This First Proof contains the story “Randy Bradley.” For copyright reasons this content is available in print only.

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Because of Miriam’s recent request for a “moratorium” in the correspondence I have with her, and because of my desire to continue that correspondence, and not, through negligence, let things just “heal over” like a scab, I write to you in the hopes that you will translate my thoughts into some palatable language for Miriam.

After half a lifetime of uncomplicated sisterhood, she has found it within herself to “vent” some “frustration” and then immediately close the channels of response. A week of trying to respect her wishes has convinced me that I, too, must have my say, even if it must come from your mouth, and in your words. I leave it to you to decide how to discuss these matters with her. You may choose to reveal the contents of my letter as if the ideas had just occurred to you, or you could create parables that would illuminate the situation for her without making her feel manipulated (for instance, the characters in the parable could be two little Chinese boys, instead of Miriam and myself). I know that you are a gentle man, Richard, and that the notion of disturbing your wife with these issues will not appeal to you. I trust that you will realize the importance of this responsibility and will summon your faculties, such as they are, to meet it.

I respond to Miriam’s letter of September 10th—the one concluding with the request for the “moratorium” in our correspondence. I will provide a few lines from that letter here so that you may be properly oriented (please remember: the “you” is me and the “I” is Miriam. The “us” or “we” is usually you and Miriam, unless it is all of us or Miriam and me):

 

“Your summer visits are not a tradition that I intended to become set in stone. The way you assume it’s OK without asking—buying tickets months in advance and then just mailing an itinerary—has become a real source of anxiety for us . . .”

“We don’t really enjoy each other’s company. Conversations dissolve abruptly into your word game, which, frankly, Richard and I don’t understand . . . you don’t really ask us about our lives . . .”

“Though we appreciate your repeated offers to help with cooking, your ‘family recipe’ deeply disturbs me in a way that I can’t fully explain . . . despite your insistence to the contrary, I don’t recall Jean-Marie ever making it for us when we were girls.”

“If they weren’t so frightening, the fires that seem to arrive every year with your visits could be some sort of family joke. But you seem not to realize that the fires have actually caused any damage, or that they are anything even a little out of the ordinary . . .”

 

There are other complaints, but these are the four on which Miriam dwelled the longest in her letter, so I will respond to them as best as I can, providing clarification for you as an outside observer (though I do realize the important place you have filled in Miriam’s life for the last 12 years). I am not well-versed in the aphorisms of the amateur psychological movement, so I am poorly armed to fit my answers strictly to Miriam’s challenges. I will, instead, provide the facts surrounding events that have caused my sister, your wife, such—until now—quiet suffering. I find that gaps in interpretation of a situation can be more neatly filled by solid facts than by the ephemeral and imprecise fluid of emotions. When a piece of a puzzle has yet to be fit, we do not fill the void with tears, but rather, with the missing puzzle piece, I always think.

 

From this point I will not be returning to your house for any occasion other than that of Miriam’s funeral—and yours, if I am invited. When that time arrives, I will register at the Bunkin’ Bear Lodge two miles from your house, and will spend most of the visit there excepting formal ceremonies appropriate to the occasion. If, at that time, the Bunkin’ Bear Lodge has closed, and a business other than a motel replaces it, or if the buildings which now comprise the Bunkin’ Bear Lodge are left to stand empty, I will make arrangements in Knoxville (because I do not like the idea of staying at one of those light-flashing motels on the edge of the highway, especially since I will want to use that time to reflect upon, and honor, Miriam’s life—or your life, if I am to be included in the solemn activities following your demise—and will need more sober accommodations than one of those motels can provide) and will rent a car to drive to the formal ceremonies, returning to Knoxville upon their completion.

I do not wish to harp on your mortality am certain, however, that you and Miriam will precede me in departure from this world, so dark events must be considered. I concluded the order of our demise several years ago, when I noticed the haphazard bed-time schedule that you and Miriam follow. The record I kept of each night’s time of retirement reveals the case: 9:30, 10:12, 10:45, 9:30, midnight(!), 10:42 . . . In these uncertain conditions, the body perceives that a desperate pursuit of rest, sans coherency, misrules its modest existence. The body soon quells rebel impulses, Richard. Finding disorder in life, the body awards itself the most absolute constancy. So it is not with morbid wishes that I inform you of such plans. It is with this fact in mind: while I have gone to bed almost every night at 10:30 since 1968, you and Miriam have yet to establish a regular bed-time.

