“Take what you want, we’ll throw the rest away.
The mice are building nests in the box, we don’t
want that old stuff anymore.” My father, 88,
kicks the box over to me with his good leg.
My mother sits on her pee-damp paper pad,
trying to take part. The box is jammed to the top
with photos and albums, dust and chewed-up rug wool.
I dump and sort. Their parents’ wedding pictures
scorched on cardboard where dimly and patiently
they held their breaths and posed for the sulphurous
flash-
the men perched rigid in wicker studio chairs,
the girls standing beside in long, dark,
serviceable, handsewn gowns, their faces
stiff and startled as a dahlia presented
in a frill of ruching or of tatted lace,
one hand on the husband’s shoulder, where it stayed.
Then with their broods of children, young, half-grown,
grown, their faces turning stern, parental,
bodies swelling, then melting down. “Surely
you want this batch.” My parents shake their heads.
They are nobody’s children now, or mine perhaps.
Their brothers and sisters, the fat, self-righteous face
of Grace, the missionary, who told me, eight
years old, “You’re a bad, bad girl to say ‘my goodness.’
Do you know why?” “No.” “Because Goodness is GOD!”
May, the educated one, capped, gowned,
adopted by a rich and childless aunt
and given “advantages.” Brought back for dinner
once with her own siblings, she laughed and cried out,
pointing at Dad, “Look at that boy’s big nose!”-
a story my father told with bitterness
till he was in his sixties. Cora, whose faith-healer
couldn’t cure the cancer she hid from her doctor.
Brownie, whose beautiful dark eyes were closed
to near-blindness by their drooping lids when she fell
downstairs and struck her head as a young bride.
Al, lover of poop-pillows, plastic turds
and pop-up snakes, whose youthful high-jinks
twisted to drunkenness and kleptomania.
The others, too, outlived. “I’ll take all these.”
Their web of love and hate has been broomed away.
“Who’s this young woman?” My mother holds the picture
up to her eyes and squints her best. Dad takes it.
“Oh, I know, Anna Meinberg, Mother’s chum.
When I was courting I always had to bring
a man for Anna or Mother wouldn’t go.’
He laughs toward Mother, but she doesn’t smile.
“Throw it away.” They are not lovers now.
I sort in the dimming light. My mother dozes.
“Who are all these children, Dad?” “Must be
your mother’s folks, some Richsmeier or Peters kids.”
They sit patiently, brushed, told to hold still,
their legs in black stockings and feet in high-top shoes
stuck out in front of them, the button-eyed
babies in crocheted caps with ribbon pom-poms
on either ear, sacked in tucked gowns or naked
like rubber dolls, their faces plump possibility.
For all three of us, they go in a discard pile.
And now a precious stack, my parents themselves:
The boy with his plowing team, the young father
with pompadour, the deep family lines
already scored between brows. (“When I grow up
I’m going to marry Daddy!” Then Mother’s jealous
“Well you can’t. I married him.” “Why can’t
I marry him too?” “Because you can’t, that’s why!”)
Posed proudly with his bantams, with his turkeys,
goats (he never lost his farmer’s heart).
Small eyes that never saw another’s pain
or point of view (“Your mother’s always complaining.
I’ve fed and clothed her all her life. What more
does she want?”) Full lips that laid down the law for us.
Big feeder before his heart attack, his Santa
belly swells in the gas station uniform.
“You’ll have to feed him good,” his mother told
his bride. “If dinner’s late just hurry and set
the table. He’ll think the food is almost ready.”
Pride in the stances. “My word’s my bond. I’ve never
cheated man nor woman.” Pride of place:
“All that education will make you Big-Headed.”
“All that reading will make you lose your mind.”
My mother, the youngest, the beauty of her clan,
minx who wooed big brother Al away
from Cora, his twin, and held him clutched lifelong
in mischief and complicity. Expressive
face I studied all my childhood to learn
if I was wrong or right, kept or cast out.
Best cook in town, best seamstress—not enough.
“I’d have been a great singer if I hadn’t married.’
“I could have been a nurse if I hadn’t had you.”
In a ruffled dustcap, her arms and lap piled full
of eleven puppies, then standing with a braid
of thick hair down to her knees, then bobbed, marcelled,
then permed—the lovely features never show
her “nerves,” the long years of dissatisfaction,
the walks she took me on when I reached adolescence
and poured my hard ear full of my father’s failings.
“Don’t tell me about it, it’s not my fault,
I didn’t marry him!” “Mother, wake up.
I wish you could see this picture of your long hair.”
“I could sit on my hair.” The old boast comes by rote.
“You want to keep this batch a little longer, don’t you?”
“No.” Those faces have turned fictional.
And now their only child, long-legged, skinny
from trying to please and hardly ever pleasing.
Long curls my mother wound on rags for a while,
then highschool ugliness, then a fragile gauze
of beauty young womanhood laid on the lens, then lifted,
with my young husband slowly changing beside me,
my father’s face stamped clearer and clearer on mine,
sterile publicity pictures, graying hair.
I need not ask the two frail watchers my question.
They are no longer parents. Their child is old.
The last’s my ace—my father’s great adventure.
Suddenly he bought a housetrailer and pulled
his startled family from our lowa village,
out of the cornfields and into the world’s wonders,
all the way to Washington, then down
the California coast, then back to home,
packing a trunk so full of memories
they’ve lasted him for nearly fifty years.
The earth erupted for us all in moonscapes
of Black Hills, mountaintips hung from the sky
(the old Pontiac boiling on every pass),
Salt Lake held you up without an inner tube,
rodeos bucked in Wyoming, bears rocked the trailer
at night in National Parks, great waterfalls roared,
Mother and I made snowballs in July
on Crater Lake and posed before studios
in Hollywood, we all stood on Boulder Dam,
our fan belt broke in the desert and Dad hitchhiked
while I fainted from the heat. On the desert, too,
in the one hundred twenty degree trailer, Mother
boiled potatoes and made gravy for dinner.
“If I don’t get my spuds every noon I’ll drive
us right back home!” We knew he meant what he said.
For years we all re-lived the trip, Dad using
the album to remind himself of stories,
used it to entertain any company-
old friends, then new ones elsewhere—then, years later,
the hired help of their old age. Still later
I’d use it to get him going, to cheer him up,
to distract him from worries, boredom, aches and pains.
I turn on the light. “Dad, here’s our trip! Remember ….”
He interrupts, staring at the darkened window,
“Everything’s rusting away out in the garage.
It’s been so long since I could get outside …”
My mother stirs. “When’s the girl going to fix
my banana and coffee? I want to go back to bed.”
I close the box. Somewhere a telephone
has made the appointment—a flower-scented pose
where they wait with patience for one witnessing heart
to snap its picture of their final faces.
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