Later that same semester I came across a recent issue (Issue 10) of McSweeney’s Quarterly. Guest-edited by Michael Chabon, the issue was dedicated to reviving genre and genre-inspired fiction, fiction that looked beyond “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.” Reading McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales—as the issue is called—was a moment-of-truth for me, and for hundreds of other young writers. If we still have literature scholars fifty years from now, I have no doubt that they will look back on this volume as an inflection point in the path of American literature, the point at which a generation of writers abandoned the castle of literary realism and engaged in earnest with the genres. Sure, such cross- pollination existed before the turn of the millennium. Our future scholars might also cite Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, or a load of other genre-bending forbearers. But for Chabon, the recently anointed Pulitzer Prize-winner, to articulate such a radical ideology was, I would argue, a revelation that opened the floodgates to a rush of debut de siècle literary experimentation.

In the past ten years, former realists such as Michael Cunningham, Kazou Ishiguro, Junot Diaz, Gary Shteyngart, and Tom Perrotta have joined Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Lethem, Thomas Pynchon and many others in the great meadow of cross-genre pollination. In an age of handheld tablets, commercial space travel, and nano neuro-knitting, an age in which the dreams of the past have become prosaic reality, it’s not surprising that literary realism would intersect with science fiction and other genres. Of course, there are still many opponents of genre-miscegenation. You can just hear the distaste in James Wood’s review of David Mitchell’s literary historical novel The Thousand Summers of Jacob de Zoot. “The historical novel, typically the province of genre gardeners and conservative populists, has become an unlikely laboratory for serious writers, some of them distinctly untraditional in emphasis and concern. … What such novelists are looking for in those oldfangled laboratories is sometimes mysterious to me.” Mysterious perhaps, but no one can deny that “serious” literary writers are turning to genre fiction in droves.

I myself have tinkered in that oldfangled laboratory. My first novel, The Oracle of Stamboul, was written with the conventions of historical fiction firmly in mind. And the experience left me hungry for more. My next project continues along in the historical fabulist vein—it’s a somewhat magical multigenerational novel about the Jews of Cairo. Beyond that, I’m thinking of something a bit more science fiction-y, the future instead of the past. Writing about the future, however, I am at a distinct disadvantage. While many writers grew up reading comic books and science fiction, I spent most of my childhood behind a strange mix of Mad Magazine and Dickens. The only science fiction I encountered was in the classroom: Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells, and the like. Thus, I have decided to embark on a mission to read the classics of science fiction. I began my journey with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and intend to continue with Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, Samuel Delany, Orson Scott Card, Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, William Gibson, and beyond. I hesitate to make any judgments so early in my travels, but I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed Asimov. I loved his engagement with history, was amazed by his vision of the future, and turned pages like there was no tomorrow. At the same time, I do wish he had spent a bit more time polishing his prose and refining his characters. But that’s the point of cross-pollination, right? It makes everything stronger.

Vitor Luiz and Maria Kochetkova in SF Ballet's production of Cranko's 'Onegin.' (photo © Erik Tomasson)

Often, the thing we love about the work of a great author is the ability to describe a moment, an emotion, some nuance of experience, in such a way that it is immediately recognizable to us, however foreign to our experience it actually is. We feel they somehow rummaged around in our mind and conveyed our lives back to us with different plots and more elegant language. The months after I graduated from college and was struggling to find work, feeling like I was both fabulous and doomed to uselessness, was probably the worst time to read The House of Mirth. And who would not recognize his own moments of mortified infatuation in Tolstoy’s description of Levin: “He avoided long looks at her as one avoids long looks at the sun; but he saw her, as one sees the sun, without looking.”

Ballet can elicit the same recognition: it doesn’t matter that most of us are too stiff, short-limbed, paunchy, or weak to even think without strain of the movements we see performed. Though we speak a different language, we can “read” dance and transcribe its expressions as our own. In Kenneth MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet,” when Romeo has left Juliet’s bedroom and fled the city, she pulls the window curtain aside, arches her back, thrusting her chest toward the dawn light streaming into her room. Somehow, we know she is asking the gods to assist her in her helpless, entirely vulnerable state, that this is the physical manifestation of heartfelt entreaty. Though dancers portray human experience in a way that most people couldn’t and wouldn’t do themselves, they are able to evoke sympathetic experiences through their movements; we (ballet lovers, at least) watch and think, “Yes, this is what love/lust/fear/jealousy/etc. looks like,” and momentarily, feel it along with them.

But there are limitations. A story like Romeo and Juliet’s is ideal for translation through movement; the emotions are extreme, the characters’ actions are driven by those emotions rather than by complicated intellectual calculations, and the plot, is easy to follow.

Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, adapted and choreographed into “Onegin” by 20^th century great John Cranko, is not quite as simple, and its nuances are often missed or coarsened, possibly in the interest of facility. I won’t relay the plot here, but rather point out the most common flaw in many interpretations of the work, which is that Onegin is erroneously, boringly, portrayed as a cad, simply because he doesn’t return Tatyana’s declared love for him on cue. For the time and society in which EO takes place, a man of the world, as Onegin is described, would have been ostracized as a seducer if he accepted a naïve girl’s offering of herself. It’s what Pride and Prejudice‘s Wickham does with Lydia, for which that character is rightly acknowledged as reprehensible. But Tatyana casts such a spell on all artists and audiences alike that for Onegin to reject her, even gently, as he does in the book, is regarded as a character flaw rather than the necessary submission to duty that it is. He is vilified by interpreters for having the honor to turn her down, and even for failing to fall in love with her as immediately and completely as she does with him.

Cranko’s 1965 ballet, which was recently performed by the San Francisco Ballet, succumbs to this misinterpretation. Onegin acts with baseless cruelty toward Tatyana, such as when he rips up her letter at her name-day celebration and throws the pieces to the ground. And he is costumed all in black, emphasizing visually that he’s a “bad guy.” Onegin’s treatment of Lensky is terrible (and his indirect treatment of Tatyana through his behavior at her party is as well). But it seems like that was a terrible, stupid thing that an otherwise conscientious person did, rather than a terrible, stupid thing that a habitually terrible person did. Onegin’s an upstanding guy—Pushkin points out in nearly every one of the hero’s meetings with Tatyana, that he takes great pains to be kind–but he fails, and there’s great drama in that. It’s not dramatic, or faithful to the book, to take Onegin’s treatment of Lensky and color his entire character with it. Why should we be interested in a uniformly loathsome character?

