Mother was from money; the acerbic, boozy kind that gnaws away a child’s trust. Father was square and hefty, determined as the houses he never stopped building her. That’s what mom required: good bones and shelter from the wind to keep her hair intact. His hospitable, rowdy family added a newlywed suite to their rambling ranch-style house. Mom dissolved her bloodline in the boiling dumpling water of their Eastern European fare, an expert in omissionist history. Then I came, too soon and couldn’t be dissolved. An inedible dumpling. A flicker in my grandmother’s kaleidoscope. A nail in my mother’s tire. A blueprint in my father’s hand.
Scrawny, wanting, and too vocal. My reluctant mother-of-one, was pregnant with my brother only a few months after I came untimely-forth. By looks, I added insult to injury. The formula milk-efforts used to quell me caused knobby hives in grotesque lumps. My eyes—too close together— did not hold still. My chin disappeared into my teeth. I bloated, but would not dissolve. I was heavy and mute, clunky as an heirloom kept for duty’s sake, in the way and causing a plethora of stubbed toes. When baby-fat reapportioned with ambulation, sharpness answered in rage. A permanent Old World angularity that I later cherished as proof I was from somewhere else far, far away.
My father’s friends were ever-present, addled with hammers and wires. I napped on a towel and concrete floors, counting the exposed beams of each ramshackle. The underneath, the inscapes, preferring anything underside and incomplete: lean-to mysteries, fill-in-the-blank planks. Befriending nooks, building imaginary nests there. Walls as story prompts. They kept my pictures and backwards letters on their lanky boards forever, lullabied me with wind and deluge and whispery hums, jolting me awake with live-wires.
If life is without the paced linearity of story, it’s like the houses my father built with his own hands. The kind with ever-altering plans, a willingness to erase and redraw the lines. He made space for us. Chose a plot of land for its forestry or the benign creek snuggling up to its edges. Never mind the dangers once it rained, the sediment’s viability for stable plumbing, or forest fires sure to strike. The consummate choice was the right-now romantic. The reason you marry. Why you stay when the chimney blows.
Thew chimneys blew. And up from soot and sawdust, I ascended; a grimy phoenix with a half-wing.