In Which I Move Again
Kelley Evans
"I moved from city to city, traveled from person to person, and then I tried to define myself through writing, but that doesn’t work, no, not at all . . ." –Etel Adnan, In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country
Breech
I came into the world butt first, my head folded over my legs, backing out of the womb. The doctor might have cut my mother, but he realized my position too late; she was open and I was traveling, groping, looking for an exit I could fall into.
Accident
I have fallen off my bike four times. The first time, my shoe laces became tangled in the gears as I careened downhill. A pile of sticks broke my fall with puncture wounds. The second time, I skidded out on gravel left over from a winter’s worth of icy sidewalks. The third time, I hit a hidden culvert on a grassy down-slope, flew forward off my bike, and landed on my chest. I felt a sharp, forced collapse followed by a desperate gasp.
These were the falls of my youth.
When I was twenty-three, speeding helmet-less downhill, a butterfly with a wing-span of six inches landed on my bare thigh. I shook my leg to free it, but the force of the wind pinned it to me, as if I’d acquired my own bug collection, the iridescent blue wings stretched out on the roundness of my thigh. In my attempt to save the specimen, we both went down.
Though all four falls were injurious, it’s the butterfly’s sting that I can feel most in memory.
A Place I Live
Washington, DC has too many vibrations. Helicopters buzz overhead, chopping up the turbid atmosphere, cutting up your sleep into a rhythm your body can’t contain. The metro only takes you so far, can’t bridge the divisions. Your body, young but aching with old joints, walks everywhere.
My Car
Faith was my first car. She broke down frequently, and the name came to me shortly after learning about nihilism in college; the exact logic of that connection escapes me now. A ten-year-old Honda Accord when I got her, she died just three years later in the middle of Nebraska, during a cross country trip with my boyfriend to his home in Denver. I knew Faith was prone to overheating. Nonetheless, I pushed her across squelching summer plains until she suffered a complete engine meltdown.
We stayed in a motel that night as we waited for my boyfriend’s mother to drive the eight hours to retrieve us. We fit my bike inside her mini-van, which I used, along with buses, to get to my temporary jobs all summer.
Mobility
What if travel is home?
Another Place I Live
The mountains are full of hunters, they say, but I don’t care. I find a sunny spot in the woods—sun to keep the chill off—and I read without clothes. Not that I’m far from civilization. My cabin-mate passes me in search of her own reading spot. “You’re naked!” she says. Skin is still so new to us, worthy of laughter. She nests in some grass, putting trees between us. Southwest Oregon is like that—warm inviting spaces not too close together.
My cabin-mate is an artist. She draws her menstrual cramps. When she tosses the abstract pastel in the trash, I fish it out. I am in awe of how she can see her body.
One night we all decide to go skinny dipping by moonlight. I’m the first one in, throwing my clothes off as quickly as I can. The last one in says, “I’m Eve!” We lie on our backs and look up at the stars, kicking in the water, floating further and further into the night above, unmoored.
Ticket
You don’t need a ticket to walk out your front door, but you need one to get back. And you are always away. Even with the advent of internet grocery shopping, you find yourself needing to go out, to accumulate more slips of paper—Metrocards, bus transfers, receipts for gas, passport photos. You can count them to see how much living you’ve done. It’s never enough.
Echo
I ride my bike—still clad with training wheels—up the sidewalk to the corner, but I don’t cross the street. At every driveway, I stop and watch the cars in the intersection ahead. Pretending it’s my intersection, I wait for the car to go before pedaling on. I am practicing driving, I tell my mom when I return home for ice water.
Mobility
Is a trap. Is the way you get caught moving again, selling off most of what you own, putting the rest in your car named Joy. Her body will house your body for two and a half months, or at least will take you to the campsites and motels and friends’ apartments that will harbor you temporarily. The only constant is Joy.
Breach
Your first apartment in Albuquerque is a studio you rent for $200 a month. It reeks of the cigarette smoke leaking through the vents from the neighbors’. When the cops come one night and ask if there’s been a disturbance next door, you tell the truth. The neighbors visit soon after and tell you to mind your own business. You should have remembered all the nights in that other big city—how to keep quiet, how to be intimidated by the neighbors more than the police. In that city, the woman in the apartment across from yours screamed at her children, who wailed. But then, you never had police at your door, asking for a confession.
