That Said (16 page)

their meanings.

 

Faces pass you in the supermarket

as you push the wire cart down the aisles.

The police artist flips through pages

of eyes and noses, assembling a face,

sliding the clear cellophane panels into place.

 

You take a quart of milk.

Face after face,

smiling obedient soldiers,

march in even rows

in the cold glass case.

Before she was born,

I was a woman who slept

through the night, who could live

with certain thoughts without collapsing...

 

if my husband died,

I could remarry; if I lost

my job, I could relocate,

start afresh...

 

I could live through “anything.”

Even my daughter arriving

four weeks early,

a smile stitching my raw abdomen, hurting

as if I'd been cut in half.

 

When they brought her to me

for the first time, her rosiness

astonished me, she

who had been so long in the dark:

 

now swathed in an absurd cap and a blanket

washed, rewashed, folded precisely as origami;

a diaper fan-folded to accommodate

her tiny body, a long-sleeved undershirt

with the cuffs folded over her perfect hands,

making them stumps.

 

In my private room

filled with expensive gift bouquets,

the stalk-necked bird of paradise flowers,

blind under their spiky crowns of petals,

gawked at me, and the anthurium's

single heart-shaped blood-red leaf

dangled a skinny penis.

 

The next morning, they wheeled me to the nursery.

Behind the glass window,

the newborns were displayed, each

in its own clear plastic Isolette.

A few lay in separate cribs, under heat lamps,

and among them, mine,

born thirty days early, scrawny, naked, her skin tinged

orange with jaundice.

 

Under the ultraviolet lamps, her eyes taped shut,

like a person in a censored photograph,

a strip of tape slapped over her genitalia,

 

a prisoner, anonymous, in pain—

 

my daughter, one day old, without a name,

splayed naked under the lamps,

soaking up the light of this world,

a sad sunbather stretched out on Waikiki.

When we play our game, Emma

always saves the best roles for herself:

the Princess, the Mermaid, Cinderella.

Pushing her toy broom around the kitchen,

she'll put up with the dust and the suffering.

She knows she'll be rewarded in the end.

 

We act out one of her favorite scenes,

where the wicked stepsisters

tear Cinderella's gown to shreds—

the dress she's about to wear to the ball,

the dress sewn from scraps

of her own dear dead mother's clothes.

While I rip the invisible lace,

Emma flings herself to the floor, sobbing

until I, her Fairy Godmother, show up

and spoil her with a coach and a chauffeur,

and a ball gown tiered like a wedding cake.

 

I've expanded my repertoire.

I'm Snow White's vain stepmother

disguised as a pimpled crone,

a traveling saleswoman

knocking on the Seven Dwarfs' door,

selling Snow White—no, giving away for free—

my entire inventory of poison bodices, apples, combs,

to a heroine who gets instant amnesia

every time evil is about to strike.

 

I'm the Thirteenth Fairy

who makes Sleeping Beauty

prick her finger on a spindle

and fall into Adolescence's deep sleep

from which she'll awaken,

years later as I did, as a mother.

Over and over, I watch my daughter

fall into a faint, and die.

 

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” I call from below,

eye level with the hem of the dust ruffle,

“let down your hair!”

And Emma solemnly flips her long beige braids

over the edge of the bed—wearing

a pair of my pantyhose on her head, like a wig.

 

The nylon feet softly brush the floor.

Now I am witch, now prince, now witch

climbing the pale ladder of Rapunzel's hair.

Pretending my fingers are scissors,

I lop off her braids, cutting off

the source of my daughter's power,

her means of escape, her route

to loving someone other than me.

 

Once, I played the heroine,

now look what I've become.

I am the one who orders my starving child

out of my house and into the gloomy woods,

my resourceful child, who fills her pockets

with handfuls of crumbs or stones

and wanders into a witch's candy cottage.

 

I am the one who sends my Vassilissa on an errand

from which it's doubtful she'll return alive

from a fate too horrible to say aloud,

a witch's hut built from her victims' bones.

 

I'm the one who commands the hunter to kill,

and cut out my daughter's heart

and bring it back, posthaste, as proof.

I will salt it, and eat it.

I do this as a present for my daughter.

And like the good girl I started out as,

I mind my manners.

I lick the plate clean, lick it

clean and shiny as a mirror—

Time's talking mirror—who is my daughter.

Through the heat register I can hear

my daughter reading in the room below,

eating breakfast in her usual chair

at the kitchen table, two white pages

of her open book throwing the blinding

pan of sunlight back at her downcast face.

I hear her chirping up and down the scale

but I can't decipher a single word

as Emma learns to read. She's in first grade

and has to read a new book every day,

a weight she carries between school

and home in her backpack, in a Ziploc

baggie, with her lunch—a nibbled sandwich

squashed into an aluminum foil ball

she's crumpled hard as a chunk of pyrite.

She unzips the baggie and out falls

“The Farm,” eight pages long, more pamphlet

than book. Not much happens in the plot.

A farm, a barn, a boy, a cow that moos a lot.

The words are hard, but Emma sounds them out

one at a time, the O's both long and short—

Cheerios bobbing in a lake of milk

in which her spoon trails like a drunken oar.

This morning her father, coaching her,

clears his throat, knocking his cup against
what?

—I hear it clatter but can't make it out.

“Hurry up,” he shouts, “or you'll miss the bus!”

I hear his imperative clearly enough,

but in the raised volume of her reply

the words are lost, garbled, caught in the throat

of the register's winding ducts and vents.

In an hour or so, when sunlight moves on,

a film will glaze the soured milk, like frost,

where the sodden O's float, life preservers.

Now, over muffled clinks of silverware,

clattered plates, running water, morning din,

the sound of sense resumes its little dance.

I hear my daughter turn the title page,

then silence, then a spurt of words, false start,

hesitation, a spondee of some sort,

then an iamb, then an anapest, then

a pause, another iamb—that's The End.

Then the scrape of wood on tile as Emma

pushes her chair away and clomps upstairs

to change from her pajamas into clothes.

As we filed through the exhibits,

Charlotte and I took turns

reading captions to Andy.

Herded into a freight elevator,

we rode to the top floor,

to the beginning of the War,

 

descending floor by floor,

year by year, into history

growing darker, ceilings

lowering, aisles narrowing

to tunnels like the progress

of Andy's blindness.

 

In Warsaw, his parents owned

the Maximilian Fur Salon,

like a little Bergdorf Goodman—

doorman, and French elevator,

furs draped on Persian carpets

and blue velvet Empire chairs.

 

Andy was one of the lucky ones—

playing cards in the back seat

of the family Packard as they

threaded through peasant villages,

trading mink coats for gasoline—

escaping Poland the day before

 

the border closed. Unless Topper,

his German shepherd guide dog,

is at his side, it's hard to tell

that Andy is blind. His blue eyes

look directly at you when you speak.

Today, his gray-bearded face, grave,