Turning Into a Shade of Someone Else

“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?

Comments