On January 18, 1976, I was eleven years old. My family and I were in the middle of moving from an apartment to a house in Queens. My brother and sister were at their jobs in Manhattan. My dad was with the movers. My mom didn’t trust her book collection to them, so we were going to move them ourselves. My mom was driving our navy Volkswagen Bug, and I was seated inches beside her in a bucket seat. The ashtray in front of us was overflowing, its odor stale. We didn’t have seatbelts because my father thought they were ugly.
This was our first trip, our first a load of books. The car was filled with them—encyclopedias, Book of the Month Club hardcovers, oversized art books from museums, a few unreturned library books by Kierkegaard and Elie Wiesel, lots of my sister’s true crime paperbacks, several of my dad’s first editions, like In Cold Blood. Some were cradled in my lap. Others were on the floor by my feet, their corners jabbing into my Levi’s with each jolt of the car on the road. The back seat was like a volcanic eruption of books piled high, spilling into the car’s crevices under the seat, knocking into the flip-open ashtrays. My Judy Blume collection was in there somewhere.
It was cold outside. The road was dark, the sky a slate gray, metallic. My mother smoked a cigarette, leaving an impression of her red lipstick on the filter. I didn’t ask her to roll down the window. I already knew the answer.
The books smelled like something ripe, like clothing that is well-worn just before it becomes dirty. The ones in my lap were in French, books by Proust, Baudelaire, Voltaire, and Victor Hugo, with soft green covers and pages that were thin and easily damaged. My mom had saved up for those. She had bought them at The French Institute over the years, and they were expensive.
“You can have all my books when I die,” she said, smiling at me.
Her coat was wrapped tightly around her waist with a belt, a fur collar around her neck, her brown hair in a stylish haircut, short, with a fringe. She shifted gears as we drove on the service lane of Queens Boulevard, the apartment I had lived in my whole life falling away behind us.
“Oh merde!” she said.
“What, Ma?” I said.
“I don’t know if our house is on 68th Road, Drive, Street, or Avenue.”
We were on 112th Street passing all the 67s. For some reason she decided to make a left on 68th Drive. Some of the books toppled over in the back. I turned around, got on my knees on the front seat, reached behind me, and tried to right them.
We looked for the address, and there it was. The house, pinkish with peeling stucco, was grand. It had two steps up to a porch in the front and a driveway that led to an old two-car garage with barn-like doors. The trees and plants surrounding the house seemed like they were frozen, static, suspended in a previous moment, like the air hadn’t moved them in a while.
“How many trips do you think we have to make to bring all the books?” I asked.
“A lot,” she said.
She parked on the street in front of the house. “Don’t get out,” she said.
She came around to my side of the car, and gently opened the passenger door. Some of the books fell to the asphalt. She bent to retrieve them, and I got out.
“We are lucky,” I said. “We found the house on the first try.”
She hugged me, and I smelled her perfume, her cigarettes, her makeup. “You are a good helper,” she said.I shifted inside my blue snorkel jacket with the fur-lined hood and then climbed back in to get a handful of books to pass to my mom. Suddenly I didn’t mind that we had to go back and forth in that little car all day, as long as I was with her.
Leslie Lisbona has been published in JMWW, Smoky Blue Literary & Arts Magazine, and Welter. Her work has been nominated for Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net 2024 contest. In March she was featured in the Sunday Style Section of The New York Times.
She is the child of immigrants from Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in Queens, NY.
https://leslielisbona.substack.com
She recently completed her memoir and is looking for an agent.