My youngest daughter tilts her head up at me as I buckle her into her car seat. She asks, “Can we go pick blueberries?”
I think, There is no blueberry season in Charlotte.
Her request comes just a week or two after our Charlotte strawberry-picking season. She recalls how I took her and her older sister to a farm flush with rows of low strawberry bushes. She tangled her fingers in the leaves and thin branches and found fruit the color of rubies. We later gathered around the kitchen table and lingered over strawberries rinsed in a colander. We discarded stems and mashed fresh fruit in our mouths. On the heels of the late-spring strawberry season and prior to the mid-summer descent of peach season and well before the tangy tart of apple season—when we leave Charlotte and drive two hours to the mountains for the day and pull ripe apples from a lush and giving orchard—my daughter says she wants blueberries.
“Too hot,” I tell her as I consider everything I’ve ever heard about blueberries, how they need cooler northern climates and mild summers. Charlotte is too hot in the summer for blueberries—and for me too if I consider the weight of the summer rays, the thick humidity that clenches the air, and the sweat beading around my hairline and dripping down my back. The air conditioner inside my home calls to me like a pied piper. I respond without protest.
“We need to go to Alaska,” I say to my girl. “We need to travel to a place with a real winter.” I think of Anchorage, where I come from, the city I left twenty years ago.
“Will we drive?” she asks me from the back seat as we join the traffic on familiar Charlotte roads and pass storefronts I’ve seen each day for six and a half years.
“Yes,” I tell her and catch her eye in the rearview mirror. “We’ll drive to Alaska, and we’ll pick blueberries.” Waves of my imagination roll over me, and I plan how we’ll drive days home to Alaska and fill our plastic pails with mounds of violet fruit. For the few moments I have the attention of a preschooler, together she and I dream. I plant a story of a long, winding road trip across the country, along the coast of Canada, and into Alaska, all in search of berries I think we can’t pick here in Charlotte.
This is my seventh summer in Charlotte. Six and a half years now in a city I thought might be a passing-through home. But my husband, my girls, and I, we are still here—beginning our seventh summer. Seven. The days of creation, the colors in a rainbow, the number of completion. Is seven also the number of years that signifies Charlotte is now the foundation for my family’s life?
Many summers ago, when I was a child in Alaska, my parents, my sister, and I collected pails of high-bush blueberries from first the slope of a mountain and then later the valley close by. We hiked into the hills near Anchorage and plucked the jewels that clung near tiny leaves, handfuls plopping in the bucket and at least as many more bursting in my mouth.
“Blueberry jam,” my mother declared, and she used a recipe a friend with extensive Alaskan roots had given our transplanted family. A recipe to boil the berries, stir in cups of granulated sugar and other ingredients I can’t recall. We set a row of jelly jars across the kitchen countertop and inhaled the fragrance of syrupy sweet. My mother poured the deep violet jam into each jar, and my sister and I helped tighten the lids. We used black permanent markers to write down the date and lined the pantry with jars of homemade blueberry jam. For the next few months whenever we wanted jam with warm slices of toast or paired with peanut butter sandwiches—perhaps all the way until that spring—we drew jars of jam from the pantry, unscrewed the lid, and remembered the slope of a mountain and the taste of fresh blueberries.
My mother is planning to leave my hometown of Anchorage and move to my Charlotte neighborhood. My father left when my parents’ marriage ended years ago, but my mother stayed and has remained now for forty-three winters of navigating ice-caked roads. And forty-three summers in mild weather offering just enough respite from the snow. My mother wants to be near her granddaughters. She wants them to come spend weekends with her and visit her on sweltering summer days. My mother has never spent a full summer in Charlotte, but soon she will. Sometimes in the midst of the Charlotte summer, when the heat bears down with an even greater intensity, I think of my Anchorage mountains. I think of temperatures ten, twenty, thirty degrees cooler. I think of days perfect for the flourishing of wild Alaskan blueberries—and overcast heavens spilling forth the crisp comfort of home.
•••
On the phone, on an ordinary day this summer, my mother tells me that she will put her house on the market in autumn, that she will pack her possessions, leave Alaska, and create a home down the road from me in Charlotte. The distance between my family and her will compress to mere streets, to a number of houses between, no longer the stuff of a thousand miles thrice over. I know these happenings usher in a time of the beauty of generations entwined, but I taste a slight bitterness in my mouth and the words slow.
“Wow. It’s sad,” I say when I think of her home sold and the way I’ll no longer be able to tell people my mother lives in Alaska.
My mother echoes my words. “It is sad,” she replies and there is a long pause in our conversation.
My daughters play down the road at a summer camp, running around a playground, sucking on ice popsicles, and living the lazy days as I once did far away in Anchorage. I stand in my garage, preparing to leave to go pick them up from a day of fun. My mother is coming to us. Next year she may be preparing to go pick up her granddaughters from a day at camp, bring them back to her house, and watch them create imaginary games at the edge of the woods in her new back yard. As I drive the couple of miles down the road, I recall my mother’s back deck and the mountains the color of blueberries in the distance and the way we were living like Alaska would always be home. I have gorged myself on the reality of a life rooted somewhere. Even as I’ve left Alaska, my mother’s presence there allows me to taste these ties to a familiar place. And with my mother’s words, with the few months left, I find the flavor I long to hold beginning to evaporate into nothing but memories.
I pull into the camp parking lot and pause a moment to glance at the height of the surrounding trees and the expanse of the manicured lawn. The months ahead will bring with it laughter and long hugs, shared meals and creation of the future—something new to alleviate the weight of the loss of my childhood home pressing against my chest but perhaps never dissipating.
•••
Days after I speak with my mother, my family and I spend a Saturday a few hours from Charlotte. We pass the afternoon on a farm on the outskirts of Chapel Hill, sipping cold drinks, seated on stools in an open-air tea house void of walls, windows, and doors. In each direction we turn, we spy plants and shrubs used in this eco-friendly business. Lavender and jasmine. Hyssop and hibiscus too. A couple of hummingbirds hover near a clump of leaves, their wings a blur. Bees buzz around, and I envision raw honey sold in canning jars. When I purchase my glass of lavender lemonade, I spot a sign that reads, PICK BLUEBERRIES HERE.
Blueberries? Here on this plot of land lit with summer heat, never knowing the chill of real winter cold? The girls and I wander past picnic benches and a makeshift playground to rows and rows and rows of blueberry bushes. We pluck the berries and begin to fill a quart-size crate to brimming, working steadily in the shade of a few trees, stripping each bush of its bounty. My girls want to move further down the row, but I keep us in the shade, the brute sun sure to transform the fun of berry picking into absolute drudgery. After we fill our quart and before we wander back to the tea house replete with spinning fans and cups of ice water, I take a photo of my youngest holding the cardboard container of berries. We stand not on the slope of a mountain, but instead on this flat patch of ground beneath a grove of trees.
“We didn’t have to drive all the way to Alaska,” I tell my daughter as she poses with her blueish-purple treasure. Here, just a few hours from our home, the blueberries grow in quantity enough to satiate and satisfy.
•••
PATRICE GOPO is a 2017-2018 North Carolina Arts Council Literature Fellow. She is the author of All the Colors We Will See: Reflections on Barriers, Brokenness, and Finding Our Way (August 2018), an essay collection about race, immigration, and belonging. She lives with her family in North Carolina.
As I slipped away from the city lights on the four-lane highway, the land opened up like a collapsible box. The sides, filled with trees and undulating rises, slowly flattened to make room for the prairie, the sky as wide as intention. In my beat-up Riviera, I drove towards our abandoned farmhouse, suffering from nostomania, an irresistible compulsion to return home.
The ache for my family and our farm—torn apart by my father—radiated through my body. After twenty-eight years of marriage, my father walked through our farmhouse, took his clothes from the closet, and left—an action so out of character that over twenty years later I still struggle to reconcile the man I thought he was with this moment. I’ve no idea how long my father cheated on my mother before he moved in with his mistress, four miles away. The veil of secrecy my parents created about their marriage, and the deceit my father displayed leaves the events of my memory out of focus, a grainy film that never uses the correct camera angle.
After my father left, and my mother was uprooted, I walked through campus as if a piece of bailing wire were tied to my breastbone. Suddenly something pulled the wire taut, and I’d drive away from Greeley, Colorado—the ugly stepchild of the Front Range where I attended college—to the prairie. I could be eating a bagel for dinner, studying at a coffee shop, or talking to a friend on the phone and a moment later find myself in my car headed east to an empty house.
On this particular night in the fall of 1998, it was almost ten, and I had classes in the morning. I knew it was dangerous for a woman to drive alone down deserted roads—a flat tire would mean I’d spend the night in my car waiting for enough daylight to change it and risk who might stop to help. I also knew if I drove fast, I could make it to the farm in two and a half hours. Usually people drive as quickly as they can through the prairie. They want to get somewhere. I drove the speed limit to take my time.
These moments are the impulse of youth, the moments I fear for my young twin sons who I hope never have to make such pilgrimages to their childhood home. Somehow, back then, part of me felt that if I returned, even for a few hours, I might make the divorce, the abandonment less real, that my presence could conjure my family’s existence. But maybe I just wanted to float out to the deepest part of my sorrow and wallow.
While I’d lived in Greeley attending college for several years, I hadn’t adjusted to the horizon obscured by houses and businesses, the streetlights and traffic, the fast talkers and strangers living on the other side of the wall of my apartment. The house became a Siren, something I couldn’t pull myself away from. I traveled the prairie like an ocean.
•••
Houses nestled next to the road became less and less frequent. Sweet grass grew in wisps like cats’ tails around the posts of barbed wire fences. Purple thistle filled pastures on either side of the road. In the moon’s white-gold glow, clumps of yucca and sagebrush gleamed like forgotten glass ornaments fallen off covered wagons years ago.
Occasionally, I passed iron gates with family brands and cattle guards marking the entrance to large ranches. The gravel driveways led to houses, outbuildings, and barns far enough off the highway to be covered in darkness. I imagined the people in these houses asleep in front of the TV or in bed, curled up like kittens beside each other, just like my own family is now if someone were to drive by our stucco house in Albuquerque.
On the interstate, a stream of headlights greeted me heading in the opposite direction, towards Denver. The farther east I drove, the more traffic thinned. I passed Ft. Morgan as steam billowed from the two concrete columns on the south side of the interstate. I breathed the decayed fumes from the beet processing plant, a smell as stale as dog breath.
After fifteen miles, I took the Yuma exit and followed the two-lane road. I thought about turning around, heading back, but there was nothing waiting for me in Greeley, either.
•••
Wide stretches of pastureland lined the highway. Every few miles, at an intersection, I saw mailboxes. Some sat on top of fence posts like ours at home. Others rested on homemade wrought-iron stands. Yard lights dotted the countryside. I saw few cars. I knew my friends from college, all city girls, would be nervous driving for miles without seeing another car. The isolation comforted me. There are times now, living in Albuquerque, when I still long for this isolation, for space around me and for the comfort of solitude.
In sixty miles, I passed through two small towns, each only a few blocks long. Clustered streetlights glowed like a lighthouse miles before I approach the town. Pickups lined the main street outside the local bar. In Yuma, at one of three stoplights, I turned north onto Highway 59.
I rolled down the window; the cold air smelled like plowed fields. Short blades of green wheat sprouted out of dark soil near the edge of the road. Once in a while, I spotted evergreen windbreaks. Some sheltered foundations of houses that fell apart years ago.
Highways in the country are narrow; few allow for a shoulder. Reflectors, paced every hundred yards or so, lead the way. I watched for deer. Almost everyone I know has hit a deer or had a close call. I’ve been taught never to swerve. It’s better to pump the brakes, take the blow—swerving might cause the car to slide into the ditch, flip. Maybe that’s what these late night drives were about: facing the hurt head on.
After twenty-five miles on asphalt, I reached Clarkville, an abandoned community.
