this is how she grows

“I need someone. I need to hold somebody close. And I need more than this holding. I need someone to understand how I feel at a time like now. And the understanding must be part of the holding.” 

― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 

The past is never far. 

―Goo Goo Dolls, Name

I. 

There is the kitchen first. 

I remember the cool tile beneath my touch because it is springtime in New York City and you can only stave off the summer heat for so long. That garbage smell they wax poetic about in movies--it’s mostly true. But, here, in this darkened room, I only see my freedom laid in three 

square rooms all of which are the same size, a handful of windows where pigeons make themselves known. We were here first, they coo. I have never had a clawfoot tub or a room of my own with a lock and a key. 

Picture this: a girl hardened by a family riddled with addiction and on the cusp of adulthood herself, readjusting into what it means to be truly taken care of. Truly? In the sense that someone rescued her before she could do more harm to herself. 

Her ribs poke out, a train track of wariness she hides between too-loose shirts. Curls that aren’t quite curly anymore are chemically straightened and burnt. A lasting scent of fear: this is what it smells like to be alone. 

My father, a man of great stature both in height and emotion, bends over a lease, pen balanced between fingers that once held me to his chest.

A memory: Mom said us three would eat dinner on the couch in their first apartment. The entire dinner I would sleep on my father’s chest while snugly held by one safe, strong hand. Don’t drop me, I whisper now, 19 but still craving his touch. I will try to find my father in the women I date. There will be several women who I ask to hold me, but I can never get comfortable enough. In the photo my mother cradles as she recounts this memory, I wear a white onesie with a yellow blanket tucked around me. Still. Held. 

II. 

Standing in my kitchen, this is all mine. My fingers graze the walls, white paint flicking off. I stare at the emptied moving boxes surrounding my newly built furniture. This place is an oasis from so much. It is also a haunted house. I will spend several days attempting to cleanse my space of a past that’s more inclined to act as a constant reminder than an ex-lover. I will befriend my ghosts as they bewitch me, for I am only scared of what I can see, not what I can’t. 

I never had an invisible friend when I was younger. I recall trying to invent one, but invisible friends don’t come when called. 

Sometimes, I will glance up too quickly and for just a second I see her, but she is not A -- my lover, my friend, the one that didn’t make it -- A is an illusion, smiling back at me. Or, maybe, A is J, my first girlfriend somewhere still in Pittsburgh. J and A, then there were the K’s and an L. These letters make up my heart. Eventually will I hold the entire alphabet there? Is there so much of a good thing? 

III.

Two years of my life will scatter in this apartment. Newly made friends, ex-lovers, peers, co-workers, crushes, and my brother (for the first few weeks of my baby sister’s life--a respite from the constant screaming). I will go on to eat many dinners at my kitchen table, a laptop propped on books, staring at the white of my wall that despite two years of living here I only ever hang one painting on, gifted to me by my father on my nineteenth birthday. I will turn twenty and twenty-one here. I will receive my learner’s permit, my license, my jury solicitation. I will pack suitcases for trips to Florida and London: the first, a family trip. The second, a solo one. My family will occasionally visit. Mostly my dad, to cook for me. My step-mom only twice, once on the day I move in to collect my mattress, pop a flower in an old milk bottle, and show me the curtains my dad painstakingly hung. The second time, to show me the Art of How to Put a Duvet On--an act I never stop performing. Family, the six-letter word that makes my heart speed up, my face contort, my hands search. I am with family and then without family--we fight, we block, we become unknown to one another. Blood is thicker than…? 

It is, but it isn't. I think blood and then I think, not mine. My family is dispelled and dispirited; broken into disparities which will last a lifetime if not for the skeletons packed in dust bags and tissue paper and neatly stacked between boxes that read HERMES and H’S BABY CLOTHES. After my father leaves my mother (I almost write brother, a story for another time) there is so much conflict. We begin by keeping secrets (by we, I mean me) and I learn that usually a quick, but convincing smile, is truly all it takes for someone to be dissuaded. There aren’t appropriate answers for “how do you let three children raise their mother and themselves,” so the questions stay hidden, too.

IV. 

