returning

i try to tell the difference, i try to find the little seam that separates the two places, but more i look, the more invisible the stitching becomes. my first days back in alabama i thought, i can see it! i can see the woolen thread, the obvious divide between where i came from and where im now, always, returning to.

the fabric has a strange texture- im not sure i recognize it. i have to analyze and run my fingers along it, i have to recite the ways it differs from what i now know as normal. but by the time i have to go, by the last night hoodie turns off her giant porcelain monkey lamp in between our two twin beds, by the last night ive stood in a smoky bar and listened to music that comes from places untouched by money, i have to remind myself that this is my fabric, this is my swatch of the quilt, this is the place that i know by potholes and smells, by coughs and fingernails. the swatches arent even connected, they shouldnt be compared- they are from separate quilts.

i go back there and every time i notice two things: nothing has changed- will still pats my back when he hugs me, hoodie still stops at green lights, davenports still cuts its pizza into squares. but by the time ive left, during the course of each little holiday, everything, absolutely everything, is different. like david taking my hand as he was leaving the bar on the night we celebrated will's birthday, and saying "i dont like it, but its ok." and he squeezed my hand as he was holding it, because he didnt want to walk away yet, but there was really nothing left to say, and because just days before we walked into the birmingham country club together for hoodies debutante ball, me wearing cherry red lipstick from lancome and him in a tux, down the hallway lined on either side with real christmas trees covered in white lights, and he put his hand on the small of my back like he always has, and we walked into the ballroom and forgot about the fact that for all of us, this was the end of the beginning, the true, bold lettered end of the beginning.

because never before have i snuck murray and justin into hoodies house, on tiptoes up the stairs and into her room, where hunter and will and theo and foster and paige were sitting on her beds, the beds i made collages for jimmy on in 9th grade, the beds ive talked my way to sleep on for nine years, the beds that have cradled secrets and lies and laughs muffled by pillows. the very beds that soaked up my tears about justin, about edward about marcel about reeves, the very beds i asked hoodie to just be honest, do you think he likes me? and there we all were in her closet, sitting on her carpet- this has never happened before. this is changing everything, and i can watch the instant it morphs into something new and altogether foreign. right now- as justin says to me "stop! you cant do that!" as if i belonged to him, as if after all those years and after all of my staring out windows and wondering, he could tell me what to do. thats the moment it changed, and no one knew it but me.

because never before have erika, jane and i watched hoodies mom dance, swishing her hips around making her turquoise dress sail, with anyone, let alone with men who werent hoodies father, men who werent good dancers, men who tried to talk to her as she kept her eyes on her feet, her eyes on the pattern she was drawing around them, despite them. we watched as hoodies dad watched, and as he cut in for a slow one. we watched as they closed their eyes and didnt speak a word for the whole song, and never before have we done that.

never before have david and i played darts, or hoodie and i gotten a manicure together. never before had i tasted o'carrs chicken salad, or gone to the garage to drink. never before had hoodies mom driven me to the airport at 4 am, had hunter made me cry, had will strangled justin, had i realized that altamont boys will always, eternally, prefer altamont girls. never before had paige and i sat in a heap on the floor in between hoodie's beds, laughing so hard our eyes closed at things that should be laughed at, at things that were waiting in a tiny sterile room somewhere for two people, two people just like us, to open the door and let them out so they could finally be realized, so they could finally be tossed around between all of us, worshipped because they were the things that needed to be laughed at then. they had been waiting for that moment, waiting in the tiny sterile room, for us to need them.

there is always a moment in birmingham, an uncontrollable moment like rear ending a car even though youve been slamming on your brakes for seconds, that takes me by the shoulders and looks me right in the eyes:

this is the place you are always returning to.

they didnt know

it became apparent to us, not gradually, but with a sudden painful thrust, an urgent realization that wasnt verbalized but that was felt simultaneously.

they didnt know, she mouthed to me as soon as it became obvious.

i shook my head slowly. no, they didnt know.

hoodie bit her lower lip like she does when shes trying not to laugh, when shes holding back laughter from something terrifying and obscene, not something funny. she started to stand up, and it was then that we realized how far into this we were- she was wearing ben's clothes, ben the non-brother, the one neither one of us had any interest in, the one we had gently repelled all evening. the simple fact of it wasnt too strange- we were in his apartment in alphabet city, it was daylight- but what it meant, to us at that moment, was an amorphous, suffocating truth. they didnt know.

