Jamie Diamond

[Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning writer James Kirkwood – author of There Must Be a Pony, Some Kind of Hero, P.S. Your Cat Is Dead, and the book for A Chorus Line – was discovered in a UCLA Extension Writers' Program class. His teacher was the late Robert Kirsch. As the story goes, Mr. Kirkwood turned in a portion of his first novel, There Must Be A Pony, for his class critique. Describing the moment when – in a classroom on the UCLA campus – his world turned around, Mr. Kirkwood recounted his teacher's remarks:

"This week I suddenly realized why I teach: because every once in a blue moon someone turns in something so original, so – I'm going to say it – brilliant, that it makes it all worthwhile. Now, who in this class is named Kirkwood?"

The James Kirkwood Prize in Creative Writing was established in memory of this most illustrious student of the Writers’ Program. Following his untimely death, Andrew Morse and several other friends created the James Kirkwood Prize which is given annually to a Writers’ Program student whose work has achieved literary excellence in the spirit of Kirkwood’s own work.

In 2002, Jamie Diamond was that student, and this excerpt from Heathens was the work.]

Her first attempt at gaining entrance to heaven was launched from the backyard swing. She spent hours pumping her legs, forcing the swing to rock higher and higher. Leaning her body forward, then back, gripping the two ropes that held the wooden seat, thrusting her legs under to catch the wind and scooping herself up into the very blue of the sky itself. Back and forth, and back and forth, the air leaving its rushing sound in her ears, her heart tilting each time her toes seemed to tickle the belly of the wooly clouds.

In her five-year old’s mind, she was a trapeze artist, soaring through the air, waiting for that exhilarating moment when an airplane flew overhead and she leapt off her swing and grabbed the airplane’s tail. She would move from one world to another as easily as if she were leaping from one trapeze bar to another. With blind faith that the nano-second of free fall during which she belonged to neither world would be brief. She’d have to hang on tight to the metal tail and wait until the plane passed over the kingdom of heaven. Then it would only be a matter of relaxing her cramped fingers and gliding gently down into a feathery meadow.

Christie had straight blond hair, a narrow face and eyes of a serious cast, as if she had come into the world already worried about it. She was athletic and quick, ready to run in case escape was necessary.

Her house stood behind the swing, overlooking a Hollywood canyon lush with oleander, bougainvillea and poison sumac. Her little sister was down for her nap allowing Mother to hole up in a wide square room, once the garage but now, thanks to the rug thrown over the oil-stained cement and some bookshelves, her study.

Mother, with her red hair and her red-black lipstick, her clanking Navajo bracelets and the unfiltered Camels that she managed to chain-smoke while simultaneously chewing Beechnut gum. Mother, she needed to work in her study, perhaps for years, until she found out if God were Christian or Jewish.

Christie understood the words--Christian and Jewish and God. She saw the fervor in her mother’s eyes. But it was unfathomable that her mother was close enough to touch and yet also so far away.

Some days, Christie just had to check, the way she’d later lift the lid of the pan to check that the popcorn was popping, hoping a sizzling kernel didn’t fly into her face.

She stopped swinging and silently, or so she thought, cracked open the study door.

Her mother said, “Not now.” And her eyes remained fixed on the text of her college book, as if to say: I am following a camel train across the Negev, I am leaving the land of Egypt, I am wandering the Judean desert, I am not now.

Still, Christie hung from the doorknob, tethered, her fist around the knob, the rest of her body stretched out into the forbidden territory.

Up, her father was Jewish; down, her mother was Christian. Up and down and up and down. It was hours until that magical time when father would come home from work. The crunch on the driveway gravel, the sound of his keys in the lock, him breezing through the door--his suit crisp, his cheek cold--bringing his lemony smell of the outside world to her. His parents had smuggled diamonds out of Russia in a sandwich. The image of diamonds hidden between slices of smelly cheese was so thrilling Christie could barely contain herself.

A long time ago, Mother had worn dresses covered with diamonds, rhinestone diamonds. After Christie had behaved in an especially ladylike manner, or if it was dark and raining outside, Mother would take out her old ballet outfits—they were electric, capable of lighting a room. A glittering rhinestone-covered bodice, a vibrant tomato-soup-red silk blouse, a snow-white skirt with a fur-trimmed hem, all releasing their scent of rose and Christmas tree.

