Listen Here Page 4

  “You know how these things can happen.”

  “Oh, I do,” he said, enjoying it all immensely.

  The form he brought out was no different from the others. The look he gave my mama and my aunt was pure righteous justification. “What'd you expect?” he seemed to be saying. His face was set and almost gentle, but his eyes laughed at them. My aunt came close to swinging her purse at his head, but Mama caught her arm. That time she took the certificate copy with her.

  “Might as well have something for my two dollars,” she said. At seventeen, she was a lot older than she had been at sixteen. The next year she went alone, and the year after. That same year she met Lyle Parsons and started thinking more about marrying him than dragging down to the courthouse again. Uncle Earle teased her that if she lived with Lyle for seven years, she could get the same result without paying a courthouse lawyer. “The law never done us no good. Might as well get on without it.”

  …

  Mama was working grill at the White Horse Cafe the day the radio announced that the fire downtown had gone out of control, burning the courthouse and the hall of records to the ground. It was midway through the noon rush. Mama was holding a pot of coffee in one hand and two cups in the other. She put the cups down and passed the pot to her friend Mab.

  “I'm going home.”

  “You what?”

  “I've got to go home.”

  “Where's she going?”

  “Trouble at home.”

  The cardboard box of wrinkled and stained papers was tucked under the sheets in the bottom of Aunt Alma's chifforobe. Mama pulled out the ones she wanted, took them into the kitchen, and dropped them in the sink without bothering to unfold them. She'd just lit a kitchen match when the phone rang.

  “You heard, I suppose.” It was Aunt Ruth. “Mab said you took off like someone set a fire under you.”

  “Not me,” Mama replied. “The only fire I got going here is the one burning up all these useless papers.”

  Aunt Ruth's laughter spilled out of the phone and all over the kitchen.

  “Girl, there an't a woman in town going to believe you didn't set that fire yourself. Half the county's gonna tell the other how you burned down that courthouse.”

  “Let them talk,” Mama said, and blew at the sparks flying up. “Talk won't send me to jail. The sheriff and half his deputies know I was at work all morning, ’cause I served them their coffee. I can't get into any trouble just ’cause I'm glad the goddam courthouse burned down.”

  She blew at the sparks again, whistling into the phone, and then laughed out loud. Halfway across town, Aunt Ruth balanced the phone against her neck, squeezed Granny's shoulder, and laughed with her. Over at the mill, Aunt Alma looked out a window at the smoke billowing up downtown and had to cover her mouth to keep from giggling like a girl. In the outer yard back of the furnace works, Uncle Earle and Glen Waddell were moving iron and listening to the radio. Both of them grinned and looked up at each other at the same moment, then burst out laughing. It was almost as if everyone could hear each other, all over Greenville, laughing as the courthouse burned to the ground.

  LISA ALTHER

  (July 23, 1944–)

  Novelist Lisa (pronounced “LIE-za”) Reed Alther was born in Kingsport, Tennessee, and spent her childhood there. She left the region to attend Wellesley College, graduating in 1966 with a B.A. That same year, she married Richard Alther, a painter; the couple had a daughter, Sara, and later divorced. Alther has lived most of her adult life in New England; she presently divides her time between Hinesburg, Vermont, and Jonesborough, Tennessee. “I get labeled a Southern writer, woman's writer, feminist, gay, Appalachian, sometimes a New England writer,” Alther says. “I'm happy to be included in any of those groups. I don't know if being in one excludes you from the others or not.”

  Alther worked briefly in New York at Atheneum Publishers before moving to Vermont where she and her husband “did the whole back-to-the-land thing. We had huge vegetable gardens, and we froze and dried and canned our own food…. I had a lot of friends in communes…. I remember fretting because everybody else was doing drugs and having sex and all I was doing was canning and freezing.”

  Alther's early attempts at fiction resulted in a stack of 250 rejection slips. “I started thinking I needed a new career, but I could tell I was getting better at it as a craft. Also I used writing to explore what was going on around me, in the world and in my life, that I couldn't understand.”

