Memoir- TRAINS by Deborah A. Lott
From the top of the stairs, my brother Paul still looks like a boy. There’s the same shock of honey brown hair, the same air of utter stillness he gives off when absorbed by a task. He is sitting, one knee under him, the other sprawled in front, in the sunken 1970s era conversation pit off my living room. He is putting together the metal tracks for his toy train. He’s had the train, a 1955 American Flyer, since the year it was released – when he was eight and I was three. Setting up the tracks in a small oval – nothing larger will fit in the space – he periodically casts his eye toward the living room and sighs with exasperation that he cannot set up all the tracks there – where a toy train clearly belongs.
I come down the stairs, and watch as my brother pulls the conveyance out of its boxes, a black engine with tender behind it, loaded with a molded, texturally accurate bed of fake coal, the four deep green passenger cars with the windows that look like drawn shades with lights behind them, the red caboose at the tail.
Paul dusts the train off, puts it on the track, and then turns the knob on the heavy, gray block of the transformer. I hear the train’s instantly familiar ch-chh-chhh as its wheels begin to move, jerking and halting completely for seconds at a time, suspended in mid-revolution. Paul ponders the problem for a moment before oiling the axles. Then, as if the train had been running continuously rather than stored in boxes for the better part of the past 30 years, it begins to move smoothly. When it makes its first, and second, and then another successful circuit around the track, my brother, now on his knees, breaks out in a broad smile. The delight on his face increases with each subsequent revolution, each time the train comes back to him.
My brother’s greatest pleasure has always come from the return of the same, the getting back of something familiar in danger of having been lost. Like the dog who relinquishes the ball from its jaws momentarily so as to have the joy of reclaiming it, my brother has always misplaced his things, panicked, and bemoaned their loss as permanent, only to have the relief of finding them again. The pure pleasure on his face now as he watches his train is the same as that he had as a child when my mother would return from some short voyage to the supermarket or dry cleaner’s and he would embrace her as if she had been gone for years.
For my brother, all objects are at risk of being lost, of sliding off the precipice into the past, and their endangered status makes them worthy of his attachment. Every object has the capacity to encapsulate a moment in time and preserve it. Not only the train is imbued with memory, with meaning, with love, but so are many other things – which is to say, nearly everything Paul has touched. Beloved objects fill up cases and crates; others, unsorted, pile up around him. They filled to the rafters the house he shared with my mother until she died. The sheer weight of what my brother saves paralyzes any forward momentum. The past is always supplanting the present, threatening to overtake my brother’s life.
“You keep trying to hold onto the past,” I say to him when I am most frustrated by his stasis. The idealized past he keeps trying to conjure by holding onto objects, like the train, I argue, is a phantom. My brother does not agree. It is not some Platonic ideal of train that excites him, not some idealized reconstruction, but this train, this particular train, that he touched, that our poor dead mother touched, the object itself with all its associations, that must be held onto.
Nearly every toddler has a favorite blanket or toy from which he cannot bear to part. Psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott described how such transitional objects represent both self and mother, and the attachment between them made material in the world. When the mother is gone, the transitional object stands in. To hold onto it is to hold onto her inside, and to ensure through magical means, her safe return. Eventually the child builds a secure self by learning how to keep the mother inside, and so no longer needs objects to take her place.
There is a formal diagnosis for what is amiss with my brother – obsessive compulsive disorder characterized by ratpack hoarding – but I prefer to think of it as something having gone haywire in his privileging of transitional objects. For Paul everything becomes a transitional object, and no single object is ever enough. These things may, in some way, still stand in for my mother, but they failed to do their magic and to keep her, the most precious object of all, from being sucked into the whirlpool of time.
My brother moves back to get some perspective on his train, then sighs with labored resonance, and I wince, recognizing that he is about to reminisce. “Remember when we used to play trains?”
