The Memory Sessions

Suzanne Farrell Smith

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781684481477
• eBook ISBN: 9781684481491
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Suzanne Farrell Smith's father was killed by a drunk driver when she was six, and a devastating fire nearly destroyed her house when she was eight. She remembers those two—and only those two—events from her first nearly twelve years of life. While her three older sisters hold on to rich and rewarding memories of their father, Smith recalls nothing of him. Her entire childhood was, seemingly, erased. In The Memory Sessions, Smith attempts to excavate lost childhood memories. She puts herself through multiple therapies and exercises, including psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, somatic experiencing, and acupuncture. She digs for clues in her mother's long-stored boxes. She creates—with objects, photographs, and captions—a physical timeline to compensate for the one that's missing in her memory. She travels to San Diego, where her family vacationed with her father right before he died. She researches, interviews, and meditates, all while facing down the two traumatic memories that defined her early life. The result is an experimental memoir that upends our understanding of the genre. Rather than recount a childhood, The Memory Sessions attempts to create one from research, archives, imagination, and the memories of others.Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide byRutgers University Press.

II.

A PECULIAR DARKNESS

i. GOING ON A HUNT

The doorbell chimes.

Shouts: No! No! My mother’s voice.

I peer at the men entering. A policeman, a neighbor. A priest.

Later—twenty minutes? two hours?—my sisters and I watch television at the neighbor’s house. Two girls per couch cushion. My six-year-old mind doesn’t register the name Knight Rider. In 1983, I just think of it as a show about a talking black car with red lights.

We’re back at our house. I’m on my mother’s lap as she says, “God loved Daddy so much, he decided to take him early.”

A long line out the door of the funeral home. People waiting in the cold.

The coffin. My mother bent double. And he will raise you up, sings the congregation.

Swinging brass and the smell of incense.

Do I see the coffin lowered into the ground?

A mound of dark, wet earth. (A mound, or just part of the crowd under umbrellas?)

It’s raining.

After that: darkness. My memory is buried with my father.

I remember nothing of the years before and after my father died. All of childhood hides behind the bold memory of death.

Did I collect pencils with my name on them? Did I hurry through my homework or poke around the margins? Did I request my sandwiches cut into triangles? When was the first time I rode a bike? Visited the aquarium? Made a mud pie? Was I the sort of child who made mud pies? I don’t remember these things. I don’t remember creeping into the woods behind our Connecticut house, the way my sisters say we did, to divine a royal bloodline and claim mountain laurel canopies as princess chambers. I don’t remember walking down our street two by two, gossiping about children who lived in the modest raised-ranch houses, especially the tiny green one, the ugly brown one. Should we have pumped our bicycles west and up the hill, to the sand dunes left behind by a construction company that went bankrupt before it could complete a planned road, I wouldn’t know for sure. I think a sister told me that once, and it seems real enough. Perhaps we spent evenings working out math problems on the classroom-sized chalkboard our mother stored in the basement. Or maybe we spent those hours together but also alone after prickly disagreements, gnawing our fingernails in vague apprehension that the trauma was not yet over.

Two and a half years after the death scene, my memory zaps to life. It’s the day after Hurricane Gloria swept over our tiny town. I see leaves. Clumps of wet, green leaves.

Crashes from inside the house. Clangs, metal hitting the floor.

The smoke alarm screams. Debbie screams too. I sprint up the path from back yard to front. The kitchen glows. Yellow, hot, loud flames push into the garage.

Seconds later, I’m at the mailbox. But we’ve lost track of Debbie. My mother crawls through the front door, disappears under the smoke.

Debbie reappears, then my mother. We wait. The fire trucks take a long time to come.

I don’t smell wood or paper on fire. I smell crocheted afghans and leather shoes burning.

Hours later, everything drips and steams. The phone is a melted mass of burned plastic; it looks like gray clay roughly hewn into shapes—rotary dial and coiled cord.

Our cat surfaces. My mother lays her over her shoulder.

Again: black.

The holes in my childhood memory have brought me here: a nondescript, overly air-conditioned waiting room at my university health center. Goose bumps spread across my bare arms. I’m uncomfortable, exposed to the frigid air and to the student receptionist. I recognize her from her beanie, knitted, the color of rust, falling limply down the back. Beanies are signature hipster, and this Manhattan school collects hipsters. She hands me a clipboard with a form attached, and I take the chair opposite the only other person in the waiting room: a girl, pretty, much younger than I am, tapping her pen on her clipboard. Tap tap. I try to tune it out, but like all small sounds—smacking-lip sounds and rattling-change sounds—the tapping agitates me.

Name: Suzanne

Year in school: graduate, second year

Parents or legal guardians: Married? Divorced? I assume they need to know because most patients here are undergraduates. Dolores, widowed. Edward, deceased. I could add “killed by a drunk driver speeding the wrong way on the highway,” but there’s no room. “Killed in car crash” will do. At some point I learned to use the word “killed,” not “died,” the word “crash,” not “accident.” I seek out stories of other crashes and make sure the language is correct. Two killed in high-speed collision. Four people, including two children, killed in fiery crash.

Tiny red hives dot my hands. I get hives from cold temperatures, salt water, and stress. I scratch, leaving long white lines across the bumps. Justin reminds me to bring a sweater, even when it’s hot outside. In summer I never listen and freeze at the grocery store or on the bus.

