That Said Read online

  behind the counter, I’d climb the folding ladder

  so I could better see

  my mother tease a woman’s arm

  into a silk sleeve of a blouse,

  or help her step into a skirt,

  or pull a gabardine sheath over her hips,

  or drape her in challis—

  I watched my mother

  button them up and zip them down.

  I watched her dress the entire town.

  Everyone in town, but me.

  Browsing in the store,

  they’d pinch me on the cheek and say,

  “You’ll be a lucky girl when you grow up.”

  I wasn’t so sure that it was luck.

  She was the queen;

  I, the heir.

  It would have been a snap for her

  to make me the best-dressed girl in school.

  But for me she wanted better.

  “Give me, give me,” I’d shout in my head.

  And my mother would answer,

  as though she’d heard me,

  “If I give you all these dresses now,

  what will you want when you’re fifteen?”

  My Mother’s Space Shoes

  My mother’s feet were always killing her.

  All day she stood in the store

  selling dresses, hobbling to the dress racks

  like a Chinese woman with bound feet.

  My mother’s mother died of the Spanish flu

  when my mother was a baby.

  Raised by her grandmother,

  aunts, and sisters, my mother inherited

  their brown hair, their nice figures,

  their hand-me-down dresses,

  and their old cramped shoes.

  And so her toes grew crooked and her arches fell.

  I was twelve when she bought her first pair

  of orthopedic space shoes. Custom made,

  they cost a bundle, plus tax.

  She had to go to the factory in Manhattan

  and stand for fifteen minutes,

  ankle-deep in a pan of wet plaster of Paris.

  Six weeks later, the shoes arrived—

  molded in the exact shape of her feet,

  the hard, black leather already broken in,

  bulging with hammertoes and bunions,

  and grained like a dinosaur’s skin.

  She clomped to the cash register,

  she clomped to fetch a customer a dress.

  At noon, she clomped to the deli

  and ordered a corned beef sandwich,

  her rubber soles trailing black scuff marks.

  It was worse than wearing

  bedroom slippers in public.

  Six o’clock, she clomped upstairs

  and cooked us dinner, and after dinner—

  my father dozing on the sofa,

  my sister and I sprawled on the floor

  in front of the TV—

  my mother plopped down in her easy chair

  with her cigarettes and newspaper,

  and soaked her feet

  in a dishpan of soapy water.

  Why couldn’t she keep her pain to herself?

  I cringed, trying to ignore her

  torturing herself with a pedicure—

  using the fancy cuticle cutters, scissors,

  clippers, and pumice stone

  from the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue.

  An hour later, her feet were done,

  wrinkly pink, like a newborn’s.

  My mother was wearing her space shoes

  the day we bought my first high heels

  at Schwartz & Son’s, the only store in town

  with an x-ray machine that showed

  if your shoes fit properly

  and your feet had room enough to grow.

  Young Mr. Schwartz jammed my big toe

  against the metal sliding ruler.

  I’d grown a whole size since the fall.

  He brought out the pair of ugly

  “sensible shoes” my mother chose—

  squat heels and square toes—

  and the ones I wanted—

  black patent leather pumps,

  pointy-toed, dangerous.

  Two inches taller, I teetered across the carpet,

  toes pinching with every step,

  as Old Mr. Schwartz conducted me

  to the x-ray console that only he

  knew how to operate.

  I stepped onto the pedestal,

  slid my feet into the machine:

  my right foot and my left foot

  were twin mummies, skeletons visible

  through their wrappings,

  bones glowing ghostly green and webbed

  with grayish flesh, cloudy ectoplasm

  of squeezed ligaments and tendons.

  Like my mother, I was wearing myself inside out.

  Like her, standing in that pan of plaster,

  I was stuck with myself forever,

  wincing, rocking backward on my heels.

  Evil Eye

  When my daughter was two,

  watching The Wizard of Oz on television,

  the moment the Wicked Witch appeared in a scene,

  Emma would walk, as if hypnotized,

  to the glowing screen and kiss

  the witch’s luminous green face

  in the same placating way

  my mother used to kiss the little silver hand,

  the charm she wore on a chain around her neck.

  The day Emma was born, my mother

  bought a yard of narrow red satin ribbon.

  She tied a bow, several bows,

  and basted the loops together

  until they formed a big red flower

  she Scotch-taped to the head of Emma’s crib

  to protect her while she slept.

  My mother made a duplicate

  to pin onto the carriage hood.

  “You can never be too safe,” she said.

  My mother used to coo in Yiddish over the crib,

  “Kineahora, kineahora,

  my granddaughter’s so beautiful.”

  And then suddenly, as if remembering something,

  something very bad, she’d go “Pui pui pui,”

  pretending to spit three times on the baby’s head.

  My mother wasn’t some fat bubbe from the shtetl.

  She owned a business, drove a car.

  I’d never seen her act this way before.

  Sitting at her kitchen table, she lit another Kent.

  “You should have given Emma an ugly name

  to ward off the evil eye.

  Harry Lebow, the brilliant young concert pianist

  from Guttenberg?

  The evil eye was jealous, so it killed him.

  Mrs. Cohen, who won the lottery

  and went on a spending spree?

  A week later, her house caught fire.

  Remember Bonnie, the doctor’s daughter,

  your girlfriend who died of leukemia?

  Her mother wore a floor-length mink;

  they had a pinball machine

  in their basement rec room.

  That’s practically an open invitation.”

