I have
vivid memories of my childhood, but as with most people, there are
missing pieces. The parts between the
bits I remember and the ones I don’t are nebulous, like watching night traffic
through a frosted window, and logically I am aware that time must have marched
on but I have no recollection how Point A became Point B.
I’m
convinced, however, that for an event to become a memory for a child it has to
have affected her greatly in one way or another because days where nothing
happened don’t matter. Not for a kid,
anyway. As adults, we relish them but
for a child events become memory only if it's the tickle of a good time or the
punch of something awful and your brain uses all of your senses to take
snapshots of the goings on for recall later.
That’s how it works.
You
smell curry and you are instantly back at your grandmother’s farm house where scent
is joined by woodsmoke and bacon in your mind.
Or you hear a truck horn that sounds like a fog horn which reminds you
of days spent at Two Lights State Park where, one day, a rogue wave drenched your other grandmother. You had laughed, but no one else thought it
was funny. Not then. And they said “serves you right” when a seagull
stole your frenchfries.
The sight of a certain toy in a
vintage resale shop brings memories out of that strange file cabinet of
experiences and opens it up for you to see.
You remember with a smile that
you had that exact Fisher Price Farmyard set with the rubber animals and the
little lever on the front which simultaneously opened the barn door and produced
a low, somewhat alarming, noise from somewhere within,. Presumably, it was meant to simulate a cow but
sometimes sounded like a duck. And then, you remember the Sesame Street play set
too. And didn’t you have the Weebles Tree
House?
The
unfortunate thing about good memories - the tickles- is that they don’t ever seem to come
without a chaperone. You never seem to
get only good memories for very long, do you?
For instance, oh, how you had loved playing with that Barnyard Set, with
it’s now recalled Little People, and the strange blocky tractor and you smile
and you remember until, inevitably, you come to wonder whatever had become of
that play set and the bad memory punch comes when you are reminded that you probably
had to leave it behind when you went to live with your mother across town or
might it have been part of one your step-mother’s yard sales?
My
sister will likely remember what happened to it. In our adult lives, I have come to understand
that she will have remembered most of our shared experiences much differently
than I have. It’s inevitable in families
with more than one child and the reason for this phenomenon is simple. We are different people with different
souls. She is not ticklish in the same
places that I am, and she would have felt the punches in different places as
well.
Having
said that, what follows is a story I wrote some time ago...because the one I want to tell you (the story of Alia and the Talent Show) doesn't want to be told yet. Parts of this, my
sister may have remembered differently, and parts of this she will not
remember at all because they are not true. That’s the fun part of memories. They play good cop/bad cop with your psyche, true, but, they
are your own and you can embellish them however you like.
The Bike
It was blue, that bike. I haven't consciously
thought about it in years although it does sometimes come to me in the dreams
of replayed childhood. Blue and sparkly. The kind of sparkly that
you only see on the worn out kiddie rides at county fairs these days. By
the time it had come into my possession, the white banana seat had grayed under
layers of the adhesive of long lost tape jobs, the flared handlebars were
speckled with the rust of a thousand dewy mornings, and the spokes bent where
baseball cards had been attached with clothespins.
I didn't care. I loved that bike.
And it wasn't until I started describing this bike that
the memory of how I came by it returned to me like a developing Polaroid.
Slowly, and with ever more detail until the clarity of it broke my skin.
My mother had driven me to the house my sister and I had
lived in with my father. I was seven years old when we left with our
clothes and a few toys. On the last day of second grade, it was as if we
had stepped through a veil from one life into another, and yet, here we were - back again. Now, as a nine year old, it
seemed so surreal to return to this place, although at the time I didn't have
the word "surreal" to attach to that tilting feeling.
When we arrived, the owner of the house, the man I had
only known as "The Landlord" was waiting on the stoop. A tall
man, at least to me, and gaunt he had scared me at first but had easily won me
over by introducing me to the wonders that lie in a roll of Necco wafers.
I tugged my mother's hand. "Mom, can I go
in?" She spoke to deny me, but the Landlord interrupted her.
"It's empty." he said, standing to hold the
screened door open, "She can't hurt nuthin'" My mother let go of
my hand, and I slipped past him and he shut the door behind me. My
eyes adjusted quickly to the dim light of the living room and I was glad that the faint smell of this house was still present, not quite masked by the Pine
Sol.
The landlord had spoken the truth. It was empty. The furniture
I remembered was no longer there, not even the footprints of the heavy recliner
and the matted place in the carpet where the rocking chair had been erased by a
rug cleaner of some kind.
From the door I could see the dining room where a big oak
table had once held my birthday cake. The doorway to the bathroom where I
had won a game of hide and seek by crawling into the front loading washing
machine. Crossing the rug, I followed the el of the dining room into the
kitchen, where one day our black lab had gotten so excited that she put her paw
through the glass.
