Housekeeping
I never saw my mother in a bathing suit like the other wives on campus, the boarding school where our fathers taught. The summer of ’76 stuck to our tanned skin in the boredom of long, humid days in PA. The radio reported record heat waves that year. On Saturdays we were barred inside until the house was “redd up,” a command in her Pittsburghese to clean up. She knelt down by our side on hardwood floors, a bucket of Murphy oil soap at her hip. Row upon row of washed out photographs of our ancestors in the hills of San Martino peered down from the mantel. Yet this was the...
Read MoreSunday Phone Call
All last night I held conversations with you. You stubbed out your cigar, striding barefoot into my dream and went on sparring with me though your last month in the hospital was silent. How do I make this a normal Sunday evening? Make a plate of spaghetti, walk up the dirty road with the dog, rent a foreign film. Instead I down Jameson neat by the woodstove. When the phone rings in the kitchen, I forget that it can’t be you. Remember Christmas Eve of ’68 when you drilled me to repeat that new telephone number over and over in the passenger seat, just in case I got lost among the...
Read MoreWhat We Do Not Say
I do not know what led to this, or when it began. Of course I have changed since we first unpacked our book bags on Divinity Avenue, cracking our history texts open to ancient Rome in Widener Library. Fifteen years later you sit on a wicker chair across the porch, arms crossing your chest. The dog watches us from his bed. Two hawks skirmish in midflight, dropping to the meadow nearby. When we look away through the tangle of trees, I look to the past, to those days living on Hampshire Street. I would like to speak to you of that memory. Your sun...
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