Putting the good things away In the drawer were folded fine batiste slips embroidered with scrolls and posies, edged with handmade lace too good for her to wear. Daily she put on schmatehs fit only to wash the car or the windows, rags that had never been pretty even when new: somewhere such dresses are sold only to women without money to waste on themselves, on pleasure, to women who hate their bodies, to women whose lives close on them. Such dresses come bleached by tears, packed in salt like herring. Yet she put the good things away for the good day that must surely come, when promises would open like tulips their satin cups for her to drink the sweet sacramental wine of fulfillment. The story shone in her as through tinted glass, how the mother gave up and did without and was in the end crowned with what? scallions? crowned queen of the dead place in the heart where old dreams whistle on bone flutes, where run-over pets are forgotten, where lost stockings go? In the coffin she was beautiful not because of the undertakers garish cosmetics but because that face at eighty was still her face at eighteen peering over the drab long dress of poverty, clutching a book. Where did you read your dreams, Mother? Because her expression softened from the pucker of disappointment, the grimace of swallowed rage, she looked a white-haired girl. The anger turned inward, the anger turned inward, where could it go except to make pain? It flowed into me with her milk. Her anger annealed me. I was dipped into the cauldron of boiling rage and rose a warrior and a witch but still vulnerable there where she held me. She could always wound me for she knew the secret places. She could always touch me for she knew the pressure points of pleasure and pain. Our minds were woven together. I gave her presents and she hid them away, wrapped in plastic. Too good, she said, too good. Im saving them. So after her death I sort them, the ugly things that were sufficient for every day and the pretty things for which no day of hers was ever good enough.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 01:33:27 +0000
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