The stepchild
I spent so much time at my best friend Maureen's house that her mother, Meredith, called me her stepchild. Meredith was tireless, a blur of movement. When she wasn't at work, she was making dinner or doing the dishes or gardening or hovering over Maur and me as we baked a cake. Their house, a boxy Colonial in a small Maryland Eastern Shore town, was a work in progress. Meredith repaired walls, restored furniture. She painted. She waxed the floors. I don't remember her sitting in the TV room watching a show or reading a book on their expansive porch. There was no time.
Meredith's face was long and smooth. She had thin lips and auburn hair styled in a poufy permanent. Her eyes were unreadable, glossy and cool whether she was happy or teasing or angry. She was not one to hold her tongue. A self-taught artist, she preferred to paint winter landscapes, liked the simple beauty of the naked trees, their limbs chafed by cold, their bark furrowed and complex. The bone-bare limbs of a tree in winter remind me of her, of the oil painting in the kitchen, a tree's dark silhouette against a grey sky.
She grew up on a farm in post-Depression Alabama. I imagined cotton fields and sticky summers, a pre-Technicolor landscape, the women in house dresses and aprons grey from too many washings, the men in straw hats. Everyone spoke with a syrupy drawl, though Meredith's accent was sharp, like the smell of crushed ginkgo berries. She told us stories of poverty and farm life. The only detail that stuck with me is that her family used corn husks for toilet paper, probably in an outhouse with a crescent moon carved into a door, a stack of husks next to the seat. It was best when the corn was still green, pliable and fresh, but people who use corn husks for toilet paper take what they can get.
From third through ninth grades, I slept over at Maureen's house at least once a month and spent many post-school afternoons hanging out there. We walked down to the corner store for Dixie cups, flung ourselves off the backyard tire swing into piles of leaves, annoyed her older sister Karen with our Three Stooges fake snores. In the early years, Maureen and I danced around the spacious living room to Goofy Gold, with songs like Transfusion and Mr. Custer, her younger brother tagging along (later it was Prince and Duran Duran, the brother supine on a couch in the den, a wet washcloth plastered across his temple, the television humming in the background. He spent most of his early adolescence in this position.). The living room flowed into the dining room, with a cabinet stereo and a gravity heat register in the corner by the stairs. Maureen and Karen dried their hair over the grate every night, tipped their heads upside down into the heat and let it lift the strands.
I learned how to properly hold a fork at Maureen’s house. I regularly gorged on junk food there, too, barbecue-flavored potato chips, cheese curls that I would let melt in my mouth, smoky Slim Jims. For a kid from a health food household, it was the stuff that dreams are made of. I played endless Atari games and savored leisurely baths in the old-fashioned tub on the second floor. The weekend my mother decided to kick my stepfather out, I was at Maureen’s, a weekend I remember as being hazy with worry about what was to come. My first cigarette was in the woods out back, I had my first joint on the side porch, and heard Madonna for the first time in Maur’s third story room.
Then, in the spring of 1984, my mother met Kevin. I quickly became peripheral to her life. By that summer, I spent most weekends at Maur's or my grandfather's place at Hollywood Beach, a small community on the Elk River. Sometimes I was alone, sometimes Maureen came for a visit. We slept in the Little House, an unheated guest cottage without plumbing or a telephone line about 20 feet from the main building. My grandfather, who had been in an industrial fire in the mid-1960s, was almost deaf. He had a prosthetic foot that he removed at night at the same time that he switched off his hearing aids. Maur and I were completely unsupervised.
We did what many rebellious fourteen- and fifteen-year olds would do if given the chance: siphoned liquor from my mother and grandfather's supplies, (I can’t smell whiskey and Coke without being immediately brought back to that mildewy house, to the puking and sneaking and the excitement), stayed out all night, brought older guys back. Stole my grandfather’s car.
Well, not exactly stole. That late spring night in 1985 we had been drinking, me much more than her. Maureen had recently gotten her learner’s permit. I cajoled her into taking the car, actually an old loaner from the dealer while my grandfather's was being repaired, down to the river. Maureen wasn't sure it was a good idea, but I pushed her until she agreed. It was less than a mile’s drive along quiet neighborhood streets. What could go wrong? When we were almost to the beach, almost home free, she noticed that the driver's side door was slightly ajar. As she moved to close it, she accidentally turned the steering wheel sharply to the right. The car tumbled into Mr. Polke's yard, scraping against the decorative log border. The impact loosened the exhaust.
