Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

Snakes
The summer I turned nine I went to Tallahassee to visit my grandmother for the first and last time. It was a hot, muggy summer, the kind of weather where you think it’s going to storm any minute, but it rarely does. That much hasn’t changed in sixteen years—not the weather, not my sense of Tallahassee, then and now, as a place where your skin crawls with the sensation that something urgent is about to happen, but you never know what, or when. That first summer I flew to visit, I was skittish as soon as I exited the plane from New Jersey, escorted by a tight-skirted stewardess who handed me a gold plastic set of pin-on wings before we walked to the arrivals gate.
My grandmother had me picked up from the airport by a driver in a company car. The driver worked for a plastics company that still had my grandfather’s name, though he’d been dead since before I was born. The driver reminded me a little bit of my father—he had the same reddish-brown skin, the same big smile—and while we waited for my luggage to come around the baggage carousel, he gave me a stick of cinnamon bubble gum that I folded and tucked into the pocket of my shorts along with the wings, which I could feel pressing into my leg. My parents, as consolation for shipping me off to my grandmother while they spent the summer in Brazil researching indigenous environmental activism, had loaded my suitcase with books. It was something they did every time they went somewhere without me. Along with the small paperback dictionary my parents had given me last summer, I kept a couple of the new books with me to thumb through on the plane: Introduction to Rites and Rituals; Talismans: A Photographic Record, Natural Wonders of the Amazon Rain Forest.
The book on talismans I found particularly intriguing. I looked at pictures of stones and amulets, brightly dyed pieces of fabric, small and elaborately carved sculptures, and wished that I had brought something magical with me. I wondered if gum or plastic was strong enough to be a talisman; I thought of fashioning the wings into a protective necklace. My own interactions with my grandmother had been limited: my mother avoided family events whenever possible, and at the handful I’d accompanied her to, my grandmother had barely spoken to me. She was the only thing in the world I’d ever seen my mother scared of, my mother who told offhand stories about living through monsoons in Asia and military coups in Africa and near encounters with poisonous foot-long centipedes in South America the way other people’s mothers talked about what they’d had for dinner the night before. Every time she got off the phone with my grandmother, my mother drank a glass of wine, followed by three cups of Zen tea. My father, who almost never yelled, raised his voice at her from behind their closed bedroom door when she made plans that involved seeing her mother, telling her she ought to know better by now and refusing to go with her. They’d fought over sending me to my grandmother’s in the first place, an argument I’d strained my ears to hear and silently hoped my father would win.
Usually when my parents traveled, I stayed with my aunt Claire, my father’s sister, but she’d been in poor health, and my mother worried that having me for the summer would be too much for her to keep up with. My father pointed out that I didn’t need much keeping up with: I read books, I ate when compelled, I sometimes wrote embellished accounts of my day in a leather-bound black diary. I was the sort of child who generally had to be coerced into playing with other children—the kind whose parents took her to anthropology department cocktail parties so often that their colleagues referred to me as their youngest graduate student—but my mother had said it was too much to impose on Aunt Claire, and anyway, it wasn’t me my grandmother hated, it was her, to which my father had responded, Give her time. I rolled the words over and over in my head, willing him to be wrong, but if I thought my grandmother would like me better when my mother wasn’t around, our reunion quickly disabused me of the thought.

“Unbelievable,” was the first thing my grandmother said when she saw me. From the airport to her house, it had been twenty minutes of loopy, winding roads, packed so densely with trees that looking out the windows from the backseat of the car, I could often see nothing but the green canopies that shaded us. My grandmother’s house was at the end of a circular driveway, a white wooden old southern masterpiece, with columns on the front porch and a veranda above it. Coral vines crept gently up its sides, and although it was only four bedrooms inside, at the time I thought of it as a mansion: it could have contained at least three town houses the size of the one I lived in back in Camden. The driver removed my bags from the trunk and walked me up the stairs to the front door. Instinctively, I held his hand as he rang the bell, and squeezed it tighter as the door opened to reveal my grandmother behind it, squinting at me as if her eyes were playing tricks on her.
But for the expression on her face, the way her eyes went from startled to angry as she said Unbelievable, she looked remarkably like my mother. They had the same delicate upturned nose and wide brown eyes, and the same fine blond hair, though my mother generally wore hers loose, and my grandmother’s was held back in an immaculate twist, and threaded with fine streaks of gray. She stepped out of the doorway and gestured toward the driver with one hand, motioning for him to take my suitcase up the spiral staircase. She ushered me into the house, shutting the door behind me. She gave me a perfunctory kiss on the top of the forehead and reached a hand out to tentatively touch one of my cornrows. She shook her head. “Did your mother do this to you?”
“My hair?” I asked. I looked down at the polished hardwood of the floor beneath me. My mother could barely do my hair herself, and knew I’d never manage to keep it untangled on my own. It was one of those things white mothers of black children learn the hard way once and then tend to remember. Just before I’d left, she had gotten one of her undergraduates to braid my hair in tight pink-lotioned cornrows, so recent they still itched and pulled at my scalp.
“Mommy can’t do my hair,” I said. “A girl from her school did it for her.”
“I swear, even on a different continent, that woman—When you go upstairs, take them out. You’re a perfectly decent-looking child, and for whatever reason your mother sends you here looking like a little hoodlum.”
“I’m wearing pink,” I said, more in my own defense than in my mother’s. I had dressed myself, and Aunt Claire had driven me to the airport: my parents had left for Rio the day before. My grandmother considered my argument, evaluated my hot-pink shorts as if prepared to object to them as well, but before she could, my cousin Allison came bounding down the stairs to hug me, blond pigtails flying behind her. When she threw her arms around me and kissed me on the cheek, she smelled strongly of sour-apple Jolly Ranchers and women’s perfume that she later confessed she’d stolen from her mother.
“I think you look nice,” whispered Allison. She took me upstairs to the room we were sharing for the summer, and then spent the next half-hour helping me undo each braid, my hair spiraling out into tight, disheveled curls. Allison had been my parent’s ace in the hole, the only thing that kept me from trying to secretly squeeze myself into one of their suitcases so they’d have to take me to Brazil with them. Her parents were spending the summer on a Caribbean cruise, and my uncle had suggested to my mother that since she’d be at my grandmother’s all summer anyway, it might be nice for us to spend some time together. Allison was my playmate at awkward family gatherings, the person I made faces at across the table at Christmas dinner the one year we’d all gathered at her parents’ house in Orlando. (It was the last holiday my mother had agreed to spend with her own mother. I’d heard her on the phone last Christmas a year later, saying almost angrily, No, we’re not coming. Last year she said she was dying, and then she didn’t.)
Allison made those first few weeks at my grandmother’s house bearable, almost pleasant. I’d never had a backyard before, but at my grandmother’s we had an acre of greenery. There was a lawn of impossibly bright grass, landscaped with flowering hydrangea bushes and neatly clipped ornamental shrubbery. Half a mile down the block, the manicured lawns of my grandmother’s neighborhood gave way to almost tropical lushness: hanging crape myrtles with vivid pink flowers and twisted, many-stemmed trunks, tall oaks brushed with Spanish moss. When we followed the gravel path off the main road, we found ourselves at a lake about a mile wide; it took us the better part of a day to circle its swampy edges. We shaded ourselves from the thick summer heat by resting underneath one tree after another. The first time we went to the lake, our grandmother admonished us never to do it again, screamed at us that we had worried her by running off and the lake was a dangerous place for little girls to be alone. It went in one ear and out the other: we were already in love with what we’d found there.


