Smoke Gets in My Eyes

In our church clothes we visit Granma, who doles out quarters to placate Sean and me. We children are then expected to recede beyond the circle of adults drinking Manhattans and smoking Chesterfields. The basement air, around the aluminum table, is blue with the uncles’ cigarette smoke, is knee-deep in the aunts’ perfumes. Climbing the cellar’s painted steps, our hands trailing along the wooden banister (oh we don’t wish to leave, do not banish us!), we bid our families farewell. We blow them dramatic kisses.

My cousin and I are each given coloring books that Granma tucks away, when we leave, in the cupboard bottom of the Victrola for the next Sunday. She means coloring to occupy us. “Stay in the lines,” she says, placing the familiar old cookie tin on the floor beside my coloring book of horses. Inside—the cookies long gone—are rolling-around-crayons, more broken in two than not, paper ends peeled off, and a pencil sharpener I inexpertly twist to shave the blunt nubs into fresh points.

I outline all the pre-printed muscles, legs and manes by pressing hard with the crayon, then color with a light feathery stroke I’ve perfected, a continuous bleeding circle, never lifting the crayon. My face peers so close to the page I miss the overall effect. I have no understanding of the stallion in mid-gallop; I am inside his color. The crayon-smell makes me drowsy. My head rests on my bent left arm while my right hand works at swirling, eliminating all white from the horse world. My hands smell like crayons. I touch my fingers to my tongue to try the taste of burnt sienna, the taste of horse, I think.

Upstairs where we color in our books on the kitchen floor there is a bedroom for Granma and a bedroom for Granpa. Their rooms each have two beds. Granpa and Uncle Jack share the beige Granpa bedroom. Granma and the tall Virgin Mary statue on the dresser rule over two pink beds in the Granma bedroom. Sean wears a short-sleeved white shirt and a skinny black tie that dangles to his belt buckle. My dress that was sewn up on the Singer also has short sleeves. Sean and I roll around on the coats tossed across Granpa’s bed. We turn them inside out to revel in the silky cool linings.

We are Lenten, between Ash Wednesday and Palm Sunday, and our arms are goose-flesh. We play inside winter coats until they hold no more secrets, which is until we have emptied all the pockets. We finger the rosary hanging across one of the bureau lamp shades in the Granpa bedroom. It is a man’s, black and without the filigree of my crystal Holy Communion rosary. “It is sober,” I tell Sean. This is a word I have recently learned means solemn and unadorned, although it also has secondary definitions that detonate the sentences of the grownups downstairs.

The Granpa bedroom closet opens to a steep staircase where bats in the attic bump against the house’s highest parts. Sean leaps to investigate, but I yank him by his belt loops until we both fall back on coats that have slid to the floor. A crucifix stares down from near the wall light switch and pins us there among wool and silk and leather gloves. I break the magnetic field that Jesus’ blood has wrapped around us, and slam shut the closet against bats intruding.

Downstairs Uncle Jack has returned with our dinner from the Hitching Post—we can smell the fried chicken—but he discards and forgets us in his bellying up to where our daddy mixes Manhattans. Daddy is Bartender, is Ice Shaker, is Cherry Diver, is Amber Spiller. We’ve seen his tricks. He brandishes his silver cigarette lighter from his pants pocket quick-draw-like, flicks it to high flame. “Pow,” he says to Mommy, worshipping her face with fire. “You’re dead.” They are always trying to annihilate each other.

Daddy smokes, Mother smokes, only logical I’d soak up the habit. The first thing I can recall for which my young self was praised: I hefted the cigarette lighter from the cocktail table where it sat among six oval silver ash trays, individual-style, all the pieces of this set atop a larger oval tray. The lighter was the weight of a small teapot in my hands, fat silvery metal, squat and unwieldy, balanced against my four year-old belly. Countless times I’d watched and by watching I’d learned—I flicked the gritty wheel with my thumb. A whiff of butane as blue enveloped the white wick, consuming while never burning up. A tall flame grew from what I thought of as the teapot’s spout. “Bravo, doll,” my mother said as I held it to the cigarette between her lips. She inhaled deeply, breathed her tremulous scratched-up whispery smoke-filled voice off and away from me to where her eyes pinned my father, who was engaged in his own lighting-up ritual: “Bra-vo.”