What I Had Before I Had You

by Sarah Cornwell

  WHEN MY MOTHER died, I came home for one night, and I was so angry I could barely bring myself to look at anything. We scattered her ashes in the ocean. I have since considered the entire Atlantic a sort of gravesite and my daughterly duty done by vacationing in Corpus Christi or Nags Head, lying out on sand dampened by some family molecule. Twenty years have passed, and I have not set foot in New Jersey once. I don’t know what made me think I could do it today casually, without consequence. For the truth is, here is the locus of my guilt. I left my mother here when she was sick and sad and alone. When I was fifteen, someone lowered a rope into my well, and I climbed it and pulled it up after me. I like to think that if my mother had waited two or three more years than she did, I would have grown up enough to come home to her. But I can’t be sure.

  For the longest time, I’ve found ways not to dwell in my guilt, but now I am here, I am failed, I am fatigued past help. I am floating in my old piece of ocean, holding my breath so as to avoid the present for as long as possible. Memory reaches for me with seaweed fingers, lifts me dripping out of the ocean, and sets me down on the seat of my old green bike to pedal back into that terrible summer, the last summer of my childhood.

  2

  EVEN BEFORE I saw my sisters in the ocean, the summer of 1987 promised misery. My freshman year of high school had just ended, and I was free of Burling Academy, the all-girls’ twelve-grade school that cost my mother half of each paycheck from her checkout job at the grocery store. All year we repeated Latin conjugations and drew scatter plot graphs. We wore green polyester pencil skirts and white shirts with stranglehold collars. This year, girls began to wear their belt buckles on the side if they were single or to the front if they were going steady. I stopped wearing mine altogether. I grew five inches during my freshman year of high school, but little else changed. I was a strange, overbold girl with a notorious mother. I was fast and strong, and nobody would accept my challenges in capture the flag; they knew I’d just pull them over the line and march them to jail. When we were shown movies in class, I laughed out loud at moments that made the other girls cry, and I cried sometimes in math when we talked about infinity.

  I did not have friends, though I knew which group to sit with at lunch: the fat girls and the nerds, girls without subtlety, who accepted my strangeness the same way they accepted each other’s silence or halitosis. I didn’t mind; I had no desire to sit with the twiggy blondes or the A students. I measured each girl in my class against my mother and found none of them worth my time. This year I had begun to admire, from the corner of my eye, the older girls I saw sneaking away through the athletic fields at lunch, their ears pierced all the way up through the cartilage, their manner sulky and sly. They always seemed to have somewhere better to be than where they were. In the hallways, they spat gum on my backpack and tripped me just as they did all the freshmen. They didn’t notice me at all. At three-twenty, I would flee the dull prison of the school day and pedal hard for home, where my mother waited with quiche hot from the oven and our evening’s adventure planned.

  Summers have always been respite from the school year, but this summer, the things I used to love have become unbearable; I nurse a global feeling of poor fit. My clothing itches and pulls, and all things become shadow cousins of themselves: songs slide off-key, the sand is too hot, the ocean a rude blue, mean with undertow. The sun scorches the part in my hair. I have appetite only for citrus and cold tea.

  I BIKE HOME from the beach, and if I close my eyes, I can still see my sisters’ faces on the inside of my eyelids. I swing by the grocery store to cash in on our employee discount. I collect tanning oil, grapefruits, iced tea, and two boxes of frozen SuperPretzels, and spill them on the moving belt. My mother disappeared again just as the school year ended, and I am set loose on the long empty days to swim, to wander and photograph the tourists, to pity myself and my—at fifteen, I am sure of it—uniquely boring life, to watch sitcom reruns and drink endless sodas until my teeth rot out of my head and she has to come home to get me to the dentist.

  “What’s the matter?” asks the checkout clerk as she scans my things. In the hours since I saw my sisters in the ocean, I have thought of nothing else. I feel as if I have lost the grip of my feet on the floor and am floating ever so slightly through a stage set. This thought makes me giggle, and the clerk appraises me over her glasses. She is too old to be a checkout clerk. She is like a withered leaf with eyes. My mother told me once that this woman lives with her developmentally delayed adult daughter, and thinking about that kind of bondage sets me on edge.

