And Go to Innisfree

By Don Eron

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree...

I shall have some peace there.

                             --W.B.Yeats 

 

A cheerleader touches a high school wrestler's face, running her finger along his two-day beard. Thus begins their covert affair, one so understated he can't be certain she's aware of it, from which he will date his sexual life. A cynical greeting card writer, who becomes America's best-selling poet, seeks redemption on tour. Enchanted by a woman at a party, a man at loose ends recalls Calla Dakos and six weeks that shook his life. A sandwich maker discovers a book of Jewish folklore, left by a customer in his shop, and is inspired by the legendary Rabbi Akiba, who was also a failure at 40. Upon hearing of his sister's terminal diagnosis, a private detective stages a comeback on the freestyle wrestling circuit. 

            These three novellas and two stories portray people in crisis, searching for Innisfree. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Contingency Street Press
• Release date: Jun 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781958015001

Don Eron

Don Eron lives in Boulder, Colorado. And Go to Innisfree is his firsst published book.

Book preview

GISELLE’S TEARS

Giselle’s tears are huge and slow. They descend her face with all due deliberation, accelerating as they reach her chin. Were I a surrealist, I’d talk about the puddles at her feet, for her tears don’t dissolve but accumulate, the small lake expanding across the room, the flood of tears wading across fields with tears ebbing at her knees. When we were little, she cried every day, every hour. Time wouldn’t move unless her tears pulled it downstream. She cried because I hit her, or Rachel was allowed to go down the street and swim in Montgomery’s pond with Suzy Montgomery and Giselle wasn’t. She cried because she didn’t want to wash her hair, because I broke my favorite glass, the one in which I liked to drink my favorite milkshake concoction. (I loved that glass so much, I told her, and then the tears rushed forth.) Giselle was sensitive, I’ll admit, even for a kid; it didn’t take much to set her off. When she was older and had plenty of stuff worth crying about, she cried about that, too.

Picture her room. More specifically, Giselle’s bed and the dolls atop her bed. Because I had to pass through her room to go downstairs, I got to know that bed. Giselle’s dolls were piled halfway to the ceiling. Dolls crowded out of the windows onto the lawn. Here goes the surrealist in me. Wherever she went, she found her way home by the trail of dolls. Sometimes travelers would report a giant doll-like spacecraft in rural New York. Experts dismissed these reports as illusions, as tricks of light and the standard distortions of perception and memory, but we knew of what they saw and where. They saw Giselle’s bed through the window.

To go to bed, she had to clear off the dolls—fortunately Mom didn’t compel her to arrange them neatly, for there was more to be done in childhood than to spend it stacking dolls—except for a favorite half dozen that protected Giselle under the covers. Perhaps her dolls cried with her to sleep as she recalled the day’s laundry list of grievous slights.

It was tough enough being Rachel’s little sister, but Giselle wasn’t satisfied with being second best: she wanted to be Rachel. That’s a lot to expect when your sister’s the knockout, the charmer, the brain who tests so high it’s suggested she audition for the TV quiz shows; as well as being, to hear Rachel tell it (her stance on the issue fashioned in the days before she had competition for the post), Mom and Dad’s favorite. Once the favorite always the favorite, went Rachel’s theory. Within two years of my clouding the picture, she’d pushed me off a highchair, breaking my femur (in the process furnishing me with my earliest distinct—if fleeting—memory), and slammed a car door on my fingers, tearing off the chunk of finger above the bone. I guess Rachel was telling me things were swell when it was just she and Mom and Dad. Four’s a crowd, Bart, so go back where you came from. By the time Giselle got into the game a year and a half later, Rachel was sufficiently sophisticated to understand that it was unrealistic to expect us, despite a little urging as she danced us on highchairs or helped us into cars, to disappear into thin air. Rachel’s sense of entitlement Giselle would always covet. Along with the beauty, the charm, the smarts.

Me Too was our name for Giselle. Rachel and I were going swimming. Me too. We rode our bikes into town for pop and candy. Me too. We ordered fried chicken in a basket at Nitzchke’s Diner. Me too. You couldn’t blame her for wanting to be included. Not that Giselle didn’t have friends of her own to involve her, but that didn’t matter. Even if she spent all her time with her friends, it couldn’t begin to compare. Me too. Me too. She would have been content to spend her life as the tag-along runt kid sister, so long as we let her tag along. If we didn’t, she would cry about it to Mom.

