Long-form Narrative | Memoir
Slipping Past Memory is a long-form narrative exploring childhood instability, memory, and trauma through layered structure and metaphor. The following excerpt is taken from the opening chapter.
Chapter One
The Epicenter
The outer crust of the earth is comprised of constantly moving tectonic plates. Sometimes, the friction creates so much stress that the rocks break and slip past each other on a fault. Then, they erupt in seismic waves that travel with such force that the ground becomes unstable and what was created to sustain life consumes it instead.
Situated so close to the New Madrid Fault line, our mobile home was vulnerable to seismic hazards. Pressure beneath the surface. Quiet shifts and tremors signaling the looming threat of something larger on its way.
Even in my earliest years, before I had language to express it, I understood instability.
My mother got a job at the shoe factory when I started kindergarten. In the long carefree days before the school bell became my master and the timeclock hers, her soap operas framed our days.
I was too young to understand why the people on television were always leaving, crying, and fainting. The characters and plot lines were beyond my comprehension, but the rhythm grounded me. The introductory music and the narrator’s voice defined the day.
“Last time, on All My Children…”
My mother was happy, quiet, and settled in on the plaid couch.
Don’t. Make. A. Sound.
”That damn Erika Kane…” to the backdrop of One Life to Live intro music. “…they oughtta know her by know… that Jack Montgomery is one good-looking man, but he sure is stupid… Amy Lynne! You ok?”
“Yes,” I yelled.
“Previously on One Life to Live…”
Mother continued to talk to herself throughout, getting up and down through commercials. “I gotta keep myself awake.”
Whisper to the furry friends in the floor. Don’t you dare mess up the bed. Let’s get in the closet so we can play.
Then the sirens introducing General Hospital.
And the sound of her quiet sleep.
Breathe free. Put up everything. Smooth out the wrinkles just in case.
“I can’t believe I did it again,” to the backdrop of the outro music. “Lord…Amy Lynne! You better not be into anything!”
Breathe lightly. Easy does it.
I was only four and I could predict it. Why couldn’t she?
“Your brother will be home in a minute, and he’ll be watching his shows. But you can watch something until then if you want to.”
I’d settle in on the couch. Then she’d pick up the yellow phone from the flowery kitchen wall and dial a number. She stretched the coiled cord across the kitchen to the avocado stove. She’d chop, stir, wash and dial, mining all seven of her sisters for what she missed on today’s episode in exchange for her thoughts on my lazy and nasty aunt Annette, my sorry drunk grandaddy, my drunk-biggest-problem-in-our-marriage uncle, and my sorry-ass-good-for-nothing-piece-of-shit daddy, and finally, how she couldn’t wait for me to go off to Kindergarten so she could have some peace and quiet.
I’d go back to my room after I heard it the second or third time.
Every now and then, she would call my name and every time, I would run to her.
Some hope is just stubborn like that.
But she’d banish me off with the swish of her hand.
A concrete message that only my body is required.
Though the paper-thin walls kept me safe from her view, nothing could stop the pressure waves from transmitting the narrative slipping through the cracks.
Constantly moving through the air.
The brain processes the past in different ways. The left side remembers the cold hard facts – gives sequence to the events in our memory – records numbers, dates, and stats. The right side stores emotions and records the senses – the smell of smoke to a house fire survivor, the taste of the cool whip that ignited vomiting once before, the sound of fireworks to one returning from war, the sight of a baby to a grieving mother, and human touch to a person abused – just to name a few. Most of the time, both hemispheres work together.
But some events shake things up and leave a fissure in place of what should be continual flow.
Cracking.
Shifting.
Breaking.
My mother and me. Two tectonic plates inching along as the world slowly turned.
I have a vague memory of two mornings when she approached me with something that looked like joy. Once she invited me to exercise with her. Though I hated twisting with the oldies, I dressed in my pantyhose and shorts wanting to please her. When she burst out laughing at my outfit, I forced myself to laugh too. The other time, we went for a walk on a bright sunny morning. I remember this day because I made my first friend just around the corner a few houses away from ours.
Mostly what I remember about mornings was the frenzied cleaning. I once asked her how the floor got clean with all that black water she mopped it with and learned quickly that she was not open to questions about her methods. She wiped at the stove with the dishrag, then the table, and the fridge, then dusted the living room with it.
Her anxiety rose and fell like dust particles as the clock ticked toward noon and if I was quiet, the dust settled. I know she must’ve fed me, but my memory doesn’t recall nourishment. What does remain is the memory of the waiting. No matter how I twist the lens on my scope, I see the kid waiting, watching, hoping in the hallway or cross-legged in the floor of her room listening to the inner ache of a longing that rumbled louder than hunger.
