Holding the Family Together

Holding the Family Together After midnight, driving a sliver of back country road between two steel cities, I remember the article I read last week about the awful things that happen to women out after dark in cars. Outside is nothing but forest and frozen creek bed, patches of black ice on the highway, and safety has become the soft melding of gears I'm counting on to get me home. Thirty years ago, "home" was only me and my father, eating our meals in silence by the radio. I was frightened then as the small animals, whose eyes shine beside the road my headlights illuminate, then flood with dark, in a time so fast they cannot comprehend it. My father said he was holding the family together, the way Edith Piaf, singing now on the radio, holds a song together through marching band music, carousel rhythms, an abrupt modulation to a minor key. Cétait pas moi, I sing along, trying to make the dark companionable as I hit a pothole and order my tires not to blow out here. If I needed help, and if it came, it would be another thing to fear, like sharp tree limbs, or the knife blades my father would flash through the yellow kitchen, saying, These, you see, could kill us both. Nothing to be afraid of, I lied to myself, until he would quiet and tell me, Listen to the music. Piafs still singing, but I've gone rigid now with defense, trusting to the wheel bearings and accelerator cable, holding the family together, in my familiar numb pantomime of a landscape, in which no enemy could recognize me as his prey. —Maggie Anderson Spring Song I will ride home again on a pink-petaled morning, find you hanging sheets on the saggy line. One by one I will watch you fold them over, make their comers meet like you used to. Their heavy dampness I would like to run through will miss the rising grass by an inch. Maybe on the back steps 111 take out my banjo, thrum wild songs you say you've never heard while we watch the sheets flip and flap in the wind. —Janice Townley Moore 90 ...