  My mother stubbed out her cigarette.

  My hand fanned the smoke away.

  “Ma, You don’t really believe

  in that hocus-pocus, do you?”

  “Maybe not,” she said, “but it wouldn’t hurt.”

  Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium

  We climb the stone staircase

  of the red-brick Victorian building,

  my father, my aunt, my husband carrying our baby,

  escaping from the mid-July heat.

  My mother is missing, dead one year.

  Downstairs the museum, upstairs the planetarium;

  we’ve waited over an hour

  for the next star show to start,

  rejected the brochures and guided tour,

  killing t
ime, instead, with the souvenir shop’s

  boxed binoculars and plastic bugs,

  rocks and minerals, and packages

  of stick-on, glow-in-the-dark stars.

  We loiter past the Information Desk

  where they’ve set up a card table with an exhibit

  of local flora, each wildflower—

  stuck in its own glass jar

  propping up a smudged typewritten label:

  QUEEN ANNE’S LACE, COW VETCH, wilting BLACK-EYED SUSANS—

  sprinkling pollen on the tabletop

  like pinches of curry power.

  The high barrel-vault ceiling is made of oak,

  the oak woodwork and oak balconies

  shiny as the beautiful cherry-and-glass cabinets

  the janitor just finished polishing,

  but all the exhibits inside the cases

  are falling apart, from the loons’ moth-eaten

  chests molting like torn pillows

  to the dusty hummingbirds’ ruby bibs.

  We interrupt a custodian vacuuming

  a polar bear with a Dustbuster.

  The bear’s down on the floor with us, on all fours,

  pinning a seal under his mauling paw.

  Shuttling the baby between us,

  we shuffle past a grizzly

  rearing up on his pedestal,

  his shin fur scuffed and shiny

  where visitors’ fingers have touched.

  He’s in a permanent rage, his bared teeth

  stained yellow-brown, as if from nicotine.

  The Information Lady hands us over

  to the Tour Guide.

  And though it is only ourselves, and a grumpy

  French-Canadian family with three wired kids

  detoured from the Cabot Creamery,

  she ushers us up the wooden staircase where we meet

  the people from the twelve o’clock show

  staggering down.

  French doors open and close on the planetarium

  barely bigger than a living room,

  rows of wooden benches

  orbiting the central console

  where our bearded, ponytailed Star Guide stands

  and personally greets each one of us

  with a damp handshake and a “Hi.”

  My family sits together in one row,

  obedient children on a class trip.

  Present, all eyes and ears.

  The sun sets, the darkness intensifies.

  Our eyes adjust, our heads tilt back.

  Suddenly the starless night sky, pitch black,

  dark as the inside of a closet,

  makes me feel like crying.

  Not a splinter of light squeezes out

  from under the French doors’ crack.

  My father and my aunt immediately doze off.

  They’re tired, tired of missing

  his wife, her sister. Now there’s nothing

  but a big black hole to hold us all together,

  grief’s gravitational pull.

  “Tim” tells us his name.

  With no higher-up to direct him,

  he’s got his chance to play God.

  He pivots at his podium, clears his throat,

  and casts his flashlight baton

  across his orchestra of incipient stars,

  no music yet, just warming up;

  only his voice and a thin beam of light

  about to point out areas of interest.

  My husband hands me our daughter

  and I unbutton my blouse to nurse her.

  Tim tells us how he used to chart the heavens

  from his bedroom window in Ohio when he was a boy,

  then he rehashes the Star Wars trilogy—

  that’s what first hooked him on astronomy.

  He tells us about his courtship of Annie,

  the home birth of his baby...

  Every once in a while he remembers

  to mention a star.

  My father softly snores. Nights and days

  are swirling all around us, moons rise and set,

  seasons turn, constellations twinkle

  on the cracked ceiling above our heads.

  Over the planetarium’s slate roof

  floats our familiar sky,

  two Dippers, Big and Little,

  and Jupiter, Mars, and the same old moon,

  big and yellow as a wheel of cheddar,

  preparing to rise from behind our hill.

  An hour later,

  like the paired fish in Pisces

  swimming in the sky, the baby and I

  are still at sea, too exhausted

  to crawl along the bleachers and escape.

  The sun pops up, pure Keystone Kops.

  My aunt startles awake, gropes for her purse.

  My father snores louder.

  Fading, the Milky Way shakes over his bald spot—

  covered, one year ago, by a yarmulke

  as he stood in the cemetery under the trees—

  under the big dome of heaven

  where my mother now lives.

  Reprise

  Rummaging through the old cassettes my father

  taped off the classical radio station,

  my daughter finds, among Mozart and Bach,

  catalogued and labeled in his elegant hand,

  Jane and Howard’s Wedding: 1984.

  I didn’t know my father taped that, too!

  Disappearing with the boom box, my daughter

  shuts the master bedroom’s door. An hour later,

  I walk in on her gate-crashing our wedding,

  sprawling on our marriage bed, ear to the speaker.

  When she was younger, she used to insist

  she was there, at our wedding, and we’ve told her

  it’s impossible, she wasn’t born yet, that she

  was there in spirit. She’s not convinced—hasn’t she

  always been with us, even when she wasn’t?

  She laughs at the Wedding March while her dad

  and I shakily walk down the aisle

  under the rented yellow-and-white tent

  filling Mike and Gail’s Walnut Ave. backyard.

  Eavesdropping on the prayers we repeat