tenth

The back of houses they stick out into alleys naked and exposed. Flowers blindly bloom in gardens that have long been lost to forgotten ambition. The sidewalks slope and crack in too much of a hurry to stay down properly.

With it's newly cut grass and broken canopy of maple trees it smells like Harvard-Yale. But the display of blight, broken bricks, overgrown shrubs, houses divided like cake with too many front doors, and the aged apartment buildings that grow like weed vine among the homes, give it away for what it is; Sugar House.

Why did we did leave here? It was the question I asked myself the first day I slipped around the corner with the dog on a leash heading up one of the Avenues. I had waited on 11th East watching Beach turn the key, let herself into the front duplex for her cat sitting job. Once she was in I had about an hour to kill. So I went walking.

It was a temporary arrangement. One month, two times a week. At noon we would drive up 17th South; drive backward through time. It reminded me of the nanny job I took when Beach was 3.

A three-month commitment.  It too took Beach and me up the hill, a few hours, a few days a week, for a few months. Interlopers in someone else's life.  That one was a cold white house hanging high over the valley on the foothills.  I would drive the streets and park my VW van with the other cars of the workers.  For all the money and the mansions the only people home were the maids and the tradesmen... and the nannies.

From the first seconds of that job, I was homesick for the valley floor. I would pick up the 2-year-old daughter from nursery school. Drive her home. Feed her a lunch of carefully dictated leftovers. Let her watch one episode of Madeline, read her one book, put her down for a nap, then wait to be excused by the grandmother "who would take it from there".

In my memory, there is no sound. The rooms tucked in between marble and carpet and the privacy money can buy all lay in a silence that is almost dead. Surely haunted.

Sugar House is the opposite. Even the job flipped: it was Beach who was working while I wandered.

I would weave my way up and down the streets crossing my own history.  I would find myself staring into a yard, into blank windows, down long driveways. I imaged the people who lived in each house.  I pressed my feelings against the apartment houses and wondered what it would be like to live there- alone.  I cut down alleys over broken glass along leaning fences and off-street parking pads.

One day it was raining; we still walked. The dog, more than reluctant but I had a question to answer and time to kill.

Yesterday was the last day. I waited for Beach to get inside the apartment then I headed out to say good-bye to my afternoon sessions with Sugar House. Mailed a letter at the post office before setting off into the rows of houses that had become my backdrop.

Why did we leave Sugar House? For space, for land, for freedom.

I miss the idea of it sometimes. Miss the idea of clean uniformity of bricks and clapboards that trickles out of Harvard-Yale. It runs downhill splashing out into the streets around Sugar House Park, it dots the shopping district; drying out around 2nd East.
   
I don't miss the interlopers. The dog walkers. The pet sitters. The traffic. The trees that lean and the sidewalks that break. I don't miss the thick bungalow where it was always winter, even when the flowers were blooming.

We moved west to stand in a field as the sun came up.  We moved west to be able to leave our bikes on the front porch while going in for a glass of water and not come back to them gone without us. We moved because of property taxes and horrible neighbors and nowhere to park.

We moved west so we could go walking along the river.

"The house on tenth west liked junk.  We didn’t know it when we fell in love and bought it.  A realtor’s nightmare with dead animals mounted on the walls, overstuffed rooms, gaping valances, and dusty curtains.  The day we were shown the house we stepped around the piles, navigated rooms so full we were not allowed to open closed doors.

We bought her anyway and moved across town.  Down 1700 South over the tracks and through the industrial warehouses, onto a wide residential street that seemed to stretch forever.  We were in by Halloween.  Ripping up carpets, tearing down cabinets and curtains, stripped her bare and we all started over." ~Taming Venus, mlb

What else I hadn't known was that we would spend the next twelve years curing the house on Tenth of her need for possessions. And as much as we have changed her, she has changed us. Once we were a family of Sugar House refugees, a child of Harvard-Yale and a child of the world, moving from under the shadows of institutions like Dartmouth and the mighty U; we are not that anymore.

drifting lanes

I blink in the mosaic darkness of 6 AM.  Well, at least it is morning and I can't be afraid, I think to myself. But I am still too unsure if it was real to close my eyes. 

A few seconds pass with me lying there trying to focus in the silence. Then I feel the sound of it rounding the corner of the bed.  The sound in my head of her nails clicking over the floorboards. A flash of her decaying body, her rotting hair laying in wait on the floor beneath me. 

No, I tell myself, which means "that is not real and you know it". 

I know what is causing this.

What is pulling back into the choppy water of my sister's death?  Part of it is that I am standing too close to a friend who reminds me of my sister.  I am wading in the water with her because she is struggling.  Because there are children innocently playing in the surf of these quick-turn waters.  Children I can't leave behind.

