The Weight of Memory

by Shawn Smucker

  The only thing about the party that I enjoyed was being hidden in my sheet. It was marvelous being among the kids I was always with and them not knowing it was me. I wedged myself into the corner and sank down in the darkness. I thought I had managed to disappear.

  That’s when I heard whispers about the drowning. Gillian Hudson, who we all knew through the years mostly for her dedication to saying the Pledge of Allegiance with particular vigor, had drowned in the lake only that morning. I hadn’t heard about it. I didn’t know Gillian well, but it was a strange and mysterious thing to think that one of my classmates, someone who had been among us earlier that day, was suddenly most decidedly not among us anymore. I sat in the darkness and thought about death, about what had happened to Gillian when she sank to the bottom. Had she blinked and found herself on streets of gold, or had everything she’d ever known, even the universe she’d been born into, winked out like a light turned off?

  Upstairs, the knocking began. The constant clang of the doorbell. The pounding of feet down the stairs and the squealing of girls and the back-pounding of boys. Soon there were so many teenagers that I couldn’t see through their legs. I was still sitting, and I imagined that I was staring into a moving forest.

  Someone turned on a strobe light, and the basement boomed with music. The sounds and the lights were hypnotic. I planned on biding my time until the end and, once it was reasonably appropriate, going outside to wait for my parents. If they took too long to come back, I even considered walking the five lonely miles back to my house, although that would take some working up to, since it was a dark road lined mostly by cornfields full of high, dried-out, whispering stalks.

  A loud shout came from the other side of the basement, followed by cheering, and the whole crowd moved back. Someone nearly sat on me, then cursed. I started to panic, breathing hard. What if I couldn’t get up? No one would hear me. What if someone else had already fallen on the ground and was in the process of being trampled? I peered down at the dark floor to see if someone needed help but saw only the strange, gangly legs of monsters and witches.

  The crowd started chanting, “Pete . . . Pete . . . Pete,” starting slowly at first but building into a crescendo. Pete was the name of the kid who had invited me, or whose parents had told my parents I should come over. Peter Singleton. Pete must have done whatever the crowd required of him, because there was another loud cheer, another pulsating movement. The group felt less like a gathering of individuals than a morphing, hungry mob, a single organism whose momentum could not be slowed. Panic rose in me again.

  I couldn’t take it anymore. I pushed my way through the shoulders and arms and annoyance. I smelled alcohol, a strange and foreign smell, and it seemed we were too young for all this, though we were juniors and I knew that juniors all over the country were drinking at parties and getting into trouble. Sowing their wild oats. It felt to me like we had all been swept up in something we wouldn’t do on our own, something the mob was making us do. I don’t know—maybe to them it was simply fun. I fled the basement and the pulsing, shadowy crowd, squinted against the hall light, and tripped through the foyer until I found my way outside, into the crisp October air.

  The front stoop was bathed in light, and people were still arriving, so I made my way around to the dark side of the house, finally breathing, relief flooding me. I was alone. I stared out into the country and wished I had my license, wished there was a way to fly away from there, soar over the quiet fields and narrow groves of trees. But for some reason I had never gotten around to taking my driver’s test. I resolved to get my license. That would free me from these things.

  But simply being outside gave me what I had wanted. My only regret was that I didn’t have a book and a flashlight so that I could while away the next two hours before my parents came back to get me.

  “Watch it, Charlie Brown,” a voice said as I tripped over something soft. I had to put my hands down onto the cold grass to keep from planting my face in the earth. But I didn’t take off my sheet. It was kind of nice, the anonymity.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. “Sorry.” I turned to go.

  “Wait a minute,” a different voice called out, a girl’s voice. How many of them were there, sitting up against the hedgerow in the dark? “Is that Paul? Are you trying to escape the party?”

  “Maybe.” I shrugged, glancing over my shoulder. A flashlight lit up and blinded me. “Who’s asking?”

