{"id":47973,"date":"2019-11-03T12:13:57","date_gmt":"2019-11-03T18:13:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=47973"},"modified":"2019-11-03T12:13:57","modified_gmt":"2019-11-03T18:13:57","slug":"katharine-coles-look-both-ways","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/katharine-coles-look-both-ways\/","title":{"rendered":"Katharine Coles: Look Both Ways"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"READ LOCAL First\u00a0represents Utah\u2019s\u00a0most comprehensive collection of\u00a0celebrated and promising writers of fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction, and memoir.\u00a0This month, we are honored to publish Chapter 1 of Look Both Ways<\/em>, Katharine Coles\u2019 biography\/memoir (Turtle Point Press) and<\/em>\u00a0a finalist in the creative nonfiction category for the 2019 15 Bytes Book Awards.<\/p>\n

Coles was Utah Poet Laureate from 2006-2012. She\u2019s been at the University of Utah since 1997. In 2012, she was a Guggenheim Fellow. Her publications include two novels and seven collections of poetry.<\/p>\n

In June of this year, Red Hen Press published WAYWARD, a collection of poems that she will read from on Monday, November 11, at Weller Book Works (where she\u2019ll be joined by fellow poet Matty Layne Glasgow, author of deciduous qween<\/em>, a collection of poems that Richard Blanco named for the 2017 Benjamin Saltman Award).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/h4>\n

Look Both Ways<\/h4>\n

Chapter 1<\/h4>\n

A SELF DIVIDED<\/h4>\n

<\/h4>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cTo speak is also to be.\u201d<\/h4>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Isabelle Allende<\/h4>\n

Walter Link is absolutely a man<\/u>!<\/em><\/h4>\n

It\u2019s a passing reference in my grandmother\u2019s diary, but I make a note.\u00a0 In fall of 1923, Miriam Magdalen Wollaeger was a sixteen-year-old freshman at the University of Wisconsin.\u00a0 She\u2019d met the man in question, who would become my grandfather, at the Lutheran church supper. \u00a0About Tom, my grandfather\u2019s first rival, she wrote,There is someone who feels like I do, to whom I can tell my strange ideas and have them appreciated<\/em>.\u00a0 And, He wants to read my poems<\/em>, a line we\u2019ve all heard.\u00a0 In spring of \u201924, about Al: He has a dandy blue canoe, with all the equipment one could think of, including cooking utensils.\u00a0 <\/em>Not to mention a little flivver<\/em>, small like her, and dashing, blue to match her eyes.\u00a0 He loved that she drove like a man, much too fast.<\/h4>\n

Sensibility.\u00a0 Gear.\u00a0 Manhood.\u00a0Her words are my window and my mirror.\u00a0Packing for my flight to Wisconsin, my first trip in their footsteps (archives<\/em>, I say to my husband, Chris, who likes to know where I am going and why), I imagine the girl who will become my grandmother looking for a combustion engine and a full tank, for someone to pick her up and move her, for transport.<\/h4>\n

Walter, five years older, I see less clearly.\u00a0 After the church supper, he lingered on Barnard Hall\u2019s front porch until it was time for her to sign in.\u00a0 Already careful of her, he watched the clock.\u00a0 The next day, he took her for a walk in the snow, a date he could afford.<\/h4>\n

Frugality.\u00a0 Discipline.\u00a0 Family virtues, I\u2019ve been led to believe, that made him a successful explorer and made her think she should love him.\u00a0 The linear head of a scientist; the lean physique of a cross-country runner.\u00a0Tall and brooding, he had the long nose that came through my mother to me and impossibly big feet that would torment him on journeys seeking oil in the tropics.\u00a0 <\/em>If Miriam by virtue of sex and class could flit from English to music to French to zoology, Walter stayed focused, determined to thrive.\u00a0 I think he is very sensitive, and considers himself inferior in some ways\u2014dear little (?) dumbbell!\u00a0 <\/em>Miriam could afford to view education as class ornament, but, like me, Walter\u2019s father earned his meager living, until he lost the power of speech and could no longer deliver his sermons, from the word.<\/h4>\n

