It’s all gotten grainy like the TV in the front room of 6840 Guyer Avenue, the moon landing on, my brother watching. The TV sputters, crackles, splats in the first room of the house, and I am alone in the second room of the house, and my grandmother is dying in the third room of the house, and my grandfather is in the basement at the rolltop desk, two thick rubber bands catching the extra folds of fabric of his sleeves, and other people (my mother, my sister, my father) must be other places, but I sit at the center of my world, or on the edges of theirs, too young to know the difference, too young to have decided.
***
In the rumble of the bus swinging wide at traffic lights and loose over its tires. All the way we go, we go, to the Sun Oil Day Camp, with the company logo on our shirts and sandwiches in our paper sacks. I’m left wrist to left elbow with the extra heat of an extra-long Ace bandage because I am broken and it will not be my turn to play when the bus pulls in and the kids pour down the big bus steps, July dust on their sneakers already, and thick on the breeze. When it comes time to swim, I will take off my canvas tennis shoes and ribbed socks and stick my aimless feet into the green chlorine and avoid the splashing from the other end, the joy of the others’ relief. When it comes time for bows and arrows, I will sit and watch from the shade. When it comes time for the girls to play cats in the cradle, nobody can use an extra hand, a single extra hand, this has been decided.
***
In the cafeteria at the morning hour, my granola, my raisins, and I sit. Where and with whom, where and with whom: nowhere and no whom. I take my breakfast back to the old dorm room. I sit on my bed and I eat, kicking aimless feet into the quiet.
***
Whispers are the loudest talk. My husband’s kin, in their Salvadoran courtyard, with white plaster walls and climbing bougainvillea and parrots in their cages and all that Spanish I don’t speak. Every now and then I hear my name like a punctuation mark. A subject. An object.
***
I will never walk into a room and keep on walking into its middle. I will never understand the Spanish when it’s whirring. I have adjusted my posture to the walls where I am leaning. I have become what I will be—fate or luck or life intervening. Which is to say that I live with the man I love and the son I love and every friendship that I have forged, every friendship being its own private orbit, a two-star constellation shining bright enough for me to see it. As if all the outlander parts of me are their own astronomical secret. As if my edge life is the cluster life, is the center of this story.
