This Is Not Your City Read online

  Hanna will be in remission by the next fall, but her parents will already have taken her out of Forsythe Junior High and placed her in a private school. I will not know when the cancer comes back. I will have discovered how easy it is to never see someone, even an eight-houses-down-someone, if you do not wish to see each other. When she passes away, my mother will find out from a newspaper obituary. She will come up to my bedroom, will still be deciding whether to tell me herself or just show me the paper. She will hand it to me and say, “There’s bad news, honey.”

  It will be my first funeral, and my mother and I will go shopping for black clothing together. As we leave the mall I will thank her for paying, like she’s bought me birthday gifts or new back-to-school clothes, and then to fill the silence I will say something about JV field hockey, and then my mother will drop the shopping bags in the middle of the parking lot and hold me tighter than she ever has or ever will again. At the funeral I will be so worried about avoiding Mr. and Mrs. Khoury and their sons that I won’t have time to cry.

  At the wedding Cal’s mother will squint at me and ask if I’m really Unitarian, or just needed a cheap place for the wedding. I will tell her that I’m pagan, that I make burnt offerings to forest demons in the Bird Hills Nature Preserve. She won’t laugh. Cal and I will go to Toronto for the honeymoon and three and a half years later the doctor will tell us to get ready for twins, girls. I will be terrified. It seems like a sign. It seems like a coin has already been flipped, and we will spend years waiting for it to fall. I will stare at my daughters in matching pajamas and wonder which one Ogan Veen will ask for. Which one he’ll try to take. If he will give them ten years, if he will come calling sooner.

  One winter the twins, bored, will unearth old photos in the basement: their baby pictures, our wedding, school portraits of Cal and snapshots of my elementary school birthday parties. The year I turned ten there was no one I wanted to invite except Hanna, no one I thought would come if I asked. In the picture there is a cake with ten candles and only two girls grinning above it—they look as if they should be lonely but are somehow perfectly happy. Madison will ask me who the dark-haired girl is, and I will get a look on my face that will make Sophie elbow her sister into silence. She is the perceptive one, I will think, the one who reads people. And then I will think, please no, not her. And then I will think, please no, I didn’t mean the other one.

  On a July morning the summer before the girls begin kindergarten I will ask them to get dressed in their swimsuits, pull old shorts and T-shirts on over. I will pack a bag with beach towels and dry clothes, and they will ask which city pool we’re going to. Wait and see, I will say, and we will all climb into the car. I will drive down the township road that skirts the edge of Bird Hills Nature Preserve; it will be lined with condos but still unpaved. I will park at the lot downriver from the Barton Dam, and we will climb the wooden steps up to the calm pond above the pump station. We will leave the trail to slide down the embankment toward the water. The shore is reedy, the ground spongy with black, rank mud. We will stand ankle deep in the water, and Sophie will yelp when her feet start to sink. I will suggest a short swim, and the girls will look at me with horror. The water will smell warm and spongy and tattered curtains of algae will stroke our toes. Madison will hold her nose, and in the end, I have to push them in. It will be only a moment, I promise, a slice of a second, that I hold them under. And then I will be tugging at their hair and the backs of their T-shirts and wrestling us all into a heap on the grass above the reeds, and a woman on a bicycle will be standing on the embankment trail shouting at me that the pond is no place for swimming. The water isn’t clean, she yells. She talks about nitrogen, phosphorus. I’m sorry, I will say. I didn’t realize. It’s such a hot day, the girls were so hot. They asked to go wading and slipped. My daughters will not contradict me, and the bicycle woman will leave, and I will bundle them into towels, warm and dry. At home we will all stand under the shower, all of us crowded together, and then eat ice cream in the backyard. I will ask Madison if she heard anything underwater, a gnashing of teeth, a creature with eyes like an oil slick and incisors like bread knives, long and serrated. I will tell Sophie that Ogan Veen has a laugh like I-94 and a stink like algae. I will tell her that I have introduced them now, the three of them, Madison and Sophie and Mr. Veen, and if they ever meet him they must run away. They must tell him that they are princesses, that they are mine, that I will protect them in the only ways I know how.

  Cal will get home from work and while I cook dinner the girls will tell him what I did and Cal will shout and I will try to explain myself and Cal will misunderstand and talk to his parents about having the girls baptized at First Methodist. I won’t know how to tell him that that won’t help, that it isn’t what I meant. I won’t know how to tell him that I am still bracing for a day when Sophie complains of a headache that turns out to be something more, when Madison reels dizzily in gym class and the teacher sends her home with a concerned note. When a doctor has something to tell me he asks me to sit down to hear. I will be trying not to think about the possibility of a day when I will drive to the dam again, climb the stairs to Barton Pond and wade in. I will walk until I can hear the pressing silence of the water, the rushing, vacuous weight of it. I will say, “Mr. Veen, do you remember me?” I will say, “Mr. Veen, I once ruled a kingdom and left traps for you in the woods. Don’t you want your revenge?” I will say, “Mr. Veen, you are an ogre and a thief and the patron saint of Julys, of summer Sundays, of miracles.” I will say, “Mr. Veen, do not take my children.”