When Paul was still the big brother and I the little sister, we used to play trains together in the living room, on the green carpet, in the tract house on the corner of Teasley and Briggs in La Crescenta, the undistinguished ranch house that was built a couple of years before the train. The house’s location on the corner was important to my father: he hated feeling hemmed in. This way he had a neighbor on only one side, and a view of the city and a strip of ocean that offered some prospect of escape. Teasley Street was the house where Paul and I grew up, and where Paul and my mother remained until she died, in a rundown convalescent hospital.
My brother lives in a motel now about 10 miles from our childhood home. It is a flimsy, two-story stucco building, also built in the 50s. The hallways are dingy and smell of the mold growing under the floorboards. The broken elevator will not be repaired. A former tenant has kicked a mean dent in the antique red Coke machine in the hall. The machine is always empty.
I live in this house, about 40 miles away, in another suburban development, close to the ocean at which my father used to peer. My house also sits on a corner with a neighbor on only one side. It is nicer, its neighborhood more exclusive than the one where Paul and I grew up. Private security forces patrol its streets. Just as for my father, living on the corner does little to alleviate my restlessness and longing for escape.
The configurations of the train’s track in the Teasley Street house were elaborate, with loops and turns and figure eights. I was small enough to sit with my legs spreadeagled in the middle of the track, young enough to imagine myself concurrently inside the train, sitting beside the lit window watching the scenery go by. The track took up about a third of the room’s 200 square feet yet seemed large enough to contain whole cities and neighborhoods, multiple alternate vistas.
My brother was responsible for the train, its progression, its tunnels, the trees along the track. I got to create the villages and cities, the fire stations, and horse corrals that it passed. We had an airport, or was it an air base? The rubbery planes were World War II fighter jets, bright red and green and yellow with military insignia and stars on their wings. I laid them out in pyramids.
A suitable distance from the airfield was a farm with white sheep, a lamb, and several pigs, enclosed by white picket fences. On the far end of the track, as if in recognition of the fact that to travel there the train had to traverse time as well as space, was a tableau of cowboys and Indians with their brown and black molded horses, one pinto among them. One Indian crouched frozen at the moment of pulling back his bow and aiming his arrows at the cowboys below, a few of whom were reaching for their six-shooters.
My brother and I were meticulous about scale – never putting a doll or a stuffed animal inside the track. To dwarf the train would have seemed grotesque, calling into question the verisimilitude of the scene. Only one exception was allowable – our bodies – which were invisible to us, mere casings for our imaginations, and so incapable of disturbing the delicate sense of proportion.
The last time I walked through the house on Teasley Street, the living room – all the rooms – had shrunk. A realtor with a hawk’s beak for a mouth was at my side taking notes. The house smelled of mildew and dust, of generations of cats and their litter boxes long gone, of kitchen grease and moldering magazines. The realtor gracefully navigated her stilettos through the stacks of seemingly random junk in her path: the lone surviving artificial rose that had been one among a vase of like roses in our living room in 1963, its sticky 15 cents price tag still attached to the stem; 45 records half out of their jackets: Leslie Gore, Herman’s Hermits, the Del-Rays; a fly swatter askew. Wherever a thing fell, it stayed. Yet if you called attention to any one of these haphazardly abandoned objects, my brother would pick it up, cradle it lovingly, and reminisce.
“Remember the summer we played this record over and over again?” Memories were embedded in even the most inconsequential things, and how could one throw memories away? What was wrong with other people that they had so little affection for the past?
The realtor touched my hand with her opalescent, lacquered nails. “That’s a beautiful ring,” she said, pointing to my diamond wedding ring, shining amidst the squalor. I got the signal. This house didn’t define me anymore. I had gotten out and must have been as embarrassed as she was by the mess. By my brother. Now I had to think about the house the way she did, as a business matter. I pulled my hand out of her grasp.
