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Authors: Anne Landsman
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Under the encyclopedia, you’ve hidden Gray’s Anatomy, which you slowly withdraw, turning to page 1, 025, “the External Organs of Generation in the Female.” A face with a hairy bonnet yawns at you, all folds and holes with its own backyard fouchette. You’re settling nicely into the froenum of the clitoris when you hear your father’s voice drifting towards you, a curl of smoke from the old country. Oh God, he’s asking Mrs. van der Vyver for something. She’s even smiling a little, patiently listening through his Lithuanian accent, the way he can’t help raking words like “please” and “Can I have?” through the coals. But Mrs. van der Vyver doesn’t speak the King’s English either, even though she has a nice sing-songy voice and likes to flute “Yeeeees?” at all the people who come past her desk.
“This way please . . .” Joseph Klein follows the squeak-squeak of Mrs. van der Vyver’s thighs, and her rising voice, which flows backwards, the trickle eking out of the mountain, to the tiny high place that’s green and pure, where spinster ladies sing and do crochet work in the still afternoons. Your father is following this fold-up rose lady to the children’s section and he’s pulling up a small chair and putting on his round glasses. Joseph Klein is reading to himself, softly, carefully, and you’re not sure if it’s Treasure Island or The House at Pooh Corner but it’s words written for children. Your father, your poor father, who was almost trampled by a Cossack once, is trying to read your old books and sit in your old chair. You can’t leave and you can’t breathe and you’d like to break every chair in this place over your father’s stupid head.
You can’t see The Water Babies in your father’s hands, the pictures with babies sleeping in oyster shells, an underworld of plump children and silvery fish, angels and seaweed, girls round, pink and untouched and do-as-you-would-be-done-by. You can’t see the beads of sweat on your father’s lip, hear the sea swell of his breath, the chair too small and the words too big, the words his children spill into the house, the long English words on the wireless jabbing their fingers at him. He thinks of you and your long nose, pointing East and then South, your scorn when he talks and you don’t listen, you never listen, you’re tap dancing away from all of us, tap-tapping right down Hibernia Street, right out of town, this boy who wouldn’t eat. He wants to slam the book on your head but he doesn’t. He folds the tissue carefully over the frontispiece and up he gets, his body not quite young, not yet old. Water Baby is what your mother called you, and now he knows why. You’re not the chimney sweep, up in the dark the way he was, you’re playing on the ocean floor, with the pink girls and the pink shells. You don’t know snow falling on your village, the quiet before the pogrom, the hooves that scar and the upset house, and a long, terrible trip in a ship that almost killed your grandmother. You don’t know what it’s like to leave and never come back.
He doesn’t see you, slumped over the apex of Douglas’s pouch, until his coat brushes you and he says he’s sorry. Your head moves and of course it’s your nose that catches him, and “Harold!” he shouts as if he’s never seen you before. He’s a tall man in a suit, with a shop, and a bicycle propped on the wall outside, near the big oak tree with the long, long chain, where they used to tie up the slaves. It’s the bicycle not Charlotte, not on weekdays, never on weekdays. Charlotte is for drives on a Sunday, on the dust road to the Wilderness. You stand and it’s not like you’re going to drive anywhere together, no father and son to the shop together. He won’t let you work in the shop. You’ve never even opened the cash register. For all you know, there are mice inside, or marbles.
You slip Gray’s Anatomy back under the Encyclopedia Britannica. No
Under the encyclopedia, you’ve hidden Gray’s Anatomy, which you slowly withdraw, turning to page 1, 025, “the External Organs of Generation in the Female.” A face with a hairy bonnet yawns at you, all folds and holes with its own backyard fouchette. You’re settling nicely into the froenum of the clitoris when you hear your father’s voice drifting towards you, a curl of smoke from the old country. Oh God, he’s asking Mrs. van der Vyver for something. She’s even smiling a little, patiently listening through his Lithuanian accent, the way he can’t help raking words like “please” and “Can I have?” through the coals. But Mrs. van der Vyver doesn’t speak the King’s English either, even though she has a nice sing-songy voice and likes to flute “Yeeeees?” at all the people who come past her desk.
“This way please . . .” Joseph Klein follows the squeak-squeak of Mrs. van der Vyver’s thighs, and her rising voice, which flows backwards, the trickle eking out of the mountain, to the tiny high place that’s green and pure, where spinster ladies sing and do crochet work in the still afternoons. Your father is following this fold-up rose lady to the children’s section and he’s pulling up a small chair and putting on his round glasses. Joseph Klein is reading to himself, softly, carefully, and you’re not sure if it’s Treasure Island or The House at Pooh Corner but it’s words written for children. Your father, your poor father, who was almost trampled by a Cossack once, is trying to read your old books and sit in your old chair. You can’t leave and you can’t breathe and you’d like to break every chair in this place over your father’s stupid head.
You can’t see The Water Babies in your father’s hands, the pictures with babies sleeping in oyster shells, an underworld of plump children and silvery fish, angels and seaweed, girls round, pink and untouched and do-as-you-would-be-done-by. You can’t see the beads of sweat on your father’s lip, hear the sea swell of his breath, the chair too small and the words too big, the words his children spill into the house, the long English words on the wireless jabbing their fingers at him. He thinks of you and your long nose, pointing East and then South, your scorn when he talks and you don’t listen, you never listen, you’re tap dancing away from all of us, tap-tapping right down Hibernia Street, right out of town, this boy who wouldn’t eat. He wants to slam the book on your head but he doesn’t. He folds the tissue carefully over the frontispiece and up he gets, his body not quite young, not yet old. Water Baby is what your mother called you, and now he knows why. You’re not the chimney sweep, up in the dark the way he was, you’re playing on the ocean floor, with the pink girls and the pink shells. You don’t know snow falling on your village, the quiet before the pogrom, the hooves that scar and the upset house, and a long, terrible trip in a ship that almost killed your grandmother. You don’t know what it’s like to leave and never come back.
He doesn’t see you, slumped over the apex of Douglas’s pouch, until his coat brushes you and he says he’s sorry. Your head moves and of course it’s your nose that catches him, and “Harold!” he shouts as if he’s never seen you before. He’s a tall man in a suit, with a shop, and a bicycle propped on the wall outside, near the big oak tree with the long, long chain, where they used to tie up the slaves. It’s the bicycle not Charlotte, not on weekdays, never on weekdays. Charlotte is for drives on a Sunday, on the dust road to the Wilderness. You stand and it’s not like you’re going to drive anywhere together, no father and son to the shop together. He won’t let you work in the shop. You’ve never even opened the cash register. For all you know, there are mice inside, or marbles.
You slip Gray’s Anatomy back under the Encyclopedia Britannica. No
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