Eleven Forever
Ann Zhang
I had a pretty easy childhood. Not the type that builds character, makes you kinder or less selfish or more appreciative of everything you have. I had close friends and a large house. School was never difficult for me. Each year I played sports and grew taller and had no medical issues except a brief bout of constipation that brought me to the ER in the middle of basketball practice. When I wished for something, it was small: green eyes, my middle splits. In the sixth grade my teacher asked us how old we hoped to someday be, and I said, “eleven forever.”
When I was ten or eleven, my parents hired a friend from church to install a swing set in our backyard. The yard then was a yellowing graveyard for baby evergreens, which never grew taller than my shins; we tried to plant them as a makeshift fence, but they didn’t take well to the dirt. That spring my dad pulled out the evergreens while Bob from church gave us three swings and a trapeze bar, a skeleton of blue plastic and dark wood nestled near the back row of maples. This was where I invented a game called “imprisoner”: like kickball, except you start off handcuffed by the rings of the trapeze bar, and once your teammate kicks the ball, there’s only one base to run to and back from—a lone, dead evergreen that my parents left as an experiment.
During my last two years of high school, we were only spending the weekends at this house, the weekdays at a two-bed apartment half an hour closer to school. Then in the summer after I graduated high school, we ditched the apartment, sold the house, and moved into a light-blue ranch in the same neighborhood as my best friends. Having left home in August, I wouldn’t see the house’s insides until Thanksgiving. I ordered clothes hangers for my college dorm, and my younger sister texted me that our new house was nicer than the apartment but smaller than our childhood home in the county.
Months later, once I touched down in St. Louis, my mom toured me around the ranch, pointing out her favorite shades of paint and the absence of certain ugly couches that she’d hated for years. It felt quiet without my grandparents, who had moved into assisted living after my grandma’s aneurysm a couple years ago, the underlying reason that we downsized. Our abbreviated family celebrated Thanksgiving and then received bad news: like the rest of their facility’s patients, my grandparents had caught Covid. My grandma, despite her inability to walk or tell her children from her grandchildren, recovered quickly. My grandpa had been in the ER for a week. Even though my dad visited him every day, and I wrote him WeChat messages with the Chinese characters that I learned in my first semester at college, his lungs were giving out.
I invented a new game of crying while driving in the dark. From our new house, I headed west on I-64, south on I-270; hardly any cars were out on weekday nights. I slowed to a stop beneath the basketball hoop in the driveway of my childhood home, where a doctor’s family would be moving in soon. For no more than ten minutes I sat motionless on the tallest swing and thought about the people who raised me. I thought I could see a bare patch of dirt where the lone evergreen used to sit, regularly watered by my mom, who remained hopeful that against all odds it might grow. I wondered if my grandpa would wake up and read my stilted messages.
My dad might have eventually read them when he collected my grandpa’s phone, but I never asked him about it. Much later I would wonder if living a life relatively free of turmoil had doomed me to spend years wallowing first about the death of a grandparent, then a beloved cat. For a few months I could hardly think of anything else. I probably spent a hundred nights crying about my grandpa, fifty for the cat. When I cried in front of my parents, they usually bemoaned how they’d spoiled me as a kid: if only I, too, had walked miles to school at the tender age of six, if I had watched my parents hunched over in the fields to put food on the table, then my calves and my heart would be better prepared for the knee-high obstacles of young adulthood. And my parents, trading their place for mine, might have grown a couple inches taller.
When thinking became tiresome, I kicked at the ground, attuning my body to the swing’s oscillation. Reaching the high points wasn’t as glorious now that I was five-foot-six and could legally drive a car—just dizzying. My fingers went numb on the chains. Then I dismounted and walked back to my car, feeling spooked by the quiet suburbs, the empty house: like when you’re a kid and scared of everything at night.
Ann Zhang is a senior at Yale University majoring in Computer Science and Film & Media Studies.
ABOUT THE ART | Light Tracing by Ethan Estrada, 2023. Ethan Estrada is a student at Yale University.