Among his children: an attorney, a botanist.\u00a0 Karl Paul, chemist and inventor of Warfarin, twice won the Lasker Prize and was rumored to have been shortlisted for the Nobel.\u00a0 Two petroleum geologists.\u00a0 Margie and Helene had orchids named for them; Ruth was a milliner. Ten children survived.\u00a0Like most of them, like me, Walter became an atheist, hardheaded and willing to rely on himself in everything but love.\u00a0 He was, I think looking back, as American as oil, absolutely of his time.<\/h4>\n

Then Al began to woo her, and, though Walter promised to take her canoeing (I hope he does!<\/em>) as soon as the lake ice melted, he had no boat to match that blue canoe, much less a fast piece of sky on wheels.<\/h4>\n

~<\/h4>\n

And Miriam: What was she?\u00a0\u00a0 Eighty years later, I find among her papers a poem penciled in a bluebook, returned ungraded because she was supposed to turn in an essay.\u00a0 In just this way, I troubled my college French professor by translating Baudelaire in place of grammar exercises.\u00a0 I imagine her lying on her dorm-room bed, wondering what it would be like to bushwhack through jungles and gaze from mountaintops over wild landscapes.<\/h4>\n

To plough the foaming waters of the boundless Spanish main,<\/h4>\n

To plunge amid the swelter of a pelting tropic rain,<\/h4>\n

To wade thigh-deep against the racing waters of a stream\u2014<\/h4>\n

All these would be fulfillment of my highest, golden dream.<\/h4>\n

It\u2019s formally predictable, but not bad, I think, for sixteen.\u00a0 Embodying desire, she spins through a Wisconsin blizzard on lamplight and white sheets, piloting her own boat.\u00a0 I follow her onto the water, our keel slicing the waves, moving us forward through active and vivid images:<\/h4>\n

To hear the billows swishing as they\u2019re riven by the bow,<\/h4>\n

With their crests like smoke a-flying, lighting dark green depths below,<\/h4>\n

To feel the rush and smother of a million airy bubbles\u2014<\/h4>\n

Here, at the end of the second stanza, comes the moment when the poem moves from its sustained provisional infinitive\u2014to plow, to plunge, to feel\u2014<\/em>and into the present, where the journey becomes embodied, or so I expect, in her<\/u>\u2014<\/h4>\n

O, the dash and vigorous joy of life make a fellow lose his troubles!<\/h4>\n

Did this line trouble her as it does me?\u00a0Sixteen-year-old Miriam, pining for adventure as I did, enters her dream\u2014in a boy\u2019s skin.\u00a0\u00a0 I remember this: when I was growing up, too, all the heroes were boys, except the intrepid Nancy Drew, who had Ned.\u00a0 Miriam had to take some trouble to accomplish her split, shifting from me\u00a0<\/em>in the last line of the opening stanza to the third-person fellow\u00a0<\/em>in the last line of the second.\u00a0 Did it occur to her that this shift stops the poem short, disturbing both its rhythm and its logic?\u00a0 Did she even consider \u201cthe dash and vigorous joy of life make me\u00a0<\/u>lose my\u00a0<\/u>troubles?\u201d\u00a0 If she were my student now, I would tell her, look there<\/u>, into the poem\u2019s flaw, for its key.\u00a0\u00a0 If she were myself, oh, I could have taken her in hand.<\/h4>\n

Asail on that bed, plowing through the night, she can\u2019t hear me.\u00a0 What more could any man desire?<\/em>\u00a0 Her spirit calls, but she can\u2019t follow.\u00a0 In the final stanza, when her speaker separates from that fellow <\/em>and they go their separate ways, she has to stay home.<\/h4>\n

