In Which We Discover How Choice Is Structured

What We Think About Them Leaving

by CARMEN AIKEN

Three things happened in quick succession, two in perfect order, one lagging. In late fall, my brother drives my parents to the airport where my father boards a plane to interview for a job. On the way driving to his afternoon classes he is blindsided by a woman turning right on red. When he calls me at my job, I’m between client calls and can only make out hysteria and suburban traffic. He hangs up and in a panic I kill my phone line, run to the bathroom and call him back to ascertain how fast I need to be by his side. Later that night I catch a ride to the suburbs and buy him dinner, have a few beers. I ride back out on the train that weekend and we talk on the way to pick up my parents. We plan our questions, we resolve to listen.

The second thing is that afternoon the parents ask us what we think about them leaving the country and the question is their decision and our answer. Over the next few hours of contracts and timetables, distance in miles and wine (me, mostly) we make the joke that at least the car, totaled, is one thing they will not have to get rid of.

The third thing. I break up with the boy who I've been spring-summer-no-pause-in-love-with. It could be called mutual: he didn't know how to leave me. I believe now, and think I knew it then, that if I had to start letting things go he had to be one of the first things to try and release.

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We controlled our reaction and were far from indifferent, although the components were not unfamiliar. Parents on their way to some idea of retirement, a job offer, children with their own jobs and beers and the ability to vote. And so? So Sweden? It could be Houston, Bogota, Mumbai, anywhere. The parents returned from a visit, which was really an interview, which was really an almost-yes and sent a missive through the satellites: When u free? Need to talk. 

Talking. Constantly, more than in years, as if each word would fit every synapse firing, each question could find its way to  answer. After the ride back from the airport, parents spilled maps, postcards, brochures, two candy bars from Heathrow. The questions came down to needs and wants and expectation. Do you want to work for these people? (Yes). Will they pay you money you feel is fair as a payment to work for them? (Yes). Did you like Sweden? (Yes). When will you have to leave? (Soon. Sooner than anyone thinks, soon sans holidays, soon sans time, always the loss of time.)

Do you want to go? An answer read in the excited face of a father who may or may not have faced redundancy in a changed world and who has worked for the same company for longer than the children have been alive, or the marriage. This is the father telling stories and making plans from percolated anticipation on a plane or taxi or train ride: a trip to Spain, a birthday in Copenhagen, a father who went from the Air Force to school to job to marriage to children and what lasted was travel, was work that took him so many places. This is a joy impossible to qualify or verbalize. This is a face and a quiet. 

And none of this worked without wife and mother. What are the reasons people stay together for thirty years, when one person is constantly back and forth in other lands? What is the reason two people decided to join when mother has taken off from the nest she grew up in to live a year in a fascist country four thousand miles south? What is the reason she says yes when a proposal comes in airmail with a bouquet of flowers? This is a hardiness, an inquisitiveness, a need to move, keep moving, keep going and finding written into some vein.

The honesty of the afternoon peaked with: if the world were different, and secure, and children older and tied to a career or person or children of their own or land, would there still be a life away from them in a land 4,250 miles away? And the answer: yes, we would go in a heartbeat, yes. Yes yes yes. Then go, the children say. Go.

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The house had to go. Not everything, not all at once. My mother would stay for another half a year or so to sort it out with my brother and I. The Swedish company would pay for a cargo container of furniture, mementos, a bicycle, for movers to pack and send it across the ocean.

In the beginning I tried to imagine Sweden and the apartment their bed, sofa, kitchen table, pots and pans and silverware would land in. I’d traveled to so few places and could only create a generic European city from my study abroad months in London or people who populated those streets as tall, pale, androgynous electronic musicians.

But the work of the move threw me out of my family’s future into too much of the recent past. I returned from visits on the weekend laden with backpacks and paper shopping bags of adolescent detritus, college paperbacks from the 1970s, stuffed animals. The weekend before my father officially moved, six weeks to Christmas and his garage full of mechanical wares and used chemicals cackling at its corpulence, I cried morosely in my junior high bedroom over a pile of book reports. My father threw up his hands and my mother told him to leave me be.

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At the time I worked as a virtual personal assistant and receptionist for a niche startup, whose clients were middling consumer attorneys across the United States. Consumer attorneys meant they trucked in the bad luck of humanity, a way to play the last hand via the legal system. This is just to explain I fielded phone calls and correspondence from thousands of citizens bankrupt, foreclosed on, wounded in surgery, dividing their possessions in dissolving marriages, drunk, arrested. It was a job I held for two years, which seemed miraculous and was the refrain of the burgeoning decade: desperate searches for work, low pay, relief. When I try and tell about this to people who have not known me very long I say, I wanted to go to law school. Like a few other tales I have said it so often it has now become true.

