Alex Straaik

Where You Are Now

     You are leaning over me, holding a noisemaker, clutching my arm. Your eyes are shadowed by a false drunkenness, convincingly posed behind the green glass of an O’Doul’s bottle, the label carefully removed. Your purple dress, speckled with sunflowers, rests across your legs. You are the most important object in the room. Everything else is brown leather and brown wall paneling and grey marble, which I am told is very expensive. I don’t remember who took the picture. I do remember someone saying your eyelashes steal everything away, being encouraged to accept the metaphorical red ribbon.

    A child, you are already trained in the art of seduction; lips curled up, a teaser of a smile. I am your little boy-girl cousin, sitting next to you, left without enough room on the edge of the couch. My arms are crossed, a failed effort to cover those cruel and useless tits, cloaked by an oversized Miami Dolphins jersey, an orange turtleneck, and tattered, open hair shafts.

     It is New Year’s Eve. The ball is just about to drop, or already has.

     Your grandfather’s too-loud projection television, quite literally the length of the kitchen wall at my house, is just out of the frame. Dick Clark is on, and a room full of overweight family members are eating slabs of lasagna, of eggplant parmesan. They’re devouring mounds of salad drenched with oily dressing that will inevitably wind up on their clothes. The evening always culminates with a mad dash to the sink, and frantic, flawed attempts to remove stains that have already set. With plates on their laps, zoning out underneath the glow of the screen, they sip iced champagne, always Dom Pérignon. A sharp contrast from my five-liter boxed-wine parents.

     We are the only people who know that, on other days, when there are no guests but us, your grandfather watches porn on that television, yells, “Stay out of my bedroom. Later. I’m having sex with my woman tonight.” The kind of man whose wealth came almost directly from his brashness and frugality, he is the type of person who brings home cartons of maxi pads from liquidation centers tied to the roof of his Cadillac, screaming at us to unload them. He keeps an inhaler for his asthma in every room. All the time, he says he will die soon.         

     His “woman,” Margot, the mistress whom everyone pretended was his wife for the sake of convenience, didn’t leave her house for three years after you left, and wouldn’t let anyone in. Then, she just arrived at Belmont Lake for our annual Fourth of July picnic, sat down at the table, and made herself a plate. Two hamburgers and a generous side of baked beans. “It’s nobody’s business, what I do,” she said, perpetually defensive, angry, when anyone asked her why she’d done what she did.  “Because I felt like it,” she’d say, other times.

     Nothing in that house ever changes, or grows. Margot’s oldest daughter, Suzanne, still lives in her childhood bedroom at the end of the hall, still wears the same hairdo; a sweeping wave of bangs brushed back over her fluffed, stiff mane. A Brooklyn bouffant, my mother calls it. Suzanne is fifty-four years old. She has over one hundred teddy bears facing her bed, which we were forced to take naps in on New Years Eve. My mother constantly worried that I would fall apart from fatigue. I never slept. Suzanne still has a fake boyfriend named Nick whom no one has ever met. She tells people, “I pity anyone who doesn’t have satin sheets.”

     I chose her as the sponsor for my Confirmation, thumbing my nose at my family’s God. It was this move that provoked my father − botanist, teacher, skeptic— to ask me if I didn’t believe anymore. A scientist, he always sought clarity, evidence. I was twelve. I said no, I just don’t.

     Nodding, he said, “Good for you.” Then, “Don’t tell your mother.”

***

     Really, it is unbelievable, the things you don’t know.  How it has come to this, that this picture of some insignificant evening is the only photograph I have of us together.

     I used to keep so many photos of us I couldn’t even begin to count. And they weren’t crushed into the bottom of a nightstand drawer, like this one is, laden with white marks and accidentally torn, the edges warped from the heat. They were in quilted photo albums, labeled with glue pens, the years written in my mother’s cursive. I remember looking through them often, even after I gave the books to my grandmother, who displayed them on her coffee table as if our memories were ones anyone else would want to look through. Now, those albums are in her attic, per my request, stacked behind the gigantic yellow teddy bear I cannot imagine my mother once loving. They are covered with dust and bits of sawdust that fall from the ceiling during thunderstorms, and the only reason I don’t wipe it off (because, despite not wanting to open the books, I always open the books) is because it would feel like telling a lie.

