The Unmet Needs and the People of Them

In our house we burn the toast, then scrape the charcoal onto the counter, then real butter, but the toast by then too cool to melt it, so every breakfast is bitter and fatty. And the counter stays that way till someone, exasperated and put-upon, wipes it mostly clean. The ice-cream is our hidden riches, a three-gallon restaurant barrel of it, but it is, somehow, in the 70s, carob, not chocolate, so its enticements lead to disappointment. Like retail, I much later learn.

Our dandelions and ant-swarmed cherry stones and purslane and crabgrass bracketed by two perfect neighboring chemlawns. I see contempt. I feel it.

The ancient Peugeot sitting crooked on a faint driveway-aura of red rust. Through its never-washed windshield I can see our neighbor's orange racing car. This can be too much after a swimming lesson or a fight.

My mother, vague then sharp. Her abstraction like a gypsy skirt. Her hair a shambles. Her glasses fingerprinted. Her hands always so strangely limp, like a Tyrannosaurus Rex's.

My father always turning a corner and barely glimpsed. Thin and dreamy. Looking up. Listing the Latin names of trees. Explaining. Ending my sentences that were not going to end that way.

My sister, shy and pale, smelling of sucked thumb.

My brother, silent till six, all in plaid, every stitch, always. His lack of other preferences. His contentment. He eats everything: burned toast, carob ice cream, home-made yogurt, snails, ants, parts of the lawnmower that sits by the front walk a summer and a winter and another summer till it's one day gone.