NONFICTION

Lessons in Living: An Anthology of Years

By Annelise Richardson     VOLUME 59 No. 1

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2002

First, she is a half-formed and unnamed thing, like an amoeba under a microscope. Before she is anything, she is her mother’s stretched-out body, which almost exclusively subsists on ice cream: pints of Phish Food and Chunky Monkey that crowd the freezer of the little two-room they rent in Framingham. It’s a craving that will superimpose itself on the girl while she’s busy forming herself inside her mother’s belly. Before she becomes a name, a discernible face, a complex personality, she’s a body, a squishy mass of skin and bones and blood, and that body will adopt its mother’s fondness for sweets.

Her middle name announces itself first, rising from the pages of an epistolary picture book by a French artist; and then, more timidly, her first name will settle in front of her parents’ eyes like a fleck of dust. Less artfully, it’s borrowed from her great-grandmother, a German nurse whose appearance in family photo albums begins as the pink-cheeked bride of a Mexican American soldier and ends as the grim woman with white hair seated in a trailer home.

The girl’s parents are artists, and when she’s born, her father draws her pudgy infant face, her curled top lip, her tiny fingernails like the scales of pond fish in his sketchbook over and over with the endearing obsession of a new dad. He’ll sketch maps of her brand-new face in graphite pencil on the thick white pages with the precision of a scientist studying a little creature under the lens of a microscope, which isn’t too far off from what she is in these first years of life: a small and frail thing, entirely dependent on others to stay alive, brimming with possibility, saturated with her caretakers’ hopes for her future.



2003

She learns that her favorite color is yellow and that her mother’s is blue and her father’s is green, and these are the unshakeable facts that ground her life in truth.



2004

She learns that if she behaves herself at bedtime and gets under the covers without complaint, even when she’s not tired, her mother will read her a story. She’ll get to pull one of the thin-spined picture books from the shelf and cradle its glossy cover in her lap while her mother brings the illustrated pages to life. Later that year, the local newspaper will publish a photo of her flipping through a children’s book on the library floor, and she’ll find the photo in her scrapbook years later but won’t ever actually remember the caption.



2005

She learns that she now has a brother, and even though her parents told her he was coming, she’s still slightly bewildered by his sudden appearance in her life. Naturally, she decides that his favorite color must be red, and this is the first of an immeasurable series of decisions that she will make for her brother. At this point in her life, their relationship is as endearing as it is uncomplicated; he is a small person, smaller even than herself, with whom she can take baths, stare at the orange cat in the windowsill, smear the counters with maple syrup on pancake mornings, and listen to their mother read from the storybooks. Now, she has a counterpart. Her emotions are reflected in the babyish face of her brother. His hair is the same golden-raisin hue. His eyes are wide and bright like hers. Their mother will proudly refer to them as her “golden children” because their skin seems to refract the warm Massachusetts sun as though they are covered in a million tiny mirrors. Strangers—and even friends, at times—will confuse them for twins because she, already small for her age, holds his chubby hand in their two-part stroller the same way newborn twins do. She’s filled with a quiet maternal urge to protect this other, tinier person who shares her home, her facial features, her doe-like eyes. She doesn’t have the foresight of an omniscient narrator to imagine that he could manage to dislike her one day, that he might surpass her in height and grow a mustache she hates and stop wanting to win her attention at every moment because age has detached him from her side so he can build an identity for himself. There’s a dissonance between the way they know how to love each other that piles up and pushes them apart, and for a long time in the future, he’ll feel like a stranger to her. But right now, they eat together and play together and nap together, and it is perhaps the purest form of love that the girl will experience in her life: a love that requires no sacrifice, asks nothing of them but their presence in each other’s worlds.



2006

She learns how to climb the really tall pine tree in the yard with her dad standing on the grass below in case she shifts her weight onto a weak branch and tumbles down. But she won’t fall, and she never does because she knows the tree like it is her own body, knows which branches can handle pressure and which cannot, and besides, her dad’s presence is like a security blanket protecting her from harm. She climbs to the top of the tree, which crowns the second-story bedroom window of their little blue house on Walnut Street, and her mother comes yelling and accusing her father of being too reckless with the kids, accuses him of forcing her to play bad cop all the time with his carelessness. But the girl has been harmed before while under neither parent’s care, like the time a wasp drops down onto her head in the backyard and stings her scalp. So she knows bad things can happen whether you stay still or climb a tree or sit at home or get on a plane or swallow your words or start a fight, so why not have a bit of fun with life? Of course, she doesn’t actually know any of this because she’s four, but she’s beginning to understand the various ways we restrain ourselves to establish the illusion of order.



