Vicki Mayk: WHAT I WANTED TO SAY • Cleaver Magazine

Flash Nonfiction by Vicki Mayk
WHAT I WANTED TO SAY WHEN YOU ASKED WHY I LIVE IN AN OLD FACTORY

Because my father grew up in a Pittsburgh house surrounded by warehouses near a river. Because his father was an alcoholic. Because they kept a black dog who barked viciously chained out in the yard. Because my father and his brothers left that house to serve in World War II. Because after the war my father loved to gamble and go to nightclubs. Because one night my mother came into one of his haunts. Because my Dad asked “Who is the girl in the hat?” and the bartender told him to leave her alone, she’s a nice girl. Because my Dad walked miles from the house by the warehouses in the 1950 blizzard to woo her at her parents’ wonderful old house. Because on her wedding day my mother learned my father’s real last name. Because on that same day he took her to the house surrounded by warehouses, past the dog chained in the yard, to meet his mother who barely spoke English. Because we lived in a third-floor apartment in my mother’s parents’ house until I was in fourth grade. Because I could smell my grandmother’s spaghetti sauce every day in that apartment. Because I loved that smell, that house, those people. Because in 1965 my father’s family still lived in the house by the warehouses and cooked on a wood burning stove. Because I was mesmerized watching my Aunt Ida stoke that stove. Because Aunt Ida hid notebooks in a special compartment under the kitchen table, magically producing them when strange people came to the house. Because she wrote numbers in the notebooks after the people gave her money. Because once she thought she saw police coming and threw the notebooks in the stove. Because when I was nine, my parents bought a big, brand-new house in the suburbs. Because my father believed the new house meant he’d finally left behind the house by the warehouses. Because I felt like my childhood ended when we moved to that house. Because living with my Italian grandparents felt more like home. Because I never told my father that I felt that way. Because when I left for college, I never really lived with my parents again. Because I spent my twenties living in too many places for too short a time. Because the two houses I owned with my ex-husband felt like prisons. Because I still search family photos trying to remember what my Italian grandparents’ house looked like. Because I keep searching for the feeling I had when I lived there. Because after my divorce, home was one room, then five rooms. Because now I’ve learned you can make a home in an apartment in an old factory building surrounded by warehouses near a river.

Vicki Mayk is a writer, editor, and teacher whose work has appeared in the Brevity Blog, Hippocampus, Literary Mama, The Manifest-Station, Bending Genres, eMerge Magazine, the anthology Air and others. Her narrative nonfiction book, Growing Up on the Gridiron: Football, Friendship and the Tragic Life of Owen Thomas, was published by Beacon Press. She earned her MFA in nonfiction from the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University and teaches adult nonfiction workshops. Catch up with Vicki Mayk on Instagram @vickimayk or at her website.