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RESPONSIBILITY
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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R E S P O N S I B I L I T Y When I turned twelve years old and began watching other people’s children for money—if you can call fifty cents an hour money, and if by watch you mean supervised begrudgingly with arms folded across my chest, bellowing bedtime instructions up the stairs as Mother had taught me, and if, only if the parents came home sober enough at a.m. to do the puny math in the palm of my damp hand (I was taught to be polite, never look at the bills, knew there must be small talk with grinning husbands on the sliding, sloppy ride home past dark-iced houses)— I began to have a dream I had more than once in the years to come. In it, I carried a baby I had swaddled deeply, expertly; swaddled, in fact, as though I were born knowing how to bind a body against oncoming danger. Like Moses’s take-charge sister carrying a package, which, in the transaction of dream had somehow become my life to save, I placed it gently in the middle of Delia Ave., a busy street, and skipped away. Barresi pages:Layout 1 5/12/10 1:43 PM Page 58 ...