Well, it's not as bad as the Coopers.

I don't remember how many there were; at least four, maybe six. They lived round the block, down by the sump, near the sleigh-riding hill with the high-tension wires that everyone thinks are harmless. Don't believe it. You buy a house for three reasons: location, location, location. Their sucked, sucked, sucked.

Mark Cooper was in my grade, kinda small and very cute. Huck Finn meets Michael J. Fox. He wasn't very popular, and he wasn't very clean. In fact, he smelled really bad. (This coming from me, a kid who took a bath maybe once a week.) One morning Mark and I were hanging by our knees , upside down, side by side, in the tiny tree by the sidewalk in front of my house. We were discussing Scooby-Doo and skateboards, lizards and lemonade. The whole time I was thinking, Mark does smell bad. Maybe he is sick.

I was good at smelling sickness, disease, and decay. It reeked from my nana's bedroom, closed windows, and unwashed skin. it lay in the living room, covering my mother, sticky sweat and Jean Nate.

It wasn't Mark who was sick, it turned out, it was his mother. She died of something so odd and rare they named it after her. I learned, years later, that their house had no running water for well over a year. The kids, all four or six of them, had to use the bathtub as a toilet. There was no place to wash your face or hair, even if you wanted to.

When Mrs. Cooper got really sick "they" found out. And "they" did whatever it is "they" do when something like "that" happens. The Coopers were gone, all of them, vanished. Mark never finished junior high school. They disappeared and, soon after, their house did too. Condemned by the board of condemners. One morning, with the neighbors looking on, "they" tore it down. There was nothing left of it, at all.

No one ever discussed the Coopers.
Their house.
The way they must have suffered.

When I rode my bike past the vacant lot that was once their home, I would think of the Cooper kids. Each of them a hero. Veterans of an unspoken war too many of us had to fight. I should have been nicer to Mark Cooper. I should have known. I should have is going to kill me one day.

The thing about having such desperate horror live right down the block from you, it redefines suffering for all who know the tale. It allows any behavior judged to be even mildly better theirs to be permissible by comparison. No matter what happened in our house, no matter how badly I felt, how unloved, scared, valueless, someone always answered me with, "Well, it's not as bad as the Coopers."

An eight-word slam dunk, verbal checkmate, conversation over. The Coopers were swamp people.

--

My mother was dying, I was pretty sure. My dad told me she had hepatitis. I looked it up in the school dictionary. Hepatitis was a disease transmitted through dirty needles. I vowed never to use the sewing machine.

--

When I was sure she was dying, but not sure what of, I decided I would have to become famous. My kid logic was that if Barbra Streisand's mom was sick, Barbra would go on the Johnny Carson show and ask everyone who loved her to send in a dollar. Everyone would. They would get a thousand dollars and be able to get medicine for her mom. Fame, I thoughts, at ten, could fix everything, even disease.

--

I fell asleep. I dreamed of circus clowns and spaceships and, once again, Angelina Jolie. I dream of her a lot, more than the average person, I suspect. I asked my shrink, "Why do I keep dreaming of Angelina Jolie?" She said, "My guess would be, Angelina Jolie." Then she charged me three hundred dollars. Whatever.

--

Obsession, on the whole, has worked for me.

--

I told my dad the Ellards had a special spray called No More Tangles, and that it came in a white bottle. I needed it. He never bought it. He had a dead wife and five small kids.; no more tangles was not a priority. It was to me.

--

I remember reading once in some magazine article that doctors took pictures of trauma survivors' brains and compared them to normal brains ,and the traumatized brains were different. The point of that story is that trauma gets stamped into the brain's gray mush - the doctors in the article called it a trauma tattoo - and that seems like a good description for the way bad things et chiseled right into your head so no matter how hard you shake your head, they won't go away.

--

I hated chemistry, back in high school. The periodic table, the one that supposedly showed how the world was made, made no sense to me. At all. It was Egyptian hieroglyphics, pig Latin, Morse code, it was pure gibberish. I learned only one thing the entire year: Some chemicals and minerals are inherently unstable; others, even in liquid form, have a certain solidity, so no matter how high you heat them or deep you freeze them the retain their essential structure. Ether evaporates as soon as it hits the air. But diamonds, you cant destroy a diamond you cant destroy iridium, osmium, mercury, which have the highest melting point of all metals. Tungsten was my favorite, for the way it popped on the tongue, and for its strength. It was a beautiful orange crystal that fluoresced bright blue in ultraviolet light.

Why, I want to know, are some substances inherently unstable while others can hold up even under mammoth pressures? Suppose no one knows the answer to this: why grace hits here and not there, why strengths emerge or don't.

I have the same question about people. Why can two people with certain similarities in their histories, from similar economic backgrounds, offered similar opportunities, wind up in such different places? Why does one person turn tungsten, another ether? Why did Melissa split? Why did I not? Melissa lived in a trailer with a leaky roof and no shower. I live in a brownstone with maple floors and pocket doors. Melissa, despite her alters, has so few people. I have, in a solidly real sense, so many.

I once read that a few good memories can be the means of saving us. I don't know who wrote that, but the line has stayed in my mind. I began to think" What are my memories - not the bad ones, but the ones that have helped me get through?