BROOKLYN READING WORKS

FEATURED WRITER: CHRISTINA FRANK

Lucy will always have two mothers, and I am inextricably linked to the other one wherther or not we ever meet. I needed her to create Lucy; she needed me to raise her.

I feel most connected to this woman on Lucy's birthday, the one day out of 365 when I am certain she's thinking about Lucy, maybe even wondering about me as I wonder about her. Just as were as phsycially close as we could ever be during my visit to Vietnam, on Lucy's birthday I sense a spiritual, real-time, across the oceans closenss. For those twenty four hours, I breathe a sigh of relief, feeling that for the a brief time, I have found her.

-An excerpt from the essay, "She is Among Us," by Christina Frank in A LOVE LIKE NO OTHER.

FEATURED WRITER: REGINA McBRIDE

From THE MARRIAGE BED: CHAPTER ONE

1910
Merrion Square
Dublin

My husband's mother had decorated the little room at the back of the house with me in mind. It was a room meant for solitude, for revery and prayer, because the face I had presented then, fifteen years before, had suggested a contemplative girl, a girl given to intercourse with the saints. To her I was an unassuming girl, a kind of empty vessel like the Virgin Mary, who would carry holiness in her womb. They were an ecclesiastical family; she wanted her son to father a priest.

A fortnight or two after we were married, and before Manus and I left Kenmare in the west, Mrs. O'Breen came to Dublin on her own and furnished this old Georgian house for us. It was then that in a surge of generosity toward me she had the walls of this little room painted sea green and scallop shells impressed into fresh plasterwork. She said that she'd been concerned that I would miss the Atlantic. In fact, after having been cloistered at Enfant de Marie, so far inland, I had grown to find the smell and sound of the waves diminishing.

But I never expressed such truths to Mrs. O'Breen. As I never expressed them to Manus.

I was up at dawn this January morning, though it was a Sunday, attempting to draw a blue vase that I'd brought in with me from the dining room.

The night before, Manus and our two daughters, Maighread, fourteen, and Caitlin, thirteen, were speaking in low voices at the dining room table. I'd come in and they'd gone quiet. When I asked them what they'd been speaking about, Manus evaded the question and began describing a horse he'd seen earlier that day on Grafton Street, decked out in ribbons and bells. There was a winter fair in Phoenix Park, and the city had been adrift with gypsies.

I struggled now to draw the likeness of the vase, but my mind was not on it. I'd had it before me for over an hour, yet I had only drawn a few faint lines. I was fixed, instead, on the static representations of water along the wainscotting.

Mrs. O'Breen saw decorative potential in all representations of the sea. Here they were, trimming the very room in controlled waves.

In spite of the plasterwork, the room she had bequeathed me was stark. The barest in the house, furnished with only a dresser and a draftsman's table more suitable for a child than an adult. The table faced the dresser upon which I placed the objects of my still lifes: flowers, fruit, bottles, and jars. When I'd finish drawing them I always cleared away the objects and replaced them with those that Mrs. O'Breen kept there: a marble statue of praying hands, and to either side of it, two separate pairs of gloves, lying palm up. They were the white novice gloves that I had been wearing the day I'd come to marry Manus in the house in Kenmare-by-the-Sea and the nuns' black gloves I would have worn if I'd taken my vows as I had been close to doing before Manus's proposal. But this morning a rebellious humor flickered in me, and I toyed with the idea of rearranging everything, and relegating the gloves and praying hands to some dim cabinet.

In the center of one bare wall hung a painting of the Annunciation in a heavy frame with fading gold leaf. There was nothing grand about this particular Annunciation. No lilies or terra-cotta floors. No sunlit cypress trees out the window. In this representation, only an empty, boggy field and an Irish sky with clouds inclined to thunder.

The angel, human looking, wore gray, one muscular knee and calf apparent as he knelt. He was earthbound, without a trace of divinity about him, except perhaps for his wings, which, in the tension of the moment, appeared slightly flexed, and, though his upper body did not lean toward the Virgin in the manner of a Botticelli angel or di Paolo's, he appeared attentive of her.

Over the years I had thought of asking Mrs. O'Breen about the painting, but in her presence my natural impulse was to be silent.

As she had selected everything else in this house, she had also selected me. I was only seventeen when she saw Manus staring in my direction at Mass at Enfant de Marie. I was a novice then, as she had been a novice when her own husband had proposed marriage to her. My quiet, careful demeanor appealed to her. I had come from a wild, windswept place, the Great Blasket Island. She'd liked the idea that I was an islander and probably thought, as many did, that islanders were more backward even than tinkers. I would be out of my element in her family, dependent, compliant.

The face I wore then suggested stillness and grace. Before my wedding night, Mrs. O'Breen had given me tea in a room with a sea view, filled with statues of female martyrs. Agnes, Lucy, Cecilia. I was at the height of my saintly persona, managing it so well that I had felt myself radiating light. Mrs. O'Breen could not take her eyes off me. For a while there was gratification in being this girl, but the young are in love with the moment, and disappointment had been inevitable. Even I knew that it would come.

FEATURED WRITER: NANCY GRAHAM

When we woke up it was the tomorrow after tomorrow.  Outside white
without the dark colors. Our car a lump, like the snake that ate the elephant in The Little Prince.  A lump you could climb in and drive away or a lump you could climb on and lumber away, into the snow on the street, the various snows. I clambered out there, into the street because no traffic.  Snow ice covered the powder in a layer just thick enough for me to step on and just thin enough to break before I could take another step.  It felt a little like walking up an escalator except for the part where I tugged my leg out and banged my shin against the ice lip.  I could feel my skin turning blue green under the windbreak pants I wore over my silkies.  Raphael didn’t wear anything but jeans, which are not waterproof and in most cases, his included, run thready holes at the knees. I tell him all the time about layers but little kids don’t know when they’re cold and they don’t do what anybody says about clothing unless they’re made to and I won’t make him which means he’ll probably freeze before we reach the oil people. 

Before mom said she was tired of the cold and died she said if the heat stopped working and the phones were down we must get to the oil people and try to strike a deal with them.  She said when they saw we were kids they would look kindly on us, and that there was still plenty of oil in reserves for special cases and that could get us through to something that would feel more like spring.  The next day we opened the door to let the cat in and he was frozen in a ball in a snow nest on top of a hedge that now looks like a sweet happy bump of snow. His fur was covered in black ice.  That was before the strong snow ice, another snow storm and the weak snow ice came and made it so Raphael and I could now be out here walking if you want to call it that, step crash shinbang legtug, in the way that we are, underdressed for this I would say and what will happen if we get across river to the oil people I do not know. 

When we go out on an expedition like this, to get a bit of food or candles or wood, my hands heat with the effort of moving through snow.  As soon as I get home I rush to the piano with the hope of pliant fingers.  I place my fingers on the cold keys in the opening position for Sheep May Safely Graze and my joints seize up. Someone should have invented microweight gloves that would keep hands perfectly warm, I think, watching my fingers go gray against the ivory.  Someone should have invented a radiant-heat piano, with an element beneath each key, and several more in the bench, where no one ever stores their music anyway because there’s never enough room.