Welcome to My American ’80s, a series of linked essays with collage images that tell stories of innocence lost and identity found while navigating early adulthood after repatriating to the U.S. during the age of Reaganomics, early Madonna, RUN-DMC, AIDS, and “We Are the World.”
New essays will be posted sporadically without regard to their chronology. This essay, “Pie,” is the first story in the collection and is centered in 1982. You can read the collection’s final story, “Birthday,” here.
When the essays go live, you can receive them via email if you are a subscriber (signup in the footer) or find the links here or under the category “My American ’80s.”
Note: Names have been changed. Content warning for “Pie”: Sexual imagery, consent issues.
Pie
“It’s a woman’s dream this autonomy where the points connect and the lines stay free.”
–Ferron, “Our Purpose Here“
Pie and the charge of male attention fused together at Thorn’s Diner in Vancouver’s Horseshoe Bay when I was fourteen. The pie case was perched behind the J-shaped coffee counter where the fishermen who’d lumbered up the hill from Sewell’s Marina weighed down the spinning stools. Mirrors surrounded the two shelves of pies, offering up an infinity of lemon meringue, coconut cream, pumpkin, apple, sour cherry, and latticed blueberry pie.
The other waitresses—mostly women in their forties—never wanted to work the coffee counter where checks seldom ran up past a couple of dollars. But I found working the counter strangely compelling and made as much money there as I did in the dining room with tables of two and four. Working my way down the counter, I filled cream pitchers and old-style coffee cups sitting in saucers with scalloped edges, cleared pie plates, and took orders. I’d lied to get the job. I’d said I was sixteen. There was nothing weird to my mom or stepfather that I’d be working at fourteen or that I’d lied to get the job. In 1941 my mom had dropped out of Grade 9 and for a job in one of Vancouver’s fish canneries. A couple years later my stepfather lied about his age to join the Royal Canadian Navy. Of course, I was going to have a job, even though we lived in nice house and the world was not at war.
The men smiled at me. Some called me Sweetheart. I was oblivious to how they thought of me, except that I felt their interest, their eyes, they’re something. At the pie counter, I felt important and adored in my sky blue uniform with its dyed-to-match zipper running down my midline.
The fishermen were M.E.N. with beards and giant yellow rain slickers and most no doubt had a wife and kid or two somewhere not far from that cove where the ferries shuttled in and out. I was a girl who was coming for the first time into centerstage’s golden cone of light, a person who men had suddenly and inexplicably saw as necessary. I was a girl who wanted to please on the cusp of becoming a woman who for a very long time believed that pleasing was the rent she had to pay to live in love’s house.
*******
We met up at the beach. English Bay. A muggy May morning. I got there first so rather than just sit on a log I walked down to water’s edge and stared at the dark green curve of Stanley Park. I heard him call my name. He said it with a little bit of accent that gave my name more gravity than it should carry. He was from somewhere else. Hungary. He loped down the sidewalk that divides the beach from the street. Markos. Tall, skinny but not quite the boy I knew in high school, which was only two years ago but felt like forever. By the time we reached each other, we both knew something was about to happen.
We sat in the sand with our feet pointing toward Howe Sound and our backs against a log, the city and all its morning sounds behind us.
“So how was Australia? I heard from Chris you were there for like six months,” I asked, not quite knowing why he’d asked me here or what we should talk about.
“A year. I mean a year total. I was in Asia after Australia.”
“Wow, that’s amazing. I want to go to Australia! Did you go to Ayers Rock?”
“Yeah, and I can report that it’s as hot as hell,” he said with a laugh.
“What are you doing here, like in Vancouver?” I was wondering if he’d be around for a while and hoping he would be.
“Nothing really. Throwing pots for my dad and making some pottery of my own at Inge’s studio.”
“You’re so lucky. You can make a living at something creative!” I dreamed of being a writer but had no idea where I might even begin to start.
“Well, barely.”
“But still.”
“What about you?”
“Nothing, collecting UI, living in Kits. I’m leaving at the end of the summer though for New Mexico,” I said, pushing some sand toward the water with my feet.
“What for?”
“School. I’m going to finish my degree at UNM. I have a sister there and my other sister’s moving there. My one sister’s going to let me live in a rental she has. It’s really small but I don’t have to pay rent. She says I can just do some work for her nursery.”
