Tag: Nonfiction

I did not want to shower with my sister Lori anymore. I was in sixth grade and she was in fourth grade when I realized this was embarrassing. By this age, there had been sleepovers at other girls’ homes, and I had begun to notice that they’d been taught things I had not been taught. They were required to brush their teeth before bed, for example. Hands were meant to be washed after using the toilet. Hair was combed and nails were trimmed, and some of them were even shaving their legs.

There was no instruction for any of these things at my house on Oxbow Drive where four girls were essentially left to raise themselves and rely on the eldest for almost everything.

I was the eldest.

While it appeared to me that others just knew to wash their hands, I had to learn by watching and listening. Around my friends and classmates, I pretended things were that way in my family too, that my mother was always hounding me to floss. I had begun to sense that no one else in my class or among my small circle of friends showered with their siblings.

When I worked up the courage to request privacy on shower nights, my mother was smoking at the kitchen table. I stood in the doorway with my hands folded in front of me, and I timidly explained that I felt too old to be in the shower with my sister.

Her left eye squinted as she smoked, and my confidence began to falter before I had even finished my carefully prepared monologue. She asked if I was going to pay the water bill.

“We’re not made of money,” she said, and that was the end of the conversation.

Behind the mildew-coated shower curtain, Lori and I circled each other, our positions dependent on who needed the strongest stream of water. The bathroom door was ajar. It always was in our house because someone else might need to use the toilet, even while a shower was going on. Sable, the cat with prickly skin and oozing eyes, might need to get to his litter box, which was tucked beneath the sink.

My sister Marci pooped in the litter box once. It’s a legendary story all of us laugh about now. She was around six or seven years old, and Jami, who was two years older, wouldn’t get off the toilet because she wanted to see Marci have an accident in her pants. Instead, our youngest sister squatted like a cat.

Marci did not get in trouble for this, nor did Jami. I got in trouble. I was the one in charge, while my parents were at work. I was the one expected to prevent such a thing from happening. There was no real punishment given—what could they take away when we had nothing? I stood in the kitchen and listened to my mother berate my lack of attention and my inability to resolve this type of dispute between The Girls.

I was always separate from The Girls. I was the caregiver and the stand-in parent. I was not one of them.

This might have been prevented if Marci had gone downstairs to use the half bathroom beside the laundry room. There was a perfectly good toilet there—in fact, if anyone in the house would have been willing to use that toilet, there would have been fewer interruptions in the upstairs bathroom when people were trying to take showers. But no one used the half bathroom downstairs, in the scary hallway leading to my bedroom and the garage. The risk was unnamed, but we all avoided it. There were spiders. It smelled. We might have to talk to our father, who spent most of his time in the adjoining family room on his recliner, filling the space with cigar smoke.

On shower nights, my sister and I worked quickly. Neither of us were interested in prolonging the shared humiliation. I remember trying not to touch the mold in the corners of the tub. We’d lather soap from a slim bar between our hands because there was no loofah. No sponge. Not even a washcloth.

The towels waiting for us on the sink were small and thin, many of them torn and stained with my mother’s hair dye. They felt and smelled like the dust that settled onto everything in the house. They were stiff from drying on the clothesline outside, and, despite all the exposure to fresh air, carried a slight scent of urine. 

While drying off, it was difficult not to notice the linoleum pulling up next to the tub. Every now and then, thick black carpenter ants would surface, wandering the bathroom floor in confusion. They were large enough that I could easily count their legs and their three body segments. 

These were always around. We saw them in the kitchen too, waltzing across the counter between piles of mail and stained coffee cups. They showed up on bedroom dressers and struggling through the fibers of a carpet. They were the worst in the bathroom, though. Grossed out, my sisters and I stepped on them as they emerged, chasing them down and squashing them. You could hear them pop to death under a sneaker or a sandal.

The deterioration of the bathroom and the family home was our fault, we were constantly told. We were too big. Too rough. Too hard on things.

“It’s why I don’t bother cleaning,” my mother said.

I told Lori that I had tried to plead my case for solitary showers but that our mother wasn’t having it. My sister reminded me that we were at least lucky to have graduated to showers from baths. Baths were worse and far more demeaning. Only a year earlier, it had been Lori and me in the bathtub first, our mother washing our hair with the green plastic pitcher that was also used to mix sugary lemonade and off-brand Kool-Aid. Jami and Marci would go next, washed in our bathwater, complaining it was cold and screeching at the sight of the green pitcher and its cascading rush of used water.

