THE WOMEN IN MY LIFE
Llara
My daughter is thirty. I tell people
we’ve had twenty-eight wonderful years.
Five and thirteen are best forgotten.
She was always independent,
insisting
on making her own decisions
which were almost always right
and certainly as good as mine.
She is nothing like me.
I am neat,
needing things in neurotic order.
She marks her territory
scattering her possessions
wherever she goes.
She is good at math
and can put furniture together.
I am good at words and
can put furniture together, but wrong
so she fixes it.
We lived in a small flat for nine months
agreeing our relationship
was more important than neat or messy,
making a lie of the saying that two wome
can’t get along under the same roof.
Susan
She knows if I am well
By the way I walk through a room.
Maybe
because we walked in each other’s souls.
She saved my daughter’s life
and thus saved mine.
When we had a rough patch
I thought she was reading my journal
so I wrote in green ink.
“Susan I know you’re reading this.”
In blue ink, the next day I found
“No, I’m not. Just keep writing.”
A problem with old friends
is that they don’t let you fool yourself.
Each year we go on retreat,
one year in Argelès-sur-mer,
the next in Ocean Grove,
walk on the beach,
eat fresh corn
lick ice cream cones
listen to music
rent movies,
read to each other,
play Scrabble,
talk about men, my writing,
her teaching, women’s studies,
politics, history and art.
Freed from chores
it is a renewal of
all that is good
In our lives.
Mardy
A boy with beautiful blue eyes
dated Mardy and me at the same time.
At sixteen we decided
we liked each other better than him.
Tied by a telephone cord for hours
we told our dreams.
When I was getting divorced,
Mardy held the glue pot
as I pieced myself together.
When we walked in the woods
behind her parents’ Maine cabin,
we tasted wild blackberries
as we spoke of nightmares
And now that we are happy,
she tells me that we are not just
foul-weather friends.
Norma
My father fell in love with my stepmom
when they were both married to other people.
She whirled across the dance floor
in a white gown embroidered with violets
and into his arms.
They never had her children
and his children.
“We have our children,”
she always said in a tone
that let everyone know
there was no alternative.
When she visits,
we play cards.
She wipes me out
no dainty widow lady she.
We go to restaurants, laugh a lot,
share memories of my Dad
and build new ones of our own.
Lillian
They met in secretarial school
Lillian and My mother,
agreed on nothing for sixty years
stayed friends and fought
over every issue.
At eighty, Lillian
picketed the British consulate,
marched for pro-choice,
and told of a man in an
Irish pub who raved about her hair.
He suggested they sleep together.
“Did you?” I asked
She shook her head.
“I was wearing a wig.
I didn’t want him to know.”
“And if you weren’t?”
She just smiled.
Dar
No one, least of all me, knows why
I called my grandmother Dar,
but soon the world followed,
Even her friends from childhood.
She never minded being
renamed in her fifties.
When she baked a cake,
she used all the batter,
but gave me the spoon to lick.
She read me the Bobbsey Twins and
made mudpies
that looked good enough to eat.
A high school dropout,
she prodded me through algebra,
tested my Latin verbs,
knew more history
than the substitute teacher.
Despite her thick glasses,
she told me I was beautiful.
She was a New England Yankee,
Right was right.
Wrong was wrong.
When she had eye surgery,
she didn’t tell the doctor
the anesthesia hadn’t worked,
thinking it should hurt.
When she lost two children,
she bore that hurt too.
Dar saw five wars,
Lillian only four.
Norma was a WAVE
in World War II
While Mardy, Susan and I
can touch names
on a long black wall in D.C.
Names of boys we played with
and will play no more.
Llara?
She knows war as a media event
As men with mikes talk on CNN.
These women’s lives span
the invention of electricity to e-mail
Dar abandoned her horse and buggy,
was called The Woman with the Ford,
while the rest of us jump on planes
to change continents on whim.
No Stantons,
Steinems,
Sangers or
Curies
in this group.
The march through history
not make it.
no one will write books,
sing songs,
make movies
or sculpt statues for public places,
honoring their lives.
They honor themselves.
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