This is a Memoir: Week 13

Après un rêve

I started piano lessons when I was 5 years old, clumsily plunking out the single staff melodies finger by finger on our oak upright Yamaha. I loved opening the hinged wooden cover, finding the keys draped in that elegant red felt. I felt akin to those black and white keys, solid, defined, usable, beautiful, and still, always waiting to be played. I would stroke the keys, the black, the white, bang my palms on the clusters of porcelain, slide the fingernail of my index finger from the highest note to the lowest and back, enthralled by the breadth of sound. I would find songs I knew (Twinkle, Twinkle or Three Blind Mice) and would hold down the Sostenuto pedal through the entirety of the short pieces, listening to the thick, dwindling sound cluster until it was almost silence. The notes on the page were not as appealing: clefs, key signatures, sharps, flats, fingering. Practicing meant playing the same song over and over again until you hated it. It meant those dreaded Hanon scales, ascending arpeggios, up and down, across the keys until you forgot why you loved the instrument in the first place. Except you never really did. And years later realized that because you can read music you can do anything.

I had grown up hearing about my Taita, my dad’s mother, who was a concert pianist. As a boy my dad would stand by her side as her fingers spun across the keys, his eyes wide. He would tell me I looked like her, short and stocky, busty by the time I was ten, which must’ve meant I was going to be play like her too. Although my mom would probably tell you differently, I’m not sure there was ever a time I didn’t want to play the piano. I would take years of lessons, settling in around 16 with a teacher who went to my church and let me play anything and everything I wanted (at one point I was learning Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata side by side with “My heart will go on”).

One of my favorite sounds in the world has always been an orchestra tuning. The A played by the oboe, the winds fluttering, quieting, the A again, the strings entering cacophonously, musically, the chaos anticipating the order to follow, each separate timbre perfectly in sync with its neighbor, like holding two crayons in your hand and tracing a heart. As an elementary school student I wanted nothing more than to play the cello, a privilege only the fourth graders in our school were allowed to enjoy. But we were moving during November of the school year and for two months I had to watch other kids leave class with the instrument I loved and go to the orchestra rehearsal I had dreamed of for so long. To my dismay at my new San Diego elementary school orchestra didn't even start until the 5th grade and the cello wasn't offered. I played the violin unhappily until entering middle school.

The first time I got my rented cello alone in my room, I took it out of its case, undressing it, revealing the scratched, taupe, wood, the chipped, curved f holes, the spun scroll, the smooth black fingerboard, and metallic strings. I tightened the bow and rosined the delicate horse hair stretched taut between the delicate arch. I sat at the kitchen chair I had dragged into my room that morning and tucked the cello between my legs, holding it tight with my knees. I pulled the bow sloppily across the lowest string with my right hand, waiting a moment before using my left middle finger to press the string to the fingerboard close to the scroll. I paused, the edges of my mouth turning up. I almost blushed. Jaws. A movie I had never seen, the soundtrack to which I could now play.

My poor cello teacher, Catherine, never seemed able to keep my attention. A small British woman with perfect pitch, she would frequently get frustrated with my lack of focus and have me lie on the floor under her piano as she plucked out notes I was to name. She would drone the A440 at the beginning of each lesson attempting to instill in me the pitch to which I was to tune my instrument and myself. Catherine had quickly removed the familiar tapes from the fingerboards, leaving me floundering for notes I could read but not play. I would tell her how frustrated I was, beg her to give me back the markers, and she would tell me I simply needed more practice. So I would close myself in my room, and stare at the music. I would try to play, each phrase sounding contrite and abbreviated. I could hear it in my mind, the wave of the vibrato, the crisp tapping of my fingers on the strings, the slick transitions from one position to the next, the clean defined pitches, the smooth pull of my bow across the strings perfectly parallel with the bridge. But I could not realize it.

My freshman year of high school my parents bought me a cello, brand new and chestnut brown. I remember the fade of the stain, the paisley of the grain. By the time I got this instrument I could play Bach, and did, pressing and vibrating the strings with my fingers, sliding my hands up and down the smooth wood of the neck, playing the piece I had now been practicing for a year, the first six measures of which were almost perfect. For that moment, because I could make music for those short six measures on an instrument of such undeniable physical beauty, I knew I would play it forever just as I had promised my parents I would, would practice for hours a day, would practice until the strings’ sound bent to my will.

My Junior year I quit the orchestra and joined the chorus. While singing at church or around the house, my parents and friends had always told me I had a lovely voice, and by now, despite being the first chair cellist in my high school's orchestra, my perceived pitch problems had overtaken any joy I had in the instrument. I knew deep in my gut that no matter what Catherine or my mom told me, it did not sound right. Months before, my parents had taken me to see a famous cellist whose name I cannot quite remember. After a breathtaking concert, for his encore he played Fauré’s art song “Après un rêve.” The cello wept, the cellist swaying side to side with the bow, as though rocking the instrument and himself back to sleep after that beautiful, terrible dream. The audience burst open as the piece ended, standing and shouting. At that time I had no idea there was text to this piece, I only understood the title due to my limited French, only knew the dream was everything he had ever wanted, and his waking world only darkness. I cried myself to sleep that night and dreamt I was on that stage, except my cello was out of tune, and the strings wouldn’t tighten. I spun the pegs endlessly but the sound didn’t change, and I could never play in front of people like that.

I moved into the chorus seamlessly, my loud, irreverent personality deeply appreciated amongst more artistic types and even got cast in our high school’s production of Fiddler on the Roof. After a few voice lessons I told my choir director I wanted to be an opera singer, and she—a failed opera singer herself who had never let go of the stage as indicated by blush whipped so high on her cheeks that even though we worshipped her we called her a clown—told me she didn't think I was cut out for it. I’m sure she thought this a kindness, but I would tell this story triumphantly while attending the conservatory, as though I had already made it just by nature of paying my scholarship-less tuition by way of student loans and being cast in a small lead my second year.

In college and in grad school I finally did learn to practice. I spent time at the piano learning notes, translated foreign languages, and memorized sounds I didn't understand. I rehearsed when and how to gesture (which I would sadly forget the moment I stood in front of an audience). I could sing in tune, usually anyhow, but my stage fright was debilitating. Before standing up even in a classroom, my heart would beat so fast I would feel on the brink of death. I would stand at the piano, my prep simply an attempt to still the shaking of my hands. It was worse if I wore high heels, my feet unable to ground, my calves shortened, my knees trembling. In a session with my coach and pianist, a small, swarthy, sensitive, South African man, just weeks before my graduate recital, I excused myself to cry in the bathroom for 15 minutes. When I came back, he had closed the piano cover and was leaning on it, looking at me intensely across the wide expanse of the piano’s grand back. I apologized for crying, and finally looked him in the eye. “There is a small part of you that is not afraid,” he said. “You have to access that part, and then, if only for an hour, you have to try to live there.”