A square of window, whited out.\u00a0\u00a0 I want to break away as did \u2018Desmond\u2019, dress as a man and fight my way<\/em>.\u00a0 Movies and novels and her own poem notwithstanding, her will was weaker than her desire.\u00a0 She wouldn\u2019t step into those britches she\u2019d stitched from words and go. I have always envied her life\u2019s romance and, yes, adventure.\u00a0 Now, I watch her begin it daunted, already divided.\u00a0She imagined motion, imagined the vast unknown, imagined moving through a world that never existed.\u00a0 She called her poem \u201cAdventuring.\u201d\u00a0 What she couldn\u2019t imagine: herself<\/u>.<\/h4>\n

Absolutely a man<\/em>.\u00a0 An American of his time.\u00a0 She couldn\u2019t become him.<\/h4>\n

Instead, with her mother\u2019s help, she would marry him.<\/h4>\n

~<\/h4>\n

But why could she not become him?\u00a0To my mother Joan, even Miriam\u2019s accomplishments represented her failure to live up to her gifts.\u00a0 She read Latin and spoke fluent German, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Malay as well as English; she was a student of violin and voice whose music teacher urged her to drop everything but her fiddle<\/em>; she was a championship swimmer, diver, horseback rider, polo player; at barely twenty she received a degree in geology from the University of Wisconsin; she had the largest working vocabulary of anyone my mother, who herself earned Ph.D.s in geology and psychology, has ever known; she traveled around the world twice before the advent of passenger flight; she lived in Colombia, Java, Sumatra, Costa Rica, and Cuba.<\/h4>\n

I have always been amazed that she managed all this as a woman in her time, even if her travels were made not on her own sweaty nickel but on that of her husband, my grandfather.\u00a0 Behind my eyes, Miriam touches the hem of my wedding dress, its lace hand-pearled for her own marriage sixty-two years before mine; in her filthy Sarasota kitchen, still missing Havana, she makes me paella from the contents of a box, three cans, and Florida tap water; at eighty-five, she sets down her beer and tilts her head, wattles trembling, to pour a raw oyster into her red-lipsticked mouth; she skids her Pontiac into the supermarket parking lot, tires screeching.\u00a0\u00a0 Even in her Florida old age, where she looks like any other pensioner, I admire and envy the romance of Miriam\u2019s life, all the things she told me that she never told my mother, her entitlement.\u00a0 I even admire her driving, her heavy foot, her muttered curses and refusal to give up her keys.\u00a0 She made her own way in a world still deeply unfriendly to women.\u00a0 She loved her children and resented being a mother.\u00a0Like her mother and mine, like anyone, she succeeded and she failed.<\/h4>\n

By twenty-two, Miriam had traveled every hemisphere, a goal I wouldn\u2019t accomplish until I was in my forties.\u00a0There are worse reasons to marry.\u00a0In her place, her time, could I have been braver?\u00a0 With all my freedoms, can I now?<\/h4>\n

Still, I have to consider the possibility that she should have done everything differently.\u00a0 Wherever she lived, she left her children with servants to play bridge, polo, tennis; she went out dancing; she flirted, and more, with aviators and deputy consuls.\u00a0 Oh, my mother remembers: Miriam was glamorous, bolero-jacketed, sequined.\u00a0Chanel #5 lingered in every room she left.<\/h4>\n

She should have become an explorer like Walter, persuading the oil companies (her mother, her husband, herself) that she too could cut her way through the jungle with a machete while her precious brats<\/em>stayed\u2014where?<\/h4>\n

She should never have had children.\u00a0She should have stayed home.\u00a0 She should never have married.\u00a0 She should have married somebody else.<\/h4>\n

She should have given more to her children or taken more for herself.\u00a0 She should not have been angry at what she\u2019d given up.\u00a0 She should have given up nothing.<\/h4>\n

She should have been the exception.\u00a0She should have done it all and done it alone.<\/h4>\n

She should have been everything she was and more, should have been ordinary.\u00a0 She should have been something else altogether.<\/h4>\n

I begin to imagine what flights I might undertake myself.\u00a0 Her flaws notwithstanding, to me she glitters.\u00a0 She is not only romance, but history.<\/h4>\n

