Her Stepfather Would Not Allow Any Smoking
Because of the new baby
her stepfather would not
allow any smoking
in the house, so we
would go out onto the porch off
the back of the little yellow house.
There was no furniture, just
a piece of old astroturf on the gray concrete,
four tall torn screens peeling from their shoddy frames
like neglected paintings,
tabs from Pabst cans in the corners and
stacks of People tied with string.
Out in the yard a broken clothesline between
two rusty poles,
across the street a junkyard behind a chainlink fence.
The boards creaked under our boots and
the heads of nails popped up
like pills.
This was winter but
we would go out there in the evenings in
the rain, the ice or snow,
to smoke and to
talk a while, at the ends of our cigarets
tiny Chinese dragons
that coiled and wavered then vanished.
Ostensibly
I went over to her place to study
but really I went there
because she had this Italian hair: black and long like a curtain and
this dramatic curve in the small of her back.
Also she wore long wrinkled skirts that
looked like they were
made of paper, chunky ankle-high boots with fat
yellow laces tied in big bows,
raspberry lipstick, baggy green sweaters, cheap wireframe glasses.
One evening
we went out there and it was
cold like metal, especially dark,
cakes of shoveled snow
dusty yellow from the dull streetlights along the edges of the upheaved sidewalks,
ridges of ice on the gray grass and in the cracks of the pavement.
We could smell the pools of oil and grease from the lot across the street,
see the rows of shredded tires piled against the fences.
In the headlights of a passing pickup the
grit and dust swirled and when it was gone we could
hear the rip of the dirty river
foaming and bubbling down at the bottom of the hill.
To the north smokestacks stood darkly
against a bruised sky.
We talked about school loans about books
about guitars.
Then we were quiet for a while. She
looked out at the street, up at the sky.
She said, You know I grew up in this place.
Then she smoked and
she sighed but like a scream.
It said:
boxes of beer stacked in the corner of the kitchen,
musty bedrooms built in basements with
drop ceilings,
hairspray cans and space heaters,
plastic stapled over the windows and
fishing rods fixed with duct tape,
fat women in stretch pants,
third or fourth marriages to the same man only
with a different name,
a constant stream of plump, white screaming
babies coming on and on like maybe just one more would
make all the difference.
I thought
her chances of escape were better than most
but still not very good:
the tragedy being not her odds but that
she knew them.
She dropped her cigarette and stomped it out with the heel of
her boot, left a hole in the mat the size of a dime.
She looked at me a long time and I thought
I should say something so I
told her that she had purple hair in
that light, and she
took off her glasses and
squinted at me seriously.
Not much later that same evening
still outside and
despite the cold
she gave me a blowjob
while I leaned against the wall of her yellow house and
I remember her eyes wide open and shining in the dark,
the way her sweater slipped down her wrists, the way
her hair folded back over her cheekbones like curtains. But mostly
I recall how brave she seemed
out there on the porch with her skirt spread out around her knees
like a flower, struggling at something
in the cold dark night.
Just once she paused for breath:
but I remain unable to forget the shock
so suddenly removed from the swell of her lips,
how afraid I was
to be so exposed, so vulnerable to
that night that town that cold.
Copyright © Christopher Miller 2003
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