OCR Text |
Show in my father's house/ 255 ramblings of our math teacher as he recounted his World War II experiences. I saw my own fragile hopes reflected behind the shy or surly or mischievous masks of my classmates. Even newsprint marched its characters in dignity as I read the events of the world that opened its arms to receive me. I discovered that I loved everyone, a great and terrifying miracle. So this was God's world, a vaster space than my lost home, but so sunny and beautiful! Another brother was born that year. In my mind, his christening blessed the red brick house as well. Aunt Helga bore pans of water and stained linen from my mother's room, stopping to speak confidentially about the birth as though acknowledging my new womanhood. Her talk made me warmly anxious as an initiate to a new club who knows nothing about the rites of membership. But I was glad to note that only joy - not wistfulness - resided in Aunt Helga's face this time. I held my baby brother for a time and gazed at my mother in awe as she nursed him. Later, I went to my bedroom and stood before the full-length mirror that Saul gave me for my birthday and imagined myself with child. "So this is what it means to be a woman," I breathed, suffused with light and warmth. Then, a feeling overwhelmed me, and I went outside where cold dark spaces hung like wet sheets between the houses and I made a dozen adolescent angels in the snow. My father stayed with my mother that night, the only night he slept in the red brick house. He brought my mother a huge box of sanitary pads and held them out as though they were a dozen roses. "This is for giving me a son," he said sincerely. My mother began to laugh. In a matter of seconds she was almost |