Made in Detroit (2 page)

books, images like genii rose murmuring

your wish is my etcetera. But she

commanded nothing except my child

labor rubbing, scrubbing what could

never be clean, as factory soot

drifted down like ebony snow.

When there was wind, it found

every crack and chink in the walls.

On winter mornings, the windows

were etched with landscapes

of frost eerie and delicate.

Rising from my cold bed

into the cold room, my clothes

laid out for school stiff, rustling

with cold, I would run to stand

over the hot air register, hoping

the furnace had been fed coal.

My father’s cigarette cough

rattled from their room.

I smelled oatmeal. Once we

ate it for three weeks of hunger.

My clothes were shaped

by other bodies, my books

had corners turned down,

notes I could not read.

Rummage sales were our malls.

My mother fed birds, talking

with them as they flew to perch

near her, leftovers, stale bread,

crumbs. We too survived

on what no one else wanted.

I remember hauling carpets out to the clothes

lines in the yard and knocking the dust out

in great cough-making clouds with wire

carpet beaters like diagrams of cellos.

Defrosting the refrigerator required much

boiling of water on the stove and flat pans

into which fingers of ice fell. Every five

minutes water cooled and needed refilling.

The coal truck came and down the chute

into the coal bin the black rocks

clattered and thundered. The floors

upstairs shook in a local quake.

The furnace with its many arms lurked

in the basement and every few days

clinkers must be removed, often still

smoking, and ashes hauled out.

During the war we collected cans

and stomped them underfoot, handing

them in. We bundled newspapers,

magazines for distant factories.

I miss none of this. They were chores

not pleasures, but still I remember

and my age hangs on me like icicles

that bear down the branches of pine.

I am old enough to remember the sad

horses that pulled open-sided carts

loaded with vegetables and fruit,

the knife sharpener’s whirring stone,

the rag man in the alley, the closed

dripping wagon of the ice man.

They were always brown or grey.

They walked and stopped, walked

on then stopped, their heads bowed

under the burden of dragging

heaviness across hot asphalt, day

after day for what scant reward?

Police horses are bigger and glossy.

I never pitied them when they

charged us. They were the enemy

grim as war horses that snuffled

fire as they trampled the infantry,

stallions bred to die on pikes.

Even the glass bottles of milk

were carried to our breakfasts

by horses. The photographer

went house to house with his pony

black and white spotted, adorned

with bells, but the working stiffs

never had tails plaited or manes

brushed out. I spoke to them

and their red-rimmed eyes would

turn to me. Then off they would clop

clop in the harness we were

each supposed to grow into.

I kept a diary my twelfth summer

when we took our first long trip

since before the war. I wrote up

every meal, a skinny pale blue

child with sprouting sore breasts

I slumped to hide. Always hungry.

“For lunch at a place called The

Green Frog I had fried cat

fish, corn bread and mashed

potatoes. For dessert I ate

strawberry ice cream!! It

was all very delicious.”

Besides every piece of food

I mentioned only animals. An owl

tethered at a restaurant in Frankenmuth

Michigan, an owl called Jerry

a woman bathed and dried.

I described a horse who whinnied

at me over a fence in Wyoming.

I lovingly listed cattle and eagles,

antelope and elk, bison. Animals

I trusted as frightened children

do. My father’s temper. My mother’s

anger. I would have run away

with a wolf pack. In Yellowstone

I decided my future as a ranger.

I would live among pine trees

and follow bison through

the tall grass. We met a man

who lived up in a fire tower

and I wanted to become him.

I wanted a tower not like Rapunzel

to coax a lover to climb,

but to rise up and hide, high

above smoky buzzing Detroit

streets, the tiny asbestos shack

thrumming with unpaid bills

and the marriage of the cat

and dog with their unloved

offspring thin as a knife—

all of us with edges that

made each other bleed.

I remember the lakes of my Michigan

childhood. Here they are called ponds.

Lakes belonged to summer, two-week

vacations that my father was granted by

Westinghouse when we rented some cabin.

Never mind the dishes with spiderweb

cracks, the crooked aluminum sauce

pans, the crusted black frying pans.

Never mind the mattresses shaped

like the letter V. Old jangling springs.

Moldy bathrooms. Low ceilings

that leaked. The lakes were mysteries

of sand and filmy weeds and minnows

flickering through my fingers. I rowed

into freedom. Alone on the water

that freckled into small ripples,

that raised its hackles in storms,

that lay glassy at twilight reflecting

the sunset then sucking up the dark,

I was unobserved as the quiet doe

coming with her fauns to drink

on the opposite shore. I let the row-

boat drift as the current pleased, lying

faceup like a photographer’s plate

the rising moon turned to a ghost.

