pretty crabby

Sex and Death

Fray Volume 3 is on sale now. My story is the last one in this issue. It would make such a great Christmas present!

Limbo

Eighteen: I start college and am crammed into a room with THREE other girls. One room. The day I move in two of them (who already are friends) show me their line dancing routine in the middle of the room. I go to dinner with my mom and that night I cry myself to sleep. The third girl is friendly at first but one weekend when I go home she systematically breaks the heads off of my collection of small wooden and ceramic turtles. This might be funny if it wasn't so weird and, eh, crazy pants. The one friend I make in the first 6 weeks has to go and have an abortion but doesn't have cab fair. I give her the $5 I have. When my dad comes to visit me two months in, we walk silently around the campus and I feel like crying the entire time. When I call him at Christmas to tell him I have flunked some classes, he says "I don't think you should go back." And I don't.

Nineteen: On my dad's birthday and three days before mine our 12 year old family cat is run over in the street before our eyes. We sit in the street with her and sob our eyes out and the man who (accidentally) runs her over sends a card which is bunched together with birthday cards on the mantel for awhile.

Twenty: My dad and I sit on the stoop and listen to the cicadas on our street. He tells me how they only come every seven years and someday I will remember how we sat on the stoop and listened to them. One day when I am sitting on the floor of my closet and crying I think maybe I should start going to see a therapist. She tells me she really thinks I just wish my parents were still together. She won't let up on it and I eventually stop going.

Twenty One: At my birthday party my friends and parents surround me with sparklers and then someone says we need to go get margaritas so a group of us heads out into the dive bar on the corner. They don't have any so then we parade into the grungy liquor store and I buy tequila from a man behind bullet proof glass. During August I pack up all my belongings and take them to the UPS store and send them to California. A week later I put my cat in a box and we get on a plane and move to San Francisco. For the nine months I am there I see a lot of movies & drive around listening to a lot of Billy Bragg. I spend most of my time alone and the rest of it with a baby who can't talk or do much of anything. I am completely homesick and miserable but at night when I sit in the hot tub and look up at the palm trees, it doesn't seem so bad. When Elaine and Ellery, who is two years old, come to visit in February it makes the homesickness so bright and clear and when I drop them at the airport I drive home wanting to cry the whole way. I don't know it then but in three months I will pack everything up one more time and turn around and fly home to Boston. Finnegan, begin again.

(Before)

High School

Fifteen: Fifteen is the worst year I can remember. Among other things: I get arrested for shoplifting; I am failing most of my classes; I hate every thing; and my parents are idiots. This is the year I slam a lot of doors and yell "I HATE YOU" more times that I can count. To this day, I cannot mention being 15 without my dad getting a look of terror on his face.

Sixteen: I am completely obsessed and enamored of the boy I met at summer camp the year before. We spend our camp days hiding out in the lifeguard shack and telling stories and flirting as if it is our job. We walk to his house and when I stand in the door way of his house looking outside, he stands behind me and puts his arm on the door frame. All the hairs on my neck stand up and I can still feel him there if I close my eyes and think about it for long enough. One day he steals all the change from his fathers junk door and rides his bike to get us pizza and sodas. Seeing him balancing the pizza on his handle bars and waving to me as he rides in to camp is one of the sweetest memories of my entire teenage life.

Seventeen: I go to prom with my best friend; I laugh too loud; I dance in the street like a crazy person and do not care who sees me; we take road trips and smoke cigarettes and act like we are the only people ever to have done this before. My English teacher is my favorite person aside from my friends and one day I ask him about his daughter who is in a wheel chair. One of my friends is horrified that I would bring this up to him. I say "he's only a PERSON" and walk away. Most of my friends parents do not like me for this reason; I am not scared of them.

(Middle school. Elementary.)

Nest

(July 2003)

The binoculars are on the windowsill so we can check on the progress.

Every few hours one of us looks. My mom is the one who gives the most updates. “I see three eggs!” she will tell us. Which is not any different from when she checked the birds nest earlier but I don’t say anything.

I haven’t checked in a while and now I’m in the apartment alone. My grandmother is there in her bed in the living room. But I don’t know how much she’s there now so I keep reading my book and looking up whenever she takes a breath. She is prone on the bed with her head on pillows. She is looking out the window, but she can’t see the birds from her vantage point and she can’t sit up to hold the binoculars now. She turns her head to look at me and when she sees I am looking back, she winks. We keep thinking that maybe she is too far gone, then she sends a up a flare telling us “I am still here.”