I would not like to issue the bold pronouncement that I will never return to your house. It would occur to you and Miriam, perhaps simultaneously, that the pronouncement included such grave occasions as I have discussed, and you might then feel obliged to extend that invitation to me years before either of you should be thinking of it. Instead, I have considered it, and included it as a condition of my resolution never to return to your house, the only discrepancy in an otherwise unalloyed decision.

 

Secondly, I would like to review with you, Richard, the origin of the “summer visit tradition,” which has apparently oppressed Miriam for the last 15 years. In the summer of 1980, you will recall, my apartment was flooded by an early-morning explosion of corroded pipes in the wall between the living room and the bedroom. Having only recently arrived in Chicago, I had no friends to whom I could turn under such circumstances. I was to be, for the two weeks necessary to fix the plumbing and flooring, homeless. That afternoon, while talking to Miriam from a pay phone, I revealed my circumstances simply, without proposing obligation on her part. Miriam immediately insisted that I take a bus to Knoxville that afternoon. She said “it would be a pleasure to have [me]”—quite a different tone than her most recent letter, you’ll note. I demurred, explaining that I could easily find some affordable lodging in the city, perhaps near the train station, and that I did not want to he a bother. Miriam refused to accept my solution and immediately reiterated her invitation, in terms that did not allow refusal. I am sure you have encountered this habit of Miriam’s, this cheerful insistence on extending graciousness not hers to give, leading her toward territory she cannot enter—the territory where occasional hospitality to her only sibling resides.

Every year, I wrote a letter, expressing appreciation for our time together; Miriam responded with descriptions of my visit as “interesting” (’84), “thought-provoking” (’89), and “out of the ordinary” (’92). You can see how I came to believe myself welcome.

So while I considered myself a desired and anticipated guest in your home, bringing fresh sausages for you and fish for Miriam—believing these small courtesies to be but a symbolic gesture of the larger exchange of familial comforts—Miriam was quietly wishing I would, perhaps, just mail a convenient Christmas card for your mantle, or make a short phone call on her birthday each year. One week together each year interrupted her fixed smile with the solid fact of blood family, dragging her deeper than the flotsam amusements which usually string her life together.

And yet she smiled as I unwrapped the sausages for you and fish for her, carried on two planes and through three airports, from its brown paper packaging; she smiled at the news I brought of Charlotte and King; she even smiled and nodded as I, barely able to get the words out, eventually informed her of King’s death at the hands of neighborhood street cats. Her maintenance of this smile—now revealed as a smirk—her stoic continuance of this rote smirking under the persecution that my visits provided, surely exhausted her jaw muscles. She must have whispered about me in bed. What a joke it must have seemed—reciting my inadequacies, all the ways that I was not like her, under cloak of bedsheets! Perhaps she even stretched her cheeks back towards her ears for you, giggling, using my voice to say ugly things, as she did for Tony Santos when she was ten!

You, of course, laughed politely and wondered from what unknown abscess in your wife’s psyche this cruelty had sprung. Yet, admitting your confusion to anyone else familiar with her, you would be met with loud defenses of her purity and good will. A new snideness of tone would not be apparent to those who had invested certain expectations in her cheerfulness. Soon, you would convince yourself that your wife’s late-night venom was merely an unfamiliar strain of her usual kindness, and that you had misconstrued her vicious confidences. And so, thus exonerated, the bright and spangled Miriam you prefer would return to your mind.

If my description traces the contours of your experience, it is only because Miriam’s machinations have been displayed to me since childhood—excepting, obviously, those she practiced on me.

As a girl, Miriam was accorded all sorts of approval. Those drawn to this talent of hers—this inborn ability to paint the world only in yellows and reds, and not admit to seeing less vivid hues, to actually refuse or evade discussion of anything less than the brightest yellows or the cheeriest reds—gathered around on the church lawn or at dance class to bless her chirping and giggling. Miriam responded by performing clownishly. She constructed a personality out of these successful confections, reassuring everyone’s convictions that such a world of only reds and yellows exists, if not for them, then for someone, while all the time, “in the heart of [her] soul,” from her diary, age 14, “[she] truly do[es] not like many things [she] smile[s] at.” That this compulsion would infect her behavior so completely that she could only offer flimsy duplicity to her sister, that she would be paralyzed in the very act of simply loving her sister and simply engaging in a sisterly relationship, is cause for concern.

I, at my present remove, cannot steer her towards the forthright manner practiced in most adult relationships. You, Richard, are best positioned for such suggestion, and stand to gain the most from its success. What could be more fitting a prize, once honesty has been nudged from the dank corners of Miriam’s heart into the open, than certainty between you and your spouse? Perhaps this is a certainty you believe you already possess, and I do congratulate you if you truly have obtained from Miriam that which she is not able to offer to herself. As we have seen, though, Miriam’s effortless pretense perverts her intercourse not only with strangers but continues into her most intimate relations. My ambition is not to defame Miriam but, instead, to dissolve the sugar castle in which she is imprisoned—you’ll excuse my lapse into poetry.

