When I was five years old, I took my last trip to Fairview Lake—a glacial lake one mile long and half of a mile wide in Sussex County, New Jersey. My maternal grandparents owned a cabin in the small lake community, which was sixty miles north of the town where I grew up. My first vivid memories emerge from the banks of that lake.
It’s July, late morning. I’m sitting in the backseat of my grandfather’s Cadillac. My younger sister, Kelsey, is beside me and my older brother, Bryan, is next to her. I watch the trees pass by, nursing a stomachache. Bryan puts down the window. I close my eyes and slabs of sunlight flash across the inside of my eyelids. Poppy sings “Row Your Boat,” and it turns into a round, all of us singing. At some point, I drift off.
When I wake, Poppy is turning onto Fairview Drive. The car plunges down the hill—like a log flume dropping at Disney World—and onto two miles of coiling dirt and gravel road. The Kittatinny Mountains surround us, southeast of the Delaware Water Gap that separates New Jersey from Pennsylvania. As soon as Poppy parks in front of the cabin, Bryan and I take off our shoes, run out back, take our fishing poles from the shed, and run down the road toward the lake.
“Put those shoes back on and be back in an hour for dinner!” Grandma yells. There are copperheads and rattlesnakes and bears. That means little to us. I had once seen a water snake swim from beneath a grouping of lily pads and pass Grandma as she did the backstroke. The wildlife intrigued me.
Bryan and I reel in the sunfish. Time fades. I didn’t yearn for it to pass like when I was in church pews or school desks. Poppy walks down from the house to retrieve us for supper. The three of us walk along the vacant road as the fading daylight trickles between the trees. Fireflies flicker. Crickets chirp.
My parents had just arrived and we eat hot dogs around the long backyard table, swatting at mosquitoes that come at us like an infinite army. Mom and Grandma clear the table. Poppy sips a beer in the kitchen, whistling to the radio. Bryan, Kelsey, and Dad sit in front of the scratchy black and white TV.
I am excited to be left alone. I walk to the side of the cabin where the water heater is surrounded with rotting wood. I slip into the cobwebbed crevice behind it and sit on the dirt. I hide. I want to see what will happen.
After a few minutes, voices unite around the table. “Where’s Geoff?” one asks. They shout my name. I smile, proud of having found such a good hiding spot for a game no one else is aware is being played. Dusk comes like a thick fog, images in the distance losing clarity. Voices resound from the gravel road—some I don’t recognize—and my smile withers into the stale air behind the water heater as the yells begin to upset me.
There’s now a search party scouring the woods with flashlights. The game is over. In tears, I walk to Poppy in the road. He breathes heavy, scowls, and picks me up like a bag of sand, carrying me over his shoulder. “I have him!” Poppy yells to the others. He takes me to the backyard, pulls down my pants and smacks me with an open hand.
The door to real danger had been cracked open, perhaps, for the first time in my short life. I couldn’t quite see what was one the other side, but my intuition told me it wasn’t good. Years later I would hear stories about Fairview Lake: a drowning, a bear that had torn through a neighbor’s cabin, and a registered sex offender who was a neighbor down the road.
The darkness of night wasn’t just an absence of light. There were tangible things of which to be afraid. But fear requires a self-awareness that I didn’t have when I tucked myself behind that water heater. I was just a curious little kid. All these years later, I can still hear those voices yelling my name. I can still smell that murky air. I can still see the murky silhouette of my grandfather in the distance, the banks of the lake out there beyond.
About the Author:
Geoff Watkinson has contributed to Guernica, storySouth, Brevity [Blog], The Humanist, The San Diego-Tribune, The Virginian-Pilot, and Switchback, among others. His first nonfiction collection, Have Some Faith in Loneliness & Other Essays, is due out in early 2022 (Dreaming Big Publications). He is the founder/managing editor of Green Briar Review (www.greenbriarreview.com). Read more of his work at geoffwatkinson.wordpress.com/publications, or find him on Twitter: @GeoffWatkinson.
She was my first crush at the age of seven. Nanami in the blue dress, fresh and new and standing at the front of the class, her face white and shining like quartz. Brown freckles splashed across her nose and square cheekbones, her fingers red from fisting into the fabric. Her matching headband sat nobly upon her head, a crown seizing the flickering overhead lights. I couldn’t even look directly at her.
I kept my gaze askew, staring down at my bumpy plastic pencil case. I felt frumpy, underdressed in my corduroy and light-up sneakers. The teacher declared Nanami the new student, spreading her hands out and demanding we be kind to the little princess in blue. How could I be cruel to her, I thought, when her dark chestnut eyes sparkled like that? When she looked up from under brown lashes and fidgeted in place? When her backpack overflowed with books and books and books, and mine was stuffed the same way? When her dress skirted around her ankles and was so pretty, so pretty I felt unworthy to even look upon her? How could I not be her very best friend?
In the back of my mind, I remembered the old adage – don’t judge a book by its cover. Disney Channel, chapter books, little cartoonish asides on Nickelodeon – they all taught me that looks shouldn’t dictate a friendship. But didn’t she feel the part of my best-friend-to-be? She sat like a reader, torso curved over the desk and empty hands grasping for a story. Her handwriting was so neat and practiced – were those not qualities that dictated a worthy playground partnership?
The sun hung fat overhead when I asked her to be my friend. Nanami sat primly under the tree at recess, legs folded underneath her. She pushed rocks around the dusty earth with a stick alone, all alone, as most outsiders are.
“Okay,” she said. Her voice was quiet and a little scratchy, as if out of use. I grinned so hard my face burned. I held out a hand and she took it.
Nanami was a girl, and I was too, so we did all the things two best friends who were girls did. We had sleepovers, we went trick or treating together, our moms took us to the park and the playgrounds. She opened her lunch and traded sticky peanut butter sandwiches for thick slices of pear and salty crackers. Nanami yanked a scrunchie from her hair, freeing her glossy bun, and wrapped my braids in its satin. I could sit there for hours and listen to her talk about her stout little guinea pig and her annoying little brother and the prettiest orange butterfly she’d ever seen. For years we burrowed into each other, plucking pieces of our identities and melting them together. These were the things childhood friends did.
But for me, Nanami stood uniquely beautiful in my mind. Unlike the other friends I had in my childhood, I wreathed her in gold and lace within my memories. Her headbands were a nimbus under the playground sun, and her laughter resounded with mine like a harmony.
Nanami in the blue dress. As we got older and more aware of the differences between us, things shifted. She spoke to her mother on the day of the presidential election and came back a little more distant. My brown hand in her white palm seemed a plague to her. She turned away while I spoke of all the new things I was learning about my heritage, my roots, my culture. The blackness that her family shielded from her and ignored in me. The entitlement her mother – white and prickly and the worst cook I’d ever had the displeasure of meeting – had over mine.
