The Mothers
Mrs. E., with the long limbs, took a daily swim
in our town’s lake. How funny she looked,
with her thin torso in black, and that bathing cap —
strange for lake swimming. We had magnificent
mothers who did such things: swim in the lake
until November, make pottery, paint landscapes,
sketch. Mrs. E. sketched us as we played on the dock
by the lake. I can still see her: bony elbows bent
above the water. The fathers were less interesting.
They worked: insurance, sales, law. They fade
with time while the mothers, magnificent, remain
vivid and forty-two. The mothers watched us,
and we watched them, my mother working clay,
Barbara’s mother, long at her easel, Jean’s mother,
swimming and sketching. She was magnificent,
and odd, wearing a bathing cap in a lake, her bony arms
churning round and round, even in November.
My mother’s pottery wheel, too, went round
and round, and Barbara’s mother, holding tight
to a steering wheel, died when she fell asleep
at the wheel. Was it November? She was tired
of being magnificently let down by her husband.
It took my mother thirty years to leave my father.
Mrs. E. was left by Mr. E. and almost didn’t recover.
It took swimming and sketching and finally law school
to pull her through. This was the ‘70s, when marriage
after marriage unraveled, when, during so many
long afternoons lakeside on the dock, Mrs. E.
passed us: bony legs, long torso, casebook closed,
cap on. November, yes, and still she would swim.