by Lorraine Ray
“Say, didn’t someone we knew live in a house along here?” I asked Mother on the way to church confirmation class. I saw a neighbor’s brick house, a ranch style brick, with a gravel front and three ocotillos, the whip-like plants that were barbed, planted in the center of the fan of the semicircular drive. We were just a few blocks east of our house when I said this.
She looked over at me sharply. “Well, I never. You mean to tell me you don’t even remember the Campbells?” she said, somewhat incredulously. “I don’t even know what to say to you.”
“Well, who were they?” I protested her indignation. We passed Blaine’s house and I did remember him, the kid who told us our dead turtle wasn’t dead and took a quarter from us promising to deliver to us what no one could. How he’d gloated over us when we realized what a liar he was.
“Ralph Campbell was from Benton County, Indiana and his wife was from Ohio,” Mother said as though those geographic locations were enough to explain everything I needed to know about the Campbells. She always acted that way about the Midwest as though membership in the “born in the Midwest club” was enough to make the person good in her eyes. Of course she had given birth to me in Arizona, so my goodness was always somewhat suspect.
“But I mean what did they do?” I asked. I was happy and optimist thinking that she had something to tell me; I suppose I waited hungrily for a juicy story about them. Inquiring for the barest sketch of a story, without doing it consciously. Groping around in the past even then for the treasures that Peg, though I couldn’t remember her, had told me to collect.
“They gave us pomegranates from their trees on the side yard every autumn. And they had a son named Mikey. He was ill. You and Meredith and Jack played with him often so that he could have company. I brought you kids over there to give him companions. You mean to say you don’t remember him at all? He had a fly swatter and you played with ping pong balls. He couldn’t walk. His head grew very big.”
“Well, now that you mention pomegranates and the fly swatter, I guess so. He used to shoot ping pong balls around the room and we chased them and tried to catch them. Did they, the Campbells, move away or something?”
“You really don’t remember, do you?” Her accusation infuriated me slightly, but I let it pass without responding. “Mikey died. Ralph’s wife left him and went back to Ohio. Ralph was living there for a few years and we even went to visit him. You really don’t remember? He died from alcohol just three years ago?”
“Oh. I kinda remember something. You might have said something about those people. Something about what happened.”
“Well, that was the something I said,” said Mother sarcastically. “I tell you at times I think there isn’t anything but holes in your head. Here I am telling you all about what is happening to other people and thinking that you’re listening, but no, not at all. I don’t know why I tell you anything, because you don’t hear what I’m saying after you ask me. Anyway, I went to Ralph’s funeral.”
The writer has to endure the scrutiny of the Mother who doesn’t approve of you not remembering the interesting things, the stories you will need to round up later that she is telling then, but afterwards when it’s all explained, imperfectly again, the writer remembers again and remembers it better in a newer form, better than anyone else who was there, for that is my job, and the shame of not remembering is enough to drive the writer to drink, like Ralph, and to writing about Ralph, and Mikey and ping pongs and to reconstruct, imperfectly, the perfect conversation of Ralph and his wife with my mother as they picked pomegranates outside Mikey’s room that day, years ago. The stories of banks, John F. Kennedy, and the weather back where the folks lived. Bless Mother for her interest in others; I took everything she offered and spit it back, imperfectly perfected.