Tucked between the food-stained pages of my old Betty Crocker cookbook is a handwritten recipe for meatloaf. It’s written on the back of a menu from Gustaf Anders, the Swedish restaurant in Southern California where my stepbrother, John, once waited tables. It was 1992, I think, and John and his Norwegian wife were in the middle of a divorce. Or maybe it had already happened. We were drinking a lot and smoking weed in those days. We had flown back from Norway together, drunk for the entire fourteen hour flight from Oslo to Los Angeles, with a stopover in New York for Customs. I think it was New York; I was in a brownout then. The valium and booze had performed their customary magic. What I remember: putrid green cinderblock walls and men in uniforms. Our bags were screened and some item was questioned and we almost missed the connecting flight. We reeked of Marlboros and sweat and Kahlua. We’d drunk the liquor cart dry.
Read MoreFucking first times, my therapist calls them. First holidays, significant occasions, anniversary of the death. The first time after you’ve lost someone, lost a child. It caught me off guard the first year, things that I didn’t expect took me to my knees. Easter, why did that leave me weeping, lashing out at everyone, feeling like a horrible failure? We weren’t religious and even if we were, Nel was most certainly not. She’d called me from prison the last Easter she was alive, Happy Easter! I tried to chirp at her. She stopped me mid-happy.
Read More“If that’s what you’ve decided to do, then go do it. But if you leave, you better know you can’t come back.”
I sat on the edge of the dining room chair as my mother stood over me, gripping the remote control in her hand, eyes blazing.
“I’m only moving to Astoria,” I said. Although my words came out smoothly, glibly even, my stomach turned over in knots.
Read MoreThe first night it happened, all the windows of our fieldstone house were open. The air moist and still, the sounds of trilling toads filled our bedroom. I’d gone to bed at nine, shortly after the twins, wrung out from an afternoon of playing alligator on the trampoline.
Read MoreI answered no to all the key questions. No implants, no tattoos, no permanent makeup, no prosthetic knees, hips, or shoulders, no aneurysm clips. They told me it was okay to keep my underwire bra on, and the snap and zipper on my pants didn’t present a problem.
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