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Indiana University Press - Andrea Lewis

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80 pages

English

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How are our lives shaped by the difficult choices of our parents and even grandparents? How will our own choices direct the future for our children? Following generations of one family across nearly a century, each of Andrea Lewis's intertwined, engaging short stories evokes an intense sense of place and time, from New Orleans in 1895 to Grand Isle, Louisiana, during the hurricane of 1901 and on to London during the Olympic Games of 1948. The people in these ten vivid tales face tragedy and real-world catastrophic events—war, hurricanes, the Great Depression, racial tension—in their pursuit of love, family, and belonging. Each character struggles to discover and preserve his or her identity and dreams while grappling with the expectations of family and culture and trying to cope with loss. Some succeed, some compromise, and some fail, but all have a traceable impact on a story to come.

1. Tierra Blanca
2. Rancho Cielito
3. Queen Juliette
4. Straight Next Time
5. What My Last Man Did
6. Tchoupitoulas
7. Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me
8. The Empire Pool
9. Castle Bravo
10. Family Cucurbita

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Literary

Literature

Fiction

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Publié par	Indiana University Press
Date de parution	13 mars 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780253026767
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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what my last man did
The Blue Light Books Prize was founded by Indiana Review and Indiana University Press in 2015. This annual prize is awarded to an outstanding short story collection or poetry collection on alternating years.
what my last man did
A NDREA L EWIS
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by Andrea Lewis
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-02670-5 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-02676-7 (ebook)
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for Deb
contents
1
Tierra Blanca
2
Rancho Cielito
3
Queen Juliette
4
Straight Next Time
5
What My Last Man Did
6
Tchoupitoulas
7
Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me
8
The Empire Pool
9
Castle Bravo
10
Family Cucurbita
Credits
what my last man did
1
Tierra Blanca
I had what I wanted. I was alone with Charles. He was driving and I was so nervous I was tearing little pieces off the edges of his road map.
The Spanish called it Tierra Blanca, he said. We were on New Mexico Highway 85, headed northwest out of Las Cruces. But only one stratum is white.
Charles was a chemist. So was I, but he was the head of New Mexico State s chemistry department and I was a TA in freshman labs. Besides chemistry, he loved rare cactus, meteorology, and geology, including every rock he ever saw. There s a fabulous collapse caldera up there, miles wide, filled with all kinds of pyroclastics.
I envied him these passions. If you had passions, you were living. Without them, you were watching-the way I was watching desert sand and half-dead creosote go by and wishing I d stop craving attention from Charles.
I had met him three months before, when I interviewed for my job, buzzed on truck stop coffee, glazed doughnuts, and No-D z. I hadn t slept in two days, ever since I saw the job listing on a bulletin board at Rice. I called for the interview, packed my station wagon, went to Galveston and said goodbye to my mother and my sister Iris, both of whom pleaded with me not to leave, and drove nonstop from Galveston to Las Cruces. I changed clothes in a Texaco bathroom and went straight to Carmony Hall.
The door labeled Dr. Charles Lancaster was guarded by a secretary with huge tortoiseshell glasses frames and white correction fluid smudged on her cheek. Her nameplate said Dorothy. I remembered her from my phone call.
She dragged her gaze up from the papers on her desk. Name?
Hannah Delgado. I held out the single sheet of 28-lb ivory paper that was my r sum . We spoke on the phone.
Dorothy took the sheet and dropped it on the blotter as though it were radioactive. Applying for?
Lab instructor. I have an appointment. Remember?
The door behind her opened and a tall man appeared. Dottie? What s next?
She leapt from her chair and almost bowed as she handed him my r sum .
His office was hot. Midday sun streamed through side windows, their sills crammed with plastic pots of cactus and two big chunks of purple crystals. His blue Oxford shirt had big sweat creases across the back. He was well over six feet, tan and fit, with a comfortable, rumpled look-messed-up brown hair and shovedback shirtsleeves. I put him around forty-five and not handsome exactly, but striking because of his height and large head and thick forearms.
He pulled up two wooden chairs so they faced each other. When we sat down, our knees almost touched. While he glanced at my r sum , I studied the white squint lines embedded in the tan skin around his eyes. He looked up, smiling, and said, My wife is giving me hell.
