know know,” she said, “they said I could eat a meal every night, then they said I ate too much. Hell, a woman needs to eat. Won’t give me my check for another week. They hold it back. I’ll pay you then.”

She sat on my couch, her body sagging inside the smiling pancake uniform. Annette put her hand in her mother’s lap.

“What we gonna do now?” Neva said.

She took a brush from her purse and brushed Annette’s hair. She took barrettes and pinned the child’s wild hair into place. She put little gold earrings in Annette’s pierced ears and made up Annette’s eyes.

“There,” said Neva. “She looks better.”

Annette looked at me, the makeup exaggerating her eyes. “Am I pretty, Miz Thomas?”

Yes, yes. Then they were gone.

I didn’t see either of them for a week. I walked by their house and it was dark. I imagined terrible things. Would Neva walk the streets? Would she sell Annette to a good offer?

I went to the phone several times, but I never dialed the AFDC number. I never did. I kept seeing Annette’s face. I heard her crying alone as they took Neva away.

I wished for money. Wished for big charitable bankrolls to handle private hospitals, the expense of another child, the cloistering of a Neva in a miracle.

Foolish to wish for money. I had happiness, my family a dream come true. Bill and I could imagine our lives 50 years from now tinged with the same happiness. I saw my past as a murky pond and my children the water lilies nourished there. Useless to desire more. Greedy.

Yet, it seemed my only option with Annette was to push her into the jaws of a system I could see, I could see was composed of shortcuts and convenient solutions, gray walls and overworked social workers. Nurses doing double time, doctors in training, on their way up, on their way up to a maintenance-free life.

Wish for money, wish for better systems. It’s the same knot.

Where could we put a third child?

Wouldn’t Neva be forever attached to her? I remembered how they talked on the walks home from school.

When they came to visit again, Annette was wearing bright red lipstick.

Neva chattered to me. I couldn’t listen. I watched Annette organize my children into games. She played so well with them, though she was eight and they were five and three.

“Are you listening to me?” Neva demanded.

“Look, Neva,” I blurted, “you need help. You’ve obviously got some mental problems. Everybody can see it. Why do you think you got fired? You’re off, not a lot, but off. They can help you. Why do you think people stare at you? You’ve got to get help. AFDC will help you get medicine. Do you understand what I’m saying? You got to do it for Annette, or something bad is going to happen, something awful.”

Neva was still smiling, just as she had when she was chattering what I didn’t hear.

“You sound like you been talkin to my husband,” she said softly. She put her hand on my throat, her thumb pressing against me in a way that made me realize my mortality. “If you try to take my child,” she said in a low, sultry voice, “I’ll kill you.”

She pulled her hand down, shook it out and examined the red paint on her nails.

“Besides,” she said, “we gonna get public housing.” Her eyes shone with happiness. “That’s what I been tellin you, we gonna be movin.”

I rubbed my throat.

“Annette Juanetta, come on, we gotta finish packing.”

Annette’s face had the same look as it did when she found out about Neva’s IHOP job. “We can come back to see Miz Thomas, can’t we?”

Neva looked at me with slitted eyes. “Yeah,” she said.” Yeah we gonna come see her some time. You wanna play with her kids, right?” Then to me she said, “I don’t got your 40 dollars now, counta I got fired and I gotta pay this man to move me. But I’m gonna bring it to you. I don’t like to be in debt to nobody.”

Annette hugged me while Neva smiled as if her face were made of ice. They walked home. That afternoon, from my porch, I watched them leave. An assortment of odd boxes, a radio, a TV, and one rocking chair were in the back of an old pickup. Neva sat next to the driver, talking and laughing at him. Annette sat next to the window. She waved at me.

I haven’t seen her since then.

Is it okay? I remember that child. I try to remember her as strong.

One day, when she stayed with us, a large flock of migrating birds roosted in the back yard. I’ve always been one to keep the doors open, something about the air in a closed house — I can’t breathe it. Even in winter, sometimes, I have to open the doors.

It was a black bird that swooped in through the front door. The windows, walls and sudden darkness of the house panicked the bird. It screeched like no bird I’ve ever heard. I tried to chase it out, then the children started running around after me. I was trying to throw a towel over it, capture it so I could put it back out. I suppose we terrified the poor thing, but it was fun chasing it. We were slow and it flew around knocking things over, banging into the windows. I finally got it, though. It pecked me through the towel.

When I let it go, the birds roosting in the yard followed it away from our house.

Annette had sat on the couch the whole time Frankie, Sarah and I chased the bird. She sat there, her feet crossed, kicking back and forth, studying the movement of her feet, humming a tune I didn’t recognize.

She didn’t seem to notice when the chase stopped. She just kept kicking and humming. I sat beside her on the couch, out of breath.

Slowly she lifted her gaze from her shoes to me. She looked afraid.

I smiled.

She smiled back.

“We got the bird out,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

Then she got up and organized a game of bird. Frankie and Sarah flew around the house with her, flapping their arms and chirping the songs of cartoon birds.

Perhaps she can always make a game out of chaos.

I wonder sometimes if I should have done something different.

Since she has been gone, I find myself looking in every crowd for her. As surely as Neva looks for her stolen children, I look for Annette. If I see her, I don’t know what.

Joy Tremawan now goes by her married name, Joy Allen. Her work has appeared in such publications as Oxford American, Sassy, and American Fiction: The Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Authors. She works at Davis-Kidd Booksellers.

Click here to find more information on this year’s contest.

I wanted Annette out of there. I wanted her here. My child. My third child. I could help her. I would be better for her. Because Neva was either crazy, or a whore, or both. Not a mother.

God bless the child that’s got his own.

— Billie Holiday

When Bill came home, he found no dinner. The house was a mess. I was hiding in the closet from the children.

It was after seven. The time, where had it gone? We had played hide-and-seek for three hours.

Bill’s feet were wet, had been all day. He was painting a maintenance-free house out east, and he and the other painters’ feet were sprayed every day by a sprinkler system that went off at the wrong time like clockwork. He took off his shoes, kissed Frankie and Sarah, said hi to me and Annette. He went to the kitchen, made and ate five peanut butter sandwiches and drank a quart of milk. Then he went into our bedroom and fell asleep with his clothes on.

Of course, when the children saw him eating, they jumped around the table begging for food. Bill just ignored them, staring at his newspaper. I led them out with the promise of making dinner. I boiled water for macaroni and cheese. That, and peanut butter, was all we had. I found myself wishing.

I knew better than to wish.

As the children ate their macaroni, I felt wishes knotting my stomach, just the same. All there was for breakfast was cornflakes. Bill would want more than that, but at least it would be Friday. If he didn’t have to work late, we could grocery shop right after he got off work.

When you fill your stomach with worry, eventually you burp. The children laughed as though gastric problems existed only for their entertainment.

I had been keeping Annette every day for two weeks by then, but her mother hadn’t paid me yet. When Bill asked last Friday, I said I wouldn’t get paid for another week. He rolled his eyes, but said nothing else. He predicted this would be an act of charity, which he didn’t mind, I don’t suppose, but it couldn’t go on forever. I wanted to earn some extra money, but money wasn’t the only reason I kept Annette.

And money wasn’t my only worry. I was worried I’d have to report Neva, Annette’s mother, to AFDC.

Neva and Annette lived down the street in one of those garage apartments that looked ready to lean over and die. I noticed Neva right after she moved in, because Neva was a woman you had to notice. Every afternoon she strutted down the street to walk Annette home from school. I mean, she rolled and ambled to the full force of her weight. She looked like Mae West in tight blue jeans and her makeup arrived five minutes before she did. She always had fancy combs in her short blond hair and wore large dangling earrings. Often she talked loudly to herself.

But on her way back with Annette, she seemed to shrink to her daughter’s size. They were always engaged in laughter and chatter. Every day, as I sat on the porch watching my children, I marveled how the conversation with a child made that woman’s garish face so pleasant.

