Rosemary Inchoate, and: Faddle on Fiddle in the Water
Rent from DeepDyve- Rosemary Inchoate, and: Faddle on Fiddle in the Water
Rosemary Inchoate
What can’t be said: the undone, every hair of ribbon scrapeduntil I shed. Tittit tongue oh fat trouble. A thin stroke and bisss. One slit. He couldn’t take that other mouth fast rose talked to soldiers on her own— he couldn’t take my hand that slapped the petals offthe hardest rose. No slack tightrope over lumps the big ditch can’t be jumped.Kick her, You nuss, Pitpat. Me so many years locked up, [End Page 160] then he,castle moated I go around around every summer ocean. Toy ruins, Missy, the faraway smiles.
Her father, Joseph P. Kennedy, decided that Rosemary, who was mildly mentally handicapped, should undergo a lobotomy, then an experimental procedure. The surgery left her largely incapacitated; she spent most of the rest of her life in a Catholic facility in Wisconsin and may never have seen some of her family members again.
Faddle on Fiddle in the Water
Fiddle came to college named her baby name, the mash made when she couldn’t spit Priscilla out.I was Jill, the older girl. Then we fell in together. One S backed to anotherS, each side a little swoon. &I got out. Followed that tune, “High Hopes,” [End Page 161] pitched into his smile. She followed. We wonfor him, & he had us. &Jill came off in the maison blanc, 1961. They dubbed me Faddle. We debuted as twins of the luncheon swim. The suits Dave Powers gave usdraped baggy & old. Silly skirts & tucks around the bosom. We brought our own, then oftenleft them in the locker altogether. & The President never called us dear or honey, used slurs, made distinctions. Who was who? Tittle and tattle, we’d laugh, saddleand riddle. Here’s one: everything began to sound dirty but she & I felt clean, playing in the happy suck,fresco palm trees waving on the walls, all the warm pontoons. [End Page 162] Breathing over my shoulder, he’d slide in, ask is that all right? A twitch. & then he’d go to her.He acted naughty, never grasped at anyone because there was enough,a cup that filled again with cream as soon as we lapped it up. & His wife passed overhead as a high breeze skims the ocean, never condensed like us. &Back in the office, chlorine masked the ooze odor of the typing pool: pink lipstick swiped one, two, starched collars smoothed. Fiddle banged metal letters through layers of paper & carbon. [End Page 163] I hung sheets that spit out from the Telex. Under our skirts a rosy ring around, around the days. & That ended with a bolt to his head.Bits of skin with the russet clips we’d primped splattered on hot black metal, red & pink, pink red, slick spray, all the women blasted out of him. & Expelled us, nearly naked, into winter. & Fiddle married well. I went back to school to study Persian arabesques, the interlace of twinning strands— they have no bodies. Then Bobby died. Then Teddy got away from death, a woman clinging underwater. & I had the nightmare several times: a face [End Page 164] smashed against the windshield of a car overturned, filling with pond. I could see only the pinkpress ofher lips turned out, the nose mashed flat. Could wonder only had they kissed? Did she have a twin back at the party in a pout? What bubbled from her mouth? Then it hit me. Oh Fiddle, I pounded the glass. I couldn’t break you out.
Priscilla Wear and Jill Cowen volunteered for the Kennedy presidential campaign in August 1960. The next January, they joined the staff of the West Wing. Both women were lovers of the president. [End Page 165]
Jean Kane is a poet, critic, and fiction writer. She has published a collection of poetry, Make Me (Otis Nebula), and her work appears in the Georgia Review, American Short Fiction, Fogged Clarity, and other journals. She teaches at Vassar College.
