Secrets
Writers aren’t good at keeping secrets. No surprise, really. Excavating shame is what they do. One of Dorothy Parker’s best poems– “Razors pain you / Rivers are damp / Acids stain you / And drugs cause cramp / Guns aren’t lawful / Nooses give / Gas smells awful / You might as well live.”–was a direct reflection of her multiple suicide attempts. In this month’s issue, our writers poke around in the secrets they tried to keep.
Jungle Foot
Word Count 920
“No, love, it was polio. Your mother had polio. That’s why one leg was so much smaller than the other.”
I didn’t like to contradict my father’s cousin, Anne, but I had never heard.this story. It’s not something you can keep secret, especially someone like my mother, who told us plenty of other horrors from her childhood: her sister dying, her brother drowning, her father ending up in an insane asylum before he too died.
If she bothered to give her children the details of how she had to sleep with her dead sister’s corpse for one night, it seemed strange that she would fail to mention that she had polio which, from what I understand, would have required a substantial hospital stay, along with a lengthy rehabilitation.
Anne and I were having this chat because, after my mother’s death, I felt a need to pin down why she was so strange physically.
Aftermath of a Suicide
Word Count 1223
Remember how George would stop at the door, gather himself, stride in, and take over the room? It really impressed me when I was 18. He’d throw his head back, haloed with that dandelion fuzz, square his jimber-jaw. Bingo! We were his.
We were in school together, and afterward, he got his first job teaching psychology in a fancy college where rich kids went. He interviewed once and wowed the dean. But I guess the kids played him hell, all their little sorrows. Not that he talked about them. And I was busy with our boy, who wasn’t even two yet. Things snuck up on us.
George went quiet for months around his orals, and that silence lingered. They say your brain doesn’t gel till you’re about 30, and we were both a long way from 30. It was my birthday – my 22nd, he was 25 – and as he left the house to teach a class, I called out to him to stop at the A&P on his way home, bring us back a steak.
Secrets and Lies
Word Count 1559
Mom was uneasy with touch. Hugs were rare. She was like a bird grazing the tip of a tree branch. Her embraces were brief, tentative, and quickly over. Even into middle age, her hugs never lasted more than a few seconds.
She was a gifted actress who had been a promising off-Broadway ingenue. After she left New York, she went on to star in productions at The Cleveland Playhouse, where my parents worked in their mid-twenties. My father referred to her as “The poor man’s Greta Garbo.”
Mom’s forte was reading bedtime stories, which she performed rather than read.
Her rendition of “Charlotte’s Web” still rings in my ears, with different voices for Wilbur, Charlotte, and Templeton, the rat. To this day, I trap and release spiders in clear plastic containers with a lid made by cutting out the centers of two paper plates and taping them together so they will slide under the container leaving spiders unharmed.
Facade
Word Count 800
After nine years, I knew his face better than mine. I spend two minutes a day, tops, glimpsing myself: a quick check in the mirror to make sure the part's straight or a glance at my middle-aged reflection while flossing. But I never tired of looking at his face, unlined except for the eye creases that crinkled when he was happy. He wasn’t happy all that much, but not because of me.
Sometimes, I traced my fingers across his stubbled chin or down the wedge of his perfect nose. Sometimes, I curled my body next to his, pressed my lips against his cheek, inhaled his soapy scent. “I'm glad you're my fella,” I purred as creases puckered around his bottomless brown eyes.
Secrecy Won't Keep You Safe In The Long Run
Word Count 1269
I was born into a world of secrets. Everything that happened in my family was on the hush-hush. My father worked for mobsters, and my mother didn’t have friends. Instead, she had confidantes. I found their world of whispers and innuendo endlessly intriguing and even as a young child, managed to be around but not underfoot, perfecting my eavesdropping skills and reading body language.
