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An Authentic Captain Marvel Ring

And Other Stories

Santa Fe Writers Project

An Authentic Captain Marvel Ring:

Perth Amboy, New Jersey, c. 1947

Originally published in Superstition Review

Jagged reddish-orange lightning-shaped scores, a circle with compass arrow and points east west north south within, and in the center of the circle, an oval, an opening invisible unless you held it directly up to your eye, an opening —

Peep inside, that is, press it in a dark room to one eye while the other you keep closed tight, and as soon as you become accustomed to the dark you'll begin to see light swirling within the ring, halos and rings of glittering pieces of light, particles of atoms, of atoms growing smaller and smaller in the depths of the once tiny but now ever-expanding space, a peek into another space, into a seemingly infinite galaxy of galaxies, dancing, spinning, sparkling, exploding now! oh, that flash of fire in the distance! but where? but how? how far away? a fingertip and an infinity!

And what if this could be real? And what if there were stars in all those flashing rings of light, stars with planets and planets with creatures living upon them? what if there were other human beings living there? what if, what if you looked long enough and hard enough, squinted at this peep-hole all night long until you might see into the lake of stars and into the small galaxy with the yellow star and the green-blue planet resembling earth and on down through the blue-white atmosphere to the continent of North America and in the east of that formation to the state of New Jersey and the town that lies at the confluence of waters, where the river meets the kill to form the bay, and a boy lies in the dark, his heart beating with excitement, with the expectation of worlds to come while he squints into the peep-hole of a ring?

O Body Swayed

Originally published in New Letters

The airplane touched down so lightly that Jane, moving in and out of sleep, didn't even know she was home, at least not until she heard the roar of the engines in braking mode. She had been dreaming, yes, and performing beautifully in this dream, making up in her sleeping mind for her current lack of mobility. Old bones. Her body ached, where she still had feeling in her hips and legs. Thank God she was coming home to fix things. One way or another.

"Miss Harrison?"

At the voice of the flight attendant she immediately banished the other thought with which she awoke — remembering thinking flying above the ocean and wouldn't it be nice to plunge into the sea and end it all.

The flight attendant spoke to her from the aisle, the same woman who had so graciously helped her survive a humiliating experience some hours before.

"We'll have a chair for you in just a moment."

Remembering their little dance together in the lavatory, Jane, as she always did, took the offensive.

"Thank you, Marion," she said.

The flight attendant responded with a smile. "You remember my name."

"I'm not losing my mind," Jane said. "I just can't use my legs very well."

"I hope your operation goes well, Miss Harrison," the flight attendant said.

"Thank you," Jane said, sorry that she had revealed anything to the girl. But then there she had been, needing to pee. The attendant had helped Jane into the tiny cubicle, and in exchange Jane had made small talk, something she usually despised. "It's been eighteen months since I've been like this. If the operation doesn't help I might as well just die. Or perhaps I should just die and skip the operation." Before she left London she had said the same thing over the telephone to Stephen and he had gotten quite upset. To get his sympathy — the poor boy whom she had deprived, as he often told her, of a normal childhood — she would have to be dying every day.

"The chair will be along just as soon as we open the door," the attendant said.

And so it was.

"How are you today, ma'm?" said the black man pushing the chair toward her.

Jane went completely still as the man with his rough dark hands guided her into the chair. She stared fiercely forward, studying the gray walls of the ramp as he rolled her toward the terminal.

"Sorry you're not feeling well, ma'am," the man said. "It's a tiring trip...."

"I'm not at all tired," Jane said. "It's just that my legs don't work."

"Yes, ma'am," he said.

Had she frightened him? Annoyed him? She didn't care. She didn't care about anything. Well, that's what she told herself. But here she was, surveying the crowd waiting on the balcony as the man pushed her into the terminal. Her audience! Someone waved — to her? But not Stephen, where was Stephen? She craned her neck, scanning the faces behind the glass.

He was waiting for her when she rolled through Customs.

"Mother," he said.

"You hirsute creature." She held out a hand.

"It's nice to see you, too," he said. Stephen handed some dollar bills to the man who had been pushing Jane's chair.

"Do you have much baggage, Mother?" he asked Jane.

"I am baggage," she said.

"Mother, please," Stephen said.

"So you think you know now how I feel?"

"Please," he said again.

But right there in the middle of the terminal, with throngs of people moving back and forth, she shook her head and waved her arms as though she were back on stage.

"I used to soar across the floor, I used to fly like a crane and bend like the rushes in a fierce wind." She pounded the flat of her hand against the arm rest, and her hand stung, as though from the cuts of little knives. "I was a beautiful mover, Stephen. And now I'm a prisoner in my own body."

"Mother, I'm sorry...." He looked around, as though worried that people might be staring.

