I was meant to be the middle child. A boy came first, or so my mother believed.
She met my father at the L.A. radio station where he wrote some jingles, and she typed the scripts. He was moonlighting from teaching. Trying new things. He rode a bicycle up the boardwalk in a dashing white suit—like Faulkner, she said. She was twenty-three and he was thirty, his divorce not yet final.
Who found the abortionist? My dad, or the liberal aunt? If she’d bled any more there would be no me. That middle one. The girl child who came second. Meant to follow, not blaze the trail.
I learned to lead anyway. It’s not so hard. We all have to go somewhere. It’s what people do.
My parents were midwestern strivers doubling as Angeleno bohemians. I look through old photos, imagining my way in. I hope he made her feel beautiful, more real to herself than the psychiatrist who seduced her when she was his teenage patient and refused to call it rape. In a picture from my parents’ courtship, she poses in black lingerie, eyes bright as her lit cigarette. He dangled a honeymoon in Mexico, where he’d once roasted snakes on a campfire reading Under the Volcano, but foreign travel was in a future they could only dream. A life that would buck against the McCarthy hearings, nuclear tests, the Presbyterian rules of his Indiana chicken farmer parents, the immigrant funerals in her childhood Cleveland, her tyrannical dad spilling whiskey and insults. It goes without saying that his dreams were also fueled by drink, hers by her Aunt Toda reading the Turkish coffee grounds to see my mother—fluent in French, first in her class, Joan of Arc in the school play—claiming a concert stage, her baby grand and that big bully, Mozart, demanding scales day after day.
Santa Ana winds demolished the afternoons they now spent in bed. Cactus plants withstood neglect like her coffee-stained sheet music. Iguanas and distant mountains peered in from the window ledge. Then one day they entered a courthouse where only the groom wore white.
I’ve known all my life that their story isn’t mine to tell, but that doesn’t stop me from visiting it like the ruins of a dead civilization, the Parthenon and a Roman circus, Teotihuacan and the Pyramid to the Sun, which I climbed in a cold sweat after recovering from dysentery—not from eating reptiles, oh no, but gorgeous red berries, so domestic and tame! I’ve known all my life that although their story isn’t mine, I would still have to do some of what they dreamed.
Once, when I wasn’t planning to, I did taste snake, not in Mexico but hunched over a lazy susan in Hangzhou, a glittering city of hospitals, lakes, and Buddhist carvings. Nothing happened to me, but one bite gave my colleague a parasite so crippling she carried it into her future, into the year she left academia to teach yoga, and I would wonder anew what it means to be free.
(That age-old quest shows up in every story doesn’t it? The sleek coyote we hunt through cactus-spiked deserts. Its carcass covered in flies.)
Transplanted back to the Midwest, they became a family of four. When her breakdowns resumed, he renewed his passport, alone. Before alcohol stopped his heart at age sixty, did he think he was free? When our mother chose a life on the streets over medication and a group home, did she think she was free as well?
One night I dreamed the morning of my birth. Mid-century Midwest. A cold cold cold cold day. I, the girl who was meant to come second, whose mother met our father in the cafeteria and chose egg salad on rye, never wishing for strangeness, wanting only to love and be loved and, in the forever now of my imagination, is still playing those scales and dreaming herself into this story, to be carried on a gust of wind away from wildness to safety and tenderness.
In her late life when she lived at the shelter, my mother’s
thin legs ached in Cleveland cold. If only I could I would bring her here now
where I write these fragments of her story and entwine them with mine—on a
North Carolina beach, a spring break of mild rebellions—and bury those limbs in
hot sand, letting the sun, that clarifying blaze, do the rest.
__
Natalia Rachel Singer is the author of a political memoir, Scraping by in the Big Eighties. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Speculative Nonfiction, Creative Nonfiction, Harper’s, Ms., O: The Oprah Magazine, The Nation, The New Flash Fiction Review, Alternet.org, The Iowa Review, Redbook, The American Scholar, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many others. Her work has been short-listed for The Best American Travel Essays and the Pushcart, and anthologized widely. She is completing a new essay collection, Stubborn Roots, and is at work on a novel. She lives in Upstate New York, where she teaches creative writing and environmental literature at St. Lawrence University.
12 comments
Jan Priddy says:
Jan 20, 2020
It is a wonder that any of us survive. (And that desire to travel where our parents never managed to go.)
Natalia says:
Jan 20, 2020
So true, Jan. Thank you for reading!
Katy Perry says:
Jan 20, 2020
This is so beautiful. Most evocative for me, a middle child whose mother died way too young, is this,
“I, the girl who was meant to come second, whose mother met our father in the cafeteria and chose egg salad on rye, never wishing for strangeness, wanting only to love and be loved and, in the forever now of my imagination, is still playing those scales and dreaming herself into this story, to be carried on a gust of wind away from wildness to safety and tenderness.”
Thank you for showing me, with these lines, what is possible.
Natalia says:
Jan 20, 2020
Thank you so much for your kind words, Katy! And I’m so sorry about your mother. We carry those losses and stories in our bodies, don’t we? Wishing you all good things.
Brianna Sinder says:
Feb 9, 2020
“We carry those losses and stories in our bodies, don’t we?”
So much so. Every generation is born striving for something more than what came before.
Kate Spring says:
Jan 21, 2020
“I’ve known all my life that although their story isn’t mine, I would still have to do some of what they dreamed.” I love this line. Thank you for this story, Natalia. Beautiful.
Karin Williams says:
Jan 23, 2020
Brava my dear friend. For every step we take away from out former lives, memories and circumstances always bring us back. Hugs from Home.
Rachel Day says:
Jan 26, 2020
Very intense. A memoir of sorts all rolled into an essay. That you knew of your mother’s circumstances is what got my attention. I presume she told you these things. I envy the obvious closeness and trusted confidence the two of you must have shared. I wish my mother had shared more with me, but then I always knew there was a really sad or bittersweet story she kept close to her heart, and only revealed bits and pieces with me. I never learned her whole story. You, at least, knew your mother, her story…and you knew her very well, it appears. I’m sure it helped you to understand her much better.
Marie says:
Jan 30, 2020
Our parents are just people (like us) both better and worse than we expect them to be. That’s the hardest part to understand. We want them to be better and want ourselves to be better. But the cup is already cracked. That crack can become part of its beauty, once we understand.
Madi says:
Mar 2, 2020
Our parents make us who we are, so isn’t part of their story ours to tell? What a great way to explain this relationship.
Natalia Singer says:
Sep 1, 2020
Kate! thank you for reading and sharing. Just seeing this now in September! Hope your gardens are thriving.
Amy Amoroso says:
Jan 4, 2024
Natalia,
I just stumbled upon this flash essay as I was preparing my syllabi for the spring semester. What a beautiful piece! After losing my father four years ago, I found myself studying photographs of him in a new way, aching to discover more about his past and the things he never got to tell me. I would love to reconnect some day!
Love,
Amy (Puzo) Amoroso