And so we enter. I am wearing my mother’s clothes, and my mother is wearing my grandmother’s clothes, and my grandmother is wearing velvet. Our hair is long, it is golden, it is identical, and this is one of our splendid illusions. My mother and my grandmother have strenuously, assiduously, dyed their hair to match mine. Now, when reminded, I dye it too. In this way, we resemble one another.

We sit in the same table every time. We have argued for ten years about the draft, the clang of the waiters, the noise. We have harassed maitre d’s, we have gotten up and changed tables mid-meal, we have weighed the case of sound against the issue of smell, and now at last we cling to the only spot that suits us, underneath a six-foot-tall statue of a giant breast.

This I love. This is home. We argue loudly, and by dessert, at least one of us has slammed our napkin down on the table and threatened to leave. Our arguments are sonorous; they are meaningless. We argue about books we have not read and politics we know nothing about. We argue about my mother’s sleeping habits and my grandmother’s eating habits and my inability to pluck my eyebrows evenly. We argue about my mother’s timekeeping, my grandmother’s worrying, about the mess I have left piled up in my room. We tell one another to be quiet—“You’re making a scene,” we hiss—and still we are no quieter, because this is what we do.

We make scenes. We frighten away boyfriends, lovers, strangers, and we do not mind, because we are together: together, we are glorious. We are effortless, inevitably overdressed, and we return on Sundays to the restaurant that knows us, that pours us free prosecco and sneaks us chocolates with the bill, where my grandmother flirts with the waiters and my mother and I shout at each other about politics, and where they save a table for us under the marble statue of the exposed breast, because this is New York, and this is home.

With them, I am beautiful. With them, the streets of New York spread out toward the rivers and come to occupy the whole world. With them, the world does not exist south of 57^th Street; and the sky and the earth are made of city lights.

This is what I am so afraid of.

***

I may have had Cinderella, but I do not remember it. The stories I remember most vividly, the ones which I begged my mother to tell me, which I repeated to my friends with pantomime wordiness, were her stories—stories of business trips and old lovers who took on the characteristics of dryads and giants, stories which I or she have made into myth and from which even now I’ve never tried to sift out truth. I made her tell me about her escape from rabid monkeys in the Punjab. I made her tell me about a businessman in Cairo who mistook her (dressed, naturally, in a djellaba) for a beggar and struck her; how she fell and hit her head; how he spent months nursing her back to consciousness, and how, when she opened her eyes, he proposed. She may or may not have been a spy, but she was almost certainly the woman about whom Jimmy Carter had famously impure thoughts. (“I danced with him once,” she says, “and he made that speech not long after.”) I made her tell me about the men whose hearts she had broken, and the men whose hearts my grandmother had broken, and about the counts and poets in seven continents who longed for them, and the financier who, twenty years on, still called my mother for advice about how to win my grandmother back.

And then I was eight, and in the back of a taxi, and my mother was telling me about a love affair in Rio, and I remember—though she does not—the rare tantrum I threw, inexplicable in my grief. “You’ve already done everything,” I wept. “What’s left for me?”

***

So I set sail. At seventeen, I moved to England, as far as I could from our familiar restaurants, from waiters who knew us, from home. It was, predictably, largely an illusory escape. My mother and I still argued, all the more splendidly for the distance between us, about whether or not to straighten my hair, whether or not I had adopted the English tendency toward frump.

England was one of the few places my mother had rarely been. She liked to complain vaguely about its food, its weather, its unfashionable footwear. It was nothing like Paris, where she had lived, or like New York, which was home.

I clung to it with atavistic stubbornness. I did not brush my hair. I wore skirts my mother hated. I never wore make-up (this I could not bear to admit to my grandmother, who even when being rushed to the emergency room insisted on a judicious layer or two of mascara, but I boasted about it to my mother in the hopes that it would annoy her). I hurtled into a faithfully domestic relationship with Brian, a waistcoat-wearing Catholic who got annoyed when I dried my dishes on the wrong side of the sink. (“Couldn’t you at least date someone with a motorcycle?” my mother pleaded, barely mollified by the fact that he was, at least, an actor.) I went by my middle name. I got my boots muddy and carved out a routine: I found a sandwich shop on Oxford’s North Parade where the owner knew me, and turned up at seven in the morning in my pajamas for take-out coffee.

I did not come home for Christmas that first year. The thought of our traditions—the pageant, the Christmas Eve party at the bookstore, the inevitable fight when my mother arrived a half-hour late for dinner—galvanized me. They terrified me. If I went home, I would wear my grandmother’s jacket and let my mother straighten my hair. I would pluck my eyebrows and then we would go to dinner, and shout, and swan, and then I would never leave.

Instead I visited Brian in England, where his mother served roast pork and we all played board games and drank tea around the kitchen table, where I marveled at a full-stocked fridge and grew restless at such easy conviviality. In five days, nobody argued. I began emailing my mother New York Times op-eds, desperate in the hope that she would disagree with me.

***

I took this as a sign I had not yet weaned myself off home. My visits, when necessary, were brief. There were no rabid monkeys in the Punjab, nor amorous businessmen, nor broken-hearted financiers, but there was a house, several college degrees, preparations made with Brian toward a partner visa, English citizenship. My grandmother had broken every heart in New York, I told myself, and my mother had fought off wild beasts in every country in Asia, but England belonged to me. I took pride in learning new shibboleths, in the fondness I developed for cider in Sunday pubs. I scandalized my mother by informing her that I enjoyed baked beans.

“You’re becoming so English,” she would say, throwing up her hands at my perverse domesticity. For years I took this as the ultimate affront, a reminder of how I had failed to live up to the legacy of the Burton women, unencumbered by husbands or other disloyalties. Only now do I realize that she missed me.

***

And then my mother and my grandmother flew to Oxford for my master’s graduation, and we changed tables ten or twenty times at an Italian restaurant on North Parade. We argued over the kitchen’s limited supply of Dover sole, my mother’s wariness of carbohydrates, the veracity of the Italian recipes. For three days, my grandmother’s mascara was perfect and my mother and I made increasingly ridiculous statements that could only be countered with argument.

But Brian was there, now. Unfailing polite, impeccably English, he sat discomfited and silent, straight-backed and rational. He did not raise his voice. He made helpful mediating remarks and tried to change the subject.

I was furious. “You’ve got to argue, too,” I insisted. Our family wasn’t like other families. The love we showed was messy, grand, performative. It bubbled over out of conflict. His silence, I felt, was a judgment on us, on our way of doing things.

“How could I?” he said. “I haven’t got a view.” He had never felt more foreign to me.

I found myself missing New York, and the ease of it, and the overwhelming beauty of city lights that do not go out. I started to miss the arrangement of telephone numbers, the availability of everything bagels, the restaurant on 57th Street with its plaster statues of giant breasts. I missed arguments. I missed home. All my stubbornness reared up in defense of what I had left behind. We broke hearts, we escaped monkeys, we almost brought down governments. We were the Burton women: beholden only to each other and to the illusion we did our best to create, and to the city that we liked to think was watching us.

I asked Brian if he’d ever thought about moving to America.

***

The last time I was in New York, we three sat at our customary table, in the shadow of the enormous plaster breast. The waiter hugged me and snuck us glasses of prosecco and told me how much my grandmother had talked about me in the years that I’d been away. We drank too much and stuck our forks in one another’s food, and then, dizzy with the joy of homecoming, we drank more and argued long and loud about aimless things.

The bill, the waiter said, was on the house. “Your grandma’s missed you,” he said. “She’s been waiting for you to come home.”

So we stumbled to the coat check. So the girl at the counter, watching the other patrons turning toward Broadway, asked us if we were going to see the show.

“You must be new here.” My grandmother slid her fur onto her shoulders. “We are the show.”

So we walked out into the city that would never end.

***

Rumpus original art by Liam Golden.

Related Posts:

• Weekend Rumpus Roundup
• Notable New York: 5/20-5/26
• A Zealot and a Poet
• Notable New York: 5/13-5/19
• Notable New York: 5/6-5/12

Watts O. stood six foot four, had flaming red hair and wore round gold-rimmed glasses that John Lennon would have liked. He saw himself as a Renaissance man, raised on a farm in Minnesota and then educated at both Carleton and Oberlin Colleges. Later as he rode the rugged plains of China, he read aloud the Romantic poets to his trudging mule, shared the wisdom of Shakespeare with his probably baffled manservant, and waxed poetical about the purple hills in the distance.

By all accounts, he made friends easily with the Chinese and was wildly successful at spreading the Gospel. Under his watch the Congregational mission in Shansi Province grew many times over. He built a hospital, schools for the Chinese children, a library and roads that proved useful for decades. He enlisted Red Cross aid for Shansi and raised needed funds for famine relief from congregations back home. The Reverend Pye’s efforts were tireless, although his journals reveal an exhausted figure. At the age of forty-eight, he was thrown from a mule out on the trail, his chest stomped upon by the animal. Soon TB filled his weakened lungs and he died. He left his wife, Gertrude, and a five-year-old son, Lucian (my father), and a compound of missionaries in search of a leader. Most of all, he left behind those Chinese out on the plains and in the mountain hamlets who would no longer be visited by the surprising white giant of a man.

I like to imagine him out there on his beast of burden, vast grey country on all sides and a book of poetry open in his hand. It is a romantic image and, when I think only of it, I can almost forget why he was there. But then there is the fact of the small leather bound tally book. In cribbed penmanship he catalogued the Chinese names and numbers. On a “good day,” the totals reached the twenties or more; on a “bad day,” a mere one or two. He gave sermons to famine-starved citizens at windswept crossroads. He stayed up late into the night listening to potential congregants weep about their fallow fields. He ate paltry meals at their tables, and in return for his kind and attentive ear, they accepted his offer of salvation.

It was then that the miracle ostensibly occurred. And although he had offered relief to some hearts and minds, the fields remained withered and famine was widespread. The country he left behind in 1925 when he died was rife with turmoil caused by internal battles and external invasion. The presumption that Chinese souls needed saving and that an outsider’s religion could do so was soon held up as yet another example of colonial arrogance. The Communist Revolution began the process of eliminating Christian chapels in cities and distant enclaves as China headed in an altogether different direction.

During my childhood as the war raged in Vietnam and conflict tore apart campuses and cities, I did my best not to think about the missionary side of my family and certainly never boasted of the Reverend Pye’s successes. For me, he was a blatant example of American imperialism. I was ashamed to claim him.

That is, until our parents were moving out of the family home and several generations of possessions had to be dealt with. From a dark corner of the attic, I pulled boxes that held my grandfather’s journals and hunkered down to skim the faded onion skin pages. I unfolded the linen cloth and studied the intricate, carefully drawn map of a rural China from long ago. Out of my grandfather’s traveling Bible fell copious notes for sermons, and when I opened his tally book, the leather made an audible crackle.

And here is what I found that day: a writer. In his journals, the Reverend effectively described camel caravans climbing mountain trails, orchards laden with exotic fruit, foul-smelling village streets and the many voices and attitudes of the Chinese around him, as well as the remarkable beauty of a place unspoiled by industry. He also recorded in more clichéd language his Christian beliefs and assumptions, but it was in his descriptions of every day life that I found him not only genuinely appealing, but also not naïve about the complexities of his position there.

“If the Orient seems strange to us,” he writes, “we should remember that we are seen just as strange to the Orient. The Chinese think us dirty, lazy and superstitious in the west. Dirty, because although we bathe, they detect a very decided odor. Gertrude had a sewing woman last winter who had never been near foreigners before, and after three or four days gave up the job, as badly as she needed the money, and the reason was that she simply could not stand the foreigners’ odors. Mr. and Mrs. Gilles were asked one spring not to walk into a neighbor’s peach orchard where they had been accustomed to walk, for it was thought that the crop failure was due to the odor of their bodies. They think us dirty, too, for the way we use the handkerchief and replace it in our pockets. To a refined Chinese, the sight of a person blowing his nose in the handkerchief and then putting it back in his pocket is actually nauseating. The point in dispute is an excellent example of how the different races may regard the same matter differently and each consider themselves innocent and the other guilty of the same offense. We think the Chinese wanting in cleanliness because, though they do not expectorate into their handkerchief, they will dust their shoes with it and wipe out the tea cup before pouring your tea. Exactly the same distinctions are made to show that we are lazy and superstitious.”

Reverend Pye expresses his intent to be open-minded and unbigoted and seems amused when he senses the Chinese judging him based on his race. One late afternoon, he wrote in his journal as he sat outdoors at a rough-hewn table in a poor village: “A crowd of about thirty watchers is pressed about me as I write, discussing the typewriter, the mysteries of foreign letters, my filled tooth, and what it can ever be that makes me ‘white,’ instead of brown or yellow. They have come to the universal belief that since we drink milk or use it in our food that is the explanation. One man has with great satisfaction just informed the rest that anyone of them could very shortly become just as white as I am, were he to use milk for a few months. They think our color is only artificial. I have heard tell of the story of a Chinese school boy in class when asked the color of the Negro replied, ‘black.’ And the American Indian? Copper color, was the reply. And the Englishman? White was the reply. And what color is the Chinese? Man color, proudly answered the youth. And so it should be.”

In other journal entries, he used the ornate, poetic language of his time to capture the transporting qualities of the countryside: “We lay around, letting the old sound of the mourning doves and the sight of the hills sink in. They sound and look just as they did when we were youngsters back home. Man and his language change while nature and the birds remain. We do miss the dear home faces. But will rest and get new visions for the days to come. There are lots of visions you can’t see, but just feel them, and after all, feeling is perhaps only the soul’s way of seeing. Something that comes to us as light as melody and as color, thrilling us with the sentient harmony that we often hear ripple from the throat of the music-made bird: that same thing that came to us times without number in childhood, and that comes to us now on run-away days like this one, under blue skies and green woods, and despite all that has gone before, and all that may come afterward, and it makes you take off your hat to the joy of living.”

My grandfather’s words revealed him to be a more complicated and nuanced person than the single-minded zealot I had presumed him to be. Before I knew it, he was transposing himself into a fictional character in my mind, because fiction is the best way I know to explore the contradictions inherent in being human. Through odd twists of the imagination, the Reverend Watts O. Pye became The Reverend in River of Dust—a man who is both foolish and wise, witty and overly serious, all seeing and yet blind.

But because The Reverend in my novel is ultimately an invention, I have him experience a crisis of faith that my grandfather never had. The real Reverend Pye died believing in his own convictions. And yet, for me, it is his written words that suggest a more honest and startling miracle—one of a heart and mind revealed across both distance and time. His was never actually a simple story of a man, a mule and a map. And the miracle he promised remains dubious at best. But if one does exist for me, it is buried in the fascination of getting to know an ancestor so long dead and in coming to terms with the moral complexities of his mission.

***

Listen to Virginia read her essay:

***

Rumpus original art by Clare Nauman.

Related Posts:

• PK
• The End of The World
• The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Erika Rae
• The Rumpus Interview with Karen Prior
• A Brief History of Swans

But not Madeline and me. We are PK’s, preacher’s kids, and we have the full run of St. James Episcopal Cathedral in South Bend: from the sanctuary to the administrative offices and everywhere in between. At seven and five, we are still young enough for this to be cool.

