It was only when I got to college that I realized how strange my family was. Ever since I was a kid it was always a race to see who could shove the most straws in my aunt’s purse before she noticed. On birthdays you would see presents that were given last month to another member of the family, especially old and unpopular records that my Uncle Chris bought for a dollar at the community thrift shop. 

My cousin Sol and I were champions at hiding little cartoons of people professing love only to be rejected in an immaculate way and then throwing themselves into space. We would make fake political ads for terrible politicians who were just *trying their best* and hang them around the houses of our aunts and uncles to bring awareness to their campaigns. Washington was practically begging us to become political advisors.

By the time we reached the second grade, we wanted to be world class business tycoons.

“I’ve got it!”

“What?” asked Sol.

“Our big idea! We can make books—you do the illustrations and I’ll do the writing!” Sol was the family artist.

“What are we going to make the book about?”

“Ummm… start drawing, I’ll just make it up as we go.”

We sold five-page novels stapled together on computer paper to make our profit. Sol would draw some befuddled creature while I tried to narrate what mayhem had befallen them. It wasn’t much, but it felt like we were millionaires in the making. At least, that’s how I felt. I never really understood how to get there, but I knew I wanted to make it big when I grew up (which essentially meant I wanted to live in a castle with an alligator-filled moat surrounding it). 

We were children, and children are strange, but my memories tell me that our strangeness was an inherited trait, something that seems obvious now. Nothing proves this more than the Orange Baby.

Thinking back on it, I can remember the day Sol and I found Orange Baby in my Aunt Karen’s basement. We would go down there to have the privacy every tween needed when the upstairs was filled with adults talking of adult things during adult birthday parties. 

My aunt’s basement was only half finished. Walking down the stairs you were met with the two halves, the finished, with a bean bag chair and bathroom all to your left, and the unfinished, with the washer, dryer, and creepy, cool darkness on the right. Naturally as children we only ever ran into the latter half for two seconds to fulfill a dare, but as we grew older, our timidness in the face of an unfinished basement dissipated (especially when we found the string to turn on the lightbulb).

The unfinished half of the basement had stacks of extra chairs (my aunt was an entertainer) and books piled where bookshelf space ran out. The blue painted floor sent cool, sparking chills into your feet even through socks. It was a tantalizing excitement crossing the threshold into that half of the room for the first time.

That day Sol and I began rummaging through boxes eager to discover the secrets of my aunt’s past. What books had she bookmarked? What treasures would we find? What decrepit skeleton was in her closet? Behind a box in the corner of a wooden cabinet in a wicker basket is where we found him. 

Or rather, it. It was a bright orange pool floaty shaped like a pill and roughly the size of a baby. The straps were stained with age and the body worn in places where it was chipped down to white styrofoam.

We took the floaty out of its wicker cradle and held it up to the lightbulb. Morning broke on the beautifully blemished sight. The orange as blazing as a traffic cone was enough for us to know this strange object was to be the subject of our next totally funny and not-at-all-expected prank. 

Unloading all the contents of a box and leaving them on the floor, we placed the floaty in, using its wicker basket and a towel from the laundry to make the floaty more comfortable. 

Sol wrote the note: “Mama, please love me – Orange Baby,” it said. 

In a flash we were blundering up the steps, skidding suddenly to a stop to sneak into the unoccupied dining room with the box, and setting it on the table for our family to discover. 

 

Later we would find out that the floaty was actually what our grandma used to keep her children from sinking to the bottom of lakes. She had twelve children and four available eyes (this calculation includes my grandpa’s eyes), so the floaty came in handy. Wearing that weird, orange styrofoam thing was like a rite of passage, my mother would tell me.

When my grandma sold her house, with all the twelve grown and her husband passed long before, my Aunt Karen took the floaty for *sentimental reasons*. The thought of the orange floaty in the garbage went against her gut. Why throw it away and never see it again when I could put it in a cabinet in my creepy basement and almost never look at it? But there is logic in that notion when you don’t think about it logically, at least I think so. Moving on is sometimes spurred by a reminder of where we came from. It sounds backwards, I know. 

One day when it’s time to clean up and go we find these little surprise memories from our lives. Insignificant objects that somehow mean something. It’s strange. Meaning can keep us afloat when we feel we are about to drown.

 

A few summers ago my family decided to travel down to the Outer Banks. We set off in five or so cars, all packed in like sheep with blankets. I always found that funny— it is so hot outside so you turn on the A.C. in your car, but then get too chilly so you pull out a fuzzy blanket and call it a day. 

What no one knew was that my Uncle Chris had brought the Orange Baby in a duffle bag. Right before we left the first rest stop, he called Sol and me over.

“Hey,” he whispered, “I need you two to put this in your Aunt Peg’s car.” He handed us the bag as if it were full of drugs and moved to close his trunk.

“What’s in it?” I asked.

“Just give it to her and tell her that a good mama should drive her baby.” Sol and I did not need more explanation than that.

With our parents calling us to our cars so we could “get a move on,” Sol and I quickly ran over to Aunt Peg’s car and put the bag in her backseat. She, of course, saw us doing this, but before she could ask questions, we were gone.

