Fashioning a Life

dollhouse — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Melissa Ballard

Only after you’ve had two glasses of wine, and only in a joking way, can you maybe admit to having graduated from fashion school. But, after all this time, you still wonder why on earth you did it.

Maybe because all your friends and your boyfriend had somehow been accepted to college, but you had never even applied, because you were a confused and mediocre high school student, and nobody in your family had gone to college. And you had to do something, for God’s sake.

So, when you were moping over the photos of Lane hope chests in Seventeen, maybe you also saw an ad that said something about “a career in a year” and promised graduates entrée to a number of jobs, including buyer for a department store. You liked your after-school job at a small clothing and gift shop, so you cut out that ad and begged your parents to pay the tuition, if you promised to use your savings to cover your living expenses. They finally agreed, so you signed up for fashion school. And on September 13, 1970, fresh from the suburbs of Cleveland, the trunk of your dad’s palomino beige sedan crammed with your personal possessions, you arrived in downtown Toledo, Ohio.

Fashion school was seventeen courses, thirty hours each, for a total of 510 hours in the classroom. Plus homework. Principles of Buying, Fashion Sketching, Fashion Writing, Business Economics, Color and Design, classes like that. And while you could certainly argue that it was not the Harvard of the Midwest, maybe you liked those courses, worked hard, and got excellent grades, because it was so much smaller than your high school, just fourteen other girls and you, and your teachers were mostly women who wore lots of make-up, and hats and weirdly dressy clothes for a weekday, but were real-live career women.

Of course, there was that mandatory finishing school component of the curriculum that you overlooked in the fine print. Afternoons, during the first semester, you had to take classes like Visual Poise, Wardrobe Styling, Make-up, and Personality. That part may not have gone as well as the morning classes, because you might have been 5’3” on your tallest day, and less than lithe and, even with your contact lenses, your mother’s nickname for you was “Plain Jane.” Also, you liked to think you already had a personality, even if it was not the correct one. However, you did learn such valuable life skills as how to enter a car like a lady: butt-first.

In the afternoon, there was also a Voice and Drama class, and your teacher assigned a speech from Macbeth, the one that starts with “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and to-morrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day,” and ends with, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” You were all supposed to memorize it and be ready to recite it in class, but you refused to do it, claiming it was a waste of your time, but really you were terrified that you wouldn’t be able to do it, and there you’d be, standing in front of everyone, with no words coming out of your mouth. Normally, this was not a problem. You were shy, but you had also learned to make fun of yourself before anyone else did it for you. Somehow, you still passed that course and all the others, too, making you, presumably “finished,” not as in “ruined,” but as in “completed.”

And you stayed, even though you were miserable and scared much of the time. Like that Saturday when you and your roommate were the only ones on the floor of the residential hotel that was being converted to offices and that did not, contrary to the school’s ad, provide onsite adult supervision other than the elderly guard who sat at the front desk in the lobby and may or may not have been there 24/7.

You stayed even after you brought your laundry up that day and were folding it and a strange man appeared in your doorway and you froze, but your rural roommate threw the empty clothesbasket and ran at him screaming, “Get out!” and “Go away!” and finally he did.

Maybe one of the students was twenty-one, or knew someone who was, and so, some evenings, you were able to consume as many whiskey and Seven-Ups at one time as you liked. And you learned that those drinks made you calmer, happier; you felt as though you fit in better and were more like other people, until you had one too many and found yourself kneeling on the tiny white hexagon tiles of the bathroom, releasing the contents of your stomach, then sobbing hysterically about how much you missed your boyfriend and how much you hated fashion school.

But, one sunny day in the spring of that school year, you walked into your friend Karen’s room and heard a voice as plain as your own, but on-key, singing, “My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue.” You picked up the album cover and studied it: Carole King’s face was as plain as your own, with dishwater brown hair like yours but crazy curly. She wore a loose sweater and jeans, and no shoes. It was the opposite of the dress code you’d been obeying for the past seven months. You weren’t entirely sure about this tapestry business, but it seemed like something worth pursuing, and you suspected it had more to do with the books you were reading on the side than anything you were learning at fashion school. Books like The Art of Loving, The Feminine Mystique, The Chosen, Atlas Shrugged (so much longer and duller than The Fountainhead, but necessary somehow, at least then) and, over and over again, anything by Salinger.

Maybe you graduated with honors, which sounds like a joke, but is true, and you gave a speech about character, both of which you had forgotten about until you were going through your mom’s things a year ago and found the program and, neatly folded inside, a typed copy of your speech, with the key phrases underlined twice, in pencil, so you’d remember to emphasize them.

Maybe you stayed in Toledo and got an apartment with your fashion school roommate. You worked at a newly opened clothing store for Juniors in a newly opened mall, where one of your former teachers was the manager. You did not drive or own a car, and the mall was five and a half miles from your apartment, the bus situation was iffy, and you worked some evenings, so you sometimes got a ride home from work on the back of the assistant manager’s boyfriend’s motorcycle.

In your free time you read, smoked pot, drank, took muscle relaxers and, once, over the counter diet pills. The latter made you really peppy and not at all hungry, until you got stomach pains so bad you doubled over, and after those stopped, you walked across the mall to the bakery, where you ate too many cinnamon rolls and gulped white milk from a small, waxed carton.

You grew tired of spending your work shifts standing in the front of the maroon-carpeted, rough-wood-paneled Juniors’ store, wearing hot pants, and folding and refolding tops, while trying to strike up awkward conversations with people who walked by, so maybe you could lure them inside to buy something.

Once, after the district manager said you weren’t trying hard enough, you marched up to a woman who was browsing the sale rack, guided her to the new rabbit fur jackets, and convinced her she deserved to buy one for herself. You felt your lunch churning in your stomach as you stood behind the counter and watched her slowly pull wrinkled singles from her purse and then the pockets of her jeans, as she tried to qualify for layaway. When she finished, you fought the urge to push the money back to her, pat her hand, and tell her to go buy something practical. Maybe that was when you decided to fashion a life some other way.

Now, you are finally able to bear the thought of going back. The school has closed, but you stand outside the now-historic hotel where you lived forty-three years ago. As you look up at the fourth floor windows, you remember a night when you’d had just enough to drink so you were relaxed but not sick or weepy. You ended up, fully clothed, in a waterless bathtub with several of your classmates. You were all singing, though you’ve forgotten the song. Without a doubt, the cover of The Mamas and the Papas’ If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears, an album you had listened to over and over again during high school, inspired you.

You look down the street at the newly built Mud Hens’ stadium, and you remember Mondays, after your classes were over, when you and your roommate walked in that direction to the meat cutting school that has since been torn down, where you carefully chose a pork chop or some thin sheets of veal for your dinner that night. And after you cleaned up a corner of the filthy, shared kitchen with its limp heads of iceberg lettuce, shriveled apples, and cartons of curdled milk, you cooked that meat along with frozen vegetables and Rice-a-Roni, the latter to make you feel as though you were living somewhere more exotic than Toledo, Ohio.

As you turn the corner to check out the front entrance of the hotel, you think of a guy you dated during your “I’ll go out with pretty much anyone who asks me because my boyfriend is 204 miles away and increasingly absent” phase. This date drove a red Corvette he loved too much to leave downtown unattended, so you waited for him on the corner of Superior and Jefferson. You stood alone on a city street, after dark, no phone booth nearby, one of the many chances you took because you did not yet understand the word “mortal.”

And, finally, you remember that you eventually substituted your Glamour subscription for one for the new Ms. magazine, and you proudly wore flannel shirts and faded, patched jeans to your college classes. You got married, earned two degrees, had a baby, and ended up working with children and, later, teaching college students.

Maybe now you can finally give your eighteen-year-old self a break. Accept that, while it might have been a good fit for someone else, fashion school mostly helped you learn what you did not want, but maybe that’s a big deal, especially when you’re young.

•••

MELISSA BALLARD studied fashion merchandising, worked retail, and was a bank teller and a public school camp counselor before attending college. She has since worked as a speech-language pathologist and a college instructor. Melissa has written essays for Brevity, Gravel, JMWW, and other publications.

The Population of Me

By Jody Mace

For most of my life you’ve been the size of walnuts. Nuts and other produce are standard measurements for small bodily organs and glands. The prostate gland is also the size of a walnut, but by the time a man is forty sometimes it’s as big as an apricot. The pituitary gland is the size of a pea. Whereas we measure hail by sports balls. When hail gets to be the size of golf balls that’s when it starts to get serious. Someone’s going to take a picture of that hail.

When I was born, stored inside the two of you, ovaries, was half the genetic material for a million people. That’s about the population of San Jose, California. I’ve never been to San Jose, but I’m imagining it populated solely by those people, the potential humans whose blueprints you harbored. Tall men and short women. Dark-haired, with poor eyesight. If I were thinking of starting a business in that alternate San Jose, it would be an optical shop. There wouldn’t be a lot of audience participation at concerts, as my people don’t like to draw attention to themselves, but the shows would be well attended. The population would have to pay special attention to sunscreen. It would be a snarky San Jose.

But amid all those brown-eyed wallflowers, maybe there would be a few blonde-haired, blue-eyed standouts. They would be the product of long-forgotten recessive genes that give them the ability and inclination to be cheerleaders or to complete layups in a graceful fashion.

Those million people, though? They’re only a fraction of the story. When I was a fetus, you held seven million eggs follicles. That’s the population of New York City, minus the Bronx. But to be brutally honest, most of those potential people didn’t have a lot of, well, potential. So you performed a culling, keeping only the most promising million egg follicles. And of those million, throughout my lifetime, maybe 500 will get even a shot at the big show.

I think of my San Jose with affection, all those ghost people, the artists, the bricklayers, the teachers, the petty thieves, the bureaucrats, the scientists. The odds were against them, were against all of us. But we made it. How can we ever look at another human being without a sense of wonder? Every person who takes a breath has scaled the Kilimanjaro of biology, has won the Powerball and is standing there with that big check and the shit-eating grin, or should be. We should be embracing each other as comrades, as survivors. Just showing up on Earth at all means we’re winners.

I know we can’t always get along. We need to argue about important things like the environment and the economy. We also need to argue about things that don’t matter, like the Oxford Comma and whether leggings are pants, because written into our blueprints are brains that want to make sense of things, that want to nail down the rules. Also written into our blueprints is the desire to have the last word.

But still, every so often I meet someone and I’m struck by the unlikelihood that I exist and that she exists and that we’re in the same place, having a conversation, and we understand the words that the other says. And I feel a connection to her. When I read about a crime, I sometimes think about both the perpetrator and the victim and feel an almost unbearable sadness that there are perpetrators and victims, after all the work that was done behind the scenes, within the warm, dark factory of the human body, to bring them into the world. I think about my ghost San Jose, and all the other ghost San Joses, and about how we’re the ones who made it into the outside world. We should be a little gentler with each other. We should be gentler with ourselves.

But back to you, ovaries. Of those million egg follicles you kept in safe keeping for me, two of them became living, breathing people. There’s no mystery like that of a newborn baby. I never saw my job as molding my children, but more as letting their mysteries unfold. Deep in the genetic makeup of my son were instructions to curl his toes under his feet when he sits, like one of his uncles does. How far back does that go? Maybe five hundred thousand years ago there was a Homo heidelbergensis sitting on a rock in what would eventually be Germany, sharpening a stone point for a spear, with his toes curled under his feet.

