If I live to my seventies, how would I remember events that happened in my twenties? Would my memories fail me and re-write them completely and paint another picture in my mind? As it is, I've already chosen to block out memories of primary school and high school, and such.
They don't seem traumatic to me now, but I was traumatized by those experiences at that point in time. I haven't re-written the narrative to what would suit me best, but I have simply chose to ignore them.
This story gives us the perspectives of such events from two women in their seventies, reminiscing about their youth. This is 'The Quiet House' by Tessa Hadley, published in The New Yorker on January 25, 2026.
Geraldine and Jane have been friends since university, from their twenties to their seventies. They have married, had children and grandchildren, and their families stayed friends, and they, stayed friends, a bond closer than blood-sisters. Geraldine's husband Terry had passed on. Jane is still married to hers, Felix, and he is still alive and well. That's a loooooong friendship that has stood the test of time, life's events, and shifts in characters as people hit different decades of life.
However, there's one person, Mattie Szymanski a flamboyant and flawed older schoolmate back then whom both women had taken a romantic interest in. He met an early death. Fifty years later, Geraldine vividly remembers Mattie with a huge degree of fondness, but Jane doesn't recall anything significant about him, and chose not to indulge in any charitable memory of Mattie. To Jane, Mattie was a messed-up kid.
They hadn’t spoken about Mattie or even thought about him much for a long time, probably not for years; now Jane seemed to be distancing herself from their shared memories of him. Recently, she’d taken to shamelessly denying things from the past which they both knew were true. It wasn’t senility: Geraldine knew that Jane was perfectly aware of what had actually happened—or at least as aware as anyone could be, when it came to penetrating the opaque past. It was more like a game that Jane played to entertain herself, Geraldine thought, because she was bored now that she was retired. No doubt Jane felt that shedding some of the things you’d been and done and believed was one of the conveniences of growing older. She’d gaze at Geraldine frankly, to challenge her, her blue eyes still large and forthright: it was funny, Jane’s deadpan stare. Nothing happened at that party with the Persians in the hills above Florence. I don’t even remember a party.
There's a slight comment about feminism in progress. The two women grew up in the 1970s, and were living in the era whereby male chauvinism was flourishing. Women were made to feel intellectually inferior to the men around them. But they made it through the era, and seemed to have survived well.
While this Mattie is such a central figure in this story, this is likely a vignette of their life this year. He was central to their Europe jaunt and all. We all remember those days, but what we choose to really remember, might be different from how others remember it. These memories are only recalled when needed. Perhaps in the next season, Geraldine and Jane will remember someone else.
In an interview with the same journal, the author explained why Mattie is remembered differently by the two women,
Both the girls, when they were young, wanted romance with Mattie, yet that impulse turns out, in retrospect, to have been beside the point. It wasn’t as a lover that he mattered for them.
As for why Jane denies the power in this past that Geraldine asserts? She has probably really not thought so much about Mattie. She’s had a happier marriage, a busier career; she’s less alone, and she feels less charitable toward the memory of Mattie, more skeptical. All our reflections on the past, if they are genuine efforts to remember, take the form of an argument, not a fixed narrative. Where Geraldine rashly asserts, Jane pushes back. Perhaps the risks that Geraldine takes—if only in thought—perturb Jane. She doesn’t want her friend to indulge in sentimentality or falsity, for instance. And, although Jane’s denials annoy Geraldine slightly, they’re also the corrective she needs, in order to get as close to the truth as she can. The story-making that the women do between them is a bit like writing. The light in which we look backward is flickering and uncertain; the forms we make out are blurred. We’re guessing and interpreting, composing stories of our past selves and our times. It’s better, in the end, to do it through debate and resistance and unease, than through consensus and certainty.
No comments:
Post a Comment