Grand Avenue, by Sarah Pape

Grand Avenue

an essay by Sarah Pape

Grand Avenue

an essay

SARAH PAPE

Editor-in-Chief

Leslie Jill Patterson Nonfiction Editor

Elena Passarello Poetry Editor

Camille Dungy Fiction Editor

Katie Cortese Managing Editors

Nonfiction Trifecta

2016

Joe Dornich Sarah Viren Chen Chen

Associate Editors: Chad Abushanab, Kathleen Blackburn, Margaret Emma Brandl, Rachel DeLeon, Nancy Dinan, Allison Donahue, Mag Gabbert, Jo Anna Gaona, Colleen Harrison, Micah Heatwole, Brian Larsen, Essence London, Beth McKinney, Scott Morris, Katrina Prow, MacKenzie Regier, Kate Simonian, Jessica Smith, Amber Tayama, Robby Taylor, Jeremy Tow, and Mary White.

Copyright © 2016 Iron Horse Literary Review. All rights reserved.

Iron Horse Literary Review is a national journal of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. It is published six times a year at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, through the support of the TTU President’s Office, Provost’s Office, Graduate College, College of Arts & Sciences, and English Department.

Cover Art and Interior Photos: Calvin Greenwood.

Grand Avenue

I. Sometimes People

ffence. Our babysitter came from behind the towering boards and

rom our kitchen window, I could see the two houses behind the tall

walked across the road, down our long gravel drive, and would wait silently in front of the door without knocking. She smelled like clothes taken from a cold laundry pile, a mixture of cigarettes, sweat, and bacon grease. She had small eyes, banded her hair in cascading ponytails, one joined to the next, and once locked my baby brother in the closet. We had never had a babysitter before. She was fourteen and came to our door one day asking my mom if she had any work for her to do. My mom, infinitely generous and concerned with suffering people, saw the state of Tanya’s life from our kitchen window: deafening motorcycles and police cars cycling in and out of what seemed like a compound of shacks behind those fences. Tattered folks of all shapes and sizes stumbled out from there, a long strand of dead-eyed zombies, who then shuffled up the long road that ran from one end of our town to the other.

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here was a bar near our house called The Oily Room, and sometimes men would pass out on our lawn after last call. Once, the police came to our front door and told us to stay inside. There was a man walking the driveway that wound around our property to the one behind ours. He had a knife. No one ever came to tell us that everything was okay. Especially at night, I imagined that he was still out there, walking the gravel roads of our neighborhood, the worn trails behind the market, across the empty fields. On cold nights, the windows of the room my brother and I shared would fog up, and little rivulets would run the length of the glass. I was afraid to see past the mist. He was always just beyond where I could see.

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ant to play a game? she would ask us, as we gaped at her with dread. My brother, a toddler—thick blond curls and eyes blue as Levi’s— would lift his arms to her, and she would place him gently into the linen closet and close the door. His whimpering started immediately.

Sarah Pape

5

e

very morning while my mom got ready for work, I would sit on the toilet seat and watch her rituals of color and curl. The hot rollers steamed in their box, a little hiss and heat that would rise to fog the mirror. I had memorized every item in her straw basket of makeup—the top layer of shadows and blush for everyday, and the darker hues underneath for going-out nights. Small perfume bottles lined the dark oak shelves, and sometimes when I was peeing, I would uncork one, smelling the sweet ghostly scent of her. The linoleum was patterned with offwhite shards, and I would look for faces in the ragged shapes, crouching down to outline them with my fingers, to show her where I saw their expressions looking up at us.

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slender wedding band and sometimes a delicate chain with a cross the size of a mosquito were the only jewelry my mother wore. She kept everything else in a box high above my reach, but I was allowed on occasion to look at and pick up each piece. There was a broken cameo brooch with no backing, a string of pearls, a clump of burnished silver chains, some costume jewelry, and then the opal ring that was my greatgrandmother’s. Her mother had given it to her, one of the few things left after her death. My mother was afraid to wear it, this small artifact of her grandmother’s, sure it would slip off or be left behind on a dresser.

