Free I Don't Have a Happy Place by Kim Korson Page A

finishing her milk and Fudge Stripes. Mrs. Tremblay had poured a glass for her daughter from a large aqua Tupperware pitcher, and inside the vessel was a plastic bag of milk. Nathalie told me her brother drank a lot of milk and, when her mother opened the fridge door, I saw at least four backup pouches on the top shelf, like IV bags fat with dairy instead of medicine or blood. Never in my ten years had I seen such a lineup of the stuff. Jews rarely drank milk as a beverage, not because it was against our religion but more because we collectively just thought it was gross. In our house we had Diet Pepsi, and Ace only drank 7 Up. I wanted nothing to do with milk but I was obsessed by those sacks of it.
    â€œLet’s go upstairs,” Nathalie said.
    The second floor of the Tremblay house was even better than the first. All the beds looked like they’d had other lives, maybe at their grandparents’ house or a distant cousin’s in war-torn Europe, and my favorite part: nothing matched. The hallway floor was hardwood scattered with area rugs, and two of the four bedrooms had wall to wall. The windows were open and a breeze swirled in.
    We had never opened a window in my house because they were painted shut. I spent many nights in bed thinking up complicated egress plans should a radiator suddenly explode and attempt to burn the place down. My parents didn’t seem to mind the lack of fresh air, as it didn’t interfere with the year-round use of the central air conditioning system. Meat-locker-temperature air pumped through the house, blasting from white holes in the floors and ceilings.
    But the real showstopper at the Tremblay house arrived every night at 5:30 p.m. Mr. Tremblay was a giant, bearded and menacing like some beastly version of the guy on The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams . Nathalie’s father taught clarinet in the public schools by day and sold lumber for firewood after hours. He had a red pickup truck with his name painted on the side. Every night, he’d stomp into the house with his oversized half-unlaced work boots tracking bits of mud all over the floor, the likes of which would have given my own father a heart attack.
    I thought of my father returning home from a day of making ladies’ blouses. Hanging up his suit on color-coded hangers, slipping on his pressed denims, the Yorkshire terrier snuggled at his feet as they fell into a deep snooze to the background sounds of Barney Miller . Sometimes I’d watch him sleep. The rise and fall of his Car­tier necklace, the naturally curly hair that was also permed poufing like a cloud around his head, the snug-fitting jeans he’d assured me were the ones real cowboys wore and were also “very in.”
    When Mr. Tremblay returned from his day, he’d stagger around for a few moments, crash into furniture, then yell at it. Nathalie told me that one night a few weeks earlier she’d had to call the operator because her father was all liquored up and swung a small machete at his wife’s neck. It was the wild, wild west at the Tremblays’. I wanted to stay forever.
    I don’t think Mrs. Grizzly Adams found the comings and goings of her house as glamorous as I did, because with each visit her nerves seemed more frazzled. She grasped her pearls tighter, and I noticed her hands shaking as she poured the milk. Mrs. Tremblay may not have appreciated what she had, but I was stinking jealous that Nathalie got to call the actual police when her father nearly sliced open her mother before her eyes. Who knew this stuff even happened outside the hum of the television droning from my parents’ room—that there were men out there who whipped out their privates, that husbands brandished real live swords in attempts to slit their wives’ throats. Currents of danger and sizzle never breezed through our sealed windows. And how did Nathalie even know what to do? I didn’t know how to turn the oven on.
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