Thistles and sunflowers grew waist high around the two remaining buildings. White paint peeled and cracked on the siding of the church and left boards exposed to the harsh sun, the cold winters. Maybe it’s all changed now. Maybe the church collapsed. Maybe the trailer’s gone.
I left the solid feel of pavement underneath the tires and turned onto gravel roads.
•••
As I drove closer to home, stories attached themselves to places void of meaning for most: the corner where my brother and sister wrecked their car, putting both of them in the hospital; the airstrip on the edge of a field where Mr. Hadler landed his spray plane in the summer; the old Holcomb place where the bus picked up children for several years and then one day the family disappeared, blown like chaff to far away places. Their house, like so many houses in this area, still stands empty.
Even though it was one in the morning, I worried about seeing another vehicle on the narrow gravel road. I might meet someone checking cows or getting home late from the bars. Great-uncles and aunts, countless cousins and neighbors will recognize my car. They’ll tell my dad or my grandparents they saw me. I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t want my grandparents, who live just four miles away from our house, to worry about me driving so far alone at night. I didn’t want my dad to call me. If they found out, I’d lie. I’d tell them I forgot something I needed, which wouldn’t be as much of a lie as intended.
Eventually, I saw three silver bins like metal cairns on the left hand side of the road. I’d reached our field.
•••
Rounding the corner, my chest swelled. I knew every inch of this mile. I ran on this road when I was in high school and the past two summers when I returned from college. I jogged in the morning before I started chores. As the sun came up, wild sunflowers in the ditch raised their heads towards the light. Rabbits and field mice scampered across the road. Cows bawled as I passed by, and the gravel crunched beneath my weight, my breath labored but even.
Sometimes, I ran at night. I could only see a few feet in front of me. The maintainer’s blade left a strip of dirt on either side of the road. I used it to navigate the road’s edge. Every noise—crickets chirping, wind blowing through milkweeds, coyotes’ calls—magnified itself in the darkened silence. From the ditch, the glow of stray cats’ eyes followed me; at least that’s what I told myself. It could have been skunks or coyotes or raccoons. At night, I only went to the nearest corner, a quarter mile away, and back several times. Fear held me back from pressing further into the darkness.
To most people, there’s hardly a dip in the road. But I knew every washboard, every soft shoulder, every drainage route. I’m home.
The elm trees my great-grandmother planted stood like guards beside the road. I entered the driveway and toke note of the wild mustard, at least a foot tall, growing up through the lava rocks in front of the house. There must have been a storm because part of the gutter over the garage hung off the roof. Small branches had fallen onto the overgrown lawn. The elm tree my parents planted on the south side of the house had doubled in size. As I followed the driveway around back, I noticed the suckers growing at its base.
The headlights glared on the large deck my father and brother built. My mom talked about buying whiskey barrels and loading them with flowers to put on the deck. She never did. She’d say, “We should put lights along the sidewalk” or “We should plant new trees.” Action was never her strong suit. She also didn’t realize everything would fall apart so quickly.
I got out and heard the echo of the car door shutting. From the glow of the yard light, I noticed dandelions and sandburs growing through the cracks in the sidewalk. Buffalo grass encroached the gravel driveway. The deck needed another stain. I paid attention to these things because they were my jobs—weeding, mowing, staining.
Cows gathered in the corral. A few bawled. When I look up into the sky, the Milky Way and a thousand other stars seemed strewn across the sky like seeds thrown by a pioneer from a grain bag slung over his shoulder.
I unlocked the door with one of two house keys we ever had made. I’m not sure how I ended up with one. I walked through the garage, up the wooden steps to the side door.
•••
During the divorce settlement, my mother had a choice: keep the house or sell it to my father. With all the siblings’ consent, my brother said, “Sell it.”
We assumed my father wouldn’t let go of the house—there’s little market for farmhouses. He didn’t need the house. The day he left my mother, he moved in with his girlfriend, Susie. I knew nothing of their relationship. She’s a ghost who has stolen my father and haunts the rest of us.
Three months after my father left, my sisters and I helped my mom move to Greeley, into an apartment. We took essentials—her bed, sheets, a few pots and pans, her clothes, the kitchen table and chairs, a love seat and recliner. My mother wandered around the house, unsure what to take, unsure what to leave. She’d point to the TV cabinet or the floral living room sofa, and ask, “Do you think this can fit?” We’d shake our heads, compromise on something smaller. By afternoon, we loaded all we thought could fit into the small two-bedroom apartment my mother and I’d share for two years.
The apartment never felt like home. In fact, even with a husband and children of my own, nowhere has ever felt so truly like my home except the farm. But the apartment my mother and I shared felt like a stopping point on the way to somewhere else—somewhere better. Living together while we both went to college reversed our roles. She relied on me to help her adjust to college and living in town. From day to day, I didn’t know what to expect. Some days we’d talk and laugh about classes like roommates. Other days, I’d find her sobbing at the kitchen table. I’d talk her through getting flipped off in traffic or prioritizing the myriad projects due for her classes. Most of the time, she couldn’t be a mother. I didn’t expect her to.
•••
When I visited the house, I wanted my mother to be at the table sipping a cup of tea, reading a book, waiting. I wanted my father to be asleep in his chair like so many other nights. Always, I imagined the idealized version of my parents, the version I’d actually had for many, many years, rather than the desperate pair I last witnessed: the woman who locked herself away from us; the man stumbling home, drunk.
I opened the door to darkness. Staleness filled the air like in an empty grain bin. I turned on the hallway light and wandered from room to room like a sleepwalker. I don’t know what I was looking for—I don’t know what I expected to find.
From the garage door, I walked into the kitchen. A towel hung in the refrigerator door. A teacup and plate rested in the dish rack. A 1996 calendar on the wall showed the month of March, the month my father left.
•••
I could’ve grabbed the cookie sheet or the over-sized pan my mom talked about missing. I could’ve taken the flower-print sheets for her bed from the hallway closet filled with towels, sheets, and linens. But I didn’t. I wanted it to stay the same like a shrine or museum. If I took something back, my mother would know I visited the house. She thought I was out with friends having fun.
We had an understanding—I can come back to the apartment whenever I want without question, as long as no boys stay the night. I didn’t want to see the men my mother might have stay the night at the kitchen table in the morning, either. Yet, I shouldn’t have worried. My mother has never been on a date. I’m sure she worried about me, but it would’ve compounded her worry to know I made trips to the house.
As I wandered into the combined living room and dining room, the absence of the table, chairs, and recliner reminded me everything had changed. Shannon’s basketball and track pictures stood on top of the TV cabinet, though the TV is missing. I walked into the hallway to my parents’ room.
I saw the imprints in the carpet where their bed had sat. I looked at the long, oak dresser with a mirror attached. On top, my mother always placed a crocheted runner, her Chanel perfume, our school pictures, and a framed wedding picture to one side. As things deteriorated in the marriage, she took everything down but the framed 8 x 10 wedding picture in the center of the dresser.
My parents stand at the altar facing empty pews of the congregation. They are young; my mother holds a bouquet in manicured hands; my father looks stiff in his white jacket and black dress pants, a crew cut. It’s the only picture my mother ever displayed of their wedding. They had an album, but my mother rarely let us look at it. She didn’t want us to put fingerprints on the pictures. She wanted it to be perfect. Though so many times, even before my father’s affair, her distance and moods created strange obstacles we carefully navigated like cows walking on ice.
I don’t know why she left the wedding picture on the dresser. I like to think she wanted my father to see it, that she wanted to show she’d always been committed, that she’d done her best.
I didn’t stay long in my parents’ room; I couldn’t make myself. I turned off the hallway light and headed downstairs.
I entered my room at the foot of the stairs. I scanned a few framed photos of high school friends on the wall and wandered over to my bureau. I opened the top drawer and shuffled through papers: canceled checks, notes from an old boyfriend, and birthday cards from my grandparents.
On top of my bureau sat a jewelry box with a small drawer for earrings or bracelets. Because I only have a couple pairs of earrings, I put cash inside. When I opened the drawer, a wad of bills spilled out. I counted thirty-seven dollars. I shoved them back into the drawer. I must’ve been saving for something. I don’t remember what.
I scanned my closet filled with old clothes. I hadn’t had time to pack them for Goodwill the day we moved my mom. After a while, I switched off my light.
I knew it was late. It must have been close to two in the morning. I should go back. But I didn’t want to leave. Even though it was abandoned, even though only memories lived there, even though I couldn’t actually stay, I longed for the place even more.
•••
Upstairs in the kitchen, I pulled out drawers filled with silverware, dishtowels, and recipe books. I rummaged through the junk drawer filled with duct tape, Christmas bows, and birthday candles. I opened each cupboard. I looked at the canned soup and vegetables, Tupperware, plates and glasses. I stopped in the hallway just before the garage door and looked at the bulletin board on the wall.
An old school menu and a few jokes clipped out of the newspaper were tacked to the board. Our kindergarten pictures lined the bottom of the bulletin board. But at the top was a family picture, one of only two we ever had professionally taken.
I’m about two. I sit on a stool beside my father’s chair. My father is in the middle of the photo holding Shannon on his lap. Lisa props herself up on her hand on the floor by my father’s feet. My brother and mom stand behind my father on either side, their hands on his shoulders. We wear our best seventies outfits in the color of tangerines and avocados.
While Shannon and I have blank expressions because we’re too young to know what’s going on, the other four seem happy. Darren smiles as though he’s heard a joke. Lisa’s heard the same joke but won’t allow her teeth to show in her smile. My parents look bright, content. They seem to have no inkling of what’s to come—the joys, the heartaches, and everything in between.
I locked the door behind me.
•••
In August 2000, my sister and I were back in mom’s apartment in Greeley for the summer when my father called. He decided to rent the house to a couple with twins. The young man had moved back home to work on his family’s farm, like my father had, over thirty years before.
I hadn’t visited the house for almost two years. To accommodate the renters, we drove from Greeley to the farm three times in one week. Darren had to work; Lisa lived out of state. On the first trip, we wandered around for hours putting a few items in boxes, but mostly we were mesmerized. One of us would find an object—the cast from when I broke my wrist in fourth grade, my mother’s wedding china, the dress Shannon wore for prom—and we told stories.
The next time we made a plan to work room by room. It helped us focus. The third trip, we brought a moving truck. Like a cowboy trying to zip a winter jacket with too many layers underneath, we crammed the truck full, barely leaving space to close the door. We left odds and ends inside—an old bookcase, bunk beds, a broken record player, among other items. We figured my father could move the rest.
After we loaded the truck, each of us took one last walk around the house. Near dark, Shannon said, “We should go.” My mother asked for a few more minutes. She went to the front living room, pulled back the sheer curtains and looked out across the lawn. It hadn’t been mowed. The limbs of the elm trees swayed slightly. The pasture across the road was brown from the August sun. Tumbleweeds caught in the barbed wire fence dangled and thrashed against the barbs, trying to break free.
The setting sun left brush strokes of orange and red across the horizon. My mom turned from the window and said, “I’m ready.” Before we walked out the door, I put the key on the kitchen counter.
•••
Last June, my husband Miguel and I drove by the house with our boys. We were traveling through on our way to work a summer teaching job in Nebraska. I hadn’t been back inside the house since that August, almost fifteen years before. I asked Miguel to slow down as we approached. Wild irises bloomed at the lawn’s edge. A large flowerpot filled with petunias sat on the cement steps leading to the front door. Fewer trees stood in the backyard, and a plastic infant swing swayed in the breeze on an elm bordering the road.
Because Miguel drove slowly, the boys thought we were stopping and said, “We get out Papí? Get out?”
“You have to ask your Mama.”
“Get out Mama? Get out?”
I leaned over to look at them in their car seats, their hazel eyes wide with anticipation then turned back to the house. I scanned the yard, the line of trees, and the outbuildings. I examined the front window and envisioned the formal living room the way we left it so many years ago: the piano against the south wall, the couch tucked between two lamp tables facing the large windows, the swivel chair to the side; a place just big enough for everyone to return.
