Memory Art
Autofiction in Words/Images
Excerpts from a work-in-progress.
“Combing through a closet one hot Sunday afternoon, I came on a hat I’d worn just once - a straw bowler the exact shade of orange I had worn as a girl. I put it on and glanced in the mirror. Suddenly I was swept into the past with a force almost hallucinogenic. The trigger was that fierce tangerine. It brought up the orange dresses I’d once worn like coats of ingénue armor, which bestowed mystical certainty, like a talisman or magic cloak.”
L 37” X W 20” X D 9”
“There is an air of strangulated religiosity. Not just on account of the icons and Madonnas or the sarcophagus-like Renaissance chest, but something more, an incense of doom, an inchoate longing for salvation. We see no irony in being atheist Jews surrounded by Christian antiquities. Atheism and an appetite for the sacred exist side by side.”
L 77” X 20” X D 8”
“He calls her ‘the lunatic.’
She calls him the ‘charm boy.’”
L 50” X W 40” X D 8”
“Sometimes, after a fight, my father storms out, and doesn’t come back until morning. Then my mother takes me on her lap and asks if I want to live alone with her.
I say yes. But I am lying.
We huddle together in the darknes, our hearts beating together through our nightgowns.”
L 43” X W 31” X D 14”
“The girl who was rich and the girl who was poor, the daughter who did everything right and everything wrong.”
L 32” X W 23” X D 4”
“It is the best lemonade we have ever drunk, probably the best lemonade in the world, but our bellies are bursting. We don’t think of offering it to anyone else - we have no desire to leave our kingdom in the kitchen and talk to the grownups.
Let’s make it evil!
Transmute the divine cold sweetness into something noxious and repulsive.
Like alchemists turning gold to dross!”
L 37” X W 38” X D 5”
“Pan, the thirteen-year-old satyr.
Every afternoon we meet on the steps outside school and take off our shoes - like Buddhists before entering a temple. Barefoot we walk the streets. Barefoot we wade through detritus and filth, closing in on the city's sacred core. The soles of our feet grow callused and black. ‘Like hooves,’ says Pan.”
L 40” X W 29” X D 9”
“It’s a school night, I'm wearing my gym tunic, sitting on the floor of my room – the room with a wall covered with lacquered wallpaper of blossoms on black ("Midnight Tropical"), the bedcover of striped cream and rose with matching silk on the love seat, and in the corner, the wood horse's head with a mane of real pony's hair from a nineteenth century French blacksmith's shop. Its eyes are rimmed in red, making them look as if they are rolling back in the head, and the mouth is open in mid-neigh.”
L 24” X W 24” X D 8”
“Confidante. I slip into this role as if it has been there always, like a dress hanging in the closet until I grow into it. This new role confers new status: I have been elevated to child grand vizier, a personage of wisdom and sagacity.”
L 34” X W 15” X D 4”
“
I am fifteen the night I ask my father the question.
I’ve thought about it for over a year. But unlike Pandora – who was warned, after all – it doesn't occur to me that there are things better unknown.
For several nights I've put off asking him because my mother is still awake. It's like committing a crime – all the conditions must be right.
I ask him on the phone. The question is too dangerous to ask face-to-face. My heart is pounding so hard I can barely hear myself say the words.
Where do you go at night?”
L 48” X W 24” X D 6”
“The fall is so swift, it is barely comprehensible. Soon it is as if the old self never existed. And when I walk down the street, Cabernet book bag slung over my shoulder, the image of the perfect schoolgirl, who can tell that I've become a ghost of myself?”
L 52” X W 72” X D 8”
“The metamorphosis starts with the costume. My dress, orange or red or shocking pink, rhinestone earrings that glisten like fireflies, too much sooty eye make-up, pearlescent lipstick that gleams under the strobes. I become a gay and glamorous being, a fantasy version of myself mysterious by definition - since I bear only a tangential relation to my true self.”
L 43” X W 23” X D 5”
“My last day of life as a schoolgirl. My last day of skipping school.
I go to the park. Down to the rowboat lake, past the bandstand and the carousel, to the dry fountain where Pan and I used to play at being satyrs. I peel off my stockings and shoes and scale the rough granite. Sitting in the dry fountain, white dress torn and caked with dirt, I can see my own escape, as if it were written across the sky.”
L 49” X W 27” X 9”
“It's then I walk out. Like a proud but dethroned queen. Like a booted mongrel. I get my coat from the closet in the hall. I throw it on over my nightgown and run into the vestibule. Waiting for the elevator I hear her coming out of the apartment. I bolt through the service door and race down the stairs, eleven flights down. She takes the elevator and meets me in the lobby, shouting my name. The doorman with the hook arm, nodding in his chair, doesn't even look up.”
“Cinderella nights! My heart leaps at the implicit promise of every dance, salvation at the ball. Walking into the intoxicating boy bazaar, like a market where the spices make you swoon and each pomegranate is rosier than the last and the colors pulse bright as the jewels in Ali Baba's cave. But then, at a certain hour, the vendors shut down, closing their stalls... soon there will be nothing left but some empty cartons and rotten vegetables and the scent you can't get out of your head.”
L 49” X W 32” X D 7”
“It's then I walk out. Like a proud but dethroned queen. Like a booted mongrel. I get my coat from the closet in the hall. I throw it on over my nightgown and run into the vestibule. Waiting for the elevator I hear her coming out of the apartment. I bolt through the service door and race down the stairs, eleven flights down. She takes the elevator and meets me in the lobby, shouting my name. The doorman with the hook arm, nodding in his chair, doesn't even look up.
