Cinnamon and Dirt

The following is a piece I wrote for a creative writing class at UC Berkeley in the Spring of 2016. 

It had been raining for a week; the rocky dirt road in the forgotten corner of the Sierra Nevada foothills was the color of cinnamon, soft and loose from the tireless rains. Unruly and verdant weeds lined the driveway, stretching their languid stalks over the edge of the haphazard gravel and shedding their offspring into the fertile soil below. Johanna had found a quiet spot on a lichen-covered boulder beneath a dying oak tree, out of the harsh rays of the post-rain afternoon sun, and had settled on her stomach to consider the dissatisfying ending of the novel she had finished earlier. Her father approached from behind, his heavy frame belied by his light footfalls in the damp soil, and poked her in the ribs quickly and too hard. His sudden appearance caused her to jump and flip over on her back, much to his amusement. He gave her a big grin before she could be angry with his antics.

“Want to walk, Jo?” He asked, raising an eyebrow conspiratorially.

A flutter of surprise worked through her chest. Her father was usually tired from working all week in the city and any time spent at home was usually allocated to her mother or the television. Shortly after they had moved, she tried to maintain her tenuous relationship with her father. Monday mornings she woke before the sun to brew him a pot of coffee before he made the three hour commute to the Silicon Valley, Friday evenings she ran out to the car to give him a hug upon his return after a work week away from his family. But his shoulders always sagged and his face began to age too fast and every time she tried to talk to him he would tell her that he was too tired to talk and she abandoned waking up early and slept in, trying to be ambivalent about his presence. Yet here he was, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, asking to spend time with her. She shrugged noncommittally, wary of her own optimism, and rose from her perch on the ancient boulder without a word. The unlikely pair began the descent down the rock-ribbed driveway, avoiding the muddy puddles in the tire ruts in favor of the uneven pathways of settled stone in packed dirt. Shadows danced along, around, between the tall grasses that framed the road, cast by the branches of thirsty trees and mobile clouds that journeyed towards the horizon. Johanna was aware of the silence between them. It hung on them like the stale tobacco smoke on her father’s jacket, a present reminder of a painful absence. They walked for a long time in contemplative silence, each immersed in their too similar brains.

Johanna snuck a glance at her father as they passed their nearest neighbor’s home, a quarter of a mile away, and considered just how similar they were. Without her permission, her mind conjured a memory from her fifth birthday. There wasn’t much that she could remember from that age, just her pausing for a moment in a sunny yellow dress stained with the dark smears of chocolate ganache frosting as her father hoisted her in the air. Up in the air, looking down at her father, she could see her pale blue eyes reflected back in her father’s, just like her curly black locks that sat upon his head.

“Daddy, you stole my hair! You stole my eyes!” She had exclaimed with a giggle as he spun her around. He had replied that they shared these things, the icy eyes and the waves of ebony hair. “They are yours and mine,” he had said. It had made her proud to be like her father, with his strong arms covered in artsy, swirling tattoos and his straight, confident shoulders. She was shaken from the memory when the uneven ground threw her off balance. She had steadied herself almost instantly, but not before a small gasp of surprise could escape her pursed lips and not before her father’s hand shot out to steady her. Without thinking, she shrugged the heavy hand off of her wrist, unused to the touch. Immediately she wished she hadn’t. She could feel her father’s disappointment even before she turned to him and saw the corners of his mouth pulling his already wrinkled face further downward. Her tongue felt heavy in her mouth with the weight of an apology she didn’t quite know how to phrase and she felt the corners of her own mouth mirroring his. Instead of “sorry” she said she was clumsy, gave a half-hearted smile, a redirected her gaze at the gravel. It wasn’t really gravel anymore, just small, sharp rocks pounded into the earth from years of tires and shoes, and tiny, puddle filled ruts. She could feel the points of the rocks through the thick soles of her sneakers, and moved instead into the tall grasses and the cinnamon soil that ran alongside the lane, risking a tick bite for the feeling of damp ground compacting beneath her feet with each step. Distantly she knew that her father was lagging behind her, but she did not slow her pace. She felt a weight in her stomach, some sort of responsibility to say something to the father who commuted six hundred miles a week to put food on that table at the price of his relationship with his daughter, but the words would not come. Things had been simpler before they had moved. One night, when she was eleven, she had snuck out of bed at midnight, her brain and body too antsy to sleep. Quietly she had made her way down the long hallway, tiptoeing past her parent’s open door with care, until she reached the living room. In the dark, it looked much larger than it was: the shapes of furniture and several bookcases were tiny in comparison to the vast darkness in the center of the room. Still, she strode forward, boldly, to the lamp by the window. A tiny click and the void disappeared, replaced by the familiarity of a leather couch and a mauve armchair of matted velvet. After choosing a thick novel, she settled in the repulsive armchair and lost herself in a world of dragons and wizards. She was so consumed by the text that she did not hear the keys in the door, and only realized her mistake as the rusty hinges swung open and her father rounded the corner into the living room. Their eyes locked for several seconds, and she felt a dull fear gnawing at her stomach. There was one thing that mattered to her father: obedience. And lights out at 9:30 was an order. She braced herself for the yelling that would wake the house and watched as he slowly crossed the room. Instead of yelling he crouched in front of her and whispered,

