by Margot Kahn
Then the judge dropped charges relating to taping and trespassing, the lesser charges, and sentenced William Green to prison for fourteen years. William Green’s name would not appear on the state’s list of sexual predators. His access to cameras, upon his release, would be limited but not denied. Schools and neighbors would not be notified of his past behavior. I remember that the judge looked down at my daughters from his chair and told them to count themselves fortunate for what had not been done to them. It was his attempt to reassure, to comfort, though I heard only dismissal. He told my children to leave the courtroom and get on with their lives.
Which is what they did.
By the time our house sold, the oldest daughter had moved out. The second was in college in Massachusetts. Number four had gone to a boarding school in Colorado and the third daughter gathered up Norman and Misty and trundled away to the house downtown. Our family house became a rental again, packed with college boys who probably laid cardboard on the bathroom floor and let their dogs pee on it. It’s a simple beige house on a busy street. But this is where I lived with my children for ten years. This is where I got so busy making the life I thought we should have that I failed to notice. How had I failed to notice? The rings dug into the soil under the girls’ windows from the bucket he stood on, the gaping holes in our photo albums. I remember folding laundry, annoyed at the missing pairs of underwear. Where are they? Are you leaving them at school after PE, at a friend’s house? I said: go search your backpacks, look under your beds. My daughters shrugged.
The tapes my children appear on span four years. Forty-eight months of William Green. Let’s say: enough footage for a feature film, or two, all those dozens of times he was at their windows. All the times he was inside our house. I understand it is a particular torment of motherhood to believe in hindsight that you could have done better, that you should have done better by your children, or maybe I’m the only one who gives up a part of each night to poke pins in my personal map of wrong-doing. But, still, one question burns in me and I suppose it will keep on burning until the end of my days: when William Green was coming after your children, where the fuck were you?
A couple of months after the third daughter and I gave up trying to find the cats, someone showed up with Norman. That someone brought our cat to the door of her rental house. I think this belongs to you. I picked up my daughter, who held Norman limp on her lap while we drove to an emergency vet clinic. The doctor there said Norman had been hit by a car. Broken bones had healed poorly. She stank of rot, of death. She was alive, breathing, but there was nothing but panic in her eyes. Norman weighed less than five pounds.
The vet left the room and then came back with an estimate. Thousands of dollars to rebreak the bones, to put Norman into some odd cat-cast for weeks of healing. A high-protein diet to restore vitality. My daughter was the first to say it, no, and then I said it, too. No. I was done; this was finished. The vet got stiff, argued with us. I think she even said, I can’t let you do that. She refused to produce the shot that would allow Norman to drift away, so we left with our cat. The next day the same vet called me at home, arguing, calling me cold, calling me callous. I was those things. Maybe I had to be those things now, though I wasn’t going to explain it to her. Then the man who would later be my husband took over. He found another vet who promised he would bring Norman peace.
Norman spent her last night in the bathroom of my loft studio, with its shiny faucets and slick tile floor. We were alone, the two of us, in a place where neither quite fit, and where one of us was thinking she’d do about anything to go back and stand as a sentry at the windows of our house, alert, awake. Norman wouldn’t let me touch her. She growled and snapped if my hand came near. She hunched in a ball in the corner of the box I’d made for her, packed with towels and bowls of food and water she didn’t want. I leaned against the wall and stayed with her until morning, letting myself indulge in memories of my home, the ring of the girls’ laughter, their fights, unfinished homework on the table, bread in the oven, and Norman staring at her favorite lamp in the living room. But now that was gone. If it ever truly existed in the first place, it was over, and this cat and I were tired. Both of us were wondering how it had come to this. Norman and I were together in a cold bathroom on a still night, sharing a single desire: we wanted one more chance to go home.
Debra Gwartney is the author of a memoir, Live Through This, and has had work appear in such journals and magazines as Tin House, The Normal School, Creative Nonfiction, Prairie Schooner, American Scholar, and others. Debra was co-editor, along with Barry Lopez, of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape. She lives in Western Oregon and teaches in the MFA Program at Pacific University.
On Moving Home
Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum
Whenever a new acquaintance asks where I live, I give only the barest details. “Not far from here,” I might say. “Close enough to the beach to hear the ferry’s horn!” I sometimes enthuse. I don’t invite friends over, I schedule my kids’ play dates for the park, and I keep the specifics of my address to myself. Why? Because I’m thirty-four, and just over a year ago my husband, my children, and I moved in with my parents.
For four years before my husband and I decided to move back to Washington—and into my parents’ house—we lived in New York. I had a great job—a tenure-track teaching position in creative writing at a college not far from New York City—and my husband taught part-time at the same college and was a stay-at-home-dad the rest of the time. We rented a tiny apartment in a suburb north of New York City, and for the most part life was fine. Before New York we had lived in the Midwest, and before that in California, and life was mostly fine in those places, too; though through all of those years, we were both aware of a vague and distant homesickness, dropped like a shimmery veil over our new landscapes, only visible in the loneliest kinds of light. “Someday,” we thought and even sometimes said aloud. “Someday we’ll go home again.”
