POET'S
ANATOMY
431
been deeply and upsettingly committed to Mother
all
along. When
I wrote my first poem of warning and kept searching for the
rhyme, I was only pretending to be on their side; I was on her side
when I set fire to the house. But I'm not proud to admit it-because
whenever I try to remember Mother, I see her in the patrol car,
her eyelids gripped on revenge.
On the street all the way home from the police station she
kept hugging me, every few feet; she kept
it
up even after we got
home until I began to think that, without knowing it, I had really
been injured in some way which she wouldn't tell me about. I began
to cry. I was still crying when Daddy came home and we told him.
He got incensed for a while, and then relaxed into, "So they were
checking on science, were they?" and finally concluded, "Boys will
be boys." Mother was shocked. She wanted to alert the school
authorities and the papers. But Daddy kept the calmer view. "Boys!"
he boomed vastly, blotting out with that loud monosyllable all
questions of right and wrong, blame or tears. "Kid stuff!" Sandy
mimicked intensely, studying me.
It was about
this
time that I began to get a bit thinner–
more boyish, I felt, with immense pleasure-and began to chase,
in desperate tomboy style, after Sandy and his friends. Most of
the time they managed to elude me, or they teased me with games
that demanded feats physically impossible for me. One summer day,
with me at the tag end, Sandy led the pack on a chase of Follow the
Leader- jumping from high walls, swinging from trees, climbing
over barbed wire fences. On the last of these I tore both the hem of
my skirt and my calf: a ragged, bloody cut behind and below the
knee. I still have that scar too. He took me back to the house and
treated the wound with cotton and iodine while I sat and writhed in
a chair in the living room. There was no one else at home. I still
remember how dark the living room was with the blinds drawn, and
the smell of the iodine which I thought was the smell of my blood, and
Sandy's blue hat which he had debonairly tossed under the piano
after wiping his fingers all over
it
to get the blood off them. I was
crying. To quiet me (I thought), he said anxiously, "Would you
like me to show you what grownups do at night?"
I must have sensed that there was something wrong because I
immediately began crying louder, quite deliberately. Obviously, how-
