Storyteller
Storyteller
My grandmother sat in her glider rocking chair, it’s blonde wood smoothed and softened over its years, and held my hand while I sat on the couch to her right. My small hands were restless, but she never seemed to mind – her thoughts were elsewhere, parsing through details and weaving the stories she told me of our lineage. The stories came in parts and sagas, a whirlwind of characters and locations and eras, farming hamlets of the North Country, trailblazing mountaineers, flits of Quebecois French sliding in and out of her phrasing. I sat and listened intently to Mémère’s stories, awestruck by the records of knowledge she held of our family, a narrative of lives all occurring before mine.
In time, I found myself trying on the role. In telling a story, I was no longer myself, but a character to build and create as I saw fit. My experiences, my identity, my insecurity, all faded into the background, blended into an idealized narrative so carefully pieced together. Stories drew a listener’s attention into the details, away from me. I built a wall of fiction, hiding behind its thickly woven timelines and experiences, forging a character I felt to be more fitting of attention than myself. Think about me, and you think of my stories, not about my shorts that were always too long as a size accommodation for my waist, my fingernails anxiously bitten until they bled, my broken and dismantled speech patterns which incessantly resisted rectification.
My mother’s ability to decode my verbal encryptions was unlike anyone else’s, leaving my father, sister, and grandmother all trailing behind her sizable lead. While I was tucked into bed, Mom usually led me in reciting our sentences, as the speech pathologist labelled them.
“Luscious lips Louise licks her lemon ice cream.”
And I would repeat. Lurching and sprinting and stumbling and restarting until finally I said it right just once. Then again - nope. Take breath, and try again.
“Wushus wipps Woo-ees wicks huh wem’m ice cuh-weam.”
My mother took a deep breath, smiled warmly, took my hand, and exhaled her usual line: “Did you try your best?”
The Rs sat like salty pebbles in my mouth, the Ls ever so slightly out of reach, longer words tending to scrunch themselves into spaces reserved for their smaller siblings. Even speaking my own thoughts, my mouth defied the laws of language traffic, not by speeding or missing the stop sign back there, but by going half the speed limit with a line of words that just want to pass you on that busy and narrow road. I felt like I read Silverstein for eons, under mandate to practice reading out loud. With a book in hand, speaking was yet another process on top of the internal. My eyes went faster than my brain, which in turn went faster than my mouth. Words got caught in the flow of the stream, and were spit out tangled. At which point, my brain cut it off. Hard stop. Restart the sentence. Repeat the same fragment, the same phrase, the same syllable until I cleared the hurdle. Repetitive. Obsessive. Focus on one word. Say it out loud. Wrong. Say it again. Nope, one more time. No. Over and over until it came out right. Finally. Perfection was always key.
A determined faux-smile and forward academic intention often sat steadfast on my face, never saying no. The more I do, the less negative of me they’ll see – they’ll have too much else to focus on. Now discernable in speech and language, my stories began to be heard. They became attributes, overblown actions of who I was, all for show, hiding myself in the spotlight.
The mask was torn off as I stepped through the door. Get home in time for dinner, then homework after. My parents went to bed, I worked until I was done – usually approaching 3:00. Alarm at 6:00. Hair pulled out in the shower. Student government meetings, honor society events, choir performances. Eloquent, present, forceful. New students often thought I was a substitute teacher; I blame the always-refilled travel coffee mug. A Janus of emotional proportions, I swung from anxious tremors to a collected and presentable young man. Trying to hold all of myself in, anything less than exact and well-done was deemed to be not my best, not me, not worthy of my story.
I dropped the knife, and I still don’t know what made me let go. I didn’t eat for two days. I didn’t speak for three. A therapist named Ryan spoke with me over the phone, and I barely whispered answers. I saw him in person the next day, then twice weekly for some time, then once weekly until I moved to Boston for school. Major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder. His practice sat in a surprisingly spacious suite in a renovated textile mill, windows overlooking the river punctuated the brick walls and flooded light to the impossibly high ceilings. My seat faced away from the windows, towards Ryan, towards the clock, the door. The oversized armchair let me sink into the warm beige cushions, my feet not quite reaching either the floor or the steel-framed glass coffee table supporting a white ceramic vase of eucalyptus clippings and a single box of tissues. Eye contact was a rarity at first, instead opting to pass my eyes over the vaguely Buddhist paintings and tapestries, avoiding the man who had told me to slow down. Yet I resentfully looked forward to it. He recommended yoga, avoiding dairy, journaling. He kept me keeping myself alive.
Over countless afternoons sunk into that oversized armchair, my created stories began to dissolve. The façade of a falsified narrative, grounded in a foundation of misplaced defenses, cracked. And so began the process of rebuilding my own story, real, present, experienced, lived, honest. My own story worth telling, one of countless in the lineage of storytellers in our family.
To our family, the role of the storyteller is a shared one. Orators of each generation naturally gravitate towards our collective history, hoping, in some way, to carry it forward for those yet to come. Yet as my grandmother has seen the passing of her sisters and cousins, she is now the sole member of her generation to bear the responsibility. She has told stories, countless, to her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, pulling the thread just a bit further, tying it to each of us to connect our future to our past. As we all understand that her time as storyteller is coming to a close, my father and I have taken up the torch, along with a few of his cousins and their children, to be sure our family stories are ones that last. He as researcher and analyst, I as archivist and documentarian, we do our best to capture our story before it is lost.
I remember sitting at the kitchen table, Mémère to my right, my small shaky hands nestled into hers, their lines telling stories themselves of all she has held, seen, done, heard, wondered, prayed. She recited to me the story of her great-grandmother, Daisy Hebert. Her voice held a meter, a balanced pace of inflections and intonations, holding her wide-eyed audience of one. Weaving family fact with local legend, specifics and details occasionally morphing but emotion remaining steadfastly true. She told me of how Daisy’s mother died during childbirth, of her father, an ailing and respected Northern Cree tribal leader, no longer able to care for her, how she was then adopted by Dr. Hebert, the doctor of the nearby Quebecois farming settlement in northern Vermont. I remember her telling me of Daisy learning to speak English, of her building an honest life in a community she did not know, of instilling in her family a respect for their history but a pride in where we’re going. Mémère reminded me, in closing Daisy’s story, of the reason we carry on our family history - a story worth sharing is a story worth remembering.
To do all I can to remember will never feel like enough, but I will do my best to carry our stories – my own, and all that have been told before me. And although Mémère can no longer tell me her stories herself, I can capture all she has left for me, in memory and what she leaves behind.