It wasn’t that my grandmother didn’t try. She woke us up one morning with the enthusiastic promise that we’d be going swimming. She had laid out clothes for us, and though usually when we went to the pool at home I climbed into the car wearing nothing but my swim-suit and jellies, I wanted my grandmother to be happy with me, and wore the yellow sundress she’d picked out. Allison’s dress was blue, which matched her eyes, and the bow my grandmother put in her hair after she brushed it. My grandmother tried to brush my hair, too, but between the muggy, humid summer air and the ineptitude of my attempts to control it, it had turned itself into a tangled baby afro, one that Allison’s fine bristled brush did nothing for. That morning my grandmother set out to comb it into pigtails, but after I began to cry from the pain of her yanking on my scalp and demanded hair grease—which of course she didn’t have—the comb finally snapped and my grandmother gave up.
“Maybe the water will help,” she said, defeated.
I didn’t understand why we needed to be so presentable to go swimming in the first place—not until she turned into the driveway of a clubhouse that looked like something out of a fairy tale. Though we were there to swim, it took us two hours to get anywhere near the pool. My grandmother walked us around the looping paths of the private lake, encouraging us to feed the ducks and asserting how pretty the lake was, as if trying to convince us of something. She took us for brunch in the clubhouse; the tables were a dark oak and the ceiling above us was decorated with crisscrossing gold latticework. I made myself dizzy mapping out an imaginary chart of constellations.
Halfway through our pancakes a woman in the tallest heels I’d ever seen a person actually walk in came into the room. “Lydia!” she said when she saw my grandmother. Until then I hadn’t thought of my grandmother as having a first name. The woman’s skirt swished from side to side when she walked, and up close, the thin brown straps of her high-heeled sandals wrapped delicately around her ankles. She kissed my grandmother on both cheeks and then turned to us expectantly.
“It is so good to see you out again, Lydia,” she said. “And who are these little dolls you have with you?”
“Marianne, meet my granddaughters, Allison and Tara,” my grandmother said evenly.
Marianne’s face flickered for a second, and then resettled into its previous blank enthusiasm.
“Ta-ra,” she said, stretching it out like it was two words. “This one must be Amanda’s.”
Amanda was my mother’s name, but the way she said Amanda, she might have been saying the earthquake or the flesh-eating disease. Still, I didn’t think much of her identifying me right away. Of course I was my mother’s daughter: I had her eyes, her heart-shaped mouth and one-dimpled smile, her round face, only darker.
“Yes, I remember Amanda,” Marianne went on. “I guess she never changed, did she?”
“She grew up,” said my grandmother, with a nervous laugh.
“They all do,” said Marianne, who went on to talk about her sons, an orthodontist and a deputy mayor. My grandmother looked uncomfortable, even after Marianne went to sit at her own table. Though usually she advised us to chew each bite twenty times, because we were young ladies, not wolves, she rushed us through the rest of our breakfast, admonishing us that our eggs were getting cold, even when we could still see the steam rising from them. After the meal, my grandmother relaxed again, but she made us walk around the lake for half an hour in order to let our food digest.
When we finally got to the pool, Allison and I were done with decorum. We threw our sundresses on the hot concrete and cannon-balled into the water, ignoring our grandmother’s shouts that we should be more careful, and who did we think was going to pick our things up from where we’d left them? We played Marco Polo while our grandmother sunbathed and read the kind of novel I could tell from the cover my mother would have called the waste of a perfectly valuable tree. When we got tired of Marco Polo, we tried doing handstands in the shallow end, and seeing who could hold her breath longest; and when that got boring, we played rock-paper-scissors to see which of us had to get out of the pool and go ask our grandmother for a penny to dive for. I lost. I climbed the ladder and saw that my grandmother had been joined by a woman in sunglasses and a straw hat.
“Grandma,” I called, and both women looked up, startled. I asked my grandmother for a penny and she rummaged through her purse to oblige.
“Amanda’s, I take it?” the woman beside her asked. She said my mother’s name with the same tone as the woman from breakfast. My grandmother nodded.
“What’s Amanda up to these days?” the woman asked, pressing her mouth into a thin-lipped smile. She turned away and reached for her sunscreen, as if already bored by the answer.
“She’s a doctor,” said my grandmother. I opened my mouth to clarify that she wasn’t a doctor doctor, but my grandmother shooed me away. I started to run off, then slowed down behind her, waiting to hear what else she said about my mother.
“Tara’s adopted,” my grandmother said. “From Brazil. Amanda’s down there now. She always did have a good heart.”


