While my oldest daughter was growing up we attended Little People of America functions, though only one person in our family was short. We went to city and regional gatherings in Portland and Seattle, and made a vacation of the annual convention.
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At this low altitude, there’s still phone reception. With an awkward lurch, the Cessna plane, scarcely bigger than my 2008 Toyota, begins a wild dance in the enveloping tropical fog. Gripping my phone tight, I concentrate on my text exchange. I must distract myself from what I cannot control.
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The afternoon following your miscarriage, you’ll resent the book on your nightstand. You lie in bed in your colonial-style house on the Chesapeake, the bay windows opening to the wide expanse of water. The vastness always evoked a sense of possibility, but you don’t see that now. You only see broken promises.
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There’s a moment sometimes when you’re trying to make a choice, the safe choice, you think, the right choice. But what you do instead is somehow put yourself—and your sleeping baby—in some crazy, unlikely danger. You don’t even realize this until the danger is upon you, sneaking up on fleet little feet and then announcing its presence. After, you think, if you can still think about it, “But it was so obvious. How did I not see that coming?”
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I knew I wasn’t a woman the first time I decided to try my vibrator a little bit farther back. Imagine my surprise, as at the time, I was four months pregnant.
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What was her name? I remembered her face. Clear blue eyes, blond hair cropped above her shoulders, that toothy smile. I couldn’t help but return that smile. Sitting at my computer, I tried all the keywords I could think of but could find only her supervisor who worked in the same museum, the man who had joined us on that expedition south. Her name was gone. Only the image of that broad smile remained in my mind.
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I walk into a bar to meet some friends and you’re sitting at a table with some work colleagues. You see me before I spot you, but when I do, the spark of recognition warms me to my core. You rise like the sun and walk toward me, your blue eyes scanning my face. “Darlin,” you whisper, “it’s so good to see you.” We embrace, holding on a beat longer than a casual hug. After we separate, we stay close enough to kiss, but we don’t, we can’t. Kissing is outside the boundary you set years ago, in another bar, on another night.
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PUP TENT: A-frame, two persons, flap door with ties, 1974.
First, my memory, not Dad's. When I was almost five and my brother was a newborn, we had an army-green canvas tent, a hollow wedge with low sloping sides that felt safe and cozy.
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After checking in with the receptionist at the HR front desk, a glance at the waiting area—consisting of four pleather arm chairs the color of weak coffee, one mini loveseat (a tight fit for two grown adults) and two swivel-back-office chairs situated at computer drop-down terminals—tells me that every place to sit is already occupied.
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Head bowed, pen in hand, I sit in my sundrenched office, pondering a young staff member’s 2001 performance review. How to suggest a change of attitude in a constructive way? That’s what I’m thinking about when the phone interrupts. I’m not prepared for a life-changing call.
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I once saw the entirety of my own tragedy pass, in a single moment, through the eyes of an old man. It was at my going away shindig. Our going away shindig–my housemate Scarlett’s and mine. She was leaving to pursue her PhD at my own old stomping grounds in San Diego. And I would travel to Oregon to attempt a second bachelor’s degree in an entirely new subject. So we would leave behind the Lorrain Street house, a slightly derelict semblance of a modest mansion in old Austin, Texas.
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You lived at 357 Woodruff Avenue for over fifty years, growing up in your tree-like way, as I did in my human one. I had turned eight when I first saw you, gracing the northeast corner of our backyard, standing tall in front of the wall which divided our large backyard in two. Behind this wall there were fruit trees that gifted us with apricots, oranges, and plums in the summer. You were a maple, so we didn’t get to eat the fruit or seeds you produced, but your many gifts to our family were just as welcomed.
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When I meet her, she’s leaving. An hourglass flips the second we make eye contact. This is the first reading she’s ever attended. I don’t know this yet. She looks at home leaning against the stacks in that Park Slope bookstore, wearing those almost-overalls with her arms loosely crossed. Her nails are short, their black polish chipping. She stands alone, which I like.
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“I’m a tax preparer now,” I said, somewhat sheepishly. Being a tax preparer isn’t exactly what anyone dreams of when considering professions, and I am probably more surprised than anyone else that those words consistently come out of my mouth now.
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In a recurring nightmare, someone unwelcome, uninvited, and dangerous tries to break into my home. It is always daytime, a shining, exposing sun more sinister than the privacy of darkness. I lock the front door, then slide across the tile floor of the family room in socked feet to lock the back door.
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“Oh, thanks.”
I try hard not to let out disappointment through my sigh as Caroline hands me the clear, water-filled baggie. It’s bulging and reflecting the only sliver of sun that shines in from the outside world.
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For the long first act of my life, as a painfully shy kid growing up in Culver City – steps away from the Sony Pictures studio lot, the iconic Gone With The Wind mansion, which was right by the movie theater downtown, and down the street from the liquor store where they filmed the infamous McLovin scene in Superbad – dating and romance was something I experienced entirely through the silver screen.
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There he was after seven years, walking out the door of the store just as I was walking in. After a second of eye contact, but no words, we kept going. Speaking wouldn’t have been appropriate. Following behind him was the woman he unbeknownst to me was still in relationship with when we dated.
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“So dear, how did we get into this mess? Tripped over a rug? Bathtub fall?” Spoken with that cheery disengagement nurses reserve for those whose grey hair betrays their moldering minds.
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The two-seater Toyota truck rushed through the darkness of early morning in Fayetteville, N.C. We were on our way to the hospital on Fort Bragg’s Army base. My pain made sitting up monumental, whimpering inevitable. I was aware of every centimeter of my body and yet, somehow, also entirely outside of myself. God, it hurt.
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