Shelter

by Rachel Parsons

In 2007, I ran away from home for the second time. The first time, I was sixteen years old, living with my family outside of Detroit. I put on my Target uniform, told my mother I was off to work, and left. There was no real destination, just an idea that California sounded much better than here. I drove for three days before my 1993 Ford Tempo broke down and I was returned to my parents via the back seat of a cop car.

By my second attempt, I was twenty-five. I had a plan, an apartment, and a respectable reason: a teaching fellowship in New York City. 

 New York, from day one, felt like coming home. Bobbing and weaving through hordes on the sidewalk, sprinting down subway stairs to catch screeching trains, packing into pulsating nightclubs on my hard-earned nights off. The speed at which things moved matched the frenetic energy of my internal world, and I relaxed into the thrum of eight million other people. 

As the lone queer woman in my master’s program, though, I was missing a political community. I set out to find my crew, and discovered a teachers’ group at a feminist bookstore on the Lower East Side. The leader, Jade, was an attractive soft butch with an authoritative air. She gathered us in a circle, smashed between the front windows and the State Repression and Resistance section, and had us speak our names, pronouns, and the reason we came. She alternated between taking notes in her palm-sized gridded-paper notebook, and looking at each of us intently as we spoke. 

Many of us were new to teaching, and brought questions about how to run a classroom, or what to do if we made a mistake. I listened, amazed, as Jade talked about writing an apology to a 7th grader she inadvertently embarrassed in class. Her kindness and humility were attractive.

Jade offered a final suggestion before we left: If I can share one thing that’s important to remember as a teacher, it’s to never yell unless it’s absolutely necessary. I saw a few other people nodding their heads in agreement. Ruling your classroom through fear, even if you are doing it from a place of concern, will not get the kids on your side. I wrote down FEAR and ANGER in my notebook, and crossed them out with dark pencil lines, the force making indents on the pages below. 

I left thinking about how I could make my class a safe place for kids, but also about Jade. Her calm demeanor was betrayed by her wild almond eyes; I imagined what they would look like up close. 

In my earliest memory of my mother, I am three years old. My sister and I are sitting on her lap, and I am resting my head on her chest, staring at the wall. My mother is yelling and my father is not, and I am afraid. I want to get down and run to him but I dread the consequences. Don’t worry, we will leave him soon, she says. She holds us tightly, her eyes fixed on where my dad retreated into the kitchen. You won’t have to be here with him anymore. 

I am confused. I do not want to leave him. I want to get away from her. But I lie still and do not add any noise to the anger around me.

I went to my first NYC Dyke March in 2010. Women were everywhere: bare-chested, painted, and shining. We walked between the skyscrapers, luxury stores, and bus stops on 5th Avenue, parting bewildered traffic. 

Jade materialized out of the crowd. It had been three years since we met at the bookstore. Rachel? I don’t know if you remember me. I’ve thought about you many times, she said. Her lips were a seductive snarl wrapping around each word: Are you free next week? She smiled and placed her hand on my forearm. Don’t say no. 

The rest of the march fell away and it was just us on the street corner—her hand on my arm; my heart in my throat. She wanted in. I did not say no.

A week later, I emerged from the F train and walked over to Dizzy’s Diner. I saw Jade before she saw me. She stood outside the restaurant, reading Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and wearing a short black T-shirt. She looked up, brushed her curls out of her eyes, and greeted me with a sultry hello. I followed her into the restaurant, admiring her shoulders and the thin hairs on the small of her back.

We sat down at a white laminate table with a red napkin dispenser and tiny salt and pepper shakers. She took control of the conversation. My girlfriend’s in Europe this summer. She held her coffee cup with both hands. Steam swirled around her face before evaporating into the hot summer morning. No, we aren’t in an open relationship. I am way too high maintenance for that. Jade held my gaze just long enough to plant a question before putting down her mug and picking up her menu.

