Before we buried Oma, she had been vain, in the same way that a muscular man is vain. She moved like fingers in a cash drawer, fingers that picked and snapped. 

 

Oma once cried, O! Her finger on my childhood head, the city pond in spring thaw. Look at how that duck dives into the mud, you, he gives himself away for eating. Don't live as he's done it. Keep your eye above the water. Her gold and brown eye on the tendon of my sturdy neck, in the wind the sweetest smell, the city's snowmelt running between the pregnant bulbs of tulips. She slipped a caramel, a plastic wrapped sugar-shout from her deep pocket into mine. Too young for fatness yet! The night was coming. The clouds rose pink as cheeks above the cold park trees then grayed then rose again and the sun fainted behind the city. Her kidskin palm patted her gold hair. Through her gold hair, I saw the last sun shatter on a tall glass wall.

 

In her closet, fabric once pressed close together, some fine as the skin of children, or bristling with a predator's fur, one or two sharp enough to cut, to scratch away at the crook of an elbow until the elbow bled and the dazzle of the sequins was dulled as smog obscures a frantic city and the lacquer of memory blanches, the softened brain like bread dropped into water. 

 

A child's forefinger and thumb picking the loaf to feed the duck. My vain Oma cast out the crumb. This way on the wind, this way, she whispered. 

 

Oma, whose name, Kuipers, had been reformed at the surf on the pilings of a barrier island and then again by marriage, her closet was full. She was vain–my mother said so. She was vain–I myself was lost in her many hung coats, I myself slipped my tiny feet into the toe of her shoe, oh, my white bobby socks dirtier than her dirtiest dancing shoe. She glued herself to the tar of this country, she kissed its glass walls, she slicked red on her lip. O! A call once softly pleading. Hollow and sharp. 

 

And young once, Nancy, then, she stretched her jaw to spit the slippery English, she bore my uncle and mother. The fairy and the little witch, she called them. Bright as a male peacock, her display she kept hidden away inside the slatted closet doors, until she could Ach! spread it wide, the twirl of a skirt. He! She had the musk of the secretary, the book keep, the lover of the wealthy American man, she was kept in a silver pouf. O! Wicked and vain! 

 

She caught a man, they said, she stole his name, his babies, she took his seed and planted them in her foreign soil. O! She was a wicked woman, her gold hair she kept gold like a spell. 

 

A cloud rose above the steam that slipped from the stacks of a freezer plant beyond the city margin, and in a bitter sunset, took all of the last light, declared itself gold above the cars, the buildings, poor and rich and the hopeful, and made the dull clouds grayer. The gold cloud rose and then darkness came, I saw it from the park when the ducks had gone, and the wind snatched the sky away, she pointed up with one bold finger to the penthouse sky. There is no point for watching up there. Nothing to see who will help you. She lowered her finger. She pointed at the suits and the tires of fast cars and the fire hydrants and the raw trees of spring, the faces turned down into the phones of a new world, illuminated cheekbones in the dusk of a gone winter, the material of our earth. What to pray for is here. Catch them in the eye with your eye. Pray. They will, o, they will hear your call.

 

Even when she was old, and she wore cotton with drawstring waists, and the bones of her face snatched at the air, the eyes peeked from fat and fold, the eyes themselves gone gold in their whites, even when she could no longer smell the smell of her own urine, even then she dyed her hair gold, she kept the bottle and the gloves in the cabinet. She kept the dye, among Pepto Bismol, hernia cream, aspirin and enalapril, the blue blood pressure cuff, the extra donepezil. Gold grandmother gone to bones in hot bed sheets. Over her reared the son and the daughter. In those lost months of winter, when her hair did lose the gold, au! and the skin turned the same sallow gray, so that her forehead appeared to peel away, fray, in those last poor months she opened her mouth like a baby to be fed, licked the pale gum where the teeth had long gone, the bright bleached dentures gone too, she turned her gold and brown eye to my mother's nose, she cried: A witch! How did I make you! 

 

The bitch laughed, my mother said. 

 

See the wart on your snout! Then she died. O! Then she died. 

 

How to plan a funeral for a mother of a fairy and a little witch? 

 

How to bury a peacock, who, a poor immigrant in this country, had learned to be rich only by the mean merit of her brief beauty? She wielded what she wore–no, what she was–as a richer woman could wield a purse and wallet. 

 

So I dance in the green envy of her plume. O! look at the crooks of my elbows, bloodied on her sequins. I have danced in my grandmother's gowns. I have pressed eyelashes onto my lids, glued them wide forever. Catch an eye and steal it. Take another for the road, for it is a long one that winds towards wealth. Slip what eyes I snatch into her pocket, a prayer bead for later. I stole a picture of myself and sent it up out of the city, I sent it across the world, into a gold cloud, I sent it. I pull her hair from my pocket, gold as caramel wrappers. Ack! Her dresses smell of sherry and want. I bleach my head, I dye it the pale color of money. My lip I slick in red paint, I glue myself like a jewel to the crown of this country. Wicked woman, though I have lost her name and taken another, I am Kuipers, daughter of a witch. I am the poor daughter of a poor daughter whose only inheritance is a mighty need. 

 

I bristle in the skin of animals. I shed my own poor feather.