Issue Sixteen

This creaky, old porch is the same one that I have spent almost every afternoon on for the last fifteen years. The screen gapes open in some places, the brilliantly teal paint is chipped. My best friend’s parents are too busy with their carousel of jobs and their habits and their special needs son to pay attention to home repairs. Or her, most of the time, which is why when the sun starts descending into the horizon line we go next door to my grandparents’ house for a home-cooked meal. She calls them Nana and Pa the same way I do, and they call her squirt or honey or little shit the same way they do me. They always slide bowls of dessert in front of us when we say we’re stuffed because they know we’re never too full for sweets. We’re both lanky and tall and freckled and mean, our bones always ache at this time of day from playing rigorously outside and we are starving. Nana tells us to wash the dishes or she’ll get a switch and being teenagers does nothing to dampen the impending fear that motivates us to the big, full sink.

After supper, we trek back over to her second-story porch to smoke Marlboros and wait on the neighborhood boys to come slinking around the corner of the house. We laugh and sprawl out on comfortable recliners her dad plucked from yard sales or the side of the road. The breeze picks up and we both do a little shiver. I stare at her and I love her so much that it doesn’t surprise me anymore how much alike we have grown up to look. Exhaling smoke, I gaze over the rotted banister and at the green, stinking pool. I stretch, and her voice interrupts my daydream of the wildlife beneath that murky surface out there.

“Where you’d get that scar on your hip? It looks like a burn, a perfect circle and I don’t remember it.”

This is the first time I have ever tried to summon my father back from the grave. I want his soul to take place of mine for a moment, just long enough to lie convincingly. If he could do anything well in the whole world, it was to modify the world into whatever he made up. But I am not him and so all I can come up with is, “It’s nothing, it’s from early childhood.”

I yank my shirt back down without moving my eyes from the bug-ridden pool in the yard. But she notices that I don’t even look at where she’s pointing and she knows me better than my own mother does. Her silence is an aggressive accusation. Her words prove my theory correct, “Stop lying to me, I’ve been around since you were two, I’d know. What the hell is that?” It makes me want to smack her the way she does me when I tell her somebody could drive a semi between the gap in those teeth of hers, but I won’t argue with her because she’s right and we both know that I’m hiding something. Part of me wants to tell her that I understand just as much as she does. My ignorance to the truth of my own story, in more ways than the chapter that she’s trying to read right now, pushes me to anger that cannot be silenced, “Dammit, look I really don’t know and I stopped caring. It’s just bullshit. You really want to see?”

Some wicked, misplaced giggle escapes my throat like a bubble blown in my stomach that floated out. It was gravity – nothing is actually funny. I sit the cigarette in between my lips and pull my shirt up to expose myself. I’ve got a constellation of perfect-circle scar burns across my ribs. She winces and turns away, mouth quivering, as if she hasn’t seen them 200 million times before but never known to look or ever noticed how much foundation I go through. I paint my face pretty and my torso plain with that liquid magic so that nobody asks me who or where or why.

She looks like she might pass out because we’ve been with each other forever and my memories are more worm than thought when they crawl through her brain. She’s not strong. She’s barely able to use her legs properly as she totters to the side of the porch and violently vomits into the weeds below it. Her mind conjures up what it must have felt like as all those cigarettes were extinguished on the thick cover of my rattling bones. I tell her it’s funny she’s noticing in fall, when it’s too late, because he only ever grows hungry when it’s sweltering out. I won’t tell her his name. After she empties her stomach of every bit of its contents, she wipes her mouth and closes her eyes. “I can’t see how you can still smoke.”

****

My mother comes into the bathroom to get the hair dryer while I am drying off from a bath. She says, “What is that on your hip?” I smirk, “You should know.” My voice is hardly above a whisper but she gets the point, she looks at me with eyes that are my own. Her lips curl in on themselves and she steals a continuous look that travel across my ribs, down to the top of my thigh. She shivers. “You know this is the only thing that has ever made me feel as murderous as my mother. Can I hug you over your towel?” She can sense my apology but I only say, “It’s been years. It’s not like you haven’t seen them before.” She leaves because she knows that touches are electric blue flames lapping my skin up, messy and grotesque, like a parched dog finding a puddle in the heat.

