Marlena Corcoran: “It wasn’t like that”

Dr. Marlena Corcoran, today’s guest blogger, is the author of The Athena Mentor College Application Workbook and Passport to College: The International Student’s Guide to the Best Education in the World (see her website, athenamentor.com, for more information). While participating in some of my daily writing challenges earlier this year, Marlena returned to her passion—stories inspired by her childhood in Brooklyn. I’m delighted that she’s chosen to share a story based on that work with you today.—Elaine

It wasn’t like that

by Marlena Corcoran

“It wasn’t like that,” says my sister.

She says it every time. Every time I publish something, the phone rings, and it’s my sister.

“It wasn’t like that.”

I listen to the list of factual errors, misrepresentations and misremembrances. Unlikelihoods. Conjectures.

I recognize transitions, metonymy, interior monologue. That’s what this is to me. Words on the page.

And then there are the plain old unattractive details that happen to be true, but did I really have to mention that.

And errors. If this were a quiz in a history class, I would fail. Even if every iota is, shall we say, correct, it just doesn’t add up for me in quite the same way it added up for everybody else. Each fact becomes a piece in a very wrong puzzle.

And then there are the things that only I would know. I get no phone calls there. Continued radio silence would have been so preferable.

***

So one day I joined an art action called “The Former Resident Project.” It was for people who used to live in Brooklyn. No current inhabitants allowed. This ensured we all were writing from memory. Our memories. Not a fact-checker in sight.

We were all invited to submit a story. I sent in eighteen. I’m sorry, but once I got going, I was on a roll. Decades of zip code 11209 got sent back to Rewrite.

The organizing artist printed out the stories on sheets of refrigerator magnet, and cut the stories to size. She traveled to the location of each story.

Did I mention they were site-specific.

She slapped each story on any metal thing that would anchor the magnet. Her idea was that people would take the stories home.

I don’t think anybody wanted my stories on their refrigerator. None of these stories was the King James Version of what went down in that particular neighborhood. But I was gratified to see the lamppost outside my childhood home covered with refrigerator magnets telling story after story of what went on behind those walls.

At least, as I saw it.

One of the magnets was set up far away, in an empty field. An airplane in the distance. Weeds. At the time, I couldn’t talk about it. The sign said only, “This was Barren Island.”

***

“Please return the family photos.”

You have to be kidding me. Return them to whom?

For once in my life, I did not ask myself what I had done wrong. I didn’t even reply to my cousin’s mail. I figured some day she might even think what a miracle it is, that someone twisted our lives into little pipe cleaner figures on a stage, that maybe might mean something to somebody else, or maybe might mean something all by themselves.

I thought back to my mother’s friend Audrey, talking to my mother about a movie that had just come out. It was set in our neighborhood: Saturday Night Fever.

“It wasn’t anything like that,” she hissed. “How could they say those things?” My mother nodded in agreement. “It’s nothing like that.” They turned to me. “Is it.”

I turned away. Maybe the miracle is that we agree on anything at all. How things are. The way they were.

Wie es eigentlich gewesen: how it really was.


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