15 minute read
THE CIRCLE GAME
The Circle Game
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Dad, can we sing “Yesterday?”
—I used to say—when you were perched on the side of my bed, the wooden frame almost split with age. It was just light enough in my New York bedroom to see the shapes of things but not their colors. You would hold my hand under your thumb, and your nail had waves in it like a tiny ocean—from playing the clarinet a long time ago, you would say.
As a kid I knew songs not by their titles but by their melodies, or by the words that snagged most surely in my brain. I learned “The Circle Game” before I knew it was called that, and before I’d heard the McCartney masterpiece whose first lyric it shares.
Joni Mitchell wrote “The Circle Game” a year after The Beatles released “Yesterday”—in 1966, eight years before you were born. Thirty-nine years before my first birthday, and 56 years ago now. That part I know.
Of where?
Not our apartment in New York, suspended between fire escapes above the uptown streets, no. I used to think of a large house, with two or three slanted roofs. Shingles, a screen porch. I could only ever see it in side-view, just enough to feel the warmth from the windows lit up yellow. It’s night. Next to the house there’s a small yard, flat, grass cut short with little patches of soft soil here and there. It’s surrounded by trees on three sides, dense, dark greenery, big leaves, maybe magnolias.
Somehow I know we’re in Westport, Connecticut, where my great-grandmother Gigi lived. My family visited Westport twice. The first time I was five or six and Gigi was in bed after a fall. She lay in a dark room in an old creaky house, and we rubbed Purell on our hands before we went inside.
When I try to remember Gigi now, I can sometimes pick up on her smile or the cadence of her voice. But these are really speculations, delivered secondhand, by grandparents and cousins closer to her in age. Mostly I picture dust, and the corners of things.
More than a year after that first visit, over breakfast, Mama told me she had passed away. My only feeling was one of guilt, for not feeling what I knew I should. “You may not have known her very well,” Mama said, “but remember she was Daddy’s grandmother. And Grammy’s mother.”
We returned to Westport for the memorial. The covers of the programs were meant to look like Scrabble boards—that part I know. A few weeks later, you and Grammy sold the house in Westport to a stranger.
You sat next to me on that old and creaky bed— sat, because there was no room to lie down without your toes pressing into the footboard. I think you said the bed had been my grandmother’s, but I’m not sure which one, your mother or my mother’s mother. You sang, and I liked to chime in when I could, which probably annoyed you. I knew most of the lyrics, but not all of them. You sang wander. I sang wonder.
: To ask a question that has an answer
Let’s go back to the Westport backyard that I have conjured out of memories that do not exist, although they do come from somewhere. The perfect squareness of the area, surrounded on three sides by greenery—that is my grandfather’s basketball court in Alexandria, paved in grass instead of gridded vinyl, surrounded by magnolias instead of bamboo. In reality—the hard and wooden kind—there is only one magnolia. And it’s on the other side of my grandfather’s house.
The screen porch, that’s my grandmother’s, at her summer house in Delaware. You had a childhood there, too; you spent your mild Augusts there when you weren’t at camp. You might have tossed your sunscreen and sandals over the second-floor banister, and my grandmother might have told you to just bring them down the stairs, for God’s sake.
But right now we’re in Westport. Instead of an insect, there’s a tiny dragon just the size of your hand, and it flies inside a jar. It’s a mason jar, a Bonne-Maman jam jar from Fairway Market in Manhattan. Mama likes to soak them in water until the label falls off. Sometimes she has to work at them a bit with her fingernails.
I was never too afraid of thunder. One night in New York when I was six or so, there was an incredible lightning storm. My little sister Tessa couldn’t stop crying, but I was in delight. Look! Look! I scrunched up my body to perch on the radiator cover, and watched Harlem and Queens vault back into a momentary midday.
: To stand in awe of something bigger than you, something unknowable, which is impossible to measure or understand.
The boy in the backyard is wearing long tan pants and sandals, and his hair is a dark color. Even though your hair has always been blond, I think it’s you. When I see you, still holding a glass jar with a dragon inside, your tears are their own falling stars.
I’ve never seen you cry, although one time I walked into yours and Mama’s bedroom and you were sitting on the bed facing away from me with your head in your hands.
The year of my second grade we lived in Syracuse, New York, where Mama had gotten her first job out of grad school. We thought we were going to live there forever. We bought a little house on Livingston Avenue, with potted plants that hung from the gingerbread trim, a splintery staircase inside, and second-floor bedrooms with slanted ceilings. To a city-dweller, this was a castle.
Fifteen minutes away there was an old-timey shopping mall named after the carousel nestled inside. One weekend, we drove out for kitchen houseware and cheap entertainment. Mama had been testing the breeze from the front seat and, not noticing, you rolled up the window before she had time to pull her hand back inside the car. I was terrified by her pain, a pain which was also yours, and which I’d never seen so clearly before.
When we got home, you filled up a blue porcelain saucer with scalding water, pulled out a bar of dish soap, some Neosporin. I stood in the entrance to the bathroom while Mama soaked her hand. Eventually, you came up to me and said, “Give her some space.”
A few months later, you were sick of the snow and Mama got another job in New York, so we sold the house with the gingerbread and moved back to another apartment in Manhattan.
By the time we were back in New York, I’d moved four times: once from Nashville to New York, once from apartment to apartment in the city, and then to Syracuse and back. A few years later we’d head to Argentina for six months when Mama got a sabbatical from work. And a few years after that I’d be in college, on my own.
But here was one thing that never changed. Every summer, at the end of August, we went to the beach in Delaware to visit Grammy. I always wondered how a house could stand on stilts and never fall.
