“Lindsey French,” shrieked a voice
slim and slender, from across the parking lot of the local,
brand-name drug store, “is it really you?”
Unhesitatingly I sensed the speaker's
aim was myself. When I looked at her, I recognized a former friend
of my mother, reexamining the town of her youth, the same weekend I
was home for a visit.
“Just the other day I was talking to
Wendy,” she continued from across the narrow, town center street,
“and she was saying...”
She'd confused me with my mother,
excluding a thirty year history as if it were 1987. Since then, my
mother had married, labored, and aged. This stranger'd mistook me
for my mother in miniature, a thirty year regression as if time could
pass without consequence.
“Have you seen what they've done to
downtown? A travesty about that old...”
She'd moved, now a line from her to me,
transfixed Main St. perfectly perpendicular. So close she stood,
separated by asphalt like a desert, and I searching for a refuge from
the unrelenting deluge of ancient and irrelevant information. But
the leaves upon the boughs offered no shelter, and no rock offered a
lee: there were only pebbles and crumbs of paving within sight.
“Now if I looked as young as you did,
strangers might mistake...”
How does she not know? And yet why
should she. We are both visitors in Massachusetts this day. I left
at the age of eighteen for out-of-state education, and she traveled
in search of other opportunities when she separated from her husband
twenty years ago. These facts, are gleaned from the babble bubbling
out of her mouth, though the dialogue is omitted. As visitors,
casually passing in orbit, as unlikely as two comets visiting Earth
on the same hour, her mind remembers one face, my mothers, and it is
mine. As I think these hopeless thoughts, a gray strand of hair
falls across my face. The back of my right hand brushes across my
brow, I'm looking, and I'm realizing. That wasn't there before. No
time to reflect, her questioning remains relentless.
“I never was able to see that house
you planned to build for yourself. At five Hillside Dr, right?”
A pause on my end, like might occur
between two participants of a phone call: unable to see, to sense,
the facial cues. But her body issues a request for recognition, and
I'm required to comply. My chin makes an awkward swooping movement,
like a hawk's dive for prey, or a rock rolling down a slope. As my
head returns to parallelity with the pavement, I tilt it a bit to the
right, to avoid reciprocal eye contact. Yet, how long can I play the
game, avoid being who another assumes they am? Standing with feet
planted firmly, as if pinned beneath the paws of a panther, I had too
much time to reflect before the next blow, and no where to go.
“I was on the phone with Sarah the
other day, and she regaled me with that funny story...”
I'd heard it before. Asked my mom
about the scar on her elbow stretching a thumb-length. Her and Sarah
were riding their bikes, and in an attempt to avoid a pothole, Sarah
shifted toward my mother. In a second, handlebars tangled, and
another left them both on the pavement, but Sarah on top. My hand
takes another trip, and I realize there's a mark on my elbow. I've
seen it before, but not on my skin.
“And your children, they must be
grown...”
How foolish that she can't see enough
to leave alone. With children of my own, but I'm not as old as she
imagines me. “The oldest is thirty,” I reply, the meaning of my
words translated and transformed by her self-assured, unaware,
persistence
“And are you still working at the
daycare?
The needle moves closer, searching for
who I am, though widely missing the mark. Should I be defined by my
occupation, by that which occupies my time, but not my mind? Her
unwillingness to see strikes at the kernel of my being as a distinct
person. There is a me, an I, that is not my mother, not my father,
not my sister, nor my brother. Not my husband or my son, or my
daughter.
“Do you remember the day you, Cathy,
and the others went down to the Cape for...”
How did she come to be standing beside
me? A revere has engulfed my senses. How long have I vacillitated
here, and... the smell of salt, the sun bursting against the sky like
a ripe peach, and the sand against my skin, while Wendy stretches to
catch the sun, with Cathy and Sarah skirting along the foaming edge
of the sea.
“Do you remember,” this friend of
mine says again.
The searing pain in the feet is nothing
compared, if one catches the Frisbee as I do, for an instant free of
discomfort, and then the blistering experience isn't confined to the
feet. Congratulations are shared.
The needle isn't seeking but
embroidering over, replacing the old, with the older.
“Do you remember,” she says,
seeking the answer I'm compelled to utter, for now it is true, I do
remember. But I needn't speak, she already knows, her callousness
has reconstructed me as the object of her desire. In a final spasm
of will, I look away, eyes seeing the library I knew in my youth, no
longer certain of whose, and then down to the pavement, like a
character so desperate to ignore their impending doom they'd entwine
all their intelligence on a dandelion pushing through a crack in the
sidewalk.
Then I can answer. “Of course I
remember. Have you seen Sarah recently, Diane?
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