Nancy With the Laughing Face
I can hear her sloshing in the bath.
The phone rings. Ma yells, “It’s your boyfriend.”
She bursts out still wrapping herself in a towel.
She sees me stunned by her likeness to Venus.
As she passes she slaps my face, softly.
She’s engaged. A photograph shows them
on a golf tee. He’s pretending to give her a lesson,
a handsome man from a Greek family.
I’m too young to know
Greek grandmothers in black dresses
sit at tables as their grandchildren dance,
drink thimbles of raki and arrange marriages.
My sister is too. She and her fiancé take
me to a movie set in an Arctic radar station.
The theremin makes our skin crawl,
a thermite bomb sinks the flying saucer
to black depths inside us. Fliers, technicians,
a doctor, engineer and a girl
find a creature in the ice. Some fool
leaves the electric blanket on. The thing
comes alive. The men try to burn it. It bursts out
shrieking sheets of fire. This is getting
serious. I crouch behind the seat in front.
It doesn’t die. They find a sled dog hanging
upside-down like a bottle of plasma
feeding alien seedlings. The men hatch a plan
to kill it. They don’t say what. In movies
they keep us hanging upside-down.
The thing hammers the metal door.
And there it is! I see her hair fly up.
We have entered the permafrost of fear.
The Russians have the atomic bomb.
We have seen enough of war to know
not all monsters come from outer space.
That was not the worst shock.
Her boyfriend’s parents say no
when he says he wants to marry her.
He should marry his own kind.
She disappears. My dad tells me she’s joined
the WAVES. Even when she gets old
there are moments when
her eyes have a far-away look.
She’s as strong as her three brothers.
She’s the one who let herself feel it all
and just kept dancing. I can still see her
jitterbugging on the Strip in Vegas
that night of the Elvis impersonators.
She’s the one who used to tell me
“make a muscle,” the one who could see
the Superman inside the Ugly Duckling,
the one who played “Teach Your Children Well”
on the eight-track in her Thunderbird
and squeezed my hand as if it were
still the Sixties. This is for you,
the one who remembered all the parts
I have left out, the one who told me
there’s no point beating a dead horse.