When the girl from the Exxon guns her engine with her derelict foot,
it’s certain I am meant to awaken and listen to those suddenly aroused
pipes and rings and filters. I always think she must want trouble.
Maybe I swiped her boyfriend in ’78 when I was nothing but a carcass
and easy like all the shit from Elsewhere, but if I did, I’d like to say
I didn’t mean it. Or maybe she just couldn’t stand the blue dresses my mother sewed
that I couldn’t stand, either. But probably it was something else,
a foul up with more death in it — something I said in third period English,
probably, some crazy thing I meant so much I’d have staked my life on it.
I don’t remember being in high school, so I can’t say if I offended the Exxon girl,
but I think she must live in a trailer. It must be horrible to work in a gas station,
and be over thirty, and I think there’s a child, as sometimes she mentions one.
To tell her how sorry I am for whatever it is I did, I would like to nurse him,
as I would like to nurse all the children of America. Like the Exxon girl,
I don’t remember getting married. I don’t recall the day or how my husband looked
or who I was then when I was so blonde I was like the color of spring
bursting from the tips of winter. It does not please me to say how invisible I was
when I got married, but I was eighteen then and ignorant of everything,
except for what would happen if I’d give myself over to a stupid boy’s stupid cock.
When the boys would use their mammal parts against me
I’d appear in the world like magic ink coming up from the center of a page,
and when I found one who’d love me, though I couldn’t see him and couldn’t be seen —
oh, it was dismal there in the white space of being ignorant and eighteen,
and I was frightened, and didn’t take to the world, so it must have been
as it often is in dreams — the way there’s this vague shape moving around
that’s got to be you, but you’re on the outside, as if watching from the sun,
and when he moves in to kiss you, you just close your eyes
like you think you’re Sleeping Beauty. And it’s almost as if the whole kingdom
goes right down with you: each hydrant, each piece of board-and-batten
in each house of every town and village, and it could go on for hundreds of years —
the vines themselves asleep at the wheel — until some girl you didn’t even know
in high school presses a part of herself down real hard into the flat, phallic gas petal
of her automobile and you wake to find yourself alone in bed
with troubled partly-grown boy-children sleeping right down the hall.
That’s when the world’s so speechless you think you can hear the dead
unbreathing in their graves. You think so much about the dead,
you think you know what it means to be in a body. That’s what rage is.
It’s being too much inside yourself. It’s waking up ten feet from the Exxon
to a caterwauling motorcar. It’s standing at the end of winter,
watching your sons sleep stony in the double bed while the house loosens on its hinges
with such self-assurance, you know your babies will start wailing any minute now.
And that’s what waking is. It’s wanting to be forgiven
for all the evil you can’t remember doing, but know you must have done.