Hello, Universe
I am gathering items for a birthday party to be: cans of silly string in bulk, balloons, water balloons, squirt guns, banners, floats. Come Saturday, I will just add pizza and cake.
Anyway, I feel like the Berenstain Bears, in “The Berenstain Bears and TOO MUCH BIRTHDAY,” when they’re getting ready for Sister’s party, and it’s still exciting and they haven’t gone too far yet—ie: before the ponies.
And anyway, I’m thinking about how they use a spare room in the treehouse to hoard all the supplies. And how I loved this part as a child. The amassing of a bunch of pieces, stacked up and colorful and promising. Like the birthday presents themselves. Shiny and lovely and hopeful—a sort of soft, consoling abundance.
Those books are something like comfort food to me—that slow baked cadence, the way they were so thorough, even in their explanations to their cubs. Especially in their explanations to their cubs. And something about being able to hide between those wordy spaces as a kid, for the assurance of grown up bears and their certainty, and for the story to take too long when I was supposed to be going to bed.
It was the same with Frances, how she lists what she grew to have in her eventual lunchbox, once she’d conquered just bread and jam. I could read that part a million times to myself before bed. Cardboard salt and pepper shakers. A bud vase of flowers! A doily for the desk. The tidiness of salad sandwiches, cut, and tucked into containers. Recordings of the ephemeral; a calmness in the details. Satisfaction in the things, nouns listed like a meditation—and I see that this type of efficiency may have just been a way to quell an ever present thrum of undiagnosed childhood anxiety.
***
What is strange is how my dad came home from the hospital a couple of weeks ago with a lingering delirium that made him list his meals in the same way—and how it didn’t feel the same. No comfort there. I would listen to the halting catalog of his menus while tears rolled down my cheeks.
This was not my dad. He was prone to speaking lengthily about anything—having kissed the blarney stone being a great point of pride for him. But this dude was not MY Dude. There was no levity in the lengthy details, he spoke too slowly. There was no laughter behind the invented fact, the words together became inert.
But. I wonder how my mom felt about the thrice daily tea parties—if she liked it. She was always fond of miniatures. Little pitchers and little silverware. China saucers and jelly jars. Our sandwiches cut into triangles and served on oblong glass plates that had indents for your teacup. Sometimes she would make me tea, adding tap water if it was too hot, and I would dunk my tea bag while I told her about kindergarten that day. I remember two things about kindergarten. The Columbus song that I can still sing. And how, when I got glasses, a girl at school told me I was ugly.
(Ugly. Even the word is cruel.)
But my mom, on those afternoons. Here is what I see. She was tiny. High waisted bell bottoms, a soft plaid button up shirt tucked into the belt tightly, so trim. Or a light sweater that came to her neck. I’d eat at the counter and she would wander over to watch “All My Children” with a mug. She would let us watch it with her; I would always wander away. Always in favor of books. Longing for my bed, for a tidier story.
***
When she bought us books, my mom would have us write our names in the front of them, on the first page: name and date, the ownership laid in artful scrawl, the artfulness in direct proportion to my current age. Scratchy when little; controlled cursive by third grade; affectedly angsty and sparse by high school. The book was mine, a minute of my time, frozen in history.
To be clear, at least 90% of what I read as a child I never actually owned, the library and the Bookmobile like houses of worship, quiet and cold and smelling like age. I would take a tote bag with me and I would fill it. I devoured entire series over and over from these shelves: Sweet Valley, and Anne of Green Gables and Little House and Nancy Drew, and Ramona and all the Judy Blume the world had to offer. A dip into Madeline L’engle and C.S. Lewis and Lois Lowry because the grown-ups would suggest it. But I was fickle and girlish, prone to wild notions. So between “Tiger Eyes” and “Forever”—the books we passed under the tables of my seventh grade honors English class with sex scenes marked and dog eared—somehow I’m convinced that I really made the most of my public school education and California’s tax payer dollars.
