"Foundations" by Mary Zelinka

Listen

Eons ago, South Florida lay beneath the ocean. As the ocean receded, exposing the seabed, the sand and shells and an infinite number of minute dead sea creatures baked in the sun, cementing into porous limestone. Marine deposits and sand—some of which had washed thousands of miles down from the north—settled over this limestone to create a few feet of Myakka, Florida’s official state soil. Myakka will suck on your tires like quicksand if you try to drive on it after it’s rained.    

〜

One hot and humid Miami evening in the mid-1950s, my father took my family out somewhere. Maybe it was dinner. I must have been seven or eight years old because my brother, Charles, was walking on his own.

As we walked down the sidewalk towards the car, Charles hung back, not wanting to go home. Mother took his hand and pulled, but he resisted.

Father shouted, “Fine! You stay here! We’ll go home without you!”

He unlocked the car, climbed inside, and started the engine. Mother let go of Charles’s hand and walked away from him.

My older sister Gracie was already in the backseat, but I gripped the outside door handle and planted my feet like I could keep the car from moving. “Don’t leave him! Don’t leave him!”  I screamed.

Crying, Charles raced into the car. Mother opened my door and nudged me inside. “We’d never leave Charles,” she said. “It was just pretend, so he’d come.”

I had nightmares about that terrible evening for years. Except I was the one left behind.

〜

If Mother’s car wasn’t in the driveway when I got home from school, I leaped off my bike as I rammed it into the hibiscus hedge. My throat closing against tears, I ran through the backyard and into the screened-in back porch. At the door to the kitchen, I took off one of my penny loafers and slammed the locked doorknob with it. If I hit it just right, it popped open. If I didn’t, I had to slam and slam and slam.  

But once inside, the house seemed like a stranger’s house. I was an intruder. The furniture loomed, unfamiliar. I sat still, not rocking in the rocking chair, until I finally heard Mother’s car in the driveway and then her steps in the kitchen. When she asked why I hadn’t waited on the back porch like I was supposed to, I shrugged. I had no words to explain how desperate I had felt. I was afraid she wasn’t coming back.

〜 

Early humans lived in groups, several family units banding together to hunt and gather food. Groups provided the warmth and safety vital for survival. Humans were easy prey for creatures like saber-tooth tigers, equipped with razor sharp teeth and weighing up to 800 pounds. Being cast out of the group meant certain death.  

Long after I left home, archeologists discovered the fossilized remains of saber-tooth tigers mixed with those of humans in a sinkhole just off Old Cutler Road, an easy bicycle ride from the house I grew up in.  

〜 

Oregon is a land of forests and waterfalls and rocky beaches. It’s also almost as far away from Miami as I can get and still be in the continental United States. 

On the phone one night after I settled here in 1978, Mother said seeing the distance between us on the map made her sad. I had no sympathy for her.  

Months before my move, my second marriage had failed, and Mother and Father had renounced me. My second husband had been violent, and by the time I left him in Colorado, I was broken. My first husband then took custody of our nine-year-old son, Bobby, because neither of us believed I could take care of a child anymore.  

After the divorce, I had drifted aimlessly around the country in a van looking for a place that felt like it could become home, and like a wounded homing pigeon, headed to Miami.  Mother said I was no longer welcome at home, but I convinced myself that if she and Father saw me, they would love me again.  

I would come to believe the whole point of a family is to give you something solid to hold on to when everything else has been ripped away. But at the time, I thought I must be truly beyond redemption if my own parents didn’t want me.  

“What are you doing here?” my father snarled when I pulled into the driveway after sixteen hours of driving. Mother looked at me over the top of her glasses and glowered.

〜

Imagine a lovely bone china box, about an inch high, which your mother gave you one Christmas long ago. She also gave one to your sister and kept one for herself. The boxes are identical–tiny pink forget-me-nots hand-painted on the lid, surrounded by “My love for you is ever true” in old fashioned script.

Imagine placing this lovely bone china box in the center of the concrete slab patio at the horrid little apartment you moved into when you first came to Oregon. Imagine the heft of your hammer in your hands as you smash this lovely box over and over and over, crushing fine bone china into bits as inconsequential as sand.  

Imagine the hollowness in your heart as you do this.  

〜

Sometime after the move, Mother and I began talking on the phone every week, cautiously navigating our way back into an uneasy relationship. My family had never spoken about anything real, and I became aware of how shallow we had been all those years. Mother tried to keep our conversations light—sticking to safe topics, like books we had read.  

But I couldn’t go along with it. I was not willing to pretend to be anything other than what I was. By giving up Bobby, I had already done the worst she could imagine. And she had done her worst when she renounced me. I didn’t censor my language around her anymore. I told her I smoked four packs of cigarettes a day. I told her I smoked pot. I told her I sometimes, many times, drank too much. I told her I got a tattoo. I told her that Abe, the man I was seeing—and would continue to see for too many years—was married.  

Mother was shocked, but she kept talking to me. To my surprise, she seemed enthralled—like I was the bad girl she had secretly always wanted to hang out with.     

