Fairfield Manor
Preface
A small bearded man sits on the porch of his trailer in Fairfield Manor trailer park, Bay City, Michigan. It’s 1987 and the sky is overcast. A small motorcycle leans against the siding, which resembles the orange off-white shade of over-creamed coffee. He has a garden of plastic flowers, and a ceramic gnome on a motorcycle peers through the fake marigolds.
Kids live here. It used to be just him and his motorcycle, but love brought children and children brought bills and lately it’s been difficult to keep his head above water. Last night the wiring in the master bedroom caught on fire, ate a hole right out of the middle of his bed. Now it’s just a network of springs surrounded by ash. He stood over it this morning and thought of how much worse it could have been.
There is no doubt anymore. He has to get them out of here.
1.
It is 2009. I am in sixth grade and discovering love. Rosemary is the first friend to whom I have said I love you. She taught me that friends can say that to each other.
Rosemary has curly blonde hair and smells like her parents’ smoke. She thinks that boys are pretty and that religion is silly. She is brave and laughs loud. She laughs loud when I pray before eating lunch and I laugh too. We sing show tunes and invent a language. I don’t pray anymore. We joke that I’m putting on a couple of pounds and she’s the father. I don’t eat anymore.
She tells me I walk like a pigeon. I laugh and train my feet to point forward but my knees still wobble.
Sometimes she calls me an idiot and sometimes she calls me at night, crying. She gave me a book that says that love hurts. I must really love her.
2.
Seventh grade: We spend a night telling secrets on my kitchen floor. Her dad hasn’t hit her since he became a Buddhist. Nobody in her house talks very much since her therapist told them what her cousin did to her. Some days I can’t imagine living to see twenty-five. I hold her and whisper I need you. I need you.
3.
Eighth grade: Our science teacher taught us that as we orbit around the sun, the sun orbits around the galaxy. I never knew I was that small.
Rosemary taught me how to hate myself.
Your poetry has no meaning.
You’re a slut.
You’re so stupid.
I find out that a childhood friend is dying of cancer and Rosemary holds me. She brushes my hair off my face, rubs my shoulder, and whispers, You don’t really care if she dies. You can stop pretending.
4.
Love hurts. When I’m twelve, my mother divorces. By the time I’m fourteen, she is engaged again. She reconnected with a high school sweetheart that never was and our families will move to a different city together a few weeks after the wedding. We’ll stay with my grandparents until then. Rosemary and I cry into each other’s shoulders on the last day of school. She asks me to promise her we’ll still be best friends. I promise.
At first we talk every day and then not at all.
5.
The world turns to rust and my mother and stepfather buy a trailer. Combined, they have eight kids. The trailer is infested with roaches and lice and the carpet smells heavily of piss. The back half of the trailer’s walls are blackened and crumpled from an electrical fire. This is where I’ll sleep with four other people. My sister, mother, and I patch up the walls, paint over them in white. The ash is still slightly visible, and the air is heavy and chemical, but we can imagine trying to be happy here.
The first night, my sister and I sit on the dilapidated porch to watch the sunset in blushing amber turn vivid and rippling fuchsia.
6.
I am in tenth grade and discovering love. I meet an older boy who finds me interesting and whose eyes follow me down the halls like I’m worth something. Danny is the first boy I say I love you to. He lives in a subdivision but wears cigarette-burned flannels. He has a smoker’s cough and doesn’t care about anything. My mother and stepfather fight every other night like clockwork, so I sit in the trailer park’s playground and make long phone calls to Danny.
One day we take a walk around the trailer park. I show him all of it: the corner store we buy groceries from, the broken glass and condoms in the street, the wire fence where all of the other kids gather to get high, how every other trailer is endearing and looks like the ’70s, and how ours is the one people walk past faster. He says I won’t need to worry about this kind of thing if I stay with him.
7.
Rosemary texts me for the first time in months.
i think about you all the time and i know i need to apologize for all the things i said to you and things i did. i need to be able to know im forgiven. i feel like......you dont like me for some reason and i can understand why cuz i was horrible to you but IM SORRY and im feeling increasingly pressured and trapped and ok this message is so dramatic bye
I ask her to promise that she’ll be okay. She promises.
8.
