Free Virgin Territory by James Lecesne

the things that were close to her. But then after a while I found I was having trouble remembering her. I couldn’t call her up on demand. That made me cry some more. First her nose disappeared, then her chin, then her lips, and finally one day, when I was about thirteen, her eyes were gone.
    We used to have a whole collection of photographs of Kat, pictures of her and Doug and me together. But when Doug and I left New York, he accidentally left behind a cookie tin filled with actual photos of our family. We were just over the Florida state line when he broke the news to me. I was furious. I made him pull over and call the people who had just moved into our loft. They said that they hadn’t found any cookie tin. I made Doug go into his computer and see if any pictures were storedin his files, but when he did we discovered that his photo file was empty. Weren’t there any images still in his camera, I asked. But he told me he sold the camera a few weeks ago. Eventually and reluctantly, I accepted the fact that the images were gone for good—along with our past life. Doug said it was all for the best. I never asked him,
Best for whom?
    Naturally, I blamed Doug. As punishment, I forced him to tell me stories about my mother so that I could keep memories of her in play. I made him repeat the same stories over and over until I felt that I could see them as plain as the life that was happening right in front of me.
    Doug met my mother at a soup kitchen in the basement of a church in Manhattan. She had worked the kitchen for almost ten years, ladling out the stuff, buttering bread, shaking hands, and mopping floors. By the time she bumped into Doug, she was famous for the way she remembered the names of the old-timers, how she handled cleanup, and how she always knew how much bread to buy so that everyone got plenty.
    After only a month, Doug proposed to her. They got married in Woodstock, and she moved into his downtown Manhattan loft. He had a thriving video business and was paid good money to make brides adopt whacky poses, get grooms to the church on time, and enroll guests in activities that they later regretted when they saw themselves in the wedding video. Doug’s business was more popular than most because he didn’t do things by the numbers; he upended all the traditional aspects of themarriage ceremony and made each event seem like an original rite of passage.
    Kat wore tie-dyed scarves and cowboy boots, wrote the occasional article for the
Downtown Free Press
or the
Village Voice
, taught poetry in the New York public schools, and hosted an annual Fourth of July poetry slam on the rooftop as a way of protesting the bombast of fireworks coming off the river, which she considered a public glorification of war.
    Then, of course, I was born. It was a big deal for Doug and Kat, because they hadn’t planned on having kids. Apparently, Doug used to make a big speech about how the world was a mess and not a fit place to raise children. Then I showed up, and he had to revise his idea about the world. We lived in that loft together for a few years, not exactly happily ever after, but happily enough until everything changed.

    Marie is totally wired. She’s up and running around the kitchen, cleaning every surface, determined to see herself reflected in the toaster, the range, the countertops, and the microwave.
    Doug barks at her: “Ma. Siddown already. You’re making me crazy.”
    Marie looks at Doug as though she’s seen him before, like maybe he’s an off-duty plainclothes cop she’s tangled with in her not-so-distant past. If she can just recall the guy’s name, shecan appeal to his sense of decency. But judging from her expression, nothing’s coming to mind. Blank. She looks around the room, appraises it all, and says, “I just thought maybe we should leave the place nice for the people who live here.”
    Doug slowly rests his head on the counter and lets out an enormous sigh.
    “When your father was a kid,”