Celery Street

My brother used to get mad when I cried. We would sit in the blue and mock-wood paneled station wagon, no key in the ignition, just two bodies ready to lay our feet on the pedal. T’s spine was straight and hot against the back of the driver’s seat, his body creased at the hip and knee. He gripped the steering wheel so tight that his knuckles turned white. Sometimes he would fumble with the radio, and I would turn my head away, looking to the contents of the garage. We never did take that car out.

We would lie hip to hip in the grass behind the baseball field and strain our necks to look past the tops of the trees at the stars. T knew all the constellations. Andromeda. Orion. Ursa Major. Ursa Minor. He said that I have the Little Dipper on my arm. I always told him that he knew too much. He would just smile with tears behind his eyes.

When we were kids, we swam in the lake behind the church. Like frogs with our goggles and fins, we could reach the bottom of the murky water and search for crayfish with our bare hands. T sat on the dock in the middle of the lake, his feet dangling into the water, his toes creating perfect, tiny circles on the surface, and I would rest my chin on my hands next to his shimmering legs. We returned home, half-naked, dripping with sweat from the long journey back across town to a safer place.

Forgetting about the lake and replacing old memories with cigarettes and gasoline, we would lie belly-up on the surface of the asphalt, which was once the baseball field. We rolled our sleeves up to our shoulders and let our bodies bake in the sun. We would trudge up the hill toward home, our faces flushed from the heat and the bottoms of our feet and ankles scraped by shards of gravel and broken glass.

We returned to the lake years later and everything was still the same. Crumbled rocks and smashed seashells leading the water. The pier with strings of seaweed wrapped around its weak wooden legs, still rotting and its edges covered in a thin green mold. I remember sitting on the dock, water up to my knees, as I watched T’s silhouette glide across the current.

We sat in the station wagon, eternally parked in the garage, our stomachs filled with red wine and chocolate. I started telling T about Napoleon, but he had fallen asleep, mouth gaping open, eyes rolled back, and his neck stretched back as far as his spine would allow. I switched off the courtesy light, one hand on the door handle and the other in T’s.

T always slept in the top bunk because he said he felt closer to God. He didn’t even believe in God. We listened to records and stared at the ceiling every night for the month of May. He wrote me thousands of poems, a stack of papers held together by four red rubber bands, weak and lined with age.

Sunday afternoons, we would visit Dad. His apartment was small. Dark. Dusty. And a ray of light peaked in from the slits of the blinds covering the windows. There was a bowl of plastic oranges and pears on the coffee table near the tiny television, always blaring. Dad would be lying on the couch, his leg resting on its tattered cloth-covered arm, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

Soon Sundays were meant for driving Mom’s Oldsmobile all the way past Augusta Avenue, the windows wide open, the wind pouring in, making our hair wild. Everything else was forgotten. Driving by the moon, headlights burning bright ahead of us while someone was burning out down on Condor Avenue.

A Saturday. We sat slumped in the floral-print couch that we had learned to hate. We rubbed our knees with sweaty palms. I sat too close to T, and I could smell his breath: a mixture of tears and sour cream and onion chips. He stood up, reaching out, offering a hand to me, but he had reached more for my cheek than my wrist. I refused; I could get up by myself.

Mom and Angie sat in the main room in the first row of metal fold-up chairs, used tissues jammed into their clenched fists. Their eyes were red. Some of Dad’s friends showed up. Burned out. Washed up. And longing for days long last. Their faces and eyes were worn, looking sad, helpless, and maybe realizing that something should be done. If not for their own sake, for someone else’s.

T and I went to the casket together, walking tall, almost proudly, but we weren’t brave enough to actually peer into Dad’s face. T told me all about dead people. How they suck the blood right out of the body with a tube and replace it with another liquid so they don’t smell. They sew the insides of their mouths shut so they don’t gape open. The eyes are removed because they are the first things to rot. All I could see from where I was standing was that Dad was wearing a black suit that he used to wear for Christmas and Easter when he went to church.

A eulogy. Childhood stories. Memories out of reach. Dad wrote T a note before he died. A thousand meaningless words scrawled recklessly on a dirty napkin. Something about following in his footsteps. Marry several times. Drink incessantly. Acquire lung cancer. Slowly kill yourself. What he meant was to become a banker. I remember T crumbling the napkin and letting it slip through his limp fingers. We stepped over it as we were ushered out of the room by a nurse who said, “He’s gone.”

A Sunday. Dad’s funeral. It rained and our shoes got muddy. A priest that we didn’t know said some words. I wasn’t listening. The lower portion of my legs were speckled with flecks of mud. Mom cried and her hands were clasped together, like she was always praying. She was crying so hard that she couldn’t drive. T took the keys and Mom sat in the back with Angie, stroking her hair and saying, “It’s okay.” He turned the radio up loud so we couldn’t hear her crying.

On Monday, the day after the funeral, T, Angie, and I stopped by Dad’s apartment to collect his things. Records. Books. Photographs. Paintings. Diaries. We were told that we could take whatever we wanted. T took all of his old albums, piles and piles of records, scratched, cracked, and peeling covers. Resting on one knee, I scooped up a pile of photographs, yellowed from age, edges bent back from mistreatment. I ran my hands over the glossy images, wondering exactly where Dad had gone wrong.

We didn’t go to school for a month.

