Curbside Splendor
June 2012
Leftover Ladies By Lucile Barker
It is a late Brooklyn Saturday afternoon in mid-August and it is too hot. St. Ann’s day is over, Labour Day too close. Twilight will be a benediction, evening a pure blessing, darkness heaven, and midnight bliss. The silent old ladies on the gray cement porches are sullen, carrying on a feud that started when Nixon was elected, a window broken by a carelessly thrown baseball. They are too hot in their perpetual heavy black mourning dresses, raging inwardly against dead husbands, negligent sons, daughters who live on Staten Island with non-Italian husbands and whine about the bridge tolls whenever they visit, and the shifty home care nurses who most certainly are stealing something, although they have never figured out what was missing, outside of time. The bells from a church on Fourth Avenue peal, and they shake their heads, knowing that they no longer have anything worthwhile to confess, outside of their rage against what has been, what could have been. The sky turns indigo and they go inside, claw hands pulling back curtains to see what is happening on the street, knowing that the other is probably doing the same thing. Finally the street is still; so quiet that the subway at Ditmas Station can be heard these three blocks away, the heat finally leaving the ground, rising more quickly than the bread they are leaving out to put in the
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