The packed dirt parking lot of white clapboard, dollhouse-sized, Greater Consuming Holy Fire Tabernacle was dotted with a few cars. I parked beneath a canopy of moss-draped oaks.

     A spare cemetery relaxed inside a marshy copse behind the church.

     I scowled at the flame-slim steeple. This tiny backwater house of worship contained ten pews at best, and most likely, no air conditioning; we'd wave makeshift paper fans on Popsicle sticks in order to survive. Sweat would bead my skin before I even slammed the car door.

     Something stirred in the shadows. I stared into the darkness until I saw her: a naked woman crouched in the reddened earth; head bowed, as if in prayer. Hair matted and wild. She lifted her eyes toward mine.

    I startled. Vincent beckoned from the other side of the glass.

    When I turned back, the woman was gone.

     "Coming," I mouthed.

     Dank, impenetrable air trailed us once the plain-timbered double doors swung wide. Beyond the vestibule with its altar table offering guest book and bullion-colored pen, loomed the murmurs and inquietude of dark-clad folk scattered amongst two modest banks of seating. Tall, arched, opaline windows filtered early evening light through stained green-gold panes. A star-shaped porthole chiseled into the red roof filled the white-walled room with even more brightness. An ancient black piano rooted one side of a spare wooden pulpit and a crude choir stand anchored the other. A gargantuan wooden cross, draped in purple cloth, adorned with a crown of thorns, was nailed to the wall. A spray of white lilies with assorted greenery flanked the lectern.

     A sausage-fingered hand gripped my shoulder.

     "Ms. Simmons?"

     I turned from the portrait of ebon-skinned Jesus. A strapping, thick-bodied man leaned my way.

     "Reverend Veal."

     He had a large squarish clean-shaven head with round cheeks. Confessional eyes. Jug ears and a protruding upper lip rimmed with gray and white-specked hair. A gap between oversized ivory teeth. He clasped my hands.

     "So glad to see you."

     "Thank you, Reverend," Vincent said. "No one could do this thing justice but you."

He smiled. I studied the cloth gladdening the neck of his robe.

     "Well," he began, then extended his arm toward the sanctuary. "I guess one is never really ready—"

     The polished shoes beneath Reverend Veal's holy garment propelled him deeper into the sanctuary. He left a foresty scent in his wake.

     Vincent quick-stepped behind.

     I tried to shadow him, but my legs wobbled and I felt myself sinking into a mud

sucking dismal swamp. There was too much sweltering perfume and no air. I grabbed hold of Vincent. My lungs stalled. I held tight, tighter. He quivered beneath my grip.

     "You all right?" He patted my temples with a pristine white hanky.

     "Please God," I mumbled into his shoulder.

     The heat was a cord around my throat, tightening.

     "It's going to be all right," Vincent whispered.

     I slumped, but he lifted, then hoisted me until we were the two still standing, lurching down the red-carpeted aisle into the unbearable future.

    A lone white-gloved usher in an ankle-length dress led us to the front of the church. Christopher Patterson, perched in the corner of his pew, cut his eyes our way.

     I returned his fire.

     Reverend Veal gripped the lectern, a grave countenance on his dewy face. He

moistened his lips, scanned the congregants. A massive bible with gleaming gilt-edged pages, rested on the pulpit. He tugged a handkerchief from the folds of his robe and wiped his neck.

     I braced for the worst: a soliloquy about the unrepentant spinning on God's rotisserie, a spit of fire and brimstone.

     Reverend Veal dabbed his forehead, cleared his throat. He leaned in our direction then dropped his head back.

What a friend we have in Jesus

All our sins and griefs to bear

And what a privilege to carry

Everything to God in prayer

     Vincent gripped my hand. Behind us, sat many of the complainants who'd made their way to our office in search of hope—Autherine Devine and her husband, Matt, sporting lopsided brogans, both diagnosed with lung cancer; Lynette Williams, and her gangly adopted son, Lance, battling leukemia, and beyond them, Raymond Murdock, survivor of multiple strokes.

