Thinking About Memoir, page 3
But there was another car trip. This time we were driving to Maine, and the road was lonely and the sky the blackest I’d ever seen and my sister and I were in the backseat. She was just a little girl, two or three, which makes me four or five, and she must have leaned against a door that hadn’t closed properly because she fell out of the car. I remember tapping my parents on the shoulders and saying, “Judy isn’t in the car anymore,” and it taking some time before they paid attention. I don’t remember the frantic drive back to find her, but I seem to recall a darkened house and my father, my sister in his arms, banging on the door to wake the inhabitants. I vividly remember, whether I saw it or not, a small white sink filling up with my little sister’s blood. Her head had cracked open. She still gets bad headaches from that accident, although it happened more than sixty years ago.
Recently she told me that I pushed her out of the car. There was no rancor in her tone, it was just a statement. We were in her apartment, it was an ordinary afternoon. We had been chatting idly. I was shocked.
“I did not push you,” I said, but she didn’t reply. I don’t know if she was teasing, and I am afraid to press her. What if she insisted? What if she really believed it? “You’re wrong,” I would want to say.
“I would remember such a terrible thing.”
I would remember, wouldn’t I?
Wouldn’t I?
Conflicting memories I struck up my courage and showed the memory piece to my sister.
1) The pear picker did not have pincers, although it did have a net. “You did not lose it,” she said. “You left it in the street and it got run over.”
2) There was no grape arbor over the pool (“Think about the grapes dropping in,” she said). The arbor was down by the river. Maybe I clumped everything together for efficiency’s sake? Perhaps I wanted my treasures in one box.
3) We were not driving to Maine, but somewhere in Baltimore. She was not two or three, she was four. It was not nighttime, it was day. Nighttime, lonely country road in Maine, darkened farmhouse—was my memory making its own story?
4) The last question I couldn’t bring myself to ask her, but my youngest sister did. “Did Abby really push you out of the car?” she asked. “I was joking,” was the answer. Phew.
Write two pages of a fading memory—something you have to squint to see.
Memory in the making The first day of January my husband died and toward the end of the month I went to Belize with my best friend Chuck to visit a pal, Ann, who had a free house on the beach. Blue everything, blue blue blue. And green. The tree next to the porch had leaves as big and round as lily pads and at night the moon shone silver all over them, like spilled mercury. Everything was beautiful and we were far away. We had no telephone. I saw frigate birds, my husband’s favorite, or a bird I assigned as his favorite, and it seemed that whenever I thought of Rich, a frigate bird appeared in the sky overhead. I cried. But pelicans are my favorite birds and there were lots of them, smashing into the water for fish, and then later, hanging their heavy wings out to dry like gray laundry. I love that pelicans have no table manners, no grace. It’s all about the food.
We ate fryjack for breakfast with honey and jam, we had butt bacon and eggs and fresh papaya and pineapple. We had lobster and shrimp and even though I don’t drink anymore I had two delicious Belizean beers one night. We bounced around in a rusty truck on red dirt roads and when it failed to start, learned how to jump it with a screwdriver from two young men we met in the parking lot of the bank. People were friendly. One morning, due to an accident of light, I mistook a slope of the sand for the sea, and was startled when two big black dogs loped across what I took to be the horizon. My god, I thought, what kind of place is this?
We hired a fishing boat to take us to the big barrier reef, and landed on an island a little bigger than my living room. There were a couple of palms, a beat-up picnic table, and a grill. The water close to shore was the color of very expensive gin, because the sand was so white, and I spent a lot of time in that. Chuck and Ann went snorkeling out past where the big drop happens, but thank god I never mastered the art of breathing and the flippers were pretty much beyond me so I contented myself sticking close to shore. I saw some small fish and lots of what I think were sponges, some sea fans of a rosy magenta so beautiful I didn’t believe my eyes—having no receptors for a color that fantastic. I wasn’t sorry not to swim with schools of fish, or frolic with a bunch of dolphins, I didn’t mind missing sharks or barracudas or any of the other awful possibilities open to us. When Chuck and Ann decided to swim far out to a big rock where waves were breaking and the snorkeling might be even better, I said nope, I’d drown and pull them down with me. And Cagey, the fisherman, who wanted to fish, took me farther out to sea. It was scary. I kept thinking, “Please don’t fall out of the boat because I won’t know how to get you back in,” but he didn’t.
On the way back to the mainland, my friend Chuck slipped and fell in the boat. He didn’t complain, which worried me. Instead, he changed the subject of How are you? Are you all right? by wondering if it was water or sand that had wrecked his digital camera.
“What’s in there?” I asked, because I knew it wasn’t film.
“A memory card,” he said. When I looked blank, he boiled it down for me—something he’s good at. “It’s just little bits of information.”
One morning, in the lone tall palm at one end of the beach, there appeared a single buzzard. In the afternoon, I noticed the buzzard was standing on a little spit of sand at Rum Point. He was leaning toward the ocean, and he never moved. I wondered was he waiting for something delicious to wash up at his feet, but decided he was scanning the horizon, waiting for his mate to come back. “His own true love,” were the words I used to myself.
