the synesthetic childhood experience, out of color

non-fiction, rumors flew for weeks, nabokov had synesthesia too

May, 2003. $20 in my pocket.

All of Our Crossing Paths
a memoir

I.

Meredith is paler than pale. We are four during swimming lessons in the dirty Farm School pool, and her mouth is icy blue and her teeth are chattering. Even at their best, her tiny pucker-lips are barely the color of normal toddler skin, without the Crayola pink tint of my own. Iron deficiency, my mother muses. She plays at my house one day; dinner is chicken and broccoli, because my mother cooked then. Merry peels the broccoli stalks away from each other, arranging a tiny budding forest around her drumstick.
My parents ask her if she eats green things. She is thinking, thinking. Minutes pass, I’m sure. Finally she finds an answer: i eat green m&m’s.
Meredith lives in Buster Keaton’s old three-story house built into the side of a cliff with a Valium-addicted mother and slant-eyed, distant father; two brothers come later. We play in the forbidden black-leather library whenever her father leaves to take their cruel black mutt, Indiana, on walks in the jagged mountains. We watch movies projected from enormous metallic discs onto an enormous blank screen at one end of the room. The Princess Bride is our favorite. If her father catches us, he curses with words I won’t learn for years while Merry and I scramble to replace mislaid couch cushions and picture books. Sometimes her mother walks in on such invectives and scoots us into the well-lit kitchen with checkerboard tile that my parents will copy in our own house eight years later. She makes us grilled cheese and pours cloudy organic apple juice into plastic tumblers without sippy lids, and tells us not to spill on the white carpet in the hall because she just doesn‘t have the energy to clean up after us today, as she leads us down to the living room on the second floor.
Even more compelling than the library is the glowing metallic ball in the living room with the electro-static ribbons of purple and blue light that shoot out of it and grab tiny fingers, sending little shockwaves into our hands before we go dancing up and down the hall yelling in tiny pre-school voices. After one such game, I lie on the floor with my hands on my flat chest, feeling it rise and fall as I catch my breath.
in. out. rise. fall. stop. hold. gasp. in.
I yell for Meredith to come here and isn’t this great?
And it’s what? what are you doing?
We consciously breathe for the rest of the afternoon, lying on the carpet with our fingers on the not-yet hardened cartilage of our small sternums.
We sneak onto the living room’s tiny wood-slatted balcony that faces the shear drop off the rough mountain overhang. Merry screams and I laugh as we toss her old dog-mutilated Barbie dolls over the unstable balustrade; their plastic blond hair, almost the same shade as my own, catches in the breeze and waves frantically at us in the seconds before they hit the side of the cliff and shatter plastic body parts into the creek below. Years later, my father relates to me the story of him and a friend sitting on the roof of their Manhattan apartment, dropping Italian pastries onto the sidewalk below, and I understand and appreciate the tone his voice takes as he describes the creamy splatter patterns that decorated the street.
In our south-western corner of Los Angeles, early October is still swimming season, and Meredith and I are changing into black and white polka-dotted two-piece bathing suits with attached ruffles that mimic skirts and cannon-balling into her side-yard pool. Her parents are less strict (or as I will realize later, merely less conscientious) than my own, and don’t get angry when we jump from the concrete and tile edges of the pool into the deep end; I, however, prefer the rickety gray diving board. Its surface scratches the bottoms of my feet as I run across it and jump. When I emerge, my face is covered with rotting orange and brown leaves from Buster Keaton‘s old trees; her parents don’t fish them out after August.
On more than one occasion, Meredith chooses me as her solitary companion on the evenings her parents throw bizarre, smoky parties that fill their angular house with equally tall, angular people. Her father, a television writer and sometimes comic book artist, invites his intriguing industry friends to their home most Friday nights, where they drink Jack Daniels, smoke Cubans, and complain about the eighties.
Usually Merry and I are allowed to float through the cliques of anorexic women and gray-haired men until we tire of them, which never seems to happen. Sometimes we dress like them, Meredith in a velvet cape and I in all black; when I am fifteen, I will see my friend again and for the last time, dressed in what I swear is the same exact cape, with dark kohl lines drawn around her cool blue eyes. She will tell me about her new philosophy or religion or something that starts with a W, and I will patiently listen, then hug her goodbye, my long ballet arms reaching around her still thin white ones.


II.

