Issue 3 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

wino Freddy on the leprous living-room carpet outside
the bedroom door. —Who had tried to pinch her
stepping calves.
He had tried to pinch them again when she left.
After her mother told her to leave —Please get out,
Mildred!— when she tried to prop a folded newspaper
under one leg of the lopsided bed.
Get out get out get out—when she had stood
in the open bedroom door with hanging arms, the
folded newspaper in one hand pleading with her
mother to let her clean the room, at least, if she didn't
want to be moved
—to her pretty little house a historical little
house it used to be a drinking & gambling establishment,
Mother— to a nice clean bed in a nice clean
room.
To a hospital bed, at least, where she could have
professional care, if she didn't want the care of her
daughter.
Whom she couldn't expect to stand by & watch her
mother die of malnutrition in a lopsided bed in a rundown
boarding house—
—Will—you—get out!
When she had gone back the next morning, the old
wino had refused to let her pass, blocking the bedroom
door with his crumpled body.
He had not been there when she'd come back an
hour later. When she had found the bedroom door
locked. & there had been a sign dangling from the doorknob
one half of a brown paper bag on which
someone her mother had written: OUT TO
LUNCH in red pencil.
She had tried to talk to the landlady of the boarding
house. Who had looked at her accusingly. & had referred
her to the social worker who came to feed her
mother twice a week. Who had also looked at her accusingly.
& had said enigmatically that she was an
honest woman who had her integrity—
She would have liked to know what her mother
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had said to the old wino to say to the landlady what
her mother herself had said to the social worker to
make sure her daughter stayed away. If what she had
said was what had perhaps started these people staring.
& whispering.
She had stayed away then. But her thoughts had
forced their way into her mother's bedroom constantly.
Cleaning it. Propping up the bed. Holding loving
spoons full of soup to the toothless lipless mouth. Of
egg custard. Making her mother swallow her pride.
Every day she had walked past the boarding house,
in the evenings. Hoping for a sign. For the landlady
waving from one of the windows. The old wino
Freddy stumbling down the steps of the porch, gesticulating
& jabbering for her to come in. That her
mother wanted to see her.
Not unlike what had finally happened. Except that
her mother had been dead when it happened. When the
old wino had stumbled down the porch steps toward
her, & the social worker not the landlady had
waved to her from her mother's open bedroom window.
—Knowing she'd be walking by, 'stalking her
prey'—
She sat staring at her father's portrait with hanging
hair & hanging arms; the cemetery shovel still in her
right hand. It was dribbling dried grey crumbs of earth
on her Chinese rug. On the sea-green back of one of
the Chinese cranes.
It all had started with the shovel when she accepted
the shovel full of dried grey earth, & stepped
forward, preparing to throw the traditional handful of
earth on her mother's grave.
—Into the poor invalid old woman's face, like a last
insult: she had felt them thinking.
For months she had felt their thoughts weave ugly
spider webs around her little house. Around her reading
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