Part of it is my reaction to this is to run.  And to run means pushing myself.  Laying there in the dark I can feel the soreness from chasing a Boot Camp workout with a 6-mile run.

But just in case I'm wrong and her hand is about to reach up over the side of the bed I tunnel my way through the blankets over to BC. I lay with him for a few minutes but I can't fall back asleep. 

I'll make coffee, I think.  Reminding myself we are skiing today and we should both already be up. 

I pause considering my options before choosing to roll over BC to avoid getting out on my side of the bed- the side where I imagine my dead sister's body is lying.  Where I know it is not...but just in case it is.....

BC groans, "There you are." 

"What?" I ask my bare foot touching the ground. 

He repeats himself, "I said there you are."

"Yeah, sorry about that my side of the bed has issues this morning."

I make my way down the stairs.  Stand at the sink. A hundred memories of the time I spent under the murky waters of her death running out.  BC has slowly ripped open and gutted the house.  The landmarks are gone.  Leaving the house looking like the belly of a giant whale.  It is all gone, I tell myself.  All of it....

I know I will never go all the way back there....but just in case I step back from the cupboard... just in case she is trying to reach out from under the sink and grab me.

I make coffee thinking about what a friend said last night.

"Stay in your own lane," he said over the phone. "Like swimming.  If you don't stay in your own lane you're going to get kicked in the face.  Stay in your own lane and take care of yourself." 

Sometimes I think I didn't do a good job introducing myself to him when we met 7 or so years ago.  There is a lot he doesn't know about me and my past. 

One would be, I used to swim. 

Years ago when I was trying to rebuild the muscles in my shoulder that were destroyed in a blunt force trauma.  Ripped and torn from the bone when I was thrown into a door frame with enough force to do permeant damage to my right shoulder and knock me unconscious.

I stopped going to the pool because it was too hard to get and keep my own lane.  The women at the pool were mean.  Flat out aggressive bullies.  They would jump into your lane and swim over you as if it was nothing.  Working in pain and very little hope to for recovery, I never stood a chance against them.

I left the pool one morning never to return with a half-used punch pass card and a shoulder that would never be right. 

There are a lot of things about me that will never be right.  But there are also a lot of things I wouldn't change.

Taming Venus, mlb

By November (2006), other small lapses in my mental state beginning to show.  I had somehow come to believe her finger was in our vacuum and refused to change the vacuum bags.  I could no longer sleep on my side of the bed.  I had nightmares every night.  I couldn’t walk through the house in the dark without worrying I walk into her rotting body.  I thought I might wet the bed if I had to use the bathroom at night because I was convinced she was standing outside the bathroom window.

She was everywhere and I was nowhere to be found.     

What truly lies beneath the grass of November?  Below the dirt double bagged in a cheap coffin?

chasing the ghost herd

I woke myself calling his name. It rolled out into an empty house like dying thunder over a dark ocean.

Don't leave me I will die here, the words whispered out of my memory.

I sat up looking through the shadows in my bedroom trying to figure out where I was. What house, what room, what bed, which partner? 

The answers crawl out of fog. The little white house, the upstairs bedroom, BC. I let go the breath I was holding and with it the panic.

Don't leave me here....It's the part of our relationship BC and I don't think about much anymore; the precarious beginning.

For me, it was a dangerous last step from a water-logged rowboat to an unfamiliar but solid ground. Not really a step at all more like a leap of desperation. Desperation unrelated to love. Entrenched in survival.

Jumping to BC was a strategic choice. Falling in love with him was a happy accident. Perhaps those 2 things are more related than I believe them to be.

When I say strategic of course I don't mean for money/power, I mean temperament and safety.  When I look back I can see him carefully watching me. I can see through the blueness of his eyes. His hands behind his back as he leans into the dark to listen from his porch to mine waiting for anything that might signal I was in more trouble than I could handle on my own.    

Before BC, before his steadiness I had a very different life which now so perfectly crafted by 'distance', it appears calm and forgettable. 

I can almost believe it was.      

Like a city blanketed in new snow the past rests under a veil that is easily broken.   

I haven't had cause to revisit it. 

I have been too busy layering on protection. Too busy insulating myself from the call of the water washing against the haul of the boat of ghosts I left drifting among the pilings. 

But this is part of the journey back. I have started running again. Not in the 2-3 times a week way but in the way that gets under your skin.  The 'if no one is watching too closely I could sneak in one more run today' way.

And as my body remembers my mind does too. 

It hasn't been easy to get even this far. It feels like I have dug such a steep hole for myself that ever step is uphill. I'm not even almost back to the surface and I can see it is about to get even harder.  

Last night was the first reminder of how fragile my peace with my past is. How light the skin of ice that holds it quiet.

It is one thing to fight the daylight. To ask your body to keep going when it is tired and sore- and old. 

But to ask your mind to break down the gates holding back the ghost herd.  Let them out so you can chase them down one by one- it seems semi-suicidal and yet this the chance & the moment I see worth taking.      

