New Writing at Webdelsol

Sisters-in-Law

Daughters of merchants and bankers, the young wives brought fair enough dowries and a taste for finery: Dresden plates, Belgian lace and a great dish of a hat, its single feather bobbing like spume above the prairie. Girls raised on a diet of contempt for shabbiness and determined to climb. Rosemarie, Helena, Cecilia, their lilting names given as ornament to the flatness cuffing the town, as antidote to any trace of a thick-ankled, dirt-grubbing past.

No other worlds remained, only this new one.

Urbane women, cinch-waisted, hobble-skirted, a crop shucked clean of oddity in a single generation. Scientific housekeepers, hygienic mothers who ruled children and help alike with firm voice, ramrod posture and a sense of one's place. At picnics, they perspired prettily into starched binders, their shirtwaists wilting and spirits flagging in unison.

But Mary was an ox, lumbering, loud-mouthed Mary, a rowdy girl grown into this stout, big-breasted woman. Farm stamped all over her, the last one to bob her hair and—imagine!—a supporter of Al Smith. Ungainly limbs, reckless gait, the alarming undulation of her uncorseted flesh.

She was the kinder's own sweet goose and Dodie's only chum in the clutch of new brides. Bouncing babies on the spanse of her lap, cracking walnuts with her teeth, lisle stockings 'round her ankles like white doughnuts—Mary, a spring of riotous laughter and easy tears.

They couldn't leave her alone,
Aw for Pete's sake, Mary!
her coarseness a poultice
Your bosom's in the gravy!
that drew their festering anxieties.

My Sexual Revolution

At the corner of Prytania and Napoleon, Patsy Kelly hesitates, exquisitely close to losing her composure, which will surely cause her to flush, a hint of defiance under the flawless matte beige of her foundation. Holier than any beads, the hollow bubbles she fingers in the plastic compact crackle with the fervor of temptation and rapture.

I have watched her preening, preparing to be pawed: the Clairol Swedish Crystal bouffant, crisp elastic teething on her thigh, the demi-bra that barely contains her breasts. And now she leans into me to steel her resolve, to march with her down the aisle of the uptown K&B to submit her empty, tell-tale case to a pharmacist in a Catholic city where we are expected to have some shame.

But we're careless, horny, and I love the New Yorker in her slumming in this swamp-sweet place, all keen edges and tease. Why, I'd jump off the Huey P. Long Bridge if she asked me to; eat oysters out of season. I hang onto every word she French-inhales, describing how excited boys get, all bulge and beery sweat, how easy to take them over the edge. Glad that she's the one fucking them, sparing me.

The waitress behind the soda fountain, her pocket hanky blowzy as a hot-house orchid, sizes us up (Yankee girls) as we swagger through a dank infusion of tea olive and steamed tamales. Patsy slaps her scrip on the counter—saucy! Tells the druggist to add a pint of Crown Royal and to charge it.

Subjunctive Monologue

So here's the thing. Maybe if it were after dark, not a plain Sunday afternoon full of ridiculous sunshine and the hockey game for background noise and the baby lying in her own sweat, fever matted in the roots of her hair. Or what if she'd waited till later, till a couple more beers dragged him too deep into the sofa to bother getting up and putting her in her place. Maybe forty-four plays of "Your Cheatin' Heart" was one too many and she could already see herself as Patsy Cline walking toward another beefy hand that could cradle as easily as break her jaw. Surely her skull buzzed with our Mother's drone about making your bed and wondered if this was how she'd have to sleep in it, this aching surprise that might be a rake tearing her cheek, a broomstick gouging her eye. How she clutched the baby, not dropping her even as she herself dropped and recognized the hammer for a fist, the thunder in her head like a pistol's report. The impression he made so quickly on her, knuckle prints by her temple, a tooth crumbling in the cave of her mouth, the stripes of maroon and ash lashed into her scalp. A face she turns to brothers bored with such funk and an armload of child drooling terror. What of their chances to survive assault, denial? And if you read only for grammar.

[first published in The Massachusetts Review]

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