Another Place I Live
I spoke fluent Danish. I ate liverwurst on small pieces of rye bread—my PB&J at daycare—and although I’m a vegetarian now, I still get occasional cravings for it. For dessert, my taste buds curled around almond paste and custard, flaky dough, smooth licorice. My mom fed me tomato soup from a can and packaged American cheese in slices. I didn’t like either, but I ate it anyway. I would tear strips of the orange square into perfect, skinny rectangles, and this was entertaining enough. I was three.
Once while in daycare, I swallowed my gum. I felt I should tell Antje, but I didn’t know how to say it in Danish. I don’t remember how I finally told her. I still have no language to complete the memory.
My mouth remembers another incident. Running down the sidewalk, from my mom’s side to my Dad’s outstretched arms, I tripped on a crack. The fall knocked out my top front teeth. For weeks I wore a crusty scab above my mouth like a mustache. I would stop in the hall mirror, my head barely visible above the side board, and I’d finger the bumpy, dark brown mass, lick it.
Echo
The road is the sound of the engine, the vibration of the sun visor loose in its clip. The road is the sound of my stomach gurgling soda bubbles. The road is my elbow bumping the armrest a split second after the dip. The road is my mother’s high-pitched hello when I arrive, her tight embrace around my shoulders. The road is the sound of her voice on my cell phone. The road is dots that don’t make a straight line. The road is the taste of exhaust from the car that has traveled twenty feet more than I have. The road is my dry eyes tearing. The road is desire.
Mobility
I slipped through nine states and two other countries, moving every couple of years, sometimes away, sometimes moving back to where I came from. Ohio thinks it has me, but I know better.
Accident
Biking to a nanny job in Oxford, England, I was hit—bumped, actually—by a car. I wasn’t hurt, just extremely rattled. The bike was unridable, almost unpushable with its tire grating against the frame of the wheel, the front wheel angling in a different direction from the back one. When I met the mother that morning, I didn’t tell her for several minutes, maybe to affect a British stoicism, maybe to heighten the drama of finally telling her (an Americanism?). I was also worried because it was her husband’s bike. She fussed over me as any mother would, though I was the one supposed to be expending energy. I was her day nanny, taking care of her first two children as she rested upstairs in bed, pregnant with her third. She had hyperemesis, severe morning sickness, and could eat nothing but crackers and red soda.
Breach
As a second grader, a patrol guard with an orange sash takes me across the first street. Then I walk up a block to the busy intersection to cross with Mr. Zenner, a teacher in an orange jacket.
One morning the patrol doesn’t arrive. As minutes drag on, my heartbeat increases, and my eyes start to tear. The first bell rings. I can cross the street safely—I know how—but I’m afraid to break the rules. Finally, more scared of a tardy, I cross. When I reach Mr. Zenner, he asks if there was a patrol at my corner. How did he know? You can’t see one end of the block from the other since it’s obscured by a hill and some trees. I tell him no, and he takes me across the last street.
The rest of the day I am tight with fear, sure he will come get me out of class, that I am in huge trouble. But nothing ever becomes of my first moving violation.
Another Place I Live
There are hills and ivy, gymnastics classes and kindergarten. Peanuts and cheese for snacks, footprints on the carpet that I like to fit my feet into. But Kentucky also has tornadoes, tall, brusque principals, and angry kindergarten teachers.
My parents drive me to school. One rainy day, a biker with wet brakes runs a red light, and our car hits him. My friend and I sit in the back seat, watching the scene unfold through gray streaked windows, seatbelts still taut. An ambulance comes. The biker claims that he’s fine even though he has bloody scrapes from skidding on the asphalt. I wait forever. I worry about being late for school.
When we arrive we walk through the empty gym, where we would have lined up with our classes in the inclement weather. The principal is still there for some reason, or maybe he finds us in the hall after we exit the gym. His inquiries terrify me, and I explain the situation, more unnerved by this encounter with authority than by the crash. When I get to my classroom, Mrs. Hayes is discussing bicycle safety, and I can hardly contain myself, blurting. She asks that I wait for my comments until she’s done speaking. I sit on my voice like I have to go pee really bad. I believe then that the world is ordered through astounding coincidence, and that I must tell others about my discovery.
