Oh, we’d talked of other lives in other places,
But where would we have gone, anyway?
(It was rural Pennsylvania in the thirties,
And being well-off meant you ate three times most days
And could afford meat every other Sunday)
So we carried on in anguish and guilt as old-maids-in-waiting
As there were dinners to cook and cows to strip out,
Fireplaces to stoke, any number of chores to do
While our mothers and fathers waited patiently for that day
When we would, each in our turn, don a grandmother’s wedding gown
And march steadfastly down some acceptably Protestant aisle
While Gert Bauer, default church organist
Though she was past eighty and nearly blind,
Tortured the wedding march, flubbing notes and stomping pedals
The tune lurching forward at an inconsistent
And unusually adagio fashion.
As it turns out, Tojo and Adolph Schicklgruber
Interceded on our behalf,
For, as the young and able-bodied men of Elk County went off to serve
(Farm boys from Wilcox and Kersey, pool sharps from Ridgway,
Fully half the production line from the paper mill in Johnsonburg)
Someone needed to man punch presses and die casters,
So we were able to find work making propellers
In a windowless and airless factory
Which didn’t have women’s rooms
Until we’d been there for three months
Allowing us to set up house together
(We told our parents
It would allow us to save up toward our weddings,
And still let us give them grocery money each couple of weeks.)
Eventually, Johnny came marching home again
And back into his old job,
Which left us somewhat at sixes and sevens,
But, like Blanche DuBois,
We came to depend on the kindness of strangers
Who believed in the value
Of strong backs or the primacy of civil service scores
And so with our steady if unspectacular incomes,
We were able to carry on keeping house, as it was said,
(Our parents sadly unpacking hope chests.
Sullenly gifting us the linens
They’d purchased for our marital bed at Larson’s,
The hand-made quilt stitched and fussed over
For nine months by Aunt Jenny)
And maintain an uneasy truce with the good people of the town;
Indeed, we were all about “don’t ask, don’t tell”
Long before it was somewhat fashionable.
When it became apparent that she would not carry on much longer,
Or, as she put it, Now I’ve got an expiration date,
Just like a can of soup,
It was as if the populace had decided, after some sixty years,
To take their revenge upon our ******* of the natural order,
As if they were a pack of wolves,
Having identified the lame and the sick among a herd of whitetail,
Tightening the circle before moving in for the ****.
In truth, I shouldn’t have been surprised,
But the pettiness and the tight, self-satisfied smirks
Were no less painful in spite of that.
And what was your relationship to the deceased?
They would say with their half-knowing, half-offended smiles.
I’d wanted to shout at the top of my lungs that for fully six decades
She had been the love of my life,
Without question and without deviation,
Not like the banker who dallied with his fat secretary,
Or the claims rep who, taking a personal day when her pipes froze up,
******* the plumber right on the kitchen floor,
But years of secrecy and compromise exact a toll,
So I simply, quietly, matter-of-factly would reply
I am the executrix, thank you.
We had talked of perhaps heading west
To make honest women out of each other,
And, later still, of burying her in Paris or San Francisco,
But tight times and walkers and wheelchairs
Made such plans unworkable;
It’s only parchment and granite, she said,
What do they mean at the end of the day, anyhow,
And so when the time came
She asked me to take her ashes up to the top of Bootjack Hill
And scatter her to the wind.
Make sure to go all the way to the top, she insisted,
*I want to get good and clear of this place.
