NONFICTION

Meditation 42

By Julie Marie Wade     VOLUME 58 No. 2

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When memory escapes, overtake it.
—Achy Obejas

I have been thinking lately of a boomerang. Not the literal thing exactly but the noun-as-metaphor for everything that returns. Sometimes incessantly. Often inexplicably. Boomerang. Hear the boom in it. Hard, loud. Hear the rang. Higher pitch. Sweeter timbre. Those competing sounds: boom and rang. (Like Sturm und Drang. There’s a reason they rhyme. Nothing comes back without tumult of a kind.) Boom, like the present thunder of Miami summer. Rang, like a missed call, the old days of my parents huddling near the phone in the hall. It rang often, but they didn’t answer. Stopped answering circa 1989. Then, a voice boomed through the blinking machine: “I know you’re home. Pick up!” They could play back these messages. And did. That big blue button like a boomerang.



An assembly, preschool, strangely named since it is in fact school. We are taken to it every weekday morning. Ushered into classrooms with colorful chairs, sized to fit our small bodies. We are taught there, made to listen, sing, draw, snack, form a line, raise our hands, speak when called upon. How is this pre? Mrs. Augustine is not my teacher, but I see her in the halls with other children trailing behind. I like how her name has a month in it. Gray curls. Large glasses with a tinge of gold. Blouses that reliably billow. Hands like knuckled dough. She reminds me of a grandmother, how she waves and smiles, warming each space she enters. Kevin sits beside me, and our mothers are there. Mrs. Augustine stands at the front of the room, answering questions. She wears soft shoes, not like my mother’s, not the kind that lift and clack. The occasion is lost now, but this moment preserved, as though it just happened today. Kevin’s hand shoots up, quick as a weed. If only my father were there with a spritz of Roundup—to weed out the weeds. She calls his name, smiling. I am sitting so close it is guilt by association. “Why are you fat?” he asks. The shame falling over me then, raining down. Boom! A cloud splits, then pours without warning. Her smile never recedes. His mother scolding in his ear, and I can hear every word. “Well,” Mrs. Augustine says—but does she stumble at all?—“I’m not sure I have an answer for that.”



My niece and nephew text pictures. Each holds a catfish on a line beside a lake, somewhere in Indiana, I think. They’re grinning, proud as they are told to be by the Scout leader and the chaperones. “You got one! Reel it in!” No one says death. No one says killed. I wince and look away from the whiskered creatures. Such a small event in the world of sorrows, but I’m nauseous still. My stomach tilts. Suddenly, it’s kindergarten again in Washington state, before I knew to say state as a means of distinguishing place. One Washington from another. How could there be more than one? Everything seems singular at first. Until the long chute—was it plastic? certainly it was sheer—and the sight-sounds of all the bright fish flapping together, desperate to reach the water below. This sanctuary only temporary, though. Was I even supposed to see-hear the stocking of the lake? How did I stumble upon the man ensuring every child would succeed in death that day? My father loved to fish—Pacific salmon, open water. I know there are pictures of him posing with a catch, reveling in the kill they don’t call kill. “Jesus was a fisherman!” my father said when I refused the boat, the going out with Roger, a warm day at sea with a cooler full of Cokes. No. My mother after: “You know, you hurt your father’s feelings.” Another tilt. He was the one I never wanted to hurt—but the fish: I had to hurt them in order not to hurt him? How the first impossible choice sets precedent. Even the “right” choice becomes questionable after being questioned. Even the “right” choice carries the capacity to wound. This was a field trip. “Freshwater,” our teachers said. “Trout,” our teachers said. We learned to cast. We learned to lift the wriggling body, watch it struggle, crucify a fish on our line. I was six and weeping as some larger arms reached over mine to complete—I thought it then; I think it now—the murder. “Now you’ll take home your catch and eat it for dinner.” I wasn’t starving. I didn’t need this fish to survive. I saw the rainbows shimmering in its side, the fish they kept calling mine. Wrapped in plastic. Handed over to my mother after the long bus ride. Skillet-fried and served with applesauce. I sat alone at the kitchen table. “To waste it is the real sin,” my mother said. If I didn’t eat what I had caught, then the fish had died in vain. So I ate the fish. My stomach lurched. Shame again, pumping through my limbs. When I finished, I left the tiny bones at the edge of my plate.



In Squirrel Hill, our high-ceilinged apartment flooded with late summer light. Buttery yellow as the letter u. Four stories above the street, and no one could see us on the purple couch--eggplant per the Macy’s catalog, the first piece of store-bought furniture we owned—shedding clothes, sprawling and spreading so that a plate (first shared purchase, predating even the couch, and this one more than one, a collective noun, a set of dishes) balanced on the armrest, toppled, then shattered. Porcelain shards on the blond wood floor. The outer specks like snow. How we didn’t stop to sweep it up just then. No cats yet to come running, no fear for their paws. Sometimes when I lift a plate from that set—which is daily and at a distance now of eighteen years—I remember the missing one and how it was lost. (Or was it actually a bowl? Same set, different shape. Parisian street scene with the Eiffel Tower loitering behind. Though we’re not Francophiles, really, at all. The mystery of this set in retrospect, why it beckoned to us so emphatically at the Mikasa Outlet . . .  ) I remember how sex took precedence. That stirring I feel, still, in my gut. When she walks into a room. When she sits beside me on the couch, now green, in Dania Beach. Smashing, I think. Which is a British word. I hold it under my tongue like a pending kiss, which I guess is French, just as the dishes suggest.



