Meredith Trede

Gifted Girls

Three-room walk-ups in red-brick tenements,
walls swollen by years of lead paint, living
room sofa-beds, fathers who spoke too little,

mothers who cleaned too much. We rode the el
to our school for gifted girls. Every word
they fed you ate. I couldn’t swallow, too full

from my mother’s madness. You took me home
when she drank too much, your older sister
buffered your father’s belt. We read Sartre,

Frost and Eliot, argued politics, found Gerde’s
Folk City, cheap-seat theater. In Central Park,
young French waiters lost in your Renaissance

face kissed me, too, in kindness, unformed girl,
youngest in our class. A mistake we thought 
when boys began to notice me, not you. I fled 

to a small, state college, At your University
boys coiled to coax virginity’s boon, pressure
no book had covered. Upstate dates found me

city-cool and still said please. Sophomore year,
mid beer-binge night, I somehow knew to call.
You, razor blade in hand, had to be convinced

anyone gave a damn for your life. The balance
between us shifted more. Next year, another call,
the Beatles blaring, my friends kibitzing, you found

frivolity infantile. We never spoke again. Years
later I rifled phone books, as your parents moved
borough to borough until their names were gone.

A reunion came I could face. We’d both been listed
on the missing side, but they said you’d died, suicide.
I want to tell you I know how hard it is to stay alive.

Meredith Trede’s books are Tenement Threnody, Field Theory, and a chapbook, Out of the Book. Her extensive journal publications include Barrow Street, Evening Street Review, Friends Journal, Gargoyle, and The Paris Review. Meredith was granted Blue Mountain Center, Ragdale, Saltonstall and VCCA residency fellowships. She holds a Sarah Lawrence College MFA, a New School MA, a BA from SUNY, Oneonta, and serves on the Slapering Hol Press Advisory Committee. She’s a born and bred New Yorker, happy to be back home.