Chasing Memories
A few months will go by and I will realize that the images
haven’t invaded my mind—a sort of remission. It’s a relief and then a reminder.
Some sensory thing will bring it back to me, a misstep on concrete, looking
over a railing in a shopping mall and feeling the familiar stomach drop, or
brushing against peeling paint on a window sill. Then, I am there.
It was summer, I was 7 or 8. Annoyingly, the specifics of
some parts of that day are lost to me…my exact age, the city we were in, the
name of the hotel. I want to know, I want to physically go back there for some
reason. But I can’t. The rest of the details, for a span of probably 10 minutes
or so, are terribly clear. Vivid. I wake to those details many nights, sweating
and with my heart pounding visibly through my nightgown. There have been
several nights when I have had to get up and change the sheets after waking to
find I have been sweating terribly for most of the night. I wake to a damp, hot
and cold cocoon, and peel myself out of it. The last two nights have been that
way.
It is ten minutes of my life. But it won’t leave me.
My mother, father and I were on a vacation somewhere. I am
fairly sure we were at a beach (maybe Florida?). I think we were there for a
short time, maybe traveling with my father while he worked somewhere. I
remember wearing a yellow bathing suit, and that our room was small, but opened
to a balcony. Our view looked straight across a courtyard to rows and levels of
rooms and balconies just like ours, a mirror reflection of middle-income
weekend-getaway style. Many floors below (maybe 8, maybe 10?) and to the left,
a turquoise swimming pool shimmered and made reflections on the ceiling of our
balcony- little glimmers of light thrown from far below, beckoning me to the
water.
The TV was on, I was bored, nothing was out of the ordinary.
I heard the familiar clunking sound of the cooler being opened, and then my
father immersing his hand into the icy water and melted ice, finding one of the
colder cans of beer in the bottom. My whole life, anytime we have stayed in a
hotel, and long before mini-fridges were the norm in each room, my father’s
first order of business was to fill the large orange Igloo cooler with ice at
the automatic machine to chill the innumerable beers he had just purchased somewhere
nearby.
So, today was no different than any other time, any other
trip. My memories of my father almost always include a beer in his hand, for
years and years, a Pabst Blue Ribbon can. That image, that red white and blue
logo and lettering, is part of my childhood. What is odd is that he hid the
effects so well. My estimation is that he was almost constantly buzzed or drunk—all
the time. But, he wasn’t a stumbling, jobless, word-slurring drunk. He had
somehow managed to conquer the tell-tale signs for the public. At home we saw
longer stretches of inebriation and violent outbursts, but to be honest, over
my whole life living in the house with him and my mother, and for the many
years I tried to go home for holidays and have a normal life, more often than
not, he seemed fine. If someone dropped in to visit, nothing seemed amiss. The flipside
of that, though, was that we could all be sitting around the dinner table and
something…nothing… would cause a reaction from him so unexpected, so shocking,
that the rest of the evening blurred afterwards for me.
So this day, in this hotel, was just that way. There were no
loud voices, no provocations, just all of the sudden the air in the room was
different. He was different.
I was sitting on the bed in my bathing suit, watching TV,
and in what seemed like a split second, my father had picked me up off the bed
by my wrists, and spun me around. He wasn’t angry, he wasn’t upset, he was
actually laughing.
What might have been normal father-daughter interactions
were always laced with trepidation for me. Today, in particular, I noticed his
grip on me was weak, faltering. It turned a light hearted moment into one of me
assessing how close he was spinning me to the glass door and the corner of the
nightstand.
He then carried me out onto the balcony and before I could
think or protest, flung me over the railing of the balcony, dangling me, eight
or so stories up. He was laughing and joking with me. At first, I struggled,
but then became paralyzed with fear, especially as he seemed oblivious to the
danger of the situation.
He pulled me up over the edge, back onto the balcony, and
looked puzzled at the expression on my face, and my tears. He began teasing me
for crying. He was still laughing, and looked absolutely shocked at my
reaction. My mother was standing near the open door of the patio, but said
nothing. She had a distant, faraway look.
She never said anything. To me or to him.
As if to prove it was all in fun, my father scooped me up
again and again, repeating the same steps, holding me over the railing longer
and longer. I scraped the back of my heels against the peeling, painted
concrete, trying to somehow climb backwards onto the safety of the balcony. I looked
down and tried to will the pool to move underneath where I was hanging, instead
of the patches of grass and sidewalk that were directly below me. I felt his
grip slipping a few times, and I was terrified he was going to drop me, let me
slip away.
