Resistance Sondra Zeidenstein
R E S I S TA N C E
by Sondra Zeidenstein Late Afternoon Woman, chapbook A Wider Giving: Women Writing after a Long Silence (editor) The Crimson Edge: Older Women Writing, Volumes One and Two (editor) Heart of the Flower: Poems for the Sensuous Gardener (editor) A Detail in that Story, poems Family Reunion: Poems about Parenting Grown Children (editor)
R E S I S TA N C E
Sondra Zeidenstein
Chicory Blue Press, Inc., Goshen, Connecticut
Chicory Blue Press, Inc. Goshen, Connecticut 06756 © 2003 Sondra Zeidenstein. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America Book Designer: Virginia Anstett Cover art: Sondra Zeidenstein “No Small Thing” was first published in Crone’s Nest: Wisdom of the Elderwoman, number 6. “In the Tub” was first published in The Newport Review, April 2002. “The Blue Sweater,” which won Honorable Mention in the 2002 Passager poetry contest, was first published in Passager, Issue 36. “Grace” won the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Silver Award in 1999. “I Never Knew Her Last Name” and “A Walk on the Moon” are forthcoming in The Depot Anthology. I am indebted to Jill Breckenridge, Betty Buchsbaum, and Geraldine Zetzel for their informed criticism and generous encouragement. I am grateful to Cortney Davis for her close reading of every poem and her steadying advice about putting this book together. I am appreciative beyond words of my husband, George Zeidenstein, for his encouragement and love.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zeidenstein, Sondra. Resistance / Sondra Zeidenstein. p. cm. ISBN 1-887344-08-x (pbk.) I. Title. PS3576.E368D47 2003 811'.54 – dc22 2003055511
iv
for George
v
TA B L E
OF
CONTENTS
Dinner at the Lobster Pot 1 In the VW 3 Walk on the Moon 5 As Far As I Could Go on My Own 7 Words 9 Under My Skin 10 Betraying the Muse 12 Childhood 14 In the Tub 15 The Tight Sash 17 I Never Knew Her Last Name 18 Rescue 19 What Silences Us 20 Do I Count the Boy 22 After a Heavy Date 24 Trade-Off 26 Mouth Work 27 Finally 28 War, 2003 29 Reading the Dream 31 Cat in Heat 32 The Blue Sweater 34 Notes toward a Conversation with My Husband 35 Dr. Bender 37 Marriage 39 Cherished 40 Koan 41 Intensive Care 43 On the South Porch 44 Holding It All Together 45
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October 2001 47 Locusts of Beita 49 My Israel Story 50 The First Noble Truth 52 Particulars 54 Mother’s Mother 55 Father’s Birth 58 Grace 60 Big Sister 62 Little Sister 63 First Visit to Harry 65 Abigail 67 No Small Thing 69 Resistance 71 Our Fiftieth 73
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R E S I S TA N C E
DINNER
AT T H E
LOBSTER POT
you and I scanning the menu for something to share since neither of us, in our seventies, can finish a full-size platter and since I don’t eat tuna which you adore and you don’t like Provençal sauces I favor, we compromise on a single order of swordfish, salad with raspberry vinaigrette and an extra plate. Tonight while you, as divider, sacrifice the choicest piece, an odd olive, last spoonful of salty juices, I study, at the table behind you, a handsome, balding father, curly-haired mother, their chunky six-month-old who flails for the spoon as it comes again and again from the baby food jar, an appetite as definite as our son’s was. I stop taking bites of swordfish when the baby begins to fuss, and the father takes him, dances him on his knee, so mother can eat. When is he going to get impatient, red in the face? The father, I mean. Later we share a sundae, long spoons, tapered glass, extra pitcher of fudge, watch each other’s greedy spoon dig for chocolate. But I can’t concentrate.
1
I look again at the father who has put his soothed son back in the high chair where the mother is making him coo and laugh into her eyes. They’ll fuck tonight, I think to myself, this is their foreplay, recall, in a rush of bitterness, how I longed for you to adore our baby, how little by little, I lost delight in your touch. If only you’d held us – me loving our son – in your gaze, in the heat of shared love.