In Mrs. Mosher’s classroom, I was admiring my poem she had posted on the wall. We had been instructed to write a poem about an emotion, and I chose favoritism. Mrs. Mosher said she was impressed with the maturity in my poem, and she hung my handwritten words against smooth tan construction paper. Lost in the lonely joy I felt looking at this accomplishment, I barely heard Joanne Lopardo ask me how often I washed my hair.

“Every other day,” I lied. We showered weekly. But earlier, I had heard the other girls discussing their shampoo schedules. I had watched Jonathan Libby be ridiculed and harassed for his once-a-week answer to the same question.

“Me too,” Joanne said with an approving nod. “Do you know Jonathan only washes his hair once a week?”

“That’s disgusting,” I said.

“I know. I’ve also seen him pick his nose and eat it.”

“Sick!” I cried, trying to keep the conversation going with this popular girl who may not have noticed my poem but did have things to say to me about another, weaker student. I was willing to listen.

By the end of the day, Jonathan’s head would be covered in spitballs. From a few seats behind him, I watched as he gently pulled them from his hair all afternoon. He couldn’t keep up, and many of them were still there as we headed towards our bus at dismissal.

Joanne and I never became friends. She was popular and she died after a bad asthma attack when we were freshmen in high school. Our guidance counselor stood in front of our homeroom, asking if anyone cared to share how they were feeling. She nodded at me encouragingly, probably because I was crying. But I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about that sixth-grade classroom and wondering if Jonathan Libby was just a little bit relieved she was dead. 

“She was probably on drugs,” my mother said that night. “Healthy teenagers do not die from asthma.”

It was a shower night and we had boldly begun closing the door. I asked Lori if she thought that was true, that Joanne had died from drugs. They played softball together and my sister probably knew her better than me. Lori shrugged. As soon as she turned twelve, my sister began wearing her bathing suit in the shower. She mumbled something about mom being a nurse and would probably know.

“She thinks everyone is doing something bad,” I said, scrubbing the shampoo into my head. I never had the chance to know or like Joanne Lopardo. But I didn’t think she was on drugs.

Lori refused to criticize my mother, even as we stood in a rotting bathtub.

About a year later, both of us now in high school, Lori and I worked out a system where we would go into the bathroom together like we were supposed to, but shower one at a time while the other waited outside the curtain, watching the door for any threats. We knew we were getting away with something, but we did not dare to acknowledge it.

You don’t need to know who Dražen Petrović was. What you need to know is that they called him the Mozart of Basketball, and that he died on a rainy Monday on the Autobahn. What you need to know about Mozart is that he composed the music for his own funeral. What you need to know about basketball is that it happens very fast.

Even if you’re unfamiliar with Mozart, even if your tastes run closer to reggaetón or silence, even if you’ve already forgotten the above anecdote about Mozart composing the music for his own funeral, fear not: the syntax of the nickname does all the work. “The (Blank) of Basketball.” From this setup alone, no matter who or what fills in the blank, one can infer that the subject herein is immortality, is greatness. No one, no matter how mediocre or near-great, takes their nickname from some historical mediocrity or near-great. There is no Salieri of Basketball, though basketball, like all disciplines, has its steady, necessary stream of Salieris.

Just below the immortals (Mozart, Dražen Petrović) are the mortals (Salieri, benchwarmers) who sometimes exist in such close proximity that the distinction is barely discernible. They often work equally hard and, in the short time in which they, the mortals, are alive, occupy the topmost percentile of living practitioners of their craft. In other words, as long as the competition consists of the living and not the dead, most mortals are really damn good. In other words, these mortals (Salieri, benchwarmers) could compose circles around you on the church organ, could break your ankles with a crossover. And still, somehow, end up forgotten.   

The Mozart of Basketball, as we’ve established, crashed on a rainy Monday on the Autobahn. Let’s say the Salieri of Basketball chokes on a fishbone. Who writes his requiem? Has he, the Salieri of Basketball, pre-composed his funeral’s organ music, with clairvoyant foresight of his own asphyxiation? Or does the task fall to me, distant, belated, underachieving elegist of Dražen Petrović?

I’ve had too many friends die this year to kill off anyone, even a fictional character, even in the hypothetical. So let’s resurrect the Salieri of Basketball, let’s dislodge the fishbone from his throat. Let’s applaud the waitress who paid attention during her certification sessions and who, without panic, executes a textbook Heimlich maneuver, expelling the fishbone from the Salieri of Basketball’s throat with such bow-and-arrowlike force that it shatters a wineglass in its exit path. Now, we might have to slow down the playback of the near-asphyxiation to hear this detail, but listen for the bell tone that, for a split second before the wineglass shatters, might be mistaken for a mallet striking a xylophone.