We had to take Me Too along, we had no choice in the matter, yet if we lost her there’d be hell to pay. Call it a series of early lessons in reality. And she was harder to keep track of than she was to lose. Giselle couldn’t focus in those days. We’d be walking into town for candy and pop, and the ducks would be out in Darrington’s yard down the block. Suddenly Giselle wasn’t out of the house to go into town for candy and pop with her sister and brother, she was out of the house to watch the ducks in Darrington’s yard. Rachel and I still followed the original plan. We couldn’t care less about the ducks in Darrington’s yard. They didn’t correlate with reality as we knew it. Giselle didn’t correlate. We’d be drinking our pop bottles before we’d remember Giselle. Sometimes she’d be curled up by the picket fence another house down, by Mr. and Mrs. Foster’s, crying, at home within her tears.

Whereas Giselle was jealous of Rachel, and jealous of me, if only because as a boy I got to do all the athletic boy things that back in those days it was unseemly for a girl to be obsessed with, at the price of being labeled a tomboy (which Giselle was, though she would have preferred to serve the office without the stigma), I wasn’t jealous at all of Rachel. I had my own little sports world that could hardly admit her entrance, even were she inclined. I think she still hadn’t forgiven me for intruding on her turf. Maybe it was because she was two years older, and whatever stage of development she was in, I was in the awkward, embarrassing stage she’d just grown out of. To Rachel I was always awkward and embarrassing. In fact, I was awkward and embarrassing, a strange kid. Who wanted a kid brother who couldn’t walk down the halls at school without falling, usually taking two or three innocent bystanders down with him? People learned to give me a wide berth as I walked the halls. Who wanted a kid brother everyone gave a wide berth to? For that matter, who wanted a kid brother who was so superstitious, so compulsive, he couldn’t leave a room without touching the floor and walls twelve times, fourteen times, or else his mom and dad, or Warren Spahn (his favorite baseball pitcher), would die? Who wanted a kid brother with so much responsibility—who couldn’t walk into his house after school without yelling, I’m home! exactly thirteen times at the top of his lungs or something terrible would happen to somebody he loved?

Not Rachel.

I can’t remember a single thing Rachel said to me between the time she pushed me off the highchair and when we were in college. I’m sure we had a lot of normal conversations during those fifteen years and talked about the usual things and had our share of fights and conspired to torment Giselle—certainly in town, as we drank our pops, oblivious to Giselle lagging behind, crying, curled in the fetal position by the Fosters’ picket fence, words must have been exchanged—but I can’t remember any of it, except for one day in high school when we passed each other in the halls. By now she was the prettiest girl in school, a senior, and I doubt anybody who didn’t happen to grow up with us had any idea I was Rachel’s brother. It didn’t correlate. I was a football player, a wrestler, a track man, a muscle-bound, friendless mute, and as I passed Rachel in the hall, she quickly said hello. I remember I looked over my shoulder and didn’t see anybody; we were the only two in the hall. I was a wiseass. But I wasn’t being a wiseass when I looked over my shoulder to see who Rachel was saying hello to.

And one other time. I was in fifth grade and Rachel in seventh, junior high. Junior high was a different world, different teachers for each subject, walking the halls with ninth graders, high school freshman tall as adults, while in fifth grade you walked the same halls as kindergartners. The idea of participating in a process as elaborate as junior high was beyond my comprehension, terrifying and foreign, though at nights I’d dream of playing junior high ball. I’d heard rumors of popular kids at our school who went to junior high and were outcasts. I’d heard that kids who wore blue jeans were ostracized, that ninth graders yanked the hanging loops, the fruit loops, the chaddy rinks, off the backs of kids’ shirts as they walked down the halls. And there were the fights, too. If you made the mistake of buttoning the top button on the collar of your button-down shirt, you not only risked ridicule, but a ninth grader was liable to beat the living daylights out of you after school, if not right then in the hallways. I’d heard rumors that squads of ninth graders publicly descended on seventh graders who struck them as in the least way odd, and pulled off the victim’s pants, gave him pink belly, strung his trousers up the flagpole, all in front of a crowd of people they’d known all their life. There were endless social gradations and nuances and rituals to junior high that I already knew I’d never understand, even if I survived into the ninth grade.

Rachel, on the other hand, was junior high, she was born to it, her entire life until junior high was treading water; now she had permission to swim. Giselle, at least, she still had use for. They could talk their girl language, and Rachel could put curlers in Giselle’s hair and show her cheerleader moves and teach her the social nuances and gradations. Giselle was an opportunity for Rachel to be the sophisticated junior high woman she was, on display at home and not only in the halls of Central Junior High.