Medical history. Of the forty-three conditions listed, I check off two: anxiety and sleep problems. The girl in the beanie stands and stretches, starts for the water cooler. Tall and thin, she’s wearing a minidress with argyle socks pulled up over her knees. I wonder if she brought the socks just for warmth. With my thick legs, I could never pull that off. As she walks by my chair, I return to the form, adding a check next to “depression.” I don’t know if it’s true, or if it’s possible to be both anxious and depressed. Inside I feel flat: anxious about feeling depressed, and depressed about feeling anxious.

Briefly describe reason for appointment. How best to explain to Eliza, the counselor I’m meeting for the first time, the reason? I have a memory problem.

It’s not that I’m an amnesiac, or melodramatic movie material—Who am I? Where am I? I’ve never lacked self-awareness. I know who I am. My memory loss, though it’s drained me of almost every childhood minute, is not incapacitating, nor is it total. I’ve long recalled the two events that comprise my entire prepubescent childhood memory: doorbell and funeral, hurricane and fire.

Then came the blood.

In my darkened bedroom, I listened to Q105’s late-night love songs: Whitney Houston, Belinda Carlisle, Richard Marx. I needed to sleep, but my lower abdomen felt tight. It must be a stomachache, I thought, as I rummaged through the bathroom cabinet for antacids, quietly so as not to awaken my eldest sister across the hall. The chalky tablets didn’t help, and the discomfort grew worse until it burned. I helped myself to more medication—ibuprofen this time—and covered my stomach with a cloth soaked in cold water.

In the morning I found dark blood on the toilet paper. I believed I had cut myself while washing. Or had I sat on something sharp? Bent over, naked, I examined myself. I don’t know if this was the first time I had examined myself, or if at five and seven and ten I had wanted to probe my body for mysteries. I found no scratches or wounds.

I took the bus to school. When I came home that afternoon, there was cherry-bright blood in my underwear.

After filling the tub to its brim with hot water, I stepped in gingerly but with the determination of a patient enduring critical treatment. Sliding down to my eye line, I waited for what was meant to happen next, for the water to draw from my body whatever was making it bleed.

Packages of pads were piled high in the storage closet near the bathroom. I used one to absorb the blood. Shame, tethered to my instinct for privacy, told me to ball up my underwear, conceal it in a paper towel, and chuck it in the trash.

I remember the blood, the sharp citrus taste of antacids, and the sting of hot water. I can’t remember how old I was, or anything else about it. I do recall the awkward moment by the washing machine years later, as I was packing up to attend college, when my mother asked me if I’d ever gotten my period. Yes, I’d told her. Some time ago, yes.

“Susan?” I look up, irritated, ready to correct the hipster who’s back behind the desk. At least once a week I have to tell someone my name is Suzanne, not Susan. I don’t understand why it’s so hard to detect the “z.” My mother likes to tell me how stubborn I was about nicknames. Adults couldn’t resist shortening me to “Sue,” and I spat back, “My name is Suzanne,” as I’m ready to do now. But the student worker is addressing the pretty pen-tapper. Susan is directed to an office down the hallway while I return to the form.

I have a memory problem. I still did well in high school, left for college, and never moved back home. I studied sociology, got involved in scores of activities, and met Justin. After graduation, I began to build a life, moving to New York, working at an elementary school, living with friends.

But beneath the surface, I didn’t settle. I didn’t enjoy the kind of emotional and mental health I perceived in others. Communication with my family was tense, and I couldn’t name the reason. My relationship with Justin stalled. I was quick to anger, blowing up at salespeople and parking garage attendants and cable company representatives—all people who delivered news that something I needed was unavailable or broken. Seesawing between irritability and fatigue, I dreaded getting up in the morning and drank myself to sleep at night.

I didn’t know what to make of my two traumatic memories. I didn’t know what to make of the whole emptiness of my childhood. The story of me, of how I got to be an agitated twenty-something, was the story of trauma, a borrowed story, or simply no story at all. I didn’t know who I was or wanted to be.

On my twenty-ninth birthday I decided to quit my job as an elementary school teacher and go to graduate school. “For what?” my mother asked. I didn’t know exactly. For thinking and writing and sitting in a classroom with other adults rather than children—children I loved but couldn’t understand.

I applied to just one graduate program. Two years with few requirements besides a thesis, open selection of social science courses. Perfect. I’d think for two years, then work at a think tank. The first assignment for my first professor, in a class on cultural criticism, was to write a short memoir. I assumed that the content had to be from childhood, since our reading that week—George Orwell, Mary McCarthy, Edward Said—recounted childhood events. I knew I didn’t want to tell the sad stories of my father’s death or the house fire. Reluctantly, I e-mailed my sisters for help, choosing what I thought was a benign topic: family dinners. They responded with tales full of humor and detail, but also pain. Pain that belonged to all of us. And pain that belonged to each alone, to the one who suffered at the hands of a family friend, to the one who suddenly became our mother’s caretaker, to the one who hardened. Pain I hadn’t until then acknowledged was irrevocably a part of everything we did after our father died. I wrote the essay, passing their memories off as my own. My professor liked it but wrote in the margin: “Powerful stuff, if it’s all true.”

It was all true. Each de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• I. The Bridge
• II. A Peculiar Darkness
• III. To Light
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author