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bigbrickreview · 11 years ago

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SWEET TOOTH by Sonja Livingston

“REMEMBER THE WAY you ate sugar right from the bowl?”Steph says. “You’d perch on a chair in your little kid underwear and toss back crystals with the shovel of a tiny spoon.”

Not the most flattering image—a child spooning sugar into her mouth while her belly hangs like a soft moon over her Day-of-the-Week underpants. But even as my sister conjures the memory and the image settles before us, part of me remains unashamed, for what is truer than the glint of sugar under kitchen light? No, I don’t necessarily remember the bowl or the spoon, but I know my sister is right the same way you can tell when night has arrived even in a room with no windows.

But the point here is sugar. How I ate it straight sometimes, how we used to cook it in winter when the potatoes were gone and the flour. How was it that we never ran out of sugar? There was always a bag of it sitting like a guardian on a shelf. Yellow with blue cursive lettering. The most solid things in that house: bags of sugar and a cast iron skillet.

“Stir it,” Steph said while the pan heated up, and the kitchen became the smell of hot metal. A year and a half older, my sister took charge, pouring a few cups of sugar into the pan, granules going soft as spent snow—how I longed to taste the syrupy slush but no, Steph said “no,” and “keep stirring” as she turned toward the cupboard, scaling a chair, hands moving behind tins of baking powder and packets of dry yeast, pushing aside boxes of instant pudding in flavors no one, no matter how hungry, had ever dared try—pistachio, for instance—finally coming away with a vial of food coloring, red or blue, color leftover from Easter or someone’s birthday cake.

Steph added a few drops of red to the skillet after the sugar moved from crumble to liquid and took the fork from my hand—regardless of how well or how poorly I stirred—my sister took that fork and told me to lay out wax paper and God help us there was hardly an onion in the cupboard but like magic, a roll of wax paper. I’d pull toward the line of silver teeth at just the right length.

The sugar was tinted by then. “Careful,”she’d say, holding the pan with a mitt, pouring the nectar onto the paper—how I much I wanted to touch it, how it was as pretty to me as a wedding cake, that clear pink pond. But Steph knew best and allowed no touching until the sugar had hardened and we’d hammered it into shards that looked like stained glass that lifted in splinters to our mouths.

Fried sugar, we called it. It stuck to the caps of our molars and was nowhere near as luxurious as caramel, not half as long-lasting as taffy, but it was sweet just the same, something to make with a long-haired sister on certain winter nights, a thing to count on when there was nothing else.

----------------------- This essay originally appeared as part of a triptych in Connotation Press in spring 2014.

Sonja Livingston’s first book, Ghostbread (University of Georgia Press) won an AWP Book Prize for Nonfiction and is used in classrooms and reading groups around the nation. Another memoir, Queen of the Fall, is forthcoming in early 2015. Sonja’s writing has appeared in journals such as the Iowa Review, Seneca Review, Arts & Letters, and Creative Nonfiction and has earned a NYFA Fellowship, an Iowa Review Award, a Susan Atefat Essay Prize and other honors. Sonja splits her time between Rochester and Memphis, where she teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Memphis. For more, visit www.sonjalivingston.com.

FIRST ANNUAL ESSAY CONTEST:

The Big Brick Review is a new nonfiction online journal that seeks personal essays which build on the narrative of our lives, finding new insight to old struggles…old insight to new struggles…and all shades-of-gray in between.

Now accepting submissions for the first annual essay contest; Our 2015 judges include Georgia Beers, Susan Bono, Gregory Gerard, Sonja Livingston, and Alison Smith.

For 2015, the contest theme is loosely based on the concept of ‘building.’ Creative interpretation welcomed. Essays must be narrative non-fiction (that is, they must explore a truth of a human experience as interpreted/experienced by the author) and will be judged on overall strength of writing, compelling content/theme, and interesting style/voice. Maximum length 2000 words.

Deadline for contest submission is Feb 17, 2015. Full details online at: www.bigbrickreview.com/contest.html

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bigbrickreview · 11 years ago

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365 PELHAM ROAD by Sejal Shah

RANCH HOUSES, WHEN I was growing up, were not cool. At least in my mind, at least on that street, in the 1980s. Ranches seem appreciated now—or maybe it’s just everyone’s eventual knee problems. My neighborhood displays an odd mix of housing styles within its streets. The developers ran out of money, I read, during the Depression. By the time people were building again, well after WWII, styles had changed. Thus, ranch houses live next to Tudors, split-levels next to Colonials.

My life is a ranch house—laid out squarely—not coyly, in levels like the Colonial homes on the street. No dormer windows or dreamy second story verandas or slight, whimsical balconies in my house. No attic bedroom or interesting third story. I am straightforward, to a fault, often without decoration.

Sometimes I think I am uncomplicated, but I know it’s not true. Ranch houses have their hidden spaces and places, too, even if they are not as old, not as interesting, not as layered as the fake Tudors and the Capes; they suggest a vision of family I could never quite get behind. Ranches present a large formal living room with picture windows and wide, open spaces. Pictures of a happy family. I never wanted anyone to be able to see into my home—houses are for privacy, places to read and restore.

