"ANY EPIC STORY LEFT UNTOLD"
EXCERPT FROM A BRIE GROWS IN BROOKLYN
"My parents live in a house that was built in 1781. It’s name is Tara Knoll. When they bought it, my dad was a prince of Wall Street. I don’t know much about those days, because my parents never talk about money.
The house is a small mansion. It’s set on 7 acres of land, and it’s surrounded by a 100 acre nature preserve. It has a guest house, a pool house, a play house, and a shed. When we first moved in, my parents only had enough furniture to fill two of the rooms. For a while, I lived in a bedroom with only a mattress and an old dresser.
The house was scary. It was cavernous and haunted. My bedroom faced an old apple orchard. The attached bathroom was tiled in green marble. At night, my sister would creep from her room to mine with her blanket and teddy bear. We were frightened sleeping alone. I made her sleep on the floor. Frequently, my little brother would join us. Most nights, we ended up in our parent’s room, draped on their couch, curled on the ends of their bed. I’ve never slept well. In the bedroom with my mother, early in the morning, I tried to match her slow, deep breathing.
We were born in apartments. My parent’s first houses had been small. They had grown rich fast. My father, in the new house, slept with a hammer under the pillow. He figured if an intruder came in, he’d at least have one shot to knock him out. He slept with his feet uncovered, because he didn’t like feeling trapped under the comforter. Still, to this day, he sleeps curled around my mother — my parents were married when they were 22-years-old.
I don’t know where we fit in this world. Our house is a rich family’s house, but our mentality is poor. Soon after they bought it, my father left his job. For years, he had sat in front of dozens of tiny computer screens, tracking money, until he had enough money of his own. He set up an office on the third floor, in one of the smaller bedrooms, and wrote a novel.
He was the first to alienate people with his writing. He sent the novel to his best friends, and a few of them stopped talking to him. I was the second. I write things, and I hurt everyone who is close to me. My little brother Brendan is the third. A few weeks ago, he read a story out loud in his English class about a gay couple who smoke weed and hallucinate seeing a bear climbing on the tree outside of their window. The teacher said it wasn’t funny, and called home.
Guilt lays heavy on all of us. Guilt is the house, which I don’t think my parents have ever felt they deserve.
When we first moved in, my parents knocked off the old kitchen. For six months, we lived in the guest house. The back end of the mansion was gutted. You could climb the servant’s staircase, and look down from the third floor to the basement. It was a cavernous hole. In the walls, we found old newspapers from the 1920s, good luck trinkets, small hidden toys. Someone came to our door once, and brought us a book of old photographs of the house from the 1920s. The people who lived there rode horses, summered in the Hamptons, wore fur coats.
My parents built a new kitchen, with custom cabinets. They bought old antiques and Persian rugs. The drapes, they had made by a man named George. For a while, a housekeeper and an au pair lived in the small bedrooms on the third floor. My aunt lived in the carriage house with her baby boy. Every summer, a boy named Keith stayed with us — he is my brother from another mother. Sometimes, he was joined by others — Jakki from Northern Ireland. A boy named Ivan who showed up with cauliflower ears from being beaten by his grandfather. Violete, a smart, talented girl from the Bronx. Dozens of kids whose moms were in the Ossining Women’s Prison. My best friends, their families. My dozens of aunts, uncles and cousins. There’s an epic book to be written about life in the house. There’s a heartbreak in the story.
Today, the house is lonelier. Two brothers, two adopted sisters. My parents. A housekeeper named Christina, who arrives every morning, and leaves in the afternoon. A handy man named David Jolen. A Guatemalan gardener named Roberto, who has to stand on a stepladder to trim the hedges, because he’s only five feet tall. He lives in a basement apartment in the next town over. His English is rough. When he comes, my mom buys him a chicken parm sub and a liter of coke. She leaves it on a table in the sun. He doesn’t know his sons.
We’ve lived there for 18 years — the house is worn. Every time there’s a storm, trees fall all over the yard. Yesterday, I returned home only to find that my apple orchard had been decimated by the hurricane. In the spring, I used to sit under those flowering trees with a blanket and a book. I fantasized frequently, in that house. I wet the bed. I hid in the closets.
Trauma, they say, strips your memory. I go in through the front gates, and I leave exhausted."
-Excerpt from A Brie Grows in Brooklyn