     The attic was legendary, a revealer of false bravery. Both of my grandparents discouraged us from going up there. My grandfather — World War Two veteran, Greek bull — said it was dangerous; was infested with wasps, had poor ventilation, and an unreliable floor. My grandmother — Brooklyn-born Italian, chronic worrier, believer of miracles — said she’d heard people up there at night; ghosts sliding their feet across the pine planks, never daring to make the trip down the five steps into her bedroom. They feared the crucifix, she’d said, which was affixed to her door. \

     “Why are they afraid?” I’d asked, young, looking at the many crosses that adorned her walls, wondering how she could sleep underneath so many tortured men, some with dried palm still tucked behind their metallic heads.

     “Everyone is afraid of God,” she told me. My grandmother was constantly making statements like this, and even now, after over a decade of my absolute atheism, she stills signs all of her cards “You’re in my prayers.” She is the only person who can get away with things like that. And in her attic, where the fear of God keeps everything in and the fear of bees and asphyxiation keeps everyone out, the albums remain.

     Out of the hundreds of photographs in those books, spanning over at least fourteen years, I can only remember three. In one of them, we’re teenagers, posed on the bed in my mother’s childhood bedroom, which, like much of my grandparents’ house, seems untouched by time. All of the furniture, cloaked in plastic, pictures of dead people and sold houses cluttering the mantle. The carpet is the same hunter green my mother had walked upon when she was in high school — then, the beautiful star in the school musicals, envy of others, now the office manager at a job she is too good for. The rug is so stained and faded, patterns unintentionally emerge from the corners. Her twin sized canopy bed is still in the middle of the room, the comforter properly folded, the pillow aptly fluffed. For thirty-two years, no one has slept in it. In the picture, there we are: giving the peace sign for an undisclosed cause, smiling through too much lipstick. I am wearing a long, maroon skirt and an unflattering white button-down shirt; I am still too shy to show my legs, to accentuate the shape of my breasts with form-fitting sweaters. You come from a family of people who are only comfortable in green velvet and black satin and are dressed accordingly. You stare directly at the camera, and I do too, almost. My eyebrows, now too thin, where then too thick. I was a blonde, and so were you.

     In another picture, that is just of you, you’re standing on stage, holding a bouquet of red roses, wearing that peach-colored bridesmaid dress that was left over our Aunt Joanne’s wedding. She hadn’t even asked me to be in the bridal party, and while silently devastated, I still had fun with you, sitting in the suite, stealing sips of champagne and glances in the mirror. I remember you wore your hair pin straight and jet black, bangs swept to the side. My hair, a purposely unnatural red, had been dyed in passive aggressive protest the day before. But in the photo, taken a year later, your hair is honey-brown again and your smile is huge, honest. Your teeth are visible. I remember sitting in the front row at the beauty pageant, bored, watching your full lips mouth thank you; and your mother, next to me, who always smelled like cigarettes and wore too short dresses, pointing to your competitors, and saying, “All those girls would be terrible fucks.” She only clapped for you.

     That was in the days when we used to have sleepovers and watch television all night — usually MTV, back when it was still okay to like it — until we fell asleep on your living room couch, comfortably experimenting with drugs. That living room, all different shades of green. Your mother thought she had it in her to be a designer, but I hated that room, I absolutely hated it. I felt like I was in a forest, somewhere lost in the underbrush with low hung branches scrapping against my skin. It was so dark in there. I don’t know how you stood living in a house that was so dark. But back then we still swam in the fountain in front of city hall at midnight. We squatted, by choice, in the unfinished building we lovingly named The Foundation. That was before you squatted, without choice, strung out, living on scaffolding above the Lincoln Tunnel. That was before I lost you.

     The other photo was taken much earlier, at the Manorville Game Farm out on the east end of Long Island. We must be no more than eight. On the mornings of the long car ride, I recall awaking in a terrible panic, immediately hit with the realization that I would become ill during the journey, forcing my parents to pull over as I threw up onto the side of the parkway, much to my brother’s dismay; because our car had a rust hole on the floor behind the driver’s seat, we were pushed together, buckled into a single seatbelt, far away from the hole. “Pull it,” my mother would say, yanking the belt across our chests, and we’d pull it, covertly seizing the opportunity to dig our elbows and knees into one and other, already learning to fight for the biggest piece of the smallest corner. He was always the kind of kid who was in a rush, even if it was at your expense, begging my parents to continue on, as if oblivious to the events that were presently unfolding. His left foot, severely scarred from an unfortunate accident involving a scalding hot cup of tea, would beat on the back of my father’s seat as he half-cried, “I want to go now.”  But it wasn’t his fault. He was born too soon. There wasn’t enough space between us, and the walls in our house weren’t thick enough to conceal the hushed, late night dinner table conversations about high food bills, no vacations, the lack of money to finish the goddamn basement/leak in the roof/rot on the tool shed, and the endless question of what did we do wrong that everyone else did right?

