My Articles:
Masked
In kindergarten my mom sewed me a crazy outfit, a combination of dots and florals, pastels and primaries, sheets and drapes. She patched me together as a billowy one-piece suit of sleeves and long skirt.
I was a clown—a clapping, jumping, spinning, laughing clown. But the best part was my mask. We bought it at the B&I all the way across town and no other kids had anything like it. My peach plastic face with red cheeks and bulbous nose beneath a waxy strand of curl in the middle of my forehead created a mask that people noticed.
On Halloween day I walked through the hallway to class with my peers (Batmans, Holly Hobbies, witches) and encountered the school principal. She honed in on me.
Apartment, Third Floor
Somethin’s rotten in Marin.
I’ve scrubbed my bathroom, where I first noticed the smell — think dead rat, dead cat, dead neighbor.
Then I smelled it in the kitchen, so I scrubbed under my sink (ick), re-garburated the garburator, loaded up all the dishes in my sink and ran the dishwasher.
I picked up everything on the living room floor. I lit candles and flung open windows and doors. I dusted the bookcase — well, really, I just sprayed Pledge on a shelf. There’s obviously nothing dead up there. Why go to the trouble? Any excuse to spray.
Revved Up
It’s Eddie Vedder’s voice and the kick of that drum and each pull on that bass guitar’s strings.
With slitted eyes, I move my head in slow scoops, my shoulders in slow motion shrugs. One hand traces the arc of the steering wheel, the other palms the sticky grittiness of the gear shift knob. I hit fifty accelerating onto the freeway before I see I’m still in second gear, the RPM dial way too far into the orange.
Quick shift into fourth and who cares who passes me in my Vanagon. I’ve got two empty car seats in back and the stereo loud and the night to myself.
Six Years Ago
Six years ago, hijacked planes were flown into the Twin Towers in New York, the Pentagon in Virginia, and into a quiet field in rural Pennsylvania.
I was in Washington state, pregnant with my daughter, and my son wasn’t even a year old. I remember crying throughout the day and listening to NPR round the clock, wide awake through the dark and long hours of the night.
I couldn’t stop thinking about those voices in the rubble, silenced to a concrete and fiery death. I couldn’t stop thinking about the victim’s families: how they were thinking about the violent deaths of their loved ones, how they dared to hope for rescue, and how they all had to consider what the years ahead had to hold for them without that loved one.
In Context
I’ve found that my kids can handle doing something they don’t want to do, or not getting their own way, if I can explain things to them. I still use the occasional,, “Because I told you to” but sometimes that feels a little inconsiderate.
Take yesterday, for instance, I was tempted to tell my kids to get out of the house at 8:15 on Labor Day morning and go out and play in the back yard simply because I told them to. But they were being sweet – if not just a tad too loud and busy for a holiday morning– and I didn’t want to ruin that mood with a grumpy argument.
So, instead, I told them the truth: “Look, you’re being too loud for our neighbors downstairs. It’s great that you’re bouncy and singing, but you can’t do that in our apartment because we live on the third floor and it’s loud right above our neighbors’ heads.”
Ok Go
The hardwood floor palpitates beneath me. The water in my bottle splashes rhythmically upward and I can feel the music in the bottle when I bring it to my lips. The bass thumps my heart hard against my sternum, and I’m sure that without the help of my ribcage it would burst through my skin like some happy lotus flower.
I feel so much.
I’m at the OK Go show with my husband, Mick, celebrating my thirty-sixth birthday with three hundred 20-year-olds and a few 40-year-old hipsters, one of whom is a large sweaty guy in front of me who nearly head butts me each time he whips his head back to the music. I’m dying to smack his bald spot with a flick of my wrist.
That’s My Body
My 5-year-old daughter loves my body – and sometimes she’s curious about it in the most disarming ways.
At the grocery store once when she was three, she crept under my skirt at the checkout line and yelled, “Hey Mommy! Why aren’t you wearing any panties?” as she reached up to run those delicate little fingers of hers across my buns.
I clenched, winced, put on a brave smile for the guy behind me with bearded stubble and a 12-pack, and gently guided her down – and out – of there, asking her to simply stand beside me please. I was not about to explain the subtle nuances of underwear at Safeway to a three-year-old; I was not about to tell her and our neighbor in line that indeed I did have underwear on, it’s just that I was wearing what we call a thong.
Music in the Fish Tank, or What Mom Thinks About When the Kids are Gone for a Week
The bubbles rise. Water drips down. The fish swims low. He skims his belly against layers of pink rocks, all the same size as his eyes. He weaves his way through his plant, shimmying between the plastic stems, listening out of his fish ears – wherever and whatever those are – to the rhythmic trickle above him. Nosing his way along the edges, his fins and tail wipe at the glass. This fish swims a pattern known only to him – and, of course, to his friend, the ceramic carp blowing on the sax. For all his days, he’s under the same tones, the same melody, of that pleasant little trickle above.
See you soon, kids.
By Anjie Reynolds
Memorial
For 27 years, I’ve spent Memorial Day weekend remembering the dead. I’ve felt somewhat guilty in this, though, because I’m not necessarily remembering soldiers who’ve died in the line of duty, instead I’m remembering my aunts: women who’ve died in the line of, well, something else.
Twenty-seven years ago my mother’s youngest sister, Arlene, ended her life in a closed garage with her engine running after a night of drinking at a Memorial Day party. Coming off a disastrous marriage and enormous loneliness, the crumpled up notes in the trashcan revealed she set out this very weekend to attempt to fulfill on an ominous promise she’d made my mother when they were teens: that she wouldn’t live a day past 30. She was 32.
Ten years before that – although not this very weekend – my mom and Arlene’s oldest sister, Karen, took her own life, as well, with a gun at the base of a steel beam bridge. She left behind a disastrous marriage and a 5-year-old child. I didn’t learn about the manner of Karen’s death until Arlene’s, and, at that point, my 9-year-old brain merged these tragedies in season.
Emergency
I spent two nights in the ER and three days on the Pediatric Ward with my 5-year-old daughter last week. Doctors were determining whether the uncontrollable fever, vomiting, and pain in her right side were solely the work of a kidney infection not responding quickly enough to antibiotics, or if they were the added burden of a bursting appendix, as well.
Two urine samples, two blood tests, four I.V. insertions, four ultrasounds, and a CT scan later, the doctors determined that the pain in her right side was indeed the work of the kidney infection, particularly raging in her right kidney (hence the heightened attention to her appendix).
The doctors and nurses were so thorough (see above), treating the many scary symptoms and listening to every piece of information coming from my 5-year-old’s mouth that, despite the pain and fear I both witnessed and felt, I was certain they would do whatever it took to correctly diagnose her.
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