Maps by Andrea Avery
At the very northern edge of the Soviet Union, just west of the Kara Sea, there’s a city called Dickson, which is exactly the spot I used to focus on on the map on my bedroom wall when I was trying to fall asleep. By the time I was twelve the map had been moved to the ceiling above my bed to make room for my little sister’s posters on the more visible wall space, and then I could see even more of the details that surrounded Dickson—its neighbors, Vorontsovo and Ust’ Tareya, and the spider web of pink that I thought I could see moving along the map. Cities where I lived had names like Morrissville, Kent, and Radford. Dickson sounded to me like a place that belonged more in my world than in a northern bulge of Siberia.
Eventually we studied the Soviet Union in school: We talked about St. Petersburg and the czars and that woman who was wandering around claiming she was the daughter that didn’t get shot with the rest of her family. For three weeks we talked about the Soviet Union, and we colored in maps of Siberia, and always I’d draw a thick blue circle on Dickson, a crumbling turquoise Crayola dot throbbing on the top of Siberia.
Geography became my favorite subject. History was similar, and I did well in it, but I wasn’t as concerned with what happened in a certain place as where exactly that certain place was. I figured out that Dickson was about eleven thousand five hundred miles from where I lived, if you went on a direct route through Quebec, went over the Atlantic and part of the Norwegian Sea, and clipped part of the green swab of Norway.
Johannesburg was about ten thousand miles southwest of me, according to the globe in my seventh-grade classroom. Karachi, a Pakistani city on the Arabian Sea, was just eleven thousand miles past the southeastern post of my bed.
Looking at maps I’d find cities I’d never heard of and practice spelling them to myself at night—T-A-L-N-A-K-H—until my sister would snort and sigh and flop around, on the verge of waking up and having a tantrum. Maps covered my half of the room, the doors of the bathroom cabinet, my notebooks, and my locker.
Not long after I turned seventeen my mother scheduled a doctor’s appointment for me. October leaf mush flapped and fell off the wheel wells of the car next to us in wet brown piles on the street as we drove to the office. Pressed against the window glass, my forehead felt steamy and wet. Quiet and warm inside my mom’s car, I quizzed myself on capitals of states and foreign countries. Reading license plates provided material for my game—Minnesota, St. Paul. South Dakota, Pierre.
Turning off the engine when we got to the doctor’s office, my mom turned and looked at me wet-eyed and sad-like before she slung her purse over her shoulder.
Under fluorescent lights in the waiting room, she conferred quietly with the nurses while I read National Geographic in a corner. Violet carpeting and pink chairs were everywhere, and the only patients were women. White walls all in the waiting room and along the hallway the nurse led me through without my mother were covered with posters of babies and women. X-ray machines, stethoscopes, tongue depressors, lollipops—these were the things I expected to see as I followed the starched white back and dark hair into a small, metallic room.
“You’ll need to remove all of your clothing including your brassiere and put this on with the opening in the back and put this over your lap, then please have a seat on the table here—your feet will go down here—just make yourself comfortable, and we’ll find out what’s wrong with you then, okay, sweetheart?”
Zemlya George is an island north of Dickson that belonged to the U.S.S.R., and at that moment it seemed closer and more familiar than this slab I was lying on with my feet in metal clamps and my knees begging to be reunited, unaware until a few minutes before that anything was wrong with me but remembering my mom’s look and my little sister’s monthly mood swings, disturbed by the empty white mapless walls and the posters of women, and for the first time in my life at that moment I had no idea where in the world I was.
Eventually we studied the Soviet Union in school: We talked about St. Petersburg and the czars and that woman who was wandering around claiming she was the daughter that didn’t get shot with the rest of her family. For three weeks we talked about the Soviet Union, and we colored in maps of Siberia, and always I’d draw a thick blue circle on Dickson, a crumbling turquoise Crayola dot throbbing on the top of Siberia.
Geography became my favorite subject. History was similar, and I did well in it, but I wasn’t as concerned with what happened in a certain place as where exactly that certain place was. I figured out that Dickson was about eleven thousand five hundred miles from where I lived, if you went on a direct route through Quebec, went over the Atlantic and part of the Norwegian Sea, and clipped part of the green swab of Norway.
Johannesburg was about ten thousand miles southwest of me, according to the globe in my seventh-grade classroom. Karachi, a Pakistani city on the Arabian Sea, was just eleven thousand miles past the southeastern post of my bed.
Looking at maps I’d find cities I’d never heard of and practice spelling them to myself at night—T-A-L-N-A-K-H—until my sister would snort and sigh and flop around, on the verge of waking up and having a tantrum. Maps covered my half of the room, the doors of the bathroom cabinet, my notebooks, and my locker.
Not long after I turned seventeen my mother scheduled a doctor’s appointment for me. October leaf mush flapped and fell off the wheel wells of the car next to us in wet brown piles on the street as we drove to the office. Pressed against the window glass, my forehead felt steamy and wet. Quiet and warm inside my mom’s car, I quizzed myself on capitals of states and foreign countries. Reading license plates provided material for my game—Minnesota, St. Paul. South Dakota, Pierre.
Turning off the engine when we got to the doctor’s office, my mom turned and looked at me wet-eyed and sad-like before she slung her purse over her shoulder.
Under fluorescent lights in the waiting room, she conferred quietly with the nurses while I read National Geographic in a corner. Violet carpeting and pink chairs were everywhere, and the only patients were women. White walls all in the waiting room and along the hallway the nurse led me through without my mother were covered with posters of babies and women. X-ray machines, stethoscopes, tongue depressors, lollipops—these were the things I expected to see as I followed the starched white back and dark hair into a small, metallic room.
“You’ll need to remove all of your clothing including your brassiere and put this on with the opening in the back and put this over your lap, then please have a seat on the table here—your feet will go down here—just make yourself comfortable, and we’ll find out what’s wrong with you then, okay, sweetheart?”
Zemlya George is an island north of Dickson that belonged to the U.S.S.R., and at that moment it seemed closer and more familiar than this slab I was lying on with my feet in metal clamps and my knees begging to be reunited, unaware until a few minutes before that anything was wrong with me but remembering my mom’s look and my little sister’s monthly mood swings, disturbed by the empty white mapless walls and the posters of women, and for the first time in my life at that moment I had no idea where in the world I was.