  “Another escapee!” the original, deeper voice said exultantly. There were a few chirps of quiet laughter. “Sit down, good man.”

  “Well, I can’t see a thing.” My eyes were dazzled, but there was something in his voice that felt kind and welcoming.

  “What’s your name?”

  I thought this was a third voice, another girl, but I couldn’t be sure. Meanwhile, my eyes recovered. The flashlight beam dropped, but its glow illuminated the three who sat there. One of them had a kind of werewolf mask perched on the top of his head. The girl beside him, the middle one of the three, wore a quaint blue dress and ruby-red shoes and had her hair up in pigtails. She was cute. The girl on the end was far enough away from the flashlight that I couldn’t get a good look at her. She wore some kind of a cloak with its large hood down, resting on her shoulders.

  “I’m Paul,” I said nervously.

  “I knew it! I’m Shirley,” said the first girl, and I recognized her from third-period art class. Not that we had ever really talked.

  “Hi, Dorothy,” I said.

  “Hey, Paul, pal,” the guy said in a radio announcer’s nasally drawn-out voice, and the girls laughed again. “I’m Tom. Lucky for you it’s not a full moon.”

  “And I’m Mary,” the second girl said. “I’m the Grim Reaper.” Her voice and the way she carried herself couldn’t have been any less threatening. She seemed to be drowning in her costume, and her voice lilted like silk rolling in the breeze.

  I almost burst out laughing at the contrast between her kind voice and her foreboding costume. Her tiny hand came up out of the deep sleeve of her cloak, and the feel of her skin was a revelation. Her hands were ice-cold but soft. I didn’t want to let go. For the rest of the night after touching her hand, I was in another realm. I was floating. I’m not sure how I managed to form words, much less express actual ideas.

  I fell to a sitting position among them, not knowing that what I had actually tripped into were not strangers who had also escaped the party but the best two years of my life.

  “Well,” the boy named Tom said, “the real question is, now what?”

  The Tea Party

  I am standing by the front door, remembering that first time I met Mary. I haven’t thought about that for a long time.

  You have gone inside to hunt down the plastic cups and saucers your dad bought you when you were five. The house smells like pinewood floor cleaner. I am, if nothing else, organized, and I keep a clean house. There seems to be something crucial in keeping a clean house for you, a tidy place for you to grow up. Or, I should say, seemed. Past tense. The doctor’s diagnosis makes me question everything: what we are doing, what I have done. Should I have found a younger family to raise you a long time ago so that I would not be all you have? Is that what was at the root of Ms. Howard’s judgmental glance—scorn at the idea that someone as old as me could be trusted to live long enough to raise someone as young as you?

  There is the light sound of toys clinking together, and your fairy voice calling from the living room. “Grampy! Teatime!”

  I walk through the house, and it feels like the first time. The entrance hall feels dingy—the baseboards in need of a fresh coat, the scuffs on the wall, the ceiling light with one bulb out. I really should paint the walls, but it all seems so pointless now, repairing, tidying up, fixing things. For what? For who? In six months, I will be gone. Maybe three. Maybe next week. Somehow, during our walk home, during my search for you, the weight of the diagnosis had lifted, but now it circles, eyes up the terrain, and settles.

&n
bsp; “Grampy!” you call again, and I turn the corner.

  There are three place settings. Three tiny plastic cups on three tiny plastic saucers.

  “Pearl,” I ask in a quiet voice, “are you expecting a visitor?”

  “I invited the silver-haired woman,” you say, not even bothering to look up, so busy arranging and running back and forth to the kitchen.

  I sigh. “Does she have white hair or silver hair? You can’t seem to make up your mind.”

  You shrug off my inquisition. “It shimmers and shines. It depends on the light.”

  “It depends on the light,” I repeat, raising my eyebrows skeptically. You giggle.