The only other house my parents owned before that was also a ranch house. (They are, at any rate, consistent.)

At least we had an interesting added-on room—the blue room—a mother-in-law attachment. I am the addition, the mother-in-law attachment. I am not a mother-in-law; I am a returned child, boomeranging back every five or ten years. I think about the woman for whom it was built: this room with its own bathroom and a walk-in closet and a cedar closet and four bright windows across three sides of the room. I must think about her weekly since I moved back here, and how kind (or necessary) it was for the Lemperts, the people who built the home, to do that for the parent who moved in with them. Everyone needs a little space.

One of the original owners asked to see the house once, years after they had moved, and my mother said no. It upset me when I heard this; I would want to be allowed back in if / when we move from the house, leave this house, lose this home.

Did he or she just ring the doorbell one day? I imagine it that way.

When I ask her about it again, my mother does not remember the previous owners stopping by at all. This I know: this house meant something once, to people other than us.

We talk about the house a lot, still. We live here, still, my parents and me, now joined by my grandmother. My parents were grateful for it—the location, the large finished basement that doubled as a meeting place for their community. Pujas, bhajans, Hindu festivals, lectures, poetry readings, visiting swamis. On those nights, their friends’ cars lined the street and their shoes filled the garage. We kids played hide and seek or tag outside, or swam. In those days, we had a pool.

I often wished my house sat closer to Highland, which bisects Pelham Road, or that we lived on Upper Pelham, which is what I called the other, older, stately, more elegant half of the street. A ranch would have been out of place on that side. And I wonder about that now—my almost-obsession with the houses on the street—they almost seem like old friends or parents of friends—I have known their faces for so long, over so many years. Thirty-five years of driving by the same houses, walking by the same houses, years of disembarking off a yellow school bus and trudging home on uneven cement sidewalks. It’s an old enough neighborhood that the sidewalks buckle and grass grows between squares, sometimes.

I orient myself from that house. Number 365: the number of days in a year, we would tell our friends—that’s how to tell our house apart from the other tan ranch houses at the end of the street. Even though the bedrooms, like everything in a ranch, are on the first floor, I always felt safe. Both the bedroom in which I grew up and the bedroom in which I now live, the mother-in-law attachment, face to the backyard. And I value that—the solidity and privacy of the house. A fort, for keeping the world outside at bay. I knew if a job ended, I could always come back. There was a place for me. I called it my house, still, though I hadn’t lived there in years, had in fact lived in other states. Maybe I always knew I would be back. I think I did. I think I always knew.

Sejal Shah’s essays and stories have recently appeared in journals including Brevity, Conjunctions (Web), The Kenyon Review Online, and The Literary Review. Her 2013 essay, “Thank You,” was nominated for Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She lives and teaches in Rochester, New York; visit her online at www.sejal-shah.com.

FIRST ANNUAL ESSAY CONTEST:

Now accepting submissions for the first annual essay contest; Our 2015 judges include Georgia Beers, Susan Bono, Gregory Gerard, Sonja Livingston, and Alison Smith.

Deadline for contest submission is Feb 17, 2015. Full details online at: www.bigbrickreview.com/contest.html

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bigbrickreview · 11 years ago

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A GUILDED CAGE by Alison Smith

IN JULY 1984 my brother Roy died in a car accident. He was eighteen. It was raining when he left for work that morning. A half-mile from our house an oncoming car spun out of control on the wet road and collided with my brother’s car. Both drivers died.

In the days after the accident, our house filled with adults—friends of my parents, distant cousins, the parish priest, a half dozen nuns. Until Sister Pat got the prayer circle going in the living room, they wandered through the rooms of our house looking for coffee and passing around boxes of Kleenex. I was fifteen that summer, old enough to understand death, but I could not believe that Roy was really gone. I walked to the end of the driveway several times that first afternoon, and looked up the road, waiting for Roy’s car to take the turn at the top of the hill and head toward home. He didn’t show up.

Our yard overflowed with adults. I discovered that the only place I could be alone was the upstairs bathroom. I sat on the hamper in the shadowed room, my foot wedged against the door, and called Jesus’ name. Jesus appeared. He took a seat across from me. The hem of his robe was tattered and dust-stained, and he looked winded, as if he had just walked up a steep hill. But I didn’t mind. I was happy to see him. He pushed his hair out of his eyes, tucked it behind his ears, and looked over at me.

“Yes?” he said.

It wasn’t the first time I had seen Jesus. The first time happened when I was five. I was in the back yard, in the sandbox. My brother had been called back into the house; he had a phone call from Bob. Roy was a solitary child. He had a limited social circle. Besides me, Bob, who lived across the street, was my brother’s only friend. When he was not with me, he was either alone or with Bob. I was terribly jealous of Bob.

I was waiting for my brother to get off the phone so that we could get back to building a castle. Three mounds of sand stood in front of me, that’s as far as we got before the phone rang. Roy was the mastermind behind all of our building projects and I didn’t dare touch the mounds in his absence. It was a sunny day; the needles on evergreens that grew along the back fence shimmered in the afternoon light. I heard a voice behind me.

