(no subject)
i was reading a book just now and it reminded me of something. and got me thinking on how sometimes you know things without knowing them.
two and some fraction years after my parents divorced, my mum was effectively bankrupt and couldn't pay the mortgage on our house. and was, coincidentally enough, engaged anyhow, so it seemed both prudent and respectful to leave the unaffordable house of a previous unhappy marriage and start fresh in a smaller house that wasn't quite as demanding in terms of shoes to fill. my mum and my then-future step-father looked for a new house, found our present one, did those things that house buying usually entails, and got it all settled; the only problem was that we had to be out of our brown house a few months before we could take over our white house, and had no place to go in the mean time. we tried tom's apartment near park avenue for two weeks, but mattresses on the floor just didn't cut it, and plus his lease was up and he didn't want to renew. so, in short. we borrowed the old house of a friend of the family who'd moved somewhere else but hadn't sold it yet, and lived for a month or maybe two on the outskirts of irondequoit, and drove to park road elementary school in half an hour every morning, and back again every afternoon, and raised a family of pet mice and traumatized my bird, with the uprootingness of the move and all, to the extent that he still can't be around me without hissing and pecking and making me feel like i let him down as only a ten-year-old who used to love but was a little too distracted to love anymore can do.
we had neighbors. there was a girl about rachel's age, possibly named andrea, and she and rachel got on famously and played with her cats and ran around a garden. said garden had grape hyacinths, and it was through the neighborly girl that i learned how to stick the individual flowers, which smelled convincingly like grape soda but didn't, unfortunately, taste like it, up my nose, and then shoot them out with force enough to make robin laugh. there were also lily of the valleys all down one side of the garage, and they smelled like bubble bath my mum used to have in the old house, and reminded me of the cupboard in the bathroom where we used to keep our toothbrushes. the hyacinths and the lilies were just about the only beautiful bits that that house had to offer. andrea or whatever her name was had a brother whose name completely escapes me, and it's him i remembered ten minutes ago.
near the end of our stay, the story goes, my mum also finished her pregnancy. i don't suppose she did it by choice, so i guess finished is the definite wrong word. but that's basically the measure of it. things didn't go so well, and on some early june day i found myself running over to the neighbors' and asking them to call 911, not really sure why but kind of scared of how my mum had shouted it at me as if i were doing something wrong, and then crying not because i understood the import of a 911 call and how it related to my mother and a baby but because of the look on andrea's mother's face like she'd totally understand if i were crying right then. i sat with my sisters and with andrea on her couch and watched that movie about beethoven the dog, and felt grave because that seemed like what was needed. i'm not sure how, but i later ended up on the stone step by her back door,and was sitting there trying to get my head around what was going on, when andrea's brother came out and sat next to me. i'm finally getting to my point. in retrospect, i'd expect a prepubescent boy, sitting next to a girl he didn't know very well, in a time of tension that wasn't fully explained, to be a little... awkward, if anything. self-conscious and stammering, at the very least. but i don't remember him being even remotely young, just then, he was just certain. i said out loud that the baby might die, and he gave me stats that he couldn't back up about babies in similar situations -- and what was the situation, exactly? -- and how they survived ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of the time, thanks to today's modern medicine. but he sounded like he knew what he was talking about, and more importantly he sounded like he wanted, with every little boyish bit of him that was capable of wanting something so unselfish and so simple, to know what he was talking about and to be able to say to me that it was going to be alright. and, remembering it today, the first thing that came to mind and the first thing that i knew, without question, was that that red-headed boy loved me. which may sound funny, now, and kind of conceited. but it was truth and it somehow got buried under other, more pertinent, truths; and suddenly it's out and i know it just like i know that it's cold now.
interestingish.
two and some fraction years after my parents divorced, my mum was effectively bankrupt and couldn't pay the mortgage on our house. and was, coincidentally enough, engaged anyhow, so it seemed both prudent and respectful to leave the unaffordable house of a previous unhappy marriage and start fresh in a smaller house that wasn't quite as demanding in terms of shoes to fill. my mum and my then-future step-father looked for a new house, found our present one, did those things that house buying usually entails, and got it all settled; the only problem was that we had to be out of our brown house a few months before we could take over our white house, and had no place to go in the mean time. we tried tom's apartment near park avenue for two weeks, but mattresses on the floor just didn't cut it, and plus his lease was up and he didn't want to renew. so, in short. we borrowed the old house of a friend of the family who'd moved somewhere else but hadn't sold it yet, and lived for a month or maybe two on the outskirts of irondequoit, and drove to park road elementary school in half an hour every morning, and back again every afternoon, and raised a family of pet mice and traumatized my bird, with the uprootingness of the move and all, to the extent that he still can't be around me without hissing and pecking and making me feel like i let him down as only a ten-year-old who used to love but was a little too distracted to love anymore can do.
we had neighbors. there was a girl about rachel's age, possibly named andrea, and she and rachel got on famously and played with her cats and ran around a garden. said garden had grape hyacinths, and it was through the neighborly girl that i learned how to stick the individual flowers, which smelled convincingly like grape soda but didn't, unfortunately, taste like it, up my nose, and then shoot them out with force enough to make robin laugh. there were also lily of the valleys all down one side of the garage, and they smelled like bubble bath my mum used to have in the old house, and reminded me of the cupboard in the bathroom where we used to keep our toothbrushes. the hyacinths and the lilies were just about the only beautiful bits that that house had to offer. andrea or whatever her name was had a brother whose name completely escapes me, and it's him i remembered ten minutes ago.
near the end of our stay, the story goes, my mum also finished her pregnancy. i don't suppose she did it by choice, so i guess finished is the definite wrong word. but that's basically the measure of it. things didn't go so well, and on some early june day i found myself running over to the neighbors' and asking them to call 911, not really sure why but kind of scared of how my mum had shouted it at me as if i were doing something wrong, and then crying not because i understood the import of a 911 call and how it related to my mother and a baby but because of the look on andrea's mother's face like she'd totally understand if i were crying right then. i sat with my sisters and with andrea on her couch and watched that movie about beethoven the dog, and felt grave because that seemed like what was needed. i'm not sure how, but i later ended up on the stone step by her back door,and was sitting there trying to get my head around what was going on, when andrea's brother came out and sat next to me. i'm finally getting to my point. in retrospect, i'd expect a prepubescent boy, sitting next to a girl he didn't know very well, in a time of tension that wasn't fully explained, to be a little... awkward, if anything. self-conscious and stammering, at the very least. but i don't remember him being even remotely young, just then, he was just certain. i said out loud that the baby might die, and he gave me stats that he couldn't back up about babies in similar situations -- and what was the situation, exactly? -- and how they survived ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of the time, thanks to today's modern medicine. but he sounded like he knew what he was talking about, and more importantly he sounded like he wanted, with every little boyish bit of him that was capable of wanting something so unselfish and so simple, to know what he was talking about and to be able to say to me that it was going to be alright. and, remembering it today, the first thing that came to mind and the first thing that i knew, without question, was that that red-headed boy loved me. which may sound funny, now, and kind of conceited. but it was truth and it somehow got buried under other, more pertinent, truths; and suddenly it's out and i know it just like i know that it's cold now.
interestingish.