White Trash

Walking toward the river, I saw—well, I didn't know what I saw.I'd never seen so many—how many?ten? twelve?—snowy egretsat once, in a single treeoverhanging the river, then realizedit must be trash of some kindas if from a great flood, but still strange,

as there had been no floodthat great, not here, or recently,and even if there had been, whywere these paper towels or plastic bagsin no other trees, only depositedin this one tree, as if anointed,and besides, they looked so white,more like pieces of the sky

that had flooded downward and then receded up,or as if memory had left them,forgotten them therelike beauty scars. Twice surrealwas the tear in the waking fabric—once that they were there,and once that trash could be so beautiful.It reminded me of toilet paper

I'd seen streaming down the treesof the high school a few months back—May, some graduation rite—they looked, in the sweep of headlights,like the binding ties of Apollinaire'srain. And just like that,decades pass. The tragedy of childhoodis its plasticity, that it will assume any shape

impressed upon it, a word like "never"dropped one part per billioninto the heart's clear watercan seize and bend it into a hideous,oil-scaled, black swan. The toilet paperhanging from the trees in the morningwas an annunciation,a violation of a deeper rain

I didn't participate in clearing.It was the first night I'd ever spentaway from my mother's house.All her efforts to shield mefrom the world's assaultcould not have predicted the cornerfrom which actual threat would come.There was said to be a prison

somewhere beyond the Florida holly.the tall barbed wire. And that wasfear—a mad convict with a knifewho'd cut into your flesh like melonas if your own life wasn't waitingto destroy you. Your life which could bein secret slowly engineeredto be a steady instrument of torment.

And the conversation was as innocent,that is, as creepy, as a doll houseall slit open in its backsidefor hands to reach into the underloinsof the puppets—abouthow all the girls the night beforein their barracks before bedhad picked which boys they would marry.

I was sitting at a picnic tablein the cafeteria with a friendI'd met the day before,and the girl telling this

who had found him to tell himhe was her picked husband,said no one, when my friend askedwho had picked me. We asked, she said,

but no one wanted to. Birds are shotout of the sky every day,and it's no big tragedy.Some of them are carried backin the jaws of faithful dogsand others flake apartinto the swamp. I can see nowmany things I couldn't then.

The cast of the girls, for example,in their bunk barracks—night gowns and nail polish,early hormonal washeslike underwater beesbuzzing before the dawn—the sea-swell I was blind tothen, and so I had to be nothing

on those paper sands, a parasailcamouflaged the color of the sky.Or, how all this might have meant nothingmore than being a work of artunnoticed for centuries,instead of the meanings that swarmed me—'no one likes me,' 'no one will everwant to marry me,'

'I will never be happy.'I didn't know I was buildingthe house I would live inand need to escape, for years,how I began that very instant,furiously, where no one couldstop me. When I returnedin the yellow schoolbus, two days later,

to my mom and dad,they would have seen I was safe,returned whole, unharmed, and not seenthe lantern turned off in my eyes,or the hands slit throughthe doll house, like the apartmentbuilding on the...