She suggested an after-meal walk in Prospect Park. I took care to be a few feet in front of her from time to time so she could watch my hips. Later, when the girlfriend in Europe was an ex-girlfriend, she told me how she had stared at the tattoo between my shoulder blades. How she wanted to kiss it gently and work her way down from there.

We walked along the path that ran the park’s perimeter. It took us from her neighborhood all the way to mine. The sounds and smells changed from neat and tidy—oakleaf hydrangea, sunscreen, acoustic guitars, sugar-roasted almonds—to seductive and alive—hand drummers, halal chicken over rice, peals of laughter, smoke from spits and pipes. We made it to my favorite tree at the edge of the small lake. It had the perfect roots for seats. We talked for hours while I memorized her scent and the curve of her neck. I felt safe. 

When we said good night, I wondered how many more of these not-dates it would take for her to follow through on what was already clear. It took exactly eight. By the Christmas holidays, we found our way back to 5th Avenue, arm in arm while viewing the elaborate Bergdorf Goodman windows and sharing hot chocolate. We stopped at the corner of 51st Street , New Yorkers and tourists rushing by, as she pulled me close and kissed me under the eaves of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the tiny twinkling lights.

It’s morning and we are still in pajamas. There is light coming through the thin curtains hanging over the picture window, the one where my siblings and I watch the mama rabbit and her bunnies nesting underneath the shrub. We lie with our foreheads pressed to the glass, whispering to each other, trying not to scare the animals away.

My mom gets down on the floor with us and tells us how the mama rabbit takes care of her babies, building a nest of scratched-up grass and piling up bits of her own soft fur for warmth. We only see the mother in the morning. The rest of the day, the babies fend for themselves, sleeping in a low-lying pile. Occasionally one pops up, its tiny red eyes bright against the evergreen branches. I worry about them, wondering why their mother would leave. They will be fine, Rachie. The mama knows what she is doing, my mom says.

One morning, the bunnies are gone. The nest is torn to shreds, hair and organic matter flung about in a violent pattern across the soil. I am horrified that my fears have materialized. Had I somehow believed their demise into being? My mother picks me up brusquely from behind, my four-year-old body light in her arms. Stop crying, we have to go pick up your sister at school. I’m sure they’re fine. I am sure she is wrong. I practice being statue-still as my mom carries me to the car and straps me in.

Inertia kept me in motion. During those first years in New York, I taught at three different schools, had friends in four boroughs, and rented rooms in five consecutive apartments. I was running away from something I didn’t understand.

Jade, on the other hand, stayed in one place. She worked at the same school and spent every Sunday at her family’s house for dinner. She lived in the same apartment, with the same organized kitchen: beans and grains arranged by color amidst the fragrant loose-leaf teas, gauzy cheesecloth, and hand-dried herbs. She cooked elaborate meals, aromas permeating the apartment, the food rich with saffron, coriander, thyme, and garlic. We would often end the night on the couch, wrapped in each other’s limbs, burrowed beneath her afghan.

I was her refuge from her antagonistic coworkers in Long Island and her critical mother. She was my soft place to land: a woman more established than myself, a few years older, further along in her career. We settled into each other. Finally, I was home.

I hear my mother before I see her, her nasally alto wafting through the office door. I’m here to pick up my daughter. I am sitting in a purple upholstered chair in the counselor’s office. The clock above the What You Say in Here Stays in Here poster reads 11:46. 

There is a muffled conversation. No, she didn’t do anything wrong. She couldn’t stop crying in class… teacher called for me… seems to be struggling again lately… well, teenagers can be secretive.

Both women come around the corner to where I am sitting. My mother presses her lips into a thin smile and clutches the purse strap hanging over her shoulder. You ready, Rachie? The counselor pats me gently on the back, and my mom and I walk silently out of the building into the parking lot. 

