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Show Looking back I see why I might have imagined a destroyed building rather than a decaying one, confused fires with the silence left behind when friends moved away. I remember a hospital leveled to its foundation with a five-year-old's hope that the bombs had already dropped. Against the threat of destruction, I sorted pipes and covered my body. In the evenings at Hospital Point, we would gather around the film projector and my parents would show family movies against the military-white walls; the breeze from the Harbor filled our tiny living room, humming between the Venetian blinds. Most of the movies were from my father's childhood, grainy films of boys chasing one another around picnic tables piled high with Tupperware. The reel I waited for was the one of my birthday. For decades I thought that on my first birthday I put my chocolate cake back together, that I repaired the sides, smoothed the frosting, cleaned my hands and face. I asked them to play the footage again and again, delighting in my ability to fix the cake. That was the kind of girl I was, intelligent, orderly, and clean. Only recently did I learn that my parents had simply been playing the film backwards. The story of a girl who would not tolerate a mess had been a lie. I had eaten my cake with the abandon of every other one year old. I am that lie. Somewhere inside me lives the little girl who couldn't stand to see her cake destroyed. It is the same little girl who remembers a demolished hospital in hopes the bombs had already fallen from the sky. She will live her life carefully and consciously, never leaving crumbs on the counter, always turning out the lights. 48 |
