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Show Sea Change We returned to Virginia in 1983, back to the house with the falling acorns and the cold mornings when the driveway was a sheet of ice. Stacy had lived in the northern Virginia area for the past two years; she had sent pictures of a boy in her class who somehow stole her underwear only to wave it like a scarf in front of the lens. Her father would make admiral. Soon the Kaup's moved to a house in Charleston that resembled the Great House on slave owning plantations in the South. Karen and Jeff now lived in Virginia Beach, a three-hour drive; their father no longer captained the Indy but managed nuclear power. The next time I saw Jeff he would ignore me. This is the year my Grandpa will die, the year Reagan will launch Star Wars, the year I will begin high school at Oakton with its 4,000 students, the year I will sit with red-haired Rosie at the cafeteria table reading books and eat homemade lunches while never uttering a word. I enter a depression that parallels the oncoming winter, feel darkness inside me, contemplate suicide in abstract terms. No sun, no friends, a father who demands that I anticipate the next tool he will need, I beg my mother to buy me contact lens before I begin my new school. They don't arrive in time and I wear glasses, cuffed purple corduroys in size eleven, and an acrylic argyle sweater with diamonds down the front my first day. "Grandma" picks Ross and me up. My room is in the basement. Because we have lived in military quarters or rental houses for so long, I am excited to actually have a room that is mine and paint it the color 181 |