I thought of all the secretive trips—how I couldn’t stay away. I want to talk to that girl standing in the kitchen. I want to tell her she needs to stop holding on to everything with clenched fists; she needs to let go. But I’m sure if the younger version of myself and I could be in the same room together, she might say the same thing back to me.
What would that girl think if she knew years later she’d still be troubled, that she’d be married but have paranoid moments when she thought her husband would leave, that no other place had yet felt like home? What would she think if she knew she’d so internalized the shape and feel of the land that memories would never satisfy her?
I knew if I asked, the family who lives there now would open their door, would let us wander through each room. But it would be their furniture, their pictures on the wall, their memories filling the house. I want my sons to see where I grew up, to somehow understand, but that would mean breaking the spell, the one that holds my childhood family suspended in time, just beyond the sheer curtains in the front windows.
I turned and said, “No, not yet. Not yet.”
•••
DANA SALVADOR’s work is forthcoming in South Dakota Review and has been featured in Fourth Genre, Cold Mountain Review,North Dakota Quarterly, Literary Mama, among others. Additionally, she’s the recipient of a Vogelstein Foundation Grant and the recipient of the 2016 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award. She sometimes leaves posts at www.danasalvador.wordpress.com.
I moved to Los Angeles in 1994, ten months after the Northridge earthquake that killed around fifty people and split the 10 Freeway in two. Despite my absence during that disaster, the specter of a quake has haunted my years in southern California since, most recently when we bought a house in Ventura some seventy miles north of L.A. I remember reading the disclosures that explained the house wasn’t merely in a fault zone—much of Southern California property is—but rather a liquefaction zone. In the event of an earthquake we could expect ground water to rise and transform the soil under the house to quicksand, thus fulfilling a phobia I’d acquired as a kid when the concept of quicksand was first introduced to me in an episode of The Incredible Hulk. That word, liquefaction, was so blunt, so at odds with the Edward-Scissorhands-suburbia aesthetic of the street, that it somehow made it easier to dismiss it as hyperbole.
I mentioned it to my husband who blithely replied that as long as we could get earthquake insurance—we could—he didn’t see a problem. We signed the contract and moved in. Two and half years later the big one came, but instead of an earthquake we got a fire.
•••
California’s largest wildfire in modern history, the Thomas Fire, started on a Monday evening in early December 2017 in the hills above Santa Paula, a sleepy agricultural town with a charming, lost-in-time main street. Fueled by relentless Santa Ana winds, the fire traversed fifteen miles of rugged terrain to consume five hundred structures in the foothills of Ventura on its first of what would go on for thirty-eight nights, culminating in the deadly Montecito mudslides of early January.
In the space of a mile, downtown Ventura slopes from the hills to the Pacific, forming a makeshift amphitheater facing Pierpont Bay. That night residents were compelled to turn their gaze from the sea to the hills. Friends who live on lower ground pulled lawn chairs into their driveway and stayed up all night watching what they described as Hades descending into the city. Earlier that day we had driven up to Berkeley, where I rent an apartment for work, and we didn’t hear about the fire until early the next morning. Alerted by a Facebook message, I turned to Twitter for news: the Hawaiian Gardens, an iconic mid-century apartment building a quarter of a mile from our house, had just burned down.
What followed was a frenzied morning of trying to ascertain if we still had a house—by mid-morning neighbors had confirmed that, for the moment, we did—and what we should do next. My grandparents’ hillside Southern California home had once survived a wildfire when a quick-thinking neighbor emptied his pool onto it, a memory that left me thinking that we at least ought to try to do something. At my urging, my husband agreed to fly down—mostly, I think, to prevent me from going. I dropped him off at the Oakland airport later that morning then called my parents in Florida to tell them we were okay, annoyed that they hadn’t yet called to ask. Despite my father’s penchant for watching Fox News, he seemed completely oblivious to the severity of the situation.
While Doug travelled, we composed a list over email of what he should try to get out if he could reach the house—our neighborhood was under a mandatory evacuation and would remain so for over a week. We’d planned that he would try to retrieve the car we had left in the garage and his passport, but the notion of things you take with you in this kind of situation remained elusive and, in the end, ours was surprisingly prosaic. He nominated some entirely replaceable small household electronics, and I chose a few pieces of jewelry I seldom wore and some photo albums dating from pre-smartphone days that we hadn’t opened in years.
It wasn’t that we didn’t value the contents of our house. Collectively they told a story of our lives, both the things we had brought with us individually to the marriage and those we had acquired together since. To single anything out—say the garage-sale painting that had hung over our sideboard in every house or the mermen Christmas ornaments we’d left permanently hanging on the curtain railing—felt hopelessly arbitrary.
The only other thing we came up with was a gold coin that my father had given us for Christmas a few years earlier. It had no sentimental value and around a thousand dollars of actual value, but we had both immediately thought of it because of what my father, a Trump-voting Republican, had said when he gave it to us. Obama was president at the time, which for him constituted a threat to his family worthy of equipping us all with portable currency and a conspiratorially whispered explanation of “in case you ever need to flee.” He’d acted on an imagined risk and failed to notice a real one. And while it wasn’t for the reason he’d envisioned, it was no less unnerving that my father’s prophecy was coming true.
•••
Doug’s return visit accomplished little other than retrieving our uninspired list of “treasured things” and giving him a chest infection brought on by smoke inhalation. The power was out so he couldn’t stay at the house, but he did skirt the evacuation order to hose it down in those first few days. After a few more nerve-wracking days of being evacuated from motels farther and farther up the coast, he drove back to Berkeley, where we obsessively watched SMS alerts and the Twitter feed of the fire department’s Public Information Officer. We hoped for an estimated containment date but got more red flag warnings.
We returned to Ventura together two weeks after the fire had started to find our house unscathed barring a thick coating of ash. While the fire continued to torment Santa Barbara County, life in Ventura began to resume some normality in the week ahead of Christmas. Air quality was finally good enough to go outside, and everywhere I went, from the dentist to the grocery store, people were telling their own harrowing fire stories. There was a compulsive need to share as a way to exorcise the trauma. Every repetition was therapeutic, an affirmation the still-disbelieving storyteller was okay, even if their belongings weren’t.
In nearby Ojai, a resort town with a tightknit community, artists Sarah Mirk and Lucy Bellwood provided a sanctioned outlet for such storytelling when they hosted a benefit at the local bookstore. Residents read aloud the stories of what they took with them when they evacuated. These ranged from a concert tee-shirt collection to a Purple Heart and were compiled into a zine that was being sold to raise money for people affected by the fire. It was the most meta of mementos: a souvenir about souvenirs.
Despite the worthy cause, I didn’t buy one. The anxiety of the past two weeks had been all-consuming, and I wanted no reminder of it. I was also nagged by the sense of being an impostor, an interloper in this community’s sacred ritual. I was not from Ojai—I was hardly from Ventura, one of seven cities we’d lived in during the last decade and not even the place where I now worked most weeks. I may have been a citizen of the world, but I was also a citizen of nowhere, incapable of partaking fully in either local tragedy or triumph. I adopted my fallback position of consumer, bought a book to support the store—which had been forced to close during the fire—and left the benefit early.
That same week I discovered another breed of fire souvenirs while walking on the boardwalk at the beach. The Ventura County Fairgrounds had been converted into the command center for the Thomas Fire, supporting and housing some of the over 8,500 firefighters that worked the blaze. Along a grassy strip separating the fairground parking lot from the beach, a cottage industry of disaster had sprung up in the form of several tents stocked with Thomas Fire–themed merchandise.
Upon being confronted with a pink tee-shirt bearing the likeness of Santa and his reindeer flying towards a full moon over a photo of the blazing Ventura hills while firefighters look on, capped off with a “Happy New Year 2018” message, my immediate reaction was to recoil. The woman working behind the table was clearly practiced in handling this kind of response and volunteered that the shirts were something firefighters, many of whom were from out of town, could bring their kids as a souvenir. There was a deserved pride associated with fighting what was now on track to be the largest wildfire in California’s history, and the presence of a few uniformed emergency services workers surveying the merchandise at another table lent plausibility to her explanation.
I swallowed my judgement and walked on, mulling over this idea of disaster souvenirs and trying to think of precedents. My sister, who works in law enforcement, had helped clean up after 9/11, and I remembered she’d given my husband a commemorative 9/11 tee-shirt from her squad that Christmas, albeit with a much more understated logo. Did the companies who had set up shop outside the Thomas Fire command center crisscross the country hunting disasters like storm chasers? My subsequent request for an interview with the Santa-over-inferno tee-shirt maker received no response.
•••
Sometime after Christmas, I finally succumbed to the lure of a souvenir from the fire. A local brewery was selling tote bags and tee-shirts to benefit fire victims. I bought the tote, reasoning I can always use another grocery bag, but mostly now really, compulsively wanting it. I attribute my change of heart to wanting a tangible reminder that the trauma of the past few weeks had in fact occurred.
Of course the evidence was all around town, from the charred hillside behind city hall where we often hiked, to rubble-strewn lots lorded over by incongruous chimney stacks. But the path of a wind-driven fire is unpredictable, and its destruction had been haphazard. The fire had left no visible damage in more pockets of the city than not. As spring arrived, the hillsides would green and memories would recede. Here on the patio of the brewery with the 101 Freeway rushing by on one side and a quintessential California blue sky overhead, the possibility of a fire threatening the entire city had already started to seem as implausible as our entire street collapsing into quicksand.
The design of the tote bag had also appealed to me in a way that the Santa-over-inferno tee-shirts had not, but it was peculiar in its own way. Two crossed hands, palms up, hold a black heart that drips what appears to be oil—a strange choice considering the bag is commemorating a fire—over illustrations of local icons: a cactus, a bell tower, our neoclassical city hall. Between the heart and the line drawings a discreet line of text reads “Helping Hands Thomas Fire XII.IV.MMXVII,” the Roman numerals arguably as pretentious as Santa Claus over an inferno is crass.
Despite their differences, both items fulfill two of our keenest contemporary needs—to buy and to broadcast: I was there. Self-conscious of this fact, I’ve yet to use the bag. But it hangs on the coat stand by the front door of my Berkeley apartment, ready to be filled with treasure should I ever need to flee.
•••
JENNIFER RICHARDSON is the author of a memoir, Americashire: A Field Guide to a Marriage. She contributes to Edible Ojai and Ventura County and is working on a lifetime reading plan app, booketlist in her spare time. Find her online at http://jenniferrichardson.net/ and on Twitter @baronessbarren.
There are airplane seats in my living room. A row of five, straight-backed, with navy-blue and charcoal upholstery, canvas seatbelts with silver buckles that still shine. They must have come from a big plane, a 747 perhaps, something that flew over international waters. Bulky and awkward, like nothing you’ve ever seen in a Pottery Barn catalog or a Living Spaces commercial, the seats are not my taste. I’d prefer they weren’t in our apartment at all, but they belong to my husband, James, and predate the beginning of our relationship. Over the years, I have tried to ask as few questions as possible about the seats, as if my disinterest could somehow make them fade into the background.
When guests come, the airplane seats are the first thing they see. “Are those from a real plane?” they ask. I roll my eyes. James smirks and nods. The guests search for appropriate responses, which vary from shock to envy, depending upon their gender.
No one ever sits in the seats, but if they did, they’d feel the scratch of polyester against the backs of their thighs. They’d notice a hard metal frame pressing into their shoulder blades. If they closed their eyes, they might hear the deep hum of the engine or the sharp rattle of a beverage cart. They might even feel the bounce of turbulence no longer there.
•••
Fifteen years ago, when he was working as a production assistant on television shows around Los Angeles, James found the airplane seats in a heap of gear outside a studio in the San Fernando Valley. After a show wraps, crewmembers tear down the set, separating scrap materials from furniture and other items that can be reused. The seats were either on their way back to a prop warehouse or bound for the trash. But James and his roommates, who were also working as PAs and stuntmen at the time, snagged the seats and brought them back to their shared, three-bedroom apartment in the city.
