Letters from Maude 

Dear Court Magistrate,

            Last Saturday (a gorgeous fall day, the leaves just starting to turn) found me downtown for our annual Festival of the Arts:  the Fraternal Order of Police was well-represented.  I believe I saw at least three members of your squadron—or do you prefer “force”—in full regalia.  I put seven (7) quarters ($1.75 according to my calculations, and, with any luck, yours) in the parking meter at Fourth and Chester, then ventured forth into what can only be described as a sensory phantasmagoria.  The only downside of this yearly homage to the wasted corpse of culture, in my opinion, is the fact that every single piece of art on display was accompanied by a price tag.  Meaning, commodified.  (Another conversation, for another time). 

You can imagine my horror upon returning to my car, lurid watercolor of someone else’s lover stowed beneath my arm (fully clothed, imagination stretched to the lees) to find a yellow slip of violence beneath my left windshield wiper (inoperative since August due to a dry season.  Thank God I don’t farm.  You?).  The officer who issued the ticket was a one Robert Hanson, Badge No. 48, and the time of issuance, 3:41 p.m.  My mother gave me a watch for my birthday and I am certain beyond a SHADOW OF A DOUBT (my husband just taught me the glories of Caps Lock, so pardon the virtual “scream”) that my watch read 12:08 (he also knows a thing or two about bolding text) when I disembarked my car and entered the fray of Saleable Art.

            Ma’am, this is the cold, hard, truth:  the going rate for keeping a motor vehicle in a stationary position on one of our city streets for 30 minutes is 25 cents.  Seven quarters, then, according to my calculations, bought me three (3) hours and thirty (30) minutes.  If I left at 12:08 and returned at 3:41, I was gone for a grand total of three (3) hours and thirty-three (33) minutes.  Shit.

            I won’t attempt to edit this to suit my purposes, which is to evade payment for said ticket, totaling (before late costs and administrative fees related thereto) $50.00, a penalty which I believe is unrepresentative of anything resembling real costs.

            Proposal:  I will be more conscientious in the future, if you will police this town in the light of sanity & reason forever, my inherent disgust in the police-state of America notwithstanding.  This ultimatum includes, on your end, the permanent cessation of racial profiling and the institution of a flat-line bond to be set for all apprehended suspects, as you are in the habit of quadrupling it for persons belonging to certain ethnic groups to which you attribute inherent criminality.  I do not belong to one of those groups, but several of my closest friends and in-laws do, and their nervous glances sadden me.

Sincerely,

Maude Parker

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Dear Mr. Riselinski,

Thank you for the opportunity to air my thoughts regarding the first and, God Willing, last, act of “delinquency” on behalf of my daughter Bonnie Sue, currently an 8th grader at Benjamin R. Potts Middle School in Eastlake Village, where you serve as vice principal.  When I called to set up an appointment with you I was told by your personal secretary (her name escapes me:  the one with the cascading hairdo?) to first write a letter and that you’d call me if a meeting was merited.  I’ll let you be the judge.   

            As you know, Bonnie Sue received an Office Detention last week, for putting a rumor that had been silently flaring throughout the 8th grade into colloquial terms, regarding the sexual orientation of one of her classmates.  The entire incident in which she is implicated boils down to the following scene:  upon hearing a debate over the lifestyle choice of her classmate Vanessa in the first-floor bathroom of your school, my daughter emerged from one of the stalls (pardon the familiarity but I’d like to render this scene as viscerally as possible) to utter (I’ve no doubt her timing was exquisite) the following words:  “I think she likes chicks,” before proceeding to the sink.

Mr. Riselinski, where do you think Bonnie Sue learned to speak her mind without fear of losing recess privileges?  Hint:  it wasn’t at school, where she has been told by several of your faculty that one word out of her mouth is one word too many!             

After her scourging, by you, she came home in tears:  “Mom, the whole school knows she’s gay,” she said to me.  Ron.  She was beside herself.  And do you know what?  I trust that when my daughter comes home from school and flings anguished words in my direction, she is not only speaking the truth, but bearing witness to a historical moment in which what she sees with her own eyes, and what she speaks with her own voice, is reprehensible to a larger social body, whose social mandates are enforced by the likes of you.  It’s not easy being a witness to the truth. 

Nor is it easy to be oneself, if one is fortunate enough to even know who one is. 

Those who do know who they are, are capable of betraying themselves as circumstances may demand in the workplace, home, or public eye, but those who don’t have it much worse, as they are betraying a stillborn self.  Ron, into which camp to most thespians fall? 

