That Said Read online

  wearing green on Friday meant you were a tramp.

  The gymnasium’s locker room and showers

  and drains moldered in the basement.

  Sanitary-napkin dispensers were always empty,

  and the changing rooms’ private stalls’

  flapping white curtains didn’t quite close.

  I undressed, put on my gray cotton gym suit,

  and stepped out in the open with all the other girls.

  The gym teacher, Miss Piano, wore a Dutch-boy haircut.

  Her legs were as solid as a baby grand’s.

  She called us by our last names, like privates in the army,

  and clapped, as each girl climbed the ropes

  and disappeared into girders and beams

  and caged light fixtures on the ceiling.

  When my turn came,

  I gripped the lowest knot and dangled down;

  my legs drawn up, I looked like a dying spider.

  On the bleachers, chummy as sorority sisters,

  the lucky girls who had their periods

  gossiped and pretended to do homework

  after handing Miss Piano a nurse’s note.

  Where was my excuse?

  After gym class, I’d undress, stuffing

  my gym suit back into its mildewed bag.

  But first I’d examine my underpants

  for the red smear of “the curse.”

  The last of my friends, the last of the last.

  No luck. I’d swathe myself again

  in my neutral clothing.

  When one morning I woke up,

  two black ink blots staining my pajamas,

  I dragged my mother out of bed to tell her.

  We squeezed into the bathroom

  as if into our clubhouse

  and she was going to show me the secret handshake.

  Blushing, leaking, I sat on the tub’s rim,

  as if poised over the mikveh, the ritual bath.

  Stuffed inside my underpants,

  the bulky Kotex, safety pins, and elastic sanitary belt

  I’d stored in my closet for over a year.

  My mother took a seat on the toilet lid.

  “Ma,” I shyly said, “I got my period,”

  then leaned over to receive her kiss,

  her blessing.

  She looked as though she were going to cry.

  In her blue nylon nightgown, her hairnet

  a cobweb stretched over her bristling curlers,

  my mother laughed, tears in her eyes,

  and yelled, “Mazel tov! Now you are a woman!

  Welcome to the club!”

  and slapped me across the face—

  for the first and last time ever—

  “This should be the worst pain you ever know.”

  The House of Silver Blondes

  Side by side in matching plastic capes,

  my mother and I were two from a set

  of Russian dolls wearing the family brand

  of hair—dark, wavy brown.

  A graduate of beauty school

  was frosting my mother’s hair today.

  Only a few years older than I,

  she had a honey-blonde beehive,

  teased and glazed,

  and a married boyfriend twice her age.

  She stuffed my mother’s hair

  under a punctured bathing cap.

  Her crochet hook pulled dark strands

  one by one through the holes.

  At first my mother looked bald.

  And then like one of those dolls

  with rooted hair you can really comb,

  clumps of hair plugged into the holes

  drilled in rows around their skulls.

  Pulling on her rubber gloves,

  the girl painted my mother’s head

  with bleach, a greasy paste,

  then kneaded and sculpted the hair on top

  into a kewpie doll’s one enormous curl.

  She set the timer, as if boiling an egg.

  If she left it on too long, the hair

  would turn auburn, red, blonde, silver,

  and my grandmother’s snowy white.

  I paged through the latest Seventeen.

  April’s Breck Girl gazed coolly back.

  With her blonde pageboy

  and pink cashmere sweater,

  she looked as if she belonged

  in the white Cadillac double-parked out front.

  She hated my babyish ponytail too!

  A semester short of his degree,

  the boss’s son practiced on me,

  bending my neck backward

  onto the cold pink lip of the basin.

  His every touch gave me a shock.

  Even while he trimmed my hair,

  I couldn’t take my eyes off my mother’s

  bumpy rubber scalp stained with dyes

  like bruises healing yellow-brown and plum.

  If my mother had one life to live,

  why not live it as a blonde?

  Gone was her beautiful dark brown hair.

  I had lost her

  among the bottles of peroxide and shampoo,

  rollers, bobby pins, rat-tailed combs,

  and dryers’ swollen silver domes.

  We walked the block back to the store,

  one dark and one fair,

  passing the grocer, the butcher, the baker,

  every window on the street a mirror.

  Music Minus One

  Music minus the solo melody part—with the tapes or records providing the background music, you can play an instrument or sing along with the band, try your hand at Grand Opera, or even perform a concerto, surrounded by a full symphony orchestra.

  —From the Music Minus One catalogue

  Sunday afternoons, my father practiced

  flute in the family room.

  He warmed up, playing scales,

  while my mother worked the crossword puzzle

  in her wing chair, like a throne.

  Three o’clock and she was still

  wearing her nightgown and slippers.

  Our store downstairs was closed.

  She was sick of looking at dresses all week.

  Sunday was her day of rest.

  I sprawled on the floor with my homework.

  Each in our little orbit.

  My father gave it all up when he married her.

  Abdicated, like the Duke of Windsor.

  Music was no life for a family man.

  During the War, he had led the band

  in the Marine Corps, in the South Pacific.

  In the photo, each man poses with his instrument

  except my father, holding a baton;

  clarinets and saxophones leaning against their chests,

  like rifles at port arms.

  It was my job to start the record over.

  The sheet music, stapled to the album cover,

  was propped on the music stand.