The guys, most of whom came to LA from the rugged streets of Boston, were just getting started in the business. They worked long, entry-level shifts and pooled their earnings to cover rent, booze, and cable TV. Back then, much of their furniture came from the curb. A large couch, swayback and gray like an old mule. Kitchen chairs. End tables. Even a futon that would later become my daughter’s bed.
James and his friends put the seats on a wooden riser in their living room to create movie-theater seating, an optimal arrangement for watching Super Bowls and Stanley Cups. A projector transformed the opposite wall into a giant screen. I didn’t know them then, but I imagine them also watching the shows they had been working on at the time, scanning the credits for their own names.
•••
One day, while vacuuming the space around the airplane seats, I see what appears to be a serial number stamped on the back of the chairs, along with a date: Sept. 25, 1992. An internet search of the serial number proves fruitless, but the date makes me smile. That’s the year James and I graduated from high school. We went to the same school in western Maine, though we were hardly friends at the time. He was the captain of the football team who dated the head cheerleader. I was captain of the basketball and field hockey teams. The titles were mostly honorary; I was a hard worker but a lousy athlete. With only sixty kids in our graduating class, we knew each other’s names but never had a single conversation—not that either of us can recall, anyway.
After graduation, he studied advertising at Florida State University, then moved to Los Angeles to find work in show business. Along the way, he was the life of every party, a distinction he earned with excessive drinking and risky decisions.
I wouldn’t know about it until much later, but when he was in his twenties, a drunken car wreck nearly severed James’ right arm just below the shoulder. Doctors said he’d never regain full use of it, but after surgery and physical therapy, he proved them wrong. He even played football again, as a fullback with a semi-pro team that practiced three nights a week and competed on the weekends. More than once, he was the team’s most valuable player.
•••
After high school, I went to the University of Maine and got a degree in journalism. James never married, but I got hitched right away, mostly to escape the paper mill town where we grew up. My first husband was in the military which meant we moved every four years. In each new town, I got a job as a reporter at the local newspaper, covering everything from tedious school board meetings to gruesome homicides. Through work, I found a way to belong.
After ten years of marriage, our daughter Angie was born, and I quit my job to take care of her. While her dad was away on short deployments, she and I went to mommy and me yoga classes, story time at the local library, and swimming lessons for infants at the YMCA. I nursed her and made her baby food from scratch. Our days were smooth and peaceful, easy and predictable. But then the clouds rolled in.
When Angie was two, her father and I split. He had an affair with a woman he had known back in high school, who now had kids of her own. After that, Angie and I left our family home and moved back to the paper mill town, where I got a job bottling pills in the supermarket pharmacy, rented an apartment and filed for divorce. Money was tight, so we furnished our new place with things from yard sales and thrift stores. Mismatched dishes. A faded pink rocking chair. A kitchen table that wobbled, no matter how I attempted to fix it.
After a year of court hearings, the judge granted me full custody of Angie, meaning all the decisions about caring for her were up to me. There were doctors’ appointments and tantrums, nightmares and fevers, potty training and time-outs. I was her mother and her father, never feeling as though I was doing either job well enough. The hardest part, though, was focusing on Angie when my own heart was broken, when I was afraid of what each new day would bring, when I couldn’t imagine a time when things would feel normal again.
Instead of being home with my daughter, making her meals from scratch and teaching her the alphabet, I dropped her off at daycare in the morning and went to the pharmacy to hand out Vicodin and Viagra for eight dollars an hour, then warmed up macaroni and cheese for dinner in the afternoon. Each evening, I bathed her, read her bedtime books, and cuddled her under the covers, wondering if this was it—if this was the life we were meant to live, in this small town, where everything was bumpy and rough. I missed our old life, our sense of stability. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I’d wake up and, just for a moment, forget where we were.
•••
For two years, Angie and I juggled work, daycare, and life in our little rental apartment. We celebrated birthdays and Christmases and made a few friends. But the paper mill town never felt like home. When she was four, we had a yard sale of our own. We sold the dishes and the furniture, then drove south to Boston and boarded a plane bound for Los Angeles.
During my divorce, James and I had begun an email correspondence that turned into friendship. I wrote to him, at first, because I was lonely and talking to adults kept me from going stir crazy. He wrote back, maybe, because his roommates had all moved out and he needed someone to vent to about work. In our emails, we told each other what we had been doing since high school. I shared the details of my breakup and the struggles of parenting. He wrote about the parties, the accident, and the day he decided to quit drinking. I admired his resolve, his self-control, and discipline; he appreciated my tenacity. Our friendship turned into intrigue, and intrigue turned into romance. He started sending Angie and me little gifts, playful things to keep us smiling: a red-and-white cowgirl lunchbox for her, a coffee mug shaped like Buddha for me. Then he sent plane tickets.
The trip marked Angie’s first time on an airplane, and she spent most of the five-hour flight looking out the window at a blanket of clouds, mesmerized by how soft the world looked from high up. I passed the time imagining what things would be like in California and wondering if James could handle being around a demanding preschooler. The visit was a test that I suspected we would fail. It was easy to romanticize a relationship from three thousand miles away. Being together every day might be a different story.
That week, James took us to all the usual tourist spots. The Hollywood sign. Venice Beach. In-N-Out Burger. Angie liked him instantly. She sat next to him at dinner, asked to hold his hand when we crossed streets, and pretended to be his pet dog—her favorite game of make-believe. But it was the quiet evenings at his place that hooked me, when he and Angie curled up on that old swayback couch to watch superhero movies, her forehead resting on the jagged scar along his bicep.
After Angie and I returned to Maine, the paper mill town felt even less like home than it had before. I knew that no matter how hard I worked or how long we stayed, the town would never be where we belonged. James invited us to live with him, and I spent several months waffling about whether moving was the right thing to do—for Angie and for myself. I was afraid of making a huge mistake, of giving up our safe haven. But I also knew that if we didn’t go, if we didn’t at least try, I would always wonder what life might’ve been like for the three of us. So Angie and I had our yard sale and went back to California. For good.
•••
In the years before our arrival, most of James’ curbside treasures had disappeared—taken or disposed of by various roommates as they moved up in the world and moved on, into their own places or in with girlfriends and wives. James had moved up, too; no longer a production assistant on television shows, he had become a computer engineer on blockbuster movie productions, the kind that involve the most famous actors in Hollywood.
The airplane seats remained, though, along with a Scarface poster, the beer-stained carpets and a shelf of half-filled liquor bottles. His party days were behind him. No more drinking, no more reckless behavior. But the bottles and other trappings stayed—reminders that good times can be good, but they can also go bad.
Of course, I had my own attachments. After two years of single parenting, I drew imaginary lines around my daughter and myself. When I went grocery shopping, I bought only the things Angie and I liked. When I cooked, I made enough for two. I kept our laundry and our money separate. At night, I crawled into bed with my daughter instead of the man who would eventually become my husband. Some of it was habit, but most of it was fear. How could I trust someone again, not only with my heart but also with my daughter’s? Sometimes it’s hard to let go of the past, even when you know that letting go is the last step before flying free.
James never questioned my hesitancy or complained about feeling left out. He simply waited to see how things would evolve. Then one day, while he and Angie lounged on the couch, it suddenly became clear: if I kept my guard up, if I continued to hold him at arm’s length, then so would Angie. Love doesn’t live inside imaginary lines. It is big and risky. It is the whole sky or nothing at all.
•••
Now Angie’s ten years old, and James and I are married. In time, he took down the Scarface poster, tossed the liquor-bottle mementos, and replaced the carpets. I learned how to shop and cook for a family of three and started sleeping in my husband’s bed. We bought a new sofa, brown suede with cream stitching, and put that old swayback couch on the curb for someone else.
The airplane seats, however, are still here.
I would love for them to disappear one day, perhaps go to a storage facility or maybe into the trash. But the chances of that happening are slim. James wants to hold onto them, even though they no longer go with the décor.
I understand the seats are part of his past, a part he isn’t ready to relinquish just yet. They hold memories of the fun he had with a particular group of guys and how hard they all worked to make names for themselves. Maybe they also remind him of his retreat from alcohol addiction, when he sharply and decisively changed the trajectory of his life.
If that’s the case, then the seats remind me of something too: that it’s all right to put my flaws in the middle of the room. I can struggle with the past and feel insecure about the future, and James will love me anyway. I can be hesitant and fearful, territorial and overprotective—it won’t matter. Love is also staying in the room with another person’s imperfections. It’s sitting with their undesirable elements without making demands or asking too many questions.
Even though I hate the airplane seats, this apartment feels like home. Angie and I have finally landed where we belong. So I’ll keep the silly seats forever if I have to, if James wants them. I’ll keep dusting them, keep vacuuming around them and dressing them up with throw pillows. I’ll even sit in them for a movie or two, scanning the credits for his name.
•••
WENDY FONTAINE’s work has appeared in Compose Literary Journal, Hippocampus Magazine, Passages North, Readers Digest, River Teeth, the anthology Turning Points: Stories about Choice and Change, and elsewhere. In 2015, she won the Tiferet Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Wendy lives and teaches in Los Angeles and is currently seeking representation for her memoir, Leaves in the Fall. www.wendyfontaine.com
Relief as I arrive at the rental office with moments to spare before it closes to pick up keys for my new home: an eleven-hundred square foot townhouse with a small backyard, a garage, and more space in the closets than I have stuff to fill closets with. I wonder if the large downstairs closet by the front door could be used as a study; I contemplate it seriously.
I furnish the town home with two tables, a small stone-colored couch, a rustic Mexican wooden television stand with shelving—all furniture that my mother and stepfather have given to me from their own home. My queen-sized bed is a hand-me-down I got from my sister; I’m pretty sure my niece was conceived on it.
About a year later, a friend from Berkeley, a former roommate, visits me there. After staying with me, she gossips to another friend that I still have all my furniture from grad school. I’m hurt since it is obviously not meant to be a compliment; but she’s not entirely wrong either. The décor of the townhome is more than a little patched together, the furniture worn and perhaps more starkly so against large, bright white freshly painted walls and new carpets. I want to paint the walls, but it’s a rental and I don’t want to lose my security deposit. Grad student poverty is still my day-to-day reality. But the new place is to me, palatial and above all, spacious with possibility.
I am 189 miles away from Sacramento where I was born, the furthest I have ever lived from that city except for the year I lived in Mexico as a girl. I am a new Assistant Professor at a public university on California’s central coast with a freshly completed a doctorate from UC Berkeley. I traveled from the Sacramento area in a caravan with my mother and stepfather in a small U-Haul truck, me driving the 1987 Volvo that my stepfather purchased for me for $750. I am twenty-nine years old, the Volvo is my first car, and I am a newly licensed driver. My mother and stepfather are doing all they can to help me. So many things are new.
2005
I’m embarking on a nationwide job search, and I interview at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. There, after actually complimenting the coffee at a restaurant in which we have dined, a graduate student accuses me of being a “Berkeley food snob.” She says: “People who come here from Berkeley are always like, ‘Oh, well, in Berkeley we have blah blah blah, and in Berkeley we have wah wah wah.’” Seriously—that’s exactly what she says.
If the apartment in which I live can be taken as any indication of the kind of status that enables one to become an anything snob, then this graduate student’s accusation is a verifiable impossibility. I live in a basement studio apartment of an old white Victorian home on Hearst Avenue, in Berkeley not far from campus. I select it solely on the basis of its location and the fact that it is “affordable.” It is not really affordable, since I have to take out roughly ten thousand dollars in student loans to afford it, but I’ve reached the point that many graduate students reach: I simply can not deal with the idea of having yet another roommate and have no idea how I will be able to write anything while having to negotiate others’ schedules and habits. I’ve been a student having student money problems and roommates for eleven years; I’m desperate to be done.