‘Knock, knock.’

I turned around. ‘Roy?’

‘Knock, knock.’

I stood up and looked over the fence. The neighbour’s yard was empty and silent. I sat back down in the sand. ‘Who is it?’ A soft-eyed, bearded man in a shapeless white shift stepped out from behind an evergreen. I recognized him right away. He looked exactly like the character in my illustrated children’s Bible.

‘Jesus.’ I said. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at church?’ I was not allowed to talk to strange men, but Jesus was not a stranger. He was a friend of my father’s. My father had spoken often about his relationship with Jesus Christ.

‘Knock, knock,’ Jesus said.

I blinked at him.

‘Come on. Humour an old man.’

‘You’re not that old.’

‘Knock, knock.’

I looked down at the three mounds of sand, looked behind me at the back door to the house. Roy was nowhere to be seen.

‘Who’s there?’ I said.

‘Aardvark.’

‘Aardvark who?’

‘Aardvark a million miles for one of your smiles.’ He grinned and sat down on the edge of the sandbox. His pale feet crossed, the grass pricked his ankles.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

‘I came to see you.’

‘Why?’

‘You are a child of God.’

‘No. You’re the child of God. I’m the child of my mom and dad.’ I didn’t want to be the child of God. Jesus was and I saw what it did to him: his father was God, his mother was human, he was stuck in the middle, he didn’t seem to fit in anywhere, and then they killed him for it.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Have it your way.’ He leaned over and placed a hand on the first mound of sand. ‘What are you making?’

‘Don’t touch that,’ I said.

He pulled his hand away. ‘My brother and I are making a castle and I don’t want to mess it up.’

The screen door slammed. I twisted my head around and watched Roy walk toward the sandbox. When I turned back to Jesus, he was gone.

The next day, Roy went into the woods at the end of our street to collect lichen moss. He used it as groundcover on his model train set. He usually took me with him on these collection trips, but that morning he took Bob. They left just after breakfast. I watched them go. Roy walked down the road, Bob beside him, a paper shopping bag, folded up and tucked under his arm.

Later that morning, I was sitting in the back yard alone and looking at the castle we had built the day before, when Jesus came walking across the lawn, a grin on his face. I waved. ‘Hi Jesus.’ He retrieved a baseball from behind the maple stump next to the garden and tossed it to me. It fell short. ‘I’ve got a good one for you today,’ he said as I ran after the ball. ‘Knock, knock.’

‘Who’s there?’

‘Centipede.’

‘Centipede who?’

‘Centipede on the Christmas tree.’

I stood up and held the ball in my hand. ‘You shouldn’t make fun of Santa.’

Jesus shrugged. He looked into the sandbox at the castle.

‘He brings presents,’ I said.

I tossed the ball to him. He missed it. His reflexes were so slow that he didn’t move till the ball was well past him. I had never seen such a bad fielder. But I didn’t say anything because, when he did finally reach for the ball, I saw the hole in the center of his hand where they had driven the stake through. His hand looked like a donut. Dried blood still collected around the wound. I wondered why he didn’t wash it off.

From the Bible stories my father had told me, I knew that Jesus had a serious guilt complex. He’d taken on the sins of the entire world and I had always felt sorry for him. And now here he was, wandering the suburban back yards of upstate New York, telling children knock-knock jokes. He looked lonely. I figured that a lot of people only talked to him because his father was God. ‘Do you want to be my friend?’ I asked. ‘Is that why you’re here?’

‘Sure!’ he said, a little too brightly. ‘I have lots of friends. You could be one of them.’

I crossed my arms in front of my chest. ‘Where are they?’

He looked around the yard. ‘Everywhere.’

I sat down in the sandbox. ‘I see.’ I squinted up at him. ‘Do you want to come in my sandbox?’

He stepped over the edge and stood next to the three-towered castle. The morning light filtering through the holes in his hands, his pale, bloody feet planted deep in the sand. ‘Knock, knock,’ he said.

I smiled. ‘Who’s there?’

Over the next ten years, I saw a lot of Jesus. He waited for me on the front stoop in the morning and walked me to the school bus. At night, when I was restless, he sat at the end of my bed until I fell asleep. He showed up during particularly trying spelling tests at Saint Thomas More Elementary. I learned that Jesus preferred grape Bubblicious to strawberry (just like me), that he was a terrible speller, that he preferred Bread to The Beatles and that he cried when ET flew away on the bicycle. When we played ball, I was very patient with Jesus. Every time he missed a throw, I ran after the ball and retrieved it for him. And, no matter how much time he spent with me, no matter how many surprising things I learned about him, I kept our friendship a secret. I figured he would want it that way. I never even told Roy.

But my father figured it out. He saw me talking to the empty air in the back yard, gingerly tossing a ball and then running after it and he knew. I could tell my father was impressed. In our insular Catholic world, Jesus Christ was still a big celebrity and I was his best and possibly only friend. Whenever my father mentioned my connection with Jesus, he did so quietly, on the sly, so that Roy and Mom did not hear. He knew how important it was to protect Jesus’ privacy and I respected him for knowing that.