  Characterizing herself as a slow writer, Alther labors over four or five drafts before she feels her work is ready for publication. It took six years for her to write her first novel, Kinflicks. The book became a best-seller. Set in an East Tennessee town some say is modeled on Kingsport, Kinflicks chronicles the misadventures of Ginny Babcock.

  “Everybody thought Ginny Babcock was me,” says Alther. “When they finally met me, they'd say, ‘You're not Ginny. You're really boring.’ I created her [Ginny] as dumb enough to participate in all those fads of the 60s and 70s. If I'd been doing all that stuff, I wouldn't have had time to write five novels.”

  Alther's blunt examination of the spectrum of human sexuality discomforts some of her critics. “It seems to me that the whole subject of sexuality in our culture is pretty fraught,” says Alther. “You're supposed to choose a category and stay in it. The main character [in Kinflicks] has a lesbian episode, but it was treated as humor. With subsequent books, I've tried to take the issue deeper.”

  Author Marilyn French says Alther “writes with a profound acceptance of human variety and vagary that is rare in this mean age.” A reviewer in Publisher's Weekly notes, “Alther is a wry satirist. She can be, and almost always is, wildly, ribaldly funny…. And with what a cool, clear eye she observes us all.”

  Alther's novel Five Minutes in Heaven follows Jude, a motherless girl, in a haunting search for love that takes her from Tennessee to Paris. In this scene, Jude struggles to accept changes in her relationship with Molly, her childhood soul mate.

  OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE

  PRIMARY

  Novels: Five Minutes in Heaven (1995), Bedrock (1990), Other Women (1984), Original Sins (1981), Kinflicks (1975). Autobiographical Essay: “Border States,” in Bloodroot (1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 22–30.

  SECONDARY

  Contemporary Authors, Vol. 65–68, 20. Joyce Dyer, “Lisa Alther,” in Bloodroot, 21. Carol E.W. Edwards, “Interview with Lisa Alther,” Turnstile 4:1 (1993), 34–50. Mary Anne Ferguson, “Lisa Alther,” Contemporary Writers of the South (1993), 22–31. Don Williams, “Writing on a Continuum” [Interview], Knoxville News-Sentinel (16 June 1995), B1–B2.

  FIVE MINUTES IN HEAVEN (1995)

  from Chapter 7

  “So if you keep your knees together tight, girls, and smile up at your date while you swing your legs under the dashboard, you can get into any sports car, no matter how small, without displaying all your worldly treasures.” Miss Melrose was demonstrating her technique in her desk chair as she talked. The Charm Class was assiduously copying her movements, even though none of the boys they knew could drive.

  As Jude secured her worldly treasures beneath her imaginary dashboard, she noticed that Molly had painted her fingernails pink. Now that Jude was in junior high, she, too, shaved her armpits as well as her legs. And she put on lipstick, eyeliner, and mascara every morning. Thanks to Miss Melrose, she knew never to wear white shoes before Easter or after Labor Day and not to make chicken salad with dark meat. But Molly was always one step ahead.

  Except in the classroom. Despite her efforts to score poorly on the placement exams, Jude had been assigned to a special seminar, along with the nerds who played slide-rule games in the lunchroom while all the cool kids did the Dirty Shag in the gymnasium to raise money for cerebral palsy. Jude had also been elected seventh-grade representative to the student council, which was dominated by classmates who were Episcopalian and Presbyterian and who lived in the big, fancy houses of the Yankee mill executives al
ong Poplar Bluff.

  But Molly never even congratulated her on her student council victory. And if Jude tried to explain some of the ideas she was learning about in the seminar, Molly would just shrug and say, “Afraid you've lost me again, brainchild.”

  Some afternoons after school now, instead of racing Flame through the Wildwoods, Jude sat with Sandy in his upstairs bedroom discussing the big bang theory and natural selection and relativity. Out the window, they watched Noreen coaching Molly in Noreen's backyard for the upcoming cheerleader tryouts. Sometimes their lyrics reached Jude and Sandy through the open windows:

  “Well, down my leg and up my spine!

