- Creative Writing -
Exit Thirteen
By Kendra Griffin
Nestled into the curve of every highway exit are the memories of a child turned
grown-up. The pieces and parts tumble into the downward whorls and collect at
the bottom like the barefoot-stuck pebbly remnants of a lakeswim that won't
be washed down the drain. You can sift them for gold. Everything is there --
the rotting boards stabbed into the trunk of the clubhouse oak, the forbidden
night raids across the neighbors' fields, the putterings of young genius minds
over hook and pulley ideas. The hours spent shaking two percent milk in a margarine
tub in order to make butter. The shaving cream and Windex potions. The stolen
gingersnaps. The never-filling penny jar. The cricket hunts, the first brave
plunges into early summer swimming lessons, and the disillusionment over sea
monkeys. All these memories find themselves tangled in the grass-filled hollows
that tremble at the passing of eighteen-wheelers.
Our exit was number thirteen. Highway exits don't skip numbers like fancy Manhattan
apartment buildings. Out there in the middle of green we counted right up to
thirteen and kept on climbing, recklessly, testing our wings, soft-throated
and vulnerable as a sparrow on your windowsill.
My father and mother planted us on twenty-five or so acres of land, mostly woods,
in upstate New York. The face of the land is still largely unchanged today;
the denseness of the trees has been spared; the fields are a bit overgrown.
The property, no longer ours, still runs itself out at the Northway, and the
doubled line of evergreens which separated our land from the neighbors' property
is still in place. Long into the spreading evenings, as the light grew thin
and disappeared in a last gasping red glow behind the old machine shed, I used
to lie awake and stretch my toes into the cool pockets of unexplored space hidden
in my clean sheets and ponder what lay beyond the tree line. My thoughts tangled
themselves on the tips of the evergreens and settled with anxious flutters like
breeze-restless leaves. In dreams it was the edge of the world, and though I
often stumbled through while playing and never found myself in Narnia, the tall
dark pines, like so many other guardians of my childhood, surely disguised portals.
And I assure you, there are portals. When I pass through I find my mother, whole,
young, green, growing above ground rather than below it. When I put my pen down
onto paper the blue ink flows red into her veins.
My mother wanted children. My father wanted my mother to be happy. He built
her a house with bay windows and set it far from the road so that she could
hide in the shade where she belonged. He brought home a German shepherd to protect
her, and he took her dancing on Friday nights. After three years of marriage
and stepladders in the living room and evenings of Irish pubs and early mornings
teaching at the high school, my mother had a baby boy. My parents murmured together
over him and then out of those intimate tanglings of sound they chose one which
they thought should represent him for the rest of his life: "Keith."
And then there was a strange space of time that was almost me-ness but not yet
quite me, while I grew inside her, and while my mother learned that taking care
of babies and working at the same time was very hard, and while my father built
an apartment on the back of the garage where his widowed father would live.
During this almost-ness of me, my grandfather, Frank, moved next door, and planted
tomato and asparagus gardens, and Keith insisted on calling him Franky instead
of Grandfather. Then I came along, separated by two and a half irretrievable
years from my older brother, and my intrusion into his life was forever represented
by a single sound: "Kendra."
Within a year my mother had a miscarriage, and my almost brother or sister
wasn't born, and Mom decided that she didn't want any more babies, either almost-ones
or real ones, and she asked the doctors to tie her in knots so that she never
could never have any more.
My first memory is of the wonderful feeling of flying that I had as my mother
carried me. I had declared on my own that I wanted to pee in the toilet, and
so my mother scooped me up that morning and held me up high by her head as we
walked out onto the beautiful thick green carpet that grew up to the edge of
the bedroom. It was her favorite color, dark green, and it was lovely, and she
was lovely. We were the luckiest mortal children on earth, because our mother
was magical; she was of the fairyfolk of Ireland's rolling hills, and the forest
inside our house was a remnant of her past fairy life before she met and married
my woodsman father.
