Memory #13

Once, when I was about four years old and travelling with Dad, we had to stop to find a restroom for me. It was probably late enough that most of the gas stations were closed. Dad found one, but the door to the bathroom was on the outside of the building. He had to ask for a key to open it.

Jenny and Justin waited in the car, I think. Dad and I walked in to find a singularly crummy-looking little bathroom. He looked frantic and told me I couldn't pee yet. I was embarrassed at the thought of using the toilet in front of my dad, but I was so desperate that I didn't really care, and I was displeased that he wanted me to wait. I begged him to just leave, or at least let me pee.

"You can't sit on that, it's filthy," he said, and began ripping toilet paper off and trying to lay it on the toilet seat. He couldn't cover the surface because the paper kept falling off into the water or onto the messy floor. He tried covering it in several different ways. I could see his frustration, but I didn't understand why the toilet offended him so badly, and I continued to plead. After a minute or two, he finally gave up and lifted me onto a seat strewn with segments of toilet paper like sparse paper maché. He looked truly defeated.

I thought he was being pretty silly at the time. Now I think it's one of the sweetest things I remember him doing.

Memory #12

Late March. An attractive little parcel, filled with trinket toys: lying unwrapped on a table next to the door in the sewing room.

"Muffitt?"

The sewing machine quiets momentarily.

"Yes, Amanda?"

"What's this?"

My grandmother turns. I am pointing at the toys. I hope the desperation doesn't show on my face.

She returns to her work. "It's a present."

"For who?"

"For a girl I know," she says. "I like her a lot."

A long pause, filled with strange humming and clacking noises from the machine. I feel confused and a little jealous. Some girl? This is my grandmother, after all.

"Why?"

"It's her birthday soon."

I think I hear a smile in her voice, but I cannot read between the lines without risking grave misinterpretation. "Oh," I murmur. "When's her birthday?"

"The same day yours is. Isn't that neat?"

For a few more moments I stand in the doorway, watching the back of her head. Then I retreat into the hallway.

Darn it.

Memory #11

Once Stephanie and I stayed at her grandpa's house, which was actually really close to mine. When her mom dropped us off, it was nighttime and he was nowhere to be seen. There is something fun about being alone in someone else's house, especially one that is unfamiliar and dimly lit, so I was pretty pleased to be there.

We set down our bags and kind of stood there for a minute, then Stephanie started looking for the TV remote and asked whether I'd ever seen Dr Quinn.

I hadn't, and subtly indicated a lack of interest.

Her shock was excessive, I thought. But I still didn't really want to watch the show, and began listing other possible activities.

We watched Dr Quinn.

I wore my hat the next day-- my favorite hat at the time, a plain black one with the Nike logo in white on the front.

Her grandpa was... either cleaning out his garage, or getting ready to sell the junk it contained. Because old stuff becomes more interesting right before you discard it, we nosed around in the boxes during the afternoon. I found a bottle of bubbles and secretly wished I could have one of my own.

Then we took a ride around his large backyard. The lawn mower we were sitting on was quite close to the ground and not a "riding" mower, but it was big enough to hold two kids. It traveled at a mind-bending five or ten miles per hour. My hat fell off as we swung into a particularly sharp curve, and the mower mutilated it before I knew what was happening. I yelled out, "Hey!" and somehow we stopped in about twenty excruciating seconds, but by that time we were several yards away from the small, pathetic black lump in the grass. I ran to it, picked it up, and stared at the shreds for a few moments, then returned in silence to the hat mower.

Memory #10

I think I entered a new stage in the process of maturity around the time I was ten. It was the winter after fifth grade, and I was at Crystal's house.

Her brothers and... some adult (her family were a little too complicated for my understanding)... were watching Beavis and Butthead on TV. I wasn't interested in the show. I really wasn't.

I felt a little self-righteous about it.

I knew it was rotten for me to feel that way at all. Imagine that a man, standing on the back end of the Titanic, looked down at all those poor, waterborne souls with pity. Imagine he felt another lurch beneath his feet, and imagine it drew his attention elsewhere.

It's the first time in memory that I was tempted to judge, and it's the first time I took responsibility for changing the way I was thinking.

