Page 63 - WTP VOl. X #4

under the sheets moving back and forth faster and faster between his legs before I get out of the room.
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Before Daddy leaves town for three weeks on a busi- ness trip for his new job, he buys several bags of hotdogs and buns and no other food for us. My mother cries after he leaves because she doesn’t have any money for anything else. After she calms down, she picks up the phone and sells the groceries Daddy bought to her friends. “See,” she says, “We’ll make it work out.”
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My mother takes me to see a priest named Father Burke. She says it will be good for me to have “a man to talk to, to trust.” We aren’t Catholic, we were going to the United Church of Christ in Cherry Hill where
I memorized all the names of the books of the Bible and won a prize, but then Daddy and the minister weren’t friends anymore, because he was always try- ing to “impress people and be a big deal,” my mother said, so we stopped going. Someone in the neighbor- hood told my mother about the Father and that it was free to go see him.
Father Burke wears a green cardigan over his black suit. I like his sing-song Irish accent when he speaks. I press my whole body against the heavy church door to open it and look for him down a dark hallway. At the end, a yellow-lighted office, some crayons, big paper. I color corner suns with long spikes onto the white paper. I’d like to close my eyes, but Father asks me gently what I’d like to tell him about myself. I will tell him a story about an alien. I wave a waxy purple crayon as I stop to think. The alien has lots of eyes,
all black, all over him. But he’s lonely and far from home. His spaceship has left him behind. I stop. The Father is helping me write the story now. He makes lines underneath the picture, so I can shape the let- ters to fit right. It is my first experience of someone just listening to me. I am scared of him but at the same time, I love him. One of the last times we meet, it’s early spring, and I’m talking so little he takes me outside to play. It’s still winter, I have my coat on,
and I am kicking my brown loafer off, high into the air like a black shadow across the sky. Then, hop- ping around to get it. He plays, too; the Father, he kicks his shoe off, and we are laughing and laughing in the cold till my mother drives up and takes me home.
I get a cello soon after this. I’m nine and in third grade, so it’s a year earlier than my class is supposed to be allowed to have one, but my mother asked if I could play something since my friends were all older and already had instruments. I got what instrument was left. Tuesdays are lesson days and my mother drives me to school. Our brown house sits at the bot- tom of the oval of Woodstock Drive and is the farthest house from the red brick Stafford Elementary. Be- sides, the cello is too heavy and bumps my hip with its sharp womanly bones dressed in a brown cloth sack as if trying to hide itself, its music.
My mother forgets to come one day to pick me up. It’s early spring and the ground is very wet and cold from the dirty snow that had finally melted two days be- fore. I rest the point of the cello stand in the mud try- ing not to get the cover dirty and look up and down the street for the yellow Volkswagen hatchback. An hour passes. I’m shivering, and two of my friends have walked by with their small instruments while I wait with my big, ungainly one. Where is my mother? A woman comes out of the house on the corner, “Are you all right, dear?” I don’t tell people anything, espe- cially about being alright or not, which is relative in my family anyway. I lean against my silent friend. “My mother will be here soon,” I say.
When my mother finally arrives, Ken is in the car with her. He has a beard and fixes instruments and has been coming to our house sometimes. We get home, and I go in my bedroom. My sister stays out- side on the front porch with one of her friends play- ing some little kid game. I see her from my bedroom window, which overlooks the porch with the climb-
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