Mal baby-sat just the one time for my older sister and me,
but I’ve thought of it often, strangely often, and each time I do
I’m lifted onto the warm motorcycle for the ride that’s lasted now
for thirty years. My mother, home early, found Mal straddling
her boyfriend, him thumbing her nipples the way a safecracker
works the tumblers, such pant-pant-panting they didn’t hear
the door, my mother’s gasp. Mallory, who went by Mal—
which even then I knew meant bad. But fun; the funnest sitter ever,
I’d whispered as she kissed me night-night . . . Never again,
Mom vowed over morning cornflakes. Inviting her boyfriend over—
imagine! Never again. Is that why we ratted, why we told Mom
about the motorcycle—because we had nothing to lose? My sister,
forever in trouble, was glad to see someone else deep in it. And I?
I was the good child and wary of secrets, but that’s not it either,
even as I began unfurling my verbal tapestry, I knew I should stop,
and could not. I told of how, our bedtime nearing, Love Boat ending,
Brendan pulled up before our picture window, swung his leg
off his motorcycle, and how Mal ran to where he was tilting it
on its kickstand, and how Julie and I barefoot in white nighties
followed into the June heat where the engine ticked percussion
to the cicada’s mating song. Did we ask, or did he offer?
I remember being lifted up, set down, clutching Brendan’s shirt,
my left cheek pressed against his back which smelled like a man,
like cut grass and sweat, the motorcycle coltishly leaping forward
and kicking up gravel as we pulled onto the road, the mailboxes
falling behind us fast, then faster, my hair blown back as if yanked
by an angry brush, and the asphalt rising as we dipped, too fast,
into a turn, and how we righted and kept on, above us strange
black scissors swooped, these were not birds I knew, not crows,
not sparrows—Bats, yelled Brendan over his shoulder, Bats diving
for mosquitoes, all my known neighborhood alien to me then,
sucked back into the gray and shuddering wind. Bats, my poor mother
repeated the next morning at the table where we’d eaten potato salad
hours after Mal took it from the fridge, where Brendan winked, slid
his hand in her jean pocket, where Mal urged before putting us down
way past bedtime, Don’t tell your mother—too late, too late, pretty
Mallory, first casualty of my crafty pleasure; already I was gathering
scraps of phrases, weaving my story of someone gone bad.