I didn’t want to attend my graduation, but Grandma convinced me to walk. She and my boyfriend sat in the bleachers and watched me cross the stage—a white robe against a brewing thunderstorm. Neither my father nor my mother showed.
* * *
—
BEFORE GRADUATING, I had applied to two nearby state schools and been accepted to both, but I decided to enroll at Shippensburg University because they offered me a full-tuition scholarship, and neither my grandmother nor I had been able to save much for college. Shippensburg also had the better secondary education program, and I hoped to become a high school English teacher.
My boyfriend, however, hadn’t finished his online high school certificate, and instead of following me to Shippensburg, he decided to move back to Idaho to live with his mother and stepdad. That summer, I took a month off work to stay with him and his mother before the semester began.
His mother gave him a job in her law office, and we spent days playing Magic: The Gathering at her office, when he wasn’t filing or answering phones. She sometimes let us borrow her car, and we drove into town for lunch or milkshakes.
One weekend, we drove into the city to meet his friends at Barber Park and float down the Boise River in an inflatable raft. The river was full of families in rafts and inner tubes; the water slow and calm. We peeled off our shoes, rolled up our jeans, and sprawled in the sun. A man floated past us with a cooler tied behind his raft, and when he cracked open a beer, we made fun of him. “That seems like a bad combination,” we laughed.
My boyfriend’s friends handled the oars, steering us away from the banks and overhanging trees, but partway down the river, they saw too late a lone branch that jutted out of the water. Our raft folded around the branch and flipped us all into the water. I ended up at the bottom, fighting through arms and legs toward the surface, only to bump into the raft instead of air. The current swept me into a quick, rocky section of the river.
I was frantic and hyperventilating by the time I pushed the raft off my head, but I became distracted with our shoes, which floated past. I caught my boyfriend’s boots by the leather straps and my sneakers by their laces, and I tucked his friend’s sandals under one arm. I collected three and a half pairs of our shoes before I realized the Budweiser man was trying to get my attention. He paddled close and yelled at me to let go of the shoes.
I didn’t let go of the shoes, but I did kick myself closer to him. He didn’t fight me as I piled the shoes into the bottom of his raft. I held on, and he paddled us to the far bank, where the water was shallow enough for me to stand. I thanked him and gathered the shoes back into my arms, and then I started trudging back up the river, the water heavy in my jeans. The stones on the bottom of the river bruised my feet, but I didn’t think to put my shoes back on.
My boyfriend and his friends were sitting under a tree with the raft, not far from where we had fallen into the water. I dumped the shoes onto the ground and apologized that I hadn’t found the fourth sandal. Rather than getting back into the water, we walked the rest of the distance to the car.
My boyfriend and I walked a few steps behind his friends. “Why didn’t you come looking for me?” I finally asked.
He glanced at me and shrugged. “I knew you could swim.”
My grandmother mailed me a spare pair of glasses to replace the ones I lost in the river. A bruise the size of my hand darkened on my left thigh, where I must have collided with a rock. When he went to work for his mother, I stayed behind in her condo and wrote about how I had stopped believing in love.
* * *
—
THE DAY I left for college, my father helped me pack my grandmother’s car and mine. We didn’t need the space both cars provided, but they were excited to see me off. I followed behind my grandmother’s car on the highway with my hazard lights flashing, because she saw speed limits as a number to drive well under, never at or above.
The school was teeming with students. While my grandmother sat in the car in front of my dorm, my father and I shuffled my packed boxes from the car to my new room. When they realized the dorm rooms weren’t air conditioned and that I had forgotten a fan, they ran to the local Kmart to buy me one, as well as a new minifridge, which they noticed many of the other students had brought. They even picked up a box of Yoo-hoo and a case of Pepsi to stock the fridge.
I could tell from the shine in my father’s eyes and the quick way he bustled around that he was happy—that he was proud of me. “Maybe one day you can teach me to spell,” he joked before they left.
Shippensburg University was a small rural school surrounded by cornfields and cow pastures. The Amish rode their buggies downtown. I lived in McCune Hall, the honors dorm, and became friends with a group of guys who lived on the second floor. They all played videogames, and I spent hours sitting in their rooms watching them play Half-Life and World of Warcraft. My computer was an old eMachines that couldn’t run many games, so when we played Call of Duty over LAN, I often picked a sniper rifle and found a spot on the map to camp.
I started dating a guy, Nathan, who I met on the first day of orientation. He had made fun of me for wearing long, baggy jeans and a black sweatshirt in the August heat. His parents were hippies; he wore patched corduroys and Grateful Dead T-shirts and hemp necklaces. He played the didgeridoo. Mostly, we hung out at the dorm with our shared group of friends, but some weekends, we drove down the country roads to a park or a creek, where he collected dragonfly larvae for his freshwater aquarium and tadpoles to feed them.
