CHRISTMAS EVE, ONE ALWAYS CRASHING IN THE SAME CAR

　Saturday, December 24, 1988 (Henry is 40, Clare is 17)

 

HENRY: It’s a dark winter afternoon. I’m in the basement in Meadowlark House in the Reading Room. Clare has left me some food: roast beef and cheese on whole wheat with mustard, an apple, a quart of milk, and an entire plastic tub of Christmas cookies, snowballs, cinnamon-nut diamonds, and peanut cookies with Hershey’s Kisses stuck into them. I am wearing my favorite jeans and a Sex Pistols T-shirt. I ought to be a happy camper, but I’m not: Clare has also left me today’s South Haven Daily; it’s dated December 24, 1988. Christmas Eve. This evening, in the Get Me High Lounge, in Chicago, my twenty-five-year-old self will drink until I quietly slide off the bar stool and onto the floor and end up having my stomach pumped at Mercy Hospital. It’s the nineteenth anniversary of my mother’s death.

　I sit quietly and think about my mom. It’s funny how memory erodes. If all I had to work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with a few sharp moments standing out. When I was five I heard her sing Lulu at the Lyric Opera. I remember Dad, sitting next to me, smiling up at Mom at the end of the first act with utter exhilaration. I remember sitting with Mom at Orchestra Hall, watching Dad play Beethoven under Boulez. I remember being allowed to come into the living room during a party my parents were giving and reciting Blake’s Tyger, Tyger burning bright to the guests, complete with growling noises; I was four, and when I was done my mother swept me up and kissed me and everyone applauded.