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the Old Overflow was no more,
and
Mommy’s father and the skunky dog
were mummified tales
preserved by Mommy and Daddy
and uncles, aunts, and cousins
who would stop on the slog through their personal deserts
and expose the memories to derision,
mourning the dead
and enjoying the loss
as they relived in words
growing up
in the Great Depression,
bereft of childhood,
forsaking school
for jobs
as low in status as they were in pay:
ironing linens in a laundry,
swilling counters for a butcher,
sweeping homemade whiskey
from the oil-blotched floor
of a body shop.
They were raised in a part of the city where
American-Irish and
American-German and
American-Italian
and American-Syrian
and American Lebanese
kids
played basketball together
and went to school
and dated
and it didn’t matter that their parents
were still learning English,
and you were as likely to hear
cliffhangers about
the famous Nude Oudist
as you were about
the choirboy
who switched a friend’s brown bag lunch
with a brown lunch bag
filled with nothing but raw green beans.
After they had saved their homes
and families from what they called
the greatest economic failure of the twentieth century,
the
Irish-American,
Italian-American,
Syrian-American,
German-American,
and Lebanese-American
kids who had pranked each other
and celebrated the Nude Oudist
went to war to save the world.
And when the war was over,
they came home proud,
delighted, thrilled
that they had
gleefully sent mortars
into hilly jungles,
and heard Chopin being played on
an out-of-tune piano
at night
in a Filipino neighborhood
lit by oil lamps,
and laughed at grunts
lining up
for turns with a whore
off the Appian Way.
(“Without a word of a lie
it wasn’t me,
it was the other guys!”)
They finished high school
(when high school was still
enough education for a man)
or
went to college free of charge
on the GI Bill,
and opened new businesses,
and built new housing
and proclaimed,
as they sat in the parlor of their own
new homes,
drinking pricey liquor
beside fireplaces
raging with their owners’ zeal,
the new prime tenet
of the twentieth century,
the one that claimed
“every generation does better
than the one that came before.”
Theirs was indeed better
than the one that came before them.
And that’s how it would be
for the generation after them,
and for every generation after that,
they said.
Soon the men who had launched
mortars into jungles
and witnessed whoring
on the Appian Way
and heard Chopin through the oil-lamped
night in the Philippines
were building new schools
and hiring new teachers,
and exhorting the newest generation to excel
in math and science.
One of those schools
was blocks away
from Sylvie Ann’s home.
A two-story institutional spread,
it was,
carved from post-war confidence
and orange brick,
sealed at the side streets with doors of glass and metal
too heavy for a child to heave open
without help.
The halls were tunnels of cinder block
painted yellow
and paneled here and there
with cluttered bulletin boards
framed by colorful construction-paper leaves.
Sylvie Ann thought
the place smelled like
home redecorated in winter:
a frigid sauce
of plaster, wallpaper glue, and hardware store.
The floor was made of rubbery tiles
that bounced shyly underfoot
and had the look of wispy clouds
reflected in a pond
going green with algae.
They sucked up sound,
so Sylvie Ann walked hard,
slapping them into speaking to her,
acknowledging her,
confessing to her:
“We know you.”
And suddenly
there she was,
not quite five years old,
in Kindergarten,
a captive of
bulbous Venus figurines
in cotton lawn and poplin,
pendulous bosoms bouncing
as they strode to blackboards
that were really green.
They did things that Sylvie Ann
didn’t understand
but figured made sense
because they
were adults, and adults
knew everything,
while little children like her knew nothing
and needed to go to school.
So when the bloated icons forced her
to write with her right hand
instead of her left,
which she always used,
she believed them
when they told her
she had to use her right hand
because
“This is a right-handed world,”
and she said nothing.
And later,
when they demanded “speed and accuracy”
from her and other pupils
struggling with math,
she
still
said nothing because
you didn’t talk back to teachers.
Talk back,
ask questions,
and they yelled at you,
and punished you
by making you stay after school.
“Detention,” they called it.
Sometimes you sat in silence
with your hands folded
on your desk.
But most of the time
the teacher preached virtues called
“integrity and character”
which demanded perfection through
hard work, telling the truth,
keeping your word,
not complaining.
Suffering in silence.
Controlling yourself.
One day
the littlest girl in the class
flew out of her seat
during yet another class detention
and threw her arms around a teacher
crying how sorry she was
and she’d never be bad again
though Sylvie Ann and everybody else
knew detention wasn’t her fault
to begin with.
The teacher said nothing
to absolve the child
of the imagined guilt,
but sent her back to her desk,
and doled out more detention.
(NOTE: this was originally posted when "Rat on a Ribbon" had the working title "Biopic at Golgotha." Also, Maris Bosquet is the name I use for the poetry. It's a riff on the Latin word for "sea" and the French word for "grove," and it was inspired by what is now my former hometown: Ocean Grove, NJ.)
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