Strip (9781948954686) by Sward Hannah

Author:Sward, Hannah [Sward, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Little Boy in the Blue Jumper

Rilke did get over Squid. She fell in love with an Austrian-Jamaican man. They got married at a friend’s house in the hills by a priest they had found in the back of the LA Weekly. ‘Priest on Wheels’, the ad said. It was a small outdoor wedding and our mom was there, and Rilke’s dad, Paul. Rilke looked so beautiful in her simple silk white dress with her long hair loose and the man she loved by her side. Unlike me she had always wanted to get married and have kids.

“We’re moving to New York,” she said the day of the wedding.

When she told me that, my whole body froze and I couldn’t hold back the tears. It felt like when we were kids, all those summers of having to say goodbye to each other, only this time Rilke was leaving.

“What will happen when one of us falls in love?” we’d always asked one another.

“We’ll just have to tell our husband he has to take the sister too.”

We said that for a lot of years but we knew the truth, it would be hard.

•

When she left I stopped stripping. Nobody wants a crying stripper, and I couldn’t do it without her. Something in me went wrong. It was like I was two again but I was in my late twenties and feeling maybe what I felt like when I was two and my mom left and I didn’t have any words just the memory of arms reaching out of the crib for her. Reaching, crying, but she never came. I don’t remember who did.

When I was ten I saw a movie. I don’t remember anything about it except one scene and I’m not sure if it’s exactly how it was in the movie but what stayed with me since then was the image of a mom and her two year old boy. A white house with a pebble path and long driveway. The boy is looking out the window, little hands and face pressed against the glass. He’s wearing a blue jumper. The mom, she’s walking down the path, not looking back. Skirt to the knees, bare calves, heels, click, click on the pebbles.

The boy is crying, “Mom.”

She does not turn back, gets in her car. The boy is gone from the window, his handprints left on the glass from the fog of his breath. He runs out the front door, his face is red, the tears, the cries, his arms outstretched before him, reaching towards her. She is driving away, he’s running after her. The blue strap of his jumper comes undone, snot runs down his nose, he can hardly breathe.

“Mom, Mom.”

She does not come back.

I was ten and in that movie theater and I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t stop crying. Shaking. The image of that boy at the window, hands pressed against the glass, him running after her, I carried that image of him with me for so many years, I could still hear the sound of her heels on the pavement, click, click as she walked away.

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