TO COLBY TREMBLING (AM I YOUR SISTER?)

By Patricia Smith Ranzoni

...to puzzle out, brood upon, look up... mutter over, argue about, turn inside-out in verbal euphoria....
—Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence

1.)
So, the day has come. I have come back. Grown. One thing to say yes another
to choose what dress to brace myself with I fear what you make me remember.
Let me look at you. And you. And you. I want you to tremble too.
A Maine Women In The Arts celebration at this polished college and here I am
an honest-to-God Maine woman not framed in someone else’s art not subject
in someone else’s voice but alive inside this skin the color of papermachine pulp
the scared breath of my own mouth against your far-life ears can you hear?

You have come to let me see you. Thank you. And you. And you. I want you
to see me and mine and to find out if I am your sister.

2.)
So, let’s start with the first and last time I climb Mayflower Hill to look out over Waterville
see city lights at night having no idea Rhea just five is being Wednesday’s Child
in the shirt and skirt her maman has made her with brown dancers and pony-tail girls
(like me) rockin’ ‘n’ rollin’ in the kitchen with her big brothers Cote down the Plains
and her millfather like mine afraid we’ll go through the floor and who will remember Elvis
five years from now but I know of nothing this far from home.

Over from Bucksport to debate. 1958. The proposition lost in time--farm subsidies,
trade tariffs—state meet. Here are Old Town’s Bishop and Emmett who always win.
One turns professor one physician I see by his obituary. Higgins from Bar Harbor’s
team gone too, teaching English years at Mount Desert. Never married still how could it be
we’d stumble onto her high school portrait and baby shots in a junk shop downeast
looking for shed windows this fall? Can you tell me anything about these
my aching throat chokes but the woman in charge can’t speak and writes out the price.
My worthy opponent I explain. Tears up against antique dust and the mute woman’s
face distorts when she puts Joyce’s picture in my hands not so much gift
as assignment I keep where I will care the rest of my life for hers.
I am her sister am I yours?

And Kinney of Auburn with whom I love arguing even after we are roommates
at UM in the dorm for poor girls off campus (who well up when an alumni association
letter arrives in the sixties raising funds to help the Tallulah Turnipheads who come
with everything they own in a cardboard box they keep under the bed) and we’ll laugh
over the right way to say herb while I make her wedding gown without even a pattern.
And Ellsworth’s Jordan who becomes superintendent of schools near here
and that fellow from Orono—Curtis—who studies law and gets elected to the legislature
and whose face I see again young in his poet son.

3.)
So, here we are out on your hill to look out over this light-patterned night.
From our inland and offshore islands come to defend one side of a question in one room
then cross the corridor and advocate the opposite oh where has this gone this delight?
This high game of testing a Given: from the affirmative and negative expected to do both?
Oh, won’t you argue with me please? Or you? Or you?

So, to bed to rest for the rounds timed from breakfast on but something is wrong.
Sure my face always flushes in fervor but this is more. Fever.
Advancing through the tournament energy drains like a watering trough
until at day’s end I know I am ill. By morning my God home I cannot lift myself
feverish still like a raging debate and here on my teen shins hot red mounds
the size of quarters. Judas Priest what have I gotten into on Colby grounds?

Doc Thegen scratches his head checks his book says erethema nodosum
red spots on the skin go to bed don’t get up you might hurt your heart.
Senior spring. They bring a cot downstairs to the front room where it’s warm
and my father who can’t stop by to tell me but my mother says is worried
stops at Braun’s after his shift and buys me a radio the size of his dinnerpail
to listen to nights after sleeping day after day after day. WPOR Rhode Island
my favorite where I hear Long Tall Sally and Splish Splash I Was Takin’ A Bath
before they play in Bangor missing friends who send out a crepepaper sunshine box.
And Mr. Christie our debate coach and civics teacher just a kid himself (looking back)
fresh out of Colby comes out. Out over the boards in the mud the chicken shit on the steps
the kitchen Mama tries to fix up in time and all the way into the room where I can’t hide.
Now he is learning now he begins to know if I am his sister.

4.)
The bumps turn black and I turn weak but get back to school in a month a few hours
each day starting on the first floor only, in time to graduate in June and by Memorial
that’s that back to the island to work all summer to earn first semester.

Years later a New York doctor asks where I was treated for this. And I’ve found it
on the internet not as perfect as my spots they say are the outward sign
of something serious within what was that serious in me? Infection?
From the barnyard well downhill just yards from the manurepile, outhouse, and that ditch
where the house drained? The water my sister wouldn’t drink from its smell
but to show I wasn’t too good I would? The report showing it’s not fit showing up later?
Who knows maybe tick bites and mountain fever from Mayflower Hill.

5.)
That’s what I remember about Colby and how you could dress me up but couldn’t
take me out without what I was breaking through every time.