L 44” X W 31” X D 6”
“In the distance, swimming towards us, the waiter returns with his sole. The fish is steaming but even drier now. My father gropes absently by his plate. ‘Would it be too much of an imposition to ask for a fork?’”
L 20” X W 39” X D 19”
“As if, when the footman arrived for the shoe try-ons and the evil stepsisters were trying to squeeze in their cloddish feet, wishing they could amputate their toes, Cinderella hid in the chimney and, for good measure, smashed her glass slipper to smithereens.”
L 16” W 72” X D 8”
“He is lying on the bed in the dark watching the news on a small TV. In that instant I have two opposing images of my father: a potentate surveying his kingdom, and a beggar lying in the gutter.”
L 34” X W 33” X D 6”
“Without a word I cross over to her and bury my face in her lap. ‘I'm sorry.’
Her fingers caress my hair. ‘For what?’ Her hands stroking my head seem possessed with godly healing power.
‘He's nothing. All I care about is you. The only thing that matters in the entire world.’”
L 30” X W 22” X W 11”
“The doorman gives it to me when I came home from school. A brown supermarket bag. He says a woman left them.
I know immediately it is her. I don’t look inside. I don’t want to see anything in that bag.
I call my father at the office. ‘Oh, shit,’ he says, and sighs his sigh, the wrathful women sigh, and says he'll come by for it in a few days.
Here I am: holding the bag.”
L 48” W 29” X D 10”
“How could she suspect? A girl like me? So quiet, so polite, so good at following the rules. I am my own best camouflage.”
L 19” X W 24” X 7”
“In the dream I stab my mother with a kitchen knife. Her body lies face up on the mahogany-stained floor. I hike up my nightgown and crouch on the floor to feast. I gorge on her flesh with huge gnawing bites. Hot blood streams from my mouth down my grinding jaws. When all the meat is gone I suck the bones clean.”
L 24” X W 42” X D 6”
“
When we’re apart, I think incessantly about having sex with him. Now I can barely endure his touch.
Touch leads to truth.
Like biting into a delectable piece of chocolate, but instead of a velvet, fruit-infused filling, there is something putrid and rotten inside.
It’s as if this moment is the logical conclusion of all that has happened, the last step in my deduction.
So though I have longed for him since the night of the kiss, I refuse to have sex with him. I lie beside him, my heart beating wildly in my chest, like a small, netted animal. I will myself into a deep sodden sleep, and when in the middle of the night I feel the weight of his body shift against mine, I move away.”
L 52” X W 28” X D 9”
“For an instant I think he's going to yank me by the hair, shove my face into the mirror and smash me into the glass. But he just stands there, as if exhausted by the sight of me. Then his eyes pick out a sodden red clump wrapped slovenly in a bit of toilet paper. His face gets red as my menstrual blood. ‘You can't even throw away your goddam Tampax!’"
L 38” X W 27” X D 4”
“It’s not just that I’ve gained weight. I wear the haunted look of an addict obsessed with the next fix. Over the past year I have descended into a private netherworld of food addiction. At first I can counteract my gorging with penitent days of carrots and cottage cheese. But soon that no longer works. My hunger is like a monstrous wave sweeping me out to sea.”
L 41” X W 25” X D 7”
“Oh the ironies. Starting with the hunting pouch, an accessory used in the killing of small prey. Little did my mother know that it was she who would soon be bagged.”
L 29” X W 17” X D 5”
“My father predicted I’d never get married.”
L 60” X W 20” X D 4”
“She is a doll with a Past. She’d been a falling-down drunk, she’d had her share of pub crawls and nights in the gutter, but she’d been rescued and now, washed, dried and dried out, she’d found a happy home, and seat of honor, on my daughter’s pillow.”
L 10” W 35” X D 3”
“The good mother, the sane mother, a mother defined in opposition to mine, a mother who did not obsess over what her daughter weighed or wore, a wife who made dinner and rarely raised her voice, and I counted all the ways my life was nothing like hers, so no one could see from the outside what I knew inside.”
L 45” X W 17” X 6”
“In her sixties, after leaving my father, my mother attained beauty. Even she would admit it. In that last gasp, she attained a magical alchemy of youth and age.”
L 76” X 24” X D X 17”
“My stepmother kept enjoining us to ‘talk,’ often leaving the room so my father and I could be alone. What did my stepmother imagine we would talk about as my father lay dying in the bedroom where he had fucked my therapist?”
L 46” X 30” X 2”
“A few months before my mother’s death, she watched me unpack groceries. There was a large package of toilet paper.
‘Who rolls that for you?’ she said.
It was not one of her crypto-mythic utterances. It was dementia.
Who rolls that for you? became the signature line of my mother's end. It seemed almost Zen-like, like a koan.”
L 32” X 29” X 6”
“Approaching death, my father became ever more what he had been in life. To bring up the pain of the past seemed like adding insult to the injury of his dying.”
L 51” X 28” X D 4”
“Now I think the true deity of my family is Kali, the Indian goddess of creation and destruction - goddess of duality. And like Kali I too flaunt my tongue, like a blazing jewel, bare to the world.”
L 52” X W 66” X D 18”
Photos by Luc Nicknair