The Memory Closet: A Novel (7 page)

“What do you want to know?” Then she paused. “Oh, I guess if you knew that, you wouldn’t be asking us, would you?” She laughed at her own humor, but the silence that followed her laughter grew quickly awkward.

They were both looking at me, but I could think of nothing to say to fill the quiet air around us, and I could feel color begin to rise back up my neck and into my cheeks.

“Why don’t we just play remember-the-time-when,” Dusty suggested. “Amy and I’ll reminisce, and you can chime in or ask questions or whatever you want.”

Dusty had deftly taken the spotlight off me and focused it on the two of them. Amy was not aware of what he’d done, but I was and I was profoundly grateful.

He looked around for the other waitress and spotted her on the other side of the room. Pointing to my cup of coffee, he pantomimed that he wanted some, too, and she nodded.

“OK, Amy, where do you want to start?” Dusty handed her a peanut. “How about that time you stole your father’s driver out of his golf bag and clocked me on the side of the head with it?”

“You always blame me for that! You should have watched where you were going.” She glanced at me and turned back to Dusty. “I don’t think Annie was there that day, though, do you?”

“Maybe not. Then how about—?” Dusty began.

“I know! Remember the time we tried to drown out ground squirrels!”

Dusty’s face registered instant recognition. “We liked to never figured out whose garden hose was whose afterward,” he said.

I was totally lost, had no idea what they were talking about.

“The whole thing was your idea, you know.” Dusty smiled at me, warmth in his green eyes.

“Shoot, just about everything we did was your idea,” Amy said.

“You don’t remember … ?” He saw my blank look. “OK, here’s what happened.”

He described how the three of us and Wendy, plus four or five other children whose names painted no faces in my mind, had been sitting on my front porch, in the swing and on the porch steps one summer morning.

“We were bored,” Amy said. “Then you got that look in your eye.”

Dusty nodded and popped open another peanut. “Soon as I saw it, I knew I was about to get in trouble. I always got in trouble if I went along with whatever you were planning. But I always went along.”

Amy leaned toward me. “You never got in trouble though, 'cause you looked so angelic.” She pointed to my hair. “Your hair was even paler then"-- she paused, saw no recognition, "--and you wore it in braids that hung all the way down your back.” Still no recognition. “And you never got dirty.”

“Oh, she did too. She got as dirty as the rest of us.”

“Well, she never
looked
dirty, then. I just remember Annie all prim and neat, and when we got our butts in a sling about something we’d done, the grown-ups never believed that such a little princess was the ringleader.”

Clearly, they have me confused with somebody else.

“And this one was your baby all the way.” Dusty chucked the shell onto the floor and fished around in the pail until he found another peanut that suited him.

“You sent us all home, said that every one of us had to come back with a garden hose,” he said.

“The Sutton boys didn’t do it; they just blew you off, got on their bikes and rode away,” Amy said. “But the rest of us did.” 
She looked at Dusty. “We all did, didn’t we?”

He nodded, but she didn’t wait for his confirmation. “We must have, because I bet we had a hundred yards of hose.”

The waitress came to the table with Dusty’s cup of coffee and warmed up mine, though I’d only taken a couple of sips.

“You sure you don’t want any?” she asked Amy.

“Well, OK. Sure. Why not? And bring some creamer, too, will you? A lot. Like in a bucket.” She laughed good-naturedly, then took up the story again when the waitress walked away. “So we all came back later, dragging garden hoses we got out of our garages.”

“Or unhooked from where they were supposed to be watering the yard,” Dusty put in. “My mother had just set out a sprinkler and I snatched the hose right out from under it. Left the sprinkler just sitting there.”

He was enjoying the story, but he was studying me, too. Not in a hostile way. Just looking. Wondering. “I got my butt tanned for stealing that hose. You always got me in trouble, Annie.”

“We all got together in your back yard and attached the first hose—no, I guess the first hose was already attached to the faucet on the back of your house.” Amy wasn’t sitting in the restaurant anymore. She was 10 years old, standing beside a little girl with blonde braids next to a chicken house. “And you took the second hose and screwed it on the end of the first …”

Slowly, the scene formed in my head. It was dim, shadowy. But it was there!