     "God bless you," the minister began in a booming, plummy voice. "For coming out

this evening. For sitting down, to stand up. And fight for what's right. God don't like ugly. And we got too much ugly going on around here."

     "Yes, Lord," Autherine said.

     "Like many of you," Reverend Veal continued. "My roots in this land go back

generations, over two hundred years, far back as the slave revolt. This place is home.

Before the chemical plants came in, you could grow beans and okra, melons and fruit trees. You could breathe without your lungs burning. Now the high school is a methanol plant and the post office, an oil testing lab. Sugarcane fields, a plastic plant. There's benzene and oil in the water and ammonia in the air."

     "Yes, yes," a voice called.

     "And cancer everywhere you look," he said.

     Lynette Williams moaned.

     "In your neck, throat, breast, lung, kidney," he raised an arm, thick as an oak limb, and pointed at Lance. "Even in your blood."

     Lynette sniffled.

     "I know this grief," he said. "Lord, I have heard from too many suffering this pain, how much harm is being done to your saints at Jerusalem."

     I leveled my shoulders. Forget Jerusalem; let's chronicle the harm here at home. A

reckoning that would take us deep into the new year: greed, paranoia, selfishness,

manipulation, sloth, pathological lying, short-fused brutish violence, family treachery, community betrayal, theft of clean water, theft of fertile soil, theft of the very air we breathe.

     Reverend Veal smiled beatifically in my direction.

     "The Bible teaches endurance, hanging on until the bitter end, being an overcomer, that's what I'm talking about. We gotta hang on till we overcome this pollution madness."

     I stared at the minister's wingtips. Watched Autherine hug herself. Begin to rock.

     "We have to throw off everything that hinders us, all the sin that so easily entangles, we have to cast off and do what we all have to do, like the bible teaches us—let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. And will you run that race?"

     "Yes," Christopher Patterson shouted.

     I half-turned to stare.

     "We must run with the hounds of this cancerish hell nipping our heels, trying to drag us down."

     "Yes," Raymond Murdock said.

     "But the bible says, 'Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD shall be a light unto me. And are we sitting in

darkness?"

     "My my my—"

     "Now, we may have fallen, once or twice—"

     Or ten thousand times, I wanted to shout.

     "And you CRIED and you PRAYED. And you CRIED and PRAYED. And CRIED

and you PRAYED and CRIED..."

     Autherine spasmed into a soft guttural keening.

     Someone near the back said, "Amen."

     "But we got up."

     A woman with auburn ringlets; stood and fluttered her fingers.

     Reverend Veal paused, wiped the sweat from his neck and face, then began to pace.

     "The BIBLE reminds us that trials serve to strengthen our faith and bring us to

maturity."

     "Well," a gravelly-voiced, clean-shaven man said.

     I squirmed, smoothed the cotton dress over my thighs. Crossed my bare legs and

closed my eyes.

     "I have had trials," Reverend Veal's boom pulled me back inside the church.

     "Yes, sir," an elderly man exclaimed.

     "Have you had trials?"

     There was a chorus of concurring murmurs.

     "We all have trials," Reverend Veal said. He froze, then gazed at the star-shaped glass in the roof.

     "But we carry everything to God in prayer."

     "Amen," several voices uttered.

    "Let us now hear from Sharon Moore, the scientist connecting the dots between the chemical plants and our sickness."

     The speaker strode to the podium gripping a manila folder. Vincent glanced at me and nodded.

     "Thank you, Reverend," she said. "And thank you all for coming out tonight to learn the truth."

     An electrical current snaked through the room. Christopher Patterson scooted to the edge of his pew.