Etched somewhere in the DNA of those two well-timed eggs were determination, a love of music, sharp wits, and a great capacity for kindness. Also (between the two of them, not naming names) stubbornness, perfectionism, a habit of telling jokes at the wrong time, and difficulty with time management. You did your part and I’ve tried to do my part. I tried to help them find their paths, but to also do a lot of staying out of their way so that they could become who they actually were and not who I imagined they might be. I didn’t do much, but I think I didn’t mess up your hard work. They’re adult and almost adult, and so far, so good.

I’m grateful that these are the two I got, although I guess that I’d feel the same if I’d ended up with two of the ghost children in San Jose instead. I know I’m anthropomorphizing you way too much, ovaries, but you did a good job and I appreciate it.

Of course, you’re only half the story. Testes are nothing to sneeze at either. They stay busy, cranking out genetic material on an as-needed basis, at an incomprehensible rate, like 1,500 sperm cells a second. It’s survival of the fittest when it comes to sperm, and the culling is even more cut-throat than that of the egg follicles. In heat after heat in the race for life, almost all of them lose. Forget about my San Jose or even my New York City without The Bronx. We’re talking twice the population of the earth every month. You, ovaries, are the students who prepared ahead of time. You read the syllabus and did the assignments the first week of class, and then just waited for the due dates. Testes are the students who goofed off all semester and then crammed the night of the test and still pulled off a pretty good grade. But don’t resent the testes. It takes all kinds.

So, with all this talk of eggs and children I want to point out that I’m much more than a mother. I’m a writer, I understand at least ninety percent of the rules of football, and I’m a highly competent parallel parker. Reproduction is only one of many facets of me. But you, ovaries, are unabashed in your single-mindedness. Everything you do is to advance the cause of extending my genetic legacy. I’m going to tell you something, but I think you know it already, if you’re really honest with yourself: no more eggs will become people. For a while now, you’ve been acting as if nothing has changed, but really you’ve just been going through the motions, like a bookkeeper in an abandoned office. There’s no new business, nobody’s asking for the report, nobody’s reading your emails, but you’ve still been keeping the books month after month.

At some point, though, your job will be done. Remember when you were the size of a walnut? Ligaments strained under the weight of the future generations within you. But eventually you’ll be the size of an almond. I wonder what size nut you are now. A pistachio? Or maybe a cashew?

There’s not too much plot to our story, and that’s a good thing. You haven’t been stricken with any diseases or major dysfunctions, although there’s still time, I guess. Most likely one of my organs will eventually do me in, but sentimentally, I hope it’s not you. You’re my connection to the future and my link to the past. Just about every other part of my body could, theoretically, be swapped out for someone else’s, or replaced by a machine. They just have their jobs to do. My heart pumps blood, my kidneys clean that blood and my lungs supply that blood with oxygen, but they don’t do their job differently from anyone else’s heart, kidneys, or lungs. But you took pieces of me, of my mother, of my grandmother, of my great-grandfather, and offered them as possibilities to the future. You know the secrets of who I am and who I could have been. I’d like you to be with me until the end, like two old friends, side by side in rocking chairs, sitting quietly. They know each other so well that they don’t have to say a word.

•••

JODY MACE is a freelance writer living in North Carolina. Her essays have appeared in O Magazine, Brain, Child, The Washington Post, and many other publications, as well as several anthologies. Her website is jodymace.com. She publishes the website Charlotte on the Cheap in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is a regular contributor to Full Grown People.

Read more FGP essays by Jody Mace.

Violets, Boxes, and Stars

By Sara Bir

The sight of demure violets and shaggy dandelions against the deep green of recently mowed grass has always delighted you. Normally you don’t like the combination of yellow and purple or yellow and green, because you hate team sports and those eye-searing pairings are often team colors, spotted on high school basketball jerseys or the itchy polyester cling of cheerleading uniforms. But in the context of spring, you love it, those three colors coming together for a few short weeks, radiant under the still-shocking intensity of midday sunlight. It calls to mind a suburban idyll, those violets and dandelions asserting themselves against an herbicide-drenched carpet of lawn.

But it is night now and you are looking at your phone, even though you’ve vowed to spend less time looking at your phone, and one of the feeds of text on it alerts you that a cookbook writer you admire just made violet syrup. It excites you, the very sound of it. Violet syrup. You imagine the violet syrup in a dainty pressed-glass jar, illuminated like an isolated shard of sacred stained glass in the path of an afternoon sunbeam, high on the shelf of a shabby-chic hutch. It calls to mind tea parties and Anne of Green Gables, harkening back to an age before phones that offer tiny visual enticements of violet syrup in the first place.

In your house there are all sorts of things to do, things that get pushed aside because of your job, which is to arrange little black symbols in lines against glowing white screen. It is called editing. The things you edit are lists about food, and you correct the mistakes in these lists because you’ve had enough jobs cooking food to spot misinformation quickly. You know what food does, even though your editing job consumes enough of your time that you now resort to serving boxes of bunny-shaped macaroni and cheese for dinner more often than you are comfortable with.

You do this editing from home, because that’s where the screen is, and your daughter often sees you scowling intently at it, and the magnetic power it holds over you infuriates her. You try very hard to limit her own exposure to glowing screens, both large and small, and yet there you are all day, tapping away at buttons as she implores you to draw with her or listen to her rambling preschooler stories. You want to give yourself fully to those stories, but the lingering demands of unresolved symbol-arranging pulls you away. Her job is to go to daycare, where she can play with other kids her age and build up her social skills so you can be at peace with your screen and your keys.

Sometimes you need a break from editing, so you switch to a different screen for a bit and click on little boxes and stars under photos of babies and dogs. You didn’t click on the star under the violet syrup on your phone. Is this worth a star? What does one do with violet syrup?

You try to shove the violet syrup to the back of your brain, but the violets do not give up on you. They appear all over, suddenly, in low-lying mobs: in the green strip of medians, along the path in the woods where you walk the dog. They grow in clusters, making pinpricks of color at the base of stop signs and between the cracks in the sidewalk. They soothe and disrupt you, because they are just another thing that you won’t get to. If you don’t pick the violets and make them into syrup, you’ll forget about how the purple and the green of violets make you feel.

You go with your daughter to a park without your phone so you can be somewhere and not really think about stars and boxes, and she runs off and then returns, bearing a fistful of white violets collected indelicately in her small hands. “For you, Mama,” she says. White violets? Was that one of Elizabeth Taylor’s perfumes?

The white violets do it. After a whole week confronting their quiet menace, you surrender. It’s Friday and you have deadlines. You are alone at home, busy editing inside and it’s glorious outside and you evict yourself from your dining room-cum-office. You close up the screen and grab a mixing bowl and go to your front yard, which, despite its minimal lawn, is infested with violets. You squat down, and you pick.

And you pick. One violet, two violets, three violets. You need a murder of violets build up in the bowl. You think of saffron, collected from the stamens of tiny crocuses, and consider how ill-suited you would be for the life of a saffron harvester, since after five minutes you are ready to quit this violet-picking business. You cannot give up. You do not give up.

The violet syrup recipe on your phone says to gather three handfuls of violets. You succeed, and you take a close-up picture of the bowl of violets with your phone, and you think about sharing this picture so other people—friends, kind-of friends, vaporous friends—can click on a box or star to agree with you about how great your life is, this life of carefree front-yard foraging. But you look at the real violets and then the violets on your phone, and you notice that they look nothing alike. Your phone violets are blue-ish and stiff and cool, and your real violets are a vibrant violet-purple, and the shiny metal bowl is warm from sitting on your lap. You delete the photo.

You retreat inside, to the kitchen, to separate the tender petals from their green bases that hold them together (a part of their anatomy called, adorably, the pip). So many small flowers, so many pips to maneuver around. Hundreds. Steeping the pips with the petals would make the resulting syrup bitter and to skip it would be to negate the already frivolous work you’ve invested so far. This is exactly the sort of thing you’d love to recruit your daughter for, but pulling petals away from pips requires more finesse than her unruly five-year-old fingers can muster. And so you do it by yourself, outsourcing the supervision of your daughter so you can blow off work and pluck itty-bitty flowers apart for making an essentially useless condiment.

It occurs to you that you should probably taste a violet before you go through with this. For all of the wildflower’s loveliness, its fragrance and flavor is that of the most bland lettuce ever, and you don’t imagine exposure to heat doing it any favors, but by now you’ve decided that making violet syrup will fill some hole in your life that needs to be filled. Even if you are just filling it with lettuce-flavored simple syrup.

Building up a critical mass of violet petals feels Sisyphean, absurd, impossible. Many times in your life, you have repeated insignificant tasks. You pumped the handle of the hopper and squirted a blob of Bavarian cream inside the donut. You stripped away the stranger’s slept-on sheets and unfurled a fresh sheet for a new stranger to sleep on. You took the rectangle of plastic from the customer, slid it through the reader, and made small talk as they paid for their pig-shaped corncob holders or glittery pink silicone spatula.

Do you receive our catalog?

Would you like a bag for this?

Enjoy your day!

You took the rectangle of plastic from someone else and slid it through the reader, and then another rectangle from another person, and then another.

A good place to eat around here? What do you like?

That meat grinder’s aluminum, so I don’t recommend putting it in the dishwasher.

Caribbean is my favorite Le Creuset color, too.

Your favorite Le Creuset color is actually Flame. The violets are tedious, still. Twenty minutes in, you have a pint of pip-free petals, not nearly the quart you need for the syrup. Screw it. You instead opt to make violet sugar, which requires only one handful of petals and one cup of granulated sugar.

It’s the big dirty secret of foraging that, with enough refined sugar, all things are possible. Only a few centuries ago, it was an expensive luxury. Crews of African slaves labored around the clock on Caribbean plantations to placate white people’s hunger for the laser-like precision of white sugar sweetness. On those islands that inspired a Le Creuset marketing expert to name a soothing shade of turquoise blue after their waters, there was a constant need for boatloads of new slaves, because they died before they got around to having children. Some fell into the boiling vats of cane juice, and some bled to death after getting their limbs caught in the rollers that pressed the cane, but most were simply worked to the point where they collapsed and never got up again.

Sugar is commonplace now, unavoidable. It infiltrates the snacks your daughter eats at daycare, the Nutri-Grain Bars and Fruit Roll-Ups. Now, the ability to afford eschewing sugar is a sign of membership in the upper class. Your white sugar, though, will not be white. After this, it will be violet.

A few blitzes in the food processor and that’s it. It tastes like regular sugar and looks like wet purple sand. To give it a boost, you add a grating of Meyer lemon zest, but it’s still not punchy enough.

You look at the windowsill over your kitchen sink and spy a vanilla bean pod. Of course you always air-dry the hulls of scraped-out beans after the majority of their flavor has been sucked into custards and compotes. They cost about a hundred dollars a pound and are actually the cured seed pods of a specific orchid, one that’s pollinated by hand a hemisphere away. The producers of these seed pods sometimes use a needle to prick a unique brand on them, just as a cattle rancher would, so the beans can be traced back should a vanilla seed pod rustler come to plunder the crop. Sometimes, before eviscerating them with a paring knife, you examine vanilla beans and you spy the tattoos, looking like leathery runes from another age, and you imagine having to prick thousands of still-green seed pods on orchid vines.