I took a break from music after grad school and got a job. My parents had given my cello to an inner city school in Washington, DC my freshman year of college, since my dreams were more focused on the Met stage than in the pit. When my parents sold their house to travel around the country in their RV for a year, they gave my piano to my brother Jeffrey so my niece, Alysha, could learn to play. She's is in nursing school now, and Jeffrey recently sold the piano for a thousand dollars on craigslist, an act that against my will felt as though a part my self was no longer mine, as though with the piano he had given away all of the wonder surrounding a seemingly random combination of sounds somehow changing the space in a room, prying open your heart, uncovering a joy, a safety you thought long gone.

My one year break turned to two turned to three turned to ten. “Where’d you go to school?” “The Boston Conservatory.” “Oh, what do you play?” “I sing. Sang. I have a Master’s degree in voice.” “You're an Opera Singer!” I smile, “No. Not anymore.”

Sometimes I will hear a Bach suite or a Beethoven concerto or the opening lilt of the violin signaling the beginning of “Donde lieta” and my chest will swell, and I'll think maybe I could do it again, maybe I can practice harder, be better, play in tune, stand solidly in that pin prick of a place where there is no fear. I close my eyes and let the sound of possibility settle warmly on my chest.

This is a Memoir Week 12

nola

My first trip to New Orleans lasted about 12 hours. During my Junior year of college in 2003 our university choir toured the deep south, singing the Vespers at different episcopal churches and trying out our white person chops on a few spirituals. We made stops in Nashville, Graceland, Apalachicola, and on the last night, before returning to California early the next morning, ended up miles away from the French Quarter the night before Mardi Gras. Once we arrived at the hotel, we quickly split off, each small group jumping into cabs to take the $45 ride to Bourbon Street. From the moment we entered the quarter, the streets were swarmed and everything moved in slow motion. The crowd shouted, its voices, eyes, and hems of shirts directed upwards at balconies so packed with people I swear they neared collapse, suffering under the weight—all tall windows, elongated shutters, scrolled, swirling ironwork, and colorful architecture obscured by the condensed debauchery. The stagnant air smelled like sick and sex. I kept my eyes down, trying to ignore the genetalia flashing in my periphery until my friends picked a gift shop, purchased a few feathered, bedazzled masks, and we were, thankfully, on our way.

I recently spent a week in New Orleans over the Thanksgiving Holiday visiting my dear friend Dahlia who had recently enrolled in an MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans. After taking an almost 6 year break from school, everything felt new to her. She hadn’t had to write an academic paper, or be in writing workshops, hadn’t had to worry about money (at least not in this way) or carve out time to actually do her own writing in quite some time. When we would chat on the phone during her first months there she would say she was “learning to be alone” and would talk about the city as though it was the only part of her new life she understood. “The city is grieving,” she would say. And so was she.

Dahlia lives in a diverse Mid-City neighborhood. The dilapidated houses with trash strewn backyards inhabited by incessantly barking dogs adjacent to newly renovated duplexes, floor to ceiling windows lining front porches opening into brightly lit kitchens presents a checkerboard of economic status. We rarely saw a white person walking down her rainbow-ed street lined with colored houses in varying states of newness and decay. On one porch sat a Latina woman, a three-year-old child playing at her feet. Stuck to one of the porch beams was a large sign that said, “Thou Shalt Not Kill.  –God,” and as we went by I wondered about past acts of violence that would necessitate such a sign.

For the two days she had to go to class I drove Dahlia to and from school, and each time passed one of New Orleans’ famous above ground cemeteries, what Mark Twain called, “the Cities of the Dead.” New Orleans’ water table is so high, you cannot dig more than a few feet down into the earth without the grave filling with water. And if you try to bury a body the earth will simply spit it out after a season of heavy rain. We walked the cemetery the day before Thanksgiving, meandering down the long, grassy aisles and crossing between the tombs when there was room. I wondered aloud what happens to the bodies inside these miniature stone mansions. I kept imagining the decay building behind the flower vases and tiny bolted doors, until, when it was opened, death spun out into the air, not just above ground, but saturating the ether.

One day while Dahlia was in class, I parked the car in the French Quarter and went off in search of beignets. The weather was icy and grey, the open air markets chilled and empty, the bars only half open, the streets full of tourists and their children. I arrived at Café du Monde and walked under the green and white striped circus tent. I looked around for the “to go” window but had temporarily lost my ability to focus in the haze of people pooling around green tables and powdered sugar. The waiters, all rushing about with mountains of steaming white powder, passed by, and I thought about asking. But instead I sighed, and left.

Two days prior Dahlia and I decided to drive through the French Quarter and ended up in stand still traffic on Bourbon Street. Every face on the sidewalk was indistinguishable from the next in the cool sunlight: pale skin, straight brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, boot cut jeans, colored fleece, and sneakers (the Midwestern tourist’s uniform). We stopped by a bike tied to a street sign, old, dirty, Mardi Gras beads hanging from the handlebars as if in homage to the last time I had paid this street a visit. The scents of partiers past wafted through the windows, a hint of alcohol and old vomit at 1:30pm even months after Fat Tuesday. We passed shop windows full of I heart NOLA Tshirts, bars with neon signs and Day of the Dead decorations, through Jackson Square. “Slaves were sold here,” Dahlia said quietly. Today, on the curved stairs sat an audience of white faces gazing down at a group of black men breakdancing on the sidewalk. I hoped they did not feel sold.

A few nights later we had dessert and drinks at a French Restaurant a few miles from Dahlia’s apartment. While eating our Lemon Icebox Pie, the middle-aged couple at the table next to us asked where we are from. We exchanged pleasantries about Boston and Uptown, the ritzy, predominantly white part of New Orleans where the woman, Paula, had been born and raised, and listened to stories of the multi-million dollar home they were currently selling, in addition to Terry and Paula’s enthusiastic drinking habits.

"What do you guys do?" I asked.

"Well, Terry's a contractor, but I get mailbox money." She wiggled her hips in her chair and rubbed her thumbs against her index and middle fingers.

“I’m confused. Is that a thing?"

"Oh, honey, yes. I open my mailbox and there’s a check! And I say, 'I didn't know I owned that land!'" We all laughed for no reason.

We were looking for a place to eat on Thanksgiving, so Paula listed off several restaurants with women’s first names before mentioning Crescent City Steaks in Mid-City.

"I live right by there!” Dahlia said, “On St. Philip!”

They both leaned towards her. "You have to be careful there,” Terry states.

“You're gonna get shot!" Paula shouted. They both laugh again.

“You need to move!” Terry was gleeful. “But seriously how long’s your lease?”

"Six months. And you aren't the first people to say that." Dahlia smiled, ”But I did my research. I walked around. I met all my neighbors. They’re mostly homeowners.“

Terry leaned even further across the space between our two tables, “You might think they’re your friends, but they’re not.” He said quietly. “They’re not your friends.”

