the squash e-mails

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Establishing care with a new doctor means having to answer seventeen pages of questions about every detail of one’s history. It cannot be avoided, and it makes me a bit grouchy, touchy. There are too many medications to recall, a depression screening that I have to lie on because it wouldn’t give an accurate picture of me, and the family history. I leave large sections of the forms blank, but they still have to be reviewed.

“Is your father still living?” the nurse asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“Is your mother still living?” she asks.

I squint and wrinkle my nose for a second, then say, “Probably.”

It’s an accurate answer. It’s been about a month since I casually checked online for an obituary and didn’t find one.

I ended our relationship in 2018. It was a time when her e-mails about the squash in her garden and when it might rain later and passive-aggressive reports about my sisters (that she knew I did not want to hear) had begun to make me simmer. She would not call; she would e-mail once every few weeks, and it would always be about the weather, mowing the lawn, squirrels getting the pecans from the tree. She spent so much time when I was growing up, then grown and gone, staring out that back door, just staring, that it was no wonder it comprised the bits of the world that made her feel safe.

It made me angry. I wouldn’t have given her more than my own squash garden – a project James did in school, how the dogs were doing, the weather forty-five minutes away and how we got more snow than they did – because when I was twelve, she read my diary and took from me what I would never have willingly given her.

I was already a writer. The contents were about the depths of my being, not hearts and doodles, not passages about crushes on boys or clues about a first kiss.

She had the gall to leave it open, face down, on my bed, so that when I returned home from school that day, I would know she had read it. I think she was expecting some kind of breakthrough in our flavorless relationship, a saccharine connection, but all I could do was stand and stare at it and wait until she finished saying words and walked away, so I could close my bedroom door and never open it for her again.

All these years later, I would not have given her more than squash, because she violated me. Yet I also held anger because she was emotionally unavailable from the time of my inception, vague, inert, cooking dinner dutifully and providing transportation and clothing as expected, custodial care; the rest of the time, staring out of that back door window. Just staring.

So we sent e-mails about squash and dogs and weather right up until the day she came out of left field and rebuked me for saying “god-damned” in a previous e-mail. She had begun attending church with my sister Kathy and, unbeknownst to me, had consumed an awful lot of Kool-Aid there. I’d had no idea. I took the Lord’s name in vain and she ripped me apart and told me I had broken her heart and she was very, very offended on behalf of her Savior who had died for her sins and redeemed her.

I thought about this. I thought about it for days. I remembered how peaceful the five years were when she rejected me after I came out and we didn’t have contact. I thought about guilt and responsibility. I thought about social duty and self-care.

I thought about a lot of things.

I wrote a final e-mail, and it wasn’t about squash. It was about the weather. I brought the storm.

Then I blocked her number, her access to me online, at the post office, everywhere. I closed my bedroom door and locked it.

I’ve had five more years of peace since then, and I do not intend them to end. I think about her sometimes because I’ve processed our dynamic and I can comfortably tolerate my ambivalence. I don’t love her, and I don’t hate her. I look for her obituary now and then because my sisters might need my signature on something that says they can leave me the fuck out of the probate of her estate.

None of them knows I live in Vermont. None of them knows I’m free. And this year, we grew some god-damned fine zucchini in our garden. There was a lot of rain, but it grew anyway.

wrapping paper

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I’m in my forties and there has not been a Christmas since I was a young teen that I haven’t thought of an English teacher as I’ve struggled to wrap gifts. In eighth grade, she assigned us a quite reasonable demonstration/speech project, and to this day I will never understand why I chose to show how to wrap a gift box in paper.

It wasn’t just that I was choked with anxiety and mumbled incoherent sentences throughout the eighty years [one minute and fifty-two seconds] it took to get the box wrapped. It wasn’t that the sound of the Scotch tape dispenser seemed to echo through the halls each time I pulled a piece. It was the sheer audacity of the undertaking itself. I’ve never been so thankful for a C-, reflective of generosity and grace. The truth is ….

I cannot wrap a gift properly. I simply cannot do it. I’ve had three decades of practice since that late-morning debacle. I’ve watched tutorials. I’ve observed others. I once unnerved an employee at Cracker Barrel by staring at her with fascination as she was wrapping gift shop items.