The days are split up into segments and it is hot in the tiny apartment. It is my mom, my uncle, his wife and me. Taking shifts on the sofa, looking out at the birds, doing puzzles, standing up, sitting down. Over and over again.

My uncle puts his hat on to go to work and when he leans over my grandmother to say goodbye she asks, “where are you going?” He takes his hat off and decides to stay.

My mother informs us that the birds are hatched. We look and see their tiny orange beaks always pointing up, waiting for their parents to fly back and put something inside. Waiting for whatever will come next; mouths open, heads up.

People come in and out of the small stuffy apartment to talk to my grandmother laying on the bed in the middle of the room. Sometimes she looks at them and says something, other times she doesn’t. Time is going by too fast and it was just the other day I came into the room from the airport and she liked my dress so I stood on a chair for her to see it. She asked me to paint her toenails but I waited too long and now she wouldn’t know the difference.

She’s asking for “white fluffy cake” so my aunt Sallyanne and I go to the grocery store to find some. Sallyanne says, “I think she should have whatever she wants”. We come back and we cut her a piece, which she eats a bite of and loves. But that is all she wants, just a bite.

More days go by. The birds get bigger in the nest and they are fluffy balls moving around, still waiting for food but getting too big to stay inside. They bump together and seem squished. Wanting more room but not able to go yet.

The time between her breaths is longer and sometimes you hold your own breath waiting for the next one. Sometimes it seems like you’re waiting forever, but it always comes. You’re happy and sad when It comes.

Finally my mom needs a break, so we make a plan to leave for the afternoon. I tell my gramma (who always hated to fly) that her bus is waiting for her and if she is ready she should go now. Katherine Hepburn and Barry White have died recently and I picture this strange trio together on the bus, telling stories and laughing. My uncle and Mom and I drive to his house an hour away to water the flowers and have a change of scenery. We aren’t there long before my aunt calls to say my gramma is gone. We all say she must have been waiting for us to leave, maybe we were holding on too tight.

A room has never been so full but felt so empty when we walk back into her apartment. Her body is there, but she is not. She looks small, old, and fragile. No words that seem like what she was.

I cut some pieces of her white gray hair and my aunt and I go into the bedroom when the ambulance comes and puts her in a body bag. I don’t want to see her in that bag, I won’t think about them zipping up the darkness around her.

A few days later we come back and go through a few things. It’s the day before my 27^th birthday. I look at all the days on the calendar on the wall and feel completely separated from time. I watch my mom going through her mom’s things and I wish we could all be somewhere else.

I remember the binoculars, still there on the windowsill. I pick them up and look to see how big the birds are, if they are still waiting for someone to come back and take care of them. But all I see is a nest with nothing inside.

Middle

Twelve: When I am 12, my breasts arrive. There are pictures of me wearing a white dress and I wonder now, WHY DIDN'T SOMEONE BUY ME A TRAINING BRA. I am also fully into boys. There are sleepovers and endless discussion of who did what with who. I, for the record, did nothing with no one. At one sleepover my friends and I bang on the basement window at the paper boy, who happens to be in our class. He flips us off. Later my friends dad remarks on the interesting "wave" he had.

Thirteen: I am "going out with" my best friend's older brother. We never speak, except one day I dare to say hello to him in the hallway. The next day he breaks up with me and his best friend asks me to a dance. I tell him my mom says I cannot go. When I go to bed early that night he calls to ask my mom if I can go with him. She tells him "I think that is up to Emily". I am horrified.

Fourteen: I cut my hair off and I get contacts. This changes exactly nothing. I also start high school and, well, there is not much to say about that. On the first day of school we take a picture in a field of our entire class. Everyone tries to sit next to someone they can imagine still wanting to sit by in four years. Some choices work out better than others.

Part one.

Far away.

Liverpool, 1999

We're in Paul McCartney's childhood home and my mom is touching everything he must have touched, the door knobs, the banisters. When we walk up the stairs to what was once his bedroom we make sure to stand in the doorway for a long time. It is like trying to follow a ghost, the ghost of someone who is still alive. At one point I am alone in the living room, listening to the tape on tour. It is saying how RIGHT HERE was where Paul and John wrote I Wanna Hold Your Hand, and the day Paul's brother watched John walk into the house for the first time, he thought he looked pretty cool. He was just some cool kid, coming over to hang out.