Here are some things I didn’t know then: The summer she was fifteen, my mother was forever banned from the premises of the Palisade Hills Country Club, after what was later described to me as “a small vandalism incident,” in protest of the golf course’s de facto segregation policy. The summer she was sixteen, my mother, bristling under my grandmother’s restrictions, ran away from home for several months. While she was gone, my grandfather died unexpectedly, and no one knew where to reach her until months after the funeral. My grandmother and my uncles buried him alone, and never let my mother forget it, because no one ever let them. Almost two years before I came to visit, a small cyst in my grandmother’s breast had turned out to be cancerous. My grandmother underwent a mastectomy, radiation, and reconstructive surgery, and was only recently back on her feet. My mother had promised to visit her in the hospital; she didn’t.


When we played in her yard, my grandmother usually sat on the porch to watch us, but eventually the phone or some other thing within the house called her away. Allison and I ran. We went for the trees, for the gravel path, for the wonders of the neighborhood or the seclusion of the nearby lake. Away from our grandmother, we mimicked the lives we imagined our parents having in our absence. We’d pretend to be my parents, carrying Natural Wonders of the Amazon Rain Forest around the northern Tallahassee suburbs, fancifully misidentifying dozens of plants, insects, and reptiles. We’d harass gardeners and mailmen and occasionally knock on the doors of my grandmother’s increasingly bemused neighbors, calling ourselves ethnographers and asking them to tell us about their people. Then we’d pretend to be Allison’s parents. Those afternoons we stripped to our bathing suits, slathered ourselves with coconut tanning oil (though I was already browner than the woman on the bottle), and made over our faces with Allison’s pilfered makeup kit. She swore her mother had so many cosmetics bags that she hadn’t even noticed one was missing, something I found shocking, having a mother who practically considered ChapStick ornamental.
After our makeovers, Allison and I would climb to sit beside each other on a branch of the biggest tree above the lake, pretending it was a ship’s deck, and the water beneath us the Atlantic Ocean. We imitated the way we’d heard adults talk, complained about our imaginary jobs, the scandalous behavior of our friends and coworkers, the way our families drove us crazy, and about—we never forgot this part—how much we missed our daughters and wished we’d taken them with us. I liked our pretend cruise ship days because I imagined us glamorous, like Allison’s parents. When I pressed her for details about their travels, she’d just shrug, and say “How do I know? They never take me with them.” I knew better than to say that my parents never took me with them, either, but they talked to me enough that I knew all about where they had been.


When our secret days were finished, we’d cool off by dipping our bodies in the shallow end of the lake, and then sneak back into my grandmother’s house, dripping some combination of muddy lake water and suntan oil and high-end cosmetics across my grandmother’s floors. On those occasions that Allison couldn’t manage to charm forgiveness out of her, we accepted our increasingly restrictive punishments with some combination of amusement and grim determination: we cleaned bathroom tile with a toothbrush; we were not allowed to accompany my grandmother to the city on shopping trips; we ate Brussels sprouts for dinner for an entire week; we were spanked, which was new to both of us. My grandmother blamed me more than Allison for our expeditions.
Though we were equally guilty, I accepted the blame, knowing that whenever it was possible, whatever punishment she gave me Allison would take along with me. Once we spent an entire morning locked in the bathroom. I’d been ordered not to come out until I had done something with my hair. We thought she was kidding us at first, because the door only locked from the inside anyway; but when we stopped laughing and tried to open it, we found she’d actually taken clothesline and looped it from the doorknob to the banister in order to shut us in. Originally it was supposed to be for an hour, but when she told me it wasn’t even really a punishment, because a girl my age ought to be able to brush her own hair and it was a travesty that my mother hadn’t taught me, I’d muttered that she couldn’t even brush my hair, and look how old she was, and just like that one hour turned into six.
In the bathroom, Allison and I pretended that we’d been confined to our cruise ship cabins because of stormy conditions and choppy water. We sang “Kokomo” at the top of our lungs over and over again, and when that got old we ran the bathtub full of water and splashed each other until we were soaking, complaining that the storm was so bad our cabin was flooding. When my grandmother finally let us out, my hair looked the same as it had that morning, only damper. Insufficiently chastised, we collapsed at her feet giggling and shouting Land! Land! What did it matter, what chores she made us do or how many hours a day she forbade us to leave the house, when we had each other?


A month into the summer, my grandmother had a brainstorm. She sat us down in the family room after dinner one night, and told us that we absolutely must stop disobeying her and running off, that she’d become very worried about us, and that the next time we disappeared, she’d have no choice but to call the police. We nodded our assent, but were doubtful. Our grandmother had worried about what the neighbors would think when the gardener took a week off and dandelions had sprouted in her yard; we could only imagine what she’d do if people spotted a police car in her driveway. Sensing our skepticism, she leaned forward in her chair, looking first me and then Allison in the eyes.
“Do you know what’s living in that lake?” our grandmother asked.
I thought we did. Minnows. Tadpoles. Mosquitoes we regularly slapped off of ourselves.
“Snakes,” said my grandmother. “Snakes are in that lake.”
I giggled. We’d seen the occasional small brown garden snake; my mother had told me before she left that there were a lot of them where she grew up, and I shouldn’t be alarmed, because they were perfectly harmless. I repeated this to my grandmother.
“Tell your mother,” said my grandmother, “that when you leave a place for twenty years, a lot changes. They’ve got these pythons that love water. Some idiots imported them as pets, and now they’re taking over. A Burmese python can grow to be the size of the both of you put together, and can get you from twenty feet away. Sometimes they lay eggs in drainpipes, and the baby python will travel through the sewer pipes and come right in through a hole in a wall and eat their prey alive. When a python eats something it eats everything, even the bones. Crushes them completely. Lately there’ve been a lot of cats and dogs lost, even a huge Saint Bernard—vanished. I’d hate to lose a granddaughter. There’d be nothing left of you to find. Tell your mother she has never had any idea how easy it is for something to be destroyed.”


