Slumber Party

Eight 13-year-old girls spent the night at Marianne Wagner’s, classmates, born nine years after the earth turned over or three after it settled, immigrants, Germans and Jews. But that’s history. Mama’s only reproof was in her eyes. They ate breakfast at the round kitchen table round which Vater Wagner stalked in silence his ice-blue gaze fixed on little semites. They cast off his stares as spring buds shed winter frost burgeoning into the sunlight. But years later the chill peered out at them from the unexpected contraction of time: insidious development invidious envelopment— yesterday it was history and today it is yesterday.