Arlo Gust

(Read: ~7 minutes)

Most memories fall into a massive black hole of forgotten, devoured, crushed. But not all.

For a many of us, life’s worst moments still fester and turn pungent. The stink sticking to us.

But also, some good ones hang on to existence, spinning out of reach of the event horizon. Crying out, “Remember me.”

We hang pictures of people and things on walls. Those good memories. To satisfy a primal urge. From imagining figures in the sky, to cave paintings to million dollar artwork hung in museums. But also our living rooms, staircases and hallways.

Letitia Bix, mother of a lovely eight-year-old girl named Rosa, happily endured the annual parent torture known as school picture day. Every year across the country, moms, dads, grandparents and guardians must put a monetary value on remembering their children at any give age. Letitia settled on an assortment a couple of steps down from the premium packages, which she thought were priced more in the range of a car payment than school pics.

Even so, her choice still included dozens of copies of Rosa, placed in one placid pose, set against the standard sky-blue backdrop, used the year before, and cost every dollar she could spare. The envelopes filled with pictures from previous years sat in a kitchen drawer, stuffed along with forgotten paperwork for this or that, whatever was important at the time. These moments of life are mostly forgotten.

So someday in their future, every parent hopes the school photos they bought, and hoarded, perhaps even shared, will confirm “I want to remember”.

Letitia did her best to make sure she and Rosa shared plenty of great memories of their time spent together, though finding time as a single mom proved a challenge. She usually kept their trips simple and a favorite included walking a few blocks to a waterfront park in Norfolk, their dingy home in Virginia. The area exemplified the competition between the beauty of nature and the grinding economic forces in the riverfront city. But there was a small stretch of green grass built atop a flood wall. From it, Rosa loved feeding the ducks with chunks of cheap white bread and waving at working boats passing along the river, back and forth from the Chesapeake Bay.

Rosa would stop to salute the U.S. Navy ships flying the stars and stripes. She mimicked the countless airplanes and the streaks of white they left overhead. Against the backdrop of the setting sun, Rosa caught lightning bugs with cupped palms, peering into the cracks in her fingers with a single eye. On those playful evenings, Letitia reminded herself that the small pleasures matter the most, taking every opportunity to make Rosa feel special made her feel special too. On the walk home, mother and daughter usually stopped for Rosa’s favorite dinner. Pizza, french fries and lemon-lime soda.

Once, Letitia swapped work shifts with a colleague so she could chaperone Rosa’s second-grade class trip to a local art museum. Though the gallery was only a few minutes walk from their home, they’d never been, and Letitia got excited when she thought about going.

That day, the yellow bus carrying the chattering kids left the school about 9 the morning and approached the museum within a few minutes. The building sat in a section of town built around a tidal basin, brackish water rose and fell several times daily. Sitting next to Rosa on a green pleather bench seat, Letitia’s heart beat with anticipation to finally see inside the building she walked past hundreds of times.

The bus driver pulled into a traffic circle in front of the museum, yellow paint marked the zone to unload and pickup passengers. The bus idled in the roundabout, while the teachers and chaperones wrangled the fidgeting children into a loose line.

For a moment, Letitia felt dizzy. But she brushed it off, maybe standing with the kids too close to the fumes from the bus.

Rosa picked two small violet flowers from a weed poking through a crack in the concrete. She slipped one into her own hair and handed the other to her mother. Letitia struggled to position the fragile flower above her ear. Rosa laughed.

The bus pulled away from the drop-off zone. Laughter rippled through the school kids at a massive piece of art seated prominently in the traffic roundabout. A weather-scarred and corroded metal man, naked and sprawled on the ground. A rider on a horse seemed to gallop past. Pointing at the fallen man’s nude ass, several boys began making fart noises and pretended to ride ponies between their legs.

Letitia stifled a laugh as they were scolded by their teacher.