I felt lucky then but also miserable and stuck and all of it coagulated into months of thinking I could separate my work from my life. In the beginning of my job I worked a night shift (lawyers in California also need girl fridays) and spent much of my non-work hours biking, cooking, reading books, trying to write. When I worked Midwest business hours I slipped into the hazards of dating, into whiskey, into trying to write with some wine, but then just the wine.

After two years of incentives, shiny middling-startup company culture made up of beer and happy-hour parties, three rounds of mass layoffs and every day full of sobbing or cursing clients, I was out. I interviewed at startups, bars, a couple nonprofits: in general anything directed at young adults across the city for months. I’d go to work full of anticipatory rage and cold biking fury and take weekends to ride out on the Blue Line to the suburbs.

Over Thanksgiving, one family member down, I cleared through wine and bits from the liquor shelf that was to vanish before next summer (with the exception of several fine bottles of Venezuelan rum, still in storage to this day). I felt extraordinarily weepy, worn down with winter too soon, with the house emptying about us. At one point before I pulled the turkey breast out of the oven, my brother confronted me with my bitterness and the lashing that came with my tongue running off the wine, told me I was worth more.

By January, a clear and cold winter that year, I quit the job, gave them ten days notice, and applied to graduate school. In March I found work at a local bike shop, two days after I traveled to Washington D.C. with my mother to the Swedish Embassy to pick up her paperwork. That June I jogged out the doors of the store to drive her car to my grandparents house a week later, where it would sleep until whenever they returned or it had to go somewhere else. The last night we stayed in the house, before it filled with open house furniture and flowers, I tried to sleep in the middle of the first-floor living room on the laminate floor I’d put in a few years prior, staring at the swingset through the glass door.

+

I don’t tell many people, right away, about my parents. I learned because after starting new jobs and paths in life where after the obligatory inquisitions about origins, I say I grew up in a nearby suburb but my parents live across the ocean. This is met with a thousand things and I’ve never liked explaining. My reticence has graciously allowed most people to forget and so whatever version of this life I live with my family now cast across countries (as has been true for many limbs of my ancestral tree) is mine. My brother shares the same sentiment.

For so many months that year, though, the anger I felt lapped around the bits of mantle built of (including, but not all): feeling like a dutiful heir, channeling all the others who have loved their families even when they go to frontiers or borders or jobs, the fear of someone who has kept rebellion to individual wounds secret to try not to burn my family’s bridges or barns, questions of pricing air travel.

What I have settled on is that I came to exist because of persons who decided to leave where they came from. The past century drastically changed how we view place, how we can be (or not be) tied to it, the ability to move rapidly. I learn this over and over again in graduate school, how everywhere is anywhere. I could say its true, but as anyone who has ever been in a long distance relationship or unable to attend a wake or caught in a land with too-fast tongues can tell, this has changed less than we think. My parents do not live around the corner or down the train from me and no skype chat can change that, but we make it work. The contents of my suitcase on my first visit where I joked to my brother, “I’m a space smuggler, kid,” included corn tortillas, hot sauce, harina pan and hibiscus tea.

+

Moving is its own unique exhaustion and tedium, which is why everyone hates even talking about it. I didn’t even have to move. Before then I’d gone from Midwest to Coast, Coast to Island, Coast to Midwest, city flat to city flat, and at that point three times over three years.

My brother and I reveled in ditching detritus in our old high school’s dumpster in the dark, hoping our parents’ property taxes would cover whatever apparent lack of education we received. Our friend who worked at a hardware store told us the store had a legal obligation to dispose of used paint and people often ditched cans of it on their curb. We loaded my brother’s small car’s trunk with all the paint I’d used to redo their garage door, bathroom, kitchen and counted down ONE TWO THREE!, running outside like it was a traffic game, ditching the boxes full of cans and drove away, exhilarated and guilty and sad.

Even with the housing market and the numerous families fleeing the suburbs, the house sold by the end of the summer. My brother lived nearby, for at time, and would ask if I wanted to drive by. I have not seen it since.

+

So we got rid of or packed up: my mother’s piano from her double-wide childhood my grandparents drove up to her first residence after she married in their truck (in storage), tax documents and medical files (shredded and recycled), metal tools, ladders and furniture (picked up by men at dawn from the curb), photo albums of the dead, diplomas, graduation photos (in storage). This list is why I find it less than useful to explain what happened in the move. Most of us will understand this sooner or later.

