[Y’all, I was gonna pull you a little smut over from FetLife, clean it up a bit, and polish it for a nice mid-week bonbon. But instead I ended up with another meditation on memory. Don’t worry, there’s more up in the attic somewhere.]
exist here
She thinks she’s imagining him. She tries to pin something down. She starts with his hands: white, freckled (were they freckled?), tanned (never tanned). Spatulate nails, long fingers. She’s pretty sure she’s not wrong about that.
She lies on the porch swing, knees bent, head bumping the arm of the swing with its peeling paint. So many elbows rested there once. So many glasses of iced tea. (She’s imagining this. She brought it home from the junk store and got her ex husband to hang it up, promising a date she keeps putting off.)
She sits up, puts a foot down to stop the swing’s crazy rocking. She prowls into the house to look for a notebook and pen. She decides to use the bathroom so she won’t have to go again as soon as she lies down on the porch swing. Middle age keeps her on the toilet more than she’d like. Then she starts out the back door, forgetting why she went back in the house. One foot on linoleum, one foot on porch board, she remembers. She goes back through the door a second time and roots around in the to-read stack on the kitchen table until she comes up with a compostion book. She picks up a pencil.
On the porch she starts again.
exist here
with your white hands, long fingers, spatulate nails
voice like a purr
The other day she called up a college friend she remembered — she was sure she remembered — had the most beautiful drawl. And he sounded like a hayseed. “How ya do’in, chick?”
That said, she wonders if she’s wrong again. If her memory’s shot. Gone to pot. Boiled like a frog in a —
How can you have a tragic romance if you can’t even remember your boy by his hands, by his voice?
His eyes. Can she at least remember those? Blue, right?
Start again.
exist here
prowling around my house
in my headspace
can’t find key fob can’t find
something goes wrong maybe you drop your coffee cup
glass hails
you throw every last knife in the drawer
not at me but I’d better not get in the way
She asked another lad, one time, “Did such-and-such happen?” “No, no, I can’t say I remember anything of the sort.” And another boy about another event. “Oh, chick, that was all fun and games. Seth was the kindest soul. He won’t have hurt a flea.”
Chicks and fleas.
But he did come to her house, right, he stayed there or at least visited every day for weeks and weeks. Or maybe it was just one day, one notable day, where at teatime they declared their love for each other — or she declared hers and imagined the words for him — and by evening he emptied the silverware drawer and the china cabinet?
She remembers cutting her feet on glass.
She has a scar, but that doesn’t mean anything.
exist here, where else?
“How can I help?”
A shriek: “Leave me alone!”
And a collapse —
He cried in a corner while she tiptoed through the glass to find her flip-flops, clawed them on with her toes, then swept and mopped up porcelain and glass.
It had to have happened, right? That’s how she lost her grandmother’s Windsor Rose tea service.
She found out his email address years ago. She could write to him. But would he welcome such memories?
No. No, he would not.
She imagines not the voice of a man of 50 but that of a boy of 21, with that boy’s arrogance. “I don’t know how in the world you came up that story.” Then, “Are you sure it wasn’t someone else? I’d remember something like that.” Then, “Don’t you think you’ve drawn this nonsense out long enough?”
don’t be so ashamed of yourself you leave me, please
come trustingly with your toys — a car for your model railroad, a map you’ve drawn, if nothing better, a cruel joke —
Even then she asked herself, “Who wants these things?
She never doubted she did want them.
why do I want this?
who else could know you so well
exasperate me make my head hurt
choke me again and again
She thinks it must have happened more than once. She thinks it must have taken an intolerable summer, 1989 maybe, for him to get through all the Windsor Rose tea service. Delicious nights talking. Even more beautiful nights comforting up the tears after a tantrum.
She learned not to walk him to the front door. On the step he always straightened up and said jauntily over his shoulder, “I might be back. Or I might not — ”
But that wasn’t the line. The word was there, jauntily, but it came from a book he quoted, something about an airman leaving his best girl for the last time, maybe it was a book about World War I? Did they have airmen in World War I? He read her that book all summer, a chapter a night, right up to the tragic death. He liked that line she can’t remember so much he used to repeat it every morning.
But if she stayed inside he was his true self — as she used to think of him then — and kissed her good-bye. He never kissed her when she was awake, but if she pretended to sleep he gave her the softest kisses and didn’t break a thing on the way out the door.
She looks back at the notebook. It’s not even a poem, really. Just jottings of a memory that probably isn’t true.
A shriek: “Leave me alone!”
And a collapse —
No one would support her in this memory, least of all her beloved (who would be so angry, blisteringly angry, to find out she was writing about him using that word). Who wants to remember himself like this?
And why should he? Why should anyone want to be such a boy, even in memory, even in a dream?
Once they lay on a quilt in the back yard. She tied white clover together to make him a crown. He felt it there when he woke up and wore it all evening. She remembers those few hours as the happiest of her life. Sometimes as the only happy hours of her life.
When he got ready to go home he tossed the crown out the back door with another laughing quote. “For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground — ”
Then he came down the hall and out through the front door and so on down the steps. This time, he said good-bye. This time, he shook her hand. He was ready not to be a boy who hurt girls and broke glass and threw all the knives across the room. She could understand that.
He never came back.
Now, lying on the porch swing with a mosquito on her knee, she thinks, well, it’s a good thing I can’t cast spells, it’s a good thing I’m an old woman and my memory’s shot. It’s a noxious force, this memory of mine, if it has the power to pin that poor boy back there.
who else could know you so well
She thinks of memory as a trail of crumbs eaten by birds, disappearing yard by yard behind her. When she looks back for her cottage, the oaks close in together.
She thinks about dementia. It will be terrible, she thinks, unless she can retreat into the past and pull the door shut behind her.
She thinks about how nymphs rub honey into infants’ eyes, making them forget the lives their souls lived before. As a child and a young woman she had a terror of losing herself at death. Now she thinks it might be for the best.
She grows an herb garden. She feeds her three chickens. Most days she starves herself. Some days she overeats. Always she drinks a Mason jar full of wine before bed.
She prays over and over for the memory no one else wants, the memory she’s probably got wrong, the unhappy child who wouldn’t thank her for remembering him that way.
be here
you impossible human
just be