I hover in the corner, not even a shadow yet, not even among the born. What is it like to have a body, to float as a stick in the river of time? I wonder as I hover over the boy for a minute, listening to the muscles of his heart open, then close, open—always that slight pause before the next beat. It’s the place where I live, that small silence.
My brother looks up as the door rattles open, then returns his gaze to the small metal car he moves along the sofa. His lips vibrate as he putters the car along. My father sticks his head in, followed by his long legs, and the door slaps shut behind him. He and my mother live in the barracks, though the war is over. Okinawa nearly finished him off, but here he is: scarred, jaunty, beanpole thin. My mother smiles at him, sweeps a hand through her shoulder-length hair, and puts down her magazine.
This man, this woman—they’re the ones I will belong to. Her eyes are green, her nose tilts up a little; the fingers on her hands are long and slender. His smell is coffee, soap, cigarettes and something like oak, something indefinable and unique. I recognize these people as mine, although they don’t yet know me. You could say they’re like all the others in this place: husbands chasing advanced degrees and wives chasing toddlers. But they’re not like all the others; they’re mine. Every family in the place includes a graduate student. Every family…family…I repeat the word. It sounds like a breeze moving through long grass.
Six times a day the thin walls shudder as something huge roars past. Like history, it seems to swallow them for a moment, but then it brushes past. This time my brother bolts up in his narrow bed, screaming, “There’s a train coming through my window!” When he screams in the night it’s because the train is loud and close. But when my father screams he’s back in the Pacific; hardly out of his teens, he’s leading men into danger. The cave, the ambush…My mother holds him, shh, shh, shh…Sometimes he rolls over, his eyes open, then drooping, then closed. Other times he gets up, splashes water on his face, sits by the window, smoking.
I feel her restlessness, wonder if I might pass through her discontent while she looks the other way. Could it be my doorway? After I’m born, the thoughts that move through other people’s bodies will drift away from me. But I’m ready. I want to lie on my back and kick my feet. I want to feel the weight of a single coin in my hand. My father stubs out his cigarette, pushes his books aside. He would like a whiskey. The dregs of cold coffee are all he has. I’d like to push a finger through the grounds, feel their grittiness, breathe in that pungent, half-burnt smell. Instead, I listen to his thoughts. There is this odd fact he keeps suddenly remembering: he has survived. And this other miracle, the slender woman whose photograph, faded and creased, traveled with him through the long nightmare. Small black and white square, a woman laughing, compass pointing toward a shred of hope. She’s here with him now, across the room, making neat squares in a pan of fudge. He leans his head back and laughs. She looks at him. He takes her into his arms. I swim into the current that swells between them. I lean toward a sea that can hold me. Bio: The author of the poetry collection Barbarians in the Kitchen, Ginny Lowe Connors has edited three poetry anthologies, including Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge, Essential Love, and To Love One Another. The recipient of numerous poetry awards, she works as an English teacher in West Hartford, Connecticut.
I watch my people go through their evening routine. Spaghetti sauce in the big iron pan, beginning to spatter. Darkness pressing in at the window. The boy in his flannel pajamas that are too short in the leg.
My mother wonders where is the train that will get her out of this maze of shoebox housing. She writes a letter to her sister: “There’s no escape.” Then she crumples up the paper and tosses it out. She shakes her watch and holds it up to her ear. It has stopped ticking. The boxcars keep rattling past the dark window, speed and thunder, whistle and cinder, while she is stalled here. There’s hardly even a Chevy in this whole small nation of tin roofs and toddlers. The washer’s half a mile away. It eats her small horde of coins.