Skyscraping (3 page)

I drop my backpack. Run.

Don’t wait for the elevator.

Chase the stairs down, like a slide.

Run past Jimmy, out onto Riverside.

I make it to the water.

Yell at a boat on the Hudson,

beg it to take me away, under a bridge,

out to the ocean, vast and wide,

beg someone to make me blind,

take me out of this shady city,

to a country, a continent,

a universe away

from here.

My eyes blur,

I don’t know what I’ve just seen.

My legs shake,

the earth has shifted.

I wander over to Broadway.

All these people

moving in all their directions.

I sit on the bench.

A mom prances with two kids, hand in hand.

Her ponytailed hair straight, a mom

who sings while she vacuums, plans Disney vacations.

Watch them cross.

A man with too many dogs,

barking at him, at each other.

A small concrete island

in the middle of rushing traffic,

a halfway place,

crowds just rush past.

Sitting here

surrounded by trash, cars, people,

hanging

in the middle of the Milky Way,

a nebulous mass

containing millions of tiny things

smeared across the sky,

in this crisscross rush,

blinded by lights.

Just one random person

in this ever-spinning city,

never colliding.

Alone on a bench.

Once whole

but now

I           am

shattered.

I have change in my pocket,

could use the pay phone,

call Chloe. Dylan.

What would I say?

Hey, what’s up,

my dad’s gay?

Instead,

I use my change

on the bus

float

back across town.

Run upstairs

to the Yearbook office.

My advisor’s there.

Asks if I’ve thought of a theme yet.

Suddenly New York City feels like a lie.

Fake. Filthy.

I look up at the white ceiling,

dotted with a million pinpricks like stars,

and I say

how about space?

Sit at my desk.

Line up supplies

in alphabetical order.

Erasers. Paper clips. Scissors.

Neat in a row.

But I freeze when I get to the stack of layouts.

The Freshman page on top.

April.

I leave the random order,

run back

for her.

Back past Jimmy, the elevator, the door,

not wanting to open it, knowing I have to . . .

How will I look at him. What will I say.

They are there. Huddled in the living room.

Dad, April, Mom. No James in sight. Family meeting.

Whatever that means.

Sit down next to April. Put my arm around her.

They don’t ask where I went.

Dad says he’s sorry for what I saw,

didn’t know I’d be home early.

Mom puts her hand on Dad’s knee.

Says she and Dad met in the sixties,

a time of exploration

(like this is a history lesson).

Then she says
we have an open marriage.

Do we know what that means?

April shrugs. I nod slowly.

It means she knows Dad sleeps with James.

It means they both think it’s okay,

it’s something they’ve agreed to.

It means Mom has lovers too.

Maybe her studio is a place where she makes more than art.

Dad says they’ve arranged it this way, out of love.

All of their friends, parties,

the disco lights, red, green, blue, spinning.

Wine glasses. Joints.

April and me. The balcony. Alone.

There are no stars.

in the dark.

After the meeting, I say nothing to her, to him,

take April, pull her to my room.

She starts to ask me what I saw.

I shake my head, say
let’s just play.

Mancala. All those bright jewels

in all those shallow holes. One. Plunk. Two.

Hear them talking outside the room:

Dad wants to come in,

Mom tells him to give us time.

We do homework.

Help April with hers,

try to do mine.

My Astronomy textbook defines

absolute magnitudes as:

a scale for measuring the actual brightness of a celestial object

without accounting for the distance of that object.

If you get too close,

you might find

the actual brightness of something

can make you go blind.

Sirens go off,

cars on the Henry Hudson never stop,

all those tiny people

in their tiny cars,

driving around their tiny lives.

Brown smog parading

as a night sky.

If your past is a lie, what happens to your future?

Open my desk drawer,

rip the corners off my Columbia application.

Open my planner,

scratch out Yearbook task lists,

draw blue lines across my hands,

a road map leading nowhere,

decorate page after page

with punctuation.

Before, James was April’s Spanish tutor.

Before, James was my dad’s Teaching Assistant.

Before, James was the person who played chess with Dad for hours.

Before, James was from Michigan.

Before, James had a story for each of his tattoos.

Before, James was fifteen years younger than my father.

Before, James was a drummer for a punk band.

Before, James was the person Chloe thought the hottest.

Before, James would tell me good books to read.

Before, James lived in Greenwich Village.

Before, James was the person who made my dad laugh the hardest.

Before, James was my dad’s running partner.

He was my dad’s best friend.

Now

he will never be anything other than this one thing to me:

my dad’s lover.

My dad was:

A teacher,

marked up my English papers, endless lectures on Mesoamerica.

A gourmet cook,

chicken mushroom alfredo, tomato basil salad.

A craftsman,

the one who made his own Halloween costumes.

A movie lover,

the one who took us to see
Back to the Future
and
The Goonies
four times each in the theater.

A sentimentalist,

the one who framed every card we made him.

A husband,

someone who stood by his wife no matter where she was.

A parent,

the one who took care of us, woke us up for school on time, every day.

My dad, hidden behind a door, is only this:

another man’s lover.

I.

Dylan calls and says

come to Chloe’s.

April at a friend’s,

I go, leave a note,

don’t ask permission.

My parents don’t seem

concerned

with normal

family

rules.