A tone which Mozart, with his perfect pitch, is able to identify as the F below middle C, the same tone produced by a standard car horn, the same tone that sounds amid the screeching tires, exhaust, and fog of a rainy Monday on the Autobahn.

A joke format popular the year I write this: girls with a time machine vs. boys with a time machine. One variation on the theme: girls go back in time and say hi to their great-great grandmother, boys go back in time and tell Dražen Petrović to take the train.

Dražen Petrović is in the passenger seat, fast asleep. A Hungarian basketball player named Klara Szalantzy is at the wheel. A Turkish basketball player named Hilal Edebal is in the backseat. The Hungarian is a part-time runway model. The Turk, MVP of her league, will soon lose her memory. Both women, riding with Mozart, probably deserve their own honorifics: Aphrodite, Lethe. The Hungarian escapes with a scar on her forehead and a vow of silence on the subject of the crash. She still gets death threats in the mail, even decades later, living in another country. The Turk escapes with broken hipbones, a ghost in her skull. 

Certain nights when I’m alone—say, sleepless, brain aching after a friend’s funeral—and need to drown some demons out, I’ll put on a sports documentary. I wore out several videotapes of basketball highlights as a kid—tomahawk dunks and swatted shots and Magic Johnson trick assists—until the tape was warped and warbled, until the pitch and image dipped in and out of decipherability. On one worn-out videotape: Dražen Petrović hitting a daggerlike three at the buzzer, pumping his fist. Then the sound and image melt.

One night, I watched a documentary about basketball in the former Yugoslavia. Or about former Yugoslavs playing ball in America, it’s hard to remember. What was clear was Sarajevo’s long nightmare of mortars and Kalashnikovs. What was clear was that every single one of those former Yugoslav ballplayers probably lost more friends any given week of Sarajevo’s extended nightmare than I had lost in the worst year of my life. What was clear was the digital restoration of that same Dražen Petrović buzzer beater I used to watch over and over on the videotape’s warbled chaos.

For certain deaths (and certain survivals) there are no statistics. How many obscure players of streetball, of pickup hoops, of rec league or high school or provincial college ball, how many of these sub-Salieris of Basketball, so minor and distant no one remembers that they, at one point in their lives, even played ball, survived the war to see what became of Mozart and his former Yugoslavia?

 I belong to this obscure subcaste of sub-Salieris. For a while I was all right at basketball, and for a while I survived—long enough, at least, to write this down. Moments before I knelt and prayed in front of an urn containing my friend Andrew’s ashes, before I shook his father’s (my ex-coach’s) hand, I passed a display case with a photo of our under-10 hoops team. In the photo, the whole squad was gathered around a trophy, all of us holding up index fingers representing the number one, which, for a brief time, our squad of nobodies—in some provincial youth basketball league, in a lifetime I barely remember—was.

In the Yugoslav basketball documentary, Dražen Petrović is giving an interview, his last, from a park bench at one of my writing spots. This coincidence—which in my vulnerable, post-funeral state seemed to be some kind of cosmic sign—can be logically explained. In his last days, Dražen Petrović played for the Nets, who back then were based in Newark, New Jersey. The site of the interview is the Jersey City waterfront in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty (the symbolism is almost too easy, but I can never resist it: Lady Liberty stands with her back turned to my godforsaken state). The waterfront was probably the closest semi-picturesque location to the Nets’ practice facility. And so the sportscaster poses one final set of questions to Dražen Petrović here, in the shadow of the monolith.

I write this sentence in the shadow of the same monolith—and the shadow of two fallen towers, which would have been out-of-frame, but still standing, during Dražen Petrović’s last interview—either 1) because this backdrop is the nexus of beauty and terror or 2) because it’s the closest public park to where I live. Pure chance and circumstance brought me here. By “here” I mean the Statue of Liberty’s shadow, the state of New Jersey. By “here” I mean—for a short time—earth.

A logical problem: two brass bands—one a second-line band from New Orleans, the other a Romani wedding band from the former Yugoslavia—are playing marching arrangements of the same Mozart sonata. Both are traveling with the velocity of a basketball leaving the hand of a shooting guard nicknamed “Sniper.” Both bands’ tuba players have the lung capacities of killer whales. If the paths of both bands are unchanging, how long before the bayou sonata and the Balkan sonata collide head-on? It’s raining. It’s Monday. Mozart, riding shotgun in a Mercedes Benz, goes screaming down an infinite Autobahn.

