My Grandmother Plays Emily in Our Town

I I am asking something gone return: at least one night, her face a girl’s, just twenty, and to be married in a month, holding the dress’s hem to her lips as places are called. And I, come along too late to know her trembling, parting the curtain— let me hear her now perched on the ladder, recite “But Mama, . . . am I pretty enough . . . ?” II When Emily marries, ladies in hats drown out the proper vows —it’s what the play requires; the everyday over the sacred. Even the set is made of items found in the actors’ garages so we always see back to the bones. Here my grandmother stands at the altar with her fictional George and gossip swells in the pews which are rows of folding chairs. III Among the murmuring departed, in the cemetery, my grandmother takes her place at the empty plot. She’s the newcomer who can’t believe she’s dead if the living roam just on the crest of this hill. My grandmother in white poplin dress and hair ribbon lifts her arms in despair— Emily, untouched by the rain. IV Tomorrow her face will glow on the cover of The Shreveport Times— a gorgeous girl demanding her life. “But oh!” she cries in Emily’s voice, “I can go back there and live all those days over again . . .” V So Emily steps back into childhood though the wiser dead have told her don’t— into her mother’s kitchen, her twelfth birthday, a moment she thought she was happy. She watches now that life: mother speaking gruffly, father late to work. Dead Emily kisses the cheek of the classmate playing her mother— understanding, in that kitchen, they’d all been blind: they never knew those people they said they loved. VI My grandmother maintains her grace to the end. She is the queen of the theater; all of Shreveport melts for her smile. She holds her palms out to feel the heavy drops as the curtains close, though she knows this rain is only the sound of rain.