Inez
My family sent my Aunt Inez to the asylum
in Marion after she pushed my brother off
the back porch one afternoon after Sunday
family dinner. They sent her home after some
years of receiving electroshock therapy.
She lived with Grandma Lawson until that
old woman died, then she lived by herself
in a dusty old house in the middle of town.
Dead maybe sixty years, Inez comes alive
in my thoughts occasionally though she
and I never talked — she spoke only to her
mother, my father, and the people we hired
to take her food and do some cleaning.
Inez cut her own hair, wore worn-out men’s
jeans and a t-shirt, scared away children
who’d come to stare through her windows.
It’s too bad Alfred Hitchcock never saw her;
he’d have put her in a movie where she could
have played the part of a little town’s crazy
woman, supported by a family that wanted
nothing to do with her. In the falling-down
garage beside the house there was an ancient
Ford she’d driven as a teenage girl; inside
the house, in bureau drawers in her bedroom,
we found a collection of used menstrual pads
and band aids, and not much more — except four
astrological charts so elaborately drawn they
were works of what we’d now call “outsider
art” — one for herself and one for each
of her sisters — Ida, Elrica, and Dunkley.
I’m writing these words a thousand miles
north of that town in a house that’s a palace
compared to the one in which Inez Lawson
lived out her final years. I think I must
be doing it to try to correct an injustice
that resists any correcting. I know I should
put my effort into helping my country heal.
Here in Burlington, at busy intersections
where cars must stop, there stand homeless
men and women holding handmade signs asking
for help. In Madison, Wisconsin, last month,
a block away from the state capital building,
in the 7 a.m. cold, walking from my hotel
to Starbucks, I stepped past a blue tarpaulin
covering an invisible human being sleeping
in a doorway, someone living like a dead
person in a culture that’s siphoning wealth
upward from citizens who desperately need it
into the banking accounts of citizens who
live so extravagantly they’d think this is
a comedy I’m writing — a story about a madwoman
painstakingly creating charts of the stars that
aligned to give her and her sisters the lives
they had. And the lives they didn’t have.