The truth is, I never liked the notion of weeding out. For my parents, though, gardening was a second religion, just as rigorous and holy. They were vigilant about weeds, so the metaphor I used earlier came easily to me. I remember plucking all the dandelions from our parking strip, then filling a dinner glass for their skinny stems, their bobbing, yellow heads. “These are not for flowers—and definitely not for weeds!” my mother said, swiping the glass away. But what was the difference, really, between a glass called a glass and a vase made of glass? The flowers were drinking too. Those were the days my father pushed a manual mower, and I knew what would become of the misnamed flowers if I didn’t step in and kneel down. (Savior complex? Does it start that young?) A girl at school rubbed a dandelion under my chin to see if I liked butter. It left a yellow stain, which meant I did. “But we only eat margarine at my house,” I said. Another girl held a dandelion with her thumb poised under the bud, then the swift decapitation, followed by a laugh: “Mama had a baby, and its head popped off!” There on the pavement, downcast, a little sun. No reason to scoop it up, but I did. When a round, white puff blossomed in the yard, I ran with it, blowing and blowing. “Live long and prosper!” I might have said. My mother rapping on the window glass--boom!—shaking her head.



In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a computer called Deep Thought calculates that 42 is “the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” I turned forty-two this year. No pressure or anything.



“Don’t enable him,” everyone warned. The student who was in recovery. The student who had fallen off the wagon before. Why do they say this? And why is it a wagon? “He’ll make excuses. He’ll ask for special favors.” The student with the ex-wife he loved, the young daughter he loved. The student who was angry and talented and trying and failing and failing to try and about my age when it happened. First, he missed class. Then, he came to class and slumped on the desk, so tired he couldn’t hold his eyes open. Later, he came to class wired, eyes red and darting like lasers, the kind our cats chase up the walls. The other students noticed, and some tried to cover for him. Finally, he stopped coming to class, and everyone said, “That’s it. He earned his grade. You have to hold him accountable.” So I did it—I did what they said. Even when he came to my office, pleading his case. “It’s hard,” he said. “I’m still doing the reading. I’m still writing. I’m planning to get back to NA.” But everyone I knew, including the people I knew in recovery themselves, urged me. They said, “It’s tough love, and tough love is what he needs right now. You think you’re being kind if you let him slide, but that isn’t what he needs. That’s what got him here to begin with.” So I said no. I told him he’d have to withdraw from the class if he didn’t want the F on his transcript. He’d have to take it again the next year or take something else instead. His hair was greasy. I could tell he hadn’t showered. And he was thinner than before, shrinking in a way that seemed more like shriveling. An unhealthy small. I feared for him; I did. “You’re just like everybody else!” he shouted as he stormed out--boom!—and left the chair behind him wobbling in his absence. It was eerie, a physical echo of his rage. I wanted to chase after him, offer an apple or a smoothie from my bag, promise we’d find a way to work things out. Independent study? Incomplete? But I didn’t. That was the wrong kind of love, I’d been told, or it wasn’t even love at all. “Addicts say things like that all the time,” a friend reassured me. “I said far worse when I was using.” Another friend, whose son has fought addiction for years: “One day he’ll thank you for it—or he won’t. But you still did the right thing either way.” A week later, the student was dead. Overdosed in the library. An ambulance screamed past as I drove onto campus that day. Was it him in there, blue-faced, forever unbreathing?



The man next door was named Mr. Olberg. He had no hair and dark freckles all over his head. He rarely came outside, but sometimes I saw his wife peering through the long, translucent curtains. How small she was, how wizened—before I even knew the word. And then one day, my parents said that she had died. I didn’t know much about death, only that you went somewhere else and became a flimsy ghost, floating around without your body. Still, I wrote a card, which I had to fold several times to fit inside his mail slot (its pursed, bronze lips!): Dear Mr. Oldberg, I am sorry that Mrs. Oldberg is dead. It’s okay to be sad. Love, Julie (girl next door) But then my parents learned about the card, perhaps from his housekeeper, I still don’t know, and they were frantic: “How could you, Julie! His name isn’t Old-berg, it’s Ol-berg! Now he’s going to think you’re being rude about his age!” But how is he going to think that? I kept thinking. Doesn’t Mr. Olberg know he’s old?



My friend James suggests I write an essay that brings together all the recurring memories I’ve never written before. “Instead of your go-to ones, why not your flee-from ones? Why not write the memories that seem too hard or strange to ever commit to the page?” Okay. This essay is for James.

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JULIE MARIE WADE’s most recent collections include The Mary Years (Texas Review Press, 2024), selected by Michael Martone for the 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize; Quick Change Artist (Anhinga Press, 2025), selected by Octavio Quintanilla for the 2023 Anhinga Prize in Poetry; Fisk, by Analogy (CutBank Prose Chapbook Series, 2025); and The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020 (Small Harbor Publishing, 2025), co-authored with Denise Duhamel. A finalist for the National Poetry Series and a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University and makes her home in Hollywood with Angie Griffin and their two cats. Her memoir, Other People’s Mothers, will be published in September 2025 by University Press of Florida.


VOLUME 58 No. 2