Читать книгу Come Clean - Terri Paddock - Страница 10

Our earliest actual memory, that’s something different. I don’t know who had our first memory first, or if I really remember it or just think I do because we talked about it so many times. I’m a baby, lying on the sofa, the one with the fruit-basket pattern. Daddy’s not in the frame of my memory and neither is Mommy – could be she hadn’t followed us home from the hospital yet after her long stay.

What is in the frame is the ceiling: white, stippled and big as life until my hands come windmilling in. They keep doing that, diving in front of my face in their arc to sink themselves in fistfuls into my mouth. I try to fix my gaze on them for a minute but they’re moving too fast. And then, shifting my head, I see, beyond the fleshy pad of my palm, I see myself, my whole self. Not two feet away from me, lying on a plate of pears on another cushion on the same sofa, wearing the same romper suit, dripping the same saliva from the same hand. I’m staring at me, except of course it’s not me, it’s you. I stare at my hand and then I stare at you and I start to cry because I’m kinda scared. Then you up and do the same thing. Wail, wail, gasp. We look at each other, see the other one crying and then we stop, just like that.

Mom discovered this trick later. If you came down with a bug or couldn’t sleep, she’d tuck me in the crib with you. And vice versa. The healthy, happy one calming the other down. Sometimes, of course, it backfired and we both got cranky, wide-awake or sick. I remember catching chickenpox off you, for instance, when we were in preschool. Mom had to separate us then because picking each other’s scabs was just too irresistible.