by Diane Zinna
I had used it as an example, but some of the students didn’t understand the assignment. At midterm time, three ambassadors’ daughters submitted moving, well-organized essays that compared and contrasted their parents’ deaths. All the midterm essays were graded by the program head, Dorothy Wisch. She just assumed the girls had copied one another’s papers. In their poor English, they each wrote out my own fabricated story about my parents, and its starkness shocked and upset me. They showed me the skeleton of my lie in three mirrors, but not the grief—the flesh.
Dorothy left it to me to address. In the department, she was my strongest advocate. To her, I could do no wrong. She never even asked me about it again.
It was a good thing, too. I didn’t handle it right. The girls were all tall and thin, like high-fashion models. They came to my office hours and insisted they hadn’t understood the assignment, they hadn’t meant to offend me. I liked those girls so much, and I wasn’t used to conflict with my students. They spoke with their long-fingered hands, widening their kohl-rimmed eyes as I tried to stand my ground.
“Why did you give us that example if we were not supposed to use it?”
“It was an example. That’s the nature of an example.”
“I will call my father,” one of them threatened.
“That’s my point. Your father is not dead. The nature of the assignment was to write a personal essay. Come on, now. You are smart girls.”
“But you shouldn’t grade us on whether it was real. This is a writing class. What does it matter if it was real?”
“That’s right. You should grade us on whether we used the right format.”
I saw then that Siri was hovering in the doorway of my office, listening.
“We are sorry that your parents are dead,” another said.
They were the first students who ever challenged me on anything.
“C’s. Would you girls do with C’s?”
Siri came in right as the girls were leaving with their reassigned grades.
“What they did was wrong,” she whispered. “They stole your story. That was a personal story.”
“Maybe they did misunderstand the assignment,” I said, and she eyed me with disappointment.
“They missed the whole point. People want to connect. You need to let people in and let them connect. That’s what the writing is for, isn’t it? That’s what you said.”
I looked out the window.
“You give so much of yourself when you talk, and they didn’t give anything of themselves. They stole your sad story and claimed it for themselves.”
“It wasn’t my story, Siri.”
“It had part of you in it. The part you wanted to share with us.”
I looked at her. She hadn’t hesitated at all. She didn’t think it was peculiar that I had lied. She skipped right to understanding that—what? That there are sometimes reasons we don’t tell the whole truth.
“I didn’t lose my parents like that. The way I described.”
She pulled over a chair and sat down.
A clutch of students was laughing outside the open window above my desk. Siri rose to shut it, then went and closed my office door, too. Privacy. She returned to her chair and stared at the tattered corner of my desk blotter. She was waiting.
But when you don’t share your stories, you eventually lose their normal starting places. How would I remember where to pause and how to pace it? I was afraid of the quiet, of her, of privacy, even though her face was full of kindness. There was a broken piece of tile beneath my desk chair, and I scraped at it with the heel of my shoe.
A bridge, a skid, the funeral, the way people talked. I chewed on the inside of my cheek. In the morgue, my father’s hand was open and reaching toward my mother’s, I said. I’d laid my hands upon my mother’s stomach. Her face was gray and pressed in on one side, I said. Her whole body was rigid, but her belly was still soft. I remember loving her, the way her belly felt under my hands.
“I have my mother’s same stomach shape,” I said to Siri, pushing away from my desk slightly and looking down at my own body.
How long had I been speaking?
In the basement office, she tried to meet my eyes. I was suddenly ashamed of my hands on my own stomach. I dropped them into my lap.
She didn’t rush to fill the silence. She didn’t tell me she was sorry or change the subject in embarrassment. Instead, she reached for my hand. Her fingers were warm from holding her coffee.
She leaned forward and asked me, “What were they like?”
I hadn’t told anyone that story in years. Her question meant everything to me. For so long I had felt physically unable to speak about my past. I wanted to travel with one of those small chalkboards people use when they have no voice. I wanted to write the word pain on it, string it around my neck, and keep people away.
But Siri really wanted to hear. What were they like? She gave me time to find the words I needed.
“Sometimes I can’t remember their faces. Or I see them only the way they look in old photos, like statues. Often, I know I’m remembering things wrong, but I don’t know where things are getting muddled. And there’s no one to tell me what mistakes I’m making.”
My parents look like movie stars in their old photos. I have hundreds of them from before I was born, all out of order, like a book with its pages torn out. I tried many times to arrange them by year, as though if I could just get the order right, I’d have a narrative that would last, a linear story that would make sense and always matter. A box less likely to wind up in a dumpster after I was gone.
I kept salvaged memories in the dream journal beside my bed: That my mother used to be a model, wore a clip with a white flower behind her ear, and she got so tan each summer, people would ask her if she was Hawaiian. That my father had once been a beatnik, was able to swan dive, able to do a backflip off the front stoop of his childhood home in Queens.
