Sunday, June 10, 2012

Am I missing?

     My brother Tim shared with Jerry and me a (true) anecdote his rabbi told him: Paul Newman was visiting one of the Jewish summer camps for children he had funded with the profits from his food products. He and the kids were having lunch together, with jars of his signature spaghetti sauce and salad dressings on the table. One little girl kept looking from the pictures of Paul Newman on the jars to the real Paul Newman and back again. Puzzled, she finally asked him, "Are you missing?"

     I think I am missing. I have memories of being molested by my father in my childhood home in Yellow Springs, Ohio. I remember having a twin bed against the wall in their room, the large middle room upstairs, and the incest--more than once--took place in my parents' big bed.
     But I just double-checked with my brothers, one eight years older than I am and one six years older. Both of them said (independently) that they slept in the middle room the whole time we lived in that house. They had bunk beds in there. They said Mom and Dad slept in the room on the other side of the stairs. That shook me up. If I'd remembered the venue wrong, had my memories of incest being wrong, too?
     On top of that, neither of them have any memories of where I did sleep. We lived in that house together for seven years. Yet Tim can't place what bedroom I slept in. And Ted says, "You were very much around, Jessica.  You were cute and irritating and funny and teasable.  But all my memories are of you outside the house . . . swinging on the swing or trashing the flowers or heading off to Joan's house or riding a tricycle . . .  and I remember you driving with us places in the car . . . but I just can't place you inside that house, except when it's a photograph that I'm remembering.
      "I haven't the slightest idea where you slept at any time; are you sure you ever actually lived in our house, not at Joanie Clark's?"
     This morning I lay awake mentally reviewing every room in the house, including all four bedrooms. I remember each of them but I can't remember where I slept, if I didn't sleep in the middle room with Mommy and Daddy.
     If I wasn't there, do I exist?

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