!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
Mike stayed over that Sunday, going with Jeanne and I to Leslie’s for brunch. She and Bev had upgraded their place settings, or maybe someone’s parents, after experiencing the mismatched plates, cups and utensils, had bought them a matching set. Bev brought in bagels, lox, cream cheese, and blintzes, along with fruit slices and cheese. Coffee came in a shiny chrome carafe, with orange juice and some champagne – “For mimosas!” Les noted. I could see myself having people over during the summer, taking off an apron as I finished bringing in a steaming bowl of vegetables – broccoli, asparagus, carrots, a regular smorgasbord to go with the bread and salad they were already enjoying.
Les crashed my fantasy by loudly asking, “Janie! You never went back to Hillel. I thought you were Jewish! You said you didn’t have a bat mitzvah, right?” As usual, she didn’t wait for an answer. “I remember mine. I was twelve. I felt like I was all of a sudden grown-up. One day I’m a kid, riding bikes, getting skinned knees, playing hide-and-seek. Then, Bam! There’s this solemn ritual, everybody humming in Hebrew and – poof! – I’m a woman. I know it didn’t happen all at once, still it seems like right then I had my period, got my first real bra, began to think about what I really wanted to be when I ‘grew-up.’ It’s like I was two different people, before and after. I remember things that happened, people I knew, from before, but they don’t seem to be the memories that make me, me.” She tailed off pensively.
Jeanne jumped into the rare break in a Leslie monologue. “There are things that happen, in our brain, that make those earlier memories less stable, less forceful in a conscious way. Something about myelination of the neurons. What’s happening to us now, from when we go through puberty until our brain stops developing, makes us who we’re going to be.” She sounded so authoritative, so rational. Still, I wasn’t convinced.
“I think there’s more,’ I countered, “not just our thoughts and memories, that determines how we act. I see those moms and their kids, in my psych lab, they can’t talk to each other yet, but they can communicate. And Freud, yes, he was more a philosopher than a scientist, still, he was onto something when he talked about how our earliest childhood experiences, with our mothers especially, set a pattern, a template, for everything we become. I mean, we’re not insects or frogs, we’re not one thing before, and then something totally different after we go through puberty, or a bat mitzvah or whatever. We’re more like snakes, getting bigger and bigger each time we shed our skins, but still recognizable as the same person, growing, evolving.” Thinking of getting hit on the head in Chicago, I went on. “Even when something suddenly makes us see the world in a different way, we still carry all our old memories with us, our previous ways of doing things. We get more complex, life gets more complicated.”
Mike and Bev sat quietly in one corner, a gentile minority to the three of us contemplating our spiritual and temporal growth. I noticed they were making a big dent in the bagels and lox, though.
Wiping some cream cheese off his upper lip, Mike started, “This stuff is really good. Where did you say you got it, Bev?”
“There’s this little deli down on the Square. Sunday morning you have to get there early if you want it soft and warm like this.” She smiled contentedly, sipping on her mimosa.
Mike plowed on, looking first at Leslie, then Jeanne, finally resting his gaze on me. Inwardly, I prepared for a lecture. Instead, without pontificating, he looked up, and then warmly back to me. “I think you’re right. There’s a continuity, at least if we’re sane, from when we’re born, and probably even before, an unbroken chain of fundamental personality.” He turned to Leslie, then Jeanne. “I wonder, do you feel the same as when you were ten? You may not act the same, think the same, even so, you are, deep down, one person your whole life, aren’t you?”
Jeanne nodded, but I knew she would not let him off so easily. “OK, yeah, I get it, I’m the same, but I’m always growing, just like Janie says. I still think the things that count, that feed our growth, they come after we’re ready, after our brains are ready to absorb them. What is it, Janie, there’s a time when a kid starts to get a sense of self? Before that, they can’t tell the difference between themselves and the outside world? Well, that doesn’t happen all at once.”
Mike put in, “You said ‘Our brains stop developing.’ When does that happen?”
“Supposedly, around 25, 6, 27 maybe.”
“And so we’re very volatile then, between puberty and when our brain has grown?” He pursed his lips in thought. “Hmm, I got to thinking, when I worked on the psych ward, that no one should see a shrink between the ages of 15 and 25, ‘cause we’re all crazy then anyway. It’s hard work, being young. And some of us, I guess, don’t make it.” He spread his arms wide, as if to ask everyone at the table, “Are we adults yet? It feels like it, kind of, sitting here at ‘brunch’, no adults serving us or telling us what to think. But what…how will we know when we’re adults, when we’re officially grown up? When I start a career? When we have kids, get married, vote? What?”
Leslie snickered, “When you have a checkbook and start paying all your bills yourself.” She turned serious. “No, you’re an adult when you start thinking for yourself, when you’ve done enough, seen enough, to know what’s right for you. You stop letting the world tell you what to do, who you should be.” She stood up, grabbing dishes, empty or not, and took them back to the kitchen. Water sloshed, pots clanged as she washed and dried in there.
Mike took up the thread. “In that case, I think we’re always as grown up as we’re going to be, each moment in time. Right now, I’m as old as I’ve ever been, right? When we were sixteen,” he said, looking over at me, “you acted like – or at least you seemed to me like – you knew exactly who you were, and where you were going. That’s changed a bit, gotten broader, fuller, but you’re still the same you, the same Sarah Jane Stein I first knew. Do you remember?”