Memory #9

I was seven or barely eight. I have no memory in my mind of the movie itself, just the clearest portrait of the view from my seat. The theatre was almost empty; the lights had just gone out. We were settled in the second- or third-highest row, to avoid the straining of the neck and bursting of the ear. I in the second seat left from the center aisle. My mother to my left, quite a head taller. A slight dip down again to the face of my grandmother, who was probably lamenting the effects of the cold on eight-year-old children. My mom was probably waiting for things to really begin before she revealed snacks in plastic bags from the smuggling depths of her purse. They were talking about something and, peering at them through the dark, I would never figure out what it was. They continued to generate wonderful effortless warmth, as always. It was perfect.

Memory #8

I always felt displaced in Ben Wash's house, like nobody actually lived there, even when one of his kids had a birthday with a pinãta downstairs, which should have clinched it for me.

One room once contained a very large portrait of two tigers, and if I remember correctly, it was propped against the wall. There were a couple of rooms into which I never ventured, which, in my experience, were kept dark. I was wary of them, and I wasn't allowed in one of them anyway.

Two big dalmatians were fenced into the back yard, behind the kitchen, and they always barked at me. I usually avoided the kitchen.

Bria taught me how to play a board game that originated in Africa, I think; it had little colored stones that you moved among compartments on the board.

Tabitha (who couldn't have been older than ten) had a Britney Spears cd and Ben made a sarcastic comment about how wholesome it was for her. I remember thinking, "You're one to talk."

He made us pasta once, for dinner. For some reason (and what follows is simply my thought at the time) it seemed surprising that someone so tall and thin, and so immature, could do something so parental as making a meal. Go figure.

One conversation sticks out in my mind, I guess because it startled me so much. I hadn't been to the house in a while. I sat down on one of the kids' bed and was talking to Bria when Ben walked in. He stood a couple of feet away and gave me a funny look.

"Who's this?"

Bria filled him in. "Amanda. You remember? She came over a few times before."

A pause. He stepped back and raised his eyebrows.

"...The Amanda? The girl with the ponytail-- that Amanda?"

It took me about three seconds to get it. Trying to hide my revulsion, I stared at him dryly.

He fake-laughed and said in a patronizing tone, "Oh, God, don't be scared. I'm not that sick."

As a thirteen-year-old, I had lofty dreams of converting Ben-- mostly through indirect, almost subliminal means such as cleverly worded Christian cds, because I knew I couldn't hold up my end of an argument with him. But whenever I actually stepped inside, all my fervor dissolved into bewilderment. He made half-jokes that I had surely heard terrible lies about him. He must've really thought I was horrified in his presence. I wasn't. I told him I wasn't. But I was sad.

Memory #7

I was up "late" one night (late would be around one in the morning when I was around ten or eleven) at Dad's house, and everyone else was asleep except Dad, who was somewhere in the back, working. None of the lights were on in the living room. I was sitting on the ground in front of the TV.

Dad had cable. I never had cable at home.

I turned on the television and started scanning the channels. Gave a couple of seconds of attention to each channel, but nothing held my interest. A cartoon I'd never seen, some movies nobody will ever remember, the news, a variety of equally boring talk shows.

I passed channel 100 and eventually landed on the Howard Stern show. He had two female guests and was talking and joking about their boobs. I was intrigued-- not by boobs, but by this guy with the hair and the headphones and no tact, and by the forbidden aspect of it all. Not quite half a minute in, my guilt overcame me and I turned off the TV.

Memory #6

I went to Dad's baseball games a couple of times. Once it was in the early evening, and once it was at night. The whole thing feels surreal and isolated because, to a little kid, the immediate surroundings were the only surroundings: the patchy and appealing face of a tiny hill; the smell of dirt and wet grass; the sickly halos of ten or twelve lights high in the air.

For a couple of minutes, once, I stood and tried to figure out what was happening in the game, but was baffled and quickly abandoned it.

I remember making a necklace from dandelions. Must have learned that from Jenny. I also liked to sneak around beneath the bleachers, which were the bare metal kind used outdoors, and were always a bit cold to the touch.

I felt so very by myself, like no one was watching me or telling me what to do (and I guess they often weren't), almost like no one was there except me. I was a little lonely, but I kind of liked it.

Memory #5

I used to make mud pies and mud cubes and other mud things with Shelby, who was my neighbor (to the right, or south) at the time.

I was thrilled that she had a huge play structure in a sandbox. I liked mine, but it was smaller and set on the grass. It was also older, and seemed to house a lot of insects.

The swings were meant for swinging and singing, for participating in how-high-can-you-get contests, and occasionally for reciting Disney movies. We twisted the chains around so much that their blue plastic covers ripped open, and we had to be careful not to get our fingers pinched in the links. Once when I was swinging high on the middle swing, the right chain snapped. I fell backward. That didn't do much damage, but it scared the heck out of me.

