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Parents Need Privacy—If Only For A Moment

Parents Need Privacy—If Only For A Moment

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By B.J. Hollars

The day started off promising enough. I’d just risen from my bed without disturbing the dog, my children, or my wife, a feat that earned me a few minutes of solitude before the day’s chaos began. There, in the pre-dawn silence I tip-toed into the shower, a smile slipping over my face as the hot water rained down.

And then, without warning, my privacy was interrupted by a New Orleans-style brass band parading through the bathroom, complete with tubas, trombones, and a drumline. By which I mean my young children and dog had apparently woken, ignoring every other square inch of our home and opting to take their shouting (and barking) to the bathroom.

“Somebody’s in here!” I hollered from behind the shower curtain.

“It’s okay,” my four-year-old called, “you’re not bothering us.”

As the children fought over toothbrushes with the ferocity of rival street gangs, I reached for my towel and excused myself without even attempting to broker the peace. Doing so would require diplomatic skills I simply did not possess—at least not while wrapped in a towel without so much as a sip of caffeine.

This bathroom-barging soon became our morning ritual. There was always some battle worth fighting, my children decided, and there was no better battleground than the bathroom—preferably when I was in it. Thankfully, the shower noise generally overpowered my screams, though surely my frustration was palpable.

Is it asking too much, I wondered, for a moment’s peace of mind?

The alternative, I knew, was one’s mind going to pieces—a situation that seemed more and more likely with each passing day.

When the shower failed to serve as a refuge, I sought asylum in less conspicuous places inside our home. Surely there must be a coffin-sized crawlspace somewhere, I reasoned, or a bit of room behind the water heater.

Meanwhile, my wife retreated to the running trails alongside our home. Within a year of our second child’s birth she’d become a marathon runner—26.2 miles was nothing compared to putting up with us.

Through all this hectic mayhem, the veteran parents—whose children had long ago flown the coop—often reminded us to cherish these “precious moments” while we could. “It’s all over in the blink of an eye,” they chided. I didn’t doubt them, but I wondered, too, if those veterans remembered what it was like to spend years of one’s life never being alone. If they’d agree that not every moment was as “precious” as they remembered, and that the “blink of an eye” seems pretty darn long when you’re living it. For me, this is the most difficult philosophical dilemma of parenthood: making a sincere effort to embrace the chaos when some days I’m just a click away from a one-way ticket to Tahiti.

While I know those veteran parents are offering me sound advice, in my more sleep-deprived moments, I can’t help but wonder if their rose-colored glasses are on a little too tight. Make no mistake, I don’t begrudge them their prophecies. And when they get that faraway look in their eyes and tell me how “the days are long but the years are short,” I know there’re speaking truth. I know, too, that one day I’ll become afflicted with that same faraway look, and I’ll parrot the same advice. This is the cautionary tale all veteran parents must preach: a reminder to the new recruits that our time together is short. And a reminder, too, that every diaper we change leads us one diaper closer to the last one; that there’s always a day when the soccer games run out and the dance recitals come to a standstill. Inevitably, there will come a night when nobody requires a story before bed. With each passing day, that inevitably creeps closer. Some nights my children close their doors and tell me they need their “privacy.” Their request is ripe for revenge—a perfect opportunity to burst in with a tuba in tow. But I don’t. Not ever. Instead, I scratch my head and wonder what in the world we are to do with ourselves when we’re no longer constantly needed.

What’s a shower, after all, without someone tossing your keys in the toilet?

I write this now from the bowels of my basement. Overheard, I hear the pitter patter of small feet. From what I can glean, somebody has apparently stolen somebody’s maraca. And somebody else believes that maraca is rightfully hers. Fighting ensues, followed by crying, and then some unexpected laughter. Suddenly, I hear the sound of two maracas, some off-key singing, and a yowling dog to boot. Here in this basement, it might as well be the tabernacle choir.

“What’s going on up there?” I holler.

My children ignore me.

Which is all the invitation I need to close the computer, barge into their band, and start beating the bongos as if all our lives depend upon it.

B.J. Hollars is a Brain, Child contributing blogger. He the author of several books, most recently From the Mouths of Dogs: What Our Pets Teach Us About Life, Death, and Being Human, as well as a collection of essays, This Is Only A Test. He serves as the reviews editor for Pleiades, a mentor for Creative Nonfiction, and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. For more, visit: http://www.bjhollars.com

Photo credit: Designer’s Trapped

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The Holes In Us

The Holes In Us

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By Reva Blau

My father did not tell anyone completely about his psychic scars. He did, however, let my mom, sister, and I ogle, occasionally, on his physical ones. Taking off his expensive, leather shoes, he would, very rarely, let us peek the roped mass of roiling purple and magenta skin at the knuckle of his big toe, where, crushing grapes at a POW camp shortly after WWII broke out, he had plunged the pitchfork. The toe bent off crookedly to the left and the nail was gone. The joke in the family was not to drink 1939 Bordeaux. He also would hand me the shrapnel shards that would, once in a blue moon, poke out from his thighs, a result of a bomb that he had tripped while he interrogated Nazis as a German-speaking US Army officer.

Three years before returning to Europe as a soldier, my father, the son of Viennese Jews, fled Nazi Vienna, then Nazi Czechoslovakia, then France on the brink of World War II. He was imprisoned three times and got out three times. He was tortured in a Nazi border patrol. The Nazi’s made him do exercises until he passed out. For meals, he only had lard.

A son of secularized Jews, He didn’t mind really that lard was not kosher; although I am sure that was the border patrol officers intention. He minded that the meat was barely edible and, subsequently could not even look at bacon without going quiet looking off into an invisible space.

From the border patrol, he escaped and made it to Prague, where he lived until the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia as well. Making his way to France to await the processing of his visa, he was rounded up by the French Army for having a German passport, even though it was branded with a red “J.” He was sent to Bordeaux to a labor camp on a vineyard. He stuck his foot with a pitchfork to get out of a French labor camp and onto a French navy steamship that would take him to New York, the white lines of blood poisoning creeping up his leg.

He liked to tell these stories. The stories were a series of lucky breaks: the last train from Vienna to Prague before the Austrian border was closed; the last train to France before the war broke out; the last civilian ship from Europe. He presented himself as the luckiest man alive.

My dad lost both his parents in the Holocaust. He saw them for the last time, taking an illegal detour back into Austria on a night train, on his way to Le Havre from Prague. He didn’t talk about his parents often. He never mentioned his mother at all. I remember maybe once or twice and always in an almost whisper.

Throughout both my sister’s and my life, he searched for what happened to his parents once their letters to him, a newly arrived immigrant in America, stopped coming in 1941. I have many of his inquiries with inquiries to Austria, Germany, and Poland as he tried, over the course of decades, to find out what happened to them. They are written in an oily tone in long, German sentences with long nouns. I have the letters back with conflicting information from each of the embassies and the American Red Cross.

This story about how his trauma affected his being my dad starts in the winter of 1976. Mrs. Kritz, my first grade teacher, told me she liked my poems about rain. The poems were stapled together between two pieces of blue construction paper. I spoke English then with a vaguely Dutch accent because we had spent the previous year in Holland. Back in New York, I went to school a few weeks and then got strep throat. I was at home, burning with fever. My parents were at the university teaching. That morning, my mother had called my new babysitter, an Israeli modern dancer, whose bones poked up, fragile like bird wings, through her translucent skin. She had skipped her rigorous training to come in on a weekday last minute because she needed the income. But she had run out of ideas for games we could play and I had spent the afternoon trying to read in English on the sofa under a blanket. At some point, I got up to wander the large apartment, which still felt foreign after the year away.

I crept into my father’s study with its walls of books, a solid inverted sculpture of brown spines. I sat at his walnut desk diagonal to the typewriter. I fingered the leather encased stapler and the clear dome that held in its perfect bubble one refillable green ink pen and one refillable pencil, both silver. Green ink had stained the small hole in the plastic where the pen stuck out. I found a lined notebook and removed the pen. I started to write my new book, the ink silkily spilling over onto the off-white paper. I planned to show Ms. Kritz my writing.

I heard the measured footsteps of leather sole heavily treading the throw rugs as my father came down the orange hallway. I should have known. It was four o’clock and it was the time for pacing, poring over books with his giant magnifying glass, endless green-inked outlining, peck pecking on the typewriter. The dog had this routine down so well that, lounging in the hallway, she would pull herself even before the elevator doors opened in the outside hallway with its black and white hexagonal tiles. I hadn’t heard the key in the lock. And, suddenly, he was filling the doorway. When he saw me, it took him a moment for him to register a small child was at his desk, that this child was his own, and had broken the biggest rule in the house: Do Not Enter Your Father’s Study. That I had entered the study and used his pen—the only pen he used, ever—and that his green ink was spilling out over the pages, was unthinkable.

It was as if the knob controlling his adrenaline system was on the opposite way as most people’s nervous system. Small things tripped torrents of anxiety, whereas the things that make most people fearful did not seem to phase him at all. When people called the house, for example, he’d thunder into the phone, “ALLO! Who’s there!” like it was on the CB radio in the mud-soaked trenches artillery raining down. Yet, he was immune from fears of his mortality. He drove, for example, fearlessly, without concern for any of our welfare. He would recline in the seat, drive with one hand, gesturing with the other. He would often hold court in the car, lecturing about books or politics, and look over at us, in conversation, for many beats too long.

When I was seven or eight, there was a fire in the building directly opposite our apartment. It happened in the middle of the night. My mother awoke to the smell of smoke then ran through the U-shaped apartment to my room. She shook me awake and I gathered important things as I had read people do in books. It was only minutes later that the super came up and pounded on the door to tell us to evacuate. It took my father an agonizing twenty minutes to dress in his habitual attire of a three-piece suit complete with tie, belt and garter socks. My mother and I stood in the hallway waiting for him, my arms full of thirteen stuffed animals and Noodles, the guinea pig, who dug her claws into my forearm. When the firefighter to come bang on our door to wonder why we hadn’t gotten out yet, my father was looking into the bedroom mirror adjusting his tie.

A year or so later, we were in Athens, Greece at an outdoor table eating salad and whole grilled fish from the center of the table. I was nine, alone with my parents on a trip, and prone to bouts of dizzying boredom if I was not allowed to read my Trixie Belden books, which was another rule: Never Read at a Restaurant Table. We lingered at the table after eating, listening to the old men chattering in Greek around us. I asked my father if I could please borrow his pen to draw. He took it out of his suit pocket and gave it to me. I doodled absent-mindedly on the bill.

Back at the cramped hotel room, my father asked for his silver pen back. He sent me outside to return to the restaurant, but the loud, beefy owner could not find it. “I will run away, I will spend my life hopscotching the archipelago by ferry, perhaps earn my money busking,” I thought to myself imagining my open fiddle case opened out on the hot, white pavement. Instead, I returned to the hotel and my father’s face, a mask of molten rage.

I was not afraid, like most children, of the dark, bugs, ghosts or monsters. I explored the old train tracks under the West Side Highway and peered at the cardboard slum cities in the tunnels. I spoke fearlessly with strangers and felt the safest on an airplane high in the sky above an ocean. Instead I feared bank tellers and police officers, authority figures, the mysterious systems that sent the mail.

After learning that the Noble laureate in Physics, who happened to have emigrated from Maoist China, lived a few a few floors above us, I slept with one eye open. He sometimes left or returned to the building in a motorcade of limousines. This left me deeply suspicious of adults generally. I was concerned to learn that a physicist had been the first to successfully split the uranium atom under the green copper turrets of Pupin Hall at Columbia across the street.

I went to a high school with a dappled quad in which one could sit between classes and read. I adored high school. In European History, Mrs. Bernstein taught us about March 12th, 1938, when Hitler marching into the Heldenplatz to the cheers of hundreds of thousands of cheering Viennese. I loved Ms. Bernstein. She spoke in a measured cadence and always in complete sentences. She allowed us to think deeply about history.

At some point, after reading an essay I had written, she had taken me aside in the hallway and asked me if I was a native English speaker.

“Why, yes!” I answered, surprised. “Why?”

“Well because your sentence structure feels German to me. You put the ideas at the end of the sentences. The syntax is just slightly different from English syntax.” She must have known my dad survived this time. It was her way of telling me that she was sensitive to the impact it had on me. We are still friends to this day.

In class, we peered at photos in our dense textbooks. One showed Hitler, a diminutive terror, surrounded by Imperial buildings of the Austro-Hungarian nobility, high above the swarms. Hitler’s lips and mustache were so thin they looked like they could chop you in half. I came home and asked my father if he was still in Vienna when the Nazis marched in and if he went to Hitler’s rally. Did you see him on the streets? I was curious—morbidly—if he had actually seen Hitler himself. He was furious with me.

“What do you think? Do you want me stampeded to death?” Uh, no, dad, I don’t want that.