Surely, as a vice-principal, you are required to step out of your comfort zone in the variety of duties you perform, so I hope you don’t find it inappropriate for me to direct these questions (rhetorical) to you. 

The war has not yet been won.  Daily, I have to make the choice between

being loved and being myself.  Have you ever had to make that choice?   Have you ever had to choose between the roles of prude or nympho, without even being aware they were roles?  The show is over, in my home, hence Bonnie Sue’s “outburst,” for which she was castigated, and will continue to be, until she agrees to squelch her true self or someone stands up for her.  As she is incapable of not being herself, advocacy is our only hope.

I would appreciate a swift erasure of Bonnie Sue’s punishment (yet to be served), as my daughter merely stated a fact over the tumult of multiple engaged faucets, one that, moreover, everyone in earshot already knew but did not have the courage to articulate. 

I Remain,

Maude Parker

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Dear Head Librarian,

Greetings.  I’m sure you receive many letters the contents of which resemble mine, but identification—as opposed to conflation—with a larger collective body has never bothered me.  However unfashionable a stance, I feel confident Marx would agree.

            I recently received correspondence from your library informing me that the overdue materials under the name Parker total $67.24.  This figure represents, according to the statement (not a bill proper, no), items taken out and not returned by four separate members of my family, all of whom have been, I was given to understand after placing a phone call to your branch, checking out print and audio materials under my name for the past two years:  not one of them ever bothered to open a separate account.

            I believe the crime of identity theft, a class B felony punishable by 6-20 years in the slammer and a fine of up to $10,000, followed this script: 

Family Member: “What color is that card again?”   

Circulation Librarian: “Purple.”  (“Avid Reader” rifles through purse/billfold, pretending to search for something she/he knows is not there.) 

Family Member:  “Shoot.”

Circulation Librarian (tolerant smile): “Last name?”

Your staff never said no.  They never said Let me contact Maude.  Not a single staffer ever said the easiest line in the English language to say:  library policy prohibits the use of another cardholder’s name without explicit permission via written documentation or a note in the data system.

I am well aware that no system is perfect.  Mistakes happen and are atoned for by way of late fees; I can accept this.  Allow me to gloss this cryptic statement with a disclaimer:  I’m willing to play by your rules, if you bow at the holy feet of mine. 

To answer the question I know is present in your mind:  do I know that $43 of the $67-odd dollar fine is attributed to materials presumed lost?   The three magazines (high-brow smut) and one hardcover book (Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth), I can assure you, will be soon found, at which time I expect full erasure of my debt, including any late fees assessed, in light of the action NOT taken (that of protecting your actual patron) by your staff (whose ample salaries, I need not remind you, come directly from hard-working taxpayers such as myself, as well as (ahem) the State.  

I would like to end on a note of gratitude, as the itemization you provided will help me in the recovery of these materials.  I will be forwarding the statement to members of my immediate family tomorrow, with a note that says, to wit: 

Find this shit now and return it the following day, or die.

I console myself in thinking that you and I are cut of the same cloth.  Like you, Head Librarian, I am sick of being snowed.

Best,

Maude Parker

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Professional Alibi

Dear Mr. Dorsey,

We have received a note from your primary care physician indicating that due to your multiple health conditions (which apparently include but are not limited to pleurisy and adult-onset diabetes) you do not feel fit to give a public testimony in the unsolved case of the late Sylvia Goldwell, who, as you know, was brutally murdered four years ago and the criminal investigation again launched at the behest of her eldest daughter, now a high school sophomore, with the help of Legal Aid Services and her uncle, a retired defense attorney from Walla Walla.  We received your request for a “nonstandardized deposition” via either electronic and wire communications; thank you.  This letter is to inform you that your deposition has been scheduled for next week (please observe the time, date, and location below).  If you need to reschedule please call me, executive secretary to Judge Hastings, at 334-378-2374, as soon as possible. 

Sincerely,

Judy Watts   

Why was I so nervous?  That was real question.  I hadn’t killed Sylvia:  I had just stood by, face averted, when she died.  I paced the house without pants until dawn. 

When I walked into the courthouse at 9:00 a.m. the next morning, the first thing I saw was the bailiff, snoring on a bench.  The smell of pork chops wafted through the air, and the elevator, cordoned off with emergency tape, sported a sign in childish lettering:  Out of Order.  Use Stairs. 

