All through that summer and well into the fall, right past where winter should have been and into the next spring, whenever the girls and Shirley showed up for a visit, I shared my little apartment with them. That first time was the only time Shirley slept in my bed, and I think she only did it that time because she forgot I was there. The apartment had always been hers to settle in when she needed a soft place to land. The girls are okay, it seems, and over the course of time I learn that their father is a sales rep for a pharmaceutical company, and that he and his new wife have a new baby. Neither of the girls say anything unkind about their stepmother, and I wonder if it’s just Shirley who hates the wifey. I hope so. I hope the girls have something solid and stable.
My birthday is coming up, and I feel heavy with the weight of memories. The baby would be two now, and it seems unfathomable that she is not the infant in my memory. She is certainly walking by now, eating real foods with her little teeth, talking, calling Meredith “Mama.” My memories roll in reverse from the baby to when I was little, to being Little Fish and eating Milk Duds from my mom’s hand. Memories that continue to roll in reverse . . . to my earliest ones of when Eddie was with us. Birthdays are horrible; all holidays are. I can go from today to tomorrow most of the time without stepping back through my life, but holidays always force the memories to the surface.
I wonder if the strange slipping of time is because there are no seasons to mark the days. It is sometimes cooler than other times, but essentially time passes without great change. Was it really already three years ago when I had met Warren and we had strung lights on the evergreen at the back of the trailer? I begin to see my life from a different angle, like an outsider looking in, and it feels calm to look back that way, without all the emotion that wrapped me up while I was living it. All through my childhood, I was angry about all the things I didn’t have—the clothes I didn’t have, the shiny toys I didn’t have—and that all felt so important at the time. All those things I wanted and felt diminished by not having. But living in the basement apartment, I am often amazed at how little I actually need.
Ina often knocks on the floor with her cane and invites me up to sit with her in the afternoons. When I first met her, I could only see the folding of her skin, the wispiness of her hair, but as I spend afternoons with Cotton sitting on my knee, his feathers fluffed as I rub the fragile frame of his body, I begin to see the bright color of her eyes and the shape of her bones beneath her skin. It’s amazing how everything on the outside just fades away when she tells me stories of her childhood, growing up during the Great Depression.
One afternoon I find her reading passages from a tattered copy of The Grapes of Wrath, looking misty-eyed and nostalgic.
“I’ve never read that,” I admit, although it was on my reading list sophomore year.
“Oh, it’s a good one,” she says and insists that I take her worn and highlighted copy.
“I tried to read it once, when I was still in high school. . .” I let the sentence hang, unfinished, remembering how chaotic and wrong that time had been. “I’ll give it another try.”
And I do, when I come home from work in the early hours of the morning, too keyed up to sleep, I start reading and am still sitting at the table when the first slants of sunlight fall into the back yard. I may as well have never seen the book before, because nothing in it is familiar. I give it another go, reading whenever I can. The writing takes me someplace else. I don’t know how I couldn’t have loved it the first time, but realize that I wasn’t ready for it then. I didn’t have the ability to experience it the way I do now. When I finish reading the last page, I sit for a long time, holding the worn copy to my chest, like a hug, and I feel like I understand something about Ina. I feel like I understand something about life.