My corners bulge unless I’m careful; if I’m careful, the paper rips and the corner of a box protrudes. I gauge and trim ends so they’ll tuck neatly; they’re too short and I have to tape some paper under the other paper to hide the contents. We won’t discuss wrinkles, lining up patterns, copious use of tape, or the end result having a discernible top and sides. Those are advanced functions reserved for the unimpaired.

That day in eighth grade, I may as well have attempted to take apart a motorcycle or groom a real horse. But I have a wife and kid who have never complained in earshot, and my efforts have been tolerated. For others’ gifts, she gently offers to wrap while I write out the card, on the supposed grounds of superior handwriting.

And to Mrs. Huffines, a teacher’s dream is to know a student took something away that stuck for life. I’ve mangled plenty of curled-up strips of tape that were sticky, and I’ve never wrapped a Christmas present on a quiet Christmas Eve morning without thinking of you.

anchor store

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It’s just a grocery store, right? There is nothing sentimental about visiting, or not visiting, a fluorescent-lighted, linoleum-floored, generic chain store with sale signs and cash registers beeping and the same products that can be found anywhere, everywhere.

This morning, I woke with a smooth, gray, heavy stone in the bottom of my heart. It feels like the pain I experience at the nadir of a depression cycle. It’s almost debilitating. My limbs do not want to move. I’m forcing down food and drink that I’d rather spit out. My blood is sludge and my body grinds and I’m fighting drowsiness.

It would make sense that this is the wall I’ve feared I would hit, with all of this cleaning, packing, hauling, dismantling, pushing my body to its limits each day so that my muscles don’t have time to heal and I wake each morning weaker and achier than the day before. Last night, I couldn’t clench my hands into fists because they had held a screwdriver and a sponge past their point of tolerance. Surely there is a wall and I’ve smashed into it. That must be it.

But that isn’t it.

It would make sense that I’ve been losing too many things, sending them away and saying good-bye, one by one, and seemingly taking it in stride. I’ve cried a little, but on the whole, I’ve been eerily okay with it all. Surely there is a tipping point, a straw that makes it all break and crumble. Surely this small thing, a run to the grocery store, could not be responsible for feeling that the gods turned up the gravity.

But it makes sense.

I’ve shopped there for twelve years. James was six and in full manifestation of ADHD. I would move up and down the aisles, trying to envision myself as the nucleus of an atom, with a whizzing electron in my orbit. I would try to shop when there weren’t many other customers who would be bothered by his enjoyment of running and falling and sliding on the floor, his spin-dancing. A nucleus can exert considerable binding force on an electron, and I wasn’t that parent who doesn’t try to control her kid, but usually, contained chaos was all I could manage.

When James was nine and ten, we played the game where we would pass a misplaced item on the shelf and one of us would point it out to the other, and we would laugh at the randomness of the juxtaposition. He was just old enough for me to permit him to leave my side and go put it back without forming, in three seconds, the certainty that he had been abducted and was already in someone’s car, speeding away from me forever. He loved putting things back. He knew where every single item was. He loved the game.

When he was twelve, he told me the things he would like and stayed home, turning back to his video games.

When he was sixteen, he told me he wasn’t allowed to check me out in his lane, because I’m family, but that he could bag my groceries.

Somehow, I became the “cool mom” and the teenagers all want me in their lines. The adults all want to tell me something funny James said or did or a reason they’re proud of him. At home, I point out when his work pants are fraying between the legs and I order him new ones.

Sometimes the goat cheese crumbles are buy-one-get-two-free and we have it in salad with mandarin oranges and chicken and almond slices.

Once, I thought I’d broken the coffee-grinding machine. I spent twenty minutes helping the manager troubleshoot, and we diagnosed the problem. It was the electrical outlet above the top of the shelf. Someone flipped a breaker and I was able to coarse-grind the beans for homemade cold brew. We high-fived.

The Sunday after I’d been released from the psych unit at the hospital, I did the shopping. The disparity was surreal, coming twenty-four hours after I hadn’t even been allowed to have shoelaces, but the asparagus and ice cream and ready-to-microwave mashed potatoes were so mundane and tangible and … normal. They were an anchor that kept me in the real world.