And though the voices called me

back to the rented space we shared

I was sure I left my real self there—

a tiny black pupil in the immense

eye of a silver pool of silence.

The girl was closed on herself

tight as a winter bud on a sugar

maple, protecting what lay within.

She imagined herself a foundling—

secret offspring of some kind, rich

parents, but the mirror contradicted.

Her shoulders hunched over newly

sprouted breasts sour as crab

apples and as hard to the touch.

Her shoulders hunched over dreams

cradled within like wet birds

just broken free of the eggshell.

Her hair fell over her face, a black

veil hiding her staring eyes that

sought distance and strange places.

Within her will was tempered

like fine steel by every rebuke

every insult, every beating—

a weapon she honed in dreams,

in solitude till its double-bladed

ax could knock a hole in any wall.

The neighborhood women

always came to my mother,

never she to them. Salesmen,

solicitors, invited couples

rang the front doorbell.

The women came to the grade

door in the yard, following

the cracked cement walk around

the asbestos siding, then knocking,

calling,
Bert
, my mother’s full name,

or softening it to
Bertie! Bertie
.…

She would summon them up

the steps to the kitchen past

rows of shoe polish and garden

tools on the shelf to the side

into the kitchen with its worn

yellow linoleum and oilcloth

covered table. She would serve

tea or lemonade and they would

hold out their palms to her,

hands cracked or water-softened

with labor, a few manicured,

some twisted with arthritis

to gnarled burls. She would study

their palms and then she would

tell them what was and would

be, what to fear and what to

avoid and sometime promises

of windfalls or even love.

Again and again they came

as if she could change their

futures. Sometimes she’d give

them folk remedies for ailments

they would not tell the doctor

or hadn’t the money for him.

By four she’d shoo them out

because what
she
feared might

come at any moment, my father’s

bolt of temper, acid mockery.

She wiped the table and set it.

My mother cooked as drudgery

the same fifteen dishes round

and round like a donkey bound

to a millstone grinding dust.

My mother baked as a dance,

the flour falling from the sifter

in a rain of fine white pollen.

The sugar was sweet snow.

The dough beneath her palms

was the warm flesh of a baby

when they were all hers before

their wills sprouted like mushrooms.

Cookies she formed in rows

on the baking sheets, oatmeal,

molasses, lemon, chocolate chip,

delights anyone could love.

Love was in short supply,

but pies were obedient to her

command of their pastry, crisp

holding the sweetness within.

Desserts were her reward for endless

cleaning in the acid yellow cloud

of Detroit, begging dollars from

my father, mending, darning, bleaching.

In the oven she made sweetness

where otherwise there was none.

By the river of Detroit

I did not weep but sulked

and stormed and bit hard

into anything sweet or

succulent I came upon.

My adolescence was grey,

fogged in with prohibitions

My lust was a stunted gnarled

tree that bore onions—

fruit tough as horse chestnuts.

I would have run off

with any stranger who asked.

I beat against the walls

of my room like a rabid

bat and in my diary

I confessed madness

and amorphous sins I

could find no partner

to share. I praised suicide

and went on crossly living.

I understand those girls

who hang themselves in closets.

Wait, I want to whisper,

then run and hide and run

out of that mangling time

only jocks, pink girls and idiots

think wonderful. Get

thee to a place where

other freaks and geeks

flourish and join the dance.

I walk down the same street

as always past the same brick

apartment house with the marble

step, past the scabby clapboard

the owners never bother to paint.

There’s the porch with plastic

geraniums, there’s the woman

with the goiter peering through

lace curtains hoping to spy

an affair or theft ripe for gossip.

There’s the house where upstairs

Dolly’s dressinggown caught fire

at the stove. I watched firemen

carrying her out. Her dog

went whimpering after them,

was left at the curb. How

could I know that cloudy morning

was the last? In my mind

those houses still stand peeling,

lace curtained, everything stuck

in a diorama of working-class

fifties while I am the bird

that has flown east, south, west,

across the ocean and back

to some place but never there.

Oh my city of origin, city who taught

me about class and class warfare,

who informed me how to survive

on your ashgrey burning streets

when as a Jew I was not white yet,

easy among friends of all colors,

how you have been plundered

and picked to pitted rusting bones.

Around you squat suburbs that never

saw a rat or woke to sirens cutting

machete wounds through the night,

whose lush lawns were fertilized

by your jobs exported to China,

by bodies of desperate murders.

This sand is fertile. Two years

after fire leaves a blackened pit

bushes are already sprouting

among blue and gold wildflowers.

In blocks of zombie houses, crack

houses, walls of gang graffiti,

where packs of wild dogs turn back

to wolves and the police never come,

people still try with little help

to remake community, to reach up