Author’s Note: “Sharing a favorite book with family and friends is one of the great joys of my life. Reading aloud together, especially with children and grandchildren, seems to alter the progression of time and merge the generations. The hours loop back on themselves as children come to a greater understanding of literature, and adults recall their childhoods. Reading Charlotte’s Web with my children and grandchildren inspired this poem. E.B. White’s classic tale raises the eternal question as to whether to try to protect children from life’s hurts and challenges or teach them to smile through tears. No answer, but our spoken cadences spin gossamer filaments between us. I’ll keep rereading my cherished books. Who I was when I first read the stories may be waiting within the pages.”

Reading Charlotte’s Web with Rebecca

You don’t realize the first time through
the spider dies
You are quite young and say
Charlotte must have gone away
and when you crawl into my lap
and ask me to read the book again
I hesitate but go ahead.
Then your tears fall,
and you beg to be in a story with a different end.

I don’t know how to comfort you
or teach the lesson
I’m still trying to learn
about befriending the lonely
and caring for the needy
and spinning art not just for fame
but for people and pigs and its own saving grace
even if we die unrecognized
leave children orphaned
and weather into wayward fairy dust.

You sit beside me now, two years
hence, and we open the book once more.
Your vocabulary much improved
You recite the words slowly to me
and to the little brother who has arrived
to join us in the telling of the story
where we see it’s possible to be
delicate and strong
kind and bloodthirsty
all at once in “this lovely world, these precious days.”

⧫

Ellen Sazzman has been published in Another Chicago, Poetry South, PANK, Ekphrastic Review, WSQ, Sow’s Ear, Lilith, Beltway Quarterly, and CALYX, among others. She received an honorable mention in the 2019 Allen Ginsberg contest, was shortlisted for the 2018 O’Donoghue Prize, and won first place in Poetica Magazine’s 2016 Rosenberg competition. She was also a 2012 Pushcart Prize nominee. Her collection The Shomer (Finishing Line Press) was a finalist for the 2020 Blue Lynx Prize and a semifinalist for the Elixir Antivenom Award and the Codhill Press Award. 

Delmarva Review is a nonprofit literary journal publishing the most compelling original new poetry, nonfiction, and short fiction from thousands of submissions during the year. It is available worldwide from Amazon.com and other online bookstores. The review is designed to encourage outstanding new writing from authors everywhere. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org. 

Author’s Note: “ ‘Will You Marry Me?’ tells the story of a young Irish girl who receives a proposal of marriage from a drunken old man on a village Sunday morning. Thus begins her misguided search for power. Everywhere around her, the failing native language, the harsh unforgiving landscape, the hardened critical people, all reek of power lost. An historically colonized lot now warped into some terrible shadow. In such a hostile setting, any weakness laid bare could mark you for life. Nicknames the most lethal of sentences. Your fate reduced to an epithet. No escape.”

Will You Marry Me ?

WHEN I WAS NINE, a man asked me to marry him.

An old man from our village—in reality, no more than mid-fifties—who wobbled past me on his way home from Sunday pub. It was early May, a summer freshness in the air that made all things seem possible.

Perched like a cat, I sat on a neighbor’s sill, soaking in some
rare sun.

The old man startled when he saw me, my legs stretched the short width of the window ledge, my back to its narrow indent. From a distance, I blended with the wall’s facade. Some trick picked up from hours of hide-and-seek. How I reveled when my younger brother jogged past a cottage doorway, or a hole in a turf reek, and I watched as though a sod, a stone, a doorjamb.

The old man cocked his head to one side, then the other, as though to retrieve a hard spelling. Even at a distance, he reeked of old-man pong: stout, sweat, staleness, fag-smoke. Sometimes, Mamma gave a lift to old men thumbing home from town in a downpour. They sat into the back seat with their litany of Thank you, Mrs., thank you, and that sickening whiff. Some manky jumper left on a cowshed peg too long and pulled on without washing.

Right where the old man stood, the sun spliced the lane to half-shadow, half-light.

Behind him, an old shop that hadn’t seen paint since the forties shaded him in its two-story decrepitude. Once, in the decades after Irish Independence, it had been the center of commerce, so clean you could eat off the floors. Or so Dadda told us. Now, rats trapped flies and bluebottles in the shop’s filthy window. Behind them, stacks upon stacks of unopened merchandise, clogged walls and floor space. Fresh meat, delivered weekly in shanks of pink and marbled white, swung from hooks in the ceiling.

Business as usual, each carcass boasted, just like the bachelor owner.

Rumor had it he’d been a genius. Could have done anything with his private schooling. Instead, his mother had coaxed him home till she died, and between her love of scrubbing, broadly known, and his big ambitions, barely known, the decades since had left only one clean thing—his jerseys—a new one every month or so. Bright pinks and daffodil yellows in a sea of tweed and gray.

As a child, I watched from the shop corner as old men and women shuffled in for their week’s messages, pointed to bread and milk and eggs, sitting uncovered in the bold open. As though all anyone could still see was what had once been true. No one dared take their business elsewhere lest they too get trapped in the profit and loss of reputation, traded and sold in the grocer’s nightly kitchen.

There the drunk man stood, one foot in the shadows of the old shop, the other in the sunlight. Even at half past two in the afternoon, any fool could see he was dole-night-drunk.

This Sunday routine was not at all uncommon. Every Sunday, at half past eleven, the priest said the Irish Mass. Men of all ages, in blazers and slacks, lined the church walls. Huddled beneath the sparse dryness of the overhang, they murmured and smoked. Just inside the porch doors, more men thronged next to collection tables and pamphlets. They never came into the church proper, not even to the men’s side.

Instead, just as communion began, I often listened for that exact moment of their exit, that hushed air-leak of evaporated pretense as the men, one by one, held the heavy door for the next and slipped out from the grip of Sunday’s obligation.

Noon had struck, and the pub door had opened.

Even as they left, the atmosphere within the church began to lighten, some sour layer removed from its devotion. Joviality spilled in from the patter of stud-tops across the tarmac as men’s voices lifted in anticipation, their call and response its own kind of sacrament.

From noon till two, frothy pints flew across that bar-top, fag-smoke thick as a clogged chimney’s puff-down spilled through the small windows, the men in their flat caps and damp overcoats arguing hounds and heifers and fair-day prices in singsong accents, loud and lively and lost of all translation to any outside ear.

When the pub door closed from two to four, bikes and cars dribbled from the single street to catch up with wives or children who had long since left for the one o’clock dinner. Lone men— of the many bachelors—traipsed the short length of the footpath to the old road, itself a narrow lane that led out to the marshy hinterland.

On this particular Sunday, I wore a dress I liked. There weren’t many garments among my hand-me-downs of which I was proud. Most outfits, my mother rummaged from the hot- press on a Saturday night, each allotment of woolen vest, knickers, socks or tights, dress or pants, tossed to each waiting child with the warning that this was it of clean clothes for the week.

The old man mumbled something.

Lovely dress.

I preened. Rolled my knee-length socks to my ankles to better tan my winter-white skin. At that hour, the slanted sun struck my neighbor’s gable in such a way that every patch of its glass and concrete twinkled. I knew this. Knew without a compass the exact moment that pebble dash would bask in gold, its slated rooftop, its well-nailed drainpipes, its black window trim, all seized by God’s stage light, roasted for hours like our Sunday gammon.

This sunspot was one of the many simple things I knew.

Just like I knew the cockerel at the crossroads only needed a hint of dawn to start his racket, as though he had sat watch all night long to not be outsmarted by a lowly robin or thrush. On school mornings, when I heard him, in the pitch black, boast his clouded half-guesses that even I knew were codswallop, I turned over for the catnap that took me to Mamma’s roll call. At seven o’clock, from the bottom of the stairs, I knew she would call to us in order of birth, eldest to youngest, each of our six names a complaint and yet, a proclamation. As though we had already disobeyed her before our eyes had fluttered open, and yet, by virtue of our existence, had proved her maternal mettle.