When they passed in front of our house, Annette’s chatter quieted and she stared at my children and their toys.

One day, she just stopped and begged her mother, “I wanna play there, Mommy, please, Mommy, please.”

“Can Annette play with your kids here?” her mother yelled to me.

“Uhh, yeah,” I answered.

“Okay. Make her be good,” she said to me, and winked. The mother eased down the street, the daughter scampered into my yard. At the time, I didn’t even know their names.

Annette was one of those strikingly beautiful children that are sometimes born to interracial couples. Her hair was white blond and hung in soft kinks past her shoulders. Her skin was a milky brown. She had almond-shaped gray eyes and soft African features. I was embarrassed that the first adjective I thought of to describe her was sensual. Yet she possessed that lanky, carefree grace that models affect through camera angles and strict diets.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Annete Juanetta Morgan.”

“Hold are you?”

“Eight.”

I remembered the requests of men, uncles, and friends of my father, the smell of beer spilling out with their laughter, “Pretty girl, let me touch your hair, come sit in my lap. Have some candy.”

“Be nice to your uncle,” my mother said, gesturing at me with her beer can.

Pictures that never get taken from the wall.

Annette played well, asked for candy and fought for toys.

Her mother never came for her.

When it was almost dark, I walked her home. She didn’t want to go and insisted her mother wouldn’t mind if she ate with us.

The door to their house was open; I could hear a woman’s laughter. Her mother was dancing by herself to synthesized music, turned down low. She was surprised to see us, stopped dancing, arms in mid-air, and glared, momentarily.

She dropped her arms and said, sweetly, “Was she bad?”

“No, not at all, she was fine. What’s your name?”

“Neva. Neva Morgan.”

“Well, my name’s Katy Thomas. Annette can come to play with my kids anytime,” I said, leaning close to her to check her breath. It was an old trick. I used it on my parents. If there was alcohol on Mom’s or Dad’s breath, I could better predict the future.

Neva smelled only of perfume. I said good-bye and left. I felt bad about suspecting her. Bill says I can’t go around suspecting everyone to be like my parents. But what kind of mother would leave her child all day with someone she didn’t know?

Perhaps she is naive, I thought.

Neva left Annette with us almost every afternoon. On Saturday and Sunday, Annette would show up in the mornings and not leave until sundown.

“I guess we got our third child,” Bill said, sitting on the porch with me on Sunday.

She wore her welcome quite thin. When I told her we were going somewhere, or that the children couldn’t play, her lip would poke out and she’d drag her feet home. Once, she just sat on the porch, glaring at us as we drove away.

About a week after school was out, Neva came over with Annette just after Bill left for work.

“Can you keep Annette today? I gotta find me a job. Them folks down there are tryin’ to move me outta my house. I ain’t got no food! The school used to give Annette breakfast and lunch. Now I gotta do it and I cain’t. She ain’t ate since yesterday. That ain’t right.”

Not since yesterday! I looked at Annette, hugging her knees in the easy chair, sucking her thumb.

“Neva, have you tried to get food stamps?”

“Yeah, I got them damned food stamps. AFDC too. It ain’t enough. It don’t last ‘til the end of the month. I got to find me a job. If I cain’t I’m gonna have to sell my pussy. I don’t wanna haveta sell my pussy again. But that what they want. That’s what everybody want is for a woman to be down so low she gotta sell herself. That’s what welfare want. Want to keep you hungry so you sell you pussy. Get a job, they take that welfare away so you still gotta sell yourself. I don’t want to. I don’t want to do that again. But I cain’t let this baby starve. I gotta find me a job.”

There wasn’t one thing I could think of to say. I felt dazed watching her pace around the living room, her arms flying in all directions. Sarah and Frankie were quiet, mesmerized by this large, raving woman. Annette hugged her knees.

She was going on and on. Her language was getting fouler, her voice louder.

I had to yell to stop her, “Yes, Neva. Yes. I’ll keep her while you look for a job.”

She looked around as if she didn’t know where she was. Then she smiled, “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll pay you. I’ll pay you as soon as I get a job. Gotta. Gotta find me a job.”

“I’ll feed Annette,” I said.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Thank you. She don’t eat much. Skinny thing. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”

When Neva left, Annette sprang back to life. Her thumb came out of her mouth, and she said, “Let’s play red light green light.”

Stirring batter and putting together sandwiches controlled some of my fear of what Neva had said. Annette ate like a horse. Then she laid on the couch and slept.

I looked at her stretched out in sleep, listened to the rhythm of her soft snores. Who was her father? Was he a John or a trick or whatever they call those men?

I wanted Annette out of there. I wanted her here. My child. My third child. I could help her. I would be better for her. No, she shouldn’t have to live with that woman. Because Neva was either crazy, or a whore, or both. Not a mother.

Watching Annette sleep, I barely paid attention to my own children. I noticed how well she fit on the couch. I was in love, noticing only her, not the holes in the couch, the unpainted walls.

I was slicing potatoes when Bill came home. He was shocked by what I told him.

“She said that? In front of the children?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think, is it possible, that she’s, uh — off?”

“Yes. I suppose it’s possible and likely. But she could be off and have been a prostitute too, right?”

He stood there with his hands in his pockets, his face dusty with blue specks. He had been scraping a blue house. Blue was out of fashion.

“Maybe you should ask John about her.”

I had already thought of that. I would talk to John.

Before I got married, John, Bill, and I shared a floor in an apartment building. I had gotten out of my parents’ house. I went to Shelby State during the day and waited tables at night. The tips were tremendous. I felt so lucky, the men taking their unwrinkled bills from their smooth leather wallets. This is for you, honey. I smiled. They swallowed the last of their wine.

Thank you. It seemed like so much money.

It was my first job. I was on top of it for a while.

Something happened to me, though. I started to feel the weight of the past was pinching off my nerves. Sometimes it felt as if my arms would drop off, or my head roll away. I was eighteen. I began to envy the customers, their fine fabrics, glossy nails, and perfect white teeth. They smelled of soft colognes. There was too much ugliness in me, I thought. I imagined the past seeping out of me, marking me like a skin disease. I dropped a tray. I couldn’t hear their orders. “What? What did you say?”

They left smaller tips. Left while I wasn’t looking.

I couldn’t remember what key opened my apartment door. I couldn’t remember why I had so many keys. The past kept blurring the present. There was no reason to cry. I was out of my parents’ life.

John Maxwell found me sitting on the hall floor, practically incoherent. He invited me to his apartment, brewed some thin yellow tea, and put it in a thin china cup in front of me. He said he did the entry counseling at the Methodist Mental Health Facility.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

He suggested I join Adult Children of Alcoholics. I went to meetings and clung to the stories of others who were cast out like lifeboats.

Our parents had marked the tempo of the room, the beat of the pain, then we each had our chance to improvise, like jazz musicians who close their eyes and tell.

The next time I couldn’t find my key, I just waited. That time I met Bill. I lived between a counselor and a lover. In a way I married them both.

When Bill found the right key, he opened the door, then took the key chain back to his apartment, where he wrapped the key in bright red tape. “My mother had trouble with her eyes, too,” he said.

I had never had my eyes checked. Sure enough, I was farsighted.

Bill never tried to solve my other problems. I was talking and talking about the past, splintering the story into its infinite variations, when he said, “Just stop. You know you can have a happy childhood any time you want. Have one now. Take it. It’s right there. Imagine any damned childhood you want.”

Bill’s eyes were the deepest brown, almost black, almost a bed of earth, his eyes. Then, he wore the face of a man who saw the world as a challenge. He was going to walk through the week knocking days out of the way.

After marriage and children, at times he looked stunned, by his empty wallet, our empty accounts. Yet each night, the children asleep, he checked them, studied their peace.