“You’re American?” He said American the way Canadians sometimes say it, like it’s a staff infection.
“Dual. Well, I will be. I’m getting my Canadian citizenship next month. Well, July actually.”
“Big summer! Swearing your allegiance to the queen and then taking off.”
“Is it to the queen still?” I asked. He must have gone through all this citizenship business himself at some point. His family was from that place. Hungary.
“Think so.”
“That’s hideous. Maybe I won’t do it. I don’t want to swear anything to the queen, the facist regime.”
“Just do it. None of that means anything. Just keep your options open so you can always come back if things get weird down there. The States can be pretty touch and go, right?”
I remembered then something that had happened a month earlier on a road trip with a friend to the Bay Area. We’d separated for a few hours in San Francisco and a guy had tried to pull her into a van near Market Street. She’d fought him off and ran back to our meeting spot. She’d been okay but the terror of it lingered with us for the rest of our trip. Startling at every sound, rushing to snap the door locks.
“I guess,” I said. “I mean anything can happen anywhere, right?”
“Yep,” he said, and then he smiled. “Good or bad.”
. I fell into that burning ring of fire with him that summer. When we were together then, we were a universe of two. We talked about the things that mattered to me the most and that most people seemed to care about the least: poetry, art, philosophy, feminism. He made me feel I was irreplaceable, a feeling I’d hungered for all my life.
After two years at a community college a year ago, I’d been working at various jobs and travelling. I was pretty lost, to be honest, and couldn’t see myself finishing my degree at UBC or SFU in Vancouver—two universities I was convinced I wasn’t good enough to attend—and so I’d jumped at the chance when my sister Megan said I could trade odd jobs to rent out her “barn” in Madrid, a once-abandoned coal mining town tucked into the hills on the Turquoise Trail between Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
And then we fell in love and my plan became our plan. In late August 1982, I got a ride from Seattle to New Mexico with my sister Ivy and her husband Jim. I was going to finish my college degree and Markos would make pots. He would drive down to join me in a week after he was finished glazing and firing a kiln. We had a plan. Everything was going our way.
About two weeks before I left, we went for a picnic with another couple—my friend Sally and this guy she was semi-seeing Jack. It was a hot day and we sat out on Caulfield Rock on the North Shore of Vancouver, eating sandwiches and watching sailboats go by. It was a sort of goodbye picnic except we weren’t focused on the goodbye part of things. Markos and I were talking all about our plans—how we’d be in the desert at 7000 feet, how he would be working for a local potter, a friend of my sister’s, how we’d heat our place by wood stove and likely get a cat of our own.
“It’s going to be amazing,” he said, looking over at me as if the other two weren’t even there.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s going to be great! Our own place!”
“The thing is,” Jack said, “I’m doing a road trip through the States next month. I want to do the old Route 66.”
“In New Mexico it’s I-40 now, I think,” I said.
“Yeah, I think so and it goes through Albuquerque, right? That’s near you guys, right?”
We both nodded.
“So would it be okay if I came by? I’d have my sleeping bag. Maybe I could camp in your yard or sleep in the back of my truck?”
Markos and I exchanged a why not shrug and both said “Sure” and “Why not?” before we decided we’d had entirely enough of looking at the water and it was time to go for a swim. We picked our way through the path down to the water. We called for Saly and Jack to come down once we were up to our knees, but they waved us off and we had the water to ourselves. The water is always freezing cold there even on the hottest day so we inched in slowly until he checked me with a giant splash and then it was game on. I pushed as much frigid saltwater as I could his way but then he was off stroking his way out of the cove. I couldn’t be left behind, so breast stroked as fast as I could to catch up to him. I only caught up because he stopped and treaded water, waiting for me to reach him.
“Hey you.”
“Hey.”
“You know I really like you, right,” he said.
“You better. We are going to be LIVING TOGETHER!”
“No, but a lot.”
“Good.” I said, giving him a tiny splash.
“Like, love.” He said in a quiet voice.
“So the first time you say you love me you’re just gonna say ‘like love’”
He stared at me. So I swam right over and put my arms around his neck and said, “I love you too.”
“I love you,” he said, finally.
