One Secret Thing Read online

  a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:

  Hub Long. My mom did not tell him

  what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.

  It was just these strange looks on my face—

  he held me, and conversed with me,

  chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother

  said, She’s doing it now! Look!

  She’s doing it now! and the doctor said,

  What your daughter has

  is called a sense

  of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me

  back to the house where that sense would be tested

  and found to be incurable.

  At Night

  At night my mother tucked me in, with a

  jamming motion—her fingertips

  against the swag of sheets and blankets

  hanging down, where the acme angle of the

  Sealy Posturepedic met

  the zenith angle of the box spring—she shoved,

  stuffing, doubling the layers, suddenly

  tightening the bed, racking it one notch

  smaller, so the sheets pressed me like a fierce

  restraint. I was my mother’s squeeze,

  my mother was made of desire leashed.

  And my sister and I shared a room—

  my mother tucked me in like a pinch,

  with a shriek, then wedged my big sister in, with a

  softer eek, we were like the parts of a

  sexual part, squeaky and sweet,

  the room full of girls was her blossom, the house was my

  mother’s bashed, pretty ship, she

  battened us down, this was our home,

  she fastened us down in it, in her sight,

  as a part of herself, and she had welcomed that part—

  embraced it, nursed it, tucked it in, turned out the light.

  Behavior Chart

  There was one for each child, hand-ruled

  with the ivory ruler—horizontal

  the chores and sins, vertical

  the days of the week. And my brother’s and sister’s

  charts were spangled with gold stars,

  as if those five-point fetlocks of brightness were

  the moral fur they were curly with, young

  anti-Esaus of the house, and my chart

  was a mess of pottage marks, some slots filled

  in so hard you could see where the No. 2

  Mongol had broken—the rug under the grid

  fierce with lead-thorns. My box score

  KO, KO, I was Lucifer’s knockout, yet it

  makes me laugh now to remember my chart.

  Affection for my chart?! As if I am looking

  back on matter—my siblings’ stars armed

  figures of value, and my x’ed-out boxes

  a chambered hatchery of minor

  evils, spiny sea-stars, the small

  furies of a child’s cross tidal heart.

  Calvinist Parents

  Sometime during the Truman Administration,

  Sharon Olds’s parents tied her to a chair,

  and she is still writing about it.

  —review of The Unswept Room

  My father was a gentleman, and he expected

  us to be gentlemen. If we did not observe

  the niceties of etiquette he whopped

  us with his belt. He had a strong arm,

  and boy did we feel it.

  —Prescott Sheldon Bush,

  brother to a president and

  uncle to another

  They put roofs over our heads.

  Ours was made of bent tiles,

  so the edge of the roof had a broken look,

  as if a lot of crockery

  had been thrown down, onto the home—

  a dump for heaven’s cheap earthenware.

  Along the eaves, the arches were like

  entries to the Colosseum

  where a lion might appear, or an eight-foot armored

  being with the painted face

  of a simpering lady. Bees would not roost

  in those concave combs, above our rooms,

  birds not swarm. How does a young ’un

  pay for room and board? They put a

  roof over our heads, against lightning,

  and droppings—no foreign genes, no outside

  gestures, no unfamilial words;

  and under that roof, they labored as they had been

  labored over, they beat us into swords.

  Money

  Filthy lucre, dough, lettuce,

  jack, folderola, wherewithal, the ready,

  simoleons, fins, tenners, I savored

  the smell of money, sour, like ink,

  and salty-dirty, like strangers’ thumbs,

  we touch it like our mutual skin

  tattooed with webs—orb and ray—and with

  Abe, and laurel leaves, and Doric

  pillars, and urns, acanthus, mint scales,

  a key I liked the feel of it,

  like old, flannel pajamas, the fiber

  worn to a gloss, and the 2 × 6

  classic size, which does not change

  from generation unto generation as the

  hand grows to encompass it—

  and I liked the numerals, the curly

  5, and the 1 the grandmother president

  seems to be guarding,

  as if the government would protect your identity

  if they could find it, and they didn’t have to kill

  too many of your relatives

  to get at it. Poor identity,

  glad-handed so long, the triangle head all

  eye, over the pyramid torso,

  parent over child, rock over scissors,

  ANNUIT COEPTIS over NOVUS

  ORDO SECLORUM. A dime a week

  if you did your jobs and did not act morally

  horrible, which meant, for some, a dime

  a year. Now if my mom had paid me, to hit me,

  I could have had a payola account,

  and been a child whore magnate. No question

  what it meant, to see the interest mount up,

  the wad of indenture, legal tender—

  no question to me what a bill was,

  its cry sounded like the diesel train’s

  green cry, it was a ticket to ride.

