Elly was surprised by the cooler than normal temperatures for an early May morning in the south and she rubbed her bare arms as she made her way down the driveway and to the street. She thought that living in New York City for four years would have helped her to acclimate to cold temperatures, but she realized when she returned, that cold in the south is just different than cold in the north.
When she returned home to Charleston, she was relieved to leave behind the snow and the freezing days and nights. She was happy to trade in months of what she considered to be debilitating cold, for months of the hot and thick, humid days that were soon to come later into the spring and through the summer and the early fall.
When Elly stepped onto the asphalt of the neighborhood road, she immediately bent over to stretch. When she did, she became very aware of her hair – again. She stood up slowly and then she reached back and grabbed a handful of her short, choppy blonde hair, which just three days ago had been long and flowing down her back. She still felt surprised by the loss of her long pony tail that used to tickle her back during a run.
She no longer had a need to pull her hair into a ponytail for a run, which she had been doing for the last ten years up until that week. The day after she got it cut, she had been heading out for a run and become agitated by her lack of preparation for the situation. She had no need for barrettes or headbands to push her hair away from her face and during her recent move to her current home, she had thrown out most of her bathroom, including every hair accessory that she had not needed or used in years.
She had managed to locate a small package of bobby pins that she had held onto and she had worked four of them into her hair and then pushed the rest behind her ears. She had hoped that she wouldn’t become annoyed by it during her run but she did. After her run she had driven immediately to Walgreens and purchased a ridiculous amount of barrettes and head bands, determined to never again be annoyed by circumstances during her run.
Elly ran her hands over her bare arms once more to rub away the chill, and then she started her run with a slow jog. She took a quick look at her watch and then she increased her pace until she was running fast enough to feel a slight strain on her muscles, to be aware of her working heart rate, and to cause her to focus on breathing evenly.
After a short time, Elly was only scarcely aware of her muscles, her heart rate, and her breathing, and her surroundings became more noticeable as she made her way along the neighborhood streets. The first thing she did when she moved there was map out various running routes around hers and the adjoining neighborhoods and even though she had only been there for a couple of months, she was already familiar with the day to day goings on of the neighborhood communities.
Elly knew which of her neighbors walked, jogged, rode bikes, had kids, gardened – were single parent families, grandparents, newlyweds – drove minivans, SUVs, sports cars, old cars, pick-up trucks, had boats and RVs. Elly knew who got the most fed-ex packages, who got the daily newspaper delivered, and who let their newspapers pile up in the driveway – who recycled, who needed multiple garbage cans, and who regularly hauled brush to the street for pick up. She knew which kids went to high school, middle school, and elementary school. Elly knew the ins and outs of her neighborhood, but had not formally or casually met even one of her neighbors.
When she returned to Charleston months earlier, she wanted to live closer to the beach than she had growing up. She lived briefly with her mother and father and begged them to help her with the down payment on a house, vowing to pay them back within a year. Her parents lived in a large house on the river that they had been in since Elly was five. Elly could have easily lived there, again, without being a nuisance to her parents – and taken advantage of the amenities she had access to – the pool, the river, the boat. But Elly wanted to be on her own without the scrutiny of her family and without feeling as though she was going to have to be at their beckon call in one way or another.
She ended up choosing a small house in a well-established neighborhood that was only minutes from the Isle of Palms, and nearly a half of an hour from where she grew up, and with the help of her parents she purchased the small house and closed within only weeks of moving home. She had gone out to the beach several times already, just to take a walk or to sit and enjoy the sounds of the ocean. It was still too early in the season to enjoy anything more.
The things that Elly enjoyed most about her neighborhood were the vast amount of palmetto trees that lined the streets and decorated lawns, and the scent of the ocean that managed to make its way across the four miles of land to saturate the nearby communities. To Elly, there was nothing that said island life more than palmetto trees and ocean breezes and despite being landlocked she very much wanted to feel like she was living the island life after three years of living the city life – on an island.
She enjoyed the peace and quiet of the early Saturday morning in suburbia. Children were not yet flooding their yards and the streets, and the only sounds were from an occasional passing car or the noise from lawn equipment being run by the eager. She tried not to disturb her surroundings too much, remaining as light as possible on her feet as she continued down the road full of tightly packed houses which were perched in the middle of insignificant lawns, some heavily landscaped, and others plain yet well maintained.