Nanami in the blue dress, there, in my memory. Before I knew what it meant to love a female friend that way. Before I entered middle school and splashed cold water onto my face, desperate to get rid of the budding and blooming. Before we passed in the halls like strangers, went to the same college, nodded coldly when we saw each other in lecture halls. Before I kissed a girl and fell in love and finally settled into who I was born to be, shedding the fear and confusion that I’d have rather forgotten. Before I forgot. Before I forget.
Nanami in the blue dress. The first clue, the first hint. That sapphic nimbus around her head – the memory-preserved saint of first crushes.
About the Author:
Jessica Mendoza is a young up-and-coming writer born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. She holds a B.A. in Screenwriting and is looking towards getting her M.F.A. in Creative Writing. As a professional writing tutor, avid reader, lover of small animals, and serious movie musical nerd, she spends her days talking about her various interests and story ideas to anyone who will listen. Jessica spends most of her time feverishly editing essays and raving about the semicolon’s usefulness to her students, who kindly humor her fits of punctuation passion.
Identify Your Triggers: Whole Foods Parking Lot | Cassie Burkhardt
I’m with my two-year-old at the grocery store today, truly the most demoralizing place for stay-at-home mothers when you haven’t showered, your stomach is grinding coffee beans in your sleep and you feel the exact same color as the uncured ham slices lying flat and helpless. My cart is piled high with chicken breasts, boxed broth, tomato sauce, jumbo cartons of berries, organic bananas—of which the two-year-old’s eaten two— the ripped-open peels an upside-down, stringy version of what used to be whole. It’s a food pantry in my cart and it will probably only last us half the week. My two-year-old is climbing out of the cart, trying to help me by lobbing pears onto the conveyor belt at checkout, dangling an egg carton as I sweep in to save it. I’m sweating and my winter coat stinks in the armpits, I’m the boring age of thirty-seven, dressed in some sort of stained, Luleisure combo, frantically searching for the Amazon Whole Foods app that will save me $2.41 on my $280.00 purchase. My daughter is shrieking that she wants to do everything herself, pressing buttons and licking the handlebar on the cart, screaming, “Cookies!” and then taking her shoes and socks off, her little mullet flipping back off her forehead as she thrusts off the flamingo print Gap sock.
The elderly couple behind me smiles, waving and cooing, just beaming because they remember the time and it goes so fast and, “You can have her!” I yell. Chuckle chuckle. Luckily, the cashier is unphased by my existence, lets me struggle alone, his nails are blue, he doesn’t even look up, I am pineapple two-for-one and what is this green stick? Lemongrass? A manager in a bossy green apron struts by to coach one of the drones who collect groceries for the rest of society when we catch his eye. He is terrified that my daughter, now standing in the part of the cart where she is supposed to be sitting, will fall mullet-first to chalky, lavender death in a bucket of bath bombs or worse, sue him. “She’s my third, she’s got this,” I tell him. He winces and motions to me to restrain her, accompanied by gasps from several other customers who are on their way to the fifteen items or fewer aisle. I stare longingly in the direction of that line, the breezy way the man in chinos walks by with his salad and a single tangerine to pay. What I wouldn’t give to have a lunch break, to be the mandarin in his palm… Hello little satsuma. It floats by, so cool, bursting with flavor underneath that skin, already undressing…
Beep beep beep, my daughter has taken over control of the credit card machine and is en route to planet Please Stop. I remove my daughter from the cart and place her before a wall of novelty magnets she can knock over or bite. One says: “I should’ve partied harder in 1999” and “Just another day of pretending I’m fine!’” and “You’re awesome” (It’s Bill Murray pointing at me) and thank you Bill, these are actually making me laugh for a second in the midst of this sweaty bagging nightmare, so I slip one in my coat pocket and don’t tell anyone, just because. Oh whatever, it’s fine. I deserve this, right? Are we done yet? The cashier is mixing everything up after I told him not to, when I quickly had to save my daughter from imminent grocery cart death. Perishables and pantry items are being tossed together into a beef-juice-animal-cracker-soup and somehow he didn’t use half of the tentlike, soft cooler bags I brought and he’s taking two decades to do it, but I’m too bored and flustered to care. I just want to be home. I want to rip off my clothes and burn them in the backyard or maybe move to Australia with my three kids, live in a thatched-roof hut where “beach” is written in chalk on a piece of driftwood or maybe just sit on the toilet and stare into my phone at home. Clothes on Shopbop. Clothes. Pretty clothes. Pretty clothes to wear one day to make-believe party. Art. Pretty abstract art in frames, swirly pastel mess contained on a canvas. Bench. Pretty velveteen entry bench, pretty bench where I will never sit but looks nice. Friend. Pretty friend on pretty cliff-laced lagoon in Europe I want to choke for jealousy. Like. Like. Like. Sweet little dopamine feedback loop. It’s already happening before it’s happening, like some Black Mirror episode I can’t get out of. I heave a bag into the cart and the handles pop right off.
“Mommy Mommy Mommy Mommeeeeeee!” Here, Coco, shake these and do this! (mints and magazine rack to dismantle while I pay) and what? My receipt. Hell no! Keep it! My gift to you! We’re done! Hallelujah, let’s get the F outta here babe! Let’s push this bitch! I practically need a mule to get me to the elevator, but no, I’m fine, please leave me alone everyone. Oh wait, no one gives a shit. No one even asks me if I need help. No one says hello anymore. No one says goodbye. Only the disabled man by the disinfectant wipes in the dark garage says, “Thank you for coming!” but he is talking to someone behind me. It’s fine. I can muscle my way through this experience, move the scooters and helmets, heave cases of sparkling water and paper towels into the trunk the way I pushed three kids out of my poon. I got this. (Ok, two out of three came out the poon, the first one was an emergency C-section.) Anyways, snap out of it, unlock the car you idiot. Garage. Darkness. The carseat, click, phew. Child is restrained. Collapse into my seat, Exhale. I practically weep in the driver’s seat. Life is so impossible and mundane.
And this is it, right? This is motherhood. Stinky armpits and “put cookie monster song on!” and clementine peels everywhere and a dented minivan, some vacations in between, some odd jobs teaching yoga on Zoom or helping a friend write something clever for something important, but mostly this grind. Oh geez, it’s all coming out of my head now. Anyone can do it for a day, a week, but: Every. Single. Day. I know, you are telling me, “Order your groceries online! Get a nanny! Go on a yoga retreat!” But that would be missing the point. That would be to misunderstand the feeling, the universal ache of the mother entirely. That ache that has nothing to do with how much help you get or manicures you treat yourself to and everything to do with feeling trapped, invisible, robotic, burdened by responsibility, and fueled by love, yet ambivalent about every decision you make trying to keep the web together. Yearning for freedom yet clinging to routines. Feeling like life is over yet hasn’t begun, starving, but I just ate, fuck me but don’t touch me, unreliable with basic tasks and pediatrician’s appointments, but completely in tune with the children’s every need, food, sleep, poop, and whose tiny underwear is whose, and constantly obsessing that we should be eating more vegetables. Exhausted, but I can’t stop, a ghost in a suburb getting gas, cleaning up Magnet Tiles, buying balloons, stirring broth, then staring into my phone at 11:48pm standing up in my bathroom saying I should really get some sleep. I am not alone, but I am so alone.