“You’ve got to hand it to him,” I said to Ann. “He hasn’t budged in an hour. He hasn’t even moved his head. That is one patient bird.”
“I don’t think that is a bird,” she said. “It doesn’t have a head.”
So I set off down the beach. My buzzard turned out to be a long bleached stick around which a black garbage bag had gotten tangled. I don’t know why I wasn’t disappointed; maybe being blown together with random bits of trash made it even more buzzardlike. I asked Chuck to take its picture, but so far he hasn’t sent it on.
Memory seems to be an independent creature inspired by event, not faithful to it. Maybe memory is what the mind does with its free time, decorating itself. Maybe it’s like cave paintings. The thing is, I’m old enough now to know that the past is every bit as unpredictable as the future, and that memory, mine anyway, is not a faithful record of anything, and truth is not an absolute.
But I’m not talking about making things up out of whole cloth. We are all allowed a flourish or two—if it was day not night, and Baltimore not Maine, well, there’s a reason why I remember it like that. But there’s a difference between premeditated embellishment and the way memory works. There’s a difference between lying and telling the truth. But do not despair.
We all know the difference.
I have a feeling that if I remember anything about Belize in twenty years, only the buzzard will make the cut. And I will remember him on his little spit of sand looking out to sea, waiting for his own true love to return.
Write two pages of mistaking something for something else.
Total recall Thank god I am not cursed with total recall. I can see myself stuck inside my steel trap of a memory, rattling the bars, hoping something would shake loose, some scrap I could look at all by itself, something to free me up. Life isn’t a puzzle that needs to fit together perfectly, every piece locking into place with every other piece to form a perfect whole. Life is complicated. Stuff overlaps. Some stuff will never fit into one place. Where, for instance, do you stick embarrassment? How do you confine your sense of humor? Memoir is not about perfect accuracy of recording—it’s more about finding perspective.
Is there one image or object that appears over and over in your memories? I don’t know what baked Indian pudding is doing alongside certain terrible moments, but I know that stirring at the stove is a meditative activity for me. My mind can go elsewhere, while I stir the spoon round and round making circles, ellipses, parabolas, keeping the stuff smooth, keeping it moving so as not to burn the bottom. Adding more butter when nobody is looking. I could probably do a five-page riff on the meaning of dessert (I won’t).
Is there something that crops up when you cast your mind back? A color? A taste? Write about it. What do you always see in your mind’s eye? What is painted on the walls of your cave? A fireplace? A flat tire? A red hat? A black comb? Take whatever it is and write about it until you can’t write anymore, then take a breath, walk around the block, and write some more.
Physical memories (textures) I was trying to recall the softest thing and remembered a white ermine muff. It might have been something that belonged to my grandmother, and how I loved to lay my cheek against it, but touching was not enough. Maybe this was my first experience of wanting to consume an object, to make it part of me. This may or may not have some psychological significance.
When my daughter Catherine was in her mid-twenties she saw a red patent-leather purse, a clutch purse with little tiny straps. I press her for details on this cold spring morning. When exactly did you see it? Where was it? Where were you? She can’t remember exactly when or where. Only that she fell in love with it, so shiny and red. It was six inches tall, she thinks, and four inches wide. She thinks it might have been in Bendel’s. It wasn’t enough to possess the bag, although it was too expensive to consider buying.
“I wanted to be the bag,” she said.
Write two pages about the thing you wanted to be.
Write two pages about the softest thing.
Sometimes all you have to do is open a jar. The smell of Noxzema takes me back to the summer of 1957, and the front seat of the old Hudson my boyfriend drove, and how we parked at the Amagansett beach at night and made out like crazy, and afterward I was afraid I was pregnant, even though we didn’t do anything but kiss. The fear and the pleasure are as fresh to me every time I smell the stuff, and I keep a jar around so I can remember being young. So hunt down your mother’s favorite perfume or your father’s shaving cream. See where those scents take you.
When my daughter Catherine smells a cake of Cashmere Bouquet she is delivered back to her grandmother’s apartment in New York City. She remembers Nonnie cooking her lamb chops for supper. She can recall the portrait that hung in the dark living room, a painting of her Nonnie as a beautiful young woman, and she can remember the fights over who should get it after Nonnie died—and how anger revealed the inner workings of a family. One specific detail always leads to another. When in doubt, don’t go abstract. Stick to detail, and your story will begin to tell itself. You don’t have to know where this is taking you. You don’t have to know anything.
Where did you learn to smoke? How did you learn to dance? Did you go to dancing school? I did, driven there with whips and chains, and the only boy who volunteered to dance with me had been struck by lightning once, and had no eyelashes. Who was the first person you slow-danced with? I taught myself how to do the dirty bop in my bedroom listening to Carl Perkins sing “Blue Suede Shoes” while in the room below my parents tried to read. There was a very good-looking boy I used to see on summer vacation at the Amagansett beach, he did the bop and I wanted to dance with him the following summer. I had all winter to practice and I got good, but alas, the next July he told me I danced too dirty and he walked away.