Most Sundays, we followed dad back to the sacristy, a tiny room accessed through a hidden door behind the altar. A stained-glass window turned the weak Indiana winter sunlight into spangled blue and gold: this was the most magical place that I knew. Golden (not gold, golden) censers filled with frankincense and myrrh hung from chains on one wall. Tall torches were stored upright against the opposite wall. Two closets with sliding doors held only vestments: cassocks (robes), surplices (more robes), chasubles (robes again), stoles (heavy, embroidered scarves), and girdles (ropes made of fancy material that our dad ties around his waist). Dad and the deacon hung their robes up. Underneath his robe my dad wore a white collar, black shirt and pants. He was over six feet tall and had a full beard and mustache. I was proud that he looked like no-one else’s dad.

Someday I would be an acolyte. Then I would get to carry the lit torch down the aisle in the dim light, or be veiled by wisps of smoke rising from the censer as I swung it gently back and forth. When the time came for me to walk towards the giant crucifix suspended above the altar, everyone’s eyes would be on me, even the black, unmoving eyes of the twelve apostles in the stained glass windows that lined the red-carpeted, wood-walled sanctuary.

***

My parents met at church. My dad was preaching in central Florida, and my mom was visiting his church as a guest. She liked his sermon, and when he shook her hand at the end of the service he liked her smile. They ended up out to dinner together, and they talked about the things they had in common: a Florida upbringing, a strong faith, and an intimate knowledge of hospitals (my mom and my father’s mom were both nurses). I imagine that he made some bad puns to try and make her laugh, and that when she did laugh he admired her dimples. She was in her late twenties, and he was a debonair five years older.

Dad had been engaged once before to a woman who broke the engagement when he decided to become an Episcopal priest. The rigors of being a priest’s wife were unappealing to her: staying late after services and listening to parishioners’ problems in the fluorescent lights of a church basement; playing guitar for the Sunday School classes; joining the women’s prayer group; cooking a dish for every potluck; offering rides to church to the disabled; participating with enthusiasm in every church event from the Strawberry Shortcake Festival to the Christmas Pageant; and raising children solidly in the faith.

Preacher’s wives, like politician’s wives, are first and foremost givers of their time. Their moral standing must also be impeccable: divorce, children from another marriage, jobs outside the “safe” realms of elementary school teacher or nurse, and telling racy jokes are all considered out of bounds for a preacher’s wife. My mom, a devoutly religious woman, thought she was up to the challenge.

Mom sang in the choir, helped in Sunday School, and got us out of bed every Sunday morning. Her most treasured activity was acting as a member of the Order of St. Luke, which meant that after every communion she stood off to one side with a handful of other women in the Order, ready and willing to lay hands on any parishioners who needed prayers. A lot did. My mom and the other women would put their hands on the parishioner’s head or shoulders, close their eyes, and silently pray.

***

When I was ten I attended Camp Mac, a Christian summer camp, for the first time. I wore my dad’s Florida Gators hat with the raggedy brim and referred to it as my “hole-y hat,” which I thought was hilarious. I was  somewhat famous since Dad was the visiting priest for the summer, which meant that he led chapel each morning and evening and for the rest of the day got to stand around with his hands in the pockets of his Dockers and talk to the counselors: adolescent boys with a starry-eyed love of God.

My dad’s first love was God too, and his passion beyond preaching was talking with teens who reminded him of himself at that age: gobsmacked by his love of the Lord and misunderstood by peers who seemed to just want sex and alcohol. As an adolescent in the 60′s, my dad was a Christ-loving Eagle Scout, devoted to his mother. He had never smoked pot or listened to Bob Dylan. When I asked him about the hippies he shook his head and said: “Immature.”

After college and seminary school (grad school for priests), my dad’s first job as a man of the cloth was as youth counselor in a small parish in Florida. He thrived. He became a father figure to a devoted group of idealistic teenagers. Eventually he moved on to be a priest, then Dean of a cathedral, but his heart was always with the teens. He couldn’t wait to raise his own.

“Father!” A pimply counselor yelled. He caught up with us on the path between the chapel in the woods and the picnic tables. “Father, I have a question about the Gospel of John…”

As he spoke with my dad, I walked on the other side, chest puffed out. He might have been everyone else’s Father, but he was my dad.

***

We shared Dad with the parishioners. He worked six days a week, seven if there was a funeral, wedding or holiday that fell on Saturday, his day off. We never spent Christmas Eve or Christmas morning together as a family because dad had to officiate at the services. And he was on call 24/7: death, disease, divorce, drugs; blessing a newborn, blessing a new house, blessing the sick. When he was not at work, Dad was usually so wiped out that he retreated to the couch in the basement, where he lay on his side and watched spaghetti westerns and reruns of M*A*S*H.

But my parents also shared my sister and me with the parishioners. They were 250 extra family members. They watched us grow up. They tousled our hair and gave us treats when we were good, and they admonished us (or our mom) when we were bad. They knew our birthdays and they asked what we were learning in school. This was nice, but it also meant that five hundred eyes were watching our every move.

Preachers’ families have been the subject of scores of sociological studies, nearly all of which discuss the “fishbowl” effect of the ministry: the family is on constant display as a model of Christian upbringing, and children are expected to behave in accordance with their preacher parent’s high moral standing in the community.

The congregation is always watching us, and, like tabloid readers crowing over Britney Spears’ latest breakdown, they’re just waiting for us to mess up.

There is an expectation for PK’s to be angels, but an assumption (possibly even a secret wish)  that we will be devils. Of our famous PK brethren, Martin Luther King, Jr. epitomizes the former, while Tori Amos—whose song “Icicle” is about masturbating while her pastor father conducted a service downstairs—decidedly represents the latter.

“Very little explanation is needed when two PK’s meet; because of their common background, they have almost instant rapport,” writes Douglas F. Campbell in The Clergy Family in Canada: Focus on Adult PK’s. This is true—I feel an instant empathy when I discover that someone is a PK, even though we might not be alike in any other way. When my childhood babysitter, also a PK but a decade older than me, crashed her first car, I cringed: I didn’t know what it meant to crash a car, or even to drive one, but I knew that she would face an onslaught of admonition and advice at church the next Sunday.

Young PK’s are encouraged to repress their budding sexuality, and the expectations encourage extremes: Katie Perry switched from singing Christian pop to kissing girls, and Melrose Foxx revolted completely by becoming a porn star.

A few PK’s manage to break the stereotype and have it all together: Condoleezza Rice (Secretary of State under President George W. Bush) and Woodrow Wilson (28^th president of the U.S.A) come to mind. And then there are some of us who may not be all there: Vincent Van Gogh (cut off his ear) and Anne Heche (claimed to have been abducted by aliens).

Our ranks include Jessica Simpson and Marilyn Manson; Jane Austen and the Wright Brothers; even Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote The Antichrist. Marvin Gaye is our cautionary tale: he was fatally shot by his minister father in a family argument.

***

When I was little, Sunday School meant coloring pictures of a blonde, blue-eyed Jesus kneeling on the ground and suffering the children to come unto him. We passed around a ring box with a tiny seed in it and heard the parable of the mustard seed, which was like the Kingdom of God in that it is small, but if you sow it with faith than, lo, ye shall reap. My mom played guitar while we sang “Jesus Loves The Little Children” and “This Little Light of Mine.”

The classes got smaller as I get older, as more and more parents let their kids drop out, and there were fewer games, songs and stories. At age twelve I volunteered in the church nursery one Sunday a month. This was a chance to play games again—puzzles and dolls and make-believe—and a reprieve from the service, which we could hear through an intercom in the nursery without having to be quiet and sit on the hard wooden pews. The toddlers and babies liked me; Adam, a tow-headed two-year-old who always smelled like syrup, was particularly enamored. His family was poor—I once heard my parents talking about how they needed extra support from the church—so I always hugged him as soon as he arrived and saved him his favorite toys.

Confirmation class started the year that I turned thirteen, and we were issued thick King James Bibles with no pictures. We had assignments to read dense verses and write analyses of them (“Abraham begat Isaac begat Jacob begat Joseph…” Who wrote this crap?) To make up for the new lack of fun in our Christian lives, the church hosted Youth Group hang-outs in the dingy basement of an adjacent building, the top floor of which was a halfway house for women. Like casinos or strip clubs, the Sunday School and Youth Group rooms lacked windows.We sat in beanbags, listening to Christian rock (Jars of Clay was a favorite) and talked about what Christ meant in our lives. My mood changed weekly: sometimes I was all in, wanting to belong and believe, and sometime I faked it.

There was more learning going on at home. I was no longer cute. My limbs were gangly and for a terrifying week I was sure that the mismatched lumps growing on my chest were cancer, but I was afraid to ask about it: “breasts” was not a word used in our home. My face was hardwired with braces and glasses. I was also less awed by my Dad largely because I was spending more time with my school friends, who thought parents were “lame,” and I was more exhausted by my duties to be a good representative of the Christian child. After services, I began to retreat into my dad’s office to read while my parents socialized in the church basement for interminable hours and Madeline ran around with the other kids. When I actually became an acolyte, the long-awaited dream, I dreaded waking up extra-early on Sundays to go to church and don my robe, walk down the aisle, and sit through my dad’s sermons. He did not believe the old minister’s adage: “No souls are saved after twenty minutes.” Papa loved to preach.

Around this time we got the Internet at home. It was dial-up of course, but if I closed the study door and put a couch cushion next to the modem then no one upstairs could hear the screech of the computer connecting to the World Wide Web. This was new territory: chat rooms, AIM, and porn. I was thirteen and had yet to kiss a boy or see anything interesting beyond the illustrations in Our Bodies, Ourselves. I was not even allowed to watch MTV. So, one night, when the rest of the family was asleep, I searched AOL for “sex.”

Clicking through the photos, I was deaf and dumb to the rest of the world, and I jumped when I heard the door squeak. It was my dad. Every time I clicked to close the screen something else even filthier popped up. He was standing behind me, and when all the screens were closed I turned around, holding my breath. Maybe he didn’t see?

He looked like he’d just caught me setting fire to puppies. He shook his head slowly back and forth. “I can’t believe…” he trailed off, then started again: “A daughter of mine…” He left the room, and I shut down the computer and followed, but when I found him standing in front of the picture window in the living room, staring out at the dark lawn, I couldn’t go to him. “I’m sorry,” I squeaked, and went upstairs to bed.

We never talked about this again, but the sermon that week was about the Gospel of Matthew’s admonition against lust: “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away.”

***

By the time I started high school, my dad and I were at odds nearly every day. I argued with him just as vociferously about the role of women in the Bible as I did about my need for a later curfew. Madeline joined in a few times, chiefly on issues of how we were allowed to dress (everyone else was wearing Abercrombie & Fitch, but Mom said the advertisements for the store were soft-core porn). Dad was increasingly unhappy. His long-awaited teenagers wore jeans that were too tight and our choice of friends was suspect. We also questioned him too often, and we were not engaged enough in the church.

My dad wanted to be the best, which in his job meant being the kindest, gentlest, godliest man in the world, supported by a loving family living solidly in the faith. When he got angry or when we failed him as a super-family he couldn’t go to his friends and complain about it. Like many others in his profession, he didn’t really have friends in that sense—there wasn’t anyone he could be honest about being human with, even himself. When you’re a Voice of God, being human is a failure.

One evening, during a flavorless February in our northern Indiana town, my dad announced, with a slow, aggrieved shake of his head, that he was “tired of living, but scared of dying.” Pointing out that this was actually a line from Old Man River was a good way to start another fight, so I refrained. But it was a strange thing for a man of God to say. What fear of death hath he who belongeth to the Lord?

After the rigors of confirmation were finally over I decided that I no longer wanted to be an acolyte, and, in a surprising twist, Madeline refused to be confirmed at all. Apparently my accounts of the experience were sufficiently awful. Having once, naively, informed us that faith is a choice, my dad accepted these decisions. He shook his head slowly, released a big puff of air from his cheeks, and shuffled wordlessly down to the basement.

***

My faith was like a grain of sand in a bed. For weeks at a time I didn’t feel it, and I thought it might be gone for good, and then one night I would roll over and there it would be, itching like crazy. At the Easter Vigil mass—where we sit in a dark and silent church the night before Easter, mourning as the apostles mourned before Jesus rose from the dead—I wept. Jesus looked so skinny and sad on the cross. He died for us. For me. It was my fault. Jesus made my heart hurt, which was the way I felt when I thought about the Monkey Twins, two mentally disabled boys with mullets and misshapen faces, who got bullied in the hallway at school. Because He was so weak and vulnerable, Jesus stirred my deepest emotions, and I thought that what I felt was love.

But the one I really loved was Matt, my first real boyfriend and the star goalie on the high school hockey team. My dad hated Matt. He was two years older than me and had a car. He listened to Phish and toured with String Cheese Incident in the summer. He was anti-establishment, so much so that he boycotted his own high school graduation. He was also Jewish. Despite a casual friendship with Rabbi Morley Feinstein (as Rabbi and Priest they would, occasionally, walk into a bar together), Dad the Father was not comfortable with any of this. Matt and I were nothing like the teens he would have chosen to mentor. Nothing at all.

***

During my junior year of high school, a year into my relationship with Matt (over which my dad and I had mostly stopped fighting out of mutual exhaustion), I decided to throw a party.

Mom and Dad were at a clergy and spouse retreat in Michigan and they wouldn’t be home until Saturday night, so everyone was invited over on Friday. My sister was obligingly sleeping at a friend’s house. A senior named Eric offered his fake ID to get us a keg, and he rolled it through the kitchen door around six. We filled a laundry bin with ice and lodged the keg inside. The first few red Solo cups were half foam, but my girlfriends and I thunked them together and yelled “cheers!” anyway. Another senior, Ryan, had a bag of weed, and he sat down at the kitchen table to pick out the seeds and stems before he packed us a pre-party bowl. At six-thirty, everything seemed easy and free.

By seven, there were a few cars parked out front. Two and three, then eight, then twelve. Each car was full, because not everyone had a car and because most people planned on getting too plastered to drive. Kids from the neighborhood just walked over. The party grew exponentially. Every room was full. An unidentified couple dry-humped on the study couch and Ryan sold joints in my parents’ bedroom. At eight o’clock, I was drunk. At eight-thirty, the police arrived.

There were three of them. We were fish in a barrel. They walked up and down the stairs, collaring panicked teens and yelling: “Whose house is this! C’mon out!” I tried to cram myself into my bedroom closet with five other people, but someone reminded me that we were in my house. Downstairs, the police had detained nineteen kids. Everyone else ran. They lined up the offenders on an antique church pew that was part of our living-room furnishings and administered breathalyzers. Tony, a popular stoner with eyes at perpetual half-mast, was covertly passing out pennies for people to suck. He claimed, sotto voce, that the copper lowers the traces of alcohol on your breath.

I was sucking on a penny and sitting on my hands when my parents came in. From the foyer they could see all of us on the pew in the living room. The police must have called them.

Nineteen drinking tickets. My father was purple. When everyone was gone he screamed at me. I was an embarrassment. I was an abomination. I was a harlot. What will people think?

Later, my mom told me that the call from the police came in the middle of a folk group’s performance of a Christianized version of “If I Had a Million Dollars” by the Barenaked Ladies. She told me that the song, both the original and the Jesus version, was ruined for her now.

