Keeping Things Whole by Darryl Whetter Page B

camisoles abutting panties, T-shirts squat in a corner, bras collapsing and expanding as sullenly as caged ravens. One night in early December when she stood in front of my hallway closest, she was both accurate and a little scheming when she said, “I never see you wear most of these jackets.” By Saturday my off-season jackets were stored in a bin beneath the bed and a small army of her shirts had colonized three-quarters of the closet. I was possibly too generous (or, more honestly, ostentatious) when I had a birch dresser custom-made for her for Christmas. I let her run her hands back and forth over the curved drawer faces—Go ahead, stroke the Dutch hooker—before I slid out one drawer to show her its old-fashioned dovetail joinery. “No glue. No nails. No screws. The drawer holds itself together, wood biting wood.” I ran my finger down the flared, hugging dovetails, enumerating “You, me. Me, you.” Finally I slid the drawer shut and got her into my arms. “Live with me. Live with me, you gorgeous slut.”
    She wanted to hear this and she didn’t. By then she almost never slept at her apartment, would complain about paying bills for her “off-site closet.” And yet my jokes about our living arrangements didn’t always get laughs. “Why do
I
need a better iron? Why don’t you just move yours in?” Because, as her gift iron implied, Kate was an escape-route kind of woman. (Can you get a genuine education and not be?)
    Yes, I was showy with the handmade dresser. While I gave her a big, flagrant thing, the jewel in the crown of my/our bedroom, she gave me a thin, stained, and tremendously ugly used book that nearly took my knees out from under me. When she handed me the present wrapped in a new tea towel (no disposable paper for her), it had the height and width of a book, but not much thickness or weight. Oh no, I thought as I untied the ribbon, please not some local poems or a student literary magazine, not some saddle-stapled slice of earnestness. Yes and no. The thin, thirty-year-old book had a stained cover barren of images save a small red maple leaf. Except for the title it looked as sober and boring as an old government instruction booklet.
Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada
.
    â€œIt’s the little book that could,” she explained. “A new press run by hippies, yet sales of this book doubled every year. It was put together entirely by volunteers, Canadians and Americans in Toronto basements, then mailed all over the US. More than 65,000 copies.”
    And stapled to my heart. Of course I’d told her plenty about Trevor by then—Mom’s dad-vs.-father speech, my science fair work with genetics, his goodbye note—but still her gift shook me, made me feel instantly smaller to have only concentrated on the physical with the dresser.
    â€œHe’d probably have used a copy,” she added. “Most in the exodus did.”
    I held her to me, and not to hide the moistening of my eyes. “This is the best present anyone’s ever given me. Live with me even more.”
    â€œ
We’re
the best present anyone’s ever given me,” she said. “Well, most of us.” But then she did stroke the dresser again, lingered on its beautiful curves.
    Ideas don’t believe in borders, and once they so much as glimpse a bridge they’re keen to get across. Neither the tomato nor the noodle is indigenous to Italy. The New Testament golden rule is a verbatim retelling of Confucius. Despite the Korean flag that hung at my taek dojo or the smattering of Japanese any
karateka
learns, many martial arts are as cross-pollinated as cooking, architecture, or fashion. Sweat in enough dojos and someone will eventually tell you about
tai sabaki
, the ancient art of getting the fuck out of the way. While a few black-belt masochists train to gladly take the first (but only the first) blow, a tai sabaki practitioner