“Good book?” She was so shocked at this adjustment in behavior that she just nodded, still waiting for the anger to come.

“I can’t sleep.” She said awkwardly after  minute of silence, squirming under his gaze. He had looked so young back then, younger than his thirty-four years. His beard, which had become peppered with gray after the move, was as dark as his hair back then, and it moved with his lips as he smiled.

“That happens to me too. Mind if I join you?” His whisper was full of a paternal warmth, something that she realized was rare, even at that young age. Too shocked to be pleased, she nodded again and watched with amazement as he approached the flimsy Ikea bookshelf and pulled out the third Harry Potter book, thumbing through its worn pages until he found his dog-ear, and sat in the worn leather armchair adjacent to her recliner, propping his feet on the ripped ottoman. Johanna watched him curiously for a moment before returning to her own book, both of them reading well into the night. It had never been easy for them, too alike in their stubbornness, with their curly black hair and their unshakable pride. But that night was precious to her. For just one night, they could enjoy their likeness without the imposition of effort or falseness or obligation. They coexisted.

She looked at him now, as they walked, wondering if this outing was an expression of that same warmth from years ago. But there had been a peaceful understanding between them as they read that night in the living room, a truce of sorts that had needed no words, only the comfort of each other’s presence. This was entirely different, devoid of that feeling of acceptance and similitude that had marked that moment in her memory.

Johanna was so busy examining her father that she had not realized that they had already reached the long, steep bend in the road that devolved into dilapidated trailers and broken barbed wire fences, until she was steps away from the demarcation between rocked road and the thickets of tarweed, sticky with bright yellow flowers. Instinctively they both meandered to a stop as they passed the line of dying oak trees that obscured the horizon in the distance. The sun setting behind their backs cast long shadows into the untamed, grassy hills, distorting the shapes of already crooked trees until they were unrecognizable— a mess of curling gray branches that spun into the crevices in the ground. Everything was quiet here. Johanna could hear the rumbling breaths inside her father’s chest, and the clicking of his fingernails as his hands fidgeted by his side. She noticed, after a moment, that she had been doing the same thing with her own fingers. She curled them into her palms and stuffed them into the pockets of her hoodie. No, this was not the comfortable silence of an insomniac father and daughter pair reading their favorite books in the sanctuary of their living room.

This was the evening in his old BMW, the smell of tobacco and cinnamon pervasive and overwhelming, when they had made the three hour drive home together. Three hours together in a car that was too small, with the radio cranked all the way up, pumping Matchbox 20 through the staticky speakers. Three hours spent staring at the hood of the car through the cracked windshield, the red paint faded and chipped from years of use and sunlight, although she could remember when it was shiny and new. Three hours replaying their short conversation in her head: she asked how he was, he replied that he was tired and just wanted to zone out on the drive home and her voice, frustratingly tiny, replying that silence was fine. Three hours regretting her decision to visit her aunt and ride home with her father in a too small BMW on a Friday night in June, with the windows rolled up despite the heat and the silence as stifling as the smell of tobacco.

