"You drink coffee now," she said. "That totally changes my image of you."
And I thought back to when I joined this family, uncertainly, not formally, eleven years ago. Still a vegetarian, not quite recovered from the grips of disordered eating, certainly not confident in who I was. Who I would grow to be.
"When I showed up, I wouldn't have eaten the turkey," I said.
And we all laughed.
When we arrived in Iowa City on Wednesday night, I still had one foot in work, in my Blackberry, in which I often sink into like a warm, welcoming bath. I understand what I'm supposed to do there.
"Can we drive past the DG house?" I asked Beloved. And I gave him directions to get there, even though when I met him, he lived in this city. His experience of it and mine are very different.
The brick house loomed in the rain. I wanted to show the little angel the formal living room, the furniture covered in pink and blue, the looping formality of that sweeping staircase. I wondered if my own composite picture might still hang somewhere in a back hallway, maybe the chapter room, even though I'd graduated fifteen years before. I felt the knock of the secret handshake on my palm as I stood, once again, on the front steps. Waiting to be let in.
But the house was closed up for break. There was no one there. Before I turned back to the car in the rain, I caught a glimpse through the curtains of the chandelier, remembered waiting under it.
We drove around Iowa City on the way to Thanksgiving at my brother and sister-in-law's house. I pointed out Currier Hall, where I lived for two years. I pointed out the apartment in which I created flat lemonus discuses flying cookies -- cookies that wouldn't even dissolve in the rain! -- and learned you should never trust boys who said they would walk you home so you could be safe from strangers. I stared at the apartment window, remembering waking up suddenly with his unexpected weight on my sternum, of throwing him out, screaming for my roommates, shrieking at the sound his fists made as he pounded on my bedroom window while I hid in my closet, his howls that I'd gotten it all so very wrong.
I hadn't gotten it wrong.
Time passed.
I took us past 420 Church Street, where I lived with my sister and friends and an iguana who would grow to be six feet long, long enough to qualify him for the zoo when my roommate finally donated him after he grew bigger than the dog. I pointed out my bedroom window as we drove by, wondering how many people had slept there since I had.
Hankfest, sometime during the flannel era
We drove past 613 S. Dubuque, where I lived with the friends with whose children my daughter now plays. I told her about the pumpkin that smashed in the hood of my roommate's Festiva and the frigid walks home to that apartment, cutting through the lobby of the hotel in which I now sit, writing out this post longhand.
We took my girl to Micky's, the place my friends and I used to call "headquarters," and sat in the booth on which I danced on my 21st birthday.
Micky's, front booth
They were out of kid's menus, so the bartender handed my girl a legal pad and some crayons. She drew a picture of two suitcases.
Little angel in the front booth
We pointed out the bar in which Beloved and I first met after flirting for months over e-mail and a proprietary Lotus Notes database.
I remembered sitting on the top of the jungle gym on the way to the DG house when I was 20 years old, listening to Jimmy Buffett on repeat over and over. Son of a Sailor.
My daughter stirred in her sleep.
I'm not the person I was when I walked these streets at 18, 19, 22. I'm 36 now, and I'm on the 36th revision of my rough draft. Better, stronger.
But certainly not final.
Revision 36
