Harold Blunt, Harold Blunt had been chasing her with a water balloon. He cornered her by her back door and, balloon held threateningly over her head, clamped his lips over hers. When Mr Phillips found her kissing Harold Blunt, he stared at her as an adulterer might stare at his cuckolding mistress. She averted her eyes, but even so it was as if every belittling, superior thought she’d ever had about the man was broadcast over the neighborhood loudspeaker. He knew he’d been had. Harold Blunt responded by smashing the water balloon on Glad’s head and running away. Glad stared at Mr Phillips through her raining-down bangs. He hardened to her in a matter of mere seconds; she was no innocent, she was just another ‘Greensleeves’-mangling trollop who’d made a fool of him.
As the balloon water dripped into her eyes, she was reminded (a reminiscence inside a reminiscence inside a reminiscence) of another moment in her life, although in fact this moment was in her then-future, so how could she have ‘remembered’ forward from the past? Confusing, and yet this was how it happened, or rather this was how this past of hers existed. As an ever-shifting matrix of falsely interconnected selves. Somehow as a twelve- or eleven-year-old she remembered being sixteen, she remembered riding in the back of a rental car driven by her parents, rain sheeting down the windshield, too much for the the hairpin wipers. Their Bermuda vacation had ‘turned’, as her father phrased it - a hurricane loomed, the three of them had colds, her mother, an incessant liar who lied about things that shouldn’t be lied about, was ‘in her element’, i.e. raucously miserable. When miserable she told stories that Glad herself knew to be untrue because they had happened, or rather hadn’t happened, to her. At this moment she was telling Glad about the time she and Glad had taken the ferry to the Vineyard and Glad had tried to jump overboard. ‘You loved to self-destruct in a crowd,’ her mother said, forgetting that Glad had climbed atop the railing in an attempt to rescue an old lady’s escaped parakeet, clinging to a porthole bolt. She’d lost her footing and slipped safely back to the deck, but not before knocking the parakeet from its perch and sending it hurtling to its death in the wake below. When the old lady approached them worriedly for a report, her mother patted the old lady’s forearm and said, ‘He flew away, dear.’
From that moment on the boat (which was, technically, an anecdote inside a reminiscence inside a reminiscence inside a reminiscence), she recalled a time when, at nine, her mother calmly watched her fall out of an apple tree; at ten, when she ran over a baby vole with her bicycle, and her mother, who was poisoning voles by the thousands in her vegetable garden, called her a murderer; at twelve, when she meticulously sliced her own thumb open with a penknife and bled over her mother’s silk party dress, hanging on the bedroom hook. The pattern was unrepeatable, and thus more dangerously ineffable than a single memory. The sensation felt like spinning too fast on a merry-go-round. Each fraction of a second her eyes focused on a new face in a crowd. Within seconds the face was gone, whisked to a blur, replaced by another face that would just as soon be lost.
Glad clutches her book, feeling rather sick. She finds herself recalling incidents that are technically impossible to recall, looking up from her changing table as a weeks-old infant, a miserable ball of heat and squirm observing the haggard look on her mother’s face, then gradually moving forward again, each memory chain-linked only by this: all involved her mother. This is why she doesn’t put much stock in so-called secrets, or the meaningfulness of untold recollections that become, in their airtight echo chambers, the supposed stuff of secrets. They are only a way to become retrospectively enraged at somebody else so that your own adult weaknesses can be tidily excused.
But even more alarming is this: the woman who appears as her mother in these memories begins to morph into a woman resembling Sylvia - thinner and more likeably imperious, but Sylvia nonetheless. And she, Glad, is nowhere to be found. Yes, a corner of the red dress she was wearing the day of the explosion protrudes from behind the tree; possibly she can even see her transparent reflection in the rainy Bermuda car window. But