I wonder how many cherry
stems you can fit in the gap
between your front teeth. I try to
count, but when I ask you to
look at me and smile you look
into the holes in my eyes at
yourself.
I spent all summer picking our
favorite fruits to make a pie but
when I was ready my basket
was empty and you had seeds
in your teeth.
Pain can be sweet like the smell
of lilacs in the morning
or the taste of cold cherries
in the afternoon.
My mother has never let us run out of toilet paper. I never realized how difficult that is, especially for a family of four asses, until I lived away from home and struggled to keep enough toilet paper around to wipe my own ass.
Our house is a toilet. The gaping hole in the roof is a urinal for God’s hot piss every time it rains. My mom has arranged a careful pile of clear plastic storage bins to catch the downpour and bails them with an empty Dean’s sorbet bucket into the bathtub. She’s been Catholic all of her life, teaching me how to pray at night to thank God and Jesus for my health and safety, including the roof over my head.
My parents bought this house in 1996. A classic American Foursquare layout, spacious enough for the small family they wanted to start there. They didn’t know the plumbing would falter and nothing could ever be flushed out. Twenty years of shit has accumulated and sits rotting, and we live around it.
I’m seven years old, and I unwrap an artificial strawberry breakfast bar, dropping the wrapper on the floor and leaving it there. It feels pointless to discern actual garbage from the useless crap we keep around. We haven’t bought garbage bags in years, I don’t know how to take out the trash.
My dad loves a deal. He drives around town hitting garage sales and thrift stores, bringing home trunk loads of treasures that he will never look at again after a week. It’s books, clothing, lamps, decorative wooden boxes, stained chairs, side tables, costume jewelry, sunglasses, instruments, and whatever else he thinks is valuable. He used to party and take a lot of uppers, but in his middle age, finding these things he thinks are valuable and buying them for what he considers a steal is how he gets high.
My mom can’t possibly keep up with his frequent carloads of shit, and things pile up around. Precarious stacks of books and magazines become a new layer of insulation in every room. Furniture and boxes stack up in corners and we lose the basement, the attic, and the bedrooms to the overwhelming waste.
“Tell your friends we are redoing the basement,” my mom instructs me. My friends asked me why they never come over. We are redoing the basement for six years before I learn how to hint at the truth.
It’s impossible to keep the house clean, because trying to mop or dust would mean acknowledging the towers of decaying trash looming around our trodden carpet paths. Admitting that they’re there would only be crushing, and not even my mom can handle that weight. I want to take a bath in bleach. I feel covered in a second skin of grime and dirt and dust. My younger brother is seventeen now and showers three times a day. I know he feels dirty like me, and I know showering doesn’t help.
My grandparents’ house is like this, too. It’s not there anymore, but the scene is burned in my brain. A trailer in a shithole town in Missouri. Literally a hole in the ground, the town is in a subtle crater, and the 10 acres my grandparents own is on the lip. This is prime real estate, because from that slightly raised earth, you can see for miles. Miles of neglected nothing land.
My grandmother’s specialty was dolls. She collected every dolly she found at estate sales, thrift stores, garage sales, or on the side of the road. Her dolls collect dust in every room, some posed on stands or sit on shelves, but most are strewn on piles of newspapers or sprawled like homicide victims on any flat surface. I am four and I take baths in the whirlpool tub surrounded by mirrors. The dolls sit around the sinks, on the radiator, and on top of the toilet. They watch me watch myself, watch me watching them, seeing what they are.
She gifts one to me every time we visit. When we get back to Chicago, each porcelain girl gets swallowed by our house, lost somewhere in the swamp of debris.
“Do you ever think about your parents dying?” I ask.
“Yes,” says my friend. “Going through all their shit and boxing it up for donation is gonna be hell.”
I know my mom will outlive my dad. I imagine her drowning alone in a river of muddy piss as torrential rain pours in through the roof. And after everything, my brother and I call a plumber to come around and plunge our drain.
Curious fingers combing overgrown Missouri grass with skin stained by bitter berries, ripe and dirty. Wash my hands with dandelion milk, scorch them with cigarette ash. Scraped knees, scabbed elbows, and swollen mosquito bites cover me like trophies of summertime.
“Come inside, sweet pea,” Mimi whistles through her gapped teeth. I join her in the kitchen. She’s got a fresh strawberry shortcake for me, it’s in a fancy crystal dish. “How big a piece do you want?” We cut a slice and I take a few bites, grinning. This is the only product of her cooking that I ever eat, but I don’t know that it’s actually store bought.
On the wooden front porch you can see the whole green world. The only other house in sight is a small white square when you squint and everything else is rolling earth. I like sitting out here in the mornings when breaths are wet with dew. Mimi and Uncle Joey try to hide their cigarettes behind their backs but I can see the smoke coming off them. The smell of cigarettes and bacon frying makes me remember this place.
The air in the garden is so humid that its thick to cut through with running legs. Uncle Joey takes me and Arty out to pick what’s ripe.
“A tomato is ripe when it’s red and little squishy, like this,” Uncle Joey squeezes a red tomato on the vine. “If it’s green, it’s still growing.” He shows me the strawberries, which also grow green and ripen red.
“Watermelons are tricky, ‘cause they’re always green on the outside. You can tell if they’re ripe by knockin’ on ‘em” he knocks on a watermelon and tells us it’s not ready. “You gotta listen closely.”
