The Lost, by Fran Markover

The usual suspects: socks without mates, lone earrings, wandering keys.
 I lost a Wedgwood china ring. The design: a pearly woman leaning against an anchor.
 Her name was Hope. I had bought it in England to keep me safe crossing any ocean.
 I lost her the day I packed for college.

I lost my father’s medallion, the gold one he pocketed during WWII as he flew over enemy
lines. Inscribed are the 10 Commandments in Hebrew. I wore it to mammograms and
court hearings for my work. I took it to the ER when my 90 year old mother broke her hip.
Found the coin one day at the bottom of a pocketbook. Now, the medallion rests on
velvet by Tante Ruchel’s bracelet.

I lost my first love, a boy I met in 6th grade. Years later, at our 50th reunion, I met his
wife who took a liking to me. We talked, this woman and me, for a long while.
She called me “soul mate.”  So now Annie and I are Facebook buddies. Life surely
becomes complicated when one door slams and an unexpected door swings wide.

I’ve lost words, early sounds of Yiddish, words that spat, that occasionally grumbled their
way home. Words like: bubkis and meshugganah, oy kinehora and tsouris. These are
syllables I yell when English seems too polite. Did I lose myself as words and phrases
vanish?

I’ve lost names. Or can you lose what hasn’t been inherited? Names like Grandpa Morris’
brothers. There were a lot of them and grandfather never could share their stories.
Did he imagine that if he whispered names of the dead, he’d travel back to his lost country,
his lost village? When he strummed his mandolin, I could almost hear a celestial roll call.

I’ve lost possibilities. After my surgery, I could never give birth. I was 31 years old.
The scar across my abdomen formed soft tracks to nowhere. I can accept this fate
until a stranger inquires: Do you have any children?

 I lost a tooth the day I left Spunky the cat at the vet hospital. I thought at 5 years old
 she’d survive. Now there’s a hole in my mouth, unfilled. Like leaving an empty chair
 where dad used to sit or the fissures in my heart when my younger brother died.
 When my tongue enters the gap, I think of Spunky’s smooth fur, how I held her against
 my chest to hear each other’s music. How a rescue cat on my lap can be an anchor.

      

Uproarious Laughter, by Summer Killian

“Uproarious laughter” is the sound she says she won’t forget. For me, it’s more the quiet I remember: the loudest, most quiet ride. The road beneath us. Tires on upstate roads sound hopeful but lonely. The green glow of the numbers on the minivan’s radio display: there must’ve been a song, there would’ve been several, really, but I can’t hear them in my memory.

She says he tried to take her clothes off, while she tried, against the palm of his hand, to say no. She says his friend thought it was funny. She thought she might die there. For me, it was a miles-long calculation of how badly injured I might become were I to slide open the side door of the van (moving 60MPH) and roll away onto the asphalt into the night. There’s a lot of time to think startling thoughts like these when a boy has his hand down your shirt. There’s a lot of time to make elaborate plans for the escape, and the turning in, and then to realize that you should already be saying something, and then to worry about who will get in trouble if you do – you? Him? And then to strangely, horrifyingly, care more about what happens to him than about what is happening to you. To weigh your broken bones from jumping out of the car against his being booted from the varsity soccer team, and to decide that his fate was worse, or that it mattered more.

It starts with thinking it’s a fly or some other annoyance on the back of your neck, but it’s his fingers and then, no…no. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t possibly be fumbling with your bra strap? Your friend sleeps peacefully beside you, or maybe even in your lap. Wake up! You are beaming a message to her brain from the center of your own. You don’t wake her up. You don’t move.

You imagine telling your dad. He would go over there! Demand a talk with the boy and his dad. Not in a fighting way, but he would fight if he needed to, maybe? Before all that, though, you can hear your dad asking you — why wouldn’t you say anything? I raised you to speak up for yourself. You are worth more than that. And you can hear the hot tears splatter on your jeans as you look at your lap, ashamed here in front of your dad. And you don’t know what to say, or to do, again.

She says she had one beer. I don’t think I had any. I also didn’t have a crush or even an interest in this boy beyond an inherent fascination with kids further along in high school than I was. But what he had was my right breast in his hand for miles. Me, staring out the windshield, and him, doing whatever he was doing with the other hand while he leaned forward from the seat behind mine.

She says she told a therapist. I told my girlfriends, in whispers. His sister was in our class. Shhh! We can’t let her find out.

She says he isn’t fit to serve. This guy sells cars today. I can see how he’d be fit for that. I imagine him speaking to a customer: “Such a quiet ride.”

Today, I wake to news that the investigation has been concluded. I read comments of all sorts, the angry, the supportive, the poorly articulated, the painstakingly so. A new theme emerges, and sounds kind of like this:

Even if he did this drinking-too-much, holding-her-down, uproarious-laughter-terrifying thing, even if, the bottom line is that he was so angry, so unhinged during his questioning, that he clearly can’t be considered for the Supreme Court. So that in the end, even if he isn’t nominated, it won’t be because he sexually assaulted someone. It will be because he was too angry about being accused of it.

This makes me want to be 14 again, speeding in a minivan on the way home from the Saratoga Performing Arts Center at midnight on a school night. I will say stop the fucking car and I will unbuckle my seatbelt and my girlfriend will wake up just in time to see me spin around with this guy’s right forearm gripped between both of my small hands that are so much stronger than they appear, and I will fucking twist that arm until he says JesusChristwhatthehell and then harder until he cries, and that’s right, I will say, YOU don’t get to be angry.

And then I will tell everyone else in the car what he was just doing and then I will tell everyone at school the next day, starting with his sister and then the soccer coach. And then I won’t even have to tell my dad because I will have handled it.

I won’t have to think about him when I drive past Ford dealerships in other years, in other states.

I won’t have to forget all the details of that night: which friend was next to me, which concert we’d been to, what I was wearing, what happened the next time I saw the guy.

I won’t have to tell my daughter that even if a man fucks up in this way, he doesn’t get in trouble. I won’t have to tell her to wait, he’ll soon exhibit some other, more minor bad behavior and we can remember him for that instead.