Postcards to Myself, Part 2

Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo
by Daphne Uviller, Deborah Siegel

(Page 2 of 2)

I fiddled with my cards obsessively. I would bring the box out to the front porch and sit on a folding lawn chair, flipping through them. I would count them, then count them again. My father gave me a set of index-card dividers, which I used to separate them into geographic categories. I was a child; naturally, I wanted to play with my postcards. But I knew that the neighborhood kids my age didn't play like this. No one else had this sort of toy.

I decided to write on one. The blank spaces on the backs beckoned. I turned over the best one, the multipictured card from Washington. Who could I write to? I couldn't think of anyone; I would write to myself. "Dear Peter," I began. Then I paused- I had nothing to say. I put the card back, ashamed. I had marred my prized possession. Later, I would wince whenever I came across the childish scrawl.

Sometimes I glimpsed the difference between my world- my solitude, my unique live-in grandparent, my idiosyncratic obsessions- and the other world, the world of nuclear families, of brothers and sisters. Next door to us lived Josh and Jenny, twins two years older than me, who lived in a house of shared toys and board games. I wondered, Did the whole family play these games together after dinner, like they did on Saturday morning television commercials? I tried to cajole my family into sitting down to Monopoly or Clue. But my grandmother couldn't understand the rules, or my father would grow restless. "I don't like board games," he would say with a grin, relishing the coming pun. "They bore me."

One day I heard the twins talking about how they were going to make paper masks that evening with their parents in preparation for a church youth-group event. I thought longingly about the mask-making all afternoon. When it grew dark I pulled a book of craft projects from my bookcase and crossed the lawn between the two houses. Jenny answered the bell. "I have this book, it might have instructions for how to make masks," I explained. "We don't need it," she said. I put one foot up on the doorjamb, as if to inch my way into the house. "What are you doing?" she asked icily. She closed the door in my face, pushing me back onto the porch.

I came to realize there were things I could do outside the house and things I could only do inside. Outside, I tried to join other kids in made-up games of War and Spaceship, making machine-gun and siren sounds. Inside, I quietly tended my postcards like a garden.

This division, unfortunately, wasn't always so neat. I knew, for example, that I couldn't bring my postcard box to school. But for a while, I would stash a few cards into a large blue zippered pencil case. I didn't dare take them out; rather, when I was in need of comfort in the middle of class, I would pretend that I needed a new or different pencil, and peek in the bag at the hidden image.

When I turned ten, my parents and I took a monthlong trip to California. My collection nearly doubled. So many new attractions: giant trees! Cable cars! My father's second cousin, a pistachio farmer outside of Fresno, invited us to stay at his ranch for a month; he and his wife and their two daughters, who were a few years my senior, traveled with us up and down the state. Kristi and Katrina were at first curious about my interest. They even began picking out cards here and there for themselves. But as the weeks went by and the long hours in the family's VW van wore everyone down, my obsession became an annoyance. I would spot a display of postcards on the sidewalk outside a cheap souvenir store and bring the clan to a halt while I squeaked the revolving rack around, hunting for fresh Kodachrome. My cousins blew at their bangs and tapped the toes of their clogs to dramatize their impatience.

Later that year, when we moved to a new neighborhood, I refused to pack my postcards with my toys and books. Instead, I sat in the cab of the moving truck on the way to the new house with my shoe box in my lap. I had a new favorite card that I proudly displayed through the transparent front of the box. The words "Greetings from the Golden State" were emblazoned over a triptych of the Sacramento Statehouse, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Half Dome.

That fall, as I entered junior high school, I grieved over our California trip. I tried desperately to recapture it. In English class, I wrote a poem about horseback riding in Yosemite. ("The horse_/_clopped_/_on the beaten path_/_far behind_/_the tour group.") At home, I decided to compose my life's story. The first chapter was a day-by-day recounting of our month in California. ("We drove along the Pismo state beach for about twenty minutes. We had dinner at McDonald's. I had a banana shake. The next day we checked out of our motel.") I started a second chapter that began with my birth and proceeded chronologically from there, but I quickly lost interest. The non-California periods of my life didn't seem so exciting anymore.

My parents bought a small business that took up much of their time. We didn't go on many vacations anymore. I was growing older and fitting into my new body awkwardly. My feet hurt, my posture was bad, my rear end stuck out. I didn't know what clothes to wear. My glasses, Coke-bottle lenses in aviator frames, were usually covered in dust and dandruff. I was confused about music. The junior-high-school walls were tattooed in blue pen with strange logos- Zoso, AC/DC. I only knew that these had something to do with devilish bands led by hairy men.

I became a walking target for jocks and burnouts. I was afraid to use the boys' room. I wished I had an older sibling, a sister with long straight hair, who would tell me what clothes to buy and what music to listen to. She would miraculously swoop in to fend off any would-be tormentors.

But what if I had a sister who became a jock or a burnout herself? What if she joined the ranks of my tormentors? I imagined an additional presence in our small suburban home, another person's voice and smells; long hair in the sink. She would be all-seeing, all-knowing. And I would be self-conscious about playing with postcards in front of her. She might make fun of them. Worse, she might tell my classmates about them.

I entertained a more horrific thought: She might actually like my postcards and want to play with them herself. What if she mishandled them? Or left them out in the backyard? Or got peanut butter on them?

I grew increasingly nostalgic for past trips. I longed to be elsewhere, far from home and school, secure with my parents, seeing new sights, breathing different air. We weren't traveling, but I searched for more postcards. At the stationery store in the mall, I'd buy cards of our city and the minor points of interest nearby: a bridge just outside of town, named after a Polish Revolutionary War general, on the highway to the Canadian border; bicyclists in a dull-looking park by the river; the large plaster dog, a local landmark, on the roof of an old hi-fi factory.

Copyright © 2006 by Deborah Siegel.

About the Author

Daphne Uviller is a former editor and current contributing writer to Time Out New York. She has been published in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Newsday, The Forward, Allure, and Self. Both editors are only children.

Deborah Siegel is the author of Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild. She has written for Psychology Today and The Progressive and is a founding editor of The Scholar & Feminist Online.