This Is the Place

by Margot Kahn

  And what to do now, now that you’re older and far away: There is not much to do now that the restaurant is gone; you’ll find this idleness disconcerting and want to grab a broom to sweep or stomp or throw. You’ll want to hiss for the sake of hissing. You’ll want to chase raccoons just to find your likeness, your feral child-self. Instead: move to New York, to Hong Kong, to Iowa, to Montana, to Washington, to a place so close to Alaska you can smell the muddy toes of moose in mid-July. Call your brother, your mother, call them in apology, as in: sorry it’s been so long and what did you eat today? Marvel over how your brother has grown exponentially taller than you, 6 feet tall, and how he stands like a pine tree, rooted, no longer shaking. Listen to your mother laugh like a bursting tomato, free and wild. Over a bowl of soup, forget your father; let the broth rise and soften your face. Forget and forgive your father. When buying groceries, open an egg carton and check if anything’s broken. Let the eggs feel heavy and round in your hands and do not calculate the physics of projectile motion; you were never good at science anyway. Read and write in good light, in hovering white light, in egg light, in a bed you share with no one. Do not be afraid of loneliness; remember your teenage self and what your mother told you right after your father left, the both of you struck by the sting of salt and wind along the boardwalk: “If I was allowed to choose, I would choose to be alone.” Allow yourself to make your own decisions. Become your own book, your own revenge in language struck with a cleaver. Repeat the little Cantonese you know to your grandparents: and . When you return to the strip mall twenty years later, the restaurant will still be a restaurant and there will be a small black-haired girl from another family, another life. Do not look her in the eye. Do not tell her who you are. Do not ask her to draw you a picture on a menu or how long it takes for her to de-vein shrimp or if she falls asleep behind the fronds of potted plants. Does she stick gum along the ribs of bamboo? Don’t ask her. It will be too close, too rotten, too down-to-the-bone honest to reach out and tell her everything you know.

  Jane Wong’s poems can be found in anthologies and journals such as Best American Poetry 2015, Best New Poets 2012, Pleiades, Third Coast, and others. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the US Fulbright Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, Squaw Valley, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Along with three chapbooks, she is the author of Overpour. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Western Washington University.

  Freeing Thanksgiving from My Family

  Jennifer Finney Boylan

  It was a few hours before dawn, and the cartoon characters were in sad shape. There they lay, half inflated in the streets encircling New York City’s Museum of Natural History: Snoopy and Hello Kitty and Kermit the Frog and Superman. They were tethered to the ground with giant nets, like something out of Gulliver’s Travels.

  “I’m not going to make it,” I said to my friend Beck.

  “Come on now,” said Beck. “You just gotta dig deep.”

  It was 4:30 Thanksgiving morning, and sunrise was still a long way off. New York was mostly deserted, except for police officers, parade workers, and insomniacs.

  And Beck and me. It was 1982. Our plan was to stay up all night, watch as the balloons were inflated, then go over to his apartment for Thanksgiving “on our own terms.” I wasn’t sure what this meant, but I suspected turkey wasn’t going to be part of it. I was twenty-four, working in a bookstore, trying to finish a novel, determined to remake the world using the felicity of my own insufferable genius. Turns out, this was harder than you’d think.

  It was my first Thanksgiving away from home. I’d been glad to get away from my parents, and what I considered their stifling view of the universe. Until that year, every Thanksgiving I’d ever experienced had been the same: my mother burning the marshmallows atop the sweet potato puff; my father silently staring into a fire that never quite lit; my grandmother rattling the ice cubes in her glass of vodka and, at a certain special moment, clearing her voice and asking, “Have I ever told you the story of the night your father was conceived?”

  I’d left all that behind now, and struck out on my own. Henceforth I would celebrate Thanksgivings among my downtown peers. There would be writers and painters and people in berets reading Goethe in German. Somewhere in my heart, thinking of the life I had chosen, dwelt the phrase, “This will show them.”

  Beck, a friend since college, was the author of a play titled Little Condo on the Prairie. At the climax of this work, the skeleton of a dog was placed in front of a Victrola, just like the RCA Victor dog, except dead. Beck was known for wearing a chef’s hat all the time, even though he did not cook.

  The plan for our anti-Thanksgiving had seemed clever enough. We’d stay up all night and watch the balloons inflate. The flaccid Superman would be a visible object lesson, we figured, on the failure of American culture.

  But now, the thing that was failing was me. “I’m hungry,” I said. “I’m sleepy.”

  “All right,” he said. “Maybe what we need is a classic New York City coffee shop. Eggs over easy, bacon, home fries.”

  That, of course, was the solution. So we set out in search of a diner. I pictured us sitting in a booth, opening the little packages of grape jelly, steam rising up from the eggs. This, I thought, is a Thanksgiving for a writer.

  But the first coffee shop we went to had a sign on the door: CLOSED FOR THANKSGIVING. We stood there, stunned. It had never occurred to me that diners in New York ever closed, Thanksgiving or no.

  The next one had an identical sign. Every diner from 82nd Street to 99th was closed, in fact, as Beck and I learned as we walked up Broadway through the dark, deserted city. At last, Beck said, “Let’s go to my mom’s house. We can have breakfast there, plan our next move.”