Two weeks after that, I fell out of a bunk bed. My grandmother, sensing she’d gotten to me, had begun elaborating on the latest exploits of the Burmese python after dinner every night. A Burmese python had been caught in a child’s bedroom in Orlando. A Burmese python had eaten an alligator in Lake Jackson; a tourist had gotten a picture of it happening, before he ran. A Burmese python came out of the pipes in a Miami kitchen; a plumber only narrowly escaped with his life, and only because he was too fat for the snake to get his jaws around. Three cats were missing from the house at the end of the block: they’d gone out in the morning as usual and simply never come back.
I consulted the books my parents had left me, contemplating metallurgy and purification rituals as forms of protection. Actually undertaking any of them was impossible, especially when I refused to leave the house. It wasn’t just the outside world I was newly afraid of: I was haunted by what my grandmother had said about baby pythons, and imagined one growing and swelling inside the walls even now. My grandmother had won one battle—I stayed where she could see me, I tracked no more mud into her house—but she hadn’t bargained for the way the fear would overtake me. I was afraid of snakes, yes, but I was also afraid of open windows, peeling paint, creaking floorboards, sinks, bathtubs, and toilets. I dropped the talisman I’d made out of the plastic wings and chewing gum down an open shower drain while trying to wash myself and hold it under the faucet at the same time. I refused to pee unless Allison held my hand, panicked when within ten feet of a wall, and tried my best not to sleep at night. One night, while trying to keep my body as far from the bedroom wall as possible, I fell from the top bunk. I hit my head, hard enough that it smacked sharply against the bare floor and Allison woke up screaming at the sound.
By the time my grandmother rushed into the room to see what had happened, Allison had already climbed out of the bottom bunk to sit beside me. My grandmother ran for her first, and I told myself, without believing it, that it was because she was the one who had screamed. Allison extracted herself from my grandmother’s arms.
“Tara fell,” she shrieked. “She fell off the top of the bed.”
“Are you hurt?” my grandmother asked.
“I hit my head.”
My grandmother pressed a palm to my forehead.
“You’re not cut,” she said. “Are you dizzy?”
I shook my head no.
“Don’t move your head,” said Allison, who had come by her medical knowledge through frequent viewings of her mother’s favorite soap opera. “Grandma, she could have a concussion.”
“The bed is five feet high,” said my grandmother. “No one has a concussion. And if I take you to the hospital to find that out officially, they’d need to shave all those knots off the back of your head to see your scalp. Go back to bed, both of you. Come get me if you feel funny.”
I didn’t want to get back into the bed. I thought briefly that if I went to the hospital, my parents might be called and, upon hearing that the house had been overtaken by enormous pythons, come and get me out of here, maybe Allison too. But it was possible that no one would reach my parents. In any case, I believed my grandmother about the head shaving, and I didn’t want to be bald. I stayed on the floor, thinking that the ground was a good safe distance from the walls and whatever might be inhabiting them. Allison’s voice rescued me from the embarrassment of admitting I was afraid to get back into my bed. “I think,” she announced with the authoritative wisdom of someone six months older, “you have a concussion. You shouldn’t move. I’m going to sleep next to you so I can check your breathing.”
She pulled the blue blanket off the bottom bunk and brought it to me. We curled up in the center of the floor, counting our breaths in whispers until they came almost in unison. I opened my eyes every few minutes to check the walls for any sign of movement, and check that Allison was still there. Every fourth or fifth time, I’d find Allison staring back at me, her two small fingers reaching out to feel the pulse on my neck.


By the next morning, I was jumpy again. I kept up my new rituals, persisted in refusing to go outside. Nightly, Allison persuaded me into our bedroom, letting me sleep in the bottom bunk with her. When I refused to even do that, she’d sleep beside me on the floor. I spent most of my days in the center of the living room. Among its advantages were a wall consisting almost entirely of plate glass windows, meaning there was one less direction from which I could be ambushed, and a wall of portraits that—once I’d read through the last of the books my parents had sent me with—I began to study in earnest, in order to keep myself entertained.
There was my grandmother’s whole life, in gilded frames: the family together, my grandmother younger and undeniably beautiful, the grandfather I had never met. Pictures of my uncles as kids, their hair pressed down so flat it looked like they’d been wearing helmets before the pictures were taken. Uncle Mark and Uncle Timothy at high school and then college graduations. Wedding portraits, including one of Allison’s father marrying his first wife. At the one Christmas dinner we’d spent together, my grandmother announced the first wife was a better woman than Allison’s mother would ever be. Allison had run from the room in tears. Everyone else sat there like they hadn’t heard her. My mother said later that if they’d all stopped eating every time my grandmother said something honest but awful, they would have starved to death before they were ten.
There were no pictures of my mother’s wedding on my grandmother’s wall. The pictures of her stopped at sixteen. There was my mother, wispy and young-looking, eyes wide open and surprised. I imagined her daydreaming before the photo was snapped. It wasn’t long after that when my mother took off on a road trip across the country with friends who imagined themselves hippies. Some of these people were still my mother’s friends, and in one of their houses I had seen pictures from that summer: my mother laughing and making faces in the backseat, my mother sleeping on a beach somewhere. My mother didn’t talk about that summer. While she was off with her friends, my grandfather was killed when his small plane encountered a tropical storm and crashed.
In my grandmother’s butterfly theory, my mother was the moth who flapped her wings in Japan and caused disaster; there was an inevitable correlation between her being in the wrong place at the wrong time and my grandfather’s untimely accident. I had been given this secret knowledge too early to know what to do with it. I was old enough to know better than to prod my mother with questions, but too young to understand debt and obligation. Too young to understand what my mother must have felt during her mother’s fight with cancer, or to appreciate the uncertainty my grandmother must have been living with. I was too young to understand that a python could be not just a threat but a warning, and too young to understand why this summer, of all summers, I had been sent off as a flawed peace offering.


