Month: April 2018

My Mother Is Not This Blanket

Photo By _overanalyzer/Flickr

By Daisy Alpert Florin

The blanket, still in pieces, sits in a bag in my attic. I take it down sometimes, run my fingers over the soft white cotton, yellow now with age. If I let my eyes blur, I can almost see my mother crocheting in front of the T.V., a cigarette and glass of white wine on the nightstand beside her. Her needle moves in a jerky, seemingly haphazard way, but when it stops, a delicate white hexagon appears. Later, she will crochet these hexagons together to create the piece of blanket I am holding now.

My mother started making the blanket back in the 1980s to replace one her mother had made that was stolen from a weekend house we once owned. That house was constantly being broken into, so there wasn’t much to steal. This time, the thieves took whatever was left—a crappy television set, some dishes, a couple of beach towels. And the blanket. The police said they probably used it to carry out the rest of the stuff, then dumped it somewhere.

My mother cried when she heard that. Her mother—my grandmother, who still lived in Sweden where my mother was born—was blind by then and while she could still crochet, she’d never make anything as beautiful or intricate again. So my mother announced she would make a new one. She worked on it for years, was still working on it when my grandmother died in 1998, and when she died two years later, the blanket remained unfinished.

I have it now, zipped up in the navy blue Longchamp tote bag she kept it in. Inside are several dozen loose hexagons, a sewn-together piece not quite big enough to fit a twin-sized bed, a pattern book, crochet needles, several skeins of yarn. Everything I need to finish the blanket is there, but I can’t because I don’t know how to crochet. My mother never taught me.

It occurs to me now that perhaps the blanket is a metaphor of some kind.

•••

I don’t always think of my mother as an immigrant, but that is what she was. She left her home country, Sweden, in her early twenties, and never went back. She wasn’t an immigrant the way my father’s parents, Jews who’d fled Eastern Europe never to return, were. The forces that brought her here were neither political nor global.

But like all immigrants, my mother was escaping something, a poverty of some kind or another that propelled her to reinvent herself on foreign shores. As her daughter, the child she rooted here to stake her claim, there would always be a part of her I wouldn’t know. Something lost in translation.

•••

“Maybe you could find someone to finish it,” my father says when I ask him what I should do with the blanket.

“Oh, yeah?” I say. “And who might that be? A crochet fairy?” I picture an older Nordic woman with braids and a mustache who would charge me a fortune to finish something no one actually wants. My father, who, I am certain, believes such a person exists, sighs and changes the subject. He’s never been one to pick a fight.

My parents met on a blind date in New York in 1967. Legend has it my mother was wearing a pink rabbit fur coat. My father visited Sweden for the first time the following year, for Christmas.

I can still hear the wonder in his voice as he describes it: Christmas—in Sweden no less— through the eyes of a Jewish boy from Brooklyn. “My family never celebrated Christmas,” he tells me. “We never celebrated Hanukkah. We never celebrated anything.” No wonder he married her.

I can understand what attracted him to her. I’m not immune to the desire to be with someone who offers a pathway into a different life, one you couldn’t possibly be expected to create on your own. This is why my father loves the blanket, thinks it worthy of repair: because it reminds him of that Christmas and all the ways he was seduced, not just by my mother but by Sweden itself. If my mother was fleeing something when she left Sweden, my father was fleeing something, too.

My parents’ marriage ended not long after the blanket was stolen, but that doesn’t stop my father from telling people who he hears speaking Swedish on the street, in restaurants, or in elevators, “My wife was Swedish.” Your ex-wife, I want to say but don’t. I know this is a point of pride for him, proof he took a chance once, for love. Maybe difference isn’t enough to build a life on, I want to tell him. Maybe the fault line at the center was too much to overcome. But because I love my father, I let it go.

•••

To me, making a blanket by hand would be an impossible labor of love. But that was what Swedes did: they made things. Blankets, scarves, mittens, sweaters, dresses—everything by hand, knitting and sewing and crocheting late into winter nights that began at three o’clock. “We had nothing else to do, Daisy!” my mother would say, laughing, and her older sister, my aunt Marianne, who used to hook her own rugs, would nod in agreement.

When my mother came to New York, Marianne was already here, and the two Swedish sisters—a phrase that always sounds like the set-up to a raunchy joke—lived together in a fourth floor walkup apartment on East 54th Street. After my mother married my father and I was born, we moved to a larger apartment on the Upper East Side.

There were a lot of women like my mother on the Upper East Side, Swedes married to Americans—Jews, specifically—but my mother was different. For one thing, as she liked to point out, those women were married to men a lot richer than my father. But there were other differences, too. Their children spoke Swedish and had Swedish names and spent summers in family homes on Sweden’s cold and rocky shores. We did none of these things. Whenever I asked my mother why she never taught my brother and me to speak Swedish, she would say, incredulously, “Why would you ever need to speak Swedish?”

I sometimes thought the other Swedish women judged her for not passing on her Swedish traditions. Perhaps I judged her for that, too. But my mother seemed all too happy to cast off her history. Her children would grow up knowing little about the country of her birth, and she was okay with that. “Your mother was an American from the day she arrived” is how my father puts it. And he’s right: there was something about her Swedish-ness she wanted to leave behind.

•••

A blanket is a shopworn metaphor, one that conveys warmth and home and all the things that are lost when a mother dies. But that is not what I want to say about my mother, or about the blanket.

The blanket is made up of hundreds of small white hexagons. Each hexagon is divided into three triangles; on each triangle are six raised bumps arranged in a pyramid design. The bumps are, I suppose, what give the pattern its name: Swedish Popcorn. When crocheted together, the hexagons transform into an undulating pattern of six-pointed stars. Looking at it almost makes me dizzy: I can’t tell where one star ends and another begins.

My mother was not a blanket. She could be critical and reserved. She wasn’t exactly the kind of woman who wrapped you up in a blanket of her love. As for the blanket, well, it’s really more of a bedspread. Decorative rather than functional. Also, it’s cotton and, because it’s crocheted, full of holes. It’s pretty, if you go for that sort of thing, but not exactly warm or cozy or any of the things you might think of when you think about a blanket.

I resist the urge to have it stand in for my mother in part because it feels too maudlin—a concrete symbol of her unfinished life and everything she didn’t have time to teach me—but also because that wasn’t her. When she died, my mother’s closets were full of blazers and skirts and pants with factory-sewn tags—J.Crew, Saks, Banana Republic. She could still sew and knit and crochet. She could even reupholster furniture. But over the years, she did all of this less and less as Sweden moved further into her past. Besides, this was New York and she wanted things she could buy.

•••

Before my mother moved to New York, her father made sure she could type. Quick and clever and affable, she was in high demand as a secretary, and it wasn’t long before she rose in her chosen field, fashion. My mother was always a working mother, and she didn’t feel conflicted about it. She didn’t come on class trips or help me with my homework or pick me up early for mother-daughter shopping trips. I used to chalk this up to her foreignness, that these were things she didn’t know she was supposed to do because she wasn’t born here. But eventually I came to understand that she didn’t do these things because she didn’t want to.

My mother’s parents divorced in 1948 when my mother, the youngest of their four children, was five, and my grandmother remained financially dependent on my grandfather for the rest of her life. Back in the early 1990s, when she first discovered Suze Orman, my mother realized how watching the financial dynamics play out between her parents had had an impact on her.

“Every Sunday night, my father would come over for dinner,” she told me once. “Before he left, he would leave an envelope with cash on top of the wardrobe in the front hall. There was no discussion of how much he would give her. He decided how much she would get and that was that.”

It was important to my mother to be financially independent, but she didn’t know how. Whatever money she made, she quickly spent. My parents fought often and bitterly about money. I remember my father telling me once, in anger, that my mother had spent $30,000 that year on clothes. When my mother left my father, she bought a $4,000 rug for her new apartment that the cat threw up on.

In 1998, when my grandmother died, my mother and I went to Sweden for her funeral, and I asked her to show me some of the places she’d lived as a child. We pulled up in front of a neat, two-story attached house.

“My brothers had the front bedroom,” my mother said, pointing at the windows, “and Marianne and I shared the one in back.”

“Where did your mother sleep?” I asked.

“In the dining room.” My mother was quiet for a while. Then she started the car back up and said, “What a life.”

There was something in her voice that day that made me think this—the mother in the dining room, the envelope of cash in the front hall, a life circumscribed by children and circumstance—was what she was running from, the hole she was always trying to fill. My mother wasn’t forced to leave Sweden. She could have stayed. The life she left wasn’t terrible or unbearable. It just wasn’t enough. There are times I wonder if that’s why she decided to remake the blanket, to atone for a wrong that had been done. The burglary, yes, but also the leaving.

In the short window of time when my mother was motherless, I saw her cry about it only once, on the day we got the news that my grandmother had died. “I just don’t like the idea of not having a mother anymore” is what she told me. As if that’s what a mother becomes after so many years away: an idea.

•••

My mother never became an American citizen. It wasn’t possible to do so at the time without losing her Swedish citizenship. “And I might want to go back someday, when I’m old and sick,” she always said with a laugh, “so Sweden can take care of me.” I used to believe her, imagined her packing her bags and heading back across the ocean. But as the years went on, she must have known she was never going to go back, that the life she’d built here mattered more than the one she’d left behind.

There is something else inside the Longchamp tote: a Ziploc bag with one hexagon inside it, a golden needle shoved through its center. I remember she used to carry pieces of it like this when she traveled for business so she could crochet during layovers or on overnight flights to Hong Kong. I hold it now, the oils from my fingers mixing with the shadow memory of hers, move my thumb across its bumpy Braille-like texture. I wonder when she realized she would never finish it, not because she was dying but because she simply lost the will.

In the end, she managed to make and sew together more than a hundred hexagons. But the blanket will never be finished because I will never finish it. Maybe my mother never taught me because she thought we’d have more time. Or maybe—and this seems more likely—she didn’t teach me because she thought it was something I’d never need to know. Maybe that’s what immigrants do—what mothers do—imagine worlds for their children that are bigger, vaster, and more electric than their own.

And maybe that was part of why she came here, to raise an American daughter far from Sweden’s dark winters and limited possibilities. A daughter who knew this much at least: that we aren’t always meant to finish what our mothers leave behind.

•••

DAISY ALPERT FLORIN’s essays have appeared in Full Grown People, Ms. Magazine and Under the Gum Tree, among other publications. Her essay “Crash” was listed as a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2016. She is currently at work on a novel. Read more at www.daisyflorin.com.

Read More FGP essays by Daisy Alpert Florin.

