A few weeks ago I was staying the night at a friend’s house. It was well past dinnertime. Clean dishes nestled into the drying rack, and a spirited conversation had ebbed. My friend’s 6-year-old daughter held my hand as she guided me up the stairs to the guest room. I kissed her good night and told her I was going to sleep. “But where do you go?” she...
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I am 13 or 14. It’s a school night. Mom and I work in the kitchen, rattling plates into the dishwasher. My brothers and sister cluster in our wood-paneled family room watching Adam 12. Dad is away on business. I ask my mother about love: When does it come? How will I know? What was it like to fall in love? Mom answers matter-of-factly. Her tone suggests...
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I was 7 or 8 when Mom enrolled me and my younger sister in ballet class with Miss Eileen. Even though I am more of a jazz hands and tap dance kind of girl, I was enthralled with the shoes and the costumes, the pale and milky leotards, the discipline. Someone decrepit sat at the piano plinking music. Lines of coltish girls followed Miss Eileen’s...
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On a July day before my fifth grade school year began, Mom and Dad circled my three brothers, my sister and I. They told us we were moving to Indiantown, a one-stoplight village in rural South Florida. We’d be moving in a week to my grandfather’s cattle ranch, which was more Roseanne than Ralph Lauren. We’d live in a doublewide trailer encircled by some...
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When my father died, I was 27. I went numb and took a job in Japan as a group leader for 10 American high school exchange students. The job required that I also live with a family. When our bus pulled into the supermarket parking lot where we were to meet our host parents, all I knew about Yuko was that she was in her 40s, she taught English, and she was...
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