My brother was dressed as always in a wool suit, his oversized trousers too short because they were hiked up by suspenders to avoid contact between the waistband and his overly sensitive abdomen. At the bottom of his light blue oxford cloth dress shirt pocket was the blot of a dark blue ink stain. “Pens always leak on me,” he says with a shrug. “It’s uncanny; something funny about my energy.”
As the realtor walked through the house, Paul was bouncing from one side of her to the other; putting his face a little too close to hers, coming perilously close to blocking her path.
“I know I have to empty it,” he said. “I’m emptying it now. But would you please tell my sister that she should buy the house, that it’s a good investment?”
In her desperate final years, my mother had mortgaged and remortgaged the house until the cost of the loan was greater than the value of the property. Despite my brother’s disbelief that we would force him to leave the house that he had grown up in, our family home for god’s sake, what was left of our family let the bank foreclose. My brother did not leave willingly but hung on. Even to the last instant, he could not accept that we would make him give up the ultimate, primary, beloved object, the holy repository for all other objects. When the trucks moved him out at midnight, he was still carrying boxes of stray junk. Two hours later, he had finally abandoned a cluttered nest of objects by the side of the road.
What my brother could not believe was that we could give up the house where my mother had dwelt. Even more than the house, she was the object to which he – to which we – were the most attached. He and I spent our childhoods competing to press our heads against her full bosom, to be close enough to suck in her sweet smell. When Paul was still a toddler, before I was born, he used to tie a string around his own arm and then attach it to my mother’s waist to prevent her from getting away from him. I too hung on her skirts, clutched at her too slippery stockinged legs. Yet no matter how furiously we clung, how relentlessly we tried to penetrate her surface, an aura of aloof absence hung over our mother, an emotional reticence. So we held onto her physical presence, worshipped her body in all its lush materiality.
We missed her when she left us at school; we missed her when she was preoccupied with keeping the family insurance agency afloat; we missed her when our father treated us like usurpers and demanded as a proof of loyalty all her time and attention. But the truth was we also missed her when she was right with us. Loving my mother seems to have left Paul and me in a state of arrested longing. I wonder sometimes if this condition might not be inherited. My mother perennially missed her own mother who lived on the other coast, and from whom she was estranged as a consequence of marrying my father. She was always wishing that he could be restored to some saner, more productive state, the way he had seemed to her when she fell in love with him in high school. My mother lived in a condition of suspended longing for the return of what had been irretrievably lost in her own life. Could it be that loving someone in a chronic state of longing only engendered further longing?
In the house on Teasley Street, my brother and I could play trains for hours. We played without conflict, my father sometimes watching from his red leather armchair, the train’s motion calming him. But there were other things that Paul and I fought over. No matter how hard I try, I cannot remember our battles’ specific causes. Our conflicts should have remained minor squabbles between siblings, but in our house, escalation was rapid and predictable. My father would leap in, convinced that my brother was wronging me or hurting me. My mother would leap to Paul’s defense. All of the larger familial conflicts, the unholy alliances, would assert themselves: my father to Paul: what did you do to my baby; my mother to my father: you’re spoiling her rotten; my father to my mother: you’re sissifying him, why don’t you let me make him into a man, I’m the father, nobody in this house treats me like the father. Then the real ugliness would start: my father to Paul: you want to sleep with your mother, don’t you? You goddamned fairy boy. My mother to me: Look what you’ve done now; you’re a bad girl, selfish and bad. My father’s raised fists. Paul darting through the house and picking up a knife: to my father: you want me to show you what a man is? My mother on her knees between them, holding my father back, sobbing. My father’s voice shaking the walls. And then the end marked by some catharsis of physical violence: my mother still sobbing, backing me into my bedroom and then striking me wherever her hand fell, across the face, the arms, the lower body. My father, in some bizarre form of equity, going after my brother. Paul and I almost welcomed it because of the release it offered, because it meant that the knives would not be used, and the fight would be over.