Sarah Pape

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e lived on Grand Avenue. The main drag, my father called it, watching every kind of vehicle speed past our house. Though we were taught to stay inside our fence, I would sometimes creep to the other side of the low wooden barrier. How curious, the way the air seemed to shift just a few feet away, the velocity of the cars stirring up electricity, a palpable danger, or, perhaps, exposure. I felt safe within the boundary of our yard, where I had places to visit each day. Our pigeon coop, where the birds shuffled and cooed at my approach. The thick bamboo grove that my father had hollowed out from the inside and cut a square of old carpet to place in the middle. The line of azaleas that created a border between our yard and the children who sometimes visited next door.

Everything from the fence line back was mine.

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rossi, my great-grandmother, died when I was just a baby. My mother loved her more than anyone, I believed. There was a little oval frame on Mom’s dresser, with tiny edelweiss painted around the border. The photo was of Grossi and Mom kissing on her wedding day, Mom holding both of Grossi’s hands in her hands and leaning forward with her eyes closed and lips pursed. I’ve looked at this picture a hundred times, straining my memory with all of my might to recall her. Do you remember Grossi? Mom asks every time she catches me inspecting the oval frame.

I say, Maybe, but both of us know the impossibility. I found my mother crying on the front porch, one of the rare moments I’ve witnessed her tears, and when I inquired, she said she was sad because her grandmother had died. Today? I asked, unaware that she had another grandmother. No, years ago. This was when I realized that you could mourn someone your whole life.

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ne day, we took the jewelry box down and found the slot with the opal ring empty. She knew without question that our babysitter had taken it. She had noticed other, lesser things missing here and there, but she wanted to know for sure, so she bought a pair of plated gold, cubic zirconium studs and called her to come watch us that evening. What she wanted was to get the ring back, not to shame Tanya. But how can you do one without the other? No one knows the preciousness of a thing.

There has to be a story.

Sarah Pape

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om worked at Montgomery Ward, behind the jewelry case. We would bring her lunch, an occasion I yearned for, and I would walk around the sea of mattresses with the older women who worked there, doting on me and offering me treats from their lunch pails. Mom had just graduated from college but hadn’t gotten a job as a social worker yet.

She said she was going to work with old people, but in my mind, she simply knocked on doors until she found a lonely elderly person who needed something. When she was hired at the county office, I missed the gleaming gold wedding sets and chains under the lights of the displays. I missed her face as she leaned down to smile at me through the glass.

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ou have to let him out now, I moaned into the crack under the bathroom door. You have to. The sounds of the faucet turning off and on, and the familiar click of my mom’s eye shadow and brushes touching the counter, had been going on for what seemed like hours. I sat against the wall of the hallway, crawling between the bathroom and the linen closet, squeezing my fingers under the doorframe, so his fat little hands could hold the tips of mine. Mom will be home soon, I repeated, again and again.

Sarah Pape

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ur house was small and yellow. Piracantha blocked our view from the picture window, so all we could see was the shaded porch and two cat-shredded wicker chairs. I collected the poison berries from the bush, a deep orange I couldn’t resist when making potions, mixing them with mud and water and the dry grass from our half-acre. I knew every corner of our property—the falling down pigpen, the pigeon coop, the overhang of my father’s garage where a motorcycle and an aluminum boat sat covered in dust. I knew the blackberry bushes I had to climb over to walk the fence line back to our house. Slightly hidden from view, this is where my friend and I posed with candy cigarettes, jutting and bending our bodies in ways we didn’t understand, and running, embarrassed, back to the field when the neighbor stepped from behind his outbuilding.