I'll never forget how marvelously proud she was of me that day, because there's
nothing I've ever wanted more than to make her proud. The memory of it is a
bit of blue sky that I carry with me and sunwarm myself beneath on dark cloudy
days. Because when my mother looked at you, she really looked at you, with eyes
that were the moist brown of rain-drenched bark. When she smiled at you it was
as if the sun had suddenly brightened without your realizing it could. And when
she held you it was like climbing into your favorite climbing tree and resting
safe in the shadows of its leaves. To disappoint her was to live without light,
to trip and fall and find your palms raw and muddy.
For the first six years of my life I shared a small bedroom with my brother,
who woke up easily when I pulled his eyelids back to see what he was thinking
about while he slept. He had a single bed, with Peanuts sheet and Snoopy's doghouse
on his pillowcase. They were great sheets, real sheets for a real bed. I slept
in a large crib that my parents "converted" by folding down the top
half of the railing onto the bottom so that that I could bang my fingers between
them at night when I wasn't ready to go to sleep.
I never understood why I had to go to bed before Keith and lose so much precious
time with my mother. Often I smuggled in whatever pen or pencil I could and
drew my thoughts furiously onto the walls. They listened patiently. From the
Den I could hear the TV. people laughing with my mother. Why could Hawkeye and
Clinger and Keith all stay up together when I had to go to sleep? I played xylophone
against the slatted sides of the hated crib-bed. I made shadow puppets in the
dim glow of the nightlight. I hooked my fingers through the bars and pretended
I was in jail, that mysterious place where my father had the power to lock up
bad people. Franky was the one who always came in to stay with me if I could
not settle in, especially once I was afraid of the dark. He sat on Keith's bed
just across from me and tried not to nod off while I talked and talked. Sometimes
I sang songs I had made up on the wooden-board swing he had built for me. He
would warn me in a stage whisper to be quiet so that Mom wouldn't come in and
yell at us.
If I were really lucky, sometimes I could stay up long enough to see Dad after
he got back from the State Police barracks. If he and Mom stayed in on Saturday
nights, we would sometimes be together, the five of us, and the german shepherd
by the door. Dad would tell stories about growing up in the woods, or about
the practical jokes the Troopers played on each other. My favorite story was
the one about his Mean Old Great-Uncle Sammy and how he cut his hand off one
day chopping firewood.
"That Mean Old Uncle Sammy had a mule that was almost as mean and stubborn
as he was," Dad would begin after I had begged to hear the story. "He
kicked it, he hit it, he yelled at it, but it wouldn't budge. So one day he
went back into his house, got his shotgun, and made sure that mule never disobeyed
him again."
I pictured a shaggy man in a flannel shirt pulling and pulling on the bridle,
and the animal digging its heels into the dirt. I didn't like to imagine the
mule after it had been shot.
"Once when one of his kids was crying at the dinner table, Sammy threw
a pot of scalding coffee from the woodstove in his face to keep it quiet. Mean
Old Uncle Sammy just got meaner and meaner." Dad would recite, making a
fist for emphasis, "and losing his hand only made him worse."
"He didn't just lose it, though," I would burst in, unable to contain
myself.
"No, he didn't, Kendra." And I'd sit up straight, stiff-backed in
anticipation of the tale's resolution. Its poetry wove itself in and out of
my mind until I could feel the pine needles under my own feet and smell the
fresh-cut wood. This is how the memory comes to greet me when I come looking
for it after all these years:
One day as dusk was falling, a time when the light was known for playing tricks
on the eyes as it trickled down between the leaves and needles of trees, Mean
Old Sam was chopping firewood. Somehow he must have misjudged the distance between
his own limb and his wooden target. It took him a moment to realize what had
happened. He lifted his arm, from which his hand hung by shreds of skin, and
saw he'd cut clean through the bone.
He stared, but just for a moment, in acknowledgment of the loss. The blood was
rushing out and racing to a finish line without him. There was only one thing
to be done. He sawed off the rest of the skin with his knife, bundled the bloody
wound in his shirt, and ran home. There he cauterized the stump on the flat
top of the woodstove.
Whenever I heard this story, it made perfect sense to me. That was how things
went in the woods. I those days I believed that life was inherently fair, that
Mom could fix anything, and that my parents would take care of me. Had Sam been
a good and kind man, the type of woodcutter that gave bread to hungry forest
creatures, he would one day have split open a tree to find a pot of gold inside.
