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by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
What
I wrote to the 6 addresses I got from US Search:
Hey there,
I'm trying to reconnect with my cousin, Anne, who I lost touch with eight
years ago. Anne, if this is you, this is your cousin Leah -----.
I'm living in Toronto but am going to be in New York for a couple
of months this fall. If you're around, I would love to get in
touch and find out how life has been treating you. You can reach
me at the mail and email addresses above or call me at (416)
***-****- it's my Toronto number but I'll be checking it frequently.
If this isn't
Anne, but you know her current address, I would really appreciate it if you
could forward this letter to her. I hope this letter finds you well, and
I would love to be in touch.
Love,
Leah
What I really wanted to write:
Dear cuz,
Hey there. It's been a while. I have
no idea what my mom told you happened to me. Maybe you think
I'm dead. Maybe she told you I was crazy. Maybe you haven't talked
to her since Christmas '96 when you didn't send her a thank-you
note and she decided to stop talking to you forever. I live in
Toronto now, I'm a writer, I live with my girlfriend. I think
about you all the time and wonder how life is for you. Are you
painting again? Cutting hair? Both? Does your mom still tell
you you're fat and ugly? Did you get out and stay away?
On the Intellius and US Search searches
they had addresses for you in San Francisco and outside Boston
and my heart leapt when I saw that. I thought, maybe someday
I'd be in the Mission and walk past you, that maybe you have
a fabulous hairdresser day job and get to paint and fuck all
night,
that you were another Worcester girl that got out.
You had flaming orange hair and black
lace goth clothes. You cut hair at one of the only places in
Worcester that was a salon, not a barbershop or a SuperCuts,
but it still paid what cutting hair in Worcester does. The dirty
pink carpeted attic bedroom you shared with your sister was always
full of makeup, smoke, perfume, black net scarves, drawings the
two of you had done when you were on acid. When I went from nerd
to punk at 16 and showed up at Thanksgiving wearing a black tank
top and ripped jeans, you just grinned and said, "I wondered
when that was gonna happen."
Remember that one Thanksgiving dinner?
The one where the family shit was so intense that we got up in
the middle of dinner without saying anything and walked out the
front door down the block? We walked as fast as we could 'til
we got to the Frito Lay truck at the end of the street, crouched
down behind it and lit up. Remember all the times we got through
family catastrophe by buying a case and renting the most depressing
movies we could find? The time we were watching Harvey Keitel
shoot up in Bad Lieutenant and your sister said, "Wow
I remember what that feels like!" and you and me looked at each
other over her head like, no she didn't.
When you were born, my mom hadn't even
thought of me, and she loved you like you were hers. She read
to you, sang to you, did all those Doctor Spock build-your-baby's-brain
things, and you knew French by the time you were three. The story
my mom always told me was that you'd been so smart, just as smart
as me, and then she'd left and gone to London even though she
knew that you'd never catch back up. A year later, mom came back
with my dad, and she clucked that you'd lost all your French.
Your parents didn't have books, and they didn't see that you
got into the gifted program or buy you paint.
My mom would shake her head, so sad,
what a loss, but I don't remember her buying you French books.
She never mentioned that you bought yourself colored pencils
and sketchbooks from your own money, but I saw them in your room.
I don't remember her offering to help with your college applications.
She might've, but I know my mother believed that there was one
shot and if you blew it, it was your own fault.
My mother always said that I had to
get away, that if I stayed I was a failure, and you were always
the specter she raised. I was not to be like you and your sister,
girls with such promise who'd wasted it. You'd made friends with
kids from Worcester and cared about them too much to let go.
You fucked up when you got a scholarship to Adelphi, came back
from Brooklyn after one semester. You were stuck, and ma blamed
you. Hadn't she talked to you, urged you to go back to school,
told you what to do? She never asked what you wanted. She pushed
you and when you wouldn't go where she pointed she threw up her
hands at you, like she did at the daughters of her friend who
wouldn't just leave their abusive husbands when they were commanded
to.
I made it, barely, though my three
and a half years on scholarship. We weren't raised in a hick
town, but the buildings were so perfect; everybody was so perfect.
I couldn't grasp it and I didn't feel perfect enough to be here.
I understood then, what you'd gone through, surrounded by girls
with straight teeth who'd been given the world at birth. I'd
been raised to always know I was smart, smart before anything
else-didn't I win scholarships, prizes, take out two tons of
books from the library every week, get the 98th percentile in
everything? But for the first time in my life, I felt stupid.
Women's studies had been taken over by cultural studies and everyone
seemed to have gone to some pre-school where you leaned what
"problematize" meant.
I'd never not known everything in the class before and I couldn't
imagine admitting my ignorance in front of them, or challenging
them on some kind of class thing I had barely started to put
together. Weren't we the middle class side of the family, because
of the books, because of me going away to college? Even you would
never call yourself that - your parents owned their house, your
dad had a good job at Morgan's and all of you were going to state
college.
I transferred
one and a half years in, wanted to drop out third year, my
mother's glare kept me in, making enough A's to keep my financial
aid.
I didn't stay in that humming city. I didn't
go back home either when, right after graduation, Mom urged
me to move back to Worcester and take care of her and, I knew,
never
leave. I moved to another city, across a national border, broken
down but with arts grants and backyards.
I had to leave Worcester because of
abuse, because of class, to write, to be queer, to find other
South Asians and Sri Lankans. I don't know if I could ever move
back to Massachusetts because of the tight segregated racism,
because of the tightness, period - sun-damaged lobster pink assholes
in ugly plaid and LL Bean shorts everywhere, everybody wearing
khaki and nobody wearing hot pink ‚ but it's never, never left
me, and the longer I'm away, the more I feel it. My girlfriend
grew up in a similar dying blue-collar town in northern Ontario.
Fuck, I started tearing up when I was watching the video for
"Photograph" by
Nickelback the other day.
Annie, I still don't know the answers
to so many questions. Do working-class artists always have to
get the fuck out from where we're from for the shit we do to
matter? What does success mean for working-class girl geniuses?
Would I be able to make a living as a writer and teaching artist
- the way I now can - if I hadn't left Worcester? If telling
the family secrets was the only way I could write and get good
at it, where I could not be stuck, does that mean leaving home?
How do you talk about abuse without leaving the community you
are from, at least for a while? How do you go back without gentrifying
the hood?
I don't know the answers, but I can
come to Worcester and we can go to a diner or Eleni's Midnight
Cafe and talk about it. I love the friends and lovers that are
family but it doesn't stop me from wishing I had a family that
was blood. In getting out, I never wanted the trade-off to be
losing you. I wanted my writing to re-weave my family, not tear
me out of it.
Maybe you think I'm crazy, the ungrateful
daughter, but if I'm crazy you are, too. It was the same shit
that was going to keep us both trapped forever. I pray your story
is that you got out - not even out of the city, but of the place
that told you that you couldn't do your work. That you paint,
write, are the genius you are. That you know I love you.
Love always,
Leah
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