Larisa’s brothers call her Sissy; if someone were to call me this, I’d probably kick them hard in the shins, even at five.
She is blunt, it’s short for sister, and I too with but sister isn’t that long. She rolls her eyes.
I am in Larisa’s living room the summer my brother is born; we are playing with her brothers Brian and Greg in the dim, narrow confines of the collapsing fort we’d constructed and slept in the night before. It’s one thirty six in the afternoon and I don’t want to leave to go to the hospital, even when my mother tells me I can hold him.
We meet in morning kindergarten, probably on the gated plastic playground, rubber puzzle mats that make your hands smell dirty black and soak up the sun to burning underneath our jelly-sandaled feet. The two smartest girls in the class, we know, from excessive smiley faces and gold foil star stickers on every test, every project. Everyone else just bores us. Larisa is unquestionably a good influence on me: she wears angora cardigans, ribbon bows in her hair, and without fail has her favorite crumbly Bonne Bell Cherry Cola lip balm slipped in her jeans pocket, though she hates soda. She sporadically convinces me to play house and secretary inside and to wash my hands before I eat the orange Big Stick I buy from the always-unexpected ice cream truck, even though it‘s so much trouble to go inside and then outside again just for a popsicle. Matching Halloween costumes in first grade, also her idea.
She tells me we’ll be you know, like fifties girls. Wait, like what girls? And with her dominating tone, girls from the fifties, with the cute socks you know? Oh, okay, and the roll-up jeans? A little stronger now, no, you know, like poodle skirts. Larisa swishes her hands around her in circles and grins. We grease back my one-year-old brother‘s wispy hair and wrap him in a tiny black jacket, and make my parents wait on the sidewalk with his stroller when we ring doorbells and fill our old pillowcases (mine is Ninja Turtles and Larisa’s is My Little Pony) with candy and, what, pennies? who gives pennies?
We have a lemonade stand in the springs and summers, but I don’t know what we spend our money on. Cars pull in and out of her circular driveway every hot afternoon, one after another after another. When we run out of the one pitcher of lemonade we made from the Country Time powdered mix and cold tap water, we sell apple juice and chocolate milk, and whatever else we can find in her family’s fridge.
When Larisa is absent from school, I have no friends, and I am forced to amuse myself; after a week of solitude, I have exhausted all resources, so I reluctantly walk the three hot blocks from Woodlake Elementary’s far-back playground to her house.
Her mother answers the door with susie, larisa has the chickenpox. hmm. oh. An excuse at least. She must expect me to leave, but I don’t, so have you had the chickenpox? what is the right answer? no… Her eyebrows lower; that must not have been right. dang. hmm. well, I suppose you can come in and see her, but just don’t get too close. And, okay. More clarification, chickenpox is very contagious. And, okay.
Larisa’s lying in bed, and looking rather normal and not very sick at all, I think; she’s playing with her treasured porcelain doll collection that always slightly annoys me. She dresses each doll and brushes their hair, then lines them up on the lacy comforter of her four-poster bed in order from her most favorite to least. She is rearranging them in their line when I walk in, sliding along the wall like a mosquito, sticking close to the fingerprint-blurred mirrored closet doors on the opposite side of the room. I play with her the entire afternoon, and I never get the chickenpox.
Only when we are at our most desperate do Larisa and I decide to explore the broken chain-link boundary behind her house that leads to the neighbor’s what? farm? Mocking, you can’t have a farm here, and shooting back, well, he does. Larisa doesn’t lie because when she tries she always blushes dark pink, so I assume that she‘s just innocently mistaken. She can read my expression and grabs my hand, come on. i’ll have to show you, then.
We’re climbing the neighbor’s steep driveway and sneaking along the side of the fence; not quite a not a farm, but there is a red-painted chicken coup and two horses grazing noisily in the yard. Larisa loves horses; for her fifth birthday, her parents rent a pony for rides in their front yard, in addition to towers of wrapped and ribboned boxes. I put dandelions in tiny braids in my hair until she (finally) tires of watching them gorge themselves on suburban backyard house grass. This is becoming habit, our daily afternoon schedule, she chooses something and then I, each suffering through the other’s good time; more labored, more tedious.
By high school, past school changes and moves, losing phone numbers and running into friends of friends and so many oh so how is shes, we will barely smile at one another in the halls. She will be ninth grade homecoming princess and captain of freshman drill team, while I’ll know every shady corner and unnoticed alcove behind every staircase; the seagulls unavoidably perched around my spots will just panic girls like Larisa, for fear of ending up like April Johnson during softball practice, thick white spray in her strawberry-blond-curled-even-though-I’m-playing-sports hair that will make me laugh for days, especially in inappropriate settings, whenever it comes to mind.