Allison got impatient with my refusal to leave the living room. She tried to reason with me: “If a snake wanted to eat us, wouldn’t it have done it already? If a starving python was living in our lake, wouldn’t all the other animals be dead by now?” I wanted to believe her, but then I pictured myself being crushed into fine dust inside of something so big that no one could hear me scream, vanishing without my parents ever knowing what had happened. When logic failed, Allison retrieved my copy of Natural Wonders of the Amazon Rain Forest from where it lay abandoned and pointed out pictures of snake after snake.
“Look,” she said, pointing at a picture of a man with a large yellow snake wrapped around his shoulders, two women in the background looking unphased. “All these people who live with snakes, and they haven’t been eaten. Your parents are with these snakes right now, and they’re not dead.”
“How do you know?” I asked. They’d told me before leaving that by a month into the summer, they would be unreachable, leaving Rio for the dense territory of the rain forest, a place where they neither sent nor received letters.
Allison gave up on me after that. She stopped letting me sleep on the bottom bunk; she began to tease me about my fears. I made a new amulet out of one of Allison’s barrettes and a friendship bracelet she had given me; Allison demanded the barrette back and, when I refused, ripped the bracelet in half. My phobia was taking a greater toll on her than boredom. Being inside meant she had to spend more time in the direct presence of my grandmother. My grandmother quizzed Allison incessantly about her grades, pulled her into the study to review brochures for day schools she wanted Allison to be prepared to apply to next summer. Allison’s credentials sorely disappointed her; makeup theft and an active imagination were apparently not among the early markers of genius. Her grades were not great, and her school records were dotted with minor citations: Allison talked back to teachers, Allison poured glue in someone’s hair, Allison stole the class turtle to keep as a pet. When I overheard my grandmother grilling Allison over these infractions, I shimmered with a kind of pride in her boldness, but Allison’s explanations were alarmingly meek. Even my grandmother noticed that Allison seemed to get in some sort of trouble every time her parents left for a vacation, which they did often, year-round, but Allison refused to admit to the correlation.
My grandmother scheduled Allison for beginning piano lessons, and took her for informal conversations with a French-speaking neighbor. My grandmother didn’t invite me to come, which saved me the trouble of refusing to leave with her. In any case, she wouldn’t have had grounds to force me. My mother shared her views on language and music, if not her approach. I attended bilingual elementary school, and was in the school orchestra. Had she asked, my grandmother would have found out that I spoke fluent Spanish, and played the viola quite nicely.


There was a long time that I didn’t talk about that summer at all, and then there were times when it was all I could talk about. It was the sort of thing that made a person interesting in college: My Youth as Real Live Tragic Mulatta. My recovery turned my scars into party favors. If you had seen them—the dot on my leg, the line on my elbow, the water in my eyes when I talked about Allison—then you had something about me to take with you. If you knew what was behind it, you had even more. If you think your family was messed up, people would whisper, you should talk to that girl. In my first year of law school I was famous for using myself as the basis for a sample torts question in study group. People wondered whether being so casual about it meant that I was screwed up, or that I was OK. I couldn’t have answered them.
A confession: because I didn’t know the difference between kinds of intimacy back then, I told each of the first four men I slept with that he was the only one I’d ever told this story. Jason was the fourth, and the only one to call me a liar: he’d already heard the story from my roommate the week before. According to him, it was part of what made him like me in the first place. I was so stunned that I kicked him out of bed and didn’t speak to him again for months. But after he had left and I had given up trying to sleep, I wondered which part of the story had drawn him to me. I never asked, but I wondered. I wondered years later, when he called the Yale housing law clinic on behalf of the New Haven Register and, upon recognizing my name and voice at the other end of the line, asked me to dinner. I wondered—it was a tiny flash in the back of my mind, but yes, I wondered—when he brought me takeout during finals week at the end of my second year of law school, and I cracked open the fortune cookie and found an engagement ring. Was it the part of the story where I was strong that made me special, or the part where I was weak? It mattered more than I could say.


