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Anne Sexton - The HouseAnne Sexton - The House
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In dreams the same bad dream goes on. Like some gigantic German toy the house has been rebuilt upon its kelly-green lawn. The same dreadful set, the same family of orange and pink faces carved and dressed up like puppets who wait for their jaws to open and shut. Nineteen forty-two, nineteen forty-three, nineteen forty-four… it`s all the same. We`re at war. They`ve rationed the gas for all three cars. The Lincoln Continental breathes in its stall, a hopped up greyhound waiting to be sprung. The Irish boy who dated her (lace curtain Irish, her mother said) urges her through the lead-colored garages to feel the patent-leather fenders and peek at the mileage. All that money! and kisses too. Kisses that stick in the mouth like the vinegar candy she used to pull with her buttery fingers, pull until it was white like a dog`s bone, white, thick and impossible to chew. Father, an exact likeness, his face bloated and pink with black market scotch, sits out his monthly bender in his custom-made pajamas and shouts, his tongue as quick as galloping horses, shouts into the long distance telephone call. His mouth is as wide as his kiss. Mother, with just the right gesture, kicks her shoes off, but is made all wrong, impossibly frumpy as she sits there in her alabaster dressing room sorting her diamonds like a bank teller to see if they add up. The maid as thin as a pencil stick, holds dinner as usual, rubs her angry knuckles over the porcelain sink and grumbles at the gun-shy bird dog. She knows something is going on. She pricks a baked potato. The aunt, older than all the crooked women in The Brothers Grimm, leans by a gooseneck lamp in her second floor suite, turns up her earphone to eavesdrop and continues to knit, her needles working like kitchen shears and her breasts blown out like two pincushions. The houseboy, a quick-eyed Filipino, slinks by like a Japanese spy from French Provincial room to French Provincial room, emptying the ash trays and plumping up the down upholstery. His jacket shines, old shiny black, a wise undertaker. The milkman walks in his cartoon every other day in the snoozy dawn, rattling his bottles like a piggy bank. And gardeners come, six at a time, pulling petunias and hairy angel bells up through the mulch. This one again, made vaguely and cruelly, one eye green and one eye blue, has the only major walk-on so far, has walked from her afternoon date past the waiting baked potatoes, past the flashing back of the Japanese spy, up the cotton batten stairs, past the clicking and unclicking of the earphones, turns here at the hall by the diamonds that she`ll never earn and the bender that she kissed last night among thick set stars, the floating bed and the strange white key… up like a skein of yarn, up another flight into the penthouse, to slam the door on all the years she`ll have to live through… the sailor who she won`t with, the boys who will walk on from Andover, Exeter and St. Marks, the boys who will walk off with pale unlined faces, to slam the door on all the days she`ll stay the same and never ask why and never think who to ask, to slam the door and rip off her orange blouse. Father, father, I wish I were dead. At thirty-five she`ll dream she`s dead or else she`ll dream she`s back. All day long the house sits larger than Russia gleaming like a cured hide in the sun. All day long the machine waits: rooms, stairs, carpets, furniture, people those people who stand at the open windows like objects waiting to topple.
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