Altering a story to “read” better through movement is one thing. (This was exhibited brilliantly at several points, for instance when Tatyana’s famous solitary “letter scene” transforms into a pas de deux between her and the imaginary Onegin she writes to.) But to flatten a complex character into a cartoon villain does injustice both to Pushkin’s story and to an audience capable of appreciating something more morally nuanced than, well, most narrative ballets. Ballet’s stories so often are populated with ruined virgins, wicked sorcerers, and fairytale princesses, possibly because the human experiences – and highly emotional stories — they have to communicate find obvious expression through the body.

But the aspects of the Onegin story on which the plot and the destinies of its characters hinge are not strictly emotional: Onegin’s initial rebuke of Tatyana does not have to do with hatred, or even dislike. Perhaps he does not reciprocate her infatuation, but even this is not what motivates him. She has thrown herself at him, and so he must do the honorable thing.

Read more from Larissa Archer at her blog, larissaarcher.com.

Gizzi is very good at combining a streetwise vocal with the structure of high lyric or “song.” The syntax and line breaks tumble around each other but maintain a sensible and surprising pattern of rhythm and image, blurring the boundary between song and plain utterance. In “Lullaby,” he writes

Everyone’s listening to someone in the air
and singing knows every chestnut from way out when
the mourning dawn of living each apple and every atom
in the tooth actually small circuits uncover vast spaces …

Poems such as that one, which read like a cubist’s elision of the senses, evoke playfulness and freedom. The highly agile lines are shaped by rhythm and not syntax, allowing Gizzi to take us to where speech and song and silence all overlap. He uses descriptions and metaphors of struggle (“we are all stranded on the shore of something // I mean to say seeing pictures inside as they are.”) to give a sense of that vulnerable moment from which utterance of song and image begins and ends.

Though the poems here hinge on rhythm, abstract concepts and “poetic inspiration” are held in high regard. And Gizzi does an excellent job combining forms and deliveries to achieve a yearning-song that always seems to be bursting with surprise at the level of line.

He molds into interesting vessels the various themes of Threshold Songs, the most interesting being the idea of language as both a human artifact and a human stand-in. In the book’s second section of poems, this is represented in the image of the communicating figure that remains silent — an excellent choice for clearly and drastically conveying the struggle of language. “Away in itself a way out of here // of transport panning the scene or skein of sight / the syncoflash of being sparrow.” Later, Pinocchio serves as a kind of wooden embodiment of this idea: a man-made temporary thing (built with care) that’s also an innocent victim of the dangers of the world, brought into a place where pure utterance is always under threat of being stopped-up: “All the world’s a stooge. The secret and silent world worn from abuse and those surfaces abrading imagination.”

But air itself is the book’s most common “vessel.” Air serves as a fluid space for possible sound to carry. Air can be a medium itself, in this sense, a blizzard-like arena where the starkest breaths go up into the atmosphere. Gizzi writes, “But the empty center / of whitish marks / its indelible air / arctic and sharp / whizzes through me,” and then later, “Speak world / glower and burn / and illumine your fancy / these moments rouse.” Ultimately this collection does for itself what a portrait should do for the artist: it releases a primary vocalization of the figure at all times, one, ideally, out of time and space.

Williams has an oblique even surreal way with narrative, giving us only a little bit of detail, just enough to tell a story. And sometimes, when the story is only a few sentences long, there’s hardly enough to do that. The temptation is to try to “get” the stories, but there’s no key to unlocking that door. The text is reflexive; what we take away from it depends just as much on the reader as the prose itself. In a 2008 interview in The Believer, Williams said that the exclamation “I don’t get it!” in response to her work is not a “pertinent” dismissal of it (or of writing in general – it could be a response to “any of our challenging circumstances,” she said.) Vicky Swanky is not a passive book. Readers have to lean into it, while Williams pushes back, hard. But the result is exceptionally rewarding (Picking up the book, it’s good to bear in mind Marvin Bell’s essay “The ‘Technique’ of Rereading,” in which he writes about the “method for noticing the little things in language.” He encourages us to read twice, first noticing the associations a text “may stir,” and then “how it says what it says, as well as what it says.” That is, read slowly and attentively.)

Most of these stories are driven by voice; the emotion and bright tone of them stands out strongly. Characters seem secondary. We meet a lot of Kevins, Betsys, Waynes and Cynthias, who populate the edges of these stories but are never fleshed out to where we are fully invested in them (and Williams does intend that we care about them). They seem to be more a collective representation of American people (like, say, the reverends, the governors and mistresses that live in Hawthorne’s work) than singular beings. They are the middle class people we run into at the grocery store, that live down the block from us (“They had been the Crosssticks!” Williams writes in “The Emporium”). The narrators, even if some are never named, shine. Williams is fully tuned into the emotions of her narrators: their loneliness, insecurity, and happiness. She is interested in the little, important moments of their days, as her narrators search for value in what appears mundane.

And a lot of her narrators are searching for something, people, maybe, or comfort or help. Sometimes, they are in search for more out of life than a slow drizzle. The narrator of the opening story, “My Defects,” the narrator, who has “made a big mess,” hints at a “sexual relation” and “reputations.” There is a visit to the doctor. At the end, the narrator goes searching for the “repose of the lake,” only to find that “although it does have a dreamy look, it is so prone to covering familiar ground.” In two pages, Williams can cover years and multiple relationships in the life of her narrators. Solitude and sex are major themes; relationships and people often degrade over time. But there is straight up happiness, too. When it comes down to it, these stories are about people simply experiencing life, with all its comedy, tragedy and, yes, monotony (the covering of “familiar ground”).

There is also the pleasure of Williams’s sentences. In one story, she describes a former lover (or new fiancé, it is not quite clear to me, both are characters in the story) as “well born, noble, a home-loving wolf.” And in the story “Stand,” she writes, “She was counting her fingers. She said she couldn’t get the neighbor’s penis to do anything. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t get his penis to do anything either.” The sentences are dense and different. They pop. They’re part of what makes Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty so enjoyable.

