First Memory
By R.W. Hartshorn
When I run out of sheep, I start counting my old lovers to put myself to bed. But after five nights of dreamy scene-painting, the counts are uneven, and now the new problem is keeping me awake. I didn’t think forgetting lovers was something that happened, but here I am. Did I take that one home after necking in the foyer of the performing arts center? Did I slide my tongue through the ravine of her underarm? Had I still been catching my breath when I’d stopped for a taco on the way home? Whole sweaty globs of my life, gone.
Once I’ve swallowed a protein shake and washed the fatigue from the corners of my eyes, the garden calls. I change into shorts, yank on my mud boots, and trek out. The earlobe-sting of March breeze, the taste of snowmelt, the undead longing in the scent of green sprouts breaking through brown hay curl into me.
*
As I turn the shovel over, the rotted tomatoes, halved egg shells, tangerine peels, yellowed collard greens, and scattered cereal flakes begin the work of transforming grainy dirt into damp, life-giving soil, while I begin the work of forgetting that twenty-five years ago today, my mother abandoned me in the cosmetics section of Filene’s Basement. I examined the labels on a parakeet-green lipstick over and over before I realized she’d left her empty cart behind and walked straight out the auto doors, as if she’d simply changed her mind about shopping.
Earthworms glide through the grime, twitching away from my reach. They swallow my leavings, and their work begins. In its way, my dismantling of things that were, my taking apart, has built something too. Alongside the mound, the bucket I’ve dragged from my kitchen sits open, reeks of rust and decay. I think of black mold, animal corpses, drainage, poems about renewal. The worms burrow deep, disappear.
This place was supposed to be another stop on my journey of thumbing my way back east after I’d aged out of the foster system and graduated to a sleeping bag on the stoop of the YWCA. I wanted to dig my fingers into the soil of my roots, get it under my nails. But I got tired, lusted over the way the stream bent into the trees, became a parent to the vulnerable little habitats around the building. I butchered invasive weeds with my spade, exhumed them with filthy hands. Gardening is anarchy, someone said. And so it was.
After my skin has gone red spreading the bird netting over the beds, I return to the house and slide off my boots in the mudroom. Somehow, my feet are still muddy.
*
At lunch, I bring a baggie of hard-boiled eggs to the corner cafe and watch a cellist saw her way through a half hour of Brahms. She’s wearing leggings with brogues, and has a smear of what looks like charcoal above one eyebrow. The groan of the strings makes my molars vibrate.
After she’s finished, I tell her I liked her set, and she asks if I’m into classical music, and I say no, it’s just the anniversary of my mother abandoning me and I’m trying to be good to myself. I can tell by the way her eyes shift to the corner of my mouth that I’ve got yolk on my face. She asks if I want to eat something better.
*
The cafe has a back room with old light fixtures, a copper penny ceiling, and a moldy odor that overtakes the smell of sizzling ham steaks from the kitchen. Here, the cellist and I occupy a round wooden table. She crunches into a baguette while I dump sugar packets into a coffee that I’ll probably never sip.
“Is this a ‘cheer you up’ type thing?” I ask. Maybe it’s unfair of me. Maybe spending the entire day bummed out is a decision I made before I woke up.
She shrugs. I tell her the whole Filene’s Basement story. I add that I can barely remember my mother’s face.
“Okay,” she says. “Do you need to?”
I tell her about thumbing across the country, things shady dudes asked me to do, show, and touch in exchange for a ride. Evenings wrapped in motel blankets at a tent site. Meals begged from strangers, halved apples out of dumpsters. Finding the house with the garden and just sort of moving in when no one answered the door. I start comparing parts of my life to vines and buds, but the cellist’s language is more half notes and eighth notes. We hit an impasse. She cinches off one of her brogues and airs out a sweaty foot.
I slurp the coffee. Too sweet. The cellist sees my fingers shaking, so she steers our conversation away from mothers and abandonment. Her daytime gig: she teaches cello, of course, but once a month she’s a Professional Mermaid. She wears a giant flipper tail and swims around in a rich person’s pool while other rich people stuff their cheeks with pâté. Now I wonder how to think of her – the cellist? The sea creature? – and whether she thinks in half notes and eighth notes twenty-nine days a month, and in seashells and glitter for the remaining day. I mention the gigs I’ve taken – feeling faces for a local lotion company, stacking cans at the food pantry, dog-sitting for a guy whose internet search history was comprised of single, cryptic words like “illegal.” She listens. Her eyes are focused, patient.