  And if he asks, and if I think it will help, and if I think it is truly what I have to do, we will be swimming and it will be July and we are a miraculous age. We are in Zolaria, we are children, our bodies are honest children’s bodies. We are narrow and quick and we still fit in all our hiding places, the sun-wet hollows and the flowers in pink and purple and turquoise, all the damp colors of girlhood. We are riding our space dolphins, and either we can breathe the water of Zolaria or we are no longer breathing and it is July and we are a miraculous age and we are ten.

  It Looks Like This

  Mrs. Holtz:

  I know this was a favor, like extra-extra credit, but if you give anyone else this assignment, maybe you could just let them retake the Hamlet midterm? You said you wanted to make this easy for me, that all I had to do was write a long paper about my life, about my mom and my sister and my friends, about where I live and what I do, and you’d give me credit for completing your English class. I really appreciate it, but I thought I should tell you that this wasn’t all that easy. Not knowing what to say about Hamlet is one thing, but this was embarrassing, you telling me to just write what I know and me still not knowing how to go about it. I tried to use topic sentences. You said you’d show the paper around if I did a good job, try to talk my other teachers into giving me credit for their classes the semester I left, so I tried to put some math and science and stuff in for them. Fifteen to twenty pages is a lot, so I used some pictures. I hope that’s okay. This was really hard for me, for a lot of reasons.

  I. This is where I live:

  In the paper the other day, some guy said, “Based primarily on the strength of local tourism, Ohio’s rural communities are sinking or swimming.” My mom’s the one who read it out to me, and she said, “Sinking or swimming? This fucking town was built underwater.” I hope it’s okay to put that. My mom’s pretty foul-mouthed. She’s been swearing more the sicker she gets. Now that she can’t really manage the stairs, she’s pretty obscene. What’s happening to her is obscene, she says.

  Maybe you could show this first part to Mrs. Steiner and Mr. Kincaid? My last semester I was taking Geography and Civics. They might like to see that I use maps and that sometimes I follow what’s in the paper. I’m writing this at the library in Mount Vernon, and when the librarian asked what I was doing, I said I was writing a report, but with pictures. She said I had to cite some of them, like this: . That’s
where I got the maps from.

  II. This is my house:

  It’s on County Road 54, and it stands out more than you’d think it would because the neighbors are all Amish. The ones to the east of us have always been there, but the ones to the west just moved in from Pennsylvania because the land’s cheaper here. They cut off the electricity and dumped the kitchen appliances out in the yard. I’m tempted to ask if I can take the oven, because it looks newer than ours, but they’re all so unfriendly. Besides, I’m not sure how I’d haul it inside.

  It’s an old farmhouse, but we never did much with it apart from a kitchen garden, a few chickens. The roosters are sons-of-bitches, and that’s not what my mom says, that’s what I say, because I’m the one has to go into the yard to feed them and they’re trying to peck me to death. I have marks all up and down my legs. I’m looking forward to picking one out and eating it.

  We knew it was coming, with my mom, and I said she should pick upstairs or downstairs, so we’d be ready when she couldn’t go between anymore. I said if she picked downstairs we’d make do with the half-bath, but I was happy she picked Up. I have to help her wash now either way, but for a few months I could just get her settled in the tub and she could take care of herself. Now it’s harder.

  Since I mentioned them, here is a chicken:

  And here is a plant from the garden:

  I told my mom about your extra-credit idea, and she said to bring you tomatoes and zucchini from the garden when I bring this paper to you. I’ll bring the tomatoes if they’re ripe, but I’m embarrassed to bring the zucchini. Everybody’s got it coming out their ears this time of year and giving it to someone just makes it look like you’re trying to get rid of it. But I thought I should tell you that my mom said to bring you some, and that she said you’re being very generous and that I should make sure you know that I appreciate it.

  III. My best friends are Dana Linfield and Jess Berman. We sat in the back left corner, by the windows, in your American Lit class last year. They come by sometimes, but we don’t have the same things to talk about anymore, so we just talk about old stuff, which gets boring. Plus it’s hard for me to enjoy it when other people are at the house because I know that my mom’s always waiting for them to leave. Dana’s going to the Nazarene college in Vernon, and Jess answers the phone at a real estate office in Zanesville. Here they are:

  You wouldn’t know Elsa, and I don’t have a picture of her. I think we might be friends, but it’s hard to tell. I don’t think she’d say no to a picture if I asked, because she’s not really backward, like she’d think a camera was going to steal her soul. I just don’t know how I’d ask her. Since I don’t have a picture of her, here is one of her quilts:

  I met her at the fabric store in Danville. Her husband brought her in their buggy. Elsa and I were inside looking out to the street when he tied their horse to a fire hydrant. I could hear her sigh and it made me like her. She’s only a little older than I am, I think, but she has two kids. She does beautiful work. The fabric store always had some traditional pieces on display, but I hadn’t realized they were hers until that day. She walked up to the counter and started unwrapping a puffy package, cut-up brown paper grocery bags tied with twine. It was just a Churn Dash, queen-sized, but done tiny, all by hand, the littlest pieces an inch square. “God,” I said. “You’ll go blind,” which on one hand was an all-wrong thing to say to an Amish person, but on the other hand, you learn growing up around here that the Amish don’t talk to anybody else anyway, so in a way it doesn’t matter what you say to them. Elsa spoke to me, though. “Haven’t yet,” she said. “Don’t intend to.”