One day, while we were out in the back yard sprinkling plant food on his prize roses he said, ‘Why don’t you ask Jesus for that baseball mitt? You know he loves you best of all.’ He smiled and patted my shoulder. I was stunned. I stood back and watched him shake the powdered food over the roses. Clearly, my father understood things only up to a point. He had no real grasp on how to be friends with the man whose father was God. You don’t just go around asking him for things, especially things you know your father is already getting you for your birthday. If you ask Jesus for things then you just look like any other star-struck, needy fan. I was disappointed in him. But I didn’t want to offend my father. After all, he was the only one who had figured out that I was friends with Jesus. So I smiled appreciatively, as if he had just said something really smart.

The next day, I mentioned the conversation to Jesus. I wanted him to know that I knew other people asked him for stuff but that I was above that.

‘Dad wants me to ask you for a baseball glove,’ I said, ‘but don’t worry about it. I know he’s buying me one for my birthday.’

Jesus didn’t say anything, but he looked relieved. I offered him a piece of grape Bubblicious. He accepted.

‘Knock, knock,’ he said.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Ammonia.’

‘Ammonia who?’

‘Ammonia a bird in a gilded cage.’

By the summer of1984 I’d known Jesus for over ten years and I had never outright asked him for something that I really needed. But that afternoon in the bathroom I was desperate. I sat on the hamper and watched Jesus. Perched on the edge of the tub across from me, his hands folded in his lap, he looked small and pale. His skin was so white that he almost blended into the white tile behind him. But this frail, fragile man was well connected. His father had the power to bring Roy back.

‘Where is Roy?’ I asked Jesus. ‘When are you going to let him come back?’ I was too shy to come right out and say I wanted my brother home right away, but we both knew what I was getting at.

Jesus did not answer my question. He would not even look at me. He stood up. He wavered for a moment on the tile floor. He seemed nervous—his fingers played with the cuffs on his sleeves. I waited for him to answer me, but he did not. Instead, he turned around and he walked away. I remember watching him go, looking at the back of his head, at his long hair where it fell over his shoulders and across his robe. I realized that, in all those years, I had never seen the back of Jesus before; he had never turned away from me.

I sat on the hamper and waited. I imagined Jesus going off to consult some divine ledger in which he could look Roy up. He’d scan the pages, a pencil in his mouth, his finger running down the column of tiny print. He’d find Roy’s name, his birthdate and the date of his pre-ordained death. He’d stop there, his finger on the death date, remove the pencil from his mouth, erase ‘1984’ and write in ‘2044’. It was easy: just change three numbers and Roy would be back. After ten years of tossing the ball and running after it for him, laughing at every one of his tired jokes, it didn’t seem too much to ask.

I waited. The minutes ticked by. The sun wound its way across the sky. Outside the door, I heard my father weeping on the stairs, the women chanting Hail Mary’s in the living room, the clatter of dishes in the kitchen. But inside the bathroom, there was just silence. It had never been this quiet before. I felt a panic rise in my throat. I swallowed, pushing it back down.

Perhaps Jesus was waylaid. There was some delay at the divine records office. Or perhaps he was with my father. My father was taking the news of the accident pretty badly so it would not surprise me if Jesus went to sit with him. I left the bathroom and went looking for him. But my father was alone, sitting on the third step of the stairs, an untouched cup of tea beside him.

Downstairs, Sister Pat cornered me in the front hall. She leaned in and said, ‘He’s with God now.’ I nodded. I squeezed her hand. I said, ‘I know.’ She walked away. But I didn’t know if she was referring to Roy or Jesus. Who was with God? I looked through the living room, the kitchen, the back hall, the basement—no Jesus. I ran out to the yard to the very back, past the swing set. I looked in the garage, in the fort. He was gone.

I used to tell people that I lost my faith the day my brother died. I would tell them that as a child I heard Christ’s voice and that it was beautiful, but one day I realized that God was a fraud. And I stopped. I turned my back on faith. But now I don’t think that’s true. I never rejected Christ. He rejected me.

Alison Smith's memoir, Name All the Animals (2004, Scribner) is a luminous, true story, and an unparalleled account of grief and secret love: the tale of a family clinging to the memory of a lost child, and of a young woman struggling to define herself in the wake of his loss. For more information, visit www.namealltheanimals.com.

FIRST ANNUAL ESSAY CONTEST:

Now accepting submissions for the first annual essay contest; Our 2015 judges include Georgia Beers, Susan Bono, Gregory Gerard, Sonja Livingston, and Alison Smith.

Deadline for contest submission is Feb 17, 2015. Full details online at: www.bigbrickreview.com/contest.html

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bigbrickreview · 11 years ago

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DEAR ME (NOTE TO SELF) by Erin Green

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. ~Anais Nin

Dear Me,

My Dear.

To find your thoughts sandwiched there, in your sketchbook, where you used to draw when you thought that was your path. Stumbling upon your written word buried in the thick black cloth-bound book, between the charcoal face that grew from random lines, and the sketch of a logo from graphic design. Among indiscriminate scribbles and road trip driving directions; you were never organized, always grabbed for whatever paper was there—notebooks or Post-its or envelope flaps (You will change in some ways, but not that. As I write to you now, thirteen years later, I’m using your sketchbook, just a couple of pages past your prose.)

