It Will End with Us by Sam Savage Page B

and my mother’s finger reaching into my mouth to extract the penny.
    Later a great many of my memories are of words. I remember, for example, the first time I heard the words menstrual cramps , though I don’t remember the first time I had menstrual cramps.
    I have an image of Mama’s dresser and my child-self seated on a satin-covered stool in front of it while Mama brushes my hair. The fabric on the stool is decorated with red, blue, and yellow tropical birds and is frayed around the edges, I can see.
    Watching her in the mirror while she brushes with long vigorous strokes that I have to strain against to keep my head from being jerked backwards.
    Feeling it still, when I think about it, in the muscles of my neck, remembering it there.
    She stops in mid-stroke, hovering the brush above my head. My hair makes a crackling noise and floats up to it. “Electricity,” she says.
    I remember “You Live Better Electrically” in large italic letters on the back of a magazine beneath a picture of a young woman in a tiny ruffled apron smiling down at a gleaming white electric cook-stove on which someone has drawn a big red valentine heart, in lipstick we are supposed to think.
    Lila, and Mama when she was in the kitchen, wore long white bib aprons with pockets.
    I remember calling the burners on an electric stove eyes . Everyone I knew called them that when I was a child, while almost no one does now. Even people who have never left the South have stopped calling them eyes. I stopped without really meaning to, it was just that one day I began to say burner instead.
    Thinking about that this morning, at the stove waiting for the kettle to boil.
    The mirror had a wooden frame of carved acanthus leaves. I remember knowing that it was very old and had belonged to my grandmother. Several of the leaves were chipped or broken off and there were black spots and speckles in the glass.
    The dresser lamps, one at each end, had tasseled shades and tall fluted bases of blue-tinted glass. I remember Mama telling me that years of sunlight falling through the large windows on either side of the dresser had tinted the glass that pale blue.
    I was an adult before I learned that this was not true.
    The windows had white muslin curtains that lifted and floated in the slightest breeze, like ghosts, I remember thinking then, the same kind of curtains I have on my windows here.
    No image remains of my grandmother. A fox-fur stole is the only bit of enduring figment I am able to attach to the word grandmother . This matching pair of fox pelts complete with glass-eyed heads and bushy tails must have produced on me an impression so dazzling it has completely obliterated the face of the woman around whose neck they once dangled, and what floats above them now is a visage-less oval, like the featureless face of a certain type of department store mannequin.
    I remember a framed reproduction of Whistler’s Mother hanging on a wall in my mother’s bedroom above a blanket chest that smelled of mothballs when you opened it.
    I remember thinking the severe-looking seated figure in black was a picture of my grandmother, and being disappointed when I found out it wasn’t.
    I remember always knowing that mothballs were poisonous.
    Now that I am at my desk again for more time than it takes to write a postcard, I am fond of mornings in particular, especially when the sky is clear and the white of the building across the way is splashed with sunlight, splashing back onto my face.
    Writing on typing paper in pencil. A little something, even if only a sketch.
    Resolving to be wary of the false objectivity of words, having learned from my failures, hauling something to the surface and having words batter it beyond recognition.
    The desk stood beneath a much larger window at Spring Hope in a downstairs room we called the library.
    Spring Hope was the only house I have ever been in that had a room called a library.
    With the door closed I barely hear the television in