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“Dear Poo, I’m sorry I’m writing this in a letter, I just couldn’t bring myself to tell you face to face…”
We’d been in our new house just a couple of weeks when my dad—Da—left a letter and, with it, left us. He was gone. And none of us knew what gone meant. Mom couldn’t tell me where he went or why. She called Grandma to try to decipher his note. Whatever sense they made of it wasn’t shared.
Read MoreWhen my ex-husband told me his father was dead, he said it casually. The way you'd mention an alma mater, or that you'd lived abroad for a while.
"My dad died five years ago," he said. We were at work, in a courtroom with no privacy, dressed in our lawyer suits. He reached down to tug up his socks when he said it. I remember searching for significance in how he announced his tragedy while adjusting his outfit. It made me wonder if his father's death was an easy thing to bear. Or if it were so painful he needed to reveal it in the bright bustle of a courtroom, with busied hands. He usually seemed so guarded.
Read MoreThe platter was lovely. It was a vintage looking black and white interpretation of a sea turtle on melamine. The species was a Kemp’s Ridley. Despite being the rarest and most endangered sea turtle in the world, it is the most common turtle to see stranded on the beaches of Cape Cod.
Read MoreWhen I realized that I probably shouldn’t be there, at your funeral, it was too late to leave. I was sitting alone in the center of a cushioned pew halfway back, picking at my cuticles in my lap, too self-conscious among strangers to put my fingers to my mouth and chew. The little chapel was sparsely filled. It seemed I was one of the few who’d found out about the service, or else, perhaps no one was meant to come who had not been asked. When I arrived, I had expected a large crowd to disappear into, or perhaps an old classmate to cling to, but neither were found. I had not gotten in line, to file past where you rested. Instead, I ducked into a pew and sat down, to hide, to gather my thoughts, wonder if I should leave or stay, try to shake off the feeling of a spotlight on my back. Being there felt like some kind of transgression, though I only meant to pay respects.
Read MoreOn an early evening during our first pandemic winter, I closed my laptop and commuted from my home office upstairs to our kitchen below. Another day of quarantine, another at-home meal to prepare for my family. That afternoon I had kneaded pizza dough and left it to rise inside the corner cabinet, warmed by the heating duct that runs beneath it. Now, the plaid kitchen towel draped over the bowl puffed above the rim, like the fabric below the empire waist of a maternity dress.
Read MoreI grab a blue-and-yellow rip-stop plastic tote with IKEA repeated up its handles. A worker greets me. Other customers disappear on their way to the ballroom. No thank you. The bag is for show. I don’t need any help. What I came for does not appear in any catalogue. I take the escalator past a miniature farmhouse with its candles, books, and modular kitchen, the promise of all needs met. It recedes below me as a black and white mural of a smiling face invites me further, all the way in. It will be wonderful! The white teeth beckon.
Read MoreIt’s December 1999, and the world hasn’t ended yet. The dreary weather reflects the pit of dread in my stomach, and nothing tastes right. My mother pulls down her largest pot from the top shelf of glory, and she shines it for show because today is the day.
Read MoreTucked 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 MoreI grew up in a house that had one bathroom and no shower. As a teenager with a perm, I hated this arrangement. I just wanted to be able to rinse the conditioner down the drain instead of having to soak in it. But Mom loved baths. She would pour peppermint oil in the warm water and soak luxuriously until the skin on the tips of her fingers wrinkled like raisins.
Read MoreStep 1: Find a Spot at the Lunch Table
The people I sit with at the middle school lunch table have an unsettling obsession with trying to deep throat bananas. I only have a passing understanding of the concept, and with a gag reflex so strong I sometimes struggle putting in a mouth guard, I don’t participate – or at least, I don’t participate well.
Read More“Oh, thanks.”
I try hard not to let out disappointment through my sigh as Caroline hands me the clear, water-filled baggie. It’s bulging and reflecting the only sliver of sun that shines in from the outside world.
Read MoreAt the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, Béla Károlyi’s star gymnast, Mary Lou Retton, stuck the landing of her full twisting Tsukahara vault, earning a perfect 10.0 and the individual all-around gold medal. At age four, I loved her teammate, Julianne McNamara. She had strawberry blonde hair like me. My sister and I begged my parents to register us for gymnastics. At my first practice, I studied the older girls and followed every direction. At pick up I asked my mom, “Can I come back tomorrow?”
Read MoreFor the long first act of my life, as a painfully shy kid growing up in Culver City – steps away from the Sony Pictures studio lot, the iconic Gone With The Wind mansion, which was right by the movie theater downtown, and down the street from the liquor store where they filmed the infamous McLovin scene in Superbad – dating and romance was something I experienced entirely through the silver screen.
Read MoreMy two young children, clad in neon swimsuits, danced around impatiently in the backyard, checking on the progress every now and then. Our new inflatable pool—turquoise and gray with an attached blow-up slide—was being filled with the garden hose; it was taking forever for any noticeable progress. It was mid-June and the Wisconsin weather was in the low 70’s; I wasn’t about to tell my kids that even when the pool had filled to an acceptable volume, the sun still had to heat the water, cold and sputtering from the spigot, and that it was likely to take days, not hours.
Read MoreSuspended above the Delaware River, I can no longer time my contractions. The fierce waves of pain sweep up my facility to do anything but breathe. Breathe I do, with an equally fierce grip on the vinyl door handle of my husband’s pickup truck—never more thankful for its heated leather seats. As my insides constrict, my fingers squeeze the handle tighter. When my muscles release their grip, I release mine, measuring my breath with a will resolute.
Read MoreIn high school, my philosophy teacher assigned each student a different question and corresponding primary sources for our term paper. He assigned me the question, “Are women free?” and handed me a Sandra Bartky article that outlined the fragmentation, domination, and objectification the female body endures.
Read MoreWe didn’t know the beauty we would find there. It wasn’t an obvious dazzling beauty. It needed to be unearthed, searched for. Our clothes stuck to us as we ambled off the plane. The heat and strong odors of others, of ourselves, pressed in on us. We cranked our windows down in the taxi as broken Soviet buildings rushed by. Their gray concrete stark against the sharp neon green of the trees and grass.
Read MoreHe poured his second, maybe third vodka tonic. He didn’t even look at me as he eased his six-foot-something frame through the sliding glass doors onto our deck. His words grazed by me as he sat down in the folding chair placing his drink on the small table between us, next to his worn copy of Machiavelli’s, The Prince.
Read MoreI stare into the camera, waiting for my cue. In the background, a shelf displays the brightly colored toys of my childhood, rendered in the fuzzy technicolor of a 1990s video recording. Next to me, a stuffed King Kong gazes off-screen.
Read MoreMy daughter’s fortieth birthday is soon, and I’m looking for something special for her. It’s a tradition in our family. At particular milestones, the mother gifts the celebrant with a special piece of jewelry, other “heirloom” from her own life. I’m looking for a piece of my history—something of me to stay with her as she moves toward all she’s becoming. When I turned forty, my mother surprised me by crocheting a lovely blue throw that I still can snuggle under on cold nights. I don’t have time to create something, so I sort through my jewelry box, looking for just the right thing.
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