“I guess it’s not about money,” he’d say, pushing his hand through Frankie’s hair. Even in his sleep, Frankie pushed that hand away.

Soon they’d need separate bedrooms. Soon we’d need a bigger place.

I didn’t want to tie up the present in wishes for the future.

It was nine at night before Neva came for her girl.

“I got a job,” Neva announced. “I got a job at the IHOP. I’ll be a night waitress. Uh, can you keep Annette, three to eleven? I won’t get paid for two weeks, but they give me meals and I get tips.”

“Yes, I can.”

Neva hugged Annette. Immediately they talked of what they would buy with the money, a fantastic list of I-wants as if the IHOP paid you real wages. With a face flushed like a child telling secrets, Neva asked me, “You won’t tell, will you?

“Tell? Tell what?”

“Tell nobody at welfare I got a job.”

“No. No, I won’t tell.”

Neva pushed her hand through the kinks of Annette’s hair. “Their hair’s a mess,” she said to me. Annette closed her eyes. “She the only one I got left,” Neva said. “I just hope someday I can get my others back.”

“You have other children?” I asked.

She withdrew her hand from Annette’s hair. “I had me 10 children. All of ‘em dead, so I thought. My husband told me they was born dead. Never let me see the bodies. I heard ‘em crying. I’d go to sleep. He’d say they was born dead. Didn’t get no pictures, nothin’. No funeral. Said the hospital disposed of ‘em. Now I know they wasn’t dead. He was sellin’ my children. I talked to the folks at the hospital. No way I could have had 10 children they said, cause they were in on it. He paid em off. I know he did. I told him to get me back my children, get ‘em back. At least let me know where they are, but he beat me up and left me. Don’t know where, but I’m gonna hire me somebody to find him, when I get me some money. I had to do something for money. Sell my ass, but I knew I wasn’t no mother of dead babies. Five girls, five boys — a mother knows!”

Her face was red. Her breathing was heavy. She spat the words. I stepped back from her, lest her waving arms strike me.

“But I had Annette, by God. Alone. She popped out screaming, alive. Annette was God’s message that my babies wasn’t dead. I’m gonna get ‘em back, I been lookin’ around for children that look like me and I’m just gonna tell em that I’m their real Momma. I’m the one that bled and screamed . . . “

Bill walked into the room.

Neva’s face changed to a smile. “Excuse me. We’ll be leaving now. Thank you for letting Annette stay, thank you for helpin out. You’re real good people.”

“Uh, no problem,” said Bill.

The door closed. The house was quiet.

I tried not to wish for an unfettered life.

Annette was there at 2:30 the next day. Her mother waved from the sidewalk, her tight uniform decorated with smiling pancakes.

I waited until after I fed Annette to ask, “Where is your father? Do you know your father?”

She took a strand of her hair and began to curl it around her finger. “We don’t know my father,” she said. “My father was someone who raped my mother.” She watched the shock on my face. “But my mommy loves me anyway. She says I’m a gift from God. Can I go play now?”

“Yes, yes, go play.” Who would tell a child of eight her father was a rapist? I felt ill. I felt the illness that medical students must feel, learning the truth of the body.

What was the truth of Neva?

I played running games with them. Freeze tag, hide and seek, anything to keep moving. I could find both Frankie and Sarah easily, but Annette hid well. Often I had to give up.

I didn’t want to face what was required of me.

There was a free concert at the park that night and we walked there with the kids. Bill pulled Annette, Frankie and Sarah in the wagon. Once they all tumbled out. Annette cried a little, then decided only she should be in the wagon.

“No, we have to share,” I said.

She looked at Bill. “You’ll let me ride by myself, won’t you?” She smiled, licked her lips and batted her eyes.

Bill grabbed the wagon handle and told her, “You heard her, got to share.”

She turned, stuck out her tongue and crossed her eyes at me. She walked beside the wagon rather than get back in with the other kids.

The crowd made her forget her bad mood. It was the first time I’d been in public with her. People I knew asked about her. “Who is this beautiful girl? This is the prettiest child I ever saw. Whose pretty girl is this?”

Annette smiled, closing her eyes with pleasure as the compliments rained down on her.

Men I didn’t even know asked, “Is she your daughter? She’s so beautiful.” Their hands reached toward her as they asked. I pushed her behind my back.

I called John when I got home.

I slept with Sarah in her bed that night, after Neva picked up Annette. Sarah’s body rolled toward me, then away.

John was there when Neva came with Annette the next day. It was easier to get her to go off than I imagined.

“Any news on your other children?” I asked.

She looked into my eyes, puzzled, as if she was trying to figure why I was asking. I kept my face still, hoping no guile would show.

“No, damnit, no . . .” and she was raving. She showed no modesty in front of John. I wonder if she saw him, quietly smoking, watching her. Foulness punctuated her rage like thunder punctuates a storm. Trying to stop her was like trying to stop thunder.

“Yes, but . . . yes, but . . .” I said, but she didn’t listen. I found myself with my arm on her shoulder, then she was easy to turn. I turned her and led her to the door.

“You’ll be late for work,” I said loudly in her ear.

She looked at me as if she had never seen me before.

“Work, shit,” she said hoarsely, “Bull shit, that’s what.”

I watched her as she walked toward the bus stop, slowly with her head down, muttering.

You want anything to eat?” I asked Annette.

“No. Can I go play?”

She joined Frankie and Sarah in the backyard. Squeals from them filled the silence Neva left.

“Looks like schizophrenia, to me.That stuff about the hospital plotting with her husband to steal children. That stuff about a message from God, sounds real familiar. She hears that stuff in her head, all those plots and things. It’s a disorder. You can say something to her and she’ll read some paranoid message in it. You can report her to AFDC. They’ll get her with Memphis Mental Health Center. They have to use drug therapy. That’s the only way.”

“What’ll happen to Annette? Will they give her to the state? Can they give her to me?”

“Well, if she goes in voluntarily, they’re very supportive. They like to keep the family together.”

The family? Were Neva and Annette a family? I had thought of them as an accident, a mistake, even.

“I don’t really know. If she wanted you to keep her while she went in for treatment, that might work. But chances are if you report her, she’s not going to want you to keep Annette. A lot of times, they’re hostile, even after treatment they’re hostile. Of course, you can wait. Looks like she’ll blow up at AFDC eventually. AFDC’ll probably find out on their own.”

He stubbed out his cigarette, got up, kissed me on the cheek and left.

You can always tell who is having that treatment, those drugs. The way there is no spirit in their walk, the way they roll their hands around an invisible ball, the way they look at you on the street, confused and embarrassed.

I rubbed the spot where the memory of John’s kiss lingered on my cheek. I could wait. I could wait for someone else to report Neva. Someone else would, surely. Then Annette wouldn’t remember me as the one who broke up their family.

I remembered how I loved my parents at eight. How even though they were lost to me and I needed out of there, how I loved them, when, occasionally, they let me close.

Sarah ran in screaming, “She hit me, she hit me!”

Annette and Frankie ran in after her. “She did hit her,” Frankie said.

“She said a nasty word,” Annette cried. “She said the s word and the f word.”

“She was just sayin’ what Miz Morgan said. She was just sayin’ what your mother said,” Frankie yelled at her.

Annette’s face went pale. She put her thumb in her mouth. All I could do was give them cookies. They forgot all about it with the sweets in their hands.

I tried to hug Annette but she turned from me.

That night, Neva said she was fired. “You know know,” she said, “they said I could eat a meal every night, then they said I ate too much. Hell, a woman needs to eat. Won’t give me my check for another week. They hold it back. I’ll pay you then.”

She sat on my couch, her body sagging inside the smiling pancake uniform. Annette put her hand in her mother’s lap.

“What we gonna do now?” Neva said.

She took a brush from her purse and brushed Annette’s hair. She took barrettes and pinned the child’s wild hair into place. She put little gold earrings in Annette’s pierced ears and made up Annette’s eyes.