  We sit there on the floor for quite some time, my back against the sofa. I notice your eyes occasionally flitting up to the side of my head, where the now slightly-larger-than-marble-sized knot juts out into the world. And my eyes are drawn over and over again to the third place setting. I can’t help it—I keep checking the front windows, looking over my shoulder, waiting for the woman to walk into the room. But she does not.

  “I have something I need to tell you, Pearl,” I say.

  You take me in with your big, dark eyes. I clear my throat. It’s aching now, the knot. I rub my jaw and squint, staring over at the bookshelves that hold all of our favorites.

  “We’re going to go away for a bit.”

  “Back to where you grew up?” you ask, but there is no excitement in your voice. Only wariness. Perhaps a little skepticism.

  “Pearl,” I begin, nearly losing my patience. “Yes. Back to where I grew up.”

  “Where my daddy grew up?”

  “Your daddy grew up here, in this house. We’re going back to where he was born.”

  “Do you think we’ll find him there?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Is that why we’re going?”

  “No.”

  “Then why?”

  “I need to go back. I need to see if my friends still live there. I’d like to show you around.”

  “Are we coming back here after we see where you grew up?”

  I can tell it’s a hard question for you to ask. “I’d like it to be your town too.”

  “So, we’re not coming back?”

  “I don’t know. Not yet.”

  A silence falls around us. You lift up your plastic teacup, raise it to your lips, close your eyes, and drink a long and deep draft of the pretend tea. “So good,” you whisper. When you open your eyes, you suddenly seem too old for tea parties. Why have I not recognized it before?

  “Pearl,” I say hesitantly, “aren’t you getting a little old for all of this . . . pretending?”

  “Grampy, drink your tea before it gets cold.”

  I lift the empty cup.

  “What’s it like?” you ask.

  “Where I grew up?”

  “No, the tea,” you say, giggling.

  I smile. “The tea is fabulous. A little too hot, actually. I might let it cool.”

  You laugh quietly again, then sit up straight as if corrected by someone to watch your posture. “What’s it like where you grew up?”

  “I haven’t been there for forty years. I don’t know what it’s like anymore.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Nysa was kind of like an island. I guess technically it’s a peninsula. The lake surrounds it on three sides. The river lines the western side. So we were always surrounded by water. We called ourselves an island even though we weren’t, not really.”

  You take another sip from your teacup.

  “I always thought it would become more popular, like one of those beach towns where everyone goes for vacation. The lake was enormous. I’ve always imagined that rich people bought up the waterfront property and built their mansions there after I left. I hope not, but who knows. The truth is, I really don’t know what it’s like. I’ve never been back, and I’ve never checked up on it.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “I liked it very much. We knew almost everyone on the island. There was a small town, one main street, but I grew up out in the country. Most of the island is farmland. Or it was when I was a kid.”

  “Did you have a lot of friends?”

  I think of the Halloween party. “No, not many, but I was happy.”

  “Did you like your house?” you ask, stirring your tea with a tiny spoon. When you ask questions in that serious, absentminded tone, you could be twenty years old instead of eleven.

  “My house? It was okay. There were places in Nysa that I loved, but my house wasn’t one of them. My parents were kind but a bit absent. I’m sure they loved me. In those days children ran free.”

  “Like me.” You smile.

  “You’re a throwback,” I say, smirking.

  “What about the field between your house and the road?”

  The room feels colder.

  “The field,” you say again. “Between your house and the road. The one along the woods.”

  I don’t know how you know this. Your voice is very matter-of-fact.

  “What about it?”

  “It’s on the map I’m drawing.”

  Yes. The field.

  “There were fields everywhere,” I say, trying to steer the conversation away from these things you should not know.

  “Not just any field,” you say. “I mean the field where Grandma saw the woman for the first time. The woman with the silver hair. She told me all about it.”