Elly sometimes ran in the early mornings, before work and sometimes she ran after work. When she headed out after work, in the late afternoon or early evening she observed her neighbors who were usually out in their yards – most of whom were older, but there were some younger couples with small children as well. She envied the young couples that sat outside to watch their small children play with balls in the yard, or ride tricycles in the driveway. She wanted that life one day. She planned to have it one day.
She crossed the road and made her way down the main road that led away from her neighborhood. As her breathing became more and more even, she took in the scent of honeysuckle, which as usual reminded her of something from her childhood, though she could never place exactly what that was.
It was the same memory that, over the past few months, had trickled into her mind as she ran through the part of her neighborhood that was encased by forest and brush. It was a memory that inundated her and caused her to ignore the energy that she was asking of her muscles, her heart, and her lungs.
Almost immediately, when the scent overtook her, her mind brought to focus a memory of being young – a child – and picking a honey suckle flower, then carefully removing its pistil and letting the nectar drip onto her tongue. She didn’t recall the place or her age. It was more like a picture of her standing on a sidewalk in front of a large row bushes that were dripping with yellow and white honeysuckle blooms, during the late afternoon or early evening, shaded by surrounding trees. Every time she thought of it, she had a very strong feeling that the child in the picture was delighted by the honeysuckle blooms.
Memories of childhood were not luxuries that Elly mingled with often. She could recall brief moments in school, occasions of playing in the woods, or riding her bike, all moments that seemed more like photographs than actual memories. For the most part, Elly had locked away her first eighteen years in a box, and she had hidden the key well enough that she couldn’t find it herself.
For years, therapists had urged her to find the key and unlock the box, and Elly would have tried to find it, if any one of those therapists could have guaranteed that doing so would have brought her peace of mind and some sort of satisfaction. But none were willing to make the guarantee, and so Elly was not willing to bother looking for the key.
Elly had spent years carefully placing her memories in a box, one by one, until they were mostly all locked away with little chance of being recovered. She didn’t try to replace them with false memories. Instead she became satisfied with simply not remembering. She was sometimes asked about her high school friends or teachers by people who she worked with, but her typical response was, “I don’t remember.” Usually people laughed about her lack of recollection, but it was easily moved past.
Elly thought it was somewhat funny every time she tried to create online accounts that forced her to choose security questions from a list that needed for her to recall the name of a grade school teacher, her favorite children’s book, or her first car. She had to make up the answers, but she feared not being able to recall her made up answers, so she kept a list of her invented childhood – one that she only used for the purpose of online accounts.
It had been several years since Elly had stopped going to therapy, deeming it a complete waste of money. She wasn’t sure what she was trying to accomplish by revealing bad memories in hopes to recall the details of good memories that she had placed in a locked box. She had worked and put herself through college. She had a very satisfying teaching career and she lived a somewhat normal and happy life, despite being recently divorced and alone again.
But overall, she was a happy functioning person and she didn’t let her past cause her to live otherwise. In fact, she made it a point to live by the rule that the past was in the past and it was where it was going to stay. She was determined that it would never impact her present or her future and as far as she was concerned, it had not.
A therapist might have told Elly that her failed three year marriage was somehow related to her inability to connect herself to her past. But Elly ignored that notion completely. Her marriage was a mistake, and she knew it the day she stood in the small church and said, “I do.” After spending three years trying to convince herself otherwise, she had to acknowledge her fault and move on.
Jeffrey was a nice man, and at twelve years her senior, he was already established in his life and his career. He had two teenaged kids who lived with their mother in Arizona and who he saw once a year during the summer and every other Christmas. Elly never felt comfortable around them and it was obvious that they didn’t have any desire to make her feel comfortable. It didn’t bother her much though, since their presence was scarcely felt.
Elly didn’t intend to hurt Jeffrey. In fact, she very much wanted to be able to mold herself into his life, and be the wife of a lawyer, living in an upscale apartment in New York City. But she never quite felt at ease or at home, despite the luxuries that he showered her with in an effort to make her forget about the need to feel at home.
