What Happened After My Eighth Birthday Party

Eleven years have passed since the day my dad left. I turned nineteen on my last birthday, and I was glad not to have a birthday party. I have not had a birthday party since I was eight, and I am happy about that. I do not like birthday parties, just like Stanley did not like birthday parties in Harold Pinter's play, The Birthday Party. Party games frightened Stanley, while they disgusted me, so we have a slightly different perspective about this. But Stanley said he preferred to go out quietly on his own to celebrate, which is exactly how I feel about it.

"None of those girls are my friends," I told my father when he came to get me out of my bedroom for the second time the day of my eighth birthday. Dad talked softly to me, bending down so he could see me under the bed. Then he got loud and he started pulling on my legs. Dad finally dragged me downstairs and I was kicking and screaming.

"Here comes The Freaker," I heard one girl whisper. That was the name they called me at school and I hated it. Hearing the name at home made me feel hot all over.

Somehow my father got me seated at the table. I did not eat anything and as soon as my father took his chair away from behind my chair, I fled back to my room. Everyone else ate the pancakes and syrup my mother had cooked, and pretended to have a good time without me. Or maybe they really did have a good time. I do not have any way of knowing for sure because of our different perspectives.

After the party was over, my parents had the last terrible fight and Dad left.

After my father left, my mother threw his things out their bedroom window. "And don't come back!" she yelled. Standing at the window of my own room, I saw his clothes tumbling down from the house and I felt as if I were going to throw up. Suit jackets. Shirts. Pants. Suspenders. Clothes are meant to be in closets, not sailing through the air and landing on snow.

At that point, I forgot that my father had already left and I began to think that soon he himself would be flung out the window to follow his clothes. "Stop," I squeaked, fear shrinking my voice. "Stop. The snow isn't deep enough. The snow isn't deep enough!"

But the falling things continued. I stood helplessly watching the garments settle, one on top of the other, on the crust of snow. It occurred to me that the clothes would get wrinkled, and then driven over when the car came out of the garage, and I wished somebody would pick them up, but I couldn't move. Finally, I shook out my stiff body and crept away from the window.

My mother even threw a photo album. I don't know why. Later I saw that photo album in the basement, before she burned up all the pictures in it. In the pictures, my mother had on a wedding dress and my father wore a suit. There were no pictures in the album of my dead brother Ashton— and no pictures of me.

I wonder what would have happened if the kid in the blue sweater had come to my party. When the other kids called me The Freaker, would that kid have said, "Her name is Taylor Jane, and she is my friend"?

Anyway, probably the blue sweater wouldn't have fit by then and so the kid wouldn't have been wearing it. I had grown out of all my grade one clothes by the time I was in grade two. Good thing I am not growing anymore or I would grow out of my jean dress and then I would not be able to wear it anymore.

If I had that blue sweater I would put it in a picture frame and hang it on our wall at home. Here in France, there are a lot of interesting things on the walls. There are pictures of naked Egyptians. There is a cloth embroidered with a church on the front. There is a watercolor painting that I really like of the village of Lourmarin. The colors look as if they were put there in layers, which must have taken the artist a great deal of planning.