When I first heard about this woman, her sudden dislocation
seemed familiar. My mind returned to a time I’d pestered my family for
details about my dad – He died when I was two – and the moment of
vertigo that resulted.
A few years ago my uncle told me about the red GTI my dad drove
in high school. My uncle recalled what it felt like when my dad drove
him around, and how it made him the coolest guy in the neighborhood.
It reminded me of a picture I have of my dad in a white t-shirt in a
pose that might’ve passed for cool in suburban Boston in the 60s. The
picture and the story made sense together. He wasn’t just the guy who
studied piano and took the T to attend open rehearsals of the BSO. He
took on a hint of depth. Some added shading. An urge to break free,
yes, that’s it! There was something fast, something alluring about him
now.
A few months later I sat at my grandparents’ kitchen table in
Maine. My grandmother does most of the talking in that house, and she
doesn’t talk much about my dad. When she does, she veers off course,
recalling the time they all toured Europe, and soon she’s recounting
the hotels they stayed at and the restaurants they ate at, and the
waiters – don’t forget those! Soon I’m listening to a homily about how
waiters in Europe are just so much better than they are in the States.
Any mention of my dad disappears in the first 30 seconds. She shifts
topics so effortlessly it was years before I noticed her doing it.
“Grandma, I heard dad had a GTI in high school. Whatever
happened to it?”
“A GTI?” she sputtered. “Where’d you get that?”
“Uncle Rob told me.”
She mulled it over and shook her head. “I never would’ve let him
have a car,” she said. “I wasn’t that kind of mother.”
I glanced at a family portrait on the wall, her children groomed
and seated around the piano, backs erect, hair combed, in descending
order of height. Even the dog had good posture. She didn’t run her
family in a way that could accommodate a GTI, so the car didn’t exist.
My grandmother kneaded the table cloth with her fingers, smoothing out
wrinkles that weren’t there. She does this when she frets and has
nothing else to do. She was trying to figure out how my uncle could be
so mistaken.
“The car must’ve belonged to Rick,” she concluded. “The kid
across the street. He was more that kind of boy.”
She’d come up with an explanation that seemed reasonable to her
and put the matter to rest, but I felt the floor shift beneath me.
I’ll never know the elusive details about my dad, but I thought they
could agree on whether three thousand pounds of metal sat in the
driveway. I suppose, if I’m willing to deal with the archives of the
DMV, a piece of paper might settle the question. If it exists. Or I
could lock my family in a room till they sift through their
recollections, cross-examine each other, untangle, assess, bully,
compromise – whatever you do when someone’s memory doesn’t conform to
your own. But if they reached a consensus would it bring them closer
to the truth?
In a courtroom, at least, the question of what happened seems
beside the point. The defense attorney may grimace in frustration at
her client, but she’ll never ask him if he’s guilty. The DA tries to
construct a compelling story, the defense tries to poke holes in it,
and the jury sits in a box, looking back and forth between them,
trying to figure out who to believe.
The process grows murkier when witness testimony is involved. I
came across an article in the Stanford Journal of Legal Studies by
Laura Engelhardt, who explores how difficult it is for juries to
assess other people’s stories. She refers to a study in which
participants are shown slides of a car crash with a yield sign in the
background. When investigators refer to a stop sign instead, the
memories of many participants change accordingly. When they’re asked
to guess how fast the cars were going when they “hit” or “smashed”
into each other, they judge the speed of the vehicles differently
depending on the word that was used. Some even remember seeing shards
of glass; the problem, of course, is there wasn’t any. If we look for
gaps in a story, they may not exist, because the storyteller
unconsciously invented details to understand the experience even as it
happened. They redraw lines again in response to the slight pressure
of our questions and the current circumstance. This evolution of
meaning, how it comes together and shifts with each retelling, is what
“making sense” really means. There’s a GTI out there somewhere, sure,
but what color it was and who drove it may be beyond our reach. The
ground keeps shifting beneath us.
That first line follows the contours of the model’s face, but
it’s off a fraction of an inch. Everything follows that first mistake
until, oh, there’s another, unnoticed when it first appeared. After
years spent gazing at people, we sit down, grab a sketch pad and
charcoal and panic as we realize we have no idea – we’ve never had an
idea – how the eyes actually relate to the face. The nose. The lips.
