by Tyler Dalzell
I go to retrieve the last of my childhood things from my grandmother’s house. I know that it’s not much, and my teenaged-self will never use the things I’ll retrieve, but it’s all I can have.
We’ve been in the car an hour now, with a stop along the way for sodas and chips and to refill the car with gas. I can still taste the syrupy pineapple Fanta I drank, which had gone warm fast in the April air. Salt and vinegar chips caught in the back of my throat. My legs hurt from sitting. I used to be able to sleep all the way through these trips, from Falkville to Birmingham and back, when my dad would come get me for weekends together because my mom refused to drive me. Now I’m wide awake, listening to the same three or four songs on repeat. I look up as I feel us pull off the interstate and pass by the Loves gas station, into the small town.
“I’ll still never understand why she wouldn’t even let us come get it,” my stepmom, Raeco, says as she squints down the dark road, the speed limit sign with a dark bullet hole through it that’s been there since I can remember, still in its place. She’s talking about my mom throwing all of our stuff in a storage building the last months I lived with her, after we moved back into Birmingham. I see the same dog as years ago behind the fence at the first house, the trailers, but now the dog has a wound on his leg and the blue trailer house’s paint is chipping and peeling away. My mom never paid for the storage, and the owners sold everything we owned.
The church is in better condition than when I left, despite the slow decay of the houses. The driveway has been repaved, and the stone bricks of the exterior seem to have been scrubbed clean, gleaming in shades of bronze and tan. There’s new grass on the street side of it. It looks like something foreign, to me and to the town. Too big and bright in the spring sun. It looks like something out of a model town.
My dad is taking pictures of everything as we drive in, as if any of this means anything, as if I’ll look back at this trip fondly someday. I’ve never really decided if I remember this place with fondness or not; the Halloweens and church communions and friends clouded by the stickiness of trauma.
Besides, it’s hard to remember most of what happened here, except in the slightest of flashes. Maybe that’s why it all looks so fake. When we moved here was when my mother started drinking badly—maybe before that. I never knew why she couldn’t pay the rent in the little lakeside community in Birmingham that we lived in until I was six. All I knew was suddenly we were moving.
My grandmother, who I call Nindy, lives in the church’s house. My grandfather was a preacher there, before it burned down and was rebuilt, but I never knew him. They let her stay when he died, since she had never worked and did so much for the church. When the church burned, her house was unaffected, save for the plastic of her mailbox warping on the side. It’s still there when we visit. Her red porch is dusty from pollen because I haven’t been there to clean it and all she can do is sweep. I remember all the splinters I’ve gotten from the swing on that porch and wonder if it would still hold my weight. I wonder how much I weighed when I left and can’t remember. I wonder how much I weigh now and flinch.
She’s at the door when we pull into the empty carport, smelling of years of dust and spider webs, holding the screen door open as we climb out of the car. There’s still nothing in her flower bed beside the carport, nothing save for the red plastic drumstick my oldest cousin, Taylor, stuck in there when he was young. I think he’s at college now, and I wonder what would change if I moved that drumstick out of the place it’s sat in for probably fifteen years now. Would it disrupt something in the universe?
Nothing seems to have changed—the same brown linoleum floor in the kitchen, which seems to creek as the three of us, too big for the house, pile in. My dad seems to crouch down. It feels wrong. I’m so much taller than I was when I lived here. The counter comes up to my waist, while before it was at my chest. I don’t understand. I could reach the top of the cabinets now, if I pleased. I have to duck to avoid hitting the hanging light in the dining room. The table looks miniature to me.
“Hey! How are y’all? How was the trip? Are you hungry?” I nod on instinct, even though I ate a bag of chips on the way up. I want to dig my fingers into that bag of multi-colored marshmallows, pull out the sticky sugary things and fill my mouth with them. I remember they were always powdery. They’d be so small in my hands now. I can’t remember her ever buying a new bag, but somehow, they were never depleted, never more than a little stale.
“No, we ate on the way up,” my dad answers, dashing my hopes for the marshmallows. My mouth is dry after imagining the powderiness.
Nindy gasps and grabs my arm, startling me for a moment from the marshmallow-induced daze. “You cut your hair!”
I reach up subconsciously to touch at it, the short strands slipping through my fingers. I’d almost forgotten it hadn’t always been like this, even as the third-grade yearbook photo of me hangs on her wall in my line of sight. It doesn’t click in my brain that I’m the kid in the picture. My grandmother’s hands are covered in liver spots and are freezing cold. Hers are dark in comparison to mine, my skin having paled in the years I haven’t lived here.