I can’t say with confidence that you wrote it here to hide it. Yet there is no date; you wrote it almost dead center, middle of the book. In case anyone decided to flip through, chances are they wouldn’t find it. You always kept your thoughts—the soft ones, the dark ones, the ones that hurt or held hope—you always kept them concealed. It could take a person years of flipping through pages to get to them, like peeling layers of a tulip bulb. Once they got close to the center page, you’d distract them, hold the pages together in one sly move, flip further back to the silly sketches and still-lifes. You’d only show your abstractions. An image can’t be challenged—or worse, understood.

Here is the thing, Dear me, back then. You with your lowercase initials, your name starting in letters as small as you felt—e.g. (just a footnote, an aside). The thing is, Dear me, you were right. About halfway between now and then, you’ll look back at these pages and scoff at your silliness—your beliefs based on feeling, not facts. You’ll let them talk you out of what you know to be true (you know more than you know, Dear me, you do). You’ll put all your faith in figures, read their theories, flip their charts, analyze and dissect. As if the laws of the laboratory could apply to real life.

For years you’ll draw nothing but conclusions. You’ll abandon your convictions one by one, like petals and leaves dropped from a dying flower. The more you drop, the less you’ll be able to rely on your own reserves. One day you’ll find yourself standing there, a naked stem in the sun. Feeling the warmth but unable to give back, to show your colors, your petals, your stuff. Your stem will grow limp under the weight of your head, stripped of splendor.

It’s not until you let go of that plucked version of you, and let the old blossom die and return to the earth—until you go another layer deeper into the bulb and draw from what’s there—that you’ll emerge again, stem stronger, petals intact. But I won’t tell you when. In all honesty, Dear me, I can’t. Hope cannot be handed over; blossoms bloom on faith, not facts.

Erin Green often wishes she could go back and talk to her past self, but knows she's the last person she'd listen to. This piece stemmed from a 2013 creative writing course assignment to write a letter to your younger self. One year later, she can't decide if perhaps it was the other way around. Erin is now working on two book projects, one about saving the world, and one about the world saving you.

FIRST ANNUAL ESSAY CONTEST:

Now accepting submissions for the first annual essay contest; Our 2015 judges include Georgia Beers, Susan Bono, Gregory Gerard, Sonja Livingston, and Alison Smith.

Deadline for contest submission is Feb 17, 2015. Full details online at: www.bigbrickreview.com/contest.html

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bigbrickreview · 11 years ago

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THE BOSS by Georgia Beers

LIFE IS ALL about building.

Every day we build on something, whether we realize it or not, whether we intend to or not. Our lives. Our homes. Our jobs. Our families.

Building, building, building, all the time. And we writers? We got to the extreme. We are extreme builders. Not only do we build on aspects of our own lives, but we build on different parts of our projects. If we write fiction, we build on the lives, jobs, and families of our characters, as well as the plot of the story. If we write non-fiction, we build on the order and structure of our piece, the layout and the pacing. As writers, we are never not building.

Embrace it. Embrace that inner contractor. You are the construction company of your life, and as a writer, you are the construction company of every project you create, from the ground up. You are the architect; you create the original design and the blueprints. You’re the mason and the builder. You sink the foundation and erect the walls, lay the floors, hang the ceilings.

You’re the interior and exterior designer, choosing colors and fixtures, furniture and landscaping. And finally, you are the real estate agent, pitching the overall project to the buyer.

You do it all.

Every aspect of building is overseen by you, the extreme builder. The boss.

Be proud.

Own that shit.

Georgia Beers is a Lambda and Goldie award-winning author and editor of lesbian fiction. Born and raised in Rochester, New York, she still lives there with her partner of twenty years, their two dogs, and a cat. When not writing, she watches too much TV, reads voraciously, and invents new reasons not to work out. Georgia is currently hard at work on her eleventh book. Visit her and find out more at www.georgiabeers.com.

FIRST ANNUAL ESSAY CONTEST:

Now accepting submissions for the first annual essay contest; Our 2015 judges include Georgia Beers, Susan Bono, Gregory Gerard, Sonja Livingston, and Alison Smith.

Deadline for contest submission is Feb 17, 2015. Full details online at: www.bigbrickreview.com/contest.html

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bigbrickreview · 11 years ago

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MOVING by Susan Bono

IN THE CONFUSION of lumber scraps, heaved earth, and ravaged lawn that has been our backyard for the last eight months, a tiny cottage has been born. All last spring I bent over blueprints, trying to imagine its future shape, feeling like a shipbuilder designing the cabin of a seaworthy craft. Throughout the golden Indian summer, men hefting tools with quiet ease hammered joists, fitted windows, skylights, pipes, and wiring. On an afternoon of impending rain, our builder made a steady dance against the sky as he nailed shingles along the roof’s sturdy spine. The gutter man and stucco crew have come and gone. The carpet spreads like thick moss, the hardwood entry gleams. Now this shelter’s lighted windows glow in the rain-sodden darkness that wraps our neighborhood this February evening.

