My Mother's Wedding Dress

Abstract

The first time she could remember my father ever striking me, my mother told me forty-five years later, I was just learning to crawl on the hardwood floors of my father's cramped officer's barracks at Fort Bliss, and when just bathed and powdered-pink and still naked on hands and knees 1 reached out to touch a scorpion, carrying her young on her back, dozens of them, her hind end up, pincers out, flicking her tail at me from the shadows of my mother's closet, my father jumped from their bed, shouting, No' then slapped me across the back of my tender knuckles, picking me up like a football under his arm as I howled, then stepped the scorpions into a long blond smear with his boot. That's what Maricella, my mother's best friend from Juarez, the bullfighter's daughter, called them: Little blondies. Gueritos. Tiny scorpions the vanilla color of calaveras, candy skulls for el Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. The day I was born, William Barret Travis Truitt, III. November second, 1954. iLos alacranes son gueritos como tu' Maricella said the next day, helping my mother hang two dozen Boraxed diapers on a clothesline in our backyard of blond sand and prickly pear and creosote bush. The scorpions are little blondies like y oui Maricella pointed at my beautiful, fair-skinned mother and told her how much she looked like that gringa movie star Marilyn Monroe now that she'd bleached her dark auburn hair blond the first time.