Grass-covered Chest

Abstract

Grass-covered Chest Fleda Brown (bio) All that we perceive at any instant is a slice of the whole. Our sense of time: an illusion. Nothing passes; nothing changes. -Hermann Minkowski, Einstein's teacher The small chest used to be covered with a woven grass fabric, but by the time we got it, the cover was tattered beyond repair. We tore it off and even after the sanding, the grassy marks are still there, making a subtle design, a stubble design. There are small, squat legs and a hinge. Inside is where we keep some of the puzzles. The chest was Grandmother Brown's. I can almost see it in the old days, but I'm not sure where to place it in her house. I know where the piano was, in the dining room with the glittering beveled glass windows. I think the chest was beside that, but it's too small for what I have in mind, the piece of furniture with my brother's record player on it. He loved that record player. He would lean over it, drooling, and try to sing along. He had some words by then. I remember my mother carrying him as an infant up the stairs and in the door of our house on Garth Avenue. Oh, I don't remember [End Page 175] this. I have to have some place to start, in my head: the little chest that morphs into what must have been a larger one, and then before that, in some sort of sequence, a baby. Virginia Woolf called memory a seamstress, "and a capricious one at that." ("Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after.") I remember a small being, in blankets. Maybe Mark, maybe earlier, maybe my sister. Memory often doesn't know what to do with its own images. This was before any sense of trouble. I remember hearing "diarrhea," and what Dr. Dexheimer, the family physician, was doing, unsuccessfully, to stop it. I remember chatter and tension the way a child does, not comprehending much, but feeling. I was seven. Then the hush, the dissatisfaction with the doctor, the talk of what to do, or was that later? Of Mark's odd, convulsive movements. Or was that later? I remember staying with my other grandparents, Mother's parents, who lived next door, while Mother took him to St. Louis to the children's hospital. My father heading out on his brother's motor scooter for St. Louis, 125 miles on that tiny thing. My grandparents' controlled anger, their urging him to drive, to take their car, use their gas. This is how he was. Terrified of spending. I remember these things as large, upper forces, moving a bit like seagrass, pulling me this way and that. Memory is not a thing, of course. It's more like a superpower. It's Mnemosyne, the ancient Greek Titan, goddess of memory and remembrance and the inventor of language and words. How desperately she was needed before there was writing! How deftly the writing pulls at the threads, the weblike pattern of cells scattered throughout the brain that combine and reassemble impressions. The convergence of sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing, and thinking create what seemed to be real, what seems to be real. I think of "convergence," and just now Thomas Hardy's poem "The Convergence of the Twain" comes to me, about the sinking of the Titanic when it hit an iceberg: [End Page 176] … the Spinner of the Years Said, "Now!" And each one hears,And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres. My brain catches the word "convergence" and sees all that: Hardy's poem on the page, each stanza shaped like a small ocean liner, the conjured image from long ago when I first read it, combined with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet standing at the prow, falling in love, you know they are, you know that. Like the ship, this image is the "sign that they were bent / By paths coincident / On being anon twin halves of one august event." You know the poem. I know the...