A Lesson in Manners

By Misty Urban

Winner of the Serena McDonald Kennedy Award. The ten stories in this haunting and hilarious collection offer a how-to manual for dealing with love, lies, and loneliness. Sam Wesson, an up-and-coming country western singer, plots to get pregnant without her boyfriend's consent, while Dacey, already pregnant, confronts her cheating husband over her secret checking account. Andrea rescues a stray dog to avoid facing her complicated human relationships. Sarah, an exotic dancer, longs for employment at  religious theme park, and Amelia dreams of creating impossible bonsai. Whether facing life-threatening illness or overwhelming loss, these characters scheme in humble, funny, sympathetic, and outrageous ways to find an etiquette that will deliver them from disappointment and shield them from crushing grief.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canty Dames
• Release date: Feb 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781736224717

Misty Urban

Misty Urban is a fiction writer, medievalist, essayist, editor, and former college professor. She is the author of three short story collections and the comedic women's fiction novel My Day As Regan Forrester. She has also published award-winning creative nonfiction and medieval scholarship on the topics of romance and monstrous women. She holds an MFA in fiction and a Ph.D. in medieval literature from Cornell University and lives in eastern Iowa with her family and a rather heavy collection of books.

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Praise for A Lesson in Manners:

Urban takes readers on an amazing journey in this exceptional collection of short stories. The author has an uncanny ability to explore relationships, love, and loss in a fresh and original way. These are powerful stories told by a strong voice and written with vivid precision, leaving readers wondering what happens to the characters after their stories end. —Publisher’s Weekly starred review

"A Lesson in Manners serves up a panoramic view of the American experience—stories that vary considerably in technique and tone, yet all display the author’s vibrant imagination and keen eye for emotional truth. Urban’s stories lead us into worlds that are unfamiliar, yet somehow recognizable in their parallels to our own. Most of all, what sets these stories apart is their deep authenticity.

Infused with crystalline language reminiscent of Bobbie Ann Mason and Ann Beattie, and a narrative playfulness recalling Donald Barthelme and John Barth, these stories bring us something truly not seen before in American literature. A Lesson in Manners is an extraordinary collection that distills the lives of ordinary people—refreshing, compelling, and moving." —Jacob Appel, author of Who Says You’re Dead?

"The collection . . . is lovely from beginning to end. Her characters, in even the briefest of the stories, are fully realized, their hopes, fears, and disappointments vital on the page. Urban leavens the heartbreak of her stories with flashes of humor, even when characters are at their lowest point. A Lesson in Manners is the work of a sure-handed storyteller with insight into the heart and its deepest desires." —Rob Cline, Cedar Rapids Gazette

Also by Misty Urban

Fiction

The Necessaries: Stories

The Day of the Beheaded Barbie: Stories

Scholarship

Monstrous Women in Middle English Romance

Melusine’s Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth (editor)

A Lesson In

Manners:

Stories

Misty Urban

Copyright © 2021 by Misty Urban

All rights reserved

Print edition by Snake Nation Press

ISBN-13: 978-1-7362247-1-7 (ebook)

The stories in this book are works of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for the quotation of brief passages, or for non-profit educational use, without prior written permission from the copyright holder.

To Traci

who is on every page

Acknowledgements

A Lesson in Manners won a Writers @ Work fiction fellowship, first appeared in Quarterly West 59 (winter 2005), and is collected in Sisters: An Anthology, eds. Jan Freeman, Emily Wojcik, and Deborah Bull, published by Paris Press (2009)

The Memoirs of Sam Wesson first appeared in Indiana Review 27.2 (winter 2005)

Trying to Find a Corndog in Tompkins County won first place in the New Letters Awards for Writers, appeared in New Letters 73.2 (spring 2007), and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize

Still Life With Dog won the Arthur Lyn Andrews Prize for Fiction from Cornell University and appeared in Blackbird 5.1 (spring 2006)

Monsoon first appeared in Front Range Review (spring 2008)

Welcome to the Holy Land won Honorable Mention in the Roanoke Review Fiction Prize and appeared in Roanoke Review XXXIII (spring 2008)

The Keeping of the Counts won first place in The Atlantic Monthly’s Student Writers Competition for fiction (2004) and appeared in Talking River 29 (summer 2010)

Table of Contents

A Lesson in Manners

The Memoirs of Sam Wesson

Sally

Trying to Find a Corndog in Tompkins County

Still Life With Dog

Monsoon

Welcome to the Holy Land

The Keeping of the Counts

Green Space

Planet Joy

About the Author

A Lesson in Manners

One day she notices it: about the size of a fortune cookie, a hard lump in her side underneath the skin. Best not to think about it, all those squishy organs in there with their unaccountable functions. Let it drift around her innards, float away.