But instead, as the fairy tales dictated, he had been cruel in his dealings
with people and nature, and so was aptly punished. It seemed very simple. Good
People had Good Things happen to them, Bad People had Bad Things happen to them,
and those Good People who were mistreated would eventually have Wonderful Things
happen to them.
In those days Dad laughed easily and often, and his feet were always warm when
I tickled them in their gray Troop Socks. I was not afraid of his uniform, but
his billy club gleamed wickedly, and I was determined never to be a criminal
deserving of its use. Dad was the stern one, the one who spanked us, the threat
Mom made when we didn't obey her. "He'll be home soon, do you want me to
tell him you didn't eat any vegetables?" I never saw my father for very
long before I had to go to bed; I associated his arrival with my banishment
from the room.
Eventually, I figured out how to crawl out of the crib, and embarked upon a
non-stop journey of climbing that was probably revenge enough upon my parents
for having made me sleep in a cage with built-in monkey bars. Again and again
I was put back in to my bed, ordered to go to sleep, and told I would not be
given a third nighttime sip of water from the dented silver cup on which my
name was engraved. "Be a good girl and go to sleep!" Mom pleaded,
and I tried, for her, but often stayed awake until Keith came in.
After nightmares, I would toddle onto the green carpet and scratch at their
door. My father would be snoring like some kind of child-eating monster, which
tended to make me even more upset after a bad dream, but still I wanted to sleep
between them. As I got bigger I was allowed to sleep there less and less, and
eventually Dad refused to make room, so Mom would secretly share her space with
me, putting her arm around me and hooking her fingers into the mattress strap
to keep me from falling off the side.
I never really slept much in their room; I couldn't block out Dad's snoring.
Instead I'd watch the colored pixels of light chase each other's tails around
the room. If I concentrated I could make any color appear that I wanted to see.
Blues and greens materialized in swarms and played tag-my mother and I dancing
together as she slept. Sometimes it seemed like black shadows flitted past my
eyes. I asked Mom what I was seeing when I stared into the darkness. She had
known exactly. "They're nightbats," she explained, "I used to
play with them too."
Eventually I was banned from the bedroom. I took my blankets and curled up on
the grass outside the locked door. It was enough to know that they were just
on the other side.
But during the daytime I gave my mother and Franky no peace. I climbed and climbed.
I learned how to use my body as ballast. The unfinished construction and my
father's whimsical secret passages made the house into a jungle gym. My reward
for my first successful ascent onto the bathroom counter was that I could drink
till my belly was full from the fresh well water that rushed out for the shiny
faucet. I drank and gulped and splashed and studied myself in the mirror: who
was that smooth cold girl with the dirty face and where did she go after I climbed
down? She had an older brother who often came up from behind and smacked her
on the head. I wanted so badly to be with her, I though if I could get inside
her house we would be great friends and we would never need our brothers to
play with us.
I studied the bathroom mirror itself. How could I get into it? It was silver
but not silver, clear but not clear, cold as the water that ran over my hands
as I tried to find the secret entrance.
One day, while my mother was on the telephone with her best friend, I made it
to the top of the refrigerator. It was my crowning glory and my mount Everest.
At last I was able to open that elusive upper cabinet where the special silver-edged
"company" dishes were kept. I poured through the tissue-paper wrapped
treasures while Mom marked grades and shared a musical conversation with Mrs.
DeLucia. Mrs. DeLucia was the mother of my best friend, Carrie, whom I loved
passionately and whom I never got to spend enough time with. We were always
pulled away from each other, crying, clinging, begging for one more hour. Carrie
had a twin in the mirror, too, and it didn't seem fair that the mirror-girls
got to giggle together behind the glass for as long as they wanted. We had to
go home and eat vegetables and go to bed. They surely lived in a world that
was broccoli free.
After I tired of my adventure and the riches in the cabinet, I decided it was
time to reveal my new feat to Mom. I wanted her with me. She had her back to
me, so I inched forward to call her attention back to me, away from the phone
and the papers on the table. I reached for her. My mouthed hummed her M, and
then the sound buzzed out of my mouth and lingered into the air just above the
fridge.
For a long time I flew, and then the ground rose up into the air and caught
me, and I was still.
I had fallen other times, but never landed like that. I had never before known
that the hardness of the ground was in direct proportion to how far you were
once above it.