I should have known there is something up with the basement apartment when the landlord asks me to give him twelve postdated rent checks for eleven hundred dollars each when I sign the one-year lease. I have never signed a lease on my own before, and I understand Berkeley to have an odd and difficult rental market, so I agree to his request. After all, he says this is the only way to secure the apartment and make sure he doesn’t rent it to someone else. I give him over thirteen thousand dollars in postdated checks.
I’m sick almost immediately and this lasts pretty much the entire year. The damp, musty basement apartment grows molds and mildews in places I didn’t know mildew grew. As a child, I lived in some poorly ventilated homes and apartments; I’m used to the green black creep of mold on bathroom ceilings, to the mold that grows around window sills. But this apartment has that and more. I discover that mold is even growing in the one small closet in the apartment. My clothes begin smelling like mildew. A girlfriend tells me about a product called Damp Rid, a container of crystals that gets put in places where moisture leads to mold in order to absorb the dampness. I have no idea such a thing existed, and after complaining to the landlord who does nothing, I think I should give it a try. I have three containers of Damp Rid in different parts of the four-hundred square foot studio including in the musty closet. I write my doctoral dissertation next to containers of Damp Rid with a constant runny nose, itchy eyes, and allergy-induced headaches.
Some young men live in the flat above. I can’t tell if they’re students or if they do something else for work. I hear them exclaim, “Oooooh! Oooooohhh!” in loud unison about once a week. I imagine they are involved in some kind of weekly circle jerk and don’t really know what to think about that. I guess I’m curious about it but I mostly stay away from them. Eventually, I figure out that they’re vociferously playing video games. A disappointment. I have a very regular writing routine and remember every day that I moved to the Hearst Avenue basement apartment because I didn’t want the noise or the distraction of roommates. One day, I begin to hear hammering right outside my window. I try to tune it out and don’t worry about it much until the hammering goes on day after day. I am distracted and irritated. I see that my neighbors are building something brown and hairy on the back of a truck. Over the next few days, it begins to take shape…some kind of an animal. A…Snuffleupagus? On a truck? One day, I ask them about it. And that is how I learn about Burning Man.
I think I will be happy and in better health once I move out of the Hearst Avenue basement apartment, but the move takes place abruptly. I file my dissertation on a Friday afternoon in May, and my grandmother dies the day after on Saturday morning. My deceased grandmother is in Mexico, and though it’s time for me to move out of my Berkeley basement apartment, I leave suddenly and take a flight to Guadalajara to accompany my mother to my grandmother’s wake. After the wake and after my grandmother is cremated, we transport her ashes to Ciudad del Carmen, my grandmother’s hometown and the place where my mother was born and raised.
Back in Berkeley, at move-out time, my stepfather and my sister pack the contents of my apartment into a small U-Haul truck. I tell my twin sister where the cigarettes I hide are, and all the things I do not want my stepfather to see; as always in my life, I entrust her with my secrets. I leave the apartment with a little clothes, a certificate attesting to the completion of the requirements for my doctoral degree, and some uncertainty about the future though I am certain I will not return to that mold-infested place. I’m grief stricken, exhausted, worried about my mother, missing my grandmother already, and overall considerably less happy and healthy than I thought I would be at this moment.
1999
I’ve walked by the 1970s era building thousands of time since I moved to Berkeley in 1995. There’s a storefront on the bottom floor and the store sells Turkish rugs, beaded jewelry, baskets, and other imports. The building is pretentiously called “The Glen Building” and it has a top floor studio apartment that I rent with he who is my first serious long term romantic partner. I’m twenty-one and just learning about what that means. The studio apartment interior is very basic and has fresh paint and a new carpet, the way I hope and expect a rental will have. The carpet has very little padding and matches the 1970s industrial storefront feel of the building. It has a full but very tiny kitchen with a sliding door onto a balcony with a view of the Bay Bridge far in the distance. We move in a queen bed that’s just a mattress and a bed frame with no headboard and an old red easy chair and a table from my parents’ house. While we live in that place together, my partner Ryan and I travel to Mexico, the first time I have ever taken a love there. After returning from Mexico, I make a complete travel scrapbook including ticket stubs, stickers, and countless photographs of us with cousins, aunts, and uncles, on the Zocalo, at la Casa Azul, in Coyoacán, in Xochimilco, in so many magical Mexican places.
I want our studio apartment in the Glen Building to be more like Mexico. We paint the bathroom Frida Kahlo blue and the kitchen a Mexican avocado green. The painting of the kitchen and the bathroom is an investment and a grownup undertaking both because of the effort and because of the cost involved between the painting supplies and the forfeiting of the deposit money. There is a basketball hoop over the sole closet door in the apartment. The closet is not like a regular bedroom closet. It’s very small—more like a hall closet or linen closet. I share it—happily—with Ryan, and we jam our clothes in there and do not complain. I have a bad habit of leaving my wet towel on the bed when I get out of the shower. It is one of only two things that Ryan ever seems unhappy with me about. The other is that I sometimes go on and on talking, and I don’t listen to him very well. I stop leaving my wet towel on the bed and learn to be a better listener.
I learn to fry tofu, I learn to make soups, I learn to use a rice cooker. We host friends sometimes overnight, even though we have no separate guest room or even a futon. One of our friends, a fellow undergraduate, and also poet, gambler, and sports fan, stays with us several times, sleeping on our floor next to us in the queen bed with no headboard in which I learn about what it means to have an adult sexuality. Another friend comes out to me in the stairwell outside of the apartment, confesses that the protagonist of the sex and romance stories he has told me is a man, not a woman as he had made me believe. I’m unfazed; we’re figuring things out and finding our way. We host parties in our cramped studio apartment and create traditions. One of these new traditions is hosting Christmas dinners the week before we leave for our respective families’ holiday gatherings. It’s a way that I can make sure I have a good Christmas. I make roasted legs of lamb and experiment with cooking other things that are brand new to me and like nothing we ate in the homes in which I grew up. With Ryan, I learn what it means to create a chosen family; we flirt with being a family of two ourselves. For the first time in my remembered life, I share a home with a man with whom love and safety are feelings I have all the time and in abundance. I am free.
1992?
We live in a rented house in a suburb of Sacramento on Ash Street, having returned from a year of living in Ciudad del Carmen just the year before. The house is a boxy, light brown two-bedroom house where I live with my stepfather, mother, twin sister, and my two younger brothers—sweet, rascally, fun, little boys. My twin sister and I miss living in Mexico and long for the embrace of my mother’s family, the literal and figurative shelter they give us.
Between, say 1984 and 1995, I live in at least six different rental homes and apartments excluding the year we live at my grandparents’ house in Mexico. In one of the apartment complexes where we live, my mother and stepfather are the resident managers, living rent free in exchange for being the on site go-to people for our neighbors in the apartment complex. A Korean family who own a donut shop are our upstairs neighbors there. The woman of the household teaches my mother to make kimchi and they sometimes bring us fresh donuts from their shop. Some of our homes have unfinished floors. Some of our homes have roaches. All of our homes have holes that my stepfather has punched into doors and walls.
The holes in walls sometimes get covered and repaired, but they sometimes stay—or multiply—while we live in those places. The holes in the wall remind me of the imminence of the “cocos”—what my stepfather calls the knuckle punches on the head he gives us—that is his most frequent physical punishment of us kids. For a while, we are hit with the hard, grey plastic handle of a paddle for a raft I only vaguely remember us owning. But I do remember the raft paddle … its sting, its heft, the fear it inspires even after the welts were gone. There are slaps, too. Hair pulling. I believe, hope, pray that my mother will make it stop.
But she is being hit, too. The sounds of my mother and stepfather’s yelling and arguments are often preludes to sounds of thuds and later to the sight of my mother’s eyes—red and bleary and puffy from crying—or to the mark of welts or bruises on her. Occasionally I see a ripped blouse from her being pulled, yanked on, or dragged. My sister and I learn to drown out the sounds by turning up the volume on the TV. Against reason, we hope our little brothers do not hear what we’re hearing, do not see what we’re seeing.
Once my mother has us pack a few things as we flee to a battered women’s shelter—a “safe house.” I do feel safe in that house though I’m also scared that my mother will go back to my stepfather. Which she does. In the safe house, I desperately want my brothers to somehow feel like things are okay and normal. Though the hand-me-down towels, sheets, and other kids’ hand-me-down stuffed animals point to the anything-but-normal nature of our situation. One of the rules of the safe house is that no one is permitted to give out its phone number and address to preserve the secrecy, anonymity, and so the thinking goes, the safety of the women and their children. We can’t tell anyone where we are or how to reach us. It does not feel normal.
2017
Today, almost thirty years later, I long to remember the faces or names or stories of others who were in that safe house with us, experiencing something similar. But I don’t. We were there just a few days and I was preoccupied with our own situation, where we would go after. It turned out to be that where we went after was the same house we had left. After that, there were promises of no more beatings, which was a promise he mostly kept. After eight years or so of much torment, he (for the most part) stopped hitting us all, instead sticking to yelling, punishing, general volubility, and the maintaining of a home environment where walking on eggshells was the norm.
Of course, we kids did sometimes have fun and experienced joy in our childhood family homes, but these feelings were rented, and we were always aware that we could be evicted from joy at any minute. My siblings and I continued to be kids together until my sister and I moved away to college; we loved and still love each other with the passion of people who know that sticking together is survival.
I’m now a tenured professor, a wife, and a mother of twin daughters. I married my husband just over two years ago, on a beautiful, sunny afternoon on a beach in Maui aptly named Baby Beach since we spoke our vows with our two babies by our side with no other family present. In the midst of our wedding planning, and after thirty years of marriage, my mother and stepfather were in the middle of a bitter divorce the dregs of which I could not bear to have at my wedding.
Beside a shimmering Pacific Ocean, my groom read poems I saw him write on the plane ride without knowing what he was writing. We had one friend in attendance, a dear mutual friend and colleague we learned would coincidentally be in Maui at the time of our wedding. Our friend valiantly did quintuple duty—as our sole guest, videographer, on-site child safety specialist, best man, and maid of honor. I marveled at our luck. Actually, I marvel at my luck every day, as the man with whom I share my home and life shelters me with love, harmony, and understanding, opening my eyes daily to all that is possible for me, for us, for our life together. What is this happiness that I dare to call my own, beyond all my younger self could have imagined?
For the first time in my life, I live in a home that is not a rental home though it is in the same campus housing complex where I moved as an Assistant Professor just over ten years ago. The home I bought with my husband is only slightly bigger than the home I rented just over ten years ago on my own. Not long after we moved in, my husband and I went to the furniture store and bought a brand new couch and coffee table, another first for me. We didn’t buy an expensive couch because we have two small children who spill and stain things the way small children do, but it’s probably still the nicest couch I have ever had.
Last month, my youngest brother hand delivered a letter from my stepfather. The letter was sort of a group letter—asking for reconciliation with my mother, with my siblings, and with me. My name was written on the envelope in handwriting I will always recognize, but there was no address on the envelope under my name. My stepfather has never seen the first and only home I have owned, and does not know where I live. Sometimes the dull ache of the past tugs, but peace reigns in the home I have made, and I relish it.
•••
MARÍA JOAQUINA VILLASEÑOR is a professor of Chicanx/Latinx Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay. She is a co-author of The Historical Dictionary of U.S. Latino Literature, and an essayist whose writing has been published in Remezcla and The Acentos Review.
As I saw my mother walk out of the international terminal at the San Francisco Airport barely able to push the cart stuffed with two enormous suitcases, I hardly recognized her.
The mother of my childhood was a stout, severe-looking authoritarian. “Don’t just sit there wasting your time—do something!” was her favorite mantra. She played the role of a mother, wife, daughter, daughter-in-law, and career woman with a sort of zeal that was impressive, intimidating, and almost always exhausting to watch.