My dad lived here when he was in high school. The farmhouse they used to live in collapsed so Mimi and Pops bought the double trailer and parked it next to the chicken coop. Before he died, Pops built the porch so they could sit and smoke and watch their old house fall in. Uncle Joey tells me it’s haunted, Dad says the ghosts are nice.
Arty and me love playing card games with Dad, he’s really good but sometimes he lets me or Arty win and he’ll laugh wink at me because I’m smart enough to be able to tell.
“Why don’t we play a game of Go-fish with Arty,” he says after I beg for another game of War. I sigh and nod, I like how excited Arty gets when he’s got a pair.
“Got any eights?” I ask him.
“No, go fishin’ Eleanor!” Arty grins, so enraptured that we have to keep telling him not to stand on his seat.
After a few rounds of Go-fish we peel the playing cards off the sticky plastic tablecloth and Mimi rings the supper bell. I help by getting ice glasses for the Cokes. Everyone files through the kitchen, filling their plates with baked and boiled food. I poke at my cornbread, uncomfortable at the dinner table.
If Mom were here, she would take me and Arty into the living room and put cartoons on while Dad and the rest of the family stayed at the table. She would help us make it look like we ate a lot and promise a happy meal later.
After supper, Mimi and Uncle Joey go outside to smoke and Arty and me help Dad clear the table. The wall phone rings, but Dad just continues piling dishes in the sink.
“Aren’t you going to pick up?” I ask.
He looks outside like one of the other grown ups out there smoking might answer for him, but he looks back down at me and says, “Why don’t you and Arty go catch some lightning bugs?” so we gallop outside.
I forget that the stars are always above me, even during the day, until we come to the farm and can see them all on a clear night. Dad says there’s too much light pollution in Chicago to see hardly any of them. I love them, I wish they wouldn’t hide behind light.
I look up to see the stars but the sky is cloudy. Arty is behind me and the two of us scramble around in the field trying to cup the lightning bugs in our hands. They flash their tails in the dark to help us find them. I make sure Arty is so gentle with them, and lets them fly away when they want to. I almost can’t even feel them in my hand, if I closed my eyes I probably wouldn’t even know I was holding one. Arty cries for me to see when they light up in his palms, but by the time I look they have flashed off.
Pops used to warn us of the creatures that prowl through the tall grass at night, that they’d think we were trespassing on their territory. I’m scared of the snakes that might be ankle-high, but I can’t imagine coming across a coyote, even though I know they live in the woods behind the garden.
“Hey, your dad says it’s about y’all’s bedtime,” Uncle Joey calls from the porch and we follow him inside.
After supper and a smoke is always the grown ups’ game of Hearts. Laying cards down, their muted voices overlap and the iced Cokes sweat rings of water on the gingham tablecloth.
Arty is bathed and put to bed and then it’s my turn.
“Good night, babygirl,” Mimi kisses my face, “Sweet dreams.”
“Don’t let the mosquitos bite,” Uncle Joey hugs me with one arm.
Dad takes me to the bathroom where the orange shag carpet floor switches to tile, and we run my bath and pick out my bath toys.
“Good night, Eleanor,” Dad says, closing the door behind him.
I think about this bathroom often, the bathtub is the size and shape of a blow-up kiddie pool, and there are mirrors around half of it. After Dad leaves, I’m left alone with six images of myself gazing blankly back at me. The sounds I make splashing in the water sound almost fake echoing off the mirrored walls. The toilet has a shaggy rust-colored seat cover, matching the carpet outside the door.
I can hear the voices of the grown ups in the other room, but in this bathroom I feel isolated and alone. The water is getting cold, so I pull on the drain and wrap up in a towel. There are two more mirrors above the two sinks in this bathroom. I pick the mirror over the sink with perfume and hair pins next to it to comb my hair in. The other sink’s got cologne and aftershave around it from before Pops died.
I pull on a nightgown over my head because I only ever wear nightgowns when I’m here. Mimi thinks I like them, and she collects them for me, but they all itch and irritate my skin.
Me and Arty sleep in the big bedroom that’s next to the bathroom, so I creep in and close the door behind me. I crawl underneath a scratchy quilt and try to fall asleep without saying goodnight to Mom.
I wake up to oil sizzling and the smell of bacon cooking in it. Arty is always up before me, he’s already on the couch watching cartoons. My bare feet pad into the living room to greet everyone.
“Good morning, sleeping beauty,” Uncle Joey drawls over his cup of coffee. I’m surprised he’s already here, he doesn’t live here and usually doesn’t make it here for breakfast.
Dad is sitting in Pops’ old recliner scowling over the newspaper. I jump into his lap.
“Do you think we could go to Kansas City today?” I ask him. We hadn’t left the farm since we had gotten here a few days ago, and I knew that Kansas City was just a short drive away.
He folds up the paper and tucked it behind the chair before answering.
“No, Eleanor, you know, I think Uncle Joey has a project for you and Arty in the garden, today,” he nods at Uncle Joey. Me and Arty both turn to Uncle Joey expectantly.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Uncle Joey clears his throat. “I’m gonna need you guys to help me out today.”
“With what?” Arty peels the last of his attention off of the television, sticking it to whatever we are talking about.
Uncle Joey runs his hand through his dark hair, something he does often. “Oh, you know, we’ll feed the neighbor’s horses.”
“Really?” I say. I love watching those horses, they have names I’ve given them that I can’t remember.
“Yeah, really,” Uncle Joey smiles. His teeth and breath are yellow from coffee and cigarettes.