“Oh, hush, Terry.” Paula widened her eyes at him. “They’re gonna think we’re prejudice.”

After dessert we are driving onto the freeway, on our way to meet some of Dahlia’s classmates at a bar by Tulane, when we encounter the Northern Lights, visible from New Orleans by an act of God. We witness part of the night sky alight with the most incredible absinthe green light, flashing and swelling between the stars. “What is that?” I say out loud. “It’s like a wall of light.” I was sure it was no less than a miracle. As we neared our exit, the Superdome came into view, green lights flashing onto the mammoth, endless, blank, rounded surface, achingly reflected into the heavens beyond.

This is where I felt it, the history of that place, of that storm. Here human beings waited for help that they knew would never come, drowning, living in filth, wondering who is alive, who is dead, tiptoeing their way between human waste and what remained of human treasure, to find their way to outside where they would keep on waiting, perpetually losing. Perhaps the city tried to put all their grief into the ground, tried to bury it in the leveled 9th ward underneath all of the growing green and Brad Pitt’s architectural jewels, but the collective mind of New Orleans is as saturated as the earth that makes it.

The day before, while Dahlia napped, I discovered every book on her night table was poetry by Robert Hass. Picking up the slim volume with the most appealing title (Human Wishes), I came across a question:  “On the corner a blind man with one leg was selling pencils… Would the good Christ of Manhattan have restored his sight and two thirds of his left leg? Or would he have healed his heart and left him there in a mutilated body? And what would that peace feel like?”

We were sitting in the third row of Zion Hill Missionary Baptist Church’s small brick building in New Orleans’ Tremé. The organist, a robust black man dressed in white and brown oxford loafers  and a white suit (starched collared shirt, vest, suspenders, loose legged perfectly hemmed pants, and a knee length suit jacket that cascaded over the back of the piano bench almost touching the floor like the train of a bridal gown) held the room. His fingers jumped quickly from keys to switches, his feet dancing across the bass pedals, the music building, in volume, in intensity. We were close enough to hear the clicking of the keys, to see the beaded sweat on his forehead, to feel the heat of joy. The women of the congregation all wore ornate colorful hats, complete with feathers, flowers, and other sparkled garnishes, boxy, shiny satin suit jackets with jeweled beading, matching calf length pencil skirts, pantyhose, and practical heels. When they would raise their hands in the air, the clean white beds of their fingernails seemed to shine against the wizened black skin, and they would shout, “Have mercy!” “Hallelujah!” “Yes, Lord!” The song climaxed on a long, held note, the organist’s finger quivering like a cellist’s vibrato, as though the organ, this organ, was equally under his spell and he could vibrate the sound with his touch (a fact I, and everyone else in the room, would never have argued). As he held the note, people shouted and clapped, wagging their hands in the air, standing up, sitting down, shaking their heads, visceral movements, subtle, and joyous, until the drummer joined in as the organist played the final notes, and a frenzy of appreciation, of worship, took over the entire congregation.

This is a Memoir: Week 10

A Love Letter

Before me there was you. And before you there was her. And before her the entirety of my matriarchal history lived and died, family branches full of women, leaves on the trees you love to hug.

I almost remember the day I slid out of you, purple and bloody. The doctor wrapped me in a bath towel and weighed that yowling bundle before presenting me. In the photo your thumb strokes the back of my tiny hand, your head bent, your face tired, but your eyes clear. The corner of your mouth curves ever so slightly, the beginning of your smile wrinkles, and you look down at your most delicate swaddled self. You must have thought in pictures, a parade of my future life: pastel, ruffled dresses and ballet classes, pigtail bows, pink birthdays, and skirt spinning. No, you singled in: Daughter. That was enough.

I wonder if that newness still exists somewhere inside my genetic makeup, because I want more of it. I worry I won’t have children. I don’t worry about birthing children, but I worry I will never be Mother. My fists clench around two ideas: in the right, the need, the base, visceral knowledge that this should be; in the left, the grey truth, perhaps, maybe. All things build on it. Wait. Wait more. Wait longer. Hope for the impossibility of age, of debt, of alone to lift. I have no biological clock, just biology.

I worry when you read this you’ll think I’m on the brink. I am, but I don’t know of what. I hope a sea shore, waves lapping at my feet, a clouded sunrise, salt and sweat and sand in my nose and between my toes. But it could be a cliff’s edge: black winds and debris settling their way into my wheezing lungs.

I worry if I am not Mother I am no woman. At least no longer woman-becoming but woman-declining. My skin will soften. My breasts will sink even lower. And I won't be able to console myself with the thought of my body as a pillow for a child; time will simply etch its self-portrait into my swollen, papier-mâché skin in swirls of varicose blue.

You made me a writer, Mom, asking me over and over again to, “Use your words.” I try to use them to write a different life for myself. Each morning I sit at my desk, I drink my coffee, and think about the stories I used to tell as a child. Today, every day, I just have to write one in which I can fit.

You love words too. I am thinking of those countless journals full of your loopy cursive. I made you buy me that workbook the moment I learned to write because I couldn’t wait to form my letters just like you. I wanted to write like you, to sleep in your bed, to wear your clothes, to borrow your underwear. I wanted to marry a man just like Dad and be an Engineer. I wanted to make peace. If you had it, I longed for it. If you wanted it, it became my heart’s only desire. I never could distinguish my own needs from anyone else’s. I learned that from you.

I learned to walk proud with my shoulders back, and my breasts pointing out. I learned no one should ever make me feel ashamed of myself. You told me that if I didn’t want to have sex with a man the minute I kissed him, he should never be my boyfriend, that sex is sacred and delicious. You explained to my Girl Scout troop how a threesome worked, because we asked.

I learned to want for thinness more than anything, because it’s what your mother taught you. I learned to sacrifice myself until nothing is left. And then to resent. You taught me to seek peace at all costs, to curb my anger, to let them win (except I am too much my father’s daughter to let this go on for long).

Why did you never tell me what life was like? Why did you never tell me how lonely it is to be an adult? Why did you tell me I could be anything I set my mind to, when I can’t? When you didn’t actually believe I could? I want to say you lied, but really you only told me what you wished the truth to be, about both of us. You tried to teach me healthy yearning, but I somehow learned mostly consequence, that you can have what you want until you realize you don’t want it.

I want to age in reverse. No human will ever love me like you did that first day. Except it wasn't me yet, just creation, spark, vessel, newness embodied. Even my little big brother, Allan, could feel it meeting me for the first time, holding me the gentlest he ever would, a change in the universe, a beginning star. You were not you yet that day either, at least not the you I know now, the you who struggles to find place, to say what she needs, to speak up, to sit still. You always said you were best at being a mom. Did Allan and I ruin you for all the other careers with our want and willingness to be yours?