This place is my new office, furnished at the moment with two camp chairs, a telephone, and an empty file cabinet. As soon as the cabinetmaker installs the long birch counter, I will begin the work of moving in.

Along with expense, risks, and decisions, each phase of building has brought its rituals. I dropped charms into the foundation footings: gifts of stones, shells, coins, a marble from my grandfather’s boyhood, two of my sons’ baby teeth. I pinned photos, poems, and tokens onto the studs and plywood sheathing. I wrote the names of those who love me on the unfinished sheetrock. I have felt like some off-kilter priestess invoking the blessings of heaven and earth.

I have been moving toward this place my whole life. The questions, intentions, and desires dreamed into the structure have already made it familiar. I seem always to have known the squeeze of the brass thumb latch, the slow swing of the mahogany door, the muted fire of the carnelian walls. Tonight, I give thanks to the many hands that were guided by this sometimes faltering heart, and for the construction that began so long ago.

This essay is part of Susan Bono’s What Have We Here: Essays about Keeping House and Finding Home, forthcoming in October, 2014.

FIRST ANNUAL ESSAY CONTEST:

Now accepting submissions for the first annual essay contest; Our 2015 judges include Georgia Beers, Susan Bono, Gregory Gerard, Sonja Livingston, and Alison Smith.

Deadline for contest submission is Feb 17, 2015. Full details online at: www.bigbrickreview.com/contest.html

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bigbrickreview · 11 years ago

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MY RUNAWAY PLAN by Gregory Gerard

I WAS VISITING Gram the day I hatched my runaway plan. At eight, the youngest in our crowded Western New York farmhouse – Big Brick – I was different from the rest of them; I sensed it.

Everybody else seemed meant to be born, but I’d overheard that I was “a surprise.” Everybody else had a regular name, but I went by nicknames: The Caboose to my dad; The Baby to my mom; Greg-ums to the others. Everybody else had a little brother, someone to babysit, boss, or tease. Everybody except me.

I longed to get away through the craggy forest behind our property and discover my own adventure. Something like Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys might encounter. A place to keep my own secrets.

My grandmother’s living quarters had originally been a two-car garage attached to our laundry room. Before she moved in, Dad and some workers converted the space into a one-bedroom suite with a kitchenette and separate entrance. A bay window in the dining area looked out over the three-tiered lawn. Beyond, an expansive field ended in a grove of fruit trees down by the creek.

Gram was not satisfied.

Dad gave her the initial tour because she was his mom. I tagged along.

She looked at the new appliances and fresh paint, her old-lady golden wig and large white earrings dipping forward in silent evaluation. As he showcased the living room, bedroom, kitchen, and bath, I watched her bracelets slide back and forth loosely on her bony wrists.

When they had seen the entire apartment, she drew back, clasped her hands, and nodded toward the tan walls of the living area. “Now, if ya had it to do over again, would ya have picked that same color?”

I held my breath and watched my father closely, to see if he’d yell. A heavyset man, he could raise his powerful voice to shout or swear at a moment’s notice.

Instead of shouting, he only snapped “Aw, Mom,” and brought the tour to a quick finish. I breathed more easily when he left me and Gram, and returned to our end of the house.

“They put me in the garage,” Gram told me later, her muted tangerine dress gathered about her legs as she sat in the living room. I knew she meant my mom and dad, but it was hard to understand why she didn’t like the place. I had to share a bedroom with my brother, Mike. With five older siblings, somebody was always telling me what to do. To me, her three rooms seemed spacious and private, a place where she could do what she wanted when she wanted.

I visited her often, after school or during summer days, winding down the back hallway of our home, through the laundry room, to the double doors that entered her apartment. She served me maple walnut ice cream when we sat at her small Formica table in front of the bay window. She told true crime stories from her Irish heritage that my mother didn’t approve of, stories of life ending mysteriously for unlucky victims she’d encountered in her eighty years. Kids, dads, drunks – no one escaped the cool hand of death in her tales.

“He was never up to no good,” she shared one day, about a man she’d known a long time ago. “He was a hard man. A drinkin’ man. That night he wandered out on the tracks, he’d been drinkin’, don’t you doubt it.” She stared at me over her gray-framed glasses and stabbed an index finger at my face. “That train came along and good night shirt!”

I recognized one of the strange phrases that often accompanied her stories. Phrases like “Get off my foot!” Or, when she balled her gangly hand into a fist and shook it at someone, “Smella that, Brother.”

My mind spun. A train clacking through the night. The guy – maybe a crook! – crushed like a soda can, right here in our little town. I sat riveted to the chair, soaking up the intrigue between mouthfuls of creamy maple.

I hadn’t been planning to run away. The idea just sprouted one day as I looked out Gram’s bay window at the two hundred acres of farmland beyond the barn. Logistics immediately pushed their way through the folds of my mind: what mysteries I might encounter (find a lost treasure); which direction I would head (north); what gear I might need (a compass).

