The Stoop

We lived across the street from the school,

but I didn’t collect friends there. My collections

were caterpillars, comic books, special pebbles,

small crumbled shells from the unyielding shores

of Lake Michigan. I had one friend, Ferrah, whose

grandma lived with them in an apartment down the street.

She was a huddling yet fierce lady, wrapped in shawls

and scarves with thick black laced shoes. She taught us things

we didn’t learn in school. A new day starts in the evening, she said,

fierce with the truth, her eyes glinting with fire.

So in three, four hours it will no longer be Monday but Tuesday.

She told us about the devil and the gaping maw of hell.

Maybe she said the gawking mama of hell. Either way,

it was bad. The next year we drifted apart, like clouds

breaking up and reforming. I started going to the Field House

in the schoolyard, where Teach showed me how to weave potholders.

The kids didn’t like me there either. A bunch of girls

crowded up close like a small battalion and asked me

what I got on my report card. All Es I said, because that was true.

You’re lying they said, their battle cry.

If she said she got all Excellents, she got all Excellents,

Teach said. I loved her then. Later, when my mom and I

walked down the street, one of the mothers,

lounging and smoking on the stoop of her bungalow

called out, your daughter is full of baloney.

My mother (though not me) thought it was better

not to reply. I didn’t know what dignity was then.