***
One of my best memories as a child, I am probably about 11. We drove into the city specifically so that I could complete my collection of “The Babysitters Club” series. We were at a bookshop I’ve never been able to find again. And I want to say it was off Union Square because I’m remembering it in relation to the Hello Kitty store, somewhere; and I want to know if I still have that complete collection, also somewhere.
Here it occurs to me that perhaps books, and the characters inside of them, are my friends. Maybe they’re the only true friends that there really are; the only things that stay the same. They never leave. You know exactly where to find them, tucked between soft covers, just waiting for you patient and unchanging.
It also occurs to me that my daughter’s love of reading came soaring out during quarantine. She was our most social creature, she has been the slowest to join in on making plans with friends again.
***
I still love opening books from my shelf and seeing the ballpoint date in my mom’s swooping pen—generally sometime amid the 1970’s—or written in my own changing hand in the 80’s and 90’s. I wonder when I stopped doing this. I wish now that I had kept the tradition going—and that I had written more underneath my name and date. Like what I was thinking, or who I was with, or what country I bought it in. Basically: more words. Words upon words. Already enough words and always adding to it.
I have a copy of “Jazz” by Toni Morrison that is tiny and royal blue and a European imprint. The penmanship of my hand drew my name so little and tight in the top right corner of the title page, no caps. Seeing it, I am drawn into the particulars: of the girl I was who wrote in that taut curve, who was secretive with her words in a notebook. I was a newlywed and the thing I feared most was that he would try to read my journals. He would press on what I was writing, and I would be defensive. I kept the notebook, and the book, together—shoved into the bottom of a backpack that I carried for two months, stashed above me on a train, across country lines and mountain ranges.
Also: I only wrote my first name in that book. I couldn’t bring myself to include with it my new last name.
Sometimes it’s the words we leave out.
(In editing, they write dele: a truncation of a thing to erase. An extra two letters too much; delete the delete, disappearing even as its written.)
***
I think now that I stopped writing my name in books during college because all I did was write in books. I have so many now that I try to reread and they are underlined to the point of obsolescence—where the more interesting feels like whatever is not underlined—and all the markings feel pretentious. Was I always trying so hard? Was I always seeking something between the lines?
I think I was.
Sometimes the stories we’re supposed to get from the words are just as important as the stories on the margins. Fantasy fills in the blanks; hope does too. Imagination is all the ink in the world, coloring inside the lines and out. And what was I supposed to take from all of it? Well, I got to choose.
***
As a child, getting to use a pen to write your name in a book felt a little bit naughty, like something you really shouldn’t do, like the breaking of some reiterated rule of elementary school and number 2 pencils.
On an unofficial scale of scandal that I’m inventing as this sentence appears before me, it’s almost as scandalous as writing your heights in Sharpie on the wall. A act, I have to say, I didn’t realize was scandalous until a little girl came over to play and gaped at the ramshackle scribbled ruler of heights and names and dates and ages. “My mom would NEVER let us write on the wall,” she said and I countered, “This isn’t really WRITING on the wall.” But she just stared at me, unconvinced of this mothering left unchecked, and I hoped she didn’t go upstairs where the bedroom walls really were written on, willy nilly, messy and, to me, expressions of place.
(Isn’t this all of our home? Don’t we all live here? How is the ink and the paint on the wall done by the hand of children any less needful than the Paul Klee? Than the family photo?)
In the backyard, this claim is evident: where a sidewalk chalk mishap at least eight years prior baked our youngest child’s name into the stucco on the back of our house. It’s gigantic lettering; it will be a cave painting for the ages. That he lived here. That he existed.
I have a memory fall into me suddenly as I write this—something I haven’t thought of in ages. When I was a teenager I dated a guy who was a tagger. He would find surfaces, overpasses, abandoned buildings, empty walls, and fill them with words, gigantic lettering, three dimensional and colorful. One time he wrote my name. All bubbled and like it was exploding. B-R-O-O-K-E. I can still see it, exploding in my mind.
Now, the thought of it makes my own name explode in my throat. A fullness I catch and can’t swallow.
