[Forthcoming in Cimarron Review #173; short excerpt below]

My new father Steve said he would be waiting there for us at six o’clock, but it was almost eight. It was as dark as eight, and under the eaves of our new home my mother and I sat on our luggage, because it was raining and there was nowhere dry to sit. My mother saw me shiver and she squeezed my fingers and said You’re going to love him as much as I do, and I wondered about that: about how much that was.

This was a time when everything new to me was older. My new father was older than my old father. The new town was an old Connecticut paper town with that evacuated look to it, half-cemetery. And my new home was a bungalow with faded Sears-brown paint situated at the end of a cul-de-sac, not substantially different from the one-room efficiency where we had been living since the divorce. The flagstone walkway leading to the front door had fragments missing, leaving behind wide troughs in which brown water collected, too big to cross in one stride. Holes older than me.

I had never met Steve or seen where he lived, probably because my mom believed that the negotiations of post-marital courtship, the unromantic complexity of adult love, was something I should be shielded from. For the whole span of their acquaintance up until their abrupt engagement, all I knew about Steve was what I’d gleaned from a photo of him a New Year’s Eve party, where even in his rented tux you could see he was a big bruiser of a guy, one who wore a cross on a gold chain with links wide enough to thread a shoelace through. My mother and I were of solidly Jewish stock, but the religion didn’t matter to my mother; what mattered was that Steve was strong. Strength, it seemed, was his strong suit. Stronger than my other father, my mom assured me. That was important for my mother, for since the afternoon one month ago when my father had explained to us in a voice full of mucus that he had been seeing a woman for two years—no, okay, paying a woman for two years—it was my father’s weakness she blamed. He was powerless to resist, she had said.

Resist what, I had asked. Resist himself, she said.

At eight-fifteen, Steve’s muddy Toyota rolled into the gravel driveway of my new home. The headlights made golden shapes in the fog. As he climbed out of the car, into the darkness of eight-fifteen, he seemed bigger than he did in his photo. He had a pink face and long sideburns, and the way he swung his arms as he walked was gravity-enriched, as if he were carrying buckets of water. With the engine still running, he jaunted over to my mother, put his arms around her waist and swayed with her. Her body surrendered the stress of the last few hours, of her last marriage and her whole life and probably the life before that, and she turned her head and flashed me an encouraged smile before Steve surprised her with a kiss. There was my introduction to their adult love, and so much for that. By the time they finished it was colder out.

“Hon, I’m late and I’m sorry. I was out picking this one up from an audition.” Steve gestured at his car, which was still idling with its headlights on. He let go of my mom but kept his thick arm around her, and turned his attention to me.

“How we doing over there, big guy?” His voice was loud and chummy.

I smiled with my mouth, and he leaned over and shook my hand. In the sweat-cloud of his breath I smelled beer and something pickled.

“What’s your name?”

“Joe,” I said, and I wondered how much, or if, my mother had mentioned me.

“Joseph, you look like a real smart guy,” said Steve.

I shook my head. “It’s just Joe. My full name is Joe.”

His smile dimmed. “Joe Blow. You look like a smart guy. A tall guy.”

We were still standing in the beams of the car’s headlights, which lit up the streams of car exhaust that hung around our legs. There was someone else in the car. It was Lorraine.

Steve jogged back to the car and opened the passenger’s side door, uttered a few sentences under the chug of the idling engine. I squinted to see her face but couldn’t. When she finally got out of the car, she did so in a hurry, re-cinching her dark gray trench coat and throwing a wine-colored scarf over her shoulder, then kicking the car door shut. Steve opened the door again and cut the engine.

She wore sunglasses, and I couldn’t tell if she looked at me as she walked by, or if she looked at my mother, whose arms were outspread in greeting. But she passed by without a word, walked up the path to the house and let herself in, leaving the door open behind her. Steve’s eyes tracked her, and after she was out of sight, he looked at me and my mother with half a grimace. My mother asked him, “How did it go?”

“Christ. Another lousy commercial audition and she acts like she’s going out for Shakespeare. Those microwave potatoes, those… Instabakes, that’s it. We drove out forty minutes to have her to say ‘Mom, we forgot the potatoes!’ Like she’d ever touch a baked potato anyway. So she says the line and they tell us to move along. Well, what does she expect? Now she’s all pissed.” Steve scratched his head, eased back into his grinning swagger. “She doesn’t know where to look. No matter what she’s supposed to be doing, she looks straight at the camera. What I keep telling her is she needs to focus on the situation, you know, do some acting, and stop playing goddamn Miss Hollywood all the time.”

***

In the front yard there was one cherry tree and no other trees and no grass. The tree looked lonely and sick. On one side it was stricken with a flaky white fungus, fatal to be sure. Steve said the tree—the fruit-bearing idea of it—raised the property value, and to discourage crows he hung strands of tinsel in the bare limbs, tinsel which in some places clumped and formed nests, hives, tumors, and elsewhere it hung down like beards.

This is the first picture I took when I moved in. Terribly lit. The sky is overbright, it presses into the tree limbs and the roof of the house, makes them soft-edged and bled out. Steve used to call me “Spider”—with your skinny spider legs, he explained, as if I didn’t already get it. And so “Spider” is what this photo is called.

***

I took the next picture when Lorraine wasn’t around. It’s black-and-white, like all my pictures. It’s a wide shot of our attic room, me and Lorraine’s, on the night I moved in. Seven paces long, seven across. In the corner by the only window is my bed, which I fit into like a finger in a matchbox. Two Japanese rice paper screens surround my bed to protect Lorraine’s privacy, though they’re nearly transparent anyway. And then there’s Lorraine’s unmade bed, alongside the desk we shared. Lorraine was not happy about sharing; she needed the desk to store her makeup, her towers of Victoria’s Secrets and Us Weeklys, which were jealously dog-eared and catalogued. And there’s the giant cosmetics mirror, with tiny round lights in the frames and a concave side to emphasize shortcomings.

I sat on my bed unpacking my things on the first afternoon, and Lorraine was in her part of the room, and from behind the screen I could see her silhouette, a fuzzy shadow on the rice paper by the yellow light of her desk lamp. I unpacked and folded my clothes, and when I finished I didn’t know whether to open the screen and introduce myself to Lorraine, or whether to warn her before I opened it up, or ask her how her audition went, and I was about to do one of these things when she said, in a voice that wanted no response: “Joe, excuse me. I can hear you breathing from over here. Can you please stop panting?”

Sorry, Lorraine.

I concentrated on nothing more than the air entering and leaving my lungs until my mother called us down for dinner.

[End of excerpt. Read the full story in Cimarron Review #173, Fall 2010.]