“I’m glad you married your father, I couldn’t do it anymore.”
Angela finished high school the next year and twelve copies each of
Ingenue, Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle
. She also read the Bible alone at night in her room.
“Because I’m nervous,” she said, “and it helps me sleep. All the trees and fruit, the figs, begat and begat going down like the multiplication tables.”
“Angela,” I said, “are you thinking of making love to someone?”
“No, Mother,” she said, “I think I’ll wait. I think I’ll wait a long time.”
Angela quit eating meat and blinked her mascaraed eyes at the glistening fried liver I slid onto her plate.
“It’s so brown,” she said. “It’s just something’s guts.”
“You’ve always loved it,” I said, and she tried to eat it, glancing at my midriff, glancing at my milk and cottage cheese.
When her father took over the Midwest and married a widow, Angela declined to go with him. When I went to thehospital to have my stomach reduced by half, Angela declined my invitations to visit and went on a fast. She grew wan and romantic, said she wished I taught at her college instead of City, she’d read about Sylvia Plath in
Mademoiselle
. We talked on the telephone while I watched the hospital grounds go dark in my square window. It was summer and the trees were so heavy.
I thought about Angela, I thought about my miscalculations. I thought about milk products and white mucous coatings. About Richard’s face the night of the first baby, skinny in his turned-up coat. About his mother sending roses every birth, American Beauties. And babies slipping in the washbasin, tiny wriggling arms, the blue veins in their translucent heads. And starting oranges for ten years, piercing thick skins with a fingernail so the kids could peel them. After a while, I didn’t want to watch the skin give way to the white ragged coat beneath.
Angela comes home in the summers, halfway through business, elementary education, or home ec. She doesn’t want to climb the Rockies or go to India. She wants to show houses to wives, real estate, and feed me mashed potatoes, cherry pie, avocados, and artichokes. Today she not only fixes breakfast for my ex-anniversary, she fixes lunch and dinner. She wants to pile up my plate and see me eat everything. If I eat, surely something good will happen. She won’t remember what’s been important enough in my life to make me forget everything. She is spooning breaded clams, french fries, nuts and anchovy salad onto my plate.
“Angela, it’s too much.”
“That’s OK, we’ll save what you don’t want.”
“Angela, save it for who?”
She puts down her fork. “For anyone,” she says. “For any time they want it.”
In a moment, she slides my plate onto her empty one and begins to eat.
Alma
A t night they shut the door of my room. The shade of the one window was drawn, and the only light I saw was the light along the bottom of the door. It was the light of their world, a razor-thin sliver hovering in space, somewhere between yellow and white. Lying in my narrow bed, I said my name over and over, slower and faster and faster and slower. I was eleven years old: I thought my name was a code for what happened when I said the word that was me, a code for the way my breathing changed, for how the space of the room got big, bigger than the house or the town, quiet and full of crashing. Light flickered behind the closed lids of my eyes. Sudden red flashes erupted like visual sirens and disappeared, sucked deeper into the sound of flying and the lonely, vast whirl of darkness. All of inner space sang with a roar of wind. I could fling myself deeper, endlessly, and all the time my name sounded in the whisper of my voice.
I thought that’s what night was for everyone, that mymother, Audrey, my father, Wes, my sister, Lenny, all tumbled into themselves, falling asleep as they fell. I imagined my parents in their double bed, lying prone and silent,
Angela finished high school the next year and twelve copies each of
Ingenue, Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle
. She also read the Bible alone at night in her room.
“Because I’m nervous,” she said, “and it helps me sleep. All the trees and fruit, the figs, begat and begat going down like the multiplication tables.”
“Angela,” I said, “are you thinking of making love to someone?”
“No, Mother,” she said, “I think I’ll wait. I think I’ll wait a long time.”
Angela quit eating meat and blinked her mascaraed eyes at the glistening fried liver I slid onto her plate.
“It’s so brown,” she said. “It’s just something’s guts.”
“You’ve always loved it,” I said, and she tried to eat it, glancing at my midriff, glancing at my milk and cottage cheese.
When her father took over the Midwest and married a widow, Angela declined to go with him. When I went to thehospital to have my stomach reduced by half, Angela declined my invitations to visit and went on a fast. She grew wan and romantic, said she wished I taught at her college instead of City, she’d read about Sylvia Plath in
Mademoiselle
. We talked on the telephone while I watched the hospital grounds go dark in my square window. It was summer and the trees were so heavy.
I thought about Angela, I thought about my miscalculations. I thought about milk products and white mucous coatings. About Richard’s face the night of the first baby, skinny in his turned-up coat. About his mother sending roses every birth, American Beauties. And babies slipping in the washbasin, tiny wriggling arms, the blue veins in their translucent heads. And starting oranges for ten years, piercing thick skins with a fingernail so the kids could peel them. After a while, I didn’t want to watch the skin give way to the white ragged coat beneath.
Angela comes home in the summers, halfway through business, elementary education, or home ec. She doesn’t want to climb the Rockies or go to India. She wants to show houses to wives, real estate, and feed me mashed potatoes, cherry pie, avocados, and artichokes. Today she not only fixes breakfast for my ex-anniversary, she fixes lunch and dinner. She wants to pile up my plate and see me eat everything. If I eat, surely something good will happen. She won’t remember what’s been important enough in my life to make me forget everything. She is spooning breaded clams, french fries, nuts and anchovy salad onto my plate.
“Angela, it’s too much.”
“That’s OK, we’ll save what you don’t want.”
“Angela, save it for who?”
She puts down her fork. “For anyone,” she says. “For any time they want it.”
In a moment, she slides my plate onto her empty one and begins to eat.
Alma
A t night they shut the door of my room. The shade of the one window was drawn, and the only light I saw was the light along the bottom of the door. It was the light of their world, a razor-thin sliver hovering in space, somewhere between yellow and white. Lying in my narrow bed, I said my name over and over, slower and faster and faster and slower. I was eleven years old: I thought my name was a code for what happened when I said the word that was me, a code for the way my breathing changed, for how the space of the room got big, bigger than the house or the town, quiet and full of crashing. Light flickered behind the closed lids of my eyes. Sudden red flashes erupted like visual sirens and disappeared, sucked deeper into the sound of flying and the lonely, vast whirl of darkness. All of inner space sang with a roar of wind. I could fling myself deeper, endlessly, and all the time my name sounded in the whisper of my voice.
I thought that’s what night was for everyone, that mymother, Audrey, my father, Wes, my sister, Lenny, all tumbled into themselves, falling asleep as they fell. I imagined my parents in their double bed, lying prone and silent,
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