But at the time it seemed impossible for anyone to understand, which made my own acceptance and agreement that much harder to hold on to.

Incredulity. From everyone. Faces slackened or eyes widened, and they repeated, “SWEDEN?” How was that possible? Half the people who heard this understood the implications of a farther side of the world, the other half tossing off, “Oh, cool” as though retirement meant moving into a condo somewhere warmer. Fact about Sweden: it is comparable in climate to the Midwest. The incredulity comforted. The telling of the same telling over, and over, and over. Everything must go, and the house must sell. There was a job there, and reindeer, and a transparent government.

But the anger. No more possibilities to take up heroin or join the Peace Corps or move to Paris. And anger when people didn't understand the bewilderment. Why did people keep mentioning no one died and no one disowned anyone? Why are those questions thrown into the air? Those are too many words. Who can go to the hospital if there's an accident? Who can come for a Thanksgiving meal? What is a Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter meal? Does anyone really enjoy turkey breast? Will they enjoy turkey or tortillas or pizza if they chose to spend time with family near or far, or chose to not see anyone at all?

I have never professed to enjoy change. I work hard to present the idea of myself as laid-back, able to turn on a dime. It may not make sense but I know it comes from my dislike of making choices, of how growing older has taught me how choice is structured, how few of them actually exist for so many people in this day and age. Then I didn't want those possibilities which was how I ended up where I was: accepting the work that came to me, the reverberations of the break-up, driving down suburban streets to second-hand stores with a backseat full of my family's possessions. Mostly it was how easy to feel angry at whatever passed that seemed not the way it was supposed to be. That was my choice and it was no choice at all.

But it was finally on some days staring at the top of a building in an alley downtown, the smoke curling into the new winter blue. And knowing how beautiful the top of that building was and how beautiful the tops of buildings must be in all of the other places to live.

Carmen Aiken is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about the difference. You can find her website here.

Photographs by the author.

"It Comes Back To You" - Imagine Dragons (mp3)

"Dream" - Imagine Dragons (mp3)

In Which We Clean It Use It Or Send It Away

La Casa Azul

by CARMEN AIKEN

At night in San Miguel, Bernadette drove us up the road from the Casa Azul.

The trip to Guanajuato took around four hours, long stretches of last century’s interstate, treacherous country bus stops, gossip from the front fueled with "Hijoles!" and "Que Padres!" The road to the house was gravel, swaths of scrub surrounding the expansive rancho, one side mined mountains and the other the faraway hiss of the highway.

My face was pressed to the window and my father listened to the chatter in the front, Bernadette’s window cracked open. I suspected if she had a chance she might be smoking a Marlboro, that sort of window crack. But she was a lady and she didn’t. Blue house, blue to black night.

"Oye, Carmen-" Bernie said, "Ven." She slowed the four-wheel drive and stopped in the middle of the road. No cars on the road passing and the night was barely windy. She opened the roof hatch and patted the arm rest. My pa leaned over, craned his neck, went, "Wow."

I pulled my torso out of the hatch, hands on the roof, Guanajuato about me. Bernadette started the engine, mountains at my back, face cool to the warm of the road and city, stars and sheep, fast patter over gravel. I lifted my hands into my hair. I stared hard into a night dispassionate and endless and indelible.

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The first hotel in the Distrito Federal sat on the edge of the Zocalo. A cage elevator led to the rooms next to a gilded keep of tiny birds, blue and green and yellow. We slept there because my father’s friend Sr. Cesar recommended it. I’d like it, he said, and it was how one should stay in the City. The first afternoon my father told me again how my abuela, who I take gleaned pleasure in at being compared to, loved and kept birds. When we sat at the bar and rank Indio and Negro Modelo, which he had been bereft of since he left North America, he pointed to the massive tricolor flag flown in the square. How one early morning he saw the baby-cheeked cadets of the army at dawn, the red and green and white rippling from end to end.

My hair was still long, then, tied back in photos. I grew it out to please a boy I shouldn’t have expended the effort for, at least by then, far too many weeks past our expiration date. One photo has me leaning over the balcony of the hotel room I stayed in. The room was palatial, as hotels always are to me but especially as I lived in a walkup where the space to fit my twin mattress and desk felt assured, controlled. I leaned over the street, the assembled white-collar women in clipped skirts and heels on their way to lunch, the Volkswagen Beetles, the boys hawking bottled water. At night when my parents slept next door, I pushed through the linen drapes to watch the evening pass by, wanted a smoke to exhale into the damp escaping the buildings.