  Fly on the Wall in the Puritan Home

  And then I become a fly on the wall

  of that room, where the corporal punishment

  was done. The humans who are in it mean little

  to me—not the offspring, nor the off-sprung—

  I turn my back and with maxillae and palps

  clean my arms: in each of the hundred

  eyes of both my compound eyes,

  one wallpaper rose. And if I turn back,

  and the two-legged insect is over the lap

  of the punishing one, the Venus trap,

  I watch, and thrust my narrow hairy

  rear into a flower at the rhythm the big one is

  onward-Christian-soldiering and

  marching-off-to-warring—as she’s smoting,

  I’m laying my eggs in the manure of a rose,

  pumping to the beat. And my looking is a looking

  primed, it is a looking to the power of itself,

  and I see a sea folding inward,

  200 little seas folding on themselves—

  a mess of gene pool crushing down onto

  its own shore. Then I turn back

  to washing my hands of the chaff that flees off the

  threshed onto the threshing floor.

  Ho hum, I say, I’m just a flay—

  fly light, fly bright, pieces of a species dashed

  off onto a wall, chaff of wonder,

  chaff of night.

  Maiden Name

  Cobb: it’s akin to Icelandic kobbi,

  seal, and my father could float and fall

&n
bsp; asleep on the water, and drift, steady

  as a male swan. Dip down below gender, it’s

  a lump or piece of anything, as of

  coal, ore, or stone—not ashes

  but a clod—usually of a large size

  but not too large to be handled by one person—as at

  times, in my life, I have been a dazzled

  rounded heap or mass of something being

  glistened almost out of existence. A cobnut

  was the boys’, and a testicle, but not the stone

  of a fruit—especially a drupaceous fruit—

  or a peapod, or a small stack

  of grain or hay, or a bunch of hair,

  as a chignon—or a small loaf

  of bread, a kind of muffin, a baked apple

  dumpling! Oh father me, tuck me in.

  I’ll be the stocky horse, one having an

  artificially high stylish action,

  and gladly be the pabulum, the

  string of crystals of sugar of milk,

  C12H22O11,

  separable from the whey, dextra-

  rotatory, as one might search

  through matter for matter one could like being made of.

  A mixture consisting of unburned clay,

  usually with straw as a binder,

  for constructing walls of small buildings,

  or matter leaping up like spirit,

  a black-backed gull, or the eight-legged Jesus,

  the spider—dear Dad, I search for how

  to be your daughter, and I find the wicker

  basket you liked to say you had carried me

  around in. And now I want to cob your name

  (to strike, to thump, specifically

  to beat on the buttocks, as with a strap

  or flat stick), O young herring,

  O head of a herring. Dear old awful herring,

  let’s go back through covetous

  to thresh out seed, let’s go back

  to ore dressing, to break into pieces,

  break off the waste and low-grade materials—

  it is sweet to throw, especially gently

  or carelessly, to toss, as if

  your carelessness had been some newfangled

  gentleness. Your spirit lies in my

  spirit this morning crosswise, as timbers

  or logs in cobwork construction, as we make

  or mend, coarsely, as I patch or botch

  these cobbl’d rhymes.

  Men’s Singles, 1952

  I sat in the noonday sun, no hat,

  no comb, no braces, my teeth reaching out buck

  naked toward food and drink, no breasts,

  no fat—my first Finals by myself—

  in front of us, as in the language of a dream,

  grown men danced and rushed the net.

  And something was building in my belly, some scaffold,

  an edifice where the flesh of those half-bare

  kings could sing, a green bleachers

  of desire. One of them was elder, I rooted for his

  shapely legs, their straight hair black—

  my heart in the stands had a fierce fixation,

  like a secret ownership, on him,

  for his pins and his face, and his name which held

  some key to knowledge, Vic Seixas. But when

  the younger, big and tawny, would serve

  with his back to me, then I could be

  the ace, the golden tiger, the Schräber

  Apollo, the Tony Trabert. I baked,

  on the bleachers’ slats, Arden bench

  of cooked Arcadian wood, beside

  a grown-up I did not know, and when he

  came back, once, with a beer, he brought back

  a Coke, for me—the varicose

  brown-emerald bottle I had seen the magazine

  pictures of, forbidden drink with

  cocaine and dead men’s fingers in it, I

  drank, and cracked a sepia sweat—

  Diana racing through the forest, the V of her

  legs, at the top, as beautiful

  as the power of a man, the nipples on her chest

  pointing her to the hunt that makes death

  worth it, Love/Nothing, Advantage In,

  Let Ball, Take Two, the hush fell over us.