From the door I watched my mother and the Landlord stand
in the back yard talking. He looked up and startled, I backed away, deciding to
go to the one place I needed to see most of all. My bedroom. At the
entrance to the dining room, a cheap hollow door lead upstairs and I opened it
to climb the matted tan steps toward the landing.
I suddenly giggled at the memory of the Christmas night
when my step-brother Tommy and I had sat on these steps and took turns burping
into his brand new tape recorder. His red mopped head bent low over the
microphone while I waited with my hands covering my mouth and my barely
contained mirth.
He swallowed hard and from somewhere deep
inside him a word like "baseball" would be borne on the belch.
Quickly, he hit the "stop" button and we would play it back,
collapsing against each other in tears. We kept playing them back until
finally I made myself sick with laughter and too much Coke, and the game was
over.
I giggled again when I reached the place where I had
thrown up, but my laugher reverberated on the landing. Sobered, I opened
the door to the room I had known as Tommy's room. Gone were the Kiss
posters, the X-wing Fighter that had been suspended from the ceiling, and the
Marvel comics. The tape recorder was gone. I turned, closing the
door behind me and crossed the threshold to the room that my sister and I had
shared.
As I expected, it too, was empty. Our beds.
Our Fisher Price farm. Our Barbie dolls, records and books. All
gone. The walls were freshly painted, but I crossed the floor to
find a minute dent in the drywall, the impact of a Weeble thrown in
frustration. On this geometrically patterned linoleum, I had made my
first stand and bloodied my sister's nose in response to some injustice.
Despite the spanking I received for it, it had been worth the pride I felt
because although she was only 15 months my senior, she stood a head taller.
None of the things I'd left behind when my mother
took custody of us were anywhere to be found. The sadness threatened to
overwhelm me, until I remembered the shed.
I dashed down the stairs and flew
out the screen door and into the backyard where my mother was wheeling the bike
my sister had gotten for her birthday two
years previously across the grass.
The gears tick- tick- ticked as she wheeled it past me,
calling back “Let’s go, Alia.”
“No.” I pleaded.
She stopped and scowled at me. “What?”
“I…” stuttered slightly. “I need to see what else is in
there.”
With furrowed eyebrows she shook her head “There’s
nothing else.”
I didn’t believe her.
I didn’t …want…to believe her. I
strode purposely toward the shed in the hopes that she had missed something.
Anything. Grownup eyes missed things all
the time and I needed to see for myself.
Leaning into the shed, I closed my eyes and counted to three Mississippi before
opening them again.
There, against the inner wall stood Tommy’s bike. Lacy cobwebs bridged the handle bars some
sort of fuzzy cocoon had attached itself to one of the front spokes. The tires were gray and flat and
it…was…beautiful.
“Mom!” I gasped. “Mom!”
Her face, back lit by the afternoon sun appeared around
the doorjamb. “Yeah, I saw that.
It’s not ours.”
I ran a finger over the torn vinyl of the once-white
seat. “I know. It’s Tommy’s.
They put it in here when he got his ten-speed'. I looked at the dust on my finger and pleaded
with her.”Can I have it?”
I was surprised to hear the Landlord’s voice, but he had
joined my mother at the entrance to the shed.
“I tried callin’ them. They
didn’t want it. Gave me your number so’s
you could come get that one.”
He
gestured to my sister’s bike. “Seems to
me this one was meant for her.”
My mother rolled her eyes and looked again at the bike
with chagrin. “It’s a boy’s bike.”
“I don’t care.”
Silence stretched between the three of us as I watched
the wheels of decision turn behind my mother’s hazel eyes. I chanted the word “please” silently, as a
pilgrim might silently pray for a miracle at the steps of a cathedral.
“Please”, the words tumbled past my lips. “I need it.”
I didn’t have the words to plead with her for this consummate reminder
of a life before I realized that my father was human. And that humans were breakable. And that life had shattered him.
“I need it.” I stated again, my voice breaking. “Please.”
The word hung in the air like the millions of dancing dust particles lit
by the one shed window.
She sighed.
“Okay.”
At some point, the bike was taken to a shop where it was
cleaned up, refitted with tires and brakes and a combination lock and plastic
coated bike chain were purchased. I
rode that bike all that summer…even after one of the pedals fell off and the
seat had lost all the cushion. I realize
now that I must have looked utterly ridiculous half –pedaling around the
neighborhood, but I didn’t care.
As
fall came I rode it less and less, and when it was stolen during a weekend trip
to my grandmother’s farm, it was no great loss to me. It was okay.
I was okay.
Every once in a while when I have time to kill, I get off
the interstate and take a right onto Veranda
street.
Then a left onto Berwick. I park
at the end of the street and look out onto the ocean and remember. The little house is gone now. They tore it down to build a bigger house
with bigger windows. The shed too, lost
in the footprint of the new house.
I never saw Tommy again, either, but that’s okay. I passed on the finest skill a brother can
convey - wordburping- to my son who if
I may say, does a pretty mean “broccoli”.
