II. The History House Mysteries
In the summer of 1989, we moved into my mother's childhood home.
The wood flesh of 702 Shannon Way bore mute scars, silently taunting Emelia and I with the confirmation of life we hadn't lived. It was a bare boned skeleton of walls and sliding doors - exposed rods hidden in empty closets, My grandmother bequeathed to us only the stone faced receipt of time spent. Without Madeline, the knower and keeper of secrets, the old house was just an old house.
My mother clutched her history like a glass ball; she guarded it, close to her chest. This was the lesson we learned when the old house was still our new house. We revived long dead artifacts with giddy excitement and solemn reverence. Each discovery we made , Emelia and I, (we ragtag pair of nosy archeologists) was treated as if it was the wardrobe door which led to the Narnia of our imaginations - that dead world of years passed before we had even begun living.
Scrawled over the flat edges of barren shelves in the pantry, blue ink labels gave testimonial that the space hadn't always been useless.
LINENS.
GUEST TOWELS.
GIFT WRAP.
WHITE ELEPHANTS.
White elephants?
White el-eph-ants?
W-h-i-t-e e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t-s?
I was 10 years old and newly equipped with the sort of grown up understandings that cluck their tongues, disapprovingly at loosely knitted, hopeful fantasies of shelves reserved for exotic, discolored animals in grandmother's pantry. I recruited Emelia, my straw haired, honey eyed, almost matching, almost twin to assist in my covert operation of WHITE ELEPHANT reconnaissance.
Our mother, we knew, was the author of revisionist history, the initiator of campaigns of distraction and mostly not a fan of "nosing around the house". I exhaled secrets against my sister's ear, one hand cupped around my mouth to hide the "Not Allowed" language I spoke.
When Emelia was 2 and I was 4, my mother caught us in our bedroom laughing and mumbling garbled, nonsensical words to each other. She observed from the doorway for a moment and then realized that we weren't just being silly. The mixed-up syllables and foreign sounds were an intricate dialect that we both spoke and understood fluently.
This unnerved her. The unnatural lexicon, in the mouths of the babies she taught to speak, was explained away by speech pathologists and child psychologists. She called them while peeling away her hangnails with her teeth and she allowed herself to be reassured that it was a perfectly natural phenomenon, though typically only observed in identical twins.
But, we were not twins. We are not twins. The history of our Untwin words was lost. Those who remembered when our mouths first wrapped around them never knew what they meant. And for Emelia and I, they had always just been there, right where they weren't supposed to be. Whispered late night secrets and WHITE ELEPHANT curiosities still sometimes filled sister lips and sister ears with forbidden, private things.
We tore through the halls, knock - kneed and frantic, to search for clues hidden in closet backs and in bureau drawers before grown-up questions and commands made our investigation silly or else against the rules. Our desperation for her knowledge made our mother's eyes look scared and angry at the same time. It was the same way she looked at us when she caught us still whispering with the intimacy that we had no right to.
Something in the years that we had missed had tramautized her, something she kept trying to kill just wouldn't stay dead. She was the prodigal daughter, returned home so that she could be safe and she could forget. But, the bare-boned ghosts of history lingered and pleaded, imploring me to know and understand.
In the summer of 1989, we moved into my mother's childhood home.
The wood flesh of 702 Shannon Way bore mute scars, silently taunting Emelia and I with the confirmation of life we hadn't lived. It was a bare boned skeleton of walls and sliding doors - exposed rods hidden in empty closets, My grandmother bequeathed to us only the stone faced receipt of time spent. Without Madeline, the knower and keeper of secrets, the old house was just an old house.
My mother clutched her history like a glass ball; she guarded it, close to her chest. This was the lesson we learned when the old house was still our new house. We revived long dead artifacts with giddy excitement and solemn reverence. Each discovery we made , Emelia and I, (we ragtag pair of nosy archeologists) was treated as if it was the wardrobe door which led to the Narnia of our imaginations - that dead world of years passed before we had even begun living.
Scrawled over the flat edges of barren shelves in the pantry, blue ink labels gave testimonial that the space hadn't always been useless.
LINENS.
GUEST TOWELS.
GIFT WRAP.
WHITE ELEPHANTS.
White elephants?
White el-eph-ants?
W-h-i-t-e e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t-s?
I was 10 years old and newly equipped with the sort of grown up understandings that cluck their tongues, disapprovingly at loosely knitted, hopeful fantasies of shelves reserved for exotic, discolored animals in grandmother's pantry. I recruited Emelia, my straw haired, honey eyed, almost matching, almost twin to assist in my covert operation of WHITE ELEPHANT reconnaissance.
Our mother, we knew, was the author of revisionist history, the initiator of campaigns of distraction and mostly not a fan of "nosing around the house". I exhaled secrets against my sister's ear, one hand cupped around my mouth to hide the "Not Allowed" language I spoke.
When Emelia was 2 and I was 4, my mother caught us in our bedroom laughing and mumbling garbled, nonsensical words to each other. She observed from the doorway for a moment and then realized that we weren't just being silly. The mixed-up syllables and foreign sounds were an intricate dialect that we both spoke and understood fluently.
This unnerved her. The unnatural lexicon, in the mouths of the babies she taught to speak, was explained away by speech pathologists and child psychologists. She called them while peeling away her hangnails with her teeth and she allowed herself to be reassured that it was a perfectly natural phenomenon, though typically only observed in identical twins.
But, we were not twins. We are not twins. The history of our Untwin words was lost. Those who remembered when our mouths first wrapped around them never knew what they meant. And for Emelia and I, they had always just been there, right where they weren't supposed to be. Whispered late night secrets and WHITE ELEPHANT curiosities still sometimes filled sister lips and sister ears with forbidden, private things.
We tore through the halls, knock - kneed and frantic, to search for clues hidden in closet backs and in bureau drawers before grown-up questions and commands made our investigation silly or else against the rules. Our desperation for her knowledge made our mother's eyes look scared and angry at the same time. It was the same way she looked at us when she caught us still whispering with the intimacy that we had no right to.
Something in the years that we had missed had tramautized her, something she kept trying to kill just wouldn't stay dead. She was the prodigal daughter, returned home so that she could be safe and she could forget. But, the bare-boned ghosts of history lingered and pleaded, imploring me to know and understand.
roddy:
beautiful, simply beautiful