we had met them just hours before, outside a bar in soho because our other friend, the one who lived in new york, who we were visiting because all of our 21st birthdays were within a week of each other and we had grown up together- was made for these situations, these shadowy bars that are as narrow as the people inside of them. paige knew people inside- we didnt, and hoodie wasnt used to wearing stilettos. we were leaning up against a waist high electrical looking box when they approached us, asking for a light. donovan and patrick davies- donovan who we would later learn was only 18 and patrick, who we found out was married. donovan and patrick davies, perfect for us, full of giddy possibilities. and their friend ben.

we walked down ludlow and found a bar with a jukebox full of built to spill and bowie, one that stayed open till four. paige got too drunk and had to leave in a cab, telling us as she removed her strappy pink heels, to come home whenever. when the sun was beginning to shatter the nightsky and we realized that they didnt know, it also occurred to us that we should have left with her, that they were probabaly expecting us to, and that we certainly shouldnt have invited ourselves over to bens. but we did, the five of us piling into a cab heading towards a street called "U."

this, i decided as i looked back at her in the cab, sitting on the laps of three total strangers, was real. this was what we wanted when we came to visit paige- not the guggenheim or 5th Ave. we wanted random strangers and nights that had no end. but as real as it was, i didnt want it to feel real, not real in the florescent light sence, not real in the daybreak sense. and after a few hours of watching caddyshack, thats what it was becoming.

but no-- thats not why we decided so abruptly to leave. thats not why we, in one motion suspended by the jibberish coming from both of us at the same time, picked up our things and walked out, leaving them to call out behind us "whats wrong?? can we call you?" no, it was something ben said, some abrasive comment, that made us understand how misunderstood we had been. i cant remember it now- im not sure if the words actually registered or it was just what he seemed to be implying- that we werent giving what we had promised, that we were the kind of people who wouldnt mind words being flung at us, words that were seeped in something that felt nearly violent. they didnt know- they didnt know us.

why, how, could we have expected them to?

we got in the cab, holding our shoes in our hands, trying desparately to remember paige's address- "um near the UN building, 1st ave and 2nd street, or is it 2nd ave and 1st st??" we looked at each other and felt like strangers- not to each other but to ourselves. the blue light of dawn was mocking, menacing. it was seven am.

half way to paiges i had a pang of regret- that we would never see them again, that we had grossly misinterpreted the situation. that we shouldnt blame the brothers for something that ben had said.

we should go back. hoodie looked at me with caution- she didnt want me to say it if i didnt mean it. we should, we should go back and explain ourselves and just say, you know, if you want to hang out tomorrow...

she reached into the front seat and flapped her hand a bit. "would you mind turning around?? and going back... to exactly where we came from?"

and then there we were- in broad daylight, with our shoes waiting for us in the cab, our mascara practically on our cheeks. we couldnt remember bens apartment number, making it impossible to ring his room. so, we guessed. we took turns closing our eyes and pushing a button, each time to no response. but this time, we would tell ourselves, this time if its not them then its a sign. we'll leave.

we ended up pushing all twenty buttons, and writing a note on the back of a receipt that said "Sorry we left like that! call us if youre up for hanging out tonight!" and wrote my phone number. we looked at the carlined street. the brothers lived in queens, surely they had a car. it was faulty reasoning and we knew it then but we did it anyway- we picked a car that looked most like them and stuck it underneath the windshield wiper.

we took a second to look at the tiny yellow receipt, both of us imagining them coming out and seeing it, glad that it wasnt quite over yet. it was unlikely. but we also knew, it wasnt impossible.

the problem was, they didnt.

going to germany, part three

and there it was- just one day away from him. art had been on the road for a little over a month, improving his german skills slowly as he travelled, meeting people and then quietly escaping saying goodbye, eating alone and using his journal as a clutch, like a cigarette. he used to smoke; he tried to limit it to visits back home during college but they chased him around, they followed him past holidays and summer weekends spent at his mothers house. art liked them- the cigarettes, as opposed to the act of smoking- because he had sympathy for them, with being bad but good, with being both cool and completley cliche.

