Open by Lisa Moore Page B

that thing works, she says. When we come back downstairs Charles is telling a story about Thomas Aquinas.
    Just stopped writing. Charles pauses to grin at everyone.
    He’d had a vision. Everything he’d written before was straw. Charles throws back his head and laughs.
    Can you imagine, straw , it was all straw.
    Blue diodes are the next thing, Joanne Barker announces. That’s all you’ll hear from now on, blue diodes.
    What about pocket calculators, Lyle says, didn’t some calculator guy get the Nobel?
    Don’t start with me, says Joanne. She raises her chin at Lyle, saucy and flirting.
    I want to do what Diane McCarthy always does, says Prissy. Each man moves two chairs down before dessert. Men, desert your wives.
    Listen, says Lyle. Everyone hushes at once. Pete has started to cry.
    I walk out to the car, Pete in one arm, the folded playpen banging against my shin. I throw it into the trunk, strap Pete into the car seat. There’s a J. J. Cale tape in the stereo and it bursts honeyed and sweltering into the frosty air. Magnolia, you sweet thing, you’re driving me mad . Fat snowflakes drift onto the windshield. The steering wheel is too cold to hold. Somewhere in the world there are magnolias. There are men who love women, a particular woman, to the point of devotion. In that part of the world babies sleep under filmy mosquito nets while their parents drink iced tea or have sex in the hammock. The babies sleep because they are overcome with muggy, perfumed heat, or maybe there are no babies. I wonder if I am too drunk to drive. I wonder it even as I sail through a red light on Elizabeth Avenue. The man in a grey fedora whose car I nearly cream has a face of pinched putty. His mouth hangs open. Pete is wide awake, he’s watching the snow. When we were driving through an industrial park last week Alex had said, What if we’re all dead and we only think we’re alive?
    This is what happened in France. This is how I got pregnant after eleven years of wanting nothing so much as to feel a child moving in my belly again. A medieval village with lace curtains in the windows and swirling cobbled streets, a castle built in a mountain pass. Isobel lost the car keys at the beach and took everything out of her knapsack, crusty socks, Don DeLillo, shaking away the sand. A goat with a chawed blue rope tied toits neck leaped onto my chest, left cloven mud prints on my blouse. An elderly woman invited us into her home, gave us port. There were four weasels glued to tree stumps on her high shelves. They killed my rabbits, she said. We saw the Papal Palace. Far below the palace grounds there is a prison, the courtyard formed by the walls draped with a fine green netting. Once a prisoner escaped in a helicopter. A girl stood on the wall and screamed to her boyfriend in a dark prison window. Did you get my message? A tattoo of a skull peeked over the drawstring waist of her pants. A field that flashed emerald, lime, yellow, and blue as the clouds drifted. A double rainbow. A sky like cashmere shredded on the blades of the mountains. A pig farm with the wind blowing toward us. Run by only one man and several computers, Lucien said. Lucien on a zigzagging unicycle, the whites of his eyes showing under the iris as he watched the silver bowling pins he juggled. Sugar cubes wrapped in a paper that says Daddy. In Marseilles a haughty waiter rolled his eyes. Alex bought sunglasses with lenses like houseflies from a black man with cornrows who jiggled his leg madly and stared in the other direction while she tried every pair. We slept on a sailboat docked in the harbour, forest of white masts pricking the indigo sky. A woman in a far-off window looked over a square, a child sleeping against her shoulder. Lamb kabobs roared on a grill, hissing and spitting fat. We picked almonds off the ground. I had my thirty-seventh birthday. Lyle slapped the cake down and the plate spun in tight, tiny circles and I shouted, Why do you always get what you