"Carsick Memoir" by Matthew Cummins

"Carsick Memoir"

The four years of my life that I spent in Albany, living with my mother, Donna, and my step-father, Ron, are a blur. Little Matthew spent a lot of that time simply surviving, and I can’t blame him for having small lapses in memory considering what he went through. Often, when I (very rarely, and usually reluctantly) take a look back at my past, I’m confronted not with a cohesive string of memories linking one event to another, but a series of scenes, precisely frozen in time, floating in the aether of my head with no apparent ties to one another.

In one scene, I can remember the cool inside of Donna’s beat up Toyota, sitting on a perfect summer day in the parking lot of the Stewart’s convenience store where she worked. The AC recycled a tepid atmosphere of old cigarettes into a slightly cooler, but still cigarette scented breeze. The stained fur of the grey car seats felt fuzzy beneath my fingers, and next to the buckle of my seatbelt was a black resin, a piece of gum that had long since hardened into a dull amber. I had spent much of the car ride over picking at it, trying to pry it off the car seat, but was unsuccessful.

Right now, though, younger me was looking rather incredulously at a camera my husk of a Mother was attempting to hand me. She wanted me to take pictures of the bloody blotches on her back and face that Ron had beaten into her the night before. Being a child somewhere between the age of four and eight years old, I remember being filled with the apprehension that, one: somehow I was in trouble; and two: that I was going to have to do a thing that I really did not want to do. Donna tried coaxing me further, and by this time in my life I had already learned that little boys who displeased their parents got hit, or locked outside for a night, or hit and then locked outside for good measure. So, I took the camera, and Donna awkwardly undressed in the front seat of her car.

As I sat there, snapping away at each mark, I think that even at that time I was struck by the thought that other children my age were not doing similar things with their own Mothers. Donna took me inside the convenience store and bought me my favorite snack: Yodels. I even got to keep the change—a single penny—which younger me thought was a much more life-altering occasion than the events that had preceded it only a moment before. The Toyota, Little Matthew happily inhaling his Yodels in the back seat, returned to my home, and to the haze of my childhood memories.

I don’t even remember what she used the photos for.