Heather McHugh

I owe you an explanation. My first memory isn’t your own of an empty box. My babyhood cabinets held a countlessness of cakes, my backyard rotted into apple glut, windfalls of money-tree, mouthfuls of fib. At puberty I liked the locks, I was the one who made them fast. The yelling in our hallways was about lost money, or lost love, but not lost life. Or so I see it now: in those days I romanticized a risk (I thought I’d die in the alcoholic automobile, die at the hands of nerveless dentistry). Small hearts were printed in the checkbook; when my parents called me dear, they meant expensive. Where were you in all that time? Out looking for your father’s body? Making for your mother’s room? I got my A’s in English, civics, sweetness and light; you got black eyes, and F’s, and nowhere fast. By 1967 when we met (if you could call it making an acquaintance, rape) I was a mal-adjusted gush, a sucker for placebos. Walking home from Central Square, I came to have the good girl’s petty dread: the woman to whose yard you dragged me might detect us, and be furious. More than anything else I wanted no one mad at me. (Propriety, or was it property, I thought to guard: myself I gave away.) And as for you, you had the shakes, were barely seventeen yourself, too raw to get it up (I said don’t be afraid, afraid of what might happen if you failed). And afterwards, in one of those moments it’s hard to tell (funny from fatal) you did a terrible civility: you told me thanks. I’ll never forget that moment all my life. It wasn’t until then, as you were sheathing it to run, I saw the knife.

ON THE BIRTH OF A SON When a child is born, the parents say they hope it's healthy and intelligent. But as for me— well, vigor and intelligence have wrecked my life. I pray this baby we are seeing walloped, wiped and winningly anointed, turns out dumb as oakum—and more sinister. That way he can crown a tranquil life by being appointed a cabinet minister.