1/27/21

         It’s not the chessboard on the table in the kitchen which also serves as a dining room that was stolen and replaced in a time of contention before I was aware of who my father was – this is where we sit and my Grandmama cooks French toast on the range top and offers me plates to no avail and my Grandpapa teaches me how to unseat my opponent’s King in his static ambition, to see the world in its positions – it’s people and their limitations through beige alternating mahogany squares revealing the way forward and sideways in the four-step leap of the horse or the versatility of the all-powerful Queen.

It’s not the musk of bubbling canola oil fried partly in the fashion of a classic American diner smelling also like the home of a plump Eastern European woman. She bastes and she bakes hand pies, apple fritters, Kledniki, Rizek, Cibulacka each pastry twisted to a certain perfection and care I can never quite understand for something that’s gone by nightfall.

It’s not the prickly stubble I wince as I kiss him my Grandpapa apologizes I feel bad he feels bad and I kiss him once more and I go to sleep to the sound of his razor buzz downstairs and I can only imagine the pewter blue smell of aftershave it’s called aquamarine blue I memorized its opaque bottle and I put it on my wrist because I love the smell.

It’s not the Sorry Sorry my Mama says to me, for marrying him and the They say psychological issues and I say No No I know she is enough, more than enough – I love my Mama and I thank her for saving me from him. It’s not the tears because she never cries it’s what’s in the void that’s supposed to be trust till forever do us part.

 

It’s not that I long for him, it’s the opposite. I see him in everything I hate except I can’t hate anything or anyone as much as I hate him and still I don’t know what hate feels like because hate is the extension of love when it is breached and there was never love for as far as I could remember it was only fear; it still is only fear, that half of my genetic makeup belongs to something I hate. It’s the asthmatic allergies to words I run away from and I learn quickly how to hold my breath and navigate streets in my head so I know the way back home and keep my breath in the room smelling of ramen noodle packets tried and fried that I figure must be in an uncleaned pantry that I’m afraid to look through as I count my breath I never lose it I run and I never tire. It’s the blue eyes, brown hair, always late but good vision that fails to care. It’s the part of me capable of one day having children and abandoning them it’s the fact I’m happy not sad they will only know their grandfather through the parts of me I try to suppress.

It’s not the things I’ve kept at a distance because I knew he liked like the Patriots and Android phones, Dunkin coffee the South Beach Diet or the cross hung on the wall that was the only thing on the wall by the bed where I cried every night for fourteen nights. I hated that cross I hated the church I hated Christmas I hated it so much I held my breath when we did mass in preschool and whenever I entered or passed any church because I didn’t want any more of him seeping in.

It’s not the fatherly touch my Mama and I share the same father and he teaches us how to drive but never drink because my Grandpapa never drinks and my biological father had issues. It’s the radio in our minivan that plays Why You Gotta be So Rude and my eleven-year old self is sobbing because my soccer coach is going back to England and I think I genuinely loved him when he called me road runner. It’s the resentment I feel when Officer Friendly comes to visit in first grade and I am being stuffed into a car against my will, my nose bleeding scared I’ll never see my Mama again suffocating and skeptical of every social service worker psychiatrist I hold my breath in the back of the car and choke on my own sobs and it’s the long brown coat my Mama is wearing that sticks. She has no expression on her face that I can remember all is blank I blink and she is civil; her face civil her brown jacket civil standing outside the courthouse of civil affairs etched into my mind and I black out I think the windows are tinted and I might see God that night I see my big brother cry for 8 hours straight and it’s the first and only time I see him cry.

It’s not the Yedna, Devye, Chi… I count down before we hang up the phone a tradition my sister started with Grandmama and Grandpapa like I count in my head the different ways I count down the hours until I get to talk to my Mama on the phone and when I do I go to the bathroom for privacy so he can’t hear me except it’s not time for a call yet I still have to wait until Thursday and it’s Wednesday so I sit on the closed toilet seat and wonder why cats like to unravel the roll of toilet paper all the way down pulling until all that’s left is the brown cardboard roll and I decide to unravel the roll until the brown tube is all that’s left is a mess on the floor and I don’t care.

I’m not sure if all small children are compelled to torture small creatures but it was the porch steps where I sought and brought my prey – caterpillars, roly-polies, worms, ants – I picked them up the tiniest of creatures and performed surgical operations on all accounts inhumane. It’s the basement of the second or third apartment on the designated days where I would go to get away from his breath and trap the cat whose name was “Bibit,” supposedly French for “bug” – I would trap the cat named Bibit underneath the laundry bin and cover the laundry bin with my princess blanket and keep it there for hours.

