Happenstance

One

One 33 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . One We look at old family photographs in which we stand next to black, boxy Fords and are wearing period costumes, and we do not gaze fascinated because there we are young again, or there we are standing, as we never will again in life, next to our mother. We stare and drift because there we are . . . historical. It is the dress, the black car that dazzle us now and draw us beyond our mother’s bright arms which once caught us. We reach into the attractive impersonality of something more significant than ourselves. We write memoir, in other words. We accept the humble position of writing a version rather than “the whole truth.” —Patricia Hampl One 34 The Hundred Days Dancing on the Icebox I sometimes think I’m engaging in the equivalent of constructing a museum diorama of the Paleolithic epoch based entirely on conjecture—the fossilized remains of flora and fauna, the approximation of radio carbon dating, a correlation with existing habitats, guesswork, imagination. For example, I seem to have no head-on, deliberate recording of the exterior of my grandparents’ house, no panoramic view of any rooms. I use a fuzzy picture of three people in an armchair and a slice of staircase or a close-up of a lurching toddler against the backdrop of the bottom of a davenport as my baseline and from such verified details sketch a broader, more elaborate landscape drawn from unverifiable memory. Most of the time it is impossible to colorize my grayscale evidence; often my larger landscape is merely line drawing. Because I can’t sit like an en plein air painter and keep checking the details of what I’m trying to reproduce, I circle around memory, trying to nudge it awake accidentally, to attend to whatever inadvertence rouses and makes flash in my mind. It is a tenuous, uncertain process. Often what I sketch in is something other than what I was trying for. It seems that way with much of what I hope to recapture from my earliest days, the three years of the war when my mother and I lived in my grandparents’ house. To complicate things, we lived there for a few years longer after my father returned, and later, when we lived around the block or across the street, we often had daily access to the house. It was more the center of my world than my parents’ house, than my own room, for a very long time. How do I sort out memories from one period or another? It’s hard to pinpoint the dates of events, to testify with any certainty about them. I am an unreliable witness to my own life. I have it on my mother’s authority that, at some point in my second year, someone stood me on the icebox in the kitchen and I danced to the song “Don’t Fence Me In.” I’m confident I have those details correct but I have no corroborating evidence from my own memory. The melody plays in my head, I tease out some of the lyrics—“Oh, give me land, lots of land, under starry skies above / Don’t fence me in”—and try to tell if it’s Bing Crosby’s or Gene Autry’s voice I hear. What always comes back to One 35 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 me when I try to remember that day—why does it seem important?—are images of the kitchen itself. I can reconstruct it in the way I most often saw it. We always came in the side door of the house and entered on the landing halfway between the cellar and the kitchen. At the top of the stairs the kitchen took up a narrow straight stretch all the way to the back of the house. The sink was on the left side as you came in, the stove opposite it, both surrounded by counter space. I’m certain the refrigerator was on the inside wall, next to the stove. I visualize one or...