
Disappearing Home
We scooped up the baby,
ramrodded the four year old,
imprisoned the two gray tabbies,
locked them all in the ‘77
white LTD with the green vinyl interior
left to me by my mother upon her death.
We disappeared,
told no one.
My parents gone—
tender father,
troubling mother.
I, so attached to both,
birthed a son
days after she died.
“She planned it so,” I recited
to myself, ripe with resentment.
We fled east and north
to a carriage house
teetering on the edge
of the Penobscot Bay.
The wind wild,
the ice insistent,
the snow shielding.
We hid.
I healed.
Just us. Him and me,
the boys, the cats.
When the year ran out, the money
collapsed, we straggled back to Texas,
the LTD rusted from the rough winter.
Encapsulated in the limping LTD,
no jobs, no money, no house,
we were home, bound by air and space,
intention and devotion
and, oh yes, love. Home.
Shopping With My Mother
“Let’s go shopping,” she said.
“I need your opinion.”
I was seventeen,
no longer inclined
to shop with my mother,
until she enticed me:
“I’ll buy something for you.”
When I was little, we
dressed in our best and
drove downtown,
always on a Saturday,
to shop and eat lunch
at the rooftop café in Fedway’s.
Mid-afternoon, we’d stop
at Woolworth’s for cake or pie,
coffee for her, soda for me
or a hot fudge sundae.
In between the eating,
we visited department stores
where she tugged garment after garment
from the racks for me to try on.
She stood aside and
oohed and aahed and
purchased what she could
on sale, of course, for we weren’t rich,
or even particularly middle class.
It thrilled her to give
and thrilled me to take,
until I realized it was a substitute
for what she couldn’t offer,
for what held her back,
for what she herself never received.
On that day during my late adolescence,
I accompanied my mother to the mall
as she had requested.
She beckoned me into
the dressing room
for my assistance.
I watched as she pulled
too tight pants
over her bulging belly,
attempted to button a blouse
about her pendulum breasts.
I stared,
looked away,
saddened, disgusted,
repelled.
But now,
when I am well beyond
the age she was in that
dressing room on that
day of shopping,
I wish I’d looked with love,
not pity,
with love,
not horror,
with love,
not dismay.
with love.
A Little Fiction
We rented a house on Elm Street,
our “Father Knows Best House,”
we christened it.
We drove six hundred miles
to find it, planning to move for a job
in less than a month.
But on the drive back
to Texas, the owner sold it
out from under us,
returned our deposit,
our first month’s rent,
left us desperate, nowhere to live.
In the thirty-five years I’ve been here,
I occasionally, intentionally pass by the house,
tucked away in a neighboring town.
It’s been sold multiple times,
leased between owners,
fallen into disrepair, repaired.
At one point, an above ground pool
squatted awkwardly in
the tiny, neglected backyard.
Today I drove by it,
nostalgic for what
I never had.
What if we had lived there?
What if we had raised our children there?
Would he still have died?
The house is painted white
when once it was yellow,
its shutters now blissful blue.
It is immaculate —
tidy, manicured, the
swimming pool vanished.
Jack-o-lantern cut outs
decorate the front door,
drapes parted in the front room.
I peer through to the
dining room beyond,
roses grace the table.
Light shimmers within.
It is serene there.
Children live there.
It was never mine.
Just a little fiction,
a dream not possessed.