I had a wonderful virtual reading in my hometown of Syracuse, NY through Temple Concord on March 22. It was great to see so many old friends and new readers. I read the first paragraph from one of the old “beginnings” of my memoir, back when it started with merged stories of growing up in Syracuse meshed with Mia’s early stories. These paragraphs ended up on the cutting room floor, but it was nice to read them again:
The wind carried water off the Great Lakes to the north. Sunless days, hot and humid in the summertime; endless rain and snow in the winter — my memories of Syracuse are cast in flattening light, making them appear unreliable. Fragments come back to me but I can’t make them line up in the right order — my weekly bath with my middle brother, Neville, going to the library in a rundown part of town, the bitter taste of cod liver oil.
I see my father bent over a vast oak desk. Bills and outgoing mail are stacked and sharpened pencils bristle in a tin can. I climb under his arm and make a place in his lap, curling myself next to his heart. He cringes. He giggles and relaxes when I throw my arms around his neck and blow in his ear. One hand moves in to hold me, the other keeps on writing long equations in elegant script.
In my first memory I have no words, only expectations. Damp with sweat my skin feels warm where I am tangled up in the covers, cool where I have broken free. I roll back and forth, back and forth, trying to get unbound. Light pierces thin drapes. Floors creak as my family moves around the house. I form sentences with nonsense sounds and let my breathing fill my mind and the room. The white enamel paint on my crib peels, exposing brown rust on metal. I focus on the rails and then let them grow fuzzy as I look beyond at the picture of two little girls in tutus hung on a yellow wall. I kick free from the blankets and drag myself up on those widely spaced bars. I stand and wait, knowing that soon someone will come through the door.
David, born six years before me, says his first memory is in the same crib. He stood and bawled and banged against the railings. Our mother, exhausted with her firstborn’s constant movement, came back in, laid him down and closed the door. She sat on the patio with a book and a cigarette, hopeful as his crying slowed and turned to hiccups.
Once he quieted himself, my brother pulled himself up and looked toward the door, bumping his body, gently at first, against the side of the crib. He felt the crib move very slightly, so he started knocking against it harder and felt it slide a little more. He walked to one end of the bed than ran and hurled his weight against the other. He did that over and over until he traveled across the room to the door. He opened it and roared to my mother to come back to play.
Neville says he remembers everything as if it were yesterday, back to when he was swimming the side stroke in my mother’s womb to the strains of Benny Goodman. But our memories clash, as if we grew up in separate, but identical pink ranch houses, each surrounded by my mother’s exuberant flowerbeds and our father’s meticulous lawn.
In my mother’s first memory she sits in the bathtub in a shabby bungalow in Vancouver. A handsome man, her father, plays peek-a-boo with her around the curtain and her mother stands in the doorway. My mother waits with worry when her father’s face vanishes, she laughs when he reappears. The memory of that face is disconnected from her memories of his long disappearances and the anger and sarcasm he brought back with him when he returned.
My father remembers his favorite cousin, Martin, persuading him to cut off his hair. Martin found the big shears and when Mutti, my grandmother, came around the corner, my father was on a stool, the floor around him covered with his black curls.
Did we really remember all these things? Or did our families tell these stories over and over, until the repetition carved something like memory into our minds?
[Image: The neighborhood gang on one of my birthdays. I am at the end of the table.]