Homesick Read online

  HOMESICK

  a memoir

  JENNIFER CROFT

  The Unnamed Press

  Los Angeles, CA

  AN UNNAMED PRESS BOOK

  Copyright © 2019 Jennifer Croft

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected]. Published in North America by the Unnamed Press.

  www.unnamedpress.com

  Unnamed Press, and the colophon, are registered trademarks of Unnamed Media LLC.

  ISBN: 9781944700942

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  Photographs by Jennifer Croft and Laurie Croft

  Cover Design by Jaya Nicely

  The Russian poem titled “There are no boring people in this world” by Yevgeny Yevtushenko was originally published in Tenderness: New Poems, Moscow, 1962.

  Translation Copyright © Boris Dralyuk 2017

  This book is a work of creative nonfiction.

  Names, identifying details, and places have been changed.

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  for my sister

  Contents

  PART ONE: SICK

  Their mom gets them ready for all the possible disasters that might ever occur

  Even though she knows she’s not supposed to, Amy looks forward to tornados

  The first time Zoe isn’t Zoe anymore is on the morning of her preschool graduation

  After a while the doctors send them home

  When a tornado happens at their grandparents’ house, day still turns to night and the leaves still get upside down and the cars still disappear, but they also get to hide in the hall closet, which is full of their dad’s old games from when he was their age

  Amy has taken one Polaroid picture of each room at her grandparents’ house, including the garage, the backyard, and the front yard, and two of the staircase, since they don’t have one at home

  Every summer the girls go to Camp Waluhili with their mom, who works there as a counselor

  Amy takes a picture of the little red suitcase Zoe uses to run away from home

  Amy takes pictures of everywhere they go

  The night before the girls go back to school their mom tells them what sex is and reads them a story about a woman in a car crash off a bridge

  The girls dance and dance and dance to Paul Simon’s Graceland in the dining room, working themselves up into a frenzy, while their mom makes oatmeal fudgies in the kitchen for them to take for Labor Day to school

  Amy is the tallest kid in her grade, and the fastest, and the best at math

  In the back of the ambulance, her sister has been taken over by a ghost

  The ambulance takes them to the pink hospital by their grandparents’ house

  Amy knows exactly what she would do if they got into a car crash off a bridge

  Sometimes their mom sings them lullabies, and Amy likes her voice but not the songs

  Nobody can tell what’s really wrong with Zoe, not even the doctors, not for a long time

  One day Zoe and the dog are intercepted by the neighbors two doors down

  Zoe starts taking medication that makes her wet the bed

  Once there was a boy at camp who loved fish

  Sometimes when they all go to the hospital together, their dad takes Amy to the maternity ward to see the babies

  At home Amy takes her pictures out of her fossil drawer and goes over them one by one, looking for clues about the tumor

  Amy and Zoe are taking time off school

  On the day before the surgery they all go to their grandparents’ house and have root beer floats and watch TV and Sleeping Beauty

  When the phone rings the ground drops out and Zoe is gone

  While her sister’s in the hospital, Amy is in charge of the dog

  One day at the hospital Amy tries to play Chutes and Ladders with some dying kids, but after just a little while they say she’s cheating, and she has to go back to just waiting

  Zoe is released from the hospital on Amy’s tenth birthday

  Amy takes a picture of Zoe on the couch with the dog and the octopus with big huge eyes

  For Christmas they get matching pairs of tennis shoes from their grandparents

  The girls like to dance together when their parents aren’t home

  Amy and Zoe fall in love for the first time, at the same time, with the same boy

  The girls get their periods within a day of each other

  Amy sends secret messages to her sister that her sister can’t read

  Over the summer Amy perfects her knots

  There is an aisle at the MedEx that the girls never visit

  Of the apparently infinite quantity of delights offered to Amy by her recent forays into the garden of Russian grammar, the single most fascinating fact is that in the present tense, the verb to be literally goes without saying, so that in order to express, for instance, Amy is in love, you would only need Amy in love, or at most a dash: Amy—in love

  During the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer the girls do nothing else

  Zoe still has seizures, but not as often as before, and when she does they aren’t as bad

  Three things happen in 1995

  Sasha and Amy are reaching the end of their first-year textbook

  Amy knows when Zoe lets the squirrels loose at last that her sister’s secret hope is they will choose to return someday, but Amy also knows they won’t

  Amy wears perfume to Sasha’s play

  Everyone in the family is aware that Sasha will be graduating soon

  Although few people do it, it is possible to go to college early, without even getting a GED

  The week of Sasha’s graduation they have one last class

  Amy does not mention to Zoe what has happened between Sasha and her

  It is their mom who breaks the news to them, one by one, Amy first

  To get away from Zoe, Amy transfers all her operations to underneath the pear tree in between the front yard and the backyard