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Kathleen and Henry

We’re doing something a little different today. Gina Easley, our staff photographer, has been providing the images for most Full Grown People essays for years (some damn amazing ones, I might add), and now she’s started writing flash essays of her own. This is one from one of her series. —ed.

Photo and Writing by Gina Easley

He’s been gone for several days, and she doesn’t know where. This isn’t the first time. Sometimes he’s just hiding out nearby, keeping to himself. It’s nothing personal. Other times he ventures further away, and she finds him only through her own persistence or the kindness of strangers. She doesn’t know if this is one of those “further away” times. As always happens in these moments of uncertainty, she is struck with a deep grief at the thought of living without him.

Fifty years they’ve been together. Still, she doesn’t know if he loves her; she only knows that she loves him.

Fifty years, and still he insists on sleeping under the bed.

•••

She chuckles at this thought: her longest lasting relationship has been with a desert tortoise.

Back when her now-middle-aged children were babies, a friend gave Henry to Kathleen. Henry was a rescue tortoise in need of a home, and Kathleen took him in. He has lived with her in ten different homes, been with her through two marriages and three children, and has even seen her grandchildren grow into adulthood. She doesn’t know how old he is. A desert tortoise’s lifespan is long. He could quite possibly outlive her.

She’s never known what he is thinking or feeling, but she does know that he has preferences, and that he is willful. His determination is obvious and strong and was proven recently when she put up a board to prevent him from entering the garage, one of his favorite places. She watched as he banged himself repeatedly into the board in an attempt to break through. She admires his determination. But maybe that is why he’s gone missing again … perhaps he’s unhappy about the board.

•••

She steps into the back yard and sees him, basking in the sun. He’s back. She goes to him, touches his head. She’s reminded of the feeling of calm that overtakes her when she looks out at the ocean, and how curious it is that he has the same effect on her. Along with gratitude and relief at his return, she is flooded with love: a no-strings, no-expectations kind of love. For fifty years she has cared for him, seen to all his needs. And for fifty years he has reminded her daily that love needs no reason, that love itself is enough.

•••

GINA EASLEY is a photographer based in Minneapolis. Aside from her role as staff photographer for Full Grown People, she enjoys photographing animals and the people who love them. This is her first published essay.

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Memento Mori

Photo by Gina Easley

By Jennifer Richardson

I moved to Los Angeles in 1994, ten months after the Northridge earthquake that killed around fifty people and split the 10 Freeway in two. Despite my absence during that disaster, the specter of a quake has haunted my years in southern California since, most recently when we bought a house in Ventura some seventy miles north of L.A. I remember reading the disclosures that explained the house wasn’t merely in a fault zone—much of Southern California property is—but rather a liquefaction zone. In the event of an earthquake we could expect ground water to rise and transform the soil under the house to quicksand, thus fulfilling a phobia I’d acquired as a kid when the concept of quicksand was first introduced to me in an episode of The Incredible Hulk. That word, liquefaction, was so blunt, so at odds with the Edward-Scissorhands-suburbia aesthetic of the street, that it somehow made it easier to dismiss it as hyperbole.

I mentioned it to my husband who blithely replied that as long as we could get earthquake insurance—we could—he didn’t see a problem. We signed the contract and moved in. Two and half years later the big one came, but instead of an earthquake we got a fire.

•••

California’s largest wildfire in modern history, the Thomas Fire, started on a Monday evening in early December 2017 in the hills above Santa Paula, a sleepy agricultural town with a charming, lost-in-time main street. Fueled by relentless Santa Ana winds, the fire traversed fifteen miles of rugged terrain to consume five hundred structures in the foothills of Ventura on its first of what would go on for thirty-eight nights, culminating in the deadly Montecito mudslides of early January.

In the space of a mile, downtown Ventura slopes from the hills to the Pacific, forming a makeshift amphitheater facing Pierpont Bay. That night residents were compelled to turn their gaze from the sea to the hills. Friends who live on lower ground pulled lawn chairs into their driveway and stayed up all night watching what they described as Hades descending into the city. Earlier that day we had driven up to Berkeley, where I rent an apartment for work, and we didn’t hear about the fire until early the next morning. Alerted by a Facebook message, I turned to Twitter for news: the Hawaiian Gardens, an iconic mid-century apartment building a quarter of a mile from our house, had just burned down.

What followed was a frenzied morning of trying to ascertain if we still had a house—by mid-morning neighbors had confirmed that, for the moment, we did—and what we should do next. My grandparents’ hillside Southern California home had once survived a wildfire when a quick-thinking neighbor emptied his pool onto it, a memory that left me thinking that we at least ought to try to do something. At my urging, my husband agreed to fly down—mostly, I think, to prevent me from going. I dropped him off at the Oakland airport later that morning then called my parents in Florida to tell them we were okay, annoyed that they hadn’t yet called to ask. Despite my father’s penchant for watching Fox News, he seemed completely oblivious to the severity of the situation.

While Doug travelled, we composed a list over email of what he should try to get out if he could reach the house—our neighborhood was under a mandatory evacuation and would remain so for over a week. We’d planned that he would try to retrieve the car we had left in the garage and his passport, but the notion of things you take with you in this kind of situation remained elusive and, in the end, ours was surprisingly prosaic. He nominated some entirely replaceable small household electronics, and I chose a few pieces of jewelry I seldom wore and some photo albums dating from pre-smartphone days that we hadn’t opened in years.

It wasn’t that we didn’t value the contents of our house. Collectively they told a story of our lives, both the things we had brought with us individually to the marriage and those we had acquired together since. To single anything out—say the garage-sale painting that had hung over our sideboard in every house or the mermen Christmas ornaments we’d left permanently hanging on the curtain railing—felt hopelessly arbitrary.

The only other thing we came up with was a gold coin that my father had given us for Christmas a few years earlier. It had no sentimental value and around a thousand dollars of actual value, but we had both immediately thought of it because of what my father, a Trump-voting Republican, had said when he gave it to us. Obama was president at the time, which for him constituted a threat to his family worthy of equipping us all with portable currency and a conspiratorially whispered explanation of “in case you ever need to flee.” He’d acted on an imagined risk and failed to notice a real one. And while it wasn’t for the reason he’d envisioned, it was no less unnerving that my father’s prophecy was coming true.

•••

Doug’s return visit accomplished little other than retrieving our uninspired list of “treasured things” and giving him a chest infection brought on by smoke inhalation. The power was out so he couldn’t stay at the house, but he did skirt the evacuation order to hose it down in those first few days. After a few more nerve-wracking days of being evacuated from motels farther and farther up the coast, he drove back to Berkeley, where we obsessively watched SMS alerts and the Twitter feed of the fire department’s Public Information Officer. We hoped for an estimated containment date but got more red flag warnings.

We returned to Ventura together two weeks after the fire had started to find our house unscathed barring a thick coating of ash. While the fire continued to torment Santa Barbara County, life in Ventura began to resume some normality in the week ahead of Christmas. Air quality was finally good enough to go outside, and everywhere I went, from the dentist to the grocery store, people were telling their own harrowing fire stories. There was a compulsive need to share as a way to exorcise the trauma. Every repetition was therapeutic, an affirmation the still-disbelieving storyteller was okay, even if their belongings weren’t.

In nearby Ojai, a resort town with a tightknit community, artists Sarah Mirk and Lucy Bellwood provided a sanctioned outlet for such storytelling when they hosted a benefit at the local bookstore. Residents read aloud the stories of what they took with them when they evacuated. These ranged from a concert tee-shirt collection to a Purple Heart and were compiled into a zine that was being sold to raise money for people affected by the fire. It was the most meta of mementos: a souvenir about souvenirs.

Despite the worthy cause, I didn’t buy one. The anxiety of the past two weeks had been all-consuming, and I wanted no reminder of it. I was also nagged by the sense of being an impostor, an interloper in this community’s sacred ritual. I was not from Ojai—I was hardly from Ventura, one of seven cities we’d lived in during the last decade and not even the place where I now worked most weeks. I may have been a citizen of the world, but I was also a citizen of nowhere, incapable of partaking fully in either local tragedy or triumph. I adopted my fallback position of consumer, bought a book to support the store—which had been forced to close during the fire—and left the benefit early.

That same week I discovered another breed of fire souvenirs while walking on the boardwalk at the beach. The Ventura County Fairgrounds had been converted into the command center for the Thomas Fire, supporting and housing some of the over 8,500 firefighters that worked the blaze. Along a grassy strip separating the fairground parking lot from the beach, a cottage industry of disaster had sprung up in the form of several tents stocked with Thomas Fire–themed merchandise.

Upon being confronted with a pink tee-shirt bearing the likeness of Santa and his reindeer flying towards a full moon over a photo of the blazing Ventura hills while firefighters look on, capped off with a “Happy New Year 2018” message, my immediate reaction was to recoil. The woman working behind the table was clearly practiced in handling this kind of response and volunteered that the shirts were something firefighters, many of whom were from out of town, could bring their kids as a souvenir. There was a deserved pride associated with fighting what was now on track to be the largest wildfire in California’s history, and the presence of a few uniformed emergency services workers surveying the merchandise at another table lent plausibility to her explanation.

I swallowed my judgement and walked on, mulling over this idea of disaster souvenirs and trying to think of precedents. My sister, who works in law enforcement, had helped clean up after 9/11, and I remembered she’d given my husband a commemorative 9/11 tee-shirt from her squad that Christmas, albeit with a much more understated logo. Did the companies who had set up shop outside the Thomas Fire command center crisscross the country hunting disasters like storm chasers? My subsequent request for an interview with the Santa-over-inferno tee-shirt maker received no response.

•••

Sometime after Christmas, I finally succumbed to the lure of a souvenir from the fire. A local brewery was selling tote bags and tee-shirts to benefit fire victims. I bought the tote, reasoning I can always use another grocery bag, but mostly now really, compulsively wanting it. I attribute my change of heart to wanting a tangible reminder that the trauma of the past few weeks had in fact occurred.

Of course the evidence was all around town, from the charred hillside behind city hall where we often hiked, to rubble-strewn lots lorded over by incongruous chimney stacks. But the path of a wind-driven fire is unpredictable, and its destruction had been haphazard. The fire had left no visible damage in more pockets of the city than not. As spring arrived, the hillsides would green and memories would recede. Here on the patio of the brewery with the 101 Freeway rushing by on one side and a quintessential California blue sky overhead, the possibility of a fire threatening the entire city had already started to seem as implausible as our entire street collapsing into quicksand.