“There,” said Neva. “She looks better.”

Annette looked at me, the makeup exaggerating her eyes. “Am I pretty, Miz Thomas?”

Yes, yes. Then they were gone.

I didn’t see either of them for a week. I walked by their house and it was dark. I imagined terrible things. Would Neva walk the streets? Would she sell Annette to a good offer?

I went to the phone several times, but I never dialed the AFDC number. I never did. I kept seeing Annette’s face. I heard her crying alone as they took Neva away.

I wished for money. Wished for big charitable bankrolls to handle private hospitals, the expense of another child, the cloistering of a Neva in a miracle.

Foolish to wish for money. I had happiness, my family a dream come true. Bill and I could imagine our lives 50 years from now tinged with the same happiness. I saw my past as a murky pond and my children the water lilies nourished there. Useless to desire more. Greedy.

Yet, it seemed my only option with Annette was to push her into the jaws of a system I could see, I could see was composed of shortcuts and convenient solutions, gray walls and overworked social workers. Nurses doing double time, doctors in training, on their way up, on their way up to a maintenance-free life.

Wish for money, wish for better systems. It’s the same knot.

Where could we put a third child?

Wouldn’t Neva be forever attached to her? I remembered how they talked on the walks home from school.

When they came to visit again, Annette was wearing bright red lipstick.

Neva chattered to me. I couldn’t listen. I watched Annette organize my children into games. She played so well with them, though she was eight and they were five and three.

“Are you listening to me?” Neva demanded.

“Look, Neva,” I blurted, “you need help. You’ve obviously got some mental problems. Everybody can see it. Why do you think you got fired? You’re off, not a lot, but off. They can help you. Why do you think people stare at you? You’ve got to get help. AFDC will help you get medicine. Do you understand what I’m saying? You got to do it for Annette, or something bad is going to happen, something awful.”

Neva was still smiling, just as she had when she was chattering what I didn’t hear.

“You sound like you been talkin to my husband,” she said softly. She put her hand on my throat, her thumb pressing against me in a way that made me realize my mortality. “If you try to take my child,” she said in a low, sultry voice, “I’ll kill you.”

She pulled her hand down, shook it out and examined the red paint on her nails.

“Besides,” she said, “we gonna get public housing.” Her eyes shone with happiness. “That’s what I been tellin you, we gonna be movin.”

I rubbed my throat.

“Annette Juanetta, come on, we gotta finish packing.”

Annette’s face had the same look as it did when she found out about Neva’s IHOP job. “We can come back to see Miz Thomas, can’t we?”

Neva looked at me with slitted eyes. “Yeah,” she said.” Yeah we gonna come see her some time. You wanna play with her kids, right?” Then to me she said, “I don’t got your 40 dollars now, counta I got fired and I gotta pay this man to move me. But I’m gonna bring it to you. I don’t like to be in debt to nobody.”

Annette hugged me while Neva smiled as if her face were made of ice. They walked home. That afternoon, from my porch, I watched them leave. An assortment of odd boxes, a radio, a TV, and one rocking chair were in the back of an old pickup. Neva sat next to the driver, talking and laughing at him. Annette sat next to the window. She waved at me.

I haven’t seen her since then.

Is it okay? I remember that child. I try to remember her as strong.

One day, when she stayed with us, a large flock of migrating birds roosted in the back yard. I’ve always been one to keep the doors open, something about the air in a closed house — I can’t breathe it. Even in winter, sometimes, I have to open the doors.

It was a black bird that swooped in through the front door. The windows, walls and sudden darkness of the house panicked the bird. It screeched like no bird I’ve ever heard. I tried to chase it out, then the children started running around after me. I was trying to throw a towel over it, capture it so I could put it back out. I suppose we terrified the poor thing, but it was fun chasing it. We were slow and it flew around knocking things over, banging into the windows. I finally got it, though. It pecked me through the towel.

When I let it go, the birds roosting in the yard followed it away from our house.

Annette had sat on the couch the whole time Frankie, Sarah and I chased the bird. She sat there, her feet crossed, kicking back and forth, studying the movement of her feet, humming a tune I didn’t recognize.

She didn’t seem to notice when the chase stopped. She just kept kicking and humming. I sat beside her on the couch, out of breath.

Slowly she lifted her gaze from her shoes to me. She looked afraid.

I smiled.

She smiled back.

“We got the bird out,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

Then she got up and organized a game of bird. Frankie and Sarah flew around the house with her, flapping their arms and chirping the songs of cartoon birds.

Perhaps she can always make a game out of chaos.

I wonder sometimes if I should have done something different.

Since she has been gone, I find myself looking in every crowd for her. As surely as Neva looks for her stolen children, I look for Annette. If I see her, I don’t know what.

Joy Tremawan now goes boy her married name, Joy Allen. Her work has appeared in such publications as Oxford American, Sassy, and American Fiction: The Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Authors. She works at Davis-Kidd Booksellers.

Click here to find more information on this year’s contest.

The Pharmacist’s Mate

By Amy Fusselman

McSweeney’s; 86 pp.; $16

By now you’re familiar with Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and his humorous and wildly experimental literary journal, McSweeney’s. On its sibling Web site at www.mcsweeneys.net, you can get your daily fix of content similar in spirit to that found in the journal. If you’ve visited the site, you know it’s maintained by and for purists, those who love the simple and beautiful sight of black ink on white paper. No banners here, no color. Just words. Gorgeous.

McSweeney’s also publishes books, nice little hardbacks. Amy Fusselman’s The Pharmacist’s Mate is the fourth book to receive the honor. Fusselman responded to and won a McSweeney’s Web contest in which the entrant who submitted the best idea for a book on marine electrical engineering (a typically arcane Eggers idea) would enjoy an authorcentric publishing deal with McSweeney’s. Fusselman’s book doesn’t really have anything to do with electrical engineering, but there is a boat in there.

The Pharmacist’s Mate is a nonfiction journal of sorts documenting a period of confusion and sorrow and wonder in Fusselman’s life: While undergoing the emotionally excruciating ordeal of employing the best obstetric sciences in order to get pregnant (a virtual impossibility for her — she’s healthy and married but evidently her mind is unconsciously rejecting her body’s every attempt at fertility), her beloved father, the one-time pharmacist’s mate of the title, takes ill due to his emphysema and unexpectedly dies. He spends his last few weeks coming in and out of the altered state of the dying; the spirit world seems to beckon to him while his daughter and wife do their best to hold on to what precious little time they may have left with him.

Interspersed with Fusselman’s journal entries are those her father wrote when he was the young pharmacist’s mate on a merchant marine vessel during World War II. Often, his sometimes haiku-like entries parallel Fusselman’s beautifully. She has obviously studied his wartime journal well in her desperation to somehow bring her father back, to savor him. It appears that when something from his journal alludes to or presages one of Fusselman’s very human dilemmas, however obliquely, she places it within her supple, loving narrative.

For a short journal, this book is quite a rumination on death, love, music, and life. One thing that particularly struck me is the way in which the author sees everything anew. She is fascinated by things she has taken for granted all her life, such as the invisibility of music, the miracle of hearing, and the silly theatrical appearance of, say, an AC/DC concert to a deaf person.

It seems that her father’s sudden death and the awful regimen of trying to get pregnant in a doctor’s office are what triggered this enhanced sensibility. Her heightened awareness begins to manifest itself soon after her father’s death. In one insightful passage, Fusselman tells us, “I have

never had anyone so close to me die. I am trying to pay attention to what it feels like.”

After I finished this book, I felt as if I were reeling. The deadpan manner in which Fusselman describes her attempts at pregnancy gently forces you to empathize with her plight, and the plight of all childless women yearning to be mothers, as her desire for kids and her anxious fear of kids collide like an unstoppable force and an immovable object. The passive voice employed, the lack of acerbic irony when faced with overwhelming psychological duress, renders Fusselman saint-like.

