Ruth Stone

The fat girl next door would give us a nickel to walk to the old man's store and get her an ice-cream cone, vanilla, of course, the only flavor then. On Powotan Avenue, Aunt Harriet and I would take turns licking it all the way back. It was hot that summer and we longed to go to Virginia Beach and put our toes in the tide. It rained every day and the James River swelled up to our doorsteps. Aunt Harriet and I wore tight rubber bathing caps and long saggy bathing suits. How skinny we were. She was nine and I was six. The lightning flashed and we hid in the closet; the thunder crashed. We had straight, bobbed hair and bangs. Once a dirigible moved above the tops of the trees, with little ladders dangling down, and we waved.

If you had a lot of money (by some coincidence you’re at the Nassau Inn in Princeton getting a whiff of class) and you just noticed two days ago that your face has fallen, but you don’t believe it, so every time you look in the glass it’s still hanging there where it wasn’t. Would you take the money you needed for a new roof on your old house (the house you’re paying for over and over in property taxes) because it’s been leaking for years and you’re tired of emptying buckets and spraying for mold, would you take that money and get your face lifted? Face-lift. They cut a slit under your ears and pull up the slack and they tack it with plastic. Then they pull up the outer skin and trim it because it’s too long and fasten that. (Your skin pulls loose from the fat like chicken skin.) Because once you were almost as beautiful as Jane Wyman ... your friends all said that. Of course at the time she was married to Ronnie and you were involved with the ASU— a McCarthy suspect. Forget about your neck. They can’t do that yet. A face-lift lasts five years. So you could go on being a member of new-speak and re-entry— with the unsung benefits of radiation and by then your roof would have rotted anyway. Or been recycled by some corporate kid. But think how you’d rather be stripped and streaked and while you’re about it get some implants of baby teeth buds that they’ve taken from dead babies’ gums and frozen for this sort of thing. You could still die young.

Cylinder sacks of water filling the oceans, endless bullets of water, skins full of water rolling and tumbling as we came together. As though light broke us apart. As though light came with the rubble of words, though we die among the husks of remembering. It is as we knew it would be in the echoes of endless terminals, in the slow scaled guises of ourselves when we came together in the envelopes of ourselves, the bare shadow, the breath of words invisible; as slight errors repeating themselves; as degradation passes like madness through a crowd. It was not ordained. It was one drop of salt water against another.

In ’29 before the dust storms sandblasted Indianapolis, we believed in the milk company. Milk came in glass bottles. We spread dye-colored butter, now connected to cancer. We worked seven to seven with no overtime pay; pledged allegiance every day, pitied the starving Armenians. One morning in the midst of plenty, there were folks out of context, who were living on nothing. Some slept in shacks on the banks of the river. This phenomenon investors said would pass away. My father worked for the daily paper. He was a union printer; lead slugs and blue smoke. He worked with hot lead at a two-ton machine, in a low-slung seat; a green-billed cap pulled low on his forehead. He gave my mother a dollar a day. You could say we were rich. This was the Jazz Age. All over the country the dispossessed wandered with their hungry children, harassed by the law. When the market broke, bad losers jumped out of windows. It was time to lay an elegant table, as it is now; corporate paradise; the apple before the rot caved in. It was the same worm eating the same fruit. In fact, the same Eden.

Enclosure, steam-heated; a trial casket. You are here; your name on a postal box; entrance into another place like vapor. No one knows you. No one speaks to you. All of their cocks stare down their pant legs at the ground. Their cunts are blind. They barely let you through the check-out line. Have a nice day. Plastic or paper? Are you origami? A paper folded swan, like the ones you made when you were ten? When you saw the constellations, lying on your back in the wet grass, the soapy pear blossoms drifting and wasting, and those stars, the burned out ones whose light was still coming in waves; your body was too slight. How could it hold such mass? Still on your lips the taste of something. All night you waited for morning, all morning for afternoon, all afternoon for night; and still the longing sings. Oh, paper bird with folded wings.

Once you saw a drove of young pigs crossing the highway. One of them pulling his body by the front feet, the hind legs dragging flat. Without thinking, you called the Humane Society. They came with a net and went for him. They were matter of fact, uniformed; there were two of them, their truck ominous, with a cage. He was hiding in the weeds. It was then you saw his eyes. He understood. He was trembling. After they took him, you began to suffer regret. Years later, you remember his misfit body scrambling to reach the others. Even at this moment, your heart is going too fast; your hands sweat.