Dear Sylvia,
BY LAURA READ
I also had a Mademoiselle summer,
I mean a summer in New York,
though I was only 9, and you were 21,
and you were writing for Mademoiselle
and I was only being called one
by my grandpa who addressed me
as Mademoiselle Lorraine because
I wanted to go to France.
How did I invent this dream for myself?
I thought Paris was black and white
with splashes of pink. One thing that’s real
is that when Marie-Claire picked us up
from Charles de Gaulle, she definitely said,
Look out your windows for rabbits.
I was sitting on the floor of the van
she’d borrowed to pick up Les Americains,
but I got up on my knees to see all
the bunnies. I haven’t eaten since Tuesday
because I have to have a colonoscopy.
It feels like floating in a light I think
you would call blue and planetary.
During my Mademoiselle summer,
my brother and I stayed three weeks
with our dead father’s parents.
I had brought only one skirt
that I didn’t know I’d be required
to draw lines of water over with an old
toothbrush every night and hang
in the bathroom while I showered
so that it would be wrinkle-free
for 8:00 a.m. mass, where I accompanied
Nanny while my brother and grandpa slept.
Apparently, men don’t need to pray
for forgiveness. The skirt was white.
If I’d known, I’d have brought a different
one so I wouldn’t have looked every morning
like an advertisement for purity,
a state you both desired (baths)
and despised (sex).
During your Mademoiselle summer,
you threw all your skirts out the window
of the Barbizan Hotel.
My grandfather was strange.
That’s what people say when they don’t want to
speak ill of the dead.
He used to cover up the television
with a sheet and then sit with us
on the plastic-covered couch until
we obliged him by laughing.
At every meal, he announced
that this was our home. This was frightening.
On the subway, Nanny pulled a roll
of saran wrap out of her purse
and wrapped me in it because I was cold.
Once on the street, she pointed at a man
and yelled, That man wants to rape you!
I felt sorry for the man who put his hands up
and fled. Perhaps he was Everyman, and this
was one of her lessons, but it felt too specific.
I have to say though that it stuck. Whenever
I see a man, I wrap myself in my grandmother’s
invisible plastic. Once in the subway,
we saw a body. The police were taping off
the area. There was blood around the head.
It was like our trip to Brooklyn in 1979
had been written to be written. Like the summer
of 1953 when you began to break down.
Today I am hungry in a way
that makes me realize I have never been hungry.
On the last day of fourth grade, my teacher told us
she was moving to Australia.
I went home and flung myself down on my bed
and cried without thinking, I’m going to cry now,
and thought, oh so all that other crying was made up?
This is finally it? Mrs. Welch?