  The Field

  The four of us walked through the field late that night: a werewolf with his mask off; Dorothy, carrying her ruby slippers; Mary, dressed like death, in her dark cloak with the hood resting powerlessly on her shoulders; and me, no longer Charlie Brown, carrying my cut-up sheet under one arm. My house was the closest, and I think they were intrigued by me, the new guy, so we left Justin’s place and started walking to my house. Our feet made lonely sounds on the smooth back roads. The air moved in fits and starts, now breezy, now still. It was dark in the way only a backcountry road on a chilly fall night can be.

  What happened on our way home could be easily explained by the fact that it was Halloween, we were sharing spooky stories, and we were all a little jumpy. We were bound to see things that weren’t there.

  “How far’d you say?” Tom asked me. It wasn’t a complaint. I think we were all enjoying the walk.

  “About five miles or so, give or take.”

  “Your parents won’t mind?” Mary asked, shaking her head back and forth to free her hair from the cloak. She had a very concerned voice, a very kind voice.

  “To be honest, they won’t even notice.”

  “Sounds like my folks,” Tom said, and there was an ounce of bitterness around the edge of his words. “They couldn’t care less about me coming or going. As long as I close the door and turn off the lights.”

  “Close the door, Tom!” Shirley shouted, laughing. “Turn off the lights!” Her voice softened. “My parents think I’m spending the night at Mary’s.”

  “And my mom thinks I’m at Shirley’s,” Mary admitted. Even though Shirley and Tom both thought this was hysterical, Mary’s voice made me think she wasn’t happy about the deception. Or maybe it was something else.

  “How’d you all become friends?” I asked. Tom and Shirley were familiar to me—our school wasn’t that big. But I couldn’t place Mary.

  “Mary and me, we’ve known each other all our lives,” Shirley gushed. “Our parents knew each other from something or other. Some nearby town. Something our moms did together. I can’t remember. But Mary only moved to Nysa last year.”

  “What about you?” I asked Tom.

  He smirked. “I’m tagging along.”

  Shirley smacked his arm playfully. I couldn’t tell if the two of them were together. They obviously liked each other. I glanced over at Mary. It was hard to see her face in the dark, but her soft voice made her sound pretty. Her hair blended in with the shadows.

  I wish you could have seen her as
I first saw her on that night. The fact that she was practically invisible in the dark didn’t make her less beautiful—it made her more so. It blurred the lines between her physical body and the world around us, so that Mary became part of the night, part of the fields, part of the air. Her physical form was only the center—the rest of her stretched out into everything else.

  I guess that sounds strange. Someday you’ll understand what I’m saying.

  Honestly? Sometimes I feel that way about you, when I go up and check on you at night and you’re sleeping, and the darkness is all around. I can hear you breathing, and I can see the shadows around your eyes, the waves of your hair on top of the blanket, but everything that is the essence of you sometimes seems to fill the room. You are much more than what lies in that little body.

  The field. Yes, the field is what you asked me about.

  The four of us came to a particular place where the corn was high in one field but had been harvested on the other side of the road. That side was actually a gradual hill, and I could see at the top of that narrow ridge the distant lights of my own house: the front porch light, which my parents left on whenever I wasn’t home, and the kitchen light, shining through the one window.

  I stopped. The other three stopped too.

  “What’s up?” Tom asked.

  “Well,” I said, “we can keep taking the road. It goes up that way.” I pointed into the night. “Or we can cut through the field.”

  “It’s not muddy, right?” Shirley asked.

  “Nah,” I said, shaking my head. It had been a dry fall. The cornstalks in the field beside us rustled loud and raspy.

  “What do you think?” Tom asked. “It’s your house.”

  I shrugged. “It’s a lot quicker cutting through. A little dirtier. There’s a narrow stream we’ll have to hop. Besides that, easy as pie.”

  I glanced around. It was hard to read everyone’s expressions in the dark. Shirley laughed. She was almost always laughing at something. But this laugh sounded nervous.

  “Onward,” Tom said, making a large sweeping motion with his arms, beckoning me to lead the way through the field.