Years ago, I called and said, “I hate you because you made me hate my body, which made me hate myself, which means I will never be happy.” And you said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what I was doing. I did the best I could.” And you meant it. We had this conversation for months, and every time you were so sorry. And every time I was less angry until I was sorry, for you, because you didn’t know what you were doing, you did the best you could. And I didn’t hate my body. And I didn’t hate you. I loved you more, if possible. And it made me long for my own daughter. I would be woefully imperfect, but when the time came I would take in and diffuse her anger, and she would finally be her own.

What is Mother? She is heart, lungs, feet. She is in front and behind. She orbits, controlling gravity well beyond when she should. She is extended, immortal. Who will tell beloved stories of my life? To whom will I pass on all those things I learned, all those silly, true, terrible, wonderful things you taught me?

Perhaps Mother is not all there is. Perhaps I wasn’t born to love anything as much as you loved me that day, wasn’t born to honor the space you take up in my chest by taking up a space of my own in the chest of my own. Perhaps I was born to be yours and then to wash away like sand on the shore, a leaf ground to dust disappearing over a cliff’s edge.

This is a Memoir: Week 9

At Work

I stand at the window in the concrete emergency stairwell of my office building. While walking to the bathroom the mist caught my eye through another window in a fire door, and my feet began to ache. I pushed my way through the red steel that shut loud behind me, a satisfying slam before echoed silence. I pressed my hands against the glass. I am not thinking about dying, but I am thinking about jumping.

I have just come from the "Diversity Dialogue," a Harvard event where a large group of new managers supposedly learn how to have difficult conversations surrounding (among other things) internalized cultural and racial prejudices. Unsurprisingly, few people of color attend, although there are more than I have seen at any Harvard staff get together prior. Usually the audience consists of a sea of white women's faces. The speaker asks us all to pair off, and we each receive a sheet of paper. On the paper are five circles, one in the center and four others connected to the center circle with ruler straight lines. In the middle you write your name. In the four surrounding circles you describe yourself, one-word answers only. I stare at the white blanks. I write, daughter. I write, liberal. I write performer. I write, artist, but cross it out. The woman next to me has written quickly: Manager, American, Woman, and Wife. After we share aloud, silence. Until she yawns, telling me she is tired, "From last night. World Series Champs! Gosh, that game was exciting." “Oh, yes,” I say but I did not watch, do not tell her I was in a class wearing a cowgirl costume (Halloween), letting a friend update me and my classmates on the score, happy for the lead only because of the energy that would pulse through the group of adults wearing musketeer hats, yellow suspenders, vampire teeth, and Hipster scarves each time another run was announced. This americanmanagerwifewoman wears her Red Sox T-Shirt with skinny jeans, a taupe blazer, and riding boots. Her long legs crossed at the thigh, she admits to workaholism with a glint in her blue eye.

I am pressed against the window because the wind is ending the world, and I can’t look away. Red leaves rush on wet blasts, branches bend, tree trunks groan, and the sky opens wide its maw to gulp at earth. The roofs of neighboring buildings shine slick and unmoving. I feel surprised we still stand. There is no rain, but there are promises in the air.

Tomorrow I will have another conversation with my employee, and she will cry. I will use phrases like "crucial situations," "decision making skills," and "time management," all to help her understand the importance of properly setting up a laptop for any lecture attended by our Faculty members. I will tell her this, face stony, eyes concerned, with unfeigned gravity, and she will cry. I will push the tissue box towards her and avoid saying, "It's all right." She will cry like something is broken. After she leaves, I will close the door behind her and cross my arms, pressing myself back together.

I lean into the thick paned glass, palms pressed, fingers spread. I rest my hairline, tilting my gaze, counting the cars in the parking lot from six floors up. There is no hinged opening, no way to step through. My thoughts are most likely chaste in comparison to the others who have wanted for this. No one is out walking. It isn't time to go home.

My office has no windows so my therapist gifted me a sun lamp: a small rectangular box, 12 inches on the long side, six inches on the other that beams something resembling sunlight into my brain all day. "The light from the HappyLight Energy Lamp must be directed at your eyes; therefore, your eyes must be open to achieve the full benefit. Note: Tinted glasses reduce the amount of light reaching your eyes," says the manual. The first day even the lowest setting is so bright I find myself squinting. But I adjust. I stay awake at my desk now. I stay awake through the night. I am vigilant.

If I were a tree I would be a rain shelter, a place for prayer, solid, seasonal, dark, and alive. My thin wooden fingers would scrape hellos on remote windows, and at night I would be almost invisible, a shadowy outline of leaves against a starlit sky. How much wind would it take to knock me over, to tear me from the ground? What if I grew on the roof of this building, wood birthed from cut wood, roots winding into heating vents, choking lab equipment, grinding chalk to dust? How much would it take then? Would a gust be enough to blow me over the edge, spinning wildly towards my splintering?

But I am not a tree. I turn abruptly and walk back through the fire door, past the bathroom long forgotten, by the finished wood of the reception desk, beyond a closed office door to a closed door of my own. I sit at my desk. I type an email using words like "critical," "expectations," and "deadlines." I press send and stare directly into the sun lamp.

I do not want to jump.

I want to fly.

This is a Memoir: Week 8

L-O-V-E

This is my family.

When I prepare my mom’s coffee, she always reminds me, “One half a packet of equal, and two heaping spoonfuls of Coffeemate. Make sure it’s about the color of your skin.” She sleepily kisses the inside of my hand. I go to the kitchen and pour the coffee, the steam rising in small billows. I lean the bottom of my rib cage onto the counter, and carefully, carefully, open the tiny blue packet, pour half of the powdery sweet (not too much), and then heap the spoon with the dried dairy-less dairy. Twice. I twirl the spoon, once, again, over and over until the powder dissolves. I hold the back of my hand close to the lip of the mug.

I am a brown child because one minute of sun exposure results in a tan. I tan through the lighter parts of my patterned bathing suits (I once ended up with a flower burnt into my little eight year old tuchus), I tan around my watch, my socks, my sandals. Every part of my body that sees the sun is dark, and every part that I keep hidden is white. My light mother, my dark father, laying claim on my body even then.

I carry the full mug to my mom, holding it far from me as my feet whisper across the floor in slow motion. I lower the mug to meet my mom’s hands. “Thanks, Deb.” She takes the first drink. She closes her eyes, the sides of her mouth turn up, her shoulders release.

My dad was no less tender. When he would put me to bed I would always request the same book (the title of which no one seems to remember). After a month of reading me the same story he would try to change it up, insert dragons where there were none, or alter characters names. I would turn to him and say, "Daddy, that's not how it goes," before reciting the words on the current page verbatim. My dad loves to tell this story, and I have heard it so often I half-remember it. Leaning into him, his long legs crossed at the ankles, smelling of Old Spice and sweat and worn starched collars. And perhaps because I feel this now so profoundly when he comments on my various memoirs, talks me through a managerial issue, or asks me in his Dad voice, "Bub, what's wrong?" causing me to break instantly into uncontrollable tears, I remember feeling, "This is my guy."