All these things I knew, just as the sun that Sunday afternoon, on that exact windowsill, caught me in its glare and filled me with sensations for which I had no name.

When the old man stumbled over to greet me, I already knew him. His homeward zigzag was not just a Sunday spectacle, but any weekday, at any open pub hour. The staggering. The dirty pants, fly undone, neck-stained shirt collar, buttons loose. Brogues frayed at the toe-line, no polish to cover their age. Sometimes, twine to hold his overcoat closed.

On that Sunday, something in me lit something in him.

I could see this.

It pleased me.

His lips smiled. But the smile held something else for which
I had no name. It said it didn’t like me, and yet, it did. It said I was a good-for-nothing and yet good-for-everything.

Mostly, I knew he saw something.

And I wanted to be the kind of person that people saw something in.

Something special.

More than anything, I wanted that.

It was hard to be special in our house.

Dadda was special because his heart could stop at any moment. Anyone who could drop dead while you blinked got to be the most important person in any room.

The older boys were special because they were lads and had hard homework like Latin, so they could get good state jobs and take some worry off Dadda’s heart.

The older girls were important too, not in the same way as the lads, but they needed help with their Domestic Science so they could get into the honors classes.

The baby—my younger brother—now five, was the golden calf everyone wanted to pat. Him and his golden curls. The summer before, my curly hair had turned from blond to brown, and my front teeth had come in crooked. No more passing from one lap to the next for me. Now, I had a new nickname, Ruby, that ugly scullery maid from Upstairs Downstairs. Most days, all I could think of was the Stay Blonde shampoo they sold on television. If I could get my hands on that, I might have some chance.

The old man threw his shoulder against the wall to steady himself.

Leaned over and patted my knee.

“Where’s your father?” he asked.

“In the kitchen,” I said. “Will I get him?”

Sometimes, these old men came to the door with council forms. Or land grants or some such. Dadda was the village teacher, so he knew everything. That made him even more special.

Master, the old people called him. Tipped their caps.

“No, no,” the old man said, “don’t get him. And your Mammy, where is she?”

“Cleaning up,” I said.

His stench, now heated by the sun, filled the gap between us. Made it hard to breathe. I wanted to swing my legs to the ground, but one of my shoes rested on the hem of his blazer. I felt embarrassed. Had it been anyone else, I might have said, mind your coat. But nothing about his coat needed minding. It felt odd to have a dirty shoe on his clothes. He didn’t seem to notice.

He rubbed my leg where the sun had started its toasting.

“You’re a nice girl,” he said. “You’d make a fine wife.”

Up close, his cheeks bloomed a nasty shade of purple. His nose, sore-looking at the tip, sniffed at me. My own cheeks scalded, like he dared to even think I smelled. I’d had a fine scrub last night. More than he had.

His eyes had a half-mad look to them, like they didn’t know where to land. They darted down my legs, up to my face, over to the old shop, and back again.

It made me dizzy to watch him.

“Lovely,” he said.

Another squeeze. This time, on my knee.

I blushed.

Something felt grown-up. The thing about being grown-up was that you just never knew when someone would treat you like you were older. Then you had to play along like you deserved to be as old as they thought you were. Otherwise, you went back to being almost nine and useless.

But something else too. The way his hand squeezed my knee. The kind of squeeze another neighbor gave me. A squeeze that meant other things. Things that happened in the locked sacristy when the church was empty. Things that neighbor did with his fly down. Things that made him mutter I love you for a short while and then shove me out the sacristy door like I’d done something terrible to him.

Those squeezes.
But new.
Like this old sod was asking me for something. Not ordering me across the lane with some dog whistle. This was different. I couldn’t quite put it together in my head. Some half-shadow, half-light of new information danced around the edges of my mind.

“What do you want?” I asked.

The old man smiled. A wet, sloppy smile.

“Will you marry me?”

His voice wavered, half pleading, half nervous. Loose teeth clattered when he spoke.

My stomach churned, and yet, I was excited.

He slouched lower, closed the gap between us. At this short distance, his eyes had the look of sour milk and a dirty windshield. My auntie across the road said the white of a person’s eyes could tell you a multitude. All her nursing years in England after the war taught her that. I watched Dadda’s eyes daily: foggy, bloodshot, bright, dim. All such reports, I delivered to Auntie, and in those moments, I too felt every inch the war nurse.

The old man stepped closer, as though into the porchway of whatever sacrament had started between us. His blazer now covered my strap-and-buckle shoe. My sideways-seated posture felt more like I was lying down. Something private. Like those blond girls on CHiPs with Eric Estrada.

“That carry on,” Mamma would sometimes mutter.

But it seemed so ordinary too.

I wanted that kind of ordinary.

The old man—his whole head trembling—asked again,
“Will you marry me?”

This was something he asked every girl and woman in the parish. Indeed, the only name anyone had for him was will you marry me.

Yet, I grew in anticipation.

If he thought me special, even his strange kind of special, the kind everyone mocked—”Oh, there goes will you marry me, no wife by him yet”—which, even as a youngster, I could understand, his whole getup head-to-toe, skin-to-bone ugly, still, he saw something in me.

And he was asking me.

It was the asking.

This was what excited me.

My belly fluttered like when the lads at school chased after me for the football. How I’d run faster. Dodge and duck right up to the goal. Kick it in. Scream in victory.
–
My older sisters did that too. Made me run after things. Waved a favorite hair slide or Jackie magazine before me, and just as I’d put my fingertips on it, they’d snap it away, say, “No, not earned yet. Go make me a cup of tea, and then you can have it.”

Like they were the boss of me.

Now, I was the boss.

The old man’s hand inched past my knee. My dress slipped up with his effort. He squeezed. I knew this kind of squeezing. It wasn’t so bad once you knew what was coming. His eyes started to dance in his head. If I were to give Auntie a word, I’d say they were glassy.

My own head felt a bit dizzy. My heart hammered fast in my chest.

This will teach him, I thought. But I couldn’t say what it would teach him.

“I don’t think I want to marry you,” I said.

My answer pleased him.

“I have money at home,” he said. “Come with me. I’ll show you.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

My voice was bolder now. It surprised me. What in God’s name would my sisters say if they saw me? They’d make breakfast, dinner, and supper out of the whole thing. Already they had me paired with every ugly sod in the place, Mrs. This or Mrs. That at every meal. Never a nice man. Only other goms like this one.

“I can make an extra bob at the bog,” he said. His hand slid along to my thigh as though his talk might distract me from his journey.

I half smiled, pulled my dress back an inch or so.

This was the best feeling in the whole world, to be in charge like this.

“Not enough,” I said. “What else do you have?”

I was beginning to imagine things now, like maybe I’d get a field from him, or a cow. Not that I’d be allowed to keep them. But still.

Village sounds came in and out. Close. Far away. Hounds groused at the back of Auntie’s. A distant car on the low road drilled round some bend.

But not a person stirred. Just us.

Me and him.

Our own back door opened the next house over. Mamma taking a look at the clothesline to see if any breeze was stirring the sheets. Mamma did this, went from front door to back door to barometer, eyes constantly on the weather, low pressure, high pressure, rain on the way, her hourly reports to everyone and no one all at the same time.

“I’ll buy you a new dress,” the old man said.

His feet shifted beneath him, like he’d lost his balance. His hand slipped, too, and the suddenness of his movement shook me from my reverie.

“Clear away,” a voice roared from behind us.

I jumped to my feet. Color drained from my face.

The old man swung his head just as the woman from the bar landed beside us.

Her whole face fumed. I couldn’t tell who she was more disgusted by, me or him.

“You.” She poked his shoulder. “Go home, you boyo.”

“And you,” she jabbed the air in my direction, “go home.”

Her words broke into two long sentences.

Go.

Home.

Beneath her words, another one, unspoken but right there, on her twisted face.