"Oh, never mind...." And what if they were staring? They couldn't have recognized her. Even at the height of her career, she had been an ensemble dancer. It was Martha they knew, it had been all Martha, and it still was, long after she was gone. Jane inhaled deeply and tried to calm herself. Do I want to be a ghost that everyone recognizes?

"Fina is sorry that she couldn't be here," Stephen said.

"Fina? I'm still trying to remember the names of your other wives." Jane focused all of her strength on her right leg. Move! The leg twitched.

Still, she felt like baggage, Stephen piling her into the car along with the suitcases — leaving the airport — all this passing so quickly that Jane thought she suddenly might be regaining her patience.

But a traffic jam just before the tunnel into the city annoyed her terribly. The cars, the white smoke of their exhausts, the black film passed by the trucks and buses, too much too thick too noisy.

"What an awful mess," she said, leaning forward from the back seat. "They could do something about this if they wanted to."

"Oh, Mother," Stephen said, his eye on the lake of vehicles in which they sat in the middle.

"They could," she said. Jane sighed, sinking back into her seat, exhausted. Clean it up," she said. "Bloody choreograph it better. They do in London."

"Mother," Stephen said, "Why do you speak like that?"

"Because it's the truth. I've always striven for the truth in my art and in my life. And now that I have no way to make art anymore, I just have my life."

"My stupid immobile life," she added. "My wasted life."

"Well," Stephen said, "that's not how everyone sees it."

"Is that so?"

"There's someone named Amy Kunstler. She's called and left two messages for you about setting up an interview."

"I don't want to see her," Jane said. "She phoned me up just before I left London. In a moment of weakness, I gave her your number and I'm sorry about that. I don't want to talk to anyone."

The traffic inched forward into the tunnel. Jane shut her eyes and hummed to herself the music from "True Blue." When in doubt, always think of your own work. Something Martha once told her. She didn't know if it was right or not, but it kept her busy during the remainder of the uncomfortable ride.

The apartment building — their destination — stood tall and antique at the corner of a street in the eighties and Central Park West. A doorman with an insidious smile ushered them into a grand lobby, and toward a gold elevator that carried them up to one of the highest floors — the apartment dear old Milly Pearson had bestowed upon her for as long as she would need it. Stephen fumbled with the keys.

"Hurry," Jane said. "I've got to tinkle."

He swung the door open and they were met by a curtain of slightly stale sweetened air.

"Do you need help?" Stephen looked down at her.

Jane looked up from her chair.

"I'm the mother, you're the child. I can do quite well for myself, thank you."

"Just asking," Stephen said.

A new chair always made for problems and it was with some difficulty that she wheeled herself toward a door halfway down the hall.

(Long hall, leading to a room filled with light, she could see as she swung the bathroom door open and wheeled in — thinking that this might not be such a bad place in which to convalesce after the operation.) But what was that odor? A man had been here long ago, and he had been a dapper fellow, used rum-based aftershave and smoked cigars. Milly Pearson had never married, though Jane had always been certain that she must have wanted to, yet what about that friend of hers, that dark-haired girl from Smith — what was her name? gone now, lost in the dust-bin of the past.

So who was the man? Milly's father, perhaps? Unless Milly was the sort of rich bohemian at the center of whose life, turned inside out, there remained a rather conventional core. Never thought that about her, though. And then sitting there in her chair, trying desperately to raise the courage to begin her ablutions, Jane remembered with a chill in her chest and arms. Milly's father had hanged himself!

"Mother?"

"Don't you dare come in. I'm still trying to figure this out."

Jane shook off the odd fear that came with the thought of the suicide. Dr. Gronski had instructed her, yes, practically scolded her. No catastrophic thinking. If the thought comes, dismiss it. Begone! she said in the otherwise quiet of her mind. I've got enough to do right now just to pass some water. (Fear death by — begone!)

In the airplane, the flight attendant had risen above and beyond the call of duty by assisting her in the small cabinet thirty-thousand feet above the ground. The two of them in that small space, it was like a strange little dance. But then she saw everything that way, didn't she? Here, by herself, twelve floors up, another dance. This one a solo, unless she asked Stephen, which she was not going to do.

But a moment later, trying, without success, to hoist herself out of the chair, she called him.

"Yes, Mother?"

"Come in here, please."

And for the next five minutes they engaged in something she never imagined would occur in her life.

As he wheeled her back out into the hall, she said, "I'm exhausted. Christ knows what I'm going to feel like after the operation. Perhaps I should just give it up and die."

"Oh, Mother, please."

Stephen always pretended that nothing upset him. When small, he never could fool her. Or his father. (His father — fear death by suppression. You're going to tour? Good — I'll sulk for a while and then have an affair and blame it on you. Jane wondered if Stephen's first two marriages were any better than that. Even now as a grown man he was still his father's boy, so she couldn't imagine that they had been. Maybe his third? To Mina. What's in a name?)