This is what I told him: My grandmother, it seems to me in retrospect, was a woman whose better impulses frequently led to her worst, the sort of person who would offer you a genuine favor, then punish you for having the gall not to take her up on it. The afternoon I ended up in the hospital, I think she started out meaning to help me.
“Look,” she said, approaching me in the living room that day, bending down to my level to look me in the eye. “This is too much. You need to go outside today. I’m taking Allison swimming. You’ll come with us.”
“I don’t swim anymore,” I said. “Snakes like water.”
“Be that as it may, they don’t like chlorine. Go get your swim-suit on.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to be eaten.”
“Look,” said my grandmother, exasperated, “it’s possible that I exaggerated a little, so you would learn a lesson about running off. There is a Burmese Python, and they have spotted a few in the Everglades, but no one’s ever heard of one this far north, and no one’s ever heard of one eating an entire person, and the only dog missing around here is that Saint Bernard, who probably ran away because his owner is a fool and a drunk, and he may not even have stayed missing if she hadn’t written her own damn phone number wrong on the lost dog poster. Get dressed.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
“Why would I lie to you now?” she asked.
“Why would you lie to me about it in the first place?” I asked. “Either way, it makes you a liar. Maybe you just want me to get eaten.”
“Don’t you get smart with me,” said my grandmother. “I never took lip from your mother and I certainly won’t take it from you.”
“Daddy says you took everything from my mother,” I said, more innocently than was honest. There was a thick feeling in my throat.
My grandmother’s eyes narrowed. She was silent for some minutes. When she left the room I could hear my breath coming rapidly in tune with her retreating then returning footsteps. In the moment I first saw the gleam of metal in her hand, I truly believed she was going to stab me.
She never said a word. She started snipping quickly, unevenly, the rhythm of her anger punctuated by the growing pile of tight black curls on the floor. It didn’t occur to me to run. It didn’t occur to me that there was anywhere to go. I don’t know how long Allison had been watching. I only know that when it was over, and all but half an inch of my shoulder-length-when-it-lay-flat hair was piled on the floor, Allison was in the doorway, looking straight at my grandmother.
She walked over to me and grabbed my hand, dragging me toward the front door. I didn’t know what to believe about snakes anymore, but at that moment I would have preferred being inside a python’s belly to seeing my grandmother look at my practically bald head like she had proved something to me. I followed Allison down to our lake, climbed with her to the top of our tree. We were out of stories, or we were out of words. We didn’t pretend to be my mother in the Amazon, or hers on a cruise ship, because we knew what we were right then: people too small to stop the things we didn’t want to happen from happening anyway. The bottoms of my jeans and Allison’s thin ankles were muddy then, our socks wet from a puddle I could not remember having stepped in. I looked down before I remembered not to. I saw our watery reflections blending into one on the water’s wet canvas, pink and peach and beige and denim softly swirling, and wondered how my grandmother managed to see two of us so clearly.
“I want to go home,” Allison said. “I want us to run away. I hate that woman.”
“She likes you,” I said.
“If she liked me, she’d like you too. You’re my best friend.”
“No I’m not,” I said, and realized as I said it that something about the last few weeks had made it true.
Then I saw Allison’s reflection lift her arms, felt the weight of her palms on my back, felt myself rock forward. In those first few seconds, I could feel the fall in my belly, a sharp reminder of gravity, the constancy of the laws of physics even when they run counter to everything else we’d have ourselves believe in. We are safe, with our families, until we are not. On the way down, I remembered dropping out of the bunk bed, thought about how much worse the first moment of the fall had been than the actual impact. I braced myself for the slap of the water, but was still unprepared for the sting of it against my nostrils, the sharpness of the underwater rock on which I landed.


I woke up in a hospital room with blue walls. It was not my mother cradling my head and humming but my aunt Claire, who, as always, had soft hands and smelled like peach lotion. She was much thinner than she’d been two months ago: for the first time I believed she was as sick as my mother had said and felt the sharp stab of what I could finally name as anger fade a bit. Aunt Claire apologized to me nonetheless. “If I had known,” she said over and over again, “what kind of people they were leaving you with, I would have insisted you stay with me.” Allison had admitted what she’d done, and my aunt Claire had already dismissed my grandmother from the premises, told the nurses she was not allowed in my hospital room, though I couldn’t exactly see her trying to sneak in.
The department chair had located my parents, who were on their way home. I spent a few days in the hospital looking, between the piles of blankets well-intentioned nurses kept putting on my bed and the scratchy blue paper hospital gown, worse than I actually felt. Help had arrived quickly enough that there hadn’t been much water in my lungs. I had scraped up an arm pretty badly, and knocked myself unconscious with some combination of fear and impact, but the worst of my injuries was a broken tibia. Once the wound above it closed and the risk of infection passed, the doctors told me it would heal normally. Though my leg occasionally throbbed, and the cast I wore itched like crazy, I reminded myself that I was lucky. I’d overheard a doctor telling my aunt that if the rock had hit my head two inches lower, the fall would have killed me.
Aunt Claire stayed in a Tallahassee hotel until my parents got back, visiting and reading me kids’ books. I was too exhausted to pretend I was too old for them. She made me excited promises about all the things we could do with my hair when it started to grow back, and was always reluctant to leave me for the hotel in the evening. I turned nine in the hospital; a nurse baked me a homemade red velvet cake; the entire pediatric staff sang to me; Aunt Claire bought me a beautiful set of turquoise-jeweled hair combs to decorate my shorter hair.
When my mother finally arrived, I heard her before I saw her. My parents had gotten in at midnight and come straight to the hospital. It was one in the morning when they got there, four days after my admittance, and they had to threaten several overprotective nurses in order to be allowed to wake me. When my mother saw me, she cried. My father was so wrapped up in hugging me and so close to crying himself that I don’t know if he even noticed her tears, but I wished somebody would have held her.
“I’m so sorry, baby,” she said when she had composed herself. “We never should have left you. Allison is damn lucky she called the cops, lucky you’re alive, and lucky your father and I don’t believe in juvenile detention centers, or we’d be pressing charges against her for pushing you off in the first place.”
“Maybe it was just an accident,” I said. What I meant was that Allison might have wanted to go home, more than she wanted to hurt me. Hadn’t she said so? Hadn’t she confessed, even before I was awake to accuse her?
My mother waved this possibility off.
“I called my brother,” she said. “They cut their cruise short in Guam and came back several days ago. She’s got a lot of problems that have nothing to do with you. She’s very confused. This is all your grandmother’s doing. I’m sure if she hadn’t been treating you so badly, Allison wouldn’t have thought she could do the same. Why didn’t you tell me what was going on in that house?”
I considered this. I was very confused.
“You were in Brazil,” I said finally. “What are they going to do to Allison now?”
“Frankly, that’s her parents’ problem now, not mine,” said my mother, cradling me closer to her, and stroking my still naked feeling head. “My only job is to take care of you.”


