6. Memory

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.

5. Struggle to Life

 

Soon—if I survive—I’ll’ve completed the transition that began years ago but didn’t commence in earnest until recently.  It’s not a matter of things going as planned:  Nothing ever does, especially on this block.  Which, of course, means that the inevitable happens.

What, if anything, had mother planned when she met that man whom I saw –just me and him—the last time I was here?  About him, I can state two facts with certainty:  He fathered me, and he left.  Could she have foreseen either event?  Could anyone?  I only know, from what I’ve heard, that her family “warned” her about him.  Did she ignore them, or did she simply not hear them?  In any event, I don’t think she envisioned his flight.  If she could’ve foreseen it, would she have spent that night, that day, or any other time with him?  I don’t think she’d’ve taken the time with him as a dare, or as a way to defy and cheat death (as the young so often do) or authority.  No, she wasn’t that kind of girl.  I guess she never could’ve been.

But she ended up like the women who attended her funeral—and, in fact, every other woman who’s lived and died on this block:  Alone, unless she was in the company of one other woman, and no more.  And there were only a few women who could sit next to her, and whom she would’ve wanted by her—only one of them at a time, of course. She probably wouldn’t’ve liked this funeral any more than she liked any other gathering.  But she wouldn’t’ve tried to stop it: She’d’ve known she’d’ve had as much chance of stopping the rain.

When I was growing up, sometimes she’d lose her temper.  She’d yell at me and toss things across the room.  But her outbursts never came when I expected them, like when I flunked math again or some teacher wrote yet another note about me doing something or another, or even when someone on this block—one of the women who ended up taking turns kneeling by her casket—accused me of taking possessions from, or teaching curse words to, their kids.  Or, for that matter, of teaching them anything at all.  Somehow, I seemed to be the easiest one to blame when their kids started talking about sex sooner than they should’ve—that is, as long as they were living with their mothers, on this block.  Well, I guess it made some sense:  There weren’t any men here to take the fall, and I was older than the other kids, or at least it always seemed that I was the oldest.  And I didn’t have any younger siblings to whom I could impart my wisdom, or corruption.

I don’t now, either.  I don’t know that anything I’ve learned, or am about to learn, will be useful for anybody else.  The change I’m going to make, soon after we bury mother, is one neither I—nor anyone else—can prepare for.  No one’s prepared to bring a new being—or, more precisely, to complete the transformation that brings a new form of life or life in a new form—into this world.  Expectant mothers have classes, and other less formal encounters, to tell them what they’re going to experience.  Sometimes their friends, mothers and sisters shower them with gifts of food and clothing for the soon-to-be-born.  But nobody can prepare them, not only for the physical pain and struggle they endure, but also for the transition they’re about to make.  In most cultures, they believe that such a transition makes a girl into a woman or a woman into a lady and have some sort of ritual for it.

Whatever they call the transition, they know it’s inevitable and irreversible.  Which means, of course, that it can—and sometimes does—kill the one who embarks upon it.  Of course, no man has ever had to, or wanted to, undertake such a journey.  (Journey:  How quaint the sound!)  Actually, no man has ever skirted death from a life within his own body.  For him, death is death is death—whether it’s from cancer, a bullet or any other projectile strikes at the walls around the moat of his life forces.  If he escapes one kind of death, there are other kinds:  all sorts of collisions and other accidents.  But they are all the same kinds of death, really.

Occasionally a man dies to save a life already present.  But that’s not the same as, it’s not even comparable to, dying in the process of delivering a new pair of eyes and ears and a new voice into the world.  Perhaps I won’t have to do anything like that, either.  But no man has ever faced such a possibility.

 All I know with certainty is this:  Either I will die, or I will live as someone different from the person who left this block.

There’re some rooms I’ll never enter again:  Some because I won’t need to; others I won’t want to see again.  Some of my old clothes, I won’t wear again.  I’ve bought some new ones, and others have been given to me, but I don’t know which ones will be right for me.  And I don’t know that I’ll wear again what I’ve worn to mother’s funeral.

 After the changes all the women at my mother’s funeral have made, many years before the funeral—and after the ones I’ve made, and am about to make—you don’t eat the same things, or in the same way.  Some women binge on certain foods when they first become pregnant and never eat them again once their babies are born.  Someone told me I might experience something similar.  Sometimes you need additional, and unusual, substances to support the life you’re about to create and sustain.

Until about a year ago, I’d never eaten an avocado.  Now I can’t get enough: I don’t know whether it’s because of the taste, which I like. I know there’s nothing like breaking open that hard, almost barklike, shell and opening up to flesh that’s almost fluorescent—soft and cool at the same time, the taste an echo of its color.  And swallowing it is a unique experience:  It goes down smoothly, but not with the cloying unctuousness of olives.  I still eat olives, but lately I’ve begun to eat them with peppers.  Will I want to eat avocados, olives, peppers or anything else I eat now once I leave the hospital in the outfit I’ve chosen especially for that day?  Will I want to wear that outfit?