October. If we could count on anything changing, we could count on the seasons. The leaves turned. The wind became harsh, stinging out eyes and burning our cheeks a deep red. We learned how to climb trees again. Limb to limb by limb from limb, stretching our spines and torsos. T sat two branches above me, his feet dangling above my head, and he said in broken French, “Dites-moi une histoire. Dites-moi une histoire du Papa.” I smiled at him, and ascended to his level, two movements of my scraped shoes, and sat close to him. He looked younger then, his eyes full of light, and I ached to reach out and touch him. He repeated his words, this time more composed, like he had practiced the phrase repeatedly, silently. A moan and a quiver.

T wrote Daddy thousands of sorry letters, sealed tight with scotch tape and covered in dozens of Alfred Hitchcock profile silhouette stamps. He watched me from across the street as I kneeled over Dad’s grave, dropped the envelopes, and turned my face away before I could feel anything. We walked to Antoinette’s and bought gobstoppers. Sitting in front of the fire station on the curb, T held my hand and asked me why I was so unhappy.

Mom bought us a white Grand Marquis for our seventeenth birthday. We lay on the hood of the car at night, watching the stars, this time stretching our necks to look past the peak of the garage roof instead of the tops of the trees. Sometimes we would take the car out, drive into the city with the windows down, inhaling the fumes and filling our eyes with the bright lights ahead of us. It would be years before we could open our car doors and step onto the concrete of the city curbs.


We had driven the thirteen miles into the city to see a movie on a Friday night. Boy meets girl. Boy falls for girl. Boy loses girl. Boy and girl are reunited. Things like that only happen in movies. T mentioned how much he loved Hollywood as we left the theater. It was raining. T grabbed my hand and we began to run into the parking lot, neglecting to look both ways before crossing, and we were nearly mauled by a moving vehicle. Suddenly, we stopped running and T said, “Do you care?” I didn’t know if he meant did I care about getting wet did I care about dying. I said no, and he put his arm around me. We walked to the car in the rain, and I remember looking up at T, his hair dripping wet and tiny drops of water clinging to his eyelashes; he was beautiful.

We returned home at 1:38 am. We played in the rain until our bones became soggy and our shivering made our smiles clatter together. Meanwhile, our blankets tossed in the dryer. We came in soaking wet with our clothes already half off. Leaving the dryer door open, we got in bed to roast our naked bodies in the cocoon of the blanket.

I had a bad taste in my mouth. I was wearing T’s shirt. It was too big on me, but I pretended that it fit, anyway. I had been wearing it since the night before. Walking into the kitchen, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the window near the phone, and I thought it was my brother. I started moving toward the image, but when I got close enough, I saw my own eyes, my own face, and I rested my forehead on the glass. A few minutes passed. My skin was cold. When I stepped back, all that remained on the surface was a smudge of oil. Is that what I had been boiled down to?

Months passed, and we would lie in bed every night, staring at the ceiling, arms and legs entangled, sharing tears and fabricating lies. Earnest movements of calloused hands, T would rest his hand on my cheek, three fingers clasped behind my ear, and tell me how he loved me.

From me, a progression of delicate words that could be easily broken. A post script. And T drove us to the edge of a cliff, threatening our lives, his and mine, his eyes wide, veins protruding, hands trembling. I reached out for him, and he grasped my wrists, desperately, burying his face in my neck, being sorry, saying he was sorry. He said he loved me. He could never hurt me. I drove home; T huddled in the backseat, knees to chin, chin to chest, arms crossed, and his eyes shut tight.

One of us had to leave. Mom was concerned. You need some time apart, she said. She was crying and shaking her head, saying, “I didn’t know.” One week to fix three months of something that had taken seventeen years to perfect.

So we went to the lake for the last time together on a Friday night. We walked instead of taking the car, just like we would have, had it been years earlier. We held hands on the walk there, and I looked up at the streetlights shining down on us. He pointed to a star. It was actually Venus, he said, and I wondered how he knew. We took the shortcut through the woods, stepping over the giant logs that were once too big for us to climb over.

There were thousands of half-dead, dried out and brown-skinned frogs lying lifeless on the shoreline. I picked one up; it lay limp and motionless in my hand. Its legs jerked and I dropped it.

“It’s dead,” T said. He told me all about dead things, just like he did at Dad’s funeral only months before. How they sucked the blood out and filled the body with another liquid so it didn’t smell. Sometimes they have to sew the inside of the mouth shut so it doesn’t open up in the middle of a funeral. And he said that sometimes dead bodies could make sounds of move. Just like the frog had done.

I picked the frog back up, stroking its head with my thumb, and T tried to pull it out of my hand, squeezing its leg so hard that something white seeped out of its limb. Its legs kicked again.

“It isn’t dead,” I said. And I handed it to him.
“It is so,” he insisted, and pushed the tiny body toward me. I put it on the ground, over the dead, wet leaves, sticks and mud, and planted my foot on its belly. Its ribs cracked, organs exploding, and blood covered the bottom of my shoe. We both kneeled down closer to inspect the sad little creature. Then it was dead.

We peeled its skin off, layer by layer. We got blood under our fingernails and T started to cry. He said that the moment reminded him of a sad movie. I put my hand on his knee and he smiled a little bit, wiping his hands on his dirty jeans. We walked home, T rubbing his hands on his thighs and crying, saying “This blood will never get out from under my nails.”