  We've got a team that's mighty fine!”

  She and Sandy would pause in their discussion of Hegel's dialectic to giggle. Then Jude would frown at herself, feeling disloyal.

  As they strolled home from Charm Class through the twilight, allowing their kilted hips to sway with every step, Jude said, “My dad said he'd teach us to drive the jeep down that hill behind the cemetery on Saturday afternoon.”

  “Oh, Jude, I'm afraid I can't.”

  “But it would be really neat to be able to drive, wouldn't it?”

  “I'm afraid I'm tied up on Saturday afternoon.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Jude, I'm not your slave. You don't need to know my every move.”

  “Sorry.”

  They walked in silence past yards full of tulips. Ever since Jude had realized that her experience on the raft with Molly had been just a dream, she hadn't known how to behave with her. It seemed impossible to recapture the unselfconscious accord of their childhood, but no guidelines for their distressing new separateness had emerged. So they often experienced awkward silences or irritated outbursts, followed by frantic attempts to backpedal to the harmony they used to take so effortlessly for granted.

  “I like the white tulips best, don't you?” Molly finally said.

  “Me, too,” said Jude, accepting the apology.

  “Actually, I'm going to the lake with Ace Saturday afternoon. To ride in his father's motorboat.” She was trying to sound casual.

  Jude glanced at her. Molly and Ace often danced together at the noontime sock hops. And although Molly never admitted it, Jude suspected that they talked on the phone a lot at night. Occasionally, the three of them sat together on the bleachers at lunch to watch intramural basketball. Ace and Molly weren't going steady, and they never went out on dates, but Jude could tell that Molly was sometimes preoccupied with him.

  “But why Ace?” she finally asked, genuinely curious. “I just don't get it. Have you forgotten how mean he was to us?”

  “There's a really sweet side to him that you've never seen, Jude. He may act tough, but inside he's just a sad, scared little boy.” She was smiling fondly, as though describing the antics of her dog.

  “Please spare me the details.”

  “Besides, there are reasons why he was so mean.”

  “Such as?”

  “His father isn't a nice man.”

  “His father is the best lawyer in town. My dad says he was a big hero in the war.”

  “I can't say any more.”

  Jude studied her from the corner of her eye. “We've never had secrets, Molly.” They were passing more tulips. Jude decided she hated them, especially the white ones.

  “I promised Ace.”

  “So Ace is more important to you now than I am?”

  “No, of course not, Jude. But he needs me. I think I can help him.”

  Reaching the crack in the sidewalk marking the boundary between their yards, they turned to face each other. Molly's shirt collar was peeping out from beneath her sweater. On it, Jude spotted a tiny dagger made from a straight pin, a piece of red plastic cord, and some multicolored beads the size of BBs. Noreen had started this fad, which had swept the halls of the junior high school. She and the other cheerleaders made sets consisting of a miniature dagger and sword. The boys bought them, and the cheerleaders donated the money to muscular dystrophy. The boys wore them crossed on their collars until they wanted to go steady, at which point they gave their girlfriends their daggers.

  “What's that?” asked Jude, pointing at Molly's dagger as though at a scorpion.

  Molly started, then looked quickly away. “Ace asked me to wear it today.”

  Jude said nothing for a long time. She was losing this battle, but she was damned if she'd make it easy for either of them. “What about me?”

  “But Jude, you're a girl,” said Molly gently. “You're my best friend, but Ace is my boyfriend. Why don't you get a boyfriend, too? Then we can double-date to the movies. What about Jerry Crawford? Ace says he really likes you.”

  “What about our cabin?” Jude asked doggedly. She didn't want Jerry Crawford. She wanted Molly.

  “What cabin?”

  “The cabin we were going to build on the ridge above the cave. With the paddock for Flame and Pal.”

  “But we were just kids then, Jude. It was like playing house.” She was gazing at Jude with loving concern.

  Jude felt the bottom drop out of her stomach, like a trapdoor to hell. She had known she was losing, but she hadn't realized that she'd already lost.

