ISSUES | winter 1996

They were irresistable, each in her own way, each in her middle thirties, counting down, each with deep, untapped maternal stores. In fact, they were too maternal to make good lovers; or maybe he was too . . . something. Oedipal? Sensitive? Accustomed to raunchy approach?

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Interviewer: In the introduction to subUrbia you talk about growing up in Woburn, Massachusetts. Can you fill us in a little bit more about where you came from?

Bogosian: I come from around the Boston area. My family, as I was growing up, was moving out farther and farther away from the center of the city into the suburbs, and I ended up spending most of my adolescence in Woburn. It’s very middle-class, a lot of blue-collar.

It’s late afternoon on a hot Friday in early June, and I’m sitting in a plaza in a close-in suburb of Washington, D.C. I’m working, without much energy, on a typical summer project for an English profesor: a study of the funeral elegies of Puritan New England. I always write my scholarship in public places like this. Writing is lonely work, even when your subject isn’t seventeenth-century funerary poems, and it’s a comfort to look up and see people going about their business.

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It’s bar day minus 4, early afternoon. Elise stands in the bathroom, vomiting. Afterwards she washes her face, brushes her teeth and walks, resting one hand against the wall, back into the den where she’s studying with Daren. Under her feet, the carpet feels rougher than usual.

When Patty sees Garrett in his new swim trunks, her heart springs up like a cobra.

It’s not just his extreme thinness and whiteness, as if he’s been somebody’s prisoner. It’s also the scars. Though not large, they are plentiful, scattered across his back and chest and legs, some pale and reserved, others rosy with youth.

It was Ellen who had insisted on taking the dog to a new doctor, one who specialized in canine personality disorders. A shrink for dogs, Gil thought. “What’s the matter with the vet?” he had asked her.

Gentian Pond Shelter, New Hampshire

On the trail, you hear about Ward Leonard long before you meet him. At the Gentian Pond the Yankee Buckeye told us, “Ward’s jumped into shelters at one in the morning, shelters where he knew there were other thru-hikers, and yelled, ‘You’re not gonna make it! You don’t have what it takes!'” The Yankee Buckeye shook his fist in the air, miming Ward’s rage.

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“Who’s this?” said Stella, settling gracefully on the sofa beside him. “Who’s who?” Frank asked. Plucked suddenly from his book, he refocused on the parcel afloat in the silk swirls of her lap.

The Harmattan came early. Already, in the first week of November, the cold wind from the Sahara swept down through a thousand miles of cracked mud and barren creekbeds and brought a fine foggy dust to settle over glasses and crockery and clothes hung out to dry and anyone who didn’t move often enough.

However modest his modern reputation, Bret Harte deserves to be resurrected from the footnote. As founding editor of the Overland Monthly in 1868, he was mentor to an entire generation of Western American writers, among them Samuel Clemens, Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller and Ina Coolbrith.