Letters from Grenada

My father’s father designed and built the house I grew up in. Legend has it that my mom went into labor while tiling the kitchen floor. When I was a kid my grandfather liked to tell me that I was almost born in the back of his pickup truck. Bullshit, I’d declare. The house on Haven Court was less than a block from Nyack Hospital. Mom WALKED.

That tile was never quite right, though. Unfinished.

Another thing that was left unfinished was one of the house’s two and a half bathrooms. Certainly it was nobody’s intention to leave it that way for thirteen years, but that’s what happened. My parents were too busy with baby me, and then less than three years later there was my brother too. Then when I was seven my dad moved out and it was a long time before my mom managed to do much of anything that wasn’t vital to our survival in the hunter/gatherer sense of the word.

By the time my brother and I were both in middle school and words like Aquanet and benzoyl peroxide and Gillette had entered our lexicon, we had grown weary of all sharing the one bathtub and shower. My mother, I imagine, was wearier still of listening to the two of us get on like two cats of Kilkenny, so she had the tile installed and, for a time, peace broke out. But that was later.

That unfinished bathroom was one of those things that seemed totally normal within the context of our household. None of my friends had anything analogous, but I didn’t notice. The toilet and the double sinks and the shower all worked, and there were cabinets and even a mirror, but no tile or wallpaper or plates covering the electrical outlets. There were old dusty boxes full of bottle green tile. The shower curtain rod had no curtain but it did have a wire hanger, and the wire hanger had herbs and flowers from our garden fastened to it with wooden clothespins, hung there to dry. I would go in there and search the contents of the cabinets that I already knew by heart, search them as if I’d find something new.

The summer I was ten I hatched a chicken. In an incubator. He was fuzzy and yellow and I imagined that he loved me. He slept in a cardboard box that I kept on the floor next to the head of my bed. He got bigger and stronger and some mornings I’d wake up to find him asleep on the pillow, right next to me. Then ihe got bigger and stronger still and when he could fly out of the box with ease, my chicken got his own room. My chicken moved into the unfinished bathroom.

I wanted to keep it forever, of course. I was ten and I was a girl and I had literally helped the bird out of its shell. It’s too messy, my mother told me. It needs to be outside, she said. To me it was obvious that my chicken should just live in the backyard. Problem solved. Why not? Because, my mother explained, there are zoning laws and this is a residential area. This is the suburbs and we are not allowed to have farm animals.

Zoning laws? Adults. Adults and their ridiculous constructs.

Christmas Day we drove upstate to my grandparents’ house. On the way, we dropped my chicken off with some farmer. In the car I smoothed his feathers and tucked him under my arm and felt his warmth and silently willed my mother to get lost and give up getting rid of my chicken. And then when we got there I put him down on the ground, and watched him inspect the hens. He walked off, oblivious to me. It was cold and we were already late for dinner, so we left. It was cold and I could see my breath and hear the crunch crunch of the frozen ground beneath my feet.

I missed my chicken, but not as much as I thought I would, and I’m sure he missed me even less.

Posted on January 22nd, 2010 under Grenada • Tags: childhood stories. •  Print This Post •  Email This Post • RSS 2.0 feed • Both comments and pings are currently closed