The sizzling sound stops which means breakfast is ready. Dad piles his plate with flapjacks, he’s eaten these for breakfast since he was my age. Arty takes Mimi’s bacon, which is always burnt, but I fill a cereal bowl with cold watermelon from the garden that we cut up yesterday. I don’t trust Mimi’s cooking because she spits when she talks and she never stops talking, most of the time just with herself.
We all sit around the table, under Mimi’s collection of novelty gold and copper cake pans. Hummingbirds feed from the nectar Mimi leaves hanging outside the screen door, the green world outside is waking up, too.
“Mimi, Uncle Joey’s taking us to feed the neighbor’s horses today,” I say.
Mimi looks up from her plate and adjusts her bifocals. “I heard, sweet pea, that’s somethin’ exciting.”
“Y’all better promise to be careful around those horse’s mouths, though, you’d be surprised at how hard they can bite,” Uncle Joey says. He thinks this is funny, but me and Arty’s faces express our anxious reactions.
“Uncle Joey thinks it’s funny to scare y’all,” Mimi whacks Uncle Joey’s chest with the back of her wrinkly hand. “Shut up, Joe, what would their mama say?”
Dad coughs and Uncle Joey spills hot coffee on the table. The spill expands across the checkered tablecloth and the grown ups all toss around napkins trying to contain it. Arty and me just sit there.
We decide we are too scared of getting bit to feed the horses, so Arty and me play hide and seek with Uncle Joey in the garden. Uncle Joey hides in obvious spots, he probably thinks we couldn’t find him if he actually tried hiding himself well. But Arty and me, we know all the best hiding spots. Dad showed them to us when we visited the farm last summer, he said he was always better at hide and seek than his brothers because these spots where his secret weapons.
“All right, hide yourselves,” Uncle Joey says and covers his eyes with his hands. Arty laughs and we take off in opposite directions. “One, two, three, four, five,”
I sprint to the front porch and pull at the bottom right corner of the wooden lattice just like Dad showed us. It leaves just enough room for someone my size to crawl around it and hide in the shadows under the porch.
“Eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Ready or not, here I come!” Uncle Joey calls. I can’t see him, but I’ll be able to hear if he gets close. I expect it’ll take him a while to find me, I only hope Arty’s spot isn’t better than mine.
I can hear Uncle Joey walking through the grass, then across the gravel, then padding around in the dirt. He rustles crates sitting around and shakes the branches on trees. A car pulls up, the wheels crunching on the gravel driveway. I think it’s probably Uncle Bobby’s van or Uncle Wayne’s truck, I think Mimi said they were coming over for supper later.
“Good morning, officers,” I hear Uncle Joey’s voice carry across the yard.
There are voices I don’t recognize that speak after Uncle Joey. I’m too surprised to make out what they ask him, but Uncle Joey responds, “Sorry, officers, I don’t know where they are.”
One of the voices asks about his brother. “When was the last time you seen him?”
“Gee, I don’t know, not for a while,” Uncle Joey says. I imagine him running his hand through his hair.
“Isn’t that his car, that blue Toyota?” one of the strangers says. I think they are talking about Dad’s car, it’s a good blue for a car. Not too dark and it’s faded a little from sitting in the sun.
“Oh, yeah, huh. Maybe he is here, I just got here myself, haven’t gone inside yet,” Uncle Joey says.
“Cut the crap act, Joe, where are they?” a lady says. She sounds like my mom. In the shadows under the porch, I wonder if my Mom could be here, too.
“Meg, is that you back there? How are you?” Uncle Joey asks. Hand through the hair.
Car doors slam and Uncle Joey starts shouting. I come out from under the porch and see a two officers standing in front of a police car and standing next to them is my mom.
“Mom!” I say. The grown ups don’t hear me from over here, not over Uncle Joey’s shouting and kicking up dirt. “Mom!”
Mom’s head cocks, wondering if she heard me call her or if she had maybe imagined it. She had been imagining it pretty often since we had been missing. She turns around anyway, though, and sees me standing next to the double trailer. Arty comes out from a pile of tractor tires, realizing our game of hide and seek is over. Dad comes out from inside the house, knowing it, too.
not to think about your
orange juice and gin
floor that I said I would try
to clean. I’m so sorry
that it will still be sticky
when you come back. I tried
not to smell your sheets
that morning, because I knew
that you stopped trying
to do your laundry and water
your plants. You’re so sorry
that you’re leaving, but you are trying
to get better. I’m so sorry
I didn’t ask how bad it was
when I came over. Today, I am crying
because I think you’re probably trying
to fuck someone else
while I take a long walk, trying
not to think about you.
The first time I read The Things They Carried was on
the screen porch of a timeshare cottage on Lake Michigan
that summer that I couldn’t get out of myself. The sun
didn’t bother me that day, actually, it put on a
golden show for us on the shore. My red legs from
yesterday were sticky with expired aloe vera gel,
spread out over the glass-top table on
that screen porch of a timeshare cottage on Lake Michigan.
Outside the white wooden frame was blue sky kissing
blue water. I wanted everybody to forget me on
that screen porch of a timeshare cottage on Lake Michigan,
and I think they must have, at least for a few hours. I know
that I did.
Triangle, 1964
Our brick two-flat is right in the middle of the block, and we have the biggest yard. Johnny and Tom are throwing the ball back and forth across it and I’m running between them trying not to get tagged. If I do, then I have to be a catcher and one of them will run. I prefer running within our yard, between my brothers, under the arch of the baseball.