6.)
So, we carry water as a way of life. And when Tatelbaum brings out her book
by that name my mother fumes. Out comes this Bangor Daily review she carries
in her pocketbook—look! Complaining how hard it is having a baby and homesteading
at the same time she thinks it says. My mother who raises five of us never having
running hot water or dependable water of any kind for that matter or anything
she can call her own not to mention time for reading or writing and here’s this feature
on this professor telling how it’s done. She’s okay Mama I tell her knowing it’s true
because Tatelbaum honors people here before her who did it real hard. Real. Hard.
As if we most certainly are sisters.

7.)
So, when you read your Star-Gazers poem at the Maine Arts Festival van Court
of Colby I naturally imagine my rebuttal. For one can you even believe I was there reading
with you not even an observable rash? Only that moth flitting about my collar and hem
in that tented field landing on my arm as if to identify with me knowing a field thing
when it flies into one my sister.

Your poem calls us Star-Gazers after lilies leaning in the sun only not as welcome
the way one of us might lean to you in the market checkout line and admire your golden
Mogen David. I can’t speak for that woman who picked it up to admire having no
desire to touch your breasts where they begin their upward swell where its gold chain
fell as you wrote but I confess I wish to touch your heart. In this room I’ll propose
you not rule out she didn’t know how to look at a star up close and wanted to enter
your shine but didn’t know how. That maybe it reminded her of a pattern in her quilt
or something like her clan’s Celtic knot the way its two triangles are woven
but never meant to offend uttering “lovely” didn’t you say but take as affront.
Or maybe because her father is interred at the Veteran’s Memorial Cemetery at Togus
like mine with the 6,200 Mainers of World War Two (as of September) she may not
have known many Jews either but wanted to and didn’t know how. The way we studied
to learn what our fathers left our whole childhoods to fight for once we heard and if they
gave life to us and gave their lives saving life giving you life am I your sister?
Sometimes when you think you’re the only Jew in Maine why not go there
by the towering lady’s slipper sculpture and listen for your thousands of kin
under the peace-pleading chimes? If you would look into my eyes and take my hands
I would go there with you.

But for the sake of classic argument in this room given time I’d present facts you’re not.
Beginning with the ones in my town and so forth. Establish evidence who’s been here
centuries and more. How Mr. Rosen lets us charge when we need a white blouse for band
or chorus and lets us pay on time as we earn our quarters in the fields. And how some folks
up against it get cared for nobody knows. Ever been to my town? For dramatic effect
and points for the judging I might ask right here in this room how many Jewish people here
please raise your hand. Next to demonstrate I know what it’s like to be the only one of a kind
in a place I’ll ask how many of you as children when things get bad have one set of underthings
to your name to be washed out every night until you can earn your own please raise your hand.
Or mention how it feels to cross to where the privileged are along the coast and want to warn
that Stonington girl in the yacht club parking lot with that fellow in his boating clothes can’t
she see she doesn’t fit why aren’t they on the veranda and what ache she is begging for her heart?

But if you’ll come with me across the corridor to that room over there I’ll agree with you.
Refute any denial by recalling how I saw for myself how it spelled out on the hotel’s brochure
what races they don’t allow. And later hearing it’s the same at the country club upriver.
What else might I offer in evidence sister van Court?

8.)
So, Sadoff. I mean here we are in line at the Belfast Co-op where we get our gingerroot
and don’t really know it’s your Ira but it sure looks like his photo in Poets & Writers
and when I dare speak to him he isn’t affronted but blushes and whatever he is
there’s only one of him in Maine and I don’t drop what I’m hanging onto the way I did
when Koufax followed me in line at the IGA when he lived outback.

9.)
So, am I your sister? Not if you walk around in a thousand dollars’ worth of clothes
every day or on the other hand the insult of fortunes of shabby chic. Not if when that picture
of that famous director from New York being ferried out to North Haven for their high school
production appears in the paper and every human in the feature is named except the man at the
motor center page not if you aren’t angry too wanting to know who he is and who patched
his coat wanting proof he has a name being his sister.

Not if in the icestorm of the century bringing power down you can’t imagine anything
to do but complain you’re bored and have seen all the shows while the news tells how
the farmers and their wives cry themselves to sleep every night for their moaning herds
suffering with udders about to burst without hands enough to relieve their milk.

Not if you are not the sister or brother of the ones who never go home on break
but stay on campus to work not knowing what a vacation is once old enough to earn.
Not if you are not the sister or brother of my sisters and brothers who cook and clean up
for you. Not unless or until you insist we get to tell our own stories along with yours
about us. For like Asaph,“I wish the rich and I could break/the contract of uncharitable
silences between us,/and speak of what our lives might mean so far,/for I am tired of being
unseen and unseeing,/of wiping my brow to hide my face...” another way to make water
can you name ten more?

10.)
So, it is forever after September 11, 2001 and none of this matters or matters more
and none of us matters or matters more. From now on not only what kind of people we come
from but what kind will we be? We must look at each other or die.
Won’t you hold up your hands with me that together we may spread out our fingers of light
the only stars within reach, and gaze?


_____________________________________
Lines quoted from Philip Asaph from his poem “In The Houses Of The Rich,” first appeared
in POETRY, copyright 2000 by The Modern Poetry Association and are reprinted by permission
of the Editor of POETRY and the author.



 

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