(a week of remembering what it was like to think about anything at all)
Liz Laribee
DAY 1
Sisters
I find my sisters comforting in the way that burnt chicken reassures me of no salmonella. Days and days stacked between us, and when we share the bed over holidays in mom’s guest room, they’ll still dig their cold toes into my side. Our parents moved us around the whole country. We were like army brats, except we didn’t get the benefit of having been born in Germany, and we were generally the least disciplined children ever. I always imagine army brats pushing themselves out of bed and into their pleated khakis at six o’clock every morning to begin work on their college finances before a grueling day of middle school. In contrast, I had to be driven to school most days after missing the bus. And, I’ll be finished paying loans for college when my children marry rich and send a check in after I’ve died.
It was silently accepted by us that we had no choice in how our lives were playing out. We choked down the chicken, we vacuumed the master bedroom, we moved all over the continental United States. Our rebellion was adorable at worst. What we lacked in malice we more than made up for in charm, a fair trade in the world of vendetta. The target was the recipe for Chicken With Curried Dates, treasured by only two living people: Martha Stewart and our mother. The Chicken was the sort of meal that stuck in your back molars for days, a memento from white American women dabbling in cuisine from, I’m convinced, imaginary Middle Eastern countries. It sat heavy and stewing like uranium on a plate, the Dates like canker sores.
We were always assigned to pack the books, sweltering in the living room under the pretense of help from a box fan in the window. Upon discovery of the cook books, production ceased as we scoured them for evidence of Curry. We then took the recipes, stacked them neatly, and taped them to the underbelly of the bottom shelf in the linen closet to be left forever.
I always told myself that I’d bring my sisters back to each house we’d scarred with recipes as a reminder, in our later years, of survival.
DAY 2
Men
Nick Perfect had this scar tracing his chin like Indiana Jones. I used to pretend that he’d gotten it (knife fight, alley) protecting the honor of a kitten or something. He played guitar in a worship music band that played at my church sometimes. I worshipped feverishly. There were a few things keeping us apart. He was a senior in college, I was a freshman in high school. He had a girlfriend. He moved to Russia. You know. Some things.
Tall Aran was the biggest heartthrob of South River High School Theater Company. I realize that the qualifier doesn’t do much in his favor, but it was a really good high school. I remember one month when he grew muttonchops. He’d swagger into the auditorium, cheeks a-fuzz, and the sophomores would swoon over their props. I knew it wouldn’t work when he started dating a girl who smoked a lot of pot and wore fishnet stockings every day.
Joe the Cook agreed to be my prom date. We had spent a year and a half working up to that moment. Flirtation was manifested in flung food through the kitchen of Friendly’s while he let tickets build up on the line and I forgot to chop lemons for my ice teas. The connection was solidified over a hose skirmish in the walk-in fridge. Later, after prom, we were standing stranded on the side of a country road beside an immobile car when the Local Riffraff drove past and egged us. It was a great metaphor for how the entire evening had gone, and I was reminded of karma and the time Joe and I had snuck out the back of Friendly’s to hurl eggs at the bank across the parking lot. He wiped my eggy left shoulder with a Kleenex, and I knew we were toast.
DAY 3
Self-Help
I am trying to be better.
I am trying to curse less and floss more and run in the afternoons and not sleep through class either in my bed or in my chair and paint more frequently and join a farmer co-op and buy organic and read my Bible ever and memorize a verse or two and think before I speak and sing the harmony line and read all of the directions before operating power tools or heavy machinery or the GREs and think better of humanity and smile at strangers and be good to my friends and carry mace in the dangerous bits of town and be time efficient and be courteous and dance in the street when cars aren’t coming and look both ways when they are and be terrific and life-of-the-party-y and clean the mug when I’ve finished my tea and clean the mugs I find left on the coffee table and go to bed on time and stay up late and have a mind like a diamond and share my secrets and gossip less and send real-live letters and listen patiently to my housemates as they spill boring problems over me and spill my boring problems over my roommates and clip my toenails and avoid identity theft and graduate college on time and hug thirteen people a day for mental health and worry less about going crazy and be an organ donor and use the hippest font and sound my barbarian yawp on the rooftops and give all the extra away and finish my homework on time and believe in God as much as I did earlier this week and wear clean socks only and smile and breathe and be Liz and hope for improvement.
Results are pending on how well I’m doing.
DAY 4
Leaving
Do you know how it is when you’re shopping in the grocery store and you hum along to the song that’s playing somewhere overhead (you say that because you have never really learned the name of that thing) and as you hum along, the song is cut off by Margie who needs Assistance With A Clean Up In The Olive Aisle (but the song is still in your head) and when the song resumes (because Margie no longer needs help) you are on the same word in your head as on the radio?
I know how that is.