2
IN
THE
VW
Rides and rides in the pea-soup-green bug: to catch the ferry to Fire Island or down to the Village to see Paper Bag Players, in our twenties, with two small children. I’m in frontier pants, Oxford blue shirt, my stomach in knots getting the children washed, fed, the car packed, hair combed out of pin curls, bright lipstick blotted. Peter squirms, already restless. Laura moans she’s car sick. Your face turns red. Why didn’t I open when you moved for me in the morning? Peter kicks Laura. She pinches him back. Why didn’t I move with appetite? You aren’t a mean man. You pack them roast beef on buttered white bread, take them hiking, buy them socks and shorts at the schlock store on your way home from work.
3
I turn around to get them quiet before you explode. God damn it to hell, if you don’t shut up back there, I’ll…. once you said, smash every bone in your body. I so want us to be a happy couple, with happy children. I push in the lighter, press the glowing coils against the Lucky in your mouth, unwrap cheese crackers for Laura, fill Peter’s bottle with grape juice, we sit in the car in traffic, in fumes, on our way to the Zoo.
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WA L K
ON THE
MOON
I waited until my husband had gone all the way to Egypt, before I went to the video store to rent A Walk on the Moon, and for a week I’ve been thinking about the willowy woman with long black hair, summering in the Catskills with two young children while her hard working husband, a TV repair man, stays in the city. It’s 1964, summer of the moon walk, Woodstock just down the road, and she is ready for change, as I was, flirting furiously. After a while, she says, we need someone different to be ourselves with. For her, it’s the man who sells blouses to the summer women, for the sake of the plot, free: no wife, children, ambition, not dangerous in any way. Not my story at all. But the distant, luminous shots of their naked bodies’ wild twining under a waterfall, show me abandon the way I remember it: the only conscionable response to longing. Thank goodness my husband isn’t beside me when he kisses her with his avid, cavernous mouth, when she comes, or when the mother-in-law guesses, you’re shtupping someone, it’s the blouse man, isn’t it, or when the husband goes crazy and says, from here on, you don’t exist for me and the daughter screams, how could you break up the family and wreck my life, or when the willowy woman says, over and over,
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I’m sorry, with a wince that doesn’t convince me. The ending drags a little. She goes to the lover tending his sunflowers, says, I can’t do it, the children, etc., waits patiently for her husband to dance to the new music. And the movie is over. See, they’re tired, but smiling. Damn, I say, as I press rewind, this movie doesn’t get it right, and sit there wondering if I’ll ever see the in-spite-of-everything-I’m-glad-I-said-yes movie, the I-know-I’ve-been-to-the-moon-but-I-can’t-tell-anyone movie, that waterfall mine, forever.
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A S FA R A S I C O U L D G O
ON
MY OWN
not counting what it took to prepare for sleep – cracked clay mask to shrink my pores, plucking of eyebrow hairs just so – so I could get up next morning fresh enough to see my husband off, pack the children for school, wait with them for the bus, then last minute preps: eye shadow, mascara, smudge-y kohl, patchouli at the elbow, gold hoops, my curls, my seams, my shoes, my keys – at the bottom of my purse his key and the heart shaped shell he brought me from a Martinique beach, focused enough to find the right tokens, unclasp and clasp the change purse, spot the right stop, take myself from the child proofed apartment in the Bronx to 64th and 2nd, on guard for anyone who might catch me: what brings you here, mid-morning, mid-week?, to unlock the door, climb the stairs, then into his naked arms, his fingers undoing my bra, sliding my panties,
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things I need him to do for me, before I can let my hair uncurl, my armpits, caked with Mum, sweat through, yielding my hungry, trusting body.
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WORDS Words were not the language of my parents’ house. We expressed ourselves in whines, grunts, slobbery tears, never spoke to each other from our beds, no words in the bathroom, one after the other undressing for Mother, never whispered about fuzzy hair sprouting down there, squiggles in our armpits we had to get rid of. No-one said anything about cleaning the razor left on the tub’s edge, soapy hairs pasted to the rusting blade. In silence we went to the hidden box of Kotex. Mother never opened her mouth when Dad called her dumb or dizzy. We never said fart or burp or balls in the house of my growing up, never said how mean Dad was, never consoled each other when one of us ran from his sudden lashing, slammed herself in the bathroom, rocked her sobs against the cold tiled floor, hugged herself tight, tight, until hurt felt like love.
