The Mississippi on her Knees Chapter Three

There is one day that I remember almost start to finish from the summer of 2005 and it was my eighteenth birthday party. I had planned it with my very close friends Megan and Brandon. The year before I’d had a very successful themed party and I wanted to try to repeat it. I decided I’d have a sock hop. And everyone would wear poodle skirts. Megan’s dad had just finished adding on to his house a room specifically for entertaining and so we elected to have it there. We had it on August 5th, in the afternoon.

Megan and Brandon showed up at my house in her 1957 Chevy Bel-Air convertible and we travelled to her dad’s house. We put up decorations. I wore jeans rolled up into cuffs at my calf and a cardigan. I had my hair in a high ponytail, secured with a scarf and some cat-eye glasses with non-prescription lenses. Brandon grilled hamburgers and hot dogs, dressed as Arnold from Happy Days. He was the only Asian we could remember from the 50s. We played a special vintage mixed cd from a player in the corner. We hula-hooped and danced. I have photos.

My brother, sister, and parents arrived gamely for opening my presents. They weren’t in costume. My dad sat on a folding chair as I proceeded through each token, unwrapped each tissue, read each card. Thinking back on it is so shameful. Because when I look back on it now, I see it differently than I did then. My dad tried to eat a hot dog, solely for my benefit. Because I was pretending that this birthday party was not selfish and ridiculous. That it was fun and normal. He had to get up and go outside, claiming it was the heat that was upsetting him. But he was actually throwing up in the grass across the street, which I knew because the entire wall of the room facing that side of the street was made of windows. I was embarrassed then, that my Dad was giving up the charade. And now I am embarrassed that any of it even happened at all. That nobody told me I couldn’t do it; that I couldn’t tell on my own that I shouldn’t do it.

My mom and dad gave me their last gift that day. It was a sterling silver link bracelet with a silver disk that dangled from it, engraved with my initials. My sister had one just like it. And I wore it every day for years as a way of keeping my family’s spirit with me; as a good luck talisman employed against bad grades, against broken fingernails, against forgetting my dad. Unlike the suitcases, this one was so far from inadequate.
I don’t know why they couldn’t have given me that bracelet at home. They should have done that.

Because the way it happened, that present was just one among many. I wonder now if my parents were as disappointed in me that day as I am in myself. Because the bigger deal was the last gift I opened. My best friend Laura had gotten four other guests and their parents to put in money for an off-brand MP3 player with lots and lots of space for songs. It was a total surprise and an incredibly thoughtful gift. My eyes went wide. My voice rose. This was the gift that I didn’t have to pretend to enjoy. Five years later, the bracelet still sits in my jewelry box. The MP3 player broke and was thrown away.

My family drifted off sometime very soon after presents. My mom approached me and told me they were going. She hugged me and then they left.
I remember feeling relieved when the car drove off, up the windy road to the highway, back to our house, away from me. I remember thinking that the fun could start, expecting that things would get wilder and that the effort we all had put in would pay off, would not be wasted.

After a few hours, it was only a few of us left. Megan, her sister Brooke, my friend Nik with his hair slicked back and wearing salmon polyester pants. We sat in the house’s den, watching something forgettable on the gigantic TV. Nik cavorted on the out-of-tune piano in the corner.
It was also the simplest scene of the day. Unorchestrated. Natural. It was the most content I’d felt. It was also the most bored.

Eventually we all headed over to Megan’s mom’s house where we spent the night watching The Aviator and eating junk food and Chik-Fil-A. We stayed up too late. I slept in an armchair in the living room.

The next morning, I woke up at 6:30 when my mom called my cell to tell me that they were on the way to pick me up. My house was only a few blocks from Megan’s, so I stuffed ephemera into my backpack and my only grooming was brushing my teeth and pulling my hair into a ponytail before they arrived. Megan’s mom, hearing where we were going, pushed a DVD collection on the War in the Pacific into my mom’s hands. On loan. It’s somewhere in our entertainment center right now.
It was August 6th . And we were going to the National War World II Museum in New Orleans. As a family. It wasn’t how I had chosen to celebrate my 18th birthday, and it wasn’t flawless. I don’t know if the museum was just smaller then, in its beginning stages, or if Dad got tired and we left early, but we didn’t spend a whole lot of time in the building. We had trouble finding a place to eat when we left the museum. We visited the Bulldog on Magazine, but weren’t there long before someone started yelling “THIS SHIT IS BANANAS! B-A-N-A-N-A-N!” at the top of his lungs and we got up to leave. We might have gotten back in the car after that. My dad wouldn’t have wanted to eat. And the rest of us might have gone along with it.

We did a driving tour through a mostly-empty Tulane campus before we got back on the interstate to go back to Lafayette. It wasn’t a particularly memorable day, but it was a day devoted to being a family for one last time. And now, a few years out, I’m pretty grateful that it’s how I got to spend my birthday that year.

I don’t know if we understood that it was the end of something. I don’t know if the feeling of finality I associate with that day is something my psychological editor has tacked on to it or if it was really there, the undercurrent of the day. We knew that it was going to get much worse. That for our dad, it wouldn’t ever get better.

That day is the last nice thing I’ve got.