Marianne Aya Omac (right), Joan Baez, and Gabriel Harris (Baez's son) at Yoshi's (photo by Jamie Soja)

As diverse as the music performed in concerts is, so are the appearances of the audiences. James Mollison documented a spectrum of what he calls the “tribes” of attendees in his photography project and book The Disciples, a rough census of personae that converge around the archetypes represented by the musical acts Mollison followed. The grouped images of said disciples invite one to guess, before reading the captions, which performers each had come out for. It’s not hard: men in trucker hats and denim overalls, Merle Haggard. Men holding up sagging jeans by the crotch and women whose skirts barely reached their own, P Diddy. Union Jack mini-dresses, leopard print and afros? Spice Girls. Cinched lumberjack shirts, curly blonde wigs and feathery cowboy hats? Dolly Parton, obviously. Kiss makeup? You got it.

Recently at Yoshi’s in San Francisco, Joan Baez performed as a guest rather than as the main act, but the audience distinctly appeared to be of the Baez tribe. The restaurant side of Yoshi’s seemed to be patronized by slick young things coifed, Spanxed, and pressed into coy “my-eyes-are-up-here-jerk” cocktail attire. But inside the jazz club, the tone was far less bothered. The patrons were older, their dress casual and accented by the occasional ethnic jewelry piece. The shoes were decidedly comfort-oriented, the hair natural in color and texture, the makeup minimal on gracefully senescent faces. Sure, they could have been there for the comparatively unknown headliner from Montpellier, France, Marianne Aya Omac, but it seemed more likely that these were the people (or a small portion of them) who for the past five decades have been following Baez, rapt by her ever-burnishing voice, loving the ground whereon she stands.

And the voice is still beautiful, though time has humanized it. The young Joan Baez, like only a handful of other singers—Alfred Deller, Mahalia Jackson, Edith Piaf, Yma Sumac—had an instrument that rendered words like “talented” and “gifted” inadequate and made comparisons with other singers cruelly unfair. The pure, high soprano that evokes youth without sounding childish, the rapid, true vibrato, and the restraint of her phrasing (how she gives over just enough emotion to tell the story but no more, and makes so many other singers seem like hopeless hams. Just listen to “Wagoner’s Lad.” Listen, and perish.): all of this placed her in a class of her own. Her voice has changed, the fair-pretty-maiden tone deepened into that of a wise, soulful priestess. Her breath control now doesn’t support the show-stopping long notes featured in such early songs as “Fare Thee Well (10,000 miles)” or “Cucurucucu, Paloma.” Her voice fades out or breaks, and seems limited to pianissimo (she never was a belter) and thus some nuance in her storytelling is lost, too. But the voice that is there, while it is there, is still capable of holding an audience in thrall, as is her stage presence, which is dignified yet playful and witty. She is still the “barefoot Madonna,” and dances at the mike in her skinny jeans and smart blazer, her silver hair gleaming like a nimbus under the stage lights. She pokes fun at herself, at the hardy myths of her celebrity (like the exaggerated, if not entirely fabricated rumors of her past drug use), and makes the obligatory Dylan reference.

Few Baez songs, including those she wrote herself, evince such dramatic power as the broadside and the Child ballads of her early albums. If there is something to regret about Baez’s career, it might be that she has spent so much of it collaborating with artists of lesser talent, lending her unforgettable voice to their forgettable songs, sharing the stage out of what can only be regarded as an epically huge sense of generosity, a grandiose selflessness. The present partnership with Omac might not be a symptom of this element to the Baez persona, which her fans have chafed against for decades. While the evening got off to a slow start with what sounded like Christian (or perhaps merely generically spiritual) lite-rock, sung with closed-eyed earnestness by a Washingtonian in dreadlocks and hiking boots named Shimshai, soon Omac got people shaking their shoulders and even hollering the occasional “Olé!” from their seats. (It helped that she gave us a lesson in how and when and why to holler “Olé!” in the first place). A French singer with a background in Gypsy and gospel music, Omac’s voice recalls the kind popular in traditional Spanish music, one characterized by a huskiness that makes it sounds as if she’s spent her life having noisy arguments and noisier orgasms, but containing a powerful, rapid-fire vibrato and capable of trumpet mimicry, an impressive party-trick talent. Her voice, rough and guttural, melded with Baez’s more polished one to heartbreaking effect on “La Llorona,” “Cucurucucu,” and “Duele.” When Baez left the stage, the material succumbed to earnestness under a song of Omac’s composition–something about “make peace with your sacred parts”– but considering her penchant for penning new gospel music (and teaching French people to sing it!) one supposes it couldn’t be helped. It was less interesting musically than the Spanish pieces, but Omac’s self-deprecating and funny personality, and the occasionally astonishing vocal acrobatics that suggested she possessed so much more than she was revealing to us, kept the performance alive.

For new fans of Omac, and certainly for those of us for whom Baez is and will ever be the flow’r of them all, the concert was too short. It took considerable effort on the part of management to pry some of the more ardent fans away from the stage, even with the promise of free re-admission to the evening’s second performance. If Yoshi’s can deliver like that regularly, we might stuff ourselves into a cocktail dress and hang out there more often.

Read more from Larissa Archer at her blog, larissaarcher.com.

Howard Swain (left), Jeri Lynn Cohen, Amy Resnick, and Patrick Russell in "Body Awareness"

As befits the first play by a young, promising playwright, Annie Baker’s Body Awareness, performing at the Aurora Theatre, is ambitious, spry, inquisitive, and restless. Before launching Baker’s award-studded career, Body Awareness appeared in the 2007 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, which showcased two playwrights who would go on to win Obies: Baker and Samuel D. Hunter. Five years later, the play returns under the direction of Joy Carlin, who balances the script’s constant intellectual and physical dynamism by keeping it zipping about, like a juggler circling on a unicycle.

The play, set on the campus of a Vermont small college, has two plots. The first deals with a lesbian couple—Phyllis (Amy Resnick), a feminist professor, and her partner, Joyce (Jeri Lynn Cohen)—struggling with their marriage and Jared (Patrick Russell), Joyce’s adult son who has Asperger’s Syndrome. And the second stems from the couple’s hosting a male photographer (Howard Swain) who specializes in nude photos of women. Out of this situation, great philosophical questions clash: feminism versus patriarchal ownership, rationalism versus semi-mystic spiritualist hedonism, and the body versus the mind.

Baker’s characters tend to fall neatly along a spectrum, spending most scenes conscripting grand ideas into their personal quarrels. They all seem obsessed with who is “right” or what is “the right thing to do.” But the play’s purpose seems to be in humorously displaying the curious juxtapositions of contemporary life, and not trying to fix them. At one point, a character exclaims in disbelief, “A goy teaching a Jew how to Shabbas. On a Tuesday.” The audience laughs.

