I think about a daydream I used to have. It started after I heard a story about a woman who was adopted as a baby. Her adopted family was nice and rich and white and she knew she was lucky but she was half-black and had an afro and never felt like she belonged. She began taking drugs. And then, in her early twenties, she stopped taking drugs and searched out her birth parents. Her mother was dead but her father was alive and lived in West Africa. She wrote him a letter and he contacted her. He told her she was a princess. He said he had always loved her and that she could move to this West African nation and lead it, if she wanted. So she went there and there was a parade in her honor, all of the women of the village lined up on the sides of the road wearing the same dress, singing her name. Welcoming her home. Even though she was a princess, she was too American to stay there and didn’t want to lead a poor third-world country. I didn’t like that part of the story so I would try to forget about it and concentrate on the women of the village singing my name, wearing the same blue dresses made special for the occasion.
The cat slips under the bed and I’m alone. I get on the floor and try to pull her out by a paw, but she swipes at me with the other so I take one of the boxes instead. There are two of them, full of pictures. I flip through a stack: I’m twenty-three, twenty-five, twenty-eight; we’re at the Statue of Liberty, Disney World, Cancún. Having drinks at a TGI Fridays somewhere in Florida. There isn’t a single place I’d want to return to, not a single place that interests me at all. I used to research these vacations for months only to end up in the most obvious locations.
I study the framed photograph of the two of us that used to sit on our dresser: my hair was thicker and my teeth were whiter and I was wearing a navy blue bikini I don’t have anymore. I think about calling him but he won’t answer. The last time he picked up, he said, Do you want me to have to change my number? Is that what you want?
I hear my sister unlock the door, heels clicking on the hardwood. She opens my door and I can feel her standing there, but I don’t turn.
She sits next to me and takes the framed photograph out of my hand.
“I was prettier then.”
“You weren’t prettier,” she says. “Only younger. I think you’re prettier now.”
“Every day I find new things wrong with me.” I take the picture and put it in the box, push the box under the bed.
“Why’d you leave?” she asks. “I was worried.”
“You must not have been too worried, you didn’t call.”
We sit there for a while, not saying anything, while I use the fish on a stick, bounce it around. Its diamond-shaped eyes sparkle.
“I was having a panic attack. That’s why I left.”
“I’m not trying to be mean,” she says, “I’m really not, but it’s always something. It’s always something with you.”
She’s right. It is always something. I try to remember a time in my life when there wasn’t something. When things were good and I was happy. I never think of it this way—I only think of today—that there is this thing I’m dealing with right now and once I get a handle on it everything will be fine—but it seems there has always been a thing and that these things have eaten up my whole life.
“Hey,” she says. “Look at me.” She takes my hand, squeezes it. I put my arms around her and hold her; she was once a baby in my arms, a baby I said loving and terrible things to.
After a while, she stands and leaves the room, closes the door behind her. I use my crooked finger to try to lure the cat out: redrum, redrum. The cat spends a lot of time under my bed. Once, I pulled the mattress off, taking the top off her world, and she was mad at me for days. I don’t know why I want to fuck with her; sometimes I just get the urge. I don’t do anything that terrible. I just pet her too roughly or make her play with me when she doesn’t feel like it. Sometimes I switch her food for no reason. You are adopted, I tell her. I have saved you from the cruel, indifferent world but there is always a cost. Nothing in this life is free.
THE 37
I had never ridden a bus before, not a city bus, not a bus where you stood at a bus stop and buses came and you had to know which one to get on and where to get off. I had once ridden a bus from Jackson, Mississippi to Denver, Colorado to see the Pope at Strawberry Park. That was the Pope before this Pope and it was a long time ago. I was no longer Catholic, was no longer anything. I recalled other buses taking me back and forth to day camp as a child and how I had not liked day camp, though I’d preferred it to overnight camp. At overnight camp I cried and got my period and made the nurse call my parents to come get me. There had been other buses as well, tour group buses, buses that took you from the airport parking lot to the airport. But those were shuttles. Mostly, I had ridden shuttles. You couldn’t get on the wrong one; they were all going to the same place.
I was living in a city now, a city with many buses that could take you many places you might want to go and many places you would not want to go and I had to figure them out because I was also afraid to drive for the same reasons and some additional ones: I didn’t know how to get to where I was going or where to park once I got there or if I’d have the right parking pass, if one was required, or whether the meters were active, if there were meters, and whether they took coins only. And I’d just discovered that campus parking was particularly fucked up because you had to back into the space instead of simply nosing in headfirst. You had to put your blinker on and stop traffic and back into the space all without hitting the cars on either side of you or the bikes flying down the hill. I watched as others did this, easily, with horror and awe. A lot of them appeared to be freshmen. Their tags said Illinois and Arkansas and New York. I once visited a friend in New York and she was late meeting me at her apartment. I stood on the sidewalk with my suitcase for a long time until she showed up. Country mouse in the big city, she said.
I was ready to give up and move back home even though I’d left everything behind in a way that would not allow for my return: I had dropped out of my PhD program and broken up with my boyfriend; I had moved out of my house, leaving my roommate in a bit of a bind. There was nothing to return to except my mother. I could always return to her and she would be happy to have me. I also had a father; he lived with my mother and I loved him, too, but it wasn’t the same. We had gone out to lunch before I’d left, just the two of us, and he’d made the waitress cry and I was pretty sure she’d quit because the manager had begun to wait on us at some point and my heart had cracked a little. It was small things like this that did it.
It was August, well over 100 degrees. I stood and then sat on the hill. It hadn’t rained but my ass felt slightly damp. I was wearing a dress made of very thin cotton. It was like nothing. It was also low-cut and the tops of my breasts were exposed. Why had I worn this dress? It had been a mistake. There wasn’t even a bench at the bus stop I thought I should be at but wasn’t sure, only a pole in the ground with a picture of a bus on it, big windows like eyes and a lot of numbers that meant nothing to me.
I was in tears by the time I called my mother. I’ve been sitting on this hill for an hour, I said, over an hour, and I’m about to lose it.
Okay, she said, panicked. What can I do?
I’m about to freak out. I have to get home.