***

A write-up of the bust was in the local news box in the next day’s South Bend Tribune. Even our address was printed. The day after this ran, Sunday, everybody at church knew. Five hundred eyes shamed me throughout the sermon. I sat with my head bowed, praying: “Jesus, remember the Monkey Boys and how sorry I felt for them? Remember how I cried for your death and for your fragile body on the cross? Jesus, please, I am no longer one of the little children but can you still love me enough to get me out of here?”

He didn’t. Mom made me stay downstairs for the reception after church. I ate a jelly-filled donut and stood next to my sister, who scooched away. In private, she intimately understood my plight, but in public, she wanted only to be out of range of the shame rays shooting at me from every direction. Old ladies with pursed lips shook their heads. Young moms whispered to each other and held their babies close, as if I might eat them. The sad-eyed mother of a grown meth addict patted my mom’s hand in commiseration.

Only one person dared to speak to the Antichrist. Little two-year-old syrup-smelling Adam from the nursery was now a seven-year-old. He still had a sweet spot for me. As he walked towards me I felt the glow of impending redemption.

He squinted into my face, then squeaked: “You’re bad.” Then he turned on his patent-leather heel and walked away.

After church I sat down for the first of many punishments, writing letters of apology to the parents of all the kids who had gotten drinking tickets. The sun shone through the dining room window as I wrote in longhand on notecards provided by my mom—I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry—like a self-flagellating medieval monk. My parents passed by but neither of them spoke to me.

In the Gospel of Luke, the prodigal son spent all the money his father gave him on prostitutes. He embarrassed the family. He ran away to distant lands. He ended up working for a pig farmer. He had so little to eat that he began to crave the pigs’ food. Finally he returned home. His father received him with open arms, saying “this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” Sitting at the dining room table, bearing the silent treatment of my parents and writing out my own guilt on nineteen notecards, I wondered how far away I’d have to go, and for how long, to get that kind of absolution.

***

First photograph by Trieste Daily Photo.

Third photograph by Brent Bill.

Related Posts:

• A Zealot and a Poet
• A Brief History of Swans
• Spit and Mud
• The End of The World
• The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Erika Rae

Accidents happen though and I found myself in a family kind of kooky and creative. In the late eighties, while I was busy head banging to the scrotal yelps of Bad Brains and Black Sabbath, my older brother Vincent was getting his design degree at Parsons. Unaware I was even doing so, I tutored at his elbow. His bedroom in the basement of our humble Brooklyn house was the first laboratory for his glam-wacky aesthetic. Blue faux fur lined the walls. A retooled waterbed was rigged to look like it floated on a cushion of light. That good dresser from my parents’ trousseau repainted with black and white cow spots. He trekked out at night in a gold-embroidered unicorn blazer by Gaultier (yes, that one from the Madonna video) and hosted “surrealist balls” in a friend’s Tribeca loft, the bartender a stunning African model, topless but for strategically placed butterfly appliqués.

Who knew what any of it meant? “Design” seemed too flighty for my angsty, anti-establishment ambitions. At Vassar my long-haired self could be found enjoying high tea of all sorts in buildings designed by Saarinen, Breuer and Stanford White, completely ignorant of who these geniuses were. (Also escaping me: why did some girls wear jodhpurs to the dining hall without a stitch of irony?) Besides, I was reading Literature. I worshipped at the altar of High Art.

Life after school was defined instead by downtown tenement apartments and the pressing need for employment. I lived with Vincent for a couple of years in a cramped Chelsea flat – anything, we thought, was better than our crowded bridge and tunnel beginnings – and I found myself under his tutelage once more. This time he installed dramatic floor to ceiling Austrian drapes in our tiny living room to cover the exposed brick that he loathed – long before we ever had a stick of furniture and were forced to eat dinner on the floor. A window dresser by trade, he also employed me as his grunt. I was pretty good with a staple gun though and was able to play the starving artist while helping to push Madison Avenue handbags that cost half a year’s rent. It all still struck me as absurd, especially when it reached a fever pitch around the holidays. Saks, Bergdorfs, Barneys were our new temples of worship. Still, I felt a begrudging pride to be part of it, and lucky to do it with my brother.

Growing up, it had been Vincent who first took me shopping. After school we’d take the subway to the Village, to cavernous clothing stores in Soho like Parachute and Commes des Garcon, to places where striking, New Wave people hung out with wildly colored hair and outrageous clothing, where it was hard to tell sometimes who was a man and who was a woman, where it occurred to me that it might not matter. These people were more than just beautiful, or crazy, they had made art objects of themselves and the city their playground, as much as doing that kind of thing seemed silly to me.

Now that kind of thing was my job, and maybe even more begrudgingly I even came to see that it was important, especially considering that Vincent was living with HIV, and even more so when he started to get sick. He never stopped working though, or playing for that matter, and rarely ever separated the two. It was a good lesson for a younger brother who sometimes took himself too seriously.

One night, very late, for example, we were hanging a big round mirror in our apartment, suspending it not on the wall but up in the corner of the hallway, on an angle by the ceiling almost like a security mirror. The apartment was already filled with mirrors, one in the kitchen, two in the living room, two more in his bedroom. Vincent knew how good looking he was, plus, he told me, they made the apartment feel bigger. This new one went up surprisingly easily and looked great. Our reflection sort of zoomed in towards us and then away, disappearing into the ceiling and the narrow hallway hanging above our heads.

I walked back and forth beneath the mirror a few times to admire our handiwork. Full disclosure: I was also completely naked. Vincent had long gotten used to my habit and barely gave it a second thought, or look. No, I’m not now nor have I ever been a naturist. I just never saw good reason to wear clothes at home, especially for my brother’s benefit alone. We had bathed together. Grown up in bunk beds. What was there really to hide?

I had just walked under the mirror one last time when the wire on back of the mirror failed and it came crashing to the ground. The noise was incredible. Shattered glass flew everywhere. Vincent and I stared at one another in disbelief, mouths dropped open, our hearts pounding as time stood terrifyingly still for that moment. I was unscathed but for a tiny cut on my arm. Had I been a second or two slower it would have come crashing down on my head and exposed body.

Vincent had me shower off just in case there was any glass dust on me or in my hair. Then he carefully bandaged my arm while I stood there, still naked, in the tub. We were both still in a bit of shock. What if it had been Vincent, and not me?

Still shaking a bit, I offered him my arm. He approached it, a few different times, trying his best to be careful, then he just said it.

“Oh, it’s not like I’m going to give you AIDS from a Band-Aid.”

I never felt that piece of glass hit me, and it was a few minutes later that Vincent pointed it out, the tiny rivulet of blood making its way down my arm. We were brothers, we shared the same blood but now that prospect was a terrifying one.

***

It’s almost the holidays again but they are always a little bittersweet. Vincent died of AIDS around this time nearly two decades ago, on the eve of his last window display for his big client at the time, Hermes. It was to be a crystal winter wonderland. We had spent hours hot gluing “ice” in the form of shattered windshield glass to tree branches and experimenting with the perfect combination of artificial snows. Winner: Shredded plastic bags topped with shredded styrofoam topped with pearlescent white glitter.

The president of Hermes suggested we add Vincent’s signature Agnes B porkpie hat to that final display. Vincent had bought it on a trip to Paris the two of us took the year before. Graduating from a good school had provided me with plenty of credit card offers – even if it didn’t necessarily help me to pay them off. We ran off to the City of Light and ran them up with zest. We strolled the boulevards window shopping, and maybe doing a little real shopping too, the hat just one of a number of impulsive but oh so important purchases. Vincent wore the hat too when his chemotherapy began, to cover his baldness like those drapes and that awful brick wall. I figured that this admittedly poetic gesture, even if it was only in a shop window, was a fitting end of both our careers in display, but it was really the end of so much more. My heart was broken.

Not long after however, needing work once more, I answered an ad in the Village Voice and found myself the in-house window dresser for Housing Works, the AIDS/homelessness charity and their chain of upscale thrift shops. I was at NYU then, getting a masters in creative writing and imagining a completely different life. I guess though I had been paying more attention to Vincent’s work than I thought, or maybe he had shown me that the real source of inspiration was something that transcended category: design, fashion, literature, art. It was really all about the heart. My first holiday window included an artificial silver christmas tree planted inside a giant high top sneaker with a toy train set running around it in reverse. There was a David Bailey portrait of Mick Jagger in a parka hung upside down and, naturally, the perfect recipe for fake snow. Vincent’s spirit was at work with me that day no doubt, and through the five hundred other windows I did for Housing Works, as it was a few years later when I got recruited as a creative executive for a major fashion brand. I felt his surprise and his pride too. But still I was reluctant.

***

Sometimes I look at the tiny scar on my bicep and wonder if it isn’t the only proof I have of those frightening if wonderful years. They seem like a dream — but if Vincent taught me anything it was to follow my own, and accidents do happen, especially the happy ones, and after a bumpy ride in the corporate world I find myself a starving artist again, trying to write books in between freelance jobs decorating underwear showrooms all the while trying to keep my internet turned on. Vincent would be horrified at my return to bohemia twenty years past the usual sell-by date, but he’d probably be more disturbed by the Barneys that’s opened on Atlantic Avenue near my apartment in our native Brooklyn. Maybe though he’d look at my cluttered apartment, books and papers and all the wrong furniture and say, begrudgingly, “What a mess, what a crazy, beautiful mess.”

Related Posts:

• A Brief History of Swans
• A Zealot and a Poet
• PK
• Round Trip
• Osiris

We were in Plovdiv for a week for two reasons: It was cheaper to fly into Sofia than it was to Athens, where my boyfriend would begin a month-long fellowship in Greece, and I had always wanted to visit Bulgaria.

Sofia was our base. Sofia’s a melancholy city, full of post-Soviet atmosphere, communist block housing, stray dogs. It was the kind of city I was born in, but did not remember well. It rained almost every day we were there, but we had also arrived during a joyous time when the schools had graduated their seniors. Just imagine a weekend-long prom vomiting onto the streets. Limousines and Porsches lined the roads in a city where the average monthly income was equal to three hundred American dollars. Students rode in their cars, honking their horns incessantly, hanging waist-high out of the windows. They screamed, counting down from twelve to one, the grades that they’d passed: tre, dve, edin! Drivers hollered and honked back, shouting their support or frustration at the young men and women dressed up as if going to a gala, costume ball, or strip club. They did not look eighteen. They made me embarrassed of my flip-flops and twenty-dollar dresses that I usually took great pride in.

But each day in Sofia was ultimately a day closer to Plovdiv. Plovdiv was, where I was told, my maternal grandfather was born.

My paternal grandfather was born by the Black Sea, in Varna. He died when I was three. I only know him through pictures and brief appearances on home videos, where he sits, thinning, fading, ghostlike on the couch. He had a face like Al Pacino, but Pacino in ten more years. We wanted to visit Varna, too, but it was out of our way. One day I will return to Bulgaria for him.

My boyfriend (now my fiancé) knows that the love of my life is my mother, and I have always known that the love of my mother’s life was her father. She was raised on his knee, his only daughter. He was my Karo papik, a tall, heavy man who cried when giving toasts, whose speeches always ended with, “May we not decrease, but multiply.” He would palm two dollar bills in my hands on my birthdays, fives, tens, as I grew older. His gifts were always separate from my grandmother’s, a secret. He trembled as he handed them to me. There was so much love in his body, and though he lost his shape, lost so much weight, near the end of his life, he still cried when he watched the Bulgarian Olympians march down the Athens stadium, cried when Bulgarian music came on the international radio. My mother was moved when I told her I’d be visiting Plovdiv. Tell me everything, she said. Don’t you dare forget anything.

So in Plovdiv, on our first day, we dropped off our bags at the Hotel Odeon, and began walking.

Waiting for my crepe, I noticed a woman in her mid-forties or fifties, standing with three other women, just a few feet ahead of us. She caught my eye, smiled widely, almost as if in recognition, and suddenly approached. She had dark hair, a Slavic face, round eyes, a sharp nose and jaw. She touched my arm and started to speak excitedly in Bulgarian. I smiled dumbly. I pointed at my chest and shook my head. “I’m sorry. I speak English.” She leaned back, a question now in her eyes as well as on her lips. I kept shaking my head. “Sorry, sorry,” I repeated. She smiled once more, briefly, hesitantly, her round eyes, just as big as mine, filled with a strange disappointment. She walked back to her group, and as they resumed their conversation, they turned to look at me every now and then.

How do describe that moment, but simply: I felt so stupid, like I had rejected a sign from the universe. I told my boyfriend: “I should’ve said something in Armenian. Maybe they were Armenian. Maybe they recognized me.”

He laughed, glancing at them. “Why would they recognize you? You’ve never been here.”

“My mother,” I said.

“Didn’t you say your mother only visited here once as a young girl? And wasn’t she like eight?”

“That’s not the point,” I said, folding my arms across my chest.

“Maybe that woman was the tourist, and thought you were the local. Maybe she wanted to know just how good this palachinki place is that we’ve been standing here for fifteen minutes.”

“Ha, ha.” But I wondered if that was even possible—could I pass for Bulgarian? In Sofia, as I walked through Maria Luisa Boulevard toward Vitosha, past churches, mosques, and synagogues, past ciganis singing for change in front of the Central Market Hall, I was surprised by just how difficult it was to identify the ethnic groups. Sofia is home to Turks, Armenians, Roma, and Jews beside ethnic Bulgarians. But it was the Roma I could most easily identify—they were darker than the rest, and they were the ones singing. But if a Bulgarian, a Turk, and an Armenian were walking down the street toward me, out of the joke of my dreams, I could not tell you who was who. This was a first for me. In LA, I can spot us a mile away. In Germany, I could show you a Turk or two. But here, for whatever reason, my judgment was clouded, I could not see as clearly. Perhaps, I figured, that was because there wasn’t as great of a difference as I thought. Maybe in Plovdiv, I could be confused for a Bulgarian.

And is this not the traveler’s dream? Why we seek out in our guidebooks the most local haunts, the holes-in-the-wall? So we can feel one with the group, as if we belong, to deceive ourselves into believing that tourism isn’t inherently an uncomfortable experience for everyone involved. I had a friend say once that you could “do” Prague in three days. Three. I was there for a month and it was not enough. I like to get familiar with a city, as intimately as possible so as to rid myself of the terrible suspicion that I’m only exploiting the city for a few pictures, anecdotes. For a story to tell my mother, and all of the world. To be confused for a local means having as clean a conscience as possible when traveling.

And to be confused for Bulgarian, especially! Land of my grandfathers’ births. The country that gave life to my mother’s greatest love. For a second I felt so aware of myself, my family, our collective history. It was a magical moment, one that all tourists want. That Eat, Pray, Love reaffirmation of the meaning of life. A silly tourist pipe-dream. Because a second later, I was back to where I started. Confused. Oddly hurt. What did this woman want to say to me? Why could I not understand it? Perhaps she knew my grandfather, perhaps she liked my shirt.

We finally got my crepe and walked on. On our trek towards the Old Town, I carried with me a new loss. I had failed. Failed what exactly, I didn’t know, but in less than thirty minutes, I’d fail again.

* * *

I was staring at a bulletin posted on the graffiti-ed exterior white wall of what I’d soon learn was an Armenian school. For now I was perplexed only by the poster. It was a notice of death. I had seen these before in Bosnia, where my boyfriend was born, and where we traveled together the previous summer. I thought it was a Slavic tradition. But the death notice I was now staring at in Plovdiv was in Armenian. There was a black and white photo of a young man in its center, and a brief obituary below, in our curious print. In appearance, Armenian script resembles that of Georgia, our geographic neighbor, and, oddly, after a few drinks, Ethiopian. I could read Armenian—spent a lifetime at my mother’s dining table on the weekends, being forced to read the books that we had brought with us from the Old Country. Still, the words looked so strange to me, the meaning not coming together, until I squinted, peering closer, the man’s face blurring.

