What Happened

It isn’t so much a question of truth as it is of misremembering. For instance, my great-grandmother did not work in a cigar factory as a teenager as I once thought, as I’m sure I told you. Nor did she use Ivory soap when she washed her hair in the kitchen sink at night after her husband took out his glass eye. It was a cigarette factory, which is only a slight difference, I realize, but worth noting all the same. I’m not sure about the soap. It may have been Palmolive or another kind altogether. My mother couldn’t remember; only said it wasn’t Ivory, and I guess she should know, since she was the one who actually got to watch my great-grandfather remove his glass eye. Other things I’ve misremembered over the years: how my mother and father met (it wasn’t at a country club dance, as I thought, but at a Bridge party his mother threw and her mother attended (my mother stopped by to pick up the house keys and my father answered the door)); the distance between the first house my mother and I lived in on Bailey Drive and my grandmother’s house in Loudonville (I made this drive recently when I went home for my uncle’s funeral. I was in need of a smoke. It only took me fifteen minutes. I could have sworn it was an hour.); the number of months between my abortion and my daughter’s birth (I’d thought there were something like twenty-four but in actuality there were only seventeen. I gave birth in May of 1996 and the abortion was in January of ‘95. My father died in the interim, which made all the difference, between the unborn child and the born, I mean.); the first movie we saw together (It was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is what I remembered. I added this here at the end to give the piece weight and so you’d know that I think about you when I write too sometimes and not always him. The thing I remember most about that movie is how you held both my hands, or maybe it was I who held both of yours. I’ve noticed we don’t often hold hands in movies anymore and I wonder if this has to do with the duration of our relationship or what happened between me and him or what happened between you and I after that. I wonder if things will change again now that he is no longer in the picture, now that he is a source of regret and anguish only and no longer a person I think about in the way that I think about you.). I hope you remember that nothing actually happened between he and I. Sometimes I think you forget.

Elizabeth Ellen is the author of Before You She Was a Pit Bull (Future Tense) and Sixteen Miles Outside of Phoenix (Rose Metal Press). She is deputy editor of Hobart and lives in Ann Arbor.