     "I am a chemist," she said. "I take samples from the air, land and water to see what's in them. I have done scientific analysis of the land here. And I came to tell you, you have been exposed to concentrations of chemicals like chloroprene at 700-800 times the rate of other people in the nation. Chloroprene causes cancer. There is no safe limit for it. And if you grew up here, you have been exposed for a very long time, over fifty years, since the plant first started making it. Now the powers-that-be will say, 'There they go, trying to shut the plants down again. You can't prove cancer is because of us.' And they'll call you fearmongers. And ask, 'what about the jobs? There are tax dollars at stake.' But I ask, is any job worth the silent slaughter of the people who live next door to the plants?"

     I heard angry buzzing in the pews. Vincent nodded at the speaker.

     Reverend Veal rose and patted Sharon Moore on the back.

     "And they told us, so many of us were dying 'cause we had bad luck. Told us, we didn't understand the science of what was going on in our natural world. Told us not to believe what our eyes could see. That we weren't feeling what we felt, which was sick as dogs."

     "'Cept they wouldn'ta let this happen to dogs," Christopher Patterson shouted.

    "I live between a chemical plant and a refinery," Autherine said. "Sometimes the fumes so strong, I can't even breathe."

    "And there's always explosions," Lynette said. "Especially on the weekend when the EPA is closed. Boom! And then the house is shaking. I go outside and smoke so thick it's like fog. I have to put towels around the door. And nobody can tell us nothing about it. Not the EPA. Not DEP. Not the oil company. Even folk that work there don't know what's going on and can't find out. But I got spots all over my body and breathing problems."  

     "My boy go outside and say, 'What that smell, daddy?' It hurt to breathe."

    "I live next to the fertilizer plant," another man said. "We get skin rash so bad only bleach can kill it."

    "At least before the plants moved in we had pecans and wallflowers, hummingbirds and fireflies. Now they gone and we got awful smells. And cancer. Skin peel off my face when it rain."

    "A lot of us don't have health insurance."  

    "The Fifth Ward school—" Sharon Moore began to weep.

    Reverend Veal swabbed his face and neck one last time, then stepped away from the podium, grasped Sharon Moore's hands.

    "With God's grace, we will fight this," he said. "And we will win."

    "Well, well," Autherine sing-says.

    His fierce glare rested on me.  

    A heavy-bosomed woman in a tight black sheath and white kitten heels, wearing a plumed hat, stood beside the piano. A waif-like young man pumped the pedals and raised his slender fingers over the black and white keys. Mrs. Amsterdam, according to the program I fanned myself with, began to hum.

    The grief-stricken began to warble, then drone the words, but Mrs. Amsterdam's chest-voice soon silenced the crowd.

"We fall down but we get up

For a saint is just a sinner who fell down

but we couldn't stay there and got up—"

     The heaped losses of my life, began to rise inside me now, stuffing my throat with dust. We will help them prove it. And we will win.

    The church bell sounded a solitary echoing knell.

    I stared at Vincent's watering eyes. There is nothing like the intimacy of tears, and I, still did not know how to handle another's grief. Autherine pressed a tissue into my hand.

     "I'm glad you came," Vincent said, eyes shining, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. He patted my hand. Words rushed and tumbled inside my brain, but sat still as mothers of the church on my tongue. I dipped my head, suddenly much more shy. Sometimes there is comfort in silence. Sometimes there is consolation in pain. I sat with my lover as grief’s precise ache filled our hearts.

Did you see her?

Who?

That naked woman walking down the road back there. You didn’t see—

Turn around

Look at her face? Who does she look like?

I don’t know anybody who looks like that

Think back

Nobody

     Remember?

**********

“They’re killing our babies,” the steely-eyed woman said.

I avoided the woman's eyes. Not another unwanted confrontation. Not after last night.

“Well—“ Vincent began.

“It’s Tuskegee all over again,” she continued. “And nobody’s trying to stop it. Not the EPA. Not the OEQ. DEP. ABCs. Nada. Nobody.”

“Some of your neighbors are trying to do something, Ms.?”

