January 3, 2012
I.
There are things I know about those years because I’ve written them down over and over ever since; like a monk transcribing a bible, I write my story to myself again and again. Let’s go back to Bethesda.
I am sitting on the edge of my dressing table, legs out in front, facing my mother. She is so close to me, putting on my socks; I can’t see her face. The only way I can see my mother’s face from those years is to look at the photographs. I don’t think I got to look at her straight on very often — I was in the stroller, or down at her shins, until she scooped me up, and then her presence was more of a smell than a sight, a feeling. So she is in front of me and I can see her face because she is looking at my face for a change, and she looks into my eyes and asks, “What did you call it?”
“Befesda,” I say. She thinks this is funny; she gets me to say it again. “Bethesda? Or Befesda?”
“Befesda,” I guess. I can tell by her reply that this is wrong, but she laughs, it makes her happy that it’s wrong, so I say it again. “Befesda.”
Bethesda is where I was switched from a crib to a bed. I was asleep one night when the door opened and the light went on, waking me up. A strange man came in with some boxes and tools and put together the child’s bed that was to be mine. The mattress came in a cardboard box that smelled dusty, and I imagined the hair-raising sensation of rubbing against soft cardboad, which put my teeth on edge. The mattress was leaned up against the wall, its bare surface striped with dull orange and rust, and it looked like a door through which unpleasant things came, like a slab that could topple over and crush me. I was not asked to sleep in the new bed that night; it was hard enough to get me to go back to sleep in the crib. But the next night, after the mattress had been pinioned to the bed and sheets had been applied, I was supposed to sleep upon it, in a bed without sides, which was not nearly as secure as a bed with walls all around it, and a nest of soft blankets. I could fall out of a bed with no sides; things could come at me from all directions, underneath, overhead. It was dangerous and risky and I was not old enough for it, I felt implicitly. Also, nobody had asked me. I liked sleeping in my crib with my stuffed animals, in my fort of batting and velvet.
So when my mother finished helping me into my pajamas, and stood with her back to the crib and told me instead to get into the bed, I refused. I cried and said no, I didn’t want to, I wanted to sleep in the crib. She told me I could not, and I yelled in reply that I didn’t want to sleep in the bed, that it was impossible for me to sleep in the bed because it was terrifying and vulnerable and I was a baby for god’s sake, I had to sleep in a baby crib. I got my way the first night, at least for a few hours; she came in once she thought I’d fallen asleep and tried to move me to the bed, her hands catching the skin under my armpits as she tried to effect the transfer, but I woke up and screamed at her until she gave up. And as she left the room in defeat, I thought, good. I will scream non-stop every single night for as long as it takes to ensure that I will never sleep in that bed.
The next night, the crib had been removed from the room.
This is around the time I started waking up in the middle of the night and finding myself in the car. I’d have some memory of my mother coming into my room when I was asleep, either dressing me against my will or just throwing a blanket around me, and carrying me out to the garage to place me in the the back seat of the car. I’d wake up and we’d be driving over the George Washington Bridge from New Jersey, headed for my grandmother’s in the Bronx. There were red and amber flashing lights; the air was cold and acrid; the outside was right there, so close, and I was supposed to be in my crib. How much was dreamed? If I woke up at my grandmother’s, my face against the nubby bedspread on the stiff couch in the spare room, I would know that it had been real, the glossy rain of the turnpike before I turned the other cheek to the vinyl seat and fell asleep again in the pool of my own warmth. Sometimes I woke up at home, and I’d never know for sure whether those nights had been real or dreams, or what the difference between the two might be.
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It’s that last sentence that nails this for me because I’ve been trying to write things down for my children and some of the things don’t feel right but I know they are true while other things I can’t say for certain if they are memory or imagination. And where does one begin and the other end?
I remember being carried from my Aunt Frances’ apartment to my own by my mother’s boyfriend but I don’t remember falling asleep or waking up–just the being carried part. I remember walking through a street flooded with water but I never could find an article about a water main break or anything else that would anchor that memory in reality. I remember someone walking along with me and my mother mother during a blackout. We were walking home from my preschool but how could that be? If it was dark enough to need a flashlight, how could I have still been at school?
Confabulation: The Life of Satia (or Someone Bearing Some Such Name)
That would be the title of my memoir if I ever got around to writing it. Apparently “Confabulous” has already been taken for a magazine.
Confabulatio would be perfect if I were a guy because sometimes all this navel gazing really feels like nothing more than sucking myself off. (And I actually wrote “nasal gazing” and corrected myself but I am chuckling over the imagery and implication of that as well because sometimes navel gazing makes me feel a little cross-eyed.)
And to ensure that my comment really bears little to no relevance whatsoever to your original post: Bibi can touch her nose with her tongue. When I tried and failed she said, “I’m sorry Gigi.” She looked so sympathetic for my inability to do what she so easily could do. She has no clue of the myriad of things she can do that I can no longer even approach let alone accomplish.
Bibi and Gigi are very lucky to have each other.
Maybe whether or not the dreams/memories are real is less important than what they mean to you and how they impact you. Memories aren’t absolute, particularly preverbal ones. When we’re too little to have words for feelings and experiences, sometimes the mind takes over and uses symbols to fill in the blanks. That’s why I think what they mean to you matters more than the specific details. Trust. Power. Control. Safety. You can bet something happened similar to what you remember/dream, whether that is true to the exact detail or symbolic of what actually happened.
Amy, My mother and I have talked about our blurry memories and I don’t know which of us came up with the idea but we both agreed that we create our own myths in our memories and, thereby, our own meaning. When reality shifts a memory there is a lot to be learned in the juxtaposition that is created in the personal myth. Just two years ago I learned a truth that completely overhauled a myth and redefined a lot of things for me. My mother, unbeknownst to her, carries a myth that my memory would shatter but I recognize her need to hold the myth as truth and I am content (even happy) to leave her memory undisturbed.
And really, I could have just said this:
Amy, I agree with you . . . the reality is less important than the meaning.
Or, better still, I could have just said:
Amen, Amy. Amen.
Someday I may learn to be concise. Today was clearly not that day.
My mom used to keep extreme hours. (Small wonder then that as an adult, or something that approximates one, I do too.) She continues to be a workaholic of the most extreme caliber, and has been known to file deposition papers while in the advanced stages of labor. And win.
She used to bring me with her to her office until (what seemed like) all hours of the night, leaving me to homework, or reading, or painting my nails with whiteout, until I would finally fall asleep on the couch in her conference room. Equally common were late night decisions to migrate to her boyfriend’s house, or my dad’s house, as were decisions to take full advantage of the 24-hour nature of the CVS down the block.
I remember waking up in cars, or in strange houses, or while being carried through parking lots, in a state between “asleep” and “awake,” experiencing the exact feeling you describe– never sure of where I was, or how I got there, trying to figure out what was real and what I was making up. A feeling that returned in full force a couple of weeks ago when I woke up at 6 in the morning in a strange apartment in Tribeca. I freaked out, and then left without saying goodbye.
Why am I tellllling you thiiiiis? (A question which I seem to be asking a lot these days, hm?) I guess because your last paragraph resonated with me in a really big way. And because the unfortunate side-effect of getting my voice back seems to be the inability to shut the fuck up.
Anyway. You’re brilliant. The end.