Paul and I both dream repeatedly that we are back in our parents’ house. I am of an indeterminate age, somewhere between adolescence and late adulthood – my age irrelevant to my condition. I am immobilized, stuck back in my parents’ house, unable to find any way out. I rage against my mother who has prepared abundant platters of food, none of which I can eat.
In Paul’s dreams, the house is brand new, his parents robust. His beautiful young mother watches over him and life is full of promise. Then while still dreaming, he is bolted back to the present: his mother has grown old and died; his childhood is lost.
My brother has stopped the train and is cleaning out its smoke stack with a forty-year-old pipe cleaner that has lost its color and turned gray. He wants to see smoke come out of the train’s stack again. He reaches into the collapsing, cardboard box and finds the original packet of smoke in its now-brown paper envelope, the type so faded that it cannot be read. He taps on the bag and then concludes that the smoke has dried up. “Too bad,” he says. “Maybe I can buy some on line.”
When I walk from the living room into the conversation pit, and sit down on the built-in couch, I’m startled to recognize once again that up close my brother no longer looks like a boy. At 55, his cheeks are reddened and a little puffy; there are wrinkled pouches under his still intense blue eyes. His beard is patched with gray, his ponytail, tucked demurely down the back of his shirt.
When was it that my brother stopped letting anyone cut his hair? In adolescence, haircuts took on too much importance. He’d stand in front of the mirror afterward, combing and recombing his hair. “Why did I let that guy ruin my hair? Nobody ever listens to me.”
When he began to cut it himself and stray hair started to fill up the divider trays in the bathroom we shared, I wasn’t sure if he was saving his hair or only neglecting to throw it away. The house was always a mess; drawers full of hair were not that much of an aberration. But he was saving it, just as he had begun to save the dried up pens, the rainboots from kindergarten – every object held a memory, every memory held him. Now Paul only trims his hair occasionally.
My brother’s hair is the same color as my mother’s. He and I both inherited my mother’s hair texture, wispy and fine, but he also got her color.
I pay a woman in Beverly Hills one hundred and forty dollars every four weeks to cut and color my hair. Pay enough money and you can find someone talented enough to cover up your defects. It is colored dark brown, the color that it would be had it not begun to turn gray, with streaks of lighter brown that are closer in color to my mother’s hair, but don’t actually appear anywhere in my genetic line.
Every time I go to see my hairdresser, I fantasize about taking my brother with me. Paul allows my hairdresser to cut his hair. As his hair falls to the floor, he begins to look stylish, normal, and we both feel a lightening of the burdens of the past. As his hair is cut, my brother’s depression lifts; it is the start of a better life.
My brother looks up from his train for a minute and notices that I have put the ceramic carousel horse music box that he gave me for my birthday on the brick hearth of the fireplace, rather than in a place of greater honor on the mantel over it. The figurine looks like a Franklin Mint offer from the back page of a women’s magazine, the horse off-white with pastel painted trim. On its back, a cherubic-faced little girl in a dress with petticoats and a big pink ceramic bow at the back, rides sidesaddle. On her face is an exaggerated smile; in her arms she carries a doll with a matching smile. My brother shows little interest in my current life: the books I read, the art I admire. His gifts reflect my childhood interests. He remembers how I loved carousel horses. In fact, I still do, but like most adults with the resources to do so, I have developed more rarefied aesthetics for the things to which I retain a childlike attachment. This figurine is too frankly sentimental for my present tastes. My brother would say that I have become a snob.
“I had to search all over the thrift shops to find it,” he says. “It took me hours.”
I hear my brother not so subtly reminding me that he must shop in thrift shops while his sister idles in high-faluting west side stores.
“It was very sweet of you to think of me,” I say. “It’s cute.”
“You know, I didn’t just get it for you just because it’s a carousel. Did you see the face on the little doll the girl is carrying? It looks just like that little monkey you used to carry around with you all the time.”
