What I’m learning is that everything is measured in weight now. You keep a careful eye on your friends’ progression through grown-up things, eyeing it against yours. There will always be friends who have immediate success in love, money and career, and those friends aren’t included in the desperate, envious examination. Those friends are written off as, “Well, I suppose if I’d majored in that in college, I’d have that luck, too.”
But the others on the same path as you – it becomes: who buys a house first? who gets married first? who has children first? who has a better house? a better job? more money? a bigger yard? better behaved pets? less debt? And if you lose at all of that, it becomes – well, who’s gained the most weight since high school? It’s something you don’t want to admit because, really, how petty? How stupid. How unimportant. But it gets checked, you know. We’re all nice people. Sweet people. But it gets checked.
And then there’s the urge to take yourself out of the competition. To never marry, to never count a calorie, to never own a house with a yard. To flit from weekend to weekend with no plans for decades until something catches up with you, probably age.
And by then, weight doesn’t matter as much. Everyone’s too achy, heads too full. No matter what a person looked like when they were young, the pictures are revered as, “Wasn’t I beautful then? Wasn’t I alive?” Even in the pictures where you knew you weren’t alive, where you were young, yes, and clear-eyed, yes, but you weren’t doing much besides smoking cigarettes out the bedroom window and wishing to be anywhere but. Does that count as beautiful? Is everything ugly when you’re old, when the weight is non-consequential and earned? Is everything beautiful when you’re young, no matter how boring and fractured it seems at the time?
My head’s so rarely at 25 these days. I have hindsight for ages I haven’t been yet. Maybe it’s a symptom of the day, where the wedge between child and grown-up lasts far longer than it used to.
A sure sign of youth: not even thinking you’ll make it to 25, and being surprised when you do. What did I think was going to take me out? Car accident, plane crash, drowning? I don’t really measure anything anymore. I’m one of those who, to a degree, took herself out of the competition, though it isn’t a solace. No eccentricity about it. No righteous glamour. Just an empty cup on the other end of the weight.
On the second leg of our return trip from Virginia, my Mom called to tell me that one of her friends, a police officer, had been killed in a car accident. He was off-duty, driving home from the gym, when another officer slammed into him head-on while in pursuit of a criminal. He’d been young, with three kids and 17 years in the department. The pursued man was not caught for several days, but when he was, he was preliminarily charged with murder.
The only funeral I’ve been to was for a police officer who died of brain cancer several years ago. Police funerals are extravagant deals, held in the town’s largest church, with officers from every district attending. The funeral opens with a bagpipes playing “Amazing Grace,” and ends with a trumpet on “Taps.” The pews hold hundreds of blue and green uniforms, and the casket’s draped with a flag. The young officer killed in the car accident had a funeral much like this, except larger than imagined. The officer who hit him sat in the front row, recovered from his injuries. He was forgiven, by all, but it’s doubtful he’ll return to work.
Upon learning of the offier’s accident, we had ten hours left to drive. We took it slow, arriving home to a hot afternoon and a grateful cat.
A break in the narrative here to tell you that I went to Duluth today, and came back a better person for it. I’m going to live there again some day, just you wait.
Pictures. (Click through, as opposed to the slide show. More captions that way.)
Chris and I stayed through the week at my parents’ house. As mentioned, they moved to Town B, the city next door to the one I grew up in, but since all the excitement lived in this particular place (i.e., the mall and the coffee shop), I spent most of my time in Town B, anyway. It was nice to take Chris to my favorite Chinese restaurant and the ice cream shop I’d hung out at in middle school. I’d driven the roads so many times that I didn’t know the street names, and was momentarily confused when my mother rattled off directions to a friend.
I don’t have this in Minneapolis. I walk into restaurants and drug stores in Virginia, and I feel like, here are my people. I’m Southern and so are they, and I grew up here, and so did they, and this person has known me since I was 12 and the owner of this restaurant has seen me through all my boyfriends, bad and good. In Minneapolis, I still feel an imposter. My accent is more Midwestern than Southern these days, but I feel like the grocery clerks know that I’m a fake, that I still can’t bring myself to say “pop,” and that the first October snow still surprises me. This is my attitude, not theirs. This was not meant to be my home, yet it is.
