I am sick for using change to buy lime popsicles. Sick for slamming doors to emphasize my temper. I am sick for not perceiving winter. For being unbothered by February’s frost; what I now observe as twenty-eight days of sky reflecting street slush. A whole spectrum of gray. I am sick for packing a snowball but being too shy to throw it and so I’d carry it in the gloved pillow of my palm like a pet snowball.
I am sick for using small scissors to cut cardboard hearts; for gluing them on paper doilies and writing someone’s name with felt marker. I am sick for cardboard and paper and markers, and the time it took to make things before gifting them. How the world subsides when you’re carefully inscribing each letter of someone’s name in calligraphy you’ve reserved for special occasions.
I am sick for my incorruptibility. Sick for believing. Sick for my body before. Before I’d ever noticed I was in possession of one. Before full-lengths. Before I knew anything about valleyed collarbones, a stomach’s folds, smooth legs, small wrists.
I am sick not for innocence as merely asylum, but innocence as custom. After a rainstorm, amid the general chaos of a home and what still needed to get done—laundry, dinner, dishes—my mother would always remark on the smell. I am sick for the custom of my mother looking up to smell the gospel of wet ground.
I am sick for wearing orange. For those years when I knew nothing about the need to abide. When I smiled with my teeth.
I remember the cool touch of my mother’s palm on my forehead before bed and how both my parents had a thing for my brother’s and my foreheads. How they’d push my hair back and cup the top curve of my skull, and tenderly point to the chipped shape of a chicken pox scar dented into my nose. Briefly in those moments, my mother or father looked, all told, peaceful. Abundant with zero trace of the day’s bulk. It was as if in their minds that smooth plane of skin above my eyes kept me small. Would keep me small and hold back time, so long as it never outgrew the size of their palms.
Because I doubt any parent is ever ready to part with his or her child’s smallness. That beautiful delusion of believing the whole universe is compacted into a tiny frame. Thinking back, the deep well of love my parents have for their two children, the labor and restorative leisure of it, even if we’ve outgrown certain comforts and warred at times over life and where it’s taken us; even if I go days without a consequential phone call with them and sound curt and ungrateful when asking for a favor; their love has never been—not once—hesitant. This much I know.
The morning we found the squirrel, I watched from my window as my mother balanced the net’s long pole, using her whole body to dip it over and place the dead squirrel … where exactly? Near the rhododendron? Here’s where my memory goes static. Here’s where I wonder if maybe it was my brother who scooped the squirrel from the pool. If so, did he grin mischievously, threatening to hide the dead squirrel under my bed? Does it matter? Here’s where I realize maybe it wasn’t even a school day and I was simply mad at my mother for some crimped and fiery but unnamed daughter reason having to do with being a daughter with a mother. Here’s where I worry that my recall is, in fact, some ramshackle excuse for recall.
What I’m sure of is the dead squirrel’s body and how I can’t unsee its dark brown corpse like a blotch of balsamic in our aqua-blue pool. That house, its backyard, the lilac bush, my green shag carpet, the older girls, the boys, the squirrel, still wind me up. Like omens I neglected, like apprehensions I would only later—much, much later—understand as how my body was, in its way, anthologizing my childhood.
3
Miserable
PRONOUNCED miz, as in Ms. magazine. Uh as in an expression of hesitation. And rull, as in rhymes with dull. In my family, when someone is miserable, we say miz-uh-rull. We say it like this because, as a kid, I couldn’t pronounce the word miserable. The B sound eluded me. I couldn’t push beyond that second syllable and form the last two: the ruh. The bull. It was as if I was encumbered by the word’s very meaning; too dejected to complete it. miz-uh-rull, it turns out, was my very own, self-styled onomatopoeia. Whatever inextricable despair I was experiencing at the age of three, it outdid me.
Some babies, once born, remain unready. Despite our smallness we are in possession of a lair of apprehension, chambered in order to lodge how estranged we feel when someone, say, tosses us a ball. Or expects from us pure jubilation the first time we encounter a Slinky. As a child, a Slinky stalled on a flight of steps caused me acute stress. The way it would cede to its coils—sometimes pause and appear to levitate—and then fail, abandoning all momentum. I couldn’t cope with the suspense. In photographs, my little hands are holding each other tight, or gripped around my wrists like clamps. Concern, far beyond my scope, was compacted into me.
There’s something about a distraught child that is instantly significant. She gets it: the world is often ten seconds away from tasting like cold french fries. The world can assert itself like a category-3 shitstorm of major letdowns, and minor ones too, which I’ve learned are harder to make peace with because they are somehow inexpressible. Averting one’s attention; reacting unreasonably with no tools to recuperate; seeking sanctuary in the company of friends, who are also unprotected from feeling wrecked; mending on an empty stomach; experiencing life as if you’re watching it from behind a shoulder-high wall—ducking when it’s too much, peering over to discover more, both wise to and oblivious of everything out of view, rashly tossing your effects over the ledge and starting over with nothing. The illusion of nothing, that is. There’s no suitable language for feeling adrift when on paper you seem all right. Arguing with yourself into becoming someone else is next to impossible. And then the world disappoints. And no amount of interpretative power could have prepared you.