Second Comings
by Elizabeth Alexander

for Kieran Jendro

I had been warned by Mrs. Shirley, who taught me everything. She showed me how to bait a fishing hook, feign attention in Sunday School, and transfer a rabbit decal onto a dyed blue egg. In high school, when I pounded on her kitchen door flushed and hysterical, she drew me a bubble bath, wrapped me in a soft white towel that smelled of cloves, and took me to be fitted for a diaphragm. She persuaded Anne to keep it quiet. In 1996, after what we feared would be the last free election, Mrs. Shirley and I took a walk in Lemon Park.

“Have some.” Mrs. Shirley tapped my arm with a silver flask. “When they come again—” she warned.

“They who?” I interrupted.

“A tyrant’s minions.

“They won’t be wearing tall black boots. They won’t be carrying shiny black batons. They won’t have swastikas on their sleeves.”

“Then how—?” I asked.

“Not by appearance, my darling. They’ll look like you.”

My sister, Anne, and I grew up in a happy story. The Nazis and the people they annihilated were removed from us by a generation in time and a continent in place. After the war, while Senator McCarthy played demagogue on the national stage, our home remained a world unto itself—seemingly immune.

What our parents wanted from us, they secured with love. Mother taught us to make pie crust and play Gin Rummy. Daddy took us to Turtle Creek to feed the ducks. They seldom went out in the evening and, when they did, they left us with Mrs. Shirley.

So it was that, when Anne and I played Cinderella, we were playing Cinderella. Meanwhile our friend Skyler was living the fairy tale, staged with a snarling meanness that was muted, almost to oblivion, in our rendition.

Anne, as Fairy Godmother: “Good night, Cinderella. Sleep tight, Cinderella, for tomorrow is the ball!”

Skyler’s stepmother, as herself: “Put your own sorry ass to bed.”

Skyler could saddle a horse, count to 100 in Japanese, and organize a kickball game in 28 seconds flat. Her sharp green eyes were iridescent, like a cat’s. She had large expressive hands and thick blond hair that, when her ponytail came undone, fell past her waist.

She had scabs in places that do not land on the pavement when you fall down.

One afternoon behind the cedar hedge, Skyler turned her back and raised her tee shirt to her neck.

Anne screamed.

“Shut up!” Skyler hissed.

Between her shoulder blades, there was a cattywompus tic-tac-toe grid made of scars, with a tiny x oozing blood at the center.

“But how—?”

“My stepmother. With a needle.”

Skyler stood so still that we could hardly see her breathe.

“. . . May we touch it?”

“. . . Okay, I guess.”

With our fingertips, Anne and I traced the smooth white scars. We touched our lips to the angry red x.

The three of us convulsed in muffled sobs.

“When they come again—”

In my mind’s eye, the warning appears in typeface as a subtitle on the screen of Skyler’s mutilated back.

Mrs. Shirley’s ashes are buried in Lemon Park where a pinewood sandbox with an orange and white-striped awning used to be.

They returned, as she foretold, with no distinctive uniform or badge unless you count the Stars and Stripes lapel pins that almost everyone was wearing in 1999. Even so, I knew them immediately.

They were a hurried, driven sort who never laughed and only when corporal punishment was restored in the public schools widened their thin blue lips in the ghost of a smile.

They shut down all the churches and established new ones.

Indifferent to happiness, they lived only for meaning.

Whole lives have been destroyed by their calm cruelties and many, many hearts have been infected.

I fear for mine.

The first silent protests were held in twilight or at dawn, when the veils between the worlds are frayed. The mood was sweet and dolorous, like being rocked.

Later protests centered on noontime rallies that were deafening in both volume and invective.

How to resist them without becoming like them?

Many of us joined hands and tried.

We all fell down.

In summer, when Skyler crops her long white hair and her skin turns golden brown, you can still make out the scar. Otherwise the brand is apparent only in her eyes, shrouding the last dashed hope.

I realize, now, how deeply Skyler trusted Anne and me and how thoroughly we failed her. We never told.

The misplaced loyalty of children to each other—

“I wish—”

I lose my voice, set down the phone, recover, and begin again as Skyler waits.

The line is still as death.

“I wish I could protect you from your past.”

© 2008 prickofthespindle.com