The performance and design of the play is solid. Cohen, Resnick, Russell, and Swain deserve praise for eschewing caricature while flirting with strong and comic physical characterizations. Kent Dorsey’s set successfully distinguishes, within a small stage and without moving much furniture, the plays’ five different settings. (But why does the bedroom have no pillows?)

Carlin puts the play’s script at the fore. She keeps the tempo high, conscripting all other production elements to maintaining a clip. The play’s classical wordiness (major actions are described, occurring offstage; characters frequently explain ambiguous stage activities instead of letting them stand for themselves) encourages this directorial choice, but that doesn’t ameliorate the chaos and the restlessness sparked by the script’s numerous philosophical contests. Carlin makes no choice to highlight one thought or through-line over another, leaving them all to compete with each other, creating an aura of both breathlessness and immobility, and deflating the ultimate resolution.

Despite this, the play is clever, nuanced, and intriguing. Body Awareness swims along, bringing plenty of comedy (and entertainment) to each scene. Though Baker excels at constructing humorous pairings of people and philosophy, her point isn’t the comedy of those arrangements. Instead, she is about the unity of opposites, the OK-ness in their existing together. Baker, in her typically neat way, sums up these thoughts in the play’s final scene, when one character reads from a book about how the body and mind are one, how we must expand our sense of the mind to include the body. Baker’s graceful implication is that such awareness creates true unity.

Body Awareness runs through March 11 at the Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley.

Meredith Maran (Lisa Keating Photography)

A Theory of Small Earthquakes (Soft Skull Press; 352 pages) is the first novel by award-winning author Meredith Maran. Known for her several nonfiction books, including My Lie: A True Story of False Memory (2010), Dirty: A Search for Answers Inside America’s Teenage Drug Epidemic (2003) and Class Dismissed: A Year in the Life of an American High School, a Glimpse Into the Heart of a Nation (2000), Maran worked on her story of love, friendship and family for eight years (“from start to publication”).

Humorous and heartfelt, and breezy yet serious, her story of the long and evolving relationship between two young women – bisexual Alison Rose and gay Zoe — serves as the book’s anchor, to which Maran tethers such themes as the politics of the lesbian community, the long road to becoming a working writer or artist, and the trials of trying to get pregnant, among other things. Told through Alison’s eyes, A Theory of Small Earthquakes is also an honest account of a young woman heeding her instincts about who she is and what she wants out of life. Doing so takes Alison and the reader to unexpected places, making Maran’s protagonist appealingly complex. Sometimes she acts like a heel; sometimes she’s noble. But she is, like all of us, trying to figure things out as best she can.

The novel deftly evokes, too, a particular time and place: the Bay Area from the ‘80s through 2005, with the focus on the East Bay and a community of progressive people – some of whom we now would call “creatives” – unafraid to redefine what’s possible: namely, a society that allows for same sex parents and expands upon the concept of what a loving family looks like.

We talked over email with Maran, who lives in North Oakland with her wife, about her new book.

ZYZZYVA: When we meet Alison and Zoe, they’re both undergraduates, and that allows you to have some fun depicting political correctness on college campuses in the early ‘80s. But you do so with some tenderness. Can you tell me what you found insufferable about that mind set as well as what you found reaffirming?

Meredith Maran: Oh, the hours of our lives we’ll never get back, sitting in all those meetings and doing all that “criticism/self-criticism” and examining each other’s cervices and voting on which sexual orientation to adopt. Recently, while shopping at Berkeley Bowl, I ran into one of my Berkeley Women’s Health Collective “sisters” who went lesbian in the 1980s. As she introduced me to her husband, it gave me a little frisson to realize there are at least 20 women in Berkeley, including me, who are undoubtedly better acquainted with her cervix than he is.

But you’re right; I have affectionate memories of those times. Smashing monogamy and growing out my armpit hair was, um, liberating while it lasted. And I don’t find the self-righteousness of that era any more insufferable than the passion and dogmatism of any other. One possible exception is the Occupy movement, which I adore for its insistence on refusing authority, which goes beyond questioning it.

Z: Sexuality in your novel is a fluid concept: It has to do with Alison heeding her physical desire, and in this sense being true to herself, despite how upsetting this may be for others. Why do you think this sort of malleability is so threatening to some?

MM: Indulge me my slightly roundabout answer. Which is, in fact, a question.

About year before I “went gay,” I took my young sons to Gay Pride (undoubtedly to prepare them, and myself, for the team-switching to come). Being an unrepentant commie, I’d taught them about the economic bases of racism and sexism and worker oppression and war. So we were standing on the corner of Market and Castro, surrounded by drag queens and bears and leathermen with picket signs, and my five-year-old said, “I know rich people make money off bad attitudes about women and black people and workers. But Mommy—how do rich people make money off bad attitudes about gay people?” My Marxism failed me. I had no idea what to say.

Fast-forward five years, to 1992. Sons and girlfriend and I are watching a Clinton/Gore rally. I get my first good look at Gore, and I blurt, “He’s kinda hot.” (If you’re questioning my judgment as a mother and an assessor of hotness, you’re not alone.) Younger son, then 12, scowls. “Mom,” he says, “it’s so annoying that you’re bi.”

If anyone knows why fluid sexuality is so annoying to large sections of the human race, please explain. I’ll pass your answer on to my grandkids.

Z: Your novel isn’t just about sexuality being fluid, though. It’s also about how we can love people in deep but different ways over time. Can you talk a little bit more about that and how this plays out in your book?

MM: In what was once referred to as “the dyke community,” being best friends with your ex-lover was practically a membership requirement. It never happened to me—undoubtedly because 33 years in the heterosexual community trained me to shed my exes, not go on vacations and spend Thanksgivings with them.

But it always amazed me, watching my lesbian friends’ relationships morph from friendship to romance to dyke drama to connections that defied labels. When the lesbian baby boom came along, parenthood and family made those constellations even more expansive and complicated. I loaned that tortured intimacy to Alison and Zoe as an homage to those brave, wacky pioneers who struck out to explore the outer relationship frontiers.

Z: The particular world you depict in the novel – of well-educated, progressive, creative types living in Oakland and Berkeley, who’ve formed unconventional but loving families – does that world still thrive today, or are you in some ways writing an elegy for a distinctive way of life that’s perhaps on the wane because of, say, a rotten economy and high cost of living?

MM: Elegy! That’s the word I was looking for.