You realize you now have a small stockpile of dried vanilla bean hulls, and you grind them to several tablespoons of fine brown dust in your spice grinder, and you add a fat pinch of this dust to your violet sugar, and it does the trick. They’re kindred spirits, these two esoteric floral essences.

You retrieve your child from daycare, and you both return home to a big bowl of intact violet blossoms, ones that were not massacred into sugar, and you give this bowl to your daughter and send her to the yard and say, “Do you want to play with these?” She sprinkles the violets on the sidewalk and scatters decapitated dandelions and mangled clumps of grass among them, announcing, “I made a store!” and you approve.

The violet sugar is in a jar on the counter. It is subdued in color and soothing to look at, nothing at all like the cartoonish hues of purchased decorating sugar that you sprinkle on cutout cookies, and you just leave it there, even though you have no immediate plans to bake anything. Maybe you will divide it among smaller jars and give it to a few of your friends, the ones who appreciate things like the glancing presence of violets. The violet sugar means you are not entirely a useless and shallow person. You think about it and think about it and then sit and tap on keys and sort those feelings out, and then there it is, Violets, Boxes, and Stars, a few teasing lines on the screen of a phone, and you tap on them, and see this.

•••

SARA BIR is a regular contributor to Full Grown People. She lives in Ohio.

Read more FGP essays by Sara Bir.

Picking Sides

By Amy E. Robillard

We’d talked about going to the German restaurant in Gibson City for years. Well, my friends had talked about it and I’d played along, neither enthusiastically nor unenthusiastically. When I thought of German food, what came to mind was the German restaurant we went to in high school as part of the German class field trip. I didn’t love it. Sausage and schnitzel don’t rate high on my list, I guess. But then Elise reminded me about strudel. Who doesn’t love a good strudel?

So the six of us—Chris and Christy, Elise and Jeremy, and Steve and I—all drove the forty-five minutes through the cornfields of Illinois one Saturday night to give it a try. I’d been hearing wonderful things about Bayern Stube for more than ten years now, and Steve loves sausage. Oh, does he love sausage. He’d studied the online menu for days and he knew just what he wanted: the huge platter of assorted sausages.

We’re seated at a huge table in the very back room, past the rooms decorated in the dark tones we’d come to associate with German-themed anything. This room is too brightly lit and feels more like a banquet room. It’s decorated—if you can call it that—with both parts of and entire dead animals. A deer head here, an entire turkey splayed out and flattened onto the wall over there. Antlers. Bearskins. “Do you get the sense that Grandpa went a little nuts decorating this room?” Jeremy asks. But only Elise and I can hear him because the table is so big and the chairs so wide and the room so loud that conversation is limited to those sitting closest to us. There’s a party of six at a round table behind us, a party of probably ten at the table next to us, and a party of five or so plus a toddler over there in the corner.

The waitresses are wearing dirndl dresses with the gathered white blouse and it’s hard not to notice how prominent their breasts are. It’s like the German version of Hooters. Our waitress takes our drink orders and disappears for a half hour. A half hour. We beg a waiter for water. It arrives only after our drinks. Steam is coming out of Steve’s ears and I’m beginning to feel the stress of his frustration. I try to make him laugh. We joke that we’d get up and leave except that this is the only restaurant in town.

We study the menu. I’m still not quite sure what a schnitzel is, but the one with apples and gruyere cheese on top sounds good. The Bismarck. We watch our waitress deliver a tray full of drinks to the table of six behind us. We salivate. “I’m feeling a little parched,” I say, smacking my lips together. I tell them all about our plans to go on vacation with the dogs up to Door County in June. We’ll be staying at a dog-friendly inn right on the lake and, as part of the “Hot Dog” package, we’ll get a gift card to a local dog-friendly restaurant whose selling points include a doggy menu. It kills me to imagine Wrigley and Essay sitting at a table with us, looking over the menu, deciding what they’re in the mood for. Yes, we’d like four of everything, please, says Wrigley to the waiter. “They’ll probably be served before we are,” someone says.

At last, our drinks arrive. Steve’s full liter of beer is in a huge glass stein and he drinks it very quickly. Mine is in a smaller glass stein and not nearly as impressive looking. Soon our waters arrive and we order. We’re in it for the long haul, it seems, so we’d better get comfortable. These chairs. They’re huge and hard and the baby over in the corner cries every now and then, a sound that grates on some of our nerves. In order to hear each other, we have to practically shout and still some of us are lost in our own conversations.

I come from a long line of loud people. My mother’s sneezes could wake the dead and her laughter could be heard up the street. In nearly every job that I’ve ever had, my loud laugh has been the subject of attention, both good and bad, but mostly good. When I move my office at school from one in a long hallway of colleagues to a much bigger but more remote one, my colleagues tell me how they miss hearing me laugh.

Our food arrives to much fanfare. We’re hungry. We need another round of drinks. One of the tables behind us clears out, making the toddler’s cries more prominent. Midway through our meal, a woman from the toddler table comes over to our table, and I wish I could describe better what happened but I couldn’t look at her and only Jeremy and Elise and Christy and I heard her ask me to please stop laughing because every time I laugh it scares the toddler and she starts crying. I can’t look at her. Jeremy doesn’t look at her. I probably set my lips tight together and nod. Later I learn that Christy gives her the stink eye. I don’t know what we say to her, if anything, to get her to leave, but she’s apologizing as she’s asking me to stop being so loud. Steve doesn’t hear her and we have to report to him and Chris what just happened. I’m mortified. I try to summon anger as my friends respond with outrage as they process what just happened.

“Why isn’t that baby home in bed?”

“It’s clear who runs the show in that household. Baby gets what Baby wants.”

“A kid who’s afraid of laughter. Christ.”

“You are not too loud. I love your laugh.”

“Who does that?”

Steve, realizing what’s happened, says in their general direction, “We’re too loud?”

I want the subject to change. I’m mortified and all I can think about is how I couldn’t even look at her when she was talking directly to me. But my friends continue defending me and I almost can’t bear it. Because I can see the woman’s point. Almost too easily, I slip from my own perspective into hers and I imagine that if I were at a restaurant with my toddler and there was a woman at a nearby table whose laugh was particularly loud, I, too, might ask her if she could perhaps be a bit quieter. Maybe I would have done it differently, more kindly perhaps, but I couldn’t inhabit my own position, feel my own anger and self-righteousness for more than a minute or two before shifting to empathy for her position.

We’re a culture concerned with empathy these days, the popular sentiment being that we don’t have enough of it. But having too much of it and accessing it too quickly can be as destructive as not having any.

Christy asks me what I would have said if I’d been able.

“Probably something along the lines of ‘Fuck you.’”

“You should’ve,” she says.

Our table goes quiet for a little bit as we all absorb what’s happened. I remind my friends of the time that another friend of ours, sitting next to me at patio table on a summer day, got up and moved to another chair after dramatically covering his ear with his hand in response to my laugh.

“Well,” says Jeremy. “This puts a damper on the evening.”

Steve is upset that he didn’t realize what was happening when it was happening because he would’ve defended me better, he says.

I often tell my rhetoric students that once I’m done with them, they’ll never be able to see the world the same way. I tell them that I’m out to ruin their lives. Experiences they’d never thought twice about would become fodder for analysis, and they’d recognize dominant ideology everywhere they turned. As my friends rushed to my defense, I wanted the subject to change because I kept thinking that if they’d been sitting at the table with the toddler, they’d be rushing to the mother’s defense just as vehemently. And they would’ve been very good at it. Their defense of me, I couldn’t help but think, was so obviously biased.

And then, a few days later, telling the story to another friend, I found myself saying that it’s not as though I would’ve wanted the opposite situation: to be called out like that and to have my friends agree with the woman. Yeah, Amy, you’re way too loud. We’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. Could you please just stop laughing?

That would’ve been a nightmare.

A few more days later and now I think I get it. It’s never just about what we think it’s about.

When I was a kid, my older sister abused me. She hit me and insulted me and told my friends how stupid and fat I was. She told me to shut up when I sneezed. Margie’s bedroom was next to mine, and the house was configured so that to get to her room, she had to go through mine—just a few steps, but enough to make me feel like I could never really shut the door or shut her out. My door was always open.

Bedtime. Margie walks through to her room. “You little shit. You’re dead.”

Middle of the night. Margie walks back through to the one bathroom in the house. “Little fucker. Fat shit.”

Back to her room. “Skank.”

Morning. “You’re dead, you little shit.”

And so it went, with our mother doing nothing to stop it. I always had the sense that Ma didn’t believe me when I told her about Margie hitting me, giving me bloody noses. But now I think that she couldn’t bear to see it and so she just didn’t. She looked away. She told me to stay away from her. She made it about me, what I was doing or not doing.

When my friends sought every possible way to defend me, to protect me from the shame they knew I’d probably eventually be feeling, they were doing what my mother never did, and I didn’t know how to accept it. I just wanted to change the subject.

I never got my strudel. They had cherry or apple/raisin. Steve and I were going to share dessert, but he doesn’t like cherry and I didn’t want raisins in my apple strudel. Instead we passed around a piece of black forest cake and when the family with the toddler left, Steve said to them, in his most sarcastic voice, “Have a nice night.”

•••

AMY E. ROBILLARD is an associate professor of writing and rhetoric at Illinois State University, where her favorite course to teach—the one on the personal essay—garners the most enthusiastic responses from students. She and her husband are the guardians of two very special mutts, one named Wrigley and one named Essay. Her work has also appeared on The Rumpus.

In the Chair; Change, Change, Change

surprised doll — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Marcia Aldrich

A friend who I hadn’t seen in about a decade visited last weekend. Pat has been a Change Artist in her professional life, taking on and then shedding many careers, and now in her current job she gives workshops on Change Management, a subject she has mastered and I have flunked.

This week when I learned that two walnut trees, fixtures in my back yard, must be cut down because they’re touching wires, I almost cried. Over breakfast, she quoted Toffler from Future Shock: “The illiterate of the 21^st Century will not be those who cannot read or write. The illiterate of the 21^st Century will be those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” I nodded along—this assessment sounded like good advice for more than just professional development. But part of me resisted—I’m recalcitrant, someone who instinctually resists guidance and the newest packaged wisdom about what’s good for me. What did it mean to learn, unlearn, and relearn? I seem to be the sort of person who needs to learn again what I already know, not something new as in for the first time, as much as learning something again. Does that qualify as relearning?

I imagine you shaking your head as my friend Pat did and saying, that’s a sad thing. And you might be right, but our discussion made me think about a recent experience in which I needed to learn what I thought I knew.

•••

I had thought at this stage in my life when I’ve made such progress overcoming my unruly impulses that I would never have this experience again. At the very least, I’d make new mistakes, live through fresh disasters, but I wouldn’t repeat the old disasters like a pack donkey who takes one trail and one trail only even though it’s rocky as hell. The disaster I am referring to is none other than a train wreck of a haircut.

Early in life, they were engineered by my mother, and then later, they were self-inflicted and these are the worst kind—don’t you think?—the kind you can’t blame on anyone else but yourself. You can’t point the finger at your mother; you can only point the finger at yourself and wonder what came over you, what secret currents were fermenting in your little brain that erupted when you took your seat in some hairdresser’s chair and instructed them to do something radical to your hair. Perhaps you would dismiss changes in hair as style and not substance, but I would disagree. Hair matters; when a woman wants a change in her life, she often starts with her hair.