My boyfriend tapped me on the shoulder. “Is that a church?”

I took two steps back and looked up, following his finger. He was pointing at the round dome of a church, barely visible behind the white wall.

“Vedran,” I said, taking a few more steps, “I think we’re right outside the Armenian Quarter.”

I had read that there was a sizable population of Armenians in Old Town Plovdiv, and, as in Jerusalem, there was even a designated “quarter.” It was on our agenda: we had hoped to find it at some point, to, I don’t know, take pictures? All I know is that I wanted to see it, and then see what happened once I got there.

We followed the white wall down the narrow cobbled lane, curving left and right until finally we arrived at the entrance of the walled compound that was marked with a poster out front. “The Armenian School,” it said in Bulgarian and English. It also professed that the school was the first secular one in the city, established in 1834.

And my first thought: Did Grandpa go here?

I stood there, at the bottom of the steps, staring at this poster. And then I heard it. Voices speaking in Armenian. My heart thudded. I turned around to see an elderly couple approaching, speaking to each other in an accented Armenian, their arms hooked. They took their time climbing the stairs, the women stepping on each stair with both feet, pausing, and then tackling the next, her husband beside her, vocal in his support. At the top stair, another man appeared—he must have come from the compound, I figured, which was, only moments before, gated. He was middle-aged, salt-and-pepper hair tied in a low ponytail, and wore a crème-colored suit. He shook both of their hands and thanked them for coming.

Armenians, I thought! Armenians! Armenians! Armenians!

I didn’t wonder why this was more wonderful and frightening than being surrounded by Armenians in LA, where I was raised. Then I was only thinking, Armenians, Armenians, Armenians!

Suddenly, it was as if the clock struck Armenian. They appeared outside of their pastel-colored houses, coming down the road, past the cherry trees and house-museums, climbing these stairs, and there I was, standing at the foot, mesmerized by it all.

Then, just as they had appeared, they were gone, vanished inside this compound. I watched it for a minute or two before Vedran said, “What are we doing? Let’s go inside.”

My legs were shaking.

The gate wasn’t closed, and we entered through it quickly, pretending we knew where we were going. We took an immediate right because to our left was a building, its doorway occupied by Armenians, the same pony-tailed figure we had seen minutes before now talking to two old men.

We stood maybe twenty feet from them, and when the man turned to look at us, I turned away. In front of me was the church. Surp Gevork was written across the archway. Below it, an image of Christ, the text around it, translating to: I am the door. But the literal door of the church was closed. If the Armenians weren’t going to church services, what were they all doing here at four in the afternoon?

“You could ask, you know,” my boyfriend said, nodding at the men casually glancing over at us in between smokes of cigarette.

“Let’s explore,” I told him instead.

Next to the church was a khatchkar, or Armenian cross-stone, engraved with a large cross surrounded by flowers, interlaces, and a curved peacock resting on top of a rosette. The khatchkar was mounted on a granite platform, which was inscribed in Bulgarian on the left and Armenian on the right, both saying the same thing: that 1.5 million innocent Armenians were killed during the twentieth century’s first genocide.

Nearby was the actual primary school mentioned on the poster outside. There was a basketball court in front of it, and it was this basketball court that did me in. I knew that even if my grandfather went here, that he never played basketball—was there such a thing in 1930s Bulgaria?—and this thought alone was devastating. Something was here now that wasn’t here before, when my grandfather was alive and young and lovely. I started crying. And I kept crying. I kept wandering from the basketball court, to the school, the memorial, the church, and back again. I couldn’t stop. My mascara was running, my nose was running, and I knew the men were still there by the unnamed little yellow building, watching me.

“Go talk to them. You know you want to talk to them.”

“What would I even say?” I bawled.

“How about, ‘Did anyone know Garbis Voskanyan?’”

I shook my head and wiped my arm across my nose. “You don’t understand. I can’t!”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know!”

Vedran looked at me pityingly. “You know you’re going to regret it if you don’t.”

“Don’t you think I know that?”

“Then go do it.”

“I’m too emotional right now,” I said, trying to calm myself, put into words what I was feeling. But frankly, I was embarrassed to ask if anyone here knew my grandpa. Another Diaspora Armenian, they’d think, seeking connection. I knew how silly I was being, how unoriginal. It made me uncomfortable. It made me turn away from the powerful emotions building inside of me, doubt it all. I grew hard. Maybe they’d pity me and give me false information, I began to think. Maybe they’d try to get me to donate money I didn’t have.

“We’ll come back. We’ll come back once I call my mom and get more information.”

“More information about what?”

“I don’t know. We’ll come back. I have to call my mom.”

I wiped my face and took a big breath, started to walk towards the gate. But there was no need for composure. The men had already disappeared into the building. We were alone.

We went down the stairs silently and began trying to find our way back to our hotel. I picked a cherry off a low-hanging branch, and swirled it in my hand. My uncle—my mother’s brother—had told me to taste the fruit that hung in the Plovdiv trees, that it tasted like nothing else in the world, but I had no water with me to wash it. As I was setting it down in a raised flowerbed we passed, Vedran stopped me. He picked his own cherry, then put it in my hand. I took a picture of it, though I didn’t know why. Together, we placed them in the flowerbed, where only a few pebbles decorated the soil. The cherries were without stems, and they looked like a swollen heart resting on the dirt.

A few moments later, we saw three men waiting outside a house, as another was locking it up.

“Faster, old man. We’re already late,” the one in the blue vest said.

“You are older than me, bidza,” the houseowner replied. They were speaking in Armenian. As they walked past us, I scrambled to find my camera.

In the picture I took, the first one I showed my mother when I returned home to LA, there are four old men walking down a narrow cobbled street of Plovdiv. The branches of the cherry trees hang low above them, and the Armenian compound is visible in front. One man with shock-white hair, in a grey jacket, has his hands clasped behind him. Any one of them could’ve been my grandfather, but him especially. Those hands. When I showed it to my mother, she understood, and went to bathroom to cry in private.

* * *

 “I don’t understand what you’re saying, Mom. Are you saying Grandpa wasn’t born in Plovdiv?”

We had gone back to the hotel and I was lying on my stomach, with the laptop in front of me, my mother’s face on the screen. The internet connection was bad; I kept restarting Skype every few minutes, but the message was clear and unchanging. It appeared that my grandfather was born in Nova Zagora, an hour’s drive from Plovdiv, a drive we weren’t planning to take, a city we didn’t even know existed.

I had called to tell her how surreal that experience was inside the Armenian Quarter, but now she was saying that she had spoken to her mother recently about my trip, and my grandmother had paused and then told her that she didn’t think he was born in Plovdiv after all.

“But she was the one who told us he was from Plovdiv, wasn’t she?” I asked, confused.

My mother nodded. She seemed both tired—I had woken her up—and excited. She was talking fast but kept rubbing her eyes, like she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing. But I was the one who just had a deeply emotional experience that now was tainted.

“I thought it was Plovdiv, too. But she seemed so sure of it, that it’s not. She said the name of the real city just popped up in her head, and she knew, without a doubt, that that’s where your papik was born.”

“All this time,” I asked, my voice getting loud, “and she didn’t even know where her husband was from?”

She frowned and put up her hand. “Naira.”

I looked over the screen at my boyfriend, sitting on the armchair, watching me, mouthing, “What, what?” I threw my hands in the air in a helpless gesture.

“But Mom, you went to Plovdiv as a kid. You remember that?”

“Of course I know I went to Plovdiv, but your grandmother says that that’s where your grandpa’s aunt lived. We had all gone to visit her, apparently.”

“But you don’t remember her, right?”

She paused. “No, I don’t.”

“Mom, Grandma’s getting old. I’m sure she recalled the past more accurately twenty years ago than she does now.”

“Sweetheart, I don’t see how this changes anything. But if this really matters to you, then why don’t you just go ask the people you saw today if they heard of him? He used to work for a prominent blacksmith, I think.”

Yeah, I thought, and ended the call. I’ll get my answer.

* * *

I put off the visit to the Armenian Quarter until our last day in Plovdiv. We have time, I kept telling Vedran. Old Town Plovdiv is relatively small, and we’d walk past the same restaurants, the same museums maybe six to seven times a day. I found things to do. We visited the Art Gallery & Museum Philippopolis on three separate occasions: the first to view the art of the two-story Hadji Aleko House—the paintings inside as well as the stunning design and architecture of the house, with its big parlor and ellipsoidal ceiling; the second time to drink frappes at its outside café, beside the fallen magnificent trunk of a tree which seemed to split into four fingers, like an open palm that overlooked the entire town; and third, to talk with the gallery guide about the old Bulgarian movie “After the End of the World,” in which a Jewish boy and an Armenian girl fall in love in the poorest neighborhood of Plovdiv.

But then it was time. We found our way, navigating the cobbled streets, passing the stray cats that served as guards to the souvenir shops (and served to differentiate Plovdiv from Sofia). We walked past the little flowerbed where we had deposited our two cherries three days before. We stopped there, amazed, and incredibly moved. The cherries were no longer there, but now tiny basil-like leaves sprouted from the flowerbed, some of them already revealing their red petals. I kissed Vedran. We continued.

The Armenian compound was pretty vacant. There was no hint of the large group that was present a few days before, only five children now playing basketball in the courtyard, four boys and a tall girl, and a woman who sat on a bench, shouting in Bulgarian at one of them. I didn’t know what to do, so we watched them for a while, until someone who looked like a security guard exited the school door. I thought he was going to ask us to leave, but he only sat down next to the woman, didn’t even glance at us. I hesitated, thinking about what I was going to say. Vedran nudged me forward.

In Armenian, I asked the guard if we could go inside the church. He looked like he didn’t understand, so I repeated my question. He was old, wore glasses. He looked so kind, like someone I could know. He put up his hand, his five fingers outstretched, then returned inside the building.

Vedran and I took a seat on the bench and watched the children some more. The girl was blonde, the boys, dark. She played well. I felt pride rise to my throat. Five minutes, I thought. He was probably going to get the keys, someone to help us. I grabbed Vedran’s hand.

Then another man came out of the building, a little younger. He waved his hand in a follow-me motion, and we obliged. The church was small, very small, and smelled the way all Orthodox churches smell, like something damp. I examined the peeling walls, the murals of biblical scenes faded, colors quieted. I passed the baptismal font, and there, the man finally spoke up. I strained to hear him, to understand, but his Armenian was more than just different, not just accented like the elderly couple I had heard climbing the stairs—it was off, it was wrong, it wasn’t fluent or clear. What was happening, I thought. I must’ve looked confused, because finally he mimicked cradling a baby. I nodded and smiled to tell him I understood.

I asked him if I could light a candle, and I blew on my index finger to show him. He nodded and retrieved a cardboard box. I put whatever bills and coins I had on me inside the box and took one candle. I lit it, dug it in the sand, praying for the health of my living family, and for peace and rest for those deceased.

It would be so simple, I thought, staring at the flicker of the flame. Just say his name. Just ask. Just turn around and ask: Do you know a Garbis Voskanyan? He worked for a famous blacksmith. He left for Armenia in 1946 or 1947. He cried at everything.

But would he even understand me? And then, in my chest, in the pit of my stomach, I suddenly recognized the depth of my fear. That, yes, he’d understand, and he’d have an answer, and that answer would change everything. Thinking my grandfather was from here deepened my experience of Plovdiv. I felt closer to the city, to the people, and to my own family. I felt the most comfortable I had ever felt traveling. So often, we travel to abandon the old and discover the new, but it was the reminder of my past here, the remnants of the things and people I left behind, that transformed the cherries of Plovdiv into giant hearts, that changed the faces of strangers into familiar shapes, that made a country I was simply visiting a home.

I looked at Vedran and knew what he was thinking. I smiled, and shook my head. No, I would not regret this. I would not ask. I stepped out of the church, turning around one last time and crossing myself in the Orthodox tradition. I stared at the candle I had lit, then put one foot behind me.

***

Rumpus original art by Russell Christian.

Related Posts:

• A Brief History of Swans
• A Zealot and a Poet
• FOLK TALK: Small Walks
• Help Vela Celebrate Unsung Women Writers!
• A Different Kind of Travel Writing

—C. M.

“Grief requires time.”

—Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

Osiris pitches a tent at nightfall. Two children—a boy child and a girl child—trail him, their feet moving over small stones clacking together in the starlight. Dew creates small trails of water at the reinforced seams of their pants, seeps into the cotton fibers and sinks its way down to the bottoms of their rubber-soled shoes. An amber haze leads from the mouth of the father, who mutters and makes abrupt movements with the arc of his hand through the air. He motions for the boy to help him move the poles deeper into the softer earth, close to the river. It, the river, appears in passing cloud cover and disappears again. 

The girl child watches, sometimes tugs at cloth where tent is pitched over lean pole, pole that seems reluctant to stay moored in earth. Osiris smokes a cigarette as he pitches the tent, throws its stub into the river, calms himself with a sharp exhale, then starts again. The tent—a riverside constellation that, if imagined in narrow-eyed vision, could almost resemble the triangle of stars in the sky—is up now.

***

My Korean mother leaves me on a fall day in the 1980s. I don’t know the year, only that it is cold, and she—who peels red apples in one unbroken skin, massages my calves when they’ve fallen asleep from sitting too long—is very suddenly gone. At night, I search the streets for her. When I return to my father’s house, he stands in front of me, accusatory, drunk: Your mother came to see you, didn’t she? He plucks the desire straight from my closed lips, but the truth is she doesn’t come back, and it is two decades later when I go to see her. She sends me a letter when I am in a Buddhist monastery in the south of France, and finally I know where to go and what to do: Go to Korea. Go to my mother.

Like all thwarted desire, I contradict myself. In the monastery, I want to forget. Safe to be motherless and fatherless. At night I sleep, and in the morning I wake up so early I cannot think or remember. Cold water and soap to wash my face, flossing the night before so that the morning requires only toothpaste, toothbrush, and a swill of mouthwash if there is enough time.

In 2009, I live on three different continents. On the cusp of its arrival, in November 2008, I try to cancel the flight for a round-trip ticket to France that I’d bought in September, fearing I’m being impulsive, vaguely aware that I move a lot and seemingly on a hairpin. I am in my 20s, living in New York, and cannot stop thinking about my Korean mother. When I call the travel company, they tell me the ticket is nonrefundable, nontransferable, and cannot be canceled. I am almost relieved that the decision is made for me. I leave New York and head, with one layover in Madrid, to Bordeaux. What to bring: Towels, sheets, sleeping bags, personal items; alarm clock; flashlight and umbrella; warm clothing and footwear for rainy, windy, and cold weather in winter, advises the packing list on the monastery’s website. Although I have never formally meditated, I am sure that the only thing that will make me happy is to become a nun. It is the chanting of the monastics that opens me. I download a talk by Thich Nhat Hanh, given in 2007, the year he was finally allowed back to Vietnam, from which he was formally exiled in 1966. This makes me trust him. The day of my flight, on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, I buy a thick brown coat that comes down past my knees. I don’t know it, but brown will be the color of the monastic robes at Plum Village.