Just then we see Jack and Sally waving at us on the shore, beckoning us back. We exchanged a glance as if to say I guess they’re in a hurry to go and start to swim back. After a few a strokes, I noticed that Markos kept getting closer to the shore but I seemed to be staying in place, the gap between us growing first by a bit and then suddenly by a lot. I started to swim harder—even my hardest—but it didn’t make any difference. Despite my best efforts, I was just staying in place. Now Sally and Jack were standing and yelling and waving. Swim along the shore, Sally was saying.
Jack pointed to a spot up the shoreline and shouted, “Swim to there and then come in. It’s a riptide.”
Riptide? I’ve never heard of a riptide here in Howe Sound. Is that even possible? But whatever, I had to just keep going, even though by then my arms felt like jelly. I pushed my way along parallel to the shore even though every instinct in me just wanted to swim in. I looked over and saw Markos had already made it to the beach. How had he made it in so easily? Was he worried about me? Jack and Sally had walked up the shore by then and were now standing at the spot they’d been pointing to a few minutes earlier. Fighting back panic and exhaustion, I chopped my way toward the beach but barely made any progress. Jack was shouting things, but I was no longer listening. I just had to swim to shore. No one was going to do it for me.
I glanced up at them again. Now Markos was there too, and they shouted together all at once and it sounded like You can do it. I didn’t know whether to feel desperate or just embarrassed, but finally my knees scraped rocks and my feet found bottom. I stumbled to a standing position like a sea monster taking its first land steps and lurched onto the beach.
But what matters most to me about this story is not how stupid I felt or that I could have died or that no one could help me. Because even if you love someone or even just like them really a lot, you shouldn’t swim out into a riptide or even a strong current to save them. Unless you can get at them with a boat or a rope affixed to something unmovable, they must save themselves. And if you’re swimming with someone, you’re not obligated to glance back as you swim to mark their progress. Even if you really like them a lot or love them. The checking or not checking isn’t the point. The possibility of drowning does not matter here. What matters about this scene is that you, Reader, have met Jack.
My first job for Rainbow Rabbit was to work the booth at the Labor Day Arts Fair on the Santa Fe Plaza. We drove from Madrid up the Turquoise Trail, the back road that links the Northeastern part of Albuquerque to Santa Fe. Batiked T-shirts in every size, even little onesies for babies, filled tubs that lined the bed of her truck. All Hanes 100 percent cotton. Five dollars an hour. Good money.
The sky was nothing I’ve ever seen before, a painful blue, a blue sharp like glass with a few puffs of white cotton strewn through. Rainbow snapped off the radio after I turned it on and said she doesn’t like music. A single mom with twin boys, two years old, she liked quiet whenever she can get it, she said. Quiet unnerved me. Gave her too much time to ask questions I didn’t have good answers to. What’s your major? Why did you want to move to New Mexico? Why is your boyfriend moving down here? What’s he going to do? Why didn’t you go to college all the way through?
The desert gave way to town, and the businesses at the base of Cerrillos Road began to bloom around us: Gas stations, an old school seafood restaurant with a captain’s wheel bolted to its turquoise siding, Jackalope Pottery with acres of manufactured terra cotta pots, motels from the early 60s with kidney-shaped swimming pools bordering the road. I wanted to smoke one of the Camels in my purse, but Rainbow Rabbit didn’t smoke, so I just kept looking out at the window, watching the old timey businesses turn to adobe houses and strip apartment complexes. I imagined what it might be like to live in town, pay rent on regular one bedroom instead of a trade labor for rent with my sister for the “barn” out in Madrid. Maybe a place with a dishwasher and nice hardwoods and a lock on the door my sister doesn’t have a key to. I don’t have first, last, and security though and won’t anytime soon. Not I, we. Markos would be here soon.
The plaza was something out of movie with its white gazebo and booths full of handmade pottery, weavings, silver jewelry, and funky ass sculptures made from pinon branches. Texan tourists in Hawaiian shirts and ballcaps. Skateboarders weaving in and out of clusters. A song drifting out of a bar’s speakers: I keep forgetting we’re not in love anymore.
My job: Keep our table stocked, locate sizes, tell people they look great in that one, and take the cash and make change. Fifteen dollars for the adult shirts/ten for kids/ twenty-five for the fancy ones with the pocket and the baby onesies, I forgot how much they were and had to ask Rainbow every time. Fuchsia, lime green, turquoise, indigo, and lavender dyed backgrounds gave way to desert scenes hand painted or silk screened by Rainbow and her helper. And now that helper was me. I’m the helper, I told myself.
