It was a kind of torture—waiting
to be kissed. A dark car parked away
from the street lamp, away from our house
where my tall father would wait, his face
visible at a pane high in the front door.
Was my mother always asleep? A boy
reached for me, I leaned eagerly into him,
soon the windshield was steaming.

Midnight. A neighbor’s bedroom light
goes on, then off. The street is quiet…

Until I married, I didn’t have my own key,
that wasn’t how it worked, not at our house.
You had to wake someone with the bell,
or he was there, waiting. Someone let you in.
Those pleasures on the front seat of a boy’s
father’s car were “guilty,??? yet my body knew
they were the only right thing to do,

my body hated the cage it had become.

One of those boys died in a car crash;
one is a mechanic; one’s a musician.
They were young and soft, and, mostly, dumb.
I loved their lips, their eyebrows, the bones
of their cheeks, cheeks that scraped mine raw,
so I’d turn away from the parent who let me
angrily in. And always, the next day,

no one at home could penetrate the fog
around me. I’d relive the precious night
as if it were a bridge to my new state
from the old world I’d been imprisoned by,
and I’ve been allowed to walk on it, to cross
a border—there’s an invisible line
in the middle of the bridge, in the fog,
where I’m released, where I think I’m free.

“Desire??? by Gail Mazur from Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems. © University of Chicago Press.

December 4, 2005

It seemed like just a short while ago. In fact 60 years have past since that time. Amazing. I sat on the kitchen floor playing, but mostly looked up at the adults gathered around the large table, talking incomprehensibly about grown up things ignoring what children may have been around to hear their incessant chattering.
At some point, my mother’s voice caught my attention and she also had the attention of all the adults present. The only thing I can specifically recall hearing her say was a story about her pregnancy with me several years earlier. She said, “We were eating watermelon (it was July, 1942) when someone spit out a watermelon seed and it flew across the room and hit me in the forehead and I threw my hand up to my forehead and said ‘Oh my God, my baby’s going to be marked!’???
Of course, when I was born I indeed was marked in the exact spot (or so she claimed) where the watermelon seed had hit her on her forehead. I would now have a decidedly unattractive little growth of skin on my left forehead for the next 13 years of my life. And it was not a simple mole. It was a small chunk of skin with little appendages coming from its base which I would occasionally pick at with my fingernails perhaps thinking I could scrape it off like a scab. While I could not pick it off my head I sometimes did cause it to bleed which of course produced a real scab which I then had to pick at some more.
As I said, this went on until one wonderful day in 1955 when my mother and I went to the good doctors office where he proceeded to electrically burn off the offending protuberance (no lasers back then) from my forehead never to be seen or felt again. I could now go out in public and not feel like the “Hunchback of Notre Dame???. (Hunchhead?)
Alas, I can hear my sister now (perhaps rightly so) noting how our mother never did anything about the large mole on her cheek! I understand now how she would have considered such a thing as horribly disfiguring although when I was younger I actually thought it made her look like a movie star. Nevertheless she would protest (again, rightly so) that she thought I was mothers pet. I used to object to that characterization but must admit she was probably correct and I am very sorry for the pain all of that must have caused her, although I cannot take responsibility for what our mother thought or did with her four children. Parents (myself included) often do the dumbest things to their kids. I still wonder how any of us made it to adulthood at all, and so many of those who did suffered terribly and will we ever really grow up as a species of beings on this planet? We’ll see.
I love you, Cookie.