The design of the tote bag had also appealed to me in a way that the Santa-over-inferno tee-shirts had not, but it was peculiar in its own way. Two crossed hands, palms up, hold a black heart that drips what appears to be oil—a strange choice considering the bag is commemorating a fire—over illustrations of local icons: a cactus, a bell tower, our neoclassical city hall. Between the heart and the line drawings a discreet line of text reads “Helping Hands Thomas Fire XII.IV.MMXVII,” the Roman numerals arguably as pretentious as Santa Claus over an inferno is crass.

Despite their differences, both items fulfill two of our keenest contemporary needs—to buy and to broadcast: I was there. Self-conscious of this fact, I’ve yet to use the bag. But it hangs on the coat stand by the front door of my Berkeley apartment, ready to be filled with treasure should I ever need to flee.

•••

JENNIFER RICHARDSON is the author of a memoir, Americashire: A Field Guide to a Marriage. She contributes to Edible Ojai and Ventura County and is working on a lifetime reading plan app, booketlist in her spare time. Find her online at http://jenniferrichardson.net/ and on Twitter @baronessbarren.

Read more FGP essays by Jennifer Richardson.

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Honest Cover Letters

Photo by Gina Easley

By Julie Parker

June 1999

Dear Beleaguered Store Manager,

I’m writing to apply for the position of sales associate at The Gap. I am too old to go back to summer camp. I’m not cut out to be a camp counselor like my friends, mainly because it requires talking to people I don’t know, which I find terrifying. But I need to start making my own money to spend on necessities like pizza at Sbarro and blue nail polish at Hot Topic. Thus, I hope you’ll consider me for this position.

Here I stand on the precipice between childhood and adulthood—between spending my summers being supervised by productive members of society and spending my summers as a productive member of society. Good riddance, childhood. So long, capture the flag and color war. I won’t miss you a bit. You have been replaced by something far more intriguing to me: earning money.

The meager allowance my parents give me is insufficient to support my weekly trips to the mall with my friends. Since I already frequent the mall most Saturdays, The Gap seems like a natural choice. I’m also interested in the employee discount, which is rumored to exist but sounds too wonderful to be true. This may sound like a selfish reason to apply but rest assured that I plan to share the discount with as many of my friends as possible.

My qualifications include a pretty good work ethic and mild interest in clothing. Please disregard the brown sweater I wear three to five times a week that my mother refers to as “Meatloaf” and that she has asked me to throw away for several years now. I believe that access to the aforementioned employee discount will allow me to meet my fashion potential in a way that I have been unable to thus far in life.

Finally, please note that I don’t believe my painful shyness will be an issue in dealing with customers. I look forward to the routinized interactions that accompany working the cash register. “That will be $42.50,” I can already hear myself saying. “Thank you and have a nice day.” Easy peasy. Though if you want me to stand quietly in a corner and fold sweaters, that’s fine, too.

I look forward to hearing from you. To contact me, please call my house and ask for Julie. If my dad picks up and makes a weird, unfunny joke, feel free to ignore him.

Thank you,

Julie

 

June 2002

Dear Poor Man’s Hallmark,

For the love of God, I cannot bear to fold another sweater. By this point, I must have folded thousands and thousands of articles of clothing, only to watch the pile destroyed minutes later by a careless shopper looking for a size 8. That’s why I’m applying for the position of sales associate at your American Greetings card store. How bad could it be to tidy up greeting cards at the end of a long day?

Don’t get me wrong, working at The Gap wasn’t so bad, at least for a while. I learned how to make polite conversation with strangers, to say, “Welcome to The Gap. Is it still raining out there?” I was a whiz at the cash register. Once I got up the nerve to ask a manager what “running” meant, I sort of enjoyed the process of transporting items from the fitting room back to the racks—almost like a scavenger hunt, finding each item’s rightful home in the store. I got better at clothing “girl talk” in the fitting room: “Ohmygod, that looks sooo good on you!” I even learned my social security number, since I used it to punch in on the time clock in the back room each day.

But none of the perks—which, along with my welcome paycheck, led me to keep working nights and weekends after school started again—could truly offset the misery wrought by spending hours upon hours folding articles of clothing. On a Saturday morning before Christmas, I would arrive while it was still dark outside only to find the store had been hit by some sort of tornado the night before, requiring hours of folding and running items from the mountain of sweatshirts and jeans still sitting in the fitting room. Like Sisyphus, I’d slowly make my way up the mountain, only to do it all over again the following day, and the day after that.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, when the store was deserted on a sunny Saturday in July, the managers would insist I “look busy” by refolding stacks and stacks of perfectly folded tank tops and shorts. God forbid the regional manager decide to stop by on a whim and find employees lazing about.

All of which is to say that I’ve decided I can do better. Retail is a good fit for my mediocre people skills and I do enjoy the sense of ownership that comes from welcoming people into a place you know well and helping them leave with what they need. But I can’t fold any more clothes. It’s not even worth it for 50% off six items every month. I’ve got all the clothes I could possibly need, including a blue puffer vest I will wear for the next decade. So I hope you’ll consider me for this position selling greeting cards, which I’m confident will be much more enjoyable.

Sincerely,

Julie

 

January 2003

Dear Federal Government, Source of All Problems (At Least According to my Dad),

Thank you for considering me for the position of intern in the congressman’s district office. I must express my disappointment at the fact that this internship doesn’t pay, which forces me to keep my job at the greeting card store and work in the congressman’s office only a few days a week. However, I do look forward to having a job that doesn’t require hunting through aisles of cards to locate the home of one dropped on the floor that has a cartoon of a naked person and reads, “For your birthday, let it all hang out!”

I have spent several summers now selling greeting cards and other useless knickknacks. The American Greetings store where I work is the competitor/ugly stepsister of the Hallmark store, which is at the other end of the mall and sells those Christmas ornaments that people collect. My store, however, has the distinct advantage of being located near both CVS and the food court, so Hallmark can suck it.

Now that I’m in college, I need to start building my resume, or so people tell me. This confuses me, because isn’t a resume just a piece of paper that lists all of the jobs I’ve had? It’s not a skyscraper or even a tower of Legos, so how would I “build” it exactly? Still, I agree that if I want to get a job after college that doesn’t involve selling Scotch tape as an “add-on,” I need to prove I’m capable of more.

Which brings me to this internship. And, relatedly, nepotism, which is how I plan to wrest this highly coveted position from all of the better-qualified people who did student council in high school (which I didn’t) and who major in political science (which I don’t). My grandmother is somehow related to the wife of a congressman in another state and his very nice chief of staff agreed to put in a good word for me.

Though I’m not exactly sure what a congressman does, much less what a congressional intern does, I’m sure I’d be great for this position. I’m adept at Microsoft Word, and after years in retail, I’m also adept at dealing with crazy people—no offense to your constituents. My only request is that you don’t call my coworkers at the greeting card store for references, because they would surely find this internship hoity-toity.

Thank you for your consideration,

Julie

 

June 2004

Dear Purveyor of Pretentious Pens,

I thought I had risen above working in retail, but how wrong I was. This is what I get for deciding to ignore reality while I spent a semester studying abroad. Now I’m back in the U.S., committed to a summer sublet with my friends that costs several hundred dollars a month, and jobless. I desperately need you to hire me as a sales associate at your fancy pen store.

Kind regards,

Julie

 

April 2005

Dear Lawyer at Law,

Please consider me for the position of paralegal at your immigration law firm. I’m graduating from college in May, I have no idea what I want to do, and moving home is not an option. This two-year position would give me some breathing room until I figure things out, so I think I’d be an excellent candidate.

I convinced my friends to sign a lease on an apartment before we even graduate, despite their misgivings. I told them we couldn’t wait, all of the reasonably-priced apartments in our desired area of the city would be gone. So we’re in, we’re committed, and there’s no backing out. I’m going to owe rent and utilities very soon, and they’re all going to kill me—and more importantly, “I told you so” me until the end of time—if I can’t pay.

I found this job through the international relations department at school, which maintains a list of job postings. Many of them are for nonprofit organizations in exotic places, which sound great in theory—but my main objective at this point is to have time to drink Smirnoff Ice with my friends on rickety back porches. The Peace Corps will have to wait.

I am a diligent worker and a decent writer. I learn fast and adapt to new situations quickly. And whether you’re partial to ballpoints or rollerballs, I’m deeply familiar with the writing implements used to sign legal documents.

Thanks in advance for your consideration,

Julie

 

March 2008

Dear Too-Cool-for-Me Magazine Editor,

Does it still count as a career change if it happens after your first job? If so, I’m a career changer. Two years at a law firm was plenty to convince me I do not want to be a lawyer. That and the first chapter of a book I bought on Amazon titled “Should You Really Be a Lawyer?” Thus, I hope you’ll consider me for this internship.

Turns out that being a paralegal means completing a lot of forms for very interesting people, but not getting to actually learn much about them, let alone write their stories. The MacArthur fellow who was applying for permanent residency in the U.S. so she could continue her art installations in dilapidated mental hospitals? I had a feeling she was more than an O-1 visa application. The only way to get to the meat of stories like hers—and to write, really write—is to become a journalist.

And the fastest way to become a journalist is to fly through a year of journalism school. I had no interest in getting some shitty job at a local paper, covering city council meetings and Little League games. It already seemed like I had wasted two years, and there was no more time to lose if I wanted to become a New York Times columnist. To journalism school I went, and now, here I am. Applying for an unpaid internship. Again.

Please find attached my clips from school: a story about the spike in romance novels for middle-aged women (sometimes known as “hen lit”) and a story about a shoddy method of birth control called cycle beads. My focus on headline-grabbing trend pieces would be a perfect fit for your magazine.

Thank you for your consideration,

Julie

 

March 2008

Dear Overworked Newspaper Editor,

Because I’m not sure this magazine internship will work out, I’m hedging my bets by simultaneously applying to be an intern for the business section of your regional daily newspaper. I appreciate the fact that this internship is paid, though I could earn more working at Dunkin Donuts across the street.

I don’t have a particular interest in business reporting, but my natural bent toward practicality led me to take a business class in journalism school and do well in it. I can look at a company’s quarterly earnings report and deduce something from it. I’m not sure that will come in handy at this job, because I don’t think I have ever actually picked up a copy of your newspaper, but I’m certain my skills can be applied somehow.

Kind regards,

Julie

 

July 2009

Dear Corporate Middle Manager,

I can’t believe that I’m applying to work at a law firm again. To be brutally honest, my mother found this job listing in the newspaper, and I kind of don’t want it to work out because then she’ll hold it over me. Still, I appreciate you considering me for the position of marketing communications specialist.