“Neely,” she said. “Neely Porter. My lab over in Jackson collect soil and water samples and test ‘em for chemicals. These big companies all ‘round the South be preying on little towns like this. Towns full of Black folk. And they just wiping us out.”

“We had a meeting about this last night,” Vincent said.

“That’s why I’m here,” Neely Porter said. “To let you know you need to gather folk all across the South ‘cause this ain’t just happening here. You got children playing in contaminated mud everywhere. The odor. Skin rashes. People walking down the street and falling out from fumes.”

I shielded my womb as Neely Porter vented. I knew that anger. And fear. And hurt. And disappointment.

No child could call me mother, yet I loved Margeaux’s daughters, and Tomorrow’s Lily, as if they were my own.

    “Did your kitty tingle when he kissed you?” I’d asked Lily during my last visit. 

    “Aunt Toi!” her russet cheeks reddened. 

    “That’s not love, honey,” I told her with a sugary smile.  “That’s lust. And if you’re lucky, you’ll have chances to feel it the rest of your life.”

    “I will?”

     I nodded. We were touring the Street of Dreams. I hoped to spark fifteen-year-old Lily’s interest in pursuing a career in real estate law. 

    “I’m going to have to leave my empire to somebody when I go, it might as well be you.  But the way these houses all look the same, this is more like a street of nightmares—like Stepfordville— if you ask me.”

    “Are you ever going to get married?”

    I snorted and shook my head. “No, honey, some of us just ain’t the marrying kind.”

    “Am I?”

    I caressed her cheek. “You’re any kind you want to be.”

    She sighed. “But mama never married either. Maybe it runs in our family.”

    I laughed. “Well, maybe some of us just have better sense.”

    She erased her smile.

    “I’m just teasing honey. A lot of folks are happy living in that institution. Your mother doesn’t know I’m talking to you about this, but she isn’t exactly an expert on men.” 

    “But I want to be in love.”

    I closed my eyes and pictured Tomorrow's scowl.

    “You’re in a sweet time of life, Lily,” I said.  “And I know folks are probably telling you not to rush things, hold off having sex and all that stuff none of us listened to, except maybe your mama. That’s not me though. I’m not gonna fix my mouth to say all of that touchy stuff doesn’t feel good. It does. But if it ever gets to feeling so splendiferous you end up doing something you didn’t think you’d end up doing—hold up,” I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.  “Has your mama talked to you about birth control?”

    Lily ducked her head.

    I frowned.  “Why would I expect somebody who ended up pregnant her first time—Forget I said that. Forget I said anything.  I run my mouth too much sometimes. Your mama knows that better than anybody.”

    “Did you know my dad?” Lily had asked in a rush.

    I bowed my head as if praying then lifted it and cupped my goddaughter’s face with icy hands. As much as I loved Lily, this was a line I would never dare cross.

    “Your mama is one of the people most precious to me. And if I told you anything about him, I’d lose her friendship. I can’t do that. But I promise you this; once you’re grown, if she still hasn’t told all you want to know, just whistle and we’ll find the answers.”   

I now wished it would be as easy to find solutions for the good people of Cancer Alley.

    "Ms. Porter,” Vincent said. "We are in the process of gathering information for a Citizen Suit."

    "A what?"

    "A lawsuit folks can file against the plants who are violating terms of the Clean Water Act, or the Clean Air Act, among others. We're building a list of plaintiffs."

    "How can I help? I'm sick of watching these companies only clean up contamination that affects white people. They know they're leaving carcinogenic chemicals in poor Black neighborhoods. It's criminal!"

    I startled. Rolled my shoulders to camouflage this creeping disquiet. Snuck a glance at Vincent. His straightened back. Earnest gaze. Here was a woman on fire for justice and a rare find: someone unimpressed with the power of industry. I, for one, did not want to give her false hope.

    “It’ll take time, Ms. Neely,” I interjected. “And it won’t be easy.”

    “And you are—?” She studied my coif, the real gold in my ears, my dutifully constructed mask.