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UNDER MY SKIN The word skin, uttered, makes my skin crawl; acne – a word I can never say; boils I sprout at thirteen, egg-sized on arms and knees I make mother cover with gauze, ashamed to let anyone see. Mother squeezes them, she on her knees on chenille, I on the commode, our heads close, her stiff hair, my wispy hair, touching. We will never be closer. With a burnt needle she pricks, then presses: here it comes, the spilling –
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yellow ooze down my arm. Later, when pimples come, blackheads, whiteheads, pustules, I keep from mother the shame I cradle, as well as the breathless delight in front of the mirror, doing what every issue of Seventeen says I mustn’t – squeeze them, forcing sebum through clogged pores, thin worms of my seething, some of it so happy to escape, it leaps off my skin, explodes, splat! on the mirror.
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B E T R AY I N G
THE
MUSE
Since my book of poems came out last week my muse, antic girl in sequined underwear, has been wary, watches me finger the bright, clean volume I am unwilling to open, watches me watch a longtime friend take the book in her hand – How pretty it is! – and open at random, the poem, Exposure, about my wanting to write seemly poems while my muse is obsessed with nits, soap scum, smelly stuff and ending – oh god! – with a lover fucking my ass, raising a hemorrhoid. My muse watches me hold my breath as my friend compresses her lips, inclines her face, expressionless, closes the book. Watching me say nothing in her defense, not even so? what do you think?, my muse takes her self
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to the furthest corner of her domain, chilly root cellar in the vicinity of my groin, and sulks, she who’s had the run of the house for years.
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CHILDHOOD spent half naked inside the pink, Listerine-rinsed, stuttering mouth of my father, spent crouched on his purple tongue, dangling my feet in his saliva, lounging in the alcoves of his cheeks, spacious, smooth, an even heat, ah! the shvitz bath of my father’s mouth, like a spa – except for the dangers: wintergreen lifesaver, caustic, pressed against the roof, intake of nicotine, cough! cough!, crunch that severs a scallion, merciless stripping of a wish bone, sooty hawker about to let fly, but especially the stutter, when it seizes him, lips twitched, tongue gripped, jerking like the arm of a washing machine. I leap for a molar, hang on, until his unplugged anger breaks through and words whip out like a swipe or a smack so fast they wrench my neck. I stay with him through it over and over, his silent adoring daughter, inside, safer, I think. 14
IN
THE
TUB
I can’t make love of it – that I took off my clothes without a word, gave them to her to look for stains, sat erect in the tub like a corpse in flames, that she knelt on the mat and sudsed my face with a soapy rag, never spoke as she buffed me up one leg and down the other, lifted my arm, rubbed from the hairless hollow down to my wrist, a pause at the elbow to scrub against the grain, never lingering between my legs or slowing around my nipples, scoured me like a greasy pan, while I sat unyielding, hard water turning gray with scum, and daydreamed rapish kisses, held against my will 15
until I melted. I can’t make love of it but a kind of bitter union – I was saying no and having her, she was taking me with a small mouth of distaste.
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TIGHT SASH I only know myself without clothes on, aware of my bones, that my knee bones touch, knock-kneed, that my shoulder bones are round as door knobs. I reach behind to finger the marbles down my back, reach up to make my shoulder blade erupt like a wing. I believe I am smooth as shiny flanks of a horse that was stroked and whispered to in the movies. Mother covers me for bed in flannel pajamas, covers me for school in starched cotton dresses, sashes she fidgets into a bow, straightening the loops so they stand out proud, for Mother. What matters to me is that the sash be tight. I need to be cinched there, definite, like my skin. Tighter. Tighter, I whine. Or how will I hold together? Like when I am blindfolded for pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, spun around until I am dizzy, then pointed in the right direction, as if I were not displaced, as if I had a keeper and a destination.
