Photography by John Vachon, Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress, LC-USF33-T01-001905-M5
Fabric stores, running your hand on the glossy rectangles stapled with buttons, yellow, white, pink. Spools of thread, shining like blue and green hair. Your mother at the Singer, sewing dresses. Back in school, sitting next to the seething steam radiator, you fold your hands on your kidney-shaped desktop. It’s one of the first days of school in your new itchy sweater, a dark spot of sweat on your chest, like your heart is leaking condensation. All the way down the hall, loafers squeaking, you imagine a thought bubble over each foot like in the comics, imagining just what your shoes could be complaining about today.
One night your mother cooks a chicken; you and your sister pull the wishbone apart. You get the big half. You wish you were a clever princess, a pirate, a girl in a book, frozen and graceful like the mermaids in the fountain, anything to get away from the bore of the day, the burrs in socks, soaping off the plates and the water glasses, handing them to your sister to dip in the rinse water. You could mark a gray X on the calendar for every day that is not Halloween or Christmas—maybe a green one for the days you go downtown on the streetcar with your grandma and your sisters to the department stores. In September, the night falls faster and faster and the crickets get quieter every night, and there’s a choky, weird sadness that you don’t know how to describe. It feels like a premonition, you older and like your mother, drinking coffee, reading newspapers, cooking, steam coming off a pan of boiling water in the early evening. And kids, slamming the screen door hard. Then the ring of a telephone, not the wrong number but the wrong receiver, a lady looking for someone who is not you. You will take your hand and rip the phone cord right out of the wall, you will grab the artery filled with dull, sparking witchery and you will put a stop to it, you will pull it out by the roots, you will evoke the name of Jesus.
It is a terrible but divine electrocution, a moment of devastation, realizing how love and grace hide in the gray containers of the dull day-to-day, the making of lunches, the over-and-over of “Happy Birthday to You.” You wash your face in the kitchen sink. You walk out the door to the neighbor’s house and ask to use the phone. It’s an emergency. You have to call your sister.
