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Bottle Rocket| | A sample of memoir writing,. I wrote this on a dare, a bet, made over Thai food.
I won. $50 bucks and fifteen solid pages of a memoir.
Someday I'll finish it.
I'd like to do that, for Amber. She deserves to have her good name cleared.
BOTTLE ROCKET: A Memoir
"I hate my sister, she's such a bitch.
She acts as if she doesn't even know that I exist." My Sister, Juliana Hatfield
This is how it happened, because this is how I remember it.
It was dark; the shadows of the live oaks had spread out across the edges of the field. The grown-ups I only remember as disembodied legs, dusty in blue jeans and boots, or naked to the thigh and gold like a tannin-stained river. I don’t remember which grown-ups were there, except that when I woke up in the hospital Mama was with me.
It was loud; the adults were all talking across the field to one another, shouting over the bluegrass music and the yelling of the children. There was a dog, a terrier I think, and it yapped and barked and darted between feet. There was a bonfire, and someone had thrown a bicycle into the fire.
There was no bonfire, my sister shakes her head, no bonfire, no bicycle.
But there must have been a bonfire, because I remember the burn of it on my cheeks, and there must have been a bicycle, because I remember the spokes burning white and golden in the fire, then fading to a tarnished black.
The boys, who had dirty faces and hair like patches of scrub brush, had stolen fireworks from inside the house. I don’t remember the house. They clutched their stolen rockets in their fists and ran to the hill. We didn’t know the boys, we didn’t know anyone there, but they were close to your age, and it was a party and so we followed them.
The hill was really a mound of dirt, with no grass and no tree roots holding the hill together. The boys put their hands into the dirt as they climbed, and they easily scaled the hill. They had a Coca Cola bottle, a glass one, with them. I remember they danced at the top of the hill, holding up the pink stalks of the bottle rockets, ready to hurl them like Zeus hurled lightning bolts, ready to play with fire.
No one knew how they got the bottle rockets, my sister adds. This should be our mother’s line, and because our mother isn’t here Amber speaks as only first children can, as a defensive advocate of her parent.
We tried to climb the hill, but the dirt kept slipping into my shoes. My shoes were patent leather and they were very sore on my little feet. You climbed much faster than I, because you were seven and I was only four. You made it to the top of the hill, but I couldn’t. I shouted for you to wait.
No, she tries to stop me.
I shouted and looked up, and you were up there with the boys, and they had put a rocket into the cola bottle, it was pink as a stalk of rhubarb, and I was crying and asking for you to wait for me, but you were already up there, with the boys, and then one of them knelt down and lit the rocket.
That’s not what happened, Amber says.
The charge of the gunpowder tipped the bottle, and the rocket shot down the hill. I was crawling, my fingers digging into the crumbling dirt that kept sliding me back down the hill. The rocket stopped in front of me.
Then, it was white and gold again, everything was white and gold, and hot, like the bicycle in the bonfire.
I never left you, she says, I was right beside you and I shouted for them to stop. I was right there when the rocket went off. I was there with you. Don’t you remember?
***
"My sister, I love my sister, she's the best.
She's cooler than any other girl that I have ever met." My Sister, Juliana Hatfield
The Chinese set off firecrackers at funeral ceremonies to ward off bad spirits. What kind of bad spirit could live inside a four-year old girl?
The bottle rocket damaged the retina of my left eye, but it didn’t blind me and it left no scarring or disfigurement. I’ve never seen a picture of what I looked like then, but my mother tells me it was puffy and red.
My older sister was there the night the bottle rocket exploded in my face. Amber– that’s her interjecting into my memory. She was supposed to be watching out for me, but my memories of that night have her on top of the hill, out of reach. I always felt like that’s where Amber was.
Amber was beautiful; I was funny looking, with Yoda ears and a persistent double-chin. Amber was graceful; she could dance and do cart-wheels and even twirl baton. I was smart, but Amber was popular.
Amber even got the better name. In the early 80s, Autumn was just uncommon enough to be warranted “weird”. Autumn Star was even weirder. Where all I wanted was to fit in, blend in, disappear, people were always stuck on my name.
“So unusual,” they said.
“Where’s Spring and Summer?” old men joked. (People still do this. As if they’d just thought of it, as if this joke had never been delivered before. And I never knew how to react. Even now, I honestly don’t know whether to laugh at their stupidity or cry in frustration.)
The worst though, was reserved for the school playground. “Autumn-Autumn-Big-Fat-Bottom!” Kids are cruel, and I was fragile. I believed them. I was Autumn-Autumn-Big-Fat-Bottom. I was a joke, a bad punch line. I was not only unusual, I was weird.
