Brittney Inman

Memory Scape:

A Memoir of Texas

I step into the darkened landscape of my memory, my bare feet vulnerable to the prick of coarse grass, cut close to the ground. A glowing ribbon of white appears across the yard, the ghost of a sidewalk that leads from my feet to a familiar colonial house. The stillness here consumes the air; every little movement and sound—scratching, swallowing, breathing—seems to disappear, sinking into the mighty hush of this midnight lawn with the quickness and finality of a stone thrown into deep water.

I strain to see the entire landscape, trying to throw back the black sheet of darkness to reveal the colors and shapes beneath, the contents of my childhood. Looking down at my feet, I notice they are now a child’s feet, all pudgy and pink, and the ground brightens beneath them as daylight begins to bleed across the black space. I recognize the geography of grass, the patches of brown, green, and yellow, which altogether look like a map of the earth—brown continents floating in a sea of green with hints of yellow to mark the shallows. The unforgiving summer heat is responsible for coloring the lawn in this way, and as soon as I remember that heat, I feel it intensifying on my skin and see the Texas sun, big and brilliant in the sky, turning the blue into a blinding white that makes everything glitter and burn.

I remember how I used to run to the shade of the magnolia trees and climb for hours in their crooked branches. Sweat drips down my face and floods my eyes, as I sprint toward the magnolias. They grow side by side like husband and wife, waiting with outstretched limbs to welcome me back. I climb into my old nooks, where I’m surrounded by hundreds of big fuzzy-bellied leaves and white blossoms that smell sweet and clean like freshly washed linen. As I climb higher, I’m reminded of the afternoon when I fell from the top branches and crashed down onto the gnarled roots below. I’d landed on my stomach and wanted to scream for help but my lungs were empty. I thought I was dying because I’d never felt that way before—utterly breathless and unable to move. The gardener Pete found me and picked me up. He cradled me in his brown, chapped arms and carried me inside, singing soothing Spanish songs.

[I was seven when I came home from school one day and found my magnolias gone. My mother told me that they had been sick. I stared at the gaping twin holes, which looked like blown-out sockets, the wiry roots detached and grasping. There was a crushing in my chest, and it felt like betrayal and it felt like heartbreak.]

I notice a wave of gold in my periphery and turn to see my mother’s sunflowers swaying in the distance. As I walk toward them, the whole brimming garden comes into view. There are geraniums, pansies, and impatiens, and there are tomatoes, cucumbers, and strawberries, and there are bushes of rosemary, mint, and basil. Dozens of sunflowers look down at me—they seem to fill the entire sky with their watchful round faces. The soil is soft and moist between my toes. The air smells like water from the hose.

A squirrel hesitates ahead of me, straightens up, and looks in my direction as if about to make my acquaintance. As soon as I take a step toward him though, he scrambles away, running up the trunk of a pecan tree as easily as if the world had turned upside down so that gravity pulled creatures toward sky rather than earth.

I dip my foot into the warm water of the backyard pool and scoop up a wet brown leaf with my toes. The smell of chlorine reminds me of the many summer days, when I practiced diving, trying to perfect my form.

[I was once practicing my dive, when I looked down from the diving board and saw my baby sister floating on her stomach in the deep end. I called to my mother, who was pulling weeds in the garden. She jumped in the pool and grabbed my sister’s blue body. She wasn’t breathing. My mother blew into her mouth and pushed her chest until she ejected a flood of water and leaves from her mouth and screamed back into life.]

Suddenly, I hear my mother and father, shouting back and forth. The familiar rising and falling of their angry voices pours into my thoughts, filling me with a perverse nostalgia. I see my mother’s lingerie floating through the air like an explosion of confetti. The colorful pieces of lace and silk flutter and fall gently to the ground. I run to gather up these beautiful things before dirt clings to them.

The landscape becomes dark again. I step away from the past, the colors and voices fading, but I feel something caught in my lungs, something as large as Texas, and I remember calf-rope. My father introduced this phrase to my brother, sister, and me as part of our wrestling lingo. Whenever he pinned our small bodies into inescapable positions, we would shriek and laugh and cry calf-rope! For many years, I’d thought that my father had invented this phrase, but it’s an old Texan expression meaning to give up, or to surrender.

[Calf-rope]

Brittney Inman recently graduated from The New School's MFA program, through which she met Joyce Johnson, an award-winning author and one of Jack Kerouac's former girlfriends. After developing a close relationship with Joyce, who became her thesis advisor, Brittney has had the privilege and misfortune of having to take in Joyce's cat, Daphne. It's a hardship to have a litter box in a studio apartment, but the fact that one could say Kerouac's ex-girlfriend's cat lives with Brittney makes the stench somewhat tolerable for her.

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