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Frankie's GirlOur love went on for nearly a year He won me over with compliments done by phone and would wait for his calls and knew even before he spoke who it was I could feel his breath and got to like that breath on the phone the gasp that came while preparing to speak and in that moment, ecstasy. *
It’s you, I’d laugh. Like the girl
I became inside. Skating, dancing like when I was a child. And he’d tell me wonderful things, ‘the melody of your voice, the proficiency of your work.’ He knew how to woo. And every time the phone rang it go so I wanted it to be him. I was snagged. Bedazzled. And let myself be. It felt grand, like sailing down a cliff waiting to be caught in velvet arms before the grassy bottom. * He lived in a tall rowhouse in the city The door was blah, he’d rattle the keys as he’d let us in we stood on a small uncovered porch then ascend, our shoes thumping against the wood my sandals his sneakers a steady rhythmed march up the steep flight to his rooms. There were three of them, large, ceilings high. A useless fireplace held his books, stacked in there like small Christmas trees. He spent time in the room in the middle. At a desk with a thick wooden chair I imagined auditors with visors over their brows sat in long ago. Reading the paper, science fiction, writing out his checks in that small black scrawl of his. Stacks of his typed-up poems and plays filed away in one of the auditor’s file cabinets. He believed in reincarnation. It was the one odd belief I couldn’t subscribe to. But took all the rest. If you love someone, you take them whole. * And when I’d come, we’d sit in the living room, which gave onto a huge backyard. We were three stories up and day after day I’d see the progression of a black man far below coming out to fix his car, his body bent under the hood, his tools lying flat on the spot of grass that passed for backyards in rowhouses tools lying flat and pressed out from three stories above. * There was also out the window further down a building taller than the others – a rotunda part of the vast university system wrapped in pink insulation material outrageous gorgeous. He was surprised I called it beautiful and went to it each dawn. He liked, I could tell, I found beauty in things he never thought of. Like his fingers, round, with rings on them, and the curled hair on his chest that made me feel when I put my head there like a lamb grazing in the fields. * And he had a huge record collection of all the great jazz artists and blues artists and he would let me pick out the records and showed me how to use the stereo and I’d put the needle on carefully so as not to scratch them. And I’d dance to Miles “Running the Voodoo Down,” and some modern-day gospel and sometimes in between we’d hear street noises, the sound of a car alarm and sirens, plenty of sirens in Philadelphia. And we’d sit on his huge black futon for hours and kiss. And the pink building was off in the distance and when it got dark outside, the pink building also got dark. * He would wait for me on the corner of his street. He loved me deeply. And I’d swing by in my car and he was waiting and I’d roll down my window and he’d walk over and we’d kiss a very long hello. And then I’d park my car and we’d go up. And I can still remember the smell of the cooking of the Indian woman on the bottom floor, it filled up the apartment house, not unpleasant, but not pleasant either. A greasy smell, like from one of those gloomy Dostoyevsky novels I read as a teenager. And the Indian children, you’d hear them from his apartment running around downstairs yelling screaming like all children do – I never did see them – but we heard them while kissing and dancing and talking about his day and mine. * The first time I saw him was when he came over and got off the train at Willow Grove. He said, “Look for the man in the red cap, bald, and a black backpack.” I sat on the steps by the Willow Grove station and waited for the 11:52. My heart was pounding, it was coming through my mouth, and I sat there, my body rocking with my heart looking down the tracks and waiting to hear the clang of the bells and see the stop lights do their fandango that meant the train was coming down the line. * He got off last. The man I already loved. The voice on the phone now complete. I walked over. I was wearing my best tight jeans and jacket, my comfortable walking sandals. He came down the steps of the train as a man walking into the clear air of the suburbs the conductor waiting. I got up and he came toward me. He put down his backpack and we stood there in a huge shy hug with the people passing by. I pressed my head against his chest and said, “So this is who you are, so this is who you are.” And we were casting soft glances at one another. It was not one of those Internet romances, you know, where you send pictures back and forth. This was all done by voice. You fell in love with the voice and then you met the person. “We’ll walk,” I said grabbing his hand. “I want to show you my world.” And led him down Davisville Road past the shops and bakery