Toy Car

“Slippery as the word deserve. How the Catholic never gets washed out of you, the temple crushed completely. Once my husband brought home a little car. It fit beside the sleds and carriages like a toy for someone bigger than a toddler, smaller than a rock star. My husband deserved it, he said, and who was I to doubt him knowing as I did how his mother lifted him into her lap and pressed against his small back, the names of her troubles seared in his skin like Latin in the mind of a ten-year-old. INTROIBO AD ALTARE DEI. I will go into the alter of God. AD DEUM QUI LAETIFICAT JUVENTUTEM MEAM. To God who is the joy of my youth. I couldn’t help the way I felt about toy cars and Bangladesh. The Jesuit in my book bag wrote on the board a thousand times: It’s harder for a rich man, etc… The Sister of Sorrow in my lunch box crossed herself and thrust her hands up her cavernous sleeves. I had great ideas, my essays on the poor rivaled Merton and Marx. I was tortured by the hair shirt of my nondesires, I was living on the mountain and I couldn’t get down. I lay beside my husband at night and thought: Who is this man who deserves such a tiny automobile that costs more to fix than food for a family of six in the South Bronx for a while year? I thought: I am too tired to deserve anything and look, how shameless my rich husband, how wild his hair blows on the winds of Westchester in his toy car with the luscious leather seats big enough for him and someone else.”

by Maureen Seaton