    How to respond? Firstborn of Ruby Lee Simmons, sister of crackhead, Toni, ride or die friend to Margeaux and Tomorrow, and our dead Grace. Barrister. Winner. Murderer.

     I met her gaze.  

    "Antoinette Simmons," I said and offered my palm. "Co-founder of this firm. Friends call me Toi."

    "Well, Ms. Simmons," Neely Porter said. "I'm ready to fight no matter how long it take."

    "Could be ten, fifteen years before we see a victory," I said.

    "Some of us won't last that long," she said.

    "There'll be short-term wins," Vincent said. "We have those to shoot for. And at least everybody who climbs on board now will have the satisfaction of knowing we'll still be fighting for them even if they pass on."

    "Listen," she said. "I'm here because one of my clients keep getting the run around from the government agencies supposed to be protecting us. My client went out to start digging in his yard in order to build and right off, dug into a mess of greasy jelly, shiny beads turn out to be creosote, oozing up from the soil. He called the plant next to his property and was told 'don't worry about it, it won't hurt you.' Him and his crew kept digging and kept getting sick. That creosote, mixed with oil and tar and a chemical called pentachlorophenol, used to preserve railroad ties. Been known to cause cancer for decades. Contact with it cause kidney and liver problems, chemical burns, and convulsions. Can even kill you. Another chemical, napthalene, is also found in creosote. It cause anemia, cataracts and cancer."

    More words to add to the Dictionary: creosote. Pentacholorphenol. Napthalene.

    "How's your client doing?" Vincent asked.

    "He alive. For now. Went into the ditch with perfect blood pressure, six weeks after he started digging, he gotta take four different blood pressure pills and his kidneys barely function. His crew got skin rashes and breathing problems 'cause that mess was deep in that soil. All over the yard."

    "He want to talk to us?"

    "He got an attorney. The plant offered a settlement but he couldn't tell nobody about it, so he turned it down."

    "Was that a good idea?" I said.

    "He a preacher," she said. "Didn't think it was Christian not to warn other folk about contaminated land."

    "I sure would like to talk to him," Vincent said. "See if he'd be interested in our citizen suit."

    "What's that again?" she asked.

    "A lawsuit we can file for anybody who's been harmed by a company causing pollution," Vincent said.

    "Plenty folk should be ready to sign up for that," Neely said.

    "Some don't want to participate," I said. "Worried about jobs."

    "Jobs ain't gonna do nobody a lick of good if they too sick to work. Or are on the brink of death."   

    "Industry provides tons of jobs here," I said.

    "Toi used to work for Exxon-Mobile," Vincent said.

    Neely sniffed. "Who's side you on now?"

    "Listen—"

    "Ladies," Vincent said. "We're all on the same team."

    “Everybody keep trying to get me to calm down. But how can I do that? I see how they do us. When the white neighborhood gets contaminated, they clean it up, quick fast and in a hurry. But black folk get exposed to polluted air or water or land, they just leave it for us to keep breathing and drinking and let our babies keep playing in that poisoned dirt."  

Memoir

I think I did it Charlotte - wrote a piece that tells the story I want to tell in the way I want to tell it. Let me know what you think.

Memoir

In my grammar school there were mean girls and quiet girls and one who couldn’t sit still and jiggled her leg all the time who became a dancer and one I called my frenemie and another who I rode one afternoon under her sheets and then she rode me and we kissed and my tongue touched her braces and shrank back. I had glasses then – I think I was born with them – and put them on her bedside table, next to a clock that had green florescent numbers and her gold diary with a pen that exploded into pink feather-down at the end. I used it to tickle her and she shrieked and fell out of bed and in revenge took my cat’s eye glasses and put them on and stumbled around the room like she was dizzy from the magnification.