~<\/h4>\n

She wasn\u2019t even sufficiently herself. \u00a0I don\u2019t know what I want or think or feel.\u00a0 <\/em>Miriam\u2019s own mother, Mandy Gettelman Wollaeger, daughter of a brewer and married to a furniture business until it failed, was famous in Milwaukee for charm and hospitality, especially toward men, and in her family also for cruelty, which she taught to her daughter in exquisite lessons.\u00a0 Four-foot-ten, dictatorial, willful, she managed her children with deft rigor.\u00a0With her husband, Louis, she had less success.<\/h4>\n

Even as a small girl, Miriam cooked for her spoiled older brother, Louis Jr., and younger sister, Tony, saw them off, then delivered breakfast to her mother in bed before hurrying to school herself.\u00a0 Female and thus fatally flawed, she became her mother\u2019s petted companion and reviled servant.\u00a0 My Darling Petty<\/em>, Mandy addressed letters all her life, and Mother\u2019s Dearest Blessing<\/em>.\u00a0 Mommy Darlingest<\/em>, Miriam wrote, until she was nearly forty.\u00a0 Baby<\/em>, she called my mother, over Joan\u2019s furious protests, until she died.<\/h4>\n

Mandy, having watched her dull brother get the education she longed for, made sure both daughters went to the University of Wisconsin, just as my mother left no doubt that I would go to college and probably graduate school.\u00a0 I am merely fulfilling her own dreams<\/em>.\u00a0Still, in 1923 as in the 1890s\u2014as, indeed, in the 1950s, even the 1970s\u2014there were few clear paths for a woman seeking a life beyond that of wife and mother.\u00a0 Like Mandy before her and my mother after, Miriam chafed against her restraints but couldn\u2019t overturn them or sidestep them.\u00a0 Instead, she created loopholes.\u00a0\u00a0 To imagine herself in action, Miriam thought herself divided.\u00a0Through beating men at sports, through conversation, through charm, she became the exception: honorary member of the male sex, object of men\u2019s desire, so lively they mistook her for beautiful.<\/h4>\n

I count Miriam\u2019s admirers at school: Edgar, Skeex, Ets, Leo, George, Tom Lake, both Link brothers. \u00a0<\/em>When I suggest Miriam got around, my mother defends her.\u00a0 Things were different then: a whirl was what a girl lived in; being seen too much with one boy was what she had to avoid.\u00a0\u00a0 Fellows do make better friends when they are\u00a0<\/u>real friends than girls.<\/em><\/h4>\n

In November 1924, Walter took Miriam to watch the northern lights play over Lake Mendota.\u00a0 She saw four movies a week, emotion flickering in the darkness, but nothing could equal the aurora for taking her out of herself.\u00a0 They sang \u201cStille Nacht,\u201d Miriam\u2019s mezzo soaring above Walter\u2019s bass and over the water.<\/h4>\n

As you say the German songs are always a font of understanding. <\/em>Miriam sent Mandy his photograph\u2014He looks like a very nice fellow\u2014<\/em>then took him home for Thanksgiving.<\/h4>\n

What passed between Walter and Miriam that weekend?\u00a0 Between Walter and Mandy? \u00a0I think he is the kind you can respect and admire. <\/em>\u00a0As he walked in the front door, Mandy took his arm\u2014her head barely cleared his elbow\u2014and led him off to her sitting room to apply her wit.\u00a0 The kind of work he does will keep him wholesome and clean inside and out.<\/em>\u00a0 She adopted his nickname, Brutus.\u00a0 Friendships such as his will have a good influence over you.\u00a0 <\/em>And she adopted his pet name for Miriam, his Muckie.<\/em><\/h4>\n

It was Miriam who couldn\u2019t decide.\u00a0He\u2019s a dandy <\/em>kid, she wrote to her mother.\u00a0 But her dreams were shaped by the stories she already knew.\u00a0 To her journal:\u00a0 I will be a solitary girl\u2014until someday the man of my dreams wakes me, and then I can do anything.\u00a0 Oh, I will love him\u00a0<\/em>(if only I don\u2019t make any mistakes first. \u00a0God please guide me!).<\/em><\/h4>\n

