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Show Moon -162 Queens is not the same as it was. The old stores have been replaced by fast food places and the chain merchants you can see anywhere in the country. I can't remember where the rooming house was, not even the name of the street. Perhaps it is enough that I visited that place in my dreams, where the rats were miraculously transformed into sparrows and squirrels. The landscape of Queens is all brick and cement, an occasional tree, enormous graveyards, row houses. But no people. I have not seen a solitary soul. Is this what they are so excited about in Washington-a neutron bomb that will match up the rest of the country to this landscape? I'm put in a tampon today just in case. But so far nothing. I touch my breasts for tenderness. They answer me nothing. I feel sexless, as though some wiring inside me had shorted out. There's a freedom in this and a loss. Perhaps I'm being protected from feeling too much. They say that the women in Hitler's concentration camps stopped menstruating. This was a mercy, I think, for how could they have borne to be reminded of the life they might never carry? Just yesterday I was with the banker called John, but already I'm having trouble remembering his face. What I do remember is the soap-washed smell of him, and the wondrous fact that he said "I'm sorry." As I emerge east of Queens, I can breathe deeply for the first time in days; I feel clean and strangely free. There's salt in the air and seagulls whirling, bringing memories of the time with Grandpa Tad, whose eyes were like a cat's, seeing things to stare at no one else could see. I can't think of him without seeing his radio and the sad plastic plants at his funeral. I get off the Expressway, point my rented Mustang onto the Northern Parkway to the place where Mark took me to the rim of madness. I've never |
