Diamonds and Dust Bunnies
Patricia Harney
Word Count 1452
I sniffed a briny breeze that hinted of urine when I stepped out of the train onto the platform. The stench was worse than my cat’s occasional protest. This was the acrid perfume of a man. There’s no toilet up here, so people probably pee in the waiting area. I tried not to trip over the empty gin nips that littered the steps to the street on my way down. To the left of the parking lot behind the station, I saw the American Legion Hall where my brother tends bar. The shop where I bought my magenta-and-tulle prom dress still stood on the corner of the block— Bridal Reflections, Established in 1973. The train ride from midtown Manhattan to the home where I grew up on Long Island seemed like a long decrescendo. The roar of the city’s excitement lost steam with each mile and fell at my stop with a sigh.
My eighty-three year old mother and fifty-nine year old brother still live in our home on the Avenue. My mother’s been there for over six decades and insists she’ll live nowhere else. Last week, she broke her hand. The little one-level ranch house shouldn’t be hard for her to navigate. But she’s hard-headed and does all of the chores herself, taking out garbage, cleaning the lint screen in the dryer down in the basement each day. Sometimes, she yells at my brother to help.
He’s lived in the basement for the last twenty-five years. My father made a room there in the ‘70s when we were kids, hanging sheetrock while we watched from our perch on the stairs, then paneling walls and laying tile on the cement floor. Plaid, colonial-style sofas and chairs furnished the room. A plastic-and-electric fireplace was affixed to a wall. On Christmas, we’d watch the black grill glow red while the Yule Log flickered on the T.V. My brother moved back home around 1999 after his stint in the Marines. That’s when he kept his feces in a shoebox, hoping to catch the worms he was sure lived inside him. My father was still alive then. He walked downstairs one morning and asked, “What’s that smell?”
My brother pointed to the cardboard container on the floor next to his bed.
“Keep that in the shed,” my father told him.
“Your dad’s so accepting!” A friend of mine quipped when I told her what happened.
I was visiting my parents around that time, and my brother took me out to the shed to show me his project. He grabbed a package from the shelf, pulled a box from a clear plastic bag, then unraveled brown paper sheets that covered the cardboard.
What’s with all the layers of wrapping, I wondered.
“Why do you keep it?” I asked him.
“I want to meet them. I need to see their f*&king faces.” He laughed as he wrapped the package again.
***
This is my family. I tried getting away. I must have thought that attending an Ivy-league university would help. Or becoming a psychologist and medical school professor. I didn’t know then that when we leave home, it hitches a ride like that stray piece of toilet tissue we didn’t know was stuck to our shoe.
I settled in Boston to begin my career. When I met my first clinical supervisors at the hospital, they asked where I grew up.
“Long Island,” I said.
“Which shore?” they responded.
Which shore?! I asked myself. People only ask that if they’re from the North Shore, Long Island’s Gold Coast.
A week later, I met another doctor-in-training. She also asked where I grew up. After I answered, she said that she was from the same train line. Whenever I met someone from my part of Long Island, they recited the sequence of rail stations with small but discernible pride that lozenged the catch in their throats. Wantagh, Seaford, Massapequa. Massapequa Park, Amityville, Copiague.
My family life hadn’t been rough like my friend’s. Our fathers were both alcoholic, but hers was often violent. Mine mostly kept to himself when drinking, although sometimes he’d pass out before bed in front of the T.V. or in the garden out back. Our neighborhood was chaotic but close knit. Six families bought plots in the same row at the cemetery, so they’ll remain neighbors eternally. When I was young, we played in the sump, a block-long, fenced hole in the ground into which street sewers drained. My first kiss happened there, a glimmer of pubertal romance in a dank cement tunnel.
There were and still are a few strange sights around town. A few years ago, I noticed kids squealing after a black, bristly boar they chased across their front lawn. Growing up, we had a veritable haunted house amidst all the ranches and split levels. That rarely seen family had turned their mother-daughter dormer into a turret. A wrought iron fence surrounded their yard, and a black metal Victorian carriage, years later a hearse, sat in the driveway. Blood-colored light spilled from bulbs on the porch. Velvet drapes covered the windows. A few miles away, another house placed a lamp in their front picture window, its base made from a mannequin leg covered with fish-net stockings, a stiletto-heeled shoe on the foot. A lampshade was screwed into the thigh.
I once heard a joke that everything bad from the city gets dumped on Long Island to rot.
I was the kid who poured over the New York Times Sunday Magazine imagining a different life for myself. My parents nursed my ambition at the same time they wanted me to remember my place. One Christmas, I gave them a list of thirty books I wanted to read and asked them to choose some for me. The pile of presents seemed never ending that year, as my father declared, “Any kid that wants books will get every one.” That holiday was better than the one before that, when my mom gave my dad a six pack of Loewenbrau because he’d been sober for a full year. They both thought he’d proven he wasn’t an alcoholic.
My dad was better than my mom at giving gifts. I was eleven when my favorite uncle was getting married to a thin, tall blonde-haired nun he’d met when he was a priest. “Any girl going to her first wedding should have a pair of diamond studs,” my dad told me. He’d gotten a bargain in the city’s diamond district. Novels and gems drew a straight line to my heart, but the diamonds may have made me feel a little too special. I couldn’t bring myself to wear them, or if I did, I’d forget to put them away. I was twelve the last time I had them, stretched out on a blanket on the shore at Jones Beach. I suddenly remembered they were still in my ears so I took them out in case they’d come loose while I dove under the waves in the ocean. They must have fallen out of the wicker beach bag I’d placed them in, lost in the sparkle of sand that summer afternoon.
By then, I had a habit of losing the small jewels I’d been given.
Like the 14 karat gold cross I got for my confirmation. Fourteen karats! I was afraid to shower or sleep with it on, so I unclasped it each night, until that morning I couldn’t find where I’d placed it. Days later, distraught, I sat in my bedroom with the bus schedule in hand, planning to jump in front of the No. 55 at the next hour, thinking I didn't deserve to live.
But somehow I’d made it, maybe through sheer force of fear. Fear of death, fear of life. Eventually, I left home but kept coming back.
After my mother broke her hand, all kinds of reflections rushed through my mind, such as the perpetual smell of overripe turnips wafting from the stairwell to the basement that I could never decide whether I hated or loved. Or my mom’s dogged insistence that she’d never leave home. Her determination that I set the world on fire but always remember where I’m from. She called me into her bedroom.
“I have something to give you,” she said, as she bent down by her bed and slipped her hand under the mattress as dust bunnies scrambled. What’s hidden in the package this time, I worried.
She unfolded some tissues and pulled out a diamond-strand bracelet that snaked through her fingers.
“You should have this now,” she said as she held out her hand.
There were just enough stones to clasp securely over my wrist. I’d never lose this piece of home.
Patricia is a writer, psychologist and musician in the Boston area. I've published in popular and academic outlets, including in Slate, WBUR's CommonHealth Blog, and Pandemic Diaries. I'm a graduate of Grub Street-Boston's Memoir Incubator, and am at work on a memoir, Grief in the Margins.