The world tells her to give over, to keep herself in check, to slumber.\u00a0 Through time, I see myself in her\u2014small, straight-bodied, self-absorbed, often frustrated, uncertain, reckless, secretive, her head easily turned by novelty, by beautiful clothes, by men.\u00a0 I want her to be wise. \u00a0I\u2019m destined to be forever in doubt as to which man of several I like best.\u00a0 It is a sad weakness.\u00a0 <\/em>Over ninety years have passed. \u00a0I would not want to have missed it.\u00a0 <\/em>She has had some glimmerings, but she is not wise yet, and neither am I.<\/h4>\n

~<\/h4>\n

I remember ice skating on Lake Mendota during the year we spent in Madison; trying not to draw my grandmother\u2019s eye, or her temper, by getting underfoot in Milwaukee; picking wild, intensely sweet blueberries with my brothers on the wind-swept shores of Lake Superior, running as wild as they did, getting lost.\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember Mandy, who held me only once not long before she died, already descended far enough into her dementia not to know me any more than I could know her.\u00a0Now, looking into a more distant past, I rummage in the Wisconsin Historical Society archives for newspapers advertising dresses Miriam might have bought and movies she might have seen; I walk downtown, identifying buildings that would have been here when she was young, trying to picture still unpaved roads gone muddy after rain.<\/h4>\n

On campus, I buy an ice cream at the old Babcock Hall Dairy Store, which my parents would have patronized in the 50\u2019s.\u00a0I tour Barnard Hall with its visible ductwork, tall windows, and original radiators, still crisply new when Miriam wrote her poems and letters there, now advertised as historic.<\/h4>\n

January, 1925: a new diary.\u00a0D\u2019you suppose I\u2019m falling in love with Brutus? <\/em>\u00a0There was a line, invisible and moving, she was always about to cross, had just crossed. Miriam, at seventeen often late like my mother, like me running to catch up with herself, strewing ribbons and buttons and torn stockings in her path, tried when he arrived to come down promptly\u00a0<\/u>(notice!) hair up and everything.<\/em><\/h4>\n

They went to see North of 36\u00a0<\/em>at the Strand. \u00a0His touch thrills me.\u00a0 <\/em>After the film, they met his elegant brother Karl Paul at the Chocolate Shoppe.\u00a0K.P. and I had a battle of wits.\u00a0 But Brutus squelched him, saying, \u201cShe goes with the man, not the clothes.\u201d <\/em>\u00a0Little did he know.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>She loved play, dance, immanence and its delicate timing. \u00a0<\/em><\/h4>\n

Absolutely a man. <\/em>She didn\u2019t stop to wonder what that meant.<\/h4>\n

The scene as I play it begins with the pair not touching.\u00a0 I wonder if he really loves me?\u00a0 <\/em>He steps into her; she backs away, foot mirroring foot, shoulder-to-shoulder, pushed before him as if by a magnet\u2019s negative force. \u00a0<\/em>Leading, he steps back.\u00a0 He has no money.\u00a0 <\/em>Breast, hip, thigh: he draws her forward, the space between them neither opening nor closing.\u00a0 At last, the distance narrows.\u00a0 When he pulls her into his arms and whirls her into the night, I sigh.<\/h4>\n

But Walter would never really learn to dance.\u00a0 She had to learn to make it look like she was following. \u00a0I wanted so\u00a0<\/u>to have him kiss me goodnight, but unless I act rather lingering, he seems to lack the courage. <\/em><\/h4>\n

If I could speak to them, what would I say?\u00a0 He didn\u2019t take her into his arms.\u00a0 <\/em>At\u00a0The Thief of Baghdad<\/em>, Miriam thought not of Walter beside her but about a distant land, a man returning to claim his beloved on a magic carpet.\u00a0 The old discontent and restlessness and wanderlust stronger than ever.<\/em>She was miles away.\u00a0 She felt distracted, introspective.\u00a0 If only I had enough character to know what I wanted!<\/em><\/h4>\n

