student who could not guess my . . . emotional incapacity.
In God We Trust: the national motto was first used during the Civil War, when religious sentiment was running high. The Secretary of the Treasury responded to pleas of the devout that it be printed on our currency.
Indian Summer: a few days of blessed warmth after the cold weather has set in; or the time when the Indians harvested their crops; or a time before frost when they attacked European settlements storing their food for winter. The settlers retaliated with cumbersome muskets. So it goes.
I live in the city. I share the garden across the street. If you would like to know with maximum honesty about my loves or further shame, my faltering heart, it’s none of your business. My brother is switching channels, expecting the bombed mosque in Mosul will be shown in more detail. Was it them? Or us? No matter, he is outraged. We all are. My husband, who works with numbers—market up, market down—figures to the nth dollar the military contracts dealt out to the Cheerleader’s friends doctoring the books, the outrageous rip-offs. There will be a candlelight vigil. We will stand with our homemade placards: WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER. Song, piety, mulled cider in the Park. It will only be effective if we wait till the sun has set, well after dark.
Daybook, October 8, 2007
1929, the year of my conception. What were they thinking of, bringing another hungry mouth into the world? Perhaps not thinking—her red hair aflame on the pillow? I must not make a drama of that cool October night, perhaps Columbus Day, in the little house with its peaked gin gerbread roof and curlicue hasps on the door. The cottage had just been built for our middle class comfort, for a night of their fumbling and fondling under the blanket in the front bedroom that faced North Avenue. In the throes of discovery they were blessedly not thinking. Who am I to say fumbling at this very late date, casting my mother in the role of shy schoolteacher rescued from spinsterhood by the brash boy detective? I have portrayed them too often, Loretta and Bill, made them my subjects.
I throw down the book I was reading, nothing to do with an October night in Bridgeport at the start of the Great Depression. The false memory of my begetting was a digression, an off-bounds stop on the way to a disturbing story. This very day I had searched the pages of a novel I’d written as though checking an old bankbook to reckon where I spent foolishly, what interest accrued that I might go on with and ended up broke, wishing dramatically to have never been born. I was attempting to make some connection, this daybook with my rants against the war to the book thrown aside. To my discredit, that love story was of the Second World War, yet all I called up, attempting to balance the account, was to switch the scene to my parents’ bedroom, muslin curtains flapping in a welcome breeze while I read War and Peace in a creaking wicker chair. Why was I allowed to invade their space through the long Summer days while I read Tolstoy’s great work? I was fourteen years old.
Today I can no longer look at my war story, the novel with the gold medallion on the cover declaring my prize. I put on an old black coat with the buttons dangling, as though covering tattered jeans might conceal the shame of conjuring my parents’ embrace on the four-poster. Is the coat needed on this warm day?
Your topcoat, Mimi. Better safe than sorry.
I put words in my mother’s mouth while Bill strikes a match, cups his hand around yet another Lucky. In this way we keep track of each other, though they’re long gone.
If egg whites are stiffly beaten, the meringue never falls.
Just brought the fellow across the state line into the jurisdiction, don’t get a hold on your lefty complaint. This rendition? I set myself up for their corrections, begging their care, their tolerance, my indulgence of the past, I suppose. The picture of him in the Bridgeport Post, Bill, plump, choirboy handsome, the jaunty brim of his felt hat casting a shadow on his smile. Handcuffed to a mobster of note: Simple police work, extradition.
May Day 1978
I write to you on his birthday, the wrong day for my father to be born. He voted Conservative down the line. You pulled