Nervously, I smile and nod. I just want her hands off of me. I don’t like how I can feel her skeleton under her skin, as if she’s already dead, even as her eyes look brightly at me.
“Oh well, I guess Aunt Joan told me that, didn’t she? I must ‘a just forgot. It looks cute though.” She’s so small, having to look up just to look at me. She must only be five feet tall. I know I’ve grown since I left but I have no measure of how much, no memory of how tall I was when I left. “Come on, let’s sit down in here, y’all.” She shuffles off into the living room, past the tiny sewing machine she always said she’d teach me to use, past the dining room table that hasn’t been used since I was here. She used to make me breakfast every morning before school, eggs with a cheese slice badly melted onto it and slightly buttered bread she had toasted in the oven. I can see the dust that’s collected on her lace placemats. Some mornings, we would sit there, and she would brush the tangles from my rats nest of hair before I was allowed to go to school or church. My hair isn’t even the same color now. I’ve dyed it cherry red. I move past it and into the living room.
The plush carpet easily gives way under our feet. My dad and I walk, heads bowed, to the couch, and he sits on the side further from Nindy, so I’m forced to sit closer to her. Raeco opts for the chair on the other side of Nindy, facing the couch, sitting by herself. Nindy, of course, takes her rocking chair, the one I used to sit and rock in so fast it squeaked and jerked, like I was on a swing at a playground. Next to her, there is a stack of Fingerhut magazine catalogues that we look through every winter and can’t afford anything from, and a sewing kit which I know holds treasures like mints and orange candies in a sandwich bag. I smile at her nervously and prop my elbow on the side of the couch, feeling where it is torn from me and my mother’s cats clawing at it years ago. Nindy’s living room curtains are still broken slightly from when the kitten scaled them.
The granddaughter who left this house three years ago is not who returned, but she talks to me the way she talked to me when I was still in the fifth grade. She asks me about boys, in particular. “They must be falling all over you, girl.” She’s laughing, and I smile and nod back, my fingers picking and pulling at the bare threads of the couch. I can’t look her in the eyes.
“Not really, I guess,” I say, trying to just go along with it because we won’t be here long. There’s not enough time for the ordeal that will follow if I let it slip, and I am used to being uncomfortable for a few hours at a time. It’s only a few hours. I can play-pretend, for a few hours, that I am still a young and pure girl. That I always will be. That version of me still exists in her house and her mind so maybe I can slip into it just for the time I’m here, like I would slip into the Sunday dresses before church, the dresses that are still in the closet in my old room here. “Besides, I don’t really have time for much. I have a lot of school work now.” I kick the rug in front of me softly, turning up the corner, rolling it, fidgeting. Raeco looks at me and indicates for me to stop, frowning at me.
“Oh, I imagine. You were always so smart.” It feels like she’s talking about me as if I’m dead, even as I sit next to her, blinking and breathing and looking at her. I know that she doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t know how my mother made me feel guilty for every breath I took, the hell of living in a single shitty motel for a month with three cats we had to keep hidden, the sick anxiety of going to a school where I understood nothing and had no friends. And still, she doesn’t know that I am going by a new name, in a newer place, that everything has changed even down to my gender. She has no idea that I haven’t worn a dress since my seventh-grade graduation, and that I won’t wear one again. “You still gettin’ all A’s and B’s, girl?”
I think about my teachers when I was here. Mrs. Grissom was my favorite; she taught grammar and history in my fifth-grade class. Once, she kissed me on the head because I was the only person who read the instructions on a worksheet. I wonder if Nindy talks to her at all, or if she lives out of town. It’s not hard to live out of town. It’s only 8 miles, 1,260 people. But then again, Nindy knows everyone here and in the nearest four towns, all fairly small, too.
“I did when I was in middle school. I was the valedictorian there.”
“Oh, really! That’s so good! I knew you would though.”
I don’t tell her how easy it was, don’t let her know that the teachers barely taught and even paying attention in class was seen as something special, that if you just followed their instructions you could pass with flying colors. I just smile and nod. “Yeah, but it’s harder now in high school since I moved schools. I’m not doing so well in biology.” I twist my shirt in my fingers, looking down at myself. I want to curl up here the way I did as a kid, curl up and not feel like a giant on this couch. The house seems so empty now, full only of my grandmother and spiders and ghosts: her husband, her twin sons, my mother, me.