One week it begins to send out faint signals of its presence, like blinkers on the brain waves. She doesn’t mention it until it’s got her flat on her back in the bed. Her hair is longer now. You haven’t seen her in three months.

Where do these things begin? Take a mental picture of her in the Austrian bed, the Alps in her window, a tennis ball in her side underneath her hand. Motrin. Tylenol. Mother’s Day.

Her skin is smooth now the way it never was at home, all the whole milk and red meat of a semester abroad filling her out to a buttery softness, hair like the ferns on the Austrian hills.

Don’t, she says when you go to touch the place that hurts her. So you don’t. Who are you? You cannot heal by the laying on of hands. You are the sister, visiting for a week.

She is the sister visiting you for nineteen years, who has hidden your favorite blue T-shirt underneath her mattress so you won’t find it and take it back home with you.

No one knows why. Only the when. A year ago she rowed on the crew team, her biceps tough as a cornstalk, her skin like almond silk; she came home drunk from college parties and got her navel pierced.

At thirteen when Rusty Stedman took her back behind the middle school to smoke her first bitter cigarette, you didn’t recognize the smell of tobacco on the flannel shirt she borrowed from Dad’s closet. She’s five, maybe, when one cell loses its blueprint and its self-respect, becomes reckless in propagation, teeming slowly into a malignant life.

Not that either? Take it further back, then, to that one rung in the step-ladder spiral of the DNA, in your father’s body, or your mother’s, to the place where we are all rogue proteins being carried around like a secret in the bodies of our ancestors, waiting for enough people to have enough sex so our two cells can meet and we can be born.

Maybe sometimes two cells meet again in almost exactly the same way and the next one born is almost exactly you again, only your sister, so in a way she uniquely belongs to you.

Look at the picture of you as babies, wearing the same denim overalls and the same red flowered shirts, sitting against a backdrop time will fade to a speckled bronze. You are three years old, she is two, grinning through fat cheeks as she sits buttoned on your lap, so close to your heart.

All of your adult lives are already in your faces, if you but knew. But you don’t know, and so you reach out your hand and she says don’t, as in don’t touch it, it hurts stupid, and in the many opaque silences that will follow you will wish you had said I just want to make it go away. But you don’t.

Leave her in Austria with over-the-counter pain relief and the last of your money, maybe twenty dollars. Fly home crowded in steerage with strangers, one of whom drools on your shoulder.

You are not blessed with knowing. Perhaps it has no beginning ever, merely springs into being like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, like Venus rising from the sea, there it is, this thing in her side, this characteristic feat of rebellion, these mysterious insides growing mysteriously out of control. These things happen.

So while there are helium balloons for homecomings and helium balloons for hospitals, there are no balloons for homecomings spent in hospitals. Yet here you all are, assembled in this utility-white room after a few phone calls, a scan through a big cold metallic tube, a doctor who can’t decide.

Heads it’s an abscess, tails it’s a tumor. He wants backup. He wants to consult a panel of experts.

This is not the kindly family doctor who taped fingers and stitched knees throughout your childhood and hers; this is a cool tall made-for-TV doctor who would be too handsome except for the scar on his chin, who would never pat a little girl on the head and give her candy if she cried.

The problem is there is no backup. This is a small town; this is a big seeping mass of a kidney that has begun to bully the other organs out of its way.

Show up in the dress pants and blouse you wore to work. Don’t stop home to change; instead, unpremeditated, pull into the parking lot of the movie theater. Aaron, the man you long for absolutely, is standing below the marquee with the long flimsy stick shuttling blocky black letters back and forth.

This is not a reasoned maneuver. This is your very last chance at a normal life. Yet there is only one way the conversation could go and it is this:

Him: I am very happy with Sarah, and I’m going to make her my wife and you and I have always been very good friends.

You: Yes, well thank you, I am on my way to the hospital now as my sister is having her kidney removed. Cheers.

When you tell the story you will leave this part out. In narrative terms, it doesn’t fit. Perhaps it could be used to develop character but as that is always a painful process you would rather avoid it.

The evening unfolds in varying tempos. This is the allegretto, the high drama when your sister’s belly-button ring has been discovered.

She insists on keeping it. She clung to it despite infection, inflammation, all the stinky pus that demanded swabbing with alcohol and prevented her from sleeping on her stomach. Your mother is vocalizing all the objections that made your sister warn you not to tell her in the first place.

Where are you in all this? You will forget later if you were standing near the head of the bed being useful or standing at the back of the room hovering, an awkward shadow, poked about by the sharp corners with no hint of dust, the sterile white.

You will always remember that the chairs are orange. Memory can flush and reorganize everything except the color, that burnt-umber orange and the arrogant white.

