After the Fire Read online

  and even love

  Each other as they have never done before.

  Now they can

  Simply refuse to scratch each other’s eyes out so

  that some man

  Can have the pleasure of possessing the scarred body

  of the winner.

  Strangers

  We’re back to the mother-daughter issue again. My mother dropped out of school in seventh grade because her vision was bad. She needed glasses to see the blackboard, and there was no money in her family for glasses. She went to Minneapolis to work as a maid for a cartoonist and his invalid wife. Later she married my father and raised seven children—washing clothes, ironing, and cooking three meals a day at a time when there were no automatic clothes washers or dryers and no dishwashers or microwaves, either.

  Growing up, I was a bookworm. My mother read magazines—when she had time, that is. With all the unyielding arrogance of the young, I was contemptuous of her for not sharing my love of books. By the time I reached high school, my two older sisters had both married, one during high school and one immediately after graduation. Hoping for a different result, my mother encouraged me to take a heavy class load—six solid credits, as they were called back then, and one non-solid, music. My mother’s encouragement came in the form of a bribe. She said that if I took extra classes she would exempt me from the household chores she had required of my older sisters.

  I was six feet tall and wore thick glasses, which set me well outside the in-crowd of my high school’s “cool” social circle. I was also bookish and more than a little lazy. I didn’t think twice before accepting my mother’s offer, one which set me on an academic track in high school and led, eventually, to a scholarship and to my admission to college.

  I wouldn’t be where I am today without having had the advantage of what my mother did for me back then. When I wrote this poem, in my midtwenties, I was not yet a mother and had no real appreciation for what my mother had done for all her children through the years.

  Now I’m a mother and a grandmother, too. It’s safe to say I’m over it. Not over the need to demand equal rights and responsibilities for everyone, but over being blind to women’s very real contributions to society whether in or out of the workplace.

  By the way, if you have read my Joanna Brady books, your suspicions are hereby confirmed. Yes, you have met my mother—a version of her anyway—in Joanna Brady’s mother, Eleanor Lathrop Winfield.

  STRANGERS

  My hopes and fears are alien to her.

  When we speak, it is as though our words

  Come from two different languages

  With no hope of finding an interpreter

  To reconcile them.

  She has lived her life by the old rules—

  Spent her time cooking, cleaning, bearing children.

  My abandonment of the kitchen

  She regards as the ultimate treachery,

  A final defection.

  I see her as “just a housewife”;

  See her years as mother a waste

  Of human potential, of intellect, of being.

  Until we both can look at one another

  With minds washed clean of prejudice,

  Until we can see the difference and the value

  Of both separate lives, it will be

  Impossible for my mother and me

  To be sisters.

  Choices

  I was a smart girl at a time when being smart and female wasn’t a particularly good idea. I figured out fairly early in the game that I was smarter than my first husband, who also happens to have been the first man I ever dated. Not wanting to rock the boat, I tried not to make an issue of it. For his part, my husband did what he could to keep me in my place.

  In his defense, I have to say that my husband was living according to the script he had learned at his own mother’s knee. She told me once, when I was single-handedly supporting the family by working as a district manager in the life insurance business—that “it’s all right if a woman works to help her husband support the family, but it certainly isn’t all right if she makes more money than he does.”

  Given that kind of background, it’s hardly surprising that her son was less than enthusiastic about my getting my master’s of education degree in 1970. One way of showing his displeasure was to take the position that graduation ceremonies were stupid and were to be avoided at all costs. Deflated by his lack of enthusiasm, I skipped commencement and received my diploma by mail. When I started taking classes toward my CLU (chartered life underwriter) designation in the insurance business, my husband always managed to provoke some kind of crisis right around the time I had to be either attending classes or taking an exam. Several of his nine stints in rehab happened either before or immediately after scheduled exams.

  Is the next poem about us? It wasn’t consciously at the time I wrote it, because I was still doing “art.” In retrospect, I can say absolutely that we were the subject.

  Incidentally, years later, when the University of Arizona awarded my honorary doctorate, I was there to pick it up. The rest of my family was there as well, including my then eighty-five-year-old mother.

  CHOICES

  She wore ambition like a double-breasted suit,

  Well-tailored but a little long.

  She sought her chosen goal with firm resolve,

  Detouring at times, but never straying far.

  He was a dashing, happy youth

  Whose cheery laughter and romantic ways

  Charmed her to believe her solitary path

  Could easily be trod by two.

  But he, without her clear-eyed vision and determined air,

  Grew weary when her beacon failed to dim.

  He counted treachery among her notes and books

  And hated every study she pursued.

  She walks alone now, having paid

  A price the world does not require from any man

  Who sets ambition over hearth and home.

