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Authors: Hilma Wolitzer
Tags: Fiction
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have?” I had sent similar notes in the past to young writers I’d wanted to encourage and cultivate, and even started long correspondences with a few of them.
My mother seemed to have had the same sort of vigorous exchange with someone named Thomas Roman, the poetry editor at a quarterly review in Massachusetts called
Leaves
that was now defunct. “Helen,” he wrote in one letter dated in March 1972, “it’s been a crappy winter, but I am considerably brightened by your latest offerings, which restore the possibility of greenness to me. I’m taking ‘Mountain Day.’ How is your back, love? Yours always, Tom.”
The ease between them was so palpable, I felt like a voyeur. I touched my own lower back, as if I were testing it for vicarious pain. I wondered if my father had ever read that letter or any of several others from Tom Roman in her folder, and what he might have made of them. Well, I’d never be able to ask him now. He hadn’t ever specifically spoken about my mother’s work to me, although he did say, in a letter I received at college, that she was “still scribbling away.”
I was reading a long poem of hers, either a first or final draft, because it was unmarked by her red pencil, when I found that my hand had crept inside my robe to touch my left breast, the breast Ev had bent to so passionately the night before. I continued reading while I lifted my arm and began the standard breast examination, moving my fingers in concentric circles, from the nipple outward. I did this once a month, usually in the shower, with wet lather on my fingertips to make the process smoother. That morning, two things happened at the same moment. I read a line in the poem that arrested me, and I felt a thickening under my fingers. The line was the final one: “Then the goose ate that feathery / thing and flew away.” “Oh,” I said, not certain of what I was responding to.
I got up from the table and went to the mirror in the dining room, where I opened my robe and peered at my breasts. They’ve held up fairly well, that midlife reward for the agony of underdevelopment in adolescence. I raised my left arm again, and retraced the area where I’d felt something before, but I couldn’t detect it now. False alarm. “Alice,” my father would chide, “you’ve let your imagination run away with you again.” Whenever he’d said that, after a bad dream had seemed real to me, or my worry over something trivial grew out of bounds, I would picture myself eloping with some fabulous, multicolored creature. This seemed like a similar escalation of fear.
Closing my robe, I went back to the kitchen and my mother’s poem. I didn’t think she’d ever published it. In fact, it seemed so unpolished, she might not have even revised it. Unless she’d kept a later draft somewhere else. I poked deeply into the back pockets of the folder, searching for another version, but all I came up with was a small square envelope addressed to my mother from
The New Yorker.
I was immediately struck by the date on the postmark: November 18, 1963—my own birthday, my tenth birthday.
Folded inside was a printed rejection slip for something she must have submitted to the magazine. She’d always subscribed to
The New Yorker,
but I hadn’t known she’d ever tried publishing there. It seemed so uncharacteristically ambitious. Scrawled at the bottom of the slip, in pencil, was the single line: “Try us again!” and the initials “C. W.” Had she? There were no signs of it, no further correspondence from anyone at the magazine. The paper looked fragile, especially at the crease, as if it had been opened and refolded innumerable times. It was really just another turndown, with the bonus of the handwritten postscript, but I had the sense of having uncovered a key piece of my mother’s history.
Except for that final, cryptic line of the unmarked poem, it was fairly straightforward narrative verse about sitting near the lake in Central Park,
My mother seemed to have had the same sort of vigorous exchange with someone named Thomas Roman, the poetry editor at a quarterly review in Massachusetts called
Leaves
that was now defunct. “Helen,” he wrote in one letter dated in March 1972, “it’s been a crappy winter, but I am considerably brightened by your latest offerings, which restore the possibility of greenness to me. I’m taking ‘Mountain Day.’ How is your back, love? Yours always, Tom.”
The ease between them was so palpable, I felt like a voyeur. I touched my own lower back, as if I were testing it for vicarious pain. I wondered if my father had ever read that letter or any of several others from Tom Roman in her folder, and what he might have made of them. Well, I’d never be able to ask him now. He hadn’t ever specifically spoken about my mother’s work to me, although he did say, in a letter I received at college, that she was “still scribbling away.”
I was reading a long poem of hers, either a first or final draft, because it was unmarked by her red pencil, when I found that my hand had crept inside my robe to touch my left breast, the breast Ev had bent to so passionately the night before. I continued reading while I lifted my arm and began the standard breast examination, moving my fingers in concentric circles, from the nipple outward. I did this once a month, usually in the shower, with wet lather on my fingertips to make the process smoother. That morning, two things happened at the same moment. I read a line in the poem that arrested me, and I felt a thickening under my fingers. The line was the final one: “Then the goose ate that feathery / thing and flew away.” “Oh,” I said, not certain of what I was responding to.
I got up from the table and went to the mirror in the dining room, where I opened my robe and peered at my breasts. They’ve held up fairly well, that midlife reward for the agony of underdevelopment in adolescence. I raised my left arm again, and retraced the area where I’d felt something before, but I couldn’t detect it now. False alarm. “Alice,” my father would chide, “you’ve let your imagination run away with you again.” Whenever he’d said that, after a bad dream had seemed real to me, or my worry over something trivial grew out of bounds, I would picture myself eloping with some fabulous, multicolored creature. This seemed like a similar escalation of fear.
Closing my robe, I went back to the kitchen and my mother’s poem. I didn’t think she’d ever published it. In fact, it seemed so unpolished, she might not have even revised it. Unless she’d kept a later draft somewhere else. I poked deeply into the back pockets of the folder, searching for another version, but all I came up with was a small square envelope addressed to my mother from
The New Yorker.
I was immediately struck by the date on the postmark: November 18, 1963—my own birthday, my tenth birthday.
Folded inside was a printed rejection slip for something she must have submitted to the magazine. She’d always subscribed to
The New Yorker,
but I hadn’t known she’d ever tried publishing there. It seemed so uncharacteristically ambitious. Scrawled at the bottom of the slip, in pencil, was the single line: “Try us again!” and the initials “C. W.” Had she? There were no signs of it, no further correspondence from anyone at the magazine. The paper looked fragile, especially at the crease, as if it had been opened and refolded innumerable times. It was really just another turndown, with the bonus of the handwritten postscript, but I had the sense of having uncovered a key piece of my mother’s history.
Except for that final, cryptic line of the unmarked poem, it was fairly straightforward narrative verse about sitting near the lake in Central Park,
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