An Accidental Memory

Annabelle Montgomery is six years old and already understands how perilous and unreliable the world can be. People, things, can suddenly go missing, without warning. No explanations are provided, no apologies. Faces of women hover at her periphery, frozen with expressions bitter as arugula. They orbit her world like asteroids without trajectories. They chain-smoke angrily, glaring at husbands or boyfriends silently from stained kitchen tables or rusty porch swings. They are perpetually waiting for the men to give them money. The women in Annabelle’s life are always simmering at a low boil, like a pot of spaghetti water bubbling in an empty kitchen. Annabelle observes the men stare quizzically at the women’s bitter expressions before shrugging their shoulders and vanishing into their world. Annabelle instinctively learns to expect nothing from adults.  She understands she is on her own.

Chain-smoking and ranting about trivial things is Nora’s way of validating her opinions. Annabelle’s mother Nora has a habit of waving lit cigarettes in the air when she goes off on a “tangent”.  Amorphous geometric designs emerge in the air from the smoke of her cigarette-paintbrush.  “Men only want us for sex. Nothing more, nothing less”, Nora says matter-of-factly. She jabs a cigarette between her chapped lips and begins cracking nuts with a silver nutcracker over a pink plastic bowl. “Their hormones tell them what to do. They can’t feel anything. All they have are hormones. Women have hormones but we have to take responsibility for what they tell us to do. Want my advice? Stay away from men. Get a dog. Get three cats. Don’t pluck your eyebrows. Let your teeth rot. Don’t shave your armpits. Get a hysterectomy.”

Annabelle’s adolescence is a labyrinth devoid of exits. There is no place to go except inward. She writes poems with a black marker on the dirty, blue wallpaper somebody pasted to her bedroom walls decades ago. She steals black markers from the local grocery store because Nora never has any money left over from her disability check.  They are always “poor”, Nora tells her when she asks for money. One day, a man stocking bread in the Dollar General sees her slip a black marker into her pocket. She waits for something to happen. But the man continues placing loaves of bread on shelves as though he had not seen, as though she didn’t even exist.

Annabelle intends to leave her mother as soon as she graduates from high school. At night, when she is doing her homework at the kitchen table, she watches Nora swallow bright blue pills instead of eating food. When Nora catches Annabelle watching her, she stares at her with eyes that remind Annabelle of dead carp eyes. Nora frequently dozes off in front of the television, her head drooping against her barely moving chest. Her dyed black scalp is littered with dandruff flakes. Annabelle wonders if Nora deliberately leaves her hair unwashed to repel men. She neither loves nor hates her mother but would not care if she ever saw Nora again. There is nothing crystalline or pure about Nora’s neurosis.

Eventually, the pills force Nora to come to the conclusion that their dilapidated house is haunted by poltergeists. “Know what poltergeists are? They’re ghosts that throw things and try to hurt you.” Nora’s cheeks are bright red. She is hyperventilating. It is the middle of the night and Nora has poked Annabelle awake.  “They’re madder than hell at us because we are alive and they’re not”. Nora punches herself in the chest with a white-knuckled fist as she says this. Annabelle wonders why her mother seems so exhilarated at the thought of ghosts “being mad” at her. It makes no sense to Annabelle and she does not waste time trying to understand her mother. This oddity is just another hallucination Annabelle plans to leave behind and forget permanently.

To stop poltergeists from “breaking her stuff” or “pulling her hair”, Nora insists on lighting dozens of candles stubs in every room, even in the attic and basement. The house glows like an immense bonfire at night. Annabelle predicts the house will eventually catch on fire and burn to the ground. She wakes up every morning and sniffs cautiously, expecting the air to smell of burnt things. She has nightmares of choking on thick smoke, gasping for air, dodging flames as she tries to escape. Annabelle always wakes up before she is burnt to a crisp in her dreams. She always wakes up in time before becoming one of her mother’s poltergeists.

When Annabelle is 17, Nora suddenly starts accusing her of being “quirky”, “crazy” and “weird”.  “You are full of secrets but you’re not special” Nora sneers at her after taking multiple blue pills and throwing back several shots of vodka.  She wants Annabelle to divulge her secrets. But Annabelle doesn’t really have any secrets except for her plan to leave her mother alone with her ghosts when the time comes.

Tornadoes bounce helter-skelter around the county during the 18^th summer of Annabelle’s life. They rip up the Brubaker farm, the old covered bridge on Yohe Road and Miller's dragonfly-infested fishing pond. The town fairgrounds catches on caught on fire because some weird little kid had finally grown up to be the arsonist everyone expected him to be. Three people died mysteriously on moonlit country roads in July while church attendance swelled as big as croaking bullfrog throats. Nora is always drunk now and always down to her last cigarette. She has begun accusing Annabelle of being a witch, of casting spells and throwing up everything she eats. Annabelle suspects Nora understands she is leaving soon and that there are secrets to learn and secrets to keep.

On the day Annabelle receives her high school diploma, Nora cuts her jugular vein with a small piece of broken glass. Annabelle has no thoughts about this event. It just happens. Since suicide was commonplace in Annabelle’s family, the episode is handled with silent resignation. Her grandmother cleans up the bloody mess while nursing a vodka and orange juice. Nora’s body is unceremoniously shipped to the funeral home to be embalmed. The funeral is attended by Annabelle, her grandmother and a pastor with a black eye patch. Annabelle has never met him before. When she shakes his hand, she can smell alcohol on his breath.

Annabelle’s mother is placed in a cheap, plain casket and buried in the town’s only cemetery that nobody bothers to mow anymore. Annabelle expects an overgrowth of stinging nettle weeds and crabgrass will quickly overwhelm the stone. She considers the possibility that the stone would no longer be visible if she ever decides to visit her mother’s grave site in the far future. If she waits long enough to visit, the stone will likely be swallowed up by the earth. No one would ever know it was there except her. Eventually, she will forget about it as new memories replace old ones she does not make an attempt to remember.

Annabelle is waiting for the bus to take her away from Nora’s gravestone, Nora’s poltergeists and Nora’s pills. Ominous clouds looking like they could contain nuclear fallout hover over Annabelle as she walks to the bus station five miles from her home. The silence is unnerving and depthless. Annabelle suspects this oddly soothing tranquility is what you would sense when you know an asteroid will soon destroy your world but there is nothing you can do to stop it. Your body will evaporate in a few seconds as soon as you hear the deafening harmony of planetary bodies destroying each other. And then it will be over.