The Death of the Firstborn by Julie Marie Wade

The fact of being no longer is how the denotation begins. If you stop there, the word that surfaces is death. The end of being. The end of life, at least as we have known it. But if you continue—the fact of being no longer part of a given family, community, or social space—the word you’re looking for may still be death.  The end of inclusion. The end of being welcome as you are. Many students start their papers this way: “[Big abstraction], according to Merriam-Webster, means…” I have never met an English teacher who approves, myself included, though I have grown empathy for the impulse over the years. Here I type estrangement, then delete it, then consider again the connotations of the word, its many hard resonances with my own life. Where to begin leads to should I begin at all, and what student—now I am a student forever, you see—hasn’t arrived at these questions? So I try to break the word down, to split it open like a geode and find what glitters inside: to be made strange or to have one’s strangeness held against one. Maybe, simpler: to become a stranger. But why? To whom? And these are the pleas for context that unfold from this word, like spilling the contents from an apron pocket. So I go to Merriam-Webster as I have gone to dictionaries all my life: a supplicant before an altar, seeking meaning in the language that I love and will not master. For language we can only serve. I learn the word estrangement comes from French, to alienate, and from Latin, foreign or from without. I learn the word estrangement shares a root with extraneous, as in details that do not matter, now or maybe ever. (I can’t remember, though: is it God or the Devil we’re supposed to find there, in the details?) When I hear estrangement or say estrangement or come upon the word in print, my first thought is always death. As in: You are dead to me. (A door closes, locks.) But also, the converse: I cannot live as you would have me be. (A car sails off into the distance, taillights aglow.) I have stood on that porch, and I have driven that car. Some estrangements are mutual, you see. Some estrangements read as kismet, which Merriam-Webster calls “a predetermined and unavoidable fate.” On a web forum, Anonymous asks, “Can kismet and serendipity ever be the same thing?” Lively discussion without resolution—in other words, a virtual English class. In school, early on, we read aloud from the Book of Genesis, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” I followed along, my finger tracing the shapes and sounds, trusting even then that words were holy.  My school was part of a church, you see, and my church was part of a school. They were imbricated, always, with classes and services held in the same building. Once, our teacher explained that genesis was another word for beginning, and my mind quickened to collect them—all the wondrous synonyms like fruits in a basket—start, origin, inception. Why did I never think to ask what exodus meant? Why did the teacher never think to say? Bad things happened in every book of the Bible, but Exodus struck me as especially sad. The Israelites, after already enduring so much, were forced to leave their home in Egypt, knowing they could never return. For years, I passed under the glowing green beacon of an EXIT sign—on my way to recess, on my way to library time—without noticing the “ex” in it, without recognizing the prefix of an ending. For years, my parents reminded me, “We don’t have the luxury of other children. You will always be our first, our last, our only,” and I heard the lonely in it, slant rhyme for another kind of sad. In the beginning was a basement, with long folding tables and cold folding chairs, which men (it was only men) set up for Coffee Hour; a stage with an upright piano where we performed our skits and plays; a kitchen with a pass-through window where women (it was only women) served us cups of punch and powdered donut holes; a corner stacked with carpet squares for the times we sat on the floor. I remember how the story of that room—for play, for fellowship—never matched the feeling. I remember how my mother forbade me to shave my legs, and how I shaved them anyway, forsaking the Fourth Commandment. I remember the razor I stole from my father (there went the Eighth—a double disobedience!) and how the blade, when I drew it back, held a sizeable chunk of flesh. To this day, that divot on my shin, that hole that even time has failed to fill. In the church basement, I stood on the stage, reciting my lines, as blood overfilled the Band-Aid, dribbled down my leg. How I didn’t know then that wounds could reopen, that some wounds might never close. I remember my socks, white, ribbed, scrunched around my ankles, and how I looked down to see them turning, sopping—pink, then rose, then red. I remember cheerleading practice in the church basement, too, how all the girls in seventh grade were required to join. “To boost morale and encourage bonding,” our teachers said, for we were painfully divided by size, style, circumstance. Miss Schmidt, fresh out of college and a former cheerleader herself, agreed to guide us. At meets, we wore matching sweatshirts with three crosses emblazoned on the back—to symbolize Christ’s mortal crucifixion. In the dictionary, Calvary didn’t only mean a site of sacred death but “an experience of intense mental suffering.” What a name for a school! I remember playing Trust in that basement, and nobody wanting to catch me, not even Miss Schmidt. I remember the night Crystal announced she was going to pants us and thinking, How in the world can pants be a verb? Kendra was giggling as her friends pinned her down, peeling the white spandex shorts from her body. I could never fathom how she kept them so clean. Then, they chased