Mom opens her car door and hits the automatic lock button, forgetting it’s broken. She sighs and reaches across to pop the passenger-side latch. I climb in with my things and slam the door behind me. 

Breath leaves my lungs in steamy clouds. My eyes are swollen from crying and one barrette clings sideways to my mussed bangs. I haven't slept in two days.

My mom puts her keys in the ignition. They hang there, swaying back and forth on the long leather keychain that reads BA BARA. We sit for so long that I wonder if we will ever leave.

She finally breaks the silence. What the hell, Rachel? My insides hum, a low vibration that rises in pitch along with her voice. My back is rigid, steeling against whatever word or blow is coming next. 

Look at me. Her voice rises an octave and several decibels. Look at me, goddamn it. I don’t move.

I told her not to call you, I say. I look down at my hands with their half-painted fingernails: irregular black shapes clinging above the cuticles. I would have been fine. I know you have to work.

Yeah, I have to feed you goddamn kids and do everything else around here too, since no one helps me. I had stayed home every night that week to watch my brothers and stir up the ground beef and Old El Paso taco seasoning for dinner, but now was not the time to contradict her.

Mom’s right hand clutches the gearshift while her left vibrates against the cold wheel. The pupils of her frosted blue eyes are dilated. Her pink lipstick has mostly worn off, clinging in cracks around her mouth. She studies me in turn, this reflection of her teenage self, inches away from rage.

What the fuck am I supposed to do with you?

I don’t respond. Staying still in these moments sometimes makes them pass. But my tears betray me, running silently down my cheeks. The muscle in Mom’s jaw flattens against her mandible.

Do I have to send you away, Rachel? Send you to someone who knows what to do with you? Is that what you want?

No. I look out the window, car exhaust obscuring my view of the soccer fields, turning the air to metal. Please, Ma, just drive. It won’t happen again, ok? She shakes her head, jams the gearshift out of park, and pulls out of the lot with a high-pitched squeal. 

We make it to our driveway in record time. She opens the door and hops out. I stay put.

Well? Are you coming in or not? 

Jade and I were beautiful not only to each other but also to the world. Our friends teased us: You look like a topper from a lesbian wedding cake. Jade would wink, kiss me softly, and wrap her arms around my shoulders. We do, don’t we? I relaxed into the crook of her elbow, leaning against her tightly bound chest, exhaled, and burrowed deeper. This was what love was supposed to look like.

But Jade was very particular about her space and her things. The first time she raised her voice to me, I had accidentally knocked a pile off her desk. She demanded I put everything—a binder-clipped pack of students’ papers, an article on Pluto’s status as a planet, an outpatient clinic receipt, a completely scratched-off grocery list—back in the exact order as before.

And she got upset when I talked loudly or told too many jokes at dinner parties. She wasn’t out at school, but demanded that I accompany her to work functions as her friend. She became agitated when I didn’t accept her mother’s advice or her uncle’s misogyny: I wasn’t trying hard enough to fit into her family.

But the attention she lavished on me—the adoration I had craved since childhood—was louder than any of my doubts. One of our favorite places to go was First Saturdays at the Brooklyn Museum. We would wind our way through the crowd of unapologetically fashionable partygoers, buoyed by the gyrating hips, the popping and locking, the sweaty angles of the bodies around us. The bass line pounded and my hips moved on their own accord, massaging the rhythm deep into my bones, Jade’s body melting into mine. She breathed in my ear: There’s nothing else I need in my life besides you, like this, right now.

The only thing that existed was her tempo, the weight of her hands, and the effortless way I followed her movement, hitting every beat just a little early, making it ours and ours alone.

My mother is not a soft woman. Sadness and fear take her places she does not want to go. When I am a child, she sees anger as the only correct response to a hard and dangerous world.

Every Friday she sits us down to watch America’s Most Wanted. John Walsh’s stern voice narrates stories of dangerous criminals over a pulsing backbeat: We are going to show you the faces of two men who have committed murder. You might know where they are right now. Tonight, they’re America’s Most Wanted. 

