Receptacles: A Homecoming

It’s late June 2022, pandemic still a slow burn. 

I’m at my parents’ house, on the highest hill in Carlsbad, CA. Nightly, my dad draws dark curtains against the Pacific sunset. I’ve come alone, my sons back home in Chicago with my husband. This is by design. 

I’ve come to say goodbye—to my old friend, Jordan, who at 52, has died, heart attack mistaken for Covid. Jordan, who introduced me to Skip-Bo and the Everly Brothers. Who whisked me away to the beach in his beater Corolla to see the phosphorescent waves light up. 

I carry my suitcase to the back bedroom. My boys slept here once, ten years ago. Afterward, my step-mom said next time we’d need to stay somewhere else. I felt relieved. It’s stressful tip-toeing around an immaculate gallery of breakables. 

Now I’m told I must stay here. So I do. 

In the doorway, a stench assaults my senses—especially the sixth one that tracks danger. “Um, one of the cats peed on the bed.” 

“No, it didn’t,” my step-mom denies from behind me in the hallway.

“Maybe the cat with kidney disease?” I turn to her.

Her mouth is a thin line: “No.”  Ronee has always been able to change reality by sheer declaration. 

I hold up a wad of soaked tissue. “There’s blood in it.”

Ronee becomes a tornado, pulling sheets off the bed. She’s on the phone, in the car, to the vet with the cat before the washing machine fills.

In minutes, the period I thought I was done with rages anew. Seismic cramps buckle me over on the toilet. I’m again holding tissue soaked in body fluids. I open every cabinet door. There’s no waste basket.

The next hour, I change my super plus supplies four times, sneaking past my dad to bury my discards in the kitchen can. He’s in the darkest corner of the living room, eyes closed, headphones on, emanating fumes of Grade A weed. His oxygen tank for his COPD is hidden away. Like me, he pretends he can breathe freely. 

I haven’t seen him in four years. So far, he’s said: “Just make sure you put me in a nice home when the time comes.” 

When Ronee returns from the vet, I ask for a trash can. She goes stiff. “No.”

“I’m bleeding like crazy. Full tilt perimenopause stuff.” I seek empathy. From the mother figure in my life. From a woman who’s gone through The Change.

“I don’t remember anything about that.” Ronee flicks her wrist, throwing away something invisible.

She rustles through drawers and hands me a plastic bag with a big red “THANK YOU” on it. The kind that Roberto’s Taco Shop used to use. “Keep it in your room. Carry it with you to the bathroom,” she says. 

Shame hisses in my ear—hide yourself—and coils around my body. The body that my dad can’t look at. I’m too fat. I’m “long in the tooth.” It’s not a guess. It’s a quote. But I look a lot like him. I’m his ugly reminder of the death he fears. 

My body is a tripped switch. I’m suddenly 17 and stuck in baseline fight/flight/freeze. I want to run—down the hill, to the Motel 6 next to the freeway. Then, I breathe, and a wave of mental novacaine hits. 

“Oh hey, I’m numbing out.” I narrate to myself. “I’m okay here.” By here, I mean in this haze. 

When I fetch the bed sheets from the dryer, I spot the photos that I send at Christmas. They’re stuck with magnets—not to the fridge—but to a grate below the water heater in the garage. To see my boys’ faces, I have to bend over. Downward dog. 

My THANK YOU bag fills up fast. I’m anemic and euphoric. I borrow my dad’s truck—to buy tampons, to walk eroding sea cliffs, to snorkel at La Jolla Cove. There, the garibaldi nibble at the flowers on my bathing suit. A harbor seal hovers close enough to kiss. I ache from the magic of it. Back in the truck, it smells of ancient cigarettes and lumber. The station is still on 91X. Oingo Boingo will play this hour. This is the same truck I drove 30 years ago.

At the memorial, my starter husband and I talk for the first time in 22 years. He’s prepared an ice breaker. “What have you been reading lately?” he asks. 

This man—wrinkled and gray, too—sees me. And he still wants to know more. It’s possible.

Back home in Evanston, my next period comes in on torrents, and I become a fainting Victorian in need of a rest cure. I flash on asking my dad to go with me to the Cove, to Roberto’s for tacos. To make a memory with me other than no, no, no.  It’s as if one word pins me to the couch. My zen master husband starts to worry.

My memory scans for all the no’s. It lands on my senior year. My dad’s building their dream house. It should be done, but it’s not. I beg him to put up a mailbox. “So I can get decisions from colleges,” I explain.

No, he says. 

At awards night, my school congratulates me on my full ride to Humboldt State. It’s news to me. On the way to the car, my dad detonates. His buddy on the school board has just told him I didn’t apply for half the scholarships I should’ve. I don’t mention the mailbox—or the biggest possible prize. Undeliverable. Return to sender. 

I am on the couch in Evanston, but I see myself back at my parents’ house in Carlsbad, cramming my THANK YOU bag under others in their outdoor garbage can. Another memory wafts up.  

My dad comes to visit twice, once for each new grandson. The second time, my baby is teething, inconsolable. “Your trash can stinks,” my dad crosses his arms, waiting for me to set my son down to clean the outdoor can. 

Almost a year earlier, I call home. I’m elated. At 42, I’m having another baby. My dad says, “Just make sure you have a little girl this time. I don’t like little boys.” 

When I don’t—have a girl, clean out the can—my dad stops answering my calls. 

Ten years later, I’m still swanning on the couch. Two, then four, then seven weeks I bleed and replay carrying the THANK YOU bag to and from the bathroom. Then Ronee calls to say they’re coming for a second cousin’s bar mitzvah. “You will be there. Don’t leave town.” When I realize it will be the same weekend as my sons’ graduations from 5th and 8th grade, I bolt awake with nerve pain that makes me pee the bed. 

By nightfall, I understand I have shingles and an unsustainable terror for saying “No, thank you.” To my parents. To anyone, really, other than myself.

One blister on my right thigh looks like Jupiter. When I fall into rumination, it delivers a lightning bolt that radiates through my body. I christen it The Portal of Truth. Things turn Magic School Bus. Ms. Frizzle drops me off in a forest of my own nerve endings where I watch them fray. I picture my hair falling out. Cancers latching on like dandelion fluff. They bloom in my breast tissue. On my ear lobe. Oh wait. That’s not me. That’s Ronee.

I sit on a new couch, in a trauma therapist’s office. I take long walks in real forests and squat in somatic yoga poses. I learn screen printing and specialize in surreal self portraits. In one, seven year-old Stacia rides in a basket with the dog my dad later gave away. A whale breaches clouds as it carries us over Southern California cliffs. 

I etch new neural desire paths. It’s as if the world itself finally slows. Just enough so I can grieve who must be lost—and love who need never be. I understand why the THANK YOU bag is all I could ever hope for. And I stop my own bloodshed.

-Stacia Campbell

Stacia Campbell is a writer, artist, and educator. Currently revising her first novel and writing a collection of personal essays, Stacia marvels that at 54 years old, she is considered an emerging writer. She is also a first generation college graduate from Vista, California, whose first bed was the floor of a converted chicken coop. She lives with her spouse and teen sons in Evanston, Illinois.