Write two pages in which you got the wrong reaction from someone you hoped to impress.
Useless memories “A gentleman never wears brown.” My English friend was fifteen. I was sixteen. He spoke with the considerable authority of an upper-class accent. I have always assumed he meant solid brown; I think tweed was okay. It is now fifty years later but whenever I see a man wearing a brown suit, I conclude instantly that this poor guy is no gentleman. It’s the first and only thing I think of.
When I think of all I have forgotten, it seems absurd that this statement took up permanent residence inside my head. Of all the interesting or funny things my English friend has said, that is what stays with me. (My mother was fond of this remark of his: “Nasty chaps, the Tudors. Crafty, grasping . . .” But I remember that only because my mother did.)
Maybe it’s because the sentence scans: a GENtleman NEver wears BROWN, and I know this is a poetic form I can’t remember the name of. It goes along with a line from a bottle of wine that represents another rarely encountered poetic form I also forget the name of: “BOTtled in BRILliant conDItion but CARE must be USED in deCANting.”
Write two pages of a useless sentence that stays in your head.
Write two pages of a snobbism you can’t get rid of.
Memories of holidays Pick a holiday. Pick a month.
I have always hated Valentine’s Day. Perhaps hate is too strong a word. Felt uneasy might be more like it. It started in school. We had colored paper, scissors, and an infinity of doilies that peeled off a single doily. We had snow falling in the dark outside the windows. We had a bucket of the good kind of paste, library paste, which I ate when no one was looking. The school radiators clanked and hissed. The room smelled of varnish and steam. Our scissors were blunt and the stakes were high—how many valentines would we get back? But we peeled and pasted and cut and wrote to our parents: “Be My Valentine.” Store-bought valentines were what we gave one another—you got 100 in a cellophane bag for 25 cents. They were flimsy and forgettable, not even as sturdy as leaves, but it was important to count how many you received.
In 1950 I liked a boy who sat two rows ahead of me, but I was too shy to sign the card I left on his desk. I used to draw his profile day after day during spelling and even today the curve of his cheekbone sticks in my memory. I think we were both outside the swirl—observers, not participants—although I never could have put that into words back then. He seemed lonely and kind. His name might have been Dan.
We were asked to buy an inexpensive present for the Valentine’s Day grab bag, and I bought ink. I had spent a lot of time in the stationery store unscrewing all the caps and staring into the bottles of deep color. Green, red, black, blue, I would smell them, being careful not to get ink on my nose. I wrapped the smooth glass bottle in tissue paper and placed it as carefully as an egg among the other gifts, waiting proudly for someone to choose it. Finally a boy ripped the paper off and began to wail, “Who bought this?”
I am happy to say that later I stole it back.
Write two pages of something you gave that was not appreciated.
Write two pages of what was supposed to be a fun holiday but wasn’t.
No memory Maybe just saying what it is you can’t remember gets the engine to turn over. My father, Lewis Thomas, began his memoir, The Youngest Science, with this sentence: “I have always had a bad memory; as far back as I can remember. It’s not that I forget things outright; I forget where I put them. I need props. The village I grew up in is gone . . .” and he is launched. Small bits and pieces, but evocative of the boy he was, and the times he grew up in, and it is clear that he begins to remember more and more as he writes. I believe his memoir was written all of a piece: memories of Flushing. So sometimes by stating what you can’t remember you begin to remember. Make a virtue of the flaw. You don’t have to remember dinner-table conversations to tell the story.
Write two pages of what you don’t remember (of course you can).
Childhood memories I had a childhood illness that kept me in bed for several months. I was six or seven and we lived in New Orleans. (It is funny that I have not a single memory of ever being hot.) During this time I turned my bedspread into a flying carpet. I spent hours in the air just above everybody’s heads, too high to reach, but close enough to cause wonder and jealousy in all my friends. (My mother used to have flying dreams, but the only place she flew was back and forth between the lions at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street.) To keep me company, I was given a pair of lovebirds whose incessant chatter drove me crazy. When some grown-up discovered the dents on top of the cage (which I routinely pounded in a vain attempt to shut them up) they took the birds away.
It was a good time. My imagination got loose. There was no such thing as television; I had tea and buttered toast with grape jam, lots of fairy tales, and my magic carpet.
Write two pages about being sick in bed.
Write two pages about where you would fly if you could.
Wishing you remembered One afternoon an old friend of mine was going through papers and unearthed a letter he’d saved for thirty years. He was taking stock of his life. He was a world-class physicist, but still he wondered at his own hubris. Here is the letter:
22 October 1957
Paris
Following our recent conversation, there is a point which you can, I think, help me clarify, and after having hesitated, I have now decided to put it to you.
The little thinking I have done for the past ten years has led me to one conclusion: there is only one real problem, namely what is the exact relation of man to the universe.
During that conversation, you stated that you knew very clearly what this relation is. Could you tell me what you mean by that? A little note will do.
With all the best,
Raymonde
My friend would have been thirty-three at the time of the letter. He had forgotten what he had once thought he knew. He would have given a lot to have remembered what it was, because he certainly didn’t know it anymore.