The nightmares are far harder to our run than the miles, I tell him. BC sighs heavily over the line.  "You have to be careful," he answers back. 

"What are you running from? The antelope seem to ask.  And I answer them, what I have always been running from- myself." ~Taming Venus, mlb

      

talking to strangers

I am shamelessly kneeling on both knees down on the floor of the grocery store just out of the way carefully transferring my purchases from Smith's bags into my snowboarding backpack.

The old man stands above me leaning on his loaded cart talking at me. I happily answer his questions even though I'm sure I' m not supposed to be.

Under the current circumstances, it seems pointless to put up any sort of fake social plaster. He asks for my name and once he has it he used it. 

"Misty, you have a bike?"  

I tell him I don't that I'm on foot knowing there is no need to define the lack of a car: the backpack has already done that for me.

As I place the large wet bundle of celery between the grapes and a container of soy milk I see a man dressed in mechanic blues with clear blue eyes to match pauses inside the breezeway to watch us. 

I don't have to stare at him to know why he and the young boy beside him have stopped.

He is a father and despite that, we might be the same age he sees me as someone in need of oversight. 

Clearly, he doesn't like what he is seeing. The old man makes him nervous and he might think I don't know enough to be afraid, or at least more cautious. 

What he doesn't know is I am always afraid.  Always watching the shadows along the trail. Today is no different. 

The old man is creepy but harmless even only if that is because I can outrun him. 

Really he doesn't phase me because I am a mom on a mission, car-less but in need of cucumbers- it's funny and it's not. 

The food isn't really even for me. I could survive on spoons full of peanut butter but the girls need something better and I have 2 hours to make that happen for them.   

I stand up, smile at the watching man, and walk out into the parking heading to the street for the slow walk home.

Halfway I realize it is already July and I am passing the very spot on 9th west where my mind resets time to before I knew my sister was dead.  

The last moment I was ever truly full myself. "And then I was driving. Driving with the windows down..." ... AND then I realize I also forgot to buy noodles, damn. 

taming venus, part one: the order of things

(Friday, July 28, 2006)

People die.  Wendi died on “A” day.  I guess that isn’t really true, she died in the dim blank space before that.  Her bloated naked body slumped across the bathroom floor.  Her swollen feet tangled around the base of the toilet.  Her badly bludgeoned forehead smashed against the door jam. In her apparent fall, her arm laid trapped beneath her, the weight of her decomposing body splitting and shedding the skin.

A bathtub of stagnating water to her left, on her right a pool of dark rancid fluid created by brown chunks of her hair, thick layers of rotting flesh, old blood, and vomit.

In the first few hours, her once olive-toned skin had taken on stark jaundice, as time past a shade of ashy purple.  It is death purple and you will not find it in a box of crayons.  You must know raw death to know this color.  And once you know it you can’t “un-know” it.

In the 6 x 9-foot front room a fan jammed in an open window did little to cool the stale summer heat, nothing to dissipate the smell.

And then there was something said about the flies.

It was the smell that exposed her.  Of course initially, my information was all second or third hand. I was told a tenant in her building called the landlord complaining of a noxious odor.  The landlord found her body.  He called the police and they called my parents.  I suppose that is our parents, after all, she was my sister.

Do I tell you now who we were, about our perfect childhood about raspberry patches and the distant sound of lawnmowers on Saturday mornings?  About the squeak, the swing set made, about tiny drops of condensation in the corner of our bedroom window, or the blistering warmth of the back deck on an August afternoon.  

Would it matter that I was the little sister separated by three years, she was the middle and there was one three years older than her?   That we were raised as Mormons on tree-lined streets with lush green manicured lawns with manicured lives to fit.  

That the home of my beloved soccer coach smelled of fresh coffee and cloves foreign aromas forever imprinted on my soul.  Along with the fields of early freedom under his watchful eye covered by dew-soaked blades of freshly cut grass that stick to your legs and arms like glitter.   

No, I don’t think it matters.  I could tell you but unless you lived it you would never come to really understand how ideal our life was.  A world created through pick gingham and station wagon windows.  Peace and isolation like that exists only in the purest of childhood and the loneliest of snow globes; I find I am a collector of both.               

The police phoned my sixty-something-year-old father to tell him there had been a disturbance at his daughter’s apartment and would he please come down.  My father, with his dark eyes, eyes he gave to us, told the officer there was always a disturbance at his daughter’s insisting the need to know exactly what it was before deciding whether or not to come.  

The officer persisted; he should come to the apartment to talk.  My dad, his dark hair peppered gray, thick strong hands and arms turning to fat, told him that he and my beautiful sweet mother had dinner plans with another couple so unless he was told what the trouble was he wouldn’t come. The police had to tell him over the phone.

