It’s all around me here, even while I lurk like a snail up inside its shell here, tucked into a third floor L train overlook, nested in amongst radiator clank bracketed with ice-steamy windows– still there is the exoskeletal framework to lug.
My husband, our sole brave breadwinner, works in the employ of that great municipal monstrosity, the City, pulling levers and switches deep in the gut of churningest turmoil, from my perspective. From his it’s something finer and more upstanding surely, yadda yadda. Granted I’m the sticky prickly one in the family– but for when I has to comes clean, clean up and shape up and make a good showing. Yes, I can make a spitting image. I had extensive training through dancing and private schools. Though I practice the elusive art of invisibility currently, I was once a clambering enough mannequin well practiced in the forms and costumes (if habitually disposed to escape to kitchens, basements, attics, and bygod servants’ quarters).
In my family of origin (cue bells tolling upon that phrase) politics was my way or the highway. Blunt force of ethics backed up with a legal degree and/or gender and/or age. A youngest daughter couldn’t win, by definition. So I became at times the most apoplectic of closet reds that litter soft suburbia.