But Jeffrey didn’t notice her inability to conform until there was a complete lack of intimacy in the bedroom. After the first year, Elly could no longer bring herself to fake that kind of relationship with him – the kind that a newly married couple should share. He claimed that she manipulated him because she was very “giving” during their courtship, and then she “took it from him,” expecting him to go entirely without.
Elly didn’t expect him to go without. She wanted him to have that kind of husband and wife relationship. She thought he deserved it – with someone else. Finally, after a full year of turmoil and his professed dissatisfaction over the matter, Elly asked for a divorce. He wanted to work through it, but Elly knew there was nothing to be worked through. There never was.
Elly had apologized for wasting his time and then she immediately moved out, leaving behind everything he had ever given her, including the rings, the car, and the fur coats. She only left with the clothes that she deemed suitable for living in the south and she made no efforts to ask for anything from him. Then three short months later, it was as if it never happened. It had been three days since she signed the divorce papers and mailed them back and then completed the legal process of taking back her maiden name – three days since she cut her long hair, short.
It was a small bump in the road in her otherwise very happy adult life. Her need to cling to someone else’s life and try to make it her own might have caused her to turn back to therapy. But she had already wasted too much time in therapy, from the time she was eighteen until the time she was twenty three, trying to link something from her past to something in her present. And she was tired and annoyed with the lack of success.
Her therapists – the six that she went through – all said that Elly was suppressing memories. And maybe in some obscure way, she was. But Elly couldn’t bring herself to see it that way. She hadn’t forgotten at all, the bad memories – the ones that should have been suppressed – that caused her to feel the need to be in therapy for so many years to begin with. If she chose to she could recall them all very vividly – every detail of every moment of every bad memory. But it was the normal, and the good and happy memories, that Elly had put away, and forgotten. She didn’t know why she had chosen to do it that way and no amount of money she had spent in therapy had helped her to figure it out.
She never had any problem recalling the memories of the summers she spent as a child at her grandparents’ farm house. She had impassively revealed every detail to every therapist she ever met with of the times that her grandfather had slipped into her room in the middle of the night, whispering to her that she was granddaddy’s little angel as he stroked her hair down her back and then slipped her panties down around her knees while he pressed a hand over her mouth to quiet her cries.
She was able to easily recall and tell all of them about the expected yet unsettling sound of her door slowly creaking open and then quietly being pushed closed. She had no trouble recalling the way he smelled like whiskey or how his stubbly chin on her cheek burned her skin. She had blankly and emotionlessly told them all how he trembled as though he couldn’t control himself, and how after only a few moments – that seemed more like hours to Elly – he would quickly escape to a dark corner in the room to finish into a towel that he had brought in preparation for the moment.
She could easily hear his voice in her mind as he whispered into the darkness, “Granddaddy loves you,” and then blew her a kiss on his way out. She never witnessed the kiss being blown to her, but she strongly recalled the sound of the rush of air leaving his lips and dissolving into the room, just before she heard her door open and then close again.
She had no problem recalling the blank look on her mother’s face when she finally told her, at twelve years old, after it had been going on for five years. She distinctly recalled the words that her mother spoke to her in response in a very hushed tone even though no one else was around. “I’ll take care of it,” she whispered as she rubbed a hand over Elly’s long hair. “Just don’t say anything to anyone else, dear.” She never did make Elly go back to the farmhouse over the summers and it never was brought up again, by anyone. It seemed to take care of it.
But fifteen years later, if asked the name of her best friend in fourth grade, she couldn’t honestly answer. She couldn’t recall the name of any child with whom she went to grade school, or her teachers, or her favorite Christmas gift, or the name of the boy she first had a crush on. She couldn’t recall books that she read as a child, who taught her how to ride a bike, birthday parties, beach trips, sleepovers, or vacations. She knew that she had done all of those things as a child. There were pictures that proved it. But Elly could not recall a single detail of any of those moments. Sometimes she wondered if she had really done some of those things or if she had invented them and placed them on a list for online accounting.
Elly’s mind floated back to reality as the scent of honeysuckle slowly diminished and the sounds of lawn equipment grew louder around her. She picked up her pace again as she ran down the street, surrounded by rows of houses and manicured lawns, waving and smiling at people riding lawn mowers, or an occasional passing car, or another jogger or walker out enjoying the spring air, as she became aware again of her muscles, her heart rate, and her breathing.
