by Katie Arnold
This goodbye is much harder than the day he moved out, because I remember it. Because it changes everything for real, forever. We are leaving and Dad is crying and leaving him seems an unforgivable abandonment, the most wretched kind of betrayal. Guilt lodges itself in my gut like an indigestible pit that won’t go away.
4
Signals
PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD
Me, Summit, New Jersey, 1980
I’m six and a half years old, and I am running.
Smocked dress, navy-blue party shoes with a buckle and leather soles. Bare legs pumping down the sidewalk in Summit, New Jersey. Behind me, my mother in her pale-pink belted dress and pantyhose, screaming Stop! I reach the corner, hesitate for half a second, look left, look right, and then hurl myself across the street alone. My Mary Janes make a scuffing sound on the concrete. I’m in my body and outside of it. I know I’m being naughty, frightening my mother. But I can’t stop myself.
Ahead, the church, its sharp granite steeple stabbing the sky. It’s my mother’s wedding day.
I have no idea where I’m running or why. The urge to flee overwhelms reason, outweighs my deep-seated desire to be good no matter what. All I know now is the sensation of flight, a brief, flickering freedom, the sudden realization that my legs can carry me away, where no one can catch me.
We rolled into Summit a few days before the wedding. My about-to-be new stepsister, Amy, seven years old, with an enviable blond bob, and I played Othello in Ron’s apartment on the morning of the ceremony, my fingers clutching the smooth black-and-white game pieces, stroking the board’s soft green felt for comfort. My wedding hair parted down the middle and pulled back with white plastic butterfly barrettes. I remember: clutching a small bouquet of roses; the hot, panting terror I felt while running to the church; nothing of the ceremony.
We lived on top of the highest hill on the highest ridge due west of New York City, in the Watchung Mountains. At 450 feet above sea level, “mountain” was an exaggeration. It was more of an escarpment, spindled with trees and rising modestly like the face of a small breaking wave. Mom told us that this was the crest where George Washington once stood, lighting beacons for his troops stationed on the island that is now Manhattan, to warn them of the coming redcoats. I liked this image of danger and heroism buried beneath the sidewalks where, two hundred years later, I rode my bicycle and played hopscotch.
Our new house on Fernwood Road was a drafty hundred-year-old Victorian, marigold yellow, with glossy black shutters, one house down from the true summit of Summit. “Don’t split hairs,” Mom used to say when we bickered over whose turn it was to sit in the front seat (always Meg’s). This was, when you think about it, an odd sentiment for an accountant, whose job it was to split hairs. But that was Mom: cheerfully determined to smooth over the sharp edges, always willing to round up.
In September, I started second grade at Lincoln School. On Fridays in Mrs. Volz’s classroom, we played spelling bingo; when you won, you got your pick of miniature chocolate bars from a bowl on her desk: Mr. Goodbars, Krackle, and my favorites, the chalky, bitter Special Darks. My class launched helium balloons from the playground, our hopeful messages tied on with ribbons. This balloon belongs to Katie A., 2nd grade, Lincoln School, Summit, New Jersey—a tenuous time capsule adrift in the clouds.
I am seven. My nickname is Minniscule, a play on my middle name, Minnis, a family name. I am the littlest in my new family, the youngest in my grade. “May I please have a Minnis pancake,” my new brother, Ronnie, asks; Minnis is code for “small.” Ronnie is ten and swings his wooden baseball bat at all hours of the day; he and Amy live with their mom in the next town over. I am dwarfed by the scale and complexity of my new life. Bigger house, twice the siblings. But half the scaffolding is gone, the sure hands pushing me forward, the protective tent under which we sheltered now flapping in the wind, letting the great world blast in. Unspoken is the gaping distance that separates me from Dad. My balloon sailing into the infinite sky, the uncertainty of its journey feels just like loneliness. Who will find my balloon? Who will know me now?
I’m learning the rules of our new house. Chores are assigned. “Many hands make light work!” Mom trills, by way of pep talk. My job is to empty the wastepaper baskets. They are wicker, made with a crisscrossed basket weave that traps tiny debris. I’m making my rounds, room to room, emptying baskets into a large garbage bag, when I hear Ron calling me. He beckons with one finger, and points to an empty wastebasket. I look closer. There at the bottom, plastered to the wicker, is half a cinnamon gum wrapper, glistening and sticky. He peels it off with two fingers and holds it up for me to inspect.
“There’s a right way and a wrong way,” Ron admonishes me. His authority baffles me. How can he be so sure? And who gets to decide which is which?
“Do it right the first time,” he says, dropping the tiny fleck of torn wrapper into the garbage bag. “Touch it once.”
This is his motto, but it’s not mine. I already know that life can’t possibly be this neat. Not when you love two families, back and forth, here and there, as best you can but never perfectly. You mess up again and again and keep going. Life is about touching it all as many times as possible.
A week later, my balloon makes landfall in the yard of another human being in another town. That person licks a finger, flips through the phone book, dials Lincoln School. My scrawled card arrives by mail a few days later, and I hold it in my hands, dazed by the distance it has traveled back to me. It has survived its improbable flight. I’ve won the balloon launch. Things lost can be found again.
