I think about my medals in the bank vault. Perhaps, if times get tough, I will have them flattened into foil and rolled for the pellets I need.
Could I ever drown? Could I ever forget that much? Is it really like breathing? I am like the cartoon character who has walked over a cliff and hasn’t looked down yet.
I watch all the cartoons on Saturday so I can discuss them with my patients. To drown would be the only death that would make sense. The thing that makes you, kills you. The thing that serves you right. The hunting accident for the hunter. But I wonder if I could let myself or if the water wouldn’t toss me back. No, it won’t be the water that I’ll drown in, it will be the swimming.
Someone has colored in Goofus and Gallant. Blue and red faces. You should hold the gate open for your little brother. You should help him find his shoe.
I have found all the hidden pictures in the Hidden Pictures and have circled them all with purple Crayola.
Bobby has yet to show up.
This is a nice life — being here, the crayons, the teeth in my pocket, Suzy home.
It’s Time
I remember the time each year when my husband cut back the raspberry bushes. I always thought he took too much, afterwards a row of whittled spikes where once a tangled mass of brambles boiled along the fence. He ripped out the dead canes altogether, brittle straws, pruned the branches down to nothing. He dug up the newly rooted tips where last year’s growth had bowed over to the ground and took hold, the first long stride into the garden. Every spring, I believed they would never grow back, but in a few weeks, with the days lengthening, the stubby canes streaked with red, budded, shot up overnight.
Does it count as a first word? The other raspberry, the sound my daughter made, her tongue melting into slobber between her lips, stirring before dawn in the tiny bedroom down the hall. It was dark, and the wet blasts helped me navigate, the floors covered with her blocks and toys. Her room was pitch black, the only light the daubs of radium I swiped from the factory outlining the rails and bars of her crib. At night it looked like a bridge lit up, suspended over the varnished surface of a wide, still river. The paint had dripped on the floor, formed a tiny drifting phosphorescent slick. My daughter tottered about. I could see only her shadow, her shape blotting out the dew of pulsing light behind her. She sprayed her one-note greeting. When I picked her up, her tongue rasped next to my ear. I felt her whole body going into the sound, her breath dying down, her spit a mist on my cheek.
“Don’t go,” my husband had said. “Stay in bed. She’s not crying. Ten minutes more. Let her go.”
I could see he was looking at the time. I watched the luminous dial of his watch float up off the nightstand. The little wedge the hands made rotated as he fumbled to right the face. From eleven o’clock the time spun to a little past five thirty. “She’s up early,” I heard him say. The little constellation spiraled back to the table.
Often there were flecks of paint in my hair. He said he could always find me in the dark. He’d kiss me through a cloud of stars. I’d shake my head and the sparks would spill down onto the pillow, sprinkling his face. My fingertips too lit up, stained where I held the brush and the tiny pot. I became distracted with my own caresses, streaks of light tracing his back, neck, hips. Flakes of light caught in the hairs on his chest and eyebrows, blinked on and off as he opened and closed his eyes. Where I kissed him I left welts of throbbing light. His lips grew brighter. It seemed like the fire should die out but it didn’t, would only disappear with the dawn in the windows. We could see everything then and still hear our daughter down the hall cooing to herself, inventing a language to call me to her.
This was in Orange right after the war. They used women at the factory there to paint the clocks. Our hands were steady. We were patient, perfect for the delicate trimming, outlining the numerals with the radium, down to the marks on the sweep face, sketching hairlines on the minute hand. I had sable brushes I rolled on my tongue to hone a point sharp enough to jewel each second. The paint was sweet and thick like a frosting laced with a fruity essence. We’d thin it with our spit. Rich and heavy like the loam in the garden. It was piecework. At the long tables we’d race through the piles of parts, my hands brushing the other hands, reaching in for the next face or stem. The room was noisy. Alvina sang to herself. Blanche reeled off recipes. Marcella clucked. We talked with our eyes crossed over our work, “She had to get married. They went to Havre de Grace by train and were back by noon the next day.” We paused after each sentence or verse as we dabbed the brushes to our lips. It was as if our voices came from somewhere else. I’d look away, out the huge windows to the brilliant sky. I can still hear the buzz above the table as something separate from the people there, another kind of radiation in the room that never seemed to burn out. The stories and the songs blend into one ache.
What more is there to tell? Our bones began to break under the slightest pressure — getting out of bed, climbing stairs. Our hair rinsed out of our scalps. Our fingertips turned black and the black spread along the fingers by the first knuckle while the skin held a wet sheen. Our hands were negatives of hands. The brittle black fingernails were etched with bone white.
But this was after so many of those afternoons at the Undark plant with its steady northern light. I remember cursing an eyelash that fluttered onto a face and smeared my work, how I damned my body for the few pennies I had lost, the several wasted minutes of work. “I’ll race you, Myrna!” There were many factories in Orange, and their quitting whistles at the end of the day were all pitched differently. The white tables emptied, the heaps of silver parts, like ashes, at each place. Another shift, the night one, would collect the glowing work and ship it somewhere else to be assembled. We ran to the gates, to the streetcars waiting, to the movies that never stopped running. It was all about time, this life, and we couldn’t see it.
At the trial, not one of us would speak, and the newspapers said how happy we were considering the sentences already imposed. We sat there with our smiles painted over our lips to hide our teeth. During recess in the ladies, we powdered over the bruises again. We couldn’t blot the lipstick since our skin was so tender. Four clowns in the mirror, mouths like targets, stared back at us. We couldn’t cry. It would ruin our work. In court, we listened to the evidence and covered our faces when we laughed at what was being said. I watched the clerk who recorded everything, his pencil stirring down the page. Sometimes he would be called upon to read testimony back, and I was taken by the accuracy of his words. I remembered the speeches that way. It seemed right, right down to some of the sounds he noted, pausing to insert laughter or unintelligible. I liked these moments best when the words were the only solid things left in court. The lawyers, the witnesses, the gallery, the jury were all poised, listening to the clerk. They might have been an audience from another time. The only thing left of us was that cursive string of knots on paper, the one sound in the room.
My daughter loved the fresh raspberries in milk. The white milk coated the scoring between the tiny globes on each berry in the bowl. It looked like the milk drying on her tongue. The berries as they steeped turned the milk pink. She grabbed at the fruit, crushing it into her fist and then sliding the pulp into her mouth.