Life is far enough along at this point for me to know that it’s not kidding. It seems pretty set in continuing on with or without my breath caught up. My dad says things like, “People don’t change after college. They’ve become who they’ll be.” I take a lot of comfort in that, thinking of beautiful people that have moved me, even though I think he was complaining about the fact that his college roommate still owed him money. I’m having a hard time believing life can be any sweeter than you’ve made it already. I’m hoping this is like an interruption as we clean up things in different aisles, but always with the song stuck in our ears. I worry that you’ll think anything less than that I’m a different person because of who you are.
I heard mom on the phone saying, “Yeah. You’ll all be dissipating. It’s kind of sad actually.” Mom has a way of making the end of the world seem like a zit.
DAY 5
Myself
I talk a lot. Everywhere I go, people tell me, “Geez, you sure talk a lot.” And it’s true. You know that moment in the movie theater when the lights go down and the din evaporates all in an instant except for that poor unfortunate soul who is One Millionth Of A Second Late and who happens to be knee-deep into telling a story about sperm banks? I’m that soul. There’s something panicked within me, jolting to get out, and as any accommodating person must, I let it. I’ve cultivated a rich history of clumsy, loud moments.
Till middle school though, I kept my cards close and wore ambivalence like a warm blanket. Once when playing a board game with my family (called “Therapy”, which should have told us how poor a choice it was for us to have made for a Friday night), my father was made to point out the player he knew the least about. He pointed, and I wept. And now, in my post-mousy years, people think that that part of me is one more punch line. I’m glad I’m not like I’m not. I haven’t always been that way, but when I was what I wasn’t, it was a real drag. But sometimes I feel like a character with too many lines to say, too many scenes to act, and sometimes I wish I were watching Little House on the Prairie with a mug of vodka.
I don’t expect to have gotten to the end of my list of things to say when I keel over in the Olive Aisle at the grocery store. And that’s okay. I say boring things.
DAY 6
Books
Eileen Laribee’s face folds in on itself beneath the nose. She keeps the line of her mouth long and bent; both ends worming over a paper cheek. It’s a beak that scowls and scolds. She’s been in central New York too long, and her vowels and hopes have flattened thin like pancakes. Most people in Camden, New York, know the name Laribee. It fades and yellows on the side of semi- trucks snaking over Route 1 bringing wire and electricians to brown businesses in snowy towns. The niche she has carved in the snow has nothing at all to do with anything more than the fact that she has always been there. Central New York has always been a reminder to me that I am part of a small group of people that have escaped.
My father is the only of his family to shoulder a canvas bag into a dorm room and to later scrape nickels together to buy books. He then went on to more dorm rooms and more books, keeping all of them stacked on cinder blocks until he finally stopped toting them back and forth from Camden to Ossining. Ossining won him at last, and he bought his first pair of bookshelves. Books were the evidence of his betrayal. They meant that he was unwilling to stick it out in the factory back home. Green shag carpet was not enough for him, nor the crumbled fried onions on green beans. Instead, he chose the box of a U-Haul to truck himself away from Central New York toward the spine of a book and later, a wife.
The U-Haul has remained a theme in his life, and later as his children, we learned to pack his books into a conveyor line of brown boxes.
DAY 7
Bits of Paper
My house burned down the year I entered fourth grade and fell in love with Paul Balzano and began to realize that my sister Rachel was prettier than the rest of us. At this point in my life I’m over all of those things, but the house-burning is still a probable threat. I have nearly laminated my room with tiny, unimportant, flammable squares of paper. They hang off walls and cling to sides of dressers, stick to my roommate’s forehead, etc. Above my desk a ticket stub for the American Museum of Natural History slices a postcard of Lillian Hellman’s gin-and-tonic-ed face in half, right through her forehead. Behind that spills out a card reading, “every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers ‘grow, grow.’” The whole thing together looks like I was undecided on whether to decorate classily or kitschily and so did both (a black and white photo taped to the rim of my computer is right above a Banana Walnut sticker).
I love these. I reckon I collect to remember that anything at all can continue to be important, that a square of words can help me remember who I am or was or want to be. A snapshot of my final moments would likely display me trapped and choking inside a house spilling over a library of paper, my fingertips disappearing beneath stacks of post-its with song lyrics scribbled in the corners.
A picture of my sisters and me as children (wearing polka-dotted swimmies and squinting into the sun) together with a tea bag wrapper and a note from Mandy Hoffman is skewered through a bulletin board. Beside that kebab, John Lennon stretches his arms like sonorous eels over a sound system, his mop-headed son looking on with a thumbtack grazing his left nostril. If these weren’t displayed like Ziggurats, I’d forget them. And that’s reason enough to buy thumbtacks.
Liz Laribee is a recent graduate of Messiah College with a BA in English and an emphasis on creative writing. She has published pieces in several journals including Georgetown Review, The Cedarville Review, and Minnemingo Review. Liz is a member of the Sycamore House, an intentional community in Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Cathedral in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
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