The Shriek They Knew So Well
When Chico, my parents’ beloved pearl cockatiel, flew away, Father drove circles around the lake—windows rolled down in ninety degree heat—calling the bird’s name in a thick, coconutty Indian accent while Mother paced the sidewalks carrying Chico’s three-story white iron cage hoisted high above her head, doors blown wide open in hopes that Chico would...
My Father’s Noose
When my father was a boy, his mother hung him. Enter Tondo, a Manila slum, and stand in the kitchen of his childhood home. Look up. The crusty knot is still there, tied around the light fixture. I imagine my father, Totoy, at ten. He hasn’t graduated yet to long pants and shoes; his shorts...
Coming of Age in the Garden of Eden, Pennsylvania
StemPlucked from the bath, jammies on, clean-smelling flannel, I come into the living room where my grandmother and aunt and mother and father and the strange woman we know as Dr. Bunny, who will later turn out to have been my aunt’s lover, sit smoking in the yellow after-dinner light. Kiss Grandma goodnight, I am...
Furniture, Rental Workers, Houston
Was it in high school or college? Before and after Passover I would drive to the rental place and pick up and bring back tablecloths and napkins. My mother rented them for our seders, where we had 25 to 30 people. At the rental place, was it one guy or two? I remember one worker...
Candy Cigarettes
While your parents drank in Schmidt’s Bar, you and your cousins gathered under buggy streetlights. No one watched you. No one cared. You all ran down a big hill in the dark, holding hands. Then up again. Later, inside the bar, you begged for everything: cashews warmed in white waxed cups, giant pickles like dead...
The Poet Visits Her Father-in-Law
Scum on the handle of the refrigerator and a giant greasy handprint on the glass kitchen table. He has turned his cup upside down again and a pool of orange juice coagulates on the clear surface. He uses the same Styrofoam cup every day, never rinses it. Never throws it away. The knife is lying...
Last Stand in the Closing Country
Black Cat Bone was covering Clapton and Dylan and promised anyone a free beer for naming one of the Yardbirds. I named three on the spot – didn’t get three beers, though, and damned if I wasn’t thirsty. We drink Yuengling out here, out in the towns and fading country outposts that patch Pennsylvania together...
Childbirth in Alabama
Tomorrow my son turns ten. Double digits. Passes out of the smaller numbers forever. It makes me remember how small he was at the beginning, four pounds, four ounces. Not, I soon learned, a really small baby; large, in fact, next to his NICU classmates, one of the lucky big premature babies moved, after the...
On Receiving Notice of My Step-Daughter’s Pregnancy
I want you to hear the voice of an angry stepmother as you read this, so go ahead and settle into it. You know the voice I mean: that extra-tall mocha raspberry voice, with the hint of an edge, the little bit of burn from sitting too long in the pot, from forgetting to remove...
Catachresis
Irony: college English professor, PhD 1989, perennially (perrenially?) bad speller, conscripted to serve as judge for the Lancaster, Pennsylvania 48th Annual Intelligencer Journal Spelling Bee. I’ve dodged this town/gown relations-building task for seventeen years by responding to the request for a volunteer by squinting and looking off into the distance, as if trying to recall...
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