Reaching back into the mind for a child’s memories, the man tries to remember what the child saw. The first to surface floats in the imagination’s shallows and is not a vision but a number – an address – 608 10th Street. The Brooklyn brownstone five stories tall and no wider than a trailer so strange to the suburban child’s sense of space. Time has merged the memories of his grandparents’ home. Discreet events sometime ago bleed together into one infinite event: one house with many rooms. Memories lost to time sometimes are merely misplaced as the mind ripples and reveals once hidden reefs and shoals. The man remembers what the child saw and tries to dissect what was real and what the child with little sense of the world constructed. It proves impossible. We are the unreliable narrators of our own lives.
Christmases are what the man remembers best about the child’s visits to Brooklyn. Could the child be thinking it was Christmas but it was perhaps Thanksgiving or Easter? Perhaps. How many holidays are contained in this memory? It could be two, it could be 20.
Let him look through the rooms for clues to his own life. There: a toy train set on its tracks. It is Christmas. Under his feet the adults gather around the tables a floor below filling glasses; the children are scattered – cousins ages 2 to 20, amusing themselves the way cousins who are 2 or 20 do. The child is somewhere in between. How does he look? The child does not concern himself with self-regard. What about me? I am me. I am always me. But his mother would have dressed him well, at least for the initial round of hugs and kisses and regards of his grandparents and eight sets of uncles and aunts and the cousins ages 2 to 20 and the assorted other old people of unclear and, to the child, dubious relation. Soon the tie would be unclipped and the shirt untucked and the slacks scuffed and rug-burned.
The clan regroups for dinner: children in the kitchen that smells like a gas stove and ensures that every gas stove the child ever encounters reminds him of his grandparents’ home, at 608 10th Street. The children throw food and make faces. Laugh. Maybe eat something. That last one is deduced.
The adults in the dining room talk their adult talk. There is laughter there, too but the jokes aren’t as funny. No one throws any food in there.
The children scatter once again and as the child explores the house with its many rooms, running into cousins 2 and 20, through the walls he can hear the green bottles of scotch get lighter and the mood below his feet grows darker.
The booze upon which the joy and levity once floated now drowns it as the adults throttle one another with their words – scratching at old wounds; picking at ancient injuries. Memories prove mutable as each defends their version of events held in a visceral vice grip of guilt. Something tells the child this is the same argument they had last year and the year before and he can predict they will have it again next year.
Before things get out of hand there is laughter, as the court grows tired of the black comedy being performed. The adults stand and trundle up the stairs they move, catching cousins in the act of doing what ever it is they do at 2 and 20. The cousins are installed in front of the Christmas tree and required to perform a song or two. Some are eager. The child is not. But he survives.
Coats are donned, ties are gathered. Presents are accounted and the families begin the ritual goodbye on the sidewalk of 10th Street for the drive back to Long Island and Queens and New Jersey.
They’ll do it again, but not forever.
Will it be Easter?
Who can recall.