It was a good morning and the pile on the table steadily shrunk, and Rainbow told me to take a break. I bought a Mexican Coke in a bottle from a vendor one booth over to walk around the plaza with.
On the other side of the plaza, I picked up a brown honey pot from a table crowded with hand thrown mugs, bowls, and vases. Thick glazes, brown, black, and cream.
“It’s five dollars,” said the guy in sunglasses behind the table.
“I’ll take it,” I said and handed him a bill.
He pointed to my shirt. “Are you working for Rainbow?”
I nodded and said “Yeah,” and he said, “She runs through people, just so you know.”
“She’s a friend of my sister’s,” I said, hoping that would stop him from telling me stuff I didn’t want to know.
“Maybe it’ll go better for you then. So hey, I’m John. Want to get a drink at the Pink Adobe later?”
I waved the pot and said, “This is for my boyfriend. He’s a potter. You’d like him. I gotta get back.”
I walked past the jewelers in front of the Palace of the Governors, just to get the shade. But then I looked over at our stand and saw the people lined up three deep. Fuck. I started to jog over and then felt immediately winded. 7000 feet. Rainbow spotted me and gave me a “C’mon!” and I ran back somehow.
On the drive back to Madrid, Rainbow was happy because I was counting the money and it looked like we made 380 dollars. Minus the gas. Minus materials. Minus the booth fee, she told me, not to mention I have to pay you.
“Want to do another one next Sunday, down at UNM in Albuquerque?” she asked.
“That’s the day Markos gets here,” I said, hoping that was enough of an answer.
“So you don’t need money because your boyfriend will pay for everything?”
“Um, no, why would he?”
“You’re just like your sister.”
“Excuse me?”
“You think a guy’s going to make everything okay, but it isn’t.”
I felt like she had me mixed up with someone else. As if Markos was some business guy or doctor and not a twenty-one year old who makes the same money as me, which is to say not much. Like my sister? Is that supposed to be a bad thing? I thought those two are like best friends.
“What time on Sunday?”
“We’ll leave at eight.”
“Okay then,” I said
She nodded a put a tape in the cassette player. We wound down the hill past Cerrillos. The church’s silver dome popped up above the river’s cottonwoods and Joni sang He was sitting in the lounge of the Empire Hotel. He was drinking for diversion. He was thinking for himself.
So the barn. The barn was not a barn–just a tiny one-room house my sister had built next to the falling down coal miner’s shack she bought for 500 dollars here in this town in 1974. Ten by fifteen feet with an outhouse out back, the barn would be our little cottage for two.
My sister Megan had lived in that coal miner’s shack for years until she moved in the big house on the hill with her boyfriend, David, the former Hells Angel with silver lightning bolts embedded into his front teeth. Their house was just tarpaper on the front but huge and its windows looked over the dry arroyo and the houses, shacks, sheds and barns spotted throughout the valley town including mine. Ours.
A few days later when someone knocks, I figured it was Megan, so I opened the barn door without thinking much about it. I was pretty shocked to see Jack standing there behind my brother-in-law Jim, a Vietnam vet who saw everything as a high-alert situation. On the drive down in my other sister Ivy and Jim’s RV, Jim made us keep the blinds all the way down AT ALL TIMES at the campsites. Sometimes, he’d lift a slat with a single finger and survey the dark quiet grounds, searching for the first sign of danger.
“This guy’s been asking people where you live. Know him?” Jim asked, pointing his thumb behind him to Jack, who was a minimum of two weeks early.
“I do know him,” I said awkwardly—awkwardly because in the flicker of Jim’s eyes I could see that me knowing him was actually worse than me not knowing him. I guess to Joe—fifteen years and three tours of duty older than me—I wasn’t supposed to know any men other than my boyfriend. All this was expressed with blinks for now, but I knew more was coming.
“He’s a friend from Canada! Hey, Jack, nice to see you!” I said with more cheer than I was feeling.
“The drive went faster than I thought,” Jack said because he knew it was weird that he was here early.
“Okay,” I said, turning to Jim. “It’s all good. Thanks for your help.”
“Alright, you know where I am. One. Call. Away.” He gave Jack a look and headed back to the dirt road where his black Bronco was still running.
“Sorry about that. He’s kind of, uh, intense. Um, come in?” I said, not wanting any of this to be happening. Not the brother-in-law. Not Jack. Just. Too. Awkward.
