Names

09

Mar

Ok, so. Here I am, sweating in McDonald’s under three layers and utilizing the free WiFi, getting ready to post a little something I’m working on. And I’m terrified.

I’m hesitant to even post this, since it’s VERY raw and everyone in the world can see it, but I don’t really have anyone to read and go over it with me who would give any meaningful feedback or would have time to do so, so I thought I’d tease (not the right word) it here and if anyone wants to or has time to read it and wants to give feedback, they can do that.

Really not sure what this is so far. It’s barely taken shape, but there’s something about it that feels like it has potential? I obviously know nothing about writing a book. I barely know anything about writing anything, even a short story. All I know is that I get these tremendous urges to write and I can’t avoid them. My fingers itch until I get whatever one line that’s running through my head over and over again out. So there’s that.

Ok, so, bearing in mind that I haven’t really written anything like this (at least not since my fiction writing class three years ago), read at will and feel free to get at me with any ideas/comments. Also, I used a little bit of something I wrote over a year ago at the end. I feel like I finally found a place for it. I’d like to note that this didn’t come from any sort of personal experience and has nothing to do with me or anyone I know. It just kind of came out.

Names

When I was born, Mama named me Raina. Not after anybody, not after a song, not because it had any special meaning. Raina, she figured, was a simple enough name that could work for a boy or a girl. I kind of disagree… I’m a girl. I think I got lucky.

When Mama was born, her parents named her Cecilia. The second my grandma got pregnant, she knew it. She could smell everything, she said, and one night she had a dream that she was babysitting the baby Jesus while Joseph and Mary went to Nazareth to build a house for some homeless people. The next day, she went to the doctor.

That night, she and my grandpa picked out a name together at the kitchen table. Grandma drew a family tree and her hands flew all over as she talked. Grandpa sat with his big, calloused hands folded on the table and nodded, and winked. Mama’s first name came from Grandma’s favorite aunt, who had been a famous actress once, but she’d died of tuberculosis. Her middle name, Ruth, came from Grandpa’s favorite dog. Growing up, Mama hated her middle name, so she pretended she didn’t have one. I think that hurt Grandpa’s feelings. He really did love that dog, and he loved Mama even more.

Around the time I was getting conceived, Mama was in what she calls her naturalist period, which is probably why I happened in the first place. She stopped having her period, but she didn’t know she was pregnant for six months, she said. Her belly hardly grew and she kept on as usual. She said I didn’t take up much space… she never threw up or ate a lot or had weird cravings. And she never went to the doctor because she had a friend who was a midwife and he said he’d deliver me at home in his trailer since doctors were fascists. She thought I would be quiet, because I had been so timid in the womb, she said. But I came out with a roar.

I liked her talking about me being born. I used to ask her to tell me that story every night, and I liked it because when she had enough patience to tell me, the story always changed a little bit. That way I got to pick the version I liked best and that’s just how it was. I didn’t remember it, so any of those stories could be the truth. Mama always said my imagination was the greatest gift God gave me.

It was sunny that day I was born, and when I came out roaring and flailing I ruined the orange shag carpet in her-friend-the-midwife’s mobile home. I guess his parents named him Stewart, but I can’t be sure if they named him that at all or if that’s just what he called himself. Stewart had big sideburns, a mustache and round glasses. There weren’t any pictures from that day, but I remember what he looks like because he was around a lot when I was growing up.

Once I developed what I thought was a pretty good sense of humor around age six, I would tell him he should be a mid-husband. I thought that was pretty funny, but he would either ignore me or say that, thanks to laws governing the state of Texas, he would never be able to be a husband. He would sit there, smoking a cigarette, scrunching up his mustache like a feather duster tickling his nose and upper lip, and his bottom lip would jut out. He had what my mom called a partner. His partner’s name was Louis. We weren’t related, but they were my uncles.

Louis was tall and gentle and had skin like leather. He always wore denim and had a big mustache and a crooked smile that made me laugh. He was my cowboy, and he always remembered to pick me up and give me a kiss on the nose first, even before he hugged Mama hello. He wore a button-up shirt that smelled like rich tobacco and Old Spice and when I’d hug him, I’d breathe him in hard, until I couldn’t breathe anymore and had to cough. Stewart never seemed particularly interested in me, but Louis was my best friend.

I remember being at a barbecue when I was four or five, and seeing Louis and Stewart sitting at a picnic table by themselves with their arms across each other’s shoulders, just laughing, like they were the only two people in the world. I felt lonely all of a sudden, and kind of bad, like I was looking in on something I wasn’t supposed to see, this little dollhouse world that I’d found a portal into. I didn’t know where Mama was at that minute, and for once I didn’t care. There was this bubbling inside me. I realized then that I wanted to know Louis and Stewart always.

