Prelude
He looked boyish. He held a credit card and paid for our dinner. He hoped he hadn’t talked too much. You did, I told him. Why should I pretend otherwise?
What Happened
There’s a splintered memory I keep hearing, wheeled inside a baby carriage by my mother along Southern Boulevard. Another hot summer’s day in the Bronx. She was with girlfriends who lived in the same apartment building on the ground floor. The baby carriage was black in color with a foldable top. A band of light flickered across my eyes and woke me. I waited for my mother to roll the baby carriage out of the sun. I cried, but nothing happened. I heard laughter. The sun was hot. I cried louder. Finally, someone pushed the carriage into the shade.
I reached school age, and mistrusted whatever I was supposed to learn there. My kindergarten teacher Mrs. Burke had taught eons of school children, including my sisters. A bitter, mean woman who was known to punish insubordinate children by locking them in the clothing closet, she always wore a smock and tucked her hair into a net that drooped over her forehead like a wire fence. The milk she served during morning break always tasted sour. I found sanctuary in the vacant lot adjoining our apartment building where I strained mica rocks into rusted cans and hid the results inside a wall that divided our block from the street below. I peed in the lot coming home from school, spent afternoons forging a path down a steep hill, holding to the side of trees and singing my songs.
The Triggering Event
Judy and I went everywhere together. I tucked her inside my own baby carriage and made sure not to keep her in the sun. She was not fancy, her hair pressed in plastic brown waves and her eyes open. She had one outfit, a plaid skirt. I examined her pink flesh and the V of her crotch. But there was something about the way she fit into my arms and how she smelled. But she died in my hands, the sawdust from her head trickling through my fingers. Her head never fit onto her body again. My mother gave me a doll wrapped in a cellophane box. She was everything Judy was not, could talk and had two outfits. I isolated the new doll on the top shelf of my closet and never opened the box.
The Short Goodbye
I thanked him. He said he’d contact me when he got back from Minnesota where he was developing a new kind of milk. He said he enjoyed himself. I nodded and thanked him, held the keys to my car and walked to the parking lot. What’s been simmering in the past smells done.