God, how do they go together?
3.
A few years ago I sat in a café with a friend of my dad’s, sharing
muffins and coffee, and mentioned the frustration I felt trying to get
reliable details about his life. Should I do research? Go to the DMV?
Do a séance?
“No,” he said. “This sounds New Age, I know, but look within yourself.
He’s there. I can see him.”
Other people have said this to me. My grandparents often called me by
my dad’s name growing up. Who knows why. The way I cross my legs when
seated? My laugh? When my grandparents traveled to Philadelphia for my
sister’s wedding, I’m sure my dad, that broken link between us, was
weighing on their mind. When my grandfather saw me before the ceremony
he burst into tears, thinking I was him, that my dad had materialized
thirty years after he died. I watched him turn away and realized, yet
again, how a powerful need alters perception, how easy it is to
mistake one thing for another, how memory and identity are soft, like
wax, easily impressed upon.
I look up and see the F train sitting at my stop. I get out,
walk the eight blocks home, and find a package waiting there. It’s a
CD transfer of an old reel-to-reel of my dad and mom talking to me.
We’d discovered the original in her garage. I finger the CD as I climb
the stairs to my apartment. What an odd thought – I’m thirty years old
and going to hear my dad’s voice for the first time. I’d seen
photographs of him, sure, but it wasn’t until I saw him move for the
first time in a silent movie that I decided I missed the sound of his
voice most of all.
I walk in, drop my keys on the speaker, and sit cross-legged on
the floor. When I listen to the CD, my dad’s voice sounds more alien
than I expected. Maybe it’s his Boston accent. It’s so thick. Then my
mom’s voice appears and I realize I don’t recognize her either. How’s
that possible? I’ve talked to her at least once a week for 30 years.
Is it the Maine accent she still had in her 20s? Is she anxious
talking into a mic with a reel-to-reel humming nearby? When copies of
the CD arrive at my grandparents’ house, they don’t recognize my dad’s
voice. They write to ask who that weird guy is on Track 1. My uncle,
too, frowns when he hears it. He wonders if my dad’s trying to sound
funny because he’s talking to me as a baby. It’s only my mom’s memory
of the day they made the recording that convinces me the voice is his,
though it makes me wonder how my grandparents can hear my dad’s voice
in my laughter but not recognize a recording of his voice. The mind
draws connections on its own – or refuses to – regardless of our
intentions.
I climb to the roof of my apartment building and look back
toward the cranes in Red Hook, which never seem to move, then north,
where the art teacher, a friend of mine, prepares another lesson.
Tomorrow he’ll bring in a portrait of a human face cut into small
squares so the features are unidentifiable. He’ll give each student a
square, tell them to draw what they see, then assemble the drawings on
the wall and voila! The lines at the edge of each page won’t quite
line up, but the portrait, nine, ten feet tall, will be hauntingly
accurate, much more so than any of them could do alone. “It happens
each time I do this,” he’s told me. “Though not one of them could draw
the whole face themselves.”
Why is that? We’ve talked about it on and off for years. and
still have no idea. Maybe we can only see what we don’t recognize.
Maybe recognition is a distraction, an excuse to stop paying attention.
Somewhere, farther out, I suspect, you’ve left the office and
boarded the train. Seated, standing, scrunched with other commuters,
you keep drawing connections between the unexpected and what you know
until, day-weary, you drop your keys, wallet and charcoal on the hall
stand, wash the smudge off your palm, and turn to bed. It’s a miracle
any of us, our attention always divided, caught between sketch pad and
model, can lose ourselves long enough to follow a plucky toaster
through his day, get to know the little guy, and still not miss our
stop in Brooklyn.
In a room near the end of the F line, the six year-old climbs
into bed. She’s nervous. The hum of the refrigerator sounds ominous
coming from the darkened hallway. Her mom reaches for the book she
read on the subway. She turns to the last page.
“See,” she smiles, finishing. “The world’s not a scary place.
Even appliances are like us.”
We hear those words, or something like them, again and again our whole
lives, and still find them comforting.