In Virginia, we didn’t do much beyond napping and eating, which is what vacations at your parents’ house should be like. We tried to see some Civil War sites one afternoon, but it was hot and the places were dark and closed, the Civil War industry apparently not the firehouse it used to be. We ate several times at the local Italian hangout, where the police and other law officials eat on their dinner breaks. The owners know my mother, and me, and there’s always an ashtray waiting for her and a discount when she leaves.
We had a loud, fun lunch with Robert and his two young daughters, and I got a taste of what my future holds, just a little. I haven’t spent much time with kids, so Robert’s insane and intelligent girls were an eye-opener. We sat out on the restaurant porch afterwards, playing chess and taking pictures, and the girls crawled on me and played with my hair. I thought, I could do this, even as the youngest ran screaming into the parking lot, throwing her doll on the concrete. But then they got back in the truck and I thought, well, maybe not just yet.
We walked around the new neighborhood, which is a far cry from the old one. The burned house was in an association neighborhood, where paint jobs had to be approved and eccentricity was something kept behind doors. The neighbors didn’t enjoy our bright purple door and our huge, rambunctious dogs, so we were left alone on our corner lot to play out our frazzled, weird existence. This new neighborhood features a house with a coffin on the lawn. Some houses have beautiful siding and cute vegetable patches. Others have rotting porches and old cars on the grass. It’s a fucking relief.
A white tomcat lives on the front porch. My mother feeds him, and before I left, I made him a bed from an old Home Depot box and a few towels. The air is set to 34 and Chris and I slept under thick blankets. In the middle of August. There’s sweet tea on the kitchen table. Someone’s always yelling, because everyone’s deaf, though no one will admit it. The TV’s set to CNN, catering to my mother’s news addiction. In this neighborhood, the doorbell rings, and my family actually answers it, in contrast to the dark, unpeopled burned house.
Chris and I sat on the front porch the night before we left, eating ice cream and listening to the crickets. He and I are in similar places, in that we’re not ready to be grown-ups, which is a good thing, since neither of us know what the hell to do with our lives. The hope is we look back on this time and laugh about being scraggly punk kids, wearing old t-shirts and waiting a year between hair cuts. That all the nights of video game marathons, midnight ice cream runs, stupid arguments, dirty dishes and mood swings will be envied in comparison. In comparison to what? The question.
We fell asleep early, but I was awake when my Dad poked his head in and said, “I just like to know you’re there. I know you won’t ever live with us again and it’ll only be visits, but I just like to know you’re there.” Me, too.
The second half of the trip was much of the same until we got to “wild and wonderful” West Virginia. I’ve never seen another state like it. It’s vertical, with black-green hills on one side and silver industry on the other. Houses are mostly in the valleys. We took a “scenic route,” and ended up several hours out of our way. The first part was gorgeous with the rolling, undeveloped forests and gray rivers, but the second part consisted of crawling at 25 MPH behind a trailer pulling metal beams. Chris and I were horribly crabby. We’d neglected to eat lunch and when you combine two punk kids who are moody on stable blood sugar days, we had a near disaster.
We made it out in one piece, still together, and felt hopeful as we entered the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. We were sleepy and hungry, but we couldn’t resist a few touristy photos at the overlook, which was crawling with small children and pocket dogs. We arrived at my parents’ new fixer-upper Victorian around 11 PM, having listened to the entire Beatles’ discography on the way. (Neither of us had listened to the Beatles, beyond the obvious singles, so it was exciting. During our stay, my Mom turned to one of her friends and said, “Chris and Zosia discovered a great new band! Can you guess who they are?”)
The new house is big, airy and full of light, the last part being a stark contrast to our old, burned house, which was always dark, even in the middle of the day. I never felt at home in the burned house. I lived there six years, during all my important years, and I had a comfortable family life, but the house often felt like a creeping mold. It was big, but cramped, with heavy blue curtains that were always closed. It was cluttered with weird knick-knacks and stacks of books and video tapes and quilts. It sucked my parents dry, emotionally. The last time I was home, before the fire, my parents seemed liked dim portraits of themselves, not doing much beyond work and necessary errands.
This new house, which is in a neighboring town (closer to their friends and my mother’s work), felt like home the moment I opened the door. I walked up the wooden staircase, and had a bizarre non-memory of standing at the landing in my junior year prom dress, while my parents and my date stood by the door. It didn’t really happen – not in that house – but it could have.
