Sunshine State

by Sarah Gerard

  I should have known you were asking not only about the baby but also about her father. It felt like a test, like the night you brought me to Mermaids to watch you do tricks on the pole, and I was supposed to say it was beneath you. I should have known it was just a performance. Instead, I was sitting in the audience of another school play, hearing you forget the lines. But you told me once that nothing is worse than being told you fucked up when you already know.

  Later, you asked me to spell her name, too: Should there be an H or not? I didn’t answer that question. I knew you were asking if I’d be there for her.

  The first of the last tests.

  I’m sorry.

  Lies I heard you tell yourself:

  Vitamins from fruits and vegetables are concentrated most densely in the stems. Eating the raw stem of a zucchini is more beneficial to your health than eating all the other parts, cooked or uncooked.

  The earth is hollow. There is a hole in Antarctica, or the North Pole, depending on the story. It is visible from space, as proven by photos you’ve found online. A navy admiral named Richard E. Byrd once landed his plane near the hole and encountered a race of humanoids living inside the planet in a land called Agartha. This race has witnessed all the events of human history. They brought Byrd inside the planet and sent him back to civilization with the message that we’re headed for extinction.

  Present-day humans are the descendants of a technologically advanced extraterrestrial race called the Anunnaki who came to Earth from the planet Nibiru and bred with Homo erectus. We know this because a man named Zecharia Sitchin has translated ancient Babylonian tablets and uncovered details of Sumerian myth, which also prove that Ur was destroyed by nuclear fallout from the war between extraterrestrial factions.

  The government controls our minds with chemical-filled contrails dragged across the sky behind airplanes. As a society, we’re growing progressively stupider and more complacent from breathing in these chemtrails, which can also control the weather.

  Everything is controlled by the Illuminati. If you look closely enough, you can find evidence of it anywhere: in the Gmail symbol, in a skirt Beyoncé wore to an awards show, in the dollar bill, and even in the Florida state flag. They are responsible for the rises to power of several important people as well as for countless suspicious deaths. We are all their slaves.

  Some people are psychic, and others have special insight into the stars. When you were a child, your mother took you to visit her psychic, who became a close family friend. I went with you once, but she didn’t tell my fortune.

  Tarot cards can tell you things about the future.

  You and I are cosmic twins. Each night, while we’re sleeping, we find each other, no matter where we are. No matter if I’m in New York. No matter if you’re in Florida. We have been together since the dawn of the universe in infinite forms. We were once an Indian raja and his daughter.

  You can force people to love you. If you doubt their commitment, you can force them to prove themselves. You can do this to them over and over, and you will be justified, even when they say they’re tired.

  The love of a friendship should be limitless. You should be prepared to do anything for each other.

  Lies I told you:

  A ghost grabbed my toe in the dark one of many nights you slept at my house. We lay awake for hours awaiting another toe grab that never came.

  I used JTT’s bathroom.

  I was sleeping the night before I moved to New York with my then-boyfriend, while you stood outside his apartment, calling and calling, and I didn’t pick up. You and I had plans to sing karaoke. He and I were actually fucking.

  My mother liked you.

  I was a fan of Johnny Cash when I slipped his Greatest Hits into the CD player as we crossed the bridge to the beach one night when I was home from college.

  I would read Women Who Run with the Wolves. I never intended to read it. At first, I didn’t trust your recommendation. Now it reminds me too much of you.

  I have never looked down on you.

  I have helped you at all times without judgment.

  When I said I’d be your daughter’s godmother, I was ready.

  When you called the bookstore where I worked on your birthday, a month after the last time we stopped speaking, you were told I wasn’t there. You called me by my nickname and told the bookseller who answered the phone which section I managed. You called yourself a name other than your own, to try to trick them. I’d told them to lie.

  Your daughter emailed me from your account a year after we stopped speaking. I responded with pictures and a list of accomplishments, knowing you’d be jealous.