Now her mother wore glasses and jeans and one of Father’s baggy shirts. Lately she just cared about God and never wanted to bring out at her pretty dance costumes.

Christie had heard her relate the story so many times to dinner guests. How, in the doctor’s waiting room, paging through an old New Yorker, she’d read about two goat herders coming upon this cave above the Dead Sea, a cave crowded with old clay jars full of scrolls. “You think, books in a jar, big deal.” She pauses here, adjusts her turquoise bracelets, arches her neck as if she were still that dancer on stage in white satin toe shoes, and then she look up, cheeks flushed. “But these books are the oldest Bible ever found, a thousand years older than the one we use today. One thousand years closer to what God really said. You know that game ‘telephone’?” She catches peoples’ eyes, makes sure they are with her. “So picture that except we’re playing telephone with God’s words. And, naturally, everything’s garbled, the very things God wants us to know.” Now she take a sip of her wine. “So when Luke came home, I was in tears. Here, I told him, here is where the answer lies. I wiped my eyes and said, And all I have to do is learn to read Hebrew and Aramaic.”

The sky above the swing set was growing slowly darker. Christie’s arms were beginning to tire, her fingers were cold. When she got to heaven she’d just march up to Him and ask Him which religion He was. Then she’d catch the plane back down to the swings and march into the study and tell her mother. Her mother would take off her glasses, she’d take off her ugly clothes. Soon she’d have time to take down the box.

The swing rises and falls back. Up and back, up and back and, there in the sky, is the silver airplane and all she has to do is one more swing and she will be so high. Jump, she tells herself. Jump. And at the highest point, she thrusts out her arms and jumps.

We have met her father’s best friend, LEO, also a filmmaker of Eastern-European descent.

“How you doing Christie?” Dr. Oxenhorn said, clipping a cloth napkin over her dress.

But she flinched when his warm hand brushed her cheek. And she was relieved when he stepped away to examine the x-rays pinned onto his light board.

He sat beside her and tilted her chair back, enveloping her in naugahyde perfume and the shush of running water in the little sink. “Let’s have a little look-see.”

As he leaned over her, she stared into his old gray eyes. He’d been her only dentist; they had a history together. She knew he could see what happened if he moved too roughly, touched something too sensitive, too raw. He’d stop and pat her shoulder, or ask her if she wanted to rinse. They were united by a common goal, keeping her free from pain. That was a big bond to have with someone.

Apparently she flinched again, because he pushed himself back in his wheelie stool and laughed. “I haven’t started yet.” He held the mirror and the metal pick out by the sides of his aqua smock.

“This is the part that doesn’t hurt. That’s a promise. Now can you open wide for me?”

The air around her face slowed down and got warmer. It was hard to have a man so near, and she had to turn her face away.

“I’m sorry.” She opened her mouth again. He was so close. She felt tears well up in her eyes. Her vision blurred.

She opened her mouth really wide and let her eyes fall on the mobile dangling from the acoustic-tile ceiling. Little cardboard elephants blew gently in the air-conditioned wind.

She felt the cold metal mirror push against her the inside of her cheek, felt the heat of his hand against her face. She blinked and unbidden tears began to stream down her face. Dr.Oxenhorn used the corner of the napkin to dry her cheek, and then his hand, and continued inspecting, touching and tapping each tooth.
“All done. No cavities,” he said, sounding relieved. “So how about a new toothbrush?” His voice was buoyant with hope, as if a teeth-cleaning implement had the power to make everything in her life new and primary-colored.

“You used to let me pick out a toy.” She liked Dr. Oxenhorn. Why was she being petulant?

“You can pick out a toy, Christie,” he responded amiably. “Let’s go check out the toy chest.”

“I really liked that toy chest,” she said, as if he ‘d just threatened to take it away from her.

She did. A balsa wood airplane that--with the help of a rubber band--might remain airborne for a second, and a toothbrush with a blood-red handle.