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he bathroom door opened with a flourish as Tanya bolted into the living room, pushing back the blinds to look down the driveway. In one movement, she opened the linen closet to my brother, head on the floor, butt in the air. He crawled into my little lap, cheeks red from crying, shuddering breaths breaking against my chest. I placed him in front of his toy basket and stood in front of her, hands on my hips: You should not have done that. She looked down at me, her stare blank, dark blue eyeshadow bruising her eyes, the scent of my mother’s most expensive perfume seeping from her stained sleeves. Brother began babbling to himself, pushing a truck on the thick moss-green carpet, hiccupping between imagined sentences.

Sarah Pape

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n just a couple of years, Tanya will get into a motorcycle accident without a helmet. She will become simple from her brain injury, and we will occasionally see her at the market next door to their house. Years after her accident, we will read about her in the newspaper. She kidnapped a baby.

She and her lover tortured him in a hotel room. The baby lived, and she went to prison. The lawyer pleaded for less time due to her brain injury, said that she had limited use of her prefrontal cortex, but I couldn’t help but remember our hall closet and the casual cruelty she meted out, not knowing what babysitters should and shouldn’t do.

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our fucking mom is home, okay? she said, pushing up her sleeves and starting to fill the sink with water and soap. Her arms were pale in the florescent glow of the kitchen, ropy muscles tense under the skin, scarred with old welts and angry red cuts. The familiar crunch of the back door opening brought my gaze up to my mom, wrestling an armload of groceries onto the counter. Hey, thanks for doing the dishes. I just couldn’t get. . . . Her voice trailed off when Tanya looked up from the steaming suds. Mom looked at Tanya, a kaleidoscope of reactions happening as she noticed each stroke of color across the girl’s face then rested her eyes finally on the sparkling point of light in each of her ears. I want my grandmother’s ring back, she said clearly.

Sarah Pape

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y mom walked her out the door and beyond the illumination of the porch light. I sat behind my brother on the floor, legs in a V around his legs. He continued the stuttering trajectory of his Tonka truck.

I ran my fingers through his hair, and he let me. Mom came in the room and sat in the rocking chair, tears beginning to well in her eyes. I began to cry. She pulled me into her lap and held me there. Are you upset because I was angry with Tanya, honey? I stayed silent, heaving breaths between sobs. Sometimes people take things from others when they feel like they don’t have enough for themselves. Sometimes people have been hurt so much they don’t realize they could be hurting another person. My brother stopped his play, looking at us both for a moment, and began again to cry.

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II. How to Swim

t

he heat was an entity in itself, a nameless quivering gas that would seep over the valley and over the brittle hills of Thermalito. The world seemed to halt in the summer. Lazy dogs panting under the olive trees and dirty babies with heavy diapers playing with faded toys on little patches of grass were the only brave ones willing to step away from the moist cold of the swamp cooler. We would bring my rabbit, Luke, inside on the hottest days. I would place him on top of a speaker near the cooler, where he’d pant inside a yellow plastic crate. Once he cooled off, I would let him hop free around the house, and he’d follow me to each room, leaving little turds behind him, which we’d find much later because it was the same color as everything.

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ur neighbor Ray, a contractor, would pull his clanking work truck into his driveway every day at five. He stripped off his orange work shirt to reveal the horizon line of his arms—the deep scarlet of his muscled forearms and pale sky of shoulders—and sprayed the day’s dust off the pickup’s flanks with a hose. His arrival was a measurement of time.

Just as the back neighbor’s flocks of chickens made a cacophony at dawn, the rattling of his toolboxes announced dusk.

Sarah Pape

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ast the chain-link fence between our yards and then the diamond lattice of his porch, the aqua gleam of Ray’s Doughboy pool shone like a cheap promise ring. My dad and I had swam in it before, he in his toosmall corduroy shorts and me with a big T-shirt over my bathing suit.

The water was clear and cold, the deep end too deep for me since I couldn’t swim yet. But we had to wait to be invited. I took to posting myself at the edge of the fence every evening as his truck rounded the blacktop drive. Most of the time, he didn’t see me; I didn’t really want him to, but it’s hard to plan a chance meeting.