How can something so universal feel so singular, so isolating? I’m life-threateningly useful to four people and useless to the rest of the world, invisible even. I haven’t watched the news in a hundred years, but I’m wiser than a goddamn-baby-whispering-sage. Why do I push friends away yet crave connection? How can I be the person I was meant to become? What is a writer and am I one? Who will be my huckleberry friend waiting round the bend with a ukulele and a wink? Unfortunately, it’s not my husband. He’s on call! And my mom is on a cleanse with my dad in Puerto Rico, so I guess it has to be my own goddamn aging self. And look at her! She’s pale and hollowed out like an avocado shell, her hair looks like it’s been licked by a camel. This is the person I have to confront?! This person in the rearview mirror?! Is she the writer? The question and the answer? What can I whisper to myself in the dark of this parking garage to validate this soul-crushing experience of life? The oddity of this mothering experience, this complete crapshoot I’ve launched myself headlong into. And will I die before I figure this out? Or worse, give up?
No. No, for me there is pressure. I’m ambitious, I went to NYU, I ran a marathon, I survived an eating disorder as a child. I can do this! I must keep putting mascara on and doing push-ups and going up to the attic to write. I will not rest until I create art out of this despair. I cannot stop trying, stop noticing, collecting, recording the details, ideas, images like food for winter. Some images and scenes I’m collecting lately: My heart is a carbon monoxide detector that keeps chirping long after the batteries have been taken out, my children’s hummingbird heartbeats keep fluttering even in sleep and I swear I can hear them from my room, their Micros scooters in blue, purple and pink keep working even after I’ve accidentally run them over a couple of times. Resilience! A dinner of apple skins and toast fragments, ham rinds and dry pasta pairs well with an expensive Sancerre, I am a diamond that can bust out of the prongs at the stroke of twelve, but still be home to make their lunches for tomorrow.
The ambivalence stuff: the weird joy I feel that when I run after my kids at the playground, pretending to be a wolf, that horrified look of delight in their eyes when they ask me to do it again, again, again, then after the fifth time screaming “no more!” and sulking on a bench with my phone wishing I were at a dark party on the lower east side, so low it’s underground and only Chloe Sevigny and I know about it. Another one: Lying in the sand with all of my children on top of me late into the evening, sticky with ocean and sweat and wind and we should really be getting home, my husband is worried about us, but lingering longer because we can, I’m the mother bear back off, and we love squeezing the last drop out of a beach day, dancing in the dunes. Two seconds later, my daughter chucking sand in my mouth and the baby pooped in her bare bathing suit and no one helps me carry anything to the car, but oh well. I’m happy/miserable. Reading stories cozy in bed, relishing the purr of my own voice, the smell of the kids’ shampoo, then two seconds later my daughter sneezes and snots all over the book and everyone is yelling and I just can’t anymore and I tell everyone to get out. Moments like this stacked up every day. Do you know what I mean?
I start the car.
Blazing through yellow lights and careening through the familiar, winding forest roads, we are on our way home. I look and feel exactly like Cruella DeVille— when she didn’t catch the dalmatians and had to get herself out of a lump of snow— and that’s ok. I’ll come out on the other side of this. I have food for my family, my daughter is click-clocking her tongue and I have my images in my head like friends that flicker off the dashboard into my brain. She is just a child. I am her mother. A woman, a flawed human headed home. I am reminded that creativity can only exist in times of uncertainty, that art is born when opposing feelings collide, rub up against each other, start a dialogue. Loneliness can be celebrated, or at least renamed “solitude” which sounds more romantic. Anger is really fear and my worst fear is losing myself.
I pull into the driveway and my daughter is madly sucking her finger and sniffing her little blankie. In two hours I have to pick up the other two kids, but now it’s naptime. The story about Curious George making pancakes will calm us both down. I’ll sing her my made-up, weird songs she loves and hold her hand, smell her head, her pure, sweet scalp that gives me hope. It’s going to be ok. Is it going to be ok? Write it down. For god’s sake, run up to the attic once she’s asleep and write this all down before you forget.
Winter Star by Andrew Jordan
About the Author:
Cassie Burkhardt is a poet from NY, currently based in Philadelphia. She has three children and is working on a collection. Her poem “Study Abroad” recently won Rattle’s Ekphrastic Poetry Challenge, Nov 2021.
When I was little, I rode on my father’s back while he swam the length of our neighbor’s pool in one breath. My legs gripping his sides, my arms waving in the wind, I tilted my head back and laughed as he pulled me through the water. The pool seemed impossibly long, and I could not imagine holding my breath the whole distance the way my father did. He carried me from the depths to the shallows, where I climbed off and he rose out of the water like a great whale’s tail, shaking drops from his face, his grin as wide as mine. I believed he could do anything.
Four years ago, after my father was diagnosed with an incurable blood cancer, I sought the pool as refuge. When I sat at home on the couch, silent tears trailed down my face and I shuddered into the angsty anticipation of a world without him. In the pool, I couldn’t cry. Once, tears overcame me in the middle of a swim, and I fought to breathe, stopping mid-lane and treading water to regain control. Crying ruined my rhythm and made me choke on chlorine, and I lost count of how many laps I’d completed.
My father swam backstroke at Mumford High School in the 1950s. One year for Halloween, I wore his robin’s egg blue and burgundy varsity sweater, and all the parents smiled when they saw me, sharing memories as they dropped candy into my plastic pumpkin. I didn’t think about my dad as an athletic star until he was dying though, when we had long conversations in his hospital room about the places he’d been and the things he’d accomplished. We hadn’t swum together in years and we no longer could (with the port in his chest for infusions, a public pool could have killed him), so I settled for collecting his stories.
*
I’ve always found water soothing – being by its side, watching its tempestuous emotions, immersing in its cold embrace. The big gusty gales of Lake Michigan. The swift current of the Detroit River. The mirror-like surface of my old next-door neighbor’s pool, ready to absorb our summertime squeals and childhood energy. The ocean more powerful than what I imagine God to be, its strong hands reaching up and out, slapping the sand and peacefully retreating. Our bodies are mostly water, even our bones. We need water to survive and, in a way, it needs us too. We begin floating and throughout our lives water symbolizes purity, fertility, life and renewal. But equally as much, water has long been a symbol of wisdom, power, grace. Essential for existence and cleansing, water has the power to change us and to bless. Some ancient cultures saw water as chaos, but I see it as deliverance. As much as its power can overwhelm, it gives me power that I desperately need.