At home every room was a mine field planted with memory bombs. When Mother stepped on one, her face remained blank. In Father’s study she picked up a magazine and saw its pages folded back to an article he’d intended to finish. Expressionless, she closed the magazine and returned it to his magazine rack. A day later she answered the door and the laundry man dropped into her hands a bundle of Father’s clean shirts. She put the blue-paper-wrapped package into the front hall closet and emptied all the wastepaper baskets even though she’d just emptied them. She found a packet of old black and white photographs—the kind with scalloped edges—taken before they were married. Christie stopped at one. Her father in Machu Pichu, at twenty, perhaps, with close-cropped curly hair and a little mustache. She’d never seen her father so young. Did she resemble him? Not physically. How would she like him if she ran into him, the way he was then, seated on a donkey, his long legs nearly scrapping the dusty path? She said, “Can I keep this one?”

Her mother took the photo out of her hands and locked the packet in the desk drawer. She said, “You don’t need more to miss.”

Mother’s stiff-upper-lip-approach was accompanied by its mate, a dry sense of humor. She shook the empty Comet can, the third she had in as many days. “That’s what mortuaries need to sell. Not caskets, but Comet.”

Busy not allowing important things to penetrate, she shifted her considerable focus to piddly things. Why did Christie have to spend an entire dollar on a bar of transparent soap that dissolved in the shower? How could Holly leave her books at the bottom of the stairs for everyone to trip on? And which of her thoughtless daughters had eaten the last piece of cheesecake? After this last, Christie stared at her mother and said evenly, “Don’t you have homework to do, Mom?”

Before she left for her graduate seminar Mother told the girls who was coming to stay with them. Even still, when Christie opened the door and saw Leo and Sylvianne, her heart raced. Then she become as expressionless as her mother. Regal Sylvianne always looked right through her. Regal Sylvianne was Leo’s French wife. She was only twenty-one, only six years older than Christie, but the way she set her Hermes alligator bag on the hall table was an artistic statement, the way she failed to glance at her reflection in the hallway mirror was a lesson in grace. Sylvianne wore beige trousers and a wheat-colored shirt with big pockets. With her honey-blonde hair, white skin and pale clothes, she gave off the ivory glow of something too beautiful to look at.

Christie wondered what aberrant notion of fashion had driven her to wear a red-checked blouse when simplicity was the key. Why had she wanted to look like a table cloth in an Italian restaurant?

Leo wandered into the study. He used to spend hours there with Father, analyzing Italian neo-realistic films over chess games.

Christie experienced that awful but familiar taste in her mouth of envy and contempt.

Holding hands, Holly and Sylvianne moved into the kitchen where they would put on cucumber masks, apply Apricot Frost nail polish, and read the horoscopes in the magazines Sylvianne brought.

Her Hermes alligator bag, Sylvianne had let slip--not by accident, Christie guessed--cost more than a VW bug. Christie wondered what it would be like to have a husband who wanted to buy you a purse that cost more than a car. She wondered what Leo and Sylvianne found to talk about. She stood at the door of her father’s study and watched him. He was making himself a drink. Behind him, scattered among hundreds of books, were objects made by people who never read books; Masai arrows, Minoan bulls, pre-Columbian fertility gods with penises long enough to hang coats on.

Leo poured some brandy, put his finger in the glass to taste it, and poured more. “So how are things going?” he asked, sucking his finger.

“Things are just dandy,” Christie said. “Holly is working on becoming left-handed and I caught Mom talking to a head of lettuce.”

“You should see the fridge,” she went on. “A box of raspberries with one raspberry. A jar of mint jelly with one teaspoon of jelly. And a kosher dill floating around like an embryo. Mother’s afraid to finish anything these days.”

She noticed that his sweater was buttoned on the wrong buttons. Didn’t Sylvianne have to do anything? She suddenly felt shy and glanced away. “Oh, you know,” she said.

He’d picked up a chess piece and turned it over in his hands. Was he teasing her? Did he really want to know how she was? “That chess set,”” she said, “Dad got it in Cuba, when he was a reporter. That’s where he broke his leg. In a tiny village where there wasn’t a doctor to set the bone.”