In Europe, I couchsurf—a first for me—in the lofted apartment of an osteopathic medical student who speaks better English than my nonexistent French, which is nominally aided by a travel language book I’d bought last-minute in New York. Once we’re back at his apartment and after he’s given me a brief tour, I pull three green Mutsu apples and a baked tart—from the Union Square Farmers’ Market—out of my backpack and place them in his hands. The next morning we wander Bordeaux’s narrow streets and stop in a museum before my host sees me off at the train station, making sure I punch the ticket before boarding and looking vaguely worried for me. Call me if you have any trouble at the monastery, he says. A joke.

France accustoms me to the cold. In France, I no longer fear winter. At Plum Village, the sisters wear brown robes and thick brown coats. On a sunny day in mid-November at Sainte-Foy-La-Grande station, one hour by train south of Bordeaux, two bespectacled nuns meet a group of arrivals, and I am one of them. In the first week, working meditation finds me kneeling in a greenhouse with my clear-plastic-covered hands pulling at grasses among the lettuce. To my surprise, one of the monastics asks me questions in quick succession: Are you married? Do you have a boyfriend? Do you want to be a nun? Another nun comments, You’re wearing a brown coat like us. Is that because you want to ordain? I think to myself, The monastics ask me the kinds of questions a Korean mother would ask her daughter.

In the monastery, I meet a French woman with the most beautiful sad blue eyes I’ve ever seen, who left home at sixteen and now travels through Europe in her home, a camper van, which she shares with her cat. She says her teacher was in India, not France, and was not Thich Nhat Hanh. Voice thick from smoking, a soft pale face marked with deep vertical wrinkles, offset by those brilliant sad eyes. A picture of a woman named Amma on her dashboard, which I saw when I sat beside her the day I got a lift into town, my red backpack at my feet.

Her name is Sister _____, and it is she who finds me. In her hands she carries a small pile of mail, one larger envelope sent by FedEx airmail held apart from the rest. She asks my name, then says something has come for me. Sister _____ shares that she was adopted, has met her birth mother, and has found the whereabouts of her birth father, who refused to meet with her. Do I ask her to sit with me? Sister _____ says, If you want me to hold onto it for you for a little while, I will. Just ask. I watch her walk away before finding a quiet place to read the letter.

That night, I read and reread the letter in Korean and English—the former handwritten by my mother on typical Korean anglophile stationery themed black-and-white and headed by large red block letters that announce, I [heart] London; the latter a typed English translation officiated with a red stamp. Afterward, I find Sister _____ and ask her if she could hold onto it.

Of course, she says, and I imagine in that moment that she tucks the white envelope beneath the sleeve of her robe or into a coat pocket. In my pocket, the letter feels as heavy as the stones lining Virginia Woolf’s pockets as she lay drowning at the bottom of a river.

My health is bad, but don’t worry about me, I read. So of course I leave the monastery. So of course I go to see my mother. Because a remembered mother is no mother at all.

***

I am a serial subletter, but in Korea I sign a two-year lease. Four months after signing the lease, I meet my father’s sister. On the phone, and again in person, she tells me, Don’t tell your father I met you. My father’s sister is wearing a black sweater tied at her waist and brown aviator sunglasses that hide her eyes from mine. We are both cupping lukewarm mugs of tea between our hands, in a café named for Marlene Dietrich, when she says, Do you remember this? At one point, your father took a tent and slept out by the river, because he didn’t have money, with you and your brother.

***

I miss her every time I leave her. My mother. Partings leave me unable to breathe, crying in bathroom stalls into which I quickly retreat after leaving her side, in bus stations, at large department stores, in coffee shops, waiting for the bus, seated on the subway.

It’s late January. Every day, I’m pulled back into sense memories by the smell of street food, by the body memories nudged awake while sleeping on the floor in my friend’s apartment, thick blankets tucked into corners come morning. It’s the first day I’m seeing my mother again—twenty-one years since I’d last seen her. The morning is a blur of sleeplessness, a numb sensation of no appetite overlaid with the vague feeling that even without hunger I may need to eat, and a cab ride to the adoption agency office. What can I say about seeing my mother again? The way her eyes are filled with tears. How I keep smiling at her.

We are finished. We are finished meeting. And although I keep holding my breath, waiting for the moment to end, my mother doesn’t leave, nor does my aunt, nor do I. Are you hungry? my mother asks. Dae, I say in Korean. So we three leave the office, a jumble of arms and crisscrossing legs, and we are outside in the cold January air, walking together toward the Seoul subway. At the subway station, we part ways with the translator, and it’s just my mother, my aunt, and me.

My aunt and mother tremble inside of the subway station, going to the ticket machine, entering money, and hesitantly placing their tickets into the turnstile slot as though not quite trusting they will be allowed to pass. On the train, warm smiles and glances come from my aunt, while my mother barely looks at me. At first, she keeps her back to me and, in her other hand, tightly grips the black handle of a large silver metal box, my rented digital video camera and clip-on microphones inside. Your mother is strong, she can carry it, my aunt reassures me, or so said the translator, a young man and business student from Seoul, or so said the social worker who passed us onto him after our scheduled office meeting time was up.

My mother stands uncomfortably on the train, holds onto the railing nearest her, stabilizes her feet, on which she wears black wedge-heeled shoes that zip at the heel. I am watching her hand, the one that is not holding onto the smooth metal pole for balance, the one that is close to me, within reach. I think about it for a moment, and then I move my hand to hers, asking softly in Korean, Is it okay? My mother quickly nods, takes my hand in hers, and squeezes back.

Eventually it feels awkward, so I let go and stand in my own space, as though she were just another woman in the car with me. To my surprise, I see my mother begin to cry, and she turns away from me, wiping tears from her eyes with the back of her hand.

On the day we meet again, my mother wears a light tan leather jacket and all-black clothing beneath: black shirt, black pants, black shoes. I love her immediately. She also wears her hair back, simply held together at the nape of her neck with an elastic hair tie.

I love her without knowing why, without needing a reason. A love that infuriates me.

***

Soo Na, spa, do you like? my mother asks. This is the day I will meet my father and brother, and I’ve been staying in my mother’s home for the past two nights. In the morning, my mother walks with me to a nearby bathhouse. She is again dressed all in black—black jeans, black shirt, black leather jacket—save for a white baseball cap that reads on the front, in rhinestones, TB, and in the back, in embroidered lettering, Cleveland Police Department. When I stand beside her, I realize how small she is. I am probably two or three inches taller than she. A woman so enormous in my imagination and longing, suddenly dwarfed by things like height, metric and U.S. units. I realize my mother means a bathhouse, jjimjilbang. She laughs at my wide eyes and discomfort. I remember going to one as a child with my father, but cannot figure out the grammar or find the words to tell her this.

We undress in silence, and my mother carries a plastic shower caddy filled with soap and, curiously, a pint of 2% milk through the door of the main room to the showers—but not before she asks me to step on a scale: fifty-one kilograms. How much I weighed when I had you, she tells me later. Just as quickly, she motions for me to come with her, to where I hear water splashing. Inside, I see a low tiled row of shower stalls, and there my mother pulls forward a short plastic stepstool where I am to sit. She takes a seat beside me. A young woman takes in my naked body and smiles with the slightest curve of her mouth. The slapping of wet, naked skin sounds behind me, as a woman in a bra and underwear stands over the body of a middle-aged woman laid on a table, her skin flushed and reddened from exfoliation and rapid, forceful massage.

There is a faucet and, beside the faucet, a showerhead. Sitting beside my naked mother, the immediacy and intimacy feel terrifying. My mother—whose last words were I will come back for you when I was a girl of four or five—begins scrubbing me with her green-shower-mitt-covered hands. I take a loofah from the caddy and wash my own body. My mother interrupts with plastic basins of warm water splashed over my back, and then I watch her open the paper carton of milk and pour it over my body.

***

Yeppeuda, you look pretty, my mother says to me in the backseat of my aunt’s car, my aunt driving.

My father seems so benign in the hotel room, wearing tennis shoes, black pants, and a yellow Reebok zip-up coat. My brother is tall and thin, with thick black eyebrows. He looks at me with a face so unreadable that this inability to know a face I, as a child, saw beside mine when turning in sleep, pulls a sharp line from my sternum to my stomach when I inhale. We draw elaborate circles around each other, my brother and I, unsure of how to relate, he standing at the hotel room business desk, flipping through a shopping catalog, and I seated on the hotel room bed, sometimes taking photographs of his back with a digital SLR because I’m too shy to take his picture while he’s facing me. I scroll through the English–Korean dictionary on my rented cell phone, trying to find words, but come up with no sentences. He hands me his business card: he works in a nuclear power plant. I don’t know where my father works or what he does with his days, and I don’t ask.

My brother is seated at the window, and suddenly he begins to sob. I don’t know what else to do, so I hold him.

***

In a combination bar and café by the ocean, I am seated across from my Korean mother and father. I watch them—long divorced—drink beer and laugh across the table from me, and a sick feeling moves through my body, a prickling of skin, a rising of the fine hairs on my arms. My brother is seated beside me, wearing black-rimmed glasses. I realize that on the previous day, he must have been wearing contact lenses when he held my hand with a soft urgency as we rode in the backseat of the probable rental car driven by my father. My brother is by now a grown man, but I let him hold my hand, surprised by and afraid for his vulnerability.

When I see my father again, his face is ashen gray indoors, red and windswept in the February air. He smokes while simultaneously holding a small Sony video camera to his eye. I am distantly curious about my father. Around him, I feel as though a cold wind is blowing, and it is difficult to hear what is happening around me.

I do not want to be surrounded by them, suddenly. I do not want to be seated in a café, posing for pictures taken by my mother. I do not want to know that my brother never met his own mother. I do not want to become saturated in stories I cannot heal. I do not reach for my mother, do not reach for my brother, do not reach for any of them. I go, instead, to the ocean, its loud waves, its cold salt water, its breadth and wetness and movement, its comfort and holding, its size and capacity.

I exit the café, make a beeline from the front door of the restaurant tea house down the wooden deck stairs, cross the road, proceed through the parking lot, and go down the steps leading onto the beach, toward the pounding ocean. The waves are dark and loud, coiling forward and backward, toward and away from me. My green silk scarf, the one I bought in France for color, to wear less black, flutters in the evening wind. It is only my brother who comes to me without guilt, who felt for a time neutral to me, and his arms are holding me. I let him.

***

The last time I saw my father, when I was five years old, we stood in an alley. A white car waited there, a man in the front seat. I walked up to the car and noticed that, in the fold of his arms, the driver held a baby loosely wrapped in white blankets, blood still visible at its umbilical cord. He was driving the baby, and he would also drive me, but to a foster home.

Behind the white car, my father and this man spoke together, and I sat inside the car, waiting in the passenger seat, peering through the side window at the rearview mirror’s reflection. I sat on my hands and noticed with a start that my father had tears in his eyes. He was crying. I had never seen my father cry. Quickly, I lifted the door handle and climbed out of the seat, then shut the door before walking toward my father. I stood beside him, unsure of what to do. It took a few moments for him to notice me.

What are you doing? he yelled suddenly. Get back in the car!

When I meet my father, he chain smokes as soon as we are outside. Although I am 25 years old, I find myself in the backseat of a four-door sedan, unable to communicate with any nuance with the three passengers—my Korean mother, father, and brother—and stifling my growing unease in knowing I am being driven but I do not know to where. The disorienting timeline of mother, then father, foster home, orphanage, plane ride, the United States, still haunts me in the car with my father, driving through southeastern parts of the Republic of Korea, unable to communicate. Because I want to see his face, and because I want to look again, I allow my adult self to be driven by him. Then, I will leave. Relax, my brother will tell me when we’re seated in a restaurant. I can’t.

It starts slowly. Mother, father, brother. Not quite meeting myself in the mirror. But, almost imperceptibly, when I meet them, I realize I finally know what I look like. An indent of lip here. A slope of eye there. I stop looking like a stranger to myself in the mirror, mute and unrecognizable.

***

We are outside of the house where my father lives. It sits back from the road down a narrow walkway, flanked on both sides by similar houses of graying white paint and overlapping waves of concave slate roof tiles. We are in the countryside of southeastern Korea. He shares his home with another man, around his age, single like him. Inside, the roof is low, and I see where my father sleeps. There are photographs of people I do not recognize in frames of shiny mahogany and a low wooden table beside the bed, a yoh covered with blankets. His bedroom is raised above the floor, and I notice plastic sheeting used for insulation around the doorframes and windows.

Soo Na, cha? my mother asks for my father.

Okay, I answer.

My father disappears into another part of the house, slides a door shut behind him, then re-emerges a few moments later with a tray bearing steaming mugs of tea. He stirs the tea for me and sets the tray down on the floor where I’m seated beside my brother. It is not just tea he brings. My father is holding a thick glass jar, squat, filled with a brown paste, dwaenjang, patting it encouragingly in his hand while he talks in Korean, his voice low and steady. He hands it to me.

Outside, as we walk toward the black car to leave, my father stops. A small black dog cowers and shivers, does not wag her tail, which ends in a U-shape behind her. Attached to a red collar encircling her neck is a chain-link leash that is hooked on its opposite end to a small concrete shed resting at its four corners on smaller concrete blocks. When my father extends his fingers to the dog, she looks at him but does not move. Her body is a horizontal line from head to tail, hips splayed behind her as if squatting when my father crouches and rustles the fur atop her head and neck. She seems to take no pleasure in it and appears as confused by her desire to be seen as she is by the fear that pulls her back like the limit of her chain-link confinement. To any observer, my father is a stranger to the dog, for when he stands upright again, the dog sniffs at his shoe, her entire body stiff and alert.

***

In the monastery, there is time to inhabit memories. I am seated in the dining room of New Hamlet after sweeping the floor of carrot peels and potato skins and bits of brown earth tracked in from outside. The orphanage remembers me. It’s the brooms that do it, their strong straw scent bringing on the same nausea I felt from the same smell in the orphanage. It is early morning, before dawn. I am five years old, and I leave the sleeping bodies of the other children. Unable to sleep, I lie on the cool tile floor leading into the bathroom, my entire body feverish. I cannot seem to cool down. My cotton nightgown, with its frilled sleeves and its hem reaching to my ankles, feels itchy and suffocating.

In the morning, a woman touches my forehead, a concerned look on her face. She places a mercury-filled glass thermometer beneath my tongue and tells me to hold it, and from her face I can tell I am sick. For the rest of the day, I am given the exalted position of a seat in her lap, and she feeds me a steaming bowl of ramen. We are seated, nested there like Russian dolls, a bowl of ramen inside of me inside of the woman on whose lap I sit. Later, I will read the adoption paperwork in my file, learn that I was treated for amoebic dysentery before my flight, that my arrival to the United States was delayed because of the illness.

In the orphanage, I remember eating orange rinds from the trashcan, and eating from a plastic bag of what I now know were croutons, to the point of nausea. Did I starve in the orphanage, too? Was I hungry? There is a one-legged toddler boy whose diaper I change. I love him, how he stands and watches, his two small hands gripping the light brown wooden slats of his crib.

