[sense of place]
ON COMPLETING A MEMORY By Taylor Brorby
The earliest memory I have is of death. I’m three, going on four, and am sitting in my grandmother’s Buick, lined with a soft, chocolate brown interior, and waiting for her to see her own mother, my great-grandmother. Parked outside of a small grey apartment building in Center, North Dakota, the car gently vibrates as I wait for my grandmother to come back to the car. I’m alone, enjoying a juice box, and am looking around, wondering what’s going on. Why did grandma leave me alone? Maybe it’s a surprise! Maybe she has a present for me! It is a surprise, but not the one I imagine. My grandma emerges, looking older, haggard, and drawn. She pauses at the front door of her mother’s apartment building, stumbles a bit. She pulls from her pocket her compaq and powders her nose, looking up to the sky to fight back her tears. I found out later in life that my father had to break into my great-grandmother’s apartment and found her sitting in her green chair with velvet fringes lining the bottom, slumped and cold. The room was cold, I was told; the television was on with a gentle static humming in the background, as if she were just dozing off to take a nap. I imagine my father’s heart pumping harder and harder as the gentle tic, tic, tics of his knock grows into a crescendo of thump, thump, thump, leading into a climax of, “Grandma, are you in there? Grandma, stand back! I’m breaking in!”
I imagine him breathless, as if he just finished a sprint, hunched over, hands on his knees, eyes pooling with the gentle tears that drip, drip, drip to her cold linoleum floor. I imagine my grandmother becoming hysterical as my father calls her, trying to tell her that four letter word that struggles to flick from his tongue, that word that lands with a thud: Dead. My grandma comes back to her 1989 Buick Park Avenue, the one that was bought new from the dealer, which is now two years old, and takes out her compaq yet again and powders her cheeks and nose. I see her quickly flinch, holding back what must be salty tears, trying like steam to escape from a boiling kettle. She clears her throat, and through a strained voice says that we’re about to go to her house so she can talk with Grandpa. She rips at the key to start the ignition, jolts the car forward, as we then come to a glide on our way to her house. The scene looks the same to me—leaves roll in the wind, grass is the same mottled brown. I do not have the sense of self to ask my grandma what has happened, have the sense of perspective to ask her if she needs a hug or a moment to herself to scream. Instead, I play the role of her grandson who is three, going on four, and buckle my seatbelt and look forward to going to Grandma’s house. ————————— I remember the basement, its musty smell and unfurling strands of grey-blue smoke. We are at Zion Lutheran Church, a country church, several miles south of Noonan, which is nestled in the northwest corner of North Dakota, gently hugging Montana to the west and Canada to the
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