Water is beautiful. Its movements, its elegant glow, its translucency, the rainbows it inspires when interacting with light at the right angles. I love to watch a rain drop on a blade of grass or a river cascade over rocks. I love the sound of water. I love the way it feels when I am in it, the way it holds me, allows me to be lighter than I am on land.
But I didn’t always seek reassurance in the waves. I am not a lifelong competitive swimmer, nor a person home-birthed into a tub. I come from very mundane and ordinary roots. The pool only became my refuge when I was divorcing the father of my three children who were aged four, three, and one at the time. My work was imploding— the economic downturn caused so many of the magazines I had been writing for to halt publication or shutter completely. I went from earning six-figures as a freelance writer to desperately searching for people to hire me to write for a few hundred dollars at a time. And I wouldn’t be getting much from my soon-to-be ex-husband, an Orthodox Jewish musician whose earning potential was limited because his faith prevented him from performing on Fridays and Saturdays.
A week after we signed the divorce judgment, my ex moved his boxes and suitcases out of our house. I sat on the carpeted steps while my kids watched Sesame Street in the family room. The big house was all mine with its stone façade and two-car garage, my daughter’s pink bedroom, the 1960s blue-tiled bathroom, the oak-floored living room, the 1980s kitchen with Formica counters and laminate cabinets, the basement that flooded in a hard rain. We had bought it at the height of the market and now at the housing industry’s lowest point, I couldn’t even sell the house to pocket the proceeds. I was stuck with a mortgage to pay, lights and heat to keep on, a refrigerator to fill. For months, hoping to leverage my skills into a career pivot, I’d been looking for companies to hire me to write press releases and blogs. Some had signed on, but the CEO of my biggest client, a family-owned grocery chain, said my business idea was stupid. I wondered how I was going to make it.
Months later, when I had three clients and income to cover the mortgage and utilities, I scraped together enough money to join a health club with outdoor and indoor pools. Many afternoons I took the kids to the club, leaving them in childcare for an hour so I could swim laps alone, then picking them up and swimming with them until they grew tired under the sun. The laps grounded me and reminded me to breathe, assured me that I could float in choppy waters. The time splashing with my children in the zero-edge kiddie pool showed me that I could work hard and have time to play. We would keep each other afloat. Those sun-lit days playing in the water with my children, I felt lucky. I was forging a path for us and I even had time and space for fun on a hot day. Once, as we carried buckets and pool toys and bottles of sunscreen from the car to the club, my older son Asher asked why I had to swim alone before we could all swim together. I couldn’t tell him that if I didn’t swim, I might crumble in front of him. Instead I said, “It makes me a happier Mommy,” and that answer seemed to suffice.
*
I never worried about money until I became a single mother. Then, I needed a safe car large enough for three car seats, clothing, winter coats, and sturdy boots for my children. They outgrew everything within months and their hearty appetites demanded three nutritious meals a day, plus snacks, and sippy cups full of juice. One day in the not-so-distant future, they would need thick textbooks, sports equipment, SAT tutors, college tuition.
The money was a literal need, but it became a symbolic one too, representing my value, my success. No matter how much clients paid me, it was never enough for me to feel secure. In the year after the divorce the notion of enough grew big and scary, a monster in the night looming over me as I tossed in bed. I called my father at least once a week asking for advice and seeking reassurance that I would land enough clients, that I could keep them. My father had created a company when I was ten. At the time he had three young children too, but my mother stayed home to raise us so he could go out and build a name for himself in the scrap metal industry. I had no fallback, no one to keep the home front going while I went out into the world.
“Take the money and do the work,” he said. “It’ll all work out.” A simple truth, that if I completed the work in front of me, I’d always have work to do. His advice was tangible and immediate. A job well done was the best way to ensure more jobs. Focusing on an unknown future took me out of the moment and away from delivering on any project. It tied me in knots I had a hard time climbing free from.
I loved the sound of my father’s voice when he answered the phone and realized it was me: “Hi, Lynnie!” he’d exclaim, as if my call was a highlight of his day. It certainly was for me. He didn’t say much about the specifics of my fears, just reassured me that if I kept showing up and doing well, I’d be ok. He never worried and his voice calmed me, like the undulating waves of the pool do now. After he was diagnosed, I started saving his messages so I could listen to him long after he was gone.
*
My company grew and I gained more clients, developing a niche in the yoga world, where I helped studios and yoga personalities build brands, land TV interviews, and create social media content. Before I made the pool my sanctuary, under the guidance of one of my clients, I tried mindfulness meditation. I bought a Back Jack chair to put on the floor and left my desk twice a day to close my eyes and breathe in and out through my nose. I’d stare at the place where my third eye was supposed to be, trying to escape the papers cluttered around my computer, the oversight my employees required and the ongoing worry of whether I could retain clients while trying to attract more.
Meditation worked for a while. I grew calmer about managing my small staff and less concerned about money. But I fell out of practice. In the midst of work and home, too many demands competed for attention. I had to leave the scene of chaos to step into calm.
In a Michigan winter, it takes effort to drive icy roads, face the biting wind, peel off my clothes, and plunge into waiting waters. But still, I go. On a busy day, when there are more demands than minutes to devote to them, I go. When my children pull at me, beg me to sit with them on the couch, I promise to sit later, after I swim. The water beckons and I respond. My anchor, my sustenance
I love the equanimity of swimming. The water welcomes me, like a lover, and I give myself over to its embrace. For the first fifteen laps, worries clutter my mind, shouting: my contract might be threatened, that client isn’t happy, will any publication take my writing? Tick-tick-tick: looming deadlines and endless to-dos. Soon, they will leave and silence will settle in, the rhythm of my body in the water, the peace of the pace. With every stroke I am reaching for the inevitable calm.
I fill my lungs and push off from the wall. I part the waters, my legs fluttering. My hands are cups filling and emptying. I point my toes and tap my heels to complete a stroke. There’s no place like the pool. Focusing on form lets the worries bubble up and float away. I breathe out of my nose, my skin pulses.
In breaststroke, my arms extend like eagle’s wings before coming together at my heart and pushing forward. Back stroke and free style are long-limbed and reaching, exposing the heart. Even butterfly, which I rarely swim, is an open-arm hug before an elegant crashing into the water. In swimming I become expansive, open to everything, full of love for this moment, full of understanding for all the complications in and around me. I become an observer, not a judge.