***

This is how I say goodbye to Korea. Quietly. This time I know I am leaving. This time I know what is happening to me. Birds fly on the air. Dragonflies land and rest on power lines and thin sapling stalks, their wings opening and closing as though respiring. I am in the mountains south of Seoul, at a silent meditation retreat. I don’t want to go, but a college friend who is traveling through Asia with a stop in Korea, suggests it, says it’s free and that there’s good food. Try it, she says. Just go. At the retreat, two other women share a hastily assembled and still incomplete one-room cabin with me. One roommate’s hair is permed, and the tight curls come down to just below her ears. She is long-limbed and soft in her loose-fitting clothing, shorts and T-shirts, always napping between meditation sits, pulling crackers from her backpack to eat after lunch, offering me the bag, too. The other roommate has shoulder-length hair, and smiles easily at me.

At first, I slip into the ease of their assumption that I am like them, from the city, that I speak like them, understand what they say. But when I open my mouth, I no longer pass. It is then that they switch to their high-school English, whispering explanations to me during the early days of the retreat. The one with tight curls still whispers to me when she is sure none of the attendants enforcing strict silence with their wide eyes and fingers held to their lips can hear her. I watch her protectively as she struggles with sleepiness in the mornings when we are roused by the clanging of hand bells. Every morning, for the first few minutes, she sits up, very still, her eyes closed, willing herself to consciousness.

In the mornings, all the women descend the hill toward the shared shower, carrying toothpaste and toothbrushes, bags of fresh clothing or dirty clothing they plan to wash in the cold shower water before meditating. There is no warm water. We shiver together, naked, and I see what I never knew, could never know, living in the country where I grew up: these are our bodies. These are our hands, these are the mysteries I’d forgotten, no longer mysterious, no longer odd or out of place. I am comforted by the bodies, the black hair, the same curve of leg, the bodies of women. Some of the women are cranky, pulling away and washing in their own corners. Some of the women shower with the showerhead; others fill plastic tubs full of water and pour it over their sudsy heads of hair, no hint of cold on their face, just the serene concentration of getting clean.

I leave the meditation retreat early, irritated by a meditation teacher we watch on DVDs and by how we are reprimanded for stretching our legs out in front of us as we watch the TV screen. How I cannot write. On the morning I leave, I hug my roommates goodbye, then start the thirty-minute walk across a stream, down a dirt road, through a forest, accompanied by a swarm of black gnats that surround me and then suddenly disappear fifteen minutes into the walk, past a torn-up field and an idle tractor, to the main street, where I sit on a bench outside of a general store, flanked by a halmoni and a young mother with her toddler son, all of us waiting for a bus headed toward Seoul.

I keep going to monasteries, I realize, because I don’t know where else to take my grief.

I go to Korea so it can open me.

***

Rumpus original art by Paige Russell.

Related Posts:

• A Brief History of Swans
• A Zealot and a Poet
• PK
• Displays of Affection
• Round Trip

– “Sign” by Forrest Hamer

***

Upon rebuilding the memory of our gone, we tell ourselves that all things are true and happened exactly how we remember. It is through the repetition of the supposed memory (was it this she said? That he said?) that we come to answers and certitudes. It was the summer between sixth and seventh grade when my grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer. No one discussed it directly; my family believed at first they could successfully hide it from me, and my grandfather continued his Saturday morning ritual of driving across town before nine with straw hat, shorts and socks pulled up to his knees while sipping a Diet Coke. He’d ring the doorbell until someone—usually myself—stumbled from her sleep to answer. By the time I’d get to the door, he’d be four houses down and across the street to my cousins’ house. You could see him standing on their porch with his arm near the door jamb. Ringing their doorbell, probably. It went this way—through the summer and into the school year—until chemo and radiation broke him so we had to take his keys and he no longer came to pick me up each day after school.

His sickness did not keep me from spending days at a time at his house. It might have increased my desire to see him. We’d spend afternoons in front of the wood panel box television that sat on the den floor and watch Gilligan’s Island or The Andy Griffith’s Show or Lassie in black and white. Between his labored breathing assisted by the oxygen machine we positioned permanently by the couch, he’d drift off to sleep and I would step outside to ride my bike. I don’t remember what other grown-up would be in the house with us—my grandmother had not yet retired from her job at the mental health facility hair salon—I just remembered that many, many days during those final ones, I was mostly at my grandfather’s side.

Maybe memory has robbed me of the context of our conversation. My mother was in the bed with him when he inhaled his last breath, and my grandmother was just outside at the point of his departure. I asked my mother a couple of months after his death if he had ever mentioned a white bird or maybe a dove. She said no. I asked my grandmother if she had heard of the white bird. She said no. They did not have the words of his I had. I remember the night he told me about the white bird there was a Styrofoam cup with a bendable straw and water in one hand, and a Bayer pill in a medicine cup. It was around the time when he was too weak to get the pill to his lip by his own hands, so I would wait until he opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue. I dropped the pill in his mouth and set the straw to his lips, and then waited for him to swallow. Where was everyone else? I don’t remember. Why was a seventh grader tasked with giving a dying man his medicine? I don’t remember. How did we get to the point where he told me about his dreams?

After he’d finished taking his medicine he had a few breaths left to tell me about this white bird. In the first dream, the white bird was perched on the foot of his bed. In the second, the white bird was in the carport. Maybe I asked him what he thought it meant. I do not remember my words in this conversation, or my reaction, but my grandfather went on to explain he thought the white bird was there in his dream to take him Home. But you are home. I remind him with my seventh-grade understanding. He said, No. Home. He seemed sure and confident and comforted by this message.

Why me? Why tell no one else the dream of the white bird who will come to help him cross over? I wasn’t at his house when he did cross, but it was morning—when we usually hear the doves in their hollowed whistle perched in the eucalyptus tree in the backyard—and he was in his bed, and my mother was in it with him. She got up to tell my grandmother he was heading Home, and I am told later the men in white came, and they carried him out in a white bag through the door connected to the carport, and I just know there had to have been a bird flanked there, calling.

 ***

Grandma Griffin lived by herself until the fall. Daddy called me at school to say she had broken her right arm and that he was going to Charleston to bring her back to Columbia until she got better. It was October of my first year of college and I had managed to befriend graduating seniors who had cars which meant freedom from the school campus on weekends and unlimited trips to Wal-Mart or SouthPoint Mall whenever I needed. Upon leaving my parents’ house to attend college a state line away, I decided early that I would embrace the Christian tradition my grandparents had tried to instill in me because my parents didn’t. My college senior friends who I trusted and admired believed in God with such fervor that I wanted to have what they had. I started going to church and writing in a prayer journal instead of partying on the weekends into Monday. Tangentially, my mother—who I did not know as a church-going-woman growing up—started going to church and for the first time I could ever know, we had something to talk about whenever she called.

My friends scheduled a road trip to South Carolina during Fall break. I was invited. In the triangle of the three planned cities (Chapel Hill, NC; Clemson, SC; Mullins, SC), Columbia was in the middle of the hypotenuse of the five-hour drive across South Carolina from Clemson to Mullins and I had a feeling that we should stop through to my parents’ house, the house I grew up in, the house my grandmother was only visiting. I asked if that was all right.

The state of the house when we got there spoke volumes to how quickly a whole world in which you are familiar and a part of can change when one variable is removed or altered. We—all of us, myself—were guests and not allowed past the dining room; my room had been converted into an in-house hospital room, and at the back end of the living room Grandma Griffin was positioned in the cushioned rocking chair facing the television tuned to The Bible Network. She was slouched over a bit, the cast covering her right arm was secured to the arm of the chair. There was of course the familiar back-drop buzz of a breathing machine behind her. From the dining room guest-only vantage, it was hard to tell if she was watching the televised church service or if she was sleeping. We passed the moments with my parents, talked about school, how we all met, our time in Clemson, a city so close to my birthplace. We would need to get back on the road soon. Daddy told me I could say hello to Grandma Griffin and granted me passage into the living room.

Escorted by my father, I walked over. He spoke loudly.

“Mom, you have a visitor. It’s Lana.”

I was closer to the breathing machine and the church service on the television. He turned around to lower the sound. He did not lower his voice.

“She’s visiting with her friends from college.”

Her glasses were on the tip of her nose. She woke up and looked around, I think trying to focus on something, but couldn’t quite. Maybe we never had eye contact. Maybe she did not know who I was, that I had come and stood before her and she had told me never to break your good arm if given a choice and that she loved me.

Halloween came two weeks later. I was back on campus with midterm papers and a lost wallet. There was nothing else to do except call my father in tears. Daddy listened as long as he could and then he didn’t. I called Mama instead; she had a greater patience for my crying. How did we come to this point? Mama listened as long as she could, and then she hung up. I called back. No answer. I needed to know what to do: I had no money, no photo I.D. My family was hours away and no one was here to comfort me, and it was dusk and students were walking through the campus in Halloween costumes and I was alone in the Pit in the middle of the campus sitting on the concrete steps, crying.

At some point, I made my way back to my dorm. Students were knocking on doors, playing trick-or-treat. I did not answer any knock. I did not call anyone again. I pulled out my Bible and prayer journal. The phone rang. Daddy tells me Grandma is gone; she had not been well since I last saw her and he didn’t want to worry me while at school. He said he was sorry. I hung up the phone.

When I made it back to South Carolina, I heard the story: mama was home. The oxygen tube slipped from Grandma Griffin’s nose. Mama was cleaning. Grandma was positioned in front of The Bible Network without her breathing machine, her good arm secured to the chair. I had called to talk about my missing wallet, and Mama noticed Grandma slumped over in the chair. Mama hung up the phone. She was there, at the last moment, to watch Grandma cross over. She was there, as with my grandfather, praying the words and crossing her forehead with oil, making the blessings. I had come just in time, they said. I had come to stand beside her just in time.

 ***

Once I walked around with a camera in hand. I wanted candid shots—a way to capture the moment, to better spark the mind to remember. It is easier to remember the context of an action shot than one posed after the action—eyes facing the quick-open aperture and bright light.

Where was I when I first heard it? I don’t know. It changed me. It was before I heard the saying again years later and began to believe it was one of those sayings that people have in-pocket to exude some level of intellectualism over a moment and the validity of the statement is questionable because the sayer is questionable. Anyway, it was a man who said it. That is not to say that is why it was questionable. But it was a writer I was trying to capture in my camera. He saw the silver mechanism held up to my face and stopped whatever he was doing. He held up his hand in protest. I pulled the camera down and looked questioningly. Why not? I asked. The man said he doesn’t like picture taken of him; the camera is a taker of souls. Maybe I laughed him. I did not take his picture.

I did take a picture of small bird not long after that, though. It was summer and I was at a writer’s retreat and there were lots of beautiful moments I wanted to remember for when I left that dreamplace. I snapped and snapped. A woman and I walked around and took in the nature surrounding us. We were walking and talking about growing up in the South, black and women, and wanting to be writers. There was a gazebo we set our eyes on and because it was summer and warm and everything was so green we removed our shoes and trekked through the grass because the concrete was too hot for sandals.

What we thought was an empty gazebo had a small visitor. We walked closer and saw a small bird just under one of the benches. I turned on my camera, trying to snap it before he flew away. He did not leave. I could see him moving, trying to open his wings, but as I positioned myself to take a picture—wide eyed and brown, I think he was a type of wren or sparrow—he stood as if posing. The gazebo’s shade triggered the flash to turn on and later I saw it reflected in his large, glass eyes. Satisfied with the picture and that I had caught this moment, my friend and I found a bench a bit away from it to finish our talk. She was writing about women of the Bible, and I was writing about a half-brother I’d never met, but found pictures of in our albums—trying to imagine who he was. He died so young. What was it like to see the world for just a few days?

As dinner time was nearing, we gathered our things to head towards the cafeteria. We left the way we arrived. In our path, the bird was no longer on his feet. A line of ants were making their way towards him. How quickly we are here, and then gone. Rigor mortis twisted his small legs like tree branches.

 ***

Sula’s return to Medallion was trumpeted by a plague of robins. This was the beginning of the end for a lot of the characters in Morrison’s novel. The September I read Sula, intrigued by a woman’s entering a town flanked with a body of birds with amber-lighted chests, I walked around Newark stepping over an unusual number of dead birds on the sidewalks. Any number above a singular dead bird on the sidewalk within the short span of weeks would be unusual, however. At first I thought it was merely a case of heightened awareness—here was this character I admired for many reasons (You think I don’t know what your life is like just because I ain’t living it? I know what every colored woman in this country is doing…Dying. Just like me) whose entrance was so grand and cloaked in mystery—I saw the birds only because I was looking for them. You know, the usual anomaly that occurs when you acquire something new you believe is unique only to you until everyone is driving a champagne-colored two-door Honda Civic because you own one. Even when I wasn’t looking for them (dragging my laundry to the Laundromat, walking to the corner store for a Pepsi) there they were: dead, on the ground. I could only wonder what was about to unravel. Of course, I have history now to allow myself to rewrite most things or create narratives where there is first only chaos, but you should know in those days, walking through a city that would nearly kill me with dead birds manifesting at my feet, I lost my first uncle. That was just the beginning. A first cousin, godmother and another uncle would soon follow.

When I get the call that my father was in the hospital, I make provisions to move back South. Or at least, I get the feeling I need to leave Newark and its roads paved with dead birds.

 ***

C and I give up sleeping in on Saturday mornings  to run miles and miles of New York City as  training for a half marathon. We make our way through the fog-lighted early morning along Fulton Street—Brooklyn’s main throughway—towards the Brooklyn Bridge where we will cross the East River into Manhattan. I don’t learn until we’ve completed the seven miles that our run had a destination: a hospital near the Financial District of lower Manhattan. C told me he wanted to make a visit to see his friend who was admitted into isolation because of the vast amounts of chemo coursing through his body. It was the second hospitalization of the month; it was the countless trip to the hospital over the course of two years’ battle with stomach cancer. Everyone marveled that he saw himself past six months.

I know how to handle this. Because I know how to handle this, I steel myself as we sign in on the visitors’ log. I am prepared to erase the last image of his friend—healthy and pot-bellied, booming laughter, large smile: always how we remember our ailing—with whatever I would face in the small white room.

Still in our running clothes, the nurse instructs us to utilize the hand sanitizing station and put on gown and gloves. I believe this to be for our own protection, but just as I didn’t want the memory of C’s friend to be traded in for what will undoubtedly be the devastating image behind the white curtain, so too his memory will be forced to replace us in street clothes with us in blue gauze and latex, and no matter how hard we tried it was near impossible to achieve a genuine, unwearied smile under such conditions. You enter the room so well-meaninged and with only good intentions. And then all of that leaves you when you see your lover’s best friend curled into a fetal position on one-half of a hospital bed. His arms are so wire-thin you wonder what vein was large enough for the I.V. needle, and you recognize that oxygen tube resting on his upper lip like a plastic mustache, and all you can think of is how exactly like your Grandfather this man looked. Without anyone knowing, I say a prayer.  Protect him, I say. C’s friend looks at me when we walk into the room while C is saying hello. He doesn’t acknowledge C. He is looking me in the eye, and I am saying the prayer in my head, and trying to smile. C is saying we just finished a training run and wanted to check in. How’s everything? C’s friend looks at me, and I swear, looks out the window. He doesn’t answer.

Despite the fact that the nurse was holding the spoon to his mouth five minutes before we walked in, he lifts his matchstick fingers to his face with a quickness and with such purpose that it made me believe for an instant my prayers were premature. He looks at me.

