Irregular

The first recognition I read in a book. Something is irregular about these figures, what the words don’t come out and say. They wear buttoned-up pinstriped shirts. They ring female, yet not women. Not mothers or teachers or girlfriends or nuns. (Old-world queer, as in off, odd, awry, but do I mean their bodies or just the angle of view the author gave me to see? Did they wear ties and smoke cigars? Did they watch with falcon eyes? Did they wait in the shadows around the corner, pulling the collars of their peacoats closed as the wind rattled the alley trash? Were they waiting for cabs or friends or their time to arrive? Did I read about these odd bodies or just hope for them, the way some children imagine talking dolls and crystal cities and that friend nobody else can see? Some say queerness, in the new way of the word, is less description than hope, but how do we wait for what we don’t yet know?)

At age seven I sit in my room at the corner of 142nd and Emerald Avenue. I am alone except for my dolls, lined up on a bench under the windowsill. A redhead in a lacy dress and plastic Mary Jane shoes and a tape recorder in her neck. A housewifey blond in a blue cotton frock, who with enough batteries is able to walk a bit, slow rocking monster steps, before she tips over. A baby doll in red cotton overalls with a stiff blond pixie. (Something was off about the dolls as well. Their hair was not pretty enough and their eyes were askew. I would find them, years later, when moving, in a box in my basement, and wonder at the baby’s matted hair, the leg pulled out of the redhead’s hip socket, the smudges on the little housewife’s puffed cheeks, and I would remember that I never did know how to play.)

From my childhood window: the steel latticework of the powerlines across the street, the truck smoke of South Side Halsted Avenue just visible over the alley to my left, the clank of whistles and freight north and west, just out of sight. Our block: a purgatory, brownstone and backyard neighborhood to the south, to the north the tracks, mills, truck routes, smokestacks. Sometimes, from my bedroom, either asleep or awake, I see a girl out there, small and filmy, like my housewifey doll but with neater hair, banana- curled like mine was once. She is short and bare-kneed, legs sturdy as my walking doll’s legs. She won’t speak to me. She stands in our yard overgrown into prairie, green stalks taller than the fence, her face obscured, her eyes watching through.