In the Old Neighborhood

To pull yourself up by your own roots; to eat the last meal in your own neighborhood.

—Adrienne Rich, “Shooting Script”

Raccoons have invaded the crawl space of my sister’s bridal apartment. The landlord insists they’re squirrels; squirrels he’ll fight, not raccoons— too ferocious and faggy, licking their black-gloved paws.

My mother works up a sudsbath of worries: what if the corsages are too small, if the candles accidentally ignite the reverend’s sleeve?

Father prefers a more reticent glory. He consoles his roses dusts them with fungicide, spades in fortified earth. Each summer he brandishes color over the neighborhood, year after year producing lovelier mutants: these bruised petticoats, for instance, or this sudden teacup blazing empty, its rim a drunken red smear.

I am indoors, pretending to read today’s paper as I had been taught twenty years before: headlines first, lead story (continued on A-14), followed by editorials and local coverage. Even then I never finished, snared between datelines—Santiago, Paris, Dakar—names as unreal as the future even now.

My brother rummages upstairs; I skip to the daily horoscope. I’ve read every book in this house, I know which shelf to go to to taste crumbling saltines (don’t eat with your nose in a book!) and the gritty slick of sardines, silted bones of no consequence disintegrating on the tongue….

That was Romeo and Juliet, strangely enough, and just as odd stuffed green olives for a premature attempt at The Iliad. Candy buttons went with Brenda Starr, Bazooka bubble gum with the Justice League of America. Fig Newtons and King Lear, bitter lemon as well for Othello, that desolate conspicuous soul. But Macbeth demanded dry bread, crumbs brushed from a lap as I staggered off the cushions contrite, having read far past my mother’s calling.

The rummaging’s stopped. Well, he’s found it, whatever it was. Bee vomit, he said once, that’s all honey is, so that I could not put my tongue to its jellied flame without tasting regurgitated blossoms. In revenge, I would explicate the strawberry: how each select seed chose to bread in darkness, the stomach’s cauldron brewing a host of vines trained to climb and snap a windpipe shut—then watched my brother’s eyes as Mom sliced the red hearts into sugar and left them to build their own improbable juice.

I fold the crossword away, walk back to the kitchen where she’s stacked platters high with chicken and silvery cabbage. Lean at the sink, listen to her chatter while the pressure cooker ticks whole again whole again now.

Out where the maple tree used to stand there once was a tent (official Eagle Scout issue): inside a young girl weeping and her brother twitching with bravado because their father, troop leader in the pitched dark, insisted they’d love it by morning.

(Let me go back to the white rock on the black lawn, the number stenciled in negative light. Let me return to the shadow of a house moored in moonlight, gables pitched bright above the extinguished grass, and stalk the hushed perimeter, roses closed around their scent, azaleas dissembling behind the garage and the bugeyed pansies leaning over, inquisitive, in their picketed beds.

What are these, I’ll ask, stooping to lift the pale leaves, and these? Weeds, my father mutters from his pillow. All weeds.)

Chink. Chink. Sound made by a starling, the first hot morning in June, when Dad switched on the attic fan and nothing stirred—faraway then a chink-chip-shiver, whittled breath of a bird caught in the blades.

We each dropped our books and ran to identify the first tragedy of the season: baby sister run down or a pebbly toad the lawn mower had shuffled into liver canapes— each of us thinking At least I’m not the one. Who could guess it would be a bird with no song, no plumage worth stopping for? Who could think up a solution this anonymous, a switch flipped on reverse to blow the feathers out?

“—tea...