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t was 115 degrees, and my mom was watering our little square of lawn in a see-through peasant top that she still had from high school. Her black underwear peeked from the hemline. This was what she wore on the hottest of days. I stood next to her, putting my feet into the hose water each time they dried. Ray came up the drive and slowed to roll down the window. It’s a hot one today, he said. Mom smiled faintly: Yeah, it’s hard to think straight in weather like this. Ray peered at our overgrown plot. It’s time for her to learn how to swim, don’t you think? he asked, gesturing at me hiding behind her. Mom turned to smile at me, knowing how badly I wanted the relief of a cool body of water. I’ll have her come by after dinner.

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here were not that many adults in my life. I had my mom and dad. My grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were hundreds of miles away.

My mom had one friend who was Polish, and her parents, Joe and Kasha, sometimes babysat my brother and me. This was a rare and wonderful experience. They both worked at the local cannery. He collected junk. So much junk that they bought a piece of land where he could bring his loads. My dad took me there once, and besides the piles of car parts and broken-down vehicles, I remember a house on stilts and how I very much wanted to see inside but could not because the earth around it was missing. Not a trench, but an abyss. When my mother would pick us up from their house, I would have tight French braids and a belly full of pirogues.

They would let me sit up in their cherry trees and eat as much of the fruit as I could reach. They would coo at and fill my brother with sweets. We loved them. I thought every adult was as good as they were.

Sarah Pape

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he dust was thick in between my toes and left a deep brown V when I slipped my foam flip-flops onto the emerald AstroTurf deck by the pool. Ray was somewhere in the garage, looking for a scuba mask that his grandson had left behind. I dragged my calves back and forth in the crystalline currents, then switched directions. The mask splashed into the water in front of me. Then Ray’s voice: Go get it.

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n one movement, he lowered himself into the water, a highball in his free hand, held up like a torch in the lowering sun. Do you know how to clean a mask, Sarah? A white crescent of skin hovered just above the water line, just below the place the collar of his shirt usually was. I shook my head. You spit in it. Bring it to me, and I’ll show you.

Sarah Pape

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he true danger, my parents believed, were the pitbulls and bikers that lived on the other side of us. I had become fast friends with one of their daughters, and we would stand at the fence between our houses, telling each other about the schools we went to and the boys we liked. She would go into her house and bring back pieces of Wonderbread with a thick layer of butter and sugar. The concoction melted in our hands as we talked, pinching small portions and letting it disintegrate against our tongues. One day, a pitbull puppy got through our fence, grabbed hold of my brother’s diaper, and dragged him across the yard. Another one of their dogs pulled my rabbit’s cage apart and unceremoniously ate it. The next day, my friend’s father stood at our front door, his leathers worn and soft, a long red braid over one shoulder, and held out a brown paper bag to me. In a gravely voice, he mumbled, Sorry, and walked back down the driveway. Feeling something move inside, I opened the bag. There were two downy white baby rabbits.

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ay sucked his cheeks in, gathering saliva, as I reached precariously with my toe to hook the mask’s elastic. He took the mask from my hands and grasped my waist, pulling me toward him. I peered down into the oval window the mask made, his feet like bright white coral at the bottom of the pool. He spit a large puddle of saliva onto the glass. Now you use your fingers to swirl it around.

Sarah Pape

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e didn’t know which dog had killed my rabbit, and though we were assured the dogs were safe, my dad put up a fence across the one open area where our yards touched. This gesture made for tension where there had previously been neutral regard; any judgment was made in low voices after a night of their fighting or cops coming to pull them apart. Ray was more like us, I imagine my parents felt, in the ways he and his wife displayed normalcy: good jobs, nice things, lots of children and grandchildren coming to barbeque on the weekends. Kindly grandparents in a landscape of disarray, they had the nicest home for miles. His wife walked with my mother to Weight Watchers meetings at Grange Hall.

