The Lonely Read Free Page B

while The Mother was dangerously pregnant with me. When her water broke they were on the Maid of the Mist and no one noticed. I quickly became an emergency and The Mother had to be rushed to a hospital right there in Niagara Falls. From day one I was an inconvenience. But apparently I was a very cute baby so that helped my case a bit. According to The Mother anyway, I was very cute. And even Phyllis my Evil Grandmother says so. Of course when The Mother says the words, “You really were such a cute baby,” she is exploding with pride and falling in love with me all over again, recalling memory-warmed images of my gummy smile and button nose. When The Evil Grandmother says it, she seems to be mourning the loss of my good looks.
    What I always find disturbing about this story is that Julia had to endure a five-hour car ride with The Evil Grandmother to come and pick us all up at the hospital in Niagara Falls. The Mother didn’t want to fly with such fresh meat. Julia would often torment me with horror stories about this car ride, tales of her having to watch The Evil Grandmother’s barely there lips wrap greasy around a fast-food cup straw, listen to her complain about the “peon food” so fiercely that bits of French fry shot from her mouth with a flat splat on the dashboard, tales of Julia’s misery told with the covers up to our chins in the dark, causing me to howl and twist with guilt. I’d never stop feeling bad about it.
    Julia always told me stories this way: her cheeks washed in the cool glow of moonlight, she trapped her whispers between two cupped hands against my head and I would get to see up close how perfect her ears were, imagine that spot just behind the lobe as soft as a bud. She taught me everything I know about us this way.
    She explained to me that my memories were implants. Formed by years and years of listening to the telling and retelling of stories about me ( Easter where on earth did you ever get that word anyway?), the stories becoming virile little tadpoles, squiggling their way into the folds of my brain (I remember the teacher told me that you were the youngest kid she’d ever known to make a racial slur). These implantsmade themselves indistinguishable from the real memories ( I’m sure you didn’t know what it meant. My god, can you imagine how embarrassing?) My “memories.”
    There are some I generated myself, because I was there and I saw it and I knew for sure. I remembered pouring five or six Pixie Sticks onto a plate and then lapping up the tiny pyramid of sugar like a dog. The Evil Grandmother thought it was disgusting, which made me like it even more. I sneezed in threes and caught the chicken pox so bad that blisters were erupting in my mouth and underneath my eyelids. I remember hearing The Father fall down the stairs, the sound of him yelping when he broke his ankle. I remember the first time I touched his scar, all purple and angry and hard and raised; there was bounce to it, unlike normal skin, spongy and resistant. I felt it whenever he’d let me.
    But the idea of these pesky little tadpole memories, disguised, hiding, polluting my brain, made me feel unsure of everything. I really should have tagged them before they wriggled in, snapped a serialized marker onto their tails. Or draped them in bells so they would unwittingly announce themselves as fakes, but I didn’t think of it then. I was too young.
    So Julia tried to help me see what was real and what was fake. She told me that there were ways of distinguishing and that she always knew for sure. You see, Julia had a special talent with brains. She could tell right away if a memory was an implant. She could even tell me who’d implanted it. She said that she had this special ability because she was sort of like a memory herself, squiggling her way through the folds of my brain with the rest of them and drawing out the fakes. Julia the Memory. She said that, just like a