Italy, June 2000

It is so dry and hot, all I smell is dead grass and it makes my skin itchy. When I breathe, hot air fills my lungs. Nothing feels refreshing or different, but I love it. I think about how I could be naked and I probably wouldn't notice. I walk as far away from the villa as I can while still in sight of it. I play Ant in Alaska over and over on my headphones. I can't stop thinking about how far away I am from him, but it doesn't seem far enough. I know I have to go home eventually.

Italy, March 2003

I am walking on an overpass between small streets filled with pottery shops and I look down and see old brick buildings and a tiny bridge all covered in moss. It is like ruins in Rome, only completely deserted and partially filled with trash. Later I show my dad and he decides we have to "GET DOWN THERE!" and finally we find a way in. A stray dog runs after us, excited for company. My dad stands on the tiny bridge which I think is about to collapse but he assures me, it's hundreds of years old! This doesn't seem like a great argument but he's so happy. I think, this is what he looked like when he was a kid.

London, October 2003

The day I go through Notting Hill and walk alone in Portebello Market is the day I am happiest. I find an Internet cafe and get a cappuchino that is bigger than my face. I sit alone at the computer and write happy messages to my parents and my friends. There is an Italian guy my age next to me, smoking hand rolled cigarettes. He takes his headphones off, taps me on the shoulder, and offers me one. I think about it for a minute before I shake my head, smiling.

Jukebox

Wake Up Little Susie is the first song I ever loved. I am six years old, riding in the back of our VW Rabbit, going to Lake Dunmore, telling my mom to turn it up. I cut all the hair off my doll, Jenny, and now she resembles a militant lesbian but I love her more for it.

When I am seven my teacher plays Here Comes The Sun every day during lunch. We sit side by side at the long orange table in our classroom, and it plays over and over. She must be repeating it on her own, she must be a George Harrison fan.

Leah and eight year old me dance in the puddles in her driveway until we are soaked and on the wet ride home my mom plays Billie Jean on the car tape deck. It's a short ride so when we get home and the song is still playing, we wait for it to end before we get out of the car.

Conclusion

I could not have loved another person more than the boy I loved when I was fourteen.

When I think about it now I realize he was the kind of person who would completely and utterly annoy me if I met him today. He was a show off, a completely obvious flirt. There was not one subtle thing about him including the Obsession cologne he apparently bathed in daily.

But I knew his walk from a hundred feet away. Once we sat in the morning group circle and threw sticks at each other for awhile. I wrote something in my diary that day about how I was in love and OBVIOUSLY he loved me back. Because he threw sticks at me.

He had the kind of fame you get in summer camp, where your popularity is not measured on your school clothes. It is measured only by the group of kids you are making laugh and how silently you can sneak out the wooden screen door in the middle of the night. Running through the dewy night time air wearing your bathing suit under your clothes, you all escape to the beach and sit in the darkness huddled close together because he said that is what you should do.

He started "going out" with my friend, Daniella. She was beautiful and sarcastic, the coolest of the girls. Because she wanted me there it would often be the three of us, together/alone. Once we ended up hiding in his cabin late at night and somehow we all got mixed up and he and I were laying side by side in the dark. My shoes fell on the floor and were lost beneath the bunks, everyone too scared of being caught to move or speak. Daniella laid silently on the bed above us with another boy, we were like a game of Yahtzee; letters scattered everywhere not making any sense. Our tan arms touched, he made a joke about laying next to a girl and "not doing anything". He was 14 years old.

A summer later he and I stood in a bathroom together in a huge house I had never been in before while he inspected his recently pierced ear in the mirror. His coolness was already starting to fade but I felt nostalgic for everything right then in that moment. I matched us up in front of my eyes, this is how we look together.

It didn't seem right. I washed my hands and left the room.

Elementary

Five: One day when I am walking to school (from our house across the street) I see a cocoon on a tree and I break the branch off. When I get to school I say I found it and Mrs. K (my teacher with the long Greek name) puts it in a glass aquarium. On the day it breaks open, she and I go outside while the other kids stay in and we let the butterfly go, standing alone in the field.