Sitting in the back of my mini van I could not stop smiling, especially when I heard hoots and hollers coming from my aunt’s car. I looked out the gray tinted window to see her jogging (remember this is an aunt, they do not run) toward our car with the Orange Baby in her hands. My mom was turning the ignition key, but on seeing her sister coming near, she paused and rolled down her window. I followed my mom’s eyes in slow motion as her gaze fell to the object in my aunt’s hands. Mom’s eyes widened and a grin broke out on her face. 

“Go away!” she laughed. She jabbed the key in the ignition, put us in drive, and sped away, leaving Aunt Peg in the rest stop parking lot waving around the orange floaty like a madwoman.

 

The Outer Banks is a wonderful place. The lull of the waves as they push and pull the ocean like the hand of God kneading bread. The ocean wind brushing over your skin, sweeping away thoughts of your normal life.

It was something we all needed. My oldest brother, Oscar, was about to start college and leave our clan for the first time. Sam (next in line of my siblings) was more into chess than Apples to Apples then, and I thought that reading Young Adult novels was scandalous at my early middle school age. The coming years would be like a wave washing into shore in a rush before leaving in a peaceful recession.

The house was gigantic (it did have to fit all of my extended family). I would describe it as modern simplicity with its gray and white color palette, blue runners going down the halls, and seashell decor. There were three stories, with the kitchen and dining room on the third floor (for a valid reason, I’m sure), and the wall facing the ocean was made of glass. You could see the entire ocean from up there. 

In the kitchen was the high chair where Orange Baby lived for that week. At dinner I would set a plate for him, putting only the finest of edible foods and drinkable beverages on his tray: napkins or dominos or whatever was lying around that day. Sometimes Orange Baby was in charge of watching over the fruit bowl or keeping everyone’s keys in one neat spot. He was a great help. 

Everyday we went down to the beach, nay, ran. The sand was like white fire and filled with tiny bleached crabs scampering around. 

My brothers made for the water in a flash. I was on their tails, but Mom stopped me because I needed to put on sunscreen. Once covered in a fresh layer of white, I darted to the water, careful not to think of the fish that lurked beneath the blue blanket ready to eat my toes. 

Uncle Chris and Uncle Tom were already out there helping all us children get up on the air mattress we used as a raft. Sitting on top of that air mattress in the ocean was exhilarating. I pretended to be a shipwrecked explorer trying to find my way to land. Uncle Chris would yell “JE SUIS JACQUE COUSTEAU!” before throwing himself off the mattress and into the water with complete abandon. 

I remember my dog jumping in the ocean and paddling around with my mom and brothers. I remember my family getting fish for dinner, a dish I choose to not partake in to this day, and me sitting at the restaurant awkwardly with my chicken tendies. And I remember coming home. Without Orange Baby. 

I could have sworn someone packed him up, that he was thrown in someone’s car at some point in time, but when we got home, he wasn’t there. The car ride home had been a long one, I was too tired to think, to care. One of my aunts or uncles had him and were just pretending not to know his whereabouts to add to the mystery. 

But Orange Baby did not show up at the next family birthday party nor Christmas nor the Fourth of July, his favorite holiday. Orange Baby disappeared.

There were, and still are, times I wish I could join him in the realm between this one and the next. I felt it when I watched my mother walk down the steps of my dormitory at college for the first time. When I realized Orange Baby was now something my family would only ever talk about in the past tense, I felt it, too. The desire for none of it to have happened. 

Then I slapped myself. Who was I to be so lucky as to have a thought like that? Thinking it would be better to have never experienced an innocent childhood just because it hurt to see it go? Thinking it would have been better to have never grown up? 

Time passed, Sol and I grew up (reluctantly), and before I knew it, Oscar was finishing college and Sam began focusing on school and work and what he wanted out of life. I chose to spend my time at school rather than in an empty house, and I grew bitter. I hated how everyone had their own avenue to walk on. What was mine? I wasn’t ready to walk so alone. 

Talking with my family changed: Where do you want to go to college? What do you want to study? Of course I shot high, choosing only the most prestigious schools and lucrative careers for my answers. The truth was that I had no idea what to do with my life. Those ideas of “making it big” were more of an alternate personality than what I wanted in reality. 

The thing is, I was dreaming for the future before I had completed childhood, and I blamed all those who raised me for growing up before me. I guess I just didn’t realize it until I took the exit to Adulthood. Once you are there, you can’t turn around; there is only forward. 

But it is so, so tempting to go backward, even though that option is next to impossible. Life is linear, as my high school Algebra II teacher would say. The wheel rolls on as we drive down this road, picking up dirt and rocks before losing them. Some are gone for good as if they left this physical universe for something greater. Some stick and become memories we dust off every once in a while. Either way the sun still rises.

Now when I think of my family’s stranger moments, I am overwhelmed with dysphoria. There are things in this world that we just can’t control. Where we were born, in what time, how we were raised. I wonder why I should have been placed in the moment that I was. Perhaps, as I once wished, it is in this time that I am meant to make it big. Or, perhaps “making it big” only ever meant making my life big. And I would say that sounds just as good as living in a castle surrounded by an alligator-infested moat (but maybe that’s just me).

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Margaret Matous is a University Park student majoring in political science with a minor in anthropology. She hopes to graduate in 2024.