A group of children. Lengths of garden hose, like coiled snakes. The first length of hose stretches from the house to the back of the yard by the fence around the chicken house, where there is an opening between the hedge of trees and the fence.

I screw the second hose to the first, and we squeeze one at a time through the opening and stretch the hose out beyond the trees into the open prairie. Wendy is beside me, her dark eyes dancing. She tries to help, but everybody wants to screw their own hose on next, and she gets shoved out of the way.

Then I say something and the other kids let her through and she’s beside me again.

“ … came running up with three or four Mason jars, so we could catch the squirrels in the jars and make pets out of them.” Amy rolled her eyes. “Like our parents would have let us keep them!”

“And like they wouldn’t have buried their sharp little teeth in our fat little fingers if we tried to pet them.”

“Joey Callison said we’d need more jars than that, so somebody …” Amy looked at Dusty and he shrugged. “Well, somebody went and got more.”

Dusty picked up on the change in the blank look on my face. “Do you remember any of this?”

“Well, yes, sort of.” My heart was pounding, with the general consternation of sitting there with two strangers and with excitement over the memory. “We’re all, a bunch of us are out in the prairie behind my house. And Wendy’s there and some kids shove her out of the way.”

“The other kids were mean to Wendy,” Dusty said. “Pushed her around a lot. She was so tiny and so pretty; she looked like a little doll instead of a kid.”

“And, of course, her being Indian and all. Back then, my parents were openly prejudiced.”

Indian? Wendy was an Indian!

“Even toward people just half Indian like she was.”

She had dark hair and eyes and I assumed her mother was Mexican.

“You always stood up for her, though,” Dusty said. “You were like a mother bear, wouldn’t let anybody hurt her.”

I was too flummoxed to say anything more than, “And then what happened?”

The two went on with the story while I scrambled to assimilate the information that my little sister had been Native American!

I wonder what tribe.

Dusty and Amy described how the children spread out and searched for holes, looking for the entrances to the tangle of below-ground tunnels dug by the small, burrowing creatures we called ground squirrels.

The little rodents that inhabited the open plains around Goshen were smaller than prairie dogs, longer, thinner and spotted, like hot-dog-shaped chipmunks. But like prairie dogs, they set out sentries that warned the others of danger, and they all vanished below ground if anyone came near. Every evening, just at sunset, they stood at the entrances of their holes and called out to each other with a distinctive, high-pitched
chee ee ee,
a sound as lonely as the cry of a chicken hawk high in the empty sky.

“ … and as soon as we had somebody holding a Mason jar over every hole, you gave the signal for the kid stationed by the faucet on the back of your house to turn on the water,” Amy said. “Then we just waited.”

“Seemed like it took forever for the water to get to the end of the last hose,” Dusty said.

Then he and Amy got into a discussion about what heartless little monsters children were and said we probably drowned two or three ground squirrels for every one that made it to an entrance alive.

“If a child tried something like that today, somebody from the SPCA would be standing on my chest, demanding that I throw the kid in jail.”

Suddenly, I could see the scene again. I didn’t even think about remembering; it was just there.

Little kids scattered out over an expanse of prairie the size of a baseball field. Each holds a Mason jar over a hole in the ground. I hold a water hose with the end stuck way down into the biggest hole, the one we think is the main entrance, and suddenly water gushes out of it, backed up from the tunnels that are rapidly filling.

Joey Davenport stands over a nearby hole, the one closest to me, and he suddenly squeals, “I caught one—I caught a bunch of ‘em!” before he falls backward. He drops the Mason jar containing two small, wet ground squirrels, while another four or five rush out of the hole and scatter.

Then it’s pandemonium. Ground squirrels are scrambling out all the holes now and none of the kids is really prepared to catch them. The little blonde general in charge of this tactical maneuver made some grave miscalculations, leaving critical holes in her strategy. For one thing, it didn’t occur to her that a Mason jar isn’t nearly big enough to hold an adult ground squirrel! Then there’s the issue of lids for the jars; nobody brought lids. As soon as the few squirrels actually caught in jars start struggling to get away, the kids drop the jars before the ground squirrels can sink their teeth into some available appendage.

