When Did You Know You Were Magic?
My father said when I was eleven years old, “Our family is very witchy. I’m a warlock.” He added, “All the witches in the family have a heart-shaped mole on their right hip.”
I don’t know where my hand was before but now it was over the hip of my pants that kept my birthmark safely covered.
Conversations with my father often came flying out of nowhere logic is spoken. You had to just always be ready. Once he came into my bedroom where I was teaching myself lyrics to the Diana Ross song, “I’m Coming Out” so I could seem to have a clue. “Hi, honey,” he said. He was carrying the poster-sized Pedigree of Gower he had shown me before. He liked reminding me I was descended from Plantagenets and the “Scottish Kings” he called them then adding, “You’re the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grand-daughter of Mary, Queen of Scots.” These were not things I am not sure anyone should be saying to children. There is absolutely nothing we can do with information. That’s for grown-ups to know.
Eleven years old you hear a lot. It’s that age when people stop talking in hushed voices because it doesn’t matter if the children hear anymore. So the grownups come up with all the stuff there is to know. It’s a lot to process. This was also the time when we moved from Toronto to Asheville then two years later moved to Tampa, where I was eleven, then after just 11 months moved to Sarasota where I finally got a chance to catch my breath, which took all of the six years we stayed there before I moved on to college then Australia, again to catch my breath. All my pre-teen moving around meant I had to fill in a million Scantron sheets with No. 2 yellow pencils and get “evaluated” by adults who offered me an array of places to sit in their toy-ridden offices and where I would coolly caculate the metaphorical meaning and consequence of sitting in the yellow pleather armchair or the turquoise bean bag. They call them a battery of tests for a reason.
My I.Q. mattered a lot to my father.
“Hey, kid,” he said after one such battery. This was during the eleven months in Tampa, the best year of my life. I had an awesome group of four friends, Anne, Tina, and Laurie. Anne had moved to Tampa from Singapore.
“Ah, I see it in your eyes,” I’d said, meaning her eyes looked Asian, or I was overtly trying to make sense of a world where it seemed everyone had moved from someplace to Tampa. Evaluating. My own father was born in China so it was a stupid thing to say. We are not Chinese. I didn’t know what I was doing.
“I’m American,” Anne said. I didn’t understand, and we became best friends anyway along with Tina (who had moved from somewhere) and Laurie (who had moved from somewhere, too). It was the year that the Go-Go’s released Beauty and the Beat. Tina had bought it so we were all in her room to hear it. I still thought that when radio stations played music the bands were there in the building. It confused me a little because sometimes the same song would be playing on Y95 and 98Rock at the same time, but it would be too dumb to ask. I felt this was about everything. I worried the all-girl record would detonate Tina’s record player which had only ever played Van Halen (with David Lee Roth) and The Who, but it did fine. The bright blue album jacket with Belinda Carlisle, Charlotte Caffey, Gina Schock, Kathy Valentine, and Jane Wiedlin with face cream slathered on their faces and only towels around their bodies and turbanned on their heads was a very different look from Tina’s other records which looked like kill the GoGo’s for all they clearly did not understand. Even Joan Jett and Pat Benetar. Even Blondie whose Eat the Beat inspired me to break camp rules the previous summer and stay back from first period when I knew the camp counselor, Sydney, would be teaching canoeing so I could play that cassette, just the first song on Side A. “Dreaming.” Never had I heard anything so magnificent as that song. I could generally get two or three full listens in before someone came looking for me, and I had to be gone before that. But in this little window of time outside of time, no one knew I was missing yet, and I felt so happy.
