CNF: Radiant
by Cynthia Belmont
Our mother’s kitchen was blond wood, black Formica, crisp lines, nothing like the bold patterned vinyl 70s kitchens on TV. She kept the counters tidy, one stack of newspapers next to the refrigerator, a menage à trois of Danish jars holding flour, sugar, and salt, a shiny microwave—modern domestic miracle, newly resized and repriced to fit the American household but still manufactured by defense companies until the 1980s. Vietnam was too recent for molecular energy not to be intimidating even though it was Agent Orange and Napalm in Vietnam, not radiation, and neither was this, but these distinctions weren’t really clear, it was a lot of people cooked one way or another. Atoms, molecules, it all sounded radioactive, invisible—you couldn’t see what they did to you inside. The Vietnamese girl in the news picture running naked in the road, you couldn’t see what they had done to her either.
Our mother said, stand back girls, don’t get too close while it’s on. Yes it’s safe, don’t worry, just don’t stand in front of the window while it’s cooking because you never know. It’s like x-rays at the dentist. You have to protect your middle.
The recessed lighting was soft, the bay window lavish with plants. I sat on the floor sometimes while she cooked, watching the red sauce splatter on the steel. When the old oven came to temperature, it issued a whimper like a musical sigh, a sleepy eye opening, cat stretch, balloon released, first star in the sky.
*
I stood at the counter drinking a glass of cold orange juice, staring out idly at the blazing green muggy backyard. My sister came into focus, sunbathing topless. Impossible. There she was, lying next to the crabapple, sunglasses on, sixteen, we never saw each other nude, or our parents, we were a dignified bunch, but there was something different about her, some kind of refusal. Her moods were mystifying. How could she be doing this? All around were two-story houses, and though the yard was heavily landscaped, some of their windows gazed down upon her. She was skinny, barely breasted, but I was ashamed, for her and for myself because she had forced me to see her. And what I saw was like and not like myself.
Everything in our graceful kitchen was suddenly strange, and I was the stranger. I felt exposed, a voyeur. Hot cheeks. This was not a setting for scenes. Also, I realized, I admired her bravado, so alien to me.
*
My sister died of breast cancer at forty-seven. It had spread everywhere, her bones, her organs, her brain, where it finally killed her. How can you have breast tissue in your brain, but you really can. Breast tissue gone wild, leaking, escaped, slinking around inside you, indiscreet, mortally excessive.
I’m ashamed now of my shame as a girl and now. But she isn’t. Not her. Little sister, her pale ribby chest is still out there in the garden. Baking, burning in glory under the sun.
Cynthia Belmont is Professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at Northland College, an environmental liberal arts school in Ashland, WI, on the South Shore of Lake Superior. Her writing has appeared in diverse journals, including Poetry, Cream City Review, Oyez Review, River Teeth, and Terrain.org.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Radiant”? I started this piece while writing along with my students in a poetry seminar. The exercise we were doing, which is by Rita Dove and appears in The Practice of Poetry, is to write about your mother’s kitchen, including the oven, something green, and something dead, and a female relative has to enter the kitchen at some point. My sister died two years ago, so she is frequently in the back of my mind, and as she entered the kitchen in a sense through the view of her sunbathing outside, I realized that the piece was really about her and that it was an essay, not a poem. And so it was also an opportunity to write about something real that happened to me and to explore my feelings about it. I love when that sort of thing happens! This is one reason that it’s always a good idea to write along with students in class. As the essay developed later, I enjoyed researching the history of the microwave oven and thinking about how this piece connects to others that I’ve written that point to hidden dangers in the modern world and how we are often focused on the wrong things—one of my favorite themes.
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