I've been haunted by that line lately, for some reason. It's said by Emily, the young heroine of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, as she is "allowed," after having died in childbirth, to relive one idyllic morning of her childhood before she takes up her eternal place in the graveyard on the hill above the town. Totally awash in memory, at once living it and beyond it, she enters her childhood home and experiences the miraculous impossibility of going back in time.
She sits at breakfast, just past dawn on a school day, tears streaming down her face, as her mother serves her breakfast and her brother pesters her. The day has begun, as days will. To her mother and brother, Emily is simply there, as she is every other morning. Emily knows the terrible truth: she is already gone, and she is alone with that knowledge.
* *
I watch my girls living the tortured magic of high school. They love this time in their lives, but cannot stand outside of it and peer in. I thought high school was OK, but I wonder why I can't remember much about my own experience. Perhaps, like them, I was too sunk in it, too self-absorbed, and/or simply too young to have cultivated that skill. I have images, not memories. Sensations. Even smells. But no narratives.
Last night, for the first time in weeks, the whole family -- all five of us -- sat down to dinner together. (Psychologists and family therapists say there is a direct correlation between how often a family eats together,the cohesiveness of the family unit, and the mental health of the individuals that comprise it.) We laughed uproariously. We talked about our respective days, we made fun of each other. Gabe entertained us by imitating his mom and the hysterical noises she makes when she hurts herself (a kind of strangled "Doh!" with an absurdly elongated vowel). We ate vast quantities of bread, trying to rid the house of all chametz as Passover nears.
I tried to remember family dinners from my childhood. I can't. It was a great childhood. But there were so many of us, and as the youngest, for many years I couldn't tell how many there were, or what was being discussed, or who was in charge. It was like living among mastodons. Perhaps this helped cast the vague contours of my memory: I could grasp the scene, sense the energy, but not share in the story. I had to just avoid wrath, or being accidentally stepped on.
There is one event I clearly recall: the famous "Prune Whip Episode." This was an evening when my mother, fed up with the finicky and impossibly varied tastes of her six children (and husband, and two dogs and at least as many cats), made "prune whip" (swear to God), slammed it down on the table (for dessert, I think), and told us we were damn well going to eat it. All of it.
And even this I don't recall as a narrative. What I mostly remember is our startled, dutiful silence, punctuated only by the soft, gagging sounds of somewhere between four and six children, choking down one of the most awful creations ever spawned in the Devil's kitchen.
It is an evening that lives in family lore, and yet I'm sure my brother or one of my sisters -- or even my father, who will use his advanced age to feign forgetfulness -- will recall more than just that audiovisual, which is all that's surfaced from my softened memory. They'll have the story. I have only the gagging sounds.
For almost the last decade of his life, my grandfather was sunk in the inescapable reverie of what must have been Alzheimer's, although it wasn't yet identified and named as such. It is impossible to know what he may have known or remembered, because he lost the ability to communicate. I remember, though, that he seemed supremely untroubled. He would cry silently when he saw us enter his room at the nursing home. He would devour, with evident delight, an ice cream cone, which we often brought him just to see him emerge from the wax mold of his illness. Then he would sink back into it and resume his reverie.
Sometimes, that's how I feel. I see memory enter the room of my consciousness. I feel the richness of a long-gone moment, I feel the lachrymose joy of bittersweet remembering, and the feeling that I can't look at it hard enough.
Then I vanish again into the contemplation of nothing in particular.
--T.A.
