by Jane Shore
and gets all tangled up.
Who’d be the lucky one
to read it to the class?
A dozen hands shot up
except Lucille’s, and mine.
Shiny straight black hair,
black patent Mary Janes,
pink cat’s-eye frames
studded with rhinestones—
Lucille was special.
She couldn’t read or spell.
She’d had to repeat
the first grade twice,
but received straight A’s
for perfect attendance.
She sat in the first row,
close to the erased blackboard,
a swirling Milky Way.
The teacher skipped Lucille
and called out, “Jane!”
I snapped back to my book,
the kitten, the sewing basket
and ball of yarn.
I opened my mouth to read
the page Fate gave to me.
Not wanting to show off,
I stumbled—on purpose—
on the words I knew I knew,
and got all tangled up
in that rolling ball of yarn,
unraveling its line
of looping handwriting
across the kitchen floor
Mother scrubbed and waxed
on her hands and knees
—Jane’s mother, not mine.
Mine puffed on her cigarette,
smoke scribbling on the air
in the rooms we call our lives,
where it begins to snow
real snow outside the panes,
beyond the huge paper flakes
children fold, cut, and tape
to classroom windows,
no two flakes alike:
brief fingerprints
whorling on the glass.
Best Friend
My first best friend had pale delicate skin
and when she laughed or was embarrassed
her cheeks flared up into two hot pink spots,
for hours, like stains she couldn’t rub out.
She lived walking distance from the firehouse,
so the days and nights her father was on duty,
she could see him anytime she chose,
visit the private quarters on the second floor,
above the gleaming trucks and coiled hoses
where her father lived his other life.
When I first went along with Cynthia,
I thought I’d have to shinny up the brass pole
through the hole cut in the ceiling, but we
only had to walk up stairs, to see one big
happy family of men, smoking and playing
cards around the dinner table, frying sausages
on the stove, drying socks on radiators,
their heavy black rubber coats on hooks,
flayed open, smooth as animal hides.
In the dormitory, I saw their beds made
with linens from home, shelves of personal
belongings, children’s photos, lucky stones.
I petted their mascot Dalmatian while
Cynthia kissed each fireman goodbye.
Afternoons after school, we’d play quietly
in the rose garden behind her house,
so as not to disturb her father, off-duty.
Once, stumbling outside in his pajamas,
he looked perfectly ordinary, not a hero—
just like my own father, who worked regular
hours in his store. Cynthia caught me staring,
and cut in, “He’s not a lazybones, really.
He’s just catching up on sleep.”
When a small plane crashed one foggy morning
into the radio tower a few blocks away,
and the engine sailed over town, missing
the school, landing down the street from us,
burning an apartment house to the ground,
many people died, all the passengers.
From my bedroom window I saw smoke
and, in the distance, eleven stories high,
the tower’s torn and twisted scaffolding
where the plane caught in it like a fly.
A week later, as I walked Cynthia home,
she whispered that her father, the day after
the crash, sifting through the cooling rubble
in the vacant lot next door, saw something
lying in the dirt, he didn’t know what,
and picked up a woman’s hand severed
at the wrist, a left hand, with a diamond
engagement ring still on it. For months
the remaining fuselage lodged in the tower
like a decomposing corpse, until someone
figured out a way to bring it down.
The Sunroom
My chickenpox was itchy, like pinfeathers.
Blisters popped out on my scalp, eyelids, even my tongue,
like the plague God brought down on Egypt.
“Don’t scratch!” my mother yelled.
I couldn’t help but scratch.
Quarantined from my new baby sister,
I was playing in the sunroom Easter Sunday morning,
keeping track of the parade on the television—
playing in the sunroom the whole week before,
during Passover, while I was still contagious—
playing in the sunroom a month before,
the one and only time I met my grandfather,
all tanned and leathery—a cameo appearance
like a retired movie star.
He brought a crate of Florida grapefruit for the family
and a stuffed baby chick for me.
The moment I saw the chick—
its black glass eyes, its real beak
smooth as a shelled peanut
with two little slits for nostrils—
I was afraid of it.
Its insides had been scooped out
like chickens my mother koshered:
she’d stick her hand between the legs and pull out
the shiny gizzard, liver, and the gigantic ruby
of the heart, then rub the skin and the inside cavity
with Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt.
What scared me the most
was that the chick was really dead,
dead in its actual body, like a mummy;
its precious organs thrown away,
its body sanitized, stuffed with straw,
and covered with feathers dyed a sunny yellow.
I was sure I’d caught chickenpox
from the baby chick.
I thought I’d die.
The first Passover,
the Angel of Death had slaughtered
every Egyptian firstborn son.
Smeared blood was the sign
for the Angel to pass over.
I was a firstborn.