As my legs push and pull me across the lawn, my muddy shoe becomes untied and my hands grab for the grass in front of me. My knees slide in green and I roll onto the butt of my jeans. Tom catches the ball and tags me on the ground.
Square, 2001
I don’t think I’ve ever been in a hospital before, except for when I was born four years ago. But Uncle Johnny said Mom is here and we are visiting her and the new baby, my brother. We are holding hands walking through the cold white hallway. We turn a corner and my dad is waiting for us. He has dark hair that almost touches the shiny ceiling lights and is wearing all dark blue. He’s twice the size of Uncle Johnny, who lets my dad take my hand and lead me into the hospital room.
“Do you want to meet Jack?”
He is laying in a clear plastic bin like the ones we keep my toys in. I stick my hand in and his tiny fingers wrap around my skinny ones.
Circle, 1976
Tom’s got a record on. Neil Diamond. I can’t tell which one, I don’t especially love Neil Diamond. Johnny and I like more of the same music; Bruce Springsteen, The Eagles, and The Beach Boys, but I appreciate sitting with Tom, listening to a record beside our shared bookcase in the living room.
The yellow afternoon swims through the blinds while we sit without talking. Our shadows trace an arch across the wall. The music stops, Tom stands to flip the record.
“Mary Pat?”
“Mhm?”
“Mary Ruth said she can’t come to this concert with me anymore, she’s got some test to study for or something, so I guess I have an extra ticket.”
“Oh?”
“Would you want to…”
“See Neil Diamond with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
Line, 2016
The only time I can successfully ignore how much I aggressively dislike myself is when I’m sitting with Jack. I think he knows this, too, because his brown eyes soften when I knock on his door wrapped in a blanket even though it’s 88 degrees in our house. We sit quietly, sharing a chair in his gray room that used to be white. But like me, and like him, and like everything else in our home, it is covered in a thick skin of dirt and dust.
I watch him while he plays battle royale games online. He tells me his scores, what he is looting, and what armor he is wearing. I press my head on his shoulder. From behind, we look like we share a body, our matching heads of thick brown hair fountaining from the top.
I listen to him play guitar. His knuckles and hangnails pluck riffs I recognize. I request songs that Dad played in the car when we were still in carseats.
“Will you play ‘Take It Easy?’”
“Patty, you and I both know I won’t do that.”
“Will you play whatever your favorite song to sing is?”
He plays the three chords of “Ruby Tuesday” and lets me sing the melody quietly while he takes the lower harmony. We both know I can’t hold a harmony part on my own.
Pentagon, 1965
When we ride in the faded blue Camri, I always sit in the middle, Johnny always sits on my left, and Tom is always on my right. This is how it has to be, because this is always how we have arranged ourselves.
In our house, the first bedroom off the living room is our parents’. The second bedroom, in the hallway, is Johnny and Tom’s. My bedroom is at the back, off the kitchen. It is the smallest since I am the youngest, but since I’m the only girl I don’t have to share.
Johnny has his own bookcase in the living room because he is the oldest, and Tom and I share one in the corner where we sit and read different books at the same time, quietly.
When we watch Saturday night TV, we all share space, spreading our bodies on the sofa, chairs, and carpet.
Cone, 2002
Jack is less than a year old and I spread a knit blanket out on the floor. Mom sets him down on his back to stare at the white ceiling. I lay down next to him, even my small body is much longer than his. I lift my hands above me, between my face and the ceiling. I examine my knuckles against the white. Next to me, Jack lifts his hands and knits his fingers together above his own face.
Semi-circle, 1994
“You know, you could have let me know she wasn’t doing well. Maybe I would have been able to see her one last time.” Tom says. The peach colored plaster walls of the nursing home turn an offensive shade of orange.
“It’s not my responsibility to call you with updates every day. She’s your mother, if you cared about how she was doing, you should have visited more.” I say. “And I did call last night, when I felt like things had changed. When she really wasn’t herself.”
Tom has no reply. He knows this is true, Judy answered the phone and was not pleased when I asked to speak to Tom right away. And I understand why he couldn’t make it to the nursing home last night, he and his family live out in the suburbs and it was such short notice. But when I called Johnny, he was already putting on his jacket.
We sign papers closing our account at the nursing home. I’m weeping, embracing nurses I’ve grown to know well. Tom waves feebly at nurses he’s just met.
Parallelogram, 2018
“Oh wow, it looks totally different.” my Mom says.
We pull up to her childhood home, Johnny’s driving, Jack and I share the backseat without seatbelts.
“Yeah, it looks like they painted the wood. So tacky,” Uncle Johnny says.
Mom reaches her hand over her shoulder from the front seat. She does this when she wants me to squeeze it. I know she’s tearing up without looking at her face.
I reach beside me and squeeze Jack’s hand, too. He’s quiet, but I know he’s thinking. I never know what he’s thinking unless he tells me, but I try to imagine the workings of his thoughts.
We unload our bodies from the car; Jack and I and our piles of limbs, and Mom and Uncle Johnny and their stouter statures. There’s a crunched beer can on the lawn, probably from some Loyola student walking home from a party. The house itself is square and brick, with a very flat front face. Above the front porch is white wood paneling, which Mom says used to be gray stone accents. Uncle Johnny is right, the painted wood looks tacky.
Trapezoid, 1996
“Will you be coming to my wedding?”
Tom has not RSVP’d to my invitation, and I’m crunching the final numbers. I need to know If he and Judy and their sons will come. I dial his phone number for the first time since Mom passed. Johnny and I broke up our childhood home without him. Broken.