That's when things got complicated. My erstwhile boyfriend, D, who was dating someone else and usually showed up at the Little House after midnight, drove by shortly after it happened. He stopped to help and Mr. Polke, who had come running out of his house when he heard the commotion, became convinced that D had run Maureen off the road. Concerned for our safety, Mr. Polke backed the unmuffled car carefully out of his yard (the tire tracks! the logs askew!) and drove us back to the house. And then – my memory may be wrong here, pickled from too many nights of Johnny Walker Red chased with Budweiser – Maureen went out with another friend for most of the night. I sat up drinking, alone, hysterical. It was getting light when Maur finally returned. I was still awake.
A few hours later, me bleary-eyed, Maureen half-asleep, we told my grandfather the story, minus the drunkenness. It was an awkward conversation that started as all conversations with him did, with a pantomime to turn on his hearing aids. He took the news stoically. Meredith, however, was livid. We had taken advantage of my grandfather's handicaps in addition to stealing his car. She made a special trip later that week to apologize to him and give me a scathing lecture. Maureen was forbidden to visit. We split the cost of the exhaust pipe repair. Sometimes we talked on the phone. But the friendship was over.
Of course, my mother was angry, too. She probably made a venomous call to my father, see what I have to deal with in your absence, the same call she made when she returned from Kevin's one evening to find me drinking. She screamed, she kvetched -- what to do with me -- but she didn't stop me from going to my grandfather's house. In fact, two months later she bought a small house down the street from his and I moved into the Little House permanently.
This could simply be a story of teenage hijinks, the ill-advised “borrowing" of a car, the stupid, relatively harmless accident, the appropriately strict parent. I see the aftermath as being another abandonment, a confirmation of my battered self image, an unsettling thing to happen at a critical moment. I was fifteen years old. I shouldn’t have been in a position to stay out until dawn, to drink my grandfather's whiskey and sour Paul Masson wine, to be spending the night with a 21-year-old man who was someone else's boyfriend. Bad things happened, I courted those things, and even when my parents figured out the extent of the trouble I got myself into, nothing changed. It was enough for decades of therapy and a lifetime of writing material. It's material I wish I didn't have.
Maureen and I diverged. It would have happened anyway, as it sometimes does with childhood friends in adolescence. One goes punk while the other embraces pop. One picks up a drug habit, the other becomes a straight edge convert. Hormones and peer groups do their damage. I was lost and I lost her, I lost her family. The few times I was with them as an adult – I was in her wedding several years ago, a nostalgic nod to a childhood promise – I was uncomfortable. “You turned out to be a good person,” Meredith told me a while back, after the struggles of adolescence were long over. She seemed surprised. I’m not sure if it is because of what she thought I had in me, or if she understood, years after the fact, what I was up against.
I wish I could stand before her, stark and bare, honest, and tell her how much I missed that time when her house was a safe place, where I could swing from a tire into a pile of leaves or play endless games of Space Invaders and forget the rest of my life. It was childhood and it was wonderful, until it crumbled. Meredith did what she had to do as a parent, but I wish she could have seen the trouble I was in. Maybe she would have reached out for me, would have helped me out of a situation I didn't understand. But she was as blind as the rest of the adults were around me, human, unaware. And so I went on living as though I was fully grown, alone, independent to a fault.
This is from a photo prompt, a picture of a streetlight and telephone pole. I looked at the photo and stared out the living room window at the bare branches of a neighbor's tree against the dawn sky. It brought Meredith (not her real name) to mind and the end of my friendship with Maureen (also not her real name; none of these are real names). I've tried to write about this before, but have been unable to make it work. Still a lot to unpack, like so much from those years. I'm not sure if I've succeeded in transforming it here.
Confidential to Maureen, if she is reading: My apologies if I have misrepresented anything.
Image by lovestruck. I'm having scanner issues, hence the many photos from other people.
