Juniper Prize for Fiction

Stories

Andrew Malan Milward

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781613762394
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Literatura general

These powerful stories limn the complexities and dilemmas of life in Kansas, a state at "the center of the center of America, " as a billboard in one story announces. Andrew Malan Milward explores the less visible aspects of the Kansas experience—where its agrarian past comes into conflict with the harsh present reality of drugs, fundamentalism, and corporatism, relegating its agrarian identity to museums and amusement parks.Presented in a triptych, the stories in Milward's debut collection range across a varied terrain, from tumbledown rural barns to modern urban hospitals, revealing the secrets contained therein.

The Cure for Cancer

BEFORE SHE WAS DIAGNOSED—before the disease—my sister drove up from Lawrence to help me move into my new apartment in Kansas City, to “keep tabs on her little brother,” she said. It had always been her joke, that I was younger than her, seemingly since she came out of the womb thirteen months before me. I had just moved back to the area after two aborted attempts at law school in Iowa City. In an effort to erase some of my college debt I applied for and, still to my mild surprise, accepted a teaching assignment at an underfunded inner-city junior high school in Kansas City, Kansas. The other Kansas City. A rough neighborhood, I knew, not like the suburb where Carol and I grew up, but it was only for two years and I’d be close to my sister. We would both teach.

She came to stay for four days during the last week before the start of classes, helping me unpack boxes and furnish the apartment. It was the heat of summer, and I’d awkwardly hefted up my window unit to find it was too big for the small windows of my new apartment. Carol laughed it off, in typical fashion, and we spent ensuing afternoons in chilly movie theaters, watching comedic matinees, wrists drooped over the rims of gigantic tubs of popcorn.

Carol lived with her husband Dan in Lawrence, where he worked in H.R. at a growing insurance company. They had a six-year-old son, Sam, my nephew. Carol had made a career as a permanent adjunct of introductory English classes, bouncing around from college to college for shitty pay. But she loved it. “Where else but the adjunct circuit can your students mistakenly refer to you as ‘Doctor So-and-so’ when you only have a masters?” she said. “Besides no bullshit committee work. No departmental meetings. I have freedom.” The best part was that she was able to design her own classes, so she always taught Shakespeare, her first love, showing the kids how to wrestle with the language, pointing out all the bawdy puns. She only taught the tragedies, she said, because at the very least the kids needed those.

On our final night together, I was unpacking a box, the last I would for a number of months, and found something I’d forgotten about: a slide projector. It had been our parents’, loaded with pictures from when they were first married, before Carol and I had been born. Our parents had us late, not until Mom was forty-one. My father had an almost perverse affinity for documentation, part of the reason he’d been such a good lawyer. More often than not, mental images I conjure of him include some kind of camera at his side or to his eye, eclipsing half his face. I looked down at the projector, so old and oversized, and showed Carol. Her eyes got big, and she clapped her hands together—“Pictures!”—speeding to the kitchen, where she filled two glasses with white wine from the box in my fridge. I set the projector on a card table and propped it up with a dictionary. When it clicked on, a beam of light shot through the motes of dust drifting singly like flakes of snow; the stuff you never realize, I thought. We spent the rest of the night getting toasty on cheap wine and watching pictures of our parents slide over my blank, white wall, pictures from when they had fallen in love—not the unhappiness, obesity and disease of middle age and retirement, but a time when they were younger, before life had imploded. In the dark silence of my new apartment I saw my parents come back to life, image by image for only a second, to a time before Carol and I had been alive.

“How old are they here?” I asked.

“Early-mid thirties, I think,” Carol answered. She was sitting on the floor, the beam hovering a few feet above her head. Her back was to me and periodically when an image struck her she’d reach behind and grab my foot, momentarily latching onto it and shaking excitedly.

We, too, were nearly halfway through that decade. It’s a strange thing to see your parents at the same age as you, all of their authority and distance shrinks away and they might just be folks you pass on the street, as hopeful and lost as you.

“I can’t believe they were together for so long,” I said. “Before they had us, I mean. What the hell did they do all the time?”

“Lord only knows,” she shook her head, taking a sip from the clear plastic cups we were both using. Then she reached for my foot again—“Look”—and laughed, pointing at the next picture. It was one of our father. On his way to some costume party. He was in rare form: dressed in a cowboy hat with a fake handlebar mustache, smiling that cautious smile he seldom let himself indulge in, a look that seemed to suggest, I know I’m above this, but it’s okay to let your hair down once in a while … once in a while. He was still alive, but today there were only words, not images, by which to construct him: wheelchair, Florida, Alzheimer’s, nursing home. They floated around my head like a mobile of planets whenever I thought of him. Our mother had died in her sleep three years before. Afterwards, our father moved to Florida, where his brain began the slow process of forgetting itself.