* * *
—
It was understood that we didn’t talk about Washington or our old life, just the three of us, Mom and Meg and me. We pretended that we had always lived this way, a family of six, coming and going, going and coming, in an elaborate charade of unity that might eventually come true if only we acted like it would. To gauge the mood in our house, you had to go on raised eyebrows, the purse of Mom’s lips, the emphatic clink of Ron’s spoon against his teacup. Our job as children was to adapt and not make trouble. We were expected to do well in school, and be happy and keep busy, as Mom had, growing up in Toronto in the forties and fifties.
My mother, Betsy, was the fair-haired, deeply adored daughter sandwiched between two sons. When she was two, her mother put her in her playpen in the front yard, and tied her wrists loosely to the wooden slats with cotton sewing scraps so she wouldn’t climb out. A few moments later, the polished black telephone began to ring. It was the neighbor across the street. “Peggy,” she said, “I think you’d better look out the window.” My mother had flipped out of her playpen and was dragging it behind her down the middle of the road.
PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD
Mom, Stony Lake, 1961
When she was nine, my grandparents bought a cottage on an island north of Toronto, without running water or electricity. Mom had her own cedar strip canoe, with Betsy painted in red cursive on the bow, and a sixteen-foot sailing sloop she named Scurry. She was the only girl on Stony Lake who sailed, and she took pleasure in beating the boys in the races. “You can do anything you set your mind to,” her father told her over and over. Her mother said, “You’re the luckiest girl in the world!”
This was the same thing Mom told us whenever she caught us pouting or feeling sorry for ourselves. “We are the luckiest girls in the world!” The way she practically sang it, so melodiously, I knew she believed it down to her very soul, and I wanted to, too. All signs pointed to yes: We lived in a big house on a hill and belonged to the Y. Dad called Meg and me every Thursday like clockwork and when they spoke, my parents were always cordial. I never once heard them say a bad word about the other. I had my own bicycle and a pair of metal circus stilts and a mother who loved me and drew silly faces on my hard-boiled eggs for lunch.
Mom w
orked part-time in an accounting firm downtown, but she was always home to greet us after school, the cookie jar full of oatmeal-and-walnut hermits just out of the oven. She’d sit with us at the kitchen table while we did our homework, a Pink Pearl eraser tied to a twine around her neck and a yellow accounting pad by her side, clacking away at her adding machine with mesmerizing sureness and speed. The paper roll spewed out mysterious sums in a long, unstoppable curl, a language that gave her a deep satisfaction and that only she understood. She could do all this and talk to us about our day without once looking at the keys.
* * *
—
Within a month of moving in, Meg and I knew every kid on Fernwood Road. Like most children in the seventies, we had a supremely unsupervised childhood. We were responsible for our own entertainment. “If you’re bored, it’s your own fault” was Mom’s refrain. We rode our bikes to school, drew a four square court in the street with soap, and made up elaborate charades. In one, Meg was the horse and Amy and I the pioneers and we would hook Meg up to the garden cart with invisible reins and sticks for crops. As Meg trotted us up and down the driveway, we fed her handfuls of instant oats we’d pilfered from the pantry. We insisted that she actually eat the oats, not just pretend. Everything else about the game—the exaggerated whinnying, the fake nasal snorting—she could tolerate, but the oats Meg found deeply, rightfully insulting. The game would grind to a halt, and she would stomp up to her room and slam the door.
Meg had been given a typewriter for her tenth birthday and was writing a trilogy about the colonization of Saturn by a band of children. Many afternoons, she didn’t come out of her bedroom. I could hear her clacking away on the keys, the metallic thwap-thwap taunting me. “Please come out and play!” I’d beg her through the closed door, and her wordless answer would echo through the woodwork—thwap, thwap, thwap. I knew from peeking that a stack of double-spaced typed manuscript pages sat faceup on her desk, the mark of a true professional.
I’d lie on the floor outside her room for a while, feeling empty and alone, but her concentration was unshakable, and eventually I’d lose hope and drift off to play by myself. The aimlessness of those suburban afternoons could suck the life right out of you, but you couldn’t expect your family to save you from the cloying inertia. You had to create your own energy. It came from within, like an engine or a flywheel. The important thing was to keep it spinning.
* * *
—
I spent as much time as possible outside, free from the complicated rules and allegiances of my new family. In the fresh air, my restless longings became less acute. Time seemed to stretch and settle, and my energy settled, too. I liked to pretend I was Harriet the Spy, fictional heroine of the children’s book by the same name. Harriet was eleven. She had freckles like me and wanted to become a writer, so she devoted herself to spying on people to get material. She mapped a sleuthing route around her neighborhood, taking detailed notes for the books she hoped someday to write.
I wanted to be a writer, too, but Meg had beaten me to it. She had the typewriter, after all, and when she broke the keys from pounding too hard, Mom and Ron bought her an electric Brother. She was working on a trilogy, for God’s sake! Human beings have been telling stories since the dawn of time, but in my dubious reasoning, this gave her ownership over the entire enterprise.