I heard my mother's worried voice calling my name over and over, but I couldn't
answer. I was stunned. We were separate, Mom and I. It was so hard and so final.
How could it be? I was Kendra. She was not. I wasn't her any more that she was
me, and I wasn't the girl in the mirror, who was I? I was "Kendra, Kendra!"
Mom cried; there was a realness attached to my name, and it suddenly became
important to respond to it.
I cried, but not too much. "That's my brave girl," she said. "You're
ok." She didn't like it when I cried because it was messy. I hated using
tissues and I would rub my face with my sleeves until they were sticky and soaked.
"You do things that I never did," she told me often. "I was never
a tomboy like you. I hated getting my clothes dirty or making a mess."
And I wanted so to be just like her, to be clean and neat and to smell like
lilacs. But I wanted to be just like Keith, too, and have adventures, and like
Franky, and make things grow out of the dirt, and like Dad, who could build
or do anything in his machine shop, and there were too many of me to answer
to one name.
So I kept trying to bridge the gap between the worlds. In our small bedroom,
there was just enough space between the dresser and Keith's bed to make it dangerous
for him to practice jumping after I'd woken him up. "You can't do it,"
he explained. "You're too little." Stockingfooted, he would launch
off from the slick dressertop and belly-flop right into the Peanuts Gang. His
courage left me in awe. I never saw him miss once, although he did whack his
head into the wall a few times. I began to practice when he wasn't around. I
never dared to land feet first, as he did, but I managed to hit the mattress
and hold on. I hit my head a few times too, and I was proud of my battle wounds.
Keith taught me how to do a lot of things that he said I couldn't do. I watched
and trailed and copied, I hunted and stalked the shadow of our two and a half
years through the house; I thought the time between us was the enemy. I learned
how to take a running leap at the couch and do a somersault over the side, and
how to pull myself up onto the counter and go through the cupboards for hidden
treats. He taught me how to crawl through the nail-covered two by fours that
crisscrossed in the semi-finished basement rooms, how to swing from the shower
rod, and how to toboggan down the varnished wooden stairs on the long daybed
cushions.
Keith and I had a pact that began as early as I can remember and had never ended.
It was simple. "I won't tell if you won't tell." So far it's been
about as successful as a Cold War can be. There were a few meltdowns, but in
spirit neither of us ever ratted the other out. I was proud not to be a ratfink
and longed to be included in his adventures. Again and again I kept my mouth
shut when Mom and Dad played Good Cop/Bad Cop. To admit the we'd broken the
rules would have gotten Franky in trouble too, for "resting his eyes"
during his game shows and letting us run amuck.
Franky usually watched us when my parents were out, and my mother hated this,
because he ignored all her rules and let us stay up as late as we wanted, but
Keith had a knack for permanently ruining babysitters. If Mom wanted to go out,
it was Franky or nothing. Keith could exasperate the most even-tempered sitters,
and could convince me to help in almost any escapade. If luring them outside
and locking the door wasn't enough, he got creative. He set up tripwires made
of fishing line across the bathroom doorway. He hid in one of the many strange
compartments that Dad had built in to the basement rooms, and made ghost noises
that carried through the vents. He lit fires in both fireplaces at once and
closed the flues until smoke filled the house. I was the distraction, the accomplice,
his sidekick. I was my own understudy. He'd stop ignoring me long enough to
draft me for his latest scheme, and despite protests, I helped. We both hoped
that Mom and Dad would stop going out if we could drain their pool of babysitters.
In the early years I was mesmerized by my brother. He never ran out of ideas.
His brain was so big, two and a half years bigger than mine. His whole life
was bigger. It crowded me out of our room, out of the house, and sometimes out
of my own head.
Keith's favorite place to be was in the reloading room in the basement. Dad
had an entire room devoted to his gun collection and bullet making equipment.
There were two full racks of rifles and a large locked cabinet that held the
handguns. There were rifles with bayonets and without bayonets, singe barrel
shotguns, double barrel shotguns, rifles with two handgrips, guns with scopes,
guns without scopes, guns with wooden stocks, guns with metal stocks, guns with
revolving chambers, guns with cartridges, silver guns, black guns, pearl-handled
guns. There was a small gray gun that could fit into my pocket. There was a
pistol so heavy I couldn't lift it with one hand.