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Jimmy was the caretaker of the Casa Azul, the Blue House. He was handsome, packed together, short and broad, inset eyes and a gap-tooth in the slow but lingering smile. He lived in the house near the gate, between the field of hens and mezcal, quick to open and close the iron when La Senora arrived.

From the taxi between airport and hotel, official, por supuesto, my father and mother talked about Jimmy (which should be read as Yi-Mee), about the caretaker in D.F. named Juan. They knew I understood how things worked, but they were right, the presence of help surprised me. At twenty-five I had not been in a house where dinner was served to me. I noted it arrived on the left, as I was taught as a waitress.

At the Casa Azul, the girl who cleaned and cut the mango and cleared the plates walked up the road from the regional bus system. She was maybe seventeen, or nineteen, or fifteen. Sra. Bernadette stood next to her to cut avocado or insisted on pouring my father more coffee. My ma, la Gringa, protested. My father deferred and quietly nodded Thanks. Stared out the window from the table next to the kitchen, watched the mountains.

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My father spent the life I’ve known him travelling. Sr. Cesar and Sra. Bernadette came to my parents’ house when I was a girl, my memory of them fractured and hazy. My father and Cesar worked together during his tenure in Mexico, my father with his other side away from the reticence, the calm, the observation I saw him in my life as when he worked with officials and engineers who pulled out petroleum, cleaned it, used it or sent it away.

He used his technical degree, years of charm and firmness, his throat that pitched upward and headshakes in Spanish (both instinct and the U.S. Air Force gift of slight deafness). He was often in another country during my life. I knew, especially as I grew older, to call him on Fridays, when I knew he landed. For a time I could manipulate gasoline money from the company he worked for. A few months after I got my driver’s license, I hunched over my tiny car’s steering wheel in a blizzard on the way to the airport, barely miles from their house, to pick him up, daughter tax. I sometimes miss the afternoon hums of flight patterns. I skidded the ramps and almost slid out to pick him up, his small suitcase and nod at the terminal. He expensed the tips and I filled the tank.

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We went to dinner at the house in Mexico City. Cesar filled it with antiquities: beloved Catholic pieces, 19th century furniture, paintings. I later learned he proclaimed himself an Atheist. As a child, he gave my father a painting, reminiscent of El Greco, an old man and his rooster.

"A farmer?" I asked.

"A cockfighter!” My mother frowned. The painting lived in the basement until my parents moved.

At the time I worked at a bike shop, waited to hear about graduate school. We sat and Cesar asked me my plans. I haven’t been able to stop writing since he met me. And so first he asked me when my novel would arrive. I laughed. But school? he asked.

"Urban planning," I answered. I had not completely thought this through.

"Perfecto!" Bernadette slapped her thigh.

"Como architectura?" one of the sons said. My Spanish is, and was, out of depth, and I hated and hate reverting to English. I resolved to answer only when asked. And I said, "Pues, si."

Later I found out Cesar was past 80. I should have assumed this, grown children and man’s empire, a King’s benevolence and graciousness and charm. He did not seem ancient. He asked me questions over dinner--caldo, carne, beautiful sopes in my small palm, furrowed his owl brow. A lover of books and history, he wanted to tell me of my brilliance, made no mention of my throat going from English to Spanish to both. My parents smiled at me. I can see why they like him, why he deigns to respect them. When we walked into the dark hotel, I climbed into the cold and perfect damp sheets, listened to the Zocalo.

+

People who heard about my trip before and after leaned their heads back, smiled, "Ay, San Miguel, Guanajuato!"

Bernadette took us to the center of San Miguel. As my father worked on his complexities, she walked my mother and I around. In shops she pulled skirts and tunics and dresses in blue and yellow and green linen. My mother and I objected, as is our plain- state mindset, but Senora set her tinted lips. I left with the dress, pooling skirts, stamped steel necklaces. I poked the heavy and elaborate earrings through my lobes.

As an infant, my ma held her ground and I didn’t pierce my ears until a grown up, consensually, at age 18, my first year of college. When we met my father after we left the shop, he admired their heft, teased me with their grande chola pull.

El Pipila is the monument attraction in Guanajuato. We did not go into the mining caves. On a post or prenuptial visit to my tias in Venezuela, my pa convinced my ma to go into bat caves in the jungle, bats, bugs, grime, all. But el Pipila is a giant man with a stone on his back, an anonymous hero of the Revolution. He pulled a mining slab on his back, meant to blow the Spaniards for a mile high. And he lived.

