In that same photograph, Felix stands tall, square, and sturdy, wearing his pin-striped suit—the lapels wide. Occasionally my mind wanders to that suit and I’ll consider what happened to it. Where is it hanging? Was it folded into a box? Where do wedding suits end up? Was it given away or did it outlive my grandfather like how a favorite reading chair might outlive its person? The sallow tuft of its seat, eternally styled just for one. Tailored pant legs on anyone else become costume: roomy chutes, flaccid, or goofy and squat. I’ll see old men on the street shrinking into their clothes—trousers girded around mini guts, jacket shoulders too stubborn to sag—and I’ll think about my grandfather.
He was a large man whom I only met once, when I was three years old, visiting Calcutta for the first time. I have no memory of the trip, though of course I do. I have unintelligible copy. Recall the texture of chiffon. I have the impression of a city, of looking down just in time to skip over a puddle. The sustained toot of car horns. Of bare lightbulbs hanging above fruit stalls at night and sun halos flecking my vision from having peered up at palm trees, absorbed by how they siphon blue sky through their plumed leaves. While I’ve been back to visit over the years, that first trip is, I wonder, when my memory switched into gear. When I began to pile experiences, grafting them without motive—suddenly hyperaware of the cone-shaped hats on the clown pattern on my two-piece pajamas, or how making eye contact with a stranger could seal that stranger’s face in my mind. How now I have at my disposal a whole catalog of strangers’ faces, for no reason at all.
One image in particular from my first time in Calcutta comes to mind: of me and my cousins, barely clothed, enjoying the hell out of pretend-coiffing Felix’s hair. He’s sitting shirtless at the massive teak kitchen table, noble as ever in an imaginary salon. We’re jumping up and down and standing on our tiptoes, pinching plastic clips into his hair. It’s possible I’ve been described this episode or that it exists more readily as a photograph conspiring to reshuffle my clarity. Like when I use someone else’s keyboard—the letter E is jammed; the space bar’s lost its spring. Or how a cover of a familiar song usually forces further consideration before I can identify it. How, all at once, what I know for sure—the words to a damn song—can feel frustratingly just out of reach.
There’s no use in trying to figure out which came first, my memory of the hair clips in that Calcutta kitchen or my mother’s telling of that afternoon nearly three decades ago. I’ve come around to the conciliatory quality of untruths. Memory fans out from imagination, and vice versa, and why not. Memory isn’t a well but an offshoot. It goes secretly. Comes apart. Deceives. It’s guilty of repurposing the meaning of deep meaning and poking fun at what you’ve emotionalized.
And besides, it feels more covert to have no evidence. To believe that something you’ve experienced will build on your extent—your extent as a person who sees things, and is moved by things—without ever having to prove those things happened exactly as they happened. Substantiating is grueling, monotonous. It’s what life expects of you. Memory is trust open to doubt.
Perhaps they weren’t hair clips but clothespins. Who knows. We were children. Recycled containers were toys. Fonts on cereal boxes provided an exciting new style for drawing the hanging loop of a lowercase g. I played house because keeping busy looked entertaining. The hectic woman was a character in a video game, reaching the next level. Her unavailable stare as she opened and closed cabinets while listening to a child’s tedious story, or, by instinct, sponging the sink’s grime while talking on the phone strangely appealed to me. Perhaps it’s because, as a child, I perceived responsibilities as possibilities, carrying around one of those Sealtest bags of 2 percent milk, pretending it was my baby and returning it to the fridge before it got warm.
To this day, watching a woman mindlessly tend to one thing while doing something else absorbs me. Like securing the backs of her earrings while wiggling her feet into her shoes. Like staring into some middle distance, where lines soften, and where she separates the relevant from the immaterial. A woman carries her inner life—lugs it around or holds it in like fumes that both poison and bless her—while nourishing another’s inner life, many others actually, while never revealing too much madness, or, possibly, never revealing where she stores it: her island of lost mind. Every woman has one. And every woman grins when the question is asked, What three items would you bring to a desert island? Because every woman’s been, by this time, half living there.
What other imaginations decked my childhood? Riches I perceived simply from staring long enough at something plain, and in staring long enough, I was recasting it. At Christmas, the tin of Quality Street chocolates had the allure of, not hidden treasure exactly, but close. Cellophane has that effect. Little wrapped jewels that came with a map I studied close. Purple twist = Hazelnut Caramel. Green = Milk Choc Block. Pink = Fudge. Nobody ate the Toffee Penny. They outlasted the holidays entirely. Even today when I see the nugget-shaped toffees, I’m reminded of how blank those days that followed Christmas and New Year’s felt. How now I often regret not being tucked into bed before midnight on December 31.
A Bruegel print hanging in our home was essentially my jackpot. I mined that peasant-wedding scene so intently that elements of its narrative details, like porridge bowls, the lip of a jug, that pureed Bruegel red—like tomato soup from the can—and a child in the foreground licking a plate, all belong to my memory’s reel. It’s the merging that occurs from housing a mental archive instead of contending with the sound of parents who were speaking to each other in a strained tone. Of momentarily acquitting myself of childhood grievances: of all the birds we hear in trees but never see, but know are there.