I had purposefully forsworn dressy clothes and was wearing an ordinary button down shirt.  When I finally reached the Judge’s chambers, my underarms were damp with sweat.  I tried squinting a lot, to give the impression of pained innocence. 

How it all, the taping of my version of the story of how a woman whom I loved half-heartedly, then not at all, was killed, went down:  me in a chair speaking into a battery operated microphone in the presence of a drowsy clerk whose lipstick seems to have been applied while making an illegal U-turn in an SUV.  I am read my rights; I tap the little toy.  “Is this thing on?” I asked.  I felt like Jimmy Hoffman, on speed. 

“Yes,” said the clerk.  “Go.”  I began. 

* * *

“There were a handful of people in my town who were really gunning for Sylvia’s mayoral election, but the majority just wanted her dead.  Sherwood, Arkansas:  population 23,100 at the time, 21,774 of whom were as white as the calcium deposit on the nail of a bride. 

“What can I say?  It was unfortunate to watch even the more progressive stanchions of democracy among us load their weapon of minor destruction—libel—with a passion that hadn’t been seen around these parts since 1989, when apple-cheeked Fanny O’Brien rose from our humble ranks to compete for Miss America, coming in 34^th place, and only because, we all concurred, her bathing suit malfunctioned at exactly the wrong moment, in exactly the wrong place, on live television. 

“Sylvia, widowed mother of two, was still somewhat young at 34, with a rather direct conversational style, in that I will prove all obstacles to be mere illusions kind of way.  She had about her person the seductiveness of a lounging mammal, and a voice that snagged on certain words, as if caught up in a biofeedback loop of ambition.”  I coughed.  This was too easy.  “Her husband had died fighting a house fire across town: the first fireman we’d lost in seven years.  Her daughters were both under five at the time, and to see the three of them clustered together at the funeral—it was raining—well, one doesn’t need to know anything about the Three Muses of classical literature to imagine that any antipathy one might have had for ‘little Sylvie,’ as the old guard called her, fled at the sight of such flagrant ruination.”  I cleared my throat.  “Then, two months later, in the fall of that year, she reemerged, a comeback kid in hot pants, in search of a cause.”

“More water, please,” I said.  I could feel a lie coming on, like an itch. 

“In the weeks that were to come,” I continued, hydrated, “I repeatedly asked myself:  what had prompted Sylvia’s change in personality?  It was as if one day she had woken up, fed the children, and, catching sight of her sallow face in the mirror, simply ascended from the undertow of grief.  She didn’t have a bachelor’s degree or professional certification in any field, yet had become quite arrogant, particularly toward persons in positions of power.  No, not arrogant,” I said, “violent, kicking the copier and yelling Holy Jesus! at Lucky’s Print Shop when her publicity fliers came out looking they’d been typeset in like pig latin.  And the questions she asked at our press conference for local veterans, returned safely from foreign shores, were an embarrassment to us all, such as ‘What was it like to watch your first child be born on a web cam?’ ”

I stopped again.  I wanted to say, “I found her complete disregard for the hierarchical strata of social relations sexy.”  It would have been the truth.  I didn’t.

“How it all,” I said sorrowfully, “the campaign against her campaign, began:  a gathering of a few rowdy men at a bar just north of town called Skeeters.  I was there having a drink with a colleague of mine from our community college in Little Rock.  Mitch taught Political Science:  I had been teaching Studio Art—painting, photography, what have you—for roughly five years.  The verbal assaults against Sylvie broke out at the neighboring table at just past eight:  ‘That hussy thinks she can reinvent the wheel.’

“Mitch and I were alarmed from the get-go, and listened in horror as the protests against Sylvia’s mayoral candidacy were laid out one by one.”  I leaned in closer to the mic.  “Let it hereby be known that the allegations against Sylvia were completely untempered by even a trace of reason and frightened me.”  It was the least I could do. 

“Hold your horses,” said the clerk, pressing the stop button.  “You gonna need kleenex?”  I frowned. 

“No,” I said.  “I am a professional.” 

“Professional what?” she said. 

“Professional . . .” I said, “professional alibi.  Please.  You’re disturbing my line of concentration.”  The clerk’s face grew peevish.  I pressed “play” again, myself.

“First and foremost, Sylvia was a woman, biologically speaking, and because she was in her 30’s, still blessed with monthly reminders of her fertility.  This was actually brought up, though in terms I do not care to repeat.  The second accusation was with regard to financials.  The concern was that she would drive the fiduciary reserves of Sherwood, which at the time had an annual budget, after payouts, of about $9,000 a year, into the ground.  I didn’t then, nor do I now, agree with Point No. Two:  Sylvia managed the books at a local sporting goods store and had good credit standing.  Maybe the men were afraid that she would write unauthorized checks upwards of $50.00 to nonprofit organizations like March of Dimes or Save our Seals.  I really have no idea.   

