First Draft
I will always carry a memory with me from my childhood. I do not know if it is beautiful or useful, but it has stayed in me like a chemical, and now I will sweat it out like a boy going on his vision quest.
I was raised by three women. To me, this has never been a strange arrangement. It was normal, and I never wanted a dad. All of my friends never seemed to like their dads, or else they liked them too much. Either way, without really consciously thinking about it, I was glad to not have to deal with the fact of a father. Eventually my three mothers decided that it wasn’t working out between them and to go their separate ways. They moved to three different towns in Western Massachusetts. My birth mother stayed in Northampton for a while, my mother Karen, who I called Kapri, moved to Florence, and my mother Judy, who I called Poohie, moved to Easthampton. Fairly soon after splitting up, my birth mother found a woman she wanted to live with, named Penny. She lived in East Longmeadow, a town I had never heard of, but I felt a sense of trepidation and foreboding despite that. I felt that nothing good could come of a town that had to be that specific about where it was.
So we moved out here, to East Longmeadow, a small green place with the world’s most dangerous intersection. In culture, it is somewhat conformist, but there is a place in town where excellent sandwiches are made, and so I can forgive it many of its’ faults. We lived in Penny’s house for maybe a year, then, due to a confluence of events, it was decided that we should move to a different house. I think underneath it all, my mother wanted to live in a house that was ours, not hers. She wanted to symbolically cast away Penny’s bachelorette trappings.
So we went out in search of a house. I only recall looking at one house with my mother, but there must have been others. Perhaps there was only one that they thought required the expertise of an eight-year-old to judge. In any case, they carted me out there, either after school or during the weekend, to look at this house. It was beautiful outside, surrounded by green fields. There was a barn in the back, but no horses. This was an ideal arrangement for me, because I hated (and still dislike) large animals: I keep thinking that they’ll decide that I am bad and that it is time to crush me. Behind the barn, there were woods, dark and quiet with quick silent deer.
Then we went inside the house. The woman who showed us around (who I now understand owned the house) seemed very nice. I seem to remember that she had something wrong with her face, like a nose that quirked strongly to one side or very crooked teeth, but I cannot remember exactly what it was. The living room had orange shag carpeting.
Whenever I am in a new structure, I am always lost. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the most obviously built, well-laid out structure in the universe, I will be lost when I am new to it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a shack with one wall dividing it down the middle. And so it was with this new house. I was confused and turned around as I moved from one room to another. By the time they led me down to the basement, through a door that should lead to the kitchen but doesn’t, through a stairwell with a turn in it, my sense of direction had entirely escaped me. The basement had no windows and was illuminated by ugly track lighting. There was probably some furniture, because I remember that “a furnished basement” was one of the selling points. It probably had hideous shag carpeting as well, but I only remembered one thing clearly.
There was a deer’s head mounted on the wall. It had glossy fur, all going in the same direction. I was old enough to understand that the deer was there because it had been killed by someone who lived in the house, and that its’ head had been mounted on the wall. This did two things: it gave me a possible explanation for the deer head, and it made me realize that someone who lived in the house was a murderer. It had a mighty rack of horns. I don’t remember how many points, but I do remember thinking that the horns looked freakish, like they didn’t belong there. I had a sensation that must have been similar to the first people to see a circus freak show, some kind of animal creation sewn together by Barnum and Bailey. The thing I remember the most was its’ eyes. It had two huge, clean eyes, opened as wide as a tunnel. They looked like a thing brought to the edge too many times, driven insane. No, insane is too modern and antiseptic a word. Those eyes looked mad.
I remember absolutely nothing else about the day. Not driving home, not eating dinner, not going to bed that night, even though those things must have happened. I have no memory of my mother informing me that she had decided to buy the house, or of moving in. I do remember asking my mother if the deer head was still there. “No,” she said with a laugh, “the people who used to live here moved away, they took all their things.”
But I found things in the house that I had no explanation for. I found an old book of medical diagrams, showing two facing people, a man and a woman, their internal organs displayed. It seemed a terrible breach of privacy to me, to show two people’s most secret things to the world. I found an empty trunk with a lock, but no key. I once closed the trunk and locked it. I was afraid that my mother would find out that I had made this trunk useless, so I taught myself to pick the lock. To this day I can pick simple locks using nothing more than a bent piece of thin metal and a fork. I found a painting of a cat. I found several keys, some of them traditional keys you can get at any hardware store, and some of them older and rustier. I found several pieces of bent metal, a few with hinges in them. I couldn’t figure out what they could possibly be for. They didn’t fit into any machine I could comprehend.
But I never saw the deer again.
We live in the house to this day, and recently I’ve started spending more and more time in the basement. I bring my computer down there and play music that echoes off the cement walls and ceiling and floor. I’m thinking of moving my bed down there. But something is keeping me above ground, floating above the chamber. It’s that memory. I’ve made others down there, nights spent there with friends, the month I had to shower in the little bathroom when the showerhead above broke. I spent my sixteenth birthday down there. But that one memory always floats to the surface, from down beneath the depths of my mind.