I am quite small when my mother (my hero, then) introduces me to a white lie. We can tell these, she says, when we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. I take that as an offering. I am careful to never hurt feelings or step on toes. I apologize to inanimate objects. When my girlfriend hits me for the first time I murmur, “I’m sorry,” but to whom I am unsure. 

V. 

I am tempted to remember the early morning in December, or maybe it was March, when my very first girlfriend, J, asked me to make her a cup of coffee. I shrugged. She looked at me begrudgingly. Not even that? Her eyes say. You don’t even know how to make a cup of coffee. Or the time, hand in hand, we walked to the bodega near her apartment to get eggs and half-and-half. She made me breakfast, which I did not finish, and neatly packed away the rest in a container for later. 

I am new to the complexities that come with suddenly living on your own when you have previously done very little to care for yourself. I know how to locate the Advil on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet for my four-years-younger brother in the middle of the night or the soothing words to murmur to my brother when it became clear he had had too much to drink. I know how to stroke my mother’s hair just so, to clean up messes that come from being rooted to a home that shakes below your feet. I know how to order take out, how much to tip, and what to feed my constantly ravenous body, always underweight, never full. What I did not know was how it felt to slip a mailbox key into a small box with my name printed on it in the shaky cursive of my landlord, or the way the fridge hummed behind my head as I slept in the IKEA bed my dad had

assembled, a book spread open on my stomach, the rain hammering against the AC unit, a constant teacher in patience and repentance. My dad bought me cookbooks, tried to teach me once how to perfect the Art of Boiling Water. I would only half-listen, more consumed by the time together than the finished product. 

All this to say, I never mastered that art. 

VI. 

It takes me a full year to become brave enough to use my apartment’s oven, and even then, I use it sparingly. Ghosts, I think. They’ll haunt you if you let them and I let them. My mother was a checker. We’d be halfway to somewhere before inevitably she’d stop and say, “Wait, was the oven off when we left? The microwave? Did I lock the door?” Questions haunt me too, but ovens are the least of my concern. I frequently forget to turn my oven off when I do manage to use it, so I smell gas for full days in my home afterwards, a reminder of a wandering mind. Dullness. I lock myself out a record three times, often just because I leave my door unlocked more than I don’t. I am too trusting, too comfortable relegating to my outside world and letting it in. I like finding small reminders of everyday lives, like a note scrawled on my dorm room door when in college. Maybe it’s just a package someone has delivered to my doorstep or a small spider which has made its way in. I watch everything even though my windows look out to a wall. I am a master inventor. 

VII.

The complexities of grocery shopping thrill me. I walk down every aisle, navigating the nannies who push strollers of cherubic children as they strain from the confines of seatbelts, always reaching forward. There’s a man with a bike. There is always a man with a bike. The bike is too big to navigate the narrow aisles toppling with products. The people who do not have time for the inconvenience of a bicycle in a grocery store. He does not hold a helmet, but rather a baguette, pushing the bike with one hand, holding the bread with the other. I feel for what I think is the ripest avocados. I add bright red cherry tomatoes in my basket, olive oil made in Tuscany, salt and pepper too. My fingers graze the spice shelf, my mind concocting dishes I will never eat, sounding out names I do not know. The cheese section is a welcomed friend; I am familiar with it. I loved shopping for cheeses with my mother. Wandering to the store that also sat nestled next door to the first apartment building I grew-up at, being handed a flimsy piece of wax paper, with a delightfully cut piece of cheddar or gouda or something equally intoxicating. A loaf of bread is next, freshly baked, evoking memories of the one time we made fresh bread when I was a child. Its smell had enticed me for days. I remember watching the dough rise, completely entranced by the simple magic taking place in front of me. Into the basket goes a bar of chocolate for good measure. In college, I learned the importance of chocolate--how it eases unexpected heartbreaks, how it works as a peace offering, how you always need a piece nestled in the bottom corner of your purse for emergencies that only dark chocolate or peanut butter brittle or salted caramels can cure. 

