The year my oldest sister was high school valedictorian, I flunked Kindergarten. “Show me where you place the fork, Sarah. The spoon?” I suppose I pre-flunked since the point was to determine my eligibility for early admittance. My memories of being grilled are my interrogator and her polished warmth, my desperate shyness, the questions about tableware placement. I let down my mother’s side of the family, her aunts from Sweden placed, not unlike a fork or spoon but with greater flourish and more reward, as maids on Long Island estates, the vast ones owned by names wealthy and infamous. They were Swedish maids in a time when “Swedish maid” meant something, dammit. Anyway. Confusion is baked into my nature. I have yet to master advanced tableware and its relation to dinnerware. For my inner-GPS, right and left, north and south, are variables, weather vanes restless in the winds. I wonder if I was branded as disappointing in grammar school. Glad we moved west. I taught in another small school system years later. Teachers gabbed (as a village, not a scandal sheet). Shared students’ family trees and modifications. We were knowledgeable cheat sheets, serving our students. Back to Kindergarten. What was the conjecture on me? That same sister jackpotted a full scholarship, all four years, to the Ivies. I am mute on my educational trajectory except what just came to mind, to wit, in Game of Thrones when Cersei was forced to parade her naked shame before all. No nakedness, on my part, but shame. Inspired maybe by my great-aunts or my sister’s rank as I saw it, I put in years of reading etiquette books. How I loved them with their safe rules and opportunity to imagine myself functional in a fading elegant world.

Sarah Sarai

writes poetry, fiction, and permutations thereof. That Strapless Bra in Heaven (Kelsay Books) is her most recent poetry collection. Bright-Eyed is forthcoming from Poets Wear Prada. An independent editor by trade, she is indifferent to the whole serial comma outrage. When its use clarifies, go for it (she says). Sarah is a New Yorker and a Californian. Find her poems and stories in The Southampton Review, Boston Review, Cleaver, Connotations Press, Sinister Wisdom, Minnesota Review, The Threepenny Review, and other fabulous journals and reviews. And her book reviews (far fewer) hither and yon. She is a grand performer of her stories and poems.

Author’s blog: My 3,000 Loving Arms

And visit her on Facebook: The Future Is Happy: Fiction & Poetry of Sarah Sarai