The Gold Cell

by Sharon Olds

  Maybe I am what she always wanted,

  my father as a woman,

  maybe I am what she wanted to be

  when she first saw him, tall and smart,

  standing there in the college yard with the

  hard male light of 1937

  shining on his slicked hair. She wanted that

  power. She wanted that size. She pulled and

  pulled through him as if he were silky

  bourbon taffy, she pulled and pulled and

  pulled through his body until she drew me out,

  sticky and gleaming, her life after her life.

  Maybe I am the way I am

  because she wanted exactly that,

  wanted there to be a woman

  a lot like her, but who would not hold back, so she

  pressed herself hard against him,

  pressed and pressed the clear soft

  ball of herself like a stick of beaten cream

  against his stained sour steel grater

  until I came out the other side of his body,

  a tall woman, stained, sour, sharp,

  but with that milk at the center of my nature.

  I lie here now as I once lay

  in the crook of her arm, her creature,

  and I feel her looking down into me the way the

  maker of a sword gazes at his face in the

  steel of the blade.

  Now I Lay Me

  It is a fine prayer, Now I lay me

  down to sleep, the power of the child

  taking herself up in her arms

  and laying herself down on her bed

  as if she were her own mother,

  Now I lay me down to sleep,

  I pray the Lord my soul to keep,

  her hands folded knuckle by knuckle,

  feeling her heart beating in the knuckles.

  Knees on the fine dark hair-like hardwood

  beams of the floor, she commended herself

  to the care of some reliable keeper

  so that all night there might be a part of her

  no one could touch. Unless while God had that part

  she did not have it, but lay there a raw

  soulless animal for someone to do dirt on …

  If I should die before I wake seemed

  possible, some nights, the father with the blood

  on his face, the mother down to eighty-two pounds, it was a

  mark of doom and a benison

  to be able to say I pray the Lord

  my soul to take—the chance that, dead,

  she would be safe for eternity, which was

  much longer than one of those bad nights—

  she herself could see, each morning, the

  blessing of the white dawn, like some true god coming,

  she could get up, and wade in the false

  goodness of another day.

  It was all fine except for the word take,

  word with the k like a claw near the end of it.

  What if the Lord were another one of those takers,

  what if the Lord were no bigger than her father,

  what if those noises through the wall were not

  her mother and father struggling to do it

  or not do it, what if those noises

  were the sound of the Lord wrestling with her father

  on the round bedroom rug, and what if the

  Lord, who did not eat real food,

  got weaker, and her father, with all he ate

  and drank, got stronger, what if the Lord

  lost? God bless Mommy and Daddy

  and Sister and Brother and Grama and Grampa

  in Heaven, and then the light went out,

  the last of the uneasy kisses,

  and then she was alone in the dark,

  and the darkness started to grow there, in her room,

  as it liked to do, and then the night began.

  The Chute

  When I was a kid, my father built a

  hole down through the center of the house.

  It started in the upstairs closet, a

  black, square mouth like a well

  with a lid on it, it plummeted down

  behind the kitchen wall, and the raw

  pine cloaca tip of it was

  down in the basement where the twisted wicker

  basket lay on the cement floor,

  so when someone dropped in laundry at the top, it would

  drop with the speed of sheer falling—in the

  kitchen you’d hear that whisk of pure

  descent behind the wall. And halfway

  down there was an electric fixture for the

  doorbell—that bell my father would ring and

  ring years later when he stood at the door with that

  blood on him, like a newborn’s caul,

  ringing ringing to enter. But back

  then he was only halfway down, a

  wad of sheets stuck in the chute,

  he could still fix the doorbell when it busted.

  He’d stand his kids in front of him,

  three skinny scared braggart kids,

  and run his gaze over them, a

  surgeon running his eyes over the tray,

  and he’d select a kid, and take that kid by the

  ankles and slowly feed that kid

  down the chute. First you’d do a handstand on the

  lip of it and then he’d lower you in,

  the smell of pine and dirty laundry,

  his grip on your ankles like the steel he sold,

  he’d lower you until your whole body was in it

  and you’d find the little wires, red and

  blue, like a vein and a nerve, and you’d tape them together.

