WITH BUCK TEETH. WITH BRACES.
— a nod to Chen Chen
With buck teeth. With braces. Without a night guard, which even now I refuse to wear in middle age, despite my dentist’s plea. With my parents’ glasses, oversized bottle lenses. With a Dorothy Hamill haircut. With clothing sewn by my mother in Lily Pulitzer style. Without interest in Barbies or Lily Pulitzer. With skinned knees and a desire to be the boy my father wanted. With my brother who liked pink and listening to LPs of Cher. With red hair and freckles and sunburnt skin. With cutoffs I still fashion from old jeans. Without models but in hindsight perhaps the great aunt who never married. With feelings for the girl with long brown hair from second grade, whose name I inked across posters scattering my room. With pink grapefruits, both sour and sweet, dusted lightly with sugar and traces of Palm Beach, where all good WASPs originate. With awkward shyness. With boys chasing girls. Without ever wanting to be chased by a boy. With silences at the dinner table. With final Christmases at my grandparent’s house. Without the safety of their acceptance. With my college roommate. With my mother accusing me of becoming a liberal at that school. With a move to New York, an inherited dream. With my brother, navigating the East Village. With hide and seek. With that girl’s electric lips on the Clit club dance floor. Without midnight remorse. With the morning’s battle of shame versus guilt. With coming out, going in, coming out, going in. With the towers falling in 1993, in 2002. With darkness and burning smoke and it will happen again and mortality. With the searching. Without the knowing. With Sunday dinners at the 11th street bar, my brother and I sharing stories of who we really were. With a tightening closet. With an anxious heart. Without him, trying to imagine a new world. With anger. With shattering. With fear and an honest letter to a broken family. With their reaction. With my partner in our Queens apartment. With the morning light draped across our mingled arms and legs. With the risk of feeling again. With love and a legal marriage. With a platinum band from Tiffany’s, engraved like my grandmother’s. With my father’s champagne toast. With our children, placing daisies on all their graves. With a vow to live the life my brother was denied.
Mary Warren Foulk is an educator, writer, artist, and activist who lives in western Massachusetts with her wife and two children. Her work has appeared in VoiceCatcher, Four and Twenty, Hip Mama, Curve Magazine, and Who’s Your Mama? The Unsung Voices of Women and Mothers (Soft Skull Press). Currently, she is completing her MFA in Writing at VCFA.