This exact look freighted with such meaning that I could, from five or six, pick the word tramp from Mamma’s features. Dadda’s, too, him sometimes muttering, “Tinkerish” at the sight of a certain woman in town, the very glimpse of her striding down the footpath in her above-the-knee skirts that left no room for forgiveness, and flowery, too-tight blouses, her large breasts free of all harnessing, enough to cloud Dadda’s face—
Mamma’s, too—with pure repulsion.

Cheap, the air between them said.

Not in a good way like five cans of peach slices in syrup for fifty pence, but cheap in head-to-toe bad. Especially when news broke that the garish woman with her bright blue eye shadow was doing a line with Dadda’s cousin, a fact that might drag us all to the devil’s door with them.

This was the look from the barwoman that day.

Cheap, it said.

My ears scalded. I knew I had done something. I knew that.

Hadn’t I been carrying on with that old lad, waiting to see if he’d get bolder, go for the squeeze in the broad daylight? Was that what I was after? Him to do it out in the open? Thoughts tumbled round and round in my head even as the barwoman’s fury scalded a patch of something terrible into my skin. Some secret she might now whisper to the whole place.

Mind your husband round that young one.

Has a streak of want in her.

They had names for everyone in our parish, and once you got the name, you couldn’t shake it loose even if you had the vet come to de-hoof you.

I wanted to scream.

To scream something at her, at the old man, at the whole village. But what good would that do, only have Mamma come to the top of the road and see all the commotion. And it wouldn’t matter who said what. Her first words would be: “What did that one do now?”

As though she already expected trouble and knew, as she often said, that her crowd would be neck-high in blame.

What good would it do to scream, though my blood boiled from some other stream building inside me that might, had it found its outlet, sound something like: How well you can see this boyo and not that other boyo staggering out of your bar half dead from drink? How well his whistle across the road to me isn’t heard by you or anyone? How come no one can explain to me why I’m petrified not to do what he says in case what . . . in case he blames me, and no amount of explaining will be enough to not have me branded with all kinds of names—mad, Mary Magdalene, the Lord Himself couldn’t stay clean with that one around the place.

I stood, rooted to the spot.

All of us frozen there, like we had peeled back something rotten.

Now, we didn’t know what to do with it.

I knew full well I couldn’t stop whatever the barwoman had seen of me. A flicker caught my eye across the way, the filthy net curtain dropping closed. The shop owner’s smirking face suddenly gone from what must have been full view. My stomach dropped.

It just went from bad to worse.

I had done something dirty. I couldn’t give it a name, not if you paid me.

But I had been carrying on. Others saw it too. Saw right inside my head to that exact spot where I had asked for it. Hadn’t I? Asked for it?

I took off running, dashed past my own front yard, down the lane to the crossroads. With every thud of one foot, then the other, on stony ground, something new came into view. I would never again play that game. That was a bad game. One that could swoop through our front door, in one report, from that foul grocer, or fuming barwoman, and Dadda would keel over, dead on the kitchen linoleum. All because I was caught, like that trollop in town, asking for it.

And that’d be my name.

There she goes: Asking for it.

And did you hear? Herself and will you marry me are doing a line.

And they’d laugh and laugh and laugh.

⧫

Other writing by Saoirse E. Doyle has appeared in Bryant Literary Review, Agave Magazine, White Wall Review, Sweet Tree Review, Big Muddy, The Ignatian Literary Magazine, Entropy, and The Magic of Memoir. Her work focuses primarily on her Irish upbringing and what she carries inside of a troubled country and its history. She enjoys photography, searching for the elusive “perfect chair,” and public speaking.

“Will You Marry Me?” was republished from the Delmarva Review (Volume 15), a nonprofit literary journal that selects the most compelling new nonfiction, fiction, and poetry from thousands of submissions during the year. It is available worldwide from Amazon.com and other major bookstores. The review is designed by its founders to encourage outstanding new writing from authors everywhere. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: “How important it is to take care of problems when they’re small! I imagined a friend doing minor maintenance on his house. He’d assess the situation, read instructions, and do a good job. The poem shifts in last five lines and moves beyond the literal fix-it. With his clean hand over his heart, he pledges to take care of what needs close attention to be held together.”

The Practice of Small Repairs

A gap. A man, his caulk gun
at first awkward draws a bead.
He recalls with a flush
to read the directions before
the gush and scrape. Seal
and in the end the colors
match and blend so no one
will know it’s not done by a pro.
Smooth, the man stands, tall.
He walks to the sink for a drink
and a wash and he thinks
hand over heart,
prayer or pledge,
this is a seam that will hold. 

⧫

Jeanine Hathaway is the author of the novel, Motherhouse (NY: Hyperion, 1992), The Self as Constellation (UNT, 2002), winner of the 2001 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, the chapbook The Ex-Nun Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2011), and Long after Lauds (Slant Books, 2019) winner of a 2020 Catholic Book Award for Poetry. She is professor emerita of English at Wichita State University and a former mentor in the Seattle Pacific University MFA Creative Writing Program. 

This poem was originally published in the Delmarva Review, Volume 15, a nonprofit literary journal that selects the most compelling new poetry, nonfiction, and short fiction from thousands of submissions during the year. It is available worldwide from Amazon.com and other major bookstores. The review is designed to encourage outstanding new writing. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org. 

 

Author’s Note: “This is a poem about aging, a topic that often comes to mind now that I am well into my eighth decade. It’s rooted first in the three memories of Camp Rodney, where I went as a boy scout in the 1950s. At my age it’s a commonplace that memories of early life tend to be more vivid than memories of more recent times. As these three ran through my mind, I was startled to realize that they were all about the same time and place because they seemed so separate as they occurred to me. That took me to the notion of dissolution, where I know I am headed, as are we all eventually. One of the better-known poems of this genre is Robert Frost’s ‘An Old Man’s Winter’s Night.’ ”

Entropy

My memories separate.
Lose their arc of identity.
No longer imply a self.
No gravity binds them.
A boy at Camp Rodney
on the North East River
decked by Charlie Eyler’s
longer arm, different from
the boy who swims half a mile
in five-foot, tidewater swells,
different from the boy
who hates living in tents.
They are more separate,
than not, cohering
into momentary self
then ricocheting off
on the way back
to the atoms
I started from,
the collection
containing me,
and not me,
randomly.

Arnie Yasinski is a retired college administrator, born American and now living in Ireland with his Irish wife. He’s a father and grandfather with a PhD in English and BA from Indiana University. He wrote his first poem at fifty and has published poetry in four dozen US journals. He has two collections, Proposition and God Lives in Norway and Goes by Christie, both published by 21st Century Renaissance press in Ireland. He earned an MBA in finance from University of Michigan.
Website: arnieyasinskipainterpoet.com

“Entrope” was published in the Delmarva Review Volume 15, a nonprofit literary journal that selects the most compelling new poetry, nonfiction, and short fiction from thousands of submissions during the year. It is available worldwide from Amazon.com and other online bookstores. The review is designed to encourage outstanding new writing from authors everywhere. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

# # #

Author’s Note: “I grew up camping on Assateague with my father and brother. I hadn’t camped there in twenty years, then went with a friend and my young daughters. The sounds were so enveloping, and I felt embraced by place, memory, and also newness. I could say so much about how I love this tiny barrier island, but I kept the poem short, with the hope that the reader will feel a sense of the peace and adventure one may find there.”

Assateague, June

Sleep in a curved seashell, opalescent and grey
all night the surf lulling into nicker

our tent leaf-patterned by moonlight
my daughter asks me to name each shell, plant, insect, bird
I might never stop counting all I do not know

bird and surf and moon-high water
wind in low trees all slush and hoof

once we lived
days of sand
wild horses at sunrise

⧫

Lara Payne was once an archeologist and now teaches college-level writing in Maryland to veterans and to children. Her poem “Corn Stand, 10 ears for two dollars” was a winner of the Moving Words Competition and placed on buses in Arlington, Virginia. Her poems explore the environment and the hidden work of women. They have appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly and Mom Egg Review.

