I tried what Dorothy Brande suggests in one of our previous week’s lessons - first thing in the morning start to write, not a story, but “unlock your thoughts on paper, write whatever comes to mind, before you are quite awake before reason has begun to take over from the dream function of your brain. It does not matter what you write” (Burroway). After I finished, I noticed there was a chronological order, the first memory was the shortest. I would like to make a pattern of lengthening each story so that the ones that follow become progressively more detailed with the interior world. I would love anyone’s feedback!
Truth, Half-truth, Lie
When I was four, my parents took me to Mount Rushmore, where I rode bareback on a yak. In the pictures by the hotel pool, my mother is holding my hand. I have long brown hair brushed into pigtails that hang in two ringlets behind my ears, wear a red zip-up sweatshirt and squint at the camera. My brother was not in any of the pictures then. He was a newborn. I do not know where we left him.
When I was seven, I was a flower girl at my godmother’s wedding in Flagstaff, Arizona. I rode 1,600 miles by train from Rochester, Minnesota to Flagstaff with my grandfather, because my grandfather was afraid of flying and someone had to babysit him on the trip. We slept in a compartment with two single bunk beds and an enormous window where I watched South Dakota, Nebraska, and Colorado go by, one by one in fields of green crops, sandy-coloured earth and swaying beige vegetation. I never saw any houses. I slept on the top bunk. The shiny silver sink flipped out of the train compartment wall like a murphy bed and disappeared back into the wall when you finished. You had to dry it out with a paper towel from a silver dispenser over the sink. There was a complimentary toothbrush sealed in plastic and a small toothpaste the right size for a child. I felt like Baby Bear. The toothpaste was in the glass that hid inside with the sink when I opened it up.
I wore my nice dress walked around the train and ate lunch at the restaurant with white tablecloths in the glass-domed double-decker compartment watching as America’s agricultural economy swished by below. My grandfather parted his thick white hair neatly to one side, it swept over his forehead, his crisp white shirt done up at the neck with a bolo tie; a braided leather cord with a turquoise stone as blue as his Irish eyes. My parents flew out on a plane and met us in the desert when we landed.
My brother was three and a half that time. We could not afford a ticket for him to go with us, so he received a shiny red fire engine, bigger than he was. We left him with at the babysitter’s house for a week.
When we came home, it was the middle of winter when we got to the house in the dark to pick him back up. He sat in a chair by the door waiting for us in the babysitter’s darkened living room, wearing the ski jacket I had grown out of the year before with large pink and burgundy flowers. He had big eyes and soft brown curls around his little face, the red fire engine tight in his arms like a newborn.
When my son was two and a half, my mother passed away. I saw her in dreams at night sitting next to me at an auction or flying in with pale skin to kiss me on the cheek. Her hair had grown out streaming behind her. After that, the next time I was on a transatlantic flight, I went so high up into the clouds that I found her there waiting for me. I stayed a while, we sat on cumulus clouds, blowing on cinnamon tea, while we sipped it, to cool it off. We talked for days about life. She laughed, called me “Honey” and smiled just like she always had when I came in the door of her apartment after I had been away for a year.
Half-way through the task of packing up her life in two oversized grey Samsonite suitcases which, in their previous existence, had sailed on conveyor belts at airports for family trips to Prague, Paris, Madrid and London, and were now tasked with transporting the inanimate objects that had made up the last 18 years of Claire’s life, Claire Michaels was folding clothes with precision and patience that surprised her.
It was winter, but the water seeping into Isla's boots felt warm, felt like a home that she melted into it without thought, when Isla stepped over the orange Jersey barrier and put her foot down in the lapping water near the bridge while the storm poured insult from overhead, lashing out in anger at the ground, now sodden after, what seemed like, days, weeks, months, years, decades of cold, wet punishment and sullen displeasure raining down from the heavens, the force of which had begun dislodging brick after brick from the wall where she stood, vigilant and tired, watching the river swell and gurgle against the embankments that guarded against destruction, tempting her to lie back on its foam and let go of everything she had known up until that moment.
Jack was hungry. The little man standing at the edge of the woods in a dishevelled shirt and thick work pants held his lanky sack out to Jack with a promise of food. Jack kept his eyes on the little man as he bent to pick up the red-covered book and cinched it under his belt, but he wanted nothing more than what the man offered. Jack pulled his shirt and jacket down around the book.
He thought of Mama taking the bread out of the oven in the morning. She prepared the dough the night before and let it rise. The smell of yeast filled the house during the night, the warm odour of bread wafted from the oven in the morning when Mama placed it, hot, on the cutting board. The dense loaf sprung back under her fingers when she cut it, steam rising in the morning air. Mama blew on her fingertips, sliced the bread then cut the pieces in half, smoothing butter on each piece. Mama took the hard, salty cheese from the neighbours’ sheep and goat’s milk and cut them thin, placing them between two slices of bread and put it back into the oven like that after she had turned off the gas. When Jack came down to breakfast, he checked the stove. The tangy, homemade bread was barely crisp on the outside while the cheese inside had become soft.
Jack did feel hungry, but what he ached for was to sit down and tear a piece of the chewy homemade bread and cheese with his teeth and gnaw on it while he thought. He needed time to figure out where they were and how he had stayed suspended above the trees, why he had not broken anything when he fell from above the trees onto the grass next to Lillian. Jack wanted to know why the damn book fluttered its blank pages at him like a bird calling and then slid out of his grasp as if to make him follow it. He wanted to be alone, away from Layla’s piercing glances telling him to shape up, away from Lillian’s mute presence. She had never played with any of them, much less Jack. Mama had been sick when Jack was born. Layla had taken care of him, and afterwards, she continued to follow him with her eyes like she knew everything he did. It seemed they were all better off without him. He glanced irritated at Lillian, who stood two steps to his left and slightly behind him. Her big eyes widened, and her small mouth formed an “O,” looking toward the man, who had been standing with his arm outstretched. Jack ducked instinctively before the sound of the black bird reached them. A sudden motion and black shadow formed where the little man had been in Jack’s peripheral vision. Jack had leaned toward Lillian, put his arm around her and tumbled to the ground with his body over hers before he turned his head to see a black bird flying, aiming at Lillian, not Jack.
“Papa,” said Lillian.
It was the first word she had ever uttered.