First Contact, or How I had Acquired a Grown-up Friend - Essay Example

First Contact, or How I had Acquired a Grown-up Friend The first part of my childhood was spent in a closet. It was not a literal closet, but it sometimes felt as limiting as one. My closet was constructed out of the hardwood of my parents’ values. I was an intelligent and imaginative child, curious about the outside world. I loved television because it introduced new ideas, new imagery, new places, new people. My parents firmly believed that home should be both the center and periphery of a child’s life, and that television is an unhealthy distraction. I was kept busy in the house, or hanging out laundry in the backyard, and television was regulated at one or two hours each month. Consequently, my world stayed very small, for many years. When I came to realize that resistance was futile, I cooperated with my assimilation to this Borg-type collective, in the interest of survival. My longing for unrestricted access to a window was hidden inside me, waiting to be awakened. The day of my awakening was a summer scorcher, I dressed in the shortest shorts and the thinnest T-shirt my mother would allow, and wiggled around on a sticky kitchen chair, staring at my pancakes and syrup, looking for images and the suggestion of something more than here. Eventually they tired of me and I was dismissed to do chores, I watered the potted plants, checked on the slimy avocado pit I was sprouting in the windowsill, straightened up the surfaces of my bedroom, dusted our living room bookshelf and the barely-ever-used television screen, and washed the breakfast dishes. I relieved the washing machine of its load of floral sheets and bath towels, cycled the night before. I had done my homework to its rhythm. They had a faint overnight musty smell. I wrinkled my sunburned nose and placed the laundry in the red plastic tub, which still had the sticky adhesive residue that originally held its price in place. Using dishwater-shriveled, white, poufy-fingered hands, and a skinny pre-pubescent hip to wedge the tub against, I carried the sheets and towels to the backyard, to hang on the clothesline. The birds had left white pasty souvenirs of their digestive adventures again. After washing away the abstract deposits, I looked around the backyard with some satisfaction. Hanging laundry was, by far, my favorite chore. It provided a private world, in which I could day-dream to my heart’s content. Day-dreaming is like television, except you get to write your own story and choose your own characters and even be the star actress, if you want. The best thing going for it is that nobody could see it except me, so there was no one reacting to my watching it, or lecturing me on how it’s unhealthy and ruining my mind. Sometimes I would indulge myself in repetitive plots. I had crash-landed on a remote island, with no parents at all. There was a cave with a stream running through it and lots of berries and zucchini and tomatoes and a chocolate tree outside. A lifetime supply of pasta and meat sauce had crash-landed there with me, along with cases of sliced precessed cheese, so I was happy. There were many rooms in the cave and each held new wonders to explore, things like chests of jewelry and exotic costumes, boxes of books, endless art supplies, a music box. I spied on the daily lives of fish, birds, and an occasional lion family. Sometimes I daydreamed emergency plots, like the world had just blown up and everyone was dead except me. What should I do? Should I look for other survivors or should I find a gun and a strong and hidden place in which to stay safe? Should I choose to still engage with the life I had, or should I be highly disciplined about my withdrawal? Whatever the daydream, its attraction lay in the privacy of how permission was irrelevant, and the opportunity to watch things happen in a very different world with very different circumstances. Living in a closet, a window can be addictive, even the illusion of a window. I hung each sheet and each towel carefully, not in a random manner but in a purposeful design that gave me a moist and cooling private space, with a breeze. The parched grass between my bare toes became a long, drafty hallway and the sheets were hand-painted walls on a stone castle, long ago. I was a princess, held captive by a wicked king and queen, who never let me near a door or window, for fear I would run away to my real parents, whose castle was even grander, a castle made mostly of golden-framed picture windows, from which I watched the most amazing stories of life around me. At that very moment, I was returned to this world by the masculine sound of a clearing throat on the other side of the fence. That fence separated me from a neighbor couple with whom my parents did not allow me to interact. My parents did not approve of their smoking, drinking, and gambling habits, which occurred right there in green and white lawn chairs, on a pink flagstone patio. I knew about this because of a hole in the fence and fierce words whispered between my parents when I was thought to be safely asleep. However, if I were leaving this earth, and could take only one clear memory with me, it would be the now ensuing single moment of fence-hole interaction with this forbidden neighbor man, I moved stealthily out of the wet castle, and toward the hole, called by the sound. The hole was unevenly rounded, and I had picked most of the splinters away from its inner and outer periphery, for safer viewing. On this particular, scorching summer afternoon, I stood with bare feet in a well-trampled patch of weeds, beside a busy, sandy, red ant hill, and peeked through the porthole. I inhaled the familiar smell of cedar wood fencing and the heat, rising from the earth. Two hyperactive flies were dive-bombing my over-heated neck and teasing my knobby knees. Suddenly the neighbor man came over and peeked back at me, over the fence. I felt my heart fall into my feet, taking my stomach with it. I held my breath, expectantly. He had friendly brown eyes, beneath crooked and animated, bushy eyebrows and, when he backed up, a friendly smile was on his full lips. I found courage to confess. “I sometime watch you in the patio,” I breathed out so softly, remembering his wrinkle-faced, red-haired wife, her dramatic red lipstick and dazzling bracelets, but not mentioning her aloud. I heard my mother’s words once again, this time inside my head. “They’re Las Vegas people,” she had said, with an edging of disgust. But I did not mention this aloud, either. With the little I had actually spoken, I had given away the secret of my window to an adult. It was a symbol of resistance. I had admitted the privacy of my longing and spoken what was forbidden. My head was pounding. My knees felt weak. I saw transparent brown bubbles in the air around my face. I focused intently on a lone trickle of sweat making its way down my back, from my neck. I was alone, like the trickle. I was outside the collective. “I sometimes watch you at the clothesline,” he said, melodiously. And he smiled and invited me for lemonade and cookies, as if everything were normal. I dutifully declined, of course. I had stretched my boundaries enough for one hot afternoon. But I was restored to myself with his words and that restoration has lasted my entire life. I understood, with Seven of Nine, that there is life outside the collective, and that I can choose to reveal myself. I understood that Borg space is not everywhere, not even everywhere beyond the spaceship of my voyaging mind. It was my first experience with feeling separately respected. I had acquired a grown-up friend, unconnected to my parents’ value-laden lives. First Contact was successful. The object of my porthole viewing had viewed me back. You can’t get that from television. Read More