Machine Dreams

clearly,
I don’t have to stay anywhere. There are laws to protect me from men like you.
The words came out of my mouth as though I’d had them in my mind all along. Later I wondered if I’d heard my mother say them to my father.
    You say I planned for years, but there was no plan. He was earning less and less; I had to earn more and more. All those extension classes and summer courses to get the master’s, almost a doctorate, then insisting we put that house on the market and move into town when you kids were in high school. Finally he agreed. You know, I told him I’d move out alone if he’d sign an agreement to pay for your college educations. But I would never have left you. I was only gambling.
    I couldn’t take it anymore, struggling on his ground.

RADIO PARADE
Danner

1963
    D anner’s family sat in two rows of folding chairs on the wide sidewalk. The parade always passed Bond Hospital and Great Aunt Bess’s house at the very beginning, having formed on vacant lots out by the Tastee Freez, where there was room for all the floats to park. Bess sat on the white porch swing under the awning with Aunt Katie; they stayed back from the street so that Katie was out of the sun, but the cousins and the men and nearly everyone stood or sat in the heat. The women wore sunglasses shaped like wings whose transparent frames were pink or blue; Danner’s mother wore a red scarf over her black hair. On the high porch of Bond Hospital there were chairs and gliders drawn up for the ambulatory patients, and they began to drift into place guided by nurses. Bess didn’t own the hospital anymore and said it had gone down, just an old folks’ home, but Danner waited every year to see the patients in their long robes. The old people weren’t erectly tense like Bess but seemed weightless, nearly translucent, their skin purely whiteand their wild hair gauzy. An hour into the long parade, noise and confusion and blasting horns an unremitting din, they fell asleep sitting up, their hands in their laps. Heads fallen back, they dreamed with their mouths wide open.
    The air smelled of heat and candy and the parade was heard far off, an invisible blare of cornets and the double-time pounding of drums. Scores of boots clicked taps on pavement, and Danner felt the waiting street shimmer. Candy coins thrown by children were already melting in their gold foil; when the bands fell out at the end of the route, breaking formation past the stone gates of the city park, their bulky uniforms would smell of trampled chocolate and sweat. Danner could almost smell them, when suddenly a first corps of majorettes swung into sight under the big trees of East Main. Their bronzed legs flashed and the crowd rippled, standing and shuffling, raggedly cheering as the girls saluted. The drum majorette wore a tall white fur helmet strapped to her head with a silver strap; behind her the others advanced in perfect double lines, the short skirts of their white uniforms starched nearly horizontal and buoyed by layers of red net crinolines.
    These were the Bellington girls from the hometown band, always first in line. The majorettes were the same girls who danced at the pool dances and sat in boys’ cars at Nedelson’s Parkette, but now they were other-worldly and startling. Gazing straight down the center of the street that wound past the hospital through town to the fraternity houses and mansion funeral homes of Quality Hill, they smiled the same set, perfect smile. College boys would watch them from balconies hung with rebel bunting; watch them, not applauding.
Do you know they set a girl’s hair on fire at the May Day Sigma Chi party? Yes, last week.
In the dank basement of the junior high school, girls had stood by rows of battered olive green lockers and speculated. The lockers were ancient, like the rest of the building; Danner’s parents, even her father, had gone to high school in the same rooms and hallways. Now there was a new high school just outside Bellington, with a big parking lot where town boys parked their cars.
She was lucky they put it out before her face was burned.
Who put it out?
Danner, how should we know? What a stupid question
, and her eighth-grade compatriots turned away. Danner,reaching into a cluttered metal shelf, found the rouge and the Maybelline eyeliner pencil she kept hidden beside her tattered notebooks; after third period, before noon hour and bag lunches in the gym, she went to the girls’ basement bathroom and