Delmarva Review selects the most compelling original poetry, nonfiction, and short fiction from thousands of submissions during the year. The nonprofit literary journal is designed to encourage fine writing from authors everywhere. Over forty percent are from the Delmarva and Chesapeake region. The book is available worldwide in print and electronic editions from Amazon.com and other major booksellers. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

 

Author’s Note: “My love for Baltimore is fierce; I’m proud and protective of my city. I’m also impatient for us to improve, for Baltimore to be a place people won’t be so quick to criticize. This vignette captures the discouragement I sometimes feel that we’re so far from where we should, could, be.”

Baltimore Is Where

IF I STOP BELIEVING IN PRAYERS, it’ll be Baltimore’s fault.

Baltimore is where I learned when to pray: before dinner, at bedtime, kneeling during Mass. Back then, it felt like magic, a longer version of the wish I’d make blowing out birthday candles. Praying made me feel powerful. The Creator, Nurturer, Protector of all things was listening to me say I love you. I hope for. I’m afraid of.

Thank you.

At first, I was too young to even imagine receiving a response. But when, eventually, I discovered prayer is supposed to be a dialogue, I became eager for the holy half of the exchange. God doesn’t just hear. God answers.

Even me.

Baltimore is where I learned the quietest part of prayer: how to listen, discern, receive. I practiced waiting instead of willing. Once I’d trained my ear, I delighted in the clarity of these conversations. Even when I didn’t like what I heard, I never again felt like I was talking to myself. Baltimore is where I came to expect divine answers.

Except when Baltimore is why I pray. Then, it’s as though the line has been severed. I’m again alone. While wrapping myself in words, I wonder if there’s a reason these particular prayers don’t seem to make their way to heaven.

dddddGod, I just want blood to stop staining our streets.
ddddddddddGod, please don’t make anyone else choose between eating and electricity.
 ffffddfddfseffefdfdGod, when will our children know they are legends?

I pray any and everywhere. Running before breakfast, waiting in line, leaving work, I pray. I pray I pray I pray.

Sometimes I want to give up—until I remember how much I love. God. Baltimore. People. So, at least for now, I’ll keep saying prayers like they’re candles on a cake.

⧫

Kerry Graham is a Baltimore-based writer, book coach, and former high school English teacher. Her newsletter, Real Quick, is a monthly glimpse into her writer life. Kerry is a Creative-in-Residence at The Baltimore Banner. This “vignette” was published in the current Delmarva Review, Volume 15.

The Review selects the most compelling original nonfiction, poetry, and short fiction from thousands of submissions during the year. The nonprofit literary journal is designed to encourage fine writing from authors everywhere. Over forty percent are from the Delmarva and Chesapeake region. The book is available from Amazon.com and other major booksellers. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

Author’s Note: “When I saw an old ‘Visible Woman’ in a battered box at a yard sale, vivid memories of the one I received for Christmas arose and prompted this poem. Having access to the nude anatomy of a grown-up woman felt thrillingly transgressive back then, though I had parental approval. The transparent plastic model was a sort of key to unlock the mystery of my own changing body, even as the prevailing model of womanhood was being questioned and disassembled.” 

Girls and Dolls

The anatomical model of the female body
Santa left when I was ten was no Barbie doll. 

The plastic lady came boxed with a skeleton,
vital organs, and the (optional) “miracle of creation”
transparent uterus complete with baby
that I could click in and take out,
although I didn’t know how a real baby
got in and out, or what to call a vagina and vulva,
parts I vaguely had but she didn’t:
she was plastica intacta down there. 

The see-through Visible Woman
wasn’t visible at all except for her insides.
She (totally) could have opened the door
wearing Saran Wrap and a glassy look
of biological destiny on her non-face,
but like Barbie with those working girl outfits
the VW wasn’t intended to show me
a person to be reckoned with,
or to model the actual real
doing disagreeing choosing
the-hell-you-say visible woman
her bold title prophesied
and who was coming into view
the year I was ten. 

Nevertheless she showed me
the sturdy bones of my durable body;
she showed me breasts and ovaries
and female embodiment;
from then on, from ten on
I was learning that it is vital
—listen, Invisible Girl—
to put in and take out,
to investigate and create,
to stand and show up in
my own visible, my own
miraculous self. 

⧫

Marda Messick is a poet and theologian living in Tallahassee, Florida on land that is the traditional territory of the Apalachee Nation and other indigenous peoples. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Christian Century and Literary Mama. 

“Girls and Dolls” was published in the Delmarva Review Volume 15, a nonprofit literary journal that selects the most compelling new poetry, nonfiction, and short fiction from thousands of submissions during the year. It is available from Amazon.com and other bookstores. The review is designed to encourage outstanding new writing from authors everywhere. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: “Stranathan’s was the name of the barber’s shop in the town where I grew up in Northern Ireland. My essay is, in part, a recollection of this fondly remembered place, where my brother and I were regularly taken for haircuts throughout our childhood. But it’s also a meditation about something that has fascinated me for years – the nature of memory, and the relationship between remembering and imagining.”

Remembering Ramathan’s 

Memories are all we get to keep from our
experience of living, and the only perspective
that we can adopt as we think about our lives
is therefore that of the remembering self. 

Daniel Kahneman,

Thinking, Fast and Slow 

IT’S MAY 2020 IN ST. ANDREWS, SCOTLAND. I’m sitting in my kitchen on a sunny morning in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown. My wife is cutting my hair, grown longer than accustomed—or wanted—over these weeks of seclusion and social distancing. Her barbering prompts a memory I wasn’t expecting. Instead of making me remember how she used to cut my hair when we were students or think of the plight of my usual hairdresser—business closed and undertaking strict shielding measures because of an elderly parent’s vulnerability to the virus—the rhythmic clipping of the scissors summons something far more distant. I picture Stranathan’s, the barber’s shop in Lisburn, the town in Northern Ireland where I grew up. My brother and I were regularly taken there throughout our childhood. The hair that fell around me then was dark, undusted by the gray that now runs through it. It’s hard to believe how long ago it was that those two little boys used to delight in feeling the prickly stubble on the back of their heads as they emerged, newly shorn, from the shop. 

I don’t remember the name of the man who used to cut our hair—in fact, I’m not sure we ever knew it. He comes back to me in fragments. Much of him is missing. He’s full-lipped—his most memorable feature—with black hair slicked back in a brilliantined wave. The breast pocket of the white coat he invariably wore is filled with razors, combs, and scissors. Once, when he stooped to pick up a bottle-top, they all fell with a clatter on the lino floor. He said nothing but simply knelt and picked them up one by one, carefully brushing and blowing the hairs off them before replacing them in the same pocket. His complexion is sallow yet overlaid with the pallor of indoors. He wears more rings than most men did back then, and his shoes are sufficiently pointed and polished to qualify as “winkle-pickers.” His style suggests Teddy boy, though he’s in his early thirties and should therefore be, as my mother put it, disapproval of him evident in her voice, “old enough to know better.” 

These remnant details only add up to a partial picture. If it were a portrait, most of the canvas would be blank. Such incompleteness is tantalizing—it offers a sense of this individual, but one that won’t come into proper focus. Alongside this patchy recall of my boyhood barber, a much clearer image comes to mind that sums up the nature of the fragmented memories I have of him. I think of the candyfloss accumulations of spiders’ webs that fur the windows of my garden shed. Their nets of dirty gossamer strands are like cotton wool thinned and soiled, flecked with an array of insect debris, a record of predation presented in a kind of dry pointillism worked in tiny body parts. What I can remember about my first barber is like these dried-up bits of insect—antennae, wings, mandibles—a peppering of particles caught on memory’s web. There’s not much left, yet the pieces still manage to conjure echoes of the living person, in the same way as the shards held in the woolly ossuary that crusts my shed’s windows still summon whispers of the butterflies, moths, bees, and flies they came from. 