“I’m gonna get a beer to go,” she says. “D’you wanna walk?”
*
We clop along a boardwalk that surrounds a man-made lake. “The key to mapping out your future is understanding your own instincts,” the cellist tells me. When I ask her to unpack that for me, she takes a sloppy sip of beer and says, “Like, think about how horny you are on any given day, and consider whether you could make yourself ignore that long enough to make sure your kid doesn’t fall down the basement steps.”
I imagine a geologist explaining how to navigate an asteroid field, but I can’t figure out how to word what I want to say, so I don’t say anything. The cellist stops at a glass vending machine on a tiny pole, drops a coin into the slot, and tosses the resulting handful of pellets into the lake. A fat carp seizes the pellets with gigantic, pouty lips.
I picture the broad silhouette of the store security guard who took my hand and led me to the back room. It was like seeing behind the scenes of a movie set.
“I want to see real water,” I say.
The cellist asks, “Drinkable or not?”
“Mermaid stuff.”
She squeezes my wrist with bottle-cold fingers.
*
The cellist runs figure-eights around me, pounding wet prints into the sand. Arms akimbo, she reaches to pull me along, but there’s ivy curling around my joints. Waves crash. I take baby steps. I feel myself smiling. My legs are tree stumps.
Our fingers flutter together. I let her yank me into the tide, just up to my shins. We’re nose to nose, and she hasn’t let go.
If this happens, I think, if we dive into the bedspread of a coastal motel, tangle ourselves into a reef knot next to a ship in a bottle, if I lay you on your back and kiss between your ribs and lick the salt off every toe, it won’t fix anything. I’ll forget you.
Then she asks, “Is this good?”
The sun is long gone. The sky is flecked with bright shards, and the only sounds are water and sand. No creaking of shopping carts, no plasticky rumble of auto doors, no security guard telling me my mom will be right back for me.
Yeah, I want to say. Good. But I’m not me now. I’m the person I was before That Day, before I knew how to speak.
A shadowy lump slides slowly across the horizon. Maybe a ship. The cellist hums something that sounds like it was crafted with grog and bilge water. I feel my shoulders swaying. She sways with me. I let her explain to me the difference between halyard shanties and capstan shanties, and then we’re shouting our own shanty as we swing each other in an oval, salt-slick palms pressed together. My heels tear away from their roots, and I move.
The ship passes. We collapse into the sand. A day ends.
*
On the next anniversary, I jab my shovel into the compost pile again. The soil is rich now, pungent, substantial. I dump a bucket of rotten grapes into the center and turn the shovel over, creating a rancid nucleus. I inhale the decay. I can barely smell it anymore; I need to bury something that will never stop decomposing.
I pass a nail salon with a mural of a pair of hands wearing the same green polish I saw decorating the shelves on That Day, and I open the door to the smell of chemicals. The nail stations and the front desk are empty, but there’s a rustle of paper from the back room.
I hold my nose and part the curtain. A cartographer with harlequin tattoos on both shoulders is spreading yellowed maps over a glossy black table. After tracing her finger the entire length of the Union Pacific Railroad, she looks up.
“Do I smell?” she says.
“Whoops,” I say, un-pinching my nose. I ask whether this kind of thing is normal after hours at a nail salon.
“No, but it’s hard to be in my line of work anymore. Everything is already mapped. I’m trying to recapture the magic by being somewhere no one’s been while doing something no one else has done.”
She can tell I don’t know what to say to that. Looking at my eyes, she can probably tell that I resemble an abandoner.
I ask about the railroad. The cartographer says she wants to hop a train and think about the new map while she’s in motion. “I’ll need you as a lookout, obviously,” she says. I nod as if it’s obvious. I don’t have anything to do but eat lunch, and trains always have those meal cars.
*
Soon, we’re sitting on the lip of a freight car, legs dangling over the side, bulleting into the afternoon. “Truth or dare?” she says.
“Truth,” I shout over the wind and the grating of the rails.
“What are the best and worst places you ever ended up because you got lost?”
“The best was a tiny bed and breakfast after I rolled my ankle on a hike. It was actually just a guest room in someone’s house on the preserve. Nothing there but a buffet lamp and a hand-carved wooden bowl of peanut brittle.”
She’s squinting. I’m not sure how much of this she’s making out.