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I NEVER KNEW HER LAST NAME When did I notice that Lucy worked in our cellar, her cheekbones shiny, hair greased stiff and straight, four times as wide as I was in 1942 when she started doing the wash for my mother, Lucy, who laughed in response to everything my mother said to her? Well, why not the cellar? That’s where the washtubs were, rough stone sinks, shoulder-deep, rub-a-dub scrub boards, later wringer, mangle, clothes chute you dropped dirty underpants in from the second floor. When did I notice Lucy was the color of chocolate, that her cheeks were apple round, that they lifted when she smiled at me, drawing out my name on her breath as if it was tasty? When did I notice the black straw hat with cherries in the band Lucy wore when she came and left through the garage, that she had her own toilet down there, hook and eye on the door, naked light bulb, blurry mirror? That she never came out of the cellar except for lunch, leftovers in a soup bowl with chunks of bread? When did I feel happy, safe in the cellar, my prospects bright for a moment in Lucy’s eyes, and carry back up a pile of clean and folded, still warm clothes? When did I start hating that my mother called Lucy the schwartze? When did I know something was wrong?
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RESCUE Cocooned as usual in daydreams I come upon my mother, without warning, sitting on a folding chair in sunshine, patch of lawn in front of our house, looking out at nothing, the privet hedge, the sidewalk, her knees, under her cotton dress, spread a little, and before I can turn away, take refuge as usual in blindness, I see my six week old sister face down on my mother’s knees, her rashy buttocks scarlet in sunshine. I see my mother’s face exposed in the light: expressionless, blank. I see her fat hand open on my sister’s back, positioning her, but not caressing, not touching with delight or welcome, and I say, Can I hold her?
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W H AT S I L E N C E S U S The man who threatened me with a screw driver when I was ten had been cruising the blacktop road below the hill when he saw me emerge from August sumac and slowed to a stop. Which is the way out of the park, he asked. My dad was still up top with my little sister, taking the long way round. I’d taken the slippery shortcut down. Go that way and when you see another road, go that, I said, a little out of breath, but confident in a flowered halter, first time alone on the steep, tangled path, my father’s lessons in my head: Keep your fingers out of crevices. Grab hold of low brush when the dirt gives way. Crouch sideways, dig in. I came onto the road flushed with pleasure, cocksure. Why don’t you get in the car and show me, he said, then, out of nowhere, Get down on the floor! I still see chipped paint on the handle, the awkward angle he held it at as he steered. I see rolled-up white sleeve – it was Sunday. He wore his shirt open at the collar. I hated it hunched in the dust, sour smell, old newspapers turning to mash, torn rubber mat. But I was not scared. Who in white shirt sleeves, clean shaven, hair clipped neatly up his neck like dad’s, would hurt me? Are you alone? he asked And when I said, No, my dad’s up there, he let me out. I just wanted to teach you a lesson. Now I was scared.
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What if my father sees dust and grit in the creases of my knees? What if he blames me? No, I’d promise, he didn’t touch me, anywhere. But when I search my father’s rimless glasses, small brown eyes – nothing. And, like the stranger in the car, nothing is written on my face to give me away.
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DO I COUNT
THE
fifteen or so, stranger, leaning down at me, smiling, offering his hand to lift me out of the deep end of the pool? I was twelve, proud of my two-piece daisy yellow bathing suit. He must like me, I thought, my shiny face, water-beaded lashes, why shouldn’t he? my back stroke, my straight-legged kick pounding the water. I smile up at him, position my toes, reach and give him my hand. Suddenly, he yanks me up so hard, so fast my yellow top is stripped up my breasts, their puffiness exposed, changelings I don’t yet know if I like, and when he has me dangling, 22
BOY
half out of the pool, half naked in his grin, he lets me go and I splash down fast, my head goes under, chlorine rushes my brain, burns like shame.
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AFTER
A
H E AV Y D A T E
Once inside the head-high hedge that surrounds the castle of my father’s house, the boyfriend grows cumbersome, extra baggage when I need to travel light. With a hurried brush of my lips, I dismiss him and hunch in the arched brick doorway yellowed by bug-repelling light, evening bag clamped in my armpit. Above me, my father leans in his French Provincial bed, hairs on his wrist lifting as I wriggle the key in the cylinder of the wide-planked door. It is not going to budge. Sweat mixes with brass in my palm. What if my fumbling summons my father? What if he catches me – twisted nylons, crushed blouse, telltale smudges of delight? I clutch the curved handle, thumb on the black latch. What if you have to get in fast? – my father would lecture each of his dumb faithful daughters,
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but never explained why the key always stuck in the keyhole – doorframe swollen, bolt unable to slide out of the striker. Just do what I show you. I yank the door toward me. The key slides as if greased. Did you turn out the lights, dearie?, he says, as my shadow passes his door. I sleep in cool ironed sheets, rise in the prim guise of morning, shielded again for battle, this frenzy to pass from one man’s kingdom to the next.
