![Material History of the Closet [Soft Serve Ice Cream]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d122e0d694a030001ef945a/1667071979042-L2S5FHV8SFR3TTJOBMK2/memoir+2.gif)
A photo: me, a high school freshman, blue with joy for making the team, standing flagstill in a parking lot, crumpled eating a soft serve ice cream cone out of a baseball mitt.
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Where the roads meet at the top of the hill and you can see farmland stretch as far as the city lights, I become intimate with everything I’ll never know.
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Eight-seater suburban parked deep-deep in the Wal-Mart lot, legal twenty-four hours or so they say, though every time we see a car coming too close we pull the sleeping bags up, stay strict-still and make like a backseat of junk.
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You can come in now, they say, holding open the door between the waiting room and the inner sanctum of the ER, and I stand, smoothing my wispy summer dress and unsticking my bare legs from the vinyl chair where I’ve waited…
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We are nine when our mom enrolls us in the Fairlanes Young America youth duckpin bowling league. Duckpin bowling is Baltimore’s bastardized version of ten-pin bowling, played on a regular-length lane but with squat little pins and hard rubber balls swirled with marble or speckled with glitter.
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After my dad falls down the hill and into the road at sunset and is nearly hit by a speeding car, it takes him fifteen minutes to limp back up to the house. I hear him call my name from the kitchen in a strange, fierce tone I have never heard before.
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Lately I feel like a mirror that got shattered and glued back together. To fill the hours, I’ve been reading about the Boötes Void. It’s a kind of oil-stain in space, an absence of stars some 330 million light years in diameter.
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Growing up, I was the only girl on both sides of the family. Most of the time, it didn’t seem to matter much. I followed my brothers and cousins when they went outside to shoot the BB gun in our grandparents’ backyard in small town Wisconsin.
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My friend Stacy was headed to freshman orientation, and it was 1985 on a day in May and the Midwest sky was showing off and Stacy was getting ready to pull out and the days stretched before me, empty and long, so I said yes and rode shotgun a hundred miles or so north out of our hometown.
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