Except this was different, because this time he had chosen to spend time with her, not the other way around. It didn’t feel different to her, but Johanna rationalized that it had to be. He would not have asked for her time if he did not want it. This seemed logical to her, but it was crowded out of her mind by fickle, mean thoughts that stung the corners of her eyes with tears.

“How is work?” She asked suddenly, feebly, turning to face her father only to look past him. She didn’t have the courage to meet his eyes. When he did not answer, she began twisting her fingers through her long, knotted hair anxiously. Anything to stop the heavy silence that rested on her ribcage, curling around her bones and weighing her down, pressing through the soles of her feet into the earth. Her mind scrambled to answer a question he had not asked, and she watched the slow rise and fall of his shoulders in the dim light of the sunset.

“Work is work. It pays the bills.” her father said finally without turning to face her. Vaguely disappointed, Johanna examined the tree branches in the twilight and wondered if it had always been this difficult to talk to him, or if their conversational skills had only degraded over time. Her dejection began to take the faintest tinge of annoyance at his lackluster response. She could recall countless times at her best friend’s home, when her tight-lipped father had regaled her best friend’s parents with tales from work, commuting, his weekends, anything to get a laugh out of them. It wasn’t the same with her; she could not ask about work and get a long-winded, comedic response. Her questions elicited only silence.

“Do you like it?” She tried again, this time gluing her eyes to the bump of his nose, they only feature they didn’t share.  But he didn’t return her gaze, only looked out across the golden California hills that rolled out for hundred of miles in front of them, stretching all the way to the place that she had called home for so long. Her home before the move, before the commuting and the silence. Johanna kicked the rocks at her feet until the soft, wet dirt underneath peered through, and traced circles in the dampness with the toe of her shoe. She saw his shoulders rise and fall in a halfhearted shrug and wondered suddenly if the invitation to walk was like work to him: something necessary, something that must be done, but not something to enjoy.

And then it all came tumbling out of each like a dirty secret, flung from the most distrusting parts of her politeness. There is something terrifying about voicing such an intimate accusation, as if the acknowledgement of such speculations on humanity somehow stains the prosecutor in the process.

“Do you hate me?” The words shot from her mouth before she could stop them. She heard her own voice outside herself, as if the words had come from someone else, someone bolder. But she was not bold, she was afraid of the answer her unprovoked question would return. He turned to her with a sudden ferocity that she had not seen since she was a child, anger glinting in his eyes. Anger and something else she could not place, or did not want to. The silence around them exploded, his famous temper letting out a string of expletives as he accused her of guilt tripping him, of not appreciating his sacrifices, of trying to manipulate him. He gesticulated wildly, his voice growing louder as he spent more and more breath convincing himself that she was ungrateful. His outraged speech fell on deaf ears. She already knew these words. She didn’t need to listen. Instead, Johanna watched the shadows lengthen and blur together in the darkness as his words floated around her, just out of her reach. Just like he was.

Sleep did not come easy that night. She cried for a while, silently, so that when her father came into her room to apologize several hours later, he assumed she was asleep under the mess of quilts and shut the door softly behind him. He would apologize in the morning, she knew, and she would be able to fake a smile and agree that she had been out of line. But she could not stomach the idea of his string of apologies that never seemed to place the blame anywhere but her shoulders. This behavior was not new, and she should have known better than to ask. It occurred to her, briefly, to apologize herself and forgo that lengthy catharsis that her father insisted upon every time they fought. Catharsis for him because he could vent his frustrations while seeming repentant. To Johanna, it was only words, empty words, like the ones he had shouted at her on the empty road as only the tiny sparrows in the tree watched a listened as the sun set on the tall grasses and the oak trees and even her damned lichen-covered boulder that had been in his line of sight from the kitchen window. But she did not apologize. Instead, she pretended to be asleep until she was sure that he was, then crept out of her bed with the soft and careful practice of someone who has spent too many hours awake when they should have been sleeping. She turned the knob on her desk lamp until she heard the soft click that lit only a small, concentric circle on the smooth, wooden desktop. After a bit of quiet rummaging around, Johanna pulled a book about dragons and magicians out of her desk drawer before placing it on the desk and thumbing through the pages until she found her dog-ear.