 

It’s not the trinkets on the side table in the waiting room I skepticize their playability they assess my mental stability even in the dim-lit shadowed figures of the waiting room we mutually decide No. It’s not the eight-and a half by eleven inches onto which he says draw a picture and I say Of What and he says Of Anything and feeling slightly caught on the spot and shy I say I couldn’t think of anything to draw. So he says Tell me a story and I say I can’t think of a story so he starts one for me – a scary story? I’m pulled into the delight of the horror – I think some very integral part of a five-year old’s mind relishes in the realm of fantasy horror in the same ways we dream up unicorns because the horrors of life aren’t real yet and so horror is still indulgent, especially in a story.

A graveyard is what we decide on for the setting but I can’t remember whether it was me or him who suggested it. We fill in the ghosts and the monsters and the undead and I can’t remember the rest. All I remember is the ride home with Mama when she asked what we talked about and I told her the graveyard story and she said she too wrote a story, one about flowers in a garden and I cried. I add this to a mental list of things I’ve become a disappointment.

Back on the porch I catch a caterpillar and my Mama sees me through the moustiquere and says you never torture living things! Would you do this to a dog and how would you feel if this was you and I broke down crying because how did I let myself do this and what kind of a person have I become at his house I’ve become a narcissistic monster.

The rest of the graveyard story transpired in some court documents I never read which are tucked neatly among others in a filing cabinet in the closet in the attic where I was never allowed to look even though I was tempted when I played with my Lite Brites. The story was overheard only through walls of adult conversations I didn’t understand then but I understand now that that wasn’t a psychologist that was a psychopath who used my words against my Mama in the court of law I was a prosecution of my mental instability and my Mama’s inability to parent. And I still wonder if it was me who came up with the graveyard story or if was it the psychopath? Sometimes I think I just complied so I could get out of there as soon as possible. I didn’t like that place and it didn’t like me. But it’s hard to testify to what I did and didn’t do. Did I actually crush and torture little bugs? Did I ever trap Bibit under the hamper? I don’t know. I just know that today I am the person who always lets out the beetle I never kill it and every time I see an earwig in the corner of the room I pretend not to see it as to let it live it’s life in my home and when a daddy-long leg spider decides to enter my room it lives on my ceiling for weeks and I feel for the creatures in its web but I imagine it has baby long leg spiders to rear and feed so I let them all live there too. It’s the countless carpenter ants, woodboring beetles and centipedes I’ve sent each off with a ceremonious goodbye I slide a tissue under its little feet so I can transport it outdoors where I pick a little home for it in the grass and I say a prayer even though I’m not religious. I have a moth infestation in my bedroom because I don’t want to kill the delicate little creatures so I don’t tell the adults and watch them every night partly in awe and partly in fear from my bed I watch as they swirl around my lamp light and sometimes brush my skin goosebumps but I feel too much for these moths so we agree on mutual cohabitation. Maybe I’m like this for a reason. Or maybe I’ve always been like this. The point is that I’m four different people if I listen to my first-grade progress reports or the court statements or my mama’s memories or my sister’s stories – I can’t know for sure who I was but I settle on detaching my current self from that person.

It’s trying to escape the ranks like not getting called back to the sorority house after showing up in a box on a screen behind concealed bags lined with rose gold powder bronze and glittering realities checked for Round Two in none of the houses I opened up to sorority sisters with tears in their eyes I thought this was deeper than the system again I wonder what it is like the life I will never know and I know it’s absurd to grieve for a life you’ve never known for a family you haven’t met but rejection from a stranger after an eight minute conversation feels like rejection nonetheless it’s as though he looked down at my eyes and walked out or even so before birth I was sworn off in an abortion before I was one of a pair of cries and swaths of wet diapers I was Baby B before I was a spinabefital fetus I was the consequence of unintention a repercussion of misbegotten feelings of aspirational love or something in the photo album reception it’s not a wedding in a park behind the courthouse it’s the courthouse I hate it’s the judge I hate so much I hold my breath in a legal manner when I pass Grabbler & Associates or any firm for it’s not the lack of reciprocity between a father and his daughter because there’s nothing on my end of the street or either end of the street for that matter except the slate walls of the County Courthouse and the marbled steps where my mother in her civil coat stands under oath in the harrowing February air she was an attorney once but that was years ago I’m a different country now she says but maybe I want to work in a courthouse someday or maybe I just want to write what’s wrong and bring justice to light like the writers of Elle Woods in Legally Blonde when she says she wants her dog back Yeah you heard her give her the damn dog back and we’d drive away together with the wind in our hair, just me and my Mama in my car with the top down.