To some extent we all feared the milkman.
Even my father, who’d fought Franco’s men, would wait until the white truck was down the block before he’d get our bottles off the front step. And our milkman wasn’t mean, not like an old teacher you avoided at the grocery store or a dentist with foul breath who always told you how thin you looked and how your arms were too hairy for a girl with such pretty teeth. No, our milkman had an intruding, strangely omniscient way of knowing what you were up to.
“Hey Wendy,” he’d say. “How’s high school?”
“Fine.”
“Well okay.”
He’d look at me, knowing that I’d saved the frog from biology and buried it under our maple tree for blessings from Khai the Amphibious, who’s goodness is plentiful. It was like I’d written it down on a sandwich board that said, “Frog Thief” on both sides, accompanied by a giant thought bubble above my head with the words “Can you smell the formaldehyde?”
And what kind of voodoo was he brewing? What blood had he spilled in his laundry room to gain such power? And why was he still delivering milk to families like mine, if not to find our stray hairs and the fingernails we piled neatly on our windowsills? And who would let such a man as Kirk Montgomery, father of three (not counting the polio cripple) put his hands and ancient evil on our milk? Who at the Honey Cow Dairy would allow this?
My mother’s fear was different from mine and my father’s since she’d meet him at his truck on Wednesdays in front of our house, ready with last week’s empties. At first I thought he’d bewitched her, but she didn’t make eyes at him the way she looked at our butcher, not like some girl lost barefoot in the mountains who’d come across a cobbler with two loaves of bread. She spoke kindly to him, and gave him a tip at Christmas. But she never shook his hand, and she always let him put the fresh milk down before she gave him our old bottles. Her rituals kept her strong, I imagine.
On the days when I was home alone, licking my father’s shoe horn, I could hear the clanging of glass bottles, the awful chug of milk pouring into a somewhere cup, and I knew the hexes were raining down on my house like spoons over Berlin. I protected myself, singing Cole Porter with a Dutch accent, breathing only through my nose; and both of these must have helped, since the color blindness only robbed me of yellow, which I never liked anyway.
Today I have two children and a husband who spends most nights with his mother.
I’m still here, Kirk Montgomery. I’m still here you son of a bitch.
