The End of the Reign of Queen Helen

My mother called this a white-wash

The End of the Reign of Queen Helen

(1894-1985)

I remember first the mouth. Always open, mauve tongue cracked down the center from seven decades of use, disappearing into a cavernous blackness beyond. Granny Gombar had a voice like a bull horn, ruined, she said, from swallowing a fish bone at twenty-five. I suspected the Salems.

I see one smoldering, caught in the bird’s beak of a silver sculptured ashtray. I see her, through a haze of years and smoke, smoke and sun, slatting through blinds from the treeless yard. The affronted black eyes behind butterfly glasses, the yellow skin, flat nose, white, tightly curled hair, the girth loosely encased in a flowered shift, wide feet in cloth wedge sandals. And the wide mouth – always open.

“My son the doctor,” she bragged to her neighbors about my father, the dentist.

That voice, screaming repartee at her powder blue parakeet Bootsie (1962-1965).