The Start of a Memoir
By Sage Hinkleman
Sage Leona Hinkleman is a cancer who enjoys putting her emotions into words that other people can read and understand. She is a graduating senior and hopes to one day join the Peace Corps.
Nobody will tell me my birth story. I’ve heard bits & pieces from grandma—mom’s water broke in her bedroom upstairs. Mom yelled for her own mother who rushed up the stairs & drove her oldest daughter to the hospital. Dad was a little bit late; I think. He was at a music festival with mom’s little sister—Woodstock ’99 in Rome, New York, actually. That has helped explain the clothes he was wearing in the pictures someone took at the hospital, and his eyes so goddamn red that I asked about and didn’t get an explanation until grandma told me when I was older.
Grandma has always been explaining things to me that I haven’t heard the full story about. When I was thirteen and talked to her about the car wreck that killed my cousin Gabriel last year, how sad it made me. She wondered why someone told me that & explained that it was wrong.
We sat in her eighteen wheeled parked Wal-Mart truck that she drove for a few weeks at a time—me in the passenger seat and her in the back, pulling food out of the cooler for us to make lunch with. I used to love going with her on the road whenever mom would let me. “He hung himself in the woods in Great Grandma Molly’s backyard.” She closed the top of the cooler and sat down in the driver’s seat with a handful of grapes in her mouth, “that’s where the police found him.”
What? I asked. Why don’t my parents tell me anything?
My grandma’s house was the first house I lived in, until my mom graduated high school & I suppose got a job and an apartment with dad. It’s funny how so many things change but don’t change at all. My parents are still renting a house and when I need real answers, I ask grandma.
Growing up in upstate New York, I lived in Parkedge Townhouses until I was ten years old & I had everything there that I needed. There were at least fifty houses all lined up in rows of five. The five houses connected and each row of houses a different color. There was light green, light blue, red, and there was plain white—the color of our row and our house. The fifty houses in groups of five formed a giant circle. My best friends all lived a few doors down from me. Danielle—we started a band together. We were the Parker Twins (named after the townhouse complex we lived in of course). Danielle, jet black hair and 5’7 by age eleven, was adopted & didn’t found out until she was much too old. I was the first friend she told. She taught me how to braid my hair.
And Yulia—she had moved to Parkedge from Russia as a toddler, she was a year or two older than me & had an older brother named Denis that I may have been in love with. Once on his birthday I walked up to him on the basketball court and handed him a card with a heart on it. I don’t think he was very impressed. Yulia’s house was my favorite to visit. Her mother always cooked for me, fresh dandelion tea from flowers in the backyard that I helped her pick. I remember Yulia’s mother’s voice more clearly than her own, a wonderful accent that I could have sat & listened to all day.
I remember Tyaisha & Devaisha, I knocked on their doors every day & asked them to come outside and play. We never had concrete plans of what we were going to do, but I don’t know if I’ve ever had more fun than then. Saul of course; Yulia’s first boyfriend, and Isaiah my first boyfriend who lived two doors down. I still remember his one lazy eye and sweet smile. Mom & Dad didn’t mind me holding his hand, even though his dad tried to sell them crack once. It’s funny though, my first kiss was with Isaiah’s cousin Nyree; all the girls lined up and he paid each of us a quarter for a kiss. When I told my mother, she said that I shouldn’t be doing things like that.
My sister, Eva, four years younger than me, had a boyfriend too. His name was Cory, & he was chunky. I still remember his mom walking out on her back porch watching us play outside. “Cory!” she would yell, I remember her diamond lip stud moving as she spoke, “You and your friends want icee?” Yes of course! We all ran to her porch and got handed a popsicle stick. I couldn’t help staring at her fingers, she had the longest nails I had ever seen in my life. They were constantly a new color with a new design. Sometimes bright red with a flower, sometimes dark purple with rhinestones. I must have thought that they were real.
Eva & Cory would hide under the picnic table, their ‘secret spot’. I dared them to kiss each other. I told Eva that if she kissed him, she could have some of my makeup. “Okay” she said. I don’t think I ever actually gave her any.
There was an apple tree near the woods that connected to Parkedge, & sometimes Danielle and I would climb it as far up as we could and pick some of them. They weren’t pretty apples. They were small & always kind of brown and bitter tasting. Danielle’s mother called them crabapples. Nobody else really wanted them, so sometimes we would make apple pies. I set up a table outside and we cut them up and smashed them down to some type of saucy mess and put them in a bowl. Neither of our parents would give us the ingredients we needed to make an apple pie, “flour & sugar & probably an egg, right?” Because, we were kids playing outside with crabapples & why waste flour on that. So, sometimes we knocked on our neighbors’ doors. We told them that we were making apple pie & we had run out of flour and eggs halfway through and could we please borrow some? We would give them a piece when we finished making it.