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TRADE-OFF Yesterday morning, police in the town next to ours detained a Muslim Indian, today our soldiers are bombing Kundahar, the Tora Bora caves, men in power assert they know what’s best for us. No-one protests, and I think of my soft-lipped, square-shouldered dad, his fedora, midnight blue suit, rimless glasses, bully, who made fun of my mother, his words like razor cuts, while his daughters cringed. I think of mother, who never cried, never fought back or defended me when, later, he turned his fury my way and I pinched my thigh to keep from crying. What does my long dead father have to do with 2000 ton, 5000 ton bombs, with thermal imaging weapons that target traces of breath, with cluster bombs the color of food packets? I live on a country road, with no dog, no gun. It is freezing today. I think of pastel sweater sets my father watched me lift out of crackly tissue paper, of the baby grand in our living room, of the tasseled velvet bell rope that served for a stair rail. I remember the expensive red coat he bought me, wide lapel, ample belt, how soft it was, how cozy-warm.
26
MOUTH WORK All tenderness banished, my lover, about to come, pins his clenched jaw against my mouth and all I can do is pray my porcelain crowns won’t crack or be sucked from my gums. After the diligence of years, the grinding of crowded teeth to stumps, mouthfuls of plaster, temporaries’ wobble, the wreck of gingivitis, suppurating gums, torturous scraping and stitching, the repair, all I can do is hold still and pray my mouth will not give way beneath his jolting.
27
F I N A L LY Don’t ask me again, my husband screams, red-faced, puffed like a miffed pigeon. So I ask him again. But I don’t understand, I dare. You would, he shouts, if you weren’t talking so much. I’m talking just the right amount, I shout back and pouf!, it’s over. Finally I can stand up for myself. Even speak up for my vagina which, as we’d begun to make love on Sunday, felt dry and burny: Don’t put it in. I’m not ready, the sharp, inelegant voice of self-protection. Finally I understand why, yellow from anesthesia, smelling of disinfectant after my surgery, when a lover insisted we meet, saying wounds turned him on, groggy, numb, I let him fuck me; why, after my gingivitic gums were scraped, gauze packing the gum line where the wound was draining, and he pressed his clenched jaw against my mouth when he came, I let him. I even felt special. I didn’t know I wanted to be held, to be comforted, what I wanted was compassion, as much as I have felt for every woman who, with broken nose, kicked shins, stays with the man who makes her fuck a stranger, though I couldn’t imagine until now why she didn’t just walk away.
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WA R , 2 0 0 3 I was sick of him: his coke habit, of being summoned to the city, of telling lies, scared of that lover who had the power to trap me across the table from my husband, where are you, I want you now, that voice spilling out the earpiece over sectioned grapefruit, serrated spoons, the telephone tied to its cradle on coiled cord. I couldn’t afford to relax, had to get to him before he called, up 64 floors on a whoosh, past cubicles of curious women, his secretary’s complicit smile as she buzzed to announce me: she’s here. Hold the calls, he tells her. On his wall, bloated, cigar chewing bankers, half stripped molls, and I am burning in his arms. Once, I kneeled under his desk, his cock in my mouth, buying a couple of weeks. And now that terror again, expressionless face of our generals: we are killing them, the man, his hunger, his penetration, invading my parlor, my bedroom, reaching under my duvet, my storms open an inch or two to the chilly night
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in which forsythia are budding. And if, this time, I appease them, if I close my eyes to how brutish they are, I am in their power again.
