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6B - The Michigan Daily Literary Magazine - Thursday, March 12, 1998
Carl and Helen
By Brie Tiderington
The Michigan Daily Literary Magazine - Thy
Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: Birthda
By Ethan Shalom Johnson
"Will it always be so hopeless?" Carl
asks Helen after he swigs down the rest
of his Guinness.
"I don't think so."
"Sometimes it seems like it will be."
Outside, on the streets of Marquette it's
quiet and black. A woman is leaning on
a mailbox in front of the Tanglewood
bar. Her hair is matted wet from the 20-
minute downpour, and she stares down
at the ground as if she thinks rain might
be coming again.
Helen thinks she knows the woman
and stares to try and get a better look. It's
the checkout woman from the A&P, the
one who wears too much rouge and gig-
gles endlessly with the other checkout
women, and with the boys who bag the
groceries. Every time Helen goes in to
buy groceries, the woman is working
there, gossiping and laughing.
"You shouldn't be so sad all the time.
It's not good for you," Helen says as she
stands up and walks over to the other
window. Carl watches how she moves.
At Don's twenty-first birthday party this
summer, Carl drank five shots in a row
and went out to look at the full moon.
Helen was there on the balcony watch-
ing Lake Superior. Or maybe she wasn't
watching anything at all. In the distance
the lights from Marquette shimmered as
brightly as Helen wearing her white
summer dress that showed round calves,
her angular ankles.
"I don't know what to do anymore. I
walk around the city and look at shop
Even the Odds,
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windows and at restaurants where I used
to go eat with her."
"You'll get over it. It takes time."
Helen's back is turned to him because
she is still looking out the window at the
woman who's so drunk she can barely
stand.
Carl opens another beer and turns off
the dining room light. He sits back down
at the dining room table and leans his
head on his elbows.
"I like the dark tonight."
"Me too." Helen turns to him now, but
stays over by the window. "I don't know
how that woman outside will ever get
home,"she says after a minute. She sighs
and cracks her knuckles. A headlight
sweeps across the window and outlines
Helen's figure. Carl thinks how Helen is
tall but not too tall, skinny but not too
skinny, pretty but not too pretty. His ex-
girlfriend was too pretty he thinks; and
she was good, but not too good.
"You're good," he says to Helen. "Do
you know you're good?"
"What bullshit are you talking now,
Carl? Are you drunk?"
"No ... yes ... no." He laughs softly.
"If my dad taught me anything at all, it
was how to drink beer. And maybe how
to bait a fishing pole in the dark. He was
good sometimes too."
"You see him much now?"
"Just holidays, really. We've never
been too close, you know?"
"Yeah, I know."
"You see your parents much?" asks
Carl after a sip of the beer.
"Every couple weeks. But, you know,
it's at fancy dinners at places only people
like my parents go, and they ask me
questions like, am I ever gonna get a real
job, how come I don't have a boyfriend,
am I ever gonna do anything with my
life. I'm always'making up shit just to
keep them quiet soI can eat my dinner."
"How come you don't have a
boyfriend? What happened to that guy
with the flannel shirts?"
Helen laughs. "Man, you really didn't
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like him at all, did you?"
Carl smiles and shakes his head back
and forth.
"Yeah, that's how I felt too."
Carl is warm and he likes how Helen
sits when she sits down across from him.
At the party this summer when Carl
went out to the balcony, he went and
stood next to Helen. The air was heavy
and humid that night. It stuck to the skin.
The house was out of the city and the
stars were big and bright. Helen pointed
out constellations and when the drinks
began to hit Carl, she put her arm around
his waist real tightly and held him
steady.
"You work tomorrow?" he asks.
"Yeah, at seven."
"Shit, that's early," he says as she
reaches across the table for his beer.
"Yeah, it's tiring. But I've also gotten
more and more used to it," she says and
takes a drink of his Guinness. Helen is a
gardener for a rich old couple who own
a house on a cliff as balanced as their
lives.
In the summer at the party Carl's girl-
friend ignored him the whole night. She
had said that it was better that they not
see each other so much. It was too
intense for her. She wanted to be her own
person.
"Do relationships ever turn out right?"
Carl asks.
"What do you mean?" Helen asks as
the rain begins again. On the street
below Helen's apartment, the woman
has left, walking home alone along the
curb, trying not to fall over.
"When you love someone, how do
you know when you love them too
much?'
"Can you love too much?"
"I think so, but what does that mean?"
Carl has an idea that loving too much is
an untruth.
All day it's been cloudy. There were
no stars tonight. There was no moon.
"It's when it destroys you. It's when
you can't fall asleep because you're
thinking about where they are, who
they're with."
"One night at a party I watched her
leave with someone. I saw them making
out by his car. I saw him put his hands on
her thighs."
"I'm sorry," Helen says as she lights
some candles. She likes to watch the rain
in near darkness. She holds onto the
match until she feels the flame on her
skin. In her stomach she has an uncom-
fortable feeling that nothing she says
matters.
"Yeah, well, I guess that's just what
happens to people;' Carl says, taking his
beer back.
"Not to everyone. Not to good peo-
ple"
"No, especially to good people." In
the light of the candles, Carl doesn't look
sad. He looks a few years younger too -
nineteen or twenty.
"Maybe you're right."
"Did it happen to you?" he asks. He's
never been able to ask her that before
and he's always wanted to. He both
wanted it to have happened to her and he
wanted to have it never happen to her. He
See CARL, Page 15B
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If you are inclined toward the sentimental, then
your mood is mine,
and you succumb to the lucid half-notes of remastered
trombones
and a tenor sax,
upon ear drums,
caressing the pentatonic scales.
the orgasmic trilling of an
And, as the trumpets cresc
You are impelled to do the
- Ethan Shalom Johnson
Chase, Md. He loves writ
the
Bring on the trumpets.
The sudden blaring, and
you quiver,
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