  Thank God she hasn’t given up the fight.

  Best Friends

  For eighteen years I deluded myself into thinking I was woman enough to keep my man.

  I didn’t find out how wrong that assumption had been until much later. Five years after my divorce, I discovered that, despite the fact I had been faithful during my marriage and celibate after it ended, I was suffering from a sexually transmitted disease.

  Given all that, one would think that the next poem is about me. Again, it wasn’t—at least not consciously so.

  To my way of thinking, I was writing “Best Friends” about a friend from college—a woman whose marriage to one of our classmates had recently collapsed into divorce due to the fact that her husband—who could well have been a clone of my own spouse—was fooling around with other women, including one of his wife’s best friends. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s possible to see that this poem was about both of us. Unfortunately, it reflects the experience of far too many other women as well.

  BEST FRIENDS

  Did you say he was the first?

  So what? Is that why you’re still hanging on,

  Pretending that he’s everything you want?

  You don’t have to pay with your whole life.

  That debt was canceled long ago,

  Interest, principal, and all.

  Your virgin loyalty has led you down

  A primrose path and kept you bound

  Beyond the call of reason.

  Stay if you want to,

  But not because he took you first.

  For him you weren’t the last.

  Don’t ask me how I know.

  Misgivings

  My younger sister came to visit, bringing the unwelcome news that she was dropping out of college to marry her boyfriend. With the unerring fallibility of our mother’s daughters, my sister’s first choice was a troubled piece of humanity who wasn’t worth the powder it would have taken to blow him up. Looking at him, I could clearly see
that she was casting her pearls before swine. Of course it was easy for me to see everything wrong with her future husband and nothing at all wrong with mine. My husband was perfectly fine, but I didn’t want my sister to mess up her own life by making some idiotic mistake.

  I believe there’s a passage in the Bible that speaks to this—something about seeing the mote in someone else’s eye while being blind to the boulder in one’s own. This was definitely the case when I wrote this poem. It gives me no pleasure forty years later to realize how right I was.

  My sister’s first husband is long gone, of course, but then so is mine.

  MISGIVINGS

  It frightens me to see her,

  Trembling on the brink of life

  And love.

  I want to reach out,

  To help, to offer her a hand

  And guide her from the precipice.

  Yet I’m frightened, too, of being rebuffed,

  Afraid that she’ll disdain the offerings

  My slim experience can bestow.

  Afraid that she will damn me

  For my meddling and ignore

  The warnings, the cautions that

  My heart cries out to give.

  But still I know that she

  Must make her own way blindly,

  Although we who have gone before

  Long to give her the newfound vision

  We have of this world.

  She must, at last, make her own way.

  And so, old fool, leave off

  Your dire mutterings of heartache and disaster

  And wish her luck and happiness

  And love.

  Portrait

  For Christmas the year after we married, my first husband gave me a Kenmore sewing machine—not the top-of-the-line zigzag model, but the loss-leader, straight-stitch, $39.95 version. I never succeeded in making it work properly, which was no doubt due to operator ineptitude. At last I closed the lid, shutting the machine inside, and relegated the wooden cabinet to the role of side table. Upon this ungainly piece of furniture sat a gold-framed photograph—an eight-by-ten portrait of me wearing my wedding dress.

  The wedding had been cobbled together in a hurry. On New Year’s Day 1967, my fiancé made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: “If you can have the wedding organized in time, we can be married over semester break.” I had been waiting more than five years to hear those words, and after he said them, you couldn’t see me for the dust. On January 29, less than a month later, we tied the knot. I was a first-year teacher and my husband was a student. That made us poor. The wedding was a bargain-basement affair. The wedding dress cost $125. Flowers for everyone came to a total of $30. All photographs, including the one on the dead sewing machine, were taken by a team of camera-wielding friends.

  For me this poem is interesting in terms of both what it says and what it leaves out. The picture was taken in a church social hall. The amateur photographer posed me in front of a basement wall. The problem is, the wall contained a padlocked door that led to a storage room. The photograph plainly captures the brass lock. Not surprisingly, it is missing from this wistful study of the image. Instead, using my poetic license as a blinder, I managed to ignore the bad omen that locked padlock really represented.

  PORTRAIT

  The lace is there, white and flowing to a train

  From the slender waist.

  The breasts are young and firm,

  Expectant under a well-fitting bodice.

  Studying the picture closely, one expects

  To see those breasts rise and fall in lightly taken breaths.

  The hands, demure, are almost invisible

  Beneath a cascade of white flowers,

  For no sacrifice would be complete

  Without flowers to lend their perfume

  To the memorable occasion.