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It was shortly after the Nazi rise to power that my grandparents and their parents lost their bookbinding business and the building they owned where the Blaus and my grandmother’s family, the Selkas, lived. My dad’s father’s doctorate was revoked and he could no longer teach or publish. The University of Vienna, where my dad was going to pre-medical school, expelled its Jewish students. The family had to move to the poorer section of town. My dad was sent to live in Prague, at which point he was captured and hence the lard episode. But weeks later, he was able to get out from the border office, and later, to America. My aunt was sent away with other children on the kindertransport to England. Sometime later my grandparents were rounded up to the ghetto. In one of the first deportations that signaled the Final Solution after the Wannsee Conference, they were sent to their deaths in what turns out to have been the very first extermination camp.

When my father spoke of this time, it was in the present tense or maybe that was still a trace of his German syntax.

When it came time for the Holocaust Remembrance day, students filed in quietly to the auditorium to hear a survivor speak in somber tones about his experiences. I am sure many of my friends wept. I fled to the bathroom and stuffed paper towels in my mouth while my body wracked itself in panic.

The conversation about what happened to his parents took place mostly in my head, although from time to time I would interview him about my grandparents. I interviewed him about why they didn’t leave. He told me that they first refused. He told me that they might have left later but that he didn’t have money for their visas and he couldn’t find anyone who did or who was willing to guarantee them both. He said that he was only offered one affidavit, for one individual, not two, so how do you choose?

In a photo book I found on the highest shelf of one bookcase in our book-lined apartment, I found and then spoke to my grandmother. In the sepia photo she peered out a zaftig woman with sad, almond eyes and tendrils escaping across her temples. She draped one hand on a baby bassinet, with my aunt as a bonneted, moon-faced baby staring out placidly. Another hand rested on the shoulder of my father, a little boy in short woolen trousers, high socks, with a bowl and scarf bowtie. Standing on tiptoe, I put the photo book away before he caught me with them.

My father and I walked downtown to see the movie Sophie’s Choice together after I read all of William Styron’s novels over a summer. At some point, he jumped up and left. It could have been when Sophie, on line in a crowd of deportees, must make the awful choice between her two children. But I think it was much earlier, perhaps when it becomes clear that Nathan is both obsessed with the Holocaust and mentally ill. People in the audience swiveled. More people turned in their seats to look as light from the lobby momentarily flooded the theater. When I came through the theater’s outside doors, I could see the back of his suit, as he race-walked up Broadway, his fists clenched.

The fall after graduating from high school, I lived in a brownstone with three Columbia friends on the first floor of a dilapidated brownstone in Brooklyn. I called him up to see if he wanted to meet and go to the exhibit of Anselm Kieffer at MoMA. Walking the air-conditioned white hallways of the museum, I was awed by the heavily worked massive grey and brown canvases. Their impasto surfaces were scarified with grids and lines in paint that climbed to cathedral ceilings describing warehouses, barracks, and imperial buildings—vast and claustrophobic both. Some paintings showed fields and earth strewn with hay or ashy powder and scarred with metal.

In a packed deli between Fifth and Sixth, he sat sullenly reading the menu. Then, suddenly, he looked up and spat, curtly,”I don’t care that this Kieffer is an artist.” Saliva sprayed my face in the cramped booth. “Why would you take me to see this exhibit?”

I recently found the ship manifest of the DeGrasse, the steampship on which he secured passage, on November 10, 1939, from Le Havre to New York in the digital archives at Ellis Island. Its heading reads “List of Alien Passengers.” The information is recorded in neat rows and columns. The list is one thousand names long and takes up several pages. My father’s name is in the very first row, number one, on the register. I can see him making sure to be first on line. He did the same on lines throughout his life. People often just let him cut the line, as if sensing he could not psychologically wait in line.

Reading across the columns, there are boxes where the immigration official marked each person’s reading and writing ability, profession, nationality, religion, marital status, amount of currency held and many other qualifying remarks, such as if the person is an anarchist, cripple, or a polygamist. For him, his nationality was marked German, the place of visa, Prague, his profession, electrician, his destination, the address of the unknown sponsor whose name and contact his high school history teacher had given him. My dad had told us that he had twenty dollars when he left Le Havre. I had somehow assumed that it was a small exaggeration. How could someone have so little money? I routinely spent his twenty-dollar bills going downtown to buy candy at the Citicorp with my friends. But it turns out that was exactly what he had in his pocket.

He was never an electrician, of course. I laughed at that one. He would have made a very bad electrician. There are three columns for which the answers are almost every one of the thousand on the list. Nationality is marked German, religion Hebrew, and, for the “amount of time the alien intends to remain in the country:” all the last answers for this column are marked “permanently.”

When I first saw the towers come down on the news on the morning of September 11, I was, like most people seized with a cold panic, and, immediately, I thought of the many people I knew who very well might have been on one of the planes or in one of the buildings that morning. Then, suddenly, I was awash with a dark, gruesome sense of doom when I realized the impact on my father’s psyche. I felt across the hundreds of miles and decades of time the sting of the humiliation he felt as a young man. For the first time, I saw my dad as terribly alone in his experience at the hands of the Nazis and facing genocide so intimately. An act of war in New York, his island of safety, all those years ago, was too difficult to even imagine him processing at his age. At first the phone lines were down, and I kept trying until I got through. When I had my father on the phone, he didn’t speak about the events in New York. I brought it up carefully and he went quiet and changed the subject.

It was after that, his heart and lungs weakened. The cardiologist said that his lungs had expanded and, actually, pushed up against the wall of the rib cage. Shortly after that, he went into the hospital. I booked the earliest flight I could. My sister, who was in Amsterdam, had taken the overnight flight. Each of us took a cab to hospital. And, within an hour, my sister, my mother, and I were all there. It was rare for us three to be together. But there we were, his existential people, gathered around him, or was it still him, in his ICU room, the screens bleeping, a machine sending rumbling and artificial inhales and exhales of oxygen through his body? And then we said goodbye to him and we were the ones left with this hole in our lives.

Reva Blau-Parlante juggles teaching middle-school, raising two kids, and writing non-fiction with the support of her partner in life Joe and perhaps too much espresso with lemon.

 

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Beach Days

Beach Days

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Art Beach Days

By Sarah Bousquet

In July I take my daughter to her first swimming lesson. We walk from our house down to the beach, where a young instructor and a few other neighborhood 2-year-olds meet. Tiny feet trod the path of my youth, hedge-lined, the bricks sprouting crabgrass. It’s the same beach where I spent every summer of my childhood. The same beach where my dad grew up. A history stretching back seventy years. I never expected, after all this time, to return to my hometown, but here we are, in a house that wakes to salt air and birdsong, a stone’s throw from memory.

My daughter is a little fish, just like me. She runs into the waves unafraid, despite encounters with small crabs, barnacled rocks, slippery seaweed. She is at home in the water, splashing with delight. Plops down on the sand and lets the waves roll over her. I can feel that feeling, when she accidentally gulps a mouthful of seawater. Sting in her sinuses, briny taste on her tongue.

There in the waves, on the ripple-patterned sandbar, I find myself inside my own childhood, a feeling truer than an echo, more vivid than a dream. I am my small self standing under a strong sun, fair skin turning pink-brown, freckled nose peeling. The beach stretches itself out familiar and changing, low tide, high tide, choppy water, water smooth as glass. Blue sky bunched with cottony clouds, seagulls diving at spider crabs, the rock jetty harboring mussels, Charles Island in the distance.

Inside this memory, I see my sister and I running over the hot sand to meet our friends at the water’s edge for swimming lessons. We race each other on kickboards, cut freestyle through the waves. I practice limp-limbed back-floats, water lapping my head, filling my eardrums, soundless, staring into the sky. Lying buoyant, body held in the water’s embrace, I drift into daydream, never hearing the instructor’s call. Eventually, I kick myself upright, unable to touch bottom, surprised at how far the current has taken me.

Midday we flock to the cooler for sandwiches, egg salad escaping the bread with each bite. The juice of plums or nectarines dripping down our chins while we bury the pits in the sand.

At low tide we run Red Rover on the sandbars, build drip castles from the black mud, dig moats, construct tiny bridges from reeds. We inspect razor clams, collect sea glass, bury our legs and wait for the tide to wash us up like horseshoe crabs. Sometimes we find chunks of red brick, wet the surface, and use sticks to draw tattoos on each other’s skin. We stab purple jellyfish, but handle starfish with care. Venture up to the seawall and crouch beneath the sailboats, ready-made forts.

On high tide days we swim. We are dolphins, mermaids, sharks. We swim until our skin is pickled, fingers and toes translucent and puckered; the whites of our eyes pink from salt.

At the day’s end, we walk up the road barefoot, hurrying over the hot pavement, pausing to cool our feet in the shady spots until we reach my grandparents’ house. Then we take turns peeling off our sandy suits and washing up with Ivory soap and Prell shampoo in the outdoor shower, run naked through the grass until we’re captured with a towel. Occasionally, my grandmother puts a bowl of goldfish crackers on the table that we eat one after another while my mother brushes our wet, tangled hair.

Memories roll in like so many waves. Less nostalgia, more a conjuring, a visceral recall that resides deep in the body. Watching my daughter repeat these routines on the same sand grants me sudden secret access to these other versions of myself, the sensation of experiencing new textures and tastes, color and light, learning the rhythms, the ebb and flow. They say you can’t go back, but as my daughter repeats these patterns, I return.

When my daughter’s swimming lesson begins, she clings to me like a koala. The other kids take turns with a kickboard, but she resists. Refuses to dip even a toe in the water. The instructor is cheerful and encouraging, but my daughter is not charmed. In the end, it proves too much, performing in front of strangers, an expectation imposed on her fun. It occurs to me I didn’t begin swimming lessons until I was four. I recall that tentative feeling, the fear and hesitation before trying something for the first time.

That weekend, I show her how to scoop water with her small hands, the first step to doggy-paddle. I hold her in the waves, kick kick kick. We search the tide pools for hermit crabs. Dig in the sand. She sees my dad on the sandbar, shouts, “Papa!” and breaks into a run, that waddle-run particular to 2-year-olds, arms out, sun hat flapping. He catches her and swings her into the air before lowering her into the water. She splashes and paddles and kicks. Little fish. These are all the swimming lessons she needs right now. The wonder of the water, the body becoming buoyant, held by strong hands. In my dad’s smile, I see the same joy reflected, and I know, he feels it too. The repeating, the return.

Headshot Sarah BousquetSarah Bousquet is Brain Child’s 2016 New Voice of the Year. She lives in coastal Connecticut with her husband, daughter and two cats. She is currently at work on a memoir. She blogs daily truths at https://onebluesail.com. Follow her on Twitter @sarah_bousquet.

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Remembering The Rotating Elephant

Remembering The Rotating Elephant

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vector illustration of decorated elephant

By Kim O’Connell

On a bright afternoon not too long ago, I took my kids to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., a city that I’ve lived in or near my entire life. Although we’ve been there many times, the dinosaur bones and butterfly garden and mammal exhibits always draw us back. We especially enjoy seeing the giant African elephant that has been displayed in the museum’s rotunda for decades. As we gazed up at its famous uplifted trunk, I told the kids, “When I was little, the elephant turned on a rotating platform.”

They looked at me with raised eyebrows. “When did it stop spinning?” my son asked. Unsure of the answer, I went over to the information kiosk, staffed by a white-haired gentleman who looked seasoned enough to know.

“Excuse me,” I said, “when did the elephant stop rotating?”

The man looked at me quizzically. “This elephant has never rotated.”

“No,” I countered, “I distinctly remember it rotating when I was a child.”

“Nope. Don’t think so.”

I was annoyed that a docent could be so ill-informed. You see, it’s not just that I have a vague recollection that the elephant rotated; I have vivid, specific memories. All of them, I realize, involve my father. My parents split up when I was 7 years old, a moment that forever cleaved away the early part of my childhood. In the way of the newly divorced, my father compensated by frequently taking me to special places on his court-ordered every-other-weekends—the circus, the ballet, the zoo, and the natural history museum. With my small hand in his, I remember standing at the base of the Smithsonian elephant and watching it slowly move, almost imperceptibly, like the shadow of a sundial. I remember it facing a different direction every time I walked back into the rotunda. I remember the way the elephant seemed to spot me out of the corner of its eye as it came around again. There was no way I could be wrong.

When the kids and I got home from the museum, I crowdsourced a query on Facebook: Did anyone else remember the Smithsonian elephant rotating? The answers poured in: No spinning elephant. (However, some people remembered the creature as a woolly mammoth, so I’m not alone in my delusions.) Still unconvinced, I finally tweeted the question to the Smithsonian itself, which responded unequivocally: @kim_oconnell We’ve checked…and the elephant never rotated.

I was, frankly, crushed. I began to wonder whether all my other childhood memories were suspect, too. Had I really almost drowned in a motel pool in Beach Haven, New Jersey, until my father swam up and saved me? Did we really keep a box turtle in our kitchen for a week after my dad found it on a bike trail? Had my third grade teacher really taken me out for cherry ice cream after she testified in my parents’ custody trial? Or was it all like the rotating elephant, a figment of my imagination?

