Angela Townsend

NONFICTION

Forget Me Not

I do not remember elegantly.

When I remember Mari, I think of a sleepover game far more anxious than any Truth or Dare. The stakes were high. Staring at the ceiling under Jem and the Holograms sleeping bags, we determined nothing short of the ownership of America.

I can’t fathom how we invented this domestic version of Risk, but one wakeful slumber party after another, we took turns claiming states as our personal possessions. We were eight-year-old colonialists. We were Laura Ingalls Wilder with an acquisitive streak. We were stressed out about the whole thing, but we couldn’t stop.

Wisconsin was Mari’s because she had cousins there. I let it go easily; the state was a faceless cheese wheel. The peppery squiggle of New Jersey shimmied into my pile, land of my uncle and Bruce Springsteen. The mysterious Midwest was negotiable, an Iowa as good as an Ohio.

But armies massed on Idaho’s gooseneck. Why two second-graders in a New York suburb should breathe fire over the land of taters, I shall never know. But we were vexed to own Idaho, willing to trade away jaunty Maine or even coppery Arizona for the state that came with its own long handle.

When I remember Mari, I think of writing, the precocious passion that united and divided us. We would laugh until pretzel salt shot out our noses when coming up with stories. Before our age reached two digits, we had assembled a hundred imaginary companions, dwarves and centaurs and Finnish princesses (Finland was nearly as enchanted as Idaho). We called them the International House of Baked Beans, a congress of which we were proud and protective. We made up stories on the swing set, bonding and elbowing each other all at once. We made each other better writers and teacup-sized comedians, but that’s usually not what I remember.

I remember coming up with a song as my swing shot higher and higher. If my life depended on it, I could not tell you where this came from, but I swear on my last tater tot it was my invention:

Pies, pies, pies by the dozen
Pies, pies, pies in your hair
Pies, pies, pies, you can see them in your sleep
Pies, pies, pies are everywhere!

It had a Vaudeville patter and a finger-licking absurdity, and the entire fifth grade soon sang it across the playground. I remember feeling as proud as if I’d won a Pulitzer.

I remember the day Mari threw pie in my face.

Our paisley-scarved teacher regularly read excerpts of our assignments aloud, no doubt to encourage creativity and spur us on in courage and whimsy. She grinned like a grandmother the day she shared “a memorable gem from our own Mari. It’s a delight. This ditty will be in your heads all week!”

She proceeded to sing “Pies.”

I felt as though I was choking on every blueberry since Eden. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t forget.

Three years later, we wrote for Mr. Fulham, a white-capped tower of a man who compared me to Anaïs Nin before I knew what he meant. He was breathless over my eighth-grade prose, presenting me with Bird by Bird and The Elements of Style at Christmas. I remember my ego expanding at a greater rate than the universe itself. I remember my father’s concern about Mr. Fulham, which made it more intoxicating. The world could keep Idaho. I was going to be a writer.

The Everest of eighth-grade writing was the Budget Project, an exercise in financial prudence wrapped in storytelling. We were each randomly assigned a family structure and income, tasked with staying solvent and adding pizzazz. Spreadsheets and narratives were due just before the class trip to Washington, D.C., a place neither Mari nor I had ever been inclined to claim.

While the hooligan boys snickered over plans to ferry their families in rickshaws so they could afford Corvettes, I gave the Budget Project my breath and blood. My children, Caroline and Noah, would grow up with wonder that laughed at luxury. We would be poor and kind, library volunteers who put every meteor shower on our calendar. We would read the Beatitudes aloud. We would keep our Dodge Neon beyond its expiration date and pick up trash while singing original songs. We would commune with finches and fairies and nursing home residents.

Two days after I handed in my masterwork, Mr. Fulham took my arm in the hallway. “Angela. Today you’re in for a treat.”

I remember his eyes as blue as the planet. I remember expecting an ultimate affirmation. I remember his wonder that laughed at my ego.

“I’m going to read you all Mari’s assignment. It is some of the finest writing I have ever experienced.”

I remember thinking his red nose looked like an angry potato. I remember my eyes filling with tears. I remember inventing a hypoglycemic event so I could get out of class that day.

I can’t say that this was the turning point, but high school cranked distance between Mari and me. She dropped off her stories somewhere between Iowa and Ohio, closing her word processor without regret. Hers would be a world of bodies and pre-pre-law, as she bewitched boyfriends and ruled Mock Trial.

I wrote on, gangly and single and married to my PC. I helmed the school newspaper until the faculty advisor coaxed me to “dumb it down; this is the Weekly Bushman, not the Paris Review.” I quit with panache. I attempted to launch a district-wide literary journal. I forgot the butter of wonder and choked on my mashed ego.

We both made our way. Mari now prosecutes; I write PR for a cat sanctuary. She has New York. I have New Jersey. When Facebook suggests her as my friend, I violently shut my laptop.

I wish this was not what I remember about Mari. I wish time turned my pride as farcical as farfalle, a word that used to make two little girls giggle. I wish I weren’t sneaking home snacks for my ego even now, parting your lips for pistachios like the Paris Review comment. I wish I could be as free as the Finnish trolls and potato pixies in the International House of Baked Beans.

I wish my story told a great story, the only story worth reading aloud.

I have heard it sung on the swing sets, but seldom in my own voice. It is the memory that chases children all the way back to dawn, even when it is buried under burlap or bravado. It would remember Mari Kramer as God’s little girl, zealous to catch the drips of improbable days. It would see her cloud of tangerine hair and be mindful of her angels, whispering promises and poetry even when her two ears battled over states and strategy.

It would see my own sticky hands, greedy to be held, fully capable of reaching directly into the pie.

I wish I remembered only enough to love.

I am neither angel nor Anaïs Nin, only a storyteller whose key still gets stuck in second grade. My only hope is that I will be remembered more elegantly than I remember.

I am comforted by the bearded youths who scrawled the Psalms, Middle Eastern meaning-gluttons who would understand my desire to command territory. People think the Bible is lilac and law-abiding, but the Psalm brats will shut you down. Good King David and his fellow poets ask God to smash their enemies’ infants. They roll on the floor like cats in heat, howling that darkness is their only companion. They throw rotten tubers at the Almighty, brazen against the brassy sky.

And after that, they ask God to remember them.

“Remember me.” Over and again, David and the nameless, needy children demand it. “Remember me.”

This strikes me as dangerous, foolish. It would be appropriate if God should answer, “Thank you for the reminder. As a matter of fact, you have been a massive mandala of swirling sandy sins. Please proceed to the nearest Gehenna. Gnashing of teeth begins at 7:00 p.m. sharp.”

God should remember the Psalm brats like I remember Mari. I should remember what the Psalm brats didn’t forget.

God remembers elegantly, which is to say outrageously. “Remember me” means “pet me like a kitten.” “Remember me” means “cherish your child.” “Remember me” means “forget ‘Pies’ and the Paris Review and today’s thirty tantrums.”

“Remember me” really means “remember Yourself.”

And God remembers. And the state of the Psalmist changes color. And mercy erases state lines.

And all the livid letters turn back into words.

I remember Mari’s face, and I remember that she grew up to be an advocate. We both parse words for truth. We are both still afraid of being holograms. We are both proud and protective, Psalms and bombs in aging little-girl bodies.

Angela Townsend is the Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Paris Lit Up, The Penn Review, and The Westchester Review, among others. She is a Best Spiritual Literature nominee.

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