The vast expanse of sand was for burying things at first. My other neighbors' cat (to the left side) found a similar use for it, and eventually enough hard, old poop accumulated in the sand that we stopped digging.

We used the slide for everything but its intended purpose-- sat under it, buried things under it, dropped a variety of things down it, and so on. It was often coated in rainwater.

The "fort" part was a great place to sit and feel exclusive. It was especially convenient for secret snacks, such as raspberries that grew on the fence behind the sandbox. Technically the bush belonged to the other neighbors (to the back). We felt justified in eating its fruit, though, when we were told we couldn't have cookies because dinner was approaching.

I once told Emily, Shelby's little sister, that we wouldn't let Shelby "ruin our day" (she was being grumpy). She overheard me and I felt kind of bad, went inside later and told my mother, who told me I could have shown more benevolence. I felt even worse then, and I think I tried to make it up to her in kind gestures, but I never apologized.

We used to play tag a lot. Hide-and-go-seek was also really fun because there were so many places to hide: all around their big house, and behind trees, and around the shed, even inside it. We rode bikes and in the summer we watched for the boys across the road, when they stayed with their grandparents. The younger one, Duke, cried frequently. His grandma yelled at him even more frequently. I didn't respect her much, although I didn't show it.

Shelby's dad would stand outside after work and smoke. I remember his moustache and his voice. Kind of gruff, but not especially deep or scary. He was a nice guy, as far as I could tell; and I liked Denise, Shelby's mom, although she was rather tall and intimidating. When they divorced, I felt miserable for their kids. The dad moved out, and the others moved away a year or two afterward.

Memory #4

During the first semester in Rochester, I was lost for maybe twenty minutes before I finally scrapped my self-importance and stopped at a gas station. The cashier was Middle Eastern; he gave me perfect directions with an accent. I was almost pleased I'd got lost.

Memory #3

One Christmas, when the tree was in the living room, Justin started to talk about the possibility of sleeping under it. I was about six, and once the idea was in my head, I couldn't let it go. With some pestering we got permission from our mother. Jenny (about fifteen then) only stayed under the tree for a while, and I felt a fair amount of distress when she got up to go sleep in her bed, but the feeling passed.

All I could see from the floor were those convincing plastic tree branches in the dark, and dangling ornaments (half of them our own creations), all glowing with the light of a hundred little blue and green stars. My favorite ornament, a trio of iridescent glass bells, hung close to the bottom of the tree. I played with it before I fell asleep. I didn't think things could get much better.

Memory #2

When I was around twelve I heard a new name on television, and I skated into the kitchen on my socks, where my mother was stirring something in the brownish-tinted glass pot on the stove. "Who's Marilyn Manson?" I asked. Her expression of pain almost made me sorry I'd brought it up.

Memory #1

At Lindsey's house we played Nintendo games like Donkey Kong-- well, more like I watched Lindsey and Tyler play them, because I was a terrible player myself.

And then there was Rickers, which was a lot closer to her house than to mine. We'd scrounge for change to get food there.

Her garage felt secluded and a little frightening, the walls were partially covered in bare insulation material, and it was usually cold in the winter, but it was worth staying in there just to consume our food in privacy. And the computer was in the garage, and that meant Photo Safari, Mudball Wall, Stickerworld, and made-up games in Microsoft Paint and Word.

I distinctly remember, one afternoon, playing the Life game in the dim clutter of her room (she had a lot of knickknacks, many of them cat-related, and posters and pages torn from magazines, mostly of the Backstreet Boys). I would act embarrassed and make jokes if I ended up with a lot of the tiny blue and pink plastic pegs which represented children... but inwardly I was pleased with the idea. I definitely wanted to be a mom someday.

Sometimes we'd go outside until it got dark, and anywhere from one to four of the neighborhood kids would come out and we'd use chalk and play games on the street.

Once when it was snowy I threw a snowball toward a car, not meaning to hit it at all, but kind of experimenting with my own audacity. It brushed the back wheel on the right and rolled down the street. The driver backed up (a messy task in that weather) to tell me off, and I just kind of looked at him. I don't remember anything he said, because I didn't care much. After that one of the girls went home and told her mom, and the next time I went to that girl's house to meet her and Lindsey, their heads appeared at the door and told me I wasn't allowed to come in. That felt scummy.

I think it was the next year that Lindsey told me her winter gloves were always coming apart and her dad wouldn't buy her new ones, so I bought her some at Kohl's.