I think, now, what would this place I live be like if we erected statues like that? A giant land crossed by epics of tribes, enormous works for those who threw themselves to die because they had to. The Haymarket riots now mean increasing land value west of downtown Chicago, a small plaque, a bar named after the square that rebelling workers were murdered in daylight at serving craft beer..

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The night before we left for San Miguel, my father and Cesar met to talk business. My mother and I left them after Cesar told me about the history of Mexico via a book by Dulles, his brows knit and enticing as any night bird.

After we stared down antiquities in the archeological museum and walked to the hotel, the noise gained around us. The April air was just warm, the cool settled in about the street lights. On the sidewalk I felt my ma stop, and behind swelled masses of men and women, mostly young. They hit drums and chanted, carried banners and giant flags. My mother flattened against the wall as she was taught in more violent countries, and I was about to leap forward. She stopped me. "Carmen Alicia," she commanded, "Cuidate!"

"Ay, ma. Come on." I pled to take pictures for my leftist friends back home. I ran forward, took terrible, blurry night shots of the young marching for better education, for Christ, anything better than what was given to them. The photos turned out full of light, young bodies. I wanted to use the flash and didn’t, knowing how that goes. The march went on for a few blocks, headed towards the Zocalo. When they passed, we waited a few moments. As we walked forward my mother said, "Don’t tell your father."

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When I was a teenager, just able to legally drive, my Tia came to visit us. She was one of my old guard, sister to my long dead Abuela I always wanted to know because I never got to. She was the youngest of the women who I later learned were the stuff of the novels I plotted - some mean or unambitious or tired, some cunning and alcoholic. My Tia was tiny but still got around, having outlived two husbands.

Before she and I took off on an errand, my father told me in no uncertain terms to not let her see me pump gasoline, to keep my nails and hair clean. It was shorter than my lady family complimented me on, but she admired it. Later she bought me beautiful pastel sheets, the color of an ocean or the coast she lived on, where Venezuela sat just a few miles somewhere else. I, in fact, still own most of those sheets and shams.

That April I tried to pack appropriately for the trip, clean jeans, nice shirts, earrings, heels. I even bought a dress I never wore. But Bernadette bought me another one. She would not consider an alternative to her generosity. When she drove us steadfastly out to the Pyramids, she found out I, like many young women my age, had a predilection for owls. She bought clay figures of buhos from all sides, filled my backpack with ceramic surrounded in newsprint. She told me I looked hermosa in queen violet, steel, endless belts embroidered with flowers. She gasped and laughed at my stories: "Hijole!" she’d amaze. At young men in squares or selling snacks in traffic, she’d call, "Joven!" and smile, ask her questions. Until we met, I never knew the joys of a Charro Negro: tequila and Coca Cola, always ordered as Coca Dieta, and encouraged me to sip in the afternoons we took breaks from exploring, dusty and tanned, my brain amazed, my tongue happy and still.

+

The last night when we returned to the Distrito Federal we stayed in the hotel my father made his work base out of during his years in the country. The high rise Maria Isabella looked out on the Angel, the Paseo de Reforma long and cast into the city following the gaze of dead revolutionaries.

One morning I woke up and took the elevator to the lobby, stood in front to watch the stream of people on wheels careen around the circle. The sun felt far away, some stilted heat, and I wondered how to build a life to end up pedalling an old European bicycle down a street in Mexico City some Sunday morning, by myself, basket for my lunch set before me, books in my head. I had just finished Bolano's Savage Detectives, was hoping to commit the next two years of my life to the study, planning and regulation of cities. I did not know a city like Distrito Federal was the future. I just felt a pull to it. That morning I wanted to live anywhere else in the world, alone, full of risky possibilities, leering men, fruit washed in the water of curses.

When my father walked in the lobby of the hotel, the men working there beamed, grasped his hand, greeted him by name. "Welcome back, Senor," they said. They took my parents’ bags instantaneously and I followed with my pack slung between my shoulders. I don’t think I gaped, but watched carefully as they conversed in Spanish. I caught, “Suecia”, my father telling him he had moved from la Chicago, yes, the country was cold, he hoped they’d send him back there often.

"What is this?" I asked my mother. My father moved as a flexible and learned shark, assured and swift.

"What do you expect?" she replied. "He lived here, basically."

That night he crossed us over la Reforma, into the lights and designer clothes and clubs of La Zona Rosa, the lean boys holding hands, where I drank micheladas in a dark street cast with the lights of clubs and liquor signs. So much of the trip was spent in a trio, something I, as a young adult hadn’t known in twenty-something years. They speak Spanish now knowing I understand it, or at least, understand more than I did as a diminishing bilingual child. 

