Plain View

Normalcy is an annoying puzzle for the self-taught: no box photograph or corners, no estimate of piece-count. I spent years as a lawyer reassembling past events in moment by moment chronologies, using daytimers and phone-records and credit card receipts. Why isn't normalcy discoverable?

Forensic assemblages of photographs and clippings, multi-colored arrows and QUERIES! on tackboards avail not. The only true guidance lurks in half-heard conversations, averted eyes, gracile chimpanzee gestures. Normalcy is a foreign-language film, viewed from the bottom of a popcorn box.

Walking next to the wall and in the shade, you pretend that you pass as an untainted Jane. And then you read Facebook.

My mother's wedding ring lived in an unused sugar bowl, on the spice shelf in our kitchen. Everything else lived in the bottom drawer of Mary Ann's bedroom dresser: kid drawings, popsicle sticks, school pictures and, it turned out, the letters which revealed the existence of my half-brother. Letters which exposed that our move to Illinois had not been voluntary, but rather an employer's drop-kick of a low-level married manager who knocked-up his secretary.

I never read the letters, even after Mary Ann had accused me of snooping. I gathered that there was evidence of a Big Bad Thing, and so avoided the drawer. What with the drinking, fist-marks in doors, two siblings with the simian crease of Down Syndrome, I must have been relieved that one secret could be so easily contained.

In my early 30's, she finally spilled. She had to explain, after all, why she had just changed their phone-number. The half-brother existed; the half-brother was engaged; and his future father-in-law kept calling the house. The FFIL's goal was to promote bonding, and ease the half-brother's sense of abandonment. Or to shake loose cash for wedding expenses. As my Dad was then gaga with Parkinson's, Mary Ann moved to an unlisted number and out of their bedroom.

The Big Bad Thing was contained once more. This solution was so nifty that it led my father - nuts and hopped up on L-Dopa - to then molest my sister. Which Biggest of All Possible Bad Things my mother neatly managed to ignore.

For years, I had regular dreams in which I visited home, to find only a smoking crater. My Dad is long dead, my mother dead and the house sold in 2005, but the crater still glows now and again. The image isn't quite as adaptive as when it constrained me from dynamiting the house myself, but it does satisfy.

But back to the Facebook epiphany, a statistically-unlikely phrase. A high-school friend has posted virtually every class picture from her elementary school days. And surprise: we did not first meet in high school, but rather had been third-grade classmates. I would have known this, had I ever retrieved those school photos from the bottom drawer. I would have examined and now possess my past.

I'm still walking, or weaving, away from the crater. It would be a kindness to pretend that my path is linear, and that you cannot smell my singed hair.