Half a Life: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

don’t even understand? Was I to become the Zilkes’ son now, visiting on school breaks, calling in with news of grades and girls?
    I tried to scrub my face of all emotion and message, to let Mrs. Zilke fill it with whatever meaning would bring her comfort.
    “Can you promise me, Darin?” Her eyes got very hectic. “ Promise . You’re living for two. Okay? Okay?”
    I nodded quickly.
    And she continued to gaze at me. Not too unkindly or even severely, just for a long while. I swallowed what had become a big pointy stone in my throat. Some clock somewhere kept beating its subdued cymbal. I looked away and then back. She was still looking at me. Why are you the one who is still alive? her eyes seemed to be saying.
    I opened my mouth to tell her—what? Nothing. Finally, at once, she turned to leave: she wanted, forever, to have no part of this life she’d doubly freighted. My dad leveled his hand on my back, on my shoulder. A kind of drape of family, holding me, recasting me as his, and our family’s.
    Next I’m standing before Celine’s open coffin. I don’t remember how I got here, who’s brought me. I only remember the tingly awareness of the two hundred whispers at my back, and how that got every hair on my body to stand up. Celine looked almost like herself. What I mean is, she now looked more like her high-school self than she had when I’d mistaken her for someone pale and dozing on the road.
    I haven’t really described her appearance at all. Her face was soft and broad, pretty and unpretending. Pretty without being stagy about it.
    Everybody wants life to speak to them with special kindness. Every personal story begs to be steered toward reverie, toward some relief from unpleasant truths: That you are a self, that beyond anything else you want the bestfor that self. That, if it is to be you or someone else, you need it to be you, no matter what. I’m not sure I can get across just how much I want to be extra-generous to Celine here. Extra-generous and, you’ve probably noticed, extra-writerly. It’s a coward’s tactic. I’m trying to write all the difficulty away.
    What if I tell you it was windy when I fled the memorial, so that all the trees moaned in protest. Is that puffed up enough, labored and lyrical enough, to seem like something extracted from a novel—and not just a real day of a real boy and a real dead girl?
    I want very badly to tell you Celine was unusually beautiful. Celine was unusually beautiful . And to equate her with quiet, sleeping Juliet—or some such overdone b.s. Will the tuneful balancing of q and t sounds—the thing I’ve learned to do with my life after Celine—isolate me from the reality of what happened? (Which was merely this: here was a plainly attractive and nice girl I kind of knew who died after she pedaled into my car.)
    The truth is—if I even have access to the truth—I remember Celine only with certain key words: athletic, broad face, good-natured, bicycle. These words call up no images. Real memory is a mix of blast and keepsake. For me, with this event, there is nothing—at least not in the part of the brain I live in. My mind looks away. I see only letters on a page, vowels and consonants, press and flop. There: I’m still trying to write and write and write away the reflector.…
    So I can’t share the image of what lay inside the coffin.I don’t have enough mental steam to make it all the way there.
    What I do remember is self-centered—my own turning from the casket. I’m hurrying past all the stares in this neat and unreal spectacle. The heels of my unfamiliar dress shoes clack on the church floor. My stomach has been clutched and empty all morning; it’s already been a long, hungry day. Soon enough I’m spluttering past the old grandfather, almost at the exit. And my dad keeps buzzing in my ear, “Keep your head up; just keep your head up …” The grandfather’s head is dropped so he won’t have to bear the sight of me.
    I hadn’t