Six: My teacher is my mom's good friend, Carol. For the first few weeks of school I can't stop calling her by her first name. Then when she comes over sometimes to have a beer with my mom on her porch, I get stuck again and keep calling her "Mrs. Madden".

Seven: Mrs. Collins is my teacher. We have two praying mantises in class and one day when we come in there is only one. She reads us James and the Giant Peach every day after lunch. We lie in a big mass on the floor, we're not afraid if our arms and legs touch. There is the sound of Velcro being ripped apart, over and over again.

Eight: We move to a new city, a new state, in the middle of fourth grade. I can't see the board, I can't see the teacher, so I squint until my head hurts and pretend it is just a new nervous tick I have. This obviously wins me a lot of friends. Some boy makes fun of me for licking my lips at lunch (where I sit alone). I resolve to never do that again. I have to get glasses, and my dad picks them out. A bright fuscia pair just for me.

Nine: Jeannette is my best friend until the night I have a sleepover with her and two other girls and she convinces them all to hate me and they lock me out of my bedroom. I start wearing makeup every day and my babysitter gives me all her old nailpolish and I paint every finger and toe a different color. Her boyfriend has a dog and they take me out with them to drive around in his fancy car. I decide the dog is mine, and whisper that in his ear, our secret. For my birthday they call me outside and give me a Cabbage Patch Kid. They both know this is a huge thing to do, but they act cool. As cool as teenagers need to act around a 9 year old who thinks they hung the moon.

Ten: We move again and I change schools and have a man for a teacher. My friends and I decide to be in the talent show and sing Walk Like an Egyptian by the Bangles. Jennifer writes the words out for us and we all practice singing along to it every day behind the school. One morning we are waiting to go inside when a rock flies out and hits Jennifer in the head. I look over and see blood and then teachers surrounding her. We have to drop out of the talent show, but I still know every word to that song, I can see her round handwriting in my head.

Eleven: We move back to Vermont and I hate my school. I start staying home when my mom leaves for work until one day no one can find me and they call the police. That night when I am back home, I sit in the bathtub and my mom and I talk. I don't pay close attention to what she says but I watch the water going over my feet, and I know I am just where I need to be.

"But once I really listened the noise just fell away..."

The other day, it happened again.

It happens fairly often and I should be used to it. Somehow we get to the point in the conversation when I am talking about my family, or my dad and his "partner" and someone will look at me, slightly confused, and say "your dad is gay?"  The next question is always a little more complicated.

"How did that happen?" Like he was sent to the moon and never came back. Or "how long has he been gay?" To which I want to say, 'well, you need to ask HIM that.' But I always try to take a deep breath and act calm and helpful, because I know they aren't trying to be rude, they are curious, and they just don't really GET IT so suddenly it is my job to be the teacher.

Everyone thinks that is the reason, it MUST BE THE REASON, that my parents aren't together today.  I suppose I could just smile and say "of course that is the reason!" Wouldn't it be great if everything was that easy, clearcut, black and white. Husband turns out to be gay, the end! But to me, and to them, I think it is much more complicated than that.

I know my dad loved my mom just the same that she loved him. They were 18 when they met and they got married when they were 21 and that was what you did then. Of course, there were other factors and I often think if I could go back in time, I would want to go back there to see them, to see what they were like. But I know (because they tell me) they were in love. Obviously.

After they did split up, when I was three, for reasons more complicated then I am going into here they always tried to put me first. They spent holidays together and did things together just because of me. They kept loving each other, even through the times when they probably didn't like each other very much.

So, yes, my dad is gay. For specifics about when he discovered that or how that was you need to speak to him. I can only say what has happened to me. When I was eight years old my dad sat me on a park bench and I will always remember that day. Even if now I don't remember the words he said to me, I know what he meant. How I always knew that I mattered, that my mom mattered, that together they put me here.

Everything I know about being brave and being honest comes from my parents. They are the two strongest, most sensitive people that I know. I am here because of them, to suggest that I am here because of something strange or dark... I  feel sorry for the people who can only think that way. It must be nice to see the world in a certain perfect organized way, where everyone is one way or another, where people never change.

That is not the world I live in. I live someplace where the babies come first, where feelings and respect actually matter. Where when you loved someone once, you always love them. Even when you have moments where you can't believe you ever felt like that, you remember. You honor your past. Somehow, someway.

More than that, I have no explanation, no reason, no cure. I can't explain how these things happened.

I can't explain love.