That Said (12 page)

until my bathwater turned cold.

There was a lot of dirt in Holland,

but I was doing my part to help.

One night, my father yelled from behind the door,

“What are you doing in there?”

I was washing the streets of Holland.

 

Blue woman on the powder can,

blue willowware plate,

gentle brushstrokes of the pagoda roof,

blades of windmills, glazed waters of the lagoon,

blue tattoo inked in flesh,

blue ink in a diary,

blue ocean whose water is really colorless, like tears,

a flood of tears, all seven seas running together—

blurring the words

and washing them away.

My father sways before the mirror

in the blue-tiled bathroom, shaving.

The wide legs of his boxer shorts

empty as windsocks,

the neck of his white cotton undershirt

fringed with curly black hairs.

 

Overnight his shaving brush

has stiffened into the shape of a flame.

When he swirls it around in the mug,

the bristles plump up with lather,

as if he's folding egg whites into batter.

 

The empty razor lies open-jawed

in a puddle of milky water.

The double-edged blades come packed

in envelopes of five, each blade

wrapped separately in waxed paper

like a stick of gum.

 

My father glances at the mirror

like a woman applying makeup,

then paints on a mustache and beard

leaving only a thin mouth hole.

His lips look redder against the foam.

He lathers his chin, his Adam's apple,

the pebbly skin of his throat.

 

Scraping, he works quickly, in silence,

in distracted concentration,

the same way he eats his dinner every night.

But what is making my mild father so angry,

arguing with the man on the glass?

He stretches his lips into the widest

possible smile, then bares

his teeth in a grimace.

 

He nicks himself. Here and there,

the lather is flecked with threads of blood.

Then stroke by stroke, my father's face

gradually returns to him,

so raw and tender I ache to touch.

What in the world would harm him now,

looking as he does, with shreds

of toilet tissue stuck on his face like feathers,

each one glued with a small red dot.

“Jane lived in a big white house

with a garden and a yard

and an apple tree out back.”

Waiting my turn to read

 

out loud before the class,

my wooden desk and chair

bolted to the wooden floor,

Jane skipped and jumped and ran.

 

Jane—my very name—

was all we had in common.

Jane's mother knitted socks.

Mine couldn't knit a stitch.

 

Jane and Dick—her brother—

a matched pair

of salt and pepper shakers,

ate dinner

 

opposite each other,

Father facing Mother.

Two parents, two children, two pets.

My sister wasn't born yet.

 

Big
A
and little
a,

upper- and lower-case
b,

the sibling alphabet

paraded across the chalkboard

 

white on black, a negative

of my primer's printed page—

the page I'd read at home,

the passage I knew by heart—

 

where the kitten, Puff,

jumps into the sewing basket,

bats her paw and chases

a rolling ball of yarn

 

across the kitchen floor

and gets all tangled up.

Who'd be the lucky one

to read it to the class?

 

A dozen hands shot up

except Lucille's, and mine.

Shiny straight black hair,

black patent Mary Janes,

 

pink cat's-eye frames

studded with rhinestones—

Lucille was special.

She couldn't read or spell.

 

She'd had to repeat

the first grade twice,

but received straight A's

for perfect attendance.

 

She sat in the first row,

close to the erased blackboard,

a swirling Milky Way.

The teacher skipped Lucille

 

and called out, “Jane!”

I snapped back to my book,

the kitten, the sewing basket

and ball of yarn.

 

I opened my mouth to read

the page Fate gave to me.

Not wanting to show off,

I stumbled—on purpose—

 

on the words
I knew
I knew,

and got all tangled up

in that rolling ball of yarn,

unraveling its line

 

of looping handwriting

across the kitchen floor

Mother scrubbed and waxed

on her hands and knees

 

—Jane's mother, not mine.

Mine
puffed on her cigarette,

smoke scribbling on the air

in the rooms we call our lives,

 

where it begins to snow

real snow outside the panes,

beyond the huge paper flakes

children fold, cut, and tape

 

to classroom windows,

no two flakes alike:

brief fingerprints

whorling on the glass.

My first best friend had pale delicate skin

and when she laughed or was embarrassed

her cheeks flared up into two hot pink spots,

for hours, like stains she couldn't rub out.

She lived walking distance from the firehouse,

so the days and nights her father was on duty,

she could see him anytime she chose,

visit the private quarters on the second floor,

above the gleaming trucks and coiled hoses

where her father lived his other life.

When I first went along with Cynthia,

I thought I'd have to shinny up the brass pole

through the hole cut in the ceiling, but we

only had to walk up stairs, to see one big

happy family of men, smoking and playing

cards around the dinner table, frying sausages

on the stove, drying socks on radiators,

their heavy black rubber coats on hooks,

flayed open, smooth as animal hides.

In the dormitory, I saw their beds made

with linens from home, shelves of personal

belongings, children's photos, lucky stones.

I petted their mascot Dalmatian while

Cynthia kissed each fireman goodbye.

Afternoons after school, we'd play quietly

in the rose garden behind her house,

so as not to disturb her father, off-duty.

Once, stumbling outside in his pajamas,

he looked perfectly ordinary, not a hero—

just like my own father, who worked regular

hours in his store. Cynthia caught me staring,

and cut in, “He's not a lazybones, really.

He's just catching up on sleep.”

When a small plane crashed one foggy morning

into the radio tower a few blocks away,

and the engine sailed over town, missing

the school, landing down the street from us,

burning an apartment house to the ground,

many people died, all the passengers.

From my bedroom window I saw smoke

and, in the distance, eleven stories high,

the tower's torn and twisted scaffolding

where the plane caught in it like a fly.

A week later, as I walked Cynthia home,

she whispered that her father, the day after

the crash, sifting through the cooling rubble

in the vacant lot next door, saw something

lying in the dirt, he didn't know what,

and picked up a woman's hand severed

at the wrist, a left hand, with a diamond

engagement ring still on it. For months

the remaining fuselage lodged in the tower

like a decomposing corpse, until someone

figured out a way to bring it down.

My chickenpox was itchy, like pinfeathers.

Blisters popped out on my scalp, eyelids, even my tongue,

like the plague God brought down on Egypt.

“Don't scratch!” my mother yelled.

I couldn't help but scratch.

 

Quarantined from my new baby sister,

I was playing in the sunroom Easter Sunday morning,

keeping track of the parade on the television—

playing in the sunroom the whole week before,

during Passover, while I was still contagious—

playing in the sunroom a month before,

the one and only time I met my grandfather,

all tanned and leathery—a cameo appearance

like a retired movie star.

He brought a crate of Florida grapefruit for the family