Jun '03 [Home]

Interviewee Poems

Phyllis Koestenbaum from Doris Day and Kitschy Melodies

Birthday Girl
Cassandra and Irene
Young Armless Man in the Barbecue Restaurant

[Interview]
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Birthday Girl

This happens a lot in restaurants. At the sushi bar, to my right, there are two men and a girl between them. The girl says she wants two scoops of ice cream:  red bean and green tea. It's her birthday. The server says you can't order two scoops, only one scoop, so the girl says OK, then she'll have one scoop and one scoop. And indeed the server brings her one scoop in one dish and one scoop in another dish, two scoops, both of green tea because they're out of red bean. This is quite funny but not a joke. The birthday girl (and the chef calls her birthday girl—everything the chef says he says smiling) has amazing lips: how can I describe them. She could be an actress in a movie with those lips but I don't think she is an actress in a movie, with the two fellows, one on each side, ordering sushi as if it were free, until the two scoops in two dishes come, then only the two order and then the check comes, which my neighbor, hunched towards the lips girl, like my son sitting on his foot at my kitchen table and hunched towards me, puts down a single hundred for and the other fellow, hunched like the other fellow towards the girl with lips, for his half tosses a card. Some years ago I wrote a poem about people in a movie theatre in San Francisco's Japantown eating noodles from styrofoam cups, a poem I never completed: no matter what form I put it in I couldn't complete it. To my left there is a young woman with the smallest wrists imaginable. A man old enough to be the chef's father, carrying a wooden boat, sits down at the other end of the emptying bar. The chef almost stops smiling, almost beads with sweat (from time to time, between sushi preparations, he wipes his face with the side of a hand, then wipes the hand on his white chef trousers). The boat man wears glasses. I've never seen a sushi chef with glasses but why shouldn't a sushi chef like a surgeon wear glasses. How respectfully, though rapidly, the chef slices the fish he's slicing, almost as if he's slicing himself. "Thank you," "Thank you," he and I say as I leave, one Thank you each. In the poem I didn't complete, my movie neighbor and his, who knew each other outside the movie, said: "How are you," "How are you," one How are you each.


[Interview]

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Cassandra and Irene

I vowed I would not have ugly, pendulous breasts like my mother's under her ripped nightgowns and housecoats but I do. Here's one reason for her anger:  I didn't leave the writing colony to take care of her when she came home from the hospital. She didn't want anyone else, only me, and I didn't come to Florida, I stayed at the writing colony and worried I had skin cancer and dreamed about animals biting me and shared the bathroom with a Nobel chemist who ate cheese and bread for breakfast because that's what he ate as a child in Europe. He was a Jew Hitler hadn't gotten and I had diarrhea every day in the shared bathroom, mortified at the smell. When I was a girl in love with Mrs. Vanderpool, my strict teacher, my best friend Elise Gruber and I walked up and down the street across from Mrs. Vanderpool's private house with a glassed-in front porch, 10 blocks from Elise's apartment building and mine, each with 6 floors. Once, walking without Elise, I saw Mrs. Vanderpool leave her house and thought she saw me. Cassandra in the poem in my father's Louis Untermeyer told the truth and was ignored—wasn't I like her with my two dresses and my settling accounts in my head at night before my brother came to his twin bed. In Ellenville in the forties the summer I was knitting a vest with two colors, light blue and brown, that I would never finish, though I knit every day with pregnant spectacled Rita Fox—I also wore spectacles—whose husband was in the Pacific—it was the summer before the end of the war or it was the summer the war ended—I saw King's Row with Ronald Reagan and a beautiful girl who will lose her mind and whose name is Cassandra. I surely wept in that movie. There is a poet whose name is Irene and my maiden name but we are not related. My allergist's name is also Irene and an editor in Ithaca, nowhere near Ellenville, is Irene also. I am obsessed with Irene, the name of the poet, perhaps a distant relative, of the allergist, of the Ithaca editor—I mean when I see or hear Irene I get a frisson of recognition. These days I only cry when I am humiliated or defeated, at the end of my rope. I am drawn to Cassandra and Irene for the sound, possibly only for the sound—Cassie—even the sobriquet has a good sound‹and I sometimes believe when I hear Cassandra or Irene, Irene more than Cassandra, that the name is mine, that's what the frisson is about, oh I'm not really sure. A soft afternoon early in my marriage to a Jew exiled by Hitler like the laureate, we happened to see a silly Doris Day movie in a working-class neighborhood adjacent to ours near the university press where I was a clerk-typist hoping to advance to editor—but I didn't advance, I was fired—and that unlikely afternoon—we didn't usually go to afternoon movies—I glimpsed a contentment I hadn't even considered, let alone had access to, how the body could give pleasure without the intercession of, say, something like the mind or even desire, a sweetness like Doris Day and kitschy melodies that I could walk to the way I walked down the movie aisle when I was three or so to the actress who'd said "Come here little girl" and I thought she meant me. It hurt to have sex and I kept putting it off and when we got home that barely dark spring evening to our tiny apartment with the cracked linoleum and the bathroom we shared with romping newlyweds from Australia I was in one of my gray, formless Sunday moods so I cooked Sunday dinner, which concluded with chocolate chip cookies I'd made the day before, mixing the batter in the miraculous new Sunbeam Mixmaster, then we turned on the radio for one of our Sunday programs and did or didn't have sex, it doesn't matter.


[Interview]

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Young Armless Man in the Barbecue Restaurant

The hostess seats a girl and a young man in a short-sleeve sport shirt with one arm missing below the shoulder. I'm at the next table with my husband and son, Andy's Barbecue Restaurant, an early evening in July, chewing a boneless rib eye, gulping a dark beer ordered from the cocktail waitress, a nervous woman almost over the hill, whose high heel sandals click back and forth from the bar to the dining room joined to the bar by an open arch. A tall heavy cook in white hat is brushing sauce on the chicken and spareribs rotating slowly on a squeaking spit. Baked potatoes heat on the oven floor. The young man is eating salad with his one hand. He and his girl are on a date. He has a forties' movie face, early Van Johnson before the motorcycle accident scarred his forehead. He lost the arm recently. Hard as it is, it could be worse. I would even exchange places with him if I could. I want to exchange places with the young armless man in the barbecue restaurant. He would sit at my table and I would sit at his. After dinner I would go in his car and he would go in mine. I would live in his house and work at his job and he would live in my house and do what I do. I would be him dressing and undressing and he would be me dressing and undressing. Our bill comes. My husband leaves the tip on the tray; we take toothpicks and mints and walk through the dark workingman's bar out to the parking lot still lit by the sky though the streetlights have come on as they do automatically at the same time each night. We drive our son, home for the summer, back to his job at the bookstore. As old Italians and Jews say of sons from five to fifty, he's a good boy. I have worked on this paragraph for more than two years.

[Interview]