Our every action was tracked through the use of little paper circles enclosed in a metal ring with a hole at the top so we could hook it on the Activity Board divided into geographical activity areas at Camp Gay Venture. (Don’t laugh—it was named that in the 1940s when it opened, and my mom’s parents, who were not witches as far as I had gathered by omission, ran it so now I went there, too. And yeah it was all girls. The boy’s camp was across the water. Camp Kilcoo, which sounded like a boys’ camp. I pictured them killing everything over there, which is why they had green cedar-strip canoes to distinguish them from our red ones.) Swimming, Camp Craft, Arts and Crafts, (Note the muted lesson here that craft could be for both surviving in the wilderness and pinch pots and something called “God’s Eyes,” that involved popsicle sticks and yarn that hardly felt worthy.) It was someone’s job each day to watch the Activity Board and walk around making sure everybody was where their little ring-tag said they were. If a kid’s ring-tag and the kid’s bodily presence were not in agreement, that counselor or camp staff raced to the red lifeguard tower, seized the airhorn that was always kept hanging from a massive nail by a macramé cord, which was strange even if it was the tail end of the 70s. Macramé was going strong and showed no signs of ever stopping its transformations from raw cord to belts, headbands, purses, and hanging plant-holders (my favorite application) any time soon. But using it to connect the air horn whose three insanely loud blasts brought every counselor, junior counselor, and C.I.T. (counselor-in-training) running from wherever they had been to receive their commands to search every inch of camp, including the murky lake water, in search of a missing or possibly dead camper. It was that intense and that serious. Kilcoo boys would jump in their canoes and head over not to help but to see if any of the counselors who weren’t wearing swimsuits would tear off their t-shirts and dive topless into their assigned part of the lake. We were all told never to wear our swimsuits all day because we could get “crotch rot” which sounded terrible once you knew what a crotch was. So many counselors followed this rule that the Kilcoo boys probably all still get excited when they hear an air horn, though you don’t hear them very much outside of camp.
Whoever’s idea it was to use macramé to attach the horn of death to the enormous nail under the lifeguard stand had the kind of sense of humor I would not learn to appreciate for another decade at the very least. In the all-or-nothing realm of the “Water Wearch,” which is what this ritual was named even though they all had to search the land, too, you did not ever want to be the kid whose ring-tag placement disagreed with your geographical reality. There were tales of campers who had slipped their ring-tag over a little brass hook under one of the activities it was possibly easier to lie about like canoeing. With all those red cedar-strip canoes solo-style slanted gunnel to the water, it was very hard to tell who was canoeing and who might be dead at the bottom of the Lake Cashagawigamog which we all called Lake Cashag as though that would be any cooler. Camp-Cool was a very real, nearly concrete, concept. You knew it when you saw it. Camp-Cool could not possibly be faked. One thing was certain: the ones who wanted it always came off as annoying while the ones who had it could not care less. That was true for everywhere, of course, but at Camp Gay Venture it mattered.
Sydney, my counselor, had Camp-Cool the way Lake Cashag had water and the way the Canadian Northwoods (where this all happened) had mosquitoes. She had these loose medium-blonde curls, a super-kind smile, and a gravelly sort of voice that may or may not have been connected to the velvet-red pack of DuMaurier (like the author of Rebecca) cigarettes before all the cigarette packs only had words like death and heart disease and lung cancer all over them, and it wasn’t stupid or cool or forbidden but just a mild surprise to see someone breathing in burning organic matter then breathing out the smoke with always this shake of the head like fans should be blowing their air all over or, more accurately as if an entire universe was being created on their breath where everybody wears silk in colors of rubies and saffron but that you know you will never see.
I sure didn’t expect Sydney to smoke because Sydney was pure. Not in a goody-goody way. In a wildlife way. Like how it is when you see a loon all heavy on the water, white dots over its folded wings and back with that little ring of white vertical slashes around its neck, the loons I could call out to and get a response from because I only lived for that, everything else was just someone else’s busy-ness. On canoe trips, Sydney was always the first to pause her bow stroke, lay her paddle across the gunnels, look around and, seeing no green cedar-strip canoes or anybody else because Lake Cashag could go forever without a cottage or a motorboat— it was like a place the world didn’t know about yet, and there, in the middle of all that raw beauty, Sydney removed her blue-bandana print bikini top, picked her paddle up off the gunnels and began paddling again, her little tits barely jiggled by the graceful reach and return of her canoe paddle. Its blade set the rhythm for all of us. It was probably Sydney whose periods the rest of camp all synched up with, but that was hard to know because we didn’t talk about it. You’d think we would. You can bet that if all the boys a Kilcoo or anyplace in the world all shed the boy-equivalent of the uterine lining, we would all know about it, and probably have songs and stuff to support them. Listening to Sydney’s Blondie cassette on Sydney’s little school-teacher-sized cassette player marked me in ways I have spent the four full decades since trying to name, understand, evaluate.
