nineteen seventy-eight

It is 1978. I am three years old and almost undetectable inside the winter coat Mama makes me wear. I fight because that is what is expected of me, but secretly I love the coat. It is a dark and canvassy blue. The cuffs and hood are fringed with fluffy white fur that tickles my skin. Sometimes I pull the hood strings as tightly as I can, and peer at the world through a narrow, fuzzy window, from safe inside my dark, warm cave.

Mama has buckled me snugly into the back seat of her Subaru hatchback, also a beautiful deep blue. I insist that I be allowed to sit in the middle of the back seat so that I can see where the car is taking us, despite the fact that, at three years old, every place we go looks pretty much the same as any other.

Mama drives and talks to Daddy, but Daddy doesn’t listen. He has just flown in from someplace else, and has been asleep almost since we found him at the baggage claim. Mama is angry, splaying her fingers against the steering wheel the way she does when she has ‘had enough’. Her hair is severe and tight, like a red bathing cap. She does not notice that Daddy isn’t listening. She is saying things like Uncle Phil and third mortgage and completely impossible and your asshole brother.

Daddy does not stir even when Mama says Goddamn psychopath, and Daddy always warns Mama when she says things like this, and since he doesn’t I am afraid all of a sudden that he is dead. Death consumes my thoughts in 1978. This is the year when Grandma Eleanor, my namesake, has died of ovarian cancer. I do not understand ‘ovarian cancer’, but I understand with terrible clarity ‘never see her again’. At the funeral I stood small and serene beside Daddy’s knees and he said, “Ellie, I want to say goodbye. Do you want to say goodbye to Grandma?” He carried me high in his arms and we stood over the casket, and Grandma was as still as I had never seen her. Daddy held me to the side and bent and kissed his mother’s forehead, and he was crying but quietly, and I say, “Me, too,” and he wore a sad smile as he tilted me down like for an airplane ride. I placed my tiny hand on her cheek and kissed the tip of her nose, just like she always did to me when I saw her. I understood ‘never see her again’ when two men in very nice blue suits gently closed the casket, and Grandma’s face disappeared into shadow and then forever.

After some struggle, I succeed in unfastening my seat belt. Mama doesn’t notice; she is going on and on: should have thrown him out, it’s a shame you weren’t around to keep him in check, your poor sweet father was so overwhelmed and sad and. I wiggle into the space between her seat and Daddy’s and pull at Daddy’s elbow. He doesn’t move. I pull harder. He still doesn’t move, so I pinch his elbow as hard as I can, and Daddy jerks awake and looks at me through eyes so tired that they are red, and for a second I am scared. Then he smiles blearily. “What was that for, Ellie?”

I shrug and say, “You were dead but now you’re not.”

Mama notices me now. “Eleanor Anne!” she cries. “Get your bottom back into that seat, young lady! Do I have to pull me over?” Mama turns in her seat to nudge me back to my place. The car bucks and shudders sharply, and I am jostled and lose my balance. I laugh and catch myself.

“You stalled it,” Daddy says.

“Dammit,” Mama mutters. “God damn it.”

“Deirdre,” Daddy cautions. I smile happily. Things are the way they should be again.

“Don’t Deirdre me,” Mama says. She is keying the ignition and pumping pedals and looking back at me, all at one time. She says, “Eleanor, I said get your--” and we are suddenly in motion, the car struck from behind, everything lurching forward. Mama and Daddy are thrown violently against their seatbelts and Daddy’s glasses come off. I am tossed past them both, to the windshield. The glass fractures like ice at spring thaw, stars as if a heavy brick has been thrown into it, and not my small body, which in some places breaks, too. But I mend.