Hadley Boyd

Excerpt from “Kenny Kincaid Is Missing” from Lake Effect:

            Phoebe stares at the picture in the paper, trying to construct some persona from the square forehead, the uneven teeth, the hair that sticks in a clump above his right temple. She didn’t know Kenny. He was a fifth grader, while she is in first, but it needles her that she can’t put that face to any particular person she remembers from recess. Without any kind of personal recognition, his disappearance is left open-ended as a thing that could happen, as opposed to a thing that had happened to him.

            Her mother comes into the kitchen with an unruly bouquet of papers and file folders in her arms. “Get your shoes on. We’ve got to go,” she says.

            Phoebe detects the jagged peaks of a large stain marking Kenny’s shirt just below the camera’s eye. He’s wearing a rugby shirt that she imagines has alternating brown and green stripes. Sad colors. She decides Kenny must have been like one of those kids who come onto the morning bus smelling of Aunt Jemima syrup, boys sticky and unwashed, boys whose noses were always running. This comforts her a little, the thought that Kenny was someone she wouldn’t have wanted to sit next to.

            “Phoebe, stop looking at that.”

            Her mother bangs her documents into a straight edge on the counter where Phoebe is sitting.

            “It’s morbid.”

            “What’s morbid?”

            “Obsessed with weird things.”

Excerpt from “The Pro” from WomenArts Quarterly Journal

            In the end, it was the pro who called Spitzy. Amanda was shaving her legs, standing up in the tub, when her mother’s voice spiraled up the stairs from the kitchen below.

            “…with a skirt that screamed Fuck Me Quick,” she was saying with a laugh. Amanda winced, and then returned to the long white strip she was clearing from her shinbone.

            “She did tell me…Well, you’re sweet to say so. I mean, what do I know? Her tennis has just been something I let Thurston handle.”

            Amanda froze. A smile of blood appeared where the razor had been. She was supposed to be doing this sitting down.

            “Oh, Lord! Are you kidding? If he was going to spend any time with his children at all, it had to b an organized activity, so I said, “Taker her to the courts! Bat the ball around with her.”

            Amanda whipped on the faucets to drown out the rest. The water made her cut sting and her eyes went blurry. Why did she have to make everything sound so pathetic?

            A moment later, there was a knock and then Spitzy was standing in the doorway. Her expression did a quick change from mild wonderment to grim satisfaction. “Honestly! What did I tell you? Did I tell you to do that sitting down?”

            “Okay!”

            Spitzy reached for a washcloth hanging on the towel rack behind her. “Sit down,” she commanded.

            Amanda sat on the edge of the tub and Spitzy sat next to her. She pressed the washcloth firmly against the gash in Amanda’s leg. “Your boyfriend called.”

            “God! He’s not my boyfriend.”

            Spitzy checked the blood flow. “Well, you certainly made an impression,” she said, pressing again. “We need to run down to the Sports Shop and get you some tennis clothes. Your team starts practice on Wednesday morning at nine.”

            A fillip of excitement and terror ran up Amanda’s spine. He had called. She was getting new clothes. She didn’t know how to play tennis. Not really.

            “Sit still, Amanda!”

            “I am!”

Excerpt from “Mothers,” published in North Atlantic Review

            Seven years together and he could still startle her with his beauty. He looked like a Roman fresco come to life with comically large, almond-shaped eyes and lips that caught the light as if he’d just wetted them. Stress, or lack of sleep, only made his black curls a little more unruly, as if he were helpless to look after himself. They’d met when she had joined his group as his trading assistant, her first job out of college. From the start, she could see that everyone, not just the people in equities, but the people in fixed income and cash, were anxious to please him. He was always exceedingly polite, giving whoever had grabbed his attention all the time they needed to explain themselves while his dark pupils remained fixed on theirs. It was only when he allowed himself to speak that he betrayed a slight impatience, shredding someone’s long held strategy with an off-the-cuff analysis; interrupting a desperate defense with a gentle hand on their shoulder letting them know he was three sentences ahead of them and had the remedy they needed. People called him M’Lord when he wasn’t around.