They were often mistaken for my grandparents. When I came home from school with my friends, my father would be there in his knit cap, squatting to water the grass with the hose and its long shot of water that reached all the way to the other end of the lawn. He would always have this huge smile whenever he saw me.
In my hometown, there was a deserted motel with a playground. It had a structure that looked like a squashed metal hamburger. You could climb up a ladder and slither on your stomach onto a circular platform that was enclosed by bars. I only tried to get inside of it once, when I was about ten. It was night, and I was with my friends. I was wearing this big coat, and there wasn’t enough space for me. I was trying to back down out of it when the streetlights came on, which was always the cue for us to go home. I could hear my friends running back in the direction of our street, but my puffy coat had bunched up, making it hard for me to get out. I tried to take off my coat, thinking that might help me fit back through the opening, but my arms got caught behind me in the sleeves. I was terrified. I just lay on the platform and screamed.
And then, there he was. He talked me through coming down. He caught hold of my heels and pulled me out so that my chin accidentally went bang-bang-bang against each of the metal rungs. The sweet tobacco smell of his coat as he carried me home.
These were the things I remembered easily. But I had blacked out the memory of the accident with a ferocious growth of neural vines that changed my mind, I said, my brain, the very structure of it—now the shape of my brain is a heart, now a horseshoe, now a—
“Did you say it has been ten years?” Siri asked.
“Yes.”
I found myself wanting to add I’m sorry.
Ten years: by everyone else’s account, more than enough time to get myself together.
She was counting on her fingers. “The pain never really goes away. I lost my father…fourteen years ago now?”
“Your father?�
��
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, Siri. I thought you said it was your mother—”
“Both. My father first.”
Is this what had drawn us together, then? I couldn’t believe it. This girl in front of me was so full of joy and lightness. She seemed so giving, outward looking. It didn’t make sense to me that she could have also experienced such loss.
“I don’t have many memories of him,” Siri said. “But he used to do this thing, after my bath—he would take this big purple comb and comb my hair straight back from my forehead, over and over in the quiet. One night I asked him why he liked to do it and he said, ‘Because I love to see your beautiful face.’ That night I snuck scissors to my bedroom and cut off almost all my hair. When he came in to check on me, he saw the pile of hair on the floor and me looking like a hedgehog. He asked me if I did it because I didn’t want him to comb my hair anymore, and I said, ‘No, Pappa, it is so you can more easily see my beautiful face all the time.’ ”
She brushed her hair back with her hand and we laughed. She had told me the story to make me laugh. I was grateful for it.
“So my dad first. And then my mom, soon after.” She shook her head. “But I have my sister and brother. Lots of cousins and aunts. I don’t mean to suggest it’s anything like your story.”
When I first lost my parents, I used to go out at night and sit on the back lawn of our old house with Annie, the gentle, then-mourning dog that had been so devoted to my mother. I’d look up at the night sky and talk to them, and every so often, I’d see a plane or a satellite drifting by. I tried to imagine my parents as rocket people, living on another world for a while, and that one day, they’d come back for me.
My favorite story was Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day.” He described Venus as a planet of perpetual rain, where the sun only came out for one hour every seven years. I loved his nine-year-old Margot, who had moved to Venus from Earth. Her gray-uniformed classmates were jealous when she insisted that she remembered how the sun felt on her skin. They were too young to remember it themselves. I loved her poem in front of her class: I think the sun is a flower / That blooms for just one hour.
In the story, her classmates lock her in a closet, and when the sun arrives, they are so excited that they forget her there and run out to play. They only remember Margot when the sun has disappeared again into the mist for another seven years.
Since my parents’ deaths, there had been so much rain. How had he put it? A thousand forests had crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. Living felt that way to me: a crushed and crushed and growing-again forest. But grief was also the painful memory of the sun. That yellow coin big enough to buy the world with.
The day I told Siri my story, something inside me clicked open. It was as though I were eighteen again, and the years—all those bad, rounded-back years—thawed. And it was only the too-young, wet-faced me sitting, finally, beside a friend.
“I understand what you mean about forgetting a person’s face,” she said. “Ten years—it’s not really that long, is it? Sadness is long. It’s always long. A long string from a big ball that you roll and roll.”
She said she understood. And for a time, I was better.
* * *
—
SIRI TOLD ME about stables within walking distance of the college. I’d seen people beyond my classroom windows riding on a trail shielded by trees but had never thought about where they’d started from.
I began to meet Siri there. We’d both grown up loving horses. The way she described her time in the countryside of Sweden, it sounded like she and her friends had trained as bareback riders in a circus. She told stories of learning to stand up on a horse’s back, riding backward, riding three at a time, riding as toddlers bundled up in snowsuits, their snowshoes making the horses look like they had wings.