My mother watches with rapt attention, taking mental notes of any defining characteristics in case the murderers leave Houston or Poughkeepsie and come to suburban Detroit, ready to strike again. Criminals, like danger, can be anywhere. She wants to be ready, and wants us to be ready as well.

Her research material varies. After reading a book about Ted Bundy, she tells us to never talk to men in casts. She keeps my brothers away from clowns after watching a show about John Wayne Gacy. She implores us never to hitchhike after hearing about Donald Henry Gaskins. 

A magazine article teaches her about the satanic power of Ouija boards. She barges into my room one weeknight while I am sleeping and demands to know where I keep the one she bought me for Christmas. She throws on the light and yanks it off the closet shelf, sending Scrabble and Candy Land clattering to the ground, then leaves. 

A mother’s love can look like many things; hers looked like this.

I awoke to heavy footsteps racing down the hall. Jade threw open the bedroom door, catching it before it made contact with the closet. I sat up fast, alarmed by her sudden entry. 

What’s wrong? I asked. She held out her bike chain—heavy and tarnished, the combination lock askew—in response. Her arms were shaking, sending ripples of movement through the chain, now in two pieces. 

Jade said nothing, her breath ragged. I got off the bed and moved toward her, slowly, as one would approach a wounded animal. I put my hand lightly on the underside of her arm and tried again. Hey. What’s going on?

She averted her gaze and stared past me out the window grate to the street. My. Bike. She paused between each word, her voice sharper with each syllable. Is. Gone. Her eyes snapped to my face, waiting for my next move. 

I voiced my thoughts aloud. Who do we call? The police? They might not come very quickly. It’s only a bike. 

Only a bike? She pulled her arm out of my grasp. Only a bike. She went straight to fury. You know, you’re the reason this happened! If I hadn’t been busy dealing with you last night, I would have locked it up correctly! 

The evening before we had stayed in at Jade’s prompting. I was struggling with finishing school, and there was only one class—Calculus 2—standing between me and my master’s degree. She made us dinner, served tea, and gave me back rubs while I struggled to find the interval of convergence for different power series. I wiped away tears of frustration and doubt until 2 a.m., when she gently closed my book, kissed me on the back of the neck, and escorted me to bed.

Now, her lips wound around angry words, throwing them at me. I’m so sick of this. You’re always trying to control my life.

I stepped back, stunned and confused. I’m sorry, I… I didn’t know. My bare heel landed on something sharp on the carpet. Cold metal dug deep into my callous, hitting the soft skin below, but I didn’t move. Let’s just call the police, ok? Let’s call them and fill out a report.

And what would have happened if the thief had come inside, huh? I gaped at her, but said nothing. The least you could do is give me your damn phone, she said. I offered it to her. She snatched it and walked away.

When the officer arrived, Jade worked to regain composure. Her lips pressed into a tight smile and her shoulders fell away from her ears. The woman asked standard questions: What’s the color of the bike? Model? Was it locked up? What time was it last seen? I stayed silent and tried not to cry.

 The officer finished her notes and looked back and forth between the two of us. Try not to worry so much, she told Jade, snapping the cap back on her pen. The people you love are all okay, like this pretty lady. The officer winked at me gently. You two take care of each other now. She tore the incident report from her pad, handed us the carbon copy, and left.

We watched the car disappear down 7th Avenue in silence. Jade turned and walked up the apartment building steps. She paused in the archway with her hand on the knob, the door half open, and looked back over her left shoulder. 

You coming? She stared at me like I was a disobedient dog and then walked inside. I didn’t think; I followed.

(What is remembered and what is imprinted? What is chance and what is marrow? What is real and what is constructed to keep my narrative clean?)

My mother came to visit New York in the summer of 2012. She and Jade were cordial, but their personalities clashed. Your mom was nice to me and all, Jade said the morning she left, but there's something about her that makes me uncomfortable. 