it had been a good month, he decided that day riding around dresden. it was all leading up to these next few days, but even without that it had been worth it. it was strange to him, when he looked at someone and had no idea what stacks were on their desks, what girlfriends they secretly had no interest in. it made it all feel so simple, so universal, so easy. it made being a carpenter seem not so bad, because how many people had he met the last few weeks with less than enviable jobs, people he still admired and imagined cooking spatzle over a stove, with one hand on their hip. how poetic that image was to art, and if that could be true and beautiful, than the mundacity of his life could be too.

he wrote to oma often, telling her about the scenery or germans he had met, but tried not to talk to anyone else from back home. his eyes were always open for clues, like he was the narrator of some great mystery, and that they were there in front of him if he only picked the right door. one night, in a hostel that looked like all the rest, he began writing down a series of questions for sophie and leonie, his cousins, leaving a few lines after each one so that he could fill in the blank. after he wrote down a page of them he became overwhelmed with sadness that his entire trip, and therefore his whole life, his whole history, could be explained in a page worth of questions. he ripped it out of his journal and deposited it under his squeaky bed. he would just talk to them, decided. the questions would come.

it was his last night in dresden, and it was dark. his hotel, like most of them, was on top of a bar, one that simply said BIER on a hanging wooden sign. he hadnt been there yet, preferring to buy bier from the store and drink it in his room, watching tv he couldnt understand. this is my introspective stage, he thought often as he turned off the bedside light, an attempt to drive away the lonlieness he felt creeping up on him like frost. he wanted to tell someone else about why he had come all this way, he wanted to awe someone with his story, but when he walked into the low-ceilinged bar he saw no one but a man drinking at a booth by himself, a sight that had always made him feel guilty. he ordered a hefeweizen and sat on a bar stool, hunched over because he imagined it looking cinematic. after another beer there were more people in the bar- an asian couple sitting at a table and a few lean german men at another booth. the bartender, who was slight and silent, had turned up the music, something art recognized vaguely but knew wasnt american. he felt absorbed in the culture because he was beginning to pick up on things that simple tourists wouldnt- tourists with their guide books and their lack of purpose. as art was about to ask for another hefeweizen the man sitting at the booth alone came up to the bar and propped his arms, covered in blond hair, on the countertop. he asked for another in german, sliding the empty glass towards the bartender. he turned his head towards art slowly, with his eyes closes until the words came out:

"wie gehts?"

art was appreciative for the conversation. the man looked younger than he had originally guessed, probably no older than 30. his hair was light and though it was thick on his arms and stubbly all over his face, it was thinning on his head. his face was reddened, making him look like it was cold outside. before art could answer, the man said

"i speak english. i understand it."

"oh, well, i speak some german, but...thats probably better. anyway, im good. and yourself?"

the man pouted and closed his eyes. he was either drunk or sad, art decided, and at the time both seemed like ideal moods.

"Wie heist du?" art asked, proud that he knew a slightly slangish way of asking his name.

"thomas" the man replied, and took a sip of his dark beer, dipping his hairy upper lip into the froth. "yours?"

"art." he knew that this would be the man to talk to, something about him seemed comfortable and stable, like he couldnt be scared off by art's story of searching. the truh was, art was scared about meeting the cousins the next day- scared that they wouldnt have the answers, or that they would be unresponsive to his questions (hoping that he had any at all). what if the answers didnt prove to art what he needed to be true? that karl was a rotten, corrupt man, that oma knew all along and hid it from the rest of the family? thomas had heard worse, art was sure of it. he was about to start telling the story as if thomas were the next blank page in his leather bound journal, as if thomas could just reflect the truth back to him as the pages of his notebook did. but before he fished out the words thomas had begun to talk about the bar, and how it used to managed by different people. it used to be IT, thomas said with his beer poised for sipping.

"how did you become fluent in english?" art thought it arrogant of himself and the rest of the US that they only learned languages half-heartedly, knowing with certainty that whereever they went, they could make themselves understood. it seemed that other countries raised their children on english- it was an unavoidable lesson, like taking responsibility for your actions. learn english; take responsibility.

"army. i served for a few years a while back. it was one of those things we had to learn, i guess in case we fought on the same side. i never asked about the why, like why we learned certain things. i suppose it comes in handy though."

they talked about the army for the time it took to drink another beer, and for a new crowd of people to replace the previous ones. art urgently wanted to tell thomas about karl and the idea for the trip, as if telling this man the reason he travelled across the world was his ultimate goal.

