Chapter 6
That night, James, had a dream that it snowed, and icicles formed all around his house and dripped down long past the window like rippled glass bars. In the dream he felt trapped instead of protected by the icicles, and he helped his mom knock them down with a broom and a shovel.
His mother did not dream anymore.
He woke up before his alarm and his room was lit by the white light peeking through the windows.
James leaped towards the window, threw the curtains aside, and was filled with the pulsing white from outside. All he saw was a blurry white morning. It snowed, I’m going to be okay, Sonny is going to forget about me and I’m going to be okay. He ran downstairs-
“Mom, Mom! Did you see? Do you know if school is canceled?” His words and body stopped like he ran into a wall when he saw his mother sitting at the kitchen table, crying. She tried to hide it by coughing when she saw that he was in the room.
“Oh, sweetie- it’s okay, you don’t have to stay home to help me clean up, and I didn’t have anything else planned for today. It’ll be gone by the time . . . by the time you get back. Don’t worry; I’ll talk to the parents at the next PTA meeting to figure out who did it.”
James rubbed his eyes and looked past his mother and at the oak tree. It was white, but not with snow. It was covered with layers and layers of toilet paper. He walked closer to the window and saw more toilet paper laced through his fence, rolled out on the yard, and wrapped like bandages around every tree and bush. There was more toilet paper in his front yard than he ever saw before in his entire life. The rest of the neighborhood autumn grey, it looked like a cotton blizzard hit only his front yard.
James hugged his mother.
“Can you get breakfast at school today? I want to get started soon.”
He walked to the closet and put his red coat on. He did not look up from his feet the entire way to school.
Karen pulled her coral bathrobe tighter and shuffled, bony bare feet hardly lifting from the carpet, to the kitchen window. She pulled the blinds closed and stood in the kitchen. She did not give him money for breakfast at school. The thin light from the windows echoed her stringy thin hair. She lifted her dry hand to the trash and threw the tissue away. She did not think of them as tears anymore She thought of them as a part of her falling away. It was nothing anymore to cry. Anything would tip her over since her husband died. Any time she saw a stray cat dead at the side of the road, she would have to pull over to collect herself. Rotting meat in the refrigerator once drove her not to eat for three days, James found out it was bothering her and he threw it away and made her oatmeal. Nights, she would cry into her pillow and from time to time bend over to the other side of the bed. She would press her face to the pillow and breathe deep five or six times as if the layers of smell would allow her to smell him again.
Karen went upstairs and put on long johns so her yard work jeans would not fall off of her shrunken frame and so she might be able to generate the warmth of life inside herself again. She put on her jacket and some work gloves and brought a ladder from the garage and set it against the oak tree out front. It was broken like a giant bonsai from a storm that nearly killed it three years ago, so she felt even more diminutive alongside it. She remembered hiding at the lowest spot in her house with her family. The power went out during the storm so they played scrabble by candlelight. Her husband won the game. They woke to find half of the tree in splinters only feet away from their house. She felt lucky that morning.
Now, she picked the toilet paper from every corner of the yard for the rest of the morning, and tried not to notice her neighbors looking away from her while they walked to their cars on their way to work.
She did not think that she would ever get married before she met James. Karen’s dad took off before she was born, and her mom died while she was in college. Karen went to school so she could become an accountant. Between the money her mom left her and her budding tax career, Karen was more concerned with saving up money for travel than meeting men.
He was a friend of a friend of a friend, and they met on Halloween night. She was dressed as a nurse, and he was wearing jeans and a faded blue sweatshirt. She asked loudly, to overcome the haze of music and smoke;
“What are you supposed to be?”
“Just a regular guy.” She could tell by the arched lines on his face that he must have been older than his thick brown hair suggested.
She went on to dance with her friends and did not think much of him until she woke up the next morning with a message on her phone. He must have spent the night talking to everyone to get a hold of her number.
She smiled sadly at the pile of toilet paper on the sidewalk, and was disappointed in herself that she had not taken a lot of notice of him right away. That was the way memory worked.
Karen’s memory of meeting her husband was not one event, it was all the events that have ever happened to her. It was all the events that have ever happened to her parents, and to their parents before them. It was also all of the events that have happened to every other person involved in that memory, and to their parents, and to their parents, and to their parents.
Her memory was a gift. She could not remember the pain, but the kind stranger who asked if she was okay, and the way the moon cut through the brown autumn leaves while the Karen experienced that pain. She remembered that there was pain. She knew it was pain she felt because she linked that the pain to another pain, and another pain, and another pain.
Her memory had become a curse. Each of her memories of her husband became one true moment with the meaning hidden. It was plucked from her life and stitched across her tattered daily routine. Since her husband passed, she used her memory to cover herself more and more from whatever was visible beyond her days. Her memory was what really made her blind to the way she was living.
Karen’s memory gave her sight, also. Each event was not a false light but a light that had become a part of her. Karen’s pain when it was happening was pain. When it was remembered it became a part of her, just as her parents were a part of her, and their parents, and her second grade teacher, and her first kiss, and a waitress she had one time they stopped for grilled cheese at a diner with two of her best friends when they were halfway home from a vacation.
Her memory was herself, and she was a basket to hold everything that happened. She could not describe, even to herself, what pain was. She could describe the sweat pooling at her shirt line, she could describe the way the moon cut through the trees that autumn evening and the trees made the pavement look like cracked glass, she could describe the kind stranger’s clothes, their concerned smile, maybe the color of their eyes. She could not remember an exact pain, or an exact pleasure, or an exact external numbing growl of hunger. She could still feel the sudden fear when an unexpected occurred, she could feel the beauty of the person upon meeting them, and she could feel the dizziness of that night. Karen could feel these things because she was under the veil of her own experience, not the meaning of the experience. These were never put to use in patching her up. She could feel everything she only felt inside of herself. She could feel it every day for the rest of her life.
The memory was stitched to her the moment the event was over. Out of longing, out of embarrassment, out of grieving, she had been taking the fingers of her mind and rubbing down the fabric of her memories until there was nothing more than a collection of facial expressions and a subtle hatred of the feeling of her bare knees on concrete.
So, this is why Karen remembered the night she met her husband while she picked the bully’s toilet paper out of the arching limbs of the oak tree. The oak tree in her front yard would have made shadows on the pavement that looked like broken glass if only there were enough sun peeking out of the low dark stratus clouds that hung numbly like hunger above her.
She remembered slipping out of her high heels that were borrowed from a friend, and falling to the ground outside the house party. She could still feel the un-enthused faces pe
ering through the window, checking, reassured, before continuing what they were doing. She could feel that a stranger lifted her, and carried her to the bathroom. She could feel the sound the toilet paper made while it was being wrapped around her skinned knee, the sight of steam coming from the sink where her scraped up hands were being washed. She could feel the color of his eyes.
She could feel the way her stomach moved while she laughed it off with him, stumbling out of the bathroom, taking a shot of cheap vodka that was poured from a plastic bottle. She could almost paraphrase a joke about how coincidental it was that she dressed as nurse that night, and was injured before she drank, before she got to the party.
As they danced, and she remembered asking him:
“What are you supposed to be?”
“Just a regular guy.”
She felt this event, and her parents felt this event, and their parents, and their parents, and everyone at the party, and the old couple across the street aching to tattle the loud music to the police, and every tree in the yard, and the construction workers who built the house that the house party was held in, and the host, and their parents, and their parents, and their parents. She felt the entire moment while pulling toilet paper from a tree.