*
In high school, swim class was mandatory for ninth graders. The gym teacher handed out brown, starchy swimsuits that were washed every night in abrasive industrial detergent. We clipped the straps together with a barrette to keep them from falling down. When my oldest son Asher was in high school, he swam against my alma mater, and my mother, father, and I watched from the bleachers. The pool seemed half the size it was in the 1980s. In my memory I treaded water, staring up at bleachers that rose like mountains of creaking seats the gym teacher traversed, shouting instructions. Asher was not a fast swimmer, but he took whatever the coach threw at him. Once, forced into the 500, the longest and hardest event in the competition, he finished last. I watched with a knotted stomach, nervous that all eyes were on my boy. I admired his resolve to plow through one lap at a time, as if no one were there, immersed in the water’s lulling support. The natatorium shimmered with cheering. After, he and my dad commiserated about what it felt like to compete in the pool. Although all eyes were on them, they lost themselves in the rhythm of the strokes. It was as if the rest of the world fell away. I knew exactly what they meant.
*
With every length, my worries have less energy and I have more. Twenty lengths in, my mind quiets. Until I reach my rhythm, I negotiate with myself to keep going: Another ten lengths. If you want to quit at thirty, fine. But I never quit. Once I am submerged, I stay. After thirty lengths, it’s all freestyle, long and gliding. Worries are little birds flying away without sound. Safe travels, little creatures – go find light and warmth.
*
I spent two years watching my father die. When his life finally ended on a dark, windy day, I thought, I spend my life waiting and then death comes to the door. There is no better time for anything.
I’d been wanting to visit the Keys for years. I yearned to leave the gray cold, short days and ice-crusted streets for slow beach strolls, an unlimited horizon and the cool reassurance of a shimmering pool, a kiss of sweet air on my skin.I drove lonely, two-lane roads under bright sun, crossing long and narrow bridges stringing islands together until I arrived in the tropical refuge of a seaside resort.I chose Cheeca Lodge in Islamorada because it had a lap pool. I could swim in the milky dawn counting lengths by the clicking of insects
Breathing in the winter can be painful – each inhale burns and harsh wind bites exposed skin, turning it red and raw. I needed to be in a place where it didn’t hurt to breathe, where I could bare my skin and feel the sun seep in quietly, kindly.It was more than a literal winter that February. The weeks after my father died were the darkest time of my life
I loved those early mornings flip-flopping across asphalt, past the golf course where sprinklers switch-switch-switched, all peaceful silence and reverence for the rising day. The air was cool, like the water. I was the only one in the pool that early, the morning whispering reassurances like my father used to. With each lap, I felt more certain that I could continue on without him, even if I didn’t want to.
*
The water and I, we are close. I push and it pushes me back. I glide and it holds me. It molds around my body and I let it comfort me. I breathe out as long as I can until there is no air left. I am a buoy in a constant current. I cannot sink no matter how hard I try.
When I finish the longest part of my set, steam rises from my skin and I duck under to cool my face. The drumbeat of music in the speakers is as rhythmic as the waves. I can’t make out words and I don’t really want to. Children squeal and splash, old people float in the shallows, a marathoner in the next lane pounds up and down the lane. Everything is happening around me and the worries I brought to the pool have long since floated away. Everything that felt heavy, draining, is simple in the haze from the water. The world is an unimportant blur.
My main set done; I proceed through my last twenty-two lengths to hit my mile. I alternate strokes, slow my pace. In my water cocoon, I watch bubbles become blinking stars in a night sky.
I’ve swum three or four times a week for more than a decade now and I sought refuge in a pool long before that. But only in the past few years have I realized that, in the pool, I find the comfort and support my father gave me. Swimming infuses me with strength, clarity, and determination like my conversations with Dad. I no longer need to hear his words to know everything will be alright. In the absence of his voice, I listen to my own.
I finish every swim with side stroke, a kindness to my weary self. Goggles off, I lay my head in the water as if it is my father’s palm. My hands and legs scissor in opposite directions. Water gurgles in my ear. And when I rise from the pool, sparkling drops drip off of me, my hair shaking out from its cap molding. I am the great whale’s tail, inhabiting the space my father used to occupy with his single-breath strength – I am carrying the little girl to safety.
About the Author:
Lynne Golodner has an MFA in Poetry from Goddard College and is the author of 8 books and thousands of articles. She works as a writing coach and professor and is the host of the Make Meaning Podcast. Lynne lives in Huntington Woods, Michigan with her husband and four teens. Learn more at https://lynnegolodner.com.
She was my first crush at the age of seven. Nanami in the blue dress, fresh and new and standing at the front of the class, her face white and shining like quartz. Brown freckles splashed across her nose and square cheekbones, her fingers red from fisting into the fabric. Her matching headband sat nobly upon her head, a crown seizing the flickering overhead lights. I couldn’t even look directly at her.
Street People – Portraits of the Opioid Crisis | Sally Quon
“Marianna”
Marianna is on the street tonight. She has a bed, but there are times when her psychosis is too big to be contained within the shelter walls. For the sake of the others, she is sent out.
The street is not a safe place for any woman, maybe especially for Marianna. She’s an easy mark and her boyfriend, Silver, likes to beat her.
Marianna carries on a constant conversation with herself. I try to engage her, but she doesn’t respond until I ask, “Who did this to you, Marianna?”
When I was five years old, I took my last trip to Fairview Lake—a glacial lake one mile long and half of a mile wide in Sussex County, New Jersey. My maternal grandparents owned a cabin in the small lake community, which was sixty miles north of the town where I grew up. My first vivid memories emerge from the banks of that lake.
Identify Your Triggers: Whole Foods Parking Lot | Cassie Burkhardt
I’m with my two-year-old at the grocery store today, truly the most demoralizing place for stay-at-home mothers when you haven’t showered, your stomach is grinding coffee beans in your sleep, and you feel the exact same color as the uncured ham slices lying flat and helpless. My cart is piled high with chicken breasts, cartons of broth, tomato sauce, jumbo cartons of berries, organic bananas—of which the two-year-old’s eaten two— the ripped-open peels an upside-down, stringy version of what used to be whole.
When I was little, I rode on my father’s back while he swam the length of our neighbor’s pool in one breath. My legs gripping his sides, my arms waving in the wind, I tilted my head back and laughed as he pulled me through the water. The pool seemed impossibly long, and I could not imagine holding my breath the whole distance the way my father did. He carried me from the depths to the shallows, where I climbed off and he rose out of the water like a great whale’s tail, shaking drops from his face, his grin as wide as mine. I believed he could do anything.
My mother’s maternity top has had at least three lives – maybe four, as I am wearing it now: a loose cotton smock covered in a gaudy pattern of blue roses and daisies. For a while I thought it was homemade; it has no tag and some hand stitching in the seams. My mother could sew, although she hated to; in fact, she won a Necchi sewing machine in one of the many jingles contests she loved to enter. But just the other day I found the top on page eighty-seven of the Sears Roebuck Spring & Summer Catalog. “Look pretty while you’re waiting,” Sears advises above the model, who has paired the shirt with blue pedal pushers.