Actually, the rotten economy seems to be leading to return to that way of life, only in reverse. Instead of smashing the nuclear family, financial constraints are forcing multiple generations of families to live together.

That said, the commune lives, at least in my North Oakland ‘hood. When I moved here in 1989, there was a “group house” across the street. Twenty-three years later, it’s still a group house. But as the economy has tanked, its ever-shifting residents have become older and older.

Z: Tell me more about your novel’s title. How does it relate to the story of Zoe, Alison, and Mark, the man with whom Alison makes a life?

MM: Don’t you hate it when writers say, “It just came to me?” Sorry, but the title just came to me. After several dozen other titles had come and gone. (The book took eight years from start to publication, so there was no big hurry.)

The phrase stuck with me, so I deconstructed it (as Alison’s Wimmin’s Studies teacher would say) and saw some obvious links: the story is set in the Bay Area, and the turning point of the novel comes as a result of the ’89 Loma Prieta quake, and Alison has built her family on a fault line of secrets and lies.

What amuses me most about the title is that it’s based on the actual theory—both scientific and urban-mythological—that small earthquakes release pressure on fissures, thereby diminishing the odds of a big one. During the years I’ve been writing the novel, that theory has been discredited, resurrected, and discredited again, but those of us who live here continue to cling to it, whether it’s true or not. Which is pretty much how Alison lives her life: believing what she wishes were true, and trying to convince everyone around her to do the same.

Z: How much of your personal life informs the novel? I’m thinking the insight into the life of a freelancer, to take one example, is informed from your own experience as a longtime journalist. But I’m guessing your own family’s formation is reflected in the novel, too?

MM: Last first: yes, my family is “nontraditional,” which, I’ve learned, is marketing-speak for “gay parented.” It’s also, sadly, all too conventional, in that I’m divorced from my kids’ father, never a good thing for a child.

And yes, I had a great time avenging the ridiculousness of the freelance writing life by making Alison an underpaid, underappreciated journalist, subject to the whims of the marketplace. (What other kind of journalist is there?) Writing queries for her also proved quite useful: I actually ended up pitching a few of Alison’s story ideas to my magazine editors.

Honestly, the aspect of my personal life that was most gratifying to write was the paean to my beloved North Oakland neighborhood, where I’ve lived for the past 28 years—and where Alison and Mark, oddly enough, bought a house much like my own. As my elderly black neighbors die or move to nursing homes, the neighborhood is changing, and despite diversity correctitudes, America is increasingly segregated, and I fear there won’t be a truly mixed neighborhood like this one used to be ever again, anywhere.

Z: A Theory of Small Earthquakes is imminently entertaining. I would even call it a “beach read.” Do you think there’s a need to tell these sorts of stories in a straight-ahead, approachable way?

MM: A beach read! Thanks for the ultimate accolade, Oscar. And thanks to Soft Skull Press for taking a chance on a book that, ironically, is pretty straight (meaning commercial) (we hope) relative to the rest of their list.

I had no deliberate intention to make the novel, dare I say, accessible. I did what I think every author does: I wrote the kind of book I like to read. That’s just who I am.

Like Alison, I’m your normal, average, dime-a-dozen bisexual North Oakland freelance writer—and, in my case, grandmother.

As part of the book tour for A Theory of Small Earthquakes, Meredith Maran will be in conversation with Terry McMillan at 6:30 p.m. on February 22 at the Hillside Club in Berkeley; with filmmaker Johnny Symons at Book Passage in Corte Madera at 7 p.m. on February 23; at Copperfield’s in Sebastopol at 6 p.m. on February 24; at Capitola Book Café in Capitola at 7:30 p.m. on February 29 (a benefit for WomenCare); at a Great Good Place for Books in Oakland at 7 p.m. on March 8; with Michelle Richmond at the Booksmith in San Francisco at 7:30 p.m. on March 15; and at the Why There Are Words literary reading series in Sausalito at 7 p.m. on April 12.

Line up and line out
says the moonwhittle.
Loss is the ring on our finger, the bright gem
compassing every step as we drop down.
Believe in what you know and you’ll go blind.

Experts doubt its authenticity.

Without heat, this pace, never an illogical leap
But always capable of
A quick rhetorical twist:

He says, We are not here to disturb the trees,
Only to win them over
With complete understanding.

The slow loris asks these questions:
Why do we need a resurrection?
Does the fruit fall or leap from the trees?

When I am sleeping,
Who are you, without my attention?
He answers,

The body is a fruit you can’t peel,
Life is energy organized
Into stillness.

Mostly stillness. The night room,
The fruit bats, the liquid giraffe,
The siamungs, the orangutans

Which are dangerous. The zoo,
Is not about hunger, but
About heat.

He made journeys into the countryside where he had grown up, hoping to reconnect himself. On one of his outings, he found a trapper gutting a bear. An idea came to him. He asked the hunter for the gall bladder of the bear.

My father put his tongue to the gall bladder. It tasted like the war. He smiled grimly. He could not fail. He could not turn back, because behind him were the Japanese army, the North Korean army, poverty, and abuse. He could not rest. This bile would be his medicine. He wrapped up the gall bladder and froze it. Whenever he felt he was getting too content, sleeping an hour too much, smiling a second too long, he would hunger for the taste of it, bitter, and clinging to his tongue.

As children, we learned that Daddy would have died if he had not had the bile: the bile reminded him of the misery and bitterness of suffering.

What I now realize is that the bitterness stayed inside him and traveled from his tongue, down into his belly, where it now churns.

Tradition runs strong in our family. We are Korean Americans, a strong line of warriors, descended from the Mongols. We are modern Genghis Khans, quick tempered but passionate, with chronicles of suffering living in our veins. We are nomadic, settling in a country that severed our mother country in half, with a tourniquet of barbed wire, swathed in khaki green.

Suffering is so much a part of the Korean psyche that we have given it a word, Han. It is a particular suffering, a sense of helplessness against overwhelming odds, a feeling of total abandonment. This word is part of what we call ourselves and our mother country, Hankook sahrahm, Hankook nahrah; Korean people, Korean land. This Han is silent and noble. It is our code and mantra.

On our Sunday hikes, my father brings up the rear. My brother Eugene, the Boy Scout, bounds up the hill on light bunny feet. Safe on the hiking trails of the San Gabriel Mountains, I try to enjoy the views beyond the silt of smog, but Father barks at us, that there is an army behind us. We quicken our pace. There are sharp-toothed men who want to kill us. They have shotguns, horsehair hats. They ride bareback, puff on long pipes, smoke opium, stab each other in the back.

