|
Edited on Wed Mar-12-08 01:59 AM by BlueIris
"Quarter to Six"
and the house swept with the colors of dusk, I set the table with plates and lace. In these minutes left to myself, before the man and child scuff at the doorstep and come in, I think of you and wonder what I would say if I could write. Would I tell you how I avoid his eyes, this man I've learned to live with, afraid of what he doesn't know about me. That I've finished a pack of cigarettes in one sitting, to ready myself for dinner, when my hands will waver over a plate of fish as my daughter grows up normal in the chair beside me. Missy,
this is what's become of the wedding you swore you'd come to wearing black. That was back in 1970 as we sat on the bleached floor of the sanitarium sharing a cigarette you'd won in a game of pool. You said even school was better than this ward, where they placed the old men in their draped pants, the housewives screaming in loud flowered shifts as they clung to the doors that lined the halls. When we ate our dinner of fish and boiled potatoes, it was you who nudged me under the table as the thin man in striped pajamas climbed the chair beside me in his bare feet, his pink-tinged urine making soup of my leftovers. With my eyes locked on yours, I watched you keep eating. So I lifted my fork to my open mouth, jello quivering green against the tines, and while I trusted you and chewed on nothing, he leapt into the arms of the night nurse and bit open the side of her face. You had been there
longer, knew the ropes, how to take the sugar-coated pill and slip it into the side pocket in your mouth, pretend to swallow it down in drowsy gulps while the white-frocked nurse eyed the clockface above our heads. You tapped messages into the wall while I wept, struggling to remember the code, snuck in after bedcount, with cigarettes, blew the blue smoke through the barred windows. We traded stories, our military fathers: yours locking you in a closet for the days it took to chew ribbons of flesh from your fingers, a coat pulled over your head; mine, who worked his ringed fingers inside me while the house slept, my face pressed into the pillow, my fists knotted into the sheets. Some nights
I can't eat. The dining room fills with their chatter, my hand stuffed with the glint of a fork and the safety of butter knives quiet at the sides of our plates. If I could write you now, I'd tell you I wonder how long I can go on with this careful pouring of the wine from the bottle, straining to catch it in the fragile glass. Tearing open my bread, I see
the scar, stiches laced up to the root of your arm, the flesh messy where you grabbed at it with the broken glass of an ashtray. That was the third time. And later you laughed when they twisted you into the white strapped jacket demanding you vomit the pills. I imagined you in the harsh light of a bare bulb where you took the needle without flinching, retched when the ipecac hit you, your body shelved over the toilet and no one to hold your hair from your face. I don't know
where your hands are now, the fingers that filled my mouth those nights you tongued me open in the broken light that fell through chicken-wired windows. The intern found us and wretched us apart, the half-moon of your breast exposed as you spit on him. "Now you're going to get it," he hissed through his teeth and you screamed "Get what?" As if there was anything anyone could give you. If I could write you now, I'd tell you
I still see your face, bone-white as my china above the black velvet cape you wore to my wedding twelve years ago, the hem of your black crepe skirt brushing up the dirty rice swirls as you swept down the reception line to kiss me. "Now you’re going to get it," you whispered, cupping my cheek in your hand.
—Dorianne Laux
|