Cindy’s Home!
When I was a little girl, my aunt would give me a huge trash bag filled to the rim with my cool cousin’s hand-me-downs. My older sister, Cindy, would sit next to the huge bag of clothes on our orange marmalade-colored carpet, oohing and aahing over each garment like it was brand new, making a big fuss.
She has been gone now for forty-one years, but I remember every single detail of the night she died and subsequent funeral, details like it was a Thursday evening; details like I was watching Gimme A Break! while sitting on the living room floor when my older brother, whom was babysitting me at the time, picked up the ringing avocado-colored wall phone in the kitchen, getting the devastating news. After he hung up the phone, he’d call another brother and I over to pray for Cindy as she teetered between life and death, the three of us standing in the smallest of circles like a couple of dominoes about to fall as Gimme A Break! continued to run in the background. This memory plays back in my mind like a slow motion movie.
I remember how she used the cuff of her jeans once as a makeshift ashtray while we sat on our front stoop in Northeast Philly, gazing up at the sunset that seemed to sit at the far end of our street. I remember her smell; a mixture of smokes, musk and the odd leather jacket. Every time I hear “American Girl” by Tom Petty, I think of Cindy. This is her song.
When I was three, I began nagging my mother for a dog, and her response was always “For your birthday,” “For Christmas,” “For the Fourth of July,” “For….fill in the blank.”
By four, I began to catch on to my mother’s little game called distraction until the day I called her out on it from the backseat after she picked me up from preschool. Her response was for me to bow my head and ask God for a dog. Unbeknownst to me, she had told Cindy about my backseat prayer in conversation, and Cindy was so touched that she got our family the last puppy in the litter from a connection her boyfriend knew. He came with the name “Gosh-Josh,” but we just called him Josh. And Josh loved Cindy. In fact, whenever we’d say to Josh, “Cindy’s home!”, he would get so excited, running around in circles and wagging his tail with zeal. Cindy had made an imprint on Josh. She had made an imprint on all of us.
On February 17, 1983, Cindy would pass away in a car accident at the age of twenty-seven, five weeks shy of my ninth birthday. A few weeks after she died, I’d say to Josh “Cindy’s home!” And watched as he got all excited again as he waited for Cindy to come walking through the front door. I’d never say it again after that.
Josh would die when I was sixteen. We buried him in our backyard in Bucks County. And I cried for a week straight.