“Point No. Three—the noose—was the most absurd of all.  Ronnie Whitehouse, the town librarian, phrased it thus:  ‘We don’t need no pushy bitch turning our town hall meetings into tea parties.  Yes ma’am.  Whatever you say, ma’am.  Hell,’ Whitehouse finished, slamming down his Labatts, ‘no.’ 

“‘Hell no!’ ” was the resounding cry from the dozen or so men huddled over the sticky expanse of table, a sorry throwback to the time of King Arthur. 

“Needless to say, Mitch and I hightailed out of there as soon as they finished.  The following week I had a conversation with Rudy Genovese, an old high school buddy who works for UPS.  According to Rudy, there were rumors that Sylvia was conducting a private investigation of our local groups of skinheads, whom she held responsible for spray-painting defamatory messages on most flat surfaces of Sherwood, as well as telling children trying to earn a few quarters by selling lemonade on their lawns that the Lord was returning within weeks, at which time all mercenary activities would be meaningless. 

“True or false, these rumors did not help her cause, but Sylvia’s fatal error, according to Rudy, came later in her campaign, during the second round of mayoral debates—Sherwood’s version of fireside chats, only no one was crippled, and there was no fire.  I will quote Sylvia’s speech word for word:  ‘I intend,’ she said, ‘to get to the bottom of the strange incidence of dying trees in the thoroughfares of Sherwood.’

“Like, huh?  To this day, I have no idea who was tipping her off to these small injustices involving Neo-Nazi vandalism and poisoned maples.  But I was determined to find out.”  I pressed stop.  “Water,” I said.  Within seconds, the cup was in my hands. 

Looking back, I’m not even sure who handed it to me, as the clerk’s eyes were glazed over, and she was glued to her seat, but there was no one else in the room.

“Sylvia had a keen eye—her aerial photographs of Sherwood, taken during the annual hot-balloon rides in Town Square, displayed at the local sandwich shop below the sign that said NO CHECKS JUST CASH, were actually, in my humble opinion, quite fascinating:  blurred, frantic bodies offset by stoic, I saw it coming hills, and the light—the light!—streaming down from the skies. 

“For clarification, the trees were not dying,” I added, leaning into the microphone, my lower lip skimming the mesh knob—“they were sickly.   Regardless, I decided to invite Sylvia out for a cup of coffee at a neutral meeting place to grill her about her research methodology and what, exactly, she intended to do with its fruits.

“During the time we spent together—an hour or so—I must say that while a lot of her facts were off, the story she unwound was incredible.  She had somehow procured several VHS copies of footage from the local slaughterhouse, capturing employees slamming the bodies of chickens into cinder brick walls while maintaining a firm grip on their necks.  Apparently, the factory farms in Arkansas, whence most of our meat derived, routinely broke what marginal animal cruelty laws there were in existence. 

“‘How much did you pay for those videos?’  I asked her.  ‘And who gave them to you in the first place?’  She shook her head, and refused to divulge a single word. 

“Going to hell in a hand basket, according to Sylvia, is a pleasant death compared to the throes of chemotherapy, our nation’s cutting-edge treatment of cancer, a disease that Sylvia linked to the overingestion of Grade D beef containing lethal traces of adrenalin that raced through the bodies of those tortured cows, pigs, lambs and horses just prior to slaughter.  Dominos of Horror,” I said, marveling, “is how Sylvie described her successive findings.  Then, I asked her if she would like another cup of coffee.  She said yes.  ‘Do you take cream in your coffee?’ I asked.  Betty,” I said, because by then Betty’s mascara was starting to run down her face in black estuaries.  “Betty.”  She refocused.  “So I asked Sylvia whether she took cream.  ‘Are you kidding me?’ she said.  She then told me our dairy supply was also under siege, as the industry standard, to which state-subsidized farms in the state of Arkansas adhere, is to induce lactation in cows, those who have borne calves as well as those who haven’t, 12 months a year, for a continuous yield.  ‘Torn udders,’ Sylvia told me, ‘equals pus, in our milk.’   Betty moaned.