At home, the tomatoes stare at me from their perch on top of the microwave, neatly folded into themselves in the plastic bin they came in, but expanding to fill the ceramic blue bowl I shuttle them into. They spark joy. They enunciate their presence by contrast. They glow. The bread is

half-eaten. Crumbs litter the countertop that never loses its stickiness. Formica? Plastic? An unknown material abused over the years by inhabitants stacking and cutting, touching, cleaning, scrubbing, slicing on. The stories told by the chips, discoloration, the “remember when.” I may not know how to cook, but I know how to tell stories. This will be a counter stacked with treats, touched by many hands, a kitchen table that sparkles the night before the ball drops, stacked with snacks, a mini speaker that enlivens a space lived in. We will dance and make out, be very sick in the morning, but overjoyed that we are young and eating mini hot dogs and drinking from red plastic cups. (Those cups will remind me, every time I see one discarded on the street, of nights like this: jubilant, relentless, mine.) I live in New York in a charming studio. I feel lonely and unsure. Are the tomatoes mocking me? 

I abandon the project of cutting the tomatoes, the ones I’ve selected from the bowl for plumpness, soaked in olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and switch on my tiny TV. I add salt and pepper, flakes of which spread to the corners of my counter, hiding until I move out, scrubbed clean by some other hand. As kids, we were never allowed to watch TV with dinner, or rather it was a treat reserved for Friday nights. Date night for my parents, chicken nuggets and The Nanny for me. I relished this time of eating a food that I learned to crave, to associate with being young, being someone’s daughter. I can still hear Fran Drescher’s voice in the background--this memory etched perfectly into my brain. 

VIII. 

I don’t remember what’s on, maybe SVU or Seinfeld reruns, but I do remember only half-watching it. Distracted. Unable to follow the story. My hands are busy reaching for the other half of the loaf. Bread feels nourishing, filling, a reminder of home, and yet. And yet, I’m caught between two worlds, not yet legal in many ways, but also fully formed. I am the woman I will be in five, ten years. And, I also won’t be. I will always eat the bread first, and forget about the rest of the tomatoes until they spoil. I will eat cheese for dinner. I will never forget the days in my kitchen, my first, mocked by the vegetables of my choosing. I will be a child without a mother for many years, an adolescent who befriends books, a young adult who relishes in being a stranger to a dorm of other young adults. 

It is 10 years later and I am signing another lease for another apartment. I am too tired and too hurt to relish in red cups or mini hotdogs. My heart is slightly more dented. I replay the lyrics to a Betty Who song again and again, twisting a silver band on my left ring finger, letting the New Hampshire breeze do its work. 

There will be a time when the dining hall food, too-green lettuce, bad tomatoes, turkey that tastes familiar, will be my version of home. My family becomes an RA alerted to a crisis, a best friend who was first a roommate, a building that is torn down, rebuilt. I will be 21 and then suddenly 27, years that have springboarded into entire entities I could have only guessed at. I will eat many dishes of pasta, boiled water heated on a stove top in our common room, then on a stovetop in a different studio, than by my own hand, tentatively and tenderly. 

I learn to feed myself and then a wife, a girlfriend, a mother, and then, myself once again.

I learn to eat, to nurture, to harness my own energy so that it expands enough to fit in the palm of my hand, then my entire chest, between my legs, the bottoms of my feet. 

I will fight to take up space in a world that hushes me between great big bites of, “What you can give, I will take.” 

I don’t know how to say “no” the first time it matters, but I can say “yes” until the early morning dew has calmed, the moon wanes, and the world quiets back to sleep. My mouth is a foreign place, determined to flavor a history of stories that traverse the people and places encountered, encouraged, and eradicated soon thereafter. I can boil water. I can gas up a truck. I can count to 10 before a needle pierces the side of my nose wherein tears tumble down my cheeks. I have a heart and it beats for the stories I keep, the promises I weep, and the feelings steeped into a soul battered, bruised, and brilliant. 

In Bluets, Maggie Nelson writes: “I am trying to place myself in a land of great sunshine, and abandon my will therewith.” 

Remember that story? There is a girl and then she is a woman. She is me.

I am finally growing into her.

Haley Sherif is a creative nonfiction writer. Her work has been published on The Rumpus, Hobart Pulp, Gravel, and Visual Verse. In May 2021, her essay was published in Fat & Queer (out by JKP). She loves the happiness that steeps in a hot cup of tea, words that hit the back of her throat, and each and. every sunset.