  Because Sasha shot himself in the mouth rather than at the temple, they are able to do an open-casket funeral

  On August 10, 1997, they move Amy into her dorm

  Amy lives in the Honors House, in the middle of fraternity row

  The next day Amy meets people

  But the next day Amy becomes famous

  In the front-page picture Amy’s long blond hair rolls smooth as a single piece of silk over her shoulders

  Zoe and their parents pick her up at six to celebrate

  Back in her room Amy peers out the window listening to the music that resounds from downstairs

  Amy doesn’t know exactly how to be in class

  One of Amy’s classes is Photography I

  The day of the Lambda Chi luau Amy takes a picture of the pack

  One Wednesday in mid-November Amy comes home from class and finds Zoe making a fort out of the desk in her dorm room

  Ever since Zoe ran away from home their dad comes to visit at the Honors House, trying to broker an agreement between Zoe and their mom

  On Thanksgiving at their grandparents’ they have turkey and stuffing, rehydrated potato flakes, and cranberry sauce slid straight out of the can, with the grooves still in it, jiggling

  They put the house up for sale

  A lot of their stuff they’re getting rid of, whatever they no longer need

  In the spring semester, Amy takes Russian Conversation, Russian Poetry, English Literature Prior to 1800, The French Revolution, and Photography II, which is her favorite

  The next day you make the prints,
and the best part of everything is when you slide the white paper into the tray and gently make the waves of solution wash over it, back, forth, back, forth, and slowly, slowly, the image unfolds

  Not people die but worlds die in them

  Amy agrees to go to a youth group meeting with Katie without knowing what exactly youth group meeting means

  Zoe has been diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus, which explains the pain, and hemochromatosis, which is a genetic mutation that prevents her body from processing the iron it takes in, and they also think her brain tumor might have started growing back

  Amy has never liked to shower at the Honors House, but now it hurts

  According to their mother, suicide is the most selfish thing you can do

  One night, in the middle of the night, Amy sneaks downstairs to the living room in the Honors House to take the rest of the cough syrup samples

  Amy knows it is time for her to go back upstairs to her room now, but she is afraid

  It has been a long time since Amy gave any thought to losing her virginity, or to her first kiss

  At dawn the next day Amy calls her grandparents, who are annoyed to be awakened but who come to pick her up and take her home with them

  In the middle of the night, Amy sneaks downstairs and takes her grandpa’s car keys from the big ceramic bowl in the hallway and drives east

  On Monday, Amy can’t speak Russian anymore

  She tries to write a letter to her sister

  Amy wakes up in a white room with a minister who is holding her hand

  Amy tries to get out of bed but finds she is tethered to machines

  She wakes up and sees her mom standing over her and flinches, and then her mom starts yelling

  A nurse wheels her down to the thirteenth floor

  She starts with her Russian homework, which is just her favorite poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the briefest of instructions clipped to the top: Translate into English

  There are no boring people in this world

  PART TWO: HOME

  People say the world will end when midnight strikes December 31 of 1999, but Amy has come to hope it won’t, and then it doesn’t, and then she graduates from the University of Tulsa and she flies to Berlin

  One day Amy wakes up wanting

  The breeze at Tempelhof is gentle

  There is a picture of an insect in the yellow fronds at the center of a big white flower; in the background a dozen giant wet green leaves, flat and sometimes ragged at the edges

  Every picture is a portrait of Zoe because Amy’s intentions as a photographer have never wavered, although she herself had never known of them till now

  The sun’s still low on the horizon when she’s done

  The last portrait Amy takes of her sister is a picture of some hot-pink letters on the thick transparent railing of the Pont des Arts

  Acknowledgments

  We photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth that can make them come back again.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  A picture is a secret about a secret. The more it tells the less you know.

  Diane Arbus

  HOMESICK

  Remember when I used to make you practice saying words?

  I’d say, Repeat after me: Egg, and you’d lean back ever so slightly like you were about to take off and then go, AIG! An emphatic Oklahoman always.

  Although each time for one split second (German: Augenblick, literally blink of an eye, in blink’s oldest meaning of starry fleeting gleam) you’d just sit there and wait for my face to tell you whether you had done it right.

  And then I’d scowl, and you would look away.

  PART ONE:

  SICK

  Their mom gets them ready for all the possible disasters that might ever occur

  So she reads aloud the headlines from the Tulsa World at breakfast while Amy and Zoe eat their Cheerios. The girls stay quiet while their mother talks, but they don’t really listen. All they know is that there is always a disaster happening somewhere. Besides tornados there are earthquakes, and plane crashes, and wars. There is an AIDS epidemic, although neither Amy nor Zoe knows what AIDS is. They only know they are supposed to wash their hands.

  There is also the story of the shibboleth, which means when you can’t cross the river because you say the words wrong and then get murdered.