her around the basement and up onto the stage. She was tugging her sweatshirt down, high-stepping her legs, but everyone could see her panties: low-cut, strings at the hip-bones, with bright, puckered lips floating on big, puffy clouds. Cotton cartoons. I remember the fear as bile, starting in my belly and rising to my throat. Marissa was next, Kendra’s best friend. She was giggling, too, as they pulled her sweats over her shoes, pantsing her. I understood it then. She kicked her legs over her head, and we saw hers then: lavender lace and dark purple satin. “No fair! Your mom works at Victoria’s Secret, so she gets a discount!” Miss Schmidt was changing cassette tapes, cranking up the music as loud as she could, no intention of intervening. Girls will be girls. I couldn’t let those girls know how plain—no, ugly—my underwear was, bought by my mother at Pay ‘n’ Save: beige, high-waisted, three to a pack. “Oh my god, Thai! You are not wearing a thong!” But she was—electric blue with a sharp V beneath her belly button. “You want me to catwalk this, ‘cause you know I will!” She did it, too, in her tiny tank top, head held high, sleek legs and bare cheeks that didn’t even jiggle. I was going to vomit. I was going to faint. I held my breath until my heart began to hammer in my ears. “You look sick,” Nancy said in passing. And then she came for me, Crystal, the instigator, strutting toward the wall where I leaned like an easel, my sweat so thick I could feel the watermark I was making and how my body was slowly beginning to slip. She put her face close to my face, and I saw how her skin was so smooth and so clear I couldn’t make out a single pore. This, my first near-death experience: eyes squeezed shut, whole body clenched. “Do you seriously think,” she whispered, “that we want to see what you’ve got going on under there?” Then, they were all laughing together as a single voice—morale boosted, bonding achieved—and I was sliding all the way to the floor, those three crosses pressing hard against the yellow paint. Miss Schmidt summoned our squad: “Julie, either get up or go home. There’s no room for wishy-washies here.” Maybe that, right there, was the genesis of my exodus, the beginning of my end. One day the school would close, and the church would merge with another. A bulldozer would come and level the grounds. The fact of being no longer. I heard the “ex” in it then, meaning over and done with, as in part of the past. I pictured the way a candle is extinguished at a ceremony’s end and remembered how I still light candles for the ones I’ll never see again. Online: Parishioners processing to their new church a few blocks away. “It’s hard to let go of the place where you got married and baptized your kids,” one of the faithful says. Another calls it “a necessary exile,” references the Land of Milk and Honey and manna from Heaven. My Canaan is 3000 miles away from where I began. Land of cafecitos and key lime pie. Land of mis-glorified oranges, papayas too large to fit inside a basket. Land of balmy Christmases and susurrating palms. Land of stucco, land of sand dunes, land of Won’t Last Forever Either. Nothing ever does. And what of my parents’ house, you’re wondering, red brick with black weather vane, trim lawn where we used to played croquet, camellia blossoms we once gathered to float in the tub? No one’s disputing how beautiful it was or how often I visit, still, in my dreams. It was my first address, my only childhood residence. Like any leave-taker—for this is the term I’ve settled on—I carry what I can in my pack. But will you? I won’t. But can’t you? I have. There is no sanctuary for me in a land where their words are the only words that matter. I remember what played as a refrain: “Don’t say that. Don’t say that ever again.” You shouldn’t. But I must. You wouldn’t. But I will. You can’t be. But, now and forever, I am. This is me parting my own sea. This is me standing between the high walls of water on either side. Stranger in a strange land. I’ll write it on my name tag. Not from around here. I’ll stitch it into my scrunched socks, my plain underwear, my bounty of swag bags and literary totes. Hear that? It’s a door wincing shut. Watch the way my foot does not move to block it. I wait for nothing now: no intercessions, human or divine.  On the other side, I hear a lock, the firmest kind, which is sometimes called a deadbolt for a reason. The fact of being no longer…open. In the car: books piled high, books sliding across the dash, books multiplying over years, over miles. One poet wrote, “In my end is my beginning.” (Eliot) He was right, of course. Another wrote, more recently, “Before it happened, it was never going to happen. After it happened, it was always going to happen.” (Bidart) When an engine turns over, we sometimes say it roars to life.  

 Julie Marie Wade is a member of the creative writing faculty at Florida International University in Miami. A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, her collections of poetry and prose include Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures, Small Fires: Essays, Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems, When I Was Straight, Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems, Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, and Skirted. Her collaborative titles include The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, written with Denise Duhamel, and Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, written with Brenda Miller. Wade makes her home in Dania Beach with her spouse Angie Griffin and their two cats. Her newest projects are Fugue: An Aural History (New Michigan Press, 2023), and Otherwise: Essays (Autumn House, 2023), selected by Lia Purpura for the 2022 Autumn House Press Nonfiction Book Prize.  

23 May 2024