The Old Pew

I did not know we all had different fathers, that I was on the sunny slope of daughterhood, that my brothers chilled in his mountainous shadow.

•••

Dad’s working seven nights a week. We’re alone with Mom. No fun. Donna Reed shakes no cocktail shaker. Smokes don’t screen her from Mary and Jeff. When Dr. Stone’s gone, she doesn’t serve bendy fish sticks and canned peas on worm-green plates in flicker blue light on black kitchen table.

•••

Mom only tells sad stories like Dad gone in the War or guys way back in our family connecting the telegraph or her grandpa living in cold sod house. No games, just boring.

I never want to be a mother. All day stay indoors, do laundry, sew, with only people who cut their knees, fracture their skulls or be a horrible mean daughter like me which how could I be so mean to her she loves me and takes care of me. And all those children of birth defects to raise money for.

But so boring. I want to be thinking of interesting things, like do you ever get sick of your body? I do sometimes, dragging it around. It would be fun to just think all the time.

Feet are good, though, to get around and swim and slide. Also hands, who let out your mind to write and draw. And eyes to read and see hands and who are your parents. Also you can cross them, but careful they might stick.

Mostly I get tired of body not fast like mind. A wish come true if it ever did because then never wait for a bus. Or think of a drawing, there it’s on paper. But going so fast, you might have to sleep for a month. Boring.

Dying, leave your body. To God if you’re good. Hell if you’re bad. In Heaven all you do is look at God all day and be happy, but hope there’s other stuff to do.

•••

By the following spring, Pogo’s left the seminary, transferred to college, and received his gold Omega watch for not smoking or drinking until his eighteenth birthday. As we all will, he makes up for it. After a scrape with a parked car some years hence, he’ll stop drinking altogether.

Tom is a high school senior, recovering from a devastating shock. His two closest friends are in a horrible car crash. His best friend dies; his friend Paul is paralyzed. Tom visits him in the hospital and gets to know Paul’s kid sister Linda. Tom himself was supposed to be in that car, but changed his plans. The thought haunts us all.

In 1959, Skip turns ten, needs thick glasses, lowering his social status, but upping his grades. He scores in the nighty-eighth percentile in Stanford Achievement Tests. Genius.

Jim, five, is regularly wetting his bed.

Mom’s giving and attending more luncheons and coffee parties. “I don’t like to go out to lunch on the same day I am having a party,” she says in one letter, “…but Anna was here yesterday and the house is all set and I’ll skin anyone alive who doesn’t keep it that way!”

•••

Don’t skin me. I do love to help a party, set olives out, scrub bathroom sink with Comet, put out dinky soaps of fans or shells and velvet towels that don’t work but look nice. Polish silver from corner cupboard which feels like weird chalk to my hands. Make baby sandwiches of cucumbers, bread of no crust, paprika for color. Blue Nun Mom pours. A magazine told Mom to spray your phone with perfume so that too. Fill shamrock swan with cigarettes and lickety-split the front door rings. Me and my brothers and sister smile. “Such lovely manners!” people always say. Take their coats on our backs upstairs. Big party, leftover Swedish meatballs. Bridge club, tomorrow eat bridge mix. When I was little I thought they made a bridge of cards and how did they keep it up? Mom says it’s just the name. But still I don’t know how a real bridge keeps up.

Sometimes me and Mom make bread, white flour hands, sweet-boing-yeast smell, mix dough, knead dough, punch dough down, over and over. Mom says we’re part of the long trail of women doing the same thing, centuries, centuries, making bread for centuries. We both feel old, old, old.

Sometimes she cleans out her drawers, gives me apple blossom cologne she doesn’t use or old red purse or circle pin she doesn’t want.

In my family lots of times it doesn’t matter if you are a boy or girl, we are all even. Dad says I can be anything I want when I grow up. But I would like to solve this because I am not perfect to my mother but get mad sometimes.

The chief thing of boys is be brave, but I can too. I cut my finger open to be blood brothers with David I played doctor with, but now he won’t be any more, but tells me to get out of here.

It’s good to be a girl so you can cry which I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t.

•••

Mom’s an active member of the hospital auxiliary, Sodality of Mary, the Military Academy Mother’s Club, and her alumnae association, and she’s on the board of the Variety Club Auxiliary.

She wants less us and more social life.

And yet how I want to stay here in the old pew of the fifties—rigid, dark, uncomfortable, but familiar. Varnished, old incense, something wrong, but so subtle you could forget about it, push it down with Oreos, ignore it walking to school, drink fresh air, distracted by birds.

•••

My way to school is good to me. You go the way of the creek. There’s abundance of trees and steep-windingly path, which is best. Or you can take the forty-six gray cement steps right to the green rail foot bridge.

Once Skip raced me down. He took the path and me the steps. I was winning and jumped the last three down but landed on my ankle to sprain it. For the first time I got crutches. Your arms get sore but you feel like a little house walking around. But to beat Skip was worth crutches.

I always anyway like the path better. With dining room table the creek is my best place. A million birds, like mallard ducks and ducklings, or pheasants make sounds like Tin Lizzie. No fox or deer or bear or dinosaur but at our penny-color creek you can pretend.

Step the stones across, but take green rail bridge when you can’t, like knobby ice or flood, once up to the sixteenth step. You didn’t know where was the bridge. Also once under it Nicky Devin found a lady’s dead body murdered there. He said.

I get tardy sometimes because it’s so pretty and quiet. Not like family and not like school. Maybe a baby bird fell out of his nest, needs breads and milk.

Cross street, climb The Big Hill. Pull on trees to get up in winter because it’s slippery as a frog. In spring, speckle-green. In fall red paint-brush sumac. On top, turn around. Blue trees, blue city way far off.

Trees will not call you names or trip you or make fun, but now get going.