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"Sick in the Backseat"
I FEEL SICK TODAY, and felt it yesterday too. Hell, I’ve been feeling sick ever since that moving day with my folks all those years ago, back when I was just that asshole kid. I still tell myself it’s the same old heatstroke I sometimes get, like the one I had that day at 11 years old—that day I was last lying in the backyard at my old house, hungover from all the dope I’d done the day before. But nope. It’s always the same old sting from what else happened that day. I remember my sweat soaking my T-shirt and stinging my squint as I was lying on the grass and waiting to leave, and mom saying how moving would “make it better.” And I remember not being up for “moving” then as much as it makes me sick just thinking back on it now, but I guess sometimes we all have to do things we don’t want to do, or else nothing gets better.
That day the screen door had snapped open when mom called to me from the threshold, but I just lay out there stiffened in the grass and gripping a mowed-over dandelion in my kid fist. That was it, the last time I’d ever lie in that backyard.
I remember how I was whispering to the sun. “Why’d he do it? Why’d I let him do it?”
“We gotta get going Jared,” mom called to me.
“As if,” was my answer.
The rays had been too much so I turned my gaze against them to inspect my pale, boney, kid arms outstretched in the grass for a moment. The next-door clothes still swayed on the lines and the concrete down by the house still rippled the air there like a desert scene. At that high noon hour it seemed the sun could’ve made anyone feel like an uprooted weed lying on the lawn like I was, even in the athletic shorts and tube socks.
So I rolled my head straight again and squinted into the sky beyond the clotheslines and cables caging me in beneath it. The old posts for the clotheslines stood out against the blue like crosses with the telephone poles that crisscrossed the neighborhood grid. Up there the broken-down flat that peered over me was gutted. The upstairs had been cleared for months and the basement where we lived, only an hour, and now we were just waiting for dad to come back with the car. Long time coming or not, I didn’t care. The last thing I wanted to do that day was leave my life and hood behind for good but guessed any day would’ve been as bad. There’d be no escaping this.
“Your dad’s waiting,” mom said. I hated how she always called him that—not “dad’s waiting” but “your dad.”
I said nothing. In truth I was too woozy to move, too in pain to walk or sit or do anything but just lay there. I could still feel the punctures and the dull aches in my muscles. I could still feel the electric touch of his hands on me. I really wanted to throw up, just trying to catch my breath, but the last thing I wanted was anyone finding out about how sick I was, or why. Ain’t it funny that over forty years later I’d come to write all about it here like this? Everyone has to find time to heal. The pain that day went away, yes, but the silence has been worse.
Soon mom was dragging her feet over to where I was. She hoisted me up by the arm to get me to get a move on and the grass I gripped in my fists ripped from the ground when I rose. I locked my eyes again once standing and felt her tug my body dizzy through the 80-degree heat. In the blackness under my eyelids I watched the washes of tan light burn out dark space as she walked me around the house. And just like that, all that was me up to then was left back in that backyard with the grass and the memories of the dandelions my sore ass was sitting on. From then on a new me embarked on the world—a sick me.
And so it was the sick me at 11 years old who first opened his eyes on that long ago hot summer day to climb into his dad’s old precious hatchback where the last of his things were packed. I remember how there was barely enough room for me between the duct-taped boxes, but I still squeezed my thin, boney body in. I remember trying to ignore home retreating off the side when we pulled out and must’ve held the seatbelt like the bar of a tilt-o-hurl when we started rolling. Dad was going to be driving me the whole way that time, and for the first time. My sweat tingled on my skin in his air conditioning.
Outside the phone lines surged and broke like waves hanging from each of those cross-beamed poles as we rode along, and yet the sweet smell of the fresh-clipped grass still twitched in my nose from the yard. Its scent was stronger there than when I was out in it. How funny. It set me forever on the thorn put in me the day before, something I tried not to think about after that—the last day spent with Broder in the grass, and how “earthy” (manly) he used to smell, like the grass. I tried to put it behind me with everything else and after an hour into the drive, I had finally gone under, fast asleep in the backseat. That was the day we moved, but even after that I felt sick.
You really fixed this beganning up nicely. It has come a long way.
ReplyDeleteI have to say much to my relief, I rolled each edit over and over in my head so many times wondering how, and when it would read with a desired cohesion. I like it!