by

PHOEBE KATE FOSTER

Augusta’s house is a very strange place,

with dust like dandruff on the shoulders

of chairs and windows well-shuttered

to a new day's air. Handsomely framed

on jaundiced walls are the faces

of the gone and the heads of the dead:

the ideal audience for ancient history

told again and again. I enter her territory

at my own risk. I’m treading on the eggshells

of a hard-boiled old soul.

 

Augusta believes she owns the world.

Wearing her little blue hat with the cockeyed feather

and wielding a wicked cane with a handle of silver,

she struts boldly into banks and shops

where she expects all the clerks to know

her name and other customers to yield

first place in the queue. At the restaurant

where we lunch, she demands the best table

to be conspicuously on view, sends back her Sazerac

(“too much bitters, not enough Pernod”), tells the chef

the paté tastes like Spam, expects the waiter

to accept her personal check. “Right away, madam…” and

“Yes, madam…” and “So sorry, madam…“ and “Of course,

madam…” everyone murmurs reverently and

right on cue to the grande dame of St. Charles Avenue.

 

Augusta knows it’s certainly not her fault

that her only child (now fat and forty-ish and

frayed from the strain of staying sane)

has turned out ungrateful and thoughtless,

greedy and grasping, insensitive and rude,

that the calls are perfunctory and the visits few

to these rooms where the hand that rocked

the cradle still undisputedly rules. This hoarder

of old dollars, old air, old hurts, knows for sure

who’s to blame. Steeped in the nobility

of what she did or did not do, she dabs

old wounds with a tissue of lies and chronicles

each bone’s ache as she slowly disintegrates.

 

Augusta thinks the party will never end.

With a roundness of rouge on her sagging cheeks,

white gloves on her hands, white pumps on her feet,

a collar of lace crisping yesteryear’s frock,

she’s tastefully attired for any occasion

but has nowhere to go. She sits in her house,

forever young, forever thin, waiting for a caller,

a call, and when the day is done, she sighs

and says to no one, “How pleasant not to have

the doorbell always chiming or the telephone

constantly ringing off the hook.”

 

Augusta looks in the mirror and sees nothing

but perfection. I look at her face, as familiar

as my own, and see only the spreading infection

of our mutual mortality. I watch Augusta fuss and

sputter like last night’s guttering candle,

and remember that she will be gone

before I know it, bequeathing me space

to take her place and walk life’s final mile

in her uncomfortable shoes.