Discrete
Wednesday, March 26, 2008 
The sun shines in the morning now, even at 7:30.
I am not sure what keeps dragging me back.
Memory is shifty at the best of times. Sit down with a group of friends that you have known for years and bring up that time at the lake. Ask each of them to relate a particular incident in their own words. No two stories will be quite the same. The characters, the background, the emotions, and the conversation remembered will all be different. Life is in the eye of the beholder.
I slip back into memory so easily. I can smell a person's coat, I remember the feel of curtains between my fingers, there is the click of women's heels on linoleum that was put down in the 1950s. It is hard to turn away from things that are always within arm's reach.
Right now, I am in the girls' bathroom in the basement of my grandparents' church in their hometown of 150 people. It is 1984. The floor is covered in a layer of plastic meant to resemble brown pebbles, and the walls are whitewashed cement. The stalls are constructed out of flat sheets of cheap plywood painted white, and the toilet paper is appropriately economical one-ply with no embossed pattern. It is suspended against the the wall on wooden doweling.
I am in an eyelet lace dress that never turns me into the girls applying lip gloss at the next sink. The dress has a turquoise ribbon sash that I tie too tightly around my waist. Unless it is constricting my ability to breathe, I feel insecure. I have split it twice at the knot while sneezing, and so the sash is nearly too short.
My white stockings make me naked. The springy girlishness of the dress makes me naked. Everything makes me naked. A friend put lip gloss on me once, and I felt as though I had been caught masturbating in public.
While the other girls touch their hair and spray hairspray out of the handles of dual-purpose brushes, I run my hands under numbingly cold tapwater.
Did you see Darryl?
Yeah!
Do you thing he's cute?
Yeah! Have you seen his cousin?
Yeah! You should talk to him!
Is my hair okay? It's too flat.
No, it's perfect! Is my hair okay?
You look so cute. Where did you get that blue mascara?
While they giggle and re-tease their hair, I think about how the first boy they like has a dog bite on his face and his cousin drags his feet when he walks. My isolation is as palpable as the cold porcelain between us. I do not have their eyes. They smell like strawberries.
I shut myself in a stall and pull the elastic tights away from my leg. When the tights snap back, dust rises from them where my dry skin has worked its way into the knit. The bathroom smells like a hockey arena, and I imagine that I am there in the hall behind the stands where I can hear people bang their boots against the wooden boards.
Reader Comments (14)
*sigh* I love how evocative your writing is. I feel like I'm in the same room.
Yes, the smell of a hockey arena. How can it have a smell? Is it the smell of ice? How can ice have a smell when water doesn't? Or is it my mistake about water, and I just haven't been paying enough attention...
Memory catches me this way too. I can't remember anything useful; I can't even remember what happened in my favourite film. But walk past me with a certain kind of perfume or scrunch a piece of paper in a particular way, and I'm right back in a moment I didn't know I had stored.
This is beautifully written. I almost remember it myself!
And hello, by the way! I'm not quite sure how I ended up here, but I'm glad I did.
poetry again!
I was just remarking to my mother today how you know when your head is back in a certain place, from a certain time? I spend a lot of time in my home town library, ca 1978, before it was remodeled. I'll be thinking about something completely unrelated but part of me is walking through those musty aisles.
I know that smell.
I know that dust.
Carolyn B., thank you!
Sparkling Red, I live in Saskatchewan, and snow definitely has a smell, so maybe ice does? I haven't really noticed. When I was writing that post, I was trying to think of what hockey arenas really smelled like, but there were too many pieces to that puzzle: cold, that black rubbing flooring meant for skates, old wood, fifty winter jackets, etc.
J. Adamthwaite, you just reminded me of cheap Avon perfume. Every time I smell it, it's the 1970s, I swear.
Thanks for ending up here.
aleximac, I know that feeling completely. I'm often hiding with all the old quilts under the stairs at my grandmother's house.
Blackbird, I almost want to haul out an old pair of tights to get that dust effect again this afternoon.
Wow. I completely felt that.
Very very good.
Smells take me back easily.
Hockey arena is wicked cold, almost. Stale smells of fair food, beer, dirt. That's how I remember them. How is it that a hockey game can take a frail looking old woman and turn her into a frenzied woman yelling 'smear 'em all over the ice!'?
Again, you've put me into your mind. Thanks.
Wow Schmutzie, I love your writing. I'm glad I stumbled into you.
how wonderful.
Wow. Just...wow. I can smell the Bonnie Bell Lipsmackers from here. You have an amazing gift, Schmutzie.
Oh please write a memoir.
Write a memoir, seriously.
I need all this bound and compact, in my purse.
Love your writing.
Love the birdie mast.
Love your description of how memory catches you. For as long as I can remember I have been at the mercy of any small thing remembered, that then drags me into a yet longer tale with elaborate details. It's hard to leave anything behind that way, even when it might be better left alone (numerous ex-es, old lives). I've had to learn to divert myself so that I can live the life that's in front of me instead of the life in my head, but sometimes the stories of the past still grab me. I find it strange but wonderful that I get so drawn into *your* memories! Compelling, moving writing even in the small observations. It's addictive. :) Thanks.
--erthsister