couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen them touch.
“You must never mention a word about this to anyone outside the family,” my mother said to Whitney and me with unusual sternness, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Nobody at all.”
I felt the news and accompanying emotions seal themselves off inside my body with the ease of a closing elevator door. Drug dealers were something you saw on TV, not in my own family. I remembered an episode of Starsky and Hutch where the drug dealer lived in an abandoned apartment on the outskirts of town. Starsky kicked in the door while Hutch aimed the gun.
I turned on the chandelier so that I could reread my essay. Outside the snow was falling harder now, and a few stray sparrows pecked aimlessly at the frozen ground.
My last winter in Michigan.
Next year I’d be gone—away at boarding school for ninth grade, and away from this house. I’d been waiting to go since sixth grade, counting down the years impatiently.
The applications all asked for an essay on an experience that had changed my life. And so while other eighth graders wrote about their golden retrievers dying, I wrote about Charlie’s drug bust and what it had done to our family, the shame and silence spreading from my parents to us, and then into just about every aspect of our lives.
As I wrote the story, I felt stronger, clearer—separate from those events for the first time. I wrote about the tension in the house, breaking it down into scenes with characters and dialogue, constructing not what actually had happened, but something that felt even realer than that. I wrote everything I’d been forbidden to say, everything that gave me back my voice. I wrote draft after draft, trying to get at the truth.
Charlie had been selling cocaine, a drug I knew about from Time magazine. I’d seen pictures of it, lines of white powder on the cover . My parents had heard the news from Charlie’s college dean earlier that year, in the spring. He was expelled, and, under pressure from my parents, immediately enrolled in Marine boot camp in San Diego, leaving in earlyJune. But as June passed into July, everything kept changing. And the tension in the house got only worse.
Coming home from day camp or tennis lessons, Whitney and I watched TV in the library, or rode skateboards up the street with my cousins Pierre and Freddy. In his universal attempt to avoid my father, Whitney routinely asked Freddy if he could spend the night at his house, but Aunt Nicole sometimes locked the kids outside while the house was being cleaned, or while she napped, and for hours at a time no one would know where Whitney or Freddy had gone. They were nine and ten at the time.
When Whitney finally came home, he’d steer clear of my father even as he sought approval by doing small chores around the house—unloading the dishwasher, say, or feeding the cats. But my father would simply complain about the direction the forks faced in the cutlery drawer, or the ratio of dry cat food to canned food in the cats’ bowls, and Whitney began to wear a permanent expression of defeat.
I usually stayed in my room playing Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones albums over and over. Sometimes my father would throw open my door and shout, “Turn down that goddamn rock ’n’ roll!” and I’d grab the volume knob so fast the record would skip. Later, I’d turn it all the way up again, partly to block out the eerie silence in our house, but also eager, in a way, for any interaction with my father.
I often found myself thinking about Charlie, who had turned strange over the last couple of years. Once tanned and vital, his face had grown pale and blemished, his eyes flattened like old decals. When he was home, he was, more often thannot, on the phone or outside the house talking with people I didn’t recognize, people who came up our driveway in their unfamiliar cars while my father was downtown at work. Charlie referred to the visitors as his
“You must never mention a word about this to anyone outside the family,” my mother said to Whitney and me with unusual sternness, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Nobody at all.”
I felt the news and accompanying emotions seal themselves off inside my body with the ease of a closing elevator door. Drug dealers were something you saw on TV, not in my own family. I remembered an episode of Starsky and Hutch where the drug dealer lived in an abandoned apartment on the outskirts of town. Starsky kicked in the door while Hutch aimed the gun.
I turned on the chandelier so that I could reread my essay. Outside the snow was falling harder now, and a few stray sparrows pecked aimlessly at the frozen ground.
My last winter in Michigan.
Next year I’d be gone—away at boarding school for ninth grade, and away from this house. I’d been waiting to go since sixth grade, counting down the years impatiently.
The applications all asked for an essay on an experience that had changed my life. And so while other eighth graders wrote about their golden retrievers dying, I wrote about Charlie’s drug bust and what it had done to our family, the shame and silence spreading from my parents to us, and then into just about every aspect of our lives.
As I wrote the story, I felt stronger, clearer—separate from those events for the first time. I wrote about the tension in the house, breaking it down into scenes with characters and dialogue, constructing not what actually had happened, but something that felt even realer than that. I wrote everything I’d been forbidden to say, everything that gave me back my voice. I wrote draft after draft, trying to get at the truth.
Charlie had been selling cocaine, a drug I knew about from Time magazine. I’d seen pictures of it, lines of white powder on the cover . My parents had heard the news from Charlie’s college dean earlier that year, in the spring. He was expelled, and, under pressure from my parents, immediately enrolled in Marine boot camp in San Diego, leaving in earlyJune. But as June passed into July, everything kept changing. And the tension in the house got only worse.
Coming home from day camp or tennis lessons, Whitney and I watched TV in the library, or rode skateboards up the street with my cousins Pierre and Freddy. In his universal attempt to avoid my father, Whitney routinely asked Freddy if he could spend the night at his house, but Aunt Nicole sometimes locked the kids outside while the house was being cleaned, or while she napped, and for hours at a time no one would know where Whitney or Freddy had gone. They were nine and ten at the time.
When Whitney finally came home, he’d steer clear of my father even as he sought approval by doing small chores around the house—unloading the dishwasher, say, or feeding the cats. But my father would simply complain about the direction the forks faced in the cutlery drawer, or the ratio of dry cat food to canned food in the cats’ bowls, and Whitney began to wear a permanent expression of defeat.
I usually stayed in my room playing Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones albums over and over. Sometimes my father would throw open my door and shout, “Turn down that goddamn rock ’n’ roll!” and I’d grab the volume knob so fast the record would skip. Later, I’d turn it all the way up again, partly to block out the eerie silence in our house, but also eager, in a way, for any interaction with my father.
I often found myself thinking about Charlie, who had turned strange over the last couple of years. Once tanned and vital, his face had grown pale and blemished, his eyes flattened like old decals. When he was home, he was, more often thannot, on the phone or outside the house talking with people I didn’t recognize, people who came up our driveway in their unfamiliar cars while my father was downtown at work. Charlie referred to the visitors as his
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