2010

She learns her (half) sister is coming to live with them because the sister’s mother passed away, and no one really tells the girl any details about the tragedy because she’s too young, but she’ll learn, maybe five years from now, that her sister’s mother—whom the girl never met—had cirrhosis of the liver and died near Disney World. But the girl sees this only as a good thing that brings her and her sister closer; they make up for time apart by writing and performing parodies of songs for their parents, filming short videos on her sister’s laptop starring the girl’s stuffed animals, and going to the park to swing in tandem and leap off onto the wood chips once they build momentum. Her sister will hide her grief from the girl so she can give her the gift of an older sibling to have fun with, but when the girl looks back on her memories of this year, she’ll notice the tiny cracks in her sister’s demeanor where her sister’s pain, inky black and festering like a wound left untended, peeks through.



2013

She learns that the Easter Bunny doesn’t exist when she finds the packaging of a bulk bag of chocolate eggs in the wastebasket in her parents’ bathroom one morning after Easter, but she truly learns the Easter Bunny—and everything it signifies—isn’t real when her father drinks too much the night before the holiday and forgets to hide the candy-filled plastic eggs, so she wakes up at dawn to hide them herself because she doesn’t want her little brother to have to share the burden of her father’s problem. She thinks she can hide it from him, and although her brother has probably started to catch on at this point—she’s only two years older than him—still she tries because this is how she has learned to show love: minimizing the pain of others by absorbing as much of it as she can into herself.



2015

She learns to want to wear a bra, which really means she learns how desire looks when it is worn on the body. She realizes via the internet that there’s a lot of sex going on in the world all the time. Parents and next-door neighbors and the school principal and the woman who bags the groceries had / have sex in varied positions and places in voracious, depraved manners, like hot breath extinguishing candlewick flames. She can imagine the desperation roiling off their skin in waves of heat, which is both disgusting and fascinating to the girl, who now understands the adults in her life through their desires: desires which weaken, soften, debilitate the people she’s been conditioned to view as stable and unyielding.

She stares at her reflection in the bathroom mirror and sternly rubs oily hair conditioner on her breasts because she read online that it stimulates growth. She gags on spoonfuls of blueberry yogurt, which she hates, because the internet said a probiotic-rich diet could induce menstruation and she hates that she’s the last of her friends still waiting to get hers. When her reflection sneaks up on her in store windows, she shudders in de-recognition of her amorphous half-child, half-woman body. The body she has right now betrays her in various ways every day. It sprouts coarse black hairs in her armpits and fills her sneakers with a stink that compels her mother to buy powdered shoe deodorant at the store—which only heightens her shame because this facet of puberty is so ungraceful, unlike the firming of breasts or the widening of hips. In the mirror, she scolds her body for its boyish prepubescence, then re-flattens her cowlick against her scalp with spit.

She gets her period for the first time in a Home Depot bathroom, and she can see her mother’s reaction playing out before her when the strip of toilet paper comes back red. She knows her mother will make more of a big deal out of it than the girl thinks it deserves, that they will drive to the drugstore to get “supplies,” that her mother will tell her she doesn’t have to use tampons “until she’s ready,” and that they’ll stop for chocolate malts on the drive home from what will be the most stereotypical mother-daughter-first-period scene to ever grace the surface of the Earth.

But even at thirteen, she knows she needs to be gentle with her mother because her mother’s mother had a condition that caused her to scream at things that weren’t really there, which confined her to assisted living centers for adults with mental health disorders. The girl knows her mother just needs to play out the first-period fantasy that she herself never got to act out at thirteen, and she knows the importance of giving her mother this closure. So she swallows her too-thick milkshake, and her pride goes down with it.

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ANNELISE RICHARDSON is a writer from Chicago based in New York City. She studied creative writing at the University of Iowa and has spent time living, researching, and working in Rome. Her forthcoming novel, She-Wolf, a feminist retelling of Ancient Rome’s founding myth, is currently on submission.


VOLUME 59 No. 1