When I was very young, I lived in a place called Pufton Village. It was ugly and gray, full of grad students and poor people. Roaches roamed freely on the kitchen floor. My mother did what she could with the place. She built a loft for my brother that could be reached by a chunky ladder made of two by fours. There was a small nook underneath where I played with a set of wooden blocks. My brother would construct elaborate mazes and thoroughfares and then put a marble in my hand and tell me to drop it in a certain location. I was little so when it disappeared and then reappeared, I was delighted. My brother surrounded himself with bright colors. He had a bureau that he painted grass green on the outside and electric blue on the inside. He filled an entire drawer with hard candies with colorful plastic wrappers, the kind that made crunching noises when you balled it up to throw it away. I remember sinking my hand down to the bottom and rifling through them. The apartment was small enough that one time, my brother constructed a giant web of masking tape, sticky lines running back and forth across the space. There were other boys there, my brother’s friends, scampering around, gleefully unrolling rolls and rolls of tape, shrieking when it made that thwap sound as it unpeeled from itself. I was small and clumsy and I ran into a piece of tape in the corner, bringing an entire section down with me. “Crawl. Just crawl! Damn it!” yelled my brother.
In photographs of that time, I am wide eyed and smiling. I am adorable. In one picture, my face is scrunched up with joy. In another, I am sitting in my mother’s studio amidst her calligraphy pens and various nibs, a row of ink bottles close by, playing with a pair of orange-handled scissors that look massive in my hands. In another, I am sitting like the Buddha, a book splayed out on my lap, just awoken from a nap, a blanket draped over me like a monk’s robe. I am utterly at peace. That photo has circulated amongst my mother’s friends because of the look of serenity on my face.
There was a store called Watroba’s that we went to for things like milk and bread. The owner always gave me an Andes chocolate for free when we went to pay for our items. I liked the mint green strip sandwiched between the milk chocolate. I liked the dark green foil wrapper with the mountain peak on it. I liked how stiff it was as you unwrapped it, how it kept it’s shape.
When we went one November, I wandered around the store until I came across a pile of frozen turkeys behind a glass door. I stood there quietly until my mother found me.
“Are those turkeys?” I asked.
“Yes,” my mother said.
“Can we save them?”
“Well...”
“Can we bring them back to the woods?” I said, without taking my eyes off of the pile. I thought their feathers and heads would grow back, that all we had to do was return them to the woods and they would start hopping about. I didn’t understand that frozen meant dead. I grew very upset. So my mother told me that she and my father would come back to the store and bring them to the woods and they would be alive again, free. I retrieved my Andes chocolate and left, convinced my mother would follow through with her plan.
“You were always compassionate,” my mother said when I told her I thought I’d sewn a set of armor so tight around me that I couldn’t get out. I was thirty-three.
“Sometimes, I’ll break free, when I’m with S.,” I said. “We were at a gas station and I turned the corner and did a flying kick. Out of nowhere. My foot got really high, too.”
It happened with M. sometimes. We were talking about farts. I got the giggles, my cheeks pushing up into my eyes. With others, when they were in front of me, they shimmered like mirages. But I couldn’t feel them. I thought maybe it was because I couldn’t gain a foothold where they had vaulted. I saw couples form. They started with a large dog and then added a small pug. Or it was a cat and then a Great Dane. I knew what came next. A child. Always a child. And I also knew, I would never have one. Children shouldn’t beget children. That’s what I say if people asked, “But I’m still I child.”
He was in the elevator when he told me. My boyfriend had sent a text that read: Disaster. I lost a shit ton. I’m an idiot. He left $300 in his account for food. I was the only thing standing between him and zero. I was a mouth to feed. And Thanksgiving was just around the corner.
“Hold on...hold on,” he said. “I might lose you.”
No, I thought to myself, you won’t. I heard an ad playing on the radio.
“It’s not just time to talk turkey. It’s time to buy turkey.”