He does not invoke the monkey’s name: JoJo. He knows it but he does not say it, as if it were the name of a relative dead in the camps or consigned to jail. I suspect that he knows he is treading on dangerous ground and afraid to go too far.
JoJo was my transitional object. My brother is talking about JoJo, I think, to get back at me. To level the playing field. To remind me that I am just like him, just as crazy as he is, despite my big house and my successful husband, my Beverly Hills hairdresser, and all my other pretensions to bourgeois normalcy. I might look as if I have moved on more successfully from our childhood, but he knows the truth. He knows my weak spots. He knows where I’ve come from and he will not stop trying to get me back. When he feels that I am being particularly distant, he will start to talk about our shared bodily preoccupations, our irritable bowel syndrome and the ministrations we underwent as children at our parents’ hands, and continue to carry out ourselves in an attempt at treatment. When he does that he knows he’s got me: Here is what you cannot talk about in polite company, with your friends, even with your husband, here is what no one knows the full extent of – except for me, your brother.
“It doesn’t look like JoJo at all and you know it. You’re only saying that to get to me. To get back at me because you don’t think I appreciate your gift enough.”
“That’s not true,” he says. “What are you talking about? You are so paranoid.”
I named JoJo after the organ grinder’s monkey that we used to visit on Olvera Street. Perhaps it was on the way back from Olvera Street; it was on the way back from somewhere downtown one Sunday afternoon when JoJo met his doom. As I got into the car, he slipped out of my hands. Slunk into the dirty water next to the car. Into the gutter. Into the pigeon droppings, my father said. For my father, the world was an obstacle course of contaminants: pigeon droppings, “rat feathers,” chicken pox, measles, and influenza germs spewed by other children with their every careless breath. I tried to pick the monkey up before my father saw where he had been but he was always watching me. He grabbed JoJo from the gutter and put him into the trunk. When we got home, my mother opened the trunk and held him up for me to see – but not touch – one last time. I tried to memorize every detail of that bedraggled brown monkey’s face and body. I tried to hold onto him inside.
My father awarded me with a bigger, brighter, more impressive monkey, a circus chimp with rubber hands and a rubber face. I made him the protector of my menagerie of stuffed animals. The caretaker who never left the house.
“She couldn’t look like JoJo (I still cannot say his name without my voice cracking just a little) – she’s a doll – not even a doll, a ceramic representation of a doll – and JoJo was a stuffed monkey.”
“. . . I think she does look like that monkey,” my brother says, now more tentatively, almost tenderly.
“Okay, then what did JoJo look like?” I am begging him to remember. Does he know that I can’t, that I still have dreams where I go through bin after bin of toy monkeys, scanning their faces, each a little off. I still believe that I would recognize his face if only I could see it again but I cannot conjure it up. This is the aspect of the loss that continues to haunt me – the absolute loss of JoJo’s face. Did he have simply a thick thread of yarn for a mouth, or a raised mound? And what about his eyes?
“Do you remember or don’t you?”
My brother hems and haws.
“If you don’t remember JoJo’s face, why did you say you did? To get a rise out of me?”
“Jesus! Aren’t you over that yet? You’re nearly fifty years old and still obsessed with that raggedy monkey? And you talk about me with my stuff! Who’s the one who can’t grow up here?”
When Paul and I fight again, as we fought as children, as everyone in my family fought, I cannot deny that I feel close to him. When I am with my brother, alone, just the two of us engaged like this, I do not perceive any differences between us. I cannot figure out why I got out of the house and he didn’t. When we are together this way, the differences between us seem a matter of chance. Vary a few factors and I would be living in a motel like him; vary a few others and he would be married and in my house. If it is only by chance that I got here then what right do I have not to share my good fortune equitably with my brother? There is another source of my guilt, an accusation that is always in my brother’s eyes if not in what he says: the most important variable was the dose we received of my father’s love. If my father had loved him a little more and loved me a little less, he would not be so crazy, for it seems to him that he caught all my father’s abuse and I got all my father’s love. And in my brother’s mind, it was my father’s love that had the potency to move me forward.