I was raised by three women. To me, this has never been a strange arrangement. It was normal, and I never wanted a dad. All of my friends never seemed to like their dads, or else they liked them too much. Either way, without really consciously thinking about it, I was glad to not have to deal with the fact of a father. Eventually my three mothers decided that it wasn’t working out between them and to go their separate ways. They moved to three different towns in Western Massachusetts. My birth mother stayed in Northampton for a while, my mother Karen, who I called Kapri, moved to Florence, and my mother Judy, who I called Poohie, moved to Easthampton. Fairly soon after splitting up, my birth mother found a woman she wanted to live with, named Penny. She lived in East Longmeadow, a town I had never heard of, but I felt a sense of trepidation and foreboding despite that. I felt that nothing good could come of a town that had to be that specific about where it was.
So we moved out here, to East Longmeadow, a small green place with the world’s most dangerous intersection. In culture, it is somewhat conformist, but there is a place in town where excellent sandwiches are made, and so I can forgive it many of its’ faults. We lived in Penny’s house for maybe a year, then, due to a confluence of events, it was decided that we should move to a different house. I think underneath it all, my mother wanted to live in a house that was ours, not hers. She wanted to symbolically cast away Penny’s bachelorette trappings.
So we went out in search of a house. I only recall looking at one house with my mother, but there must have been others. Perhaps there was only one that they thought required the expertise of an eight-year-old to judge. In any case, they carted me out there, either after school or during the weekend, to look at this house. It was beautiful outside, surrounded by green fields. There was a barn in the back, but no horses. This was an ideal arrangement for me, because I hated (and still dislike) large animals: I keep thinking that they’ll decide that I am bad and that it is time to crush me. Behind the barn, there were woods, dark and quiet with quick silent deer.
Then we went inside the house. The woman who showed us around (who I now understand owned the house) seemed very nice. I seem to remember that she had something wrong with her face, like a nose that quirked strongly to one side or very crooked teeth, but I cannot remember exactly what it was. The living room had orange shag carpeting.
Whenever I am in a new structure, I am always lost. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the most obviously built, well-laid out structure in the universe, I will be lost when I am new to it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a shack with one wall dividing it down the middle. And so it was with this new house. I was confused and turned around as I moved from one room to another. By the time they led me down to the basement, through a door that should lead to the kitchen but doesn’t, through a stairwell with a turn in it, my sense of direction had entirely escaped me. The basement had no windows and was illuminated by ugly track lighting. There was probably some furniture, because I remember that “a furnished basement” was one of the selling points. It probably had hideous shag carpeting as well, but I only remembered one thing clearly.
There was a deer’s head mounted on the wall. It had glossy fur, all going in the same direction. I was old enough to understand that the deer was there because it had been killed by someone who lived in the house, and that its’ head had been mounted on the wall. This did two things: it gave me a possible explanation for the deer head, and it made me realize that someone who lived in the house was a murderer. It had a mighty rack of horns. I don’t remember how many points, but I do remember thinking that the horns looked freakish, like they didn’t belong there. I had a sensation that must have been similar to the first people to see a circus freak show, some kind of animal creation sewn together by Barnum and Bailey. The thing I remember the most was its’ eyes. It had two huge, clean eyes, opened as wide as a tunnel. They looked like a thing brought to the edge too many times, driven insane. No, insane is too modern and antiseptic a word. Those eyes looked mad.
I remember absolutely nothing else about the day. Not driving home, not eating dinner, not going to bed that night, even though those things must have happened. I have no memory of my mother informing me that she had decided to buy the house, or of moving in. I do remember asking my mother if the deer head was still there. “No,” she said with a laugh, “the people who used to live here moved away, they took all their things.”
But I found things in the house that I had no explanation for. I found an old book of medical diagrams, showing two facing people, a man and a woman, their internal organs displayed. It seemed a terrible breach of privacy to me, to show two people’s most secret things to the world. I found an empty trunk with a lock, but no key. I once closed the trunk and locked it. I was afraid that my mother would find out that I had made this trunk useless, so I taught myself to pick the lock. To this day I can pick simple locks using nothing more than a bent piece of thin metal and a fork. I found a painting of a cat. I found several keys, some of them traditional keys you can get at any hardware store, and some of them older and rustier. I found several pieces of bent metal, a few with hinges in them. I couldn’t figure out what they could possibly be for. They didn’t fit into any machine I could comprehend.
But I never saw the deer again.
We live in the house to this day, and recently I’ve started spending more and more time in the basement. I bring my computer down there and play music that echoes off the cement walls and ceiling and floor. I’m thinking of moving my bed down there. But something is keeping me above ground, floating above the chamber. It’s that memory. I’ve made others down there, nights spent there with friends, the month I had to shower in the little bathroom when the showerhead above broke. I spent my sixteenth birthday down there. But that one memory always floats to the surface, from down beneath the depths of my mind.