“What was the worst?” she says before I finish saying everything I wanted to say about the room.
“Foster care.”
When the train reaches the next station, we hop off and fork over some cash for another train, this one a regional rail with a bright green engine and sleeper cars. We don’t take our seats yet. The cartographer kneels on the concrete and sketches a few lines on parchment while I look over a collection of footprints in cement. The prints surround a miniature garden of non-native plants. No description of why these prints exist, just a brown sign with “Under construction” in yellow lettering. I move to set my foot in a print that looks about my size, but I think better of it.
When I look up, the cartographer is watching my face and sketching at the same time. She smiles at me, which I now realize she hasn’t done yet. I smile back, a big toothy one.
*
Curled in my seat, I tell the cartographer the story of That Day while she draws thick index lines with a flat pencil, as if translating my voice into elevations, my lost years into the number of steps it takes to scramble up an escarpment. When I get to the part about cutting my wrist on a jagged can lid while searching a dumpster for stale donuts, she plucks a red colored pencil from behind her ear and ticks a depression ring within the index lines. Then she sets the pencil down.
I ask if she’s going to do the peak ring. She says not yet.
I traipse down the aisle to the meal car as the rails rumble beneath. I buy a cardboard boat of cheese fries, a bagel the size of a refrigerator magnet, and a juice box. When I get back, the cartographer is in my window seat, pressing a new pencil against the parchment, creating a narrow saddle between two mountains. I kick my shoes off and curl into my seat again. In silence, I eat and she sketches. Soon, a tightness locks in behind my knee, and she lets me stretch a leg across her lap.
She touches a fingertip to the sole of my foot and traces a line from ball to heel. I giggle, twitch. She begins again. She traces until I don’t flinch. My capillaries burn. She gives me a look like she didn’t know where this map was going until now.
Outside, spheres gleam above the setting sun like planets yawning through their cycles. I tell myself not to forget this moment. Billions of years pass.
When the train darkens and the shades are pulled, we enter the sleeper car. The cartographer tackles me onto the stiff cot and decorates me with her lips. After our clothes are humped into the narrow walking space and I’m prone on my stomach, she sets a finger in the center of my spine and begins finding a route, carving a little trail across the mountain range of my shoulder blades, over miles of spine. She makes a new kind of map. No one could lose their way here.
*
When another year has been sucked into the gelatin of time, I once again stand over the pile, plump and soft. I toss maggoty bread crusts into its maw, fold them in with the shovel. Next the mushy strawberries get tucked in, then the brown carrot butts. The pumpkin leaves will follow, once I’ve sheared them away and packed the garden beds with compost, marvel of regurgitation. Next year, my blooms will reach the stars.
I kick off my boots, scrape the gunk out of my cuticles, and banish all thoughts of vulgar green polish, broad-shouldered security guards, and extended thumbs from my mind. I glance over the museum brochure on my fridge and make sure I’ve got the time right for From Skulls to Resurrections. I dig up some old jeans, give the mirror a lazy twist of the hips, and poke studs into my ears.
*
I sit on a wooden chair squeezed between two pre-teens who have been engaged in an argument since before I got here. While the paleontologist on stage speaks, the duo fire whispered curses over, around, and through me.
The paleontologist – in a canvas sun hat, earth-caked denim, and the same brand of boots racked in my mudroom – talks about the bones she’s pulled out of ravine floors, fossils excavated from Xinjiang, hopping the red-eye to America to examine quill knobs on the ulna of a velociraptor.
When the demo is over, she asks who wants to go on the Guided Resurrection Tour. The crowd dissolves into fragments. I stand alone with the paleontologist in the darkening cavern of the exhibit. I’m not sure who’s waiting for the other to speak first.
“Sorry I’m all that’s left,” I say. “I think everyone learned from the lecture though.”
She blows a raspberry, sloughing off the professional skin. “No one has ever stayed for these things,” she says. “I was about to call it a night and get a cherry beer.”
“Guess you’re stuck with me.”
“Guess so. Let’s go.”
We maunder into a pitch-black corridor, immersed in a hollow groan coming through the walls. I hear the paleontologist snap three times in perfect intervals, punctuating the groan, thinking she’s going to hand me an egg-shaped fossil to crack open with a little mallet, but when the lights flare on, we’re in the foyer. She fishes through her pocket, and the engine of a green hybrid yawns to life in the lot.
“The tour is somewhere else,” she says, then opens the glass door for me.
