If Memory Serves
Linda Murphy Marshall
Word Count 820
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
It’s always ourself that we find in the sea.
-E.E. Cummings
*
I have a memory, a gray, blurry, shadowy movie-memory. It must be wrong — how could it be right? — but it has haunted me for years. I was only six when it happened. Somewhere there is a home movie of the scene — an accidental movie — which I remember watching, taken by my father, but where is it now? Long gone, maybe moldering in a brother’s basement, or evidence deliberately destroyed? Who to ask, though? How? But the home movie is what I remember, even though I was there when it happened. The movie isolates the action, strips all else away and focuses on the two actors in this drama: my mother and my sister.
We are on vacation somewhere in Florida in the late 1950s, maybe Clearwater Beach, escaping from our Midwestern home for a brief respite. My mother is holding my baby sister in the motel swimming pool, and suddenly — a few frames into the movie — my little sister is somehow separated from my mother’s arms, prelude to disaster. Panic ensues. My father — the family photographer — happens to be taking a video at the time and inadvertently captures a five-second movie from the edge of the pool. What I remember is that, instead of showing my mother reaching out for my sister to pull her from the water, it looks like she is pushing her away from her body, not towards her. But there is a flurry of man made waves, waves which splash up onto the camera, blurring the lens, making it hard to see. People are screaming, it is chaotic, and water is splashing everywhere.
How could this possibly be true? Maybe the film reversed itself in a bizarre technical glitch, making the movement of mother and daughter look like a pushing, not a pulling, the brief mother-daughter water ballet a duet of embrace and release, not release and embrace.
Two and a half seconds or so into the movie, after the push or the pull, a bystander — a former Olympic swimmer I’m later told — jumps into the pool in seconds three, four and five of the film, and rescues my sister from the water. Then the film abruptly stops when my father no doubt puts down his camera to help my mother and sister. I don’t know where my mother was after her initial movements. The shortest and most powerful movie in my life is over.
So many years later, its unanswered question still haunts me: what happened? Some topics are so unfathomable, unspeakable, that you flee from their truth as though a nest of hornets were chasing you. Other topics are merely dramatic for a moment, and then forgotten when transferred to a benign all’s well frame. Which of the two was this incident, I keep wondering….
***
That same summer, we’re still in Florida, at the same motel. The sun is going down and I’m at the deep end of the pool, floating with a small inner tube holding me up, my arms draped loosely over its edges, my head nodding, fighting sleep. Even though I’m six years old I don’t know how to swim yet. I remember feeling tired; it was getting late, playing in the water had probably worn me out, and the inner tube’s movement on the surface of the water was rocking me to sleep. My parents were there, somewhere, next to the pool, talking to someone or the other. The next thing I remember, I had slipped through the inner tube, my arms floating upward as my body sank through the hole in the inner tube, down down down, the inner tube floating on the surface as my body sank towards the drain at the bottom of the pool. I remember that my short life flashed before me, and then someone — who? — pulled me out and I was safe.
Later, my mother told me that I hadn’t been in danger, that no time had passed at all before I was pulled out.
“Linda, don’t be so dramatic. You were never in any danger. We pulled you out long before you took any water. Get your mind off yourself.”
But my memory is different, and since then I can’t look at swimming pool drains. Whenever I swim laps, I squint when the wavy specter of the rectangular, black grate comes into view, trying to avoid it. The mere sight of it below me makes my pulse quicken and, though I know it’s irrational, I still relive that day long ago and imagine being sucked into the drain’s vortex.
What are the words of that child’s song, “Water water everywhere…” That’s how I feel when I sift (wade) through the memories of my early years, memories that, like someone whose face mask was ripped off, are blurry, imprecise……but still, I wonder.
Linda has a Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing. Her memoir, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery received a starred review from Kirkus. Her essays and stories have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Catamaran Literary Reader, The Ocotillo Review, Mom Egg Review, Under the Gum Tree, and elsewhere. Two of her paintings were featured in literary magazines. She is also an Associate for the National Museum of Language and a docent at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Her second memoir comes out in 2024.