The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Cancer Voodoo by Melissa C. Johnson

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content warning for cancer

Bindweed

Mama told me once that she never thought life
could be different, or maybe she said better,
than a series of brutal, arrogant men making
your choices, treating you like a servant—
angry fathers and husbands ruling like despots.
I think it was after my separation, when I asked
why she’d never left, why she’d put up with
him for so long. When I asked her what about books,
television, movies—all those glimmering mirages
upon which I’d built my own escape
from that stifling small town, she said
“Oh, that’s just playacting. That’s not real.”

The only kind man in her life the doctor
her mother had nearly escaped with,
the affair discovered only after her death,
Mama so disgusted and angry that I’d been a pawn
for those two elegant grandparents generously
treating their five-year-old grandchildren
to the Ice Capades. I wasn’t corrupted, only
remembered the lost balloon, the tears,
the replacement then tied to my wrist
for safekeeping. Mama’s rage seemed outsized, proof
of her uprightness, her strong moral code. She valued
the truth above all else, it seemed, but ambivalently

told me about the trial in which my dance teacher’s
husband was acquitted of raping the Black maid,
even though he’d surely done it. My grandfather served
on the jury, told the story with pride, how he
and the other men had protected one of their own.
Maybe this story was a warning.
I went to that house twice a week for lessons;
the youngest boy, much older than me, paid
me too much attention, kept trying to get me alone.
Maybe both stories were warnings.
Maybe Mama was just angry about the lies,
the vows and oaths dismissed,

or maybe she resented my grandmother
who always seemed to get her way,
who was never defeated, who outlived her husband
and could finally buy whatever she wanted,
who wrote Mama out of the will so Daddy
didn’t get the money, who didn’t stop her from smoking,
and kept her home to cook dinner, do the books at the shop
while her younger sister got a new VW and two years of college,
her older brother saw the world with Uncle Sam.
My mother got mono, got pregnant, got married,
got pregnant, got a shitty job, got up to a pack a day,
got cheated on, got beaten, got cancer that grew like bindweed.

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