"A nice view," he said, rolling her up to the window and looking down into the park.

"Of places I'll never go anymore," Jane said.

"Mother, don't be so pessimistic. This operation is going to give you back your legs."

"What use are they to me now, anyway? I'm too damned old to dance and have been for a decade. I don't know why I should have my hips replaced. I'm sorry now that I agreed to all this. Damned sorry."

Stephen turned away from the window and looked at her.

"You used to scold the hell out of me when I was kid. Now it's my turn to scold you. I want you to stop complaining about everything. The operation is going to go well. I've been doing some checking up. This doctor is the best guy —"

"Best guy, best guy. Your father was the best guy," Jane said. "And he turned into a fool. Such a fool! He had me, what did he need of other women, he himself told me that he only did it out of revenge, because of all my touring."

"I missed you, too, when you were on the road, Mother."

"But you didn't decide to find another mother, did you?"

Before Stephen could respond, if he could respond, the telephone began to ring and he went off in search of the receiver. In a moment, he called to her from the bedroom.

Jane sighed and wheeled herself along the hall.

"Amy Kunstler," Stephen said.

"I told you I don't want —"

Stephen forced the receiver into her hand.

Jane stared at the instrument for a moment and then held it to her ear.

"Miss Harrison?"

The voice at the other end of the line sounded much younger than it had when Jane had taken the call in London.

Jane said, "I told you that I am not interested in —"

"Mother!"

"Stay out of this, Stephen. Young lady?"

"Yes, Miss Harrison, but I wanted to —"

"I don't care what you want. I don't give interviews. I never have and I never will. Goodbye."

"Mother!"

"I will not," Jane said as she pounded the heel of her hand against the armrest of the chair, "I will not demean what we had by trivial interviews in the American press."

Stephen's face squinched up in exasperation.

"She's not the 'American press', for Christ's sake. She writes for Dance Magazine, Mother. She is a very good writer and she is interested in your work. She knows just about every solo piece you ever choreographed and performed."

"No," Jane said, feeling suddenly as though the walls of the apartment, the building, the sky itself were caving in upon her.

And then came a call from the doorman.

"Yes," Stephen said, "we're expecting her."

"I told you —"

"Mother, it's Milagros, the woman I've hired to take care of you."

"Oh, yes, to help me pee," Jane said. "You did a fine job just now. Why don't you stay?"

"I'm glad to see you're not losing your sense of humor. But I'll leave that particular chore now to this woman. She'll help you bathe and make your meals."

"What does she cook? 'Milagros?' Is that a rice and beans sort of name?"

"For Christ's sake, Mother, will you stop this? If it's up to me right now, you can just damned well starve to death."

"No, I won't starve. I'll eat my heart out first. Thinking about all that I've done and all that I can't do now. It's not you, dear boy, that I'm fighting. It's gravity. And old age. Perhaps I should just give in to it and sink into the ground."

"Mother...."

"You sound just the way you did when you were a little boy. 'Mother....' I'd be going off to rehearsal or on a tour, and you'd speak to me in that little voice. A little squeal of a voice. Begging me to stay. But I went. And did it deform your life irreparably? Did it do you terrible psychological damage?"

"No, Mother, I really don't think so. You were consistently absent. If you had deviated from that, I might really have been damaged."

Before Jane could respond, there was a knock at the apartment door. Stephen went to answer and admitted a big dark-faced woman in a white uniform about whom swirled a cloud of spicy odors.

"Milagros!" Jane nearly hoisted herself out of her chair in mock enthusiasm. "Well, don't expect to work any of your miracles on me!"

The operation was scheduled for the following week. Her idea had been to give herself plenty of time to settle in before going to the hospital. She would visit museums, go to galleries, perhaps even see a dance performance or two. But she had lost all heart for it now, stuck in this chair, unable even to pee by herself let alone shower or make an outing of an afternoon. Better that her airplane had dived into the dark ocean.

"No, thank you," she said to Milagros when the woman asked her if she wanted to get out and get some air. "I just want to sit here and sulk."

Which she did, looking out the window at the building across the street, a modern design with sloping glass at the penthouse level and even and odd casements all the way down to the floor above the street. At the corner, the park's green bled out of her sight. The touch of green reminded her of London, but the geometry of the streets called back every year she had spent here in the city ever since arriving as an eighteen-year-old dancer from Sacramento, determined to turn her body into art.

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Excerpted from An Authentic Captain Marvel Ring by Alan Cheuse. Copyright © 2013 Alan Cheuse. Excerpted by permission of Santa Fe Writers Project.
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