that smelled like cream puffs. But he was not, I want to tell you right now, the man I pictured over the phone. And I was trying to put the man he was into the voice over the phone. And it wouldn’t work. But let’s not tell her yet. Let’s allow her to have the time of her life, to trick her into believing everything she wants to believe. She needs it, poor thing. For love, she’ll become a fool. Willingly, joyfully, will discard everything – wits, clothes, propriety, duties joyfully, in the name of love. * Under the sheets in his large bedroom they’d lay. The first time they were together they stayed for hours, all night even Such hungry mouths and flesh and hands. Every patch of parched body loved and warmed, taken care of healed of wounds for all time, neverending peace. “You make me feel I’ll never die,” she said. “I want to give my life to you and marry you,” he said. He slept late in the morning snoring. His body hunched at the shoulders like an old man. She would awaken first, press her cheek against his, and do yoga in the living room. He’d have her food waiting for her in the fridge her Tropicana orange juice and Diet Dr Pepper. And he’d have heaping bottles of Diet Pepsi for himself, stored sideways at the bottom. They’d sit together in the living room in the morning and sitting in the chair, he’d drink down his Diet Pepsi right from the bottle, he had a mustache and she’d watch his small fingers twist off the cap And would listen for the sound the bottle cap would make. The quick twisting sounds. The boisterous rhythms his fingers made it do. And would close her eyes and listen to the sound. I’m a part of his world, she’d think, Frankie’s world. * And it was like that from the winter months through the spring thaw until one time she drove over and he wasn’t waiting outside and she couldn’t roll down her window for their kiss Another time the Dr Pepper and the orange juice were missing from the fridge. She looked at his graying mustache and tiny black marble eyes and whispered “You forgot?” But she wasn’t ready just yet to bear the news. * They went to one of the fine Mexican restaurants in the city and she saw when he ordered that he looked the waitress up and down. And had a snotty look of arrogance that she’d never seen before. His arms were extended on the table, his cuffs unbuttoned, exposing his fancy gold wristwatch. And his head was tilted back in arrogance. She had never seen that look before and began to fret. * And then one night she stayed over – and found it harder and harder to leave so great was the feeling in the pit of her belly that she was losing him – and was – and was lying naked under the great white sheet and he was sitting in his underpants in the chair and wasn’t talking – and she had a tremor. And she turned off all thought and attended to the tremor. She was a woman in her fifties – “beautiful, radiant, glowing,” he had called her before and after their toss and felt the tremor, like finding an old lost toy on the beach, a rusty child’s pail with a swinging metal handle And she heartened to the tremor, and the feeling, the lost feeling like a she-dog hearkens to the full moon and, God, she had never felt so alone. * She threw back her head on the pillow and took one last look at the ceiling fan and at his altar of things on his dresser: the picture of his bar mitzvah in tallis, his sister’s marriage to the man who became the president of a great university a picture of himself in a small tight black suit, his hunched shoulders firmly outlined with pride, his captured brilliance. And with a sob threw off the sheet and put on her socks her panties and buttoned her blouse over breasts he would never see again and looked at him. Under the sheets, she had made a deal with herself: ”I never want to feel this way again.” At home she would walk the floor and beg God in the night, Please, don’t let me dial his number again. She would pick up the phone and would trace the numbers over the dial, over and over. She could do it blindfolded her head thrown back feeling the numbers like Helen Keller her raised Braille. She’d pull out the plug and dial the numbers, pressing them hard and firm and listen for the nothing and strain to hear that breath and then the voice and then to feel the rush of ecstasy. * Every time she heard the train coming or going from Willow Grove when she was out in the yard raking leaves or even up in bed she’d remember the smell of his aftershave the feel of his bald pate would see him descend the steps of the train, his backpack weighing him down. She threw away the cards he’d sent her the necklaces, the love letters, threw them all away, except for one thing she put away, an envelope with his writing on it. And yet if she really wanted to could look around the house and find in each thing in each particle in every mote of dust floating in the sunlight traces of Frankie. #Poem #Poetry #RuthZDeming #FrankiesGirl Visit our shop and subscribe. Sponsor us. Submit and become a contributor. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. CommentsComments are closed.
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