The dining room table was laid with a red and blue checkered tablecloth. It wasn’t so much a dining room as a pass through between the kitchen and the living room. When my father reached across the table to strike my mother with an aluminum pie pan, I remember how we three children cried, but what I remember most is the tablecloth, the red, yellow and blue checkered pattern, how within the checks themselves were more criss-cross patterns of thin white lines, how the tablecloth and the dining room curtains matched, and how they bunched up along the curtain rod when they were cinched to the side to let the sunlight in.
In the kitchen proper and near the front door and far above my head was the empty hamster cage. It was mostly empty because the hamster we had didn’t live long, on account of my having played too rough with it. Our pet bunny met a similar fate. Apparently I had poked it with a stick too hard or too many times. I don’t recall either of these events.
When someone blocks out a memory of harm, it’s called dissociative amnesia. It doesn’t matter if you inflicted the hurt or received it. Your mind blocks out information that it deems too painful to acknowledge, too distressing to believe, too threatening to accept.
The most mysterious objects in the apartment were the stereo speakers in the living room, two dark brown wooden boxes almost as tall as me that flanked the couch. I sat in front and pressed my face up against the thinly hewn wooden lattice, straining to see through the thin black nylon veil just behind, trying to glimpse the magic back there that caused all that music to come out. If I cupped my hands around my eyes to block out the peripheral light, I could just make out the circular edges of the diaphragm, though the fabric was mostly opaque. When I poked a finger between the slats it was soft and supple like my mother’s nylon hose and it flexed just as easily. I remember how ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ came on through the speaker, how my father sang along, how clear his enunciation of the girl with kaleidoscope eyes.
It was a kind of peace. I touched my finger to the veil, felt the fabric buzz, and stared into the darkness.