“Well you never were too good at all that science and math stuff, I know that,” she says with a matter-of-fact nod, rocking slowly in her chair, not going so far back so fast that it squeaks, the way I used to make it. We make small talk for a while and I continually feel as though the house is shrinking into some kind of dollhouse and I am still every bit of five feet and seven inches tall. After a while, Nindy hoists herself from her chair with a small grunt. “I won’t keep you too long, I guess. Come on.” She toddles back to the bedroom at the end of the hall, the one on the left. The one to the right is hers, and the one we already passed was my mothers.
The room is still stark white, with the spring light filtering in through dusty cream curtains and landing in slats on the floor as it’s cut by blinds. The bed is made too neatly and tight, and none of us sit on it when we get inside the room.
My things are collected in a small and unceremonious pile beside the dresser that I never used, the one with the mirror that spans big enough for you to see the whole room in it. I never used it because it was always full of strange items of hers that she seemed to never use, either, like photographs of people I didn’t recognize, craft paper and scraps of fabric, magazines and buttons.
The items of mine include a small giraffe stuffed animal that was supposed to function as a sort of chair, some clothes, a basket of trinkets and a few books. I smile at the pile with the knowledge that none of it means anything to me anymore. These things will wind up in the dumpster within a month, rain-soaked from sitting on the curb outside our house waiting for the garbage man to take it.
She unfolds the clothes and tells me about how much I loved wearing them, reminds me of the time I got upset at her for giving away my favorite shirt that didn’t fit me. It feels like a different person must have been the one to wear them. It couldn’t have possibly been me. I doubt that it could have been me. I don’t remember any of it.
She puts the books in my hands, talks about how she used to pass by my room at night and see my light still on late, peek in and see me reading a book bigger than my head. She says she still expects me to be in there reading some nights when she goes to bed. I barely read now. There is no time. There is no time for anything.
“Oh, I really want this,” I say, lifting up a picture from the bottom of a drawer she had opened to hand me more clothes. It’s a baby picture of me, chubby and pale in the summer sunlight, wearing a floppy denim hat and an overall dress, laughing at the camera. All that you can see in the frame is me. It’s surrounded by a blue frame, decorated with rubber ducks in the corners, and the word “baby!” in all caps bubble-lettering at the bottom. I look happy, a grinning baby with rosy cheeks.
We don’t have any baby pictures of me at my dad’s house. My mom had most of them, since my dad had to move houses so many times. But when my mom lost all of our stuff, it included those baby pictures. Most of any documentation of me as a child disappeared without me even knowing, until weeks later. I wonder if anyone bought the scrapbooks, or if they ended up in a dumpster somewhere. I don’t really know which seems more terrible to me.
“No! That’s mine.” She scowls at me, pulling the picture from my hands. She hardly even glances at it before placing it back into the drawer. It will probably remain there, completely in the dark and collecting dust until she dies, and we come to clear her house out. I wonder if I’ll even be allowed to keep it then, or if someone will snatch it from under my nose first. I wonder if my mother will take that from me, too. I watch Nindy close the drawer on my childhood. It feels final.
After gathering all of my things, folding the clothes back up and stacking everything into my arms, we file back down the hall, heads down, and into the kitchen again. We act like this isn’t a sort of funeral.
Nindy opens the fridge and begins to pull out containers she has likely been preparing for days in advance—into my stepmother’s arms she piles fudge and a pie, into my father’s, a container of macaroni and cheese and, one of his favorites, the potato salad that she makes. The whole time she smiles so wide that her eyes crinkle, telling Raeco her secret for the mac and cheese, telling my dad to leave some of the potato salad for us, too.
It will be gone by tomorrow, probably. The fudge will take two days at the most. The macaroni and cheese will last the longest, picked at by bare and hungry fingers while it’s cold in the fridge as we stand, half dazed, with the door propped open on our hip.
I smile passively and help arrange the items in the car, so nothing will slip, nothing will spill. I have to sit somewhat squished now, using the giraffe as a sort of desk for the hour-long ride home. We go back past the Loves gas station, stopping to get sodas again, then continue on past the trailer home sales-place, the rows and rows of billboards, and eventually, back into the city.
Within a week, the clothes have been donated to Goodwill, the books to the library down the street, and the giraffe soaks up rain and mud and rots in front of our house until the garbage truck comes to pick it up four days later. I keep one stuffed animal, a small bear with a yellow bow tied around its neck, the fur worn down from being stroked for years by my baby fingers. My dog chews off one of its ears. It is the only thing I own from before I was twelve. I don’t go back to my grandmother’s house.
Tyler Dalzell is a young poet, creative nonfiction writer, and amateur photographer from Birmingham, Alabama. He loves nothing more than his dog and has hobbies in hiking, embroidering, and popping as many of his joints in one go as he can.