Then we would be in her mom’s kitchen sneaking ice cream from a freezer the size of a mausoleum, only to be caught by her grandmother who had come to check the kugel in the oven. It was filling the air with sweet cinnamon smell and making me wish my mom was Jewish. With a wink and a slap and a big bowl of warm sweet noodles with vanilla ice cream melting on top I’d stuff myself and then be off to have dinner at my house, where boys reigned supreme and I never ate fast enough to get seconds. I’d dash home, running round the corner, past the International House where women in jewel-colored saris were tugging dowdy brown overcoats over their splendor as they walked or sailed or floated down the stone steps into the chilly evening, getting darker and colder every day as we came close to the end of the year here on the South Side of Chicago.

Home then to my brothers, who, with their friends, were falling down in great smoldering piles of leaves, daring each other through their coughs and teary eyes to get closer to the sad and lonely bit of flame that remained as we tried to burn the oak and elm leaves we’d raked into soggy mounds. The whole street was asthma inducing grey smoke, acrid and pleasant by turns. It made our hair and clothes smell like we were a fireman who’d rushed into a burning house and come out dripping sweat and soot, carrying a small child who would be revived by tearful parents waiting anxiously just beyond the police tape.

We came tumbling into the warm kitchen. It smelled of lemon chicken – yum - or liver and onions -yuck. No matter. We were hungry, as teenagers always are, and fought for the places beside the mashed potatoes and not close to the bowl of green beans. Mom would be placing glasses of milk on the table and we would spit on our hands and say they were clean and she would give us a look and we’d dash to the sinks upstairs and down so we could be first back to the table and claim the best seat. The kitchen table was a piece of plywood, big enough to make a whole house, that tipped slightly this way and that because it balanced on boxes of books we’d brought with us when we arrived seven years ago. The bottom boxes were smushed into pleats as they’d shrunk down, and they had many a milk/coffee/ beer/wine/hot chocolate stain on them. Some day we would have the beautiful mahogany table my dad was making in the basement; someday - but not really until we were months away from selling the house and leaving. But that was the dream, like the bathroom he was renovating, the one next to my bedroom that only had a curtain the whole of my adolescence. They fought over the unfinished-ness of the house, my mom and dad, but I think they were really fighting over getting it done at all (mom) versus getting things done beautifully (dad). There were five kids, one small paycheck, and he wanted things to be just so, perfect, the way his dad made things – his dad the rich engineer.

So the bathroom was never finished and the table tipped dizzily if you sat on the edge but it didn’t deter the wild and carefree and sometimes hurtful and careless conversations that flew around the table at dinner and beyond. There weren’t many tables in our town, or any other in the 1960’s, where you could and did discuss death and sex along with pass the gravy please. As the decade went on the conversations included how to transport an exhibit to the science fair, the merits of learning Russian as a second language, whether the Tower of Babel was real or metaphoric - as well as the qualities of highs from peyote, psilocybin, LSD and weed. No one was more brave and experimental than my mom when it came to psychedelics, which was exciting until it wasn’t and made me feel like an outcast as she and my dad and my boyfriend and the girl next door swapped recipes for their mind altering weekends and set up scenarios for sex swaps. My rebellion was to rail against the drugs and multiplying partners who joined “The Nest,” which met on my parent’s bed on the weekends. They came to touch each other and imbibe and inhale things I wasn’t supposed to see since I was babysitting my little brothers.

There were many plates to keep afloat besides my family: high school, waitressing, getting arrested at sit-ins with students from the University, dancing with my new boyfriend who didn’t want to sleep with either of my parents or get loaded or debate the finer points of brewing a heady psychedelic. I stayed away from home as much as I could. I was always tired. I didn’t want to go to college, since I was sick of school, but I desperately wanted to leave home. My high school was one of the ones white flight had shifted so it was almost all black; being one of the few white kids I got a pass on everything. My grades weren’t great but good enough to go to college, though the first college I went to let in anyone who could pay because it was experimental and in Denmark and only had twelve students the day I arrived a few weeks before my seventeenth birthday. 