I may never know the answer. Among other things, my father is now gone, so I can’t ask him, and even if I could, chances are his memory would be just as faulty as mine. Scientists have studied the phenomenon of false memories for years, and the unreliability of memory has come up in countless cases involving eyewitness testimony. Apparently, our memories are malleable because our brains are taking in so much information all the time, and our thoughts about our memories, as well as our hopes and dreams and other input, inform what we are filing away for future retrieval. Psychologists have asserted that some false childhood memories can even be useful to us, if they help to construct a positive narrative of one’s past.

This is how I’ve come to view the rotating elephant. Because my time with my father was so precious in those early days, my experiences with him were seared into my memory bank—or some version of them. Many times I have told the story about how a group of camera-toting tourists accosted my father and me outside the Kennedy Center in the 1970s, convinced that I was presidential daughter Amy Carter and my dad was a Secret Service agent. Did it really happen? Maybe. Or maybe just being there with my dad made me feel like we were something more special, together, than we ever were apart.

I hope that someday my kids will feel that way about me, even though our nuclear family—in contrast to the one I grew up in—is so stable, so easily taken for granted, that they aren’t likely to consider our outings all that precious. Still, like my father did before me, I like to take my kids to places like the Natural History museum, where they are forming their own memories of the elephant, fixed as it is on the museum floor. Maybe they find enough magic in its broad shoulders, its wide ears, and its sad eyes. Yet I can’t help but feel grateful to my younger self for conjuring up something even more enchanting—a gigantic elephant spinning, almost dancing, almost alive—to carry with me to adulthood, along with all the other real and manufactured memories that make up my life story. I’m not sure I’m ready to let it go, even now. And in my mind’s eye, at least, I don’t have to.

Kim O’Connell is a writer whose work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ladies Home Journal, Babble, PsychologyToday.com, National Geographic News, and Little Patuxent Review, among others. In 2015, she was chosen to be the first-ever writer in residence at Shenandoah National Park. She lives in Arlington, Va., with her husband, son, and daughter.

 

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The Decision

The Decision

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mother and two daughters playing on the beach at the day time

By Francesca Grossman

My childhood stairs were carpeted red with little black flecks. The rug was threadbare in places, and I spent hours every day pulling the little wiry strings back to reveal more wood. The stairs always squeaked as they do in old houses, so that later, as a teenager, I knew exactly which side of which step to avoid when I snuck out to meet my boyfriend in the dead of night.

I felt most comfortable on those stairs, perched on the small landing exactly three stairs from the top, where upstairs became downstairs and daytime became nighttime.

I floated down those stairs once; I can still feel the flight in my flesh, the ultimate little girl freedom dream when life had yet to leaden me. That night of the floating dream, I ended up pouring a glass of milk in the kitchen, the cold white liquid overflowing the tall glass, spilling on my hand and then the linoleum floor, waking me up.

One winter afternoon when I was about seven, my father came back from the hospital after having surgery on his hands. He had arthritis, and it was bad enough that he had to “fix his thumbs” in my mother’s words. All I remember was he disappeared rather suddenly, and was gone at least a week.

It was a Saturday morning, and I wore a flannel nightgown with a lace collar and elastic wrists I would pull until they ripped and stretched. I wore my nightgown all day on the weekends, feeling the freedom of a day without pants.

My father was a gorgeous man. Still is. Tan, thin, one part Cary Grant, one part The Man with the Yellow Hat. His mole, black and distinctive, sat right on his cheekbone, below his left eye. When he walked in the front door, which was directly at the bottom of the stairs, my mother had to help him take off his coat. She had driven him home. His thumbs were wrapped in white braces wrapped in Velcro to render them immovable.

“Hey, CiCi,” he said.

“Hi, Daddy,” I said, and came down the stairs from my perch, not knowing whether to hug him in case I would hurt him.

“Miss me?” he asked.

I nodded.

“I missed you,” he said, and ran one finger under my chin, feeling the soft skin there. The Velcro scratched my neck, but I kept that to myself. He kissed my head.

He went into the kitchen to talk to my mother and I stayed in the foyer, the black marbled linoleum cold under my feet.

A little later, after he went upstairs to rest, I crept up after him and sat again on the stairs, slowly inching my way toward his room. The door was closed and no light shone through the crack at the bottom. I reached the doorframe and sat outside. The old floor was hardwood and splintery, and I arranged my nightgown so that I wouldn’t sit directly on the prickly bits.

At first, I thought my father had the TV on. Long low moans punctuated by hiccupping sobs filtered through the doorjamb.

Then it hit me—my father was crying.

I had never heard my father cry before, though I would hear it again in the years to come. But on this day in my childhood, I had never even considered my father crying a possibility. He was a mostly happy man who only seemed to ever get upset when I woke him up from a nap, or when my sister and I would pretend to run away, filling our knapsacks with stuffed animals for dramatic emphasis.

My mother was always the anxious one, the rule maker, the one who checked the stove twice before we left, even though she hadn’t used it that day.

I didn’t know what to do. I scooted closer to the white, peeling door and held my arms wide and flat. I pressed my face up against it, and closed my eyes, smelling the old paint. I stayed there, hugging that door, for a long while, knowing that I couldn’t go in, but not willing to leave.

My narrative on love, marriage and parenting was tight and exact. Everyone in my family met young, married young, and stayed together until they were old. I grew up with parents and grandparents all who were still together and (mostly) happy. The people in my family loved their children fiercely. There was never a doubt in my mind that my parents would do anything for me or for my sister, anything at all. I never wondered if they wanted me, I never felt as though I didn’t fit in the family. There still is no doubt in my mind about that. If I call, they come. It has been tested more than once, even in my darkest days. That’s it.

I think, as a child, my understanding of this kind of love made me feel protected and safe. As I grew up and moved away, I set a goal for myself: give myself to other people, especially my future children, with a feverish protection of love.

So when I heard my dad cry from pain, or I saw my mom anxious and worried, or any sliver of doubt made its way under my fingernails, it unwound me. It shook me to see them shaken, and I didn’t know how to deal with that. What I decided on was probably the worst way to deal with anxiety: stomach it all and not let the unraveling show.

In a sense, it was this self-magnified promise of parental love and safety that rooted something in me that was both good and bad: a deep need to echo my childhood, and an even deeper fear that I wouldn’t be able to.

As long as I can remember, I have been a hopeless maternal. I would mother my friends, my pets, my sister and my stuffed animals. I wanted to be able powerful, multitasking, strong. Like my own mother.

My mother put us before herself at every instance. There was never any doubt in my mind that my sister and I were the best things that had happened to her. There was never any competition with friends, or work, or life, really. As I look back, I realize this may not have been the healthiest reality for her, but for us, it was paradise. And it was the way I learned what motherhood meant—giving everything, all of myself, to everyone else.

Every summer, still now, my family rents a cottage on a beach in Cape Cod. The house is tiny and sparse, but the beach is expansive, spectacular, ours.

Almost every day, we would walk down to the completely desolate part of the beach, about a half a mile from the eighty stairs that took us up the dune and back to our cottage. There was clay that made itself from the water and the sand and the wind and we would paint it on ourselves with our fingers, sure it would do something magical to our skin and soul.

My mother, sister and I were painting with the magic clay when a gust of wind blew by, whipping sand into our faces. My sister got sand in her eyes and she burst into tears. Later in life, my sister’s eyes would get her into or out of anything she wanted, but back then, a child of four or five, they got in her way. Catlike, huge, taking up half of her face, they were quick to catch pinkeye and seemed to always be irritated by something.

“Get it out, get it out,” my sister shrieked, holding her little balled-up hands against her eye sockets, hopping on one foot to the other. I had closed my eyes in time, my seven- or eight-year-old self much more sandstorm savvy. Plus, my eyes were a much smaller target – relatively normal sized, and plainer than my sister’s.

“Stop, wait, stop!” my mother exclaimed as my sister jumped around in agony. We had nothing with us, no towel, not even a tee shirt.

“It hurts,” my sister cried.

My mother paused.

“Ok, hold on.” She kneeled on the sand next to my sister. Her red bathing suit wedged up her bum but she didn’t move to pick it; she was working. The tan line on her rearend made a perfect “V.”

My mother pulled my sister’s head close to her face.

“Here,” she said. And she put her lips right up against one eye, and then the other, licking her eyelids.

“Ew,” I said, but quietly.

She did it again, slowly, making sure to get the sides of the eyes too.

“Ok, now try to open.”

My sister opened one eye slowly, blinking rapidly, then the other. She looked around.

“It’s gone,” she said.

The awe I felt watching my mother lick the sand out of my sister’s eyes was palatable. That was the kind of thing that big love makes. That was motherhood. My mother was a master of motherhood. She put us first always. She’d lick the sand from our eyes.

In that moment, as I watched my mother heal my sister, I knew I needed to have children of my own someday; even then, I wanted the ability to come up with a solution out of thin air. I wanted to love my children with that kind of thick, unconditional, and obvious maternal love. And I’ll be honest: I wanted, of course, to be loved with that kind of awe too. I wanted, I still want, I think, the kind of gratitude that my sister had for my mother in that moment. Her mommy stopped her pain.

I was twenty-nine and had just had surgery to remove my thyroid and the cancer had grown. I was also sick with Crohn’s disease and a peripheral arthritis that brought me to my knees. I was stricken with insomnia and used that time to internally obsess about whether it would be selfish to have a baby in my state, to the point where it’s all I could think about. It was taking over every inch of my headspace, and I was slowly starting to drive myself crazy. What would I do with my life if I didn’t have children? What would my husband do? Would he leave? Should he leave? Should I leave to save him that choice?

There’s no clear prognosis with Crohn’s. Usually, hopefully, it was possible to get it under control and live a long, happy life. Doctors, patients and the internet showed me the gamete of other dire possibilities. Since then, I have heard more varying and optimistic versions. But it’s also very possible that my life could be spent in and out of hospitals, having numerous surgeries, living with very little energy and a low quality of life. Even if I never got worse, living a life I had been living—having to be within a ten-foot vicinity of a clean, private bathroom, hiding my depression from my friends, having a difficult time walking, standing up, sitting down, lying down, turning over—wasn’t a great indication of the life I would lead in the future. I could get better, sure, but what if I didn’t? What if I got worse?

My doctors had told me that the Crohn’s was an indication that I had very severe inflammation response, and the thyroid cancer was just one more confirmation that my immune system was severely off kilter. When foreign agents entered my system, my body tried to kill them. Why would that not happen with a fetus? Why would my body spare those new cells when it won’t anything else?

Also, this disease (and my other autoimmune maladies) was genetic. My father suffered from several ailments, as did my grandmother. What right did I have to pass that on to an innocent child?

I kept overthinking, bringing myself into reality: What would I do if I had children, but I couldn’t care for them? What if the cancer comes barreling back? What if I was too tired to help take care of them? What if my husband, Nick resented how much work of a burden he had to shoulder?

My mouth felt coated in cotton and tasted like play dough. Some of my prescriptions came with a side effect of dry mouth, and the aftertaste of the pills was always salty and surprising. I grabbed the water bottle by my side of the bed and took a long swig.

I knew Nick was sleeping, but I started talking to him anyway.

“What if it doesn’t happen, or maybe worse? What if it does happen but then I kill it?” I said.

“You are not going to kill it,” Nick said sleepily, as if he anticipated me waking him up with that thought. He sighed, turning over to face me.

Our bedroom had one big window right next to the bed. I stared out of it in my insomniac nights, watching the trees. The phone lines and their birds turned from black silhouettes to 3-D as the morning arrived. Pinks and oranges painted the sky. Clouds swirled above the buildings and the trees. It was so big, that sky, it made me feel like I could believe in some sort of God.

“What if I can’t take care of one?” I asked again.

“Well, I think you can, but I know what you’re saying,” he said.

The sunrise was blocked by the building across the street, but I got up and climbed onto the windowsill to peer around it, trying to find the sun.

“We could just try,” Nick said from the bed.

“Yeah, we could.”

I searched the sky for the answer to the real question: could I live with not being a mother? Could I live without giving birth? Could I? Could I really be like my mom on that day on the beach, ready for anything, giving it my all? Or would I be like her in different ways, ones less strong?

We are not supposed to remember things before we are four, but I do, down to the feel of the wallpaper.

I remember my mother, deep in her bed with her socks on, sticking out. She never wore socks, so I remember it surprised me. Her heels were always cracked, like mine are now, and though she perpetually tried to soften them, with creams and gels and special razors, in the summer they immediately toughened up, calloused and yellow and split as soon as she set foot on them. There was nothing wrong with her skin; it was just the way she was put together.

When I was about twenty years old, my mother told me that the best thing she learned in therapy during that period was that at a certain point you get to choose if you want to stay miserable. I’m not sure when that choice happens. After all, we can live inside of sadness for a long time before we see the choice as real.

I remember my father looking for me, I could hear him call, and I realized after a moment that my mother didn’t see me. She was sleeping, maybe. She had been in bed for days, maybe weeks, though at age two I should not have been able to remember anything like this, especially not the feel of time.

