Ohio Portraits Vol. 1: A Midwestern Micromemoir

By Erika Price

So much free parking. So many empty schools. So many aborted and half developed exurbs, suburbs. Such low rent. So many hollowed-out malls with shifty-eyed security guards and put-upon bored kids. Such cheap produce. So many aging classmates who never left. What a lovely parks system. What a dirty lake. So many new casinos. Such unbelievably wide pot holes. What nice turnpike pit stops. What a low sales tax and minimum wage. What a greying population.

Our grandparents or parents moved here to have children, to make steel or cars, to teach at the college, to work for NASA, to mine salt from underneath Lake Erie. The schools were good then they say. The land was cheap, but there were plentiful amenities. It was a proper city, but not an intimidating one. Eastern Time, rustbelt industry, nonregional dialects, diverse-ish populations, Midwestern sensibilities. Such promise. What times they had. The suburbs grew for decades, schools and houses appearing steadily. And now they shrink, dry out, and empty.

Researchers call it the Cleveland Brain Drain. We grow, we suck all the nutrients from the dirt, we learn, we save our money, and we leave.

We take jobs in the eastern cities, with their steep rents and narrow streets; we hide in expensive, drafty bars in Chicago or St. Louis, bragging about what we know; we add degrees or men’s surnames to our names; we flee to LA or San Fran or France or Lebanon and show everyone back home all the pictures. We are smiling and small against big backdrops.

We come back briefly to collect Christmas presents, roller coaster rides, hugs, memories, estates, condolences. We do not call enough. We spend our money on stupid craft brews that all taste the same – bitter – instead of on plane tickets.

We are statistics. We move by trends, like the grandparents and parents who brought us here. They placed their roots beside the veins of salt that ran beneath the lake. We have placed thin roots in the air. They quiver and shift as the times do.

When we visit, we enjoy the low sales tax, eat the 99 cent peaches, roam the empty sidewalks, reflect in the windows of our closed-down high schools, and prepare to leave again. A huge hunk of us stays. But not the brain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erika Price
• Release date: Jun 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310000263

Erika Price

Erika D. Price is a writer and social psychologist living in Chicago, Illinois. Her work has been featured in Whiskey Paper, EFiction, Red Fez, Literary Orphans, and on Liar’s League NYC’s podcast, among others. She’s also written journal articles for academic presses that no sane human being would ever read. She writes regularly at http://www.erikadprice.tumblr.com

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Ohio Portraits Vol. 1

By

Erika D. Price

Copyright 2015 Erika D. Price

Published by English Prime Press at Smashwords.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover Image Copyright Erika D. Price, Licensed under an Attribution 2.0 Generic Creative Commons License. Original photo by Jackie Bohannon, Used with Permission.

Ohio Portrait No. 1 

The story goes that after she retired, she drove out to the Arizona desert and burned to death in a conflagration of her own pay stubs. She was an English teacher, or a speech coach, and well loved, but apparently she carried herself through the career with organs full of gasoline. But it happened a long time ago, it’s impossible to verify. 

Ohio Portrait no. 2 

She was doe-eyed and won a state forensics prize for her acting. Three years passed and she was willingly homeless, sleeping under an air conditioning unit by the rec center. Then she got married. 

Ohio Portrait no. 3 

Her little sister sat naked on the driveway all day. As for her, the rumor was she had married a Saudi prince. It mustn’t have been true, because I found her profile on the site of a nude cleaning service. $50 an hour, no touching allowed. 

Ohio Portrait no. 4

He said that if he hadn’t been born gay, he would have grown up to be racist.

He still kinda was, actually. 

Ohio Portrait no. 5

He burned cans of Axe in my yard, trying to impress me. In college he moved south and began drinking blood. I tried learning to drive in the children’s cemetery where his infant sister was buried. Rows of tiny graves, some decades old, each dotted with toys from devoted, eternal parents. 

Ohio Portrait no. 6

A fifteen-year-old drug dealer named Peanut. 

Ohio Portrait no. 7

There was a family of girls with the thickest skins and the most chronic sneers. They had to be that way; their lives had been too rough to do justice here. Once, they surrounded a woman in white and beat her to a pulp at her own wedding.

Ohio Portrait no. 8

If a family’s house had two stories or an above-ground pool, you knew they were kinda rich. We were the sires of nurses, dental hygienists, law office admins, receptionists and people who loaded up trucks with bread or refrigerated organs.

