This Is Not Your City (3 page)

And if he asks, and if I think it will help, and if I think it is truly what I have to do, we will be swimming and it will be July and we are a miraculous age. We are in Zolaria, we are children, our bodies are honest children's bodies. We are narrow and quick and we still fit in all our hiding places, the sun-wet hollows and the flowers in pink and purple and turquoise, all the damp colors of girlhood. We are riding our space dolphins, and either we can breathe the water of Zolaria or we are no longer breathing and it is July and we are a miraculous age and we are ten.

Mrs. Holtz:

I know this was a favor, like extra-extra credit, but if you give anyone else this assignment, maybe you could just let them retake the Hamlet midterm? You said you wanted to make this easy for me, that all I had to do was write a long paper about my life, about my mom and my sister and my friends, about where I live and what I do, and you'd give me credit for completing your English class. I really appreciate it, but I thought I should tell you that this wasn't all that easy. Not knowing what to say about Hamlet is one thing, but this was embarrassing, you telling me to just write what I know and me still not knowing how to go about it. I tried to use topic sentences. You said you'd show the paper around if I did a good job, try to talk my other teachers into giving me credit for their classes the semester I left, so I tried to put some math and science and stuff in for them. Fifteen to twenty pages is a lot, so I used some pictures. I hope that's okay. This was really hard for me, for a lot of reasons.

 

I. This is where I live:

In the paper the other day, some guy said, “Based primarily on the strength of local tourism, Ohio's rural communities are sinking or swimming.” My mom's the one who read it out to me, and she said, “Sinking or swimming? This fucking town was built underwater.” I hope it's okay to put that. My mom's pretty foul-mouthed. She's been swearing more the sicker she gets. Now that she can't really manage the stairs, she's pretty obscene. What's happening to her is obscene, she says.

Maybe you could show this first part to Mrs. Steiner and Mr. Kincaid? My last semester I was taking Geography and Civics. They might like to see that I use maps and that sometimes I follow what's in the paper. I'm writing this at the library in Mount Vernon, and when the librarian asked what I was doing, I said I was writing a report, but with pictures. She said I had to cite some of them, like this: <
www.openstreetmap.org
>. That's where I got the maps from.

 

II. This is my house:

It's on County Road 54, and it stands out more than you'd think it would because the neighbors are all Amish. The ones to the east of us have always been there, but the ones to the west
just moved in from Pennsylvania because the land's cheaper here. They cut off the electricity and dumped the kitchen appliances out in the yard. I'm tempted to ask if I can take the oven, because it looks newer than ours, but they're all so unfriendly. Besides, I'm not sure how I'd haul it inside.

It's an old farmhouse, but we never did much with it apart from a kitchen garden, a few chickens. The roosters are sons-of-bitches, and that's not what my mom says, that's what I say, because I'm the one has to go into the yard to feed them and they're trying to peck me to death. I have marks all up and down my legs. I'm looking forward to picking one out and eating it.

We knew it was coming, with my mom, and I said she should pick upstairs or downstairs, so we'd be ready when she couldn't go between anymore. I said if she picked downstairs we'd make do with the half-bath, but I was happy she picked Up. I have to help her wash now either way, but for a few months I could just get her settled in the tub and she could take care of herself. Now it's harder.

Since I mentioned them, here is a chicken:

And here is a plant from the garden:

I told my mom about your extra-credit idea, and she said to bring you tomatoes and zucchini from the garden when I bring this paper to you. I'll bring the tomatoes if they're ripe, but I'm embarrassed to bring the zucchini. Everybody's got it coming out their ears this time of year and giving it to someone just makes it look like you're trying to get rid of it. But I thought I should tell you that my mom said to bring you some, and that she said you're being very generous and that I should make sure you know that I appreciate it.

 

III. My best friends are Dana Linfield and Jess Berman. We sat in the back left corner, by the windows, in your American Lit class last year. They come by sometimes, but we don't have the same things to talk about anymore, so we just talk about old stuff, which gets boring. Plus it's hard for me to enjoy it when other people are at the house because I know that my mom's always waiting for them to leave. Dana's going to the Nazarene college in Vernon, and Jess answers the phone at a real estate office in Zanesville. Here they are:

You wouldn't know Elsa, and I don't have a picture of her. I think we might be friends, but it's hard to tell. I don't think she'd say no to a picture if I asked, because she's not really backward, like she'd think a camera was going to steal her soul. I just don't know how I'd ask her. Since I don't have a picture of her, here is one of her quilts:

I met her at the fabric store in Danville. Her husband brought her in their buggy. Elsa and I were inside looking out to the street when he tied their horse to a fire hydrant. I could hear her sigh and it made me like her. She's only a little older than I am, I think, but she has two kids. She does beautiful work. The fabric store always had some traditional pieces on display, but I hadn't realized they were hers until that day. She walked up to the counter and started unwrapping a puffy package, cut-up brown paper grocery bags tied with twine. It was just a Churn Dash, queen-sized, but done tiny, all by hand, the littlest pieces an inch square. “God,” I said. “You'll go blind,” which on one hand was an all-wrong thing to say to an Amish person, but on the other hand, you learn growing up around here that the Amish don't talk to anybody else anyway, so in a way it doesn't matter what you say to them. Elsa spoke to me, though. “Haven't yet,” she said. “Don't intend to.”

“I've had people asking after you,” Mrs. Carpenter said. She runs the fabric store, and for a moment I thought she was talking to me, but it was to Elsa. “Up from Columbus for the day, antiquing. One of them owns a gallery on the Short North.”

Elsa didn't say anything, just looked at Mrs. Carpenter. The look reminded me of how as a kid all the Amish on market days made me sad, because you could see how easily they smiled at each other but never at you, and I didn't understand what would be so wrong with me that I couldn't be smiled at.

“They asked who had done the Ohio Star in the window, and the Bear's Paw and the Trip-Around-the-World up on the wall. They asked me to take them down and match the stitching against the yardstick on the cutting table. Ten stitches per inch, they said, you don't see that much anymore. Is the whole thing by hand, they asked. And I said, absolutely, Elsa Beiler's Old Order, a real craftswoman. Lady said she'd be happy to carry pieces like these, and she knew someone with a traditional furniture shop in Olentangy who's looking for pieces to drape on bench backs, that kind of thing. She said you should bring some work by, since there was no way to call you.”