An Outline with Memories

Exploring what may come up on a quiet Sunday in 2024

The playwright Mike Bartlett does an exercise with aspiring playwrights where they take turns lying on a large piece of paper while a fellow student draws an outline of their body. Then the aspiring playwrights write down, within the outline, an event for every year of their life. Each of these memories is paired with a larger cultural event for that same year. Finally, the aspiring playwrights brainstorm a dozen or so storylines.

This exercise scares me. Maybe most of all because I’ll discover how little I remember. Also, what if memories come rushing back? No. Honestly: memories don’t come rushing or flooding back for me. They come like links of a thick chain I pull out of dark water. I can often feel the weight of them before I know what I’ve got. Each linked to the next.

And there is always a fear of what might come up.

I was once in a tiny motor boat with my best friend and two men, so far out to sea that I couldn’t see land. Two men, each of whom had a secret that had to do with me, but I held no power over either of them. (You’ve seen the after-school specials.) I caught a deep-sea fish whose eyes bulged in a terrifying way, then something edible that we kept. It lay in the hull, bleeding from its torn gill. It was 1977. I was 11.

In 1997, I made bagels from scratch and my youngest fell asleep while crawling over the living room floor, like a mechanical toy winding down; it was the year my eldest fell down an embankment and blood gushed from his scalp; the same year their father was gone for 5 weeks, then 2 weeks, then 3. And we lived in a nearly new, 3-bedroom house at the farthest edge of the suburban sprawl, on the almost-top of a small mountain.

There are so many kinds of isolation.

1997 was the year of Diana’s car crash. I remember watching the reports on television. Then I remember the accent wall with dark green fleur de lis wallpaper, the burgundy faux-leather couch. I remember the volume of that couch because it was also the “year of the flu”, holding my oldest on my lap as he lost consciousness. We drove him to the hospital that was so far away. The hospital where his father and I said nothing to one another, sitting next to one another in molded plastic chairs, not touching, while we waited for the doctor.

It was the year of revealed vulnerabilities.

It was the year of Heaven’s Gate, of the North Wales pedophile charges. It was the end of the Chechen war, but the refugees weren’t going home. There were other wars somewhere off the radar—I know this because there always are.

Twenty-five years before I lived on this little mountain-almost-top, there were other wars of other kinds. I would stay for days-at-a-stretch with Grandma in the adults-only trailer park, and she’d take me to the swimming pool there. She’d lounge in a chair reading a Mitchener novel, wearing a one-piece swimming suit with a built-in bra, so she looked like a pin-up from the 40s. I know she got in the water with me at least once. Maybe only once. I can remember the smells of the rubber swim-caps, the chlorine, the aluminum of the arms of the lounge chair.

Most of all I remember different ways of measuring distances.

I remember staying in the shallow end because when I was alone in the pool, the drain in the deep end scared me. Maybe because I thought I would get sucked down the drain when no one was looking. Maybe because the pool was like a big bathtub, and my cousin Jimmy had recently died in a bathtub.

Alone.

There’d been an investigation. A divorce. Another divorce. People disappear after little battles like these. Everyone left shrugs it off like you shrug off a bathrobe before you step into the shower and wash off the day.

This was 1972, the year of Bloody Sunday, Bloody Friday, the Munich Massacre. Planes fell out of the sky, and the last man to walk on the moon left his footprints.

They’re still there, the footprints—his and those of the men who’d gone before.

When you slowly pull a chain out of dark water, there is a moment when the link is reflected on the surface and you aren’t able to tell if it’s really a reflection, or the obscured view of the next link—the one we may not want to acknowledge is really there.

If I were to lie on a piece of butcher paper and you were to trace my body with chalk, you’d see I leave behind the outline of a solitary wasp.

There are millions of us. And countless have been before.

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