Philadelphia
Dimitri Kaasan-Stull
It started with chatter about oil heating. My older sister and I were on the phone talking--as we’d been doing more of since her cancer diagnosis. I mentioned that the whole protocol of refilling the household fuel tank was something of a novelty to me since moving East. My sister remembered that oil had heated our grandmother’s house in St. Paul. As much time as we spent there as kids, it was not a detail I’d held on to.
I’d been ruminating on my childhood a lot lately, and my grandmother’s house, where we’d spent a lot of time as kids. I’d been thinking about the staircase to our grandmother’s second story dormer. While under the care of our father, I had taken a hard tumble down the stairs.
When, during that phone call, I asked if my sister remembered the incident, she asked, “You mean with the cream cheese?”
It was.
When I told my sister I’d been doing a lot of remembering childhood stuff lately, she said. “Tell me about it. Since the diagnosis, it’s all I do on those sleepless nights.”
Like what stuff?
Oh, everything, she said, From my pipala on.
Her pipala, Italian for pacifier, was lost rather cinematically in a plummet from her mouth over a sun-baked cliff in Crete. I knew this to be one of her earliest memories, and can’t help but see the incident for its symbolism; the loss of the pacifier as the loss of my sister’s golden child status, the perfect triad of father-mother-baby that broke when I was born.
I’m not sure why I’d been doing all this childhood remembering. I’d been going into a kind of spiritual hibernation, holed up here in a Western Massachusetts college town, winter coming in strong and fast. The feeling had ranged in psychic tone between melancholic and morbid. Partly being in my head in this way was from disorientation. Leaving Minneapolis, which had been my home for most of my childhood and adulthood, had left me unmoored. I’d been more distracted, mentally sliding off the present demands of childrearing and husband-being. Going through the motions, I guess. Into the vacuum of my mind I’d been dwelling a lot on childhood,
I’d been dwelling on the whole phenomenon of childhood, really. It’d hard not to considering the scale and visibility of suffering by children in the world in lately. Trans-Mexican migrant children, Syrian children, Yemeni children, children of opiate-addicted parents... That’s on top of our perennial backyard holocaust: black American children, especially boys, being murdered in actual backyards.
Here’s what my sister and I each remembered during that phone call. She was in a back bedroom when it happened. She’d only heard my fall, and only remembered that I had teased the dog, Toto, with cream cheese, maybe by tempting him with it. What happened, as I recall, was that I had put cream cheese in my little sister’s hair (she would’ve been 4-years old to my 8). I had done that because she’d put cream cheese in the dog’s hair. I guess this was my idea of justice. Which I must’ve gotten from my father, because when he saw what I’d done to my little sister, he very thoroughly rubbed cream cheese in my hair. I have a clear picture of him pinching a palmful from a packet of Philadelphia cream cheese. He was screaming in my face as he worked the stuff in. Then he threw me down the stairs.
Maybe.
In my early thirties we moved my grandmother out of her house to a condo, and I made a point of looking one last time at those stairs. There were 12 of them. They were a glossy, mahogany-stained wood, with a thin shag runner tacked in place. That many years younger and closer to the time when it happened, I probably had a clearer picture then of falling head over heels, glimpsing the floor I’d soon be crumpled on. But neither then nor now do I remember if I stepped backward, missed my step, and somehow made a half turn in an attempt to break my fall, or if my father shoved me.
The memory is a funny thing. Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are known, among other long-term effects, to mess with memory. Yet it’s memory that confirms the incident, and also affirms the truth of an experience we often carry into adulthood. So it affirms us. It’s about the ability to believe: Yes, something bad happened to you, so don’t feel so crazy. Or maybe: Don’t worry, you’re supposed to be this way.
Consider this year’s bumper harvest of children’s innocence. As, or if, these kids reach adulthood, how will they tell the story of what happened to them? With what words will they name what harrowed them as children and shaped them as adults? How much will their wounded minds even allow them to remember?
Our father left when I was eleven, without warning us and without any word for years. Neither of us would see him until we were adults, when his passing was not far off. His leaving affected us differently. For my sister, the sense of abandonment was the thing. Disappearing like that was a greater betrayal for her, because she was demonstrably his favorite (being favorite: a wound-worthy circumstance itself, with more nuanced consequences maybe). Accordingly, for much of her life, my sister has struggled to trust people. Because Papa was physically and verbally rougher with me, his leaving (birthday no-show, October 8, 1982), was confirmation of my innate unworthiness. Accordingly, I struggle to like myself.
Despite the different ways those experiences shaped our characters, my sister and I both have a sort of repertoire of memories that we share. “Papa Drinking” is one. “Papa in withdrawal is another.” “Papa crazy fun” yet another. “Papa Leaving” another still. While my sister and I have a shared understanding of each story, our points of view of each event or iteration could be fairly different. The possible exception is the time he knocked our heads together for bickering, in that instance what she and I we experienced was pretty damn close to identical. Otherwise, our past is like when you go to a movie with someone, and talking about it afterwards you seem to have seen two versions of the same movie.
Did he push me down the stairs? Or did he simply bump me me off balance, maybe by using too much force with the cream cheese hair treatment. Was I clumsy enough to fall on my own? And what about afterward? Did he come to my aid when I landed? I don’t know why, but I also wish I remember if it was really Philadelphia brand cream cheese. Is that an artifact of my imagination, a detail that springs from the visual cue of the block blue lettering on the classic matte silver cream cheese envelope?
Papa couldn’t tell me. More than 25 years after he vanished, I tracked him down to a cinder block house in Costa Rica’s Pacific backwaters. When I confronted him about what happened in Grandma’s stairway, he said had no recollection of it at all. That could’ve been a lie to deflect shame, or the alcohol, or both.
After talking for a while, my sister got a call from her oncologist and we had to hang up. When we did, it occurred to me that I’d spent the better part of the conversation, with all the talk of the stairs, essentially wallowing about wallowing. And here she was the one with aggressive breast cancer.
I let the wave of guilt pass through me, then let the familiar grip of self-accusal and self-pity release it’s hold on my throat. Then I thought about cream cheese. That’s how my sister remembered the stairs incident, and that’s how I would, too, from now on. Cream cheese. Because it’s no longer about the presumption of a fall, the deeds that preceded it, the intent behind it. It’s instead the certainty of brotherly love. It’s the certainty, you see, of the cream cheese.
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