Sticks

How do you pick up a cow?

Begin as a child with a newborn calf, lifting it every morning.

—Variation of the practice attributed to Milo of Croton, sixth century bce, Greece

If you could go over all your memories every day, lifting them from where they are stored, turning them over, and returning them. If you could go through them and going through them keep them, picking them up and putting them back inside your head. If you could look at them every day and every day have new ones to add to the load, and every night. If you could do that. You would be able to remember everything. Like the researchers say about fat cells; they form when you are young and stay with you always, within you. If you lose weight, the cells shrink but never disappear. Do you have memories you never lose, that shrink but keep their hard cellulose shells? Inside, the soft membranes collapse on themselves. Or is the outside border semiporous, allowing some memories in, others out, all out of your control?

If you could go where the memories are stored, as in a box, and open it up and find them in there. If you knew where to look for them, from a map, the way you might gather up snow or sand and sift through, find what was buried. Snow falls. Indifferently. It has its own pace. You can’t stop it.

Mandy Silverman of the late twentieth century ce, USA, tries to remember, and in remembering, she comes up with sticks. She remembers a field of sticks. Does this mean snakes or fences or borders or—sticks? Closes her eyes, sees herself as a small girl, gathering sticks.

As a child she kept sticks in the closet. In a big oaken chest. She didn’t know that “oaken” meant made of oak. The hinges gave off a sound, not a squeak, but a protest. A groan. It started out that she would collect anything she happened to find on the sidewalk and street—pebbles, buttons, broken china and plastic, most often plastic—and then with her Girl Scout training she began to pick up the most supple long and lean tinder, that’s what it was called. She would take the ones with little branches like arms and try to push doll dresses on them, hard to push the branches through the sleeves without tearing the fabric. It was as awkward as trying to get her dog Topsy on the tricycle. She felt guilty for stretching him, his recalcitrant paws, spongy and gray, didn’t belong on the pedals, but she liked to try. Why couldn’t he ride the trike since he liked doing so many of the other things she liked—to run around the camellia bushes, lie on the grass, dig in the sandbox? She learned digging from him.

She wanted to hide in the trunk. One of the tragedies of childhood is being too small to do so many of the things you want to do, and then when growing larger and larger, like Alice, you no longer fit in the spaces you once inhabited.

When she was three she put a stick there. She doesn’t know why.

She wonders if either of those sentences is true. But neither sentence is premeditated.

Both came to her, like that.

The theory of incest survivorship is you have the memory buried in you like treasure, the late-twentieth-century equivalent of the nineteenth-century dream, Freud’s royal road to the unconscious. You have a dark place in your memory, in your history, you must dig it up, dig it up, and when you do, when you go back to the scene, you’ll pluck and purge and tweeze it from the pain-box.

What do you do with this pain, this scene, your own primal scene of betrayal? Do you set it aside? bronze it? spray-paint it, flatten, and dry it between the pages of a big dictionary?

You cry over it. You say, that is the reason for all of this—things that are sad...