And so it was that I found myself in Sunshine’s chair in front of the big mirror that doesn’t reflect back to you who you’d like to be, but who you are. And yes, the woman who cuts my hair is named Sunshine. It isn’t her birth name. She gave herself that name when she came of age and was charting a very different course for her life than the one she had barely survived. She’s been cutting my hair for fifteen years. We’ve been adventurous, we’ve tried out some cuts and colors that weren’t as becoming as we had hoped; sometimes I’ve left feeling a tad deflated but mostly I’ve been struck that Sunshine saw just what I had been wanting to go forward. Until this last time, I’ve never gotten into my car and slumped over the steering wheel wondering if I could go on, wondering whether I had the will to turn the ignition on and ease my car back into the flow of traffic.

How was I going to return to work and face my coworkers and students who are gifted panelists on the runway of life’s mistakes? How, later in the evening, if I survived the afternoon, would I face my neighbors? I saw my day, post haircut, stretched out before me in one long extravaganza of shame.

Until that noon in Sunshine’s chair, I had medium length hair—a long, loose updated shag that tended towards the messy and wild. As a dedicated swimmer, I tend not to comb my hair after my swim and instead tousle it on the run. I don’t want to be one of those women who swim for thirty minutes and then spend sixty minutes fixing their hair and make-up before they emerge from the locker room. As Raymond Carver advised—get in and get out fast. Like him, I don’t like to linger or fuss. In the days running up to my appointment, my hair felt increasingly heavy. By the time the day arrived, the feeling of gravity was killing me.

When I plopped into the barbershop chair, its cracked leather cushion sighed. I found myself grabbing bunches of my hair and saying to Sunshine in a slightly accusatory manner, Look at this unruly mess! And indeed, when I pulled my hair this way and that, scrunching it up and away from my scalp, I did make a wild spectacle of myself. It is one thing to look stylishly disheveled and another to look like a banshee. I was trending towards the banshee. I had entered Studio 107 planning to ask for my usual, a trim. I wasn’t thinking, let’s do a radical, mind-blowing cut. I was going to make a modest proposal. What was unleashed when I settled into the chair? Little did I realize something larger was motivating my agitation and that I was pursuing my own winding path.

Here’s the thing about the relationship between hairdresser and hair possessor: the power between them is unequal. And the chair, even if you are sitting in it, belongs to the hairdresser. It is hers; she just allows you to sit in it temporarily. I know all this and usually I proceed with caution, if not trepidation. Yesterday, if I had paused and collected myself, I would have realized that my comments coupled with my gestures gave Sunshine a clear opening to interpret what she thought were my real desires. And that’s what she did. She believed my antics were saying I don’t just want my usual trim; I want you to hack the hair from my head like a mother fucker. And Sunshine, being the bold person that she is, did just that. It was quick and dirty and I hardly knew what happened. Did I mention that most of Sunshine’s skin, except for her face, is covered with a tattoo of many colors? Her hair is never the same color or style from appointment to appointment. It doesn’t resemble hair you see on the street or in the work place. It is elaborately constructed of a design that can’t be repeated. Therefore, I do not look to Sunshine for a restrained approach to hair.

Still the question remains—why didn’t I stop her? Having unleashed the fury in her, why didn’t I reach up and grab her arm, the one with the sensational scissors, or open my mouth and say, Wait! Why did I sit passively and mutely in the chair, chunks of my hair drifting down over my face and arms and floating onto the parquet floor? Did I want Sunshine to think I still had risky behavior running in my veins? Did I secretly want Sunshine to do what I lacked the nerve to do myself? Sometimes we forget and must be reminded of this fact: hairdressers are powerful. They are among the most powerful women in the world and other women live in fear of them and place their happiness in their hands. Yesterday I cared more about what Sunshine thought of me than I cared about my hair. A challenge had been laid down, and I’d better see it through.

When the hacking was over, we both looked in the mirror at my head. It was something to behold. Even Sunshine seemed taken aback by her handiwork. My hair, what there was of it, was now remarkably close to my very angular head, and it seemed at cross purposes, some sections twisting up, some twisting down. It made a statement that I was a woman who wasn’t afraid to have my face come before others directly with little formulation, like a short poem without any adornment. At the time I didn’t know whether I wanted to make that statement or not. It seemed not. Weakly she pronounced it a success: “I like it,” she said. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

Back in the car, after I managed to lift my head off the steering wheel, I thought about wigs. I wanted one. But then it didn’t seem like me to cover up my mistakes. Following up a mistake with another mistake was not a good practice. Better to live with the results—isn’t that what I had learned from past mistakes?

I got through the afternoon’s work related events without comment and that was a bad sign. I obviously had something radical done to my hair and if it had turned out well, people would have mentioned it, wouldn’t they? I had two meetings with female graduate students and I did not attend to what they were saying because I was so preoccupied by their not saying anything about my hair. I was sure they were thinking, who does she think she is? Jean Seberg in Breathless or Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby? Though both these students were too young to know that Jean Seberg in Breathless was iconic of a certain kind of female waif popular during my era—the role Michelle Williams is now playing. When I was in high school I wore my hair as short as Mia Farrow. These were the days of a female counter-revolution in style when Twiggy and Mia and Jean were all the rage and symbolized a breezy and sexy independence with their boy cuts. Like them, back then, I was a stem of a girl with long legs and long neck, and the short hair worked. Now it would appear that I needed reminding Jean Seberg is dead and we study Breathless in film classes. Even Mia Farrow and Twiggy are no longer waif-like and neither keep their hair short, and if they did, we’d think they were foolishly reclaiming their long gone youth. We’d only be reminded of what they once were and aren’t now. But here I am with my cropped hair.

I slunk out of the Wanderer’s Tea House where I had met my students and felt myself lucky that I didn’t run into anyone I knew on my way to the car. But that evening on an unusually warm spring-like day, I knew that my neighbors would emerge from their winter lairs with their dogs and flock to the street. After dinner on the walk with the dogs, it was as I had feared—many neighbors were out and about. On the curve before our house, we ran into John Beck and the first words out of his mouth were, “I like what you’ve done to your hair.”

I almost blurted out—“You mean my removal of it?” Trying but failing to make light of my chagrin, I told him the sad saga of how I had made a mistake.

“Nonsense,” he said, “It makes you look perky.” Which he considered a good thing, something uttered to cheer me up. Unfortunately I could only think of the bitter irony that now after my mother had died and could no longer see me, I had finally realized her ideal vision of me. She had always wished for me to be bouncy and perky like a ball that you can throw against the wall and it comes back to you.

Before I could move on, another neighbor, Lyle, came by with his dog and again immediately launched into comments about my hair, as if there was no other subject. He really liked the change or alternatively he had quickly ascertained that I was feeling low about it and decided it was his job to buoy up my spirits.

Either way, it was interesting that two unaccompanied men sailed forth into the breach of my hair disaster with spirit and bravado. My own husband joined their ranks to form a trio of positive appraisal. I didn’t trust them one little bit. I thought the earlier female silence was much more likely to be an honest assessment. Still it gave me pause—they seemed unlikely cheerleaders. Or perhaps their cheerfulness reflects the relative lack of importance they place in hair. After all, my husband spends not one iota of his time thinking about his hair. And John Beck doesn’t have any. Only women can be counted on to understand the complications of hair, I thought.

A few days have passed since what I call the epic cut, and I’m coming to realize that the trio of men may have seen something I couldn’t. Maybe my new hair suits me or suits something I wanted but was struggling to articulate. Maybe this is what I wanted and it’s taken a few days to catch up with my hair as has so often been the case in the past. I’ve found to my surprise that I don’t shriek when I catch sight of myself in the mirror. I’m getting to like my new old self—she seems less armored, less covered, and reminds me that being alive is not a well-behaved kind of affair. When I run my fingers along the back of my neck I’m not entirely surprised to find that my hair is growing back just as Sunshine said it would.

•••

MARCIA ALDRICH is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton and part of the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers Series. Companion to an Untold Story won the AWP Award in Creative nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in The Best American Essays. She has just completed a collection of essays, The Art of Being Born. Her website is marciaaldrich.com.

Transportation

planes — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Wendy Wisner

We’re driving to my cousin’s wedding in Atlantic City. We’re on a tight schedule. We spin past the bare-branched sycamores. The ground is dotted with patches of snow. The wind lashes against our rickety Honda.

Ben says he’s too hot in his coat. Peter says he’s too cold. “Just wait. We’ll be there soon.” We’re getting closer. I begin to smell the waves of the bay.

Then Peter throws up.

We pull over, strip him down. He cries, his bare legs shaking in the cold. We toss his dirty clothes in a plastic grocery bag, find some clean clothes, mop up the vomit with baby wipes.

“Okay,” I say to my husband. “We’ll get there right when the ceremony starts. You’ll drop me off. I’ll change into my dress. I won’t miss it.”

We keep driving. Now the ocean is clearer, on the edge of the parkway. I inhale it. I, who hate to travel, inhale the ocean and its expanse, its freedom.

Finally, we arrive at the hotel. Bright lights, gold fountains, Roman god pseudo-sculpture. I was naïve; I expected a simple hotel. It’s like we’ve entered an amusement park.

Dizzy circles through the parking garage. My stomach in my throat. My mother texts me: “It’s okay. She won’t notice if you miss the ceremony.”

A parking spot, finally. I toss all our “fancy” clothes in a garbage bag to change into along the way.

We enter Caesar’s Atlantic City. Immediately the smell of cigarette smoke and misery. The blinking lights of the slot machines. The room begins to spin.

I say to my husband, “Here, watch the children.” I take out my dress and tights, my good bra. I hand him the garbage bag with the children’s clothes, and run inside the ladies room.

I change inside a stall, my bare feet on the cold bathroom floor. I tie up my messy hair, smear on some lipstick.

My husband has changed Peter into his button-down shirt and necktie. He hands me the garbage bag and Peter, then wanders off with Ben to change.

This. This is when I begin to fall apart.

Peter wants nothing more than to climb on all the slot machines. Peter will not stay in my arms. He twists away with all his two-year-old might. I try to carry him, the garbage bag of clothes, and my winter coat. And I cannot. I cannot do it.

My cellphone is low on charge. I have no idea which direction my husband has gone. I am completely lost, alone, with a screaming toddler who is half-covered in vomit.

I can’t hold onto all of it anymore. I can’t stop the panic from boiling over, from my belly, to my throat, to my eyes.

And then I’m not in my life anymore. It is 1983, and I am alone with my mother in the airport. The stench of cigarette smoke in our hair. Is it from the airport, or from the cigarettes my father has been smoking?

My father is gone. He left just as the snow began to fall in life-size, enormous chunks. Just as the baby started to blossom in my mother. Winter and spring colliding.

We are utterly alone in that airport. We do not know where he is, only that we are following him. The airport tilts as the planes rise up into the sky.

•••

The airport was the room between the worlds. But not a room. A cavern. A chamber. An expanse of white that stretched beyond where I could see. There were no exits, no escapes, no way home.

The only way to out was to get on a plane.

We watched the planes through the window—a giant wall of glass. The planes were larger than life. They were dinosaurs: standing still, then suddenly running, lifting their clobbering tails up into the air.

The airport smelled of gasoline, cigarettes, and diaper cream.

It was 1984, and my sister was a newborn, snuggled against my mother. But her presence was slight, muted. She was young enough to sleep quietly in my mother’s arms. She closed her eyes and ignored it all.