During COVID lockdown, James kept coming home late from work. There were time discrepancies and they concerned me. I looked into it and learned that he was buying fresh produce after his work shift for his best friend’s parents, who couldn’t go out in public places, and dropping it on their doorstep. They’d leave cash out for him. He never wanted to tell us.

The deli subs are pretty good, especially the ones on cheese bread.

Places don’t leave me. I can still close my eyes and wander around the offices of former jobs, see the names on the mailboxes and file folders and smell the hand soap in the bathrooms. I can peruse the border art and posters of former classrooms and turn to the right pages of church hymnals, ready to stand and sing. I can walk in these places as settings in dreams. When the raw edges heal over, I know I will walk the hallways of the schools I just left.

But this place? It’s just a grocery store.

the social experiment

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The last straw in the subtle, systematic bullying fell the morning I stood bleary-eyed in the tiny kitchen of the student apartment, pouring Apple Jacks into a melamine bowl. I was always the first up because as a freshman, I hadn’t been clever enough not to schedule an eight o’clock honors calculus class. As my three apartment mates slept, I sat on the side of the sofa without the protruding spring and ate my cereal and thought to myself, It’s darker out there than it normally is. Something’s not right. Need to walk to class. It’s dark.

I checked Jackie’s watch on the small table by the door on my way out. It was 4:36 a.m. My roommates had set every clock in the apartment forward three hours on purpose, then adjusted their own alarms accordingly.

The business-suit lady in the Wingate College housing office was concerned. “I certainly understand that you need a better fit. We’ve talked to all of them and they said it was just a joke. Heather said she refused to participate in it. But we want you to be able to have a good year here and moving to a dorm sounds like a good idea. Are you sure you want to give up the privilege of living in the apartments, though? It came with the Belk scholarship. A lot of people would give anything for that.”

“I’d give anything to get out of it. Today,” I added.

“Well,” she began, then paused and considered how to present the information. “There’s only one opening in a dorm room, in Cannon. But it … might not be a good fit, either, so you can take all the time you need to think about it. Normally we try to … put girls together who are … alike and will get along well.” She shuffled some folders. “There’s a space in a room with a Black girl, but everybody says she’s really nice and I think y’all would probably be fine. We just don’t normally do that,” she emphasized. “I mean, you know, just because there are a lot of differences.”

“It’s fine. I’d like it. Please.”

“If you’re okay with that, then sure. You’ll have to park over in the C Lot and there’s a fee for that. You can’t park at the apartments any more. Be sure to hang the tag on your rearview mirror. And we’ll … keep an eye on you and check in to see if it’s going all right, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I wanted to start moving my belongings right away. They would fit in the front seat of my old Mazda and leave leg room.

Dear Tameka,

I doubt you know any of that. I doubt you know that they called me over to the administrative building twice in those next weeks to see if I was handling things well. I doubt anyone checked on you for the same reason.

I’m sorry I was an awful roommate. I was always on my Tandy, playing trivia on a BBS with my new 2,400-baud modem, and I listened obsessively to my Nanci Griffith cassettes, while you walked around singing the chorus to “Walk Away” by Da Five Footaz. I smelled up the room with raspberry shower gel and you smelled up the room with a bitter pear-scented goo that you had to put into your hair to maintain it.

Do you remember when you tried to put some in my hair? It took three shampoos to get it out. You couldn’t stop laughing. Eventually you got me to grin.

Do you remember that night you left your textbook at home and we drove in the Sunday night dark all the way to Timmonsville, South Carolina, to your house? I met your dad. It was awkward, but not as awkward as walking into that Waffle House together outside of Florence.

Do you remember what we talked about on that road trip? I don’t. We never bonded, exactly. We led disparate lives that seldom intersected.

What I will never figure out, though, is why they thought it would be a problem, a Black girl and a White girl sharing a room. Because sometimes, we turned out the lights to go to bed, and we laughed and talked, not knowing we’d been mentioned in a meeting in a conference room earlier that day, the college’s social experiment.

how gifts are given

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“May I sit here? I’ve been out. I’ve had a cold, but I think I’m well enough now to sing.”

“Of course,” I say, and scoot my chair to the left a few inches to let her into the aisle. I move my glass of water and my coat.

