Page 64 - WTP VOl. X #4

What We Hold On to (continued from preceding page)
ing rose trellis on the end. My mother is pleased the roses have conformed, have lived up to her pruning and shaping and have, in fact, blossomed. She nags me to practice my scales for a half hour every day and reminds me all the time that I wanted to play an instrument. She hopes I will bloom into a real cello player, since my teacher has told her I have a talent for music. It is quiet in the living room where my mother and Ken are, and I wonder what they are do- ing. Daddy is away on another business trip, but this is better, I think.
~
I am sitting at the long brown wooden kitchen table with my feet tucked under the rungs of the chair. My
“Rising up on my toes, I peer out the bathroom
window down the street toward my house. The police car lights are flashing round and round and my eyes hurt. I am afraid my mother is dead.”
sister is eating next to me. She started out making faces over her juice glass, but soon we are only eating and looking at our food as the argument between
my mother and Daddy in the dining room becomes louder. I taste the hamburger on the back of my throat, and my stomach clenches.
Then the sounds of thudding footsteps, something hitting flesh and the screaming. My mother yelling, “Get out. Get out!”
My sister starts sobbing then, with her nose running and blue eyes as big as our dinner plates. I yank her arm, pulling her up from the chair, through the back door and down the four cement steps to the driveway.
We run across the street to my best friend Debbie E’s door, but there’s no answer. Maybe I haven’t knocked hard enough; the lights are on.
My sister is asking for my mother. “Where’s Mommy? I want to go back and get Mommy.”
I drag her across Debbie E’s lawn to the Penente’s
house, home of Paulie, two years older, who once showed me how to rip the light from a firefly’s body. My feet are wet from the early evening damp. I’ve forgotten my shoes. Mrs. Penente pulls open the
door. She’s a big woman, to us at least, and her house smells like onions, but they have already finished eating. I ask her to call the police, that something... something has happened, and I start to cry. I ask to use her bathroom as she picks up the phone. I lock the bathroom door. It’s the same house as my own, only turned around on the other side of the street. And Mrs. Penente has lots of fluffy blue rugs and tow- els and sweet soap. I don’t go to the toilet, although I feel sick and sweaty. I pick up the grass I’ve tracked in from the floor.
Rising up on my toes, I peer out the bathroom win- dow down the street toward my house. The police car lights are flashing round and round and my
eyes hurt. I am afraid my mother is dead. What if he has killed her? What if I have no mother anymore? Sometimes our babysitter takes us to her Baptist church where they ask if my sister and I have been saved. I listen for God, maybe he can save us now. God is bigger than Daddy, as big as the whole world they say. Then I feel calmer and Mrs. Penente is at the bathroom door telling me it’s OK and my mother will be here soon. My sister is banging on the door calling my name. I come out in my bare feet and shame at Mrs. Penente’s stare. Everyone will know about our family now.
~
Later that night, my mother gives us each a little white pill to make us sleep. The feeling, as we ride in the back of the car to her best friend’s house, is like diving under the ocean. I’m falling down deeper and deeper until I fly between the blue underwater mountains, the ones my mother and I have made. I drift there. Where is my bedroom? My backyard? My hands open, and there’s nothing but water and this strange sleep to hold on to. My mother would like for us to forget it all, but I have helped her make the map. I keep what I know.
Kossmann’s recently completed memoir What We Hold On To
is looking for a home. In addition to her essays “Taking a Step Forward” and “Why We Needed a Prenup With Our Contractor” published as “Modern Love” columns in The New York Times, the “Tale of Two Primates” appeared as a Menagerie column in the NYT Opinionator section. She was the winner of the Short Memoir Com- petition at the 2007 Philadelphia First Person Arts Festival and is a recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Her poetry, essays, and feature articles have appeared in a range of literary journals and other publications.
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