Each time I was finally back safe in the room, I was a
wreck, and crying loudly for my mother to make him stop—pleading with him--
telling him he was scaring me. In his drunken haze, he was just more confused.
In my mother’s life-saving veil of denial, she couldn’t be in that room. She
was there, but not there. It wasn’t happening.
Those last two sentences did not come easily to me. Over the
years, I remembered that episode in my life with so much bitterness. I
remembered a drunken, uncaring man who saw his little girl terrified and wanted
to keep scaring her. I saw a mother in that room who didn’t care and did
nothing. Those statements are both true and untrue. There is reality and then
there is the whole picture.
As it is with all occurrences like this from my past, I have
no one I can go to and say—“do you remember this? Can you tell me more about
that day?” These things simply didn’t happen in the world my parents
live in. My father, in truth, can’t remember a lot of things in his alcohol-soaked
past. My mother may remember somewhere in her lost soul, but she can’t let
herself.
All of this realization came after years of therapy, and in
particular, one night in a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Washington DC. It
has been over a decade now since I sat in the floor of the self-help aisle in
that bookstore and pulled book after book off the shelf about living with an
alcoholic parent. At that point, I wanted to understand my father more, I was
trying to solve the mystery of it all. I had just started admitting the reality
of my life to myself. I wanted to know how my father came to be this person,
and what kind of person it was making me.
What I found instead was words on a page that described my
mother in such intricate and perfect detail that I was frozen in that spot. Her
denial, her absolute inability to look back and help me piece things together. Over
the years, I had tried desperately to shake answers from her, questioning her,
reminding her of dates, holidays, what I was wearing on a particular night—trying
to jog her memory to give me the answers to all the whys I had for so many incidents.
She would reply with a blank stare, a confused expression, and finally
exasperation that I was “misremembering” or worse, making up things.
It had haunted me. Was I crazy?
Did I imagine these nights, these outbursts?
No, I hadn’t. And as I read the words through my tears that
night at Barnes & Noble, I knew that what I was reading was true. No one
could write about what I was living with such accuracy unless it was happening
to others, unless it was real, unless one thing led to
another. My father was an alcoholic, my mother was a typical spouse of an
alcoholic. I was also on my way to becoming a statistic. Depression was ruling
my life at that point, I had broken down more than a few times. I had been in
therapy, but I hadn’t been honest. Secrets were a way of life in our house, and
they were kept with an unspoken promise. I hadn’t told anyone the truth of my
life, the truth of it all. The main reason I hadn’t was that I felt I
was somehow the reason for it all. I had always felt that way. I felt if I had
been a better child, a better daughter, my father wouldn’t be the way he was,
and my mother wouldn’t be the way she was. If only I had been better, our lives
would have been different.
That night in the bookstore was a turning point for me. Many
more years of therapy, truth telling, and realizations lay ahead of me. If I
had known how many, I might not have kept going. It was a long road from there
to here, just to understand days like the one in that hotel. And I do
understand it, I do. But it still haunts me.
Tonight it hit me that I have so much uncertainty in my life right now,
and I feel so out of control. Maybe the reason this dream has visited
me the last few nights is that feeling of being out of control was so present in
that moment. Maybe it is one of the first times I remember feeling that way.
Maybe the two are connected.
Maybe not.
In my dream, all the details of that day are the same except the end. In
my dream, he loses his grip, and I am falling and falling…it seems like
forever. And just before I hit the ground, I wake up, gasping for air.
A part of me wishes I could remember where it all happened
so I could go to that hotel, find that exact room, and step out on that
balcony. I want to look over the railing and sigh with relief that it was only
a floor or two up, not a long drop at all. I want to realize that he hadn’t put
me in as much danger as I thought, that I was just being a child, being scared,
seeing things as worse than they were in my mind. He didn’t nearly let me slip
away. I always wonder if that would put this memory to rest once and for all.
But like so many things in my past, so many similar memories,
I won’t get that type of closure. I would likely get something worse- that it
was all just as I remember it, just as scary, just as bad.
I would just be chasing memories, going in circles, getting
nowhere. There is nothing deeper in that ten minutes than what I know it to be.
I believe I am at peace with that, but for whatever reason, that day still has
a hold on me.
And I will be here, waiting, until it lets me go.
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