We sneak out,

run down

her fire escape.

Chloe in her Kurt Cobain shirt.

We sing “Come As You Are,”

all the way to Ludlow Street.

Use our old fake IDs,

lie to strangers,

Dylan buys rounds of shots.

Dad and James. The bed.

Shot.

An open marriage. What’s always been.

Shot.

Chloe asks why I’m drinking,

I tell her it’s Senior year, right?

Time to party.

Dylan gives me weird looks,

but doesn’t ask questions.

I try to play the jukebox

songs from when we were young,

“Our Lips Are Sealed,” “Love Is a Battlefield,”

but the box keeps flashing red:

out of order.

I kick it once.

Lay my middle finger against the glass.

Dylan laughs, tells the machine it better watch out.

Chloe says we don’t need music, just dance,

and so we do.

II.

Next morning, stumble home,

pass April watching
The Wonder Years.

Worried she will smell me,

I walk fast, manage a small hello.

Mom not here. Again.

Dad waves from the kitchen,

bent over a sandwich,

asks how my sleepover was,

I don’t wave

or answer.

Go to my room

but I don’t know why I’m there,

reach for my homework,

head pounding.

Can’t focus on it,

instead I tear

the Columbia application

all the way

in half.

Why would I want to

follow him there.

Then I go into my closet:

throwing everything

that was once folded—

pink, purple, gray—

onto the floor.

Staring up at me

from the mishmash of sweaters

is a piece of the glass fish

I broke when Mom left.

Part of its eye.

Dusty yellow.

Sharp edges.

I sit with it

in my closet.

My stomach sick.

Like hanging on to the ledge of a building,

I squeeze the glass piece

as tight as I can.

When I uncurl my fingers,

red covers the fish’s remains,

my palm bleeds

just a little bit.

In an effort to be this so-called family,

we all go see
The Glass Menagerie.

Mom and Dad think a play about people

more confused than us will make us forget.

In the taxi home, Mom says

they’ve hired an art therapist

to help us process everything,

some woman named Ann

Mom knows

from the studio.

As Mom speaks, the taxi driver catches

my eye in the rearview mirror.

Pretends he didn’t.

I think about the play,

how Laura forgives Jim for breaking the horn

off her tiny glass unicorn,

then gives the hornless unicorn to him,

a symbol of how he

broke her.

I rub my forehead with my cut hand,

catching again the stranger’s eyes in the mirror.

Silence strangles all of us, as we fly past

Shakespeare & Company,        H&H Bagels,

veer down West End,

spin the corner,

land right smack on Riverside.

We get out of the cab, Dad never saying a word

about Tom, Laura, the unicorn.

Usually he would’ve lectured us

on themes, metaphors, symbols.

Now, we’re all silent—

evidence left behind

at the scene of a crime,

lying motionless              on an empty stage.

Art therapist Ann, armfuls

of bronze bracelets rattling,

asks us each to draw

a tree,

a house,

a person.

For her, I draw quickly:

trees as streetlights

houses as skyscrapers

people as shadows.

Later, alone:

I take my time, drawing what I want.

Two sisters climbing trees,

gardens to tend, bikes to ride,

neighbors, lawns.

A house, yellow, with a white fence.

A mom, pulling fresh cookies from the oven.

A father, tanned and tall, in a tie.

I hide this drawing under my pillow,

dream myself

into a dream

of a different kind of place,

a different kind of family.

October

SESSION TWO

(Sighs)
Just going down the line here with these assigned questions.

Three:

How did you choose your career path?

I had a teacher in high school who had me tutor other students. She thought I would make a great teacher myself. I listened to her.

Number four: Did you ever doubt your path?

Not really. As soon as I got to New York City, I knew I was in the right place. As big as Texas was, it doesn’t compare. This city’s a place where you can be anyone you want to be. A place where there’s always something to do. Always something new to eat. Always something happening in the street.

What does that have to do with teaching?

Well, teaching brought me to Columbia, and Columbia, the city. And the city brought me to your mother. We met in October, you know.

Yeah—

I’m not sure you know the whole story . . .

We were both marching in the Halloween parade.

She was a fairy with glass-beaded wings, me a praying mantis. She said, “Nice wings.” I told her hers weren’t so bad either.

Dad—

We drank wine at a patio bar and watched the parade go by. (Laughs) Both of us had trouble sitting with those wings on, so, after a while, the costumes came off and it was just us. We stayed up all night talking, agreed on so many things . . .

That’s—

The value of art and education. The importance of living life with an open mind. Letting love in, never being too rigid about anything—

Dad!

We’re supposed to talk about career here. Not take a trip down memory lane.

Well, I was going to say it was that night that your mom inspired me to follow through with my PhD plan and not stop at my Master’s.

(Pause)

So did you finish your application? To Columbia?

I’m not going to Columbia.

I’m not staying in this city.

Oh.

Okay.

That’s too bad, I was looking forward—

Number five: What career advice do you have for me?

Play to your strengths. Be true to yourself.

Well, that’s funny. Coming from you.

Pardon me?

Be true to yourself? The way you’ve been true to us?

Miranda—

What if you don’t even know who you are?

Miranda. You’ve always known who you are.

I don’t know anything anymore.