“Well, it would be awkward if we didn’t,” he says.
“No, it wouldn’t.”
“Mary Pat…”
“Look, Johnny is giving me away, and Denise is my maid of honor. If that makes you feel negatively, then you and Judy do not have to come.”
“Mary Pat, of course I’ll come. We’ll come.”
Rectangle, 2017
“I’m leaving, I love you.” I knock on Jack’s bedroom door, creaking it open to fit my body in the doorframe.
“Noted. Bye.”
“Yeah, love you.”
“Okay. You can leave now.”
“Please say something nice to me before I go.”
“You won’t leave until I do, will you?
“No, it’s okay. I’ll see you soon. I love you, bye.”
I’m downstairs putting my backpack on. I usually forget that I don’t live here anymore.
“Patty?” Jack appears behind the peeling white staircase railing. “You know, I don’t hate you.”
“I know.”
Oval, 1997
It’s an unusually warm winter day, so Johnny is wearing shorts. He does this partly as a joke, and partly because, having grown up in Chicago, he has calluses against the cold. He doesn’t know what I’ve asked him to come over.
I tell him that I need a really big favor. His huge eyes that match mine swell with concern.
“Could John and I borrow your crib? The one Stephanie and Michael used?” A pause the size of a pregnancy fills the space between my question and Johnny’s revelation. “Unless, you think you and Denise will need it again?”
“What? No, of course. I mean, yes. You can borrow the crib. Congratulations.” We laugh and our arms made of the same flesh wrap us up.
“Thank you, thank you”
“You know, if it’s a boy, you should name him Tom.” This is also a joke, but we stop laughing.
I would rather be early than late but I’m unprepared and sweaty as I arrive at the jury seating area on the fourteenth floor of the Daley Center. I didn’t fill out the back of my summons, I didn’t even realize there was a back to fill out, but there is a table with a pen for the first-timers.
When I finish I hand it off to the tired looking lady in maroon who tells me my juror group is number five. I stick out five of my fingers like I always do when I have to remember a number – muscle memory. I paste an orange sticker on my chest marking me a civil servant for the day and take a seat by the big windows.
It’s gray and humid out, an ugly morning for early June. The street below is busy with bug people in suits, talking on iPhones and ignoring homeless folks sitting on corners holding cardboard signs while they rush to their various offices.
I pull out a cheap plastic DePaul University water bottle and a Kurt Vonnegut novel from my round green backpack. I really want to broadcast my status as a liberal arts student. I don’t mind sitting and reading as the other responsible citizens file in with Starbucks cups. If I weren’t here, I would be getting paid minimum wage serving coffee to morning commuters. Everyone here is business casual and bothered.
I don’t expect much of today, I know that every time my parents have had jury duty they’ll just sit and read or maybe talk to whoever is sitting nearby. After a little while, juror group numbers begin to be called over the speaker system.
“Juror group eleven, please form two single file lines at the front of the room.”
It goes quickly at first, calling the group numbers. Seven and nine and four and one. As the population of the waiting room dwindles, the groups are called less frequently, and those of us that are left have been waiting in this same beige room for more than two hours.
One lady with a teased and hairsprayed bob stands up and twists her torso around. She takes her purse to the vending machines, buys a packet of cookies, and starts walking around the room as she eats them. She makes her way to the windows and looks through them at the thick, foggy mid-morning. Abruptly, she turns and offers me a cookie. I don’t realize how closely I’ve been watching her, but she doesn’t seem offended.
“I’m okay, thank you, though,” I say. She smiles and returns to chewing and walking.
“Juror group five, please form two single file lines at the front of the room.”
Everyone left in the room stands up and creates the two lines. I’m standing next to the cookie lady.
“If you’ll just follow me, we are going to the sixteenth floor. Court sixteen-oh-four,” says John, who tells us he is our court deputy today. “You guys are lucky, you might actually make it onto a jury. But you got a nice judge, Judge Marjorie Flynn, you’ll love her.”
We stack into two elevators and follow John to court sixteen-oh-four. At least twelve sets of eyes stare us down as we enter the courtroom – some are hopeful and some are vicious, but all are judgemental.
The courtroom is all glossy wood. “In God We Trust” is carved into the wall across from the jury box, and the only clock in the room hangs above it. The carpeted floor is beige and brown. The room overall is reminiscent of dehydrated urine.
“Good morning, everyone,” the judge says, stepping down from her seat. “I’m Judge Flynn, I hope everyone had an okay time getting here today, we all really appreciate it.” She has thick, shoulder-length gray-dyed-brown hair like my mom’s, and like I’ll probably have when I’m forty. She says she is originally from Chicago, although she got her degree on the East coast. She has a daughter who’s a ‘rising junior’ in college now, who just got home for the summer.
The judge helps John pass out clipboards with a short questionnaire on them as she monologues about the importance of the American justice system. I’m not really listening, I’m trying to answer questions like, “Who is someone you most admire?” and “Is there any important reason you cannot serve on this jury?” For some reason, I cannot think of a single person that I admire so I write Ruth Bader Ginsburg because I can see the woman in front of me did. I also write that I need to work my hourly wage job so I can pay my rent.
The judge introduces us to the lawyers for the prosecution and the defense and says they are going to ask each of us a few questions that are more specific to this case. Both are white, representing black women. The prosecutor’s lawyer is an angular forty-something in a tailored suit. His scalp is bald and his skin looks thin. When the Judge calls the first fourteen names for interviews and instructs them to sit in the juror’s box, he greets them like how I think he greets his in-laws.