  “Spit it out, hon.” I don’t spit it out, so she sighs. “Is your mom coming in tomorrow? She’s going to catch hell.”

  “I think so,” I say. “I’ll ask her. But I think probably.” When my mother disappears, the rule is to play along. She started disappearing when I was in elementary school, and I still don’t know where she goes. Sometimes she is gone for a few days, a week, two weeks. When she comes back, it is always with dark undereye circles and strange gifts. “This made me think of you!” she’ll say, handing me a box of dinosaur marzipan candies or an alpaca poncho or a book about walking tours of the pine barrens. She usually says she’s been in New York with friends. If I ask her what friends, where in New York, doing what, she will grow cold and brisk and turn from me. These are things we do not share, even with each other: how I learned to cook for myself at eight years old, how I forged her signatures on utility checks and school forms, how I sensed who I could ask to help me in an emergency and who must never, ever know that my mother performed these vanishing acts, and would report us to the county.

  I bike home with my groceries in the crate behind my seat. My route takes me through the backyards of a row of vacation homes, and the summer people startle from their plastic chaise longues, flip their hamburgers into the grass as I hurtle past, building up speed for the patch of poison oak where I hold my legs up and coast the last twenty yards out of town before turning up the parkway drainage ditch toward home.

  Our house is a yellow box with a flat tar-paper roof accessible by ladder, on which we grow strawberries and herbs in pots and often eat meals cross-legged on old bedsheets. All around the house’s perimeter, my mother has planted tomato and pepper plants too shallowly and then mounded the soil around them to compensate. This rectangular burr of dirt gives the house an air of having been dropped from above. Our front door faces out to a little gravel street which is never plowed in winter and always mud in summer, and the rear of the house is naked to the parkway save for twenty feet of scrub forest in which tourist children who didn’t know they had to go before they got in the car squat nervously to pee.

  Blanche, our dog of the moment, accosts me as I chain up my bike by the back door, and thoroughly licks my shins. Like all our dogs, Blanche appeared at the back door in winter, a starving, sniveling sycophant. She is mostly golden retriever. She grew red and glossy and fat in weeks, so we surmise that she must have had many such adoptions and abandonments. She is Blanche for Blanche DuBois; she has always depended on the kindness of strangers.

  In the cluttered kitchen, I pour her a bowl of kibble while my SuperPretzel rotates in the microwave. I open a cabinet and hang on the pulls, staring hard at the shelf of baby food. Before now, my sisters have always presented themselves as infants. Two high chairs complete the square of our kitchen table, where my mother makes offerings of creamed corn and Gerber spinach. Every week she buys diapers, and every week she throws out last week’s diapers, spoons the expired baby food into the disposal. My sisters consume less than living babies would, which she admits is lucky for us.

  It is my job to clean the nursery each Sunday, a pink and dim and changeless place. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of my mother watching me covertly from a doorway down the hall, smiling at the communion of her daughters. It was hard for me to understand at the age of four or five, when I became conscious of my own growth and change, why my sisters did not grow, too.
I couldn’t see them, but that didn’t stop me from believing. I figured that my mother’s ability to see my sisters came from the same place where adults learn adult things, like how to keep track of time or how to fall asleep when you are very excited. As I grew older, I found a comfortable place between believing and not-believing for my sisters, the same place I kept God and Sasquatch. I listened to the neighbors’ whispers, and I agreed with them that my mother was gently crazy but a decent cook and a rare beauty.

  JAMES SHOWS UP with a pizza I don’t want. I eat a piece anyway, for show, though my stomach roils as if there is a wasp pinballing around in there. I feel the slow bloom of this new misgiving: that I am crazy, or gifted, or both. That I’ll turn out just like my mother.

  James is the most constant of my mother’s companions. When she disappears, he shows up like this, with food, with extra lightbulbs. He has a bristly brown beard, from the center of which his pink, wormy lips protrude obscenely, and a heavy head that draws him forward when he walks. He speaks slowly, hatching each word in his mouth, which makes me wild with impatience. I like to flick paper balls at his forehead while he sleeps in the Barcalounger and watch him twitch. I haven’t realized yet how kind he is to us.

