A Sick Day With Adrienne
I encourage her to look at the board head-on
instead of sideways,
to better see the pawns advancing straight,
only lurching on attack.
But aside from the awkward circularity of our kitchen table,
she seems to prefer the sideways view,
the battle as narrative as much as strategy or rote.
Or, in truth, as all three.
For a 5-year-old, she’s pretty damn sharp.
Her little arms, reaching for a knight,
might unsettle a bishop.
The rook she takes just a square or two,
his infinite linear powers suspicious to her.
Audacious to the point of cockiness at times;
others, she peers up at me and asks, of her queen,
“Is she safe?”—as skeptical of my judgment on the matter
as she is of the decorum of the in-your-face pawn
who dares jut up against the royal gown.
Then, in checkers, she wears me down,
the game a quick mutual massacre
till the last several indecisive kings
play zone when shy, man-on-man when spry.
Then it is a war of attention’s attrition.
We both have our reckless moments,
then two of her high-headed goons
corner me at 4-A.
“Can I go tell mom?,” she grins at her victory,
leaving me to make Tuscan pork chops.
In the morning, she watched the second half
of The Sound of Music, because she’d never gotten that far.
I was to sit on the big bed with her and read my book,
but Mr. Kim,
the contractor who came to help us
with our leaky basement windows,
wanted to confer,
then sang “Edelweiss” with Christopher Plummer.
“One of my favorite songs,” he claimed.
“That awful Rolf,” I think to myself in disgust.
“What could make a guy turn so quickly? One minute
prancing around a garden singing to his gal, the next
delivering Nazi naval commissions with nary a good day?
But why would Captain Von Trapp goad him on that way
at the end was that Sudafed 12 hour or 24 hour endangering
his whole big harmonious family just to get the last word in?”
“At my church, I sing in the choir,” said Mr. Kim,
I read in The New Yorker
about Chalabi duping the Pentagon and hopping up Bush,
and the CIA-fronted PR agency in London leaking
word of bioweapons to Fleet Street. “You’ll never
be one of them,” the Captain sneers at Rolf. So
gratuitous, really Adrienne brings me
a Post-It note and asks me to write the children’s names:
Brigitta, Liesl, Marta, Gretl…
Everything hurts her throat,
but still, at dinner, she sings:
“You look happy to meet me…”
At bedtime, we air-hug and blow kisses.
“But you can kiss me. We’re both sick.”
“But my cold might be a little different.”
A little after midnight,
she comes to me with a bloody nose.
I have nothing to tell her but lie back,
press the cloth gently, it will stop.
Parents aren’t good for much
beyond confirming the obvious,
are we?
Glasses off, I stare at the clock,
numbers indeterminate.
Shouldn’t watch, I scold myself,
old Frank Sinatra movies
about junkie-drummer-poker dealers
before bed did I take one Benadryl,
or two for a junkie, he’s pretty
enterprising being both
a drummer and a poker player
and having Kim Novak
as a gal on the side, to boot what
the hell does to boot mean?
Wish I could get back to sleep…
“I did it my way,” sings Mr. Kim.
With the cement
and a one-and-a-half inch aluminium reinforcement
under the plastic bubble, he
will give us a one-year warrantee
in return for just one hit,
just to get me through the audition, man,
then I swear I’ll kick I know I can.
You’ll want to exchange clay for this top
soil to keep the runoff grade.
The choir conductor nods solemnly,
and now a hymn, first in Korean,
then in English. “You’ll never be,”
the sopranos sing, angelically,
“one of us” of course,
the moisture trapped inside the paint
is a different matter, probably wetness seeping
in from the bottom would have
to re-tar that whole side of the
house, which would take some digging
probably four, five grand.
“You’re very luck to have me,” says Mr. Kim
his hand bloodied by the carpet staple.
“How do you hold a moonbeam in your
hand?” sings the bishop,
moving diagonally into Najaf to avoid the
rocket grenades of the Sunni insurgents.
“With butter and salt.
No pesto. I’ll have veggies at dinner.
Can I have Sprite. Sprite. Sprite.”
“You forgot a word.”
“Can I have Sprite, please,
you little fink, you’re lucky I don’t kill you.”
“I swear it’s a clean game,
I’ve never held cards in my sleeve before. I’m
just so tired.”
At six in the morning
Adrienne comes to us in her dress.
“I’m hungry.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Throat still hurts.”
“But a little better?
A bite of cinnamon toast. A sip of milk.
“A little better,” she says.
“And how ’bout you?” asks Lauren.
“I think,” I say, “I’ll go to work today.”
________________
Icing
The kids made sugar cookies yesterday with their mom.
Because they ate a good dinner—steak, noodles, green beans—
they got to decorate the cookies with four colors of icing.
They decorated not just the tops, but the bottoms.
They squeezed the tubes and squirted the bold blue, green, yellow, red.
They got it on their hands and their cheeks and their sleeves
and their tongues and their eyebrows and their place mats.
Then they added, again to top and bottom, some bright sprinkles.
I hovered and tried not to say:
Too much. It’s dripping. Won’t even taste good. Too blue.
They ate their cookies. I bit my tongue.
My son, between chews, as clairvoyant as I am compulsive,
not even looking up at me, but instead at his cookie, said,
“Try to remember, daddy—it doesn’t matter.”
I grabbed an ice-cream sandwich and thought,
What the hell.
I made it to bath time.
- Alexander C. Kafka