“Is it okay that I’m here?” he asked, ducking through the doorway. “None of the streets have names and none of the houses have numbers. Did you know that? I know I’m early. I just. Traveling by myself wasn’t what I expected. I just didn’t feel like stopping anymore and wandering around places by myself, you know? Plus, the States! Some places are just scary. Like weird tense vibes. Where’s Mark?”
Mark? Oh, Markos. I’d never heard anyone call him Mark so it took me a second. “Vancouver still. But on his way. Like could be here very soon.”
“That’s good.” He said, glancing around the kitchen and beyond.
“Yeah, it is. Hey, come on in! So, you’ve been camping?” I asked, walking us through the kitchen—a mini fridge, a hot plate, and a sink all crowded around a single counter a few feet from the woodstove. We stepped up into the barn’s tiny living room where we settled in opposite each other, him on the sofa with his long legs extending well into the room and me perched on one of the folding chairs at our makeshift dining room table.
“Yeah, but you know at these higher elevations it’s really cold at night. I need a better bag. Like one of those down-to-zero sleeping bags,” he said.
I crunched a massive calculation. If I offered him the couch, will both my sisters somehow take note that he’s slept inside and start assuming something? Jim is clearly already deeply suspicious of the situation. But then I got mad because I’m a grown person. I’ll make my own decisions! I’d turned twenty-one three weeks earlier. I hadn’t lived with my parents since I was seventeen, for god’s sake. I do what I do! They can think whatever. “Do you want to sleep on the couch tonight?” I offered.
“Is it alright?” he asked. He seemed so vulnerable in that moment.
“Sure.” I said lightly, as if all my choices were easy and completely my own.
Somehow we survived the awkwardness of making and eating dinner together in that tight space. And then it was the inevitable time for me to go up to the loft and head to bed.
He started to roll out his sleeping bag and turned and asked, “Are you sure this is where you want me to sleep?”
As opposed to where? Outside or? He wasn’t possibly thinking he’d sleep with me, was he? But framed that way, it wasn’t that hard for me to answer, “Yes,” maybe because it was so much easier for me to say yes than no. Maybe because I had no interest in sleeping with him and was in love with Markos. But there was also a weirdness because the sleeping loft was in full view of the living room. But ignoring weirdness seemed like the only good option and was something I’d been doing most of my life, so I made my way upstairs and pretended it was normal for me to change into my nightie under the covers.
But then a few minutes later when I’d turned off the loft light and was settled into bed, I heard his voice call up: “I feel kind of sorry for myself down here.”
That comment was the turning point. His displeasure was the thing I could not tolerate. After he said those words, I slipped over the line from No to Yes. As a very grown woman, I can see that the opposite should have been true. I should never have slept with someone who did not take my first answer as the final answer and who used guilt to get into my bed. But I cannot transport that knowledge back in time. I cannot change the fact that in the competition between a man’s displeasure and my own, I sacrificed my own. I felt I had no choice but to do so. Indeed, this was so deeply true that I wasn’t even cognizant then that I was making a sacrifice. Why would you choose to do something you did not want to do? It seems almost impossible to conceive a reasonable answer to that question. But maybe you know the feeling of letting your own will slip through your hands, the burn of the tug-of-war rope.
I didn’t want to have sex with him, and yet I didn’t want to say no. Everything in my being had been trained to say yes to men. I am not a special recipient of this training. Female acquiescence was the water we swam in, so much a part of who we were that it wasn’t even identifiable. It was just there—the accommodating, the yielding, the pleasing, the serving of pie. To be loved, I felt I needed to be compliant, which might have been barely okay if the need to be loved didn’t extend beyond the people who mattered most to me, if I didn’t need everyone to love and to like me.
“Yes, okay, come up.”
Does it matter what the sex was like? I think it does. It was like this: Getting it over with. I know it wasn’t a rush of passion because I can remember thinking “Why am I doing this?” halfway through—him hovering above me, green eyes illuminated by the bedside lamp. But the idea that I could stop him part way through was not available to me. I did not stop him, even though it was absolutely clear to me that I didn’t want to be doing this. What I wanted—not only wanted but had tacitly agreed with another to do—didn’t matter to me as much as pleasing him, as avoiding conflict.
