Barnstorm (2005)

Barnstorm: Contemporary Wisconsin Fiction, edited by Raphael Kadushin and published by the University of Wisconsin Press under its Terrace Books imprint in 2005, collects fifteen stories by writers with Wisconsin ties, among them Lorrie Moore, Jane Hamilton, Kelly Cherry, Anthony Bukoski and Ron Wallace. Jesse Lee Kercheval's "Brazil", first published in Ploughshares in the winter of 1994 to 1995, follows Paulo Silvas, a Miami hotel bellboy, on his twentieth birthday, when a woman who tells him to call her Claudia picks him up in an Art Deco bar and takes him on the road. (Open Library)

Watches

Swatch watch: In "Brazil", Claudia dresses Paulo in Giorgio Armani at an Orlando shopping mall, then steers him into a jewelry store, where a salesgirl staples a diamond stud into his right earlobe. Claudia pays cash for the hole and the stud and, at the last minute, buys him a red Swatch watch, which Paulo thinks is much too young for him. The cheap, bright plastic watch sits oddly beside the Armani suit and the diamond, one more piece of the costume Claudia is building. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: She pays cash for the hole and the diamond stud, and at the last minute she buys me a red Swatch watch, which is much too young for me. (Raphael Kadushin, ed., Barnstorm, scan cataloged as University of Wisconsin Press (Terrace Books), 2005, p. 27, in "Brazil" by Jesse Lee Kercheval, which begins on p. 20; the line-break hyphen in "diamond" is closed up; Internet Archive scan OCR)