Away at school, my family was easier to ignore, but my grandmother left me long voice messages, complaining that I never called, and my father sent me regular drunken emails about the future of AI and about Google, the company he believed would save the world. Nathan didn’t like hearing about my family, and my new friends labeled and dismissed them as crazy. I started to learn how to twist my sorrow into a joke. I laughed when I told them about how my father had broken his leg: He was so drunk, he walked into the side of a moving dump truck. Its wheel rolled over and fractured his leg in a spiral, requiring pins and screws. His starburst scar from a spider bite was buried under new and tender pink flesh. But if I laughed, they could laugh with me. I could share a piece of myself and bury the rest.
I didn’t want to go home over Christmas break, but the school closed its dorms and I was forced to vacate.
My father was living at my grandmother’s again, and both he and my grandmother slept in the living room, on opposite couches, the two bedrooms still belonging to my sister and me. To me it seemed ridiculous to leave my bedroom empty, but perhaps my grandmother believed I would return home more often than I did.
Grandma said my father wasn’t allowed to drink while he stayed with her, but of course he did. One of the mornings I was home, he barged into my room and shouted, “You have to help me save these sorry fucks!”
I had been asleep and sat up slowly and mumbled at him to leave me alone.
He sat down next to me on the bed and tangled his hand in my hair. “Come on, Danielle,” he said. “Give me a hug.”
I pushed him away and told him again to leave me alone.
“When did you become such a fucking bitch?” he muttered, walking out.
Later that day, we sat around the kitchen table, and Grandma tried to feed him cold chicken salad. “Eat something and go to bed,” she insisted.
My father stubbornly shook his head. “You’re the reason I drink,” he told her. “You taught me how. It’s your responsibility.”
“Shut up, Michael,” she groaned.
“You don’t know what it was like,” he told me.
I laughed, and he shoved his plate across the table at me; stood up; stormed out of the house.
That night, I drove my sister to see a friend across town. Eileen was old enough to apply for her learner’s permit, but too scared to drive. She had enough
friends to hitch rides around town. In the car, my sister couldn’t stop fidgeting—toggling between stations on the radio, digging through my CDs, bouncing and kneeling and turning around and around in her seat. She told me about all the new drugs she had tried—about candy flipping: tripping on both ecstasy and LSD. She liked to try and get a rise out of me. If I told her “That’s dumb” or “That’s dangerous,” she would counter, “You should try it,” and laugh. I stayed silent and gritted my teeth.
After I dropped Eileen off, I called Nathan and cried. He offered to let me stay with him at his parents’ for the rest of winter break. They lived an hour north in an old farmhouse. He gave me Pennsylvanian directions: right at the cemetery on the hill, take the next left, then look for the tall bushes; there are chickens in the yard. His mother asked me to sleep downstairs on the couch, but after I heard his father snoring, I snuck upstairs and into his bed. I woke up to the sound of a cardinal, perched on his windowsill, gently tapping at his own reflection in the glass.
I returned to school and tried to forget about my family, but that spring, Eileen ended up in boot camp again. She mailed me letters at school, listing the number of push-ups, sit-ups, and pull-ups she could do. She confessed, for the first time, that she had started using heroin. She talked about completing her GED and joining the army once she got out. In one of the letters, she wrote, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t want to fail when I leave.”
Every few weekends, I drove down to South Mountain, often without my grandmother present. Eileen cried apologies into her hands. “I want to get clean,” she said.
I moved home at the end of the school year and started working at the vintage clothing store again and slowly broke up with Nathan, whose best advice about my family amounted to distancing myself from them, which I was not prepared—nor had ever been taught—to do. I started dating a punk I met through work, and I met Marie, so even when I returned to school in the fall and lost half of the friends I shared with Nathan, I found a new group of friends to replace them with.
We had weird fruit-tasting parties and played nerdy board games. On the weekends, we went hiking on mountain trails. I joined the school’s literary journal and we organized student readings on campus.
In the spring, I successfully auditioned for The Vagina Monologues, and I invited my sister to see my performance of “Crooked Braid,” an optional monologue in the play, created by Eve Ensler after she interviewed women on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation about domestic violence. My sister did my makeup: red lips, blue eyeshadow.
I recited the lines in my mother’s voice—slow and careful, dropping the hard consonants at the ends of my words. The monologue read like a song, like a poem, where nouns were allowed to become something else:
the snow was melting
it was sloppy
and mud
I asked my sister after the performance how I sounded; I told her I had tried to channel our mother’s accent. She said I sounded Mexican, but it was close enough.
* * *
—
MY MOTHER STARTED calling me more often when I left home for college. She called from her boyfriends’ phones, whose numbers often changed, but I could always tell by the area code—561—that it was her. She seemed to only call when she had been drinking, which meant that she had much to say and I had very little. I laughed when she laughed, and I cried when she cried, and I always told her I loved her back, but mostly I sat quiet on the phone and absorbed every word she said. When she hung up, I recorded our conversations from memory into a Word document, so I might have something of hers to hold on to until she called again.
In those phone calls, my mother told me about how she started selling orchids on the side of the road.
She told me about her new pet turtle, Troy, who she named after a Sioux Indian she knew who didn’t want to do anything but sit.
