Closet Prayer

Closet Prayer —for Gerald It just happens, maybe it started in Phoenix, 1987, the kitchen table ofa Vietnamese Buddhist temple (a tract house, actually, where the novice monk had hair because he worked for a software company— "Don't tell anybody," he said to me, "but I'm not that great—"). Across from me, a Vietnamese couple, they want to tell me, the American, their story: how he was sent to prison, leaving her alone with their child; how she sent medicine, food, clothing to him but the guards took it all; how she sent the child to school one day, immunization day, and the shot was contaminated, and after three days the child died. "You Americans, you had everything," the man says to me. "You had guns, you had money and power. You had everything, and you lost the war." We did have everything. I don't even know what Fm doing, it's strange, like calling yourself "Mrs." and feeling it must apply to Someone Else. Still, undeniably, today when I remember that child, my mother and her brother who are now dying of cancer, the mailman on break drowsing in the back ofhis truck, and, in the yards I pass, lobelia, jasmine, Meyer's lemon, bunch grass, Gregory saying "Green pea soup!" (our only meal together) on the phone shortly before he died ofAIDS, when I remember these things they make a kind of space in my life, like the Big One that didn't come around one a.m. after two temblors from the Hayward Fault. My husband and I braced in the bathroom doorway, clutching our son, fast asleep, between us, waiting for the earth to gape, gas pipes burst, windows shatter, houses crack in half, but nothing happened. 50 At least, I thought there was nothing, but something seems to have sneaked in, and though for lack of anything better I say prayer there are no words it is directed at no one and who exactly it comes from I don't know. Patricia Y. Ikeda 51 ...