For the first 9 years of my life, my dad worked. He would be gone before we got up in the morning, and he would come home well after school. If we were pulling into the garage around 6pm we would take bets about whether he was home, and whoever was right got to be the first one to hug him. It was never odd to me that he was gone; it was what dads did. All of the mothers in my neighborhood would rent a huge beach house in Virginia Beach for two weeks every summer. All the moms and kids would pile into our various minivans and spend 14 glorious days on the beach. The dads would always only join on the weekends. When I write this out here, now, it sounds creepily like an episode of Madmen. But this is to say I was used to Dads (my own, and so many others) existing on the outskirts.

To be honest, back then, it was fine with me. Because I cleaved to my mother, almost desperately. She says that from the moment I was conscious I was watching her, figuring out how to be a woman by analyzing her every word, expression, step. It is no surprise really that I feel wary of most men, while simultaneously leaping  into deep, emotionally intimate relationships with women, and instantly connecting with any and all children.

I never wanted to sleep alone, in a box, under a canopy, it didn’t matter. I wanted to be in my parents room, as close to my mother as possible. My often overwhelming love for her might be a result of my mom breastfeeding me until I was three-and-a-half years old. I had a full set of teeth and could speak in full sentences when she explained to me, logically, that she did not want to breast feed me anymore. “Then you shouldn’t!” I exclaimed, wanting to validate her every feeling even then. “All right then,” she said, “I won’t.” I was visibly upset. “Can I at least touch them?”

My mom went back to school when I was 9, she would have to lock herself in her bedroom in order to do her homework. Sometimes I would stand at the door knocking and she would ignore me. This is also when my parents started fighting, daily, terrifying arguments that pressed through every closed door, every hand clamped over ear, into closets where I would cower and cry, convinced every argument was just a quick skip from divorce. I learned much later in my life that they were not far, that the word separation had come up many times.

When the fighting ebbed years later, I was left with more anger towards them than felt possible, which is, oddly enough, when I think I started to actually love my parents. I could tell a hundred adorable stories about betting for hugs, about cute, curly-haired green-eyed Debbie instructing her parents in the way of simple emotions, about palm kisses, and butt tans, and miffed storytelling.

But that isn’t why I love them.

When I was 16 and being particularly shitty about needing to borrow my dad’s car to return a VHS to the video store, my dad and I started screaming at each other in the parking lot of our condo. I believe I refused to return the video unless I got to drive in my dad’s (understandably much nicer) car. After yelling back and forth for 20 minutes or so, he called me a bitch, and threw the video to me. At me, would probably be more accurate.

When I was 9 we were running late for church, and I had dragged a chair in front of our aquarium to watch the fish while I brushed my hair. When my mom happened upon this scene, she screamed at the top of her lungs, “I HAVE HAD IT UP TO HERE,” gesturing to her forehead before literally just screaming, letting the frustration peel out of her high and long and loud. It was the first time I ever remember being afraid of her.

Because I grew up in the 90s, when my dad would be freaking out about this or the other dish that Allan and I used but did not put in the dishwasher, we would say, “Dad, don’t have a cow.” To which he would respond, “Don’t have a cow? I’M GONNA HAVE 20 COWS.” Before he would, with his tiny legs, attempt to kick us away from him and toward the offending bowl.

We would get into screaming fights at restaurants, have screaming “Family Meetings” which led to screaming family therapy. But somewhere around age 20 after the screaming, someone would apologize, there would a hand on the shoulder, a step towards forgiveness, quiet explanations, even quieter validations. Maybe it was because Mark died. Or maybe it was because in my mind my parents were becoming, blossoming: beautiful, dark, broken, and real.

Every time we fight, every time they frustrate me, or treat me like a child, every time their advice insists I have not grown up, or their actions prove that they have not either, I want more of them. I admit there are better parents in the world, parents who are better with money or who are more communicative or less selfish. But these are my parents. My issues are theirs, and their issues are their parents, and back and back and back. They are in my blood, pulsing through my legs and brain and heart. Coming home to them is like finding myself over and over again.

My mom and dad came to visit my first year in grad school, and took me and three of my friends out to dinner in the North End. After we had eaten, my dad was, as he tends to, dominating the conversation with his not so back door bragging. Over coffee and tiramasu, he explained, “Our family is based on one thing: L (long pause) O (long pause) V (long pause) E (longer pause). LOVE.”

And strife. And communication. And needless criticism. And needed criticism. And attention. And knowledge. And honesty. And some lies. And, yes, love. L-O-V-E.

This is a Memoir: Week 7

To be Good

I came to Jesus for the first time in 1996 while sitting in the balcony of one or another mega church populating suburban southern California. My family was singing (something Jesus frees something Jesus is Lord), raising our religiously diverse voices to the heavens: my Dad, the recovering Catholic; my mom, the Unitarian; my brother, Allan, the newly converted Christian; and me, the pubescent and desperately unhappy teenager. The projected words disappeared from the large white screens on either side of the stage as the band quieted. The singers hummed and swayed and the pastor, a white man in his early 30's said, “If anyone out there who wants to accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior, I want you to come and stand here at the altar and let the Lord God change your life." A hook behind my sternum, a turning in my stomach.

I walk tearfully down the stairs to the back of the church before processing up the aisle. People shout congratulations as I walk by (as if at 14 I am capable of making a lasting and/or reasonable decision) or pat me on the back, propelling me forward. I get to the foot of the stage and stand awkwardly with four other people as the pastor begins to pray. “Something something new believers, something peace, something blessing, something walk with them. Amen.” He ushers us into another room where 30 chairs have been broken up into pairs. I find a seat and an elderly man sits across from me, “Do you understand the wonderful decision you just made?” He asks excitedly, before explaining church, fellowship, and prayer in as few as 5 minutes. He gives me a piece of paper where a different prayer is typed: “Jesus, something sinner something separates me from God something Jesus's sacrifice something closer to God." It is appropriately vague, non-denominational, and strange as fuck. I fill out a card with my name and address, and leave the room to find my family waiting in the pews. They all hug me at once, happy, for now, that I am happy. And I am happy because I know this will fix me.

That, my friends, is an altar call.

I started going to church with Allan the next Sunday, my head and heart full of hope for my much anticipated counter cultural community. This wouldn’t be a place where women wore makeup or short skirts; it wouldn’t matter what you looked like. Every person would, of course, be valued for who he or she was, every person’s gifts would be used, and no one would ever feel left out or inadequate. Uncomfortably square and an obsessive rule follower, finding a place where I didn’t feel cast out made up the entirety of my social aspirations. I wanted to fit, and I didn’t, anywhere and everywhere.

