The Blizzard Party

which could last a week or more, that I realized my memory of the night in question had begun to erode. The act of reading his story was destroying my own. Not only destroying it, but rebuilding a new city atop it. My father always said that the more you repeat a lie, the more it sounds like the truth. I would amend thus: writing down a lie makes it the truth. What chance did a teenager have against the foremost narrative wizard of his generation?
I’d read and reread, underlined and crossed out, censored entire pages with thick black Sharpie, crammed notes into the margins and gutters, tagged lies and half-truths, fury driving me back again and again to certain passages until I knew them by heart. I’d flooded notebooks with outraged responses without noticing that his rhythms and inflections were trampling my own. I was horrified to discover later that his linguistic tics had seeped into my English essays; in class discussions, I’d insisted on Salinger’s intentions using terms I’d picked up from critical essays about my father’s work, arguments sagging with prolepsis and discursion, my father’s favorite diversionary tactics. I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t forget, that I would keep the two versions separate, and all the while I was reading and rereading until my own story was buried deep beneath his. I’d shoveled so much dirt onto my memories that I’d never be able to perform a successful exhumation. It’s hard to believe I hadn’t done it all on purpose.
So my memory is water-warped and faded. I’ve executed my best vanishing act on my father’s defective translation. I have rewritten and rewritten so that I—not the hole in the world—might appear in the cracks between his paragraphs, in the gap between a comma and an I. So that I might appear in fiery letters blazing against the sky. I appear here. If I embellish, if I fail to account for certain facts, if I speak through the mouths of the dead, you’ll remember that my father spoke for me without so much as a knock on my bedroom door. Many of you read what he wrote, and you believed. Do me the service of reconsidering.

5.
The night of the party, I’d fallen and hit my head, and because of the blizzard my mother couldn’t track down my pediatrician, so she’d taken me upstairs to see her friend Dr. Jane Vornado. She hadn’t intended to stay any longer than it took to have Jane look me over, but there she was, putting away her third rum and Coke. My mother and Jane had been friends for decades, yet my mother arrived wearing the apologetic smile she put on anytime she had to involve a third party in my care and comfort, the smile meant to give the impression she was a reasonable and pliant woman, not one given to hysterics or undue demands. She hoped that the smile would, in turn, transform her so this attitude of agreeability would become her genuine state of being. Jane was the one who put the first drink in her hand.
Her reflexes are fine, Jane had said. Coordination’s fine. It’s a little cut. I’m going to put some Loctite on it.
Do I need to ask? my mother said.
Something I picked up from an OB at City. He picked it up from a midwife.
Isn’t that remarkable, my mother said, sucking down half the drink.
For tearing. Better than stitches. Right, Hazel?
Tearing what? I said.
In a percentage of births, the perineum sustains tearing during delivery, Jane said. Do you know what your perineum is?
I shook my head.
It’s the area between the bottom of your vaginal opening and your anus, Jane said. Sarah, you’ve got to get in there on this stuff. These days there’s no telling where they’ll pick up things if you don’t get in there first.
Can you stop saying I have to get in there? my mother said.
That would hurt, I said.
What would? my mother said.
Tearing your vagina, I said.
Yep, Jane said, dabbing my wound with gauze. And then you have to get stitches. But for first-degree lacerations like this one, sometimes you can use glue. That’s better, right?
Right, I said.
Okay, hold still. She pinched the wound and dropped a dot of the clear cement onto the skin. Toothpick, she said to my mother, who handed it over, and Jane smoothed the adhesive around. Done, she said.
My mother knocked back the rest of her rum and Coke.
Hey, Jane said to me. You get dizzy or you feel like you’re going to throw up, you tell your mom right away, understand?
I crossed my eyes and stuck out my tongue. I got brained! I said.
That had been hours ago. Days, years ago. I had happily ensconced myself in a guest bedroom to watch TV. My mother felt the party stretching out, becoming leaner as it settled into accumbency for the long night ahead. Though still early in the life cycle—people were standing around in clusters, and only a couple of guests—a man and woman, both white-haired, who looked like they’d just gotten off the Concorde from de Gaulle—were dancing to the Stooges album pounding through the speakers. They were both wearing silk scarves and platform shoes. Once the party got a little older, the sofas would fill up, someone would dim the lights, the crowd’s id would emerge. These parties, if they were any good, went backward in time, the guests urging the river back upstream, toward their coolest years, always bygone, and they’d land on “I Can’t Explain” or Cavern-era Beatles and they’d abandon conversation for dancing when that frenzy of physical memory shot through their spines, everyone young again for three minutes and twenty-seven seconds. That would come later. They were still on punk, music for corporate cools, according to my mother’s students, all of whom listened to reggae. Donna Summer would put in an appearance before a sustained bout of Bowie, depending on when Bo relinquished control of the stereo.