It was a magical place, in the farmer-tamed wilds of Jutland, overlooking fjords that led to the North Sea and on to the east coast of Scotland. The school had moved into newly renovated barns which overlooked rolling fields punctuated by mysterious mounds called kæmpehøj: ancient burial mounds. The tractors that harvested the wheat made spirals around them as they scythed the yellow stalks with their industrial blades. The townspeople were curious about us, a bunch of draft-dodging or otherwise outcast Americans, but in typical Danish style they quietly and politely assessed us from the shelter of their sensible brick homes and their sweet smelling bakeries, birthplace of clouds of airy sweetness we know as whipped cream.

I didn’t know what I was doing there, but everyone else was a bit lost too. One couple had come so they could have their baby far away from disapproving parents, one guy didn’t want to kill strangers in the war in Vietnam, one girl had eczema so bad she had worn a mask most of her childhood. The founder, Aage Nielsen, believed in a radical form of education where teachers paid more than students because you always learn more by teaching. There were no classes – you had to create your own program. Having never lived in the country I was bored, lost, confused. I gained 20 pounds in a few months, stuffing baguettes into my mouth until I was sure they were coming back up my throat. I watched clouds. I listened to the guy in the room across from mine - Phil, a former steel worker from Pittsburg - beat his wife Elaine, who always looked apologetic as she came out bruised. We all heard it. Aage told Phil he really probably might not want to do that maybe sometime if he chose to perhaps lighten up. When I finally emerged enough to give a lecture at the only scheduled academic event, Saturday Morning Lecture, I spoke about the oppression of women from the perspective of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. That was more than anyone at this radical school could take and they all walked out.

Then my parents showed up, drugs and anger intact, having sold their house and begun the disintegration of their marriage for reals this time. My father hit on a local college student, then got in a fist-fight with my brother Davey. They brought their psychedelics and were popular, and I faded into a shell, the self who was emerging lost in the spectacular show of Littlewoods On Parade. Just as my former boyfriend/mother’s lover was going to show up I escaped: my grandmother was dying. I arrived in Maryland a few hours after her funeral and stayed to keep my grandfather company.

We were a sad couple – me 18 and lost in every way and him 68 and lost without his lifelong companion. We traveled that fall to friends of his, and family, and came back to his estate on the Chesapeake as lonely as before. Grampy was broken hearted, and on December 6^th he had a massive heart attack, slipped off his lounger, and died while I tried to hold his head up so he wouldn’t crack it on the floor.

My parents came back from Denmark and began tearing my grandparent’s house apart, the one I loved, the one they found disgustingly bourgeois. They were happy for the cash thank you very much but not the petti-point footstools, Willow-ware plates, or the grand piano. My smarmy former boyfriend showed up and moved in, with his girlfriend, the same dope dealing girl-next-door I despised years ago. The weed and psychedelics and emotional dramas began again. I applied to colleges – I knew if any accepted me I would go because my family couldn’t follow.

Bennington, in January, is the perfect place to study poetry, ancient Greek and art history. That winter, in 1968, I might have studied those, slept a lot, thrived as I started again at a real college. But I don’t think I understood that life could be this simple. Nobody having a bad trip? Dying in my lap? No dad hitting on my friends or smashing my brother’s face? I hated the ritual line-up of pimply guys from Dartmouth who descended each weekend and stood in sniggering elbow-stabbing nudgenudgewinkwink groups watching us walk to the dining room. When I found I’d been accepted at the University of Chicago for the fall I jumped at the chance to return to where I’d grown up - someplace familiar. I had no worries my parents might return as well: they were set on separating and making their way to counter culture California.

__________________________________

In June I moved back to the South Side of Chicago, got a job where I used to waitress, and started sleeping with guys I met that day at the bar so I wouldn’t be alone. Sometimes I’d wake up in the bed of one guy, go off with another in the lull between the lunch and dinner crowd, and go home with a third. Anything to be touched. I also learned you can be as lonely as a tunnel lying next to someone you don’t care about.

