Queen of the Fall Read online

  “Deft, evocative, mysterious, heartfelt, swirling, lyrical, with lines that pop off the page and essays that shimmer in your head for days after you finish reading them—or thought you did.”

  —Brian Doyle, author of Mink River

  “Much more than a touching portrayal of an American, Roman Catholic girlhood of the 1980s. . . . This is a book that sheds light.”

  —Kathleen Norris, author of Dakota and The Cloister Walk

  “In this simply beautiful collection, Sonja Livingston serves up gorgeous prose and unswerving honesty to map the awakening of an essayist’s heart.”

  —Dinty Moore, author of Between Panic and Desire

  “Livingston writes with a fierce strength and intelligence that not only makes for compelling reading but an absolutely unforgettable voice.”

  —Kristen Iversen, author of Full Body Burden

  Queen of the Fall

  American Lives | Series editor: Tobias Wolff

  Queen of the Fall

  A Memoir of Girls & Goddesses

  Sonja Livingston

  University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln and London

  © 2015 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska

  Cover image © Kelly Knox/Stocksy United

  Author photo © Gregory Gerard

  Acknowledgments for the use of previously published material appear in Source Acknowledgments, which constitutes an extension of the copyright page.

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015931435

  This is a work of literary nonfiction based on memory, perception, and personal experience. Some names and identifying information have been changed to respect the privacy of others.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  For my mothers, actual and acquired

  and

  In memory of Judith Kitchen

  Contents

  Introduction: The Memory of Trees

  I

  Land of the Lost

  Our Lady of the Lakes

  The Lady with the Alligator Purse

  World without End

  Mythology

  Capias

  The Last American Virgin

  Peace

  Our Lady of the Carpeted Stairs

  II

  A Party, in May

  What the Body Wants

  Our Lady of the Roses

  Sybil

  III

  Flight

  One for Sorrow

  Brick House

  Klotilde’s Cake

  Mock Orange

  The Lonely Hunters

  Something Like Joy

  Coda: This River

  A Thousand Thanks

  Source Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Queen of the Fall

  Introduction

  The Memory of Trees

  WE BEGIN WITH APPLE trees. An orchard at harvest time: trees wild with growth, branches pushing into sky the color of oceans on classroom globes, blue like swimming pools and certain perfect crayons. I start up a ladder set against a tree—how else to reach the red circles of fruit? But I can go only so high. The bigger kids might catch glimpses of Lake Ontario climbing as they do. They might see past the lake and into Canada even, but I switch between the lowest rung and the ground, watching my brothers and sisters pick apples and return to earth in scurries and jumps. They call out for me to come and catch whatever shakes loose from the tree, laughing and talking, making claims over who has the most and everyone wins because you have never seen so much fruit and so many hands reaching for it.

  It’s like a trip to the zoo, this place of tree and sky and my family scaling together the branches.

  We have our good times, loading into the station wagon and driving to the Orleans County Fair. We travel to the center of town to see the parades down on Main Street, lining up on sidewalks, pressing our knees into Vs as we make seats of the curb, lifting our hands to direct the marching band, following the crash of tuba, cymbal, and snare. Once or twice a year our eyes go fat as moons as the majorettes pass, the flash of baton and the tap of shoes, the scrambling for candy tossed by beauty queens from flatbeds and slow-moving convertibles. We know about sparklers and the Fourth of July. We understand picnics and firecrackers and heat lightning, yes. There are birthday cakes and trick or treat and even Christmas morning, but nothing like this day: the air crisp and clean, the trees letting us into their crowns, the apples coming as they do, a shower of valentines falling into open hands.