“This is the wrong one. Can you change it?” he says. Now he is looking to C to make the change.

My grandmother removed her oxygen mask when she sat in the rocking chair in front of the television set to The Bible Network.

C looks behind the bed. There is nothing to change out. He says he doesn’t understand.

“This is the wrong one,” C’s friend says again. C pushes the button for the nurse. In the meantime, he tries to talk about sports.

I am trying to be in the background, to not impose myself on this intimate time between two friends, but he keeps looking at me and I think he knows I am praying for him. I think my face is saying what my mouth isn’t. I tell C that I think he’s uncomfortable with me in the room—the last time I saw him we were eating Mediterranean food on Fulton street after a film screening, and his laughter sounded throughout the restaurant—and that I’ll wait for him in the lobby. I tell his friend, Good-bye.

An hour later, C meets me in the waiting hallway and says they talked about the NCAA tournament for a bit, and he helped him eat a few pieces of pasta. And maybe I was right, C said.  He perked up a bit when I left the room. We leave the hospital and I say I’m worried.

“I know, me too,” C says.

Because I had the young hatred for my mother I believe most daughters have at some point in their lives, I once blamed my mother for the death of my grandparents. She was there. They both died within her reach. Why didn’t she do anything else to stop it? Then she was the bird in the building announcing a death; she was the white dove at the foot of the bed. My last living grandparent is going on several tours of ICU each month. I pray my family won’t call to say they are bringing her to their house “for a while,” as I believe that will be the beginning of the end. As long as she leaves the hospital each time and can call me from her own house—she is alive and on this earth still and breathing the same air.

C calls me a few hours after we left his friend at the hospital. His exact words: “He almost went home a few hours ago.” At first I am delighted and elated. I was wrong. I cannot tell if his “home” is the capital-H Home. Heavenly Home. So I assume he meant back with his brothers, up to the Bronx, out of the hospital. But the gravitas in his voice—Where are you? I ask.

“Leaving the hospital. They called his friends and family in,” C says.

Capital-H Home.

I ask him how he’s doing, and he says all right. I start preparing myself, for him. The next morning we wake to find his friend is Home. He struggled as he did when I was in the room, as my grandfather did before he fell to a stroke, at the last moment to free himself of the hospital wires and tubes. Of the things holding him down.

Only hours ago, he was on this earth and breathing the same air. Am I the bird? My grandmother calls me and I don’t answer. She says she misses me and when will I come home to visit? Am I the bird? Mama and Daddy fuss because it’s been over a year since I’ve been home and Grandma just got out of the hospital for eleven days and they don’t know how much more her body can take. When am I coming to visit? No one else knows about the bird. C’s friend is gone. Only hours before I walked into his room in my blue gauze and latex gloves, stood at the foot of his bed, and called his name.

Related Posts:

• A Memorandum of Ghosts
• A Brief History of Swans
• 0–9
• A Zealot and a Poet
• Hold On to What You’ve Got

“There’s more I needed to tell you about how this works,” she said, preparing a stack of plain white paper and a pile of ballpoint pens to write with through the session. “I can’t concentrate though.” She shook her head.

“Alright. I hear you,” she said to someone other than us. “We’ll just get started then.” Some ghost wanted her to get on with this.

“There’s a woman,” she said.

There is always a woman, but this was why we were here, my mother and I side by side on the sofa. We wanted to hear something from my maternal grandmother. We wanted to know if 54 years ago my grandmother had truly walked into a closet, put a J.C. Higgens .22 caliber rifle to her head and pulled the trigger… or if my grandfather had shot her. We weren’t expecting answers, but we would take anything we could get. We would take it even though neither of us really believed the dead can speak. We just wanted a few more words to chase in a mystery, perhaps a murder mystery, that was quickly growing colder.

“When you hit a dead end, why not talk to the dead,” I had joked, although, I don’t think there are ghosts, at least, not exactly.

***

Seven years ago I edited a book titled, Is There Life After Death, an anthology of opposing views on what happens after we die. The project required that I not only look at the obvious arguments, but the eyebrow-raising ones as well. I had to seriously read all view points and find a few that held steady on either side.

Most of the arguments I read that insisted there was life after death were laden with syllogisms. “I almost died and saw a light. Heaven is a light. Therefore I saw heaven.” The arguments were hard to get your hands around, all reaction and no logic. No matter how much I read, I wasn’t convinced. When people asked me what I got from working on the book I always shrugged and said, “It doesn’t make a difference what is next. You only get this once.”

***

I watched the medium and tried to be Fox Mulder. “I want to believe,” I told myself. I do believe in some things, just not everything. So I listened.

“Is there a woman with an ‘M’ name, a Mary maybe?”

“Yes.”

“She’s a mother figure?”

“Yes.”

The paternal grandmother who raised me was named Mary Evelyn and my mother and I had already joked about her showing up instead of my other grandmother, Barbara Jean. My mother had given me up when she shouldn’t have and Mary Evelyn had given me up sooner than she wanted to as well. The only difference was that Mary Evelyn had no way to take me back. She had died 20 years before. We imagined my dad’s mother pushing everyone out of the way to make a few last minute suggestions about the rest of my life. I also knew it was easy enough for a medium to look me up online or read my memoir and come to this conclusion herself.

“She wants me to say ‘Knotts’ as evidence it’s her,” the medium said. “Does Knott’s Berry Farm mean anything to you?”

“Yes,” I said, suddenly chilled.

My grandparents took me to Knott’s Berry Farm so that we could go to Mrs. Knott’s Chicken Dinner Restaurant and eat the god awful chicken every Sunday for what had felt like a lifetime of Sundays. I used to beg them to let me stay with my best friend and roller-skate, but my grandparents always made me put on my stiff Sunday clothes and go with them instead.

While we waited to go in to Mrs. Knott’s for dinner we would sit next to a petrified cross-section of a 750 year-old coastal redwood tree. I would lean over the railing and count the rings, trying to believe in things so nearly everlasting. Then when I got bored, I would chase the chickens. Once I caught one of the big white hens that ran feral in the park, tucked her against my chest and carried her back to my grandmother, who screamed. She was terrified of birds. I was only seven or eight and her terror thrilled me.

After dinner, my grandfather would take me to throw pennies in the duck pond and tell me to make a wish. One time I fell in while trying to gather up other people’s wishes. My grandmother clucked over my soaked and soiled Sunday dress. When I did manage to stay dry after the wishing, my grandfather would put a penny in the cracked corn vending machine and let me feed the ducks from my palm. I hated the dinner, but I loved the chickens and the ducks.

***

“Penny,” the medium said, “Someone named Penny maybe? Or something to do with pennies. Sometimes it’s literal. I can’t really tell. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Yes,” I said.

With a twitch of anger I flicked away tears. Then I rubbed my arms because the chills had gotten the best of me. I had never written about any of this. My mother was staring at me, surprised by the Knott’s Berry Farm connection, but uncertain what else had shaken me. And then we moved on. There were more ghosts waiting in line.

***

When I was working on Is There Life After Death there was one essay that stuck with me titled, “Science Suggests There Is an Afterlife”. It asserted that even in a time of scientific revelations, supercomputers and quantum physics; nearly 80 percent of Americans believe there is an afterlife. The article promised that we lived in a moment where spiritual beliefs and scientific fact could live in tandem and in fact, often did. Who knew what a parallel universe might hold? And although science couldn’t prove there was an afterlife, it left open the door for believers. Many scientists believe there is something we’ve yet to explain, some inexplicable thread through it all. Maybe they are right.

***

It took nearly an hour and a half to get to my other grandmother, the one we had been waiting to hear from, Barbara Jean. We ran through half the dead relatives of my mother’s best friend and perhaps heard about a relative or two we didn’t know. My maternal grandmother was the smallest voice in the bunch. When the medium began to speak with her she had to tune out Mary Evelyn who kept pointing to the heart that had failed her and holding up a sign that said “mother”. Then the medium began to talk about three daughters. My mother had two sisters.

“A B name,” she said. The medium had consistently scribbled on her pieces of paper, mostly in frenetic loops and we watched her carelessly spell out murder.

My mom and I met eyes and listened while the medium said, “suicide”. She told us that it wasn’t what we thought. She said she kept seeing the woman hold a sign that said, answer. “I keep feeling suicide,” she said. “It feels like my blood sugar dropping.” Yet my mom and I kept looking at the word she had written. Murder. Then the medium talked about a phone call that had been important and a house for sale and maybe a book and that something was missing. None of this meant much to us. She told us that the woman said we had just started talking about her again, looking for her and that she was glad for this.

“She says you have your answer,” the medium said.

Of course we do, I thought. Of course. Questions are for the living, not the dead. The answer is that you keep living. It might have been murder, it could have been suicide, but we keep on living.

***

The medium wrapped up the session with platitudes, love from beyond and all that. We didn’t hold it against her. How else can you end a conversation with people lost and briefly found again? Of course they would love us. She told us that Barbara Jean said she missed her daughter, my mother, although she didn’t know why the dead said that, after all the dead don’t miss anything. They are always here.

When the medium had left, my mother asked me if I believed.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but Knott’s Berry Farm…” I shrugged.

“Barbara Jean did miss me, you know?” my mom said. “She missed everything.”

We sat in silence for a moment while I drank the bottle of stout I had left out for Barbara Jean. “What?” I said when my mom raised an eyebrow at me. “She’s done with it and it’s not like ghosts backwash.” We both laughed.

“If it was her, really her,” my mom said, “I think I know what she meant. Do you?”

“Yes,” I said, nodding for her to continue.

“She doesn’t want us to find how she died as much as she wants us to find out who she was, to fix what happened when she was erased. That’s the work that needs to be done.”

“Yes,” I said.

***

Maybe I do believe in ghosts. Or maybe that’s not right, exactly. Perhaps what I believe in is the spirits in our blood. We have what we need, we always do. Sometimes we can’t get to them, these answers inside us. Some scientists have faith in an afterlife and I suppose I do as well, but more than that I believe in this one. I believe in this place I find myself in.

My blood says that the grandmother who raised me, that Mary Evelyn loved me, despite my penchant for chickens. My blood says that Barbara Jean did not walk into a closet and while my six year-old mother slept in the next room, shoot herself in the head. I know these things. And I don’t know if I can prove them, but it is the believing that will set our family upright again.

Were the dead really talking? Who am I to answer that? I’m not a scientist or a medium. I’m just a writer, but I understand living. We’re living with our ghosts. We’re speaking to them. Isn’t that enough?

Related Posts:

• When Barbara Jean Was Missing
• A Brief History of Swans
• A Zealot and a Poet
• PK
• Displays of Affection

My grandfather, John Borowiec, passed away last Thursday. I have been listening to polka music all evening and all morning. He was Polish, born of first generation immigrants. He ranked E-4 in the Marines, a small rank but a committed one, loyal to what opportunities he attained. This became a pride in my family. Photos of his uniform and medals worn brightly in photographs on my grandma’s wall, photographs and medals proudly adorned during the funeral services. Services that I missed due to distance. But I held them here, a thousand miles away, in my home in candlelight. A fixture on a mantel adjacent Norman Rockwell Americana, comically soothing and whimsical at once. This morning, my cousin live-texted the funeral services because I could not be there. There is something so magically profound about technology. My cell phone now holds a photo of my grandfather in his casket.

I have learned that it is not scary to talk about the dead. They come back. They came back in stories and remembrance. They shoot right up through your body and take form. They become being as you pause to reflect and listen. I knew the second my grandfather died. I picked up the phone to find no voicemail only to receive the phone call that instant. I knew because I couldn’t think of anything else and because the only thing that became important was opening my mouth and giving his story form, honoring his life: a person who imprinted so much of himself onto me. In the good ways.

And I became brave. I became brave because everything that distracts me from the most honest intention no longer has voice and I can only listen to one thing: my heart. It’s like time travel. The grandest, most beautiful and unexpected phenomenon.

I experienced it almost a year ago when my mother passed prematurely. She was 53 and I have been haunted by her ghost since. In her memory, I haven given that ghost life in multiple forms and those forms wrestle with me each day. They challenge me and, in so doing, I have become a conduit of her spirit: the form who held me and coddled me as a child and the one who tormented me in my adolescence. In my adulthood, I honor both of those forms, or I try. I tell her stories, no matter how harrowing, because that is how I break from the imaginary chains and how I dream. And she is there with me when I do this. Not in the way that someone says the dead will always be with you because they don’t know what else to say, but in the way that my mother’s voice strikes right though my body sometimes and demands attention. So I give it. When I can and when it is reasonable, I give it.

I am working on a writing project in prose vignettes that focuses on cemeteries and the afterlife. Each poem is a gravestone. I have been working on this project for a few years, before persons of my direct familial lineage passed through this life. Perhaps I have more to work with now, but I am not grateful for it. What I am grateful for is the gift of life. What other realm than the realm of the dead can remind how frail, how beautiful, how bleak and how temporary the navigation of life is? Only one of the vignettes is completed. A few others are in the works. The voices in the vignettes will not come from the voices of my family, but from the voices of ghosts who have no voice. They will be fictional characters based on a grim reality, the way cemeteries look on overcast days in January.

In a fight for the good ghosts, my attempt is to dismantle the demons of addiction, lethargy, tardiness – demons that hold grudges and self-aggrandize, the ones that threaten and terrorize.

I plan to build an army of ghosts from the hearts of those I love. Their conduits will come with an industrial sewing machine and the most shimmering spools of thread, a wood stove, a tool shed, and a chopping block.

My grandfather tended the Saint Paul Cemetery in the small town of Warren, Massachusetts for many years of his life, a resting place of rolling hills and immigrants and Korean War veterans.

That is where he will repose when the ground thaws in the spring, and the ghosts of generations will dance to polka music.

Related Posts:

• Interstitial Days
• Consider the Bird
• Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #5: Darin Strauss
• Show Me More Funny Books Please
• Your Occasional Roundup Of Death

When Mom said, “You are the closest thing,” I knew I had to find Barbara Jean. My mother is turning 60 in a few weeks and her mother has been lost to us for 53 years. In 1958 she shot herself in the head with a .22 rifle. In the forced silence and palpable disapproval Barbara Jean had ceased to exist, stopped being anyone’s mother. We had always talked like Barbara Jean had made her choice. Now I wonder how many choices were made for her.

Where do you start when someone has been missing a half a century, when all the major players have taken their certainties to the grave? I suppose that question answers itself, you start with a headstone. If my mother ever visited Barbara Jean’s grave, she doesn’t quite remember it. She found a story she wrote in high school for English class in 1969. She thinks it is meant to be a short story, but it rings true with the awkward beauty of teenage prose. She and her father walk for what seems for miles until Roger finally halts, lost things found.  “Neglected, the grave looked lonely. The grass had grown around it covering the face.”

In the essay my mother and grandfather rip at the overgrown grass, tidying the grave with reverence. The seventeen year-old girl, seeing her mother’s headstone for the first time, seeing her mother for first time since she was six years-old needed to do something more. She thought she should find something lovely to leave, but wrote “I could find nothing but a torn broken dandelion.” So she placed it on the headstone.

“I don’t think it happened, Becky,” my mother says. “At least, I don’t think it happened like that.”

“I don’t care,” I tell her. I don’t care. When you begin to gather stories, you start realizing that what happened is not nearly as important as what is truth.