Trying to reconstruct from these fragments a fuller picture of Stranathan’s barber shop and the full-lipped, white-coated man who used to cut my hair reminds me of a scene from Homer’s Odyssey. Descending to the underworld, Ulysses meets the souls of the dead. Before they can regain their memory and recognize him, he needs to provide them with the blood of sacrificed animals. Only after drinking this life-imbued liquid can the dead be parleyed with. The blood restores a level of consciousness that allows them, albeit temporarily, to communicate again, recalling enough of life to connect with the concerns of those still living. 

Given the mnemonic potency accorded to blood in the Odyssey, it’s ironic that the memories awoken by my wife’s lockdown cutting of my hair are focused on a barber’s shop. Stranathan’s had one of those red-and-white-striped poles outside the shop,  

an internationally recognized sign of a barber (see Note). Theirs was a modern version of this ancient symbol. It was fixed like a flagpole above the shop’s front door. Encased in a kind of elongated bell jar of glass or plastic, the red and white spirals must have been electrically powered. Turning endlessly, even when the shop was closed, the moving helix drew the eye with the illusion of infinite repetition, the prospect of perpetual continuance, red and white appearing, disappearing, reappearing without end.

[Note: Red and white are the traditional colors for barbers’ poles in Europe. The addition of blue in America is variously explained. Some suggest it stemmed from patriotic motives—introducing blue so that the pole echoes the colors of the US flag. Others say it’s an extension of the original symbolism with blue representing the color of veins opened during bloodletting.]

 

The reason for the red-and-white-striped spirals on a barber’s pole is all to do with blood. The poles are often capped at the end with a kind of bowl-shaped cup—Stranathan’s glass bell jar was topped with just such a device. It, too, is blood related. Only a few centuries ago, barbers didn’t just deal in coiffure. They offered surgery, bone setting, and tooth pulling. Bleeding was relied on as key therapeutic measure in the 

treatment of many ailments; barber-surgeons used to bleed their customers as routinely as they tended their hair and beards. The pole represents the stick customers gripped tightly as they underwent this procedure. The red in the spiral stands for blood, the white for bandages. The shape that tops the pole represents the bowl into which the blood was drained. Some poles have a second bowl shape at their base, representing the container in which medicinal leeches were kept. 

Though bloodletting has long been abandoned by barbers, something curiously elemental still attended our visits to Stranathan’s. Perhaps the skillful wielding of sharpened metal implements at close quarters suggested something less quotidian than cutting hair. Or perhaps the strange mix of intimacy and distance conferred a special quality—the way the hands of someone scarcely known touched our heads, those warm receptacles of what we thought and felt. I find an almost elegiac note accompanying the realization that the full-lipped barber used to touch the head that, all these years later, is writing about him and still holds fragments of him in the invisible embrace of memory. I can’t help wondering how many other minds he’s held in. If I could access the way in which all the little boys whose hair he cut stored him in the mazes of their minds, would that bring back a fuller picture or just further fragments? And how did he see us? My brother and I were just two among droves of little boys brought in for haircuts (girls were taken to an upstairs salon). He may scarcely have distinguished one from another in this crowd of juvenile customers, or perhaps he remembered via a kind of phrenology, his memory holding a whole array of contour maps for the different shapes of heads he felt beneath his fingers. 

Is there any equivalent to Ulysses’ sacrificial blood that I could offer to the fragmented shades from Stranathan’s that roam the underworld of my remembrance, something that might make more whole the memories they represent? I don’t think there’s anything straightforwardly efficacious, no magic pill, no obvious medicine to take, though perhaps writing this kind of reflection is a type of self-bloodletting that makes an incision in the psyche’s store of what has passed and collects what flows in its bowl of words. I’m not sure how seriously to take that conjecture. But whatever’s made of it, there are two more prosaic strategies that can help. 

The first involves an almost meditative focusing and disciplining of the mind as I imagine myself returning to that point in childhood. I think through the years, reach back and back again, try to discount distraction, let the noise of the present fall away until I’m there again in spirit. I hope the spectral touch of this kind of concentrated attention can nudge some of the particles of remembrance into new alignment, send a pulse of voltage through them so that they can come together, cohere into more viable patterns, even jerk back into momentary life. 

The second strategy is more straightforward. It simply involves asking my older brother what he remembers. We were always taken to Stranathan’s together, which means I can tap into a second perspective, access another set of memories to lay beside my own and see what tallies. Using the whetstone of his independent recollection offers a way of sharpening my version of the past, giving it a keener, truer edge so that it can cut through the years more cleanly and see those vanished days again, cleared of the overlay of time that’s passed since they were present. 

Putting these two strategies into play has helped me to imagine going through the door to Stranathan’s again, passing under the endlessly turning barber’s pole. My brother and I are ushered in by a parent—we don’t agree whether it was our mother or father who most often accompanied us. The three of us sit down, side by side, in the row of chairs arranged against the back wall, waiting for our turn. There’s a warm, sweet smell of perfumed oils and lotions. As for noises, the snip-snip of scissors, the buzz of electric clippers, and the sporadic conversation don’t quite blot out the sound of clumps of hair falling on the floor in featherlight swishes. If you listen closely, you can hear this gentle 

punctuation every now and then, making a sound that’s reminiscent of wire-brush drumsticks touched gently to a cymbal. The single window in this back room of the shop is always closed. Its lower half is net-curtained, its upper half is misted with the heat of the muggy salon atmosphere, blurring the view of nearby buildings. On the windowsill sits a large valve radio. Is it switched on? Is there music playing? My memory is of it being tuned to a sports channel with commentary on horse racing. But my brother doesn’t remember there being a radio at all, so perhaps my mind has conjured it from somewhere else, and those excited cadences of the commentator’s voice as the horses near the finish line are not part of the aural background of Stranathan’s at all but have strayed here from some other fragment caught on remembrance’s candyfloss web of pieces. 

We both agree that there were three red leather swivel chairs with silver levers for adjusting their height and angle. Each chair is facing a large, rectangular mirror. The mirrors are fixed to the wall by screws at their corners. Each screw is covered by the small domed globe of a shiny, gold-plated head. I’m fascinated by the missing screw at the bottom left of the center mirror. It reveals a small dark hole that I imagine some secretive insect creeping out of once the shop is quiet. Perhaps there’s a whole warren of tunnels hidden behind the mirror’s surface. When customers sitting in the red leather swivel chairs look at their reflections, they can also see the row of chairs behind them where my brother and I—and often one or two others—sit fidgeting, waiting for our turn. Under the line of mirrors, there’s a shelf that runs the full length of the room. It’s littered with combs and brushes, scissors and clippers, shaving brushes, cutthroat razors and the leather strops used to sharper them, bottles and tubes of hair oil and brilliantine, all the tools of the trade. 

Of the three barbers who worked in Stranathan’s, we remember the full-lipped Teddy-boyish one so much more clearly than the others that it’s almost as if he’s in color while his two colleagues are in washed-out sepia or black and white. He always worked at the middle chair, between an older, balding man—possibly called Billy—whose station was the chair beside the window, and a younger man about whom all that we can summon now is the fact that he was younger, and of slighter build, than the other two. He was so quiet that the silence could be uncomfortable on those rare occasions when he cut our hair. 

Is it possible to be sure what’s accurately remembered and to distinguish it from what may have been invented? By “invented,” I don’t mean something deliberately fabricated in order to deceive, but rather something generated automatically by the mind in passing, without thinking, as it strives to complete the patterns that are hinted at, finding the missing pieces in the jigsaw of recall. I’ve tried to reconstruct a picture of place and people from the traces of them that remain in memory. But for all my sense of being there again, there are many gaps in what comes back, and I know that it is exactly these kinds of spaces that the imagination is quick to fill and gloss over, supplying absent detail that may not match the way things actually were. 