It was an artist-designed t-shirt, displayed in the small, overflowing gift shop, on the historic boardwalk. “Jones Beach” was writ large in large gray, block letters. Within the letters were drawings of Adirondack chairs, beach umbrellas and other summer paraphernalia, all in different shades of gray so that the entire effect was of reading Jones Beach as though it were carved into sun-bleached driftwood. Underneath this, in script embroidered in deep blue, the artist declared, “There’s Nothing Else.”

Well, that was my sentiment exactly because the “else” that the Jones Beach waves washed away to nothingness included the custody battle and the child support battle that had become a child neglect accusation, which meant that I and my court-appointed attorney, who had 125 cases, were up against my ex-husband, his new wife, their private attorney, and the Administration for Children’s Services, who they had managed to enlist on their side. We had gone through six judges in six years who understood what my ex-husband was doing, but who also understood the politics of child neglect cases. Being in untenable positions, somehow, they all managed to get off the case. Over these years, I had become friendly with enough of the court personnel to know that, by the seventh judge, the system had reached the Peter principle, and maybe I should have settled the case—make a deal, sell off one of the children and his child support in exchange for the other child and withdrawal of the ACS charges.

I bought the shirt; I needed to bring that message home. My daughter instantly claimed it for a beach dress. She bobbed along the boardwalk, like a carbonated message in a bottle, headed for the bay, the waveless, knee-deep, oceanic equivalent of the kiddie pool. She had her pail and shovel. The concession stand sold butterfly nets for gathering minnows. We waded in.

Sand, sky, sun, shells and living water. There’s nothing else. Nothing.

Nothing, that is, except swooping, shrieking seagulls.

“What are the seagulls doing, Mommy?”

My parenting philosophy was that if she was old enough to ask a question, she was old enough to hear the answer, and besides, the answer was flying in her face. “They’re catching minnows with their beaks,” I tried, minimally, making it her option. She took it.

“Why?”

“They eat them.”

“They eat them! No! Seagulls get out of here! What’s that?”

“A part of a minnow that a seagull dropped.”

“Oh, I hate you seagulls! I hate you!” She caught a minnow with the net and tipped it into her pail. “Ooh, fishy wishy. Are you scaredy-waredy?”

The minnow replied by somersaulting out of her pail.

“Oh, no! Oh, no!” She scooped more water into the pail, and her next minnow stayed put.

Once she had the hang of it, I ambled back to our blanket and watched her from there. I started idly formulating explanations for later about why we couldn’t take the minnows home with us. Once the gulls were gone, we could talk a bit about salt water and oceans being different from fresh water and sinks, and how she had done her part to protect the minnows, and then there would be the drama of releasing them back into the ocean and watching them swim back where they belong, and we would go back where we belong

I watched a woman wade over to my daughter; she was showing her how best to catch minnows. Yes, let the village help raise your child. Relax. There’s nothing else. No spiteful ex-husband spewing out papers to a dismally dull-witted family court judge, someone’s political favor, sitting there deciding my children’s futures. No, nothing but wind, water and sun, nothing else—except a grab, a sudden high-speed swoop, and my child racing towards me.

“Mommy, Mommy—she took my net, and she caught a big crab—and she said she’s going to eat it! Stop her! Stop her! Make her throw it back.”

Damn it, damn it, damn it.

With my daughter at my side, I asked the woman to put the crab back in the water. In retrospect, I could have argued that since she used my daughter’s net, it was my daughter’s crab. After hundreds of hours in family court listening to less-reasoned arguments than that, it should have occurred to me, but it didn’t. This woman was appalling, and yet, I argued that she was violating a child, as if she didn’t know that, as if that would change her and the outcome.

The woman answered. “No, I’m going to eat it.”

“Not with our net, you’re not,” I said.

She removed the crab and handed me back my empty net. “Now, I need a stick,” she mused. She found a twig, and walked away, with the crab hanging on by one pincer. It dropped off. She picked it up and forced the twig into its mouth. It fell again.

“Do something. Do something about that killer woman,” my daughter sputtered. “And those boys—you know what they’re going to do with all their minnows—use them for bait! They’re using them all for bait.”

“They can’t keep the fish that long,” I tried.

“Yes, they can. They told me! They did it last week. They take them home, and they get dead, and then they use them for bait.”

I looked at the boys with the bottle, at the woman, at the crab, and my daughter, somewhat surprised to see her still wearing a shirt that read “Jones Beach. There’s nothing else,” when there was everything else.