     There is none of this, though, in that photograph. These gripes are new blues. When it was taken, things were different. My parents were still firmly together, the kind of a couple who held hands in the front seat. My father doesn’t yet live in the basement. My mother doesn’t yet throw her birthday presents into the Atlantic Ocean, or sleep, when she feels like it, at her office. I do not yet hate her and I do not yet forgive her; I do not yet understand that type of loneliness to do either of those things. But in this picture, there is just you and me and my brother, not yet my friend, standing a little off to the side, disgruntled from hanging out with the girls. There is a straw in each of our mouths. We’re sipping soda from a single can.

***

     And now, a letter appears in my mailbox, along with this picture from an unknown New Year’s. The envelope is blue and the handwriting is yours, just as I remembered it, alongside mine, scrawled across walls of abandoned buildings. Judging by the way you shape your letters, the roundness of your vowels, the open circles above your i’s, you are still fourteen years old, the kind of girl who forges love letters you will never have the courage to send. I won’t say the same doesn’t go for me, but I don’t even bother writing them. Not anymore. Always nostalgic about something, the girl (now the woman) who stares out of living room windows during family parties, watching the passing traffic, wondering who’s riding with whom, trying to picture myself in a million lives, quietly trying them on to see which one, if any, would fit.

     Rather than telling me where you’ve been for the past six and a half years, you’re explaining that girls who are married aren’t allowed to compete in the Miss America pageant and you sound profoundly upset, truly disappointed. It seems like you just don’t understand, or don’t want to acknowledge, the fact that you are no longer a kid. No longer a beauty queen, climbing trees and sleeping in the woods, with me, watching the sunrise.

     You do not mention the time you set fire to your bedroom with both of us in it, how you took an X-acto™ knife and sliced up all of the furniture in your mother’s apartment, drawing all of those crazy designs on your walls and mirrors and telling me I couldn’t understand the code. You do not mention us finding your flattened dead kittens laying on the concrete floor of the unfinished basement, the grey one’s tails curled halfway around the rusty leg of your father’s old worktable, forgotten and covered with mildew, left to rot underground. Those are the memories I think of now, when I think of you at all. How the black fleas ran up our legs that night, forcing us, together, crying and naked, into the shower.

     But that’s not what you think of. You have never been the type of person who knows how to look back. You just say, I miss you. That we should have a sleepover. That you hope I’m well. Mockingly, you still call me Ms. Nobel Prize, ask if I’m “still too smart” for you. You use too many exclamation points. You never use a question mark, even when you ask “How are you.” You just end the sentence with a period, with a single flick of your pen. It is more of a line than a dot. Everything you write, it seems, proves why my grandmother was afraid to tell me about you. Because you are too the same. Because you are still a child, now overgrown. At a family wedding a few months ago, she’d come up to me so slowly, her hand crumpled around a piece of paper — your grandfather had given it to her, making my family do the dirty work again. I could tell she didn’t want to give it to me by the way her fingertips lingered around the edges. But there was no drama like I imagine you’d think. There was just a piece of paper, passed from one hand to the other, with your name and phone number scribbled in your handwriting, and nothing more. No conversation about where you’d been, if you were healthy or the kind of sick that you never recover from, or out on bail or on parole, or really free, trying to make an honest go of it again. There was none of that. Your resurgence was so unceremonious, so quiet. My grandmother simply handed me the paper, and asked if I’d tried the cake.

     And in spite of it all, regardless of the fact that I never called you, even after I received this letter in the mail that I hid underneath my mattress for three days after seeing your name on the return address, I finally, late at night, drew the deepest breath I could, exhaled over what felt like a minute, and opened it. And there we are: on the couch getting a second chance, wearing old expressions, yours still self-assured and smiling, and me, right there next to you, uneasy, regretting every second, but lacking the courage to move.

 Alex Straaik is a writer of fiction and thinly veiled non-fiction. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Copyright Alex Straaik. Used with permission of the author.