Eugene runs up the hill out of earshot. Father, Mother, and I drip with effort, and we push ourselves to each crest out of this ancestral fear.

“Eugene! Wait for us!” I shout. I don’t see him anymore, and he doesn’t answer. The path bends mercilessly in the chaparral heat.

“Forget about him. He never wait. Stupid boy, never cares about us,” says Father.

Mother hits Father on the arm. “Leave him alone. You are bossy, maybe he’s running away from you.”

Father glares. Mother doubles her pace so that her shoes kick dust back at us over the switchback.

Up ahead, I imagine Eugene’s already arrived at the destination, a shady plateau of pine trees. He’s taking a long sip of water from the water fountain up there, and drinking in the views of Pasadena. He may even see us, a short and irritated snake making its way.

We gather in the kitchen to eat an early lunch. Our bodies, sweaty with the recent Sunday excursion, stick to the vinyl kitchen seats. Father looks straight at Eugene, points his finger and bellows, “You never wait for us!”

Eugene rolls his eyes and says, “Dad, you never give us a break.”

Father takes a breath and continues. “I am going to tell you about myself, your father. I had hard life, nothing to look forward to, just running away. Eugene, you run to something, like nothing pushing. We go hiking, you go away. You don’t wait for your own family? We have to enjoy together!”

Eugene replied, “You were just slow, and I waited for you at the top. What’s the big deal?” My brother kicks me in the leg.

I chime in. “Dad, please don’t worry so much. It’s not so complicated. Eugene just is in better shape. Don’t take it so seriously. We get it!” (Please, please do not tell the story again.)

“I gave up my dreams long ago and decided to have children instead. You don’t know your father, what I do for you! You know, I have to teach you good lesson, so you will never forget.” This sends my father into a synopsis of his life. We have it memorized.

“I don’t even know if my brother is alive. He fought against the Japanese, and they took everything, burned our house. I was five years old. But our family was a hero family, so our village supported us,” says Father. “Then the Korean War came, and my brother, he joined the Communists. Everyone hated us then. We had to burn his pictures. Still, we survived.”

So it was with my mother as well. “Your mommy, her family had to leave North Korea. They took only what they could carry. They put the money and gold and jewelry inside their clothes, inside the silk linings. Rich people became poor in one night!”

Then Mother adds, “But we were smart. Instead of eating only one bowl of rice a day, we mixed it with barley, so we ate a little more often. We always ate, even though sometimes we had to sell our clothes. Your grandma’s wedding dress, someone else owns it now.”

“Eugene, you are going to learn,” says Father. He nods at my mother, points at the refrigerator. My mother takes out a recycled plastic Safeway bag. We reuse plastic bags often, and it could contain anything, a box of ice cream or a package of dried seaweed. It does not send an alarm, but Eugene raises an eyebrow and I lean forward.

“We have something for you. It will help you like it helped your father.”

Eugene nods, distracted. “Enough with the story. I get it! I have heard it all before. You had a shitty childhood …”

“Don’t say shit! I don’t think you understand. I took the gall bladder of a bear and drank the bile! It reminded me of what I was working away from. I was working so I would have a better future. So I would have a better future than my past. My past is bile! You have to learn about your father. Who you are, you know?”

“You have to be tough, too,” comments Mother.

“You will learn, too,” says Father.

Mother hands the plastic bag to me, and goes to get a plate from the cupboard. The bag hisses open. Inside is a Ziploc bag, and inside it is a piece of flesh. It looks slimy like the innards of Foster Farm chickens. But this is larger than any chicken liver I’ve ever seen. It is pear-shaped and bruised in tones of blue and gray and brown. It is dying, deflating, defecating on itself. I fully expect it to pulse, but it lies still. It smells like a goat has parked itself in our kitchen.

Father gestures to me. “Open it! Take it out! Put it on the plate!” I take out the Ziploc bag and place it gingerly on the plate. Is this some kind of sick sushi?

“Open it!” snaps Mother.

I recoil. Mother and Father are on some screwed-up Old World kick, and I duck out of view.

“I won’t make you drink it like I did. You’re not like me. You will taste it, that’s all you need to do. But you will learn.”

I can only tell you the before and the after, because I did not watch them feed Eugene the bile.

I leave the room. I hear my mother unwrap the gall bladder and snag it with chopsticks. I hear Eugene’s footsteps, my father’s commands, the rush of water from the faucet. I imagine the bile as it fills Eugene’s body with poison and drains his face of all the pink flesh, leaving it pinched and brittle.

In the hallway outside the kitchen, I am surrounded by childhood awards and family pictures: Father smokes thin white cigarettes, leaning against a white tree trunk with dark gray leaves. He is wearing black pants and a white undershirt. He is lean and tanned. His shoulders are held back at attention, and his skin is taut, his eyes open wide. His gaze rests on something soft and gentle. He is at the point of remembering…

There’s a picture of me at Disneyland, holding an ice cream cone. My father has no pictures of himself as a child, and maybe that furthers the distance between us, because we have no proof that he was ever a child. He was born a jaw-clenching, wide-eyed man who drank bile.

Eugene brushes past me in the hall. “Move,” he says.

I move. “Hey.”

He looks up and past me.

“Never mind,” I say. There are no words of healing.

In this way, we inherit suffering. But the bile does not strengthen Eugene. It flows within him, as it did within my father, but it does not give him strength and resolve. Only resentment.

Long after the gallbladder has become a solid rock of ice next to the ice cream, Father asks me, “Should you taste the bile, too?”

I want to shout, “No!” but I don’t. I want to tell him that I think this is sick and perverted, but I don’t. I know what I have to say. Like my father, I know how to survive.

I know the answer to this. My father coached me a million times.

“I’m a Hankook sahrahm. I understand why I need this bile, because I already have this bile.”

Father nods. He walks out of the kitchen, his feet squeaking against the linoleum.

He leaves a wake of anger in his path, and my mother and I sponge it up. We don’t want him to return and refuel; it’s easier when he does not see what he does to us, even though I think he should. I sit on the stool and stare out the windows into the cul de sac.

Mother scurries around, washing dishes. “You know your father, he really lives just for you. He really loves you, but it comes out all wrong,” she apologizes. I stare at her Han figure.

I walk into the backyard and stare at the wall, covered in honeysuckle. The scent is sweet, and the drunken bees lumber slowly through the vines. The sun beats against me, and my plastic sandals mold against my feet and stick slightly to the concrete path as they make “smuck-smuck” sounds on the patio pavers.