  We thought it was such an honor to be chosen,

  and like all honors it was mostly terror, not

  only the blood in your head like a sac of

  worms in wet soil, but how could you believe he would

  not let go? He would joke about it,

  standing there, holding his kid like a

  bottle brush inside a bottle, or the

  way they drown people, he’d lower us down as if

  dipping us into the darkness before birth

  and he’d pretend to let go—he loved to hear

  passionate screaming in a narrow space—

  how could you trust him? And then if you were

  his, half him, your left hand maybe and your

  left foot dipped in the gleaming

  murky liquor of his nature, how could you

  trust yourself? What would it feel like

  to be on the side of life? How did the

  good know they were good, could they look at their

  hand and see, under the skin, the

  greenish light? We hung there in the dark

  and yet, you know, he never dropped us

  or meant to, he only liked to say he would,

  so although it’s a story with some cruelty in it,

  finally it’s a story of love

  and release, the way the father pulls you out of nothing

  and stands there foolishly grinning.

  The Blue Dress

  The first November after the divorce

  there was a box from my father on my birthday—no card, but a

  big box from Hink’s, the dark

  department store with a balcony and

  mahogany rail around the balcony, you could

  stand and press your forehead against it

  until you could almost feel the dense

  grain of the wood, and stare down

  into the rows and rows of camisoles,

  petticoats, bras, as if looking down

  into the lives of women. The box

  was from there, he had braved that place for me

  the way he had entered my mother once

  to get me out. I opened the box—I had

  never had a prese
nt from him—

  and there was a blue shirtwaist dress

  blue as the side of a blue teal

  disguised to go in safety on the steel-blue water.

  I put it on, a perfect fit,

  I liked that it was not too sexy, just a

  blue dress for a 14-year-old daughter the way

  Clark Kent’s suit was just a plain suit for a reporter, but I

  felt the weave of that mercerized Indian Head cotton

  against the skin of my upper arms and my

  wide thin back and especially the skin of my

  ribs under those new breasts I had

  raised in the night like earthworks in commemoration of his name.

  A year later, during a fight about

  just how awful my father had been,

  my mother said he had not picked out the dress,

  just told her to get something not too expensive, and then

  had not even sent a check for it,

  that’s the kind of man he was. So I

  never wore it again in her sight

  but when I went away to boarding school I

  wore it all the time there,

  loving the feel of it, just

  casually mentioning sometimes it was a gift from my father,

  wanting in those days to appear to have something

  whether it was true or a lie, I didn’t care, just to

  have something.

  Late Poem to My Father

  Suddenly I thought of you

  as a child in that house, the unlit rooms

  and the hot fireplace with the man in front of it,

  silent. You moved through the heavy air

  in your physical beauty, a boy of seven,

  helpless, smart, there were things the man

  did near you, and he was your father,

  the mold by which you were made. Down in the

  cellar, the barrels of sweet apples,

  picked at their peak from the tree, rotted and

  rotted, and past the cellar door

  the creek ran and ran, and something was

  not given to you, or something was

  taken from you that you were born with, so that

  even at 30 and 40 you set the

  oily medicine to your lips

  every night, the poison to help you

  drop down unconscious. I always thought the

  point was what you did to us

  as a grown man, but then I remembered that

  child being formed in front of the fire, the

  tiny bones inside his soul

  twisted in greenstick fractures, the small

  tendons that hold the heart in place

  snapped. And what they did to you

  you did not do to me. When I love you now,

  I like to think I am giving my love

  directly to that boy in the fiery room,

  as if it could reach him in time.

  June 24

  (for my father)

  I look at the date, and it has such a look of

  fullness, the fat juicy word June and then the

  2 and the 4, like a couple and a couple coupled,

  the whole date such a look of satiety and plenitude,

  and then I remember today is your birthday,

  you are 68, it is the birthday of an aging man

  and yet I feel such celebration,

  as if you were newborn. And it’s not just the

  turgid redness of your face, or your plump

  fleshy hands, appealing as a baby’s,

  it isn’t your earth-brown physical eyes

  blank as a baby’s lacking knowledge and memory,

  it isn’t just that a man of 68

  is young still, you could have a child

  after my own fertility is gone,

  a baby dark and smart as you were

  the hour of your birth, when your skin shone with the

  oil of the world that lies on either

  side of our world. The day moves me

  because you were given back to me.

  You died night after night in the years of my childhood,

  sinking down into speechless torpor,

  and then you were told to leave for good

  and you left, for better, for worse, for a long

  time I did not see you or touch you—

  and then, as if to disprove the ascendancy of darkness,

  little by little you came back to me

  until now I have you, a living father

  standing in the California sun

  unwrapping the crackling caul off a cigar

  and placing it in the center of his mouth

  where the parent is placed, at the center of the child’s life.