  The apple is the trickiest of fruits. It’s what did Eve in, they say. All that unbridled longing and the foolishness of allowing herself to be sweet-talked by a snake. She caved, and in doing so, became a sort of red fruit herself, maybe even a snake. Either way, Eve was emblematic as she wrapped her arms around Adam and became the source of his collapse. Snake. Eve. Adam. The order of wrongdoing. But what can be expected of a snake? What can be expected of a man, especially where a woman is concerned? So it was Eve, really, who shouldered the blame. Her shoulders were strong, at least, maybe as broad as Adam’s, for it’s said she was fashioned from one of his ribs. How odd to imagine woman made from man when everyone knows it’s the woman who bears fruit, the whole of her body bending to the task, ribs and elbows and knees working to support her growing belly. But the Bible gives us Eve with her long hair and borrowed rib resting a hand against the tree she’s already been considering as the snake winds round the trunk, all slippery skin and big talk.

  I wonder if Eve came to regret it, the fruit. It’s implied, of course, because she saw right away her nakedness and covered herself with leaves. But hiding is shame, not sorrow, and what is fruit if not meant to be eaten? Where would the story be if they’d linked arms and walked right on by that glorious tree? So they fell. So they had to pack up and leave Paradise. But how much more they had to say to each other then, how much wider the world and how lasting the memory of the tree—during even the hardest of times, there would be the taste of it, brave upon their tongues.

  I say to my sister when we’re older, Do you remember that time in Albion with the apple trees? I describe the lake, which I could not have seen so much as felt shimmering just beyond the orchard. Apple trees everywhere, I say, all of us reaching for fruit, the blue sky and perfect clouds. I see her as the dark-haired girl she was pushing into the branches, and think of the names of old-fashioned varieties (Winesap, Northern Spy, Queen of the Fall), swooning the way one does over long-gone days until she breaks in, You mean the time Ma signed us up to work as migrants?

  We laugh then, because what else can you do when memory is cracked wide enough to include the reality of day labor? How different my sister’s recollection, how costly sometimes knowledge. Her account must be technically correct. There was never enough money. My mother did not fear hard work, enjoyed being outdoors, and would have thought it a wonderful opportunity, a day or two of picking together in the field. It’s possible someone shouted orders, saying, Come on now, the day’s half done, shooting dirty looks at my mother and her children hanging like monkeys from trees. Perhaps we were paid by the bushel. It’s likely, of course. But my impression does not catch up so quickly and the only green I remember is the press of leaves cloaking the shyest apples.

  How fickle it is, memory—preferring some days to others, granting first a blue sky, offering next the sound of laughter, swelling our remembrances until a largeness seeps into the grain of things and memory itself becomes billowed and flapping. The way it renders its stories without the burden of fact. The fact is that even with so many children, there was no father to be found. The fact is that the lot of us
must have looked so ragged we inspired pity in all who passed. The fact is that we were probably in the orchard as laborers. Those are facts but not the truth, which does not even speak the same language. My sister’s information adds a new layer to the scene—providing another lens through which to view the apple trees, explaining the circumstances of the day perhaps, widening the scope, to make us laugh and shake our heads as slivers of shame threaten to seep into the orchard—but making it does nothing to memory itself, which does not change, cannot change, and remains as it was to a girl too young to understand picking apples for anything other than pleasure.

  Come now and let us return once again to the branches, close enough to see the child standing beside a ladder, a girl in old corduroys and flat red sneakers whose neck is sore from so much looking up as she races to catch falling fruit and tries hard to fill her basket.

  I

  This is how easily the pit opens.

  This is how one foot sinks into the ground.

  RITA DOVE, “Persephone, Falling”

