my own bones

“There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences.”

– Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

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Iaeger, West Virginia. Nineteen seventy nine. The old bus terminal that use to sit somewhere along the river bank. Maybe next to Sears & Roebuck? Maybe not. Maybe Sears & Roebuck came after it was already gone? I can’t remember. But I do remember the terminal; the diner it held. And it’s a memory from this diner that’s running away from me.

I keep trying to get my head around it. To see all the things I can already hear and smell and taste. But all I see is a plate. White. With a blue racing stripe around its edge.

The room smells of beef. The real kind. And of lettuce. It sounds like my grandfather. Loud and laughing. He’s sitting beside me. Telling a story. To men or to the air. I can’t see him; all I see is the plate. But he’s there. Just like the sun. Breaking through the windows, fracturing over hands and faces, lighting up the room.

My grandmother tells me to put my legs together. I’m in a dress. It’s Sunday. The day her husband doesn’t work. Church is over. She doesn’t use words, but I feel her hands on my knees and I know what they mean. They say things, my grandma’s hands. Like…

“Always be a lady; but be a smart one.”
“Men will fool you; but they will love you too.”
“Do and become; because I could not.”