But Allison was the other half of the story; the half I didn’t tell because it didn’t belong to me anymore. People would ask me sometimes what happened to her. “I’m sure she grew up,” I would say, and they would nod at my empathy and rarely point out that growing up did not mean and never has meant the same thing as getting better. The truth was I didn’t know much about how Allison was doing. My mother had deliberately cut off contact with her family after that summer, deciding the whole lot of them were toxic. I’d heard her though, talking to my father about the fact that my uncle had decided to leave Allison with my grandmother for a little while, to straighten her out. “That’s a mistake,” my mother had said. “What an unfortunate pair.”
An unfortunate pair. Her words were in the back of my mind when she called me a few weeks after my law school graduation. I had been hibernating, wearing headphones and reviewing for the Connecticut bar, and it was only because she called three times in a row that I bothered to pick up the phone.
“Tara,” my mother said, “the first thing I want you to know is you don’t have to do this.”
“OK...” I said.
“Allison is in the hospital,” she said.
“What’s wrong with her?” It occurred to me, stupidly, that maybe she needed a kidney.
“She tried to kill herself,” my mother said.
“My God,” I said.
“She’s asked to see you,” my mother said. “Apparently, her therapist thinks it would be good for her to talk to you. I’m sure she wants to apologize in person. But I told them, you have a life, too, and we’ll do this on your schedule, if at all, OK?”
“I’ll do it,” I said.
My mother paused on the other end of the line.
“I’ll book us flights,” she said finally.
“I can go by myself,” I said.
“No you can’t,” she said. “I don’t trust those people with you for a second.”
Her fear was understandable, if belated. The year after my summer with the unfortunate pair, I didn’t sleep more than an hour a night. When I said so later, my mother said that wasn’t biologically possible, and then changed the subject. My father said it simply wasn’t true, because he didn’t sleep well that year and he remembers waking up nights, walking down the hall, and pulling back the blankets in my room to check on me. “You slept,” he told me, “like an angel.” Perhaps they are right. When I was very little, my mother used to say there was something of my grandmother in me, in how I tell stories the way I need them to be and not the way that they actually happened. In any case, I remember staring at the ceiling every night for a year, tracing shadow patterns with my finger. I remember closing my eyes whenever I heard footsteps outside the door and relaxing every time I realized it was only my father.
My parents were careful with me like they’d never been before; I was in college before they were willing to let me out of their sight for more than a few hours. Even when Aunt Claire requested my company, to sit beside her bed and read to her those last few months before she died, they were reluctant to part with me. That summer was still with me somewhere, and so was Allison, and my grandmother, but thinking about any of it was like looking at an old photograph of myself, staring a long time and all the while trying to figure out whether it was really me in the picture.