I received the call from Carol nearly a month later as I was struggling with my new teaching position. I hadn’t taught since I was in graduate school (the first time), and the crash course certification program I’d completed the previous summer was mostly an overview of what to do if a student came to class armed or on drugs. These kids were eating me alive: I couldn’t control them; they didn’t respect me; they hated the material. I told Carol so and she laughed, the old veteran. Her classes at the community college were going “swimmingly,” she said with a British accent. “But they are, you know, college students,” she added in her normal voice. She offered advice, jokes mostly, games I could try, and if that failed there was always mental abuse and humiliation. “Oh for the days of the belt and lash,” she sighed, wistful. My mind wandered off as Carol continued. I imagined being one of my students, sitting in a classroom with all the other black children, staring up at an awkward white man delivering stale one-liners, trying to rouse anything from the void of the sleepy and confused. I just flew in from Iowa City and boy are my arms tired. Try the roast beef. Tip your waitress. I’ll be here all week, or until my loans are paid off. When I came back to, she was telling me about going to the doctor recently to have her breast examined. She had found a lump, she said so matter-of-factly.

“A lump?” I said.

She told me not to interrupt, she was telling a story. “So they bring me in the room, the examination room, you know. And the doctor—this squirrelly looking guy with a goatee—tells me to take my shirt off and lie down on my stomach. And I’m thinking, I’d bet you’d like that now wouldn’t you. But I do it, good girl that I am. Now the table, you should have seen it. The table has a hole right where my boob is. And I sort of look back at the nurse, and she gives a look like, yes, sweetie, drop it right in there. So I do. Bombs away. It was like one of those cutouts at an amusement park—where you stick your face through a hole to have your picture taken, so it looks like you’re a cowboy or a huge body builder. Something like that.” I found myself nodding, thinking, Lump. “But it gets better. Then he hits a button and the table starts to elevate, like I’m a car at the repair shop, and I tell him to give the tires a rotation while he’s down there, but he doesn’t say much. Just whispers something to the nurse. And then finally he goes underneath to examine my disembodied boob,” she said. “The little perv,” she giggled.

I knew then what was happening and what would happen, could see the whole terrible future in a millisecond. I imagine some part of Carol did too, but she stayed calm. “It’s no big deal,” she said, “so don’t go getting all maudlin on me.” I thought of how after Mom died people told me she was in a better place. And when my uncle Terry had survived his first tumor biopsy—before they began to fresco his whole upper torso—everyone said what a fighter he was. This, the language of coping.

I had called him, my uncle Terry, the day after that first operation, at my mother’s urging. I was young and she had to dial the number for me. When he answered, woozy from pain pills, the first thing I asked was if he was going to die. Mom snatched the phone from my hand. “He means, how are you feeling?” and gave the phone back to me. There was a delay, perhaps he was gathering himself, before he answered: “I feel pretty good for having my throat slit yesterday.”

______________

It all happens so quickly, the blink of an eye, the turn of your head:

After the mammogram, the biopsy, the modified radical mastectomy, and the chemo, there is a recurrence. Her oncologist calls it a “local recurrence,” which means, he tells us, looking each one of us in the eye, that the cancerous tumor cells remained in the original site. I picture one of those time-elapsed films of flowers blooming. Usually, when this happens, the tumor grows back over a long period of time; this is abnormally quick. He recommends a hospital in Omaha that specializes in cancer treatment, where things are “top notch.” Within the month Carol is relocated to Omaha. Because she’s from out of town, she stays at the hospital full-time (unlike most of her fellow patients who arrive for treatment and leave again), while Dan takes care of Sammy in Lawrence and looks for an apartment to rent in Omaha. The first time I make the three-and-a-half-hour drive north from Kansas City I get lost, spacing off at the snow-covered barns I pass in the early winter afternoon. I miss a sign and end up on another highway, nearly halfway to Iowa City, before realizing the error and turning around.

In the hospital I stop four separate doctors for directions, check in at three different desks, and present my driver’s license a handful of times before being given her room number and a clip-on badge that makes it undoubtedly clear I am in fact a FAMILY VISITOR. Walking the halls toward Carol’s room, I feel uncomfortable in the same way airports make me uneasy: the hustle and bustle; the worried and reunited families with their Styrofoam cups of coffee, milling about, aimless as cattle; the slow walks that explode into sprint at the hint of urgency. And the smell, that sanitized smell my brain can only further characterize as sickly, as nauseating as the smell of jet fuel that forces me to breathe out of my nose whenever I queue up in that discouragingly long line, waiting to find my seat assignment.

I find her room, 44, and enter. She is in bed with one leg on top of her blanket. There is a box of Kleenex by her left leg and a mound of clumped tissues beside her right thigh. A small army of machines surrounds her, the clear tubing winding all over her body. She’s in the middle of treatment. They have decided to try chemo and radiation concurrently, hoping for what her doctor calls “synergism.” She is alone, reading. She stares intently at the page and doesn’t seem to notice me. For a moment I think about turning around and leaving, driving back to Kansas City. I want no part of this. My palm slides behind my back, latching onto the door handle, ready to slowly turn and walk out. But then I’m spotted when Carol laughs at a passage in her book and looks up, eyeing me in a quizzical manner.

“What are you doing skulking around like that, Kojak?”

I take a few steps toward her. “Didn’t want to disturb you.”

She nods, slowly and suspiciously.

