Oatmeal
The kitchen in our brick row house was always cold in the early morning. Chilled and shivering, I sat on the cracked vinyl chair and huddled against the small radiator in the corner. My stomach rumbled as I stole a few forbidden sucks on my six-year-old thumb. In the dim overhead light, I watched as...
Tommy
Tommy Schmidt does not drink milk. He is scrawny and freckled and eight years old to my five. We are in love. His mom pays my mom to watch him after school. I watch him from the kitchen as he sits Indian-style on the brown shag carpet in front of our T.V. Later, in the...
What If?
for D.P. You had the habit of pulling practical jokes on me that pushed the line of decency: shooting bb’s from your upstairs window like a sniper, wrapping my Jeep in industrial strength plastic wrap five inches thick, putting on a Halloween mask and stealthily breaking into my house and then standing over me with...
Candy Cigarettes
While your parents drank in Schmidt’s Bar, you and your cousins gathered under buggy streetlights. No one watched you. No one cared. You all ran down a big hill in the dark, holding hands. Then up again. Later, inside the bar, you begged for everything: cashews warmed in white waxed cups, giant pickles like dead...
Hometown
I’m sitting on the front porch of the house where I grew up, smoking a cigarette like a teenager. It’s dead quiet, cloudy and damp. I watch a single, fat blue jay screech madly at a yellow cat on the grass median strip in front of the house, flying back and forth from one tree...
Orbit
Miss Ranney’s stockings were always straight. I checked the seams each morning as we stood facing the chalkboard, my hand across a place I called a pocket but she called your heart, and I pledged allegiance to a flag no bigger than my brother’s diaper flapping on the line. We sang of mountains and amber...
Chop Suey
My mother was a champion bowler in Thailand. This was not what I knew of her. I knew only her expectations of me to be the perfect Thai boy. I knew her distaste for blonde American women she feared would seduce her son. I knew her distrust of the world she found herself in, a...
Beginnings
Late October, 1969. I’m three years old. We’re driving at night on a country road outside Culpeper, Virginia, to visit my recently widowed grandmother. No moon or lights. We have only the reach of the high beams to see by. I sit between my parents in the front seat. My mother is six months pregnant...
My Mother’s Touch
When my mother tries to touch me, I flinch. I don’t like her to touch me at all, ever, and I don’t remember a time when we cuddled or hugged or she took me “uppy,” although it happened. My grandmother has proof, the old black and whites of me in my mother’s arms, in a...
Thumb-Sucking Girl
Look at me. At me, over here. Look and shake your head all you want. At my uneven bangs, these broken-down shoes, my momma, all us kids, and all our belongings shoved into just one car. Whisper and sigh all you want because I have something better than good clothes and a permanent address. I’ve...
Prince Valiant
We lived on Riverside Drive then, in the apartment once occupied by Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale. I imagined a bird from a faraway land fluttering through the big open rooms of our apartment, hovering by the window that looked out on the Hudson, yearning to be free. Back then, animals could talk and I...
The Causeway
“Watch me, Margaret,” my freckle-backed father said. Wearing cut-off Levi’s and a silver crucifix, he stood barefoot on the cement wall designed to keep cars from driving off the causeway into the lake. “I’m watching, Daddy.” “You have to stand up close to the wall and watch until my feet disappear.” He was getting ready...
Bowling
I remember my father with his pot belly, polishing his bowling ball, standing on the lane, taking a deep breath, getting ready to swing his arm back and then forward. I never told my father how beautiful he looked and how grateful I was that when he threw a strike, he always turned around to...
Immigrants on Vacation, 1965
After May 24th, all roads in Canada lead north. Your mother wears olive green Crimpeline pants from Simpson’s basement and your father’s shorts are at war with his black nylon socks and dress shoes. A grandmother like a squat shrub in a headscarf occupies the back seat. The green rolling hood of the family Buick...
My Contribution
I wasn’t there when it started. I wasn’t there in the beginning. I was invited to join later on. Enroll, enlist. I wasn’t usually included in these sorts of things. It seemed like everyone was asked to join. I was invited too. A boy in my class had started it, one of my fellow second...
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