And then there I was in Tallahassee again, this time in a downtown mental institution, only the kind with a marble lobby and a fountain on the grounds, so you were supposed to call it a wellness center. I had waited for my mother’s flight at the airport and had lunch with her when she landed. Though she insisted on driving me to see Allison, she announced in the parking lot that it was probably best if she not come in, and I agreed with her. The grounds of the wellness center reminded me of the grounds of the country club so long ago. Everything was flowering, in obstinate resistance to the severity of its locale.
When I announced who I was and whom I’d come to see, the woman behind the desk looked at me sharply for a second but then looked again, nodded, and told me I had my grandmother’s eyes. A nurse in a powder blue uniform escorted me down the hall to a waiting area with plush teal chairs. I sat in one of them before I even took note of who was sitting on the other end of the room. My grandmother looked older, of course—her hair now gone completely white, her face creased with wrinkles—but there was no mistaking her. Her eyes were still as sharp as ever, her mouth still set in a line of grim determination. Her wardrobe, though, was in a state of disarray, her silk scarf tossed on the chair beside her, her blouse and pants wrinkled as though she had been sleeping in them—which, I supposed, was entirely possible. She looked at me, gave me an almost smile. I tried to think of a comforting thing to say to her, the kind of thing you would say to a stranger in similar circumstances, but nothing came to mind. I focused instead on the insulting giddiness of the waiting-room magazine covers, their cheerful refusal to be about anything that mattered.
A nurse punctuated the silence. “Miss Ellis?”
She led me down the hallway and opened the door to a room, but didn’t enter. I could see her hovering in the entry. Before I walked through the door, I heard Allison’s voice, still thick like sweet liquid. “You came.”
She looked worse than I was expecting, but I already couldn’t remember how I’d pictured her all this time. Certainly I was never picturing her in a hospital bed, with bandages and an IV and a red plastic food tray in her lap. She was thinner now than she had been when I had known her as a child; the roundness I remembered in her face had given way to something angular. Her eyes, which I’d remembered as being almost electric blue, seemed gray in this light, and her long hair was feathered with split ends. She looked exposed in a flimsy cloth gown; I wondered if there were levels of crazy here, if some people qualified to wear real clothes and others didn’t. I closed my eyes, then opened them again. Allison smiled at me. I smiled back. I looked around the room, wondering what was coming next. The clock on the wall ticked loudly, as if counting down for an explosion.
“What happened?” I asked, which was the most delicate way I could think of putting the question. Something cold flashed through her eyes briefly, and then she smiled at me again. “I got divorced last month,” she said. “But I got divorced once before, and I didn’t try to kill myself afterward, so I guess that’s not it, is it?”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I probably should have learned my lesson about marriage the first time.”
“Thanks for the warning.” I nodded at my engagement ring.
“I bet he’s a nice guy,” Allison said. “Is he a lawyer too?”
“Jason’s a journalist,” I said. “And I’m not a lawyer yet. I just graduated.”
“Still, look at you now. I always hoped you were doing well. Our grandmother would love it.”
The way she said it, it sounded like an accusation and a compliment at the same time. I waited for her to tell me why she’d asked me to come. To fill the silence, I told her a little about school, about Jason, about the sample bar question essays I’d written out and read into a tape recorder that I played so often I could hear it in my sleep.
“What are you doing these days?” I asked finally.
“Other than slitting my wrists?”
I flinched.
“I teach music,” she said. “We tried to make a real pianist out of me, but I was never quite good enough. My heart wasn’t in it.”
“ ‘We ’?”
“Grandma and I,” she said. “Grandma more than me. My parents gave me to her after that summer, you know. They put me in a place like this for a few weeks, and when I came out they said they simply lacked the knowledge to deal with a child with those kinds of issues. They moved to LA the next year.”
“I know,” I said. I had known, but hearing it out loud still felt like a slap. “I never understood why you told them. You could have said I’d fallen. I never told them you pushed me. I never said that. I wouldn’t have.”
“I could have said a lot of things,” said Allison. “I thought my parents would come get me and yours would come get you. I thought if anyone got in trouble, it would be our grandmother.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We were kids. We didn’t know what we were doing.”
“It took me all these years to figure out that she didn’t know, either. She had the next decade of my life scheduled before my parents were on the plane. She was so scared to mess up again that I was barely allowed to leave the house. I think I got married the first time just to get away from her. She went on and on about my first husband being trash. Her favorite thing to say when I messed up was that I took after my mother’s side of the family, and water seeks its level. I guess it never occurred to her I hadn’t seen my mother in years, or that it probably didn’t say much about her that I had decided that moving into a trailer with a man who sold cheap souvenirs in the Everglades would have been better than going back to her house.”
“But you went back,” I said.
“I didn’t know where else to go. So I lived with her until I got married again last year. He was grandmother-approved, but that didn’t stop him from sleeping with our next-door neighbor. Maybe I would have been better off staying in the Everglades. Lots of snakes there, but most of them are harmless. Sometimes seeing one would startle me, and I would think of you.”
I closed my eyes. I thought about all the things I’d accumulated since I’d last seen Allison, and how absolutely useless they seemed right now.
“Maybe you just need to start over someplace new,” I said. “Get away from all of this. You could stay with me for a while when they let you out.”
She parted her lips a little, like she was going to laugh, but she didn’t. I tried to picture it in my head: the look on Jason’s face when I told him I was bringing home a suicidal white woman who had almost killed me once; Jason and I converting the study into a bedroom for her, getting a piano, her getting settled in Connecticut. I imagined our kids growing up together, the way she and I had thought we would.
“Maybe I’d like that,” she said finally. “I never thought of you getting married without me. Remember, we were going to be each other’s bridesmaid?”
“I remember,” I said. “I was going to pick mint green dresses, because that was your favorite color, and you were going to pick orange, because it was mine. Jason’s sister is being a pain in the neck and doesn’t want to wear the dress I picked out. You should be a bridesmaid instead. I’d even change the color for you.”
“You would,” she said. “But I just wanted to see you. I just wanted you to see me. Take care of yourself. I really am glad you’re happy.”
I looked at the clock again, then back at Allison. It had been an hour; I was ready to go, though still uneasy about why I’d been sent for in the first place. I reached for her hand and squeezed it by way of good-bye. She didn’t ask me to stay. I felt like somebody ought to stop me from walking out, like there was a rule that you couldn’t leave behind such palpable need.
In the waiting room, my grandmother still sat. I was struck by how open she looked, the way her grief pulled her out of herself the way most people’s tucks them in. I felt bigger than her for the first time in my life, but I couldn’t feel good about it. I thought of saying something to her, but I didn’t know where to start, how to explain who I was now, or what she’d had to do with it.
“I hear you’re really something these days,” she said when I stopped in front of her. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” I said, before I had time to regret it. I turned my back to leave, waited for her to say something else. I only heard her breathing.


My mother was still in the car outside. When I knocked on the window to be let in, she jumped, then seemed relieved to see it was me.
“I’m sorry you had to do that,” she said as I got in the car. “You’re a better person than I’d be, in your shoes.”
“I’m not,” I said. “It wasn’t a big deal. It was a long time ago.”
“ ‘A long time ago’—Tara, we almost lost you. Maybe you don’t remember, but to me it’s like yesterday. Like yesterday.”
“How could you possibly remember?” I said. “You weren’t there.”
The tone of my own voice surprised me. My mother looked stung and I was sorry, but not sorry enough to apologize. She bit back tears.
“Tara, don’t. I mean, not now. Look, I wanted you to have your own life and me to have mine. I made a mistake, putting you there that summer. But I loved you, you always knew I loved you?”
I didn’t think she meant for it to be a question, so I didn’t answer her directly.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
I looked out the window, watching people at a park through the glass. I thought of saying a lot of things that I didn’t. I didn’t tell her how badly I had wanted her back, not just that summer, but all the years before it; how those days she had lain beside me in the hospital bed, for once mine and mine alone, were among the best of my childhood. I didn’t tell her that every time I took note of the scar on my elbow, I thought she ought to thank me for giving her the way out of her mother’s house that she’d never found for herself, no matter how many times she ran away. I didn’t tell her how I had learned it wasn’t just snakes that could eat you alive. I didn’t tell her what I had told no one in all these years, what I had lied about even to the love of my life, because saying it out loud would unravel so much. Whatever motives Allison had for saying so—whatever she thought she saw a way out of, or more likely, back into, in confession—there had been no push, no one’s hands on my back. I hadn’t fallen, I’d jumped. It was shallow water, and though as it turned out I’d been lucky not to kill myself, at the time it hadn’t seemed like a long way down. Twenty feet and I would have my parents back, I would have my mother forever, I would have years before I had to consider the costs. I’d been, for the second time that summer, less afraid of the fall than what else I thought awaited me. That afternoon above the murky water, which I remembered quite clearly, there had been nothing but me, looking down at my own reflection, and seeing at last a way toward what I wanted most.