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Show Moon - 46 person doing things she needed to learn. If it weren't for the milk, which had become a burning issue at every mealtime, Joy would have been happy. Mother, am I remembering that wrong? Am I determined that something like milk should have spoiled our happiness even then? Am I unable to be objective, even about a third person, someone who isn't me at all? Am I the sort of person who will manufacture unhappy memories to justify present-day failings? Then again, the opposite might be true. I might be idealizing, and using the milk problem as a little screen for God knows what. It has been said that World War Two spawned a domestic mythology unlike any other in our history. Perhaps to forget the horrors it had seen, if only in newsreels, the family was a cradle lulling the mind, a collective nesting imperative seizing America like mass hypnosis. We like to think that our lives belong to us alone, to be shaped according to our individual will. But look, we're part of a larger story, like it or not. The public version of that story comes back to us in novels and movies. Then we tie into the plot, our memories inextricably bound up with the fictions of the day. You, my mother, for example, have become submerged in the story of sweet daily routine. What was the undercover story, the one made unreal by the silence around it? I have fragments of memory that could be misleading-Daddy sitting on my bed stroking my neck until he'd sigh with what felt like terrible sadness and finally go away. Why try to make something of this? Why did I shrink from his touch? Perhaps someday those early fragments will fall into some unity I've failed to see, or I will discover they mean nothing whatsoever. |