            But when he leaned over her chair to say in her ear, “Let’s go long 20,000 on our custom tech basket and hedge it with some index futures,” she was not undone by his low, intimate rumble because she only heard the numbers, not how they came to her.  The thought of making a mistake around those smart, bullying personalities was so terrifying she’d focused on her job like a pilot bringing in a plane with a burning engine. She responded so often with the same polite and efficient, “I’ll throw it in,” that the traders and sales people swore it was all the conversation she had in her.  And yet it was she that John had chosen, and not the leggy, Harvard MBA’s who dreamed of writing venture capital plans with him, rubbing legs under the covers.

            Well, she reminded herself, blinking at him now with her recently acquired mixture of awe and annoyance, she had been the perfect trading assistant, never asking anyone to repeat anything, never confusing buy with sell. That, and she had understood how to handle his mother, a glamorous, patrician woman (black hair still worn in a slight bouffant) whose left incisor stuck out at a sharp angle.  Meeting Nelia had been Meredith’s entrée into a world where a deliberate imperfection could be left alone as a mark of class, so different from her own mother’s Midwestern pursuit of Chanel bags and Botox treatments.  She had been duly intimidated until she’d heard the woman vomiting up the excellent salmon en croute Meredith had made to impress her at their first dinner. At the sound of quiet gagging followed by the splash of toilet water, she had jumped up in alarm but John had given her an almost imperceptible shake of his head and, after a moment’s confusion, she had gone into his kitchen to grind beans for their espresso.  The noise of the grinder was her offering to Nelia, giving the woman a measure of privacy, while keeping her own hands busy, denying her acute embarrassment.  She let her questions go unanswered as she fit seamlessly into John’s family.

Excerpt from “Saturday At Clive’s” from the Pisgah Review

            In the back of a tired, sallow drugstore sits a horseshoe lunch counter where two eight-year-old girls are eating fried egg sandwiches with mayonnaise on toast, washing them down with large glasses of Coke and chipped ice. It is a large drugstore, big enough to carry lawn mowers, as well as hair spray, but not large enough to dispel the fat cushion of cigarette smoke that hovers beneath the fluorescent lighting.

            There is a woman, Tina, running the cash register way up at the front, but otherwise the girls are in the company of men. It may be Saturday morning and these men may be at their leisure, but they are still dressed in their work-a-day uniform of short-sleeved, button-down shirts, khaki pants, and work boots. Their conversation, over cups of burnt, black coffee and cigarettes wedged deep between their fingers, runs at a murmur, except when a regular comes in. He might slap his newspaper on the counter and say, “Hey, Clive. You got extra help today?”

            To which Clive, flipping a grilled cheese on the griddle, will answer, “Yep. Let the kid pay her room and board. The other one’s Tracy. She’s along for the ride.”

            Bonnie, Clive’s daughter, engrossed in the crinkle fries on her plate, is oblivious to these exchanges, but the other girl, whose real name is Amy, blushes and looks down at her lap. She has no idea why Clive calls her by a different name, except that it is some sort of joke between them and a mark of affection.

            On the middle finger of her left hand sits her blue, mottled turquoise butterfly ring that her grandmother sent her for Christmas several months ago. She’s only been allowed to wear it for the past week, however. She turned eight last Saturday, and this is her first real test of responsibility.

            Seeing the jewelry on her body makes her feel uneasy and also proudly feminine. She wouldn’t have worn the ring if Bonnie hadn’t gotten her ears pierced for her birthday. Once, right after Christmas vacation, Amy snuck her grandmother’s gift out of her mother’s top bureau drawer and brought it to school to show Bonnie, who said the turquoise looked like somebody’s eyeball and pretended to puke all over the steps. At recess that day, Bonnie played on the monkey bars with a new girl, and they spoke a made-up language when Amy came near. But now Bonnie has tiny, gold balls in her lobes, and that makes all the difference.

Excerpt from “The Ride” from Passages North Magazine

            I suppose the seeds of my affair were really planted when I was twelve.  At twelve I started baby-sitting.  It paid for the tights and leotards I needed for dance classes, since the scholarship to the studio covered only tuition.  Every Friday and Saturday night, and all summer long, the routine was the same:  The wives would race around, chased by the silk swish of their dresses, hot pink swipes of lipstick on their mouths.  In breathless, distracted voices, they would scatter the instructions, which often began with a thank you for coming on such short notice.  “We usually call Katie Manning next door, but she’s fallen behind on her college applications I guess.”  Followed by the evening’s lineup.  “There’s some left over macaroni in the fridge for them, and some hot dogs you could boil.  They need to have a bath at 7:00, and bed at 9:00.”  And finally, there was the smiling, apologetic push.  “If you get a chance, could you fold the laundry?”