  Driving through downtown one night past the Detroit Hotel, you told me you’d been reading Schopenhauer’s Essays and Aphorisms. I insisted you had misunderstood the title, but I was just an idiot.

  I don’t wonder what I’d say if I saw you again in passing. When I visit my parents in Florida, I don’t make a point to go downtown in the hope that you’ll be there. You’d be eating pizza on the sidewalk outside Fortunato’s, surrounded by friends. You’d be smiling and confident, the loudest and most interesting of the group. You would talk with your mouth full, like you always have, and would clear the food from your gums with a nail-bitten finger. I would stand across the street, watching you silently in the dark. Your daughter would see me first. I would smile and wave to her.

  The detritus of a happy friendship: the tin Beatles poster; your chest of special things, including your copy of a newspaper article about Robert E. Lee, your great-great-great-uncle; the notes we tossed back and forth in Spanish class (Señora Santiago hated us); your journals, which still sit atop my refrigerator; the copy of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet that you gave me in New York, an inscription inside from one early-century friend to another; the Bhagavad Gita; the glass pelican sun ornament your daughter gave me, now broken; matching red parachute jackets; matching sneakers and haircuts; No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom; the photograph I keep turned backward in a frame engraved with “Best Friends”: we’re posing for each other.

  I know you live on a peach orchard now. Last year, your younger daughter seized in the orchard and turned blue, and you ran screaming back to the house with her in your arms, unable to open her jaw.

  I check up on you, yes.

  I know you have vintage items online. You and your daughter model them. You’ve gained weight since the second child. All your girlishness is gone, replaced by a heaviness in your stance and a look of desperation, like you’ve lost something that can’t be replaced.

  I mean this gently.

  Your home is surrounded by forest, lake water, crabgrass, dirt. You watch the sunset, a brilliant orange, from your porch. Your hair is the longest I’ve seen it, red and gold. Your skin is freckled suede.

  In one photo, you are smiling from the front end of a canoe with two oars in the water. Your body is strong and comfortable. The person holding the camera saw you so well. You think of this moment often. I know you.

  In another photo, you are bikini-clad and midsentence in a deck chair between two of your friends. Each of you gestures obscenely toward the camera. The day is hot, yellow. You had fun that day.

  I miss you.

  I know you married among trees and surrounded by friends. Your daughter is in the awkward prepubescent phase we were in when we met. Her teeth are too big for her head, crooked, clean.

  I wonder who your daughter’s friends are, if she loves them like we loved each other. I wonder if she’s anything like you in the way she loves them. I wonder if they’re good to one another.

  In another photo, your husband is shirtless, paunchy, his long hair a mop over his shoulders, squinting into the Florida sun with your younger daughter’s legs around his neck, holding her by the feet. Behind him, a body of water sits blue and calm under an unclouded sky.

  You haunt me in my everyday. When I think of you, you are twelve, our most perfect age. You’re laughing, and the gap between your front teet
h is half the size of mine—we are comparing them. This is the before time: before the real hurt came. We exist in the perfect sweetness of girlhood with our feet in a pool, with matching bathing suits, with egrets stalking through the grass behind us and lizards wending their subtle ways across leaves. We are diving in the water. We’re clean.

  I open up this time so I can feel all the other time around it. I can see it in sharp focus: a difference of this or that, the light or the dark. I am choosing the light.

  In the dark, hurt is pushed to the perimeter and stretched. It is variegated, bold. A bright pink scar.

  In the light, I can love you the way I want to. The way you deserve.

  I hope you’re happy.

  Mother-Father God

  This immaculate idea, represented first by man and, according to the Revelator, last by woman, will baptize with fire; and the fiery baptism will burn up the chaff of error with the fervent heat of Truth and Love, melting and purifying even the gold of human character.

  —Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures

  I reserve the right to change my mind.

  —Charles Fillmore

  I.

  I was baptized in the sanctuary of Unity-Clearwater Church in 1985. A gold winged globe hung above the sanctuary stage. People stayed after the Sunday service for the baptism and sat scattered throughout the old theater seats. I was one month old.