If the sun were to die, it would take roughly eight minutes for the news to reach Earth. When Rosemary dies, it takes three days for me to find out. During that time my older sister becomes infatuated with a new boy, I show my boyfriend my hometown, my new friends and I go to a diner. I go to school, get an A on a history test, come home, and check my phone to see it flooded with missed calls.
Finding out feels like falling out of bed onto an icy tile floor.
9.
If the sun were to die, it would take roughly eight minutes for the news to reach Earth. If you overdose on Vicodin, it takes twelve hours for your body to show symptoms. Twelve hours.
Eighteen pills. By that time, the damage is already done.
I read in Rosemary’s obituary that she died in a children’s hospital. Before, I pictured them finding her already empty and limp. It never occurred to me that maybe they found her struggling or that there was vomit, yellowed eyes, screaming, and people trying to save her.
I want to know if there was any hope. I want to know if she looked scared or sorry.
10.
Her father doesn’t cry at the service. I hear acquaintances saying that they wonder how I’m holding up. Strangers stand and tell stories. I am one of them: Rosemary was the first person I thought I couldn’t live without and I never thought I would have to. The urn sitting at the front of the room is full of her and I can’t help but picture her skin sizzling and aglow. It is nauseating and beautiful.
11.
I don’t come home for a while that night. I walk to the trailer park’s playground instead. I kick woodchips and climb to the top of the red plastic slide scarred with lovers’ initials and Fuck yous. I stare past the wire fence and rundown corner store and I look at the sunset, trying to convince myself I’m somewhere else.
I sit there for an hour and watch the sky dim, sun sinking behind overcast into the earth.
The sky turns yellow, gray, and then black.
12.
My mother finds a job a couple hours away that will pay much better. She wants to rent a big house and move the whole family. My stepfather’s feet remain planted on the ground of this trailer. My mother will leave for a few months and get settled. She will come back for us when everything is ready.
13.
My stepfather won’t look at us anymore. He makes sure the pantry remains empty and takes his kids out to eat every night. I have gone two nights without dinner. Danny says he likes me curvier.
I don’t wear seatbelts or sleep much anymore. Daydreams in class change from Danny warming my hands in his to mushroom clouds of my blood in the bathtub.
One night the thoughts I accept as normal are as palpable as the bottle of bleach held to my lips. I think of my sister finding me empty and limp and how she’d blame herself. I see sliced wrists and dangling feet. I can’t see myself dead without also seeing everyone I love dead. I crawl back to bed next to my sister’s sleeping body with a chemical bitterness and shame on my tongue. The smoke stains swirl on my ceiling and I know that I can’t let this cycle continue.
14.
Fear goes hand in hand with guilt. I start passing out notes to strangers in the hallways. Eighths of notebook paper saying, remember that life is good, you are a miracle, people care about you. These little prayers litter the hallway floors.
I constantly check on my friends, never giving them the chance to feel unloved. I let Danny scold me and grab me without a second thought or any attempt at defending myself. I hold him tighter and let him cry. I forgive easily. I can’t afford not to.
15.
My mother picks me and my sister up one day with no warning. She looks so much older with her eyes swollen and nails bitten down. She tells us that she needs to get us out of here. We throw all of our belongings into stretched black garbage bags and pack them into the trunk. Our stepfather watches from the porch, arms crossed and smirking. He names himself victor and locks the door behind him.
16.
Danny insists on fighting for what we have, which incidentally involves a lot of fighting.
He calls every night with his list of grievances.
Your writing is cute.
Don’t have so many male friends.
How naive can you be?
I never knew I was that small.
It takes two hours to break up with him. He tells me he doesn’t want me to leave and I remind him that I am already gone.
He says, You know what I mean.
I say, Yes, and I meant it in that way too.
17.
The day we left and my mom backed out of that driveway for the last time, I could breathe again. The smell of smoke and carcinogen faded from my skin. I watched in the rearview mirror as the trailer grew smaller and smaller, until it wasn’t even there at all.
Nen G Ramirez (@ERamirezGorski) is a ChicanX writer from Adrian, Michigan. They are a recent graduate from the University of Michigan where they studied Creative Writing and Literature as well as Latina/o Studies. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gasher Journal, The Acentos Review, The Journal of Latina Critical Feminism, and Michigan Quarterly Review.