Shirley

Grandboy Age 12, or In the Time of Peonies   He was calling on his mother’s phone. He wanted to come over. “You know it’s just me,” I said. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll have to get you in the truck,” I said. My husband had taken the car to Pennsylvania. “Yes,” he said. “I know.” He didn’t say what he planned to do. Just play, I guess. Maybe eat my food. Plus he always likes to talk. So down the lane I chugged to fetch him, Buster along, even though it’s shedding season and his fur has been coming off in clumps. We used to worry about him throwing up if we drove him places, but now my husband hauls him along when he goes over to hoe in Boy’s garden. Buster just runs around on the seat and pants like mad and goes on high alert whenever he sees cows. I kept the windows rolled pretty high. I didn’t want him bailing. Now, I hate the truck. I hate it, hate it, hate it. I can hardly get in and out, for one thing. The floorboard is so distant from the ground, I always have to strain for...

A recent morning in April Now for some cup-half-empty cup-half-full thoughts. It was only their fence the cows broke through, upside the hill, not also the fence across the road. So that was nice. They probably had their sights set on the cows downside the hill, thinking to mingle, but the other herd’s farmer keeps up his fences. Besides the mooing and bawling, there’d have been a bigger crowd standing in his creek and dropping in their pies . Ug. More E. coli coursing toward the glacial downstream pool and shady bank we used to call our beach. Also it was just cows, my word, not lady cops stationed in the middle of the road, watching me thrust my phone up to the windshield to record and then nabbing me . Whew. Cops on our road, the kind that pretend they’re checking for drunk drivers but in fact have their eyes out for scared sober persons, could mean those selfsame individuals, hardworking, generous, disinclined to even lie or steal, getting dragged away in handcuffs. Well...

What is wrong with this woman? I’d like to know. Somebody with the gall to tell Terry Gross— in Wednesday’s interview —that she, Amanda Peet, thinks constantly about getting a face lift? That she worries about the sagging? What could be weirder, more boneheaded? Can she even see past her nose? Who does she think she is? Who does she think she’s talking to? I was at a function, she tells Terry. A premiere party. And when I was leaving, an older, quite beautiful woman across the room stood up and yelled “Amanda!” She made a beeline for me and sort of opened her arms and said “I love” — and I thought she was going to say “your performance.” Instead she said “your wrinkles.” No, responds Terry . Not like she’s shocked by that word wrinkles . More like, aghast at Amanda ’s fatuousness. I love that you haven’t had a face lift , says Terry. I love that you’ve kept your face. Terry tells Amanda, A face is such a n important tool . You have such really nuanced facial expressions in...

You do what you can. Some come, and then more come and you get a tad dizzy , not in the falling-down sense, maybe more like foggy and dazed, but it’s okay, it’s okay. Every single bed in the house is taken, and the upstairs loveseat, and the living room sofa, and every night you load the coffeemaker and move it to the windowsill in your bedroom so in the dark of morning the drip drips maybe won’t wake the sofa child and everybody upstairs and you can get a few minutes for your brain. Or, that’s the hope. (Your husband’ll fall straight back to sleep.) (Once, i n the middle of the night, you f ind the sofa child still on the living room carpet, dead to the world, because h ours previous, getting settled, he thought the sofa was too ho t, but i n the mornin g you see he’s crawled up where he belongs and he still has Lulu with him, she must’ve crawled right along up with him, and she’s quietly wagging, not disturbing hi s slumber , just watching you out of her huge moon eyes. So that...

Malika came up to the whiteboard before class, a pair of earrings in her hand, blue, with bitty rhinestones. For me, ooh. “Put one on,” I said, lending her my ear. She fumbled with my hair, tried, tried more. “I can’t,” she said. So I stuck them in my bag and took them home. Where I discovered they weren’t the clasp kind. “I don’t have pierced ears,” I said to Malika, next day. Pierced. Perhaps I wrote it on the board. Every interaction in a class like this—English for immigrants—is a game. You’re endeavoring to communicate without making things complicated. If that isn’t a trick I don’t know what is. Teacher and student, you’re trying to bore down to the word’s core, spark understanding, connect. It’s intimate, intense. “Why?” asked Malika. “Why?” Every female in her culture, she wanted me to know, down to the babies, had earrings. E ar holes . She maybe didn’t say holes. How to respond? Oh, well, I grew up Mennonite. Say that? Say I kind of have a Mennonite predispositi...

It’s Ama. She’s going to be Ama. AH-ma. That’s what she’s decided—Jennifer, our daughter, whose son Jonathan is now a father. Perfect, I think. So now am I GrandAHma ? Wait, Great-grandAHma ? Or just Ma (pronounced Mah )? I’m de finitely not Maw. Now that would be revolting. Or could Solomon, the new baby, just say Grandmommy like all the others when his soft suckling mouth grows brave enough to try the word? Great-grandmommy, I think, would be taking things too far. It sounds overly greatly grand. I’m all thumbs. Mere days after his birth, over at Jonathan and Hannah’s, carrying Solomon across their grassy, bumpy yard and trying not to fall and break him—Jonathan had handed him over when I got out of the car—I realized I might be stabbing his tender fetal-curled back (through his clothes) with my car keys. Another day, Hannah on our sofa, Paulson and Jonathan outside somewhere, and me prowling the house with Solomon, I let his head slightly wobble. Obviously I was f...