Skyscraping Read online

  and around

  smiling faces.

  Give them a place to stay.

  A memory design.

  So that, years later,

  we can look and see our faces,

  stare into the past

  as though looking into the night sky,

  where stars that have already died

  keep showing us their shine.

  When our future might be up in the air,

  not knowing where we will be next year,

  this is the only way to capture time.

  I tell them:

  so much will change,

  even us,

  but this book

  will stay the same.

  Some nod, some roll their eyes,

  but all of them draw

  frames like plane windows

  on blue graph paper,

  the color of sky over water.

  REAL-LIFE THINGS

  Lasagna night.

  We layer

  noodles, sauce, cheese,

  Dad asks me

  if I’ve given more thought

  to touring Columbia

  (where he teaches)

  before I apply early admission.

  Heart races as I

  imagine my dorm room,

  glimpsing Dad in the courtyards,

  hosting April uptown for meal plan dinners.

  Say, okay, sure, maybe in a few weeks.

  James,

  dark eye makeup, piercings, tattoos,

  Dad’s Teaching Assistant and April’s tutor,

  eats with us

  then helps April with Spanish,

  plays chess with Dad.

  Mom, home later after blowing glass all day at her studio.

  April and I sit, discuss her new teachers,

  my new staff,

  spin ice cream into a sweet soup,

  watch 90210.

  Dad says we should watch shows about real-life things.

  Mom tries to join, asks questions about Brenda, Brandon.

  I turn up the volume.

  Mom eats cold lasagna alone.

  TIME TO REMEMBER

  I.

  Later, on the phone, Chloe yawns,

  she and Dylan smoked up,

  says her guy is cheating on her.

  Hear Chloe’s nonna screaming.

  Parents gone. No siblings.

  Chloe tries

  to smoke it all

  away.

  But it’s Senior Year, the time to remember

  everything.

  II.

  A long machine message from Adam

  saying hi, hope I had a good first day

  at school, leading my first Yearbook meeting.

  Ever the editor,

  offers to brainstorm

  yearbook themes with me.

  Says he’s been pretty busy,

  plans to join a frat.

  Lie in bed,

  wonder if he’ll drink,

  something we used to not do, together.

  Eyes closed, listen to Dad listening to opera,

  banging around the kitchen, house sounds stirred

  with the whooshing cars on the Henry Hudson—

  a city lullaby rushing me into easy sleep.

  ON AGAIN, OFF AGAIN

  In the morning, Dad gives us breakfast.

  Mom gone again,

  like we’re a TV family,

  there at her convenience—

  she can choose

  when she wants

  to switch us on, tune us in.

  OTHER PEOPLE’S WINDOWS

  Twenty Seniors chosen to mentor Freshmen.

  April says she has me, why does she need them.

  She opts out,

  I opt in.

  In a room on the twelfth floor I’ve never been to,

  the windows here show us into

  other people’s lives.

  Huddled around a wooden table,

  Mr. R tells us congrats on being chosen,

  assigns us a partner, a group, tells us

  we also have to interview our own mentors.

  Something catches my eye,

  I peer into the windows:

  TV flickering in one.

  An old woman in a turban, smoking.

  Curtains. A potted plant.

  And a little girl staring out,

  unblinking like a doll,

  too little to be alone.

  I raise my hand to wave but

  Mr. R calls on me to share with the group.

  My mentor is my dad.

  I look back to the windows:

  TV still flickering in one,

  the woman still smoking,

  but the little girl, staring out—

  gone.

  RECORDING SESSION

  September

  SESSION ONE

  So, this is my dad, Dr. Dale Stewart.

  He’s a Spanish Literature professor at Columbia.

  He’s pretty smart.

  Gracias, mija.

  Okay, Dad, so we are supposed to interview our mentors. I have a list of questions here.

  Shoot.

  Number one: What’s the most important quality of a mentor?

  Well, before I answer that, do you know who the original Mentor was?

  What do you mean?

  From the Odyssey. Odysseus left Mentor in charge of his kingdom when he went away: Mentor watched over Odysseus’s son. He did this gladly. You see, a mentor teaches for the love of teaching. A mentor leads his students, sometimes indirectly, to the answer.

  A mentor can be sneaky.

  (Laughs, coughs)

  What’s your answer to the question then?