Louder that the rise and fall of my mother’s moods. Unpredictable, but somehow rhythmic as breath.
Trauma disrupts the brain’s left hemisphere causing a disordering of events. With no capacity to organize events in sequential order, comprehension of cause and effect is disabled. When cause and effect reasoning is disabled, the concept of consequences is lost. The absence of causal comprehension disables planning for the future – which makes one think that they are stuck in the traumatic event forever.
The rocks break.
The plates shift.
The earth rumbles.
My father’s evening arrival thinned the air a bit. He let me jump in his arms the minute he got home unless he was extra greasy. I always lifted the big sharpie from his uniform shirt pocket as my arms snaked around his neck. I could get in two or three good sniffs before he recognized what was happening. I couldn’t understand how something that smelled so good could be so bad. Eventually though, my father learned to hide toxic things like sharpies, spray paint, and gas cans. The same way he hid his pictures in his big black chest in the shed.
I had a propensity for inhaling toxic things.
He lay on the living room floor every evening, where we’d wrestle around until my mother yelled, “Would ya’ll quiet down? I’m on the phone!” He’d roll his eyes and put a finger over a conspiratorial grin, and I’d snicker and breathe in the certainty that we were a team.
After dinner, bath, and TV time, he’d read to me. I had many books to choose from, but I chose the same one every time: The Monster at the End of this Book. I was fascinated by his ability to lift words off the page and birth story from his lips. I’d watch the words on the page, watch his lips pronounce them, and try my best to understand the formula of translation. Once, he put his chubby finger with the greasy fingernail out onto the page and pointed out warning words, “Stop. “Do not.” Nails, boards, and brick walls, all warning us to stop turning the pages that we kept on turning despite the warnings.
The big black chest with the big silver lock.
I determined then that those words had meaning and that I must figure out how to read books to myself. I memorized the words, line by line, practicing when he was at work and daydreaming of the day when we would sit down to read it and I would smartly read it to him instead. I dragged arm loads of students around with me from one side of my tiny room to the other – lions, tigers, and Raggedy Anne along with my favorite blanket and that book – and I practiced reading to them, every day, all the work-day long until at last, the day arrived that my mother had long waited for.
Chapter Two
Seismic Waves
She took me to the wrong school on my first day of kindergarten. As we walked across the broken asphalt, she took my hand and said, “Finally, you’ll be out of my hair.” The school walls were a pukey green that peeled like reptilian scales. A kind black lady met us just inside the double doors and explained something to my mother and grandmother as I breathed in the smells of lead paint and moldy books that unto this day remind me of hope.
Back in the car, after my grandmother pulled the long yellow Pontiac onto the highway and the school was out of sight, my mother half-whispered, “I didn’t know they still had black schools,” her face wrinkled into a scowl of confusion.
“I didn’t either.”
“Well, she did say that this would be their last year open. Surely, they hadn’t stayed open all these years like that. Idn’t that against the law? Lord, Lord. I can’t believe it. Well, where’s the white school then?”
My grandmother shook her head and drove us to the other end of town, turned left, crossed the bumpy railroad tracks, and headed down the hill to my new school as my mother droned on and on about the black school across town.
Just like at our Sunday school, there were black and white children, even though my mother had planted in my head the expectation of a classroom with only white kids. When I asked my teacher out loud, with the innocent curiosity of a five-year-old, why the black kids didn’t go to the school across town, the mystery was solved when she gave our class a history lesson about our town. She explained that the school across town had been a high school that was closing because a new high school had been built. It was not a black school at all.
My mother had misinterpreted the message that was delivered to her by the kind black lady, and it was these kinds of misunderstandings that would mark many memorable moments in years to come.
School was my favorite place on earth. I colored the red apple sheet over and over and when it was time to go home, I asked my teacher for copies to take home. She smiled and gave me a new stack every day.
When my teacher walked me to the double doors to hand me off to my mother each day, she would go on and on about how quiet and well-behaved I was.
“I don’t think I’ve met a child who loves to learn as much as her,” she’d report.
“I wish she was that way at home,” my mother huffed.
And as we walked the fifteen-minute walk to Mull Street, she’d say, “Now, why can’t you be that good at home, huh? And speed up would ya?”
By the time we got home, she’d be so worked up that her fussing soured to threats. I could never wrap my head around how to meet her standard of goodness, but I understood full well what would happen to me if I didn’t. She’d snatch up the phone and call her tribe as soon as we got in and report to them all the ways she planned to keep me from being just like my sorry-ass-good-for-nothing-piece-of shit-daddy.
I would retreat to my room with my students and color apples – tracing the black line over and over with my red crayon making thick lines we could all see.
