Volume 14 Number 2

Are there too many memoirs out there? Are too many being written? Is enough, enough? After all, for the last twenty-five years we’ve read memoirs on every conceivable subject. Some great, some good, some fair, some poor. Everybody knows what those subjects are, so I’m not even going to bother listing them. I’m treating my question rhetorically, of course. Nobody would ask if it’s time to stop writing novels or poems or plays or movies, so I do not know why we’d ask it of memoir, but many critics do. Those of us who love memoir know how some critics appear to delight in deriding them. Read More...

“You usually get here this early?” she asks. A woman, sixty or so, white uniform dress, stockings, white shoes, dropping her clothes into an open machine.

“No,” I say, “I’ve never been before noon.”

“I love this place early.” Her voice is soft but strong, the accent more Mississippi than Arkansas. “Before everyone else gets here with their big bags of clothes and children piled up all over the place.”

In the late eighties, the city desk’s telephone lines became overwhelmed by callers making impossible demands. Phone technology was still the newsroom’s main conduit of raw information and we had multiple lines to accommodate tipsters and sources, as well as reporters notifying assignment editors of breaking news and late inserts. But in the evening, the lines were often blocked with personalities who didn’t understand that our deadline culture required efficient, sometimes telegraphic speech. I heard from many of the same callers nightly, some every fifteen minutes until their mania ran its course. In quick succession, I might answer the phone’s insistent ringing to the complaints of a televangelist’s unhappy wife, a man who called himself Hoboken offering nonsensical editorials, and an unknown presidential candidate reciting a press release. Their confusion and pain altered my consciousness, a case study in neuroplasticity.

I love getting in my car in the pre-dawn darkness, watching the dashboard glow green and silver and red as I turn the ignition, feel the neighborhood stillness all around me. They’re all asleep, my neighbors, and I’m awake and stealing away on an adventure. I back out of the driveway slowly and roll up the street, the GPS beaming on the dashboard, toward a destination two hundred miles away, where I will talk to a stranger, an old moonshiner who, in his wild youth, drove fast cars down midnight roads on the adventure of his life, and hope that he will tell me what he knows and I need to know that will help me make sense of the history of half a million restless people and their descendants—and I don’t even know what that is.

Grandma glanced at the mantel clock on top of the television every time the cuckoo clock in the kitchen called cuck-coo. I begged to wait up. “Ja, Schatzee, just a while longer.” She always called me Schatzee, her darling. Curled beside her on the sofa, I played with her fleshy upper arm. It was my security blanket, Grandma’s arm, and I kneaded it like kiachle dough while she taught me German words—guten Morgen, gute Nacht, schlafen, auf Wiedersehen—and darned Boppa’s brown socks with silky yellow thread, a thimble protecting her thumb. Boppa’s supper—a slab of ham, a crusty hunk of buttered rye, paper-thin cucumbers swimming in vinegar—waited on a plate covered with waxed paper on the kitchen table in the dark.

A dark shadow crosses my face and my heart jumps. Standing over me, Tyler says, “I’m ready to go.”

“So soon?” I say, shaking something away from me, something that buzzes around my head as if it were a fly. The sun holds steady above the canyon wall but the air has cooled. I startle at how long I may have dozed.    

As my mind clears on the drive home I ask Tyler, my nine-year-old son, if he had a good day. “No,” he says.

J. C. said, “Come here for a minute. I want to show you something.”

I’ve told my wife about this moment. I’ve told my dad. I’ve told one friend. Otherwise, maybe because I feel shame, maybe because it has never come up in conversation, maybe because I’m a chickenshit, I haven’t talked about this: J. C. pulled me into a separate room of the church five years ago to show me pictures of him at war. We hadn’t seen each other for two or three years, and the gathering at the small Methodist church was in some way about us coming home. I’d come home from Utah, recently married, recently become a father of three. He’d come home from Afghanistan, the single father of a baby girl. He handed his daughter to his father and asked me into a smaller room.

He said to me, “I’ve gotta show you something. You’re the only one around here who will understand.”

In 1984 I, like every other girl in America, wanted a Cabbage Patch Kid. To impress everyone with my logic—I was one of those brats—I asked for the brown-skinned version, a request my Sri Lankan-born parents could only understand as preposterous: dark-skinned dolls were for black children. That this was pitiable for them—the dolls’ homeliness was a given—was no reason for me, however, to get a doll that matched my skin. At Zayre’s, my father held the boxed toy at arm’s length, wondering was I sure I didn’t want a regular doll?