My parents made us the traditional welcome-home midnight dinner of grilled cheese sandwiches (on white bread, with Kraft cheese – the best kind), sweet tea and fried potatoes. My brother joined us, and soon, Robert, a close family friend, stopped by. He was on duty, so he was wearing his blue uniform. And gun, which goes without saying. My mother’s a magistrate, so most of her friends are cops. Robert and my mother grew especially close in the past few years as they alternately supported each other through a bizarre string of tragedies, from my mother’s unlawful firing by her sexist boss to Robert’s painful and surprising separation from his wife of 20 years to the fire.
We went to sleep afterwards. My new room was full of my old things – my white vanity, which had belonged to my great-grandmother, stacks of old books and stuffed animals, and several framed posters from the plays I’d been in over the years. Tramp, the old 13-year-old German Shepard we’d rescued from the shelter when we first moved to Virginia, slept on the rug in front of the bed. Her hips were too weak to jump on the bed, but she seemed okay. Tramp’s a smart dog, one uncannily aware of time and absence. I sat with her for a while before bed, her nose in my lap. It was a new place, but it smelled the same – my mother’s cigarettes, fried food, four dogs, old books. This sounds like an awful combination, but it was wonderful. I felt relaxed for the first time since the original house burned.
We’re in a hotel in Indianapolis, surrounded by the state champion Little League team (from Coon Rapids, no less). The drive was uneventful and full of corn, cows and water slides. A cursory glance tells me that Indiana isn’t much different from Minnesota, though people seem a little more willing to not freeze you out in the first two minutes of meeting you.
I think I’d enjoy a nomadic lifestyle. It seems so easy now, really. I loved the feeling of loitering outside the restaurant, waiting for our take-out, thinking, “I don’t live here! All these people live here, and I don’t!” A life on wheels would be obligation free, yes? 10 hours in the car felt like nothing, but time is nothing, too. It goes so fucking fast! I’m in Indiana! WTF! I remember feeling this way when I first moved to Duluth. Duluth! WTF! Days were stretchier then.
I forgot toothpaste, and I’d like to run down to the front desk, but the Little League team is reenacting the last six games of the season directly in front of my door.
There’s two double beds in here, so we designated one the eating bed and one the sleeping bed, but Chris fell alseep halfway through his dinner in the eating bed.
Sleep time! There’s some shitty expose about Mel Gibson on Fox, and now I remember why I don’t have a TV.
Everything’s packed. This is a picture of Chris’s bag, with the cute slippers and rolled-up socks. I’m not so much about rolling socks, but I did buy enough first aid kits and snacks to last us for the next six years. I contemplated packing winter clothing in case we a) got stuck in the car until December or b) ended up in South Africa, but the urge passed. The big thing is – how can I leave my cat for 10 days? She’s in good hands, but, you know. An internet friend said, I can’t imagine what type of love I’m going to have for my future child if I love a cat this much. FOR REAL.
Anyway, I’ve never been a road trip, so I’m nervous, but I’m a nervous person in general. I remember one night during the first summer Chris and I started dating when we were driving back from seeing a show at a club that’s since closed (RIP Sumsurcorda, or however you’re spelled). I made Chris pull over, and asked him if he wanted to drive to New York. Immediately. Just for fun. Neither of us had obligations for the next week, and it suddenly seemed so possible. What did we need clothes for? Or logic? Or a map? We didn’t go to New York, but we planned it for a good 20 minutes, in between a lot of making out. Instead, we went to the basement I was living in at the time. He had to sneak in through the window because he wasn’t technically allowed to be there. It was just as good, really. It was a muggy summer, so we slept without sheets.
It’s not a whim this time around, but I hope it’s just as fun as the idea of New York was. We’re stopping in Indianapolis for the night, then heading to Virginia. My parents have a new dog (which brings the total to four – Tramp, Bailey, Daisy and Laddie) and a cat named Thomas who wandered onto their porch and never left. There will be no fiery car wrecks or road pirates. There will be Mystery Holes. Best of all, my undead priestess will get a ton of rest XP while I’m gone. KIDDING. But she will, actually. If you don’t get that, it’s a good thing. Trust me.