  I think the most important quality of a mentor is that they are open to following students where they want to go. Not always pushing their own agenda.

  Okay, got it. Thanks. Number two: Who’s one of your mentors?

  That’s easy. Your mother.

  What? Why?

  Because she helped me the most at a time when I needed it, and always encouraged me to dream big without telling me what to dream.

  She did?

  Yes, Mira, she did.

  UNKNOWNS

  In second grade, school had us

  plant flowers in pots, decorate them

  for our moms for Mother’s Day.

  I picked the flowers with the most buds.

  Not sure which color to choose.

  I painted tiny animals,

  the only thing I knew Mom liked.

  Chloe planted daisies for her mother, painted her pot blue.

  Said her mom didn’t like strong smells.

  Everyone seemed to know their moms’ favorite flowers

  colors

  smells.

  All of them experts.

  I went home, nervous,

  pink carnations in my painted pot.

  Dad, April and I ate dinner,

  waited and waited.

  Mom never showed up.

  NEWBORN STARS

  In the fall of ninth grade,

  Mom left a note saying she’d gone

  to Italy for a while, to study.

  Mom left,

  April wept,

  Dad cooked,

  I smashed one of her glass fish.

  Buried it in the back of my closet:

  mouth open,

  gasping for water,

  drowning in a corner, dark as sea.

  Day after,

  Dad held a family meeting,

  April held
a glass frog,

  I said I didn’t care that she left—

  she was hardly here anyway.

  After the meeting,

  April stuck next to me.

  I stacked my sweaters like Pez candy:

  pink, purple, gray.

  Assembling order from mess.

  That weekend,

  Chloe and I got fake IDs,

  so easy

  it surprised me.

  I never drank,

  just followed Chloe into bars,

  poured my Sprite into her vodka

  while she

  looked the other way.

  Took fake puffs from cigs

  newly sprouted from her fingertips.

  Newborn stars

  take millions of years to form,

  billions of tons of mass to make.

  But the constellation of a family

  can shift shape

  in seconds.

  TURNED

  She was gone 13 months,

  returned just before Halloween,

  Sophomore year.

  I had already found Yearbook. Adam.

  When she came back,

  arms full of glass,

  April said welcome home,

  Dad held her.

  I said nothing.

  She reached out for a hug

  but I

  turned

  the other way.

  MISMATCHED

  Years later,

  sorting mail,

  bills from junk,

  things Mom can’t be bothered with,

  I hear her fruit earrings rattling

  down the hall.

  She matches our apartment:

  plastic oranges and bananas drip from her ears,

  her lips painted red peppers,

  bright like our dining room table.

  Her hair a tousled salad like

  laundry left unfolded in piles.

  Down the hall,

  Mom’s artwork:

  glass roosters and fish hijack the bookshelves,

  infest the coffee table.

  As many times as I try

  to place them in cabinets

  or line them in height order,

  they march back in,

  a disordered stampede,

  a resurrection.

  Mom’s closet:

  green scarves overlapping purple purses,

  scattered costume jewelry

  falling on top of random shoes, socks.

  Mine: jeans, hung, creased,

  sweaters folded in color order.

  One pair of sneakers, flats, boots, clogs.

  One mom

  one daughter

  mis-

  matched.

  SOMETHING STELLAR

  In Astronomy class,

  formulas scatter the blackboard.

  Mr. Lamb tells us

  in May we’ll see

  a solar eclipse as a class.

  We’ll all stand

  in the sun

  and go dark

  for a minute.

  In May, seven months from now,

  just a month before graduation

  into college, yearbook done,

  a month before we’re flung

  into space,

  I will be

  something stellar.

  Even as the world goes dark around me,

  I’ll keep my shine,

  I will not eclipse.

  SHADOWING

  Tuesdays, out early, two frees in a row.

  Sky so blue, walk past the bus stop,

  skip through the park,

  the reds and yellows

  nip at the greens,

  tell them it’s their turn to change.

  Cross the bike track,

  remember flying, back of Dad’s bike,

  first time riding a two-wheeler,

  his pushes, my breaths, how I pedaled.

  Now, passing benches,

  an emaciated, bearded man with a hollowed face

  lies on one, propped up on full gray trash bags,

  hands shaking—

  I tell myself not to look.