July 4^th. I’m staying with friends of my parents until the school year begins. On this night I’ve been on a date after my shift. Don’t remember who. It’s about 8:00. He’s walked me to the door and I lean in for a kiss as we stand on the porch. The front door opens and my host, Ben, says I should come inside. “Please sit down,” he says, walking into the living room. “I’m so sorry to tell you this but your brother Davey is dead. Your father is on his way – he’ll be here tomorrow sometime.”   

Davey was my younger brother by eighteen months - the one who looked up to me. The one I could boss around until he grew taller and stronger. As my enmity for my parents had grown I’d turned my back on everyone except him. He was my last thread of connection.

The day before Davey died, July 3^rd, my father had gotten on his BMW motorcycle, covered head-to-toe in black leather, and roared off in a cloud of dust, leaving his family so he could “find himself.” He now had the money to do so. He was off to lay hippie chicks all across America, buy turquoise jewelry in Arizona and sugar cubes of acid in San Francisco, dabble at art in Mexico. He must have been restless - eager to end his life with my mother, his three sons living with her, and all the people she attracted who were now burning their cigarette butts into the antique furniture he hated. He was excited for the adventures ahead. So excited he couldn’t stay at his parent’s estate in Maryland for family festivities planned for the Fourth of July. It was the nation’s birthday of course, and, in addition, this year, a special birthday celebration for the youngest in our family since everyone still with my mom would be moving on his actual birthday, when he turned six.   

The Fourth being all about explosions and fireworks, Davey had gone to the garage to make something special. In this case, a smoke bomb, because young men do weird shit like this: put gunpowder into an iron pipe and – if all goes well – ignite it so it makes a crapload of black, smelly smoke. If all goes badly, and you’ve mistakenly capped both ends, the powder ignites and the shrapnel pierces you. Davey staggered the short distance from the workshop to the kitchen and died on the floor.

My father had called home after being on the road a day and heard of his son’s death. Knowing I was in Chicago he drove 22 hours straight on his motorcycle and we caught the next flight back to Maryland. He slept. I cried. And cried. And cried. I knew once I got off the plane I could show no emotion around the people I now hated more than ever.

And so it was. I stayed frozen. So frozen it took me 40 years to remember crucial parts of this story. I know people flew in from all over for Davey’s wake. I know my parents asked people to share memories as we sat around the spacious living room, looking out on a golf-course sized lawn that rolled to the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, where Davey and I had watched horse-shoe crabs escape from our curious fingers by burying themselves in sand. I know my ex-boyfriend was there and he would write about this in his popular novel “Endless Love.” I know I didn’t speak because I was a glacier of fury, paralyzed with pain and loss.  

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The morning I was to leave my brother’s wake I got up early for the cab coming to take me to the airport. I opened the screen door and stepped into the soft, humid air of a Maryland summer morning. As I came out I realized there was someone on the porch: Kevin, a dwarf, my mother’s new friendloverwhatever. I’d hardly noticed him all weekend and I didn’t want to start now. He was sitting on the built-in bench on the porch, his short legs straight out on the old wood. I nodded and he nodded and, as we heard the crunch of wheels on the gravel, he reached out his hand and offered me a gold box. “You might need these someday,” he said. I thanked him, put the box in my bag as I walked to the car.

Once the plane reached cruising altitude on my flight back to Chicago I started to relax. Reaching under the seat in front I pulled a sweater from my bag and with it came the box. It had a bone closure. I pulled it up and opened the lid. Inside was a mother-of-pearl encrusted pair of opera glasses. I was delighted at such an odd gift from such an odd man. And then I realized where he got it. I thought about my grandmother at the opera, feeling fancy in a hat with a hatpin and veil, bright jewelry, a sexy dress. My next thought was about all the strange people my mother surrounded herself with who had pawed through my grandmother’s treasures, mocking her taste and her life as my parents did. I shut the box. I shut myself and didn’t open again until now.