It occurs to me that you may be reluctant to provoke Miriam’s submerged integrity. You may not see the evidence compelling you to act. It may be that this reluctance relies upon historical ignorance nurtured by Miriam herself. Simply: have you been given all the facts, Richard? We must pursue doubts. For example, why would a woman so invested in the creation of a false world—a world, as I have said, consisting primarily of bright yellows and bright reds—introduce notions to her husband which muddied this false world, which then would require scrubbing and repainting in the form of explanations and arguments to restore this world to its previous gaiety? I certainly can’t think of an answer, unless, as I have suggested, the two of you confide on a level of intimacy unavailable to Miriam in any other social capacity.

It is at this point that I must mention the name Randy Bradley. I trust that my hints of the previous few paragraphs, coupled with the reassurance of a 12-year marriage, will have readied you for the introduction of this subject. Sensitive to the ticklish nature of a man’s jealousy, I wanted to arouse questions of certainty, to prompt various of your defenses, to have you muttering testimony to the strength of your marriage just at the point when I began to discuss Randy Bradley, so that at the very moment Randy Bradley’s name entered our discussion, you would be at the peak of certitude, from which you could consider the “Randy Bradley matter” relieved of the anxiety that rides the boot-heels of envy or insecurity.

Thus fortified, you should know that I always thought it odd that a man who had lived in Miriam’s house just one winter before your first summer would be so remarkably absent, that he could have been effaced so easily. I would frequently think to inquire about a certain aspect of Randy Bradley, or refer to him in a reminiscence, but was always forced to regard his name as verboten. All traces of Randy Bradley had been ostensibly whisked away, replaced by this new “arrangement”—this new man whom Miriam invited home one day to sit down in Randy Bradley’s chair for 20 years at least, maybe for the rest of his (your) life, putting silverware formerly used by Randy Bradley into his (your) own mouth at dinner, climbing stairs bowed by the heavy feet of his (your) predecessor to sleep with a woman accustomed to the cagey and devastating sexual maneuvers that a man of Randy Bradley’s evocative hand gestures must have practiced. And yet, simultaneously, during the period when his absence was freshest and most complete, the house had become swollen with Randy Bradley. He was pressing against the edges of every conversation. His name dangled in my mouth, suggesting itself at every occasion. He was six and one half feet tall, Richard. Surely you were uncomfortable. Surely you did not pretend sovereignty in this house. I can only guess that the tactful oblivion with which you have always engaged me in conversation permitted you to live a life in the spaces not filled by Randy Bradley.

As always, I stifled my opinions. With due stealth, though, I undertook measures to detach Randy Bradley from your lives, a process seemingly circumvented by Miriam and, unwittingly, yourself. You may have noticed that soon after you joined Miriam in her house, I began to redirect general conversation towards specific topics, either facts about objects or events occurring during that immediate visit. These were subjects which could not be corrupted with glib recitations of common history. I had to speak carefully, you see, to avoid stumbling into the name Randy Bradley. It was difficult with the sort of man Randy Bradley was (titanic), and being in the house where he had lived (your current house), but by observing strict parameters in our conversation, it was possible. On some evenings, more drastic intervention was needed: I would become drowsy, the conversation would get away from me, or you and Miriam would begin a discussion into which I had no clear channel of entry. Rather than watch the two of you waltz each other closer and closer to topics of Randy Bradley’s particular interest—delicate natural phenomenons, anything to do with traveling by bus or train (especially long distances), or the quality of life now as compared to some other point in history—I stepped in. Hence, the “word game.”

 

The “word game” came about spontaneously one evening, as you and Miriam perversely chose to discuss your grandfather’s 1916 passenger-train journey to Minnesota from New York for the purpose of studying reptilossic fungus. Simultaneously covering three specific areas of Randy Bradley’s interest was sure to evoke his name. Miriam had finished two glasses of wine that evening and was speaking none too crisply. You, innocent of these things, doggedly pursued subjects like “what it must have been like to travel back then, especially across the frontier.” Had you and Miriam been other than what you so immutably are, I would have suspected farce. Opportunities to cite Randy Bradley’s thoughts on these matters repeatedly exploded into the conversation, crackled with unnerving propriety, and then fizzled, only to be replaced by a new suggestion, even more blatant and insistent than the last. Dangerous comments were bound to be made. The subsequent discomfort, I was sure, would ruin my visit, and possibly your marriage. Be assured that I tried to steer the conversation toward safer territory, contributing facts about Minnesota—a state for which Randy Bradley had little, if any, regard. Yet the triangular theme of the train ride, the fungus, and the differences between then and now had transfixed you. Miriam did not discourage your enthusiasm but, instead, asked you questions, murmured small affirmations. It occurs to me that she may have temporarily forgotten her current situation—forgotten that she had dismissed one husband—and was now conflating the two men, drunkenly encouraging one to perform as the other.