*
The hybrid’s cabin is snug, claustrophobic. My toes tap in my shoes, trying to do something with the silence. At a red light, the paleontologist tells me about a summer when she was never able to get all the dirt from under her nails no matter how many portable showers she washed in. Airport shuttles collect around us.
“My mom said she’d bring me to Europe once,” I say, making eye contact with a tween in the shuttle alongside us, whacking the tag on her huge sunglasses back and forth.
The paleontologist looks at me, her gaze excavating what she needs without having to ask. She says, “Is that where we’re going?” The green arrow flicks to life, and we join the shuttles in turning toward the airport. “Like I said, nobody’s taken me up on the tour before.”
An answer gets caught in my throat. “If you want my take,” she says, “save Europe. Let’s go to a place that used to be yours.”
We cross the stretch of airfield. The hybrid yawns apart from the shuttles, then closes in on them again as we reach the terminal. The paleontologist parks in the twelve-dollar-a-day lot, and we clop over the crosswalks. The doors whip open for us, and we’re surrounded by hot air and digital boards. Families drop their shoes onto plastic trays, get blasted with air in the puffer machine, and rejoin each other to find their gates. On our side of the queue, single people sip cheap coffee and stand way too close to the local artwork, hoping someone they know will drag a suitcase off the next plane that lands.
The paleontologist hops onto a stool in front of a little wooden cart that’s decked out to look like a bar.
“One cherry beer,” she says to an overworked guy in a black vest, who rolls his eyes and points to a tiny chalkboard listing the only two off-brand ales they’ve got. She orders something else and motions for me to sit. The cushion is torn and hollow.
“Tell me where we’re going,” the paleontologist says.
One of the boards flashes an outgoing flight to the city about an hour from my hometown, three hours from my foster home. I picture myself standing over an old foundation, digging nostalgia out of wet rubble: a deflated pool float, a moldy plush, a spatula. I try to draw a line from these things to myself. A mom hugs a teenage girl as she lumbers through the gate with a stuffed duffel bag. The paleontologist touches my hand, which I now realize is trembling, and swigs the backwash at the bottom of her glass.
The next flight empties into the terminal. We lock eyes. She knows I’m not getting in that queue, but that I’m still not ready to be the tour guide.
We board the escalator to the baggage claim, canned announcements over the loudspeaker muffling my thoughts. Everything is the same as it was twenty-five years ago. I don’t know where to go.
As the paleontologist heads to what she calls “the good vending machine” to find a chaser for the beer, I see it: a Dutch rabbit with frantic, twitching ears. No escaped cage, no human chasing it, just a black-and-white puffball sliding its feet against the tiles looking for traction, struggling to avoid what must feel like a stampede. Someone’s early Easter gift, maybe. The paleontologist returns, taking a sip from a bottle of cold coffee. She could scoop up the bunny, tell me how easy it is for them to have heart attacks, list the best rescue shelters, keep this tour going, but she doesn’t. Just shrugs, trusts my judgment.
At the sight of the rabbit’s trembling, my own stops. I approach, crouch, extend my hand.
*
Winter lingers this year. The compost pile, now bulging out past its wooden border, is frozen to the ground, dusted with snow like a foamy, crashing wave. I lump a bucket of corncob on top. I don’t bother with the shovel. The stabbing odor of rabbit urine presses my eyes into a squint.
She waits for me in the mudroom. Behind her, a little bin sits, ready for fresh corncob, a fistful of hay, a few leaves of kale and collard. After the boots come off, I kneel and give her a scratch between the ears with my knuckles. She leaps into my lap, and I recline against a torn bag of birdseed. We’ve taken turns being tentative around one another – me for a week, her for a few days, me for an hour or so – hoping that we’ll reach a point where neither is afraid that the other will leave. I cup my hand and roll it over the fur on her head. Her sandpaper tongue dabs at my wrist. Someday, I think, I’ll have to build a cairn for you, but you won’t think I left you, because you’ll have watched me stack the rocks, and you’ll still see the nightlight from where you rest. Someday, maybe, I’ll find out where you came from, and I’ll lay out cloverleaves instead of trying to fix you.
Another day, I’ll tell you how I got here, and you’ll keep nibbling little holes in the cuff of my jacket as if I never said anything at all.
R.W. Hartshorn (they/them) is a nonbinary fiction writer and educator living on the Rensselaer Plateau.