  After 37 Years My Mother Apologizes for My Childhood

  When you tilted toward me, arms out

  like someone trying to walk through a fire,

  when you swayed toward me, crying out you were

  sorry for what you had done to me, your

  eyes filling with terrible liquid like

  balls of mercury from a broken thermometer

  skidding on the floor, when you quietly screamed

  Where else could I turn? Who else did I have?, the

  chopped crockery of your hands swinging toward me, the

  water cracking from your eyes like moisture from

  stones under heavy pressure, I could not

  see what I would do with the rest of my life.

  The sky seemed to be splintering, like a window

  someone is bursting into or out of, your

  tiny face glittered as if with

  shattered crystal, with true regret, the

  regret of the body. I could not see what my

  days would be with you sorry, with

  you wishing you had not done it, the

  sky falling around me, its shards

  glistening in my eyes, your old, soft

  body fallen against me in horror I

  took you in my arms, I said It’s all right,

  don’t cry, it’s all right, the air filled with

  flying glass, I hardly knew what I

  said or who I would be now that I had forgiven you.

  201 Upper Terrace, San Francisco

  We were up and down the sickening hills of the city

  and then at the top, at the tip, I saw

  the sign, the street where I had lived as a baby. We drove

  up it and up it till three streets

  fell away as if plummeting and I

  recognized it, a small building with

  naked picture windows—the shape of those

  rectangles burned on my 3-year-old mind—we

  stopped for a moment by the front archway, a

  hole in the building like the gates of birth,

  dark and tiled inside, dark

  spiked plants. I gazed on it as you’d

  gaze on a cell where you had been kept, with

  awe and terror, I realized

  I was conceived here, at the top of this white

  hill with the three streets sliding down

  straight as water, these two blind rectangle

  eyes facing this Western bay as she

  stood at the window afterwards and I

  whipped my tail and sailed up and

  saw the egg like a trap door in the

  side of the jail and I pushed through it

  head first, my tail fell off I began

  to explode in ecstasy released,

  released, and in nine months they

  lifted me up to the view and said to me

  This is the world we give you, and said to the

  view, We give you this girl.

  III

  California Swimming Pool

  On the dirt, the dead live-oak leaves

  lay like dried-out turtle shells,

  scorched and crisp, their points sharp as

  wasps’ stin
gers. Sated mosquitoes

  hung in the air like sharks in water,

  and when you held up a tuna sandwich

  a gold sphere of yellow-jackets

  formed around your hand in the air

  and moved when you moved. Everything circled

  around the great pool, blue and

  glittering as the sacred waters at

  Crocodilopolis, and the boys

  came from underwater like that

  to pull you down. But the true center was the

  dressing rooms: the wet suits,

  the smell of chlorine, cold concrete,

  the splintered pine wall, on the other

  side of which were boys, actually

  naked there in air clouded as the

  shadows at the bottom of the pool, where the crocodiles

  glistened in their slick skins. All summer

  the knothole in the wall hissed at me

  come see, come see, come eat and be eaten.

  First Boyfriend

  (for D.R.)

  We would park on any quiet street,

  gliding over to the curb as if by accident,

  the houses dark, the families sealed into them,

  we’d park away from the street-light, just the

  faint waves of its amber grit

  reached your car, you’d switch off the motor and

  turn and reach for me, and I would

  slide into your arms as if I had been born for it,

  the ochre corduroy of your sports jacket

  pressing the inside of my wrist,

  making its pattern of rivulets,

  water rippling out like sound waves from a source.

  Your front seat had an overpowering

  male smell, as if the chrome had been

  rubbed with jism, a sharp stale

  delirious odor like the sour plated

  taste of the patina on an old watch, the

  fragrance of your sex polished till it shone in the night, the

  jewel of Channing Street, of Benvenue Avenue, of

  Panoramic, of Dwight Way, I

  returned to you as if to the breast of my father,

  grain of the beard on your umber cheeks,

  delicate line of tartar on the edge of your teeth,

  the odor of use, the stained brass

  air in the car as if I had come

  back to a pawnshop to claim what was mine—

  and as your tongue went down my throat,

  right down the central nerve of my body, the

  gilt balls of the street-light gleamed like a

  pawnbroker’s over your second-hand Chevy and

  all the toasters popped up and