Then I could ask about the work done by my parents in the past, in Pinochet’s Chile, in my father’s travels in Mexico, Colombia, his life in Venezuela. How vast systems got interpreted through my parents, my family, their brains, nicknames and serious pauses, how those came through, “Carmen, you have to understand.” When I declared I’d like to live there, in Mexico City, near the Zocalo, the Zona rosa, the headshakes, the emphatic responses of, "Absolutely not."

I wouldn’t have the language, and they were and are right. All the years I tried to learn, I can still only admire poems in the subjunctive. "San Miguel," they said, "Maybe. Remember, Senor Cesar said you can live in La Casa Azul and finish your novel." Behind this came the knowledge I don’t come from nor belong there. I could be hurt or vanished,or worse, just like any other soft body with skin who falls in love like any silly gringa.

The day I flew back to Chicago, my parents went to Miami for a wedding, and I cried in the airport. I always cry in airports but I didn’t know why I did then, exactly. There was no one to miss or mourn. I would return to the States for my birthday, for a summer, for the beginning of graduate school.

+

The last morning at the Casa Azul, Bernadette and my ma urged me to wear the dress. The morning burnt off and I sat on the wood steps, stared at the mountains. I drank coffee and clicked to the collection of dogs Bernadette alternatively cooed or commanded at. Most of them were beautiful, handsome mixed shepherds. I tried to make my voice like hers, calling, "Luuuuuuula." Outdoor and dusty packed, I realized the dress would be prey to their claws, tongues, affections, and went up to the bedroom to pull on my ratty jeans.

On my way in my pa, soundlessly sipped coffee, blinked at the outside scent, the door.

"Quite la dress," he said at me. "La reina?"

"Always," I agreed.

Before we got in Bernadette’s car to drive down the vast highway, she gathered the dogs.

"Ata! Pirata! Luuuuula!" I called with her. She clapped her hands. Ven aca! Daniel, to my father, Vamonos! My father snapped the photo, blue house, tall dogs, my ponytail and shiny lobes, a squint and shrugged smile. My arms pulled their necks to me, my eyes lost in the gaze at the mountain.

Carmen Aiken is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about things she never liked explaining.

"Tambourine Like A Crown" - We Were Evergreen (mp3)

"Quicksand" - We Were Evergreen (mp3)

 

In Which There Are Things I Have Never Liked Explaining

What We Think About Them Leaving

by CARMEN AIKEN

Three things happened in quick succession, two in perfect order, one lagging. In late fall, my brother drives my parents to the airport where my father boards a plane to interview for a job. On the way driving to his afternoon classes he is blindsided by a woman turning right on red. When he calls me at my job, I’m between client calls and can only make out hysteria and suburban traffic. He hangs up and in a panic I kill my phone line, run to the bathroom and call him back to ascertain how fast I need to be by his side. Later that night I catch a ride to the suburbs and buy him dinner, have a few beers. I ride back out on the train that weekend and we talk on the way to pick up my parents. We plan our questions, we resolve to listen.

The second thing is that afternoon the parents ask us what we think about them leaving the country and the question is their decision and our answer. Over the next few hours of contracts and timetables, distance in miles and wine (me, mostly) we make the joke that at least the car, totaled, is one thing they will not have to get rid of.

The third thing. I break up with the boy who I've been spring-summer-no-pause-in-love-with. It could be called mutual: he didn't know how to leave me. I believe now, and think I knew it then, that if I had to start letting things go he had to be one of the first things to try and release.

+

We controlled our reaction and were far from indifferent, although the components were not unfamiliar. Parents on their way to some idea of retirement, a job offer, children with their own jobs and beers and the ability to vote. And so? So Sweden? It could be Houston, Bogota, Mumbai, anywhere. The parents returned from a visit, which was really an interview, which was really an almost-yes and sent a missive through the satellites: When u free? Need to talk. 

Talking. Constantly, more than in years, as if each word would fit every synapse firing, each question could find its way to  answer. After the ride back from the airport, parents spilled maps, postcards, brochures, two candy bars from Heathrow. The questions came down to needs and wants and expectation. Do you want to work for these people? (Yes). Will they pay you money you feel is fair as a payment to work for them? (Yes). Did you like Sweden? (Yes). When will you have to leave? (Soon. Sooner than anyone thinks, soon sans holidays, soon sans time, always the loss of time.)

