July, l996, Iowa

This is an archive of the original Bastard Quarterly newsletter, edited by Damsel Plum and Charles Filius. It was published in print and on the web between 1997 and 2002.

July, l996, Iowa

by Helen Hill

(This article first appeared in the Fall 1997 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)

I arrive in the night. A square of yellow light from your kitchen window hangs on the outside of your house like a painting. Please, please come out and meet me in the dark. I've crossed barrier after barrier in order to arrive at this address, but now your small house is the last complication, the warped screen door is a barrier I can't cross; my bravery's left me. You must be the one to cross the distance that's left.

The warm yellow light from your kitchen window stops me cold. I am dark and secret like the night. I'm your secret daughter who's found you and come to meet you after forty one years. Do you want me now? It's a raw, unfair question, but I'm impaled by it. I've come to look at you and touch you but I'm turning cold inside. I'm so cold inside and where my skin meets the hot Iowa night, it might be that I will crack. If you don't leave the light of your kitchen and come out to me, we'll lose each other, again. I'll get back in the rental car and drive away.

There are big trees in your yard, elms and oaks, a walnut. The roots have pushed up and broken through the concrete. Fireflies are long gone at this hour but the heavy, dark heat that goes with them is pressing on my arms and face. There are several people waiting, standing here and there among the trunks of the big trees. They're curious, and nervous for our reunion on this summer night.

Suddenly I feel this is a terrible mistake. I'm afraid of you and of the big, ancient trees. I'm afraid of the warm golden square of your kitchen window. I'm afraid that I have no right to be here, and that you'll gently make it clear, again, that you can't invite me in. I ache to hear the sound of your screen door slam. My God I am scared.

And then I hear it (have you understood?). You're moving towards me, a smallish woman is moving towards me through the shadows of the big-leafed trees. The hug is brief and awkward. And so momentous we must leave it behind, throw it away from us like the torn pages of a court order.

The silence of the ones watching is broken now. Everyone moves toward the door. I'm slightly behind you, and now it's all right to go inside your home. I move as surely as if there are footsteps for me to follow painted in luminescent color on the cracked slab of your porch.

Through the doorway and into a small kitchen, towards food you've prepared for me. Inside. Chairs around a table. Warm, sweet food. There are brothers and sisters, mine I think, talking and laughing, but it's you I watch from the corner of my eye. I steal a glance at the shape of your thumbnail and compare it with the shape of my own, under the table. I'm struck deaf and dumb and blind way deep in my soul that I'm eating food you've prepared. That fingers can end in ovals so remarkably alike.

I need to slow down. Maybe stop altogether and drop to the floor, crawl to a dark corner and draw in with my head down and my hands over my ears to shut out the nervous small talk. I want to stay absolutely quiet and still and be alone to recall your warmth underneath the trees. I want to try and understand how it was that a few minutes ago, I experienced an appalling intimacy with an absolute stranger.

Then I'm like a child I dreamt of as I follow you up narrow attic stairs to a small, clean bed you've prepared for me. I think you've ironed the snow white curtain at the window. I lie in the dark for hours, I toss and turn in this bed with a beautiful family quilt laid over it. You made a point of telling me about this quilt, just before you left me to go back down to your family (was it my imagination, or did you leave me quickly, and wasn't this what I wanted too?). You told me how women of the family (my women? Can these ghosts make room for me inside the circle?) stitched it years ago, when you were a little girl, with cotton thread. They stitched together hundreds of pieces of my ancestor's shirts and dresses and made a beautiful blanket to make visible this family's continuity.

I'm a broken, dangling thread trying to knot into the finished pattern. I lie under this design and it's heavy. The old quilt is heavy with the weight of unclaimed intimacy. My unspoken, unexamined history covers me, it burns and suffocates me. I push it off.

There's a window at the head of my bed and I look out of it long into the night. I breathe in the intimate odors layered through your house. The scent of your former presence still hangs in the air; it is terrifyingly familiar.

The cicadas are droning, hidden in the dark branches of an elm, and I'm at the end of my longest journey. All the time I was sure this journey led home, but I find I've arrived instead in a stranger's attic on a hot night in a room with small pieces of unrecognizable dresses and shirts. I've arrived in a place where I can't be sure if the ghosts will grant their permission for the privilege of a restful sleep, or if I offend them.

For what seems like hours, I keep my eyes on a section of asphalt road shining under a streetlight. I long for this road as I once longed for you. The dark night is my family. The secret cicadas and the shadows of the big leafed trees are my brothers and sisters, not those wonderful, warm-eyed people that might have been so dear to me, gone home now to sleep in their homes scattered throughout this city.

A loneliness I never bargained for, never thought would be the end of my journey, carves me hollow and black and sick. The only thing that staves it is the sight of the road. I am comforted by the silver gleam of it. I can always return to the road, it belongs to everyone. It will welcome me over and over, asking only for my feet, never for my courage.

All these years I've been a sad question mark to you, while this house where you live has been the only place I could imagine all roads led. All my life I've been searching for this food, for these people, for this room with its resting place. But now that I'm here, I long for the comfort of the road. I long for the road that will take me away from this house where my family has lived a lifetime without me. I leak tears on the clean pillow case, the one you selected for a homecoming that mocks me with its confusion and hollowness. I cry for all the wretched longings that are better left unsatisfied. For where do I go now that I've arrived? What do I do now that I find that I've been gone so long, I don't belong here, that I never did?

It must be the longing that makes a heart go on. As soon as one longing is satisfied, another is there waiting quietly in the silence between beats to take its place. And that is a fiendish disappointment, an unholy fact of myself, just understood, that might break me in two.

I could sneak down in the dark and go to meet the road and run away with it. I could make my way downstairs and move through the rooms of your house, like the chambers of your heart, as silent as a ghost. I'm skilled at passing by unremarked and unknown. I can shut a door without the slightest noise, as if I was never there at all.

The drone of the cicadas swells as if they're calling me. I can see my feet so clearly, one in front of the other, on the edge of the road. But now that I've arrived, it's unclear where I'm headed.

I wake to light filling the room like slow music. I must have fallen asleep, dreaming of the road. I hear you downstairs in your kitchen, I go back down the narrow stairs. You're baking cinnamon rolls. Rolling them out just like I do. You have plates like mine.

We talk. And laugh. And cry, a bit, in the morning brightness of your kitchen. And though this knowledge will seep through and warm my blood slowly, warm my veins like a gathering sunlight on roads and paths interrupted by the roots of the giant trees of my oldest dreams: I have arrived. My longest journey is over.

My own dear mother is found, and the secrets of the universe are mine.

Helen Hill lives in Oregon, where she is currently chief petitioner for Ballot Measure 46, a state wide initiative that will grant adult adoptees born in Oregon the right to receive copies of their original birth certificates. When she's not out gathering the 75,000 signatures needed to qualify the measure for the November l998 ballot, she is mother to three and a painter, sculptor, and teacher.

(This article first appeared in the Fall 1997 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)