When kids weren’t calling me Autumn-Autumn-Big-Fat-Bottom, teachers were getting my name wrong altogether. “April, can you read Chapter 3 aloud?” Of course I could read aloud, but my name wasn’t April. I’ve been called, along with April, Aubrey, Donna, Summer and Eden. But, of course, there was one name above all others that I hated being called. The name that tops the list, that I still get called most often: Amber.
People who don’t even know I have a sister call me Amber.
It was bad enough growing up under her shadow. When people called me her name, it felt like an erasure. Like they were rubbing me out, laying her better image over the spot where I used to exist.
Growing up in not just the same town but the same house for our whole lives meant that Amber and I always had the same teachers. She was three years ahead of me, but that wasn’t enough time for her glimmer, or her glint, to fade. All through school teachers would see the name Kindelspire on the roll, and they’d look up to find me.
“You’re Amber’s sister?”
In grammar & middle school, I’d nod and slouch down a little further in my chair. I didn’t want people to get too good a first look at me, didn’t want them to see how different from her I was. In high school, that switched. I’d carved out a reputation as “the smart one” and I fiercely defended that role. Amber’s popularity hit its peak in high school, but she’d started drinking excessively and skipping school. She’d been arrested more than once and was in a Drop Out Prevention Program. At home, my father had broken up fights between her and my mother. She’d been thrown out once, and came back as defiant and headstrong as before.
In high school, when teachers peered down their glasses to find the face of the new Kindelspire, I couldn’t object quickly enough. “I’m nothing like her,” I said, and there was always a ripple of laughter from the class.
Did I feel guilty, throwing my sister under the bus? Labeling her the “bad seed” and never trying to understand her motivations? No. Not back then. She’d abandoned me long ago. As far as she was concerned, I was a pest who couldn’t keep up.
That’s not what happened.
We’d never discussed it, the bottle rocket incident. It was a story I’d told a thousand times to friends and strangers at parties. Mama and I had talked about it, about where she was when the explosion took place, why she wasn’t there. She’d left Amber and me in the care of her friend while she’d gone to get the car. She hadn’t liked the way the party was going, and she’d been ready to leave when she heard people screaming, and then saw her friend holding me in his arms, Amber racing behind him, crying.
I never left your side.
It wasn’t until many years later, when we were both adults, that Amber was finally able to refute my version of that night.
We sat in the lawn chairs on our parents’ pool deck. It was night, and the moon was elsewhere. We were smoking in the dark. I’d had a fight with Mama, about my divorce, about my behavior. Amber had defended me. She was married too, and though I didn’t know it then, she was equally unhappy and getting ready to leave her husband. When Mama left to cool off, Amber and I had gone outside to talk. The conversation started by poring over my husband’s faults, our mother’s reaction, the practical matters of divorce.
We’d laughed about past break-ups, which led to childhood stories, which led to my usual complaints. That night was different though. That night, Amber responded. Amber set the record straight.
Remember when you were ten, I said, in that Minnie Mouse leotard, twirling baton in a parade? The pom-pom puffs on your white socks never got dirty, even while you twirled and cart-wheeled down the street. That was the kind of perfection you had. Your socks never got dirty.
You were the one who always succeeded. You could read and write and draw before anyone else your age. You were always so smart.
But intelligence has no place in the competitive lives of children. How could my I-Can-Read books measure against a baton spiraling through the air, how could my stick figure horses stand against a cart-wheel?
You were everyone’s favorite. Amber, with the adorable freckle above her lip, like a beauty mark. Amber, with her green and golden eyes and her lips deep pink, like Mama’s azaleas. Everyone always adored you.
It was you we all loved. You had the blondest hair, it was almost white. And your cheeks were so fat you had dimples when you smiled. No one could resist you.
I always felt like I couldn’t possibly measure up to you, like no matter what I did, I wasn’t good enough to be your little sister. That you would move through life ahead of me, without me, and I would always be scrambling to catch up.
I always wondered why you hated me so much.
And then, we talked about the bottle rocket.
No, that’s not how it happened.
I was with you, on the hill.
I was right beside you.
Don’t you remember?
But I don’t remember it her way. I think it must have happened this way, the way that I remember it. There must have been the bonfire, the burning bicycle. She must have been on top of that hill, laughing at her little sister who couldn’t climb up because her shoes were full of dirt.
It had to have happened the way that I remembered it. Because I’ve based everything I know about Amber from that night. My whole life I’ve judged her from the day she wasn’t there to save me. But, what if she was there all along?
| | | Posted 12/22/2008 3:38 PM - 10 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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