She’s a little controlling, don’t you think? My mom asked over the phone. She always had to have everything exactly as she wanted before we could even leave the house. I pressed the cell phone to my ear, the screen warm against my cheek, but said nothing. But I guess I’m not the one who has to date her, so I should just keep my mouth shut. She paused. Does she make you happy?

Jade and I had been up-and-down for months at that point. The night before we had gone out for a lavish dinner to celebrate a teaching fellowship I had won; the date had devolved into an icy cold silence, then an argument about how to split the check and where we should sleep that night. I was exhausted, and couldn’t face the real answer to my mother’s question, so I gave her a half-truth.

I love her, I said.

Okay, Rachie. As long as you love her, I suppose. 

Years later, I rush home to Michigan on a frozen Tuesday in November. My father went into the ICU with a rapid heart rate and high fever, but three days later he is resting comfortably. We are all exhausted from riding waves of adrenaline. My mom and I leave the hospital for a late breakfast at IHOP.

I push my overcooked eggs around my plate and accidentally nudge them into a puddle of syrup. My mom sips her coffee, sits back against the worn vinyl booth with a sigh. Glad your father is going to be okay.

Me too, Ma. I’m focusing on my breakfast, separating the sticky eggs from the salvageable ones.

  My mom watches for a while, then asks, Was I a good mother to you, Rachie? She has an undecipherable look on her face. While you were growing up? Was I a good mom?

 I am stunned, unsure how to answer. I finally decide on a gentle version of the truth. It was hard sometimes.

She looks back out the window. I’m sorry, Rachie. I did my best.

I know, Ma.

We fall back into quiet, done for now. 

Jade and I moved in together a few months after my mother’s New York visit. I thought having her nearby would make things easier. By then it was clear she wasn’t going to change, but I saw myself as strong enough to take on her struggles. The good moments continued in between her flare-ups. If we just burrowed down. If we just stayed loyal. If I just didn’t push her away when she needed me most. I knew how it hurt to be blamed because people didn’t know how to help you.

We went about the business of creating our home, hanging plants in the windows and purchasing new sheets. She bought a water fountain for my cat and a quilt for the couch; affixed color-coded labels on my spice jars; set up a compost bucket in the freezer. We nailed pictures to the walls and put our toothbrushes in the bathroom, side by side in a blue ceramic cup. 

But decor could not disguise that things were falling apart. I kept reorganizing in an effort to fix what was wrong, constantly changing things around the house—the furniture, the shelves in the fridge, the lighting, the sound of my footsteps—to accommodate her endless demands. 

I woke up one morning to a quiet house. Jade had left early for work and I was alone. A small box was waiting for me on the dining room table. Inside was a necklace resting on a bed of cotton and dried ryegrass. It had a dark-linked chain with a pewter charm depicting the chemical formula for red wine: a pair of carbon rings imbued with three hydrogen-oxygen molecules, long, crooked, and thin.

It was an exact replica of the necklace Jade bought me that first Christmas. I had lost it six months ago, when things were still hopeful. I turned the new charm over and saw that it had the same nick as the original, down on the bottom left-hand side, proving the error was in the mold, not the cast. 

I stared down at the necklace, remembering how my fingers wrestled with its s-hook clasp. The two halves were almost mirror images, though one was more ornate than the other, disguising its grip with its beauty. It would get tangled in my scarves during the winter, tearing holes through many of my favorite things. 

The tears I had been holding back for months released, surprising me with their hot flood on my cheeks. I wiped them away quickly, as though afraid I would get caught, and picked up the note Jade had left with the box. I love you, it said. With everything I’ve got. I can’t wait to see you tonight.

It read as though everything was fine—as though love was still a language the two of us shared. As though I didn’t have a suitcase, packed in the closet, ready to leave at any moment. 

Published May 10th, 2020