Pru, my grandfather’s dreadful second wife, saved him from drink. She told him that if he ever after touched a drop, she’d leave him flat. She was seventy, he eighty. She was the one paying the rent. He had lived a wild life, exuberant and generous in flush times, desolate in poverty and the dts. Pru’s dour regimen gave him seven steady years, sober and happy. He repaid her. Then he got out.
At his funeral Pru told me she didn’t know what sin she’d committed to be so punished. “I worked all those years in the needle shop, never married, never bothered anybody. Only two pleasures I allowed myself—reading and embroidery. Now arthritis forbids the one, blindness the other. I don’t know what I did for God to punish me so, but it must have been terrible.”
I said, “You’ve been a good woman.”
“Yes,” she said. “That must have been it.”
A poet, Regina hates her ex-husband. Paul, a far lesser poet, “Dallied, predictably,” Regina says, “with a fleshy, ordinary, and, as you’d expect, dull woman.” If you ask about him now, she says, “Paul? Oh, yes, Paul used to write poetry.”
In her poems Regina celebrates her anger at Paul’s betrayal. He’d given her “his paltry all.” He was not worthy of more, and, thankfully, he knew it. Paul’s second wife “provided children, the best that she could do.” Now, instead of writing poetry, Paul “sells things.” Regina pretends not to know what.
Out of this crude material she hones verse that keeps its edge, her gift to Paul.
For a poet, Regina sells well, publishing in first tier magazines. Over the decades she’s grown more inclusive. Her last volume keened exquisite meanness about those who don’t take the gutter when faced with her wit. They are many.
Boys avoid her. Men, though they won’t admit it, fear her. With few exceptions, other women, even ones her own age, keep a polite distance. Neither witty nor pretty, she has this power that when she calls you a rat, you feel a skinny, hairless tail growing down between your legs.
Merle Drown is the author of stories, essays, plays, reviews, and two novels, Plowing Up A Snake (The Dial Press) and The Suburbs Of Heaven (Soho Press). Merle edited Meteor in the Madhouse, the posthumous novellas of Leon Forrest, (Northwestern University Press). Barnes and Noble chose The Suburbs of Heaven for its Discover Great New Writers series. Merle has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the NH Arts Council and teaches in Southern NH U’s MFA program. Pieces from a collection-in-progress, Shrunken Heads, miniature portraits of the famous among us, or Balzac in a Nutshell have appeared in Amoskeag, Meetinghouse, Night Train, The Kenyon Review, Rumble, Sub-Lit, Word Riot, Bound Off, JMWW, Eclectica, Toasted Cheese, Foliate Oak, SN Review, and 971 Menu.