We’re both originally from Seattle (or, more honestly, we grew up near Seattle), and our parents and siblings are all still settled in the blue-green stretch of land that runs between Puget Sound and the Cascade Mountains. That land has always—for both of us—been the place we’re talking about when we say the word “home.” New York, no matter how we tried to root ourselves to it, was never home. In fact, the longer we were there, the less it felt like we belonged.
During our last year in New York, however, my homesickness became unbearable. While it had been a low-grade fever before, it was now a full-blown virus from which I could not recover. I thought of home at every turn. On my early morning runs, as I looked out over the pitched roofs of Tarrytown to the lights of the Tappan-Zee Bridge and the slubby brown water of the Hudson, I remembered the silver lights that outline the ferry docks on Puget Sound—the layered multi-blue wash of water-mountains-wide western sky—and I felt gutted by the memory. In the evenings, lodged in traffic on my way home from the college, horns blaring both ahead and behind, I felt a frantic, caged frustration and a sense of powerlessness that made my heart race and my stomach tilt. And nights, kissing my children’s foreheads and tucking them in, I was flooded with a sudden and deep sorrow, a feeling that I was failing them. They were becoming New Yorkers. When they said home, they meant here: this foreign place with its endless, clustering buildings and sunsets made beautiful by smog. They meant this place in which we—their father and I—felt ourselves alone among strangers.
As the year progressed, my sickness only worsened. I was angry—inexplicably—almost all the time. I did not like myself in New York. I did not like my growing resentment of the place, my inability to fully invest myself in the present because the present was happening there. I didn’t like how difficult gratitude was becoming for me, and joy, and ease. Instead of feeling those things, I was moving through my days tripped up by my own restless anxiety and the buzz of my generalized anger.
And then, one night in November, during the college’s Thanksgiv
ing break, it all finally broke open in me. I lay awake, my heart pounding out of rhythm and my breath drawing up short: a panic attack. I hadn’t had one in years. I needed to go home. We needed to go home.
So we did. That spring I resigned from my teaching position. We let go of the lease on our apartment, sold what furniture we could, said our goodbyes. In June, just a week after school got out, we drove west.
To some, I suppose, the risks involved in our decision to leave steady employment and good benefits might seem too great. And it’s true—they were great. We came west with no jobs waiting for us, no health insurance, no guarantee beyond our own intuitive certainty that our family would be happier in Seattle than we had been in New York. Looking at it from the outside, our move might seem impulsive and immature, an irresponsible leap of faith for the parents of two young children to make. We didn’t see it that way. We saw our move as an investment in long-term happiness—both our own and our children’s—and a chance to show our kids that sometimes, even when it’s risky, you just have to jump toward what you want and believe that you will find a way to land safely.
The other truth, however, is that we could not have left New York if my parents had not been here, in Seattle, ready to welcome us home. And this brings me back to our domestic arrangement—our intergenerational household.
We’ve now been living with my parents for just over a year. When we first arrived, we had no sense of how long we’d be with them. We planned to stay until we had jobs, were grounded here, ready to buy a house of our own nearby. But how long would that take? We didn’t know. Six months? Nine months? At that time, a year seemed impossibly far away. Now though, looking back, I see how quickly it slipped away. Since we unpacked our boxes last June, our son has grown a full clothing size, lost three teeth, become a proficient (and avid) reader, and completed his first year of school. Our daughter, who was just two when we moved—still in diapers, still speaking in broken sentences, still timid about the newness of this place—is solidly a preschooler today. She talks almost without cease, has climbed to the highest rung on the monkey bars at the playground near our house, and has grown into a personality that is at turns hilariously funny and wickedly independent. My parents have been present to witness those changes, and that is a gift we could not have given the children had we stayed in New York.
But the reality of living with my parents is that we get far more than just their presence for major events. We get the routine of daily family life. My father drives my daughter to preschool twice a week, a habit she treasures. Every morning, she and my mother have breakfast together and talk about their plans for the day, plans that last weekend included building a fairy garden together in an oversized pot in the garden, as well as filling the cherry tree’s bird feeder with seed, and later baking a loaf of bread. While they were busy with that work, my father took my son to the public pool for Open Swim (and afterward, my father reported, they talked about sea creatures and Legos and friends). Most nights we all sit down for dinner together at the same big table my parents had when I was a kid, and then the children kiss “Amma” and “Papa” goodnight, and I usher them upstairs so that my husband can give them their baths and I can read them their bedtime stories.
We’ve also seen all of one another’s imperfections. My parents have now witnessed my son raging with a temper that still sometimes shocks me. They have pried him off the floor mid-tantrum and carried him up to his room amid his wails to set him in time-out. They’ve tolerated my daughter’s incessant, obnoxious whining on the days when she’s missed a nap she really ought to have taken. They’ve shared the kids’ viruses, helped clean up endless glasses of spilled milk, withstood our circus of noise. And we’ve seen them at their most fatigued, too; we’ve seen them weary with the exhaustions of work and physical pain, with the ordinary and particular strains of their lives. It would be dishonest to suggest that there have not been moments of discomfort in seeing so much of each other; but in the sweep of the year, most of those moments have been few and forgettable. Overwhelmingly, this has been a gift of a year—and not just for the children, but for all of us. I know my parents as adults now in a way I did not before moving home. My family has always been close, but our already tight bonds have strengthened in this year of joint living.