The evening my father wanted to talk to me about my I.Q., he had told my mom to take my sister out shopping or for an ice cream she would barf up afterward and then go running. Barfing up ice cream made zero sense to me, but I was only eleven. Our house had a counter we could sit at like on the Brady Bunch. It also had an electric orange juicer sunken directly inside the counter. It was in the middle of it like a centerpiece that made it weird to put four plates around it so we ate at the table. The person who thought of putting it there was the same person who had planted the four orange trees growing outside the window, one, two, three, four leading away from the yellow cinder block wall to the lake we couldn’t swim in because of the brain-eating amoebae that figured into my childhood more often than maybe we should have been so comfortable with. I mean, if all the lakes in Florida have brain amoebae why on earth do so many people live there? We could sail but not swim. I was always careful about opening my mouth when I sailed. I liked my brain. Turned out my father liked my brain, too. We sat at the counter, the orange juicer silent and still, the oranges heavy on the branches on the other side of the horizontal-slatted window.
“Honey, I want to tell you that I’m very proud of you.”
A great big Palmetto Rat had once tumbled out of a palm tree that must have arced over the first orange tree because it fell through the oranges while my mom was doing dishes. It broke branches. If you look up Palmetto Rats you get to know that they are smaller than Norway Rats, which is not really information in the way answers should be definitive, the end of questioning, a resolution but no, you now have to go learn about Norway Rats augmenting the curiosity that made you look up Palmetto, or Palm Rats, apparently, in the first place. This is exactly how I learned not to pay attention so god-damned closely because if you do, you’re only going to start seeing all the holes in everything, all the answers that are really just more questions but with a period at the end. There are extremely very important things that no one really knows, and it’s the really important stuff, the stuff entire eras of history have set their sails by and done whatever one does with the sextant and has been going steadily in that direction for four centuries before someone goes, Oops but doesn’t apologize, which matters. The rat that fell while my mom did dishes must have been a Norway Rat because she said it was the size of a small dog. The broken branches were proof. My father went out the sliding glass door with a shovel, and I didn’t want to know anything after that.
“So, kid, we know we’ve been putting you through a lot with all these tests and psychologists and everything.” This was the stage of life when my father was still a dad. It didn’t last much longer, and I wish I had known so I could have been present in another way. At the time though you just do what you do to make everyone feel like they’re making sense.
I nodded about the tests and the psychologists with too many chairs. It hadn’t occurred to me that this wasn’t what every eleven-year-old was doing, a lot like how I always made up songs and wrote poems about everything and how I told stories every morning before Social Studies and how much I loved the black swans on the small lake at my little school that used to be some kind of wildlife preserve and still had a disproportionate ratio of students to peacocks but saying it that way makes it obvious that any ratio would be off, for most people.
I could not believe there were black swans. I lived for them. I loved them so much I blazed through all the math homework and reading assignments because I thought if the teachers knew I didn’t need them to teach me anything they would let me spend all day outside with the peacocks and the swans. Wouldn’t that be the sensible thing anyway? Instead, we were sitting in the round “portable” classrooms we would later call “portables” like changing an adjective to a noun made anything transient suddenly permanent. A fixture. The teachers gave me more assignments so I would feel “challenged.” They told my parents I was accelerated. They didn’t want me to be bored. I leveled up and did math and social studies and science and reading, the whole time feeling the movements of the black swans upon the water, even smelling the tang of the luminous green algae surrounding their stillness. They were so still even when they were moving. How could anything in the world do that, inhabit two opposing realities at once? Even all this time after and more moves than I want to count off again like it mattered. Everything was always moving. There was never time for any of us to catch our breath. All our lives happened this way when all we ever should have been doing was standing outside under the live oaks, feeling the inland Florida dust that sand turns into when it dies from being away from the sea too long creep up around that colorful edge of tennis socks with the single pom pom even though we hated tennis but would play anyway because that’s the thing there was to do.