  A slender neck, bedecked with antique pearls,

  A slight smile, a veil of cloudy lace.

  How long before that smile lies buried

  Beneath a hundred petty tyrannies?

  Entrapment

  It is disturbing to realize that “Portrait” and the next two poems, “Entrapment” and “Idle Conversation,” all predate my divorce by ten years and two children. The children, you see, were part of my over-all game plan. In fact, they were my two highest face cards.

  I had set out on a single-minded crusade to save the man I loved from himself. For years he had assured me that he would stop drinking once we had children. To my credit, I had some reason to believe him. His father had been drunk when he went away to World War II and had come back sober. To my knowledge, my father-in-law never had another drink, and he never went to meetings, either. My father-in-law told me several times not to worry, that when his son was ready to straighten up he would. It turned out my husband wasn’t made of quite the same stuff as his father.

  Totally unaware that my husband was incapable of keeping his promise, I spent the first five years of our marriage hoping beyond hope that we would get pregnant. Each month when that didn’t happen, I was plunged into a pit of despair.

  When I wrote “Entrapment,” I had never lived anywhere but Arizona and had never visited the fish ladder at the Chittenden Locks in Seattle. Years later, when I did go there, I was shocked by the battered condition of the fish I saw. The salmon simile was far more appropriate for what was happening in my life than I could possibly have imagined.

  And yes, in those days, that’s exactly what a marriage license cost in Tucson, Arizona—two bucks.

  ENTRAPMENT

  If there were some definite way of knowing,

  The report of a rifle, a shotgun blast,

  That would tell her precisely when

  The trap was sprung, it might be

  Somewhat easier to deal with the shambles

  Her life has, before her very eyes, become.

  There was no clang of iron gates

  When he slipped the yellow band

  Upon a willing finger. If only

  They had posted danger signs in that

  Dingy office where, for only two dollars,

  She had signed away her life.

  But no, she had been eager enough,

  And even had the danger signal warned her,

  She would not have listened, seen, or noticed,

  But plunged on, like a salmon rushing upstream,

  Bent on procreation and destruction.

  Idle Conversation

  For five years we lived on a hill thirty miles from town and seven miles from the nearest neighbor. After dinner, my husband would sit in his recliner and fall asleep, leaving me with an empty evening in which I could write poetry, read a book, or watch TV.

  As far as television was concerned, I watched whatever I wanted because I could change the channel whenever I liked. During those times when my husband went through treatment, his homecomings were always punctuated by ferocious fights when he was awake and wanted to select the programs. Over time I had grown accustomed to keeping my own company in the evenings, to doing things my way without having to take his likes or dislikes into consideration. I know it was stressful for him to try to stop drinking. It was equally stressful for me to try to live with him when he was sober.

  Again, dealing with hindsight, I can see that would have been an excellent time for me to have given Al-Anon a try, but I was in denial. Going to Al-Anon would have meant admitting there was a problem. It would also have meant that my parents had been right all along. The first time I brought my new boyfriend home to visit, my parents warned me he was an alcoholic. I arrogantly replied that, as teetotalers, they didn’t know what they were talking about. True, living with a drunk wasn’t easy, but it was a hell of a lot easier than admitting I had been wrong.

  So I hung in there. The fiction in this poem, like the missing padlock in “Portrait,” is the newspaper. My husband was never sober long enough to read newspapers in the evenings.

  I’m smiling as I write this because I’m aston
ished by two things—my stubbornness and my stupidity. I can’t figure out which came first or played the most important part. It’s one of those chicken-and-egg questions that will never have a definitive answer.

  IDLE CONVERSATION

  “Do you love me?” he asks.

  “Yes.” The answer is simple.

  She has given the required response

  A thousand times before, and

  It is the truth, although perhaps

  The truth is no longer so simple.

  “Yes,” she answers. “But . . .”

  The last is an afterthought she hadn’t planned

  To loose upon the air, upon his heart or on hers.

  She quails as the word falls between them. “But.”

  She hopes he will not notice,

  Has forgotten his absentminded question

  And will miss the terrifying thoughts

  Behind her half-uttered answer.

  His head comes up slowly.

  The word has registered and she knows

  She will be trapped into saying

  What she herself does not yet fully understand.

  “But I love myself better,” she adds after a pause.

  He watches her for a time, puzzled,

  Pulling his eyes from the newspaper for once

  To study her with knitted brows.

  Perhaps for a moment he senses

  The lightly veiled threat behind her words.

  But then, seeing his doll alive, unchanged,

  Still in her accustomed chair,

  He is, at least for now, reassured.

  She is making a joke,

  Showing him she has kept some semblance

  Of the wit she had when he married her.

  He smiles at her little jest

  And then returns to the real world