Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “Vestibules” by Pamela Jackson. Pamela is a creative nonfiction writer and therapist living in Brooklyn, NY. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, but stepped away from writing to become a therapist. Now she has completed her first manuscript, a memoir about the blessing and burden of dissociating. When she is not writing or providing therapy, she is with her electric guitar-playing daughter or volunteering as a Baby Cuddler in the NICU.
It’s 2023 in Brooklyn, New York. My ex-husband is using a knife as a metaphor to explain to our nine-year-old daughter how the internet can be toxic.
“You see when I hold the knife this way…” He says to Gaia, clutching it with one hand and holding it like he's preparing to stab someone sideways, “…it can be a weapon.” I am watching from my phone through a video call I made to Gaia. The curves of the knife seem to be right in front of the eye of the camera on his phone.
He positions the knife with the sharp end facing down. “But when I put it this way, what does it look like the knife can be used for?”
“To cut something you’re about to eat?” Gaia answers but contorts her face. She looks the way she does when I pick her up from a sleepover at her best friend's and ask if her body felt safe the whole time, like I’m distorting something we both know is good. Her face and long silk black eyebrows look distorted now too.
I tell myself he knows what he’s doing. He knows he is in a basement holding a knife while I watch. He uses this furnished apartment when he visits from out of town each month. But the dank setting is perfect to inspire my hypervigilance–brick walls and wide plank gray vinyl floors, centipedes and moths Gaia says she has to kill. One window that minimizes light more than it brings it in. It seems he doesn't like when I show up in person or on video calls like this during his visits with Gaia. I’m “micromanaging.” I’m intruding on “their time.” He’s “got it.” I also tend to call from my two-bedroom apartment, where Gaia loves opening the curtains each day since our view has so much bright light because we are eye level with the clouds. I think he knows the type of home I must have: clean, airy, and safe.
But I’ve called because something told me to track her history on YouTube. I have discovered this week she’s been online looking at gamer videos long past the time she’s allowed. I’ve called because I’m not sure if she’s tunneling into an abyss we need to rescue her from again.
We decided to remove the tablet from her life two years ago. She seemed to be nestling herself into a private portal through which we almost did not know how to claim her back from. Her interests in others or going outside waned, her conversation grew scattered, the tablet, held close to her chest, had become her “friend” while we finalized the divorce.
I tell myself he knows how to make me leave this moment without asking me to leave. He can make me go back to a time I’ve told him I never want to return. My body is here, but my prowess as a mama has shrunk into the eye of this camera. I’m small and frozen, staring at the steel mountain peaks on the knife in his hand. I get so small I become a nine-year-old, too, sitting back on my grandmother’s couch.
* * *
Vestibules were first built to separate the interior of a space from its exterior, just how the present is meant to be separated from the past. In ancient Greece, Roman architects used them as a type of barricade. They made it difficult for anyone outside of the home to be able to look all the way into it.
* * *
It is the 1990s in Wheaton, Maryland, where the branches of sycamore trees reach for the sky like bent arms and block the sun. 11903 Ivahar Street looks like a nuclear family lives here. A two-story house made of red-brick with hedges that line the front. A white screen door with plexiglass in the center and guard rails made of cast iron, strong enough to hold my grandmother's three-hundred pounds when she grasps them to get up the steps.
On the outside, my family is: an elegant woman dressed in pearl earrings who works as a Washington Post Press Operator; an awarded Green Beret Colonel with three tours of Vietnam under his belt; a thousand-watt smile executive assistant typing 150+ WPM; a budding poet, crushed, then budding again like the grass that keeps returning in the bald spots of the yard where our dogs keep shitting.
Grandma and I sit cuddling on her plastic-covered white couch. We watch our favorite show, The Golden Girls. The glare that extends from the television set makes a tiny blue-light haven–the promise of an incident that will resolve with laughter even if it is programmed.
“Lon, turn that down!” Grandma yells to Pop-Pop above the TV.
“Whatchu say there?...Have you seen her?/Tell me have you seen her?” Pop-Pop slurs as he sings, while ice clicks against his glass cup as he cooks dinner in the kitchen.
“Turn that racket down! Pam and I cannot hear the television!” My grandmother’s unwavering posture next to my grandfather’s incandescent presence is the one performance in real life I enjoy each night.
I am under one of grandma’s large, pillowy-soft arms while I watch the TV. Pop-Pop prepares stir fry chicken, steak, onions and green peppers, with no sides. And don’t touch his Coca-Cola. It’s for his rum. Smoke from his pipe is the cherry-flavored Captain Black tobacco, but to me it smells like vanilla and licorice in the air, candy mixed with the savory scent of dinner. My little cousin’s asthma machine sits by the outlet next to the couch. This is when the past is simple.