My twelve-year-old brother became my caretaker after she went to work, and we became classic latchkey kids. Mother walked home from the factory and was usually home by four-thirty – “they’ll be just fine,” she had told my father who opposed the idea vehemently, but to no avail.
It takes years for earthquakes to form, but the event itself only lasts a few seconds. One indicator that an earthquake is about to occur is erratic animal behavior – scared and anxious pets for instance.
Unimaginable things can happen in an hour.
When she arrived, she went straight to the phone to start her routine. One by one she told them all the great things about her job – how easy it was, how happy she was to be out of the house, and went on and on about the durn good money she was making now.
And then, one day, she came in and sat down at the kitchen table and began shuffling a deck of cards.
“Hey, you want to play a game?”
I couldn’t believe my ears. My heart leaped in my chest. I looked around sure that she was talking to my brother. But there was no one there but me.
“I’m talking to you silly,” she said. “Do you want to play a game?”
I wish I could say that she taught me how to play War or Old Maid. I wish I could say that we built something beautiful together or that we laughed ourselves silly.
But that is not at all what happened.
I stepped toward her, as stubborn hope just floated all around in my six-year-old head. When I stepped to the table, bubbling with anticipation, my mother threw all those cards down on the floor and said, “It’s called 52-pick up. Pick them up,” and she laughed. I turned to go back to the couch, but she insisted that if I said I was going to play the game, it was my job to pick them up no ifs, ands, or buts about it… I knew not to argue, so I crawled around on the vinyl floor and picked them up one by one and choked back tears.
When I got up, I knew, even then, that I was different – like an unholy baptism – or drowning. A shift had occurred. My mind had been rearranged.
Adrenaline and cortisol are two of the hormones that mobilize the brain’s forces for fight or flight …
I went outside and ran deliberately to the tree in the back yard that my mother had warned me not to climb at least a hundred times. It wasn’t a big tree by any means. I don’t remember ever seeing any leaves on the tree and the branches were bone dry.
…In most cases, the deployed hormones, after the crisis is over, will return to their normal levels…
I wasted no time in the way I climbed that day. I nearly ran with no hands up the three barbed wires that the tree had grown around before I was even born. With strange confidence, I leaped up to the next limb and headed up the familiar pathway. I did not care that she was just in the kitchen. I did not care that at any minute, she would scream my name from the front door and demand my presence right now or I’ll whip you if I have to come find you…and you better not be up a tree… nor did I care that she would likely be carrying the flyswatter or belt with her. I simply wanted relief from what I felt, and the top of that tree was the only place I knew to find it.
Up and up and up I went as fast as my six-year-old legs would climb. My confidence boosted with every perfect twist and turn and every perfect foothold. I climbed higher than I’d ever climbed until at last, at the summit where the air felt lighter, I sat perfectly still, taking in the scenery and listening to my own fast breath.
As it slowed, tears burned my cheeks. I let go of the branch to swipe my face and as my weight shifted, the crackling beneath my feet gave the warning just as my mother’s voice rang out. With finely tuned ears, I could tell that she was already coming down the steps of the creaky front porch.
Panic gripped me and when I tried to leap over to safety and shimmy down, I mis-stepped and tumbled down the tree, landing in a tangle with the barbed wire fence and broken limbs. I scrambled free, ignoring the barbs that were ripping the skin on my back. I leaped to my feet just as she rounded the corner with the belt in her hand.
“Bet you were back here climbing trees again, wadn’t ya?”
I said nothing. I didn’t know how bad I looked -whether it was safe to lie or not.
“I tell you what, little missy, if I catch you in a tree, your ass is grass, do you hear me?”
She stopped moving towards me. I stood deathly still and wide-eyed, holding my breath.
She turned around and stomped back toward the front. “Now get your butt in here and get this mess out of the living room…I don’t know why you can’t just get your stuff to your room every day…no sense in having to tell you over and over again…” she trailed off. “…I start using this belt on your behind every day, you’ll start minding me…”.
The screen door slammed – an exclamation point.
…but in the traumatized brain, levels remain high, holding the person hostage to the brain’s fight or flight mode for longer than necessary which can evoke extreme reactions to situations that are only mildly stressful.
I dusted myself off the best I could and prayed she wouldn’t notice.
Of all the things I remember about that day, I cannot remember feeling pain.
I remember the silent witness of heavy clouds against blue sky.
the neighbor’s dogs chained to a tree, sores swarmed with flies
the sharp whiteness of mother’s shirt rounding the corner.
the black leather belt in her hand
the limb cracking beneath me
the long and fast fall
the deafening silence
But for the life of me, I cannot recall feeling any physical pain.
Only the pain of the earth swallowing up the child I was supposed to be.
Additional chapters available upon request.