“Sylvia was Jewish,” I said.  “It’s not Kosher to slaughter animals inhumanely.  So when she saw the starved, mangled bodies of the still-sentient fowl and livestock, and visited the dairy farm and saw cows chained to milking machines—well, she was not too happy.  The practices dishonored her ethnic heritage, though I don’t believe she professed a metaphysical commitment at the time of her death.  She was also not too happy about the fact that state-protected forest preserves and the pristine Alaskan wilderness had been pillaged to accommodate growing demands from middle management teams who, as she put it, ‘need to create the illusion of productivity with 36-page memorandums,’ but I think she could live with that.  What most scared her,” I said, conspiratorially, “was her theory on the ‘teleos of nature.’  And I quote:  ‘Nature can only be pushed so far before becoming suicidal, then vengeful.  Farewell, martyred mommy.  Hello, angel of death.

 “When Sylvia and I finished our coffee, I walked her home, and in her driveway, she told me a story about a veal calf she’d seen with a chain digging a three-inch welt into its neck that, blinded by malnutrition, bleated to her nightly in her dreams.”  I adjusted the collar of my shirt.  “She was a hot date, alright.  Let me tell you.” 

Betty was crying openly by then at the gruesome narrative twist unexpectedly thrust upon an otherwise serene landscape of homicide, and Sylvia was long gone, therefore leaving me, the narrator, in an empty room with Betty’s honking sobs.  Sylvia without makeup, Sylvia in a brown turtleneck sweater with circles beneath her eyes from lack of sleep:  I could not, I had finally decided, love a prophet of doom.  

“She expressed wanting to ‘survive the campaign.’  ‘Good luck,’ I told her, ‘and goodbye.’  So when the conversations in the bars got systematically uglier that week, I blocked them out by talking louder to whomever I was with.  On the morning of the election, I saw her at the park with her two daughters, and do you know what I thought?  I thought:  For Halloween, you should wear a scarlet letter, you stupid whore. 

“One week later,” I continued wearily, no water, no water, “I took an early morning bike ride through Sherwood’s poorly planned nature trail—it takes the cyclist, walker, what have you, dead straight for two miles before curving sharply to the left and ending in an abandoned car lot—all the while wondering what the hell happened to Sylvia, who had since been reported missing, and the election temporarily stalled. 

“I returned home, and just as I was trying to choose between Corn Flakes or scrambled eggs for breakfast, guess who calls:  Mitch.  ‘I hope you’re sitting down,’ he told me.  ‘They found her body.’  “Puke, as my peers used to say.  Double puke.”

Right then and there would have been the time to confess that just before leaving the café the week before Sylvia’s murder, I had gripped the edge of the table while rising to stand, and found a listening device, the size of a nickel.  The Knights of the Sticky Table were that worried that Sylvia’s imminent reign would put someone out of a job.  No biggie, I told myself for years.  Biggie, I told myself now. 

“At Sylvia’s funeral,” I said, voice pinched, “Sylvia’s daughters did not cry, though they were at that time nine and ten, old enough to understand exactly what had happened—the death of a mother, by design.”

I decided to end on a high note: the truth.

 “I’ve no doubt those men advanced clumsily, on foot, before thwacking in her head,” I said, and whatever control I had over the narrative began to leak from between my fingers like granulated sugar.  Thank God my version (the pretty one) of how it all went down was almost done.  “And I stand to venture that because Sylvia was a little on the wily side, she put up an estimable fight, which may have lasted some time, and may have involved unnecessary harm to be done to her person, for the purposes of causing her pain, rather than quickening her death, their primary intention.”  I blinked, rapidly.

“What grieves me is that after this, which cannot be surmounted or surmised, comes Monday, and the jollities of the water cooler.  I have no idea what people are up to in Argentina and whether their budding female politicians are also being slain in fields amid artificially lactating cows, but to be blunt, I sleep pretty well, and without the help of a narcotic.”  I pressed power; the machine’s red light bled to black.

“If justice is in fact the final chapter in human affairs, I have no doubt the perpetrators of this crime will be apprehended, and punished in a manner that is humane but which also serves to demonstrate that torture and murder are not acceptable methods of responding to a woman trying to institute social change.  I hope this helps.” 

Bolstered by my off-the-record aplomb, I stood up, removed my coat from the peg, and nodded civilly to Betty, who was by now a mess, on my way out the door.  

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    Virginia Konchan is a graduate of the NEOMFA program at Cleveland State. Her poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Journal, The New Republic, Rain Taxi, The Believer, and Notre Dame Review.  The photographs in this issue were taken in Budapest.

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