Her words seemed to hover in the air. The statues of fertility gods did not hurl snakes at her for mentioning her father. Neither she nor Leo seemed about to burst into tears.

“Know what your father was most afraid of?” Leo asked. “Getting too comfortable.”

“One day I was home and I found this suitcase under their bed. It was full of his stuff—his shirts, his socks, his underwear. Neatly folded, of course. But over in a pocket he had stuff for getting caught in a jungle. A mosquito net. A snake bite kit. A bottle of quinine pills. A syringe full of something. And in another pocket he had stuff for getting caught in a jungle with kids. Juicyfruit gum. Packs of it. And then it hit me: Here’s my dad, packed and ready to run to the jungle, the whole time he’s at home with us.”

She immediately dropped her gaze to the chessboard. What was she saying? That she held Dad’s suitcase against him? She’d have to be careful. Did she hold Dad’s suitcase against him? Of course, she did. Why didn’t he want to stick around with her?

She traced her finger along the border of an ebony square, feeling that the square was set low and left a depression in the board. Then she raised her eyes to Leo’s. “When we got home from the funeral, when everybody was so busy eating that chili from Chasen’s,” she said. “I went into their bedroom. Praying his suitcase was gone. I wanted him to have taken it with him. I wanted him to have gone to the jungle. And what do you think?”

“It was there. Of course, it was there. . It hadn’t gone anywhere at all.”

Leo took a swig of his brandy. “When someone’s not coming back, that’s hard to see.”

She nodded, her thoughts pooling around the rest of the story. She’d opened his suitcase and grabbed a pack of gum. When she slid out a stick, she saw it had broken into tiny desiccated pieces. No matter, she jammed them into her mouth, chewed them up and swallowed them whole. “You’re the only person I’ve told,” she said to Leo.

“Thank you.” He put his glass down on the table and eyed the chess board. “Want to play a game?”

She said, “Oh, I forgot.” She examined the carved pieces: wooden soldiers standing at attention with toothpick spears at their sides. They were the pawns. Horses with wind-blown manes frozen in the wood. They were the knights. She and Holly used to make those horses gallop across the Persian rug in hot pursuit of a bandit. She and Holly would hide behind the armchairs and shoot their fingers at one another.

Father had explained to Christie the way each chess piece was permitted to move—the bishop diagonally, the king free to go anywhere.

She reached out and touched the toy horse. Two down, one across. She hadn’t forgotten. She moved the piece.

Leo picked up one of his soldiers. He moved it and looked expectantly at Christie.

After staring incomprehensibly at chessboard for a while, she moved the same guy Leo had, only on her side.

Leo rested his chin in his hand. “Hmmm. This is getting interesting.” He moved another piece.

The round chess table was the size of a large pizza. She was aware of the fact that sitting there--knee to knee, heads bowed--their bodies made a triangle. The thought of lifting her head and breaking the triangle made her neck hurt. She moved a piece that looked like Rapunzel’s tower..

“Imitating you. Father only showed me how to move the pieces. He never got around to showing me how to play the game.”

“This opens your bishop. And if you’re free to move your bishop, then you have a clear path.”

He said, “Look at the board, Christie. If I have to move here to protect my knight, then who am I putting in danger?”

She did. Horses. Soldiers. Castles. Women wearing crowns. Priests wearing cloaks.

Leo’s finger traced a path through the squares and stopped at the skirt of the queen. Running his forefinger and thumb slowly up the length of her skirt, he gripped the queen by her waist, lifted her into the air and shook her above the board, as if to sprinkle out a few grains of something Christie couldn’t see.

“Yes.” He exhaled, slid his body down low in his chair and looked at her. “So you do know what you’re doing.” His eyes stayed right on her face. “Don’t you, Christie? You know what you’re doing.”

She felt light-headed, as if some clouds overhead had suddenly parted and the sun poured all over her. She let the warmth open her up. Then she felt a chill, as though she’d experienced something she shouldn’t have.

She slipped her feet out of her shoes and hooked her heels against the rung of her chair. “Teach me how to play,” she said.

