Spree

My father paces the upstairs hall a large confined animal neither wild nor yet domesticated. About him hangs the smell of righteous wrath. My mother is meekly seated at the escritoire. Rosy from my bath age eight-nine-ten by now I understand his right to roar, hers to defy the bill from Wanamaker’s in his hand the bill from Strawbridge’s held high the bill from Bonwit Teller and the all plum-colored Blum Store. His anger smells like dinner parties like trays of frothy daiquiris. Against the pre-World-War-Two prime standing ribs his carving knife flashes a little drunkenly. He charms all the other Bonwit-bedecked wives but something overripe malingers. I wear his wide cigar bands on my fingers. Oh God it is so noisy! Under my bed a secret stair a gold and purple escalator takes me nightly down under the sea. Such dancings, such carryings on with the prince of this-or-that with the duke of ne’er-do-well I the plain one, a size too large to tell grow tremulous at stickpin and cravat I in toe shoes and tutu suddenly see shopping is an art form a kind of costume ball. Papá, would we so humbly come to the scene in the upstairs hall on the first of every month, except you chose the mice for footmen, clapped to call up the coach and four? You sent to Paris for the ermine muff that says I’m rich. To think twelve poor little things had their heads chopped off to keep my hands unseemly warm! When you went fishing down the well for fox furs, hats with peacock plumes velvet evening capes, what else befell? You paid the bills, Papá. You cast the spell.