****
There is this boy I meet after the trauma that swept me into isolation. At seventeen, I am hostile and blunt and very into my education and liquor. He tiptoes into my world out of nowhere and immediately annoys me because he can barely speak my language. Yet, he clings like a gnat. He’s asking too many questions in his broken, deformed English that he knows I won’t answer and telling me jokes that I do not understand. He shows up at sunset on my mother’s doorstep searching for me on the first day I ever crack a grin at him. Somehow, my family falls more in love with him that evening on the deck than I ever will think about being and for that reason alone, he is allowed into my life. He cooks dinner with my soft-spirited mother and wraps Christmas presents with my spiny-hearted Nana. He never complains when I want to sleep through the day, he just sits beside me as I dream. I wake up to cut fruit and cigarettes beside my bed, and his fingers slowly moving across the surface of my skin.

When he sees the scars it’s because we are camping and before that, I hadn’t been in the woods with a boy for six years, but there is safety in his foreignness and his coming departure. When he saw my bare hip, his mouth formed a perfect O and he sadly stares. You could make beautiful out of ugly memory. Tattoo over. My sister did. I like that he doesn’t call them scars, he doesn’t mention that they are perfect circles and he doesn’t ask who did them. But he does scratch furiously at his own rib cage as he slips from the zipper door and I know he is burning up, though he doesn’t know why. A moment passes and he pokes his head back in, says he’s feeling sick, he’ll go for a walk and be back.

Wildflowers are clutched in his fist when he returns. He looks at me softer than any creature like me should be looked at and whispers that I should get these flowers drawn on my ribs to represent the beauty of uncertainty.

I still don’t know if he said what he was trying to, but I like to think he did.

 

 

Sydney Craig is a double major who really just wants to explore the world. She adores spontaneous road trips, antique hunting, photography that makes you feel something, and laughter of all calibers.

 

To say the least, my grandfather is old fashioned. Constant monologues about New York City in the forties, changes in technology, and how amazing the economy is has left me well versed in the mind of an eighty-five-year-old man. But the most striking of his stale views are those of women.

“Most women her age have hit the wall,” he was explaining one day. “Hit the wall” meant, in paraphrased words, that a woman had “peaked” and lost the sex appeal that gave her value. “But Audrey,” he continued, “is far from it.”

Audrey is his partner. Amicable, devout, at times frivolous. She kept my grandfather company after his wife passed. But in no way was this heavily lipsticked woman comparable to my grandmother.

The range of possibilities in my life have been created by my grandmother. Inspiration overflows from the white stock paper of her resumé. Successful business owner, seasoned globetrotter, cultured trendsetter, loving sister, mother, and grandmother. Rather than acquiescing in an early marriage, she secured a college degree. Once her business was thriving, she resolved to buy an exquisite New York apartment a block from Lincoln Center. With cash. Trips to the jewelry store grew in frequency until she became best friends with the owner. Precious metals and gemstones flooded her drawers. Ruth was utterly powerful.

She never followed the trail of tradition. In a jungle of misogyny, she slashed a path through thick, cunning vines. Ruth shared little with my mother’s mother: her style was extravagant rather than plain and she displayed only grace and class. And I’ve seen her cook only once.

I was small, probably four or five years old. Pigtails bounced next to my shoulders as I sat at the table. The tall, expansive surface enveloped my body and nearly covered my head. Gawking, as I did during every visit, I studied the stark whites of the kitchen, the simple oak cabinets, and the industrial refrigerator that I could have fit in six times over. A miniature Kermit the Frog found a seat upon the cubed steel clock that hung from the ceiling. Between pictures of my cousins and I stuck on by magnets, late afternoon light glinted off metallic gray.

The memory itself is faint but imprinted in my mind. Screeching, the microwave begged for my grandmother to collect her food, but she sauntered over with leisure. The usual smell of her house, a confusing mix of mothballs and incense, meshed with the odor of burnt plastic.

“I’m hungry!” I complained. It would only be a few minutes longer, she replied, proceeding to cook the dish despite the microwave’s plea.

After ten more minutes, a black heap steamed on my plate. Long, bony fingers delivered me a fork. My grandmother stood back and crossed her arms, proud, while I contemplated what I was supposed to do with that fork and a burnt brick of frozen food.

I thought of my other grandmother: full, soft around the edges. Her visits were always accompanied by cookies and presents and hugs.