I wrote secretly, where no one could see or hear. Before dinner, I played basketball alone in the driveway. I’d position myself in front of the hoop and throw the ball against the backboard, over and over. I was small for my age and had no talent for the sport, nor did I love it. What I loved were the elaborate stories I invented, entire sagas that came to me while I did my layups. I never wrote them down; they lived in my head, and when they disappeared, new ones would come. I felt a rush of almost indescribable joy in these moments, a secret thing flapping inside me: my imagination.
The one story I did write down was about a girl whose parents had divorced and who was scheming ways to get them back together. I wrote the title in bubble letters (“What a Choice!,” exclamation point) and tied the pages with cheerful orange and yellow yarn that I hoped would disguise the trepidation I’d felt while writing it. Couldn’t I have made the story about something fantastical or perilous, like Meg’s novel? No. I had to go and base it on a girl my age, like me but not me. My writing in comparison seemed shabby, lacking in both imagination and ambition. My teacher pulled me aside and told me she was going to submit it to a children’s literary journal. I was mortified. The thought of my parents reading it and talking to my teacher made me cringe. They would think I was writing about me! That I was unhappy and wanted my parents to reunite. Did I? Was I? I didn’t think so, but I’d made up so many stories in my head that it was hard to keep track anymore.
I stuffed the story with its babyish yarn and drawings into a shoebox in my closet. Writing was best kept as a private happiness, like bike riding and making up spy stories in my head. It was much better to not be so serious. Look where it got you.
Instead, I made my own spy route. I rode my bike around the block, scouring the sidewalk along Summit Avenue for torn bits of handwritten notes and receipts dropped from pockets, evidence in a mystery of my own invention. I would fold them into my pockets and pedal home. Our garage was a carriage house dating to the 1890s, with three stables and rusted feed bins that still smelled like hay. Upstairs in the coachmen’s quarters was a wooden ladder up to the cupola. The cupola had four low rectangular window openings, covered in thick fencing wire that allowed a view of neighbors’ backyards while obscuring the watcher from view. You could see rooftops and trees, sheds and garages, people emptying their trash, coming home from work. It was the ultimate stakeout.
The cupola didn’t have a floor, just a narrow beam spanning the middle. To get to the beam, you had to lunge out from the top rung of the ladder and hook one leg around the beam, then scoot out on it until you were straddling it, perched ten feet above spools of pink insulation. Ron had cautioned us that the pillowy rolls were made of flecks of glass and might cut us if we slipped off. The possibility of falling frightened and fascinated me equally. I imagined plunging through suffocating clouds of cotton fluff, sailing through darkness and beyond, landing in another world.
Alone on the beam, I examined my haul and scanned the territory below for signs of subterfuge. I could sit for an hour, noting my observations and speculations in my second-grade composition book labeled SPY WORK, PRIVATE! and by the time I was done, I would believe my own stories totally:
The Case of the Plant Divice [sic]. Who we think is the person causing this? Mrs. S. is. What makes us think she is the person? Because she ran up her driveway suspishishly….She bent down into the hole. Rocks were messed with and her panse were dirty. How did she get the divice down in hard ground? All she had to do was place it down and when it rained it froze. It was packed down…More explanations later.
The world contained many inscrutable things, of this I was certain. I could not grasp how I had arrived here or where I was going, but I liked a mystery almost as much as I liked solving it.
* * *
—
My old life became subsumed by my new life, what I thought of as real life. Washington was buried so far below the surface that most of the time I wasn’t even aware of what we’d lost, except when I was getting scolded, and then it was tempting to think wistfully of Dad. But the truth is, I had no point of comparison. I didn’t remember living with him. In the calculus of old life versus new life, there were too many variables to compute, no clear winner or loser, just all the moments blending together into a kind of cockeyed whole.
On a regular day in that highly irregular year—the year everything changed—I wandered aimlessly into my bedroom and sat cross-legged on the floor. Mom had covered my walls in pale-blue wallpaper patterned with perky sprigs of daisies and baby’s breath. Around me the house was quiet. A full-length m
irror hung on my door and I inched closer, studying the person looking back: a skinny girl with a brown pixie cut, freckles across my upturned nose, striped T-shirt, boxy front teeth too big for my small mouth, sparrow limbs, bruised shins, fingernails bitten down to the skin. I had the uncanny impression that I was seeing myself for the first time, not as a reflection in the mirror but as I actually existed: real and of this world, a flesh-and-blood entity.
I regarded myself in a plain, detached manner. I saw myself not as perfect or flawed, not with gray-blue eyes or lavender OshKosh overalls. Instead I saw, beneath that, a body. And beneath that a self. Maybe even all the way down to a soul, though I wouldn’t have used that word or even known what it meant. The essence of myself. I understood for the first time that there was a correlation between the world and me. I was part of it, but separate. I was separate from my sister in the next room, from my green rain slicker hanging on the doorknob, from our pet hermit crab that Meg and I would one day tire of and throw, mercilessly, out the second-floor window. Separate even—as unthinkable as it was—from my mother in the kitchen. I sat there feeling my atoms crawl and move in my body in a way that they crawled and moved in no one else’s body, and I felt distinct for the first time in my life—fuller and bigger than I had only moments before.