He had already turned his attention away to the in-flight magazine. As I sat there with my weeping, I thought it might be a mistake to expect to come away with an understanding of what happened. It might be a trap. I prepared myself to be satisfied with uncertainty even though I hated things that were uncertain or ambiguous. I disliked clouds, fog, certain types of philosophy, little children, and poetry. I preferred the concrete, the absolute, fiction and nonfiction. Because life is not poetry; life resembles fiction, life resembles the writing of the Greek tragedians, those foundational thinkers!
You’re not flexible enough, my adoptive father once told me. Life is going to be very difficult for you, Helen, unless you learn to adapt to changes. Be flexible. Be a better person. Be a better daughter.
The stewardess gestured at me. Ma’am, seats in upright position.
Everyone always called me ma’am for some reason.
I’m thirty-two, I said under my breath as I stuffed the soiled tissue into the seatback pocket.
Then I remembered that I packed my headphones, the noise-canceling type. I took them out; I liked to use them as earplugs, even at my shared studio apartment, I wore them on nights when my roommate Julie had her boyfriend over, so I wouldn’t be forced to listen to their disgusting, noisy genitals smacking against each other. Someone gave them to me as a gift, or perhaps someone loaned them to me and forgot to ask for them back.
I stared out at the gray and brown flat grids laid out simply and locked together like pieces of a child’s puzzle, then I looked down at the lake, glass-smooth like a French bistro tabletop. I pictured my adoptive parents’ house, and for a moment, I pictured the black sweater’s arrival in a cardboard box, addressed to Helen Moran. It was with great pleasure that I pictured myself trying on the sweater, a perfect fit. Then I remembered I was going to my childhood home for a horrific reason. My eyes continued to water until the plane landed, and I took a taxi home.
I have always preferred not to pay too much attention to interstitial spaces like the space between landing and arriving, bland, forgettable spaces without texture, oatmeal spaces. I knew the ride home would take twenty minutes. During that interstitial space, the sky became darker and darker as if someone were slowly placing a black blanket over my eyes. My stomach trembled, saliva welled up inside my mouth, I swallowed it, I tried to trick myself into thinking I had just sipped a refreshing glass of spring water. A teacher said to do that. Instead of letting us go get a drink of water, she told us to think of a Swiss mountain stream and to swallow our saliva. The taxi crawled forward like a beetle through the suburbs, stopping and starting, stopping and starting, and I saw in my head the nunnery where all the nuns died and the priests took over, the pharmacy that housed a child-pornography ring, the bird sanctuary where a governmental agency collects the geese to feed to wolves.
It had been years since I had been to my childhood home to see my adoptive parents. It was by some unspoken agreement that as my adoptive parents and I became older we would come into contact less and less, although I couldn’t say for certain why that was. I didn’t even tell them I left Milwaukee until months after the fact. At the time it satisfied me to do that to them; to disappear for a while felt like getting some kind of revenge, because throughout the eighteen years I lived with them, they each on various occasions asked me to leave, to move out and find a new place to live. In the end, I suffered for my revenge, because when I moved to New York, unspeakable things happened to me.
Everything bad went around in a circle. Gray pocked streets and black skies filled my head like heavy stone tablets, causing me to feel a throbbing pulse near my left temple. In the pitch-black darkness, I felt the taxi coast down the hill of my childhood memories causing tears to come to my eyes, a physical descent that must have been buried deeply in my subconscious, and so we arrived at my adoptive parents’ house, the house of Morans.
I don’t want to be here any longer than you, and therefore I’m hoping my stay will be very brief, I said to the driver as I gave him two wrinkled twenties, twenties I grabbed from my roommate Julie’s desk.
I asked for change; when traveling it’s always useful to have a little cash. The taxi left and I stood for a while outside the house. I put away my headphones. It began to rain. In silence I walked around the backyard, through the oak trees and bushes as a few motion-detector lights switched on and swept across my lone figure at a delay. By the time I made my way to the front door, my coat and shoes and canvas suitcase were soaking wet.
I rang the bell and the door opened. I was greeted by two little astonished ghost-figures clinging to each other for dear life. Helen, my adoptive parents said, we weren’t expecting you! They were taken aback. No, it wasn’t entirely clear to anyone, not even to the two who had raised me, how I had ended up at the front doorstep of my childhood home in soaking wet clothes. They appeared to be shocked by my canvas suitcase. Instead of greeting me pleasantly, they were whispering to each other.
5