My mother and I walked up and down the corridors. We were marbles being rolled up and down and around the tunnels, gates, entrances. We were being rolled by the great hand of my father. He reached for us across the continent. He didn’t want us with him, but he beckoned us nonetheless.

He made us want to find him. He made us look for him in each man’s face we saw streaming past.

Had he shaved his mustache yet? Was it just growing in?

I looked for my father, though I knew he wasn’t there.

I wanted to leave. I didn’t want to go with my mother. I wanted to run away.

I stood at the top of the escalator, and my mother stood below. “Take me home,” I said.

My mother had no words. And now I see my sister for sure, my mother holding her, running up the escalator as it’s moving. There is no way to stop it from moving. My sister, the suitcase, the tickets—everything in her arms but me. It is clear that she can’t carry me as well, that I must will myself up the escalator.

And I do. I follow her. I get on the plane. I begin the endless journey of looking for my father.

•••

I have been trying to piece it together, the origins of my anxiety—why my mind so easily jumps to the worst-case scenario.

I have had to untrain myself from assuming that any time my children get sick that they are going to die. I have to shut out the thought that any time I don’t hear from my husband for a few hours that he’s in grave danger. It is their lives—the ones whom I hold most dearly—that are at stake.

I have some theories. The loss of my father is one. But I didn’t completely lose him. He didn’t die. He just left. As a child, it was a loss that felt like death, but I still saw him often enough over the years. I could still find him, wrap him up in a bear hug.

I think the feeling of doom runs deeper, back to my ancestors, back through my DNA.

The dead babies, the boat, the planes, the entrances, the exits. Portals into the world, and out.

•••

My grandmother slid the box out from under her bed. It was a beautiful brown box, old, faded around the edges, but nicely preserved. Maybe she was going to show me one of her hats, or try to give me another of her soft patent-leather shoes. (We had the same tiny feet, size 5).

She opened it up to reveal a small dress. Light pink, with a lacy, embroidered neckline. It was flattened and neatly laid, like something you would see on display at a museum. Small enough to lie flat in the box—a dress for a very young girl. You could almost see her lying quietly there.

I thought it was perhaps one of my mother’s childhood dresses, or one of my grandmother’s from when she was a girl.

“This is the dress of the girl who died,” my grandmother said. She drew out the word “died.” She had this way of being completely serious, but with an airy, dramatic flair.

Then she told the story. I only heard it that one time and was too scared to ask about again.

Her parents and their daughter were immigrating to America from Kiev, Russia. The boat was dirty, disgusting, people piled on top of one another, nowhere to sleep, living in squalor. There was very little food. Everyone ate rice, she said.

The little girl never made it to America.

My grandmother didn’t know how she died. And I was too shocked to ask.

“They named me Nachama, which means comfort, because I was her replacement,” she said.

But no one ever called her that. Her name was Emma.

She was Emma, my grandmother. But now I knew she was born after trauma, after the deepest loss imaginable. It would haunt her, and me, for the rest of our lives.

•••

We moved thirteen times by the time I was thirteen years old. We were chasing my father up and down the west coast. But there was also a restlessness on my mother’s part that propelled us from house to house—a search for the key to happiness.

I never felt that I had a home. Home was intangible, something reserved for daydreams.

And real dreams, too. I have always dreamt about the houses. I dream that I can go back to a home of mine, one that we left, and is still there, preserved as it was.

I dream of the apartment with the walk-in closet that I turned into a room for myself. I’d make stacks of toy money and play bank, or I’d take in all the books in our house and play library. I remember playing with my charm necklace, hiding the parts behind the coats. I think I tried to sleep in there, curl up into a little ball behind my mother’s boots. But I couldn’t relax. I couldn’t rest.

I dream of the apartment where I did have my own room. The twin windows that faced the mint tree. I’d crack the window open and inhale. My room with the full size bed in the center, the faded pink blanket, boom box on the bureau. When the earthquake began, first the windows rattled, then the radio switched itself off, then the lights. I walked out of my room as my mom and sister were coming out of the kitchen. We watched the chandelier sway, slowly, calmly, as though nothing momentous and devastating was happening.

And last night, I dreamt about the apartment I lived in longest. I knew it would enter my dreams soon enough—the apartment we left last summer. Both of my children were born there. I became a mother in those narrow rooms. Last night, in the dream, I stood in the living room, its soft brown carpet under my bare feet. The carpet felt wet, like soil that had been newly watered. A breeze was coming in. Ben’s stamp collection was lying open on the floor. The couch was gone, but the piano was there—the keyboard open, the keys whiter and brighter than I remember them.

I couldn’t say goodbye to that apartment. The last time we went, to get an ice cream sandwich my older son had left in the freezer (I kid you not), I didn’t want to go in. Because I hate endings. I hate last times. Especially when it comes to houses.

If I never have to move again, I will be eternally grateful. But I know we will move again someday. We rent our new home, and I have a deep desire to own a house someday.

If I own a house, it’s like I will never have to leave. I can grow old there. I can die there. I can sink into it. Get comfortable. A small square of earth that is entirely my own.

•••

Then there was the story my grandmother never told me: the story of the other baby, her baby, the first one. I don’t think they ever named him.

In those days, you didn’t talk about stillbirth. The doctor told them to grieve briefly, then try right away for another baby.

That’s one of the few details I know. That, and the cord wrapped around his neck.

In my mind, the cord is blue, the room is blue, the baby blue. Gray and blue swirling together, enveloping the room in a dense fog.

I wonder if they ever saw him.

Did they hold him? Could they bear it?

Their second son, Raphael, the angel, was born a year later, as the doctor recommended.

But where did the grief go?

You never saw my grandmother in grief, only in fear. Her sister gone, this baby, too. Life so fragile, so temporary.

My grandmother used to read the obituaries every day. She’d sit in the rocking chair next to the aqua-blue telephone.

Did he die as he entered the world, as he journeyed out of her body? Or did he die inside her?

My son Ben was born that way, with the cord around his neck. The midwife told me to stop pushing for second; then she deftly hooked her finger under the cord, and slipped it off him. He came crashing out of me, alive and screaming.

I don’t know what happened with my grandmother’s baby, but sometimes I imagine that I could save him—unloop that cord, set him free, stamp out the panic that passed from my grandmother’s body, into my mother’s, into me.

•••

I started walking when I was eighteen. I was coming out of one of the toughest times of my life: the first time I’d experienced a period of panic attacks.

It started the summer I turned sixteen.

I used to spend the summer with my father in California. That summer was brutal. I missed my boyfriend (who would later become my husband), and I was starting to assert myself in new ways—typical of the teenage years. I began to criticize my father and my stepmom. Harshly. I wasn’t pulling any punches. It got nasty, fast. They couldn’t handle it. They couldn’t handle me. I couldn’t handle them. And I felt trapped.

After that summer, I developed an intense fear of flying (obvious connection there—flying meant visiting my father). And, devastated by my abandonment, my father cut off all communication with me for a year. In that year, my phobias increased. Things I’d never been afraid of before became tinged with the most incredible, raw terror I’d ever felt.

I was afraid of all modes of transportation, really. Cars, taxis, the school bus. There had been a shooting on the Long Island Railroad, and I was sure it would happen again, to me. I was deathly afraid of mass shootings. I’d get nervous in crowded places. The diner. The mall. Thank God school shootings weren’t rampant at the time—I’m sure I would have been too scared to go to school.

I gained a lot of weight. I’d always been a normal weight—curvy as I became pubescent, but always in a normal range. I gained at least twenty pounds then. I ate to cushion my frightened body. I ate to silence my racing heart.

Somehow—I’m not really sure how—I started to come out of the panic. I decided to see a therapist. She wasn’t great, but just the act of going was good for me. And I started walking, both to lose the weight, and also because I found it amazingly freeing. It seemed to wash the anxiety out of my body. And I liked being out of my house. I liked the fresh air. I liked the endorphins. I liked being able, at last, to think clearly. I liked slicing through the world at my own pace. I liked looking at the perfect houses, with the perfect families inside (or so I imagined).

All these years later, I still walk almost every day. Sometimes with a baby strapped to my chest, or a toddler in a stroller. And on weekends, entirely alone.

Since this past summer, I have added some running to my routine. I’m not sure why. I had been having dreams about running. It seemed absurd to me at first. But the dreams were like magic, like I was gliding through space.

•••

When we moved to the new house last summer, we noticed several white beings swooping across the trees out in the distance, over the pond.

Later, we realized: egrets.

And then the four of us—even the baby—would wait until night came (it came late then, in summer) and wait for them at the window. It was magic. Pure and simple. These great, graceful birds, with wings that were quiet, long breaths.

As the earth cooled, the egrets retreated. Where did they go? No one asked. We moved deeper into the everyday. School started. The days got shorter and darker.

But I have thought over the months, where did they go? You always hear that birds go south. But really—where? Or do some die? I guess that’s what I really want to know.

I am obsessed with beings—people—coming and going. The way they wander in and out of lives. And how they get there.

My grandmother would always ask: How did you get here? By foot? Car? Train? She was interested in modes of transportation—fixated on the travel routes of the ones she loved. She wanted to make sure you would arrive at your destination in one piece. “Call when you get there,” she’d say.

The formation of birds as they migrate—of course it takes our breath away. The unspoken communication, the way their bodies seem to magnetize to each other. Don’t we all just want to know where to go? And with whom to travel? What comfort there. What grace.

Ben wants to get a new camera with a zoom lens so that we can photograph the egrets this summer to preserve the magic. We know it’s temporary. We want to capture it.

Just a week ago, the pond was covered in snow, and under the snow—ice. Now it’s melted, and the ducks swim smoothly through it. On the way home from a walk today, Peter and I heard them quacking.

Yes, spring. Which leads to summer. And all the birds opening their wings, returning home.

•••

We missed the ceremony.

After we were all dressed, we rushed through the hotel, past restaurants and gift shops, up escalators, around corners—everything sharply glittering. We found signs for the reception (there were many) and took the final elevator up to the very top of the building.

The elevator opened onto the wedding. The reception was in full swing. I saw the bride first, my cousin, towering over me in heels, her burnt-red hair, endlessly flowing shimmer-white dress trailing behind her. She was rosy-cheeked, in a just-married daze, and thrilled that we made it.

No guilt. No worries. No fear. We made it.

An enormous picture window overlooked the ocean. It was twilight, and the grays and blues from outside drifted into the wedding hall, bathing everyone in a warm, ethereal light.

I began to breathe.

I scanned the room for my family. There they were, my mother and sister, sitting on a leather loveseat together, plates of hors d’oeurves balanced on their laps. My mother and sister—strange and beautiful to see them here, in this otherworldly place, a place none of us had ever been before, and would probably never return.

For a while I just watched them, and time seemed to melt away. Then I looked at my two sons, who had quickly situated themselves in front of the window, cheek to cheek, watching seagulls sweep across the sea.

My husband appeared beside me, put his arms around my shoulders, asked me if I was feeling better, and walked me down the aisle toward the ones I loved.

•••

WENDY WISNER is the author of two books of poems. Her essays and poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Washington Post, Literary Mama, The Spoon River Review, Brain, Child magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, Huffington Post, and elsewhere. She is a board certified lactation consultant (IBCLC) and lives with her family in New York. For more, visit her website www.wendywisner.com. Connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.