You advertised this job as being an internal reporter for your law firm—someone to write about the cases the lawyers are working on, in layman’s terms. That sounds pretty perfect for me. My first job out of college was at a small law firm. I’ve spent the past year working at a local magazine and newspaper, writing about subjects as varied as a men’s beauty pageant (which I very nearly got to judge) and a fire truck getting stuck in the snow during a blizzard. (That was a miserable day at the paper. I kept getting sent out in the storm and was forced to dig my car out anew every two hours.)

What I discovered during this time was that for me, journalism is not enough fun to make up for such meager compensation, lousy benefits and long hours—if it’s even possible to snag one of the disappearing jobs. My editor at the paper was a wonderful journalist who truly loved the daily grind: spending hours making phone calls, banging out stories about ultra-local issues, putting the paper to bed at eight p.m. on a Friday. Sure, I could slog through those things too, but they didn’t bring me joy the way they did him.

Suffice to say, I want to find something that does bring me joy. I’m willing to give this “marketing” thing a shot, even though I’m not sure what marketing is exactly. Hopefully I will not be required to say things like,“I’m reaching out to my contact to see if he can meet his deliverables by COB.” If there’s one thing that’s been instilled in me by journalism, it’s a low tolerance for BS.

Thank you,

Julie

 

April 2014

Dear Director of Client Services, Whatever That Means,

It’s been quite a while since I’ve written a cover letter. I’ve been at my law firm for almost five years now, and it’s been the best job I’ve ever had. But I know it’s getting to be time to move on, and I think your law firm could be the right next step for me. Thanks for considering me for the position of marketing communications manager.

This has been the first job I’ve had that really makes me feel like an adult. The things I do each day are interesting, and they matter, and I’m good at them. I get a sort of high from being able to earn respect from lawyers twice my age who make associates cower in the hallway. My boss tells me I have potential as a leader. No one has ever told me that before. And hallelujah, praise the lord, I have VACATION DAYS.

I’m not sure how I feel about the fact that this job is such a good fit. I’m a little bit ashamed that I don’t have the urge to be a war correspondent in the Middle East, like so many of my classmates from journalism school. I’m too embarrassed to stay in touch with my favorite journalism professor; I can almost feel his disappointment. Do I want to work in legal marketing forever? I don’t know. But I like the variety, getting away from the reporting/writing grind. I like working on the text of a brochure in the morning, and then sending out an urgent alert to clients about a Supreme Court decision in the afternoon. The 9-5 is underrated. I wouldn’t take a job at a newspaper if one fell into my lap.

Still, things have gone downhill in the last few months. Morale is not great. Most of my days consist of one person after another sticking their head into my office and saying, “Can I vent to you for a few minutes?” I don’t have any interesting new projects on the horizon. And I know they can’t promote me any further. But they’ve made me believe I’m manager material.

To that end, please consider me for this role. The prospect of being in charge of all marketing is scary to me. I don’t know anything about PR or web design. But I’m sure I can figure it out. And if all else fails, I’m an excellent sweater-folder.

Thanks in advance,

Julie

•••

JULIE PARKER is a work-in-progress living in Boston. For the past four years, she has managed marketing and communications at a law firm.

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Where There’s Smoke

Photo by Adam Parrott/Flickr

By Matt Jones

This is a couples’ vacation. Just the four of us.

In New Orleans.

In August.

The drive coming from Tuscaloosa should only take four and a half hours, but Jess and I are arguing because she thinks she forgot her birth control back at the house. Forgot is the wrong word, though. The problem is that I rush her. This is my thing when we travel: I hurry her out of the house at a speed beyond her comfort level. I pace up and down the hall and stand hawkishly over her shoulder wondering just what on earth could be taking so long.

She tells me that procrastination is her form of rebellion. She discovered this through self-motivated psychoanalysis, by reflecting upon memory after memory of family road trips in which her father woke her when it was still dark out and insisted they be on the road before the sun was up. Now, at twenty-seven, she says she dawdles as a form of dissent. Ambles in revolt. Climbing into the car and then needing to get out to use the bathroom just one more time is all part of the revolution.

We’re halfway to Louisiana, coming up on Hattiesburg, Mississippi, when I pull off the highway into an empty truck stop and Jess rummages through our luggage.

“It’s not here,” she calls, annoyed, from the back of the car.

“You forgot it?”

“You rushed me,” she says.

We’re in love. This is not in question. What is, however, is whether or not we want to risk bringing a child into the world. The risk is small, of course, but Jess and I are in our last year of graduate school. We have many reservations, so on the side of the road in southern Mississippi, we do the math.

  • We had sex the night before.
  • She didn’t take her birth control then.
  • It’s August, more precisely, mid-August. If she were to get pregnant, then the baby would gestate for nine months inside her body and enter the world in June.

“We’ll have our degrees by then,” I say.

“But no jobs,” she says.

We both nod.

We’ve talked about children many times before this. We love the freedom of just each other. We’re worried about the state of the world, about the climate, rising seas, violent conflicts. Our general consensus is that we will not procreate intentionally, though this, in the here and now of rural Mississippi, would be one of those unintentional times.

“Would you hate it if we drove back to the house to get it?”

“No,” I say.

“What if we just drive home and don’t go? Would that be so bad?”

I smile. We are both iffy when it comes to couple’s vacations. They’re traumatic. The only other one we’ve been on together took place three years earlier on Lookout Mountain in the Northeastern reaches of Alabama where Jess shared a room with her then-husband, and my then-girlfriend and I took the bedroom upstairs. At one point during a long night in which the University of Alabama football team barely eked out a win over LSU, we all took our clothes off and climbed into a hot tub that faced a sea of moonlit pines.

The thing about being in love with a married woman is that you can never rush her. There is so much waiting involved. So much patience. If I perform that same level of self-motivated psychoanalysis on myself that Jess is so adept at, then I determine that this is why I rush her out of the house now. I’m sick of waiting. I have waited. I was patient. I don’t like to think about the first couples’ trip we took, when Jess was married to someone else, though there is a moment from that night after her husband and my girlfriend stumbled out of the hot tub and back into the house when Jess reached her bare foot through the water and parted my knees and then we just sat there staring at each other through the steam while sweat gathered on the back of my neck.

And so now, sitting on the side of the road in Mississippi trying to decide whether or not we are okay with having a child in nine months, it’s best not to hurry important decisions. Take it slow. Painfully slow if necessary. Turn the car around. Drive back. Pick up the birth control. Turn a four-and-a-half-hour car ride into ten. When she parts your knees in the dead of night, don’t move. Don’t even breathe. Just be still and know there is still yet a great distance to travel before you arrive anywhere.

•••

We meet Rex and Kelly in New Orleans. Rex is a friend of mine from college and Kelly is his girlfriend. For my birthday, Rex has rented us a duplex in the lower ninth. Down the street, there’s an urban kale farm and chickens running loose and houses with the letter X still spray-painted across the siding.

On our first morning, Rex and I walk through sticky heat to the nearest coffeeshop and he tells me about wanting to become a firefighter. The year before it is a muay thai fighter and a year later it will be a carpenter, but for now it’s a firefighter.

He’s in the midst of crisis of masculinity. I suspect he doesn’t love Kelly, and if he does, it is a love I am unfamiliar with. For as long as I have known him, Rex has tried to exhibit the calm coolness of James Dean or maybe even a young Steve McQueen or Robert Mitchum and he can often manage the performance for a short amount of time. But then he cracks. The cracking is inevitable. I expect this trip of ours is built upon the foundation of a crack.

Over the years I’ve determined that it doesn’t matter if I am conciliatory or confrontational—either way, Rex will do what Rex does—so once we get to the coffeeshop, I just come right out and ask, “So you’re not applying to graduate school?”

And here we go with the firefighter talk again. Rex has spent the last six months telling me over the phone in hushed tones while Kelly is in the other room that he is going to pursue a graduate degree, that he is going to devote his energies to writing. At the coffee shop, we pick up drinks for “the girls.” Already, I don’t like this, this couples’ trip lingo of “girls” and “guys.” There’s too much performativity involved in the couple’s trip. There are the things Rex reveals to me man-to-man and then there is the man he reveals in the company of “the girls,” and I think why must we have these moments of tenderness and intimacy followed by such emphatic exaggeration and denial and deflection? Don’t you know I can’t handle this kind of dynamic? Don’t you know I have couples’ vacation trauma? But of course he doesn’t.

Rex tells me that becoming a fireman will put him on the sure path to a nice home, a better body, kids, a family, a red Corvette.

“A red Corvette?” I say. “Who are you, my uncle?”

He tells me firemen have a lot of downtime to do bench press in front of the firehouse.

I nod. My shirt sticks to my body. The coffee is too hot. Just holding the cup makes my hand sweat. I wait for Rex to ask about my life. Not just a question meant to segue into something he is dying to talk about, but a real inquiry into the quality of my being. It won’t come. That is fine. I’m practiced in the art of waiting and nodding along.

Our conversation reminds of talking to Jess’s husband, how the morning after the hot tub, he and I drove down the mountain and into town to buy breakfast and he said, “Jess doesn’t really know what she wants. She likes to think she does sometimes. Things will get better once we leave Alabama. Once we go somewhere else.”

Nod, nod. Right, right.

When I first met Jess’s husband, he said we should open up a mobile dog grooming studio together. He said maybe he’d go to law school. When I first met Jess she told me, “He said things would get better when we came to Alabama.”

Sometimes I want to grab Rex by the scruff of his shirt and slap him. The world is full of violent conflict anyway. What is all this firefighter business? This obsession with muay thai? I thought you were trying to write? I know the answer, of course. I suspect Rex does too. I think he knows, but he won’t say. Can’t relationships go on forever in the cramped space of what is known but goes unsaid? Who wants to live in that space? I could never go back there, back in that incommodious box. Neither could Jess. We have spent countless hours talking about that space. For her, it was a marriage, for me an affair, a long weekend in a North Alabama rental cabin.

“I think I could get a lot of writing done at the firehouse. They’ve got a lot of downtime, firefighters.”

“Good, good,” I say. I am conciliatory in the heat of August. I don’t have the energy for argument. I haven’t had a sip of my coffee yet. I’m spent from the ten-hour drive that should have only been four and a half.

When we get back to the house we’ve rented for the weekend, Rex pushes open the front door and says, “Let’s see what the girls are up to.”

They’re in the kitchen sitting across from each other at a small table beneath a spice rack. The whole trip is deja vu already. I think of the cabin just outside of Fort Payne, Alabama. Lookout Mountain. The changing of the November leaves. Of my then-girlfriend and Jess sitting there talking to each other while me and her husband unload groceries. All of us together in this incommodious box.

In New Orleans, I’m only happy that there’s no hot tub. There is no need for one. The duplex itself is feverish, built shotgun style so there the four of us will stay trapped in the barrel for two whole days.