  “I’ve had people asking after you,” Mrs. Carpenter said. She runs the fabric store, and for a moment I thought she was talking to me, but it was to Elsa. “Up from Columbus for the day, antiquing. One of them owns a gallery on the Short North.”

  Elsa didn’t say anything, just looked at Mrs. Carpenter. The look reminded me of how as a kid all the Amish on market days made me sad, because you could see how easily they smiled at each other but never at you, and I didn’t understand what would be so wrong with me that I couldn’t be smiled at.

  “They asked who had done the Ohio Star in the window, and the Bear’s Paw and the Trip-Around-the-World up on the wall. They asked me to take them down and match the stitching against the yardstick on the cutting table. Ten stitches per inch, they said, you don’t see that much anymore. Is the whole thing by hand, they asked. And I said, absolutely, Elsa Beiler’s Old Order, a real craftswoman. Lady said she’d be happy to carry pieces like these, and she knew someone with a traditional furniture shop in Olentangy who’s looking for pieces to drape on bench backs, that kind of thing. She said you should bring some work by, since there was no way to call you.”

  “Wouldn’t be much of any way for me to bring things by, either,” Elsa said.

  “Do you know anyone who could give you a ride?”

  “I’d do it,” I said. “I could take you.”

  They both looked at me. “Do I know you?” Elsa asked.

  “No.”

  “Then I would pay you,” she said, after a few moments thinking about it. “It would be a help.”

  “I’d be happy to,” I said, and I was, maybe because she wore black sneakers with her navy blue dress, or because she spoke to me, or because it was a thing I could do that would get me out of the house, and after eighteen years growing up around people who wouldn’t speak to me, I thought it would be nice to have one in my car for a while to talk to. We picked a day and a time, and she gave me directions to her farm, and when I got there it looked just like she’d said. It looked like this:

  Every three weeks I drive to her farm to pick her up. I drive to the house, and she comes down the porch steps. She’s always waiting on the porch. She’s never had me inside and it keeps me uncertain if we’re friends, or just friendly with each other. I turn the car around, then it’s fifteen miles to the Interstate, forty minutes on 71 to this fancy Amish furniture shop in Olentangy, another half hour to the gallery in the city. People stare at her in Columbus, at her long dress and her hair pulled back hard under her bonnet, and I forget that I shouldn’t be startled by it.

  Elsa always has at least one new piece for each place, crib quilts and wall-hangings, small pieces to fill demand. Full-size bed quilts take too long. Still, she must spend hours every day away from the kitchen, or her children, or the garden, or whatever else she’s responsible for, to produce that much work. I wonder what her husband thinks, what the other women think. In the car she talks about how in the autumn her hands are quick with a certain light, how they shake with the work inside them, and the only way she’s found to calm them is to choose colors, cut pieces, load stitches on the needle. When she talks that way, it’s the only time I feel sorry for her, but then I’m sorrier because it makes me happy to know that that’s something I have that she doesn’t, that if I ever wanted or found the time I could draw or dance or listen to music or just drive too fast with my window open and Elsa can’t do any of those things. I didn’t think she could have any music, either, until she told me she met her husband singing.

  “It’s just instruments we can’t play,” she said. “The teenagers have sings on Sunday evenings.”

  “Sing something for me,” I told her.

  “They’re all hymns.”

  “Sing one anyway.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m married now. I can’t sing anymore.”

  “That’s sad,” I said.

  “Why? The sings are for courting.”

  “It’s sad you had to stop.”

  “Why should I care what makes you sad?” she said.

  The more I think about it, the more I think that Elsa won’t let us be friends after all, and that’s one more thing that makes me sad so then I stop thinking about it.

  IV. I have a job. I make quilts too, like Elsa, but they’re not as good:

  If I sold
this one as my work, handquilted at four to five irregular stitches per inch, some of the angles on the quilt top crooked and a few of the seams lumpy, it might bring $250 at Buried Treasures, in Martinsberg, $300 if it sold at Annie’s Antiques, in Jelloway. $325 at the Treasure Mart in Danville. I’m not nearly as good as Elsa, and I’m definitely not Amish, which doesn’t help in the quilt business. $250 minus $60 for fabrics, batting, and thread, divided by 150 hours of work, equals $1.27 per hour. This is why I don’t sell my quilts as made by me.