Ghostbread
Page 18
epilogue
Ask anyone who leaves one world for another and you’ll hear about a kind of limbo. Once you pass through certain doors, you can no longer go back—you find that your body has grown in ways you could not have predicted, and no longer fits. Even if you sucked everything in and forced yourself through, the rooms you’d find would feel smaller somehow. Constricted.
And still, the place at which you’ve arrived isn’t quite right either. The rooms are wide and light, but you angle your body by habit; manage somehow to sit down to tea, but always, bits of you stick out in ungainly fashion, and you must work to keep yourself in check.
I am grateful for the life I have built, but as with most people, my journey does not end, and I cannot say that I’ve arrived simply by reaching a place where I no longer worry about how to pay an electric bill.
I managed to make my way. Across that stage at East High School. Through years of college and graduate school. Into a different life. But remnants of the past remain. Like a ghost, the past is always there, flicking its gauzy fingers my way.
I work as a counselor with children, and when I find myself face to face with a six-year-old without lunch money or a nine-year-old whose parents are never home, I feel it. When a friend tells me about a husband who has left, on the perpetual search for something better, I think of my mother, and can almost hear the flapping of wings. When the phone rings at 2:00 a.m., I go cold; it will be the past calling, I know—a sister or brother in need—and as I reach for the receiver, I’m transported back to that small dead end street; standing in that kitchen, staring at the cracked linoleum floor. As though I never left.
Indeed, despite my personal exit from them, the places I came from are still all too real. Western New York remains a place of rampant poverty.
On the reservation, in the rural towns dotting Ontario’s southern shore, in the cities of Buffalo and Rochester, boys and girls—even as you read these words—are stuck and struggling to survive. Their families love them, but love is not enough, and so they scour cupboards and backyards and alleyways looking for something more. Children are told that if they work hard, there’s a future in store, brighter and better than anything they see. But when they are ready to begin the journey, they find themselves without a map. Or the map they are shown has no local coordinates, and so, wringing their hands, they are left to wonder over points unknown. They may not have the benefit of a lucky break or twist of fate. And they, like all in need, will grab at the first thing that offers itself.
Girls will lie down with sweet-talkers—not because they are stupid or weak, but because they are human beings with hearts and heads and dreams, and above all, hunger, and sometimes sweet-talking is just the thing. They will have babies, because babies are warm and real and maps they can make sense of.
To choose what one knows is so compelling, after all, that one barely realizes she is choosing.
I might have easily become a mother in high school. I could have taken a different and better-marked path, and certainly, I tried for it with my recklessness. Like other girls (and boys) who looked to the future, I saw only a one-sided bridge. Only chance kept me from becoming a parent. Only circumstance allowed me to walk the stage at East High all those years ago. Circumstance, and perhaps a bit of light carried to me by the goodness of others. And it is some combination of such things that brings me to this page.
“How did you make it through?” people want to know. And I am not being humble or coy when I shake my head and can find no words.
I am not sure.
Was it my mother’s appreciation for books, access to open fields as a young child, the people at church, a penchant for test-taking, or simply a faulty reproductive system? And I don’t wish to condemn where I came from with a celebratory exploration of where I am, and yet, I celebrate. I celebrate and cry for those who still live in poverty’s clutches: beautiful nieces, good-hearted nephews, hardworking siblings. I see with agonizing clarity from where I stand, and though I’d love to point them in new directions, there is no rope strong enough to pull someone from one life to another. And perhaps it is arrogance to try.
Ideals and opportunities and social theorizing are just fine, but if you must understand only one thing, it is this: a warm hand and words whispered into the ear are what we want. Paths that can be seen and followed and walked upon are what we most need.
Because in the end, the thing that feeds us, no matter how tenuous, is what we will reach for.