Page 55 - WTP VOl. X #4

My mother isn’t angry now, but she’s putting all the ironing she hasn’t done into big bags, so Nanna doesn’t see it. She lugs these garbage bags into the back basement and pushes them against the wall all the way back in the dark fruit cellar. Nanna irons ev- erything when we stay with her, even our underwear. My mother hates to iron.
“She’ll never find out about this,” my mother says, laughing a little and pushing her bangs from her sweaty forehead, “It’ll be our little secret.”
But when I come home from school, Nanna has the ironing board out in the middle of the basement where we play with our toys and dolls. She care- fully presses everything in the big bags my mother thought she hid.
“Your mother never keeps up with things,” Nanna says. “She’s messy.”
My mother rolls her eyes when I tell her later. “Your grandmother probably did that white glove test on the mantle just to make sure we remembered to clean there.”
~
My mother is very proud of the new dining room table in the center of the house. It’s Danish, I am told, and my mother polishes the beautiful surface regu- larly. We aren’t allowed to use it except for special oc- casions such as when my grandparents visit. Nanna and I play Scrabble here. She teaches me this: words have points—you can win with them. You can play off another’s words and make something. I learn to beat her, but it takes a few years. She is too focused on the words, not on the winning or the score. I see connections between words, how things can run alongside each other but not collide.
I am sitting at the table, writing something, on that paper with the blue lines—grainy paper with dashes and lines, like a code, I squeeze my letters between. C-A-T, I write, and my Tommy and I are walking again in the backyard under the willow tree and down into the woods. So early in the morning there is no sound but his purr, orange fur running past my fingers. He walks with me, an escort into the world of black bark and leaves and water. I write W-A-L-K and see how the barbed points of the W keep us out like a fence, like the boundaries on the property. I sit at the din- ing room table and practice this, the words onto the
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“Night after night, we are making a whole
world together. And as we do, my mother talks about my ‘real’ father and how someday she hopes that I can meet him because I would like him a lot.”
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