Lite Brite

Took apart a picture that wasn’t right

This is not my life

It’s not what I’m like

* * *
The hatred I learned in childhood is my world-is-flat truth.

1973. I’m born into a family that walks the tracks like a fence. Poor Mexicans on one side, and new money on the other.

My father’s mother might have been the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. Achingly beautiful. Every feature is young and perfect. She looked like a drawing. When I’m 6 or 7, I am standing in their house, in Bruceville-Eddy, and I stare at a black and white photo. It’s the only photo I’ve ever seen just once whose details I can remember precisely.

It is the image of happiness.

“Who is that?” I ask.

“That’s me, sugar. I was a pretty girl, huh?”

I look up at her, a cigarette dangling at her side, an elbow framed by green, polyester pants, skin too white for Texas skies.

* * *

My grandfather always joked about how ugly he was. And how he was lucky to have somehow landed the prettiest girl in Arkansas.

When he died, she remarried within 6 months.

Her new husband, an even uglier man, wore a wide brimmed cowboy hat and smelled like English Leather. He was a heavy, bald widower with money.

“And he promised me he’d take me dancing on New Year’s. I told your grandfather that if he wanted to marry me, he’d have to take me dancing every year on December 31st. We never missed a year, not even during his chemo.”

And like that, I hated her.

* * *

Overcoming truth is possible, but only if you’re willing to lie to yourself.

When she fell ill with cancer in 1990 she asked my sister for me. By this time, I had sworn never to cross those tracks again. I didn’t speak to her, or answer her letters, which shamed me with their 8th grade vocabulary and penmanship. The prettiest girl in Arkansas had never finished school.

“I don’t want to see her,” I told my sister over the phone.

She died the next month.

Her new husband had to listen to her cry out for my grandfather. One ugly man was giving up his prize to the original owner, and he did so elegantly. He wasn’t a bad man, just charmed by the prettiest girl Arkansas ever did see. He buried her, as she wished, next to her first husband.

* * *

I have to constantly fight my belief that the world of my memories is flat. I don’t want to believe that the past, like the present, is three dimensional, that it is a series of facts that cannot be changed. I have to fight my assumptions of what’s done is done, of dust to dust.

The photo of that pretty, uneducated girl from Arkansas haunts me. Unlike the other people who have died in my life, she hasn’t forgiven me. That photo of her, lodged in my memory like a truth, reminds me that I once visited those hills where she was born; that she came from my side of the tracks, too. The photo reminds me that she rewards devotion, above all else. She reminds me that while my grandfather was taken from her, I chose to stay away.

I would be afraid to have that photo in my house, afraid that my kids would look upon it and see something I never noticed.

“Who is that girl?” they might ask.

“And why does she look so sad?”