For that matter, I can’t even say for sure that I’ll get away from this block once I’ve buried mother.  That’s what I planned to do, but I have to be careful, and keep my eyes and ears open.  There are plans, and there are the lives we bring into this world—and this block.

4. Stories of Men and Women

 

Nobody’s a hero; nobody’s decorated.  Nobody’s remembered…at least not the men, anyway.  Now, with my mother gone, I hope that nobody here remembers me, either.  It’s a privilege I could’ve claimed for myself the day I left, no matter where I went next. 

But of course I didn’t have to.  That may be the one advantage I have as a result of growing up here:  that I’ve never had to claim privilege; I’ve never had to pull rank on anybody.  Or at least I’ve never felt any such need.  You might say that I’m not impressed with people or with anything they do; I’m even less awed by men and their stories.  This isn’t to say I fear no one:  I simply know how one can or can’t or will or won’t do what, and to whom or what.

So there’re lots of things I’ve never had any use for.  Like most of the things they tried to teach me in school—or more precisely, most of the things  they were supposed to make gestures of teaching me and I was supposed to make them think I’d learned—and everything I heard in church.  The canons of the academies and monasteries echo thousands of lies and even more exaggerations and misrepresentations.  No one you ever meet is like anyone you read about in any history book or in any epic tale, whether it’s Beowulf, The Deerslayer or All Quiet on the Western Front.  The ballads I had to hear and the paintings we looked at in textbooks and on school trips to museums were all about generals, emperors or mystic visionaries:  about solitary men leading lonely young men to their deaths, in the fields or in the trenches or at their own hands.  No man like any of those characters ever came from this block—or, for that matter, like any other blocks like this one that I’ve seen or heard about.

Who’s ever written an opera about a woman and her cat?  Or a woman and another woman, or a woman and her children?  About the latter, there’s the story of Mary and Jesus.  Of course:  two people who never could’ve existed on this block.  Not only is he to good to be true, she…well, let’s say she contradicts one of the few relevant facts that’s ever been taught in any science class!

Why can’t we have a religion—if we have to have one—based on a story of a woman and her cat?  At least someone could get that one right, I think.  I don’t believe anyone could ever set down the story of a woman and her child, and whenever anybody’s set down the story of a woman and a woman, it sounds like a man’s fantasy.  (Trust me. I know the difference:  I’ve had lots of time—and more opportunities than anyone should have—to learn.)

But about a woman-and-cat tale: If someone could write it, that person is not me.  I’ve never kept a feline, at least not long enough to have such a relationship.  The one time I had one—a gray, smoky shadow I never named—I ended up giving him to an old woman.  It just didn’t seem fair to make that cat dependent on someone like me; it was no more fair than my dependence on my mother for so much of my life.  Since then, I’ve avoided making any need for me in any other living being 

Even if I’d had a cat, a child, or any other permanent companion, I couldn’t’ve written about me and him, her or it.  Maybe if I’d stayed in school, I’d’ve learned how to put some experiences—my own and others—on a page, or even between the covers of a book.  There’s so much I’ve never learned. As a kid, I asked myself, “Why should I?” So I could write the kinds of things they made us read? I wondered.  Or to play what they told us was music, or how to say their prayers?  I never could understand why I should learn how to do such things.

Now, I have practically no education, and as far as most educated people are concerned, I’m illiterate, or close to it. Still, I’ve managed to read a bit outside of school.  I’ve even finished a few books, a couple of plays and a whole bunch of poems—something I never did while I was in school.  I’m not going to explain or analyze anything I’ve read:  Anything I could say about them isn’t that important and probably has already been said.  I don’t know.  Maybe I’d’ve stuck with school or “done something with myself” if I’d known, while I was still in school, that those pieces of writing existed.  Let’s just say that they’re not about war heroes, and they’re not the sorts of things that give men excuses for believing that women are neurotic.

 

I don’t think anybody on this block has read about them.  Living here isn’t like being in one of those books-and-brunch neighborhoods.  I don’t think even Mrs. Littington-- who’d seen more of the world than most of us and spoke at least two languages--ever read them.  (I can only hope that she didn’t have to read some of those really awful books and even worse translations they tried to shove down my throat:  The Bible, for one.)  As far as I know, the male gender has produced three real poets—at least, when it comes to writing about other men.  One of them—who actually could write about women, too—wrote Othello, The Tempest and Macbeth, and of course a whole bunch of sonnets.  Another wrote some great poems and Les Miserables.  And, finally, there’s the one who wrote Don Quixote.  I’ll  pass on all the rest.  Just for once, I want a story about a woman opening—or closing—her window.