The ladies were always a little bit skeptical but eventually handed over the ingredients that we mixed in with our saucy mess and dipped our fingers in to taste. It was never good, and it sat there for a few days until disappearing from the animals that had found their way to it.
My sister has always been beautiful. At five years old in Parkedge she already got compliments from all the neighbors, “what a gorgeous little girl you have”—my mother heard it everywhere she went. My mother was beautiful too. Young only twenty-seven then, they made a pleasing picture when they walked down the street together. My mother with her brown hair down to her hips and my sister with her blonde hair so light you could call it white put in pigtails on her head. I felt proud riding my bike beside them, “that’s my mom. And that’s my little sister”. I didn’t care how I looked at that time, buckteeth and hair always pulled back in two French braids, I knew my family’s faces stood out and I was part of that family, even if I wasn’t the one getting the compliments.
I remember when my little sister’s face got hurt. Parkedge had its own playground, and me and Eva walked there probably once a day. It was a wooden playground, wood already worn out and no longer a smooth surface but a place where you could run your hand along the side of a board and get three splinters. A lot of the kids went there—there was swings and monkey bars and two slides. One of the slides was even a tunnel slide. Once someone dared Nyree to pee down it, probably me, and he did. Everyone screamed and ran away. We never touched the tunnel slide again until Danielle told her dad—he was the head of maintenance at Parkedge—and it got thoroughly disinfected. The floor of the playground was covered in rocks, and a lot of the kids at Parkedge liked to throw these rocks. One day me and Eva walked into the playground during a rock fight and hopped on the swings and a rock hit Eva right in the eye. It was a big rock, and it was thrown hard. She started to scream.
I couldn’t believe it, they had hit my five-year-old sister in her beautiful face. I walked right up to the boy that did it and told him to apologize right now. He laughed at me. I took my sister by her hand and walked her home fast; she cried the whole way. When my dad took the icepack off her eye I gasped, it was black and blue and red and purple and swollen. Before I started to say anything, my dad looked at me and shook his head. “It doesn’t look that bad” he spoke more gently to her than I had ever heard him do before, “It will be gone in a week. Don’t cry anymore.”
But the scar never fully went away. Today my sister still has a mark under her left eye, some of the veins stand out and it always looks tender. She got a rock thrown at her when she was five and you can still see the evidence of it. I want to explain that to my dad. Marks don’t always go away. Apologies cannot physically heal things. Some bruises last forever and don’t go away in a week.
Eva is still beautiful, and I put my hand under her left eye and rub my thumb over it sometimes like I did that night it was swollen as we laid down for bed when I was ten. I was going to get whoever did this to her back. I was going give him two black eyes tomorrow. Eva has more marks now—they are scattered from her head to her toe just like mine. This is inevitable; I think, life is mean sometimes. But I still remember her face before the scars started forming, my little five-year-old sister—skin so untouched that you would look at her and wonder if life even deserved someone so pure. Sometimes I still don’t think it does.
Often enough, my dad turned on the Sirius XM and flipped it to station 23- The Grateful Dead station. He turned it up loud, opened our windows in the living room. Usually around 6 or 7 at night, when the sun was beginning to set, the orange and golden beads flooded into the room, and he opened a can of beer. I wish I could remember what beer he drank, but he kept it right within reach of him as he bobbed his head to the music.
We had a golden-brown vase made out of glass with little triangles throughout the whole thing that sat on our coffee table and seemed to sparkle. If my dad held it in the right angle of the setting sun streaming through the window, the prism would reflect golden triangles on every inch of the walls throughout the living room. It was so much fun to watch them dance and twirl along with them. He would spin the vase, slowly, and then sometimes fast as the triangles danced dervishes in the house. He could twirl the vase upside down, so the triangles switched places with each other. I would chase them, jump on the couch and run my fingers along the walls feeling them, grasping and catching shadows.
He could only do this when the sun was setting though, when the light hit the windows in a certain way. It was the golden hours, and the music made my heart feel things it had never felt before. I spun myself in circles until I couldn’t see straight. My braids whipped at my face and I smiled with real happiness. And then, I laid down, flat on my back and watched the ceiling. The triangles were up there too, and they swayed left and right as Jerry crooned. My dad sang with him and closed his eyes as if he was someplace else. Eva chased the triangles with me sometimes and turned the music up louder and louder until all three of us couldn’t hear anything else. The songs all blended into each other, they never seemed to stop playing.