My parents called me.  When it was about Wendi I was always called- but I didn’t get that phone call.  I was at the grocery store buying green beans, a tiny seedless water watermelon with dirt still caked on one side, and unbleached flour. All for the petite towheaded toddler sitting in the shopping cart basket clutching a package of goldfish crackers in one hand, pudding in the other, and singing a very bad rendition of twinkle-twinkle little star.  

It was “A” day, the start of 26 days of learning the alphabet one letter one day at a time.  It was a simple idea a friend gave me.  I have come to understand even simple ideas can rely on very precarious assumptions.

I could drive myself mad picturing what I was doing while she died but it wouldn’t do any good.  She had been dead for so long.  We don’t know how long so I can’t find the moment to hate myself for.  All I know is what I was doing when my parents climbed the stairs to her apartment.   Where I was when the M.E. told them not to go in, that no parent should see their child that way.   

The phone calls, the police, the smell, I was there in the store like I said, shopping for dinner, for green beans, flour, and watermelon.  And then I was driving.  Driving with the windows down in the red VW van mostly because of the lack of a working air conditioner but you can’t overlook the fact that the driver side window was broken and I could not have rolled it up even if I wanted to.  

There in the heat of a July evening, in the part of the day when the air rises like fat ribbons off the pavement, between the rush of 5 o’clock traffic, my little girl safely strapped in her car seat talking away to no one.  Domestic chores of everyday life floating off into dryness of Utah desert, the only worry was a fall semester, which looked like a bear of calculus and bio-chem.

 

It is slow and silent now.  I can see us driving, eternally preserved as if we never came home.  We become a mosaic of filtered colors and sunlight dancing across the tiny proteins of memory, stored next to dust fairies and thick green shag carpet.  

But I did come home...

doing seven to ten

As I rounded the car throwing open the back to toss my bag in, I opened my mouth to say something but it was a thought I decided not to share, "You know I don't see my sister very much anymore...." 

 It would have hung heavy in the fresh spring air. Out of place in the middle of the day with the sun shining, white clouds making like lazy sheep strolling through the sky.  So I said nothing.   

Well yes, it's hard to see dead people, isn't it? That is, it is hard to see them through the wall of sanity.  

I am just now noticing how over the past few years my life seems to have completely rebuilt itself; without permission, I would note.  And in the name of progress, just as I feared, what I had left of my sister slipped through my open hands.  

There was a peace there in that time of madness.  Freedom within being trapped under the soft water of sadness.  A quiet that wouldn't lift.  A slowness that wouldn't break. A shelter in the darkness of her death. 

I miss the invincibility of standing firm on rock bottom.

But there are places you simply can't go back to, even when you are standing in them. 

I marvel that she isn't even a ghost here anymore- except when I am running. Passing through short shadows and long stretches of sunlight I can remember the heavy warmth of being haunted, of being lost, of being nothing more than elemental. 

Maybe it was because we used to run together. Maybe it is because it is a space long enough to think in. Or perhaps it is the struggle, body vs. brain that reminds me of what I was then, reminds me of her.  

And even though I don't see her anymore, my dreams don't hold that constant question "wait, I thought you were dead; are you dead?" I can imagine and I can remember. And I can doubt.

Tomorrow would have been her birthday.  Never would she have wanted to be this old.  She seems to always get her way, even in death: now she never has to grow up.  She doesn't have to go through all of this and she will never know. 

Never know what she gave up. 

      

June 2009

The dawn breaks hard in the desert.  Heat and light are the same.  The vast expanse of tundra ripples across valley to valley.  Mountains explode from the grasses and junipers.  Life is heavy here.  I rub dust from my eyes, pull back my hair, and lace my running shoes.  Even as I watched her do the same I knew this will have to be the last run for me and her.  I simply cannot carry her any farther.  

It is a bittersweet moment letting go.  Just as holding on to what was before, the release is slow and silent.  I was there my feet striking the desert floor, sunlight filtering through the brush, the morning ripe with the smell of sage, and the air full of dust fairies.             We were together there running as sisters and when I came up over the horizon she was gone. I was running alone.  The antelope stopped grazing to stare at me and at the nothingness that followed me as I ran by.  I finally had the answer to their question “What are you running from?”  What I have always been running from. I am running from myself.  

At this point, I don’t know if I am more afraid of being crazy or of forgetting her.

~Taming Venus, mlb    

Wendi M. Brown- Bevan, born May 2, 1970, to Jon and Julie Brown, Salt Lake City. In the pouring rain, on August 1, 2006, long after her spirit had left this world, the body of Wendi M. Brown-Bevan was laid to rest...  Wendi, we know your sight was often unclear, your path mostly unpaved, but whatever life may have held for you and for all of us who cared for you along the way, we want you to know that you were and forever will be truly loved by us.

May you find the peace you were seeking.