It was summer. The big fan in the attic was whirling. The air was heavy and hot. I sat on the coarse bright red and white rug on the floor of my parents’ room and looked at my mother’s face. It looked creased and old, though she was just over thirty. Her long dark brown hair spilled over the side of the bed but a thin piece stuck to her cheek with what I realize now was a glue of dried tears.

Something was different about my mother then. She was skinnier than I remembered, weaker. Her fingers were bare, her plain thick gold wedding ring sat on the mirrored tray on her dresser next to the perfume she didn’t wear anymore.

I heard my father again, this time closer.

“Fran?”

He came into the room and scooped me up. My bare legs burned on the rug from the quick movement.

“I lost you, for a second,” he said with a laugh because he didn’t mean it, or didn’t want to scare me, or something.

“Daddy,” I said, reaching up.

He had me on his hip, which was not really a hip for holding children—bony and sharp. His dog tags, actual dog tags because he thought it was funny to wear them, bumped up against an old Talmud pendant in sterling silver in the jingle that always told me he was there.

He perched me again on the other side, and then went over to my mother’s side of the bed, the left side, or the right if you were in it. He looked down at her, and just for a moment, lost his perpetual smile. The jungle wallpaper behind him became 3-D and I reached out my hand over his shoulder to touch it. It was rough, like real leaves, which at the time I imagined it was.

He took the little piece of stuck hair and pulled it gently off my mother’s cheek, placing it back on her head and holding it there.

“You need anything?” he asked, which surprised me because I thought she was sleeping.

“No,” she answered quietly, not opening her eyes. Not sleeping.

He nodded and turned away from her, back towards me.

“Should we get a snack?” he asked me, nuzzling his face into my neck, feeling the underside of my chin with one finger, as he always did.

I don’t remember nodding, but we went to the kitchen anyway for our usual snack of three cookies on a plate washed down with some ice cold milk.

That night, staring out the sunrise, Nick tucked into bed, arguing with me about my chances at motherhood, I realized something. At different times in my life, both my mother and my father were sick in some way. This is true for every child, I suppose. My mother had some times of sadness, like I do, and my father suffered the kind of severe genetic inflammatory disease I have been dealt. He has thyroid disease, and severe arthritis, and stomach problems, at times. I cannot know if the way I see the world is natural or nurtured. I imagine some of both. But I know what love is. And it is bigger than illness, in all its forms. It busts through.

The kind of love my parents have for me and my sister is fiery and absolute. It’s as small as the circumference of our four-person nuclear family and as big as the blue September sky. I have never doubted it for a minute and I can only hope that someday, someone will trust my love like that; that I will be that love that shines through any of my illnesses; that I will be strong enough.

Years later, we are on the beach, the same beach that my family has been going to all my life, the same eighty steps down the bumpy dune from the cottage at the top. I am with my family, my children, and Nick. Theo and Brieza and I are walking towards the surf. It is colder than usual in July, and the waves are rougher than they usually are on Cape Cod.

Nick is perched in a chair out of the way of the water, dressed in a bathing suit and a sweatshirt, holding the rainbow umbrella he just put up with one hand, but having a tough time keeping it still.

My son and my daughter play ahead of me, both only in bathing suits, neither of them cold. I pull a Little Mermaid towel tight around my shoulders, but follow them to the foamy break.

The wind kicks up. Sand whips around us and I throw my towel out against it.

My daughter laughs, but my son cries. He kneels, holding his face in his hands.

Immediately, I know what happened, and I know what to do. I run to him, lift his five-year-old head in my hands, tilt his chin up and peel his balled up fists from his eyes. I lean down and lick the outsides of each of his eyelids, one by one. He is surprised, but doesn’t squirm away.

“Better?” I ask. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah, Mama. I’m OK.”

There is a thin line between having it all and losing it all. It is on that line I balance. I used to think the beat of my life was uneven, stopping and starting with the poison of sickness. But the more I think about it, the more it seems like the beating has been pretty steady all along. I can’t do this, I must do this, I can’t do this, I must do this. And on and on.

Nick and I have landed in our life. It’s not settled, it never will be. We have two healthy children I thought we could never have. We have jobs, we have a home. We are well more often than we are not. We have an old cat that likes to find the square of sun on the edge of the bed. We battle chronic disease.

I used to wonder what would make me whole: what pill, or man, or relationship, or therapist. Now I think it isn’t about adding things to your life to become whole, but instead it’s about taking them away. Like my fear. Like my vanity. Like my need to be healed. Maybe, if I unfurl myself so that the palm of me is naked to the world, and I am here, in my body and in my life, in my remission, then I can finally be complete. Right there is freedom. Right there is absolution. Right there is grace. Right there is me.

Francesca Grossman’s work includes contributions to The New York Times Motherlode, Drunken Boat, Brain, Child Magazine, Ed Week/Teacher, Glasscases.com, S3 Magazine, and Interview Magazine. She graduated from Stanford with a BA and MA in Education and from Harvard with a Doctorate in Educational Leadership, with a focus on writing education and improvement. Francesca lives in Newton, MA with her husband Nick and two children, Theo and Brieza.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fiction: Mama Jane’s Pizza

Fiction: Mama Jane’s Pizza

Posted on by • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

16-x-16-x-1-3-4-kraft-corrugated-pizza-box-50-caseBy R.L. Maizes

Mama Jane’s Pizza sign gripping the roof of his silver BMW, Neal pulled up to a small ranch house with a shattered concrete drive. “Could be she’ll have the money, could be she won’t,” Mama Jane had said, handing him the pie. He rang the bell twice and was about to turn around when a boy of perhaps eight opened the door.

“Mom can’t find her purse.” The kid stood with one bare foot on the other, knobby knees pressed together. He had curly black hair Neal imagined girls would one day run their fingers through.

Neal could pay for the pizza. Probably should pay for it, but where did that end. He had never been especially charitable. It would be odd to start now, when he was neglecting his own family. Nevertheless he had the urge to hand over the pizza. He pictured the kid thanking him.

The boy touched the red delivery bag with two fingers.

“What’s your name?” Neal asked.

“Charlie.”

“I can’t give this to you, Charlie, you know that, right? That’s not how it works. Mama Jane has to get paid. Otherwise there are no more pizzas.” It was a crock. Charlie looked like he knew it, too, narrowing his eyes and shaking his head. What was one pizza?

Air conditioning rippled Neal’s frayed Sex Pistols T-shirt as he drove back to the pizza shop. A lifetime supply of mint gum filled a Seven-Eleven bag on the floor of the car. His girls, Allie and Avery, sophomores at Long Island Prep, inhaled the stuff. Used pieces wrapped in foil sparkled beneath the seats, tumbled across floor mats when he took a sharp turn, flattened beneath his sneakers.

He had stashed five thousand dollars in the glove box that morning and now he opened the box to gaze at the loose stack of hundreds. He had no immediate need for the money, but it reassured him they weren’t poor, not yet, which meant he could put off getting a real job. His wife, Maddy, would be furious if she knew he had cashed in a CD. The thought made him smile.

At Mama Jane’s, he slipped the pizza under warming lights to be sold by the slice.

He got home at 10:00. Maddy was in bed, reading a British novel, the kind that would make an unbearably slow movie. They used to watch movies like that together. She set the book on the nightstand and turned off the light. A halo burned around her white silk pajamas before his eyes adjusted. She punched up her pillow. “Landtech is hiring a manager.”

“So?”

“So we’re spending the kids’ college funds.”

The room smelled of the Tom Ford lavender perfume he had put in her stocking last Christmas. In the past, she had worn it as an invitation. He wasn’t accepting invitations from her now, though he sometimes imagined entering her roughly, hearing her cry out. He had always been tender. Maybe that was the problem.

He walked down the hall to his daughters’ room, his footsteps muffled by dense wool carpet. Standing outside, he re-read the stickers on the door: “Enter at your own Peril,” “Quarantine Zone,” and “If We Liked You, You’d Already Be Inside.” Light from the room leaked out beneath the closed door. He knocked.

“Who is it?” Of the two girls, Allie was kinder.

“It’s Dad. Can I come in?” He grasped the brass doorknob. When they remodeled, Maddy had made him look at hundreds of knobs he couldn’t tell apart.

“What do you want?” Sharpness came naturally to Avery, especially when she was talking to him.

He let go of the knob. “Just wanted to say good night to my girls.”

“We’re not dressed,” Avery said and laughed in a way that made him think it wasn’t true.

Since Maddy had gone back to work as a paralegal a month ago, he drove the girls to school in the morning. He had looked forward to spending the time with them. When they weren’t in school, they were off with their friends, kids whose names he no longer knew, and he rarely saw them. But as it turned out they had no problem disappearing in plain sight, riding with ear buds in or furiously texting, as if he wasn’t there.

“Take that thing off,” Avery said, pointing to the pizza sign.

He had forgotten it the night before. “I’ll just have to put it back on later.”

“I’m not riding in the car with that thing on.”

“We’ll help you, Dad,” Allie offered.

It was his fault they were pushy. His and Maddy’s. Always giving them whatever they wanted. He had once taken pride in earning enough to spoil them, and it had been easier than saying no. Now it was too late. He knew from experience to give in or Avery would throw a fit.

Wrestling with the sign, he scratched the roof of the car, cutting a jagged line through the luminous paint. “Fuck!”

“Dad!” Allie said.

“I guess it’s alright to say that now,” Avery said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

He drove to school, both girls riding in the back, making him feel like a goddamn chauffeur. They used to fight to sit in front with him.

In the rear view mirror, he stared at them. They were beautiful, even Avery when she didn’t know she was being watched and wasn’t scowling, skin perfect and pale like their mother’s, straight black hair touched only by the world’s most expensive salon products. Allie had recently cut hers in a bob, he guessed so people would stop calling her Avery. Avery’s was past her shoulders. How two such attractive girls could have come from him was a mystery.

After he dropped them off, emptiness took hold of his day. Alone in the house, he started at sounds of appliances breathing on and off, and birds smacking into windowpanes. Maddy had left a printout of the Landtech job description on his desk. When he saw it, his chest tightened. Struggling to breathe, he ran out the back door, sat on the concrete stoop, and put his head between his knees.

The first time it happened, he was in front of a room full of clients, giving a presentation, like hundreds he had given before. As he clicked through his PowerPoint slides. Sweat soaked his forehead and splattered the remote control. He mopped his face with a linen handkerchief. Never had he been so afraid without knowing what he was afraid of. The oak conference table wavered. His clients were a blur of blue suits. Somehow he managed to get through the slides and never-ending questions.

That was five years ago, and hardly a week had passed since then without an episode. They happened at work and occasionally at home if he was thinking about work. When his consulting firm went bankrupt two months ago, he secretly celebrated, filled with relief. He didn’t know how much longer he could have gone on generating reports, attending meetings, currying favor with his CEO., all the while convinced he was having a heart attack and would die if he didn’t get out the building. Ashamed, he hadn’t told anyone about his condition, not even Maddy, who was never happier than when she was straightening his Burberry tie or brushing a piece of stray lint from his Dolce & Gabbana suit.

He had an MBA. How could work terrify him? Early on, he had diagnosed himself on the Internet, ordering Klonopin from a Mexican website, popping two when the panic attacks were at their worst.

When his breathing returned to normal, he went inside. On their monogrammed stationery, Maddy had left him lists of things to do. They had let go of the housekeeper, but if Maddy thought he would scrub toilets or mop floors she was mistaken. She had never done those things, taking golf lessons while the kids were in school. He crumpled the list of household chores and tossed it in the trash, folded a grocery list and put in his pocket.

At 3:00 he picked up Avery. Allie had stayed after school for band practice. They had gone only half a block when she opened the glove box. “Holy shit!”

“Close that!” How had he forgotten to put the cash back in the bank envelope? His heart pounded in his temples.

“I was looking for gum. Are you a drug dealer? Is that what you do all day?”

Glancing over, he saw her counting the money and he grabbed the bills, swerving and nearly hitting a parked car.

“It’s cool. You can hook me up.”

He shoved the money back in the glove box and banged it shut. With the back of his hand he wiped his forehead. “The gum is in the bag on the floor. I’m not a drug dealer. What do you need to be hooked up for, you don’t do drugs!”

“Did we win the lottery?” She had found the Seven-Eleven bag and was stuffing gum in her backpack.

“Leave some for Allie. We didn’t win anything. Don’t tell your mother about the money.”

“Why are you keeping secrets from Mom?” She opened the glove box again and fingered the money. “Can I have a hundred?”

What did she want it for? Did she do drugs? If she did, he didn’t want to know about it. “No.”

“You don’t want me to say anything, right?”

He had raised an extortionist. “Don’t tell anyone. Not even Allie.”

“We hardly talk to each other. She’s a geek.” She peeled a hundred off the stack.

When they got home he offered to make her a snack.

“Yeah, Dad, some milk and cookies because I’m three,” she said over her shoulder. She couldn’t seem to get away from him fast enough, and then he heard the door to her room slam shut.

Neal watched market reports on TV until it was time to go to Mama Jane’s.

He attached the sign to the roof of the car.

