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Adolescence
Speech Lessons
The problem is I don’t talk at a seventh-grade level. I mumble and swallow words, sucking them in instead of spitting them out. Mrs. Handy wants me to work on my breathing. She says I gulp air like I’m afraid the world’s running out of oxygen.
March 1998Some Keep The Sabbath
I stopped going to church the night Diane Pearson announced God filled her cavities. That same night, in the spring of 1973, the police arrested my sister, Sheila.
January 1998Sunday Driving
My mother thinks her boyfriend is a father figure for me. I think he’s a derelict. His name is David. I call him the Big D — D for Derelict. He’s always trying to help me with things.
January 1998Turning
Pulling down my pants was not enough. I had to let them fall below my knees and then carefully, so as not to lose my balance, turn as if on a vertical spit, heated by Tommy’s eyes.
December 1997Photographs By Gordon Baer
The first [part of the series] documents a day in Lewis’s life in Salem, Missouri, when she was a carefree seventeen-year-old who often skipped school and tried on the wedding dress she kept packed away in her hope chest. The second part was made a year later, after Lewis was married and pregnant. The year was 1969.
December 1997How To Find Him
Listen to your mother’s story about playing baseball at fourteen and hearing her own mother say to a friend, I don’t know what I’ll do about Martha’s looks. Wonder if your mom’s speaking in code. Is she going to say that you’re pretty, or has she just told you why she never will?
December 1997The Patron Saint Of Girls
Girls, look up here! See me hovering close to the water-stained ceiling, above the buzzing VCR. Behold, I am Agnes, patron saint of girls, come to distract you from the climax of your freshman biology class, the video How Christian Girls Blossom into Maturity.
May 1997Fallen Angels
A stolen backpack, a lesson on self-esteem, a stranger and a thunderstorm
May 1997
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