Seeing the Place Where My House Used to Be from out the Car Window

By Amber Grasmick

My scar is fading and it is hard to tell now what is real and what is not, but I am five years old and I do not cry.  I see my grandmother’s hand, her crisp salmon painted nails, fingers smooth still, pushing the microwave buttons nonchalantly as she talks on the phone with an aunt.  I cannot yet reach the shelf where the bowls are, but I can reach to the microwave in the house with the chickens and one hundred trees and the tile that is cool beneath the pads of my feet, smaller then than they are now, but mine still.

The girl with long braids hands me the picture.  The girl with the braids is the girl that I love –the girl I want a house with, like the house I knew once ago but have since forgotten with the passing of time and the fading of scars.  She is the one I want to make children with, and chickens, and trees.  I see myself this August, in the picture she took, in the car that is new.  I am looking out, driving by the place where my house used to be isn’t there anymore never will be.  I do not recognize the landscape in the picture, half desert half freeway a sky so blue it makes the ocean seem imitative.  As she hands it to me she says—this is your house.  This was my house—I say.  Before.  But now it is a huge hole of freeway in the earth, and if I try hard I can place my driveway where I learned to ride my bike in between the six lanes where the cars run like a river never could through Las Vegas in August. 

But I am five years old and I do not cry.  I do not cry when my brother and I both reach for the water in the glass Pyrex cup at the same moment, both driven by the same desire: to be the first to eat the oatmeal.  And together we both drop the cup—he at three years of impulsiveness, me at a reticent five.  It is hotter than we anticipate, because my grandmother has entered ten minutes on the microwave instead of one. 

I cannot remember if the measuring cup breaks when it hits the floor.  In my mind, there are two possibilities, each a distinct branch of the reality that belongs, now, only to memory.  I remember the pattern of the floor, the smooth brown grout that feels warmer, always, than the cold ceramic tile of muted reds and oranges.  I see the measuring cup hit the floor, it bounces up, the tiles give, the cup does not break but comes to rest instead on the ground next to the boiling water that chars away the top layers of my skin.  I am five years old and I do not cry.  Or this: my brother and I both reach, we drop, it falls upon the tile and shatters, boiling water running over glass in crystalline threads.  My grandmother does not hear the breaking of the glass beneath my brother’s screams.  I am five years old and I do not cry.  But the possibilities do not matter now, they do not exist because my house is a freeway gone and the scar on my foot is fading.  As my scar is heals, the cars on the freeway grow denser and the desert is marred irrevocably—a black concrete slash of the daily commute where my house, where the sagebrush used to be, and my chickens, and the one hundred trees.

I am wearing a set of wool legwarmers that the other grandmother had knit for me herself and it is October and it is cold outside.  It is the day before Halloween and my grandmother with the salmon colored nails who does not knit rips the legwarmers (which did not seem as absurd in 1987 as they do in 2002) off my legs.  With the legwarmers, she rips off the top three layers of my skin and I do not cry. 

Grandmother gets off the phone with aunt, gets on the phone with mother at work, gets off the phone with mother, gets on the phone with hospital, and half an hour later I am in the doctor’s office and for once I do not have to wait in line.  My little brother cries because his stomach is burned too and he vomits when the doctor pours saline over the place where my skin used to be.  I am five years old and my left leg and foot are covered with second and third degree burns but I do not cry and I go to school that day because we are having a Halloween party and I am wearing the dress the knitting-grandmother gives to me.  I am a princess, and I am determined to stay awake and eat my cookies and Halloween candy despite the painkillers and sedatives the doctor gives to me. 

For six months, I have to wrap my foot in gauze.  I remember the smell of the ointment my mother rubs into it every night, her penance for being a working mother, her pain at abandoning us to her husband’s mother.  I cannot bathe that leg, and my mother’s husband’s mother helps me to keep it elevated out of the tub so that I do not get the dressings wet afterwards.  But this part is less vivid because the bathtub is gone and my grandmother now weeps to me upon the recognition of her imminent death and neither one of us remember well things that happened 15 years ago.  She is my grandmother still, but she is not the woman with salmon colored nails who pushes the buttons on the microwave without glancing at the time, and no longer am I a little girl with burns half way up my leg wearing a pink princess dress biting my lip five years old determined not to cry. 

The government buys our house with chickens and corn and trees taller than I ever could be to build a freeway through the desert to the suburbs.  The new house is in these suburbs and it has pink carpet and pink stucco and the backyard is mostly concrete and all the trees are ugly.  I am eight years old and I cry and cry because I do want to move even though the county says we cannot contest their decision to build the road.  After we move out the government rents my house to people before they destroy it for their freeway—asphalt progress.  I have nightmares every day about them tearing down my house with a bulldozer even though my mother tells me that we live somewhere else now, and it is my new house.  I cannot reach the microwave in this house until I am eleven years old and it is never, really, my house because we are not allowed to keep chickens.   

I try to explain it to her, to the girl I am knitting a blanket for Christmas for.  I try to explain to the girl who has had more houses, probably, than I have fingers, what it was like to move two miles from the desert to the suburbs but never be at home again, the noise of the measuring cup breaking or not breaking on the ceramic floor, but there are not enough words that I know, so I show her my scar and tell her that I am five years old and do not cry and make her promise that when we are old we will have chickens and we will never move.