  Land of the Lost

  SHE’S THE GIRL EVERY other girl wants to be. Ivory skin. Feathered hair. A tiny mole orbiting her crooked smile, a smile that puts one in mind of Kristy McNichol, the actress who plays Buddy on TV’s Family, whose cuteness is like new kittens, who breaks America’s heart open each and every time they tune into the show. It’s 1979. Skin that tans, a decent pair of Candie’s shoes, and a Kristy McNichol smile are everything. But there’s something else. Leah, who has these things and could rule over other girls on the street, does not hold court. She speaks in whispers as she tucks filmy cotton blouses into faded Levi’s and wraps braided leather belts around her tiny waist—not knowing how much it hurts other girls not to have the creamy skin, the impossibly small waist. Leah Fiuma does not know the weight of such things and though her shyness sometimes comes off as indifference, her prettiness is sometimes mistaken for superiority; in truth, Leah doles out kindness where other girls might dole out pain.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” she says as we make our way up the stairs and into her room, past the Breaking Away movie poster taped to her wall. Leah’s vanity sits beneath the poster of a blond boy on his bicycle and includes a cushioned bench and pivoting mirror. It’s been repainted many times, some of the old color showing through where it has chipped, but still, it’s a vanity, and Leah may as well be Miss America, because besides the dressing table, she has a red handkerchief blouse trimmed in lace with butterfly sleeves that flutter about the arms. Leah has let me borrow this blouse on precisely two occasions, and as I follow her into her room, I can’t help but hope that the subject of the blouse will come up again—that she will offer, that I will accept.

  Leah Fiuma rarely invites other girls into her room, and when she does, it’s mainly to talk about the boy she loves, the one everyone knows is wrong—the one Amberlee Mangione has nicknamed Sleestak.

  Sleestaks are reptilian creatures from Land of the Lost, a Saturday morning TV show in which the Marshall family has slipped through a time portal and become trapped in an alternate universe inhabited by sleestaks and dinosaurs and even the mythological Medusa living in a garden of stone. They struggle to survive, the strong-jawed Rick Marshall and his kids, Will and Holly, exploring their new world, escaping the various monsters and traps, while trying to make it back home.

  Back in our world, Amberlee struggles to understand how the prettiest girl on the street could succumb to a boy so ugly. Sleestak’s blue-black hair drips like oil onto skin that rises in swollen pink foothills across an expanse of forehead and cheek. Though Leah uses it in every other sentence, I fail to retain Sleestak’s actual name. And it doesn’t matter. Not really. The main point is her choosing me to tell about him. She’s done it before, asked me to her room. Just a few times, but enough so that I stand taller as I follow her onto the front porch, snaking through a clump of her brothers who smoke weed to the sounds of Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

  I’d like to think that Leah asked me up here because I’m one of the few who doesn’t judge her for loving Sleestak, but it’s probably because I’m not technically in sixth grade until September and am too young to formulate meaningful judgment. And what do I care for reasons when I’m occasionally rewarded with a curlicue of pink blush and the chance for close-up observation of the proper way to brush back one’s bangs? Boys seem years away, but liquid blusher and the secrets of feathered hair—these are mysteries in need of immediate unraveling.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” she says again. “Especially not your mother.”

  Such caution makes me wonder if she’s going to talk about something other than Sleestak today. Leah stands at the window overlooking our dead-end street, pulling the white cotton curtains closed while I fumble with my fingers, sensing the importance of a secret requiring the drawing of curtains and worrying whether I’m an adequate choice for such disclosure. But she doesn’t seem concerned as she walks to the vanity. She must have a new shade of eye shadow or is about to explain the mechanics of the eyelash curler whose metal bends intrigue me. The girls in my family don’t wear makeup; my mother forbids it. But I’ve seen the tools of beauty in the homes of friends, and always, I watch, waiting for secrets to unfold.

  Leah fishes through the small drawer, pushing things around, until finally, she emerges with a trifold brochure and I try not to show my disappointment while wondering if she’s planning to tell me something academic. She’s older, in high school—another universe practically—and who knows, maybe brochures are a part of it all. She sits beside me, the chenille dots of her bedspread imprinting the backs of our legs as she opens the brochure and sets it onto our knees, revealing photographs that look blistered and scarlet.

  “Can you see them?” Leah’s eyes are like the Sacred Heart of Jesus print every mother on the street has hanging in her living room. All the Fiumas have those eyes—baby blue made lighter by sand-colored skin. Because it’s summer and the sun has bronzed her face, Leah’s eyes are little flames.