I find a Chocolate Shoppe in Madison, founded in the sixties, long after their time.\u00a0 There is no dance floor.\u00a0 Though the Orpheum Theater, built in 1926, still stands on State Street, its iconic sign competing with the Capitol dome for attention, the Strand was demolished in 1990 to make way for a parking lot, its facade hauled off and tucked into storage in some Historical Society warehouse, awaiting a future that wants to see it again.<\/h4>\n

My mother\u2019s cousin Tom lives in the house Karl Paul built in the 1930s on a hill outside town.\u00a0 He and I sit on the terrace drinking wine, looking down the long lawn whereas a child I chased fireflies through the grass.\u00a0 Though Karl spent the northern winters locked in depression behind his study door, I knew his summer self, my mother\u2019s favorite and also mine among the great aunts and uncles; his gentle-humored wife Elizabeth a progressive and lovely anti-Miriam, unpainted, hair smoothed into a simple bun, who channeled her own brilliance without apparent resentment into her children and courteous but passionate activism.\u00a0 Tom, who has her bones, is bemused as I was to learn that his father, whom we both knew as a white-maned and gently ironic man of science, possessed a shadow self, a devil in wit and on the dance floor too.<\/h4>\n

~<\/h4>\n

In February, during Walter\u2019s second visit, Mandy was exercising her temper on her husband, who, when she wouldn\u2019t give him money, borrowed from friends he never repaid. I\u2019d never marry if I thought there\u2019d be such unpleasantness.\u00a0<\/em><\/h4>\n

Used to real hardship, Walter fitted himself in, working puzzles, praising Miriam\u2019s cooking, helping Lou work on the Ford. \u00a0<\/em>Sitting alone, he listened to Bach and Beethoven on the Victrola, each note a little miracle only money could buy.<\/h4>\n

When they got back to Madison, the closeness of the visit held, just long enough.\u00a0 I told my beloved that I love him.<\/em>\u00a0In love with the dance.\u00a0 For the moment, she was right there, under his hand.<\/h4>\n

Two weeks earlier, K.P. had confessed his love<\/em>, the second man that day. If Brutus weren\u2019t so much in love<\/em>\u2014like her, he was a tease, light and brittle and quick, happy to watch himself woo.\u00a0His mouth to her ear, the brasses scorching the air\u2014she was his feather, his Ferris wheel gone wrong, his reckless schooner: I too have imagined myself free yet utterly mastered.\u00a0 If only Brutus isn\u2019t hurt and martyrish.\u00a0 <\/em>She laid her head back and laughed.\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019m not going to tell Brutus at all.<\/em>\u00a0 When she put it that way\u2014but what could she do? And why did he refuse to see?<\/h4>\n

In May, Miriam rode horse drills in the big parade.\u00a0 Major was ten times her weight, the ground wet and slick, the horse\u2019s hooves slipping. She was leading, in control, but all Walter saw was how small she looked, back straight, thighs straining to grip the horse\u2019s body.\u00a0 He was a flicker on the edge of her mind.\u00a0 I am almost afraid that he is cramping my style.<\/em><\/h4>\n

Mandy had forbidden her to go out with Walter more than two nights a week.\u00a0 Had she expected Miriam to resist, to make of this obstacle a stronger bond between herself and her lover?\u00a0 Are you getting tired of the boy?\u00a0 Be careful what and how you say and do things. <\/em><\/h4>\n