Except this church had its own hierarchy. Our relatively youthful youth pastor had a thinning hairline, a small protruding belly, slightly hunched shoulders, and lovely straight teeth. A decent guitar player, albeit abysmal singer, this was a man who clearly had not felt cool a day in his life. But here, he was everything. Steve was warm, smart, and could talk about secular books and music. He could draw little graphs and charts in black marker on the whiteboard in the high school ministry room singlehandedly turning inexplicable truths into nifty, easy to understand pictures. In my last year of high school, he would strike up a friendship with one of the 17 year old girls in the group. She would tell everyone that Steve had told her that when she turned 18 they were going to date. I graduated before this was confirmed, so they just might have.

The youth group itself was compiled of the children of regular parishioners (kids who spoke only in Christian platitudes and kids who were overtly rebellious), douchebro Christians boys (with whom my brother hung out), good Christian girls (thin and soft spoken and desirable), and me. It was just like high school only worse: everybody thought they were going to heaven.

I can't think back on this time, on that church, on those people, without anger. I actually think it’s safe to say I hate most of them and hope they harbor deep, lasting shame for being such huge dicks in a space created to be inclusive, which, of course, says more about me as an adult, than them as teenagers. Perhaps I feel for my young self, a victim of rejected sexuality and blindness to my unique blend of quirks. Perhaps you never recover from slights perceived while your brain still develops. Perhaps I cleave to the past, this past, as the beginnings of my will-be knowledge of the depths of the world's damage, millions of years of suffering tucked inside the heart of one lonely teenager. Or perhaps I'm just no good at letting things go.

I tried to quell thoughts of lust, to convert all of my friends, to be so thoughtful, so connective, so enchanting that every person who met me would wonder, "What is it that makes this woman so amazeballs?" If this question had ever been posed to me I would've shouted, "JESUS," at the top of my lungs. Except no one ever asked. I was plagued by sin, convinced my unhappiness was a punishment because I couldn't be good, at least not good enough.

My body was the ultimate punishment. The thighs that rubbed together, the upper arms that jiggled and expanded, the too big breasts, the width of my shoulders, the roundness of my stomach created the tone and picture of a Failure, my whole body as sin, an embodiment of my gluttony.

Because I had an eating disorder. But not a glamorous one, if there is such a thing. Not one where people frown and feel sympathy, marvel over small weights, where other women secretly envy you because you have the self-control to just not eat or the wherewithal to throw up (I have been those other women). It’s the kind where you eat 8 pieces of toast in secret, where you push wrappers deep into the trash so your mom or your roommate won’t find them, where you wander around the grocery store figuring out which food you can eat the fastest, which food will make you feel the worst, that night and for days afterwards, because you just can’t stand yourself. The inside of a binge is barren, infested, hateful. You keep putting bite after bite into your mouth as quickly as possible, don't think, it will slow it down, only stop when you think you will die if you eat another bite. Because maybe, if you are lucky, you will.

And I was fat. Am (albeit no longer mournfully). And they would not let me forget.

My parents: “Do you need to eat that?”

My brother: “You don't want ice cream.”

My grandma: “Why don't we go to an OA meeting while you're visiting?”

My grandpa: “All you need to do to catch a man is lose those extra pounds.”

My sister: “You're fat because you have unexpressed anger.”

My cousins: “Did weight watchers stop working?”

My aunts and uncles: “Are you really happy at this weight?”

People I work with: “I cut out carbs and lost 20 pounds like snap!”

But it might as well all have been that stranger driving by me in his truck one day, as I stand with a friend on the sidewalk, laughing. As he speeds by he yells out the window, “Lose some weight, bitch!”

At 14 I was full to bursting with self-loathing and bread. Too responsible to cut myself or let my grades slip, I took it in, shame slathered across the toast with the butter. My self-esteem was a jenga game, a tower of crisscrossed blocks that they would take away one at a time, thoughtfully, carefully, until…

This is the child who came to Jesus that day in 1996. Who came weeping, crazed, terrified, but still trying to be good, still wanting for goodness because perhaps it was the only thing that could combat the truth she already knew deep, deep in her little, broken heart: I am bad.

Sixteen years later I would return to Jesus quietly, almost in secret, with the still same truth tucked firmly beneath my breastbone.

This is a Memoir: Weeks 5 and 6

Half

When my brother died, I did not remember his name. I didn’t know what he was like as a child, or why he never got married. I didn’t ever share a house or car with him. We never went to the same school. I had never been to his apartment, never spent time alone with him, never met his girlfriends when he had them. I knew he loved flying, and so I like to think he wanted to be free, but he never told me that. I wish this story could tell him, but it won’t.

My dad, Michael, first got married in 1952 to a beautiful, blue-eyed, Catholic woman named Betty. The only time I believe I’ve seen Betty in person was at my brother’s funeral, so I remember her primarily as the woman in the wedding picture on my sister Adrienne’s mantel. Michael is tall, dark, smiling widely, showing off the tremendous gap in his front teeth his current dentures have eradicated. His eyes are alight: he is young, he is an American marrying an American, and he has waited his entire life for this. He is carrying Betty across some invisible threshold, and she is laughing. Her right arm thrown across his back, her mouth open, curly brown hair framing her heart-shaped face. My dad rarely talks about her now, but I know from that picture that, no matter what he says, they were in love. They were happy, even if only on that day.

Michael and Betty would have 6 children between 1955 and 1964: Paul, Adrienne, Mark, Jeffrey, Michael (who we called Suppy), and Caroline. I cannot give true details of how it fell apart. Michael doesn’t want to be the bad guy, so when he tells the story, I don’t trust it is the story complete. Betty did not believe in birth control. Betty did not want to go to therapy. Betty did not talk to him, did not tell him she loved him. Betty felt guilt about sex. But Michael had affairs. Michael worked such long hours and was never home. Michael was the one who left. In the end for all of us it seems to only matter that Michael was the one who left.

He left when he met my mom, Margie, or he was separated and got divorced so he could marry Margie, or he was already divorced and dating another woman when he met Margie. I don’t know whose story to trust, but however their marriage came about he met Margie when he was 42 at an Overeaters Anonymous retreat in Lake Arrowhead, California. She was 19. I like to imagine her crooked smile is what drew him in, although it was most likely her young, curvaceous body, her smooth skin, her emotional and sexual openness. They went on a walk in the moonlight, and he asked if he could kiss her. Darker still than the wedding photo, grey streaking his hair just above the ears, fit, intense, that gap in his front teeth mirroring his soul’s openness, she said, “Yes.” What else could she say?

Michael and Margie married within 6 months and then spent the next seven years pulling each other back together. Michael from poverty, from Betty, from his feelings of failure as a father, Margie from her own father’s failure, her mother’s depression, her responsibility as the oldest child who learned quickly to walk softly. My brother Allan was born in 1979, blond, chubby, excited to be alive from the first moment. I was born two and a half years later in 1982. All the things I don’t know about my brother who died I know about Allan. I was raised in the room next to him; his face, his cruelty, his adoration were the defining moments of my childhood, my adolescence, my adult self. He was to me what Mark was to the rest of Betty and Michael’s children.

Mark. His name was Mark.

