I was born in Maine. Nearly born in a graveyard, the story goes; my mother and father were walking through one near their house when her water broke. They had just waved to some neighbors across the graveyard who they had never met. My father rushed my mother to the hospital.
They never saw those neighbors again. That’s the salient detail, here. Not the graveyard itself.
For the first five years of my life, we lived in a rural area, cars rarely passing, planes overhead a notable rarity. Black-eyed Susans, thyme, sorrel, and chives in the yard. Boulders to scramble over, dragging my stuffed animals. An apple tree to drape a sheet from, to make a tent. Asparagus to harvest, though one year the black flies were so bad I ran inside screaming. Got a tick in my ear at one point, too, which has left me with a lifelong phobia of the things. Acorn caps as dishes for my dollhouse, red maple leaves and mud in fall; in winter, snowdrifts well over my head, and mountains for tobogganing.
Raspberry canes; concord grapes at the end of the driveway, and the dark sweet ichor they made when my mother dripped them from cheesecloth in the bathtub, to make jam. Tiny, sweet, fingernail-sized wild strawberries grew all over the lawn. To this day the thing that calms me more than anything else is strolling around picking and eating berries. I used to think this was some ancestral, genetic-echoing memory, but the real reason was simpler: as a tiny child I was indulged in grazing on the good land around us, like Red and Stewie, the cows next door.
A short drive away, in a raw-pine house that seemed never to be finished, was my best friend, a sunny, lively girl as willing as I was to go look for frogs or make up songs. We were two feral hippie children, allowed to decorate my wooden dollhouse and toybox with crayon scribbles, putting on shrieky, wordless plays about pee, poop, and genitals. Her mother recalls that I would cry unconsolably when it was time to go to nursery school. I preferred home, hers and my own, to the unfamiliar strangers at school.
When I was four, I was told our family was moving to California. Where in Maine is California? I asked. As my reward for the question, I was given a puzzle that was a map of the United States. Now it was clear to me: there was something bigger than Maine, that contained Maine and California both.
I practiced popping each of the states into the puzzle tray over and over. Each of the states was an individual piece, with the exception of some of the smaller Northeast ones (the puny ones Californians or Texans would have written off as “counties” anyway) which were stuck together. Because it was a tray puzzle, the United States was a giant hole. What appeared to be its continent was, to me, an animal with two legs (Texas and Florida), and a tiny head (Maine), lumbering into the Atlantic or resting its giant ass (the West) on the Pacific.1 The map gave no clear sense of what was to the north or south, so I did not learn until later that, in fact, North America had a much larger, proudly crested but more awkward head (Quebec and Newfoundland), and its legs were inextricably bound to Latin America by Mexico.2 Despite the puzzle’s limitations, I did manage to overcome the incongruity of Alaska and Hawaii floating vaguely over Baja California, thereby escaping a misconception that turns out to be common among many Americans that you could drive to Hawaii from Arizona.
This was how I was taught that the nation I was born into was a coherent whole. That the part I understood, the part that mattered to me as a four-year-old beginning to sound out a word that I could see out the window from my car seat, M-A-I-N-E—could not be as all-encompassing as I needed it to be to keep my heart from breaking.
There were two routes they had to show me on my map, one of mystery, one of sadness. The latter was the route my best friend would take. Her family was going to Florida before we left for California; they would then move to Pennsylvania for a spell. It was achingly unfair. I would still be at home in Maine, but she wouldn’t be here. If she ever moved back (and in the end, her family did), I would be gone. I made her a going-away present of a plastic dog she had left at my house, wrapped in so much Scotch tape it became an unrecognizeable mass. Our parents were bemused. I knew there was anger and sorrow and love in all that tape. We were so little. I could write well for my age, but I didn’t have the words.
The route we would drive across the country was one of mystery. We would drive across the fissures between my puzzle pieces, through the 50s-era vignettes of the industrial products and landmarks painted on the states: corn in Iowa, oil derricks in Texas; tipis in Oklahoma, cowboys in Wyoming; peaches in Georgia; the capitol in DC. My father would leave us in Michigan after seeing his parents, and fly ahead to start his job at Caltech. My mother would drive my sisters and me down through the rest of the US, visiting her own grandfather and an aunt near Chicago, where both my mother and grandmother were born; picking up my helmet-haired, long-suffering, loving great aunt Judy—they call her Saint Jude—at her house in Denver; passing through Four Corners, that empirical-imaginary intersection between Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico whose interest to tourists (the only place you can stand in four states at once!) would be explained to me on a paper placemat at McDonalds.
Out the window of the car, strange shapes passed. Large two-legged metal constructions of triangles, holding up the phone wires that glided up and down as our car raced alongside them. I drew the constructions, titling the drawings “Road Monsters.”
I encountered my first concrete in Royal Oak, Michigan, where my grandparents still lived in my father’s childhood home. When I say “encountered,” I mean in a three-point fall, scraping both knees and an elbow badly. I was chagrined. Falling on the mossy ground had never been so cruel in Maine.
There was even more concrete around my maternal grandmother’s house in Pasadena, California. The smoggy sky seemed to reflect its color, as well as its heat. The grass looked dead. The oak trees were hostile, with spiny leaves and acorn caps too teetery and fragile to be used as cups in my dollhouse. I hated it.
When I was six or seven, our music teacher had us sing the song “Home in Pasadena” for our end-of-the-year concert:
Home, in Pasadena
Home, where grass is greener
Where honeybees sing melodies
And orange trees scent the breeze
I wanna be a home-sweet-homer!
There I’ll settle down
Beneath the palms, in someone’s arms
In Pasadena town!
On the thin pink heart-dotted pages of my childhood journal, I wrote angrily that if Mrs. Thomas was going to make us sing that, I was going to have a LOCKED JAW for the entirety of the concert.
I didn’t let go of my anger at the move, at the loss of my friend, at the apparent barrenness of the California landscape, until I was a teenager. I retained a compulsive urge to go on road trips, to sew together the three-thousand-miles-apart places I was from, for years.
Would you tell four-year-old me I was wrong?
Again: tell me I’m wrong.