Suzanne Roberts
This Girl’s Life
Bristol Avenue, Blackpool, England, 1955 Take Jack Smith, who got his sister pregnant. Everyone knew. He left for the war. She stayed home, listening to the radio with her baby Rhonda, who never learned to talk, froth coming from her mouth like sea foam. Next door, Geraldine Riley lived for years with all those cats, then hanged herself behind the front window of her rented one-room house. She dangled there for days like a wilting fern, till someone finally came and cut her down. Margaret Parker played the piano— was a genius, really—famous only for being lesbian. And one-legged Mrs. Proctor, hobbled down the road on two sticks, had 21 kids in a three-bedroom house. They all shit in the bathtub. We never saw the husband. Bobby Stringer was handsome, but never gave any of us girls the time of day. Kenny Cooper — the boy who used to neck with me in the back alley — had a mother missing a breast. He got Mary from the chip shop pregnant. But he liked the drink, finally died. Margaret Waitmans wore a glass eye, Mellie Flint had a house full of rats, Rita Mason, a jealous husband, who shot her for carrying on with the milkman. Dorothy Long had a clubbed foot, she would do it with anyone for a packet of Woodbines. Maureen Milligan was the only girl to go to college. Later, she died of asthma in an ambulance. She was the first person I’d kissed. We’d pretended we were boys, neither wanting to be the girl. Then Seed Street was bombed, and we took in evacuees. At night, the air raids splintered through the night sky like cracking bones. We sat still in the dark. In the corner, Great Grandma Smith held a horn to her ear, bent on an elbow, shouting, What? What’s that? No one paying her any mind.
Suzanne Roberts is the author of three books of poems, Shameless (Cherry Grove, 2007), Nothing to You (Pecan Grove Press, 2008), and Plotting Temporality (forthcoming from Red Hen). She writes and teaches in South Lake Tahoe, California.