The Pharmacist’s Mate is touching, somehow reminiscent of Vonnegut’s best (especially in the closing paragraph), and a morsel of shattering prose. Out with formulaic writing, in with the heart letting it all hang out. I want more.

Vacant (Facing the Tower) , a joint effort between Project: Motion and Loop Productions, played to a full house Saturday night. The theater was so full, in fact, that patrons crowded together, curling up on the stairs and squatting near the stage. At the showÕs start, the lights came up to reveal the entire cast quietly holding eggs. One dancer violently threw her egg to the ground, strongly suggesting we were in for an evening of angry, feminist propaganda. It was a fantastic sleight of hand by choreographer Louisa Koeppel as nothing could have been further from the truth. The piece ended with the exact same image, only the eggs had been replaced with white rubber balls which, much to the audienceÕs surprise, bounced into the crowd en masse. This kind of whimsy infused an otherwise predictable meditation on the nature of beauty with liberating lightness.

Using music ranging from recordings of Johnny Rotten to a live a cappella version of the gospel standard ÒIÕll Fly Away,Ó Vacant (Facing the Tower) told the story of a nightingale that fell asleep and became entangled in vines. After freeing herself the terrified bird never allowed herself to sleep again. Instead she kept awake by singing through the night. Koeppel, a dancer who, when she errs, tends to err on the side of beauty, made a star turn as the besieged nightingale. With the innocence of a child performing a magic show for doting parents, she flapped her wings and spun gracefully about the set, while the chorus questioned our collective ideas about what it means to be beautiful. The set, designed by Su Harruff, was a dazzling copper cage.

Some of That Jazz

Sadly enough, Warren LeightÕs award-winning play Sideman, a show deserving a much longer run, closed this past weekend at Playhouse on the Square. The show chronicles the lives of four jazz players after Elvis Presley arrived on the scene with his rock-and-roll song-bag and robbed them all of their livelihood. But Sideman is not about the decline of jazz. Sideman is a tragedy along the lines of Arthur MillerÕs Death of a Salesman. It is a tragedy of obscurity and neglect about a musician, who, obsessed with his music to the exclusion of all else, somnambulates through life leaving random bits of useless beauty here and there along the way.

Michael Detroit, in his strongest performance to date, was an ideal choice for Gene Glimmer, a trumpet player of tremendous sensitivity and total obliviousness. He blunders through his characterÕs rocky life unaware that his family is disintegrating. Guy Olivieri was equally effective as the narrator, Clifford Glimmer, and captured both the humor and frustration of a child forced by circumstance to raise his own parents. Lisa McCormick and Carla McDonald turned in a pair of noteworthy performances as, respectively, CliffordÕs alcoholic wife and a sassy-but-wise waitress who canÕt say no. Jonathon Lamer, Kyle W. Barnette, and Jason Craig brought to life a trio of brass players caught up in the midnight world of booze, dope, and groove. Craig, a performer who too easily sails over the top, was the portrait of restraint this time around, and his depiction of a gentle, world-wise junky was, without doubt, the eveningÕs high point.

Robots and Rhyme

The single most maddening thing about Memphis theater is its sick determination to play by the rules at every level. Generally speaking, and with a handful of notable exceptions, local fringe groups make low-budget versions of what could easily be main-stage productions. Where are the angry artists? Where are the eager youngsters determined to inform, enlighten, and entertain us in ways we have not yet imagined? Where is the spirit of reckless innovation that a youthful Tennessee Williams once described as Òsomething wildÓ? IÕll tell you where it is. ItÕs buried somewhere in the FlyerÕs After Dark listings. ItÕs masquerading as a band called AUTOMUSIC.

Taking their musical cues from German groups like Kraftwerk, the band responsible for songs like ÒPocket CalculatorÓ and ÒAutobahn,Ó AUTOMUSIC wants to make us all aware of our robot nature. They want us to see that all humans are robots but not all robots are human. Their immensely fun and eminently portable show is the most purely theatrical and visually exciting performance you are likely to encounter this side of Berlin, and if you donÕt go see them you have only yourself to blame.

Except for some occasional synthesizer pecking, all of AUTOMUSICÕs music is prerecorded on video, and the digital sound is fantastic. Wonderful animations, with imagery that would make any Soviet propagandist worth his salt mine burst with pride, enhance this trioÕs brilliantly stiff and mathematically precise choreography. They don old-fashioned hardhats, brandish tools, and chant, ÒMy hammer goes tink, tink, tink when I work, my hammer goes tink tink tink.Ó That particular song, appropriately titled ÒThe Industrial Worksong,Ó conjures images of old-school agitprop and concludes, ÒIf you have a hammer and you work very hard you will get very far like me, youÕll help to make a productive state and a strong economy.Ó And how can anyone resist songs like ÒEverything Is For the Baby,Ó where the group declares, ÒWhat a stupid stupid baby it cannot do math at all its politics do not impress me inane, banal, obtuse babyÓ?

AUTOMUSIC may think they are just a band, but allow me to be the first critic to rave theyÕre the best theater in town.

After much anticipation, the Art Museum of the University of Memphis and Delta Axis have unveiled “Max 2001: All About Paint,” an extravaganza of big, bold, slick, and sexy art that packs quite a visual wallop. No heavy agendas here; instead, one might say the emphasis is on fun and lightheartedness. Fuzzy textures, hard-edged graphics, and plenty of ooey-gooey lumps all appeal to the sensual, especially apparent in the abundance of eye-scorching pink. The show’s title may be a little misleading. Several hardcore painters are certainly featured, but curator Holly Block defines the subject of paint rather loosely to encompass sculpture, video, photography, performance, installation, and even conceptual art.

Block, the executive director of Art in General in Manhattan, has upped the ante with this Max, the third manifestation of the exhibit. “Max 1998” and “Max 1999,” curated by Kim Levin and Buzz Spector respectively, were exclusively regional affairs relying on slide images and studio visits to select artists — a course of action that resulted more or less in survey exhibits. Although she used a similar method of recruitment, Block brings to her theme of paint the works of artists from all over the nation and beyond, and these mix quite comfortably with regional offerings. Certainly this international roster of artists adds an air of prestige to the exhibit, especially when several have accumulated impressive résumés. More importantly, this fusion presents an opportunity to relate the art issues and practices of the region to a wider cultural context.

Paul Henry Ramirez of Mexico sets the festive tone of this exhibit with a goliath scroll painting. Spread II perches majestically above the ensemble of art objects in the main gallery, unfurling down the wall into a heap on the floor — a pretty brash way to mount a painting. The imagery is even more indelicate: A fractured diagram of flesh, hair, and squirting bodily fluids is rendered with a taut graphic style that seems to revel in lavish ornament, while large pools of flat color outlined by svelte ribbons of black heighten the architectonic qualities of the picture. Ramirez is enjoying a growing reputation for his art; one of his paintings even graces the cover of the current issue of Art Papers, reflecting the art world’s love affair these days with all things beautiful. “Max 2001,” as a whole, is likewise tinged with this pervasive sentiment.

If any paintings in this exhibit can hold their own next to Ramirez’s extroverted image, they are Hamlett Dobbins’ two luscious offerings nearby. It is paint that is Dobbins’ passion, and looking at the striped Glimpse, one is swept up in the excitement of his piquant palette of neutral pinks, yellows, and beige. The artist has never been one to scrimp on paint, and he likewise lays it on thick here, but do I dare detect a newfound deliberateness in its application that borders on the slick? For HH (the stillness of skin) is a delightful pink-on-pink affair — not rose, not mauve but the pinks of pink Cadillacs, Double-Bubble, and Pepto-Bismol. Pink Panther pink. This painting looks delicious enough to eat.

