Thanks for the memories
To scrape your memory
clean, you need only a handful of pills
washed down with gin. You need a good wallop
to the head, a fall on Mexican tile or sharp
granite. You need to take the prescribed dose
of anti-malarial medication before the trip
to the tropics. The combination of drug and
sun and strange circumstance will have the
desired effect, the wake-up in a stranger’s
room, the philosophical conversation in a bar
strangely devoid of smoke, you speaking in
tongues, memory gone.
But without my memory I am nothing. There is
no story, no me. You could tell me about my
life and I would smile and nod, sometimes
gasp. Maybe I wouldn’t believe parts of it,
just like I don’t believe the stories you
tell about yourself, about first grade and
that teacher with the wheedling fingers. He
cornered you in the empty classroom and you
knew something was wrong and then you let it
happen again and again. OK. I can believe it.
Maybe it happened; you wouldn't be the first.
But the one about your mother, her fingertips
coated in lotion, rubbing your bare chest as
she tried to erase your budding breasts? The
chair was cold, her hands were warm. You were
obedient, pulled between pleasure and
confusion.
Are you sure that you're not confused now?
I don’t need my memory to tell me that I am a
skeptic. It's built-in, a defense mechanism,
maybe, or just hardwired into me. So you
could tell me about my life, the room done up
in pale pink, my chenille bedspread soft
against my cheek. You say he came in through
the window after I went to sleep and the
image is so surreal it could
be fantasy, the
fluttering curtains, the dark shadow of
stubble on his familiar cheeks. And then,
seven months later, in the same room, the
push and shove of labor and my mother
screaming. The silent bloody bundle that
neither of us knew what to do with.
Or you could lean across the table and tell
me my secret, say that I let him in, did
nothing to prevent it. The curtains didn't
billow: the windows were closed. I unlocked
the door and held out my hand for his. You
could cup your hands and whisper, "Some girls
get the ending they deserve."
No.
You could tell me and I would be polite about
it, would raise my eyebrows in mock surprise,
but inside I would fold your stories on top
of themselves, like the handkerchiefs I wash
and fold for my husband. I would make them
smaller and smaller. I would compress them
and leave them on the table for someone else
to put away.
Prompt: In the blink of an
eye (heavily edited from the original and
then avoided for a few weeks).
Image: Chair outside the Little
House, Fall 1986.