Labrador
When my brother and I have been back in our hometown together – which has happened, oh, maybe twice since our parents moved in 1995 – we say “This/that is so…weird” over and over. Which is, well, weird because there is nothing “weird” about where we’re from. (In fact, it’s kind of amazing!) What we are trying to articulate – albeit very poorly – is that nostalgia is a strange bugger. How does one make sense of one’s childhood memories? Not the concrete ones, but the “feelings” of: how your elementary school was or what it was like to take swim lessons. And the people, of course. Remember Mr. X? What about that family from Sweden who lived in the house across the street for 9 months? All those kids beaming from a class photo? You know how it goes. A stew of moments.
Kathryn Davis’ novel Labrador – published in 1988 – is stunning. Through her characters Willie and Kitty, Davis captures what it’s like to be sisters – one who (Kitty) greatly admires the older, and one who (Willie) can’t wait to split from her childhood. “Feelings” about childhood are hard to describe because there’s no clear language for how to portray encountering the past. So Davis uses both poetry and “alternate worlds” to convey the swirled way that people interpret their childhoods.
Instead of the “weird” that my brother and I use, Davis employs lines like:
“It was spring and the branches of the trees were dark red, clustered with buds, and there was a heat coming from inside things that had nothing to do with wind or air but was like the heat you feel in the palm of your hand when you exhale into it.”
*
“…as if to distract me from the secret process wherein the sensory details of those we love withdraw into memory.”
*
“How could it happen that I would find myself flitting, finned and cool, through the thumping, fluent corridors of the house, as if my love for you were a thing external to myself—as if it were the only substance in which I could move or draw breath?”
PS: Aforementioned swim lessons occurred at a place Carrie Brownstein names in a chapter of her book, excerpted in The New Yorker. Search her name + “Samena” and you can read her own take on figuring out one aspect of her childhood.
originally published on instagram