Persistence

The mind is a map
crisscrossing,
intersecting
highways,
one-ways,
back country roads,
and a few tolls.

A million raging spider-men threading passages of sticky black pavement through the night in an ever winding web that shifts and spreads away from the always busy, always modern, always current City’s center into the past. The farther you drive - the deeper into nostalgia and unchanging country side. These rural outskirts are as picturesque as they are lawless; a sweeping golden meadow is neighbors with the woods eclipsed in fog where serial killers hide the dismantled bodies.

Whenever I’m in town, I like to drive past the house.
This time, wannabe-white-suburbia siding has been plastered all over the outside.
The whiteness covers the hideous green paint from 5 years ago,
which covers the more hideous yellow paint from 4 years before that,
all of which is suffocating the blue like a squelched candle.
My blue; the textured powder-blue stucco of my childhood home.

My first memory is of her.
Sunlight has poured into the room through the sliding glass doors, making the scene hazy and soft; illuminating the yellowed, peeling wallpaper patterned with roses and other indiscriminant flowers. My tiny fingertips run over its vertical lines and grooves as I venture slowly into the hallway, peeking around the corner. An old woman on a sunken, floral couch is staring at a buzzing television screen. Her posture is hunched forward, a cigarette burning between two long, womanly fingers knotted with arthritis, knees parted and bent up against the coffee table. The coffee table is as it has always been: Sunday’s newspaper, Neccos, a bottle of Lubriderm. Red check book, Marlboros, Kleenex. BIC pens with blue ink, Lifesavers. I don’t remember who she is, and looking at her, I am playing process of elimination: “Gram? Mom? Gram? Mom?” Realizing I’m there, her voice carries to me….


My grandmother was the Titanic.
My Gram didn’t knit. My Gram didn’t clean. And my Gram sure as hell didn’t cook. The woman wouldn’t even boil an egg; at age 6, I was master of the microwave. She smoked cigarettes and fat, sweet vanilla cigars. Watched NASCAR, horror movies, Wheel-of-Fortune and Jeopardy, Colombo, Dick Van Dyke, and things in black and white. We ate at McDonald’s at least three times a week. She had this upper class air of dignity that overshadowed her “white trash” small-town life. She was unsinkable.
Possessed mild to moderate road rage.
Worshipped Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra.
Wore dentures. Cursed often. Irish to a fault.
And sometimes she told me stories.
“What do you think I am, a goddamn story teller?!”
Sometimes.

She loved to embellish, exaggerate, manipulate, personalize; the stories she told all held devastating importance.
They had lived in Florida where the cockroaches were the size of rats.
Working in The Mill, she’d sat next to a woman who was scalped by the roaring machinery.
Florence Henderson once called her a “plumber’s daughter” and she punched her so hard in the face that “Mrs. Brady” was knocked through the double-doors behind her.
Her own mother took away her first born and gave it to a relative.
Her Daddy, the most beloved man in her life, played for the Boston Red Sox and single handedly installed all the plumbing in North Adams and Williamstown.
I lived with her because Mom was mentally ill and thought the porcelain dolls could talk through pointed teeth telling her the Devil was coming and she needed to kill us to save us and so Social Services had taken me away.
You never did know what was completely real with Gram.

Driving, you come to a bridge that has crumbled into the sea,
the end juts out
over the edge as a
dangerous
stub.


If memories change over time, can truth change? If memories can be lost, can truth be lost?
Without truth, can there be reality? Without reality, can there really be honesty?
What if we don’t want to remember?
Without our memories we are the sea.
Building nothing of permanence.
Existing everywhere, going nowhere.
Moody emotion pushed and pulled by force and gravity.

Something wasn’t normal, but I didn’t know it.
I knew my lunches at school were free. I was allowed to eat breakfast before class, and I was let out in the middle of the day to play games downstairs with a woman named Glenda. It never seemed to matter what time I showed up or if I’d done any homework. We used perforated paper to buy food at the Big Y. Silver aluminum meals were left on our door step.
My parents weren’t married,
Daddy had a different last name,
and I lived with Gram.

