Amazing, how many people you meet, even if you’ve lived as I have. Of course, you forget most of them. No, that’s not quite right. They become like one of those files the FBI or some other group of snoops keeps. Pictures of them are stored somewhere in memory. There’re very few you’d ever have any reason to recollect. And when you do see one of them again—always in the most inevitable, which is to say the least expected, time and place—it’s a surprise.
If I or anybody’d thought more about it, the women who came to mother’s funeral are precisely the ones one would’ve expected. Which means, of course, they all surprised me. Mrs. Littington—where did she come from? And the woman who seemed to recognize me by the door to the bathroom: I never would’ve expected her to leave the patch of grass people called her lawn. As for the others: They seemed to exist only on this block, along the streets bounded by the parkway and the cemeteries—an area just away, but a whole neighborhood away, from the train tracks. And, it seemed, those women wore only pastel-colored housedresses or stretch pants and baggy blouses. If they went to church or some other worship place, they always seemed to wear the same hues of washed-out lace and linen they wore to some school dance, to a graduation or one of those terminally immemorial events of those women’s youth. Those clothes always seemed to fit—or, more precisely, not fit-- the same way, no matter how much weight they’d gained or lost.
Then again, Mrs. Littington doesn’t look that much different from the way I remembered her, and I remembered her because she didn’t look like the others. The others also looked more or less the way I remembered them. I guess that’s because they seemed like old ladies when I lived on this block.
There they were: photos pulled up from some old image bank. Like the ones that flash on the television screen of some actor thirty years past his last role or some athlete who retired before his kids were born and nobody knows what he’s done since. They die, and it takes everyone by surprise, even though they’d “valiantly fought cancer” or some such thing.
Funny—when I came back to this block, I didn’t know how she died. For a time, I knew she wasn’t well, but she’d never talk about it. Which isn’t to say that she never complained. Oh, there were the stories about people who lied, who were supposed to know better but didn’t, about someone—usually a man—who screwed something up she probably could’ve, and should’ve, done herself.
It was usually the men. They, the ones who didn’t finish a job, who left before doing so, who showed less loyalty to their women and their children (which they denied responsibility for, while boasting of their ability to make them) than the average housecat. Men, sometimes coming, usually going. A few, the women remember. Me—none. When you don’t know your father’s name, it’s hard to find any reason to remember any other man’s. You don’t expect other men to stay, and you may not stay, either.
For a long time, I hadn’t left anything or anybody on this block but mother. Not even a fragment, a memory of me, except what mother held. I don’t doubt that she thought about me as much as she said she did, but I wondered what exactly she recalled. Whatever it was, it had less and less relationship to the person with whom she spoke on the phone with every conversation we had. Soon, whatever image she had of me won’t have anything to do with me, with the person I’ll soon be.
And what were those women thinking when they looked at me? Could it be the child, the teenager, they knew? That’s hard to imagine: too many years have passed. My size, my shape, even my voice, has changed since any of them last saw me. And, as I said, my transformation is not complete.