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is spit was warm as I dipped my fingers into it, drawing figure eights and then quickly brushing a thin layer over the entire surface. He dipped it down into the pool water. See how clear everything is when you hold it on top of the water? What else can you see down there? I looked into the mask like a crystal ball, debris floating beyond the surface, and could see, suddenly, what he wanted me to see. His swim trunks were pulled below his distended belly to reveal the bobbing head of his penis.

Sarah Pape

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ee it? He squeezed me closer and hard around the ribs. I didn’t dare take my eyes off of it, swaying slightly as he maneuvered us toward the ladder. Uh huh. Your thing. He laughed hard, gripping my small thigh.

My thing? Who told you that— your mom? I am going to teach you a few things today. He set his drink down. That, is my cock. Then he swam his hand to the crotch of my bathing suit. And this is a pussy. I thought about the bathroom steam after my baths and the puff of Avon powder I was allowed to pat between my legs. I squirmed his hand away, turning to the outer rim of the pool. My mom told me about that already. And though I didn’t say it, the staccato sound rang in my brain: Tata.

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hen I am a teenager, my boyfriend and I will go to the feed store and impulsively buy a baby duck and chick. After the first couple of weeks delighting in their cuteness, naming them and making failed habitats, we realize that the chick is becoming a rooster. We now live in a better neighborhood, and the crowing is unwelcome with no other sounds to buffer the startle of it. It is aggressive and mean to the duck.

Mom tells us to get rid of it, and, without question, I know where we will take it. In the car, driving through the dark, I hold the rooster in my lap, like a warm, pounding heart, its strong wings pushing up into my hands. I tell my boyfriend where to turn and gesture toward the dusty driveway where he can park. In the moment before getting out, I notice how little is the same, even though we’ve been gone only a few years. I see Ray’s truck parked in its predictable place. There is the blue glow of a television seeping through the front window. I hurl the flapping bird into the front yard, squawking and riled. I don’t look back to see if anyone stirs. I tell my boyfriend to go, go, go. Get us away from there.

Sarah Pape

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ay grabbed my arm and pulled me back onto his lap, his penis tapping at the back of my thigh like a nibbling fish. You can’t go until you swim, and you still don’t know how, so you can’t go. I was beginning to panic, as if I was in trouble for something I didn’t do, couldn’t explain. My mom wants me to go home now. He took a long drink from his glass, the cubes clattering together. Now don’t you start lying, Sarah. Your mom didn’t call you.

She asked me to teach you how to swim. I could feel my mom next door, imagine her at the stove, browning hamburger or shaking up the dressing. I keened in the direction of our yellow house, the lattice where the azaleas drooped, the tiny cabinet where my mother kept her spoon collection, wishing with everything in my small body that she would feel my invisible call. I don’t feel good though. Maybe some other time.

Sarah Pape

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e wrapped his arms around my middle, hugging me to his warm chest, breath sweet with whiskey. I want to hold you a little bit longer.

I swung my legs like a windmill and landed one solid kick to his groin. He held on with conviction, squeezing me until my chest burned, lowering me until the water touched my lips, dipping me under and then raising me back up, sputtering for air. Bucking like a demon, like someone on fire, I finally broke loose and, choking my way across, found the ladder and heaved myself to the edge. Running toward home, I didn’t look back, the soles of my feet leaving sloppy tracks behind me.

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oaked and sobbing, I opened the door of my house, immediately chilled as the swamp cooler air collided with my skin. What happened? My mom ran to me, alarmed. What had happened? I wasn’t sure how to make her understand. He was so mean to me. She crouched down, looking into my face for an answer. Who? Ray? How was he mean to you?

I tried to recall everything that had happened, how it had progressed. All I could hold onto was the lingering tightness in my chest. He. Wouldn’t.

Let. Me. Breathe. Each word shook its way from my throat. Sometimes that happens when you learn how to swim, honey. You eventually learn how to time your breaths. My mother struggled to understand what this meant, how to respond. He. Sob. Squeezed. Sob. Me. Sob. Well, I’ll just go over there and talk with him. I don’t want there to be a problem between all of us.