We had a car.
I would start the ignition for her and had dreams of driving before I learned cursive. We had cable. My favorite show was “I Love Lucy” on Nick-at-Night. I would brag to kids at school that I could do whatever I wanted, and I could. I opened jars for her. Reached things in high places. Skipped school around Halloween and Christmas to look at decorations through the windows of her red Ford Thunderbird. When she had me run into Val’s for her cigarettes, the clerk didn’t protest. We had an above ground pool with green water and a swing set in the back yard. I had an attic full of Barbies and toys and books. Having a birthday on Christmas was great, back then. I would rub her back, littered with brown moles, like freckles or stars.

Looking back, everything was like the difference between freckles and stars.

The point where I had to look away from my life and forget these paths of memory or else be consumed by the forces outside of my control, engulfed in a spectacular but unmerciful, unyielding light. The headlights that blind you just before the collision.
We lived beyond our means, and yet she always made it work. I was aware of it all, but I was still a child.

Like her, I thought the rules just didn’t apply to me.
And I could be a terrible brat.
We would be in the red Ford Thunderbird with its fuzzy matching red seats, and my mother would drape her arm across the space between the driver and passenger seats. At first, this bothered and annoyed me – sitting strapped down in the back, I couldn’t see with her arm in the way. So I’d tell her to move it. Gram would back me up. Every time it happened, I’d tell her to move just for the control of it. Just for Gram’s approval and support of it. The longer it took her to move her arm, the more hostile I’d become. Screaming. Kicking. Physically pushing her away. After a while, I just sat in the front seat, and she sat in back. Gram hated mom, and so I hated mom.

Gram would always scream at her:

“YOU LEFT YOUR TWO
LITTLE BITCHES ON
MY DOORSTEP!”

It was all a great big production sometimes. Like when people slow down just to look an accident, just to spot the victim. Caught up in excitement and pity, apathetic to who caused it or who lived. Then they’d drive home to their comfortable houses with lit fireplaces and sink into their beds, sink into the perfect darkness of easy sleep.

I couldn’t sleep at night until I had hugged her.
“Sweet Dreams”
She would say.
“It’s 11:11. Make a Wish”
And I would.

Her last memory was of me.

Mom asked me if we should call the ambulance.
I said, “No”.
Stepping out of the bathroom, I clutched the white towel close around my body. Mom was sitting at the dining room table. Gram sat in a wheel chair, he arm wrapped in rosy linen bandages from last week’s run in with her car and somebody’s porch. The television ticked and spun with people winning money-

Her head tilted backward, a gasp left her mouth as though
something was being pushed out instead of sucked in, and her chin
came to rest on her chest.
My mother asked me if we should call an ambulance. I said no.
Gram didn’t want to die hooked up to machines. She’d always said so.
I think what she really wanted was to drive off a cliff at a hundred miles an hour in a top-down convertible with Elvis and Sinatra blaring into glory.
Gripping my towel, I knelt before her.
“Gram, are you alright?” – “You’re drooling a little, Gram”
I held a mirror up close to her face like I’d seen once in a movie.
It was sparklingly clear.
I hugged her, tight.

“Sweet dreams.”

Standing, I turned to my Mother,
“Fine! Call, but she’s going to be so pissed.”

March 4th, 1999
She was 68 years old. I was nine.

There’s some asshat behind me honking his horn. It’s not a busy road, he could just go around.
Memories or small town roads, you can’t stay anywhere for too long. Not when you’re in the middle of it anyway. Be idle when you get home; be idle when you’re dead. These road maps in our heads aren’t sold with keys and legends – we have to make those ourselves. Seemingly disconnected, some memories are like passing through a small out-of-the-way place, and there’s always a gas station and a diner. Others are landmark memorials and freak side-shows; our own fields of Gettysburg, beaches of Normandy, Las Vegas, Hollywood, World’s Largest Ball of String. Driving through our minds, reliving past road trips, we always see something we didn’t before.
Meanings change.
Dreams change.
But existence is persistence.
Frowning with disapproval at the old house, my eyes crinkle at it endearingly. I step on the gas and continue on my way, where ever it is that I’m going.
I just hope I’ll remember how I got there.