The lines of this room are askew; the planes of the ceiling slope inward, the walls are distant, the bed in the middle of the room seems enormous with your sister atop it in pale skin and a blue-sprigged hospital gown, like a grand French lady of the 18th century conducting business in her boudoir.

The intern, flanked by a rolling cart of needles and syringes, pokes her arm for the seventh or eighth time, still trying to start an IV. Let me get that, the nurse says with scrubbed and well-practiced efficiency, and the grateful intern diminishes with embarrassment.

The nurse takes your sister’s wrist and turns her arm out, flicks her middle finger twice against the inside crook of her elbow, picks a new needle off the cart, rips the package open with one hand. Your sister doesn’t bat an eyelash as the pin sinks into her vein.

The metallic taste at the back of your throat has been there since you left the movie theater. Is this where it begins? Is this it?

Enter the doctor, on cue, with a lean white coat and three different colors of pen in his pocket. The room is suddenly crowded with assurance, expertise. He is wearing white sneakers. He is tall enough to graze his head on the TV bolted to the ceiling.

Undoubtedly he played sports in high school; he has an athlete’s grace. He is sportsmanlike about his talent, the power to stick knives and needles into people, to juggle organs like balls. Bad kidney, into the bucket with it.

He begins to explain procedures, surgery times, recovery times, biopsies, consults, all things that sound organized and terribly normal. At the side of your sister’s bed the nurse attaches a small blue-capped vial to the IV and begins to fill it with blood.

With slow thoughtfulness the rich dark liquid seeps into the glass container. Think as you watch how simple it is, really, how fragile, that barrier of skin. So easily what is inside can come out.

Your mother looks a little dazed. She has not yet seen the pictures from Europe and now she is looking at X-ray films, a weedy mass of shadows.

The doctor, using his finger as a marker, draws the incision line across your sister’s paper-thin bed gown. He starts just shy of the navel, bumps over the rib cage, ends somewhere beneath the left shoulder blade. The line he traces is at least twelve inches long.

In the next twelve hours she is allowed to eat nothing. The jewelry must be removed. Earrings and necklace unclasp; the bellybutton ring does not. Alcohol, infection, or greedy time has fused the slender wire into one hard-bitten circle.

The doctor sends the nurse for wire cutters. Your father offers to go home and get his. He has them in three different sizes and he, too, would like to be useful. He can build a house and dismantle a car, pour cement and name all the planets.

Right before he met your mother, his own mother died in long agony when the cells of her spine forgot how to be bone cells and turned into something else. It made him the kind of man who does not want to be cremated; better to have the body preserved and safely locked away underground just in case he is wrong and there is a God and a Last Judgment.

Perhaps you are sitting in one of those orange chairs. Perhaps you are holding the slim plastic baggie full of your sister’s jewelry. This much you can do. This small thing.

Your mother cringes as the doctor wrestles with the navel ring, this tiny, harmless, inorganic piece of metal. At last he snaps the wire. Presto—beads spatter like tiny bullets onto the tiled floor.

Adagio. There is little left to do except wait. Your father goes home to feed the dog. Your mother goes down the hall to make phone calls she doesn’t want your sister to overhear.

You sit in one of the burnt-orange chairs, taking mental notes, hoping someone will ask you to give blood. Imagine your presence is soothing. Hope someone will ask you for your kidney, to give to her.

Your sister kicks you out when the nurse comes to perform the enema.

Time passes. Night falls. Your mother goes home. You stay; it doesn’t occur to you to leave. That is your sister on that bed.

All those nights in Austria, alone in a dark room with this thing in her belly; what would have gone through her mind? The nurse simply shrugs. You suppose she must have daughters. She must have watched them brush each other’s hair and argue about who got which side of the bed before falling asleep cupped together like spoons.

When the two of you are finally alone, and all the nurses have pattered softly away, move the chair closer to the bed. There is something that can be said here, surely, to ease the awkwardness of these moments, to push the walls gently back into place and let in some air.

You do not know what that something is. Begin to reminisce about Austria. She looks at you with eyes dark and huge, as though there is no light in the room.

Remind her of when you first met her host brother and how you prattled on at him in English before she pointed out that he didn’t understand a word past hello. She laughs: a small triumph.

Tell her how the two of you walked along the river in Salzburg one evening singing and listening to the bells of the dozens of churches. That night in the café you ordered a bottle of California wine and the waiter gave you his cigarettes, sliding a cool gaze over both of you, before deciding to leave you alone, the two American tourists, not ugly ones.

On the train back to her university she took a picture of you sleeping on the bench with your mouth open. You took a picture of her in the cloudy rain, standing at the gate of the palace gardens in her purple windbreaker, hood pulled over her head, looking up.

Say to her that you will go to Paris. It is a promise, defiant of recovery times or of fate.

She hates Paris. A man there lied about her departure time so