  Think of what Dad would do,

  jog back, squish a dollar into the man’s cup.

  His sign reads:

  Homeless, starving, lost everyone.

  Lesions on his scalp, his forehead—

  like the skeletal men they show in health class,

  unprotected sex, flashing at us, warnings.

  I scurry away, eyes on the changing leaves,

  Belvedere Castle, the pond,

  kids chase their mom around the tire swing,

  don’t look at the trash falling from bins,

  don’t smell the urine on the rocks,

  don’t read the SCREW YOU graffiti

  sprayed on the old stone wall.

  Look at the kids play,

  look at the statues,

  look up into the blue,

  all those buildings framing the sky.

  The wind picks up

  as I get close to home,

  it comes to me suddenly:

  The yearbook theme should be New York City.

  HIDING

  Jimmy, the doorman, says hello,

  I push the elevator button, make it glow.

  Breath speeding up, can’t wait to tell Dad

  I’ve got my theme.

  Turn the key.

  Walk down the hall.

  Go to his room.

  But as I turn the handle on his bedroom door—

  I hear a yelp.

  I hear a NO!

  And then I see:

  James, naked on my parents’ bed.

  Dad, beet-red, naked,

  hiding

  his lower body behind the door.

  A UNIVERSE AWAY

  I drop my backpack. Run.

  Don’t wait for the elevator.

  Chase the stairs down, like a slide.

  Run past Jimmy, out onto Riverside.

  I make it to the water.

  Yell at a boat on the Hudson,

  beg it to take me away, under a bridge,

  out to the ocean, vast and wide,

  beg someone to make me blind,

  take me out of this shady city,

  to a country, a continent,

  a universe away

  from here.

  BLURRED

  My eyes blur,

  I don’t know what I’ve just seen.

  My legs shake,

  the earth has shifted.

  THE MILKY WAY

  I wander over to Broadway.

  All these people

  moving in all their directions.

  I sit on the bench.

  A mom prances with two kids, hand in hand.

  Her ponytailed hair straight, a mom

  who sings while she vacuums, plans Disney vacations.

  Watch them cross.

  A man with too many dogs,

  barking at him, at each other.

  A small concrete island

  in the middle of rushing traffic,

  a halfway place,

  crowds just rush past.

  Sitting here

  surrounded by trash, cars, people,

  hanging

  in the middle of the Milky Way,

  a nebulous mass

  containing millions of tiny things

  smeared across the sky,

  in this crisscross rush,

  blinded by lights.

 
Just one random person

  in this ever-spinning city,

  never colliding.

  Alone on a bench.

  Once whole

  but now

  I am

  shattered.

  FLOATING

  I have change in my pocket,

  could use the pay phone,

  call Chloe. Dylan.

  What would I say?

  Hey, what’s up,

  my dad’s gay?

  Instead,

  I use my change

  on the bus

  float

  back across town.

  Run upstairs

  to the Yearbook office.

  My advisor’s there.

  Asks if I’ve thought of a theme yet.

  Suddenly New York City feels like a lie.

  Fake. Filthy.

  I look up at the white ceiling,

  dotted with a million pinpricks like stars,

  and I say

  how about space?

  FREEZE-FRAME

  Sit at my desk.

  Line up supplies

  in alphabetical order.

  Erasers. Paper clips. Scissors.

  Neat in a row.

  But I freeze when I get to the stack of layouts.

  The Freshman page on top.

  April.

  I leave the random order,

  run back

  for her.

  THERE ARE NO STARS

  Back past Jimmy, the elevator, the door,

  not wanting to open it, knowing I have to . . .

  How will I look at him. What will I say.

  They are there. Huddled in the living room.

  Dad, April, Mom. No James in sight. Family meeting.

  Whatever that means.

  Sit down next to April. Put my arm around her.

  They don’t ask where I went.

  Dad says he’s sorry for what I saw,

  didn’t know I’d be home early.

  Mom puts her hand on Dad’s knee.

  Says she and Dad met in the sixties,

  a time of exploration

  (like this is a history lesson).

  Then she says we have an open marriage.

  Do we know what that means?

  April shrugs. I nod slowly.

  It means she knows Dad sleeps with James.

  It means they both think it’s okay,

  it’s something they’ve agreed to.