I’ve walked into a fireplace and I just want a little relief. I wonder what would happen if I could disappear. I wonder how mad my father would be. The neighbors’ wall looms just ahead.

I drag one of the backyard benches over to the wall, and I sit in its shade. I cannot stay sitting for long. I stand on the bench to look over the wall into the neighbors’ backyard. The Andersons are away on vacation, and we are on neighborhood watch.

Inside the house, I hear my father yelling at Eugene. Doors slam. My mother makes kitchen noises, the clattering of dishes on countertop tile and porcelain sink. All this, amidst the bees and heat. I can either go inside the cool, poisonous house or melt outside.

My legs twitch. I’ve been standing still, stretched over the wall, and I ache. I have also been holding my breath. I let out a desperate exhalation. The Andersons’ lot is on a higher elevation than ours; it would not be a long fall from the wall. I climb the wall slowly, so as not to anger the venomous bees, but I’m stung before I swing my leg over the top and fall into the Andersons’ yard.

I limp to one of the lounge chairs and sit down. There’s a welt on my leg with a stinger pulsating in the middle of it. I pull it out, but the pain is still there. A dark part of me wells up and receives that pain. Out of my numbness arises the cathartic pain of a bee sting. It loosens the knot in my belly. I can breathe a little now. If I focus on the pain enough, the knot travels a little up my throat.

The person under discussion, Melinda Hopkins, seemed like a fairly standard California and Stanford beauty, except for the shy way she had of not meeting the eyes when you looked at her. The population tended to look at her. Flaxen hair with almost no wave in it; tennis shorts on campus or, for more formal occasions, white tennis dresses; an unusual smoldering thing going on in those eyes that did not meet mine and, according to stricken garrulous Fred, did not meet his, either, as he loomed above her or squirmed beneath her. He said she had a talent for computers, was working on advanced programs for import-export purposes. Even when she made love, or a kind of love, looking into the eyes of others, it was a distraction from her interior life. “Bad, bad person,” Fred repeated.

“She did harm to you, maybe,” I said, a true buddy, “but that’s because you chose to fall. Let yourself get done to.”

“Bad.”

“Hey, come off it. Let’s just say what kind of person she is has yet to be determined. Just, far as you’re concerned, it was a bad deal, okay?”

Closing out my buddy duties for the spring quarter.

Melinda, graduating on one of those glorious June days, kissed her dear ones goodbye, kissing Fred and then turning to me with the same lightning brush against the mouth.

Her father lived in Belgium (sometimes she saw him during the summers); her mother was an actress in New York. It wasn’t convenient for her parents to show up for graduation ceremonies. “They’ve been there, done that,” she explained. “Anyway, Mom is an ingénue, working at it in New York, still the ingénue.” She was smiling more than just at one corner of her mouth, enough smile to assure Fred and me that she saw the humor in her mother’s career. “But she’s not forty yet—well, maybe—so why shouldn’t she play twenty-two-year olds?”

I asked Melinda if she was interested in acting or modeling, and she said they were fifth and sixth on her list of interests, after sheep-ranching in Australia, running garage sales, knitting multicolored skull-caps for Hassidim, and—her serious talent—writing computer programs. “But that’s lonely sometimes,” she said. “So maybe I should get into the ingénue business, like Mom.”

Clever Melinda seemed to have some humor or at least irony. Sad young people often develop this as a useful device.

“I’d like it if you stayed in Palo Alto with me,” Fred said, ever the hopeless nerd. “We could get married?” It was a question. He wanted me as a witness.

She wouldn’t tell him where his idea could be found on her list of career alternatives, but she puffed out her cheeks in a throw-up gesture. She didn’t like it when Fred talked dirty to her, and as to tenure with an untenured professor — hadn’t been there, didn’t want to do that.

“I’m sure Stanford is a fine school with an excellent reputation,” she said. “And I love the architecture, too, all those beige buildings, that time in the computer lab, those rich kids with their fathers living in Belgium or someplace.”

Fred had given me the news and a few years later told me she was getting out, maybe hadn’t been raped by the matronly truck-driver population of her federal prison, and now what should he do? Surround her with caring, pay for therapy, woo her with his kindness into a new life program that might also include Fred?

“Stay away,” I said.

“Can’t,” he said (wailing).

“Then why are you asking me?”

As it turned out, it was I who had the chance to avoid contact with this bad-luck Melinda, formerly of Stanford University. She called from San Francisco, where I live, and said: “Beached here, man.”

Yes, I would take her to dinner. Probably I also wanted to see what twenty-two months in a federal prison looked like on this fresh-faced, shy-eyed young computer programmer.

I’m doing a bit of landscaping, picking up one stone at a time from our gravel driveway, carrying it to a large tin washtub, dropping it in, and going back for the next. I’m working hard, but showily. I widen my eyes like a silent film star. I hold up a clear piece of quartz to be admired, put it in my mouth, stuff it into one cheek. My mother appears and removes it. She steps back out of the frame, but I’m speaking emphatically now—you can see this in my gestures—and she returns, drops the stone into the tub. The whole thing lasts about four minutes and I never stop talking.

I’m prettier as a child than I’ve turned out, towheaded back then and dolled up for the camera. My flyaway bangs are pasted down with water and held on one side by a rhinestone barrette shaped like a bow. Whenever I turn my head, the barrette blinks in the sunlight. My little hand sweeps over my tub of rocks. All this, I could be saying, all this will be yours someday.

Or something else entirely. The point of the movie isn’t the words themselves. What my parents valued was their extravagant abundance, their inexhaustible flow.

A few years later, Mom read us the old fairy tale in which two sisters return from the well speaking in flowers and jewels (the younger) or toads and snakes (the older.) The image in my head then was from this same movie, of my mother reaching into my mouth for the glassy stone, my words falling from my lips as gems.

Still, there were occasions on which I had to be stopped. When you think of two things to say, pick your favorite and only say that, my mother suggested once, as a tip to polite social behavior, and the rule was later modified to one in three. My father would come to my bedroom door each night to wish me happy dreams and I would speak without taking a breath, trying desperately to keep him in my room with only my voice. I would see his hand on the doorknob, the door beginning to swing shut. I have something to say! I’d tell him, and the door would stop midway.

Start in the middle then, he’d answer, a shadow with the hall light behind him, and tired in the evenings the way grown-ups are. The light would reflect in my bedroom window like a star you could wish on.

