V – at 5 I wanted not to go to school wanted a guitar wanted a Robin (as in Batman) costume cause he got all the girls my mother said the other tenant Mrs. B. was sewing upstairs & would give me, along with a Batgirl outfit for her daughter, the love of my life, Irene, & Batman for her stubby towheaded youngest, Joseph, who my mother later said grew up to be a fine bald doctor I could have married, but, well, there was the problem of that word she found in my diary once. if only we had stopped playing in time and come inside when we should have, we could have had our costumes made.
X– at 10 I wanted not to move from Ironbound wanted not to go to a new school wanted a new bike and certain kids at school to sign the cast I had on my left leg from the fall off my old bike before it and my brother’s were stolen from the garage one of us left unlocked that first summer we were in Kearny and watching ourselves become. I was in the bathroom washing off the evidence of wandering far afield with the other recent neighborhood latchkeys—Mike, Frank, Jimmy, Lou and me—for knight and squire quests into the parceled Sacred Heart convent acre from which our new street sprang; Evel Kneivel pallet ramps over the canyon lot behind the auto parts concern; fiery crashes in the weed-cracked Congoleum Nairn office parking lot we dubbed ‘the Congo’ (I came to love sumac and benzine like a second skin)—when I heard the noise downstairs, too early for my parents’ return from work and Lou, unperturbed, was watching Ironman, so I didn’t go and check but oh the things that can go wrong when no one’s looking. later, our rides gone, Ma and Pa, like hybrid characters outta first generation American Gothic or Portuguese Hee Haw stopped staring down and shouting at each other long enough to say that’s what we got for leaving the door wide open to anyone.
XV – at 15 I wanted to be a 1- or 2-hit new wave wonder so I could save my profits and retire early wanted not to have to go downstairs to clean my father’s apartment my mother said I had to as the girl after she my brother and i moved out upstairs because that’s as far as the lawyer told her she could go in this is the house that love built on a street in sprawl walking distance to everywhere. it took me all day saturday to push the broom from one window to the next,
because we were home already.
Paula Neves is a graduate student in English at Rutgers-Newark and editor of the Website Itinerant Muse at www.itinerantmuse.com. Posted January 2008.
