Cover

Title Page

Dedication

For Emma Sweeney

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Author’s Note

I became an essayist by default. My first love was poetry, my second love was fiction, and my third and lasting love was the essay. It’s like a third marriage—you know that this is where you’re staying, where you’re going to work out your issues, for better or for worse. And yet, because we’re all only human, this very book has a couple of stories in it—“The Tomb of Wrestling” and “What You Seek Is Seeking You”—or anyway they were first published as stories. They are also essays, in their own secret ways, and the essays are also stories.

Several of the pieces here were published first by Tin House, and I am grateful to Cheston Knapp and the other Tin House folk, for their willingness to publish my efforts without undue fretting over genre. The Tin House magazine will be missed by me and by others, for just this quality of openness and flexibility.

My gratitude to Cheri Tremble’s loved ones, for their willingness to tell me Cheri’s story, and then to allow me the privilege of imagining my way into her final moments. Werner Hoeflich, similarly, shared his story with me in great precise and painterly detail, and then stepped back and let me imagine it for myself on the page. Thank you to these collaborators and friends.

Epigraph

One of these days

I’ll look at your face and find

The sad detailed imprints

Of the festival days

—Nand Chaturvedi, “The Cruel Festival Time,”
translated by Katherine Russell Rich and
Vidhu Shekhar Chaturvedi

Festival Days

Last Night

Something happened to her while she was eating, or right afterward. She began turning in circles and couldn’t stop. In my kitchen, in my car, and then in an examining room at the vet’s office. I sat on the floor with her while the vet stood leaning against the wall, watching us. I was crying, but he ignored that.

“You indicated once,” he said, looking through the file, “that we should let you know when it might be time.”

It wasn’t time.

“It looks like a brain abnormality, something that’s grown or shifted. We might wait a day or so to see what happens. But if this doesn’t stop…” He paused.

“Sheba, stop,” I said, and held her. She looked like Lady from Lady and the Tramp, only old; she was fifteen.