I take off my jacket and sling it onto a chair that has a stack of magazines on it.

“Welcome to my new abode,” she says, lifting one arm over her head. The tubes hanging off it slap against each other, and she winces a little.

“How do you like it here?”

“It’s shitty and small,” she answers, which makes me look around the room. “And yet,” she says, “I believe it’s still bigger than your apartment.”

I laugh, exhaling harder than I mean to.

I tell her how tough it was getting clearance to visit. “It’s like you’re top secret,” I say. “I’m lucky I didn’t have to take a blood test to get in here.”

She purses her lips and makes the face she always does when I try to be funny. It is the face of a parent touched by her child’s effort.

“What are you reading?”

“Dante,” she says, flipping over the book and showing me the cover. “I’m in purgatory now.” She points to the cover. “Just finished the Inferno. I want to complete the Comedy before—” she’s saying when her oncologist walks in with his head in a chart.

“Doctor Kim, this is my brother Jacob,” Carol says, affecting a dramatic English accent, “bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester.” She does this sometimes, slips into Shakespeare.

The doctor looks at me, confused or interested I can’t tell, as if to say She’s been doing this since she arrived. What does it mean?

Doctor Kim sidles around in constant conversation with himself, flipping charts and clicking pens. After he leaves I ask her what she thinks of him. She blows her nose. “Well, he’s Chinese,” she says, waving a hand as if this explains everything. She refers to anyone with roots in an Asian country as Chinese, an atavism from our grandfather, who lived well into his nineties and never understood the whole P.C. thing. When I tell her I think he’s Korean, she just snorts and looks away: “Why are you so uptight all the time?”

She blows her nose again and tosses the tissue into the pile. It’s silent, and I feel the need to say something either funny or hopeful. She sniffs and her nose makes a little whistle sound. She ignores it, and starts thumbing the corners of her book, looking at me, squinting like she’s trying to decide whether to tell me something really important. But when it happens again, the little whistle, she starts to laugh which in turn makes her do it more. Then she stops. “Listen. ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,’” she says, and puts her hands up to her nose, pressing her nostrils open and closed.

______________

Stacks of unpacked boxes still line the corners of my apartment, shrinking my already small living space. It feels like some Lego construction gone terribly wrong, like instead of building up or out I’m growing in, confining myself to the smallest possible space. When I need something from one of the boxes, I remove it from the stack, take out the item, and put the box back where it was. Three months and I can’t bring myself to fully settle. After school I come home to make dinner and then have to leave again. I spend most nights going to bars or bookstores, drinking things that either speed me up or slow me down. Some nights, though, I just walk around all night. I live in a poor neighborhood, full of liquor stores and government housing, not far from school, a condition of the teaching deal I accepted. Usually, I drive past State Line, crossing into the Missouri side of Kansas City. There I walk downtown under the golden and red pulse of the flashing Western Auto sign, where abandoned buildings and bankrupt businesses are being turned into galleries, trendy gay bars, and lofts.

Tonight though, Friday, it’s freezing so I decide to stay close, to walk to school and see what it looks like at night, empty. I pull on my wool hat and zip the parka that saw me through several Iowa winters unscathed. The waning evening light gives way to the click of streetlights that illuminate perfect circles of pavement. Illegally parked cars block hydrants and spill over curbs, their owners unconcerned that the police will make their way over here. People crowd around the doorways and stoops of ramshackle buildings. I walk by one house where there’s a party going on. Loud thumping music crackles out the windows. From the street the bass feels like the initial tremors of a coming earthquake. Groups pack the porches, smoking and drinking from red plastic cups. I fear bumping into one of my students out here, or, worse, their parents. Cars pass me slowly, writhing from all the bass. I can feel my lungs shake. Sore thumb that I am, which is to say white and dressed in khakis, my neighbors can’t help but notice me. I stuff my hands into my pockets, trying to get them warm, and can feel the rings of my nostrils beginning to freeze. The voices pick up on both sides of the street as I walk past. Laughter and catcalls fly around the air.

Someone says something to me now, closer, and I keep walking, head down.

“Where you think you’re going?”

I keep on, hoping he’ll leave me alone if I just walk fast enough. He speeds up and I can feel him just a few paces back.

“Hey, white shadow, you in the wrong part of town?”

My fists clinch inside my pockets.

“You separated from the herd, little white lamb?”

I hear the people from nearby porches yelling things I can’t make out.

“No,” I say. “I live here.”

Then I feel his hand on my shoulder.

“Hey!” he pulls harder and I stop.

“Don’t you know where you are, white shadow?”

I look at the ground. He has on big black boots with cleatlike treads.

“Kansas City, Kansas,” I say. A moment passes and then I hear laughter and look up to find him doubled over. He’s gasping for air.

“Yeah,” he laughs, “yeah, you is.” ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Quail Haven, 1989
• Skywriting
• The Agriculture Hall of Fame
• John
• Two Back, 1973
• Birthday
• Ulysses
• The Cure for Cancer
• The Antichrist Chronicles
• Silver Creek, 1969
• Acknowledgments
• Back Cover