Robin Becker

I’ve expanded like the swollen door in summer to fit my own dimension. Your loneliness is a letter I read and put away, a daily reminder in the cry of the magpie that I am still capable of inflicting pain at this distance. Like a painting, our talk is dense with description, half-truths, landscapes, phrases layered with a patina over time. When she came into my life I didn’t hesitate. Or is that only how it seems now, looking back? Or is that only how you accuse me, looking back? Long ago, this desert was an inland sea. In the mountains you can still find shells. It’s these strange divagations I’ve come to love: midday sun on pink escarpments; dusk on gray sandstone; toe-and-finger holes along the three hundred and fifty-seven foot climb to Acoma Pueblo, where the spirit of the dead hovers about its earthly home four days, before the prayer sticks drive it away. Today all good Jews collect their crimes like old clothes to be washed and given to the poor. I remember how my father held his father around the shoulders as they walked to the old synagogue in Philadelphia. "We're almost there, Pop," he said. "A few more blocks." I want to tell you that we, too, are almost there, for someone has mapped this autumn field with meaning, and any day October brooding in me, will open to reveal our names—inscribed or absent — among the dry thistles and spent weeds.

Seeing my friend’s son in his broad-brimmed hat and suspenders, I think of the Quakers who lectured us on nonviolent social action every week when I was a child. In the classrooms we listened to those who would not take up arms, who objected, who had accepted alternative service in distant work camps and showed slides of hospitals they helped to build. On Wednesdays, in Meeting for Worship, when someone rose to speak, all the energy in the room flew inside her mouth, empowering her to tell what she had seen on her brief encounter with the divine: sometimes, a parable, a riddle, a kindness. The fall that we were seventeen, we scuffed our loafers on the gravelly path from the Meetinghouse, while maple and elm leaves sailed around our shoulders like tiny envelopes, our futures sealed inside. Despite the war in Vietnam, I felt safer than I ever would again. Perhaps those aged, protective trees had cast a spell on us, or maybe the nonviolent Quaker God had set up a kingdom right there— suburban Philadelphia. Looking back, I see how good deeds and thoughts climbed with us to the attic room for Latin, descended to the gym for sports, where we hung from the praiseworthy scaffolds of righteous behavior. We prepared to leave for college, armed with the language of the American Friends and the memories of Thanksgiving dinners we’d cooked for the unfortunates: borrowing our parents’ cars to drive downtown to the drop-off point, racing back to play our last field hockey match. Grim center forwards shook hands before the whistle, the half-backs’ knee-pads strapped on tight; one varsity team vanquished another.

—for Tamar Craig I knew the hard winter of sapphires set within gold claws, amber and pipestone strung on gut, fringed pouches stuffed with hash. Separate, separate, I urged her that summer of Woodstock, when I lied to get the car and draped my love beads around the neck of someone else’s sister. In a hayloft in Ohio my friend lifted three bales to show me a litter of week-old kittens, each pair of eyes infected with a slimy mucus. Their pupils swam in opaque opal membranes and they would have gone blind if she had not pulled an eyedropper of antibiotics from her jacket, doing what the mother cat could not do, what the owners would not trouble themselves to do, doing what a sister or friend might do if she took the time to attend the wayward, opalescent unhappiness in this world.

for Abbe, Sally, and Joseph I Amidah Hear my personal prayer,the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart

We are walking our very public attraction through eighteenth-century Philadelphia. I am simultaneously butch girlfriend and suburban child on a school trip, Independence Hall, 1775, home to the Second Continental Congress. Although she is wearing her leather jacket, although we have made love for the first time in a hotel room on Rittenhouse Square, I am preparing my teenage escape from Philadelphia, from Elfreth’s Alley, the oldest continuously occupied residential street in the nation, from Carpenters’ Hall, from Congress Hall, from Graff House where the young Thomas Jefferson lived, summer of 1776. In my starched shirt and waistcoat, in my leggings and buckled shoes, in postmodern drag, as a young eighteenth-century statesman, I am seventeen and tired of fighting for freedom and the rights of men. I am already dreaming of Boston— city of women, demonstrations, and revolution on a grand and personal scale. Then the maître d’ is pulling out our chairs for brunch, we have the surprised look of people who have been kissing and now find themselves dressed and dining in a Locust Street townhouse turned café, who do not know one another very well, who continue with optimism to pursue relationship.Eternity may simply be our mortal default mechanism set on hope despite all evidence. In this mood, I roll up my shirtsleeves and she touches my elbow. I refuse the seedy view from the hotel window. I picture instead their silver inkstands, the hoopskirt factory on Arch Street, the Wireworks, their eighteenth-century herb gardens, their nineteenth-century row houses restored with period door knockers. Step outside. We have been deeded the largest landscaped space within a city anywhere in the world. In Fairmount Park, on horseback, among the ancient ginkgoes, oaks, persimmons, and magnolias, we are seventeen and imperishable, cutting classes May of our senior year. And I am happy as the young Tom Jefferson, unbuttoning my collar, imagining his power, considering my healthy body, how I might use it in the service of the country of my pleasure.

The snake, alphabet of one glide, swims with its keepsake head, periscoping, and then we lose it in the pond grass, lashed among the bottom-feeders. Pocketing goggles, my gaze tends pineward, to the driest sky in twenty years (also passing, rain predicted), a month of sun days. In Fairbanks, all-night baseball and a picnic breakfast Alaskan-style. Someone’s driving south, to Anchorage, in that luscious uplift that here will linger long enough for us to get a sunburn, to get down, to get stung, to get the hang of happiness and get going. Get the picture? I do, but just for the moment, which is why I want it monumental, equestrian, astride, however I can get it. What’s passing is June, another; peony’s scent; postcards from the lower forty-eight. The frog I trod sprang back intact, all its receptors set on July.