Now my eyes rested on a short, drooping woman in her late sixties. Her shoulders curved in weighed down by some invisible burden. Her once long, dark hair, turned salt and pepper, was gathered in a small bun at her nape. White sneakers stuck out conspicuously, at odds with her festive silk saree and the bright red bindi on her forehead. She blinked nervously, scanning the crowd for my familiar face. When exactly did my mother, the invincible superhero of my childhood, shrink into this fragile, vulnerable person? The transformation felt both rapid and stealthy (hadn’t I seen her just a few years ago?). I was not only unprepared for it, I was suddenly aware of the role reversal and unsure of how to navigate this new shift in power.
I hurried towards her, trying to mask my surprise, and gave her a hug, breathing in the familiar smell of Ponds cold cream and coconut oil. I felt her papery lips kiss me on both cheeks and sensed in her touch both excitement and trepidation as if she couldn’t believe she had crossed the ocean to visit her daughter in America. The country I had chosen over my birthplace. The country I now called home and to which she had lost me almost fifteen years ago.
•••
When I left Madras for Chicago, I was twenty-five and too old to be living at home with my parents, but this was the early nineties and Brahmin girls like me left home either married (usually arranged) or dead. Neither option was particularly appealing to me. Luckily, I wriggled through a loophole that middle-class India, especially Tamil Brahmins, couldn’t resist: education. I headed to Northwestern University to get my master’s degree.
That day, our home was a tornado of activity, and my mother was at the eye of the storm with a single-minded goal—sending her oldest daughter safely to America. Dad reconfirmed my flight, and my brother was dispatched for the third time to check on the taxi’s arrival. My sister, with rising exasperation, was stuffing my suitcase with things my mother deemed necessary, if not critical, for my life abroad: rice, lentils, spices, pickles, a pressure cooker, and an Idli steamer. I, of course, had no say in the matter whatsoever. “When you land in Illinois”—my mother enunciated the s at the end with a hiss—“and want to make sambar, you’ll thank me.”
I was raised in a traditional “Tam Bram” (short for Tamil Brahmin) home, and my mother had decided that her primary duty was to equip her daughters with skills essential to fulfilling their life’s mission: finding a suitable husband and raising a family. This included learning to cook all the traditional South Indian dishes, studying classical Indian music and dance, and learning the bafflingly nuanced rites, rituals, and superstitions that came with an orthodox Tamil Brahmin way of life—touch your right elbow with your left hand while lighting an oil lamp, prostrate two or four times (not thrice!) at the feet of an elder, and my favorite, when you leave the house never shout, “I’m leaving,” say “I’ll be back.”
I watched my mother juggle the binding responsibilities that accompanied a woman born into an orthodox Brahmin family and a career in banking (unusual in those days) with only a high school diploma. She could have a career as long as she didn’t neglect the duties and obligations of a good Brahmin woman. This meant she was the first to rise, often as early as four a.m., and the last to retire. She kept up with all the rituals and traditions expected of her, tended to the needs of our five-member household while advancing her career and doggedly pursuing her various interests that ranged from learning Sanskrit to playing the violin. Like a bonsai tree, she found a way to grow within her established confines and she somehow made it all seem effortless. She had, without explicitly intending to, passed on her independent, ambitious spirit to me.
My mother careened between pride and despair as the days of my impending journey neared. Part of her was deeply dismayed about sending me to a country thousands of miles away, one she had only seen on TV. She worried that the conservative values she had so painstakingly instilled in me wouldn’t withstand the liberal assault of the West. Part of her was very proud and excited that I was making this westward journey—a first for our family and a woman, no less. She had dreamed of becoming a doctor but had to give up her education to care for her sister who had been incapacitated by polio. She married my father at the tender age of nineteen and had me at twenty-one. My siblings followed shortly thereafter. Her life was never carefree, and she wanted more for her daughters. She wanted us to live freely without societal expectations clinging to us like a petulant child.
I, on the other hand, was already in Chicago. In my mind, I had left the familiar landscape of my Indian life far behind to stroll the streets of Evanston, drive along Lake Shore Drive, and soak up campus life. After years of living under the iron fist of a highly competent but controlling mother, who had either directly managed my affairs or influenced my life decisions, I couldn’t wait to leave it all behind and start fresh in a new place. A place she couldn’t get to easily.
My mother responded to my excitement with an equal measure of fire and ice—one minute sending the household into a tizzy with her rapid-fire marching orders to prepare for my departure, and the next sulking in the prayer room with her books and prayer beads. When friends or neighbors threw a party for me, she would make excuses not to attend. I was annoyed by what I misjudged as petulance (she should be happy for me!). I failed to understand that my eagerness to get away from the home and family she had worked so tirelessly to create only substantiated the fact that I could leave. She couldn’t even if she wanted to.
Three weeks later, as I was navigating the aisles of the local grocery store in Evanston, I stood there, teary-eyed, unable to choose from among the numerous brands of neatly stacked shelves of tea. My mother would have picked out just the right type of black tea to make that perfect cup of chai. My sambar never tasted like hers, and my kitchen could never smell like hers—a seductive mix of sandalwood, turmeric, and curry leaves. I missed her strength, her confidence that everyone’s problem could be solved with a good home cooked meal, her remarkable faith in some universal power that would make things work out just fine for everyone, especially her children. I missed her rare and awkward display of affection (“you’re so thin, eat some more” or “don’t be out in the sun too much, you’ll get dark and then who’ll marry you?”) I even missed her marching orders.
•••
Fifteen years had passed since I left my hometown and a lot had changed in both our lives. My sister married and moved to Malaysia. My brother followed me to America. Suddenly, empty nesters, my parents were nearly strangers. Their marriage, a brittle shell they both chose not to shed. A marriage that was once bonded by children was now held together by familiarity and obligation.
My mother followed my life from afar, reading and hearing about it through snippets in e-mails and static-filled phone conversations: graduation, new jobs, new homes, new adventures in new cities with strange names. Each step forward in my American life seemed to drive a wider wedge between us. The more independent and confident I became, the less I relied on her. She had a life scripted for me: a successful Western life on the outside—respectable education, career advancements, and professional success—and a traditional Eastern life on the inside—a successful (preferably wealthy) Indian husband, a couple of adorable kids, a suburban home where I kept all the Tam Bram traditions alive. I couldn’t blame her—it was what she wanted for herself.
While I happily embraced the former, I resolutely rejected the latter. I married a kind artist who lived modestly after abandoning his career as a geologist to pursue his passion in filmmaking. Although a South Indian like me, his Tamil was terrible. He could barely sit crossed legged on the floor (a basic requirement for a Brahmin) let alone be well versed in all the Tam Bram traditions. Neither of us wanted to have children, which bitterly disappointed my mother. She was convinced that I was missing out on a defining life experience. I refused to blindly follow the Brahmin traditions, declaring myself spiritual and not religious. With every passing day, I was becoming more of a stranger to her. She struggled to understand my new life and the different set of values I was embracing. Yet secretly, I wanted her approval, wanted her to accept my choices, even as I defied her traditional wisdom.
When my husband and I separated amicably after seven years, I agonized for days about sharing this news with my mother. This was yet another first in our family and not a first to be proud of. I had to share this news across a transcontinental phone line, not an ideal medium for such a personal conversation. I mentally prepared myself for her reaction. How would I respond if she reproached me? What would I do if she hung up on me? What if she started to cry or scream at me? I had replayed all these scenarios over and over in my head and crafted “mature responses”—take the high road, I told myself—for each of these potential outcomes.
Finally, one morning I gathered the courage to call her. She listened patiently. After I finished, there was a long pause. Just when I thought that she had hung up on me she asked, “What took you so long?”
It was the one scenario I wasn’t prepared for. Surprised, I blubbered incoherently and she said simply, “I want you to be happy. I don’t want you to spend a minute longer in a life where you are not happy.”
She refused to let me dither about in self-doubt and pessimism and with her trademark unflappable spirit she reached across the ten-thousand-mile divide—I could almost feel her hand on the small of my back—to guide me gently yet firmly towards a brighter future that she was certain was waiting for me. She was in my corner after all. In fact, she had never left.
Over the next few years, our bond, which had floundered due to distance and years of separation, strengthened. I found myself sharing fragments of my life I had never dared to share with her: my fears and anxieties, my stumbling dating life, my travel adventures and misadventures, my hopes of rebuilding my life after my divorce. In the beginning, she mostly listened, but slowly she started to open up. About her own dreams, disappointments, failures, and joys.
I felt privileged. Singled out from my siblings. Her confidante. I remembered a time, not too long ago, when we couldn’t have a conversation without either one of us bursting into tears or storming out of the room. We argued incessantly about everything from hairstyles to grades to boys. After years of mother-daughter strife, we found ourselves embracing our strengths and vulnerabilities, instead of being repelled by them. We were connecting as adults, as women from different generations trying to find our own place in this world.
Now she was finally here. I would have her all to myself for three whole weeks. Our past stood between us both binding and dividing us. My life here continued to puzzle her and I was just beginning to piece together hers. Somehow we managed to establish a connection between our divergent worlds and we found ourselves clinging to it. Each day provided an opportunity to strengthen that fragile bond. As I walked her to my car, my arm around her thin shoulders, I felt that same anticipation that I felt years ago when I left her home. Only this time, I couldn’t wait to bring her into to mine.
•••
HEMA PADHU is a writer, professor, and marketer. Her writing has been published by Litro Magazine and American Literary Review. She lives in San Francisco and is working on a short story collection.
You can tell by the way his footsteps sound coming down the stairs if he’s having a grumpy morning or not. It’s okay—getting out of a warm bed sucks for you, too. Just don’t talk to each other until you’ve both had your coffee. The stronger the brew, the faster your moods improve. Talking while grumpy is always a bad idea. Kiss goodbye—a good kiss, not one of those ones you give your elderly relatives—when you separate for the day. A pat on the ass would be welcomed, too.
You can tell by the look in your child’s face how much her feelings were actually hurt. You clench your jaw so you don’t call the other kid a bad name. You know the other child’s mother might have done the same. Tomorrow they will be best friends again, and the rhododendrons are starting to bud, and your new kitten is getting so incredibly fluffy, and you plan to make a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting on Saturday. Life always goes on, but your child’s life has been too short for her to know that yet, so you must wrap her in the best furry blanket and cuddle her, until your words and touch permeate her being.
You can tell from the height of the bedside stack that you won’t ever have enough life to read all the books you need to read. There’s a sunny yellow puddle on the floor because you were too engrossed in the Abigail Thomas memoir to remember that you own dogs. Small dirty socks scatter across the floor because your children are real, not model children by any measure but the love they have for you, beyond what you’ve ever imagined receiving. The stately Mount Clean Clothes in your laundry room tells everyone you aren’t a good housekeeper. You smile when writing these words because you don’t care. Your husband is mostly silent when observing the laundry room (or any other room, honestly) so maybe he’s finally accepted that you’re not Marie Kondo or anyone like her. You can tell by your inner serenity in the house chaos that you aren’t willing to waste the life you have remaining on house perfection.
You can tell by your son’s jawline that he will be a man, sooner than can be tolerated, faster than is decent for a mother to have to endure. All you can do is hold him as long as he will allow it, patiently listen to his never-ending stories about things you care nothing about—the bad guys in Minecraft, the desire he has for a pocketknife, the funny thing his friend said which is really not funny at all, the newest Nerf machine guns that shoot foam bullets “ so super fast!” because it’s enough that he cares about them, and walk him to the basement—without complaining—to play video games because he won’t be scared to be alone forever.
You can tell by your daughter’s voice, attitude, face—all of her—that she has more confidence than you had at her age. Fourteen, and when she shrieks in laughter the entire cafeteria can hear and recognize it—no careful tittering for her. Her joy overtakes her and she roars, falls on the floor with its force, her mouth wide as the promise she holds. She stomps up to a boy who insulted her friend—not stopping her stomping until he is pinned to the wall like a fly on a corkboard—and informs him that what he did is not okay with her, and he will be apologizing now, and she claps her hands in front of him for emphasis. She radiates righteous anger. You are thrilled and you are jealous. You hope that she has more of all of it, of everything there is here, because surely no woman ever had as much of life as she deserves.