“They’re not doing anything wrong,” I said, because it wasn’t her complaint that the woman had tricked and used her; that was my complaint. Nor was it her complaint that the boys had been brutally honest; children generally are. Her complaint was that might makes right, and that the animals were not on the agenda at King Arthur’s Round Table. That was true, and now, somehow, once again, I was going to have to explain the inexplicable.

“People eat crabs. People fish. People eat animals. You, too. When you eat a hot dog, you’re eating an animal. It’s the way life is.” Brilliant.

“I’ll never eat a hot dog again. Never.” She was sobbing. “Can we start a sea creatures’ rights organization?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because big fish eat little fish.”

“What do the little fish eat?” she cried.

“Littler fish.”

“What do the littler fish eat?”

“Even littler fish.”

“And what do the littlest fish eat?”

“Ocean plants.”

“Well good for the littlest fish!” she screamed, and she ran back into the ocean, shaking her fist up at the seagulls, and chasing the crabs and minnows away from the people, driving them and back with her butterfly net, back into Sea of Blood.

I stood next to her as she raged.

I did not try to stop her.

Wasn’t I shouting into the wind too?

I drove a stranger to jail once because he begged me to, his sentence causing this sentence, compounded with my ignorance of his sense of time, how it has passed, where it has been kept, where to begin is with the facts: 25 years old, arm tattoos only, the right one darkened with various demons all dripping and swallowing blood, a Medusa below his elbow, and a single angel on his left arm, “DARK AND LIGHT” he says, sitting in a city park where he is hiding out, high on methamphetamine, sleepless for unknowable days but able still to fear what is to come and what he will leave behind (namely a four year old son who, two days later, will run around my car as I come to take his father to jail and will scream “LOOK AT OUR BIG PUMPKIN!” and I will look at the uncarved, starting-to-sag orange pumpkin standing on the front porch: his father was gone elsewhere, surely awake), but still we wait in the wetlands where an amusement park once stood and talk about God knows what besides him shooting heroin once, our mutual sour loves, being kids before now, but the cobwebs of his past have kept him June-bugged to this life still, even after two years already spent inside and a substance abuse program medal hanging somewhere in his parents’ home, (his mother, who those same two days later tells me that I am an angel, saying it just like that: “YOU’RE AN ANGEL”), but right now this angel is drinking and hearing about manic depression and suicide attempts and how meth led to a fantasy land where her son’s anxiety and anger disappeared, and I ask the great square question how long he’d been able to stay awake (the answer: 12 whole days, “I TOOK TWEAKER NAPS, 11 HOURS DURING THAT TIME,” all spent playing Skyrim, putting his headphones in and walking the city over; the rest of the time he says he was just beating off), and then he says that “JESUS LAID WITH THE SINNERS, BUT I DON’T THINK JESUS WOULD HAVE USED METH,” which seems like sound logic, his childhood dream to be a lawyer, and a high school mock trial team education structuring his speech even now, high on what he calls “JUNK METH” and asking for reading recommendations for jail besides “THE GOOD BOOK” and East of Eden, his first Steinbeck, which he read his last stint in, which is now in his sister’s backpack in the halls of his old high school, the edges of the pages pushed together, all reading “COUNTY JAIL,” so we walk out of the park with me staggering out suggestions, him saying, “IF I DON’T CALL YOU IN TWO DAYS TO PICK ME UP, THEN I WON’T CALL YOU AT ALL,” but he calls the next night at 3 a.m. just wanting to “HANG OUT,” and there is a black metal sound behind him which makes it hard to hear, but I say that I can’t make it to wherever he is and he says, “I UNDERSTAND,” and I don’t hear from him until noon the next day, a text message that says to pick him up at a CVS where he’s outside finishing someone else’s cigarette, and we’re moving now towards his parents’ house for the look at the big pumpkin before he says goodbye, taking off then for jail, mostly silence with phrases of paranoia trickling out, routing our path to the highway: he tells me to watch my speed as a cop car passes and watches it move away far beyond what the rearview can see, so I ask him if there’s anything else he wants to do before we go in, and he says, “THERE’S NOTHING ELSE FOR ME OUT HERE,” looking with two cue ball eyes out of my car past this city, this state, this piece of America he’s never tried to leave before and won’t now for some time, and as we pull up to the county jail, he actually laughs and says, “JESUS, I’VE GOT TO WRITE ALL THIS DOWN. I’VE MADE UP SO MUCH STUFF IN MY HEAD. NONE OF IT IS REAL, OR MAYBE IT IS,” and the car door slams, and he disappears through the front door of the county jail, and I drive off alone, wondering whether he ever wrote any of it down, and, if he did, if it looks anything like this.