Sorting the stones

I think I’ve found where the book begins.

I’ve been posting these scenes as they come — out of order, the way memory hands them to me. But this one feels like the first one. The threshold. So if you’re just coming to the book, you’ll read this first. If you’ve been following along, imagine reading it the way you’d read the first page of a book you just opened: before everything else, before you know any of them, before the falling starts.

Here is where it begins.

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SORTING THE STONES

We are standing in my mother’s studio, which used to be the dining room, in the house where I grew up. We are sorting through a bowl of smooth white stones.

On the table, there are other bowls filled with chalky gray clam shells, skate cases black as licorice, and necklaces of wampum, that’s what we called these — whatever they are, the spines of some fish? She shows me the large trunk, filled with sea treasures collected from a lifetime of beaches: S’conset, Surfside, Tom Never’s Head; West End 2, Ocean Beach, Montauk.

“I pulled out every single shell and stone and made a decision about it,” she tells me. “I know it sounds crazy but I had to do it this way.”

“It’s hard to let go of things,” I say. “Maybe that’s why it’s taking so long for your house to sell. Maybe you aren’t finished sorting your stones.”

My mother tells me, “I keep trying to picture the moment when I actually leave. Do I tell your father, ‘Okay, goodbye then,’ and just walk out? I can’t imagine it… I can’t see myself doing this. And I’m afraid that if I can’t see it, I won’t be able to do it.”

Afternoon light bends into the room, and Mom’s collection of bottles, dug out of the hill behind our house, sits on a high shelf around us like a string of jewels catching light: blue, green, brown, clear. The bottles, too, are waiting to be divided: keep, discard, sell.

I feel like an hourglass, sifting sand, collecting what I can — rescuing memories and carting them away in the trunk of my car.

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That night, asleep in my childhood bed, I dream that I’m in Greece — a place I’ve never actually been — walking on a spiraling path on an island. Sun-bleached shells crunch beneath my sandals. White cottages, bright blue skies and lapis lazuli waters, white-capped by wind. I wake suddenly, tumble-tossed by a wave as the dream pulls away. It sounds like the rushing of sand and stones, the backwash of the sea. I open my eyes and, finding myself in my room, in my stupid life, I begin to cry.

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This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. The next chapter is here: Keys. The full list of scenes, in order, is here.

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Photo by Vitalii Abakumov on Unsplash