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How I Got Here Christal McDougall
Without even thinking, I know this: She was smart but she acted dumb, pretended she was less intelligent, listened to his voice, held her ear at his mouth while he whispered what he was learning in business: economics, marketing, supply, demand; kept her ear there while he stuck in his tongue She undid her pearls for him, took off her sweater, let him unfasten the buttons and slip off her blouse They did it in a car, they did it in the frat house; my father told the brothers what they already knew— cute Margie was holding back— that prissy way she walks? that’s Holyoke blood I know it happened more than once, he had to show her off, had to get her where he wanted, and she was playing dumb and letting him come inside her and letting him believe she loved him and letting him believe she loved him and one day I was there, just cells, just a slight puffiness below her navel, a feeling of hangover in the morning It was me growing there and she let him believe she wasn’t afraid the way the cells, the part of me that was not me had fallen from the sky and heaven and risen from stones and earth and joined her where I loved her, the sticky dark of her womb, the safe ocean there She acted less smart than he was, but I know her plan all along was to get me from him, to pull me up out of nothing, push me into the sunlight and dirt of this world.
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"How I Got Here" first appeared in Many Mountains Moving, Volume II, Number 2. The work appears here by permission of the author.
Original Graphic Image, "Mask 2" © 1999 by Jim Davis-Rosenthal
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