That Said Read online

  and gets all tangled up.

  Who’d be the lucky one

  to read it to the class?

  A dozen hands shot up

  except Lucille’s, and mine.

  Shiny straight black hair,

  black patent Mary Janes,

  pink cat’s-eye frames

  studded with rhinestones—

  Lucille was special.

  She couldn’t read or spell.

  She’d had to repeat

  the first grade twice,

  but received straight A’s

  for perfect attendance.

  She sat in the first row,

  close to the erased blackboard,

  a swirling Milky Way.

  The teacher skipped Lucille

  and called out, “Jane!”

  I snapped back to my book,

  the kitten, the sewing basket

  and ball of yarn.

  I opened my mouth to read

  the page Fate gave to me.

  Not wanting to show off,

  I stumbled—on purpose—

  on the words I knew I knew,

  and got all tangled up

  in that rolling ball of yarn,

  unraveling its line

  of looping handwriting

  across the kitchen floor

  Mother scrubbed and waxed

  on her hands and knees

  —Jane’s mother, not mine.

  Mine puffed on her cigarette,

  smoke scribbling on the air

  in the rooms we call our lives,

  where it begins to snow

  real snow outside the panes,

  beyond the huge paper flakes

  children fold, cut, and tape

  to classroom windows,

  no two flakes alike:

  brief fingerprints

  whorling on the glass.

  Best Friend

  My first best friend had pale delicate skin

  and when she laughed or was embarrassed

  her cheeks flared up into two hot pink spots,

  for hours, like stains she couldn’t rub out.

  She lived walking distance from the firehouse,

  so the days and nights her father was on duty,

  she could see him anytime she chose,

  visit the private quarters on the second floor,

  above the gleaming trucks and coiled hoses

  where her father lived his other life.

  When I first went along with Cynthia,

  I thought I’d have to shinny up the brass pole

  through the hole cut in the ceiling, but we

  only had to walk up stairs, to see one big

  happy family of men, smoking and playing

  cards around the dinner table, frying sausages

  on the stove, drying socks on radiators,

  their heavy black rubber coats on hooks,

  flayed open, smooth as animal hides.

  In the dormitory, I saw their beds made

  with linens from home, shelves of personal

  belongings, children’s photos, lucky stones.

  I petted their mascot Dalmatian while

  Cynthia kissed each fireman goodbye.

  Afternoons after school, we’d play quietly

  in the rose garden behind her house,

  so as not to disturb her father, off-duty.

  Once, stumbling outside in his pajamas,

  he looked perfectly ordinary, not a hero—

  just like my own father, who worked regular

  hours in his store. Cynthia caught me staring,

  and cut in, “He’s not a lazybones, really.

  He’s just catching up on sleep.”

  When a small plane crashed one foggy morning

  into the radio tower a few blocks away,

  and the engine sailed over town, missing

  the school, landing down the street from us,

  burning an apartment house to the ground,

  many people died, all the passengers.

  From my bedroom window I saw smoke

  and, in the distance, eleven stories high,

  the tower’s torn and twisted scaffolding

  where the plane caught in it like a fly.

  A week later, as I walked Cynthia home,

  she whispered that her father, the day after

  the crash, sifting through the cooling rubble

  in the vacant lot next door, saw something

  lying in the dirt, he didn’t know what,

  and picked up a woman’s hand severed

  at the wrist, a left hand, with a diamond

  engagement ring still on it. For months

  the remaining fuselage lodged in the tower

  like a decomposing corpse, until someone

  figured out a way to bring it down.

  The Sunroom

  My chickenpox was itchy, like pinfeathers.

  Blisters popped out on my scalp, eyelids, even my tongue,

  like the plague God brought down on Egypt.

  “Don’t scratch!” my mother yelled.

  I couldn’t help but scratch.

  Quarantined from my new baby sister,

  I was playing in the sunroom Easter Sunday morning,

  keeping track of the parade on the television—

  playing in the sunroom the whole week before,

  during Passover, while I was still contagious—

  playing in the sunroom a month before,

  the one and only time I met my grandfather,

  all tanned and leathery—a cameo appearance

  like a retired movie star.

  He brought a crate of Florida grapefruit for the family

  and a stuffed baby chick for me.

  The moment I saw the chick—

  its black glass eyes, its real beak

  smooth as a shelled peanut

  with two little slits for nostrils—

  I was afraid of it.

  Its insides had been scooped out

  like chickens my mother koshered:

  she’d stick her hand between the legs and pull out

  the shiny gizzard, liver, and the gigantic ruby

  of the heart, then rub the skin and the inside cavity

  with Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt.

  What scared me the most

  was that the chick was really dead,

  dead in its actual body, like a mummy;

  its precious organs thrown away,

  its body sanitized, stuffed with straw,

  and covered with feathers dyed a sunny yellow.

  I was sure I’d caught chickenpox

  from the baby chick.

  I thought I’d die.

  The first Passover,

  the Angel of Death had slaughtered

  every Egyptian firstborn son.

  Smeared blood was the sign

  for the Angel to pass over.

  I was a firstborn.

  My body was covered with signs.