My Twenty-Four-Hour Boyfriend

heart leaves — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Zachary Zane

I don’t typically go out to bars alone. In fact, I never do. But I’m in Provincetown; I’m cute, tall, and twenty-three. I should have no problems making friends. Or at least that’s what I’ve been told.

After spending some time with my uncles at the P’town Theater, I head directly over to A-House. I walk in and immediately beeline it to the bar. Head on a swivel, I look around, hoping that my smile will be enough to bring people over to me. It does not. I stand next to the bar, only to notice how salient my sobriety feels. I order a Jack and Diet. I notice no one. No one notices me. Chug my drink. Order another. I notice him.

Cut jaw, blue eyes, big lips, scruff. Tight dark jeans cuffed at the bottom. Perfect bubble butt. Black low-laced boots. Light blue button down shirt. Untucked. Top three buttons undone. Humble chest hair. Tattoos everywhere. Backwards hat. Short blond hair underneath. Feather earring. Necklace. Rings. Bracelets.

He’s alone at the other side of the bar. I see him laugh as he talks to the bartender. The music is blaring, but somehow I can still hear him. He opens his mouth wide as he laughs. A real heartfelt laugh. His teeth are white and straight. His tongue, pierced.

I stare. I stare for a long time. He does not notice. I finish my drink and order another. Liquid courage begins pulsing through my veins. He moves to the dance floor. So do I.

I walk up to him.

I love your earring.

Thanks.

We introduce ourselves.

Wanna step outside to talk? I smile and nod. That is exactly what I want.

Do you smoke?

No, I don’t.

Good you shouldn’t. He takes out a cigarette and lights up.

We talk. About places. Where we have lived. Where we will live. Why we’re here. Me, visiting my uncles for the long weekend. Him, for the summer, but moving to Crown Heights shortly.

He’s confident and honest. Comfortable in his own skin. Maybe that’s the difference between being twenty-three and twenty-seven. The difference between my age and his.

His honesty is not abrasive. Not too soon. With anyone else it would be. He grew up in foster homes and left home when he was fifteen. He is the first person in his family to go to college. He created his own major there. Social Entrepreneurism. He was in India for work, helping impoverished children with cancer. Related to a startup he headed. Almost too clichéd. Almost. He comes home to find his husband of four years gone. Picked up and left. It led to a downward spiral of alcohol, drug use, and sex. Mistrust. With himself and others. I can’t blame him.

You’re cute.

Thank you. I would return the compliment, but he is much more than cute. Calling him cute would be insulting.

He recognizes a friend and calls him over. He starts talking to him and introduces us. His friend has a friend. That friend starts flirting with me, while his friend talks to him. The friend of a friend is drunk but kind. I don’t listen to him as he speaks. I eavesdrop. He acts the same with his friend. Confident. Charismatic. The four of us reconvene.

You two are too cute. Do you guys plan on having sex tonight?

He looks at me and smiles. Well, I hope… if—

I look at him. I really hope so.

We smile at each other. Naughty smiles.

A-House is closing. I grab my jacket and take a leak.

I can’t find him when I come out of the bathroom. Minutes go by. God damn it.

He comes up behind me and grabs my hand.

I’ve been looking for you.

I’ve been looking for you, too.

I stare into his blue eyes. They’re intoxicating. His whole face, intoxicating. High cheekbones. Full lips. A subtle rosy completion. We head back to his place. On the way he whips out a pair of prescriptionless hipster glasses and a slingshot.

Please tell me you’ve been carrying around this slingshot with you for the past ten years.

I wish. I got it today at a yard sale.

Why did you ruin the illusion?

Here, look how much fun it is.

He helps me grip the base.

I shoot at a sign.

See! Isn’t it fun?

I smile. Yeah. It really is.

He pulls back the slingshot and cuts his lip. It bleeds. Good. I was beginning to suspect he wasn’t real.

He pulls down the bottom of his lip to show me.

How did you do that?

I don’t even know.

I lean in to kiss it. He pushes me away. I start to worry and stop myself. He’s just waiting. This isn’t the moment. We head back to his place. It’s nice. Really nice. He made friends with a rich man who doesn’t charge him rent. He offers me a beer. I take one. He does too.

Hi.

He’s looking into my eyes. I meet his gaze. No blinking. No smile. He breaks eye contact first to blush.

Sorry, you’re just really cute, and I get awkward.

If anyone else had said that to me, I would have known he was playing me. A game. I trust him. I believe him. He’s nervous. Human. Real.

Don’t be. His eyes lock with mine again. We stare. At the same time we both lean in to kiss. A slow, soft kiss. His lips are slightly chapped, but I don’t mind—again, reminding me that he’s human. I inhale deeply as I close my eyes. He smells of man. No deodorant. It’s a short kiss. Little tongue. He breaks away first.

Wanna head to my bedroom?

I do.

I use the bathroom before heading in. His pants are already off. He wears boxer briefs. Hanes. Nothing flashy. But they fit in all the right places. I take off my boots and jeans. Boxer briefs. Champion. Nothing flashy. He offers me a bedtime shirt. I decline. I know I’m going to take it off shortly.

He keeps the lights on. I like that. We begin kissing. Slowly. I open my eyes to see his closed. To see him losing himself. Losing himself in me. I close my eyes and feel him. Toned. All hair and muscle. Six-foot-one and one-hundred-eighty-five pounds of man.

We get naked, but don’t have sex. We don’t need to. It’s incredible to be with someone my size. His weight on me. His body against me. Holding one another. He falls asleep in my arms. Snoring. I don’t mind. I like hearing him.

The next morning we wake up. Naked. We make out. Cuddle. Feel one another. We lounge around. Still naked. Talking. About work. Family. Friends. Provincetown. Lovers. Past and present.

Do you have boyfriend?

No. I don’t. Do you?

No. There is this guy I talk to in D.C. But no, I don’t. You’d be surprised how many times I ask that and the answer is yes. Why don’t you have a boyfriend?

I’m not sure what to say. I just don’t. Men are new to me. At least dating men. I tell him the truth.

I was faux-dating this guy for many months. I broke things off with him recently. I knew he was perfect for me. I just wasn’t attracted to him physically. I hate myself for it. I know physical attraction is important, but I can’t help but feel shallow when that’s the only reason. I tried forcing it for a while, but that didn’t work.

Yeah, you can never force something like that.

I know that now. The whole thing was so frustrating.

I’ve been there, too. We all have. Doesn’t make you a bad person. You just know what you need now.

I do.

He looks into my eyes again. How do I feel so vulnerable and yet so comfortable? He smiles and gives me a big kiss.

When do you leave?

I’m not sure. I need to head back to my uncles later today, and I’m leaving in the afternoon.

It’s a shame. This always happens. Where I meet someone right before I am leaving for some place new. I like you. I could see myself really liking you and enjoying the process of getting to know you.

I know. I have nothing more to say. I agree.

Well I can be your twenty-four-hour boyfriend.

I would like that.

He kisses me, and we cuddle in various positions. Still naked.

He shows me cute pictures of himself in drag. I try on jeans he throws at me. They fit surprisingly well.

I think I’m gonna steal these.

Don’t you dare! We’ll grab you a pair today in town.

We hop in the shower together. Kiss. Scrub each other. We hop out. I put on my clothing from last night. He puts on something new. Cute. Hip. Tight shirt. Short sleeves. Jeans. Faux boat shoes.

We get brunch. He knows the owner and the waitress by name. It’s incredible seeing him interact. You would think that he’s best friends with everyone. He invites both of them over later to help him make applesauce with all the fallen apples in his yard. He had invited me earlier, but I told him I wouldn’t be around for it. It’s clear he’s never hung out with them before. But he’s happy to invite them over. To meet new people. Experience new friendships.

Eggs Benedict and gluten-free peach and pineapple pancakes.

Do you like ketchup?

Yeah.

Do you like pepper?

Yeah. I like everything.

That’s good. You’re a yes guy. I like that. I could never be with anyone who isn’t a yes guy.

He leans over the table and grabs my arms. I look into his eyes. He kisses me, moving his hand slowly down my jaw. He puts his leg on me as we eat. I pet it throughout brunch.

We split the bill and walk into town.

So you have the one tattoo?

Yeah.

Why just the one?

I got it with my best friend in college. I know it’s silly, but I like it. I’d be happy to get another one; I just don’t know what it would be. I wouldn’t want it to be a joke tattoo like this one. I would want it to mean something. At this point in my life, I don’t think I’ve accomplished anything, or simply lived enough to get another tattoo that means something.

That’s not true at all. Of course you have lived. Just in the short time I have spent with you and from the little you’ve told me. Of course you have lived. Don’t put yourself down like that.

I don’t mean to put myself down, I just … I don’t know.

You’re twenty-four?

Twenty-three.

I know you’re probably thinking that you should have your masters and be able to suck fifty dicks at the same time, but—

Well, I mean, I can.

He laughs. I know you can, but in all honesty, think about it like this. Think about all the things you can teach people. Every little thing from the very small to the very big. I bet you would have a really long list.

Yeah, I guess I would.

A professor once told me that. I like to think about it from time to time.

Yeah. I like that. It’s trite. It’s cliché. It’s something that can be put on an inspirational poster. I know all this. But when he says it, it means something. When he says it, I feel better. I believe him.

We walk into a boutique. He asks the owner, a friend who he lived with previously, if they have jeans my size. They do, but not in a cut he thinks will fit me well. We shop together. Try on hats and glasses. He buys a cute sweater.

We walk down Commercial together. Holding hands. He picks his long board up from a friend’s house.

Have you ever ridden one?

No.

Do you wanna try?

Sure.

He steadies me as I hop on the board. His hands on my waist. He’s got me. I know I won’t fall. He helps me kick off, and I ride a little bit. He pulls my hand so I can actually pick up some speed. I hop off.

The walk back to my uncles is about two miles. We talk more. We hold hands. We stop in the street to kiss periodically. He tells me how he got expelled from high school. He beat up a kid who called him a faggot. I like hearing stories like these. People who stand up for themselves.

I don’t know what it is. If it’s just that I know you’re leaving, and I won’t ever see you again, or see you again like this, or if it’s really something more. But I can see myself with you.

I know. I feel the same way. And honestly, I don’t know. It might be both. I shouldn’t have said it—admitting that it may not be real, but I did.

Yeah.

We reach my uncles’ place. He gives me a kiss. A long, real kiss.

Text me. Or don’t.

I know how he means it.

I will.

I’m really glad you came up to me at the bar.

Yeah, and to think I was about to leave right before meeting you.

I’m glad you didn’t.

Me too.

I kiss him again. I don’t want him to go.

Bye.

He hops on his long board and rides away. I want to cry. Not tears of joy. Not tears of sadness. Tears of emotion. Raw emotion. What just happened?

Provincetown is already a surreal fantasyland where time stops. Where I feel far away from the city. Where everyone is friendly and queer. In my fantasyland, I met my dream boy.

I didn’t love him. I know that. But it was more than lust. What happened was ineffable. I felt connected, as if I had known him for years. I let myself go to him. I didn’t hold back, knowing there was nothing to lose.

Maybe I’m just a sucker for blue eyes and a pretty smile. Even though this was the first time something like this happened to me, I know it wasn’t the first time it happened to him. His personality, his whole being, lends himself to love and be loved. To real connections. And I’m sure he’s had real connections, just like this one, before. But that doesn’t matter. For twenty-four hours, I was his, and he was mine. All mine.