  The Float

  A Commanding Officer, after The War,

  had given it to someone’s father, who had

  anchored it in the lake, a square

  aluminum pontoon, seamed with solder.

  I was a little postindustrial

  water rat in a one-piece suit with the

  Blue Willow pattern from a dinner plate on it,

  the man on the left nipple going

  away forever, the woman on the right

  forever waiting. I would dive into the lake

  —immediate, its cobalt reach and

  silence—slide down, into the rich,

  closed, icy book, blue lipped

  in a white rubber cabbage-roses

  headdress, and a coral rubber nose-clip,

  slow-flitting like an agate-eating

  swallow, floating sideways in

  the indigo pressure. The grown-ups said we must

  not, swim, under, the float,

  we might get tangled in the anchor chain, I

  swam, under the float, and saw

  the slant of the chain, its mottled eel. And you must

  never go up, under the raft, to its

  recessed chamber where there’s poison ether.

  I would soar supine on my back, looking up

  at the bulk, I’d rush up slowly closer

  to the antilife, holding my breath,

  finally dipping up into it,

  putting my face up into it

  a second or two, then shove down

  and water-sprint for home. But of course

  I felt I had to inhale that stuff

  and live. I left no note, the woman on my

  right chest would always long for

  the man on my left, and never touch him, I

  came up, between those boiler-plated

  bulges, and breathed. It was more an unguent

  than air, it smelled like myrrh gone bad,

  I’d go and sip it up all summer,

  and live. Sip, sip, sip,

  first the left, then the right

  nipple faintly puffed, almost

  chartreuse with silvery newness, the lover

  on the left pushed out his mouth, and on the right

  she puckered hers—if they grew enough,

  they could kiss, or some resuscitator could be

  begged to give them mouth to mouth to mouth.

  Freezer

  When I think of people who kill and eat people,

  I think of how lonely my mother was.

  She would come to me for comfort, in the night,

  she’d lie down on me and pray. And I could say

  she fattened me, until it was time

  to cook me, but she did not know,

  she’d been robbed of a moral sense that way.

  How soft she was, how unearthly her beauty, how

  terrestrial the weight of her flesh

  on the constellation of my joints and pouting

  points. I like to have in the apartment,

  shut in a drawer, in another room,

  the magazine with the murder-cannibal,

  it comforts me that the story is available

  at any moment, accounted for, not

  dangerously unthought-of. I think he kept

  ankles in the freezer. My mother was such a good kisser.

  From where I sat in the tub, her body,

  between her legs, looked a little

  like a mouth, a youthfully bearded mouth

  with blood on it. From one hour to the next on earth

  no one knew what would happen.

  The Bra

  I
t happened, with me, on the left side, first,

  I would look down, and the soft skin of the

  nipple had become like a blister, as if it had been

  lifted by slow puffs of breath

  from underneath. It took weeks, months,

  a year. And those white harnesses,

  like contagion masks for conjoined twins

  —if you saw a strap showing, on someone

  you knew well enough, you could whisper, in her ear,

  It’s Snowing Up North. There were bowers to walk through

  home from school, trellis arches

  like aboveground tunnels, froths of leaves—

  that spring, no one was in them, except,

  sometimes, a glimpse of police. They found

  her body in the summer, the girl in our class

  missing since winter, in the paper they printed

  the word in French, brassiere, I felt a little

  glad she had still been wearing it,

  as if a covering, of any

  kind, could be a hopeless dignity

  But now they are saying that her bra was buried

  in the basement of his house—when she was pulled down into

  the ground, she was naked. For a moment I am almost half

  glad they tore him apart with Actaeon

  electric savaging. In the photo,

  the shoulder straps seem to be making

  wavering O’s, and the sorrow’s cups

  are O’s, and the bands around to the hook

  and eye in the back make a broken O.

  It looks like something taken down

  to the bones—God’s apron—God eviscerated—

  its plain, cotton ribbons rubbed

  with earth. When he said, In as much as ye have

  done it unto one of the least

  of these my brethren, ye have done it unto

  me, he meant girls—or if he’d known better

  he would have meant girls.

  The Couldn’t

  And then, one day, though my mother had sent me

  upstairs to prepare, my thumbs were no longer

  opposable, they would not hook into

  the waistband, they swung, limp—under my

  underpants was the Y of elastic, its

  metal teeth gripping the pad,

  I couldn’t be punished, unless I was bare, but I

  couldn’t be bare, unless I took off my

  Young Lady’s First Sanitary Belt,

  my cat’s cradle, my goddess girdle,

  and she couldn’t want me to do that,

  could she? But when she walked in, and saw me still