What did Miriam long for?\u00a0 Her lover.\u00a0 Her mother.\u00a0\u00a0 Sometimes she confused them.\u00a0 Every night they didn\u2019t see each other, Walter called to tell her what time to go to bed.\u00a0 He believes he\u2019s been appointed regent in your absence.\u00a0 <\/em>She wanted privacy of mind and to be understood.\u00a0 She wanted love and freedom.\u00a0 I know how this is, though I came of age in a different time, with different risks, different protections, buying and carrying condoms long before I ever planned to use them, in the years immediately following Roe v. Wade.\u00a0Perhaps my letters are, as you say, shorter and dumber. <\/em>\u00a0\u00a0How could she say what she felt or wanted to the tiny woman with the stinging slap?\u00a0\u00a0 She didn\u2019t know herself.\u00a0 She looked at Walter awash in sweet longing.\u00a0 She never wanted to see him again. In her journal, sheasked for a big handsome man with a rich car to take me riding in my cute new clothes, and he would take me places!\u00a0 <\/em>A means to an end.\u00a0 O, I know it\u2019s wicked and ungrateful.\u00a0<\/em>Love.\u00a0 Liberty. For either, she would have to give up something she hadn\u2019t tasted.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>She dreamed she could go back, that she and Mandy could be close as lovers again, and she wouldn\u2019t have to choose.\u00a0 Then my Mommy and I will go bummin\u2019 together and have a gorgeous time afterward in a nice little house by the sea<\/em>.<\/h4>\n

One Saturday evening, she and Walter went to the pump house, which sits at the lake\u2019s edge, the water that feeds its intakes lapping beneath the foundation.\u00a0 Among the hydraulic equipment, the smell of the lake rising from beneath their feet, she felt shy and young and itchy.\u00a0 My goodness, Brutus was bold. <\/em>\u00a0Pressing back, backing away.\u00a0 I guess I haven\u2019t been strict enough.\u00a0 <\/em>After he left her at the dorm, she lay awake, flushed and disturbed.\u00a0 He\u2019s getting a bit too passionate and I mustn\u2019t let him.<\/em><\/h4>\n

It\u2019s summer when I visit, and the building, now housing laboratories, is cool and quiet.\u00a0 With its modernized interior, it floats in layered history.\u00a0Not far from here my parents would meet at a Hoofers Club party, my father lying on the floor plucking his mandolin until my mother stepped on him.\u00a0 Did she really break it, or is that my invention?\u00a0 She was majoring in geology to prove to her father she was worth as much as any boy.\u00a0 My parents too would marry in Milwaukee, stepping off Miriam\u2019s porch into new lives.\u00a0I would marry in my own hometown, where I now live with Chris, from the Ladies Literary Club.\u00a0 Like Walter, like Chris, my father was in love, I presume, and hopeful.\u00a0 My mother, as always, was dazzling and angry.\u00a0 Was she also, like me, in love?<\/h4>\n

On Sunday, Miriam waited for Walter to phone, but he left her to herself.\u00a0 It\u2019d be just my luck to fall in love with him when I can\u2019t have him.\u00a0 <\/em>Only then?<\/h4>\n

The next day was a Monday, a perfectly gorgeous night, <\/em>one of the evenings they weren\u2019t to see each other.\u00a0 When he called, she was already half-carried away.\u00a0 I simply had to go out for a walk with him, and so we went up on top of the ski-slide.\u00a0 Across the lake there were just one or two lonely lights, while the stars were so big and bright they looked as if they were on fire.<\/em><\/h4>\n

A child.\u00a0 Why should she have seen how ill-suited they were?\u00a0 Not love, the idea\u2014<\/h4>\n

When I told him he was naughty and asked him if he thought he\u2019d ever get to heaven, he said he was as close as anyone could get right then. <\/em><\/h4>\n

~<\/h4>\n

Filigree of leaves against bright sky and water.\u00a0 Night air soft and close, fired with starlight.\u00a0 Soft pine duff underfoot; clothes rubbed thin at knees and thighs.\u00a0 That June, Walter came to the Wollaegers\u2019 summer house on the shore of Lake Superior as a member of the family, as far as Mandy was concerned. At Lakeside, Miriam had always been free as her brother to ramble, to swim and dive, canoe and sail, wade and scramble up rock faces. As I was also taught to do, she went her own way, in trousers.<\/h4>\n