  We walked over to West End Avenue and quietly opened the door so as not to wake Beck’s mother or sister. He fried up some eggs and bacon, and I looked around the kitchen. Taped to the fridge, there was a picture of Beck in Little League. Another showed him as a one-year-old, a tiny pink pig in his mouth.

  “My mom’s had a hard time letting go,” he noted.

  After breakfast we left our dishes in the sink and flopped into his bed. Soon enough, he was snoring.

  I lay awake, staring at the ceiling of Beck’s childhood bedroom, at his high school trophies, and a semi-naked poster of the actress Karen Black.

  I wasn’t sleepy anymore.

  In years to come, I would spend many Thanksgivings away from home. My father would pass away just four years later, followed in turn by my grandmother and all of my aunts and uncles, and at last, in 2011, at age ninety-four, my mother.

  Now I have a family of my own, and my sons—college students—make the journey each year back to Maine to be with us. I do not know how many more Thanksgivings we all have together: many, I hope. But I do know that someday I’ll get a call, or a text, telling me that this year they’re not coming home. It makes me wonder how my mother felt when I told her, back in 1982, that I’d be spending the holiday with my friend the playwright, watching strangers blow up Superman in New York.

  Except that things turned out differently that year. As Beck lay sleeping, I sneaked out of bed and put on my clothes. I left him a note: “I’m digging deep.” Then I walked through the dawn and took the subway to Penn Station. A train was leaving. I got on it.

  By lunchtime I was walking up the streets of my childhood toward my parents’ house. I opened the door. It smelled like turkey. There was my mother, putting the marshmallows on top of the sweet potato puff. She looked up.

  “You’re home,” she said.

  Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of fifteen books including the novel Long Black Veil and the memoir She’s Not There. She is the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University and serves as the co-chair of the board of directors of GLAAD.

  Broken Home

  Debra Gwartney

  A month af
ter I’d sold our house in Western Oregon, my third daughter called me to say her cats were missing. Our family cats, now in her charge. I drove over and she and I walked the streets of her new neighborhood, calling for Misty and calling for Norman. I’d seen the cats just a few mornings before, when I’d dropped by the house this eighteen-year-old daughter had rented with friends. Norman, black with a swipe of white moustache, was perched on the railing of the front porch that day, staring at me like she was the very symbol of our now disjointed family. Like she was wondering why I had let everything unravel.

  After a few hours of searching, we walked back to her house, my daughter rubbing at her face as she tends to when she’s upset, and rolling a cigarette, though she knew I hated that. I held her for a second before she pulled away and went inside and then I stood on the porch, certain she was wanting her old house, her real home, her room painted tomato red where she closed herself up to listen to Billy Joel when she’d had it with the rest of us. She’d insisted she was ready to be on her own, but I didn’t believe it. Maybe I didn’t want to believe it. Not of her or of the other three daughters who’d packed up and left too fast. But then, I’d left fast, too. I’d moved into a loft studio, no pets allowed, above an audiology center. People, mostly old ones, drifted into the office to discover how much they’d been missing, while I sat by the window upstairs, feeling old myself, and bewildered.

  Of course there are many reasons the five of us dispersed as we did, and isn’t this the way of things: children leave, mother grieves. Except I have come to blame the rush of it, the abrupt and jagged edge of it, on a man. A man who brought a taint into our house. He brought a poison. Maybe we could have eventually wiped our rooms clean of him, but I doubt it. In fact, one time a neighbor showed up with a smudge stick and I followed her, the children trailing us, while smoke did its filmy business, floating into corners and under bureaus and beds, soaking into curtains. I went so far as to light a stack of kindling and newspaper in our fireplace, adding logs until the flames were licking, so my kids could toss in every pair of their underwear. But it wasn’t like we could burn the man up or smoke him out. We couldn’t dump him in the street, a smoldering pile of ash.

  The man’s name is William Green.

  First there was the clerk at the grocery store who noticed lewd photos of a child on a roll of film she was printing for a customer named William Green and called the police.

  Then there was the officer who took extra time searching William Green’s house so that he found a secret compartment in the garage that held dozens of videotapes.

  There’s the detective who, once he viewed the tapes himself, locked them away in his office so that no one else could. That same detective called me one afternoon to ask that I meet with him in person, so he could tell me that he’d counted, on William Green’s tapes, the naked bodies of nearly one hundred girls from our town, four of whom were my daughters.

  Here’s how William Green did it. He hid outside girls’ bedroom windows at night with his camera; he filmed them as they undressed for bed. Then the next day, or the day after that, he found a way to get in. Maybe he jimmied the lock with his contractor tools while everyone was gone, while I was at work, my daughters at school. He filmed himself masturbating on the girls’ beds, their panties wadded in his hand. He spliced the footage together in his garage, film of the girl undressing, sliding under her covers; film of him on her bed, his head on her pillow. Against my will, I pictured him. I pictured him watching what he’d made in a sweaty corner of his own dank house.

