Margaret of Streeper street

by Jennifer A Sutherland

Margaret kept a bowling pin in the vestibule,

beside the door. She never had to use it but

she reached for it once or twice. The dangers

were all inside that house. Her neighbors scrubbed

their marble steps every Saturday morning. 

Margaret made a decent sauerbraten, never as good

as her mother-in-law’s, my grandfather said, 

but close. She baked a kind of cookie filled 

with cinnamon and raisins, a little mince pie.

When one of us got smart with her she chased

us through the kitchen into the dining room waving

a spatula. If she caught you, you got paddled. She

rarely caught us. My grandfather died when I was three,

lung cancer he stoked with decades of Marlboros 

and the smoke of the house fires he hosed down. Nobody

wore respirators. The steel beams of skyscrapers

were all coated in asbestos. Of him I remember 

an oversized lollipop, the muted green of the bucket seat 

in the car he drove me to a street fair in. My mother swears 

she never left me alone with him but there it is, a recollection

no one can explain. Margaret worked at one of the city

markets, in a butcher’s stall. A man once tried to rob

her there and she chased him off with a meat cleaver. 

She sold the Formstone house, moved in with my uncle

and his wife, then to a succession of tidy garden

apartments in the county. No more bowling pin to reach

for when the doorbell rang. The doorbell never rang.

No fruit sellers strolling down the street, no gas men. 

When she succumbed, it was to a UTI. Her landlord handed

us the key to her apartment so that we could collect

her things. The door swung open to an empty room,

little divots in the carpet where her furniture used

to be. In her final months a man had started coming

round. She called him her friend which we understood meant

boyfriend. We were concerned but what can you tell 

an eighty-six-year-old woman about danger? She bequeathed 

her jewelry box to me. All the earrings were the clip-on kind. 

The thief left them behind: pretty, heavy, worthless things.