I remember the first morning we went to the stables together. “Here,” she said, and she handed me some sugar cubes she’d brought to feed the horses.
It was March, and still cold. I could see her breath when she made a clicking sound with her mouth and the two horses in the ring ambled toward us. From her pocket, she drew out carrots and placed them along the top of the fence.
“You’ve been here before,” I said. “They know you.”
“This brown one is named Rockabye. The white is Irish Cloud. The first day I saw people riding I knew I had to find the stables. I needed something that felt like home.”
“Are you homesick?”
“No. I mean, I don’t know. I needed to get away from there.”
“Why?”
“So many reasons.”
“Tell me one.”
She smiled. “Did I ever tell you that my brother is an artist?”
“No.”
“His name is Magnus. He’s good. He’s even kind of successful. He said he’d help me. But I just needed to make my own way, you know?”
“Do you like his work?”
She paused for a moment. “No.”
I laughed. I wasn’t expecting her to say that, but she stayed serious.
“Why don’t you like it?” I asked.
“I hate talking about Magnus,” she said quietly.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We don’t have to.”
She emptied her pockets and seemed to be gathering her thoughts together as she lined up more carrots, small apples, and sugar cubes along the fence rail. The two horses watched her without taking any, like they were waiting for her to continue, too.
“Every painting he does seems to tell a story about me doing something wrong.”
“He paints you?”
“He mostly paints my mother, but he makes her look frightening. When I was small, right after she died, I found all these sketches he’d done of her where each one was scarier than the last. When I was in Sweden, all I could do was paint beautiful pictures of my mother. And self-portraits where I looked like a perfect version of me, and landscapes with our house glowing as with a halo around it. All I was doing there was trying to tell my own version of things, fix what he did. I needed to get away to get him out of my head.”
“And now? Your work? Is it more you?”
“Not yet. My work is still where I meet all my ghosts. And I still see a lot of argument in the things I do. Like I’m trying too hard. But this is only my first year. I’ll find my way.”
The horses had eaten their treats and were now staring at me.
“Give them your sugar,” Siri laughed. “I think they saw me give you some.”
The sugar had crumbled in my hand as she’d been talking. She’d had me entranced. I wanted to remember her in that moment, sounding so confident, so unlike me at her age. I wanted to remember her hair just so, the puffs of dust around the horses’ hooves, their smell, her smile. I loved the way she spoke about art like it was her way to work through grief. I remember thinking, How convenient to compartmentalize that way, to only meet your ghosts when you work. She exerted control over them and met them where they lived, in her netherworld of geode paintings, mosaics, trompe l’oeil, plaster, glitter—unlike me, who lived at their mercy, memorizing a dead language so as not to meet them in the language they spoke.
I felt she had something she could teach me, and I loved being with her. Soon we were going to the stables most mornings. And soon, the pockets of all my coats were sticky with sugar.
* * *
—
THE SEMESTER SIRI came into my life, I was doing a lot of technical-writing work. Companies would host happy hours in D.C., and I’d often be invited and pass around my business card to the people there. My card had a logo like a feather pen. I still don’t know why I thought that would be a good visual for that crowd of military contractors and tech people. Maybe to set myself apart from them.
“What
do you do with feathers?” one of them asked.
I tried to make a joke, but it got swallowed up in the din of the place, and the man who had said it just turned back around to the bar. He was all shoulders, that man. The way he hunched, I imagined it was from the weight of his shoulders in that too-tight suit. I remember thinking that, too, when he was shrugging off his jacket in my apartment that night. In my bedroom, a red light glowed from the numbers on my digital clock radio. His back shone red in that light, his broad shoulders slick with sweat.
When I was depressed, or even when I was happy and had no one to share it with, or when I was bored, I reverted to some of the same behaviors from the New York house, bringing home strange men. But here, the rubbing together of my beloved days at Stella Maris and my midnight life made me feel there was more at risk.
The red-backed man in my bed was a rectangle. He was a sponge. My blinds were closed. One by one, I leveled the slats closest to my eyes and looked out upon the playground and the swings, where a woman sat talking on her cellphone. I tried to imagine she was talking with me until I fell asleep.
In the morning, the man was a damp depression on the pillow. I thought he’d gone, but he was another thirty minutes in my bathroom. Finally, when I opened the front door for him to leave, there was Siri with a bag of scones from the corner bakery.
Fog hovered over the man-made lake behind her like paint. We’d had plans to go to the stables that morning, and I’d forgotten. She had never come to my apartment before. It was alarming to see her there, so out of context. Her hair was in short pigtails, and she was wearing a puffy coat and an off-the-shoulder sweatshirt that said Casablanca across the front in glitter.
“What’s on your shirt?” the man said.
She looked down at the front of her shirt.