When I open the envelope containing a notice from the Diocese of Oakland that my EX of several years has petitioned for a Declaration of Invalidity, my first reaction is to laugh and toss the paperwork into the recycling bin. But the words toll like solemn bells throughout the day. Ecclesitasticum, Ajudication, Decree of Constitution. In the grip of the language as I had been some twenty years ago when I made the mistake of converting to Catholicism, I retrieve the paperwork.
He ordered a scotch and then broke the news that his appeal for a new trial had been denied. We were in the lounge of the Thunderbird Hotel in Miami, the baby upstairs in the room, asleep. “Twelve years. The judge threw the book at me. I did my best to charm him, but it didn’t do any good.” They’d used everything they could against him, including the time during the Depression when, at the age of five, he’d rapped another kid in the mouth with his shoe-shining kit for taking over his corner.
The bathroom of the 7-Up plant in the Bronx is an artist’s canvas for pornographic drawings. A giant penis, balls with hair, vaginas, large-lettered dirty language. A perverse form of hieroglyphics. This new, raw world is a wonderment, far away from green suburbia.
She shows us a photo of a boy and tells us he is from Korea and will be our new brother. He’s standing on a wooden swing, clinging to a rope. He’s looking right into the camera, but the person taking the picture forgot to tell him to smile.
I initially judged The Home for the Friendless by its cover and expected a story like that of Annie. I pictured the Home for the Friendless as an orphanage, and I thought I would be reading about all of the children living there. However, I soon discovered that the facility was merely a temporary home for author Betty Auchard and her two younger siblings and was written about as a small memory intertwined into hundreds of memories. I never expected to learn so much about a poor girl’s faith in her family as well as rich historical details about the war and the Great Depression.
At the train station, Amber greeted me with bells on. Underneath a school-girl uniform, crotchless panties tinkled the chime of a lone brass bell. I spun her love atop my fingertip, dribbled between my knees and launched the fadeaway jumper. Returning from dinner, she asked, “How come you don’t hold my hand anymore?” I called her a bitch. The comparison of a lover to a female dog conjured a deeper truth.
My friend Danna Ephland’s pink flamingo earring hung from my rearview mirror. When my hound dog Truffle and I had visited Danna in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on a cross-country road trip, she had gone upstairs and rummaged around to find a pair of pink flamingo earrings. She and a friend had bought them on a road trip to Florida back in the eighties. Danna handed me one and kept the other. “This way we’ll always be connected,” she said.
She still has that dark line running up the back of each bare leg. Women did that during the Depression and World War II: drew lines up their legs to simulate the seams of the stockings they could no longer buy. Each time I see this cashier I wonder if she’s making a statement, an unspoken protest about the present state of our economy. Or maybe she’s an immigrant and this is simply the fashion where she comes from, I consider, forgetting for a moment that I’ve heard her voice. She speaks pure Michigander, just like me.
My mother’s pasta sauce always tasted just right to me, even though she often didn’t remember my favorite foods while I was growing up. She didn’t remember that I hated ham, that I wouldn’t eat mayonnaise. For years, my three brothers and I didn’t understand why my mother was the way she was because we didn’t know. All we knew was that she forgot our birthdays, confused our names.
I say, “He was nice,” and watch the fair-skinned, jolly man slip into his car and drive away. From the kitchen, Mom says, “That was your dad.”
