From the aforementioned misliked Nonfiction course. I guess I didn't mislike it all-in-all, just misliked the way it was taught and the fact that workshopping stories in a Creative Writing Program seems to inherently be:
"Teacher, I can't read this story because the grammar is so bad it's unintelligible."
"Oh, don't worry about that—you don't need to correct it—just push through that and comment on the story."
"But if I can't read to understand it, how can I tell if there even is a story!?"
"Well, that's the assignment..."
Oh, Sisyphean Fates, how you taunt me so‽
The assignment was to write a story (nonfiction) about something you remember one way but found out was, in fact, different than your memory.
I, of course, had just the story...
~•~
(2nd draft)
CRW 309 Creative Non-Fiction
TANTALUS MUSE: The Red-Haired Girl
12/3/08
Final Draft
When I was five years old, my family went to visit my aunt for two weeks, at the end of summer. She lived in a house along the Atlantic shore in Virginia. Her back yard was a wide flat manicured lawn that fell away suddenly in rocky cliffs at the water's edge. There, a pier ran out into the ocean like a long fingertip that pointed into the gray-blue flux of forever. At high tide, the waves would crash up against the rocky shoreline, spraying their salty mist into the cool air, the beads of sweat of its long endeavors. I remember watching the crashing waves for hours wanting to linger on a single wave dissipating into mist, but before I could hold onto the falling drops back into the sea another wave would come along and smash into the remnants of the previous.
I'm sure I watched those waves for hours.
A few minutes, anyway.
My Aunt Gertrude had a proverbially quaint-and-lovely tea garden behind her house next to a koi pond that wrapped around three sides of a small swimming pool. The fourth side of the pool was bordered by a bunk house, long thin deep green fingers of hollyhock vines crawling slowly up its dark fired brick walls. A few sprawling Southern Oaks held a canopy of shade over the garden, towering over a few maples, a single red cedar, and not-so-closely trimmed hedges lining the courtyard. Saw palmettos guarded ever corner, threatening impalement to a three-foot tall five year old, should he venture off the cobblestone path. In the middle of the courtyard of the tea garden the adults would all sit around a glass-topped black iron table and talk about the boring things adults tend to talk about.
I remember the place so vividly—I can still hear the cricket chorus in the evening tune down as the bullfrogs started their nightly swollen throat-song contests that would go on for more hours than most people would believe or ever bothered to sit around and hear—the smell of wet brick and soil and rain and roots. I remember one afternoon out by the bunk house and pool—fallen reddish leaves on the slate cobblestone blown by summer breezes to scrap away days that lasted forever—I first saw my cousin, the red-haired girl.
I guess she was my cousin. I didn't think of her as my cousin at the time, but in the memory, that's the impression I have. When I was five, I didn't make such differentials. She was older than me or my sister. More like my brother's age, I guess. My sister was nine at the time, my brother, fifteen, so I guess my cousin I saw at Aunt Gertrude's would have been about seventeen, maybe eighteen years old.
She had coppery red hair and wore a white summer dress the turned soft yellow or dark amber in the sinking shades of daylight. I followed her through the tea garden and around the wooded backyard, out to the shoreline of the crashing Atlantic. I'd wait for her along the grassy lawn She was nice, and didn't really play any games with me, but didn't mind me following her around like a lost puppy dog, plastic Batmobile in one hand and chewing on my shirt collar. That was a habit I had then. Pull the front of my shirt collar up to chew on until it was soaked with slobber. I didn't mind that sort of thing when I was five. And neither did the red-haired girl.
I remember she thought it was cute that I followed her around, and although I remember we talked a few times, I don't remember the sound of her voice. I remember her smell, like sweet rotten cypress and honeysuckle, and the way she moved, her bare feet seeming to not touch the ground where she walked but getting dirty none the less.
A sure sign that you'd had a good day was seen in how stained and dirty your feet were at the end of it.
Following around the red-haired girl those last days of summer when I was five is a memory that still speaks to me in a wordless language of invisible symbology, a feeling steeped in faith and intuition. Reassurance; the calm certainty that everything is all right. Not so much safe and secure as balanced and still.
Sitting by the koi pond and watching the mammoth goldfish in the dark green waters of the garden pond with the red-haired girl is one of the most blissful places in my memory. And deeply imprinted me in so many ways.
There is something very wrong with that vivid slice of the past.
Here is the verifiable evidence of this deeply curious memory: Aunt Gertrude's house wasn't in Virginia, but was, in fact, on a barrier island near Savannah, Georgia; our visit was in Spring, not late Summer; my mother's oft-told story of how I almost drowned when I dropped my plastic toy Batmobile into the swimming pool and dove in after it was in no way exhaggerated.
And there was, in fact, no red-haired girl present at Aunt Gertrude's.
For years after that visit I thought about my cousin, the red-haired girl, and wondered, as years passed, what sort of life she had. When I was older than she would have been when I met her, I asked my mom about her. My mom's a genealogist and historian and she always has the story behind the various weird family members.
"That time we visited Aunt Gertrude," I asked my mom, "Her . . . daughter, I guess it would have been. Maybe sixteen, eighteen years old," I told her, just like my memory held in place, "Whatever happened to her?"
"Aunt Gertrude's daughter?" my mother asked, looking at me like I had a sprouted tentacles from my head.
"Yeah. Isn't that who had the house my the shore, with the tea garden and pool?"
"Yes, Gertrude's house had that wonderful little tea garden in the back courtyard and the pool you dropped your Batmobile in and almost drowned trying to get it."
My mom loves bringing up the highlights of my brushes with death. The local ER had a ward named after me.
"That's the place." I tell her.
My mother's expression of crazed disbelief didn't change. "Aunt Gertrude doesn't have a daughter. I don't know who you're remembering . . . "
Even after several attempts at clarifying, my mother drew a blank on who I was talking about. My brother and sister weren't any help, neither of them remembering anyone at all that I could be remembering.
A figment. A ghost.
I clearly remember spending many hours of each day for two weeks following around and talking to someone who apparently wasn't real in any consensually experienced part of the universe.
Was my memory of a guardian angel? A creepy fetch-spirit? Manifestation of the divine? A succubus come to prey on a little boy?
Hmmm, I don't mind the sound of that.
But then I think, things don't need to have happened to be real.
Memories are real even if the events in them didn't happen in that way. Stories are real, even if they aren't true. Storytelling is creating something that didn't previous exist.
And the non-existent red-haired girl started showing up, wearing various guises, in my stories. Like a shirking shadow of thought, a wisp of impossible memory, my Tantalus Muse would come and tell me a story. I'd write them, but it sometimes seems more like transcribing the words of someone else.
Maybe the red-haired girl is in some other version of this universe and I'm the figment in her memory. Maybe she's the storyteller, that little red-haired girl, in that other universe, and I'm just a character in her tale. The threads of the plot stretch out into the darkness of possibility, and I step forward to find out what comes next.
· • ·
