Miranda Volpe

All of my relatives on my mother’s side were big smokers. At our family gatherings, my aunts and uncles would light up throughout my grandparents’ house, filling glass ashtrays with butts and creating a hazy filter over the festivities. My aunt Jane, high cheekbones, translucent skin, held her forearm aloft at a right angle, slim fingers forming the V where her cigarette rested. Uncle Arnold, a costume designer, gestured wildly with his, the glowing ember making circles in the air as he told steamy backstage stories. One Christmas, shortly after my eleventh birthday, I started to wonder why my mother was the only one in her family who didn’t smoke. I asked her, and she told me that my father refused to marry her unless she stopped smoking. He had been studying tobacco-related diseases in medical school, she explained. He also thought it was a disgusting habit. So, my mother quit. When she was a teenager, she said, she used to sit around smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee with her own parents. She widened her eyes and shook her head to show how crazy that was. 

The thought of my mother puffing away while my grandmother poured Folgers into their chipped china did sound crazy. My mother would never smoke a cigarette with me. She married a man who lectured about the dangers of nicotine for a living. She was a gardener and an art therapist. She was straight-laced. But I was eleven years old and ready to reconsider her image. I knew that when she met my father, she had a beehive hairdo and was a college student in New York City who studied modern dance on the side. My mother with a cigarette? I could almost picture it. What I couldn’t understand was why she would let my father tell her what to do.

As the year went on, I grew even more curious about smoking. I went to see the movie Grease and watched with rapt attention when, at a slumber party, Sandy learned to French inhale by sucking wisps of smoke from her mouth directly into her nostrils. A month later, our family gathered for a Fourth of July celebration. As firecrackers exploded in the distance, I stood next to Uncle Arnold and examined the roll of white paper that formed a fiery extension of his hand. I was transfixed by the smoldering cherry, the snaking tendrils of smoke, the pile of powdery ash on his empty plate. I wanted to see what it felt like to exhale a steady stream of foggy air in the heat of July. I became determined to smoke a cigarette. 

My parents hired a summer babysitter, Diane, to look after me and my little sister, Serie. Shortly after Diane arrived and my parents departed for work, Diane’s boyfriend, Dave, would appear. They would spend the rest of the day entwined on our living room futon. Being eleven, I wanted nothing to do with a babysitter, but as the muggy afternoons dragged on, I sometimes pestered Diane. One day, she let me turn her rawhide purse upside down and pour the contents out onto the wide plank floor. There was a compact with a flesh-colored smudge across the case, a thumb-sized silver lighter, several tampons wrapped in crinkled white paper, and a half-full pack of Marlboro Lights. 

With Diane and Dave nestled in private conversation, I saw my opportunity. My heart thumped in my chest as I pulled a Marlboro Light from the pack and hid it in my closed fist. I pushed the contents of the purse back into the main chamber and mumbled that I was going upstairs to get something from my bedroom. Once there, I held my breath as I listened to hear if Diane would follow. 

I was bold in certain ways. Most climbers my age would chicken out when they approached the canopy of a tree, but I regularly clambered to the very top of the giant sycamore in front of the library down the street. I had even carved my initials in the uppermost branch with a red Swiss Army knife. But in other ways, I was a scaredy cat. Two years before, I had been scolded by my teacher for not having memorized my times tables. She called me stupid in front of the whole class and sent me to write out my sevens and nines at the rusty desk in the back of the room. I could barely hold my pencil as I scribbled the numbers onto faded index cards. I became terrified of getting in trouble with adults. 