“It’s a gag, right?” Maddy had said when she first saw it. “It’s not enough for us to be poor, you want to humiliate me, too?”

Maybe he did. After he was laid off he was using Maddy’s laptop—his had belonged to the firm—and he discovered hundreds of e-mails to Jackson Lohr, the golf pro at their club, about their family, the girls’ social lives and her mother’s deteriorating health. Things she hadn’t even told Neal. But the worst of it was how she mocked him, writing in one: “He’s practically useless in the bedroom.” In another: “He reeks when he comes home from work. It’s like he’s run ten miles, yellow stains under his arms. I have to buy his shirts by the dozen. What’s so strenuous about sitting in an office all day?”

He had positioned the laptop behind his rear wheel and backed over it, thinking about the man in the plaid cap whose red nose Maddy had so often mocked. Then he had laid the machine on her pillow.

When she found it, she brought it to him in the kitchen.

“How are your golf lessons going?” he asked.

Red splotches darkened her cheeks. “I needed someone to talk to.”

He pretended to look at the issue of Sports Car Market he had been reading.

Maddy cradled the computer, trying to keep its shattered parts together. “To talk to. Like a shrink.”

“A shrink you fuck.” He turned the page.

“He never touched me that way.”

“What way did he touch you?”

“In a lesson.”

“Those must have been some lessons.”

To get to the pizza shop, Neal drove through a neighborhood of castle-like homes. Swimming pools liquefied sprawling backyards. Changing rooms the size of small homes pushed up out of the ground. Anorexic teens lay on lounge chairs, sipping lemonade served by Central American maids. Once, he’d delivered to one of those homes, and a man his age had tipped him fifty dollars, a kind of karma payment, Neal figured, so the man wouldn’t end up in Neal’s shoes.

At the shop, Mama Jane wore the same thing every day, jeans dusted with flour that matched the color of her hair, and a chef’s coat. “I got one for you,” she’d say when he came in the door, and he’d pick up the box and the receipt. She never asked personal questions, though she must have wondered about the BMW and the thick gold wedding ring. Or maybe she’d seen it all in her years behind the counter.

He’d applied for the job the day after he found the e-mails. “Long as you don’t mind your car smelling like pizza we can use you,” Mama Jane had said. Neal remembered delivering pizza the summer of his senior year in high school, sleeping until two in the afternoon, getting stoned before heading to work, and flirting with a girl named Melissa who came in for slices. When she learned he was starting Cornell in the fall, Melissa waited for his shift to be over and then blew him in his Camaro among empty soda cups and burger wrappers. “When can I start?” he asked Mama Jane.

No spouse or kids of Mama Jane’s ever stopped by the shop or called. Even without a family, she seemed happy. Perhaps that was the secret, Neal thought.

“Do you mind sharing with me how much longer you’re going to be on your vacation?” Maddy asked, when he returned that night. She muted Jimmy Fallon.

“I go to work every day.” He peeled off his T-shirt and cargo shorts, and dropped them on top of a full bathroom hamper. Delivering pizzas out of his car the past few weeks, open space all around him, he had felt calm.

“What you earn doesn’t pay for our groceries.” She sat up, arranging two pillows behind her.

“We should simplify our lives. People all over the world live on less than a hundred dollars a month.” He half-believed it was possible that the life they had constructed around wealth could somehow be reconstructed around—what? He wasn’t sure.

“You want to pretend you’re in Bangladesh? Do it alone. Explain to our girls why they can’t get mani-pedis with their friends.”

The girls were a problem. Their expectations were too high. “You earn good money. We should sell the house and move to an apartment. I could get rid of the car, buy a beater for the pizza route.”

She turned toward the TV. Gave Jimmy back his voice. The studio audience was laughing at a bit, but Neal imagined even they thought his idea was ridiculous.

“That’s what you want to do? Deliver pizza?” She was shouting.

“Maddy, the girls.” He closed their bedroom door.

She hugged her legs and dropped her forehead to her knees. Her voice, softer now, sounded like it might crack. “Why aren’t you looking for a real job? Just because I sent e-mails to a golf pro?”

Here was his opportunity to confess his malady. She’d have to understand. She was a compassionate person, wasn’t she? When he first met her she was living in an upper west side studio with a one-eyed cat she’d rescued. She was volunteering at a soup kitchen. But it had been years since their lives revolved around anything other than the girls and the remodel and getting into the right golf club, which turned out to be the disastrously wrong golf club. “The corporate life isn’t for me anymore.”

“Not for you anymore. Just like that.”

“Just like that.”

When he picked Avery up after school the next day, she snapped open the glove box. “Where is it?” she demanded.

He was starting to hate her. He still loved her but he also hated her. “None of your business.” As he pulled into a busy intersection, he saw her rummage through the glove box and find the bank envelope. “Leave that alone.”

“I need another hundred.” She slipped it out of the envelope.

“You can’t have it.” He snatched it and stuffed it in his pocket. “What do you need it for?”

“It’s for a friend. You don’t know her.” She pulled another bill out.

“You can’t have it. I’m not kidding.” When he tried to seize it, she lifted her hand against the window, out of his reach. The car swerved but he righted it. “What does your mystery friend need it for?”

“She’s on the golf team and can’t afford the green fees.”

Golf. It was at the root of all of his problems. Or she was making the girl up. “I’m not giving your friend money. She should ask her parents.”

“They don’t have money. She’s on scholarship.”

“We don’t have money, either. Maybe you haven’t noticed but I deliver pizza.”

“Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I don’t give a fuck.”

Furious, Neal leaned over and grabbed her arm. All he was to her—to all of them—was a paycheck. Once he stopped bankrolling their private school and designer clothes, he wouldn’t exist. Maddy had already replaced him with an alcoholic golf pro.

The sound of the impact wiped everything else out. The interior of the car flashed white. Neal was shoved back in his seat, his eyes closed. When he opened them, the BMW was facing oncoming traffic and Avery’s head was covered in blood.

Later that night, after an ER doctor examined and released him, after an officer cited him for reckless driving and he called a lawyer, Neal stood trembling next to his daughter’s hospital bed thanking a god he didn’t believe in that he hadn’t killed her. Maddy sat on a chair on the opposite side of the bed, clutching Avery’s hand. Avery had broken three ribs and had a concussion. Her hair was a patchwork, shaved in half a dozen places where the doctors had stitched her scalp. A jagged cut furrowed her right cheek. Asleep under heavy doses of painkillers, she didn’t know what she looked like. She would find out soon enough, and she would blame him for destroying her appearance and the status that went along with it and for all the glances she would get that would be curious rather than admiring.

It was his fault. When he had reached for her arm, the light turned red, but he didn’t see it and continued into the intersection. An SUV rammed the passenger side of the BMW.

Allie stood behind her mother, staring at Avery. “Is she going to be alright?”

“Yes,” Maddy said. “It’ll take some time. She’ll need your help.”

“What about her face?”

“We’ll do plastic surgery and tattoo the scar. You’ll hardly notice.”

“Mom?”

“What is it?”

“I’m glad it wasn’t me.”

“That’s okay, baby.”

Allie fell asleep in a chair and Maddy motioned for Neal to follow her into the hall. “What happened?” she whispered. Since the morning, she’d aged. New lines appeared beneath her eyes. She’d run her fingers through her hair so often it looked slept on.

Bright hospital lights bounced off the walls and the linoleum floor. It seemed an appropriate place for an interrogation. “I leaned over to take something from her.” A firebox hung on the wall and Neal was tempted to pull it.

“What was so important you had to have it?”

“Cash she found in the glove box.”

“You should have let her keep it.”

“If I had known this would happen, I would have.” Carrying a stack of clean sheets, a nurse’s aide glided by on rubber-soled shoes. Neal longed to go back in time, uncash the CD, and save Avery.

Maddy had rushed to the hospital from work and still wore her tailored gray suit and narrow pumps. She shifted back and forth, uncomfortable in the shoes or the conversation, or both. “How much was it?”

“A lot.”

She wrapped her arms around her belly. “You’re planning to leave us.”

“No.”

“Then why?”

“It reassured me.”

“If money makes you feel so good, go back to work.”

When he tried to take her hand, she pulled away. “I feel like I’m having a heart attack when I’m in an office,” he said. “Like I’m going to die if I don’t get out.”

“Since when?”

“Since forever.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” She shook her head and looked past Neal.

“I was ashamed. And we were doing that goddamn remodel. Everything was so expensive. The fixtures, the windows, the cabinets—they might as well have been made of gold. I didn’t see how I could leave the job, so there was no sense worrying you. I was worried enough for the both of us.” Neal looked down at his bloody T-shirt and shorts. “Besides, you only like me in a suit.”

“That’s not fair. You stopped talking to me. Telling me what was going on inside you. I thought you were having an affair.”

“You were the one having the affair.”

“They were just e-mails.”

“And lessons.”

“And lessons. But I don’t take them anymore. And we don’t e-mail.”

“How’s your handicap?”

“Lousy.”

 Finally, some good news. She didn’t have time for golf.

He spent the next day in the hospital with Avery, who ignored him except when she wanted something. In the hospital gift shop, he bought the copies of Elle and Vogue she had asked for.

“I’ll never look this good. Not anymore,” she said, when he handed them to her.

“Sorry.” What else was there to say? He was sorry. And anything he tried to say, about how she would get through this, she would contradict. That was how it had been lately. She wouldn’t accept comfort from him, neither of the twins would.

She turned back to the soap opera she’d been watching. “Get me a diet coke and a salad. Not from the cafeteria. From the health food store on Lakeville.”

He returned with her lunch and was about to enter the room when he heard her sobbing. If he went in, she’d stop and pretend she’d never started, so instead he sunk to his heels, leaned against the corridor wall, and waited.

“I’m starving,” she said, her voice quieter than usual, when he brought the food in. “You took forever.” Crumpled tissues were scattered across her blanket. Neal gathered them, dropped them in the trash, and washed his hands.

Maddy came over after work and Neal drove her Buick to the pizza shop.

Mama Jane was kneading dough without looking at it, pressing and folding it over itself. The dough looked pure and smelled ripe with yeast. Neal briefly wished he were a pizza chef instead of a delivery boy.

“I got one for you. It’s that woman hardly ever has money. Okay if you don’t want to take it. I could sell it by the slice and save you a trip.”

He picked the box up off the counter. “Maybe tonight they’ll get to eat it.”

“Hope—that’s good.”

But it wasn’t hope. He was betting on a sure thing. When he arrived at the house, he set the pizza down, rang the doorbell and retreated to his car. Driving away, he saw in his rear view mirror Charlie take the box inside.

R.L. Maizes lives in Colorado with her husband, Steve, and her dog, Rosie, under the benevolent dictatorship of Arie, the cat. Her stories have appeared in The Barcelona Review, Blackbird, Slice, The MacGuffin, and other literary magazines. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Spirituality & Health, and other national magazines.

Letters From My Father

Letters From My Father

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Weathered Rusted Old Mailbox

By Amy Monticello

We like to have a destination when we walk. A place to arrive. Life with a baby is easier with small goals, the day divided into manageable hours. An hour of tummy time. An hour of napping. An hour at the thrift store, hunting for cheap treasures.

Boomerangs, with its orange block-lettered sign and kitschy window displays (a chess game set up mid-play on a wicker table with matching chairs, a mannequin wearing a vintage fur-trimmed dress looking into heavy mirror rimmed with embossed gold), sits just a few doors down from the Goodwill and its junkier junk. In the gentrified neighborhood of Jamaica Plain, three miles west of downtown Boston, Boomerangs serves the young white professionals like us who drive the rent up and pay more for their plastic art deco chair, their distressed leather jacket.

Our 8-month-old daughter, Benna, quickly became bored in the racks of women’s dresses. She began to fuss, drawing stares, so my husband and I wheeled the jogging stroller down the ramp into the back of the store, where unsteady bookshelves line the walls, hoping to distract her with the children’s section. We picked out a hardcover copy of Make Way for Ducklings, an adorable story set in Beacon Hill, and a copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for when Benna is a bit older and can sustain attention for chapter books.

I don’t remember either of my parents reading to me, though I’m certain my mother did, must have. She had custody of me from the time I was two, and I had started memorizing my books by then. But she didn’t remember Where The Wild Things Are. When the Spike Jonze film based on the book came out, it was James Gandolfini’s voice, pure northeast Italian-American, that made a memory of my father’s voice percolate up from somewhere deep inside, an almost tactile memory of the book and how the wild things made me feel: frightened at first, and then smothered in comfort, like the furry pile of themselves they make in the film.

While my husband distracted Benna with her rattles, I pulled a new-looking kid’s book from the shelf. It was called Not So Rotten Ralph. The story features a lanky red cat with green, globular eyes that plays practical jokes on people and gets sent to feline finishing school in an attempt to make Ralph good. It’s not exactly highbrow stuff, nothing comparable to the subtlety of Maurice Sendak or Margaret Wise Brown, but the title reminded me of an old boyfriend by the same name, Ralph, who was also mischievous. I court nostalgia where I can.