My father’s family were all dead before I was born, but my mother’s father and her two siblings were around enough for me to pick up on their secrets. The principal family secret was that they were Jewish. Her father, a chemist employed by a company that famously did not employ Jews, lied to get a job he proudly held for thirty years. The family told anyone who asked that they were Unitarians, a convenient lie as there was no Unitarian church in that town and therefore no one to squeal on them. On Friday nights, they closed the curtains and pulled down the shades to hide their Shabbat candles. When my grandfather retired, he returned to being Jewish. My mother, who early on decided she didn’t believe in God or organized religion, frequently reminded me that should another Hitler-type turn up, we would most certainly be outed as Jews and likely rounded up.
The Burden
Word Count 1255
I was sitting in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco in 1993 when my father told me his secret. “Everyone deserves love, don’t you think?” he asked. Yes, to love! “Don’t tell anyone,” he added. I chose a fortune cookie carefully and promised. Then we went to my younger sister’s apartment, and he extracted the same promise from her. Then my youngest sister.
In 1970 my sisters and I had sat on the edge of our parents’ bed in their room overlooking the Hudson River (one sister remembers this as the kitchen). I was the eldest, but only six years old. “Your mother and I don’t love each other anymore,” my father said. The rest was made clear: having a family had gotten in the way of his painting. To rededicate himself to his art, my father would have to leave. It was confusing. I had a vague sense that he’d be moving into a painting studio. Yes, to art; who could be against it? But it became a rival for my father’s affections. My sisters and I spent every other weekend with our father, who took us to museums and antique stores, to Europe, and Upstate New York. We all went into art-related fields and stayed close to him.
Commencement
Word Count 1652
Much as I admired girls in my high school class who were voted “Brainiest” or “Girl Most Likely to Succeed,” the truth is, I wasn’t remotely interested—as my father would have put it—in knuckling down. I was crowned “Best Legs” by the Class of ’69 and gifted a pair of L’eggs, the pantyhose sensation of the moment, packaged in a large plastic egg.
My classmates’ awards predicted a judge and a pediatrician. While not prestigious, mine referenced my focus throughout high school. Starting in tenth grade, I’d roll up my pleated skirt after drop off; in summer, hasten a caramel-colored tan by mixing Mercurochrome with Baby Oil. In some ways, “Best Legs” foretold the defining moment of my adolescence, even though I was anything but “experienced.” I was the girl with nicknames like “Bones” and “Slim” who longed for curves and a boyfriend. Small wonder then, when the lifeguard from our public pool paid attention to me; offered a ride on a stallion—all chrome, with a saddle soft as a horse’s muzzle. My father’s warnings—No motorcycles! Think of your teeth! All of that dental work, down the drain—were drowned out by roaring desire.
The lifeguard evaporated as quickly as he had appeared. Six to eight weeks later, I’d honed a skill for which there was no award.
The Soft Beauty of an Ordinary Life
Word Count 670
Before his wife catches you:
One spring evening in Georgia, you slide onto the passenger seat of Bob’s Jeep Cherokee outside a Big Lots. You secretly meet here, Thursdays, in this anonymous location, to head north into the foothills of the Appalachians. At dusk, the lights of this box store appear like an oasis across the vast cement stretch of parking lot, across the endless boredom of the week, since the last time you were together.
After his wife catches you:
You imagine you’re walking tracks of a railroad through a forest. Under your feet, you hear gravel crunching like bones. Wind tangles branches of trees, and the bark creaks on an otherwise silent day. You don’t know if this railroad line leads away from your unforgivable past or toward what will be an unforgivable future. Or both.
Airing the Drying
Word Count 1516
“Vaginal atrophy,” the gynecologist says in a neutral reporter’s voice, and the speculum chimes faintly as she sets it down. My grimace makes a guttural sound. Her ponytail bounces winsomely. “Nothing to worry about. Perfectly natural when you age.”
“Oh, we all have that,” a friend tries to reassure me. I hope others are spared the image of the pinched balloon knot of an old woman’s mouth. I wonder if organismal attrition is another classic symptom of aging that no one talks about. Or is it my own personal idiosyncrasy? It’s just a little snap of a cough, like clearing my throat before unmuting on Zoom. Fireworks was such a stupid cliche, but it did capture the time-lapse component of an orgasm back then. Not actually fizzling into separate points of light; more like hearing your echo become increasingly loud as you headed deeper into a cave.