"Never ever point a gun at someone," Dad warned us, "unless you
plan to use it."
And there were other weapons, too. There were knives for fishing, knives for
hunting, jackknives, penknives, buck knives, switchblades, knives with straight
blades, knives with curved blades, knives with blood gutters. There was also
a ball and chain, a mace, a double-bladed war hammer, a spear, a set of sheathed
swords, a bow and arrow, and last but not least, an extra billy club that leaned
in the corner.
The guns and knives and other weapons were for making holes in people from which
blood came out. I was very confused about why the blood seemed to want to get
out of a person so badly that it bolted at the first chance, like the dog did
when we opened the sliding glass doors in the morning. I worried about the weapons
we had. If the holes they made were too big or too many, too much blood would
run out.
Santa brought Keith a BB gun for Christmas when he was eight, and he kept it
on the rack with all the others. I had one weapon in my possession-an Indian
arrowhead that my father had found when he dug the foundation for the house.
It's gone now, returned somehow to where it came.
If Keith was in his element inside the gunroom and the garage, I was at home
in green. The outside was my true domain. There was enough space outside for
me to find my own new treasures. Perhaps it was the amount of time Franky spent
with me in this vegetable and flower gardens, teaching me how to hoe and plant
and put the white pellets of fertilizer in the holes. In July he walked around
with a coffee can filled with oil and Japanese beetles. He wouldn't let me hold
the can, but he showed me how to pull the beetles off the leaves and drop them
into the oil where they made a rainbow of slippery drowned bodies. Their beetle
legs tickled tight to my skin. They clung to my fingers, they clung to life.
When it was warm, Franky sat me on his lap while he mowed the lawn. When it
was cold, I helped pick up the kindling that collected on the ground as he chopped
the smaller logs left over from the splitter. He built me a rope swing in front
of the kitchen window where I could wave to Mom while she cooked dinner. When
I asked him to push me higher, he did, and once or twice my toes touched the
elusive dangle of leaves that inspired me to pump my legs as hard as I could.
I was his tomboy. Around him there was no question of identity-there was no
time to wonder, just to do, do, do, until I dragged myself exhausted into the
house where Mom would try to get some vegetables into me. After dinner I would
rush back outside until dusk sent its whispers out to frighten me into the house.
Behind the garage was a tire swing, a rabbit trap which never caught any rabbits
but always had a fresh carrot stuck in it, a burn barrel, and a cage which briefly
housed a violent raccoon that Franky named Sammy. But most importantly, behind
the garage was the world's best climbing tree.
The tree was always sticky with pine pitch that got in my hair and took days
to come off my hands. It had wonderful branches. There was a good one to boost
yourself up on and one where you could sit and hold another above you and bounce.
Keith taught me how to get down from up high by letting the branches bend under
my weight and deposit me safely on the ground. I climbed higher and higher,
until the trunk thinned and I could feel the tree shake in the wind as I held
on.
The trees to the right of the house, just outside the front door, weren't as
good for climbing, but they were full of birds. I used to whistle to them. I
imagined I was saying something fascinating and irresistible in their language.
I took my stuffed animals out to get sunshine and shade. We played in the dry
pine needles and watched the birds build their nests. Sometimes, if I were completely
still, they'd dare to come close and grab a twig from almost within my reach.
The first living creature that Keith ever shot was a robin. I heard the whiz
of a BB and paid it no mind until Keith's shadow fell over me and I looked up
to see his confused face. His hands held the bird, a small robin. He held Spring
it his hands and it was barely moving. He thrust it away from himself at arm's
length, as if it might revive and seek revenge.
I jumped up to get Mom. She'd know what to do. If anyone could save it, she
could. Maybe she could say some fairy prayer and the robin would lift its head
and sing me its stories.
"Wait!" he commanded. "You can't tell Mom. You can't tell her
I shot it. You can't tell!"
And I was trapped then, trapped between so many of my selves while my thumping
heart tried to understand what to do. How could I tell on him? Who would I be?
Which me was I?
