Holding

Perry Glasser photo by Rod Kessler Perry Glasser taught English in a public high school in Brooklyn, New York, for ten years before moving to Arizona. He is now in the final year of the M.F.A. in creative writing degree program at the University ofArizona, and is a Graduate Teaching Assistant there. During the past two years he has completed the draft of a novel. His fiction has appeared in the North American Review, Western Humanities Review, Green's Magazine, Colorado Woman Magazine, Into 12, Antioch Review, Sonora Review, and Nantucket Review. Holding HE HAD TO turn wide to avoid hitting the large empty cardboard box they'd left in the driveway. Marsha's new refrigerator must have been delivered, which meant that her latest adventure in redecoration was nearly complete. Sol Baum usually went directly from the garage into the house, but it was so fine an October evening that instead of pressing the button on the Lincoln's dashboard, he manually closed the garage door and went out back. Beyond the flagstone patio, past the perfectly blue kidney-shaped pool, past the rococo cabana with the wet bar and sauna, beside the fenced tennis court where stood the uninhabited dog house, the poplars and elms on his untended acreage were turning russet and gold. A few dry leaves had drifted over the tennis court and had settled against the cyclone fence, and some had found their way across the lawn and floated on the still surface of the pool. Except for the steady trickle of water running down the curved plastic slide into the pool, all was hushed. Sol could not recall the name of the last dog the children had had, only that it had been an Irish setter that had learned the trick of climbing to the slide's top and then plunging headfirst into the water. At the far side of the pool, he knelt to empty a trap of sodden leaves. He knelt again to shut the valve that controlled the flow of water to the slide's top. As he returned to the house, he noticed the tennis net sagged. He would have to have it taken down. That summer Sol had played tennis, what, twice? He was about to enter the rear door when he remembered he should move the box. It was large, very well constructed, two layers of corrugated cardboard, the seams neatly folded and stapled. What had they done with the old refrigerator? If they'd hauled it, why not the box? Anyway, there was no reason to leave it in the driveway. He grasped an open end and his finger was nicked by a bent staple. Reflexively, he put his injured finger to his lips and sucked on the cut. When he'd been a kid in the city, these boxes were a rare great event. They'd be discarded on the street, and he and the other neighborhood kids would find them and pull them over to the vacant lot covered by broken bricks, weeds, and bits of sharp colored glass. Kids then knew how to make something from nothing. Mostimportant, it was fine to have a private place. Once when he pulled on a box, he'd sliced his palm, a papercut, and he had been rushed to the clinic for a tetanus shot. A pale scar still obliquely crossed the natural lines of his hand. His finger stopped bleeding. Instead of breaking down the box and taking it out front, he wrestled it into the back yard, at first to the patio Perry Glasser The Missouri Review · 33 near the house, but it looked wrong beside the two-story colonial. He tugged it further, but the pool deck was wrong, too, so he pulled the box past the cabana, beyond the tennis court, past even the dog house, over the rough ground and fallen leaves to a small rise beneath the trees. There, it looked right. Satisfied, he walked briskly back to the house. Marsha greeted him at the door, they kissed, and she followed him up the stairs, all the while talking about the delivery men and how they'd nearly destroyed...