The Girls Who Went to Live With Their Auntsby Diane Elayne DeesWere cheerleaders, future homemakers of America, girls who smoked in the bathroom, girls who belonged to the Baptist Student Union, girls who would not eat lunch with me, girls whose fathers played golf with bankers. The girls who went to study abroad had hardly cracked a book. The girls whose families went on long vacations came back pale and silent, with empty photo albums. The girls who suddenly went to beauty school never emerged from the shampoo bowls. The girls who went to live with their aunts left behind mothers who stopped teaching Sunday School, fathers who drank too much, sisters who could not get a date except in a dark car by the lakefront, and boyfriends who bragged behind fogged Ford windows on Saturday night while their fathers wrote checks. The girls who went to live with their aunts wept alone, saw things I would never see, and were sometimes never seen again. © Diane Elayne Dees Diane Elayne Dees is a writer and psychotherapist in Louisiana. She has work recently published or forthcoming in The Binnacle, Mobius, ShatterColors, and the Syracuse Cultural Workers' 2009 Women Artists Datebook. Diane publishes the women's professional tennis blog, Women Who Serve. |