Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories
Read Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories Online
Authors: J. Robert Lennon
Pieces for the Left Hand
Also by J. Robert Lennon
Castle
Happyland
(published serially in
Harper’s
)
Mailman
On the Night Plain
The Funnies
The Light of Falling Stars
Pieces for the Left Hand
100 Anecdotes
J. Robert Lennon
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2005 by J. Robert Lennon
First published in 2005 by Granta Books in the United Kingdom
Publication of this volume is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota; and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art. Significant support has also been provided by the Bush Foundation; Target; the McKnight Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
Paperback ISBN 978-1-55597-523-4
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-004-8
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008935605
Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter
Cover art: Paint-By-Numbers Collection, Archives Center,
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
for Steve Murray
Contents
Introduction
The author of these stories is forty-seven years old. He lives in a renovated farmhouse at the edge of a college town somewhere in New York State, with his wife, a professor at the college. He is unemployed, and satisfied to be unemployed, and spends an inordinate amount of time looking out the windows at the road and woods and the orchard at the bottom of his hill. He shaves once a week, is always showered before 8:00 a.m., and takes long walks daily, regardless of the weather. He cooks all the meals and does all the cleaning; indeed, he believes he is a better cleaner than the professional one he dismissed when he lost his job. He considers his solitude to be a great and unexpected gift to his life, and in fact occasionally finds himself regarding it with a kind of moral superiority, which he swiftly quashes, but not without a moment of amusement at his own vanity. The author is often amused by his faults.
What he did for a living isn’t important—if you were to talk with him for a hundred years, he would never even bring it up. It was the kind of job most people would call tedious, and so would the author, except that its particular tedium appealed to him, insofar as it busied his mind and protected it from worry. It supported his family when his wife was in graduate school, and now that it is gone, he doesn’t think about it at all.
Instead, he walks. Some days he walks for hours, cutting through fields and forests, hiking along the shoulders of roads. Local people, initially wary at his appearance, have grown used to it, and now they smile and wave when he passes. He enjoys imagining what they must think of him, this idle member of the middle class. He likes to think that they find him odd, though he is aware that there are too many people like him in this town for anyone to think that.
Some time ago, these walks began to shake things loose in the author’s mind. Dark memories of his childhood—his mother’s misery, his father’s death. He began to remember events he had witnessed, stories he had heard, thoughts he had had that he couldn’t let go. Things that happened to his neighbors, to his wife’s colleagues. Things he read in the paper. Every day, for many months, he sifted through the growing pile of memories, until he had begun to tell them to himself, as stories. I once knew a man, the stories began. A woman I know. In our town. The stories accumulated, forming a script in his mind, a repertoire. Some of them are true. Some have been embellished, or fabricated entirely. If he had to, the author could get up on stage and recite them all, but this isn’t the kind of thing it would occur to him to do, or that he would enjoy. What he enjoys is being alone, telling himself stories.
The stories are there now, in his mind, as he walks. He is happy with them the way they are: ephemeral, protean. In time his mind will move on to other things, and he will forget them, or most of them. Eventually the author will probably find a job—he isn’t bored, but he senses that he will be, and he would prefer not to taint with boredom these excellent days.
JRL
1. Town and Country
For more than a century, the main street in our town was named after a founding father of our state, a man who, in a recent revisionist essay, was revealed to have been a corrupt, bigoted philanderer who beat his children and disliked dogs. After a string of protests disrupted rush hour traffic, our mayor took down the street signs and promised to rename the street. But loyalists protested the removal, and the signs were restored. Further protests again eliminated the signs, and the battle has moved to the courts. Meanwhile, our town’s main street has no name at all, confusing visitors, complicating mail delivery, and making us the butt of vicious joking from other, less volatile neighboring towns.