  When she takes her baths their mom reads them articles from Good Housekeeping. She never ever takes showers because she says she saw a movie one time where the main character got killed while she was taking a shower, and then there was blood everywhere. She likes for the girls to keep her company while she’s in the bathtub.

  Sometimes she tells family stories. She always tells everyone the one about the crazy neighbor from down the cul-de-sac who shot his family and then hid in the big tree in the backyard. Their dad was off in Stillwater running one of his workshops on geography. So their mom went and picked his rifle up and prepared herself to do whatever was necessary to protect them. She put Amy under the bed and told her to stay there no matter what, and not to make a sound. No matter what, she repeats, and every time she tells the story her voice gets thick there.

  Zoe was still a baby and had to be held. Even though she was a baby she could sense that something was wrong because she would not stop crying, and that made you think, says their mother, about those women in the Holocaust who had to smother their own kids so they wouldn’t get discovered.

  Amy and Zoe know the Holocaust was when the Jewish people all got murdered for no reason and dumped into a big pit in the forest.

  So their mother had Zoe in one arm, wailing, and the gun in the other. The police were there already and had him surrounded. They knew this from the TV because even though it was literally right there in their backyard their mom knew she had to stay away from the windows in case a bullet came through. The crazy neighbor kept shooting and shooting and even shot one of the other neighbors who had come over to help the police.

  Here their mother pauses and looks around every time she tells the story.

  But the man who got shot chewed tobacco. And he happened to be chewing tobacco right then. The bullet went in through his cheek at an angle like this—their mother points to her cheek using her forefinger as a pistol—but instead of going on into his throat and finishing him off it lodged in his tobacco!

  Everyone always likes that part, which the girls don’t understand because they know that tobacco will kill you too, and besides they see this neighbor all the time sitting out on his porch spitting out his black juices into a big tin pail, skin and bones and ragged looking, that ugly old scar on his face.

  But Amy hates the whole story. She can’t remember being alone under the bed, but she’s heard about it so much she can picture it, so much so that sometimes she has dreams about it: Zoe orbiting around, crying, out of her reach.

  In the end, the crazy neighbor shot himself, and then he died.

  Even though she knows she’s not supposed to, Amy looks forward to tornados

  Even in the day the sky gets black, and the streets get empty. The wind pries back the leaves of the silver maple tree, and underneath they gleam.

  When it’s a tornado watch they don’t do it, but when it’s a tornado warning, the girls go and get inside the pantry, where they squeeze in among the cans and powders and cardboard boxes and wait until one of their parents says they can come out. The pantry is the only place in the whole house that does not have windows. You have to stay away from windows when a tornado comes because the very thing tornados love best is breaking glass, and if that happens, and you’re sitting for example in the bathtub right below the bathroom window, you will almost inevitably get hurt.

  When the sirens start, Amy gets them organized. She has developed a system. Each of them is allowed three toys, not more, and Amy is in charge of the flashlight because Zoe might break it. Zoe always dallies over her dolls, feelin
g guilty for playing favorites. But Amy explains to her how in life you have to make choices, and eventually Zoe always does, although sometimes she tries to hide things in her tiny pants pockets.

  When she gets caught she bursts out laughing or into tears depending on Amy’s face. She always gets caught. Then Amy quiets Zoe, and they kneel down on the dimpled linoleum, pull the door shut, and wait.

  Once the door is closed, Zoe’s dolls have conversations. Often they discuss the weather. Amy just listens, lets her own dolls rest, feels her sister’s hot quick breaths on her neck. If their electricity isn’t out, Amy insists the light be off anyway. Slowly she gets sleepy like she does in the car, and just like when they drive somewhere, Amy, unlike Zoe, would rather just not get there, would rather just keep going, would like it if the warning never expired. Then the pantry door will fly wide open, and all across the top of it the frying pan and the strainer and all the knives will glint and shiver like they want to fall. And their mother will reach down and grab Zoe, and then she’ll carry her away.

  Do you ever wonder where words come from, Zoe?

  The first time Zoe isn’t Zoe anymore is on the morning of her preschool graduation

  Amy has just finished second grade.

  Since their grandma and their grandpa hardly ever come to school, now the girls talk over one another, each hoping to capture their attention. Zoe squawks like the blue jay in the backyard that dive-bombs the cat with its beak, leaving bald spots. Finally their grandpa stoops over, showing all the baldness on his head, and picks her up and takes her to the playground.

  In the peace this break affords them, Amy shows their grandma all her work. She has nearly completed a whole spiral notebook, the words resolving into what they mean: squint and butterfly’s already butterfly, not simply scratches on the brittle pages, but aloft, like magic.

  Their grandma squints and oohs and ahs, until all of a sudden, their grandfather returns.