Memoirs 7 and 8
There's a television show on at one o'clock on Sundays. Some Sundays get divided and carefully wasted. One hour gets spent on laundry, one hour for Melissa and Joan River's fashion critique on Channel 55, another hour spent on Calculus.
My brother and I hadn't watched television together since grade school. Our parents had banned cartoons after school, but the comforting glow of X-men and Batman cartoons was too much for us to go without. As stealthily as we could, the two of us huddled around the screen, always careful to return the television to CNN when we were finished. The television room became our shared cave, the colorful cartoons reflected in our wide faces and eyes. We would bicker over which X-man or X-woman was more powerful; we would sit in awe as Batman roared out of his cave in his sleek Batmobile.
We fell out of favor with the cartoons, and eventually each other. The brawls we had over television, Sports Center or Music Videos, became more than the television was worth for me. Except for Sundays. Except for the ornery and obnoxious Joan Rivers. These are rare moments of harmony, of fraternity, glimmers of a friendship between my brother and I. We watch Rivers critique fashion, and yell back at her, insult her, and laugh uproariously.
"I can't believe what an ass she is," I say. "She has no personal style. None at all," my brother notes gravely. "I would wear that dress," I say about a dress Rivers has torn to shreds. "I can't believe she called that girl a slut," my brother says profoundly. I look at him out of the corner of my eye, and see that he's serious. Silently, I'm proud of him. We watch the rest of the program in peace, and laugh at Rivers and her absurd fashion sense, then laugh at the fact that we're watching such trash in complete peace, and laugh more at the fact that it's finally us against them.
---
I found the small and somewhat lumpy mound of glass on the chest of drawers in the upstairs hallway one afternoon. Inside the cold glass was a bed of red and blue flowers. Or maybe coral, or any other sea creature, an anemone maybe, suctioned into the glass. I remember wanting to open up the glass, and rub the palm of my hand on the odd looking flowers. They looked so smooth to the touch, unlike anything I'd ever seen before, and I wanted to touch them and make sure they weren't an illusion.
I never understood what the paperweight was, or what it was used for, or even where it had come from, until I visited my mother's mother. Palo Alto, California. The house was shivery cold and clammy despite the sun. I huddled my entire visit there on the green plush couch, staring out the dirty window at the bicyclists riding by. Just trying to get a little warm.
"When I was applying to college, I applied to Stanford and Smith. Smith as an "Oh what the hell," because I was certain that I was going to Stanford. But Jimmy flunked out of Stanford and I realized my mother was insane�" and she trails off here. Jimmy was the family failure. He killed himself. Years later. She wound up at Smith because of Jimmy's first failure.
I pictured my mother, staring out the dirty window. Wanting out. Beneath the window is a row of paperweights. Fifty of them, lined up neatly. Swirls of pale glass, of fiery glass, of seashells and stones. Flakes of iron, blood, nervous and anxious designs, trapped in the lead glass. My mother had taken hers when she left for Smith. She went to Smith to flee her mother, but brought her mother's paperweight anyway. She didn't abandon her disturbed, unsettling, and sometimes-wonderful family.
---
I suppose the first one is funnier if you know my brother, and how big of an ass he can be. I have my reservations about posting the second one. I had my reservations about writing it, but it was the last one I wrote and I was desperate. These are probably all the memoirs I'm going to make available. You can read Foster's memoirs too, for the same assignment.
It's my last full day of highschool. I feel nothing but nervousness. I'm worried about my grades, but I'm not doing anything about them. I'm worried about everything. I didn't buy a yearbook, but I've been looking at friends. At the beginning of the year, I wrote my ambition was to be "the next David Byrne, Indiana Jones, and/or Sylvia Plath." I don't wanna be Sylvia Plath! She killed herself! I don't even really wanna be David Byrne either, to tell the truth. I can't really figure out what I left Becca in my class will. I said "peanuts and Ringo." I have no idea what that means. It makes no sense. I didn't make sense. Lucidity is so undervalued sometimes.
2000-06-13, Memoirs 7 and 8
before / after archives / website / hello book / diaryland