When I cracked the still-stiff spine, an unopened card fluttered down to the dirty tile floor of the store. Its envelope was still crisply sealed and folded, preserved like a clover by the covers of the book. It’s true that have no respect for other people’s memories—I once combed through every one of my husband’s photos from college, trying to determine if his ex-girlfriend was prettier than me. I tore the envelope open immediately.

“I have a perfectly good reason why this card is late,” said a smiling cartoon beaver on the front. Inside, the card’s punch line: “I wanted to make your birthday last longer!” The card was signed, “Love Grandaddy and Pam.” Included was an uncashed check for twenty-five dollars dated December 1994. I was twelve years old in 1994. I remember braces. Frizzy, curly hair bluntly cut and hanging triangular around my face. My first love, John Lacy, moving away in the seventh grade. My first experience with unshakeable sadness.

I couldn’t stop wondering about the card, and why it had gone unopened. Did the mail arrive at a bad time—the middle of dinner, or the climax of a toddler’s tantrum? Did its recipient, the grandchild, feel slighted by its lateness, or simply uninterested in the banality of the accompanying book? Or was it the child’s parent who felt slighted, maybe carried inside them a legacy of disappointment? Missed school plays. Unacknowledged report cards. Did they grumble at the card’s sheepish joke, and then stash it in a place where it couldn’t hurt the heart of someone too young to understand that people sometimes forget, or are self-absorbed, or simply too busy, or unable to send a birthday card on time? Or was it simpler than I was making it, the card and check simply misplaced and forgotten in the chaos of a home with young children?

And what about the sender? Grandaddy. A man in a relationship with someone who was not Grandma. A man who later found Pam, and cared for her enough to sign her name to his grandchild’s birthday card. A man who wrote out, in careful cursive, a twenty-five dollar check and placed it inside a card that makes a subtle nod to shortcomings.

My own father, dead two years now, often gave money as a present. Sometimes for no reason at all, he would slip me a twenty, a fifty, even a hundred dollar bill. It used to upset my mother, the way he spoiled me without cause, the way he used money to show love, dropping me off at her house on Thursday evenings loaded with shopping bags from the mall. Buying love, she said, though we both came to understand it differently. He once sent me home with a check for five thousand dollars. Give this to your mother, he told me. I didn’t know then that he’d heard we needed a new roof put on our house, but that my mother couldn’t afford it. And yes, sure, he still loved her. He was sorry. But the money came without strings—it always came without strings, or at least, the strings were no more than a hope that she’d call him occasionally, let him tell her a joke over the phone.

My father’s grief was simply part of how I knew him. It made him vulnerable, easily pierced, even preemptive in his need to know I loved him. He lived in the apartment above my aunt, his footsteps muffled by brown shag carpet and the sound of the television, the History Channel or a Yankees game. Occasionally, his need would grow so loud that it required immediate relief. Here, hon, he’d say, handing me the fresh-from-the-bank bills from his wallet. Then he waited to hear the words. Thank you, Daddy. I love you so much.

A friend once told me that having children shifts the center of the narrative, our own past usurped by our child’s future. Still, it’s impossible for me not to project. Not to install myself in others’ stories—even, and maybe especially, my daughter’s. In The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison writes, “When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I don’t know if this is empathy or theft.” I’ve been thinking about this. I’ve been thinking about what it means to feel sorrow on someone else’s behalf, if it’s ever possible to feel their sorrow, or just supplant it with our own. Desperate for rest, we sleep-trained Benna when she was six months old. Making the decision to let her cry was agonizing, so I made a secret stipulation in order to agree to it; I would inhabit what I perceived as my daughter’s confusion and fear. My mother has abandoned me, I imagined her cortisol-flooded body telling her. Perception is reality for a baby—I couldn’t show her I was right outside her door unless I opened the door, and the point was not to open it. I didn’t do what experienced parents recommended—take a shower, go for a walk, stick earplugs in to cancel the sound of her crying. I couldn’t allow myself to be spared and reduce my family’s overall suffering.

And can it go the other way? Will Benna someday be wounded by the absence of the grandfather she never knew? Will I desire her to feel wounded? To mourn because I mourn? When I tell her about her grandfather, what will I emphasize so she will feel his absence particularly? He would not have changed a diaper. He would not have babysat by himself. He would have come to visit, but only if my mother drove him. He would have paid for dinner. He would have been amused by fine motor skills, fascinated by language acquisition. He would have told jokes about her seriousness. He would have liked that she doesn’t go readily to other people. He would have been proud, and said so.

He would have doted on her, spoiled her. I think he would have loved her; I think he would have allowed himself that. When I say all of these things, will I be doing so to satisfy a curiosity, or to make Benna feel more loved? Or will I say it to see my grief reflected back to me?

Last week, as my father’s birthday loomed full moon on the calendar, I attempted to wear the locket where I keep a tiny bag of his ashes. Because of my daughter’s exploring hands, I rarely wear jewelry anymore. She was immediately drawn to the locket, an anomaly on my person, which is otherwise so familiar to her, my body just an extension of hers. She gripped the delicate braided chain and pulled with determined hands. Afraid of it breaking, I took the locket off and tucked it back into my jewelry box.

But I wanted to put something of my father into her hands. So I took his Yankees baseball hat off the bookshelf where I keep it. The inside of the hat once smelled of his scalp, but not anymore; it smells like nothing now, or of our house, which I can no longer smell. Benna wasn’t interested in the hat. Again and again, I placed the hat in her lap, on her head, on my head, and again and again, she flung it aside, looking for something more exciting to play with. I tried to snap a picture in the few seconds when the hat was still in her possession. I heard my father tell me not to do this. Not to manufacture a moment between them. He didn’t like when the seams of an emotional performance were showing. In the pictures I took, it was clear what I was trying to do. The seams showed. I deleted them.

I became a writer in part because I want to make the things I’ve lost come back to me. John Lacy, who moved away in the seventh grade. My ex-boyfriend, Ralph, who was not so rotten. I create mirages of them. I imprint them onto the world as I live in it now by writing essays where they walk across the pages, back into my hands, my life. My daughter and my father missed each other. There isn’t anything I can do to change the end of his life and the beginning of hers. She will not recognize the smoke-and-dander smell of his scalp faded from the inside of the baseball hat. She will not beam him like a hologram into her books, her family holidays, the time we spent together in her infancy, nursing away the days already forgotten. She may never understand the happiness my father would have felt to know the sale of his business left a small nest egg for us.

The money came a year after my father’s death, when we settled his estate. And just like that, with a check, he was part of things again. The money bought clothes and a convertible car seat for Benna, and an extended maternity leave for me that kept me home with Benna for a full eight months. His money bought us 14-hour days of nursing. Every thirty minutes or so, Benna rooted and latched, and I settled us into the couch so I could watch her ears—perfect replicas of mine—twitch as she swallowed. As my milk let down, suppressing dopamine for prolactin, a surge of sadness crested from my belly to my throat, and sometimes, I would cry. The narrative collapsed then, my story and my daughter’s folded into waves of milk. I nursed my daughter because I could, and I could because my father was dead.

Money, I want to tell Benna, is time.

Of course, it’s only my imagination that can project my father into a life lived long enough to know his grandchild, or, perhaps even more astonishing, to meet another woman. Pam. In line at the bank, maybe. A companion after so many years in that apartment above my aunt,. An embarrassment of riches—a partner and a grandchild—in the twilight of his life. I imagine a happiness so unexpected, so total, it makes the days on the calendar fly, his beloved grandchild’s birthday temporarily lost in the blur of new joy.

But then, he remembers. “I’m gonna run to the drug store,” I picture him telling Pam. He yanks on his brown winter jacket and the Yankees hat. He drives the ten blocks. He peruses the sparse selection of cards, knowing he has to acknowledge his lateness somehow. The imperfection of his love. He wants to give more than the mea culpa of the cartoon beaver, so he writes the check out at the post office. Twenty-five dollars is a lot of money to a toddler.

He signs the name his granddaughter gave him. Grandaddy. Traces the “G” in darker ink so it will be clear.

Drops it in the mail and trusts it will arrive.

Author’s Note: Benna can now recognize my father in photographs, and even calls him Grandpa. Perhaps just as importantly, she can also recognize Mickey Mantle.

Amy Monticello is the author of the memoir-in-essays Close Quarters, and a regular contributor at Role/Reboot. She is an assistant professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston, MA, where she lives with her husband and almost two-year-old daughter.

 

 

 

 

Fiction: Waushakum Pond

Fiction: Waushakum Pond

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father-n-daughter_fishing-passion-1024x576By Orli Van Mourik

When Mona was little, Archie used to take her fishing. It felt like the trips had been going on since Mona was old enough for waders, but it was possible that they started in the fall of 1957 during those first few months when they both still woke up every morning to the shock of her mother’s absence. Mona couldn’t remember ever crying for Eve, but she did remember those chilly mornings when the house still felt abandoned—all traces of her mother gone apart from a few framed photos and a lingering smell in the hall closet. Saturday mornings were the hardest. Normally Eve would have been bustling around in her ratty bathrobe, whipping up a batch of leathery buckwheat pancakes while humming along to the radio. The lack of her was so acute in those moments that neither of them could bear to stay indoors and Archie would go fetch his red metal lunch pail from the garage and pack it full of liverwurst sandwiches and Nila wafers. He’d send Mona upstairs to get dressed while he brewed up a thermos of coffee and then they’d set off for Massachusetts in the old wagon, leaving the cat to fend for herself overnight.

There are plenty of fish in Connecticut—lakes and rivers chock full of them—but for Archie fishing was an activity reserved for the place he came from: Middlesex County. There was nothing particularly special about Waushakum Pond. It was bordered by the same hemlocks and spindly spruce trees as any other pond in rural Massachusetts and the swampy fields of wild rye surrounding it were alive with same croaking frogs. The only thing distinguishing it from any other pond was that it was where Archie’s father Leonard had taught him how to skate when he was a boy and the first place he’d ever managed to snag a bass on his line.

To Mona, it seemed clear that the pond was Archie’s natural habitat. When they were there she could see that he was a creature of the woods: built strong to withstand tough winters, with careful hands that could thread an arrow or tie a knot in a line without fumbling. His movements, which appeared fussy and painstaking in normal life, seemed in perfect tempo with the pond.

Had anyone asked, Mona would have told them that she and her father were close—and, in many ways they were. Years of living together had taught them to anticipate each other. If they sat down to dinner, the salt arrived at her elbow before she’d had a chance to open her mouth. And she knew to keep to her room on those nights when she smelled cigar smoke coming from the den. She pressed his shirts every Tuesday and hung them on his doorknob and he made sure that her bicycle tires never went flat. But Archie’s mind had always been a locked box. No matter how Mona tried to read him, she was never sure quite what he was feeling and when she guessed wrong he made her feel it. He did not suffer fools gladly, so she endeavored not to be one. But when they were at the pond, there was no need for guesswork. The pond was a leveling force. It brought Archie out of his mind and into himself. As soon as they arrived, he settled into a silence so complete that when Mona wasn’t facing him, she’d sometimes worry he’d stopped breathing.

In the week it took Mona to work out how to tell Archie the news, only one thing was clear to her: it would have to be at Waushakum Pond. But it had been so long since they’d gone there that it took her days to work up the nerve to ask him. When she finally did, he hesitated, and she saw from the pained looked on his face the reason for her own hesitation. It was one thing to stay overnight with your ten-year-old daughter at some fleabag motel. It was another to go with your seventeen-year-old. As soon as she suggested it, Mona pictured them trading places at the room’s yellowing washbasin before retiring to neighboring twin beds. The thought made her squirm.

“Why don’t we take a drive instead,” Archie said. And, like that, Waushakum Pond vanished from view taking with it all of Mona’s courage.

They decided to go visit the Glass House in New Canaan. Instead of piling into the wagon, they took her father’s new MG. Mona wore a scarf around her head to keep her hair from whipping around in the wind and felt alternately silly and glamorous, a gawky Grace Kelly. In her mind, she had pictured them chatting on the way up and then eventually settling into a companionable silence that left room for what she had to tell him. In reality, the wind was so fierce they barely spoke and when they did, they were stilted and formal with one another.

After forty minutes, they arrived at the spot on the map. It took them forever to find the entrance and once they did Mona was horrified to see a chain strung across it. They both got out of the car and walked close enough to read the sign hanging off it that read, “Shut.”

Archie turned to look at her, “What should we do?”

She shrugged and nodded toward the car. None of this was turning out as she’d expected. She couldn’t imagine telling him now.

They got back in the car. “It’s an strange thing building a house out of glass and then walling it off from the world,” Archie said, contemplative. “I don’t even know why I brought you here. Your mother liked Glass. I’ve never cared much for him.”

“Did she?” Mona said. Archie nodded. “What else did she like?”

“She liked Bogart movies and Quaker quilts—a hodgepodge of things. I never could keep track. She had eclectic tastes.”

“I don’t remember,” Mona said.

“I don’t expect you would,” he said, and then, after a long silence, “She was a good mother.”

Mona nodded.

“She wanted you to be happy,” Archie said. “I’ve tried to do that.”

