My father first saw me as an LSD vision while he was hiking in Wyoming.
He was walking up mountains, trying to catch a glimpse of himself,
His senses and sweat pouring out.
He was as strange a vision as I.
“What is this young, pale, thin foreigner doing here?” you could almost
Hear the mountains query.
He was trying to find a summit, somewhere to rest, somewhere to plant his feet.
Knowledge of such a place had always escaped him.
He had left a country, a mother and a wife.
But now, the vision told him he must go back.
Three days, he said.
Three days to get back to the farmland of Ohio.
Weeks before he told her he couldn’t stay in this town. He had tried.
He got a job in a glass factory so hot the men didn’t have eyebrows.
At lunch he talked with a man. He offered him a Cuban Cookie—
A vestige of his homeland.
No, said the man.
You will like it, my father told him.
That’s what I am afraid of, he said.
She wrote on the white sheets that covered them with a black pen.
She wanted to tell him why she couldn’t go with him.
She was elsewhere anyway.
No, not in another man’s arms, but in her mothers.
There weren’t any doubts there. She had been a daughter.
But, how do you become a wife? The movies always stop there.
Man and woman come together and live happily ever after,
The End.
How? She wanted to scream, to crawl into the screen to see the secrets.
In the beginning they thought they could both stay.
She would write for six months and he would work.
Then he would paint and she would work.
They were poor, but it didn’t matter.
At night he would come home and do quick sketches
Of her sitting behind her typewriter in a red cotton dress
Holding a cup of tea.
He thought his role was going to be easy.
Find a woman whom you love and she will
Build a home.
There wasn’t going to be a home with this American wife.
So, he went to the mountains.
Now there had to be a home. A child, a child needs a home.
They both knew that much.
Three days, three days to get back to the farmland of Ohio.