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and a college student. My first night there, when I was nine or ten, the counselors sang to us at bedtime, and they sang your songs, Dad. I sat up almost in a sweat when I heard the first notes. They sang your songs, but differently: there was an end section to “Moonshadow” I’d never heard before; there was a descant to “You Can Close Your Eyes.” And there was this verse of “The Circle Game,” which you’d skipped over when you sang to me at bedtime. Thirty years ago when they taught you the song, did the counselors omit that verse by habit? Or did you just forget it over the years?
I guess all this music is only yours in the way that it’s also mine—learned, given, unknowingly rewritten.
I think of the creek that runs through the cemetery in Alexandria. When I was ten or eleven my grandmother and I went down there and built a dam out of the soft-looking stones along the bank. We called it Pillow Rock Dam. I imagine that the frozen stream is narrow and full of rocks that peek out above the ice, but you skate on anyway, unfazed. It’s funny. The last time we went skating together at the rink in New York, you slipped and fell backwards and I heard the dull thud of your head against the ice.
There was a picture book you used to read to me before you sang me to sleep. It was called, Someday is Not a Day of the Week!
Sixth or seventh grade, and another August in Delaware. Grammy had hung new photos over the dining room sideboard. They showed a beach besieged. There were tidelines of broken shells and strangled seaweed, lying on damp sand that I had only ever seen dry. One week that winter, Grammy said, the waves had hurtled all the way to the dunes.
The ocean had not yet breached the second boardwalk, but you told me that the stilts were built to protect the house from the floodwaters. They are so spindly, I thought. How could they ever protect anything?
I didn’t ask you the question. There are some things I’m scared to push on.
When I sing the chorus now I put an emphasis on look, and a pause for a second before going on. I got this from camp. At 15 I was old enough to come back as a counselor, and it was my turn to sing the bedtime songs. The staff would all come together in a circle at the intersection of the trails that led to the girls’ tents and the boys’. When we reached that lyric of “The Circle Game,” we all turned our heads over our shoulders and made eye contact with our neighbors. Sometimes people banged heads.
Nowhere was this ritual written down. I couldn’t have known, as a camper, how little the counselors were given when they arrived—a scrappy pink manual, a costume bucket filled with mismatched cowboy boots, and the tents, of course. Just wooden platforms and heavy canvas that the counselors strung up in early May. What a flimsy foundation for the castle I remembered.
Years later I’m in college and you tell me, on one of our weekly FaceTime calls, that Grammy has sold the house in Delaware. She found an agent last week and put the property on the market yesterday, and it sold in a little over three hours.
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One time in high school you got back from a long day at work and told me to fold up my music stand, for once, Jesus Christ, it was always in the way. I said I would a little later. I was busy. You are the calmest person I’ve ever met, and I don’t understand it, maybe I never will, but that night something switched. You were livid, you shouted at me. I shouted back hurtful things that I have chosen not to remember, and then I went back to my room and cried like the world was ending.
But I knew it wasn’t. I was sure that when I woke up, you would be in the kitchen packing Tessa’s lunch and listening to Ira Glass or Ezra Klein or another two-syllable one-syllable radio type, and I would say good morning, and you would give me a hug before I left for school, and everything would be fine.
When I was in the backseat at night and you and Mama would talk to each other with your faces turned toward the windshield, I learned to stop clinging onto what phrases I could discern and instead succumb quietly to the itchy leather car seat and the gentle murmur of your speech. The melody, the music: that strange thread that holds family together.
: To accept that you are small.
I imagine the boy on a dusty carousel dragging his feet, shuffle shuffle, and maybe your mother would say: pick up your feet when you walk!
You are not that boy on the carousel; that part, to some extent, I know. The boy on the carousel is only mine, and when you hear this song you don’t think of him, just as you don’t hear the lyric wonder.
I go away to college and leave New York behind. I try to describe you and Mama to my friends, and I struggle. You were always the one who asked the questions.
In my creative writing class I’m told to practice characterization, so I say things like: His parents went to Brandeis and he grew up playing in the All-State orchestra on weekends, playing Little League, bleaching his hair in the Alexandria sun. I’m immediately skeptical of my construction— all simplicity and idyll—but I read the lines again and again, and eventually I believe them.
: to let the stories we tell fill in the gaps.
I’m doing it again—building a house out of little pieces, misheard lyrics. Maybe I’m wrong in doing it. But the house I’ve built is mine now. It suits me.
One summer when I was seven or eight, you and I had a water-gun fight in the driveway in Delaware. I was not very good at hitting you and mostly bounced water off the beams of the deck above us, showering us both with chilly glitter. Then I would dart around the stilts and pretend not to notice the gravel that sliced into my feet. We kept at it until the driveway was half flooded and water was streaming down the stilts. You let me win.
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There is no room for me in our apartment anymore. My toes press against the footboard of my bed. And I’m always bumping into you in the kitchen.
Manhattan will be underwater soon, anyway—beset by seaweed and broken shells.
The apartment in Manhattan; the house in Syracuse, with the slanted roof; Grammy’s beach house in Delaware; the Westport house with dusty corners: These houses are gone, or soon to be.
The song that was yours will never be mine. But you gave it to me still, when you sang.
Sometime after graduation, I’ll move into a new house. It may not have a screened-in porch or magnolia trees around back, but I know it will be standing on stilts. You’ll come over to visit, and we’ll both wonder at how the house still stands. But it will. It will keep on standing, somehow.
It will be a blanket fort and a canvas tent and a castle. It will be as real as the lyrics to a song.
LILY SELTZ B’25 is sad that Joni Mitchell is no longer on Spotify.
