| 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 earphone, 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 mahine waits: rooms, stairs, carpets, furniture, people-- those people who stand at the open windows like objects waiting to topple. --Anne Sexton |