  I left the detective’s office that day with a stake jammed in my side. Now I’d have to go home and tell my children what had been perpetrated upon them, which I did. Now I would have to make up a story to tell others about my lack of culpability, which I did—in fact, I recited it to anyone who’d listen. I mean, what could I have done about a hidden man and his hidden camera? Except here’s the thing. My daughters no longer believed I could keep them safe. At least that was what I took from them as we went through grand jury hearings, the trial, the sentencing, the disclosures of what William Green had done to us and others. One at a time, the girls came to me: I need to make my own way now. How could any of us stay? That was their argument. How would any of us feel unwatched, uncontaminated in our house again?

  When I first drove into our Oregon town in the early ’90s, it was already dark. I parked under the lights at a Safeway to figure out where I was, a map of the city unfolded in my lap. The daughters and a single cat were asleep behind me. I knew no one here. No one to call if a child got sick, or if I couldn’t start my car some morning. I was just divorced, far from their father. My new job would start in a few days. The plan was that we’d hole up in a two-bedroom apartment until I could find a better place for us to live. I had $150 in my bank account. What I wanted to give my daughters was stability, but there’s nothing stable about a dry leaf tumbling down a sidewalk and that was me. Still, did that ex-husband of mine believe I’d fail now? I was thirty-four years old sitting in the parking lot that night, and no one was going to tell me I couldn’t do it all—earn a paycheck, make Saturday morning doughnuts from scratch, transport the children on field trips to the coast where they could bend their bodies into the stiff wind. I would buy a house, too, as soon as I could, an address that would be stamped in my children as indelibly as it was on the front stoop.

  Two years later, I found one, a house that had been a rental for years, with holes in the walls and cardboard boxes laid out on the bathroom’s peeling linoleum, carpets soaked in dog piss. That could be cleaned up. And I could leave the children alone a few evenings a week so I could work longer hours to make house payments and afford to fix the leak in the roof and pay some guy to scrape the dead possum out of our crawl space. A sacrifice, is how I thought about it then, a little skin scraped off for the good of us all.

  The day my offer was accepted, the girls and I headed over to walk around the vacant house we’d soon own. On the way, I waited behind a Ford van for the light to change. A daughter called out and pointed to a black and white kitten that wobbled, as we watched, off the road divider and climbed up the van’s rear tire. Almost unreal that it happened that way, but it did. The girls, between the ages of six and twelve, started to scream. And I mean: scream. The kind of sound that dents the side of your head. I honked, we shouted out the window, but the light turned green and the van started to move.

  The screaming, if possible, was louder now, with seatbelts strained to the breaking point, their bodies ready to hurl out the windows to rescue the cat. After the van turned left, onto the street where we’d soon live, and we followed, still honking and yelling, we watched as the kitten was catapulted from the tire well, landing hard on the side of the road. I pulled over and we jumped out. Girls on their hands and knees pawing through the grassy strip until I said we had to face the fact that the kitten was gone.

  The next day after work, kitten turmoil somewhat abated, we tried again to go to the house. I thought I’d wedge open a window, slide one of the smaller girls through the opening so she could unlock the front door and let us in to rooms we hadn’t yet seen clear of others’ belongings. Once we arrived, the girls ran ahead to look into a box on the front porch. I was thinking only about getting in so I could convince myself to keep stretching thin, my thin money and my thin time.

  I saw the oldest daughter stand up, holding a note she’d found in the towel-lined box. I think this belongs to you, it read. Inside was the kitten, unharmed save her tail, which was severed about an inch from the root. My first thought was, I can’t afford a second cat. A hurt cat would be a chore, a nuisance. But before I could tell them so, my daughters stood as a wall of resolve in front of me. The cat’s name was Norman, the oldest one said, and we were giving her a home.

  At one point in the investigation, the detective let my daughters and me watch a single piece of film confiscated from the cupboard in William Green’s garage, where police also found bags of girls’ underwear a
nd swimsuits, snarls of hair pulled from drains and out of garbage cans, as well as collages of photos he’d stolen from family albums, including ours. The footage wasn’t of a daughter undressing or of William Green on her bed, and yet it was somehow more disturbing. I hadn’t known, until I watched it, that he’d filmed at our living room window too. But here it is. The four girls sprawled on sofa and chairs, one daughter’s legs entangled with another’s. It’s a hot night: they’re wearing shorts. Their long blonde hair tied in loose knots on their heads. Norman is sitting next to her favorite lamp, until a daughter pulls the cat into her lap. Misty is there, too. Ghost television light flashes across the girls’ faces and you can see me like a shadow down the hall, an apparition in the kitchen, puttering about, so ordinary, such an ordinary weekend evening, no threats, no fears. I leaned in to scan for any sign in that mother on the film that she must be vigilant now against the trouble seeping under our door and in through our windows, but I saw nothing.

  The detective worried that the girls might cry when they saw the living room tape. But they didn’t. There was nothing left to cry about. They’d already faced the shackled William Green who sat behind the defense table, maybe eight feet away from us. At the end of the last hearing, the judge said that, really, we were so very lucky that the girls hadn’t been touched. This wasn’t much of a crime after all: the only things stolen from us were a few pictures, a couple of pairs of underpants. Not one girl’s body, he said, had been violated.