Sarah Pape

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lay on the couch and wrapped a blanket around my sun-soaked skin, little gasps quaking through me as the water slowly dissipated. I ran to my bedroom and found the diary that my grandma had given me for my birthday. It was still in a little plastic cover, the keys hanging from a yellow string.

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he low mumble of my mom speaking with Ray over the chain-link fence sifted through the window as I held my ear to it. His voice rose and fell, and she eventually laughed, as if he had just told her a joke. I don’t want Ray to touch me again, I scrawled in clumsy six-year-old script. I closed the latch until it clicked and inserted the toothy little key. I could feel the air leave the house as Mom entered through the backdoor, as I slipped the book into the dark place beneath my dresser.

Sarah Pape

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III. Liar

m

y father had shaggy, chestnut-brown hair, and my mother would cut it in the living room, a sheer yellow cape from her time in beauty school tied delicately around his neck. He would sit with his ankles crossed, hands clasped in his lap, a sleepy gaze overtaking his face as she ran the comb up, fingers closed on the fin of hair, then snip—up, hold, snip. One evening, she was giving him a trim. I lay on my stomach with cold tea bags draped over the backs of my thighs to soothe the sunburn I had gotten from Slip’N Sliding all day with a friend in our front yard. Mom was just beginning to vacuum up the little hairs from the carpet when the phone rang.

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ad, feeling silly and handsome from his fresh haircut, answered the phone in the voice of Donald Duck. From the other room, I could hear him repeating, Who is this? And then finally an angry shout: Don’t you go near her. I had never heard my dad raise his voice in this way—panic and threat creeping in. I was curious. I came into the kitchen, and both parents startled at my entrance. It’s nothing you need to worry about, honey, Mom started. The phone started ringing again. I ran over and snatched it from its cradle.

Sarah Pape

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ello. The sun-yellow phone was mounted to the wall. A stool and chalkboard rested next to the tangled cord. Hi, Sexy. I didn’t recognize the voice, faraway and crackling. Who is this? I heard him laugh: Tell me your name first. Only my boyfriend called me at home. I was in fourth grade, and this was new—boys calling our house and me spending long minutes waiting for them to say something. Is this Dusty? I knew already that it wasn’t. The voice on the other line sounded adult, grown. I saw you in your bathing suit today. Is Dusty your boyfriend? Does he make you suck his—

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om grabbed the phone from me and yelled into the receiver, Call again, and I’ll kill you. We’re calling the police right now. Shaking, she hung up. Immediately, the shrill ring erupted from the wall. Standing at the kitchen window, my parents began talking in hushed voices, pointing across the street, murmuring about who could see our front yard from there. Who could have seen me playing on the Slip’N Slide, or have the vantage point to know I was in my bathing suit?

Sarah Pape

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veryone said: developing early. It was like a diagnosis for whatever was ailing my body and its hearty horizontal and vertical leaps. My friend next door, who wasn’t always there but came some weekends to visit her dad, had breasts three times the size of mine. That day on the Slip’N Slide, I watched as her white bikini top failed to hold, the anchor design across the front stretched and skewed under the pressure of her flesh. She was teaching me how to pull the bottom of my T-shirt up and over the neckline to create a crop top that showed our bellies. We ruined my best pair of jeans with a squirt bottle full of barely diluted bleach.

Her boyfriend’s favorite car was a Lamborghini Countach—one of the only car names I’ve ever committed to memory, because it came with the instruction that you must remember details that are important to boys, even if they aren’t important to you.

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om says, It could be someone at Tanya’s house, a disgusted tone entering her voice at the mention of our across-the-street neighbors.

My dad gestured through the window at the store’s bright neon sign: Or Ron’s Market. Anyone standing in that parking lot could just look over. Mom hesitated. What about Ray? I know he’s your friend, but he sits on his porch and looks over here. A lot. They agreed it could be anyone.