Looking closer at the monument, Letitia traced the arm of the man struggling on the ground, stretched upwards, passing a blazing torch onto the horse’s receptive rider. Turning back to Rosa and the rest of the students waiting to get inside the museum, she felt a sense of pride for these babies, her own especially. Joy in their growth, and her own role.

When the museum opened the doors to the students, the group swarmed the marble-encrusted lobby. Letitia did her best to help keep the group of energetic eight-year-olds quiet. Passing through the first few galleries, the kids moved in an accordion line, bunching up then stretching out. Rosa checked out artwork here and there with mostly disinterested glances.

Then suddenly, she stopped in front of a painting and exclaimed, “I’ve seen this one before, in Paris at the Salon, just a year before the first exhibition by the impressionists.”

“What?” Letitia asked, then looked up at the painting. A hairy man with horns and animal legs and hooves, and a bunch of blonde women trying to pull him into a river.

“I remember it because the nymph’s wide butt is almost in the center of the painting. My friends bristled at the judges, how these naked nymphs were accepted. The impressionists were condemned for nudity at the same time.” Rosa shook here head like an old woman. “The hypocrisy,” she added.

Letitia responded after a few seconds. “I’m surprised you’re learning those details in art class, but I’m glad you’re paying attention,” Letitia joked, taking Rosa by the hand and moving her on with the rest of the group.

Soon after that, still holding hands, the pair stepped into another gallery. Rosa stopped dead in her tracks again and pointed at a portrait on the wall while she stared. Without warning, straight from the somber eyes of the woman staring back from the painting, a shock surged through the girl’s fingertips like a bolt of lightning. The force rang through Letitia’s chest.

“That’s me, I remember now,” the girl said to her mother.

Out of sorts from the feelings rushing through her, Letitia let go of Rosa’s hand. She brushed away the comment with a “Shhh! Don’t be silly,” then telling Rosa to come along with the rest of the group before they all moved into another room.

Rosa stomped her foot, “Non!” the child screamed, refusing to move away from her spot in front of the painting. Letitia laser-focused on her suddenly misbehaving child, whose attention was still fixated on the painting.

“Rosa, come now!”

The child turned her head to face her mother. The unfamiliar look in her eyes chilled Letitia. Rosa pointed at the painting again, and stated, “C’est moi, Lise. Ces’t moi. Je me souviens.”

Letitia turned and looked at the canvas again. She studied the somber look of a pale and slightly pink chubby woman sitting in a chair, her long black hair tied up with a red ribbon, yet still falling towards cleavage revealed by a loose-fitting, white linen blouse. Sun filtering through a thick background of green and yellow brush strokes cast dappled light on the meaty hands she rested in her lap. A red and black striped skirt hid the outlines of her belly and wide hips.

“Oh, Pierre … mon amour. Pourquoi?” Rosa whimpered.

Letitia looked back down at her daughter, flustered by her child’s behavior and unsure how to respond. She looked around to see if anyone else heard Rosa’s comments about the painting. No one did and Letitia grabbed Rosa’s hand again and pulled her back towards the group bunched up in a passage leading to the next exhibit. One of her classmates waved her over, and Rosa joined a small clique, absorbed in second-grade intentions, away from her mother.

The rest of the day at the museum was uneventful and the next few days passed normally. Letitia forgot about Rosa’s museum outburst. But at the end of the week, Rosa brought the topic up while sitting at the kitchen table. They were talking about possible activities to do the next day since Letitia got the day off from work.

“Let’s go back to the museum and see my painting,” Rosa suggested.

Letitia felt her gut sink. She dreaded asking her daughter about the picture, but she did anyway.

The eight-year-old, who never ventured further than a few blocks from home, remained adamant that she lived the life of that lady in the picture. She remembered being in love with the artist. His name was Pierre. He often painted her picture when they lived together in Paris.

But when Letitia pushed the little girlf for more information, Rosa became cranky at the questions, so Letitia backed off, letting her watch television.

The next day, instead of going to the museum, Letitia talked Rosa into a trip to the zoo by promising plenty of pizza, fries and soda on the way back home.