My sister would have known the smock wasn’t hand-sewn. But Andi has been dead for four years, and when we pulled the shirt out of a trunk after my mother died, I did not think to ask. Because Andi was not examining the needlework or waxing nostalgic over the pattern. “I remember that shirt,” she said, “because she slapped me right across the face one day when she was wearing it.”
This would have been 1959. I was there only in utero, but when I picture the scene the camera of my eyes hovers just behind Andi. I imagine the blur of blue flowers, my mother’s enraged face, and her right hand striking with rapier speed. The vision is as real as a memory. But that is all: I don’t recall why my mother slapped her (Had she spilled something? Made a smart remark?), but after all the child is not responsible for the parent’s anger. My mother was nearly forty years old, unexpectedly pregnant, probably hot, hormonal, and irritated at something that had nothing to do with her eight-year-old daughter.
In the 1950s, only pregnant women and painters wore smocks. In fact, although the style would become fashionable twenty years later, no definition in the dictionary explains this article of clothing or women’s relationship to it. The word derives from the Anglo-Saxon smoc (Middle English smok), meaning a loose dress or chemise, or “an overgarment of washable material” – a sort of workman’s apron. The 1977 Webster’s New Collegiate labeled the chemise definition archaic, but made no note of the smock’s evolution that decade into a fashion trend. Even in the 1998 edition, its principal dictionary denotation was as a cover-up for workers. The shirt’s identity as maternity clothing or Baby Boomer styling went unremarked; dictionaries were still written primarily by men.
Sometime in the 1970s, I discovered the loose shirt in my mother’s drawer and asked if I could wear it. Smocks were in. On Simplicity patterns and in the pages of Mademoiselle and Glamour magazines, models like Barbara Minty and Colleen Corby wore them loose or tucked into jeans. Andi and I combed through our FBS (French Boot Shop) catalog, from a retailer in New Rochelle that sold trendy clothing for modern women. Here the term “smock” became a catch-all for peasant blouses, India-print shirts, and short tunics. There was the “dude smock,” the “absolute smock,” the “gauze smock,” the “scarf smock.” The descriptions paid homage to the shirts’ origins: “The easy going smock is really a Mexican’s work shirt with a mandarin collar, front pocket”; another was “made from real peasant scarves in prints of the provinces.” Were there actual Mexican workers or peasants behind these creations? In 1975, no one cared. The models flaunted these shirts in third-world countries like Haiti and the Dominican Republic, giving them a certain native cachet. I wanted to live like the women of FBS, who summered in exotic locales and carried sisal bags with flowers poking out of the top, who played tennis and strode down cobblestone streets, whose tall, lean bodies had never been pregnant and surely never would be.
What happened between my mother’s maternity smock and the tops of the 1970s? For one thing: Elizabeth Taylor. In the 1966 movie The Sandpiper, she plays a bohemian artist living on the coast of Big Sur in California whose wild young son is sent to a conservative private school run by a British headmaster (Richard Burton). It doesn’t take long for the buttoned-up Dr. Edward Hewitt to fall for the free-living Laura Reynolds, and the best parts of the campy movie consist of location shots of Taylor painting on the beach, dressed in, you guessed it, floaty artist’s smocks over tight pants. By the time Laura and the minister sneak away for a picnic in an isolated cove, she has shed everything but that smock, her legs emerging provocatively as she entwines herself around him.
But in 1975, I did not question how a garment that had once served as maternity clothing became a fashion statement. Why would women want to wear smocks if they weren’t pregnant? I had no answer for this at fifteen, and I put on my mother’s blue-flowered maternity top hoping my friends would not make the connection. I had no intention of getting pregnant, then or ever.
My mother never slapped me. She did pop me on the bottom once, when I was older than Andi, maybe ten, because I was teasing her about her middle name. Hope. What kind of a name was that? Hopie, Hopie, I heckled. She was infuriated. The smack did not hurt, not really, but her rage was incomprehensible. Why so sensitive? She would have these sudden fits, dissolving into tears, threatening to go to bed or never do our laundry again. Menopause, we blamed. Always there was some female condition responsible for her anger. But did pregnancy really make her slap Andi? Were hormones behind her fury about her middle name? My mother was angry. I suppose she had plenty of reasons to be, but she would have denied all of them. She did not like to admit my arrival was unplanned. She dismissed the resulting end of her teaching career with a shake of the head; she wasn’t healthy enough to continue, that was all. Women of her generation wore smocks to cover up their condition, and my mother was a master of subterfuge. One never really knew the full story. It was true she had hemorrhaged badly after I was born, and the pregnancy left her with some unpleasant physical issues, but it’s also true that she petitioned for a year’s leave of absence and the School Committee denied her appeal. Only then did she cash in her retirement fund and stop working. So, which was it? Was she relieved to stay home and be a full-time mother? Or was she papering over the truth, that she would have preferred I hadn’t been born at all?
My mother quit teaching school as soon as her pregnancy showed. It was considered unseemly for visibly pregnant women to be out in public, as though young children might be corrupted by the sight of them, as though the condition were contagious. It was only a few years before my birth that the wildly popular TV show I Love Lucy was enjoined from using the word “pregnant” on TV. Lucille Ball, as Lucy Ricardo, dressed for TV much as she did in real life: in stretchy pants and balloon-like maternity smocks. The tops were so expansive that you never saw the belly lurking beneath; that was by design. A woman who was pregnant was the subject of lame jokes about pickle cravings and mood swings. Pregnancy was a temporary and charming spell not to be broken by the actual word or a real belly bulge. It was a state of euphemism: “Look pretty while you’re waiting.”
As it happened, I was named after another pregnant woman on TV. “Betty Jean” was a character on the CBS soap opera The Edge of Night, whose husband was having an affair. One night he brought her ice cream to make up for an argument, but he left it on the counter to melt. At least, that is how my sister remembers it; in the plot lines of 1959, Betty Jean and her husband Jack are indeed estranged, but they already have a child, Bud. Andi may have been recalling an earlier episode: She would have seen enough of them in her preschool years, when she lived with my grandmother during the week. In any case, you might wonder why my mother would name a child after an unhappily married woman. The answer is she didn’t – my grandmother, who was devoted to her “stories” as she called the soap operas, picked out “Betty Jean.” My mother wanted to name me Caroline. She probably changed the spelling to “Jeanne” to give it a little pizzazz.
My mother’s pregnancy was more The Edge of Night than I Love Lucy. She would have been wondering how they were going to fit a third child into their two-bedroom house (the answer: a crib in the kitchen), how they were going to get by on my father’s meager earnings as a sawmill operator, and what it would be like to take care of a child full time. My grandmother, her mother-in-law, had raised Andi and Mary Jane while my mother taught school; they only came home on weekends.
So, I can’t really blame her for that slap. It was a momentary fissure in her composure, a cry for help even. My mother was overwhelmed. I know how she felt. One evening, one of the many nights when my husband was working and I had three children seven and under to corral, I lost my temper. It may have happened twice, although I only remember once: I slapped my eldest across the face.