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y dad had a lot of buddies. That’s what he called them. Many were younger than he was, guys who liked to fish and work on cars. My mom tolerated them and my father’s devotion to them. He would drop anything to help a buddy who needed a favor. We’d have their cars in our driveway for weeks while he rebuilt a carburetor for free. They drank cases of Budweiser and played darts in the garage, where from just outside you could hear the crunch of cans under their boot heels and the satisfying puncture of dart into wood.

Sarah Pape

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n the weeks following the phone call, my dad woke up early to take me to school, his white pickup sputtering around the corners that I usually would have ridden on my bike. I was to wait for him behind the chainlink fence after school. I was to tell my teachers if anyone spoke to me from outside of the playground. I was to stay inside or in the backyard when I got home. I was absolutely not allowed to answer the phone.

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would lie in bed, considering who this man was who called to tell me he liked my bathing suit. Achingly almost, I attempted to remember his voice and what the end of his question was going to be. Does he make me suck his—what? I didn’t yet know about the ways that mouths and bodies could join. From the way my dad reacted, I knew that something about what he said was dangerous. But there was something soothing about his voice, and a pounding heartbeat would begin to pulse in my underwear whenever I thought about it. Something could happen to me.

He called me Sexy.

Sarah Pape

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kept my mother’s copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves under my bed. I would flip through every page, memorizing each chapter name, the pictures of contraceptives, the side dissection of female and male genitalia. I didn’t understand what they were fighting for, but I looked at the women’s faces who held up signs, their breasts swinging free. There were breasts with areola as big as saucers. Then there were the drawings. I always got stuck looking at the delicately rendered pencil sketches of couples in sexual positions. In one, a bearded man lay spooned against the back of his partner, a woman with close-cropped hair. Her legs were opened, and his arm snaked over her belly, and his hand rested in the place where the shadows of dark hair tangled, and his fingers squirmed under my close inspection. It was labeled: Manual stimulation.

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was alone the next time he called. My dad had gone on an errand, and my mom was at work. From the increasing amounts of time I was spending alone again, I understood that I was no longer in danger. I imagined my mom marching into the local police station, which in my mind looked like the one on The Andy Griffith Show. In my fantasy of this moment, she shakes her fist at them, shouting that she won’t rest until this pervert has been found and locked up, as they look at her with a mixture of awe and intimidation.

Sarah Pape

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ello?

Hi, Sarah. We haven’t talked in a while.

Who is this?

Who do you think it is?

Grandpa? Are you playing a trick on me?

Do you still have that bathing suit?

Silence.

Are you there? Sarah, do you still have that bathing suit?

A whisper: Yes. I can come over, and you can put it on for me.

My dad is going to be home soon. I don’t think that’s a good idea. He doesn’t like you.

Your dad is a liar, and I don’t like him.

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hung up the phone, panting to catch my breath. I knew that I should get up and make sure the doors were locked. I should close the blinds, but I couldn’t move. It was as if the man on the phone was already in the house with me. Nothing I could do would keep him out. Suddenly, I realized that I had told the man that my dad was not home. He was probably already walking up the driveway. He could be standing with his hand on the doorknob of our front door, the back door.

Sarah Pape

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ran into my parents’ bedroom and crawled into their closet. I moved Mom’s shoes aside and cleared a little space to sit, shallow breaths coming quickly as I listened for any noises that would reveal his presence. I gathered the hems of my mom’s dresses into a fabric bloom and rubbed my face into the scent of her. They smelled of the Avon body powder she would dust each part of herself with after getting out of the shower.

Sometimes, she would let me sprinkle myself with it after bathing. Don’t forget your Tata, she would singsong as I crumbled into a fit of giggles.

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he light in the room changed color as a filtered sunset descended outside the opaque window shades. This time, I noticed that the man’s voice was old, like the man who lived behind us that my dad worked for sometimes. He called my dad “Art the Fart” as he handed him a beer. I liked going with my dad to that man’s house because chickens lived in his trees. Sometimes, he asked me to feed his horse and showed me how to separate a flake from the bale. It couldn’t have been him. He lived behind our house and couldn’t have seen me through all of those trees.

