Zoe’s childhood, which she thinks of as a fairly standard American middle-class one, took place in Clovis, New Mexico. In fact most of her life to date took place there, excepting a few vacations, until she came to college here. To people here, in Michigan, New Mexico is exotic, but this is beyond ridiculous. She spent no time at all roaming the mountains, learning Native American wisdom. We’re talking small-town Americana, people. A town with strip malls and housing developments, sitting in matter-of-fact exposure on the flat-ass plains. There’s nothing exotic about a pickup truck.
Zoe exists in a condition of irritable sorrow. Her grief is a secret to the people around her. Her irritability is not. At least she thinks her grief is a secret. Some of the adults—that film studies professor—treat her with a compassion that suggests they can spot it. Her peers mostly leave her alone, and thus she lies on her bed in her dorm room on a Friday night, while the rest of the world makes merry. She would not like anyone to know it, but she has cried about this. And yet the people who try to reach her—she pulls back from them with all but an animal snarl.
She was not always like this. Once she had many friends, she had an openness to joy. What her father taught her in childhood was how to welcome the world, to seek out delight. Her mother, her wary, closed-off mother—but she will not think about her mother now. Her father once showed her a video of her mother dancing. Zoe was little, five or six. Her father whispered, “Don’t tell her I showed you this,” even though her mother wasn’t there to hear. It was hard for Zoe to understand that the dancer on the stage was her mother, even though of course she looked like her. But she was so abandoned. At that age Zoe wouldn’t have used that word. But she recognized what she wasn’t yet able to describe: her mother not just abandoned to beauty, but making the world more beautiful, all by herself. Her mother summoning joy. Zoe’s eyes filled with tears, watching.
“Oh, look at you,” her father said, pulling her onto his lap, wiping her eyes with his fingers. “Look at you, sweet pea. Are you happy or sad?”
“Why?”
“Why what, sweet pea?”
“Why can’t I tell her?”
Her father watched the video. She could see he was thinking about what to say. “Sometimes we don’t like to remember when we were happy.”
“Why?”
“Because remembering makes us miss it, and then we feel sad.” He kissed her head. “But I wanted you to see how your mother could dance.”
“Could I dance like that?”
“You’re her little girl,” he said. “I bet you can.”
Zoe closes one eye and then the other, watching how her roommate’s poster shifts from side to side. It’s a Doctor Who poster—her roommate is a major fangirl. Zoe, never having heard of the show, did ask some polite questions in the beginning, but she found her roommate’s eager complicated explanations hard to follow, and then when the other girl offered to show her some episodes Zoe said no. Now her roommate has found a crowd of like-minded people, and they wear catchphrase T-shirts they find on the Internet and buy advance tickets to midnight openings of fantasy movies. Zoe probably could have belonged to this group—maybe quite happily, as she has no objection to nerds or their enthusiasms—if she’d just that one time said yes. She could be with them right now, doing whatever they’re doing—her roommate doesn’t bother to tell her anymore. Sure, let’s watch one. Would that have been so hard?
Yes, that’s the trouble. Yes, it would’ve been.
So that’s one memory. Is that really a top five though? What criteria is she applying? Does top mean favorite, or just unshakable? She remembers sitting on the stairs until her leg fell asleep, and how scary and weird that was, because it had never happened to her before, and it hurt but it didn’t, and she couldn’t walk on it, numb and then prickly prickly prickly, and she cried. Who came running when she cried, that time? She doesn’t remember. Maybe no one. Does that count as a top-five memory? Does she have to be crying in all of them?
And so we move through childhood into junior high and high school, and there are birthdays, and tutus. She insisted on taking dance classes, though her mother was reluctant at first. She took them all through elementary school. Then, after the end-of-year recital in seventh grade, her mother was in tears, and Zoe stormed away, certain they were tears of disappointment, and her mother caught up to her and squeezed both of her arms and said, “For God’s sake, Zoe, I’m crying because you were wonderful!” The next year, when her mother said, “So I’m signing you up again, right?” Zoe said, “No, I don’t want to do it anymore.” Her mother opened her mouth to argue. But then she just closed it and walked away.
That was her mother. They never talked about it again.