One never knows, in moments of crisis, how confusion leads to reason. But while you continued to fill the room with the vapors of Randy Bradley, Oskar Morgenstern emerged as the solution to the evening’s general discomfort. A few years prior, I had become fascinated with Morgenstern. You may recall him as the co-author of the Game Theory, which systematized elements of combative relationships. His book on the subject was enormously influential but, while his co-author John von Neumann continued an impressive career, Morgenstern only published one more article, in the June, 1963, National Mathematics Review. It was a garbled piece of prose, attacking elements of his own famous theory, repeatedly referring to the “embalming effect” possible under certain conditions. Morgenstern was dismissed as a casualty of his own success and died, unmentioned in any major paper, in 1970. But the “embalming effect,” long forgotten in most circles, nagged me.

To my interpretation, it suggested the application of a benign static force to an increasingly hostile situation, much like placing a jar over an insect without its knowledge. The jar, of course, both protects the insect from the vengeful fist of the human and the human from any harmful capabilities of the insect. Yet, in this case, the insect would retain its autonomy—the jar would travel with it. Thus, one adversary would initiate the peculiar relationship, while the other would guide its course, providing “feeder sentences.” The relationship itself would be static, marking no progress towards conflict. Needless to say, the whole thing seemed rather utopian.

But that evening, listening to you discuss our grandfather’s train trip, interest in fungus, and relative simplicity of life—listening to you speak entire sentences that had first been introduced to the living room by your predecessor—I realized the urgency which had propelled Morgenstern to propose the “embalming effect.” I felt the desire to contain you, to cease your play with disaster, yet I knew that if I were to confront you directly with the nature of the situation, Randy Bradley’s name would fly from one, if not various, mouths.

So, when you said, “Once, Once, he rode a train along the coast down to Florida” and I responded with a jaunty “So, he went to be an alligator fellow, and soon lost his tracks?” I was fairly certain that Morgenstern’s principles could be achieved in conversation. Obviously, the first speaker is free to say anything, while the second speaker is not. The respondent may only form sentences around the sequence of vowels in the previous sentence. Thus, “What are you saying, Lucy?” would quickly bring the retort, ”’What’ can’t be known, thus say it ‘but why.’” Similarly, “Please—is this some kind of word game?” would be met with “Least best is this not, lest it show not at bed.”

It really is quite a beautiful language, divorced from its immediate function. Straining out complicated insinuations and nuanced opinions that frustrate a conversation, it frees words, stringing them together incidentally, like beads that happen to please the idiot jeweler. Many times, I thought of the pleasant hours we could pass, speaking only in that language if I explained how it was derived. But larger considerations stopped me: if either you or Miriam knew the method of achieving the language, the “jar” would have been smashed to pieces. We all would have been left defenseless against the encroaching subject that had necessitated such a language in the first place.

I did not intend to manipulate you or Miriam, Richard. I would even suggest that your freedom to determine the number and arrangement of vowels placed you in a position of power, once the Morgenstern relationship had been established. At times, you held me to certain strings of vowels I would not have chosen, again and again linking a u-series to an oia-cycle. Sometimes you wouldn’t speak for several minutes, occasionally glancing up to see if I was still watching you, waiting for the next feeder sentence. Then, you’d speak rapidly, spewing vowels faster than I could answer. I would have to begin responding before you were finished speaking, shouting above your words so you could hear me. I did not enjoy these evenings, chasing after your words, Richard. Nevertheless, my mission was served: Randy Bradley never fell from any of our mouths.

Yet, though there was now little chance of his emergence in conversation, Randy Bradley had not left the house. After one especially exhausting evening of the “word game,” when you and Miriam had gone off to sleep at 9:00, I sat up in the living room, waiting for my bed-time. I am not being fantastic when I tell you, Richard, that in those quiet moments, the room began to smell of Randy Bradley. My head was tipped back and I was thinking of something entirely different when he entered my nostrils. You know me not to be a raving sensualist. This sort of detection is not a common occurrence for me. In truth, my sense of smell is rather weak and I resort to it only to confirm suspicions of my other senses.