“You have,” Mona agreed.

“Is everything okay, Scottie?” Archie said, suddenly searching. “I thought this class would help, but Boorish-Barney-the-professor seems to have made things worse.”

“Please don’t call him that,” she said.

Something in her voice made him turn toward her. “Archie,” she said, realizing there would be no better time. “I’m having a baby.”

Her father’s face went white as the sky behind it; it was like all the youth bled out of him in an instant. “I don’t understand.”

“I know.”

He placed his hands on the wheel to stop them from shaking. “How could this happen? Did you let that boy Chad—?”

“—No!” Mona shook her head. “Nothing like that.”

“Who then?” he demanded.

Mona was aware that, in that moment, she held Archie’s heart in her hands. She cupped it gingerly, terrified of crushing it. Maybe it wasn’t too late not to tell him. Maybe she could take it all back. “Barney,” she said finally.

His face fell. “Barney.”

“Yes.”

Archie slammed his hands against the wheel so hard it made the small car shudder. “How could you?” he said, and Mona said nothing. She knew that outside of Waushakum Pond there was no way he’d ever accept the real answer: love.

Orli Van Mourik writes fiction and nonfiction and holds a Master’s in Journalism from NYU. Her work has appeared in Psychology Today, The Brooklyn Rail and Brooklyn Based, among other outlets. She teaches fiction for the Sackett Street Workshop and is working on her first novel. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters.

This story was the winner of The 2015 Annual Pen Parentis Writing Fellowship, which promotes the creation of new work by writers who are also parents.  Pen Parentis is a literary nonprofit organization that provides resources to writers to keep them on a creative track once they start a family.

The Janus Face of Parenthood

The Janus Face of Parenthood

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By Vincent O’Keefe

janus_by_valkea-d3gxqfm

A parent’s face is a constant mix of past and future, which leads to the tendency to forget the present moment right before one’s nose.

 

Face it, parents: You’re two-faced. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, since parenthood naturally has a Janus face. Janus was the Roman god of transitions who had two faces—one looking toward the future and one toward the past.

My most memorable Janus-faced moments seem to occur while I’m driving. For example, recently I sat at a red light with my oldest daughter, Lauren, who was fourteen at the time. The license plate on the car in front of us read “LIL LAUR.” I smiled to myself and assumed the car’s driver was a parent who probably reveled in the joy of having a baby daughter named Lauren. Memories of my own baby Lauren’s voluminous curls and ocean-blue eyes danced through my mind.

When I told fourteen-year-old Lauren my warm theory about the license plate, however, she replied coldly from the passenger seat: “No Dad. I think the person driving nicknamed the car ‘Lil Laur’ because she loves it so much. I wish I had a car too.” While I faced the past, she faced the future.

It was a moment fit for one of those “Janus words,” or contranyms, that convey contradictory meanings depending on their context—e.g. to weather can mean endure or erode, to sanction can mean endorse or penalize, or to dust can mean apply or remove (dust). My favorite Janus word in relation to parenting has always been “to cleave,” which can mean to cling to or separate from something (or someone). The parent-child relationship often features one person clinging to the other and one person trying to separate from the other, though each person’s role changes according to context. At that red light, I was cleaving to family while she was cleaving from family.

The moment reminded me of a bookend from thirteen years ago that also occurred in a car. When Lauren was just seven months old, my wife and I moved to an Orlando, Florida hotel for two months while my wife completed a medical rotation at a cancer hospital. Yes, that’s correct: I was a stay-in-hotel-room father to an infant for two full months. Let’s just say the Comfort Inn became a misnomer in a hurry. In addition, Lauren had just started sleeping through the night, but that ended in the hotel’s rickety crib. The result? Sheer exhaustion.

The point-of-two-faces happened one afternoon when baby Lauren and I were speeding around town in our tiny rental car. After she fell asleep in her car seat behind me, I parked and tried to work on a book review in the front seat. I had not yet accepted that my becoming an at-home parent with a wife who worked long hours would seriously curtail my production as a writer, at least for a few years.

Shortly into my writing session, Lauren started crying. It was incredibly frustrating, but I knew I had reached a limit. Tired beyond words, I looked back at my crying baby in her car seat, and it seemed fitting that she was facing backwards and I was facing forwards. Together we made a Janus face, though one that demanded adjustment. Obviously, I needed to be more in sync with her needs, to welcome her inevitable clinging and cease trying to separate from it. So I stopped writing for a time, and in the process became a better father.

Ironically, I started appreciating those moments with my child that become the cherished memories a parent clings to at red lights when his child is a teenager longing to drive away into the sunset. I realized a parent’s face is a constant mix of past and future, which leads to the tendency to forget the present moment right before one’s nose. In other words, parents are tweens too.

Thanks to these bookends, I can imagine the not-so-distant future when Lauren will have migrated from the car seat to the passenger seat to the driver’s seat. Little did I know, however, that as we switch places, we also switch faces. Talk about a Father-Daughter Dance.

Vincent O’Keefe is a writer and stay-at-home father with a Ph.D. in American literature. He is writing a memoir on gender and parenting. His writing has appeared at The New York Times “Motherlode” and The Washington Post “On Parenting” (among other venues), and he has been featured at CNN Parents. Visit him at www.vincentokeefe.com or on Twitter @VincentAOKeefe or Facebook at Vincent O’Keefe.

Fighting Dragons

Fighting Dragons

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Illustration: The Manitoban

 

By Amy Cissell

When I was nineteen, my father gave me a portion of a poem to remind me to never give up.

And sometimes when our fights begin,

I think I’ll let the Dragons win…

And then I think perhaps I won’t,

Because they’re Dragons, and I don’t

— A. A. Milne

I hung this in my dorm room, and in my first apartment, and in my home office, and in my heart.

***

My Dragons started to appear so slowly. They snuck up on me and took hold before I even realized they were there. Only by looking back can I see how they crept in without a fight.

I can tell you about the awful third trimester of my pregnancy. How everything hurt and I couldn’t run and I could barely walk. How my father was diagnosed with cancer—brain tumors, the scariest cancer of all—had surgery, had chemo, had radiation, entered hospice, died. How the death of my father on March 19, 2012—two weeks before my son was due—was devastating. I can tell you that complications with my pregnancy meant that I never got to see my father between his diagnosis and his death.

I can talk about the labor and delivery. About my mother being in the room and stressing me out because she was so sad. About the intensity of pain that I had not anticipated. About finally getting an epidural after nearly three hours of pushing so the baby and I could rest. About the rapid deceleration of my baby’s heartbeat, the emergency C-section, the hemorrhaging. I can talk about lying on the operating table, hearing the doctors talk about not being able to get the bleeding stopped, and how I didn’t know if my son was alive.

I can paint the picture of the first time I saw my son, no worse for wear after the craziness of his entry into this world. How my arms were shaking too much to properly hold him. How I cried so much in those first weeks as I looked for signs of his grandfather in his face. How so many people needed him to be a symbol of something that made my father’s death O.K. How I felt that he was the trade-in, a newer model, and how that made me feel guilty. I can tell you that the fact that he was born on Easter Sunday was given special significance by people who wanted to believe that there was a just and loving God.

I can give you that glimpse into my soul and how much I struggled with my feelings of intense grief and ridiculous joy.

I can even tell you what happened next.

The autumn after my father’s death and my son’s birth, the Dragons made themselves known. They crept in gradually. I have never liked bridges. I have other fears: ostracism, irrelevance, spiders. But my number one fear is plunging off a bridge to my death, sometimes in a ball of fire; more often quietly, unnoticeably.

I live in Portland. City of bridges. To get to work, I must drive over at least one bridge. And so I do. But that autumn, the fall of death and birth, it started getting harder and harder. I had panic attacks while driving across the Marquam Bridge. The anxiety started spreading. Slowly, like fog on little cat feet. Creeping into everything.

And then there were whispers.

“You are a terrible mother who can‘t even produce enough milk for your son.“

“Your constant anxiety is stressing out everyone around you and they‘re starting to resent you.“

“You‘re about to get fired because you‘re doing such a terrible job.“

“Your friends are sick of your bullshit.“

“Your husband wishes he‘d never met you, much less married and impregnated you.“

“You are a terrible wife.“

“Everything would be so much better if you weren‘t here.“

“You are an awful mother.“

“You shouldn‘t be here.“

The whispers grew louder each day, until they drowned out the echoing sounds of bridge traffic. I started wondering if they were more than an evil internal voice that always tries to fuck things up. I began to believe it was real, that she was real—a voice of authority and reason. I started avoiding. I fantasized about running away. Sometimes those fantasies would include taking the baby and driving south until I found a place to hide. In other fantasies, I thought it would be better if I left him behind; I was obviously not stable.

I noticed my driving was becoming more erratic. I told my husband I couldn’t drive the baby anymore. I wasn’t always sure who was in the driver’s seat.

The running away fantasies met and mated with the plunging-to-my-death anxiety, and it got harder and harder to not plunge to my death. It would be so easy to just speed up and flip over the edge. To “trip” while looking down from the top tram dock and fall, screaming, to the grass below. To go for a trail run in the Gorge and not watch where I was going.

A tragic accident.

A release.

A new and better life for those I left behind.

Every day, I got out of bed. I could manage nursing my son only once a day. I dressed him. I went to work. I came home. I fed him (formula this time, such a bad mom). Rocked him. Cried.

I knew I was sinking. I knew this wasn’t right. It wasn’t me. I had a therapist who sent me to a psychiatrist. I got some drugs. I made sticker charts and bought gold stars to chart my Aggressive Happinessâ„¢ plans that involved exercise and drinking plenty of water and taking all my medications.

I stopped talking about my anxiety and depression and weird bouts of mania.

I alphabetized my closet.

I stopped seeing my friends.

I drank.

I fantasized about razor blades and blood.

I decided to become a drug addict. And then I realized that I didn’t know where to buy drugs, so I gave up.

I stopped looking down when driving across bridges lest the temptation to follow my line of sight proved too much.

***

Finally one day, I felt a little like myself. And the next, I was a little better.

It wasn’t a progressive upward slope. It was more a few steps forward, and a slow slide back. Gradually, however, I got out of the hole. I stood up and stretched and looked around. And that’s when I saw them clearly for the first time: Dragons. Hovering silently above the ground. Waiting for me to take my eyes off them, like scaly weeping angels, so they could knock me back down.

I backed away slowly, and just kept backing.

They aren’t gone. I still see them there sometimes out of the corner of my eye. They are waiting for me to forget. I can’t blink. Can’t let them win. Won’t.

There are times I want to pull the Dragons out of the dark corners where they’re hiding and wrap myself up in them. There’s something almost comforting in the thought of being smothered in the numbing fog of mental illness. No one expects too much, or is disappointed, or needs me to be strong.

***

I look for signs of my father in my son, but so far they are absent. There are times I resent my son for preventing me from being with my dad when he died. There are times I resent my father for ruining the end of my pregnancy and the birth of my son. For not living long enough to hold his first grandchild.

Last night, I rocked my teething toddler to sleep and gazed at his face. Even though I’ve been unable to find my father in his face, I felt ready to let go. Let go of the expectation that my son was the consolation prize I received for giving up my dad. Let go of the belief this was the trade-in, the upgrade, the newer model. Let go of the nearly crippling grief responsible for my second guessing all the decisions I’d made in the past two years.

Let go of the fantasy of Dragons and the idea that I might let the Dragons win.

Because they‘re Dragons, and I don‘t.

Author’s Note: In the last month I’ve celebrated my son’s third birthday and mourned the third anniversary of my father’s death. The grief still hits me like a truck from time to time, but it’s no longer a constant presence in my life. Although I consider myself recovered from the postpartum anxiety and depression I describe in this essay, I still don’t enjoy driving over bridges.

Amy Cissell is a Portland, Oregon-based writer whose first love is fantasy. She is hard at work editing her first full-length novel when she’s not chasing around an active preschooler. Find her online at http://www.gazellesoncrack.com or on Twitter @gazellesoncrack

 

Stripes

Stripes

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By Alicia Chadbourne

Recollection is a curious buffet. My mother’s memories are deep fried and sugar-dusted. Like a churro, their only bite is a smattering of cinnamon. If hers are confection, mine are curtido, shredded and pickled greens in bitter brine. On their own, either sets a stomach churning.

I left home at 17, the day my father, a Vietnam vet, choked me for opening my bedroom curtains. He said “they” were watching us. Because of “them” I was never allowed a sleepover or guest. Most children learned phonics from Dick and Jane. My father clipped stories of heinous crimes to read over breakfast. For years I wondered who these mystery monsters were. Over time I came to realize that for him, the enemy was anyone outside the house. Nadie te va querer como tu familia. “No one will ever love you like your family,” he chanted. But his love required darkness and I needed sunlight.

“No!” I said, refusing to close the curtains.

“Exhibitionist! Slut!” he snarled, his face contorted and eyes hollow. I reached for the phone to call 911, but he ripped it out of the wall. “No one’s coming,” he whispered with a smile and wrapped his hands tightly around my neck. “I’ll kill you, little bitch.” He squeezed tighter. I couldn’t breathe.

I couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t hit me. He said I “never did listen.” That’s why my pudgy legs were covered in welts even as a young child. But this was more than hitting. I feared he would kill me. I wanted to live and so for the first time, I didn’t float away and wait for the calm. I fought back. I thrashed and kicked. I clawed. But my struggle was futile as he outweighed me by 200 pounds. There was nowhere left to go but down, so I let my body fall, boneless as a toddler’s. He lost his balance and his grip loosened. I rolled away and ran.

I could hear his heavy footsteps behind me, the jangle of keys dangling on his dungarees, his jagged breath. Outside, the day was oddly sunny. I looked back as he slammed the front door and peered at me through the glass. He retreated into the dark house, never to catch me again.

We made it to Colma, a strip mall and cemetery wasteland, a town where the dead outnumber the living by a thousand to one. Colma’s motto is “It’s great to be alive in Colma.” I called my mother from a pay phone. I had spent years begging her to leave him. When that failed, I prayed he would die. Still nothing changed. Now this horror would be the impetus. She would save us all. It took several tries before I reached her. She was away at a union conference. My mother: professional advocate.

“Go home,” she said from her hotel room 500 miles away. “Your father would never do anything to hurt you.”

“He tried to kill me,” I said.

“If he really wanted to kill you, he would have.”

I started to cry, knowing then that my father was right. No one was coming.

I hung up and moved into my boyfriend’s walk-in closet, the first of many homes to come. It was cozy enough, but I cried incessantly. “Do you want to talk about it?” Daniel asked. I shook my head and sobbed.

Years passed, and Daniel remained the constant in my life. My mother cut me off financially when I refused to return home, so I nearly dropped out of college. Daniel and I both found jobs to pay my tuition. When I graduated, we married. I refused to invite my father to the wedding. My mother was appalled.

“You know,” she said, shaking her head, “Your uncle chased your cousin around the house with a knife and she still lives there.” My mother had a collection of stories starring families more dysfunctional than ours who miraculously stayed together. She called me exajerada, literally, she who exaggerates. When that didn’t work, she resorted to Jesus-speak mixed with psychobabble. “Pray. You need to forgive him for yourself. It’s not healthy to hold grudges.”

“I never knew how to be a mother,” she whimpered, tears streaming down her face. “I did the best I could.” My mother had been abandoned by her mother as an infant, so in her mind, simply by sticking around she had done better. Everything is relative. Still, I yearned for more than she would give.

I became sullen and withdrawn, angry and confused, storming around the house for days after a visit. Daniel begged me to distance myself from her. I severed ties for good when I was pregnant with my first child. I would do anything for my baby and I couldn’t be fully present while living in the past. It was time to stop trying to find a mother, so that I could become one. I changed my phone number and we moved.

I revisited my childhood in nightmares. It was always the same one: me trapped in my childhood home, cradling my son, running around searching desperately for an exit, up and down the winding stairs, my father in pursuit. I’d wake up wheezing, the asthma of my youth perched on my chest like a leaden ghost.

With time, the nightmares stopped and when my son was one, I became pregnant with a girl. At first, I was terrified. How could mother/daughter ever mean anything good? Then I saw her. She was red and puckered, like most newborns, but had the alert brown eyes of someone far older.

I named her Aria, which means lioness in Hebrew. It proved to be the perfect name. Bright and quick-witted, Aria’s cherubic face belied her ferocity.  If anyone dared hit her or her brother, she was quick to hit back harder. “I have a right to defend myself,” she insisted. It was an impulse I would never squelch. Neither would I stymie her curiosity.

“The kids at school have two grandmas,” she said.

“Really?” I replied. She nodded.

“Is your mom dead?”

I hesitated, tempted for a moment to lie. “No.”

“Why don’t we see her?”

“She and I don’t get along.”

“Why?”

“My father hit me when I was a kid.”

“That’s mean.”

“Yes.”

“And she didn’t stop him?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“You should ask her.”

“Maybe.”

“What does she look like?”

“I have a picture.”

“Can we meet her?”

“Do you want to?”

“Yes.”

I paused again. “Then…. yes.”

My voice faltered.

“Stop it, Aria,” my son said. “You’re making Mom sad.”

“I can ask Mom anything I want,” said Aria.

“That’s right,” I replied.

I knew what it was like to grow up in mystery. My father had enlisted in the navy at 18 and never saw his family or the Bronx again. But fleeing never gave him the distance he sought. He carried the past locked tight inside him. There were no pictures, just stories that painted everyone, except his sainted father and beautiful sister, as demons. As a child, I was curious about his family. Who were they? Did I look like them? The unanswered questions plagued me. Cutting ties with my own mother had been an act of rage, desperation and self-preservation. Seeing her again would be an act of love—for my daughter.

My father never gave me the choice to know his family. But choices are power, and Aria would have it. She would not spend her life tiptoeing around the past. She would know our history, even if the path traversed shadows.

I was pregnant a third time when my mother and I met again at a playground in San Francisco. The children complained during the forty-minute drive, but I would not meet my mother in Oakland. It was important to me that we keep a bay between us. Seven years had passed, but she looked immeasurably older. She was obese, stooped, with deep furrows in her brow. Her hair was an unnatural shade of orange that clashed with her yellowing skin. It pained me to look at her.

“I am your grandma,” she announced, before demanding hugs from her grandchildren. My son, ever the pleaser, acquiesced, but Aria refused. She simply met my mother’s eyes, shook her head and walked off.

“That one’s a handful,” said my mother.

“Like me,” I replied.

We sat there side-by-side for a long while, silently watching the children play, my past and present coming together again.

We met sporadically after that, always in public places and never for more than two hours. She bought the children Christmas presents and I texted photos of their smiling faces. She called to make idle chitchat and sometimes I answered the phone.

Recently, I baked a quesadilla for my mother’s birthday. It is a homely Salvadoran cake made of Parmesan, sour cream and rice flour, the top freckled with sesame seeds. Let’s just say, it’s no churro. Still, I think she liked it. I can only speculate because she is not prone to smiles or praise.  It is a tendency, along with my father’s temper, that I battle.

“There is something I’ve been wanting to ask you,” she said.

“What is it?” I replied, curious.

“Why did you stop talking to us for all those years?” Embedded in her question was one of the very reasons—she viewed herself and my father as one, never “I” but “us.” She had stayed married to him for more than half her life. When he died, she canonized him in her mind.

I answered my mother the only way I knew how. “I know we have differing opinions on the past. I feel dad was abusive. I could never forgive him for it. I feel you should have protected me. I could never forgive you for that.”

“Oh,” replied my mother.

Once upon a time, her response would have sent me spinning, back when I still held out hope of apologies and Sunday teas. But that dream exists in a world where monsters abound and darkness is sanctuary. Now maternal has a new meaning.

This past Halloween, Aria decided we would both dress up as tigers. Her father wanted in on the act and declared himself ringmaster.

Aria shook her head. “No, daddy. Mama and I are not circus tigers. We are free tigers.”

Free indeed. And together, we make our way.

Author’s Note: Aria is putting her spunk and loveliness to good use as an actress, but there are certain perils involved when you mix a bouncy six-year-old and a curling iron. Last week, I singed her forehead.  Racked with guilt and regret, I tearfully apologized. Aria touched my cheek. “You’re my mama,” she said. “I’d forgive you anything.” I am working toward the day when I might feel the same way.

Alicia Chadbourne is a writer, actress and mother of three from Oakland, California.

 

Anecdotes of a Girl

Anecdotes of a Girl

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By Jacqueline Maria Pierro

WO Anecdotes of a Girl ART

My Father

It is the dead of winter yet my bedroom window is wide open to a black sky devoid of stars and compassion. Frigid. I’ve removed the screen and pulled back the curtains allowing full entry should Peter Pan find my house and fly me away, enveloped in fairy dust to the Never Land. As I watched the dawn creep upon the dark, my tears fell cold upon my cheek: Peter wasn’t coming. I have only one visitor that night; another visit in which I had to stare with empty eyes at the room’s hideous skin—my posters of innocence were obnoxious now, the cotton candy paint I’d picked out in Home Depot was ugly now. I guess I was ugly. Well, not to him. But I wished I was ugly to him, or plain, or just his kid—the kid that you play softball with in the front yard and read Grimm’s Fairy Tales to at night and maybe build stuff with, like clubhouses or go-carts. I wasn’t that kind of kid though; I am the one who he visits at night, who he makes keep his secrets and then they turn into my secrets.

 

As my reality becomes unlivable I start to read an endless amount of books. When Peter failed to find me I decide to read about Narnia. Soon I was crying silent tears and waiting for Aslan to roar in and let me bury my small face in his glorious fur. Then I read the Bible and prayed for Jesus, God, Mary, Joseph, any one of the Apostles to appear in a sort of diaphanous manner, speak in magnificent echoes and carry me away on a song to Heaven. Then I read Sybil and tried to convince my psyche to formulate new and stronger personalities to compensate for the frailty that I felt. I was shattered inside yet my skin stayed together holding it all in; I was both the captor and captive of the particles which bound me together. Stuck and lost within endless walls and secrets.

 

He brought me home presents in his briefcase. I ran down my long block on my skinny legs anticipating his arrival each day. Or I peered out the window and counted cars, trying to guess how many would pass before I would see him stroll down our street in his business suit. His briefcase always held some sort of treat: a cool pencil, stickers that smelled when you scratched your nail across them, a small set of magic tricks. One evening when I was twelve he came in my room after work and opened his briefcase to give me my treat. It was some sort of lacy red panty and bra set. He said I could wear it for him if I felt comfortable enough, like maybe when my mom wasn’t around or something. I took it and crumpled it into my drawer as far back as it would go and sometimes when I caught a glimpse of it I would feel sick, like I was going to pass out or like I couldn’t really breathe too well. I think I just hated that thing. On a Tuesday when no one was home I took it out of my drawer and tried it on and looked in the mirror. And then I felt like I hated myself.

 

As I walked home from school that day when I was 12 I felt this overwhelming urge to just be normal. And then I saw him standing at the end of our driveway with this smile on his face saying he was happy to see me. I wasn’t happy and I told him that I wanted to be normal and that I wanted him to just stop. To just leave me alone and to love me, but in some other way that doesn’t make me feel bad. He nodded his head slowly and said that he understood and he was sorry, he would never do things to me again, but that of course our relationship would change and he couldn’t be that nice to me anymore. He said he would have to treat me like shit because I obviously didn’t love him and that I better not say anything to my mother.. So I told him that he could treat me like shit then. I walked inside and that began the next few years of him not being nice to me. I guess I was just a disappointment so it was easier to call me names or hit me when he was angry.

 

When it was warmer out I started to find freedom in running away. I left my house with a backpack full of books rather than clothes. I ran to fields of broken glass whereupon I could escape into tales and legends and words and pages; the words danced and sang to me—they were my elixir, soporific and hypnotic—they gave me temporary amnesia. Some days it was raining and my clothes stuck to me in the most uncomfortable way and I just couldn’t go back to that house to change and maybe open my drawer and see that ugly lacy red thing that he wanted to see me in.

 

Home was just an illusion that I clung to but I wasn’t going to go there because he was there. Often I watched the night silently turn to day in some random house or another; I was almost 14, the secrets that I had inside had devoured my spirit. So I wandered. I played chess with those old guys in Washington Square Park and explored Manhattan; I could feel its pulse beating under my feet and I had to write the skyline in words, ascribe letters to each smell, to the cacophony of sounds that somehow made sense, and to the faces. I walked across the George Washington Bridge to the familiarity of New Jersey and was drawn to the walkways along the Hudson River where I would sit and write what I saw from afar. But I wanted to go home. To make microwave popcorn and sit in my cozy chair and watch TV shows and see my family. I knew he would be there; I had never told so I was the bad one—the black sheep, the runaway. The difficult child.

 

When I was 14, I told my mother. It just came out, my mouth was moving and I heard the words but I didn’t feel like I was actually telling her everything; it was more of an uncontrollable spewing of words. Oh, her face. In my wanderings my eyes had seen the unspeakable, things that a child really shouldn’t have seen (was I ever a child?) but her face—that is an image that I can never escape. Shattering (I knew how it worked) starts on the inside and sometimes it slowly permeates the skin so one can actually see the blood drain to make way for the anguish which takes up so much space. I have crushed my family with my truth and soon the cop cars and lights and the guilt and embarrassment in his eyes made it all real. I ate Frosted Flakes as they led him out in handcuffs. They had disgusted faces.

I never saw him again.

Author’s Note: Ironically, shortly after the completion of this essay, my father tried to contact me. Throughout my life I’ve felt this strange, little desire to communicate with him; however I’ve come to realize that I was actually craving to communicate with an “alternate version” of my father. But there is no alternate version—he is that man whom I’ve written about; he exists on these pages and not in between the lines. And so I don’t think I can pick up that phone call.  

Jacqueline Pierro is a student at Columbia University in the City of NY and single mother to three amazing children. After graduating in May she will continue work on her novel in progress.