III.

Andy is sitting next to me. He has sandy brown Malibu beach hair parted neatly down the middle, gigantic t-shirt has bright illustrations of Looney Toons characters wearing shorts like his, grazing his crew socks. His. However, I don’t notice any of this, because I have fallen asleep on the six thirty five a.m. bus to San Jose Elementary School, my head leaned against the cold latched window, legs stuck to the indescribably colored vinyl seats. Eight years old and an hour and a half commute to and from school every day; I won’t be bored anymore and magnet schools are different.
When I wake up, Andy is gone, and the only reason I know he was ever there is his introduction to me when I get off the bus last, in front of my new school, hi. So, uh, hi. wait. was he talking to me? i’m andy. i sat next to you on the bus but, like, you were asleep so you probably didn’t know that. oh god. i’m susie.
He is my savior, the escape from elementary school morality. Andy listens to rap (which I categorically detest, in favor of Paul and John and those two whose names I can’t remember), shoplifts (only candy bars, they don’t notice if you’re quick) and curses like a sailor. He scrawls graffiti on any object that comes near his grimy eight-year-old hands. I see him draw on the back of the bus seat in front of ours once, and watch his movements closely. Three vertical lines, evenly spaced. Three more, evenly spaced below. He connects the lines with a series of diagonals. It takes me a few moments to realize that he has drawn a sort of angular S.
what’s that for? Andy jumps a little, because I haven’t spoken to him since he sat down next to me. He pauses to think of justification for someone else’s absurd symbol he’s stolen and tried to make his own. for 'shorty'. And oh-so naively, I’ll regret it for days - who’s that? He almost smiles. uh. His tone is patronizing, I already realize my mistake. me. Andy is rather short, but I find the obviously self-proclaimed nickname hilarious. it looks like a braid. It does. shut up, it doesn’t. I smile a little, trying to cover up the shame that my pink cheeks surely give away, and refrain from further comment.
Andy‘s greatest exploit is his womanizing. One day during our painfully short recess, he holds a girlfriend contest. to all girls, he announces, meet outside at the benches. The benches have uneven metal legs and cracked plastic covers the color of the tapioca pudding Lena always has at lunch. Every girl stands on the benches, lined up against the blue-painted bungalow for the third grade classroom, but I stand next to Andy on the asphalt below them.
no. And he’s back with, oh shit, come on. But no. And i wont involve myself. This, a phrase I have heard my father use when my mother and I fight. Andy laughs and I realize how small my voice is.
I leave to play tetherball alone, which I will never do again, after the ball hits me in the temple and leaves a constellation of blue and purple the size of my now cut-down ego - a ping-pong ball, maybe. It’s why wouldn’t he just pick me? and I realize that my affection for Andy does not resemble the kind I feel for other boys, like James, who has a healing puncture wound in his forearm from a sharpened pencil incident that Timothy was consequently expelled for. I see Andy across the yard, kissing Lena on her freckled cheeks and holding her hand, and my bruise throbs.
The losing competitors stand in a circle, trying to brush off Lena’s rather obvious victory, as the contest took only four minutes; I walk toward them but, what?, I am not allowed in this group either. They resent my non-participation; I am too conceited, or more simply, I suck. They even make a song about it, but their voices are poorly organized and the tune dies quickly.
Andy still considers us best friends; I discover this the next day when, once again, he sits down next to me on the morning bus. I am listening to the Animal Farm book on tape on my Walkman, because my mother says it is good for me; we rarely read in school, even at this new (and better?) magnet, usually only when my teacher falls asleep at her desk after lunch do I remove my beloved James and the Giant Peach from my backpack. I ignore my friend until he pushes me into the corrugated metal under the window. He must have noticed my book.
you are such a dork, susie.
This will not be the last girlfriend contest, or the last time Andy surprises me with the extent of his loyalty. Nor, however, will this be my last so obviously unrequited love; simply the first in a long train to follow. Andy will go to jail ten years later for armed robbery. The last thing he will tell me, when I see him at our fifth grade graduation, is that I look nice with my hair up. I will wear it like that until I forget how to spell his last name, something long and Italian and problematic, that once graced the cardstock cover of every one of my spiral-bound notebooks.


