Smoke

SMOKE


Cigarettes tasting of face powder
evoke the Second World War.
They were from my cousin Grace's purse,
smoked as we sat in my Aunt Nell's kitchen
talking.
Grace was home for the weekend from Charlotte
where she worked.
I was in high school, discontented.
All the men were off to war: Grace's husband, Dan;
her sister's husband, Heman Queen; my father.
It was a distant war. More immediate were things
like starting to shave, starting to smoke,
why I couldn't talk to girls,
what I was going to do with my life.
Grace sensed my restlessness and seemed to understand,
perhaps because her own had never left her.
So we talked and exchanged confidences
through a pale blue haze of cigarette smoke,
An intimacy between us born of the time;
the sense, even this far. away from the war,
that things would not last: an imminence in the air
as of things about to die,
of men going off not to return or to return changed.
Grace liked living in Charlotte out from beneath
Aunt Nell's allknowing gaze.
She liked the bustle of the city, the sense of life,
the soldiers passing through.
Living there five days a week,
she was able to do pretty much what she wanted to
and hinted at intrigues and romances,
stopping short of details only because
of Aunt Nell's impeccable timing:
she seemed to sense when the conversation veered
in a certain direction
and appeared in the kitchen doorway
with an omniscient lock in her eye.
Only later did I realize that she had other reasons
for looking in on us from time to time.
Aunt Nell didn't think that, at sixteen,
I needed to know all that Grace did.
Aunt Nell didn't think that Grace, for all her years,
needed to know all that Grace did.
Grace wavered between intimidation and defiance
and sometimes they argued in soft voices
in the other room.
There was a haze of mystery surrounding this time.
Now, looking back, it seems pretty obvious
what Grace was doing in Charlotte
with all those young men on their way to the war
and just as obvious why Aunt Nell,
with her staid convictions, objected.
But then, it was more mysterious than that-
and more romantic:
a perfume hovered in the air not unlike
the fragrant smoke of cigarettes from a woman's purse.
I was a very young sixteen.
Once, a couple of years later,
something almost happened between Grace and me-
on a winter evening when I was home from college.
But it was snowing outside and Aunt Nell was inside
and there wasn't much time.
It might have saved me a lot of difficulties.
Grace was sensitive and gentle and loved me
very much in her way.
She'd have taught me without my knowing
and saved me countless blunders.
But, like so many times,
what should have happened didn't.
And what did happen is more factual,
less tinged with fragrance and mystery.
The war ended.
The men came home.
Grace got pregnant. I went off to school,
then married and dropped out.
Grace was never very happy. Later, she got sick
and Aunt Nell moved in and nursed her.
I don't think this world was enough for Grace.
Perhaps there is no world for people like her.
But if there is, it's a world of beautiful young men
going off to war never to be seen again,
of brief, intense meetings amid the bustle
of city streets, ending as quickly as they began;
a transient world, as fleeting, fragrant
and insubstantial
as smoke.


Albert Huffstickler

Posted over on Nerve Cowboy