  MAGGIE ANDERSON

  (September 23, 1948–)

  Maggie Anderson inherited Appalachian connections from both sides of her family. Her mother's family was from Jefferson, Pennsylvania, on the West Virginia border near Morgantown; her father's family was from Preston County, West Virginia. The only child of teachers, Anderson grew up around aunts and uncles who worked in mines, mills, and on the railroad.

  She was born in New York City. Her mother died when she was nine, and when she was thirteen, she and her father moved back to West Virginia. Her West Virginia connections have been the subject of her creative work as a poet, a teacher, and an editor. As she explains, “The hills are in everything I write.”

  She has four books of poetry, including her most recent, Windfall: New and Selected Poems. She is also the editor of Hill Daughter (New and Selected Poems) by West Virginia's former Poet Laureate Louise McNeill (1911–1993). Anderson's poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Northwest Review, Poetry East, and other magazines.

  Her work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She has been a Resident Fellow at the MacDowell Colony. For a decade (1978–1988), she worked with the Artists-in-the-School-and-Communities Program in West Virginia and has served as Poet-in-Residence in Marshall, Mercer, and Jackson counties. She has also taught poetry writing in rehabilitation centers, senior centers, and prisons, as well as at Hamilton College, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Oregon.

  Director of the Wick Poetry Program, she is a professor of English at Kent State University, where she has been honored with a Distinguished Teacher Award. Through Kent State University Press, she edits a chapbook poetry series and a first-book series. She is also the co-editor of A Gathering of Poets (1992), a collection of poems commemorating the shootings of students at Kent State and Jackson State in May 1970. She has co-edited an anthology of poems about the school experience, Learning by Heart: Contemporary American Poetry about School (1999).

  Poet George Ella Lyon observes that “Anderson's work often walks the line between poetry and prose, but it is generally a taut line, more like a highwire than a fence, and there is energy in the balance.” Anderson explains that her writing process is in a constant state of flux: “Just as I learn one way of writing, it changes, or I change, and everything must be relearned or learned fresh again…. I like to think of my work as a garden with some things newly sown, some germinating, some which need to be weeded or pruned, and some ready to harvest.”

  OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE

  PRIMARY

  Poetry: Windfall: New and Selected Poems (2000), A Space Filled with Moving (1992), Cold Comfort (1986), Years That Answer (1980). Autobiographical essay: “The Mountains Da
rk and Close Around Me,” in Bloodroot (1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 32–39. “Comments,” in Her Words (2002), ed. Felicia Mitchell, 10–16.

  SECONDARY

  George Brosi, “New Appalachian Books,” Appalachian Heritage 15:3 (summer 1987), 91. Catherine Daly, review of Windfall, Valparaiso Poetry Review (30 September 2002), http://www.valpo.edu/english/vpr/dalyreviewanderson.html. Joyce Dyer, “Maggie Anderson,” in Bloodroot, 31. Ellesa Clay High, “Maggie Anderson: Two Languages,” in Her Words (2002), ed. Felicia Mitchell, 3–9. Jane Wilson Joyce, review of Cold Comfort, Appalachian Heritage 15:1 (winter 1987), 63–67. Gerry LaFemina, review of Windfall, Poetry International 5 (2001), 184–88. George Ella Lyon, review of Years That Answer, Appalachian Journal 8:3 (spring 1981), 217–20. Sandra Meek, “Poetry from the Pitt Poetry Series: Connie Voisine, Daisy Fried, Maggie Anderson, and Robin Becker,” Arts & Letters: Journal of Contemporary Culture 5 (spring 2001), 205–15. Edwina Pendarvis, review of Windfall, Journal of Appalachian Studies 17:1 (spring 2001), 153–54.

  ONTOLOGICAL

  from Windfall: New and Selected Poems (2000)

  This is going to cost you.

  If you really want to hear a

  country fiddle, you have to listen

  hard, high up in its twang and needle.

  You cant be running off like this,

  all knotted up with yearning,

  following some train whistle,

  can't hang onto anything that way.

  When you're looking for what's lost

  everything's a sign,