|
Lies of Omission
Bethesda Literary Festival 2006, 1st Prize
As my husband and I pedal along the Capital Crescent trail, I keep a watch out for turtles, yelling out the number I glimpse sunbathing on logs or somersaulting into the canal, hoping that one of us will remember so that I can tell my grandma how many we saw. When I see her, which isn't as often as I'd like, or when I talk to her, which isn't as often as I should, I tell her about our bike rides. I talk about the leaves that catch on the breeze, pirouetting through sun and shadow before landing on the trail. I tell her about the kids pumping their legs so hard that the training wheels on their bikes lift off from the ground and they glide unknowingly on only two wheels. We laugh together about the freshman kayakers who can't get their boats to go in a straight line, and she asks whether the little girls who were once selling sugary lemonade and gooey brownies were on the trail that day.
When there's not a bike story to tell, I'll recount my trips to the Bethesda Farmer's Market, and together we'll fawn over the earthy smell of ripe tomatoes and the way that smell always takes me back home to Kentucky summers and BLT sandwiches on the back porch. Sometimes I'll mention the deer I spy out the window when I'm cleaning dinner dishes at twilight or tell her about the black squirrels so common here.
I keep track of details and file away images so that I always have a story to share with her. But there are so many details I leave out. I don't tell her about sitting on the floor of Barnes & Noble, a teetering stack of books beside me, as I searched for the perfect guide to bike trails in the area. And I never make her laugh at stories about my attempts to conquer chopsticks during sushi dinners at Matuba. Art gallery hops and Barking Dog Friday night specials find no place in my stories.
It's not that she wouldn't be interested in those details, but that those details would complicate her world in a way that I wouldn't know how to fix. She is at that age now where she spends most of her time looking backwards rather than forwards. She lives in memories--with brown hair, smooth skin, regal posture. She does not recognize the mirror's reality--the grey hair, the lined face, the body being pulled towards the earth.
And so as not to shatter her fragile cobweb of memories, I don't tell her that the town she remembers as Bethesda--a town of farmhouses and cornfields where my uncle lived when he once called Maryland home--is not, and was not, Bethesda. Instead, I filter my reality to fit her memory, pulling out the idyllic and removing the urban. Through lies of omission, I make my Bethesda hers.
|