“Hey, I just want to express my pleasure to be meeting everyone here, today.” he says. He smiles, big white teeth. “I think, although it is our duty, participating in the justice system is the most important thing we can do as citizens. Every one of us has the right to a fair trial, that’s why we are here today. To give Rashea Anderson a fair trial.”
When he questions each potential juror, he asks questions like, “what was the last good movie you saw?” before asking his questions to determine their possible bias.
The defendant’s lawyer is a woman who I place in her mid sixties. She is wearing a tan pantsuit and gold jewelry. She has a blunt brunette bob that I think is a wig, and I also think that she must really hope that no one notices it is a wig.
“I won’t take as long my colleague to get to everyone, but I would like to express the same sentiments regarding your jury service today,” she says.” Her first round of interviews goes by much quicker.
The judge calls the next fourteen names for interviews, mine being one of them. The cookie lady waves and gives me a thumbs up.
I try to think of the last good movie I saw, but when the prosecutor’s attorney gets to me, he asks where I went to high school.
“Oak Park and River Forest,” I say. He recognizes it.
“When did you graduate?”
“Two years ago.”
“Are you going to school now?”
“Yes, at DePaul.”
“So you’re a sophomore? A junior?”
“A rising junior, actually.” I say.
He asks what I study, which I say English and creative writing. He says “Good for you,” and moves on. When the defendant’s attorney interviews me, she just asks if anyone in my family is, every has been, or intimately knows a doctor. I say no. Most everyone else has said yes.
One sunburnt man wearing shorts, which our summons specifically said was inappropriate, makes a big deal about how he doesn’t trust doctors, his son had a bad surgery or something. Another younger guy is going on vacation next week, he can show his plane tickets as proof. A distressed lady’s daughter has cancer and she has to take her to chemotherapy appointments. Out of the thirty-two people in juror group five, twenty-eight were interviewed, and I know that I was one of the most agreeable. I’m not wearing shorts, and I have no plane tickets to prove I am busy.
…
Judge Flynn promises myself and the other twelve jurors that she will take care of us. She says we should all expect to gain a couple of pounds over the next two weeks because she loves to bake, and is known to bring her juries baked goods.
She and the attorneys have worked out a schedule, which means this case should not last past next Friday, unless we take longer than one day to deliberate.
Every morning we come in at nine, and place our lunch order with John. John says the meatball sub is actually pretty good, but I’m a vegetarian so I always get the garden salad. Court begins at nine-fifteen. The first morning, before we hear the opening statements, Judge Flynn reminds us that we cannot weigh anything the lawyers say as evidence.
“This is a case about not finishing what you started.” the prosecution says. He emphasizes each word with his hands. “In a December twenty-twelve hysterectomy with Ms. Anderson, Dr. Christmas did not complete all the safety checks she should have. Dr. Christmas did not finish what she started.” Every juror gets a notepad that John collects at the end of the day. I make a drawing of what the prosecution demonstrates to be Rashea Anderson’s ureter as a result of this unfinished surgery, it’s a garden hose that’s been melted and stepped on.
“It is not required by law to perform every safety check in a standard hysterectomy. It is not expected that Dr. Christmas perform the types of tests the prosecution is alluding to because she herself is not even qualified to do so.” the defense says.
We watch expert witnesses testify, be examined, and cross examined. All of them are older white men wearing watches who have published studies about gynecology or urology or radiology. Half of their testimony is spent confirming their list of credentials and accolades, which the defense spends the entire examination trying to discredit.
The prosecution asks each of his expert witnesses how much they have charged his client to testify. One estimates fifty thousand dollars. Others say forty or thirty thousand. The defense has hired one expert witness, who has charged only twenty thousand.
We break for lunch every day around one. We eat in the deliberation room, which smells like Pine Sol and feels crowded with thirteen bodies inside. There are two bathrooms with doors that don’t lock, one is pink and one is blue. We are not allowed to talk about the case yet, so I learn small, intimate details about everyone else.
David is a retired FBI agent. He has a daughter my age that he is worried about, and he likes to travel to Africa and South America with his wife. Jessica teaches English as a second language on the South side, and she lived in Spain for three years. She is getting married in the fall. Destiny works as a detective and puts away rapists and murderers, so this case feels like a vacation for her. She wakes up at four every morning to work out, she has lost forty pounds in the last two months, and she’s feeling really good. Gina’s mother was just diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and had a bad episode last week. She took the car and they didn’t know where she went for hours, but they eventually found her at a gas station a few neighborhoods away. Noel works at the Harold Washington Library. He just met his son that he fathered when he was sixteen for the first time, he didn’t know about him until this April.
I don’t have very much to share about myself. I’ve never really been outside the Midwest and I’ve never done anything very noteworthy, I chew my nails and write niche poetry.
“But you’re so young,” David says. “You can do anything.”
John knocks on our door to let us know it’s time to return to court. We watch another expert witness testify and get fried, collect our check for $17.20 from John for our day of jury service, and go home until the next morning.
“It’s crazy that the tiniest nick in the wrong place can totally change someone’s way of life,” I say to my roommates when we catch up on each other’s days. I can’t talk about specific details, but I explain that it’s a doctor negligence case. “Doctors aren’t God, we can’t expect them to perform perfectly all the time, but we should expect mistakes to be acknowledged.”
