Thinking About Memoir, page 2
Write two pages about a time when you felt compassion unexpectedly.
Also on the subject of fish: My mother tells me that the first thing my father checked for when I was born was a gill. This is because he had a gill, a tiny hole at the top of one ear, vestigial, but he was proud to find I had one too.
Write two pages about a physical characteristic you are proud to have inherited or passed on.
A friend remembers an old girlfriend who spent a large part of every day in the bathtub holding her breath underwater. Why? I asked. He didn’t know. Maybe she was reproducing the moment when we lost our gills and breathed air for the first time, bursting from the surface of the water joyfully, explosively, and taking a big gulp: Eons of rehearsing for that one moment of spontaneity. That’s what taking notes and then the act of writing is like, come to think of it.
Write two pages of whatever you remember about something being born.
Now I remind you that this all came from having had a diary handy, and that it went into the diary in rough notes, which were fun to make nice afterward, when I’d had a chance to think. Or let the aquarium settle. One of these days I’ll figure out what to do with it.
Write two pages that take place in water.
Diary as fact checker From time to time my daughter Jen looks at her old diaries. She kept a pretty accurate record of growing up in the seventies, most of which I don’t want to hear. “Don’t tell me! Don’t tell me!” I want to shout when she reads me passages over the phone. But there are hilarious bits, too. “I decided I don’t want to see Bobby in the daytime anymore. I noticed a lot of icky things. His teeth are gross, he’s got acne . . . he’s got a wart and a tiny little beard and all these things just get me so depressed.” Another day: “I dreamed me and Bobby were in the bedroom and mommy came in looking really mean and she shot me and cut off my head and sent it to Bobby in a hatbox.” This is not all that funny, it is horrifying—perhaps it’s the use of the word “mommy” that makes me laugh, albeit nervously, and I wonder why I feel guilty for something I did in someone else’s dream.
Write two pages of apologizing for something you didn’t do.
“I’m not driving you to school just because it’s your birthday,” she has a record of my saying once.
“Oh, surely not,” I protest, rifling through my scrappy memory for extenuating circumstances. A broken toe? Sick baby? No gas?
“And it was raining,” Jen continues, delivering the coup de grâce.
I can’t argue. She had no reason to make anything up. It was a diary after all, not a story.
Write two pages of something you can’t deny.
Mysterious old diary entry I have just come across these instructions printed neatly in an old diary: Hang up-press function/edit up or down then scroll to ringer setting then press arrow to right select desired volume using up or down arrow. Base unit press.
At the bottom of this page I describe emptying a sugar bowl on somebody’s head. I don’t know whether these were notes for a story, or if I really did it, saying, “Sweets to the sweet,” as my diary records.
Write two pages of something you wrote or did that you no longer understand.
Write two pages of “sweets to the sweet.”
Diary as a means of keeping myself honest I am keeping track of what I am not buying and writing it in my diary:
No butterfly bushes.
No hollyhocks.
No pigs’ ears.
No cotton pajamas.
No hair lightener.
No curtains.
No out-of-season organic blueberries.
No Syro-Hittite bird goddess from 1200 bc.
No hand-painted wooden pigs.
No Victorian photos of house and occupants in Indiana, reminiscent of the house in In Cold Blood.
No organic futon mattress with pine frame.
No trilobites.
No illuminated manuscript from 1791.
Last Saturday however, before I turned over my new leaf, I went to The Golden Notebook and bought Stanley Kunitz’s Collected Poems even though I’m pretty sure I already have a copy somewhere. (What makes the engine run / desire desire desire). I bought Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen and two more copies of Mystery and Manners by Flannery O’Connor, one for a friend. Later I bought two newspapers, a pound of hamburger, hamburger rolls, and diet dog food. I bought two pots of pink hollyhocks. I bought creeping thyme ground cover (quite a lot of it) and three pots of daylilies. I bought pink pansies. I bought the new moleskin notebook in which I am recording this. I bought two new pens. I bought a desk organizer. I brought all the stuff home with me in my car.
The only items still to come through the post office are one nun box made by the same artist as made my shark box, one large painting of flowers and a dinosaur by Mose Tolliver, one two-drawer box made out of an old packing crate, one movie from Amazon.com but I can’t remember which one, one sculpture of a woodpecker on a branch twenty-eight inches long by outsider artist Ralph Griffin, and one copy of Lost: Season Two bought on the black market, which is coming from England. I already received the plug-in waterfall scene that lights and ripples. I didn’t bid on the Royal Doulton Bunnykins mug. I am not bidding on the huge tramp-art log-cabin jewelry box.