Sarah Pape

59

i

was beginning to get sleepy when I finally heard the back door open and the familiar sound of my mom’s keys being hung on the rack. I heard the slump of her purse as she tossed it onto a kitchen chair. She came into her room and began to undress from her work clothes. Unzipping her pants, I could see that she was wearing pale pink, threadbare panties; I could see the shadow of dark hair between her legs. She lifted the blouse over her head and unhooked her bra, letting her heavy breasts fall, her nipples relaxed and flattened from the day. In just her underwear, she walked into the bathroom and shut the door.

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Grand Avenue

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crawled out of the closet on numb legs, creeping down the hallway into my bedroom. Turning on the bedside lamp, I edged under the covers and picked up a book and pretended to be reading. Why would the man say that my dad was a liar? My mother sometimes accused him of the same. He would stay gone for too long, and she would meet him out in the driveway, where he would stagger from his car, ashamed, sometimes drunk. By the end of it all, he would cry and beg her. She would let him in, and I would be sitting with my brother, playing with his Hot Wheels or pretending to sleep in our little bedroom, where we could hear everything.

Sarah Pape

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om, now in her Pepto-Bismol pink robe came and sat on the edge of my bed. I didn’t see you when I came in. I scooted away from her. I was just here reading. When she came home from work, she would take a half-hour nap and then make dinner. Where’s Dad? she asked, a hint of irritation in her voice. He said he was going to run some errands. This is what I always said because it’s what he called it when he would leave for unknown amounts of time. How long has he been gone? The day had lengthened exponentially as I waited in the closet, my fear making a little lifetime between each noise. Since before it got dark.

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Grand Avenue

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he got up from my bed and walked into the kitchen, muttering that asshole under her breath as she turned from me. I could see her looking out the window from where I was laying, her body tense and straight in the fading light. A beam of headlights turned onto our gravel drive. Did anyone call? Mom asked absently from her perch. Yeah, but they didn’t give a name.

Sarah Pape

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Sarah Pape teaches English and works as the managing editor of Watershed Review at Chico State. Her poetry and prose have recently been published in Passages North, Ecotone, Crab Orchard Review, Harpur Palate, The Pinch, Smartish Pace, Pilgrimage, The Squaw Valley Review, The Superstition Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. She curates community literary programming and is a member of the Quoin Collective, a local letterpress group. Check out her website for more information: www.sarahpape.com.

About this essay, “Grand Avenue, ” Sarah explains that it was written in response to a series of photos her good friend and talented photographer, Calvin Greeenwood, took as part of a writer/artist collaboration. The two of them spent a day walking around the neighborhood she grew up in, going to all of the normal spots—first, house, then the road she walked to school on, then the market across the street, etc. All together, the images told a story of economic depression, neglect, and a sense of danger. It both was and wasn’t the place she remembered. She took Greenwood’s images and began writing to them. The only constraint she gave herself was that the central hub of the memories should stem from the house and property her family had lived on. In the end, the essay conveys a sense of potential harm from all sides, both tangible and felt. “Grand Avenue” was the name of the street she grew up on, which ended up being an ironic and fitting juxtaposition for the prose that attempts to capture it.

Sarah Pape

Iron Horse Literary Review would like to thank its supporters, without whose generous help we could not publish Iron Horse successfully. In particular, we would like to thank our benefactors and equestrian donors. If you would like to join our network of friends, please contact us at ihlr.mail@gmail.com for information on the various levels of support.

Benefactors ($300) Wendell Aycock Lon and Carol Baugh Beverly and George Cox Sam Dragga Madonne Miner Charles and Patricia Patterson Gordon Weaver Equestrian ($3,000 and above) TTU English Department, Chair Bruce Clarke TTU College of Arts & Sciences, Dean Brent Lindquist TTU Graduate School, Dean Mark Sheridan TTU Provost’s Office, Provost Rob Stewart TTU President’s Office, President Lawrence Schovanec