  Rev. Leddy Hammock led the blessing. My parents stood near her on the rust-brown carpet in the sanctuary, two pairs of blue eyes and two sets of chin-length oak-brown hair. They’d been married seven months and sober three years—since joining the New Thought Movement.

  Leddy told the story of the disciples asking Jesus to hush the children,1 and how He’d said that children should not be kept away. For children have a greater understanding of the Kingdom. Unless we become like them, she said, we will not be able to enter His unlimited creative consciousness.

  She poured water into a shell and dipped a white silk rose into it. She touched my forehead and chin, crossed my brows, and baptized me in the name of the Father (Divine Mind), the Son (Divine Idea), and the Whole Spirit of God.

  She reminded all present that my name means “princess,” and that I am the royal child of the most high, endowed with infinite possibilities for good.

  Children are a great gift, she said, here to be sheltered and also to teach us.

  She gave the rose to my parents. Leddy had known them since they found the church, and she had married them. As they came from different faith backgrounds, they’d held the wedding in an upscale restaurant rather than a place of worship. My mother was three months pregnant. Looking at the photographs, I can see the small rise of myself beneath her sensible white suit.

  When I was young my parents were deeply involved with Unity-Clearwater. Church members’ names were omnipresent in the conversations we had at home; the songs I sang in the bathtub were those I’d learned in Sunday school. And yet, for the amount of time my parents devoted to the church, my own memories of it are scarce. I was often with babysitters when my parents were there; I had only the vaguest sense of what they did there. My memories of my parents take place between outside commitments—full-time jobs and church meetings. I had limited access to these places.

  When I was twelve, we left the church and never returned. I never learned why. Now, nearly twenty years later, I still wonder. I crave better understanding of my parents and Unity-Clearwater. What it meant to them, why they left. I crave understanding of what the church taught me—the unconscious ways in which it still shapes me.

  In my conscious mind, the church has been reduced to a foggy set of images floating through my childhood memories: A wooden replica of Noah’s ark big enough for a child to climb inside. The koi pond in the courtyard on the way to the meditation chapel. The small window in the door of the Unity-Progressive Council, which opened onto a long hallway of other doors; knowing my parents are behind one of them. A glass gift case with baubles handmade by church members. Palm Sunday, carrying fronds into the sanctuary—the mustiness of it—singing, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” The Prayer for Abundance, manifesting prosperity in the lives of all who spoke it—a wicker basket floating down each row—and its ending, “Thank you, Father-Mother God!”

  My mother was one of six children, a middle child. She was fifteen when she moved with her family from Paterson, New Jersey, to Winter Park, Florida. It was 1964. Her stepfather’s drinking had grown so intolerable that my grandmother had threatened to move to Florida with or without him—he was only invited if he put down the bottle. Sober for the moment, he joined them. They moved into a duplex. My mother’s room, such as it was, was partitioned off with a curtain. There were no beaches nearby, but there were plenty of lakes teeming with alligators.

  My mother hated Florida. It was hot and boring. It rained every day on her walk home. The girls at school were all snooty, the daughters of citrus barons, wearing Villager clothing while my mother wore hand-me-downs. She missed her friends back home in New Jersey, and her brother who had joined the navy, and her older sister, who’d already married. Soon, her stepfather took up drinking again. In the afternoons, while my grandmother was at work, he’d line the kids up and browbeat them until they cried, then make fun of them for crying. My mom dreamed of escape.

  Barbara, a girl at school, had also just moved to Florida, from Pennsylvania—not so far from New Jersey. She hated Florida, too, and she and my mom became close friends, bonded by their mutual appreciation for the shortcomings of their adopted state. When Barb got pregnant and her father threw a butcher knife at her, my mom comforted her. When Barb’s boyfriend abandoned her, my mom was there for her. Barb’s brother, Bob, was nineteen and he liked my mom. Bob was in the navy, like my uncle Dennis, and was close with his parents—the mark of a good man. After just a few months of dating, when my mom was sixteen, he asked her to marry him. Despite her mother’s pleading, that’s what she did.

