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Sport 19: Lightworks
Restaurant
Restaurant
I.
Before we had our own
child, I had a fantasy;
adopt or just bring these two—
brother and sister—into our home.
Because of the way the father walked
ten feet in front of them, yelling
abuse. What sweet
kids—maybe six and five.
On Wednesdays, weekends. Expose them
to warmth, inquiry, baking, TV. Tell us
the word for bread how
your grandmother says it.
The brother is now nine or ten. Puts
something in his hair. I've got to tell him:
Stop throwing rocks over the roofs
of the parked cars. You can see the marks
in his hair from the comb. How many times
do I have to tell him! This is property,
people walk by. Next day he's back
on the dirt-pile our neighbour dropped
from digging out his new bedroom.
The boy's not throwing in that direction though.
The gay man I'm eating with doesn't have any
patience for the crying child. The mother has him
by the door, ready to leave, though she doesn't want
to go. She wants to eat her dinner.
Do I take this as an unlikeable thing about all
gay men? But then there's the man at the next
table, in his sixties—difficult to imagine him
in bed with another man—who, raising
his voice, says he would have been knocked
from here to kingdom come. ‘I'd be dead
by now.’
II.
Our neighbour hasn't put curtains in his new bedroom. Sometimes at night, when I'm taking the recycling down, or carrying a tool up from the basement, sometimes I might just want to be out of the house for a moment—everyone steps into the night, don't say it's just men hiding from the mothers of their children screaming in their baths, soap in their eyes—I see his girlfriend laying out her clothes for the next day's work on their bed. It's very exciting. Her—what is it—thoughtfulness? The composing—the blouse, the skirt. She is already wearing her white dressing-gown. Once she told us, when our child was about to be born, she couldn't imagine something growing inside her. ‘I'd feel too full.’
III.
My father smacked us. I remember curling under
a shrub and crying. He lies down on the floor
and our daughter tells him she wants to look in his
mouth. ‘It's all right,’ she says, ‘You've been a good
girl.’ He cries out because she's kneeling on his chest.
When he knows she's coming to visit, he shaves.
He combs his hair! His combs were always
dirty—who would clean a comb? He used to chase
my sister around the dining-table, the noise
so great you could shout with joy
and not be heard.