Sarasota
Companion artwork by Lauren Bradford.
BY SYDNEY LEVY
She had a sticky-sweet smile in the Sarasota heat.
“Three days, three nights.”
It was the final night of our visit down to see my parents, and I only noticed the ripening sun as it coaxed June’s head to the east. Her head was pillowed by a nest of gold, which did not splay out smooth and reflective like on dry inland days but tangled with the fraying edges of the quilt, suspended by humidity. She lay among discarded orange peels and flip-flops, opening and closing the spaces between her fingers. I repeated her actions from my lawn chair and thought of her fingers, always cold. She got that from my father. Even if she would not have more memories like this, she had his hands.
I hoped she would remember this feeling with our grocery store oranges up north. I could not see from the cement stoop, but I was sure that her fingernails were white with bitter pith, fingers and mouth juice-stained. She smiled at the stickiness.
I had never learned to tell time by the sunset and made that child’s mistake of staring too long. I closed my eyes against the day’s receding warmth. With the burning image rose a second sun against my eyelids.
I needed to stay. My sister, Emily, swore she could handle our parents’ care on her own. Of course, I mailed a check every month to help with medicine and the rest of it. But to Emily my distance was abandonment. She had the yellow house next door while I had a cubicle with picture frames and half-painted walls, states away. This would make it difficult to sell the house. There’d be a job for June’s father anywhere. It wouldn’t pay as much down here, but it didn’t cost as much, either. And we had his parents to think about, too. He told me I couldn’t keep pulling June out of school to see them. He reduced my parents to pronouns long ago.
“Mommy.”
“Mm?”
I opened my eyes, June’s face obscured by my second sun. She asked when dinner would be. She already knew the answer, but her pressing reminded me to check the stove. I rose slowly and smoothed out the impressions of woven bands on my thighs. More transience. I hesitated to leave her outside, but the street was busy enough. June was eight years old now, getting big. She was only half that age last time we came down here. My only daughter. Would she take care of me?
The lawn chair collapsed easily upon itself. I rested it against the vinyl clapboard of the house, which gently undulated from age and heat. A strip came up at the edge closest to the storm-door. I jabbed with my index finger and watched it spring back. Much of the house was like this, the corners coming up.
The door creaked closed behind the screened-in porch. Against the left wall was the daybed, speckled with constellations and crescent moons. That’s where Papa slept in the summers when he would hear or listen to the rain. I wanted June to have memories with him there, in the crook of his arm, repeating, “Uno, dos, tres…” and imitating his accent.
I smiled to myself, wondering if she’d later be good at impressions. She wouldn’t. Instead of indulging these fantasies, though, she preferred to make a game of waiting at the netting of the window screens for the little house lizards to scamper down. She liked the way it tickled when they crawled up her arm.
Yellow light bid me forward through the archway and into the kitchen. It was just as rooster-clad as our Queens apartment had been when I was June’s age. These mismatched, enamel roosters must have reminded my mother of Poland. She used to mimic their crows and wipe the sleep out of my eyes in the morning. She did not sit listlessly and wring her hands the last time I had seen her. She was forgetting. I refused to use the other word. I smoothed my mother’s hair and kissed her cheek and lingered before straightening. This was not for daughters to do.
“Margaret.”
I didn’t know whether to correct her anymore. It never made a difference, and frustration only made her more confused. So I could just be Margaret and remember a before. But these moments were June’s before. I could smooth out the wallpaper in my stories, un-chip the enamel. I could rewrite a name, too.
The pot sputtered behind me. I lifted the metal lid and winced from the steam. We always ate stuffed cabbage when we came down. The smell clashed with Florida heat and the wafts of Spanish-language television shows seeping in from the side room. Both immigrants, my parents had met working in a textile factory in Brooklyn. Polish and Puerto Rican.
“It’s almost ready, Mom.”
I called June in to eat. She bounded up the porch steps into her seat. Dad called her “cariña,” and waved his fork toward her plate. June unraveled the little rolls. She picked at the rice and pork and nudged them into piles.
“Just give it one bite.” I could not be so gentle.
“I don’t like it.”
“You’ve never tried it.”
I asked if it would be chicken nuggets or Cheerios tonight. She asked could she pour from the box this time and missed the bowl. With still-stained fingers she picked up the small mess and popped each grain into her mouth. She crunched with her mouth open. Between the sounds I reminded her to get her things together, we’d be leaving early in the morning.
*
The screen door crashed against the sound of their last “I love you,” although this would not come true until later. An implacable mixture of Nana’s Polish, Papa’s Spanish, and June’s English, the phrase was a thing entirely new. I bumped our suitcase down the cinderblock stairs and against my legs, sweating and stifling my curses. Its weight settled on the cracking concrete of the path. It was pebbly and old-fashioned and unlike the chalk-covered sort back home. June slipped out of her flip-flops and massaged her toes against blades of Florida grass, stiff and sharp.
“I’ll call when we’re back home. Come on, Junie.”
Home. Here had never been home for either of us. And these three days, three nights were not long enough to make a play at any kind of life. The trunk of the taxi slammed. It was time to go. I helped her into the backseat before I remembered that she was old enough to do it herself now. She buckled herself in. I went to close the door.
“You said I could take a lizard home!”
“There’s nowhere to put it. And it’s too cold.”
Neither of them would be able to live alone, I was sure. I’d talk to Emily about it later. For now, the meter was running, and the plane would not wait. I looked back at the house, or I must have, and then back at them. My dad, her Papa, cupped my face in his hands. Cloudy brown eyes.