Spree

By Maxine Kumin

My father paces the upstairs hall

a large confined animal

neither wild nor yet domesticated.

About him hangs the smell of righteous wrath.

My mother is meekly seated

at the escritoire. Rosy from my bath

age eight-nine-ten by now I understand

his right to roar, hers to defy

the bill from Wanamaker’s in his hand

the bill from Strawbridge’s held high

the bill from Bonwit Teller

and the all plum-colored Blum Store.

His anger smells like dinner parties

like trays of frothy daiquiris.

Against the pre-World-War-Two prime

standing ribs his carving knife

flashes a little drunkenly. He charms

all the other Bonwit-bedecked wives

but something overripe malingers.

I wear his wide cigar bands on my fingers.

Oh God it is so noisy!

Under my bed a secret stair

a gold and purple escalator

takes me nightly down under the sea.

Such dancings, such carryings on

with the prince of this-or-that

with the duke of ne’er-do-well

I the plain one, a size too large to tell

grow tremulous at stickpin and cravat

I in toe shoes and tutu suddenly

see shopping is an art form

a kind of costume ball.

Papá, would we so humbly come

to the scene in the upstairs hall

on the first of every month, except

you chose the mice for footmen, clapped

to call up the coach and four?

You sent to Paris for the ermine muff

that says I’m rich. To think twelve poor

little things had their heads chopped off

to keep my hands unseemly warm!

When you went fishing down the well

for fox furs, hats with peacock plumes

velvet evening capes, what else befell?

You paid the bills, Papá. You cast the spell.

Copyright Credit: Maxine Kumin, “Spree” from The Long Approach (New York: Viking Press, 1985). Copyright © 1985 by Maxine Kumin. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Source: The Long Approach (Viking Press, 1985)