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<\/a>\u201cThe Memory of All That\u201d was published in the anthology, Each In Her Own Way<\/i>, Queen of Swords Press, Eugene, OR, 1994.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was scouring the bathroom sink when I thought of Mrs. Kratlian.\u00a0 I was surprised to have her appear in my mind, and trailing a mystery as well.<\/p>\n
Mrs. Kratlian had been a neighbor on the street where I grew up.\u00a0 I doubt I had thought of her since I was 13, which is when we got our first television set.\u00a0 The arrival of that machine broke our one link with the Kratlians.\u00a0 Fittingly, television was the avenue which led my mind to Mrs. Kratlian again after thirty some years.<\/p>\n
As I scrubbed the sink, I hummed Gershwin\u2019s \u201cThey Can\u2019t Take That Away From Me.\u201d\u00a0 I had first heard it from Fred Astaire in the movie Shall We Dance?\u00a0 <\/i>Fred had sung it to Ginger Rogers while they were riding on a ferry from New Jersey to Manhattan.<\/p>\n
I saw Shall We Dance? <\/i>and many other movies about twenty times in my early teens thanks to a t-v show out of New Year called \u201cMillion Dollar Movie.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cMillion Dollar Movie\u201d played one movie a week, airing it two or three times a day.\u00a0 My immersion in the romantic Hollywood products of the thirties and forties may explain why I was a late bloomer.\u00a0 I never did learn how to lindy, fly, mashed potato, or Bristol stomp, though I did manage to approximate the twist.\u00a0 It took the Beatles to propel me into a respectable adolescence.<\/p>\n
Anyway, as I hummed Fred\u2019s song over the sink, my mind drifted to \u201cMillion Dollar Movie\u201d and then to the years before.<\/p>\n
The Kratlians owned the first television on the block.\u00a0 All the neighborhood kids would crowd in front of it to watch cartoons.\u00a0 Actually, it seemed to be the same cartoon over and over: a bewhiskered Farmer Brown or Farmer Gray with an upraised shovel endlessly and fruitlessly chasing mice.\u00a0 No dialogue.\u00a0 No color.\u00a0 Few background details.\u00a0 We were spellbound.<\/p>\n
I remember the Kratlians\u2019 living room as always dark, probably because I was usually there at 4:00 or 5:00 on winter afternoons.\u00a0 The t-v gave the only light.\u00a0 The two Kratlian boys, fat and swarthy and sullen, sat on the rug.\u00a0 The rest of us, still wearing our thick coats of forest green wool or brown corduroy, stood behind them.\u00a0 No one ever thought to sit on the plump navy blue horsehair sofa or armchairs around us.<\/p>\n
Mrs. Kratlian was a homely woman, short and round.\u00a0 She wore dark dresses that seemed shapeless even though they were belted, and black lace-up shoes that I\u2019d seen only on nuns and very old ladies.<\/p>\n
She was a housewife, like every other woman on the block, but she seemed truly wedded to her house.\u00a0 The other women could be seen coming and going with strollers or shopping bags, gardening, tending young children in wading pools, walking dogs, conversing on the sidewalk.\u00a0 Mrs. Kratlian stayed inside.\u00a0 Waxy-leaved evergreen bushes obscured her front windows.<\/p>\n
She came across the street and up on to our porch only twice that I remember.\u00a0 Once, she was leading my brother home.\u00a0 His forehead was bleeding profusely from a gash inflicted by a hoe swung by Mrs. Kratlian\u2019s younger son.\u00a0 The other time, she was leading her older son, who\u2019d been bitten by our dog.\u00a0 Both times she was frowning.<\/p>\n
I rinsed the sink and smiled, amused by how the mind stores and connects things.\u00a0 Then, into my chiaroscuro memories of Mrs. Kratlian burst the bright pink belly-dancer\u2019s costume trimmed in gold.<\/p>\n
When I was in sixth grade, my class put on a tableau as part of a school assembly.\u00a0 At the center was someone dressed as the Statue of Liberty, and grouped around her were eight or ten children in the native costumes of as many countries.\u00a0 I sat at Liberty\u2019s feet and represented Armenia in Mrs. Kratlian\u2019s belly-dancer\u2019s costume.<\/p>\n