I knew I would be punished for smoking, of course. But I also believed that my parents had no idea what went on at home when they were at work. They didn’t even know about Dave, who at that moment was speaking in hushed tones too muted for me to hear from behind my bedroom door. With the cigarette clutched in my sweaty palm, I tip-toed into the hall and cocked my ears. I heard Diane’s muffled laughter and surmised that, per usual, she was preoccupied with Dave. Those two were obsessed with each other. I walked back down the hall and stopped outside of my sister’s room. The sound of scissors crunching through construction paper was reassuring. Serie was making paper dolls, an activity that could occupy her for hours. In search of a place to stow my contraband, I turned and opened the door to the attic. The staircase was steep and narrow and I tread lightly so as not to make the floorboards creak. The attic was hemmed by rows of shelves on each side which served as storage racks for old games, toys, and puzzles. I opened the Paris, C’est La Vie puzzle on the bottom of a stack, placed the cigarette against the side of the box, and closed the lid tightly. I returned to my room the way I had come and decided that was more than enough risk for one day. 

For a month, I wrestled with where to smoke my cigarette. I knew I needed to be outside, or at least near an open window. But our house was on a corner lot in the middle of town and the yard was too exposed to hide an activity like smoking from passersby. Another problem was Serie, who tried to tag along with me all day. If she saw me smoking, I knew she would expose me. 

I brought my friend Lizzy in on my secret. Lizzy was my next door neighbor, a year older than me, and more experienced in the way of most things because she had several older sisters and brothers. Her mother spent most days slumped at their kitchen table smoking Pall Mall Longs and drinking gin gimlets. Lizzy was free to do whatever. It was Lizzy who came up with the idea to smoke the cigarette on the roof of my house, where no one would ever think to look. We decided we would enact the plan when my parents were at work, Serie was at swim lessons, and Dave was over, distracting Diane.

The prime moment came a few days later. As I climbed the attic stairs with Lizzy behind me, I was gripped with fear that the cigarette would somehow be gone. I imagined my father sniffing it out, discovering it in the Paris, C’est La Vie box, picking it up like a dead mouse, and bagging it in the trash, thinking it belonged to, who? A drunken relative who misplaced it on game night? But that Marlboro Light was right where I had left it, smelling of sour tobacco and puzzle dust. I grabbed it with one hand and rubbed the pocket of my pants with the other, fingering the outlines of the matchbook I had lifted from the kitchen. Toward the back of the attic, there was a ladder that led to a rectangular escape hatch in the ceiling. Lizzy scurried up the ladder, lifted the eye hook on the hatch door, pushed the wooden cover upwards, and disappeared through the opening. I climbed up the ladder and my head emerged into the air. The pitch of the roof was much steeper than it looked from the ground. I threw a leg over the side of the hatch, pulled myself up onto the slope, and slithered toward the apex where Lizzy was already sitting, grinning widely. From this vantage point I could see our chimney up close, the uppermost branches of our Elm tree, and in the distance, the town green. 

The height of the roof and the fear of getting caught caused me to shiver. With shaky hands, I took the matchbook out of my pocket and gave Lizzy the cigarette. The plan was for her to light it because she had watched her mother fire up Pall Malls about a million times. The wind kept blowing the flame out. With the cigarette dangling from her lips, Lizzy made a cocoon with her hands around mine, and I was able to ignite the match. I held the flame to the tip while Lizzy sucked on her end, and a circle of orange embers formed where my match had been. Lizzy blew smoke into my face and we both coughed. 

I sat back and Lizzy handed me the cigarette. I brought it to my lips and inhaled the bitter smoke. Immediately, I felt dizzy and clung to the asphalt shingles for security. The first stab of a headache struck, but I was elated. Between my fingers was a ticket to the adult world. Soon, I would lounge with my friends at slumber parties, French inhaling like a movie star. I would move to New York City and study modern dance and wear my hair in a fashionable style and all the while a lit cigarette would dangle from the corner of my mouth, or rest in the V between my fingers, or punctuate my steamy stories. It was only a matter of time before I would stand with my relatives and breathe out my own foggy cloud. And no husband would ever tell me to stop. I took another drag and felt my brain press against the bones of my skull. I gazed out at the park-like green in the distance and found the library. For the first time, the library tree, etched with my initials, looked small.