No U-Turns
Word Count 1532
One way street. 1951
At first, all I see are scuffed whitewalls as the rusted-out Plymouth comes to a screechy stop. An old lady, her face framed by scraggly red hair, cranks her head out the passenger window, her grin twisted in an effort to look at us. It’s Saturday morning, my older sister Bonnie and I are playing with our dolls under the maple tree growing between curb and sidewalk on our Midwestern street. Even at five, I knew no one ever comes to visit unless they’ve been invited, and that’s rare. Somewhere between frightened and excited, I rock my doll, “Tiny Tears,” hard, eyes locked on the lady. My sister jumps up, her doll flopping off her lap into the dirt, and runs up the porch steps yelling, “Mom, a car just pulled up, and a lady’s getting out.”
Whack!
Unforgiveable
Word Count 1415
Just outside of Alamogordo, New Mexico, stands the World’s Largest Pistachio, 30 feet tall, the lurid green nutmeat peaking out between the two shells. It’s an eye-catching tourist attraction, cheesy yet weirdly majestic despite the crowd of RVs and the smell of exhaust. Seemed like as good a place as any to dump my mother’s ashes. I was furious. And there was really no other way to punish her.
The night before, I sat on the floor of her dusty living room, sorting photos and letters, jewelry, and bits of debris, from matchbooks and corks, to cocktail napkins and baby teeth. Finally, I found what I was looking for, the thing nobody would show me, my parents’ divorce papers, the thing that split our family into two equal halves. They were married barely 13 months, yet continued to hook up for years afterward. Drunk in love, it was impossible for either of them to go cold turkey, so the four of us found our way back to each other again and again, with me, a baby, and my 8-year-old half-brother, Mark, in tow.
The Lion in the Garden
Word Count 1044
Angela León and I weren’t great friends. I went to her house just once in the four years I lived in Quito. She was in my grade in our Evangelical middle school, and one of the only Ecuadorians there. Our school was primarily for temporary expats and missionaries, and the only nationals admitted at that time were those who had at least one international parent. I assume this was the case with Angela León, although I don’t recall what her parents looked like or what their first names were, because, besides being flawlessly bilingual in Spanish and English, she had light brown hair and intense blue eyes. Both her hair and her eyelashes, coincidentally, reminded me of manes. Her hair was thick and bushy around her thin white face. She had big eyes that had a mesmerizing effect because of their dense, almost black lashes.
Everything is Copy
Word Count 804
Claire and I arrived at the same summer camp in July 1977. We were both wearing the same shirt, the kind you’d find in a novelty store or Army/Navy: you’d choose the tee, pick out the letters of your first name to personalize it, and the store would iron it on. These shirts were controversial fashion: parents feared strangers would learn your name and abduct you in a van. But wearing them in a safe environment like camp? Safe, and trendy.
Claire and I shared a bunk bed, and I had the top. Tucked into our sleeping bags after lights out, she shared stories about her mother, a Brit, and their whirlwind lives in Manhattan: Her mother’s boyfriend was Bernie Taupin, and they lived in a building with a doorman. Her father did something famous in publishing.
Secret Words
Word Count 1352
I get my first secret at age five. A gift from my father. Two invented words, three nonsensical syllables in each—secret words all my own to use whenever and however I choose, he says. My father had created one of the secret words for my brother, but at fourteen, he has no interest in our made-up language and passes his word along to me.
Sitting on my dad’s lap that night, my tiny frame tucked into the space between his protruding belly and the edge of his knee, we practice saying the new words between fits of giggles. He drinks a large martini from his favorite tumbler, the one etched with the face of Hawaiian pop singer Don Ho, and we share a pre-dinner snack of the six pimento-filled, green olives from the bottom of his drink. We alternate between speaking in low and high-pitched voices and putting the emphasis on different syllables. When my mother wanders into the living room, my father covers his mouth and mine tightly with his hands, our laughter slipping out between his fingers. She grudgingly plays along and goes back to the kitchen. As she leaves, he whispers, “I don't think she heard us. Whew. That was a close one.” He winks at me. I smile back.