When I went to college, Paul went as well, to another commuter college in the area. It was a few years late for him, but my going spurred him on. My brother flourished in academia; earned straight A’s, tutored other students, had several girlfriends whose apartments he stayed in for weeks at a time. It was the most normal, the happiest he had ever been.
Within a few years of graduation, I had fled to Boston with an on-again-off-again hippie boyfriend, and Paul was re-entrenched back home. A couple years later, when my father had the first of what was to be a series of ultimately fatal strokes, I came back to the Teasley Street house, my already shaky claim on autonomy wavering. I was lonely and barely getting by in Boston. The drama of my father’s illness was pulling me back. But Paul had turned my bedroom into a storage closet and a waystation for his assemblage of motley cats to which I was allergic. Their litter boxes lined the room’s perimeter. In the middle of the room was a disassembled organ and several TV chassis. I begged my mother to make Paul give me my room back. I screamed and ranted at Paul. My mother shrugged and said she couldn’t argue with him. I had left my room and he had taken it over for his own needs. That was just the way it was. She loves him more, I thought. She’s always loved him more.
I slept on a fold out couch in the dusty room that served as an office for the family business. Within a few months, I had gotten a job and moved into a shabby motel not so different from the one where my brother lives now. Despite my desire to return to my life in Boston, inertia, fear, attachment to the familiar took over, and I never made it back. By the time my mother died, fifteen years after my father, Paul was still in the house, having become my mother’s caretaker, or was he her patient? He had given up on sleeping in his own bedroom across the hall from mine, had given up on the whole end of the house in which we had grown up, claiming that it was haunted.
I pat my brother’s shoulder. “The train looks pretty good,” I say. “At least it’s not rotting like all that other stuff you hang on to.” Paul’s train is one of the few objects of his that my husband Gary and I allow him to keep in our house. It is one of the few things he keeps whose value we recognize. I have no sympathy for the boxes full of antiquated binoculars, the collection of Polaroid cameras, the thirty years’ worth of Look magazines, covered with stray cat hairs. Maybe I like the train because it has not decayed, does not show its age – rather because it does not show my age – as do the objects of paper and cloth that deteriorate even more rapidly than flesh.
My brother says nothing, but puts his hand back on the transformer, and does, again, what he could not resist doing every time we played trains as children. He turns the gauge up higher and higher until the train goes faster and faster and a smell of burning metal fills the air. And then, he turns the transformer full blast and as the train approaches the loop of the oval, it crashes – the caboose turning over first and then a chain reaction traveling up the green lit passenger cars which careen and twist, and then pull the black locomotive off the track.
“Whoops,” he says.
In the weeks leading up my mother’s death, she kept bringing up the subject of my brother. One late afternoon, we were in her curtained off cubicle in the far corner of the room in the convalescent hospital where they had moved her the day before. They moved her a lot – from room to room depending on who came in and checked out, depending on who died. Yesterday she had started screaming that there was a black bear in her room. My mother’s heavyset roommate was sleeping and all my mother could see from her own bed was a lump under the sheets and a squarish, unkempt, dark-haired head sticking out at the top of them.
“Mother, it’s your roommate’s head,” I told her. “She’s turned away and you can’t see her face.”
“It’s a bear, I tell you. It’s a bear!”
“It’s a nice bear,” I said. “It won’t hurt you.”
Today my mother seemed to know where she was and what she wanted.
“You’ve got to take care of Paul for me,” she said. “You will, won’t you?”
“Please, don’t put me in that position,” I said.
“Not everyone can live alone and be independent.”
