Homecoming
On Saturday, my mother takes me to cute shops
selling soap, scented candles, and pink aprons with slogans
that tell me to get sloshed. It’s wine o’clock! Dinner
is poured! Drink happy thoughts! This town is full of offers
for a prodigal daughter, 22 days sober. A drive-through
beer vault. Margarita Mondays. $2 shots at the Comeback Inn.
At the side of the road, a dead fawn nearly disappears
under a cloud of black flies, and the Brood X cicadas,
who make a quick visit every seventeen years – even
less often than me – pile onto lawns and tree branches,
car hoods and rooftops, creating a wall of humming
like collective tinnitus, although singly they sound like
B-movie UFOs. I am happy to see my family, but I know
I’m a disappointment. I am not as fun as they remember.
This afternoon, for example, all I want to do is watch
wild turkeys poke through dappled shade in the woods
behind my mother’s condo. Eight bottles of red wine
and fourteen bottles of booze crouch on the bottom shelf
of her pantry by the Cheez-Its, waiting for dinner to be poured.
But I’m OK. There’s something underneath the buzzing
discomfort. It’s faint, but I hear it. My invitation to emerge.
Pixie
I am six and my hair spills down my back. I love it,
but my mother insists long hair is too much work.
A bell jingles as we enter the salon. Smells of lavender
and ammonia and pizza from DiCiccio’s next door. I am draped
in a pink smock. It hangs past my knees, like a hospital gown.
In the mirror haloed by Hollywood lights, my mother
meets my eyes. For one last teetering moment,
I still trust her. Why shouldn’t I? In her world, beauty
is the only currency that matters. Silver scissors flash.
I watch myself disappear. When the stylist asks me
what’s wrong, my mother reads my mind
and corrects me. It’s not your hair, she says. You look ugly
because you’re crying and acting like a baby.
Back home, I assemble my dolls in a circle around me,
and read to them all afternoon. We explore
other worlds through words that sound like truth
and beauty. All of us are newly shorn. Our eyes
are tough as buttons. How do we look? Like nuns.
Or witches. Or prisoners of war.
We are those things, and so much more.