She tried to give me advice on love, in which she told me to be patient with men, because they’re just men. “A really good relationship is one where you’re good to each other,” she said.*2, *3
She told me she would visit for Christmas, and then for Easter, and then maybe over the summer. “I’ll try,” she promised, “but don’t tell Eileen.” We both knew my sister couldn’t handle it when her plans inevitably fell through.
When I asked how my younger sister, Alexandra, was doing, my mother told me she was learning to speak Spanish in school. “She has a lot of things going on in her little life,” my mother said. She never admitted directly that Alexandra wasn’t living with her, but I could tell through her evasions that my sister was somewhere else.
On one of our calls, she asked me what was wrong, and when I said nothing, she asked, “Then why are you being so quiet?”
“I’m always quiet,” I said.
“Your grandma raised you wrong in that,” my mother sighed.*4 “But you’re doing well. I can tell that. I don’t know how, but I know.”
* * *
—
I PLANNED A visit to see my mother the summer after my sophomore year ended. My sister begged to come with me.
She wanted to confront our mother—for abandoning us, she said—but when I told her it sounded like a bad idea, she yelled, “What the fuck, Danielle?” And then she laughed. “I would beat the shit out of her to make her understand.”
“I just want to have a nice week with our mom,” I sighed.
“That’s fucked up, Danielle,” she said. “I thought I had a sister, but I guess not.”
Before I left for Florida, I called my mother to solidify our plans. She had found a new job, installing air-conditioning ducts in a school building, through the labor hall, which meant she couldn’t afford to take time off work, but I still planned to spend a full week driving down and back.
I asked my mother if she knew how I could contact Fran. I wanted to spend a day with her—maybe take her out for lunch or dinner.
“Oh, sweetie,” my mother said, “I think Franny died.”
“What?” I asked, stunned.
The last time I heard from Fran, she had sent me a letter from the hospital. She had been bitten by a rabid fox while sleeping in the woods, a few months after she left Pennsylvania. She hadn’t written since.
“I think she died,” my mother said again.
I worked half the summer to save up enough money for my trip, and then I took a week off work and packed my clothes into a single bag. I left without Eileen, at six in the evening—partly to avoid traffic, but mostly because I preferred driving at night. I held the gas pedal low and cruised over a hundred. Each time I crossed a state line, I asked myself, “Are we in Georgia yet?” And when I finally crossed the Georgia line into Florida, the sun was just beginning to peek over the horizon. I still had eight hours to go, but by the time I arrived, my mother was nearly done with her shift at work.
These were the days before smartphones, so before I had left home, I printed MapQuest directions to the grocery store parking lot near her house, where we had agreed to meet. I pulled into one of the empty spaces at the back of the lot and sat on a parking curb to wait.
“You’re so white!” my mother cackled when she arrived.
I glanced down at my arms, Pennsylvania pale, and said in defense, “I’m darker than everyone I know.”
That just made her laugh even more, but it kept us from crying as we stepped into a hug.
We got back into our cars, and I followed her home: a square, lime-green house in Lake Worth. She was living with Ron at the time, and as soon as we walked in the door, she ran over to him and giggled, “I tol’ you how big her boobs are.”
That night she cooked liver and onions, and we sat on her back porch to strip the copper wire she salvaged from work. She sat in an old rocking chair with a small radio in her lap, and I sat at her feet, and I marveled that my hands remembered ho
w to shave the plastic casing away from the wire in long, delicate coils. She folded the copper into skeins, like yarn. We didn’t say much. Long after the mosquitoes chased Ron back inside, we worked together, in silence, in the fading light.
The next day, while she was at work, I ventured down roads I remembered from childhood. I followed my memories into Westgate, where I found our first apartment on Nokomis Ave. The roads were paved with new asphalt, black with crisp white lines. I followed Okeechobee Boulevard to the trailer park where my grandmother, Don, my sister, and I had lived. Where our trailer should have been, there was a heap of rubble, bordered by yellow caution tape.
I knew the rubble was mine. I recognized the brown-and-tan siding and the bubblegum-pink panel that marked the place my sister’s room had been. As I crept around the debris, an anole lizard skittered along the edge of a windowpane, and I stepped back. If there were lizards, there could be snakes.
I circled the rubble and found our old Christmas tree still standing—the one I made Grandma buy when I decided I didn’t want to kill a tree for Christmas. We’d gone to Home Depot to look for a pine tree we could plant after the holidays, but the only tree they had available was a star pine, which had huge, empty spaces between each of its star-shaped branches. It was the epitome of a Charlie Brown Christmas tree, and our sparse ornaments dangled pitifully, but the tree survived to be planted in the front yard. After years of hurricane seasons, it seemed, only the branches at the tippy-top of the tree remained. The rest of the tree’s trunk was completely bare.
I took photos of my trailer and my tree, and then I got back into my car. I drove through the neighborhood and snapped a few more photographs of the places my friends and I had played, and then I drove back to my mother’s. It felt right that my childhood home was in ruins. I was only grateful I had been able to say goodbye.
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