She had been a late and only child to parents <br />already old and set; none of us had ever <br /> <br />wanted to go inside that hushed house <br />and play with her, her room too neat, doll-crowded. <br /> <br />We did encourage her later, though, to enter <br />the high school talent contest—after we’d heard <br /> <br />her singing My Funny Valentine in a stall <br />in the girls’ bathroom, reckoning the boys <br /> <br />would laugh, perhaps find us even prettier <br />in comparison. Still, we would not have predicted <br /> <br />those wisteria-scaled walls, the one room <br />we could see from the street with its windows <br /> <br />open year round so that greening vines entered <br />and birds flew in and out—bad luck, we thought, <br /> <br />bad luck. By then we were members of the ladies’ <br />garden club, the condition of her house <br /> <br />and what had been its garden a monthly <br />refreshment of disappointment, the most <br /> <br />delectable complaint her parents’ last <br />Coup de Ville sinking in tangled orchard grass <br /> <br />and filled to the roof—plush front seat and rear— <br />with paperbacks, fat, redundant romances <br /> <br />she had not quite thrown away—laughable, <br />we laughed, unphotographable—with wild restraint.<br /><br />Claudia Emerson<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/funny-valentine/