My body was covered with signs.
On Easter morning,
I watched them walking home from church
to eat their Easter meals—
men and boys in somber suits,
women in flowered hats,
girls wearing new spring coats on sale
at Lobels Department Store,
in lovely Easter-egg colors—soft unbleached wool
dipped into pale washes
of baby blue, mint, lavender, and pink—
pink as an Easter ham
stuck all over with cloves,
cloves like the burning scabs I scratched
as they paraded past.
The Holiday Season
The electric eye of the mezuzah
guarded our apartment over the store,
as innocent of Christmas
as heaven, where God lived,
how many stories above the world?
Was He angry when He saw
all the windows on my street—
the assimilated gr
ocer’s, druggist’s,
even my father’s store—
lit up like an Advent calendar?
Alone in my bedroom
the nights my parents worked late,
I’d hear voices and laughter
float up through the floor—
customers trying on dressy dresses
in the fitting rooms below.
The store was dressed up too,
with tinsel, icicles,
everything but a Christmas tree—
“Over my dead body,” my mother said.
Christmas was strictly business
in my parents’ store.
Fourteen shopping days to go,
my class sang carols
in front of the school assembly.
In starched white blouses
we marched up to the stage,
our mouths a chain of O’s.
When we came to the refrain
“Christ the Savior is born,”
as if on cue all the Jewish kids
were silent, except me,
absent-mindedly humming along
until the word Christ slipped out.
It was an accident!
Gentiles believed in Christ.
We Jews believed in a God
Whose face we were forbidden to see,
Whose name we were forbidden
to say out loud, or write completely.
We had to spell it G-d,
the missing o dashing into its hole.
That afternoon after school,
I sat near an empty fitting room
folding gift boxes, carefully locking
cardboard flaps in place.
Was God going to punish me?
My father knelt in the window
like one of the Magi in a crèche,
among mannequins, dressed
and accessorized, as if they actually
had someplace to go. He dusted
off a plastic angel three feet tall.
Stored in the cellar, she lorded it
over the old broken mannequins,
naked, bald, their amputated limbs
piled in the corner like firewood.
The Sunday before holiday season
she ascended, one flight, to the store,
trailing a tail of electric cord.
After my father plugged her in,
she glowed from halo-tip to toe,
faith—a fever—warming her cheeks,
her insides lit by a tiny bulb.
I longed to smuggle her up to my room,
to have some company at night
when the store was open late.
I gazed down the darkening street,
Seventy-ninth to Boulevard East,
and out over the Hudson.
At sundown, I went upstairs.
Dinner was defrosting in the oven.
The last night of Chanukah,
eight candles, like eight crayons—
arranged from right to left,
like a line of Hebrew writing—
wobbled in the brass menorah.
My father struck the match.
Flame wavered in my hand;
I numbly sang the blessing
as if the words on my breath
could sweep away the word
I’d sung earlier that day.
Was God going to punish me?
I’d have to ask the Magic 8 Ball,
my gift on the first night of Chanukah.
For the past seven nights,
before going to sleep,
instead of saying my prayers,
I’d consulted the 8 Ball.
It could predict the future.
You asked it a yes-or-no question,
you turned it over,
and the answer slowly floated up
through the inky liquid
to the round window on top.
I held the black ball
firmly in my hands.
“Is God going to punish me?”
“CONCENTRATE AND ASK AGAIN”
I stared out my bedroom window
across the back alley
at the rabbi’s house,
and watched him walk from room
to room, his windows
like frames on a strip of film.
He vanished through his kitchen door
and reappeared a moment later
a shadow, a hazy nimbus rippling
his bathroom’s frosted window glass.
Swaying before his mirrored ark’s
two fluorescent scrolls of light,
he performed his evening ritual—
brushing his teeth,
washing his hands, then
sinking discreetly out of sight.
For spying on the rabbi,
I’d added on another sin!
I concentrated, closed my eyes,
again I asked the question:
“Is God going to punish me?”
“REPLY HAZY TRY AGAIN”
“Is God going to punish me?”
“BETTER NOT TELL YOU NOW”
“Is God going to punish me?”
“IT IS DECIDEDLY SO”
“Is God going to punish me?”
“MY REPLY IS NO”
“8 Ball, what is your answer?”
“ASK AGAIN LATER”
I had to see what was inside.
I took a hammer to the ball
and whacked. Not a crack;
I’d barely scratched its shell.
I looked into its eye,
the dark unblinking eye,
as far as I could see inside the skull
where, floating together in ink
(so many I couldn’t see them all),
were all the answers possible.
The Slap
In 1959, at Horace Mann Elementary
in North Bergen, New Jersey,
wearing white on Wednesday meant you were a virgin,
wearing red on Thursday meant you were a lesbian,