•••

Late afternoon we all head over to the French Quarter. Rex and Kelly drink more gin and tonics than I can count. I have never had a beignet but everyone else has and they tell me I’m not missing out on much. So amongst other things, this weekend will also be a beignet-less one. Again, it is fine. I can deal with the lacking.

In our alone time, Jess and I laugh about the birth control incident that took place on the highway. It’s already funny. The two of us in the tight confines of my little hatchback, debating in the span of a few minutes whether or not we want to alter our family planning. We’re good at those kinds of situations. Maybe good is the wrong word. Practiced, though. In my car. In her car. The library stairwell. The graveyard behind the football stadium at midnight. Empty classrooms on the third floor of the English building. The kitchens of rented country cabins while our significant others are asleep down the hall and up the stairs. Give us a cramped space and something impossibly large to discuss and we’ll work it out. We’ll tiptoe around it. We’ll attack it head on. We’ve got a trophy room full of “should I leave my husband,” “do you love me,” “quick describe our future together while he is in the bathroom.” When other couples come over for dinner or drinks, they see the heads on the wall, the furs on the floor. Our house has a kind of enigmatic funk to it.

But then again, whose doesn’t? The New Orleans rental, after a full day of drinking and sweating and stale cigarettes, gets kind of fetid. There’s brooding in the air. Rex is about two drinks past young Steve McQueen and heading into old Marlon Brando territory. And Kelly, you can tell she’s got things on her mind. Things she wants to say. What better way to do it than with a game of Scrabble?

We all sit down at the tiny kitchen table and spread the board out, set ourselves up with a set of seven letters each. I love words, but I don’t care for Scrabble, for the limitations. Back on Lookout Mountain, the four of us played Taboo. Jess was on a team with my girlfriend. Us versus Them. Tensions were high not because anyone cared about winning but because the whole weekend was Taboo. The entire couples’ trip was guessing what someone was trying to say without them actually saying it.

While we play Scrabble, Jess and I lock ankles under the table. I’m in last place and Jess is in third so the real contest is between Rex and Kelly. Rex has always wanted to be a writer. This game means everything to him. I can see it in his eyes. And if it doesn’t mean everything, then it means next to everything, whatever is adjacent to it. And for Kelly, I can tell that winning is important, not winning in its own right, but Rex letting her win. Jess and I tap this out in morse code on each others’ thighs under the table. We are far past words. Masters of secret communication, we are. Of the coy glance. Of the hand brush. We used to text each other in acronyms that all began with the same three letters: RTR. Roll Tide Roll. The rallying cry for the Alabama football team.

RTRIWYSBRN (Roll Tide Roll I Want You So Bad Right Now)

RTRIWTFU (Roll Tide Roll I Want to Fuck You)

RTRIWYIM (Roll Tide Roll I Want You Inside Me)

Rex wins the game. The board is a collage of nonsense we’ve all had a part in creating. Kelly grabs her wine glass and storms off either because she does not like losing or because she does not like Rex winning. Then a literal storm rolls in. Rain patters the tin roof and fills the duplex with white noise. Jess and I climb into bed, and because we are renting a shotgun house, Rex regularly marches through our room and out the front door and onto the porch where he chain smokes.

“What is he doing out there?” Jess asks.

Lightning flashes. We can see Rex’s silhouette. Rain pelts his face and the front half of his body. His hair drips. His cigarette glows. In the shadow of the porch, in the right light that is, he does sort of look like Steve McQueen a la The Towering Inferno, at least a little bit, perched there as he is, exhausted, grim, both drenched and aflame. Yeah, I think, you go on and fight your fires.

•••

On Sunday morning Rex and Kelly are out of money. Out of gas. Jess and I pack our things while Kelly makes calls to her mother’s boyfriend to see if they can have some cash wired over. Until then, they are literally stuck.

I load our things into the car, then we pace awkwardly up and down the sidewalk while Rex and Kelly take turns calling different people, explaining the situation, and snapping at each other.

Jess pulls me off to the side.

“Do you think they want us to give them the money?”

“Maybe,” I say.

Maybe we’re back to the performance. Maybe they’re too embarrassed to ask us directly. They should just ask, though. They should just come right out with it. I have stood in front of Jess on a cloudless night with tears welling in my eyes pleading, “Pick me. Please, pick me.”

In the darkness of my room I have begged her, “Just divorce him. Don’t wait. Just do it.”

In the hot tub on the back porch of a house that didn’t belong to us, I let her part my knees and then just look at me.

I shouldn’t judge Rex and Kelly, but I do. If they need help, I want them just to come right out and say it. But I also understand not being able to.

“You guys can head out,” Rex says. “We’ve got it worked out.”

Nod, nod. Right, right.

So Jess and I climb into the car and pull away. We wave through the window. The rain follows us out of the city but stops by the time we cross Lake Pontchartrain.

Jess says, “You remember Rex last night? Smoking his cigarette in the rain?”

We both laugh.

The drive back doesn’t take long. The road we’re on is well traveled. We’re used to it by now, and before we know it, the weekend is behind us, so too is the storm, the sticky heat, the brooding, the performance, the cramped box. All of that, behind us now.

•••

MATT JONES is a graduate of the University of Alabama MFA program. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, The Atlantic, Post Road, Ruminate, The Journal, and various other publications. More of his work can be found at www.mattjonesfiction.com.

 

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The Stars In The Sky

Photo by Gina Easley

By Jennifer James

I was sitting in the dermatologist’s office, waiting to be seen for what I was convinced was a killer mole. Killer. I couldn’t quite get a full lung full of air, but over the last few months, and several futile visits, my general practitioner had listened to my chest, put me on antibiotics, and assured me I could breathe just fine. After my third visit to her for what was apparently an imaginary ailment, I went on with my life, hoping that she was right, that I could breathe just fine, even though I really, really couldn’t. My oxygen levels were fine, according to the professionals. But those fuckers had missed my malignant mole.

I was determined to live, against all odds, so I bypassed my worthless primary care doctor and took myself straight to the specialist. I waited for forty-five minutes, which was normal for this dermatology practice, I knew. The doctor in this office was notorious for his friendly, long-winded office visits. I’d seen him a time or two before for warts and skin tags—definitely minor issues—and had left the office in in a little under two hours, from check-in to walking out the door. Large medical conglomerates would seizure over the disturbing amount of time this man spent with his patients—often discussing his children’s college plans or the weather, or anything else that crossed his mind. But I knew the guy, and at this point, I just wanted to get what I knew would be the bad news and get on with an aggressive treatment plan.

Dr. Pike bustled into the room like Santa Claus. He was jolly and friendly and happy. He shook my hand and asked why I was here. I took the deepest breath I could manage and showed him the offending, obviously atypical mole on my right wrist. He adjusted his glasses and examined the spot thoughtfully. Too thoughtfully, for my taste. Just say it, I thought. He took off his glasses and looked at me.

“What we’re looking at here is a kind of pigmentation change that comes with age, Mrs. James. It’s normal, nothing wrong with this bit of skin at all.”

“Okay, thank you…” I said shakily. Dr. Pike smiled encouragingly and checked my chart. “So you’re thirty years old, right? Do you have any high risk factors regarding your skin? Because you’re pretty young to be worried about this sort of thing unless you had some specific reason to be concerned.”

I recognized this routine now: it was a kind of variation on the talk my general practitioner had given me about my breathing. The message was essentially, Lady, you’re fine. We’ll check you out because you’re here in front of us, but you might be just a little nuts. This was familiar and increasingly becoming true: I WAS a little nuts.

“No, not really,” I said.

Dr. Pike looked me in the eye and smiled gently. “So … how’s your health otherwise?’

I could feel my mouth turning down and my chest opening up wide. I sobbed and sobbed. I couldn’t make words come out, and all the while, Dr. Pike looked on kindly, passing the tissue box and making reassuring, non-judgmental noises. I loved him for this.

After a while, I blew my nose, and wiped my face. Dr. Pike sat patiently, perched on his little stool with wheels, waiting for me to get my shit together. When I could talk again, I told him, “My mother died. She died almost six months ago. Ever since then, I can’t breathe. And the doctors can’t find anything. But I can’t ever get a big, deep breath and I don’t think I’m ever going to be okay.”

Dr. Pike nodded. “I understand. There’s something inside that breaks when your mom dies. I remember going outside one night not long after I lost my own mother. It was a perfect night, kind of cool, but not cold, and the stars were bright, bright, bright, bright as I’d ever seen them. And I looked up at them and thought: Huh. Just stars. I knew they’d never look the same to me, that I’d lost something so enormous that even the most beautiful starry night meant nothing.” He paused and I don’t remember what I did, but I remember feeling a tremendous lifting, the feeling that finally someone understood how fucked up the world was because my mother had died, that someone spoke my language.

Moving on to actual medicine, he said: “Now, as for your breathing, let’s do this one thing at a time.” He concurred with my general practitioner that it was probably nothing, but also strongly recommended that I find a new doctor. “I believe in the power of negative test results,” he said confidently. “We need to be sure that it’s nothing, and the only way to do that is to test for the things it could be.” He continued talking, lapsing into his signature story-telling mode, telling me all about a friend of his who’d displayed all kinds of horrifying neurological symptoms, had undergone extensive, invasive testing, only to learn that his symptoms were a blip…benign. No underlying, lethal cause. “You need to have some testing,” he said. “Get some answers and then go on.” He didn’t offer any bullshit assurances that everything would be fine, and that I didn’t have anything to worry about—another reason to love the man. I was relieved to be talking to someone who got it: things were fucked and they could get more fucked. Get your shit together as best you can and take a step.

•••

A year earlier, I’d still been nuts but in a much more manageable way. I’d been working at a dead end job as a receptionist. I was looking for a new job and had romanced myself into thinking that if I returned to teaching, I’d finally be happy. I applied and applied and finally found a position in a classroom. The job description was fluid—I’d be an assistant in a classroom, unless a full-time teaching position opened up. I didn’t care; I was excited to be getting out from behind the receptionist’s desk and to be making more than seven dollars an hour.

My husband and I had no children at the time. We’d made some sketchy decisions early in our marriage, beginning with our choice to make his rural hometown our permanent home. It turns out that small hometowns make lovely movie backdrops but don’t provide a robust job market. We started out really poor and managed to become really, really poor. Right before my mom died, we were on the verge of getting our collective shit together. My husband had landed a job with health benefits. I had resumed my education, trying to fashion a career that I didn’t really want from classroom experience and good intentions, and about a month before we found out my mom was sick, I’d started as the director of the infant program at a Montessori school. I was really trying to love it.

