We Are All Shipwrecks by Kelly Grey Carlisle

Author:Kelly Grey Carlisle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2017-07-11T04:00:00+00:00

21

It was the end of July that summer before my first year of high school, and I was sitting with Dee on a bench outside the Anderson Cottage at the Old Soldiers’ Home in Washington, DC. She had moved there a few years before. I was visiting her for a week, staying in one of the home’s guest apartments, where I had my own kitchen and a living room and a view of the Washington Monument. I felt like a grown-up.

We were sitting on the bench, waiting for the mess hall to open for lunch, and the DC heat was just beginning to ratchet up in the shade; the cicadas were beginning to buzz. We didn’t have cicadas in LA. The sound made me happy and gave me the chills all at once, as if I were in some primeval forest. Dee held her cane in one hand and my hand in her other. I was almost as tall as she was now. I looked at her gray, curly hair, her brown eyes as she watched the world go by, her lips lined with age but still scarlet with lipstick. I looked down at her arms, which—because she was fat and had avoided the sun—were smooth and buttery white against the navy of her slacks. I noted the gentle roll of her stomach beneath her pink blouse.

Sometimes when I looked at Dee, I thought about how my grandfather said she was a lesbian. I tried to imagine her making love to another woman, something I’d learned to think was disgusting—unless it was on a porn box, when it became magically sexy. Dyke. It was a word people saved for ugly girls who didn’t quite fit in or the ones who looked like boys. But as I looked at Dee, even thinking it might be true of her, even trying hard to judge her for it, I couldn’t; I felt no disgust. She wasn’t sexy. She wasn’t gross. She was Dee, my Dee, and I loved her. We sat in silence, listening to the cicadas and the burble of conversations behind us. I leaned my head on her shoulder, smelling her White Shoulders perfume, the clean scent of her shirt.

“You see that tree,” she said, pointing with her cane to a huge copper beech in front of the white cottage. “That’s a pretty famous tree. Tad, President Lincoln’s son, used to play underneath it. They say the president even climbed it once, playing with him.”

I remembered reading about Lincoln’s visits to the Old Soldiers’ Home in a book. Lincoln had often stayed in the cottage on the home’s grounds, back when the inmates still wore uniforms and raised their own food. That was here. I was filled with awe. The last Civil War veterans had died long before, but here was this tree that had known Lincoln.

“I have to go touch it!” I said and ran toward it.

I bent down to get under its lowest branches, which brushed the ground, but once I was inside, I could stand.

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