SUNNY

What I remember most about the two years after the divorce is my loneliness.

When I was in seventh grade, Mom was diagnosed with uterine cancer. She had a partial hysterectomy—they’d removed her uterus but left her ovaries—and her cancer was never mentioned again. But by then, she’d already become a shadow figure in my life. First Jane, a friend of hers, had moved in, along with her husband and son, to help pay the rent. The only two things I recall about them was that Jane’s husband put up a calendar of obese “pin-up” girls—drawings, not photos—wearing things like daisies on the their nipples as pasties, a new concept to me. And one day their little boy, Davy, knocked the butterfly case with the magnificent luna moth off the wall, breaking the glass and shattering the moth’s wings.

When they moved out, Mom took in two boarders—college girls who had the upstairs bedrooms across from my brother and me. My mom would often talk to them behind closed doors—about their problems, apparently—and I remember thinking wistfully, “she spends more time with them than she does with me.” The one conversation I remember with my mother during this time was when I got my first period. “You’ve become a woman now,” she said. But all I felt about it was a kind of bleakness.

I also recollect having a bladder infection that I never told anyone about. Sometimes, when I walked home from school, I had to stop to twist and tighten my legs, trying to stop myself from “urinating,” as my dad would say. He always used formal terms like “defecate” and “feces.” If memory serves, I had the infection—not that I knew what it was—for most of the winter, and eventually it cleared up on its own.

Out of sequence, I’m also remembering my new little striped kitten dying of distemper on the day he was supposed to get his second distemper shot. We laid him on the door of the stove and turned the oven on low to keep him warm. I called him Archie, short for Archimedes, which was my father’s idea. But that happened before my dad left.

Doug and I did see our dad some weekends. The routine was he’d pick us up in the late afternoon, we’d play cribbage and have popcorn, go to a movie, then spend the night. But there was an empty perfunctoriness to these evenings together. One of my father’s apartments was near a railroad track, and I’d hear the lonely, mournful sound of train whistles throughout the night. Once, when our dad took us up to a northern lake, he stayed up playing the harmonica after Doug and I went to bed—and his playing reminded me of those whistles; I ached with sadness for him, feeling that he’d been forced into a kind of exile by the divorce, pushed out into the cold.

Sometime during that first year in the Doswell house, I started wrapping one arm around myself in bed at night, trying to find comfort in the fantasy that someone was holding me, something I would do for years to come.

So when my mom started talking about moving to California, she painted such a rosy picture that I got caught up in the idea of a fresh start, surrounded by affectionate relatives that I’d only seen on the few trips we made, and maybe even, eventually, with a stepfather nicer than my own father. Naively, I imagined I could leave my failures behind—the humiliations I’d suffered, the loss of friends, of prestige and self-respect, as well as a sense of belonging. In my new life, I decided, I would tell everyone that my nickname was “Sunny.”