Fall 1964
Mami sent me to Abbot where they tamed
wild girls—or so she’d heard—into ladies,
who knew to hold their skirts down in a breeze
and say “Excuse me” if compelled to speak;
ladies who married well, had lovely kids,
then inexplicably went mad and had
gin and tonics or the gardener for breakfast—
that part my mother hadn’t heard; ladies
who learned to act like blondes even if they
were dark-haired, olive-skinned, spic-chicks like me.
And so that fall, with everything checked off
the master list—3 tea dresses, 2 pairs
of brown oxfords, white gloves, 4 cardigans—
I was deposited at Draper Hall
to have my edges rounded off, my roots
repotted in American soil.
I bit my nails, cracked my knuckles hard,
habits the handbook termed unladylike—
(sins, the nuns called them back at Catholic school).
I said my first prayer in months that night.
“Ay Dios,” I begged, “help me survive this place.”
And for the first time in America,
He listened: the next day for English class
I was assigned to Miss Ruth Stevenson
who closed the classroom door and said, “Ladies,
let’s have ourselves a hell of a good time!”
And we did, reading Austen, Dickinson,
Eliot, Woolf, until we understood
we’d come to train—not tame—the wild girls
into the women who would run the world.