Do you want to go? An answer read in the excited face of a father who may or may not have faced redundancy in a changed world and who has worked for the same company for longer than the children have been alive, or the marriage. This is the father telling stories and making plans from percolated anticipation on a plane or taxi or train ride: a trip to Spain, a birthday in Copenhagen, a father who went from the Air Force to school to job to marriage to children and what lasted was travel, was work that took him so many places. This is a joy impossible to qualify or verbalize. This is a face and a quiet. 

And none of this worked without wife and mother. What are the reasons people stay together for thirty years, when one person is constantly back and forth in other lands? What is the reason two people decided to join when mother has taken off from the nest she grew up in to live a year in a fascist country four thousand miles south? What is the reason she says yes when a proposal comes in airmail with a bouquet of flowers? This is a hardiness, an inquisitiveness, a need to move, keep moving, keep going and finding written into some vein.

The honesty of the afternoon peaked with: if the world were different, and secure, and children older and tied to a career or person or children of their own or land, would there still be a life away from them in a land 4,250 miles away? And the answer: yes, we would go in a heartbeat, yes. Yes yes yes. Then go, the children say. Go.

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The house had to go. Not everything, not all at once. My mother would stay for another half a year or so to sort it out with my brother and I. The Swedish company would pay for a cargo container of furniture, mementos, a bicycle, for movers to pack and send it across the ocean.

In the beginning I tried to imagine Sweden and the apartment their bed, sofa, kitchen table, pots and pans and silverware would land in. I’d traveled to so few places and could only create a generic European city from my study abroad months in London or people who populated those streets as tall, pale, androgynous electronic musicians.

But the work of the move threw me out of my family’s future into too much of the recent past. I returned from visits on the weekend laden with backpacks and paper shopping bags of adolescent detritus, college paperbacks from the 1970s, stuffed animals. The weekend before my father officially moved, six weeks to Christmas and his garage full of mechanical wares and used chemicals cackling at its corpulence, I cried morosely in my junior high bedroom over a pile of book reports. My father threw up his hands and my mother told him to leave me be.

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At the time I worked as a virtual personal assistant and receptionist for a niche startup, whose clients were middling consumer attorneys across the United States. Consumer attorneys meant they trucked in the bad luck of humanity, a way to play the last hand via the legal system. This is just to explain I fielded phone calls and correspondence from thousands of citizens bankrupt, foreclosed on, wounded in surgery, dividing their possessions in dissolving marriages, drunk, arrested. It was a job I held for two years, which seemed miraculous and was the refrain of the burgeoning decade: desperate searches for work, low pay, relief. When I try and tell about this to people who have not known me very long I say, I wanted to go to law school. Like a few other tales I have said it so often it has now become true.

I felt lucky then but also miserable and stuck and all of it coagulated into months of thinking I could separate my work from my life. In the beginning of my job I worked a night shift (lawyers in California also need girl fridays) and spent much of my non-work hours biking, cooking, reading books, trying to write. When I worked Midwest business hours I slipped into the hazards of dating, into whiskey, into trying to write with some wine, but then just the wine.

After two years of incentives, shiny middling-startup company culture made up of beer and happy-hour parties, three rounds of mass layoffs and every day full of sobbing or cursing clients, I was out. I interviewed at startups, bars, a couple nonprofits: in general anything directed at young adults across the city for months. I’d go to work full of anticipatory rage and cold biking fury and take weekends to ride out on the Blue Line to the suburbs.

Over Thanksgiving, one family member down, I cleared through wine and bits from the liquor shelf that was to vanish before next summer (with the exception of several fine bottles of Venezuelan rum, still in storage to this day). I felt extraordinarily weepy, worn down with winter too soon, with the house emptying about us. At one point before I pulled the turkey breast out of the oven, my brother confronted me with my bitterness and the lashing that came with my tongue running off the wine, told me I was worth more.

By January, a clear and cold winter that year, I quit the job, gave them ten days notice, and applied to graduate school. In March I found work at a local bike shop, two days after I traveled to Washington D.C. with my mother to the Swedish Embassy to pick up her paperwork. That June I jogged out the doors of the store to drive her car to my grandparents house a week later, where it would sleep until whenever they returned or it had to go somewhere else. The last night we stayed in the house, before it filled with open house furniture and flowers, I tried to sleep in the middle of the first-floor living room on the laminate floor I’d put in a few years prior, staring at the swingset through the glass door.

