One Secret Thing Read Free Page B

I
    couldn’t be bare, unless I took off my
    Young Lady’s First Sanitary Belt,
    my cat’s cradle, my goddess girdle,
    and she couldn’t want me to do that,
    could she? But when she walked in, and saw me still
    clothed, her face lit up with sarcastic
    wonder, and combat. I did not speak, she came
    toward me, I bolted, threw open her door,
    slamming my brother to the floor with a keyhole
    shiner, I poured down the staircase and through
    some rooms, and got my back against
    a wall, I would hurt her before the last scene
    of this long-running act could be played out
    to its completion. When she got there, maybe she could see that,
    we faced off, dressed in our dresses and our
    secret straps and pulleys, and then
    I walked away—and for the year I remained
    in that house, each month our bodies called
    to each other, brought each other bleeding off in the
    waste of the power of creation.

Home Theater, 1955
    They weren’t armadillos, or sow bugs,
    or nautili, the animals printed on the
    seersucker cotton of my nightie, maybe they were
    rabbits, or deer. There was a new style,
    that year, the shortie nightie, no longer
    than the hem of its matching panties—and on its
    cloth no eels, no trilobites,
    no oviraptors, but goldfish and pigs
    placed in rows like sown seeds.
    That night, what was supposed to be
    inside our father’s head—the arterial
    red—had emerged and cooled on his brow,
    cheeks, mouth, into a Comus mask,
    and the police were there, and our mother was not. It was
    like a Greek play, in a stone
    amphitheater, with very few characters—
    first the one in blood disguise,
    then the elder daughter who
    had called the two officers
    to our home—they were not much older than she, they were
    dressed for the hour in midnight blue.
    And my sister’s torso, in its shortie, in the kitchen,
    seemed to be almost rippling,
    swaying like an upright snake still
    half in its basket. Then, for an instant,
    I thought I saw the younger cop just
    glance at my legs and away, once
    and away, and for a second, the little
    critters on my nightie seemed to me to be
    romping as if in an advertisement.
    Soon after our father had struck himself down,
    there had risen up these bachelors
    beside the sink and stove, and the tiny
    mastodons, and bison, and elk, the
    beasts on my front and back, began,
    atonal, as if around an early fire, to chant.

Paterfamilias
    In the evenings, during the cocktail hour,
    my mother’s new husband would sometimes inspect
    the troops. Your mother has the best damn fanny
    in the house, he would say to my sister and me—in our
    teens, then twenties, thirties, forties. Turn
    around! he’d cry out, Turn around! We wouldn’t
    turn around, and he’d say, Your mother has the nicest little
    ass in the house. And let’s look at those legs,
    he’d shout, and she’d flash her gams. Your mother
    has the only decent legs in the house,
    he’d growl. And when I’d pass him next,
    he’d bear-hug me, as if to say
    No hard feelings, and hit me hard
    on the rear, and laugh very loud, and his eyes seemed to
    shine as I otherwise never saw them shine,
    like eyes of devils and fascists in horror
    comic books. Then he’d freshen his Scotch, and just
    top hers up, a little, and then
    he’d show us his backwards-curled, decurved
    Hohenzollern thumb—Go on,
    touch it! Touch it! They were people who almost
    did not know any better, who, once
    they found each other, were happy, and felt,
    for the first time, as if they belonged
    on earth—maybe owned it, and every creature on it.

Easter 1960
    The doctor on the phone was young, maybe on his
    first rotation in the emergency room.
    On the ancient boarding-school radio,
    in the attic hall, the announcer had given my
    boyfriend’s name as one of two
    brought to the hospital after the sunrise
    service, the egg-hunt, the crash—one of them
    critical, one of them dead. I was looking at the
    stairwell banisters, at their lathing,
    the necks and knobs like joints and