During my three pregnancies, from 1989 to 1995, maternity clothing was still loose and camouflaging. It was unheard of to wear tight knit shirts that clung to one’s belly like plastic wrap on a bowling ball, as women do today. I started out in polyester pantsuits until they became too tight, and graduated to loose dresses and jumpers. By the last weeks of each pregnancy, hardly anything fit. I remember one summer when, as the birth of my second child approached, only one sundress accommodated my girth. Somehow I did not think to borrow my mother’s smock as I had in the ’70s.
Like my mother, I was working full time. But all these years later, the choice she made – to leave her children in someone else’s care from Sunday evening to Friday afternoon – shocked me. We cobbled together babysitting between my aunt, a day care center, and my husband’s split shift. I wanted my children to sleep in their own beds at night. I wanted to see them, cook them supper, bathe them, play with them. We had a routine, and most of the time it worked out fine. But some nights it was all too much: the boys running amok, refusing to settle down, my baby girl disinterested in sleep. I snapped. The slap, sudden like a thunderclap, stopped the commotion. The sad thing is it worked.
Years later, I confessed to my eldest that I still felt guilt for striking him. He just laughed. Unlike my sister, he had no memory of being hit at all.
The smock was the only maternity clothing that my mother saved. She did not intend to have more children. Why did she keep it? Did she, too, imagine wearing it while writing? The only other clothing she stowed away was her college sweatshirt. Not even her blue wedding suit survives, but the smock and sweatshirt were folded carefully in a drawer, along with our snowsuits and my father’s Army uniform. She never wore either one again, but they must have represented something to her: She had graduated from college. She had borne three daughters.
I think of my mother in that hot kitchen, unable to bear one more trial of motherhood, smacking my sister in a rage. I don’t know if she felt deep shame later, as I did for slapping my son, or whether she even recalled the incident that had embittered Andi. She liked to hide behind forgetting, and cited Andi’s memory as though it were a character flaw: “Oh, your sister. She doesn’t forget a thing.” When I appropriated the smock as a teenager, I was innocent of its history. What did my mother think about her youngest parading around in it? I wonder now if women in the 1970s donned smocks precisely because they could: freed by the birth control pill and the women’s liberation movement to control their fertility, they transformed a maternity shirt from a garment of camouflage to one of allure. It seemed only fitting when my daughter, another generation, took an interest in it. Enchanted by its bright blue flowers, she made the smock into 21st-century chic by adding a leather belt.
Today I see my mother’s smock as something sacred. Whether you are painting a picture or making a baby, the smock is a sign you have something gestating. I put it on now to write. Although it is weighted by its history – by the lives of my mother, my teenage self, my sister, my daughter – it feels light and loose; not confining, but not tent-like either. It was well made. After sixty-two years, the smock has held up – its colors a little faded but its stitching tight, its lines true. And I suppose mothers are like that. We are not perfect. We are stretched and stressed by the demands placed on us, and sometimes we snap in ways that are unforgivable. I wear the smock to remind myself that if I judge my mother, I must judge myself. That if I empathize with my sister, I must not forget to atone for my son, even if he did not hold onto the memory. The smock, that garment that was supposed to hide so much, continues to reveal: our humanity, our creativity, our potential. Its story also is a cautionary tale. It reminds me how quickly we can turn from loving to cruel. But it also carries with it the possibility of forgiveness. Like the smock, my mother was more than maternal; she was a teacher, a writer, and a flawed human being doing the best she could. And the smock, like my mother, has transcended its maternity function into a garment for the ages.
About the Author:
Betty J. Cotter is the author of the novels Roberta’s Woods (Five Star, 2008) and The Winters (which earned her a Fiction Fellowship from the R.I. State Council on the Arts). The first chapter of her novel Moonshine Swamp was selected for the premiere issue of Novel Slices (2020) and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A Rhode Island resident, she holds an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Blue–navy, royal, sky. If we were speaking in general terms, I would tell people that this is my favorite color because I love all the different shades that make blue, blue. Purple–plum, violet, a bright orchid color. His favorite. But he likes the bolder shades. I tend to favor the shyer, more muted, shades like lavender.
I pick up the spools, unwind the different colored strings, trying to make them even in length for the friendship bracelet I am about to create.
I cut seven strings. I group the blue shades together, then the purple. I take each pile, lie them in my palm to try and make them one. I run my hand over them. Smooth them together.
They meet. Sometimes they say hi.
I fold the strings in half, so that each end meets and a bend forms in the middle. I put the bend over a finger, pinch it below so it forms a loop. I twist the loop, point it downward, pull the strings left hanging through the loop to form a knot to make the loop permanent. Connected.
Friends.
I arrange the strings and we start to weave. In and out, end, repeat.
Each movement brings them closer together, makes their paths cross purposefully. Starting the bracelet is exciting, optimistic–this was a good idea.
If we are being specific, my favorite color is periwinkle because it’s the color where blue and purple work together to form one, where the line between blue and purple blurs. I watch as the bracelet forms, the shades of purple starting to melt into blue.
The bracelet is a gradient. Purple turns to periwinkle turns to blue turns to periwinkle turns to purple. Blue and purple are still their own but they are one.
Stop. A knot. Take a needle to work through it, undo it.
The string tangles, more knots form.
Undo, redo, it’s okay.
Sometimes I wonder if forgiveness only gets harder. Or if it only feels harder because it feels like I am the only one working to fix it. Even though he says he wants to.
But I pick apart the knots. Because I care. The bracelet is no longer perfect, but nothing ever really is.
I continue to weave. It looks like a mess. I can’t see where things went wrong, but the last few rows are messy. I pick up the needle, try to unravel it so I can fix it again, but can’t find where things went wrong. Maybe it was a mistake from earlier in the bracelet–spots I’d thought we’d fixed but had only appeared as if they had been. The strings are scarred, fractured, bent from constant reworking. Reminders of how they used to be so close, so connected.
This is not as easy as it once seemed to be. I have to stop. I am frustrated, stressed. The string is frayed–weaker–from constant reworking. There is no hope of finishing the bracelet, of it becoming wearable, beautiful. I won’t be able to do this right and continuing to fight the strings will make them snap. And we are breaking up but we don’t want the strings themselves to break.
How much can I care about someone who doesn’t want to be cared about or someone who doesn’t want to care in return? Does it count if I do? But then, if you genuinely care about someone, can you ever really stop?
We leave the ends of the bracelet loose; we had only just begun weaving it. Loose ends. Only smooth where they hadn’t been woven. Unsure, but hopeful. Potentially dangerous.
Because it’ll end up being okay or I’ll have to throw it away.
I leave the bracelet, rolled up in the cupholder of the front seat of my car, where we had sat many evenings, talking. Right underneath where his palm would meet mine and our fingers would intertwine.