I wonder what befell my full-lipped barber. In one sense, I already know the answer. Since he was in his thirties when he cut our hair, he’d be a very old man now or more likely dead. A common fate awaits us all. In that sense, there’s no mystery, no enigma. I can be quite certain about the outcome. What I wonder about is not so much the inevitable conclusion of his life as its unique texture. What twists and dips and camber marked the unfolding of his days? I’m interested in the specifics draped over the generalities we all encounter—desire, pleasure, pain, fear, regret, longing, satisfaction – our whole repertoire of feelings— the particular weave of one person’s fabric of experience that results in the precise contours of the peaks and troughs that shape the map of who they are, the seismograph that marks the meanderings and undulations of the paths they followed. And this is precisely what’s lost—or what, in truth, was never known. For even as we watched him in the mirror as he cut our hair, we knew little more about him than what’s suggested by the fragments lodged in memory, fragments that seem so hollowed out and substance-less that they recall the husks of insects in a spider’s web. Memory has preserved a sliver of what only ever was a sliver. The intimate texture of his life was invisible to us then and is now vanished beyond hope of any full-blooded retrieval. 

How memory operates is something that has fascinated me for years. It’s easy enough to see why some things are retained— they fall upon us with such force that we’re permanently imprinted with their signature—but with others, there’s often no obvious reason why the mind has latched on to them and preserved them from forgetting. Clearly, it would be impossible—and undesirable—to remember everything. We’d soon capsize under the weight of such a cargo. But it’s often hard to fathom what criteria have been applied so that some things are salvaged and others cast aside. What algorithm was in play to result in the few details of my full-lipped barber being kept while everything else about him was let go? 

As I’m writing these reflections, I remember the expression “harking back.” It means to turn back to an earlier topic or circumstance, to go back to something as origin or source. It stems from “hark,” an ancient word meaning “listen.” Originally, it was a call used in hunting. The master of a hunt might shout “Hark forward!” or “Hark Back!” directing hounds and hunters to where it seemed the quarry’s trail was strongest. The cries became set phrases. A hark back is a retracing of a route, a turning back along the course a hunt has followed to try to find the scent again. From its use in hunting, figurative meanings soon developed. I’ve directed the hounds of memory to hark back to Stranathan’s. But the dogs are tired. Beside them run the unruly mongrels of the imagination. The scent has all but gone, and I worry that I’ll end up chasing something that was never there. 

If I’m not to end up with a hybrid—a chimera—where garden shed cobwebs and the barber of my childhood merge into a single macabre figure, I need to keep apart the strands of memory from those woven by the imagination to create a metaphor that shows what this particular instance of remembering is like. The full-lipped, Teddy-boyish barber is remembered. The open fibrous sarcophagus of the garden shed cobwebs is something pressed into service as an image that represents the nature of the remembering in which he’s held. Or, to use a different image, what’s left of him is like shrapnel created by the detonation of moments exploded long ago as they came into what was then the full glare of my present experience. I’m not sure how feasible it is to reconstruct from these fragments an accurate sense of the force of the present as it lit my youthful consciousness back then. Can I regain anything of the luminescence of its immediacy, the bright light of its passing, as it struck me all those years ago? However much I reach back through the psyche’s store of memories, however much I check the details against what my brother recalls, there’s a sense of an elusive something that has slipped away or that perhaps was never there in the way I now imagine it. 

We know so little of each other. What did my full-lipped barber feel when he woke in the middle of the night and looked out at the stars? What did he most desire? What was his idea of a perfect day? What was he proud of? What made him ashamed? Who was the person he loved most in all the world? Was the gap between how he wanted his life to unfold and how it did unfold, such as to allow contentment to warm his psyche, or did it breed the acid of resentment, regret, and disappointment? How far could he be trusted, relied upon? Had his heart ever held hatred in it? Was he loved? Had he ever written a poem? Listened to Beethoven? Read James Joyce? What favorite places soothed his spirit and made him feel at home? What was the last dream he ever dreamed? Who was the last person he ever thought of? 

Stranathan’s has long closed. Its premises have seen various other businesses come and go. A gap of decades yawns between now and when the full-lipped barber cut the hair of the little boy I was. Thinking myself back, and talking with my brother, has led to a sense of the place flickering into the light of consciousness again. A great deal has, of course, been lost; there are many gaps in the picture I can summon, and I have no sacrificial blood to revive the shades that stir in memory’s underworld. Yet despite this, I find, to my surprise, that underlying all the loss and absence and forgetting, all the uncertainty, I can still savor the feeling of being there. A sense of the place’s atmosphere has been rekindled; I can feel its notes playing out excerpts of a signature tune I recognize, sounding in the same register I used to hear back then. In the end, the strongest image that remembering Stranathan’s leaves in mind is of a barber’s pole, turning and turning without end, bright with the possibility of retrieval and meaning. 

⧫

Chris Arthur is an Irish essayist currently based in St. Andrews, Scotland. He is the author of several books of essays, most recently Hummingbirds Between the Pages (2018). A new collection, Hidden Cargoes, was published in 2022. His awards include the Sewanee Review’s Monroe K. Spears Essay Prize. Website: www.chrisarthur.org.  

Delmarva Review is a nonprofit, independent literary journal that selects the most compelling nonfiction, fiction, and poetry from thousands of unpublished, new submissions during the year. Designed to encourage outstanding writing from authors everywhere. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org. 

 

#  #  #

 

Author’s Note: “In grade school, I remember encountering Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ and leaving with the false impression—encouraged by well-meaning teachers—that the poet was exhorting his readers to follow the road ‘less traveled by.’  In hindsight, while this reading of the poem is rather simplistic, I have continued to find myself fascinated by paths never traveled, alternative realities that deviate slightly (or greatly) from my own, and the increasing recognition with age that much of life is shaped by roads not taken and doors closed by choice or circumstance.  My parents deserve credit for opening doors for me, but also for closing them, as this essay reveals….” 

Closing Doors

IN KINDERGARTEN, FIRST GRADE, SECOND GRADE, infinite futures opened before us like the automatic doors at the Pathmark—some leading to fire stations or ballet stages, others as far as the moon—and then suddenly in third grade, at Miss Spillman’s command, we found ourselves forced to choose. Our teacher’s decree arrived in the form of a dittoed handout, purple ink still pungent with methanol from the duplicator, instructing us to decide upon a career and depict this vocation on an oak tag poster. Alas, I was not one of those striving nine-year-olds endowed with detailed fantasies of becoming a big game veterinarian, or a Ringling Brothers clown, or of replacing Bucky Dent at shortstop for the New York Yankees. Any musical ambitions I might have nurtured had been dashed earlier that autumn when my parents arranged a “bedtime talk”—a formal affair—to reveal that Mrs. B., the Swiss taskmaster responsible for my weekly piano lessons, had abruptly carted up her instrument and relocated out-of-state. Around that time, as I recall, having stumbled upon a historical atlas, I’d voiced an interest in cartography, only to be met with disdain: the eldest sons of nephrologists in bedroom suburbs might reach for the stars but not chart the earth. 

Of this point only was I certain: I did not wish to become a doctor. My father, who was a prominent kidney specialist, had ensured my resistance during a hospital visit in the late 1970s: We’d gone together one weekend afternoon to check up on his dialysis patient and, while he demonstrated the “lost art” of physical examination, a faulty catheter in her groin led to geysers of blood. This was before AIDS, largely pre-PPE. I remember being ordered to a corner, stunned and in terror, until the unfortunate woman could be stabilized. Yet only a portion of the responsibility for my negative impression of medicine belonged to my father’s crimson-splattered glasses. Stories handed down from my grandfather, a one-time military psychiatrist, deserve a share of blame: how he’d treated servicemen who’d butchered their own commanding officers, how he’d later performed electro-shock therapy in his home office on a table also used for family dinners. The Lord’s work, maybe, but not exactly Marcus Welby, MD. 

So that was my poster: “NOT A DOCTOR.” Sensing that my parents might not approve, I conducted my drawing clandestinely in my bedroom. Today, I might have depicted maniacal surgeons, eyes and bone saws equally agleam, or possibly medical atrocities like Tuskegee and Willowbrook. At nine, my approach was to depict doctors in action, stethoscopes dangling, white coats crisp, as though I did intend a Hippocratic adulthood—and then to slice through my creation with the red circle and backslash of universal prohibition. In the end, my poster proved as clear and decisive a rejection of the medical arts as could be hoped for, and no grade school Picasso has ever been so proud, or rightly so, smuggling his masterpiece to school in a cardboard tube. 

