"An Attempt to Describe Beatrice"
1.
We got her out of the sanitarium when she learned to check her pills.
She got out of the marriage to Larry. The night before she left
she brought coffee and lit cigarettes
in two ashtrays for my mom and dad.
They sighed and looked like something had been gotten through.
The at night she cleared out my closet and disappeared;
all my Carnaby Street hip-hugger skirts, chain belts,
granny purses, loud floral orange and yellow shirts.
She was my aunt but we wore the same size.
We didn't hear from her for six months.
2.
Years later, after she married the baker and began raising
Rhodesian Ridgebacks and German Shepherds I asked her
about that time, when she stole my clothes and ran away.
She left the guy that beat her up on their honeymoon.
She went with two men to California in a stolen car.
3.
Her mother died when she was five and then she slept with her dad.
He entered her in beauty contests and dressed her up.
She discovered men and he disowned her.
After she was seventeen she never saw her father again.
4.
They held up gas stations all the way to L.A.
No, she was only the driver. She never held the gun.
They financed their return trip the same way but something
went sour between her and one of the men. She jumped out
of a moving car in Oklahoma, picked the gravel out of her hands
and hitch-hiked to her sister Geraldine.
5.
After that she dated only policemen.
6.
She had a little dog she called Capezio.
She could lasso a man from afar with her cobra eyes.
She could draw him toward her like a curling vapor of smoke.
Later she became an atheist who raised talking birds.
7.
She had some children with the police.
One guy did something or other,
she cut up his shoes and uniforms into two-inch squares,
piled them away in the hallway outside their door.
She had a baby that died in her womb.
She lived in housing projects just north of the city.
Her boy up and nailed all of his toys to his bedroom wall,
drove lines of nails to balance his rubber balls.
Her girl hid in the laundry room instead of going to school.
As a child this daughter called every man daddy.
She inherited my aunt's unfortunate taste in men.
They lived in mobile home lots the size of small towns.
8.
I went with my aunt for alcohol rehab.
We almost ran off with our cabbie on the way.
We learned together about A.A.
She cleaned houses and then learned to build them.
When I was a child I was afraid of her parties and her boyfriends.
She gained and lost hundreds of pounds;
carried a six-pack wherever she went.
Most of the police who stopped us had dated her and quickly let us go.
The baby that died in her womb was induced.
The hospital staff said only her husband could be with her.
I said I was him.
9.
She borrowed a cop's car and threw it from forward
to reverse, smashing cars in front of and behind her.
She turned on the siren and red light.
We stood on our front lawns and watched her,
the antics of her boyfriend the policeman as he ran alongside his car.
She was a ball. We were all of us afraid of her.
In treatment, she was smarter than the doctors.
Funnier, too, she could wrap her gaze around a man
and make him blind.
She liked danger, men who could spin basketballs on their fingers.
Then she married the banker. Once in a while she ran away.
She and her daughter dated together.
Her daughter's boyfriend went to jail.
The banker bought her more dogs, then birds;
huge cages of intelligent blue parrots with eighty-year lifespans.
The big dogs moved outside.
The daughter's lover got out of prison and she moved back in with him.
The grandson tore all the heads off his toys.
10.
I miss her. We had a falling out in a bar around Xmas.
She wanted to go home with the band. A friend and I
dragged her to our car. She hasn't spoken to me in years.
I remember her little dog Capezio, so tiny she could carry
him in her purse.
~Sheryl Noethe
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