My mother was alluding to her sister Amy who never dated a man, who never left her parents’ house. When they died, she was in her late 50s and my mother’s other sister and brother-in-law took her into their home. She had a yellow bedroom with white French Provincial furniture – the bedroom of a virgin. They lived together as a threesome for the rest of their lives; my uncle Max treating Amy as some composite of second wife, sister, daughter. My mother held him up as a paragon of unselfish familial rectitude.
“He’s not strong like you,” my mother said. “He’s sensitive.”
“Paul can’t come and live with us. You’ve created a bad situation and I resent inheriting it.”
“You’ll have to at least subsidize him then,” she said.
My brother didn’t appear many nights at visiting hour in the hospital. He would call at 6:00 to say that he was on his way, and then again at 7:30, to say that he was delayed, and finally at 9:00 to say that it was getting late and he wasn’t sure he could make it, and then at 10:00 to say that his irritable bowel was acting up or he had too much work to do. If he stayed at home he could deny the facts of my mother’s decline and tell himself that she was getting better.
My mother made up her own explanations of where my brother was when she didn’t see him. He was with the wife she invented. “Paul’s got a new life now. That’s what’s keeping him so occupied.”
On the early morning when my mother lay dying, I was in the room when my brother appeared. He sat down beside her on the bed. Although I had been at the convalescent hospital nearly every day taking care of her, I had never done that. I considered putting my body on her bed unlawful. No, the truth was, I was afraid for there to be that much symmetry between us; there had never been that much symmetry between us. And if I lay down beside her, I was afraid that I would not be able to resist the pull to go with her.
My brother reclined and took my mother into his arms. She was limp, her eyes up in her head, her extremities pale and blood starved. Her chest and arms were mottled with blue. He stroked her head. He ran his hands through her hair. He gazed into her unresponsive eyes. Like a lover, I kept thinking. Like a lover.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Go towards the light.” She was in a coma, she couldn’t hear him. He was moving in for the final act, taking over, the star. Could I even feel sibling rivalry with my brother when my mother was on her deathbed? I imagined our fighting over her as we had once wrestled over toys or cameras. She belongs to me, was what I heard him thinking. No, she doesn’t, I thought. Give her back. But he was right. She had always belonged more to him. Maybe that was the real reason I got out of the house – because my mother wanted Paul more.
Her breath was ragged and noisy.
“She can’t die because she’s too worried about me,” Paul said. “Tell her you’ll take care of me so she can let go.”
He was holding my dying, white, suffering, already cadaverous mother in his arms. We were both crying, in tandem, but unable to comfort each other.
I hesitated. “I’ll take care of Paul,” I said under my breath.
“Promise,” he said.
“I promise.”
I looked down and then to my husband who was standing beside me in the room. I took his hand and pulled it behind my back so that he could detect that my own fingers were crossed. He crossed his in return, then we laced our hands together.
After my mother died, the Filipino nurse who had taken care of her for the past year, wanted, in keeping with the edicts of her tradition, to wash my mother’s body. She was the only one who seemed to know something that someone could do – it seemed that with my mother gone, there was nothing anyone could ever do again. Paul refused. “Let Pela do it,” I said. He stepped back, relinquishing my mother’s body temporarily; I knew that neither one of us was going to leave that room. The nurse stripped my mother’s body, left it fully naked on top of the sheets. Congestive heart failure had pumped up her frail frame, giving her the illusion of full flesh again. While the nurse cried and ran a wet cloth gently over my mother’s flesh, my brother and I both stared, trying to take her in for one last time. She still had a beautiful face, aristocratic. Her legs were as smooth and white as porcelain. We both loved her body – the innate benevolence of her body. If we had never been sure what my mother was feeling, her body had always been there with us, with its pure white promise of succor. And now even that would be gone.
My brother has got the train back on the tracks, and we are both watching it make its circuits.
“Do you want to read what I am writing about you?” I ask. “About you and your train?”
“Why? Is it bad?”
“Why would it be bad?”
“Oh, you know, about your crazy brother.”
“Maybe you should write your own version,” I say. “Then I would be the crazy one.”