"i wanted to tell you why i came here, why i took this trip."

thomas took a deep breath and asked him two things, counting them off on his fingers. "do people who live in new york really go to times square for new years eve? and do all of the other states have barnyard animals?" this made art laugh.

he told them that no, only tourists go to times square, and he supposed that all states had barnyard animals, though he couldnt imagine any in new mexico. thomas asked him if he liked it there in america.

"yeah, i like it. i like it sometimes, but thats all you get when youre visiting a place, so you think you'll like it always." thomas nodded, though art wasnt sure he had conveyed what he intended to.

"thomas, i do want to tell you about my trip."

"no," he said gently. "this is not a place you should want to come. i dont want to know about peoples reasons for coming here." it was an awkward thing to say, but art wanted to write it down, word for word. instead he said,

"but i didnt come here for the same reasons most people do. it weighs on me; ive been alone for a month."

thomas turned to him with eyes afloat in tears. "enteschuldigung. enteschuldigung," he said, his whole body quivering.it meant i'm sorry.

art said nothing for a moment, making sure he hadnt forced a culturally inappropriate moment on the two of them. "for what, thomas? you have absolutely nothing to be sorry for. i just wanted to tell you-"

"im sorry. we killed so many people. it was us," tears wormed out of his colorless eyes. "im sorry. i need to tell you that."

"i dont understand..." art lightly touched the top of thomas's arm, bewildered. "for what?" he said in a whisper.

"you know for what." it was almost a hiss. he wasnt angry, just desparate that art understand. "the holocaust."

it took the color out of art's sight. for a second everything was black and white- he must have missed an integral part of the conversation, like somewhere along the way he had made a horrible mistake and thomas had been suffering from it beer after beer.

"thomas" art said, and shook his head back and forth.

"you needed to tell your story, i needed to tell you that."

"thomas, you cant apologize for that. you...you werent even a thought yet. it had nothing to do with you."

"yes," he said, as gently as he had said no. "yes it does." thomas looked art steadily in the eye. "can you forgive me?"

art looked at him and wondered if they were related. if this was all part of a plan, a plan for the two of them to meet and use each other to figure things out. he knew this wasnt true before the thought entered his mind, but he wanted to linger in it anyway. he wanted to believe that this was his family, that this was meant to be, that this was the question he had been waiting for.

"no, thomas. i cant forgive you." thomas looked at him with the same look of panicked sadness. "but i can tell you, you dont have to apologize to me." art thought of going to sophie's house tomorrow, of leaning forward on the wool couch, of delicatley approaching the subject.

"neither one of us had anything to do with it."

"but this," thomas said, holding back tears by letting his lip quiver, "this is my history."

art pictured the clock that didnt tick. he was thinking of ways to explain it to thomas, that it wasnt really broken. the clock didnt work; otherwise, art wouldnt have kept it.

going to germany, part two

on the plane art opened a blank leather journal and looked out the window. he was going to record it all, it was going to be the story of his life. he smoothed out the white page with his muscular, squarish hand and poised his pen on the first line. he wrote

my father grew up an orphan. i blame this on one man, karl, who married my grandmother in 1950 and made her move with him to venezuela. i have been told who he is, and i have never believed it. my father was only 4, he was abandoned in georgia, adopted by his abusive grandparents. he wrote his mother letters, letters to which she never responded.

art loved words. he majored and english and had dreams of becoming a professor, not one that wears couderoy jackets with leather elbow patches but one that rides motorcycles and believes that a story can be told through building a staircase, or hammering a nail into a dense piece of wood. he filled out applications for graduate school last year, and took the GRE, but they still sat in a neat stack on his desk in the upstairs of his mother's house. he would get around to it one day, he promised himself silently so it would mean more, so it could resonate within him, getting louder and more deafening because it was never deflected to anyone else's ears. but for now, he had been offered a job working with a friend of his and another guy, as a carpenter. art had been good with his hands since he was a child; he had assembled a clock with his father one summer, a clock that never worked. once they had finally finished putting the hundreds of parts together they didnt even discuss the fact that it didnt tick. something about this, to the seven year old art, was manly.

the idea for the trip began with a conversation he had with oma, as she lay immobile in her nursing home bed, her hair still long and pulled back tightly in a french bun. she was talking about karl, as she often did, and said to art, "i belong over there, with his family." it was the first time he realized how transferable the idea of family was. it was the first time he realized that he was implicated in this family that he had never met before, this family that he secretly loathed.