Immediately, I opened all the windows in the living room and switched on the ceiling fans. I took the rugs outside and hung them on the fence to air. I swept the entire room with the char brush from the fireplace. I opened and closed the front door quickly fanning out the smell of Randy Bradley.

All of this I did for the sanctity of your marriage. I did these things so that you and Miriam might endure each other without a ghostly third appraising the small acts of marriage between you. Surely, given the particular type of man Randy Bradley was, and somewhere continues to be, you and Miriam would prefer constructing your unlikely union alone, free from facts that have existed, and then, suddenly, not existed in Miriam’s life—facts which lie solidly behind everything she has ever said to you, every promise she has ever made to you, every chuckle at one of your infamous “dry comments.” I speak of facts, Richard, that record a glorious epoch prior to her present situation which are so basic to Miriam’s life that even when one has opened all the living-room windows, even when one has scrubbed walls and beaten dust from pillows, even when one has wiped lamps and floorboards, the smell of these facts—which is, not surprisingly, the odor of the man to whom all of these facts are attached—remains beneath every surface, refusing to exit a situation from which it has been inexplicably banished.

I began to boil the bones then. Not that night, but the next day. I had not slept well, and in the morning, the odor was still there: strongest in the living room, but also having spread to the kitchen. Miriam’s and your (pre- viously, Randy Bradley’s) bedroom sent waves of the smell to answer what I had intended as an inquisitive sniff, so that I cried out in surprise. You may remember how you woke up then, looking so confused—or did you also smell the evidence and know, instinctively, that your place in that bed (where you had, moments before, slept peacefully and confidently) was not so easily claimed, that it was not a position to be presumed so casually? Your eyes were wild, unfocused. You shouted “Out! Get out!” not understanding the power and tenacity of this odor, thinking that mere shouting would steady your suddenly precarious spot. I walked downstairs as quickly as I could and almost ran to the market. Within an hour, I had returned with five pounds of beef bones and threw them in a soup pot to boil. The stench that rose from that bloody broth made my tongue swell and my eyes water, but gradually, as the vapors misted the kitchen walls with droplets, Randy Bradley’s scent waned. Needless to say, my suffering was so great in that hot kitchen that when you and Miriam appeared at the door, asking “what [I was] doing,” I almost burst with rage. The situation was so obvious, the purpose of my effort so plain and clear, that I truly thought you had abandoned good will and sense and were mocking me, exchanging the product of my decent work on your behalf for a chance to scream and shudder with laughter at Miriam’s sister, stupidly boiling bones in the kitchen all morning, stupidly filling the kitchen with the smell of meat, as if there were no reason for her (me) to be doing that, as if the sweet fetor of Miriam’s discarded former companion were not, at that very minute, choking any possibility that we might enjoy a peaceable visit free from the irritation and confusion of unresolved incongruity in the life of the ever-smiling hostess. Presently, though, I realized that Miriam’s dependence on falsities and your ignorance of the shaky character of your marriage necessitated—begged—that I participate in some fiction. For the first time in my life, I lied. “I am,” I said, my hands shaking so that the large spoon I held danced in front of my face, “making a recipe, of course.” I continued, the lie crawling through my mouth and making me sneer. “It is a recipe that Jean-Marie made for us when we were children. I’m sure you remember, Miriam, the evenings when we would drink this soup for supper.” Miriam began to cry then, the pressure of maintaining this charade shattering her composure. I was unable to assist her in this collapse. I had done what I could. You, I recall, stood in the doorway, your tongue lodged in your mouth.

 

Before closing, I must admit initial confusion in reference to Miriam’s mention of “fires that seem to arrive every year with [my] visits.” Knowing her penchant for metaphor, I considered events involving me which could be thought of as fires—occurrences that seemed, in some way, incendiary. There have been none. Next, I thought that perhaps Miriam’s tendency to exaggerate induced her into overstating the mention of a single fire, perhaps a kitchen accident, during one of my visits. Yet there have been none. That being the case, I have determined the “fires that seem to arrive . . .” to be an attempt at a measure of levity in an otherwise strident letter. Please inform Miriam that while I do not share her sense of humor, I acknowledge her efforts to temper her jeremiad, to soften the blows she must have known she was inflicting upon me.

 

I expect no response. I expect neither phone call nor letter. I expect no continuation of sisterhood with facts acknowledged, and desire none with facts suppressed. I will live out my life here, awaiting notice of Miriam’s passing. Then, I will travel one last time to your home to pay respects correspondent to a sister who, in the blithe spirit of self-preservation, suddenly and inexplicably cut the strings of relation between us.

 

—Jake Bohstedt is a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has been published in Gulf Coast.