Memoir or Autobiography? Serial Musings on the Fiction of Memory
Written by MFA@CIIS candidate Guy Slater
Part Two: Mixed-MotherMetaphors
The last alien spawn of memory gestating within me is the time mother showed up after a disappearance of several years in a crappy white van filled to the brim with rubbish, second-hand clothing and a mangy pet, a dog I think, well maybe it was a cat, or a ferret? Honestly, I don’t remember exactly. The point is that it was pathetic. And terribly sad. She spouted special crazy for a full fifteen minutes before my brother and sisters and I could get a word in edgewise. She began giving us things from the stinky pile in her van. My fuzzy memory struggles to fill in the details: for one of my sisters, a torn gown of cheap fabric, maybe polyester. My mind’s eye sews sequence on it for some reason. There was definitely maybe a pair of soiled high-heel shoes. That seems resonant. One of the heels was snapped over and dangling in the midday Sausalito breeze, rendering the offering all the more absurd.
The whole thing was just dangling there, in fact. Broken before mother’s audience of shocked offspring who were unable in that moment to bridge the chasm between continuity and burlesque. But none of us thought to cry; that would have been appropriate. No, no, we just smiled and nodded and took it all in. Why? Because we’re not fucking monsters, that’s why! Not sure how that happened. I mean, given the spectacle before us, we should have all become monsters. Then again, maybe we will. Give it some time.
As I recount this, it occurs to me that certain events define and confine us. The effect is seldom recognized in the moment, but something gets flash frozen in the memory and gets transported around with us, informing life’s decisions big and small. Some of us never unpack it and it gets freezer burned in. Some of us find strategies to manage the pain. Some of us write.
And, even now, as I write this memory down for the first time, there is something faintly redemptive about the act. The twenty odd year distance helps, but it is also the transference, the transcription, that creates a space for something other than the narrative I’ve always run in my head. It thaws, melts and runs over the page, it is no longer indelible. What is possible now? How have I altered the future course of my life by allowing this monster out?
I remember that we were all new parents in our early thirties at the time. And with some great effort of coaxing by my brother (how he found her I still don’t know), she reluctantly emerged out of her oblivion looking puffy and stiff, gimping slightly in a crumpled full length (linen) skirt and a shabby (wool) sweater. The bleached blonde, sharp dressed cougar with exotic bone structure and striking eyes had long since receded, her former glory banished as she had banished herself from our lives. We desperately hoped there was something we could recognize in her and of ourselves.
We wanted to know so much that day. Was there some good reason she’d disappeared? Did she miss us? What had she learned out there that she wished to impart? Did she return to claim her role as grandma? But it was impossible to tell any longer because there was no reflective quality from which to glean her emotional state. In her speech and gesticulation, she was doing a rough performance of mother from memory that was, well, unsound. Not in faith but in fidelity. It was a robotic soliloquy, and when we spoke to her, no one was there to respond. The light in her eyes was gone. She ceased to carry on two-way communication, her broken transceiver only sending messages in loops like a homing beacon but unable to receive any. It was breathtaking. Like being dropped into a bathtub full of ice.
But only in writing and revising this scene do I allow myself any room to understand why she was frozen in time. It’s easier for me to see that her old hurts and resentments were never ameliorated. She’d lost complete trust in the world. No progress could be made. As I re-narrate, I have to imagine what that’s like. I have to get inside this person and try to feel that. And believe me, its icky and gross and I’d rather not. Then why? Why do we autobiographical writers do it? To purge, yes. But we could do that in therapy. There must be something more to it because memory feels like a fictive space, a many-faced truth, a phantom. Or as neuroscience has discovered, a tenuous neurochemical response that resides in the hippocampus (more on that later).
After twenty minutes, it was clear that this pantomime was taxing her but she kept at it. And it was also clear that her years of livin’ in a van down by the river had further agitated whatever contorted neurochemistry she already contained. So the nonsensical ranting and sickly family heirlooms being distributed from the back of a van seemed inevitable, and it seemed she had no idea how crazy this looked to us as she smiled blithely through the whole exchange like this was the most natural thing in the world. And in her case, maybe it was. Perhaps, she really believed this outreach would help us. Because wouldn’t the offering of a water-logged box of plastic chess pieces or an antique horse-hair brush sans most of its bristles for our children make all the difference? Oh! And what about this golf bag for poppa with an incomplete set of rusty clubs rattling around in it? She hoisted it over the pile and into my arms, useless to me even if I did golf. But maybe, just maybe I thought bitterly, I could fashion it as a piñata for my baby daughter’s first birthday. Y’know, fill it with candy and beat the shit out of it with mixed company for an hour! That might help.
But here we see that compassion is a fragile thing. The empathy I had envisioned two paragraphs ago is suddenly replaced with a resentment wanting to bleed out of my fingers. With several keystrokes, it would be so easy, too easy, to crucify this poor soul right here and now in my word processor. I could answer all the questions on her behalf to my self-righteous satisfaction and could smugly claim my rightful place as one of the world’s wronged. Didn’t mother know that this visit, after all the trouble she’d given us in our youth, would not, could not, convince us of her devotion? No? Maybe? I can’t know for sure. But I know that this moment, this scene, represents the final threshold of my ability to tolerate her from that day forward, but symbolically, it also works backwards. It is the first gateway back through time with mother. The first of many episodes of my youth, sometimes full of wonderment and sometimes deep confusion.
This is where I ask myself, should I endure the journey and write an autobiographical account, every lit-worthy incident from an egoistic point of view? Could I avoid the moral hazards along the way?
She did hug and kiss us goodbye before she left. The only gift of that afternoon that really mattered. But I found myself bristling, not wanting to get near her. She smelled like the wilderness. Like the old ascetic whose walk through the world would never do anything but confound those still trying to live in it. She disappeared as strangely as she appeared, and who knew for how long.
We finally got around to the crying. First tears of uproarious laughter at the sheer cuckoo bananas of it. And then the sad, angry, wounded kind; there’s hardly any difference between the two. And one insidious thought circled around my head like a hungry buzzard — “at least I’m not related to this psycho! None of that in my blood!” I was the adopted son, you see, and the truth was that I had already cut my losses by that time. Or so I’d thought. But the buzzards continued to circle. “Not my mother,” was the incantation repeated incessantly in the days that followed. “She’s not me and I’m not her.” But nothing could have been further from the truth, and the vultures finally swooped in at the persistence of rotten logic.
- *Part 3: “Mr. MommaThon”
Guy Slater is an MFA@CIIS creative writing student who is working on an autobiographical fiction with the working title, “A Year of Amnesty.” His goal is to complete it by the end of the program.
