Here’s what Kelly Cherry, the Poet
Laureate of Virginia, says about it:
“This novel about a thirty-something
woman who travels from Kankakee, Illinois, to New York to ‘make it’ deepens in
unexpected and moving ways. Wisniewski ventriloquizes with perfect pitch his
female narrator, who has a real talent for getting into trouble. Show Up, Look Good
is funny, dark, poignant, and unsettling.”
Here's an excerpt from the novel:
The
ground floor window under my room exploded, glass raining onto the sidewalk.
Smoke twisted out and rose.
“Joyce
better leave,” I said.
Ernest
wrote:
FIRE ESCAPE
IN BACK.
“Good,”
I said, and he nodded, and I did, too, and I was glad Tino was in Etta’s
section of the building’s back yard: with the firemen now inside, I trusted
he’d be safe there. Then I wasn’t so sure. To distract myself from worry, I
asked Ernest, “What was in your duffel bag?”
MEMORABILIA.
I WAS
GOING TO
SELL IT.
Another
window exploded, and then they were exploding from left to right, ax-heads
popping through them like iron tongues. This is serious, I almost said, but the
escaping smoke tapered off. Then axes shattered two second-floor windows. I
glanced at Ernest, whose eyes were fixed on the window to my room, and his expression
assured me that he, unlike Joyce, knew that heat and smoke ascended, and that
he was picturing Joyce dashing through Etta’s dark hallway while his duffel bag
remained beside a bra on my floor.
“Excuse
me,” I told him.
I
crossed the street, accelerated toward the building, and a fireman yelled, “Ma’am.
Where you going?”
“I’ve
got to get something,” I said. “Just a duffel bag. Before it burns.”
“It’s
burning.”
“What
if it’s still there?”
“It’s
burning. You might as well phone your insurance.”
“I
can’t run up and check?”
“We
just got everyone out of there. You run up and I lose my job.” He clutched an
industrial-size crowbar. “So you’re not running up.”
I
nodded and walked back to Ernest. We stood beside each other, neither speaking
nor writing, just watching more onslaughts of smoke. Then a hand squeezed my shoulder
hard enough to portend rudeness. Joyce? I thought, and I turned and saw Etta
pulled up as close to my left as Ernest was to my right.
“Etta,”
I said, “can you believe this?”
“Unfortunately,”
she said.
“At
least we’re out here,” I said, but my insides churned—because if the third
floor caught fire, our living arrangement might end. “Tino’s out back,” I said.
“In the yard.”
Ernest
thickened a period and handed his notepad to me, and Etta read it as I did:
I HOPE
JOYCE
BRINGS
MY DUFFEL
BAG.
“So
do I,” I said.
“What
was in his duffel bag?” Etta asked me, and before I could answer, another fire
truck rounded the corner. Ernest and I exchanged glances. He shrugged. Then the
second-floor window beneath mine exploded
without the help of an ax. Inside that room, the tips of flames stretched into
view. Ernest’s breathing grew vexed, then worse. He had only so much
memorabilia, I was sure, and he was probably
picturing his last aged and genuine baseball singe, and his autograph on that
baseball could have made someone happy—and helped Ernest afford more of the
city. I felt sorry for the person the memorabilia might have made happy, and
for Ernest himself. I felt ashamed that I’d fantasized about Letterman while
Ernest’s future had burned.
“If
the whole building goes,” I said to myself out loud, and then I babbled about
how I’d just begun to get my life together, about how Manhattan was the only
place open enough to let me be who I really was, and about who knows what else.
As I said these things, I used phrases made common on talk shows and felt
destined to make an awful impression on Ernest, but I babbled on anyway, and then
I tried to explain to Ernest that, for most of my life (which, granted, I
added, had been less than half of his), all of my trying and talking and
lovemaking and understanding had done nothing but separate me from everyone
else. Then I noticed that his breathing had gone silent, and I turned to see
his pencil finish a message:
I KNOW
WHAT YOU
MEAN.
“Do
you really?”
He
nodded, sat on the curb, and watched the flames rise. Then he lay back so that
his legs were splayed on the street, his spine flat against a sidewalk dotted
by black, discarded gum. He shut his eyes and placed his palms down, one on top
of the other, on his chest.
“Will
you watch it?” I yelled at a woman who nearly stepped on his head, but
she kept on walking, so I hoped for a response from Ernest.
His
eyes stayed shut. He can’t, I thought, handle the city right now.
“Ernest?”
I tried.
Someone
tapped my shoulder: Joyce, hugging Tino, then handing him to Etta. “Ernest is
napping,” she said. “He does this wherever he feels.”
Etta
glanced over. “Is he okay?” she asked me.
“I’d
say he’s felt better,” I said.
“I
took CPR at the gym,” a guy on the sidewalk behind us said. “If anyone here can
help, it’s me.” This guy was huge, maybe three hundred pounds, and he planted
his feet on either side of Ernest’s chest, then crouched so his ass touched
Ernest’s abdomen, then rested on it.
“And
I’m engaged to this man,” Joyce said. “Do you see what I have to put up with?”
“You’re
smothering him,” I told the fat guy.
“I’m
helping him,” he said.
“I
don’t think so,” I said. “He doesn’t need CPR. It’s a breathing thing.”
He
placed a palm on Ernest’s chest and pressed. “It’s his heart,” he said, and I
grabbed his gargantuan arm and tried to shove him off of Ernest, but he didn’t
budge. I pushed again, using strength I hadn’t expected, and he let go of Ernest’s
dwindled shoulders and rolled onto the sidewalk. He was lying beside Ernest,
straining to sit up, but I didn’t see him rise: I was hovering over Ernest,
pinching his nose and grabbing the skin where his jaw was supposed to be, and
lowering the flabby remains of his chin. Then I was descending, hoping Ernest’s
eyes would open before our lips touched. Then we were sharing his silence. His
mouth was warm, and I exhaled into it, and my palm, on his chest, rose slightly.
I won’t have to do this more than twice, I thought, and I inhaled, tasting garlic,
halitosis, and cinnamon. I heard glass pelt the sidewalk across the street. I
tried not to hear the fat guy, who was shouting at me with instructions. One
more time, I told myself, and I’ll hear that troubled breathing. Everything
will be exactly the way it was.
_______________________________________________
Mark Wisniewski is the
author of the novel Confessions
of a Polish Used Car Salesman, the collection of short stories
All Weekend
with the Lights On, and the book of narrative poems
One of Us
One Night. His fiction has appeared in magazines such as
The Southern Review, Antioch Review, Virginia Quarterly
Review, TriQuarterly, New England Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Yale
Review, The Sun, and
The Georgia Review, and has been anthologized in
Pushcart Prize and
Best American Short Stories. His narrative poems have appeared in such venues as
Poetry International, New York Quarterly, and
Poetry. He’s been awarded two Regents’ Fellowships in Fiction,
an Isherwood Fellowship in Fiction, and first place in competitions for the Kay
Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story, the Gival Press Short Story Award, and
the Tobias Wolff Award.