There were rules back then. That was something you could count on. When you
go through the portal and put pen to paper, you remember what it was like to
still live a life that had guiding principles. These are some of the things
that you knew: You don't ratfink. The reds and the purples are the best flavors
in any candy, and the greens never taste like lime. Serious accidents cannot
occur while singing. Leaving your foot over the edge of the bed is dangerous
unless a parent or pet is in the room, or unless you are still singing. You
know where to go to find toads and you know how to make bubbles in your milk
even without a straw, you know which vegetable you can sneak to the dog and
which ones he will drop with a telltale thud onto the linoleum. And most importantly,
again, you don't ratfink.
Which one was me? Which girl was I? What could I do? My heart had become the
bird's and it was fluttering like wings. What color was I? What was my name?
What would the girl behind the mirror do? I had no time to ask her. What would
Carrie do? Why had my brother become Mean Old Uncle Sammy, why? What would happen
to this robin?
My brother dropped the bird then onto the pine needles, roughly, as if he were
done with it after showing it to me, as if my knowing he had hurt it was enough.
I had to help it. I picked it up, carefully, at last touching what I had ached
to touch for so long. The feathers were soft beneath my fingertips. Its red
belly trembled. At last. At last. I tried whistling. "Wake up, wake up,
fly away," I told it, but the robin only shuddered. "I don't know!"
I cried. My stuffed animals fell silent, unable to give me advice.
I needed my mother. I had to save it. I had to do something. I slowly walked
into the house, and when he heard the screen door's rusty squeak, Keith ran
back after me. I found Mom correcting papers. Keith lied to her. He said it
had fallen out of the nest. I didn't tell. Where was the hole? There was no
blood. The bird's wings were hardly fluttering now.
"Mom, what's happening, what do I do? Should I give it some bread?"
She pushed her dark hair neatly behind her ears. "You shouldn't have that
in the kitchen," she said. "Let's put it in something. It's dirty.
And it's scared. It's afraid of us."
I nodded. Afraid of me? Yes. That's right. I was very big compared to the bird.
I ran into the living room, grabbed the Lincoln Log container and dumped them
out all over the floor. But I kept the bird in my hand. I wanted to protect
it. "It's ok, I won't hurt you," I murmured.
Mom sat me down on the steps leading to the door. I could hear more birds talking
to us through the screen door that was still stubbornly ajar on its rusty hinge.
"I don't know if it's going to make it, Babe," she said as she sat
down next to me. "It's very tired."
Its heartbeat was tiny. How small we had both become. The bird stopped moving
its wings. I kept holding it out to my mother in my cupped hand. The sunlight
and the breeze poured through the screen. I was shaking. Its head lolled against
my fingers.
"Why doesn't it hold its head straight?" I asked her.
"It's gone now," she said. "Honey, it's not inside your hands
anymore." I didn't understand. We sat there for a very long time, saying
nothing to each other on the green-carpeted stairs. She was wearing the white
blouse with the little blue and green flowers. The material was stiff and there
was a tiny button at her wrist that I stared at and tried not to cry. Her brave
girl.
"Kendra, the bird is dirty. You should wash your hands and we'll put this
outside."
I couldn't answer her. My throat was tight. Why hadn't she saved it. Weren't
she and the bird friends? Didn't it love her? Didn't it want to be with us?
I started to cry. My hands were dirty. I was not brave.
"Kendra," she said again, softly. "Do you want to bury it?"
"You mean put it in the dirt?" I sobbed, rubbing at my face with my
sleeve.
"Yes." She sighed. "In the dirt."
Then I understood. I would make a hole in the dirt, and the bird would be on
the opposite side of the ground, under us instead of in the sky. "Yes,"
I sniffed. I put the robin very carefully into the round Lincoln Logs container.
The bottom was metal and shiny, like a mirror. The bird had a friend with it.
They would play together under the ground. I would put them there in the dirt.
Mom stood up. Her shirt was so clean. She seemed darker, and sad. She was a
willow tree in the shade. She was so green and white and good. She would go
back to her clean white papers and I would go back outside and dig in the dirt.
Keith was gone. It was just me. Me, me, me, and a bird that wasn't a bird anymore.
I put the container down and said, "I'll wash my hands first."
"Never mind," she said. "Wait here. I'll go get us some spoons."