Even though the sex caused me no memorable pleasure, I was not immune from the shame it quickly ushered in. It seems to me that shame might reasonably be exclusive to taking something you wanted badly enough to overlook the consequence of how your actions might hurt others, the expected cost of a wanted purchase. In the movies, cheating feels passionate, urgent—bra straps yanked down, the wall of resistance tumbling down at last, desire finally sated. This was not that.
The next day I had ten layers of trouble to contend with. I had the problem of him and his presence—how much longer would he stay? What do I say to him? But mostly, I was consumed with the acidic guilt of my betrayal and the worry about how I was going to manage that guilt and keep it cordoned off from my relationship with Markos, the person with whom I’d once thought I would share my every worry and concern. And yet, there was no doubt that I would be keeping this a secret from Markos for all the following reasons:
- There was not conversation in the culture then about “adultery” or “cheating” except for the commonly held understanding that such behavior meant the end of a marriage or relationship. Most stories of cheating at that time involved men screwing around because they deeply, desperately, passionately wanted to. I couldn’t even imagine an infidelity story starring a woman who apparently did it for no real reason except avoid an acquaintance’s irritation.
- What would I even say? How would I explain it? Why should I hurt him for this?
- I would lose him, which would be horrible and all for what? For this sex that I hadn’t wanted?
- No. Just no.
The next day was hot hot. In the late afternoon charcoal clouds bunched up in the hills that surrounded the town’s valley. An afternoon storm is pretty much an everyday occurrence in late August in Northern New Mexico. And before its arrival, pressure built. It was awkward as hell and weird as anything and but we both wordlessly agreed not to speak of the night before and that today was the day he would leave. I held my breath until he left. I wanted to just the relief of his departure, but as soon as he was gone, I was overcome with shame and regret. I felt ill, thinking of future conversations about Jack’s stay that were inevitable, unavoidable, and would require Meryl Streep level of precision in execution. How would an innocent person speak of such a visit? Oh yeah, it was great to see him. Yeah, he didn’t stay long, did he?
Could I run away? No. There was nowhere to run. This was the place I’d run away to.
Markos arrived a couple days later, and we set up our first house together. I feared he’d immediately sense what had happened, but he didn’t seem to.
He brought with him two bowls and two plates that had come out of that kiln he’d just fired, cobalt blue with brush strokes of white slip, our dining set. They were the most romantic thing I’d ever seen. I gave him the brown honey pot and told him about John, the potter I met on the plaza. I thought about telling him Jack but just said that he’d been there, spent one night and then left in a hurry. Uneventful.
I started my classes at UNM the next week. In the evenings when I’d come home from Albuquerque, Markos had make us dinner and we’d eat from the plates and bowls he’d made just for us. It was shocking to me how domestic he was, how he wanted to greet me when I came home and made things for me to eat and loved the coziness of our woodstove the way I did. We cobbled together a sustainable life that we couldn’t sustain. We built furniture out of cinder blocks and plywood and traded our unskilled labor for rent. I took classes, cleaned houses, and made silkscreened T-shirts for Rainbow. He threw pots at a pottery studio a five-minute hike across the arroyo and eventually started renting studio space from John, the potter I’d met on the plaza. On afternoons off we sat in a secluded spot on the edge of the trickle known as the Galisteo River and smoked Camels and drank Coca-Cola from glass bottles. The cottonwoods along the river’s red banks turned from emerald to golden against the achingly blue sky. America was just a movie we were watching together then. We weren’t responsible for how it unfolded.
That fall I took a women’s studies class at UNM. At the end of the semester, we had a group dinner at one of the professors’ houses in an Albuquerque suburb of adobe and irrigated lawns. One of the women said, “The thing is in a relationship with a man, you’re always going to be the one who brings home the fresh blueberries.”
I couldn’t begin to articulate my issue with men, but I knew that her experience wasn’t my own. I didn’t doubt what she said was true, but my problem was a different animal, one with a name still unknown to me. I remembered then that I’d even had a recent experience that exactly contradicted hers, right down to the very berry. I remembered in that moment a carton of blueberries Markos had brought home one day not long after his arrival. I thought of how he’d rinsed some of the berries in one of the cobalt bowls streaked with white, how he’d climbed up to the loft where I was reading This Bridge Called My Back in our bed–that very same bed–how he’d handed the bowl to me.
“Here you go,” he’d said. “These are for you.”
Writing Is My Drink 
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