"well maybe the next best thing would be for me to go there, and take pieces of you with me to give to them and get pieces of them to bring back here." she looked at him with watery blue eyes and nodded slowly.

"that would be nice." so she gave him a large enough sum of money to buy the plane ticket and rent a motorcycle, a sum of money so large he was afraid to deal with it at all, afraid he would make some mistake that would result in it being squandered away, in oma being furious with him, on her death bed. he was afraid it would result in what he secretly feared to be the truth- he just couldnt do anything right. but he swallowed those worries and tucked them under a pillow in his mind, and instead imagined himself weaving through lush green mountains, meeting karl's family and leaning forward on a wool couch to ask them questions, maybe recording it all, bringing home those answers to oma, but most importantly, finally knowing for himself about the family he never really knew he had.

she gave him addresses and phone numbers that looked like measurements. he had never left the country, except for one trip to mexico with his college girlfriend that ended up in a silent car trip back to her home in texas and them never speaking to each other again. he didnt count that. there were numbers for karl's elderly sister and her children, who art supposed would be his cousins. since he had none in his real family (both of his parents were only children), he never learned the proper names for these relationships.

the phone conversations had been strange and brief. he only spoke with the two cousins, both women still living in the small town of weimar, near dresden, and they acted as if it was expected, and usual, for a man 24 years old to stop by germany for the sole purpose of meeting them. "sure, sure" they said, and hung up the phone in the middle of his goodbye. it would be a challenge, he knew. and though it seemed the opposite, he had never felt more equipped.

he was to start off in munich, travel up to frankfurt, then go to dresden and weimar to meet the cousins, whose names he could never remember, ending the trip in berlin. he looked at his map with stars placed on the cities he intended to visit. he put the bulbous tip of his finger on weimar and pressed down enough to make his fingernail whiten.

"there," he said out loud, but the person next to him didnt flinch.

going to germany, part one

art didnt go for specific answers, but because he didnt know the questions yet. and because it was the last summer he would ever let himself do something like that- take a motor bike trip across germany, alone. he was 24, it was time to decide. he was 24, and there was absolutely nothing keeping him in georgia, nothing but a girlfriend he barely knew and a job delivering carpets to big design firms in atlanta. he was old enough to need to know, he was old enough, now, to figure it out.

there was a picture of his grandmother and her husband, the man who she married just a few years after art's father had been born, after she had gotten a divorce from art's grandfather and sealed away his letters in a box that wouldnt be opened for decades. in the picture she looked beautiful because she always did, and because art had a tendency to romantcize the past, and its characters who he now knew as wrinkled, three dimensional. then, when that picture and so many of the others that he studied his whole life were taken, family members were strangers, they werent family members yet just creatures like him, organisims that had no idea what was coming, or who they were really posing for. in the picture his grandmother, who he grew up calling oma, is smoking a slim cigarette and smiling through it while her husband, karl, is looking at something off to the side, the side opposite from her. he has one hand on her waist, not in an affectionate way but because, it looks like, he is trying to tell her something. that someone is there, to look where he is looking, to see what he has just seen the instant the camera clicked.

art grew up being told that karl was a good man, though the k in karl's name and the way his thin mustache looked like a fold of skin in photographs made him think otherwise. there was really no explaining it- he had only been told good things about the love of his grandmothers life. karl died the year art was born when he stepped off a plane, the first time his feet had met german soil in over 20 years, had a heart attack and died face down on the tarmac. art imagined him clutching his heart, and gasping for air, but according to oma, he just collapsed.

though art never trusted karl, and never knew where to place him in his understanding of his own past, his own history, there was one moment that solidified art's uneasiness. art's parents were divorced and his father had remarried a woman who art had grown up considering the only solace in a family full of stingy, cold people. art was at their house for christmas one year. he remembered being barely tall enough to see over the counter, in the kitchen watching as lynn, his father's wife, cooked. she was stirring something in a big white bowl, and art wondered what it would be like if the bowl was her heart, like the only way to keep your heart beating was to keep ferociously stirring this substance that always stayed the same consistency. his father walked in the kitchen and said

tomorrow lets go to the storage unit with oma to sort through karls things.

lynn looked up and nodded slightly, smiling, and his father walked back out of the kitchen. lynn said, in a fiery voice that she kept in the net of a whisper,

nazi.