  The needle skated its single blade

  in smaller and smaller circles on black ice.

  The needle skipped. He was a little rusty.

  When he lost his place, it left a hole in the music,

  like silence in a conversation.

  You had to imagine his life before the War.

  At fifteen, on the Lower East Side, he played

  weddings and bar mitzvahs;

  at sixteen, he toured with the Big Bands.

  You had to imagine him before

  he changed his name from Joseph Sharfglass

  to George Shore; you had to imagine him

  handsome in his baby-blue tuxedo

  when he played with Clyde McCoy’s orchestra,

  lighting up hotel ballrooms from New York to California

  and all the road stops in between.

  One enchanted evening in Connecticut,

  he saw my mother.

  A week later, he shipped off to the War.

  Yo
u had to imagine his life before the War—

  the one-night stands, the boys on the bus,

  and in its wake the girls

  with plucked eyebrows and strapless dresses

  surrounding him like the mannequins

  as he stood behind the counter

  of his store, waiting for customers,

  in New Jersey on the Palisades.

  You had to imagine him occupying the uniform

  now folded neatly in his footlocker

  under the telescope pocked with rust—or bloodstains—

  a souvenir from the War.

  The record spun. He caught his breath.

  The music raced on without him.

  Meat

  The year I had the affair with X,

  he lived downtown on Gansevoort Street

  in a sublet apartment over a warehouse.

  It was considered a chic place to live.

  He was wavering over whether to divorce

  his wife, and I’d fly down

  every other week to help him decide.

  Most nights, we’d drop in for cocktails

  on the Upper East Side and hobnob

  with his journalist friends, then taxi

  down to SoHo for an opening and eat

  late dinner in restaurants whose diners

  wore leather and basic black.

  We’d come home at four in the morning,

  just as it was starting to get light

  and huge refrigerator trucks were backing up

  to the loading docks and delivering

  every kind of fresh and frozen meat.

  Through locked window grates I could see

  them carrying stiff carcasses, dripping crates

  of iced chickens. We’d try to sleep

  through the racket of engines and men

  shouting and heavy doors being slammed.

  By three in the afternoon the street would be

  completely deserted, locked up tight;

  at twilight they’d start their rounds again.

  The street always smelled of meat.

  The smell drifted past the gay bars

  and parked motorcycles; it smelled

  like meat all the way to the Hudson.

  And though they hosed it down as best

  they could, it still smelled as though

  a massacre had occurred earlier that day,

  day after day. We saw odd things

  in the gutter—lengths of chain, torn

  undershirts, a single shoe, and sometimes

  even pieces of flesh—human or animal,

  you couldn’t tell—and blood puddling

  around the cobbles and broken curbstones.

  On weekends, we’d ask the taxi

  to drop us off at the door

  so that no one could follow and rob us.

  We’d climb to our love nest

  and drape a sheet over the bedroom window—

  the barred window to the fire escape—

  which faced across the airshaft the window

  of a warehouse—empty, we assumed,

  because we’d never seen lights on

  behind the cracked and painted panes.

  In the morning, we’d sleep late,

  we’d take the sheet down and walk

  around the apartment naked,

  and eat breakfast in bed, and read,

  and get back to our great reunions . . .

  One Sunday, we felt something creepy—

  a shadow, a flicker—move behind a corner

  of broken glass. And we never knew

  who they were, or how many,

  or for how many months they had been

  watching us, the spectacle we’d become.

  Because that’s what we were to them—

  two animals in a cage fucking:

  arms and backs and muscle

  and flanks and sinew and gristle.

  Workout

  My sister is doing her exercises,

  working out in my husband’s study.

  The rowing machine sighs deeply with every stroke,

  its heavy breathing like a couple making love.

  She’s visiting from Iowa

  where the cold weather is much worse.

  When she was ten, I’d hear her

  strumming her guitar through the bedroom wall.

  She’d borrow my albums—my Joan Baez, my Dylan—

  and sing along,

  shutting me out, drawing me in;

  imitating my hair, my clothes,

  my generation.

  I used to feel sorry for her

  for being eight years younger.

  She opens the door a crack, and surfaces

  in earphones, and wearing pink bikini panties

  and a lover’s torn T-shirt.

  Strapped to her hands are the weights

  that weighed her suitcase down.

  Her thighs are tight, her triceps shine,

  her body is her trophy.

  The night she arrived, we sprawled across my bed,

  her cosmetic bag spilled open,

  and she shadowed my eyelids violet,

  demonstrating the latest tricks,

  the way I used to make her up

  on those nights she watched me dress for dates,

  watched me slip into my miniskirt,

  my sandals, my love beads.

  Now she’s no longer in love with me,

  and eyes me pityingly,

  triumphant, her expression the same as mine

  when I watched my mother

  examine her face in the magnifying mirror.

  She’s got to keep in shape.

  She’s a performer, it’s her business

  to look beautiful every night.

  Sometimes, when she begins to sing,

  men in the audience fall in love.

  She’s warming up in the shower;

  the tile walls amplify her voice.

  Safe, for once, under temperate rain.

  Like a dress handed down

  from sister to sister,

  in time one body will inherit

  what the other has outgrown.

  The Wrong End of the Telescope

  For Elizabeth Bishop