A bead or two of dribbled paint greets one at the entrance to the building and then follows a path to the museum inside, terminating with a leaky can of paint stuck to the gallery wall. A label beside the affixed can and runny trickle says that this is a work of art from the oeuvre of Francis Alÿs. Titled The Leak, it undoubtedly springs from the artist’s past performances in which he took short treks carrying an upturned, punctured can of paint, marking a path that concludes where it begins. Alÿs could not come to Memphis to do the piece himself, so Block was the stand-in for a proxy performance. The notion of purposely spilling pigment from a ruptured vessel while following someone else’s prescribed scheme, no matter how meaningful the intent, seems both ludicrous and pretentious, especially when its most enduring consequence will likely be what’s left on the carpet after the show is over. Besides that, speaking as an aspiring Pollock myself, not just anybody can drip paint.

It might seem unusual to include photographs in an exhibit about paint but not when you’re talking about the work of Phillip Andrew Lewis and Martina Shenal, two artists who utilize the medium with a painter’s perspective. Shenal exhibits images from her recent show with Lewis at the Second Floor Contemporary Gallery, but it’s never too soon to once again admire these beautifully austere images of objects veiled by scrim. Lewis breaks out a new triad of images of the Mississippi River floodplain, transforming the horizontal bands of the landscape into a sensuous gradient of azure, in which form is dissipated into pure radiant color.

When I heard that Roxy Paine was going to be in “Max 2001,” my jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe it. I had seen his contribution to “010101: Art in Technological Times” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) just a few weeks prior. Paine’s Scumak seems well-suited to that exhibit’s theme of exploring the integration of art and technology, because one literally walks into a computer-operated sculpture factory. A high-tech machine slowly oozes a viscous mass into a lazy lump on a conveyor belt then sends it down the line to an accumulating stockpile of similar soft sculptures, with the production’s limited set of variables all handled by a lil’ laptop computer. Ironically, the only humans necessary are the ones guarding the merchandise and fancy hardware.

It is something of an anticlimax to see Paine’s lumps at “Max 2001” sans the spectacle of the SFMOMA installation. Scumak (4) is a nice enough set of specimens from the production, with that characteristic shape somewhat akin to a lava flow or soft-serve ice cream. Perhaps part of the disappointment lies in the objects themselves. Because in the context of witnessing their origin, one’s attention is fixed upon the manner of production, while the objects themselves are ephemeral, a remnant, one as valid (or not) as the next. As art objects, they’re delightfully indulgent, tactually inviting yet mind-numbingly arbitrary.

Gee, there is so much other remarkable work and so little space left. Arturo Herrera’s stunning Say Seven is a bolt of brown felt meticulously cut into a shape that resembles a splash of chocolate syrup dripping off the wall. Les Christensen, who was in the last Max, offers her 100 Maidens (Nuptial Shield) and 100 Widows (Death Shield), funky spirals constructed from the heels of women’s shoes. Meikle Gardner unleashes his Ab-Ex tendencies with a couple of his slash-and-drip paintings. And there’s even more.

Get out the Kool-Aid and lemon cookies. Although a happenstance, Emily Walls’ installation in the adjacent Artlab gallery fits right in with the insouciant revelry of “Max 2001,” as it is a twisted re-creation of prepubescent art-making. The artist has painted murals throughout the gallery with cheerful colors and anamorphic forms of preschool life. Populating the room are all manner of mutated doll, in every conceivable color, texture, and form, shoved into corners and dangling from the ceiling. Kitsch is Walls’ ongoing obsession, and the inventiveness and industriousness of this effort is impressive. But ultimately, the installation offers a pastiche of the Playskool experience that is not too dissimilar from the original.

Through July 21st.

Just in time to kick off the steamy season, a sexy exhibit at the Cooper-Young Gallery pairs the bathhouse eroticism of Bryan Blankenship with the delicacies of irises and lilies found in the work of Nancy Bickerest.

Bickerest is among several artists in the region exploring nonobjective photography to one degree or another, pushing the medium beyond the realm of documentation into the ephemeral world of light and color. Originally trained as a painter, the artist took up photography to gather resource images but soon discovered that the medium had much to offer in its own right. Bickerest uses a macro lens to capture the minutiae of budding flowers, rich in supple forms and imbued with pungent primary and secondary hues.

The artist is particularly fond of the drama gained from a shallow depth of field, in which details, such as the serrated edge of a flower petal in hibiscus syricus, emerge from a nebulous blur of saturated hues. Gladiolus transports the viewer into a microcosmic domain resembling a fractal image; out of a sea of orange, lemon, eggplant, and lime, the stamen juts into the focal plane. This method heightens the carnal aspect, especially in works like iris prismatic, in which the focal point is the particulars of the openings, folds, and crevices of the subject, cast in a radiant yellow and luscious blue light.

Bickerest displays her C-prints standard-issue: double-mat, black ribbon frame, under glass. Perhaps I have been spoiled by offerings in which the conventional mount has been abandoned in favor of methods that contextualize nonobjective photographs more as paintings. The mats and frames around Bickerest’s work seem an ill fit. The glass is especially troublesome in one of several photos titled lilium ‘star gazer,’ a beautiful image of a flower emerging from a black ground — if only one can find the angle at which the bric-a-brac from the next room is not reflected across its surface.

That being said, the images are captivating in color and form, and one can linger for quite some time on these landscapes, which are just a few centimeters deep.

While the fertile subject matter of flowers is by its very nature sensual, nothing suggests that Bickerest intended to make erotic images. On the other hand, Bryan Blankenship’s tongue is thrust squarely in his cheek for his “receptacle” series. What appear at first glance to be innocent geometric abstractions are in fact symbolic fetishes signifying gender-specific body parts. But what really drives up the temperature is that the artist uses the vernacular of a decaying bathhouse, replete with trompe l’oeil mildew stains, mineral deposits, grimy porcelain, and yellowed grout. The resulting mixed-media works are equal parts Rauschenberg raunch, bathroom humor, and Home Depot know-how.

One such, um, piece is receptacle #3, a rectangular composition that incorporates shoddy paneling, faux stained and yellowed tile, and other signs of mucky decay with an inset panel containing a slit above a drain hole. If not careful, one is likely to miss, among the yuk-yuks, the absolute command that Blankenship has over his materials. His use of encaustic here is delightful, creating an equivalent to the look of glazed bathroom tile, in a dated minty green. Looking at Blankenship’s convincing rendition of decomposition and swelter reminds me of Greg Haller’s stint making unbelievably realistic pictures depicting wretched brick walls, complete with graffiti and dirty windows.

Of course, Blankenship is not simply interested in memorializing decomposing facades; rather a seediness is exaggerated by the combination of tactile sensation and (not so subtly) veiled crotch humor. In the aforementioned receptacle #3, the artist goes for the gold as a yellow bead of beeswax drains out of the slit and crawls down the concave orifice below it (nasty boy). The work next to it, receptacle #4, is obviously its, er, mate, as similar elements have been combined to create an iconic phallus.

Just so you know, Blankenship is not completely obsessed with you-know-what. Untitled offers sanctuary from the sexual innuendo but is still very much interested in decay. It also uses trompe l’oeil sleight of hand to create a balloon pattern one might find in a toddler’s room, except this happy motif is mired by rows of dripping stains and soiled wallpaper. One gets the idea that this paradoxical juxtaposition represents innocence sullied.

If you are not prudish, the works are a delight to behold. But if you are, Blankenship is also exhibiting some very innocuous pottery with not a crease or crevice that’s the least bit suggestive. But I can’t go into that, as I could use a cold shower.

Through June 16th.

You’re likely to see most anything in Huger Foote’s photographs. Lush green foliage scaling a prickly chain-link fence. A woman’s feet clad in orange sandals, picking their way through scattered droppings of cabbage, carrots, and cauliflower. A small girl, seen through a plate-glass window, huddled against a laundromat.

