From the archive
Dawn in Pennsylvania
“How to describe it all? My dad and his sweaty armpits and the black garbage bags with the slice of old-time America buried inside. This sadness I’ve become filled with, which doesn’t feel like the kind of sadness the artist intended, but the opposite…his sadness looks like happiness to me.”
“How to describe it all? My dad and his sweaty armpits and the black garbage bags with the slice of old-time America buried inside. This sadness I’ve become filled with, which doesn’t feel like the kind of sadness the artist intended, but the opposite…his sadness looks like happiness to me.”It starts with someone pounding the door of my apartment. I go to answer in clothes that are damp from the thick August heat, thinking maybe it’s the neighbor who wants me to watch her cat again or maybe it’s the super, finally come to fix my wobbly toilet bowl. But when I peek through the peephole it’s him, this hulking, huffing guy whose hair is as black as shoe polish, exactly how I remember it. “Dad?” I’m shocked in a weary sort of way. Like, what is he doing here after all this time? What is he going to want? He’s dressed in a gray security guard suit, though it looks like a Halloween costume, something not fitting right, with giant pit stains oozing across the too-tight fabric, a sight so embarrassing it is kind of endearing. Though I remember all the things Mom used to say about him, and how he never called or even sent a letter, so it’s going to take more than big pit stains for me to love this man. “Janey,” he says, huffing and reaching out to lean his hand on my door frame. God, he’s out of shape. Wherever he’s been these past twelve years, it obviously did not include the gym. I have to bite my tongue to keep myself from offering him water. Or to ask if he’s okay. All these ways I have of doing the opposite of what I truly want. You let the wrong people in and push the right people away, Laila tells me a lot. Which is her way of coming at the front door of my heart with a pounding fist of her own, only with a sweet heart-shaped mouth and lovely clear eyes, unlike this black-haired man and his sweaty jowls.
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Publisher's Note:
This work is preserved in Merion West’s archive of articles and poems published from 2016 through early 2025. Explore the archive