But a little boy off to my left—it’s Dusty!—catches one, a small ground squirrel, probably a baby, and he has the presence of mind to turn the jar upside down on top of it and put his foot on the jar. Then he shouts, “I got one!”

“ …
I was yelling ‘I got one!’ at the top of my lungs,” Dusty said. “I was holding the jar down with my foot—”

“And that’s when Allison started screaming,” Amy said.

A dark-haired girl with brown freckles is screaming. She drops her jar and stumbles, scrambles backward, shrieking, and she knocks Wendy down in her frantic effort to get away from the hole in the ground. I can see something dark there in front of the hole.

“ … didn’t have sense enough to figure out there might be something else in those holes besides ground squirrels,” Dusty said. “When that tarantula crawled out of that hole, Allison turned so white her freckles stuck out like pepper on a fried egg.”

The huge tarantula crawls fast, running from the water flowing out of the hole. It heads straight for Wendy, who’s lying on her back in the dirt. She sees it, screams, tries to scoot away, but it gets to her before she has a chance and crawls up on her bare leg, looking for high ground. She kicks at it with her other foot as she continues to scoot backward in the dirt, screaming. But it keeps climbing. Up her leg and across her belly. She swats at it with her hand. Misses. Now, it’s on her face and she is totally hysterical.

Suddenly, I’m beside her. I reach down and grab the hairy, black spider off her face, throw it to the ground and stomp it. It is crushed, but its mangled body struggles to crawl away, and I stomp it again and again and again as Wendy continues to scream.

“Annie ... Anne?” Dusty’s voice summoned me back to the real world. “Are you all right?”

My face must have registered the terror and horror and loathing I was feeling.

“I stomped it, the tarantula.”

They nodded. They knew that; they’d been there.

“I grabbed it, touched it,
picked it up!”
I shuddered in utter revulsion. I was suddenly dizzy and nauseated. “You don’t understand,” I whispered in a ragged gasp. “I’m
terrified
of spiders.”

“Well, you sure weren’t scared of spiders then!” Amy said, but I caught the look she shot Dusty, and I yearned to shrink back deep into myself, away from them, away from their assessment of me, their judgment that has informed them, albeit belatedly: This woman is definitely not dragging a full string of fish.

“I’m scared to death of snakes,” Dusty said.

Amy turned to him, confused by his non sequitur. Attention off me, onto Dusty.

“Do you know why the sheriff’s posse was late in the Fourth of July parade last summer?”

“I didn’t know it was late.”

“Well, it was—because Brett Robertson, Joe’s youngest, the little one with glasses, was standing beside my horse with this snake in his hand. A bull snake, harmless. But I wouldn’t get anywhere near it! I told Joe if he didn’t get that boy and his snake away from me and my horse, I’d arrest the kid on the spot and charge him with assaulting a police officer.”

“Oh, you did not!”

“Did too. Ask Joe if you don’t believe me.”

Dusty proceeded to tell Amy the saga of finding a rattler in his garage when he was a kid, embellished the story, kept her laughing, never once looked at me. But I sensed he was aware of me all the same. He was reading me. And when he decided I was ready, he turned and pulled me effortlessly back into the conversation.

“I think sometimes it’d be great to forget all about things like that,” he said. “But it’s not, is it Anne? It must feel awfully, oh I don’t know—empty, not to remember.”

“It’s the emptiest feeling in the world,” I said quietly. But I’d stopped trembling, and no longer looked like I had recently escaped from the Terminally Befuddled Ward of the Rutherford County Hospital. “I really appreciate you, both of you, helping me remember. It means a lot.”

“Well, it certainly wasn’t no trouble at all,” Amy said pleasantly. I could tell that she’d figured out there was something fragile about me. Everybody saw it eventually, spotted Anne Mitchell’s flashing neon sign:
handle with care.
“You’re welcome to come back anytime, and we’ll talk about the past--well,
I’ll
talk about the past and you can listen. I’ll pick a more enjoyable experience next time—promise.”

Dusty reached into the pail, pulled out a handful of peanuts and piled them in front of him on the checkered tablecloth. Then he selected the biggest one and began to peel it.