The Rooms of My Childhood

Of the first room I remember only a crib below an open window with a moving cloud of a curtain blown by a summer breeze But it may have been my brother’s crib or my baby sister’s Each of us on the heels of the other with barely enough time to anticipate to adjust And through the window my mother hanging the laundry turning her head quickly to avoid the wind driven wash shoeless even in the snow The way my father loved her best barefoot and pregnant My grandmother used to say Of my second room after we moved from the country to the suburbs I remember very little at first sleeping while awake leading orchestras in a locked room After being chased by a monitor With an arm band At recess—at the new school PS 170 and sliding in the gravel on my face A lost period of time a lost room Of the room of my growing up shared with my sisters First one Then both I remember every tiny detail I can count every knot on the knotty pine walls feel the fever in my wrists as the knots whirl off into space Of a black and tan puppy its shuddering fur woven through my hot fingers a cooling glass of juice the color of crayon slipping down my fevered throat the silly puppy lapping it off my chin wounding me with sharp claws and puppy teeth My oldest sister is as always across the chasm of the stairwell reading The flashlight a telling glow through the sheets And my baby sister who joined us later in her narrow bed beside the sloping wall another chasm of just five years a stranger We left her in that big room and moved to our rooms in the basement built by my father during the embarrassing years of his unemployment With our own entrance and an exit on the back alley transition to the grown up world to come Montclair, NJ, 2005