I answered, “I remember then, but I remember so much more now, everything that’s happened since. Every memory builds on the one before, making you richer. You can see more, hear more, learn more. There’s just more to you. And it never stops, does it?”
“Memories are all we are, then, is that what you mean?” Mike asked.
Jeanne and Bev munched on the cookies Leslie had brought in, staring out the bay window, when Mike pointed out, “I’ve got to get back sometime this evening, I think we ought to go back to your dorm?”
Walking back to Radcliffe, Mike picked up on memories again. “That all made me think…there is a split that happens, maybe at puberty, maybe a little before or after. Maybe our brain does change, physically, like Jeanne was saying. But you know better than any of us, babies have a real personality, and their mothers and others who they come into contact with them react to them, and babies react in term, building memories right from the start, about the world, and people, mostly all emotions, ‘cause they don’t have any words.”
I just nodded, didn’t want to stop wherever he was going. Times like this, when he was teasing through his thoughts, sifting, rejecting, accepting, trying to analyze, synthesize, were when I liked him best.
“I feel like I’m a different person since maybe eighth grade, thirteen. After that, I started living not just in the moment, not using my past only for casual entertainment. When somebody asked me, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I stopped saying something childish like ‘baseball player’ or ‘mountain climber’. I took the question seriously. How much of who I am now comes from the times I can’t remember?”
He wasn’t asking rhetorically, so I offered, “The thing I see between those babies and their mothers is love. Moms, most of them anyway, love their kids without any thought or hesitation. It’s the first thing most of us experience. And babies eat it up. We all want to be loved, it’s like we’re born that way. Everything flows from that.” I thought of the unlucky ones who came through the study room, age ten or twelve and already at war with the world. “If you don’t get it the right way, or enough of it, you can get stunted, shunted down a path it’s hard to find your way back from. Then there’s all the kids you play with, you learn how to be with people, but in the end, you find your way back, to love, spiraling up from your mother, to friends, to just one person, and then renew the cycle with your own kids.”
Mike stopped, took his hands out of his pockets, and spread them apart, first close together, then gradually wider and wider, fisherman telling about the big one that got away. “My memories, the older I get, the less time any one moment represents in my whole life. When I’m fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, with so very few of them, they all seem outsized, laden in importance. Now, I’m doubled in age since then, compared to turning thirteen, so each thing that happens, each memory in the past and each one I create today, becomes, little by little, less and less meaningful, in the overall scheme of things.”
I added, “And the earliest ones, the ones we’ve had the longest, those are the easiest to remember, to come back to, and the last to leave us, I’ve heard. I can recite the words to so many songs I heard in the car when I was fourteen riding with my sister, singing along.” Mike nodded vigorously, smiling in agreement. “I bet when I’m senile, in an old folks’ home, I’ll still be able to sing ‘It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to’…”
Mike chimed in, “…you would cry too if it happened to you.” We both laughed, acknowledging that silly as the song was, it apparently made a big impact on both of us.
“Our memories are who we are,” Mike pronounced.
“Memories are who we are,” I murmured in assent.
Back in my room, I picked up a book, hoping to get a little studying in before dinner. Mike lay back on the bed, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. His eyes fluttered as he breathed softly, evenly. Then, his leg kicked suddenly, and he asked, “Ever wonder where we go when we sleep?”
Sighing, I pointed at my book, then acquiesced with, “What’s that Hamlet said, ‘To sleep, perchance to dream’? I don’t think we go anywhere, we just stop making memories. Suspended animation, maybe a few random thoughts and emotions that just confuse us when we wake up.”
“But if memories are who we are, then don’t we cease to exist when we’re asleep? And when you’re dead, are your memories gone, too?”
“Maybe not, as long as the last person who knew you is still alive, making memories about you.” As I said this, I came over to the bed, pushing him towards the wall, trying to stop this endless sophomoric philosophizing. It didn’t work. For the next fifteen or twenty minutes, we made a few more memories together. What stuck with me was the electric quivering inside my legs, flowing up through my curling fingers, into my skull, a small explosion moving from the back of my neck, then shooting forward and out my temples. I lay back, satisfied, ignoring his intensity.
“Why’d you stop,” he moaned.
All I could do was breathe deeply and smile. When I’d calmed down, I pulled him back towards me. Once again, his words had captured me, torn away my sense of self. I wanted to envelop him, pull everything I could out of him. He obliged.
After we’d dressed, he gathered his books, ready to leave. “What was that all about?” I asked, shaking my head with a small rattle of a laugh.
“I think,” he said, “that was a double dip ice cream cone we just shared.” I cocked my head quizzically. In response, he went on, “You got your flavor, I got mine, but we each got to taste them both.”
I wondered what it would be like if we had some extended time together. If Mike weren’t always coming and going, spending just a night or a weekend with me, then going away for a week, or a month, writing instead of talking. I save up my feelings all that time, they take over when he comes back. I don’t think we’re growing together, as if we’re singing the same song over and over, not writing any new ones. He’d always talked about dreams, the future, building a life together. But we aren’t together, not this way, not in two college towns a two hour drive apart. And he wouldn’t try and build that life with me, wouldn’t make the effort to spend the summer here, with me.
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