Beyond that, and apart from the family life we’ve found here, for me there is also the utter joy I daily feel about being back in this landscape that I have missed for so long. I can catch my breath here on the shore of Puget Sound. I can work and rest now without the hollow feeling of absence slowly carving me empty. Home, I’ve discovered, is not something that can be made anywhere; for me, at least, it is a definite and fixed point, a holy center, and I am more myself here in that center than I could be anywhere else in the world.
Even still, it feels risky to me to write this. I’ve put it off, actually, worrying about how I’ll be perceived once it’s known that at thirty-four, with two kids in tow, I shucked off a “successful” life that just didn’t quite fit and moved back in with my parents. Living with your parents as an adult is a joke in our culture. It’s a sign—perhaps the sign—of real failure, and I’ve fretted over being judged for it. I’ve fretted over having my parents judged for it (they are, after all, the people who raised me to think that happiness might be worth more than stability). Until now, in fact, I’ve not let many people know that we live with my parents. But I feel guilty about that reluctance, which seems to me a betrayal of my parents’ generosity, a denial of how truly well this year has gone and of how grateful I think we all feel to have lived it together.
This internal conflict is particularly strong right now, as my family’s multigenerational cohabitation is about to come to a bittersweet end. In another two months, I’ll start working full-time again, reinventing myself as a high school English teacher. My husband will soon mark the first anniversary of his own major career change (he’s left teaching completely and is training to work as an electrician), and we’ve begun the process of buying our own house. The house has a bedroom for each of our children—which, after our time in New York, still feels like a luxury—and a backyard big enough for a swing and a garden. The kids are excited, but they’re also saddened by the prospect of leaving their grandparents’ house. “We won’t be far,” I reassure them. Our new house is within walking distance of my parents’ place. “We’ll be Amma’s and Papa’s neighbors,” I say. I mean to be comforting, but I can see the doubt on my children’s faces, and though it sounds cruel to say so, their doubt makes me glad. It’s a confirmation, you see, that we did the right thing in leaving New York to come west. It’s a sign that, despite the risks and the fears and the losses, we’ve all found what we were hoping to find here—happiness and rootedness and home.
Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of two collections of short stories, This Life She’s Chosen and Swimming with Strangers. Her fiction and essays have appeared widely in journals, and her writing has been recognized with a PEN/O. Henry Prize and a Jack Straw Writers Program fellowship. She lives north of Seattle with her husband and two children, just down the road from her parents.
Between My Teeth
Naomi Jackson
On this trip to the Cape, I’m surprised and comforted by the Jamaican accents I hear all around me. My father jokes that you can find a Jamaican and a Nigerian everywhere. And true to Daddy’s word, here are Jamaicans in the most unlikely place, although I wonder how this seaside town diverges from and resonates with their memories of home. These are the people who first loved me, West Indians with loud talk and patois filling their mouths, a raunchy, cutting sense of humor. There are women who work in the shops and then there are the men on the road. One catcalls to me as I walk the long, hot highway to Race Point Beach. “Beautiful,” he calls out from the truck he’s driving. I look up and smile, not because I enjoy being harassed on the street, or because I think this compliment bears any relationship to me, but because his voice takes me home. Home is the language you a
re loved in.
My story of home begins in my grandmothers’ houses. I have a complicated family tree that extends in many directions, two moms—my biological mother and my stepmother, one father, three grandmothers. I learned how to make home from the women who made me. I’ve taken these lessons with me into the world, carrying them, as Maya Angelou once said, between my teeth, in these years when I’ve learned to call home anywhere I rest my head at night.
My paternal grandmother, Ruth, hails from Antigua. She raised her husband, six sons, and several of her sisters’ and brother-in-law’s children in a two-bedroom house in a neighborhood that was down at the heels for years before it was razed for tourism ventures—“down Fibrey” as my father and his brothers called it.
In the 1970s, just before they left to try their fortunes in the States, Ruth and my grandfather Herbert Jackson and their children built a house in Villa, a new development just outside of town. The new house was a serious upgrade: four bedrooms, a rose garden and a gallery in front, space to hang laundry and for her beloved dogs in back. As she began earning dollars at her job at a Queens nursing home, my grandmother made additions to the house. In the 1990s, she built a bathroom with hot water that none of her grandchildren were allowed to bathe in without her express permission. Every afternoon after her four o’clock tea, my grandmother took her evening bath, her sizeable frame creaking the wooden floorboards as she slowly, deliberately, made her way to her bathroom. I learned from my grandmother that rituals of self-care were sacred moments not to be interrupted by anyone, especially children, and that the benefit of years of hard work and sacrifice was making and enjoying, quite literally, a room of your own.