The costume consisted of sheer billowy pants gathered at the ankles, a closely fitting vest-like top cropped short, and a filmy veil long enough to drape loosely and gracefully across a woman\u2019s head, around her body, and over the lower part of her face.\u00a0 My teacher had insisted on the use of the veil.\u00a0 For modesty\u2019s sake, I was to conceal my childish midriff and non-existent cleavage.<\/p>\n
I felt quite glamorous in the outfit, which was the most exotic and authentic of the lot.\u00a0 I\u2019m not Armenian, but I\u2019m dark, the only brunette in a family of blondes.\u00a0 I knew I looked real.<\/p>\n
The mechanics of how I was loaned this startling costume escape me now.\u00a0 My mother and Mrs. Kratlian weren\u2019t friends.\u00a0 I never saw them together without a wounded boy between them.<\/p>\n
I remember Mrs. Kratlian as gloomy and retiring.\u00a0 Yet from her had come the bold, resplendent costume.\u00a0 I imagine the shimmering thing carefully wrapped up in some dark drawer in that dark house waiting, almost with a life of its own, for an opportunity to emerge and be known again.<\/p>\n
Perhaps Mrs. Kratlian wore the costume as a girl, before she was a Mrs.\u00a0 It\u2019s difficult to picture her belly-dancing, but I like the idea that she could have.\u00a0 Mrs. Kratlian, barefoot, is stepping rhythmically amid smiles and music.\u00a0 Her exertion and the firelight put a sheen on her skin.\u00a0 The costume, and Mrs. Kratlian herself, would have looked their best by firelight.<\/p>\n
During one turn, the corner of her long veil slides across the knees of her future husband.\u00a0 The coarse weave of his trousers catches at the lightweight pink cloth, and for a moment, the veil tarries, its edge brushing his lap with gold.<\/p>\n
Or maybe Mrs. Kratlian had never used the costume, but only kept it because of who had passed it down to her.\u00a0 Perhaps a stern, silent grandmother handed it to her from a deathbed, or perhaps it was left behind by a scandalous older sister when she ran away with her gypsy lover.<\/p>\n
Mrs. Kratlian fingers the fabric of the abandoned garment and sighs.\u00a0 She spreads it out on a narrow bed.\u00a0 She has closed the bedroom door even though she\u2019s alone in the house.\u00a0 The costume, limp and quiet, still gives the impression of a woman\u2019s body. Mrs. Kratlian wonders about the memories of the women who have worn it.<\/p>\n
Before storing it away, she sprinkles a fragrant layer of dried rose petals over it.\u00a0 She folds it slowly to hold them in.\u00a0 In ancient times, a rose hung over a council table indicated that everyone present was sworn to secrecy.<\/p>\n
It often strikes me that the lives of women are suffused with secrecy.\u00a0 How little, really, I knew of the lives of the women on that long-ago suburban street, lives that looked so straightforward and conventional.\u00a0 Or, how little I thought I knew before I was ambushed by memory and given a glimpse of private possibilities.<\/p>\n
Mrs. Kratlian walks to the kitchen doorway with an onion in one hand and a knife in the other.\u00a0 She looks across the dining room to the motionless backs of the children in front of the television set in the living room.<\/p>\n
She stands watching them for a few minutes.\u00a0 They don\u2019t notice her.\u00a0 She knows if she approaches them, they\u2019ll jostle one another and lift their wide faces to greet her politely.\u00a0 If she were to squat down among them, she\u2019d find their differences: the one with cherry Lifesavers on his breath; the one with a Bandaid on her knee; the one with muddy mittens; the one with chapped lips and a piece of sleep in the corner of an eye.\u00a0 If she were to speak to them, some of them might tell her stories.<\/p>\n
But she stays where she is, and from her post, the children, outlined by the light from the t-v, appear to her as cardboard silhouettes, simple, static, obvious.<\/p>\n
She returns to the cutting board and her own thoughts.\u00a0 Her memory lies in wait.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n