Harrison Road 

Jenny rescues a tiny opossum from the gutter the spring my mother dies. We name her Wilma and she is a fleck-furred acrobat with a witchy grin She quickly becomes our constant companion. On the floor of Jenny’s room, Wilma’s rope-tail unfurls from beneath the pages of the Joy of Sex and Seventeen Magazine and it distracts us from applying sweet lip gloss before Jenny and I practice kissing. When we bike to the deli no one tells us we can’t buy ham and swiss on a roll and a bag of chips. No one has yet said we’ll get as big as a house if we keep eating like this, that we look like clowns in our paint-splashed clothes. No one tells us we can’t propose to each other with grape ring pops on a park bench, our baby Wilma between us, whiskers twitching out from her canvas carrier sack. These are the days I stay with Jenny for as long as I like, before my father emerges from the softness of grief and invests in demands again.

Jenny and I read all night, carelessly toss books about when we’re done.

“Have you tidied a bit?” her mother wonders, but we all know the answer. Her home-therapy office is on the third floor of the house on Harrison Road, its Victorian ceilings so high she and Jenny’s dad stand on ladders to hang tapestries from the doorways in the wintertime because the radiators are weak and it costs a fortune otherwise.

“They’ll burn the place down by accident,” my father says, but he is too sad to insist on anything and he lets me spend the night without objection.

Jenny’s mother is the only one who asks me “How are you?” her face melting with concern for a motherless girl, but we all know the answer.

Jenny’s bathroom mirror is framed in fake gold and when I am sleepless, Wilma follows me and watches me ritualistically press the pages of my mother’s teenage journals against the glass. I want to decipher hidden meanings. Through the other side of the mirror Wilma is a changeling, kitten-like, winding herself around my ankles, and my mother’s tattered college T-shirt I wear looks new again. In her loopy handwriting my mother reports fatigue from the grapefruit diet but she is losing weight and getting A’s in Biology, which is her favorite class, and she likes to feel smart at something. She’s smitten with Daniel but it’s Tommy who gives her attention at lunch. She is training to be a summer lifeguard, desperate to grow up and pass the test, in which she attempts to save the grown men who will try to drown her.

When dawn eventually drenches the bathroom mirror in orange light, I am still hunting for love  between my mother’s pages, Wilma asleep on my feet. I drop the writing into the sink and press my hands against my shoulders, neck, hold my cheeks, hold myself, hold my mother before she completely escapes me. Hold,            hold                             hold.               

Later when Jenny and I smear our faces with cotton balls soaked in astringent and stand beneath the ceiling fan, the sting on our pores is so acute we can only laugh in our self-inflicted pain and spin to pop music, Wilma in our arms, consumed with the bright shock of it all.