Months later, he would tell me he thought it was stupid that my favorite color was periwinkle. Stupid, he said, because it isn’t even real.
About the Author:
Caitlin Matheis is currently an M.A. candidate in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she studies American Literature and Digital Humanities. Her current research focuses on the influence of archives, public libraries, and librarianship on women’s writing of the Harlem Renaissance. At UNL, she also serves as a writing instructor and as a research assistant at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities.
You forced yourself to go to this party. You figured external noise would be a welcome respite from the internal dialogue that has played on repeat since the night you found out your husband had been cheating. I mean, you knew he had a rich fantasy life. You knew he objectified women- always had. You were one of them early on, back when being objectified seemed a worthy goal. There had been more to the marriage, of course, but the bottom line is you gave your heart to a man whose heart belonged to longing.
The hosts are good friends. The party is outside in their garden. There are tables of food and open bottles of wine. There are fairy lights strung through trees. There’s a fountain with carp. When they rise to the surface of the water their mouths look like empty eye sockets opening and closing. You read somewhere that all goldfish have what it takes to become carp, but they only grow as large as their environment allows. You wonder if these were once aspirational goldfish. You remember when goldfish were ten cents each. You could buy them at the pet store and take them home in a little plastic bag. You bought a dollar’s worth, filled mason jars with fresh water and divvied the fish up into two families. You set the jars side-by-side so the fish could watch their neighbors. Every day at school you imagined returning home to tiny, finned babies, the mason jars and the fish multiplying into an empire.
One of the guests at the party throws a penny into the fountain. You overhear him telling his date to make a wish. Glasses chime, delicate as a chorus of seashells, and someone proposes a toast. You climb up on the wide, tiled rim of the fountain. From this vantage point you check out the penny thrower. His hair is parted on the side, like a pastor’s, comb tracks line up nice and even. You’re pretty sure that whoever throws the penny is the one who should make the wish. You wouldn’t want to be with a guy who changed the rules just like that and threw the penny for you. A woman in a yellow sundress holds her glass high and says the usual things about the night being lovely and the hosts being generous. You reach into your pocket and pull out a coin. You close your eyes, taking your time to think of a wish. You remember when you were a kid and thought you’d cracked the magic code when you made all your wishes for more wishes. In this moment you realize the code must have cracked you because your life has been a series of endless wishes. Upon realizing this, a person with initiative would make a wish to stop wishing and start doing. You are not that person. You wish to be happier than you are now. You throw the coin, open your eyes and watch as sightless mouths rise to the surface of the water and blink.
About the Author:
Laurie Guerin is a spoken word artist who has performed her original works on stage throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. She has co produced two live storytelling series, Word Up and Tell Me More in Santa Cruz, California. A student of Roxan McDonald’s, she has also studied with Danusha Lameris, Ellen Bass and most recently Pam Houston. Her work has appeared in Literary Mama and more recently in Prometheus Dreaming and she is currently working on a collection of creative nonfiction essays.
There’s something wrong with you if you wear coats in summer. It means you don’t live with the people who have tan arms and hair kissed by sun, hair that flashes yellow and almost-white even when you don’t put Sun-In on it. There’s something wrong with Mother putting on her wool coat to walk to Safeway, slow like in another time zone, like walking on the moon, somewhere cold and dark, while children are shouting and riding bikes and running through sprinklers. When I went to see Mother in the hospital there was a man wearing a coat in the waiting room, talking to himself, and that’s another kind of thing that means there’s something wrong with you.
Theodore wears a coat in summer. He wears it when his Big Brother picks him up to go shopping, go to Radio Shack, get ice cream. When he comes back, sometimes he doesn’t have his coat on, and it makes me think maybe his Big Brother can save him from being one of the coats-in-summer people. Or maybe he can’t.
But most days, Theodore wears his coat in summer, and that’s how I know he is not a normal boy anymore. I will go to school and freeze if I have to, on a sunny day in September, and I will stop wearing a coat in February, even if the gusts are gusting and frost is on the grass by the bus stop, because I can’t belong to the coats-in-summer people, can’t run different forever. I want to be in the world of the people who go to the beach, who go on vacations, who have lime green shorts and eat lime green popsicles, not wearing avocado-green coats puffy and fat and thick.
Theodore and Mother have the same kind of wrongness to them, the kind that makes people get quiet and look at each other. One time in a gift shop, the cash register lady smiled and uncomfortable smile and followed us to the back room when I was walking behind Theodore, and we were looking at the greeting cards, and the spider plants, and the big silver decorating letters that said “Beach” and “Relax.” It was hot, and everyone had shorts, and outside on the sidewalk, people were licking ice cream cones piled high with strawberry, mint-chip, and chocolate swirls. Theodore was wearing a coat.
You can’t be with us, even when you are. It means you’ll see things, hear things, feel things, that people in the regular zone don’t understand. When Theodore says, “They’re out to get me,” I don’t know who he’s talking about. He says it again: “They’re out to get me.” And Mother says there are germs on her purse and on the table, and she can’t stop thinking about the germs, and it makes her face pinch up and her voice shake, soft and high. So really, all that’s happening is that they are somewhere else. They look off, away at something, over their shoulder. They see a dolphin on television and say, “There’s a disease you can get from marine animals.”
A coat in summer means you feel the wrong season.
Or maybe that’s wrong.
Could be the coat in summer protects the skin. The skin of Mother, of Theodore, has many more prickles on it than our skin. The nurse in the hospital called it schizophrenia, but I don’t think she knew about skin. It looks normal, but it is covered with tiny little hands that reach out, get slapped, and scratch, with small, fragile fingernails always trying to hold Mother still, hold Theodore still.
These tiny hands are always getting bumped and bruised, all the invisible hands, and they have to be gently gloved, covered, saved, protected. The coat in summer keeps the bones of their invisible hands from being broken. Also, they don’t have to touch people all the time. Touching people creates electric currents and it hurts.
Mother says the doctors sent electricity through her when she was young, and now she doesn’t remember things. She always remembers her coat, though. I always remember there’s something wrong, and so I forget my coat every time I can, leave it on the playground, ride my bike in my T-shirt, get sunburned. I can be one less wrongness. I can be with the ones who shop in the gift shop and no one says a thing. Maybe someday if no one else can save Mother and Theodore, I can come back from this place to their place and give them someone to belong to, even with their coats on.
About the Author:
Christi Krug’s poetry and prose have appeared in everything from religious magazines to horror anthologies to comic zines. Her latest stories appear in Griffel, Nightingale & Sparrow, Montana Mouthful, and Luna Station Quarterly. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and recently served as writer-in-residence at North Cascades Institute. Since 1997, she has been a community educator for Clark College in Vancouver, Washington. Christi is a multifaceted coach of creativity and mindfulness and the author of Burn Wild: A Writer’s Guide to Creative Breakthrough. www.christikrug.com