Miss Spillman, to her credit, didn’t fail me outright. She was one of those old-style elementary school educators who carried with her an aura of perpetual amusement, and her teaching style, while not exactly Socratic, involved asking naïve questions: What kind of training did one require to ‘not become’ a doctor? Did a person need a license? A uniform? She pressed her broad flat palms together in front of her lips, as though deep in reflection, and it was almost as though she were winking without moving her eyelids. And what, she asked, would I do with all my free time while I was not being a doctor? In the end, I agreed to craft a second poster. 

I believe this magnum opus remains preserved in my parents’ attic, awaiting discovery by twenty-second-century critics. Or possibly termites. I fear that upon this one masterwork hangs my hope for posthumous artistic glory. Its theme: “NOT A PSYCHIATRIST.” 

READER, I BECAME ONE. Despite my most valiant efforts— and even a detour through law school—I now earn my keep as a headshrinker, a trick cyclist, a couch quack. What the Germans call a Seelenklempner or “soul plumber,” and my mother, for whom I remain her son-who-is-not-the-rabbi, terms “almost a real doctor.” Whether as a result of predestination or Brownian motion or free will, I stumbled through the gates of Aesculapius and never looked back. In contrast, I am not a pianist. By not a pianist, I don’t mean not a rival to Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubenstein, nor even Victor Borge, but rather three-thumbed and tin-eared, no longer capable of playing “Jingle Bells” or “Frère Jacques” with the sheet music. Mrs. B.’s mad dash for the state line had managed to block permanently my path to Carnegie Hall. My own floundering efforts merely obstructed temporarily the asylum entrance without managing to padlock its gates. 

Closing doors is no easy business. Even edging them shut a few inches can be challenging for many contemporary Americans, especially those of the middle and upper classes, trained from childhood to keep their options open and to reach for the moon. Our ambitions may be Caesarean, but the underlying mantra is pure Cassius: if we do not achieve stardom, the fault lies in ourselves for failing to preserve our opportunities. Alas, these goals—more choices, higher aspirations—are often incompatible: With a few rare exceptions, maybe Leonardo da Vinci or Benjamin Franklin, success comes from specialization—from targeting relatively narrow but worthwhile objectives and pursuing them relentlessly. Usain Bolt may try his legs at the 100-meter sprint and the 400-meter dash, but he doesn’t also pursue medals in archery and curling. To master the clarinet, Benny Goodman had to forgo the French horn and the sitar, as well as training in astrophysics and architecture. For all Emma Goldman’s talk of dancing after the revolution, she kept her nose on the anarchist grindstone and left Fred Astaire to Ginger Rogers. 

In fact, closing doors is essential to well-adjusted living. Pursuing a career in law or medicine generally means waiving the other, and failure to do so risks the fate of Richard Carstone in Dickens’s Bleak House, who trains in both professions, yet is able to practice neither. When a bride and groom stand before the altar and declare, “I do,” they are presumably also proclaiming, “I don’t,” to countless other former passions and prospective suitors. Love itself is the supreme act of door slamming. Of course, we all know lotharios who adopt the collect-them-all approach to romance, like ice cream aficionados taste-testing all thirty-one flavors at Baskin Robbins, but at some juncture, failure to commit becomes self-defeating. Basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain, who died unwed and childless after a record-setting course of regretted promiscuity, serves—by his own admission— as people’s exhibits one through 20,000. 

When medical students approach me for career advice, which is a staple of my work in academic psychiatry, I generally avoid discussing Wilt the Stilt’s sex life. In any case, I suspect many would not recognize his name, and a few might even mistake him for Winston Churchill’s predecessor on Downing Street. (To anyone doubting that fame is fleeting: I’ve already encountered students who believed Lou Gehrig’s disease took its eponym from a neurologist.) But these young men and women— in their own modest way—are fighting to win a version of the battle that Wilt lost 20,000 times. They have discovered that becoming a transplant surgeon means not becoming a pediatrician, and that becoming a pediatrician means losing the opportunity to procure livers and implant kidneys, and for some, still struggling to fit into their psychological white coats, that embracing either may preclude writing plays for the stage. 

Helping this last group is often the most difficult. Medical education, an in-for-a-penny, in-for-a-pound enterprise to the tune of many years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, does not make second-guessing easy. How does one advise a student to jump off the Hippocratic conveyor belt? And when? Should they complete their degrees? Finish their internships to acquire licenses and prescription pads? Stick it out long enough to pay off their loans? These questions are all the harder when approached with a mindset that equates closing doors with failure. Among the many words of wisdom attributed to deaf- blind activist Helen Keller, mostly false, she apparently did write: “Often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.” This is the fate of Lot’s wife on the plain of Jordan, of Miss Havisham in the darkness of Satis House. I can echo this sentiment firsthand: I hardly ever encounter a piano, whether in an upscale parlor or a cocktail lounge, without thinking of Mrs. B. and her distant betrayal. 

THE MEDICAL STUDENTS often ask how I became a doctor. I rarely mention my contribution to Miss Spillman’s occupational gallery, the row of tagboard sketches that hung like laundry across the back of her classroom for much of that winter. One of my classmates, in my memory, aspired to rescue elephants from poachers. Another planned to become the next Michael Jackson. (I wish I could attach a name to these remote dreams—to track down my erstwhile classmates to assess their prognostic skills, or just for a good laugh—but you don’t have to be a psychiatrist to realize that surveying your former third-grade classmates on their dreams derailed is a sign of an incipient midlife crisis, or at least far too much time on your hands.) I see no upside in relating to the students Miss Spillman’s response to my second poster: how she stood, arms akimbo, as though at the unveiling of the Mona Lisa or Washington Crossing the Delaware, and then served up a silent nod that I took for approval, but likely represented calculated resignation. 

What I do tell the medical students about is Robert Frost. Particularly, Robert Frost’s celebrated poem, “The Road Not Taken,” which Miss Spillman recited to generations of grammar school students as a paean to individualism. We had read the poem previously as second graders in Mr. Minard’s class, alongside standards by e. e. cummings and Emily Dickinson, there being considerable curricular overlap in the era before relentless standardized testing, but for Bob Minard, the poem had been about roads. I vaguely recollect an exercise that involved drawing hobos carrying bindles. For Ruth Spillman, Frost’s verse was all metaphor: “Two roads diverged in a wood,” and by choosing “the one less traveled by,” we might someday become the next Edison or Einstein or Earhart. She was a lovely woman, Ruth Spillman. Hopeful, encouraging, and authentic. (Decades later, I sent her copies of my early novels, and following her death, her partner approached me at a public lecture to thank me.) I still have no idea whether she misrepresented Frost’s lines intentionally or had absolutely no idea what they were about. 

The poem serves as an ideal mirror for the questioning medical student. Frost’s point—as elucidated in David Orr’s well-known Paris Review essay, “The Most Misread Poem in America”—may be that both roads hold equal promise. Only in hindsight does the road we choose, for better or worse, make “all the difference.” According to an alternate reading considered by Orr, “the poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.” When I broach the century-old stanzas with future doctors, my goal is for them to recognize their good fortune: Many of the roads before them lead to auspicious futures. A contented pediatrician does not suffer nagging doubts about the transplants she never performed any more than a happily married husband reflects with regret on the countless women he never accompanied down the aisle. 

Life does not offer one right answer, just multiple good ones. And poor ones too, of course: anesthesiology and obstetrics may both lead to distinct yet rewarding lives; murdering strangers on contract bodes less long-term joy. I used to recommend that uncertain medical students read Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide (2009), which argues that some choices are best rendered on emotion and instinct. He suggests this gut check is a good method for buying a home. I also find this approach works well in choosing a medical specialty. Alas, the decision to recommend the book was taken away from me in 2013 when its author was accused of plagiarism and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt yanked the volume from bookstore shelves. Now I just tell the medical students to make a visceral decision and try not to second guess themselves. 