  “What’s it going to be, kiddo?” he asks me, tearing paper-towel squares to cover his lap. The pizza drips oil, the way we both like it. My mother would towel it off. I flip through channels and settle on a Star Trek marathon. I am in the mood for the neat resolution of intergalactic crisis. In the blue glow of the TV screen, James’s face is a comfort right now, his eye-crinkles and even his awful smacking lips. These are the times when I can feel the heft of our bond: We are the left behind. We are in the same boat.

  “I’m tired of this,” I say after an hour.

  He offers the remote.

  “No, of this.” I gesture expansively.

  He shrugs. “I don’t think it’ll be a long one.” James knows where my mother goes, and he knows that I would like to find out. But in this one area, he is as strong as she is against my questioning.

  I watch TV with half my brain and worry with the other half until it is one A.M. and James is snoring beneath his greasy paper towels, and I am wider awake than I have known I could be, thinking of my sisters. The porpoise curves of their shoulders as they dove. I am too wide awake to be in the house, and almost without thinking, I am out the door and on my bike, pedaling back out through the woods into the drainage ditch and along the highway toward town. Cars are nothing but headlights swooping past me, and I swerve around a deer carcass, its neck twisted, its shining dark eye. I feel compelled. I feel something new waking up.

  OCEAN VISTA IS another place at night. The parkway glistens like a river. I can see the grass growing and the sand shifting, layering, wearing away. Everything yearns for itself. Everyone holds secrets in their mouths. Groups of people stumble from neon-lit bars out into parking lots, the men loud and sweaty in button-down shirts too unbuttoned, the women with flagging curls, holding their shoes in their hands. A group of boys beat a smaller boy in the shadows behind the carwash. Vision throbs in my temples. I photograph a woman sleeping on a bench under a red blanket, but I do not wake her.

  My camera is heavy around my neck and bruises my collarbone when I ride over broken cement. I turn onto the boardwalk and ride past the dark hulk of the Emerald Hotel. The moon is full, and I can hear the waves blocks from the boardwalk. I feel calmer out here. I feel kin to the moon, full of moonly wisdom. Now I want it to be true: I am a visionary, too. A mystic with eyes for another world. My mother will be proud of me. She will teach me everything.

  I feel sure that something is going to happen tonight, so I am not surprised when it does. I have hidden my bike in the spidery driftwood beneath the boardwalk, and I am standing in the surf, throwing rocks at the ocean. Gulls take off up the dim beach. And I see them again: my sisters. They materialize from the darkness into the halo beneath a street lamp, heads together, whispering, and then pass again into the dark. I recognize them utterly; my blood calls to theirs. Later, I will come to know this certainty sensation as my enemy, but now it is thrilling. My sisters are walking quickly, destination-bound. I throw my last rock and follow them.

  They lead me along the boardwalk a ways and turn down the stairs to the rides, which are planted in a sunken concrete lot. We pass the sign, spray-painted in silver bubble letters, proclaiming FUN LAND. The closest street lamps have burned out and it is unfathomably dark, but I have been here a million times. There is a swinging pirate ship and a rotochamber, which spins fast enough to stick you to the walls when the floor drops out; if you practice, you can turn sideways and spit on a target feet away. There is a Ferris wheel for couples on dates. There are some kiddie rides—bobbing plastic dolphins with silver handlebars stuck through their brains, the Jamaican Bobsled, the Haunted Ruins. And there is one white wooden roller coaster, the Ocean Spirit. The tracks rise a hundred feet above the boardwalk on a flaking cross-braced timber frame. When the coaster cars click up to the summit, the whole structure shudders and hacks like something feverish.

  My sisters walk to the back of the lot and slip through a snipped place in the chain-link fence. A few other forms duck in after them. A small crowd whispers at the foot of the Ocean Spirit, where, against the white timber lattice, I can make out a wiry, dark-haired boy climbing hand over hand. The jagged tree-root ends of the chain-link scrape the asphalt as I duck through. I move from shadow to shadow until I am close. I recognize girls from my school, older girls, leaning up against boys and sprawled on the ground, hands over their mouths to keep from laughing, eyes wide and glassy to the star-backed roller coaster. I know a few by sight and reputation—the gum spitters, the hallway trippers, metal-faced stoner girls with nothing to lose—and beside them, Kandy Williams, all bleached blond and black leather. Notorious.