Gram interrupted my thoughts of escape. “Go into the bedroom and get me the picture with five boys in it,” she instructed. “They took that picture and a week later one of ’em drowned. Good night shirt!”

I located the small frame on top of her sewing table. Reaching for it, I noticed the bottom drawer was not completely shut. A hint of Reese’s orange peeked out at me. I opened the drawer another inch, slowly, so it wouldn’t squeak. There, snuggled against her stationery and envelopes, lay a ten-pack of peanut butter cups. Perfect sustenance for my trip. I looked around the room. The window was open a crack.

I could do it.

As I slid the drawer fully open, my mind saw Father McFarland pull back the tiny window in the confessional at our church, Saint Patrick’s. There in the darkness, I would have to shamefully whisper of my theft, praying the mesh screen masked my identity. He’d whisper back my penance, concern evident in his low tones. Would it be ten Hail Marys? Apologize to my grandmother? Something worse?

I loved most things about church. Mystery peeked out at me from every corner; darkened shadows whispered the secrets of Saints long dead. At Mass, I watched the priest lift his shrouded arms toward Heaven, muttering prayers only God could hear. Desire to be holy like him, like my mother, always flooded me. To be a son of God. To belong.

But the confessional was another story. Whenever I entered the tiny wooden room, I felt embarrassed and exposed. My budding crime came to an abrupt halt. I considered the Reese’s carefully. Was it worth it?

“Do ya see it, Honey?” Gram called from the living room.

“Yeah, I got it.”

I grabbed the frame and, with no time to consider further consequences, the candy as well. I shoved the ten-pack through the narrow gap of the open window. The orange wrapper flashed as it fell to the grass outside.

I handed Gram the frame. She pointed to the different children in the aged photo, including the one who had met with an untimely death. Normally this would hold my attention, but I worried about the peanut butter cups melting in the afternoon sun.

She talked mother’s tears; I pictured tears of chocolate dripping off my candy. I finally told her I had to go and raced through the laundry room to one of Big Brick’s back doors. Outside, I crawled low under her window to snatch the Reese’s. I felt them through the wrapper. They were intact.

I brought the orange package to my bedroom and laid it on my sleeping bag, then gathered more supplies. A pillow, some Hardy Boy books. I looked at the pack and evaluated. It needed a goodbye note.

I sat on the corner of my bed and wrote a long letter to my family, listing how sorry I was to leave, but for them not to miss me. I drew eight round faces – my mom, dad, gram, my five older siblings – and penned streams of tears running down their tiny paper cheeks. There wasn’t a dry eye on the page.

The goodbye note went in with the other supplies. I rolled the sleeping bag into a tight cylinder and hid it in the back of my closet.

The excitement of my impending departure distracted me from the guilt of my theft. I did worry that Gram would miss the candy and tell my dad but, as two days passed, the paternal wrath I anticipated never materialized. I continued to imagine my adventure, waiting for the right opportunity to escape.

The next morning I woke to rain, a steady, pounding curtain of water on the upstairs windows. Using the delay of weather to tighten my plan, I decided to add a map to my runaway kit. On my adventure, I’d travel further than our rural twin towns, Palmyra and Macedon, known as Pal-Mac to the locals, where I’d lived all my life. Heading to the downstairs bookshelves, I pulled out a thin road atlas – which promised Up-To-Date Construction Information in a little yellow bubble – and carried it upstairs.

Opening my bedroom door, I discovered Mike and Anne, my brother and sister, sitting in the center of the carpet.

Mike was six years my senior and wiser about everything. He wore his brown hair short and straight-cut across the bangs, giving him a serious, tough-guy edge. He wrestled at school – which showed in the tight bulge of his arm muscles.

Just a year younger than Mike, Anne was often at his side. My tomboy sister, her hair hung in a long dark splash to her shoulders, curling slightly near the ends, as if in defiance to the straightness of the rest. Her boldness earned my brother’s respect. I envied her.

My sleeping bag lay between them on the floor, unrolled. Mike had my goodbye note in his hand and was reading it aloud.

They were in hysterics.

“What – is – your – problem?” he asked, barely able to get the words out.

I reached for the note, my face flushing with familiar warmth. He held it toward me, waving it back and forth. I grabbed, missed, then snatched it from him. I tore it up quickly.

“So you’re gonna run away?” Anne transitioned from laughter to concern.

My meticulous plan evaporated into embarrassment.

“NO,” I said.

The impact was gone – now that they knew about it. Besides, it was really raining outside, and the reality of sleeping on soggy grass diluted the portrait of my grand escape.

“Where’d you get the peanut butter cups?” Anne interrupted my thoughts.

“At the store,” I said, mentally adding lying to the list I’d review with Father McFarland, as Mike tore open the package and divided the spoils among us.

Having gathered nearly five decades of secrets, Gregory Gerard lives in Rochester, NY, just a thirty-minute drive from Big Brick, and has begun the slow, satisfying reveal, one tale at a time. His first such attempt, including the excerpt above, resulted in a full-length memoir, In Jupiter's Shadow.

