My father recently gave me a box of things he’d saved from my parents’ brief time together. It included a passionate, delusional love letter my mother wrote to him when she was pregnant with me, though she doesn’t tell him that. She is desperately trying to convince him to come back to her and this poem distills her hopes for her new job at a department store. This illustration is from the inside cover of my
mother’s Winnie-the-Pooh, a book she had inscribed to my father and then taken back when they split up, later
blotting out her dedication with one of my crayons. Photo: Bryan Boake.
I get paid in two weeks so I
can send you money I arranged
transportation for a couple dollars a month
I’ve limited myself to 25 cents a day (coffee)
Except for one day a week 45 cents
It will cost me $9.86 to work a month I will spend
a grand total of $32 a month for store items
Clothing I’m too fat and tall for mine
Stockings makeup perfume shoes
Gifts (for you darling)
$41.86 a month on doctors dentists and you darling
$375 in three months $725 in six months
I could pay for us both to go to Europe
aren’t I awfully clever for being so dumb
