Poem: House of Women

It was a house of coffee cake and hairspray,
needlepoint and gossip,
men essential to the organism
but flung to sides
like water in a salad spinner,
not the heart of things.

My mother and her mother
crocheting on the beach,
bottoms waffled in damp nylon,
shoulders brushing nightly over soapsuds
in an aproned kiss.

They teased that I was like my father,
so I pulled away from them
the way I saw him do.

My sister tried to tap dance to their rhythm,
but her step-ball-change
was never on the beat.

She wears their lily-of-the-valley fragrance now,
souvenir of childhoods past.

Its notes of sweetness stir my stomach
with a ghostly longing
every time she washes and I dry.

Paula Rudnick is a former television writer and producer who has spent the past 30 years as a volunteer for nonprofit organizations. In the past several years, she has begun to write poetry — another nonprofit endeavor.