Walter imagined a life that might include both of them within one frame. If he couldn\u2019t lead on the dance floor, he could in the woods.\u00a0 He bounded on his long legs up any hillside, leaned down to offer his hand.\u00a0 She required not help, but the very mastery she would resent.\u00a0 Though she loved to win at any sport, she couldn\u2019t long tolerate a man she could beat.\u00a0Still, here in the woods, she could take his offered hand.\u00a0 They could admire each other.<\/h4>\n

During the long northern evenings, the family sat on the screened porch and listened to the whine of mosquitoes pressing the mesh.\u00a0 They played cards, or Miriam strummed her uke while everybody sang along.\u00a0 Mandy folded Walter in so easily he almost felt he belonged.<\/h4>\n

At summer\u2019s end, he would board a boat bound for South America, where Standard Oil was sending him for two years while Miriam stayed behind.\u00a0 My spirit of Adventure.\u00a0 <\/em>He found himself a hundred times a day looking at Miriam, trying to memorize her face or capture a turn of phrase, one of those lines of poetry she was always dropping, an attitude of body.\u00a0 He had bought a used camera with his waiter\u2019s wages, and he photographed her plying her paddle in the front of the canoe; lowering herself down a cliff face, rapt in concentration; wading into the lake; diving, laid out over the water\u2014photos I thumb through, edges worn ragged.\u00a0 To me, they become documents of an obsession they can\u2019t explain.\u00a0 Barely out of adolescence, at rest she is dreamy if not moody; in her sailor\u2019s blouse or tank swimsuit she looks disheveled and a little dumpy.<\/h4>\n

Like me, he was trying to capture but also to decode.\u00a0 This life had made her, but into what?\u00a0 In the mornings, he awakened to the distant sound of her singing as she took an early walk along the shore.<\/h4>\n

At last, the days of rest ended.\u00a0Walter was leaving for Venezuela; Miriam would head north on a field trip, having decided that she too, like my mother and uncles after them, would become a geologist.\u00a0 On their last rambles, they talked of living in the wilderness as partners, looking together for oil to light cities, to drive civilization.<\/h4>\n

As Mandy stands on her toes to kiss her little girl goodbye, I feel something ending before it\u2019s quite begun, while something else gains force and momentum just over the horizon.\u00a0 It was hard to say goodbye to Walter, but this farewell also sent a tremor of excitement through her.\u00a0 He would go forth in their stead and return with spoils and tales to tell.\u00a0He had promised to write, and Mandy to reply.\u00a0 She had long since given up dreaming of her own journeys.\u00a0 She looked forward to following him in words.<\/h4>\n

Though she knew the cottage would be quiet, Mandy wasn\u2019t prepared for the emptiness she felt as the screen door slapped shut.\u00a0 Tony and Lou were both out.\u00a0 Louis knew to stay out of her way.\u00a0 As she sat over her unread book on the porch, she mulled over her loose-endedness.\u00a0Like any girl being wooed, she mustn\u2019t write Walter until he had written her, but in the morning, she settled herself outside in the shade and began her letter to Miriam.<\/h4>\n

Last night when you left it almost seemed to me as though Brutus wanted to kiss me too \u2014 or was I mistaken? I should have been glad to if I had thought he really wanted me to … <\/em><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

READ LOCAL First\u00a0represents Utah\u2019s\u00a0most comprehensive collection of\u00a0celebrated and promising writers of fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction, and memoir.\u00a0This month, we are honored to publish Chapter 1 of Look Both Ways, Katharine Coles\u2019 biography\/memoir (Turtle Point Press) and\u00a0a finalist in the creative nonfiction category for the 2019 15 Bytes Book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1566,"featured_media":47981,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,2513],"tags":[1710,1294,2512],"class_list":["post-47973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-literary-arts","category-read-local-first","tag-15-bytes-book-awards","tag-katharine-coles","tag-weller-book-works"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/KateColes.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-24 11:49:00","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1566"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47973"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47988,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47973\/revisions\/47988"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}