Julia Alvarez
Wallpaper
He said in his mother's house, growing up
he remembered roses, and his friend said
his mother could not abide print on her walls,
whether determined children swinging their swing ropes taut,
or tidy cottages, their chimney-smoke trained upwards.
She wanted no pretense of happiness,
the rooms gift-wrapped with trotting horses or teakettles pouring.
She could not abide them and tore off, sanded, painted blank
the little dogs barking, ladies with umbrella and muff.
His companion remembered his mother on a stepladder
rolling out roses, hundreds of roses, thousands
since she papered not just the halls and the living room
but the kitchen alcove where he and she sat
eating meal after meal after his father left
and she relied solely on him for company,
for belief in something in her fury and grief.
Still she insisted they live in this perpetual celebration
of rose petals, which grew vague with repetition,
vague with his vivid daydreams of running away.
We were standing all three at a party,
and since I could not tell yet whether these two men
were paired or paired only in their interest of me,
I was listening carefully, leaning back against the wall
like Vuillard's sister in the painting of his mother and sister,
the print of her dress the same pattern as the wallpaper,
so that she is disappearing into the wall, as I was,
the better to listen for who these men might be
by what they were saying of their mothers.
Julia Alvarez, Homecoming: New and Collected Poems, Plume, 1996.