The summer he died, Michael and Margie were moving from Virginia to Las Vegas. At 70 Michael had attempted to go back to work and after nine months understandably exhausted himself. Margie’s degree in Civil Engineering made Las Vegas, the single fastest growing city in the United States in 2001, the perfect new location. I had just finished my first year of college, and Allan had just returned from doing mission work for six months in Central America. Margie found a job before Michael found them a home, so the four of us moved into a two-bedroom rental house in the retirement community where my Grandpa (my mom’s stepfather) owned his own house. This would be my last summer living with my parents, and it would be spent sharing a room with my emotionally overbearing brother in a city where I knew no one.

I actually spent the first two weeks after the semester ended staying with my sister Adrienne in Newbury Park, about an hour north of Los Angeles. My consistently tumultuous relationship with Allan throughout the entirety of my childhood made me cleave to my sisters, Adrienne in particular. She is 25 years older than me, and my earliest memories of her are nothing short of worship. She is bright, wild, tender, charming, judgmental, protective, fierce, and beautiful. Perhaps she was not all these things the day my mom took the picture of us meeting for the first time, me a dark-haired bundle she is holding to her chest, the smile on her face revealing her deep love of our father, of all fathers, of motherhood, revealing her full-to-bursting heart edged with hurt and distrust so deep, feelings she cannot escape and will, in the near future and for decades after, face with bravery and sideways grace.

My relationships with Betty and Michael’s children have always been rife with conflict, although I did not know it when I was a child. In my mind, there was no separation except age between my older siblings and myself. Yes, we had different mothers, but I would never, and still never, call them my “half” siblings until I have to explain why my brother Paul is only 5 years younger than my mom. I cling to the closeness, to the love inherent in the word brother or sister, because the reality is uglier. There is still strife. I am still the daughter of Margie, a different wife, a different mother than Betty, Michael is still married to my mother, he still left theirs. Michael and Margie paid for my college, they bought me a car, Michael existed in close proximity to me my entire childhood. They are the ones he left. Allan and I are the ones he kept.

That sad truth stains even Adrienne’s and my sisterhood. It hangs between us, a divider, a barrier we dance around until we can’t anymore. She has resentment towards me that is not mine to own, I have anger towards her which is not hers to bear. We are swimming in blame, sticky and binding. That summer, staying in her house, driving that new car, wanting desperately to connect, I was still, at 19, only a half person. I couldn’t ask the right questions and, even if I could, what would I have done with her answers? We wanted closeness, but neither she nor I, for those two weeks, could stand it. I drove from Newbury Park to Las Vegas gratefully, not knowing how soon we would all return.

I couldn’t find a job that summer. I applied to about a hundred places, made a hundred follow up phone calls, and nothing. During the day I would sit and read, or watch my mom do exercise videos in which she would unsuccessfully try to make me participate. Allan and I would stay up late in the night talking, sometimes about our idea for a Radiohead Aerobics video, sometimes about Jesus or our collective sadness. And when we didn’t talk I would stay up pouring my host of teenage angst into a maroon, canvas journal. “You are disgusting.” “You are alone.” “No one really loves you.”

On the evening of July 20th, my brother Mark got into a two-man pusher prop plane with his coworker, Chris. Mark, at 41, worked his dream job at the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Ontario, California, a 30 minute drive from where I went to college. He flew around the Pacific southwest picking up various engine parts so he could repair classic planes (the planes from his museum were even featured in Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor). He didn’t have a wife, or children, but he loved his job, and he loved to fly.

They had flown to Palm Springs to see two jet fighters that had flown in from Russia and were coming home late in the evening. We don’t know when it happened, but the small wings on the nose of the plane stabilizing the craft as the propeller pushed it through the air fell off. Two tiny wings gone and down they went.

When the FAA retrieved the plane’s radio from the debris, there was nothing to hear, no cries for help, no maydays. Just radio silence as the ground approached, as though they both already knew they were dead, knew that within moments their bodies would be spread across the desert, no longer men but ears and arms and torsos.

On July 21, we were unpacking our new house in North Las Vegas. Allan and I had been fighting all day, as we were wont to do, and I was punishing him by playing the music in my room at deafening volume (what I believed to be a worthy sacrifice). He burst into the room shouting at me to turn it down. I glared at him over my box of DVDs. He stormed across the room and angrily cranked the volume knob to silent.

"WHAT?" I yelled at him.

"Mark died."

Please, God, do not let me say what I will say next. Stop time, stop my mouth, quicken my mind, but please, do not let me ask it.

"Who?"

“Mark. Our Brother.”

I appeared in the kitchen. Did I float there? Did I crawl? There is nothing between the word “Brother” and what is next. My dad sits at the kitchen table: one hand holds the phone to his ear, the other scrapes across his chest, clawing at the cotton and skin between his fingernails and the heart that is deconstructing. “Why God,” he cries out. His mouth tears open, there, in between his front teeth, still his soul, black and blank. “Why did you take my son?” Michael’s hands grasp at his shirt, pulling the fabric taut. He wants to tear it off, to bear his breast, to curse God. He wails, long, loud, a scream, a sob. Everything inside him is torn. Everything inside him is broken. Somehow he is on that plane, he is piecemeal across the desert, he is dead. Except he is not. It’s worse. His son is gone. His son is dead.

Michael is no stranger to loss. He was born the second son (the lesser son) of Charles and Bessie in Cairo, Egypt on November 1, 1929. Charles would abandon their family before Michael would turn 11. Michael would leave school and go to work sweeping the floor at a clock shop, Michael would care for his younger sister, Micheline, because his mother was too busy doting on Armand, his older brother. Michael would overhear his Aunt Alice saying to his mother, “Go to America without Michot. He is worthless. Leave him and take Armand.” There would be moments sweeping that floor when he would stand still and listen to the tick tock of the clocks intoning his aloneness. Tiny Michael, cardboard in the bottoms of his shoes to cover the holes, would be waiting for his family to leave him. He would run away to find his father, a soldier in the British army camped out near the Suez Canal, in the middle of the night. After being lured into a strange man’s home with the promise of a warm bed, that stranger would try to rape him. Michael would escape out the window and sleep under a park bench. Days later he would come to his Father’s tent. He would burst in, breathless, “Dad!” Charles would turn and stare down at him. “What are you doing here?”

There were nights when dinner consisted of bread and water, and there was night after night after night when he would fall asleep to the groan and vibration of his empty stomach. For his fourth birthday his mother brought home an unprecedented treat: a bunch of bright yellow, perfectly ripe bananas. After the feast Michael took the last one and, so afraid his older brother would steal it from him, slept with it under his pillow. When he woke up in the morning and reached his hand expectantly into his hiding place, he was met with the soft, wet mush of squashed fruit.

