Your StoryAuthor(s): Susan WoodSource: The Iowa Review, Vol. 12, No. 2/3, Extended Outlooks: The Iowa Review Collection ofContemporary Writing by Women (Spring - Summer, 1981), p. 372Published by: University of IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20155767 .

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Your Story Susan Wood

We rose from the bed and sat at the table.

You were telling your story,

how your father would disappear for days each morning with a tin pail full of cold meat

and thick bread to come home drunk

for a few hours' sleep and another bloodshot dawn.

Nights you lay so still

you scarcely breathed, wishing and wishing. In family legend you had the Irish in you, those high-horse looks at two, and charm,

the boy who's always "acting up." You hid your young aunt's sandals in the icebox

while she was dressing for a date.

You laughed and wouldn't tell. She slapped your face.

Whole summers by the ocean escape you and there's only the moment the cart is bolting,

leaving behind a blur of sand and sea,

the unfamiliar streets, the boardwalk. You were four

and proud to be minding your baby sister.

Your father had handed you two nickels

for the ride. On the far side of town

the driver stopped the pony, made the children all get down, and drove on.

If your father had come just then to lead you home,

what would it matter? All I remember is being lost,

you said. And so do I. It's what we know

and can believe in, why the present wears the past, each day knit to the next.

Or why this story is true as anything,

where the boy and girl are left in the forest.

I'd like to say it has a happy ending,

they find their way, love,

breadcrumbs the birds haven't eaten,

this table in the morning light.

372

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