Why? I might ve decided right there to fall in love with him.
Because I put off these interviews for two months, and now the semester s about to start. He folded my r sum into quarters and leaned in, elbows on knees. So. Hannah. Talk to me. Why should I hire you?
He was sitting too close. A rapidly dissociating lime deodorant scent emanated from the open neck of his shirt. The blunt question, the physical closeness, the opening gambit my wife, all demanded an intimate answer. What happened next was strange, but the whole eight-track of interview-speak that had looped through my brain since Galveston shunted to a forgotten section that contained the truth and I heard myself blurt, My father died sixteen months ago. April tenth, 1974.
Charles straightened a little and tilted his head, as though he suddenly heard a baby cry deep in the woods.
Tears collected in my eyes. One rolled down my cheek when I blinked. He nodded, as if to affirm that crying was the one qualification he was looking for. I knew then I had the job, such as it was, with its poverty-line wage and the straight-faced imperative I would discover later in the NMSUCD Lab Assistant Handbook to guide students in the proper techniques of the professional chemistry laboratory and even to write detailed and helpful correction-orientated notes on their weekly lab reports.
He unfolded my r sum and scanned it again, perhaps seeking data that would explain my outburst. I m sorry about your father, he said. You have other family?
That s the problem.
I did not mention the sinkhole that threatened to suck me back into Galveston. Did not mention my sister Iris or how she once pointed a Remington over/under shotgun at a flesh-colored Chrysler Newport full of developers my mother had invited to evaluate our land. Did not mention the financial setbacks my mother faced now that my father s businesses-opal mines, silver mines, nickel mines-proved to be a propped-up maze of illegalities. Did not mention Louis Paradiso, the faithful man who worked for us for twenty years and was now watching, bewildered, as our family and his life fell apart. Definitely did not mention Quentin Boudreau McKenna, III, who stood to inherit an oil fortune, small by Texas standards, but large enough to stem the rising tide of Mother s bad luck. My mother wanted me to marry him. He wanted me to marry him. Iris wanted me to do anything that would hold off the sale of our land. I wanted to get out of Galveston and start over.
A partially converted janitor supply closet in the basement of Carmony Hall became my office. The few books I had brought from Texas shared shelf space with boxes of brown paper towels that emitted the same alkaline aroma of defeat I remembered from junior-high bathrooms back home. Under the cataleptic flicker of fluorescent tubes, I graded lab notes at a primer-gray desk whenever I wasn t in the laboratory watching football-scholarship linebackers break beakers or stoned sorority sisters stare into Bunsen burner flames without blinking.
All the students-except one or two standouts who would ve done fine without me-handed in lab reports that were at first shocking in their inaccuracies, then for a while hilarious, and finally depressing. I had been scrawling C-minuses and D s on quarterfinal tests when Charles stopped by my office that morning. He looked over my shoulder at the red slashes on the papers. Ah, he said. Our future Pasteurs.
I showed them how to filter lead sulfate, I said. I think they all left most of it in the filter paper.
Maybe they were too dazzled by their instructor, he said.
I loved these compliments, which he lobbed at me like popcorn at a pigeon. I felt silly for craving his attention and powerful because he had noticed me. I bounced between those extremes, every other heartbeat, laying down hope one stratum at a time. The fact that he was all wrong-married, my boss, a flirt-gave me a perverse desire to make it right. Prove to some unseen audience-as if anyone were watching-that my considerable emotional and sexual powers, once unleashed upon the world outside Galveston, would be irresistible.
All these Tertiary volcanic terrains up there. He was talking about Tierra Blanca, inviting me to go there that afternoon. I was wondering when I d have the chance to kiss him.
We had been in the car for an hour. I had used that time to shred his map and hyperventilate.
Along the river, you can see whole profiles of ash-flow tuffs, basalt, rhyolite. When Charles realized I didn t know what he was talking about, he added, We ll see some fantastic views, too. Sunset, the Mogollons, everything.
My joy at having him to myself was chemically deteriorating into panic. I was afraid he would see how little of me actually existed. Afraid the pure New Mexico light pouring into the car from every angle would illuminate an outline of my body and the hollowness within. I wanted to catch him off-guard and blurt something crazy like, What do you love most in the world?
Without warning, Charles called out, The open road, as if answering my question. I could drive like this forever. He pointed at a wan streak of cloud on a horizon that seemed a million