It was a hot, sticky, still day in the park, and the night didn’t get any cooler. Later, when Grandpa was tucking me in and I was saying my prayers, I tried to explain to him how I’d felt when I’d seen Louis and Stewart earlier. He told me when you’re family, it doesn’t matter if you’re related by blood… he said you can be related to people by blood your whole life and never know them at all, but some people sneak into your life out of the blue.

“Your job is just to hold on to them,” he said, and kissed me on the forehead.

I didn’t tell Grandpa about everything I’d seen that day. While I was standing there, stuck, staring, I saw Louis and Stewart kiss from across the park. Something inside me felt funny, because I’d never seen two men do that before. Men never kissed other men, or that’s not the way it was on TV, and I was pretty sure Grandma and Grandpa wouldn’t be very happy with Mama if they knew she was spending time with two grown men that kissed each other. But it also felt warm, like the way I felt whenever Daddy came over and fixed the sink for Mama, or like at holidays when Grandma would run across the house to the front door to give Daddy a big hug, even though he was freezing cold and dripping snow in the house.

My grandma loved my daddy. I think she may have even had a little crush on him. She and Mama always fought about why Mama hadn’t kept him around, even though it was pretty clear he wasn’t going anywhere.

Daddy’s parents called him John. They didn’t call me anything, because I never met them. They hated Mama, and she hated them right back, and I wanted to meet them but was too scared to even bring it up with her. It would have been okay if she’d just gotten mad, but seeing her cry left this ball in the bottom of my stomach that stayed there for days.

Daddy was friends with Louis and Stewart too, but especially Louis. They went to college together at the University of Texas. Louis met Stewart around the time Mama met Daddy. Daddy was a good dancer, and he said Mama had the nicest tan legs in cowboy boots he’d ever seen. By the time I was born, they had already split up.

But he was never far away. And he never quit coming over. And I don’t think in all the years I knew both of them that he ever quit on her. People were always quitting on Mama, she said. But in all my sharpest memories from when I was a little kid, he’s making her laugh, or lighting her cigarettes, or fixing the sink, or bringing over groceries. John was just not the type of person to quit on someone he’d made a kid with – that’s what Louis used to say, and he’d button up my coat and send me out to play, or pull me close and lay his big, warm hand on my head.

These are the people that made me, and this is the way I grew up in Magnolia, Texas. Some things are harder to remember than others, but I promised Grandpa that before he and Grandma died I’d write them a book of our whole life together. I promised I’d remember every little detail I could, and when I was old enough to read and write I started writing down things I remembered or things I saw when no one knew I was awake.

To get me ready for this job, Grandpa got me a pink spiral notebook and a sparkly Disney Princess pencil for my “documenting.” I gnawed on the eraser of that pencil until Belle’s head kind of melted into the rest of her body.

I felt important – I was the official family historian, he’d say, and it was important that I kept all the pictures and concentrated on tiny details – the gaps would fill themselves in, he said.

When Mama went away and I wouldn’t get out of bed, he said time would smooth down the bumps of our story. He said when I looked back and wrote it, the pages would be worn soft and yellow and glow a little, and the hurt I felt now would give me juice later.

I took it serious. I wrote down about Louis and Stewart and their bickering, and the cigarettes, and the kisses; Grandma’s homemade jam and the fireflies at the screen door; Grandpa’s harmonica and Daddy’s guitar; Mama, bright as the sun through the attic window and darker than December.

***

Dozens of pink spirals and 25 years later, the memories are slipping and the graphite on the page, sometimes mixed with crinkled blotches of spiral paper from where my little kid teardrops fell, looks so blurred I can barely read it. When I can’t read those things I wrote, and when the pictures are so sun-bleached and aged I can’t see the details of what Mama wore that day or the whiteness of Daddy’s teeth, I panic, and it feels like the memory is completely gone.

I get mad at myself for relying so much on those damn spirals, those stupid Polaroids that I spent so much time documenting. I look back on those years, the years of “our story” as Grandpa always called it, and I’m mad at myself for spending so much time on the outside – a courthouse secretary of my own childhood,  clacking away on a typewriter and never looking up.

Over the years I came to the conclusion that time, and specifically memories, should follow Robert’s Rules of Order. If I asked God’s secretary, she should be able to provide me with some sort of filed documentation — the “minutes” of those years, typed and organized, to prove that time in my life existed and I didn’t dream it.

That I was happy, even when things weren’t perfect. That the louder the house was, the better we all were. That the tinkling of Mama’s laugh drifting through an open door made me come running. That the sound of Mama on the piano and Daddy and Grandma singing in perfect harmony pumped new blood into my veins. That there were screen doors and picture frames, and that the plucking of Daddy’s guitar blew across the breeze in time with the billowing of the tall grass.

I want to know, for sure, what I remember so well – that our house smelled like library books and groaned like a ship at sea. That vinyl seats stuck to my thighs, that the Belle pencil was permanently stuck behind my ear, that my teeth were crooked and that I was in love with everything.

13 years ago Short URL 4 Comments