Mobility
Language makes me stumble. The words from one place do not transfer to the next. Words dislocate in the space between. Travel uproots my sentences.
Another Place I Live
Wheaton isn’t Chicago, but Mom sometimes calls it Chicago when asked where we’re from. Chicago is wind and water, buildings that look like they’ll fall on me but don’t. Chicago is easier when I’m inside—looking at Christmas tree lights from the car, or seeing stars on the planetarium dome. Wheaton is made up of houses: mine, Nana’s, Aunt Suzi’s, the Wood’s, and the Jones’s. We drive to church and to the grocery store. I like to sit under the grocery cart basket as Dad pushes me and my little sister in the seat above. We eat animal crackers from a small red box with a string handle. Dad pays for them later when we check out.
Mostly, Wheaton is two blocks kiddy corner from each other. I can see my school from my front steps. On the drive when my parents first point out the house we will move into, I think they’re indicating the school gymnasium. I spend several weeks trying to reconcile living in a huge, brick rectangle.
Next to the gym, on the large blacktop where I cower in games of dodge ball in physical education, my dad teaches me to ride without training wheels. There is a slight slope to the tar; we start at the top and move diagonally across it. I pick up speed and feel something between excitement and terror, my long hair streaming behind me, my feet struggling to keep up with the pedals. I can hear my dad’s running shoes keeping pace with me, his hand on the back of the bike. At the bottom of the lot we stop, both breathless. Dad tells me, no, he wasn’t holding the bike up—it was you—and I feel betrayal, gratitude, and pride all at once.
Echo
Between my third and fourth grade years we moved from Illinois to Minnesota. My sister sat in the U-haul with Dad, our collie at her feet. My mom followed in a brown Honda with me and my infant brother in the back seat; my job was to take care of him. At the beginning of our journey we crossed the railroad tracks that bisected the town; Mom and I saw the U-haul tip precariously in front of us. We gasped, but Dad and my sister were surprised when we told them the story later.
When my brother got fussy, I took him out of the car seat and put him in my lap, my hands around his torso, bouncing my knees in a rhythm more consistent than the car’s. I didn’t have a good enough hold of him, and when we hit a bump, he toppled over, his head softly bumping the arm rest. He cried even louder; I gripped him tightly in panic, sure that I had done something irreversible.
His slight forehead bruise was one of many. Our new house had wood floors, and as my brother learned to sit and stand and walk, he hit his head repeatedly. His head was often adorned with a knot or two, a veritable halo of purplish brown. As he grew into a more accomplished walker, he began to demonstrate the family talent for falling not only down stairs, but up them as well. I remember sitting on the sofa upstairs once and hearing the thumps and the ooph; I hooted with laughter. Except for my dad, we were all clumsy. It was just my brother’s turn to fall.
Another Place I Live
I don’t notice the faint light, only the brightly colored beads on the necklace I made, strung together on twine. They are the same colors as Legos, the same as train cars I run on a wooden track.
I live in a rectangle, and I ride my tricycle around the square formed by my house and three other rectangles. Once, I crawl out my ground-story window to see if I can. The stucco on the side of the house scrapes, something I didn’t anticipate. The front door is locked, so I have to ring the doorbell to get back inside. My mother is not happy.
My Car
Joy had air in her brake lines, leftover from a botched brake job. I’d slam the pedal to the floor and nothing would happen. After pumping furiously, the pressure would magically return, and Joy would halt. I felt terror and then almost a shame after they began working again. The third mechanic believed me and bled the air from the lines.
Ticket
Guard it. Don’t lose it, whatever you do. You fear that it won’t have the correct bar code when it’s waved under the red laser, when the conductor scrutinizes it. Pack it somewhere easily accessible—a coat pocket, the outside flap of your bag—and then forget where you put it when you get to security. Finger the flimsy paper. You accidentally tear some of the perforation; futilely press the edges together to make it appear intact.
After the trip, hold on to the ticket for years. Find it in an old coat, under piles of papers, in back folders. Put it back where you found it. Keep it as a record of your passage.