You can tell by your jeans button that you have gained weight. When you grasp your belly roll in both hands, marveling at its heft, at its rubbery texture, know that goddesses need solidity and heft, something to work with if they want to reign effectively. Just remember, you alone decide if you want to repaint or remodel your dwelling, and you alone can accomplish it. Whether the Venus of Willendorf was a fertility statue, a goddess, or ancient porn, she was made that way for a reason and so are you. Your breasts can and have nourished in more ways than one, and your children fight for your lap because it is cushioned for their needs. Praise yourself for your mightiness, for your strength, for your steadiness in a storm, knowing these things make you a sanctuary.
•••
SARAH BROUSSARD WEAVER is a Southern transplant living in Oregon, a spouse, a mother of four children, and an MFA candidate at the Rainier Writing Workshop. Her essays have been published in Hippocampus, The Bitter Southerner, and The Nervous Breakdown, among others. Find her at sbweaver.com or tweet her @sarahbweaver.
My dishwasher broke. So I’m standing at my sink, hand-washing all of the dirty dishes I’d rinsed and loaded into the dishwasher the day before, plus the rest of what had accumulated since. Doing the dishes always means looking out the kitchen window. In the warm weather, with the window open, I can hear the bullfrogs and waterbirds from down in the creek. Today I’m washing and watching, my rubber-gloved hands warm in the soapy water, Joe’s work-gloved hands lifting broken cinder blocks and chunks of concrete off of the back lawn and onto the trailer, which is hitched to the back of the John Deere.
His arms still bear bruises from the beating he took changing the John Deere’s blades the week before. His shins are scratched from mushroom hunting in shorts deep in the woods, and his right knee is scabbed over from where the guardrail on the bridge gouged him impressively as he tried to climb over it. Last week, he took a weedy thorn to the front of his nose, and it bled and bled and bled, but he said he wasn’t hurt. Now he’s outside my kitchen window, in the fenced-in part of the back yard, bending over and righting himself, lifting and moving one jagged hunk at a time. His black gloves say CAT in big yellow letters. After he has removed the blocks, he mows inside the fence. I go upstairs to get some work done on my laptop, the push mower sputtering in the background. After a while it’s quiet, and he comes in to ask for a burger. I’ve learned to keep ground beef, Swiss cheese, and buns on hand at all times.
I head back to the kitchen and open the fridge, hunting and gathering, tomato, lettuce, ketchup, provolone, that brown mustard that he likes, butter for the cast iron skillet and to toast the buns. I look out the window to see the shorn lawn out back, and Joe in reverse motion now, heaving new cinderblocks off the trailer into a tidy little octagon in the grass, his yellow-lettered CAT hands swinging with each heavy hoist. I quickly pat the beef into concave disks and set them on a smear of butter in the pan. For nearly two decades I was a vegan, but today the sound and smell of sizzling fat and flesh make my mouth water without compunction. Outside, Joe stands back to admire his work: We have a sweet new fire pit in the back yard now. He comes in, washes up, and sits down to his burger and a Gatorade. Purple, low-calorie. His favorite.
There are always a million repair projects around my property. Or maintenance. Sometimes I lose track of the difference. And there are upgrades too. Things that work perfectly well but are ugly or old or otherwise undesirable. I don’t expect Joe to take on everything all on his own. I make calls, set appointments, take care of the household business. I need to have the heating vents cleaned. And several stumps ground out of the front yard to make it easier for Joe to get the mowing done. It’s a part time job, the mowing. A few hours a day, a few days a week, in season, to keep everything sensible around here.
And I had a painter come out the other day to give me a quote on several smallish jobs: My kitchen ceiling has that horrible popcorn texture on it and it’s impossible to clean, so it has this greasy little beard on it right over the stove. Twenty-three years of the detritus of cooking here, ten of them mine. My son’s bedroom needs painting too, and then there’s the trim on the inside.
•••
It used to be that I would come home from work in the late evening to find the house a wreck, my husband and son still in their pajamas, homework incomplete, no dinner or bath or bedtime stories in progress. Upstairs in the master bedroom, my husband would proudly show me the fruits of his day of labor: tiny, elaborate, repeating patterns of flowers and leaves and berries that he had painstakingly painted on the wooden trim around the windows and doors and the crown molding framing the room. He would spend the hours I was at work on a stepladder in the bedroom, choosing and mixing paints and delicate brushes, dabbing dots of gold and silver highlights on his acrylic flora, all the while neglecting the real plants on our small farm and the real boy pinging off the walls downstairs wondering what would ever be for dinner.
•••
The kitchen ceiling and the boy’s room are easy enough problems to solve. The trim is another story. “You could sand it and prime it and paint it,” explained the man through his fuzzy gray beard, “but you’d still be able to see it.” I nodded. “Some days the light will hit it just right, and even with a few coats of paint, those patterns will make themselves known to you again.”
I could imagine exactly what he meant, and there was no way I was going to pay someone to do all that work only to still see those flowers in relief just refusing to die in the afternoon light.
“Call Kevin,” he suggested. “He’ll come in and redo that trim for you, and it’ll be much nicer than what you have now. Get those corners right with a miter saw.”
I think to myself, Joe’s such a real man to be able to lie with me in my big marital bed with that shitty trim and the painted ramblings of an unbalanced mind insistently outlining the bedroom.
•••
My first divorce hearing was scheduled for Valentine’s Day, 2014. We were still living together, but my husband had moved himself to the guest room in the basement. The night before the hearing, the tension in the house was horrific. There was screaming and wailing and it was so, so dark. It finally simmered down to a wretched and tearful talk in the kitchen, just outside my son’s bedroom door. I was exhausted and just wanted to sleep, wanted to be out of my son’s earshot, for crying out loud. I excused myself from further conversation. My husband responded sorely, “I hope you sleep well in the bedroom I made beautiful for you.”
•••
Like my divorce, all these repair projects always cost more than I think they will, and at this point it’s all money I don’t have. In the nineteen months since the sheriff removed my husband from the house, I’ve had to put in a new water treatment system and a new barn door. I bought a new used car on credit—appropriately enough, a Ford Escape. Bought a new doghouse and a new compost bin too.
I put in a security system after my husband broke in. I guess that’s an upgrade, though, not really a repair. I’ve had to replace siding and remove birds’ nests and repair both garage door openers after a bad windstorm. Fixed the refrigerator once and the dishwasher twice; now it’s not working again. I should’ve just replaced it the last time. Sometimes things aren’t worth repairing; it’s cheaper to get a newer, more efficient model than it is to keep sinking money into something that just doesn’t work. I know, I know, that’s how our landfills get full: planned obsolescence. Things don’t always last like they should.
Once Joe moves in, money will be a lot less tight. It’ll be different having a second income in the house after all these years of family breadwinning by myself. He’s not afraid of work. He brings in good money and he’s handy. Strong, incisive, good at figuring out how everything works: people, machines, plants, animals, electronics, toys.
I’ve never once heard him holler at things that get in his way, not even the stump that took out the blades on the John Deere. “There’s no point,” he says. “You can’t reason with inanimate objects.” This property has long felt to me like just a lot of work, but Joe says he’s always wanted to take care of a place like this. I can see that it satisfies him. I hope it stays that way. I’m trying everything I know to make sure that he feels like it’s his home too, even though it’s technically my house. I call it Our House, in the Middle of Our Street. I ask him to help me pick out area rugs and bedding. I’ve made space literally and figuratively: cleaning out closets and dressers, and learning to stop hosting him when he’s here because then he feels like a guest. But nothing that I do or don’t do is really key, because the thing that makes him feel most at home here is working on the place. He likes that John Deere. He was proud of those bruises.
•••
I’ve been known to tell people that owning a home is a lot like being in love: At the outset, it’s all spacious and bright and airy. It looks and feels perfect and seems worth all the sacrifices you had to make to get it. But then you move in and you start to fill it with your crap and you notice its flaws. Spaces fill up. Cracks start to show. New things get old. The dust settles, and one day you look around your place and realize that it’s not only not perfect, it’s a hell of a lot of work. Everything needs repair or maintenance or replacement. So you sand and you prime and you paint, and one day the light hits things just right and those old patterns just make themselves known all over again. An adult lifetime of monthly payments starts to seem a lot longer than it once did.
I also tell people that this home is a dream home, but it was someone else’s dream. I’m a city girl, a third-generation Angeleno. I lived in Paris and Chicago before I married, and I thrived. I never really even imagined myself paying a mortgage, let alone paying for a stump grinder or a John Deere or a barn door. I never dreamed of this place: a big pine-log home with a pitched metal roof and skylights, perched atop hilly green acreage in the rural Midwest. This winding road runs between two small central Illinois towns, and all my neighboring farmers—real farmers—have gone organic.
This place is beautiful, no question, when I take a longer view, when I can see past the claustrophobia of repairs and projects and dust. Out front, I have a porch swing and a healthy ecosystem and a pretty good sunset almost every night. There is no time of year that the view out my bedroom window is not breathtaking, if I look beyond the framework of florid trim. When it’s winter and the air is frozen clean, the early twilight colors the snow on the ground periwinkle blue. It happens every year. I’ve spent a decade in this house all told, long enough to see the patterns emerge.
•••
My husband had two favorite lies, and he told them louder and more frequently the closer I got to divorcing him: One was “you’ll never be able to take care of this place without me,” and the other was “no one else will ever love you.” I’m in my seventh season on my own here now; soon Joe will move in and that will change. It’s a good change, I think. The light is hitting everything just right, and from my perspective, it all seems to be in good repair.
•••
GINA COOKE is a linguist working toward her second graduate degree, a pursuit that has spanned half of her adult life. She lives and works on a small farm in the rural Midwest with her son and her dog. She typically writes about spelling: word histories, word structure, and word relatives. This is her first foray into the personal.
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.
Two years ago, my husband and I moved away from Portland, Oregon, on purpose. We left behind friends, career prospects, and a two-bedroom rental house that cost a mere $875 a month. And we loaded our dog and kid into our Outback and drove as fast as a ’99 Subaru can go all the way to Marietta, Ohio, the town where I grew up.
“We just need to be closer to family,” I told people in the perplexed silences that inevitably followed when they heard our plans to relocate. What illustrious family could possibly woo us away from an artsy Eden on the Willamette?
The family thing was true and untrue. We needed to be closer to them because we were perpetually broke, and the broke-ness had become such that it was time to deploy the emergency move-in-with-my-folks plan.
But there was also an ache that hadn’t gone away despite five years of gamely trying to adore that adorable city where we fit in so well, in so many ways. Portland loved me, and I could not love it back, and I felt like a shithead because of it.
We arrived in Portland in 2007, three mayors and at least two ultra-bougie New Seasons food markets ago. Before that, we lived in New York City, and in comparison Portland seemed preposterously quaint and manageable. Our first months in Oregon, my husband and I would admire the downtown skyline and the conifer-studded hills rising behind it and coo, “Oh, look—it thinks it’s a city!”
The intensity of city life was what we moved to escape, and our new no-name strip of neighborhood between I-205 and the used car lots of Southeast 82nd Avenue struck us as a quiet haven of playgrounds and modest houses, with a few hookers thrown in for color. Two greasy old-school Chinese joints bordered us, Hung Far Low to the south and Chinese Garden to the north. We had a spacious backyard, where I doggedly pruned an overgrown apple tree and hacked away at diseased lilac bushes. We got a dog from the Humane Society. My husband joined a few bands. On heady Portland summer days when the sun cascaded down like a shot of heroin, he haunted a skate spot under the Hawthorne Bridge. Though magazines and newspapers in New York barely gave me the time of day, in Portland I wrote freelance stories for the food section of Portland’s major news daily, eventually worked in their test kitchen, and also taught cooking classes on nights and weekends. My husband had a string of long-term temp assignments in administrative offices. It was almost enough to keep us afloat.