And then there was the war. Michael sat in an open air movie theatre, having left his six year old sister home alone, when there was an air raid. As the planes opened fire Michael started running. A machine gun bullet zinged past his ear as he ducked into a concrete shelter. He kept running, no time to think about what was happening, about what could be, about why God would so punish him. Get home. Find Micheline. Drag her under the bed. Hold onto her. Hold so tight.

When I imagine Michael’s childhood home, it is not a normal house but a prison: cinderblock walls, barred windows, feelings of hopelessness swirling across the floors with the dust bunnies. He is a boy trapped inside a nightmare hoping to wake up to something, anything, but this.

At 20 he will board a boat to Boston, and his awakening will begin. He will have 25 dollars in coins in his shoes, because he knows when he leaves the boat they will take all of his money. Because they can. But he will step onto American soil all the same, and he will be free, finally, ultimately. He will think he can leave all the terror in Cairo. He will think all he has brought with him is his pride, his possibility, his resourcefulness, and his 25 dollars.

Except Michael is never more than a breath away from that little boy in the clock shop. No wealth, no wife, no child can make him a man. He is trapped there, in the old shoes, hands full of squashed banana, stomach void, listening to Aunt Alice proclaim his worthlessness. I know that boy. I know him because even as he ages Michael clings to that broken child. Who is he without him? He doesn't know. And does it matter anyway? He is already lost. "What are you doing here?" He has been lost for so long.

We leave the new house half unpacked and drive to my sister’s home in Newbury Park. Slowly every sibling drags themselves across the country and arrives on Adrienne’s doorstep laden with the new burden of our decreased numbers.

The day before the memorial service my mom and I shop for Hawaiian shirts in a Wal-Mart. Hawaiian shirts, T-shirts, jeans, and khakis made up the entirety of Mark’s wardrobe. To my sister’s semi-formal vow renewal a few years earlier, Mark had donned a Hawaiian shirt made of silk to officiate the ceremony. We rifle through the men's section. It’s a relief to be away from them, from all of them. I cannot contribute to the communal grief. My memories seem trite, paltry in comparison to the man’s lifetime being described on repeat.

I am 10 years old and sitting on Mark’s lap facing him. His fingers are laced around my lower back, so close to my ticklish sides. I am prodding his chest, looking for a specific offender. I had heard my Dad on the phone with my sister-in-law Patrice (Jeffrey’s wife) weeks before; he had begged her to have Mark go to the Doctor. He would pay for it. A possible tumor near your heart is not something to take lightly. He would do this again for other sons, many times over. Tell him I will pay for it. Make him go. He went, and it was nothing. I am prodding that nothing now, a protruding part of his breast bone. “Is this it?” I ask. He smiles at me, “Yup.” And finally tickles.

This one is too big. This one is too red. What color will Dad want? Blue. Like Mark’s eyes.

We are driving in our van, Mom and Dad up front, Allan and Mark in the middle and me in the way back. Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” is playing on the radio, and I am singing along so loud I am almost shouting. I want my older brother to hear me, to think I’m talented. I am 12, already afraid my singing voice, my grades in school, my deep love for my family will never be enough to cover my multitude of failures. The van stops, and Mark climbs out. Then he leans back in, offering me his hand. “I’ll dance with you, Deb.” I grab onto him and dance into his arms.

My mom and I are reading Sympathy Greeting Cards, trying to pick one for my older siblings which will accompany the picture of Mark framed for each of them. Somehow, no card can touch on actual sympathy when read by those horrid fluorescent lights.

Mark comes to visit for his birthday, a short six days after my own. We go to the mall and movies (Mummy 2) and end up walking through Macy’s. I see a wicker purse plastered with huge, colorful flowers. I don’t have any money. My mom doesn’t care. Mark buys it for me. I carry it until the wicker bottom breaks, until it is a rag instead of a purse, and then store it carefully in my closet until I realize it will not bring him back.

We cremate what’s left of Mark’s body. Someone jokes that we should get a discount because we only have 75% of it. We all laugh. And when we are done laughing we are silent, for a moment or for hours, which is how everything feels this week and for weeks and months and years following.

Betty comes, but she stays in a hotel. She has already found every picture of Mark in her home, Mark as a baby, as a boy, as a man, and piled them into a locked drawer. At the memorial service she and Michael will hold each other for just a moment, knowing that deep underneath those years of resentment lies the only person in the world who knows what the other has lost.

Over a hundred people attend the memorial service, and I remember hardly anything of what is said. My Aunt Lisa asks me to sing. I can’t even make sound. I mumble something into the microphone and sit back down next to my Mom. One woman proselytizes about the hope Jesus offers. Even as a believer in Jesus, I am offended. Mark did not believe in Jesus. He always said he believed in the Force, which means he believed in either a powerful, benevolent wind driving all living things, or nothing. Michael’s cousins come dressed in black, and they stand out in the sea of flowers and colors. My eyes are drawn to them.

As the service ends, we move out onto the airfield. The three-plane V comes from the south. When they are over our heads one of the planes abruptly turns it trajectory west as the other planes fly northward. As Mark-in-flight moves into the horizon, I grasp for Allan. I wish I could confess to him what I did, wish he could exonerate me. But he is the wrong brother.

In March of 2001, Mark calls my dorm room. I’m in class, so he leaves a message. “Hey, Deb! It’s Mark, your brother. I thought since we’re so close, I’d come pick you up and take you to lunch. Give me a call. Love you.” I listen to it. I feel afraid. What will we talk about? What do we have in common? What if there is nothing to say? A week goes by, and I don’t call him back. A month goes by, and I don’t call him back. Two months. Three. The school year ends. The message gets deleted as my voicemail is reset. I stay with my sister for two weeks. I lie awake night after night in that terrible two-bedroom house. We move. Allan comes. Mark died.

Who?

I didn’t know life was short. I didn’t know about saying things you can’t take back. I didn’t know that a person could be wiped out, smeared across the desert like a moth under a rolled up magazine. I didn’t know that regret never ends, and that I would be 31 thinking of a one-word question I asked 12 years ago, feeling an ache in my chest so profound no time might have passed at all. I didn’t know I would someday count the one who died as the lucky one.

Six months later, in my dreams, he comes back. He says it was all a joke he was playing on us. We are so relieved. We hug. We cry. All of us. Paul, Adrienne, Jeffrey, Suppy, Caroline, Allan, and me. And Michael. Mark laughs, bright and free and so wonderfully alive. But I wake up. I creep out of my dorm room with my cell phone and onto the fire escape. The sun is just coming up, but I know he’s awake. He hasn’t really slept since the summer.

“Hello?” His voice is gravely, and he speaks quietly. My mom is still sleeping.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Deb! It’s so early.”

“I had a dream last night that Mark was still alive.” And then we cry.

“I didn’t call him back, Dad. He called, and I didn’t ever call him back.” I am surprised he can even understand me.

“It’s okay.” His voice comes out cracked, deep and worn down. It isn’t. Nothing is. It feels like nothing will be again. But because in this moment we both must cling to this untruth, he says it again, “It’s okay.”