  In 1966, my mother dropped out of high school and moved to Norfolk, Virginia, where Bob was stationed. They rented a duplex and painted the walls turquoise. It had a tiny living room and an even tinier kitchen. My mom knew no one. An introverted girl in an unfamiliar place, she grew afraid of leaving the house alone when Bob was gone—and he was gone at sea for weeks at a time. When he was home, they argued. Their fights escalated. One night, he punched her. He apologized. My mom stayed.

  After the military, they moved back to Florida and he joined the police academy, then they kicked him out. Then he welded for a while; then he didn’t. He convalesced. My mom went to work making children’s clothing in a factory for $1.60 an hour. Coming home, her arms were dyed red to the elbows. She’d clean up, make dinner, then visit Bob’s parents. Every day. Bob’s parents sued people—the city, other motorists, etc.—for a living. Like Bob, they were lazy. And fat. At his fattest, Bob weighed 350 pounds. He loved food—without discernment. As he grew fatter, he grew lazier, and meaner. My mom went to work with black eyes, fat lips. No one at work said a word.

  When Bob got going, my mom would run and hide in the school yard behind their house. She once picked up a knife, but put it back down, afraid he’d use it on her. He never found her in the school yard, but sooner or later, she’d have to go home. There were no shelters in the area back then, and she had no friends. She was afraid to call the police—they all knew her, and they knew Bob. He’d hurt the dog. He’d hurt her worse if she stayed away longer. With nowhere else to go, she went back. He’d kill her. She grew certain of it.

  One night, curled in a ball as Bob punched her, my mom grew calm. She felt that there was a spiritual being inside her. It was a new feeling. Bob could kill her body, but he couldn’t kill her; he could physically control her, but he couldn’t control her mind. He could make her act the way he wanted her to act, but he could never make her think the way he wanted her to think. This was the turning point.

  My mom left Bob in
1976. She left the house, the car, the furniture, the checkbook, her clothes, and the dog. For two weeks, she crashed on her supervisor’s couch. Then, because she had no one else to call, she asked Bob to help her find an apartment. He told her he would, but that she wasn’t allowed to stay in their house in the meantime—another woman was already living there. My mom would have to stay in a motel.

  A few days later, she moved into her first apartment. It took weeks to decide what to put on the walls. After ten years with Bob, she didn’t know who she was, had never known. She bought a matching black-and-white-plaid sofa and chair set. She asked her mom to help her buy a used Pontiac, pea green, with the $300 she had to her name. Bob had never drank, so my mom had never drank. Now she drank, exclusively beer. Drinking made her sociable. She made friends who drank with her. She went to bars alone. She felt wild.

  One night in 1978, my mom went to a biker bar in South Tampa to hear the Mad Beach Band.2 She’d dated the lead singer for a few months until he’d broken up with her. She’d taken to showing up at gigs and just kind of . . . staring. That night, she wore a striped cotton beach dress. Her hair down. She’d come alone. On her third beer, the band played her favorite song, and she began to sing along—she knew every line. The guy next to her turned to get her attention: “So, you’ve heard this band before?” He smiled.

  The man would become my father. He had light blue eyes, a scruffy beard, and large wire-framed glasses. He wore a baby blue Jimmy Buffett T-shirt.

  My father grew up in Cleveland, where he’d worked for his father since the age of fourteen—after school and long days in the middle of winter and during summer vacations—cleaning and hauling industrial chemical drums. The men in the yard drank Wild Turkey. So did my dad. He learned the motto “Work hard, play hard” from his father.

  But my dad felt work in the barrel yard wasted his time and his abilities—it interfered with his outside interests, his social life, his garage band. He respected his father but didn’t want him as a boss. He saw in journalism a way to use his mind, to engage with the world around him in a meaningful way. He saw in Florida an escape.