The City She Was

Sometimes There’s a Virgin

46 The Terms When the telephone rings, I let it ring; it’s a term of my exile. I can allow ten feet of rope out the window and only four birds may visit the telephone wires outside. Figure it out, they tell me. I can’t look forward or to the future or to the door of eggs and wives, and only three hold jailer’s keys. My hands, coy companions, look terrifying now, like claws or cloying snakes. If the window is open and a parade passes, then I must close the window. Some terms involve windows, although I only have one. Terms about how much I can say about the president. About how many cigarettes I can smoke.The length of my veil.Can I play Aaron Copland at five? One that insists I read recovery narratives: tracts in yellow ink. My exile has terms that aren’t proscribed.Pushed out of shape and stretched,a price I fret over like the mishap of my hands over my face, the metropolitan succubus. I can tell my past with abstract brushstrokes only. Black or white. I can’t even give a detail, tell you I was too young to see what I did, or about the length of my reveries. I am to memorize old maxims, then apply them as curative to my impertinent torso. ...