Skip the beginning. Start in the middle.

So the middle of my story comes in the winter of 1996. By then, we’d long since dwindled into the family that old home movie foreshadowed: me, my mother, and, unseen but evident behind the camera, my father. In 1996, ten years had passed since I’d last seen my brother, seventeen since my sister had disappeared. The middle of this story is all about their absence, though if I didn’t tell you so, you wouldn’t notice. By 1996, I was no longer at home myself. Weeks went by in which I hardly thought of them.

Leap year. Year of the fire rat. President Clinton had just been re- elected; it would all end in tears. Kabul had fallen to the Taliban. The Siege of Sarajevo had ended. Charles had recently divorced Diana.

Hale-Bopp came swinging into our sky. Claims of a Saturn-like object in the comet’s wake first surfaced that November. Dolly, the cloned sheep, and Deep Blue, the chess playing computer program, were superstars. There was evidence of life on Mars. The Saturn-like object in Hale-Bopp’s tail was maybe an alien spaceship. In May of ’97, thirty-nine people would kill themselves as a prerequisite to climbing aboard.

Against this backdrop, how ordinary I look! In 1996, I was twenty- two years old, meandering through my fourth year at the University of California, at Davis, and still maybe only a junior or maybe a senior, but so thoroughly uninterested in the niceties of units or requirements that I wouldn’t be graduating anytime soon. I had no particular ambitions beyond being either widely admired or stealthily influential—I was torn between the two. It hardly mattered, as no major seemed to lead reliably to either.

My parents, who were still paying my expenses, found me aggravating. My mother was often aggravated those days. It was something new for her, analeptic doses of righteous aggravation. She was rejuvenated by it. She’d recently announced that she was through being translator and go-between for me and my father; he and I had hardly spoken since. I don’t remember minding. My father was a college professor himself and a pedant to the bone. Every exchange contained a lesson, like the pit in a cherry. To this day, the Socratic method makes me want to bite someone.

Autumn came suddenly that year, like a door opening. One morning I was bicycling to class when a large flock of Canada geese passed overhead. I couldn’t see them or much of anything else, but I heard the jazzy honking above me. There was a tule fog off the fields and I was wrapped inside it, pedaling through clouds. Tule fogs are not like other fogs, not spotty or drifting, but fixed and substantial. Probably anyone would have felt the risk of moving quickly through an unseen world, but as a child, I had a particular penchant for slapstick and mishap, so I took the full thrill from it.

I felt polished by the wet air and maybe just a little migratory myself, just a little wild. This meant I might flirt a bit in the library if I sat next to anyone flirtable or I might daydream in class. I often felt wild back then; I enjoyed the feeling, but nothing had ever come of it.

At lunchtime I grabbed something, probably grilled cheese, let’s say it was grilled cheese, in the school cafeteria. I was in the habit of leaving my books on the chair next to me where they could be quickly moved if someone interesting came by, but would discourage the uninteresting. At twenty-two I had the callowest possible definition of interesting and, by the measure of my own calipers, was far from interesting myself.

A couple was sitting at a table near me and the woman’s voice gradually rose to the point where I was forced to pay attention. “You want some fucking space?” she said. She was wearing a short blue T-shirt and a necklace with a glass pendant of an angelfish. Long, dark hair twisted messily down her back. She stood and cleared the table with one motion of her arm. She had beautiful biceps; I remember wishing I had arms like hers.

Dishes fell to the floor and shattered; catsup and cola spilled and mixed in the breakage. There must have been music in the background, because there’s always music in the background now, our whole lives soundtracked (and most of it too ironic to be random. I’m just saying.), but honestly I don’t remember. Maybe there was only a sweet silence and the spit of grease on the grill.

“How’s that?” the woman asked. “Don’t tell me to be quiet. I’m just making more space for you.” She pushed the table itself over, swung it to one side. “Better?” She raised her voice. “Can everyone please leave the room so my boyfriend has more space? He needs a fucking lot of space.” She slammed her chair down onto the pile of catsup and dishes. More sounds of breakage and a sudden waft of coffee.

The rest of us were frozen—forks halfway to our mouths, spoons dipped in our soups, the way people were found after the eruption of Vesuvius. “Don’t do this, baby,” the man said once, but she was doing it and he didn’t bother to repeat himself. She moved to another table, empty except  for a tray with dirty dishes. There she methodically broke everything that could be broken, threw everything that could be thrown. A saltshaker spun across the floor to my foot.

There was a moment’s pause as the door closed. Then the woman turned on the rest of us. “What are you losers looking at?” She picked up one of the chairs and I couldn’t tell if she was going to put it back or throw it. I don’t think she’d decided.

A campus policeman arrived. He approached me cautiously, hand on his holster. Me! Standing above my toppled table and chair, still holding my harmless glass of milk and my plate with the harmless half-eaten grilled cheese sandwich. “Just put it down, honey,” he said, “and sit for a minute.” Put it down where? Sit where? Nothing in my vicinity was upright but me. “We can talk about this. You can tell me what’s going on. You’re not in any trouble yet.”

“Not her,” the woman behind the counter told him. She was a large woman, and old—maybe forty—with a beauty mark on her upper lip and eyeliner collecting in the corners of her eyes. You all act like you own the place, she’d said to me once, on another occasion, when I sent back a burger for more cooking. But you just come and go. You don’t even think how I’m the one who stays.

“The tall one,” she told the cop. She pointed, but he was paying no attention, so intent on me and whatever my next move would be.

“Calm down,” he said again, soft and friendly. “You’re not in any trouble yet.” He stepped forward, passing right by the woman with the braid and the chair. I saw her eyes behind his shoulder.

“Never a policeman when you need one,” she said to me. She smiled and it was a nice smile. Big white teeth. “No rest for the wicked.” She hoisted the chair over her head. “No soup for you!” She launched it away from me and the cop, toward the door. It landed on its back.

When the policeman turned to look, I dropped my plate and my fork. I honestly didn’t mean to. The fingers of my left hand just unclenched all of a sudden. The noise spun the cop back to me.

I was still holding my glass, half full of milk. I raised it a little, as if proposing a toast. “Don’t do it,” he said, a whole lot less friendly now. “I am so not playing around here. Don’t you fucking test me.”

And I threw the glass onto the floor. It broke and splashed milk over one of my shoes and up into my sock. I didn’t just let it go. I threw that glass down as hard as I could.