  “See what?” I ask. All I see are glossy piles of red. Words crowd the spaces surrounding the photographs, but with her watching I can’t read quickly enough to understand. Only the way she holds her breath makes meaning for me.

  “Babies,” she whispers. Her Jesus eyes turn toward the brochure, looking as if the weight of every bad thing has settled onto her shoulders. “Some girls get pregnant and do this to their babies.”

  I have always been an unfortunate combination of knowing and painfully unaware. For as far back as I can remember, I was a sponge for what fell from people’s mouths. I loved words and was never disappointed because more than any other thing, the world is filled with words. Some, like saturation and photosynthesis, came from school, while others, like jive-ass and pimp-walk, came from the streets. They swam about my head, such words, but even as I aced the weekly vocabulary tests at school, I was technically impaired—understanding nothing of the architecture of an apology, for instance, or how to tie a slip knot or the mechanics of the sexual interactions we joked about so freely in the cafeteria, so that even with the photographs laid out before me, I could make no sense of what I saw.

  No, I didn’t understand what I saw, but I looked hard anyway and the images stayed with me, the soft carnage of them. And the image of Leah Fiuma stayed with me as well. Leah with the hovering mole, thinking of her boyfriend perhaps and many other things as she stared into the brochure and said, “Isn’t it terrible?”

  The word, of course, was abortion, and once it came from her mouth, I received it and held it to me the way I’d held other words; some, like marzipan and malarkey, caused ridiculous joy, while others, like phlegm and masticate, I wished I’d never heard because of the way certain words refuse to leave once they wrangle their way inside. And after she gave it to me, the new word, I stored it away, recognizing it when it came a few years later, in health class, when we were assigned to write papers telling what we thought—whether abortion was right or wrong. What could I possibly
have written? In a neighborhood with the highest rate of teen pregnancy in a city with the highest rate in the state, all of us with sisters or friends whose laps had been overtaken by babies—what did that teacher of ninth-grade girls really expect us to say?

  I want to be as heartbroken as Leah as we look into the brochure. We move to the window when I admit I can’t see anything and she thinks maybe some light will help. I try, but can’t make out what she’s waiting for me to see. After a few attempts at pointing out tiny fingernails, I finally pretend to recognize them while stealing peeks at the vanity, wondering when she’ll fold away the brochure, take up her pearly pink lip gloss and tell me one more time the way Sleestak has become her world.

  Whatever happened to that brochure? That chipped vanity? The poster of a boy on a bicycle pushing into the wind? Soon after that visit, Leah went into hiding with Sleestak, who was running from the police over problems with drugs. She had a baby not long afterward and—who knows?—maybe a couple more. Her mother was a cashier at a local university and Leah and her brothers could have gone to college for free—a fact much touted in a neighborhood where ringing up lunches was the closest anyone got to college. And though I don’t think any of the kids ever made use of their mother’s tuition benefit, it was practically a law degree on our street, Mary Fiuma’s tuition waiver, the way it impressed. Now such things hardly matter. A breeze coming up from the past, that tuition benefit, nothing more than the flutter of a page.

  I keep my promise to Leah and don’t tell my mother the word she’s taught me, never once mentioning the brochure. Not because I’m especially good at secrets, but because this one has no weight. A new ankle bracelet would have pressed heavier against me. A silver bloom of hair spray. The word does not rise in me for many years and when it finally does, it involves the case of a sister. She’s young, still in high school, so I will take her for the procedure, I tell my mother. Planned Parenthood will help schedule and pay, I let her know, because if there’s one thing none of us has, it’s money. But no. My mother says no. We don’t believe in abortion, she says, and I shake my head and wonder what we do believe in. The edges of the Sacred Heart of Jesus have worn thin. Leah is long gone, and taken with her that vanity full of secrets. What then, I wonder, what then?