I want you to know that I had a little school desk in my childhood bedroom. It was one of those old steel desks, with a hard wooden seat and wood-slatted back, and a small writing table on the right side. But what I loved most about this little desk was the storage cubby underneath. I used that storage cubby to store letters, birthday cards, certificates, my stationery sets and diary, and other treasures. Every now and then, I would take everything out and organize it all by size order. I would reread the letters—though who was I getting letters from then? That, I don't remember. I do remember looking at all the birthday cards my grandma in Arizona would send me without fail every year. I wasn't particularly close to Grandma Helen. She was a strange bird—racist, a hoarder, difficult to please—but even so, there was something comforting about the dependability of her cards and gifts each year, even though it was probably a sweater covered in cat hair or yet another pair of silver and turquoise earrings to go with the dozens I already never wore. Still, there was something about the giving, the sending—it signaled a world outside this bedroom shrouded in shadow.
Maybe that's why this little cubby in the steel school desk still weaves itself into me. I never sat at the desk. Never wrote on its writing surface. But I did sit on the hideous purple shag carpet next to that cubby as I laid out with reverence all the letters and cards and ephemera of paper and words. It occurs to me now that they were missives in and out of that dark place. My grandmother's cards never had anything written more than “Happy Birthday, XO Grandma”—except for the one reply I received when I'd written to her as a teenager about how much I wanted a car. Secretly, I hoped she'd buy me a car. I had no idea why I thought that possible, since she lived in a dilapidated trailer on the reservation in Fort Defiance, with way too many cats and dogs (hence the fur on all her gifts). She wrote in her reply that I could get a job and start saving money for a car. Fairy godmother dreams crushed.
But I keep wanting to tell you about the cards themselves. They were old-fashioned cards, like where you could trifold out three different views of a princess in three different embossed sparkly gowns. The cards themselves, their textures, their designs, their colors—they pulled at my heart, somehow whispering of stories so different than mine.
You should know that that house—well, do I really want you to know? About the desiccated piles of cat shit in my closet no one ever cleaned up? About the—no, actually, as my mind starts to catalog the scenes of neglect and despair, I turn away from wanting you to know all that. But then, does it all die away with me and my siblings? The sounds of violence, the fear? Maybe so. Maybe so. But what I do want you to know is that the young girl who so, so loved each stationery set she received, with their thick cream paper and matching envelopes in floral-lined cardboard boxes, that she somehow found ways to keep her secret, small pleasures. That she carried with her ways to send and receive words from other places, people who had other thoughts about her, and, somehow, those secret longings and pleasures carried through with her, until here, now, and became part of the mother you know, who has lived through more than I will tell you, but who has worked hard to make different stories for you. But maybe you should know, it wasn't easy. And there was a little steel and wood desk as part of the arriving here.