While your heart still beats
The pavement was slick and there were potholes and too many trees by the side of the winding road. The first to go were two juniors who were cutting school, doing what teenage boys do, driving too fast, maybe drinking or passing a bowl while the tires screeched and the car fishtailed. They ended up upside down in the creek that snaked by the road. They died. There were others in high school who died in car accidents, too, though at this point I mainly remember the names of the survivors (thanks, Facebook, with your updated images of people from the past).
Since my grandmother died, I’ve developed a strong sense of mortality, of my own, of other peoples’, of the various cats and dogs that have been in my life. Sometimes it hits me more than others, generally when I’m feeling low and isolated, when the sun hasn’t been out in weeks. It doesn't help that I've been spending an hour or two a day writing out the details of illness and death for my novel manuscript. And I’ll have dreams about these people, the dead from high school, usually as represented by David Anderson, the last one to die, the one who made it into the yearbook, a ghost by the time the book was printed.
There are other “deads” as my son calls them, like Carolin, a friend from college who had some sort of birth defect that we never discussed. She’s been gone for seventeen years, sometimes still visits me in my dream version of our college dorm. My grandfather shows up less and less now as I deal with the past, though I am sometimes reminded of how much there is to deal with (another nod to Facebook, where people who knew me peripherally during one of the darkest times in my life show up, and I remember just how bad it was and I want to die with the memory).
As I was wrestling again with that long-ago past, something that I keep thinking should be a “dead” itself at this point, as I was having a good cry after washing the dishes Thursday night, Nora, our Russian squirrel hound, came clicking into the kitchen. She likes to comfort the sad and inexplicably lonely, especially if it involves a pat or two for her. I knelt down to stroke her chest and was struck again with memory. There I was, ten years old, in what used to be my grandmother’s room, petting Greta the miniature schnauzer. Greta's fur was warm and soft. She groaned as I scratched behind her ears, reached out a paw as if to say "Don't stop." At the time, I was struck with the exquisite transience of it all, the way a heart stops and the lungs give out, the vulnerability of our soft bodies and delicate skulls. Disease creeps in. A car slams into a tree and then into you. You ignore the deep cough until it is too late. No matter the trajectory of the story, we all know how it ends.
Greta was killed by a hit-and-run driver when I was in seventh grade, about six months after we left my grandfather's house for Wilmington. He let her out when he was getting the mail. As he limped to the mailbox, Greta trotted to a neighbor's yard. She was halfway across the street when a car came tearing past and knocked her into a ditch. Either the driver didn't see her or didn't care to stop and my grandfather caught only a glimpse of the car's tail lights. It was the violent conclusion of Greta's brief story.
I knelt in the kitchen, my arms around Nora, and added up the dead. I felt their hands in mine, the touch of a gentle paw, the sound of a meow. Greta and I sat together in the dusty sunlight, her eyes brown and serious, her heartbeat strong. Sidney played a game of capture, batted at the pencil I pushed under the door. Louise curled up on the dining room table, a dog pretending to be a cat. I brushed against a boy in a hallway as he ran by, late for class. And my grandmother croaked out "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" while I giggled from the swing that hung from the maple tree. Even the tree is gone now, but like the rest it exists in my memory, in the stories I tell.
I held Nora tighter, tried to appreciate the moment, knowing I would think about it when she was gone. And the sweetness of it almost killed me.
Top photo by Jane Underwood, Writing Salon mistress and photographer extraordinaire.
Bottom photo by Mr. T from Nora's first week with us in 2003.
After writing this prompt and struggling with various versions of it for the blog, I got out my senior high school yearbook (theme: "A Unique Blend." I had forgotten that high school yearbooks had themes), just to check on some of the facts. There was David Anderson, still in with the living seniors, but at the front of the book was a dedication to three other people from our class who had died, two of them in car accidents: Pat O'Donoghue, Rob Klaczkiewicz, and Joe Lombardino. There were others who died while I was at school, specifically those upperclassmen in the first paragraph of this post, though I could have some of my facts wrong about the accident. They died in the mid-80s, well before our lives were digitally monitored, before you could have a Facebook page even after death. The fact that there was no trace of these young men made me sad. It was almost as if they had never existed.