Jersey Dreams

Little pink monkeys that you could hang off one another. Vague notions of basements in Jersey and thunderstorms and dark corners that should have been scary, but somehow weren't. Maybe it's because my sister was scared, maybe I just don't remember, 'cause I don't really remember very much else. A picnic table in the backyard, a house across the street, on the corner, with a little girl I liked. Snow treats in the winter with maple syrup poured all over. Dad eating his eggs and bacon, all stacked on a piece of toast, so that each square he sliced off had a bit of everything. My stepmom marching me across the room, something about either walking (heel and toe, heel and toe) or the alphabet, how it's "el em en oh" and not "elemeno."

Christmas one year, eating the popcorn strings off the tree. We thought it was fun. My aunt insisted it was because we were starving because my stepmom wasn't bringing dinner nearly fast enough. And there was the sailboat on the water, me getting hit in the head with the boom. I had an older sister then, and I can almost remember her. I remember her mouse dying but she doesn't remember a mouse.

And maybe the best thing about being three is that I can't remember any bad times, except maybe the time at breakfast I told my stepmom to go away and she did. (Turns out she was going to work, but she let me think she was leaving me.) But everything else just happened, the people I remember were just glimpses, fragments, a word here and a sentence there. We actually drove out to California, the four of us -- my stepmom and dad, my sister and me -- and I don't remember. We set up shop in a friend's house in California, and I remember the pool and the piano and I remembered their names at one time, but no more.

There was a new house for us, with a little pile of Portland cement still in the driveway and three walnut trees in the yard and my sister and I in a bunk bed and a wall filled with books, my sister's books. Maybe television has taken the place of those books, but it was almost magical to me the way there was an entire world within that bookshelf, fantastic stories about babysitting men with pipes and magical bathtubs or dodo birds, a far-away place with an emerald city, a bear and his friends... there was always something else to read, always someplace else to go. It would be a few years before I had a bedroom in the attic of my uncle's house, a bedroom with no books and lots of boxes storing this and that, bare insulation staring at me from the rafters, showing my initials -- JM -- in a repeating pattern. But not a single book. Only then did "go to your room!" become a punishment instead of a ticket to wherever I wanted to go.