Marooned
When I was fifteen, my dad got a new job, and we moved from Kingston, Ontario to Atlanta, Georgia. This memoir piece captures a day in my life soon after we arrived. It was a significant date for the human race, and a deeply personal one for me.
This story was originally printed in Avis (A Manchester Metropolitan University Student-Led Literary Journal), 2015-16: Migration issue.
I was a young teen in a strange land and I was so not at my best. My hair, which had always behaved in Canada, reacted to Atlanta’s summertime humidity with an Einsteinian frizziness that defied gravity. My mascara melted in the suffocating heat, making me look like a paint-by-numbers sad clown.
Hellish, that’s what it was. I couldn’t pretend to be enjoying myself, in this land of gaudy magnolias and cloying, southern belles. I wanted my friends. I wanted my old house. Most of all, I wanted good hair.
One day, soon after we arrived, we visited a home of some Armenian-Americans who had thrown out the welcome mat for us on the strength of my dad’s family name and background. How disappointed they were when they met my Anglo-Irish-Canadian mom and my sister and me. The three of us didn’t speak a word of Armenian and when our hosts switched to a molasses-sweet southern drawl solely for our benefit, we didn’t understand much of that, either.
My sister and I took our misery outdoors into the steam bath atmosphere of the summer evening. We were semi-polite to the household’s teenage kids, who asked us questions about our background and teased us about not speaking Armenian. Over and over they urged us to say “house” and “out” and “about,” laughing at our Canadian pronunciation and thereby increasing our wretchedness tenfold.
From time to time, we caught glimpses of the adults through the partially fogged-up windows of the house. They were clustered around a swanky console TV the size of a caboose. What a waste, though: whatever they were watching was telecast in boring greyscale. It seemed ridiculous to me. Why watch black and white programming in this glorious age of technicolour?
My dad came to the back door and called us in. We walked into the living room in time to hear the words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” The grown-ups and most of the kids oohed and ahhhed. They applauded when they saw the American flag planted firmly on the moon’s flinty surface.
Unnoticed, as cheers broke out, I dropped my head into my hands and sobbed. Atlanta could have been the moon as far as I was concerned. I missed Canada more than I could ever have imagined. It was only a thousand miles away, but it felt like a million.