 ***

We found where Barbara Jean was buried on the Internet. She lies in Tigard, Oregon at Crescent Grove Cemetery and I wondered if it was a family plot. I wonder if it was her family’s plot, because Roger had run away with her girls to Southern California, leaving the grave untended. Short story or true story, Roger did not seem to recall exactly where she was buried. With no family left in Oregon, it was hard to know who was connected to the graveyard where she was buried. I wrote the cemetery and asked if she was there to be sure. Then I asked for a map. I had made up my mind to go, but I had to have a map.

Nearly twenty years ago I walked through Riverside National Cemetery with an arm full of carnations and baby’s breath on Christmas Day. My boyfriend was driving and I stepped from the passenger side of my Pontiac sunbird with a bravado that was broken by the long stretch of the cemetery’s perfect symmetry and well-groomed lines. I was looking for my other grandmother, Mary Evelyn who I had lived with from the time I was four until I went to college. She died when I was 21 years-old. I was looking for the mother who raised me, but I could not find her.

We walked for a half an hour, looking at the multitude of tiny plaques until it was unarguable that I was lost, that I would not find her on her birthday, on Christmas. My boyfriend coaxed me back into the car and I cried into the flowers in my lap for 100 miles. When we got to San Diego and I gave them to my boyfriend’s mother.

I don’t ever want to be an orphan in a cemetery again. I have never gone back to pay respects to Mary Evelyn. This time I have a map, but I still keep postponing the trip to see Barbara Jean. I think I am afraid I won’t find her.

My grandparents, Mary Evelyn and Howdy took me to the cemetery on relative’s birthdays and holidays. I am not sure who we left flowers for, but this was something that you did. You never forgot. So this year on Christmas I wanted to see Barbara Jean. Mary Evelyn and Howdy are buried side by side now, they are not alone. But no one was bringing lilies, glancing at the sky, holding hands above Barbara Jean. I wanted to go, but I didn’t.

Instead, I called my mother on the phone and read her the number of Barbara Jean’s plot from the papers I had just gotten in the mail. We imagined things lost and found. I promised I would go and take photographs of everything. We giggled like little girls who had just whispered of forbidden things, who had the audacity to speak of Barbara Jean on Christmas. Then I saw two familiar names in the list.

“Mom,” I said. “William and Rhoda are there too.”

William Everett Cates and Rhoda Duckett Cates were buried just a few plots over; Barbara Jean rested close to her parents. It was their family cemetery, their plots. I knew that Rhoda had died in the 1970s, more than ten years after her daughter, but ultimately were still near her. Barbara Jean had three brothers and a sister, but she was the only sibling buried near her parents.

“They said Rhoda was crazy,” my mom said. I knew that. It was why my mother and her sisters were never allowed to see her. Rhoda was disturbed. They said Mary Evelyn was crazy too. In fact, they committed her twice.

When I was eight years-old, when my mother was gone and I had only been living with my grandparents for a few years, Mary Evelyn disappeared. I don’t know what happened exactly. What I remember is later being told that she was staring at the canned goods in the grocery store, unresponsive, that she wasn’t right. What I remember with a clarity born of unease is waving beneath her third story window in Loma Linda Psychiatric Hospital, where I was too young to visit. I was told later that she thought I had been kidnapped. She was certain that she had lost me. I had to stand before her window and wave because she was crazy.

Still, no one took me away. They only whispered about Mary Evelyn being unbalanced. She returned home, growing heavy and angry over the years, molding her body and mind into the recliner in the living room from which she rarely rose. My family only whispered about her changing, about her pupation into state that as a teenager I was too self-absorbed to consider. I cried myself to sleep most nights, but I couldn’t see that my grandmother was probably more depressed than me.

They told me that if I went away to college that Mary Evelyn would probably die. She had three sons, but the family thought I was keeping her focused and alive. I didn’t understand that what they really meant was that she would lose her grip once she lost me as an anchor, once the world kidnapped me. I chose to go to school 500 miles away from home. I refused to be anyone’s reason for living. That was how I looked at it, but I spent my first three years of school working in a convalescent hospital as a nurse’s assistant, tending other people’s forgotten grandparents as if it were a penance.

When I called home one night and my grandmother could not remember who I was, I did not think she was having a breakdown. I listened carefully and believed that she was sick. I thought it was maybe an electrolyte imbalance. This was like when one of my charges, Jack Schiele, who was normally witty and wicked with humor, had become confused and frightened during one of my shifts. “Potassium,” the nurse had told me. “Mental confusion is often a sign of an imbalance.”

I drove home and my grandmother was worse when I got there. She was catatonic, sitting on the toilet, half dressed. I had to stand her up and dress her mechanically. I dressed her as if she were someone else’s grandparent, like it was any other day at work.

I demanded that she be taken to the hospital. My demands were met, but once at the hospital the doctor read her file, ran a few tests and then he transferred her into the psychiatric unit.  It took weeks for someone to ask the right questions and discover that her kidneys were failing, that her kidneys had been failing for some time.

 ***

I remember being twelve years-old, my father and my uncle wrestling my grandmother to the green Impala while she cried, “No. No. No.” She sounded terrified and defeated while her sons insisted she go and then forced her to go to the hospital. She had to have been in tremendous pain, her appendix had already burst, but she was desperate not to go. I could not understand her fear of being fixed. I thought it was just one of her foibles, but I understand now. If you let them know you are hurt, they might decide you are crazy.

***

Mary Evelyn wasn’t crazy, but after regular dialysis, her system cleaned of toxins, she was a woman I had never met. She was a grandmother who called me honey and bought me presents. When we spoke on the phone there was a warm depth in her voice that made me imagine a dark-haired slender woman with a knowing smile. When she told me that she loved me, I couldn’t remember if she had ever said it before. She sounded so alive, but she only stayed with us for a few months. She died of heart failure so I never got to see her again, but I am so glad I got to experience her whole. They were wrong about her and I am glad for that as well, or maybe it is more that I am relieved.

They say that Barbara Jean’s brother Armil, told Roger not to marry her. Armil took her fiancé aside and said, “Don’t do it, man. Babs is not right. She’s not right.”

She must have been crazy to shoot herself in head with a .22 rifle, right? She must have been clinically depressed, unhinged. In those rare moments when someone mentioned Barbara Jean, that is what they said.

***

Women suffer from depression at a much higher rate than men, but I am not convinced that depression is such a straight road to suicide. Women lead men in suicide attempts at a two-to-one ratio, but most psychologists are quick to point out that a suicide attempt is usually something very different than suicide. About 95 percent of suicide attempts are meant to be a solution in itself, a way to jar loose the problem for everyone else to see clearly and to assist. I understand this. When I was 20 years-old I gobbled a bottle of sleeping pills and later that year I slit my wrists. Yet, had there been a rifle in my closet I wouldn’t have used it. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to be reborn.

Women are only 25% of all suicides. Modern psychologists like George E. Murphy speculate that a woman is less likely to commit suicide because “She’ll consider not just her feelings but also the feelings of others — her family, the children, even acquaintances and how those people will be affected by a decision like suicide.” The idea of women taking their own lives has been considered so incompatible that there is very little historical research on the subject. A woman committing suicide was considered an anomaly not worth studying. In 1883 a writer in London’s Contemporary Review wrote, that ‘three-fourths of the cases [of suicides] are males, which shows that if the female intellect be less powerful than man’s it is at the same better balanced, or at least more capable of standing against reverses of fortune, and facing the battle of life.” It was even suggested that women who committed suicide were suffering from the effects of trying to be a man.

In 2006 a study examining three years of suicides in Riverside County, California showed that women were 73% less likely to use firearms than men. It isn’t the method of choice and more than that a rifle is not an attempt. If Barbara Jean pulled the trigger herself, she meant it. If she had other suicide attempts they would have been listed in her mythology, the hindsight of what was always coming. But there are none. We talk about how she locked herself in her room. We think that she was sad. Maybe Barbara Jean was even clinically depressed. This does not explain why she shot herself in the head. They say that she was always not quite right as if it explains it all.

I keep telling myself this is just a trip to the cemetery, but I had three beers before I finally bought the plane ticket and I still hesitated before I clicked “purchase”. I tell myself that I am afraid I won’t find her, that there will be nothing left to find, but that isn’t it. I believe that the older the secrets the harder the truth, but that isn’t it either. I worry what any answer might do to my family, but none of this is quite what is bringing me to my knees. The thing is that I want to be a daughter, but I am afraid of what that means.

 ***

On the plane to Portland, nursing a Bloody Mary, I stared at my wrist. I try, but cannot remember what it feels like to be that alone, even for the moment it takes to make a hesitant cut. I can’t remember, but I cannot quite forget either; I wear the proof.

When my mom told her sister Leslie that I was looking for Barbara Jean, Leslie fretted, repeating the story of her mother like a mantra, that story that must be protected. Leslie said that Barbara Jean was depressed. She was unwell. She was lost to us. “You don’t, remember, Shelley,” she said. “You were too young.” Leslie remembers Barbara Jean locked in her room, always locked in her room. She remembers her sisters being hungry and that is was her who eased their pangs, who fed them spoonfuls of sugar. She remembers being alone, but she was only seven, that age when moments alone are eternities.

“What if she was in her room writing her novel,” my mom asked her sister, thinking of the novel my grandfather burned when Barbara Jean died. Then my mother asked, “And where was our dad?”

 ***

I pulled down my sleeve to cover my wrist when I heard the shift of the plane engine and felt the dipping of our pitch, descending into Portland. The plane eased into that space of white nothing between open sky and obvious ground and I thought about how Barbara Jean wrote a novel. My grandmother was a writer. I know what they say about writers.

***

The night of my twentieth birthday my boyfriend, Pat told me to meet him at our apartment later in the evening. Although my name was on the lease, I had moved out and given back my keys to prove I meant it. Even though I didn’t mean it. Our relationship was on and off and punctuated by brutal fights in between. We were trying to make up again and he offered to buy wine coolers and make me smile. He was having beers at The Graduate where we worked and I wasn’t old enough to join him so would just have to wait, but it would be worth it, he promised.

The apartment was dark when I arrived at ten o’clock and when it began to rain, it felt inevitable. I checked at The Graduate, but he wasn’t there either. The bartender, Mike looked perplexed, “Pat? He left a while ago with,” then he stopped. “Never mind.”  I couldn’t get him to explain what “never mind” meant, but I thought I knew. Mike’s expression had changed from confusion to pity. So when I returned to the apartment and pounded on the door, I wasn’t surprised to hear a female voice. I thought she was asking Pat, “Who is that?”

I walked over to the bedroom window, moving into the rain, trying to hear. I still couldn’t make out what they were saying. I banged on the window and Pat shouted at me to go the fuck away.

“It’s my birthday, damn you,” I yelled, marking the beat of my words with fist on glass. “My. Birth. Day!” And the window gave way, rendered into shards and a cracking that overpowered the muting fall of the storm.

A man from the apartment above sing-songed, “I’m calling the police.”

My hand stung and I held it up to see blood dripping off my knuckles, mixing with the rainwater that drizzled from the bangs of my hair. For a moment everything hushed as if in that pause before your ears begin to ring.

Then I heard Pat say to the woman in our bed, “See. I told you she was crazy.”

 ***

I was expecting to find my grandmother’s grave, rest my palm on the stone and solemnly swear that Barbara Jean and all of her blood were of sound mind, that there was more to the story and vow to find it. As the road wended past historic three-story homes, their porches peeking above tangled landscape, I adjusted to the Pacific Northwest, its somber sky and dense undergrowth. What I had come to do was important, a poem to be carefully composed for generations. I thought that whatever I would discover would be hidden and historic, like those homes hinting at a past in quick glimpses though their untamed plots.

The cemetery was nothing like I expected. I made a sharp turn off a busy road with the lime green Ford Fiesta that had been assigned as my rental car and began to troll the North road. I was looking for the 920 marker on the curb. After following these instructions, North and 920, I gave myself a few moments come to terms with the incongruity of my view. I had imagined a vast cemetery, ancestors hidden in a forever grid of stone and grass. I had imagined lush pines weeping with a Pacific Northwest storm. This was not what I imagined. I laughed and cracked open a microbrew stout from the six pack I had brought with me. I wiped away a few tears, but they were equal parts sorrow and hilarity. “I can see JC Penny’s from here,” I said out loud.

I could have been in someone’s backyard, a house once rural now butted up against a towering shopping mall on three sides of its reluctant property. The sounds of car alarms were as prominent as the quarreling gulls and preoccupied clucks of the cemetery geese. The place made me imagine an 80 year-old woman swinging on her porch, wearing a wry grin and swigging from a mystery coffee mug. Crescent Grove Cemetery was grand and wise and stubbornly pretending there were no damn kids on its lawn.

From the 920 marker there was a twelve-grave walk to get to Barbara Jean and she was hardly hiding. “There you are,” I said. And to stop myself from crying, I looked around for witnesses. Then I knelt down next to her grave and I poured the opened beer I had carried for her into the ground. I poured it too fast and when it a bit of it frothed onto the headstone, I laughed and apologized, rubbing it clean with my sleeve. There was no one looking. And when I was sure of this, I walked back to my Ford Fiesta and opened my own beer. I placed yellow lilies on the grave and I drank a beer with my grandmother.

Rhoda and William were a row above her and two graves over. William had died in 1960, only two years after Barbara Jean. I wondered how Rhoda managed while I counted her extra 14 years. I looked up and spun around to keep my view close, taking in the stretching trees and the soft paint of the moss. I marveled that somehow this was home, a story that was mine.

When it was time to take the car back and catch my plane, I wasn’t sure how to say “goodbye”. How do you farewell someone you have never met? Who is even listening? The rich beer and the dichotomy of the landscape made me brave though. I closed my eyes, pretended I could hear and asked.

Barbara Jean said that she loved Shelley, my mother because she was a pain in the ass and for her daydreaming questions. Barbara Jean had a mouth like a sailor. I blushed and delighted. Then I begged her to tell me what happened to her. I asked for the answers now, not later, to just tell me. She said that what happened wasn’t nearly as important as what we decided had happened. Then I had flashes of what it would have been like to have Barbara Jean as a grandmother. There were burnt cookies, crooked Band-Aids, unfortunate hair braiding and an indifference that was dwarfed by a brilliant smile for the stories I wrote for her, for the stories I am writing her now.

I soaked my knees in the Oregon grass, cooled my forehead against her headstone and sobbed until there were no tears. Maybe Barbara Jean had nothing to say. Maybe the dead cannot speak. I could have been talking to myself, but I like to think that your blood sings. If the dead speak through our blood, this is what I said to myself. I believe what I heard.

It was hard to leave. I wanted to keep listening, but more than that wanted to get home, to call my mother and tell her what Barbara Jean said.

 ***

They said that Barbara Jean was crazy. They said that her mother Rhoda was crazy too. We said these things because it is what we were told. Whether we believed did not matter. These are the things that were said. Now we are saying, “I wonder.”

I wonder, was she? Were they? Am I?

Here is where we start again. Here is where we find you, somewhere between stone markings and shared blood. I was. I am. Your daughter. I will be your mother for a little while, for as long as you need me to be, Barbara Jean. Grandma. Here is where your story begins again and becomes ours.

Related Posts:

• The Ghosts in Our Blood
• A Brief History of Swans
• FOLK TALK: History Reinterpreted
• A Zealot and a Poet
• Death of a Gay Porn Star