Her diminutive eighty-year-old frame doesn’t take up the full width of the chair. She sets her bag on the floor and opens her music folder. “What did he go over last night? What did I miss?” she leans over and whispers, so as to keep from disturbing Jamie, who is teaching the basses how to sustain a modified vowel on a note too high for their range.

“Let’s see … ‘Lift Up Your Heads’, ‘And With His Stripes’, and yeah, we went back to the Christmas stuff and did ‘And He Shall Purify’ and ‘For Unto Us’. He tortured us on the melismas.” She scribbles furiously with her pencil on a single sheet of notebook paper in the back of a folder that is shabby from many years of use.

She leans over once more. “I’m Nancy,” she says.

I smile. “Amy. Thank you for sitting with me, Nancy, but you’re going to be sorry because I sound like a frog tonight!” She keeps a straight face. “Well, then, we’ll just be a couple of frogs. This thing still has my throat.”

Why does this remind of me so much of my Grandma? She would have said something like that. She was always a little odd. I think about the name Nancy and decide that she reminds me more of a Ruby.

During our first break, we talk in the fervent, rambling way that people do when they’ve just met but feel like fast friends. We talk about raising kids and fact-checking the media and her thirty-minute drive down for these practices, which she makes without complaint every week because she feels safe in her Buick. She won’t let her husband drive her.

We talk about church choirs and music and why I sing Messiah every year when I’m not a believer. “You are … unusual!” she says after a thoughtful pause. We talk about the piano I’m planning to sell. She says it’s a shame to sell a piano, unless it’s going to someone who’s going to use it. “I played when I was young and I thought I could get it back,” I explain. “I play every Sunday for our little church up there, but if I sit at the piano in my living room, I can just play for hours. Such a joy, and you never lose it,” she says, and she gives me a keen, piercing look, convicting me for giving up, then lets her eyes fall because something has occurred to her.

“I used to play the violin, too. I played for years, honey, and sometimes I even did a solo in church on it. And you won’t believe it, but ten years ago, we had a windy day, as windy as I’ve ever seen it be, and don’t you know, I was carrying the violin back into the house — “

I know what is coming. The violin neck is about to get crunched or the whole case is going to be blown out of her hand and the instrument smashed to pieces.

” — and the wind caught and the door slammed right on my hand and broke my finger!” She holds out her right hand, so frail with its paper skin and liver spots, and shows me the ring finger, knuckle swollen with arthritis, bent and misaligned. “My husband took me to the emergency room, but you know, they let me sit out there for so long that it didn’t get set right, and now look at it.” She looks at the finger and rubs it. “I haven’t played the violin since. It hurts too much to hold the bow. I have to have that finger to hold it, you see. Ten years,” she muses.

The break is over. We sing through ‘Glory to God’ and ‘His Yoke Is Easy’. Jamie makes jokes and Nancy glances over each time with a smirk. “He is just something else, isn’t he? So funny,” she whispers. Something in that half-smile is my Grandma. Nancy stands at four-eleven, the same height, the same tiny form. Her wit is sharp.

I am suddenly overcome with love for this woman, a gem like Grandma was, and I know what to do, because they make damned near everything these days. Things an eighty-year- old woman would not necessarily know about, I realize.

At the next break, I sneak off to an empty room in the church fellowship hall, take out my phone and bring up Amazon. I search for “violin bow arthritis”. There it is, a grip mod piece for the bow frog that is made for players with arthritis, complete with five stars and multiple, grateful testimonials about finally getting to play the violin again after years of prohibitive pain.

I order it. It won’t be here in time for me to give it to her in person, even with Prime, but I have her name and her town and addresses are easy to find in online voter records. I see she is registered as a Democrat in a sea of Republicans. I think about how she just told me she loves NPR.

It’s terribly difficult to keep from grinning for the rest of the rehearsal. I manage to solemnly charge her with being careful on the way home and resting up and taking care of that cold. In this moment, I know that my heart has adopted a grandmother.

I’ll stand beside her during the performance, transported back to twelve years old, standing beside Grandma in the church choir.

You never lose it. I want to give Nancy back this music, because I think she’s really a Ruby. I can close my eyes and envision a violin and bow in her hands again. It gives me the much-touted Christmas warmth I seldom experience. This is how gifts are given.