Forget me not
29 April 2011 08:27 AM Categories: Memoir
The muddy bottom of the Bohemia glittered with Budweiser bottles, the emerald necks of Molson 12-ouncers submerged jewels peeking out of the muck. Above, his daysailer, an stretched oval of white, bobbed in the wake of a speedboat. We were joined like in porno below the jib. From the marina a pair of binoculars focused on us, the watcher's eyes trained on the fools in the boat who believed in the false privacy of an almost-empty river.
"I don't know if I love him anymore," I thought afterwards, pulling a beer from the pack, letting him adjust the sail so the wind could drag us back home. We were browned and bleached by sun, by Saturday afternoons on the water. A starburst of new freckles marked his right shoulder blade. I counted them, added them up. Every trip started with a struggle, first with the boat as we pulled it from its grassy hiding place, next with him as we moved the daysailer onto the rollers and slipped it into the brown water. I could do nothing right.
If glass is made of out of sand, is the substrate holding the liquid in place, then we were returning the bottles to their rightful place, sending them home. The bottles became worm homes, mud collectors. They carried the memory of what they once were, of being small enough to sift through his fingers. The shards on asphalt, loose mosaics on the edge of driveways, scattered into cornfields, were part of the process, too, the breakdown, the slow return of glass to rock to sand again.
"I don't know if love him anymore." The thought followed us up the street to his parent's house. Inside, it smelled like him: spicy with a hint of sawdust, like soap, like freshly-dried paint. His mother, a rangy woman, gangly and tanned, was cutting the grass. We walked downstairs to his room and I collapsed into him, breathing him in, his family, the threatening safety, the years of sameness that would await. From the window, his mother's feet did their dance with the mower, the tip-toe push and back-up, her calves rippling with each move. He wrapped his arms around me as if I was a child.
I can hold on to a moment for as long as my memory holds out. I can warm myself with love, the love object, the glow of his attention. I can take the walk after dark cozied up to my man, telling my secrets, letting the tears flow in the dark. But I can't make the moment last forever. Eventually, the road beckons and I become a cliché of non-commitment: If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me? Because I will remember everything about you.
Instead, I remember landscape: the crumbling decrepitness of fallow cornfields in the moonlight, the languidness of July air after midnight, the crackle of dead leaves on the oak as the new growth forced them out.
That evening, I found a baby rabbit by the birdbath, tiny enough to be practically newborn. My grandfather had cleared out the undergrowth at the birdbath's concrete base and left it homeless. I tended to it with an eye dropper and sugar water, made a nest in a shoebox. I let the creature sleep next to me, cuddled up against me for warmth. When I woke up, it was dead, crushed by my weight.
Motherless animals don't stand a chance.
He stopped by late the next night. I recorded it like a photograph, like a movie: a knock on the door, my head pressing into his chest, the thin fabric of his sleeveless t-shirt soft against my cheek. I switched the television off. Every night was what if, the romance of not knowing, the worry of the no show. He redeemed me again and I forgot my worries about love for the moment, for the sweet moment when he hovered above me.
Image: Small rabbit, Summer 1985.
I've taken license with space and time in this post, compressed events from a couple of summers together.
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