What I didn’t tell her about were the nightmares I still had about my ex-husband’s violence. And the nights I jerked awake, gasping as though I were drowning, because I thought I heard Bobby calling me.  

〜 

Many of the trees and plants in South Florida are considered invasive species. Though the term “invasive” seems a curious word choice. These trees and plants didn’t invade Florida.  They were deliberately brought there.  

Melaleucas lined the parkways in my family’s neighborhood. Their thin leaves wave like mermaid fingers when they shiver in the wind at night. Australian pines are tall and spindly.  The slightest breeze blowing through their long quivery needles makes a whispery faraway sound, lonesome and sad.   

Florida prohibits the cultivation of melaleucas and Australian pines now, on the basis that they’re invasive and don’t belong.  

〜

It was 1982, four years after my banishment from my family. For some inexplicable reason, I was desperate to see them again. I told Mother I wanted to come for Christmas. She didn’t say no, but she didn’t encourage me either. I didn’t have the money for plane tickets, so I sold the piano I had been playing since grade school.  

It was a mistake. My father didn’t speak or look at me. And without the safety of the whole country between us, Mother had little to say.    

During my then-partner Abe’s nightly phone calls, he reassured me that the visit wouldn’t last forever. That I would never have to see these people again if I didn’t want to.    

I repeated his words over and over when I ran five miles to and from Matheson Hammock’s tangle of mangroves every morning. I ran hard, trying to keep all the feelings clawing away at me at bay. I wished I still drank, smoked pot, cigarettes—anything. Air thick with humidity weighed me down, compressed me; I seemed shorter here than I was at home in Oregon.  

One morning, as I was cooling down after my run, I noticed I smelled different. I turned my nose into my armpit and inhaled deeply. The same shampoo and conditioner I always used, the same Ivory soap, the same deodorant. But I smelled salty and faintly of seaweed. Tears sprang to my eyes. I had missed this smell. Miami’s smell. My smell.  

That night, my last before I went back to Oregon, Mother came to my room and said she needed to talk to me. She sat on my sister’s old twin bed, and I perched on the edge of my own twin, wary.  

“Something you said last night about your work at the domestic violence shelter made me understand why you left Jack and gave up Bobby,” she said. “When I saw you get off the plane, I didn’t recognize you at first. You looked so hard. So jaded. I wondered how you had gotten that way.

“Then last night I realized I had done that to you,” she continued, her eyes filling with tears. “I abandoned you. Can you ever forgive me for acting so ugly?”   

〜 

My father never asked for my forgiveness. But the next year at Christmas, after overhearing a funny story I was telling Mother about my dog, Beau Beagle, he looked me in the eyes—that in itself extraordinary—and said, “The two of you have been through so much together.” Beau Beagle had fled my marriage with me and helped carve out our new life in Oregon.   

After that, my father spent weeks making me a lap desk—choosing matching pieces of walnut; sanding those pieces until it was impossible to see any seams; special ordering round-head brass screws for the old-fashioned-looking brass hinges on the lid.  

He told Mother to order me Elizabeth Boyer’s Marquerite de la Roque: A Story of Survival, an historical novel based on a French noblewoman who spent two years abandoned on an uninhabited island off the coast of Canada in the 1500s. Father read a review of the book in the newspaper and thought I would like it.  

It is a testament to how much I wanted him to love me that even now I cling to these shards as proof that, during those moments at least, he cared for me.       

〜

Imagine you are in Miami during what has become your annual Christmas visit.  

Imagine you notice your mother’s lovely bone china box sitting on a glass shelf in her living room. Your mother sees you looking at the box and asks if you still have yours.  It got broken, you say. She takes her box off the shelf and places it in your palm, folding her hands around yours. Then I want you to have mine, she says.

Imagine what a treasure this is.

〜

Florida is vulnerable to sinkholes. It’s the porous limestone, which erodes over time because of rainwater, allowing holes to form. For some time, the few feet of soil above a hole holds firm. But after heavy rains, the soil can collapse into the limestone hole. Depending on the size of the hole, lives and homes and trees—invasive or not—can crumble into it.

〜

One year at Christmas, out of the blue, Mother said Father was not changing the will, that I was still renounced. 

“That’s very unfair,” I told her. “I am one of your children too.”  

“You’ll be fine.” She took my hand and squeezed it. “You can take care of yourself.  Gracie’s never had to support herself. And Charles just doesn’t seem to be able to get started.”  

I didn’t argue. What was the point? It was their decision. My place in the family might have been precarious, but it was still a place.  

〜 

The Christmas visits stopped in 1992, after Hurricane Andrew trashed Florida with 164 mile-per-hour winds, taking many trees with it and leaving more than 250,000 people in the Miami area homeless. My father, already furious at life, became completely unhinged over the power outages and the overwhelming clean-up effort facing Miami. He climbed over downed trees and through labyrinths of storm wreckage to lash out at each neighbor. Then he took off walking.  