My grandmother, Gladys, was an interesting woman. She was cultured and funny and kind. She was also the kind of person who could suck all of the air out of any room she passed through. My parents had divorced about fifteen years earlier and as my grandmother grew older and my mother grew poorer, they combined households. My grandmother moved in. These two women had been the most imminent, consistent presences in my life and even now I have trouble explaining how they got along. Or didn’t. One phrase might be: unconditional love, as in, no matter what, these women never really let go of one another, regardless of distance, circumstance, or the emotions involved. Another phrase might be: toxic codependency, also as in, no matter what, these women never really let go of one another, regardless of distance, circumstance, or the emotions involved. It was quite a mess. Like most families.

It was a cool, September evening in 1998 when my grandmother called. In her throaty alto, she said, “Well, dear, don’t be alarmed, but your mother was admitted to the hospital this evening. She was having just a little trouble breathing. She’s much better now, though! Everything will be fine. But it would be so lovely for her to see you…” I planned to come up the next day after work, leaving the classroom full of babies behind and spending a long weekend with my mother who was, reportedly, “much better.” I would only miss one day of work at my new job and could go see about my mom. It was manageable.

My classroom full of babies was not so manageable. The babies themselves were fine. But I had some serious doubts about my return to the classroom. The business of caring for babies is sacred to me; they are some of the most precious, vulnerable people on the planet. I went into the classroom with the idea that my mission was to care for the children. I had forgotten about their fucking parents. Parents who drove up in their Mercedes to drop off their twelve-month-old with an ear infection. Parents who demanded that their child nap at school, even though the child sobbed through nap time. Parents who dropped their babies so they could go golf. Not that there weren’t lovely parents there, too, parents who came at lunch to breastfeed their babies, parents who took days off of work, just to spend time with their babies, but I wasn’t seeing those folks as clearly. I committed a cardinal sin in teaching: I judged the parents. Now, twenty some years later, a parent myself, I have a little more compassion for everyone involved. At the time, I thought, Jesus. I fucked up again. I need ANOTHER new job.

So when my grandmother called, there was a part of me that was actually relieved, grateful that I would have the coming Friday off from the babies and their whiny-assed parents. I would see my mom and my grandmother, they would annoy me, and I would go back to my life and try to learn to love it as it was, or at least grow into it gracefully. I didn’t feel particularly sad, even. Rather, I had a kind of dysfunctional anticipation of a crisis. “Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out,” wrote Chekhov. I wasn’t very good at the day-to-day-living. A crisis sounded a little bit lovely.

My sister and I talked later that evening too. My sister is four years younger than I am, but many years wiser.

“It’s cancer,” my sister muttered. “You know it’s cancer.”

On my end of the line: “Maybe. You don’t know for sure…” I believed myself, too. My mother was…well, my mother. She had survived all kinds of unlikely, life threatening illnesses, and it seemed silly that life would smack her down at this point. My sister, on the other hand, took the view that it was a fucking miracle life hadn’t smacked her down before this point. It seemed too soon to say.

The cold, hard truth was that my mother had been smoking since she was twelve years old. When I got this phone call, she was fifty-five years old and had just celebrated her birthday with a traditional lobster tail dinner that she just couldn’t eat. That should’ve been a sign, my grandmother said later. At five feet, four inches, my mother weighed probably a hundred pounds. She’d looked suspiciously thin for years, seeming to survive mostly on nicotine and pure sugar, with the occasional navel orange (she always peeled them artfully, leaving the entire skin in one, unbroken spiral) or bowl of rice for variety. This was who my mother was, though. Quirky and kind of depressed, relatively happy to go to bed early most nights with a thick novel, a pack of cigarettes, and a bag of gooey circus peanut candies on her nightstand, in her odd little nest of a bed. There would be too many cats sleeping on her feet and two big dogs flopped on the floor beside the bed (they were too big to fit on the actual bed) and she drifted in and out of sleep fitfully, smoking a cigarette or two during the night in the dark.

The following day, I went to school and explained the situation to the Head of School. She nodded, her big brown eyes concerned. “Of course, take tomorrow,” she said. “Hope your mom is okay; we’ll see you Monday.”

My mom was not okay. I got to the hospital and could see that. My grandmother was lovely in a kind of lethal way; she couldn’t hear much, didn’t want to hear much, and couldn’t believe that anything could be really wrong with her daughter. On the trip from my mother and grandmother’s house to the hospital, my grandmother chatted serenely, telling me about the fluid they drew off my mother’s chest, how she was breathing so much better, and how it was so nice that I’d been able to come this evening; I could see the doctors in the morning and surely they’d figure something out. I nodded and smiled—this was always the best approach with my grandmother.

My mother was in the ICU. Her private cubicle (the only fabulous thing about being gravely ill—you get much better hospital care than the less gravely ill) was lined with monitors. The ubiquitous bag of fluids was hooked up and she wore that tiny oxygen cannula in her nostrils. I suddenly felt everything. The corners of my mouth turned down and an actual sob came out of my mouth. My mother, truly one of the kindest people I’ve known, snapped: “Oh for heaven’s sake. Stop being so dramatic, Peanut.”

There is a scene in the movie, Lawrence of Arabia, when Lawrence allows a match to burn all the way to his fingertips without showing a reaction. When his friend attempts the same trick, it hurts! Lawrence says: “Of course it hurts. The trick is…not minding that it hurts.” This was how my mother lived her life. She swallowed pain as a life mission. She didn’t expect people around her to make a big deal about it—that was incredibly poor form. Which is why she got so mad at my boohooing.

My mother was a complicated person. She was exceedingly generous, funny, and kind-hearted. Once she let a diabetic, homeless man live on our front porch (only on nights when he couldn’t get into the shelter because he was too drunk). When our cat brought her a half-dead mouse, she nursed it back to health and we kept it as a rescue/pet (named Templeton) until spring came and she could let him go without worrying about him freezing to death. When she worked teaching English as a second language to students in downtown Washington, D.C., her car was the only one which remained unvandalized in the church parking lot. To be fair, it was a pretty shitty car, but the real reason my mom’s car stayed intact was that she was a smoker.

When she stepped out to the parking lot to smoke between classes, she’d make conversation with whoever was also out there smoking, which seemed most often to be a group of aimless-looking young men. She would chat amiably, smoking along with the boys, sharing her point of view with such a warm smile that those boys let her say ridiculously cheesy things like: “Oh, for heaven’s sake! You shouldn’t have beat that fellow up. Now—why aren’t you in school?” I never witnessed any of these conversations, but I know her smile and her voice, and I’m certain when she smiled at the guy, he felt like she genuinely cared about him, and was letting him in on a little secret: that he shouldn’t have beat that other dude up and that his ass should be in school! When she scuffed out her butt and tucked it into her pocket or a trashcan (nobody likes a litter bug), she’d wink at him and his friends and say: “Now, boys. You try and stay out of trouble, now, okay?” I don’t think they stayed out of trouble because of her. But her car was never fucked up, either.

The diagnosis was, in fact, cancer. Lung cancer. Advanced lung cancer. Today, I know what that diagnosis means. Then, I had no fucking clue. My mother died five weeks later. In five weeks, and two chemo treatments, she dropped another twenty pounds or so, lost all her hair, and had spongy patches of yeast growing inside her mouth. She was conscious until the last three days of her life, when she slipped into that world between the worlds, the one where morphine and cellular failure meet. One of the hospice workers told us we’d need to start using diapers with her; she died twenty minutes later. None of her family believes that timeline is coincidental—my mother would rather die than wear diapers.

•••

It surprised me how weirdly my mother’s dying fucked me up, what strange ideas fluttered through my brain as she died. For example, I felt compelled to take pictures of my mother while she lay in the funky hospital bed in the den. It wasn’t that she looked otherworldly beautiful or anything at all like that. She was bald and haggard and irritated that death had come to sit on the bed beside her. Even so, I wanted a picture, because I knew that was the last I’d see of her in this life: her frail, bony skeleton wrapped in fragile skin, her breath whispering in and out, in and out, the oxygen pumping, the air purifier purifying, the fan blowing a constant, ridiculous breeze on her face. The nurses had advised keeping a fan blowing toward her, to create the illusion of fresh air, the concept that she actually could breathe. Just so you know, I didn’t actually end up taking pictures of her, I didn’t. But I thought about it a lot.

I didn’t want to wash the sheets after she died. How fucked up is that? Understand, we did wash the sheets. They smelled like yeast and bleach and death. But they smelled like my mother’s death and I didn’t want it gone yet. Not just yet.

The end came way more quickly than we’d thought it would. I kept taking time off from the babies, and each time I’d go back to the classroom, the parents of the babies would say, “Oh, I’m so glad you’re back,” and list everything that had gone wrong while I was away. I tried to quit entirely, and the Head of School said no. If my mother had lived another week, I would have, just never returned. As it was, there was no need. I was free much sooner than I hoped.

When I came back after the funeral, and after I’d written thank you cards to everyone who’d attended, brought casseroles, I was changed, not for better. My first “real” day back in the classroom, I brought in a tasteful (I thought) harvest-themed floral arrangement someone had given me as a condolence offering. The flowers looked authentic and added a nice feel to the room (I thought). The Head of School walked in and lifted her eyebrows. She didn’t say a thing. After she left, one of my co-workers said: she hates fake flowers. I will say that having my mother die helped me with my codependency issues quite a bit. Fuck her, I said. See? What a little thing, right? And at least some of you reading this also hate fake flowers. Which is, under normal circumstances, okay with me. That day, I thought I’d take those fake flowers and fling them right at The Head of School. Fuck her very much.

I couldn’t stand it. I just couldn’t stand my life without my mother in it.

By the time I got to Dr. Pike with my imagined lethal mole, I was undone. I couldn’t breathe, I hated my job, and I wasn’t talking to God. Fuck Him. I broke up with Him after a flukey ice storm killed the power in our area on Christmas Eve. I’d made it through my mother dying, cleaning out her house, tolerating my job, and when I finally got a break, everything got cold and dark, every bullshit metaphor brought to life.

Dr. Pike helped me, though. He heard me. I think losing a parent is like becoming one. People can help you, be sympathetic, be kind. But until you experience it yourself, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. You can’t. It’s another language altogether. And the stars in the sky, they get sketchy. Breathing: also sketchy business. Dr. Pike spoke the language, and in his way, helped me turn back to the living place, a place where maybe the weather wasn’t out to get me, where some jobs just aren’t right, and where maybe, just maybe, the stars would find a way to shine once more.

Finally I could breathe.