  My sisters sit leaning back to back near some ratty boys they seem to know. Courtney lights a cigarette. I want to take her picture, but I don’t have enough light. The tip of her cigarette glows orange in the dark. And climbing, that’s Jake Ireland, with the beautiful hands. He is wearing jeans and an army vest that keeps snagging on nails and tearing audibly. I see that he has on bike gloves, and I feel relieved for his hands. Jake was in a summer craft workshop at the public high school with me two years earlier, and once he walked me to the nurse when I cut my thumb on the band saw, leaving scarlet pennies of blood to mark our path on the school’s linoleum floors. He held my wrist up to stop the bleeding, his thumb in the cup of my palm.

  A guy with long blond hair starts heckling him; I thought he was a girl until he spoke. “Chicken! Bwak, bwak bwak.” Jake’s climbing has slowed. He cranes to peer down at us, and I can sense the fear in him, the tightening of muscles. He is only about forty feet up, but he struggles to hand-walk up the diagonal boards to the joints. His body hangs, dead weight. I wonder if he’s thought about how to get down. I look at the pattern of boards and work out how I would do it, how I’d wrap my legs around and swing myself up. Everyone has silver flasks, but nobody is drinking.

  Then Jake falls. He glances off a beam and drops five feet. He catches hold of a joint and hangs there. My gasp blends into the general noise, but one of my sisters—the taller, sharper one—turns and sees me. Then everyone is running to Jake, holding up arms, and he drops himself down from board to board to the concrete and grins, ashy, some weird kind of hero. He lies on the ground and drinks, and so does everyone. It gets loud, kids punchy with relief and adrenaline and whatever else they’re taking in. Some boys monkey around on the low boards of the roller coaster, showing each other the right way to do it, doing it wrong. My sisters watch them. I move forward, magnetized. I have no plan.

  Courtney climbs up the concrete base and tries to hand-walk up to the first joint but drops flat-footed. “Ow,” she says. “Laura, you try.”

  Laura.

  “Don’t hurt your pretty feet,” says a ratty boy, and lif
ts off Courtney’s sandal to massage the sole of her foot. My sisters seem so corporeal. And yet, who hasn’t heard stories of ghosts passing among the living—girls in outdated dresses who ask for rides home from dances and get out at the graveyard. The long-dead boy sitting at the top of the hotel stairs bouncing his rubber ball. Right now, in the hallucinatory darkness under the roller coaster, my sisters seem equal parts real and unreal. I tell myself I am not afraid of them. I step forward and say, “You have to wrap your legs around.”

  Laura turns her elegant face to me, tiger-striped by the shadows of the boards. She says, “So you do it.” She looks at me steadily, and I am sure that she knows who I am. This is a test.

  I am standing by another concrete base, farther from the crowd, and the structure rises above me, stretching into the dark world. In a moment I am up and climbing, flip-flops kicked off. I use my legs to inch up the boards, and at the joint, I swing into a massive pull-up. I swing my camera to my back and wear the foam strap like a choker. My sisters are watching, and I am proud to have their eyes on me. I am torque, I am strength. I am almost to where Jake fell when the rest of the crowd notices me.

  “Who is that?” someone asks, and they are all on their feet, looking up. I hear a girl from my biology class say the word “biology.” When I look down, I can see Laura and Courtney standing still and serious, watching me. Pleasure thrills down my spine; I can do what all these boys cannot. I climb. I can look down at the dark huddle of kids below me without fear, without imagining drop or impact, and that makes it easy. I trust in my arms and legs. Quite suddenly, I reach the top. Kids will tell me later that it took forty-five minutes. I stand on the wooden track, curling my toes into the metal grooves where the coaster anchors to the wood, imagining how I must look from the ground: a starless area of sky in the shape of a girl. I feel a whole-body quiver of joy.