Julie Marie Wade

 
What Is Quorum? $400

from the Q Words category

At three, we were small, indisputably. My parents would say cozy, would dissent if they heard me say incomplete. Though we were, indisputably. And when my father traveled for work all week, woefully so. Yes, I missed him, of course I did, but this is not the story of Daddy’s Girl not getting what she wants so much as the story of an only daughter over-steeped in Mom. My mother loved tea & brewed her tea too strong! Picture me as the hot water in her cup, the bag of Lipton soaking in me, soaking, soaking, no timer set, sipping me then, sipping me down to the dregs, only much later wringing out the bag, winding it around the spoon, but just as soon pouring another cup, submerging another bag, so the ritual began again, interminably, her chain-drinking of me, her perpetual consumption. Sometimes water wants to be something other than tea. (Coffee anyone?) Sometimes water needs to trickle or gush alone, undammed. Inverse ratio: the fewer of us, the more focus on me, me, me! And by focus I mean scrutiny, & by scrutiny I mean invasion of privacy—which implies there was ever privacy to invade. So not that. This: I started building my imaginary family with the same diligence & determination some boys I knew built Erector Sets—the way my soon-to-be brothers did, in our daylight basement borrowed from real life. I started with the oldest children & worked my way down: Matthew, Kristen, Vanessa, Jeff. (My parents planned to have a son named Jeff—before the cancer came, before the window closed. This was how I paid homage to their best-laid plans…) Then, there was Julie, but I didn’t want to think about myself, so I held off for a while, surrounded her with ellipses & question marks. The whole point of this elaboration was to help me get lost in a crowd. Every younger sibling was a twin, some identical & some fraternal, all united by an ampersand: Andie & Mandie, Billy & Bobby, Katie & Kevin, Sarah & Alex. Now the parents of this extensive nuclear family physically resembled my own. They bore the same names, worked at the same jobs, but they were less like people & more like sitcom stand-ins for a “good mom” & a “good dad.” They were always busy, of course, with so many children to raise, & I was busy, too, as a court reporter, transcribing in separate notebooks the events of my actual life & the events of this parallel narrative. I drew blueprints of our house with its third- & fourth-story additions—to accommodate us all, you see, sprawling but never cramped—& when I finally accepted my fate as a first-person narrator, I rewrote myself as one of four, quarteredinto selfhood I could reasonably sustain. We middle children, cummerbund at the waist of our family, we quadruplets: Kellie, my twin sister, David & Jonathan, our twin brothers (& best friends in the Bible, which I thought a nice touch…). But just because Kellie & I looked alike didn’t mean we were. She could get away with things I couldn’t—sassing our parents, refusing the food on her plate, staying up hours past bedtime & curfew. She was also willing to take the risks she knew I wouldn’t—riding rollercoasters, cutting class, having the sex I was still scared to have. Yes, I kept this family far too long. Matthew got married, joined the military, moved to an army base in Idaho. Kristen dropped out of college, waited tables at a diner I liked to visit after school. (Moo juice & hen berries, a tiny jukebox at every booth…) Vanessa became a dancer with the Pacific Northwest Ballet. And Jeff, the longed-for son, turned out to be difficult, defiant, something of a ne’er-do-well. In the upstairs bathroom, window cracked so he could smoke a joint without our parents smelling, he told me the hard truth: “Look, there’s a lot of freedom in being make-believe, but if a shrink ever gets a hold of this, you’re going down, Jules, for real.” Was this junior year? Maybe senior? He offered me a hit, & I took it. “You don’t have to kill us, but you definitely have to let us go—so you can.” He kissed my forehead. Decades later, I can still feel that small damp spot. “I just wanted enough members to make our assembly valid, to make our proceedings sound,” I said. He laughed, & as the smoke escaped his lips, he vaporized. (Soon enough, so did I…)
 

Julie Marie Wade is a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, and she teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami. Her most recent collection is Other People's Mothers (University Press of Florida). website

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