…
I’m thinking about this case all the time. The lawyers have been building it since twenty-fourteen and each party has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. And now, we as a jury get to step in for two weeks and make a decision that will affect both the doctor’s and Ms. Anderson’s lives, only to walk away from it and never think about it again.
Each day in court, we sit in the same seats, eat the same lunch, and watch the same two lawyers dressed in a rotation of two-piece suits point at diagrams from different textbooks and come to different conclusions. It doesn’t feel like it’s about finding the truth of what happened to Ms. Anderson’s ureter. It feels like a carefully staged performance of wit and power where my civic duty is to participate in writing the ending.
After both parties have rested and closing arguments are finished, Judge Quinn instructs us on deliberation. We still haven’t gotten to sample her baking. She’s brought us store bought plates of brownies and cookies every day, but not anything she made herself.
“Any questions?” she asks. No one has any. “Good, all rise.”
We stand up and begin to snake into the deliberation room. I’m nervous to hear what everyone else has been thinking about the case, and what we will decide at the end of the day. The prosecution has asked for $1.3 million in settlement, which feels like an unreal amount of money to me. I’m thinking about money and time and bodily damage, following the rest of the jury out of the courtroom when the judge calls my name. Everyone pauses and looks at her, then at me.
“Yes, hi, Patricia? Could you gather your things and meet me in the hallway back here?”
David pats my shoulder and says he was happy to meet me. Gina says she’ll friend me on Facebook. Destiny says they’ll think of me while they deliberate, Jessica agrees. John helps me with my backpack and escorts me out of the courtroom. He asks if I would like any popcorn or soda. I say “I’m okay, thank you, though.”
The Judge meets me in the marble hallway behind the courtroom. I never realized she’s tall. We are about the same height.
“Hi, Patricia, I’m sorry for this confusion, but you’re actually our alternate juror,” she says. I feel embarrassed. “You’ve been so great in court, you would have been a great juror. I could tell you were paying attention. I want to thank you for your time here.” she says. She gives me her phone number so I can call tomorrow and find out the verdict. She thanks me again and gives me a hug. I thank her and tell her goodbye.
When I turn around to walk away, I begin to cry. It feels like a huge emotional release and I want to slap the marble walls of the Daley Center with open palms and stomp on the carpeted floor. But I just cry quietly, a steady stream of salty water dripping from my chin. I pass both the prosecution and defense attorneys on my way to the elevators. They try not to look at me.
I exit the building through the revolving doors into the streets of Chicago, where I am once again nameless and faceless among the population of the city.
Here is a scene; Meredith at sixteen – blunt brunette bob, smokey eye makeup, and a dark floral Forever 21 dress she’s cut shorter – performing a dance of a ritualistic nature with two raw corn cobs in Sophia’s kitchen after midnight. Her head is thrown back, her eyes are closed, the sleeves of her jean jacket, the “Double J,” are rolled up.
She’s wearing her new amethyst ring. A gift from her parents, together. A “Sorry that your dad had a crisis, punched through a CTA window, and has a new girlfriend he needs to stay with,” ring. A “Sorry that the last six months you’ve been left alone to cope by repressing our upsetting family situation and distract yourself by creating other drama,” ring. A “Sorry for promising we were staying together, and now divorcing anyway,” ring.
It’s a Friday night in late February, and we are sleeping at Sophia’s so Meredith doesn’t do anything stupid or dangerous.
“My parents want me to go to therapy,” she says, sitting on the floor with the rest of us now but still holding the corn.
“Maybe that’s a good idea, it could be helpful,” Katie says with Meredith’s head on her shoulder.
“They are a little late to the game, if they really trying to care about your mental health,” Sophia says, “they should have gotten you a therapist last summer.”
“They think if you get divorced, you have to send your kids to therapy. Like it’s how to be a good parent or something,” Meredith says.
“I’m sorry they are making you do this, just because they think they’re supposed to,” I say. I touch Meredith’s hand, the ring is cool and protruding on her clammy finger.
In early March, Meredith Facebook messages Snow Flakey, the boy she has been obsessively in love with all year, but also the name we give any boy Meredith likes. Dark curly hair, undereye circles, budding existentialist, et cetera. We all know that Meredith has been channeling her emotional energy into her fantasies about him, when they had only ever talked once or twice at a party.
When he rejects her in the kindest way possible, she finally begins to grieve. The next day at school, she carries a mug of tea with her from class to class and wears the same clothes as the day before. She says this is the worst day of her life, but promises it’s not because her dad is moving out, but because Snow Flakey will never love her.
In May, her mom decides she is moving Meredith and her brother to North Carolina where their grandparents live, and where she can escape the embarrassment of her divorce. Meredith calls it “North Khaki-lacky,” since all of her cousins there wear khakis and are in youth group.
We throw Meredith a going away party at Sophia’s the weekend after finals, Americana themed because Meredith loves the trashy aesthetic. We buy super moist blue velvet cake mix by Betty Crocker, cover it in chocolate frosting, and Meredith smashes it with her fist. She writes “FUCK” across the top in blue icing.
“Now it’s art,” she says, licking the chocolate left on her ring.
We force Meredith to invite everyone she ought to, like her childhood friends and high school acquaintances she owes a goodbye to. She tells everyone she’s leaving next week, but she’s not moving until August.
“I don’t want to see any of these people ever again,” she tells me.
We invite Snow Flakey, and she talks to him when he arrives. He has only been kind to her, even though she’s made him feel awkward on several occasions. Tonight, she has curled her short dark hair into tight ringlets, not unlike his.