In the weeks he was gone, I called Mother every morning, and she called me every night. I pictured her sitting on her couch in the darkness, a candle glowing on the coffee table, a flashlight clutched in her hand. She didn’t mention where my brother Charles was, and I didn’t ask.

During those long phone conversations, Mother confided things about Father and her marriage that I knew she would regret saying. But who else was she going to talk to?  

My father stayed gone for three weeks. He never told her where he had been. After that, I was no longer welcome at home. 

“It would make me very uncomfortable if you were to come home,” Mother told me one night. She didn’t have to say why: I now knew too much.  

〜 

I continued calling Mother every week. As always, I shared news of Bobby and whatever I was up to. Sometimes she talked, other times she was too busy. She mailed me envelopes stuffed with random newspaper clippings accompanied by scrawled notes, “Will write more later.” I could only imagine what it must be like for her to live with the judgmental angry man who was my father and the bitter, purposeless man my brother had become.  

Years later, when her lungs collapsed, she spent the next year and a half in intensive care with a respirator snaking down her throat. While she was in the hospital, I flew to Miami and sat with her. We held hands and stared into one another’s eyes.  

〜 

Sea levels are rising due to climate change and causing groundwater in coastal areas to also rise. Each year there is more flooding and collapsing of sinkholes. The ocean is taking South Florida back.

〜 

After Mother’s funeral in 2003, my sister Gracie plunged into the house as though she had been waiting her whole life for just that moment. She upended drawers filled with old letters and newspaper clippings and catalogues and nonprofits’ glossy brochures into extra-large garbage bags. She ordered Charles to take boxes of books and National Geographic magazines dating back to the 1940s to thrift stores. She moved quickly, chaotically—unstoppable, like a hurricane. 

I followed in her wake, scavenging for letters I had written mother and anything with her handwriting on it. Air inside the house was thick with dust and time. The plush aqua carpet my parents had installed when they bought the house fifty years before was more backing now than pile. It was summer, and there was no air conditioning. All the jalousie windows were shut tight, the broken handles discarded on the chipped and cracked tile window sills. We discovered termites in my brother’s room. It was like the house had lost its will to exist.  

〜

We were all sinking back into ourselves. My father, losing his eyesight to macular degeneration, slumped deeper into his chair in the living room and seethed. My brother retreated further into his mysterious secret world. My sister stormed through the house with her extra-large garbage bags and fury. I tried to be invisible.    

Within two years, and one by one, my sister, my father, and then my brother estranged themselves from me.  

〜

Many years before, my father had built a wall around our backyard in the style of those constructed by Miami’s early settlers. Charles brought him chunks of the limestone South Florida is built on, and pink conchs and coral from the ocean. It took Father years, mixing cement in a bucket, and hand-picking each conch and piece of limestone and coral. Lizards and other creatures made homes for themselves in the wall and skittered through the natural tunnels.   

After my father’s death, Gracie and Charles sold the house. One night I googled it on Satellite Maps. The new owner had added a wing on to the bedroom my sister and I had shared, nearly doubling the size of the house. New tiled roof, new windows, new paint, new landscaping.  

My father’s wall was gone.  

〜 

Periodically, my son and I talk about those terrible days when he and I lived with my second husband’s violence, and about how I sent him off to live with his father and stepmother. I tell him my deepest regret is that I hadn’t been able to take care of him. 

“You did the best you could,” he always says, and I know he means it. 

“That may be,” I tell him. “But it wasn’t good enough.”

I was angry at my parents for a long time. But I have finally come to believe the same was true for them: They did the best they could. It wasn’t good enough, yet they weren’t holding out on me. They simply didn’t have more to give. 

I may as well have been mad at Miami for being built on porous limestone.  

〜

When you are homesick for Miami, this is what you miss: Turquoise and pink sunrises. Cracking coconuts open in the driveway. Grey asphalt streets with names like Placetas, Cellini, Maynada, and Bayamo. Australian pines and melaleucas and coconut palms and palmettos and ficus trees with their wide shallow roots. Red hibiscus hedges. Mossy limestone walls surrounding old estates. Flamingo-pink art deco buildings. Manatees floating through the canals. Iguanas and wild parrots and little pale green chameleons. Mangoes all juicy and sticky. Humidity that lays upon your skin like a presence. And wrack: that seaweed tangle, fringing the tideline where you can find whelk egg cases, as fragile and transitory as the beach they washed up on.

Color blobs on a black and white background - art by Danielle Preston

Mary Zelinka lives in Albany, Oregon and has worked at the Center Against Rape and Domestic Violence for over 30 years. Her writing has appeared in The Sun Magazine, Brevity, Eclectica, and more.

Abstract collage artist Dani Preston is a California native currently living in Lyon, France. Using scissors and paper to create psychedelic abstract compositions, her collages spill out tangled amoeba-like guts, spotted orbs and human hands. Titling her works Cosmic Jelly, she is expressing human connectedness as wiggles of life dance across the universe of the paper. You can find more of her art on Instagram at @cosmicjellycollage.