IV.

Kendall is picking me up off the playground blacktop with one long tanned arm as I blow in short hard breaths on my scraped knee; I am apprehensive because she was the one who pushed me down in the game of three flies up kickball. Three weeks earlier, she had taught me every curse word in English, and a few in Spanish, and I use a couple while wiping sharp rocks and dripping blood off of my leg. She takes me to the nurse’s office, after single-handedly halting the game for my sake.
She has toast-color skin, perfect almond eyes, a tiny sloping nose, and corkscrew bronze hair cut to three inches all over her head; she is gorgeous, despite her erratic cruelty. My friend Chrissie will be the first to finally admit this, six years later, remember that mulatto girl? her name started with a C sound, you know? I remember everything so, oh, kendall? Quickly, yeah, that’s her. she was like a fucking bitch. but she was really beautiful too. I consider her sincerity. we were friends when I first got to san jose. Pause. that’s weird. And another, while I wonder where she is now. yeah.
Kendall is constantly trying to convince us that she is adopted, but no one can believe her; the physical resemblance to her abusive father is too striking, and later, she’ll also mirror maternal bi-polar tendencies. This adoptive couple take us to the Los Angeles County Fair in the spring of third grade; it is an arranged playdate that my own parents must at least partially organize, and I don’t really mind, because of the infrequency and instability of my few current friendships. Kendall and I forge a delicate familiarity over mutual hatred of the 4H Club animals, and instead eat sticky pink cotton candy from white cardboard sticks and ride the ferris wheel, giggling and kicking our legs to rock the seats, to avoid the petting zoo nightmare at the other end of the fairgrounds.
Midway through the fourth grade, small objects start to go missing from desks and backpacks: plastic pencil boxes with fickle buttons to open tiny hidden compartments, favorite new brightly colored markers, half-full packs of Juicy Fruit gum, even whole brown paper bag lunches. Weeks go by, the thefts a mystery, until Lena sees her broken charm bracelet in Kendall’s flannel jacket pocket.
detention, suspension, expulsion.
I’m sitting next to Kendall on a bench under a low shady tree in June, and I think she’s crying, but I can‘t tell, her long thin hands at her face. For some reason that I cannot quite fathom, I am not angry or even disappointed in her; I am the eye of the storm, cooler, calmer than normal.
I guess I should ask are you okay? Her head jerks up. oh. yyeah. So, yeah, well. I can’t look her in the eye. why can’t I look her in the eye? yeah. I sit down next to her and say I’m sorry to the ground. it’s okay. then she gets up she walks away.
Kendall will not be expelled, suspended for a week, but something unspoken yet understood ruins our friendship. In the fifth grade, some of the more popular girls start an Anti-Kendall Club, and, through some surely underhanded scheming, persuade her to join, passing it off as another group. I tell her the truth and she shoots me a cold but self-conscious glare.
fuck you.
There are black marker messages written about her on the blue bathroom walls, accompanied by phone numbers with downtown area codes with 3's and 2's that I’m sure aren’t hers. She eats lunch by herself and I secretly hate myself for not sitting with her, though I know I’d have to weather the fuck you’s for forty-two long, exact minutes, because I wouldn’t have the sense to walk away.
Her mother makes frequent visits to school, under the guise of helping our class make a miniature city out of recyclables. She is a stone-faced social worker with permanent forehead wrinkles, and follows Kendall’s every move, sometimes even making notes once or twice, looking back and forth between a pad of paper and her only daughter. She checks Kendall’s locker in middle school (for what?) almost weekly. She pulls every item out one at a time, Kendall leaning against a trashcan, the coordinator looking on excitedly (jesus… is she really hoping to find something?), but the searches never yield any explanatory clear Ziploc bags of powder or pills, or guns or knives or even condoms. Justifications, reasons for something they can't understand. Kendall is so deeply humiliated, she doesn’t even bother claiming that she’s adopted anymore; she rarely speaks to anyone long enough to give such an explanation.
Kendall will drop out of high school to model in New York at seventeen, without finishing high school. I won’t see her after middle school, but a friend of mine, who will die in the city eight months later under a sports utility vehicle, will relate to me running into her on the subway. She tries to steal his wallet, her stomach swelled by five months of pregnancy, and raised marks on the creamy inside of the arm she reaches out toward his back pocket.


V.