Some doors are shut to us from the outset: several billion would-be heirs apparent, for instance, likely stand between my Ashkenazi-Jewish head and the English crown. Others close of their own accord. It is too late for me to win a Rhodes Scholarship or become a Navy SEAL—neither of which accept candidates in their forties—although the army did allow my grandfather to enroll in middle age after Pearl Harbor, so I suppose exceptions do remain possible. Even with daily lessons and first-rate coaching, I am no longer likely to sing Turandot at La Scala or play Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” to rival Glenn Gould. Yet most of my successes in life have resulted from paths that I have consciously shunned: rejected professions, third dates that didn’t follow seconds, essays that never met a printed page. Miss Spillman feared her students might lack the courage to open doors; my fear is that my own students won’t possess the confidence to close them. 

Would Miss Spillman be pleased to see me a psychiatrist? Disappointed? I do not sell widgets for a living or ride a commuter train to Stepford, but I’m also not exactly the Wizard of Menlo Park nor will I be flying a biplane solo across the Atlantic anytime soon. I can’t help wondering if there is a parallel universe where Mrs. B. never moves away, and I grow up to become not-a-psychiatrist, licensed and uniformed, and Miss Spillman spends her final days listening to my classical piano recordings. He took the road less traveled, she tells her partner. Like in the poem. Shame on me for thinking he’d give in and end up shrinking heads…. 

I DIDN’T FULLY UNDERSTAND how I’d become a psychiatrist until several years after completing my residency. We’d gathered for a Thanksgiving dinner at my boyhood home. Upon entering, one immediately encountered a cased archway leading to a low-slung sitting room that remained frozen in the final days of the Carter administration: tight plaid upholstery in earth tones, hard-backed copies of American Heritage and Horizon shelved on rosewood. The piano, too, stood precisely where I’d left it decades earlier, a console model, although now it served primarily as an oversized plinth for family portraits and greeting cards. Someone, most likely my aunt, had deposited her coat and purse atop the bench. I doubt anyone had played the instrument since the evening before my final lesson unless one counted contests my preteen nephews had to gauge who could bang its keys the loudest. You’ll find similar relics all across the suburban landscape, untuned testaments to the aspirations of men and women whose parents had escaped Pinsk or Palermo—and later fled integrated blocks in Morrisania or Brownsville. For couples like my parents, what mattered was owning the instrument, not playing it. On the remote chance you wanted to listen to a Grieg concerto, or “Stairway to Heaven,” you turned on the radio. 

In the weeks leading up to the holiday, I’d been contemplating tracking down Mrs. B. As a psychiatrist, I find myself attributing the behavior of others, and my own, to the ordeals of early childhood, and—for whatever inexplicable reasons—the abrupt end to those weekly musical forays loomed large in the rehashing of my personal history. Or maybe my interest was mere self-deception, a twist on Professor Orr’s reading of Frost. If those who chose a less traveled road of their own creation could take credit, why shouldn’t others (like me) who had opted for the opposite fork—at least in hindsight— castigate themselves? Why hadn’t I argued for a new piano teacher rather than accepting Mrs. B’s departure as decisive? Somehow reconnecting with my Swiss piano instructor seemed essential for closure. Assuming she were even still alive. Ruth Spillman had passed away the previous June in her mid-eighties, but I’d only learned of her death that autumn, adding to the urgency of my quest. In my memory, Mrs. B. had been as ancient as music itself, although in hindsight, she’d probably been younger than I am now. 

The challenge was that I didn’t know Mrs. B.’s first name, nor even the precise spelling of her surname, so my only hope was to recruit my parents into my efforts. I did this gingerly— with some trepidation. My parents are not ones to dredge the past, and earlier attempts to track down the previous owners of their home and to locate long-lost relatives of my grandmother had both been met with indifference. Sometimes people drift apart for a reason, my dad had said of the abortive hunt for Grandma’s second cousins. Why spend your time on that? Think of all the people you could be helping instead . . . .So I waited until a post- prandial lull in the conversation, hoping pumpkin pie and apple cider might help them swallow my question. 

“Do you remember Mrs. B.?” I asked. “My piano teacher….” 

My father glanced up blankly from his dessert. “Did you take piano lessons?” 

“With that Swiss woman,” replied my mother. 

“For three years,” I emphasized. “Do you remember her first name?” 

My mother shook her head. “I don’t think I ever knew it….” 

Then she ducked into the kitchen to retrieve fresh coffee for our guests and the conversation drifted back to vacation plans, gardening, whether my aunt might retire. Case closed. Had the meal lasted until the Pilgrims returned to Plymouth Rock, nobody would have inquired why I’d suddenly sought the name of a piano tutor not mentioned for nearly four decades. 

I tried a different tack. “I’m thinking of tracking her down,” I said. “Mrs. B. To ask her why she moved away so abruptly….” My mother had returned with more coffee cups than she could safely carry. She’d taken piano lessons as a child herself, I knew—so maybe she could empathize. We still kept her old metronome and several of her method books. Had she laughed off my questions, I’d have taken her lack of interest in stride; to my surprise, she responded with silence. I could see her trying to draw the attention of my father, who was busy regaling my date with a joke.

“Maybe I can find her without a first name,” I pressed. “You don’t happen to remember where she moved to….” 

“She didn’t move anywhere,” said my mother. 

“Yes, she did,” I insisted.

“No, she didn’t. We just told you that.” 

A hush had descended upon the table, as though my extended family had sensed the relative unimportance of their own conversations; even my dad had resisted another joke. Suddenly, my mother found herself with an audience. “We’re talking about his piano teacher….” 

“I thought she moved away,” I said. 

Now my mother smiled, as though recognizing a dose of unanticipated humor in the episode. “She called us and said you were one of the worst students she’d ever encountered—that you couldn’t hear when you made a mistake—and no amount of practice could fix that.” Even vicariously, after half a lifetime, the critique stung. I had practiced. Religiously. I’d curled my fingers precisely as she’d instructed and always sat up straight. “She said we were doing you a disservice,” Mom added, “by letting you continue. I can’t believe we never told you….” 

“When would it have come up?” I asked. 

Yes, when? Only on the literally thousands of occasions I’d had dinner with my parents between the ages of nine and forty- two. But the dark comedy wasn’t lost on me. If fate had steered me away from Carnegie Hall, it was on account of my own innate dearth of talent—not a-man-with-a-van who’d hauled off Mrs. B.’s piano. For all I knew, if she were still alive, she might be residing at the very same address, even giving lessons on the same baby grand piano. That interested me much less. What was I going to do? Knock on her suburban door and ask: Remember me? Your worst student ever? 

So that was that. I suppose my musical career would have ended anyway, sooner rather than later, but somehow Mrs. B.’s rejection towered over my future choices like a Mount Rushmore of Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms. She had closed the doors of virtuosity, driving me along the well-worn path that led to medicine and then head-shrinking. How could anyone have been so heartless? I asked myself. And what could I possibly do to thank her? I forced a smile, trying to brush off the shock. “Glad we’ve cleared up that mystery.” 

Only there had never been any mystery. Only the echo of doors: closing and opening, opening and closing. Maybe a pair of tin ears had kept me from hearing the din. 

My mother laughed. “We’re just not a musical family,” she said. 

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Jacob M. Appel is a physician, bioethicist, American author, lawyer, and social critic in New York City. He is the author of twenty volumes of fiction and nonfiction, and most recently the novel “Shaving with Occam.” He is also known for his short stories, his work as a playwright, and his writing in the fields of reproductive ethics, organ donation, neuroethics, and euthanasia. Website: www.jacobmappel.com 

Delmarva Review is a nonprofit, independent literary journal that selects the most compelling nonfiction, fiction, and poetry from thousands of unpublished, new submissions during the year. Designed to encourage outstanding writing from authors everywhere. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

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