THE STORIES WE TELL
WINDOWS
[CW: intergenerational violence, eating disorders, depression]
I was five when I was first shown the window behind which my grandfather sat, perched above the street. We listened to his aunt say that she saw his mother taken by the men with spiders on their sleeves. They put her in a truck full of yellow stars. He sat there and looked down, as the trucks drove past, and the stars sat up above. He was five when he lost his mother in Budapest. I was five when I first woke up in the middle of the night with sweat down my forehead as I dreamt of stars and sawdust and rats. What questions have I never been able to ask? My mom once told me that when she hears German, it sounds like stormtrooper boots. I’ve never been able to hear anything else. My step-grandmother is German. One time I almost told this to my grandfather. I almost asked him if he too heard the stomping boots, saw the trucks full of stars, felt the void of his mother. How can I hear them, and does he as well? How long can it take to forgive when forgetting is never an option? +++ I was twelve when I picked up the phone at home and the school nurse asked for my parents. After hanging up, they rushed to the car and drove away. That evening, I did math homework, ate takeout food, and rambled to my neighbor about how I liked history class because you could just memorize the dates and figure out the connections and how that just made so much more sense than doing math problems over and over and where did my brother go? I was asleep when they came home and woke me up to tell me that my brother was in the hospital for swallowing an entire bottle of pills in the bathroom downstairs. As I think back, I can’t imagine a time when I had picked up the phone that day and not known that
11
FEATURES
BY SG ILLUSTRATION Eve O'Shea DESIGN Anna Brinkhuis
he was sick. I can’t imagine a time before we knew he and fifteen-foot fence. He was safer there. We had a was depressed. I can’t believe that I missed it all along, hard time eating. I thought about my grandpa eating that I didn’t think to look at Tylenol like it was a weapon. sawdust and rats in a safehouse during the war. When my brother came back, we hid the ice cream and I don’t remember what I dreamed about that night. cookies under lock and key. It could have been pills or stars or who knows? He stayed in the hospital for two weeks. I asked him how I was fifteen when I picked up the phone and was he was, he said he was fine. I went to school and said he told that my brother was kicked out of college. This was fine—told everyone I was good. time I wasn’t put to bed. This time. I listened as my parents learned that he was in the hospital, again. This After school one day, I went to the hospital and saw time, though, it was a different hospital hundreds of the fifteen-foot fence and guarded doors, and I saw miles away. This time, he had just said something that my brother inside making a doormat from plastic bits. scared people. This time he had not swallowed pills or He was safer from himself there; I know this because tried to puke. This time I tried to tell my friends, tried when he came back home two weeks later, the knives to tell them that something happened. I don’t think I were kept in a corner under lock and key. could even open my mouth to speak. He was home by Thanksgiving, which was something to be thankful for. My mom was fourteen when her dad, my grandfather, left; something about how he was too young. +++ She moved across the country and sometimes her dad wrote her letters. They visited each other a few times a I was eleven the first time I dreamed of my brother’s year. Last year, my grandfather came to visit with star- funeral. I don’t remember the time of year that it was in framed ideas of collected moments that envisioned a my dream. I do remember standing in front of a crowd relationship with my mother, my brother and me. He as tears lodged in my throat and I spoke of love. I don’t brought dreams of special breakfasts and treasured remember how he died. memories of being a present father and grandfather. I remember visits filled with lectures on family history These dreams only come when I’m awake. At night, and arguments and not knowing how to tell him that they are followed by dreams of truckloads of stars, I was a kid and I wanted to play and I didn’t want to sit my mom’s letters to her father, and the window from and listen. I guess that’s special, too. which my grandfather watched trucks go by. Another dream, the eulogy I have never had to give. Last year, I asked to hear those stories. It has been five years since my brother was last in +++ a hospital. When I call him I wonder if, like me, he still thinks of pill bottles, fifteen-foot fences, and cabinets When I was fourteen, my brother was in the hospital with a lock and key. Last year, I asked him how he was, again. He had lost weight and everyone told him he was he said he was good. This time, I was the one who was “looking good.” Every night after dinner, he would go just okay. Sometimes I can smell the plastic bits of his to the bathroom. One night I heard him puke. I asked if doormat that welcomes me into my parents' house. he was okay, he said he was fine. +++ This time he was in the hospital for longer. I never visited. He slept there, behind the guarded doors My paternal grandfather died three years ago. At his
06 MARCH 2020