“Yeah.”
We both laugh.
“Maybe if you write about the objects you love you won’t have to actually hold onto all of them. Maybe you could be freed of the past by writing about it.”
“It doesn’t seem to have freed you.”
“Sometimes it helps.”
My writing serves the same function for me as hanging onto objects does for my brother. We are both immersed in an act of return, sharing the same mission: to rehabilitate the past, to remake it in some better, more artful image. I write memoirs, and my brother keeps things, both of us caught up in regret and nostalgic longing for an ever returning, ever receding past.
“You’ve got all those Polaroid cameras. What about taking pictures of all your things and arranging them in some kind of conceptual art. Then you won’t need to keep them.”
Yes, taking pictures is a great idea, Paul says. He can take pictures and save those too. But don’t I understand? No form of representation can replace the genuine article. This is not about abstraction, not about a process in the head. This is about holding onto as much as you can hold onto for as long as you can hold on. Don’t I see that the outside world is inherently depleting, always taking things away, that even our bodies are being depleted? He is just trying to counter that tide of loss.
I pick up one of the green passenger cars. “I do love your train,” I say.
“Can you believe that it was 40 years ago when we played like this?”
With the weight of the train in my hand, it feels like only a moment has passed, and yet if I flip through the intervening years: my father’s nervous breakdowns, my leaving town, my father’s strokes, his death, my mother’s protracted final illness, my life as a single woman on the East and West Coasts, all the multiple therapists I engaged to try to make sense of my childhood, my marriage; my life in this house; it feels like a great deal of time has passed. And when I look in the mirror, I see how all that time has traveled through me, and is still barreling through my flesh.
“Yes,” I say. “It feels like 40 years.”
“But how old do you feel right now?”
I want to tell Paul the provocateur that I feel my full age, that I have grown up, that I am an adult, mature and fulfilled and that he is the one who refuses to leave adolescence. I cannot lie to my brother.
“I feel like five many days. Many days I cannot get beyond five.”
“I feel like sixteen,” he says. “I know that I am 55, but I feel like sixteen.”
“Why do you think it’s so hard to get past our childhood when it was so terrible?”
“It wasn’t all terrible.” My brother cocks his head, and becomes again the boy who loved science and weather, who took everything apart and sometimes back together, the sweet, sweet boy.
“You should leave the train up – why do you have to take it down?” He casts a glare in the direction of my husband sitting out of earshot. He is doing his best to turn Gary into the third in a triangle – one more abusive father who would drive us apart and deprive him of even the simple pleasures of his train.
“It doesn’t really go with our house. There isn’t room for it.”
It would be in the way of my current life, I almost say. It would make me think about things I don’t want to think about. It would make me feel guilty for not letting you live here with us – or was that why he was so insistent on its remaining – as a placeholder?
“You can keep it here in boxes on my bookshelf and I’ll take care of it but you have to put it away.”
Paul sighs. “Whatever you want,” he says, still glowering in my husband’s direction.
The train will be put away. My brother will go back to the motel. I will go on with my current life. But for both of us, childhood will always be more potent, more significant, and substantial than anything that has happened since. What I want most is what Paul wants most: to crawl into my mother’s bed and wait for her to come back and take care of us.
I move in closer to the train and am surprised to see that I am way too big to fit within the perimeter of the tracks. I put my hand over the top of the locomotive and feel the cool rush of air as it goes by. My brother rubs the joints of his hand.
“Arthritis,” he says.
“Remember the farm? Whatever happened to all my animals?”
My brother shrugs, and puts his hand on the transformer.
“All aboard!” he says.
Deborah A. Lott is the author of In Session (W. H. Freeman), and her essays have appeared in Salon, The Los Angeles Times, Lear’s Magazine, and Psychology Today. Lott’s short childhood memoir, “Elephant Girl,” appears in Gray Wolf Forum #5: Open Houses.