No wonder the word “perfect” has no “q”, the ugliest of all cursive letters, at least by my hand. Whose hand was it in my dream last night that reached across the table to lift “q’s” from my journal and lay them out, one by one, where they could be plainly seen? “You may want to look at these,” she said, tweezers in hand to pluck another “q” from its hiding place within a word and add it to the array. Of course, I looked. How could I avoid it? Each bulbous, cumbersome, racetrack of a letter misshapen against the white tabletop. They filled me with shame, these shapes I never mastered. How often is this letter even used?! I clamored. Then came the hand, the tweezers, another “q” dropped on a pile. *** “Perfect” doesn’t have a “q”-- only “queenly”, “query”, “quince” (a what?), and “quintessential.” Who needs these words? That question can by answered by my mother. She was the quintessential critic, queenly in an odd, democratic sort of way. Quinces? She’d tasted them, being stylish in the 60’s, of the cultural vanguard. She was, like Mary Poppins, “Practically Perfect in Every Way.” In other words, a willing hand might write, not quite. Karen Jessee Please offer your responses and comments below, then consider sharing this post with a friend.
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In honor of an anniversary. Even at home she isn’t at home:
the most Irish-looking girl in her Jewish neighborhood. When her parents flee the Bronx to flaunt in Scarsdale—the golden faucets, ducks vomiting into dark vanities-- things get worse. She brings her one white sweater. Other schoolgirls taunt with woolens in rotation: Irish knits, cabled colors, houndstooth. Her skin itself is a source of constant disappointment. Ever-emerging freckles interfere with her mother’s hopes for peaches and cream. Considered fat (by whom?) at age sixteen, she poses, prim, holding a golf club. Her peers smoke. So does she. At nineteen in a shawl-collared gown, the photo witnesses to bare shoulders finally as elegant as a beauty queen’s. The swirl through Wellesley pairs her on a blind date with a Jewish boy, the tall, handsome one; he whispers his proposal during the film Anne Frank. In motherhood, central Illinois, she’s wed to the house by twenty-five feet of white telephone cord. Envelopes she stuffs by the hundreds export her Democratic ideals. Sunday morning newspaper drapes a net across her lap, her world. Cigarette smoke wraps everything. Her hair grows long in silver strands as her husband dies. Beauty bears her forward. And her children? They live away. She doesn’t call them. Her work defines her: Expert Witness for the Homeless. She writes a book. Resettles in California. Her new house—maroon, intense, plush—puts others at ease, yet when she sits, her elbows, legs, lips and brow, pitch. Eventually, menopause deprives her of hips. She primps, pleased. Starvation never accomplished so much! Congregants admire (people she collected as well as art)-- the mid-century headboard, chairs, desk, buffet, by the local woodworking avant-garde. She smokes, patio, office, and cafe. Finally flies east for the baby, her granddaughter, evidence her first love now lives on, her husband who was lost. Everything redeemed, except her cough. Karen Jessee Right now, the shape anger takes? My face. Bold tension presses my features the way cake batter fills the folds of a birthday cake mold. Out from the oven comes a favorite super-hero waiting for frosting to bring the eyes to life. Instead, I’m spongy, fragile, with eyes as dull as biscuits. Tunneling into family life during this sheltering at home has, on the one hand, left me feeling more and more like I did in early childhood, enamored with the laundry chute upstairs in the split-level which carried our dirty clothes—obliquely, mysteriously—to my brother’s basement bathroom. There, my mother would stand, too tall for me to see anything but the backside of her body as she measured soap and managed machines, her hands lit by rays from the tiny window. I thought my brother was lucky being close to the clothing piled where the laundry chute let out. That channel linked the whole family, upstairs and downstairs, brother and sister, father and mother and a space so small it felt like a den. Sequestering also reminds me of other spaces—without windows, without light. My daughter was four when, during an innocent game of hide-and-seek, a friend helped her into the drawer under the window-seat in her room and shut it. All the way. Until it was dark. Until my little one was trapped. No one to hear her. No way to get out. Thankfully, she was remembered. We found her. She could see again, and breathe, shedding copious, desperate tears. My son was eight when the neighborhood gang of boys pretended to play hide and seek then locked him in a neighbor’s basement closet. They truly played him, shoved his innocence right into the closet with him. He was trapped, shamed. Afraid. No one there to hear him. Eventually, the mother set him free. He crept home, stunned, to rest in safety. After my father died, my childhood family grew dark, offering no recourse for grief. That household stored me away like a sweater or a broom might be. When would I be pulled out again? He was gone. Never again would I be truly seen. This time of quarantine has forced me into its own closet—more like a cannister under pressure. More like a hot oven. Anger bangs for me, abrupt guest to this party I didn’t plan: my head as the centerpiece with no eyes to see through the dark. Karen Jessee If you would like to receive notifications of new posts, please email me at searchandknow@mindspring.com. If you are inspired to leave a comment expanding this reflection, please do so below. Thank you. Today, is my father's 47 death anniversary. I celebrate by sharing a poem I wrote many years ago, which still speaks faithfully to my childhood experience. My body rolls like a swollen riverbank, mushy, fertile. I look down at breasts each boasting a life of her own. They define me. I talk more than I should. I have to with breasts like these. In our bathroom of speckled salmon laminate I straddle the toilet. My mother props her hips, arms crossed, watching me put a tampon in—my fingers blind, my nose offended by bloody syrup and the thought, whose is all this? Not mine. Downstairs on the family-room couch my father wastes, his complexion greying against brown wool. A child needs her father. What am I? Karen Jessee 4/3/20 Please feel free to offer a comment below, and please invite a friend to SEEK AND KNOW.
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