•••

JENNIFER JAMES lives with her family in rural Virginia. She writes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, and has been published in Full Grown People as well as Life in 10 Minutes. She has completed a novel and has just begun work on her second one. In her free time, she enjoys reading all kinds of books and discovering new podcasts. Above all, she loves a good story.

Some names have been changed. —ed.

Read more FGP essays by Jennifer James.

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In Plane View

Photo by Gina Easley

By Wendy Fontaine

There are airplane seats in my living room. A row of five, straight-backed, with navy-blue and charcoal upholstery, canvas seatbelts with silver buckles that still shine. They must have come from a big plane, a 747 perhaps, something that flew over international waters. Bulky and awkward, like nothing you’ve ever seen in a Pottery Barn catalog or a Living Spaces commercial, the seats are not my taste. I’d prefer they weren’t in our apartment at all, but they belong to my husband, James, and predate the beginning of our relationship. Over the years, I have tried to ask as few questions as possible about the seats, as if my disinterest could somehow make them fade into the background.

When guests come, the airplane seats are the first thing they see. “Are those from a real plane?” they ask. I roll my eyes. James smirks and nods. The guests search for appropriate responses, which vary from shock to envy, depending upon their gender.

No one ever sits in the seats, but if they did, they’d feel the scratch of polyester against the backs of their thighs. They’d notice a hard metal frame pressing into their shoulder blades. If they closed their eyes, they might hear the deep hum of the engine or the sharp rattle of a beverage cart. They might even feel the bounce of turbulence no longer there.

•••

Fifteen years ago, when he was working as a production assistant on television shows around Los Angeles, James found the airplane seats in a heap of gear outside a studio in the San Fernando Valley. After a show wraps, crewmembers tear down the set, separating scrap materials from furniture and other items that can be reused. The seats were either on their way back to a prop warehouse or bound for the trash. But James and his roommates, who were also working as PAs and stuntmen at the time, snagged the seats and brought them back to their shared, three-bedroom apartment in the city.

The guys, most of whom came to LA from the rugged streets of Boston, were just getting started in the business. They worked long, entry-level shifts and pooled their earnings to cover rent, booze, and cable TV. Back then, much of their furniture came from the curb. A large couch, swayback and gray like an old mule. Kitchen chairs. End tables. Even a futon that would later become my daughter’s bed.

James and his friends put the seats on a wooden riser in their living room to create movie-theater seating, an optimal arrangement for watching Super Bowls and Stanley Cups. A projector transformed the opposite wall into a giant screen. I didn’t know them then, but I imagine them also watching the shows they had been working on at the time, scanning the credits for their own names.

•••

One day, while vacuuming the space around the airplane seats, I see what appears to be a serial number stamped on the back of the chairs, along with a date: Sept. 25, 1992. An internet search of the serial number proves fruitless, but the date makes me smile. That’s the year James and I graduated from high school. We went to the same school in western Maine, though we were hardly friends at the time. He was the captain of the football team who dated the head cheerleader. I was captain of the basketball and field hockey teams. The titles were mostly honorary; I was a hard worker but a lousy athlete. With only sixty kids in our graduating class, we knew each other’s names but never had a single conversation—not that either of us can recall, anyway.

After graduation, he studied advertising at Florida State University, then moved to Los Angeles to find work in show business. Along the way, he was the life of every party, a distinction he earned with excessive drinking and risky decisions.

I wouldn’t know about it until much later, but when he was in his twenties, a drunken car wreck nearly severed James’ right arm just below the shoulder. Doctors said he’d never regain full use of it, but after surgery and physical therapy, he proved them wrong. He even played football again, as a fullback with a semi-pro team that practiced three nights a week and competed on the weekends. More than once, he was the team’s most valuable player.

•••

After high school, I went to the University of Maine and got a degree in journalism. James never married, but I got hitched right away, mostly to escape the paper mill town where we grew up. My first husband was in the military which meant we moved every four years. In each new town, I got a job as a reporter at the local newspaper, covering everything from tedious school board meetings to gruesome homicides. Through work, I found a way to belong.

After ten years of marriage, our daughter Angie was born, and I quit my job to take care of her. While her dad was away on short deployments, she and I went to mommy and me yoga classes, story time at the local library, and swimming lessons for infants at the YMCA. I nursed her and made her baby food from scratch. Our days were smooth and peaceful, easy and predictable. But then the clouds rolled in.

When Angie was two, her father and I split. He had an affair with a woman he had known back in high school, who now had kids of her own. After that, Angie and I left our family home and moved back to the paper mill town, where I got a job bottling pills in the supermarket pharmacy, rented an apartment and filed for divorce. Money was tight, so we furnished our new place with things from yard sales and thrift stores. Mismatched dishes. A faded pink rocking chair. A kitchen table that wobbled, no matter how I attempted to fix it.

After a year of court hearings, the judge granted me full custody of Angie, meaning all the decisions about caring for her were up to me. There were doctors’ appointments and tantrums, nightmares and fevers, potty training and time-outs. I was her mother and her father, never feeling as though I was doing either job well enough. The hardest part, though, was focusing on Angie when my own heart was broken, when I was afraid of what each new day would bring, when I couldn’t imagine a time when things would feel normal again.

Instead of being home with my daughter, making her meals from scratch and teaching her the alphabet, I dropped her off at daycare in the morning and went to the pharmacy to hand out Vicodin and Viagra for eight dollars an hour, then warmed up macaroni and cheese for dinner in the afternoon. Each evening, I bathed her, read her bedtime books, and cuddled her under the covers, wondering if this was it—if this was the life we were meant to live, in this small town, where everything was bumpy and rough. I missed our old life, our sense of stability. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I’d wake up and, just for a moment, forget where we were.

•••

For two years, Angie and I juggled work, daycare, and life in our little rental apartment. We celebrated birthdays and Christmases and made a few friends. But the paper mill town never felt like home. When she was four, we had a yard sale of our own. We sold the dishes and the furniture, then drove south to Boston and boarded a plane bound for Los Angeles.

During my divorce, James and I had begun an email correspondence that turned into friendship. I wrote to him, at first, because I was lonely and talking to adults kept me from going stir crazy. He wrote back, maybe, because his roommates had all moved out and he needed someone to vent to about work. In our emails, we told each other what we had been doing since high school. I shared the details of my breakup and the struggles of parenting. He wrote about the parties, the accident, and the day he decided to quit drinking. I admired his resolve, his self-control, and discipline; he appreciated my tenacity. Our friendship turned into intrigue, and intrigue turned into romance. He started sending Angie and me little gifts, playful things to keep us smiling: a red-and-white cowgirl lunchbox for her, a coffee mug shaped like Buddha for me. Then he sent plane tickets.

The trip marked Angie’s first time on an airplane, and she spent most of the five-hour flight looking out the window at a blanket of clouds, mesmerized by how soft the world looked from high up. I passed the time imagining what things would be like in California and wondering if James could handle being around a demanding preschooler. The visit was a test that I suspected we would fail. It was easy to romanticize a relationship from three thousand miles away. Being together every day might be a different story.

That week, James took us to all the usual tourist spots. The Hollywood sign. Venice Beach. In-N-Out Burger. Angie liked him instantly. She sat next to him at dinner, asked to hold his hand when we crossed streets, and pretended to be his pet dog—her favorite game of make-believe. But it was the quiet evenings at his place that hooked me, when he and Angie curled up on that old swayback couch to watch superhero movies, her forehead resting on the jagged scar along his bicep.

After Angie and I returned to Maine, the paper mill town felt even less like home than it had before. I knew that no matter how hard I worked or how long we stayed, the town would never be where we belonged. James invited us to live with him, and I spent several months waffling about whether moving was the right thing to do—for Angie and for myself. I was afraid of making a huge mistake, of giving up our safe haven. But I also knew that if we didn’t go, if we didn’t at least try, I would always wonder what life might’ve been like for the three of us. So Angie and I had our yard sale and went back to California. For good.

•••

In the years before our arrival, most of James’ curbside treasures had disappeared—taken or disposed of by various roommates as they moved up in the world and moved on, into their own places or in with girlfriends and wives. James had moved up, too; no longer a production assistant on television shows, he had become a computer engineer on blockbuster movie productions, the kind that involve the most famous actors in Hollywood.

The airplane seats remained, though, along with a Scarface poster, the beer-stained carpets and a shelf of half-filled liquor bottles. His party days were behind him. No more drinking, no more reckless behavior. But the bottles and other trappings stayed—reminders that good times can be good, but they can also go bad.

Of course, I had my own attachments. After two years of single parenting, I drew imaginary lines around my daughter and myself. When I went grocery shopping, I bought only the things Angie and I liked. When I cooked, I made enough for two. I kept our laundry and our money separate. At night, I crawled into bed with my daughter instead of the man who would eventually become my husband. Some of it was habit, but most of it was fear. How could I trust someone again, not only with my heart but also with my daughter’s? Sometimes it’s hard to let go of the past, even when you know that letting go is the last step before flying free.

James never questioned my hesitancy or complained about feeling left out. He simply waited to see how things would evolve. Then one day, while he and Angie lounged on the couch, it suddenly became clear: if I kept my guard up, if I continued to hold him at arm’s length, then so would Angie. Love doesn’t live inside imaginary lines. It is big and risky. It is the whole sky or nothing at all.

•••

Now Angie’s ten years old, and James and I are married. In time, he took down the Scarface poster, tossed the liquor-bottle mementos, and replaced the carpets. I learned how to shop and cook for a family of three and started sleeping in my husband’s bed. We bought a new sofa, brown suede with cream stitching, and put that old swayback couch on the curb for someone else.

The airplane seats, however, are still here.

I would love for them to disappear one day, perhaps go to a storage facility or maybe into the trash. But the chances of that happening are slim. James wants to hold onto them, even though they no longer go with the décor.

I understand the seats are part of his past, a part he isn’t ready to relinquish just yet. They hold memories of the fun he had with a particular group of guys and how hard they all worked to make names for themselves. Maybe they also remind him of his retreat from alcohol addiction, when he sharply and decisively changed the trajectory of his life.

If that’s the case, then the seats remind me of something too: that it’s all right to put my flaws in the middle of the room. I can struggle with the past and feel insecure about the future, and James will love me anyway. I can be hesitant and fearful, territorial and overprotective—it won’t matter. Love is also staying in the room with another person’s imperfections. It’s sitting with their undesirable elements without making demands or asking too many questions.

Even though I hate the airplane seats, this apartment feels like home. Angie and I have finally landed where we belong. So I’ll keep the silly seats forever if I have to, if James wants them. I’ll keep dusting them, keep vacuuming around them and dressing them up with throw pillows. I’ll even sit in them for a movie or two, scanning the credits for his name.