FIRST ANNUAL ESSAY CONTEST:

Now accepting submissions for the first annual essay contest; Our 2015 judges include Georgia Beers, Susan Bono, Gregory Gerard, Sonja Livingston, and Alison Smith.

Deadline for contest submission is Feb 17, 2015. Full details online at: www.bigbrickreview.com/contest.html

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bigbrickreview · 11 years ago

Text

VAULT BEACH, 1996 by Jenny Lloyd

MY GROWN-UP CHILDREN and I sit apart from each other on the sand. It is sand only by courtesy, a false promise gleaming seductively from the cliff walk. In fact it is tiny white and gray pieces of gravel, coarse to the touch, unpleasant to walk on barefoot. Close up it is a dull gray on the surface but sparkles in the dampness we uncover when we comb it gently with our fingers, looking for a glimpse of pale pink. We are searching for cowry shells no bigger than my fingernail, folded mounds, crimped at the edges, tiny pink-striped calzones. I am the person who knows they are there, who brings that knowledge back to Vault Beach where perhaps it has been forgotten.

I spent many childhood days staring at surely not this very sand but its ancestor, eroded from the granite Cornish cliffs. Perhaps it is the same sand—it seems indestructible. No other Cornish beach I know of has granite sand. Why not? Perhaps some quirk of the tide sifts the fine from the coarse, and dumps the gravel here, on the long curve from the rocky Gorran headland to the smooth gaunt Dodman point, a deceptively long distance I don’t think I ever walked. Is there a connection between the granite sand and the cowry shells, also unique to this beach? They are smaller and squatter than the ones I have seen in American necklaces, the ones Africans used (use?) for money. I have never found a cowry shell with a creature in it. Do they float here only when their inhabitants are dead? Is Vault Beach perhaps the Sargasso Sea of cowries, and our shells the relics of those that did not make it back?

In my memory we found cowries easily. We carried a small handful up the steep path to our cliff-top school, a gray slate house with small-paned windows reflecting the ocean’s moods, snuggled in a hollow on the cliff top, protected by a hedge of fuchsias. Today I find many other small shells that I remember—yellow or terracotta snails, limpets shaped like coolie hats, my favorite spiral winkles—but no cowries. Were they this rare fifty years ago? Or has something changed? Perhaps the tides have shifted with global warming, although the granite sand is still here. Perhaps cowries are dying out in Africa. Maybe someone gathers the shells and glues them together into tourist souvenirs. It could be that the ocean deposited a finite number millennia ago and we picked up most of them. The beach is shelled out.

I look ahead to where Tom and Jane have staked their claims. I showed them how to sift for shells in Majorca when they were small children twenty-five years ago. A storm the night before had left our hotel’s beach a shrunken mess of stinking seaweed so we rented a double stroller and walked to a tiny inlet sheltered from the still-brisk wind. We hunkered down between rocks like Vault’s, where the ebbing tide uncovered pools with sea anemones and salt-water shrimp. The Majorca sand had a hint of coarseness and an area of fine pebbles that reminded me of my childhood siftings. I showed Tom and Jane how to rake the sand, to look carefully and slowly, to distinguish shells from pebbles, to be patient. We excavated a small pile, enough to satisfy, and took them home as souvenirs, spread out on shelves for years.

Tom and Jane have not forgotten. We have not traveled together for a while, but have as usual fallen into easy companionship. I am still the guide, I control the itinerary, and we resume as adults the pattern we had on vacation in Austria, in France, in Majorca those many years ago. All I taught them in their childhoods I learned here in mine. In the mornings, in the schoolroom atop the cliff, Miss Rapley encouraged me to love learning and let me surge ahead by myself. In the afternoons, on this beach, walking along these cliffs, I learned to appreciate the astounding beauty of the place, and to look for and name flowers in the hedgerows, sea creatures in the tide pools, shells. I instilled these passions in my children, I prepared them to hunt patiently for cowries. They choose to do so because I learned here that it was fun. I am passing on Miss Rapley’s legacy.

I shift locations a little and turn my attention to an area of tiny pebbles. I begin to sift again—and there it is, a cowry, exactly as I remember. I brush off the sand and jump up to show Tom and Jane, who are encouraged. A family passes by, parents, two small children, and ask me what I am doing. Looking for cowries, I say, and show them my find. They are interested—they come here often but never knew to look. They drop their bags and join the search. But we find no more and decide to give up and go look for a Cornish cream tea. We wind back up through the yellow gorse, pink vetch, and rosy ragged robin that have bloomed here in summer far longer than I remember. I look over my shoulder and see the family has recruited others to the hunt. The tradition is safe. If there are cowries left to find.

Jenny Lloyd is a retired historian and recovering from academic writing. She grew up in Cornwall, England, and is writing a memoir of her childhood and adolescence on a farm there.

FIRST ANNUAL ESSAY CONTEST:

Now accepting submissions for the first annual essay contest; Our 2015 judges include Georgia Beers, Susan Bono, Gregory Gerard, Sonja Livingston, and Alison Smith.

Deadline for contest submission is Feb 17, 2015. Full details online at: www.bigbrickreview.com/contest.html

#nonfiction #creative nonfiction

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