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READING
THE
DREAM
I’m being shown around a Department of Public Health successful in meeting the needs of the people. I am attentive, polite, but not impressed by my guide who says to me, later, as we move toward the cafeteria: I hear you’re an anthropologist. No, I demur, but before I can say my degrees are in literature, he takes my hesitation to mean I don’t have a profession, wants me to know he excuses me for that, he’s a family man and understands how much time the care of children requires, and before I can say what I am, rattles off his degrees: B.S., M. Pimm, whatever that is, and a list of honoraria, capped with a Disney award. I shut up. Then, in the dream, I’m ahead of him in a narrow aisle, but instead of waiting for me to go through first, he moves past me sideways, his front to mine, groin to groin, inches apart, and by the time he’s ahead of me in the line, I’m aroused, I can’t wait to fuck him. The dream, precise as an x-ray, reveals me: all it takes is a man who needs to show he’s superior, like my father, a man who steps uninvited into my space as if I’m his, and I’m trapped. The more I swallow, the hotter I get.
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C AT
IN
H E AT
Last night under my window screech of a she-cat, harrowing scream to be heard for miles by toms under a misty quarter moon, under stars, under Venus, tough orange cat who never asks anything of anyone. This morning still here, bedraggled, spent, fucked silly, her cry diminished: hep, hep, but still alerting the robins, poor thing brought low by an ache in the pelvis. And I remember the worst of it: how feverish I was one night in bed after a party where a handsome, foreign man asked me to dance, held me close, routine flirtation for him but I was stunned by his body, wordless in his arms. All night I lay on fire, hollowed out, receptacle aching to be filled, calling it longing, desire, unable not to yield.
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I made it my pride, my badge in the world, called myself independent woman taking my pleasure.
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T H E B L U E S W E AT E R I wear a purple sun hat and Peter Limmer boots, stride in the bright thin air of Sherpa country, sprawl in the shade of a bodhi tree and suddenly, in the darkened room, watching my husband’s slides after thirty years, I am a liar again. Under the purple hat, my eyes are guarded. No-one knows I am not what I seem. “I’d forgotten that wonderful sweater,” my husband says, hand-knit, navy blue, cable-stitched I wore against morning chill. I am young again, brushing my teeth beneath the great snows, washing my hair in a clear swift stream, the weight of my boots holding me firm in mud. “Great pattern of diamonds,” he says. I am young again, trying on sweaters for my lover, lying in his arms, in our stains. The heat that flushes my body in the dark behind the projector is not desire. It’s the squirm of deceit. What I want now is clarity: my smile etched with wrinkles, my husband’s blue eyes.
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N O T E S T O WA R D A C O N V E R S A T I O N WITH MY HUSBAND What I think makes me wary, makes me hold my breath when I’m near you, is how many times you’ve read my poems about my long-ago love affairs and the way things are between us now, thorny and loving. Five times, you say; some of them more than five. How perfectly I place my words, you tell me, turning them over like pebbles. Are they moist underneath? What is the depth of the hollow they fit in? Sometimes I think you’ve lost your way in their shadows, tracking the woman I’ve written the poems to understand, you’re losing sight of these fleshy arms, this shape moving in sunlight, under a faded pink hat. Sometimes, at the slatted green table, taking dinner in the summer air, you look in my eyes to find her, the one who rocked in other men’s arms, not this woman greedy for every bird call in the dusk until all are quiet but the hermit thrush. I feel you pushing through me when we make love to find the passion you think escaped you, as if I’m not pressed to you, making kissing sounds up and down your body.
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Then I am furious, want to roll out from under, push you away, lie with the air consoling my body – want to nourish old grudges: you bullied our son when he was a baby! you think fucking is what matters most! But I don’t roll away. I come back to myself, weathered, stay in your arms, embrace your kindness now, embrace this tough life that gives us so few chances to get it right.
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George Zeidenstein
Resistance gets it right: poem after poem like brick upon brick builds a yes to life. We hear the complexity of power, its brutal hold on a woman, and we see its strength to make action, courage and change. I don’t know when I’ve felt more inside the pages of a book. Witness to wars at home and in the Middle East, Pakistan and Ireland, these poems speak a truth our hearts open to because Zeidenstein has crafted them to enter our bodies. I must give them to my sister and friends, these poems of hot, tough, sweet love that say “look, look what we have created.” – MYRA SHAPIRO
Sondra Zeidenstein is author of A Detail in that Story and editor of Family Reunion: Poems about Parenting Grown Children, The Crimson Edge: Older Women Writing, A Wider Giving: Women Writing after a Long Silence and Heart of the Flower: Poems for the Sensuous Gardener. She lives in Goshen, Connecticut.
$16.00
ISBN 1-887344-08-X