•••

WENDY FONTAINE’s work has appeared in Compose Literary Journal, Hippocampus Magazine, Passages North, Readers Digest, River Teeth, the anthology Turning Points: Stories about Choice and Change, and elsewhere. In 2015, she won the Tiferet Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Wendy lives and teaches in Los Angeles and is currently seeking representation for her memoir, Leaves in the Fall. www.wendyfontaine.com

 

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Between the Cow and the Buoy

Photo by Gina Easley

By Charlotte Gullick

2009

The last of my winter unemployment checks came today. Two hundred eight-three dollars. My husband, Dreux, worked one day this month, three last. It’s not his fault—the bed and breakfast where he cooks is newly opened and just not pulling in the customers. The harsh winter storm didn’t help, leaving the town without electricity for two days, us for four. The paying guests scheduled to come, didn’t. He could look for other employment, but his choices are limited: working with the developmentally disabled or busing tables. At the docks, the fishing boats come less and less often, the better catches are elsewhere. A year before, the lumber mill closed down: the last two-hundred fifty employees laid off. While the air above the town became clearer, the pall about its future did not.

I teach at the local community college—every week I am told that I’m lucky, that working there is one of the best possible places in this town of eight thousand. I am lucky—mostly because I have fabulous students and I like to explore the world with them through our English and Creative Writing classes. But, the full time, tenured instructors on that campus teach four classes a semester—I teach five and make a third of what they do. I have no retirement, no benefits, and no office. Rural community colleges across California are faced with an enrollment crisis. While urban two-year schools almost burst, small town colleges beg for students to attend each semester. It wasn’t until today, the second day of the spring semester, that I signed a contract for the term, but the contract isn’t binding: The college has two weeks to cancel classes, if the enrollment doesn’t hold.

I recently did an editing job for a timber faller. It’s a book about high climbers and the big trees—the redwoods that stagger with their height and impossibility. The work is a series of vignettes about what it’s like to work in the woods here. Or what it was like—those jobs are mostly gone. This logger/storyteller once said to me when he was dropping off pages, “This town used to have everything a working man needed. Now, it’s got everything he doesn’t: lattes, bistros, and yoga studios.”

It’s four in the morning and the buoy two miles away mourns its call through the chill air. The Mendocino Coast stuns with its rugged sweep of cliffs and moody, dangerous surf. In the spring, red tails ripple the headwinds while gray whales break the Pacific’s surface with puffs of air. Two miles away, redwoods stand in vibrant dignity.

The buoy sounds at ninety-second intervals, piercing the quiet and fog with an eerie regularity. For every third buoy keen, our neighbor’s cow answers, two pitches lower. Our daughter, Hope, sleeps between Dreux and me. She’s almost three, but after the accident, we’ve kept her with us, close, nested, sheltered. I hold her warm foot, listening to the back and forth of the buoy and the cow. I wonder if we need to move.

•••

When I was eight, my father bought sixty head of cattle that were delivered to the bottom of our dirt road, a half-mile from our rented house. He and my grandfather drove the frightened beasts, and I stood on our front porch, watching the cows herd together as they approached the open pasture gate. Once they stepped inside our fenced valley, they broke apart from each other, spilling over the land with a new earthiness I will never forget: dung and large bodies and damp friendliness.

That night, trying to sleep, the summer air was heavy with the smell and sound and shape of those animals: calls and shifting bulks and snorts. Next to me, my three siblings breathed deeply, each dreaming a separate world I would never know. The cows lowed to each other, filling the darkness with their sound, keeping me awake as I wondered whether Dad and Grandpa’s plan to make it in the cattle business would pan out. Dad’s smile had been so satisfied earlier that evening as he and Grandpa talked of the branding, ear marking, and worming that would need to be done. Maybe this time, they could make it work.

•••

Almost three months ago, my toddler daughter slipped on a tiled bathroom floor at the community college and did the splits. One second she was upright walking toward me, and in the next, she lay in an impossible puzzle. In that instant of impact and torque, her left femur broke in a spiral fracture. She whimpered like an injured puppy. My own heart hammering, I sat to comfort her. She wouldn’t put any weight on the leg and she cried in a horrifying new way, faint and breath half-caught. My stomach churned with the intuitive knowledge that her leg was broken. Bile gathered in my mouth, and my head swirled.

I interrupted the classroom nearby and a friend, an EMT, tried to gauge Hope’s injury. He was almost positive that she couldn’t have broken her leg because she hadn’t fallen, but alarm still fired through me. He had an ice pack in his car, which soothed Hope a bit. I took her home, and laid her on the couch. Even though I covered her with a blanket, she kept shivering. I finally understood: She’s going into shock. I bundled her up and whisked her to the hospital. When the nurse cut away Hope’s pants, the leg sat at a sickening angle, a hematoma building in the thigh. My body waved with shame because I hadn’t come to the ER immediately.

The rural hospital didn’t have anyone on staff capable of dealing with the injury. A quick call determined that the leading orthopedist in the county—thirty-three very curvy miles away, wouldn’t touch her. My two and a half-year-old daughter—this tiny, tiny person—would need to be flown, by helicopter, to Children’s Hospital in Oakland. A doctor eyed me and said, “You won’t be flying with her. She’ll need go into surgery immediately.” My husband was in San Francisco, attending a weekend graduate program for writing. I didn’t want to have to leave my daughter—she was so incredibly vulnerable. I didn’t want to watch the helicopter ascend without me holding her slight hand. Teary, I asked, “What are the risks of transport?” thinking she might die in flight and I wouldn’t be there. The nurse replied, “There are always risks in transport. But if she doesn’t go, she will be disabled for life.” She rushed away.

I tried to take a deep breath, tried to call my husband again on my dying cell phone. The nurse returned. “A helicopter is coming with an extra seat. Can you promise to sit on your hands the entire flight?”

I nodded then—and the five other times I was asked the same by other hospital staff and employees. Yes, I will not touch my daughter if you just let me go with her.

•••

In her sleep, Hope calls out to make it stop. I don’t know if she’s dreaming of the leg break pain; of the fear of being flown through the air in a metal, thumping, whirr; of the terror of not having control. I soothe her. The buoy sounds and the cow answers. Through the darkness, I stare at the ceiling. Two days ago, I called my sister and asked, “You live in the city, right?” I’ve been to her apartment in Brooklyn, the small one she shares with her husband and two cats; I’ve been to her work in Manhattan, followed her through the subway system.

“Yes,” she said slowly, as if maybe I’ve suddenly lost my intelligence, evidenced by stating the obvious.

“And you do okay, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

I paused. “I’m wondering if I can do it, you know, live in the city.” Where the tenured jobs are, where Dreux can find reliable and meaningful work, where we might have health benefits.

“You’ve lived in cities before.”

“Not with a kid.”

My sister remained silent.

I asked her, “Don’t you ever worry about something like Hurricane Katrina happening in New York?” No one on this planet understands like she does the deep fear our mother’s religion planted in us about apocalyptic events. “I mean, here, I know where to find fresh water. In the city, I’m not so sure.”

“I think about it all the time,” she said.

•••

The sixty percent body cast came off after six weeks, and Hope’s recovery is a delight to watch. She’s learning to walk, run, and dance. Yesterday she rode her tricycle down our country road and we stopped to look at the cows, see how their large nostrils expand as they breathe. They sniffed at us, and Hope smiled back. After she studied them, she tried to pedal backwards away from the fence and her leg wasn’t strong enough to do it, so I pulled the tricycle and set her on her course. Her little legs churned and she moved across the dirt, building her confidence again.

If Hope’s accident had happened a week later, we would have had no low-income coverage, and we would face a mountain of medical bills. The helicopter ride itself was over thirty-thousand dollars. My family and I are barely surviving. We have no savings, no investment in a home, no retirement, no inheritance, no access to career networks. What we have is a wealth of landscape, the smell of ocean air, the hush and lull of the sea. I have a graduate degree—shouldn’t I use the opportunity it might afford me to provide her with more stability than I had?

•••

Twelve years after the arrival of his cowboy dreams, my dad rounded up his remaining cattle in order to come up with the earnest money for the property I grew up on. In the moonlight, he herded those now rangy and wild beasts, and browbeat them to the corral. He got the money he needed and traded one dream for another: cowboy for landowner—first time in America for the Gullicks. He died at home fourteen years later, on the land he loved almost as much as his children, without medical care and without hospice. I know that part of his choice to die at home had to do with dignity and being in a familiar place, but a larger part of his decision concerned medical bills. Simply put, dying at home was less expensive. And already there was so much debt.

When he was twelve, his mother sent him north from East Los Angeles to remove him from the violence he was courting. He was “running” with the kids he looked like—Mexican Americans, other young people caught in the politics of identity and poverty we do so well in the United States. A knife fight happened at a dance, then someone’s mother was shot. My grandmother searched inside and decided he’d been safer in the country.

I think about that every day: a mother’s love so great as to send a son away. From the city where both opportunity and ruination circle an individual, depending on their resources and choices. My father fell in love with the landscape of Mendocino County, let that terrain take up residence inside of him as he took up residence upon it.

I love so much of my childhood: the stretch of time a quiet country day gives to a child’s imagination; the purr of bees flirting with apple blossoms; a creek slipping over mossy stones as it works its way to the wider world. I was given the gift of a deep relationship with the elements that sustain us: water, earth, gardens, orchards, clean air. But to offer my daughter the same requires a layer of cushion my husband and I don’t have. Like so many others, we are faced with the choice of country versus city. I feel that binary in my body, a pressing building. Strong enough to break bones.

•••

Dawn has begun to break, the darkness relieved of its burden as the sun creeps toward rising.

So much of me wishes that the beauty of this place was enough to sustain us. If we do move, will Hope remember her first five years filled with towering trees, the open possibility of sky and ocean? Will the landscape of her imagination have had enough time to make roots? I think about my father, rounding up one dream in order to pursue another.

The buoy has stopped, but the cow calls on, lowing a message I don’t yet know how to understand.

•••

CHARLOTTE GULLICK is a novelist, essayist, editor, educator, and Chair of the Creative Writing Department at Austin Community College. In May 2016, she graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with a MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Charlotte’s first novel, By Way of Water, was published by Blue Hen Books/Penguin Putnam, and her nonfiction has appeared in The Rumpus, Brevity, Pembroke, Pithead Chapel, and the LA Review. Her other awards include a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship for Fiction, a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry, a MacDowell Colony Residency, a Ragdale Residency, as well as the Evergreen State College 2012 Teacher Excellence Award. For more information: charlottegullick.com

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