“What should I make for dinner?” Beth would ask.

But my father’s mother was different, eclectic almost. The scorched meal had been microwaveable Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese. And Ruth had forgone the simple instructions, white type against red cardboard, attempting to unleash her own culinary approach.

When I hadn’t sampled the dish for two minutes, she shot me an insisting look. “Just try it.”

The dark crust resisted my fork at first, then slid right in. Beneath the charred layer was a golden cheesy river, steam rising from its stream. To my young eyes, it appeared edible.

I ate the mac and cheese. It was ambrosia.

I’ve never seen my grandmother cook besides that. And I’m not sure if you can call over-microwaving mac and cheese a method of cooking. But she wasn’t bad at it. She just chose to focus on other tasks.

—
When I discovered she had cancer, I cried for two weeks.

Ten years old. Mostly innocent. I wasn’t completely sure what that word meant. Cancer sounded like a black mold, steadily creeping toward her soul. It sounded like a parasite, arresting, petrifying.

“Her doctors are great,” my dad repeated before each time we saw her. But I couldn’t connect how the doctors were helping, as she grew sicker. After awhile, those recurrent words rung empty.

We started visiting more often. The smell I remembered from an earlier childhood, incense and mothballs, warred with medicinal agony. Tragic orange prescription bottles littered cold granite countertops. Any natural light left—there often wasn’t any; the sky was always gray—filtered through, casting long, orange shadows.

Visits were sandwiched by hugs. “Hi Grandma,” I recited as I embraced her. She had always been tall, lean, thin, but, soon, her ribs jutted against translucent tissue-paper skin. “How are you feeling?” I would ask, but I could never remember her answers. Everything was rehearsed.

The woman I was seeing was no one I knew. She was a shadow of the pill bottles, weak and watery at times, but mostly absent.

There was a last good day. The whole family was there, crammed inside her expansive city apartment. Windows sheltered the party from unfriendly autumn air while welcoming sunlight that emerged for the first time in a week and a half. All the pill bottles were hidden in the cabinets.

We ordered food from the Chinese restaurant down the block. Ruth was an auctioneer, delegating chicken lo mein and crisped halves of egg rolls to distant cousins. A tub of duck sauce splashed on the counter as she unloaded flimsy plastic bags from the sturdier paper bags. She organized a conveyor belt of a meal, designating the beginning, middle, and end of the line, commanding which side of the family to go first, micromanaging which plates were used with which food, —and keeping the pork set aside to maintain something close to kosher for Uncle Earl.

The apartment swarmed with energy. Nostrils flaring, my brother challenged my cousin to see who could eat the most hot peppers without crying. Teenage cousins stood bored in the corner, texting on pearled slide phones as I begged them to braid my wild hair.

Ruth rescued me from wandering window to window, munching on a vegetable dumpling. “Come with me,” she urged. “I have something to show you.”

I followed her confident steps past the closed doors of her bedroom. A lamp blinked on and revealed costume jewelry carpeting a bureau, imposter gems flashing across the room. Something that looked like an emerald reflected in her eyes.

I wasn’t sure what to do. There was a fortune of jewelry mere inches from my fingers. Tense, uncertain, I watched idly as Ruth began to hold up technicolor necklaces, earrings, and brooches

against my eyes. She unfolded my hand, which had frozen into a nervous fist, and began laying pieces in my palm. Her touch was cold yet assertive.

“This one.” She seemed to be chatting to herself, murmuring aside although I was in the room as well. A lapis lazuli charm, encrusted with gold leaf and hanging from a shimmering chain, collapsed into a small mountain. I studied the wondrous pendant while Ruth continued perusing.

“Hmm, and this one.” On a cream-colored pin, black ink drew a scrimshaw ship traversing the ocean. From the water, a whale’s tail waved a solemn hello. The brooch rocked in my palm, ship on rough sea.

Ruth spoke again. “These are perfect.” She dropped a pair of glinting garnet earrings onto my new collection. My birthstone. Beautiful, encased in a gilded frame.

Then, she folded my hand back into a fist, her touch still cold yet assertive, and left the room.

Sophie Lipset is a high school senior with a passion for creative writing. She began writing seriously at sixteen and attended the New England Young Writers’ Conference at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English. She focuses on creative non-fiction.