Some children had parents who were professors, shrinks, and NASA scientists. They took honors classes and went to schools you’ve heard of. I sat among them and joined them for some extra-curriculars, but we never understood each other. Many of them are married now, living in cramped coastal apartments, their last names changed, degrees hanging on walls, hobbies replacing their academic passions. Very few are doing anything I would call enviable. The most successful classmate I can think of is a White House intern, but he pulled straight C’s in remedial classes back then.

Ohio Portrait no. 9

He was very Christian, but I kept showing up at his house with no bra on, hoping to corrupt him. The first time we kissed was behind the concession stand of a children’s baseball field. We sat on a cement planter beside dormant flowers as the snow came down and talked for forty-five minutes before it happened. He told me he had an uncle who would wait outside abortion clinics accosting women, offering to adopt all their unwanted would-be children. He thought it was a good and noble idea. He didn’t believe in gay rights or masturbation. I didn’t even bother to argue with him about any of it. I just took him around the back of the building.

It was cold and I opened my red felt coat to let his hand slip down to cup my breasts. I had stopped wearing a bra so that every time he touched me under my shirt, he would be tempted. We made out against the cinderblock wall of the concession stand, and in the bright yellow slide on the playground, and in the back seat of the school bus that we each took every morning. Every morning I waited outside my neighbor’s house for the bus to deliver him to me, coat opened no matter how chilly it was, no bra on, no scarf, and no hat. It was early in the winter morning, and dark, so we could fumble and press against each other for the entire fifteen minute ride unperturbed.

At last, one day in spring he invited me over to his home. I changed into my most flattering underwear and walked over, brimming with anticipation. I would have bet a thousand dollars that I was going to have sex that day. In the loft above his parent’s garage, I stripped naked and stood in front of him, spinning slowly. It did not work. 

Ohio Portrait no. 10

He ran from her, drove to his parent’s house, and shut himself in the garage with the engine on. She punched out a window to let in fresh air, crawled through the hole, stopped the engine, and saved him. She was the one the cops came after. 

Ohio Portrait no. 11

Our AP US Government teacher was a girlish woman of 30 years. Petite, blonde, cute; she made us fold paper hats of various shapes and wear them, to illustrate the many hats the President must wear, befitting his many duties. 

She taught Psychology, as well, but I thought she was a bit of an idiot so I took the class at the nearby college instead. She was a doormat. Her voice was soft and high like a cartoon mouse’s, her small dresses were baby dolls in taupe, olive green, and light yellow. She could fade into the similarly colored old tiles that lined the classroom.

She could have been attractive if she’d done more with her shoulder-length locks, worn lower-cut pants, and held her chin higher. I despised her for squandering what was left of youth. That derision came from fear of sharing her fate, of course.

One day, she sat at the edge of her desk and told us she had to leave class early, because she was having a bed delivered. For months she had just kept a mattress on the floor of apartment, she said, and now it was time to commit. To get a proper bed, just for her. 

It came out simply. We were seniors, and Honors students, so she afforded us more honesty than we deserved. She didn’t have a bed because she’d left her old house on short notice. She had been married, and her husband used to clean his shotguns at the head of their marital bed while she slept. She would wake up with a start each night and find him towering over her, his eyes dark and unreadable, the barrel inches from her face. He was doing it to intimidate her, she knew.

Since she acted like it was a small matter, we did too. But all her flightiness and vulnerability suddenly made sense.

A few weeks later she came to school in gigantic, sagging, brown-colored clothing that erased her form entirely, her hair completely shorn off. She looked like an 1850’s school marm. Her new bed had been delivered; a twin. 

Ohio Portrait no. 12

Why was a twenty-year-old man hanging out with a freshmen girl on the steps? Why were his tight orange curls and his boxy leather jacket attractive? Why did no one stop him from smoking within feet of the school building, or from carrying small baggies of pills in his pockets and palm? What did she find alluring about him? Why did we keep leaving her outside with him after the bell rang?

Why didn’t we believe her? 

Ohio Portrait no. 13

Diabetes from childhood. An eating disorder, allegedly. A bad cold the week before homecoming. She took some Dimetapp and never woke up. A tree was planted in remembrance of her, in the front lawn of the school, beside all the memories for the other dead kids. On top of the roots they placed a marble slab with her name and an etching of an angel on it. She was in our photography class. In the dark room you couldn’t tell anybody was missing.

Ohio Portrait no. 14

During an in-class debate on affirmative action, she was made to defend herself. I love white people! she said, My mother is a white person! 

We didn’t understand why she didn’t say, I’m half-white! 

But now I do. 

Ohio Portrait no. 15

The boy in the pool told me our mutual kickboxing instructor had been caught screwing my hairdresser, who was married. 

It makes me sick, the boy said. "I quit taking lessons from him. I mean, what if