In the Small Rooms

Under the big house, above the pool, surrounded
by flowers, to the side of the sea on a bed
in a room that I share with my brother is an X-
marks the spot that is me. I am ten years old. I have
finished the fifth grade and now know Spanish: Usted
está aquí. The people we are visiting
wear white every day. In the kitchen is a pantry
filled with King Oscar sardines and saltine crackers
from the mainland. In the living room my father
teaches us the stock market with a full bowl
of walnuts. We go on trips some days, my mother,
father, brother, me: to a sulfur spring that turns
earrings and belt buckles black, on a sailboat
where we watch flying fish stitch the sea, to town
to buy duty-free Chivas for my grandfather,
my first wrist watch (I will later stop its time
in water and tell no one), Wedgewood teacups
for my mother. Tiny lizards, quick and curved
as punctuation appear on the walls, sleep
in our shoes, flick their tongues at us and vanish.
There is a woman who cooks and a woman who cleans,
a man who tends the pool and gardens and a young man
who helps him and runs errands. This young man appears
in some photos from that visit, in the background.
All of them live here, in the small rooms beneath the big
house in back where my brother and I go by mistake
and find the kittens, gray and mewling, so new
they could die without their mother. Unfortunately
I have read Black Boy, where the boy kills the kitten
whose mews disturb his father, and unfortunately,
I have told it to my brother. We cuddle the babies
and have to be summoned for dinner. We smell
a different dinner cooking in the small rooms.

For years I remember this much only: my feet
on cool marble slap-slapping through the big house, my feet
on rough gravel, my feet on hot slate stones. My room cool
and dark and square like a flower box to be planted
but no one else, anywhere. The generator humming,
the electric snap of the mosquito-zapper.
I suck on the ends of my pigtails and taste
sea-salt. Where are my favorite white sandals,
my plastic sunglasses? The young man who carries
crates of sardines, who digs weeds from the garden and
bottle glass from the beach and skims leaves and dead lizards
off of the top of the pool is lying on top
of me and for years that is all I will remember.