I don’t know if I’ll see him again. Of course, I could. I’m in New York once every few months anyway, but there is a part of me that wants to keep this a fantasy. To keep this perfect. The moment I see him again, outside of Provincetown, he becomes real. Our relationship, or whatever it was, will be real. Not this perfect dreamlike fantasy. And I won’t be able to think of him as fondly as I do right now.

Still, I have to see him again. Even if it ruins it. Normalizes it. Realizes it. If he made me feel so much in twenty-four hours, imagine what more he can make me feel. Odds are it won’t work out, but it’s a risk I have to take.

•••

ZACHARY ZANE is a Los Angeles native who got lost and somehow ended up living in Boston. He’s a freelance writer and contributor at PRIDE. When he’s not trying to get his book published, he spends his time pondering about relationships and sexuality. You can follow him on Twitter @ ZacharyZane_

How Gender Works

By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Alex Myers

Exhibit A

It is 2003, and my wife and I have moved to Florida. I’ve been taking testosterone for a few months. I’d been living as a man for over seven years at that point, but it had been getting harder to pass—I was twenty-four but still looked like a fifteen-year-old boy.

We moved to the Gulf Coast of the state, the conservative side, and I remember sitting in the very-empty living room of our brand-new rental home, calling endocrinologists, trying to find someone who would treat me. I’d dial a number and say to the receptionist: I’m a transgender person looking to continue my hormone therapy under a doctor’s care. Is that something Dr. So-and-so can assist me with?

That afternoon, I got every answer from the professionals but clear: That’s not his area of expertise. To the curt: No. To the shocked: Is this a joke? You’re sick. And others that were ruder. At last, a sympathetic receptionist told me: Try calling someone over in Miami. I ended up with a doctor in the Fort Lauderdale area.

I remember sitting there, on the beige carpet, leaning against the gleaming white wall, thinking that I would never come out in this place.

Our second year in Florida, we moved to an older neighborhood, a little more run-down, but in a good way. Our neighbor was a lesbian who flew a rainbow flag off her back deck, a short woman with spiky blond hair and the fierce energy of a former collegiate lacrosse player. After we’d known her for a few months, we had her over to dinner and, with the slight awkwardness that always accompanies coming out, told her that I was transgender and that my wife, Ilona, was bisexual.

I knew it! she crowed.

How did you know?

She pointed at Ilona. Gaydar. I just knew you weren’t straight. Then she pointed at me. And you—I knew because when that dog was attacking your wife, you chased it with a broom.

She was alluding to an incident that occurred not long after we moved in. Another neighbor had a pit bull that was both mean and always getting loose. One weekend afternoon, I was sweeping the house, and Ilona was outside gardening. I heard her scream and looked out the window to see the pit bull in our yard, growling at her. I ran out the door, brandishing the broom. At that moment, our lesbian neighbor happened to drive by and stopped her car. Taking in the scene, she first called animal control and then picked up a handful of rocks from the roadside and began to throw them at the dog. The pit bull, which had largely ignored my broom waving, responded to the rocks and ran off.

What man fights a dog with a broom? our neighbor insisted.

Exhibit B

It is 1998; I am an undergraduate in college, and I need a physical on short notice for a summer job with the Audubon Society. The doctor I normally saw at Harvard’s clinic didn’t have any open appointments, so I was put with a provider I didn’t know, an older man.

In the little examination room, I handed him the paperwork. I was nineteen, in good health. I expected this to be a mere formality, a matter of checking the boxes off. And at first, it was. Reflexes, blood pressure, peering into my ears. Then the stethoscope, snaked up under my shirt to listen to my heart and lungs: Deep breath. Again. I thought that he might figure it out then, that he might feel my breasts as he placed the cold metal disc against my flesh, but, no, he didn’t. Check, check, check. Immunizations, up to date. In between the components of the exam, he asked small questions about my studies, about the job. Where was the bird sanctuary that I’d be working in? He flipped the page on the form. Okay. Now I’ll need to examine your testicles.

I’m sorry, I told him. I don’t have any. I’m transgender. I was born female, but now I live as a man.

It may have been the most awkward coming out that I’d managed yet.

The doctor just blinked at me. What’s that?

I’m transgender. I’m female. Biologically and genetically female. I was raised as a girl. Now I live as a man.

Oh. So no testicles?

I shook my head.

He looked at the sheets of paper, flipped one over, made a mark. I tried to imagine what he was writing—or what he was looking for. He proceeded with the rest of the exam and then flipped through the pages again before peering at me.

No testicles.

It was half-question, half-statement.

No testicles. I affirmed. I waited, wondering if there was some other test he needed to do in lieu of the testicular exam, wondering if he would need to ask what I had instead of testicles. But he said nothing, just looking at me and then looking at the pages in front of him.

And you’re what, again?

Transgender. I’m biologically and genetically female. I live as a man.

His eyes brightened as he gave a small sigh and smile. Ah! I understand. You’re a woman with short hair.

Exhibit C

It is 1995. I have been out for less than a week. It is an evening in July, and I am at a mixer for GLBT youth. The music is thumping, and I am avoiding the dance floor. There seems to be no good place for me—the lesbians are not interested now that I’m living as a guy; the gay boys are bound to be disappointed once they find out. So I am leaning against the wall, watching the scene.

She comes over to me—round glasses, dangling earrings, and she says: I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m just trying to figure out if you’re a boy or girl.

Me, too, I tell her.

That night, we laugh and talk and even, I think, try to dance for a song or two, unaware that in seven years we will be married, that in all our years together we will never find a better understanding of gender, of who we are, than at that moment.

•••

ALEX MYERS was born and raised in Paris, Maine. For most of his adult life, he has taught English to high school students. In January 2014, Simon & Schuster published his debut novel, Revolutionary. In addition to teaching, he works as an educator and advocate around transgender identity. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and two cats.

The Detour Path

dune — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Powell Berger

You started skydiving in college, a dare at first, then an obsession, and now an escape. You like standing on the step of the airplane, clinging to the wing strut, still tethered to the airplane but in just one leap, one moment’s push from the metal sliver holding you, you fall away, the plane banking and disappearing above you. You feel the wind blast against your face, your cheeks pushed flat against your cheekbones, no sounds audible against the wind screaming past you. You revel in the shock of opening your parachute, pulling the little pod tucked on the back of your leg-strap that initiates the sudden stop, yanking you from free-fall, jerking you from your plummeting dive into a quiet, suspended hover above the hues of greens and blues and browns beneath. The rustling sound of the parachute above your head as you glide towards earth fulfills you. In those moments, you are free, certain, invincible.

You pack everything you own in your rattletrap white Chevette—except for the bookshelf that your grandfather built because it’s too big to stuff in the car and you feel bad about leaving it behind but you tell yourself you’ll come back for it—and you drive south. You are in love. Not a man—you’re still too wounded, too raw for that—but a lifestyle, a sport, an escape hatch. You know this isn’t your “real” life, but rather a detour before you head down that inevitable path of career and Washington politics and all things you’ve always known you’ll do. But now, this opportunity beckons, and you can’t say no.

You spent most of your college holidays in Florida—Thanksgiving, spring break, Easter—encamped at the biggest, baddest, best skydiving center in all the world, learning from the sport’s luminaries, trying to hone your skills. World champions congregate there, and you wanted to learn to do the complicated freefall acrobatics like they do, the ones you’ve seen in the magazines. Now they want you to manage this legendary drop zone, and you are only twenty years old. You! You can’t say no, and while you know it won’t be forever, it will be for now.

You drive the eight-hour trek from Atlanta with all your books, your skydiving rig (the one you bought by pawning your beloved flute and hoarding waitressing tips) and your blue jeans and tee shirts and gauzy cotton skirts shoved in the back of the Chevette that your mother gave you when you left home. You start your new job. The pilots like you because you pay them on time. Most of the other skydivers like you well enough, too. They largely ignore that you still don’t have the skydiving expertise that they have. You’re not fooling yourself. You understand your skydiving skills are mediocre, but you love it in spite of your lagging abilities and you appreciate the attention when the skydivers you’ve read about take time to jump with you, to teach you. And you love the scene, alive with risk and money and big dreams. And drugs, planeloads of drugs. It is Florida in the 1980s where planes no longer deemed fit for drug-running haul skydivers. Including you.

You meet a guy—a man, really—and you start dating, and soon you move in together. He’s fifteen years older than you, but somehow that seems okay and he’s part of skydiving’s “it” crowd and you like that. And you like him. Between you, you know all the best skydivers in the world and all the best coke dealers and where all the best parties are. Sometimes you host the parties. The sport’s glitterati turn out for your parties, and your life is full and you forget the bookshelf that you said you’d retrieve, the tongue and groove mitered corners dinged by Nancy Drew and history texts and political science theories. Your mother entrusted you with it when you left for college, and you know that she’d be disappointed to discover you’d left it behind. But you are young and alive and happy and the open hole in your soul left by the boyfriend who died your freshman year is slowly scabbing over and you feel alive again.

•••

The man is cutting the grass in the late Friday afternoon sun when you finally summon the courage to pee on the stick. You are twenty-two now and beginning to forget that this is your detour life with its skydiving and parties and cocaine and life lived large. Until your nipples get tender and your period doesn’t come. You bought the stick at the drugstore where you rarely go, hoping not to be recognized, and hid it until this moment so you can face the stick alone. You open the box and read the small print instructions, studying the clinical sketches illustrating the proper wipe-and-catch peeing position, and you realize you have never done this before. You curse yourself for forgetting the pill so many times, always taking two the next day—or three sometimes—and believing it would still work out. You feel stupid and ashamed and you wish you hadn’t left the bookshelf, hadn’t left that life at all.

Now you pee on the stick and watch the lines appear in a faint plus that bleeds to dark and decisive. You slip out and go back to the drugstore and spend another twenty dollars that you don’t really have for another stick, even though the first one left little room for uncertainty. And again, back in the bathroom you share with the man, the lines cross in the certain plus and your head feels light and the tiny bathroom with his comb and shaving cream and toothbrush on the counter feels cold and prison-like.

You stare at the two sticks, now lined up next to the toothbrush and shaving cream. A fetus grows inside you, maybe six or seven weeks along, the product of this man and you and your life on the detour path. You always said that you didn’t want children, mostly because your now-dead college boyfriend couldn’t have them because the chemo had racked his body and stripped him of heirs, and so you held his hand and agreed that children would not be part of your life. Your life together. But now he is gone and finally, finally after the months of anguish and anger and emptiness, you have moved on to a happier place, on the detour path, and you feel complete again. Although you still talk to him almost every day—tell him stories of your detour life (which he only pretends to understand) and assure him that you are okay— but only when the man is working or sleeping so he won’t know you still live with the ghost of the life that will never be.

The man comes in from mowing the grass and showers and opens a beer. You show him the sticks and wince as the pain crawls across his brow. You sit together on the couch and recount the last six weeks—the all-night parties steeped in alcohol and pot and coke, the meals you’ve not eaten, the sleep you’ve not gotten. You know the first few weeks of development are important, and you know you’ve not behaved well. You are ashamed, and he knows it, but he does not judge.

You talk about the detour life and the future that’s yet to begin—the career, the dreams, the possibilities. He tells you he knows that you never meant to stay and that he supports you, whatever you decide. No one is angry. No one cries.