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I don’t tell many people, right away, about my parents. I learned because after starting new jobs and paths in life where after the obligatory inquisitions about origins, I say I grew up in a nearby suburb but my parents live across the ocean. This is met with a thousand things and I’ve never liked explaining. My reticence has graciously allowed most people to forget and so whatever version of this life I live with my family now cast across countries (as has been true for many limbs of my ancestral tree) is mine. My brother shares the same sentiment.

For so many months that year, though, the anger I felt lapped around the bits of mantle built of (including, but not all): feeling like a dutiful heir, channeling all the others who have loved their families even when they go to frontiers or borders or jobs, the fear of someone who has kept rebellion to individual wounds secret to try not to burn my family’s bridges or barns, questions of pricing air travel.

What I have settled on is that I came to exist because of persons who decided to leave where they came from. The past century drastically changed how we view place, how we can be (or not be) tied to it, the ability to move rapidly. I learn this over and over again in graduate school, how everywhere is anywhere. I could say its true, but as anyone who has ever been in a long distance relationship or unable to attend a wake or caught in a land with too-fast tongues can tell, this has changed less than we think. My parents do not live around the corner or down the train from me and no skype chat can change that, but we make it work. The contents of my suitcase on my first visit where I joked to my brother, “I’m a space smuggler, kid,” included corn tortillas, hot sauce, harina pan and hibiscus tea.

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Moving is its own unique exhaustion and tedium, which is why everyone hates even talking about it. I didn’t even have to move. Before then I’d gone from Midwest to Coast, Coast to Island, Coast to Midwest, city flat to city flat, and at that point three times over three years.

My brother and I reveled in ditching detritus in our old high school’s dumpster in the dark, hoping our parents’ property taxes would cover whatever apparent lack of education we received. Our friend who worked at a hardware store told us the store had a legal obligation to dispose of used paint and people often ditched cans of it on their curb. We loaded my brother’s small car’s trunk with all the paint I’d used to redo their garage door, bathroom, kitchen and counted down ONE TWO THREE!, running outside like it was a traffic game, ditching the boxes full of cans and drove away, exhilarated and guilty and sad.

Even with the housing market and the numerous families fleeing the suburbs, the house sold by the end of the summer. My brother lived nearby, for at time, and would ask if I wanted to drive by. I have not seen it since.

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So we got rid of or packed up: my mother’s piano from her double-wide childhood my grandparents drove up to her first residence after she married in their truck (in storage), tax documents and medical files (shredded and recycled), metal tools, ladders and furniture (picked up by men at dawn from the curb), photo albums of the dead, diplomas, graduation photos (in storage). This list is why I find it less than useful to explain what happened in the move. Most of us will understand this sooner or later.

But at the time it seemed impossible for anyone to understand, which made my own acceptance and agreement that much harder to hold on to.

Incredulity. From everyone. Faces slackened or eyes widened, and they repeated, “SWEDEN?” How was that possible? Half the people who heard this understood the implications of a farther side of the world, the other half tossing off, “Oh, cool” as though retirement meant moving into a condo somewhere warmer. Fact about Sweden: it is comparable in climate to the Midwest. The incredulity comforted. The telling of the same telling over, and over, and over. Everything must go, and the house must sell. There was a job there, and reindeer, and a transparent government.

But the anger. No more possibilities to take up heroin or join the Peace Corps or move to Paris. And anger when people didn't understand the bewilderment. Why did people keep mentioning no one died and no one disowned anyone? Why are those questions thrown into the air? Those are too many words. Who can go to the hospital if there's an accident? Who can come for a Thanksgiving meal? What is a Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter meal? Does anyone really enjoy turkey breast? Will they enjoy turkey or tortillas or pizza if they chose to spend time with family near or far, or chose to not see anyone at all?

I have never professed to enjoy change. I work hard to present the idea of myself as laid-back, able to turn on a dime. It may not make sense but I know it comes from my dislike of making choices, of how growing older has taught me how choice is structured, how few of them actually exist for so many people in this day and age. Then I didn't want those possibilities which was how I ended up where I was: accepting the work that came to me, the reverberations of the break-up, driving down suburban streets to second-hand stores with a backseat full of my family's possessions. Mostly it was how easy to feel angry at whatever passed that seemed not the way it was supposed to be. That was my choice and it was no choice at all.

But it was finally on some days staring at the top of a building in an alley downtown, the smoke curling into the new winter blue. And knowing how beautiful the top of that building was and how beautiful the tops of buildings must be in all of the other places to live.

Carmen Aiken is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about the difference. You can find her website here.

Photographs by the author.

"Things I Don't Remember" - Ugly Casanova (mp3) 

"Hotcha Girls" - Ugly Casanova (mp3)