Painting by Elaine Brown Folgar
One for the road
Six-pack stashed behind
the seat, one can at a time wrapped in plain
white Styrofoam. How many hands does a person
need to drive? If he spotted
a police car, he passed it toward
the clenched-arm wife. When
she declined, he ducked, head hidden
to find
a level spot.
Take the wheel, he added, while she
cursed—the trip, the marriage, beer,
until he'd right
himself, ready—
no seatbelts, no cup holders—to steer.
Domestic Dramas
1.
She finds their picture in the bottom dresser
drawer under his clean white socks, paired
neatly but not turned one inside
the other. They have nothing to do with her,
these girls dressed in matching pinafores,
faces stacked as neat as plates, smiles wide
so she can see the gap each keeps between
her front teeth. Like mine. Doesn't wonder
why though other questions burn the back
of her throat and eyes at night waiting
for Daddy to come home, to tell her why
he never invites these lookalikes
to play after school. Closing
her eyes, Mother, always in bed, turns away.2.
[Scene: a small dining room, filled with a large
table, its centerpiece a three-layer box,
and heavy oak chairs, impossible to slide
in or out. Water stains cover a low
drop ceiling. Voices, alternately loud
and mumbled are heard coming from an arch
outlined by assorted blinking lights, e.g.,
bells, turkeys, hearts, skulls, "Fasten seatbelts." A candle
fires old toys, crepe paper, clippings, photos
at the audience.] Then I remind her about
the time before I was born when she dyed
her hair Marilyn-blonde and came home. Surprise!
He called her hussy, whore. Chased her screaming
around the table with a knife. Oooh. I'd forgotten that.3.
Soul and body—the Presbyterian
minister begins. We weep for the one,
celebrate the other's risen glory.
But she doesn't cry when her mother dies.
She is eight, wearing stiff, black Mary Janes,
a plain black jumper, straight black hair divided
in two braids—it hurts when he weaves the pieces
together, but when Daddy finishes, there's
never a stray bit sticking out. Poor thing.
Looks just like her father. Perhaps that's best.
The Lord receives our Sister now at Peace. Back
home they set out, whispering, the feast. Tongues flap
as fast as Gramma Groper's potato masher
but they keep their voices down—sisters—shame—4.
Across the room her cousin's sleeping late.
Her mother died too—she's like a sister.
Grandmother sews a fast, neat seam without
a pattern, can copy any dress you'd want,
makes dumplings. Grandfather—farmer, mail carrier—
built the shotgun house, widely porched, for his fool
wife from Alabama, whose father was a Major.
My mother tells a story about the aunt
caught creekside just before she drowned her baby
girl. Others about her mother knocked flat
by one fiancée then nearly murdered
by another. And Grandfather, how he gifted the pretty
girls presents my mother envied. This happened to her cousin.
Maybe both of their mothers.5.
How she defended him, bent over a hot
iron, smoothing one wrinkle after another.
It's what he's asked since she moved in. Daddy
says, Make an effort—try to see what it's like
for them—her step-mother, their three teenage
daughters, all older than her, who somehow
share her father. He doesn't explain,
and whatever questions she has have to wait
until dishes are washed and put away,
floors mopped, niece bathed, diapered, put to bed. The girls—
she won't say sisters—don't help, busy with boys
and music, for which she has no ear. When
the crimping iron lights one daughter's s hair on fire
she doesn't pretend it was an accident.6.
It's blanks and backstory, the bread-and-butter
of Southern gothics, how to explain a husband
with two families or a Pottsville girl with more
than one murderous lover. One flattened her
at the train station the rainy Sunday
he arrived, not after all to marry her, but to say
he'd returned to his former fiancée. Or
maybe wife. Another who took her up
in his plane, planning to kill them both when
she broke it off, but changing course, left her
instead with a broken back. She was a small
woman—delicate, dark with short, curly hair
and a flapper look who painted before her health went.
She scribbled through her own face in the photos after that.