For sure you’ll see light, dappling over a leopard-print sofa in a cluttered, cheerful room; dancing off a car outside a Texaco station; bathing a tree, a dog, a dumpster with mysterious significance.

And to Huger Foote – a native Memphian now living in London, son of historian and author Shelby Foote, and a self-professed voyeur who considers his photographs “gifts to me” – all these minutiae of everyday life are more than significant. They’re extraordinary.

“If my book could speak,” he says, referring to a published collection of his works that was released in fall 2000, “it would say, ‘Look!’ Exclamation point! I guess I want everybody to take another look at the world.”

Foote isn’t sure why he titled the book My Friend from Memphis. “I guess I just liked it,” he says during a phone interview from his home in London’s Notting Hill. “It’s not logical. Who is the friend? I don’t know.”

What he does know is that Memphis holds a powerful attraction for him and that at least half of the 87 photographs in the book were shot here during the mid 1990s. “There’s a part of me that I think I bottle up when I’m away from Memphis,” says the 39-year-old Foote, who has also lived in New York and Paris and has had exhibitions at London’s prestigious Hamiltons Gallery, which has also represented the likes of Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. “My heart is always pulling me there. Going home wakes up the oldest part of me. There I can get reconnected to my old true self.”

And it was in Memphis, in 1994, that a near-death experience taught him the discipline that comes with solitude and gave fresh inspiration to his work.Ê

Foote – whose first name was passed down from his great-grandfather and is pronounced “U.G.,” though most folks simply call him Huggie – is the only child of Shelby and Gwyn Foote, who raised him to revere the arts. “Literature, painting, photography, these were and are my father’s gods,” says Foote. When he was 16, his father gave him a list of “99 Best Books” – including Silas Marner, Ulysses, The Idiot – “works that changed me and opened my mind to the big world,” he adds.

Foote can hardly remember a time when he wasn’t taking pictures. He started out around the age of 10, first with an old Polaroid, then with an Argus that his father fished out of an old shoebox. “It was a proper 35 millimeter,” he recalls, “and I was very excited.” His early shots included “lots of photos of my dog,” a bull terrier named Rattler, and “whatever happened to be around.”

As a student at Memphis University School, he won a photography contest for a photo he called Boy Upside Down. “I was standing at the top of some steps and he was below me leaning back, just a kid in the neighborhood,” says Foote. “Those are the kinds of things I started out shooting and have ended up shooting.”

But Foote’s life has hardly come a neat full circle; he’s made some dips and detours along the way. As a rebellious, angry teen, “resenting the self-righteous when they tried to impose themselves on me,” Foote wound up being expelled from MUS in his freshman year. “I was smoking grass with some other guys by the tennis courts and one of the coaches came bounding over the hedge and collared us,” he recalls with a smile in his voice. “The next thing I knew I was in Connecticut, meeting people in another part of the country, experiencing the crazy environment of boarding school.” Although he admits his stint at Pomfret School was “one of the best things in the world for me,” it didn’t snuff his rebellion; he hung out in girls’ dorms, left campus while on restriction, and was ultimately booted out for “cumulative offenses.”Ê

Back in Memphis, the good times kept rolling. He’d sneak out of the house at night and go partying with adults who’d buy him all the Stingers he could drink, then get picked up on the streets by friends who’d drop him off at home before dawn. “Memphis in the ’70s was such a fantastic, bizarre, bohemian community,” he recalls. “The drugs, the late nights – I would snooze through school. But my grades were always good and I graduated from MUS. I started doing adult things and I’m so glad I was in Memphis for that.” While he has no regrets about that period of his life, he’s relieved to be rid of the anger. “I like to think I’ve stopped fighting anyone. It’s a waste of time and spirit.”

After high school, Foote headed for Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, and spent his senior year in Paris. Serendipity, as he calls it, guided him to a job that launched his career in photography. After graduating in 1984 he decided to stay in Paris and was looking for work when he heard about a new photography studio that was hiring.Ê

Soon he’d landed a job as personal assistant to famed fashion photographer Pamela Hansen. “It was a great training ground,” Foote recalls, “an endless amount of film, models, a working environment with major magazines.” After about four years of assisting various photographers, including Annie Lebovitz, Foote came to a realization. “I wanted to be a photographer in my own right.”

Although he set out to shoot fashion, his works revealed as much about the individual as they did the clothes. “I started getting a lot of half-fashion, half-portrait work assignments, including shots of blues artists Aaron Neville and John Lee Hooker,” says Foote, who by this time in the mid-1980s had moved from Paris to New York. “I was New York-based but was always attracted back to the South, to home, and the great subjects there.”Ê

Among these subjects was Foote’s mentor, and fellow Memphian William Eggleston, the first artist to exhibit color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art. Foote’s portrait of Eggleston – dressed in riding clothes, fondling a shotgun, looking at once elegant and dangerous – appeared in the October 1991 issue of Vanity Fair.Ê

In the introduction that Eggleston wrote for My Friend from Memphis, he zeroes in on Foote’s talent: “Over the years I’ve watched Huger get better and better: Delightful thing, his way of looking around. Sometimes, one of the best ways to take pictures is to forget what the subject is . . . and compose a fine image of whatever’s out there. . . . That’s something you can’t teach, something you somehow pick up.”

As it turned out, fate compelled Foote to sharpen his skill of “looking around” and granted him plenty of time to do it. In the spring of 1994, during a two-week visit to Memphis, he was shot at pointblank range with a double-barreled shotgun in an attempted carjacking. “It was random,” he says. “[The shooter] was aiming at my head. I held my arm up, ducked, and the gun went off.” Left for dead, he managed to drive himself to the hospital. “Shock is a weird thing,” says Foote. “I wasn’t scared. Just blissfully floating.” But he sustained serious injuries to his left arm that required several surgeries and an extended convalescence in Memphis, which after the Big Apple seemed “awfully quiet and full of empty hours to fill.”

During recuperation, a large box arrived from a friend in New York, the sculptor Richard Serra. In the box were gifts that helped Foote learn to savor solitude – the journals of Edward Weston, a photographer who retreated from New York to live out West. The journals held a message for Foote about living in isolation. “I knew I needed to listen to this man.”

Soon Foote was spending his long afternoons taking “Memphis safaris.” He’d pack a couple of Leicas in the car and just drive, down Summer Avenue, through neighborhoods he’d never seen, and stop to record the details of life – parking lots and light poles, wisteria blooms and watermelon stands, a lemon peel lying beside a water meter. The next thing he knew it was five o’clock; he’d drop the film off to be developed and edit it the next morning.Ê

Certain photos spoke to him. One was taken while poking around an antiques mall on Union Avenue. “I made a composition of various elements,” – a book, a table, a picture frame, a blur of blue – “but I wasn’t really looking at the subject matter. It was just an abstraction.” says Foote. When some-one told him that the blur of blue was a glass bird called the bluebird of happiness, a self-revelation dawned. “I knew that I was happier and more inspired photographically and more alive than I had been for a long time,” he says. “The message was, ‘Just go with this. Stop worrying and keep shooting these pictures.’ ”

He not only kept shooting but started gluing pictures into books, gradually replacing weaker works with stronger ones. “But I had no intention of showing them in galleries at that time. They were for my own pleasure, or friends and family.”

In 1995, David Lusk and Baylor Ledbetter, who at the time were starting Ledbetter-Lusk Gallery, happened to see one of the photographs. Intrigued, they asked if they could come and look at Foote’s other work.

“I was nervous,” recalls Foote, his voice cracking a little at the memory. “I didn’t know what they were going to think.” Later that day the gallery partners called and said they wanted to represent Foote and display a group of his photographs as their gallery’s first exhibition. Laughing with delight, Foote says now, “Can you imagine my surprise? That show just boggled my mind. The thought that I would make money on these pictures never even occurred to me.”

