Sally Lipton Derringer

Dinnertime, 1960s

After work, an hour before Dad 

                        got home, Mom would pull the 

 

Impala into the driveway, rush 

                        into the kitchen and put her apron 

 

on. She'd pierce the potato skins 

                        and put the steak into the oven. 

 

From the freezer she'd take a can 

                        of Tropicana and a cardboard 

 

box of peas, dilute the juice with 

                        water in equal parts 

 

and dump the vegetables into a 

                        saucepan. One of us, depending 

 

on whose turn it was, would leave 

                        the other two to homework or 

 

TV and set out the flowered 

                        plates, folding the paper napkins

 

into fancy triangles on the yellow 

                        Formica table. Soon, we'd hear the 

 

sound of Dad's car pulling in and 

                        the timer would go off. He'd take 

 

his place at the head of the table, 

                        the bright orange drink in its 

 

plastic pitcher a hopeful centerpiece. 

                        Putting on her mitts and with a

 

deep breath, Mom would take the 

                        steak and potatoes out and rescue 

 

the peas just before their skins began to 

                        shrivel from the unexpressed steam.

 

author bio

Sally Lipton Derringer’s work has appeared in Poet Lore, The Los Angeles Review, Solstice, Sentence, Bellevue Literary Review, The Prose-Poem Project, Memoir, SLAB, The Quarterly, The New York Quarterly, Tampa Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association, december, Far Out: Poems of the '60s, Writing for Life, and other journals and anthologies. She has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Antioch University, has taught in the English Department at SUNY Rockland, and currently teaches at Rockland Center for the Arts in W.Nyack, New York.