            The rest of the evening would be spent keeping the littlest one from crayoning the walls, while the oldest told me I wasn’t allowed to wear my shoes on the new Chinese rug, and I better stay out of their dad’s coffee ice cream too, ‘cause that was just for their dad.  When I’d gotten them to bed, there was the kitchen to clean, the toys to pick up, and the small crimes of the evening to hide (Orange Crush spilled in the master bedroom).  Then, I would be free to wander

the enormous rooms, smelling the wives’ perfumes, playing with the neck massage machine, staring at photographs of the family at the beach, at the bottom of the ski hill, in black tie on New Year’s Eve.  In some houses, the best part of the tour was saved for last.  Sliding open the glass door off the den, I would slip into the tile-encrusted spa room and stand over the covered, still Jacuzzi water daring myself to turn the jets on.  I never worked up the nerve.

            But it was the rides home that hooked me.  Having waved goodbye to the wife, I was now the guest whose need for transportation was being attended to by a grateful host.  The husbands were usually a little drunk, so they would be very quiet, focusing all their attention on the road.  Because I’d been a shy kid, totally incapable of small talk, I’d lose myself in the soft leather seats, the warm air from the heater blowing over my knees, the after-hours smell of alcohol, aftershave and cigarettes, and the comforting hum inside the Cadillac or Lincoln Town Car.  It had been like riding in a glass bubble where time had stopped, a world perfectly contained, tinged with excitement.  As we whooshed through the streets of the big houses with their overhanging porticos and one-hundred year old trees, I’d pray we would never arrive.   

 Excerpt from “Inner Landscape” from Gargoyle Magazine

            Half an hour later, Wallace emerged from his bungalow, barely dry from his shower and already sweating in the monstrous heat. He took the jacket off before it suffocated him and stopped for a moment to check its pockets for his eulogy. On the paper was a set of bullet points: the earth’s beauty that she understood so well and let others see in unexpected ways; the infectious delight she took in life; the courage she had to pursue her passion; her unstinting generosity (with her things, if not herself). In fairness to Charlie, he was also going to throw in some stuff about her being a complex woman; the arc of her sometimes difficult life. He hadn’t quite nailed it all down, yet. Nervous sweat zigzagged between his ribs.

            Darnell seemed to be waiting for him in his yard across the street, shooting whipped cream from a can into his mouth. His rubbery frame sprang up when he saw Wallace emerge from his house. Darnell was short for his age, and skinny. Half of him seemed to be taken up by his enormous brown eyes. Wallace had never seen him smile, but because he was such an animated boy, his body always in motion, his attention sharp and quick-witted, he would have described Darnell as a happy kid, although he had no way of knowing if this was true. “Hey, glue man. Hey there, glue man,” Darnell yelled to him.

            Last spring, Wallace tried to make papier-mâché masks with Darnell’s class, but things got out of hand when Darnell and his posse decided they could get high on the “glue” if they put the strips of wet, sticky newspapers over their own faces. It started a craze. Within minutes, all the kids looked like newsprint mummies gone ecstatic over imaginary fumes. They knocked over easels and ripped the kindergartners’ finger paints down from the wall before the teacher next door burst in and grabbed Darnell around by the neck, which quieted the rest of them pretty quick.

            Things often went this way in Wallace’s classroom. He was either too liberal or too hot-tempered in all the wrong moments, and this kept him forever off-kilter, always afraid of some extreme he might go to. The students ran on his uncertainty like it was a no-limit charge account.

            Wallace glared at him.

            “Hey, glue man, my grandma say your grandma dead.”

            “Darnell! Shut your wide-assed mouth. That man don’t need to hear from you,” someone yelled from inside their screen door. Probably Darnell’s Aunt Ruby, an eminently sensible woman Wallace had planned to approach about the spying. He rarely saw Darnell’s mother, who worked as an operator for Bell South and then as a security guard over at the Bi-Lo Center, and the grandmother was sick with something. The house was also filled with various cousins and siblings. “Get in here and eat this toast!”