His words floated around, pretty music. This was nicer than sitting in the kitchen with cucumbers on her face. After awhile, all of the things in her father’s study took on a friendly glow. Even the fertility gods softened their expressions; they looked cute, like the Seven Dwarves. And the house seemed to expand around her, everybody in place, happy, breathing together in a familial way.

Leo stood up and moved some bottles around in the liquor cabinet. “Your father has ouzo. Can I interest you?”

Leo poured some ouzo into his brandy glass and came back to the table, bearing with him a wave of licorice-scented air. “Here’s a story for you,” he said. “When I went to Greece, I stayed on Hydra, this island so small they don’t allow cars. And walking in front of me one morning was this girl in a yellow shift, with dark shiny hair that looked red in the sun. I ran to catch up with her. And I realized I was running because the whole time I’d been in the Greek Isles, I’d never seen a young Greek woman. Crones in black, boys in knee pants—they were all over the place. But the young women, where were they? Locked up in basements? When I caught up to the girl, I suddenly didn’t know what to do. There was no reason to think she’d speak English. Especially after being locked in a basement. I was afraid I might have frightened her. But when she saw me, she said, ‘Thank God, an American. Do you know where you can get Noxzema on this godforsaken island?’ She was a girl from Brooklyn on her honeymoon, looking to help her sunburned husband.”

He shrugged. “Well, I never found out where the Greeks keep their young girls.”

She smiled, picturing the girl in the yellow dress with gleams of red in her hair. “When was this?”

Last year he was married to Sylvianne. “Last year,” she repeated, dumbly, feeling her face blush and turn red as her blouse.

She slipped her feet into her shoes and stood up. Then she sat down. He just looked at her over his ouzo glass. She said, “What else happened in Greece?”

“I tried to get your father to join me, but he was tied up with that thing in Sicily running three days behind schedule.”

“I left her in Paris with her mother,” Leo continued. “Of all the mothers-in-law in the world,” he said in imitation Bogart, “I had to pick this one. With one breath she’s saying I robbed the cradle, with the next she’s begging for grandchildren.”

Christie felt a surge of alarm. “When are you going to give her grandchildren?”

“That’s too bad.” She looked at the chessboard so he couldn’t read her expression.

He went on, “I don’t want her to. She’s too immature to be a mother.” He held both hands around his glass and swirled the ouzo. Then he inhaled.

“That she’s immature? Well, Christie, she is, isn’t she? You know that as well as I do. What is she doing now? Reading horoscopes with your sister, who’s what, eleven?”

He took a sip of the ouzo and regarded her evenly. “What’s that got to do with it.”

Things were going too fast. Now she wished she were in the kitchen with Holly and Sylvianne waiting for nail polish to dry. Except she was with Leo, and he was sitting inches away from her, and his knee was brushing hers and he was thinking that she Christie, was smarter than Sylvianne, his wife.

Christie wanted to stay in the study. If Sylvianne couldn’t keep up with him, she could. She wanted him to keep telling her stories, dark mossy stories, the stories of the fertility gods. She waited until she was sure her voice would sound level. “You’re right,” she said. “What’s love got to do with anything?”

For the first time she was aware of the sound of Leo’s watch ticking. She felt as if she were underwater.

He shrugged. “Love figures in there. For about five seconds. You ever sort it out, give me a call.”

She listened to his watch tick. Then she heard her voice say, “You buttoned your sweater wrong.”

When he bent over to examine his buttons, she saw the thick bathmat of his hair, tight, wiry, impenetrable. She tapped the table top twice with her knuckles. “Time to go. It’s my bed time.”

He looked up from his buttons and emptied his ouzo glass in one swallow. “You do look tired.”

As she stood up and walked through the doorway, she felt him watching her back and she had to remind herself how to walk.

Upstairs, watched over by her collection of dolls from every country her father had made a movie in, she climbed under the covers. But she was wide awake, glaring in the darkness. Her heart was pounding. It was hard but she tried to move herself back to that time when she could lie in the back seat of the Cadillac, warmed by Father’s jacket, wrapped in his smell, drifting down the river of her parent’s voices, while the headlights cut a path through the darkness, to her house, in her car, driven by her father.