Roxanne Pilat
When I was a little girl, I think my uncle took me
to the fights. Just once.
The kind of place I had only seen in the black-white
world of a nine-inch Zenith enshrined in a blond
wooden box, guarded by the blessed mother Mary,
who stood atop a doily on the sacred sarcophagus.
On this screen I watched the Friday night fights,
with my uncle and grandfather, sitting cross-legged
on the floor of my grandparent’s den, when I stayed
with them each summer, when I was a girl.
No one else remembers that trip to the fights,
but I do. Though its memory is smothered
in cigar smoke and the swagger of sweaty men,
and my uncle has been dead for many years.
I can’t get him to tell me now. Whether it’s true
or not. Whether I dreamed it. Or made it up.
He used to call me monkey, this uncle of mine.
I was charmed by the small hug of that word,
which must have meant I was his pet. I
only figured this out a few years ago, when
I found myself closer to the age he was then.
He was kind to me in uncle fashion, a way
that he had not been to his own children,
when they were my age. Or even
to his wife, I’m told.
He lost them all. His wife died of childbirth.
His children raised by other family members.
He didn’t know. He hadn’t figured out how
to be a husband to her.
And he couldn’t figure out how
to be a father without her.
He had wanted to play major league ball.
In photos he’s poised proud and lean,
in minor flannels: clenching a mitt,
dreaming a wish that vanished in the
I do’s and I will’s he uttered to himself
when his father died too early
and he had to put the mitt away.
But all of this happened before I was born.
By the time that I was a little girl, he had softened,
they said, and he would take to calling me
monkey, walking with me to places
that I knew mostly by their smells:
the cinnamon-dust of the donut shop;
the tobacco-varnish of a bowling alley, where
puppet-like hands still set the pins.
And I do think he took me to the fights once,
where I stood, too warm, in my navy blue
snowsuit, and white overboots,
next to men like my uncle. They sat
in suspendered suitpants and crisp white shirts:
lifting charcoal fedora hats, wiping brows with
handkerchiefs. Cheering cursing calling to
boxers I never saw, because I was too short.
He didn’t smile much, even there, except
when he gave me a stick of red licorice
I didn’t really want, but ate anyway,
so as not to not hurt his feelings.
Because he already seemed too hurt.
I sucked slowly, slowly on the fruity sugar
until my throat felt thick and confused with
strawberry sadness, all mixed up with the stench
of scotch and Old Spice lingering over us
in the neon air.
