For Mrs. Sullivan
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- For Mrs. Sullivan
Your death was for the best, they all agreed, for the best.
In the photograph my plump parents raise a toast to the camera—china and crystal sparkling with the sequins adorning my mother’s bodice.
My first cruise—from Djakarta to Genoa—thirty days of cards, shuffleboard, dips in the ship’s pool.
We loved our purchased boredom.
Our cabin was a dollhouse: tiny furniture crammed in make-believe space for tiny people—like you Sullivans next door:
your husband and Karen, compact, athletic; you, sickly small, wasting your way toward invisible.
Something ghastly in that emphatic smile stretched to the max, about to snap.
At the on-deck service I failed to cry for you, then cried at my failure. Dry-eyed Karen grabbed my hand and sneaked me a toffee.
We sucked our forbidden candy and bit down hard on our giggles [End Page 19]
while the others murmured and nodded for the best, for the best.
Five-two and eighty pounds—aphasic, drunk, unmotherly— you slid into the China Sea without a splash.
The white sheet that was your shroud, lingered on the surface unfurling, then surrendered. [End Page 20]
Peg Boyers, the executive editor of Salmagundi, is the author of two books of poetry.