***
Tagger was the least of his disobedience to civility and rules, and though he wasn’t my first, he was older, and taught me a lot about my own body. He would peel my shirt off of me anywhere that we were after dark, a cement picnic table at the park or in his car, and I remember distinctly, looking down at myself and seeing my bra gleaming in the dim, and how my skin looked blue in the moonlight.
Sometimes he would just stare at me. He saw me at a party and then sought me out, finding me at my job in the mall. He was relentless, he called me as soon as I got home. He said to me, “You have the most interesting look.” As though I could help it. It was just my face, my body, my skin, my hair, the way these cells came together.
And honestly? These words stuck, from men, and I’m never entirely sure if they were compliments or accusations.
***
I want so badly to be witnessed, but I don’t know how to let people see me, and what I want is to be seen, out in the open, lying there plain and broken and whole and disparate and complete. Exploding and okay with it. The only problem is that everything changes; I change. Maybe writing things down is a way of making something that is fleeting stay still for just one minute. That my mind will change, that my thoughts will change, that everything will change means nothing, not really. It is mainly about witnessing it at the moment, like the heights on the wall—each child has dozens of markings and a date. They don’t stay static at three feet high—it only marks where they were, once. And that they grew.
Could you see me like this? All my heights? All my selves? Every word? Can you take me in, in entirety? Find me like this: unembarrassed, unashamed.
***
I read in the Sunday paper one morning, a light letter in the TV section, the critic writes back to a girl who can’t get over “Normal People.” And neither can I, frankly. Just. All of it—the novel first, and Sally Rooney as a writer second, and the cinematic scope of Ireland in the show, and the spare way it all handles itself.
And, anyway, she writes this to describe a character:
“…that artsy impatience of people who spent a lot of time reading alone as children,”
And I think, Huh.
And I think: How strange that I just had my entire sensibility reduced down to the fractured second half of a sentence. Literally the aside of an answer, a prelude to the actual thought, a diagnosis that took very few words at all.
***
My daughter is next to me reading a book called, “Hello Universe.” It’s been in her bookcase for a while. It looks a little young for her. “I can’t remember if we bought it in Santa Cruz or Denver,” she muses on two bookshops that we love, lying on her tummy, looking over the top of the hardbound cover, at the trees. Her feet are crossed and by the kitty, who bats at her toes lovingly then forgets what she’s doing to lick her own paw.
I think: Here’s an argument for writing an establishing paragraph in the front cover of your books—if it was Santa Cruz, it was that rainy afternoon near the holidays, and we met the Grinch and took a stroll to Pizza My Heart afterwards; if it was Denver, we chose it after you tried a cappuccino for the first time and hated it, then we ate breakfast at lunchtime, and kept singing, “Build me up, buttercup baby, just to let me down.”
Wouldn’t these details be nice to know?
My daughter says, “I like this book because this concept: It says that when you get a good feeling or a bad feeling, it’s the universe telling you something.”
Well.
I have a good feeling and a bad feeling.
(What is it, Universe? Lay it on thick and spare me no details. Use color. Use pen. Scratch it all out.)
***
My laptop is open in front of me, we are still in the nook outside. He wanders over from across the yard to see what I am searching. “Pool toys.” He approves.
We discuss his impending birthday party—the exact slip n slide that I bought. The color of streamers. Ideas for a cake. God bless the scrappiness of this child that wants to make it and decorate it himself… “Orrrr,” he muses, “Just buy it at a bakery.” Then we decide where we will sit while he opens his presents. “I don’t know why,” he says, staring at the sky, the leaves of the trees that seem to captivate us all, sending our vision upwards, “Birthdays are just a really big deal to me.”
***
Once upon a time, someone told me that their mom forgot their birthday. This thought suddenly pinches my heart. These feelings aren’t mine to keep, but. I plan my son’s birthday party thinking of that, with a little bit of ache. For all the little accidental ways we hurt each other, even our kids, even ourselves, even each other.