Shark box? It is a diorama fourteen by eight by three inches in which numerous small plastic grooms have been eaten or are being eaten by sharks. Several bloody grooms lie on the ground. One faces the wall. Big sharks are painted on the backdrop. One groom’s head is completely inside the jaws of a real plastic shark. “The grooms are vintage,” said the maker. I bought it for thirty-five dollars but would have spent more. “It’s great, Mom,” said one daughter, “but I don’t understand why you bought it.” Ah, how to answer? “I had to have it,” is all I can say. The nun box has no sharks.
Write two pages of what you had to have.
Yesterday I went to the post office at five o’clock to pick up a package. I stood behind the red line until it was my turn to approach the desk, holding my postal package claim slip in front of me like a convict with her serial number. The clerk who is usually so jovial took it and frowned. I heard him say, “Blah blah blah you should be fired from the Woodstock Post Office.” I didn’t pay much attention. I was wondering what I’d bought because I’d gotten to the point of being surprised whenever I opened a package. “There’s a lot of stuff going to your house all the time.” He was glaring at me. “All the time. A lot of stuff.”
“You’re not kidding,” I heard myself say as if I were the passive recipient, as shocked and put out as he. I signed the receipt and gathered up my huge misshapen package (which turned out to contain the Large Wildcat by Mose Tolliver) and retreated to my car, unmasked—the bright red compulsive shopper. Once last year the UPS guy asked if I was opening a store, but he was in a good mood. I went home and counted up the things to come from eBay and paid UPS rate to save further embarrassment at the post office. And I stopped shopping, just like that.
Write two pages of humiliating exposure.
My friend Denise tells me somebody told her, “Shopping is despair,” but my daughter Jennifer says, “Shopping is hope.” Hope gets out of hand. One turquoise ring from eBay is not enough. I must have five. A single secondhand Coach bag is not satisfying—I bid on seven. As I have implied, one is not a concept I understand. When I smoked I smoked three packs a day, when I drank, well, let’s not get into that. If your psyche is a balloon animal and you squeeze to eliminate the cigarettes and whiskey, the crazy has to go somewhere. A friend’s mother ate nothing but clams for six months. Morning, noon, and night, nothing but clams. “I don’t know what it is—I can’t seem to get enough of them,” she told her son. He shakes his head, but I understand. I eat nothing but broccoli for a month, then yogurt for six days, then (for one glorious week) lamb chops. One day I roasted a chicken and had seven chicken sandwiches before nightfall. If I like something, I like it a lot. Just one doesn’t cut it. I don’t know what it is I can’t get enough of.
At least I don’t have shopping bags full of duck sauce.
Write two pages of what you have too much of.
Today I resist buying June and Johnny singing together. I resist hopping in the car to find a carpet store and pick out carpeting for my naked stairs even though I am experiencing a surge of positive energy to go do that right now. How comforting the look and feel of carpeted stairs. I would choose dark rich colors in a flowered pattern. It would be like the carpet in Grandma Thomas’s house, and I would recall how the gas fire in her fireplace danced blue and yellow and smelled like heat. She fried lamb chops. She boiled her coffee with an eggshell to trap the bitter oils. Her Christmas tree lights were little flames. When she died we lived in New Orleans. My mother whispered, “Go tell your father you’re sorry.” My father flew to Flushing for the funeral. He never said a word. Grandpa Thomas went downhill from there.
In New Orleans I spent all my allowance on blue Popsicles, which I ate one after another, my forearm sticky with juice. Our family lived at 51A Macalaster Place on the campus of Tulane University. The road was paved with white shells, and when it rained water overflowed the curbs, rushed into the grass for a little while, and sank away again. I remember my little sister Judy and I caught hundreds of doodlebugs and dragged them around in a wagon. Then we bashed them with a rock. Movies were a nickel on Saturdays but we didn’t have to pay, and most of the movies starred June Allyson. When we moved to Minnesota I bought 25 red lollipops with my allowance. Sometimes I bought a bar of white Turkish taffy and fifteen red lollipops. Once in a while a nickel’s worth of licorice. Those were simple times. When you got money, you spent it on sugar and when you got old, you died.
Write two pages of how you spent your allowance.
In Minnesota at the university they had a cow with a hole in its stomach. I don’t think we had to pay to see it, but memory puts 50 cents in my hand and then we were ushered into the dark barn. They took a blanket off the cow’s back and there was this big hole, and you could see the hay turning over and over inside, kind of like a dryer. The cow just stood there swishing her tail. It was sad and fascinating. We lived at 1488 Branston Street and our telephone number was MIdway 8-8237. I had a fossil collection and some petrified wood. I had a misshapen root that resembled a squirrel frozen in a death rictus and I brandished this about when friends came over. I had a big pink rabbit onto whose back I tied all my other stuffed animals and then hopped the pink rabbit to safety. We moved in 1956 and my father, who was packing the house, left everything behind.
Write two pages of what got left behind.
I do not collect cows because they scare the shit out of me. I have a large collection of wooden horses.