* * *
Sometimes the layout is intricate. There is a vestibule within a vestibule. An entry to an entry. There is more than one layer to pass before being let in.
* * *
Aunt Jackie has been missing. So has my mother’s coat. It has leather on the outside and fur on the inside. Aunt Jackie has arrived. No coat. My mother has stormed up the stairs from the basement where we lived. Or she has stormed out of the bathroom where she has gone often to cry to God—I don’t remember. I don’t remember if the footsteps I heard are my mother coming up the stairs or another person going down the stairs, the family member who found me when my mother left to work at night. I do remember:
“You jealous little asshole. You fucking thief.”
“Bitch, I didn’t take your coat. Don’t nobody want your shiiittt.”
“I will fucking kill you if you touch my shit again!”
The last time my mother yelled like this, she went and grabbed a knife. This time she won’t need to.
On the inside, my family is: a drunk soldier who can’t find a job, an obese grandmother who works two jobs on arthritic knees, an aunt who steals, lies, and cleans so well she scrubs even the baseboards of the home. A mother who can afford an expensive wardrobe like leather-fur jackets because we didn’t have to pay rent, living in our grandparents’ basement with the dogs, their favorite place to shit.
The couch I sat on listening to these death threats has been reupholstered twice to remain a family heirloom. I wanted the heirloom more than the family. This is what happens when the past is not simple but a cornerstone memory–an event that will fasten to my mind as one of the first moments in my life that other moments will establish themselves around.
* * *
I think grandma liked the word “vestibule.” Her inner-debutant coveted privacy. But we were so loud and so bloody, all she had was this word as a symbol of class.
The vestibule of my childhood home was a mere 3 x 5 square foot rectangular-shape. It had a closet at the back of it filled with our coats, rainboots and broken umbrellas to the right of the front door. I think my grandmother’s favorite part was the shelving wall to the left of the closet. It was the part of the vestibule that gave only a partial view of the home. It held paraphernalia from her jobs, black and white family photos, and a floral porcelain urn. But mostly, if somehow the front door flung wide open, it hid the eight to ten people living in a three-bedroom home, a smoker caretaking for an asthmatic, and imminent wounds. It shut you out and shut you in all at once.
* * *
Grandma yelled, “Stop it right now! I don’t want the neighbors to hear! Why do we have to be the niggas on the block?!!” Jackie stomped out of the house. Grandma placed Jackie’s son Marcus on her lap and cuddled him. I sat up straight on the couch. The plastic started to sweat underneath my thighs. I couldn’t get to me. I didn’t want to. I had become a spirit dislocated from my body, hovering above it. And I wasn’t looking to re-enter myself. If I kept my spirit away from my body, maybe I wouldn’t have to exist for this moment. My eyes darted onto the television screen. Studio laughter was on repeat in my ears. A 30-minute program. A beginning, middle and end I could anticipate. The one thing in this house that gave me a predictable night.
I couldn't be in the same room with myself when I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next, so I left. I leave similar to how I will leave in the future when I see knives or basements—my body is present but I’m not Here. Here is the willingness to be a home for yourself and others. It seems safer for me to not be Here with my family, though, so I find another home. Sharon Pillsbury’s. Blue trim shutters. White siding. A white family. A family I have been programmed to think is what family looks like. A nuclear family that appears to have no signs of anyone who will detonate. They have let me come over since Sharon and I made the same grades at school, though the teachers have watched me like a shoplifter sitting next to Sharon in class. They thought I was cheating off Sharon’s work and that’s why I made those grades, even though one of our classmates ended up cheating off me. But on the outside, I must have looked like someone you don’t protect.
I’ve come back home, because now I can’t leave. Jackie rammed her fist through the glass of the front door to let my mother know she was ready to fight. A shard of glass ripped open the vein in her left arm. Her blood poured onto the linoleum in grandma’s vestibule.
* * *
Vestibules were a design to allow for transition, to acknowledge when we first enter a space we might not be ready to step further inside. But when vestibules are not finished or get damaged and aren’t repaired, the innermost parts stay exposed.
* * *
Pop-Pop rushed to the living room from the kitchen while Jackie dropped to the floor staring at her arm bleeding out. My mom: “Oh my God!! Jackie! What did you do?!?” The vestibule filled with a puddle of Jackie’s blood. I have seen puddles of rainwater before this puddle of Jackie’s blood. I stay far away from them because the kids who have rain boots have jumped in the puddles to splash me. I’ve only tapped my foot in the puddles to see the ripple I can make. I have wanted to see if I can feel the water, whatever weight or depth, in the drip off the edge of my shoe. I imagined plopping my foot in my aunt’s blood and it would not drip but drool thick. Too much of the depth she needed to survive was on the floor of the vestibule.