We’d had a Schipperke, Mitty, for a year. Rachel had already outgrown the need for pets, but both my world and Giselle’s revolved around Mitty. I could spend hours giving him body massages, rubbing his thick black fur, taking him for long walks down River Street. When you’re ten years old there’s not much more fun than taking your dog for a walk, if you like your dog. I liked Mitty. Though I doubt I had the perspicacity to take this for an early object lesson, as much as I liked my dog, Mitty turned on me regularly. Maybe I was too aggressive with the body massages? Maybe I’d force him on walks he didn’t want to take? I’d walk into a room, and he would bare his teeth, growl alarmingly, lunge at me until Giselle or Rachel, if she wasn’t in her room fashioning lipstick and eyeliner, calmed him. Good dog, Mitty, good dog. We won’t let Bart hurt you.

Three dogs in our neighborhood had been poisoned in the weeks before I came home from school one afternoon and found Mitty in our driveway, teeth gritted, stiffened, legs fixed in the air. Because of the poisonings, we’d kept him on a long leash at the end of our driveway, fifty feet downhill from River Street. That morning as I left for school, I noticed an open can in our front yard, and I think I supposed it belonged there. I can’t say I didn’t think anything of it—certainly I thought a lot of it after I found Mitty, and for months afterward—but I’d always envisioned the poisoner walking up to the dogs and feeding them from his hand, the way old strangers in parks were supposed to offer candy to trusting kids. As soon as I saw Mitty I knew instinctively how naive I’d been, how much a grade-schooler, for anybody serious about poisoning a dog wouldn’t go up to the dog in broad daylight and feed him the poison where everyone could see, the poisoner would drive by at night and quietly toss a poisoned candy bar maybe, or a poisoned sugar cube, from an open car onto the lawn.

When I saw Mitty, I was anaesthetized, the shock narcotic putting me at one remove where I could observe, where I could evaluate. I thought—I didn’t think this was likely, but I wasn’t a veterinarian, I wasn’t a doctor; I was, as was profoundly apparent, a naive grade-schooler—that Mitty might be alive. I walked inside our house. I went upstairs and knocked on Rachel’s door. I could hear music behind her door. Chad and Jeremy, or Peter and Gordon. The Dave Clark Five. Those were the groups I’d heard of. Rachel already owned a lot of records. I wouldn’t have known where to buy a record even if I wanted to own one. I don’t want to sound disingenuous, but it had just been a few weeks since the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. Music didn’t seem like much of a thing worth having an interest in. I’m sure they had record stores in Iowa in 1964, where Dad’s job brought us from upstate New York, but I didn’t know where they were.

What do you want?

Rachel, Mitty’s hurt.

Rachel turned and went back to her music.

Please go out there with me.

Rachel sighed. If she’d been doing anything else but her homework while playing the music, I know she would have told me to get lost. Rachel followed me out. Mitty was still at the end of the driveway, his legs still petrified in the air. I kneeled over and massaged his belly.

Do you think he’s alive?

The dog is dead, Rachel announced, turned around, and walked back inside.

I continued massaging his belly. I don’t think I was mad at Rachel. I doubt I expected her to be much help. Mitty had been crazy about her, but she never had much use for him, perhaps because she sensed he so captured Giselle’s and my imaginations. I’m sure she didn’t feel good about it, but the dog was dead, and none of it had much to do with her. Later in her life she became a lover of animals, she had dogs she loved almost as much as she would have loved her children, but this was still 1964 and I was leaning over Mitty and massaging his belly, anaesthetized, without a clue as to what to do. I knew it would be an hour before Mom and Dad got home. Giselle was off at Brownies. Then I took a breath and walked inside and pulled down the telephone book and looked up veterinarian in the yellow pages. I called up the first listed. I think my dog’s been poisoned. Can you come out here and look at him?

The woman who answered the phone asked what he looked like. He’s very stiff. His legs are in the air.

I see. I’m sorry. You’re very brave. She asked me if I would wait a moment, and a moment later came back to the phone and said they could be there in an hour.

But he may be dead by then. I told her I’d call back if I couldn’t find somebody to come sooner.

I made a note beside the vet’s name in the yellow pages. One hour.

The seventh vet heard my voice and agreed to come immediately. Once there, he quietly confirmed Rachel’s pronouncement. I told him about the open can I’d seen on our lawn that morning. He looked at me. Well, he said, dogs can die suddenly, and for a lot of reasons. He asked if I’d like him to take Mitty away—in fact, he wanted to send some samples to Ames to verify the poisonings. I thought it over. I don’t think Giselle should see Mitty like that. He nodded and wrapped Mitty in a black wool blanket, then placed him in the trunk. Before the vet drove Mitty away, though, he seemed to hesitate. He may have been on the verge of offering an apology on behalf of human nature. Where could he begin? I wish I could remember the good man’s name, if I ever took it in to begin with. He stuck out his hand and I shook it.