“I don’t know why I ever liked him,” she says, sipping a Squirt soda after she abandons him to talk to us. When he leaves the party and says goodbye to her, she says to us that it’s unfair she has to move when she wishes she could stay here and be with him.
Until now, she has not acknowledged her approaching move. When Snow Flakey said goodbye to her, the summer became a countdown until her reckoning.
“I don’t want to move to North Khaki-lacky,” she says, pouting with her “FUCK” cake.
“We don’t want you to, either, babe,” Sophia says, petting her head.
Meredith steals a paper bag from the recycling, deciding to pay homage to Shia Labeouf, writes “I Am Not Famous Anymore” across the front, and puts it over her head. She poses for a photo, saying “this is the last picture you’ll take of me.”
Our tired white station wagon rolls up and over the last few hills, turns past the overgrown creek, and pulls into the gravel and grass driveway in Belton, Missouri. Of course Mimi with her fried orange hair and Uncle Jerry who looks like Jim Carrey and Papa who frowns like a chimp are waving from the wooden front porch. We left them there last summer when we went back home to Chicago, and I believe they haven’t hardly moved in a year. All are smoking cigarettes, backlit from the lamps on inside. The smell of cigarettes and bacon frying rises from this place.
There is a caved-in farmhouse that’s been rotting since a tree fell on it and Mimi and Papa bought the double trailer and parked it a football field away. Papa built the wooden porch around the trailer so they could sit outside and smoke and watch their old house fall in. At night, the double trailer casts a haunting glow over the ten acres of neglected farmland.
The only other house in sight is far enough away that on foggy mornings you can’t make it out. In the heat of the afternoon, when the air is pulsing with humidity, it looks like a mirage. The only time people come over is on Sundays in the summer to buy tomatoes, one dollar per pound.
Uncle Jerry mows the lawn and takes care of the garden and eats whatever Mimi cooks. He also grows weed and smokes it with my dad in the garage when we visit. Uncle Robert comes around to play cards, but he has to stay inside because he’s had lots of surgeries to remove tumors and doesn’t have sweat glands anymore. Uncle Mark lives in Nashville, but sometimes he’ll visit at the same time as us so all four brothers can take a picture.
“My beautiful grandbabies,” Mimi says, ashing her cigarette as my little brother and I are lifted out of the car. “Let me see you.”
“They are awfully tired, Billie, we’ve been driving all day,” my mom says. Mom is the only one who calls Mimi by her name.
Mimi waves her wrinkled hand at Mom. She thinks she can make the wrinkles on her hand disappear like magic by turning her arm upside down, and even though I’m only six, I understand I have to humor her.
Jack is only two, and sleeping in my dad’s arms, but Mimi stands and demands to hold him. She kisses him and strokes his head like she does with the porcelain baby dolls she collects. Papa and Uncle Jerry stay seated, but I hug each of them before I’m hugged and kissed by Mimi.
Inside, the double trailer is floored with rust colored shag carpet. Decorative copper cake pans, black and white portraits of dead relatives, and Papa’s purple hearts hide the wood panelled walls. Books and magazines are stacked up in corners, swollen and sticky from humidity. Empty Coke cans and their accompanying glasses for ice sit on every flat surface, wading in the rings of water that sweat from them that day. There’s three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a small tiled kitchen.
Jack and I are set up in the master bedroom, where we fall asleep quickly on top of a scratchy quilt. Mom and Dad sleep on the pull out couch, and Mimi and Papa each sleep in the other two bedrooms. Uncle Jerry leaves to spend the night delivering pizzas in his truck.
I wake up smelling bacon and flapjacks, and when I get out of bed and trod into the shag carpeted living room, my dad is already nursing an iced Coke. Papa is sitting in his blue recliner, squinting through his reading glasses at a newspaper. I crawl into his lap, which makes stiffen for a second before he lets me get comfortable in the crook of his arm and resumes reading.
“How’s the world today?” I ask him.
“Doing just fine,” he says and pinches his lips. Whenever I draw Papa, I illustrate him with a triangular tuft of hair on top of his head. This is not at all what his hair looks like, but it’s what I recognize. I draw Mimi’s hair as it is – burnt orange curls. She promises everyone this color is natural, but I’ve seen her hair dye boxes in the garbage. I’ve also seen her dentures in a cup in the bathroom.
I can hear Mimi talking to herself while she cooks breakfast over the noise of Fox news on the television. My dad hates Fox news, but he doesn’t want to fight with Mimi so he leaves it on. Mimi spits when she talks, and she’s always talking, so I try my hardest not to eat her cooking. I imagine a chunk of her phlegmy spit flying into the flapjack batter.
Mom knows I don’t like Mimi’s cooking, so she helps me move my food around the plate to make it look like I ate more than I did.
“Babygirl, you ought to eat more than that, Mary Pat why do you let her get away with eating hardly anything?” Mimi criticizes my mom for my picky eating. When Mimi’s in the bathroom, Mom gives me a blueberry breakfast bar she had packed before we left Chicago. She knows it’s just two more weeks of Belton and Mimi and then we get to go home and don’t have to come back until next summer.
Do you admire me
because I write creatively
or because I remind you of your daughter?
Or, worse than that,
am I a fantasy –
naive and needing your blue eyes to follow me?
I trust your hands but not your intention
and roll my eyes when you say with conviction
that you know more about
me that you know how to be
presenting yourself in a certain manner
to make you seem trustworthy
rose lit world 