All the while, we looked for better jobs. And looked and looked and looked. There were two main problems we grappled with in Portland: rain and money. Too much of one, and never enough of the other.
•••
Let me tell you about Marietta, Ohio. Founded in 1788, the first permanent settlement in the Northwest Territory. Situated at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum rivers, which means it’s in spitting distance of West Virginia. It’s an Appalachian Interzone, at once very Midwestern and not Midwestern at all; a generous pinch of twang runs through the local speech. The population is staggeringly white, though there might be about twenty black residents now, and if memory serves, back when I was in high school there were maybe five. So that’s improvement. As for other ethnicities, if you live here and you’re Asian, you’re probably a doctor. There’s one shop that serves decent coffee, but it’s a nutritional supplement store/smoothie bar that doesn’t open until nine in the morning. Vietnamese food? A taqueria? Fat chance.
Portland feels like another universe in comparison. I still struggle to define the charms and drawbacks of each place. Both are defined by the big, dirty rivers that run through them. Portland had innumerable food carts and strip clubs; Marietta has innumerable churches and fracking rigs. You’ll have to wait for hours to score a table at Portland’s Tasty n’ Sons for breakfast on a Sunday, but in Marietta, the Busy Bee Diner offers immediate seating and a waitress who wears her hair in, yes, a beehive. Sure, Portland has scads of idealistic youths engaged in civic activism—but you’d never guess how many grumpy retirees in Marietta volunteer their time for charitable causes. Instead of laptops, they might carry concealed weapons. John Deere pajama bottoms worn as all-purpose outerwear are a common fashion statement, true, but the population overwhelmingly accepts proven science and public health—that is, you don’t see citizens coming together against fluoridated water that way they do in Portland.
Living here is a bit like going back in time. After my high school experience as the resident misfit weirdo, I skipped town with a happy shrug, never suspecting that decades later I’d come to crave Marietta, with its scenic bridges and dozens of historical markers and goofy festivals and rickety, underfunded little museums. It’s an all-American community with a picturesque downtown of antique stores and brick streets. The thrift shops and flea markets are great, because the records and mid-century furniture aren’t all picked over. Baby boomers abound, as do minimum-wage positions in nursing homes. Among the ladies there’s an unfortunately popular haircut, this wedged-in-the-back/spiked-in-the-front chemical-drenched thing with streaky highlights that my husband and I call “crispy hair.”
And I have to be slightly more mindful of what I say in mixed company. In Portland, most people likely lean Democratic, or support reproductive rights. In Marietta, I have friends who vote for Tea Party candidates.
Free from the confines of that infamous Portland bubble, I like walking around and not running into endless clones of myself and my political views. I feel like I have a better understanding of what the rest of America is like, and a window into the goodness of people who don’t think like me. “You’re not from around here, are you?” I’d get asked when we first moved back to Marietta. The old guard here clings to a deeply ingrained Midwestern/Appalachian skepticism of outsiders, and they are reluctant to embrace change, even small ones, like installing pedestrian crosswalks on the busiest street downtown.
“I grew up here, actually,” I delight in replying. Not fitting in is my comfort zone. I’m used to it. I’m comfortable in Marietta.
•••
My California-bred husband still wakes up dazed upon realizing that he resides in the ass-end of Appalachia. He loves record stores, ethnic food, post-rock bands, and independent movie theaters. He’s trying to be a good sport.
But once we had our daughter, those things phased out of our Portland lives, anyway. By then I’d veered away from my culinary career, landed job with the county library, and was thoroughly enjoying the best employee benefits of my life.
Which was great, because we needed those funds to cover childcare. It became apparent that raising Frances in Portland would present increasingly complex logistical problems. For our one-car family, Frances’s daycare had to be reasonably close to my library. Both Joe and I worked until six many nights, and nearly all daycare centers closed before then. Through desperate combings of Craigslist we found a few options, but there was precious middle ground between total sketch-fests that reeked of sour milk and tiny palaces of early childhood education where the tuition was higher than my paycheck.
When my husband’s temp gig with a Portland city agency ended, even though he wanted to work, we realized we couldn’t afford it. We reluctantly pulled Frances out of the loving daycare we’d been lucky to find and had him stay home with her, collecting unemployment until he got a job offer high enough for us to clear her monthly fees.
That put us more in touch with the day-to-day struggles of the working class than we were comfortable admitting. We could have chosen housing that was even lower-cost than our moldy house of sadness, where I had to make wiping the backs of our bookcases down with bleach water a weekly task. I developed a ceaseless runny nose that eventually blossomed into massive sneezing attacks, ones that disappeared once I walked out our door, and I realized I was allergic to our own home. We knew we had food, a roof over our heads, and a bank account that was barely ever overdrawn.
The biggest ache was a battle we raged with our privileged identity. We’re educated, liberal, and artsy. People like us are supposed to gentrify neighborhoods, not get pushed out of them. For extra money, I picked up sub shifts at public library branches; eventually, I worked at least once at all eighteen branches in the county system, the grand slam. It was a great way to see the parts of city that the alluring travel features in magazines don’t show you. That was the Portland I ultimately fell in love with, the one that didn’t trump itself up. I saw a lot of meth teeth and smelled the stench of urine wafting from clothes that had not been washed in years, sure, but I also saw people who were more or less…normal. People who needed jobs and barely had any tech literacy, so I’d have to walk them through filling out a resume online as they raced to submit it before their allotted time for the day ran out on the library’s public computer. People who needed referrals for free legal services, or were trying to locate their parent’s birth records, or who just wanted recommendations for a good book.
To a casual observer, I looked like the Portland dream: The librarian-writer! With nerdy glasses! Who used to be a chef! But really, I was one of them, the other Portlanders. The ones who constantly did the utility bill/paycheck triage. The ones whose shady landlord, when asked to take down the 1970s wood paneling because it’s housing a robust colony of mildew, replies “But if I take down the paneling, it’ll expose the hole in the wall!” The ones who shopped at the discount grocer not because thrift is trendy, but because thrift is necessary. A few strokes of massive bad luck and I could have been the urine-reeking patron, or the patron who lived in her car, or the patron who lost visiting privileges with her kid.
We were tearing our hair out, working with a tiny margin of error from month to month, with no bright future in sight. We cobbled together our work schedules for Frances-watching duties, doing that frantic parent-to-parent handoff as one of us headed out the door; I worked every weekend, and we rarely had relaxed family time together. What’s the point of living in an amazing city when you can’t access its best attributes?
“You know that feeling you get when your plane descends to land in Portland, and you look at the city below and think, ‘I’m home’?” A friend posed this question, and I had to confess I’d never once felt that way. It was more like, “Huh. Here we are again.”
The love that Portlanders have for their city borders on romantic. I felt like a third wheel, immune to the giddiness. While tall bikes and food carts made out on the couch, I skulked in the corner of the rec room, alone. I became cantankerous about the stupidest things, hundreds of soggy twigs to fuel the brush fire of animosity shouldering inside me. I think of myself as a person with pluck, a problem-solver who deals with the situation at hand, but I’d somehow let my circumstances neuter that part of me. On I went, pruning the apple tree. Bleaching the furniture. Polishing a turd.
But really, I was angry for us at not getting it together enough to thrive in one of the most livable cities in the country. Portland was often good to us. We had lovely friends, and I adored my library job. Every morning I’d wake up and resolve to bloom where we’d planted ourselves, and then the sad numbness would settle in, and it became impossible to suss out which part of that sadness was Portland’s fault and which was mine.
There’s that TV show. You know the one I’m talking about—it pokes affectionate but absurdist, sketch-comedy fun at Portland and its charming yet maddening idiosyncrasies. It’s big there; it’s very Portland not to get enough of Portland. If you live, or once lived, in Portland, people will inevitably bring up That Show.
Please don’t bring it up with me. I can’t watch it. Not because I don’t like it, but because it’s too close. Why watch a parody of something that felt like a parody the first time around, in real life? “Come sit with me,” my husband implored as he sat on the sofa a lifetime later, in Marietta, enjoying That Show. He says it reminds him of bygone times, times when it was unlikely that he would have a co-worker named Delmus who wore a t-shirt that read “Dicky-Doo Champion: My Tummy Stick Out More Than My Dicky Do!”
I recognized all of the spots on That Show that Portland people recognize, the cutesy storefronts and brunch places and busy intersections, and I felt both so glad to be rid of them and so idiotic for my inability to flourish there. That Show is a little like my past punching me in my gut.
We had a big garden in our Portland backyard, which I spent many pleasant hours tending, and we curated a collection of the jagged, dirt-crusted bits of metal and plastic and glass that perpetually worked themselves to the surface of the soil in an ornery dis to gravity. It was not a pretty garden, but it produced enough vegetables that it created a decent dent in our grocery bill during the summer months, and yanking at its prolific weeds was an excellent outlet for the bad juju I carried around. Besides, I love to be outside in the sun. With three dependable months of it, I had to soak up as many Pacific Northwest rays as I could.
One day, Frances, who was out playing with the broken Fischer-Price farm I found for free on someone’s curb, called out, “Mama, look at what Scooter did.” I looked up from my weedy reverie and saw a bloody rat between the parsley and Swiss chard. Our dog looked up at me, beaming over his fresh kill. The rat, I assume, had been nosing around in our compost heap. I dug a shallow hole at the base of our fruitless apple tree to bury the thing, and in the process unearthed two corroded AA batteries. Who knows how long they’d been lurking down there? It was nothing, really, but after that, I was done with Portland. The rat-battery incident was my final straw.
I was poised to score a coveted Library Assistant position at the library, one that would nearly double my pay. But I didn’t have it in me to hold out any longer. I couldn’t be content in a saggy dump of a poorly-insulated house, donning two sweaters indoors to stay warm and buying organic spinach and avocados on our credit card. We aged out of that, but couldn’t get it together to bring in the income for necessary creative-class trappings we saw our friends enjoy: Waldorf preschool, annual beach house rentals, February trips to Hawaii in order to remain sane until mid-June, a compact, tidy home in a cute neighborhood within walking distance of a bar full of synth music and unevenly executed vegan menu options. Portland is a shitty place to be broke, though I guess you could say that of any city.
Still, on most days, Marietta squeaks ahead as a less shitty place to be broke. We lived with my parents until we found a house that does not give me allergy attacks. Its rent matches what they raised the rent to in our old Portland dump after we moved out. To the new tenants of the putty-colored house on SE 89th Avenue with the collapsing back patio: I hope the apple tree’s fruiting now. The flower pot of rusty nails and glass shards you found in the shed are the spoils of my unintentional garden archeology digs. Let me know if you ever accidentally encounter that rat.
Sometimes in Marietta, I look at the lazy bends of the Ohio River’s familiar brown muck, and waves of profound contentment wash over me, a strange mixture of bliss and relief. We came back to Portland in July for a visit, our first since moving to Ohio. I rode busses all over town, savored frequent cups of expertly-brewed coffee, and enjoyed the absence of crispy hairdos. At the tail end, I started getting a twinge of the coolness fatigue I had when we lived there. Boutiques selling tiny terrariums, bars built to resemble libraries, movie theaters selling rosé by the glass. In Marietta, maybe a dozen things are cool, and half of those are cool because they are utterly not cool at all. It’s special to be cool.
When we got back to Ohio, our cherry tomatoes were ready to pick. The first sweet corn of the season hit the farm stands. Vinyl banners advertising dozens of vacation bible schools crinkled in the breeze. My daughter returned to her preschool, where she played with classmates named Kolton and Kaylee instead of Mabel and Forester.
The flight back was uneventful. The plane took off and I looked out the window at the familiar vista below, crisply outlined in the magical Portland summer sun, and I thought, “There it is. That was my city.” Keep on loving it for me, okay?
•••
SARA BIR is the food editor of Paste Magazine and a regular contributor to Full Grown People. “Smelted”, her essay from this site, appeared in Best Food Writing 2014. She lives in southeast Ohio with her husband and daughter.
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