And now I’ll try the sleeping thing, though it never works out for me. I’m the lightest sleeper in the world. An ant blinks in Zimbabwe, and I’m jarred awake. Side story, but I had a boyfriend once who slept like a corpse. He fell asleep immediately and I could walk on him or yell in his face or bite his ears off and he still wouldn’t wake up. One night, I woke up to scratching on the window. I eventually figured out it was a branch smacking the window, but at the time, I thought it was a murderer/robber. I shook the boyfriend hard and said, “There’s a fucking murderer outside our window, wake up!” He sort of rolled over for a second and then mumbled, “Shh, he’ll go away if we keep sleeping.”
THE END. See you on the road, pals.
Stock picture from thereel.net! Not my actual belly.
I got my belly button pierced in a shack on the boardwalk when I was 18. It was the week after I graduated high school, and my boyfriend and I were in Virginia Beach for the fabled Beach Week, during which recent graduates piled in hotel rooms for sex and beer. We didn’t do the beer thing, and having been together nearly two years (a lifetime in high school), sex was totally old news. We still wanted to do something “crazy,” however, so my boyfriend suggested piercings and tattoos. I said, I’ll get a piercing, if you get a tattoo! And he said, deal, but you go first.
It didn’t hurt much, but it bled a lot. I was wearing a red bikini and no shoes and the piercer told me the blood would go well with my outfit. I felt spontaneous and intensely hardcore. I walked out of the shop, proudly displayed my belly, and yelled, YOUR TURN! And the boyfriend was all, um, maybe later! He didn’t get a tattoo that day, but instead waited until later in the summer, when we’d broken up. Jerkwad!
So the moral became, boyfriends are temporary, but piercings are forever. The piercing never healed because I was busy holing up in my dorm room and making people buy liquor for me so I could write really awesome poetry about my jerk ex-boyfriend. It’d be tender and infected for a few months, then heal, then re-open, then heal, and so on. During the infected months, I’d keep a bandage over it, but I developed a terrible habit of reaching under my shirt and fiddling with the ring when I was nervous, thus contaminating it with the sort of digusting bacteria you pick up at college. And because I didn’t want to deal with it and because I knew it’d involve a trip to the doctor and medicine I was probably allergic to, the cycle went on for SEVEN YEARS.
I couldn’t even take it out if I wanted to because the goddamn thing was stuck, thanks to body sweat and cheap jewelry. Unless I wanted to resort to screaming pain and wire cutters, the ring was a permanent extension. No one was ever allowed to touch my belly. If I went swimming (or, my version of swimming, which is standing waist deep and splashing my arms around), I instinctively protected it with my hand. If I was making out with someone and they were all, cute belly button ring! and tried to touch it, the hand would get slapped away. Chris has never touched my stomach. It’s a section of my body that always gets skipped in any sort of touching. It’s like child abuse, except for skin.
Last week, I went to the doctor and said, take it out. I don’t know why I thought to do it now, other than I’m working on different parts of my life, and that seemed like a good place to start. She tugged on it a bit, told an amusing anecdote about a guy who had a fishing hook stuck in his ear, and then cut open the ring with pliers. It didn’t even hurt. She asked me if I wanted to keep the ring and I said no, but I regretted it the minute she tossed the pieces in the trash. She gave me an antibiotic to clear up the infection, and then I left.
I felt pretty happy afterwards. I mean, part of my body had been infected for the last seven years of my life, so who wouldn’t feel good after something like that? But I kept reaching down to do my nervous fiddle and finding nothing. It feels weird. It’s nice to reclaim my stomach, but, you know, it makes me want to call people and be like, remember my belly? You can touch it now. I want to call the high school boyfriend and be like, remember? It’s out. I want to call people who knew about the ever-infected plight of the ring, who knew it was my thing in a way (and a disgusting thing, indeed). But I can’t call these people. I get the same way when anything major happens. I want to call people I haven’t spoken to in years because I think they’ll want to know. I’d want to know, right?
But instead I mostly keep it to myself. It’s just a piercing and I have plenty of other nervous habits to replace the stomach fiddle. I have plenty of things to remind me of the stupid things I do for boys, and how love makes me overshoot my caution. I should’ve kept it, but what would I do? I’d throw the pieces in a shoebox in my closet and they’d probably grow a mutant strain of bacteria and kill everyone in Minnesota. Or if it didn’t kill anyone, I’d take the shoebox out years later and want to call someone to share the memory, but who would I call? It’s best to leave these things behind.
I’m going on a road trip starting Friday, so I’ll be updating daily from the road. Stay tuned.