Chrissie has the biggest breasts in the fourth grade, or the fifth and sixth grades, for that matter. They dominate over the rest of our tiny pouches of skin carefully folded into stretchy triangles of soft fabric (it is not a training bra); she needs under wires. I am fascinated by her, and not because of the cleavage I won’t match until high school, or the strappy platform shoes that make her almost a foot taller than me, and not even because her Jewish mother named her Chrissie Christensen, but because she devours books even faster than I do.
speed-reading classes she tells me one day when I ask how she finished Weetzie Bat in two days. She loans it to me and I match her, but only by staying up until midnight and battling nausea on the bus the next morning to get through the last chapters.
We start a newspaper for our elementary school: one legal-sized sheet of paper, cleverly titled Here’s the Scoop. We are made to include two younger girls on our staff so that the paper won’t be so one-sided; more often than not, we unintentionally drive them to teary trips to the coordinator’s office (schools of eighty don’t have principals?).
As a kind of self-serving appeasement, we invite one of the girls to be in our talent show act, a song and dance to a very appropriate Brady Bunch song, something or something else about sunshine coming our way. Chrissie is Marcia, I am Jan, and Danielle, the girl from the newspaper, is Cindy. At a break in the music, I say the infamous words Marcia Marcia Marcia and flip my long straw-blond hair, and everyone laughs.
It is Chrissie’s idea, at the beginning of the fifth grade, to make our own version of the Babysitter’s Club, whose fictional lives we had memorized after reading our favorite soda-stained copies for the fifth and sixth times. Chrissie deems herself Dawn, the tall, beautiful hippie character. I constantly forget mine, but it is surely the most off-beat and boyish of the group; the one overlooked by all the attractive male characters with their learner’s permits, except maybe the nice audio-visual near sighted boy with a manageable skin problem and mismatched socks. We have mock meetings (and membership cards?). The club breaks up a couple of months after it is created, which is almost a couple of months after we lose interest.
After teachers begin threatening us with lunch detentions for talking in class, Chrissie and I switch to writing notes. By the end of the day, I have an entire pocket of my huge backpack devoted to whatever half was shoved into the under-side metal pocket of my desk. This rather casual system of storage leads to several embarrassing incidents of notes becoming lodged in math books later opened in front of crushes. Finally, we allocate the whole of an 80-page college-ruled spiral bound to our prematurely cynical musings and complaints. Mine are usually about my long-haired neighbor not noticing when I skateboard in front of his house and almost (I was so, so close) into his driveway; Chrissie’s are usually on the subject of Andy.
he’s so fine. I’ve only heard Andy use the word, so I laugh at her, because uh, duh. he’s a guy. And then uh, duh. Now I’m confused. well, I mean, guys can’t be fine. only girls can. An exasperated sigh, flip of thick hair. Condescending tone in her big-toothed voice. no, susie, guys can be fine too. oh. oh. Chrissie is doing her best to teach me the ways of the world, and taking much pride, I think, in the progress I’ve made.
she’s so fine. I see Andy looking at Chrissie as we stand in the cafeteria line. what? um, who?
They are officially going out (where do they go?) a week later, and maybe I never recover, as Chrissie puts me in the same friend position so many times over the next years. I see them go off behind buildings together, and come back wiping their lips; they choose each other as partners for projects, and I am put with Jason Randall, who smells like pastrami and never washes his hair. Two years later, three seventh graders from my bus who Chrissie plays spin the bottle with will steal the supply of dissection frogs from the biology lab, and fill Jason’s locker with them; he will transfer schools, and no one will miss him, but Chrissie will always answer his rambling e-mails.
She will move before high school, and I visit her only twice; she will join a band, but quit a few months later, after being involved with the bassist and singer. She’ll start dating the guitarist of a rival band. They’ll get their GED’s and take community college classes together while I am still a never-been-kissed high school sophomore. They will move in together by the summer after my high school graduation, and I will visit their condo in the suburban depths of Encino Village. Chrissie will look much older, and refuse to tell me where she works (a place a lot of girls work when they don‘t, you know, have a lot on their resumes); her boyfriend will have a beer in hand and his eyes glued to his (my?) shoes. Chrissie will clench her teeth and ask him something about the car, and he’ll disappear for a couple of hours.
I’m wary, but, have you seen andy lately? I wonder how he is, you know? A pause. I can hear Chrissie think. And finally sorry, who?