  On Easter morning,

  I watched them walking home from church

  to eat their Easter meals—

  men and boys in somber suits,

  women in flowered hats,

  girls wearing new spring coats on sale

  at Lobels Department Store,

  in lovely Easter-egg colors—soft unbleached wool

  dipped into pale washes

  of baby blue, mint, lavender, and pink—

  pink as an Easter ham

  stuck all over with cloves,

  cloves like the burning scabs I scratched

  as they paraded past.

  The Holiday Season

  The electric eye of the mezuzah

  guarded our apartment over the store,

  as innocent of Christmas

  as heaven, where God lived,

  how many stories above the world?

  Was He angry when He saw

  all the windows on my street—

  the assimilated gr
ocer’s, druggist’s,

  even my father’s store—

  lit up like an Advent calendar?

  Alone in my bedroom

  the nights my parents worked late,

  I’d hear voices and laughter

  float up through the floor—

  customers trying on dressy dresses

  in the fitting rooms below.

  The store was dressed up too,

  with tinsel, icicles,

  everything but a Christmas tree—

  “Over my dead body,” my mother said.

  Christmas was strictly business

  in my parents’ store.

  Fourteen shopping days to go,

  my class sang carols

  in front of the school assembly.

  In starched white blouses

  we marched up to the stage,

  our mouths a chain of O’s.

  When we came to the refrain

  “Christ the Savior is born,”

  as if on cue all the Jewish kids

  were silent, except me,

  absent-mindedly humming along

  until the word Christ slipped out.

  It was an accident!

  Gentiles believed in Christ.

  We Jews believed in a God

  Whose face we were forbidden to see,

  Whose name we were forbidden

  to say out loud, or write completely.

  We had to spell it G-d,

  the missing o dashing into its hole.

  That afternoon after school,

  I sat near an empty fitting room

  folding gift boxes, carefully locking

  cardboard flaps in place.

  Was God going to punish me?

  My father knelt in the window

  like one of the Magi in a crèche,

  among mannequins, dressed

  and accessorized, as if they actually

  had someplace to go. He dusted

  off a plastic angel three feet tall.

  Stored in the cellar, she lorded it

  over the old broken mannequins,

  naked, bald, their amputated limbs

  piled in the corner like firewood.

  The Sunday before holiday season

  she ascended, one flight, to the store,

  trailing a tail of electric cord.

  After my father plugged her in,

  she glowed from halo-tip to toe,

  faith—a fever—warming her cheeks,

  her insides lit by a tiny bulb.

  I longed to smuggle her up to my room,

  to have some company at night

  when the store was open late.

  I gazed down the darkening street,

  Seventy-ninth to Boulevard East,

  and out over the Hudson.

  At sundown, I went upstairs.

  Dinner was defrosting in the oven.

  The last night of Chanukah,

  eight candles, like eight crayons—

  arranged from right to left,

  like a line of Hebrew writing—

  wobbled in the brass menorah.

  My father struck the match.

  Flame wavered in my hand;

  I numbly sang the blessing

  as if the words on my breath

  could sweep away the word

  I’d sung earlier that day.

  Was God going to punish me?

  I’d have to ask the Magic 8 Ball,

  my gift on the first night of Chanukah.

  For the past seven nights,

  before going to sleep,

  instead of saying my prayers,

  I’d consulted the 8 Ball.

  It could predict the future.

  You asked it a yes-or-no question,

  you turned it over,

  and the answer slowly floated up

  through the inky liquid

  to the round window on top.

  I held the black ball

  firmly in my hands.

  “Is God going to punish me?”

  “CONCENTRATE AND ASK AGAIN”

  I stared out my bedroom window

  across the back alley

  at the rabbi’s house,

  and watched him walk from room

  to room, his windows

  like frames on a strip of film.

  He vanished through his kitchen door

  and reappeared a moment later

  a shadow, a hazy nimbus rippling

  his bathroom’s frosted window glass.

  Swaying before his mirrored ark’s

  two fluorescent scrolls of light,

  he performed his evening ritual—

  brushing his teeth,

  washing his hands, then

  sinking discreetly out of sight.

  For spying on the rabbi,

  I’d added on another sin!

  I concentrated, closed my eyes,

  again I asked the question:

  “Is God going to punish me?”

  “REPLY HAZY TRY AGAIN”

  “Is God going to punish me?”

  “BETTER NOT TELL YOU NOW”

  “Is God going to punish me?”

  “IT IS DECIDEDLY SO”

  “Is God going to punish me?”

  “MY REPLY IS NO”

  “8 Ball, what is your answer?”

  “ASK AGAIN LATER”

  I had to see what was inside.

  I took a hammer to the ball

  and whacked. Not a crack;

  I’d barely scratched its shell.

  I looked into its eye,

  the dark unblinking eye,

  as far as I could see inside the skull

  where, floating together in ink

  (so many I couldn’t see them all),

  were all the answers possible.

  The Slap

  In 1959, at Horace Mann Elementary

  in North Bergen, New Jersey,

  wearing white on Wednesday meant you were a virgin,

  wearing red on Thursday meant you were a lesbian,