Marcus’ chest collapsed and ballooned. But I could only keep track of the albuterol I became efficient at pouring into his asthma machine in moments like these. Rip off the perforated head with my teeth and somehow steady my body from shaking long enough to hold my hand still. I tilted the five milliliter of steroids into the tiny plastic container, put the mask on his face and pressed the on button. His machine made a shhhh sound in the air. I heard it as a request to quiet down the emergency, to make it not so emergent. I could keep track of this and, in my periphery, the cheap gold-plated border that separated the linoleum floor of the vestibule from the living room. A border my aunt’s blood started to cross over.
The ambulance arrived. Two men knelt down to Jackie. Another two came over to my little cousin.
“Hey, Marcus. You alright there, buddy?” He placed a hand on Marcus’ back. We knew the EMT guys and they knew us. So did the police. They crossed our vestibule many, many times, strangers we had to let deep into our center to keep us from killing one another.
* * *
I felt lonely as I watched Jackie roll out on the stretcher. Maybe because violence had become a family member by then. An inner working. An essential part to our home, a visitor who had crossed the threshold with no end to their visit in sight. It seemed it had entered to stay.
* * *
“You understand why I’m taking some screen time away, Gaia?” My ex-husband says as he hugs our daughter. Watching him help her wipe away her tears pulls me out of my grandmother’s living room and back to Here. When the present retrieves me from the past, most of the time it's because my body has awakened out of numbness. Usually it's one of the five senses that brings me back. I finally notice I’m cooking because a pilot light on the stove starts to click and the aroma of gas in the air needs my attention. My funny bone has hit against the corner of a wall and the pain needs my attention. A child has begun to cry. Gaia is crying but she isn’t screaming like a demonic soul is being released from her lungs. She screamed, “I WANT MY TABLET!!” two years ago and “I hate myself!” the year after. But now, despite our divorce, our efforts to limit the time and space our daughter has to disconnect, to fall into an abyss of not-Hereness seems to be working.
“Yes, I understand,” she says, but her head isn’t bowed too far down nor does it seem her sorrow has a basement to fall into inside her.
I say, “You know what you get to do with this time?”
She shakes her head no.
“Be with dad more…Now, go beat him in UNO.” She grins while her father begins to tickle her.
“Okay, mommy’s going to go now. But be present with your dad, ok?”
When Gaia comes home a few days later, I bring her into the kitchen. I place her in front of me as I go into one of the drawers to grab a knife.
“If anybody, including an adult, holds a knife this way…” I grip the knife the same way her father did, sideways like I’m preparing to take on my aunt if she made it past the vestibule with her fist, the basement if the dark made it past dawn.“…you tell them: ‘Excuse me, can you please hold the knife down to the floor? It’s safer for me that way.’ Ok? Repeat that back to me.”
She does while looking at me, again, like I’ve done too much, like I’m overemphasizing what the future could hold. Then she whisks past me with her arms stretched out like a dancer, as if my heedful warnings don’t coordinate with what’s predictable in her life.
* * *
It was difficult for me to not look at my family from inside the memory of the vestibule. I kept trying to spot evidence of Jackie’s blood on the floor but my grandfather had cleaned it up. Jackie would have done the cleaning if she had not been taken to the hospital for a couple of days. Had I let this memory pass through the vestibule, had I stepped myself further inside, I would have remembered when Jackie came back, she was quieter. She admitted to stealing. Apologized to my mother. And her WPM was only 75 when she returned to work, but eventually got back to the 150 range. She never exploded like that again. We moved out of the basement soon after. Marcus grew out of his asthma. My grandfather got a job, and grandma rested the last five years of her life.
But I grow up and keep seeing the puddle of Jackie’s blood. And when I don’t see it, I look for evidence that it might have been wiped away so I don’t confuse places I want to call home with places I need to survive.
I will spend over three decades in that vestibule with my aunt’s blood. I will stay here until a few years after becoming a mother. I think in order to leave the vestibule I needed to see evidence of a different kind of ending than the one from that night. I had to see my daughter gliding past me, impacted by a trauma like my divorce, yet still agile. Unbothered by her mother’s fears of replicating the past.
Reading this made me feel like I had a concrete block on my chest. The writer so clearly conveyed the scene in its entirety that I felt I was present.
"I look for evidence that it might have been wiped away so I don’t confuse places I want to call home with places I need to survive." I feel this in my bones. Thank you.