I didn’t cry until after Giselle got home. My parents had been home for half an hour already. They were proud of me for calling all these veterinarians. They said it was a very brave and responsible thing to do—they couldn’t believe I was only ten years old. When Giselle got back from Brownies and they told her Mitty was dead, she thought they were kidding her. Then it struck and she began sobbing. Huge tears slowly descended her face, accelerating at her chin, swamping her blouse.

She buried her sobbing head in my lap, and I remember crying into her hair as upstairs the Dave Clark Five sang to Rachel.

GISELLE WOULD HAVE been much happier if she could have been a wrestler, my dad told me in one of those talks we have periodically in which we encapsulate the past. (You used to have to scream, ‘I’m home! I’m home! I’m home!’ thirty times every time you came home, Dad recollected once. Well, Dad, it was a burden. A burden? I’d feel like yelling back, ‘Who cares! Who cares! Who cares!’) The conversations don’t tend to last long, if only because Mom has a way of sensing that some important matters are being discussed and must come into the room from the kitchen or her bedroom where she’s riding her exercycle or running in place while watching the soaps—in her late fifties she became a fitness fanatic—and change the subject. Theoretically I’m sure Mom strongly endorses important conversations, but you can’t beat mother nature, and her instinct for survival has a way of cutting them off at the pass. Maybe she feels, given the unresolved emotions that dominate any family that risks taking each other seriously, that it won’t be long until blame is assigned. Blame makes her uncomfortable. It has a way of suggesting that things might have been different.

Though I never would have said it—when I venture reflections about Giselle, particularly her history of imbroglios and losses, my motives often tend toward the transparent—Dad’s right. She would have been happier if she could have been a wrestler. I was a wrestler, and that’s been the key to my happiness. But seriously, ladies and gentlemen. If she could have been a boy instead of a tomboy, she would have accomplished a few things that she’d take seriously as accomplishments. And she wouldn’t have been her sister’s little sister, always a step behind, never measuring up. Boys have measurable things to compete in, on level playing fields. You fight it out on a mat with a referee and afterward they raise your arm if you outscored your man, even if your man happens to be your brother. There may be hard feelings, but you know where you stand. And if you try hard enough and put enough time into it and are lucky enough and have any talent, you can stand over there and not always a step behind, never measuring up. They had girls’ sports back in the sixties when Giselle was growing up: swimming, tennis, gymnastics; not basketball yet, like today, courtesy of Title IX, not track and field and cross country and softball. But none of that was Giselle anyway. She was built for power, stocky, low to the ground, a born nose guard like her brother, a wrestler, big on muscle, crude with the finesse. There was no equivalent in girls’ sports, no place to develop her nature, to channel her temper, to show her best goods. Instead, she started the Mat Maids at our high school. The Maids ran the PA system during the home meets, worked the scoreboards, made posters during the week that they hung on bulletin boards or held above their heads as they sat in the stands in their Mat Maid section, cheering their heads off on the rare occasions they paid attention. Sometimes they made sandwiches for the team for after the meets and otherwise tried to look like they belonged. A Giselle natural. Mostly freshmen and sophomore girls who had nothing else to do weekend nights signed up when Giselle founded the club her junior year, when I was a senior. While the concept was nice, nobody on the team had any interest in those girls.

Marian Leigh Anberg was Giselle’s best friend, or close to it. Giselle always had a lot of friends, as befitting her office as Matron of the Mat Maids. Sometimes she’d claim they had crushes on me. If so, they’d never betray it in our rare conversations. Marian was very thin, almost anorexic before the days of anorexia as a defining cultural symbol, and had huge white teeth when she smiled, which was almost always. She had jet-black hair. Three or four nights a week Marian was at our place, with Giselle and the muffled laughs and rock music playing behind closed doors. By now Rachel was off at college. I had the huge room downstairs, next to the rec room, and every night did jumping jacks or ran tiny laps for hours behind my own closed door, the lights out, as Cat Stevens or the Grass Roots performed on the portable hi-fi. Mom, passing Giselle’s door or loading the washing machine on the other side of the rec room, passing my door, must have thought we lived in an entertainment complex with competing rock and roll venues.

What did I think about during those hours in motion? Nobody in the world wanted to know, and I liked it that way. It was good training for wrestling, as I’d punctuate the laps with the occasional set of one hundred six-count burpees, two hundred pushups, then back into motion, then fifty pushups clapping my chest with my hands each repetition, then one thousand jumping jacks, then back to the tiny laps. All this, needless to say, on top of practice after school, on top of my official workouts after practice when I lifted weights. Before my senior year I could bench press three hundred pounds, do three sets of