Jennifer Croft - Homesick: a memoir

HOMESICK

a memoir

JENNIFER CROFT

The Unnamed Press
Los Angeles, CA

AN UNNAMED PRESS BOOK

Copyright 2019 Jennifer Croft

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to . Published in North America by the Unnamed Press.

www.unnamedpress.com

Unnamed Press, and the colophon, are registered trademarks of Unnamed Media LLC.

ISBN: 9781944700942

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

Photographs by Jennifer Croft and Laurie Croft

Cover Design by Jaya Nicely

The Russian poem titled There are no boring people in this world by Yevgeny Yevtushenko was originally published in Tenderness: New Poems, Moscow, 1962.

Translation Copyright Boris Dralyuk 2017

This book is a work of creative nonfiction.

Names, identifying details, and places have been changed.

Distributed by Publishers Group West

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition

for my sister

Contents

We photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth that can make them come back again.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

A picture is a secret about a secret. The more it tells the less you know.

Diane Arbus

HOMESICK

Remember when I used to make you practice saying words?

Id say, Repeat after me: Egg, and youd lean back ever so slightly like you were about to take off and then go, AIG! An emphatic Oklahoman always.

Although each time for one split second (German: Augenblick, literally blink of an eye, in blinks oldest meaning of starry fleeting gleam) youd just sit there and wait for my face to tell you whether you had done it right.

And then Id scowl, and you would look away.

PART ONE:
SICK

Their mom gets them ready for all the possible disasters that might ever occur

So she reads aloud the headlines from the Tulsa World at breakfast while Amy and Zoe eat their Cheerios. The girls stay quiet while their mother talks, but they dont really listen. All they know is that there is always a disaster happening somewhere. Besides tornados there are earthquakes, and plane crashes, and wars. There is an AIDS epidemic, although neither Amy nor Zoe knows what AIDS is. They only know they are supposed to wash their hands.

There is also the story of the shibboleth, which means when you cant cross the river because you say the words wrong and then get murdered.

When she takes her baths their mom reads them articles from Good Housekeeping. She never ever takes showers because she says she saw a movie one time where the main character got killed while she was taking a shower, and then there was blood everywhere. She likes for the girls to keep her company while shes in the bathtub.

Sometimes she tells family stories. She always tells everyone the one about the crazy neighbor from down the cul-de-sac who shot his family and then hid in the big tree in the backyard. Their dad was off in Stillwater running one of his workshops on geography. So their mom went and picked his rifle up and prepared herself to do whatever was necessary to protect them. She put Amy under the bed and told her to stay there no matter what, and not to make a sound. No matter what, she repeats, and every time she tells the story her voice gets thick there.

Zoe was still a baby and had to be held. Even though she was a baby she could sense that something was wrong because she would not stop crying, and that made you think, says their mother, about those women in the Holocaust who had to smother their own kids so they wouldnt get discovered.

Amy and Zoe know the Holocaust was when the Jewish people all got murdered for no reason and dumped into a big pit in the forest.

So their mother had Zoe in one arm, wailing, and the gun in the other. The police were there already and had him surrounded. They knew this from the TV because even though it was literally right there in their backyard their mom knew she had to stay away from the windows in case a bullet came through. The crazy neighbor kept shooting and shooting and even shot one of the other neighbors who had come over to help the police.

Here their mother pauses and looks around every time she tells the story.

But the man who got shot chewed tobacco. And he happened to be chewing tobacco right then. The bullet went in through his cheek at an angle like thistheir mother points to her cheek using her forefinger as a pistolbut instead of going on into his throat and finishing him off it lodged in his tobacco!

Everyone always likes that part, which the girls dont understand because they know that tobacco will kill you too, and besides they see this neighbor all the time sitting out on his porch spitting out his black juices into a big tin pail, skin and bones and ragged looking, that ugly old scar on his face.

But Amy hates the whole story. She cant remember being alone under the bed, but shes heard about it so much she can picture it, so much so that sometimes she has dreams about it: Zoe orbiting around, crying, out of her reach.

In the end, the crazy neighbor shot himself, and then he died.

Even though she knows shes not supposed to, Amy looks forward to tornados

Even in the day the sky gets black, and the streets get empty. The wind pries back the leaves of the silver maple tree, and underneath they gleam.

When its a tornado watch they dont do it, but when its a tornado warning, the girls go and get inside the pantry, where they squeeze in among the cans and powders and cardboard boxes and wait until one of their parents says they can come out. The pantry is the only place in the whole house that does not have windows. You have to stay away from windows when a tornado comes because the very thing tornados love best is breaking glass, and if that happens, and youre sitting for example in the bathtub right below the bathroom window, you will almost inevitably get hurt.

When the sirens start, Amy gets them organized. She has developed a system. Each of them is allowed three toys, not more, and Amy is in charge of the flashlight because Zoe might break it. Zoe always dallies over her dolls, feeling guilty for playing favorites. But Amy explains to her how in life you have to make choices, and eventually Zoe always does, although sometimes she tries to hide things in her tiny pants pockets.