I was late to marriage,
late to motherhood.
When I met Jamie in New York,
something blossomed in me
that had been dormant.
His jazz club became my hangout,
I dressed up every night
with some place to go.
He was the owner, and I was his girl.
By Nancy Wick This is the sort of thing that happens to a teenager, I think, as I sit in the newsroom, the phone to my ear. Calling my therapist from work is a first for me. Desperation strangles my voice and cinches my shoulders tight. I speak quietly even though the newsroom is practically […]
Continue reading… "A Choice Moment"“Think I just heard another FUCK YOU PORTER,” I text my husband upstairs.
It is early, unlike most of the other times we’ve heard them. I fiddle with the undone ribbon on the waistband of my pajama bottoms, sip the too-hot-for-this-90-degrees-before-ten-a.m.-crap coffee. The soundtrack is a steady stop and start of morning traffic, but the words rise up over the misery song of our busy-at-all-hours avenue
Continue reading… "Variations on a Theme"When I first woke, the barely lit morning made it possible to open my eyes without sunglasses. Squinting first with only my left eye open, and then with only my right, I saw the pile of clean white T-shirts on the writing desk across the room. They looked alternately warm-white, then cool, warm and then cool. My vacillating experience of whiteness blindsided me, as if there existed some true whiteness about which I had either been, or found myself now, deluded.
Continue reading… "In Blue"An old boyfriend came courting. I was standing in Grandma’s breezeway, looking out over the yard, and he came walking down the side street from the cemetery. Everything was still and overcast, humid, as if there might be a storm.
He looked as I remembered, the one time I’ve seen him since high school: middle-aged heaviness, hair long and curly. He was wearing weird round little glasses, as if trying to resemble James Joyce.
Continue reading… "Widow"Newark was a bustling post-world war II metropolis, and I was maybe seven, possibly eight years old. A long time ago. There were no air-conditioned buses then and the beige-colored bus I was on had split windows; they were metal frames that slipped from the top only, down one half of the opening. On Saturdays, I rode to the church where, in the sacristy, I would polish the candelabra that decorated the main altar at Mass on Sunday. It was summer, and the sun had climbed atop the city. As I remember, the ride was like any other, for a while. My bus
Continue reading… "The Bicycle"I was on the cell phone during my mother’s last breath. I was on the cell phone. A conversation with a funeral home director can’t quite qualify as chatting, but I remember it that way, I was chatting, it was easy-going and on the surface, unhurried despite my having said earlier in the conversation “There’s not much time.” I was arranging things for the aftermath, unaware that the aftermath was forming itself in those small seconds between one question about procedure
Continue reading… "A Mother Removed"Year after year, my mother awaited those flaming red hues. The shrubs lining our rural road flaunted their fall glory in a dazzling foliage extravaganza. As we neared the scarlet hedge in the center of Goshen, Massachusetts, my mother gathered herself in anticipation. At the first glimpse, she would shout out, “Euonymus!” or something close to it. She was so proud of remembering the name. Sometimes she’d get only the first few syllables, and I’d help her with
Continue reading… "Beech Forest"Imagine this said with a brogue:
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”
I stop bending the little paper tab that holds the dress onto my paper doll. My grandmother’s voice precedes her by only a second before she looms over me.
“You were supposed to be watching him!”
Continue reading… "If Only Connemara"I stood on a pedestal, looking in the mirrors of my life and lives before me, reflected. And I waited, cocking my head, attempting to understand how I got to this point and why.
This was supposed to be an unaffected visit to my Grandfather’s home, now I was dressed in the marriage gown of his dead wife.
“Try it on,” he said, egging me on. “I’d like you to have it…see you in it.”
Continue reading… "Ancestral Song"