After that show, titled “Thirty Photographs,” a representative with the Gallery of Contemporary Photography in Santa Monica called, saying she’d heard of Foote’s work and asking him to send her a portfolio. He shipped her 10 pictures, all of which she sold, and she gave him a solo exhibition that spring.

After that, more shows followed. Over the past five years, Foote’s works – which now start at about $2,000 and are available in the dye-transfer and pigment-transfer method of printing – have been displayed in some 30 group or solo exhibitions in galleries from Memphis and Chattanooga to New York and London. Last year the Brussels Art Fair, Sotheby’s in London, and The Armory in New York featured his photography, and David Lusk Gallery in Memphis and Hamiltons Gallery in London gave him solo shows. Foote’s works also hang in the private collections of singer Elton John, model Christy Turlington, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.Ê

In 1997, wanderlust struck and Foote headed for London with only a suitcase of clothes and a portfolio, planning to stay a month or so to see how he liked it. “Within a month, everything fell into place,” he says, “the most important being I signed with Hamiltons Gallery. It’s like a fantasy place, like being in the halls of splendor, right in the middle of Mayfair in London.”Ê

Within Foote’s photographs, some critics see a paradoxical world of joy and pain, innocence and menace. Foote’s friend, novelist Susan Minot, writes in My Friend from Memphis, “In all the work there’s a festive celebratory atmosphere and hidden within, something wrenching.”Ê

Yet others, including Hamiltons Gallery’s Tim Jeffries, consider Foote’s works more sanguine. “It always seems to be summer in his photographs,” Jeffries told British Vogue. And Edward Booth-Clibborn, whose company Booth-Clibborn Editions published My Friend from Memphis, writes, “. . . there is something unusual about this photography, with such brightness, such clear primary colours . . . I could see the light of Memphis in all his work.”

Foote himself says that Minot’s description of his photography – festive yet wrenching – sums it up. Perhaps the wrenching comes from his sense that each moment is fleeting and that a camera’s lens can only capture so much. “Having stared death in the face makes every detail more alive for me,” he says. “It’s like I suddenly woke up to the incredible magic, the extraordinary beauty, of everything around me.”

Refreshingly upbeat, well-grounded, and grateful, with a charming streak of Southern gentility, Foote hasn’t let success go to his head. And while comments about the “extraordinary beauty” of life might come across as sappy from someone else, from Foote they ring with genuine joy and awe. He speaks with respectful fondness of his family, who, he says, “stood by me and encouraged me through thick and thin.” From his father he learned discipline. “Seeing him work in his office eight hours a day, five days a week, I saw what adults did,” says Foote. “By example and advice he’d keep reminding me, ‘The most important thing is your work,’ and if I’d get sidetracked, by women or whatever, he’d say, ‘Son, you need to remember what’s important.’ ”

Perhaps the highest compliment he’s received came from his mother. “She said, ‘After I looked at your book, I walked around and the world looked like one of your pictures.’ And that really was just what I was hoping,” says Foote. “Somewhere deep down that really is probably why I felt this urge to show them to people.”

My Friend from Memphis (Booth-Clibborn Editions) is available at several local bookstores, including Burke’s and Davis-Kidd Booksellers, and at David Lusk Gallery.

[This story originally appeared in the May issue of Memphis magazine.]

Scheherazade Goes West:

Different Cultures, Different Harems

By Fatema Mernissi

Washington Square Press, 220 pp., $25.95

Once upon a time there was a fairy tale that began, as any good fairy tale must, as a tale of tragedy, and it went like this:

Good King Shahzaman, the happy ruler of “The Land of Samarcand,” returns to his palace one day only to find his wife in the arms of a kitchen boy. Enraged, Shahzaman kills them both then sets out for the Persian kingdom of his older and wiser brother, good King Shahrayar. One morning, however, Shahzaman, with that habit of being in the right place at the wrong time, happens to look out onto Shahrayar’s harem garden only to look in on still more monkey business: Shahrayar’s lady of the house in cahoots with a slave freshly swung from a tree and her retinue of slave girls magically transformed into 10 swinging couples up to their own business. Shahrayar gets wind of it, kills the whole unfaithful lot, then goes several steps (and heads) further by marrying then decapitating in revenge every virgin in sight. Except for one: daughter of the king’s vizier, Scheherazade, who keeps her head by filling the king’s with some tales of her own, the body of which we know as The Thousand and One Nights.

This makes Scheherazade, in the mind of Fatema Mernissi in the pages of Scheherazade Goes West, the one thing not one Westerner, she’s convinced, wants Scheherazade in truth to be: a political hero and self-liberator and on the following three fronts: knowledge, which would mean she’s an intellectual; words, which would mean she’s a cunning strategist; and cold blood, which would mean she’s a cool cookie. The very opposite, in other words, of what Western ideas and art — from Kant to Ingres to Delacroix to Matisse to Picasso to Diaghilev to Hollywood — have taken harem insiders in general to be, which, Mernissi argues, is basically ready, willing, and able, dumb-struck before the “male gaze” and stark naked while we’re at it. Why the misunderstanding? First, some understanding, from the Islamic point of view and to wit:

Muslim men expect their women to be “highly aware of the inequality inherent in the harem system” and, by extension, aware of the inequities in conduct and dress prescribed by present-day and fundamentalist Islamic societies. Background insight: Muslim men fundamentally fear women. Reason: Muslim men are full of self-doubt. Why? Because Islam, as a legal and cultural system, “is imbued with the idea that the feminine is an uncontrollable power — and therefore the unknowable ‘other.’” Again because: It’s not the men who do the penetrating where it ultimately counts — the brain Ñ but the women, what with their capacity to outthink and outwit men, which is, to men, the “essence” of sexual attraction. A man in love risks slavery, therefore locking women up makes rejection impossible. The Muslim fantasy in art nonetheless: “self-assertive, strong-minded, uncontrollable, and mobile women.” Evidence: the story of Harun Ar-Rachid, “the sexy caliph,” born 766; the Muslim tradition in secular painting as propounded by Empress Nur-Jahan of India in the 16th century. Mernissi makes all these points and cases clear but only until she finds space to get to them and only after she dispenses a lot of chitchat, the ultimate mark reached when she discovers that she cannot fit into a size 6 skirt and blames Western mankind for it.

And what of the West’s historical response to Scheherazade? Kill her off, according to Edgar Allen Poe, who plainly feared her in his short story “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade.” Beauty plus brains? A philosophical contradiction, according to Kant. Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque? “By spending months painting a beautiful woman,” Mernissi confidently concludes, “Ingres was declaring daily to his wife that she was ugly!” Matisse? His passive odalisques “did not exist in the Orient!” And poor Hollywood? Maria Montez, Mernissi disposes of as a low-budget burlesque queen, and Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra Mernissi cannot even bring herself to openly name as Montez’s high-end offspring. Muslim men at least have an inkling; Western men, we learn, haven’t a clue, until, that is, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu publicly put the stamp on the “symbolic violence” perpetrated on women’s bodies and Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth ran with the idea.

Other ideas in Scheherazade Goes West it’s up to you to run from. As in, in the author’s words: “Scheherazade’s passive submission to her own death [in Poe’s story] upset me so much that I could hardly carry on with the book promotion tour when I arrived in Paris.” Or: “I would have to see a doctor about my heart palpitations. It would be such a hassle to have a heart attack in France. É “

One idea, though, is way off the register. To talk herself down from the upset of a heart attack in France, Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist best known for her book Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, puts herself through what she calls “Arab psychotherapy,” which means “you keep talking nonstop about your obsessions, even if people don’t listen or care. One day, someone will give you a sensible observation or answer, and save you the trouble and expense of checking yourself into a psychiatric hospital. The only problem with this technique is that you lose a lot of friends.”

East may still be East; West, West. But on this centuries-tested and cross-cultural method of losing friends (never mind the attention of readers), there is no divide.