•••

On Monday, you make the phone calls to find the best doctor, the best place to go. You choose someone who practices at a local hospital and is known to be a good doctor, one who cares about his patients. He assures you it will be simple and that you will be able to have children one day, when you are ready.

It will cost $2500—or maybe it is $1500 or $25,000. Whatever the number, it is money that you and the man don’t have, so he goes to the bank and gets a loan. You wonder what he told the bank, but you don’t ask.

You don’t know that finding a doctor who practices in a real hospital and who takes care to make it simple and sterile and makes sure you are able to conceive and bear children again is not a universal thing. You don’t know that other women don’t have the same options and that you just happen to live in a state where, at least for now, the decision is yours to make. You just know you don’t tell your mother, or your friends, or anyone really, except for the nice lady at the doctor’s office, and she looks at you with understanding and sadness.

You arrive on Thursday morning as directed, and the man waits in the lobby strewn with copies of Time and Newsweek, Ronald Reagan splayed on the covers, while you change and go to the procedure room. You are scared and glad that the man took the day off to be with you. It is as the doctor told you, simple and relatively painless, although the machine makes a sucking sound and you don’t want to think about why. The stirrups are cold and the speculum is uncomfortable and the doctor keeps reminding you to relax your knees as he moves from the sucking machine to his tray of silver probes and scrapers and devices.

The assistant is kind and holds your hand, asking if you are okay when you blink back a welling tear. You are, you assure her, and you feel relieved that it is done yet sad that it had to be.

You sleep all day on Thursday while the man follows the doctor’s instructions to make sure the bleeding isn’t too excessive and that you remain coherent. He brings you a tray of food in the afternoon, which you eat gratefully before slipping again into fitful dreams.

On Monday, the bleeding finally slowed and the pain subsided, the man returns to work. You make phone calls to your friends in Washington, where your real life is supposed to be, and schedule interviews.

•••

In a few weeks, the man will propose to you, sitting at an oceanfront table at sunset, and you will say yes. You will sell your little Chevette—it only starts sometimes now, though it was your faithful friend on the detour journey. The man will join you on your trek to Washington—where you always knew you’d be—uprooting his life so he can be with you as you pursue the career you always meant to follow, and you will build a life together. He will keep skydiving, but you sell your rig while holding tight to the strength found flying free, untethered and so certain.

You and the man will not last forever—the detour too great, your difference too vast—but you will have a son and you will both raise him and cherish him. You will break barriers and your career will flourish, just as you had imagined. Occasionally, usually on starry nights when you feel particularly wistful, you will still talk to that first love—the one who died so young—and you will hope that he’s not disappointed. You will eventually remarry and move again, pursuing your next chapter. The man will remain in Washington, a life he chose because of you, and while you know he is happy, you feel guilty about uprooting him.

Just as the doctor promised, you will have other children—another son and a daughter, who, with your oldest child, form a trifecta of sibling unity, something you cherish because you know it will outlast you, as it should, and you are grateful. They ask about your skydiving days and you smile, remembering the freefall, the invincibility. And every doctor’s visit, every check-up, every test—those routine visits that become part of life as time passes—every time you fill out one of those standard medical forms that ask about your pregnancies, you will flinch and remember. And you will wonder whether to count that first one, so long ago.

•••

POWELL BERGER is a freelance writer living in Honolulu with her two teenagers and two cats, where she revels in their havoc and joy in equal measures. She spends every July as a Program Fellow at the Paris American Academy’s Creative Writing Workshop and dreams of one day living there. Besides her essays for Full Grown People, her work has appeared in various print and online publications, including Travelati, Hawaii Business, and Inside Out Hawaii. Her writing world is housed at www.powellberger.com.

We’ll Always Have Frankfurt

clouds w:plane — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Zsofi McMullin

I took the last fortune cookie that came with our bill at the dim sum place near my office. My friends and I were celebrating the end of a long week, and we were all loud and slightly buzzed from our cocktails. The thin slip of paper fell into my lap as I crumbled the cookie between my fingers, and I almost simply tossed it on my plate amongst the small pools of soy sauce. Instead, I wiped my fingers and straightened out the strip. I laughed at a joke half-heartedly, not taking my eyes off the words in front of me.

“An old love will come back to you.”

“Well, you are going to have to be more specific,” I joked after I read my fortune to my friends. But I really only had one old love in mind.

The last time I had seen Peter was thirteen years ago when he flew halfway across the world to show up at my office, unannounced, two months before my wedding to another man. We had lunch, then later that afternoon we met up at my apartment and talked for maybe an hour about … I don’t even know what. Definitely not about our six-year, mostly long-distance relationship—by now more of a friendship rather than a love affair—or what was about to happen to that relationship. I think back and wonder why he was there, why he drank tea with me in my kitchen, why he told me that his girlfriend was looking at wedding magazines. Was he looking for a certain reaction from me? Was he there to change my mind? Or his?

We held each other and he kissed my forehead. Then he walked away.

We stayed in touch through infrequent e-mails and occasional phone calls through this thick, juicy part of life filled with marriage and children and careers. Somehow our friendship deepened over the years despite the distance, and our interactions always buzzed with that faint undercurrent of lovers who fell victim to time, distance, circumstance. We could have been. But we aren’t. And now we never will be.

The good thing about meeting up with an old love after a long time is that there are no expectations. When I first fell in love with Peter, I wanted desperately for him to rescue me. I was nineteen, a sophomore in college, and all I wanted from life was to graduate—although I think I would have given that up for him too—marry him, have his babies, and iron his shirts. Everything else in life seemed too scary, and loving him was very easy. He was irresistible—all blond hair and blue eyes, easy humor, and cool confidence. I fell in love with him the moment I heard his name—one of those pit-of-your-stomach, butterflies-around-your-heart, love-at-first-sight, unexplainable affairs that I believed only happened in very cheesy movies. It sounds ridiculous now, but I remember the feeling clearly—giddy and out of control and all-consuming.

When I saw him a few months ago for the first time after thirteen years, I had no expectations of our time together. A nice dinner, maybe. Pleasant conversation. But that was it. I know now that I don’t need to be rescued. I have a baby. I have shirts to iron. I have love that is giddy but not all-consuming or out of control.

What I didn’t expect was that the moment I saw him, I would constantly have to remind myself that I can’t touch him. I can’t just take his hand in mine. I can’t run my fingers through his hair. I can’t wrap my arms around his waist as we wait to cross the street. But even after all these years, some weird reflex compelled me to reach for him. We used to kiss and caress and grab and now here we are, trying to find this restaurant in the rain and the darkness and I can’t take his arm, so I don’t lose my balance? Seems ridiculous.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” we told each other when we first awkwardly embraced. I know we both said it to break the ice, to acknowledge the absurdity of standing face-to-face after all these years.

But it’s a lie.

We have changed. Maybe not the basics, maybe not the important parts. But we are softer around the edges, maybe a bit tougher on the inside. We’ve seen things and we’ve done things that we never thought would happen to us: dead babies, illness, disappointment, messy relationships. Our bodies are plumper with age, scarred from surgeries, birth, accidents. The hairs are finer, dusted with gray; the eye crinkles are deeper, a bit sad. We have loved and fought and bought cars and houses. We changed diapers and stayed up all night with sick kids. We have savings accounts, retirement funds, houses, employees, vacation time, car-pool duty, in-laws.

We are grown-ups.

We are nineteen.

Sitting across from him at dinner our time apart didn’t feel that long. Then the thought hit me: if we wait another thirteen years, he will be fifty-seven. I will be fifty-one. A lifetime gone, pretty much. How many more thirteen-year chunks do we have left?

Dinner was a blur—catching up after so much time is hard work and it takes concentration. It’s possible that I drank my wine a bit too quickly. My mind had trouble catching up with what my eyes were seeing: HE was sitting right across from me. He had the steak. I had the veal. We took bites of each other’s desserts. Like it was no big deal.

After dinner we walked slowly in the cool, rainy darkness to my hotel. Not yet ready to end the evening, we circled each other once we got to my room, our conversation suddenly faltering. Here he was, amongst my things—my travel-weary suitcase, my patent-leather shoes under the desk, my coat on the back of the chair, my jewelry spilling out of its case, my work notes and business cards in a neat stack on the desk, next to my keys from home.

“You drive a Honda,” he noted, and I laughed and said it was a soccer mom car. He asked “May I?” and rifled through the stack of papers and magazines and the flowery notebooks and postcards I’d bought.

I remember that when I first loved him, I always wanted a piece of him. Something that belonged to him. I would have given anything to be able to stand in his room like he was in mine now, surrounded by the things he touched every day. Once when he visited me in college I hid his white undershirt from the previous day under my pillow. The shirt smelled of him for a couple of days after he left and I hung on to it for years, even after his scent was gone. Another time I stole a pair of his socks—blue, with little teddy bears on it. I don’t know if he ever noticed—I doubt it. But I still have that pair of socks and, now in that hotel room in Germany, I thought I should have brought it with me, given it back to him. But then again, that’s probably the only piece of him I’ll ever have.

The next day we walked the cobblestoned streets of the city together—sometimes arm-in-arm, but mostly not. We talked; he took a couple of work calls and walked away from me as I sat on a bench. It was a Saturday; there were weddings at the town hall and we watched as happy couples took pictures in front of medieval buildings.

We wandered into the church on the main square and in the quiet, musty hall we walked our separate ways. I lit a candle, but it was just an excuse to stand still for a moment and breathe. I knew we’d have to say good-bye in a couple of hours and that the countdown would begin on our next thirteen years. I wandered over to the tomb of a German prince and his wife and felt jealous of their eternal togetherness. I looked around to find him and saw him across the church, writing something on a piece of paper to be pinned on the church’s prayer wall.

I never asked what he prayed for.

Over the candles I prayed for strength and composure, but neither of those things were granted that day.

“We were able to pick up right where we left off a lifetime ago,” he wrote in a text after we said good-bye. And he was right. The slow burn, the thrumming background noise of our past was right there, ready to spill over.

When I got on the plane the next morning to head home to my husband and little boy, I felt suspended between my nineteen-year-old self and my current life. Somewhere over the Atlantic, settled down by the plane’s gentle rocking and the clouds passing outside my window, my twenty-one hours with Peter started to feel otherworldly. My destination on the plane’s map became clear, a fixed point on the horizon, comforting, promising.

I thought about how, in the end, the fortune cookie wasn’t exactly correct. Old loves don’t just “come back.” They visit, they haunt, they poke around in the sensitive flesh right around the heart with their deft, nimble fingers. Old loves are beautiful and tempting and so, so delicious. And for a moment it seems like yes, yes, a comeback is possible. A moment of weakness. A look. A shared memory. But then… life. The real one. The one waiting at the airport.

I stared at the little “x” on the map for a while as the plane flew through some turbulence and thought about how the engines just keep on whirring and pushing forward, no matter what shakes them.

We wait out our thirteen years and then for a couple of hours we lie and pretend that nothing has changed. We keep walking on cobblestones, through crowded streets; stop to eat chocolate, to watch weddings and street performers. We stand under an awning during a quick rain shower and we wind our arms together as one of us peeks out, looking for a small break in the clouds.

[This essay has an equally excellent companion. Read Zsofi’s other essay about the old love here. —ed.]

•••

ZSOFI MCMULLIN is a writer with recent essays in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Role Reboot, and Kveller. She blogs at http://zsofiwrites.com and she is on Twitter as @zsofimcmullin. She is a regular contributor to Full Grown People.