Chapter 2: The Last Screw

All the Names W Carry is a memoir that draws on an archive of letters and genealogy research to explore how patterns of addiction, mental illness, and silence appear across generations and in my own life.

← Chapter 1: The Genealogist | Part One TOC | Chapter 3: Stick Figures →

I’ve been unemployed for over six months and the stress of finding a new job is reaching its peak. Like anyone suddenly untethered from work, I throw myself into the search for a new job — updating my résumé, refreshing job boards, registering an LLC, building out a pitch deck. The hunt is its own full-time occupation, but I try not to let it consume me.

Meanwhile, in the corner of my office sits a nagging reminder of something I’d avoided for years: a large plastic bin stuffed with family letters, records, and photographs I’ve inherited by virtue of my self-appointed role as family genealogist. I’ve been intending to organize and archive the material, and whenever I see it, I feel the small, accusing tug of unfinished work — the same tug that once pulled me through musty archives and microfiche.

One fall afternoon, without quite knowing why, I open the lid. Before I know it, my job becomes reading, transcribing, remembering. Now, two months later I am deep into the archive, and a new routine.

In the mornings I put another cup of yesterday’s coffee in the microwave and flick the lock on the sliding door. The dogs race to a tree, look around for squirrels, pee in perfect synchrony, and return inside.

Today, I’m looking at a photo album my sister Diane assembled as a thirtieth anniversary present for my parents in 1980. It’s only after I begin to lift it out of the blue plastic bin that I noticed the handwritten warning on the cover: Do NOT lose the two screw extensions!! A loose collection of pages slips out of my hands. The screw extensions are long gone, and the back half of the album has separated from the front.

Once I’ve stabilized the stack of plastic pages, I open the stiff leather cover, to photos of the four-unit apartment building where everyone lived before I was born—my parents, siblings, paternal grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins.

Everyone but me.

There are photos of my grandparents, Nanny and Pop. Together in a formal wedding portrait, Nanny in the kitchen rolling out dough, Pop standing in The Shop, a black pipe hanging from his lips as he inspects a freshly sanded altar rail.

In the center of the page is a photo of an envelope with our name written on it: GLAVASICH, as if the name alone could anchor all of us in place. It had been fastened to the family long before I arrived. The original spelling of the name would have been Glavašić. In Croatian, the “ć” makes a soft ch sound. In our branch of the family, we placed the accent on the first syllable: GLA-va-sich. Our cousins preferred Gla-VA-sich.

Although it was composed of three simple syllables, most people froze when they tried to pronounce it.

When spelling the name for others, the conversation often went like this:

G-L-A

“B-L-A?”

No, G as in Good. L-A.

“Okay.”

V-A.

“B-A?”

No. V as in Victor!

What followed were half-hearted attempts at pronunciation: Gavish. Glasich. Gazasick. Blavavitch.

At some point frustration met practicality.

“Close enough,” I’d mumble.

When we ordered pizza, we used Smith.

Years later, I told my mother I was considering legally changing my name to her maiden name, Walsh, but she was so unmoored by the idea that I never raised the subject again. It may have been unwieldy, but it was a name that had been carried across borders—through towering empires, onto ship manifests, across state lines—eventually finding its home in a five-bedroom raised ranch perched on the banks of the Shrewsbury River.

There are lots of pictures of the river in the album, unfurling from our house in long silver curves, past marsh grasses and reedy islands that glowed gold as the sun set behind a train trestle. Me in my rowboat, waving at the passengers as the kachunk-kachunk of the train moved like a steady mechanical heartbeat across the trestle.

Just past the trestle and almost out of view sat Fort Monmouth, home to the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Suddenly I am flooded with the sounds of summer. The distant wake-up call of Reveille at six and the mournful sound of Taps at ten. “The 4:30 boom”—cannon fire that marked the end of the duty day and the lowering of the flag—punctuated each afternoon.

On Saturdays we could also hear the faint patter of live horse races being called from Monmouth Park Race Track, less than a mile away: “Into the stretch they come—Storm Banner driving hard on the outside, but Ollie Oop still holding the lead…”—and the cheers and boos of the bettors when the race was called.

At the edge of the lawn, traps were slung from the dock to catch crabs and, occasionally, a gnarly, inedible fish called a sally-growler with tiny razor-edged teeth. There is a picture of me sitting cross-legged on the dock, holding a live crab with my thumb and forefinger. At low tide I loved to walk along the exposed riverbed and dig up a rough green sediment we called Indian Clay that my sisters helped me haul back to our shed in my red plastic wheelbarrow.

The pictures of the inside of the house are filled with the Appalachian oak, which covered nearly every surface: the walls, a balustrade that separated the den from the hallway, the kitchen cabinets, and a staircase that wound in a gentle spiral toward a framed overlook where I could peer into the living room unnoticed.

There are photos of my father working. In the basement, where the sound of wood feeding through the table saw and the smell of sawdust drifted up through the floorboards. And in his workshop outside, where static would crackle from the transistor radio, cutting through the smooth, brassy swing of the big bands led by Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw.

The album has Diane’s order imposed on it: holidays, meals, boats, bicycles—family life sorted into categories.

In one photograph, I appear to be holding court in front of the Christmas tree, the living room awash with a post-present frenzy of wrapping paper and cardboard boxes while Sue and Diane give me their full attention.

Sue is seated on an ottoman, thick black hair to her waist, wire-rimmed glasses perched on her nose, hands folded neatly. Diane sits next to her on the floor in an oversize T-shirt, her strawberry-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, and a faint look of amusement on her face as she looks at me.

On Christmas morning, I was allowed to open my stocking as soon as I woke up, but presents could not be opened until after a formal breakfast in the dining room. I would be fidgeting in my seat, hot with anticipation, as my father slowly, intentionally sipped a second cup of coffee.

I peel back the yellowed plastic and lift out a photograph of my sister Fran at the dining table. She looks radiant. A wide smile and soft brown waves frame one side of her face while the rest slips just out of frame. At the bottom of the image is me, hoisting myself up in my chair, staring straight into the camera. Only then do I notice the small detail: a tiny stemmed glass at my place setting. I had almost forgotten that on holidays, I was allowed one serving of white wine with dinner, poured into a port glass—or, as I understood it to be, a kid-size wine glass. I would lick the inside carefully, not wanting to leave a single drop behind, and my brother Joe would erupt with his wheezy, delighted laugh.

“She’s just like the rest of us!” he’d cackle.

Chris appears in the album first as a sullen child sitting precariously on a roof. Then as a gawky teenager startled by a llama at Great Adventure. Then as a young adult, forehead pressed to a salt shaker at the kitchen table in a gesture of surrender.

In the album, I watch everyone change—their faces lengthening, bodies rearranging themselves around circumstance. Children become adults. Adults become old. Near the back is an In Memoriam page. Diane wrote out a quote from a Mary McCaslin song and fastened it there, as if even the family’s grief needed a space of its own: Saw an old friend the other day…took me back to only yesterday, the years somehow let slip away.

I slide the album back onto the ottoman. A small screw drops from the binding and rolls across the floor.

Now there is only one left.

Chapter 1: The Genealogist | Part One TOC | Chapter 3: Stick Figures →