1986
My sister and her husband called Wednesday and told me Dad had
molested their daughter. Over the weekend. At his house. He was
babysitting her. Another sister told them the previous week that they
should be concerned because Dad had fondled her from seven until she
left home at seventeen.
The four-year-old. . . pain, pediatrician, abrasion, evidence. By law, the
doctor filed a report. My sister . . . he put his pinkie in her, he had her
hold his penis, something thick, like toothpaste, came out. It’s what play
therapy revealed. Pedophiliac. I never knew the word before.
1987
Our father pleaded no contest on two counts of child molestation against
his granddaughter. There will not be a jury trial. We are relieved.…
...continue reading
The ocean dries up when I touch it. Fish and algae disintegrate; every drop of salt water seeps into sand. Emoto says it’s my negative energy, that the waves would rather go bare than be exposed to me. I don’t know the ocean’s feelings. And it doesn’t care to know mine: I’ve given up looking for my notice of its departure. All I know is the little girl inside me, and the apologies I keep giving her. I write sorries in handwriting she doesn’t know as her own. I’m a stranger to her now. Her tiered dresses hang dusty in my closet, gray around the seams. The mole on my forehead mirrors hers, and, to her disappointment, the scar on her fingertip still hasn’t faded. I try to tell her about the science of nostalgia, about sensory stimuli and chronological remoteness.…
...continue reading
Distancing – Week Five
The Neighbor
I have never been in my neighbor’s back garden. I find the gate in the alley
barricaded by recycle bins. A grape-clustered clematis blooms on the fence.
She steps back, allows me to enter after she has moved everything. I take a
chair in the grass. She takes the chair on the patio. I’ve brought my own tea.
A single Cecile Brunner blooms. A variegated osier muscles its way out of a
bed. Compliments are given, complaints are made. Two women on a spring
morning sitting six feet apart hold their worlds together.
A leaf blower blasts
obscenities – we lean closer
to hear ourselves…
...continue reading
It’s been drizzling and damp the last few days. I take my chance to walk a few blocks and visit a pond I’ve gotten to know. Most of the streets around the city are tidy, controlled. The people wear shoes all the time. City dust is a sad smell. I feel heavy from a week of work. My shoulders are a mess of neat concrete knots. My feet slip around in my wet thongs. Something small and brown flitters across the footpath in front of me, into a restrained, tasteful, potted buxus. The street sweeper will swing through later tonight, but for now the damp leaves in the gutters glitter in the sun. A shiny car parallel parks in the distance, but otherwise the road is empty.…
...continue reading
On my grandma’s last birthday, I brought her a scoop of vanilla ice cream. She told me to come back the next day with more ice cream, as I had forgotten her real birthday and celebrated a day too early. I knew for a fact that her birthday that year was on Christmas Day, as it had been every year since 1926. I blamed this episode on her worsening dementia. Regardless, I decided to try again the next day, with a hopeful scoop of ice cream and an even more hopeful attempt at convincing my geriatric grandmother that it was, in fact, her birthday. Four days later and many more naive scoops of ice cream later, I realized my grandmother’s dementia might have made her a genius.…
...continue reading
I pry up the bright coin of its lid. Behold — the destroyer of shirts, the speckler of grand pianos. True, I have turned the furniture to ghosts, and I have spread out The New York Times like a sidewalk along our walls. None of it matters. I have always believed too deeply in the steadiness of hands. I should know by now that ruin has a way of finding us, that only my toe print on the bedroom floor can prove that we resisted.
– Charles Rafferty…
...continue reading
my mother, pearl, with folded hands, in rooms patiently waiting. her hands are a shimmering flame. time is precious in the inspiration. her wriggling in the doctor’s ear. a blanket for a shawl, taking three buses to the hospital in a blizzard to come get me. how is he getting better, when he believes the wall is a piano? at least he plays a real one at home. like the earnest search for the b section of a maple tree. not a figure yet, but the contours of one. he’s even composed pieces on and for the wall he calls “études for chalk piano and penumbral figures on the wall.” quite stunning really. the insistence that we be somebody somewhere impedes assembly. i’m in the middle of the piece with melody all around.…
...continue reading