Write two pages of what you do not collect.
Recently my friend had a birthday and I bought him a beach chair and a blue shirt.
Today—July 29, 2006—I am not buying:
An 1870 copper horse and sulky weathervane.
A rare early sewer tile basset hound fourteen inches long.
A large carved and painted wooden tooth trade sign for a dentist measuring seventeen by ten inches.
In other words, I have stopped shopping. Maybe I will send the post office guy a note.
The tooth is big enough to use as an ottoman.
Looking back, I knew I was in trouble when I stopped opening the boxes. I still have not unwrapped one painting (unknown); one queen-size EuroBed bought for forty-eight dollars; two sets of pale blue queen-size sheets, 440 thread count, bought for twenty-two dollars; something in a big box I don’t know what it is; something else in a medium box I don’t know what it is. In the laundry room is another thin box I hid on a shelf next to the detergent like an alcoholic with her whiskey, I don’t know what’s in that either.
Write two pages of when you knew you were in trouble.
The tooth is carved from a single block of wood and is very heavy. It is in good untouched condition with minor age cracks, some staining, and a chip on the bottom of one root. They are asking five hundred dollars and the auction will be over in six hours and forty-one minutes. To show how big, there is a Coke can in front. The tooth has provenance. I could hang it in my window. My teeth are stained and cracked and one in the back is tipping over like an old ferry piling. It lost its mate years ago and there is nothing to go up against. Also, it broke in half when I was eating spaghetti. The dentist wanted to fix it but I protested. “No patient of mine is going to walk around with a tooth like that,” he said merrily, and made me an appointment that I didn’t keep. That was six years ago when I lived in the city.
Thought: In New York City nobody cares how many packages you get.
The seller of the tooth has sold 1,114 objects and his approval rating is 99.6 positive. I have bought 141 objects and have a 98.6 positive rating. This is because I complained about a Coach bag that dyed my hands black. And once, inexplicably, I didn’t pay for six miniature bowling pins I’d won for three dollars. They were two inches tall.
There are now five hours and three minutes left to bid on the tooth. I have viewed it from four angles. Upside down it looks like an unfriendly flower. There is a similar tooth in the collection at the Shelburne Museum, which is included in the National Gallery of Art’s folk art catalog from 1987. This is its provenance. None of this means squat to me because these are not reasons for bidding on a big wooden tooth. The reason is that you fall in love and absolutely have to have it this minute. One week, I bid on and won twenty-two Persian rugs, but that was years ago.
My sisters sometimes spy on me by looking at my recent purchases.
The tooth goes for $713.37 at the last minute. The person who bought the tooth also recently bought a folksy painted birdhouse, three balls of wound-up rags, and a street sign. This person also bought a “funky hand-carved foot, reddish color,” eight inches long, for $110. Now he has a foot and a tooth. Checking further, this person bought a painted wooden penguin whose image is, alas, no longer available. I get quickly off the Web site, lest I lose my resolve and bid on the 1674 map of the United States with California as an island, although I am in much more danger from the rare midcentury sewer tile figural lion doorstop. What I love is the worn smile on its face. It’s a how-did-I-get-here? sort of smile, a how-lucky-to-be-a-lion-instead-of-just-a-plain-sewer-tile philosophical sort of smile.
There are no bids on this object so far, and I have six days to think it over.
Write two pages of restraint.
Write two pages of how did I get here? and the accompanying facial expression(s).
three
Memory
Imperfect memory My sister remembers many things I have forgotten: the sundial, the pear tree, and the pear picker (which she says I lost). The pear picker comes back to me now—a long pole with pincers at one end to cut the pears and a net to catch them. What she remembers goes into her pile, so the pear picker belongs to my sister now. Her pile is bigger than mine; my memory is full of holes. But I can still see the tree; it hung out over a bend in the road, dropping pears all fall until the road was slippery and sweet. Yellow jackets hung around, cranky and unpredictable, and we walked on the other side.
I don’t bring up the precious stuff unless I’m certain I’m right, because getting something wrong is even worse than forgetting it entirely. I remember a waterfall in the woods and the deep cold pool it fell into. I think a grape arbor stood above it, held up by fluted columns. But I could be mistaken. “No, there was no arbor over the pool,” I imagine my sister saying, and I am banished from the garden, covered only by my small scrap of memory. Still, I can’t go back and knock down the columns and yank out the vines. Even if I tried, it would put itself back together again, the way I’ve always remembered it.
I don’t know why some things stick in my mind and not others. I recall, for instance, one long family trip when my sister and I amused ourselves by tearing limb from limb two plastic dolls we disliked. I remember how satisfying it was to throw the arms and legs out the car windows, and then the two heads, and finally the torsos. I don’t know if she remembers any of this, and I don’t know why I do except perhaps for what we’d named the dolls: Toenail and Fingernail.
