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Will This Do

In this house I am always
waiting. For my grandmother or
egg-salad sandwiches. It is on an
island, limited
but exotic.

Everyone kills time (though were we
to really kill her, we would end
up trapped in one long moment. I do
not wish to let this moment linger.
My homicidal efforts are lackluster),
and great-uncle Mick shows me
his mother's college yearbook. Mary
Adaline Brockway. Every girl
got a rhyming couplet. She was
Handy with needles and quick to mend
Broken hearts or fallen hems.
I'm told again the story of how
she named the house. Mick's father
showed it to her and she said,
This'll do.
The rotting plaque on the porch describes
the residence's adequacy, and elaborates,
enumerating all her current visitors.
Dick and Jeanne Hawes
Hocker Grandchildren
And Others.

By the fireplace, which is full of dried
flowers, hangs an oil painting
of Mick's father. He is bald as a globe,
a tuft of white topping his forehead.
Mick so resembles him that
when he dies his grandchildren will not
remember the portrait
was not of him. They are only
children and lure me
down the steep staircase, wood turned ashy,
beaten by the sun, to collect sea-glass,
ocean-stroked out of sharp danger.
One says, "Let's make our own."
I take a green Heineken bottle from the bin,
break it against the sign prohibiting
alcohol and glass bottles. They pick
the smaller pieces deftly, throw
them into the ocean as far as they can.
Not far. I wade out and hurl
the rest, cutting myself on the bits stuck
to the label.

The eggs are boiled and I am ordered to
remove their shells. The broken white shards
cling to the inner membrane, whose name
I once knew for a Biology test.
Grammer mashes the eggs while her
sister cuts the celery. Papa pours
soda. Mick supervises the washing
of hands. Things are orderly, and we
make duck-bills out of potato chips
in our mouths.

Then Allison spots a deer sniffing
Aunt Betsy's garden flowers. Mick
rises to chase it away. Papa and I
wash dishes in the stone sink.
Afterwards my pruny fingers rub the stained
edges of Mick's father's paperbacks. James
Bond and Alfred Hitchcock and Perry Mason.
There is glamour in the rich walnut shelves,
their ornate decoration.
Fumbling through photographs in a crate
from the attic, I find death portraits.
Corpses. Photography was expensive, and
these subjects stayed very still.

At the ice cream shop I chat
with Sophia, whose olive-skinned cousins
are disinterested in me. My ice cream, covered
by coffee syrup, which you cannot get in
Maryland, is long melted. The fireflies blink
mating calls as I walk back. I help
Betsy at Trivial Pursuit, and carry
the youngest grandson upstairs. He stays
in the bookshelf room. I change and fall
asleep in an armchair with battered
Mata Hari.

The sun wakes me early.
Through the window there is
the beach, and green sparkles. I take
a plastic sieve down to the water,
scoop up the glass. Not soft yet.
This time I swim out further,
push the sieve under and upturn it.
Later, no one asks why my nightgown
is on the clothesline.
By evening it has stiffened.