Dangerous Life

I quit med school when I found out the stiff they gave me had book 9 of Paradise Lost and the lyrics to “Louie Louie” tattooed on her thighs. That morning as the wind was mowing little ladies on a street below, I touched a Bunsen burner to the Girl Scout sash whose badges were the measure of my worth: Careers . . . Cookery, Seamstress . . . and Baby Maker. . . all gone up in smoke. But I kept the merit badge marked Dangerous Life, for which, if you remember, the girls were taken to the woods and taught the mechanics of fire, around which they had us dance with pointed sticks lashed into crucifixes that we’d wrapped with yarn and wore on lanyards round our necks, calling them our “Eyes of God.” Now my mother calls the pay phone outside my walk-up, raving about what people think of a woman—thirty, unsettled, living on food stamps, coin-op Laundromats & public clinics. Some nights I take my lanyards from their shoebox, practice baying those old camp songs to the moon. And remember how they told us that a smart girl could find her way out of anywhere, alive.